Mangalore: Air India aircraft overshoots runway, 160 feared dead

MANGALORE: At least 160 people are feared dead after an Air India Express aircraft from Dubai, carrying 173 passengers, overshot the runway while landing at the Mangalore airport on Saturday morning.
At least 6-8 people in critical condition have been rescued. Rescue operation was hampered by the thick smoke that engulfed the plane, airport authorities said.
The aircraft was on fire, he said. About 25 fire tenders and ambulances are on the spot, authorities said.
The incident happened near a valley 10 km from the airport, Karnataka home minister V S Acharya said.
The flight IX-892, operated by a Boeing 737-800, had 163 passengers, 4 infants and 6 crew members on board.
Aviation sources said the aircraft overshot the runway, hit the fence and went beyond the boundary wall of the airport.
All the contact with the aircraft was lost after 6.30 am as the left wing of the plane caught fire.
Aviation sources termed it an ‘accident’ instead of ‘incident’, they said. In aviation parlance an accident denotes causalities.
AI has opened helpline centre at Delhi Airport and the two numbers are 011-2565-6196 and 011-2560-3101. Mangalore Helpline number is 0824-2220422
DGCA Director-General S N A Zaidi said, “we have received only preliminary reports regarding the accident. But we are awaiting for the details including the number of passengers.”
Civil aviation minister Praful Patel has rushed to the spot.

Tearful pope says church will better protect young

VALLETTA, Malta — With tears in his eyes, Pope Benedict XVI made his most personal gesture yet to respond to the clerical sex abuse scandal Sunday, telling victims the church will do everything possible to protect children and bring abusive priests to justice, the Vatican said.

The emotional moment carried no new admissions from the Vatican, which has strongly rejected accusations that efforts to cover up for abusive priests were directed by the church hierarchy for decades. But the pontiff told the men that the church would “implement effective measures” to protect children, the Vatican said, without offering details.

Benedict met for more than a half-hour with eight Maltese men who say they were abused by four priests when they were boys living at a Catholic orphanage. During the meeting in the chapel at the Vatican’s embassy here, Benedict expressed his “shame and sorrow” at the pain the men and their families suffered, the Vatican said.

“Everybody was crying,” one of the men, Joseph Magro, 38, told Associated Press Television News after the meeting. “I told him my name was Joseph, and he had tears in his eyes.”

The visit — which came on the second day of Benedict’s two-day trip to this largely Roman Catholic island — marked the first time Benedict had met with abuse victims since the worldwide clerical abuse scandal engulfed the Vatican earlier this year.

“He prayed with them and assured them that the Church is doing, and will continue to do, all in its power to investigate allegations, to bring to justice those responsible for abuse and to implement effective measures designed to safeguard young people in the future,” the Vatican statement said.

Victims’ advocacy groups have demanded that the Vatican take concrete steps to protect children and remove abusive priests and the bishops who protected them, saying the pope’s expressions to date of solidarity and shame were meaningless unless actual action is taken.

The main U.S. victims group, Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said it was easy for Benedict to make promises about taking action to protect children.

“Not a single adult should feel relieved until strong steps are actually taken, not promised, that will prevent future child sex crimes and cover-ups,” said Peter Isely, the group’s Midwest director.

Magro said the men, in their 30s and 40s, received a call Sunday morning to come to the embassy and that the pope spent a few minutes with each of them. He said the overall encounter, which lasted about 35 minutes, was “fantastic.”

Lawrence Grech, who led efforts to arrange the encounter, said the pope told each of the men: “I am very proud of you for having come forward to tell your story.”

Grech said he told the pontiff: “This a one-time opportunity in life … you have the power to fill the emptiness that I had, someone else took my innocence and my faith.”

At the end, they prayed together and the pope gave his blessing, the Vatican said.

“The climate was intense but very serene,” said Vatican spokesman the Rev. Federico Lombardi.

The private meeting was confirmed only after it had occurred — as was the case when Benedict met with abuse victims in the United States and Australia in 2008. He returned to Rome late Sunday.

Benedict’s overnight trip to Malta — originally scheduled to commemorate the 1,950th anniversary of St. Paul’s shipwreck — had been overshadowed by expectations that he would make a strong gesture to repair the damage of the scandal.

