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Deanne Weakly was among the first to the microphone. The 51-year-old estate agent told how a couple of years ago she was pulling in $80,000 (£48,000) a year from commissions selling homes in LA’s booming property market.

When the bottom fell out of the business with the foreclosure crisis, she lost her own house and ended up living on the streets in a city with more homeless than any other in America. She was sexually assaulted, harassed by the police and in despair.

She turned to the city and California state governments for help. “No one wanted to listen. They blame you for being homeless in the first place,” she said.

Others followed, recounting in English or Spanish, sometimes Korean, their personal crises. Some shouted their anger, others laboriously recounted details of losing homes, families forced into overcrowded shelters, life on the streets.

The United Nations special rapporteur, Raquel Rolnik, listened to it all patiently, occasionally taking notes, nodding encouragement.

Rolnik had waited more than a year to tour cities across the US to prepare a report for the UN’s human rights council on America’s deepening housing crisis following the subprime mortgage debacle.

UN special rapporteurs are more often found investigating human rights in Sudan and Burundi or abuses of the Israeli occupation than exposing the underbelly of the American dream. George Bush’s administration blocked her visit, finding itself in the company of Cuba, Burma and North Korea in blocking a special rapporteur.

“I was asking for almost a year before I as allowed in,” Rolnik said.

When Barack Obama came to power she was welcomed to range across America talking to those who have lived on the streets for years and the newly homeless forced out by the foreclosure crisis.

Rolnik, a Brazilian urban planner and architect, said administration officials were genuinely interested in what she might find, if not embracing of her raison d’etre that everyone is entitled to a decent home.

“One of the first meetings I had at the state department they clearly told me: here, adequate housing is not a human right,” she said.

“I was shocked when I realised that the US, and countries in Europe – England – as well, had a solid housing policy for many years that worked pretty well. That was dismantled and the situation became worse throughout the nineties. Then we had this financial crisis and a real crisis in housing. It’s all tied together,” she said.

“But I didn’t expect to see what I have seen. In some ways the situation is worse than I expected.”

Rolnik travelled from New York and Chicago to New Orleans and South Dakota’s Native American reservations, talking to the homeless, the desperate, the foreclosed, and the officials who run housing policy.

Her final stop was Los Angeles, the homeless capital of the nation. Up to 100,000 people are sleeping on the streets or in shelters on any given night. Some have been living like that for years. Others found themselves suddenly destitute as the bank seized their home or they lost a job and couldn’t pay the rent.

Two years ago about 1,300 people were evicted from properties in central LA. Last year it was 15,500. Across the wider Los Angeles region 62,400 people were thrown out of their homes.

“There is a predictable path for those who lose their jobs and can’t pay the rent or the mortgage,” Gary Blasi, a University of California law professor, told Rolnik. “First they live with friends and relatives, but they’re poor, too. Then they live in their cars until the cars get towed or break down. Some live in tents. Almost all the camping grounds within 100 miles of Los Angeles are now filled with people living in them.”

A single person on welfare living in Los Angeles receives $221 a month – an amount that hasn’t changed in a decade. The rent for one room is typically nearly double that. Too often the newly destitute end up on the streets.

“I had a job as a cashier in K-Mart and shared a house with other women,” Deborah Burton told Rolnik. “But then I lost my job and when you lose your job you lose your home. You can’t pay the rent.”

Burton, 57, found herself sleeping on the streets. She explained how the tents go up on Skid Row in central LA after dark but must be down before dawn.

“If you aren’t up and moving by 6am, the police arrest you for sleeping or sitting on the sidewalk. It goes on your record and makes it very difficult to get [public] housing,” she said. “Not many think of us as people. Don’t criminalise us because we find ourselves in a certain situation. No one wants to be homeless.”

Doris Tinson certainly doesn’t but she is on the brink of losing the house she bought in 1964 for $29,000. She paid off the mortgage several times as she borrowed against the house to supplement her pay as a nurse and send her children, and then grandchildren, to college.

