Nagin also promised that New Orleans will be a "chocolate" city again. Many of the city's black neighborhoods were heavily damaged by Katrina.

"It's time for us to come together. It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans _ the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans," the mayor said. "This city will be a majority African American city. It's the way God wants it to be. You can't have New Orleans no other way. It wouldn't be New Orleans."

Nagin described an imaginary conversation with King, the late civil rights leader.

"I said, `What is it going to take for us to move on and live your dream and make it a reality?' He said, `I don't think that we need to pay attention any more as much about other folks and racists on the other side.' He said, `The thing we need to focus on as a community - black folks I'm talking about - is ourselves.'"

Nagin said he also asked: "Why is black-on-black crime such an issue? Why do our young men hate each other so much that they look their brother in the face and they will take a gun and kill him in cold blood?"

The reply, Nagin said, was: "We as a people need to fix ourselves first."

Nagin also said King would have been dismayed with black leaders who are "most of the time tearing each other down publicly for the delight of many."

A day earlier, gunfire erupted at a parade to commemorate King's birthday. Three people were wounded in the daylight shooting amid a throng of mostly black spectators, but police said there were no immediate suspects or witnesses.

“The 20th century was all about the origin of matter and the universe, so it seemed useful to go to space and the Moon,” the project’s director general, Asahiko Taira, told The Times. “There were extraordinary advances and we learnt about atoms and the Big Bang. The 21st century is about the fundamental question of where life comes from.”

The ship will also be conducting research into the origin of earthquakes. By sinking sensors beneath the Earth’s crust scientists aboard the Chikyu want to provide Japan and East Asia with the first effective earthquake prediction system.

The theory behind the life sciences side of the research is that life may have originated beneath the Earth’s crust at temperatures and pressures unknown on land or sea. The energy that provoked the first semblance of life may also have been geothermal rather than solar.

Samples of mantle that have been pushed to the Earth’s surface over thousands of years have been studied by scientists but nobody has ever seen a “living” slice or had the opportunity to see whatever micro-organisms may be living there.

“This planet is home and we know so little about what is going on just a relatively little distance below our feet. If the secret of life exists to be seen, it is in the deep somewhere,” Dr Taira said.

After completing the training missions that begin today, the ship, which cost about £350 million to build and will cost another £50 million for every year it is drilling, will head to the Nankai Trough, 200 kilometres off the coast of Nagoya, where the sea-bed is 2.5 kilometres below the surface.

The mission of discovery is not restricted to biology. Physical samples of the mantle are also expected to deliver a rich trove of seismological, volcanic, geological, environmental and climatological information. The reason the Japanese project offers the prospect of such important scientific discoveries is not depth alone.

The now-abandoned Russian Kola Well bored nearly 12 kilometres into the Earth, but contributed virtually nothing to science because its entire depth was all in the crust. The Japanese project will be the first to reach the entirely unsurveyed environment of the mantle — the next layer of depth within the Earth — and will do so by exploiting that the Japanese archipelago lies near to a site where main tectonic plates overlap, making it an area where the Earth’s crust is thinner.

By boring beneath the seabed the scientists will take advantage that the Mohorovicic Discontinuity (the point where the crust officially becomes the mantle) is nearer than it is on land.

Although the international project has the financial and scientific involvement of the US, South Korea, several European countries and China, it is led by the Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Technology and is heavily funded by the Japanese taxpayer. The cost can be justified because of what the Chikyu may find about the origins of earthquakes.

By drilling to record-breaking depths below areas where tectonic plates overlap, the ship may have its sensors in place as an earthquake begins and significantly advance the science of seismology.

Other areas of research include using deep rock samples to construct a better picture of Earth’s environmental history, particularly in the areas under ice caps, which may offer clues to the baffling question of why the polarity of the planet’s magnetic field has repeatedly switched.

The project’s chief engineer, Kiyotaka Yamamoto, said: “We will be drilling at possible temperatures of 200C (392F), pressures at which we make industrial diamonds and through rock that even the oil industry has never scratched. Of course there will be failures before we get down there, but this is Japan’s Apollo mission.”

A DRILL TOO FAR

- In 1957 the American scientist Walter Munk proposed drilling through to the Earth’s mantle to find out more about the Earth’s origins

- Drilling began in March 1961 off the coast of Guadalupe in Mexico, using a former oil drillship. Five holes were drilled in the sea bed 3,500m below sea level, the deepest reaching 183m into the crust

- The second phase of the project, which would have continued drilling towards the mantle, was abandoned by Congress as too expensive

"Europe in particular ought to step up in this type of risk management," said Samuel Jutzi, head of the animal production and health division at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome.

