cryptogon.com

Ms Turner, 38, who was at the heart of the cash-for-honours inquiry in 2006 and 2007, was chosen by the former Prime Minister last spring to run his new Tony Blair Faith Foundation.

It has become a highly lucrative vehicle for the ex-premier, concentrating its activities at America’s Yale University, where Mr Blair teaches a course on ‘faith and globalisation’ – and where Ms Turner’s British-born father, Denys, is a theology professor.

Yale, which is one of America’s top three universities, has paid the foundation more than £127,000 since it appointed Mr Blair as its Howland Distinguished Fellow.

A recent posting on the foundation’s website announced that ‘a small team of staff’ will be based on the campus to ‘extend the [foundation’s] reach across North America’.

Yale maintains that Mr Blair’s post has nothing to do with Ms Turner’s father. But yesterday the university confirmed that the foundation’s office will be in the picturesque neo-Georgian divinity school complex, where Ms Turner’s father is based.

The foundation insists it wants to promote understanding between world religions. But The Mail on Sunday has been told that several of its key figures are Catholics.

Mr Blair converted to Catholicism in 2007 with his wife Cherie, a Catholic, as his sponsor. It is less well known that it is a faith he shares with Ms Turner and her father. Sources close to the Blairs say that Ms Turner was one of the figures in whom Mr Blair confided as he decided whether to convert to Catholicism.

Professor Turner is a prominent writer and scholar who once described himself as a ‘Marxist Catholic’. And intriguingly he is a former member of Opus Dei, a conservative Catholic lay organisation shrouded in mystery with rituals that include wearing a cilice – a spiked chain strapped around the thigh.

Author Dan Brown is accused of exaggerating its alleged secretive sadomasochistic practices in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. According to Catholic magazine The Tablet, Professor Turner was a member of Opus Dei for eight years and faced threats that he would ‘lose his soul’ when he left.

The magazine said that Professor Turner believed Opus Dei ‘traded on the instinct which Catholics had for obedience, exercised a kind of mind control and cultivated a psychology of dependence’.

The article continued: ‘He des-cribes leaving as a catastrophic experience for him and was told he would lose his soul over it.’

Ms Turner accompanied Mr Blair to Yale last month for his seminars on faith and globalisation. And breaking her silence about her association with him for the first time, she contributed to an article about him in New York magazine.

Speaking warmly about Mr Blair’s devotion to the new charity, she declared: ‘You can make the case extremely convincingly for why religion is an absolutely terrible thing, and you’ll be right in every respect. Except for the fact that it’s not only like that and, anyway, it’s not going to go away.’

She disclosed that she is so close to him she can predict his choice of clothing when he visits his old haunts in the North-East of England. ‘Whenever he goes back, it’s fantastic,’ she said gushingly. ‘He wears a tracksuit all day.’

Ms Turner was born in Dublin in 1970 and spent her childhood moving between university towns as her father’s career took off. He was a professor of theology at Cambridge before his appointment at Yale.

She is a committed socialist and launched the Northern version of Big Issue magazine, where she earned a formidable reputation for using her charm to raise big sums of money from businesses. It was when she joined Labour’s ruling National Executive Committee in 2000 that she caught the eye of Mr Blair, who promptly recruited her to No 10. A former Downing St aide said: ‘Ruth is clever, sexy and has a sparkling personality. Everybody loved her at No 10. Underneath it all, she is very tough, but she has this delicate vulnerable look that makes you want to put your arm round her.’

Ms Turner worked 18-hour days at Downing Street, often reporting directly to Mr Blair.
He displayed fierce loyalty to her when she was arrested and quizzed by police in the cash-for-honours row, and took the unusual step of issuing a statement defending her. ‘Ruth is a person of the highest integrity for whom I have great regard and I continue to have complete confidence in her,’ he said.

After being cleared in the scandal, Ms Turner remained loyal to Mr Blair. When he left No 10 in 2007, she was top of the list of Downing Street staff he wanted to take with him.

Professor Turner told The Mail on Sunday that he had gone to great lengths to avoid any connection to Mr Blair’s activities at Yale. ‘I have been careful to be sure that my relationship with Ruth is kept entirely out of the way of her professional relationship with Tony Blair,’ he said.

Explaining why he left Opus Dei, Professor Turner said: ‘I moved in a pendulum-like way into a rather opposed position politically and eventually the pendulum settled down in the middle somewhere.

‘I am a Catholic, but I wouldn’t describe myself as a Marxist now. I’ve been through that phase and came out of it at the other end.’

A spokesman for Mr Blair said yesterday: ‘Professor Turner is a highly respected member of the [Yale] faculty but he had no role in establishing the partnership between Yale and the foundation.’

