Largest drug haul in history of state

A drugs haul of up to €50 million appears to have been made off the coast of Cork when a man swam ashore this morning and raised the alarm for his mates who were adrift with an overturned dinghy. Unfortunately for the men when the rescue services arrived they also found 40 to 50 bales of what appears be cocaine. The estimate is half a ton of cocaine valued at €50 million.

Understatement of the week comes from the Coastguard.

A Coastguard spokesperson said both men were 'extremely shocked' and suffering from hypothermia.

I'd bet their shocked and more than a little worried about what happens when the crime boss realises his €50 million is now floating it's way back to South America. There has to be a movie of the week somewhere in there, the big screen version has already been made complete with Irish actor. At the very least I'm going to tune into that episode of crimecall.

Update: Looks like it's up to at least €105 million, most papers have it at €200 million but some tabloid newspapers have it up to €300 million.

Brown

Gordon Brown has taken over in the UK as Prime Minister. It was strange looking at Blair leaving and getting on a train home while Brown appoints his new cabinet. I cant help but think, we had the election and they got the new government.

Apple sounds like a cool place to work

At a town hall meeting for all Apple Employees Steve Jobs announced that announced that all full-time Apple employees will receive a free 8GB iPhone, while part-time employees who have been with the company for more than a year will also receive a free iPhone. Not a bad little gift and I'm sure it built up a lot of good feeling towards the company with staff.

Irelands First Black Mayor

Ireland just elected it's first black mayor. Rotimi Adebari is originally from Nigeria and now lives Portlaoise. Granted the method of electing mayors is a little strange with county councellors rotating the position between them but its still cool that we have finally elected a black person as mayor. I'm more surprised that it took until 2007.

Tallaght has WMDs

Nuclear-weapons laboratory Los Alamos was subject to a security breach when a laptop was stolen from the hotel room of an employee on holidays in Ireland. There were "government documents of a sensitive nature" on the laptop and an encryption card in the laptop whose export is government-controlled. I cant help but think there is a little skanger somewhere in Tallaght now trying to build the bomb so he can break the locks on the securicor van...

Ireland is Nevada

Here is an interesting map of the USA with the State names replaced with the name of a country of comparable GDP.



Ireland is mapped to Nevada, in 21st place of the 51 states.

[via Boing Boing]

New Junior Ministers

Bertie Ahern has appointed his Junior ministers and increased the number from 17 to 20. Junior ministries are basically a waste of time so I wont bother going into detail, you can find them here if you want, but the one appointment that gave me a chuckle was Brendan Smith T.D. as Minister of State with responsibility for Children.

In case anyone forgot the previous Fianna Fail Taoiseach Albert Reynolds had a bad experience with another Brendan Smith and some children. Fr Brendan Smith caused the collapse of Alberts government in 1994.

Hotmail and IE7 problems?

Anyone else having problems lately using drag n drop in Windows Live Hotmail when using IE7? It used to work for me up to recently but when I tried this morning the messages wont drag for more than a couple of pixels before the mouse releases them. I thought there might be a problem with Hotmail itself but it all works in Firefox so the problem seems to be in IE7 and has probably existed since the latest set of security updates. It's not a big problem just a nuisance, my MSN Messenger insists on launching IE to load Hotmail instead of Firefox which is my default browser.

I should just stop using Hotmail but I've so many things set up to use it now I couldn't be bothered.

Rain

Ok, I'm beginning to get pissed off at the weather this month. Rain rain and more rain. Walk to work, it's raining, go for lunch it's raining, walk home it's raining. What is up with this month, it's supposed to be the middle of summer not the middle of winter.

Small little run around number

Someone has bought one of the new super jumbo Airbus A380s for personal use at the Paris airshow. It costs $300 million and will take a year to convert to private use. Of course something this size is not exactly environmentally friendly. Quote of the week, if not the month must go to this group.

Environmental groups were annoyed by the news, saying that buying a superjumbo for private use was like "buying a filthy coal-fired power station just to use to charge up your mobile phone."

Still, it's probably a Middle-Eastern oil sheik so he will be able to fill it up at home long after no one else in the world has fuel for their cars, though he may have difficulty converting it into a sea plane to land on a planet with no polar ice caps.