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The French documentary, called “The world according to Monsanto” and directed by independent filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin, paints a grim picture of a company with a long track record of environmental crimes and health scandals.

The story starts in the White House, where Monsanto often got its way by exerting disproportionate influence over policymakers via the “revolving door”. One example is Michael Taylor, who worked for Monsanto as an attorney before being appointed as deputy commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1991. While at the FDA, the authority that deals with all US food approvals, Taylor made crucial decisions that led to the approval of GE foods and crops. Then he returned to Monsanto, becoming the company’s vice president for public policy.

Thanks to these intimate links between Monsanto and government agencies, the US adopted GE foods and crops without proper testing, without consumer labeling and in spite of serious questions hanging over their safety. Not coincidentally, Monsanto supplies 90 percent of the GE seeds used by the US market.

Officer Geovani Nunez and Detective Jorge Hernandez, both 13-year veterans of the Miami Police Department, were paid a combined $39,500 by a man they thought was involved in numerous illegal businesses, prosecutors said. That man, however, was secretly an FBI informant and all of their conversations were taped.

U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta said the case was particularly disheartening in a year when several South Florida police officers have died in the line of duty.

“It is sad that a handful of individuals choose to repay their colleagues’ sacrifice through criminal conduct,” Acosta said.

Nunez and Hernandez were released on bail after appearing briefly in court Friday. Their lawyers said they would fight the charges, which carry potential life sentences.

Nunez’s attorney, Michael Catalano, said the FBI sting means that all of the allegedly illegal conduct was staged and not real.

“They are charged with committing crimes that did not exist,” he said.

It’s was not immediately clear if Hernandez had an attorney.

The exchanges and related clearing houses have found themselves at the centre of the growing storm over claims that speculators have been behind the recent rise in oil prices to record levels.

The New York Mercantile Exchange (Nymex) and ICE Futures Europe in London, the former International Petroleum Exchange, have now tripled “margin calls” for some contracts.

They hope the increased margin calls will reduce volatility and force out some of the more speculative players.

Nymex has announced a threefold increase in margin calls for long-dated Brent crude futures in New York. As a result margin calls on some contracts will jump from $100 to $300 for clearing members.

On more popular contracts, such as Brent for one-month delivery, the margin call will rise by 12.5pc to $450 for clearing members.

For investors with sizeable positions, the increase could mean the difference between a profit and a loss and appears to have already forced some speculative traders to close their positions.

The move, introduced by ICE earlier in the week and followed by Nymex yesterday, has coincided with a fall in the price of oil by around $7 a barrel from last week’s record high of more than $135. In London yesterday, a barrel of Brent crude for July delivery was up 88 cents at $127.77 in late trading. In New York, a barrel of sweet crude was up $1.34 at $127.96.

Rob Laughlin, senior energy broker for MF Global in London, said that, as a result of the increases, many “smaller speculators have finally taken their money and run”. However, Walter Lukken, acting chairman of the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission, yesterday dismissed the idea that raising margin calls would help long- term, saying it would just force speculators to go elsewhere.

A spokesman for Nymex would not explain why the margin calls had been raised, except to say that the calls are based on a formula linked to volume and volatility and are assessed on a daily basis.

The ICE in London, where the contracts are cleared by LCH.Clearnet, has also increased margin calls – for a “lot” of Brent crude, for example, the initial margin call has risen by a third to $10,000.

LCH.Clearnet said the margin call was raised because of “a change in the nature of the volatility across the oil curves”. Lehman Bros’ chief energy economist Edward Morse blamed the spike in oil prices on Wall Street analysts repeatedly raising their forecasts. The investment bank described the price rise as a repeat of the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s.

In a research note, entitled “Oil dotcom”, Mr Morse and Lehman’s fixed income and commodities research team argue that the ratcheting up of forecasts for oil is partly to blame for the recent increase.

Sales of Spam — that much maligned meat — are rising as consumers are turning more to lunch meats and other lower-cost foods to extend their already stretched food budgets.

What was once cheeky, silly and the subject of a musical (as Monty Python mocked the meat in a can), is now back on the table as people turn to the once-snubbed meat as costs rise, analysts say.

Food prices are increasing faster than they’ve risen since 1990, at 4 percent in the U.S. last year, according to the Agriculture Department. Many staples are rising even faster, with white bread up 13 percent last year, bacon up 7 percent and peanut butter up 9 percent.

There’s no sign of a slowdown. Food inflation is running at an annualized rate of 6.1 percent as of April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The price of Spam is up too, with the average 12 oz. can costing about $2.62. That’s an increase of 17 cents, or nearly 7 percent, from the same time last year. But it’s not stopping sales, as the pork meat in a can seems like a good alternative to consumers.

Kimberly Quan, a stay-at-home mom of three who lives just outside San Francisco, has been feeding her family more Spam in the last six months as she tries to make her food budget go further.

She cooks meals like Spam fried rice and Spam sandwiches two or three times a month, up from once a month previously.

Pulling Spam from the shelf prevents last-minute grocery store trips and overspending, said Quan, 38, of Pleasanton, Calif.

“It’s canned meat and it’s in the cupboard and if everything else is gone from the fridge, it’s there,” she said.

Spam’s maker, Hormel Foods Corp., reported last week that it saw strong sales of Spam in the second quarter, helping push up its profits 14 percent. According to sales information coming from Hormel, provided by The Nielsen Co., Spam sales were up 10.6 percent in the 12-week period ending May 3, compared to last year. In the last 24 weeks, sales were up nearly 9 percent.

