Ferrara said she wasn't alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen. "Something's not right," Ferrara said. "One person that's a fluke. Two, that's strange. But several within a five minute period of time - that's wrong."

Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said there is no voter fraud, although the issues do come up because the screens are sensitive. For that reason, a person may not want to have their fingers linger too long on the screen after they choose their candidate.

"Especially in a community with elderly citizens (they have) difficulty in (casting their) ballot," Lomax said. "Team leaders said there were complaints (and the) race filled in."

Lomax said voters need to have faith in the system. "This election, I think, more than ever," he said. "The two sides are very fractured and each side is suspicious and we're caught in the middle."

"From everything we hear from inside the administration, they wanted this to be part of their efforts at diversity," said Denis Dison, spokesman for the Presidential Appointments Project of the Gay & Lesbian Leadership Institute. The pace of appointments has helped to ease broader disappointment among gay rights groups that Obama has not acted more quickly on other fronts, such as ending the "don't ask, don't tell" policy that bans gays from serving openly in the military.

In a sign of how times have changed, few of the appointees - about two dozen required Senate confirmation - have stirred much controversy. It's a far cry from the 1993 furor surrounding Clinton's nomination of then-San Francisco Supervisor Roberta Achtenberg as assistant secretary for Housing and Urban Development.

White House spokesman Shin Inouye confirmed the record number, saying Obama has hired more gay officials than the Clinton and George W Bush administrations combined. He said Obama "is proud that his appointments reflect the diversity of the American public."

"He is committed to appointing highly qualified individuals for each post," Inouye said. "We have made a record number of openly LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender) appointments and we are confident that this number will only continue to grow."

Mujiharto, who heads the Health Ministry's crisis center, said a 10-foot-high (three-meter) wave washed away hundreds of houses on Pagai and Silabu, part of the remote and sparsely populated Mentawai island chain. "We have 200 body bags on the way, just in case," he said. Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity due to its location on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire.

The fault that ruptured Monday, running the length of the west coast of Sumatra island, also caused the 9.1-magnitude quake that unleashed a monster tsunami around the Indian Ocean in 2004, killing 230,000 people in a dozen countries. Getting to the Mentawais, a popular surfing spot 175 miles (280 kilometers) from the Sumatra coast takes 12 hours and the islands are reachable only by boat.

Ade Edward, a disaster management agency official, said 23 bodies were found in coastal villages - mostly on the hardest hit island of Pagai - and another 167 people were missing. Water in some places reached roof tops, and in Muntei Baru, a village on Silabu, 80 percent of the houses were damaged. Some 3,000 people were seeking shelter Tuesday in emergency camps, Edward said, and the crews from several ships were still unaccounted for in the Indian Ocean.

"Fuel injection into the core of the reactor has begun," the state television announced. The US withdrew its opposition to the plant after Russia satisfied concerns over how it would be fueled and the fate of the spent fuel rods. Worries remain, however, over Iran's program to enrich uranium for nuclear fuel since the process can also be used to create weapons grade material.

Iran says the 1,000-megawatt nuclear plant, built with the help of Russia, will begin generating electricity in early 2011 after years of delays. Under a contract signed between Iran and Russia in 1995, the Bushehr nuclear power plant was originally scheduled to come on stream in July 1999 but the start-up has been delayed repeatedly by construction and supply glitches. Iranian officials have sporadically criticized Russia for the delays, some calling Moscow an "unreliable partner" and others accusing Russia of using the reactor as a lever in nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

Russia began shipping fuel for the plant in 2007. At the plant's inauguration on August 21, Iran's Vice President Ali Akbar Salehi had said loading the fuel into the reactor core would take place over two weeks and the plant would then produce electricity two months later in November.

Although food stocks are generally good despite much of this year's harvests being wiped out in Pakistan and Russia, sugar and rice remain at a record price. Global wheat and maize prices recently jumped nearly 30% in a few weeks while meat prices are at 20-year highs, according to the key Reuters-Jefferies commodity price indicator. Last week, the US predicted that global wheat harvests would be 30 million tonnes lower than last year, a 5.5% fall. Meanwhile, the price of tomatoes in Egypt, garlic in China and bread in Pakistan are at near-record levels.

"The situation has deteriorated since September," said Abdolreza Abbassian of the UN food and agriculture organisation. "In the last few weeks there have been signs we are heading the same way as in 2008. We may not get to the prices of 2008 but this time they could stay high much longer."

