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Former FG Minister for Communications Michael Lowry arriving at the Moriarty Tribunal in 2007.
THERE WERE ACCUSATIONS of “mudslinging” today at an Oireachtas Committee meeting Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is attending.
Varadkar told the Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, that costs of the Moriarity, Cregan and Cook tribunals will overrun by millions.
The Moriarty Tribunal kicked off in 1997 to look into the financial affairs of Charlie Haughey and Michael Lowry – and 22 years on, it continues to cost the State money.
Officially called the Tribunal of Inquiry into certain Payments to Politicians and Related Matters, it took 14 years to find that former Fine Gael minister Michael Lowry had an “insidious and pervasive” influence over the awarding of Ireland’s second mobile phone licence in the 1990s to Denis O’Brien’s Esat Digifone company.
Lowry is currently still a sitting TD for Tipperary. He rejects the findings of the Tribunal, as does O’Brien.
Earlier this year, the Public Accounts Committee heard the tribunal would cost €65 million.
Today, the Taoiseach said it will top out at €75 million – but he said this depends on the final cost of the bills.
There were heated exchanges between Sinn Féin’s Pearse Doherty and the Taoiseach when the Donegal TD asked Varadkar whether he believed the Moriarty Tribunal was value for money.
Varadkar said he thinks the tribunal did “very good work”, adding that some of its findings resulted in policy and legislative changes. Could the tribunal have done the same work for less money? The Taoiseach said “quite possibly”.
Doherty asked the Taoiseach about whether he was happy relying on Michael Lowry’s government support, and also mentioned a recent meeting with businessman Denis O’Brien.
The Taoiseach told the committee that Doherty’s questioning was just “mudslinging”.
“I bumped into Denis O’Brien in a corridor in Davos,” he said, adding that the questioning was “ridiculous”.
Varadkar shot back at Doherty, asking him if he was concerned that there are people sitting on the Sinn Féin benches who have “very serious criminal convictions”. Doherty said he was the one asking the questions at today’s committee hearing.
Referencing the Cregran Tribunal – which is the investigation into the sale of certain loans held by IBRC, the former Anglo Irish Bank, including the controversial Siteserv deal – the Taoiseach said costs will also increase.
To date, it has cost €7 million, however, Varadkar said he expects it to cost around €30 million. He said it is difficult to give a final figure on any ongoing investigation as there is no end date in sight.
The Cooke investigation, which is reviewing Project Eagle, Nama’s sale of Northern Ireland-linked loans to US company Cerberus, for €1.6 billion, has cost €2 million.
The tribunal is due to report in June. Varadkar said he had no reason to believe that an extension would be sought.
The Taoiseach said he expects it will cost around €10 million. In giving his predictions, he was keen to point out that they are estimates.
He said the cost of tribunals is something “we should all bear in mind”, stating that there isn’t a week that goes by that the opposition isn’t calling for a tribunal to be set up into a matter.
Varadkar said while the calls may be merited in some cases, politicians have to remember that these inquiries don’t often provide the answers that are being sought, and ultimately it is the taxpayer that pays.
Fianna Fáil’s Barry Cowen said that many of the tribunals and the matters they investigate are warranted.
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Yep, every single one of them.
Will you for sequins or swirls?
No gym selfies or sedated tigers here.
It features a vibrating sleeve for her pleasure.
Yes, the future has arrived.
Warning: May contain fairy wings.
People ALWAYS ask if you're Irish.
Poverty and desolation never looked so chic.
What's most popular near you?
As solid as modern touchscreens are, there’s very often an subtly apparent sense of disconnect when you try to use one. According to Paul Dietz of Microsoft’s href="http://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/"> Applied Sciences Group, it all comes down to latency — he notes average touchscreens have a latency of a 100ms, which yields a noticeable bit of lag between a user touching a screen and the screen displaying a reaction to it.
Sure, it’s totally usable, but it never really feels like you’re fully in control. If you drag an app across the iPad’s screen, for example, the icon will dance around your finger a bit as the display tries its best to keep up. That’s not good enough for Dietz and his team, as they have whipped up a demo of how things ought to be — unlike the 100ms delay of a regular touchscreen, the demo knocks that delay between touch and tracking down to 1ms flat.
The difference is staggering, especially when Dietz trots out the slow-motion footage. With the delay between touch input and screen response slashed by orders of magnitude, a device that sports the sort of super-low-latency Dietz envisions has the potential to feel far more (for lack of a better term) natural than its brethren. There’s zero delay when you slide a checker across a board, for example, and bringing that sort of instantaneous feedback to the many screens in our lives could help to bridge the gap between operating a bit of software and the feeling of interacting with objects.
