Nurses and midwives staging a work-to-rule have until 5.30pm this evening to call off their action or face having 13% deducted from their pay. The HSE said it planned to take the action in a bid to recoup the €2m a week which it claimed the dispute was costing.

An Irish teenager has won a High Court battle in Dublin to be allowed to visit Britain for an abortion. The 17-year old was told by doctors her four-month foetus would not live more than a few days beyond its birth.

Community workers are to launch a campaign to tackle the problem of children taking and dealing in drugs. Parents in Ligoniel in north Belfast said children as nine are stealing, not only to feed their habit, but to keep the dealers away from them.

The Health Service Executive has told schools in Naas, Co Kildare, that it is closing its waiting list for child and adolescent psychiatric services. It says this is because the list is now running at a two-year wait.

A Fermanagh priest and a Co Antrim man are due to go on trial in Liverpool today for a catalogue of horrific child sex attacks. Billy Adams (38), a native of Newtownabbey, is accused of several rapes and a string of other offences against a 12-year-old girl.

The INO and the PNA are expected to seek legal advice following the HSE’s threat to dock nurses’ pay as a result of their industrial action.

Inflation, new terms and conditions for staff, developments in the service, and general population growth have all been blamed for an increase in Government spending on Northern Ireland’s health service.

Nurses are set to escalate their campaign of industrial action today with two-hour work stoppages at 12 hospitals and mental health facilities across the country. Six facilities will be hit between 10am and midday and another six between 2pm and 4pm in the afternoon.

The High Court has been told that the fetus being carried by a 17-year-old girl who wants an abortion in the UK has the same right to life as any other unborn child, even though it will not survive long after being born.

It would be inhumane to force a pregnant teenager to carry her baby for nine months knowing it would die, Ireland’s High Court has heard. The 17-year-old girl, known only as Miss D and from Leinster, is asking judges to allow her to travel to Britain for an abortion after health chiefs told her she could not go.