Thousands of people attend debt burden marches in six cities & town's of Ireland
David Begg said while the deal on promissory notes was an important step, Ireland was nowhere near solving its financial problemsGardaí estimated that up to 25,000 marched in Dublin Marches have taken place in a number of cities across the country. A number of trade unions were represented at the marches & Rallies told debt burden on Irish people was unfair
Thousands of people have taken part in protests organised by the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in a number of cities across the country.
Debt burden marches took place in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Sligo, Limerick and Waterford.
ICTU said over 110,000 people took part in the demonstrations. However, local and garda estimates put the number at around 50,000.
The largest event took place in Dublin, where gardaí said up to 25,000 people took part.
Congress General Secretary David Begg warned European authorities that unions will campaign against the debt burden until they honour the deal of 29 June.
Speaking in Dublin’s Merrion square, he said there would be more “stoic little pixie-heads” and no more “Mr Nice Guy”.
Mr Begg told the crowd that they would be campaigning with the 60 million trade union members in the European Trade union confederation.
He said the situation where Irish people were paying 42% of the European banking debt burden was not fair.
Last week, Mr Begg said he hoped between 80,000 and 100,000 people would attend the protests.
He said that while the deal was an important step, Ireland was still nowhere near solving its financial problems – and the debt burden on the Irish people was still unsustainable and unjust.
In Limerick, around 8,000 protesters gathered at Pery Square following a march through the city.
Local ICTU representative Mike McNamara said 1.8m working people are still being asked to pay a total bank debt burden of €64billion.
He said the cost of the bank debt has been €9,000 per person in Ireland compared to an average cost of €192 per person in the EU as a whole.
Mr McNamara told the crowd that the limits of what people can bear and tolerate has well and truly been exceeded.
He said his message for Government was that people did not elect it to cut child welfare, close Garda stations and create yellow pack jobs.
He said an economy must serve the people, not enslave them, adding that the Government was elected to be watchdogs, not lapdogs.
In Cork, gardaí said around 6,000 people took part in the protest, which began on Parnell Place and continued through Merchants Quay, Patrick St before finishing on Grand Parade.
In Galway, gardaí estimate that up to 2,000 people took part in the rally.
In Waterford, local estimates suggest around 2,000 people turned out for the rally, which began from the Glen, to Bridge St, onto The Quay and finished on John Roberts Square.
Gardaí said around 6,500 people took part in the rally in Sligo town.
A rally took place in the main street, which was addressed by a numbe of speakers including union officials and a representative of the Senior Citizens Parliament.
West of Ireland politicians told they will be replaced in next election? at Galway protest march
West of Ireland politicians were warned, by a trade union leader, that if they fail the voters they will be replaced at the next election.
The warning came from Padraig Mulligan of the IMPACT trade union in the city at the Galway rally for ‘jobs not debt’ – one of six held in cities nationwide.
Gardai estimated that approximately 2,000 attended the Galway rally which ended with speeches at The Spanish Arch.
A number of young people addressed the rally, after Padraig Mulligan’s hard-hitting speech, warning western politicians to deliver or else be dumped out of their seats in the next election
Unemployment in Ireland must be tackled, says the European Commission
Irish banks must rein in unsustainable mortgage and SME loan arrears and tackle unemployment in 2013, according to teams from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and IMF.
However, the troika said the next tranche of funding would be released as Ireland had met its fiscal targets last year and remained on track to achieving a 7.5 per cent GDP deficit ceiling by 2015.
The comments come as the teams completed their ninth quarterly review of Ireland’s economic programme during a visit to Dublin from January 29th to February 7th.
More than one in 10 homeowners were in arrears of 90 days or more, according to the Central Bank, in the three months to end of September 2012.
IMF Ireland mission representatives said: “Given the scale of mortgage arrears, supervisors should ensure that banks intensify their engagement with customers in order to find durable solutions appropriate to borrowers’ circumstances.”
Changes to insolvency law are expected to help decrease arrears. “Timely activation of the new personal insolvency framework will support these efforts. As a complementary step, greater efforts can be made to pursue legal remedies for unsustainable investment-property related debts.”
Unemployment remained stubbornly high and the troika said “reducing it must remain an urgent policy priority”, though “significant skills mismatches among the unemployed” may hold up any short-term change in the rate.
The troika commended Ireland’s progress in 2012, which has contributed to improved market access and lower sovereign bond yields.
Ireland’s recovery is expected to gain momentum with forecast growth of more than 1 per cent this year and more than 2 per cent next year.
Ireland is a wet country, so why are we not more interested in our wetlands?
Brent geese: regulars at Dublin’s North Bull.
There has to be the occasional day at this time of year when Ireland, seen from space at the right angle to the sun, would glitter all over, like one of those Victorian diamond brooches people take to Antiques Roadshow. From ditches, dune slacks, reedy lakes, estuaries, sandy bays and flooded fields, our February dykes catch the light in a generous, even excessive, celebration of water.