Mounting anger has greeted food price inflation of 21% in Egypt in the last year, along with 17% rises in India and similar amounts in many other countries. Prices in the UK have risen 22% in three years. The governments of Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Indonesia, Brazil and the Philippines have all warned of possible food shortages next year, citing floods and droughts in 2010, expected extreme weather next year, and speculation by traders who are buying up food stocks for release when prices rise.

A default is likely "as long as you can contain the contagion to other countries and it is done through orderly restructuring and repricing to retain competitiveness," El- Erian said at a conference sponsored by the Economist magazine in New York today. "The alternative doesn't promise growth and employment generation."

Europe's sovereign debt crisis erupted at the end of 2009 after Greece's newly elected socialist government said the budget deficit was twice as big as the previous administration had disclosed. The European Union and International Monetary Fund approved the aid package on May 2 in exchange for the Greek government agreeing to cut public-sector wages and pensions and raise taxes on fuel, alcohol and cigarettes.

"I have never seen 11 percent of GDP being delivered" under the current program assumptions, El Erian said. The debt burden at the end of the process is likely to be higher than it was at the beginning, he said.

US officials said the money flowing from Tehran was further proof that Iran is playing a double game in Afghanistan - wooing the government while helping Taliban insurgents who are fighting US and NATO forces. The United States has itself used cash as a weapon in the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq - from local development projects to win public support, to salaries for Iraqi insurgents who switched sides, to cash payoffs to influential community leaders willing to back the US and its allies.

Karzai said that once or twice a year, Iran gives his office $700,000 to $975,000 for official presidential expenses. "This is transparent. This is something that I've even discussed while I was at Camp David with President Bush," Karzai told a news conference, referring to meetings with then-President George W Bush at the US presidential retreat outside Washington.

"It is not hidden," he said. "We are grateful for the Iranians' help in this regard. The United States is doing the same thing. They are providing cash to some of our offices." Asked whether the US actually gives bags full of cash to the presidential office, Karzai responded: "Yes, it does give bags of money."

US officials in Washington said both countries have given Afghanistan assistance in cash payments - a widespread practice in a country where few people have bank accounts or credit cards. "Going back a number of years, because of the nature of the Afghan financial system, there have been times where assistance has come into Afghanistan in the form of cash," said State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said.

The toll of 600, according to an AFP tally based on a count kept by the icasualties.org website, compares to 521 killed in all of 2009 in what was previously the deadliest year on record for the forces in Afghanistan. On average, two soldiers die each day. A total of 2,170 foreign soldiers have been killed since the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan which overthrew the hardline Islamist Taliban regime.

A Taliban-led insurgency has since strengthened each year, but it is most intense in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand. At least 1,348 American troops are among the dead, and the US military provides two-thirds of the 150,000-strong international force in Afghanistan.

The objective is for Afghanistan to take over responsibility for security by late 2014, but experts doubt that local security forces will be big enough or sufficiently well trained to shoulder the burden on schedule.

The dollar resumed its recent downtrend Monday in the wake of a meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations at the weekend. The meeting failed to yield a definitive agreement on currencies, putting selling pressure on the greenback.

"The dollar is being trashed, we've actually had effectively devaluation of about 14 percent in the last two months," Griffiths said. His view is contrary to that of HSBC foreign exchange strategist David Bloom, who told CNBC that a continuation of the currencies war after the G20 might put pressure on risky assets, causing a flight to safety into the dollar.

"After years of historic deficits, this 110th Congress will commit itself to a higher standard: Pay as you go, no new deficit spending," Pelosi said in her speech from the speaker's podium. "Our new America will provide unlimited opportunity for future generations, not burden them with mountains of debt." Pelosi has served as speaker in the 110th and 111th Congresses.

At the close of business on January 4, 2007, Pelosi's first day as speaker, the national debt was $8,670,596,242,973.04 ($8.67 trillion), according to the Bureau of the Public Debt, a division of the US Treasury Department. At the close of business on October 22, it stood at $13,667,983,325,978.31 ($13.67 trillion), an increase of 4,997,387,083,005.27 (or approximately $5 trillion).

Pelosi, the 60th speaker of the US House of Representatives, has added more to the national debt than the first 57 House speakers combined. The $4.997-trillion increase in the national debt since she took the gavel is more debt than the federal government amassed from the speakership of Representative Frederick Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania, who became the first speaker of the House on April 1, 1789, to the start of the speakership of Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, the 58th speaker, who took up the gavel on January 4, 1995.

