Author: xaurav

Brian Lenihan was diagnosed with cancer in December 2009

Former Irish finance minister Brian Lenihan has died at the age of 52.

Mr Lenihan, who was suffering from pancreatic cancer, was an MP for opposition party Fianna Fail.

As finance minister, he agreed the 100% bank guarantee and signed the bail-out deal with the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank.

He was a member of a political dynasty with his father Brian, his brother Conor, and his aunt Mary O’Rourke all serving in Irish governments.

Mr Lenihan had been fighting cancer since December 2009.

He had undergone intensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatement at the Mater Hospital in Dublin.

He had served as minister for justice and as the minister for children in previous Fianna Fail administrations.

Since Fianna Fail left government in March, he had continued to act as Fianna Fail finance spokesperson.

He is survived by his wife and two children.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

The £545 tram project is behind schedule and over budget

A number of staff at the company responsible for the Edinburgh Trams project could lose their jobs, it has emerged.

TIE has confirmed that a voluntary redundancy scheme has been launched at the firm, which has 60 full-time staff.

The announcement follows a dispute between TIE and its contractors Bilfinger Berger, which has halted work on the £545m project.

Work on the transport scheme is now due to re-start in September.

A spokesman for Edinburgh Trams said: “We can confirm that in line with the next stage of the revised governance process, a voluntary redundancy scheme has been launched within TIE.

“This is only the initial pre-consultation phase and as yet, way too early to say how many individuals may be interested, or indeed, considered.

“As is standard process, we will be seeking the views of staff as to whether they wish to be considered for this and we will report back to the council after a period of weeks.

“There is also work ongoing to establish the future size and reporting mechanism for TIE and how this works more closely with the council.

“This in turn leads up to a full council discussion of the trams project in the near future.”

In recent weeks a number of officials have left the company running the trams project.

Mandy Haeburn-Little is to step down from her post as TIE director of communications and customers services in July, after two years in the post.

Richard Jeffrey, 44, the chief executive has also left, having worked for the company for two years.

The previous chief executive, Willie Gallagher, also resigned after two years.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman has urged restraint on household water use

Parts of England are officially in a drought following the dry spring, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has said.

Areas of East Anglia are in drought, with parts of the south-west and south-east of England, the Midlands and Wales in a “near-drought” state.

In the drought-affected areas, Anglian Water and Cambridge Water say there is no threat to public water supplies.

But Severn Trent Water says there may be restrictions if rainfall stays low.

Both the south-east and central-southern regions of England have had their driest spring on record.

Across England and Wales as a whole it has been the driest spring since 1990.

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman is set to hold a second drought summit to review the impacts of the continuing dry weather.

She said: “Water companies are confident that supplies are high enough so that widespread restrictions to the public are unlikely. We’re doing all we can to reduce the impact on agriculture and wildlife, but everyone can play their part.

“Households know how to use less water and everyone can do their bit to use water more wisely, not only through the summer, but throughout the year.”

Low levels of water are causing considerable problems for farmers, with crop yields being hit.

In parts of the Fens, some farmers and growers have volunteered to irrigate only at night to reduce evaporation, and co-operatives have formed to share limited amounts of water available.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Some men wildly exaggerate the number of sexual partners they have had, analysis suggests

Surveys of cyber crime and numbers of sexual partners have a lot in common, researchers have suggested.

Both are self-reporting, uncorroborated surveys that are subject to “catastrophic errors”, according to analysis by a Microsoft research team.

Over-reporting by a small number of survey subjects can wildly skew final estimates.

As a result, they said, no faith should be placed in the evidence these surveys claim to have uncovered.

There were deep similarities between surveys that try to get a snapshot of hi-tech crime and those that peep into human sexual relations, said Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley in a paper entitled Sex, Lies and Cyber Crime Surveys.

Typically these surveys build up their totals from self-reported estimates because both phenomena defy “large-scale direct observation”.

In the case of sexual partner surveys, such self-reporting produces totals which suggest that men have had far more female sexual partners than women have had male sexual partners. This, according to the researchers, “is impossible”.

The truth is that in these surveys men over-report partner numbers and women under-report. Plus, said the researchers, some men tell “whopping” lies about their sexual lives and, as a result, vastly inflate the final results.

The same is true of cyber crime surveys, in that respondents tend to over-report. Also some wildly overestimate the financial loss they suffered or the time it took to resolve problems caused by theft of login details, credit card numbers or other valuable data.

Mathematical analysis of the surveys shows that it only takes a few large overestimates to produce a total that bears little relation to the facts.

“Our assessment of the quality of cyber crime surveys is harsh,” wrote the researchers. “They are so compromised and biased that no faith whatever can be placed in their findings.”

David Emm, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Labs, said he was always “sceptical” about figures that tried to quantify cyber crime.

“It’s by definition a covert economy,” he said, “cyber criminals don’t publish annual accounts.”

But, he said, it was not necessary to produce a global market estimate to be sure it was a big problem.

“Look at the reports in online media of arrests of cyber criminals and the figures cited for what the criminals would have ‘earned’ had they been successful,” he said.

“These are real figures,” he added. “Given that this is just the tip of a much larger iceberg, it’s clear that it’s a lucrative business.”

The Sex Lies and Cyber Crime surveys paper is due to be presented at the forthcoming Workshop on the Economics of Information Security.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

Ed Balls has denied there was a plot by Gordon Brown and his supporters to oust Tony Blair as Prime Minister in the months after the 2005 general election.

This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.