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Despite the use by US traders of trading terminals within the United States to trade US oil, gasoline, and heating oil futures contracts, the CFTC has until today refused to assert any jurisdiction over the trading of these contracts.

Persons within the United States seeking to trade key US energy commodities – US crude oil, gasoline, and heating oil futures – are able to avoid all US market oversight or reporting requirements by routing their trades through the ICE Futures exchange in London instead of the NYMEX in New York.

The plans are the most concrete yet by Vikram Pandit, nearing his five-month anniversary as the bank’s CEO, to prove himself a capable turnaround specialist at a company that many claim was struggling long before the housing market collapse.

The bank’s plans to wind down its $2.2 trillion in assets to approximately $1.7 trillion were part of an investor day presentation at one of Citigroup’s Manhattan offices.

These so-called “legacy assets” included yet-to-be-named noncore businesses, as well as assets in Citigroup’s securities and consumer banking segments, including mortgages and other real estate-related holdings.

Already, the bank has written down assets tied to soured debt by some $38 billion since last summer. It has also announced plans to reduce its residential mortgage assets by $45 billion over the coming year, and has recently sold businesses including CitiCapital, CitiStreet and Diners Club.

The anticipated rise in revenue will derive largely from cutting costs — which Chief Financial Officer Gary Crittenden said will mean more job reductions. Citi has so far lowered its work force by 13,200 people since last summer.

Citigroup has been under heavy investor scrutiny over the past year as the value of its stock tumbled. Many Citigroup holders have been angling for a large-scale overhaul of the company’s structure.

Those shareholders’ hopes, however, are dwindling, with executives apparently largely keeping the bank’s major parts intact.

Woven into one small story about a plane crash in Venezuela that killed seven people are visible threads from two perennial American cover-ups: one surrounding vote fraud, and one covering-up the CIA’s role in drug trafficking.

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The downed plane’s relevance to the ongoing story of vote fraud in America involves the identity of it’s passenger, Jose Alfredo Anzola, a 34-year old founder of Smartmatic, a Venezuela-based election company whose American subsidiary counted one in every three votes in the 2004 Presidential election, while engaged the whole time in heated controversy over allegations the firm counting America’s votes had hidden ties to—of all people— Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez.

The connection between last week’s plane crash and the ongoing saga of CIA Drug trafficking begins with 43-year old Mario Donadi Gafaro, the veteran drug pilot at the controls of the twin engine plane.

Donadi boasts a 1999 drug trafficking conviction in the U.S., where he served three years.

Then, even more recently, he was convicted of the same offense in Venezuela, and sentenced to an eight-year stretch at Venezuela’s Big House.

When he crashed and burned last week, reporters noted with surprise, he still had six years to serve. Donadi was supposed to be in prison.

Edgar Millan Gomez, the acting chief of Mexico’s federal police, in January.

The Mexican police have been under constant attack since President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2007 and started an offensive against drug cartels that had corrupted the municipal police forces and local officials in several towns along the border with the United States and on both coasts.

Since then, Mr. Calderón has sent thousands of federal agents and troops into those areas to establish law and order, provoking retaliation from drug cartels that have killed about 200 officers, among them at least 30 federal agents.

The acting chief, Edgar Millán Gómez, was ambushed by several men wearing rubber gloves and carrying weapons as he entered his apartment building in the Guerrero neighborhood of Mexico City with two bodyguards at 2:30 a.m. He was hit eight times in the chest and once in a hand. He died a few hours later at Metropolitan Hospital.

Rising agricultural commodities prices and a large population increase mean that the traditional policy is now untenable even if crude oil trades at about $120 a barrel, forcing countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, to reconsider how it feeds its population.

“The region has woken up to the new food market reality,” says Abdolreza Abbassian, an expert at the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.

The FAO estimates the region’s cereals import bill will hit $22.6bn this year (£11.4bn, €14.5bn), a 40 per cent increase on 2007. Since 2000, it has jumped almost 170 per cent. The rising bill is the latest signal of the looming food crisis hanging over the Middle East and north Africa, the region of the world most dependent on imports of food staples.

