The economist - one of the first to predict the US housing crash and nicknamed 'Dr Doom' - said the likely path of fiscal policy after next Tuesday's election will mean the country "experiencing serious fiscal drag just when it needs a further boost".

He argued that with a gridlock in Congress expected to get worse following next week's elections, President Obama's lack of forward looking action - such as tackling spending of social security and introducing VAT increases - meant he was trapped in a stalemate made worse "by the lack of a reason to act on the deficit".

This put the US on an "unsustainable fiscal course". "The risk... is that something on the fiscal side will snap... The trigger could be a debt rollover crisis in a major US state government," he wrote.

In the final six months in which it could spend money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Treasury set aside $243 million for new contracts for law firms, accountants and money managers to help run what's left of the bailouts - on top of the $529 million already spent on work by staff, private companies and other agencies. Many of the contracts last until 2019, and there's nothing to stop the government from hiring even more help if it's needed to chase down the remaining bailout money.

Treasury's authority to spend more from the $700 billion fund expired on October 3. The law requires officials to recoup as much as possible of the $185 billion still in the hands of shaky private companies. After all collections are made, the government expects to be out about $51 billion, mostly from housing programs.

Rising voter anger ahead of next week's elections has made Obama administration officials reluctant to speak candidly about the ongoing cost of managing TARP. Politicians who voted for the TARP law now face tough re-election fights. By downplaying their efforts, officials sidestep criticism of bailouts that helped Wall Street without easing lending or keeping many people in their homes.

But prosecutors have refused to accept the promises on face-value and launched investigations into bank chairman Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and his deputy Paolo Cipriani after financial police seized 23 million euros from a Vatican bank account on September 21. They claim that even as the bank was claiming to tackle money-laundering, it broke the law by trying to transfer money without identifying the sender or recipient, or what the money was being used for.

Italian prosecutors have placed bank chairman Ettore Gotti Tedeschi and his deputy Paolo Cipriani under investigation.

The Vatican initially reacted furiously by insisting that the omission of data was just a 'misunderstanding' that could be easily clarified. It tried to get the seizure lifted, but the court refused.

At the same time, the bank is gearing up for another possible assault by Holocaust survivors who claim that Nazi loot was stored at the Vatican. A US federal appeals court threw their case out in March after determining the Vatican bank enjoyed immunity since the Holy See is a foreign sovereign.

Attorney Jonathan Levy has since taken his case to the European Commission, asking for an investigation into whether looted Nazi gold had been used in Vatican euros and commemorative coins. He said: 'The issue here is that it's the EU's problem because they entered into an agreement with the Vatican to mint euros. From our point of view, it's the EU's responsibility to hold the Vatican responsible to meet money laundering standards.'

Forty aircraft - including the Air Force One military plane - and six heavily armoured cars will follow the president around the country.

The huge security operation comes days after a suspected bomb was found on a cargo plane at East Midlands Airport in the UK. The entourage will be the biggest ever in terms of logistics and manpower for any US president.

The president himself will be ferried around in a black Cadillac - dubbed 'Barack Mobile' - which has its own built in communications centre - to enable Obama to be in touch with the White House, US vice president and the US strategic command. The car also has the US nuke launch codes and the nuclear switch for the president. It can also withstand a chemical or germ warfare or even a bomb attack.

Obama will be accompanied on the trip by US first lady Michelle Obama and their daughters Malia and Sasha, according to Indian newspaper Headlines Today.

It is hoped that the trip will build important economic links between the US and India. The country has become one of the fastest growing economies and some experts predict that it could rival China in the coming years. Earlier this year, UK Prime Minister David Cameron took a group of business leaders on a trip to India.

Part comedy show, part pep talk, the rally drew together tens of thousands of people stretched across an expanse of the National Mall on a beautifully sunny day. Comedy Central, which organised the event and on which Stewart and Colbert have satirical shows - The Daily Show and The Colbert Report respectively - estimated the crowd in advance at 60,000.

Screens showed a variety of pundits and politicians from the left and right, engaged in divisive rhetoric. Prominently shown was Glenn Beck, whose conservative Restoring Honor rally in Washington in August was part of the motivation for the Stewart/Colbert event. It certainly appeared to rival Beck's rally in attendance.

Stewart and Colbert refrained from taking political sides on stage, even as many in the crowd wore T-shirts that read 'Stewart-Colbert 2012'. But the timing just days before the election has raised hopes among Democrat supporters that the rally may rekindle the kind of support - particularly among the young adults - seen for Barack Obama during his election campaign in 2008.

