EVERY EVENING, TheJournal.ie brings you a round-up of all the day’s main news, as well as the bits and pieces you may have missed along the way.

• Environment Minister Phil Hogan ruled out an extension to the registration period for the Household Charge in the Dáil this afternoon, saying “everyone knew when the deadline was”. Hogan said deadlines served only as an incentive to allow people to delay paying the charge, and claimed that only 25 per cent of eligible households had paid the household charge a week before the March 31 deadline.
• A retired Irish Catholic priest living in Australia who has been accused sexually of abusing children has been charged by police in Sydney. Fr Finian Egan, 77, was charged on Monday with 17 offences relating to alleged assaults on four children between 1972 and 1987. He has denied all allegations.
• Al-Qaeda’s main spokesman in the United States was preparing a message to the people of Ireland in an attempt to encourage the country to convert to Islam, documents seized during the raid that killed Osama bin Laden have revealed. A letter by Al-Qaeda’s American spokesman says Ireland was ripe for conversion because of its ‘sympathy’ for Palestine.
• The UN mission to Libya has expressed concerns about the recent deaths of three people being held in detention in the country, saying they have died as a result of torture.
• Patient advocacy group Dignity4Patients, which represents people who have been subjected to sexual abuse by medical practitioners, has complained to the Ombudsman’s office about an alleged lack of cooperation from the State and health authorities.
• Two residents at a County Roscommon nursing home have died from an outbreak of a seasonal influenza strain – the same which claimed the lives of seven residents in a home in Donegal earlier this year. The HSE said 42 of the 76 residents at the Drumderrig House private nursing home in Boyle were affected by the outbreak.
• The Minister for Communications Pat Rabbitte has said that RTÉ’s deficit is likely to hit 50 million by the end of this year. The minister was discussing the closure of RTÉ’s London bureau, which he said was decided “in the context of a restructuring and cost reduction programme across the entire organisation”.
• The UK’s Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) came under cyberattack last night, with a DDoS attack forcing its website to go down. The organisation said today that it decided to take the site offline in an effort to “limit the impact” on other clients hosted by their service provider – and insisted there was no threat to its security.

Street art activist Will St Leger teamed up with Ben &Jerry today to create a truly tasty moment in Dublin city centre today… (Image: Thinkhouse.ie)

• Which new movie release is worth the price of a cinema ticket this weekend? Decide for yourself with trailers of these three films, opening in cinemas tomorrow.
• A US study by an online games publisher has found that the amount of time ‘tween’ girls spend playing games per month has more than doubled over the last year. Key findings in the report showed that while boys choice of video games are violent and action-packed, girls top choices are games centred around cooking, fashion and tests and quizzes.
• Check out this video of Irish football fans preparing for their Poland odyssey by building their own campervan.
• Do you think that Ashton Kutcher’s new ‘dating’ advert is racist – or does it simply highlight his talent for mimicry?
• Minister for Justice Alan Shatter had a laughing fit the Seanad yesterday – as this video shows. What cracked him up so much? The excessive use of acronyms in his prepared statement. Apparently.
• The European Space Agency has announced plans to launch a new mission – to Jupiter’s moons. The ESA says that the Jupiter Icy moons Explorer (or JUICE) is the first large-scale mission selected by the body as part of its 2015-2015 Cosmic Vision programme.
• Anyone know what’s up with Molly Malone today?

There are way of getting things done, and there are ways of getting things done with a tank. We know which gets our vote.

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