Brian Batson News Today

The City Council is scheduled to vote on Order 68, which would temporarily end sweeps of the city's homeless encampments.

The City Council votes 8-0 to prohibit sales and distribution of plastic drinking straws in the city starting Jan. 1, 2021.

Portland Charter Commission candidates disclose fundraising totals At-large candidate Marpheen Chann currently leads the pack of 23 candidates in fundraising, reporting over $10,000 raised, while several other candidates reported no financial activity. Share The 23 candidates seeking nine seats on Portland’s new charter commission were required to report campaign fundraising and spending activity last week. Fundraising efforts vary widely, with a handful of candidates raising thousands of do...

The fate of our NHS and the success of the Covid-19 jab mean health is high in readers' minds, but so is the health of our political debate

Politicians talk the talk but don’t deliver Sir, – Not surprisingly, John Swinney “survived” the vote of no confidence because he has done absolutely nothing wrong. The hypocritical Scottish Tories manufactured the vote, knowing it would fail, as a political gesture. The other two Unionist parties jumped on board in a pathetic show of solidarity. It baffles me as to why both Labour and the Lib Dems always support the Tories, both in Holyrood and in Westminster, despite the record of Bor...

by Courier Readers © PA Sir, – On March 11 2021, it will be one year since the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a pandemic. In one year, millions of people from all corners of the Earth have died from this disease. In this same year, science has developed effective vaccines to fight Covid-19. But the vaccines have not reached all corners of the globe, and are not likely to do so soon. Billions of public money, was given to the manufacturers to enable the development of these...

Economies will adjust and grow Sir, – In spite of the various crises it has gone through during the past 150 years – such as the two world wars and the Great Depression – the UK economy has shown an average annual growth of 1.8%. We grow richer because human ingenuity produces innovations which raise productivity and enable us to buy things more cheaply. The recent financial crisis and pandemic are the periodic shocks we should expect. The financial crisis provided a shake-up of capital a...

by Courier Readers © PA Sir, – My small business employs nine staff who can see how wonderful an oven ready Brexit deal this truly is. Before Brexit when sending goods to the EU it took less than a minute to copy and paste a customer’s address, phone number and email into our shipper software. Now it takes 12 mins as we have to supply EORI numbers, commodity codes, the product number, the brand, the colour, a description, the individual weight and cost. If we are sending two parcels ...