Several buildings in Ambon, including the main shopping center, the Ambon Plaza, sustained cracks to the walls, but there was no major damage.

"It was so strong that people who were soundly sleeping were awakened," Ambon resident Sulaiman Tuasikal.

Detikcom news portal said the quake also cracked the walls of houses and government buildings in Masohi in Central Maluku, which is closest to the quake epicenter.

Hundreds of Masohi residents had fled to higher ground and refused to return to their homes, fearing a tsunami, it said.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii, which monitors seismic events and their tidal wave-generating potential, put out a bulletin following the quake, but said no tsunami was anticipated.

"A destructive tsunami is not expected from the earthquake," Stuart Weinstein, the center's assistant director, told AFP.

"The quake was very deep. It's 340 kilometers or roughly 220 miles deep. It's so far under the surface that it's not going to cause enough displacement of the sea floor that it'll generate a tsunami," he added.

On December 26, 2004, Indonesia's Aceh province was the hardest hit by the 9.3-magnitude quake off Sumatra that triggered tsunamis which killed more than 220,000 people around the Indian Ocean.

An official with the Jakarta meteorological office said it had recorded the latest quake at 7.3 on the Richter scale.

The tremor was also felt in Tual and Saumlaki, also in the Maluku island chain, as well as in Sorong in Papua province, Kupang in East Nusa Tenggara province and the South Sulawesi provincial capital of Makassar, he told AFP.

A local policeman in Ambon, who declined to be identified, said the quake was "felt very strongly in Ambon and caused many people to flee their homes".

"I ran out of the office along with my colleagues," he told AFP, adding that he was not sure whether there were any casualties or damage.

The sprawling Indonesian archipelago sits on the Pacific "Ring of Fire", where the meeting of continental plates causes high volcanic and seismic activity.

Saturday heavy snow and wind up to 110km/h are expected for the southern part of the central mountain range, the Massif Central; the storm is expected to sweep as far west as the Pyrénées Orientales.

While snowfall while be lighter to the north, the low temperature and high winds will still cause heavy frost through the Aquitaine, Charentes, Limousin, and has far north as southern Brittany.

Snow levels are predicted to reach five to 10 centimetres in most low-lying areas and as much as 30 centimetres above 500 metres.

Temperatures for Saturday morning are forecast from 0 to -5 degrees everywhere except the Côte d'Azur, where the mercury will probably register at least four degrees warmer.

'Orange' is the next to highest alert level indicating the need for extreme vigilance and possible local reaction to specific threats, such as the closing of some roads, the restriction of truck traffic — already in place in the Var, for example — or the opening of emergency shelters for the homeless.

The mayor of Paris already ordered, as of Thursday, the addition of 300 more beds to existing facilities for the homeless.

Drivers are recommended to carry heavy clothes or blankets in their cars to protect themselves in case their car breaks down.

The list of regions falling in the 'orange' alert zone include: Aquitaine, Languedoc-Roussillon, Limousin, Midi-Pyrénées, Poitou-Charentes, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, Ardèche, Cantal, Drôme, Isère, Loire, Haute-Loire, Puy-de-Dôme, Rhône, Saône-et-Loire and the Vaucluse.

The cold snap has already claimed dozens of lives in other European countries, including seven in Germany since last week and 39 in the Ukraine in one mere 24-hour period.

The arrival of truly glacial cold, however, does nothing to calm meteorologists' fears of a dry winter; based on October-December 2005 rainfall, Météo France also warned last week of an even more severe drought for 2006 than that of 2005, which was the driest year for some three decades.

"It just looked like a big old mountain of ice," said L.A. Leavitt, 19, who left his nightshift job at the city to check out the ridges.

Ivus are like frozen tsunamis and crash ashore violently. They have killed hunters and are among the Arctic's most feared natural phenomena.

The ivus crashed ashore Tuesday after strong winds from Russia and eastward currents began pushing pack ice toward Barrow last weekend, said North Slope Borough disaster coordinator Rob Elkins.

By late Monday, thick, old sea ice known as multiyear ice had shoved younger, thinner ice onto shore.

Witnesses here said the northernmost ridge was about 20 feet high and 100 feet long and contained car-size blocks. Ice left a coastal road with only one lane, they said.

"It was just an amazing sight," said Elkins. "It looks like huge stacks of huge ice cubes."

Two days after his Conservative party ended 13 years of Liberal rule, Stephen Harper declared he would keep his campaign promises to step up Canada's military presence in the region, despite opposition from the US and various European countries.

The often edgy relations between Washington and Ottawa had been expected to improve under Mr Harper. But that was anything but the case on Thursday as the Prime Minister-elect used his first post-election press conference to take direct aim at David Wilkins, the US ambassador to Canada, who last week described the North-west Passage as "neutral waters".

