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

IRELAND

Minister for Justice Helen McEntee addressing media outside Government Buildings Sam Boal Sam Boal

• A murder trial has heard details of Urantsetseg Tserendorj‘s injuries sustained after being stabbed while walking home in the IFSC in January 2021. 
• A Belfast man has been remanded in custody over a security alert which halted a peace event addressed by Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney.
• Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said a return of mandatory mask-wearing “wouldn’t cut it” as it is “almost impossible” to stop transmission of the BA.2 lineage of Omicron.
• Tens of thousands of Irish civil servants will now be able to work remotely at least some of the time.
• The government is to consider using mandatory time-of-day-pricing for electricity in an attempt to address the cost-of-living crisis.
• A woman who  was sexually assaulted by her father as a child has told a court she forgives him and does not want him to serve any more jail time for his crime against her.
• A convicted Garda killer who forced another officer to jump out of the way of his speeding car to avoid being ‘crushed’ at a checkpoint has been jailed for almost five years.
• The prosecution of a soldier over the death of a man in Northern Ireland in 1988 has been adjourned due to “circumstances beyond everybody’s control”.
• The recent spell of relatively mild weather has come to a close with Met Éireann forecasting temperatures as low as -4 degrees tonight. 

INTERNATIONAL

A Ukrainian soldier stands one top of a destroyed Russian tank on the outskirts of Kyiv Rodrigo Abd Rodrigo Abd

#RUSSIA: President Vladimir Putin has warned “unfriendly” countries, including all EU members, that they would be cut off from Russian gas unless they opened an account in rubles to pay for deliveries.

#FLORIDA: An LGBTQ advocacy group in the US has sued the Florida Governor in an attempt to block a new law forbidding classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity from pre-school through to third grade.

#SHANGHAI: A top Shanghai official conceded that the Chinese financial hub had been “insufficiently prepared” for its latest Covid outbreak.

PARTING SHOT

The census is taking place this Sunday.

Last year was supposed to be a census year (they happen every five years), but it was delayed because of the Covid pandemic. 

But what is the purpose of the census – what sort  of data does it capture, and how is it used? And how does it keep up to date with our ever-changing society?

That’s what we’re looking at in this week’s episode of The Explainer. Presenter Gráinne Ní Aodha speaks to Cormac Halpin, who is a senior statistician with the Central Statistics Office (CSO). Halpin works in the area of the CSO that is responsible for processing the data and disseminating the results of the census. 
https://soundcloud.com/the-explainer-podcast/what-is-the-census-used-for