EU MEASURES

According to the EU regulations, if H5N1 virus is suspected or confirmed in any EU country, the authorities must immediately set up an inner protection zone, surrounded by a surveillance zone andan extra buffer zone.

The sizes of the protection and surveillance zones are the samefor both wild birds and domestic poultry -- 3 km for the inner zone and 10 km for the surveillance zone -- while the buffer zone's size depends on the area's topography.

Within the inner zone, domestic poultry must be slaughtered if the H5N1 strain is suspected or confirmed. In the surveillance zone, poultry must be confined unless traveling to a slaughterhouse, officials said.

The buffer zone is a new measure.

"We are taking the additional precaution of defining high-risk areas to act as a buffer zone between infected areas and unaffected parts of a member state," Philip Tod, European Commission food safety spokesman, told a press briefing in Brussels on Thursday.

"The establishment of these risk areas will help to define a disease-free part of the country, which is obviously good for trade purposes," he said.

On Wednesday, the EU agreed to pay half the costs of national bird flu surveillance programmes, which aim to ensure early detection of any outbreak of the disease in the EU-25, up to a ceiling of 1.96 million euros (2.32 million US dollars).

Countries where the highly pathogenic strain has been detected,or strongly suspected, have in recent weeks set up protection and surveillance zones as a precaution.

In wild birds, all poultry and captive animals must be kept indoors in the event of an outbreak, within both the protection and surveillance zones, with movement within and from the zones restricted. Hunting of wild birds should be banned.

Brussels earlier this week adopted a global ban on imports of untreated feathers, and the new measures passed on Thursday are expected to be put into action in the next few days.

The whole European continent is now in a high state of nervousness, and every country is rushing to make preparations to prevent the spread or outbreak of the disease.

"Everybody is on high alert," one EU expert said on condition of anonymity. "We are working on the assumption that there is a high risk of infection in many areas of Europe."

BIRD FLU SPREADS

In Europe, the presence of H5N1 virus has so far been verified in Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Ukraine and the European part of Russia. Almost all the cases involve migratory wild swans.

On Thursday, Slovenia reported its first bird flu case near theAustrian border. Germany's leading animal health institute also verified two dead swans found on Tuesday were infected with the deadly virus. Another new case was also confirmed in Romania, bringing the affected number to 31 in the country.

"Of course we are worried and we have to get used to the fact that avian flu is now spreading within the European Union," said Zsuzsanna Jakab, head of the EU's Stockholm-based European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

Until now, all the cases in Europe were found on migratory birds, which means the deadly virus has not, or has not been found,to affect poultry and people on the European continent, yet the clock is ticking.

EU officials say the real fear now stems from the expected spring migration from Africa, where Nigeria is having its first bird flu outbreak in the African continent.

H5N1 influenza remains mainly a disease of poultry, and has killed or forced the culling of more than 200 million birds acrossAsia, parts of the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

But it has also infected 169 people, killing 91, and is steadily mutating. If it acquires the ability to easily pass from person to person, it could cause a pandemic that would kill millions. 　

POULTRY INDUSTRY CRISIS

Europe's poultry industry has been hit badly by the arrival of the virus in the European Union. Poultry farmers in Italy complained that chicken meat demand has fallen 70 percent since Saturday when bird flu first hit Europe. They called on the government to abolish tax to help them survive the crisis.

The Lowy Institute for International Policy, an independent Australian think tank, predicted that a pandemic could wipe 4.4 trillion US dollars off global economic output and kill more than 140 million people.

The French food safety agency AFSSA warned on Tuesday of a heightened risk of the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus reaching the country, with one expert warning that it is only a matter of time before it arrives in France.

France's agriculture ministry has already ordered free-range birds in more than half of its 96 mainland departments to be kept in shelters.

Live birds have also been banned from all markets and trade fairs, including at a huge annual agricultural fair in Paris at the end of this month.

European leaders, meanwhile, took urgent new action Wednesday to counter fast-multiplying outbreaks of bird flu, ordering poultry indoors to avoid infection but urging consumers not to panic.

