The success of that programme has led to the relaxation of some of the animal's protections. The interior department is working on a plan to take it off the threatened species list, and from early January the wolf packs of Idaho and Montana will no longer be wards of Washington but will instead have to rely on the state authorities to keep their enemies at bay.

Those enemies are almost all human. The success of the reintroduction has led to an outcry among western ranchers that the wolf packs represent a threat to their sheep and cattle. Despite official statistics showing the wolves are responsible for a tiny proportion of livestock deaths, and the fact that ranchers are compensated for any such attacks, hunters in the western states are increasingly taking the law into their own hands, shooting wolves on sight or even venturing into the woods to drop poison meatballs.

Environmentalists question whether western states, which represent their overwhelmingly anti-wolf electorates, will have the political willpower to enforce the wolf's legal protections.

Ranchers can get licences to hunt wolves if they can prove they are killing livestock. From January they will be able to get them from state authorities, rather than having to apply to Washington.

"This is a bad idea," said Rodger Schlickeisen, of the Defenders of Wildlife organisation. "Not least because several key state governments seem caught up in the reflexive hatred of some of the most strident of anti-wolf voices.

"State government antipathy and illegal killings mean that it's especially important to finish the job of wolf restoration, instead of stopping halfway, as the department of the interior intends."

Wyoming, where anti-wolf sentiment runs highest, wants to institute a shoot on sight policy outside its north-western woodlands.

An Idaho man, Tim Sundles, is due in court in the next few weeks for poisoning wolves on federal land in a trial likely to bring emotions to a head. He portrays his trial as a struggle between the individual and an "out-of-control federal agency" - the fish and wildlife service.

Predator profile

US wolf population: (except Alaska)

1994: 200; 2005: about 5,000

Alaska: 7,700-11,200 (estimate)

Attacks: Wolves are believed to have killed a man in Saskatchewan, Canada, last month. If confirmed, it would be the first lethal wolf attack in more than a century.

Sheep deaths caused by wolves: 0.1%

Wolf deaths caused by humans: 90%

Source: International Wolf Centre

Duluth Seaway Facilities Director Jim Sharrow said the problem isn't found in other Great Lakes ports. The new research project will first determine the extent of the problem in the harbor.

"One of the things that we will be trying to do is to map, carefully, the extent of that coverage," Sharrow said. "Is it really as severe in all areas of the harbor? At the Oliver bridge, which is several miles above the navigation channel, we're not seeing this corrosion. We don't know if it has anything to do with shipping or just the other activities of the population around the harbor, or some other thing."

They do know the problem is only in the inner harbor.

"The corrosion is evident on the inside of the Duluth piers, right out to the lake, but not on the outside of the pier structure, where lake water is in contact with the steel," Sharrow said.

The plates are being replaced at the dock of a grain elevator, and along the port entry in Superior, Wis., where ships follow the river channel into and out of the harbor.

"Part of the Superior entry is being replaced by the Corps of Engineers, because of the excessive corrosion," Sharrow said. "Both of those projects are giving us some corroded steel that can be reviewed and analyzed during the study."

The Minnesota Legislature approved $100,000 for the study last summer. In November, Congress approved another $300,000.

Sharrow said the investigators will take a close look at whether something in the harbor water is causing the rust.

"To study the water chemistry, and the condition of the steel pilings of the various docks, as well as the on going corrosion process," Sharrow said. "We also will be studying the rate of corrosion and various possible methods of protecting the steel."

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will lead the study.

Dave Bowman, a Corps project manager in Detroit, said there are many theories about what could be causing the rust, including electrical currents or micro-organisms.

He said he is coming to the problem with an open mind, but he's leaning toward an issue with water quality.

"Main things seem to be the water chemistry; water temperature; or dissolved oxygen content - all those kind of water quality parameters," Bowman said. "So those are something that we can fairly easily look at. You know people have monitored that in the harbor for many years. And, those will be the first things that we look at."

The results could have a significant effect on the Corps' budget.

"The one figure that I saw was over half of the steel sheet pile in the harbor was corps' structures," Bowman said. "So, yeah, we are potentially on the line for tens of millions of dollars."

Officials think they may have some answers within two years.

Impossible? Not necessarily, according to physicists Stephen Hsu and Anthony Zee. No one knows why our universe came into existence. But Hsu and Zee argue that if some superior being or beings did intentionally create it, they might have left an elaborate signature in the cosmic microwave background, the relic radiation of the big bang. And in 20 or 30 years' time, we might finally be able to spot the message, the "word of God" if you like.

"I sometimes wonder what's the most mind-boggling thing that could happen during my lifetime," says Hsu, a particle physicist at the University of Oregon in Eugene. "One of them would be to come into contact with an alien civilisation. But it would be more exciting to find some message from a creator - the implications would be even more profound."

