* PROTEST STUDIES
Ways to Up the Revolution
* Puerto Ricans Gain Ear of Washington but Seek Far More
* China Jails Stanford Researcher for Leaks
* U.S. Aide's Arrest on TV
* Submariner solves a polar problem
* Energy: Energy Policy Should Be Refocused in New Year
* Energy: Nuclear Waste to Top Panel's Agenda
* 'The day of reckoning'
Nuke plants running out of space as they wait for Yucca decision
* Senators gear for next round of Yucca battles
* Plans for giant nuclear sculpture are stalled
* Books: "Biohazard" by Ken Alibek
* Books: "Plum Island" : A Novel by Nelson Demille
* Books: NEW WORLD DISORDER, Free Speech vs. Free Trade
* White House Miscalculation Led to Talks Without a Focus
-------- direct action
PROTEST STUDIES
Ways to Up the Revolution
By JOE SHARKEY New York Times December 5, 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/120599protest-tips-text-review.html
Hey-hey! Ho-ho! LBJ has got to go!" The classic syncopated chant from the anti-war movement of the 1960s was borrowed by protesters who took to the streets of Seattle last week during the meeting of the World Trade Organization. But the words were tweaked to fit the multisyllabic objects of a broad new range of outrages, including corporate globalization, automatic teller machine fees, environmental imperialism, coffee-bar gentrification, genetically modified food, endangered turtles, logging, shrimp farming, aggressive landlords and unemployment among Hollywood studio workers.
"Hey-hey! Ho-Ho! WTO has got to go!" was the closest the Seattle demonstrators got to a foot-stomping beat.
It's been a long time since Abbie Hoffman was able to speak volumes against the establishment by publishing a manifesto with the perversely simple title, "Steal this Book." A generation later, courses in "protest studies" are taught by colleges and even high schools. Demonstrations are now firmly supported by academic theory and even boot-camp training.
Perhaps inevitably, political action has moved from the dorm room to the Internet. Here are excerpts from two Web sites that had links to organizers of the Seattle protests.
The Ruckus Society, founded in 1995 in Berkeley, Calif., sponsors camps and seminars to train protesters for environmental and human rights groups. Neatness counts when it comes to dealing with the news media, the Society says on its Web site (www.ruckus.org):
This chapter includes a checklist of what you should do, and when you should do it, to have the best shot at getting your action's message out. But these steps can be for naught if not done with thorough professionalism. Journalists are professional cynics, and if you're sloppy, they will notice it, and it will color their coverage. So go the extra mile; proofread the press release again; make the extra phone call. Never cut corners.
Ruckus says it has trained hundreds of activists in nonviolent civil disobedience, many at rugged camps at more than a dozen rural locations in North America.
Our showcase venue is Action Camp. Through these trainings, we help people learn the skills they need to practice civil disobedience safely and effectively. These trainings contain cerebral elements as well as physical, like classroom-style instruction for action planning, communicating with the media and nonviolent philosophy and practice. Safety and nonviolence are integral themes of each subject taught.
Among the courses taught at the camps:
Basic ropework, belaying, rappelling, knots, harness and hardware. Anchors, hammocks and platforms, jumaring, equipment care and repair. Protest situations such as tree sits, bridge blockades, building climbs, stack climbs, etc. will be illustrated, discussed and practiced.
Blockades: These are, in some regard, the brown bread basics of direct action. Among the subjects we will demonstrate, discuss and practice are: tree sits, tripods, lockboxes, railboxes, barrel blockades, vehicle blockades, water blockades, bridge actions, cattle guard blockades, putting cup blockades, etc. Learn how to lock your head to something. ...
How to Hang Yourself from an Urban Structure: Disclaimer -- This is a basic guideline for how to create the image of a hanged man from a company sign (generally oil companies). Only an EXPERIENCED climber can comprehend and practice this form of direct action, and even then only with extensive training.
Rock-climbers, mountaineers, and activists with the desire but not the experience DO NOT QUALIFY to try this activity. Only people who have years of urban, direct action ... should even consider training for this. You WILL get hurt attempting this without proper training, setting the movement for social justice, environmental security and human rights back in the eyes of the world. A good activist is a living activist.
