News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Sunday 15th January 2017

Irish mortgage rates still nearly double the euro area average?

Variable rate holders continue to pay price for profligate bank lending during boom years

   

Irish mortgage interest rates remain nearly double the euro area average, according to data published by the Central Bank last Friday.

The weighted average interest rate on new mortgages, excluding renegotiation’s, was 3.38% in November, down 28 basis points year-on-year. The equivalent euro area rate was 1.72%.

Mortgage interest rates in Ireland used to reflect the main European Central Bank (ECB) lending rate, primarily because of the high proportion of tracker mortgages issued during the boom years.

The more recent divergence reflects the premium Irish banks have attached to variable rate mortgages issued since the start of the financial crisis.

Lenders here have resisted political pressure to lower their rates, insisting that lending into to Irish market represents a riskier proposition.

They also argue that Irish costs remain higher because of the higher funding costs they face as a result of the crisis.

Variable rates can rise or fall depending on wholesale interest rates, which are set by the ECB, though banks are not obliged to pass these changes on to customers.

Fianna Fáil is pushing for legislation that would give the Central Bank powers to cap variable mortgage rates, a move that is being resisted by the Central Bank and the Government.

The latest Central Bank data also show the volume of new mortgage agreements amounted to €548 million in November, bringing new agreements to €4.9 billion over the past 12 months.

Oxfam World report reveals ‘an obscene gap’ between the rich and poor.

Eight men’s wealth same as world’s poorest 50%, indicates study ahead of Davos forum

    

The gap between rich and poor is becoming increasingly large, with just eight individuals owning the same wealth as 3.6 billion of the world’s poorest people, according to new research.

A report from Oxfam, launched on the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, found that the poorest half of the world has less wealth than previously thought, due to new data emanating from China and India. This means that the eight richest men in the world are worth the same as the poorest half of the world’s population, according to wealth distribution data provided by Credit Suisse.

“It is obscene for so much wealth to be held in the hands of just eight men . . . particularly when one in nine people in the world go to bed hungry every night,” said Oxfam Ireland chief executive Jim Clarke. “A fundamental change in the way we manage our economies is required so they benefit everyone, not just a fortunate few. We need a global economy for the 99%, not just the 1%.”

More than 3,000 participants, including Taoiseach Enda Kenny, will descend on the snowy peaks of Davos, Switzerland, this week for the 47th World Economic Forum.

While the annual gathering has long been seen as a playground for the rich and powerful, the event this year is taking place against a background of resurgent populism and increasing public opposition to globalisation. This mood has been manifested in the election success of Donald Trump and the British vote to leave the European Union.

Although the US president-elect will not be attending the event, his inauguration as president of the US on Friday is expected to overshadow the summit. A number of sessions during the week are devoted to globalisation and the challenges posed by growing inequality and the question of wealth distribution. The theme of this year’s forum is “Responsive and Responsible Leadership”, a barely veiled acknowledgement of anxieties about the incoming regime in Washington and the series of elections scheduled to take place across Europe in 2017.

Xi Jinping Keynote address.

Among the most high-profile participants this year is Chinese premier Xi Jinping, who will deliver a keynote address on Tuesday. His presence marks the first visit to Davos by a Chinese leader.

British prime minister Theresa May will deliver a special address on Thursday morning, two days after she is expected to unveil details of her government’s vision for Brexit in a major speech.

British chancellor of the exchequer Philip Hammond will be in Davos on Friday, when he is expected to do a series of interviews and participate in a session titled “Britain and the EU: The Way Forward” with the former Italian prime minister and EU commissioner Mario Monti and others.

While more than 50 heads of state and government will travel to the exclusive Swiss ski resort, some of the world’s most senior banking and corporate executives will also attend the five-day event.

Among the economic heavy-hitters in attendance will be Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, and IMF managing director Christine Lagarde, as well as senior executives from the world’s biggest banks, such as UBS, Goldman Sachs and Deutschebank.

One familiar face on the Davos circuit, the Goldman Sachs chief operating officer Gary Cohn, won’t be present this time. He’s likely to be busy preparing to become Donald Trump’s new chairman of the National Economic Council.

Senior officials from Trump’s transition team will attend the event, however, and are expected to hold a series of bilateral meetings with senior political leaders, including possibly Xi Jinping, on the fringes of the event.

Outgoing US vice-president Joe Biden will address the summit on Wednesday, while US Secretary of State John Kerry will also attend the forum, undoubtedly one of his final official engagements of the Obama presidency.

Gaybo (Gay Byrne) hopes for best in battle against prostate cancer?

‘He is doing well. The treatment is ongoing’

    

Left Pic. Broadcaster Gay Byrne, with wife Kathleen, right pic. the old, the middle & the new L.L.S. hosts. Gay remains positive despite being diagnosed with prostate cancer

Ireland’s most-loved broadcaster Gay Byrne is upbeat and positive as he comes to terms with his cancer diagnosis, telling the Sunday Independent: “The treatment continues and we hope for the best.”

Gay was his usual sanguine self as he talked about his illness – echoing the thoughts of millions of well-wishers up and down the country who hope for his return to the airwaves in full health.

Last November, with typical understatement, Gay revealed to shocked listeners on RTE’s Lyric FM the disheartening news that he was suffering from cancer.

“I shall not be with our listeners on this day next week. Have to go to hospital… They think they may have discovered a bit of cancer in the prostate and they think it may have moved up into my back.

“I’ve had the most wonderful, fantastic, robust, good health all my broadcasting life,” he said in usual breezy style during his enormously popular show on the classical radio station.

“It’s my turn now… many, many people much worse off. Thank you for your good wishes,” he signed off.

Now, nearly three months on, Gay is in the throes of cancer treatment, but he is tough and resilient and well aware that he is undergoing the same difficulties endured by so many who are touched by the disease in this country.

And he is aware that prostate cancer is very treatable and the chances of a favourable outcome are quite high.

In short, Gay is not feeling sorry for himself but ongoing medical treatment obviously interrupted the usual Christmas and New Year celebrations – a favourite time of year for the couple who were married in 1964.

“Everything is on hold while we do our best to look after Gay,” his wife Kathleen Watkins told the Sunday Independent yesterday.

“He is doing well. The treatment is ongoing. Do thank the many people all over the country who have been in touch,” Kathleen requested.

“We got all the notes and letters and cards. We read all of them. Thank you. Thank you to all those kind people.It’s so much appreciated.”

The broadcasting legend is being looked after by his devoted wife at their home in Ballsbridge and there is lots of help and encouragement from the family – as well as the good wishes of an entire nation.

Local Property Tax in Sligo has highest compliance rate of almost 97% in Ireland

    

There was a compliance rate of 96.8% with the Local Property Tax in Sligo in 2016 according to the figures just released by Revenue.

The national compliance rate is is estimated at 97% which is in line with previous years.

Revenue, which oversees its collection, say some €5.3 million was collected through the tax in county Sligo last year from almost 30,000 properties. Laois and South Dublin had the highest compliance rate in the country at 99.8%.

The vast majority of householders in County Sligo (43.8%) valued their homes in the lowest bracket of up to €100,000 with 32.1% valuing their houses up to €150,000 and 16.4 falling into the €150,001 to €200,000 category. Just 1.5% valued their homes at over €300,000 and a further 1.5% were in the €250,001 to €300,000 bracket. Approximately 42% of property owners self-assessed the same valuation band as the Revenue estimate and 58% of property owners self-assessed a different LPT valuation band compared to Revenue.

LPT Exchequer receipts in 2016 (at end December) are €463m. This includes approximately €50m in pre-payments for 2017 LPT as well as €70m in payments for 2015 LPT and earlier years. Exchequer receipts also include Household Charge (HHC) arrears. Revenue assumed responsibility for the collection of arrears of HHC from July 2013. By end 2016 in excess of €64m was collected (including nearly €8m in 2016) and over 360,000 additional properties are now HHC compliant.

For 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 Revenue issued 212,000, 148,000 and 324,000 and 300,000 compliance letters respectively. In the vast majority of these cases property owners fully complied with their LPT payment obligations, either on a phased basis or by way of a single payment. However, in each year there were a relatively small number of cases that chose to remain non-compliant,

Revenue say it left them with no alternative but to deploy debt collection/enforcement measures or other sanctions to ensure payment. Some 864 cases were referred to the Sheriff in 2016 and 40 cases to external solicitors for collection. Over 20,300 tax clearance requests were refused on foot of LPT non-compliance, of which almost 97% were subsequently granted clearance following mutually acceptable payment solutions.

Revenue deducted LPT from the salaries or pensions of almost 89,000 property owners last year of which over 49,000 ‘rolled over’ from mandatory deductions applied in 2015. Over 11,000 valuations were also increased in 2016 following Revenue compliance interventions.

The BT Young Scientist exhibition category winners

All the winners in each section of 2016 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition

    

Right picture the overall BT Young Scientist & Technologist of the Year 2017 Shane Curran from Terenure College.

And above left picture:- Shay Walsh, managing director BT Ireland (left) and Minister for Education Richard Bruton (right), with Matthew Blakeney and Mark McDermott of the Jesus & Mary Secondary School, Sligo, runners-up at the BT Young Scientist & Technologist of the Year 2017 with their project Flint on the Moy?

The winners in each category of the 2016 BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition have been announced.

1st place Junior group Kinsale Community School, Impact of sound pitch on the biological gustatory perception mechanism, a quantitative comparative study between adults and children.

Biological and Ecological Junior Group Caoimhe Lynch , Sylvie Plant

2nd place Junior group Loreto College – Foxrock, Does Simulating a Lack of Binocular Vision Have An Impact on performance?

Biological and Ecological Junior Group, Jessica Oakley O’Kelly, Margot Moore, Jennifer Leavy

3rd place Junior group St Mary’s Diocesan School, 40 Licks ( trying to determine if being weaned onto certain foods as a baby can effect your development into a super-taster) Biological and Ecological Junior Group Seb Lennon Calum Agnew

1st place Junior individual Christ King Girls Secondary School, An investigation on whether cereal is a healthy breakfast option for Children Biological and Ecological Junior Individual Romy Kolich

2nd place Junior individual Bandon Grammar School, A novel approach to growing Nannochloropsis in a controlled environment and it’s subsequent ability to produce oil Biological and Ecological Junior Individual Gregory Tarr

3rd place Junior individual Sandford Park School Ltd, Time as a variable in bread production Biological and Ecological Junior Individual Oscar Despard

1st place intermediate group Loreto Secondary School – Balbriggan, Does consuming certain varieties of potatoes as a staple food in a diet, increase blood glucose levels & chance of high blood pressure and diabetes in a sample of Rush residents Biological and Ecological Intermediate Group Sophie Weldon Laura Weldon Emma Kleiser Byrne

2nd place intermediate group Tullamore College , Investigating The Difference In Bacterial Contamination When Handling and Using a Device to Insert Contact Lenses Biological and Ecological Intermediate Group Lucy Leonard Michele Mann

3rd place intermediate Group Avondale Community College, Biodegradable plastic pots to minimise the effects of transplant shock. Biological and Ecological Intermediate Group Ayyub Azmat Niall Gaffeny Christopher Makin.

