Monthly Archives: January 2021

Springfield, based in Elgin, had hoped to build the homes in a field to the north of Bonfield Road.

The entire field has been designated by Fife Council as being suitable for up to 66 homes after planning permission in principle was granted in 2019.

However, Springfield sought to build all but one of those homes in just two-thirds of the plot, earmarking the remainder of the site for potential future development. Technical drawings included with the application suggested this could be as many as 14 extra dwellings.

The housebuilder described the proposals as a high quality residential environmentrespecting both the surrounding built and natural environment.

But its plans were criticised by Councillor Jane Ann Liston as a stealthy attempt to add more homes to the site than were permitted. She tabled a motion, approved by majority, to have the homes refused.

The Liberal Democrat said: The houses look awfully squished together. There are concerns this is a backdoor to get more houses in. Id be interested to hear what has to be said about that.

Residents of Strathkinness, a village of roughly 350 homes, made 32 formal objections to the plans, citing concerns over the developments density and the impact 65 homes would have on Strathkinness Primary School, which has 75 pupils on its roll.

Alastair Hamilton, Fife Councils development management service manager, sought to dismiss those concerns.

Density is something thats never a good indicator of whats good design, he said.

Its about how that works and how it sits as part of the kind of, natural expansion of a settlement.

I have to say, from my perspective it doesnt shout out at me as being a particularly dense layout.

He also suggested that, were the 65 homes approved, Springfield could come forward with further plans to build homes in excess of the 66 home limit.

Cllr Listons motion, backed by fellow Lib Dem Jonny Tepp, recommended refusing the plans on the grounds of a lack of physical amenity.

She said: What we have here is 65 houses that have been put into two thirds of the site. It is out of keeping, the houses next door have more space, these are too squished together.

The motion was passed by eight votes to five.

Springfield Homes was contacted for comment.

Read this article:

Fife housing development refused for trying to 'squish' 65 homes onto land - Fife Today

OTTAWA, Ill. For a man who has devoted his life to promoting kindness, a diagnosis of advanced-stage cancer in his pancreas and liver might seem the unkindest cut of all.

But Rabbi Reuven Bulka, often dubbed "Canada's rabbi," says he has no complaints.

"In terms of having complaints to God or complaints that life isn't giving me a fair shake, that doesn't enter my mind," the 76-year-old beloved spiritual leader in Ottawa's Jewish community said in a telephone interview from New York City, where he has gone to be with his five children.

"I really feel blessed in the life that I've lived."

Over almost 50 years as rabbi and now rabbi emeritus at Ottawa's Congregation Machzikei Hadas, Bulka has spent countless hours at the bedside of dying people and consoling grieving family members.

It's an experience he feels has prepared him to face his own mortality.

"When you see it happening all around you, you know that nothing is forever."

Indeed, Bulka thinks it's beneficial to embrace that reality early on in life because it shifts your focus from the pursuit of pleasure to thinking seriously about the meaning of life and how to make the most of whatever time you have.

"It doesn't mean that we can't enjoy life but we shouldn't be obsessed with the pleasures without being totally also focused on the meaning and doing things which are important that actually enhance the human condition, that actually improve people's lives and have a lasting impact," he says.

"However long we're destined to live, when we say goodbye, that's an indelible part of one's resume. Nobody really cares whether you've golfed 1,000 rounds or 1,500 rounds It's how you impact others that really defines who you are."

Bulka has spent nearly his entire life trying to improve the human condition, starting at 16 when he took over rabbinical duties at his father's New York synagogue after his father suffered a serious heart attack.

He has championed causes like organ and blood donation, co-founded Kindness Week in Ottawa and spearheaded many events aimed at promoting tolerance and understanding among people of different faiths. He has imparted his wisdom in dozens of books, a weekly newspaper column and a weekly radio phone-in show.

Ottawa has given him the key to the city and named Rabbi Bulka Kindness Park in his honour. He's also been awarded the Order of Canada.

