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A proposal drafted by the Ministry of Agriculture would make supporting offshore land acquisition by domestic agricultural companies a central government policy. Beijing already has similar policies to boost offshore investment by state-owned banks, manufacturers and oil companies, but offshore agricultural investment has so far been limited to a few small projects.

If approved, the plan could face intense opposition abroad given surging global food prices and deforestation fears. However an official close to the deliberations said it was likely to be adopted.

“There should be no problem for this policy to be approved. The problem might come from foreign governments who are unwilling to give up large areas of land,” the official said.

The move comes as oil-rich but food-poor countries in the Middle East and north Africa explore similar options. Libya is talking with Ukraine about growing wheat in the former Soviet republic, while Saudi Arabia has said it would invest in agricultural and livestock projects abroad to ensure food security and control commodity prices.

China is losing its ability to be self-sufficient in food as its rising wealth triggers a shift away from diet staples such as rice towards meat, which requires large amounts of imported feed.

China has about 40 per cent of the world’s farmers but just 9 per cent of the world’s arable land. Some Chinese scholars argue that domestic agricultural companies must expand overseas if China is to guarantee its food security and reduce its exposure to global market fluctuations.

The British Ministry of Defense’s first ever “Grand Challenge” intends to encourage participants to turn their ideas into prototypes for machines the army can use in urban environments.

The six finalists, who each received $600,000 to build such contraptions as a disc-shaped remote-controlled flying robots fitted with heat and motion sensors, were in London last week to display their models.

From Swarm Systems Ltd. comes a set of tiny helicopters that fly in formation into a village and record images and audio tracks to beam back to headquarters. And British aeronautical company BAE Systems teamed up with the University of Manchester to build a self-propelled, remote-controlled camera.

The Silicon Valley Group PLC, a small research company in southeast Britain, teamed with the Bruton School for Girls in Somerset to build an unmanned buggy that can analyze gunmen’s movements to determine whether they are angry or nervous.

“This project has really allowed us to broaden out our vision and look at what other work is being done out there in our field,” said Norman Gregory, the company’s business manager. “We are a small company and would not have been able to put together a consortium to develop such a sophisticated system without this competition.”

The government wanted participants to get schools involved, Gregory said, so the company consulted the Bruton School, which already sponsored robot design competitions.

Finalists will take part in a mock battle in August in Copehill Down, a village built near Stonehenge for military training during the Cold War. The contestants will have their machines search for pretend gunmen and mock bombs, earning points for each find and losing points for hitting civilians or transmitting data too slowly.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency personnel are trained and ready. Buses and vans are standing by for raids. Detention facilities have expanded.

All that is lacking is clearance from the courts.

Employers should be prepared in the coming months for immigration raids on scales never before staged by the federal government. The stakes for employers will be especially high if the courts give a green light to the mailing of Social Security no-match letters.

ICE already has stepped up its worksite enforcement program in recent years, even without the new kind of no- match letters that were held up by a court injunction last fall.

Social Security will not provide ICE with a list of employers receiving the possible new round of no-match letters. The letters would establish new grounds to nail employers with criminal charges.

Austin lawyers Kevin Lashus and Robert Loughran compare the federal government’s preparations for increased worksite enforcement to an army practicing for battle.

“The government expects a massive disruption of the work force,” Loughran said. “A climate of fear is the strategy of this administration.”

Employers receiving the new no-match letters would have 93 days to resolve discrepancies, said Lashus and Loughran of Tindall & Foster’s Austin office.

Employers could find themselves trapped by federal laws that on the one hand prohibit unauthorized workers and, on the other hand, ban discrimination. Employers cannot look beyond the employees’ documents. If they do, they face federal discrimination lawsuits. If employers have not followed steps listed in the no-match letters or are determined to knowingly employ unauthorized workers, they will face criminal charges.

Lashus, a former ICE official, has been involved in some of the agency’s previous workplace raids. Loughran is a longtime specialist in employer sanctions law.

Whereas ICE has routinely conducted about 10 raids a month, the lawyers expect the pace to rise significantly once the Social Security Administration mails the letters. ICE could strike workplaces 20 to 30 at a time in any given city. The agency would pause to process the cases, then begin new rounds of raids, Lashus said.

Homeland Security wanted to implement its plan last fall, but a U.S. district judge blocked Social Security’s no-match letters after labor unions and other organizations contended the plan would disrupt companies and harm innocent workers.

Social Security’s own inspector general already estimates that about 17.8 million of 435 million records contain errors that could generate a no-match letter. An estimated 70 percent of the erroneous records belong to U.S. citizens.