1st place intermediate individual Ardscoil Ris ‘To Bee or not to Bee’: Investigating solutions to falling bee populations using a multifaceted problem solving approach. Biological and Ecological Intermediate Individual David Hamilton

2nd place intermediate individual Colaiste Choilm, Investigating the use of natural plants oils and extracts as an antiproliferative cancer agents. Biological and Ecological Intermediate Individual Aivan Jose

3rd place intermediate individual Bandon Grammar School, A comparison of foot biomechanics in sport playing and non-sport playing teens Biological and Ecological Intermediate Individual Alex O’ Connor

1st place Senior group Midleton College , Foal sickness containment and prevention Biological and Ecological Senior Group Cathal Mariga George Hennessy

2nd place Senior group Loreto Secondary School – Balbriggan, To investigate whether contrast sensitivity can be improved from regular exposure to action video games and the impact on everyday tasks on a teenager with myopia Biological and Ecological Senior Group Chloe Tap Dagmara Dobkowska

3rd place Senior group St Joseph’s Secondary School, Stimulating plant growth using electricity Biological and Ecological Senior Group Niamh McHugh Vitalija Janusonyte

1st place Senior individual Our Ladys College – Drogheda, The Antimicrobial Potential of Tree Bark Extracts Biological and Ecological Senior Individual Niamh Ann Kelly

2nd place Senior individual Coláiste Choilm, An Investigation into the Application of Symsagittera roscoffensis & it’s symbiont Tetraselmis convolutae in Neurobiology and Biotechnology. Biological and Ecological Senior Individual Con Moran

3rd place Senior individual Scoil Mhuire Strokestown , An investigation into the quality of effluent discharging domestic waste water treatment systems (septic tanks) and an apparatus to improve this. Biological and Ecological Senior Individual Abbie Moloney

1st place Junior group Synge Street CBS, Generalisations of Feynman’s Triangle Theorem Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences Junior Group Carl Jones Keiron O’Neill

2nd place Junior group Synge Street CBS, New Conjectures Concerning the Partition Function Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences Junior Group Talha Moktar Abdulrhman Abouryana

3rd place Junior group Sutton Park School, The design and testing of a safe drinking water system for developing countries Chemical, Physical & Mathematical Sciences Junior Group Xiangyu Carbon Mallol Méabh Scahill

A huge glacier crack in the Antarctic ice shelf widens dramatically

 

A huge chunk of Antarctic ice is hanging on by a virtual thread. At the edge of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, a glacier is cracking from the inside out at an alarming speed. That’s scary because this glacier, and others like it, keep the ice from flowing into the sea, where it would raise sea levels by several feet.

The ice shelf in danger is known as Larsen C. British researchers who are monitoring the crack in this ice shelf believe that only about 12 miles now connect the chunk of ice to the rest of the continent. You can see more images of this ice crack here.

“After a few months of steady, incremental advance since the last event, the rift grew suddenly by a further 18 km [11 miles] during the second half of December 2016,” wrote Adrian Luckman in a statement from the MIDAS Project, which is monitoring changes in the area.

Luckman, a professor at Swansea University in Wales, and head of the MIDAS Project, is referring to a crack that has been growing for years and is now a total of roughly 70 miles long. When that fissure finally reaches the far side of the shelf, British scientists believe that an iceberg the size of Delaware will float off. The ice shelf itself is almost the size of Scotland, and the fourth largest of its kind in Antarctic. The piece that it is getting ready to break off is nearly 2,000 square miles in size.

It’s true that icebergs break off from ice sheets in the Antarctic on a fairly regular basis, but this one is especially significant because of its size, and because it shows that the ice retreat is happening farther inland than scientists had previously observed.

What Could Happen After This Break?

What will happen next? Scientists are uncertain. But the consequences of the break could be dramatic.

“When it calves, the Larsen C Ice Shelf will lose more than 10 percent of its area to leave the ice front at its most retreated position ever recorded; this event will fundamentally change the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula,” said the MIDAS researchers in a statement about the rift.

The First Time In Over 12,000 Years and this could be part of a broader pattern for ice shelves.

It’s the latest sign of major ice loss in the fast warming Antarctic Peninsula, which has already seen the breakup of two other shelves in the same region, events that have been widely attributed to climate change. Larsen A collapsed in 1995, and much of Larsen B collapsed dramatically in 2002. Scientists have revealed that this is probably not something that has happened in the past 12,000 years or possibly, even more alarmingly, in more than 100,000 years.

So, Antarctica has lost ice shelves before, but none so huge as this one.

The iceberg resulting from this crack will not in itself raise sea levels, but if this ice shelf breaks up even more, that would have an impact on sea levels. Experts believe that if all the ice that the Larsen C shelf currently holds back entered the sea, global waters would rise by around four inches.

Antarctica is geographically a long way from most of us, but what happens there could be an indication of what’s happening with our planet Earth.

Is Climate Change To Blame?

The Project MIDAS group has not made any statement attributing the development at Larsen C to climate change, but has stated that the shelf would be “at its most retreated position ever recorded,” which suggests the possibility of climate change being the cause for this crack.

Previous research has also noted that the Larsen C ice shelf is becoming less thick, making it float lower in the water, which appears linked to the warming of the Antarctic Peninsula in recent decades.

Meanwhile, scientists wait for the anticipated break. Luckman told the BBC that “If it doesn’t go in the next few months, I’ll be amazed.”

But there are few certainties right now apart from an imminent change to the outline of Antarctica’s icy coast. “The eventual consequences might be the ice shelf collapsing in years to decades,” said Luckman.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Sunday 8th November 2015

Enda Kenny & Cameron hope for a Stormont deal soon?

‘This week sometime’

      

Taoiseach Enda Kenny has said he hopes a Stormont deal can be reached within days, to resolve the political crisis that is threatening power- sharing.

Talks began in September, aimed at tackling the dispute over welfare reform, paramilitarism, and budget matters.

British prime minister David Cameron recently met Stormont’s political leaders as the pace of negotiations stepped up. The Taoiseach said “I am very hopeful and happy that the reports I am getting are that a deal is on here.

“I do hope it can be concluded successfully in the next couple of days.”

A vexed budget wrangle has left the power-sharing administration in Belfast facing an unsustainable black hole of hundreds of millions of pounds.

A resolution to the long-standing impasse over the executive’s failure to implement the government’s welfare reforms in the North will be crucial to any breakthrough.

It is understood that Stormont’s leaders want the British government to commit extra funding to the power-sharing executive, both resource and capital, as part of any settlement.

The wider negotiations, which have been on-going for weeks, are also trying to find a way forward on other problems causing the current instability at Stormont, including the fallout from a recent murder linked to the IRA and a row over how to deal with the legacy of the Troubles.

Mr Kenny is meeting David Cameron at 10 Downing St this afternoon for bilateral talks.

Yesterday, Mr Kenny laid a wreath at the war memorial in Enniskillen, 28 years to the day after the IRA bombed the annual Remembrance Day service.

Eleven people, who had gathered to pay their respects, were killed and dozens more were injured in the no-warning blast in 1987, just minutes before the event had been due to start.

In terrible weather conditions, Mr Kenny joined other dignitaries in laying a wreath at the foot of the memorial.

In Belfast, Foreign Affairs Minister Charlie Flanagan laid a laurel wreath at the Cenotaph.

He said: “I am pleased to represent the Irish Government for the second year at the Remembrance Sunday commemoration at Belfast City Hall.”

More than 200,000 Irish-born soldiers served in the British Army and Navy from 1914 to 1918.

Businessman Bobby Kerr announces cancer diagnosis

The broadcaster is receiving treatment for cancer of the neck and head

      

Businessman Bobby Kerr has started receiving treatment for cancer of the head and neck, and is temporarily stepping aside as host of his Newstalk radio show. 

Businessman Bobby Kerr has revealed live on his own radio show that he has been diagnosed with cancer.

The self-made millionaire and owner of the Insomnia chain of coffee shops told listeners of his Down to Business show on Newstalk that he has started receiving treatment for cancer of the head and neck, and is temporarily stepping aside as host to “make myself better”.

“Did you know 35,000 people hear the dreaded words every year ‘we have the results of your biopsy, you need to come in and see me’. Well folks, it’s 34,999 and one other- me,” he said, “because guess what, I’ve been diagnosed with cancer of the head and neck, and I’m currently receiving treatment to make myself better.

“I have a very serious disease, it’s been caught early, it’s only in one place, and because it’s been caught early my chances of beating this increase incrementally,” added the 55 year-old, who has been presenting the Saturday morning magazine show for six years.

Mr Kerr, who was previously an investor on RTÉ’s Dragon’s Den series, said he wanted to broach the issue in such a public manner to raise awareness of Movember and Men’s Health Month in the hope that more people will get themselves checked out.

“So, why am I telling you this, what you might consider a very personal and private piece of news? The reason’s simple- it’s Movember, it’s Men’s Health Month. Get yourself checked out, I did.

“I’ve always considered myself a glass half-full type of person, always tried to take a positive attitude of whatever life throws at me, and I believe that life is absolutely for living,” he said.

He went on to mention the “arsenal of armoury” he has to beat the illness including support from his mother, brother, extended family and business colleagues alongside his wife Mary and their four daughters Meghan, Emily, Rebecca and Michaela.

He also paid tribute to co-workers and station management at Newstalk, as well as fellow presenters Jonathan Healy and Vincent Wall who will take over hosting duties for Down to Business until Mr Kerr’s expected return in the new year.

“God bless you all and thanks, and I’ll see you next year,” he concluded.

The perfect solution to stop office colleagues from stealing the milk?

    

Yes, we have all been in that situation where that pint of milk you lovingly bought and stored in the fridge at work has miraculously disappeared.

And you know all too well that your chances of catching these milk thieves at work are pretty slim.

After all, which colleague in his/her right mind will admit to the fact that they have made (and drank) several cups of tea using the milk that YOU bought?

But it seems someone may have found a rather passive aggressive solution to this problem by going to extreme lengths to keep their milk for themselves.

And it requires a lock… and the means to drill holes into the milk carton. (Either that, or they’ve gone to great lengths on Photoshop to put a padlock on the image).

Real or fake, this hilarious picture of the padlocked milk has been viewed more than 1.8 million times on Imgur.

The photo was posted on Reddit by a user called banginthedead with the caption: “The milk situation at work is starting to get a little serious.”

But the story doesn’t end here.

It seems banginthehead later posted a second image of a milk container with what looks like an explosive booby trap device on it saying: “The milk situation hasn’t improved.”

It’s hard to say whether this person really went and padlocked and booby-trapped their milk container, but it’s definitely a good laugh.

Hundreds of Web Summit attendees go west for guaranteed Sligo surf waves

Surf Summit weekend event included talks from local and international surf champions

      

The web Summit attendess took part in a range of activity sports including stand up paddling, kayaking, kite boarding and surfing at the Surf Summit in Strandhill Co. Sligo.

Hundreds of Web Summit attendees made the break for the West lured by stand up paddling around the lake isle of Innisfree, kayaking on Lough Gill and making business deals on the waves alongside some of the world’ s top surfers.

Watching Peggy Johnson, one of Microsoft’s top deal makers, pulling pints at Sligo pub Shoot the Crows on Saturday evening was a bonus.

“There was a time when the golf course was synonymous with networking and deal making but a lot of people in the tech world are into activity sports,” explained local surfer and tech enthusiast Allan Mulrooney, one of the organisers of the Surf Summit.

He and his friend former Westlife singer Kian Egan were among the hosts who brought high profile guests including world record big wave surfer Garrett McNamara and Adam Berke of AdRoll, on a whirlwind tour of Sligo’s best known surfing and party locations.

About 300 people, most of them delegates from the Web Summit, attended talks by Mr McNamara, European surf champion Pauline Ado and local sufer Easkey Britton over the weekend.

Mr McNamara, who broke the world record when he surfed a 100 foot wave in Nazare in Portugal, had never been to Ireland before. “We took him to Mullaghmore and Bundoran and he told us he will be back to surf here next month,” said Mr Mulrooney.

A range of activity sports including stand up paddling, kayaking, kite boarding and surfing kept delegates busy on Saturday.

“The weather was amazing. We even had a double rainbow,” said Easkey Britton, founder of Waves of Freedom whose lecture focussed on how surfing can be a tool for social change.

While guests sampled everything from locally brewed White Hag craft beer to traditional music in well-known Sligo bars Connollys and McGarrigles, there was also time for some business at the Surf Summit.

“ We had investors here from Singapore, the US and Australia and a few deals were clinched”, said Mr Mulrooney.