Mr Harper was not asked by reporters about the ambassador's comment, but he refused to let it pass unchallenged.

"The United States defends its sovereignty, the Canadian government will defend our sovereignty," he said. "It is the Canadian government we get our mandate from, not the ambassador of the United States."

The assumption here is that Canada's new leader was sending a message that he would be no pushover for Washington.

With global warming steadily melting the passage, the period during which it is navigable is growing year by year, offering access to untapped fish stocks, and a shipping route that shortens the journey between Europe and Asia by almost 2,500 miles.

But climate change also provides new opportunities for smugglers and traffickers. For that reason, Canada's new leadership says, it must assert its sovereignty over the remote area.

Control of the Arctic sea lanes has long been a contentious issue, with the US in particular sending submarines through waters claimed by Canada. During the Cold War - and perhaps even now - British, Russian and French submarines also travelled under the ice. But without the resources to enforce its sovereignty, Ottawa generally turned a blind eye.

That attitude may now be changing. During the campaign, Mr Harper said he would send three armed Canadian Navy icebreakers to the North-west Passage, and build a $1.7bn (£995m) deep-water port in Iqaluit in south-east Baffin Island. The new government also plans a network of underwater "listening posts" to monitor sea traffic.

The US government insists that Mr Wilkins was merely restating a long-standing policy. "We don't recognise Canada's claims ... most other countries do not recognise their claims," he reportedly said.

The research provides a new hypothesis for why certain bird flu viruses are particularly lethal for humans.

Published in today's issue of the journal Science, the research comes as Canada prepares to release an updated pandemic flu plan that includes new infection control and border measures, from strategies to get people to wash their hands and cough into Kleenex, to surveillance systems in airports and emergency rooms to detect the virus's introduction into Canada.

There's no evidence so far that the H5N1 avian flu is transforming into the next human pandemic flu strain, but "we certainly are really increasing our efforts in terms of preparedness," says Dr. Theresa Tam, of the Public Health Agency of Canada.

But a SARS survivor, and infectious disease specialist, says Canada is "nowhere close" to being ready for a pandemic should it happen. Dr. Allison McGeer, of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, says more money and time needs to be spent on looking for new drugs for influenza, which masks will truly protect people, how sick people will be cared for when there aren't enough health-care workers and getting Canadians to agree on "fair and reasonable" distribution of vaccines.

In what is being described as the first large-scale mapping of bird flu viruses, researchers from St. Jude mapped 2,196 bird flu genes culled from ducks, gulls, shorebirds and poultry samples collected over 30 years, looking for patterns and comparing them to human flu bugs.

They also mapped the complete genome for 169 bird flu viruses. The work doubles the amount of genetic information available on avian flu.

The team honed in on a gene called NS 1. After looking at nearly 1,200 bird, human and swine NS 1 proteins, they found a particular feature of that gene which is unique in bird viruses and different from human ones.

In bird viruses, the gene produces a protein that allows the virus to bind to "scaffolding" proteins inside human cells.

"It's like a large number of policemen being held hostage. Society falls apart," says McGeer.

In human viruses, the protein doesn't bind to certain cells, which may explain why they're not as virulent.

It hasn't been proven yet. "But, we think that if you interfere with that many proteins in cells, you're going to have a deleterious consequences," said author Dr. Clayton Naeve of St. Jude.

The finding fits with what doctors on the ground in Asia have seen: The H5N1 virus can attack not just the airways, like regular flu, but multiple organs and systems, including the kidney, liver, spleen and brain. Infection has been fatal in more than half the reported cases, and most cases occur in previously healthy children and young adults.

The H5N1 avian flu sweeping across Asia has this "bird" form of the protein. The milder pandemics of 1957 and 1968 had the "human" one.

The 1918 Spanish flu virus, which scientists now believe came from birds, had a very similar "bird" protein that the researchers believe behaves the same way. The protein could become a key target for the development of vaccines and new anti-flu drugs.

McGeer says the research answers "a big piece of the puzzle.

"Does it tell you H5N1 is going to be the next pandemic? No. What it does is add to our understanding of the evolution of influenza viruses."

Naeve says it is possible that whatever makes H5N1 so pathogenic, or toxic to humans, could persist even if the virus adapts to spread easily from humans to humans, and becomes pandemic.

If or when that happens is anyone's guess. Some virologists believe H5N1 is not going to be the next human pandemic.

The virus, which surfaced in Hong Kong in 1997, has been in contact with humans for eight years "and we haven't seen the required mutation," says Dr. James Mahony, a professor of pathology and molecular medicine at McMaster University.

The 1918 virus, by contrast, jumped from birds to humans and was quickly lethal.

