Taoiseach Kenny & Co heads to Gulf for trade and diplomatic mission
Over 80 Enterprise Ireland linked firms on trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai and Abu Dhabi
Taoiseach Enda Kenny is to arrive in Saudi Arabia today to lead an Enterprise Ireland trade mission in Riyadh, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai (pictured).
Taoiseach Enda Kenny is to arrive in Saudi Arabia tonight ahead of a trade mission and a series of diplomatic engagements in the Gulf region.
Mr Kenny and Minister for Enterprise, Jobs and Innovation Richard Bruton are joining more than 80 companies on a five-day Enterprise Ireland mission aimed at creating deeper economic links between Ireland and the region.
The visit will see the Taoiseach visit the Saudi Arabian capital Riyadh as well as Doha in Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The four economies have a combined annual GDP of some €1.2 trillion.
The Gulf region will continue to see significant investment in the coming years ahead of big ticket events such as theWorld Cup in Qatar in 2022 and the World Expo in Dubai in 2020.
There is also significant construction work being carried out in the region, a growing agricultural industry and likely opportunities in areas such as healthcare, software and ICT which Irish firms and officials hope can lead to investment, trade and jobs.
Mr Kenny is to meet dignitaries such as Saudi Arabia’s deputy prime minister Crown PrinceSalman, Qatari prime minister Abdullah bin Nasser bin Khalifa al Thani, and the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
He will also meet Abu Dhabi’s minister for foreign affairs Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al Nayhan, and UAE prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum in Dubai.
“This visit will strengthen our economic, political and cultural ties with these key priority markets for Ireland as well as providing an opportunity to explore new commercial opportunities and build on the strong educational links that exist between Ireland and the Gulf States,” the Taoiseach said in a statement.
Irish companies with backgrounds in areas such as agriculture, energy, construction and audio visuals products are among those taking part in the mission.
Goods worth some €626 million were exported from Ireland to Saudi Arabia in 2012 with chemicals, food and livestock, and machinery the main areas of trade, according to Central Statistics Office figures.
The United Arab Emirates (which includes Dubai and Abi Dhabi) purchased Irish goods worth €373 million in 2012 and exports worth more than €58 million were dispatched to Qatar.
Mr Bruton said he hoped the diplomatic and trade visit could deliver “tangible results for the Irish economy”.
“The Gulf offers huge opportunities for Irish business and this mission of 87 companies led by the Taoiseach demonstrates our commitment to delivering on that,” he said.
Mr Kenny is also due to visit the historic Al Masmak Fortin Riyadh and Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the tallest manmade structure in the world at 829.8 metres, during the missions which continues until Thursday.
Reform Alliance to hold conference at the RDS
Billy Timmins says event will focus on policy and is not a step towards the launch of new party
Reform Alliance member and Wicklow TD Billy Timmins who said the conference would focus on political, economic and health reform.
The Reform Alliance, comprised of breakaway Fine Gael TDs and Senators, is to hold its first conference on January 25th, at the RDS in Dublin.
Wicklow TD Billy Timmins said the one-day event would focus on three policy areas of primary concern to members of the grouping; political, economic and health reform.
Mr Timmins said the conference would not focus on political ideology and was not intended as a step towards the establishment political party, he told RTÉ.
Last month it emerged that the Reform Alliance, which was formed by five TDs and two Senators expelled from the Fine Gael parliamentary party for voting against the party whip, has registered with the Standards in Public Office Commission as a “third party”.
The move allows the group to raise funds and accept donations, but “third party” registration does not mean a separate political party is being established.
Roscommon deputy Denis Naughten, a member of the group, said registration was primarily a device that will allow the group raise funds to carry out political research.
He said the group receives no exchequer funding under the leader’s allowance, unlike political parties and independent TDs and Senators. That is because all were elected as members of Fine Gael but the party still receives funding for each of the seven parliamentarians despite them being outside the parliamentary party.
Another leading member of the group Lucinda Creightonalso emphasised that the Reform Alliance was in the process of registering as a “third party” and not as a political party.
Pope Francis to visit Holy Land in May
The Pontiff will visit Jerusalem, Bethlehem in the West Bank and also Amman in Jordan
Pope Francis waves as he leads the Angelus prayer from the window of the Apostolic palace in Saint Peter’s Square today.
He also indicated one of the key moments of the trip will be an Ecumenical Meeting at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, a meeting due to be attended by Orthodox Christian Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, as well as representatives of other Christian Churches in Jerusalem.
