The exchange said preliminary investigations indicated that the human error "may have occurred in suspicious circumstances", adding that it took the matter "very seriously" and the relevant authorities had been informed. The Financial Services Authority is understood to have been told.

The LSE declined to comment any further on the investigation. Turquoise, which trades the largest European stocks including those listed in France, Germany and the Netherlands, went down at 8.32am on Tuesday before trading resumed at 10.30am, the exchange said. Following the glitch, the LSE has decided to delay adopting the same technology for its main trading system.

Xavier Rolet, LSE chief executive, wants to migrate the exchange's main order book trading platform Sets to new technology that is already in use by Turquoise. The shift would make it faster and more attractive to high-frequency trading firms that generate large volumes. Tuesday's disruption marks the second glitch in less than a month. On October 5, a problem with a network card forced the exchange to shut the system for over an hour. Last month's problem came only two days after Turquoise had moved across to the new technology platform.

In April, it was Eyjafjallajokull. Now, there is a new threat from Iceland to European air travel: Grimsvotn. Meltwater is currently gushing from a glacier above Iceland's most volatile volcano, suggesting significant sub-glacial seismic activity. On Monday geophysicists told reporters that the flood at the remote southeastern Vatnajokull glacier could be an indication that the Grimsvotn volcano underneath is about to erupt once again - raising fears of a repeat of the immense ash clouds last spring which seriously disrupted both trans-Atlantic and European air travel.

So far, says Gunnar Gudmundson from the Icelandic Meteorological office, no underground tremors have been detected. Such tremors are often a reliable signal of an impending eruption. But scientists are monitoring the mountain closely for further tell-tale indications that it is about to blow its top.

The Grimsvotn volcano magma chamber lies buried under 650 feet of glacial ice and volcanic lakes. Movements of magma could be responsible for melting the ice above. Pressure then builds up under the ice until water is forced up to the surface of the glacier. The resulting "glacial blasts" have been known to send huge clouds of ice, fine ash and dust into the skies. Grimsvotn last erupted in November 2004, spewing volcanic ash 40,000 feet into the atmosphere. The ash fell to earth as far away as Scandinavia and caused temporary disruption to local air travel.

At the same time, inventories are at their lowest levels in decades. "All buyers we see are buying on a hand-to-mouth basis," said Peter de Klerk of Czarnikow, the London sugar merchant. That has pushed prices up sharply, with raw sugar futures in New York soaring 135 per cent from a low of 13 cents in May.

On Tuesday ICE March sugar rose 4 per cent to a peak of 30.64 cents a pound, surpassing the level reached in February and rising to their highest point since 1980, when prices jumped to nearly 45 cents. The dramatic rise in sugar prices is causing headaches for policymakers. While sugar is widely available in the west and its price is rarely considered, it is an essential source of cheap calories in emerging economies, where surging sugar prices are driving food inflation.

On Tuesday India's central bank raised benchmark interest rates for the sixth time this year in an attempt to curb inflation. New Delhi has emerged as a crucial factor in the sugar market, as India's harvest is expected to be large, but the government is still debating how much sugar to allow the country's industry to export. Traders expect India to authorise exports of 1-2 million tonnes starting in December. Anything less, or even a delay to the decision, could send prices spiralling higher, traders warn.

"I think a 20 percent decline in the dollar is possible," Gross said, adding the pace of the currency's decline was also an important consideration for investors. When a central bank prints trillions of dollars of checks, which is not necessarily what (a second round of quantitative easing) will do in terms of the amount, but if it gets into that territory - that is a debasement of the dollar in terms of the supply of dollars on a global basis," Gross told Reuters in an interview at his PIMCO headquarters.

The Fed will probably begin a new round of monetary easing this week by announcing a plan to buy at least $500 billion of long-term securities, what investors and traders refer to as QE II, according to a Reuters poll of primary dealers. "QEII not only produces more dollars but it also lowers the yield that investors earn on them and makes foreigners, which is the key link to the currencies, it makes foreigners less willing to hold dollars in current form or at current prices," Gross added.

