A round-up of today's other news stories in brief

Düsseldorf base for Ryanair

Ryanair has announced its 19th base and 16 new routes across Europe. The new base is located at Düsseldorf Weeze, which is around 78km or one hour and 15 minutes from the city of Düsseldorf.

From June 2007, Ryanair will invest in two new aircraft and 10 routes from the German base. Destinations served by the base will include Venice, Stockholm, Shannon, Rome, Palma, London, Glasgow, Barcelona, Alicante and Alghero.

Ryanair also announced a number of new routes from other airports yesterday, including flights from Dublin to Alicante and to Bremen. The latest expansion brings Ryanair to four new airports, including Alicante in Spain, Maastricht in the Netherlands, Palma de Mallorca in Spain and Zadar in Croatia.

Ryanair announced the withdrawal of two routes, Girona to Marrakesh and Stansted to Deauville.

Eurosport for NTL package

UPC Ireland, which owns the cable television operators NTL and Chorus, has signed a deal with British Eurosport to make the station available as part of NTL's basic package of digital channels from next week.

Its addition is a boost to NTL, which has 270,000 subscribers, as the sports channel is already carried on rival Sky Ireland's satellite platform. It is also broadcast by Chorus, NTL's sister company.

British Eurosport covers a range of live sports, including the Tour de France, the summer and winter Olympics, athletics world championships and all of the tennis grand slams, with the exception of Wimbledon.

O'Brien's Digicel in 'roaming' deal

Denis O'Brien's Caribbean mobile group Digicel has entered a three-year "roaming" agreement with Vodafone, the mobile giant. The deal provides access to Digicel's network in 22 markets for Vodafone's 198 million subscribers. It comes in advance of the group's expected flotation in the first half of this year.

Providence secures licences

Exploration group Providence Resources said yesterday it has been awarded two petroleum exploration licences to search for oil in St George's Channel and the Celtic Sea.

This latest licence comes only a few days after Providence revealed it had been awarded two exploration licences by the British authorities.

Irish Life's €200m capital notes

Irish Life & Permanent yesterday announced the issue of €200 million worth of step-up perpetual capital notes. In a statement to the stock exchange, the company said interest on the notes would be payable from this Thursday until February 8th, 2017, at the rate of 5.25 per cent a year. From that date, the notes will bear interest at a rate related to the euro interbank offered rate and reset quarterly.

Diageo in carbon offset scheme

Diageo Ireland, owner of Guinness, has offset 4.5 tonnes of carbon generated by staff business flights in recent months as part of a new environmental sustainability project.

So far the project has been rolled out at Diageo's brewery at St James's Gate in Dublin. The carbon emissions produced by business flights taken by brewery staff are calculated, and then offset by investments in a variety of carbon-emission reduction schemes.