SANKT POELTEN (Austria) - A JURY on Thursday ordered Josef Fritzl jailed for life for treating his daughter as a sex slave in the cellar of his home during a 24-year orgy of depravity in which he fathered seven children.

The court in the Austrian town of Sankt Poelten said Fritzl would have to spend the rest of his life interned in a mental institute after a psychiatrist warned that the 73-year-old Fritzl felt 'born to rape'.

THE alleged thief involved in the Cortina Watch theft case, Jerry Ee, returned to Singapore on Thursday evening in the custody of Singapore police.

He landed at Changi Airport at about 7.45pm on a scheduled Singapore Airlines flight from Bangkok.

THE Government will help buffer the impact of the downturn on Singaporeans and businesses, but Singapore will not emerge from the crisis until the global economy starts to heal, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has said.

He made the point to the BBC in a interview aired on Thursday, during which he described the current downturn as 'the most severe' since World War II.

WASHINGTON - THE International Monetary Fund on Thursday said that the world economy, reeling from financial crisis, was on track to shrink for the first time in 60 years in 2009, by as much as 1.0 per cent.

In a report prepared for the Group of 20 meeting of finance chiefs last week in Britain and published Thursday, the IMF slashed forecasts from two months ago to a global contraction of between 0.5 per cent and 1.0 per cent.