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The pilot program set to start next week in the Middletown school district would have about 80 children put tags containing radio frequency identification chips, or RFID chips, on their schoolbags. It would also equip two buses with global positioning systems, or GPS devices.

The school and parents will be able to track students on the bus, and the district hopes the program will improve busing efficiency, Superintendent Rosemarie Kraeger said. The devices are intended to record only when students enter and exit the bus, and the GPS would show where the bus was on it’s route.

Parents could opt out of the program, Kraeger said.

The pilot program, made by MAP Information Technology Corp., is to run for several months at the Aquidneck School, she said. The district, which serves about 2,500 students, is the company’s only client, said Deborah Rapp, the company’s director of marketing and communications.

Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, sent a letter to Kraeger and members of the school committee calling the plan “a solution in search of a problem” and saying the school district should already have procedures in place to track where its students are.

On Monday, he said the program raises enormous privacy and safety concerns.

‘Currencies and oil are the main drivers behind this at the moment,’ said Commerzbank analyst Rory McVeigh. ‘When stops were taken out at 870 usd we saw a real rush of buying. It’s held above 870 usd so we should see it consolidate now until the Americans come in later today.’

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With electric cars and boats finally in action, that might sound like no big deal. But electric power has long been the impossible dream of aviation because the energy is so puny compared with the dead weight of the batteries. Sitting behind the noisy, gas-gulping beast that pulls my little plane through the sky, I often muse on what it would be like to have a smooth quiet motor turning the blades and belching no carbon into the air. That, in modest form, is exactly what the APAME, a team of French engineers at the village of Saint Pierre d’Argencon, have just achieved.

Their “Electra”, a kit-built single-seater, flew around the high Alps with a 25 horse-power electric motor and 47 kilogrammes of lithium-polymer batteries. The flight shows that non-polluting, quiet and inexpensive flying is withing reach, Anne Lavrand, the president of the APAME group, said. “This will be a real aeroplane that will have an airworthiness certificate. It’s a machine built for anyone with a pilot’s license.”

Several far richer outfits, mainly in the USA, are working on similar power packs but so far none have got off the ground. Lavrand told me that they started the project quietly 18 months ago, partly financed by donations from aerospace groups. “It’s not always a question of money. When we began, no-one believed we could do it.” Having proved that “ecological aviation” is viable, her group aims to extend the range and power of their technology, which for the moment uses a modified golf cart motor made by LCM, a British firm.

Like most aviation advances, the Electra project is not a leap but an evolutionary step. Batteries now power most radio-controlled model aircraft and some small unmanned observation “drones”. Electric motors provide the auxiliary power in some motor-gliders and experimental flying machines with ultra-long solar panel wings have been flown successfully since 1980. NASA and Boeing in the USA are working on future projects that derive electric power from hydrogen fuel cells. The French group also achieved the first electric flight by a delta-wing ultra-light aircraft last summer.

The difference with the Electra project is that electricity has been used for the first time to power an ordinary light plane, albeit a small one. This opens the way to practical, manned electric flight.

But that was before she was rousted from bed at 5:30 a.m. last week and taken to the Broward County jail on orders of a circuit court judge who slapped Sando with a six-month sentence after she failed to show up for a hearing on a domestic battery complaint.

And in jail is where Sando remained Friday, without her motorized wheelchair, her service dog Fudge, her glasses or, as yet, any opportunity to appear in court and be represented by an attorney.

“This reminds me of a foreign country where there are no rights,” said Broward Chief Assistant Public Defender Steve Michaelson. “Without a hearing, she went directly to jail, just like in Monopoly. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.”

In a telephone interview Friday from the women’s lock-up in Pompano Beach, Sando said, “I’m pretty strong. So if this is the worst thing that happens to me in the new year, I’ll be grateful.”

Sando’s case is unusual not just because of her physical condition, according to Michaelson. Typically, when a defendant fails to appear for a civil court hearing, the judge orders the police to bring the missing person into court.

But along with her order to have Sando picked up, Judge Marina Garcia-Wood sentenced her to six months in jail. The judge added a provision that Sando could get out of jail in 60 days if she took a course on domestic violence.

In an emergency petition filed Thursday with the 4th District Appeals Court, Assistant Public Defender Sarah Sandler argued that Sando’s incarceration is unlawful. Sandler said Garcia-Wood “failed to comply with each and every requirement” of a rule of criminal procedure written to protect individuals from being sentenced to jail even before they are arrested.

“She is in jail without due process,” said Michaelson, adding that Sando was behind bars for at least three days before she even learned why she was there.

Among the hours of covert tape recordings, she says she heard evidence that one well-known senior official in the US State Department was being paid by Turkish agents in Washington who were selling the information on to black market buyers, including Pakistan.

The name of the official – who has held a series of top government posts – is known to The Sunday Times. He strongly denies the claims.

However, Edmonds said: “He was aiding foreign operatives against US interests by passing them highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

She claims that the FBI was also gathering evidence against senior Pentagon officials – including household names – who were aiding foreign agents.

“If you made public all the information that the FBI have on this case, you will see very high-level people going through criminal trials,” she said.

Her story shows just how much the West was infiltrated by foreign states seeking nuclear secrets. It illustrates how western government officials turned a blind eye to, or were even helping, countries such as Pakistan acquire bomb technology.

The wider nuclear network has been monitored for many years by a joint Anglo-American intelligence effort. But rather than shut it down, investigations by law enforcement bodies such as the FBI and Britain’s Revenue & Customs have been aborted to preserve diplomatic relations.

Edmonds, a fluent speaker of Turkish and Farsi, was recruited by the FBI in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Her previous claims about incompetence inside the FBI have been well documented in America.

She has given evidence to closed sessions of Congress and the 9/11 commission, but many of the key points of her testimony have remained secret. She has now decided to divulge some of that information after becoming disillusioned with the US authorities’ failure to act.

One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent.

In one conversation Edmonds heard the official arranging to pick up a $15,000 cash bribe. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed location by someone in the Turkish diplomatic community who was working for the network.

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official.

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Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks.

Edmonds said the State Department official once again proved useful. “A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents.

“The people provided lists of potential moles from Pentagon-related institutions who had access to databases concerning this information,” she said.

“The handlers, who were part of the diplomatic community, would then try to recruit those people to become moles for the network. The lists contained all their ‘hooking points’, which could be financial or sexual pressure points, their exact job in the Pentagon and what stuff they had access to.”

One of the Pentagon figures under investigation was Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon analyst, who was jailed in 2006 for passing US defence information to lobbyists and sharing classified information with an Israeli diplomat.

“He was one of the top people providing information and packages during 2000 and 2001,” she said.

Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder.

Edmonds said: “Certain greedy Turkish operators would make copies of the material and look around for buyers. They had agents who would find potential buyers.”

In summer 2000, Edmonds says the FBI monitored one of the agents as he met two Saudi Arabian businessmen in Detroit to sell nuclear information that had been stolen from an air force base in Alabama. She overheard the agent saying: “We have a package and we’re going to sell it for $250,000.”

Edmonds’s employment with the FBI lasted for just six months. In March 2002 she was dismissed after accusing a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals.

She has always claimed that she was victimised for being outspoken and was vindicated by an Office of the Inspector General review of her case three years later. It found that one of the contributory reasons for her sacking was that she had made valid complaints.

The US attorney-general has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI’s methods and current investigations.