Of all the scaremongering in the run-up to Tuesday's mid-term elections, Stewart told the audience: 'We live in hard times, not End Times.'

The first day of a European Union summit in Brussels ended in political victory for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who emerged from discussions after midnight on Friday morning with a German-engineered plan to protect the euro that was largely accepted by EU leaders. "I can say on behalf of Germany that we brought our essential points very far forward," she said.

The EU's 27 leaders endorsed "limited changes" to the Lisbon Treaty to create a permanent emergency mechanism allowing euro zone members to default on sovereign debt without threatening the euro as a whole. The mechanism will replace the 440 billion euros emergency fund established this year to bail out European nations threatened by the Greek debt crisis. That emergency fund is scheduled to end in 2013.

The new mechanism would also give the European Commission new powers to scrutinize national budgets of member nations - and impose fines on so-called deficit violators, governments which consistently overshoot deficit guidelines set by the EU's Growth and Stability Pact.

The use of explosive material built into printer cartridges shows terror groups are coming up with innovative new ways to launch attacks on foreign soil, security experts said today. The packages discovered on cargo planes in Britain and Dubai are now undergoing forensic analysis. According to US officials initial tests indicated the use of PETN, the same powerful explosive used in the plot to blow up a plane over Detroit last Christmas.

'If this attack is by AQAP (al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula), it demonstrates an accelerated ability to design new and innovative ways of conducting IED attacks and a focused effort to execute those attacks on US soil,' Ben Venzke, chief executive of the intelligence agency IntelCenter, said. Mr Venzke said the group elaborated on its bomb-making philosophy in its official Arabic-language magazine, Sada al-Malahim, following the attempted Christmas Day bombing.

Yemen-based group 'Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula' is now considered the most dangerous strand of the terror organisation outside Pakistan and Afghanistan. At its head is the preacher Anwar Al Awlaki, who is thought to have influenced both the Detroit bomber Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab and the 9/11 terrorists.

MI6 say he is urging violent attacks against the UK and the US describes him as 'probably terrorist Number One.'

Mutallab, who is accused of trying to blow up a jet over Detroit on Christmas Day with explosives hidden in his underwear, is thought to have been tutored in Yemen.

The report, dated July 27, but still unreported in media outlets, documented, "Weakness in DoD's financial management controls left it unable to properly account for $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion in DFI (Development Fund for Iraq) funds it received for reconstruction activities in Iraq."

"This situation occurred because most DoD organizations receiving DFI funds did not establish the required Department of the Treasury accounts and no DoD organization was designated as the executive agent for managing the use of DFI funds. The breakdown in controls left the funds vulnerable to inappropriate uses and undetected loss," the IG report warned. In the report, the military suggested that the documents were around somewhere, probably in a "stateside" archive, but it could take a long time to find them. Neither the Department of Defense nor the IG office returned WND calls requesting comment.

The military response recommended the following wording: "DoD did not establish deposit fund accounts within the Department of the Treasury for $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion of the DFI funds it controlled. As a result, attempting to account for $8.7 billion of the DFI funds controlled by DoD would require significant archival retrieval efforts."

But European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek said opinions were split. EU leaders meeting in Brussels are grappling with how to protect Europe from a repeat of the recent Greek debt crisis but arguments over the size of the EU's budget - which are not on the formal agenda - have been moving centre stage.

Arriving at the two-day summit, Mr Cameron said the 5.9% increase to the EU's 107 billion pounds budget agreed by the European Commission and approved by the European Parliament was "completely wrong" at a time of austerity across the continent. A rise of that scale could cost the UK another 900 million pounds a year and is opposed by most Conservative MPs.

Mr Cameron has vowed to "build alliances" in an effort to bring that figure down to no more than 2.9%, which would cost the UK an extra 450 million. Downing Street said it now had the backing of France and Germany - the EU's two most powerful members - as well as the Netherlands, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Slovenia and Estonia for that stance.

These results are from Gallup's annual Crime poll, conducted October 7-10. Approximately 8 in 10 Americans were opposed to legalizing marijuana when Gallup began asking about it in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Support for legalizing the drug jumped to 31% in 2000 after holding in the 25% range from the late 1970s to the mid-1990s.

