Speaking at a town hall meeting in Mumbai, he said, "I do think that one of the challenges that we are going face in the US, at a time when we are still recovering from the financial crisis is, how do we respond to some of the challenges of globalisation?"

The US leader disagreed with those who saw globalisation as unmitigated evil. But while acknowledging that the Chindia factor had made the world flatter, he said protectionist impulses in US will get stronger if people don't see trade bringing in gains for them.

"If the American people feel that trade is just a one-way street where everybody is selling to the enormous US market but we can never sell what we make anywhere else, then the people of the US will start thinking that this is a bad deal for us and it could end up leading to a more protectionist instinct in both parties, not just among Democrats but also Republicans. So, that we have to guard against," he said.

He pointed out that America, which once traded without bothering about barriers put up by partners, could not promote trade at its own expense at a time when India and China were rising. "There has to be reciprocity in our trading relationships and if we can have those kind of conversations - fruitful, constructive conversation about how we produce win-win situations, then I think we will be fine."

Obama's remarks at the town hall meeting exposed his tremendous anxiety over the failure of his policies to spur the US economy fast enough and create jobs for Americans facing nearly 10% unemployment rate.

The scheme will eventually be extended to cover all people in work, allowing HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to reduce the massive errors seen in the tax system in recent years. The move is likely to raise concerns about both privacy and data security, but Whitehall sources insisted last night that all the information involved is already supposed to be passed to the Government.

One said: 'About 94 percent of employees and 97 percent of benefit recipients get their earnings or benefits through the banking system - it contains all the data we need.' Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander said the proposals represented a 'quiet revolution' in the way government works.

More than 40 executives from Britain's biggest companies, including Alliance Boots, Virgin, Shell and Barclays will accompany the ministers in the hope of leveraging high-level political backing to increase their presence in China. Although China is the world's second largest economy with an enviable 10 percent economic growth rate, its trade with Britain remains disappointingly small, with UK exports to China totalling just 7.7 billion pounds in 2009.

Mr Cable said that Britain was determined to improve on the lacklustre figures, capitalising further on business opportunities thrown up by China's massive program of urbanisation and infrastructure investment as well its growing consumer and services sectors. "China represents the biggest source of demand in the world for many of the products that we in the UK have to offer," Mr Cable said.

"This brings a huge increase in opportunities for UK firms given that they are globally competitive in services, advanced manufacturing and engineering, life sciences and creative industries." Sources in Beijing said the three days of official meetings would focus primarily on trade issues, including breaking down China's trade barriers, however Mr Cameron will also have to decide how to address growing international concerns over China's human rights record.

A mass burial late Sunday for many of the 141 people killed in the last two weeks served as a reminder of the mountain's devastating power that culminated in its deadliest blast in 80 years that sent hot clouds of gas, rocks and debris avalanching down its slopes.

The biggest threat to the city, experts say, is not searing gas clouds, but the Code River, which flows right into the city's heart from the 9,700-foot (3,000-meter) mountain. It could act as a conduit for deadly volcanic mudflows that form in heavy rains, racing at speeds of up to 60 mph (100 kph) and destroying everything in their path. A thick, black volcanic sludge has already inundated one city neighborhood that starts at the river bank and climbs a hillside.

Nearly 280,000 people - many of whom normally live on the fertile slopes of the volcano - have jammed into emergency shelters. Many have complained of poor sanitation, saying there were not enough toilets or clean drinking water.

Here are snippets from Palin's prepared remarks obtained by National Review Online:

"I'm deeply concerned about the Federal Reserve's plans to buy up anywhere from $600 billion to as much as $1 trillion of government securities. The technical term for it is "quantitative easing." It means our government is pumping money into the banking system by buying up treasury bonds. And where, you may ask, are we getting the money to pay for all this? We're printing it out of thin air."