“The setting may have been unusual – some investors did not expect to be drinking hot whiskeys at a camp fire on the shores of Lough Gill listening to Dave O’Hara of SUP forAll reciting Yeats poetry but I think they enjoyed it”.

A bonus, he added, was that the Wifi worked well, there were no traffic jams and Peggy Johnson knows how to pull a pint of Guinness.

Meanwhile:-

Lisbon’s Web Summit won’t be the same as Dublin

Ireland’s high-profile tech event packed its bags on Thursday and set sail for Portugal. But will it succeed there, and will Dublin rue its departure?

     

On the Dart to Sandymount they’re talking about angels and unicorns. Which is strange, as they’re not five-year-olds. In fact pretty much everyone in the carriage is a 25- to 45-year-old man wearing the same uniform: suit jacket, no tie, jeans. The chat is also of VCs and VR, pivots and platforms, bootstraps and wearables. You’d need an app to translate this stuff.

My phone pings – again – with a notification from the Web Summit app. “Hi Hugh! I’m a 20 year old girl from Australia, co-founder of ClosetDrop – Rent out your wardrobe. To put it simply, we’re basically the Airbnb of fashion. My best friend and I started ClosetDrop to help girls all around the world fulfil their expensive taste in fashion for just a fraction of the price. ClosetDrop is a global online market-place where girls can rent out their own clothes, shoes & accessories between each other . . .”

I’m still 10 minutes from the entrance, but I feel as if I’m already deep inside the forcefield of Web Summit. (The definite article is always absent, as with Fight Club or Electric Picnic, or Narnia). What is this strange place, and why does it exist?

Part evangelical prayer meeting, part digital flea market, it’s a mixture of the huckster and the hipster, and in its own way it provides a snapshot of a lot of the forces that, for good or ill, proclaim that they’re going to change your world.

And what exactly does the word tech mean? I like this description, by Nathan Heller: “Tech today means anything about computers, the internet, digital media, social media, smartphones, electronic data, crowd-funding, or new business design. At some point, in other words, tech stopped being an industry and turned into the substrate of most things changing in urban culture.”

Through some happy conjunction of luck, timing, brass neck, hard work and sheer pig-headedness, Web Summit’s founders,Paddy Cosgrave and Daire Hickey, tapped into that substrate over the past few years and built from scratch an international event that this year claimed an attendance figure of more than 40,000. Web Summit has grown and grown, and now it has grown too big for Dublin. Some might say it has grown too big for its bootstraps.

Irish media coverage this week has been as plentiful as ever – to the annoyance of those who regard the whole thing as overhyped in the first place – refracted through the prism of the absurd handbags that broke out between Cosgrave and the Government about who wanted what and who said whatever to whom in the months leading up to the announcement that Web Summit would be moving to Lisbon for the next three years.

It flared up again with rows about invitations and snarky interviews on radio and television.

Nobody came very well out of this small-town bickering, but it didn’t seem to have registered particularly with the international visitors I met this week. Talking to a cross section of them during the pub crawls organised across central Dublin on Monday night, one thing came across clearly, however. They did like being here.

It helped that the weather was better than it had been in August, but over and over I was told what a beautiful, interesting, friendly city I lived in. The impression was unavoidable that there’s a connection between Web Summit’s success and its location.

It’s something the Government would do well to pause and ponder, no matter how well the move to Lisbon works out. Because, whatever method you use to calculate the value of Web Summit to Dublin in cold, hard cash terms, and whether or not you buy into the proposition that it contributes to the growth of an indigenous tech sector, there is no doubt that these tens of thousands of people are highly educated, highly connected and potentially highly influential, which has to be worth something.

The people I talked to came from North and South America, from across Europe, the Middle East and (to a lesser extent) Asia. To my inexpert ear some of them seemed to be involved in substantial enterprises. One was helping to build a platform for the sale and distribution of education services and distance learning across the Indian subcontinent. Another was developing a digital marketplace for advertising inventory on digital billboards in Brazil.

Some of them, though, do fit the start-up cliche. Two young guys have an app that allows you to hook up and socialise with like-minded people when you’re away from your own country. “So it’s like Tinder for city breaks,” I say, but their faces darken. Someone must have got to that line first.

All this frenetic activity, all these tiny start-ups selling variations on a theme: does it really amount to anything substantial? Henry Hwong, a Palo Alto-based marketing consultant, tells me that cloud-computing platforms like Amazon Web Services andMicrosoft Azure mean there is a very low barrier to entry, which is the reason for the glut of “Uber for this” or “Airbnb for that” type of companies.

“It would be nice if there were more investment in really hard engineering projects that move technology forward,” Hwong says. “But that’s just technology capitalism, and Darwinism, at work – lots of investment in many companies that will go nowhere, but the ones that succeed could have a major impact on society.”

At the RDS over the succeeding three days the sheer scale of Web Summit now creates its own dynamic. With so many stages operating simultaneously, and so many different “summits”, each with its own rows of start-ups pitching for business from cramped plywood booths, this year’s event starts to feel as if it has split in two, with one Web Summit in the main RDS complex and the other across Anglesea Road in Simmonscourt.

As the Irish Times columnist Karlin Lillington pointed out, too many of the events are just too short, and therefore don’t go deep enough to yield anything truly interesting. But, despite all the self-aggrandisement and messianic claims of changing the world, there are plenty of thoughtful, impressive people with something to say.

Then there’s the Food Summit in Herbert Park. In previous years this was an impressively organised series of tents feeding thousands of people excellent Irish food, with front-of-house duties carried out with aplomb by the likes of Darina Allen – all included in the price of your ticket.

That you had to pay an extra €20 a day this year, and that the quality of the food seemed to have fallen significantly, provoked some angry reaction. The tents looked grim and empty compared with previous years, and the organisers stood accused of price-gouging – the very charge they had levelled at Dublin hotels.

Who knows what Web Summit will be like at the end of its three-year stint in Lisbon? Cosgrave seems to model it, and the spin-off events he now runs in other countries, on the digital-business model of scaleability, where rapid growth and the acquisition of new customers are the overriding imperatives.

He may be right – and there are other successful events internationally that outrank Web Summit in size. But human beings aren’t software, and the impersonality of a purpose-built conference facility on a city’s fringe could drain away some of the improvisational and occasionally ramshackle elements that made the whole thing work in the first place.

Rising temperatures could drive 100m people into extreme poverty,

The world Bank warns?

    

Efforts to curb climate change must be twinned with programmes to cut poverty, warns a study of the threat posed by global warming to food security.

A dead acari-bodó, a type of catfish that can remain alive for a couple of days out of water, lies before stranded floating houses on a dried out stretch of Brazil’s Rio Negro.

The world must pair efforts to stabilise climate change with programmes to eliminate poverty if vulnerable people are to be kept from falling back into hardship as rising temperatures wreak havoc on food security and livelihoods, a report has said.

As many as 100 million people could slide into extreme poverty because of rising temperatures, which are caused by greenhouse gas emissions, the World Bank report said. The bank’s most recent estimate puts the number of people living in extreme poverty this year at 702 million, or 9.6% of the world’s population.

Climate change has led to crop failures, natural disasters, higher food prices and the spread of waterborne diseases, creating poverty and pushing people at risk into destitution, according to Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty, released on Sunday.

Efforts to stabilise climate change should incorporate strategies to eradicate poverty, said Stéphane Hallegatte, a senior economist at the World Bank’s climate change group and co-author of the report. “The policies, the investments, the financing, all of that should be integrated. Otherwise, we’re just less efficient.”

Poor people need social safety nets and universal healthcare to sustainably eradicate poverty, according to the report. Programmes to lessen the impacts of climate change should not create new vulnerabilities and they should inform development policies by taking into account future climate conditions.

Beating climate change is key to making nutritious food needed to beat hunger

Neven Mimica and Phil Hogan

“When we [build] infrastructure, for instance, [we need] to make sure it’s in a safe place today but also in a safe place with sea level rise and the change in rainfall and so on,” said Hallegatte.

He added that the world needs to take urgent action to reduce the impacts of climate change if the sustainable development goal on eradicating extreme poverty is to be met.

“We really want to reduce poverty before people get affected by even bigger climate impacts. It’s easier to get people out of extreme poverty now rather than doing it later,” said Hallegatte.

Without proper planning, efforts to stabilise the impacts of climate change can undo decades of progress in lifting vulnerable people out of poverty, the study warned. Environmental taxes, designed to reduce emissions, can raise the cost of fuel and food, which hit poor people hardest.

“These same policies can be designed to protect, and even benefit, poor people – for instance, by using fiscal resources from environmental taxes to improve social protection,” the report said.

Ethiopia’s social protection and Rwanda’s health coverage have boosted long-term poverty reduction efforts in both countries, making it less likely that poor people will fall back into poverty as a result of climate change.

“In most cases, what we want is a package of policies – the climate polices themselves and additional policies to smooth the transition and to support poor people in the transition,” said Hallegatte.

Hallegatte is optimistic that world leaders will take urgent action to stabilise climate change, which he says will boost efforts to eradicate poverty.

This year, a series of high-profile meetings took place, creating a sense of gathering momentum around the battle against global warming. A key step was the adoption of the global goals – which set a 2030 deadline for the eradication of poverty in all its forms and sought to galvanise action to combat climate change and its impacts – at the UN general assembly in September.

This growing migration crisis is the canary in the mine on climate change

Mahmoud Solh

Other milestones have included the Addis conference on financing for development and the Sendai conference on disaster risk reduction, while next month world leaders will convene in Paris for the 21st session of the conference of the parties to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.

“You can see there is a convergence – these conferences have been designed as a package and you can feel the urgency,” Hallegatte said.

But many challenges remain. According to the report, the world needs to find $1tn (£645bn) more each year to boost key infrastructure if the goals are to be met. Climate summits have in the past been thwarted by the US and China, which have been reluctant to sacrifice economic growth for reduced emissions.

Expectations for next month’s climate summit have been buoyed by fruitful talks held last year in Beijing, where China pledged to bring its emissions to a peak “around 2030”, and the US said it would cut its emissions by 26-28% of their 2005 level by 2025.

Hallegatte said: “Now there is the implementation, and that’s really the challenge – to translate this willingness to act into something that makes a difference on the ground.”

Ireland daily news BLOG by Donie

Sunday 20th September 2015.

Irish offered 1 million dollars to eat more potatoes

    

A new marketing campaign wants young Irish consumers to eat more potatoes. 

A new $1 million marketing campaign has been launched in an effort to boost potato consumption among Irish consumers.

Bord Bia will coordinate and manage the three-year campaign, which will be co-funded by the EU, Ireland’s potato industry and the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine. The initiative will be run in conjunction with the British Potato Council,BreakingNews.ie reports.

Over the 10 years, retail sales of fresh potatoes in Ireland have declined by 25 percent, according to Kantar WorldPanel.

Speaking at the campaign launch on Thursday, Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Simon Coveney said: “The potato is part of our culture like no other food, inextricably linked to Ireland’s story and part of who we are.

“This campaign will bring the different varieties and versatility of the Irish potato to a younger generation.”

The Minister welcomed the EU Commission’s decision to approve a total fund of €4.6m “to promote potatoes on the Irish and British markets over the next three years of which 50% will be funded by the EU.

“My department is also availing of the opportunity to grant financial support to the Irish potato industry for this positive promotional activity. Combined with industry funding the total campaign will be worth €1m over the three years in Ireland.

Said Mike Neary, Bord Bia’s Horticulture Manager,  said: “Potatoes are still Ireland’s preferred main meal carbohydrate, however shoppers under-45 account for only 33% of potato sales and these consumers will ultimately make up a major part of the total market in the years to come.

“Younger consumers view potatoes as a traditional, unexciting food and less convenient than modern carbs such as pasta and rice.”

The promotional campaign, entitled “Potatoes – more than a bit on the side,” will focus on younger consumers, in particular 22-44 year old females.

“We really need to challenge consumer perceptions of fresh potatoes – particularly amongst younger age groups – in order to combat declining consumption,” said Neary.

