Latest news with #PeterWalsh
Irish Independent
2 days ago
- Business
- Irish Independent
EV drivers in Limerick set to benefit from three new high-powered recharging hubs
The new sites are supported by nearly €8 million in government funding and will be strategically located to ensure drivers are never more than 60km from a high-power charging facility. 'We're taking real, practical steps to make electric vehicles work for everyone,' said Minister for Transport Darragh O'Brien. 'With more chargers, more choice, and more support, we hope even more people will feel confident making the switch to electric,' he added. The recharging hubs are part of the Light Duty Vehicle (LDV) initiative operated by Zero Emission Vehicles Ireland (ZEVI) and delivered by Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII). This national phase of the programme focused on over 1,200km of national single carriageway roads. Funding was awarded through a grant process for accessible locations such as service stations, supermarkets, hotels, and car parks. The total funding for this phase amounts to €7.9 million, with several Limerick locations among the first confirmed: Weev Charging Ltd, Templeglantine, N21; Hodkinson's Centra & Top Oil, Patrickswell, N21; Dooleys SuperValu, Newcastle West, N21. Peter Walsh, CEO of TII, said: 'Working in partnership with ZEVI and the private sector, this scheme is helping us build the kind of infrastructure people can rely on: fast, efficient and accessible.' This announcement follows earlier funding rounds under the ZEVI National Road Network EV Charging Plan, which have already supported the installation of 131 high-power chargers at 17 motorway and dual-carriageway locations. A new scheme, aimed at supporting charging infrastructure on an additional 3,000km of national roads, is also underway, with applications open until the end of June.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Climate
- Yahoo
Has good weather helped to fuel record small boat crossings?
Good weather and the willingness of people smugglers to cram more people onto small boats have been highlighted by the government as factors driving the level of migrant Channel crossings. The Home Office has released figures showing that the number of "red days" - when conditions are considered favourable for small boat crossings - peaked in 2024-25. The figures also show a rise in "severely overcrowded boats" in the same period. The Conservatives and Reform have accused the government of "blaming the weather" for the record crossings so far this year. The government has said it is working to fix "a broken asylum system" left by the Tories. The Home Office figures reveal there were 190 red days in the 12 months to April 2025 - an 80% increase on the previous year and the highest number since records began. Red days are defined as days which the Met Office has assessed as "likely" or "highly likely" to see small boat crossings, based on things like the height of waves, wind speed and rainfall. By publishing the red day figures, the first official release of this kind, the government is suggesting a link between good weather conditions and the level of migrant crossings. So far this year, 14,812 people have arrived in small boats - up about 40% on the same period last year. Almost 1,200 people arrived on Saturday alone. BBC Verify asked Peter Walsh from the Migration Observatory, based at the University of Oxford, exactly what impact the weather has on Channel crossings. He said it was a factor but other issues, such as the effectiveness of smuggling gangs and the number of people wanting to reach the UK are likely to be more important. "A migrant's decision to come to the UK by small boat is important and life-changing for them: will they casually drop their plans and decide not to migrate because of a few consecutive days of bad weather? Or will they just wait until the next safe-weather day," he told BBC Verify. While acknowledging that gangs have exploited periods of good weather to increase crossings, a Home Office spokesperson insisted the government is "restoring grip to the broken asylum system it inherited". "That's why we are giving counter-terror style powers to law enforcement, launching an unprecedented international crackdown on immigration crime and have prevented 9,000 crossings from the French coastline this year alone", the spokesperson said. Is the government meeting its pledges on illegal immigration and asylum? More than 1,000 migrants cross Channel in a day Responding to the red day figures, Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp, said: "Blaming the weather for the highest ever crossing numbers so far this year is the border security equivalent of a lazy student claiming 'the dog ate my homework'." Reform MP Lee Anderson said: "This Labour government blaming small boat crossings on the weather is like blaming the housing crisis on homebuilders - it's pathetic." The figures also show a rise in what the Home Office has called "severely overcrowded small boats". In the year to April 2025, there were 33 boats which carried 80 or more people on board. The year before, there were only 11 boats with 80 or more people and there was just one of these boats recorded in the year to April 2023. While the number of people per boat has increased, the total number of boats has fallen from 1,116 in 2021–22 to 738 last year. Last year a record number of people died attempting to cross the channel in small boats, something which the Home Office attributes to "more people [being] crammed into flimsy and dangerous boats" by people smugglers. What do you want BBC Verify to investigate?