"He's really been a healer when there's been religious rifts in the city and he's respected by all faiths and people of no faith at all," says Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson.

"He's just been a stalwart of our community for so, so long and we can do nothing now but pray for a miracle."

On Monday, Congregation Machzikei Hadas will host a virtual "worldwide prayer rally" for Rabbi Bulka.

"In Ottawa, we like to claim him as our own but certainly he's everybody's rabbi," says Rabbi Idan Scher, one of Bulka's successors at the synagogue. "The moniker Canada's rabbi couldn't be more true."

Indeed, Scher adds: "The people that he's touched live all over the world."

Within a day of setting up a website last week (aprayerforrabbibulka.ca), Scher says about 2,000 people had registered to take part in the online rally. Former prime minister Stephen Harper and former Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty are among the dignitaries scheduled to speak at the event.

Bulka is probably best known to Canadians outside the capital from the annual Remembrance Day ceremonies at the National War Memorial a role he modestly suggests was given to him some 30 years ago because the government wanted to engage a local rabbi "on the cheap" rather than bring one in from Montreal.

Watson marvels that Bulka delivers his Remembrance Day sermons without referring to notes, never repeating the same message twice and always managing to capture a countrywide audience with "his words, his wisdom, his humour."

Former interim Liberal leader Bob Rae, now Canada's ambassador to the United Nations, says Bulka has also been a national leader in "breaking down hatred and building greater religious understanding and embracing multiracialism and multi-faith work."

He was among the first, Rae recalls, to reach out to Muslim groups when they faced a backlash following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001.

Rev. Dr. Anthony Bailey, pastor at Ottawa's Parkdale United Church, recalls working with Bulka to organize a multi-faith blood donor drive in response to a spate of racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Islamic graffiti spray-painted on houses of worship in Ottawa in 2016.

"We were trying to make a statement that we basically support each other as human beings at the very level of blood," he says.

Bulka practices what he preaches, says Andrew Bennett, director of the Cardus Religious Freedom Institute and former ambassador for religious freedom during the Harper government.

"He is certainly a kind man, he really lives by that. But he lives it in a way that's not sort of superficial kindness, it's not sort of a Walmart-greeter kindness. It comes from a very deep place."

Christians and Jews alike believe that human beings "bear the image and likeness of God," adds Bennett, a deacon in the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. "And it's very easy for me to recognize that image and likeness in Rabbi Bulka."

Bulka, like any human, says he thinks about things he should have or could have done.

"I would say a person who lives a life without regrets is probably living in La-La land," he says.

Still, he's grateful for everyone's "showing of appreciation and all their good wishes."

"We'll do our best. With God's help, hopefully we'll be able to live a little bit longer."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 17, 2021.

Read more:

Worldwide virtual prayer rally to be held for 'Canada's rabbi' after cancer diagnosis - Kamloops This Week

A site for a gigafactory to make batteries for electric cars has been identified and could be in Coventry, according to the Mayor of the West Midlands.

Andy Street made the claim as he faced off criticism from Liam Byrne - a Birmingham MP and Labours candidate to become West Midlands Mayor - who claimed that thousands of jobs in the region are at risk because of the failure to secure a gigafactory.

Mr Street said Jaguar Land Rover are at the heart of the plans - as a company which would use batteries made there - and it has been claimed the facility could be built on land at Coventry Airport.

Mr Byrne published a report saying: Failing to create a UK-manufacturing base for electric vehicle batteries, through taking the necessary steps on funding certainty and process, risks a huge harm to the industry and losing 114,000 automotive jobs by 2040.

A similar warning was issued by Andy Palmer, former chief executive of Warwickshire car maker Aston Martin, who warned the UK will lose its automotive industry and the 800,000 jobs that go with it.".

Dr Palmer, who led Aston Martin until last May and is now non-executive vice chairman of InoBat Auto, a European electric vehicle battery producer, said: If the UK doesnt build giga-plants quickly, within a decade we will lose our vehicle manufacturers to countries where they can get local batteries.