Stylus-based interfaces would benefit greatly from this sort of tech. I spent a few brief moments playing with Samsung’s 10-inch Galaxy Note, and while the included S-Pen certainly did the trick, it was still jarring to see the line I was trying to draw following the pen rather than coming from it. (It took me a few tries to nail that TC logo, natch).
But here’s the thing: as cool as this stuff is, I can’t help but wonder if it’s an accomplishment best appreciated by nerds. Microsoft’s interest in this seems purely academic — they’re not, after all, in the business of stamping out displays. The touch mavens at Synaptics though showed off an impressively precise low-latency screen at MWC 2011, so the interest within the industry is definitely there.
Whether or not this sort of tech will ever make it to the mainstream is something else entirely. Cost of implementation is one potential issue, but I would imagine for something like this, a bigger question is whether or not the average consumer will care enough. A stylus-driven UI is one thing, but our standard, slower displays have been doing an adequate job with finger-based input for a while now. Do we really need a disruption in screen tech if what we have is good enough?
I say yes (I’m no fan of just “good enough”) but that’s really not for me to decide. I look forward to seeing if any manufacturers out there are willing to take the plunge on a low-latency screen like this, and I’m even more hopeful that people find they like how it feels.
ZURICH, Nov 26 (Reuters) - Only a handful of staff at Swiss banks have drawn on a $2.6 million fund set up to help bankers and other employees who have fallen on hard times because of a U.S. crackdown on tax evasion through hidden offshore accounts.
At least 25 people, including bankers such as former UBS executive Raoul Weil, lawyers and asset managers, have been charged by U.S. authorities with assisting tax evasion via Swiss banks since 2008, rocking the country’s banking industry.
Data on thousands of bank employees have been handed over to U.S. authorities as part of the investigation, which is looking into how banks in Switzerland helped wealthy Americans avoid paying tax through hidden offshore accounts.
The fund, which is financed by banks, was put in place to support Swiss employees not accused of any wrongdoing but who have lost their jobs or suffered other personal or financial troubles after being caught up in the probe.
It has only paid out around 100,000 Swiss francs ($104,047) to about 10 bankers since it was set up in 2013, the director of the Association for Bank Employees, Denise Chervet, said on Wednesday.
The figures on the fund were originally reported by Swiss business newspaper, Handelszeitung.
Of the Swiss banks that have already settled with U.S. authorities, UBS and Credit Suisse, the country’s two biggest banks, have incurred the biggest losses, forking out more than $3 billion in fines between them.
Roughly a dozen Swiss banks are still facing criminal investigations in the United States. Around 100 more signed up to work with U.S. authorities at the end of last year, to make amends for possibly aiding tax evasion by wealthy Americans.
Ex-UBS executive Weil was acquitted earlier this month, shortly before a former executive at Swiss private bank Rahn & Bodmer was indicted in the United States on charges of conspiring to help Americans evade taxes using secret accounts.
Madison Avenue long has adored NFL quarterbacks, and Teddy Bridgewater figures he has what it takes to get some of that love.
The Vikings rookie knows he will have to perform on the field to have long-term success in marketing. If that happens, he says, he has the charisma to put up a good Q Score, the measurement used by advertisers.
Despite being just the No. 32 pick in the NFL draft in May, Bridgewater is off to a good marketing start. Thanks to his success at the University of Louisville, No. 5 had the fourth-best-selling NFL jersey among rookies the week after he was selected.
Bridgewater already has endorsement deals with Cadillac, Nike and several trading card companies. Guiding him along the way has been his business manager, Abe Elam, an NFL defensive back from 2006-12 who developed a relationship with Bridgewater several years ago that was helped by their both being South Florida natives.
When training camp gets underway July 25, Bridgewater will battle Matt Cassel and, to a lesser extent, Christian Ponder for the starting job. No doubt the advertising world will be paying attention.
Bridgewater’s apparel deal with Nike includes the gloves he wears during games, so the company would likely be pleased to see the rookie on the field.
Yes, they do. Marketing mavens at the NFL’s premier position include established stars Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers and Drew Brees, and young guys making big strides are Russell Wilson, Robert Griffin III and Cam Newton.
Unless your name is Johnny Manziel, it helps to win in the NFL and put up big numbers before the deals really start arriving. So how good of a player he becomes ultimately will determine how much success Bridgewater has off the field.
