Seventy nine year old activist Margaretta D’Arcy transferred to Mountjoy prison
The Artists (79) was serving second month of sentence in Limerick before being moved.
Artist and peace activist Margaretta D’Arcy has been transferred from Limerick Prison to Mountjoy in Dublin, her family confirmed today.
Artist and peace activist Margaretta D’Arcy has been transferred from Limerick Prison to Mountjoy in Dublin, her family confirmed today.
The 79-year-old Aosdána member, who is entering the second month of a three-month sentence, was informed that she was to be transferred to the Dóchas women’s prison this morning , her son Finn Arden said.
“I spoke to her by telephone and she was in good form,” Mr Arden said.
His mother was imprisoned in mid-January for refusing to sign a bail bond to uphold the law and keep away from unauthorised zones at Shannon airport, following imposition of a suspended sentence for illegal incursion of the runway at Shannon on October 7th, 2012.
She is suffering from cancer and has arthritis.
Earlier this month, the Department of Justice said there are no plans to offer her early release from prison on compassionate grounds.
Former UN assistant secretary general Denis Halliday has appealed to Minister for Justice Alan Shatter as have a number of MEPs and several TDs, but the department has said that Mr Shatter believes resolution of the matter “rests entirely with the individual concerned”, as stated in the Dáil.
Ms D’Arcy has been visited in a private capacity by Sabina Coyne, wife of President Michael D Higgins, and Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, and was in court again earlier this week relating to protests over US military use of Shannon.
The seriousness of the climate situation has yet to sink in nationally
We are witnessing a displaced fury against windmills and pylons rather than tackling the real threat to our future.
It is tempting to imagine that a sea change in Ireland’s on-again, off-again relationship with the reality of climate change has occurred in recent times, as extreme weather events have yet again battered our coastline, inundated farms and flooded urban areas, with the latest wave of damage running to more than €100 million.
Minister for Finance Michael Noonan, visiting areas ofLimerick hit by flooding, commented: “I think we all now believe in climate change . . . the defences that were here, with the new climates that we are having all around the world, are no longer adequate.”
Next up was Minister for Public Expenditure Brendan Howlin. “When calm is restored I think we have to do some serious thinking about long-term flood defences because clearly climate change is a reality.”
Then Brian Hayes, Minister of State for the Office of Public Works, said the OPW had identified some 250 at-risk locations for repeated flooding. The costs of trying to defend these locations, he warned, would run into “tens of billions of euros”.
Meanwhile, Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Opposition leader Micheál Martin both agreed that climate change was indeed real. The one who doesn’t seem to have got the memo was Minister for the Environment Phil Hogan. As the storms rolled in and the flood waters rose higher, Hogan chose instead to join Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney in celebrating securing a renewal of the environmental vandalism that will be Ireland’s latest derogation from the EU nitrates directive.
“Whether we have scientific evidence or not in relation to climate change, it looks as if we’re going to have these types of weather patterns in the future,” said Hogan. This was about as close to uttering the “c” word as he has managed in 2½ years. And yes Minister, there is evidence alright, mountains – and lakes – of it, in fact.
Tipping point: Not everyone is so conflicted. The world is “perilously close” to a climate tipping point, IMF managing director Christine Lagarde warned recently.
With a culinary flourish, she added: “unless we take action, future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled”.
The public service broadcaster RTE with a budget in excess of €300 million, should have a team covering climate and environment with the depth and passion lavished on business or sports. Instead, it scrapped its solitary environment post.
Rosy future: The Marian Finucane Show on Sunday featured an economist gushing about the rosy future of improved labour market opportunities his three-year-old daughter would enjoy by the mid-2030′s.
Meanwhile, the World Bank’s 2012 document Turn Down the Heat projects that global average temperatures will break the plus 2 degrees “point of no return” by the end of that decade. This locks us into a future of food and fresh water shortages, devastating and intensifying weather extremes, coastal inundation, desertification, ocean acidification and mass extinction events. This shocking reality has barely made a dent in our national discourse.
Quite how anyone imagines the global economy could survive such relentless disruption has become the question that dare not speak its name.
RTÉ’s failure on environmental reporting is a tragedy. The print media have hardly fared much better. RTÉ’s audience council is now inviting the public to comment on its communication of climate change. Submissions close next Monday.
Interestingly, Met Éireann’s head of forecasting, Dr Gerry Fleming, pointedly avoided linking the ratcheting up of extreme weather events in Ireland to climate change, stating: “it’s our grandchildren or great grandchildren who will make that call”. His British counterpart, the Met Office’s chief scientist, Dame Julia Slingo, had no such reservations. “All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change . . . there is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”
The clamour for answers is gathering pace yet, oddly, the outrage is not being directed against the real enemy, an energy system utterly dependent on coal, oil and peat-burning. In our displaced fury, we are, Don Quixote-style, tilting instead at “ugly” windmills and pylons.
