cryptogon.com

Congress has required that the 33 million foreigners a year coming into U.S. airports be fingerprinted when they arrive and leave the country but did not specify who should take the prints.

The Homeland Security Department, which currently fingerprints foreigners coming into U.S. airports, wants airlines to be responsible for taking fingerprints as these travelers leave.

The International Air Transport Association (IATA) urged the White House to kill the plan. “This is a government function, not to be outsourced to the private sector,” said Ken Dunlap, security chief for IATA North America. The association represents 240 airlines worldwide.

Bristol-based Marine Current Turbines (MCT) said that the installation will go ahead on Easter Monday, subject to favourable weather and further engineering work.

SeaGen is the biggest turbine of its kind in the world, with the capacity to produce 1.2MW of electricity – four times more than any other tidal turbine – and will generate clean and sustainable electricity for around 1,000 homes.

The giant turbine is environmentally friendly – it makes no noise, is almost completely below the surface of the water, never runs out and has zero emissions.

MCT has been given permission to install and operate SeaGen in the mouth of Strangford Lough – one of the fastest tidal flows in the world – for five years.

The company says it believes it will be realistic to achieve up to 500MW of tidal capacity by 2015, based on the SeaGen technology.

The turbine was set to be installed last August but the company had to cancel, because the huge crane barge chartered to install the device was delayed on another job and then damaged in an accident in port.

MCT said a replacement barge would sail to Belfast’s Harland and Wolff shipyard, where SeaGen has been waiting since last summer, and load up on March 22.

It will then sail to Strangford in County Down, where the turbine is due to be installed on Easter Monday.

The whole operation is expected to take up to 14 days before the turbine, which cost £12m to develop and build, is fully fixed to the seabed.

Martin Wright, managing director of MCT, said: “There is global interest in SeaGen as it will be the first and largest commercial tidal stream device to be installed anywhere in the world.

The Army is preparing to deploy to Iraq two 4-ton biomass refineries designed to turn piles of trash into electricity. Each can run for 20 hours on a ton of trash, producing enough power to light a small village.

The novel machines were built by defense contractors and Purdue University scientists as part of the Army’s push to reduce troops’ diesel fuel use in Iraq, where convoys are frequently targeted by insurgents.

Army planners say cutting the fuel needs of the generators that power military encampments will mean fewer trips into harm’s way for soldiers who drive tanker trucks. It will also free up more fuel for tanks, Humvees and other military equipment.

But first the machines, dubbed “tactical biorefineries” by the military, must perform well during their six-month test in a combat zone. They’ll face windblown dust and grit, 120-degree temperatures and the risk of breakdowns when they arrive in the Baghdad area in early May.

“We want to put them under those kinds of stresses and see how they do. We want commanders to say, ‘This thing is really worth looking at,'” said Jerry Warner, CEO of chief contractor Defense Life Sciences LLC of McLean, Va.

In 2006, the Army commissioned Defense Life Sciences, Purdue biomass experts and three other companies to build a prototype refinery. An updated version completed last year at a cost of about $1 million now sits in an unheated warehouse on Purdue’s West Lafayette campus awaiting a final shakedown before deployment. The same team is currently building the second unit.

Nate Mosier, an assistant professor of agricultural and biological engineering who is overseeing the work at Purdue, said the refineries are unique in their ability to burn multiple fuels at once. They’re also portable, designed to fit snugly into a standard shipping container.

The trash-to-energy process begins when unfiltered garbage is fed into a chute, falling into a grinder that chews the trash into small pieces.

Organic food waste heads to a bioreactor where an industrial fermenting process produces ethanol. In another chamber, plastic, cardboard and other trash items are heated to create low-grade propane or methane.

Those gases and the ethanol are then combusted in the refinery’s modified diesel engine, which powers a 60-kilowatt generator.

About 10 percent of the electricity the refineries produce are used for the machines’ power needs, but the remaining 90 percent would be available for the troops.

Beyond the military applications, the refineries could provide temporary power after natural disasters. Mosier said they could be set up near hospitals or shelters to supply power and light, while feeding off the trash those locations produce.

If they work well, a fleet of them could be built and sent to Iraq, Afghanistan or other combat zones, said Dan Nolan, who works on a program overseen by the Office of the Secretary of Defense that’s trying to reduce the military’s use of fossil fuels.

“This is probably the most ambitious program we’ve done. We think there’s a high probability of success. But until we put it out there, and into the operational vacuum, we won’t really know,” Nolan said.

But even if they do work, the refineries will only save the military a drop in its fuel bucket. Each of the refineries should save about 115 gallons of diesel fuel a day, Nolan said. The U.S. military brings 1.29 million gallons of fuel to Iraq each day.

Another effort to reduce fuel consumption is a 5-kilowatt hybrid electric power station being tested by a contractor in California. It uses a conventional generator paired with wind turbines, solar collectors and battery storage capacity.

