In The News

For Washington insiders observing how the Trump administration conducts its business, Natalie Harp is an alarming figure.

The 35-year-old White House aide appears never to leave the president’s side, whether he is meeting a world leader in the Oval Office or playing golf. Her influential role has been questioned, and ridiculed, for years.

Harp’s nickname is “the human printer”; she is rarely seen without a sheaf of documents ready for her boss. When it emerged that those documents included highly personal letters she had written to him, laying bare her devotion, insider gossip turned into public soap opera.

A political attack line delivered by Democratic senator Jon Ossoff put her in the public spotlight when he said of the president: “He doesn’t want to do the job. He wants to build his ballroom and travel with Natalie on their apparently defenceless flying palace, gifted by the Emir of Qatar.”

Shawn McCreesh, a White House reporter for The New York Times, explains this latest, and perhaps most puzzling, controversy to hit the Trump administration.

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan, with Andrew McNair.
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Now in its fifth week, the trial of Lindsay Clancy in the US for the murder of her three children has been headline news, with blanket TV and press coverage and endless online discussion.

What is known – and what she admits – is that on the evening of January 23rd, 2023 while her husband Patrick was out running errands, she killed their three children, Cora, 5, Dawson, 3 and Callan aged 8 months in their suburban home.

When Patrick came home, and before he found the children, he found her on the ground outside their house.

As Shanelle Kaul, a national correspondent for CBS News, tells In the News, his 911 call for help was one of the most harrowing evidence heard in court.

Her defence is that she was suffering from post-partum psychosis; the prosecution maintains her actions were deliberate.

As the jury prepare to begin deliberations this week, Kaul discusses the key evidence heard at the trial so far.

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode was originally published in March 2026.

In his new documentary Amplified: The Exportation of the Culture Wars, director Mike Sheridan explores the profound influence of toxic discourse in the United States on the rest of the world – and in particular, Ireland.

Through interviews and examples he shows how, with the amplification of social media, legitimate grievance can bloom into conspiracist, and how easily performance, paranoia, and power intertwine.

As Irish Times reviewer Tara Brady notes, the film which “begins as a study of toxic discourse in the United States expands into a sobering excavation of recent unrest in Dublin. The riots of November 2023, along with the persistence of aggressive anti-immigrant demonstrations, are presented as symptoms of a transnational malaise”.

Sheridan explains to In the News how he made the documentary, how imported misinformation can gain such a powerful hold, and why high-profile US commentators including Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes became so invested in the Dublin riots without any apparent factual knowledge of what occurred.

Amplified: The Exportation of the Culture Wars is available to rent on Apple TV and other digital platforms

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This episode was originally published in March 2026.

If you got an invoice you’d been waiting for from your builder for work done, you’d get ready to pay it, wouldn’t you?

And if, a couple minutes after that, you got another invoice from the builder saying that actually he’d made a mistake and he’d given you the wrong bank details, you’d think nothing of it and proceed to pay.

Well that’s exactly what the reader who contacts our consumer affairs correspondent Conor Pope did. She sent the requested €30,000 to her builder and thought nothing more of it – until a week later when her builder contacted her politely wondering if where the payments was.

She is tech savvy, has been made aware through her work about all kinds of fraud, and is cautious by nature yet she had been the victim of payment redirection fraud – also known as invoice fraud.

Conor Pope came into the studio to explain how this scam worked and why this particular case should be a lesson to everyone who believes invoice scams are only targeted at big business.

Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Staff at Oberstown Children Detention Campus are set to strike again on Tuesday the 25th of August.

It will be their fourth work stoppage this summer over plans to expand the capacity of the north Dublin facility for young offenders.

Members of the Fórsa trade union have already taken to the picket line this week in a protest relating to staffing levels, saying they’re “running on fumes.”

While acknowledging that management have made progress in hiring 11 new staff, they believe recent high profile events, such as wrong-way motorway driving, will further heap pressure to find beds for teenagers in trouble with the law.

Workers are concerned that inadequate staff ratios will undermine their safety, particularly in light of a spate of serious assaults on the campus last summer.

One social care worker told Irish Times work correspondent Emmet Malone these “young people often present with challenging and difficult behaviour; they’re only in Oberstown as a last resort and we regularly find ourselves in difficult, sometimes dangerous situations ... If we don’t have enough staff to operate the unit safely, properly and adequately, the young people we work with on a daily basis are suffering too.”

But if management are engaging with the union, why are staff still planning to strike on Tuesday? What are the sticking points and what might draw this dispute to a close?
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