The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 2

2 NEWS The Guardian Friday May 24 1996 ends well, ma'am Economy limits scope for a giveaway budget, CBI warns the Chancellor Sarah ftylo and Larry Elliott Retail sales 1990100 110 GDP Percentage change 5 PSBR bn 50 dry and season in position, had to be reinvented. The 14-truss celling uses 70 massive Hereford oak trees. Mr Downes, nervous of being accused of tree abuse, has checked, and says that 110,000 oaks are harvested every year in Britain, but more are planted. "It is not a copy of gothic, but a modern reinterpretation of the gothic spirit," he said. Contemporary architects had clamoured for the hall to be rebuilt to a modern design.

"But so much of what survives is gothic, they would both Analysts said the outlook for high street spending was reasonably healthy. The shadow trade and industry secretary, Margaret Beckett, said the problem was a lack of investment, while the CBI highlighted the impact of recession in Europe on manufacturing exports. The CBI's monthly snapshot of the manufacturing sector showed weak demand for factory goods will continue to subdue this part of, the economy. More factories reported high levels of stocks than in' the previous survey, and with orders at their lowest since December 1993, the CBI said they expected manufacturers to meet what demand there was with existing goods. The CBI believes factory output will grow by just 1 per cent in 1996, but Mi-Major could reap the benefit of faster expansion next year, if he can cling on until the end of the Parliament.

With the cost of the BSE crisis set to add 0.5 billion to the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement this year, the CBI said the budget deficit would come down slowly from 31.9 billion in 1995-96 to 26.1 billion in 1996-97. The effect of the global ban oh British beef is also likely to re-inforce the current poor performance of UK trade. Office for National Statistics data yesterday showed that imports grew faster than exports in the first quarter of this year, holding back growth to just 0.4 per cent. CBI chief economist Kate Barker said stronger consumer spending should help to keep the economy ticking over but added that there were no signs of a re-run of the late 1980s boom. mini 1 wm A Bi USINESS leaders today warned the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, that slow eco nomic growth and the hole in the Government's finances rule out all but the most modest tax cuts in the last Budget before the election.

The Confederation of British Industry said a 2 billion, giveaway smaller than last year's 3 billion reduction and equivalent to just over a penny off the basic rate of 24p in the pound was affordable but would have to be offset by 1 billion of savings. i ne urn analysis was based on the weakness of manufacturing, which it believes will restrict growth to 2 per cent this year, well below the Treasury's forecast of 3 per cent expansion. Murder 1994 95 1 96 97 Source: CBI employment to 2.1 million by the end of the year. But it said that despite the slowdown, there would be no further interest rate cuts -this year, with borrowing costs pegged at 6 per cent. is out of jail and in the money Fewer than two years after going pnson, a man who covered up his Maev Kennedy Ml I ORE than three years after the bonfire that I lit ub her Annus Hor- ribilis, the Queen's great state hall at Windsor Castle is still a forest of scaffolding poles.

The desolation, all the tourists see when they peer through'the glass door from tile intact apartments next door, is deceptive. Above the scaffolding in St George's Hall, the largest green oak Gothic ceiling built this century is nearing completion. In another two years, guests at state banquets should be able to sit down to dinner beneath it. John Tiltman, director of the restoration project for the royal household, promised yesterday that Windsor Castle will have fully recovered from the fire by spring 1988, on scheduleand slightly under the 40 million budget. He wasn't rash enough to promise how much under.

He paid generous tribute to the English Heritage archaeologists. They were so fanatically thorough ill sifting the sodden charred mountains of rubble in some rooms the rubble consisted of modern bedrooms and staff bathrooms, which crashed down through layers of medieval, 17th, 18th and 19th century ceilings that they virtually dug out the foundations for free for the reconstruction. Giles Downes is too tactful to say so to the Queen, but he thinks her hall will be better than before the fire. Wyattville's early 19tlj Gothic roof was plaster, and uncomfortably shallow for the 70 metre length of the hall he made by knocking the 17th hail and chapel together. The new self-supporting green oak ceiling increases the height of the room by two metres.

