Speed freaks are blowing a gasket as the 30km/h zone around Dublin city centre is widened, but the forgotten population of the capital raises a cheer. Cyclists and pedestrians suddenly feel safer and begin to experience what a city that is not dominated by lumps of speeding metal feels like. Research shows a reduction to a 32km/h limit leads to a 40% fall in casualties and collisions.
A small step for fiscal rectitude, a giant leap back for America as the world leader in science? Obama's decision to focus on longer-term projects as part of his budgetary "adjustments" may be honourable, but is axing plans to have an American astronaut back on the moon by 2020 symbolically suicidal? To some it portrays the US as a mortgaged nation with no hope of financing a Big Idea to get the country beyond its 'not waving, but drowning' mode.
John Terry's away matches make the front pages. But the sports fraternity calling for his head as England captain are less concerned about his infidelity to his wife than with the fact that he cheated on a team-mate. Everyone's gutted – Terry, his wife Toni, former Chelsea team-mate Wayne Bridge, and Bridge's ex Vanessa Perroncel, now in talks with media moneymaker Max Clifford and fighting off claims that she was literally taking one for the team. Extra time please!
They divorced two decades ago, and are still good friends but, as the Academy probably hoped, the headline writers are already debating who will get custody of the Oscar. James Cameron's Avatar gets nine nominations including Best Director, but so too does ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker.
"As one nightmare ends, another begins," says Brian Fetherston, father of 26-year-old Ken Fetherston, whose remains are found in the Dublin mountains, over four months after he went missing. Gardaí have begun a murder investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of this generous and outgoing young man who was never in trouble with the law. But for the Fetherston family, the certainty that has replaced the void of not knowing what had happened to their son is devastating.
It became Australia's second national anthem, but one catchy little ditty from the 1980s seems to have been less the product of creative genius and more the result of an earlier one that stuck in the minds of Men at Work, the band for whom 'Down Under' was a global hit. A judge has ruled they drew too much inspiration from the flute riff of a popular folk song called 'Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree', written 70 years ago by a woman called Marion Sinclair for a Girl Guides competition. First guestimates are that €38m in royalties will have to be paid.
Extracts from the 'How Not to Handle a Corporate Safety Scare' manual by The World's Biggest Carmaker: 'Deny there is any problem, blame ill-fitting car mats, blame poor driving when 19 people are dead, keep selling new cars that have not yet had what is now admitted is a faulty accelerator modified, and constantly belittle and minimise customers' fears.' Toyota was the first choice of Americans availing of their "cash for clunkers" motor trade stimulus plan. Not now, as US car buyers boycott what they see as a clunker for a clunker .
A great fire lights up the sky on Thursday night. A rock from space entered earth's atmosphere, showering shards all over the country. Astronomy Ireland's phones are jammed with sightings. How do you recognise a bit of space rock if you come across it? It looks like, well, a rock.
Most-read resignation note is a goodbye tweet from Jonathan Schwartz, recently departed CEO of Fortune 200 company Sun Microsystems. He signalled his departure with a resignation haiku, on Twitter: "Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a haiku. Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more."
The college friends of Eamonn Lillis insist he is a gentleman, "mild-mannered and courteous", but the family of his wife Celine Cawley can never forget the "treacherous lies" he told. Mr Justice Barry White sentences him to six years 11 months in jail. He is taken to Wheatfield prison but the sentence will now become as much a focus of debate as the evidence in the trial itself.
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