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A report by the SEC’s internal watchdog alleges that the two SEC lawyers traded in stock of a large financial services company despite being told by another SEC employee of ongoing investigations of that company, CBS News reported.

The SEC inspector general report said one SEC attorney under investigation works in the Office of the SEC’s Chief Counsel and has access to a tremendous amount of nonpublic information, CBS News said.

An SEC spokesman said: “We take seriously even the suggestion that any SEC employee would engage in insider trading. We note that the inspector general report neither accuses any SEC employee of insider trading nor concludes that any such conduct took place.”

Calls to the SEC’s inspector general and Federal Bureau of Investigation were not immediately returned.

The SEC is in charge of policing markets and protecting investors. Ferreting out individuals who use nonpublic material information to profit on a company’s stock has been a priority for the SEC.

At least, that’s the hope of researchers at the Pentagon’s mad-science division Darpa. The agency’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $4 million to start up a program called Silent Talk. The goal is to “allow user-to-user communication on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analysis of neural signals.” That’s on top of the $4 million the Army handed out last year to the University of California to investigate the potential for computer-mediated telepathy.

Before being vocalized, speech exists as word-specific neural signals in the mind. Darpa wants to develop technology that would detect these signals of “pre-speech,” analyze them, and then transmit the statement to an intended interlocutor. Darpa plans to use EEG to read the brain waves. It’s a technique they’re also testing in a project to devise mind-reading binoculars that alert soldiers to threats faster the conscious mind can process them.

The project has three major goals, according to Darpa. First, try to map a person’s EEG patterns to his or her individual words. Then, see if those patterns are generalizable — if everyone has similar patterns. Last, “construct a fieldable pre-prototype that would decode the signal and transmit over a limited range.”

Gross domestic product in the 16-nation euro-currency area fell 2.5% in the period from January to March, compared with the fourth quarter of 2008. That means Europe’s economic heartland was contracting at an annualized rate of nearly 10% in the first quarter.

However, the latest monthly indicators for business activity suggest the pace of Europe’s recession has slowed sharply. “This kind of pace of contraction will probably not be repeated,” said Greg Fuzesi, economist at J.P. Morgan in London: “You’re not going to get -10% again.”

A growing number of analysts believe the euro-zone economy could stabilize by this fall and return to growth around the end of the year, although unemployment is expected to continue rising until well into 2010. Business surveys have shown new orders stabilizing, while big drops in inventories in the last two quarters are expected to lead to higher production by firms in coming months.

The euro zone took an unprecedented beating in the first quarter, however, with the biggest contractions coming in countries that rely on the export of manufactured goods.

Professor Roubini, of New York University’s Stern business school, believes that while such a major change is some way off, the Chinese government is laying the ground for the yuan’s ascendance.

Known as “Dr Doom” for his negative stance, Prof Roubini argues that China is better placed than the US to provide a reserve currency for the 21st century because it has a large current account surplus, focused government and few of the economic worries the US faces.

In a column in the New York Times, Prof Roubini warns that with the proposal for a new international reserve currency via the International Monetary Fund, Beijing has already begun to take steps to usurp the greenback.

Geithner’s presence will be in violation of the Logan Act, intended to prohibit American citizens without authority from interfering in relations between the United States and foreign governments. Congress established the Logan Act in 1799. The only Logan Act indictment occurred in 1803. It involved a Kentucky newspaper article that argued for the formation in the western United States of a separate nation allied to France. No prosecution followed.

Tucker told Alex Jones today that Geithner will attend the secretive meeting to talk about global government. Geithner recently announced while addressing the Council on Foreign Relations that he supported a proposal to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency with a composite of currencies that would be managed by the International Monetary Fund.

Nationwide, winter wheat production was forecast at 1.5 billion bushels, down 20 percent from last year. The nation’s production is expected to come from 34 million acres with average yields of 44 bushels per acre. Winter wheat acreage this season is down 14 percent.

“The drought really got Texas and it was the freeze that finished up the better Oklahoma wheat-producing areas. And southern Kansas was touched by the freeze as well,” said Mike Woolverton, grain marketing economist at Kansas State University.

Tuesday’s forecast comes at a time when wet conditions are keeping farmers from planting their spring wheat. The window for spring-planted wheat typically ends by mid-May; after that yield potential plummets because of hot weather during pollination, Woolverton said.

Wheat planting is far behind schedule in Montana, North Dakota and Minnesota, he said. Some farmers are now considering putting those acres instead into soybeans, which can be planted later in the season when their fields dry out.

A researcher for Human Rights Watch, who met Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi at the Abu Salim prison in Tripoli late last month, said a contact in Libya had confirmed the death.

Libi was captured fleeing Afghanistan in late 2001, and he vanished into the secret detention system run by the Bush administration. He became the unnamed source, according to Senate investigators, behind Bush administration claims in 2002 and 2003 that Iraq had provided training in chemical and biological weapons to al-Qaeda operatives. The claim was most famously delivered by then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his address to the United Nations in February 2003.

Powell later called the speech a “blot” on his record, saying he was not given all available intelligence and analysis within the government. The Defense Intelligence Agency and some analysts at the CIA had questioned the veracity of Libi’s testimony, which was obtained after the prisoner was transferred to Egyptian custody for questioning by the CIA, according to Senate investigators.

In their book “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War,” Michael Isikoff and David Corn said Libi made up the story about Iraqi training after he was beaten and subjected to a “mock burial” by his Egyptian interrogators, who put him in a cramped box for 17 hours. Libi recanted the story after being returned to CIA custody in 2004.

When President George W. Bush ordered the 2006 transfer to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of high-value detainees previously held in CIA custody, Libi was pointedly missing. Human rights groups had long suspected that Libi was instead transferred to Libya, but the CIA had never confirmed where he was sent.