Bridgewater’s most high-profile marketing moment actually came a few days before he was drafted by the Vikings. He was featured in a 7-1/2-minute online film made by Spike Lee that concluded with Cadillac providing a pink Escalade for Bridgewater to give to his mother, Rose Murphy.
Murphy is a breast cancer survivor. Bridgewater had revealed on Dan Patrick’s national radio show early this year that, when he was 9, he promised such a car would be hers when he made the NFL.
Bierley said Cadillac used Bridgewater with his mother as a one-time deal because it was such a compelling story, but that Bridgewater has signed a short-term contract with the company to make some personal appearances. Bierley said it has not been Cadillac’s strategy to use celebrities in endorsement campaigns, but he sees Bridgewater as having the personality to be effective in marketing, regardless of the company.
Bridgewater originally had been projected to go much higher in the draft, including possibly No. 1, before a bad pro day in March torpedoed those chances. Dropping to the last pick of the first round likely cost him some immediate endorsement dollars in addition to salary.
Still, Bridgewater, who signed a four-year, $6.85 million contract with a fifth-year option, was one of the most popular players drafted. The only players ranking ahead of him in initial rookie jersey sales were Manziel, taken No. 22 by Cleveland, St. Louis defensive end Michael Sam, a seventh-round pick and the first openly gay player drafted by the NFL, and Houston defensive end Jadeveon Clowney, the top selection.
Now, Bridgewater must do the job on the field. The Vikings are expecting that eventually will happen.
“He’s the future face of your organization, so that’s the hope,” said wide receiver Greg Jennings, who caught passes in Green Bay from endorsement stars Brett Favre and Rodgers. “He’s definitely going to be marketable, but that’s something that Teddy’s going to have to be comfortable with.
"I didn't know I was going to be the referee for an internal GOP ideological civil war," Frank, D-Mass., said on CBS's "The Early Show."
Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who appeared on the same show, said many GOP lawmakers dislike the proposal that has been pushed on the administration's behalf principally by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.
"Basically, I believe the Paulson proposal is badly structured," Shelby said. "It does nothing basically for the stressed mortgage payer. It does a lot for three or four or five banks . ... "
The political infighting happened even as Washington Mutual Inc., one of the country's largest banks, collapsed under the weight of its bad bets on the mortgage market. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. seized WaMu on Thursday, and then sold the thrift's banking assets to JPMorgan Chase & Co. for $1.9 billion.
Even for a party whose president suffers dismal approval ratings, whose legislative wing lost control of Congress and whose presidential nominee trails in the polls, Thursday was a remarkably bad day for Republicans.
The White House summit meeting, called principally with the purpose to seal the deal that Bush has argued is indispensable to stabilizing frenzied markets and reassuring the nervous American public, descended into arguments.
The meeting revealed that Bush's proposal had been suddenly sidetracked by fellow Republicans in the House, who refused to embrace a plan that appeared close to acceptance by the Senate and most House Democrats.
Paulson begged Democratic participants not to disclose how badly the meeting had gone, dropping to one knee in a teasing way to make his point according to witnesses.
And when Paulson hastily tried to revive talks in a nighttime meeting near the Senate chamber, the House's top Republican refused to send a negotiator.
"This is the president's own party," Frank said at the time. "I don't think a president has been repudiated so strongly by the congressional wing of his own party in a long time."
"What we have right now is total chaos brought by injecting presidential politics into very serious negotiations," New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said on NBC.
The presence of McCain and Obama at the White House session indeed lent a greater aura of urgency - and personal intensity - to the discussion.
Asked Friday whether an agreement appeared likely by the end of the weekend, Frank said: "It depends on the House Republicans dropping this revolt against the president and cooperating in trying to amend the plan and at this point I can't give you a yes or no because it's up to the House Republicans and their war, I think, on behalf of Sen. McCain, with President Bush."
McCain's leadership in the negotiations "is to try to stop us from yelling at each other, announcing deals that don't exist, to actually talk to the House and the Senate and get agreement and then go to the press," Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said on NBC's "Today" show: "Try to create organization out of chaos. Three days ago (Sen.) Harry Reid said there'll be no deal without John McCain's support. Nothing happened for three days. John comes back to town, now he's being criticized for coming back."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, asked if a way can be found to an accord any time soon, said that "it will happen because it has to happen. I would hope we could come to agreement within the next 24 hours so we could put the bill in writing and bring it to the floor. That's really up to the House Republicans."
