Page 4 - Martina Devlin News Today

“Ditch the witch,” protesters chanted at Julia Gillard, Australia’s first and only female prime ­minister. Nancy Pelosi, the first female speaker of the House of Representatives, was depicted as a witch in ads run by a political opponent, who laughed off his tactics. Elsewhere, T-shirts were printed with her face and a witchy “I’ll get you, my pretty” threat.

The drumbeat of war is banging ominously in the Middle East, but where is the sound of peace? Where is the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? Peace cannot be silent – it must be a visible, vocal presence, urging a just and lasting settlement.

Life isn’t always a tightrope, but most of us have to walk one at some stage, hopefully with a balancing pole between our hands and the other side within sight. But what if we start to teeter on the high wire? At that point, a safety net becomes a lifesaver.

/PRNewswire/ -- As Daisy Alpert fLorin explains, "novelists love to tell the story of outsiders, and in a sense, everyones an outsider in college. No matter...

“When I said I was standing for office my mum asked if I’d considered being an estate agent instead,” British MP Stella Creasy told a Dublin audience this week. While her words raised a laugh, they were also revealing: political life can be hellish.

If ever there was a time to listen to climate experts, it is now. The planet is responding to human abuses with unparalleled ferocity, unleashing floods, wildfires and heatwaves – opening “the gates of hell” as UN secretary general Antonio Guterres warned a climate summit.

Kevin Bakhurst has a surgeon’s job to do, in addition to managing a crisis. The RTÉ director general must cauterise the broadcaster’s open wounds – many of them self-inflicted – if he is to put an end to the convulsions of recent months.

If further evidence were needed of how unimportant and irrelevant Northern Irish concerns are to most British politicians, it lies in the contentious legacy bill now on the point of becoming law.

Blood calling to blood – family connections passed across three generations over more than a century – has led me here, to row after row of graves, in the world’s biggest Titanic burial ground. My grandmother’s uncle was lost with the ship, and this may or may not be where he is buried, but the remains of scores of unidentified Titanic victims were laid to rest in this graveyard.

Blood calling to blood – family connections passed across three generations over more than a century – has led me here, to row after row of graves, in the world’s biggest Titanic burial ground. My grandmother’s uncle was lost with the ship, and this may or may not be where he is buried, but the remains of scores of unidentified Titanic victims were laid to rest in this graveyard.