Drinks exports play a vital role in the Irish economy, Simon Coveney, the food minister, told agri-food leaders at briefings in Illinois and Chicago yesterday.

BEING the first black president of the United States and of Kenyan origin, perhaps the most unexpected connection was that a man with such an exotic name, in the most powerful job in the world, would have links to a small village in Co Offaly.

IT wasn’t the man he had travelled across the Atlantic to see. But when Taoiseach Enda Kenny yesterday found himself in the same Washington Hotel lobby as Duke Special he would have been forgiven for asking the Belfast songwriter for a rendition of his hit I Never Thought This Day Would Come.

US PRESIDENT Barack Obama will be told an “Irish welcome” awaits him if he accepts an invitation to visit Ireland when he meets Taoiseach Enda Kenny in the White House today.

Dennis Quaid describes a harrowing scene with “blood everywhere” as doctors and nurses worked to save his newborn twins after they were given an overdose of a blood thinner.

Actor Dennis Quaid and his wife have launched a lawsuit against the makers of heparin after their newborn twins were inadvertently given massive doses of the blood thinner at a hospital.