Stockpile

. -- When the first thief drove off with nearly a ton of rock salt last month, pilfered from a road de-icing firm's supply stored behind a strip mall, local police officers in this affluent Chicago northwestern suburb were flabbergasted. "It was so strange," said Buffalo Grove Police Commander Steve Husak. "Salt?" Then, as winter storms continued to bombard the Midwest with snow and sleet, there were reports of a second salt heist.

Cereal grain stockpiles are expected to hit their lowest level in more than two decades, helping to keep prices high, a United Nations food agency said. The low stocks combined with continued strong demand, also driven by the growing biofuels industry, to keep prices elevated, the Food and Agriculture Organization said in a report to be released today. By the close of the current season, stocks are expected to fall to 405 million tons -- down 22 million tons, or 5%, from the start of the season.

The Bush administration said Tuesday that it would make a 15% reduction in the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons, taking the overall inventory down to less than a quarter of its size at the end of the Cold War in 1991. A major effort to retire older weapons was accomplished five years ahead of schedule, allowing the new round of cutbacks, said Thomas P. D'Agostino, chief of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The additional cuts would be done by 2012.

Oil's rise to $100 a barrel, which seemed inevitable as recently as two days ago, was placed on indefinite hold Wednesday after a U.S. government report showed that crude stockpiles fell less than expected last week, easing supply concerns in the world's top consumer. The decline extended losses that have chopped $7 off oil prices since Friday on expectations that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries may increase output and signs that U.S.

The U.S. is dismantling unneeded nuclear warheads at a faster pace than forecast as it substantially reduces the arsenal under terms of an arms-control treaty with Russia, government officials said Sunday. The Bush administration is to announce today that it has taken apart three times as many reserve warheads in the 2007 budget year as it had projected, and that it expects the rapid pace of dismantlement to continue.

Wheat futures prices hit fresh record highs Wednesday, extending the powerful rally of recent months amid expectations that global stockpiles will fall to the lowest levels in 26 years. Bad weather in many growing regions around the planet has driven prices up. September wheat futures in Chicago jumped 21.5 cents to $7.42 a bushel. The price was $4.38 at the end of March.

Four years after invading Iraq, the U.S. military still does not know how many tons of explosives were stolen from the country's massive prewar stockpiles or how many weapons caches remain unsecured, according to a government audit made public Thursday. Many of the looted munitions have since made their way into the roadside bombs and other improvised explosive devices responsible for the bulk of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq.

Wanted: a charity with lots of freezer space. Or a town in need of flooding. Neither scenario is likely for Florida's State Emergency Response Team, which confronts a peculiar dilemma imposed by last year's dearth of hurricanes: The agency has almost 9 million pounds of ice cubes worth $1.8 million -- bagged, bundled and costing the state $90,000 a month in storage fees.

The United States has stockpiled millions of pounds of methyl bromide, a pesticide that depletes the ozone layer, according to newly public documents -- information that could create a stir during international negotiations next month, when the Bush administration seeks permission to produce more. Methyl bromide has been banned for almost two years under the United Nations' Montreal Protocol.

In the Cold War arms race, scientists rushed to build thousands of warheads to counter the Soviet Union. Today, those scientists are racing once again, but this time to rebuild an aging nuclear stockpile. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico are locked in an intense competition with rivals at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the Bay Area to design the nation's first new nuclear bomb in two decades.