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PVM Oil Associates, the world’s largest over-the-counter oil brokerage, said on Thursday it had been the “victim of unauthorised trading”. The privately owned company said that as a result of the unauthorised trades it had been forced to close substantial volumes of futures contracts at a loss.

London-based PVM said it had informed the Financial Services Authority, the UK regulator. But officials at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the US regulator, claimed they had been kept in the dark for several hours in spite of an agreement between the watchdogs last year to exchange such market-sensitive information spontaneously.

Oil traders in London and New York said the “unauthorised trading” explained the exceptional spike in business activity and prices in the early hours of Tuesday that some initially thought must have been caused by a geopolitical event. “Trading volumes rose overnight and prices jumped more than $2 a barrel without apparent justification,” a senior oil trader in New York said.

Prices rose in one hour from $71 to $73.5, the highest level for the year, according to Reuters data. In total, futures contracts for more than 16m barrels of oil changed hands in that hour – equivalent to double the daily production of Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil producer, and far more than the traditional 500,000 barrels for that time of the day.

Traders said the broker implicated had allegedly accounted for at least half of the unusual activity, with the rest the result of others chasing the rally. Oil prices on Thursday fell to $66.5 a barrel, down almost 10 per cent from Tuesday’s peak.

The Financial Times has identified the PVM broker as Steve Perkins. PVM declined to comment and Mr Perkins could not be reached. Fellow traders said Mr Perkins was considered an experienced broker, well-regarded in the market.

The payroll decline was more than forecast and followed a 322,000 drop in May, according to Labor Department figures released today in Washington. The jobless rate jumped to 9.5 percent, the highest since August 1983, from 9.4 percent.

Unemployment is projected to keep rising for the rest of the year just as the income boost from the stimulus package fades, undermining prospects for a sustained rebound in household purchases, analysts said. As companies from General Motors Corp. to Kimberly-Clark Corp. cut costs, the lack of jobs will restrain growth.

Seven banks were shut down by authorities Thursday, pushing the tally of failed banks for 2009 to 52, more than doubling the failures in 2008.

Six regional banks in Illinois and one in Texas closed their doors, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Twelve banks in Illinois have failed this year. Thursday’s failure in Texas was the first for the state in 2009.

Last year, 25 banks failed in the United States.

Local banks have been hard hit as plummeting home values devalued mortgage-backed assets and rising unemployment rates caused an increasing number of consumers to default on their loans.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff.”

With the newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said in a staffwide e-mail that the newsroom would not participate in the first of the planned events — a dinner scheduled July 21 at the home of Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

“Now instead of being put into prison, addicts are going to treatment centers and they’re learning how to control their drug usage or getting off drugs entirely,” report author Glenn Greenwald, a former New York State constitutional litigator, said during a press briefing at Cato last week.

Under the Portuguese plan, penalties for people caught dealing and trafficking drugs are unchanged; dealers are still jailed and subjected to fines depending on the crime. But people caught using or possessing small amounts—defined as the amount needed for 10 days of personal use—are brought before what’s known as a “Dissuasion Commission,” an administrative body created by the 2001 law.

Each three-person commission includes at least one lawyer or judge and one health care or social services worker. The panel has the option of recommending treatment, a small fine, or no sanction.

Peter Reuter, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, College Park, says he’s skeptical decriminalization was the sole reason drug use slid in Portugal, noting that another factor, especially among teens, was a global decline in marijuana use. By the same token, he notes that critics were wrong in their warnings that decriminalizing drugs would make Lisbon a drug mecca.

“Drug decriminalization did reach its primary goal in Portugal,” of reducing the health consequences of drug use, he says, “and did not lead to Lisbon becoming a drug tourist destination.”

Walter Kemp, a spokesperson for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, says decriminalization in Portugal “appears to be working.” He adds that his office is putting more emphasis on improving health outcomes, such as reducing needle-borne infections, but that it does not explicitly support decriminalization, “because it smacks of legalization.”

Drug legalization removes all criminal penalties for producing, selling and using drugs; no country has tried it. In contrast, decriminalization, as practiced in Portugal, eliminates jail time for drug users but maintains criminal penalties for dealers. Spain and Italy have also decriminalized personal use of drugs and Mexico’s president has proposed doing the same. .

