A tound-up of today's other stories in brief...
Petrol bomb thrown at party house
Gardaí in Galway are searching for a disgruntled partygoer who attacked a house with a petrol bomb after he was refused entry.
Gardaí say that the young man was unknown to the occupants of a house in Belmont in the east of the city when he arrived at the door around 3am on Sunday morning where a house party was in progress.
"He was refused entry and there were words exchanged," said a Garda spokesperson.
The man, described as being in his late teens and wearing a light blue jumper, left in a dark car, which may have been a Honda Civic.
However, he returned to the estate off the Dublin Road and close to the Galwegians RFC grounds and threw a petrol bomb at the house.
Nobody was injured in the attack. Gardaí at Mill Street station (091-538000) are investigating.
Deputy Chief of Staff appointed
Brig-Gen David Ashe was yesterday appointed Deputy Chief of Staff (Support) of the Defence Forces with immediate effect, writes Stephen Collins.
He succeeds acting Lieut-Gen Patrick Nash who has been appointed as operation commander of the EU military operation in Chad.
From Dingle, Co Kerry, Gen Ashe lives in Naas, Co Kildare. He served as press officer and spokesman for the Defence Forces and has also seen service in Defence Forces HQ as the finance officer and as a staff officer in the operations section.
Manslaughter trial collapses
The trial of a Galway city man charged with the manslaughter of a man whose charred remains were found in the back seat of a burnt-out car last year collapsed at Galway Circuit Criminal Court yesterday.
The jury had heard evidence that the dead man's spinal cord had been severed in two places in his neck during a high-impact, head-on collision with a taxi minutes before the driver of the stolen Mazda car, Thomas McDonagh(27), Lios na Rún, Ballybane, Galway, set fire to it in an attempt to destroy all fingerprint evidence.
State pathologist Dr Michael Curtis said at first that in his opinion the dead man, Joseph Sweeney (38), of St Finbar's Terrace, Bohermore, Galway, had been alive at the time the car was set alight. But under cross examination by Martin Giblin SC, defending, he said he could not rule out the possibility that Mr Sweeney was already dying from the "catastrophic" neck injury at the time the car was set on fire. Judge Raymond Groarke told the jury he was withdrawing the charge from them as the State could no longer prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr Sweeney had died from the inhalation of hot gases during the conflagration.
McDonagh, who had already pleaded guilty to charges of reckless endangerment and to the arson of the car, was remanded in custody until tomorrow, when sentencing may proceed on these offences.
Decorated stone found in M3 work
An advisory committee from the National Museum is to examine a decorated stone found in Co Meath during archaeological works for the M3 motorway.
The stone was discovered last week during excavations of an early souterrain, which was being dismantled as part of the M3 archaeological works at Lismullen in the Gabhra valley.
The stone is believed to date back to 3,000 or 4,000 BC and exhibits a series of motifs commonly found in passage tombs.
According to site archaeologist Mary Devey, the stone was not in its original position.
It had been split, she said, and used by medieval builders as part of the souterrain, an underground passage. She said it was common for medieval builders to quarry stone from previous monuments.