Homeland Security appealed the judge’s decision but in March proposed to go ahead on its plan. Any day now, the Arizona judge must decide whether to lift the injunction or make it permanent.

If the injunction becomes permanent, Social Security will hold the letters while Homeland Security again appeals. If the injunction is lifted, the no-match letters could be mailed within days.

“The government is deadly serious about these cases,” Loughran said. “The difference is that the federal government is eager to enforce the laws now, whereas they couldn’t be bothered 15 years ago.”

Especially vulnerable would be businesses 10 to 15 years old that haven’t strictly monitored their new employees’ documentation. “They have no understanding where the lines are,” Loughran said.

The damage would go beyond that. A sudden explosion of enforcement could victimize legal workers, either directly or indirectly. Businesses would close, throwing innocent workers out of work amid a weak economy. Families would be torn apart.

Mark Carney says the central bank won’t bail out Canadian financial institutions like the U.S. government did when the Bear Stearns brokerage, one of the giants of Wall Street, ran afoul of the subprime mortgage mess.

“If you cannot make a judgment (on the value of an asset), you should not own the security,” Carney told a Senate committee yesterday.

“There is very high value, if a situation came about, to ensuring the shareholders and senior managers bear the full consequences of their actions,” he said.

“The Bank of Canada has a role to become lender of last resort, but we would do that on the advice of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions that the institution is solvent, not because the institution needed money.”

Carney said the central bank would come to the rescue of a chartered bank in the case of a temporary liquidity problem — if the institution had sufficient capital to be considered viable.

The plane’s autopilot, yaw damp and pitch trim all malfunctioned in the first 45 minutes of Crist’s flight from Tallahassee, Florida, Erin Isaac, Crist’s director of communication. The yaw damp is part of the autopilot system that helps stabilizes the tail, and the pitch trim the craft’s up and down movement.

With the plane over neighboring Georgia, the pilot decided to return to Tallahassee, she said.

Isaac said the plane could have continued on its journey with the malfunctioning yaw damp and autopilot, but the pitch trim problem and possibility of other issues surfacing created enough concern for the pilot to bring the plane around.

But Liu is investing $10 million in the Palmetto State, building a printing-plate factory that will open this fall and hire 120 workers. His main aim is to tap the large American market, but when his finance staff penciled out the costs, he was stunned to learn how they compared with those in China.

Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg — less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn’t have to put up with frequent blackouts.

About the only major thing that’s more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.

“I was surprised,” said the 63-year-old president of Shanxi Yuncheng Plate-Making Group. “The gap’s not as large as I thought.”

At random times near the Tijuana-San Diego border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers have been setting up checkpoints, boarding buses destined for Mexico and pulling off people who don’t have proper documentation.

The operation appears to be an expansion of a broader federal crackdown targeting illegal immigrants in jails, airports and workplaces across the country.

The checkpoints, which are not announced in advance, are set up on southbound Interstate 5 about 100 yards north of the border. Vehicles in all lanes must stop.

Vincent Bond, an agency spokesman, said departing immigrants are fair targets.

“If our officers come upon people who are here illegally . . . regardless of whether they’re leaving the country, we detain them, make a record of the fact they were here illegally and return them to Mexico,” Bond said.

…

Customs and Border Protection, which typically provides detailed statistics on apprehensions, would not disclose details of the checkpoint operation. Nor would they say how long it has been underway.

The checkpoints have been randomly deployed since the Sept. 11 attacks, with inspectors typically looking for fugitives, stolen vehicles, weapons, drugs and other contraband.

Illegal immigrants became targets for arrest at the checkpoints only a few months ago, according to immigrant rights groups and human rights organizations in Mexico. It is unclear how frequently the checkpoints have been set up.

But Enrique Morones, president of the Border Angels, a San Diego-based group, said he believes that hundreds of immigrants have been arrested since the crackdown began.

Over a half-hour period April 30, agents appeared to be pulling over every bus and van heading for the border. But any vehicle, including cars, that agents deem suspicious may be stopped and searched.

Inspectors detained five young men from one bus traveling from Los Angeles to Puebla, a city southeast of Mexico City. After the inspectors made their apprehensions, only two passengers remained onboard.

…

Federal agents say the checkpoints are a productive way to stop dangerous criminals, drug shipments and money launderers.

The illegal immigrants they apprehend are typically turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol for processing. Unless they have serious criminal records or numerous immigration violations, most are returned to Mexico within a few hours, the agents say.