Last Saturday, indeed, was World Wetlands Day, anniversary of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, an intergovernmental treaty adopted in a small Iranian city on the coast of the Caspian Sea on February 2nd, 1971. Signed up to by 164 countries, it had as its main concern the conservation of the planet’s migratory waterbirds.
About 2,000 wetlands across the world were picked as especially important, 45 of them in Ireland. A typical one is the North Bull in Dublin Bay, where amiable brent geese do their best to ignore the traffic and the great flocks of waders that swirl against the sky.
In four decades since the signing, the importance of watery ecosystems has been extended to much more than geese, swans, ducks and waders. The Ramsar organisation, based in Switzerland, is still pressing ecological imperatives for “wise use” of wetlands, urging governments to report on progress, and spread the word to the world.
This month’s World Wetlands Day sought “to highlight ways to ensure the equitable sharing of water between different stakeholder groups and to understand that without wetlands there will be no water.”
Last summer, Bucharest, in Romania, hosted the big Ramsar conference of “contracting parties”, held every three years to fix policy. It drew almost 900 people from governments and NGOs in 143 countries.
All the big guns were there – Russia, Australia, the US, Japan, the UK, Brazil – and most of the little, even quite poor, ones. Among the absentees – Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, Belize – was the Republic of Ireland. Nearly all the governments had duly filed reports on what they had done for wetlands, but the update on Ireland’s inventory remained filled with question marks.
Heavy in procedure and endlessly attentive to the concerns of far-off places – Panama, Senegal, the Islamic Republic of Iran – the conference wouldn’t have been much of a junket.
Even Ramsar’s new focus on tourism as an “ecosystem service” from wetlands could hardly have prompted Irish minds to anything but envy, as tropical beaches and coral reefs flashed up on the screen. (Wetlands, in Ramsar’s wide scope, include “areas of marine water the depth of which at low tide does not exceed six meters” – this along with fish ponds, rice paddies and salt pans.)
If Ireland doesn’t “do” Ramsar conferences, it could be just because we’re broke. And as our best wetland sites – coastal bays, bogs, lakes, winter-flooding rivers and so on – are all protected in response to the EU’s habitats and bird directives, this is where the legal authority is seen to lie.
But our failure to report to Ramsar must irk the Irish Ramsar Wetlands Committee ( irishwetlands.ie), an umbrella group set up with government financial help to spread the gospel on wetland and water issues, not least from 20-odd handbooks of Ramsar wisdom. This Irish team, drawn from NGOs, academic experts, heritage officers and local authority engineers and planners, is chaired by Karin Dubsky of Trinity College Dublin.
It has made up for staying at home by compiling a badly needed national inventory of wetland research. The first harvest is impressive: about 170 studies across the island, most to do with wildlife (birds, newts, beetles, plants) but with them a major report on a new national value for wetlands – their ability to hold back the floods.
Commissioned by An Taisce, The Use of Wetlands for Flood Attenuation is the work of the aquatic services unit of University College Cork. Here, we find, is another “ecosystem service”, as bogs and fens slow the movement of water into downhill channels, or as coastal wetlands blunt the energy of fierce waves and storm surges.
But there are false ideas about this, too. When the high bogs are full of water, as they are much of the time, they have no room for more.
Indeed, as the report points out, the drier soils of well-drained alluvial flood plains often have even more storage potential. This, of course, if we have not covered them with houses, roads and industrial estates. Even as farmland, water storage depends on the presence of rough vegetation, hedges and trees, of hollows and ditches that are so often filled in or planed away.
Did you know about the Corkagh ponds? The River Camac, a Liffey tributary, flows through Clondalkin, Co Dublin, where flooding did damage in 1993. Since then, a cluster of five lakes has been scooped out where the river runs through Corkagh Park, one filled for people to fish in and the rest as wetland meadows – hollows in reserve for future overflow.
Constant stress causes type 2 diabetes in men
Men who reported permanent stress have a significantly higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes than men who reported no stress. This is the finding of a 35-year prospective follow-up study of 7 500 men in Gothenburg, by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Since the 1970s, a large population based cohort study has been undertaken at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg to monitor the health of men born in Gothenburg between 1915 and 1925.
Using this unique material, researchers are now able to show that permanent stress significantly increases the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Of the total sample, 6 828 men without any previous history of diabetes, coronary artery disease or stroke were analysed. A total of 899 of these men developed diabetes during the follow up.
How stress levels were measured
Stress at baseline in this study was measured using a single item question in which they were asked to grade their stress level on a six-point scale, based on factors such as irritation, anxiety and difficulties in sleeping related to conditions at work or at home.
At baseline, 15.5% of the men reported permanent stress related to conditions at work or home, either during the past one year or during the past five years.
