This week's cold snap means that most of us will have been more focused on keeping our homes warm than addressing the challenge of global warming.

Industrial action by three separate sets of workers this week illustrates the severity of the crisis facing our public services.

After 21 long and dismal months in which its Stormont boycott has achieved, by its own assessment, precisely none of its aims, it must be dawning on even the DUP's most antediluvian fantasists that it is time to acquaint itself with today's political realities.

Dublin has been left reeling by the frenzy of violence which swept through the city centre, tarnishing its international reputation for céad míle fáilte and bringing shame on Ireland.

Though there is huge relief that a truce has been brokered between Israel and Hamas, it is profoundly regrettable that both sides have not decided to end the bleak horror of their war entirely.

SINCE he stepped down from frontline politics at the start of 2016, Peter Robinson has carefully rationed his public pronouncements.

In an enmity that dates back to Brexit and the ill-starred negotiations over the UK's withdrawal from the European Union, there is something about taoiseach Leo Varadkar's interventions on northern politics that is almost guaranteed to set unionists on edge.

In another example of how the British government's cynical approach to the legacy of the Troubles is going against the wishes of victims' families, the Police Ombudsman will be unable to complete around 400 investigations linked to the past.

It was perhaps too good to be true. The faint glimmer of self-awareness that led the Orange Order to admit that events around its flagship parade in Belfast were, in its own words "abysmal and unacceptable", has been extinguished