Then a few years ago, a man came knocking offering her a cheap mortgage, a fraction of the value of the house by then put at $750,000. Tinson took out the $87,000 loan but along the way the monthly payments quadrupled to $2,324, nearly her entire income and they are set to rise again.

“The mortgage went up because the interest rate went up. I still don’t know how that happened,” she told Rolnik.

On Los Angeles’ own Wall Street, in the poorer, mostly black and Hispanic, south of the city, the “for sale” signs hang outside the boarded and secured foreclosed homes with warning notices against trespass. On average homes have lost two-thirds of their value in south central LA.

At the end of 2008 about 2% of Los Angeles homes had been foreclosed on. Housing activists told Rolnik that was mostly because of sharply increasing unemployment and predatory lending that exploited the vulnerable.

Rolnik takes it all in. Later she describes herself as disturbed that a country so rich is in many ways so deficient and indifferent in dealing with its poor and vulnerable.

She says that the more recent conservative philosophy of dismantling the old policy of providing affordable housing to those with smaller incomes in favour of the illusion that everyone can, and should, buy their own home played a central role in not only creating the housing crisis but the financial one.

“Part of the financial crisis has to do with these housing policy options because one of the main ideas of this policy is to promote home ownership to those who never got access to property. People who never had credit finally had banks provide them credit and they can buy a home. But it didn’t work for the poor.

“So now we have a new face of homelessness – people who had homes, were not living in public housing, were not living in assisted housing, but now are in a position of asking for assistance because they’re homeless. But the public housing has been destroyed,” she said.

Rolnik held a town hall meeting in every city she had visited. Always they were packed.

At the Los Angeles meeting, the queues quickly form at the three microphones.

Toni Matthews has been homeless for nearly nine years. “I wrote to Washington but nobody ever answered,” she said.

A Spanish-speaking veteran of the Korean war steps up. He is the angriest of the lot. He is not a communist, he says, but in Cuba nobody goes homeless. He fought for America and now he is left to live on the streets.

Others tell of being evicted by unscrupulous landlords, of living in dangerous and filthy buildings and how the city council doesn’t force landlords to obey the law. The frustration is mixed with a sense of powerlessness.

“Anyone can end up in this situation, living on the streets. Don’t imagine it can’t happen to any of you,” shouted a man.

Away from the microphone, Deanne Weakly says she had never heard of a UN special rapporteur but she’s glad Rolnik turned up.

“I am grateful for the spotlight on the homeless. The spotlight of attention on what people don’t think exists here. These people have no voice. They’re afraid. Not everyone has a big mouth like me,” she said.

Deborah Burton thinks it is a shameful reflection on America that Rolnik should be in the US.

“America is one of the richest countries in the world. For me as a citizen and a person of colour I think it’s important to let the rest of the world know what’s going on here,” she said.

“American politicians come and listen but they don’t do anything. The question we have to answer is why this has been going on so long.”

Rolnik doesn’t pretend she can change the situation. All she can do, she tells the crowd at the meeting, is to draw their problems to the attention of their government and warn others of the dangers.

Shares plunged, weak currencies were battered and more than £14 billion was wiped from the value of British banks on fears that they would be left nursing new losses.

Nervous traders transferred the focus of their anxieties from the risk of companies failing to the risk of nation states defaulting. Investors owed money by Mexico, Russia and Greece saw the price of insuring themselves against default rocket.

Although the scale of Dubai’s debts is comparatively modest at $80 billion (£48 billion), the uncertainty spooked the markets, with no one sure who its creditors are. Several banks rushed out statements to reassure investors that their exposure was small.

The FTSE 100 plunged by 171 points to 5,194 — its biggest one-day fall in eight months in one of the most jittery days in the financial markets since the depths of the banking crisis.

The Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority were monitoring events closely and are demanding figures from UK banks on their loan exposures to Dubai.

According to a senior government official, Dubai’s crisis is regarded as modest and manageable for Britain, but there were growing fears that Abu Dhabi, the oil-rich neighbouring emirate that has in the past given rescue loans, would leave Dubai to its fate.