Nonviolence Works expounds on the theory of modern social activism and provides links to human rights groups. One expert cited on its Web site (www.nonviolenceworks.org) is Gene Sharp, a director of the Albert Einstein Institution in Cambridge, Mass, and author of "The Methods of Nonviolent Action" (1973). In it, he lists 198 techniques for fighting the good fight, including:
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
12. Skywriting and earthwriting
14. Mock awards
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
28. Symbolic sounds
30. Rude gestures
31. "Haunting" officials
35. Humorous skits and pranks
52. Silence
53. Refusing honors
54. Turning One's Back
65. Stay at home
69. Collective disappearance
102. Prisoners strike
144. Stalling and obstruction
148. Mutiny
158. Self-exposure to the elements
162. Sit-in
165. Wade-in
169. Nonviolent air raids
177. Speak-in
In the '60s, protest philosophy was short and sweet. Sharp makes a more expansive argument in "The Importance of Strategic Training in Nonviolent Struggle."
If one wishes to accomplish something, the chances of achieving that goal will be greatest if one uses one's available resources and leverage to maximum effectiveness. That means having a strategic plan which is designed to move from the present (in which the goal is not achieved) to the future (in which it is achieved). Strategy pertains to charting the course of action which makes it most likely to get from the present to a desired situation in the future. This type of thinking and planning, which some individuals undertake for ordinary purposes in daily life, should be undertaken by leaders of social and political movements.
Unfortunately, however, strategic planning is rarely given the attention it deserves with such movements. ...
It's a long way from spring break in Fort Lauderdale, but those immersed in today's no-nonsense protest studies need a holiday trip from time to time, like this one offered by the Ruckus Society:
Alternative Spring Break Action Camp 2000
When: March 2000, exact dates to be announced later.
Where: Florida, exact location to be announced later.
Who: Student activists from all over the United States.
The Ruckus Society, Ozone Action, and Free the Planet have teamed up to co-sponsor the first Alternative Spring Break/Climate Change Action Camp. This ground-breaking training will bring a vanguard of student activists . . . to Florida for a spring break celebration markedly different from the standard fare.
The training is designed to increase the overall effectiveness of student advocacy by providing participants with a new set of technical campaign tactics and strategies, while building stronger ties of cooperation. We will emphasize campaign work that challenges the corporate culture that has laid claim to colleges and universities alike. While our primary focus will be on global warming, the Action Camp will also offer ... skills to tackle a wide array of environmental, human rights, fair-trade, and social justice abuses that are inextricably tied to the "corporatization" of our academic institutions.
-------- puerto rico
Puerto Ricans Gain Ear of Washington but Seek Far More
By FRANCIS X. CLINES New York Times December 5, 1999http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/puertorico-navy.html
Related Articles
President Halts Target Practice by Navy on Puerto Rican Island (Dec. 4, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/early/120499puerto-vieques.html
Navy to Train Off Puerto Rico With Live-Fire Issue Unsettled (Dec. 1, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/early/120199navy-puerto-rico.html
Panel Backs Firing Exercises in Puerto Rico (Oct. 19, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/early/101999puerto-military.html
VIEQUES, Puerto Rico -- Again and again across the decades, the U.S. Marines have stormed ashore here on Yellow Beach in a full rain of firepower and won the vital mock battleground that has been made of the eastern third of this small, lush island.
But not now, and not ever again, according to the resolve of Sen. Ruben Berrios Martinez, the Puerto Rican lawmaker and Independence Party leader who holds the political high ground with a mere pamphleteer's firepower as he keeps the Marines at bay.
In seven months of peaceful uprising set off by the death of a civilian in a wayward bombing run, the senator has led dozens of angry squatters in blocking the prime beachfronts of the amphibious training ground for the U.S. Navy's Atlantic fleet.
Marshaling civil disobedience, the squatters have managed to turn ground zero in the Navy's practice wars into a looming bastion of nationalism in Puerto Rico's long struggle for definition in the shadow of the United States.
