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The two prototype units will be installed on the seabed near the two islands next year, following an agreement between Hydro Tasmania and Biopower Systems, the Sydney-based developer of the units.

The wave power system will be off King Island, the tidal power one off Flinders Island. Each unit can produce up to 250 kilowatts. The $10.3 million system is half funded by the Australian Government.

Biopower’s chief executive, Tim Finnigan, said his company was gearing up for full use of the system.

“This project will allow us to develop the technologies to be ready for commercial production within a couple of years,” he said.

There are already wave power systems providing electricity around the world, including a plant off a Wollongong beach that opened last year. That station, operated by the Australian company Oceanlinx, is capable of pumping 500 kilowatts of power into the electricity grid.

But because its units sit on the seabed, Biopower says its form of wave power is less of an eyesore and more friendly to shipping — as well as being more efficient than units that simply bob up and down on the surface.

“The forces you can tap from waves are very large, and you can generate very large torques,” Dr Finnigan said.

“To make the most out of that torque, and take as much power as possible through into a generator, you’ve got to react that torque against a fixed surface. And the only fixed surface nearby is the seabed.

“Unless you’re rigidly locked into the seabed, you’re only reacting against the drag on the water.”

And, unlike many other wave power units, Biopower produces its energy at sea. The experimental CETO — which stands for Cylindrical Energy Transfer Oscillating unit — off Fremantle, for example, has a generator that is located on land. CETO merely acts as a pump, pushing water along a seabed pipe that leads to the generator on land.

But the Biopower generators are located within the units themselves, on the seabed. “They generate their electricity on the shore, we generate ours on the spot,” said Dr Finnigan.

Since fiscal year 2000, the military’s budget has essentially doubled, from less than $300 billion to more than $600 billion. Two wars have begun. But the number of criminal investigators and financial auditors at the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD IG) has stayed more or less the same. So there are now “gaps in coverage in important areas, such as major weapon systems acquisition, health care fraud, product substitution, and Defense intelligence agencies,” according to the report, obtained by the Project on Government Oversight.

Forget aviation hero. On the side, Lindbergh was a Dr Frankenstein figure, who used his mechanical genius to explore the possibility of conquering death – but only for the select few who were considered “worthy” of living forever.

“Beating death was something he thought about his entire life”, says David M Friedman, American author of the new book The Immortalists. “Even as a small child, he couldn’t accept that people had to die. He would ask: ‘Why do you have to die to get to heaven?'”

Machine-enabled people

Friedman’s The Immortalists relates the untold story of Lindbergh’s frequently bizarre efforts to cheat death by creating machines that might sustain human life.

In the 1930s, after his historic flight over the Atlantic, Lindbergh hooked up with Alexis Carrel, a brilliant surgeon born in France but who worked in a laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute in Manhattan. Carrel – who was a mystic as well as a scientist – had already won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the transplantation of blood vessels. But his real dream was a future in which the human body would become, in Friedman’s words, “a machine with constantly reparable or replaceable parts”.

This is where Lindbergh entered the frame. Carrel hoped that his own scientific nous combined with Lindbergh’s machine-making proficiency (Lindbergh had, after all, already helped design a plane that flew non-stop to Paris) would make his fantasy about immortal machine-enabled human beings a reality.

“Both of their needs were met in this rather strange relationship”, says Friedman. “Carrel benefited from Lindbergh’s mechanical genius and inventiveness, and for Lindbergh – well, Carrel became the most important person in his life, effectively steering the way he viewed the world and the people who lived in it.”

At the Rockefeller lab, Lindbergh and Carrel – almost like a real-life Jekyll and Hyde double act – made some extraordinary breakthroughs.

Lindbergh created something that Carrel’s team had singularly failed to: a perfusion pump that could keep a human organ alive outside of the body. It was called the “Model T” pump. In later years, Lindbergh’s pump was further developed by others, eventually leading to the construction of the first heart-lung machine.

“Some people, even academics and science students, are still shocked when they hear about the contribution that the aviator Lindbergh made to developing life-saving cardiac machinery,” says Friedman.

But there was a serious downside to what Friedman refers to as Lindbergh and Carrel’s “daring quest” to live forever.