While we don't know what triggered the creation of our universe, there is good evidence that it came into being as a searing hot, expanding fireball some 13.7 billion years ago. During the first split second, the theory goes, it underwent a particularly dramatic expansion, with space ballooning outwards faster than light.

One of the developers of this inflation theory, Andrei Linde of Stanford University in California, has speculated that some techno-wizard in another universe could have provided the initial trigger. Linde's work hints that it might be possible for someone to spawn a universe like ours by compressing a speck of matter to an unimaginably high density, something like 1065 megatonnes per cubic centimetre. That could create a strange state called a false vacuum and trigger catastrophic inflation, with new space and matter exploding into existence from the negative energy of the gravitational field.

No one knows whether that is really possible. But imagine that some being, or beings, did create our universe - and they wanted us to know that. How would they send us a message?

From a religious standpoint at least, there has been no shortage of suggestions. People have proposed, for example, that God might have encoded a message in the genetic sequence of our DNA, or within the striking rock formations of Colorado's Grand Canyon. But would a hypothetical creator leave a message only for humans, and specifically Americans? "That's just chauvinism - as if God would only write His message in the United States," says Zee, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Messages of this kind would also require some inconvenient, last-minute intervention from the creator, who would be hastily scribbling a message into DNA or rock formations billions of years after the big bang. That doesn't make sense, Hsu and Zee argue. The logical thing would be for the creator to send a single, universal message, one that would be visible to every technologically advanced civilisation. That points to one obvious option: the message would lie in the cosmic microwave background.

The microwave background formed when the universe was just 380,000 years old. By this time, the expanding big bang fireball had thinned out enough to become transparent to the photons of light bouncing around inside. So for the first time, light could flood freely through the universe. Today, we can still measure this radiation as microwaves heading in every direction in the sky. The radiation has slight variations in temperature that reflect small density variations of the early universe.

What's special about the microwave background is that it is universal. The expanding universe has swept some distant pockets of space beyond the reach of any man-made telescope, so we cannot see galaxies evolving there. But the microwave background radiation is like ubiquitous cosmic wallpaper with the same mottled pattern, and it is potentially visible to advanced civilisations everywhere. "I think of it like a giant billboard in the sky," says Zee. "Anybody can see it, regardless of whether you have five heads and three eyes, even if your biology is not based on carbon."

Our most accurate measurements of the ripples in the microwave background come from NASA's WMAP satellite, launched in 2001. Its measurements are often plotted to show the temperature difference between pairs of points on the sky versus their angular separation, which creates a curve with series of peaks (see Graph). The signals so far show no sign of any cryptic message. But the error margins are still fairly large, so it does not necessarily mean there isn't one.

Hsu and Zee say that when future, more detailed observations are made - with the error bars reduced by a factor of about 100 - it is possible that a message could come into focus as little lumps and bumps on the curve.

Earlier this year, they calculated how much information such a message could contain (www.arxiv.org/abs/physics/0510102). The amount of information is limited by a slight statistical variation in the microwave background ripples depending on where you live in the universe. Having allowed for that noise, Hsu and Zee calculate that the ripples could encode approximately 100,000 bits of information - enough to relate the entire first scene of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. "That's enough to say something substantive, to say something that no one could deny was a real message," says Hsu.

Except the message is hardly going to be from Shakespeare. So what might it say? Hsu draws a parallel with the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI researchers assume that aliens would reveal their existence by sending a signal that is obviously not random and encodes some natural sequence, like the digits of the number pi. The message would essentially be: "We're here, and we've figured out what you've figured out."

Similarly, the creator of the universe might hallmark His handiwork with a message about universal laws. Hsu speculates that the first part of the message could be a kind of key - a simple statement that is easy to decode. That might be the simplest matrices of the algebra that describes nature's fundamental forces. "They could give out very specific information that all the physicists of all the advanced civilisations would immediately recognise," says Hsu. There would still be room for plenty more information - maybe even telling us something we didn't know, like the route to a "theory of everything".

But how could a creator physically stamp the code on the microwave background? That bit is tricky. Maybe He encoded a message by somehow programming the details of inflation before kick-starting the new cosmos. "The creator would not have to interfere with the universe after the initial moment - it would merely evolve according to physical laws," says Hsu.

Anyway, he argues, someone with technology sophisticated enough to make a new universe would probably also be smart enough to work out how to write a message.

Hsu and Zee know that it's a pretty wacky idea. But then again, it's not impossible. "The ultimate thing, as always with physics, is to do the observations and look," says Hsu. "We should consider everything that is possible and testable, and I think this will be testable within the next 20 to 30 years."

