The Leaving Certificate may be in full swing at home but Giovanni Trapattoni’s squad slept through the worst excesses of the local ‘School’s Out’ party which took place just a few hundred yards from the team hotel on Sopot’s beach front on Tuesday night.

HERE COME the WAGs.

The Hodson Bay Hotel Group wants to expand its hotel business into Dublin, managing director Padraig Sugrue confirmed yesterday.

A powerful earthquake swayed buildings from Los Angeles to Tijuana, killing two people in Mexico, blacking out cities and forcing the evacuation of hospitals.

THE IRISH might have drawn in their horns on home turf, but it is full steam ahead in the Slovakian capital, Bratislava.

WOKE up dis mawnin’… Or, rather, by the time you read this, yesterday morning, but why mess with the opening line of every self-respecting blues lament ever written? Anyway, waking up, whatever de mawnin’, is always an encouraging start to the day, I find.

ROBERT HEFFERNAN ended up ninth in the IAAF Racewalking Challenge — the Grand Prix of Race walking — following what has been a sensational year for the Cork athlete.

Two hundred and fifty jobs are set to be created at a new 12-storey Sheraton Hotel in Athlone town.

TYPICAL. You wait for years for a tourism project like a five-star hotel and golf course, holiday lodges dotted along the fairways, plus a spa...and then two come along almost at once.

Three massive vehicle bombs exploded today near the Palestine Hotel, home to many foreign journalists, killing at least 20 people.

Yahya Barzanji, Irbil

TWO South African men, captured along with a senior al-Qaida terrorist, were plotting attacks on tourist sites in their home country, and a senior police official said yesterday.

The QE2 liner was among the targets selected by two South Africans – captured in Pakistan along with a senior al-Qaida terrorist – who were plotting attacks on tourist sites in their home country, it was reported today.

Three civilians died and three were wounded when a US patrol was attacked west of Baghdad early today.

Attackers fired a rocket that struck a Baghdad hotel housing foreign contractors and journalists early today. There were no reported casualties.

More than a dozen rockets fired from donkey carts slammed into Iraq’s Oil Ministry and two hotels today – in brazen coordinated strikes at Baghdad’s most heavily protected civilian sites.

BASRA took a step towards self-rule yesterday after British troops asked a local tribal leader to set up a body to lead the population. The local sheikh, who has not been named, has been enlisted

From palace ashtrays and pillows to jeeps and a grand piano, the spoils of war are disappearing fast in Iraq.