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On Monday, justice and foreign ministers from more than 60 countries, including the United States and China, are gathering in Singapore for a meeting hosted by the two international organizations.

It is the first step toward creating what Interpol calls a “global policing doctrine” that would enable Interpol and the United Nations to improve the skills of police peacekeepers, largely by sharing a secure communications network and a vast electronic trove of criminal information, including DNA records, fingerprints, photographs and fugitive notices.

“We have a visionary model,” said Ronald K. Noble, secretary general of Interpol and the first American to head the international police organization, which is based in Lyon. More than 187 member nations finance the organization.

“The police will be trained and equipped differently with resources,” Mr. Noble said. “When they stop someone, they will be consulting global databases to determine who they are stopping.”

Modern peacekeeping has evolved dramatically since the blue-helmeted U.N. military force won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1988. Since 2005, the number of police officers within the total force of 95,400 peacekeepers has more than doubled from about 6,000 to 12,200 in 17 countries.

U.N. police are already battling kidnappings and drug crime in Haiti and illicit lumber trading in Liberia. The aim of the joint effort is to increase the ability to track the movement of criminals around the world by sharing resources and common standards, according to Mr. Noble. He is also pressing ahead with plans for special electronic passports for the agency’s staff of more than 600 Interpol investigators to speed border crossings.

The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs is contributing more than $2 million to finance the development of international global policing standards, according to Andrew Hughes, an Australian who currently heads the U.N.’s force of police officers.

The ambition is to create a series of networks to counter borderless organized criminal operations, Mr. Hughes said. Women, in particular, are being recruited, with a goal of reaching 20 percent of the U.N. force and the development of all-female units like the group of 140 peacekeepers from Bangladesh that is about to be deployed.

“We’re working with refugees,” Mr. Hughes said. “Many of the victims of atrocities are women, and they’ve had enough of men with guns and uniforms.”

He said that among the most critical tasks for a global police force were combating illegal arms and drug trafficking. His own officers in West Africa have watched the growth of cocaine smuggling by Colombian and Venezuelan drug cartels through weakened countries like Sierra Leone and Liberia to the lucrative consumer markets in Europe.

The United States remains the biggest market for cocaine, according to the U.N.’s annual report on drugs and crime. But in the past three years, South American cartels have moved more drugs to Europe using transit points like Guinea Bissau, where the president and the head of the military were killed in sophisticated bombing attacks in March. Each year, at least 50 tons of cocaine from Andean countries passes through West Africa to the streets of Europe, where the drugs are worth almost $2 billion, according to the U.N. report.

“Organized crime is a business that looks for opportunity to expand their market enterprise,” Mr. Hughes said. “When you have a breakdown in police and courts and corrections, organized crime is ripe. We also see the toxic effect of corruption, because they are able to corrupt officials, which makes it difficult to build a functioning society.”

In Afghanistan, where heroin and hashish trafficking is also a thorny issue, NATO announced plans this month to start training the local police — a move it has avoided in the past to concentrate on military responsibilities.

But Mr. Noble of Interpol says he takes a dim view of transforming warriors into beat cops, because the mind-sets are so different.

“We caution on making the delegation of civil police development tasks to military structures,” Mr. Noble said, citing the example of an attack that freed hundreds of Taliban from a prison in Kandahar, Afghanistan, last year. Although Interpol immediately asked for information about the missing prisoners, he said, “we were really shocked and dismayed to learn there were no fingerprints and photographs despite billions spent to train police there.”

The guidelines warn that exposure to television at such an early age can delay language development, affect the ability of a child to concentrate and lead to obesity.

The recommendations also suggest that children aged two to five should watch no more than one hour of television a day.

The recommended viewing limits vary wildly from the actual amount of television and DVDs viewed by Australian children.

Australian statistics show that four-month-old infants watch an of average 44 minutes of television each day and that children under the age of four with pay television at home spend at least three hours a day in front of the screen.

The draft guidelines, which have been designed for childcare centres but also offer advice for parents, are intended to help curb the spread of obesity. Six to eight per cent of Australian schoolchildren are currently listed as obese and an additional one in five, while not obese, is overweight.

“Based on recent research, it is recommended that children younger than two years of age should not spend any time watching television or using other electronic media (DVDs, computer and other electronic games),” said a draft copy of the guidelines obtained by The Australian newspaper.

“Screen time … may reduce the amount of time they have for active play, social contact with others and chances for language development.

“(It may) affect the development of a full range of eye movement (and) … reduce the length of time they can stay focused.”

The project in North Carolina has already helped nab at least one suspect. Agents are eager to look for more criminals and possibly to expand the effort nationwide. But privacy advocates worry that the method allows authorities to track people who have done nothing wrong.

