Ireland’s Men’s and Women’s Senior Basketball teams secured semi-final berths at the FIBA European Championships for Small Countries yesterday with impressive victories on day two.

DECEMBER football doesn’t enjoy the most enviable of reputations but the Dublin and Laois champions made light of the heavy and Baltic conditions yesterday to deliver one of the best games seen in the last 12 months.

GUILLERMO RIGONDEAUX will complete his preparations for his world title defence against Willie “Big Bang” Casey at a special training camp in Cork.

ROSS HICKEY, who won a national senior title at lightweight back in 2008, launched his campaign at light-welter at last night’s national elite championships at the National Stadium with victory over Crumlin’s Stephen Carroll.

Ireland's Olympic hero Ken Egan has been using the hills of Donegal as his inspiration ahead of his tilt at creating another piece of Irish boxing history.

BRIAN BARRETT, a cousin of former Irish Olympian Francis Barrett, brought the curtain down on a marathon session of National Intermediate Championships quarter-finals with a thrilling win over Patrick O’Shea at the National Stadium in Dublin on Saturday night.

The chief prosecution witness in the trial of four men accused of shooting a Limerick bouncer standing trial at the Central Criminal Court has told the jury that he was involved in six murder plots both before and after the shooting.

The defence counsel for one of the four men accused of shooting a Limerick bouncer standing trial at the Central Criminal Court has told the chief prosecution witness that he could not have gone to collect a gun from his client at any point on the day of the murder.

THE finals of the national under-21 boxing championships provide some interesting pairings at the National Stadium tonight when some beaten finalists from the seniors will be involved.

Ian Guider

A SENIOR opposition politician yesterday called for all garda interviews with suspects to be videotaped.

IF ever there was a compelling argument for accelerating the installation of video facilities at garda stations to record interviews with suspects in cases of serious crime, it was yesterday’s acquittal of two men of the alleged murder of a civil servant.

Two young Dublin men have been found not guilty of murdering a civil servant by direction of Mr Justice Liam McKechnie at the Central Criminal Court today.

The jury in the trial of two men accused of beating a civil servant to death have been sent away until Friday week as the case enters lengthy legal argument in the Central Criminal Court.

Two men accused of murdering a civil servant told a prosecution witness they "milled" a man and left him lying in a pool of blood, a murder trial heard today.

A civil servant who died after a beating had "patterns" on his face consistent with "stamping", a murder trial was told yesterday.

A witness in a murder trial today denied parts of her Garda statement which she made after the murder of a civil servant in 1998.

A hackney driver has told a murder trial that he saw a man lying on the ground being punched by another man while a third man stood over him.

A 43-year-old civil servant was beaten and kicked because he refused to give cigarettes to two young Dublin men accused of his murder, it was claimed in the Central Criminal Court today.

EAMONN TOUHEY (Moate ABC), a silver medallist at the European Cadet Championships last year, will be hotly fancied to add another title to his growing list at the National Stadium tonight.