Benedict has been accused by victims groups and their lawyers of being part of systematic practice of cover-up by church hierarchy for pedophile priests, in his earlier roles as an archbishop in Germany and later at the helm of the Vatican morals office.

BishopAccountability.org, a U.S.-based website that tracks abuse, called on Benedict to follow up his words with actions.

“The pope must follow the meeting in Malta by accounting fully for his own role in the crisis and by disciplining complicit officials,” the group said in a statement. “Otherwise, it will be evident that he was exploiting the goodwill of the survivors in Malta to improve his image.”

Benedict made no direct reference to the scandals during a Mass Sunday morning. He told Maltese to cling to their faith despite the temptations of modern society.

“Many voices try to persuade us to put aside our faith in God and his church,” he warned.

Children fathered by Fathers to sue Church

ROME/VIENNA: When Pat Bond told her lover Henry Willenborg, a Franciscan priest, she was pregnant, he urged her to have an abortion. Bond, who was 28, had a miscarriage, then became pregnant again. This time Willenborg’s superiors urged her to give up the child for adoption. Bond kept the child but agreed to a vow of silence. In a signed contract with the Catholic Church, she undertook to keep the priest’s identity secret in exchange for financial support for her son, Nathan.

In America, Britain, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy and Austria, women made pregnant by priests have signed such pledges in exchange for hush money from the Church.

The Church, already reeling under a series of scandals, faces a new battle over the children of priests. Many former lovers and their offspring are preparing to mount lawsuits.

Bond was 25 when she started a five-year relationship with Willenborg in 1983, after going to him for marriage counselling. He kissed her passionately as she left his parlour, she left her husband. After Bond became pregnant for the second time in 1986, Willenborg’s order, the Order of Friars Minor, offered her $50,000 and a confidentiality contract. “They said: ‘Take this money, sign this contract and you’ll have support for your child’. I signed,” said Bond. She broke her vow last year after the Franciscans refused to meet part of the cost of treatment for Nathan, then 22, who died in November from a brain tumour.

When Willenborg’s liaisons with Bond, now 53, and another woman became public, the priest was suspended from his parish in Ashland, Wisconsin.

He was treated for sex addiction, then returned to his pastoral duties. Catherine Schroeder, a St Louis lawyer for the Order of Friars Minor, declined to comment. Willenborg and the order failed to return calls and emails.

Other cases are reaching the American courts. In Maryland, two children of the late Father Francis Ryan are filing a lawsuit against their local archdiocese and a religious order for $10 million after discovering through DNA tests that he was their father.

Carla Latty, 58, and Adrian Senna, 65, say Ryan never admitted he was their father or made any payments to their late mother. Senna was sent to an orphanage, while Latty was put up for adoption.

Cait Finnegan, of the Good Tidings association, an American charity for priests and their lovers, has been contacted by nearly 2,000 women who had relationships with priests. She said one pregnant friend had been told by a bishop to “get rid of the child” — a comment she took to mean she should have an abortion.

The woman kept the baby.

Thousands of priests in German-speaking countries are believed to have fathered children. Paul Zuhlener, an Austrian theologian, has estimated that up to 22% of Austrian priests have sexual relationships.

In Britain, Adrianna Alsworth, who has two children by a priest and runs the Sonflowers helpline for those who have had relationships with priests, said she knew of several women who had been offered confidentiality contracts in return for child support. “The children aren’t given an opportunity to have a normal family life, and they suffer,” she said.

Quake kills 400; destroys homes on Tibet plateau

BEIJING  – A magnitude 6.9 earthquake on Wednesday killed about 400 people in the mountainous Tibetan Plateau in southwest China and left more than 10,000 injured as houses, schools and offices collapsed.

A series of quakes and aftershocks caused low, mud-brick buildings in Qinghai Province’s ethnically Tibetan Yushu county to collapse, residents and state media said.

“I see injured people everywhere. The biggest problem now is that we lack tents, we lack medical equipment, medicine and medical workers,” Zhuohuaxia, a local spokesman, told the Xinhua news agency.

Troops have been dispatched to the area and some aid shipments from private organizations have set off from the provincial capital, Xining.

