IRELAND has been placed 14th best on a list of 178 countries which have been ranked according to how corrupt they are perceived to be by business people.

THE last-minute booking trend among tourists is the focus of a new €20 million campaign to draw British, American and European visitors to Ireland.

LAST Monday the Mahon tribunal sat for the 900th day. Established in 1997 to “inquire into matters regarding planning and payment to politicians”, it has been exhaustive and exhausting, not least in terms of resources.

An anti-corruption group has expressed concern about the Government's plans to raise the value of gifts and loans that politicians can receive without making a public disclosure.

Falling energy prices gave stocks a modest lift today as Wall Street set aside worries about interest rates and a weak forecast from Intel Corp. But the gains weren’t enough to help the major indexes, which ended the week with losses.

Transparency International Ireland has launched the country’s first corruption news and analysis service.

Microchip pioneer Jack Kilby, who won the 2000 Nobel Prize for co-inventing the integrated circuits that ushered in the digital age of personal computers, mobile phones and the internet, has died after a brief battle with cancer. He was 81.

Seán McCárthaigh

Aerospace and defence group Smiths is to snap up one of the world’s leading medical device companies in a $925m (£476m / €688.7m) deal, it confirmed today.

Baltimore Technologies, which is a provider of e-security, has announced that I.T. Telecom S.p.A. has selected Baltimore UniCERT(TM) to provide Telecom Italia Group and its customers with public-key infrastructure (PKI) security applications.

FF and PD ministers are becoming increasingly hysterical in trying to frighten voters into reversing their previous decision on the rerun of Nice.

Technology shares were lower midsession, with the Nasdaq composite hovering near its lows for the day amid worries about the upcoming earnings season, with fears of ongoing tensions in the Middle East continuing to weigh on sentiment, dealers said.

Aerospace group Smiths said today that demand for their services had ‘‘mushroomed’’ since the terror attacks in the US.

Texas Instruments is warning that first-quarter revenues will decline by about 20%, compared with its previous prediction of a fall of around 10%.

Texas Instruments is the latest technology company to suffer from the slowdown in the US economy.