In a statement, the Agriculture Department responded that two of the programs don't specifically focus on small producers; in fact, one is for public or nonprofit groups, not farmers.

And in one program, $1.5 million was set aside for smaller producers this year, the department said. The agency also created a $1.47 million grant program for small minority producers.

The nonprofit group argues the programs are crucial to traditional, independent family farms and ranches, which are disappearing across America.

In Iowa alone, the number of mid-sized farms, those with sales between $100,000 and $499,999, dropped 19 percent from 1997 to 2002, the center said. Nationwide, the average age of farmers has seen an annual rise of one year since 1997.

"Given the demographics of agriculture in America ... the inability of major USDA research and grant programs to address the topic of beginning farmers and ranchers is disappointing," said the center's Kim Leval, an author of the report.

The group called on the government to target family farmers and rural communities in awarding federal money and said each program should set aside money for beginning farmers and ranchers.

The programs are the Rural Business Enterprise Grant program, the National Research Initiative, the Initiative for Future Agriculture and Food Systems and the Value-Added Producer Grant Program.

Funding for ethanol and other biofuels is causing tension within the value-added program, the report said.

"Whatever benefits flow from ethanol and biofuel production will not generally flow to small- and medium-sized farmers as large-scale energy production will be dependent on large-scale grain production and will increasingly become corporatized," the report said.

The Lyons, Neb.-based center is funded by private foundations, national church programs, government sources and individual donations.

Streshley said the Las Vegas Strip had a big month, with a gain of 14.3 percent, due in part to strong table game action that favored the resorts. He noted the casinos' take from baccarat games was more than double what it was in August 2005.

Other factors included convention activity and the Hasim Rahman-Oleg Maskaev heavweight fight in Las Vegas.

While the Strip was up, downtown Las Vegas was down 14.3 percent, the third straight monthly decline. Streshley said factors included the closure of the Lady Luck hotel-casino for remodeling.

Other markets that showed declines included Reno, down 2.3 percent, and clubs on Lake Tahoe's south shore, down 12.8 percent. However, casinos in Sparks posted a gain of 7.6 percent.

Streshley said clubs on Tahoe's south shore were hard hit by lucky dice players. He said craps revenue in August was down more than 100 percent compared with the take in August 2005.

The statewide win was the amount left in casino coffers after gamblers wagered $14 billion during August. That included $11.3 billion bet in slot machine games, and the rest on table games.

The state collected $67 million in percentage fees on gambling winnings, based on the August win. That was up 8.3 percent compared with the fees collected for the same month in 2005, and the total is about $5.4 million higher than what the state Economic Forum had predicted earlier.

"Win" is a gross figure, with no operating costs or other expenses deducted. It represents casino revenue only - not hotel, restaurant or bar revenues.

A breakdown of the win showed that slots accounted for about $726.1 million of the total. That included $307 million won by multidenomination slots, up 19 percent. Penny slots were second with a win of $118 million, up 37 percent.

The board said live games, including poker, accounted for the $337 million balance of total. That included $105.5 million won on blackjack tables, up 7.7 percent; $33.7 million on craps tables, up 13.6 percent; $29 million on roulette, up 10.9 percent; and $3.5 million on sports pools, down 42 percent. Poker games won $13.8 million, up 17.7 percent.

BAE also said it has won a 132-million-dollar Concepts and Operations for Space and Missile Defense Integration Capabilities (COSMIC) contract from the US Army.

Under the COSMIC contract, BAE will provide engineering, maintenance and support services to the US Army Space and Missile Defense Future Warfare Center.

The total cumulative value of the 10-year COSMIC contract could reach 482 million dollars if all options were exercised, BAE said.

The defence group added that it has also received a 87-million-dollar ship repair contract from the US Navy.

But the total worth of the multi-ship multi-option contract could reach 270 million dollars.

Because the wireless system is built into the missile and the missile case, wireless TOW works with existing launch platforms -- including the Improved Target Acquisition System, Improved Bradley Acquisition Subsystem, TOW 2 Subsystem and M220 Ground TOW. The system performs exactly as the wire-guided version, enabling soldiers to continue using the proven weapon without changing tactics or incurring additional training.

"The wireless TOW provides the soldier and Marine with the next logical step in the evolution of this proven weapon system," said Jim Riley, vice president of Raytheon Missile Systems' Land Combat product line. "This increases the tactical superiority and versatility of a system that continues to prove itself in ongoing combat operations."

