"We are directing banks to maintain adequate reserves for potential losses and other contingencies and to make appropriate disclosures," Walsh said in prepared testimony released on Wednesday. The testimony is to be delivered to a House Financial Services subcommittee on Thursday. Federal Reserve Governor Elizabeth Duke, also in prepared testimony, said regulators' on-site review of major banks will be completed by the end of the year, and bank agencies will publicly release their findings in early 2011.

The Fed and other regulators are trying to understand the scope of the problem and potential impact to the economy, she said. "Delays and uncertainty resulting from flaws in the foreclosure process have the potential to delay recovery in housing markets and to undermine confidence in our financial and legal systems," Duke said. Banks are accused of having used "robo-signers" to sign hundreds of foreclosure documents a day without proper legal reviews, a fiasco that reignited public anger with banks that received billions of dollars in taxpayer aid during the financial crisis.

Duke said the Fed is also evaluating the potential macroeconomic effects of foreclosure documentation problems to the mortgage and housing markets. She said the Fed expects about 2.25 million foreclosure filings this year and again next year, and about 2 million more in 2012.

Because of the problems, he is ordering about 50 married church officials to delete their accounts with the social networking site or resign from their leadership positions. He had previously asked married congregants to share their login information with their spouses and now plans to suggest that they give up Facebook altogether. "I've been in extended counseling with couples with marital problems because of Facebook for the last year and a half," he said. "What happens is someone from yesterday surfaces, it leads to conversations and there have been physical meet-ups. The temptation is just too great."

On Sunday, he plans to "strongly suggest" that all married people to stop using Facebook, lest they endanger their marriage. "The advice will go to the entire church," he said. "They'll hear what I'm asking of my church leadership. I won't mandate it for the entire congregation, but I hope people will follow my advice."

About one in five adults uses Facebook for flirting, according to a 2008 report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. And a do-it-yourself divorce site in the United Kingdom, Divorce-Online, reported late last year that the word "Facebook" was appearing in about one in five of the petitions it was handling. Miller says there are legitimate uses for Facebook, which is why he started an account a few years ago. "People use it as an opportunity to invite others to social gatherings, to share Scripture or talk about what went on at church," he said. "Those are all positive, worthwhile things. But the downside is just too great."

The authorities must ensure that the cards contain no mention of the number 666, which in Greek Orthodox tradition is associated with the antichrist, the Church of Greece said in a statement. "In no way should the 'citizen card' contain the number 666, either in visible or invisible manner," the Holy Synod, governing council of the Church of Greece, said after a meeting between canon scholars, legal experts, computer specialists and government officials.

"The Church is obliged to protect personal freedom and defend the integrity of the faith," the Holy Synod added. State planners have pledged to take the observation on board, it said. The new cards are to be finalised early next year. The Church is officially part of the state in Greece. Frequently criticised as backward and superstitious by liberal circles, Orthodox custodians strongly adhere to tradition surrounding the number 666, which appears in the biblical Book of Revelation, believed to have been written by the Apostle John in the first century AD.

Also known as the figure of the Beast, the number has led ultra orthodox clerics to oppose the use of bar codes on goods, as well as electronic checks carried out under the border-free Schengen Area of which Greece is a member.

The warning by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation adds to fears about rising inflation in emerging countries from China to India. "Prices are dangerously close to the levels of 2007-08," said Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the FAO. The FAO painted a worrying outlook in its twice-yearly Food Outlook on Wednesday, warning that the world should "be prepared" for even higher prices next year.

It said it was crucial for farmers to "expand substantially" production, particularly of corn and wheat in 2011-12 to meet expected demand and rebuild world reserves. But the FAO said the production response may be limited as rising food prices had made other crops, from sugar to soyabean and cotton, attractive to grow. "This could limit individual crop production responses to levels that would be insufficient to alleviate market tightness. Against this backdrop, consumers may have little choice but to pay higher prices for their food," it said

The deepening debt crisis in Ireland which has spread to other parts of the eurozone has left the single currency and European Union fighting for their "survival", Herman Van Rompuy warned. "We are in a survival crisis," he told an audience of Brussels policymakers yesterday. "We all have to work together in order to survive with the euro zone because if we don't survive with the euro zone, we will not survive with the EU."

The comments helped spark a fall in share prices and the value of the euro across the world.

The way things are going, the facility will fail even before its wider fault lines have been fully exposed. Europe is making things up as it goes along, and a pretty desperate job it is making of it too. The extraordinary thing to outsiders trying to analyse these events is just how poorly prepared Europe was to cope with sovereign debt crises within its midst. Indeed the no bailout clause contained in the Maastricht Treaty seemed to deny the possibility of there ever being one.

