LAST UPDATE | 21 Mar 2025

GOOD MORNING.

Here’s all the news you need to know as you start the day.

Heathrow

1. More than 1,300 flights to and from Heathrow Airport will be disrupted today due to the closure of the airport following a fire at a nearby electrical substation.

Rental Sector

2. The watchdog for the rental sector has begun examining recent attempts by major landlord Ires Reit to add an extra €150-200 every month to tenants’ bills by charging them for use of their building’s common areas.

Missed housing targets

3. Government targets for housing completions over the next two years will be missed by around 9,000, according to the Banking & Payments Federation Ireland. 

Israel

4. The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, has been sacked. Ronen Bar’s dismissal comes days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and amid fallout from a report on the 7 October, 2023 Hamas attack.

Tariff threat

5. A new paper published today by the Economic and Social Research Institute outlines the potential impacts of protectionist economic policies coming from the United States. 

Melting glaciers

6. All 19 of the world’s glacier regions experienced a net loss of mass in 2024 for the third consecutive year, the United Nations said today, warning that saving the planet’s glaciers was now a matter of “survival”.

Ukraine

7. EU leaders failed to reach a consensus late last night on issuing €5 billion for Ukraine’s artillery supply, choosing to discuss it at the next European Council meeting next month instead.

US

8. Donald Trump signed an order aimed at shutting down the Department of Education, a decades-old goal of the American right, which wants individual states to run schools free from the influence of federal government.

All I Want for Christmas

9. A US federal judge ruled that Mariah Carey did not steal her perennial seasonal hit All I Want for Christmas Is You from other songwriters.