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

In today’s Budget news…

• Day two of Budget 2012 and we learned quite a lot. VAT is up, there’s a new household charge, and the threshold for paying the Universal Social Charge has changed. Here are the main points of Michael Noonan’s announcement today.
• The €100 household charge is one the main elements of the budget, but will you have to pay it? Find out here.
• Are you a smoker? Get the ciggies in before midnight because they’ll be 25 cent more expensive after tomorrow, a move which has been described as ‘tokenistic’ by one lobby group.
• Other measures today include fuel increases and help for first time buyers but they weren’t enough to stop Labour TD Patrick Nulty from saying he will vote against the budget, he has told TheJournal.ie why.
• Plenty happening on Twitter too. One TD took the opportunity to tweet details of Michael Noonan’s speech before Noonan himself had a chance to deliver it to the Dáil while here is how you were reacting on the Twitter machine.
• Here’s what TheJournal.ie’s contributors have to say about the budget.

In today’s other news…

• A man has been hospitalised after he was shot while sitting in his car in Kilcock, Co Kildare this morning. The 25-year-0ld man is at Blanchardstown Hospital in Dublin and gardaí are appealing for witnesses.
• The body of Cork teenager Caolan Mulrooney has been found by gardaí today. Mulrooney, 19, had been missing since last Friday morning. A post-mortem will be carried out to ascertain the cause of death.
• A ten-year-old boy has been injured after he was hit by a train in Howth earlier today. He is being treated for leg injuries at Beaumont Hospital.
• Believe it or not, Germany’s finance minister has welcomed the threat of a downgrade of the eurozone’s credit rating by one agency. Wolfgang Schauble said it was the “best possible incentive” for European heads of government to agree on new measures to end the crisis.
• Before all the budget madness in the Dáil today, Taoiseach Enda Kenny defended his appointment of a former advisor to a €127,000 post saying  Ciaran Conlon was chosen to work in the Department of Jobs “for a specific purpose of getting people off the dole.”
• The Bar Council website was the victim of a hacking attack overnight, it has emerged.
• Overseas visits to Ireland were down between August and October. The Central Statistics Office also said that Irish residents made fewer trips abroad in that period than they did last year.
• Burglars in the UK microwaved a ten-week-old kitten after they found nothing to rob in the house they ransacked.
• H&M has defended its use of digital models on its website. The digitally-developed images carry the real face of a human model, but are built by digitally altering mannequins posed in H&M clothing. Check it out.
• Finally, forget the budget, forget the cuts and forget all the bad news that’s out there in the world tonight, just look at this fox, he’s licking a window (via statixy).

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