“People are very scared,” said Pierre Deve, with Snowland Service Group, a local non-government organization, adding that many had already given up hope for those still trapped.

The Tibetan plateau is regularly shaken by earthquakes, but casualties are usually minimal because so few people live there.

Many residents of the remote area could be left without shelter in temperatures that hover near freezing in Yushu and even colder in mountain villages. Government officials told state media the majority of houses had been badly damaged.

Photos showed larger concrete buildings mostly intact, with rubble around them.

The Japanese government has offered emergency aid, Japan’s government spokesman Hirofumi Hirano said.

“The response was that there was no need at this stage,” he told reporters.

SOME SCHOOLS COLLAPSE, MOST STUDENTS ESCAPE

Xinhua reported that the early morning quake had caused some schools and part of a government office building to cave in. Some vocational school students and primary school students were trapped in the rubble, it said, although residents said most students had been able to flee to playgrounds

“Most of the schools in Yushu were built fairly recently and should have been able to withstand the earthquake,” said Wang Liling, a volunteer worker for Gesanghua, a Chinese charity that helps school children in Qinghai. Her group, she said, had heard that a vocational school collapsed in Yushu.

“Many homes have been damaged, but we’ll have to wait until this evening, when our staff arrive there, to understand anything specific.”

The widespread collapse of school buildings when other surrounding buildings stayed standing, caused anger and accusations of corruption after the devastating May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province, which killed 80,000.

“A lot of one-storey houses have collapsed. Taller buildings have held up, but there are big cracks in them,” resident Talen Tashi told Reuters.

People from the Yushu prefecture highway department were frantically trying to dig out colleagues trapped in a collapsed building, department official Ji Guodong said by telephone

“The homes are built with thick walls and are strong, but if they collapsed they could hurt many people inside,” Zhuo De told Reuters by phone from Xining after contacting his family in Yushu.

The quake was centered in the mountains that divide Qinghai province from the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The foothills to the south and east of the area are home to herders and Tibetan monasteries of Yushu county, while the area to the north and west is arid and desolate.

The quake was centered 150 miles north northwest of Qamdo in Tibet and 235 miles south southeast of the mining town of Golmud in Qinghai, and had a depth of 6.2 miles, the United States Geological Service said.

A magnitude 5.0 quake struck the same region late on Tuesday night, and aftershocks of magnitude-6 and over rattled the town Wednesday morning, sending fearful residents into the streets

Strong quake hits China’s Qinghai province, 300 killed: State TV

BEIJING: A strong earthquake rocked northwestern China on Wednesday, killing about 300 people and injuring another 8,000 as it toppled houses in a remote mountainous area, state media said.

Many houses have collapsed, roads have been damaged or blocked by landslides and telecommunications have been disrupted, local officials said after the quake, which was measured by the US geological survey at a magnitude of 6.9.

Officials said the quake wreaked havoc on the flimsy earth and wood houses near the epicentre in the high-altitude area of Qinghai province on the border with Tibet.

Xinhua news agency quoted government officials in the area saying about 300 had been confirmed dead, with 8,000 hurt.

“The injured are everywhere in the street, a lot of people are bleeding from head wounds,” Xinhua quoted a local official, identified as Zhuohuaxia, as saying.

He said more than 85 percent of houses had collapsed in the town of Jiegu, located near the quake’s epicentre.

“There is a big crack in the Yushu Hotel, the four-storey meeting hall of the prefecture government has collapsed,” the official said.

At least part of a vocational school had also collapsed and “a lot of students are buried underneath,” he added.

Another local official, Huang Limin, told Xinhua that soldiers had been sent to the scene to comb through the debris for survivors.

“We have to mainly rely on our hands to clear away the debris as we have no large excavating machines,” said Shi Huajie, a paramilitary police officer working on the rescue operation.

“We have no medical equipment either.”

State television broadcast footage showing paramilitary police clearing the debris of a collapsed structure.

Rescue teams and equipment were being rushed to the area, Xinhua said, but noted they could be hampered by the infrastructure damage.

The China Earthquake Administration put the magnitude of the quake at 7.1. It said there was extensive damage to local structures in the area, including cracks in a dam.