“The FBI today is announcing a rapid DNA initiative,” said Louis Grever, executive assistant director of the FBI’s science and technology branch, during his keynote presentation at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa.

The FBI plans to begin migrating from its IAFIS database, established in the mid-1990s to hold its vast fingerprint data, to a next-generation system that’s expected to be in prototype early next year. This multi-modal NGI biometrics database system will hold DNA records and more.

Grever said that fingerprints and DNA appear to be the most mature and searchable biometrics possibilities, but the FBI is working to include iris-scan records among newer biometrics technologies to identify criminals and terrorists. The plan is to share this data with authorized U.S. and international investigative partners, as the agency does today.

The FBI’s current IAFIS database remains a workhouse; it processes about 200,000 daily transactions from its 370 million 10-fingerprint records, and it just crossed the 250 million transaction mark.

In turn, the seed companies have expressed surprise at the outcry, claiming the issue is being overblown. And even though the July meeting, organized by the American Seed Trade Association in Alexandria, Virginia, did result in the writing of a set of principles for carrying out this research, the seed companies are under no compunction to follow them. “From the researchers’ perspective, the key for this meeting was opening up communication to discuss the problem,” says Ken Ostlie, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, who signed the complaint. “It will be interesting to see how companies implement the principles they agreed upon.”

What is clear is that the seed industry is perceived as highly secretive and reluctant to share its products with scientists. This is fueling the view that companies have something to hide.

Who’s in control?

It’s no secret that the seed industry has the power to shape the information available on biotech crops, referred to variously as genetically engineered or genetically modified (GM) crops. Commercial entities developed nearly all of the crops on the US market, and their ownership of the proprietary technology allows them to decide who studies the crops and how. “Industry is completely driving the bus,” says Christian Krupke, an entomologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

A Russian version of a video by Hermitage Capital, the London-based hedge fund claiming to be victim of a $230m (£146m) scam, has attracted over 12,000 hits, and is the most viewed news clip on YouTube in Russia, the site shows. The English version has had almost 8,000 viewings.

William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital, hopes the video’s international impact will put pressure on the Russian authorities to listen to his claims of theft, gangsterism and government corruption.

“It’s a true Kafka-esque type of situation,” Browder says in the video. “It’s one thing to be victimised by a crime, it’s another thing to be blamed for the crime that you’re a victim of.”

Browder has been banned from entrance to the country and has removed his staff from the fund’s offices in Moscow after police raids. However, one lawyer working for Hermitage, a 37-year old father of two, is still in prison.

Hermitage alleges that its position as Russia’s largest foreign investor two years ago made the establishment nervous, leading to Browder being denied entry to the country. His petition for a new visa led to a string of threats that ended up with the police raiding Hermitage’s Moscow offices, seizing all its documentation.

The video contains reconstruction of the raids and also the transcript of a telephone call from a tax official which the company alleges contains blackmail threats.

The Russian interior ministry is still seeking to have Browder returned to Russia for questioning, Irina Dudukina, a ministry spokeswoman told Bloomberg News by phone today. The executive was placed on the ministry’s international wanted list on charges of tax evasion.

However, according to the fund, the criminals used a network of corrupt lawyers, police and judges to fake transactions and simulate that three profit-making Hermitage subsidiaries had turned a profit into losses – for which they demanded a tax rebate. The new owners of the stolen companies received Russia’s biggest ever rebate within two days, the video claims.

“The $230m which belonged to the Russian people had been stolen by the criminals in an organised conspiracy supported by corrupted officials in the higher reaches of the Russian state,” the video says. “The story sounds like a thriller but isn’t and it’s being repeated every day.”

The Food and Agricultural Organisation says if more land is not used for food production now, 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050.

The world population is expected to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9.1 billion by mid-century.

Climate change, involving floods and droughts, will affect food production.

• Ban all mail-order and Internet sales of handgun ammunition.

• Prohibit the retail sale, the offer for sale or the display of handgun ammunition in a manner that allows ammunition to be accessible to a purchaser without assistance of a vendor or employee.

• Require that the delivery or transfer of ownership of handgun ammunition occur in a face-to-face transaction, with the deliverer or transferor being provided bona fide evidence of identity of the purchaser or other transferee.

That evidence of identity, which must be legibly recorded at the time of delivery, includes:

• The right thumbprint of the purchaser or transferee.

• The date of the sale or other transaction.

• The purchaser’s or transferee’s driver’s license or other identification number and the state in which it was issued.

• The brand, type and amount of ammunition sold or otherwise transferred.

• The purchaser’s or transferee’s signature.

• The name of the salesperson who processed the sale or other transaction.

• The purchaser’s or transferee’s full residential address and telephone number.