"The Fed hopes doing this may buy us a little temporary economic growth by supplying banks with extra cash which they could then lend out to businesses. But it's far from certain this will even work. After all, the problem isn't that banks don't have enough cash on hand - it's that they don't want to lend it out, because they don't trust the current economic climate."

"And if it doesn't work, what do we do then? Print even more money? What's the end game here? Where will all this money printing on an unprecedented scale take us? Do we have any guarantees that QE2 won't be followed by QE3, 4, and 5, until eventually - inevitably - no one will want to buy our debt anymore? What happens if the Fed becomes not just the buyer of last resort, but the buyer of only resort?"

The Republicans increased their seats in the House of Representatives by the biggest margin since 1948, with a significantly bigger win than 1994, gaining 61 seats. They surely would have taken the Senate as well, had all of the seats been up for re-election, instead of just 37. At the gubernatorial level the GOP now controls 29 governorships compared to just 19 for the Democrats. Republicans also picked up 680 seats in state legislatures, the highest figure in the modern era according to figures provided by the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The midterms were largely a referendum on Barack Obama's policies and his leadership, and represented a remarkable reversal of fortune for a president who just 21 months ago seemed unassailable. His party's heavy defeat at the polls represented an overwhelming rejection of the Obama agenda as well as the liberal ideology that drives it.

The Obama White House has been strikingly contemptuous of public opinion, deriding fellow Americans as "enemies", and aggressively waging campaigns against its critics, including even the British press. Even now, the president refuses to acknowledge the failure of his own policies despite the massive "shellacking" he received at the polls.

The continued borrowing means federal unemployment insurance taxes are going to increase, upping the annual payroll costs $21 a year per worker. California tops the list of 32 states that have borrowed a total of $41 billion to pay claims. The state took out its first loan from the federal government early last year, to deal with rising payment of benefits and number of claims.

Mr Zoellick, a former US Treasury official, calls for a system that "is likely to need to involve the dollar, the euro, the yen, the pound and a renminbi that moves towards internationalisation and then an open capital account". He adds: "The system should also consider employing gold as an international reference point of market expectations about inflation, deflation and future currency values."

His views reflect disquiet with the international system, where persistent Chinese intervention to hold down the renminbi is blamed by the US and others for contributing to global current account imbalances and creating capital markets distortions.

This week's meeting of government heads in South Korea is likely to see yet more exchange rate conflict. A US plan for countries to sign up to current account targets has run into widespread opposition.

Next year, fifteen major developed-country governments, including the US, Japan, the UK, Spain and Greece, will have to raise some $10.2 trillion to repay maturing bonds and finance their budget deficits, according to estimates from the International Monetary Fund. That's up 7% from this year, and equals 27% of their combined annual economic output.

Aside from Japan, which has a huge debt hangover from decades of anemic growth, the US is the most extreme case. Next year, the US government will have to find $4.2 trillion. That's 27.8% of its annual economic output, up from 26.5% this year. By comparison, crisis-addled Greece needs $69 billion, or 23.8% of its annual GDP.

So far, with the notable exception of Greece, major advanced nations haven't had too much trouble raising the money they need. Japan's domestic investors have consistently bought its government bonds despite their low yield. Foreign investors have been snapping up US Treasury bonds, which remain the world's premier safe-haven investment.

But as the IMF warned in a report this week, THE CHANCES THAT INVESTORS WILL BALK AT LENDING TO GOVERNMENTS "REMAINS HIGH FOR ADVANCED ECONOMIES." That's a highly undesirable outcome — picture a financial crisis in which governments can't step in to help, because government finances are the problem. We can't know how close we are to such an outcome, and the need to keep the recovery going would make cutting back now a risky move. Ultimately, though, we're heading in the wrong direction.

Bernardine Dohrn, who with her husband William Ayers were leaders of the communist revolutionary Weather Underground, had been tied to so many acts of protest violence in the '70s that she was placed on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted List and was described by J Edgar Hoover as the "most dangerous woman in America."

