THE proposal by the Trump administration to abolish the position of US special envoy to Northern Ireland must be countered by both the Irish and British governments.

IT would be refreshing for the media to once in a while write something positive about Donald Trump, the president, or Donald Trump, the man.

ONE of the many gifts sport offers is an economy of language; a battery of pithy philosophies that express truths that would, in a sane world, be more widely embraced.

AS alarm calls go the report that some schoolchildren need trousers with 54in waistlines is very much in society’s Defcon 1 category.

PRESIDENT Donald Trump should have felt he was among friends when he visited Texas to see the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey floods.

THE respect our courts and the legal professions need has been diminished by a litany of suspicious compensation claims. The courts’ occasionally incomprehensible response to those claims has also undermined their position.

EVERY nation embraces and promotes security-blanket fictions about itself. Creating and sustaining the right image, the winning impression is as important in today’s never-ending struggle to attract foreign investment — jobs and some taxes — as divisions of well-mounted cavalry were when a different kind of imperialism prevailed.

ANY faith Irish citizen Ibrahim Halawa and his family might have had in Egypt’s justice system has surely disappeared over the four years he has been held in custody.

THE defining characteristic of Britain’s response to the narrow 52/48 vote to leave the European Union has been uncertainty layered with confusion, conflict amplified by delusion. Despite that, preparing for a new world, an EU without Britain seems obligatory.

IT is hard to know if the suggestion from New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio, that he might remove the statue of Christopher Columbus which has dominated Manhattan’s Columbus Circle since 1892, the 400th anniversary of the Genoese adventurer’s arrival in the Americas, is serious or not.