Indian Express
17-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
Mrs Dalloway at 100: Virginia Woolf's forgotten India connection
Virginia Woolf's classic novel Mrs Dalloway was published on May 14, 1925, and its centenary is being celebrated all over the Anglophone literary world. This newspaper too carried a laudatory editorial on the book, 'Mrs Dalloway Turns 100,' as well as a quotation of the day from a more mystical novel of Woolf's, The Waves (1931): 'I am rooted, but I flow.' (IE, May 15). But hardly anyone has noted the multiple connections between this novel and its author and India. These links are often explicit but sometimes indirect and counter-factual or, so to say, counter-fictional. The heroine Clarissa Dalloway lives in Westminster in the privileged heart of London in the shadow of the Big Ben, for she had three decades ago chosen to marry Richard Dalloway who is now an important Tory M.P. Had she not married this dull-though-suitable boy but her far more ardent suitor Peter Walsh, she would have become Mrs Walsh, gone off to India as an ICS officer's wife, and probably become a benign sympathetic mem sahib, just as Peter is a benevolent and innovative ruler. As if to rub in the vital mistake she then made, Peter Walsh now turns up in London, calls on Clarissa, and she, at the age of 52, feels 'like a virgin, … so shy,' and quietly wipes a tear; she finds him still 'perfectly enchanting.' She says in her mind, 'Take me with you,' and seems to want him even more keenly after he tells her that he is in love with a young woman in India. Just because Peter had gone off to India, his friends in London think him to be a failure. As he now walks around London, he stops to look at the new cars on display in a shop but finds his own face staring back at him in the plate-glass shop-window, and has a moment of self-reflection both literally and metaphorically: 'And there he was, this fortunate man, himself…All India lay behind him; plains, mountains; epidemics of cholera; a district twice as big as Ireland; decisions he had come to alone — … all of which Clarissa knew nothing whatever about.' Clarissa Dalloway here may seem to be in some ways like the young Virginia herself. The man she married, Leonard Woolf, had served in the Ceylon Civil Service from 1904 to 1911 and, on coming home on leave, had married Virginia and resigned from the service. This was after Lytton Strachey, his close friend from their student days at Cambridge, had strongly urged Leonard to marry her. Lytton had wanted to be a Cambridge don and had written a fellowship dissertation on Warren Hastings. He came from a family of distinguished 'India hands,' one of whom had served as the Lieutenant Governor of the United Provinces and another as a High Court Judge. Even after all the recent re-naming, there is still a Strachey Hall at the Aligarh Muslim University, a Strachey Bridge in Agra, and Strachey Roads in Prayagraj, Howrah and Asansol. In the novel, this long Indian lineage is transferred to Peter Walsh, who is a descendant of 'three generations' of high British administrators of India. In contrast with this pedigreed world, Leonard Woolf, with his deep first-hand disillusionment with imperialism, had become a committed campaigner of the Labour Party and the long-term secretary of its Imperial Advisory Committee. It must have been inputs from Leonard that made Mrs Dalloway resonate with the expectation that the Labour Party would soon come to power, as indeed it did in 1924, the year after the novel is set. Peter goes to Clarissa's grand party, which forms the climax of the novel, planning to ask Richard Dalloway 'what they were doing in India – the conservative duffers.' When the Prime Minister arrives at the party, he soon closets himself in a small room with Lady Bruton, an arch-conservative political busybody, to seek confidentially her views on India, rather than asking someone like Peter. In Woolf's most lyrical and introspective novel, The Waves, she created a set of six young friends of whom the most gifted and attractive, Percival, goes to India, falls off a horse, and dies. My Ph D supervisor, a humorous man named Frank W Bradbrook, joked once that Woolf treats India as a dumping ground for the characters she no longer needs, and it is true that she seems to keep India largely at bay and off-stage. Historically, the Indian Empire constituted the very ground on which the privileged upper classes of England trod. But the Bloomsbury group disavowed their forefathers, the 'Eminent Victorians', as Lytton Strachey ironically called them in the title of his debunking book. And in doing so, Virginia Woolf and her friends also relegated the Raj to the shadows from which it could be glimpsed only fleetingly and obliquely now and then. In June 1923, when Mrs Dalloway is set, Gandhi had been in jail for over a year on the charge of sedition, but one would never guess that from reading Mrs Dalloway. The writer taught English at Delhi University