A separate question in the poll asked about legalizing marijuana for medical use, and found support significantly higher than it is for legalizing the use of marijuana in general. Seventy percent of Americans say they favor making marijuana legally available for doctors to prescribe in order to reduce pain and suffering. This figure is down, however, from 78% in 2005 and 75% in 2003.

The study was led by UCSD's James Fowler and focused on 2,000 subjects from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Scientists matched the subjects' genetic information with "maps" of their social networks. According to researchers, they determined that people "with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults." However, the, subjects were only more likely to have leanings to the left if they were also socially active during adolescence.

"It is the crucial interaction of two factors - the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence - that is associated with being more liberal," according to the study. "These findings suggest that political affiliation is not based solely on the kind of social environment people experience," said Fowler, who is a professor of political science and medical genetics.

The researchers also said their findings held true no matter what the ethnicity, culture, sex or age of the subjects were.

The headline reading fell below the 3 million mark - a key political threshold - for the first time since November 2008, to its lowest point since October 1992. On an adjusted basis, the jobless rate held steady at 7.5 percent, while economists had forecast 7.4 percent. "Although October's decline in unemployment turned out weaker than expected, the underlying trend in the German labor market clearly remains one of rapid improvement on the back of strong economic growth," said Aline Schuiling from ABN Amro.

Data on Europe's biggest economy over the past week has been bullish, signalling its unexpectedly strong recovery could hold up in the face of signs of fragility in the global economy. Consumer morale remains at its highest level since May 2008 going into November on expectations for a further rebound, a survey by GfK market research group showed on Tuesday.

EU officials said the eurozone had almost collapsed earlier this year because it lacked such a mechanism. Germany wants limited changes to the EU treaty to reinforce the changes, but is facing resistance from other countries. Meanwhile, UK Prime Minister David Cameron won backing for his battle against a 5.9% rise in the EU budget.

The BBC's Jonty Bloom, in Brussels, says the new eurozone rules are designed to force a country to put its house in order long before its economic problems threaten the eurozone. Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the EU Council, hailed the summit's achievements, saying: "Today we took important decisions to strengthen the eurozone."

"We recommend a robust and credible permanent crisis-resolution mechanism to safeguard the financial stability of the eurozone as a whole." Under the new rules, EU officials will warn governments about property and speculative bubbles, and will be able to impose stringent fines on countries that borrow and spend too much.

The permanent crisis fund will replace a temporary one, worth 440 billion euros, created earlier this year to bail out Greece and support the euro. But Germany has argued that the Lisbon Treaty will have to be amended to make the emergency fund permanent. The current treaty contains a clause banning members from bailing each other out.

They said workers at Indiana's Bureau of Developmental Disabilities Services have told parents that's one option they have when families can no longer care for children at home and haven't received Medicaid waivers that pay for services that support disabled people living independently.

Marcus Barlow, a spokesman for the Family and Social Services Administration, the umbrella agency that includes the bureau, said suggesting homeless shelters is not the agency's policy and workers who did so would be disciplined. However, Becky Holladay of Battle Ground, Indiana, said that's exactly what happened to her when she called to ask about the waiver she's seeking for her 22-year-old son, Cameron Dunn, who has epilepsy, autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Holladay, a school nurse, said she and her husband would go bankrupt trying to pay for services themselves, so Cameron spends most days sitting in his stepfather's truck while he works as a municipal employee. Some families have been on waiting lists for waivers for 10 years. The lists contained more than 20,000 names last month, and one advocacy group predicted they will only grow longer because Governor Mitch Daniels ordered budget cuts that have eliminated 2,000 waiver slots since July.

Budget cuts also have resulted in the state moving foster children with disabilities to a lower cost program that doesn't provide services for special needs and eliminating a grocery benefit for hundreds of developmentally disabled adults.

There are concerns a 6% rise, backed by the European Commission, would cost the UK another 900 million pounds a year. Labour's Wayne David accused Mr Cameron of "vacuous rhetoric" on Europe and said he should demand a budget freeze. The European Council has already agreed in principle to a 2.9% rise in the 107 billion pounds EU budget for 2011 - a figure the prime minister is expected to agree to, despite previous UK demands that it should be frozen.

But with members of the European Parliament and European Commission calling for a 6% rise, the final figure is likely to be somewhere in between. Arriving at the summit, Mr Cameron said he was anticipating a "difficult meeting" amid calls for the 6% rise: "I think that is completely unacceptable at a time when European countries including the United Kingdom are taking difficult decisions on their budgets and having to cut some departments. It is completely wrong that European institutions should be spending money on themselves."