Carrel was a eugenicist with fascistic leanings. He believed the world was split into superior and inferior beings, and hoped that science would allow the superior – which included himself and Lindbergh, of course – to dominate and eventually weed out the inferiors.

He thought the planet was “encumbered” with people who “should be dead”, including “the weak, the diseased, and the fools”. Something like Lindbergh’s pump was not intended to help the many, but the few.

Lindbergh himself sympathised with the Nazis.

“I wouldn’t say Lindbergh was the philosophical partner of Himmler or Hitler,” says Friedman. “But yes, he certainly admired the order, science and technology of Nazi Germany – and the idea of creating an ethnically pure race.”

The process, Ranua said, helps the native plants survive against invasive species.

“You know, Europeans didn’t just come here as people,” she said. “They brought their own plants and animals, and changed a lot of what was here.”

Ranua works for the casino-enriched Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, which is recovering, acre by acre in the southwest metro, portions of the land its ancestors once lost to European settlers, and meticulously returning it to age-old looks and uses.

But the tribe’s land purchases, which are surging as the price of land sags, are turning up a different sort of heat in Scott County. Civic leaders in Shakopee say the pace and pattern of the tribe’s land buys — it has spent more than $100 million — are making planning a logistical nightmare in the fast-growing community.

And they wonder if the tribe is engaged in a shrewd chess game to block Shakopee’s development plans, then move out into open countryside to start reacquiring vast stretches of ancestral land. It’s a question emerging from New York to California as tribes riding high on casino profits have begun spending that wealth to reassert control over that ancestral land.

In Shakopee itself, said Mayor John Schmitt, “It appears they’re out to garner as much as they can get, wherever they can get it. And they have the war chest to do that.”

For his part, however, Stan Ellison, the tribe’s land manager, points to a pile of historic maps as a reminder of who, historically, interfered with whom.

“It’s just the sickness. I can’t get rid of it. It just keeps coming back,” said Bouffanie, 27, who was pregnant with her now 15-month-old daughter, Lexi, while living in the trailer. “I’m just like, `Oh God, I wish like this would stop.’ If I had known it would get her sick, I wouldn’t have stayed in the trailer for so long.”

The girl, diagnosed with severe asthma, must inhale medicine from a breathing device.

Doctors cannot conclusively link her asthma to the trailer. But they fear she is among tens of thousands of youngsters who may face lifelong health problems because the temporary housing supplied by the Federal Emergency Management Agency contained formaldehyde fumes up to five times the safe level.

The chemical, used in interior glue, was detected in many of the 143,000 trailers sent to the Gulf Coast in 2006. But a push to get residents out of them, spearheaded by FEMA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did not begin until this past February.

Members of Congress and CDC insiders say the agencies’ delay in recognizing the danger is being compounded by studies that will be virtually useless and the lack of a plan to treat children as they grow.

“It’s tragic that when people most need the protection, they are actually going from one disaster to a health disaster that might be considered worse,” said Christopher De Rosa, assistant director for toxicology and risk assessment at the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, an arm of the CDC. “Given the longer-term implications of exposure that went on for a significant period of time, people should be followed through time for possible effects.”

McClellan includes the charges in a 341-page book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” that delivers a harsh look at the White House and the man he served for close to a decade. He describes Bush as demonstrating a “lack of inquisitiveness,” says the White House operated in “permanent campaign” mode, and admits to having been deceived by some in the president’s inner circle about the leak of a CIA operative’s name.

The book, coming from a man who was a tight-lipped defender of administration aides and policy, is certain to give fuel to critics of the administration, and McClellan has harsh words for many of his past colleagues. He accuses former White House adviser Karl Rove of misleading him about his role in the CIA case. He describes Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as being deft at deflecting blame, and he calls Vice President Cheney “the magic man” who steered policy behind the scenes while leaving no fingerprints.

McClellan stops short of saying that Bush purposely lied about his reasons for invading Iraq, writing that he and his subordinates were not “employing out-and-out deception” to make their case for war in 2002.

But in a chapter titled “Selling the War,” he alleges that the administration repeatedly shaded the truth and that Bush “managed the crisis in a way that almost guaranteed that the use of force would become the only feasible option.”