“This integrated campaign will highlight the fact that potatoes offer enormous potential within the world of modern cooking and build awareness of the added health and nutritional benefits of potatoes in comparison to competitor carbohydrates.”

The campaign kicks off with National Potato Day on Friday, October 2

LEO hosting seminar on the new Companies Act

   

The Local Enterprise Office Wicklow will be holding a free seminar next Tuesday, September 22, from 2 p.m. to 4.30 p.m., in the Parkview Hotel, Newtownmountkennedy.

The seminar covers a topic relevant to many small businesses in the county – the new Companies Act and the impact this will have on businesses that must convert to the new ‘DAC’ type of company.

It will also be relevant to anyone thinking of setting up a business now, or in the next few years, as new companies can now be set up with one Director (instead of two under the old system) and reduced filing of documents is now possible – all of which benefits small businesses, due to less compliance and fewer disclosures.

The Companies Act 2014 commenced on June 1 this year. It is the single biggest piece of legislation enacted in the history of the state.

The commencement of the Act brings over 15 years of consultation, preparation and work to a conclusion.

This LEO seminar has been designed to assist the ordinary businessperson orentrepreneur through the transition to The Companies Act 2014, avoiding the pitfalls and availing of the opportunities.

The Local Enterprise Office Wicklow is hosting this free seminar, which will feature guest speaker David O’Connor of Omnipro Corporate Consultants.

The seminar is specifically designed for small and micro businesses – from one-person operations to those with dozens of employees – however it is open to anyone to attend.

Although the seminar is free of charge, those wishing to attend must book in advance, online at http://www.localenterprise.ie/Wicklow/Training-Events/Online-Bookings

Alternatively, anyone wishing to reserve a place or find out more information can call the Local Enterprise Office Wicklow on (0404) 30800 or email enterprise@leo.wicklowcoco.ie

Pope Francis meets Fidel Castro in Havana

  

Pope Francis and Cuba’s Fidel Castro shake hands, in Havana, Cuba, Sunday,

What a day for the pontiff! Here’s are the key points from the first day of his tour, spent in Havana:

• In an “intimate and familial” encounter, Pope Francis and former Cuban president Fidel Castro spoke about the environment and exchanged gifts. Pope Francis gave Castro books on spirituality by priests; Castro gave the pope a book of his own insights on spirituality. Well done, El Jefe.
• At a papal megamass attended by thousands in Havana’s Revolution Square, the pope encouraged Cubans to serve one another, noting that service is never “servile” or ideological, “for we do not serve ideas, we serve people”. His homily was free of political messages but was nonetheless a strong statement. The liturgical music, a variation on Cuba’s Danzón, also a made a strong statement.
• Prominent activists told the Guardian at least 31 protesters were arrested in a “repressive and aggressive” move to stop them attending the mass. This included members of a women’s group that campaigns for prisoner releases.
• On the prospect of peace in Colombia between rebels and the government, Pope Francis said we do not have the right to another failure of reconciliation.
• Cuban president Raúl Castro appears to have given Pope Francis the gift of a giant crucifix made out of oars.
• Francis went “Pope Unplugged” for the afternoon, discarding his prepared speeches (to the chagrin of journalists and editors everywhere). He instead spoke from the heart on poverty, disability, and faith to clergy and young people.

Thanks for tuning in! The blog will be running all week as the pope continues his tour through Cuba and the US.

It was not as easy as you might expect to find Catholics among the crowd waiting for the pope this evening. But there was not shortage of excitements and optimism about seeing a pontiff who has played a major role in improving relations between Cuba and the United States.

Many students here want to emigrate to their wealthier neighbour as soon as they graduate. Others hope that closer ties will help their own country become a more desirable place to live.

“I’m not Catholic, but I respect the pope. He’s an important man for the world and he has done a lot of good for Cuba,” said 21-year-old Xavier Alexander Rodríguez, a students of computer science.

“Young people in Cuba want change. The closer ties with the US are a great step towards that. I wish that we can walk like brothers with the US.”

Vivian Rodríguez (no relation), a 23-year-old lecturer in psychology at the University of Havana, said international support and a positive message were important for people like her who want to stay in Cuba.

“Cubans are very excited by the arrival of the pope. We’re grateful for the help he has given us in relations with other countries,” she said. “It’s always good to know that there is backing for unity in Cuba and closer ties with the United States. That helps people make personal decisions (about whether to stay or go).”

Among the world leaders visiting Cuba for the papal visit is Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who attended this morning’s mass in La Plaza de la Revoluciónwrites Angela Bruno.

Some Twitter users have raised their eyebrows at la presidenta’s expensive tastes – she arrived yesterday at Havana’s José Martí Airport sporting a Hermès bag which can cost up to at $22,000.

Such a display of wealth seems somewhat at odds with the Pope’s message: he has repeatedly criticised excessive consumption, warning in his homily this evening that “wealth makes us poor.”

The Pope and Kirchner have had their share of differences. Guardian correspondent Stephanie Kirchgaessner spoke to their once-rocky relationship in her coverage of the Pope’s trip to Latin America during the summer:

There was bad blood between them when Francis was still known as Father Jorge Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires and a fierce critic of corruption in Argentinian politics.

The icy relationship worsened after Fernández passed a law legalising same-sex marriage in Argentina in 2010 when Bergoglio headed a march against the gay marriage bill.

‘Pity there is no ‘popess’; if not, I could compete for the post,’ Fernández said when she heard that Bergoglio had become pope.

Since then, however, the two have managed to improve their relationship: Relations have seemingly warmed and Fernández has become a frequent visitor at the Vatican.

Meanwhile:

Pope Francis gives an ‘unplugged’ homily on poverty and disability in the world

  

Pope Francis discarded his prepared homily and spoke off-the-cuff to the gathered priests and religious.

Pope Francis put his prepared homily aside and gave an extraordinary “unplugged” address on poverty, mercy, disability and service to Cuba’s priests, religious brothers and sisters and seminarians, during a Vespers service at Havana Cathedral.

“We always try to curtail poverty, as it were,” the pope said. “That’s a reasonable thing, but I’m talking about the heart.”

“Richness impoverishes you; it takes away from us the best we have. It makes us poor in the only richness which is worthy: trust in God.”

“Our holy mother church is poor. God wishes it to poor, as he wishes our holy mother Mary to be poor. Love poverty as a mother.”

The crowd smiled and some wiped away tears as the pontiff spoke. Cameras also caught some looks of consternation as the congregation grappled with Francis’s words, especially when he (jokingly) drilled in on the struggles of some religious and priests.

Nuns got it first: “May God spare us grey nuns, those who are always lamenting things! Saint Theresa used to say that to her nuns. Woe to that nun!”

Some nuns in the crowd (mainly the young ones) laughed. Others weren’t so amused.

Religious life as a consecrated brother or sister is, the pope said, about “burning” your life for the ones the world despises, the “disposable material” of humanity.

As an example, he mentioned those “who with new analytical methods, if it is discovered they have a degenerative sickness, the world wants to send them back before they are born”.

“Sometimes [a young religious sister] doesn’t know how good it is to see the smile of someone who is paralysed,” the pope said, smiling.

“The tenderness and mercy of God is like someone who is paralysed getting saliva all over your face. Or when a person with a disability gets angry and hits you!”

Priests were next: “Please to the priests,” the holy father said, “do not grow tired of forgiving.”

“Do not hide in fears or rigidities. Be like this nun [Sister Ponce, who spoke earlier in the service about her ministry], and those who are here. They are not angry when they find the sick person filthy; they just clean him. When the penitent comes to you, don’t feel bad. Don’t be neurotic. Jesus embraced them. Jesus loved them.”

“No corporation can be made, no money can be made from the least ones. In that place Jesus shines brightly,” the pope said.

The pope says he will give his printed homily to one of the cardinals to distribute and is going to speak off the cuff. This regular journalist quietly screams. Thanks, Frank.

The chanted psalms are sung beautifully by a choir. The pope is saving his voice, by the look of it.

The choir chants the psalms. Photograph: EWTN/Screenshot

Just a little church fact you might find interesting: the Catholic church’s communal prayer is the same around the world each day. I heard the same readings at mass this morning in New York as the pope heard in Havana, and in every other parish in the world.

In a sense, it’s like the church prays for you. That’s especially true of what’s called the Divine Office, the daily schedule of prayer, because few lay people perform it. Here’s the relevant bit for this particular service.

A Daughter of Charity, Sr Yaileny Ponce, speaks to the pope. She is is pouring her heart out about her ministry with the severely disabled. “I have to discern in a shout or a cry or a scream: Joy? Or pain?”

“[It’s] beautiful because there, in his weakest children, God lives and shows himself.”

“It is worth giving your life to serve these people because in them you find the kingdom of God.”

The congregation applauds her, and the pope begins the formal liturgical element of the service.

China’s new rocket carries a record 20 ‘micro’ satellites

  

The Long March-6 rocket blasting off yesterday in Taiyuan, Shanxi province.

The smaller rocket may make China more competitive in the market for commercial satellite launches.

China has launched a new, smaller type of rocket from its “Long March” family which will be used primarily for carrying satellites aloft, state media reported, as the country races ahead with an ambitious space programme.

The Long March-6, a newly developed carrier rocket which uses liquid propellant, took off from a launch base in northern Shanxi province yesterday morning carrying 20 “micro” satellites, the official Xinhua news agency said.

The rocket climbed into bluish-grey skies, footage aired by state broadcaster China Central Television (CCTV) showed.

One Chinese official suggested that the smaller rocket will make China more competitive in the lucrative market for commercial satellite launches.

“We believe it will greatly boost the competitiveness of Chinese carrier rockets in the international market,” said Mr Zhang Weidong, chief designer at the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology.

“The new model will also significantly improve our ability to access space,” he told Xinhua.

China launches its own satellites as it continues to build a navigation system, but also carries out launches for other countries and commercial companies.

The rocket is 29.3m high, shorter than others actively used in China’s space programme, reports said. Long March-6 uses fuel composed of liquid oxygen and kerosene, which is said to be free of toxicity and pollution.

State media hailed the achievement, saying the launch marked a record for the number of satellites carried by a Chinese rocket and its first time with the “environmentally friendly” fuel.

The small satellites will be used for “experiments” in technology and new products, CCTV said, but gave no details.

China’s space programme, which has potential military applications, is shrouded in secrecy.

“The separation control for 20 satellites required high accuracy, precision and reliability,” Mr Hao Yao- feng, a technician at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre, told CCTV.

A 2011 policy paper issued by the State Council, or Cabinet, said the Long March-6 would be capable of placing a tonne of payload into orbit at a height of 700km.

State media publicly announced plans for the Long March-6 in 2009, but said at the time that the first launch was scheduled for 2013.

Chinese scientists earlier this month said the country is planning to land a lunar probe on the dark side of the Moon before 2020, according to state media.

In 2013, China landed a rover dubbed Yutu on the Moon, making it only the third nation after the US and the Soviet Union to land on the Earth’s natural satellite.

China completed its first return mission to the Moon last year with an unmanned probe landing successfully back on Earth.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Friday 2nd May 2014

Massive boost for Irish exchequer as tax revenues are up more than 5%

 

Ireland’s income tax, the biggest heading, rose by 7% to €5.4 billion in four months of this year and up to April 2014.

The State’s public finances are continuing to improve with the latest official figures showing tax revenue ahead of projections for the first four months of the year, while spending is lower than forecast.

The Irish exchequer returns published today show tax revenue of €11.5 billion, which is €612 million, or 5.6%, up on last year, and €222 million or 2% higher than forecast.

Income tax, which is the biggest tax heading, generated €5.4 billion, is €362 million or 7.2% up on last year, and €106 million or 2% ahead of profile for this year.

The department of Finance officials said higher income tax receipts reflected improved conditions in the labour market, which has seen unemployment fall from its 2012-peak of 15.1% to 11.7% this year.

