Islam is now Ireland’s third largest religion after a 70 percent surge in the number of Muslims in the country between 2002 and 2006, according to official data.
For decades Ireland was a country of emigration but the 2006 Census showed a surge in immigration in a decade of the so-called Celtic Tiger economic boom has resulted in 420,000 of the population being born outside the country, reported AFP.
The arrival of immigrants and returning Irish emigrants saw the population swell to 4,172,013--the highest since 1861.
“Muslims are now the third largest religious group in the state“ behind Roman Catholics and Protestants, said the Central Statistics Office (CSO), noting that the 2002-2006 increase continued growth seen from 1991-2002.
Overall 32,500 people said they were Muslims, of whom just over 55 percent were either Asian or African nationals, while 30.7 percent had Irish nationality, the CSO said.

India accounts for about 10 percent of the total 1.2 million fatal accidents in the world.

With an average of 365 accidents a day and more than 100,000 fatalities a year, Indian highways--which serve as the arterial road network of the country--are perhaps best avoided.
According to the ministry of shipping, road transport and highways, at least 129,994 cases of road accidents were reported from the national highways in 2005, while the figure was 130,265 in 2004. In 2003, a total of 127,834 such cases were registered, IANS reported.
“A research project entitled ’Establishment of System for Identification and Rectification of Accident Black Spots’ suggests that 78 percent of such accidents occur due to road user’s behavior on road stretches and 35 percent accidents happen due to inadequate traffic guidance devices at intersections,“ said K.H. Muniyappa, minister of state for shipping, road transport and highways.
Muniyappa said the report suggests that the maximum number of accidents, especially fatal ones, were found to occur on straight stretches due to high speed. In fact over-speeding, wrong overtaking and poor knowledge of road rules are the primary cause of accidents.
“Pedestrians are the most vulnerable victims due to insufficient pedestrian facilities and poor knowledge about traffic rules. Pedestrians are ranked second in making errors and one of the main causes of accidents,“ the minister informed the Rajya Sabha, parliament’s upper house.
Alarmed by the growing number of road accidents and subsequent deaths, the home ministry is planning to include traffic guidelines as part of the school curriculum so that youngsters can imbibe good driving culture.
According to government estimates, India accounts for about 10 percent of the total 1.2 million fatal accidents in the world. In the year 2000, the Planning Commission and the World Bank had assessed the social cost of road accidents in the country at Rs.550 billion (nearly $14 billion).

EU member states endorsed plans to allow only fire-safe cigarettes to be sold in Europe, a move which could take two or three years to come into force.
The 27 EU nations approved a European Commission proposal which would require the tobacco industry to use fire-retardant paper in all cigarettes in order to cut down on the number of sometimes fatal fires which dropped cigarettes cause each year, reported Eubusiness.com.
EU Consumer Affairs Commissioner Kuneva stressed that “clearly it is better not to smoke at all“.
But as people choose to smoke “requiring tobacco companies to make this small technical change is another step in the right direction towards reducing some of the terrible damage that can be caused, both to the environment, and for some of the most vulnerable consumers in their own homes.“
The decision by the EU nations starts the process of bringing the European Union in line with some other leading industrial economies which are taking similar action.
Since New York introduced the fire-safe cigarette requirement in 2004, most other US states have moved, or are moving, in the same direction.
In Canada, legislation setting out safety requirements for cigarettes has been in force since October 2005, and Australia is preparing to introduce very similar laws US research shows that cigarettes are the leading cause of home fire fatalities every year, the European Commission said. Dropped cigarettes are also a major cause of forest fires.
The EU’s executive arm added that the most common “fire-safer“ technology involves wrapping cigarettes with two or three layers of special thickened paper which slows down a burning cigarette.
“If a cigarette is left unattended, the burning tobacco will soon hit one of these bands of paper and self-extinguish,“ the Commission said in a statement.
Data from 14 EU member states (with Iceland and Norway) shows that cigarette related fires causes some 11,000 fires every year, with 520 deaths and 1,600 injuries. The elderly are disproportionately affected.

This year’s World AIDS Day sees health watchdogs battling against complacency, warning that AIDS still kills some 6,000 people each day even if the estimated toll of infections has fallen and life-saving drugs are being rolled out.
The December 1 event is traditionally a time of grim Stocktaking, wrote AFP.
AIDS campaigners sound the alarm over the disease’s rampage through Africa, the threat it poses to Asia and former Soviet republics. Superficially, 2007 is a rare moment for celebration--and this is what worries the experts.
On November 20, the agency UNAIDS announced that the prevalence of HIV or AIDS-- the percentage of the world’s population living with the HIV virus or the disease it causes--peaked sometime in the late 1990s.
UNAIDS also reduced its estimate of the number of people living with HIV or AIDS, from 39.5 million in 2007 after 33.2 million in 2006, after overhauling its methods for collecting data. The tally of new infections has fallen, too, from 3.0 million in the late 1990s to an estimated 2.5 million in 2007.
Meanwhile, the agonizing effort to bring antiretroviral drugs to Africa, where more than two-thirds of the people with HIV/AIDS live, is now bearing fruit.
At the end of 2006, more than two million people were getting the vital pills, a 54-percent increase over the previous year, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Put together, these figures may give the impression, for some, that a once-irrevocable death sentence is now a manageable chronic disease. But experts and advocacy groups say that this is a dangerous mirage.
“Despite substantial progress against AIDS worldwide, we are still losing ground,“ says James Shelton of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in a commentary appearing on Nov. 24 in The Lancet, a London medical journal. Despite progress in the drug rollout, treatment is still only available to about 10 percent of those in need, notes Shelton.
In developing countries, “the number of new infections continues to dwarf the numbers who start antiretroviral therapy in developing countries,“ he points out. “We must not be complacent about the AIDS crisis,“ Paul Zeitz, executive director of the Global AIDS Alliance, said.
“There is still a huge unmet need for basic HIV/AIDS services, including for orphaned children,“ he said.
The revised toll “does not change the fact that only a tiny fraction of HIV-positive pregnant women are getting the treatment they need to avoid passing the virus to their newborns and to stay alive to raise them.“
The war against AIDS “continues to be undermined by a global resource gap,“ says Alvaro Bermejo, executive director of the International HIV/AIDS Alliance.
According to the United Nations, there is currently an eight-billion-dollar shortfall in resources to fight AIDS, including for basic prevention, treatment and care for orphaned children.
Looking to how the battle against AIDS unfolds in the coming years, experts predict a combat that will increasingly be less monolithic.
“In the future it is likely that there will be two different kinds of epidemics--a generalized one centered in sub-Saharan Africa and a concentrated one in specific high-risk groups worldwide,“ The Lancet said Friday in an editorial.

