The Irish Independent reports that the runaway property market is finally beginning to cool and some homes are even seeing a drop in prices for the first time in more than a decade.

The Irish Independent also reports that savvy Irish property investors are turning the tables - to tune of €25bn.

The Irish Times reports that Minister for the Environment Dick Roche has cleared the way for two tall towers to be built near the mouth of the River Liffey, with the aim of creating a "dramatic maritime gateway" to Dublin.

The Minister gave his approval for the towers, each of which would be 40 per cent higher than Liberty Hall, in the context of amended planning schemes for the Grand Canal Docks and the North Lotts, drawn up by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA).

One of the 100m towers would be located on Britain Quay, where the Dodder flows into the Liffey.

Designed by Blackrock-based architects Burdon Dunne Craig Henry, this "twisting tower" would house new recording studios for rock band U2 on its upper levels.

A competition winning entry from 2002, it was originally intended to be 60 metres tall. However, under the amended planning scheme, the height has been increased by 40 metres - excluding a "feature roofline".

The second tower, by Scott Tallon Walker, would be the centrepiece of a development by businessman Harry Crosbie adjoining the Point Theatre on North Wall Quay.

Its design has been substantially altered following criticism of the blandness of an earlier scheme.

The Point Village will include a hotel, apartments, offices and a district shopping centre as well as doubling the capacity (to 12,000) of the Point Theatre - a protected structure that was originally built as the Midland Great Western Railway's freight depot in Dublin Port.

In approving the DDDA's amended planning scheme for the Grand Canal Docks, the Minister made a principal modification specifying that a proposed public plaza should be relocated 100m to the east, to provide more open space around the proposed U2 tower.

Welcoming ministerial approval for the two planning schemes, DDDA chief executive Paul Maloney said yesterday that authority intended "going to tender on a Europe-wide basis in the next couple of months for a joint venture partnership with developers to build the U2 tower".

Mr Maloney said the amended planning schemes would create new cultural and leisure facilities in the Docklands. "With significant expansion in retail and entertainment provision, the area will become a visitor magnet and a dynamic destination both day and night."

Mr Maloney pointed out that the DDDA's amended planning scheme for the Grand Canal Docks specified that there must be more larger three-bedroom apartments in the area, designed for family living, and also included provision for a half-acre "play park" for children.

The Irish Times also reports that World Trade Organisation chief Pascal Lamy, known for his love of long-distance running, will need sprinter-like speed if he is to get a breakthrough in snarled global free trade talks in the month or so that has been given.

After nearly five years of struggle, the WTO has turned to the 58-year-old Frenchman as its last hope for a deal on farm and industrial goods, the core issues in its Doha free trade round.

After cutting short a planned three days of negotiations by a day because of the continuing deadlock, the 149-state WTO asked Mr Lamy to act as a "catalyst" for the pact, shuttling between capitals and working the phones in an attempt to bridge the still yawning gaps between countries.

"It is a crisis but not yet panic," Mr Lamy told journalists after accepting the challenge.

He promised to "crack heads" if necessary in the search for an accord which all agree must come in the next few weeks if the WTO is to wrap up the Doha round, which includes a host of other complex issues such as services, by the end of the year.

No deal in 2006 could see the final collapse of the round, which was launched with the aim of accelerating global growth to help lift millions out of poverty.

"With time not on our side, the only thing that can help us . . . is the readiness of members, starting with the big players, to exchange, to make concessions, to negotiate, and this is what I will be trying to do," he said.

The one - possibly only - positive element, he said, was that all were committed to the end-2006 target date, which cannot be missed because in the middle of next year US presidential powers to negotiate trade deals expire and are unlikely to be renewed.

But the difficulties are immense.

Trading powers have been unable to agree on how far rich nations should slash farm subsidies and tariffs and developing countries open their manufacturing markets - the three sides of the triangle the metaphor-loving Lamy says must be closed.

Washington has so far resisted pressure to give more ground on farm subsidies, which developing countries say prevent them competing on world markets.

