A glance at the week that was
Balloon Boy goes up
Poor old Falcon Heene. As if one unusual name wasn't enough, the six-year-old will now be known as Balloon Boyfor the rest of his life. The world watched as news cameras followed the giant helium balloon he was supposed to have crawled into. Then he was found in the attic, puked a couple of times on TV and said something that hinted his parents had faked the whole thing. Quite a day all round.
Ice cap going down
The Arctic circle is losing its ice so rapidly that in a decade it will be largely ice-free over the summers. That’s good for shipping lanes and for those looking for oil and gas reserves, but not such good news for the polar bears. “It’s like man is taking the lid off the northern part of the planet,” said Prof Peter Wadhams, from the University of Cambridge, who was part of an expedition whose discoveries have led to the claim.
"I never took anything fromj any man. I never could. I never would."
John O’Donoghue defends his reputation while resigning as ceann comhairle
22
The height, in inches, of Khagendra Thapa Magar of Nepal, who turned 18 this week and sent his “world’s shortest person” application to the Guinness Book of Records
100
number of international soccer caps now earned by Shay Given and Kevin Kilbane
€5.5 bn
what the State expects Nama to pay the taxpayer by 2020
We now know
Jaycee Dugard now looks like this (above)
X-Factorjudge Cheryl Cole will mime her new single on tonight's show
Roman Polanski is completing his next film from inside his Swiss jail cell
The number of prison inmates in Ireland has passed 4,000 for the first time