The USGS said the quake hit at 7:49 am (2349 GMT Tuesday) and was centred 380 kilometres (240 miles) south-southeast of the city of Golmud, at a depth of 46 kilometres.

A series of aftershocks rattled the area shortly after the quake, with magnitudes of up to 5.8, the USGS reported.

Repeated calls to local government headquarters, businesses and the local airport in Yushu county, the quake’s epicentre, went unanswered.

Chinese media reports said telecommunications with the airport had been lost, and that roads leading to the terminal had been damaged.

Yushu county has a population of about 80,000 people, according to government figures.

“The houses here are almost all made of wood and earthen walls. Some collapsed when the quake happened,” Karsum Nyima, deputy director of the news department of Yushu TV, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.

The remote high-altitude region is prone to earthquakes. Home to ethnic Mongolians and Tibetan farmers and herdsmen, the area is dotted with coal, tin, lead and copper mines.

A 6.2-magnitude quake rattled Golmud in August last year, triggering landslides and the collapse of about 30 homes, but there were no reports of casualties.

A massive 8.0-magnitude quake in May 2008 in neighbouring Sichuan province devastated a huge area of southwestern China, leaving at least 87,000 people dead or missing.

The civil affairs ministry was to send 5,000 tents, 50,000 cotton coats and 50,000 quilts to the quake-hit region, Xinhua reported

Organ donor blunders ‘could cost lives’

Patients could die unnecessarily as a result of a blunder that has meant hundreds of thousands of potential organ donors have had their wishes incorrectly recorded, it has been warned
Families of would-be donors may refuse permission for transplants if they fear that the deceased’s stipulations on which organs they were willing to donate were not going to be followed
It emerged that details collected from driving licence applications over the past six years had been mixed up after being passed to NHS Blood and Transplant, which runs the organ donor register.
A total of 800,000 records were affected — half of which have been corrected but 400,000 are yet to be notified that there is a problem.

Officials fear that trust could collapse in the donor register, which holds more than 16 million names.

The blunder related to instructions about which organs people were willing to donate. Many are reluctant to offer external body parts such as corneas or skin, while others state that their tissue cannot be used for research. These stipulations were mixed up when details were transferred to the NHS database.

Joyce Robins, the co-director of Patient Concern said: “This is a terrible tragedy for patients awaiting a transplant. Lives may be lost because people could be deterred from joining the register.”

An investigation found 21 cases where organs were removed that the deceased had not wished to donate. Their families are due to be contacted shortly by officials to inform them of the mix-up.

Database errors began to occur when it came into routine use in 2004, but the problem was not discovered until December after the transplant service began writing to all new donor members to thank them for their consent.

The families of organ donors always have the final say over how the body is used. Prof Peter Friend, a Professor of transplant surgery at Oxford University, said if families were unsure that their loved one’s wishes had been correctly recorded they might decided to block all donation.

“If a family says ‘no’ for a donor who would have wanted it to happen, there are two or three avoidable deaths. It is a disaster,” he said.

There are more than 10,000 people waiting for a donor organ and about 1,000 people die each year while on the list. Around 3,500 operations are carried out a year with organs from about 1,500 people.

Stephen Banks, 27, from Redditch, Worcs, was shocked to discover that upon his death, his eyes could be made available for donation.

“I have to say I am a little angry. How could such a major error occur,” he told the BBC.

“This could have had an awful effect on my loved ones – if something had happened to me.

“I haven’t tried contacting them. I feel a bit embarrassed to call up and say: ‘I don’t want to donate my eyes’. I feel a bit awkward about it.”

He added: “But at the end of the day, it is my choice and these are my wishes.”

Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said he wanted to assure families and those on the donor register that “their wishes will be respected”.

A spokesman for NHS Blood and Transplant said the technical error only affected those who registered via the driving licence application form.

“We assure everyone currently on the organ donor register that the affected records will not be used in discussions with their family about organ donation. They will only be used once they have been corrected in accordance with the donors’ wishes.

“We will shortly be writing to all those on the register who may be affected to confirm their preferences. Anyone else on the register who is not contacted can be confident that their record is accurate.”

Foreclosure auction of Nicolas Cage’s mansion is a flop

Nicolas Cage is leaving Bel-Air. And not by choice.