“Over that summer of 2002,” he writes, “top Bush aides had outlined a strategy for carefully orchestrating the coming campaign to aggressively sell the war. . . . In the permanent campaign era, it was all about manipulating sources of public opinion to the president’s advantage.”

Although at least two of the family members suffered gunshot wounds, the investigation has not revealed how the family died.

The badly decomposed bodies were identified through fingerprints as Manas Ucar, 58; his wife, Margrit, 49; their twin daughters, Grace and Margo, 21; and Margrit Ucar’s mother, Fransuhi Kesisoglu, 72.

Manas and Margrit Ucar were shot, but autopsies have not determined how they died, said Lt. Erin Giudice. Two handguns were found near their bodies, she said. One pistol was registered to Margrit Ucar. Giudice declined to comment about the other weapon.

There were no obvious signs of trauma to the bodies of the daughters and their grandmother, and toxicology tests are underway to help investigators determine what killed them.

“The bodies were very decomposed. It will take a few weeks before we know the cause of death for any of them,” Giudice said.

She said there were no signs of a struggle inside the home, which is on a bluff overlooking the ocean in the gated Sea Pointe Estates neighborhood.

There is no record of domestic violence calls to the Ucar’s home on Campanilla, Giudice said. Neighbors said the family members were close-knit and kept to themselves.

It was a neighbor who first became concerned after the family had not been seen for a few days.

Giudice said a the neighbor asked the Sheriff’s Department to do a welfare check at the home on May 14. A deputy knocked on the door, got no response and walked around the house looking for anything amiss.

“There was nothing unusual or out of the ordinary,” she said.

Ten days later, brothers of the husband and wife asked the department to do another welfare check when they had not heard from their siblings. But Giudice said the family asked the deputies not to break into the house, believing the Ucars might be on vacation.

The couple’s brothers went to the San Clemente house the following day , Margrit Ucar’s 49th birthday, and discovered the bodies in a bottom-floor bedroom. Manas and Margrit Ucar were found near a closet.

Kevin Morrow, a spokesman for Syracuse University in New York, said Manas Ucar earned a masters and a doctoral degree in engineering from the school and was an assistant professor before leaving in the 1980s. He said Ucar’s specialty was thermal engineering systems.

Ucar is listed as a consulting engineer on an website of accident investigation and reconstruction experts in California.

Morris Talansky told an Israeli court he did not know how the money was spent, but linked it to Ehud Olmert’s “love” of “expensive” luxury goods.

Police are investigating whether the PM took up to $500,000 (£250,000) in bribes or illegal campaign donations.

Mr Olmert says sums from Mr Talansky were legal campaign contributions.

Mr Talansky made his claim during testimony under oath at the request of prosecutors, before his expected return to the United States.

“I gave [Mr Olmert] cash in envelopes,” the millionaire campaign fundraiser said, according to a transcript of the hearing.

“I asked him why I couldn’t write a cheque and he said it’s because of the way the money is channelled.”

When asked how the money was spent by Mr Olmert, Mr Talansky said: “I only know that he loved expensive cigars. I know he loved pens, watches. I found it strange.”

Criticism

Mr Talansky has already said that he gave Mr Olmert money for more than 10 years before he became Israeli prime minister.

Correspondents say the revelations are likely to damage further Mr Olmert’s already low standing.

This is the fifth investigation that police have launched into the financial affairs of Mr Olmert, who also faced criticism about the handling of the 2006 war in Lebanon.

Mr Talansky told the hearing that the bulk of the money was raised in New York “parlour meetings”, where Mr Olmert would address US donors who would then leave contributions on their chairs.

“He was articulate, he was intelligent. I felt that he would be a leader that I would have hoped to be if I had the talent,” Mr Talansky said.

He also said that he had given Mr Olmert loans of tens of thousands of dollars for foreign trips, but the money was not repaid.

“I had a very close relationship with him, but… I never expected anything personally. I never had any personal benefits from this relationship whatsoever.”

Mr Olmert has twice been questioned by police in recent weeks, but he has not been charged with any wrongdoing. He says he will resign if indicted.

Mr Talansky’s testimony is not part of a trial but was taken as a precaution in the event of a future legal case, as he resides in the US and might not return to Israel.