Every afternoon, TheJournal.ie brings you five things you really need to know at 5 o’clock.

1. #GE11: With eight days to go, the main parties just can’t stop shouting at each other. Labour opened the day with newspaper ads attacking Fine Gael plans to cut child benefit; this morning, Eamon Gilmore said the country would be “screwed” by Fine Gael’s austerity plans and labelled it the “stealth-tax party”.

In response, Michael Noonan said that while FG plans would hit average families by over €1,700 a year, Labour would hit them by over €3,000. Fianna Fáil has attacked FG, meanwhile, claiming that it would sack one in every three civil servants.

2. #BAHRAIN: Police in Bahrain have fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters as anti-government demonstrations escalated in the country. Its interior ministry has apologised, meanwhile, for the deaths of two protesters earlier this week.

3. #FREE-TO-AIR: FIFA and UEFA have lost an appeal to the European Court of Justice which had hoped to overrule moves by the UK and Belgium to safeguard the entire World Cup and European Championship tournaments as free-to-air sporting events.

The football governing bodies had tried to stop the countries from declaring the entire tournaments as being sufficiently important to guarantee free-to-air coverage, hoping they would be able to auction off less attractive fixtures to commercial pay-per-view broadcasters.

4. #96FM: The temporary departure of talk show host Neil Prendeville from the morning schedule of Cork’s 96FM has done the station no favours.

The latest JNLR radio listenership figures show that the station’s share of Cork’s daytime radio listenership for 2010 fell to 30.3 per cent – down 2.1 per cent on the last figures reflecting the twelve months up to September 2010.

Prendeville, who previously presented the morning chat show from 9am on the station, remains sidelined pending an investigation into allegations that he exposed himself on an Aer Lingus flight in October.

5. #MCFADDEN: Former Westlife singer Brian McFadden was detained at Sydney Airport overnight after police were called to the airport following a mid-air incident. McFadden was reported to have begun smoking during the flight, but tweeted afterward that he “wasn’t arrested… I did have a few drinks, but I was not smashed and abusive.” He has been banned from V Australia airline, however.