The European Union's executive arm also warned that it expects more cases as warm spring weather brings a seasonal migration of swans and other wild birds carrying the potentially lethal disease.

As Germany became the latest EU country to confirm the lethal H5N1 strain of the disease, EU health experts agreed to ban all imports of untreated feathers to further reduce the "high risk" of the disease spreading.

"Today's decision ... was taken in light of the rapid spread of avian influenza over the past months and the current high risk of the disease spreading further," said the European Commission.

So far, the presence of H5N1 virus — which in its highly pathogenic form can be fatal to humans — has been confirmed in recent days in Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Romania and the European part of Russia.

Preliminary tests have proved positive in Austria, while Croatia, Hungary, Slovenia and Ukraine are investigating suspected cases.

EU health commissioner Marko Kyprianou, attending the two days of talks with health experts from member states, underlined that there is unlikely to be an early end to the cases of bird flu.

"Given that the spring migration will begin soon we will review again the situation to see if there's need for additional methods... We shouldn't be surprised if we have more migratory wild birds with this virus," he said.

"There's no need to panic," he warned. "We have to advise the European public to stay calm... There's no reason not to consume chicken."

The potentially lethal H5N1 strain has killed at least 90 people — almost half those who caught it — mostly in Southeast Asia and China where it first erupted but also in Turkey and northern Iraq.

The big fear in the EU, the world's third biggest exporter of poultry after the United States and Brazil, is that the virus passes from migratory swans to chickens, or other birds in the human food chain.

To head off that risk a number of countries, including Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Sweden, have ordered poultry and tame birds to be kept indoors to avoid contamination.

The avian influenza virus, first reported on Europe's southeastern flanks in early January, re-erupted with a vengeance last week, starting in Italy and Greece. But there are now almost daily reports of cases in a string of European countries.

In Germany, the authorities Wednesday set up the now-standard 10-kilometer surveillance zone around the site where two dead wild swans and one dead hawk were found on the island of Ruegen in the Baltic Sea.

Hours later Hungary confirmed that it had detected the H5-type virus in the bodies of three dead swans in the south of the country.

Further north, a number of dead birds, including swans, were found across Denmark on Tuesday and Wednesday.

As the EU scrambles, some underline that there is basically little it can do to prevent the disease arriving.

"We have absolutely no control over the introduction of the virus by migratory birds that are about to start returning from Africa to Siberia, Scandinavia and Greenland," said French food safety agency panelist Jean Hars.

"It is unavoidable," he told AFP.

Until recently the 25-nation EU has said it is satisfied that the measures taken are sufficient.

But Brussels is closely monitoring the situation and if poultry should become infected, it may call for the culling of all birds and eggs on small holdings or farms.

In addition the European Commission has proposed speeding up the process of clamping down on new outbreaks, by making arrangements automatic rather than on a case-by-case basis.

How can the upbeat views be reconciled with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ payroll jobs data, the extraordinary red ink, and exploding trade deficit? Perhaps the answer is that every economic development, no matter how detrimental, is spun as if it were good news. For example, the worsening US trade deficit is spun as evidence of the fast growth of the US economy: the economy is growing so fast it can’t meet its needs and must rely on imports. Declining household income is spun as an inflation fighter that keeps mortgage interest rates low. Federal budget deficits are spun as letting taxpayers keep and spend more of their own money. Massive layoffs are spun as evidence that change is so rapid that the work force must constantly upgrade skills and re-educate itself.

The denial of economic reality has become an art form. Except for Lou Dobbs, no accurate economic reporting is available in the “mainstream media.”

Occasionally, real information escapes the spin machine. The National Association of Manufacturers, one of outsourcing’s greatest boosters, has just released a report, “US Manufacturing Innovation at Risk,” by economists Joel Popkin and Kathryn Kobe. The economists find that US industry’s investment in research and development is not languishing after all. It just appears to be languishing, because it is rapidly being shifted overseas: “Funds provided for foreign- performed R&D have grown by almost 73 percent between 1999 and 2003, with a 36 percent increase in the number of firms funding foreign R&D.”