The Irish Examiner reports that as the world trade talks in Geneva collapsed, a row broke out between the umbrella body for Chambers of Commerce in Ireland and the Irish Farmers Association (IFA) over the Government’s negotiating stance.

Chambers Ireland criticised the Government’s position of opposing concessions regarding cuts in farm supports and said such inflexibility is undermining Ireland’s future economic prospects. But the IFA accused it of being out of touch regarding the negotiations and praised the Government’s stance and the strong defence of Ireland’s interests by Agriculture and Food Minister Mary Coughlan TD.

Chambers Ireland chief executive John Dunne said as a small, open internationally trading economy, a new world trade agreement is overwhelmingly in Ireland’s interest and it will not be reached unless compromises are made.

“The three main trading blocks each need to make concessions. The G-20 group must concede on tariffs on industrial goods’ imports to their countries. The US has to concede on subsidies to agriculture and Europe has to concede on tariffs on agriculture,” Mr Dunne said.

“With time fast running out, WTO members need to make major strides to narrow their differences. Commissioner Mandelson has taken the progressive and sensible steps which Ireland ought to support — especially as this is a deal from which Ireland, one of the world’s most open economies, would benefit disproportionately from. To say that no trade deal is better than a bad trade deal is erroneous and irresponsible,” he said.

But in an angry reaction yesterday, IFA president Padraig Walshe accused Mr Dunne of ill-informed and misjudged support for Mr Mandelson’s bargaining away of the Irish food industry.

He said he failed to see how Mr Dunne’s ‘fifth columnist’ tactics of supporting Mr Mandelson’s attempts to destroy the Irish food industry could help the members of Chambers of Commerce.

“I am aghast that Mr Dunne can see an advantage for his members in replacing the Irish beef industry with imports from Brazil,” he said.

Noting that many members of Chambers of Commerce depend on a vibrant rural economy for their success, he asked how Mr Dunne could make such a statement on their behalf. Irish Cattle and Sheep Farmers Association president Malcolm Thompson, meanwhile, described the collapse of the talks as welcome news for farmers.

Mr Thompson said the collapse of the talk’s means the threat of a further opening up of the market to cheap agricultural imports has now receded.

The Financial Times reports that the conflict has already taxed some of the European Commission’s finest legal minds, required hundreds of hours of internal negotiations and exposed a rare split in the otherwise harmonious 25-strong executive body of the EU.

The issue at stake, however, is neither grand economic policy nor a tricky foreign affairs dilemma, but a bizarre controversy over diapers.

László Kovács, the European Union’s tax commissioner, has for months been waiting for his colleagues’ clearance to launch a legal challenge against five European countries that he says are applying the wrong rate of value added tax on diapers – babies’ nappies.

Mr Kovács and his advisers argue that nappies are not included on the list of goods that are exempt from the EU’s minimum rate of VAT, which is currently 15 per cent.

They believe that the countries – the Czech Republic, Portugal, Poland. Hungary and Malta – are in breach of EU law and it is therefore the Commission’s duty to launch an infringement case against their governments.

Launching such cases – thousands of which come up every year – is normally seen as a routine matter.

But unfortunately for Mr Kovács, he is facing a powerful alliance led by Vladimir Spidla, the EU social affairs commissioner, that is bent on thwarting his ambition. According to several officials, Mr Spidla, who hails from the Czech Republic, has secured the support of no fewer than three Commission vice presidents – Germany’s Günter Verheugen, Jacques Barrot from France and Sweden’s Margot Wallström – and at least three other commissioners.

Faced with such a growing chorus of dissent, Mr Kovács took the nappies item off the agenda of last week’s Commission meeting at the last minute.

His spokeswoman says he wants to consult his fellow commissioners before proceeding any further.

Mr Kovács’ opponents argue that any move that would result in higher taxes on babies’ nappies would send the wrong signal to young Europeans, who are already proving worryingly reluctant to have babies. They also point out that some countries, such as Britain, apply no VAT on babies’ nappies at all because of grandfathering rights negotiated during their entry into the EU.

“It is absurd to impose a burden on families, especially since diapers for old people benefit from reduced VAT rates,” one official close to Mr Spidla said.

