LAST UPDATE | 36 mins ago

GOOD MORNING.

Here’s all the news you need to start the day.

The Morning Lead

1. Children as young as five were referred to the state’s agency for troubling sexualised behaviour last year, amid another rise in the number of children and teenagers being referred to the service.

Rural housing

2. Tánaiste Simon Harris has said the government is preparing the “biggest overhaul of rural housing rules in two decades” to make it easier for families to build one-off homes.

Clashes

3. The US struck southern Iran on Thursday, drawing retaliation from Tehran against a US military base, in the most serious clashes since an April ceasefire began.

School costs

4. The consumer watchdog has written to schools telling them to avoid “restrictive and costly” uniform policies when parents are readying their children for the return to the classroom later this year.

Layoffs

5. Workers will protest outside the offices of tech giant Meta and outsourcing tech firm Covalen Friday over the news Meta is to lay off up to 350 staff within its Irish workforce.

Investment fraud

6. A surge in AI scams promoting bogus state-backed investment schemes helped contribute to a 20% increase in investment fraud last year, with losses totalling over €20 million.

Online abuse

7. The recent byelections in Dublin and Galway saw the continuation of a trend of online hostility, bigotry and disinformation aimed at candidates, particularly women and people born outside Ireland, according to a new report by the Hope and Courage Collective. 

Kenneth Iwamasa 

8. Matthew Perry’s live-in personal assistant, who had a central role in the Friends star’s descent into ketamine addiction and injected him with the fatal dose of the drug, was sentenced to three years and five months in prison.

Middle East

9. Israel said it had killed the new head of Hamas’s armed wing in Gaza, Mohammed Odeh, after killing his predecessor earlier this month despite an ongoing ceasefire.