Every afternoon, TheJournal.ie brings you 5 things you really need to know by 5pm.

1. #NATIONAL GOVERNMENT: Brian Cowen has told reporters he would welcome all-party consensus on the government’s four-year budgetary policy to be published next month – but has written off the chances of forming a ‘national government’ with the opposition parties, saying to do so would cause ‘political instability’.

2. #FACEBOOK: The Data Protection Commissioner will contact Facebook over concerns that the social network has been storing the details of its users’ mobile phone contacts lists without their knowledge, TheJournal.ie has learned.

3. #COURTS: The partner of Twink’s ex-husband has lost her High Court action against the Sunday World where she claimed it had breached her privacy by publishing pictures of her and her partner, David Agnew, in 2006.

The president of the High Court, however, said that the Sunday World had engaged in the “lowest standards of journalism imaginable” in publishing the piece.

4. #NOBEL PRIZE: China is upset that this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to China’s best-known dissident, Liu Xiaobo. Lui was praised for “his long and non-violent struggle for human rights in China”, but China has summoned the Norwegian ambassador to Beijing in protest at the move.

5. #RIP: Ireland’s most famed heart surgeon and former Irish Times columnist Maurice Neligan has died suddenly at the age of 73. A former surgeon at the Mater Hospital, Neligan was an active campaigner for patient services and had carried out Ireland’s first heart transplant in 1985.

Have a good weekend – and don’t forget we’ll still be here to cover all the news as it happens.