Ireland's newly qualified graduate nurses are being left completely in the dark after the HSE suddenly paused new employment contracts due to strict hiring controls. Nurses who proudly accepted job offers over the summer—like Westmeath's Della Ní Chléirigh—are now receiving alerts that their start dates are on hold until further notice. While the HSE points to a severe budget deficit and heavy reliance on agency staff to justify these measures, frustrated graduates are left wondering how a healthcare system with such massive staff shortages can turn them away. Many are now facing financial uncertainty, with some even considering moving abroad or staying on jobseeker's benefits. Healthcare unions and political representatives are rightly calling out these restrictions as reckless and dangerous for patient care. #DellaNíChléirigh #HSE #NursingGraduates #Reckless

On the sixteenth of December 1960 a twelve-year-old boy was put on a table in a San Jose hospital, given electric shocks until he was unconscious, and had an ice pick hammered through the thin bone above each eye and swept from side to side through the front of his brain, because his stepmother had told the doctor he was defiant. The doctor's fee was two hundred dollars. Howard Dully was a big, clumsy, daydreaming boy whose mother had died when he was five, and his father had married a woman called Lou who could not stand him. She took him to six psychiatrists. All six told her the problem was not the boy. The seventh was Walter Freeman, who had performed more lobotomies than any man alive, who drove between state hospitals in a van he called the lobotomobile doing them by the dozen in an afternoon, with no gloves and no surgical training, and who had once done twenty-five in a day. Freeman's notes on Howard, which Howard did not read for forty-four years, record the symptoms. He objects to going to bed. He turns the lights on when there is broad daylight. He does not react to love or to punishment. He has a savage streak. On that evidence, and Lou's signature, and two hundred dollars, Freeman wrote that the boy would benefit from a transorbital lobotomy and did it four days later. Howard remembers the table. He remembers waking with two black eyes and a fever and no idea what had been done to him, because nobody told him, then or ever. His father never spoke of it. Lou put him into a state institution the following year, and the boy with the holes in his brain spent the next forty years in and out of asylums, juvenile halls, a jail, halfway houses and the street, drinking, drifting, never quite able to say why he was the way he was, with a photograph that existed somewhere of a doctor in a suit standing over a child with a steel spike in each eye socket. At fifty-six, driving a school bus, he went to find out. He found his file in Freeman's archive at a university in Washington, in the doctor's own handwriting, and read for the first time what his stepmother had said and what the doctor had agreed to. He went to see his father, who was eighty, and asked him why he had let it happen, and his father said he had been bullied into it. Howard told the story on the radio in 2005 and five million people listened to a man weep over a piece of paper. Walter Freeman was not a quack. He was a professor of neurology, the man who had brought the lobotomy to America, and the operation had won its inventor the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949. The journals published him. The hospitals booked him. The newspapers called it a miracle. He did it to three and a half thousand people, nineteen of them children, and he kept doing it until 1967, when a patient died on the table and the hospital took his privileges away, and he spent his last years driving the country in the van looking up his old patients to prove it had worked. That is what settled science looked like from inside, to a twelve-year-old. A mother's complaint, an expert's confidence, a procedure with a prize behind it, two hundred dollars, and a lifetime nobody could give back. The same institutions now tell you what your child should eat, in the same voice, with the same certainty, and the leaflet has a logo on it. Howard Dully is in his seventies and still cannot say what was taken. Nobody ever apologised.

World-leading cardiac surgeon Asif Hasan was surrounded by the children who received the gift of life thanks to his unerring skills at the emotional climax of another memorable Pride of Britain ceremony. 🥹 Now 70 years old, Mr Hasan has just retired after 35 years of service at the Freeman Hospital in Newcastle upon Tyne, but just after receiving his Lifetime Achievement Award, he had an extra special surprise: a cast of patients who would not be alive without him. ❤️

A new exhibition is celebrating the 200-year history of The Coombe Hospital, which was founded in Dublin in 1826 rte.ie/news/dublin/2026/1022…

MAURA GAVE FULL IRISH PRIDE WITH THIS POWERFUL PASO DOBLE !!!! 🇮🇪 THIS WAS SUCH A FUN ROUTINE AND THIS REALLY PUT A SMILE ON MY FACE. MARK IS SUCH A CREATIVE GENUIS !!!!!!! #DWTS #DancingWithTheStars #DWTS35 #DedicationNight

📣🍿Our short film ‘Lives of Mission, Lives of Hope’ is now available in its entirety on our website. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did. Thanks to our wonderful interviewees and to @colmflynnire for making such a beautiful piece. Link 👇 ireland.ie/en/holysee/lives-…

Mark Allen: “I’m just trying to survive at the minute. My snooker career might be over.”

For more than 30 years, a mother in Tacoma, Washington, placed a birthday message in the newspaper for a son she hadn't seen since he was five weeks old. She had no idea where he was or whether he'd ever read a single word she'd written, but every year she kept trying. Her name was Patti Langdon, and in 1967, at just 22 years old, she gave birth to a little boy she desperately wanted to keep. Because she was unmarried, her father pressured her into giving him up for adoption. Patti later remembered dreaming about running away with her baby rather than losing him. But when he was just five weeks old, she had to say goodbye, not knowing if she'd ever hold him again. As the years passed, she thought about all the birthdays she was missing. She wondered what he looked like, whether he was happy, and what kind of man he was becoming. So she began placing birthday messages in the newspaper, hoping that somehow, somewhere, her son might see one and realize his mother had never stopped looking for him. Meanwhile, that little boy had grown up to become a man named Todd Smith, with a family of his own. He knew he was adopted, but he had no idea his birth mother had spent decades trying to reach him. In June 2010, Todd was sitting at his computer when he became curious about how many babies had been born at Tacoma General Hospital on the same day he was in 1967. He searched online, and the very first result was a newspaper advertisement addressed to "Baby Boy Langdon." It was from his mother. After 43 years, one of Patti's birthday messages had finally reached the person she'd been writing them for. Todd and his wife found her address and drove to her apartment, but nobody answered when they knocked. Just as they were preparing to leave, a neighbor approached them. Todd showed him the advertisement, and the neighbor went to find Patti. Imagine being Patti that day. For 43 years, she'd wondered whether her son was alive and well, whether he knew she loved him, and whether she'd ever get the chance to tell him herself. Now he was standing right there. When Patti finally saw Todd, she was so overwhelmed she could barely speak. The baby she'd last held at five weeks old was now a grown man, standing in front of her after a lifetime apart. Patti and Todd were given nearly seven years together before she passed away in 2017. She never got back the childhood she'd missed, or those first 43 birthdays. But she finally got to know her son, and he got to know the mother who had never stopped searching for him. After 43 years apart, what do you even say to the son you've spent all those years missing?

Beautiful. Turkish professional soccer player Semih Güler holds his baby daughter, reminding the world of the humanity and dignity of people with Down syndrome. “They are actually just like us, even though they have one extra chromosome, but they are more beautiful people than we are.” Every child with an extra chromosome is worthy of life and love.