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The report “will shock us all,” said Diarmuid Martin, during Mass at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral.

The archbishop said the report, compiled by the Dublin Archdiocese Commission of Investigation, is expected to show that “thousands of children or young people across Ireland were abused by priests in the period under investigation and the horror of that abuse was not recognized for what it is.”

The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.

“It felt a little bit like Dr. Strangelove,” one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told POLITICO.

But instead of military brass plotting America’s defense, it was hedge-fund managers, professors and executives from at least one investment bank, UBS – all invited by the Pentagon to play out global scenarios that could shift the balance of power between the world’s leading economies.

Their efforts were carefully observed and recorded by uniformed military officers and members of the U.S. intelligence community.

What she did not tell anyone was that she had no legal right to be in the home.

Ms. Omega, 48, is one of the beneficiaries of the foreclosure crisis. Through a small advocacy group of local volunteers called Take Back the Land, she moved from a friend’s couch into a newly empty house that sold just a few years ago for more than $400,000.

Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said about a dozen advocacy groups around the country were actively moving homeless people into vacant homes — some working in secret, others, like Take Back the Land, operating openly.

In addition to squatting, some advocacy groups have organized civil disobedience actions in which borrowers or renters refuse to leave homes after foreclosure.

The groups say that they have sometimes received support from neighbors and that beleaguered police departments have not aggressively gone after squatters.

Barack Obama shunned political contributions from lobbyists and, on his second day as president, announced new ethics rules to reduce their influence. Republican nominee John McCain disdained lobbyists as “birds of prey.”

Still, about one-quarter of the House and Senate members who retired or lost elections last year have found new jobs with lobbying firms, where business is booming as Obama pushes for multitrillion-dollar changes in federal banking, health care, energy and military procurement policies.

“Even though some people deplore lobbying, it’s still a growth profession,” said Bill Allison, a senior fellow with the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based watchdog group.

Law, lobbying and consulting firms have announced the hiring of at least 15 of 61 House and Senate members who left politics or were defeated in 2008.

The new hires include Jim McCrery of Louisiana, who was the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee before moving to Capitol Counsel LLC, where clients include Roche Holdings AG, the world’s biggest drugmaker by value. Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican who sat on the Senate Finance Committee, joined the Covington & Burling LLP firm, which has advised the Investment Company Institute, the mutual-fund industry trade group.

New York Republican James Walsh, who retired in January after 20 years in Congress and joined the K&L Gates LLP law and lobbying firm, said companies have legitimate needs for experienced advisers.

‘Demagoguery Going On’

Instead the $9 billion development named CityCenter — touted as the city’s most ambitious endeavor — has come to symbolize a global retail and leisure slump and the city’s struggles to come to grips with crushing unemployment and dwindling casino revenue.

Partners MGM Mirage — struggling to bankroll the project’s ballooning cost — and Dubai World had pondered placing the development under bankruptcy, thrusting its future into question, sources say.

Things appear to be buzzing along at the 67-acre glass and steel mini-metropolis of envisioned condominiums, hotels, shops and casinos in the middle of the Strip, dwarfing MGM Mirage’s own sprawling Bellagio and Harrah’s Caesar’s Palace.

The complex is scheduled to open in phases starting late this year, although analysts say it’s unclear if that target will be met.

Motorists and pedestrians slow to gawk at buildings glittering in the desert sun, while workers in white hard-hats and orange vests throng the site.

But trouble is brewing beneath the surface. In March, Dubai World, the development arm of the United Arab Emirates, sued MGM Mirage, claiming mismanagement and wanting out of further financial commitments. The U.S. company hired bankruptcy counsel, setting off alarms about solvency. And the company was forced to inject an emergency $200 million to keep construction going.

“The events of the last six months have been our Pearl Harbor, economically,” said Bill Thompson, gaming expert and professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “CityCenter might be too big to fail. If it opens, it’s a dramatic gesture that says we’re winning, we’re not defeated, we’re on the way back.”

The purchases from General Motors Corp., Chrysler LLC and Ford Motor Co. are being made from the $787 billion stimulus package “to increase demand for American auto companies during these difficult economic times,” a White House announcement said.

The General Services Administration, the government’s landlord agency, will spend $285 million from the stimulus law to buy fuel-efficient vehicles. About 2,500 of the vehicles will be hybrid sedans that will be ordered by April 15. This is the largest one-time purchase to date of hybrid vehicles for the federal government fleet, according to the statement.

“By purchasing fuel-efficient vehicles from American automakers over the next two months, this move will help stimulate the economy, support the auto industry and achieve energy-efficiency goals,” Obama said in the statement.

Late last month the president rejected recovery plans submitted by General Motors and Chrysler, and gave GM, the biggest U.S. automaker, 60 days to develop an acceptable strategy. The president said No. 3 Chrysler can’t survive on its own and gave it 30 days to complete a planned partnership with Italy’s Fiat SpA.

“This is going to wreck us,” said Black, 62, speaking of GM retirees. “These pledges from our companies are now garbage.”

As the biggest U.S. automaker teeters near bankruptcy, workers and retirees like Black are bracing for what may be $16 billion in pension losses if the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. has to take over the plans, according to the agency. As many as half of GM’s 670,000 pension-plan participants might see their benefits trimmed if that happened, an actuary familiar with the company’s retirement programs estimates.

The request is expected to pay for those conflicts for the rest of the 2009 budget year, two Democratic congressional sources said.

The money would bring the running tab for both conflicts to about $947 billion, according to figures from the Congressional Research Service.

More than three-quarters of the $864 billion appropriated so far has gone to the war in Iraq, the agency estimated.

Since taking office in January, President Obama has announced plans to shift troops out of Iraq and beef up U.S. forces in Afghanistan, where American troops have been battling al Qaeda and Taliban fighters since al Qaeda’s 2001 attacks.

In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Obama said the situation in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan “demands urgent attention.”

“The Taliban is resurgent, and al Qaeda threatens America from its safe haven along the Afghan-Pakistan border,” Obama wrote in submitting the funding request.