On the downside, the long-anticipated recovery in consumer spending appears not to have materialised as evidenced by a worse-than-expected VAT intake.

The sales tax generated €3.65 billion for Government coffers, which was €177 million or 5.1% up on last year but crucially €51 million or 1.4% lower than forecast.

Excise was €1.5 billion, which was 6.2% up on the year and €82 million or 5.8% ahead of projections.

The better-than-expected excise receipts were to a rise in new car sales.

The department also revealed that approximately €120 million of income tax taken in during February and March was wrongly classified as VAT, falsely inflating the performance of the retail sector.

Last month, the department said only €101 million had been mistakenly submitted as VAT and only during March.

The department said the Central Bank and the Revenue Commissioners had investigated the issue, and had put in place processes “to mitigate the possibility of this happening again”.

It also emphasised that the overall tax collection for the period had been unaffected by the errors.

On the spending side, the April figures show total net voted expenditure of €13.65 billion, which is €315 million, or 2.3%, down on the same period last year, and €167 million less than forecast.

According to the department, the main drivers behind this improvement were reduced guarantee pay-outs, increased tax revenues and a reduction in net voted expenditure.

On the basis of these figures, the Government is comfortably on track to hit its troika-agreed deficit target for the year of 4.8% of gross domestic product.

The cost of serving the national debt to the exchequer was €3.7 billion so far this year, a decrease of €256 million or 6.5% on last year.

Meanwhile:

Tax cuts on the way for low income and hard pressed Irish families

   

Middle and low-income families have been promised tax cuts by Finance Minister Michael Noonan in his strongest comments yet ahead of October’s Budget.

Mr Noonan, speaking at a Fine Gaelevent in Dublin yesterday, said the current level of income tax, particularly for lower-paid workers, was a major inhibition and barrier to people getting jobs.

Mr Noonan signalled clearly that he intends raising the bands to increase the level at which people begin to pay the higher rate of tax.

SIGNAL

“The greatest inhibition in the income tax code is that on an income of €32,800 people go on the higher rate of income tax,” he said. While he has suggested tax cuts previously, Mr Noonan’s comments represent the most tangible signal of his intentions for the Budget.

Despite having to introduce spending cuts and tax increases totalling €2bn, Mr Noonan said his priority now is to look closely at the income tax codes.

As the tax take begins to flow more strongly into the Exchequer, the Finance Minister said he wanted to make sure that current income tax codes do not prevent job creation.

He also said he wants to address those barriers which are preventing people from taking up jobs and preventing our young people from coming back home.

“So it is a priority of the Government to address that, and to lift that figure . . . whatever resources we have available over the next two Budgets we will do that,” he said.

“I hope we will be able to start the job in the Budget in mid-October.”

Meanwhile the Government’s tax receipts for April are 9pc higher than they were a year ago.

The Finance Minister says he saw a preview of the figures last night. He says the income tax take is about 6.5pc higher than 12 months ago.

Mr Noonan also pointed to his record of adjusting taxes to create jobs since taking office in 2011, despite the pressures on the public finances.

“Over the three years, even when we didn’t have any money, we changed the tax codes so we made it more jobs friendly.

“We cut the VAT rate on the tourist industry from 13.5pc to 9pc. That created an awful lot of jobs in the tourism industry,” he said.

His comments however come in the wake of an Irish Independent/Millward Brown opinion poll on Monday in which voters signalled they would prefer an end to austerity rather than tax cuts.

HIKES

Last week, a number of trade unions called for pay hikes amid signs of economic recovery.

The Civil, Public and Services Union, representing lower-paid civil servants, called for restoration of pay lost under the last two cost-cutting deals with the Government.

SIPTU and IMPACT indicated they will seek pay raises if the government finances improve during the Haddington Road deal.

David Begg, leader of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, has backed calls for post-troika wage rises. Companies who could afford it should pay up, he said.

3 Irish colleges now make world top 100 Universities list

 

Two Irish universities and Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) have been listed among the top 100 of the world’s universities under 50 years of age.

NUI Maynooth (NUIM) and Dublin City University (DCU) are rated 67th and joint 92nd, respectively, in the prestigious Times Higher Education (THE) 100 Under 50 2014 league table.

It also looks beyond colleges with ‘university’ in their title and, this year, DIT has made its way into 94th place – its first appearance in the table which is now in its third year.

The 100 Under 50 uses the same list of 13 performance indicators that underpin the annual THE World University Rankings, but adapts the methodology to better capture the characteristics of young institutions.

The criteria used includes research income, reputation for teaching, numbers of PhDs awarded, the number and quality of scholarly papers, and citations from staff.

The Top 100 Under 50 aims to highlight a new breed of high-performing universities that have managed to join the world elite over decades rather than centuries. It marks them out as having the potential to become the next global academic powerhouses.

Recent funding cuts have made it increasingly difficult for Irish universities to achieve or retain a place in the top 100 of the main global rankings. But in the smaller, younger pool, they fare better.

TOPPING

Similar to the main rankings, the continuing march of well-funded colleges in East Asia is evident at the top of the 100 Under 50 with South Korea’s Pohang University of Science and Technology (Postech) topping the list for the third year in a row.

Its national rival, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), holds on to the third spot, while the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology stays in fourth, and Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University moves up to fifth from eighth.

New developed brain implant could restore lost memory

 

US military researchers have revealed that in the next few months, they will unveil new advances toward developing a brain implant that could one day restore a wounded soldier’s memory.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is forging ahead with a four-year plan to build a sophisticated memory stimulator, as part of President Barack Obama’s 100 million-dollar initiative to better understand the human brain, Discovery News reported.

The science has never been done before, and raises ethical questions about whether the human mind should be manipulated in the name of staving off war injuries or managing the aging brain.

Some say that those who could benefit include the five million Americans with Alzheimer’s disease and the nearly 300,000 US military men and women who have sustained traumatic brain injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan.

DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez said this week at a conference in the US capital convened by the Center for Brain Health at the University of Texas, said that they think they could develop neuroprosthetic devices that can directly interface with the hippocampus, and can restore the first type of memories which are the declarative memories.

Declarative memories are recollections of people, events, facts and figures, and no research has ever shown they can be put back once they are lost.

Scientists offer new hope on pancreatic cancer treatment

 

Pancreatic cancer, one of the most deadly forms of the disease, can be stopped in its tracks by targeting an “Achilles’ heel” protein, say scientists.

Blocking the molecule, called Yes-associated protein (Yap), did not prevent the disease but halted its growth.

  Researchers hope the experiments, conducted on laboratory cell lines and mice, will one day lead to an effective treatment.

“We believe this is the true Achilles’ heel of pancreatic cancer, because knocking out Yap crushes this really aggressive cancer,” said US study leader Dr Chunling Yi, from Georgetown University Medical Centre.

“This appears to be the critical switch that promotes cancer growth and progression.”

DEFECTS: Pancreatic cancer is often diagnosed late and has one of the worst cancer survival records.

Yap is over-active in pancreatic cancer and other cancers, including those affecting the lungs, liver and stomach.

The new study, reported in the journal Science Signalling, involved mice with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), which accounts for 95pc of human pancreatic cancers.

Like humans with the disease, the mice have mutations in two key genes, KRAS and p53.

It has proved very difficult to develop drugs that target either of these gene defects. But Dr Yi’s team discovered links between Yap and both KRAS and p53.

KRAS activates Yap, and Yap shuts down p53 – an oncogene that offers protection from cancer when it is not faulty.

Researchers claim that the “North Sea Atlantis” was hit by a Tsunami 8,000 years ago

  

According to a new research conducted by the scientists at Imperial College, North Sea ‘Atlantis’, a prehistoric low lying land mass that previously connected Britain to Mainland Europe, may have been hit by a 5m high tsunami about 8000 years ago.

The research has been presented in Vienna at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly.

According to geophysicists, Dr Hill and his colleagues, Alexandros Avdis, Gareth Collins, Stephan Kramer and Matthew Piggott, a devastating subsea landslide off the coast of Norway, called the Storegga slide, generated the tsunami which submerged the island of a low-lying Atlantis, Doggerland. It was, once, inhabited by Mesolithic tribe.

Dr Jon Hill, a researcher from Imperial College who has published the team’s findings in the journal Ocean Modellingstated that the tsunami would have completely inundated the landmass and that any human living there would have suffered a catastrophic event. Scientists used computer modelling techniques to track the course of tsunami. He also informed that if one takes that sediment and lays it over Scotland, then, it would cover it to a depth of 8m.The tsunami appears to have put an end to any human activity in Doggerland or anywhere else in the region.

The location of Doggerland was first discovered two years back by Scottish archaeologists. It was located in the area between modern day Northern Scotland and Denmark. At that point of time, sea levels were much lower as well as the region was a continuous landmass. North Sea fishermen had picked up ancient artifacts, human bones etc in their nets.

It was, however, a matter of suspicion for a long time that some sort of settlement had been located in the area. As the glaciers of the “Ice Age” began to melt about 20,000 years ago, the sea levels gradually started to rise and, as such, the people began to shift elsewhere.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Saturday 2nd November 2013

Reilly hopes to strengthen private insurance regulation next year

 

IMO’s GP committee say ‘no hope’ of free GP care for all by 2016

Minister for Health James Reilly said he would introduce legislation to further regulate the health insurance market to ensure it is ‘fair and transparent’.

Minister for Health James Reilly has said he will introduce legislation to further regulate the private insurance market in next year.

Speaking on RTÉ radio today Dr Reilly said he would legislate “to empower the Health Insurance Authority as the regulator of the market to ensure that we have a fair and transparent market”.

Dr Reilly said there were “far too many” private health insurance plans on the market which were confusing for customers.

“The reason (they) try to confuse you in my view is so that you can’t make a valid and valued decision in relation to what is best for you and to me that’s not right and proper or appropriate,” he said.

“The Health Insurance agency needs to have its powers beefed up so that it can dictate to the market how many policies are allowed on the market at any one given time… I am determined that we will address this issue of the proliferation of plans in the new year in order to simplify things for the consumer.”

Dr Reilly also voiced his commitment that free GP care for all would be delivered by the next general election in early 2016.

“That’s absolutely the commitment of the Government,” he said. “I am absolutely committed to it, my Government are committed to it… that remains our goal, remains an absolute must to achieve,” he said.

Reacting to his comments, the GP committee of the Irish Medical Organisation has said there is “no hope” that free GP care for all will be achieved by 2016.

Committee chairman Dr Ray Walley said Dr Reilly’s commitment that free GP care would be implemented within the next two years was “Government by sound-bite”.

“The Department of Health have no plan to support this objective and no appreciation of the resources required to implement it,” he said.

“Politicians talk up free GP care as if it’s free for everyone but the reality is that people will still pay for their GP but will simply do so indirectly through their taxes or through an insurance scheme instead of directly as at present,” he added.

Irish Government to exclude small firms from tendering for public contracts

New  Government rules on the tendering and awarding of public contracts will exclude small businesses, the Small Firms Association (SFA) warned.

The organisation’s chairman said the Government’s new policies for deciding which bidders should win public contracts have the potential to eliminate small businesses from the tendering process. The rules, which seek to save taxpayers €500m, emphasise cost-saving and electronic transactions.

“In its pursuit of the cheapest price, the Government is neglecting the fact that this will not deliver either the quality, cost-in-use savings or service levels it desires – but will result in lost jobs,” said SFA chairman AJ Noonan.

He was speaking at the organisation’s annual lunch in the former Burlington Hotel in Dublin, now trading as a Hilton DoubleTree Hotel. The SFA also called for better access to credit for small firms in addition to a fairer public procurement system.

“Access to credit is still one of the biggest issues for small firms,” said Mr Noonan. One in four small firms still finds it hard to access credit, according to research from his organisation.

“Both AIB and Bank of Ireland claim they have a huge approval rate for loan applications from businesses, but there is shockingly low draw-down levels.