Asked about the foundation’s expansion plans and whether Catholicism played a role in it, his spokesman drew attention to an article on its website, which said: ‘As Prime Minister of Britain, Tony Blair was officially an Anglican. Unofficially, though, he was a practising Roman Catholic.’

But that was then and this is now. And as CBS News correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports, even Dubai is feeling the pinch of the worldwide economic crisis.

The gulf city state’s property prices went up as fast and as high as the towering buildings. But reality has suddenly intruded.

One investor said it was as if someone had thrown a switch, as the global credit crunch slammed a city that was, in effect, the world’s biggest construction site

It took just 20 years for Dubai to go from a desert outpost with a handful of office towers to a world metropolis, where one fifth of the world’s cranes operate, and property became a very hot commodity, with some people playing real estate the way others play poker.

“People were buying and flipping properties on a launch basis,” says Manesh Khadri of Century 21 Real Estate. “You launch a property and you flip it within the same day.”

Before an apartment was even built you could away with tens, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Developers promised: Pay $140,000 for an unbuilt apartment, and within six months, reap a $46,000 profit. So as fast as the city expanded, investors snapped up the real estate, taking on big debt.

American Internet entrepreneur Mahmood Panjwani understands the risk of building a business

But, “I really did not know what risk was until I came here,” Panjwani says. “I mean Dubai is like Silicon Valley on steroids from a risk perspective.”

Buying real estate with little money down and lots of debt is risky indeed. Panjwani saw trouble coming and got his cash out of the market.

“There’s a lot of fear,” he said. “How low can it go down? How long will it stay down?”

Take the world’s tallest building, the Burj Dubai, which remains under construction. In the last month prices there dropped at least 50 percent.

House prices on the man-made Palm – the iconic frond-shaped island colony – down 40 percent.

A seven bedroom villa? $10 million last year, under $6 million now.

Banks aren’t lending. Projects are shelved. And the normally secretive government has had to acknowledge it has one of the highest levels of per-capita debt in the world — and not enough oil to pay for it.

“The worst is still yet to come in the sense of people losing properties” Khadri says. “That will happen.”

A federal judge ordered Madoff to provide the commission with an account of all investments, loans, lines of credit, business interests, brokerage accounts and other holdings. The court

did not authorise its public disclosure, said a commission spokesman, Andrew Calamari, who confirmed receipt of the list.

“I think one of the fears here is that much of this money may be in offshore funds,” said Professor John Coffee, of Columbia Law School, adding the commission wanted to keep the assets secret to protect them. “There is the danger that foreign regulators and foreign creditors may seek to seize that money if the names and sources are made public.”

Madoff was charged last month by federal prosecutors with directing an alleged Ponzi scheme through his New York investment firm. His lawyer, Ira Sorkin, has said Madoff’s company is co-operating with the Government.

Shortly before he was arrested, Madoff allegedly told employees that he had $US200 million to $US300 million left, according to an FBI complaint. Mr Sorkin declined to comment on the amount of Madoff’s remaining assets.

Madoff’s firm collapsed after he was arrested on December 11. He told his sons that he directed the Ponzi scheme, in which old investors are paid off with money from new ones.

The firm is in liquidation under the Securities Investor Protection Corporation.

The list of Madoff’s assets may be attractive to his investors, including hedge funds, celebrities, universities and charities, as they sue to recover their money. His advisory business could have had more than 4000 customers, investigators said.

Losses disclosed by some clients could have been inflated by gains held in their accounts with Madoff.

The Institute for Supply Management’s factory index fell to 32.4, below economists’ forecasts and the lowest level since 1980, from 36.2 the prior month. Readings less than 50 signal contraction. The group’s new-orders measure reached the lowest level on record and prices slid the most since 1949.

“Every component suggests that the weakness is going to carry over into 2009,” Mark Vitner, a senior economist at Wachovia Corp. in Charlotte, North Carolina, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “There’s just not a whole lot of new business coming in,” and companies will have a “painful adjustment” as consumers shun spending.

Shops have been forced to step up security around food counters after sharp increases in the quantity of beef, chicken, bacon and cheese going missing.

Tesco, Iceland and Marks & Spencer have all reported rises in theft in their stores this year. The problem has become so acute in some areas that retailers, including Somerfield, have experimented with fitting electronic tags to expensive cuts of meat.

Over the past decade, most shoplifters have pilfered small high-value items – such as perfumes, packets of razor blades and DVDs – to fund drug habits.

Richard Dodd, spokesman for the British Retail Consortium, said: “In difficult times likes these, there is evidence that the range of people stealing expands. They are stealing a bigger range of items and going for things they want to use rather than sell.