But current West Midlands Mayor Andy Street, who will stand again as the Conservative candidate in this years mayoral election, said work on securing a giant factory to produce batteries for electric vehicles was well underway. A bid for funding, prepared in partnership with Coventry car maker Jaguar Land Rover would be presented within the next two months to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which has made 500m available to help secure a factory.

A site for the proposed facility has been identified, Mr Street said. Details have not been revealed but options could include land at Coventry Airport.

With the Government banning the sale of new petrol and diesel-fuelled cars in 2030, car makers such as Jaguar Land Rover will increasingly shift to producing electric vehicles.

However, the batteries used to power these vehicles make up around 40% of their value. They are also bulky items which are hard to transport.

Industry experts say that car makers will shift production to sites close to car battery factories - which means UK plants could eventually close if there is no such factory here.

Mr Byrne said that unless the West Midlands battery factory is built, car makers will move their production to Europe, where 16 huge gigafactories are already up and running or in production.

He said: I want our region to a global capital of green manufacturing. Coventry has set out the site for a huge gigafactory in our region at Coventry Airport, and building British batteries for British electric cars could help create 60,000 jobs.

Right now, with unemployment rising fast, thats a shot in the arm we need to cut carbon - and create new careers with full time, well paid jobs.

The Government has set aside nearly 500m to spend over the next four years for the development and mass-scale production of electric vehicle batteries.

Business Minister and Stratford MP Nadhim Zahawi told the House of Commons: A gigafactory will support industry, provide high quality jobs and help the automotive sector transform over the coming decade - as we make strides towards our world-beating net zero goals.

Mr Street said: This has been a consistent theme of mine, that the electrification of the car industry is coming and we have to be ready for it.

I have for over a year been arguing that the Government has to put the cash on the table.

We do need this subsidy. We need a client - thats Jaguar Land Rover - a supplier, a site and the subsidy.

Talks were taking place with a number of potential suppliers, the firms that would manufacture the batteries, he said.

This wasnt going to happen immediately, Mr Street added. "There are people working now on the location, working on whats needed and, most crucially, working with Jaguar Land Rover on who will be the suppliers.

Mr Street pointed out that the region had already secured the 130m UK Battery Industrialisation Centre in Coventry, which will help develop and fast track batteries and provided the first steps towards getting

A formal bid for some or all of the 500m would be submitted to the Department for Business within the coming two months, he said. But he had already held talks with Kwasi Kwarteng, the new Business Secretary who last week replaced former Business Secretary Alok Sharma.

Mr Street said: I have had a couple of meetings with the previous Business Secretary, I was in touch with the new Businesses Secretary over the weekend to talk about this.

The debate over the gigafactory is set to become an issue in the forthcoming mayoral election scheduled for May, although it may be delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Labour will attempt to argue that Mr Street, as a Conservative, should have been more successful in securing investment for the region from the Tory government at Westminster.

As well as Mr Street and Mr Byrne, other candidates will include chartered accountant Jenny Wilkinson, for the Liberal Democrats, and Solihull Council opposition leader Steve Caudwell, the Green candidate.

To sign up for our newsletter, delivered free to your inbox, click here.

Go here to see the original:

Jaguar Land Rover at heart of gigafactory plans - and it could be in Coventry - Coventry Live

By most measures, 2014 was a good year for Eula Biss. Her third book, On Immunity, impressed the critics. Sales were strong. Closer to home, her job teaching creative nonfiction at Northwestern University now looked permanent enough for Biss and her husband to take out a mortgage, leave their Chicago apartment and move with their young son to a more spacious two-bedroom bungalow a few miles north of the city. But she was uneasy.

The house felt enormous to me, Biss says on a video call. Ifelt kind of upset about it, like we have too much, we clearly have too much.

She tells a story from shortly after they arrived, when a Mexican woman with four children in tow rang the doorbell to inquire whether the curtainless and visibly empty front room was available to rent. Told that it was not, the woman asked why.

