IT’S FRIDAY, FRIDAY, gotta get down on Friday – and like any other day, TheJournal.ie brings you the nine things you need to know by 9am.

1. #ENDA IN AMERICA: An optimistic Enda Kenny has told an American audience that Ireland has been through a “bleak midwinter” – but that its best days are still ahead. “The road is long, but we’ve made a firm start,” the Taoiseach told an audience at Harvard University.

2. #BARRACKS: Alan Shatter has insisted the government will save €1m by renting premises in the same towns that it’s already closed Army barracks in. Closing the four barracks will save €1.3 million a year, he said, while renting them would cost less than €100,000.

3. #ARRESTS: Two men are still being questioned by Gardaí over the shooting of Melanie McCarthy McNamara, the 16-year-old who was killed in Tallaght last week. The men were arrested in Athy, Co Kildare yesterday evening.

4. #SYRIA: The UN’s general assembly has overwhelmingly backed a motion demanding an immediate end to violence in Syria. Ireland was among the 137 countries to back the plan – with only 12 countries, including Iran, Cuba, Russia, China and North Korea – opposing it.

5. #TALK TALK: Irish officials are putting the final touches to an application for EU funding to help retrain the 575 Waterford workers who lost their jobs at the former TalkTalk call centre.

6. #ROADS: A 38-year-old woman has been killed in a road traffic accident in Galway. The car the woman was driving hit a wall at Colemanstown in Menlough. She was the only occupant.

7. #NAMA: The man credited with ‘inventing’ NAMA has expressed fears that the agency will be happy to simply make a profit based on the price it paid for its loans – and stop short of making sure that €72bn developers’ loans will be repaid in full. Peter Bacon also told RTÉ’s Prime Time that the agency’s daily running costs of €1m was “missing the point”, given the size of its operations.

8. #PRIVACY: Twitter has promised to improve its privacy policy after it emerged that the latest version of its apps for iPhone and Android had been copying a user’s entire address book and storing it on its own servers. The row prompted particular ire because the latest iPhones come with the app built in automatically.

9. #GROUNDED: You might remember a few weeks ago we showed you some of the first modelling work by Cindy Crawford’s clone-a-like daughter Kaia Gerber, 10. Well, you won’t be seeing much more of Kaia’s uncanny resemblance to her mother: Crawford has told her daughter that she’s not being let do any more modelling work until she turns 17.