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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’.

The Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement saying wiretaps will resume under the current law “at least for now.”

“Although our private partners are cooperating for the time being, they have expressed understandable misgivings about doing so in light of the ongoing uncertainty and have indicated they may well discontinue cooperation if the uncertainty persists,” the statement said.

On Friday U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said telecommunications firms have been reluctant to cooperate with new wiretaps since six-month temporary legislation expired last weekend. As a result, they told Congress, spy agencies have missed intelligence.

Democrats accused the Bush administration of fear-mongering and blamed it for any gaps.

President George W. Bush has said he would not compromise with the Democratic-led Congress on his demand that phone companies be shielded from lawsuits for taking part in his warrantless domestic spying program.

The measure passed by the Senate would provide retroactive lawsuit immunity to firms which cooperated with warrantless wiretaps that Bush authorized after the September 11 attacks. But the House of Representatives has opposed it, and Democratic leaders of both chambers said they would try to find a compromise.

Little about the official explanation of the events at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5 1968 makes sense. Now a new forensic analysis of the only audio recording of the fatal shots has given new weight to a controversial theory that there were in fact two shooters, and that the man convicted of Kennedy’s killing — Sirhan Sirhan – did not fire the fatal shots.

Following his victory speech to supporters after clinching a tight democratic primary victory in California, Kennedy left the podium in the Embassy ballroom to address a press conference.

But the shortcut he and his entourage took through the hotel’s pantry quickly descended into bloody mayhem. As Kennedy turned from shaking hands with two of the kitchen staff, a gunman stepped forward and began firing. Kennedy was hit by four shots including one which lodged in the vertebrae in his neck and another which entered his brain from below his right ear. He died in hospital the following day. Five other people were injured but survived.

Sirhan – a Palestinian refugee who said he wanted to “sacrifice” Kennedy “for the cause of the poor exploited people” – was quickly apprehended. He was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment.

“Sirhan was apprehended at the scene with literally a smoking gun,” said acoustic forensic expert Philip Van Praag of PVP Designs, who has carried out the new analysis. “At the beginning many people looked upon this as an open-and-shut case. It was one man, Sirhan Sirhan, who was observed by a number of people, who aimed and fired a gun in the direction of Kennedy’s entourage.”

But the lone gunman explanation has always looked shaky. The autopsy of Kennedy’s body suggested that all four shots that hit him came from behind, and powder marks on his skin showed they must have been from close range.

But Sirhan was in front of Kennedy when he fired, and after shooting two shots was overcome by hotel staff, who pinned him to a table. Also, Sirhan fired eight shots in total, yet 14 were found lodged around the room and in the victims.

“There is no doubt in our minds that no fewer than 14 shots were fired in the pantry on that evening and that Sirhan did not in fact kill Senator Kennedy,” said Robert Joling, a forensic scientist who has been involved with the Kennedy case for nearly 40 years. He and Van Praag have published a book on the killing this week entitled “An Open and Shut Case”.

The inconsistencies in the case have bred numerous conspiracy theories, including the involvement of the CIA and the idea that Sirhan – who claims not to remember the shooting and pleaded insanity at his trial – was a “Manchurian Candidate” assassin who was hypnotically programmed to kill the senator.

Now Van Praag has added new weight to the ‘two shooters’ theory. He reanalysed the only audio recording of the shooting, which was made by an independent journalist, Stanislaw Pruszynski. “At the time Pruszynski was not even aware that his recorder was still on,” said Van Praag.

The recording quality is poor, but it is possible to make out 13 shots over the course of just over 5 seconds, before what Van Praag describes as “blood-curdling screams” obscure the sound. That is more than the eight rounds that Sirhan’s cheap Iver Johnson Cadet 55 revolver carried.

Also, there are two pairs of double shots that occurred so close together it is inconceivable that Sirhan could have fired them all. The third and fourth shots and the seventh and eighth were separated by 122 and 149 milliseconds respectively. In tests, a trained firearms expert firing under ideal conditions could only manage 366 milliseconds between shots using the same weapon. And he was not being pinned to a table at the time.

Lastly, five of the shots – 3, 5, 8, 10 and 12 in the sequence – were found to have odd acoustic characteristics when specific frequencies were analysed separately. Van Praag thinks this is because they came from a different gun pointing away from Pruszynski’s microphone.

To recreate this he recorded the sounds made by firing the Iver Johnson and another revolver, a Harrison and Richardson 922. At least one member of Kennedy’s entourage was carrying this weapon when the killing happened. In the acoustic tests it produced the same frequency anomalies Van Praag had seen in the original recording but only when fired away from the microphone.

He presented his results on Thursday at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in Washington DC.

Paul Schrade, a close associate of Kennedy’s who was director of the United Auto Workers union, was at the senator’s side in the pantry and was shot in the head. He told the meeting that America lost an outstanding leader and potentially great president that day.

“I think we were in a position of really changing this country,” he said. “What we lost was a real hope and possibility of having a better country and having better relations around the world.”

He wants to see the case reopened and properly investigated. “We’re going to go ahead and do our best to find out who the second gunman was and that’s going to take a lot of work,” he said.

It may sound like science fiction, but Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) is an idea whose time has come. It is based on the work of Jacques-Arsène d’Arsonval, a 19th-century French physicist who thought of using the sea as a giant solar-energy collector.

The theory is very simple: OTEC extracts energy from the difference in temperature between the surface of the sea (up to 29C in the tropics) and the waters a kilometre down, which are typically a chilly 5C. This powers a “heat engine”: think of a refrigerator in reverse, in which a temperature difference creates electricity.

Claude’s efforts to develop a practical version of d’Arsonval’s concept had to be abandoned due to poor weather and a lack of funds.

As you can see from the photo above and others further down this article, the car is pretty far from our modern “manta ray-shaped, wind tunnel-vetted carbon fiber space car”, as the SeattlePI reporter puts it. How did it achieve such high fuel economy when even our modern hybrids are orders of magnitude less efficient? What can we learn from it? Read on.

The first thing the team that built the car did is make it as light as possible: They completely stripped the interior except for a seat. They also chopped the top to lower wind resistance.

The Opel’s rear axle was narrowed and super-hard low-friction tires were used. To save even more weight, a chain drive was used. The engine was pretty much the stock 4-cylinder that came with the car, but the fuel line was insulated and heated so the gasoline entered the combustion chambers as lean vapor.

The record was achieve by driving the car at a steady 30 mph (48 kph).

Now of course this isn’t exactly a practical car. But even if you changed it enough to reduce its performance by 250 mpg, that still leaves you with 126 mpg! With modern technology, we should be able to do much better than what we’re doing now.