“This is because the price and terms and conditions attached to these loans are just not feasible. There’s no point approving a loan if what you are offering is not actually going to be any use to the consumer.” He called on the Government to establish a new state-owned bank aimed solely at lenders, modelled on the now-defunct Agricultural Credit Corporation.

The SFA also called on the Government to clarify what Ireland’s exit from its bailout programme on December 15 will mean for small businesses here.

“Will regained sovereignty mean parity for entrepreneurs and small businesses in accessing finance and credit?” said Mr Noonan.

“Will it mean that our pension contributions will be safe from further levies?”

Transport Minister Leo Varadkar spoke at length at the event, calling among other things for a hike in the point at which Irish people are charged a higher tax rate.

Currently, the higher tax rate of 41pc kicks in on any income above €32,800 for a single person and €45,400 for a married couple or civil partners.

“Irish people are hit with the highest rate of tax even on modest incomes,” said Mr Varadkar, who added that these taxes were damaging domestic spending, which is crucial for small firms.

Lower income women more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer later  

A study shows

 

Cancer charities have called for urgent action on health inequalities after a study revealed that ‘social deprivation’ may be responsible for as many as 450 avoidable deaths from breast cancer every year.

Women from lower income groups are much more likely to be diagnosed later, when cancers are more advanced and more difficult to treat, according to research to be presented at the National Cancer Research Institute conference in Liverpool today.

The treatment history of more than 20,000 women was analysed by researchers and it was found that if all groups of women had their cancers diagnosed at the same stage as the most affluent women, 40 lives could be saved.

The charity Breast Cancer Campaign called on public health leaders to give “urgent consideration” to new action to ensure breast cancer is always diagnosed early.

The research was funded by Cancer Research UK. Dr Julie Sharp, head of health information at the charity, said that other research had shown that poorer women were more likely to feel “embarrassed or worried” about going to see their GP.

“People are much more fearful of serious illnesses in a deprived community, perhaps more so than in more affluent areas where better access to accurate information allows people to know that cancer isn’t necessarily a death sentence,” said Dr Simon Abrams, a GP in Everton, which has the most deprived population in England, according to Department of Health indicators. “There is a lack of information about symptoms and also a fear factor that is quite substantial,” he told The Independent.

Eluned Hughes, head of public health at Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: “By focusing on improving early diagnosis particularly in deprived areas we can have most impact in stopping women dying from breast cancer.”

“Most cases of breast cancer are found by women noticing unusual changes in their breasts and visiting their GPs. The earlier breast cancer is found, the better the chance of beating it, so it is important women check regularly.

Dr Sharp added: “All women should be aware of how their breasts normally look and feel because we know that early diagnosis is one of the most important factors in whether breast cancer treatment is effective.”

In Ireland, there were 2,463 new cases of breast cancer diagnosed in 2007 making it the most common invasive cancer in Irish women.

Introducing do it at-home fertility test for men

To any man rushing out to buy the new over-the-counter fertility test available from Boots, I say this: enjoy the excitement while it lasts. For you, the chance to find out whether your sperm count is “normal” or “low”’ may feel like one small step for a man.

But women know that when that first packet of Sperm Check Fertility drops into the shopping basket you’ve taken one thumping great leap for mankind – straight into an abyss of anxiety.

Today, that quickie test – taking 10 minutes, available for just £29.99 – may make you feel “in control” of your end of the fertility business, revealing who is hitting the World Health Organisation’s target level of 20 million or more sperm per millilitre.

Tomorrow, you may purchase a second test, or a third, or bulk-buy online “for friends”, because it was “fun” or “fascinating” to do, or you dropped the test in the loo, or the result can’t be right and must be due to yesterday’s bike ride, or those tight trousers, or that hot bath, or actually because the first test was clearly part of the two per cent margin of error quoted by manufacturers.

From now on, you are just one more minnow swimming about in the maelstrom of an infertility business estimated to be worth £3 billion globally and rising, shopping for facts and certainties, when all you can really do is grasp at hopes and dreams.

Welcome, gentlemen, to our world, where women are constantly sold the promise of “control” – over our faces, figures and finances, but especially over our fertility. The world where we’ll happily spend all our disposable income and more on products to assist conception: from expensive herbal supplements to ovulation kits, pregnancy detectors to thermometers. The world where oocytes – egg cells, to the uninitiated – are an obsession, not a high score in Scrabble. For now it’s your turn to enter this emporium of reasons to rejoice, or to despair.

Perhaps you are tempted by some red healing crystals, or Ayurvedic medicine, or even the prospect of “Snowballs” cooling underwear (still in development, and based on the theory that the testes need to be kept cool to produce healthy sperm). Or maybe you just want to stock up on one of the vitamin supplements packed full of amino acids and herbs known to thin the blood, in the hope of improving erectile quality.

Of course, the reality for men – as for women – is far less frivolous than my shopping lists suggest.

Male fertility is in decline, as research published last December showed. Between 1989 and 2005, average sperm counts fell by a third in a study of 26,000 men, increasing their risk of infertility, according to researchers from the Institut de Veille Sanitaire in St Maurice. The quantity of healthy sperm produced was also reduced, by a similar proportion.

The findings, published in the journal Human Reproduction, confirmed findings over the past 20 years that shows sperm counts declining across the world. Many reasons, ranging from tight underwear to toxins in the environment, have been advanced to explain the fall, but no definitive cause has been found. The European Commission has even set up a working group, Reprotrain, to tackle the increasing crisis around “Male Reproductive Biology and Andrology”.

Some men won’t need the new test. They already know, or suspect, they have a problem (it is estimated that problems with sperm account for about a third of known fertility problems) but are probably suffering in silence. Far less attention, after all, is paid to the psychological effect failure to conceive can have on men.

Jo Hemmings, a behavioural psychologist and relationship coach, says: “Perhaps because women are deemed to have a stronger maternal instinct than men’s paternal instinct, and gestate, give birth and breast feed, they have received more attention than men. And so men are often seen as having an almost interdependent role – more of a support role to their partner’s emotions, than a need to express emotions in their own right.”

Men do not have quite the same sort of societal “permission” to express feelings around infertility, she notes. “Yet for many men, there are feelings of inadequacy, low self-esteem, guilt, shame and anger. This can often lead to a withdrawal from communication – and indeed sexual dysfunction – making the problem that much more difficult.” Old stereotypes have not done much to help. Men with fertility problems may find it grimly ironic that, until recently, all males were considered fertile until proven otherwise, even in old age. And there were only two realistic ways of altering that: a vasectomy or condoms.

For, just as attention has focused on women’s experiences of infertility, so has the medical establishment concentrated on women’s control of fertility.

Scientists have been talking about a male contraceptive pill since the early 1980s (with many women sceptical as to whether they would trust a man to take it), but we are still not there.

According to the NHS, research is focusing on combinations of hormones – synthetic testosterone and progestogens – with some in phase III trials, the last stage of clinical trial before a medicine is given a marketing licence. Scientists in Israel are looking into how blood-pressure drugs called calcium channel blockers (such as nifedipine) may alter the metabolism of sperm so that they are not able to fertilise an egg – such a pill could be on offer as early as 2015, researchers suggest. We won’t hold our breath.

In the meantime, rising levels of anxiety seem to be doing a better job on suppressing fertility than hormones. Researchers note that the increase in the number of men diagnosed with infertility seems to correlate with increasing anxiety in general. In July, psychiatrists at the University of Cambridge and the University of Hertfordshire reported that more than 8 million people in Britain suffer from anxiety disorders – up from 2.3 million people in a 2007 study.

Of course, infertility makes people anxious, raising the possibility of a vicious cycle. The impact of male infertility is an area “where the man’s psychological and physiological reactions should be considered far more seriously than current research would suggest”, argues Hemmings.

And yet, silence still surrounds the issue in many quarters. Visitors to the female-dominated Mumsnet website forum discussing conception quickly learn that there is no such thing as TMI (too much information) among women desperately seeking reassurance as they attempt to get a BFP (Big Fat Positive) line on their pregnancy test. But hop over to the Men’s Health site forum on “becoming a dad” and users seem more worried about whether their wives will still be attractive after giving birth.Look, too, to the Hollywood stars who – refreshingly – are admitting to fertility problems more openly than before; they are overwhelmingly female. You won’t find many men risking their He-Man reputations. A rare exception is Tom Arnold, the hero of True Lies and ex-husband of Roseanne Barr, who said earlier this year: “I have a very low sperm count. I didn’t think fatherhood was in the cards for me, I’ll be honest.”

Given this backdrop, perhaps SpermCheck will help to get men talking about infertility as openly as women do. Certainly, men and women need to accept when there is a legitimate problem – and not be afraid to ask for support. At the time of the contraceptive pill being introduced, Germaine Greer said: “The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood.”

Fifty years on, how we handle infertility is at least as vital.

Rare solar eclipse this Sunday: How to see it

 

There’s a rare hybrid solar eclipse coming on Sunday, and no matter where you are in the world, you will be able to see it — thanks to the Internet.

The eclipse will be easy to see from Africa, the Middle East, southern Europe, the Caribbean, and Northern South America. The eastern U.S. and Canada will also have a chance to view the event, but it could be more difficult. People living in this region that wish to see the eclipse should make sure they have an “open view” of the eastern horizon.

If you live on the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, in parts of southern Europe or anywhere in Africa, then you can enjoy this eclipse firsthand with a little planning and the proper viewing glasses, of course.

If you live in Los Angeles or somewhere that is not any of the places mentioned above, then you will have to turn to your computer if you want to watch the eclipse live.

Luckily, Paul Cox, an astronomer at the online observatory Slooh.com, is shepherding a telescope and other equipment to a remote spot in Kenya, where he plans to live-stream the total eclipse to viewers across the world.

Those of us on the West Coast will have to get up early if we want to see the total eclipse as it happens. The Slooh broadcast begins at 3:45 a.m. PST Sunday. (We will have just set our clocks back as we moved from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time). The broadcast, which also include feeds from telescopes in Gabon, Africa, and the Canary Islands, will end at 7:15 a.m. PST.

The Nov. 3 eclipse is known as a hybrid eclipse. When it first occurs, it will be in the annular form, which is also known as a ring eclipse. At this point, the moon is not quite big enough to fully cover the sun, so it leaves what’s known as a ring of fire around its periphery. But as the eclipse moves east, the curvature of the Earth makes the moon appear larger, and by the time the eclipse gets to central Africa, the moon will cover the sun entirely.

If you are on the East Coast of the U.S., you can catch a partial eclipse, in which the sun will appear to have a bite taken out of it, at 6:30 a.m. EST on Sunday. Get yourself to a place where you have a clear view of the eastern horizon, and make sure you have eclipse glasses or No. 13 or No. 14 welder’s glasses. But don’t be late. Your window of opportunity to see the partial eclipse is just 30 minutes.

If you want more information about what our East Coast friends will see Sunday morning, check out Sky and Telescope’s story about the eclipse. The site has also put together this handy graphic to help you understand when and where the eclipse will be visible.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Thursday 16th August 2013

Republic of Ireland babies at risk of having a wrong blood group

      

Most of the cases are at the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin

Hundreds of new mothers in the Republic of Ireland have been told there may be a small chance their baby was incorrectly blood grouped at birth.

The mistake is believed to be due to a mislabelling of a blood test kit for newborns.

Around 540 patients – mothers and babies – have been notified.

The Republic’s Health Service Executive (HSE) said there are no immediate safety concerns and the risk of a blood group being incorrect is extremely low.

The five maternity hospitals affected are the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, Cavan General, Sligo General, Limerick and Galway.

Most of the cases are at the Rotunda, one of the biggest hospitals in thecountry.

The hospitals began contacting affected mothers on Monday and letters have been sent to anyone potentially affected by the manufacturing error.

GPs are also being notified.

The HSE said it was recently notified by Ortho Clinical Diagnostics, a Johnson & Johnson company, that a small number of the ORTHO BioVue System Cassette testing kits supplied worldwide had been incorrectly labelled.

