Latest news with #PaulByrne
The Irish Sun
5 days ago
- The Irish Sun
New ‘isolated' ex-gangland enforcer chief suspect details in dad's chilling murder amid ‘people know what he did' plea
A FORMER gangland enforcer is the chief suspect in the murder of dad-of-two Paul Byrne, the Irish Sun can reveal. Paul was just 20 Advertisement 4 An ex-gangland enforcer is the chief suspect in the murder of dad-of-two Paul Byrne 4 He disappeared just weeks after discovering partner Martina McQuillan was pregnant 4 Paul's mother Ashley Dempsey, with Martina and Abbey Credit: Niall Marshall/News Group Newspapers Ltd His skeletal remains were found in a wooded area near Blessington, He disappeared just weeks after discovering he was to Advertisement Shortly after his disappearance, his family were also subjected to a campaign of intimidation when leaflets about his disappearance were vandalised. At the time, gardai also confirmed that the dad-of-two wasn't involved in organised As the Garda investigation continues, Paul's killer is still being hunted by gardai. The prime suspect Advertisement And just days after he was released, he was caught with a huge stash of drugs. Before his arrest for Paul's murder, he had been regarded as an enforcer operating in the Tallaght area. One source said: 'This individual is a violent criminal who's suspected of killing Paul Byrne. 'VERY ISOLATED' 'He has been ostracised by many in the criminal world and is now very isolated. 'There are people who know what he did but he's longer in a position to terrorise people.' Advertisement Meanwhile, Paul's mother Ashley Dempsey told of her family's ongoing pain. She said: 'We have been through hell and no family should have to experience such a living nightmare. 'BRUTALLY TAKEN' 'Paul was a precious son and we all just miss him so much. 'He was brutally taken from us and it's awful to think that we had to wait such a long time before we were able to give him a Christian burial. 'We will never forget Paul and he will always keep his memory alive.' Advertisement The grieving mum also said: 'This terrible murder has had a horrendous effect on my family - the pain will never go away. 'DESERVES TO HAVE JUSTICE' 'He deserves to have justice and that means those responsible for his murder being brought to justice. 'My son was killed without ever getting to meet his daughter.' Although five people have been arrested over the murder, no one has ever been charged. Following Paul's disappearance, the local gang suspected of killing him imploded. Advertisement 'MURDER DIVIDED THE GANG' Since then, the suspects have been involved in criminality but aren't part of any major crime gang. One local resident told us: 'Any hold these individuals may have had in the Tallaght area is now gone. 'They were a local gang and they went their own way after Paul's murder. 'The murder divided the gang and when new groups came to the fore they no longer posed the same type of threat. 'SLEEPLESS NIGHTS' 'The chief suspect was an enforcer and used violence in the past and he has gone on to lead a very isolated and chaotic life. Advertisement 'Paul's murder must have caused many sleepless nights to those involved and his family deserve justice.' 'He was brutally taken from us and it's awful to think that we had to wait such a long time before we were able to give him a Christian burial." Ashley Dempsey Paul's mother They also said: 'Paul would have known some of these people but he was keeping his distance from them in the weeks before he went missing.' At present, the ongoing case is being run by Det Insp Seamus Ryan and the team at Blessington Garda station. FAMILY 'DEEPLY AFFECTED' The senior officer said: 'Paul's family have been deeply affected by his murder. 'They are anxious that he's not forgotten and our investigation is active and ongoing. Advertisement 'I have no doubt that there are people in the Tallaght community who have information on this callous murder but have yet to come forward. 'There are people who know what he did but he's longer in a position to terrorise people.' Irish Sun source 'I want to reassure anyone who has information that they will be treated in a sensitive and confidential manner. 'Relationships and allegiances may have changed over the years so it's never too late for people to come forward with the slightest bit of information, no matter how insignificant they think it might be. 'Paul's family are anxious for the investigation to progress so that it can bring them some closure.' 4 Paul's family and friends 'are anxious that he's not forgotten' Credit: Niall Carson/PA Wire Advertisement
The Journal
6 days ago
- The Journal
Gardaí renew appeal for information over murder of Paul 'Frank' Byrne in 2010