In that time, precise observations of the microwave background could become available from satellites. When they do, Hsu thinks someone might set up a project like SETI@home to look for a possible message. Since 1999, more than 5 million people have downloaded SETI@home programs onto their home computers to analyse signals from the Arecibo radio telescope and look for patterns that might be broadcasts from alien civilisations.

Likewise, your humble home computer might one day trawl the microwave background in search of a divine message. "People could donate their computer time to just beat on the data and see if there are any strange patterns," Hsu says. It's a long shot, maybe, but finding God on your laptop? That beats little green men any day.

Twelve miners had gone into the mine to start their shift when a carbon monoxide monitor sounded an alarm around 5:36 p.m., said Doug Conaway, director of the state Office of Miners' Health Safety and Training. The monitor was located about 10,000 feet inside the mine and about 900 feet underground, he said.

The miners encountered smoke, put on breathing gear and rushed out of the mine, he said, but two were separated from the group. Nine others in another part of the mine also escaped.

The fire came less than three weeks after an explosion at the International Coal Group's Sago Mine in Upshur County killed 12 miners. The disaster's sole survivor, Randal McCloy Jr., 26, remained hospitalized in a light coma Friday.

Gov. Joe Manchin arrived at the scene, and miners' families gathered to wait at the Brightstar Freewill Baptist Church, about a mile away. Four rescue teams were searching the mine, two were on standby and others were traveling to the mine.

There are six miles of tunnels in the section where the fire occurred, according to a map. By 6:30 a.m. Friday, two rescue teams had moved past the fire, which was smoldering, and were trying to reach the mine car the miners took to get into the section.

Air samples from an existing hole near the fire showed elevated levels of carbon monoxide, although not as severe as levels at the Sago mine. At one point, rescue teams were in the mine without breathing gear, Conaway said.

"We're very hopeful," Manchin said. "It's a different scenario. Sago is very fresh in everybody's mind but this is a different scenario."

Haskell Sheppard, 29, works the overnight shift as a repairman on the main conveyor belt that brings the coal out. He said the line where the fire broke out had problems in the past, but nothing as serious as this time. Officials did not know how the fire started.

"Things are bound to tear up every once in a while," he said.

According to the Mine Safety and Health Administration's Web site, the Alma mine received 95 citations from MSHA inspectors during 2005. The most recent were issued on Dec. 20, when the mine was cited with seven violations ranging from controlling coal dust and other combustible materials to its ventilation plan.

The mine was assessed $28,268 in penalties last year and it has paid nearly $13,000.

It has not had a fatal accident since 1995. The mine had a better-than-average accident rate between 2001 and 2004, but it increased last year when 16 workers and one contractor were injured.

The oil painting, by Gustav Klimt, shows his lover, Adele Bloch-Bauer, and has been reproduced in thousands of posters and postcards. It has become a symbol of modern Austria’s commitment to Klimt and his Vienna Secession movement at the turn of the 19th century.

As a result the Austrian Government seemed to be in deep shock yesterday at the prospect of losing a national icon. Elisabeth Gehrer, the Education and Culture Minister, seemed almost to despair when she said that it would be impossible to buy back the five paintings, valued at about $150 million (£85 million). “That would exceed our financial possibilities,” she said. “It would be more than the annual budget for our state museums.”

Adele Bloch-Bauer’s niece, Maria Altmann, approached the Austrian Government seven years ago but claims that she received no reply. “I wanted to solve this peacefully,” she said. She ended up going to court.

The 90-year-old widow, who now lives in Los Angeles, said yesterday that she might consider leaving some of the paintings in Austria. A private benefactor would, however, have to help the Government to make the purchase.

Ms Altmann’s aunt was 26 in 1906 when she was painted by Klimt in gold leaf and oils. When she died in 1925, all five paintings remained in the family. Her will asked her husband to give the paintings to an Austrian gallery but the courts ruled that this was no more than a request. After the Nazis came to power the family was under no obligation to give the paintings to Austria. Adele’s husband fled to Switzerland in 1938 and the paintings were made the property of the Third Reich. Ms Altmann argued that the Holocaust had made a nonsense out of Austria’s claim to be the rightful owner of the paintings.

The four other paintings are less famous: Apfelbaum (Apple Tree), Buchenwald/Birkenwald (Beech Forest/Birch Forest), “Häuser in Unterach am Attersee” (Houses in Unterach on Attersee Lake), as well as a lesser-known portrait of Bloch-Bauer. All, however, form an important part of Klimt’s life work.

The pressure will now mount for the Austrians to settle the ownership of another Klimt painting, Amalie Zuckerkandl. This too is being held by an Austrian state gallery and ownership is being claimed by two contesting Jewish families.

