US nun admits taking $125K from churches

A ROMAN Catholic nun with a gambling addiction has pleaded guilty to stealing nearly $US130,000 ($A125,430) from two parishes in rural western New York state.

The Daily News of Batavia reports 68-year-old Sister Mary Anne Rapp pleaded guilty Monday in Orleans County Court to grand larceny

She admits she stole the money from St Mary's Church in Holley and St Mark's Church in Kendall from March 2006 to April 2011.

Rapp faces up to six months in jail when she's sentenced July 1.

She'll also be required to pay restitution that would be worked out at a later date.

Rapp was arrested in November after discrepancies were found during an audit.

Investigators said she stole the money to feed a gambling addiction and spent the money at western New York casinos.

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IMF warns central banks to watch inflation

THE International Monetary Fund has warned central banks to keep an eye on inflation and resist political pressure to focus policy only on lowering unemployment.

With many governments desperate to find ways to generate jobs, the IMF said on Tuesday, it was ever more important for central banks to assert their independence to keep an eye on all potential problems in the economy - whether growth, prices, or jobs.

"In the wake of the Great Recession, there is political urgency to reduce unemployment," the IMF said in a section of its World Economic Outlook.

"Instead, what our analysis underscores is that, whatever the source, limits on central banks' independence and operational restrictions that limit their flexibility in responding to evolving challenges can cause problems and must be avoided."

While the IMF played down the immediate threat of a surge in inflation, many economists remain concerned that the exceptionally loose monetary policies pursued by major central banks will eventually spark runaway price increases.

In the four years since the global financial crisis, advanced economies have unloaded massive monetary firepower to try to jump-start growth and create jobs.

The US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England have employed large bond-purchase programs, or quantitative easing (QE), while the European Central Bank has focused on lending.

Last week, the Bank of Japan announced an aggressive QE program and monetary policy to tackle deflation and end decades of tepid growth.

So far the wave of easy money has not yet unhinged widespread expectations that prices will remain tame amid weak growth.

The IMF noted broad evidence that, since the mid-1990s, inflation has become "better anchored around long-term expectations, which themselves have become more stable."

But the IMF said the nature of inflation in advanced economies had changed since the 1970s.

In the past, inflation rose as unemployment fell, an inverse relationship known as the Phillips curve.

That relationship has flattened out, according to IMF analysts, and they now warn that inflation can suddenly pick up without an improvement in joblessness if other aspects of the situation change - particularly market and consumer expectations about inflation.

"The greatest risk for inflation, just as in the 1970s, is the possibility that expectations will become disanchored," the IMF said.

That underscores the need for central bankers currently pumping up their economies with easy money to not take their eyes off the threat of inflation.

"Central banks are already making use of whatever flexibility they have in responding to the unprecedented circumstances following the Great Recession," the international lender said.

"However, changes in the behaviour of inflation and profound challenges in the aftermath of the Great Recession may mean there is need for even greater flexibility."

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SAfrican feather thieves target ostriches

SOUTH African thieves are invading ostrich farms and poaching feathers from the giant birds, in a crime that has baffled local farmers, an industry chief says.

"This started during the last six weeks," said Piet Kleyn, the chief of the South African Ostrich Business Chamber.

He said thieves sneaked up on the birds at night and plucked their feathers without using proper tools.

"The frightened birds are badly treated and some die because of the terrible injuries," Kleyn said.

At least 50 birds in the ostrich growing region of Oudtshoorn, in the Western Cape, have been attacked in recent months.

According to Kleyn, even birds with feathers that had not yet fully grown were targeted.

The cause is not known, but it is believed that the trend is driven by good market prices for ostrich feathers.

The feathers are much sought after in the fashion industry. They are also used to accessorise carnival costumes and make feather dusters.

The South African ostrich industry is often hampered by a ban on meat export, due to avian influenza outbreaks.

South Africa is one of the leaders in ostrich production, with 75 per cent of global market share.

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One screen not enough for US viewers

AMERICAN television viewers are increasingly finding that one screen won't do: almost all have a second-screen device and 87 per cent use it while watching shows, a survey shows.

The NPD survey said multi-tasking consumers were splitting their attention between televisions and their laptops, tablets, smartphones, and other devices.

But most of these viewers are not interacting directly with the TV programs through games, voting or other activities.

The most common second-screen interaction was learning about actors in a show (29.8 per cent) or seeking information about the program they were watching (23.1 per cent), NPD found in survey released on Tuesday.

