WITH diabetes on the increase, it is alarming to learn that people are losing limbs needlessly due to lack of investment in basic services.

BECAUSE it’s Saturday most of us will be spared the weekday gridlock, that unavoidable waste of time, that daily fraying of manners and — almost worst of all — the stress fest brought on by sitting in traffic like so many battery hens waiting for something unimagined to happen.

IT’S probably a tad wistful to expect that in our new, multicultural, multichannel Ireland that Bridget or Eamonn, Maureen or Donal might make the top 10 list of names we give to our children.

Ryanair’s announcement that it is dropping two of its Cork routes to Britain has come as a blow not just to Cork Airport but also to the Munster region as a whole, because it will inevitably impact on tourism and thus jobs in the tourist sector.

The survey of 90 general practitioners by the Irish Medical Times shows a marked decline in satisfaction with the performance of the Health Service Executive (HSE) chief executive Professor Brendan Drumm.

THOUGH not on a par with the ferocity used by Russian forces to reimpose the old Soviet hegemony in Georgia this week’s pictures of burnt-out cars on the roads of Armagh, the gun and bomb attacks on PSNI officers in Craigavon, were reminders of the violence we all hoped had been consigned to the past.

AROUND about this time the country’s primary and secondary schools are reopening after the summer break.

THERE are all sorts of cost and environmental reasons to reduce our dependency on private cars but now it seems we will have to add the growing number of toll roads to that equation.

THAT almost 200,000 children from 88,000 families need government help to buy clothes and shoes so they can go back to school is an indictment of our affluent society.

The Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine has published what it claims is the largest ever study of opiate-dependent teenagers anywhere.