Drought is good for business, says world's largest commodities trading company

The United Nations, aid agencies and the British Government have lined up to attack the world's largest commodities trading company, Glencore, after it described the current global food crisis and soaring world prices as a "good" business opportunity.

With the US experiencing a rerun of the drought "Dust Bowl" days of the 1930s and Russia suffering a similar food crisis that could see Vladimir Putin's government banning grain exports, the senior economist of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, Concepcion Calpe, told The Independent: "Private companies like Glencore are playing a game that will make them enormous profits."

Ms Calpe said leading international politicians and banks expecting Glencore to back away from trading in potential starvation and hunger in developing nations for "ethical reasons" would be disappointed.

"This won't happen," she said. "So now is the time to change the rules and regulations about how Glencore and other multinationals such as ADM and Monsanto operate. They know this and have been lobbying heavily around the world to water down and halt any reform."

Germany's chancellor to call for convention to draw up rules on tighter political union.

Angela Merkel wants leaders of European Union member states to set up a convention for a new EU treaty by the end of the year to formalise steps towards tighter political union, according to German press reports.

Merkel, Germany's chancellor, wants leaders to agree at their summit in Brussels on 13-14 December to hold a first meeting of a convention on a new treaty, reports the Germany weekly magazine Der Spiegel.

A treaty convention, made up of representatives of the European Parliament and European Commission, as well as of member state governments, is needed to draft a new treaty.

US farmers are heading for their most profitable year on record despite the worst drought in half a century as high grain prices and payouts from a federal crop insurance programme compensate for a smaller harvest.

Net farm income will reach $122.2bn in 2012, the highest-ever nominal profit and the second highest in inflation-adjusted terms after 1973, the US Department of Agriculture said in its first forecast since drought spread across the corn belt.

The expected 4 per cent increase in average farm profit from 2011 comes as agricultural states, including Iowa and Ohio, have emerged as battlegrounds in the November presidential election and lawmakers have failed to renew legislation outlining agricultural subsidies ahead of its expiry on September 30.

Intense summer heat and dry soils dramatically worsened the outlook for this year's US corn and soyabean harvest, propelling prices to all-time highs. Farms in northern plains states that escaped the worst conditions, such as North Dakota, will earn 39 per cent more this year, the department said.

Mexico leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador rejects the ruling that Enrique Peña Nieto won the election and calls for protests, saying the PRI cheated.
Mexico City - Dismissing arguments that recent elections were rife with fraud, Mexico's electoral tribunal on Friday officially declared Institutional Revolutionary Party candidate Enrique Peña Nieto the president-elect, a ruling that was defiantly rejected by leftist leader Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the second-place finisher who, for the second presidential contest in a row, called his followers into the streets of the capital to protest.

The unanimous ruling by the seven-judge panel clears the way for the return of Peña Nieto's party, known as the PRI, to power. It had lost the quasi-authoritarian grip on the country that it had enjoyed for more than seven decades in 2000, after numerous democratic reforms.

Though there were scattered protests throughout Mexico City, they have not yet risen to the levels of 2006 when, after an even closer election, Lopez Obrador's followers choked the city center for weeks, bringing the country to the brink of a constitutional crisis. Lopez Obrador - who has declared the latest elections neither "clean, free or authentic" - has called for a protest Sept. 9 in the Zocalo, the capital's historic square.

The president-elect arrived at the tribunal chambers late Friday to receive the judges' blessing. In a short speech, he urged Mexicans to unify despite their differences, and had words that, while not mentioning him by name, were obviously meant for his vanquished opponent:

"Legality is fundamental to our democratic system," Peña Nieto said.

"There are rules, deadlines and procedures," he said. "All of the competitors accept them, and we have an obligation to respect them."

The judges' decision was widely anticipated by observers here who had assumed that the tribunal would not deem the PRI's electoral sins sufficiently grave to warrant overturning an election that Peña Nieto won by nearly 3.2 million votes.

A twin suicide bomb attack targeted a Nato base in eastern Afghanistan today, killing eight civilians and four Afghan policemen, local officials said.

A spokesman for Nato's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said no one from the alliance was killed in the attack, which happened in Wardak province's Sayed Abad district.

"The truck bomb was huge, killing 12 and wounding 50 more," said provincial governor spokesman Sahidullah Shahid.

The Taliban, which took responsibility for the early morning attack, said it had sent the two bombers, one on foot and one in an explosives-laden truck.

