X-Factor judge Tulisa Contostavlos and boyfriend, Danny Simpson recently underscored their love with a trip to the local tattoo studio.  Closer to home, Deirdre Cashion talks to tattoo fans about their passionate love of body art.

Tattoos are no longer the preserve of the celebrity footballer, pervasive pop princess, criminal overlord or street junkie.  People of all ages and from all walks of life are decorating their bodies, inspired by fashionable trends or by their own artistic creativity and life experience.

Some spend years working towards a full body-suit; a multi-coloured, intricate canvas of narrative art with skulls, serpents, script and a host of religious imagery.  Others opt for a discreetly-placed, subtle symbol of love or loss – a constant, visual reminder of a time of emotional upheaval in their lives. Read more

Sunday is Holocaust Memorial Day, but this year’s Irish events will be missing a significant voice, writes Deirdre Cashion

AN EMPTY chair at this Sunday’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration will serve as a painful reminder that the community has lost one of its most passionate and colourful commentators on the horrors of genocide.

Holocaust survivor Zoltan Zinn-Collis, who passed away last December, aged 72, at his home in Athy, Co Kildare, will be sadly missed by those who gather to remember the victims of Nazi atrocities. Read more

The police sketch of the kidnapper. Notice the strong resemblance to John Knoll.

The beer flowed freely as John Knoll chatted with his regular customers about events of the day. The post-Prohibition ‘Emerald Isle’ bar was a popular haunt with Irish-Catholics in the Yonkers neighbourhood of New York State and Knoll claimed to be one of them – an Irish emigrant, forced to leave behind his beloved homeland in search of a better life in the land of opportunity.

But history may have finally caught up with John Knoll, who was in fact Johannes Knoll, a German emigrant from the small town of Herxheimweyher in Rheinland Pfalz.

For the first time, a revealing new book from author, Robert Zorn (54) publicly names John Knoll as the callous mastermind and ringleader behind the 1932 “Crime of the Century” – the abduction and murder of the son of pioneering aviator and American hero, Charles A Lindbergh, the first man to fly non-stop from New York to Paris.

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Thousands of angry protestors recently demanded the immediate closure of America’s largest canvas prison compound in Maricopa County, Arizona.  But can the Irish penal system learn a thing or two from Sheriff Joe Arpaio?

The mercury rises to an unbearable 53 degrees Celsius.  The searing, mid-day, desert sun beams down on the canvas roof of the tent compound – the only protection, which 2,000 men and women have from the relentless, blistering heat.

You could certainly fry an egg on the stones here, if you had an egg.  But it seems like an eternity since breakfast and there’s just one more meal to come today.

This is not Iraq or some other middle-Eastern, war-torn battlefield.  This is ‘Tent City’, America’s largest canvas prison compound, where thousands of protestors gathered last weekend to demand its immediate closure on the grounds of human rights violations. Read more

It’s 9am in sunny Los Angeles. John O’Shea is off to bed for some well-deserved rest after 12 hours straight at the poker table. But the 27-year-old Dubliner sounds decidedly downbeat. He’s had a bad run on the green baize over four or five days and has lost $150,000 (€112,000) — about 25pc of his bankroll, or float.

For most ordinary punters, this would be unimaginable. But for O’Shea, it’s just another day at the office.

That week’s loss isn’t exactly small change — even by O’Shea’s high standards — but with estimated career profits of $2m (€1.5m), there’s plenty more left in the kitty.

O’Shea is doing what thousands of Irish online players dream about: he gave up his well-paid job to become a poker professional. And, although he doesn’t regret the decision, he’s no longer starry-eyed about his career change. Read more