Your Tuesday evening catch-up

Here’s a briefing on some of the stories and issues highlighted on irishexaminer.com today.

IRELAND

The Government is to take no action on the problems with the Commission of Investigation into write-offs at the IBRC until an interim report is provided by the judge. The inquiry’s stalled after Judge Brian Cregan raised issues with confidentiality and legal privilege.

The Environment Minister Alan Kelly has announced a series of reforms to the private rental sector to provide rent certainty for tenants and landlords. The measures include increasing the rent review period from one-to-two years - meaning anybody who faced a rent increase in 2015, will now not have a rent review until 2017.

A mother from Louth is calling on detergent manufacturers to make their liquid tablets less attractive to children following an incident involving her 17-month-old daughter.

A Carlow man who regularly raped his niece and grandniece has been given a ten year sentence with the final three years suspended.

WORLD

A Russian ban on all flights to Egypt in the wake of a plane crash will last for at least several months, President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff has said. Sergei Ivanov said that it would be impossible to radically revise the nation’s security system in a short time, according to Russian news reports.

Slovenia is to start building razor-wire fences on the border with Croatia to stem the flow of refugees– but not to stop it entirely, the country’s prime minister said. Miro Cerar said that “at this moment about 30,000 immigrants are on their way towards Slovenia”, adding that the work to build the fence will begin “in the next few days”.

Former chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who guided West Germany through economic turbulence and Cold War tensions, has died aged 96. German weekly Die Zeit, of which Schmidt was a co-publisher, confirmed in a statement that he died at his house in Hamburg on Tuesday afternoon.