Earthquake drills were held in schools across Iran on Nov. 29. Iran is located on a number of major fault-lines and ranks as the fourth most disaster-prone country.

In a rare public health success story on the world’s most beleaguered continent, Africa has slashed deaths from measles by 91 percent since 2000 thanks to an immunization drive.
The measles Initiative said that worldwide measles deaths fell from an estimated 757,000 to 242,000 between 2000 and 2006, a reduction of 68 percent made possible by the remarkable gains in Africa, which cut fatalities from an estimated 396,000 to 36,000, Iht.com said.
It said that south Asia--notably the Indian subcontinent--now remained the toughest challenge. An estimated 178,000 million people died of measles in the region last year-- only 26 percent down on 2000.
The figures are a mixture of projections and hard epidemiological data.
The measles Initiative, which includes the American Red Cross, the US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control, the World Health Organization and UNICEF, now hopes to take the strategy that worked so well in Africa, where trained volunteers formed the backbone, to India, where an estimated 10.5 million children are not immunized.
“The clear message from this achievement is that the strategy works,“ said CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding of the drive to vaccinate all children against measles before their first birthday and provide a second opportunity for measles vaccination through mass vaccination campaigns.
But she said the death toll of 600 per day remained unacceptably high. “We have a very safe and effective vaccine and we have to do a lot better,“ she told reporters on a conference call.
Between 2000 and 2006, an estimated 478 million children aged nine months to 14 years received measles vaccine through campaigns in 46 out of the 47 priority countries severely affected by the disease.
In 2006, global routine measles vaccination coverage reached an estimated 80 percent for the first time, up from 72 percent in 2000. The largest improvements in vaccination coverage were in the African and the Eastern Mediterranean regions.
The example of Zimbabwe, whose health system is collapsing under an economic crisis marked by acute shortages and an inflation rate of at least 8,000 percent, highlights the commitment of even the hardest pressed African countries authorities toward immunization.

As bicycle attendant Guo Guiyou stands guard outside a busy Beijing railway station, he suddenly makes a loud coarse noise as he opens his mouth and propels a gobbet of spit on to the pavement.
“It’s good to spit, it’s good for your health,“ said the 40-year-old man unapologetically as he rubs his shoe over the foul puddle he has just created.
Although there is now a wide consensus that spitting is “uncivilized“ behavior, as pre-Olympics manners campaigns term it, spitting is still pretty much a trademark sight and sound across the country, AP reported.
Even though the government has stepped up punishment for spitting, a possible fine of 50 yuan (seven dollars) does not deter Guo.
“That’s okay--most of the time, they don’t see you,“ he said. Few who visit China can help but notice the frequency of spitting in public, which often follows a irritatingly gravelly clearing of the throat and lungs, and a complete lack of embarrassment about the habit.
Late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping was a known to be an enthusiastic spitter who proudly kept a spittoon close by when he greeted foreign dignitaries at the Great Hall of the People in the 1970s and 1980s. Although the practice spreads diseases that are rife in China, it is still common on the roads and alleys of the Chinese capital to have to dodge disgusting blobs of saliva.
Earlier this year, officials admitted that getting the capital’s residents to bring their manners up to international standard in time for the Olympics next August could be a bigger task than constructing the new sports venues.

Japan will toughen punishment for firing or owning guns in connection with organized crime activities following a series of high-profile shootings by gangsters in a country that has long prided itself on crime-free streets.
The upper house of the Diet, or Japan’s parliament, passed legislation to revise the firearms control law, according to the upper house’s web site, AP reported.
The legislation, which passed the lower house earlier this month, is expected to take effect by the end of the year pending its official publication, according to an official of the National Police Agency, which drafted the bill. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing protocol.
Shootings are still relatively rare in Japan, but authorities are concerned about a recent rise in crimes involving guns, which are already tightly controled.
Currently, firing a gun is punishable by three years to life in prison. Under the revision, if a member of an organized crime group fires a gun, the punishment would be five years to life in prison and a fine of up to 30 million yen (US$279,600).
Possessing a gun is currently punishable by up to 10 years in prison. But a member of an organized crime group found with a gun could face up to 15 years in prison and a fine of up to 5 million yen (US$46,660) under the new law.