Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG

The two-year-old boy who climbed from his cot,

and walked a mile from his home, & reunited with his parents at 4am.

  

A young man has been hailed a hero after helping to reunite a toddler with his family after the boy dramatically disappeared from the family home in the early hours of this morning.

The two-and-a-half-year-old opened the front door of his home in Garryowen and walked about a mile along the Dublin Road at around 2.20am.

A 21-year old man found the boy wandering along the road and alerted Gardaí.

Gardaí at Henry Street station took the boy into protective custody as they tried to ascertain where his family lived.

According to Gardaí, a door was left open at the boy’s house which was what led investigating officers to the parents of the toddler who were completely unaware the toddler had left home.

Gardaí woke the occupants, who were shocked to learn that the boy had climbed out of his cot before letting himself out the front door. The boy, who turns three this summer, was reunited with his shocked but delighted parents at around 4am in the morning.

According to Gardaí he was unharmed.

“He was absolutely fine thankfully, nothing untoward happened, and his mother was delighted and relieved to be reunited with him,” Chief Supt Sheahan said.

He also praised the actions of the hero passer-by who alerted the gardaí and who went on to search a number of estates near where he had found the child.

“That little boy is incredibly lucky. It’s amazing he managed to get out of the house like that, and it’s even more fortunate he wasn’t knocked down by a car or worse, kidnapped,” a local man said at hearing the news.

(IMHO) Group reports massive upsurge in mortgage deals

 

€195,000 mortgage write down believed to be the largest so far?

A group involved in the brokering of deals between banks and distressed mortgage holders has reported a “monumental upsurge” in activity.

The Irish Mortgage Holders Organisation (IMHO) said it had recently negotiated 97 deals involving AIB customers which included some form of debt write-down.

In one case, involving a couple in Cork, the bank had written off €195,000 in mortgage debt while allowing the couple and their two children remain in the house.

The deal is believed to be one of the largest mortgage write-downs agreed by the lender.

The couple had originall y borrowed €478,000 to purchase their home.

Under the terms of the deal, the family will now have to service a new 30-year variable rate mortgage of €200,000, with €100,000 being warehoused and €195,000 written off.

“There’s been a monumental upsurge in activity” related to mortgage debt, the IMHO’s David Hall said.

“After six years of banks doing nothing, we have banks doing a combination of good and bad things from repossessions to restructuring deals.”

He said his organisation was dealing with just over 2,000 clients from AIB or its building society EBS as well as 360 KBC bank customers.

However, he said hundreds of customers were agreeing debt write-down deals with the bank independently of the brokerages.

AIB recently announced a new split-mortgage product involving some form of automatic debt write-down.

Under the deal, eligible customers will have their loan broken into three tranches.

The first part, which the customer will be expected to repay, will be based on the current market value of their home, while another will be warehoused, interest free, for settlement at a later date, with a final tranche The number of people who cannot afford food in Ireland has doubled

A worrying statistic from today’s OECD report.

A major report from the OECD has highlighted the growing problem of food poverty in Ireland.

       

Among figures about unemployment, falling incomes and suicides, sits a stark number counting those individuals and families who experience hunger.

A graph shows that the percentage of people in Ireland who say that they cannot afford food has more than doubled to 9 per cent in five years.

In 2006/7, the corresponding data showed a figure of 4.2 per cent.

According to the report, reduced spending on food is one of the main causes of food insecurity, a term that describes a situation where inadequate access to food does not allow all members of a household to sustain a healthy lifestyle.

The OECD noted that the US holds very detailed statistics on food insecurity that are not matched in Europe. However, it said there are unofficial estimates that growing numbers of families and children suffer from hunger or food insecurity in economically distressed countries.

In Greece, 10 per cent of students fall into the category.

Scientists announce new dinosaur discovery

  

The dinosaur had feathers on its arms?

Scientists in the US have announced the discovery of a new species of dinosaur. The fossils offer further clues to how the dinosaurs became extinct 66 million years ago.

Anzu wyliei is a strange bird-like creature that has a bony crest on top of a beaky head and a long tail like a lizard. It was identified from the partial remains of three skeletons collected in North and South Dakota.

The first detailed report about the Anzu wyliei is published today by the journal PLOS ONE.

“We had inklings that there might be such a creature out there, but now with these bones we have 80% of the skeleton and can really look in detail at the structure of this animal and make inferences about its biology,” says Hans Sues, curator of vertebrate palaeontology in the department of paleobiology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC.

“Anzu is really bizarre, even by dinosaur standards.

“The skull has this extraordinarily tall and thin crest with a snout and a huge beak with sharp edges and a strange sliding jaw joint” that could be used to cut up vegetation and meat, he says.

Diverse communities

The size of a small car, the dinosaur also had claws and feathers on its upper arms. It belongs to a group of dinosaurs known asOviraptorosauria. Most evidence of their existence comes from fossils discovered in Central and East Asia.

The Anzu bones are the first detailed evidence that oviraptorosaurs also lived in North America.

The Anzu fossils were found in a geological formation known as Hell Creek which has been extensively explored and is the source of many dinosaur fossils discovered in North America.

Scientists have nicknamed it ‘the chicken from Hell’ because of its appearance and where it was found.

The site is important because it was formed in the last two million years of the Cretaceous period, just before dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid strike.