The Austin, Minn.-based company, also known for the Jennie-O Turkey Store, has embarked on its first national advertising campaign for the 71-year-old brand in several years. They’ve credited the sales increase to that, along with new products like individually packaged “Spam Singles” slices. Also helping sales, executives said in an earnings conference call, was the fact that people looking to save money are skipping restaurant meals and eating more at home.

Spam sales are reaching across all spectrums, young and old and rich and poor, said Swen Neufeldt, Hormel’s group product manager for the area that includes Spam. Many of the eaters are new to Spam, which was created in 1937 and gained fame as the meat that fed Allied troops during World War II.

“We have significantly increased our household penetration,” Neufeldt said. “I think it’s a lot of folks that are coming into the brand perhaps for the first time and coming back to the brand.”

Hormel began its national advertising campaign, including print and television, for Spam in January. Neufeldt said such campaigns are planned in advance and it wasn’t tied to perceived weakness in the economy.

Consumers are quick to realize that meats like Spam and other processed foods can be substituted for costlier cuts as a way of controlling costs, said Marcia Mogelonsky, senior research analyst with Mintel International in Chicago.

These products have protein and decent nutritional value, and they provide some variety to consumers who may be bored because they’re eating more at home, she said.

“They might not have Spam at every single meal, but they might supplement a couple of meals,” she said.

Consumers are also using more coupons and paying more attention to sales, doing anything they can to save money, she said. You may be able to cut back on your driving due to high gas prices, but you’re not going to stop eating because of high food prices, she said.

Quan just bought a couple more cans of Spam on sale and some ramen, the instant noodle dish long a staple on college campuses. Her food and gas budgets are together, so she’s had to cut back on food spending while the cost of gas increases. Her favorite Spam meal? Spam and macaroni and cheese. She doesn’t skimp on nutrition, though. Quan serves her husband and three children — ranging in age from 4 to 11 — organic vegetables like salads, broccoli and carrots.

“It balances out,” she said.

Other companies are seeing similar boosts in their lunch meats. Kraft Foods Inc. reported last month that subsidiary Oscar Mayer, which makes hot dogs, bacon and cold cuts, saw double-digit revenue growth in the previous quarter in its Deli Fresh cold cuts. The company, based in Madison, Wis., has recently introduced new products including family sized deli-meat packs and deli carved, which offers thicker slices of meat.

April Smith has been changing the way she feeds her family in Broken Arrow, Okla., to keep up with rising costs. This summer the 33-year-old administrative assistant will feed her two boys, ages 11 and 8, more ramen for lunch. Normally they eat the noodle soup on Saturdays, but since ramen costs about a dime per pack, they’ll get it twice a week. Smith says she’ll throw in some leftover frozen vegetables to make it more nutritious.

A new global discount window is “under active study,” Kohn said. “It is possible that over time, major central banks could perhaps agree to accept a common pool of very safe collateral, facilitating the liquidity management of global banks,” he said, stipulating that such loans only be made to sound institutions.

Kohn’s suggestion came in prepared remarks wrapping up a special conference in New York on liquidity in money markets that was sponsored by the New York Fed and the Columbia Business School.

On the other hand, Dean seemingly thinks clusters of 1,800 servers are pretty routine, if not exactly ho-hum. And the software company runs on top of that hardware, enabling a sub-half-second response to an ordinary Google search query that involves 700 to 1,000 servers, is another matter altogether.

Google doesn’t reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I’d estimate it’s easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I’d guess it’s far beyond that and growing every day.

Regardless of the true numbers, it’s fascinating what Google has accomplished, in part by largely ignoring much of the conventional computing industry. Where even massive data centers such as the New York Stock Exchange or airline reservation systems use a lot of mainstream servers and software, Google largely builds its own technology.

I’m sure a number of server companies are sour about it, but Google clearly believes its technological destiny is best left in its own hands. Co-founder Larry Page encourages a “healthy disrespect for the impossible” at Google, according to Marissa Mayer, vice president of search products and user experience, in a speech Thursday.

To operate on Google’s scale requires the company to treat each machine as expendable. Server makers pride themselves on their high-end machines’ ability to withstand failures, but Google prefers to invest its money in fault-tolerant software.

“Our view is it’s better to have twice as much hardware that’s not as reliable than half as much that’s more reliable,” Dean said. “You have to provide reliability on a software level. If you’re running 10,000 machines, something is going to die every day.”

Breaking in is hard to do

Bringing a new cluster online shows just how fallible hardware is, Dean said.

Day-to-day tasks, the company says in an online job listing, will include “deploy[ing], installing] and remov[ing] strategic and tactical data intercept equipment on a nationwide basis to meet Comcast and Government lawful intercept needs.” The person in this “intercept engineering” position will help collect and process traffic on the company’s “CDV [Comcast Digital Voice], HSI [High Speed Internet] and Video” services.

Since May 2007, all Internet providers have been required to install gear for easy wiretapping under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Anyone taking this position, Comcast says, will have to be “knowledgeable with … standards such as CALEA.” (The company is all too happy to “intercept its customers’ communications” for a fee of a thousand dollars, Secrecy News revealed last year.)

But the person in this job won’t just be snooping for the government. He or she will also “perfor[m] diagnosis on data, voice, and video services to detect and respond to fraudulent activity such as theft of service and speed enhancement.”

For the better part of a year, there have been rumors that the company kept some sort of bandwidth limit on its customers. Finally, in February, Comcast admitted that it had been “clamping down on subcribers’ file-sharing as a way of keeping overall net traffic up.

The job requires a “B.S. Degree in Information Systems Technology, MIS or related field or equivalent years of progressive experience and self-study,” a minimum of two years of policy or security engineering experience,” as well as the “ability to carry and coordinate delivery of a 50-pound server to support deployments in local market.”