A four-year suspended jail term was imposed yesterday on a man with autism for sexually assaulting a five-year-old girl.

A man who threatened his wife that he was going to kill their four children — starting with “the favourite” child — and then kill her, yesterday received a fully suspended jail sentence.

One of the senior detectives leading the search for a woman who has been missing since March has made a direct appeal for her to contact gardaí.

Unfortunately I was unable to go to Saturday’s Guns’n’Roses concert in Slane, I was too busy on the farm. And I missed their last appearance in Slane 25 years ago too for the very same reason. I never seem to be able to get the time to let the hair down.

An energy therapist who carried out a bizarre campaign of blackmail against his sister-in-law and her husband wrote an apology to them while remanded in custody for the past week.

“Oh man,” said the late great Muhammad Ali when he found George Foreman fading fast in the eighth round of their thrilling Rumble in the Jungle encounter, “This is the wrong place for you to get tired.”

An energy therapist got the idea from a sex addict patient to make up a story about his sister-in-law’s husband and he then set about a bizarre campaign of blackmail.

It was all about Michael Creed in Macroom mart on Saturday last, with talk as to what kind of Minister for Agriculture he might make.

Thank God summer has finally arrived. I thought for a while that it would never get here. But it has.

As you well know at this stage, I’m a glass half full man, rather than a glass half empty. Indeed so long as I have any drink at all, I’m happy.

There is a real sense of getting down to business at the marts this week. With the schools reopening after the Easter break, cattle marts are back to an adult-only audience.

On our farms right now many cattle are spending a good deal of their day backed up against a sheltered ditch.

A man living a reclusive existence in a container in East Cork made an anonymous 999 call claiming to have kidnapped a woman at gunpoint on New Year’s Eve and yesterday he was released from jail.

An East Cork man on a week-long drunken bender texted his wife that he would torch the house if she did not bring him drink and he later carried out an assault by punching her in the forehead and face.

A South African woman trusted to work as a cashier at the Midleton Park Hotel made off with €76,000, and after being questioned by gardaí, she fled to Australia and had to be extradited back to Ireland to face yesterday’s case against her.

Brendan Hyland was the standout performer at the Irish Long Course National Championships, securing the 200m Butterfly title in an Irish senior record time of 1:58.68 at the National Aquatic Centre in Dublin. The previous best was 1:59.14.

A trusted salesman’s theft of €33,500 from his employer could have put a furniture store out of business but for the fact that the money was repaid, a court has heard.

A dead cat was hung on the front door of an 18-year-old girl’s home by a man who texted and phoned her hundreds of times in a campaign of harassment.