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In an interview on CNBC, Buffett said his Berkshire Hathaway holding company made the offer of reinsurance to bond insurers Ambac Financial Group Inc., MBIA Inc. and Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. Buffett said one firm rejected his offer, and he was still waiting to hear from the other two. He did not say which was which.

Many have speculated Buffett could step in and help out the troubled industry, though he made clear his offer was not altruistic.

“When I go to St. Peter I will not present this as some act that will entitle me to get in,” Buffett said on CNBC. “We’re doing this to make money.”

Buffett’s spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a message left Tuesday morning.

Earlier this month, Buffett said Berkshire would not invest in any of the bond insurers, but his company would consider insuring some of the risks the bond insurers had assumed.

Bond insurers write policies that promise to cover payments to bondholders if the entity that issued the bonds defaults.

Reinsurance policies offer coverage to insurance companies that want to completely or partly insure the risk they have assumed for their customers.

In recent months, bond insurers have come under fire from ratings agencies, which are worried the insurers do not have enough spare cash to cover a potential spike in claims.

Bond insurers originally offered insurance mainly to municipalities but in recent years expanded their operations to insure more profitable but riskier instruments.

That riskier debt includes bonds backed by pools of mortgages — mainly subprime loans given to customers with poor credit history. As those mortgages have increasing defaulted, ratings agencies fear the bonds supported by the troubled loans will default as well.

A spike in defaults in the coming months could force the insurers to pay billions of dollars in claims.

Late last year, Berkshire launched its own bond insurance business to take advantage of the credit problems other bond insurers have been having.

It’s midnight at Chena Hot Springs Resort, 56 miles northeast of Fairbanks, and outside, the July sun has only just slipped below the horizon. Holdmann’s blond hair escapes a loose ponytail as she climbs onto a metal walkway to point out the heat exchanger. A black-eared husky named Amberlynn watches her every move from below. “The cool thing about this … ,” she begins, as she does most sentences, and it occurs to me that it’s appropriate every time: This is cool. It is Alaska’s first geothermal plant, and it’s producing electricity from lower temperature water than any plant in the world.

Heat stored beneath the Earth’s surface holds 50,000 times the energy of all the oil and gas in the world combined. If it could be harnessed, it would be an ideal source of base-load power: Geothermal is cleaner than fossil fuels, and more reliable than alternative sources like tidal, wind, wave and solar. Today, geothermal plants in the United States generate nearly 3000 megawatts of electricity—enough to power South Dakota. Almost all of it comes from reservoirs that are at least 300 F.

The water rising through a fracture in the granite pluton under Chena is only 165 F. Experts didn’t think it was hot enough to produce serious power. But with the nearest electrical grid 32 miles away and generators burning through $1000 worth of diesel fuel daily, Chena had the incentive to prove the experts wrong. Now, its tepid water not only generates electricity, it heats the resort’s buildings, maintains a greenhouse and keeps an ice museum frozen year-round. There are thousands of such low- to moderate-temperature geothermal systems scattered throughout Alaska and the rest of the country. Power plants like the one at Chena could tap them to produce tens of thousands of megawatts of electricity.

“I think we have an opportunity here in Alaska to be leaders in moving toward a more renewable energy economy,” Holdmann says, her voice an equal mix of practical and impassioned. “The cost of power can be exorbitant in our villages—as high as a dollar a kilowatt-hour. It’s a real bummer for a lot of these communities, but it can also be a real motivating factor.” She pauses at the door of the hangar. “We’re an oil-producing state and we’re worried about our energy costs. It’s just a matter of time before the rest of the country catches up to where we are.”

Chena Hot Springs is the kind of resort one would expect to find on an episode of Northern Exposure. Nestled deep in a valley of birch and aspen, it has a comfortable, well-appointed lodge, an activities center, indoor plumbing and a resident masseuse. It also has a team of sled dogs, a 3500-ft. dirt runway, outhouses and, at this moment, a moose nonchalantly grazing near a geothermal production well.

