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There's been a bit of a brouhaha over the Federal Reserve's inadvertent early release Tuesday evening of minutes from its closed-door March 19-20 policy meeting.

As The Associated Press writes, "employees at JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs Group, Wells Fargo and Citigroup were among those to receive [the] market-sensitive information."

The Fed says a staffer mistakenly sent the report to a group, also including some trade associations and lawmakers, that should have gotten the information right after it was made public — not before. The Fed's inspector general is going to investigate what happened.

There haven't been any reports to indicate that anyone who got the news a day early traded on the information (which was supposed to be released at 2 p.m. ET on Wednesday; after discovering the mistake, the Fed put it out to the rest of the world at 9 a.m. ET that morning).

But once the minutes were there for everyone to see, they did move financial markets. As The New York Times writes, stock markets rallied. Traders focused on signs that Fed policymakers are committed to battling "a weak economy and soft labor market," CNBC says.

All this fuss about minutes of a meeting held three weeks ago raises a question: Why do they matter so much to so many investors and financial institutions?

It's because "the markets are always looking for tiny morsels of information about what these guys are thinking," says Michael Englund, chief economist at Action Economics, a bond and currency consulting service that provides its clients with economic analysis.

The minutes offer a chance to see how Fed policymakers are "balancing their different views," Englund tells us. "And any subtle changes can change perceptions in the markets."

Other than occasional speeches given by Fed policymakers as well as Chairman Ben Bernanke's twice-annual testimony before Congress and his handful of news conferences each year, Fed watchers don't get much information about what the central bank's chiefs are thinking. So the meetings' minutes get parsed carefully. The policymakers gather eight times a year.

And, Englund says, "this was a bad one to leak because it did [end up] moving the market." Traders concluded, he says, that "perhaps there was more energy" expressed by Fed policymakers for gradually reducing the amount of stimulus they're giving the economy — meaning that those policymakers thought the economy is on the upswing.

Of course, with economics there's always an "on the other hand." In this case, since the Fed policymakers met in mid-March there's been disappointing news on job growth. That could mean the economy isn't doing as well as those Fed officials thought, which in turn could mean that they won't move to ease up on their stimulus efforts.

We won't know what Bernanke and his colleagues think, though, until the third week of May — when the Fed releases (presumably on time) the minutes of their April 30-May 1 policy meeting.

For the first time in 14 years, Hugo Chavez is not on the ballot for a presidential election in Venezuela. The firebrand leftist died last month at 58 after a long fight with cancer.

Pollsters say the sympathy vote and the state's huge resources will translate into a big victory in Sunday's election for Chavez's hand-picked successor, Nicolas Maduro, a 50-year-old former bus driver turned government minister who had been a Chavez loyalist for 20 years.

Still, the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, is mounting an all-out fight for a chance to lead the oil-rich nation out of socialism.

In the gritty streets of Caracas, the capital, the crowds have been as big as ever for the young, energetic Capriles.

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Roasted fish on a stick is OK, but wouldn't it be nice to be able to cook up some fish soup?

That's what might have crossed the minds of hunter-gatherers who made the world's first cooking pots. A new analysis of pottery made 15,000 years ago in what's now Japan reveals that it was used to cook seafood, probably salmon.

Not so long ago, scientists thought hunter-gathers were too busy roaming and foraging to invent cookware. But more recent archeological discoveries in China and Japan suggest that people were making ceramic containers as early as 20,000 years ago, long before the advent of farming.

What were they cooking? Speculation first centered on nuts and plants. But this new study, published online in the journal Nature, says it was fish soup.

To find out, a multinational team analyzed the residue on pot shards found in 13 places in what's now Japan. They were made 15,000 to 11,000 years ago.

About three-quarters of the 101 shards had traces of carbon and nitrogen, suggesting that they were used to cook food from fresh or salt water. Many had traces of marine fatty acids, while only one had fatty acids typical of a grazing land animal.

The high nitrogen levels suggest that the foods cooked were something that ate other fish, rather than mollusks, according to Oliver Craig, an archaeologist at the University of York in England, and a co-author of the study.

"As some of the vessels were found some distance from the coast and still had marine signatures," he says, "we think this may be from salmon, as these animals spend most of their lives feeding in marine environments before migrating up stream."

Evidently, these earliest cooks weren't too keen on dishwashing. But their neglect is science's gain.

Cooking food makes nutrients more readily available and is thought to have given early humans an evolutionary boost.

And cooking food in a pot conserves more nutrients than grilling, according to Peter Jordan. He's director of the Arctic Center in Groningen, Netherlands, and another co-author of the study.

With grilling, he says, "lots of nutrients run away into the fire and are lost. Whereas if you cook in a container, all the nutrients, the oils and the fats, are retained."

Clay pot cooking is also more efficient, because people could park the pots on the coals and let them simmer away, freeing up time for other tasks. Crockery cooking, he says, is "enormously beneficial."

The White House unveiled its proposal Wednesday for drastic changes in government programs that donate food to fight hunger abroad — and surprised no one.

As we reported last week, rumors of such an overhaul had been circulating for weeks, arousing both hope and anger among organizations involved in global anti-hunger programs.

The rumors, it turns out, were largely on target — and the groups that previously had expressed enthusiasm or skepticism repeated those views Wednesday.

The Obama administration wants to increase sharply the share of food aid that the U.S. provides in the form of cash, rather than through food commodities that are bought in the United States and shipped abroad. Humanitarian groups could use that cash to buy food wherever it can be found most cheaply and quickly.

In addition, the U.S. would end the awkward and much-criticized practice known as "monetization." This essentially uses food as a way to transfer cash. The government buys commodities in the U.S. and ships them abroad, only to sell them on local markets in order to fund local nutrition and agricultural development projects. Critics of monetization call it a highly inefficient way to fund such projects.

The change that may matter most for the proposal's chances of success, though, is purely bureaucratic. The Obama administration wants foreign food aid to be funded through the U.S. Agency for International Development instead of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

This change is more than symbolic. For one thing, the agriculture committees of the U.S. Congress would lose authority over these programs — a prospect that is unlikely to please those committees and will certainly complicate the prospects for this reform on Capitol Hill.

In addition, what people think of this bureaucratic switcheroo seems to depend a great deal on their opinion of these two agencies.

Supporters of the Obama administration's proposal have no love for the USDA. They see it as a knee-jerk defender of domestic farmers, hopelessly out-of-touch when it comes to fighting hunger abroad.

Defenders of the current system, meanwhile, see USAID as a lightweight agency that continually revises its programs to fit the latest political fashion in Washington. They point out, for instance, that USAID's new flagship program in agricultural development, called Feed the Future, is active in a relatively small number of countries, most of which are friendly to the U.S. Anti-hunger programs funded through traditional monetized food aid are active in twice as many countries.