On Thursday, Indonesia reported that a 22-year-old chicken seller infected with the H5N1 virus died, the country's 15th death from bird flu.

China on Wednesday confirmed the country's 10th case of human infection with H5N1, a 29-year-old woman from Chengdu City in the province of Sichuan. It's not known if she was exposed to infected birds.

The virus has infected 152 people in six countries since 2003, killing 84 of them.

At least some species of migratory birds are carrying the virus to new areas along migratory flyways, according to a report presented this week to the WHO's executive board, and the chance the virus will spread to poultry in new areas "is now high."

Health officials in Canada are monitoring the outbreak of bird flu in Turkey, where two people have died. "To date, people are still convinced there is no efficient human to human transmission," says Tam, associate director of the immunization and respiratory infections division at the Public Health Agency of Canada.

But, "we really have no idea how this virus will behave next if it undergoes some mutation."

The updated influenza pandemic plan will include recommendations for the use of masks. Droplets, or larger "blobs" of secretions primarily spread flu. General surgical masks should be enough should a pandemic happen, Tam says.

"Public health experts feel that putting a mask on an ill person when they're coughing or sneezing and have to move around ... is a sensible thing to do.

"Having well people milling about on the streets wearing masks all the time, we don't know if it's effective or not."

The public focus will be on hand hygiene, Tam says.

Researchers in Germany and the United States did just that to develop a mathematical model of human travel that can be used to plot the spread of future pandemics.

"There are some universal rules governing human travel and they can be used to develop a new class of model for the spread of infectious disease," said Dr Dirk Brockmann, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Gottingen, Germany.

Health experts fear the H5N1 bird flu virus that has killed at least 82 people in six countries since 2003 could mutate into a highly infectious strain in humans that could cause the next pandemic.

"We can now plug in the parameter ranges that we think will apply to influenza and then simulate a pandemic that runs through Europe and see what happens," said Brockmann, who reported the findings in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

In addition to giving insights into how an infectious disease would spread, mathematical models and computer simulations could help to develop measures to take against it, he added.

WHERE IS GEORGE?

Human movement is a main cause of the spread of infectious disease but with modern-day travel involving boats, planes, trains, cars and other means of transport it is virtually impossible to compile a comprehensive set of data on travel.

The scientists analyzed information from www.wheresgeorge.com, an online bill-tracking Internet site. Users, most of whom mark their bills with the Web site address, register on the site and follow the trail of their money after they spend it.

About 50 million banknotes have been registered on the site, according to Brockmann.

The information from the site enabled the researchers to develop a mathematical theory of human travel behavior. When they compared their results with traffic flow of aviation networks in the United States, they found it correlated very closely.

"This is a very good estimate of how humans travel," Brockmann said.

"The things that we observed in the United States may also be valid for Europe or Canada. If that is so, we can develop models for the spread of infectious disease that can reveal universal characteristics of modern pandemics," he added.

The researchers – Robert Gordon and Thomas Graedel of Yale University and Marlen Bertram of the Organisation of European Aluminum Refiners – suggest that the environmental and social consequences of metals depletion became clear from studies of metal stocks--in the Earth, in use by people and lost in landfills--instead of tracking the flow of metal through the economy in a given time and region.

"There is a direct relation between requisite stock, standard of living and technology in use at a given time," said Gordon, professor of geology and geophysics. "We offer a different approach to studying use of finite resources--one that is more directly related to environmental concerns than are the discussions found in the economics literature."

Using copper stocks in North America as a starting point, the researchers tracked the evolution of copper mining, use and loss during the 20th century. Then the researchers applied their findings and additional data to an estimate of global demand for copper and other metals if all nations were fully developed and used modern technologies.

According to the study, titled "Metal Stocks and Sustainability," all of the copper in ore, plus all of the copper currently in use, would be required to bring the world to the level of the developed nations for power transmission, construction and other services and products that depend on copper.

For the entire globe, the researchers estimate that 26 percent of extractable copper in the Earth's crust is now lost in non-recycled wastes; for zinc, it is 19 percent. Current prices do not reflect those losses because supplies are still large enough to meet demand, and new methods have helped mines produce material more efficiently.

The study suggests these metals are not at risk of depletion in the immediate future. However, the researchers believe scarce metals, such as platinum, risk depletion in this century because there is no suitable substitute for use in devices such as catalytic converters and hydrogen fuel cells. They also found that, for many metals, the average rate of use per person continues to rise. As a result, the report says, even the more plentiful metals may face similar depletion risks in the future.

"This is looking at recycling on a broader scale," said Cynthia Ekstein, the National Science Foundation (NSF) officer who oversees the Yale award. "This is looking at the metal lifecycle from cradle to grave."