US industry is still investing in R&D after all; it is just not hiring Americans to do the R&D. US manufacturers still make things, only less and less in America with American labor. US manufacturers still hire engineers, only they are foreign ones, not American ones.

In other words, everything is fine for US manufacturers. It is just their former American work force that is in the doldrums. As these Americans happen to be customers for US manufacturers, US brand names will gradually lose their US market. US household median income has fallen for the past five years. Consumer demand has been kept alive by consumers’ spending their savings and home equity and going deeper into debt. It is not possible for debt to forever rise faster than income.

When manufacturing moves abroad, engineering follows. R&D follows engineering, and innovation follows R&D. The entire economy drains away. This is why the “new economy” has not materialized to take the place of the lost “old economy.”

The latest technologies go into the newest plants, and those plants are abroad. Innovations take place in new plants as new processes are developed to optimize the efficiency of the new technologies. The skills required to operate new processes call forth investment in education and training. As US manufacturing and R&D move abroad, Indian and Chinese engineering enrollments rise, and US enrollments decline.

The process is a unified whole. It is not possible for a country to lose parts of the process and hold on to other parts. That is why the “new economy” was a hoax from the beginning. As Popkin and Kobe note, new technologies, new manufacturing processes, and new designs take place where things are made. The notion that the US can lose everything else but hold on to innovation is absurd.

Someone needs to tell Congress before they waste yet more borrowed money. In an adjoining column to the NAM report on innovation, the February 6 Manufacturing & Technology News reports that “the US Senate is jumping on board the competitiveness issue.” The Bush regime and the doormat Congress have come together in the belief that the US can keep its edge in science and technology if the federal government spends $9 billion a year to “fund innovative, big-payoff ideas that have the potential to transform the US economy.”

The utter stupidity of the “Protecting America’s Competitive Edge Act” (PACE) is obvious. The tremendous labor cost advantage of doing things abroad will equally apply to any new “big-payoff ideas” as it does to the goods and services currently outsourced. Moreover, US research is open-sourced. It is available to anyone. As the Cox Commission Report made clear, there are a large number of Chinese front companies in the US for the sole purpose of collecting technology. PACE will simply be another US taxpayer subsidy to the rising Asian economies.

The assertion that we hear every day that America is falling behind because it doesn’t produce enough science, mathematics and engineering graduates is a bald-faced lie. The problem is always brought back to education failures in K-12, that is, to more education subsidies. When CEOs say they can’t find American engineers, they mean they cannot find Americans who will work for Chinese or Indian wages. That is what the so-called “shortage” is all about.

I receive a constant stream of emails from unemployed and underemployed engineers with many years of experience and advanced degrees. Many have been out of work for years. They describe the movement of their jobs offshore or their replacement by foreigners brought in on work visas. Many no longer even know American engineers who are employed in the profession. Some are now working in sawmills, others in Home Depot, and others are attempting to eke out a living as consultants. Many describe lost homes, broken marriages, even imprisonment for inability to make child support payments.

Many ask me how economists can be so blind to reality. Here is my answer: Many economists are bought and paid for by outsourcers. Most of the studies claiming to prove that Americans benefit from outsourcing are done by economic consulting firms hired by outsourcers. Or they are done by think tanks or university professors dependent on corporate donors. Or they reflect the ideology of “free market economists” who are committed to the belief that “freedom” is good and always produces good results. Since outsourcing is merely the freedom of property to act in its interest, and since this self-interest is always guided by an invisible hand to the greater welfare of everyone, outsourcing, ipso facto, is good for America. Anyone who doesn’t think so is a fascist who wants to take away the rights of property. Seriously, this is what passes for analysis among “free market economists.”
Economists’ commitment to their “reality” is destroying the ladders of upward mobility that made America the land of opportunity. It is just as destructive as the neocons’ commitment to their “reality” that is driving the US deeper into war in the Middle East.

Fact and analysis no longer play a role. The spun reality in which Americans live is insulated against intelligent perception.

