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These factories, Marston said, are dark, since no lighting is needed for the robots, and run 24 hours a day, picking and moving goods around.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Law-enforcement agencies in Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas took part in what was described by local media as “an anti-crime and anti-terrorism initiative” involving officers from more than 50 federal, state and local agencies.

Given the military style name “Operation Sudden Impact”, the initiative saw officers from six counties rounding up fugitives, conducting traffic checkpoints, climbing on boats on the Mississippi River and doing other “crime-abatement” programs all under the label of “anti-terrorism”.

WREG Memphis news channel 3 reported that the Sheriff’s Department arrested 332 people, 142 of whom were fugitives, or “terrorists” as they now seem to be known.

Now this straight-talking Southerner is launching the biggest and most audacious project of his career. This month he will make the first down payment on 500 wind turbines at a cost of $2m each. The order is the first material step towards his goal of building the world’s largest wind farm.

Over the next four years he intends to erect 2,700 turbines across 200,000 acres of the Texan panhandle. The scheme is five times bigger than the world’s current record-holding wind farm and when finished will supply 4,000 megawatts of electricity – enough to power about one million homes.

It’s not just the breathtaking scale of the scheme that is striking, though at a total cost of $10bn it impresses even Pickens himself: “It’s pretty mind boggling,” he says. The fact that Pickens, a tycoon who made his fortune in oil, has turned his attention to wind power is an indication of how the tectonic plates are moving. Until recently wind was seen as marginal and alternative; now it is being eyed by Wall Street.

Colleagues and friends expressed shock and grief at Farrell’s death, noting that it came at a time when his career trajectory was climbing rapidly and his life’s work was finding an audience with policy makers.

“Alex Farrell was an extraordinarily influential scientist at the peak of his work,” said Mary Nichols, who knew Farrell from his work as a consultant for the California Air Resources Board. “It’s a terrible void he leaves behind.”

The circumstances surrounding Farrell’s death made it appear to be a suicide, according to Nichols, who did not have many details. The San Francisco Medical Examiner said an exact cause would not be known for several weeks.

An engineer by training, Farrell’s research focused on projects with practical and timely applications, included biofuels, hybrid electric vehicles, hydrogen-powered and transportation sustainability. He came to Berkeley in 2003 after teaching and doing research at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2006, he had directed the campus’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center.

“He was one of the leading lights in the area of low-carbon fuels and energy systems, and his career was on a dramatic rise,” said colleague Dan Kammen, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group and of public policy who helped recruit Farrell to UC Berkeley and co-authored many papers with him, including a just-released report on plug-in hybrid vehicles.

State officials said Farrell’s research and advocacy had been pivotal in California’s effort to get cleaner-burning cars on its roads by setting targets for zero emission vehicles and requiring automakers to produce a fleet of plug-in hybrid vehicles, policies that have been adopted by 12 other states.

“Alex Farrell was one of California’s truly brilliant minds. He was instrumental in developing Governor Schwarzenegger’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard, a groundbreaking policy for our fight against global warming that is now being adopted by other states and countries. His passing is a huge loss both personally and professionally,” said David Crane, Schwarzenegger’s special advisor on jobs and the economy.

Last year, Farrell was invited to join the Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels, an international panel working to develop standards for evaluating biofuels and their effect the environment.

Born in Miami on Jan. 1, 1962, Farrell grew up in New Jersey and graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1984. He spent five years as a Naval engineer on nuclear submarines from and earned his Ph.D. in energy management and policy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1996. His postdoctoral training included fellowships with the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. He worked at Carnegie Mellon, first as a research engineer and then as director of the university’s Electricity Industry Center, from 1998 until 2003.

His research on energy and environmental policy appeared in journals such as Science, Environmental Science & Technology, Environmental Research Letters and Energy Policy.

Containers destined for local police forces were dropped from a helicopter into a Taliban-controlled area of Zabul province.

The coalition helicopter had intended to deliver pallets of supplies to a police checkpoint in Ghazni, a remote section of Zabul late last month.

By mistake they were dropped some distance from the checkpoint where it was taken by the Taliban, the Internal Security Affairs Commission of the Wolesi Jirga — the Afghan parliament’s lower house — was told.

Hamidullah Tukhi, a local politician from Zabul, told the parliamentary commission that the consignment had been taken by a local Taliban commander.

A Nato spokesman said the pallets were carrying rocket propelled grenades, ammunition, water and food.

Afghan politicians have said they do not believe the drop was an accident.

Nato’s General Carlos Branco blamed it on “human error” when the navigator confused two very similar grid references.

A spokesman at Nato headquarters in Brussels denied the suggestion the alliance had deliberately armed the Taliban. “We are aware of it but we are not fired up about it. It sounds like someone made a mistake. It was a cock-up rather than a conspiracy.

Within hours of the smell first hitting Britain’s nostrils, people in London, Kent, Hertfordshire, Berkshire, East Anglia and Devon were grumbling about the stink, and the big pong had become a national talking point, with websites espousing increasingly anti-European theories.

Conservative communities complained about a political stench emanating from the European commission; the Daily Mail complained of “Le Stink” (which later became Der Stink, when blame was shifted from France to Germany); and others named “garlic-eating surrender monkeys”. But the Met Office stepped in to rule that it was basic pollution – the “odour of ordinary everyday life in northern Europe”. Belgian chocolate factories, Dutch pig farms, German diesel engines and 1,000 other smells had become trapped under a motionless cloud hanging over continental farms and factories for several days.

“On Thursday night the wind picked up and it blew over to us. It’s hard to say exactly what it is because we don’t know. The air hadn’t moved much so it’s picked up all kinds of things. All we can do is wait for it to blow away. The intensity is likely to decrease but we don’t expect a change in the air flow for a couple of days,” said a Met Office spokeswoman.

The jump came as the Philippines, the largest rice importer, failed for the fourth time to secure as much rice as it wanted.

The unsuccessful tender followed Bangladesh’s inability to buy any rice at all this week.

Traders and analysts warned that rice demand was escalating in spite of prices rising to three times the level of a year ago as countries try to build up stocks.

Vichai Sriprasert, president of Riceland International, a leading rice exporter in Bangkok, said several of its customers, including governments, were buying far more than they usually did amid fears about scarcity.

“It is panic,” he said. “My customers are demanding double the usual volume. We would not have enough supplies for all the demand we are facing.”

Michael Whitehead, a rice specialist at Rabobank in New York, added: “The potentially destabilising social effect of rice shortages in most high-consumption countries has strengthened the resolve of governments to build supply.”

Rising rice prices have triggered riots in the past month in countries such as Haiti, Bangladesh and Ivory Coast. Rice is considered the most political agricultural commodity as it is a staple for about 3bn people in poor countries in Asia and Africa.

Ajith Nivard Cabraal, Sri Lanka’s central bank governor, told the Financial Times that the rise in food prices was “definitely” a bigger problem for Asia than the ongoing credit crunch.