The fate of the sprawling Tudor mansion owned by the actor, who won an Oscar for his role in “Leaving Las Vegas,” was decided Wednesday far from the baronial estate.
It was up for auction Wednesday morning — along with a handful of other foreclosed properties — on the steps of the county courthouse in Pomona.

After a rapid-fire spiel by the auctioneer, the bidding was opened at $10.4 million, far less than the $35 million that Cage had tried unsuccessfully to sell the house for.

To put it mildly, the house, though impressive, was not to everyone’s taste. Real estate agent Bret Parsons, who toured it most recently in October, described the interiors as “fascinating and bizarre.”

“The design was ‘frat house bordello,’ ” Parsons said. “There must have been 300 comic book covers elaborately framed and hanging on the walls.”

Model train sets on raised tracks a couple feet below the ceiling circled the inside of the breakfast room and two bedrooms.

There were also no takers in the courthouse sale, and in less than a minute the auction closed, with ownership reverting to the foreclosing lender — just one of six holding a total of $18 million in loans on the property.

The pattern of repeated borrowing against equity is familiar to Bob Baker, sales manager of County Records Research, a Huntington Beach-based company that supplies information about foreclosure properties.

“This is a microcosm of what’s going on in our state,” Baker said. “We’ve seen as many as 13 loans on a house.”

When people keep borrowing, he said, it has “a snowball effect.” The final loans often are taken out to meet expenses, he said. “It’s a survival tactic.”

This is not the only property lost to foreclosure by Cage, who was ranked last year by Forbes as the fifth-highest-paid actor in the U.S. with earnings of $40 million.

Cage’s publicist said the actor could not be reached for comment.

In October, Cage sued his former business manager, Samuel J. Levin.

The complaint, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accused Levin of having “lined his pockets with several million dollars in business management fees while leading Cage down a path toward financial ruin.”

Levin filed his own countersuit, describing Cage as setting off “on a spending binge of epic proportions” and states that by July 2008 Cage owned “15 palatial homes around the world,” four yachts, an island in the Bahamas, a private Gulfstream jet and millions in art and jewelry
The Bel-Air manse, at 11,817 square feet, has a central tower, custom wine cellar, 35-seat home theater, six bedrooms, nine bathrooms and an Olympic-size pool.

Borrowing against it included a first mortgage of $425,000 in 2005 and, in 2007, a second of $10.35 million and a third of $5.5 million
The fourth, fifth and sixth loans, totaling $2.1 million, all came in 2008.

The courthouse event practically eliminated the lenders’ chances to collect on the last four loans because they’re no longer secured by the real estate.

“This makes it easier to buy,” said James Chalke of Beverly Hills real estate firm Nelson Shelton & Associates, who once had the listing on the house.

Although Chalke had clients who were interested in the estate — and at one point a $12-million offer — the debts made negotiating with the lenders difficult, he said. “They weren’t prepared to come down.”

An owner-occupant, rather than an investor, will probably be the buyer now, said Stephen Shapiro, who expects to retain the listing at his Beverly Hills-based Westside Estate Agency.

The property was built in 1940 for $110,000, said Parsons, who is also the author of “Colcord Home” about architect Gerard Colcord, who designed the landmark property.

It was once owned by singer Dean Martin, who in 1974 commissioned Colcord to add a 2,500-square-foot entertainment complex. When another singer, Tom Jones, owned it, a $60,000 wall was erected around the property to keep adoring fans at bay.

Parsons blames the pricing for the fact that Cage couldn’t unload the house, even after it came down to $17.5 million. But the real estate agent also noted that the lot was squeezed with the addition of the entertainment complex. And, he said, there was no room left for a tennis court.

“People at that level want all the requisite amenities,” he said.

Still, he thinks it’s a rare find for the right buyer. “It is a superb home,” he said. “The floor plan, craftsmanship, location. It’s a great house”

U.S. Gasoline Rises to $2.852 a Gallon, Survey Shows

April 11 — The average price of regular gasoline at U.S. filling stations rose to $2.852 a gallon as crude oil futures jumped more than 5 percent.

Gasoline gained 3.79 cents in the three weeks ended April 9, according to a survey of 5,000 filling stations nationwide by Trilby Lundberg, an independent gasoline analyst in Camarillo, California.

