Seven Days

A glance at the week that was

71,065Number of new cars that have been registered so far this year, a decline of 12 per cent on last year.

€200,000Estimated street value of the cannabis plants seized in Dublin during the week

31Years since MTV made its debut and changed the face of music.

2,300The fall in the number of people on the Live Register in June from the same month last year, representing a drop of 2.1 per cent annually.

€620Estimated back-to-school costs for secondary-school children, according to the National Consumer Agency.

4,437Number of Swarovski crystals on one of the US women's gymnastics team

We now know

India’s electricity grid isn’t fit for purpose, after two power outages in a week left more than 600 million people in the dark.

Criticising US broadcaster NBC’s Olympic coverage is enough to get your Twitter account suspended, as the British journalist Guy Adams discovered.

The rapper Snoop Dogg (right) has gone from canine to feline, and is now known as Snoop Lion.

A needle in my food, darn it

Airline food has a reputation for barely being edible most of the time, and a rash of recent incidents has only reinforced the notion. Last Monday, an Air Canada passenger found, of all things, a sewing needle in a sandwich. You’d think that would be an exceptionally rare discovery, except that it was the seventh needle found in aircraft sandwiches in the past three weeks: six needles were found on sandwiches on Delta Airline flights from Amsterdam to the US. It is not thought to be a terrorist plot, which is small consolation.