It was a deeply embarrassing moment, says Biss. I thought she was right, and I could see that by her terms and in her eyes we had plenty of extra space, and we should be sharing it. But it also kind of mortified me that this woman thought a family of five could use the space that we werent using.

Bisss new book, Having and Being Had, is in part a record of that discomfort, based on the diary that the writer, then in her late thirties, began keeping to document her feelings before it all started to seem normal. But the real subject, as has often been the case with her work, is much bigger than the intimate method might suggest.

I have never been as uncomfortable... as I was with putting down my own salary or what I paid for my house

Notes from No Mans Land, the 2009 collection that announced Bisss arrival as one of the leading lights of the modern American essay, examined race and racism through the prism of her own white identity; On Immunity looked beyond her experience as a mother contemplating vaccinations for her baby to the social contract underwriting our approach to infectious disease. Now, in Having and Being Had, she tackles capitalism, property and class privilege.

The new book has a more comic aspect than its predecessors, which seems to suit Biss, and theres an engaging kind of lexicographical drama to early chapters as she finds words that she had seldom wondered about breaking apart under the pressure of her inquiry. Work, she writes, is interfering with my work, and I want to work less so that I can have more time to work.

Bisss frankness about her own privilege, meanwhile, extends further than most would expect. We learn that she has a salary of $73,000 and a household income of $125,000; that she makes $8,000 renting out her house for a TV commercial, pays a mothers helper $8 an hour and spends $200 on a necklace. She leafs longingly through catalogues of paint that costs $110 a gallon and rounds down from $485,000 to $400,000 when she mentions the cost of her house to her sister a piece of dubious accounting that, on later consideration, persuades Biss to set a rule requiring her to give exact figures whenever money is mentioned in the book.

The point here is that we tend to compare ourselves with those who are wealthier, and so do not perceive our circumstances quite as the numbers would suggest. Did she find this a difficult rule to follow?

It was quite excruciating, and I was very surprised, says Biss. Ive written about vaccination, Ive written about race, Ive written about my own body, Ive written graphically about my childs birth Ive written about all these things that people consider sensitive or personal, and I have never been as uncomfortable with the material I was putting on the page as I was with putting down my own salary or what I paid for my house.

In search of an exception, I observe gingerly that the formula she uses to describe the advance that allows her to go part-time more than the total of what Ive earned from all my writing over the past twenty years was perhaps a little vague. The reason, it turns out, is that this was just a number floated by a publisher and the eventual figure, negotiated outside the period described in the narrative, was a little less. But because of the project, Im happy to tell you that the advance was $650,000, she says. Thats for two books, so Im only halfway through the work.

I apologise for prying but Biss brushes aside my discomfort. It seems to me that we have various different polite habits around talking about money, and one of them is that you never mention your salary, or that you avoid specific sums, she says. When I thought about, Well, who does this serve? Who does this way of thinking or talking serve?, it is always the people who have more...Its in the interests of the people who have more to not talk about money, to have these silences written into our conversations and our exchanges.

Raised near Albany, New York, the daughter of an artist and a doctor, Biss describes her parents as unconventional and anti-materialist. She makes herself sound like a dreamychild, most at home in the woods. But she thrived as an undergraduate at Hampshire College, Massachusetts, where the liberal ethos of self-directed learning suited Biss well enough for her to emerge from her studies with the core of her first book, The Balloonists, a work of prose poetry published in 2002. Then came various jobs in New York and California before she arrived in the Midwest to join the University of Iowas well-established writing programme.

Im interested in how Biss sees her works relationship to memoir and, while at pains not to disparage that form, she is very clear about this: the ideas come first, no matter how large the life experience might seem to loom. Her chief models were Joan Didion and James Baldwin, both of whom are central to the courses she now teaches at Northwestern, and she has written of being given permission to think by Susan Sontag, whose investigations into the language of disease in Illness as Metaphor were an important influence on On Immunity.

Today, as her work is held up alongside that of writers such as Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine and Leslie Jamison as evidence of a revival of the essay form, does she see herself as part of a literary movement?