For some time, there had been speculation the Pope would announce this trip during the Christmas-New Year period.
In the end, Francis chose to make the announcement on the day that marks the 50th anniversary of an historic meeting between Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagorasin Jerusalem on January 5th, 1964.
The Pope said one of the main reasons for making the trip now is to commemorate the visit made by his predecessor.
French Scientists find a natural hormone (Buzzkill) that counteracts marijuana high
Pregnenolone might be released by the body to fight the nice feelings created by pot. At least that’s what French scientists believe.
THEY’RE DANCING happily IN THE STREETS OF COLORADO.
Why would anyone want to dampen their joy at being able to legally buy pot?
Yet along comes a bunch of French researchers to suggest that the brain has natural defenses against the nice feelings generated by the very popular plant.
As Agence France-Presse reports, the researchers probed with lab rats and discovered that the naturally occurring hormone pregnenolone seems to counteract the high delivered by marijuana.
The research, published in Science magazine, explained that initially pregnenolone was thought to be “the inactive precursor of all steroid hormones.”
However, in this experiment, “pregnenolone antagonized most of the known behavioral and somatic effects of THC.”
Science did, though, offer a prognostication that might numb more than a few. It suggested that this research “could lead to new approaches to treating marijuana intoxication and addiction — and it may allow researchers to isolate the medicinal properties of cannabis while blocking its behavioral and somatic effects.”
Wait, do these people really think they’re going to make all those medicinal marijuana cards actually be used only for genuine medicinal purposes?
Pier Vincenzo Piazza of the French Institute of Health and Medical Research told the AFP that the rats in this research were very high. They were given 3 to 10 times the amount of pot than a normal Coloradan.
On discovering that the pregnenolone inhibited the effects of rats’ highness, the researchers began to experiment on human cell lines. Similar results were achieved. The next step will be a full-scale clinical trial.
Their aim, they say, is to combat marijuana addiction. This is a concept with which some might argue, as they believe that, well, there is no such thing.
“These researchers weren’t trying to be buzzkills,” Science explained.
I wonder whether the world’s marijuana lovers will come to revere this potential breakthrough.
An emigrant of Ireland 92 frozen in time
(Left photo) William Muldowney in 1956 & Meeting Lane, Athy town, 1968.
Photos of 1960s Ireland taken by William Muldowney (92) have gained a following on Facebook
“I think we are lonely for a world that is gone,” says Irish-born emigrant William Muldowney (92) by way of explanation for the “astonishing” reaction to his old photographs of his childhood locality posted on Facebook.
In September his daughter, Maureen Flooks, set up a page on the social networking site called Carlow Memories to connect her father, long living in Southampton, England, to home. She did this because last year, for one of the first summers since he emigrated, he was unable to visit the boyhood locality he left in 1944.
Since then she has posted more than 100 photographs her father took during visits in the 1960s around counties Carlow, Laois and Kildare. The page has gained more than 3,000 followers.
The photos taken by this long-departed emigrant have stirred the memories and “likes” of the more recent generation, as Flooks has received messages from Irish emigrants in Mexico and Australia.
Among the images are intimate portraits of towns and villages standing still in time from Carlow and its surrounds: the last thatched house in Ballylinan; Bambrick’s shop in Moneenroe; the church at Killeshin; the view of the sugar factory from Rossmore; a horse and trap in Graiguecullen; an overgrown playground at theArles national school; and two women looking out a half-door at Meeting Lane in Athy.
Emigrated
Muldowney, who celebrates his 92nd birthday today, emigrated to England during the second World War when British Rail came to Carlow offering free passage to Irish workers for the railways. He settled in Southampton, married and had three children, and lives there to this day. But his “heart has always been in Ireland”, Flooks says.
He began taking the photographs on his annual visits from 1967 of places and things that reminded him of what he was doing “when very innocent”, he says.
“I really enjoyed my youth in Ireland. They were the happiest years of my life. We were poor but very happy. I expected nothing and did not get very much,” he says of his childhood as part of a family of nine in Ballinagore near Ballickmoyler and Arles, Co Laois.
He also took them as solace for his parents, who followed their children and emigrated to England in 1956. “They were quite lonely for Ireland . . . They had a difficult life in every way and didn’t cope well with old age.”
When he returned with the photographs that first summer his parents were “astonished”. “My mother cried,” he recalls.
