'Is this real?': tapes reveal 9/11 horror

"Did you just say somethin' hit the World Trade Centre?" an incredulous military official asked shortly after the beginning of America's terrorism nightmare on September 11, 2001.
Minutes later, with air traffic authorities warning that another commercial jet was off course and just 10km from the White House, Washington ground control sounded in denial, saying it was "probably just a rumour".

Bird's eye view ... The towers, mid-collapse. Photo: NYC Police Aviation Unit

Heat on Cameron over News pay to fallen adviser

Questions ... discredited former editor Andy Coulson. Photo: PA

British Prime Minister David Cameron faces "serious questions" over claims his former communications chief Andy Coulson received several hundred thousand pounds from News International while he was employed by the Conservatives, Labour says.
The BBC has reported that Coulson, the former News of the World editor, received a series of severance payments for several months after he began working for the Tories.
The instalments totalled the full entitlement under his two-year contract as editor of the now defunct tabloid which was published by News International, the BBC claimed.

His severance package also included continued access healthcare as well as keeping hold of his company car, the BBC said.
A Labour spokesman said: "David Cameron now faces allegations that one of his top advisers was also in the pay of News International.

European bank job 'bloodbath' hits 67,000

UBS’s decision to cut 5 per cent of its workforce brings to more than 40,000 the number of jobs cut by European banks in the past month and to 67,000 this year, as the region’s worsening sovereign debt crisis crimps trading revenue.
UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank, said yesterday it will eliminate 3500 jobs, mainly from its investment bank. It follows HSBC, which announced 30,000 cuts on August 1, Barclays, which is cutting headcount by 3000, and Royal Bank of Scotland, which is eliminating 2000 posts. Credit Suisse announced 2000 reductions on July 28.
European banks are slashing jobs this year six times faster than their US peers, as concerns about the creditworthiness of Italy, Spain and France roil financial markets and reduce income from fixed-income trading, stock and bond underwriting as well as mergers and acquisitions.

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Financial firms are also cutting costs as regulators force banks to hold more and better quality capital to withstand future shocks.
“It’s a bloodbath, and I expect things to get worse before they get better,” said Jonathan Evans, chairman of executive-search firm Sammons Associates in London. “I cannot see a lot of those who have lost their jobs getting re-employed. Regardless of how good someone is, no one wants to talk about hiring. Life will be very difficult for two or three years.”

Poison at the heart of Greece

'Facing the metrics of doom', Greece is heading for a pyrotechnic default. Photo: AP

The debt-laden country is mired in corruption.
TAVROS is a scruffy suburb in the south-western part of Athens, about five kilometres from the city centre. It is home to the kind of utilitarian office blocks that 1960s town planners thought were a good idea. Many of the buildings are scarred by graffiti and the side streets are strewn with litter.
On a stiflingly hot day, I come here to interview Petros Themelis, a Finance Ministry official, who runs a call centre that's part of the Greek government's battle against tax evaders. The idea is that public-spirited citizens ring up and dob in those they suspect of tax-dodging. This is the human factor in a much bigger war: Greece's life-or-death struggle with the debt beast.
The state's accumulated borrowings are equal to about 160 per cent of national output. Greece cannot afford to service the interest, much less repay the capital. The country is, in effect, insolvent. Without the largesse of outsiders - many billions in bailouts from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union - it would already have collapsed into bankruptcy.

West must take share of blame for Gaddafi

In the name of business a blind eye was often turned to his predatory behaviour.
FOR all practical purposes, the rule of Muammar Gaddafi is in its final days. After Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, the fall of Gaddafi marks the end of the third Arab dictator within the space of eight months. The biggest lesson for the West is to not support dictators when it suits, and for the remaining Arab rulers to reform or face a fate similar to the fallen dictators.
As is normally the case with dictators, Gaddafi had increasingly become delusional. At the helm for 42 years, he thought that he had become infallible and that, with the exception of his equally delusional son Saif al-Islam, there was nobody to replace him. His rule was based on fear, torture, patronage, self-adulation and aggrandisement. He plundered Libya's oil wealth in pursuit of bizarre and idiosyncratic ideas and practices that demeaned Libya internationally and stigmatised the Arab people as a whole. In this, he was not much different from many other Arab authoritarian rulers.
Yet, he stayed in power not simply because he was able to deceive the Libyan people and the world for so long. There was also the matter of the West's love-hate relationship with him. They loathed him because he was, as the late US president Ronald Reagan put it, ''the mad dog'' of the Arab world, and therefore an unpredictable rogue and supporter of international terrorism who needed to be watched and feared.

George Jonas: A decade after 9/11, the Islamists still have the upper hand

Many have suggested that 9/11 was like Pearl Harbor for America, at least psychologically. If so, it might be instructive to compare anniversaries. Where was the West 10 years after Pearl Harbor, compared to where it is 10 years after 9/11? Was being attacked by the Far Eastern militarism of the Empire of the Rising Sun as harmful to America as the suicide assault of Near Eastern fanatics? Did one do more damage than the other?
I’m posing the question, because I consider both acts of belligerency expressions of larger conflicts than just Japan’s or al-Qaeda’s with America. I take Pearl Harbor to have been Oriental despotism’s fascist-tinged declaration of war on Occidental democracy, and regard 9/11 as theocratic Islam’s challenge to secular post-Christendom.

