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“Significantly higher potash prices and extraordinarily tight supply have become much more firmly entrenched since China’s previous contract was signed 14 months ago,” said Potash chief executive Bill Doyle.

Saskatchewan’s offshore marketing company, Canpotex Ltd., is jointly owned by Potash, Agrium Inc. and Mosaic Co., all of which have potash operations in Saskatchewan.

As millions of Chinese join the middle class, their diets are changing to include meat and dairy products. This has in turn spurred demand for grains to feed livestock. As grain production rises, so does demand for fertilizer and the potash used to make it.

Rice and corn prices soared to records on U.S. markets and wheat jumped to its highest in a week after Kazakhstan, the world’s fifth-largest wheat exporter, and Indonesia, a major rice producer, became the latest nations to impose export bans. The price increases further inflated global food costs that already had surged 48 per cent since the end of 2006.

The device, which functions as a mini laboratory on a chip, can screen and identify multiple classes of pathogens and genes in a single diagnostic test within two hours, unlike other tests available on the market that can detect only one strain at a time and require days or weeks to obtain results.

The chip can differentiate human strains of the Influenza A and B viruses, drug-resistant strains and mutated variants, including the Avian Flu or H5N1 strain.

There have been 236 human deaths globally from the H5N1 strain, according to the World Health Organisation, though it remains mainly a bird virus.

“ST sees new high growth opportunities in the healthcare market, especially in areas like patient care,” said Francois Guibert, STMicro’s Asia Pacific chief executive, at a briefing in Singapore on Monday marking the commercial launch.

The VereFlu Chip was developed by the Franco-Italian chipmaker together with Singapore’s privately held Veredus Laboratories after more than a year of research. The application underwent extensive evaluation trials at Veredus Chief Executive Rosemary Tan said the company had obtained “very promising” sales orders from hospitals and non-hospital customers, but declined to provide details.

Another big potential market is the screening of travelers at airports and border checkpoints, Tan said.

The Prirazlomnoye oil well of Yuganskneftegaz, Yukos’ main production unit in western Siberia.

The news is adding to market jitters with oil prices headed for new highs Tuesday. Analysts played down the significance of Russia’s first drop in oil production since 1998.

A recent report by the International Energy Agency says Russia saw a 1 percent drop from January through March compared with the same period last year.

IEA oil analyst David Fife said Tuesday the agency is not yet changing its forecast on Russia’s oil output this year because the results may be anomalous.

Artyom Konchin is an analyst with Aton Capital in Moscow. He puts Russia’s oil supply lull down to high taxes and insufficient reinvestment, not a shortage of oil.

Energy traders rewrote the record books again Tuesday, pushing oil futures past $114 a barrel as gasoline and diesel prices struck new highs of their own at the pump.

The estimate yesterday by Haroldo Lima, head of Brazil’s petroleum regulator, has “no technical basis,” said Guilherme Estrella, chief of exploration and production at Petrobras, as the Rio de Janeiro-based company is known. It will take at least until July to drill deep enough to make an accurate estimate, he told reporters in Brasilia today. Lima’s estimate would make Carioca the world’s third-largest field.

The deep-sea find by state-run oil firm Petrobras could yield 33 billion barrels in reserves.

Further tests are required to assess the scale of the find, off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, but analysts say it could have significant implications.

Brazil announced sizeable new gas and oil discoveries last year as well.

‘Big number’

In December 2007, Brazil said it had found a new reserve in the Espirito Santo region a month after a reserve in the nearby Tupi oil field of up to eight billion barrels was found.

According to the US Energy Department, Brazil’s existing proven oil reserves total 11.8 billion barrels, while the US holds 21.8 billion.

Referring to the latest discovery, Citigroup analyst Tim Evans said: “It’s a big, big number”.

Petrobras said “more conclusive data” about the potential of the discovery would only be known after further evaluation.

A spokesperson for the National Petroleum Agency said the statement by its president Harold Lima about the find was based on unconfirmed sources.

Greens Senator Bob Brown said he was “shocked and alarmed” by the claims, heard today by the Senate legal and constitutional committee’s inquiry into a Stolen Generation Compensation Bill 2008.

On the first day of hearings in Darwin today, Kathleen Mills from the Stolen Generations Alliance said the public did not know the full extent of what happened to some children.

And efforts to obtain records that support the claims, such as that children were injected with serums to gauge their reaction to the medication, had been hampered, she said.

“These are the things that have not been spoken about,” Ms Mills told the inquiry.

“As well as being taken away, they were used … there are a lot of things that Australia does not know about.”

Outside the inquiry, Ms Mills said her uncle had been a medical orderly at the Kahlin Compound in Darwin.

She said he told her that children were used as “guinea pigs” for leprosy treatments.

“He said it made our people very, very ill … the treatment almost killed them,” she said.

“It was a common experience and a common practice … People are very inhibited to speak about their experience and it is not a nice subject … I don’t want them to be shamed.”

Senator Brown said it was important to get to the bottom of the claims, which he called “very, very serious”.

“It may be right, it may not,” he said.

“It needs investigation. If within the indigenous community there is a feeling that children may have been experimented upon for a treatment for leprosy or anything else, the air needs to be cleared.”

Ms Mills said information to do with the testing would be in health department archives and she called on the Government to assist “opening Pandora’s box”.

She also said it was important to work with indigenous groups to ascertain who is eligible for compensation.

“It has to happen … but there’s this reluctance to do it,” she said.

“We don’t have the necessary information … it’s probably tucked away in some archive but we don’t have the resources to research, we don’t have the people who are qualified.”

The compensation Bill aims to pay money to victims of the stolen generations, including living descendants, out of a Stolen Generations Fund.

Ex gratia payments would be set at $20,000 as a common experience payment with an additional $3,000 for each year of institutionalisation.

Rodney Dillon, from the National Sorry Day Committee, said that while the Government debated action, Aboriginal elders entitled to compensation were dying.

Wal-Mart, which is the largest seller of firearms in the United States, agreed a 10-point code, which also includes rigid inventory controls, with a bipartisan coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns led by New York’s Michael Bloomberg.

The retailer said it will develop a first-of-its-kind computerized crime gun trace log that will flag purchases by customers who have previously bought guns later recovered in crimes.