GARDAÍ HAVE RENEWED their appeal for information in relation to the murder of 20-year-old Paul 'Frank' Byrne, whose remains were discovered near Blessington, Co Wicklow on the 29 July, 2010. Paul was last seen on the 15 July 2009 at Kilmartin Green in Tallaght, Dublin 24 when it was reported that he left the estate in a 2000 registered wine-coloured Mitsubishi Carisma accompanied by other men. This was the last sighting of Paul Byrne. Paul was reported missing by his mother at Tallaght Garda Station the following day. His body was found two weeks later in a wooded area by a forestry worker near Blessington. 'To date, five people have been arrested in connection with this investigation, however no one has been brought to justice for Paul's murder,' a spokesperson for An Garda Síochána said in a statement. Advertisement It is now sixteen years since Paul Byrne was last seen and gardaí at Blessington Garda Station are renewing their appeal to the public for assistance and information in relation to his disappearance and murder. Paul's family are anxious for the investigation to progress to bring them closure. Gardaí are appealing to those who may have information since 2009, or who may have come into possession of information in the intervening years, to come forward. They are urging individuals who, sixteen years on, may want to come forward, especially if relationships or associations have changed over the years. Gardaí say that, with the passage of time, people may now feel more comfortable sharing information. They say they will treat anyone assisting the investigation in a sensitive manner. Anyone with information can contact Gardaí in Blessington at (045) 865 202, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666 111, or any Garda station. Readers like you are keeping these stories free for everyone... A mix of advertising and supporting contributions helps keep paywalls away from valuable information like this article. Over 5,000 readers like you have already stepped up and support us with a monthly payment or a once-off donation. Learn More Support The Journal
Irish Times
7 days ago
- Irish Times
Gardaí renew appeal for information over murder of Dublin man last seen in 2009
Gardaí have renewed their appeal for information about the murder of a 20-year-old man whose remains were found almost 15 years ago in Co Wicklow. Paul 'Frank' Byrne was last seen on July 15th, 2009, at Kilmartin Green in Tallaght, Dublin 24, when it was reported that he left the estate in a 2000 registered wine-coloured Mitsubishi Carisma accompanied by other males. His mother reported him missing at Tallaght Garda station the following day. His skeletal remains were discovered in a wooded area by a forestry worker near Blessington, Co Wicklow, more than a year later on July 29th, 2010. He was identified through DNA testing. READ MORE To date, five people have been arrested in connection with the investigation, but nobody has been charged in relation to the case. On Monday, gardaí at Blessington announced they were renewing an appeal to the public for assistance and information concerning Byrne's disappearance and murder. A statement from gardaí said the Byrne family is anxious for the investigation to make progress. 'Gardaí are appealing to those who may have information since 2009, or who may have come into possession of information in the intervening years, to come forward,' noted the statement. 'Gardaí are urging individuals, who 16 years on, may want to come forward to do so, especially if relationships or associations have changed over the years. With the passage of time, people may now feel more comfortable sharing information with gardaí.' The statement added that anyone assisting in the investigation will be treated in a 'sensitive manner'. Anyone with information can contact gardaí in Blessington at (045) 865202, the Garda Confidential Line on 1800 666111, or any Garda station.
Skift
06-06-2025
- Science
- Skift
NASA Faces Steep Budget Cuts, One Space Meeting Has Already Been Scrapped
The White House has proposed the largest single-year budget cut to NASA in U.S. history. As a result, space science and exploration are taking a hit — and so are the cornerstone conferences that support these efforts. NASA is facing a proposed 24% budget cut. The financial uncertainty is already hitting the events sector. The International Space Station Research and Development Conference, planned for July in Seattle, has been canceled just two months out. 'The International Space Station National Laboratory, in close consultation with NASA, has determined that the current regulatory and budgetary environment does not support holding the International Space Station Research and Development Conference in 2025,' said the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space. The event, held annually for over a decade, spotlighted research aboard the station and offered updates on NASA's work. NASA Puts Lunar and Planetary Science Conference at Risk The uncertainty doesn't end there. NASA has announced it will no longer fund or seek partners for the 2026 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, a fixture of the planetary science calendar. NASA still send staff and participate but expects outside organizations to cover all costs. The conference organizer says it intends to host the 57th event next year. Some doubt that will happen. 'The lead time it takes to find a venue, speakers, sponsors, and all that goes into it may prohibit a 2026 gathering from happening,' said Paul Byrne, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, who hasn't missed a Lunar and Planetary Science Conference since first attending as a graduate student in 2007. 'This meeting is vital. It's the lifeblood of our community. Plus, it's an extremely important resource for early career scientists,' Byrne said.'This is the go-to meeting, and if it goes away it is an indicator of the crises we are facing.' These cancellations follow a broader trend. NASA's Science Mission Directorate has steadily pulled back support for community-led meetings and workshops.