The energy bill also proposes a change in how homes are sold. Originally, it called for all “for-sale” homes, old or new, to go through a mandatory energy audit. Subsequently, homeowners would receive a type of “energy performance grade”.

The same way consumers use the nutrition label on a box of cereal, potential home buyers could view the grade like a rundown of energy efficiency.

Opposition to the energy audits arose from homeowners and realtors. Their concerns were centered on a struggling housing market and the problems an “energy performance grade” could created for homeowners already struggling to make a sale.

Brian Sears, of Sears Real Estate in Springfield told 22News on Wednesday, “If it comes in and it’s not a ‘good’ energy score… It affects the home sellers, the home buyers, it stops the process.”

Lawyer Laura Marino, from the Law Offices of Laura M. Marino in Springfield, gave 22News her thoughts on the energy bill on Wednesday. “If they want to do [energy audits] to newer construction, go ahead and do it. They’re probably going to all rank pretty high because they’re new. The older homes… The homes that are one hundred, two hundred years old… How are they every going to catch up?”

She added, “It’s basically going to stigmatize older homes in New England. Which, again, they’re never going to be at the energy efficiency level as new construction.”

Sears shed some light changes that may benefit owners of those older homes,” Changes that were made [to the bill] were significant. To make it from requiring every home sale requiring an energy audit to only requiring it on new construction.”

Hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed using high-precision weapons, while others were shot at close range, the group Amnesty International says.

Its report also calls rocket attacks by Palestinian militants war crimes and accuses Hamas of endangering civilians.

The Israeli military says its conduct was in line with international law.

Israel has attributed some civilian deaths to “professional mistakes”, but has dismissed wider criticism that its attacks were indiscriminate and disproportionate.

Amnesty says some 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the 22-day Israeli offensive between 27 December 2008 and 17 January 2009, which agrees broadly with Palestinian figures.

More than 900 of these were civilians, including 300 children and 115 women, it says.

In March, Israel’s military said the overall Palestinian death toll was 1,166, of whom 295 were “uninvolved” civilians.

Pattern

The 117-page report by Amnesty International says many of the hundreds of civilian deaths in the conflict “cannot simply be dismissed as ‘collateral damage’ incidental to otherwise lawful attacks – or as mistakes”.

It says “disturbing questions” remain unanswered as to why children playing on roofs and medical staff attending the wounded were killed by “highly accurate missiles” whose operators had detailed views of their targets.

Lives were lost because Israeli forces “frequently obstructed access to medical care,” the report says. It also reiterates previous condemnations of the use of “imprecise” weapons such as white phosphorous and artillery shells.

The destruction of homes, businesses and public buildings was in many cases “wanton and deliberate” and “could not be justified on the grounds of military necessity”, the report adds.

“All of those things occurred on a scale that constitutes pattern – and constitutes war crimes,” Donatella Rovera, who headed the research, told the BBC.

The document also gives details of several cases where it says people – including women and children posing no threat to troops – were shot at close range as they were fleeing their homes in search of shelter.

Israeli officials responded saying the military targeted only areas where Palestinian militants were operating, and accused Hamas of turning civilian neighbourhoods into “war zones”.

“We tried to be as surgical as is humanly possible in a difficult combat situation,” Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev told the BBC.

Human shields

The Amnesty report says no evidence was found that Palestinian militants had forced civilians to stay in buildings being used for military purposes, contradicting Israeli claims that Hamas repeatedly used “human shields”.

However, Amnesty says Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups had endangered Palestinian civilians by firing rockets from residential neighbourhoods and storing weapons in them.

It says local residents had in one case told researchers that Hamas fighters had fired a rocket from the yard of a government school.

The Israeli military has repeatedly blamed Hamas for causing civilian casualties, saying its fighters operated from buildings like schools, medical facilities, religious institutions, residential homes and commercial premises.

In the cases it had investigated, Amnesty said civilian deaths “could not be explained as resulting from the presence of fighters shielding among civilians, as the Israeli army generally contends”.

However, Amnesty does accuse Israel of using civilians, including children, as human shields in Gaza, forcing them to remain in houses which its troops were using as military positions, and to inspect sites suspected of being booby trapped.

It also says Palestinian militants rocket fire from the Gaza Strip was “indiscriminate and hence unlawful under international law”, although it only rarely caused civilian casualties.

Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniya declined to comment on the Amnesty International criticism, but said: “We believe the leaders of the occupation state must be tried for these crimes.”

The offensive was launched shortly after 4:30 p.m. ET Thursday in Helmand province, a Taliban stronghold and the world’s largest opium poppy-producing area. The goal is to clear insurgents from the hotly contested region before the nation’s Aug. 20 presidential election.

It came as U.S. military announced that one of its soldiers was captured by insurgents in eastern Afghanistan on Tuesday. The missing soldier was not involved in the Helmand operation.

Officials described the offensive — dubbed Khanjar or “Strike of the Sword” — as the largest and fastest-moving of the war’s new phase and the biggest Marine offensive since the one in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. It involves nearly 4,000 newly arrived Marines plus 650 Afghan forces. British forces last week led similar, but smaller, missions to clear out insurgents in Helmand and neighboring Kandahar province.

Lawmakers’ failure to act on Tuesday, the end of the fiscal year, also widened California’s deficit from what already had been a whopping $24.3 billion — more than a quarter of its general fund.

The failure to balance the state’s main checkbook and the looming IOUs prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday to declare a fiscal state of emergency.

Under the declaration, state offices will be closed three days a month to conserve cash. If the Legislature fails to solve the deficit within 45 days, it cannot adjourn or act on other bills until the crisis is resolved.

The partial government shutdown also will lead to a third furlough day for 235,000 state employees, bringing their total pay cut this year to about 14 percent.

“California needed the Legislature to act boldly and with conviction. Their response was not a solution to California’s budget problem but an invitation to actually a bigger financial crisis,” Schwarzenegger told reporters Wednesday.

On Tuesday, as the previous fiscal year was drawing to a close, the Senate rejected three bills designed to save $5 billion, including $3.3 billion in education funding cuts that had to be enacted. Passing those bills would have given the Legislature time to work out a broader solution to the deficit and delayed the need for IOUs.

Instead, the budget shortfall is set to grow even wider because of California’s complicated school funding formula, meaning the state will not have enough money to pay all its bills.

State Controller John Chiang said his office is prepared to issue IOUs totaling $3.3 billion in July.

Senate Minority Leader Dennis Hollingsworth said neither he nor his Republican colleagues wanted to see California resort to IOUs to pay its bills, but he said Democrats had refused to make sufficient spending cuts to solve the shortfall.

“It’s unfortunate that we’re at this point,” said Hollingsworth, a Republican.

It will be the first time since 1992 that California will have issued IOUs. The move is almost certain to further damage the state’s credit rating, already the lowest of any state, saddling taxpayers with billions of dollars in higher interest payments on bonds that have yet to be sold.

“We wanted to understand how minds work and how they develop and how the interplay of innate and environmental influence makes us who we are and how we learn to communicate.”

It was a big task and after years of research, scientists around the world had only begun to scratch the surface of it.

But now, Professor Roy is beginning to get some answers, thanks to an unconventional approach, an accommodating family and a house wired with technology.

And the research may even have kick-backs for everything from robotics to video analysis.

…

“Every parent knows that a child can change a lot in a week or a month,” he told BBC News.

“If you’re interested in the process of development then it is important to have a continuous view.”

It is a problem recognised by other linguists as well.

“Current samples that the field works with – typically an hour of recorded speech a week – are one to two orders of magnitude too small for our scientific purposes,” Professor Steven Pinker of Harvard University told BBC News.

So, Professor Roy, who by then had a child on the way, set about solving the conundrum. His solution: wire up his house with 11 cameras, 14 microphones and terabytes of storage and record every waking moment of his soon-to-arrive son.

It was christened the Human Speechome project and immediately drew comparisons with its genetic counterpart.

“Just as the Human Genome Project illuminates the innate genetic code that shapes us, the Speechome Project is an important first step toward creating a map of how the environment shapes human development and learning,” said Frank Moss, the director of MIT’s Media Lab at the time.

Professor Pinker, who is also an adviser to the project, said: “In developmental psychology there has long been a trade-off between gathering lots of data from a small number of children, or a small amount of data from a much larger number of children.

“Roy is simply pushing this trade-off to an extreme – a truly massive amount of data from a single child.”