“Armenia is facing a demographic catastrophe,” Nune Pashayan, a health department official, told a news conference this week. The government plans to triple funding for reproductive programs. Mr Pashayan cited a number of statistics. The fertility rate is 1.6 (and needs to be 2.1 to maintain the population). According to the latest data, 14.9% of women […]
ON THIS DAY: 30TH MARCH 1849, Doolough Tragedy where a large crowd of starving people died on the journey to receive food they had been promised. 170 years ago on Friday night, March 30th, 1849, during the starvation, 600 people, including women and children, were living in the town of Louisborough. The starving people were […]
JAMA Internal Medicine hosted a fiery debate about Dutch euthanasia this week. Geriatrician Diane Meier, of the Icahn School of Medicine, New York, responded feistily to critics of an editorial which she had written in December, headlined “The Treatment of Patients With Unbearable Suffering—The Slippery Slope Is Real”. Two teams of Dutch physicians responded with reassurances that “all […]
The decision to remove Speech and Language therapists from The Holy Family Deaf school in Cabra was made without consultaion with parents or the school – and will be “devastating” for deaf children, parents say, as it removes a vital and effective service from already disadvantaged children. Dáire Ryan a parent of a child attending […]
In 1974 local farmers digging a well near the Chinese city of Xian came across one of the greatest archaeological discoveries ever made. The discovery of a clay warrior figure soon revealed many more by state archaeologists. In fact there may be 8,000 terracotta figures in total, each individually modelled and purposely arranged in three […]
Today, the 28th of March 2021 marks the fifth anniversary of the death of Tracey Campbell-Fitzpatrick at St Luke’s Hospital in Kilkenny. Tracey died from massive blood loss shortly after giving birth to her second child. It is only a short number of weeks since the HSE and the hospital admitted liability in her death […]
The real controversy surrounds the appalling mismanagement of Covid-19 by both government and opposition. Sunday Griptoon by Brian Doyle #gript
I do not own a conventional smart phone. Instead, I intentionally use a style of flip phone whose rugged case and physical numeric keypad buttons won’t be injured by a drop of three or four feet to a concrete surface. It can receive some texts on its small screen, and I can even send texts […]
Ms. magazine is the unabashed holy grail of feminism. Right on the masthead it says “More than a Magazine, a Movement.” But just what is feminism? Like many buzz words in our pestilential popular culture, the term is used like a sledgehammer to set the parameters of permissible public discourse. It is a set piece of […]
PODCAST: Listen to John Aidan Byrne, Irish commentator based in New York, alks with A.D. Ultman, on the rise of political extremism in the US US POLITICAL EXTREMISM: Former Capitol Hill staffer, political scholar, A.D. Ultman, on big money & corruption in American politics & his book, Animal Town, his timely warning about […]
Looking to ensure that your partner has consented to sex? There’s an app for that—or at least, someone tried to make an app for that. Earlier this year, iConsent was released in Denmark in response to a new law that criminalizes sex without explicit consent. The app allows users to request consent to sexual intercourse within 24 hours to […]
How the Bog Bodies told their story In March 2003, in a bog on the border of Meath and Offaly, in a place called Clonycavan, a body emerged from the peat beneath the shovel of a cutting machine. The workers stopped their machinery immediately and after inspecting the body suspected they had unearthed evidence of […]