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Prices have fallen by 2.5% during May, according to its latest monthly survey.

The lender said prices were now 4.4% lower than a year ago, a drop of £8,000, which has taken the average UK house price down to £173,583.

The Nationwide, the UK’s second-largest lender, said price falls were now accelerating and had continued for seven months in a row.

“The pace of house price falls accelerated in May as more weak economic news added to the gathering momentum of negative sentiment about the housing market,” said Fionnuala Earley, the Nationwide’s chief economist.

The company placed a $2 billion order for 667 turbines for the Pampa Wind Project, which will ultimately provide more than 4,000 megawatts of electricity, or enough for more than 1 million homes. The project will be completed in four phases.

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.”