Control of the House sets up Republicans to block Obama initiatives. The president phoned John Boehner, the likely new House Speaker, to say he hoped to "find common ground" with him. Speaking after his own re-election, Mr Boehner vowed to cut spending and reduce the size of government. He said voters had sent Mr Obama a message to "change course". Compounding the misery for Mr Obama's camp, a Republican captured the president's old Senate seat in Illinois.

While some of the Tea Party's most eccentric candidates lost their races, the conservative wing of the Republican Party is now a power in the land, BBC North America editor Mark Mardell reports. This is hugely difficult for the president, our editor says. While there will be much talk of compromise and reaching deals, many Tea Party supporters' explicit aim is to block and undo Mr Obama's agenda.

Up for election were all 435 seats in the House (the lower chamber of Congress), 37 of the 100 seats in the Senate, governorships of 37 of the 50 states and all but four state legislatures. With counts still to be completed, projections suggested the Republicans had obtained a net gain of 57 seats in the House, more than in the tumultuous 1994 mid-terms.

According to Pamela Smith, who heads the Election Protection Command Center, a national non-profit, non-partisan vote monitoring organization, early results from volunteers around the country and from voters who call a toll-free number show that reports of vote flipping and other problems are already severe enough to "cause concern." Smith said problems with iVotronic machines have cropped up in Pennsylvania's Lawrence County, where voters trying to vote a straight party ticket registered their votes for another party - in essence, flipping the votes.

In these cases, voters tap one spot on the touch screen and another lights up. "It is like when you use an ATM and hit withdraw and check balances lights up," said Susan Greenhalgh of Verified Voting, a nonprofit organization that advocates reliable and publicly verifiable elections. "In one case a voter called the poll worker in to help, and neither could get the machine to vote properly," Smith said.

There has been concern in the past few weeks over the security and reliability of the iVotronic touch screen voting machines.

Reports from Texas, West Virginia and other states have found that the machines can misclassify votes, and a recent report by former CBS News anchor Dan Rather showed that the machines are constructed in the Philippines under "sweatshop conditions" that cause malfunctions. In North Carolina, the state Republican Party has sued to force election workers to notify all voters of problems with the machines, preserve all ballots and personal electronic programs and have voting officials keep detailed records of all complaints at voting stations.

The following ratios were compiled using data from 2004 National Safety Council Estimates, a report based on data from The National Center for Health Statistics and the US Census Bureau. In addition, 2003 mortality data from the Center for Disease Control was used.

- You are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack.

- You are 12,571 times more likely to die from cancer than from a terrorist attack.

- You are 11,000 times more likely to die in an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane.

- You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack.

- You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack.

- You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack.

- You are 13 times more likely to die in a railway accident than from a terrorist attack.

- You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack.

- You are 9 times more likely to choke to death on your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack.

- You are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist.

- You are 8 times more likely to die from accidental electrocution than from a terrorist attack.

- You are 6 times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack.

Passenger profiling has been resisted by previous Home Secretaries because it means far greater numbers of travellers will be stopped, searched and barred from flying. Home Secretary Theresa May has refused to rule out the introduction of passenger profiling.

This will anger libertarian Tory MPs and Liberal Democrats who have made much of their wish to end the 'Big Brother' state. But Mrs May told MPs: 'We are in a constant battle with the terrorists. They are always looking for another way, another innovative way, in which they can try to get around our defences. Our job, and the job of our security and intelligence agencies and the police, is to ensure that we are doing all we can to make sure that there are no gaps in our defences.'

Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary warned against overreacting. 'Every time we have a terrorist scare, the first thing that goes out the window is common sense,' he said. 'We in the aviation industry are all for effective security measures such as taking knives off passengers, but we are all opposed to ludicrous and ineffective measures.'

Whether prolonged or sudden, the transition to a stable monetary system will become possible only when the shortcomings of the status quo become unbearable. Such a transition is, by definition, nonlinear. So central-bank soothsaying based on the extrapolation of historical data and the repetition of conventional wisdom offers no guidance on what lies ahead.

It's amazing that there is no intelligent discourse among policy leaders on the subject of monetary rot and its implications for the future economic and political landscape. Until there is fundamental monetary reform on an international scale, most economic forecasts aren't worth the paper on which they are written.