Scientific American
14-05-2025
- Science
- Scientific American
Venus Isn't (Geologically) Dead
Earth's geology is downright vital. Here, giant 'plates' of the crust rift apart and smash together like pieces of an ever changing planetary jigsaw puzzle. Mountains rise, volcanoes spew, and Earth itself quakes as the crust constantly remakes itself in the ceaseless cycle of plate tectonics. This is a process that controls the flow of carbon through our planet and stabilizes its climate; were it not for plate tectonics, Earth might not be habitable at all. No other rocky world in our solar system has anything approaching Earth's degree of geological activity. At least, that's what scientists used to think. Mercury, Mars and the moon appear essentially inert. But Venus, our closest neighbor and the only other large rocky world around the sun, is now starting to look far livelier than once thought. A fresh look at decades-old data from NASA's Magellan probe has found evidence of active tectonics—around dozens of circular volcanic features called coronae—on Venus today. The finding, published on Wednesday in Science Advances, provides some of the best evidence to date that Venus isn't dead—at least, not when it comes to tectonics. 'Venus works differently than the Earth but not as different as what was originally assumed,' says the study's co-lead author Anna Gülcher of the University of Bern in Switzerland. 'We should think of tectonics as not just a black-and-white picture.' On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. 'Questions as fundamental as 'Is Venus alive today?' are extremely hard to answer,' says planetary scientist Paul Byrne of the University of Washington in St. Louis, who wasn't involved in the study. This new evidence of geological activity around the coronae suggests 'the heart of Venus still beats today. I think that's extremely invaluable for us to understand the big, rocky world next door.' Venus is called ' Earth's evil twin ' for good reason: the planet is almost exactly as large as the Earth and is made of roughly the same stuff. But while Earth is a verdant water world, Venus is a scorched hellscape with temperatures hot enough to melt lead, a dreary, permanently overcast sky and air so thick that it crushes spacecraft as if they were tin cans. For a while, Venus was widely assumed to be just as dead on the inside as it is on the outside. Lacking any obvious plate tectonics—which can help release a world's internal heat—Venus's interior was thought to instead just simmer like the contents of a tight-lidded pot on a stove. According to one popular hypothesis, the pot had eventually boiled over: after eons of frustrated heating, some 800 million years ago, the planet's outer shell buckled, and Venus's entire surface was paved over with immense outpourings of fresh lava. And, the thinking went, with all that heat dissipated, the planet's geology basically shut down. But evidence is mounting that Venus is, geologically at least, still kicking. Most notably, in 2023 two researchers scrutinizing 30-year-old Magellan data realized that the probe had caught a volcanic eruption in the act: radar images of the volcano Maat Mons that were taken months apart showed what looked like a caldera collapse and subsequent lava flow. Venus, it seems, still has active volcanoes. Some researchers now think it could have active tectonics, too. And in 2020 Gülcher and her colleagues showed via simulations of Venusian tectonics that the planet's mysterious, ring-shaped coronae could be a good place to look for such activity. Tectonics refers to the processes that deform a rocky planet's brittle outer shell. On Earth, this outer shell—the lithosphere, which includes the crust and part of the upper mantle—is broken into tectonic plates that drift over the hot, plastic mantle. When two plates collide, one of them can slide below the other and dive down into the mantle in a process called subduction. On Earth, subducting plates start melting as they sink, feeding volcanoes along plate boundaries. Such volcanoes include Japan's Mount Fuji and western North America's Cascade Range. Unlike Earth, Venus doesn't have global plate tectonics. The new study suggests, however, that around coronae, something quite similar to subduction could be happening. Gülcher and her colleagues simulated several tectonic processes that might be occurring around coronae and compared their predictions to real observations collected by the Magellan probe 30 years ago. The comparisons were more than skin-deep: the researchers used gravity data to take a peek underground. Hot rock is generally less dense than cold rock, and these density variations from place to place can correspondingly alter the strength of a planet's gravitational field. So Magellan's spatial mapping of Venus's gravity can 'see' if there's hot, light material under a corona—a sign that rock is actively rising up from the mantle below. Of the 75 coronae that the team could resolve in Magellan's gravitational maps, 52 seem to be geologically active. The predicted and real data lined up so well for some coronae that 'we could hardly believe our eyes,' says the study's other co-lead author Gael Cascioli of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Most of the active coronae were encircled by trenches, a hint that old crust dives into Venus's mantle around these rocky rings, where it is driven downward as buoyant rock rises from below in the middle of each corona's ring structure. 'Basically, if something goes down, something goes up,' Gülcher says. Where the lithosphere is softer and more pliable, bits of it could break off and 'drip' down into the mantle in globs. In places where the lithosphere is stiffer, entire slabs of crust could subduct in a small-scale, circular mirror of Earth's subduction zones, like those that form the Pacific Ocean's famed volcanic Ring of Fire. Working with 30-year-old data comes with an obvious limitation: the data quality often isn't very good compared with newer observations. The new study's researchers did well with what they had, Byrne says. But NASA's upcoming VERITAS (Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography, and Spectroscopy) mission could do much better—and the team predicted exactly how much better in the paper. 'The improvement would be extraordinary,' Cascioli says. Instead of being limited to analyzing 75 coronae, VERITAS's gravity dataset should allow scientists to examine hundreds of the strange ring-shaped features. For the foreseeable future, Venus is the only other large, rocky world that we or our robotic emissaries will ever reach. Understanding why Earth and Venus ended up so different despite having so much in common helps us understand our own planet—and whether the rocky worlds we're beginning to glimpse around other stars are more like Earth or instead resemble its evil twin. 'Venus is the world that we probably understand least,' Byrne says. 'Yet it's the one, arguably, I think, that's the most important.'
