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The LSE says the break to trading on Thursday is due to connectivity issues, but it hasn’t yet determined the root cause of the problem.

The exchange has placed all order-driven securities in to an auction call period — which allows customers to continue to place orders into the exchange’s order book. The exchange says it will give customers 30 minutes notice before ending the auction period, once it sorts out the technical issue.

Trading went offline at 10.33 GMT, freezing the FTSE 100 at 5,264.97.

By Kyoko Shimodoi

Nov. 26 (Bloomberg) — Japanese Finance Minister Hirohisa Fujii said the government needs to take action on abnormal currency movements after the yen traded close to a 14-year high against the dollar.

“I am watching these movements, right now it’s time to watch them closely,” he told reporters in Tokyo today. “We need to take appropriate action against abnormal movements.”

It was the third IMF sale of gold in a month as the Washington-based institution seeks to reduce its dependence on lending revenue and bolster its finances amid the global economic crisis.

“The sale was conducted on the basis of market prices prevailing on” Monday, the IMF said in a statement.

Gold prices had hit a record high that day, topping 1,170 dollars an ounce. Since then, the price of the precious metal has soared higher to new all-time peaks as investors seek a safe haven amid economic uncertainty.

The sale brought the total IMF gold sold to central banks to 212 tonnes. India bought 200 tonnes between October 19 and 30 for 6.7 billion dollars and Mauritius bought two tonnes on November 11 for 71.7 million dollars.

Sri Lanka has a 20-month IMF loan of 2.7 billion dollars that was awarded in July after the island nation’s reserves slumped to just over one billion dollars as the government made a final offensive to crush separatist Tamil Tiger rebels.

Sri Lanka’s central bank in early November said it has been buying gold to diversify its reserves amid volatile currency markets but refused to reveal from which sources the bank was buying the gold or at what prices.

The IMF executive board approved the sale of 403.3 tonnes of gold in September. The fund, which currently holds roughly 3,000 tonnes of gold, is the world’s third-largest official holder of the precious metal after the United States and Germany.

Gold and other commodity prices have surged in recent months amid a move away from a sliding dollar. The metal is also winning support over fears about a spike in inflation, as gold is widely regarded as a safe store of value.

The Austrian police announced the arrest today of 5 men and the discovery of 10 counterfeit gold bars stamped with numbers and refiner’s name to match 6,000 real bars stolen in Britain last month.

The police said the five arrested in Vienna on Tuesday night apparently planned to sell the counterfeit gold, passing it off as part of the haul of three tons of bullion stolen by masked gunmen from a warehouse near London’s Heathrow Airport on Nov. 26.

A police spokesman said the police did not know how the men had discovered the numbers stamped on the stolen bars.

The police at first suspected the counterfeit bars were part of the Heathrow booty, but the spokesman said tests showed the bars were made of tungsten and only coated with gold.

The new H1N1 strain, which was discovered in Mexico and the U.S. in April, may be the product of three strains from three continents that swapped genes in a lab or a vaccine-making plant, Gibbs, and fellow Australian scientists wrote in Virology Journal. The authors analyzed the genetic makeup of the virus and found its origin could be more simply explained by human involvement than a coincidence of nature.

Their study, published in a free, online journal reviewed by other scientists, follows debate among researchers six months ago, when Gibbs asked the World Health Organization to consider the hypothesis. After reviewing Gibbs’ initial three-page paper, WHO and other organizations concluded the pandemic strain was a naturally occurring virus and not laboratory-derived.

“It is important that the source of the new virus be found if we wish to avoid future pandemics rather than just trying to minimize the consequences after they have emerged,” Gibbs and colleagues John Armstrong and Jean Downie said in today’s eight- page study.

Gibbs and Armstrong are on the emeritus faculty at the Australian National University in Canberra and Downie is affiliated with the Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Laboratory Services at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital, according to the study.

While the exact source of the new H1N1 strain is a mystery, their research has “raised many new questions,” they said. The authors compared the genetic blueprints of flu strains stored in the free database Genbank and found the pandemic virus’s nearest ancestors circulate in pigs.

‘Simplest Explanation’

Ensign was the focus of media attention over his affair with a campaign staffer. Just last night, a Nevada man disclosed that he found out about his wife’s affair with the state’s junior senator — his best friend — via a text message.

The common factor among these political players is their involvement with the Family, a secretive fellowship of powerful Christian politicians that centers on a Washington, D.C., townhouse. Investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet has written extensively about the influential group in his book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.