EVERY EVENING, TheJournal.ie brings you a round-up of the day’s news, as well as the bits and pieces you may have missed.

• Police investigating the NOTW phone hacking claims also searched the London offices of the Daily Star Sunday today. In audio secretly recorded and leaked from Rebekah Brooks’ meeting with NOTW staff this afternoon, staff accuse her of arrogance and ‘toxifying’ the newspaper. Cameron’s former aide Andy Coulson, an ex-editor of the NOTW, was arrested in connection with the alleged hacking just as the prime minister defended having hired him as his director of communications. Former NOTW royal editor Clive Goodman was also arrested today.
• Here’s a slideshow of how the press has been covering the newspaper’s demise. This morning TheJournal.ie asked if you thought closing the News of the World was the right thing to do and 65 per cent of you said yes.
• Alas, Oireachtas casual Friday is no more… A new Dáil dress code in being introduced under which TDs must wear business attire. Guess which TD was particularly unimpressed with the new rules?
• Minister for Health James Reilly has confirmed that the government hasn’t actually agreed to the planned downgrade of services at some smaller regional hospitals. Meanwhile, nurses at Naas General Hospital are to ballot for industrial action over what they describe “unsafe conditions” there due to understaffing.
• The space shuttle Atlantis launched today for NASA’s final space shuttle mission, despite a slight blip in the countdown clock. If you missed lift-off, here’s a short video showing, as NASA says, the space shuttle spreading “its wings a final time for the start of a sentimental journey into history”:

• Keep your Oxegen festival, (not) Cardinal Brady says in today’s column, we have Priestopalooza.
• Irish banks became even more reliant on the ECB’s funding last month as depositors withdrew their funds from the banks.
• Prosecutors in Paris have begun the official investigation into allegations former IMF director Dominique Strauss-Kahn attempted to rape a woman in 2003.
• A passenger plane crashed while attempting to land in the Democratic Republic of Congo today. Over 50 people are thought to have been killed, while another 40 have been pulled alive from the wreckage.
• The family of a four-year-old boy who is in remission after being diagnosed with rare cancer last year says it will borrow €10,000 to harvest potentially life-saving stem cells for him after confusion arose over a hospital carrying out the procedure for her. His heavily pregnant mother wants to bank her umbilical stem cells because there is a high risk of her son relapsing.
• Georgia has reason to celebrate today: Eduard Saakashvilli, the son of the country’s president, has set a new world record for swift iPad typing.
• You may want to re-think you’re holiday reading: a leading UK psychologist has claimed that romance novels along the lines of the Mills & Boon collection are bad for your sexual health.
• The army bomb disposal team was dispatched to Tralee IT today to make safe a quantity of the chemical re-agent Picric Acid.
• The music was kicking off at Oxegen this afternoon. Thousands began arriving to set up camp for the festival yesterday and, judging by these photos, spirits weren’t dampened by the weather. Meanwhile, if you want to know what it takes to host an Oxegen, here’s a guide to the festival in numbers.
• A pet squirrel, stunning sunset, and six-to-a-bike: just some of the subjects of the week in photos.
• Andy Warhol artwork was being arranged at Bonham’s in New Bond Street London ahead of the auction house’s sale of Warhol pieces:

(Victoria Widdowson/PA Wire)

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