12 days before disaster: Poland no longer needs IMF

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Apr 112010
 

Twelve days before one of the most politically and militarily devastating plane crashes in history and during a visit to Warsaw by the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Poland’s Central Bank issued a statement declaring that the former communist country no longer needed help from the IMF.

“The situation with the Polish economy and the financial system is sufficiently good … that it is not necessary to ask the IMF for a further extension of the flexible credit line,” the bank said in a statement.

The central bank said it could instead provide the IMF with a loan to “help other countries overcome the effects of the global crisis.”

Yesterday’s horrific crash took the life of the head of Poland’s Central Bank along with the Polish President and virtually all of that country’s top military officials. All 97 people on board the Tupelov-154 military transport perished.

U.N. judge calls for prosecution of Pope Benedict

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Apr 112010
 

United Nations judge Geoffry Roberts wants to put the Pope of the Catholic Church on trial.

In a Guardian UK piece making its rounds this week in Catholic circles, Robertson demanded the pope be “put in the dock” so that the church might “feel the full weight of international law” over its thousands of pedophilia scandals.

The pope’s conduct, he said, “amounted to the criminal offence of aiding and abetting sex with minors,” making Benedict a justifiable target for either the International Criminal Court or a British court acting under the legal principal of universal jurisdiction.

Roberts also denies the sovereignty of the Vatican. He writes, “The anomalous claim of the Vatican to be a state – and of the pope to be a head of state and hence immune from legal action – cannot stand up to scrutiny.”