TOW remains the Army and Marine Corps' primary heavy anti-tank and precision assault weapon deployed on more than 4,000 TOW launch platforms including the Army "Stryker," Bradley Fighting Vehicle System and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.

"I am on the Joint Chiefs, and I don't want to see the other services disadvantaged as a result of having a proper Army," said Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker at a press conference Monday in Washington.

The Pentagon budget is usually a zero-sum game for the military services. The "topline" for the next year's budget is handed down from the White House in the spring, and the services jockey for extra dollars within those constraints.

But 2008 may be different.

In a virtually unprecedented move, the Army leadership in August declined to submit a 2008 budget to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, citing a major and irreconcilable "mismatch" between Army strategy, wartime needs, and the $114 billion budget it had been offered for 2008.

Harvey said the Army made its case to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has agreed to allow the service to seek more money from the Office of Management and Budget, which is responsible for coordinating budgets across the federal government.

Army Secretary Francis Harvey refused to say exactly how much extra the Army is seeking, but the Los Angeles Times has reported it wants $138 billion, approximately $26 billion more than it got for fiscal year 2007.

"We felt we had a challenge we couldn't overcome in '08-'13 program," Schoomaker said.

Both Harvey and Schoomaker insist that the amount is affordable, given the strength of the U.S. economy.

It's a refrain they picked up from Rumsfeld, who has been laying the groundwork for a much larger defense budget for the last year. The rationale is that as a percentage of gross domestic product -- less than 4 percent -- the United States spends less now than it has historically, and can afford much more.

"We're at historic lows, and the American people have to make their minds up if that's what they want at a time of great uncertainty," said Harvey.

"Ultimately this is an issue of priority. This is not an issue of affordability to our nation," Schoomaker said.

In real dollars, even adjusted for inflation, the defense budget is as large now as it was during the Reagan build-up years, if the $300 billion in supplemental appropriations made for the Iraq and Afghan wars are added to it.

Schoomaker rejects that calculus, pointing out that supplementals are spent to replenish "consumables" in the war -- destroyed equipment and ammunition, for instance. The Army budget is for modernization of its forces -- developing and buying new weapons and training soldiers.

That's not precisely true -- billions in the supplemental have been spent accelerating the Army's already planned reorganization and modernization program to overhaul forces headed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

But Schoomaker's concern about supplementals has at least as much to do with timing as it does constraints on how the money can be spent. The fiscal year 2006 supplemental, meant to pay war costs between October 2005 and September 2006, was not submitted to Congress until February 2006 and was not approved until the end of June, just two months prior to the end of the spending year.

Where the money will come from is unclear. The White House has cut taxes and shows no willingness to raise them; much of the federal budget is obligated to domestic "entitlement" programs like Medicare and Social Security that are difficult to cut.

And it is the White House that has set the budget for the Army and the Pentagon for the last six years.

Harvey was careful to credit the White House for the 10 percent increase in the Army budget for the last two years.

"So far the Army is getting the resources it needs to execute. So far this headed in the right direction," Harvey said.

"The dilemma here is we can't get well on supplemental funding," added Schoomaker.

India's biggest private company, Reliance Industries, with a market capitalisation of $33bn (£17.8bn), runs the plant. Controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, whose father Dhirubhai founded the company, Reliance towers over its industry rivals, contributing 8% of India's exports.

The company's ambitions in Jamnagar have helped India move from being a net importer to an exporter of refined petroleum products. "We want to make a statement that India can be an industrial giant. Jamnagar is a refinery for the world, based out of India," said Hital Meswani, executive director of Reliance Industries. "In the mid-90s when this project was conceived, no one believed it would work. We were told there was too much capacity, returns were not great and every management consultant we hired told us don't bother."

In the dizzy days of the 90s internet boom, distilling crude into diesel, gasoline, home-heating oil and aviation fuel was considered a dinosaur business, with low margins and large outlays. Oil refining was yesterday's business, not tomorrow's.

A hi-tech gamble

But Reliance says it gambled on a "paradigm shift" in the economics of the refinery business. The company, which began as a textile trader but moved into producing polyester, had noticed that India was importing millions of tonnes of refined hydrocarbons a year. Its managers projected prices creeping upwards largely due to three global oil trends.

