TODAY’S Leaving Certificate results have once again sounded alarm bells, alarm bells that have rung loudly every August for some years now.

FOR every two people who commit suicide in the North, three people take their life in the Republic.

TOMORROW morning more than 55,000 young people will get their Leaving Cert results.

IT’S BEEN 40 years since the Soviet Union’s old Cold War armies cracked down so emphatically and violently on Czechoslovakia, sending tanks to crush unarmed civilians marching on the streets of Prague.

SO, how was it for you? Was your weekend a washout? Wellies and sandbags to try and stave off the flash floods, extraordinary rain and this never-ending summer of clouds, showers, winds and occasional floods? Did you get caught in the flooding on the M50?

THOUGH our economy has been under siege for just a short while it appears that cracks are beginning to appear in the citadel already.

CONFRONTING fraud and theft at all levels of society is welcome, especially if the money being stolen is taxpayers’.

AT LAST, some good news, albeit minor rather than major in scale and import.

JOHN DEVEREUX died because of the unexpected reaction to the combined use of two ordinary, everyday drugs, one used to fight cholesterol and the other an antibiotic.

DURING the lifetime of many of the hundreds of millions of people who will watch tomorrow night’s Olympic Games opening ceremony from Beijing the people of China endured the greatest famine in the history of humanity.