Her association with Barack Obama notably led to Sarah Palin's famous comment during the 2008 presidential campaign that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists." Dohrn, however, told an Indian news and views website that she's concerned about a new breed of protesters, the tea partiers, whom she describes as "a hard right emerging, an armed, new hard right with massive control of media. It's racist, it's armed, it's hostile, it's unspeakable," she said. "White people armed, demanding an end to this president - it's very crazy-producing."

Speaking of the polarization of the nation as evidenced by the tea parties, Dohrn told NewsClick India, "It generates thousands of death threats every day in its wake and hate mail and craziness." Dohrn also addressed her violent past as well as Palin's famous quote, calling the suggestion that she was a terrorist "a caricature" that "has nothing to do with reality" and "is built on a complete lie." She made a point of steadfastly refusing to apologize for her past actions, in fact affirming, "We are radicals today; we think that the real terrorist is the American government – state terrorism unleashed against the world."

Speaking Saturday to journalists en route to Santiago de Compostela, Benedict said he had created a new Vatican office to fight such secular trends worldwide. He said Spain was a particular focus since it had played such an important role in reviving Christianity in centuries past.

"In Spain, a strong, aggressive laicity, an anti-clericalism, a secularization has been born as we experienced in the 1930's," Benedict said. "For the future of the faith, it is this meeting - not a confrontation but a meeting - between faith and laicity, which has a central point in Spanish culture." In his comments upon arrival in a fog-shrouded Santiago, the pope recalled that Pope John Paul II had issued a similar message to Spain and Europe to rediscover their Christian roots when he visited Santiago in 1982.

"A Spain and Europe concerned not only with people's material needs but also with their moral and social, spiritual and religious needs, since all these are genuine requirements of our common humanity," he said in Spanish. The Pontiff wraps his trip up on the other side of the country in Barcelona, where he will dedicate the famous albeit unfinished Sagrada Familia church. There, he'll also face a "kiss-in" staged by gays and lesbians expected to number in the thousands, evidence of the secular lifestyle that Benedict has identified as a threat to the faith.

With such palpable opposition to the pope, it's no surprise that Spain's Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero will only see Benedict as he's leaving on Sunday night. Laws under Zapatero's watch have allowed gay marriage, fast-track divorce and easier abortions, deeply angering the Vatican. In Zapatero's place, Spain's royal family is taking care of the protocol during the pope's visit. Crown Prince Filipe greeted Benedict at Santiago's airport Saturday and welcomed him to the country.

The Israel Law Center (Shurat HaDin) had filed suit against the Wakf on behalf of 150 Israeli citizens. Charges were filed over the Wakf's use of bulldozers to carry out unauthorized construction in the area, despite archaeologists' warnings that the machinery was demolishing ancient Jewish artifacts. Attorneys from the Israel Law Center accused the Wakf of deliberately destroying Jewish artifacts in order to eradicate evidence of the Jewish claim to the Temple Mount. By neglecting to take action to stop the demolition of ancient historical finds, the Israel government has been "abandoning the millenniums-long Jewish claim over the Temple Mount and allowing Islamic extremists to re-write Jerusalem's history," they said.

The attorney general's office had tried to get the Israel Law Center suit dismissed, arguing that private citizens should not be allowed to prosecute in a case that affects the general public. The Law Center responded by accusing the attorney general of caving in to political pressure. The Islamic Wakf has been carrying out illegal construction on the Temple Mount for more than a decade. The work has been allowed to continue despite archaeologists' protests that ancient artifacts are being crushed. The Wakf has denied that any First Temple-period artifacts are located on the Temple Mount.

The Israel Law Center released a statement saying, "It is absurd that while the Israeli government is mounting an international campaign against UNESCO to protest its labeling Rachel's Tomb and the Cave of the Machpelah [Tomb of the Patriarchs - ed.] in Hevron as Muslim mosques and denying their Jewish origins, it obstructs Shurat HaDin from acting to safeguard the status of the Jewish people's holiest site." Law Center head Attorney Nitzana Darshan-Leitner said the High Court ruling in the case "gave the Islamic Wakf a free pass to continue its destruction of Israel's sacred heritage sites."