European nations, he said, should consider requiring arriving travelers to fill out forms detailing their travel history and the agricultural products in their possession, as has long been the policy when entering the United States. Jutzi noted that some of those products, such as feathers and chicken parts, might introduce the bird flu virus H5N1 into countries where it is not yet present.

There are 80 flights a day into Frankfurt alone from countries now affected by bird flu, for example, and passengers are largely unscreened, Jutzi said. When the German authorities carried out spot checks on 300 flights over a three-month period at the end last year, they confiscated 9.5 tons "of items that should not have been brought in," he said.

As the World Bank prepared to convene a meeting of international donors in Beijing on Tuesday to solicit more than $1 billion to fight bird flu, officials here stressed that human commerce must be better monitored and controlled. While they acknowledged the Turkish claim that the country was vulnerable because it is at a crossroads of wild bird migration routes, they said that was only part of the story.

"It's very easy to blame bird migration, because then no one's responsible," said Juan Lubroth, a senior UN scientist who has spent the last week in Turkey investigating the outbreaks there. "Migrating birds may introduce the virus into an area, but it is human activity that spreads it."

Jutzi said there was "no reason to believe that the virus in eastern Turkey had not already passed the border into neighboring countries," and researchers would be sent to investigate that possibility. The remote towns of eastern Turkey most affected by bird flu in recent weeks are on trade routes into Iran and Armenia and other nearby countries should be aware as well. "Syria is at risk, Bulgaria is at risk," Jutzi said.

In Turkey, Lubroth said, the simultaneous outbreaks in distant regions of the country may have been caused in part by the practice of commercial poultry farms sending huge truckloads of old and unproductive hens to the countryside to sell to poor farmers, potentially seeding outbreaks if even one of those birds was ill. "That practice has come to a standstill," he said.

Twenty people in Turkey, all of whom had close contact with sick birds, have been confirmed as infected over the past two weeks and four of them have died. The most recent victim was a 12-year-old girl, Fatma Ozcan, who initially tested negative for the disease. She died Sunday and it was determined Monday that she had the virus.

In Southeast Asia, where bird flu first appeared in 1997, there have been about 140 cases over a period of three years. Jutzi said that Turkey's colder temperatures might allow the virus to live longer and give humans a greater chance of becoming infected.

There are now 19 confirmed outbreaks of bird flu in Turkey and the government announced Monday that it was culling birds in 29 provinces where flu was "confirmed or suspected."

Lubroth suggested there might well be more to come. "As we are now combing the countryside to identify new outbreaks, we will see if this is the tip of the iceberg," he said.

All of the deaths in Turkey have occurred in the eastern city of Dogubayazit - 40 kilometers, or 25 miles, from Iran. Truckloads of old hens from other parts of Turkey arrived regularly in Dogubayazit until about three weeks ago, residents said.

The H5N1 virus does not readily spread from animal to man, and there is no evidence at all of human to human transmission. But scientists are worried that the virus might acquire that ability and precipitate a pandemic.

Lubroth praised Turkey's current "response and transparency," noting that over the weekend Ankara had created a special commission to fight the disease and recruited provincial governors into the fight, a move that made the army available for control efforts. In the last week, 760,000 birds have been killed to contain the disease, the government announced Monday.

In its early stages, flu outbreaks can be contained by culling all birds and restricting animal movements in an out of the affected areas.

But Lubroth said that lack of funds was a major impediment to containing disease. He said the government still had a chance to prevent the virus from becoming permanently entrenched, "if the Turkish government has enough resources," he said.

To that end, officials here expressed hope that far more money would be available after the Beijing conference. "The international community will finally come up with the funding to fight this disease," Jutzi said.

With the lethal virus now raging at the threshold of Europe, officials from half of the world's nations gathered in Beijing for a two-day meeting aimed at raising 1.5 billion dollars to help fight the disease.

The Turkish health ministry identified the new case of H5N1 infection as a child from the remote eastern town of Dogubeyazit, near the border with Iran, from where the four dead also hailed.

The child, whose details were not released, was in intensive care in a hospital in the eastern city of Erzurum.

Meanwhile, in Van, further east, five-year-old Muhammed Ozcan, the brother of one of the four victims, was reported in deteriorating condition.

"The infection in his lungs advanced a bit more last night," Huseyin Avni Sahin, the chief physician of the Van hospital, told AFP by telephone on Tuesday. "His condition is now worse than yesterday."

The boy, described as the gravest case so far among the H5N1 carriers under treatment, did not require an artifical respirator yet, he said.

The disease has killed four teenagers in Turkey since January 1, including the boy's sister, all of whom were in close contact with sick birds that their impoverished families bred in backyards.