Europe had wholly failed to plan for a hurricane of this sort - bizarre when you consider how meticulous the Germans are in their economic disciplines. As a result, the euro is left scrambling around looking for a plan. The European Financial Stability Facility plainly isn't it, for this only seems to condemn the surplus nations to repeatedly having to bailout the deficit economies. Eventually, that's going to be politically unacceptable. Perhaps it already is judging by Austria's actions. And even if it were acceptable, it doesn't work. For decades, Northern Italy has been bailing out the south with massive transfers of money.

It's done no good what so ever, with the gap between the rich north and poor south still as wide as ever. Fiscal transfers ultimately only succeed in entrenching the dependency culture.

European Union talks are famous for ending in last-minute breakthroughs during marathon negotiating sessions. But for once, late-night talks ended in deadlock as the EU failed to meet a deadline of midnight on Monday to reach an agreement over the bloc's budget for 2011. The breakdown in talks between representatives of the EU's 27 member states and the European Parliament means the EU is left for the time being without a budget for 2011. The whole budgetary procedure will have to start again from the beginning - a process that could take months.

"This is an unfortunate failure," said Alain Lamassoure, the chairman of the European Parliament's budget committee and the body's lead negotiator in the talks, in remarks to the German news agency DPA. "But there are still a few weeks until the end of the year." European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek said that the parliament "wanted a deal, but I regret that a few member states closed the door to the 2011 budget agreement." He described the breakdown in talks as "not good news."

If no agreement is reached by the end of the year, the EU will however be able to continue working in 2011 without a budget. Instead, it will operate on monthly payments calculated on the basis of the 2010 budget until the issue is resolved.

It is being described as a day of reckoning for Ireland. On Tuesday, European Union finance ministers are gathering in Brussels for their regular monthly meeting - and the first item on the agenda is sure to be the state of Dublin's finances. As worries over the country's debt have spread in the past week, the country has come under increasing pressure from the European Central Bank and other countries belonging to the European common currency zone to apply for aid from the 750 billion euros fund established earlier this year to prop up the euro. Ireland, however, continues to insist that, for the moment, no help is needed.

"I would hope after the (EU finance ministers' meeting) this afternoon and tomorrow there would be more logic introduced into this," Dick Roche, Ireland's European affairs minister, reiterated to BBC Radio on Tuesday morning. "There is no reason why we should trigger an IMF or an EU-type bailout." Roche did say that Irish banks did face serious liquidity problems. But, he added, "I don't think the appropriate response to that would be for the European finance ministers to panic."

British and German banks are certain to be watching the developments in Brussels closely. According to data provided by Germany's largest financial institutions in the summer as part of the Europe-wide banking stress tests, they hold some $138 billion in Irish debt, with Hypo Real Estate, the crippled German lender, leading the way with a portfolio worth 10.3 billion euros, according to a report in the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Tuesday. British banks have total holdings of Irish debt worth $150 billion.

As the barricades burned, the disease continued spreading across Haiti and potentially the island of Hispaniola. Authorities in the Dominican Republic reported their country's first confirmed case of cholera in Higuey, near the tourist mecca of Punta Cana. The man was a Haitian citizen who had recently returned from a 12-day vacation in neighboring Haiti. The news alarmed Dominicans, but the spread of the disease is easily prevented with good hygiene and sanitation, and no locally originated cholera cases have been reported.

Haiti's police chief, the health minister and other Cabinet officials headed to Cap-Haitien, the country's second largest city, where protesters erected barricades of flaming tires and other debris and clashed with UN troops. At least two demonstrators died, one of them shot by a member of the multinational peacekeeping force that has been trying to keep order since 2004. A UN World Food Program warehouse was looted and burned.

The cholera outbreak that began last month has brought increased misery to the entire country, still struggling with the aftermath of last January's earthquake. But anger has been particularly acute in the north, where the infection is newer, health care sparse and people have died at more than twice the rate of the region where the epidemic was first noticed.

The health ministry said Tuesday that the official death toll hit 1,034 as of Sunday. Figures are released following two days of review. Aid workers say the official numbers may understate the epidemic. While the ministry of health says more than 16,700 people have been hospitalized nationwide, Doctors Without Borders reports that its clinics alone have treated at least 16,500.

The drive by Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, to rewrite the European Union's treaties to set up a new bail-out system for future Greek-like collapses - and her insistence that private investors bear more of the cost of such rescues - was quietly resented when she bulldozed it through last month's summit of EU leaders.

But as bond markets have reacted and plummeted in the weeks since, that resentment has begun to boil over, with increasing accusations that Ms Merkel has put many of her fellow eurozone leaders in untenable positions in order to reinforce her own standing with German taxpayers. "They're unprintable at times," said Daniel Gros, director of the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies, of the angry remarks he has heard aimed towards Berlin.

German officials insist their campaign to get private bondholders to shoulder more bail-out costs is not just about domestic considerations. The government is more concerned that the current system - which condemns well-managed states to bailing out badly-managed ones - is unsustainable

Members such as the Republic of Ireland and Portugal are under fresh scrutiny. Questions have been raised over whether they can manage their debt without help from EU funds. Mr Van Rompuy said he was "very confident" the problems could be overcome. But he added: "We all have to work together in order to survive with the eurozone, because if we don't survive with the eurozone we will not survive with the European Union."

