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The plans are the most concrete yet by Vikram Pandit, nearing his five-month anniversary as the bank’s CEO, to prove himself a capable turnaround specialist at a company that many claim was struggling long before the housing market collapse.

The bank’s plans to wind down its $2.2 trillion in assets to approximately $1.7 trillion were part of an investor day presentation at one of Citigroup’s Manhattan offices.

These so-called “legacy assets” included yet-to-be-named noncore businesses, as well as assets in Citigroup’s securities and consumer banking segments, including mortgages and other real estate-related holdings.

Already, the bank has written down assets tied to soured debt by some $38 billion since last summer. It has also announced plans to reduce its residential mortgage assets by $45 billion over the coming year, and has recently sold businesses including CitiCapital, CitiStreet and Diners Club.

The anticipated rise in revenue will derive largely from cutting costs — which Chief Financial Officer Gary Crittenden said will mean more job reductions. Citi has so far lowered its work force by 13,200 people since last summer.

Citigroup has been under heavy investor scrutiny over the past year as the value of its stock tumbled. Many Citigroup holders have been angling for a large-scale overhaul of the company’s structure.

Those shareholders’ hopes, however, are dwindling, with executives apparently largely keeping the bank’s major parts intact.

Woven into one small story about a plane crash in Venezuela that killed seven people are visible threads from two perennial American cover-ups: one surrounding vote fraud, and one covering-up the CIA’s role in drug trafficking.

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The downed plane’s relevance to the ongoing story of vote fraud in America involves the identity of it’s passenger, Jose Alfredo Anzola, a 34-year old founder of Smartmatic, a Venezuela-based election company whose American subsidiary counted one in every three votes in the 2004 Presidential election, while engaged the whole time in heated controversy over allegations the firm counting America’s votes had hidden ties to—of all people— Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez.

The connection between last week’s plane crash and the ongoing saga of CIA Drug trafficking begins with 43-year old Mario Donadi Gafaro, the veteran drug pilot at the controls of the twin engine plane.

Donadi boasts a 1999 drug trafficking conviction in the U.S., where he served three years.

Then, even more recently, he was convicted of the same offense in Venezuela, and sentenced to an eight-year stretch at Venezuela’s Big House.

When he crashed and burned last week, reporters noted with surprise, he still had six years to serve. Donadi was supposed to be in prison.

Edgar Millan Gomez, the acting chief of Mexico’s federal police, in January.

The Mexican police have been under constant attack since President Felipe Calderón took office in December 2007 and started an offensive against drug cartels that had corrupted the municipal police forces and local officials in several towns along the border with the United States and on both coasts.

Since then, Mr. Calderón has sent thousands of federal agents and troops into those areas to establish law and order, provoking retaliation from drug cartels that have killed about 200 officers, among them at least 30 federal agents.

The acting chief, Edgar Millán Gómez, was ambushed by several men wearing rubber gloves and carrying weapons as he entered his apartment building in the Guerrero neighborhood of Mexico City with two bodyguards at 2:30 a.m. He was hit eight times in the chest and once in a hand. He died a few hours later at Metropolitan Hospital.

Rising agricultural commodities prices and a large population increase mean that the traditional policy is now untenable even if crude oil trades at about $120 a barrel, forcing countries in the region, including Saudi Arabia, to reconsider how it feeds its population.

“The region has woken up to the new food market reality,” says Abdolreza Abbassian, an expert at the Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.

The FAO estimates the region’s cereals import bill will hit $22.6bn this year (£11.4bn, €14.5bn), a 40 per cent increase on 2007. Since 2000, it has jumped almost 170 per cent. The rising bill is the latest signal of the looming food crisis hanging over the Middle East and north Africa, the region of the world most dependent on imports of food staples.

Jonathan Calland, of Tilda, India’s largest ex­porter of basmati rice, says: “Security of food supplies is for the first time since the 1970s back on the agenda in the Middle East.”

In the past few months, food riots have hit Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen as prices jumped almost 60 per cent in a year. A general strike, demanding action on rising prices, has been called in Lebanon on Wednesday. The discomfort over food price hikes is aggravated by a huge dependence on the international food market. Middle East and north African countries buy almost a quarter of all the cereals traded globally.

Abah Ofon, agricultural com­modities analyst at Stan­dard Chartered in Dubai, says: “The region is in a very precarious position.”

