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Temperatures below freezing this weekend occurred north of a line from Amarillo, Texas, to Kansas City, Kansas, and east to Toledo, Ohio, ending the growing season for immature plants, said Dave Tolleris, president of WxRisk.com in Richmond, Virginia. Harvesting across the U.S. will be delayed by wet weather in next two weeks, Tolleris said.

“The harvest rates are very slow,” Jonathan Barratt, managing director at Commodity Broking Services Pty in Sydney, said by phone today. If the harvest turns out smaller than expected, then the market “will refocus and reprice,” he said.

Corn for December delivery rose 9.5 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $3.7175 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade at 1:35 p.m. London time, after gaining Oct. 9 to $3.73, the highest since Aug. 3. The most-active contract advanced 8.6 percent last week, the most this year.

Soybeans for November delivery rallied 17 cents, or 1.8 percent, to $9.81 a bushel in Chicago. It earlier reached $9.8325, the highest since Sept. 1. The most-active futures gained 8.9 percent last week, the most this year.

The U.S. corn and soybean harvests are lagging behind the pace of recent years after rain delayed planting in May and below-normal temperatures in July and August slowed crop development, government data show.

‘Field Losses’

“Harvest delays equal field losses at this point and this is not fully priced into futures yet,” said Mike Zuzolo, president of Global Analytics & Consulting LLC in Lafayette, Indiana.

About 10 percent of the U.S. corn crop was harvested as of Oct. 4, compared with the five-year average of 25 percent for the same time of the season, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said last week. About 15 percent of the soybeans had been collected, below the five-year average of 36 percent. The USDA will update harvest progress on Oct. 13 after the close of trading in Chicago.

The progress numbers may show “only a few percent gains” in the corn and soybean harvest, Zuzolo said. Corn may rise to $3.89 a bushel and soybeans may rally to $10.09 as harvest losses are priced into futures, he said.

Wheat for December delivery gained as much as 12 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $4.80 a bushel in Chicago, before trading at $4.7875 at 1:36 p.m. London time.

Ashoka Mody has been identified in an email to his fellow employees at the International Monetary Fund as the man shot Thursday night around 7:30 in his Bethesda garage in the 6800 block of Millwood Road

Mody is currently the assistant director in the European department and an expert in economic development and international finance.

He is also known in his Kenwood Park community as a good neighbor, and those who live near him are stunned that he would be the target of a gunman.

Police say the 54-year-old remains in critical condition after he was shot in his garage Thursday night, before he even had a chance to get out of his vehicle.

Mody’s wife told police of a masked man in dark clothing

It is unclear if anything was taken during the attack and police say they don’t know whether it was a random or targeted crime.

After the shooting, the usually quiet Bethesda neighborhood was filled with police and detectives scouring the lawn as they continue their hunt for a gunman.

“This is worrisome,” said a neighbor.

“It had to be random,” said Julia Sullivan. “They are the nicest family. I don’t know why anyone would want to hurt them so it’s terrifying.”

Michael Sullivan added, “If it was random, it could have been me.”

Detectives are still working to determine a motive for the shooting and police have only a vague description of the masked gunman, who fled on foot.

“We know he was last seen fleeing from this community toward Goldsboro Road,” Baur said. “We expect he escaped from the area.”

Police say there is no evidence to suggest robbery was the motive behind the shooting, but the investigation remains in its infancy.

Josef Haselhofer from Vienna’s Central Agency for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG) said today (Mon) Arctic air would probably result in the first snow cover in provincial capitals before 20 October in history and said Innsbruck, Salzburg and St. Pölten were likely to see snow.

He said as much as 30 to 40 centimetres of snow was likely down to 1,200 metres and snow could fall as low as 400 metres later this week, adding it had already begun to fall in Vorarlberg. He also predicted low temperatures would be minus five degrees at higher elevations and zero degrees in the lowlands by Thursday morning.

Policy makers boosted foreign currency holdings by $413 billion last quarter, the most since at least 2003, to $7.3 trillion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Nations reporting currency breakdowns put 63 percent of the new cash into euros and yen in April, May and June, the latest Barclays Capital data show. That’s the highest percentage in any quarter with more than an $80 billion increase.

World leaders are acting on threats to dump the dollar while the Obama administration shows a willingness to tolerate a weaker currency in an effort to boost exports and the economy as long as it doesn’t drive away the nation’s creditors. The diversification signals that the currency won’t rebound anytime soon after losing 10.3 percent on a trade-weighted basis the past six months, the biggest drop since 1991.

“Global central banks are getting more serious about diversification, whereas in the past they used to just talk about it,” said Steven Englander, a former Federal Reserve researcher who is now the chief U.S. currency strategist at Barclays in New York. “It looks like they are really backing away from the dollar.”