First the oil being produced from the world's hydrocarbon reservoirs was increasingly "sour", or heavy, full of sulphur and other impurities that older refineries could not cope with.

Second was that no new capacity was being built around the world. Environmental concerns and the rising costs of infrastructure projects discouraged the oil majors from putting up refineries in Europe and America. No new oil refinery has been built in the US since the 1980s as environmental legislation has tightened.

Third was Reliance's belief that Asian economies would become dynamos of world growth - inevitably increasing demand for petro-products. It also saw that many European countries wanted cleaner petroleum, which required complex refining techniques. According to its strategists, commercial logic dictated that new, hi-tech refineries would be needed - and soon. Reliance, Mr Meswani says, decided to build big.

Work started in 1996 on a dry, sandy stretch in Jamnagar, about 500 miles north of Mumbai in the Gulf of Kutch with almost 100,000 workers toiling around the clock. Although the area was off the beaten track and served by just one small airstrip, supertankers could deliver by sea.

The first stage was to build a refinery that could process 660,000 barrels a day. Mr Meswani and Mr Ambani lived for months on site in shipping containers to make sure the project ran smoothly. A five-star complex with villas for 2,400 families, a golf course and swimming pools were built for foreign workers.

In many ways Jamnagar was a turning point for Reliance, silencing critics who claimed its talents lay with manipulating government policy to its advantage rather than creating wealth through project management skills. It also made Mr Ambani's reputation as able to fill his father's shoes - which he traded on when a family feud led to his younger brother Anil walking away with Reliance's businesses in telecoms and fund management. Mukesh, or MDA as he is known, was left with the bulk of Reliance, essentially its cash-rich petrochemical arm.

Ahead of the game

Having built from scratch the world's third-largest refinery complex, stage two in the Reliance plan is to double capacity by 2008. Other companies and nations have woken up to the potential of refining. Saudi Arabia's national oil company, Saudi Aramco, is planning a 400,000-barrel-a-day refinery. Mexico, alarmed by how much crude oil it exports and gasoline it imports, is also planning a refinery capable of processing 250,000 barrels of crude a day.

Reliance has made the most of the shortfall in refining capacity. This year it spun off Reliance Petroleum to complete the $6bn stage two of the project, which will add 580,000 barrels a day. Reliance Petroleum went to the markets with a share issue, raising $600m through a pre-float placement with banks and the same amount through retail investors on the Bombay stock exchange. Considered a magic brand by many in India, Reliance's offer was 52 times oversubscribed. Perhaps the biggest endorsement was the news that Chevron, the world's fourth-largest oil company, agreed to buy 5% of Reliance Petroleum for $300m, with an option to increase the stake to 29%. Experts say that Reliance's strategy is modelled on one developed east of India. "Singapore taught us about offshore refining," said Santanu Saikia, editor of Indianpetro.com. "They showed how use of high technology and low labour costs would attract such large-scale investments."

Others worry that alternative fuels such as ethanol could slow the growth in demand for gasoline. Chandra Tripathy, who until last year was India's petroleum secretary, its top oil official, said the impact would be limited. "I think we are looking really at just a few countries like Brazil where this would be an important factor," he said. However, India's laws were changing to reflect concerns about climate change, he said. "There will be tighter environmental laws for us too so that we will have to make sure our savings in terms of labour and expertise will outweigh the cost of importing the crude. It is a fast-closing window that India, not just Reliance, needs to exploit."

In response to questions from Reuters, a Labor Department spokesman said there had been 647 claims for death benefits between March 1, 2003, and September 30, 2006. The Defense Base Act covers both Americans and foreigners, and there is no breakdown of the nationalities of those killed. The
Pentagon does not monitor civilian contractor casualties.

The death toll of civilians working alongside U.S. forces in Iraq compares with more than 2,700 military dead and, experts say, underscores the risks of outsourcing war to private military contractors.

Their number in Iraq is estimated at up to 100,000, from highly-trained former special forces soldiers to drivers, cooks, mechanics, plumbers, translators, electricians and laundry workers and other support personnel.

A trend toward "privatizing war" has been accelerating steadily since the end of the Cold War, when the United States and its former adversaries began cutting back professional armies. U.S. armed forces shrank from 2.1 million when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 to 1.4 million today.

"At its present size, the U.S. military could not function without civilian contractors," said Jeffrey Addicott, an expert at St. Mary's University in San Antonio. "The problem is that the civilians operate in a legal gray zone. There has been little effort at regulation, oversight, standardized training and a uniform code of conduct. It's the Wild West out there."