Two countries in the re­gion, Morocco and Jordan, have an even more acute problem because not only are they facing higher food prices rises, they are also net importers of fuel.

The dependence on im­ports is a consequence of the meagre agricultural supply – a result of paltry land and water resources – and booming demand – the upshot of fast rising populations and strong economic growth courtesy of high oil prices.

Despite the challenge, policymakers have taken a short-term view of the crisis and are pursuing quick-fix solutions, such as raising salaries, as in Egypt, to increase affordability or imposing price controls as adopted by the UAE. Nevertheless, four long-term trends are emerging: food subsidies, seen only a couple years ago in retreat, are on the rise, strategic stocks are been considered, the countries are trying to diversify their imports and there is renewed efforts for agriculture self-sufficiency.

Akhter Ahmed, at the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based think-tank, says that in the current environment of rising food prices, “politically it is very difficult to make any substantial change in the subsidies policy” even though, he argues, most result in wastage of public funds.

Alarmed by the potential for social unrest, Egypt will spend an estimated $2.4bn this year on bread subsidies, up from $820m last year.

Price controls, mostly eliminated during the 1990s’ economic liberalisation, are back. The UAE, for example, has imposed them through agreements with big supermarkets, such as the French retailer Carrefour, to maintain food costs at last year’s level.

Governments have also returned to the idea of building strategic food stocks, which were common in the 1980s. Sultan al-Mansouri, UAE economy minister, said strategic inventories are a “formula to control prices once they are out of control”. In Oman, the government has announced the purchase of 200,000 tonnes of rice, enough for two years.

Diplomats say the region’s policymakers have realised that relying entirely on the global market without a cushion is a flawed idea.

At the same time, governments are also looking to diversify imports through bilateral government-to-government trade agreements such as that recently reached between Libya and Ukraine. They are also trying to increase local agricultural production, particularly in north Africa, but also in Iran and Syria, but with limited success.

However, more long-term policies are necessary, particularly to battle the impact of climate change in the region, experts said. In a context where food price shocks are already a big concern, changes in temperature and precipitation will only add to the stress on agricultural resources.

The regulator, the forward markets commission, acting under instruction from the Congress party-led coalition government, suspended futures trading on Thursday in potatoes, soy oil, rubber and chickpeas for at least four months. Last year it banned futures trading in wheat, rice and two types of dhal.

“The government perceived that suspending a few commodities will perhaps soften price expectations. Though I don’t personally agree with that, that’s how a democratically elected government feels, therefore we had to respect that,” B.C. Khatua, the chairman of the regulating commission, told the Financial Times.

India’s government is taking an aggressive stance on food and steel prices to try to stem inflation, which hit 7.57 per cent last month – well above the official “comfort zone” of 5 per cent. This week steel producers agreed to a third price cut in three months despite rising raw material costs after a meeting with Manmohan Singh, the prime minister. But economists say market intervention will achieve little as most of the inflation is resulting from shortages of supply in global markets.

The vetting process checks only for crimes committed in Britain. Foreign workers – arriving from inside or outside the European Union – are not checked in their country of origin.

This means that someone with a conviction for firearms or explosives offences committed abroad could, for example, take a job loading bags on to aircraft at Heathrow, Gatwick or any other airport, provided they had committed no crimes here.
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A proposal drafted by the Ministry of Agriculture would make supporting offshore land acquisition by domestic agricultural companies a central government policy. Beijing already has similar policies to boost offshore investment by state-owned banks, manufacturers and oil companies, but offshore agricultural investment has so far been limited to a few small projects.

If approved, the plan could face intense opposition abroad given surging global food prices and deforestation fears. However an official close to the deliberations said it was likely to be adopted.

“There should be no problem for this policy to be approved. The problem might come from foreign governments who are unwilling to give up large areas of land,” the official said.

The move comes as oil-rich but food-poor countries in the Middle East and north Africa explore similar options. Libya is talking with Ukraine about growing wheat in the former Soviet republic, while Saudi Arabia has said it would invest in agricultural and livestock projects abroad to ensure food security and control commodity prices.

China is losing its ability to be self-sufficient in food as its rising wealth triggers a shift away from diet staples such as rice towards meat, which requires large amounts of imported feed.