Dubai World, the state-owned corporation that began the panic on Wednesday by demanding a standstill on its interest payments, worsened the mood when it postponed a teleconference for its bond holders, saying the phone lines were overwhelmed.

Gerard Lyons, chief economist with Standard Chartered, said: “The market reaction shows how vulnerable some economies are to the aftermath of the debt binge. This highlights how fragile confidence is.”

The Eid al-Adha religious holiday in the Middle East, and the closure of financial markets in the United States for Thanksgiving, exacerbated the sense of uncertainty in markets that were open for business.

A computer crash at the London Stock Exchange, which by coincidence is 21 per cent owned by the Dubai Government, left dealers unable to trade for three and a half hours.

Shares in HSBC slumped by 5 per cent, wiping £6.2 billion from its value. According to the United Arab Emirates Banks Association, HSBC has £11 billion of loans outstanding to the UAE, of which Dubai is one of seven emirates. HSBC declined to comment.

More than £2.6 billion was slashed from the value of Barclays, while Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland, both partly owned by the taxpayer, saw their values fall by £1.7 billion and £1.5 billion respectively.

The dollar briefly fell to 84.82 yen — surpassing Thursday’s low and prompting the country’s finance minister, Hirohisa Fujii, to tell reporters in Tokyo Friday that he was “extremely nervous and watching the market carefully.”

“There’s no doubt the market has moved too far in one direction,” Mr. Fujii said. “Moves right now are extreme, and it would be possible to take appropriate measures.”

Although he did not explicitly say that the government might intervene in the foreign exchange markets — by buying dollars for yen — such comments are often interpreted as “verbal intervention,” in which comments from top policy makers can swing market expectations and thus influence currency levels.

By mid-morning in Tokyo, the dollar gained somewhat, to 85.90 yen, but it remains weak in comparison to earlier this year. In April, it took $1 bought 101 yen, and at the start of 2008, $1 bought nearly 110 yen.

The dollar’s slump against the yen, and against many of the world’s major currencies, is part of a wide, multiyear decline, set off by worries about the U.S. economy and its swelling debt — and more recently, a belief that the United States was unlikely to raise interest rates soon.

The dollar’s weakness is especially causing jitters in Japan, whose economy is still struggling to emerge from a deep recession. A strong yen — which makes exporters’ good more expensive for consumers in the United States — is something Japan’s export-oriented economy can ill afford.

The Nikkei 225 stock index in Tokyo dropped 1.8 percent on Friday morning, led by exporting giants like Sony, Toshiba, Toyota, Nissan and Honda.

Earlier this decade, Japan frequently intervened in currency markets to weaken its currency, thereby keeping its exports affordable for overseas markets.

But Japan has held back from similar moves amid increasing signals from Washington that Asia’s export-driven economies should no longer count on American consumers to keep them afloat.

In a research note on Friday, Patrick Bennett, a strategist at Société Générale in Hong Kong said he still expected “some ratcheting higher in tone before physical action is taken.”

On a recent trip to the region, President Obama urged countries like Japan and China to cultivate domestic demand instead, while allowing their currencies to appreciate against the dollar.

Mr. Obama is concerned by what economists call a global imbalance: a huge trade and current-account deficit in the United States and trade surpluses in the rest of the world. The president said Americans must spend less on imported goods — and increase their household savings — while consumers in Asia must spend more.

“It was just two weeks ago that U.S. President Obama stressed the necessity for the United States to reduce its trade deficit, and for Asian countries to grow domestic demand,” Osamu Takashima, an analyst at the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ, wrote in a note to clients. “International circumstances make it difficult for the Japanese government to halt the yen’s rise by intervening in currency markets.”

The slump in the dollar, so soon after Mr. Obama’s visit, is putting the Japanese government to the test, however. Japan has not meddled in currency markets since 2004, but the recent trend upward had prompted speculation that an intervention might be imminent.

“The United States Mint has depleted its current inventory of 2009 American Eagle 1-ounce gold bullion coins due to the continued strong demand for this product,” the Mint told its authorized dealers in a memorandum on Wednesday.