Jonathan Calland, of Tilda, India’s largest ex­porter of basmati rice, says: “Security of food supplies is for the first time since the 1970s back on the agenda in the Middle East.”

In the past few months, food riots have hit Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen as prices jumped almost 60 per cent in a year. A general strike, demanding action on rising prices, has been called in Lebanon on Wednesday. The discomfort over food price hikes is aggravated by a huge dependence on the international food market. Middle East and north African countries buy almost a quarter of all the cereals traded globally.

Abah Ofon, agricultural com­modities analyst at Stan­dard Chartered in Dubai, says: “The region is in a very precarious position.”

Two countries in the re­gion, Morocco and Jordan, have an even more acute problem because not only are they facing higher food prices rises, they are also net importers of fuel.

The dependence on im­ports is a consequence of the meagre agricultural supply – a result of paltry land and water resources – and booming demand – the upshot of fast rising populations and strong economic growth courtesy of high oil prices.

Despite the challenge, policymakers have taken a short-term view of the crisis and are pursuing quick-fix solutions, such as raising salaries, as in Egypt, to increase affordability or imposing price controls as adopted by the UAE. Nevertheless, four long-term trends are emerging: food subsidies, seen only a couple years ago in retreat, are on the rise, strategic stocks are been considered, the countries are trying to diversify their imports and there is renewed efforts for agriculture self-sufficiency.

Akhter Ahmed, at the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based think-tank, says that in the current environment of rising food prices, “politically it is very difficult to make any substantial change in the subsidies policy” even though, he argues, most result in wastage of public funds.

Alarmed by the potential for social unrest, Egypt will spend an estimated $2.4bn this year on bread subsidies, up from $820m last year.

Price controls, mostly eliminated during the 1990s’ economic liberalisation, are back. The UAE, for example, has imposed them through agreements with big supermarkets, such as the French retailer Carrefour, to maintain food costs at last year’s level.

Governments have also returned to the idea of building strategic food stocks, which were common in the 1980s. Sultan al-Mansouri, UAE economy minister, said strategic inventories are a “formula to control prices once they are out of control”. In Oman, the government has announced the purchase of 200,000 tonnes of rice, enough for two years.

Diplomats say the region’s policymakers have realised that relying entirely on the global market without a cushion is a flawed idea.

At the same time, governments are also looking to diversify imports through bilateral government-to-government trade agreements such as that recently reached between Libya and Ukraine. They are also trying to increase local agricultural production, particularly in north Africa, but also in Iran and Syria, but with limited success.

However, more long-term policies are necessary, particularly to battle the impact of climate change in the region, experts said. In a context where food price shocks are already a big concern, changes in temperature and precipitation will only add to the stress on agricultural resources.

The regulator, the forward markets commission, acting under instruction from the Congress party-led coalition government, suspended futures trading on Thursday in potatoes, soy oil, rubber and chickpeas for at least four months. Last year it banned futures trading in wheat, rice and two types of dhal.

“The government perceived that suspending a few commodities will perhaps soften price expectations. Though I don’t personally agree with that, that’s how a democratically elected government feels, therefore we had to respect that,” B.C. Khatua, the chairman of the regulating commission, told the Financial Times.

India’s government is taking an aggressive stance on food and steel prices to try to stem inflation, which hit 7.57 per cent last month – well above the official “comfort zone” of 5 per cent. This week steel producers agreed to a third price cut in three months despite rising raw material costs after a meeting with Manmohan Singh, the prime minister. But economists say market intervention will achieve little as most of the inflation is resulting from shortages of supply in global markets.

The vetting process checks only for crimes committed in Britain. Foreign workers – arriving from inside or outside the European Union – are not checked in their country of origin.

This means that someone with a conviction for firearms or explosives offences committed abroad could, for example, take a job loading bags on to aircraft at Heathrow, Gatwick or any other airport, provided they had committed no crimes here.
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