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

IRELAND

Member of the public looking at the new Nikita Hand book Not The Perfect Victim n Easons Dublin on its first day of being released. Conor McGregor was found to have sexually assaulted Nikita Hand and was ordered to pay around €250,000. Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie Leah Farrell / RollingNews.ie / RollingNews.ie

• It is likely that the bombing of Omagh in 1998 involved “operational cooperation” between dissident terror groups the Real IRA and Continuity IRA, a public inquiry has heard.

• Four former ministers and a former special adviser lobbied their one-time government colleagues over the summer, according to latest disclosures on the Lobbying Register.

• The Taoiseach has said the Israel Football Association’s comments about Ireland’s football manager are “unacceptable” and “should be withdrawn”.
• Scrambler, e-scooter and e-bike related injuries are rising at an “exponential rate” and placing a “huge burden” on an already overstretched system, emergency doctors have said.
• Over 11,000 health workers across 30 hospitals are set to strike for a full day on Wednesday 14 October, trade union Siptu has announced.
• Sinn Féin has denied claims that a motion to scrap carbon tax on home heating oil is just “political theatre”.
• A teenage driver has been killed in crash with a lorry in Co Meath, while on Monday, an 80-year-old cyclist was seriously injured in a collision with a car in Co Galway.
• Wholesale electricity prices have jumped by almost 77% in one year, new data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) revealed.
• The funeral mass of a young mother of three from Kilkenny who was found with fatal injuries at her home in Australia has heard she was “devoted” to her young sons and always made aware that they were deeply loved.
• A letting agent connected to property group DNG has apologised after it used artificial intelligence to alter photos on a number of its apartment listings.
• A 28-year-old Irishman has been jailed for 13 years and one month for dangerous driving causing the death of a woman in Wales.
• Fianna Fáil TD Malcolm Byrne has tabled a bill that would ban the sale of tobacco or nicotine products to anyone born on or after 2009, thereby creating a “smokefree generation”.
• A man accused of attacking Kerry TD Michael Healy-Rae in Dublin has been further remanded in custody for another two weeks pending directions from the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).
• Legal action is being taken against the garda watchdog by the son of Martin Doherty, who was murdered by loyalist terrorists in a gun attack at Widow Scallan’s Pub House on Pearse Street in Dublin in 1994.
• A man who escaped from garda custody through a courthouse window in Co Limerick has been apprehended following a manhunt.

INTERNATIONAL

Demonstrators gather in response to the shooting of Wilber Rafael Garces Perez. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

#UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY US president Donald Trump has said he is deciding between making a deal with Iran or “driving them into hell with no chance of survival”. He was speaking at the United Nations, where he also said that artificial intelligence should be renamed “superintelligence”.

#LEGAL ACTION Piers Morgan has vowed to press ahead with suing Charles Spencer despite the author apologising over an error in his controversial memoir about his sister Diana, Princess of Wales.

#ICE A Venezuelan national who was shot by a US immigration agent in Texas was jailed with the bullet still inside his body.

PARTING SHOT

On Friday, Trump announced that he was banning news outlets CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, accusing them without specifics of reporting “fiction and lies.”

Yesterday, CNN, MS NOW and Politico announced they are suing Trump.  

Trump has since created his own TV channel, Trump TV, which provides 24/7 updates on the White House and the president. There were some teething issues, however, when there was no audio during the ribbon cutting ceremony for his new helipad, as the normal “pool” cameras, manned by the organisations that had been banned, were not there recording.

And Trump’s war with the press has finally met some resistance, writes Marion McKeone.

“After almost a decade of belittling its members and whittling away its First Amendment rights, the White House press corps has finally grown the semblance of a spine with its first unified defiance of the White House authoritarian creep that has long since progressed to a gallop,” McKeone writes.

Read the full column for The Journal here.