Irish Politics, Current Affairs and Magazine Archive - Politico.ie

Directed by Tamara Jenkins, The Savages follows the story of the unfortunately named Savage siblings, Wendy (Laura Linney) and Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman), who are faced with the tough decision of sending their elderly father into care.
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If anybody should be the new poster boy for “Say No to Ageism” week, it's Harrison Ford. Reprising perhaps his most famous role as the swashbuckling archaeologist, Indiana Jones, in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Ford proves that at the sprightly age of 65 he can crack whips and solve riddles in dead languages with the best of them.  Add a comment

“Welcome to the world of tomorrow”, a bespectacled goofy scientist delcares in his best science fiction voice to Futurama's Philip J. Fry when he is reanimated after spending a thousand years cryogenically frozen. Visitors to Techno Threads, the latest exhibition at the Science Gallery, should be greeted with a similar refrain.  

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John Moloney, the new Minister for State with responsibility for Mental Health, has a genuine commitment to improving mental health facilities and to reducing the stigma associated with mental health problems. In private therefore he must be concerned by the insistence of the government on going ahead with the relocation of the Central Mental Hospital from Dundrum to the site of the new prison at Thornton Hall in North County Dublin.
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We posed the following questions to Batt O'Keeffe, the new Minister for Education and Science:
What assistance and/or information did you give the protestors at Pike Farm, Charleville in their blockade of a residential home being opened for people recently discharged from mental hospitals;

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The last hours of Nuala O'Faolain were anguished as she choked and begged for help, while still at home. She had wanted to die at home rather than to be taken to a hospice. She needed morphine but her friends could not access this for her, as general practitioners were either not available or could not supply morphine in the form of a liquid drip. Eventually, she was moved to a hospice, where she died peacefully a few hours later.

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Before long, the download speeds attainable over mobile broadband devices could increase massively. The mobile operator Vodafone, in conjunction with another communications company, is hoping to develop a new technology that will “bundle” broadband channels to give faster speeds.
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Apple has added to its collection of miniature MP3 players with the new ‘wallet sized' iPod nano that easily slips inside a wallet pouch. The miniature device is an improvement on previous models in terms of size, image quality and the display size. With up to 8GB of disk space, the nano plays 5 hours of video and 24 hours of audio, allowing you watch TV shows, podcasts and movies while retaining the simple, easy to use iPod layout. In America the new nanos are being sold for $160 in shops – one Villager bought a nano at an airport vending machine. In Ireland they retail for €139 for 4GBs up to €189 for 8GB.


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Bob Dylan strumming in the bedroom, Oasis thrashing through the kitchen and Tom Waits melodising the living room. No, not the ultimate house party, but a neat innovation by Sonos that allows digital music (eg MP3 files) from a single library to be played in multiple rooms at once.

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In the age of digital photo albums, libraries of MP3s, radio podcasts and movie downloads, a standard PC is hard pushed to keep up with storage demands. Most computers and laptops come with 80GB of disk space, around 50GB of which may be used to stores personal files. A single movie requires upward of 1GB in space. Hence the popularity of external disk drives while have huge storage capacities, allowing important files to be backed up and older files to be archived rather than deleted with each spring clean.

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