There were fresh fears today that the potentially devastating bluetongue disease was spreading after a fourth case was confirmed.

The virus, often spread by midges, was found in a cow in a farm near Ipswich in Suffolk - close to a farm where the first two cases were discovered. The cow will now be culled. A third case was confirmed yesterday, about 40 miles away, near Lowestoft.

The environment department, Defra, said it was still too soon to say whether there was an outbreak of the disease, which has never previously been found in the UK.

“Cases in single animals don’t constitute an outbreak,” a spokeswoman said.

“We need to determine whether it’s circulating in the midge population.”

Bluetongue, which has been present in northern Europe, may have come to the UK on midges blown across the Channel.

An outbreak, which would trigger new movement restrictions in several counties that have just seen them relaxed after foot and mouth, requires transmission between two native animals.

Plans to restore farm-to-farm movements in Norfolk and Suffolk yesterday were scrapped following the new bluetongue case. Surveillance for bluetongue was yesterday extended to animals in Suffolk, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire.

The disease is spread by infected midges to ruminant animals, such as cows and sheep, but unlike the highly contagious foot and mouth, it cannot spread directly from animal to animal.

Bluetongue, common in the Mediterranean, is difficult to control and has swept across much of northern Europe since its arrival last summer. There is not yet a vaccine against the strain type found in Britain, which experts have confirmed is the same as the disease circulating in northern Europe.

The virus can only be carried by a very small number of midge species. Scientists investigating 3,000 cases across France, Germany and surrounding countries last year identified only a single insect carrying the disease. Meanwhile, restrictions on animal movements across much of the rest of the UK were eased yesterday, as another suspected case of foot and mouth disease in Hampshire was declared a false alarm.

Defra said initial tests showed livestock on a premises near Rogate, West Sussex, did not have the disease, and that the temporary control zone had been lifted. The all-clear means the disease has not been found outside Surrey since the outbreak began in August. The risk of foot and mouth spreading throughout the country is now considered low.

The UN has accepted a request to rename Auschwitz to make it clear that the concentration camp was run by Germans not Poles, the Polish government said today.

“Unesco has made a decision as a result of Poland’s request to change the name of Auschwitz-Birkenau to reflect the historical truth,” the Polish culture minister, Kazimierz Ujazdowski, told a news conference in Warsaw, with the Israeli ambassador at his side. “This is a victory for truth”.

But a spokesman for the Paris-based UN education and culture organisation said he could not confirm the news as he had not received word from Unesco’s world heritage committee, which is meeting in New Zealand.

Last year, Poland announced prematurely that Unesco had made the change on its list of world heritage sites. Auschwitz was added to the list in 1979.

Poland wants Unesco to change the official name of the camp, where more than one million Jews from across Europe were killed by the Nazis, to “former Nazi German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau” to avoid any confusion as to who was in charge.

The Polish government made the request last year after media references to Auschwitz as a Polish concentration camp.

The German newspaper Der Spiegel last year called the camp “Polish”, sparking anger in Warsaw.

Polish officials fear that the link between Auschwitz and Nazi Germany is being lost among younger people.

Auschwitz was established by the Nazis in the suburbs of the city of Oswiecim, that, along with other parts of Poland, was occupied by the Germans during the second world war.

The name Oswiecim was changed to Auschwitz, which also became the name of the camp.

Initially used as a labour camp for Polish prisoners, it was gradually expanded into a vast labour and death camp that became the site of the greatest mass murder in history where Jews, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals, people with disabilities and prisoners of conscience or religious faith were killed.

The request for a name change comes amid tension between Poland and Germany after an ill-tempered EU summit where the two clashed over a new voting system for the 27-member organisation.

A rightwing Polish magazine this week poured fuel on the fire when its cover carried a montage showing a beaming German chancellor Angela Merkel as “Europe’s stepmother” baring her breasts to nourish the Polish prime minister, Jarolaw Kaczynski, and his twin brother, the president, Lech Kaczynski.

WASHINGTON: The U.S. Interior Departments program to collect billions of dollars annually from oil and gas companies that drill on federal lands is troubled by mismanagement, ethical lapses and fears of retaliation against whistle-blowers, the departments chief independent investigator has concluded.

The report, a result of a yearlong investigation, grew out of complaints by four auditors at the agency, who said that senior U.S. administration officials had blocked them from recovering money from oil companies that underpaid the government.

The report stopped short of accusing top agency officials of wrongdoing, concluding that the whistle-blowers were sometimes unaware of other efforts under way to recover the missing money and that they sometimes simply disagreed with top management.

But it offered a sharp description of failures at the Minerals Management Service, the agency within the Interior Department that is responsible for collecting about $10 billion a year in royalties on oil and gas. Many of the issues, including the complaints by whistle-blowers, were initially reported last year by The New York Times.

Prepared by the Interior Departments inspector general, Earl Devaney, the report said that investigators found a “profound failure” in the agencys technology for monitoring oil and gas payments.

It suggested that the agency was too cozy with oil companies and that internal critics had good reason to fear punishment.

“It demonstrates a Band-Aid approach to holding together one of the federal governments largest revenue-producing operations,” Devaney concluded.

In one case, senior officials decided that the agency would impose a “hardship” on oil companies to demand that they calculate the back interest they owed after having been caught underpaying. The agency itself was years behind in billing the companies, because its computers could not perform the calculations.

When asked about this matter by investigators, the agencys associate director, Lucy Querques Denett, responded, “How do you define hardship, just because they have a lot of money?”

The report was the latest result of a long series of investigations into the troubled federal program for collecting oil and gas royalties. Last year, Devaney told a congressional hearing that “short of a crime, anything goes at the highest levels of the Department of the Interior.”

The new report did not try to estimate the amount of money that might have been lost. Early in 2006, officials conceded that the government might lose about $10 billion in revenue over the next decade because of a legal mistake in oil and gas leases that had been ignored for six years.

At issue in the new report are the assertions by the four auditors at the agency, who said that senior officials blocked them from recovering money from more than two dozen companies that underpaid their royalties.

The rebel auditors took the unusual step of filing their own lawsuits against the oil companies under the False Claims Act, a law that allows private citizens to sue companies that have cheated the government and to receive part of any money recovered.

The first of those cases, brought against Anadarko Petroleum by a former auditor named Bobby Maxwell, went to trial in Denver early this year. Maxwell lost his job within a week after his lawsuit became public, in what Interior officials said was a reorganization.

In January, a jury in Denver ruled that Maxwell was correct and that Anadarko had cheated the government of $7.5 million. But the judge in the case reversed the jury on technical grounds.

In their report, the investigators confirmed Maxwells assertions that senior officials in Washington had ordered him to drop the case.

The report said the senior officials disagreed about the cases merits. Maxwells supervisor in Denver supported his view; lawyers in Washington opposed him.

The decision from Washington appeared to perplex the official in charge of reviewing the quality of audit work, who said in a draft report that investigators found that the guidance decision, made by “a senior-level MRM official,” did not contain “documentation to support the management decision.” That comment was excised from the officials final report, the investigators noted.