Amid the gloom, some positive news: An Taisce has just established a new climate change committee (disclosure: I’m a member) to take a more forceful approach to communicating this crisis and challenging Ireland’s dangerous do-nothing consensus.
Minister Reilly says Rehab cannot be forced to comply with public pay policy
Rehab will hold meeting next week to decide whether to disclose CEO’s salary
The Minister for Health has admitted that Rehab cannot be forced to abide by public pay policy.
But James Reilly says the government expects organisations receiving major public funding to pay staff at similar rates to public servants.
The Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has agreed to hold a hearing with Rehab “in the next fortnight” to discuss pay and funding issues.
Meanwhile, the Rehab board of directors is meeting next Monday to decide whether to reveal the salary package of its chief executive, Angela Kerins.
The Chairman of the Group, Brian Kerr, said last month that the remuneration of the CEO is a matter for the Rehab Group board – and since the last voluntary disclosure of her salary in April 2011, there has been no formal request from any relevant authority to do so again.
In a statement on January 23rd, Mr. Kerr said some of the pressure that has been placed on Ms. Kerins and her family has been entirely unfair and very personal.
Minister Reilly says the government will not stop until it has full transparency in bodies that receive State funding. But he is ruling out an independent inquiry.
The human brain now reacts to emoticons naturally,
Says Neuroscientists
The humble smiley face or ‘emoticon’ is now much more than a simple pattern of colons and symbols. According to a recent study, the human brain now reacts emotionally to seeing them on our screens.
With the advent of text messages as one of the most popular forms of communication, human beings as a physically emotive people meant some messages were lost in translation without the addition of a 
or 
to indicate their mood.
or to indicate their mood.
Now, according to a team of neuroscientists, we have used emoticons so often in the past 40 years that the human brain now recognises them as human faces.
The report was published in Social Neuroscience and titled Emoticons in mind: An event-related potential study involving 20 participants in the study.
As part of the experiment, the 20 people were shown images of upright and inverted faces, emoticons and meaningless strings of characters. The participants’ facial responses, known in neuroscience as the N170, showed that inverted faces “produces a larger and later N170 while inverting objects which are perceived featurally rather than configurally reduces the amplitude of the N170.”
The first documented use of the emoticon was by Scott E Fahlman from Carnegie Mellon University, who suggested that the smiley face be used as an indication of when something is a joke or not.
2014 Google Science Fair seeks entries from teens 13-18 worldwide
2014 Google Science Fair is seeking entries from teens worldwide
Students aged 13-18 who have a concept for changing the world are invited to submit their ideas to the fourth annual Google Science Fair and be in with a chance of winning some pretty spectacular prizes.
Students from around the world may enter the Google Science Fair. All they need to participate is curiosity and an internet connection, Clare Conway of Google Science Fair team wrote on Google’s Official Blog.
Students have until 12 May to submit their projects. The winners will be announced at a finalist event at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, on 22 September.
M/s Conway also detailed the prizes that are up for grabs.
“This year’s grand prize winner will have the chance to join the Virgin Galactic team at Spaceport America in New Mexico as they prepare for space flight and will be among the first to welcome the astronauts back to Earth, a 10-day trip to the Galapagos Islands aboard the National Geographic Endeavour and a full year’s digital access to Scientific American magazine for their school.
“Age category winners will have a choice between going behind the scenes at the LEGO factory in Billund, Denmark, or an amazing experience at either a Google office or National Geographic.”
If there is global warming this is what the British aisles would look like
The possibility that global warming might have something to do with the extraordinary weather that is now rapidly floating up and dominating the agenda.
It is an all too familiar sight these days as Father Thames reclaims his ancient sovereignty over his flood plain. A Street, in Oxford, has become a river, banked by sodden suburban homes. Its inhabitants have taken to canoes instead of cars. But this time there is something else: people are holding a banner: “Can we talk about climate change now?”
Well, I guess they can. At first, the possibility that global warming might have something to do with the extraordinary weather – which has dumped nearly 300 Windermeres of water on Britain in two months – was little discussed. But it is now rapidly floating up the agenda.
After years avoiding what used to be his trademark issue, David Cameron has now twice voiced his strong suspicion of a link with climate change, most recently in a passionately delivered peroration at Tuesday’s press conference.
Junior environment minister Dan Rogerson, standing in for the more sceptical Owen Paterson, agreed on Thursday that global warming was to blame. And Lib Dem Energy Secretary Ed Davey accused some Conservatives of “parroting the arguments of the most discredited climate change deniers” – only for his deputy, Michael Fallon, to hit back by denouncing “unthinking climate change worship”.
