Ireland

More than 50 police were injured as they tried to prevent clashes between Protestants and supporters of the Irish Republican Army.

The young sailors aboard the Astrid were on a training cruise and part of a 50-ship flotilla promoting tourism to Ireland.

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin have some long awaited test results: After 69 years, they have captured on video a drop of pitch, also known as bitumen or asphalt. The experiment proves pitch is a liquid.

The new film from the director of Man on Wire and Project Nim, James Marsh, is a fiction film about the period toward the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It stars Clive Owen and up-and-comer Andrea Riseborough.

Syria's civil war is expected to be a central issue as the U.S. president meets with the world's other major powers. Obama's decision last week to send weapons to the Syrian rebels is supported by Britain and France, but not by Russia.

The capital of Northern Ireland is no longer the city of snipers that it was before the Good Friday Agreement, but novelist Stuart Neville still draws inspiration from the decades of violence. In The Ghosts of Belfast, he examines the shattered life of an IRA killer in the aftermath of The Troubles.

Novelist Colum McCann decided to write about the ties that bind his homeland, Ireland, with the United States, where he now lives. But he wanted to stay far away from cliches about being Irish-American. The result? His new novel, featuring historical figures searching for freedom, adventure and peace.

Irish banking officials should have known there were problems with the controversial 10-euro coin commemorating James Joyce, according to Ireland's RTE News. The coin misquotes the author's Ulysses, and bears an image of Joyce that his estate did not approve.

Although scientists have known that a funguslike organism caused the potato blight that triggered the Great Famine in Ireland in the 1840s, they didn't know which strain was the culprit. But they do now, thanks to the genes in some 19th century potato samples.

It goes back to a single page in a report written decades ago by U.S. consultants, and funded by the U.S. State Department.