New gay rights laws for Ulster – which aim to criminalise discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation – are set to be challenged today in the High Court.

An investigation is under way into the sudden deaths of four babies at the neonatal unit of Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry. The babies died in the space of a few months, the last in September when the matter was referred to the coroner.

A leading SDLP assembly member is to quit politics in order to take a job as champion of children’s causes in NI. Lagan Valley MLA Patricia Lewsley is to become Children’s Commissioner. She replaces Nigel Williams, who died earlier this year following an illness.

Minister for Health Mary Harney has defended the Government’s new scheme of funding for older people in long-term residential care, claiming it will take people out of the “unfair, stressful” situation they can currently find themselves in.

Homeless charity Focus Ireland today called on Finance Minister Brian Cowen to earmark €2bn in the upcoming Budget for social housing. With the Exchequer awash with billions more euro than forecast, campaigners said the money should be used to build 10,000 homes for the poor during 2007.

Dame Anita Roddick has launched Amnesty International Irish Section’s appeal for a new Human Rights Action Centre at a fundraising event in Dublin. The Human Rights Action Centre will encourage, inspire and educate a new generation of human rights activists in the heart of Dublin.

{mosimage}The centre will house a training and education centre, along with a conference centre with seating for up to 100 people and an action and resource centre where people can react immediately to human rights violations. Amnesty International Irish Section seeks to raise €3 million to make this project a reality.
Amnesty International is currently campaigning against torture in the context of the “war on terror”, demanding protection for the people of Darfur, combating violence against women locally and globally and seeking better mental health supports and services in Ireland. “This project is more than a building, it’s about increasing Amnesty International’s capacity to realise human rights by delivering high impact campaigns that change the lives of real people,” said Colm Ó Cuanacháin, Secretary General, Amnesty International Irish Section.

A cross-border initiative to help people recognise the symptoms of mental health problems among 16 to 25-year-olds and treat them with ‘first aid’ was launched in Armagh today. Experts were this morning to converge on a conference to launch the findings of a pilot project, called Mental Health First Aid (MHFA). It has been designed to help address the mental health problems of young people in the border counties.

A man put images of his four-year-old daughter on the internet, a bail court in Belfast has heard. A Crown lawyer said the child was clothed and the images were not indecent, but conversations with other internet users were sexually explicit. The 34-year-old father of one is accused of making, possessing and distributing indecent photographs of children. The man’s name was witheld to prevent his daughter being identified.

Social workers were yesterday trying to comfort two little children after their mother was gunned down at her home in an apparent professional assassination. Baiba Saulite, 28, and from Latvia, was shot at close range a number of times while chatting with friends at the doorway to her home in Holywell Square, Swords, north Dublin, shortly before 10pm on Sunday.

A County Down man died from hospital acquired infections, an inquest has found. Brendan McDowell, 43, a builder from Annalong, was admitted to the Royal Victoria Hospital for a back operation. But a jury at Belfast Coroner’s Court found he died two months later from the infections, combined with an allergic reaction to drugs given to fight it.