More significantly, Dame Julia Slingo, the Met Office’s chief scientist, judged that “all the evidence” suggested that climate change helped cause the “most exceptional period of rainfall in 248 years”. She was launching an official study that fingered increasingly heavy rains, sea-level rise in the Channel, and an increasing intensity of Atlantic storms hitting Britain as possible signs of its effects.
The report also cited the “extreme cold” of the North American winter, stretching all the way down to New Orleans, which has even forced a polar bear at a Chicago zoo to take refuge indoors. Indeed, last month Michigan became the chilliest place on the planet, beating the South Pole: water thrown from buckets turned to ice in mid-air, while the 200-strong community of Hell, west of Detroit, froze over.
California, meanwhile, is suffering its most severe drought in a century; Australia has just had its hottest year on record, and Argentina sweltered through some of its worst heat in December. And Arctic Norway has been so hot and dry that it has experienced three major wildfires in two months, while Greenland has been basking in a heatwave.
None of this, let it quickly be said, can clearly be attributed to climate change. Even the Met Office report said “it is not possible, yet, to give a definitive answer”, leading Lord Lawson to protest: “It’s just this Julia Slingo woman” making an “absurd statement”. More clarity may come – a 2011 study found that global warming made the devastating floods in 2000 at least twice as likely to happen – but firm conclusions are, at the least, premature.
Nor is it clear that such “extreme events” have increased because of climate change. But what does seem to be certain – and has been consistently predicted for decades – is that these will become more intense as the world warms up and injects greater energy into the weather system. So the lesson of this winter’s weather and the other extremes around the world is that – whatever their cause – this is what climate change is expected to look like. Or as one former Tory ministerial adviser put it to me: “We are watching the trailer of the movie called Global Warming.”
That undermines a reassuring view that seems to have been adopted by Mr Paterson – that climate change will do more good than harm for most of this century and is, as he put it, “something we can adapt to over time”.
This approach rests on over-simple calculations of longer growing sessions, the fertilising effects of increased carbon dioxide in the air, and reduced deaths from cold in developed countries (the fate of the poor, who suffer throughout, is glossed over), which pay scant attention to the effects of extreme weather.
But these, as we are finding out, can be extremely disruptive. So far only a tenth as many homes have been inundated as in the 2007 floods, but 70 per cent of the fire and rescue services are caught up in the biggest mobilisation since the Second World War.
Fishermen have been stranded in port, tens of thousands of families have lost power, and much of the country almost came to a halt this week as roads and bridges closed, and rail links were smashed: rail chiefs warn that hundreds of places on railway lines are at risk and that services will be disrupted for months. The estimated cost, 1 per cent of GDP, threatens the recovery. So what will the feature film be like?
It’s time to do more than talk about it.
In with a chance: rhinos have just been given more protection
Prince William makes his mark on the wild side
Now for some good news: the agreement this week, between 46 countries in London, to clamp down on the illegal wildlife trade (since the original treaty to control it was agreed 41 years ago). It comes not a moment too soon; the trade is driving the rhino, the elephant and many less spectacular species toward extinction.
It also marks the emergence of a new big player on the international environmental stage, joining his father and grandfather. The Duke of Cambridge has shown this week that – just like the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh – he is a force to be reckoned with. It was en route to the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne, on the Royal Yacht Britannia, that an abiding love of nature was instilled in Prince Philip as he tried out a new camera by taking pictures of seabirds. This led, in time, to him effectively lobbying governments as head of the World Wildlife Fund.
Prince Charles has taken the issue even further, campaigning on a host of issues, and increasingly using his convening power to bring governments together. His son joined him in making this week’s meeting a success. Let’s hope it’s just a beginning.
Homes built of fungi (but will there be mushroom inside?)
We’ve gone through the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages to the Atomic one. But what’s next? Promoters of a new building technique, about to be tried out in New York claim it’s going to be – wait for it – the “Mushroom Age”. In future, they hope, we’ll live in self-growing houses made of fungi.
Don’t worry, it’s not like the Smurfs’ spotty homes. This will be very hi-tech, if organic, stuff – based on bricks made of corn stalks and mushroom cells that grow to form blocks in any shape an architect dreams up. And once they are laid, the bricks go on growing, meshing together and strengthening construction.
The first such building, three giant joined-together towers, is to open at the Museum of Modern Art PS1 in Queens in June to provide cool (in more senses than one) seating for people attending its summer concerts. Pedro Gadanho, of the museum, believes the material “could change the way people build”.
“It’s really inexpensive, almost cheaper than anything,” adds its designer, David Benjamin. It emits no carbon, it requires almost zero energy, and doesn’t create any waste (eventually it’s composted). Enough, in short, to turn a Smurf green.
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