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

1. # HEAVE: Is the heave on Cowen over already?

Following Brian Cowen’s assertion that he was not a Taoiseach “on probation” yesterday, it seems a number of backbenchers have turned in favour of him once again. Over a dozen backbenchers who were contacted by the Irish Independent following Cowen’s appearance expressed explicit confidence in him as leader of the country.

2. # BOND MARKETS: Cost of borrowing to the Irish government has remained steady today, following this morning’s auction of €1.5bn in government bonds.

There were worrying rises last week in bond prices, with the yields rise to a record 6.5%.  The price of 10-year bonds opened at 6.482% this morning and had fallen to 6.291% by close of business.

3.# EMIGRATION: New figures released by the Central Statistics Office today show that the level of emigration from Ireland has now reached the highest levels since the 1980s.

In  the year leading up to April 2010, about 65,300 people left Ireland – 27,700 of who were Irish natives.

4. # ITALY: Italian police have seized €23m worth of funds belonging to the Vatican, and have launched an investigation into the top banker at the Credito Artigiano bank.

The Italian central bank allegedly alerted police when it noticed two attempted transfers of Vatican funds, totalling €23m, from its account at Credito Artigiano to unnamed beneficiaries.

5. # TWITTER: Twitter users became victims of a malicious security attack today, when a JavaScript exploit automatically posted itself to a user’s timeline.

If users of the microblogging site used third party applications to access the site – instead of using the services on the website – they could avoid the problem.