A glance at the week that was
We now know
Ireland could be home to 6.5 million people by 2060, according to the EU’s statistics agency.
The French media have been banned from promoting their Facebook
and Twitter accounts, as they are foreign commercial brands.
Shrek, the New Zealand sheep whose ability to avoid the shearers made him a national celebrity, has died aged 16.
Most read this week on irishtimes.com
1 United offload Irish pair
2 ‘Naked’ Irish rower rescued off Australia
3 ‘Bono Pay Up’: art group plans tax protest at Glastonbury gig
4 The last minutes of Air France flight 447: what the box tells us
5 E.coli bug traced to restaurant
6 Ireland tops satisfaction ratings
7 ‘Mysterious’ English paper welcomed
8 Gas explosion in Dublin apartments
9 Leinster get the luck of the draw
10 Our 256,000 (and counting) atheists, agnostics, humanists and non-religious
Shakespeare's flower girl
Ophelia, the heroine of Shakespeare's Hamlet, may have been based on a girl who lived 20 miles from Stratford-Upon-Avon, according to a history lecturer at Oxford University.
Steven Gunn discovered records of a Jane Shaxspere who drowned while picking flowers in 1569, when Shakespeare would have been about five. “If Jane was his younger cousin, the parallels to Ophelia – who picked flowers and drowned when she fell into a river in Hamlet – are intriguing,” said a statement from Oxford University.
The Numbers
$200The amount fetched at auction by underwear once owned by fraudster Bernard Madoff.
40% The drop in house prices since their peak in 2007, the Central Statistics Office said.
10,435The record lowest number of students registered to take higher level maths in the Leaving Certificate this week.
€120bnThe cost of bribery and corruption on EU taxpayers, according to the European Commission.
160kmThe distance that Dublin's two new electric taxis can travel once their batteries are charged.
126%The increase in prosecutions for mobile phone use by Donegal drivers in the past year, say gardaí.
