cryptogon.com

“We are going to make all of the army’s archives public so we can know the truth, to start building on a foundation of truth and justice,” said Mr Colom, who beat a right-wing former general to take office in January.

Almost a quarter of a million people were killed or “disappeared” during the 1960-1996 conflict between leftist guerrillas and the government. More than 80 per cent of the murders were committed by the army, according to a United Nations-backed truth commission.

The commission, which compiled thousands of interviews with victims after the 1996 peace accords, named no officials, in part because the army files were not open to the public.

Mr Colom’s uncle, Manuel Colom Argueta, a leftist politician with presidential ambitions, was killed by the army in 1979 in a well-coordinated ambush.

Rights groups say the new army files will help solve war crimes when matched with information in the police archive discovered in June 2005, as police collaborated with the army.

Mr Colom said all the information from the military will be turned over to the human rights ombudsman, also in charge of cleaning and categorising the thousands of police documents left to go mouldy in an old warehouse behind a dump for rusted cars.

The massive paper trail gives hope to family members who are looking for answers about their long-disappeared relatives.

Eighty-year-old Emilia Garcia hopes the army files will contain clues about her son Fernando Garcia, a union leader shot by police in 1984, taken to a military hospital and never heard from again.

That’s when Washington Mutual Inc. first tried to foreclose on his home in Boca Raton, Florida. The Seattle-based lender failed to prove that it owned Lents’s mortgage note and dropped attempts to take his house. Subsequent efforts to foreclose have stalled because no one has produced the paperwork.

“If you’re going to take my house away from me, you better own the note,” said Lents, 63, the former chief executive officer of a now-defunct voice recognition software company.

Judges in at least five states have stopped foreclosure proceedings because the banks that pool mortgages into securities and the companies that collect monthly payments haven’t been able to prove they own the mortgages. The confusion is another headache for U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as he revises rules for packaging mortgages into securities.

“I think it’s going to become pretty hairy,” said Josh Rosner, managing director at the New York-based investment research firm Graham Fisher & Co. “Regulators appear to have ignored this, given the size and scope of the problem.”

More than $2.1 trillion, or 19 percent, of outstanding mortgages have been bundled into securities by private banks, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a Bethesda, Maryland-based industry newsletter. Those loans may be sold several times before they land in a security. Mortgage servicers, who collect monthly payments and distribute them to securities investors, can buy and sell the home loans many times.

Housing Boom

Each time the mortgages change hands, the sellers are required to sign over the mortgage notes to the buyers. In the rush to originate more loans during the U.S. mortgage boom, from 2003 to 2006, that assignment of ownership wasn’t always properly completed, said Alan White, assistant professor at Valparaiso University School of Law in Valparaiso, Indiana.

“Loans were mass produced and short cuts were taken,” White said. “A lot of the paperwork is done in the name of the original lender and a lot of the original lenders aren’t around anymore.”

More than 100 mortgage companies stopped making loans, closed or were sold last year, according to Bloomberg data.

The cost of direct US military operations – not even including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded veterans – already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.

And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War, and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3 million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years, at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for inflation) of about $5 trillion (that’s $5 million million, or £2.5 million million). With virtually the entire armed forces committed to fighting the Germans and Japanese, the cost per troop (in today’s dollars) was less than $100,000 in 2007 dollars. By contrast, the Iraq war is costing upward of $400,000 per troop.

The Russian effort began modestly this month, with trading in refined products for the domestic market.

Still, the effort to squeeze the dollar out of Russian oil sales marks another project with swagger and ambition by the Kremlin, which has already wielded its energy wealth to assert influence in Eastern Europe and in former Soviet states.

“They are serious,” said Yaroslav Lissovolik, the chief economist at Deutsche Bank in Moscow. “This is something they are giving priority to.”

Oil trading is now nearly always denominated in dollars, the de facto common currency of the petroleum business. When Kuwait sells oil under a futures contract to India, for example, the price is set in dollars.

Similarly, Russia’s large trade with Western Europe and the former Soviet states in crude oil and natural gas is conducted in dollar-denominated contracts. Gazprom, the natural gas monopoly, set the price of natural gas in Ukraine at $176 per 1,000 cubic meters in 2007, for example. There are no proposals yet to switch natural gas pricing away from dollars.

As a result, companies and countries that buy petroleum products are encouraged to hold dollar reserves to pay for their supplies, coincidentally helping the American economy support its trade deficit.

Russia would like to change this practice, at least among its customers, as a means to elevate the importance of the ruble, a new source of national pride after gaining 30 percent against the dollar during the current oil boom.

Global wheat stockpiles will probably fall to a 30-year low this year, while corn inventories are headed for the lowest since 1984, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said Feb. 8. Almost $1.5 billion flowed into farm commodities in the week to Feb. 19, investment bank UBS AG said in an e-mailed report yesterday.

Wheat, soybeans, corn and palm oil are among commodities that have touched records this month, stoking prices of bread, pasta and noodles worldwide. The gains have driven up costs for food companies from Kellogg Co. to Nissin Food Products Co. and complicated efforts to curb prices in China, India and Malaysia.

“Speculators keep jumping into the market as supplies are very tight globally, especially spring wheat,” Takaki Shigemoto, an analyst with Tokyo-based commodity broker Okachi & Co. Dry conditions in some wheat-producing areas in northern China and also lent support, he said.

Wheat for May delivery rose by the daily limit of 90 cents, or 8 percent, to $12.145 a bushel in after-hours trading on the Chicago Board of Trade, the biggest one-day percentage gain since October 2002. It stood at $11.975 at 3:50 p.m. Singapore time.

The exchange expanded its daily limit after the contract surged by the previous 60-cent limit yesterday.

Stockpiles Shrinking

Record prices, led by scarce high-protein varieties, have not deterred buyers. Export sales from the U.S., the world’s largest shipper of the grain, are up 56 percent since June 1 compared with the same period a year earlier.

Global wheat stockpiles may fall to 109.7 million metric tons by May 31, while corn inventories may decline to 101.9 million tons as of Oct. 1, the U.S. government estimated Feb. 8.

Prices rallied by $5.75 a bushel, or by nearly 30pc, at one point from Friday’s close.

Eight months ago on June 19, the lead Minneapolis wheat contract settled at over $US5.00 a bushel.

Panic over commodity shortages continues to emerge as the dominant factor in the global markets, with both end user and speculative buyers of corn, soybean, cotton, rice and a host of other commodities taking note of what’s happening in the wheat pit.

While US has made improvements to increase crop production efficiency in recent years, the world hasn’t really put sufficient investment into production agriculture for several decades.

The net result has been declining stocks at the same time that expanding global wealth has demanded more raw commodities.

The net result on Monday was new all-time record high prices for corn, soybeans and wheat on the same day.

Sentiment in the marketplace is changing from, ‘buying just-in-time’ to one of, ‘buy what you need at any price’ and then to ‘buy even more to restock the shelves’.