"Viewers are interested in searching to find further information about TV shows they are watching, but they are not using games and other immersive applications created as a component of the programming," said NPD's Russ Crupnick.

"This situation creates a potential diversion from advertising, and it will take a combined effort from content owners, advertisers, broadcasters, and others to present an aligned second-screen experience that will appeal to viewers."

The survey found PCs were the devices most used simultaneously with TV (60 per cent), followed by smartphones (55 per cent), and tablets (49 per cent).

Just 19.4 per cent said they shopped for a product seen on television, and 11.8 per cent said they played a game related to a show.

Laptop users and consumers between the ages of 35 and 49 were most likely to shop for products via their second-screen devices.

"Converting viewers into impulse shoppers has big potential impact for advertisers, who can leverage second screens to further connect with consumers watching TV," Crupnick said.

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Quake near Iran nuclear plant kills 20

A POWERFUL earthquake has struck near Iran's Gulf port city of Bushehr, killing at least 20 people and injuring 650 but leaving Iran's only nuclear power plant intact, officials say.

Shocks from the quake were felt across the Gulf in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, provoking panic and the brief evacuation of some office towers, residents and media said.

At least 20 bodies had been taken to the morgue in the city of Khormoj, an unnamed hospital official told Iranian state news agency IRNA.

Khormoj, east of provincial capital Bushehr, is about 35km from Kaki.

Bushehr provincial Governor Fereydoon Hasanvand said at least 650 people needed medical help.

There were no immediate details on where the casualties occurred, but the head of Iran's Red Crescent rescue corps, Mahmoud Mozafar, said it appeared at least one village near Khormoj had been razed.

Media reports said search and rescue teams had been sent to the area, where telephones and electricity had been cut.

Meanwhile, Hasanvand told state television "no damage at all has been caused" to the nuclear plant.

The facility's chief engineer, Mahmoud Jafari, told Arabic-language Al-Alam television "no operational or security protocols were breached".

The 6.1 magnitude quake hit at 4.22pm (2152 AEST) with a depth of 12 kilometres, in the area of Kaki, nearly 90km southeast of Bushehr, the Iran Seismological Centre said.

The agency has so far reported more than a dozen after shocks, the strongest at 5.3 magnitude.

The US Geological Survey ranked the quake at a more powerful 6.3 magnitude.

In Dubai, hundreds of kilometres down the Gulf from Bushehr and home to the world's tallest building, Burj Khalifa, local media reported that several high-rise buildings were briefly evacuated.

"Chandeliers were shaking," tweeted one resident.

Iran sits astride several major fault lines and is prone to frequent earthquakes.

A double earthquake struck northwest Iran last August, killing more than 300 people.

In December 2010, a big quake struck the southern city of Bam, killing 31,000.

The long-delayed Bushehr nuclear power plant is yet to become fully operational.

Iran is at loggerheads with world powers over its development of a controversial nuclear program, which the Western and Israel suspect is aimed at military objectives despite Tehran's denials.

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Killer mum on her way back to Sydney

KILLER mum Allyson McConnell is set to touch down in Sydney this morning, leaving behind shattered lives and a political firestorm in Canada.

McConnell, 34, who was sentenced to six years' jail for drowning her two young sons in a bathtub in her adopted home town of Millet, Alberta, was taken through a non-public security checkpoint at Edmonton airport on Monday night.

According to Canadian media reports, she flew from Edmonton to Vancouver, where she caught a Sydney-bound Air Canada flight.

Her mother, Helen Meager from Gosford on the NSW Central Coast, was reportedly accompanying McConnell on the 15.5 hour journey from Vancouver to Sydney.

McConnell's former husband, Curtis McConnell, along with prosecutors and the Alberta Justice Minister, fought to keep McConnell in Canada until the appeals for her six-year sentence and acquittal on second-degree murder charges were heard.

"We fear that if Allyson Meager McConnell is deported to Australia, we will never see her face justice for the horror and terror she inflicted on two innocent babies before killing them," Mr McConnell's family said in a statement released on Sunday.

"How can we be assured that this case will not get swept under the rug when we have not been kept in the loop up to this point?"

McConnell admitted she drowned her sons, two-year-old Connor and 10-month-old Jayden, in the bathtub in 2010 and at her trial last year she was found guilty of two counts of manslaughter, but not second-degree murder.

The judge found McConnell was suffering psychological issues and there was reasonable doubt she had the specific intent to kill Connor and Jayden.