American “manufacturers” are becoming merely marketers of foreign made goods. The CEOs and shareholders have too short a time horizon to understand that once foreigners control the manufacture-design- innovation process, they will bypass American brand names. US companies will simply cease to exist.

Norm Augustine, former CEO of Lockheed Martin, says that even McDonald's jobs are no longer safe. Why pay an error-prone order-taker the minimum wage when McDonald's can have the order transmitted via satellite to a central location and from there to the person preparing the order. McDonald’s experiment with this system to date has cut its error rate by 50% and increased its throughput by 20 percent. Technology lets the orders be taken in India or China at costs below the minimum wage and without the liabilities of US employees.

Americans are giving up their civil liberties because they fear terrorist attacks. All of the terrorists in the world cannot do America the damage it has already suffered from offshore outsourcing.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

First published at www.counterpunch.org

The commotion was caused by a special variety of neutron star known as a magnetar. These fast-spinning, compact stellar corpses -- no larger than a big city -- create intense magnetic fields that trigger explosions. The blast was 100 times more powerful than any other similar eruption witnessed, said David Palmer of Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of several researchers around the world who monitored the event with various telescopes.

"Had this happened within 10 light-years of us, it would have severely damaged our atmosphere and possibly have triggered a mass extinction," said Bryan Gaensler of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

There are no magnetars close enough to worry about, however, Gaensler and two other astronomers told SPACE.com. But the strength of the tempest has them marveling over the dying star's capabilities while also wondering if major species die-offs in the past might have been triggered by stellar explosions.

'Once-in-a-lifetime'

The Sun is a middle-aged star about 8 light-minutes from us. Its tantrums, though cosmically pitiful compared to the magnetar explosion, routinely squish Earth's protective magnetic field and alter our atmosphere, lighting up the night sky with colorful lights called aurora.

Solar storms also alter the shape of Earth's ionosphere, a region of the atmosphere 50 miles (80 kilometers) up where gas is so thin that electrons can be stripped from atoms and molecules -- they are ionized -- and roam free for short periods. Fluctuations in solar radiation cause the ionosphere to expand and contract.

"The gamma rays hit the ionosphere and created more ionization, briefly expanding the ionosphere," said Neil Gehrels, lead scientist for NASA's gamma-ray watching Swift observatory.

Gehrels said in an email interview that the effect was similar to a solar-induced disruption but that the effect was "much smaller than a big solar flare."

Still, scientists were surprised that a magnetar so far away could alter the ionosphere.

"That it can reach out and tap us on the shoulder like this, reminds us that we really are linked to the cosmos," said Phil Wilkinson of IPS Australia, that country's space weather service.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime event," said Rob Fender of Southampton University in the UK. "We have observed an object only 20 kilometers across [12 miles], on the other side of our galaxy, releasing more energy in a tenth of a second than the Sun emits in 100,000 years."

Some researchers have speculated that one or more known mass extinctions hundreds of millions of years ago might have been the result of a similar blast altering Earth's atmosphere. There is no firm data to support the idea, however. But astronomers say the Sun might have been closer to other stars in the past.

A similar blast within 10 light-years of Earth "would destroy the ozone layer," according to a CfA statement, "causing abrupt climate change and mass extinctions due to increased radiation."

The all-clear has been sounded, however.

"None of the known sample [of magnetars] are closer than about 4,000-5,000 light years from us," Gaensler said. "This is a very safe distance."

Cause a mystery

Researchers don't know exactly why the burst was so incredible. The star, named SGR 1806-20, spins once on its axis every 7.5 seconds, and it is surrounded by a magnetic field more powerful than any other object in the universe.

"We may be seeing a massive release of magnetic energy during a 'starquake' on the surface of the object," said Maura McLaughlin of the University of Manchester in the UK.

Another possibility is that the magnetic field more or less snapped in a process scientists call magnetic reconnection.

Gamma rays are the highest form of radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum, which includes X-rays, visible light and radio waves too.