Gasoline for May delivery rose 1.5 percent to $2.2893 a gallon on the New York Mercantile Exchange in the three weeks ended April 9. Crude oil for May delivery advanced 5.3 percent to $84.92 a barrel.

Crude oil rose 10 cents during the survey period, said Lundberg, although “refiners were able to only pass through a portion at the pump.” Most took “a 9-cent gallon loss because demand is so weak.”

Gasoline demand during the summer will rise 0.5 percent above a year earlier, lower than 2009’s 0.8 percent growth rate because “the stimulus to demand from the continuing modest economic recovery is constrained” by higher prices at the pump, the Energy Department said April 6 in its summer fuels outlook.

Regular-grade gasoline will average $2.92 a gallon in the period between April 1 and Sept. 30, up from $2.44 last summer, the department forecast. Average prices will at times exceed $3 a gallon during the season.

“Gasoline demand is nearly flat because unemployment is so deep,” Lundberg said. Consumption is dominated by fuel used to commute, she said. “That is the bulk of it,” and the need for fuel will not grow significantly until employment grow is more robust. “Until then, price increases will be small,” she said.

Demand and Supply

Demand for the motor fuel, as measured by what’s supplied to the wholesale market, rose to 9.08 million barrels a day in the week ended April 2, according to the department. Averaged over the past four weeks, consumption was 1.7 percent above a year earlier.

Supplies of the motor fuel are 5.5 percent above the five- year average for the period as gasoline output by refiners and blenders jumped to a 16-week high.

U.S. retail gasoline consumption rose 1.2 percent in the week ended April 2 as motorists filled their tanks for the three-day Easter holiday weekend, MasterCard Inc. said in its SpendingPulse report April 6. Demand over the four weeks ended April 2 averaged 9.59 million barrels a day, the highest level since July 3.

Regular gasoline at the pump, averaged nationwide, is $2.86 a gallon, according to AAA, the biggest U.S. motoring organization. At the same time a year ago, the average was $2.05, according to AAA.

On Long Island, regular gasoline averaged $2.95 a gallon, Lundberg said. Los Angeles-area retail stations averaged $3.06.

The highest price among cities surveyed was Honolulu at $3.43 gallon. The cheapest place to buy gasoline was Newark, New Jersey, where a gallon averaged $2.64, Lundberg said.

Greece Wins EU45 Billion Pledge to Blunt Crisis, Shore Up Euro

April 12 — European governments offered debt- plagued Greece a rescue package worth as much as 45 billion euros ($61 billion) at below-market interest rates in a bid to stem its fiscal crisis and restore confidence in the euro.

Forced into action by a surge in Greek borrowing costs to an 11-year high, euro-region finance ministers said yesterday they would offer as much as 30 billion euros in three-year loans in 2010 at around 5 percent. That’s less than the current three- year Greek bond yield of 6.98 percent. Another 15 billion euros would come from the International Monetary Fund.

“This is a huge amount,” said Stephen Jen, managing director at BlueGold Capital Management LLP in London and a former IMF economist. “This is more than a bazooka. They have gone nuclear on the issue of Greece. In the short run the market is short Greek assets so we’ll get a rally in those.”

With the euro facing the stiffest test since its debut in 1999, the 16-nation bloc maneuvered around rules barring the bailout of debt-stricken countries, aiming to prevent Greece’s financial plight from spreading and to mute concerns about the currency’s viability. Germany also abandoned an earlier demand that Greece pay market rates.

No Aid Request

The euro has dropped 5.7 percent against the dollar this year as the discord within Europe over the response to the Greek crisis sapped faith in Europe’s economic management. The single currency rose in Asian trading to $1.3634 from $1.35 on April 9.

Bond investors’ response will determine whether Greece needs to tap the aid, a Greek Finance Ministry official said in Athens yesterday. Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said the government plans to go ahead with debt sales, including a dollar-denominated bond, without taking up the offer for aid.

The package “sends a clear message that nobody can play with our common currency and our common fate,” Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou told reporters in Larnaca, Cyprus.

Yesterday’s teleconference of euro-region officials, which included European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet, left open just how much Greece might need in 2011 and 2012, the final years covered by the package.