Many researchers have argued that dinosaurs were already dying out because of climate change. But according to Dr Sues and his team, the discovery of Anzu offers further proof that many species were still evolving and dinosaur communities were diverse and flourishing.

“This is consistent with the idea that a mass extinction was caused by the great asteroid impact 66 million years ago. It’s clear that dinosaurs were still quite diverse until the very end,” says Dr Sues.

A thousand species of dinosaurs have been discovered so far. Scientists believe there are many thousands more waiting to be identified, even in heavily excavated formations such as Hell Creek.

The discovery of another species from the site was announced in December last year,

A small raptor called Acheroraptor temertyorum. And scientists have only begun to explore potential dinosaur graves in Central Asia.

Bones in ground

But there’s no magic formula for discovery according to Tyler Lyson, who found one of the Anzu skeletons in 2009 on his uncle’s ranch in North Dakota.

“We were just walking along when we saw some dinosaur bones poking out of the ground,” he says. “I knew right away that they belonged to a meat-eating dinosaur because meat-eating dinosaurs have hollow bones, and these bones were hollow. We carefully made a plaster jacket to wrap the specimen and get it back to the lab. After several hours cleaning it, we knew we had found something new. It was unlike anything else we had ever seen before.”

Dr Lyson is part of the Smithsonian team and the founder of the Marmarth Research Foundation, which promotes the study of fossils. He discovered his first dinosaur bone when he was just six years old. The other two Anzu skeletons, which include a skull, were discovered by private collectors.

“You just have to spend time out there,” he says. “The bones come to the surface and then break up into little pieces. You get a trail of broken bits of bone which you follow, and if you’re lucky you’ll see bones sticking out of the side of the hill – and that’s exactly what we found here.”

Although the Anzu skeletons were discovered several years ago, scientists work in “deep time”, says Dr Lyson. Bones have to be catalogued and compared with other specimens while scientific evidence has to be peer-reviewed. It can take a decade before any official announcement is made.

All three Anzu skeletons are housed at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, which collaborated with the Smithsonian to identify the new species.

How people can live a long life

  

If you want to live a long and healthy life, then ditch high heels, switch from fresh fruit to frozen — and take off all your clothes – these are Dr David Agus’s surprising tips.

According to a new book by one of the world’s top cancer specialists, these small changes could dramatically increase your longevity.

Strip off and go naked

  Take a good look at yourself naked in front of a mirror — front and back. This will help you  spot trouble on the horizon in the form of body oddities you didn’t have before and signs of skin cancer.

And once in a while, take a visual inventory of every square inch of yourself, including your hair, nails and the inside of your mouth.

Bin your high heels

Uncomfortable shoes cause unnecessary inflammation in your feet that can have an impact on your whole system. Inflammation has been linked to some of our most troubling degenerative diseases, including heart disease, Alzheimer’s, cancer, auto-immune diseases, diabetes and accelerated ageing.

Wake up with a coffee

Drinking coffee or tea in moderation has long been shown to confer positive benefits on our health.

Eat at the same time

If you don’t eat when your body anticipates food, it will sabotage your efforts to lose or maintain an ideal weight.

Have a flu shot

Just one to two weeks of an inflammatory storm, which is  what will take place if  you contract flu, can increase your lifetime risk for obesity, heart attack, stroke and cancer.

People still falsely think the vaccine has side effects, that it doesn’t work, can cause the flu or  even contains toxins or poisons. All this is rubbish!

Stand up

There is a profound link between more time sitting and   a greater incidence of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and early death.

Way back in the Fifties, a comparison of London’s double-decker bus drivers and conductors in the Fifties found that the ticket takers, who climbed stairs all day, had a much lower incidence of heart attacks than the drivers.

Stop slouching

Apart from neck and back problems, poor posture can also cause headaches, arthritis, poor circulation, muscle aches and pains, difficulty breathing, indigestion, constipation, joint stiffness, fatigue, neurological problems and poor physical function in general.

Take aspirin daily

Many high-quality research studies have confirmed that the use of aspirin not only substantially reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease.

But make sure that you discuss it with your doctor first as there are side effects such as stomach bleeding.

Frozen fruit & veg

We may be able to access pretty much any type of food all year long, but it comes at a cost: nutrition.

By the time most of it reaches your supermarket, it doesn’t contain nearly the same amount of nutrients as when the crop was picked.

Unless you can buy truly fresh local produce that’s in season, opt for frozen fruits and vegetables.

Avoid vitamins

Many studies on groups of more than a thousand people in the past few decades have shown that taking vitamin supplements is correlated with an increased risk of serious diseases such as cancer, and it produces little benefit to health.

The body likes to create free radicals to attack ‘bad’ cells, including cancerous ones.

If you block this by taking copious amounts of vitamins, especially those touted as antioxidants, you block your body’s natural ability to  control itself.

Have children

If you have children you’ll be more likely to live longer than your childless counterparts.

That’s because raising a child compels us to remain active and mentally challenged.

Sip a glass of wine

Moderate alcohol intake, especially red wine, can reduce the risk for heart disease.

Aim for no more than one drink a day if you’re a woman and two if you’re a man.

GIVE US A SMILE

Smiling will boost your mood. It will trigger the release of pain-killing, brain-happy endorphins and seratonin, which reduce harmful stress levels.

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