Medieval construction techniques for green oak, cut straight from the felled tree and then left to shrink. parents' death can Ian MacKinnon A FORMER financier jailed for helping his to cover up the murder of their wealthy parents in Jersey is free to inherit part of the family fortune after being freed less than two years into a six-year sentence. Home Office sources said Mark Newall was released on parole three weeks ago, 20 months alter being convicted, because the time he spent in custody had been taken into account. The early release of Mr Newall. aged 30, who admitted destroying evidence and burying his parents' bodies after they were bludgeoned to death, means he can now inherit a share of his parents' 1 million estate after an earlier court attempt to prevent him becomint! a beneficiarv of the will was withdrawn while he was in prison.

Mr Newall and his rji'Htnor Roderick, aged 31, who is serving a life sentence in La Moyo prison, Jersey, tor the ihb muraers, were convicted in August 1994. Their parents, Nicholas Newall, aged 56, and Elizabeth, aged 46, were battered to death with a blunt instru ment during an argument at their home in St Brelade's Bay after a birthday celebra tion. But because the brothers Mark Newall (left) and his brother Roderick at the funeral of their parents, Elizabeth and Nicholas (below). The were later charged over their parents' deaths. Roderick is serving a life sentence but Mark is now a free man have made one another look silly." John Thorneycroft, English Heritage's chief adviser on royal palaces, climbs the scaffolding for a last look at fragments of a lost masterpiece.

Just before Christmas he was ready to shout "Stop!" An archaeologist cleaned a shadow on a piece of plaster, and saw what Mr Thorneycroft calls "cabbage-ish leaves" emerge, and then an arm. They were fragments of Antonio Verrio's mural of Christ Healing the Sick, for Charles II's chapel, the most important English commission for the Italian artist. English Heritage thought a significant section had survived, and would somehow have to be incorporated in the design. When they returned to work after Christmas, they found some swags of Cowers and fruit, fragments of a painted pillar, and a man's face, but all the rest was gone. The fragments have been conserved, carefully recorded, and are about to vanish again behind the new walls.

The workmen say most members of the royal family have shinned up the three flights of scaffolding steps for acloserlookattheir new roof. One of the biggest jobs is now invisibly complete. The walls and floors have finally dried out: quenching the raging fire involved pouring in over 1,500,000 million gallons of water. Indeed, the restorers say. Windsor is probably now drier than ever before in its history.

This news provoked tremendous excitement on the part of one American journalist. "An English castle with no damp? Wow!" sanna, who has her father's gift for dissembling, repre sents the conflict between pas sion and survival. Hall and Smith, both religious puritans, show how conscience can be trimmed by expedi ency: the former for the sake of his medical practice and the latter to save Susanna. The one character of fixed princi ple is tne vicar-uenerai wno carries out the ruthless court interrogation. Whelan's great strength is that he sees the vices and virtues of all parties: at one ex Susanna's belief in self- fulfilment drives her to Implicate a servant in lies, and at the other, her interroga tor's devotion to truth hints at the zealotry that would even tually lead to the closing of the theatres.

Even though the language sometimes" veers uneasily between ancient and modem (with the court official talking or wanting to "wrap it up Whelan's play offers an engrossing moral conundrum. Michael Attenborough's production, played against a Robert Jones set that is a mixture of wattle and medical workshop, is also vehemently acted. Teresa Banham's Susanna is a very English blend of outward propriety and inner fire and Liam Cunningham and Joseph Fiennes. as respectively husband and lover, reveal the cost of tight-lipped self-preservation. But for me the performance of the evening comes from Stephen Boxer, who as the Vicar-General brilliantly dis plays an implacable certainty that suggests convictions are both prisons and a source of moral strength.

At The Other Place (01 1990 31 92 93 94 95 I 1996 Source: IMS Because of subdued price expectations for factory goods, combined with other forecasts for the economy, CBI expects continuing low inflation, muted earnings growth and a slow fall in un plot son inherit a fortune had buried the bodies and concealed the evidence of the violent assault, police did not realise they were dealing with a double murder for more than a month. Even then, there was no evidence to link the pair to any- crime. In January 1991, the brothers successfully appealed to the Jersey courts to have their parents declared dead so they could inherit. Roderick spent much of his share of the inheritance on a 180,000 yacht and in fighting a long legal battle against extradition from Gibraltar, where he was taken after a dramatic arrest off the coast of Morocco in 1992. But Mark, who was extradited from Paris in 1993, is believed to have invested the money and to have secreted large sums around Europe.

