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

IRELAND

The last rays of sunshine iluminate sheep on the Curragh Plains in County Kildare. Eamonn Farrell / RollingNews.ie Eamonn Farrell / RollingNews.ie / RollingNews.ie

• RTÉ board chairperson Moya Doherty has defended the station’s output and financial position. 
• The Vatican ‘still hasn’t granted permission’ for the Sisters of Charity pull out from maternity hospital site, Dr Peter Boylan has claimed. 
• Labour leader Brendan Howlin told his party’s conference that it will not join the next government just to make up the numbers. (RTÉ News) 
• A vote to green-light the redevelopment of O’Devaney Gardens on Dublin’s northside brings to an end more than three years of discussions.
• A local authority failed to carry out any environmental impact assessment before destroying a biodiverse wetland area in Tallaght. 

WORLD

Tourists photograph themselves on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. PA Images PA Images

#BERLIN WALL: Chancellor Angela Merkel called for the protection for democracy and freedom as Germany commemorated the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

#POLANKSI: A French former model and actress has accused Oscar-winning director Roman Polanski of raping her in a Swiss ski resort when she was a teenager.

#THOMAS GRIFFITHS: A UK schoolboy who stabbed his former girlfriend to death then placed her hand on the knife in her neck to make it look like a suicide has been sentenced to life.  

PARTING SHOT

Scene of the crash in the town Turkey, about 420km from Dallas.

A small plane that crashed in Texas in September was flying “too slow” as part of a gender reveal stunt, a new report from US authorities has found. 

The NTSB has concluded that the pilot of the crop duster was maneuvering the plane at a low altitude in order to “dump about 350 gallons (1,325 litres) of pink water for a gender reveal”.

The crash is the latest in a series of accidents that have occurred as a result of dangerous gender reveal incidents.

Last month, an Iowa woman was killed when a homemade device that was meant to spray colorful powder into the air instead exploded like a pipe bomb.