AS the evenings shorten and the back-to-school advertisements fill premium viewing slots on television we all, metaphorically at least, reach for the warm fleece to stave off the first chills of autumn.

AMERICA’S guitar-and-chorus chronicler of the Great Depression, the Dustbowl, and social injustice, Woody Guthrie, once described California as “a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see...” and even if he was warning those forlorn, destitute farmers fleeing the Midwest’s Dustbowl not to go to California, he could hardly have imagined that something approaching a Dustbowl catastrophe might hit the Golden State. 

THERE is “no end in sight” to the country’s devastating flood problems with high tides expected on top of more rainfall next week, the Government’s emergency response group warned last night.

ON APRIL 23 Fisheries Officers on a routine patrol of Lough Derg on the Shannon came across a party of French anglers fishing for pike from boats.