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[OMEN]

Mr Strauss-Kahn said the IMF would again lower its global growth projection
More spending by governments will be needed to stimulate worldwide economic growth, the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has told the BBC.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn said he feared measures announced by the Group of 20 nations last month would not be enough.

The IMF has already cut its forecast for global growth next year, and he said the next projection, due in January, would be even worse.

Mr Strauss-Kahn spoke of "2009 as really being a bad year".
"I'm specially concerned by the fact that our forecast, already very dark... will be even darker if not enough fiscal stimulus is implemented," he said in an interview with BBC Radio 4.

'Less bad solution'

He said it would take a spending stimulus equivalent to about 2% of global Gross Domestic Product, or about $1.2 trillion (£800bn), to make a real difference.

The level of debt in the UK was "disturbing", he said, but he added that given the choice between increasing the deficit and not fighting the recession, he favoured the "less bad solution".

He described European Central Bank chief Jean-Claude Trichet's warning that eurozone governments must keep a lid on borrowing as "noble".

"He's the head of the central bank - it's his job to say things like that," Mr Strauss Kahn said.

"We are in the biggest crisis we have experienced for 60 or 70 years and we have to take that into account," he added.

In November, the IMF lowered its global economic growth forecast to 2.2% from 3%.

Last week, Mr Strauss-Kahn said the IMF could cut its 2009 forecast for China to around 5% amid an "unprecedented" global slowdown.

BBC

[OMEN]

Joseph Kony's force has spread terror across the region
The Ugandan government says it has destroyed more than 70% of camps run by Lord's Resistance Army rebels in a remote region of northern DR Congo.

A joint offensive was launched by Ugandan, Southern Sudanese and Congolese forces against the rebels in mid-December, after peace talks failed.

Observers say the rebels, led by Josephy Kony, have managed to evade military operations in the past.

The LRA are blamed for abducting children and forcing millions to flee.

The BBC's Martin Plaut says that as jets went overhead to bomb the LRA camps, local people in the Congolese town of Duru came out and cheered.

Countries from Uganda to the Central African Republic have suffered 20 years of terror inflicted by the LRA.
Our correspondent says that Joseph Kony's force is relatively small - about 650 strong - but the difficulty is that when it is hit, it scatters then regroups.

Last week, the UN envoy trying to end Uganda's long-running conflict, Joachim Chissano, said he backed the offensive against the rebels.

Mr Chissano said the aim of the operation was to force the LRA leader to sign a peace deal, which he has so far failed to do.

He urged the UN Security Council to support the action by Uganda, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

BBC

[OMEN]

Gardaí investigating the death of Celine Cawley have charged her 51-year-old husband, Eamon Lillis, with her murder.

He will remain in custody and will appear before Dublin District Court tomorrow morning.

Mr Lillis was arrested early yesterday morning in the Howth area.
Ms Cawley, a 46-year-old mother of one, was found beaten to death on the patio of her home on Monday last.

RTE

[OMEN]

One-third of retail businesses to close, wages down and jobless up


TDs have gone on a Christmas holiday for a scandalous 40 days, enjoying an "outrageous" €11m in largely unvouched, tax-free expenses in a stark illustration of the extraordinary disconnect between the political elite and ordinary people.

The Dail will not sit again until January 28, by which time employers and employees in the real, exposed economy will exist in a bleak house of rapidly mounting closures and redundancies.

At an office in the IFSC in Dublin on Tuesday night the owners of commercial property were told to expect that a third of retail businesses throughout the country will close between January and Easter next year.

The shocking assessment was delivered in a week in which definitive evidence emerged that the cosseted political and banking establishment are operating in what several observers have described as a “virtual world”.

The devastating impact of the economic crisis has been evident for some time: official figures last week showed that unemployment jumped from 4.6 per cent earlier this year to 7 per cent at the end of September.