Since 1998, when Austria passed a law on art restitution, complex ownership questions have been plaguing the authorities. The critical questions centre on the price at which the paintings were sold — under Nazi duress — and who bought them. Some galleries have been protesting that they do not have the funds to research the exact ownership history of their paintings.

Similar dilemmas have been surfacing in Germany. There, the original ownership of a painting by the Expressionist Emil Nolde is in dispute. The painting was denounced as degenerate by the Nazis and lost its market value. It was bought cheaply by a Jewish art collector, who later emigrated.

After the war he gave the painting to a German state gallery, which is reluctant to surrender it. Austria and Germany are now both in the grip of these tangled rows that raise not only legal but also artistic and ethical issues.

Police said that Annina Gentilezza had kept her daughter, Giuseppina, now 52, a prisoner in the top-floor council flat at Pescara, on the Adriatic coast. They raided the flat after being tipped off by Signora Gentilezza’s daughter-in-law.

They found Giuseppina curled in a ball in a tiled room measuring 7ft x 9ft containing a lavatory, bidet, sink and washing machine. Wires hung from the ceiling where the light had been disconnected. The room contained a camp bed and plastic dog bowls in which Giuseppina was allegedly fed leftovers.

Police said that instead of being washed Giuseppina was “hosed down” on the balcony. Nicola Zupo, the officer who led the raid, said that Giuseppina was sometimes left out on the balcony as a punishment, especially in the winter, and beaten. She was allowed out once a month with her mother and stepfather, but only to collect her invalidity pension.

Psychiatrists at a local hospital where Giuseppina has been taken said that she was beginning to talk. “She doesn’t want to go back home,” a hospital spokesman said.

Giuseppe De Felice, Signora Gentilezza’s second husband and the father of her two sons, who is also under investigation, denied the allegations: “Those bowls really are for the dog. We never hurt her, she sleeps in her own room, she eats with us and watches television with her mother in the evening.”

The call for urgent reform to the 200-year-old institution of investigating judges was prompted by outrage over the way in which a young magistrate at Outreau, near Boulogne, had detained the thirteen defendants for three years and sent them to trial on flimsy evidence. Another defendant committed suicide in jail.

Judge Fabrice Burgaud, 34, added to the anger yesterday when he insisted that he had nothing to apologise for, and said that he was the victim of “deep injustice”.

President Chirac apologised to the Outreau thirteen last month, when five were acquitted on appeal of raping and abusing children as part of an alleged child-abuse network. Four people remain convicted after the original trial last summer. “I am anxious to offer my regret and apologies for what will always be seen as an unprecedented judicial disaster,” M Chirac wrote in a letter.

On Wednesday, France heard nine hours of emotional testimony by the 13 to a parliamentary inquiry into one of the worst fiascos in a system that has too often punished the innocent, and allowed cases to collapse from delay. France has been repeatedly criticised by the European Court of Human Rights and campaign groups for pre-trial detention that can last up to five years.

The Outreau 13, who include a priest, a court bailiff, a taxi driver and a bakery owner, described how Judge Burgaud tormented and humiliated them to extract confessions. He had ruined their lives, breaking up marriages and families, they said.

The judge rounded them up in 2002 after they were falsely accused by Myriam Badaoui, the woman at the centre of the trial, who, together with her husband and another couple, were the only ones to be convicted. The only other evidence came from confused accounts from Badaoui’s children, who were victims of her abuse.

Odile Marecaux described how Judge Burgaud turned up with 11 police officers and arrested her in front of her small son and daughter for sexually molesting children. Like those of other families in the case, the children were put into care. Alain Marecaux, the bailiff who was arrested, said that under questioning over two years, the judge called him a sodomiser. “First he would insult me. Then he would offer a deal: ‘If you confess, your children will be released.’ ”

The Outreau affair symbolises the failings of a prosecution system that depends, in serious cases, on a single juge d’instruction, or examining judge. “The juge d’instruction must be abolished,” said Renaud Van Ruymbeke, a judge who has investigated a series of financial and political cases. “The judge . . . is at the same time investigator and referee, so he is caught in an intellectual contradiction.”

Robert Badinter, a former Minister of Justice who led the campaign for the abolition of the death penalty in 1981, said that the system of investigating judges was unfair. “The juge d’instruction is expected to be an impossible mixture of (Inspector) Maigret and King Solomon.”

The media joined yesterday in the outcry against the judge and an investigating system which one of the accused described as a shredding machine. Judge Burgaud’s cold zeal was of the kind applied in the terror trials of the French Revolution and in the show trials of Stalin, said France Soir.

“It is unacceptable that no mechanism could halt the judicial machine and this assault on the innocent,” it said.