Sliding Share

The dollar’s 37 percent share of new reserves fell from about a 63 percent average since 1999. Englander concluded in a report that the trend “accelerated” in the third quarter. He said in an interview that “for the next couple of months, the forces are still in place” for continued diversification.

An “embarrassing affair,” is how one German diplomat described it. The official could also have added: potentially damaging to trans-Atlantic relations.

In an operation reported on by SPIEGEL over the weekend, US soldiers entered the freighter Hansa India in the Gulf of Suez at the beginning of October and discovered seven containers full of 7.62 millimeter ammunition suitable for Kalashnikov rifles. An eighth container was full of cartridges suitable for the manufacture of additional rounds. The incident is particularly awkward for Berlin as the Hansa India is registered to the Hamburg-based shipping company Leonhardt & Blumberg.

Investigators suspect that the arms were part of an Iranian shipment bound for either the Syrian army or for Hezbollah, the militant Islamist group. US officials have pointed out that the delivery is in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1747, which prohibits arms shipments either into or out of Iran.

According to Leonhardt & Blumberg, the 243-meter-long (297-foot-long) ship has for years been under charter to the state-owned shipping company Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines. Two US warships halted the Hansa India after receiving a tip-off from intelligence services.

Following an intervention by the German government, the US allowed the ship to continue on to its destination in Malta, where the containers were secured.

German Pistols on the Black Market

Meanwhile, the German radio station NDR reported over the weekend that German-made pistols have become a mainstay on the black market in Afghanistan and Pakistan. According to the report, the German Defense Ministry delivered 10,000 Walther P1 pistols to Afghanistan for use by the country’s fledgling army and police force.

“The evidence that our democracy is failing is overwhelming and yet those with the biggest interest in sustaining the current system – the Westminster village, the media and particularly the political parties, including this one – are the groups most in denial about what is really happening to our democracy.” (Brian Wheeler, ‘Dyke in BBC “conspiracy” claim,’ BBC website, September 20, 2009; http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8265628.stm)

Dyke argued there had never been a greater separation between the “political class” and the public:

“I tried and failed to get the problem properly discussed when I was at the BBC and I was stopped, interestingly, by a combination of the politicos on the board of governors, one of whom [Baroness Sarah Hogg] was married to the man who claimed for cleaning his moat, the cabinet interestingly – the Labour cabinet – who decided to have a meeting, only about what we were trying to discuss, and the political journalists at the BBC.

“Why? Because, collectively, they are all part of the problem. They are part of one Westminster conspiracy. They don’t want anything to change. It’s not in their interests.”

Dyke said the MPs’ expenses scandal had been “British democracy’s Berlin Wall moment” but the opportunity to change the system was fading. He added:

Drivers could be forced to pay to use the capital’s busiest roads as Mr Johnson seeks to plug a multi-million pound hole in the Transport for London (TfL) budget.

The extra charges would come in addition to the congestion charge, which costs £8 per day or more if not paid on time, and could be up to £1.34 a mile if previous government proposals are followed.

A commuter making a 12-mile round trip into central London by car during the day could therefore pay more than £20.

The busiest areas in London would be targeted. These include Edgware Road, Marble Arch, Hyde Park Corner, Embankment and busy suburban areas such as Croydon and Greenwich.

An IT outage crashed airport check-in systems, as well as on-line bookings and call centre systems about 9.30am yesterday, affecting more than 10,000 passengers and throwing airports into chaos.

The airline said most systems were restored around 1.30pm, but the passenger backlog did not start to clear until self check-in kiosks were up and running again about 3.30pm.

Air NZ and IBM were to meet today to discuss the fault.

Meanwhile, the contents of Mr Fyfe’s email were made public by Computerworld.

He said he struggled “to recall a time where I have seen a supplier so slow to react to a catastrophic system failure such as this and so unwilling to accept responsibility and apologise to its client and its client’s customers” during his working career.

“We were left high and dry and this is simply unacceptable.

“My expectations of IBM were far higher than the amateur results that were delivered yesterday, and I have been left with no option but to ask the IT team to review the full range of options available to us to ensure we have an IT supplier whom we have confidence in and one who understands and is fully committed to our business and the needs of our customers.”

Air NZ’s short haul airlines group general manager, Bruce Parton, told Radio New Zealand the fault appeared to have been caused by a power failure, followed by a delay in a back-up generator running.

Record lows were reported at Los Angeles International Airport, Lake Arrowhead, Idylwild, Yorba Linda, Escondido and Lake Elsinore, among other places. Some broke records set in the 1920s and 1940s.

The cool weather will continue for the next few days, with lows in the 50s and highs in the mid-70s. Temperatures will increase by the weekend.

The cool weather and high humidity is helping firefighters battling the Sheep fire in San Bernardino County, which broke out Saturday and has burned more than 7,000 acres.