EVERY EVENING, TheJournal.ie brings you a round-up of the day’s biggest news stories, as well as the bits and pieces you may have missed.

• Michael Lowry has once again dismissed calls to step down as a TD – while demanding that the government give him more time in this week’s Moriarty Tribunal debates to air his side of the story. He’s taking 30 minutes as of now, having been offered 20 earlier – but he wants 50 to put out his side of the story. Debates on the matter kick off tomorrow.
• Earlier, Gardaí confirmed that they were not proceeding with any investigation over earlier suggestions that the phone of Justice Michael Moriarty had been bugged in the week before the Tribunal’s findings were published.
• Plutonium has been found in the soil at the Fukushima I nuclear power plant – proving, worryingly, that the main nuclear core of reactor 3 has been breached in some way.
• A Scottish woman has pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of a man who was killed by blunt force trauma to the head in 2007. Gary Bull’s body was only recovered when Gardai drained a slurry pit.
• The British government has issued a formal apology to the parents of Majella O’Hare, an Armagh schoolchild who was shot and killed by a British paratrooper on her way to church over 30 years ago.
• South Dublin County Council says it‘s in ongoing talks with Gama Construction over compensation for the shoddy state of the Balgaddy housing complex – which was only built in 2004, but where many houses already have major dampness problems.
• Monaco’s Prince Albert II is visiting Ireland next week – almost exactly fifty years after his parents did.
• 78 people are now confirmed to have been killed at an explosion at a weapons factory in Yemen.
• Rolling Stone magazine has published more photographs of the US Army’s “Kill Team”, apparently posing with the decapitated bodies of Afghan civilians. Warning: the photos make for tough viewing.
• Every day, NASA publishes an ‘astronomy picture of the day’. Today, that picture is a video – and an incredible one at that. This time-lapse video, shot by Terje Sorgjerd, shows one of the biggest shows of the aurora borealis – the ‘northern lights’ – for some years. The incredible video was shot at a national park near the border with Russia.