Anthony Ward, 50, bought 241,000 tons of cocoa beans and now owns enough to manufacture 5.3 billion quarter-pound chocolate bars.

Mr Ward, who is worth around £36 million, holds so much of the market he could force manufacturers to raise the price of Britain’s favourite chocolate bars.

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Cocoa prices rose by 0.7 per cent as a result of the trade to £2,732 per metric tonne – the highest price for cocoa in Europe since 1977. It follows a series of weak harvests in Ghana and the Ivory Coast, the main areas where the crop is grown.

In 2002 Mr Ward made £40 million in two months after making a similar deal. He bought 204,000 tones of cocoa when West Africa was experiencing poor harvests and political instability in the equatorial area.

He then watched the price of cocoa increase from £1,400 a ton to £1,600 a ton.

Cocoa prices have more than doubled since 2007, following increased demand particularly from China and India, forcing chocolate makers to raise prices and in some cases to change recipes to use less cocoa.

The trade took place on the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange (Liffe), a market which trades contracts in commodities such as corn, wheat, sugar, coffee and cocoa.

Most of these contracts are “options” or “futures” giving a trader the right to buy these commodities at a certain price at a certain time in the future. What made yesterday’s trade so unusual was that the mystery buyer or buyers took physical delivery of the commodity.

The beans will be stored in one of Liffe’s warehouses in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bremen, Felixstowe, Hamburg, Humberside, Le Havre, Liverpool, London, Rotterdam, or Teesside.

There have been mounting worries that speculators have been distorting the cocoa market in recent weeks, with brokers writing a letter of protest to Liffe earlier this month.

Barbara Crowther, a spokesman at the Fairtrade Foundation, said that no farmers in West Africa would benefit from the higher prices. She said: “This speculation only serves to increase volatility and uncertainty. Part of the problems in rent years have been the lack of investment in improving cocoa farms. But the farmers have already been paid a set price – none of this money will filter down to them.”

As officers walked toward the pickup, they saw the man pick up a handgun, police said. They said they returned gunfire and radioed for help.

Three CHP vehicles had their windows shot out, but no officers were shot, police said. They said the driver was armed with a rifle and a shotgun as well as the handgun and fired at least two of the weapons during the shootout.

Morgan said the driver was hit numerous times and survived only because he was wearing a bullet-resistant vest.

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Janice Williams said she kept the guns because “eventually, I think we’re going to be caught up in a revolution.” But she said she had told her son many times that “he didn’t have to be on the front lines.”

Space is one of the paramount sites for the legitimation of Western configurations of power/knowledge. The kinds of futures people ascribe to space–e.g., the military-technocratic order of Star Trek: the Next Generation–have a lot to do with the apotheosis of colonialism under the auspices of neo-liberal capitalism (Kilgore 2005)

Archaeologists know that Maya Blue is made by heating the organic pigment indigo with palygorskite, a type of fibrous clay found in Yucatan. During this heating process, the indigo is somehow absorbed into the fibrous clay and this fixes the colour. But how this processes increases the longevity of the pigment hasn’t been known until now.

Dejoi et amis say that the clay fibres contain channels filled with water molecules. Their analysis shows that the heating process causes the water to boil away, allowing the indigo to enter these channels. When the material cools down, these channels then become sealed by “gatekeeper” molecules that prevent the indigo from getting out again.

That partly explains the longevity but there is another mechanism at work too. Dejoi et amis say that indigo looses its colour and becomes yellow when a carbon-carbon double bond in the pigment is broken. However, this cannot happen in Maya Blue because this bond is protected by the clay channels, a phenomenon known as steric shielding.

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The discovery of the secret of Maya Blue could have important implications for pigment manufacturers. Dejoi and pals say that now they know why Maya Blue is so long lasting, the same trick can be used for other colours too.

They even reveal the first new pigment designed in this way: a new kind of blue in which indigo is embedded in microporous zeolite which performs the same protective function as the palygorskite clay.

That, they say, is the birth of the new discipline of archaeomimetics in which the molecular structure ancient pigments is inspiring a new generation of long-lasting colour.

rather than it being a piece of furniture, historians believe it would have been a vast wood and stone structure which would have allowed more than 1,000 of his followers to gather.

Historians believe regional noblemen would have sat in the front row of a circular meeting place, with lower ranked subjects on stone benches grouped around the outside.

They claim rather than Camelot being a purpose built castle, it would have been housed in a structure already built and left over by the Romans.

Our world is now riddled with what C. West Churchman referred to as ‘wicked problems’: issues like climate change, healthcare, and education that are difficult to address because of their complex interdependencies and changing requirements.

The tattooed suspect wearing an earring and baggy shorts seemed a world away from the ragtag, Kalashnikov-toting Taliban fighters, just as the streets of south-central Los Angeles are from the dusty villages of mud-brick houses in Afghanistan.

But in many ways, police in Los Angeles’ crime-ridden neighborhoods use the same skills that Marines say could help them.

Marines are in charge of training Afghanistan’s army and police but often have no police experience themselves. Their success in building effective police forces is considered key to stabilizing the country and allowing foreign troops to withdraw.

Marines also are changing their approach, realizing that marching into towns to show force alienates communities. Instead, they are being taught to fan out with interpreters to strike up conversations with truck drivers, money exchangers, cell phone sellers and others.

The rapport building can net valuable information that could even alert troops about potential attacks.

Marines can gather intelligence by picking up the notebooks, receipts and other papers left behind in raids that could provide insight into the opium business the Taliban uses to buy their weapons, Afghan expert Gretchen Peters said.

She told Marines before the Los Angeles patrols that they should follow the lead of some Afghans who have gone from using the term “mujahadeen” or “holy warrior” to identify the Taliban to calling them gangsters.

That, she said, shows how fed up the villagers are with being extorted by them and calling them gangsters will win them over.

“Think of the Taliban as the Sopranos in turbans,” she said. “I think essentially they’re criminals.”