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The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which had traded in a range of more than 350 points, ended down 444.99 points, or 5.56%, at 7552.29. The S&P 500 plummeted 54.14 points, or 6.7%, to 752.44, and the Nasdaq dropped 70.30 points, or 5.1%, to 1316.12. The S&P 500 last closed lower on April 14, 1997. The Dow had its lowest close since March 12, 2003.

Interpol, which is based in France, announced Wednesday it is sending a team of investigators to Mexico to investigate the possibility that its communications systems and databases are not being used for legitimate law enforcement purposes. The prospect was raised after the arrest of the top official working with the agency in the country.

Ricardo Gutierrez Vargas, director for International Police Affairs at Mexico’s Federal Investigative Agency and the head of Mexico’s Interpol office, was placed under house arrest Sunday, the attorney general’s office said Tuesday.

More than 30 officials have been arrested since July in connection with the anti-corruption Operation Limpieza, an ongoing investigation into information leaks by law enforcement officials to drug traffickers, said Niverda Amado, a government press secretary in Mexico City.

Gutierrez can be held for up to 40 days while authorities “obtain sufficient evidence to determine his probable responsibility,” the attorney general’s office said in a news release.

Rodolfo de la Guardia Garcia, a former top official at the Federal Investigative Agency, also is under 40-day house arrest. He was arrested October 29.

Mexico’s Interpol office, or National Central Bureau, is staffed and run by the Federal Investigative Agency.

In the final day of trading for the December contract, U.S. crude futures fell $3.35 to $50.27 a barrel in electronic trading, but not before dipping as low as $49.91.

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who plans to increase his stake to 5 percent from less than 4 percent, said the bank’s shares were “dramatically undervalued” following a nearly 90 percent plunge since late 2006.

He also expressed “full and complete support to Citi management,” including embattled Chief Executive Vikram Pandit, who earlier this week announced a plan to cut 52,000 jobs.

Do not expect these recommendations to be carried forward if Eric Holder decides to forgo his lucrative corporate law practice at Covington & Burling and accept the U.S. Attorney General position for which many believe he is the top contendor. Eric Holder would have a troubling conflict of interest in carrying out this work in light of his current work as defense lawyer for Chiquita Brands international in a case in which Colombian plaintiffs seek damages for the murders carried out by the AUC paramilitaries – a designated terrorist organization. Chiquita has already admitted in a criminal case that it paid the AUC around $1.7 million in a 7-year period and that it further provided the AUC with a cache of machine guns as well.

More than 40 percent of packaged meats sampled from three Arizona chain stores tested positive for Clostridium difficile, a gut bug known as C. diff., according to newly complete analysis of 2006 data collected by a University of Arizona scientist.

Nearly 30 percent of the contaminated samples of ground beef, pork and turkey and ready-to-eat meats like summer sausage were identical or closely related to a super-toxic strain of C. diff blamed for growing rates of illness and death in the U.S. — raising the possibility that the bacterial infections may be transmitted through food.

“These data suggest that domestic animals, by way of retail meats, may be a source of C. difficile for human infection,” said J. Glenn Songer, a professor of veterinary science at the Tucson school, who talked with msnbc.com about work now under review by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But specialists from the CDC and scientists who study C. diff said the connection between the presence of C. diff bacteria and infection has not been established and that there’s not enough evidence about food transmission to warrant public alarm.

“There are no documented cases of people getting Clostridium difficile infection from eating food that contains C. difficile,” said Dr. L. Clifford McDonald, chief of prevention and response for a division of the CDC. “However, because C. difficile has been found in some retail meats, that possibility does exist.”

Songer’s samples included brands sold in grocery stores across the nation. Contamination ranged from 41 percent of pork products and 44 percent of turkey products to 50 percent of ground beef samples and more than 62 percent of samples of braunschweiger, a type of liverwurst.

The second-largest U.S. bank by assets has been reeling on concerns that mounting losses from credit cards, mortgages and toxic debt could overwhelm its efforts to slash costs and add deposits. Last month, Wells Fargo & Co dealt a blow by derailing Citigroup’s bid to buy Wachovia Corp.

Citigroup shares closed down $1.96 at $6.40 on the New York Stock Exchange and have fallen 33 percent this week as some investors concluded that Chief Executive Vikram Pandit’s plan to shed 52,000 jobs and cut expenses by one-fifth won’t restore the bank to health.

“People are looking at their business model and wondering how on earth they’re going to be able to survive,” said William Larkin, a fixed-income manager at Cabot Money management in Salem, Massachusetts.

The no-show infuriated attorneys who’d spent the day milling about with what they’d hoped would be slam-dunk motions to quash the cases.

And it put Presiding Judge Manuel Bañales in a position he said he’d never been in before.

“At the very least I expected the district attorney to be here,” Bañales said, asking Guerra’s office manager, “Do you know where he is?”

The manager, Hilda Ramirez, was subpoenaed by defense attorney J.A. “Tony” Canales when buzz circulated in the courthouse that Guerra was nowhere to be found.

Canales summoned Ramirez to act as representative for Guerra in hopes the motions could go forward.

She told the judge she had been trying to reach Guerra all day.

When Bañales asked if she were concerned for Guerra’s safety she said she would not know how to answer the question.

Guerra’s cell phone message box was full much of the day, but an assistant who answered the line late Wednesday said he was not ill.

Bañales said he would not hear the motions without the state present and set arraignments for Friday morning.

He allowed all defendants to waive court appearances and appear via their lawyers and set a jury to be called Dec. 8.

“The State of Texas is entitled to have its day in court,” he said.

Guerra, a 53-year-old Rio Grande Valley prosecutor who drew national attention for suing counterparts in the county justice system and staging a protest with barnyard animals, long has alleged high-ranking corruption in the deals that brought the impoverished county a $60 million immigration detention center.

On Monday, he got a grand jury to sign off on a slew of indictments including an acceptance of honorarium charge against state Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr., and an engaging in organized criminal activity charge against Cheney and Gonzales.

Cheney is accused of contributing to the neglect of federal immigration detainees by contracting for-profit prisons.

“By working through corporations as prisons for profit, Defendant Richard Cheney has committed at least misdemeanor assaults of our inmates and/or detainees,” the indictment reads, adding that a “money trail” can be traced to Cheney’s substantial investments in the Vanguard Group, which invests in privately run prisons.

This morning, attorneys filed motions to quash indictments “for prosecutorial vindictiveness and failure to allege an offense.”

“In most of the indictments, the prosecutor identifies himself as the victim. The prosecutor has usurped for himself the role of prosecutor, judge, victim, and director of the grand jury. His conflict of interest and abuse of office require that he be stopped,” Canales said.

A number of experts were shaking their heads at the indictment.

Shannon Edmonds of the Texas District and County Attorneys Association, after reviewing a faxed copy of the indictment against Cheney and Gonzales, said he’d never seen one like it.

“It’s a creative indictment, but I don’t think it properly alleges any crime,” Edmonds said. “It’s more of just a rambling narrative … I think a court will find that it’s legally insufficient in that it fails to allege a crime.”

Chip B. Lewis, a prominent criminal defense lawyer in Houston whose clients have included former Enron chairman Ken Lay, said, “It’s a shame. I’m not a Cheney supporter by any means. I’m Democrat. But the misuse of our criminal justice system is apparent … It just smacks of partisanship and it’s a shame that credence can be lent to this type of charge because you have a grand jury indictment.”

When the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced at the international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations per second, the first two computers to do so.