Model dumps flirty Prince Harry

End of the affair ... model Florence Brudenell-Bruce calls it quits with Prince Harry and his "wandering eye". Photo: Getty Images

Prince Harry's latest romance with a blonde lingerie model ended because of the royal's wandering eye, a British tabloid says.
Widespread media reports in recent months matched the red-headed grandson of the Queen with 25-year-old Florence Brudenell-Bruce.
However the pairing has ended and it was her decision, the Sunday Mirror newspaper reports, contradicting previous comments from royal sources that it was the prince who called it off.

Wiki war: 3500 unpublished leaks destroyed forever as Assange hits out

Former WikiLeaks staffer and one of the founders of OpenLeaks, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, holds his book Inside WikiLeaks. Photo: AP

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's former right-hand man has irrevocably destroyed 3500 unpublished files leaked to the whistleblower site including the complete US no-fly list, five gigabytes of Bank of America documents and detailed information about 20 neo-Nazi groups.
Daniel Domscheit-Berg, who left WikiLeaks last year after a falling out with Assange, revealed the document destruction in an interview with Der Spiegel.
WikiLeaks has hit back, accusing Domscheit-Berg of being in bed with US intelligence agencies and of jeopardising the leaking of “many issues of public importance, human rights abuses, mass telecommunications interception, banking and the planning of dozens of neo-nazi groups”.

Facebook sex scandal with girl, 16, topples German conservative politician

Christian von Boetticher, Schleswig-Holstein's Christian Democratic Union leader and top candidate for regional state elections in 2012, wipes tears as he gives a statement to the media after a board meeting in Kiel, Germany. Photo: Reuters

BERLIN — German voters may be willing to tolerate a politician's having an affair with a teenager, but not when that politician — a leading conservative, no less — met her on Facebook, where he also flaunted immodest details of his life.
Christian von Boetticher, 40, the successful state legislator at the top of the Christian Democratic Union's ticket in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, resigned as head of the party there during a tearful news conference on Sunday. He admitted to the affair, which was legal under German law, and to making a misjudgement, but insisted that he had nothing to be ashamed of because it was "a very unusual love".
It is also an unusual scandal — not only because of the girl's age, which was at the border of permissible and punishable, but also because of the role played by the social-networking site.

In some ways, the fact of her youth was less strange to conservative voters and colleagues "than that a grown man with more important things to do would spend so much time playing around on this network with nothing better to do than trade messages with a young girl," said Rudolf Koetter, director of the Centre for Advanced Ethics and Science Communications at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany.

Romania makes tourist trail of Ceausescu horror spots

A young Romanian holds a portrait of late Romanian dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, as he collects scrap to be sold from a house to be demolished in Bucharest. Photo: AFP

BUCHAREST: A young man holds a portrait of the former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, collected among scrap from a house being demolished in Romania's capital.
The Minister for Tourism, Elena Udrea, has said tourists will soon be able to follow Ceausescu's trail.
''We are working on a 'red circuit' that would follow the traces of communism and the dictatorship,'' Ms Udrea said in an interview with the Romanian B1TV channel.

The circuit will include Ceausescu's native village of Scornicesti and the Doftana prison where he served two years for ''subversive activities'' between 1936 and 1938.

Pope starts Spain visit with call for economic ethics

 

MADRID (Reuters) - Pope Benedict denounced economic structures that put profits ahead of people on Thursday at the start of a trip to recession-hit Spain where the costs of the pontiff's visit have sparked violent protests.

"The economy cannot be measured by the maximum profit but by the common good," Benedict told journalists on the plane taking him to Madrid for a four-day trip centered around the Roman Catholic Church's World Youth Day festivities.

"The economy cannot function only with mercantile self-regulation but needs an ethical reason in order to work for man," he said.

The Spanish economy is struggling to exit a recession which has left one in five unemployed, of which a large proportion are young people.

Banned ad 'inappropriate'

AN AD for men's clothes that shows a teenage girl with the word slave barcoded on her bare shoulder and her wide open mouth stuffed with a disc showing the Union Jack, has been banned because it presents her as a sexual object. Following several complaints about the ad for menswear retailer Roger David, the Advertising Standards Bureau asked for it to be withdrawn , saying it ''inappropriately depicted a young girl in a sexualised manner''.
The ASB said the ad suggested the girl was being held against her will, that the object filling her mouth evoked a sense of her being ''gagged'' and that she looked as though she was under 18.
But Roger David defended the ad, telling the ASB that the woman was 18 when the photo was taken and that she ''is a student of history, Spanish and English and is also a model in the United Kingdom".

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