Shelby, however, said he has a letter from some 200 economists saying the plan as structured by Paulson "is a mistake and won't work."
"I say this will not solve the problem," he said on ABC's "Good Morning America.:"
"We're going to spend close to a trillion dollars, we're going to borrow it, I say we can do better," Shelby said.
Republicans and Democrats alike seemed unsure which way McCain was leaning. His campaign's statement late Thursday shed little light.
"At this moment, the plan that has been put forth by the administration does not enjoy the confidence of the American people," it said. It was unclear whether McCain would attend Friday night's scheduled debate against Democratic nominee Barack Obama in Oxford, Miss.
Ordinarily a Republican president's problems are with Democrats, especially if they control the House and Senate. In this case, Bush seemed almost over that hurdle.
To be sure, Democrats demanded a number of changes in his plan, but administration insiders signaled they probably were acceptable. They included greater oversight, more protections for taxpayers, efforts to head off home foreclosures and piecemeal allocations of the federal money to buy toxic mortgage securities.
Miami International Airport's south terminal has a new passenger assistant named Leticia, who works 24/7 to provide information about shops, restaurants and other services.
Leticia is actually a virtual assistant, a small control board accompanied by a high-definition projection screen, a surround-sound system – and a cardboard cutout of a young woman.
Stationed at two entrances to the South Terminal, she responds to questions in English or Spanish. MIA is the latest in a growing number of airports employing virtual assistants.
Every day is Quidditch season with these Harry Potter desk lamps. Perfect for a bit of task lighting, each of these desk lamps feature a Quidditch flag-inspired lampshade in the house of your choice.
So whether you’re a courageous Gryffindor, a devious Slytherin, an intelligent Ravenclaw, or a loyal Hufflepuff, your desk lamp will always let your house pride shine brightly.
Accio your own lamp or buy it here for $39.99.
After being crushed by a natural disaster, Greensburg, Kansas, could have just rebuilt the same way as before. Instead, this conservative town bought in for the future. This audio slide show looks at how and why.
This article is part of Orion magazine’s two-year series, Reimagining Infrastructure, which we’ll be running here on Co.Exist. Request a free trial issue of Orion here.
On the evening of May 4, 2007, Greensburg, Kansas, was utterly demolished by a category EF5 tornado. Roaring up from the Texas panhandle, the 1.7-mile-wide monster tore through the town, flattening houses and flinging car parts onto the roof of the grain elevator. Residents had 26 minutes’ warning, allowing many of them to scramble for shelter. Nonetheless, the tornado destroyed 95% of the town and killed eleven people.
Greensburg was determined to rebuild. The simple way to do it would have been to re-create essentially the same town as before. But despite being physically, emotionally, and economically shattered, residents managed to see the opportunity that followed in the twister’s path. They chose to rebuild not the simplest way, but the best way. Regional activist Daniel Wallach and mayor Lonnie McCollum envisioned how the new Greensburg could become a model of rural sustainability; Kathleen Sebelius, the governor at the time, lent support; and the rest of the town embraced the idea.
Despite its name (the original Green was a nineteenth-century stagecoach driver), Greensburg was no hotbed of eco-activism. It was, and is, a conservative farm town, the seat of rural Kiowa County, where Mitt Romney got 86% of the vote. But sustainable rebuilding represents, as the townspeople like to say, “solid midwestern values.” Planning for the future, using water wisely, respecting the land, reducing waste: everyone could get behind those goals, and did. Even people well beyond the city limits of Greensburg contributed money, time, resources, and ideas to help remake the town.
Fast forward to 2013. Greensburg farms the wind for its electricity, selling its surplus back to the grid. Most municipal buildings, including the city hall, school, and hospital, are LEED-certified, and the streets are now lit by LEDs. The town’s business community has bought in as well—the Best Western has its own wind turbine, the LEED-Platinum-certified John Deere dealership stores its waste oil to heat itself in winter, and Centera Bank, also LEED-certified, absorbs stormwater with its own bioswale. People come from all over the world to tour these facilities.
According to Daniel Wallach, interest in the Greensburg model is so strong that GreenTown, the nonprofit organization that leads the tours, has fielded inquiries from hundreds of other towns and is now consulting for many of them. There may only be one Greensburg, Kansas, but the world is full of communities recovering from catastrophe, as well as those taking up the challenge of planning for a smart, sustainable future. They can find that future happening today in Greensburg.
Find more from Orion’s new series, Reimagining Infrastructure, at www.orionmagazine.org/infrastructure.