The dispute is the latest in a series of disputes in the European Union over VAT and follows earlier stand-offs over such crunch issues as restaurant bills, where France was pressing for a lower rate.

But Mr Kovács insists that he has the law on his side. The Commission’s powerful legal service opined last week that babies’ nappies did not fall under the definition of “medical products”, as described in an annex to a European tax law.

But with political sensitivities mounting, it is far from clear whether the lawyers will have the final word. In the meantime, the nappies battle rages on.

The FT also says that few people are in a better position than Bernd Bransch to welcome as a “refreshing change for Germany” the flag-waving that is accompanying the national team’s progress through the football World Cup.

The imposing defender who captained communist East Germany’s team in the 1974 cup – the last time the competition was staged in Germany – remembers no displays of “such relaxed patriotism” back then, in either the west or the east.

“Things were much more restrained back then” as memories of the country’s Nazi past were still relatively fresh, he recalls in an interview at his home football ground in Halle, south-west of Berlin.

As for Mr Bransch, Germany’s success so far in this year’s tournament has for many of his compatriots revived memories of 1974. Now as the team prepares for Tuesday’s semi-final match against Italy in the western industrial city of Dortmund, many Germans in both east and west are recognising anew the radical changes the country has gone through over these three decades.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the euphoria of unification of east and west in 1990, and Germany’s emergence as a “normal” European country that has become a vital player on the world stage, are just some of the staging-posts of the last 16 years.

In Angela Merkel, Germany has its first female chancellor. She is also the first leader from the former East Germany – a personal history she shares with Michael Ballack, captain of the national team.

Some trace the overwhelmingly positive atmosphere in Germany since the tournament opened last month at least in part to these historic transformations.

“The whole background to the [German] bid for the World Cup was to show the world that Germany has changed. The warm welcome [this month] for the foreign fans, and the flags waved by ordinary Germans, suggests this is working,” says Ulrich Hesse-Lichtenberger, author of a social history of German football.

For Mr Bransch, it was the “cold war atmosphere” of the 1974 tournament that stands out in contrast with today. In particular, West Germany was “absolutely convinced” they would thrash his eastern team. In fact East Germany shocked the sporting and political world with a famous 1-0 victory.

The communist regime “used the victory to score points in the class war with the west”, he says. The historic match was the only time the West and East German sides met for a full international game. Despite the defeat in the tournament’s qualifying stage, West Germany went on to beat Holland in the final.

Mr Hesse-Lichtenberger says there are parallels in the security worries in both 1974 and 2006. The 1974 event came only two years after Palestinian terrorists killed Israeli hostages at the Munich Olympics, while al-Qaeda – and football hooligans – are the main threat today.

Yet politics aside, the focus in the 1974 tournament “was really on the matches, on football. In contrast, in this year’s competition that is only one of many considerations [for the organisers]”, he says, pointing for instance, to the central role of business and of Germany’s image campaign in shaping the event.

For Jürgen Croy, East Germany’s goalkeeper in 1974, the turning point in this transformation process was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In frequent job changes that mirror broader patterns in eastern Germany since unification, he has turned to business and politics, working at times for Puma, the sports goods maker, and as mayor of Zwickau, his home town south of Leipzig. “I’ve been glad to meet new challenges,” he says.

Mr Bransch is pleased history appears to be coming full circle. The German football association has given East Germany’s 1974 team free tickets for some World Cup matches, and Mr Bransch is attending Tuesday’s semi-final.

He hopes for a win of course – but knows that, even if Germany loses, he will have his own, rather special memories to hang on to.

The New York Times reports that when Google was a graduate-school project being run from a Silicon Valley garage, its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, built their own computers out of cheap parts meant for personal computers. They wanted to save money, and they felt that they could design a network of computers that would search the Web more efficiently than those available from traditional manufacturers.

Google no longer needs to pinch pennies. It is a solid member of the Fortune 500 with $9 billion in cash. Still, it is stubbornly sticking to its do-it-yourself approach to technology. Even as it spends more than $1.5 billion this year on operations centers and technology, most of the hundreds of thousands of servers it will deploy are being custom-made based on Google's own eccentric designs.