The ESRI has predicted that unemployment will hit 10 per cent next year. But many economists believe that figure has already been reached and is likely to be surpassed: some say unemployment may even exceed an astonishing 12 per cent, or close to 500,000 people.

The Government’s decision to impose a VAT increase in the Budget is being blamed by retailers here for accelerating decline.

There is little doubt that the decision caused shoppers to flee north, where they took advantage of a slashed VAT rate and weak sterling across the Border.

Many businesses here, who have so far been reluctant to make redundancies, are instead proposing significant cuts in salary in the hope that they will somehow come through a recession which is now conservatively predicted to last for two years.

Against this bleak reality, the country’s TDs have gone on a 40-day festive holiday, the second-longest such break in all democracies, behind only Australia, which is predicting 2.5 per cent growth next year.

In Ireland, the economy will decline by at least 4 per cent, perhaps up to 6 per cent. As a result, at least 117,000 people will lose their jobs next year and a minimum 50,000 will be forced to emigrate.

Such startling analysis has not prompted the political establishment here to reassess its priorities, however.

Last week, the country’s166 TDs went on a comfortable break, secured by what one economist this weekend called “ludicrous” expenses, totalling in excess of €11m. This sum effectively doubles an average TD’s basic salary of €100,000.

The expenses can be claimed, substantially, on a tax-free basis and without the need to provide evidence of expenditure incurred.

The eight top claimants are: Brendan Kenneally (FF), €93,880; Jackie Healy-Rae (Ind) €89,705; Bernard Allen (FG), €88,831; Michael Moynihan (FF), €86,951 and Sean Fleming (FF), €86,828. Mr Kenneally said yesterday he wasn't surprised he topped the list after he received additional expenses for setting up his office.

“I was in the Senate before getting my seat back so I have had to set up a new constituency office. I am also on four committees and I was travelling a lot.” Last week the ESRI drew attention to the widening “significant” — up to 20 per cent — differential between pay rates in the private and public sector.

It has suggested urgent pay cuts for public sector employees. While members of the Cabinet have taken a 10 per cent salary cut, their lead has, overwhelmingly, not been followed by rank-and-file TDs, who still enjoy a lavish regime of salaries and expenses while the dole queues grow.

Yesterday Friends First economist, Jim Power told the Sunday Independent: “These huge sums of money are totally unsustainable, particularly when people are losing their jobs or taking savage pay cuts. “TDs almost doubling their pay through expenses and allowances is outrageous.”

Mark Fielding of Isme said the TDs expenses regime represented the “public sector mentality gone mad”. He said: “It’s no wonder public sector costs are out of control when these guys are they way they are . . . they take 40 days’ holiday just when the country is going down the tubes.

It’s absurd.” At a solicitors’ office in the IFSC last week, a retail property expert from Jones Lang Lasalle property advisers told of how a third of business will be closed by Easter.

The meeting was attended mainly by the owners of shopping centres and multiple retail outlets throughout the country: they were warned to expect a “bleak” outlook.

They were also told that with outlets closing and some landlords offering rent-free terms for two to three years they could expect retailers who manage to survive the Christmas downturn to return in large numbers to re-negotiate rental agreements.

It is understood that many retailers are already indicating that they need a 50 per cent rent reduction to survive in the current economic crisis.

It is widely accepted that the rents charged in major shopping centres and high streets are now unsustainable for many retailers, who have seen their business decimated by a combination of the economic downturn, the rising VAT rate and the parity of euro with sterling.

Independent.IE

[OMEN]

George S Patton, America's greatest combat general of the Second World War, was murdered after the conflict with the connivance of US leaders, according to a new book.

The recently-unearthed diaries of a colourful assassin for the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, reveal that American spy chiefs wanted Patton dead because he was threatening to expose Allied collusion with the Russians that cost American lives.

The death of Patton in December 1945 is one of the enduring mysteries of the war era. Although he had suffered serious injuries in a car crash, he was thought to be recovering and was on the verge of flying home.

