Every morning, TheJournal.ie brings you nine things you really need to know by 9am.
1. #SHOOTING: A murder investigation is underway following last night’s shooting in Dublin. A twenty year old man was sitting in a car in Ronanstown when he was shot four times in the head and upper body. He was pronounced dead at Tallaght Hospital.
2. #STAGNATE: The OECD believes the Irish economy will stagnate this year. The Paris-based think tank now expects gross domestic product (GDP) to come in at 0 per cent in 2011, down from growth of 1.5 per cent six months ago. The OECD also says Ireland should not raise its rate of corporate tax and that it believes house prices will stop falling in 2012, RTE reports. It also believes the government should cut the dole for the long-term unemployed to encourage them to go back to work. But there’s good news for the rest of the world, whose recovery is becoming self-sustaining, the think tank says.
3. #CHILDREN: The lack of laws to allow the sharing of “soft information” on paedophiles is hampering child protection efforts, Geoffrey Shannon, Ireland’s Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, has said. His fourth report calls for out-of-hours social services, the extension of youth homeless facilities to over-18s and an end to the use of garda stations to house children overnight, the Examiner reports.
4. #RACE FOR ARAS: Mary Davis of Special Olympics Ireland is likely to announce her bid for the Presidency at a press conference later today.
5. #ALCOHOL: The number of young people presenting at hospitals with alcoholic liver disease (ALD) has trebled in the last 12 years. Addiction specialist Dr Bobby Smyth has warned that ALD discharges from hospital increased by almost 250 per cent for 15 to 34-year-olds between 1995 and 2007, the Examiner reports.
6. #NUCLEAR STRESS TESTS: Britain’s ten nuclear plants, including Sellafield, are to undergo stress testing by the EU, to see if they could surivive forest fires, transport accidents, loss of electrical power supplies and human error. Would stress testing reassure you about the safety of Sellafield. Let us know.
7. #FACEBOOK JNR: Facebook has no plans to target the under-13 audience, despite comments fournder Mark Zuckerberg made last week suggesting children should be allowed on the site for educational purposes. Zuckerberg and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also warned G8 leaders against over-regulating the internet – one of the topics on the table for today’s G8 summit.
8. #NAUGHTY MONKS: Pope Benedict XVI has ordered the closure of a monastery in Rome and sent its monks packing to other monasteries over claims their lifestyle is “not in keeping with Church doctrine”. The monastery hosted a performance by a lap-dancer-turned-nun Anna Nobili and welcomed celebrities such as Gloria Estefan and Madonna, the Telegraph reports.
9. #TOO THICK: Cheryl Cole has been dropped as a judge on the US X Factor because her accent was “too thick” for American audiences to understand. TMZ also reports that she and Paula Abdul “lacked chemistry”.
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