Yes, the answer is very much so. Im not sure whether to call it a movement Idont know what it is. A situation? she says. A great many of these essayists are women and, for me, thats just tremendously exciting. And the other thing thats happened, at least in the US, is that this has suddenly become a viable commercial genre.

What does she think is driving this renaissance of the essay? Biss wonders, following the theorist Theodor Adorno, whether it is an essential genre for political moments that lean fascist, in which orthodoxies are being imposed or enforced. Theres less opportunity to be formulaic in the essay, she says.

A little later, she frames it in the most universal terms. When we see someone putting their life in relationship to history, thinking through their life in conversation with some other system of thought, I do feel like its a map or a template, she says. The service offered is that when that work is done well, it helps you, the reader, think through your own experience even if your own experience is vastly different from the authors. You dont have to share the authors experience, youre just walking the lines of their map.

I often thought of Bisss On Immunity over the past year, as slightly specialised virological termsthat I last encountered there became everyday buzzwords. We are talking in late December and Biss has been home schooling her son, now 11, since March.

It has really taken a toll on my writing time and my productivity as a writer, she says. I know this is true for women across the world there are huge dents being made in peoples careers because of the time thats been lost.

As someone who has written about anti-vaxxers, is she optimistic about the take-up of vaccines against Covid-19 in the US in the months ahead? Well, its been mishandled, she says. The communication around the vaccine has been so mishandled that I think a lot of damage has been done. That is not to say that the vaccine development itself has been mishandled, I dont know of any evidence that it has. But even just the naming of the vaccine development project, Operation Warp Speed...that is not going to inspire confidence in people. People want to know that care has been taken and that every precaution has been taken.

For Biss, the big exception in a year of tight lockdown came following the killing of George Floyd in the summer, when Black Lives Matter protests swept America. She participated in these with her family locally and speaks of a trip to Atlanta, Georgia, where friends of hers were campaigning for the removal of a Confederate monument. I was taking photographs because Icouldnt believe what was written on it, phrases like These men were of a covenant keeping race. The next day, it was gone it was taken down in the night.

Capitalism doesnt care about relationships between people, its not a system that is built toforward or enrich relationships

She feels hopeful about the movement. I think its just incredible, says Biss. It fills me with a sense of the wheels turning in a new direction, and makes me excited for my sons generation too you know, I dedicated Notes from No Mans Land to my son, he was born just a few months after it was finished, and as I was finishing that book, I did feel dismay about the world he was being born into.

How has the debate changed in that time? This sense of racism being a white problem, caused and promoted and continued by white people, that really was not in the air in any mainstream way when I was writing Notes...The white liberal position then was that the best way to not be racist was not to acknowledge race ever, to never speak of it, to be race-blind. Weve shifted far from that, and to the point where I think there are things in that book that now read as, to my eyes, very fumbling and naive.

Biss is already immersed in the second part of her two-book project, a more outward-facing, internationally focused collection of essays on land ownership. She tells me about a recent trip to Laxton in Nottinghamshire, home to Britains last surviving feudal open-field system, where farmers still cultivate strips. I thought it would be like a living history museum, she says. But that is not whats going on in Laxton, its not a demonstration its people who are dedicated to the continuity of a way of life.

Biss accepts that Having and Being Had is a less polemical book than its predecessors, focused not so much on articulating alternatives as on unpicking the contradictions she observes in her own life. Even so, theres an intensity to her gaze that any of us would find daunting.

Ultimately, the question for Biss was whether she could sustain her values in a world that she views as hostile to them.

Capitalism doesnt care about relationships between people, its not a system that is built toforward or enrich relationships, she says. My most major form of resistance is to privilegerelationships with people over other things.

Lorien Kite is the FTs deputy Life & Arts editor. Eula Bisss Having and Being Had is published this month by Faber & Faber

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Listen to our podcast, Culture Call, where FT editors and special guests discuss life and art in the time of coronavirus. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

See the rest here:

Its in the interests of those who have more to not talk about money - Financial Times