Shetland Islands Council has turned down a planning application – from Shetland Islands Council!

The proposal to carry out earthworks next to the Clickimin sports ground in North Lochside, Lerwick, was thrown out after fears were expressed that the site might become a dump.

It was heartening that councillors on the planning board this week approved plans by a man who was born and brought up in Walls before leaving Shetland to do well in the oil industry.

Sad news reached me last week from the other side of the Atlantic when I learned of the death of my friend Virginia Davis.

The BBC has caved in to pressure and granted independent candidate Billy Fox equal status in Friday’s election hustings programme. Mr Fox had boycotted the programme after being told he could not sit on a platform alongside candidates from the four main parties. Yesterday SNP candidate Jean Urquhart said she would not take part in the debate either unless the corporation allowed Mr Fox to participate fully.

Knocking on doors for the Scottish election, the subject of the coalition at Westminster is one which crops up quite a bit.

The Scottish Parliament is very limited in its powers. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is of course at the heart of the debate between Nationalists and Unionists. But during an economic crisis exacerbated by high commodity prices, a critical period for the fishing industry and a more general political malaise which has many causes, there is a danger that expectations about what can be achieved by MSPs at Holyrood will be heightened.

I am by nature an optimist. I tend to believe that if the will exists then all things are possible.

Even I, however, am forced to concede that the editor of this paper will never accept that the decisions taken by the coalition government to reduce public spending were correct.

It would be a strange person indeed whose sense of perspective has not been changed, even temporarily, by recent events around the world.

To see whole towns destroyed by the tsunami in Japan, to see thousands of lives erased in moments, is to be faced with something to which it is hard to find an appropriate response.

Marsali Taylor finds ordinary people coping with extraordinary difficulties when she meets members of the support group Families Affected By alcohol and drugs.

Like the entire Northwest Territories, Fort Smith is known for wildlife. For years people from around the world have been travelling to the north to view animals in their natural habitat. But in the southern NWT, those animals are not what you would expect when thinking of the far north. There are no polar bears or muskoxen, and caribou have not been seen around Fort Smith since the 1950s.