The Evening Fix... now with added Irish mammies

A girl looks at the models of Iron Man at a shopping centre in Bangkok, Thailand today (AP Photo/Sakchai Lalit)

HERE ARE THE things we learned, like and shared today as we round off the day in three easy steps.

THINGS WE LEARNED

#XTRA-VISION: Bad news for video and games retailer Xtra-vision tonight: 20 of its branches are to close with the loss of more than 100 jobs. Receivers said that the stores that are to close – the majority of which are in Dublin – had been trading at an unsustainable level.

#FOUND: Police in the US state of Ohio have praised the bravery of three women who were found alive in a house in Cleveland, around ten years after they went missing. You can hear the dramatic 911 call one of the women, Amanda Berry, made to call the police after she escaped from the house.

#ABORTION: Taoiseach Enda Kenny has dismissed calls for a constitutional referendum on abortion and said he had ‘no intention of playing party politics’ over the issue. Speaking to the Dáil this afternoon, the Taoiseach said the Government is confined by the Constitution.

#COURTS: Justice Minister Alan Shatter is to appoint two additional judges to the Supreme Court to deal with the large backlog of cases in the highest court in the State.

#OFFENDER: A registered sex offender who had been missing since early April has handed himself into a police station in Northern Ireland. Joseph McCabe, 29, had breached the conditions that had been attached to his release on licence.

#AMNESTY: The Oireachtas has this evening passed a bill offering amnesty and immunity from prosecution for Irish soldiers who left the Defence Forces during World War II to go and fight with the Allies. The new legislation will also offer an apology for the way the veterans were treated when some were found guilty by a military tribunal or dismissed from the Defence Forces.

THINGS WE LIKED

• Photographer Drew Gardner came up with the idea of recreating portraits of famous people in history – Napoleon, Charles Dickens, Emiline Pankhurst – using their descendants (often great-great-great-great grandchildren). The results are both eerie and impressive.
• A cow, a dog and an unlikely friendship: the Guardian asked readers to send in photographs of their pets becoming best friends with animals they shouldn’t really get on with. Some readers didn’t seem to quite understand the task (lots of dogs being friendly with other dogs, which isn’t exactly unusual) but there are gems here.
• If you hate The National, stop reading now. If you like The National and are a tad compulsive, you may enjoy this: the band performed their song Sorrow for six hours straight – that’s 105 times in total –  as part of a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on Sunday. Pitchfork has the lowdown on what happened, complete with many, many videos, and the band posted this photo of the set list on their Facebook page:

THINGS WE SHARED

• Things Irish mammies know: 7-up cures all ailments, if you sit on a damp wall you will get a cold in your kidneys, and where that draught is coming from. It’s a mammy thing. Here’s more things that only an Irish mammy can teach you.

• Imagine spending two months on an icebreaker (a giant research vessel which carries out scientific missions and can er, cut through ice) on the Ross Sea in the Antarctica. Marine researcher Cassandra Brooks made this weirdly compeling video of  two months condensed into under five minutes (spoiler: the boat gets stuck briefly at around 2:35):

(Video: Cassandra Brooks/YouTube)