The manufacturer estimates that the potential risk of a kit being labelled incorrectly is less than one in 11 million.

According to the HSE all hospitals have completed an inspection of their remaining kits and have removed any potentially affected batches.

All patients, including babies, have a repeat blood group test when being admitted to any hospital or in pregnancy.

Hard-up Irish pensioners living on the breadline, new CSO figures reveal

      

Almost 10% of over 65s were left destitute in 2011

One in 10 elderly people in Ireland have been at risk of poverty according to worrying figures now revealed.

A new report from the Central Statistics Office detailed how 9.7% of over-65s were living on the breadline in 2011 – up from 8.7% the year before.

The figures also revealed that average weekly incomes among the elderly dropped by 5% from 2009 to 2011.

Age Action spokesman Eamon Timmins said he was not surprised by the startling figures and said it highlighted the need for the elderly to be protected in the upcoming Budget.

He said: “The fact that the average income of people aged over 65 fell by 5%, combined with the rise in poverty levels over such a short period, only shows part of the difficulties which many older people are currently facing.

“On the other side of the equation there are new charges and rising prices which have to be met from these declining incomes.

“These increase taxes, charges and costs have escalated since these statistics were gathered, leaving many older people seriously struggling to make ends meet.”

The CSO’s figures show the average fell from €428.86 in 2009 to €407.28 in 2011.

The at-risk of poverty rate rose over the two-year period, the number of pensioners population experiencing two or more forms of deprivation rose from 9.5% to 11.3%.

Mr Timmins said: “Age Action is not surprised that the poverty indicators for older people are rising, with financial pressures increasing substantially on older people in the last 18 months.

“Property tax, a trebling of the prescription charge and soaring energy prices are just some of the increased costs which have been introduced since 2011, with older people having to pay them from a declining income.

“The increased costs are on unavoidable elements of their cost of living – a roof over their head, essential medication and heat.”

The news came as the Government weighed up the option of slashing the pension by €10 in October’s Budget.

The figures said more than half of the over-65s surveyed revealed they suffered from a chronic illness or health problem, but only 7% described their health as “bad or very bad”.

In 2011, 55% of Ireland’s elderly population was female, while just over a third were widowed, divorced or separated.

Around 52% of the elderly were retired and just over 7% were still at work.

Benefits accounted for the most significant source of income for the over-65s. In 2011, social transfers made up nearly two-thirds of the average person’s total income.

More than 4 cups coffee a day linked to higher death risk

 

Drinking more than 28 cups of coffee a week may be harmful for people younger than 55, according to a study.

The debate over coffee’s health risks continues to brew. A new study, out Thursday, finds that heavy coffee consumption is associated with a higher death risk in men and women younger than 55.In the study published online in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings, men younger than 55 who drank more than 28 cups of coffee a week (four cups a day) were 56% more likely to have died from any cause. Women in that age range had a twofold greater risk of dying than other women.

The study looked at 43,727 men and women ages 20-87 from 1971 to 2002.”From our study, it seems safe to drink one to three cups of coffee a day,” says the study’s second co-author Xuemei Sui. “Drinking more than four cups of coffee a day may endanger health,” adds Sui, assistant professor of exercise science with the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. She defines a cup of coffee as 6 to 8 ounces.The study did not find a higher death risk for adults 55 and older. Sui says there may be a bias — the research may not include unhealthy older people because they might have already died.The reasons for the higher death risk among younger adults are not clear since experts through the years have found both health benefits and problems associated with coffee.

Sui says the caffeine in coffee can elevate heart rate as well as raise blood pressure and blood sugar levels. However, coffee is a major source of antioxidants, she adds.

Sui says the study didn’t find a significant association between coffee consumption and heart disease death. Further research is needed to look at any connection between coffee and cancer, she adds.

Gregg Fonarow, co-chief of clinical cardiology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, says, “Differences in other dietary factors, marital status, and other socioeconomic factors that were not adjusted for in this study may account for some or all of these observations.”

Fonarow, who was not involved in this research, says observational studies that survey people about their coffee intake and tie that to how many died from any cause have yielded mixed results.

Consider a 2012 study that found that coffee drinkers ages 50-71 had a lower risk of death than their peers who did not consume coffee. In that study, researchers from the National Cancer Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health, and AARP found that the more coffee consumed, the more a person’s death risk declined.

Joseph DeRupo, a spokesman for the National Coffee Association of USA, says the new study “presents findings that are out of step with prevailing science as well as with widely accepted research methods.”

Because coffee still stirs debate, Sui says more research is needed. In the meantime, people should watch their coffee intake, she adds. “Avoid excessive coffee drinking.”

NUI Galway digital freedom debate focus at international student forum

     

Ireland hosting the ten-day debating event for first time

MEP Marian Harkin has opened an international youth forum in NUI Galway which will debate digital freedom.

Students from 48 countries will debate digital freedom over the next 10 days at an international youth forum in NUI Galway.

More than 100 students, from Belarus and China to Tajikistan and Vietnam, are competing in the Global Youth Forum, held in Ireland for the first time and hosted by theInternational Debate Education Association (Idea).

Idea is a global network of organisations that believe debate “promotes mutual understanding and informed citizenship around the world”.

The event is being run with NUIG’s Literary and Debating Society and the Open Society Foundations – Youth Initiative, and was opened by Ireland North-West MEPMarian Harkin.

Now in its 19th year, the forum is aimed at novice and experienced debaters and offers students training, competition experiences and the chance to participate in cross-cultural exchange.

Idea youth forum director Steven Nolan said the event offered an “unrivalled opportunity for young people to develop their skills, meet and interact with people from a different background to their own”.

Scientists milestone study probes the origins of cancer

  

Scientists are reporting a significant milestone for cancer research after charting 21 major mutations behind the vast majority of tumours.

The disruptive changes to the genetic code, reported in Nature, accounted for 97% of the 30 most common cancers.

Finding out what causes the mutations could lead to new treatments. Some causes, such as smoking are known, but more than half are still a mystery.

Cancer Research UK said it was a fascinating and important study.

A tumour starts when one of the building blocks of bodies, a cell, goes wrong. Over the course of a lifetime cells pick up an array of mutations which can eventually transform them into deadly tumours which grow uncontrollably.

Cancer origins: The international team of researchers was looking for the causes of those mutations as part of the largest-ever analysis of cancer genomes.

Hidden within the cancer genome are these patterns, these signatures, which tell us what is actually causing cancer in the first place – that’s a major insight to have.”

Prof Sir Mike StrattonWellcome Trust Sanger Institute

The well-known ones such as UV damage and smoking mutate the DNA, increasing the odds of cancer.

But each also leaves behind a unique hallmark – a piece of “genetic graffiti” – that shows if smoking or UV radiation has mutated the DNA.

Researchers, led by the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK, hunted for more examples of “graffiti” in 7,042 samples taken from the 30 most common cancers.

The found that 21 separate “graffiti signatures” could account for 97% of the mutations which led to cancer.

Prof Sir Mike Stratton, the director of the Sanger Institute, told the BBC: “I’m very excited. Hidden within the cancer genome are these patterns, these signatures, which tell us what is actually causing cancer in the first place – that’s a major insight to have.

“It is quite a significant achievement for cancer research, this is quite profound. It’s taking us into areas of unknown that we didn’t know existed before.

“I think this is a major milestone.”

Mysteries: Other signatures were related to ageing and the body’s immune system. Cells respond to viral infection by activating a class of enzymes which mutate the viruses until they can no longer function.

“We believe that when it does that, there is collateral damage – it mutates its own genome as well and now becomes much more likely to become acancer cell as it has a huge number of mutations – it’s a double-edged sword,” said Prof Stratton.

However, 12 of the signatures defy explanation for now.

It is hoped that if some of them can be pinned down to things in the environment then new ways of preventing cancer could be developed.

It may also spur further research. One of the unknown causes of mutation happens only in neuroblastoma, a cancer of nerve cells which normally affects children, so something unique is happening there.

Prof Nic Jones, Cancer Research UK’s chief scientist, said: “We know that environmental factors like smoking and overexposure to UV rays can cause faults in DNA which can lead to cancer, but for many cancers we don’t know what triggers the faults in our DNA that can lead to cancer mutations.

“The genetic fingerprints identified in this fascinating and important study identify several new processes driving the development of cancer.

“Understanding what’s causing them could be an extremely important way to get the bottom of how cancer develops in the first place – and this will lead to new ways to prevent and treat the disease.”

Climate Scientists predict more extreme Heat Waves on the horizon

     

Cities like Shanghai and Seoul are enduring a brutal heat wave. But climate change will make this year’s summer feel like nothing in the decades to come

Northeast Asia is on fire. Yesterday temperatures in Shanghai hit an all-time high of 105.4ºF (40.8ºC), the hottest day in the coastal megacity since Chinese officials began keeping records some 140 years ago — during the Qing dynasty. On Aug. 12 the heat reached 105.8ºF (41ºC) in the southern Japanese city of Shimanto, the hottest temperature ever recorded in the country.

Hundreds of people throughout South Korea have been hospitalized because of heatstroke, even as the government was forced to cut off air-conditioning in public buildings because of fears of a power shortage. As heat waves go, it’s a tsunami, similar to the brutally hot weather that singed Europe 10 years ago, which contributed to the deaths of over 30,000 people.

It’s also a glimpse of a blazingly hot future. We know that temperatures will generally rise as the globe warms thanks to increased greenhouse-gas emissions. (It’s right there in the name: global warming.) But as a new study published in Environmental Research Letters shows, the sort of scorching heat waves currently baking Northeast Asia are likely to become more frequent and more severe in the decades to come — and that’s going to happen no matter what we do about carbon emissions in the near future. There are some very uncomfortable summers on the horizon.

(MORE: Antarctica Melted in the Past, and as the Climate Warms, It’s Poised to Melt Again)

The study, by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) in Germany and the Complutense University of Madrid in Spain, used climate models to project how heat extremes would change over the next century. The scientists found that extreme heat waves like the one that baked much of the U.S. in 2012 — when the country had its warmest year on record — are projected to cover double the amount of landglobally by 2020 and quadruple the territory by 2040.

The most severe heat waves — so-called five-sigma events, because they would involve temperatures that are five standard deviations above the norm — would go from essentially nonexistent today to covering about 3% of the globe by 2040.

The researchers project that those heat waves will increase in frequency and intensity until 2040 even if the international community manages to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions — which, it should be pointed out, we’re not doing. (The carbon emissions we’ve already added to the atmosphere have baked in a certain amount of warming regardless of future climate policy.)

But under a low-emissions scenario, the frequency of those nasty heat waves would likely stabilize in the second half of the century as the climate begins to heal itself. But if emissions just keep on rising, the heat waves will intensify — the three-sigma heat waves will cover 85% of the global land area by 2100, while five-sigma events will cover 60% of the globe by the end of the century.

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

Sunday 2nd June 2013

Income equality & increasing poverty staring Ireland in the face for a good while longer

  

The latest data (for 2011) on income inequality and poverty will shortly be published by the Central Statistics Office, revealing if the trend towards growing income inequality and increasing poverty is continuing or if it has subsided.

The gini coefficient is an index ranging from 0 to 100 where 0 represents a perfectly equal distribution of income and 100 represents a perfectly unequal distribution. The gini coefficient stood at 29.3 in 2009. This compared with an EU 27 average of 30.4.

The gini coefficient grew in the early years of the boom from 30.2 in 2000 to 32.4 in 2005. There was then a move towards greater income equality in the later boom years and early years of the crisis up to 2009. However the gini coefficient has since risen precipitously to 33.9 in 2010. This compares with an EU 27 average of 30.5 in 2010.

The Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI), in the latest Quarterly Review, analysed disposable income to show that almost a third (31%) of households had a disposable income of less than 500 euro per week. Their research uses 2009 data, which does not cover the last four budgets that have had a depressing effect on incomes. The proportion of households on lower incomes is likely to have grown.

