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The project in North Carolina has already helped nab at least one suspect. Agents are eager to look for more criminals and possibly to expand the effort nationwide. But privacy advocates worry that the method allows authorities to track people who have done nothing wrong.

“The FBI today is announcing a rapid DNA initiative,” said Louis Grever, executive assistant director of the FBI’s science and technology branch, during his keynote presentation at the Biometric Consortium Conference in Tampa.

The FBI plans to begin migrating from its IAFIS database, established in the mid-1990s to hold its vast fingerprint data, to a next-generation system that’s expected to be in prototype early next year. This multi-modal NGI biometrics database system will hold DNA records and more.

Grever said that fingerprints and DNA appear to be the most mature and searchable biometrics possibilities, but the FBI is working to include iris-scan records among newer biometrics technologies to identify criminals and terrorists. The plan is to share this data with authorized U.S. and international investigative partners, as the agency does today.

The FBI’s current IAFIS database remains a workhouse; it processes about 200,000 daily transactions from its 370 million 10-fingerprint records, and it just crossed the 250 million transaction mark.

In turn, the seed companies have expressed surprise at the outcry, claiming the issue is being overblown. And even though the July meeting, organized by the American Seed Trade Association in Alexandria, Virginia, did result in the writing of a set of principles for carrying out this research, the seed companies are under no compunction to follow them. “From the researchers’ perspective, the key for this meeting was opening up communication to discuss the problem,” says Ken Ostlie, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, who signed the complaint. “It will be interesting to see how companies implement the principles they agreed upon.”

What is clear is that the seed industry is perceived as highly secretive and reluctant to share its products with scientists. This is fueling the view that companies have something to hide.

Who’s in control?

It’s no secret that the seed industry has the power to shape the information available on biotech crops, referred to variously as genetically engineered or genetically modified (GM) crops. Commercial entities developed nearly all of the crops on the US market, and their ownership of the proprietary technology allows them to decide who studies the crops and how. “Industry is completely driving the bus,” says Christian Krupke, an entomologist at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

A Russian version of a video by Hermitage Capital, the London-based hedge fund claiming to be victim of a $230m (£146m) scam, has attracted over 12,000 hits, and is the most viewed news clip on YouTube in Russia, the site shows. The English version has had almost 8,000 viewings.

William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital, hopes the video’s international impact will put pressure on the Russian authorities to listen to his claims of theft, gangsterism and government corruption.

“It’s a true Kafka-esque type of situation,” Browder says in the video. “It’s one thing to be victimised by a crime, it’s another thing to be blamed for the crime that you’re a victim of.”

Browder has been banned from entrance to the country and has removed his staff from the fund’s offices in Moscow after police raids. However, one lawyer working for Hermitage, a 37-year old father of two, is still in prison.

Hermitage alleges that its position as Russia’s largest foreign investor two years ago made the establishment nervous, leading to Browder being denied entry to the country. His petition for a new visa led to a string of threats that ended up with the police raiding Hermitage’s Moscow offices, seizing all its documentation.

The video contains reconstruction of the raids and also the transcript of a telephone call from a tax official which the company alleges contains blackmail threats.

The Russian interior ministry is still seeking to have Browder returned to Russia for questioning, Irina Dudukina, a ministry spokeswoman told Bloomberg News by phone today. The executive was placed on the ministry’s international wanted list on charges of tax evasion.

However, according to the fund, the criminals used a network of corrupt lawyers, police and judges to fake transactions and simulate that three profit-making Hermitage subsidiaries had turned a profit into losses – for which they demanded a tax rebate. The new owners of the stolen companies received Russia’s biggest ever rebate within two days, the video claims.

“The $230m which belonged to the Russian people had been stolen by the criminals in an organised conspiracy supported by corrupted officials in the higher reaches of the Russian state,” the video says. “The story sounds like a thriller but isn’t and it’s being repeated every day.”

The Food and Agricultural Organisation says if more land is not used for food production now, 370 million people could be facing famine by 2050.

The world population is expected to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9.1 billion by mid-century.

Climate change, involving floods and droughts, will affect food production.

• Ban all mail-order and Internet sales of handgun ammunition.

• Prohibit the retail sale, the offer for sale or the display of handgun ammunition in a manner that allows ammunition to be accessible to a purchaser without assistance of a vendor or employee.

• Require that the delivery or transfer of ownership of handgun ammunition occur in a face-to-face transaction, with the deliverer or transferor being provided bona fide evidence of identity of the purchaser or other transferee.