Telltale signs of future trouble aren't hard to spot. Only a few months ago, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and a chorus of other high-ranking Fed officials were talking about exit strategies from the US central bank's bloated balance sheet and the financial system's unprecedented excess liquidity. Now, those same officials are talking about pumping more money into the system to stimulate growth.

Gold is an imperfect, but comparatively reliable, market gauge for the extent of current and future monetary destruction. The recent acceleration in the dollar price of the metal to $1,381, a record high in nominal terms, coincided with talk of a new round of quantitative easing and highly visible discord among major nations on trade and currency-valuation issues.

Naysayers point to gold's price and see a bubble, without understanding that the only acceleration that is taking place is in the rate of decline of paper currency. The Fed is organizing an attack on the dollar's value, believing that this is the most expedient way to defuse deflationary market forces. The man in the street is unaware, a perfect setup. Inflation can only be successful when the public doesn't see it coming.

The sudden torrent of commentary on gold isn't the sign of a bubble. Anti-gold pundits provide a great service to those who grasp this historical moment: They facilitate the advantageous positioning of the one asset most likely to be left standing when the dust settles.

The Fed's "QE2" risks accelerating the demise of the dollar-based currency system, perhaps leading to an unstable tripod with the euro and yuan, or a hybrid gold standard, or a multi-metal "bancor" along lines proposed by John Maynard Keynes in the 1940s. China's commerce ministry fired an irate broadside against Washington on Monday. "The continued and drastic US dollar depreciation recently has led countries including Japan, South Korea, and Thailand to intervene in the currency market, intensifying a 'currency war'. In the mid-term, the US dollar will continue to weaken and gaming between major currencies will escalate," it said.

David Bloom, currency chief at HSBC, said the root problem is lack of underlying demand in the global economy, leaving Western economies trapped near stalling speed. "There are no policy levers left. Countries are having to tighten fiscal policy, and interest rates are already near zero. The last resort is a weaker currency, so everybody is trying to do it," he said.

But whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument, the reality is that a chorus of Chinese officials and advisers is demanding that China switch reserves into gold or forms of oil. As this anti-dollar revolt gathers momentum worldwide, the US risks losing its "exorbitant privilege" of currency hegemony - to use the term of Charles de Gaulle.

The innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of Fed policy are poor countries such as India, where primary goods make up 60 percent of the price index and food inflation is now running at 14 percent. It is hard to gauge the impact of a falling dollar on commodities, but the pattern in mid-2008 was that it led to oil, metal, and grain price rises with multiple leverage. The core victims were the poorest food-importing countries in Africa and South Asia. Tell them that QE2 brings good news.

So the question that Ben Bernanke and his colleagues should ask themselves is whether they have thought through the global ramifications of their actions, and how the strategic consequences might rebound against America itself.

Americans have lived beyond their means for decades. It was a culture long defined by a mantra of entitlement, one that promised opportunities for all while ignoring the risks. Relentless and seemingly unstoppable upward mobility was the secular religion of the United States. Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, established the so-called ownership society, while Congress and the White House helped free it of the constraints of laws and regulations.

The dream was the country's driving force. It made Florida, Hollywood and the riches of Goldman Sachs possible, and it attracted millions of immigrants. Now, however, Americans are discovering that there are many directions that life can take, and at least one of them points downward. The conviction that stocks have always made everyone richer has become as much of a chimera in the United States as the belief that everyone has the right to own his own home, and then a bigger home, a second car and maybe even a yacht. But at some point, everything comes to an end.

The United States is a confused and fearful country in 2010. American companies are still world-class, but today Apple and Coca-Cola, Google and Microsoft are investing in Asia, where labor is cheap and markets are growing, and hardly at all in the United States. Some 47 percent of Americans don't believe that the America Dream is still realistic.

The Desperate States of America are loud and distressed. The country has always been a little paranoid, but now it's also despondent, hopeless and pessimistic. Americans have always believed in the country's capacity for regeneration, that a new awakening is possible at any time. Now, 63 percent of Americans don't believe that they will be able to maintain their current standard of living.

And if America is indeed on the downward slope, it will have consequences for the global economy and the political world order.