While most households have been affected by years of austerity, the impact has been greatest on low-income households.  Budget measures that do not take account of household income have a disproportionate impact on low-income groups, which have the least capacity to absorb reductions in income. The relentless downward pressure on low incomes is one of the main reasons why the domestic economy remains in the doldrums.

Stewart Lansley in his book The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality is Essential for Recoverypresents evidence from the last 100 years which shows that more equal societies alleviate, and more polarised societies exacerbate, the ‘gyrations’ of the economic business cycle.  His work shows that equality has a smoothing effect, which buffers societies against the peaks and troughs of economic booms and busts.

Lansley argues that inequality is not just an issue about fairness and equity, but that it is integral to economic success. An economic model that encourages the richest members of society to accumulate more and more wealth leads to demand deflation, asset appreciation, and a constriction of the productive economy. This ultimately results in economic instability.

The OECD in its recent report, Economic Policy Reforms: Going for Growth 2012, states that there is a growing consensus that assessments of economic performance should not focus solely on overall income growth (GDP) but should also take into account income distribution. The OECD notes that rising income inequality tends to be shaped by an increasing concentration of income at the top end of the income distribution.

Ending the present crisis and building a sustainable global economy requires a fundamental leap that accepts that there is a limit to the level of income inequality a country can have that is consistent with stability. The successful management of economies depends on securing a more equal distribution of incomes. Reducing inequality has not yet been a central economic goal alongside, for example, controlling inflation or tackling fiscal deficits.

Measures to reduce income inequality must be seen as having a central role in creating the right conditions for sustainable and inclusive growth. The Government needs to set clear targets for a number of key economic relationships to make progress on income inequality, including:

• Striking the right balance between wages and profits, because a lower wage share leads to lower growth;
• Reducing the pay gap between top and bottom earners, as this will contribute to maintaining and increasing aggregate demand;
• Putting limits on the level of income concentration and using the tax system more effectively for redistributive purposes. T. Pickety, E. Saez and S. Stnatcheva, in their 2012 paper, Optimal Taxation of Top Labor Incomes: A Tale of Three Elasticities, illustrate how the trend where the top 1% are paying less tax than they were thirty years ago needs to be reversed.

Irish Businesses facing big bank charge increases says Éamon Ó Cuív

        

Galway West Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív has criticised the Government for failing to intervene as Galway businesses face an increase in charges for lodging cash with AIB.

Galway West Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív has criticised the Government for failing to intervene as Galway businesses face an increase in charges for lodging cash with AIB.

From next week, businesses in Galway and across the country face an increase of up to 165 per cent in charges at the State-controlled bank.

“These are ridiculous increases for business owners,” said Deputy Ó Cuív. “The bank is actually charging more money to take in money. It makes absolutely no sense, and the Government is doing nothing about it despite the fact that the State controls AIB.

“This is just another example of government policy failing to bring about real reform in the banking sector.  It is our communities that are suffering as a result of the failure to support businesses local businesses and help stimulate growth and job creation.”

Deputy Ó Cuív said he meets business owners in Galway and Mayo every week that are under “huge pressure” from high rents, high rates, increasing utility costs and now higher bank charges.

“At the same time, the banks are still refusing to play ball when it comes to making credit available to these viable businesses. There are over 21,700 people on the Live Register across Co. Galway.

“They don’t need more bureaucracy and more pressure from government or government controlled areas. The entire banking system owes its existence to the Irish taxpayer – a point that the banks seem to have very quickly forgotten.”

The Galway West TD said that as AIB is State-controlled bank, the Government should be pushing through policies that will ensure businesses are supported.

“It is not good enough for Fine Gael and Labour to stand by as our local businesses are put under even more unsustainable pressure. This Government is very quick to take the credit for any positive news on jobs but it is nowhere to be seen when decisions are needed to support businesses and job creation in our communities.”

Skin cancer the most common cancer in Ireland

         

Skin cancer is the most common form of cancer in Ireland, with the number of people suffering from it doubling over the last ten years.

The latest statistics reveal one in eight men and one in ten women will develop the disease by the age of 74.

Bernie Rice, an office administrator from Leixlip, Co Kildare, is still trying to come to terms with the death of her oldest daughter, Sharon, 33, from skin cancer.

“Hand on heart, the word melanoma was not even in my vocabulary then. There was no warning, no real awareness out there,’’ she recalls.

“Sharon was such a vibrant girl. I have a photograph of her taken at a wedding in October. She is glowing, smiling.

“It is so hard to believe that three months later we had lost her.’’

A small mole on Sharon’s left leg changed everything.

In 2006 she noticed that it had got bigger and then one day she accidentally cut it and it began to bleed. Sharon immediately consulted her doctor and was diagnosed with malignant melanoma.

“It was a total shock, but Sharon was very positive. She was a bright, intelligent girl and we never thought at all that she was going to die from it,’’ says Bernie.

After having the mole removed, Sharon, an IT manager, thought she was cured. She got married and later ran the mini-marathon for the Irish Cancer Society. However in 2007 she began to have pains in her legs, unfortunately the cancer had come back with a vengeance.

In the wake of her daughter’s untimely death in February 2008, Bernie established the Sharon Rice O’Beirne Melanoma Trust, to raise the importance of early detection and awareness of the disease.

“We had to do something, Sharon meant so much to us. She was so strong and positive, if we could save even one person’s life through our campaign,’’ says Bernie.

If skin cancer is detected early, up to 90% of cases are curable. The Irish Cancer Society suggest that people should check their skin every month and get to know it, so that any changes can be easily spotted.

Although many skin changes are harmless, the Irish Cancer Society recommends consulting a doctor if you have a new growth or sore that does not heal; a sport or sore that continues to itch, hurt, crust, scab or bleed; constant skin ulcers that are not explained by other causes; or have a new or changing mole.

While most cases of skin cancer are in areas exposed to the sun, melanoma can also develop in places that do not get the sun, so don’t forget to check the soles of the feet and in between toes for skin changes.

The advice is to always wear sun screen and don’t forget that you can get burnt even on a cloudy day.

“There is this belief in Ireland that we don’t really get the sun. If there is a fine day, people strip off and forget about the sun cream. But the Celtic skin is so fair that the risk of skin cancer is greater,’’ says Bernie.

Over half the world’s population has untreated dental problems

  

Over half the world’s population some 3.9 billion people – are suffering from untreated dental problems, according to a new report.

A team of international researchers investigated the area of oral health as part of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) 2010 study.

They found that almost four billion people are affected by oral conditions, with untreated tooth decay and dental cavities (caries) being the most common of almost 300 diseases assessed. These two conditions alone affect some 35% of the world’s population.

“There are close to four billion people in the world who suffer from untreated oral health conditions that cause toothache and prevent them from eating and possibly sleeping properly, which is a disability.

   “This total does not even include small cavities or mild gum diseases, so we are facing serious problems in the population’s oral health,” explained lead researcher, Prof Wagner Marcenes, of the Institute of Dentistry at Queen Mary, University of London.

The report revealed that the global burden of oral conditions is moving away from severe tooth loss and towards severe periodontitis (gum disease) and untreated cavities.

“Tooth loss is often the final result when preventive or conservative treatments for tooth decay or gum disease fail or are unavailable. It is likely that current dental services are coping better to prevent tooth loss than in the past, but major efforts are needed to prevent the occurrence and development of gum diseases and tooth decay. Ironically the longer a person keeps their teeth the greater the pressure on services to treat them,” Prof Marcenes said.

He added that the findings show that an urgent and organised response to oral health problems is urgently needed.

Rich world smugness and greed will melt with the Arctic ice

  

There are no comparisons to be made. This is not like war or plague or a stockmarket crash. We are ill-equipped, historically and psychologically, to understand it, which is one of the reasons why so many refuse to accept that it is happening.

What we are seeing, here and now, is the transformation of the atmospheric physics of this planet. The Arctic has been warming roughly twice as quickly as the rest of the northern hemisphere. This is partly because climate breakdown there is self-perpetuating. As the ice melts, for example, exposing the darker sea beneath, heat that would previously have been reflected back into space is absorbed.

This great dissolution, of ice and certainties, is happening so much faster than most climate scientists predicted that one of them reports: “It feels as if everything I’ve learned has become obsolete”. In its last assessment, published in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted that “in some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century”.

These were the most extreme forecasts in the panel’s range. Some scientists now forecast that the disappearance of Arctic sea-ice in late summer could occur in this decade or the next.

As I’ve warned repeatedly, but to little effect, the IPCC’s assessments tend to be conservative. This is unsurprising when you see how many people have to approve them before they are published. There have been a few occasions – such as its estimate of the speed at which glaciers would be lost in the Himalayas – on which the panel has overstated the case. But it looks as if these will be greatly outnumbered by the occasions on which the panel has understated it.

The melting disperses another belief: that the temperate parts of the world – where most of the rich nations are located – will be hit last and least, while the poorer nations will be hit first and worst. New knowledge of the way in which the destruction of the Arctic sea ice affects northern Europe and North America suggests that this is no longer true. A recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters shows that Arctic warming is likely to be responsible for the extremes now hammering the once-temperate nations.

  The north polar jet stream is an air current several hundred kilometres wide, travelling eastwards around the hemisphere. The current functions as a barrier, separating the cold, wet weather to the north from the warmer, drier weather to the south. Many of the variations in our weather are caused by great travelling meanders – Rossby waves – in the jet stream.

Arctic heating, the paper shows, both slows the Rossby waves and makes them steeper and wider. Instead of moving on rapidly, the weather gets stuck. Regions to the south of the stalled meander wait for weeks or months for rain; regions to the north (or underneath it) wait for weeks or months for a break from the rain.

Instead of a benign succession of sunshine and showers, we get droughts or floods. During the winter a slow, steep meander can connect us directly to the polar weather, dragging severe ice and snow far to the south of its usual range. This mechanism goes a long way towards explaining the shift to sustained – and therefore extreme – weather patterns around the northern hemisphere.

  I have no idea what is coming to Europe and North America this winter and next summer, in the wake of the record ice melt, but it’s unlikely to be pleasant. Please note that this record represents a loss of about 30% of Arctic sea ice, against the long-term average. When that climbs to 50% or 70% or 90%, the impacts are likely to be worse.

Our governments do nothing. Having abandoned any pretence of responding to the environmental crisis during the Earth summit last June, now they stare stupidly as the ice on which we stand dissolves. Nothing – or worse than nothing. Their one unequivocal response to the melting has been to facilitate the capture of the oil and fish it exposes.

The companies that caused this disaster are scrambling to profit from it. Shell only abandoned controversial plans to start drilling for oil in the Arctic in September when a final test of its environmental protection equipment off the north-west coast of Alaska failed to meet the standards required to gain a full drilling permit.  When it resumes it will push its operations hard against the moment when the ice re-forms and any spills they cause are locked in.

The Russian oil company Gazprom is using the great melt to try to drill in the Pechora Sea, north-east of Murmansk. After turning its Arctic lands in the Komi republic into the Niger delta of the north (repeated oil spills are left unremediated in the tundra), Russia wants to extend this industry into one of the world’s most fragile ecosystems, where ice, storms and darkness make decontamination almost impossible.

David Cameron, who still claims to lead the greenest government ever, is no longer hugging huskies. Last June he struck an agreement with the Norwegian prime minister “to enable sustainable development of Arctic energy”. Sustainable development, of course, means drilling for oil.

Is this how our children will see it: that we destroyed the benign conditions that made our world of wonders possible, and then used the opportunity to amplify the damage? All of us, of course, can claim to have acted with other aims in mind, or not to have acted at all, as the other immediacies of life seemed more important. But unless we respond at last the results follow as surely as if we had sought to engineer them.

Stupidity, greed, passivity? Just as comparisons evaporate, so do these words. The ice, that solid platform on which, we now discover, so much rested, melts into air. Our pretensions to peace, prosperity and progress are likely to follow.