An item of "Breaking News". Will appear on the Breaking News page and the front page.
Feeling the heat?
Then spare a thought for the Broughton Scouts travelling abroad today for a Kayaking Adventure in south-central France.
Twenty-eight plucky lads, lassies and leaders have spent the last 18 months planning for nine days of camping, caving and climbing, the trip culminating in an overnight kayak expedition down the Ardèche River.
Daytime temperatures there are predicted to reach 98.6º F (37ºC) and not dip below 89ºF (32º).
After eight years in the role, Leith Walk councillor Maggie Chapman will step down from Ward 12 duties this summer.
She will concentrate instead on contesting the North East of Scotland seat for the Greens at next year’s Scottish Parliamentary Election.
‘While I am taking nothing for granted and will work hard for every single vote, I also firmly believe that we can and will win MSPs in every region in Scotland,’ she announced yesterday.
Those of us who are old enough to remember the 1970s and 1980s in this city will remember that each householder used to take responsibility for keeping the pavement in front of their property clear of snow and ice in winter, and of weeds in summer, writes Fred Street of the New Town Clean Streets Campaign.
There were subtle social pressures at work which also encouraged us to pick up any dog mess and litter, as this was felt to reflect as unfavourably on the householder as as on the litterer.
The Leith Walk by-election (Ward 12) triggered by Councillor Deidre Brock’s resignation will be held on 10 September.
Sue Bruce, Returning Officer and Chief Executive of The City of Edinburgh Council, said: ‘Deidre Brock has served as an elected member for more than eight years and I wish her well in her new role as a Member of Parliament.
‘I now look forward to involving the public in the democratic process to elect a new councillor for the Leith Walk ward.’
Deidre Brock is stepping down as councillor for Leith Walk (Ward 12). She will focus instead on her new role as MP for the Westminster parliamentary constituency of Edinburgh North and Leith.
In a letter to City of Edinbugh Council's chief executive Sue Bruce at the weekend, Brock wrote:
Dear Sue,
With works in the permanent collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the City Art Centre, Scottish artist Joyce Gunn Cairns needs no introduction.
It is refreshing to get a chance to see some of her works in one place, and this exhibition – a mixture of portraits and wildlife studies – shows off Gunn Cairns’s elegant and curious style.
HART STREET AND HART STREET LANE
As I meandered one recent evening, scrutinising the ebb and flow of the Georgian gloaming, it suddenly struck me that the Situationists were right after all: authentic social life has been superseded by its representation.
It seemed clear that many local households took satisfaction in, indeed derived meaning from, their proximity to the pavement. Displaying themselves and their wares to the passer-by, they take enthusiastic part in the New Town's very own Society of the Spectacle.
‘It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.’
So wrote the US author and counterculturalist Hunter S. Thompson, and it’s a sentiment seemingly shared by several of the artists in this month’s joint exhibition Coast to Coast in the Union Gallery.
Plans for St Mary's Music School to move into a restored, refurbished and reconfigured old Royal High School complex went on display on Thursday.
The Royal High School Preservation Trust (RHSPT) held the public exhibition in Canongate Kirk, directly below the imposing Thomas Hamilton building at the foot of Calton Hill.
These were far from being the kind of detailed proposals required for a full planning application (they'll cross that bridge if and when they come to it).
An interim economic appraisal goes before councillors next week.
It will conclude – to nobody’s great surprise – that extending the tram route to the Foot of the Walk, or Ocean Terminal, or Newhaven would increase the number of people using the system.
It would also deliver ‘a positive economic impact’.
The Council’s press release is tellingly mute about extending the line only as far as McDonald Road.