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

IRELAND

Members of the public pass by a mural in Dublin Sasko Lazarov / RollingNews.ie Sasko Lazarov / RollingNews.ie / RollingNews.ie

• Health officials confirmed five more deaths and 456 new cases of Covid-19.
• A teenager received a seven-and-a-half-year sentence for the fatal stabbing of Azzam Raguragui in a Dublin park last year.
• Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the Government will review permission given to pubs to sell takeaway pints.
• New figures showed that the number of people receiving the Pandemic Unemployment Payment is continuing to rise.
• Almost 2,600 students began their postponed Leaving Cert examinations, after opting not to receive Calculated Grades earlier this year.
• Donegal County Council confirmed it has launched an investigation into a bog slippage at the site of a proposed wind farm near Ballybofey last week.
• Dublin City Council voted not to sell a housing development on Oscar Traynor Road to private developers.
• A charity warned that cancer patients are at increasing risk of poverty due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
• Tánaiste Leo Varadkar launched a public consultation on plans for laws to give employees legal right to sick pay.

INTERNATIONAL

PA PA

#VACCINE: A second experimental vaccine against Covid-19 by Moderna was shown to be 94.5% effective according to early results from a clinical trial.

#EUROPEAN COMMISSION: Ursula Von Der Leyen announced that the EU will sign a contract with German pharmaceutical company CureVac for another potential Covid-19 vaccine.

#HURRICANE IOTA: Low-lying areas of Honduras and Nicaragua have been evacuated as the Category 5 Hurricane Iota moves towards Central America.

#TRAIN ATTACK TRIAL: An Islamic State operative went on trial in Paris on terror charges for moving through a train with an arsenal of weapons and shooting a passenger in 2015.

PARTING SHOT

Months into a global pandemic and with Covid-19 cases rising across Europe for a second time, governments across the continent are having to find new ways to boost morale as they introduce new restrictions to stop the virus. 

In Germany, the government has done that by releasing a new series of videos praising the country’s couch potatoes.

One such video shows an elderly man ‘reminiscing’ on the winter of 2020.

“The fate of this country lay in our hands,” he says. “So, we mustered all our courage and did what was expected of us, the only right thing. We did nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

That’s one way of spreading the message. You can watch the video here.

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