While McConnell was sentenced to six years, with time already served credits, she spent just 10 months in the psychiatric ward of Alberta Hospital.

The trial heard how the McConnells' marriage had broken down in 2009, Mr McConnell moved out of the family home and filed for divorce and a judge ordered McConnell could not take her sons back to Australia.

Mr McConnell found his two sons floating in the bathtub, with his former wife's wedding ring sitting on the toilet seat next to the bath.

McConnell's release after 10 months has led to a war of words between Alberta politicians, and their federal counterparts, with each side blaming the other for McConnell's release ahead of the appeals and exit to Australia.

Alberta's Justice Minister Jonathan Denis has vowed to extradite McConnell from Australia if the appeals for a stiffer sentence are successful.

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Reagan-Thatcher: allies but often at odds

WHEN US president Ronald Reagan ordered the 1983 invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada after a coup, he got an earful from an angry world leader: his closest ally, Britain's Margaret Thatcher.

Friends with her fellow conservative confidante since the mid-1970s, the prime minister was furious she had not been consulted ahead of the US storming of a territory in the British Commonwealth.

Thatcher and Reagan were ideological soul mates, after all - two Western giants who were staring down the Soviet empire while sharing free-market and anti-communist convictions that led to startling shifts in the political and economic landscapes of their countries.

That did not stop Reagan from what he described in his diary at the time as his need for operational secrecy.

A livid Thatcher summoned assistant secretary of state Richard Burt, who "just let her yell at us for a couple of hours", he recalled to AFP after Thatcher died of a stroke on Monday aged 87.

The episode illustrates the complexities of the deep but volatile friendship between the leaders that endured a pinballing of crises and lasted well beyond Reagan's 1981-1989 presidency and Thatcher's 1979-1990 premiership.

Fierce defenders of their own interests, together they ushered in dramatic turnarounds from the economic malaise gripping their countries and rolled back the welfare state movement as they pushed to shrink government and grow the global free market.

US lawmakers bent over with praise of Thatcher and the relationship she cultivated with the man she called her "dear friend".

President Barack Obama was reminded of her "standing shoulder to shoulder with President Reagan," while Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner spoke of Thatcher's "loyalty to Ronald Reagan and their friendship that we all admired".

Looking back, Burt said the two leaders "had a very warm relationship. They saw the world in similar ways."

Nancy Reagan agreed, telling MSNBC on Monday: "I loved it that she and Ronnie were as close as they were."

But while images of "The Gipper" driving a beaming "Iron Lady" around Camp David in a golf cart filled newspapers, they masked crucial disagreements about Cold War flashpoints like the Falklands, the Soviet Union, nuclear threats and the Middle East.

"On all these things we now know they disagreed, and very often Margaret Thatcher would tear a strip off the president during their phone calls," said Bard College professor Richard Aldous, author of Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship.

"So I think that the very kind of 'flowers and champagne' image that they very often liked to present is very far from the much harder political reality."

But such shrewdness hardly undermined the most storied trans-Atlantic partnership of the last 70 years.

"It just shows how incredibly clever they were at ... marketing their relationship in a kind of political marriage," Aldous said.

They came from similarly humble backgrounds, and each grew up far from their nations' capitals, wary of big government.

Reagan wrote in his memoirs after hosting Thatcher for his first White House state dinner that he was "immediately" smitten.

"She was warm, feminine, gracious and intelligent - and it was evident from our first words that we were soul mates when it came to reducing government and expanding economic freedom," Reagan noted.

Thatcher later returned the compliment, praising Reagan for having "won the Cold War without firing a shot".

But in private they were often at odds.

When Thatcher ordered British troops deployed to the windswept Falkland Islands in April 1982 amid a sovereignty dispute with Argentina, Reagan spoke with his friend several times by phone in an effort to avoid war.

He dispatched his top diplomat Alexander Haig on a mission of shuttle diplomacy between London and Buenos Aires, but the talks fizzled.

After a May 13 call to Thatcher, Reagan wrote in his diary: "I talked to Margaret but don't think I persuaded her against further action."

In 1986 the tension rose again, after the Reykjavik Summit where Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev pressed for a dramatic reduction in their nuclear arsenals.

Thatcher two years earlier had met with Gorbachev and famously said that "we can do business together", but after Reykjavik she went to Camp David and quietly berated the US president for exposing Western Europe's defensive flank with his nuclear stance.

"When Margaret Thatcher got upset, people noticed in Washington," Burt said.

"She had a credibility that nobody else in Europe had with people in the White House."

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