To be closer to its users and speed response time, it is building a worldwide string of data centers, including a huge site in The Dalles, Ore., with technologies it designed to reduce its ravenous need for electricity. These computers in turn use software developed with advanced tools that Google also designed itself. There are signs that Google is even preparing to create its own custom microchips.

"Google is as much about infrastructure as it is about the search engine," said Martin Reynolds, an analyst with the Gartner Group. "They are building an enormous computing resource on a scale that is almost unimaginable." He said he believed that Google was the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.

Google's biggest rivals, Microsoft and Yahoo, certainly write much of their own software, and they work to configure their computers and data centers to their own needs. But they largely buy machines from existing manufactures like Dell, Sun Microsystems and Rackable Systems.

"At some point you have to ask yourself what is your core business," said Kevin Timmons, Yahoo's vice president for operations. "Are you going to design your own router, or are you going to build the world's most popular Web site? It is very difficult to do both."

Google, in fact, has decided it will do both. In many ways, it still has the head of an graduate-school project grafted onto the body of an multinational corporation. The central tenet of its strategy is that its growing cadre of world-class computer scientists can design a network of machines that can store and process more information more efficiently than anyone else.

Mr. Reynolds estimated that Google's computing costs are half those of other large Internet companies and a tenth those of traditional corporate technology users.

Google will not comment on its costs, but it does claim an advantage. "We don't think our competitors can deploy systems cheaper, faster or at scale," Alan Eustace, Google's vice president for research and systems engineering, told analysts in March. "That will give us a two-, three-, five-year lead."

Despite those boasts, some argue that Google's home-brew approach is unnecessary and inefficient, a headstrong indulgence masked for now by the growth and profitability of its advertising business. And Google's rivals say their networks are plenty efficient and powerful.

"Google doesn't have anything magic here," Bill Gates, the Microsoft chairman, said in an interview. "We spend a little bit more per machine. But to do the same tasks, we have less machines."

Google is notoriously secretive about its technology. Yet it also has published papers on some of its developments and been granted patents on others. These, along with the public statements of Google executives and interviews with current and former employees, vendors and other technology executives, paint a picture of a company devoted to pushing the boundaries of modern computer science, and applying those concepts on a vast scale.

"Google took the best ideas from the supercomputer research community and wove them into a working system," said Stephen E. Arnold, a technology consultant to investors and the author of "The Google Legacy" (Infonortics, 2005), a book on Google's technology.

Some of its innovations are designed to wring pennies from its growing spending on technology. Last year, it was granted a patent (06906920) on a "drive-cooling baffle," meant to funnel air into a rack of computers held together with Velcro, a Google design signature.

But some innovations are bolder, like a series of software tools that simplify the way it can divide a problem to be handled by thousands of processors simultaneously, an approach called parallel processing.

One such program, called MapReduce, is based on ideas discussed in computer science literature for decades, according to Urs Hölzle, Google's senior vice president for operations. "What surprised us was how useful it turned out to be in our environment," he said.

MapReduce, he said, "allows Joe Schmo software engineer to process large amounts of data and take advantage of our infrastructure."

Mr. Arnold, the consultant, said these tools created a significant cost advantage. "If you talk to guys who work in massively parallel computing operations, as much as 30 percent of their coding time is spent trying to figure out how to get the thing to run," he said. Google "has figured out how they can reduce a lot of the hassle and work of creating parallel applications."

Mr. Gates acknowledged that MapReduce was a significant technology, but he asserted that Microsoft was building its own parallel processing software, opening another front in the technological war between the two companies.

"They did MapReduce; we have this thing called Driad that's better," Mr. Gates said. "But they'll do one that's better."

Moreover, Google's focus on building general purpose tools and systems is different from that of most companies, which develop systems tailored to specific applications. And it is building these systems rapidly, with the billions of dollars in cash it generates and the thousands of engineers it hires each year. It hopes that it can build a lead that will allow it to create products that do more, for less money, than its rivals.

