NEED TO CATCH up? The Journal brings you a round-up of today’s news.

IRELAND

• British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has insisted Sinn Féin were not excluded from a meeting with him in Belfast. It came after the party said its leader Mary Lou McDonald was told she could not attend the meeting. She called the turn of events “bizarre”. 
• Justice Minister Simon Harris has said that gatherings outside of a migrant shelter in Ballymun were “intimidation” rather than a protest.  

• Personal beliefs and a fear of litigation are among driving factors for clinicians while making decisions about caesarean sections for first-time mothers, a new Irish study has found.
• Modular houses are to come on stream as Cabinet briefed on accommodation crisis for refugees, while many hotels currently under contract with the Department of Integration will revert to tourist trade in March and April.
• Efforts to catch cancer cases early are being “put at risk” by overcrowding in Irish hospitals, according to the Irish Cancer Society. 
• Influencer Andrew Tate is “capturing the imagination” of young men and is a cause for “deep concern”, Irish teachers and youth workers have said. 
• Doctors Co Roscommon, have refuted a claim spread online by an election candidate for the anti-immigration National Party, that they have special days devoted to only seeing patients from Syria or Ukraine. 

INTERNATIONAL 

#UKRAINE: The fate of a devastated salt-mining town in eastern Ukraine hung in the balance today as Ukraine said its forces were holding out against a furious Russian onslaught in one of the fiercest and bloodiest recent ground battles of the nearly 11-month war.

#US FLIGHTS: Thousands of flights were canceled or delayed in the United States today following an hours-long nationwide grounding of departures due to an outage of a key computer system used by pilots.

#PARIS: An attacker stabbed six people at the busy Gare du Nord station in Paris this morning before being shot and apprehended by police, authorities said.

#WESTMINSTER: British MP Andrew Bridgen has been stripped of the Tory whip after appearing to compare Covid-19 vaccines with the Holocaust.

 PARTING SHOT

The Hunterian museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England has decided to stop displaying the skeleton of a 7 foot 7 Irishman when the museum reopens next month.

Charles Byrne was born in Derry in 1761 with an undiagnosed benign tumour of his pituitary gland, an adenoma, which caused acromegaly and gigantism.

Byrne grew to be over seven and a half feet, or 2.31 metres, tall and made a living exhibiting himself as the ‘Irish Giant’ at shows in Britain.