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

Dr Benjamin Gearey, Lecturer in Environmental Archaeology at UCC and Principal Investigator of IPeAAT, artist Eleanor Brayden, and Dr Shane Mc Guinness, Assistant Professor in Sustainability at UCD and UCD Climate Fellow, at the launch of a specially commissioned series of beer mats about Ireland’s peatlands at the Cobblestone pub in Dublin. Rolling News Rolling News

IRELAND

• A woman received a six-month prison sentence for sending social media messages to Tánaiste Simon Harris, branding him a “murderer” and saying “I hope somebody does something to your family”
• Plans for a paid parking barrier system to serve the Blanchardstown Centre in west Dublin have been stalled
• Staff at the out-of-hours GP service Caredoc are now on strike in the south-east amid a row over funding
• Gardaí have appealed for witnesses after a man was knocked down by a vehicle and seriously assaulted with weapons in a housing estate in west Dublin earlier this month
• Social Democrats TD Rory Hearne was chastised in the Dáil today for holding up a piece of art highlighting the record number of children in homelessness this Christmas
• Gardaí are investigating after a pharmacy in Oldcastle, Co Meath was targeted in a suspected arson attack
• Two men in their 20s died after separate crashes in counties Limerick and Tipperary
• The Office of the Ombudsman has taken its IT systems offline after being targeted in a “financially motivated” ransomware attack

INTERNATIONAL

Farmers pictured protesting in Brussels today. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

#BRUSSELS: Protestors lit fires and hurled potatoes at riot police who responded with teargas and water cannon in Brussels today, as tensions boiled over at a farmer demonstration against the EU’s planned trade deal with South American bloc Mercosur

#EU: European leaders took part in a make-or-break summit on using frozen Russian assets to fund Ukraine, with key player Belgium under pressure to drop its opposition

#EPSTEIN: Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell asked a US federal judge to set aside her sex trafficking conviction and free her from a 20-year prison sentence, saying “substantial new evidence” has emerged proving that constitutional violations spoiled her trial

PARTING SHOT

Gardaí have launched a pilot that will arm 128 frontline members with tasers for the first time.

Uniform gardaí serving in Dublin’s Pearse Street and Store Street stations and those serving in Waterford will receive the devices for the trial period.

However, Garda Commissioner Justin Kelly said that An Garda Síochána may decide against rolling out tasers across the organisation at the end of the pilot.

The Journal’s Diarmuid Pepper went down to Store Street Garda Station today, where gardaí gave a live display of the tasers in use (Diarmuid was NOT tased during the demonstration).