After the railways, Muldowney began working at electrical retailer Currys, where he manned the camera counter and received some training in photography. When he first brought his camera to Ireland and returned armed with shots of Arles and Ballylinan his colleagues were taken aback by the clarity of the photographs – the lack of air pollution in Ireland made everything look “as clear as crystal”, he says.
The uniqueness of his photographs is heightened because few good-quality cameras were in the hands of amateurs in Ireland at the time. One summer he took a super-8mm movie camera home. “People looked at me as if I was from Radio Éireann or the BBC,” he says.
‘Overwhelmed’
The father and daughter have been “absolutely overwhelmed” by comments and messages about the photographs on Facebook from people from the locality in Ireland or recent and long-departed emigrants from the area.
Flooks was going to put one of her father’s stories and memories with each photo but decided “if people comment it becomes their story”. And so it has happened as people have added their layers of memory.
“I never dreamed that people would find them that interesting, this interest now – I can’t explain,” says Muldowney.
He has hundreds of photos of the locality and has even been offered a possible book deal as a result of the Facebook page.
“It is something about the past that is more mysterious now because of the way the world is at the moment,” he says. “You look at a photo and you think, ‘Didn’t it look perfect back then?’”
Risk of super-volcano eruption big enough to ‘affect the world’
FAR GREATER THAN THOUGHT SAY SCIENTISTS
Scientists have analysed the molten rock within the dormant supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park and found that eruption is possible without any external trigger
The eruption of a “supervolcano” hundreds of times more powerful than conventional volcanoes – with the potential to wipe out civilisation as we know it – is more likely than previously thought, a study has found.
An analysis of the molten rock within the dormant supervolcano beneath Yellowstone National Park in the United States has revealed that an eruption is possible without any external trigger, scientists said.
Scientists previously believed many supervolcanic eruptions needed earthquakes to break open the Earth’s crust so magma could escape. But new research suggests that this can happen as a result of the build-up of pressure.
Supervolcanoes represent the second most globally cataclysmic event – next to an asteroid strike – and they have been responsible in the past for mass extinctions, long-term changes to the climate and shorter-term “volcanic winters” caused by volcanic ash cutting out the sunlight.
The last known supervolcanic eruption was believed to have occurred about 70,000 years ago at the site today of Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia. It caused a volcanic winter that blocked out the sun for between six to eight years, and resulted in a period of global cooling lasting a thousand years.
A supervolcano under Yellowstone Park in Wyoming last erupted about 600,000 years ago, sending more than 1,000 cubic kilometres of ash and lava into the atmosphere – about 100 times more than the Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines in 1982, which caused a noticeable period of global cooling.
Following Pinatubo’s eruption, the global average temperature fell by about 0.4C for several months. Scientists predict that a supervolcanic eruption would cause average global temperatures to fall by about 10C for a decade – changing life on earth.
Scientists have analysed magma from the Yellowstone caldera, a 55-mile-wide underground cavern containing between 200 and 600 cubic kilometres of molten rock, to see how it responds to changes in pressure and temperature.
Using a powerful X-ray source at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France, the researchers found that the density of the magma decreased significantly at the high temperatures and pressures experienced underground.
Density variations between magma and the rock surrounding it means that the lava within the supervolcano’s caldera can produce big enough forces to break through the earth’s crust, allowing the molten rock and ash to erupt from the surface, the scientists said.
“The difference in density between the molten magma in the caldera and the surrounding rock is big enough to drive the magma from the chamber to the surface,” said Jean-Philippe Perrillat of the National Centre for Scientific Research in Grenoble.
“The effect is like the extra buoyancy of a football when it is filled with air underwater, which forces it to the surface because of the denser water around it,” Dr Perrillat said.
“If the volume of magma is big enough, it should come to the surface and explode like a champagne bottle being uncorked.”
The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, was possible because the X-ray machine at Grenoble was able to take accurate density measurements at temperatures of up to 1,700C and pressures 36,000 times greater than normal atmospheric pressure.
“The results reveal that if the magma chamber is big enough, the overpressure caused by differences in density alone are sufficient to penetrate the crust above and initiate an eruption,” said Professor Carmen Sanchez-Valle of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, who led the study.
Preventing a supervolcanic eruption is not possible, but scientists are currently trying to devise methods of monitoring the pressure of underground magma in order to predict whether one is imminent.
Dr Perrillat said there are no known supervolcanoes that are in danger of erupting in the foreseeable future, and it would take at least a decade or so for the magma pressure within a caldera to build up to a point where an eruption is likely.
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