Daily Mail
11-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE The US 'export' making millions for UK's gangs: How illegal drug is 'flooding' into Britain from America - and why the criminals could be set for huge profits
Donald Trump regularly complains about the illegal drugs 'flooding' into the US from abroad, but for one particular substance these roles have been reversed. High strength cannabis is increasingly making its way to British shores, causing a major headache for law enforcement. Seizures at British airports last year hit 27 tonnes - five times the amount in 2023 - with much of it coming from legal farms in America. While some caught out are unwitting tourists, vicious organised criminals are also muscling into the market and generating vast profits in the process. And they could receive a boost from an unlikely source - President Trump himself - with one narcotics expert predicting that the fall in the dollar caused by his tariff regime will make US-grown cannabis even more attractive to British gangs. Peter Walsh, author of Drug War: The Secret History, described a 'very interesting' phenomenon. Former Come Dine With Me: The Professionals winners Nicholas Panayiotou, left, and Eleanar Attard, right, were convicted of smuggling American-grown cannabis into the UK 'The US was always the market rather than the source of supply. So while they always grew large amounts of cannabis in the US illegally before it was legalised, that tended to be consumed at home,' he told MailOnline. 'These exports from America will be a response to supply and demand. There's clearly an oversupply in the states and a demand in Europe. If there's a glut it makes financial sense to export it.' Mr Walsh predicted that the market may continue to grow in the coming months. 'It might also be interesting to see the way that dollar pricing affects it - the collapse of the dollar against the pound following Trump's tariffs could mean you start to see this more,' he said. As so often with drug crime, the type of people seizing the chance to make money from US-grown cannabis do not always resemble classic criminals. They include Nicholas Panayiotou, 43, and Eleanar Attard, 45, proprietors of the Touch of Greek restaurant in Chingford, East London - and winners of Come Dine With Me: The Professionals in 2022. The pair were traced by officers investigating a theft of suitcases and passports from two women waiting for a taxi outside Heathrow in 2023. It later emerged the theft had been part of a wider conspiracy to use the two women to bring in 58kg (130lb) of California-grown cannabis before robbing it back off them. Panayiotou was jailed for four years and one month in prison last year while Attard received a suspended sentence. Another member of the conspiracy, Koby Haik, was sentenced to seven years in prison after he wielded a baseball bat at officers raiding his home before firing two shots of an imitation firearm. The National Crime Agency, which typically investigates major drug seizures at airports, believes demand for American cannabis is driven by the perception that it is a higher quality product than that grown illegally in the UK and Europe. Part of their strategy has involved warning potential couriers of the 'life-changing prison sentences' they face for smuggling the drug into Britain, even if it originated in one of the 24 US states where it is legal for recreational use. Alex Murray, NCA Director of threat leadership, said the trade was attractive to organised crime groups because of the 'significant profits' on offer. One gang busted by Greater Manchester Police were found with £500,000 in cash and a BMW M4 car. Detectives targeted the group in a series of raids last year after 100kg of ultra-strong American cannabis worth £3million was seized by Border Force. Eight people were arrested, aged between 18 and 52. They were all charged and remanded shortly afterwards. The legalisation of cannabis in Canada in 2018 has turned the country into another supplier to Britain's illicit market. Those involved have included Raekelle Powell, 22, a professional volleyball player from Toronto, who was stopped at Heathrow with £600,000 of cannabis in her suitcase and jailed for 15 months last year. Large-scale cannabis smuggling will inevitably continue thanks to continuing demand in the UK, where it remains the most popular drug among 16 to-59-year-olds. Despite the rise in imports from North America, much of this continues to be grown domestically in illegal farms - often using slave labour.
