GOOD MORNING.
Here’s all the news that you need to know as you start your day.
1. Healthcare workers have expressed their frustration that the Health Service Executive filled certain roles via international campaigns while the recent recruitment freeze was in place.
The freeze, which was put in place as a cost-saving measure, was in effect from October 2023 to July 2024.
In today’s lead story, one worker in Dublin told The Journal she is “horrified” she and others were “bypassed” for jobs during the recent freeze.
2. Two men were rushed to hospital after an alleged stabbing in Dunmanway, Co Cork, yesterday evening.
Both men, aged in their 30s, were taken to Cork University Hospital with serious injuries.
Two other men, aged in their 30s and 70s, were arrested and are currently being detained at a garda station.
3. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is due back in Israel today as mediators seek to cement a Gaza ceasefire deal, while a senior Hamas official dismissed “American diktats” in negotiations.
Making his ninth trip to the Middle East since the Gaza war broke out last October, Blinken is expected to meet Israeli leaders before truce talks resume in Cairo in the coming days.
4. Young Irish people are used to bad news on the housing front. But even with that in mind, the past week was a tough one.
First – property inflation is red-hot, with prices rising by almost 9% year-on-year. But the second piece of news was possibly even worse.
A new study from property company Savills looked at nine developed countries, including the US, Australia, the UK and Canada, and found that Ireland is doing the worst job at building new homes relative to population.
5. Ukrainian forces said they thwarted a Russian missile attack on the capital Kyiv where air raid sirens sounded before dawn today.
“This is the third ballistic missile attack on the capital in August with a clear interval of six days between each attack,” the Kyiv City Military Administration posted on Telegram after the early morning barrage.
Simultaneous to the missile attack, drones were spotted heading to Kyiv.
6. Inside a building in the Curragh Camp in Kildare, a team of Irish Army artillery experts are rewriting manuals and syllabuses as they learn lessons from the war in Ukraine, Niall O’Connor writes.
Captain Brian Clarke and his team are studying closely how hundreds of years of artillery expertise is being cast aside by the hard lessons learned inside the teams firing the big guns on the eastern reaches of Europe.
7. Police in Northern Ireland are working to locate a prisoner who escaped and is currently on the run.
David McCord (54), who is serving a life sentence for murder, was in the custody of prison staff at a property in the Crumlin Road area of north Belfast when he escaped on Friday.
8. Both pro- and anti-government protesters are holding demonstrations in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas, as tensions continue to flare over disputed presidential election results.
Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, leader of the Vente Venezuela (Come Venezuela) party, led a ‘Protest for Truth’ in the capital yesterday.
Speaking on a campaign truck flanked by motorcyclists and cars waving the national flag, she called on the anti-government protesters to “remain firm and united”.
9. ”This has been an extraordinary period in American politics,” Larry Donnelly writes in his column this weekend.
A month on from the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and Joe Biden dropping out of the race, the presidential campaign “has been transformed, utterly”.
“Harris is enjoying a sustained bounce in the polls that has the Trump people deeply concerned and has surprised many observers, this one included,” he writes.
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