Above the only 27 year-old, Spanish-built, MV Aratere, retired after a sequence of breakdowns including two incidents of drifting out-of-control toward rocks with hundreds on board. Cook Strait Ferries, linking the north and south islands of New Zealand, currently runs only two quite young (under 30) ferries but the service is a national scandal of poor service with dangerous incidents, unreliability and the utter fiasco of the government cancelling urgently needed replacement contracts. The consequence of this unreliability, not of any media frenzy as there has been little, is the serious damage to tourism. From RNZ, two days ago: Fed-up … Continue reading New Zealand’s Cook Strait Ferries – unreliability alarms international tour operators in sharp contrast to Scotland’s island tourism surge ignoring media ferry frenzy

From Transport Scotland – Total number of collisions on the A9 between Perth and Inverness: EIR release published today, the above figures for the five years from 2012/2022 to 2025/2026 (2 February). Barring any tragic events in March 2026, the results reveal a dramatic reduction for two years in a row, from 2023/2024. The overall fall in the last two years of around one-third, 33% and by three-quarters, 75%, in fatal incidents from 2022/2023. This data covers personal injury accidents from the A9 Perth to Inverness ( Inveralmond Roundabout to Longman Roundabout, not including roundabouts. Source: https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-202600504907/ BBC Scotland is … Continue reading A9 accidents and deaths plummet in recent years

Justice Secretaries David Lammy [England & Wales] and Angela Constance [Scotland] From Sky News in the last hour: 179 prisoners freed ‘in error’ in England and Wales in single year – Pressure mounted on Justice Secretary David Lammy last year following a series of high-profile manhunts. https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/179-prisoners-freed-in-error-in-england-and-wales-in-single-year/ar-AA20Y6K8 You know where I’m going. The most recent official parliamentary data (as of 5 December 2025) shows 5 liberations in error in financial year 2025-26 up to that point. This covers roughly the first 8 months of the financial year (April to early December 2025). No specific updated total for the full period to March … Continue reading Shocking incompetence as Lammy oversees the release in error of more than THREE times as many prisoners as Constance in Scotland

From BBC Scotland today: Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has branded Reform UK’s Scottish leader “a liar” and “a pathetic, poisonous, odious little man” after the pair clashed on a Channel 4 debate. Sarwar has a problem with correctness. He has previous in mocking stroke victims and that with his laddish manner suggest he’s hiding a few unreconstructed lines of humour. Last night, furious with Malcolm Offord for suggesting he had ‘bounced’ up to him a make a deal to oust the SNP, he couldn’t help himself and called him ‘little’. What height are the two, fighting a bromance and clearly … Continue reading If Offord is a ‘pathetic, poisonous, odious LITTLE man’ then so is Anas

From CBS News, yesterday: After decades of cancer cases and public outcry, the federal government this week will begin the long-awaited cleanup of a nuclear waste dump in Armstrong County.  The site in Apollo was a dumping ground for hundreds of 55-gallon drums containing radioactive nuclear waste. But come this week, a half-billion-dollar project to safely remove it will finally begin.  The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers gave KDKA an exclusive look at the painstaking, intensive and expensive process to rid the site of radioactive waste in Armstrong County.    https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/nuclear-waste-dump-apollo-armstrong-county-cleanup/ The Apollo plant is in Apollo Borough in the South West of … Continue reading US citizens living near nuclear waste dump, 100 times smaller and less hazardous than Sellafield, to get clear-up