Sheep shelter in their field in the snow covered hills near Brough in the North Pennines after overnight snowfall in parts of Yorkshire in England. (Anna Gowthorpe/PA Wire)

HERE ARE THE things you need to know as we round off the day in three easy steps.

THINGS WE LEARNED

#ROYAL BABY: The big news this evening is that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge or Prince William and Kate as they’re better known are expecting a baby. Kate’s in hospital with severe morning sickness but otherwise everyone is delighted for them.

#SHANNON: Back home and with the Budget looming large, the government tried to give us some good news today by saying that 850 new jobs will be created by the merger of Shannon Airport and Shannon Development with the western airport given full independence from Dublin Airport Authority.

#GOOGLE: Google’s Irish operation is likely to come under scrutiny when the UK government’s Revenue and Customs investigates Google UK’s tax returns over a six year period. The Irish and UK branches of the search engine giant collaborate closely in areas such as staff payments.

#CLINTON: We may all be fearing the Budget but we’re all looking forward to Hillary Clinton visiting Ireland later in the week, right? Well even if you’re not you might like to know that she will be giving a speech in the Helix in DCU on Thursday afternoon.

#CRIME: A fourth person arrested in connection with the fatal stabbing of a German man in Rialto, Dublin on Saturday has been released without charge this evening. Separately, there was an armed robbery of a cash-in-transit van outside a west Dublin supermarket this afternoon.

#RUGBY: The strange nature of the Rugby World Cup means that Ireland knows two of the four teams it will be playing in the competition in England in three years time. The draw today saw Declan Kidney’s men avoid a potentially tricky tie with Wales who knocked us out of the World Cup last year.

THINGS WE LOVED

• These incredible pictures from a Russian volcano, the Plosky Tolbachik, which has erupted for the first time in 36 years.
• And here are more incredible pictures from the whole of 2012, courtesy of Reuters.
• Okay, we can’t really say we’re loving the prospect of the Budget on Wednesday but this publicpolicy.ie tool is pretty cool for calculating how you might balance the budget for 2013.
• This Filipino man isn’t too bothered by the weight imbalance as he brings loads of used plastics to sell at a junk shop in a poor suburb of Manila and has a casual cigarette while he’s at it (AP Photo/Aaron Favila)

THINGS WE SHARED

• Please take a look and share with your friends this job opportunity with us or rather our colleagues across the office at DailyEdge.ie who are hiring freelance journalists and an intern.
• We all shared in the fun of the Late Late Toy Show on Friday, right? Well it’s little wonder then that it’s the most watched programme of the year so far. Meanwhile here’s what you can look forward to on RTÉ over the Christmas and New Year.
• Finally, the normally a-political coverage of American football got a bit political on Sunday during half time when host Bob Costas spoke about gun control in the wake of the dreadful news of the NFL player who killed his girlfriend before taking his own life on Saturday:

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