5 things you need to know today

1. Public pay review part of Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil deal

A commission to examine pay levels across the public sector, including for new entrants, is proposed in the agreement to allow Fianna Fáil to facilitate a Fine Gael-led minority government. The commission, to be established within six months, is cast by sources as a mechanism for preventing strikes across the public sector, which would have the potential to cripple a minority government reliant on opposition co-operation. The parties are  at odds over the wording of proposed legislation to provide for the suspension of water charges.

2. Barack Obama may reveal secret Saudi links to 9/11

Twenty-eight pages of the 2002 joint congressional inquiry into 9/11 lie in a guarded vault in the basement of the US Capitol building. Former president George W Bush had them classified, allegedly to protect US sources and methods in the "war on terror".  Now the Obama administration is under pressure from families of victims, members of Congress and the media to release the secret pages. Elsewhere, Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz has said former speaker of the House of Representatives John Boehner "allowed his inner Trump to come out" when he called him "Lucifer in the flesh."  Mr Boehner, who was forced out as House speaker in September after years of in-fighting with Republican hardliners, criticised the Texas senator during a talk at Stanford University in California.  Some 20 demonstrators were arrested on Thursday outside a Donald Trump campaign rally in southern California, where the Republican presidential front-runner vowed to his supporters to get tough on illegal immigration if elected. Meanwhile, the slaughter continues in Syria where air strikes on a hospital in Aleppo on Thursday killed three doctors and some 27 patients, in addition to dozens of civilians killed in strikes on insurgent-held residential quarters of the city.

3. Gardaí to dig up Dublin garden in search for ‘murdered babies’

Gardaí are preparing to excavate the garden of a house in south Dublin where a woman has alleged two children she gave birth to were murdered and buried. The woman, who is now middle aged, came forward to gardaí last year and told them she had been the victim of sexual abuse at the hands of men she knew as a child. She alleged she was raped and abused over a period of about 10 years. In the 1970s, when aged 12, she said she first gave birth to a baby conceived during the abuse. She told gardaí that in order to cover up the abuse, the child was murdered and buried in the back garden of the house.

4. Paramilitaries active on large scale in North, study shows

Newly compiled figures reveal the scale of ongoing paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland, with 1,100 bombings and shootings over the last decade, almost 800 punishment attacks and nearly 4,000 cases of people being forced from their homes. Punishment attacks are continuing at a high rate. PSNI statistics show there were 279 paramilitary-style shootings and 508 paramilitary-style assaults. A panel of experts is scheduled to present a report on disbanding paramilitary groups after the Stormont Assembly election on May 5th. The Fresh Start Agreement, negotiated last year to stabilise the political process in Northern Ireland, appointed a three-person panel to advise on the issue of paramilitary activity.

5. Irish-based geologists make zircon crystals breakthrough

Geologists at Trinity College Dublin have discovered that the very oldest pieces of rock on Earth are to be found at the bottom of craters left by asteroid impacts. The finding may overturn previous research suggesting these rock components - zircon crystals - form where pieces of the Earth's crust smash together to build mountains. Zircon crystals are found in all kinds of rocks across the planet, said Dr Gavin Kenny, based in Trinity's school of natural sciences. The Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago and the crystals represent the oldest constituent of rock found anywhere in the world.

Misc:

László Nemes: "Is it now trendy for 17-year-olds to be neo-Nazis?" Son of Saul director László Nemes raises some uncomfortable truths in his remarkable Oscar-winning Holocaust drama, and in conversation he's no less controversial.

Colum Kenny: Irish Water shambles a sign of a deeper malaise in Irish society:  If politics fails again by delivering further inadequacy, social unrest is more likely

Garda Commissioner misses opportunity to make case for resources:  The first meeting of the Policing Authority was marked by an overabundance of jargon at the expense of substance.

A colourful Seanad but hopefully the last of its ilk:  The most dramatic shift in the line up of the 43 senators on the vocational panels was the Sinn Féin breakthrough

Can Twitter be saved by 'word of mouth' advertising? The social network is desperately trying to compete with Facebook for video ad dollars
 
Star power of 'Game of Thrones' actors rises in US 'Rebellion' reviews: The US reviews for RTÉ's 1916 Rising drama Rebellion, which aired on the Sundance channel this week, were not uniformly kind