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Although he rose to executive director of the Canberra branch, Detheridge was always below the poverty line. He worked 15-hour days for the Church of Scientology, plus another three hours in the early morning as a cleaner to feed his family. Days off were rare.

He told The Age how he learnt to lie, bully, intimidate and humiliate people and particularly to extort money in service of the church and its ostensible aim, the greatest good of the greatest number. Now he calls it ”a crock of shit”.

Detheridge lost 17 years to the church, under constant financial and emotional pressure. He did much of which he is now ashamed, and suffered much more. This week his story hit the headlines when Senator Nick Xenophon called for an inquiry into the church and tabled several letters from former members.

For decades the celebrity-recruiting group, granted legal status as a religion in Australia in 1983, has fought to preserve its secrets. These include a bizarre cosmology involving the galactic dictator Xenu dumping millions of corpses in volcanoes on Earth 75 million years ago and blowing them up with 17 hydrogen bombs (the last word in high-tech when L. Ron Hubbard founded the group in the 1950s).

“Senior government officials say there was a colossal error at the mint itself,” said CTV Ottawa Bureau Chief Robert Fife on Tuesday night.

Mint officials double-counted some gold bullion they sold, and also underestimated the shrinkage of the gold during processing.

The federal government had withheld bonuses for mint executives until the mystery was solved. It’s unclear whether those bonuses will still be paid out.

Junior Transport Minister Rob Merrifield, who’s responsible for the mint, called in the RCMP on June 9 after he learned that an audit would not “rectify the problem” of the missing gold. That’s about 10 weeks after the government first learned of the missing gold.

The Deloitte and Touche audit cost taxpayers $360,000.

Ottawa now requires the mint to report on inventory levels of metals every three months.

Last month, Liberal critic for Crown corporations Joe Volpe said the security, reputation and the quality of the Canadian Mint’s product has been compromised.

William E. Sparkman Jr. died of asphyxiation and was found with hands, feet and mouth bound with duct tape, a rope around his neck and the word “FED” written on his chest, investigators concluded. Passersby spotted his body on Sept. 12 in a remote area of the Daniel Boone National Forest.

Witnesses said Sparkman had discussed ending his own life, recent federal investigations of public officials in Kentucky and negative perceptions of federal agencies expressed by Clay County, Ky. residents, investigators said.

Sparkman also secured two life insurance policies that would not pay out for suicide shortly before his death, investigators said. Authorities decided to share some, but not all of the details of their investigation on Tuesday due to the high level of national interest.

Sparkman was a substitute teacher and one of 5,900 part-time Census field workers that conduct the annual American Community Survey and dozens of other government surveys each year. Such workers are typically called in by the Census Bureau for assignments as needed. The agency said it will hire roughly 700,000 temporary workers to conduct follow-up interviews for next year’s decennial Census.

Normal census operations will resume in Clay County next month, Census spokesman Stephen Buckner said.

“The death of our co-worker, William Sparkman, was a tragedy and remains a loss for the Census Bureau family,” Buckner said in a statement. “Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends.”

Gilbert Acciardo, a former state trooper who worked with Sparkman at an after-school day-care program, said that Sparkman gave him no clues that he was contemplating suicide. Sparkman had been treated for Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, but told Acciardo that it was under control. Nevertheless, he said he was confident in the results of the investigation.

“If that’s what they say, because they are the professionals,” Acciardo said when told of the findings. “With the time frame they worked on it, and the thoroughness of the investigation, it sounds like a reasonable statement.”

Violence against Census employees is extremely rare, according to the agency. Field workers receive safety tips as part of their basic training and are instructed to immediately remove themselves from unsafe situations and to inform supervisors if they consider an area too unsafe to work alone.

Company spokeswoman Gwenan White said that they issued the advice after reports that one batch of the swine flu vaccine might have caused more allergic reactions than normal.

“We have advised health care professionals not to use that batch while health authorities and GlaxoSmithKline investigate,” she said.

White said the batch at issue, which has been distributed across Canada, contains 172,000 doses of the vaccine. She declined to say how many doses had been administered before the advice to stop using them was given.

His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.

According to the government’s broadest measure of unemployment, some 17.5 percent are either without a job entirely or underemployed. The so-called U-6 number is at the highest rate since becoming an official labor statistic in 1994.

The number dwarfs the statistic most people pay attention to—the U-3 rate—which most recently showed unemployment at 10.2 percent for October, the highest it has been since June 1983.

But that happy situation, aided by ultralow interest rates, may not last much longer.

Treasury officials now face a trifecta of headaches: a mountain of new debt, a balloon of short-term borrowings that come due in the months ahead, and interest rates that are sure to climb back to normal as soon as the Federal Reserve decides that the emergency has passed.

Even as Treasury officials are racing to lock in today’s low rates by exchanging short-term borrowings for long-term bonds, the government faces a payment shock similar to those that sent legions of overstretched homeowners into default on their mortgages.

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.

In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The potential for rapidly escalating interest payouts is just one of the wrenching challenges facing the United States after decades of living beyond its means.

The surge in borrowing over the last year or two is widely judged to have been a necessary response to the financial crisis and the deep recession, and there is still a raging debate over how aggressively to bring down deficits over the next few years. But there is little doubt that the United States’ long-term budget crisis is becoming too big to postpone.

Americans now have to climb out of two deep holes: as debt-loaded consumers, whose personal wealth sank along with housing and stock prices; and as taxpayers, whose government debt has almost doubled in the last two years alone, just as costs tied to benefits for retiring baby boomers are set to explode.

The competing demands could deepen political battles over the size and role of the government, the trade-offs between taxes and spending, the choices between helping older generations versus younger ones, and the bottom-line questions about who should ultimately shoulder the burden.

“The government is on teaser rates,” said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan group that advocates lower deficits. “We’re taking out a huge mortgage right now, but we won’t feel the pain until later.”

So far, the demand for Treasury securities from investors and other governments around the world has remained strong enough to hold down the interest rates that the United States must offer to sell them. Indeed, the government paid less interest on its debt this year than in 2008, even though it added almost $2 trillion in debt.

The government’s average interest rate on new borrowing last year fell below 1 percent. For short-term i.o.u.’s like one-month Treasury bills, its average rate was only sixteen-hundredths of a percent.

“All of the auction results have been solid,” said Matthew Rutherford, the Treasury’s deputy assistant secretary in charge of finance operations. “Investor demand has been very broad, and it’s been increasing in the last couple of years.”

The problem, many analysts say, is that record government deficits have arrived just as the long-feared explosion begins in spending on benefits under Medicare and Social Security. The nation’s oldest baby boomers are approaching 65, setting off what experts have warned for years will be a fiscal nightmare for the government.

Mr Paulson, best known for making $3.7bn from bets on the collapse of the US sub-prime mortgage market, is believed to have told investors that the new fund, to be run by Paulson & Co, will invest not just in gold miners but also in other investments related to the precious metal.

Although not Paulson & Co’s first foray into gold, given approximately 10pc of the $30bn it has under management is in gold-related investments, it would be the firm’s first pure-play gold fund.