The Nato base was targeted last year on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the September 11th attacks when a suicide bomber drove into it, killing four civilians and wounding 77 US troops.

President Rafael Correa says Ecuador will sue a US laboratory for holding and selling blood samples deceitfully taken from members of an Amazon tribe.

Correa said in remarks broadcast on Friday that the samples were taken from members of the Waorani community in the early 1990s by two US nationals on the premise that the community is particularly resistant to disease and this merited medical research, AFP reported.

In July 2012, the 3,000-member group filed a complaint with the Ecuadorian ombudsman's office, and in response the government decided to take action after some 20 years, Correa stated.

According to the 2008 Constitution of Ecuador, biopiracy is forbidden.

An Israeli F-16 fighter jet

At least two Palestinians have been injured in Israeli airstrikes on the besieged Gaza Strip, local medical sources say.

Israeli F-16 warplanes carried out the attacks on northern Gaza late on Friday night, Xinhua reported.

The Palestinian resistance movement Hamas says Israel launched over 58 air and ground assaults on the Gaza Strip in June, which killed over a dozen Palestinians and injured many others.

The Israeli military frequently bombs the Gaza Strip, saying the actions are being conducted for defensive purposes. However, disproportionate force is always used, in violation of international law, and civilians are often killed or injured.

Gaza has been blockaded since 2007, which is a situation that has caused a decline in the standard of living, unprecedented levels of unemployment, and unrelenting poverty.

The US Justice Department ended a four-year probe into the CIA's controversial, and at times brutal, treatment of detainees, closing two final homicide investigations without filing charges. The decision sparked outrage among human rights supporters.

­US Attorney General Eric Holder announced on Thursday that no charges will be filed in the cases of two terror suspects who died in CIA custody - one in Iraq in 2003 and another in Afghanistan in 2002. "The admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt," Holder said.

Gul Rahman died in 2002 at a secret prison in Afghanistan known as the 'Salt Pit' after being bound to a wall in near-freezing temperatures. Manadel al-Jamadi, also a suspected militant, died in 2003 in Iraq's Abu Ghraib, where his corpse was photographed, wrapped in plastic and packed in ice.

The two cases were the final verdicts in a widespread criminal probe by federal prosecutor John Durham into interrogation techniques used during the presidency of George W. Bush. Durham determined that a number of the detainees were never in CIA custody, and all the cases have now been closed without charges.

Durham examined the treatment of 101 detainees who were taken into custody by the US in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. The probe, which lasted more than four years, began in 2008 in the wake of an investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes of interrogations of terror suspects. The case was later expanded to include the deaths of the two prisoners.

Thursday's decision sparked outrage among human rights groups.

Former Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette is going to tell his version of events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden, even if the Pentagon sues him for every last penny.

Last night, the Defense Department's top attorney wrote a letter to Bissonnette threatening to use "all remedies legally available" against him for the publication of No Easy Day, his firsthand account of the mission to kill bin Laden in Pakistan. "You are in material breach and violation of the nondisclosure agreements you signed," wrote Pentagon general counsel Jeh Charles Johnson. The letter hinted at a criminal prosecution of Bissonnete for disclosing classified information and threatened to seize the royalties from his book and go after his publisher Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Group. In a written response, a lawyer representing Bissonnette denied his client breached his nondisclosure agreement in a letter to the Pentagon. (The letter, obtained by The Atlantic Wire, refers to Bissonnette under his pen name Mark Owen.)

"Mr. Owen sought legal advice about his responsibilities before agreeing to publish his book and scrupulously reviewed the work to ensure that it did not disclose any material that would breach his agreements or put his former comrades at risk," wrote Robert D. Luskin, an attorney at D.C. lobbying behemoth Patton Boggs. "Mr. Owen is proud of his service and respectful of his obligations. But he has earned the right to tell his story."

Islamabad - Pakistani intelligence officials say a U.S. drone strike has killed five militants in northwest Pakistan.

Two intelligence officials said at least seven missiles were fired from U.S. drones Saturday at a vehicle and a house in the village of Degan in the Pakistani tribal region of North Waziristan near the Afghan border.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to talk to the media.

They said the area is dominated by anti-American militant commander Hafiz Gul Bahadur. They did not know whether the killed men belong to his group.

The CIA-run drone program is controversial in Pakistan where many call it an infringement on the nation's sovereignty. The U.S. maintains it is necessary tool to combat militants.

Source: The Associated Press