This means that, despite millions of years in isolation in the ocean, the region was a lot more biologically diverse than previously believed. The amber, dubbed Cambay amber, was found in lignite mines in the Cambay Shale of the Indian state of Gujarat. Jes Rust from the University of Bonn in Germany led an international team of researchers from India, Germany and the US.

According to a predominant theory of continents' formation, at first there were only two so-called supercontinents on Earth. The one in the north was called Laurasia and the other one, located more towards the south, Gondwana.

Most of the recently discovered bugs also show links to modern insects as well as those that lived millions of years ago in different parts of the world, including Asia, Australia, and even South America. Many insects are related to modern and ancient species found in different parts of the world

"The synod was hijacked by an anti-Israel majority," he added. Bishops and patriarchs from across the Middle East on Saturday called on the international community to end the occupation of Arab lands in an official statement following a two-week synod held at the Vatican.

"Recourse to theological and biblical positions which use the Word of God to wrongly justify injustices is not acceptable," the synod said.

Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, head of the commission which drew up the statement, went one step further, saying: "The theme of the Promised Land cannot be used as a basis to justify the return of the Jews to Israel and the expatriation of the Palestinians. For Christians, one can no longer talk of the land promised to the Jewish people," the Lebanese-born head of the Greek Melkite Church in the United States said, because the "promise" was "abolished by the presence of Christ."

Ayalon said he was "especially appalled" at those remarks. "We call on the Vatican to (distance) themselves from Archbishop Bustros's comments, which are a libel against the Jewish people and the state of Israel and should not be construed as the Vatican's official position." Most religious Jews believe the land of Israel was given to them by God, and Jewish settlers often cite biblical justifications for holding onto the West Bank and east Jerusalem, territories seized in the 1967 Six-Day War.

But foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said scripture had never been used by any Israeli government to justify the occupation or settlement of territory.

Countries like the United States are betting that with greater representation emerging economies such as China will be more willing to address the trade distortions causing currency volatility and threatening increased protectionism. The deal avoided a widening of the gulf between emerging and developed nations and a chaotic ending to a G20 meeting in which the United States failed to convince China and others to agree to targets to limit current account imbalances.

The IMF agreement also spares the G20 from losing credibility, opening the way for G20 heads of state, meeting in Seoul on November 11 and 12, to handle more politically difficult decisions on fixing the trade imbalance problem. The G20 communique on Saturday called for more market-determined exchange rate systems and the avoidance of competitive devaluations of currencies but failed to get into specifics.

"There was criticism of the American policy of monetary easing, or creating more liquidity," Bruederle said after a meeting in South Korea of finance officials from the Group of 20 economic powers. "I tried to make clear in my contribution to the discussion that I regard that as the wrong way to go," he said.

"An excessive, permanent increase in money is, in my view, an indirect manipulation of the (foreign exchange) rate." Foreign exchange rates should be determined by markets, said Bruederle, who was attending the G20 meeting in place of Germany's hospitalised finance minister.

Tomorrow sees the start of the Alternative Families Show - the first event of its kind for non-heterosexual couples and single people. The British Association of Adoption and Fostering is one of 13 agencies giving advice at the show, which was started by publisher Sarah Garrett, 35, who conceived twin daughters Sophia and Phoenix, aged three, with the help of a sperm donor. Ms Garrett, who lives with partner Linda Riley in Marylebone, said attitudes towards gay parenting were shifting. But she added that many parents in London resorted to private education because some schools, particularly faith schools, do not welcome children born to same sex couples.

Ms Garrett said: "Times are changing and lesbian and gay men are becoming more visible as parents. We need to take into account the changing nature of society. Schools in particular need to, especially when it comes to events like Fathers' Day." Stonewall said this year had been a "landmark" for lesbian and gay parents. Two women can now be named on a birth certificate and it has become unlawful for fertility clinics to turn lesbians away.

The Charity Commission ruled in August that gay people were suitable parents and Catholic adoption agencies were wrong to discriminate against them. The Catholic Care adoption agency had wanted to limit services provided to homosexual couples on religious grounds. Research carried out for Stonewall found that children with same-sex parents have the same standard of upbringing as those from other families.

The London Women's Clinic, which specialises in fertility treatments, has also reported a seven per cent rise in the number of lesbian couples seeking insemination via sperm donor. There has been a doubling in the number of lesbians signing up for insemination treatment in return for donating their eggs to infertile couples.