That evidence of identity, which must be legibly recorded at the time of delivery, includes:

• The right thumbprint of the purchaser or transferee.

• The date of the sale or other transaction.

• The purchaser’s or transferee’s driver’s license or other identification number and the state in which it was issued.

• The brand, type and amount of ammunition sold or otherwise transferred.

• The purchaser’s or transferee’s signature.

• The name of the salesperson who processed the sale or other transaction.

• The purchaser’s or transferee’s full residential address and telephone number.

Temperatures below freezing this weekend occurred north of a line from Amarillo, Texas, to Kansas City, Kansas, and east to Toledo, Ohio, ending the growing season for immature plants, said Dave Tolleris, president of WxRisk.com in Richmond, Virginia. Harvesting across the U.S. will be delayed by wet weather in next two weeks, Tolleris said.

“The harvest rates are very slow,” Jonathan Barratt, managing director at Commodity Broking Services Pty in Sydney, said by phone today. If the harvest turns out smaller than expected, then the market “will refocus and reprice,” he said.

Corn for December delivery rose 9.5 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $3.7175 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade at 1:35 p.m. London time, after gaining Oct. 9 to $3.73, the highest since Aug. 3. The most-active contract advanced 8.6 percent last week, the most this year.

Soybeans for November delivery rallied 17 cents, or 1.8 percent, to $9.81 a bushel in Chicago. It earlier reached $9.8325, the highest since Sept. 1. The most-active futures gained 8.9 percent last week, the most this year.

The U.S. corn and soybean harvests are lagging behind the pace of recent years after rain delayed planting in May and below-normal temperatures in July and August slowed crop development, government data show.

‘Field Losses’

“Harvest delays equal field losses at this point and this is not fully priced into futures yet,” said Mike Zuzolo, president of Global Analytics & Consulting LLC in Lafayette, Indiana.

About 10 percent of the U.S. corn crop was harvested as of Oct. 4, compared with the five-year average of 25 percent for the same time of the season, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said last week. About 15 percent of the soybeans had been collected, below the five-year average of 36 percent. The USDA will update harvest progress on Oct. 13 after the close of trading in Chicago.

The progress numbers may show “only a few percent gains” in the corn and soybean harvest, Zuzolo said. Corn may rise to $3.89 a bushel and soybeans may rally to $10.09 as harvest losses are priced into futures, he said.

Wheat for December delivery gained as much as 12 cents, or 2.6 percent, to $4.80 a bushel in Chicago, before trading at $4.7875 at 1:36 p.m. London time.

Ashoka Mody has been identified in an email to his fellow employees at the International Monetary Fund as the man shot Thursday night around 7:30 in his Bethesda garage in the 6800 block of Millwood Road

Mody is currently the assistant director in the European department and an expert in economic development and international finance.

He is also known in his Kenwood Park community as a good neighbor, and those who live near him are stunned that he would be the target of a gunman.

Police say the 54-year-old remains in critical condition after he was shot in his garage Thursday night, before he even had a chance to get out of his vehicle.

Mody’s wife told police of a masked man in dark clothing

It is unclear if anything was taken during the attack and police say they don’t know whether it was a random or targeted crime.

After the shooting, the usually quiet Bethesda neighborhood was filled with police and detectives scouring the lawn as they continue their hunt for a gunman.

“This is worrisome,” said a neighbor.

“It had to be random,” said Julia Sullivan. “They are the nicest family. I don’t know why anyone would want to hurt them so it’s terrifying.”

Michael Sullivan added, “If it was random, it could have been me.”

Detectives are still working to determine a motive for the shooting and police have only a vague description of the masked gunman, who fled on foot.

“We know he was last seen fleeing from this community toward Goldsboro Road,” Baur said. “We expect he escaped from the area.”

Police say there is no evidence to suggest robbery was the motive behind the shooting, but the investigation remains in its infancy.

Josef Haselhofer from Vienna’s Central Agency for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG) said today (Mon) Arctic air would probably result in the first snow cover in provincial capitals before 20 October in history and said Innsbruck, Salzburg and St. Pölten were likely to see snow.

He said as much as 30 to 40 centimetres of snow was likely down to 1,200 metres and snow could fall as low as 400 metres later this week, adding it had already begun to fall in Vorarlberg. He also predicted low temperatures would be minus five degrees at higher elevations and zero degrees in the lowlands by Thursday morning.