Holdmann is well-cast for the setting. A professional dog musher, she lives off the grid with her husband and 80 huskies and commutes to work in a Jeep Liberty that runs on vegetable oil. She came to Chena four years ago as a hydropower consultant, but quickly determined that the water flowing under the resort was more valuable than the water flowing past it.

The only hitch: “Some of the reports I read from research on Chena concluded there was no way you could ever generate power out of this resource,” Holdmann says. “I started to look into why, and began to realize it was a bit of a misconception.”

When water cooler than 350 F is released from the pressure of a geothermal reservoir, it doesn’t convert to steam efficiently enough to drive a turbine directly. Anything less than 230 F was considered too marginal for the alternative: a binary system that uses water to heat a fluid with a lower boiling point. But that threshold was a product of geography, not technical feasibility, Holdmann realized. A binary system just requires a heat source and sink: 165 F water can produce electricity if the ambient air or surface water temperature is at least 100 degrees lower. While that may be tough to find in the deserts of Nevada, in Alaska cold air and water are abundant resources.

Now all she needed was a plant, built to one important spec: “We need things that work up here,” Holdmann says. “We don’t need a bunch of things that, yeah, you can do in a lab. We need something we can take to a village and use normal people to run it. And run it every day, because we don’t need it only half the time.”

Fortunately, United Technologies Corp. was looking for a partner to collaborate on a pilot project: an air-conditioning unit that had been reverse-engineered to run off geothermal water. Instead of putting in electric power to create areas of high and low temperature, Chena provides the heat differential and the plant puts out electric power.

The technology has the added benefit of solving two remaining hurdles to low-temperature power generation. First, air-conditioning refrigerant operates more efficiently at low temperatures than isopentane and other fluids typically used in power plants. Second, the components are already mass produced, which cuts the cost of a small, modular plant in half.

The rand is down 12 percent this year against the dollar, six times more than the next-worst performer among the world’s most widely traded currencies. UBS AG forecasts the sharpest drop in the rand since 2001 this year, and option prices show it has the worst prospects of any currency.

The decline signals the world is losing confidence in South Africa’s ability to remedy a power shortage that has disrupted mining of some of the world’s most valuable precious-metals deposits just when prices are climbing. Mbeki, the 65-year-old successor to Nelson Mandela who has presided over nine years of economic growth, steps down in 2009, and the man most likely to replace him, Jacob Zuma, is due to stand trial this year on charges from fraud to tax evasion.

“The currency is the share price of a country,” said George Glynos, managing director of Johannesburg-based Econometrix Treasury Management, which advises investors on bond and foreign-exchange holdings. “If anyone wants to know what foreigners are thinking about South Africa at the moment, they need look no further than the rand.”

The rand fell 6 percent to 7.81 per dollar last week, the largest weekly drop since June 2006, and was little changed at 7.79 as of 5:05 p.m. in Johannesburg today. Zurich-based UBS, the world’s second-biggest currency trader last year with almost 15 percent of the market, according to Euromoney Institutional Investor Plc, forecasts continued “rand weakness.”

Officials with AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd. told them customers of all wireless carriers were affected.

It was not immediately clear how many BlackBerry subscribers had problems, as some users reported being able to access their service normally Monday afternoon.

The BlackBerry service, which lets users check e-mail and access other data services on their handheld devices, has become a lifeline for many business executives and is increasingly popular among consumers with models like the BlackBerry Pearl.

There was no word what caused the outage or when service would be restored.

RIM officials did not return phone calls.

Major disruptions have been rare but often provoke an angry backlash against the Canadian company because of its typically lengthy silences about the cause and because it eventually gives only cryptic, jargon-laden explanations.

When the BlackBerry service suffered a major outage last April, the company remained silent about the cause for two days.

In a statement, AT&T spokesman Fletcher Cook said the company first learned about the problem from RIM at about 3:30 p.m. EST.

“This is not an issue with AT&T’s wireless network,” Cook said. “Customers could experience difficulties using their BlackBerry devices. RIM has not given us an estimated time of when this problem would be fixed.”