China has about 40 per cent of the world’s farmers but just 9 per cent of the world’s arable land. Some Chinese scholars argue that domestic agricultural companies must expand overseas if China is to guarantee its food security and reduce its exposure to global market fluctuations.

The British Ministry of Defense’s first ever “Grand Challenge” intends to encourage participants to turn their ideas into prototypes for machines the army can use in urban environments.

The six finalists, who each received $600,000 to build such contraptions as a disc-shaped remote-controlled flying robots fitted with heat and motion sensors, were in London last week to display their models.

From Swarm Systems Ltd. comes a set of tiny helicopters that fly in formation into a village and record images and audio tracks to beam back to headquarters. And British aeronautical company BAE Systems teamed up with the University of Manchester to build a self-propelled, remote-controlled camera.

The Silicon Valley Group PLC, a small research company in southeast Britain, teamed with the Bruton School for Girls in Somerset to build an unmanned buggy that can analyze gunmen’s movements to determine whether they are angry or nervous.

“This project has really allowed us to broaden out our vision and look at what other work is being done out there in our field,” said Norman Gregory, the company’s business manager. “We are a small company and would not have been able to put together a consortium to develop such a sophisticated system without this competition.”

The government wanted participants to get schools involved, Gregory said, so the company consulted the Bruton School, which already sponsored robot design competitions.

Finalists will take part in a mock battle in August in Copehill Down, a village built near Stonehenge for military training during the Cold War. The contestants will have their machines search for pretend gunmen and mock bombs, earning points for each find and losing points for hitting civilians or transmitting data too slowly.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency personnel are trained and ready. Buses and vans are standing by for raids. Detention facilities have expanded.

All that is lacking is clearance from the courts.

Employers should be prepared in the coming months for immigration raids on scales never before staged by the federal government. The stakes for employers will be especially high if the courts give a green light to the mailing of Social Security no-match letters.

ICE already has stepped up its worksite enforcement program in recent years, even without the new kind of no- match letters that were held up by a court injunction last fall.

Social Security will not provide ICE with a list of employers receiving the possible new round of no-match letters. The letters would establish new grounds to nail employers with criminal charges.

Austin lawyers Kevin Lashus and Robert Loughran compare the federal government’s preparations for increased worksite enforcement to an army practicing for battle.

“The government expects a massive disruption of the work force,” Loughran said. “A climate of fear is the strategy of this administration.”

Employers receiving the new no-match letters would have 93 days to resolve discrepancies, said Lashus and Loughran of Tindall & Foster’s Austin office.

Employers could find themselves trapped by federal laws that on the one hand prohibit unauthorized workers and, on the other hand, ban discrimination. Employers cannot look beyond the employees’ documents. If they do, they face federal discrimination lawsuits. If employers have not followed steps listed in the no-match letters or are determined to knowingly employ unauthorized workers, they will face criminal charges.

Lashus, a former ICE official, has been involved in some of the agency’s previous workplace raids. Loughran is a longtime specialist in employer sanctions law.

Whereas ICE has routinely conducted about 10 raids a month, the lawyers expect the pace to rise significantly once the Social Security Administration mails the letters. ICE could strike workplaces 20 to 30 at a time in any given city. The agency would pause to process the cases, then begin new rounds of raids, Lashus said.

Homeland Security wanted to implement its plan last fall, but a U.S. district judge blocked Social Security’s no-match letters after labor unions and other organizations contended the plan would disrupt companies and harm innocent workers.

Social Security’s own inspector general already estimates that about 17.8 million of 435 million records contain errors that could generate a no-match letter. An estimated 70 percent of the erroneous records belong to U.S. citizens.

Homeland Security appealed the judge’s decision but in March proposed to go ahead on its plan. Any day now, the Arizona judge must decide whether to lift the injunction or make it permanent.

If the injunction becomes permanent, Social Security will hold the letters while Homeland Security again appeals. If the injunction is lifted, the no-match letters could be mailed within days.

“The government is deadly serious about these cases,” Loughran said. “The difference is that the federal government is eager to enforce the laws now, whereas they couldn’t be bothered 15 years ago.”

Especially vulnerable would be businesses 10 to 15 years old that haven’t strictly monitored their new employees’ documentation. “They have no understanding where the lines are,” Loughran said.