The results show that men who have reported permanent stress had a 45% higher risk of developing diabetes, compared with men who reported to have no or periodic stress.
The link between stress and diabetes has been statistically significant, even after adjusting for age, socioeconomic status, physical inactivity, BMI, systolic blood pressure and use of blood pressure-lowering medication.
“Today, stress is not recognised as a preventable cause of diabetes” says researcher Masuma Novak, who led the study. “As our study shows that there is an independent link between permanent stress and the risk of developing diabetes, which underlines the importance of preventive measure.”
Spam decreases, malicious programs & stealing usernames and logins increases in 2012
The use of anti-spam protection among Internet users worldwide has decreased spam in 2012, according to IT security solutions company Kaspersky Lab.
However, year 2012 also saw the spread of malicious programs that steal usernames and logins.
Based on the Spam Report 2012 by Kaspersky Lab, the latter part of 2012 showed the percentage of spam ended at 72.1 percent to 8.2 percent less than in 2011.
The year 2012 also reflected a comparably huge decline in spam volumes than in 2010, reporting with 82.2 percent and in 2011, which reported 80.3 percent spam volumes.
The shuttering of several botnet command centers and pharmaceutical affiliate programs in 2012 also contributed to the spam volume decline.
Apart from the use of anti-spam applications, another reason for the decline of spam is the use of mandatory DKIM (domain key identified mail) signature policies by email providers.
DKIMs are digital signatures that verify the domain from which emails are sent.
Darya Gudkova, Kaspersky Lab Head of Content Analysis and Research, said the percentage of spam decreased over the course of the year, and during the final three months of 2012 the figure remained below 70 percent.
But even with the decline of spam volumes in 2012, there were some major changes in terms of the source country of spam.
China was suddenly thrust into the top of the list of spam sources for 2012, contributing 19.5 percent of all unsolicited email. This is unprecedented as China was not even in the top 20 spam sources in 2011, which was topped by India then.
The entry of China in the top list already increases Asia’s ranking as the primary regional source of spam, rising 11.2 percentage points for 2012, finally contributing 50 percent of all spam. North America took second place with 15.8 percent last year.
Meanwhile, the amount of spam originating in Latin America fell by 8 percentage points and closed at 11.8 percent.
Europe also dropped down in ranks last 2012, the total amount of spam originating in Western and Eastern Europe combined came to 15.1 percent, which is about half the amount in 2011.
Europe also dropped down in ranks last 2012, the total amount of spam originating in Western and Eastern Europe combined came to 15.1 percent, which is about half the amount in 2011.
Among the top 20 countries that are sources of spam for 2012 is the Philippines contributing 1.1 percent. It is ranked among the last 10 countries contributing less than two percent of the overall spam.
Kaspersky Lab also reported that despite the decrease in overall percentage of spam in mail traffic, the proportion of emails with malicious attachments fell only slightly to 3.4 percent.
The company said this is still a significantly huge percentage since it only reflects emails with malicious attachments and not spam messages containing links to malicious websites.
In 2012, Trojan-Spy.HTML.Fraud.gen was the most common malicious attachment. The fourth quarter saw a change and the most prevalent malicious attachments were Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.fsfe and Trojan-PSW.Win32.Tepfer.cfwf.
These three malware were designed to steal user account information such as usernames and passwords. Fraud.gen and Zbot specifically targeted passwords from financial and payment systems, while Tepfer stole other types of passwords.
These three malware were designed to steal user account information such as usernames and passwords. Fraud.gen and Zbot specifically targeted passwords from financial and payment systems, while Tepfer stole other types of passwords.
The volume of spam from the US and China grew substantially in 2012 and even if anti-spam laws were passed and botnets were shut down, spammers were still taking advantage of powerful computing resources in both countries. These computing resources were then used to build new botnets in those countries.
Kaspersky Lab also reiterated in its report that the volume of malicious emails remained high throughout the year.
Malicious users are copying even broader range of legitimate notifications. 2012 also saw the spread of malicious programs that steal usernames and logins, focusing primarily on account information for financial services. Nevertheless, creators of these malicious programs also want passwords from social networks, email accounts, and other services.
In such situation, Kaspersky Lab reminded Internet users to keep safe: “When you receive an email, make sure that it was actually sent from the resource that it claims to be. Never click on links in suspicious emails, and remember, it is critically important to update your software regularly.”
Gudkova said the drop is the result of a gradual departure of advertisers from spam to other, more convenient and legal means of promoting goods and services.
“However, that doesn’t mean spam is headed the way of the dodo anytime soon. Malicious spam, fraud, and advertising of illegal goods cannot simply or easily migrate to legal platforms, due to their own inherently criminal nature. We expect that the decline in spam volumes in 2013 will be negligible at best,” Gudkova said.
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