As Israel attempts to reduce tensions, Hamas, Fatah and the Israel-based Islamic Movement have each called on Muslims to "defend al-Aksa." Hamas declared Friday a "Day of Rage" and called on followers to protest, while Fatah called for a general strike on Friday on behalf of the al-Aksa mosque. Fatah, the party of Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, accused Israel of working with "Jewish extremists" by allowing them to enter the Temple Mount compound.

The Islamic Movement, an Israel-based Muslim organization that does not recognize Israel, has called for Israeli Muslims to arrive in Jerusalem for Friday prayers, and to ignore police limitations on the number or age of worshippers to be allowed in. The Palestinian Authority has called on the United Nations to intervene in Jerusalem in order to prevent Israel from taking action regarding the Al-Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount. PA officials, along with senior members of Fatah and Hamas, have accused Israel of planning to allow religious Jews increased access to the Mount.

PA minister Riyad al-Maliki relayed the request to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday during a visit to New York. "I informed him of the escalation of Israel's policy against Palestinians and against the al-Aksa Mosque," he told AFP. The PA and Muslim leaders have accused Israel of sparking Muslim riots in and around Jerusalem by allowing religious Jews - described in PA media as "extremist settlers" - to visit the Temple Mount.

The Arab world, including the Palestinian Authority, has increasingly accused Israel of the same charges over the past several years, and many Muslim and Arab leaders have told the Arab world that the Temples never existed. However, Prime Minister Netanyahu's statements were referencing to the Islamic Movement. The group's northern branch leader, Sheikh Raad Salah, was arrested last week for incitement, which police said was behind the Arab riots that wounded policemen and interrupted Jewish prayers at the Western Wall (Kotel).

Muslim clerics also have alleged that Jews are preparing to take over the Temple Mount, where the First and Second Temples stood, and Salah charged that Jews were preparing to build a synagogue on the site, although the Israeli Rabbinate has ruled that Jews may not ascend to the site. Several national religious and other rabbis allow Jews to ascend to certain parts of the Temple Mount but only if they have immersed in a ritual bath (mikveh). Muslim authorities, backed by Israeli police, do not allow Jews to pray or carry a prayer book when visiting.

At next week's meeting in Seoul of the G20's leaders, there will be no last rites - this hopelessly unwieldy exercise in global government wouldn't recognise a corpse if stood before it in a coffin - but it seems clear that this tragedy is already approaching its denouement. To understand why, you have to go back to the origins of the credit crunch, which lay in the giant trade and capital imbalances that have long ruled the world economy. Over the past 20 years, the globe has become divided in highly dangerous ways into surplus and deficit nations: those that produced a surplus of goods and savings, and those that borrowed the savings to buy the goods.

It's a strange, Alice in Wonderland world that sees one of the planet's richest economies borrowing from one of the poorest to pay for goods way beyond the reach of the people actually producing them. But that process, in effect, came to define the relationship between America and China. The resulting credit-fuelled glut in productive capacity was almost bound to end in a corrective global recession, even without the unsustainable real-estate bubble that the excess of savings also produced. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

The rest of the world is now openly questioning the merits of a global currency whose value is governed by America's perceived domestic needs, while the growth that once underpinned confidence in its ability to repay its debts has never looked more fragile. Already, there are calls for alternatives. Unwilling to wait for one, the world's central banks are beginning to diversify their currency reserves. This, in turn, will eventually exert its own form of market discipline on the US, whose ability to soak the rest of the world by issuing ever more greenbacks will be correspondingly harmed.

These are seismic changes, of a type not seen for a generation or more. I hate to end with a cliché, but we do indeed live in interesting times.