November sales to date were at 124,000 ounces, higher than the 115,500 ounces sold in each month of September and October, the Mint said.

The Mint said it expects to resume sales in early December.

Increasing worries about inflation, a falling U.S. dollar and geopolitical tensions are prompting individual investors to take physical possession of gold coins and other bullion products due to the metal’s appeal as a safe haven in financial and political crises.

Armin Eckermann, president of the homeschool organization, Schuzh, was present at the trial. He told HSLDA the judge was seeking a compromise.

“This judge said that he thought a jail sentence was too harsh for the Dudek family under this situation,” said Eckermann. “But the prosecutor took a hard line.”

The new trial was continued to next week after more than seven hours of testimony. This included an outburst by Mr. Mueller when Mr. Dudek asked the local school officials if they knew the current laws that criminalize homeschoolers were based on laws from 1938. Mr. Mueller loudly protested: “All those Nazi laws have been suspended, and this one is democratic, and you’ve got to accept it, and that’s it.”

Mr. Dudek disagrees.

The source, who has worked on covert US military programs for years, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan, has direct knowledge of Blackwater’s involvement. He spoke to The Nation on condition of anonymity because the program is classified. The source said that the program is so “compartmentalized” that senior figures within the Obama administration and the US military chain of command may not be aware of its existence.

The White House did not return calls or email messages seeking comment for this story. Capt. John Kirby, the spokesperson for Adm. Michael Mullen, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told The Nation, “We do not discuss current operations one way or the other, regardless of their nature.” A defense official, on background, specifically denied that Blackwater performs work on drone strikes or intelligence for JSOC in Pakistan. “We don’t have any contracts to do that work for us. We don’t contract that kind of work out, period,” the official said. “There has not been, and is not now, contracts between JSOC and that organization for these types of services.”

The previously unreported program, the military intelligence source said, is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, announced he had canceled in June 2009. “This is a parallel operation to the CIA,” said the source. “They are two separate beasts.” The program puts Blackwater at the epicenter of a US military operation within the borders of a nation against which the United States has not declared war–knowledge that could further strain the already tense relations between the United States and Pakistan. In 2006, the United States and Pakistan struck a deal that authorized JSOC to enter Pakistan to hunt Osama bin Laden with the understanding that Pakistan would deny it had given permission. Officially, the United States is not supposed to have any active military operations in the country.

The pound also fell sharply against the dollar, which recovered some of the previous day’s sharp losses, and dropped to a six-week low against a broadly firmer yen.

Traders and analysts said sterling was coming under pressure following Dubai’s move on Wednesday to restructure its biggest corporate debtor, Dubai World, and delay repayment on some of the company’s $59 billion (35.6 billion pounds) of liabilities.

“The administration is committed to a comprehensive review of its landmines policy. That review is still ongoing,” spokesman Ian Kelly said in a statement.

Speaking ahead of a review conference next weekend in Cartagena, Colombia, on the 10-year-old international Mine Ban Treaty, Kelly said the U.S. policy review was “going to take some time” and while it continued the current policy of declining to join the accord would remain in force.

It also states that three quarters of young black men are on the database. The finding risks stigmatising a whole section of society, the equality watchdog has warned.

The revelations will fuel the debate about the DNA database, the world’s largest. They are included in a report by the Human Genetics Commission, an independent government advisory body. It criticises the piecemeal development of the database and questions how effective it is in helping the police to investigate and solve crimes.

Jonathan Montgomery, commission chairman, said that “function creep” over the years had transformed a database of offenders into one of suspects. Almost one million innocent people are now on the DNA database.

Professor Montgomery said: “It’s now become pretty much routine to take DNA samples on arrest, so large numbers of people on the DNA database will be there not because they have been convicted, but because they’ve been arrested.”

Recorded crime has fallen every year since 2004-05, but the number of people arrested in England and Wales annually is rising. Latest figures show that arrests rose by 6 per cent to 1.43 million in 2005 and a further 4 per cent to 1.48 million in 2006-07.

Professor Montgomery said there was some evidence that people were arrested to retain the DNA information even though they might not have been arrested in other circumstance.