“It shows there is money behind this,” Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker told reporters in Brussels yesterday after chairing the conference call. “The initiative for activating the mechanism rests with the Greek government.”

IMF Loan

Europe’s contribution would represent about two thirds of any aid, with the IMF chipping in the rest, European Union Economic and Monetary Commissioner Olli Rehn said.

“We cannot speak on behalf of the IMF, but we know that they are ready to cooperate and contribute with a substantial amount,” Rehn said. Greek, EU and IMF officials will meet today to start working on details.

The IMF was “ready to join the effort,” Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said an in e-mailed statement, without giving more details on the IMF contribution.

European rhetorical support in February and March failed to prevent Greek 10-year bond yields from soaring to 7.51 percent on April 8, according to Bloomberg generic prices, amid concern that Papandreou’s government will be swamped by its bills.

The jump in Greek yields to the highest since December 1998 helped overcome resistance to an aid package in Germany, which as Europe’s biggest economy would contribute almost a third of the loans, the largest single share.

Germany Backs Down

Germany “has lost the competition,” said Carsten Brzeski, an economist at ING Group in Brussels who used to work at the European Commission. “All that fuss and talk about not putting taxpayer money at risk has been made obsolete.”

The premium investors demand to buy Greek 10-year bonds instead of German bunds jumped to 442 basis points April 8, easing to 398 basis points the next day as speculation over a rescue gained steam.

In the compromise hammered out yesterday, the European loans would be tied to Euribor and priced above rates charged by the IMF, a nod to German opposition to subsidizing a country that lived beyond its means. The EU will offer a mix of fixed- rate and floating rate loans.

The IMF would charge less than the EU. Both types of funding would be offered at the same time, Rehn said. Transfers to Greece would be made by the ECB.

Greece last week raised its estimate of the 2009 deficit from 12.7 percent of gross domestic product to 12.9 percent, the highest in the euro’s history and more than four times the EU’s 3 percent limit.

Deficit Limits

While rules dictated by Germany in the 1990s foresee fines for countries that go over the limit, no penalty has ever been imposed. Germany also led the charge to loosen the rules in 2005 after three years of excessive deficits.

While all euro-region governments vowed to contribute, some would need parliamentary approval. Ireland, itself reeling from the financial crisis, would require “national legislation,” Finance Minister Brian Lenihan said in an e-mailed statement.

The Greek government has yet to request a European lifeline, confident that this year’s planned budget cut of 4 percentage points will stem speculation that it is heading for the euro region’s first-ever default. Fitch Ratings highlighted that risk by shaving Greece’s debt rating to BBB-, one level above junk, on April 9.

A combination of higher taxes, lower spending and salary cuts for public workers have prompted strikes and protests against Papandreou, a socialist elected in October on promises of raising wages.

Maturing Debt

The EU showed no sign of demanding further Greek austerity measures. Rehn hailed the Greek government for implementing “a very bold and ambitious program.”

Greece needs to raise 11.6 billion euros by the end of May to cover maturing bonds, and another 20 billion euros by the end of the year to pay debt coupons and finance this year’s deficit.

The debt agency plans to offer 1.2 billion euros of six- month and one-year notes tomorrow, in a test of investor confidence.

Greece is likely to need money by the end of April, said Erik Nielsen, London-based chief European economist at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Noting that the budget cuts threaten to cripple the economy, he said in a research note that “this thing is unlikely to go to bed anytime soon.”

Polish plane crash: investigators rule out technical fault

Russian investigators have ruled out technical faults as the cause of the air crash which killed 96 people, including the Polish President Lech Kaczynski, and appeared to blame the Polish pilots for the tragedy.
The crew of Mr Kaczynski’s plane, who were all members of the Polish Air Force, were said by investigators to have ignored repeated warnings not to land in thick fog. They are now studying black box recordings to try to work out why the pilot did not divert to another airport.

Speaking at a meeting with the Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin, who is in charge of the investigation, Russia’s chief investigator Alexander Bastrykin, said: “The recordings that we have confirm that there were no technical problems with the plane.
“The pilot was informed about complex weather conditions but nevertheless made a decision to land.”

