THE tiny Baltic republic of Estonia regained independence in 1991 after almost 70 years of Soviet and Nazi occupation – a difficult birth amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union, with no petrol for ambulances or food on the shelves. Its GDP has since increased five-fold and today it’s recognised as Europe’s “Baltic Tiger”. But the country’s newfound economic success is solidly based on cultural confidence – a singing revolution, a much-loved language, an irrepressible national identity, a bold, youthful leadership and a people who never gave up. Are there lessons for Scotland or are our circumstances simply too different? Estonia: The Baltic Tiger tries to answer that question. Funded by Chris Weir and the Scottish Independence Foundation, filming with director Charlie Stuart began in February 2020 to coincide with the country’s Independence Day celebrations – and ended abruptly with lockdown a few weeks later.
Jason Caron, Ashley Grier, Omar Uresti Earn PGA Professional Player of the Year Awards for 2020
Published on
Friday, January 22, 2021
Jason Caron of Oyster Bay, New York; Ashley Grier of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania; and Omar Uresti of Austin, Texas, persevered through the unique circumstances associated with a global pandemic to capture respective 2020 PGA Professional, Women’s PGA Professional and Senior PGA Professional Player of the Year awards.
The trio will be honored in conjunction with the PGA of America’s Annual Meeting, Nov. 2-5, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Caron, the PGA Head Professional at Mill River Club, Inc. in Oyster Bay, began his year in strong fashion, emerging from a three-player playoff to win the 2020 PGA Stroke Play Championship. Caron authored two other wins in Metropolitan PGA Section play, winning the Section’s PGA Professional Championship in September, also in a playoff, before claiming a wire-to-wire, two-stroke victory in the 96th Long Island Open
Because of the Internal Market Bill, Scotland will have to allow the sale of genetically edited food if England decides to change its laws SCOTLAND may soon be “forced to accept the marketing, sale and free circulation” of genetically modified food as England looks to change its own laws in the area post-Brexit, the Scottish Government has warned. The UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has today launched a public consultation on the use of gene editing on both livestock and arable crops. Gene editing (GE) is slightly different from genetic modification (GM). While the latter involves inserting new genes into a DNA strand, GE involves the cutting and removing of undesirable parts of genes.
COMMENT
Jacob Rees-Mogg said the actions of Unicef to feed hungry children in the UK was no more than political point scoring - he must have missed the Good Samaritan parable in the Bible . JACOB Rees-Mogg responded to reports last week that Unicef had been providing aid to children in England for the first time in 70 years by saying that the UN organisation should be “ashamed” for the work it is doing. Rather than thank the organisation for its efforts to keep British children fed during this particularly dark winter, the Tory leader of the House of Commons attacked it for political point-scoring – though who those points were aimed at is unclear.
OK, Christmas has been cancelled (more or less), the British economy is about to fall off a Brexit cliff (more or less) and the physical world is caught between a pandemic and being fried by climate change (both actually). At this point I should really stop writing and pull the covers over my head. Yet there is a lot of reason for optimism in 2020. Here’s my case. Let’s start with that little green country north of Englandshire. The Scots used to be terribly conservative and dour. Back in 1955, a majority of them voted Tory and did as they were told.