History offered another one of its delicious ironies yesterday when a World Bank report suggested that China, hardly 30 years after Communist demigod Mao Zedong’s death, will become the world’s biggest economy and the country with the greatest purchasing power this year, several years earlier than had been anticipated.

Latest Birdwatch Ireland figures suggest there are 62m birds in Ireland and, of 51 species, the wren — an dreoilín — is the most populous.

The decision not to impose a custodial sentence in the Anglo Irish Bank corruption trial will fuel the sense of injustice, pointlessness and disenchantment that has convinced many people, far too many people, that State officialdom is incapable of, or ultimately disinterested in, standing between citizens and the social havoc out-of-control capitalism can wreak.

The murder of teacher Anne Maguire, 61, at Corpus Christi Catholic College in Leeds on Monday, where she taught Spanish and had a profound, positive influence for 41 years, should give us all pause for thought.

Judge Martin Nolan’s remarks, that it would be unjust to jail former Anglo Irish bank executives William McAteer and Pat Whelan given “a State agency had led them into error and illegality” confirm the impression that this was something of a show trial.

Just over 50 years ago, as the confrontation between the US and Russia over Soviet plans to base nuclear missiles in Cuba moved ever closer to the kind of catastrophe that threatens world stability and peace, or whatever the current version of that is, US President John F Kennedy ordered that all senior American military commanders read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, the Pulitzer Prize-winning and seminal history of the first months of the First World War.

Yesterday afternoon, Environment Minister Phil Hogan conceded the Cabinet will consider “revised proposals’’ on water charges at its meeting tomorrow.

The Garda Representative Association (GRA) opens its 36th annual conference in Killarney today. It is reasonable to say that none of the previous 35 conferences opened in an atmosphere as bristling as the one that prevails today.

Catholicism has two new saints — Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II — and, almost uniquely, a great number of people will remember their pontificates.

The Government has been criticised for some time for not setting specific targets to meet the problems of climate change.