"If they can get a 30 percent cost advantage, in operating a service on the Internet that is a huge difference," said John M. Lervik, the chief executive of Fast Search & Transfer, a Norwegian search company.

Google's academic approach can be traced not only to its founders' graduate work in computer science, but even to their early home life, Mr. Arnold said, noting that Mr. Page and Mr. Brin had come from families with expertise in computer science and mathematics.

"The stuff they did in 1996 to 1998 was not as immature as it should have been," he said of the Google founders. He said that told him the two men learned a lot "when their parents were talking at the kitchen table."

By the time Mr. Page and Mr. Brin were designing Google, parallel processing was more than an academic dream; it was enabled on a large scale by the low prices of processors, memory and disk drives used to make personal computers. These components were hardly of the highest quality and could be counted on to fail often.

Mr. Page designed the initial Google servers, with the assumption that parts would fail on a regular basis. At first he tried to simplify assembly — and reduce the presumed repair time — by not fastening components to the servers at all but simply laying them on a bed of cork. This proved to be unstable, and so parts were connected with Velcro.

"Nobody builds servers as unreliably as we do," Mr. Hölzle said in a speech last year at CERN, the Swiss particle physics institute. Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software — individual hardware components can fail, but software automatically shifts the local task and the data to other machines.

For example, Google designed a software system it calls the Google File System that keeps copies of data in several places so Google does not have to worry when one of its cheap servers fails. This approach also means that it does not have to make regular backup copies of its data as other companies do.

Another system, called the Google Work Queue, allows a big pool of servers to be assigned to various tasks as needed and reassigned to other projects later. This concept, called "virtualization," has become a trend among large data center operators, which also want to reduce the expense of having separate servers dedicated to each system. But most companies buy commercial software to track which computers are doing what, a complex process.

While Google's servers are built on inexpensive parts, the designs it uses have been modified every year or so, to improve their efficiency and increasingly to customize them to Google's applications. The current generation uses the powerful Opteron chip from Advanced Micro Devices, which uses less power than the Intel chips Google had used.

Google is among Advanced Micro's five largest clients, and the largest that does not make computers to resell, according to a semiconductor industry executive with knowledge of Advanced Micro's business.

Google is increasingly doing business with Sun Microsystems as well. Sun, known for systems that are both reliable and expensive, would not seem a natural match for a company that emphasizes economy and self-sufficiency. But Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, is a former Sun executive, and Sun has developed a new microchip that is especially efficient in electricity use.

Moreover, Google increasingly needs systems that are less likely to fail than those it uses for its search engine in order to handle important information, like e-mail and payments in its new Google Checkout service.

Beyond servers, there are signs that Google is now designing its own microchips. The company has hired many of the engineers responsible for the Digital Equipment Corporation's well-regarded Alpha chip.

"Google's next step is to build high-performance silicon," said Mark Stahlman, an independent technology analyst.

Mr. Hölzle said Google had considered custom semiconductor design, but he declined to say if the company had built any. He said that, in general, Google did not want to build anything from scratch if it could buy something that was just as good.

But he added that Google continued to believe that its approach to designing its own cheap and fast computer networks gave it an edge.

"Having lots of relatively unreliable machines and turning them into a reliable service is a hard problem," Mr. Hölzle said. "That is what we have been doing for a while."

The NYT also reports that the blogging bubble has been taking on serious air of late. Last week, PaidContent.org, a blog that covers digital media, held its first mixer. It was, by all reports, filled to the brim with money and content guys speed dating on the way to marriage.

Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker Media, was there, but he wasn't looking for love or money.

"It made me want to move to Budapest, batten down the hatches and wait for the zombies to run out of food," Mr. Denton said cheerily.

One of the overlords of the blogosphere with 15 sites and enough buzz to arm every doorbell in the nation, Mr. Denton has watched page views at his sites double in the last year; Gawker Media and Nielsen/NetRatings put monthly unique visitors at 4.2 million. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that Mr. Denton celebrated a very upbeat stretch in the blogging industry by putting two of his sites on the block, reorganizing others and laying off several people.

Laying off journalists? How very old media.