The eruption was also recorded by the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array of radio telescopes, along with other European satellites and telescopes in Australia.

Explosive details

A neutron star is the remnant of a star that was once several times more massive than the Sun. When their nuclear fuel is depleted, they explode as a supernova. The remaining dense core is slightly more massive than the Sun but has a diameter typically no more than 12 miles (20 kilometers).

Millions of neutron stars fill the Milky Way galaxy. A dozen or so are ultra-magnetic neutron stars -- magnetars. The magnetic field around one is about 1,000 trillion gauss, strong enough to strip information from a credit card at a distance halfway to the Moon, scientists say.

Of the known magnetars, four are called soft gamma repeaters, or SGRs, because they flare up randomly and release gamma rays. The flare on SGR 1806-20 unleashed about 10,000 trillion trillion trillion watts of power.

"The next biggest flare ever seen from any soft gamma repeater was peanuts compared to this incredible Dec. 27 event," said Gaensler of the CfA.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft wasn't in the correct position to photograph the storm when it was first detected. Scientists asked amateur astronomers around the globe to confirm that the disturbance was raging in the planet's southern hemisphere.

Those early images provided the first visual confirmation of the storm, which is shown in more detail in later photographs taken by Cassini, say mission scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Researchers say it is the strongest lightning activity they've seen since the spacecraft arrived at the ringed planet.

They don't know what causes the storms, but think the planet's warm interior may play a role.

Cassini is funded by NASA and the European and Italian space agencies.

It was launched in 1997 and took seven years to reach Saturn, where it is exploring the planet and its moons.

To test the idea, psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis of the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and his research team recruited 80 people for decision-making experiments.

In one test, half the participants had to make a purchase decision shortly after being presented with options about the product. The other group had to make the same decision, but they were given puzzles to complete before being asked for their choice.

Both groups went through exercise with simple products with a short list of features and more complex choices with up to 12 conflicting characteristics.

When thinking about the complex choice, participants reported they were happier with their verdict when they were distracted by the puzzle, allowing their unconsious mind to determine the outcome.

The experiment showed the same results among shoppers at a department store who were buying simple items such as kitchenware, or at IKEA, where they were buying furniture.

"Purchases of complex products were viewed more favourably when decisions had been made in the absence of attentive deliberation," the researchers said.

Indeed, a hacker encountered the poem recently, and a copy of it has been circulating on Mac-user Web sites this week.

Apple confirmed Thursday it has included such a warning in its Intel- based computers since it started selling them in January.

The embedded poem reads: "Your karma check for today: There once was a user that whined/his existing OS was so blind/he'd do better to pirate/an OS that ran great/but found his hardware declined./Please don't steal Mac OS!/Really, that's way uncool./(C) Apple Computer, Inc."

Apple also put in a separate hidden message, "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext," in another spot for would-be hackers.

"We can confirm that this text is built into our products," Apple issued in a statement. "Hopefully it, and many other legal warnings, will remind people that they should not steal Mac OS X."

The hacking endeavors are, for now, relegated to a small, technically savvy set, but it underscores a risk Apple faces if a pirated, functional version eventually becomes as accessible and straightforward as installing other software on a computer.

It's a risk that became apparent after Apple decided to make a historic transition to Intel-based chips, the same type that its rivals use in predominant Windows-based PCs. Apple previously relied on Power PC chips from IBM Corp. and Freescale Semiconductor Inc., but this year began switching its computers to the Intel platform.

Various analysts have since hypothesized a worst-case situation in which Apple would lose control of its proprietary Macintosh environment: how its reputedly easy-to-use and elegant operating system would no longer be locked to its computers, a critical revenue pipeline for Apple.

Such scenarios have raised a debate among Apple observers about whether the company should just license its operating system to run on other machines, similar to Microsoft Corp.

But Apple has repeatedly said it will not do that.

Meanwhile, security experts on Thursday identified a new computer worm that specifically targets Mac computers running OS X _ a rarity since most worms target the broader base of PCs with Microsoft's Windows. Experts, however, consider the threat low.