“Retailers believe there has been an increase in theft as a result of the downturn and are tightening their security. More security staff are being taken on and the tagging of items is becoming more widespread.”

Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College in London, said: “If members of the public are risking prosecution to steal basic staples, that adds to the evidence that families are experiencing real hardship. It’s not just shops feeling the pinch. Their customers are too.”

The latest figures from the pensions advisers Aon Consulting show that a steep decline in the FTSE 100 over last year and a sharp drop in commercial property values has sent most final-salary schemes into crisis and pushed fund deficits to new lows. According to government figures, company pension fund deficits rose in the 12 months to November from £58bn to £155bn.

Aon Consulting warned that the figures underestimated the problem and pension funds had suffered a £226bn loss on their investments in the year to October.

However, accounting rules – which critics argue distort company pension scheme fund values – will show a rise in assets. For the top 200 companies in Britain, that will mean a £13bn surplus at the end of 2008. Aon says the top 100 firms have seen a £5bn improvement over the last year, based on current accounting rules.

Auditors must calculate deficits using the IAS19 accounting method, which assumes pension funds are invested entirely in corporate bonds and ties the value of the fund to current bond yields. Calculations under IAS19 put pension deficits at £2bn in December 2007. Figures from Aon show that a subsequent rise in bond yields turned that small deficit into a surplus of £3bn.

The average person now spends 2-1/4 hours of every day worrying — six and half years of the average life span — a figure up 30 minutes a day from last year, according to the worry index compiled by reallyworried.com, a support group.

Young adults — those aged between 16 and 24 — worry the most, and women worry substantially more than men, according to the survey of 1,400 people nationwide.

The top five concerns in 2008 were: the cost of living, energy prices, personal health, outgoings and income, and personal debt.

Job security, which last year didn’t figure in the top 25 worries, shot up to number 7 in the rankings, one notch below recession and a bigger concern than crime.

So much fretting can take a terrible toll on people’s health and their sex lives, according to the survey’s compilers.

One in five questioned said they drowned their concerns in drink, up 50 percent on last year. One in six said they now shy away from sex because of their constant fretting.

“It is alarming to learn from this research just how many people in Britain are chronic worriers,” said Phillip Hodson, a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy.

That’s right: With more than three job seekers for every opening, more workers are having to take significant pay cuts to find employment.

“For people who have been laid off, this is obviously a buyer’s market,” said Ravin Jesuthasan, a managing principal at Towers Perrin. “We’re seeing pay levels in new positions coming down.”

In fact, 63% of unemployed workers said they would be willing to accept a job offer that pays less than their previous job, according to a recent survey conducted by the National Employment Law Project. Still, only 37% of respondents expressed high confidence in finding a job in the next four months despite being willing to make such a sacrifice.

Nearly 2 million jobs were lost in 2008 and economists say the unemployment rate, which stands at 6.7%, will continue to rise into 2010.

“People realize that this is a different environment, said Jeff Joerres, chairman and CEO of employment services firm Manpower. “People are more anxious and are willing to secure something even if it is less.”

Shaun Chedister, 30, is one of those people. Chedister was laid off from his job at Washington Mutual at the end of last year. After eight months of actively looking for work to help support his wife and four children, he accepted an offer from Ernst & Young even though the new position as an executive administrator paid less than half of what he was making before.

“My unemployment had run out, and I had to get something,” he explained.

But the adjustment to making $66,000 a year from $125,000 has been hard. “For the last four to five years I’d been making six figures,” Chedister said. “My lifestyle had been at a certain level.”

Now Chedister said he’s looking for a more affordable home. Last week one of the family’s cars was repossessed after he got behind on the payments.

“It could be worse,” he said, I could still be unemployed.”

Often the hardest part of accepting a pay cut is the change in lifestyle that goes along with it, says Manpower’s Joerres. “When you recalibrate your earnings expectations that means you have to recalibrate your lifestyle as well.”

And for those living paycheck to paycheck, that can mean having to move, sell possessions or give up everyday extravagances such as cable TV or phone service.

After Jarrod Posner, 34, was laid off from his $110,000-a-year job as a mortgage lender for D.R. Horton, he had to change careers to find employment. After months of looking he took a job as an enrollment counselor at the University of Phoenix – a position that paid $33,000.

“I was actually thankful because I was getting a job, but at the same time my wife and I realized we had to make a lot of lifestyle changes,” Posner said.

Since then, the Posners, who have two children, foreclosed on their home, moved into a rental property, downgraded from two cars to one and learned how to budget, he said. They’ve also given up their telephone and cable TV package. “All the little luxuries we don’t enjoy anymore,” he said.