Teams continued to sift through the wreckage of the plane at Smolensk, where Mr Kaczynski and those on board, including Poland’s army chief, the navy chief commander, and the governor of the Polish central bank, were heading to honour 22,000 Polish officers killed at Katyn by the Soviet secret police in 1940.

The news came as a shocked and grieving Poland welcomed home the body of its president. Hundreds of thousands lined the streets of Warsaw to pay their respects as Mr Kaczynski’s cavalcade wound its way through the capital to the presidential palace.

Investigators in Russia, who have been joined by Polish teams, have said that Captain Arkadiusz Protasiuk, 36, the flight’s first officer, had made three abortive attempts to land, and had been advised to fly to another airport, before deciding to make one last attempt. Both Captain Protasiuk and his second officer, Major Robert Grzywna, were experienced pilots with more than 5,000 hours of flying experience between them.

Lech Walesa, the Solidary founder and former president, said: “Someone must have been taking decisions on that plane. I don’t believe that the pilot took decisions single-handedly,” he told reporters. “That’s not possible. I have flown a lot and whenever there were doubts, they always came to the leaders and asked for a decision, and based on that, pilots took decisions. Sometimes the decision was against the leader’s instructions.”

However, questions were being asked last night about why a roll-call of Poland’s influential politicians and military chiefs were allowed to travel on the same Tu-154 aeroplane. Russian has withdrawn its Tu-154 fleet, the workhorse of Eastern Bloc civil aviation in the 1970s and 80s, from service because the planes are expensive on fuel and do not meet international noise restrictions. While there have been 66 crashes involving the planes in the last four decades, Poland has not retired the aeroplane because of cost. The presidential plane was fully overhauled in December.

Gregorz Holdanowicz, a Polish military aviation expert, said the only rule as that the president, the prime minister and the speaker could not travel on the same plane. He said that the cost of flying so many out to the event would have been a reason for carrying so many dignitaries on the same flight.

While Polish-Russian relations had been improving recently, there had been enmity between the two dating back to the Katyn slayings. President Kaczynski had angered the Kremlin with his as a staunch defender of Ukraine and Georgia against what he called Russia’s “new imperialism”. He had also supported the decision to allow the US to use Poland as a base for its missile shield programme.

There have been mounting conspiracy theories about Russian involvement in the crash appearing on the internet. Fyodor Lukyanov, a political analyst and editor of the journal Russia in World Affairs, said: “Kaczynski was, to put it lightly, not a friend of Russia. Nonetheless, he is being treated with the utmost respect by the Russian leadership.

“This crash, however, is symbolically very gloomy … and may reinforce in Poland the notion that everything associated with Russia is awful and bad.

“Even if it is confirmed that pilot error caused the crash, there will inevitably be those who say it was the KGB that killed Kaczynski.”

However, Witold Waszczykowski, deputy head of Poland’s National Security Bureau, said: “We did not expect this gentle, kind approach, this personal involvement from Putin,

“Naturally it will have a positive impact on the relationship between our countries. I can imagine a high-ranking Russian delegation from Moscow coming to Kaczynski’s funeral.”

In Poland, people were still struggling to come to terms with an accident described by Donald Tusk, the nation’s prime minister, as the worst tragedy to befall the nation since the end of the Second World War.

At midday on Sunday air-raid sirens wailed in Warsaw and across the country church bells tolled as Poles observed two minutes of silence as a precursor to a week of official mourning.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the president’s twin brother who travelled to Russia to formally identify the body, is said to be “devastated” by his loss. In a grim and sad ceremony the surviving Kaczynski knelt and prayed at the crash site for a man whose whole life and political career had been so much entwined with his own.

Bronislaw Komorowski, Poland’s acting president, now has 14 days to call new presidential elections, which must then take place within 60 days.

Who from President Kaczynski’s Law and Justice party will run for office is not clear, with the crash claiming the lives of other leading party lights, only Jaroslaw might have the necessary stature needed for a bid for the presidency.

The crash also delivered a devastating blow to the Polish army, which lost a number of its senior commanders at a time of intensive activity for the country’s armed forces. Poland has over 2,000 troops engaged in combat in Afghanistan and the loss of so many generals could not have come at a worse time.

The date of Mr Kaczynski’s funeral has not yet been set.

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