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."

Indonesia's president has visited the islands, which were inundated after a 7.7-magnitude undersea earthquake triggered the tsunami three days ago. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono cut short a trip to Vietnam to oversee the rescue effort, flying in a helicopter loaded with food and other basic necessities to the remote and inaccessible islands.

There he met both survivors and local officials, promising the central government would help West Sumatra's government to build temporary homes, health facilities and schools, his spokesman said.

Local officials say most of the villages hit by the tsunami have been reached, with victims from the worst-hit areas being buried in mass graves. But almost 400 remain unaccounted for, and rescuers are now working on the assumption that a large number of those missing will not be found alive, having been washed out to sea by the wave.

Indonesian officials said locals had been given no indication of the coming wave, as a high-tech tsunami warning system installed in the wake of 2004's giant Indian Ocean tsunami was not working. Two buoys monitoring rising water levels off the Mentawai islands had been vandalised and were out of service, officials told the BBC.

The aid effort comes as Indonesia struggles with the devastation caused by this week's eruption of Mount Merapi in central Java, which killed more than 30 people.

The "official" unemployment rate in the United States has been at nine and a half percent or above for 14 consecutive months, and today it takes the average unemployed American about 35 weeks to find a job. However, the "official" unemployment rate is misleading, because it does not include workers that have quit looking for work or that have had their hours cut back to part-time. According to 60 Minutes, when you add those "discouraged workers" and "underemployed workers" into the equation the actual rate is about 17 percent, and in the state of California the actual rate is about 22 percent.

Meanwhile, foreign nations are using sovereign wealth funds to buy up staggering amounts of US infrastructure. America is quite literally for sale in 2010. All across the United States, highways, ports, toll roads and even parking meters are being gobbled up by foreign powers. We have shipped massive amounts of wealth and jobs to other nations, and now those very same countries are turning around and buying huge amounts of US infrastructure with the gigantic piles of dollars that they have accumulated.

Widespread long-term chronic unemployment was something that America was never supposed to see again. Our leaders promised us that the US financial system was so strong that we would never have another "Great Depression" in our lifetimes. But then the financial crisis of 2008 happened. Unprecedented numbers of Americans started losing their jobs and the US Congress did something that it had never done before. Congress decided to extend unemployment benefits all the way out to 99 weeks.

Doing that has cost US taxpayers approximately $100 billion dollars to this point, but we were promised that it was a "temporary" fix and that it would give displaced US workers a chance to find new jobs. Surely any industrious American worker could get another job within 99 weeks, right?

Wrong.

Today, there are at least 1.5 million "99ers" - those Americans that have completely exhausted all 99 weeks of unemployment benefits and that still do not have jobs.

60 Minutes recently did a report on some of these "99ers". Many of them are very highly educated and very highly qualified. If you have not seen this 60 Minutes report yet, you have got to take few minutes to sit down and watch it. This video is so shocking that many of you will have your jaws on the floor by the time you finish watching it...

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/CwpdGyIY2fQ

Last year, some 1,103 cities worldwide joined Benedict XVI, Father Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the custos of the Holy Land, and Archbishop Fouad Twal, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, to participate in the prayer for peace. It is being supported by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and responds in a special way to the call for prayer from the recent Special Assembly for the Middle East of the Synod of Bishops.

The organizers noted that this event "is a way to commit for and to concretely live a day of profound prayer and intercession." The 24 hours of continuous prayer will begin in conjunction with the 5th Extraordinary Prayer of All Churches for Reconciliation, Unity and Peace Beginning in and Proceeding from Jerusalem as well as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in Jerusalem.

So at Greece's request, the EU took the unprecedented step on Tuesday of agreeing to deploy border guards to help the country police its land border. "We could not handle this situation alone anymore," says Christos Papoutsis, Greece's Minister of Citizen Protection. "We don't have the centers to house the people, we don't have the staff to help them."

But in its quest to get a handle on the flood of illegal immigrants, Greece also has an EU rule called the Dublin Regulation adding to its troubles. Under the law, countries can send asylum seekers back to the country through which they first entered the EU - and these days, in most cases, that's Greece. Stavros Lambrinidis, a Greek member of the European parliament who works on asylum and border issues, and other EU leaders are calling for changes to the regulation that would, among other things, stop the practice of sending asylum seekers back to already overwhelmed countries such as Greece.

Lambrindis and Papoutsis also hope neighboring Turkey will help the Greeks break up the human-trafficking rings that smuggle people into Europe. But in the meantime, Greeks are focusing on the immediate problem - stopping illegal migration across their land border - before increasingly fragile relations between migrants and citizens deteriorate further. "Greeks are already worried about jobs, the decreasing quality of their lives in this bad economy," says Papoutsis. "They are afraid. And I don't want the xenophobes in this country to exploit that."

In a bid to restart the stalling recovery, the US Federal Reserve is next week expected to unveil a second round of quantitative easing (QE) of as much as $500 billion, on top of the $1.2 trillion already completed. In typically robust comments, Mr Gross said the Fed had run out of other options but warned that more QE would in the long-term mean "picking the creditor's pocket via inflation and negative real interest rates".

In a bid to restart the stalling recovery, the US Federal Reserve is next week expected to unveil a second round of quantitative easing (QE) of as much as $500bn, on top of the $1.2 trillion already completed. In typically robust comments, Mr Gross said the Fed had run out of other options but warned that more QE would in the long-term mean "picking the creditor's pocket via inflation and negative real interest rates".

(The term "Ponzi scheme" is a widely known description of any scam that pays early investors returns from the investments of later investors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ponzi)

Meanwhile, Ireland has announced fiscal retrenchement of 15 billion euros over the next four years, twice the original plan. It is already cutting public wages by 13 percent. John Fitzgerald from Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute said there is a risk that austerity tips the economy into a downward spiral, comparing it to an overdose of "chemotherapy" that does more harm than good.

Finance minister Brian Lenihan said the country had no choice. "The cost of borrowing is high and rising, and if we do not act soon to live within our means, people may stop lending to us. We will not fool the markets for an instant if we seek to defer any longer what evidently needs to be done now. The Irish people will have to accept cuts in public expenditures and higher taxes," he said.

In Greece, yields on 10-year bonds surged 67 points to 10.26 percent, the biggest jump since the turmoil in June. The sell-off came after permier George Papandreou warned that the country was still in danger, and threatened to call early elections.

Gavan Nolan from Markit said fears of "political instability in sovereign credits" had moved onto the radar screen, with investors now paying closer attention to whether or not governments can actually deliver on austerity plans. The test will be whether these countries can generate enough exports to trade their way out of crisis over coming years, or remain trapped in slump with rising political tensions.

Tensions are mounting ahead of a crucial meeting of European leaders this week, with Germany and France at loggerheads with both the EU executive and many other member states over their calls for further changes to the European Treaty. On Wednesday the European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding slammed a deal hashed out between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to push for CHANGES TO THE EU LAW TO ALLOW FOR THE SUSPENSION OF THE VOTING RIGHTS OF MEMBER STATES WHO VIOLATE STRICT BUDGET DEFICIT RULES.

"Coming up with illusions of new treaties looks completely irresponsible to me," Reding said in an interview with German daily Die Welt published on Wednesday. "Haven't they both understood that it took us 10 years to wrap up the Lisbon Treaty?"

Germany has threatened to block a package of reform proposals, to be presented by European Council President Herman van Rompuy at the summit this Thursday and Friday, if it doesn't get its way on alterations to the Lisbon Treaty. The irony is that Berlin supports the bulk of the reforms, which include plans to improve EU budget discipline and widen provisions for financial and political sanctions.