The 16-year-old Fatma Ozcan died Sunday, about two weeks after she and her brother slaughtered a sick duck for food.

The other three victims -- a brother and two sisters -- perished earlier this month, becoming the first human fatalities of the virus outside its origins in Asia.

Sahin said late diagnosis and treatment were likely a "primary factor in fatality cases".

The four dead adolescents were brought to the hospital days after they began showing the symptoms of the disease, doctors said.

Days before Fatma Ozcan perished, she was shown on television, sitting visibly sick on a hospital bench in Dogubeyazit, as her father argued with a doctor against sending the two children to a larger hospital.

The impoverished man agreed to send the children to Van only after he was persuaded that he would not be charged for their treatment.

The government has told villagers to halt backyard breeding, blamed for most of the human H5N1 infections in Turkey, a vast country which lies on the routes of migratory birds who are believed to be spreading the virus.

Officials said 932,000 birds had been slaughtered as of Monday afternoon, since the outbreak started late December in an area near Dogubeyazit.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan renewed warnings Tuesday over the dangers of backyard breeding and said the government was stepping up efforts to increase the people's awareness.

"Turkey's struggle against the disease has been successful so far and the current situation is not of a dimension that should cause citizens to worry," Erdogan said.

The virus has reached birds in the center and west of Turkey, including the capital Ankara, a touristic region on the Aegean coast, and the country's biggest city, Istanbul.

Scientists fear that the more the virus spreads, the greater the chance H5N1 will mutate into a form that is easily transmissible between humans, possibly sparking a global pandemic that could claim tens of millions of lives.

Turkish Agriculture Minister Mehdi Eker stressed the need for greater international cooperation in fighting the disease.

He complained that some countries, including neighbors of Turkey, were hiding the presence of the virus on their soil.

"This is a global problem... Countries with non-transparent regimes in particular are hiding the disease," Eker told NTV television Monday, ahead of his departure to China to attend the international bird flu gathering.

"Some countries around us, where we know that the disease exists, do not officially acknowledge that, either," he said.

Since reappearing in Southeast Asia in 2003, the virus has killed about 80 people and infected some 150 in six countries, according to a World Health Organization toll. Most the dead are in Vietnam.

Electricity monopoly RAO Unified Energy System of Russia said Tuesday that the sharp drop in temperature had caused no supply disruptions in Moscow. But NTV television reported that power was cut off to nearly 30 towns and villages in Ryazan region southwest of Moscow, and that there were also problems in the Volga River region of Samara.

Chief executive Anatoly Chubais has threatened to reduce supplies to nonessential points if temperatures stay below minus-25 C (minus-13 F) for three days or more. NTV reported that in Moscow, the first items to be shut off if necessary would be electric-lit advertising billboards.

The national meteorological office RosHydroMet has forecast the current cold front to keep temperatures at or below present levels at least until Friday.

Russian media reported that police were under orders to make an exception to their usual practice of evicting homeless people from the subway, building entrances and other shelters.

The Interfax news agency reported that 107 people had died of exposure in Moscow since October.

Prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into alleged negligence by prison officials in the Russian Far East village of Takhtamygda, where the heating system broke down and the more than 800 inmates had to use makeshift wood-burning stoves to keep warm for more than a week, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported Tuesday.

Investigators said prison officials had failed to obey instructions to keep a backup pump engine for the heating plant.

They reported that this unusual electrical activity, linked to the welcome thunderstorms and rain in recent days, was viewed above the clouds from TAU's Wise Observatory at Mitzpe Ramon on the nights of January 13 and 14. The figures look like jellyfish, carrot tops or giant bagel-shaped coins of light with a hole in the center.

Dr. Yoav Ya'ir of the Open University and Prof. Colin Price of TAU used special cameras that scanned the skies above the thunderstorms that occurred over Tel Aviv, Haifa and the Mediterranean Sea as far as Cyprus - between 250 and 400 kilometers from the Negev observatory. A special program identified the short-lived flashes that the naked eye can only extremely rarely pick up because they are so short-lived and occur above the cloud cover during thunderstorms.

It was the first time such a phenomenon has been seen over Israel and only the second time in the world - after Japan - during winter storms. Elsewhere in the world, such "sprites" and "elves" have been observed only during summer storms.

The Israeli researchers are focusing on identifying the meteorological conditions that cause these phenomena and their influence on the upper atmosphere and its chemical and physical processes. The research is being conducted with cooperation from scientists around the world, with data on the lightning that causes "sprites" and "elves" received by ground stations in Hungary, Antarctica, the US and Japan. This data has helped the Israelis locate the flashes.

The researchers also intend to coordinate their observations with a Taiwanese satellite that is scanning the upper atmosphere as part of its research into the phenomenon.