Lotter said the agency is merely being cautious with the approach of an early-December deadline when thousands of Indiana residents could see their unemployment benefits end after exhausting the maximum 99 weeks provided through multiple federal extension periods.

"Given the upcoming expiration of the federal extensions and the increased stress on some of the unemployed, we thought added security would provide an extra level of protection for our employees and clients," he said.

Lotter said state employees in the affected offices have also recently gone through stress-management training in which they learn how to respond appropriately to angry clients. "This is a stressful time for people in the economy," he said. "That's why we're not only taking this step (of hiring guards), but we're also increasing our training for our staff to be able to help people as they're trying to cope with these changes."

Up for election on Tuesday are all 435 House seats, 37 of the 100 seats in the Senate, governorships of 37 of the 50 states and all but four state legislatures. The Republican Party needs to gain 39 House seats to win control of the lower chamber of Congress - an amount opinion polls suggest they will easily win - and 10 to take over the Senate.

Democrats are hoping to hold on to the Senate by at least one or two seats. In addition, voters will decide on ballot measures ranging from marijuana legalisation in California to a referendum in Oklahoma on forbidding judges from using Islamic Sharia law in rulings.

Republicans are riding high in opinion polls, buoyed by discontent over unemployment running near 10%, slow economic growth and a burst housing market bubble that has seen many Americans lose their homes. The results of the day's gubernatorial and state legislative elections could also have a big impact on American politics. In a given state, the party that controls the state legislature and holds the governor's office has influence over the redrawing of the Congressional district map for the next 10 years.

Prime Minister David Cameron and President Nicolas Sarkozy will also outline plans, at a London summit, for a joint army expeditionary force. Downing Street called the measures "practical", but Labour said they left "big questions" over the UK's defences. Mr Cameron and Mr Sarkozy are to sign two treaties - one on greater general military co-operation and the other on nuclear weapons.

The latter will establish a centre in the UK to develop technology and another one in France to carry out the testing. It is understood that each country will still control its own warheads, and that nuclear secrets will not be shared. The other treaty will allow the setting up of a "combined joint expeditionary force", thought to involve a brigade of about 5,000 soldiers from each side.

Each country will retain a veto for each operation, which will operate under one military commander to be chosen at the time. The UK and France have also agreed to keep at least one aircraft carrier at sea between them at any one time. Joint work on drones, mine counter-measures and satellite communications is also proposed. In a statement, the French presidency said the test centre in Valduc, eastern France, would start operations in 2014.

While Americans' attention is riveted on fierce midterm battles and the subsequent power struggle in response to Barack Obama's attempted socialist revolution, a second stunning coup - one every bit as dangerous to the nation - is rapidly progressing toward victory with almost no notice or publicity.

This highly coordinated effort, once extremely controversial but today basically greenlighted by politicians and the press - including key conservatives - is rapidly advancing toward total victory, after which any return to Christian morality in American law and culture will become almost impossible.

Despite recent shocking news reports - like the CDC's revelation that 1 in 5 homosexual males in the US is infected with HIV/AIDS and new studies proving children raised by same-sex parents are far more likely to commit homosexual acts themselves than other kids - the radical "gay rights" agenda, including same-sex marriage and open homosexuality throughout the armed forces, is about to be forced down Americans' throats. Ironically, despite the almost total capitulation of America's elite class on this agenda - including the news media and pundits both left and right - Americans themselves overwhelmingly reject it.

In light of this growing rift between regular Americans and the political and cultural elite, WND Managing Editor David Kupelian asks the obvious question: "With the nation trying to counter a maniacal socialist coup in Washington, an economy in dire freefall and a wholesale invasion of the US across our southern border, why should anyone care about same-sex marriage at all?"

The answer, says Kupelian: "We all better care, because once gay marriage is legalized in America - something for which there's no precedent in 5,000 years of Western Civilization - schools will be required to indoctrinate children that homosexuality is perfectly normal and healthy, pastors and rabbis will fear preaching their faith's core moral values, gender confusion and gross immorality will dominate our culture, polygamy and other bizarre 'marriage' arrangements will be legalized, and much more - in short, America will become unrecognizable, regardless of who's president and which party is in power."