After attempts by relatives to prevent the brothers inheriting the money dropped, Roderick issued a statement from prison saying he did not wish to benefit, but there is nothing in Jersey law to stop Mark becoming a beneficiary. Yesterday. Detective Inspector Graham Nimmo. who investigated the murders for two years before retiring in 1990, expressed his anger over Mark's release. "He and his brother cost this island a tremendous amount of money.

The investigation took longer than the tune ne nas served. was lost and ordered the businessmen to finance an underground network aimed at restoring the party to power. Stunned researchers from the World Jewish Congress, looking for evidence to buttress their case for the restitution oflooted Jewish property, have found themselves stumbling over documents that can destroy reputations, imperil fortunes and jeopardise international relations. "It is incredible, astounding. Every day we are getting extraordinary materia) that has just been sitting there in the archives," Elan Sternberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, told the Guardian yesterday.

There are claims that the Red Cross helped Nazi officials smuggle their ill-gotten gains across the border into Switzerland in diplomatic pouches. The Enskilda bank, run by the Wallenberg family, Is said to have helped finance German industry without collateral, and to have acted as a money-laundering network to conceal German investments and holdings in US industries. "Here wo have a document from the US treasury which shows that the treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau authorised a secret operation to insert treasury agents into the New York branches of the Swiss banks. It is attached to a detailed list of all the accounts, the holdings and the 1992 93 94 95 96 97 Source: CBI The economy grew by 0.4 per cent in the first three months of the year, requiring growth of 1.25 per cent in each of the next quarters if the Government is to hit its 3 percent prediction. Datastream Cowboy fixes Pentagon in his sights continued from page 1 tried by the Datastream Cowboy when he was identified and arrested on May 12, 1994.

Pentagon computer sleuths believe the British teenager, whose name has not been released, was working with a more experienced mentor. Known only by his Cyberspace name of Kuji, he is suspected of being a foreign intelligence agent. Whenever the Cowboy was blocked by computer security, he launched into a brisk e-mail exchange with Kuji, who advised him on possible ways past the controls. The Cowboy's penetration of the research laboratory at Rome air force base, New York state, gave him effective control of the computer system. Once inside, lie leapfrogged into more than 150 government data banks, Including Nasa, the Wright-Patterson air force base where most flight testing and warplane development take place, and even South Korea's Atomic Research Institute.

The teenager was traced by accident, when Mr Christy heard in an online chat of an English teenager whose nickname was the Datastream Cowboy. The Pentagon is to start operating a new e-mail system next month for its civilian contractors, which Is meant to cut down access routes from unclassified systems. Local angle on the moral maze Neutral Europe helped Nazis hide war loot Boy, 1 1 guilty of slab killing Michael Billington The Herbal Bed The Other Place, Stratford NOT since Edward Bond's Bingo has Stratford staged such a local play as Peter Whelan's The Herbal Bed: most of the action takes place round the corner from the theatre at Hall's Croft. But, although the plot revolves around an action for slander brought by Shake- -speare's daughter, Susanna, in 1613, the real fascination of this gripping play lies in a -much larger issue: the conflict between sexual passion and puritan conscience. The bare facts are that Susanna took a laddish local gent to the consistory court at Worcester Cathedral for claiming that she had "the running of the reins and had been naught with Rafe Smith at John in other words, that she had gonorrhoea and had committed adultery at a private house in Stratford.