Robert Peston, Business editor, BBC News comments:-

"There would be a serious risk of a new credit crunch, and global recession, if the providers of that $1.5 trillion of credit to Ireland, Portugal and Greece were to lose confidence... and were to ask for their money back now"

In a another highly contentious move, Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, also agreed to reopen the Lisbon Treaty, the EU's quasi-constitution, in order to force countries that find themselves in a crisis such as the one suffered by Greece to declare insolvency and to forfeit their voting rights in EU councils.

It could also spell trouble for David Cameron, the prime minister, who opposed the treaty and will come under pressure to hold a referendum in Britain if it is renegotiated. "If EU politicians want a new treaty, they must first give the people a referendum. Now is the chance for cast-iron Dave to make good on his reneged promise to hold an EU referendum. I'll believe that when I see it," said Marta Andreasen, the Ukip MEP.

Under the draft laws last month from Olli Rehn, commissioner for monetary affairs, countries would face fines of 0.2% of GDP for flouting the stability and growth pact, the euro rulebook which limits budget deficits to 3% of GDP and national debt levels to 60%. The penalties would come almost automatically, decided by the commission and could only be stopped subsequently by a qualified majority vote of EU governments.

The system was designed to try to avoid the kind of political trade-offs inevitable if the decisions were taken by EU governments. Germany, as the EU's fiscal disciplinarian, was the strongest supporter of the automatic fines and the commission. Sarkozy led the opposition, arguing for the primacy of politics and elected governments over national budgets.

Des Thurlby, human resources (HR) director at the international car maker, said he had held "pointed" discussions with up to five of the company's best employees urging them to consider moving "out of leafy Warwickshire" to China to help the company capitalise on emerging markets. Those who refused had less chance of being shortlisted for a future top job at the company, Mr Thurlby said.

The HR director is adopting the controversial stance because the luxury car manufacturer is struggling to convince its best workers to relocate on typically three-year assignments. Those with partners, or children in schools, were often put off the upheaval of moving abroad, he said.

China is now Jaguar Land Rover's third biggest market after the UK and USA. The company, owned by India's Tata Motors, is looking to set up a joint venture deal with a Chinese industrial plant to manufacture tens of thousands of cars a year. However, the plans could be dealt a blow if too few UK executives committed to running the overseas operations.

Last Tuesday Jaguar Land Rover reported profit after tax of 238.1 million pounds in the three months to September compared to a loss of 60.4 million pounds over the same period last year, according to Tata. Sales were up 43 percent on rising demand for the group's $72,000 (45,000 pounds) Jaguar XJ Sedans in China and the US.

Revelations that several big mortgage issuers sped through thousands of home foreclosures without properly checking paperwork already has raised alarm in Washington. If the irregularities are widespread, the consequences could be severe, the Congressional Oversight Panel said in a report issued Tuesday. The full impact is still is unclear, the report cautions.

Employees or contractors of several major banks have testified in court cases that they signed, and in some cases backdated, thousands of certifying documents for home seizures. Financial firms that service a total $6.4 trillion in mortgages are involved, according to the new report. Big banks including Bank of America Corp, JPMorgan Chase & Co and Ally Financial Inc's GMAC Mortgage have suspended foreclosures at some point because of flawed documents.

Federal and state regulators, including the Federal Reserve and attorneys general in all 50 states, are investigating whether mortgage companies cut corners on their own procedures when they moved to foreclose on people's homes. "Clear and uncontested property rights are the foundation of the housing market," the report says. "If these rights fall into question, that foundation could collapse."

It lays out the possible scenarios: Borrowers may not be able to ascertain if they're sending their mortgage payments to the right party. Judges may block all foreclosures. Prospective buyers and sellers could be in left in limbo. For major banks, if they discovered that they still owned millions of bad mortgage loans they assumed had been sold, the losses could reach billions.

His challenge is to reassure European partners that, despite political weakness at home and embarrassing setbacks abroad, he remains committed to better cooperation on issues ranging from the war in Afghanistan to the fight against trade protectionism.

But it will not be easy for Obama, whose Democratic Party suffered heavy losses in this month's congressional elections, to dispel the impression that his stature has been diminished on the world stage. He will attend back-to-back NATO and European Union summits in Lisbon on Friday and Saturday. "The tricky thing for Obama is to show the Europeans not only that he's still important to them but that they're still important to the US," said Sally McNamara, a European affairs expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington.

Accustomed to being at the center of US foreign policy, Europe may be feeling jilted. The White House insists that Obama's engagement with economically dynamic Asia will not come at the expense of America's "enduring partnership" with less-vibrant Europe. But analysts believe sweeping Republican gains in the November 2 midterm elections, which could cause legislative gridlock, will make it harder for him to make progress on top European concerns like financial regulation, climate change and trade.