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Payment in progress .. 24 Sept, it may be the most annoying message an adsense publisher allover the world hate to read now! it has been 6 days, now it is the first of October in some countries and they have not been paid.
I normal months it took maximum 2 or 3 days in progress then payment is issued and publishers can happily get thier money at Western Union offices allover the world.
Some think it is a problem at Western Union not Google Adsense, others think it is due to Google employees are busy celebrating the Google's 11th birthday..lol
Also some bloggers wrote it is Google validating all accounts for violations and expecting lots of accounts to get banned (most silly thought I think).
Of course there must be an official announcement about this issue, yet nothing comes from Google ...

Update :
official comment on google blog :

Just wanted to let you know that our engineers are currently investigating the payment issue you've reported -- please visit our Known Issues page, where we'll continue to post updates as soon as we receive them.

-Arlene

also see

Now I am 99% sure that Google do follow nofollow links, however the page rank is not assigned.
this is done by :
I put a link of a page not indexed in Google, on a known website which was 100fm6.com, and the page was a profile on a social bookmarking new site.
the profile page was indexed soon the page on the website was crawled.
from my experience Google uses nofollow for only Page rank issue however it follow the links.
this means you should never use nofollow to link to a warez or non-friendly Google sites, Google knows exactly who you link to !