The damage would go beyond that. A sudden explosion of enforcement could victimize legal workers, either directly or indirectly. Businesses would close, throwing innocent workers out of work amid a weak economy. Families would be torn apart.

Mark Carney says the central bank won’t bail out Canadian financial institutions like the U.S. government did when the Bear Stearns brokerage, one of the giants of Wall Street, ran afoul of the subprime mortgage mess.

“If you cannot make a judgment (on the value of an asset), you should not own the security,” Carney told a Senate committee yesterday.

“There is very high value, if a situation came about, to ensuring the shareholders and senior managers bear the full consequences of their actions,” he said.

“The Bank of Canada has a role to become lender of last resort, but we would do that on the advice of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions that the institution is solvent, not because the institution needed money.”

Carney said the central bank would come to the rescue of a chartered bank in the case of a temporary liquidity problem — if the institution had sufficient capital to be considered viable.

The plane’s autopilot, yaw damp and pitch trim all malfunctioned in the first 45 minutes of Crist’s flight from Tallahassee, Florida, Erin Isaac, Crist’s director of communication. The yaw damp is part of the autopilot system that helps stabilizes the tail, and the pitch trim the craft’s up and down movement.

With the plane over neighboring Georgia, the pilot decided to return to Tallahassee, she said.

Isaac said the plane could have continued on its journey with the malfunctioning yaw damp and autopilot, but the pitch trim problem and possibility of other issues surfacing created enough concern for the pilot to bring the plane around.

But Liu is investing $10 million in the Palmetto State, building a printing-plate factory that will open this fall and hire 120 workers. His main aim is to tap the large American market, but when his finance staff penciled out the costs, he was stunned to learn how they compared with those in China.

Liu spent about $500,000 for seven acres in Spartanburg — less than one-fourth what it would cost to buy the same amount of land in Dongguan, a city in southeast China where he runs three plants. U.S. electricity rates are about 75% lower, and in South Carolina, Liu doesn’t have to put up with frequent blackouts.

About the only major thing that’s more expensive in Spartanburg is labor. Liu is looking to offer $12 to $13 an hour there, versus about $2 an hour in Dongguan, not including room and board. But Liu expects to offset some of the higher labor costs with a payroll tax credit of $1,500 per employee from South Carolina.

“I was surprised,” said the 63-year-old president of Shanxi Yuncheng Plate-Making Group. “The gap’s not as large as I thought.”

At random times near the Tijuana-San Diego border, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers have been setting up checkpoints, boarding buses destined for Mexico and pulling off people who don’t have proper documentation.

The operation appears to be an expansion of a broader federal crackdown targeting illegal immigrants in jails, airports and workplaces across the country.

The checkpoints, which are not announced in advance, are set up on southbound Interstate 5 about 100 yards north of the border. Vehicles in all lanes must stop.

Vincent Bond, an agency spokesman, said departing immigrants are fair targets.

“If our officers come upon people who are here illegally . . . regardless of whether they’re leaving the country, we detain them, make a record of the fact they were here illegally and return them to Mexico,” Bond said.

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Customs and Border Protection, which typically provides detailed statistics on apprehensions, would not disclose details of the checkpoint operation. Nor would they say how long it has been underway.

The checkpoints have been randomly deployed since the Sept. 11 attacks, with inspectors typically looking for fugitives, stolen vehicles, weapons, drugs and other contraband.

Illegal immigrants became targets for arrest at the checkpoints only a few months ago, according to immigrant rights groups and human rights organizations in Mexico. It is unclear how frequently the checkpoints have been set up.

But Enrique Morones, president of the Border Angels, a San Diego-based group, said he believes that hundreds of immigrants have been arrested since the crackdown began.

Over a half-hour period April 30, agents appeared to be pulling over every bus and van heading for the border. But any vehicle, including cars, that agents deem suspicious may be stopped and searched.

Inspectors detained five young men from one bus traveling from Los Angeles to Puebla, a city southeast of Mexico City. After the inspectors made their apprehensions, only two passengers remained onboard.

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Federal agents say the checkpoints are a productive way to stop dangerous criminals, drug shipments and money launderers.

The illegal immigrants they apprehend are typically turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol for processing. Unless they have serious criminal records or numerous immigration violations, most are returned to Mexico within a few hours, the agents say.