Out of this Whelan weaves an intriguing piece of historical speculation. His Susanna, chafing at the restrictions of her marriage to a dedicated physician, John Hall, is genuinely drawn to a local haberdasher, Rafe Smith: the two of them are caught on the verge of coition in Hall's herb garden by a servant. But when Jack Lane, who has been sacked as Hall's apprentice, embroiders the story and puts it about in a local pub, the three parties involved brazen the matter out and take him to court, resulting in a trial scene reminiscent ot The urucime. Whelan does much more than deck out a piece of titivat ing historical gossip, bu- account holders in the US and it is dated July 1941, five months before the US even came into the war." The documents, some of them obtained by US and British intelligence officials in 1945, and some part of the vast cache of Nazi and German military records which were microfilmed by the American archivists, also record the enthusiastic co-operation of British and American intelligence teams in gathering the information. "By 1945, there is no doubt that the US and British governments had a very clear picture of the real co-operation of the Swiss and Swedes with the Nazis, and knew also how much Nazi loot was still In Swiss banks." What the allies did with that information is the question which disturbs Mr Steinberg, as he looks at US state department documents that list Nazi gold worth $402 million (at 1945 prices) being shipped to Switzerland.

It all began when the World Jewish Congress concluded that it was being blocked by the Swiss Banking Association, which was asked to help trace the fate of the Nazi loot. Switzerland ran a nuclear bomb programme, "just in from the second world war until 19B8, Jurg Stussi, the government's senior military historian, said in New Scientist magazine yesterday. Martin Walker in Washington THE declassification by the United States National Archives of thousands of previously secret documents is throwing up accusations mat companies and financial institutions in neutral European countries worked hand in hand with the Nazis to hide their looted millions. The material is providing the first serious confirmation that Nazi leaders and German industrialists conspired in late-1944 to shift gold and other assets to Switzerland to finance the post-war revival of a Nazi-led German empire. The International Red Cross, leading Swiss and Swedish banks and corporations, and the family of the Swedish diplomatic hero Raoul Wallenberg, who helped save up to 20.000 Hungarian Jews, are accused in the documents of enthusiastic co-operation with the Nazis.

Among those numed are the Swiss banks Credit Suisse and Union Bunk, and the shoe company Bally, which is accused of taking over Jewish companies seized by the Nazis. Among the most tantalising of the documents is one from 1944 that recounts a secret meeting in Strasbourg at which Nazi leaders told German Industrialists the war religious education lessons to his own behaviour. But the jury also heard a statement from the boy in which he said clearly that he knew the difference, and that wrong Included going on to the roof of the flats and throwing tilings off. Evidence given on video by two of his friends, aged 10 at the tune of the tragedy last August, painted a picture of a deliberate act. One of them, who like the defendant cannot be named for legal reasons, said the boy had led them up to die roof, saying: "I've got a surprise for you." He had told his two friends not to look while he lifted the slab on to the parapet, and then said: "You can turn round now." In spite of their warnings not to push the slab, he toppled it from the roof.

The boy's friends said that he had laughed, shrugged and said "I'm not bothered" after there was a scream from below and he was told that the slab had hit a woman. Roger Keen QC, for the boy, did not call any evidence but told the jury that the defendant was not criminally responsible because there wus no clear and positive evidence that he knew that what he was doing was wrong. Mrs Condie was killed instantly, falling in a pool of blood in front of her husband George, agdd 76, and her daughter, Janet Smith, 43. Martin Wainwright 11-year-old boy gaped in disbelief at his other yesterday as a jury at Leeds crown court found him guilty of killing a pensioner by toppling a concrete slab 12 storeys on to her head. The unanimous manslaughter verdict was reached after only 65 minutes by the nine women and three men, who were thanked by the judge for "trying such a difficult Sentence was adjourned for three weeks for reports on the boy, who was said by witnesses to have roared with laughter alter friends told him that someone had been hit.

The slab, part of a broken lightning conductor on the roof of Grayson Heights flats in Kirkstall, Leeds, crushed the skull of Edna Condie, aged 74, as she returned from shopping with her daughter. The boy denied manslaughter. Neither he nor his mother spoke after the verdict was given, following a four-day trial, which hinged on whether such a young defendant was sufficiently aware of the wrong he had done to be convicted. The court was told by two of the boy's teachers that they were not certain he knew the difference between right and wrong, or was able to apply standards he learned about In i3Hta.