The boy told Mr Katz that his brother had seen him and Mr Jackson engaged in a sex

Posted by admin · · Jump to comments

The boy told Mr Katz that his brother had seen him and Mr Jackson engaged in a sex act, and that he was offered wine on some occasions or "Jesus Juice", as Mr Jackson apparently called it.Mr Jackson was in Washington DC yesterdaymeeting black members of Congress about fighting Aids and HIV in Africa. This evening, he will receive a humanitarian award from an association of wives of African ambassadors.Theodore Boutros, a lawyer representing several news organisations, including The New York Times and the Associated Press, has filed a complaint with the California appeals court about the unprecedented secrecy surrounding the grand jury. "County officials have invoked an extraordinary, and seemingly unprecedented, approach to grand jury secrecy... that involved moving the grand jury from undisclosed secret location to undisclosed secret location so that the press and public will not know where the jury is meeting," he wrote.These latest allegations became public when police raided Mr Jackson's California home, Neverland, in November. He turned himself into police, amid a media frenzy, two days later and was formally charged shortly after.. The Bush administration yesterday vowed to stay the course in Iraq despite the attacks in Fallujah that ended with jubilant Iraqis dragging the charred bodies of Americans through the streets.

Meanwhile, US cable channels showed heavily edited images of the burning shells of two sports utility vehicles in Fallujah itself, in which four foreign contractors, at least three of them Americans and another a woman, were ambushed, according to the US. "We are making progress."Nonetheless, the gruesome photos from Fallujah circulating on the internet yesterday were proof that Iraq remains a dangerous place where foreign soldiers and contractors alike venture at their peril - exactly the message, of course, that the insurgents intended to send.The deaths of the five soldiers are a separate reminder that US forces in Iraq are suffering losses almost daily.In the 335 days since President Bush proclaimed an end to "major combat operations" on 1 May 2003, 461 US servicemen have died, almost four times as many as during the six week-long war proper, and at least 3,000 have been wounded. Compared with the Golden Age - which includes the period of sharply rising inflation from the late 1960s onwards - inflation volatility in the major economies has fallen by 60 to 80 per cent in the past decade.The improvement has been so marked that the record in most European countries now matches Golden Age conditions. The first was the 20 years from the end of the Korean War to the growth climacteric of 1973, a period often referred to as a "Golden Age". Then there was the turbulent decade of large oil price and other shocks, followed by the next decade of marked disinflation and, lastly, the benign decade ending in 2003.Comparing the past decade with the Golden Age, growth volatility has fallen by between 40 per cent and 60 per cent in the major economies except France, and all of them are less volatile compared with the decade ending in 1983.The changes in inflation volatility are more dramatic still. The same is true of many other economies, although Japan and Germany have performed relatively poorly. Some believe stability is the result of good luck - with the implication that instability could easily return I disagree. With present-day monetary policies, and assuming the world is spared cataclysmic events, I believe economic stability will last.Since the Great Inflation of the 1970s, economic stability has been fostered by improved monetary policy and by associated changes in the behaviour of inflation, which has become less self-feeding.

Economic shocks and surprises have become less volatile for the same reason.Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, has argued that the past decade was an exceptional period, unlikely to be repeated.I am inclined to agree, but our projections show most economies continuing to enjoy an unusual degree of stability judged by historical standards.The history of business cycles over the past 50 years can be conveniently summarised using a measure of volatility of economic growth and inflation We divided the past 50 years into four periods. For the past 10 years, the US and British economies have been unusually tranquil. Activity has continued to fluctuate, but less violently; severe recessions have been avoided; and inflation has remained low and stable. The Financial services Authority yesterday said it was investigating allegations that Boots, the high street retailer, allowed details of a trading update to leak before a formal statement from the company.