"Better to sober up now, before the end of the party," he said in announcing the realignment. As of last Friday, Sploid, a tabloid-infested site built on screen shots, and Screenhead, an aggregator of video clips, were put up for sale. Editors at Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo, and Gridskipper were moved or replaced. At a time when mainstream media companies are madly baking their own piece of blog pie, Mr. Denton was summarily executing underperformers.

"We are becoming a lot more like a traditional media company," Mr. Denton said last week. "You launch a site, you have great hopes for it and it does not grow as much as you wanted. You have to have the discipline to recognize what isn't working and put your money and efforts into those sites that are."

No one would ever accuse Mr. Denton of being a sentimentalist. A former reporter for the Financial Times, he made his money on First Tuesday, a social networking site that reportedly sold for $50 million, and Moreover Technologies, which sold for a reported $39 million. He then built a chain of professionally staffed blogs that eschewed media conventions like, oh, fairness and reporting, for brutal, well-turned takes on fairly mannered industries.

Gawker, Deadspin, a sports site, and Valleywag, a Silicon Valley blog, in particular, have gone beyond cult status with rapacious, real-time annotations. But while newer sites like Jalopnik, an auto-obsessed blog, and Kotaku, a gaming destination, took off, Sploid and Screenhead tanked.

BRACING candor is not the only relevant application at Gawker Media. Blogs, as they became a medium unto themselves, have generally been characterized not just by idiosyncrasy, but also by a publishing schedule known only to them. Not so at Gawker Media, where the writers publish early and often, delivering on the critical expectation that readers will always find new content.

And every site, regardless of subject, is built on speaking what mainstream reporters will only say sotto voce. It isn't journalism — as Mr. Denton and his pack of merry provocateurs happily remind — but it is the kind of media that attracts steady audiences that advertisers covet.

"I always thought that you needed to know the code for finding out what was actually going on when you read mainstream publications," he said. "We just say it. It is supposed to be the conversation that occurs between reporters at the bar after they have finished their stories."

Sitting in his apartment on Spring Street, he appears to be the epitome of the new media aesthetic, with the buzzing Sidekick and a wireless laptop on a metal counter surrounded by appliances that seem to be made out of titanium. The antithesis of the schmoozer — human beings are, at best, companion media to Mr. Denton — he stares at traffic numbers and incoming e-mails as he talks.

But the whole digital veneer masks a bit of a media traditionalist. His sites are arrayed over very common contemporary interests — celebrity, pornography, sports, Hollywood — that would not be out of place in mass magazines (a dead-tree medium, by the way, that he believes is far from dead). He thinks all of the bluster around blogs, fueled in part by AOL's purchase of Weblogs, has brought stupid money off the sidelines. He has felt the touch of clammy hands from venture capitalists more times than he would care to count.

"There is no doubt that there is a bubble right now," he said.

So why not cash out?

"Because it would be too hard to start over," he said. "Sites need to be well-managed and well-designed and even then it is harder and harder to launch a site. The world does not need more blogs," adding that if you count all the pages on MySpace, "there is approximately one reader for every blog out there."

For his part, Mr. Denton spends a lot more time reading computer code than blogs. He believes that the common software behind blogs isn't up to the task and now has 11 people, including 4 in Hungary, working on developing proprietary solutions.

He has a massive noggin and a quiet ego to match, but has very little interest in routine publicity. Mr. Denton is an advocate of Fleet Street standards when it comes to the lives of public figures, but his own business approach has more in common with the Kremlin at the height of the Cold War. He leaves editorial matters to Lockhart Steele, the managing editor of the sites, and would only comment on the profitability of Gawker Media by saying, "I haven't had to sell my apartment yet."

Mr. Denton, whose practice of poor-mouthing his own enterprise may have some competitive advantages, is not a complete blog bear. This summer, the company will introduce a music site, no doubt full of unspeakable truths and half-truths from behind the curtain. Mr. Denton thinks a few other opportunities are worth investigating, but is not making any bold predictions.

"The barrier to entry in Internet media is low," he said. "The barrier to success is high."