The demand to put armed air marshals on to the flights is part of a travel clampdown by the Bush administration that officials in Brussels described as “blackmail” and “troublesome”, and could see west Europeans and Britons required to have US visas if their governments balk at Washington’s requirements.

According to a US document being circulated for signature in European capitals, EU states would also need to supply personal data on all air passengers overflying but not landing in the US in order to gain or retain visa-free travel to America, senior EU officials said.

And within months the US department of homeland security is to impose a new permit system for Europeans flying to the US, compelling all travellers to apply online for permission to enter the country before booking or buying a ticket, a procedure that will take several days.

The data from the US’s new electronic transport authorisation system is to be combined with extensive personal passenger details already being provided by EU countries to the US for the “profiling” of potential terrorists and assessment of other security risks.

Washington is also asking European airlines to provide personal data on non-travellers – for example family members – who are allowed beyond departure barriers to help elderly, young or ill passengers to board aircraft flying to America, a demand the airlines reject as “absurd”.

Seven demands tabled by Washington are contained in a 10-page “memorandum of understanding” (MOU) that the US authorities are negotiating or planning to negotiate with all EU governments, according to ministers and diplomats from EU member states and senior officials in Brussels. The Americans have launched their security drive with some of the 12 mainly east European EU countries whose citizens still need visas to enter the US.

Lawyers for the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, asked for the records to support their argument that prolonged isolation and harassment at the Guantanamo prison have mentally impaired him and compromised his ability to aid in his defense on war crimes charges.

“All known records have been produced with the exception of the 2002 Gitmo records,” one of the prosecutors, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Timothy Stone, told the court. “They can’t find it.”

He said the military was still looking for the records kept at the remote U.S. naval base in southeast Cuba, which he referred to by its nickname.

President George W. Bush authorized the Guantanamo court to prosecute suspected al Qaeda members on grounds that the existing military and civilian courts were not adequate to prosecute terrorism charges against war captives who are not part of any national army.

The project could be operational by the end of 2009.

Oceanlinx’s unit combines the established science of the Oscillating Water Column (OWC) with its own patented turbine technology, and has successfully completed a full scale trial at its pilot unit at Port Kembla, Australia.

Each WEC is about 65 by 100 feet and 15-25 feet high and will not likely affect views from land.

An OWC, is a chamber which is open underneath the waterline and allows the water inside the OWC to rise and fall, compressing and displacing the air inside, driving it past a turbine which is housed at the narrowest point in the chamber, located above the waterline.

Since the OWC chamber narrows, the air is accelerated to its highest velocity as it passes the turbine allowing for maximal extraction of the energy. The oscillatory wave motion causes a similar oscillatory airflow through the chamber, and the turbine converts energy on both the up and down stroke.

The unique characteristic of this turbine is its blade pitch control system which enables it to rotate in the same direction irrespective of the direction of the air flow. This turbine, converts the energy in the airflow into mechanical energy which drives an electrical generator. The Oceanlinx turbine uses variable pitch blades which, with the slower rotational speed and higher torque of the turbine, improves efficiency and reliability and reduces the need for maintenance.

The incident at the Flotel Safe Scandinavia platform was being treated as a hoax last night and a 23-year-old woman had been detained.

Jake Molloy, general secretary of the Offshore Industry Liaison Committee union, said a woman on the rig had told colleagues she had dreamt a bomb was on the platform.

“Before long it had grown arms and legs,” he told the Daily Record. “The next thing, workers were being evacuated.” The alarm was raised on an accommodation block which is attached by a bridge to an oil rig in the Britannia field.

Fourteen helicopters, including five from the RAF, were involved in the rapid airlift, 115 miles north east of Aberdeen. The accommodation block was evacuated and the workers moved across the bridge to the rig after the alarm was raised, but the emergency was over before all the workers had been airlifted away.

Aberdeen Coastguard said 161 of the 539 workers had been flown out before the rescuers were stood down in the afternoon.

At 5pm, the Ministry of Defence confirmed that all of its aircraft had been sent home. The company which runs the rig, Britannia Operator Ltd, then began returning the evacuated workers to the platform.