But after a decade-long investigation, Robert Wilcox, a military historian, claims that the OSS head, General "Wild Bill" Donovan, ordered a highly decorated marksman, Douglas Bazata, to silence Patton, who gloried in the nickname "Old Blood and Guts".

His book, Target Patton, contains interviews with Bazata, who died in 1999, and extracts from his diaries, detailing how he staged the car crash by getting a troop truck to plough into Patton's Cadillac and how he then shot the general with a low-velocity projectile which broke his neck, while his fellow passengers escaped without a scratch.

Bazata also suggested that when Patton began to recover from his injuries, US officials turned a blind eye as agents of the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, poisoned the general.

Mr Wilcox said that when he spoke to Bazata "he was struggling with himself, all these killings he had done. He confessed to me that he had caused the accident, ordered by Wild Bill Donovan.

"Donovan told him: 'We've got a terrible situation with this great patriot, he's out of control and we must save him from himself and from ruining everything the Allies have done.' I believe Douglas Bazata. He's a sterling guy."

Bazata led an extraordinary life. He was a member of the Jedburghs, the elite unit that parachuted into France to help organise the Resistance in the run up to D-Day in 1944. He earned four purple hearts, a Distinguished Service Cross and the French Croix de Guerre three times over.

After the war he became a celebrated artist who enjoyed the patronage of Princess Grace of Monaco and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He was friends with Salvador Dali, who painted a portrait of him as Don Quixote. He ended his career as an aide to US President Ronald Reagan's navy secretary, John Lehman.

Mr Wilcox also interviewed Stephen Skubik, an officer in the US Counter-Intelligence Corps, who said he learnt that Patton was on Stalin's death list. Skubik repeatedly alerted Donovan, who simply had him sent back to the US.

"You have two strong witnesses here," Mr Wilcox said. "The evidence is that the Russians finished the job."

It sounds far-fetched but Mr Wilcox has assembled a compelling case that US officials had something to hide. At least five documents relating to the car accident have been removed from US archives.

The driver of the truck was whisked away to London before he could be questioned and no autopsy was performed on Patton's body.

With the help of a Cadillac expert, Mr Wilcox has proved that the car on display in the Patton museum at Fort Knox is not the one Patton was driving. "That is a cover-up," Mr Wilcox said.

The Telegraph

[OMEN]

Green move: Barack Obama
Barack Obama yesterday ushered in a revolution in America's response to global warming, when he appointed one of the world's leading climate change experts as his administration's chief scientist.

The president-elect's decision to make Harvard physicist John Holdren director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy reveals a new determination to draw a line under eight years of US policy that has seen President George W Bush steadfastly reject overwhelming evidence of climate change.
News of the appointment was hailed by scientists around the world, including former UK chief government scientific adviser David King.

"This is a superb appointment," he said. "Holdren is a top scientist. This is a signal from Barack Obama that he means business when it comes to dealing with global warming."

Mr Obama also announced that respected climatologist Jane Lubchenco is to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The appointments follow Mr Obama's recent selection of Steven Chu, a Nobel prizewinner, to the Department of Energy, where he has been directed to lead the development of alternative energy sources.

"Today, more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival as a planet and our security and prosperity as a nation," the president-elect announced.
And, in one telling remark, he added that respect for the scientific process was not "just about providing investment and resources. It's about ensuring that facts and evidence are never twisted nor obscured by politics nor ideology".

Mr Obama's appointments are outspoken proponents of the need for urgent action over climate change. The Bush administration resisted emission-reduction accords, as well as the introduction of laws to protect threatened species.

Mr Holdren, whose expertise spans nuclear weapons proliferation to global warming, recently warned that he considered "global warming" to be a misnomer. "It implies something gradual, something uniform, something quite possibly benign, and what we're experiencing is none of those."

Mr Obama has made clear that, despite the global economic crisis, the success of his presidency will hinge on a revolution in America's use and production of carbon-based energy.

Observer

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