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France issued decrees banning the use of MON 810 maize seeds in February after a government-appointed committee said it unearthed new evidence of damage GM products could inflict on the environment.

Ecologists and ordinary consumers hailed the ruling, but seedmakers, including MON 810 creator Monsanto, and maize farmers lodged an emergency injunction in an attempt to overturn the ban.

In a document released on Wednesday, France’s State Council shot down arguments put forward by pro-GM groups, saying they did not cast doubt on the validity of the government’s stance.

Congress has required that the 33 million foreigners a year coming into U.S. airports be fingerprinted when they arrive and leave the country but did not specify who should take the prints.

The Homeland Security Department, which currently fingerprints foreigners coming into U.S. airports, wants airlines to be responsible for taking fingerprints as these travelers leave.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) urged the White House to kill the plan. “This is a government function, not to be outsourced to the private sector,” said Ken Dunlap, security chief for IATA North America. The association represents 240 airlines worldwide.

Bristol-based Marine Current Turbines (MCT) said that the installation will go ahead on Easter Monday, subject to favourable weather and further engineering work.

SeaGen is the biggest turbine of its kind in the world, with the capacity to produce 1.2MW of electricity – four times more than any other tidal turbine – and will generate clean and sustainable electricity for around 1,000 homes.

The giant turbine is environmentally friendly – it makes no noise, is almost completely below the surface of the water, never runs out and has zero emissions.

MCT has been given permission to install and operate SeaGen in the mouth of Strangford Lough – one of the fastest tidal flows in the world – for five years.

The company says it believes it will be realistic to achieve up to 500MW of tidal capacity by 2015, based on the SeaGen technology.

The turbine was set to be installed last August but the company had to cancel, because the huge crane barge chartered to install the device was delayed on another job and then damaged in an accident in port.

MCT said a replacement barge would sail to Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard, where SeaGen has been waiting since last summer, and load up on March 22.

It will then sail to Strangford in County Down, where the turbine is due to be installed on Easter Monday.

The whole operation is expected to take up to 14 days before the turbine, which cost £12m to develop and build, is fully fixed to the seabed.

Martin Wright, managing director of MCT, said: “There is global interest in SeaGen as it will be the first and largest commercial tidal stream device to be installed anywhere in the world.

The Army is preparing to deploy to Iraq two 4-ton biomass refineries designed to turn piles of trash into electricity. Each can run for 20 hours on a ton of trash, producing enough power to light a small village.

The novel machines were built by defense contractors and Purdue University scientists as part of the Army’s push to reduce troops’ diesel fuel use in Iraq, where convoys are frequently targeted by insurgents.

Army planners say cutting the fuel needs of the generators that power military encampments will mean fewer trips into harm’s way for soldiers who drive tanker trucks. It will also free up more fuel for tanks, Humvees and other military equipment.

But first the machines, dubbed “tactical biorefineries” by the military, must perform well during their six-month test in a combat zone. They’ll face windblown dust and grit, 120-degree temperatures and the risk of breakdowns when they arrive in the Baghdad area in early May.

“We want to put them under those kinds of stresses and see how they do. We want commanders to say, ‘This thing is really worth looking at,'” said Jerry Warner, CEO of chief contractor Defense Life Sciences LLC of McLean, Va.

In 2006, the Army commissioned Defense Life Sciences, Purdue biomass experts and three other companies to build a prototype refinery. An updated version completed last year at a cost of about $1 million now sits in an unheated warehouse on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus awaiting a final shakedown before deployment. The same team is currently building the second unit.

Nate Mosier, an assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering who is overseeing the work at Purdue, said the refineries are unique in their ability to burn multiple fuels at once. They’re also portable, designed to fit snugly into a standard shipping container.

The trash-to-energy process begins when unfiltered garbage is fed into a chute, falling into a grinder that chews the trash into small pieces.

Organic food waste heads to a bioreactor where an industrial fermenting process produces ethanol. In another chamber, plastic, cardboard and other trash items are heated to create low-grade propane or methane.

Those gases and the ethanol are then combusted in the refinery’s modified diesel engine, which powers a 60-kilowatt generator.

About 10 percent of the electricity the refineries produce are used for the machines’ power needs, but the remaining 90 percent would be available for the troops.

Beyond the military applications, the refineries could provide temporary power after natural disasters. Mosier said they could be set up near hospitals or shelters to supply power and light, while feeding off the trash those locations produce.

If they work well, a fleet of them could be built and sent to Iraq, Afghanistan or other combat zones, said Dan Nolan, who works on a program overseen by the Office of the Secretary of Defense that’s trying to reduce the military’s use of fossil fuels.

“This is probably the most ambitious program we’ve done. We think there’s a high probability of success. But until we put it out there, and into the operational vacuum, we won’t really know,” Nolan said.

But even if they do work, the refineries will only save the military a drop in its fuel bucket. Each of the refineries should save about 115 gallons of diesel fuel a day, Nolan said. The U.S. military brings 1.29 million gallons of fuel to Iraq each day.

Another effort to reduce fuel consumption is a 5-kilowatt hybrid electric power station being tested by a contractor in California. It uses a conventional generator paired with wind turbines, solar collectors and battery storage capacity.

The biomass refineries are the first portable refineries of their kind, said John Scahill, a project manager with the Department of Energy’s field office in Golden, Colo., which works on biomass projects like those that are part of the refineries.

He said that if the demonstration in Iraq is a success, it could catch the eye of private investors looking for ways to hold down their costs amid rising energy prices.

The wheat stem rust, whose spores are carried by wind across continents, was previously found in East Africa and Yemen and has moved to Iran, which said that laboratory tests have confirmed its presence in some localities in Broujerd and Hamedan in the country’s west.

Up to 80 per cent of all Asian and African wheat varieties are susceptible to the fungus, and major wheat-producing nations to Iran’s east – such as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan – should be on high alert, FAO warned.

“The fungus is spreading rapidly and could seriously lower wheat production in countries at direct risk,” said Shivaji Pandey, Director of FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division.

He urged the control of the rust’s spread to lower the risk to countries already impacted by high food prices.

Iran has said that it will bolster its research capacity to tackle the new fungus and develop wheat varieties that are rust-resistant.

Called Ug99, the disease first surfaced in Uganda and subsequently spread to Kenya and Ethiopia, with both countries experiencing serious crop yield losses due to a serious rust epidemic last year. Also in 2007, FAO confirmed that a more virulent strain was found in Yemen.

The agency appealed to countries to bolster disease surveillance and step up efforts to control it.