The biomass refineries are the first portable refineries of their kind, said John Scahill, a project manager with the Department of Energy’s field office in Golden, Colo., which works on biomass projects like those that are part of the refineries.

He said that if the demonstration in Iraq is a success, it could catch the eye of private investors looking for ways to hold down their costs amid rising energy prices.

The wheat stem rust, whose spores are carried by wind across continents, was previously found in East Africa and Yemen and has moved to Iran, which said that laboratory tests have confirmed its presence in some localities in Broujerd and Hamedan in the country’s west.

Up to 80 per cent of all Asian and African wheat varieties are susceptible to the fungus, and major wheat-producing nations to Iran’s east – such as Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan – should be on high alert, FAO warned.

“The fungus is spreading rapidly and could seriously lower wheat production in countries at direct risk,” said Shivaji Pandey, Director of FAO’s Plant Production and Protection Division.

He urged the control of the rust’s spread to lower the risk to countries already impacted by high food prices.

Iran has said that it will bolster its research capacity to tackle the new fungus and develop wheat varieties that are rust-resistant.

Called Ug99, the disease first surfaced in Uganda and subsequently spread to Kenya and Ethiopia, with both countries experiencing serious crop yield losses due to a serious rust epidemic last year. Also in 2007, FAO confirmed that a more virulent strain was found in Yemen.

The agency appealed to countries to bolster disease surveillance and step up efforts to control it.

“One thing is for certain, we’re in challenging times,” the president said after meeting with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other senior economic advisers. “But another thing is for certain: We’ve taken strong, decisive action.”

The president commended the Fed for its urgent actions over the weekend. “We’ve shown the country and the world that the United States is on top of the situation,” he said.

Bush spoke on a day of turmoil and plunging prices on global financial markets. Oil prices hit a record in Asian trading, U.S. stock index futures fell sharply and the dollar hit record lows.

The White House moved quickly to raise Bush’s public profile Monday, and he continued to send an upbeat message, even in acknowledging a downturn that keeps roiling the economy and the people as well.

“We agree upon the fact that our financial institutions are strong, and that our capital markets are functioning efficiently and effectively,” Bush said with his economic aides.

Still, Bush said his administration is monitoring economic developments closely.

“When need be, we’ll act decisively in a way that continues to bring order to financial markets,” Bush said.

He did not indicate any other steps his government might take, or when.

“In the long run, our economy is going to be fine,” Bush said. “Right now we’re dealing with a difficult situation.”

The Federal Reserve, in an extraordinarily rare weekend move, became a lender of last resort for Wall Street investment houses to begin securing short-term emergency loans. The central bank also approved a cut in its emergency lending rate to financial institutions to 3.25% from 3.50%.

“The financial crisis which started in the United States is more serious and more global than it was a few weeks ago,” IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said in Paris.

“The risks and dangers are very high. The economic environment is still worsening.”

More industry consolidation and acquisitions may follow after JPMorgan Chase & Co on Sunday said it was buying Bear Stearns for $236 million, or deep discount of $2 a share, a fraction of the $30 price on Friday and record share price of about $172 last year.

“Last evening the Bear Stearns situation reached a crescendo, as JPMorgan agreed to acquire the wounded broker for a token amount of $2 per share,” CreditSights said. “The reality check is that there are many challenged major banks, brokers, thrifts, finance/mortgage companies, and only a handful of bonafide strong U.S. banks.

Rising prices and alleged corruption have sparked recent clashes at bakeries in poorer neighbourhoods, leading to several deaths.

Hosni Mubarak said eradicating bread queues was “imperative”.

The army and interior ministry control numerous bakeries normally used to supply bread for troops and police.

Mr Mubarak issued his order to the army at a meeting of cabinet ministers on Sunday that was called to address the growing crisis, his spokesman said.

“Bread should be provided to the citizens and the lines should disappear,” Suleiman Awwad quoted Mr Mubarak as saying.

The price of wheat has more than tripled on international markets since last summer.

Mr Mubarak has ordered the government to use some foreign reserves to buy additional wheat from the international market, the spokesman said.

Many of Egypt’s 70m population, about half of whom live below the poverty line, survive on subsidised bread.

Gary Pugh, director of forensic sciences at Scotland Yard and the new DNA spokesman for the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo), said a debate was needed on how far Britain should go in identifying potential offenders, given that some experts believe it is possible to identify future offending traits in children as young as five.

‘If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long-term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large,’ said Pugh. ‘You could argue the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won’t. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society.’

Pugh admitted that the deeply controversial suggestion raised issues of parental consent, potential stigmatisation and the role of teachers in identifying future offenders, but said society needed an open, mature discussion on how best to tackle crime before it took place. There are currently 4.5 million genetic samples on the UK database – the largest in Europe – but police believe more are required to reduce crime further. ‘The number of unsolved crimes says we are not sampling enough of the right people,’ Pugh told The Observer. However, he said the notion of universal sampling – everyone being forced to give their genetic samples to the database – is currently prohibited by cost and logistics.