FOG OF LAW

Two court cases slowly making their way through the U.S. legal system have opened a window on the legal fog hanging over civilians who work alongside the military and have become an everyday presence in conflict zones.

The legal cases involve Blackwater Security and Halliburton which field hundreds of civilians in Iraq. The two companies are part of a global industry estimated to bring in up to $100 billion annually.

The suit against Blackwater, the first of its kind in the United States, was brought 19 months ago by the families of four civilian contractors who were shot in March 2004 by insurgents who burned their bodies and hung the charred remains of two from the girders of a bridge in the city of Falluja.

Television images of the gruesome scene, with jubilant Iraqis shaking their fists, were beamed around the world and shocked the United States. Some military experts view the Falluja incident, which prompted a massive U.S. retaliatory assault on Falluja, as a turning point in the war.

The suit, for fraud and wrongful death, alleges that Blackwater broke explicit terms of its contract with the men -- Stephen (Scott) Helveston, Mike Teague, Jerko Zovko and Wesley Batalona -- by sending them to escort a food convoy in unarmored cars, without heavy machine guns and in teams that lacked even a map.

The suit against Halliburton stems from the April 2004 ambush of a convoy of fuel trucks near Abu Ghraib in which six drivers working for a company subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root were killed and 11 injured. In September, a federal judge in Houston threw out the suit, saying his court had no jurisdiction because the decision to send the convoy had been "interwoven with Army decisions."

"The effect of this ruling is ... a legal gray zone in which Halliburton and KBR can act in any manner they chose," said T. Scott Allen, attorney for the families. "We will appeal."

A few days after the Houston decision, a U.S. appeals court in Raleigh, North Carolina, rejected a Blackwater petition for a rehearing of an appeal to have the case moved from a state court in Moycock where the company is based, and have it adjudicated by the Department of Labor, which decides Defense Base Act claims in the first place.

"The decision was clear: jurisdiction of this case rests with the state court," said Dan Callahan, one of the attorneys for the families of the four killed in Falluja. "This paves the way for holding Blackwater liable and establish guidelines and accountability for contracting firms operating abroad."

Where the case comes to be heard has enormous monetary implications: There is no cap on punitive damages in a state court and past judgments have reached staggering heights. Callahan, for example, won a $934 million jury verdict in a 2003 corporate litigation in California.

The Base Defense Act provides for maximum death benefits of $4,123.12 a month.

Until the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine's military industries were a central component in supplying the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces. Yushchenko has previously revealed that under his predecessor, President Leonid Kuchma, Ukrainian corporations secretly sold a dozen nuclear-capable cruise missiles to Iran.

Ukraine and Israel have the potential to offer each other a lot in joint ballistic missile and ballistic missile defense cooperation. Ukraine has an enormous and widely dispersed industrial base that Israel lacks, especially in the Donbas, on Don Basin. Israel is exceptionally advanced in its electronic high-tech sector, an area where Ukraine lags. The Ukrainians also lack Israel's massive web of connections and credibility with defense ministries and corporations around the world from the United States and Taiwan to India.

"We will be very glad to cooperate with Israeli scientists and developers in the area of missiles and satellites. Development of advanced technological weaponry could be the basis for further strategic cooperation between the two countries," Yushchenko told Peres according to the Israel Today report.

Peres is a lifelong high tech enthusiast and he was the director of Israel's fledgling nuclear program at Dimona back in the mid-1950s. According to the report, he also suggested during his talks with Yushchenko that Ukraine and Israel could work together to create a new generation of anti-terror weapons and security devices based on nano-technology, another area where Israel is a world leader.

Chavez was speaking before participants in a state program aimed at helping alcoholics, the homeless and street children. The crowd had cheered him enthusiastically earlier in his speech, but his beer decree was met with a lukewarm response and scattered applause.

Chavez assured his audience he was not banning the consumption of alcohol.

The leader's order apparently was aimed at trucks that sell beer directly on the streets of poor neighbourhoods, rather than those delivering to liquor stores or other established businesses. Selling alcohol requires a licence.

Although drinking alcohol in public areas is illegal in Venezuela, bottles of beer are often downed on street corners, and it's a preferred thirst-quencher at public rallies - including during some of Chavez's long-running speeches.