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The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?… The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.

Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq’s oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through “production-sharing agreements” (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world’s two largest producers, is state controlled.

Two Israeli air force squadrons are training to blow up an Iranian facility using low-yield nuclear “bunker-busters”, according to several Israeli military sources.

The attack would be the first with nuclear weapons since 1945, when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli weapons would each have a force equivalent to one-fifteenth of the Hiroshima bomb.

Under the plans, conventional laser-guided bombs would open “tunnels” into the targets. “Mini-nukes” would then immediately be fired into a plant at Natanz, exploding deep underground to reduce the risk of radioactive fallout.

“As soon as the green light is given, it will be one mission, one strike and the Iranian nuclear project will be demolished,” said one of the sources.

The plans, disclosed to The Sunday Times last week, have been prompted in part by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad’s assessment that Iran is on the verge of producing enough enriched uranium to make nuclear weapons within two years.

Israeli military commanders believe conventional strikes may no longer be enough to annihilate increasingly well-defended enrichment facilities. Several have been built beneath at least 70ft of concrete and rock. However, the nuclear-tipped bunker-busters would be used only if a conventional attack was ruled out and if the United States declined to intervene, senior sources said.

Israeli and American officials have met several times to consider military action. Military analysts said the disclosure of the plans could be intended to put pressure on Tehran to halt enrichment, cajole America into action or soften up world opinion in advance of an Israeli attack.

“We want to do everything we can to help Iraq succeed in the future but, like many of our senior military leaders, we do not believe that adding more U.S. combat troops contributes to success,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, wrote to Mr. Bush.

“Adding more combat troops will only endanger more Americans and stretch our military to the breaking point for no strategic gain,” the Democrats’ letter said.

Also reiterating his deep opposition to any troop increases was Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin. “The administration refuses to acknowledge the devastating impact that keeping our brave troops in Iraq is having on our national security, and now the president is considering sending even more troops,” Mr. Feingold said in a statement.

“We should be bringing our troops out of Iraq, not the other way around,” he said. “The American people’s message at the ballot box was loud and clear, and it is past time that the administration listened.”

“One hundred hours to make this the most honest and open Congress in history,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared at the beginning of a history-making day — which ended last night with the Democrat from California presiding over a glitzy fundraiser open to anyone with $1,000 for a ticket.

A few folks in the block-long line of partygoers waiting to get into the National Building Museum — social activists, feminists, union organizers, fat-cat liberals, Hollywood allies and not a few serious Deadheads — did sense the cognitive dissonance. They promptly dismissed it in a tidal wave of idealism about the future under the nation’s first female speaker of the House.

They had waited a long time for this night to party, nibble on goat cheese ravioli with pumpkin and truffle, wipe their lips with paper napkins embossed in gold with “Speaker Pelosi January 4, 2007,” listen to former members of the Grateful Dead sing “Truckin’ ” and Tony Bennett sing “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Scotsman Ian Gilmartin, 60, and his friend Bob Cattley, 58, both from Kendal, Cumbria have invented a mini-waterwheel capable of supplying enough electricity to power a house – for free.

The contraption is designed to be used in small rivers or streams – ideal for potentially thousands of homes across Britain. It is the first off-the-shelf waterwheel system which can generate a good supply of electricity from a water fall as little as 20cm.

Mr Gilmartin, an electrician and inventor, was not prompted to think up his new device by high energy bills – he does not own a TV and has never lived in a house with electricity.

But he has a stream at the back of his house, the Beck Mickle, and with the help of Phd engineering student, Mr Cattley, now hopes to see the invention in the shops by the end of next year.

Mr Gilmartin first began experimenting three years ago with yoghurt pots and wheelie bins in the stream, before test-running a proto-type. They took the results to the Lake District National Park, and secured a £15,000 grant from the organisation’s sustainability fund.

The prototype has now been working successfully at St Catherine’s, a National Trust site near Windermere, opening up previously untapped energy. The waterwheel produces one to two kilowatts of power and generates at least 24 kilowatt hours of sustainable green energy in a day, just under the average household’s daily consumption of around 28 kilowatt hours.

It will hope to cost around £2,000 to fully install – and will pay for itself in side two years.

The Beck Mickle ‘low head’ micro hydro generator could potentially provide electricity to more than 50,000 British homes and could be used industrially.

Mr Gilmartin said: “While we cannot say this provides free electricity, because of the initial cost of buying the machine, it is expected to pay for itself within two years and then greatly reduce the owner’s electricity bills after then.”

Waterwheels of various types have been known since Roman times and hydropower was widely used in the Middle Ages, powering most industry in Europe.

But the energy produced from the flow of water depends on the height, or head, that the water falls.

A ‘high head’ like a traditional water-wheel, is large, expensive and needs civil engineering. But with ‘low heads’ – under a 18 inches, no one had yet invented a method of successfully recovering the energy generated.

Researchers have long sought out low cost technology to exploit the vast number of suitable low head hydro sites as a source of renewable energy.

A conventional waterwheel allows the water to escape prematurely as the wheel rotates, but the Beck Mickle Hydro generator contains the water for the full drop of the device, converting around 70 per cent of the energy into electricity.

Mr Gilmartin explained, “This idea started off to answer the question, ‘How do you recover energy from very, very low heads of fluid?’

“With a low head there is not very much flow, no velocity, the fluid has got to have speed, and the only way of doing it is with a water wheel, but they are big and expensive and need lots of civil engineering.

“I have come up with an answer and I don’t know why anyone has not thought of it before.”

The switch, however, will cost you a few hundred dollars more.

SanDisk on Thursday released a 32GB drive for commercial notebooks that stores information on flash memory chips rather than the magnetic platters that make up a traditional hard drive. The drive is available only to manufacturers, and the company declined to give out pricing or identify any notebook makers that will adopt it, but SanDisk said notebooks sporting the drive could come out in the first half of 2007.

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SanDisk gained the bulk of its expertise in these drives when it acquired Msystems, an Israeli outfit that was an early pioneer of USB flash keys.

“A few years ago, some of the people at Msystems told me their most expensive drives cost $70,000,” said Jim Handy, chief analyst at Objective Analysis. “They are very tightly connected to the military in Israel.”

The commercial drive from SanDisk contains a controller and other electronics that reduce power consumption and the overall cost of the drive that make it possible to slip it into high-end corporate notebooks, Oren said.

SanDisk packaged the drive into a 1.8-inch package, mostly to make it easier for notebook makers to adopt it. The package can be shrunk (to reduce the overall size of the notebook) or increased so that a flash drive could fit into a notebook with a 2.5-inch drive chassis.

CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden and spy chiefs from Australia, Britain and Canada were invited to the birthday bash, the Dominion Post newspaper in the capital, Wellington, reported.

“I personally had the opportunity to meet with the visiting chiefs,” Prime Minister Helen Clark said, noting that South Pacific issues had been discussed.