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

IRELAND

A sunset in the Phoenix Park in January Sasko Lazarov / RollingNews.ie Sasko Lazarov / RollingNews.ie / RollingNews.ie

• The Sisters of Charity’s shareholding in the St Vincent’s Hospital Group has been transferred to a new charity and the order said it will have ‘no role’ in the new National Maternity Hospital.
• Public health officials reported 1,149 new cases of Covid-19 confirmed by PCR and 1,221 positive antigens registered on the HSE portal. 
• Minister for Environment Eamon Ryan compared government plans to regulate the sale of turf to the workplace smoking ban.
• Sea levels in Dublin Bay rose at nearly double the global rate between 1997 and 2016, according to new research from Maynooth University.
• The HSE was fined €23,000 after pleading guilty to four breaches of safety, health and welfare legislation.
• The Minister for Integration confirmed catering company Aramark, which operates in several direct provision centres, has been awarded the Government contract for catering hubs for refugees from Ukraine.
• An Oireachtas Committee examined the issues faced by same-sex couples in international surrogacy arrangements.
• Tenants are often unable to make discrimination complaints about their landlords within the necessary timeframe because they cannot find the landlord’s address, the human rights commission said.
• Ireland’s consumer watchdog has not identified any “clear breach” of consumer protection law by two similar Dublin events showcasing the art of Van Gogh, but said any evidence of “misleading” practice should be reported. 

THE WORLD

A man stands in a crater of a Russian shell that brought down a section of an apartment building in Borodyanka. Yuliia Ovsiannikova / Ukrinform/ABACAPRESS.COM Yuliia Ovsiannikova / Ukrinform/ABACAPRESS.COM / Ukrinform/ABACAPRESS.COM

#UKRAINE Russian airstrikes hit Kyiv today as UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres visited the capital. 

#INDIA AND PAKISTAN A massive heatwave, which climate change is making more frequent and harsher, is taking its toll on India and Pakistan this week. 

#CHINA The city of Guangzhou has cancelled hundreds of flights and launched mass testing of 5.6 million people after one suspected Covid-19 case.

PARTING SHOT

The Journal’s factchecking team has just sent out the latest edition of our Fact Check newsletter to subscribers – here’s an extract:

A couple of days ago, a video began doing the rounds on social media of Volodymyr Zelenskyy talking by video chat with Elon Musk recently, with – and I believe this is the technical term – an absolutely massive amount of cocaine sitting on his desk. Unsurprisingly, the video was manipulated. There is no cocaine in the real video.

Around the same time, a fake tweet from BBC News was being shared which quoted French president Emmanuel Macron saying that sanctions against Russia will lead to 60 million refugees in Europe. Again, this didn’t happen. Macron didn’t say it and BBC News didn’t tweet it.

If we spent the entirety of this newsletter listing Russian disinformation about the war in Ukraine, we wouldn’t even scratch the surface of just how much of it is out there. It is unrelenting.

Factcheckers around the world – including us -have debunked over 1,400 claims since the war began just over two months ago, and that’s just the ones that can be investigated and proven wrong.

It doesn’t take into account all the disinformation in the years running up to the war; the videos and stories that are so subtly done that it’s not even possible to recognise them as disinformation; and the ones that are made and shared in countries which don’t have factcheckers or an independent media to point out that they are dodgy.”

You can sign up for future editions (for free) at this link.

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