"It will be a cumulative triumph," Berrios predicted Friday as he warily patrolled the pristine sands of Yellow Beach and rejected the latest compromise offer by the Clinton administration to gradually return the shell-pocked island of Vieques to the full control of its 9,300 residents.
"But now we are on their radar screen and all this is a big triumph in the struggle for decolonialization," Berrios said, acknowledging that he was amazed at having achieved the full attention of Washington.
The realization that the simmering political power of Puerto Ricans is finally being heeded at the highest levels after centuries of colonial subservience is being celebrated across the main island of Puerto Rico, eight miles to the west, as much as here on this verdant sliver of land that the Navy has used as it pleased since World War II.
"Navy Out!" signs dot the rich kaleidoscopic scene of San Juan as Gov. Pedro Rossello and other Puerto Rican political leaders across the spectrum echo the firmness of Berrios, the San Juan politician who first chose the path of civil disobedience.
Now he and his fellow squatters can grin in their storm-tattered tents at the fact that while he was quickly arrested and roundly condemned by the Puerto Rican Legislature when he took a similar protest course 28 years ago, his action this time was avidly blessed by the legislature as a legitimate and necessary function of lawmaking.
In 1971, Berrios lasted only five days before being imprisoned for three months. "And now, seven months on the beach is a small kind of victory," he said in an interview, citing an array of changed circumstances in the interim.
These include the vast tide of Spanish-Americans now inheriting political power across the United States, he noted, and a growing international realization that if Washington can creatively help Britain clean up its colonial baggage in Northern Ireland, it should also pay attention to the lingering grievances of Puerto Rico in its own sphere.
This point was graphically brought home to many Puerto Ricans last month when the leading European heads of state voted as members of the Socialist International not only to support the Vieques cause but also to choose Berrios as its president.
Surveying his wind-whipped campsite at the foot of the Navy's Vieques observation post, the senator insisted that the simple scene of resistance had the power to revive the independence cause, a minuscule movement eclipsed in the more than four decades since Puerto Rico became a commonwealth of the United States, a status that Puerto Rican voters have favored repeatedly in plebiscites.
"This is a metaphor, a prelude of what is going to happen in Puerto Rico as a whole soon," Berrios said. "Because the United States cannot live with a remnant of 19th-century empire like Puerto Rico. It's not being true to its history nor its future."
The resistance campsites have been growing along with the visits to Vieques by institutional leaders hurrying to catch up with an issue that polls show is engrossing and uniting a large part of the Puerto Rican population. It is one of the few issues on which Puerto Ricans of all political persuasions -- pro-commonwealth, pro-statehood and pro-independence -- seem to be united.
Last week the Roman Catholic hierarchy signaled its own show of force, issuing parish appeals for solidarity behind Vieques even as a Navy battle group led by the aircraft carrier Eisenhower retreated from the training grounds under orders from Washington.
Another campsite squatter, Fernando Martin , a law professor at the University of Puerto Rico who is vice president of the Independence Party, exulted, "The issue of this little island has taken more of President Clinton's time and, I dare say, anxiety than the whole Puerto Rican issue has received from all the presidents from McKinley up to now."
Clinton's latest proposal, to return Vieques to local control within five years, repair the 52-square-mile island with $40 million in aid and have the Navy fire only "inert" ammunition, not live salvos, was rejected by Puerto Rican political leaders as inadequate. Inert rounds would rain down with all the power of "inert" lead bullet heads, islanders warn.
"It is another trick," a fisherman muttered here in Esperanza village amid the usual daily catch of rumors and speculation on the will of Washington. "Clinton is lulling us so they can sneak in federal agents to arrest the squatters," the fisherman insisted at the dockside before setting out for the protest camps on the circuitous choppy water route around the Marines' land sentinels.
At critical turnings along the southeast coast, squatters waved at the passing boat from huts jerry-built from wooden Navy target boards and other detritus of the seven-month standoff. The news media of Puerto Rico, and lately the world, course through the whitecaps to feed a story that has seized the commonwealth.
"There is this overwhelming consensus throughout Puerto Rico that has never existed before," said Robert Rabin, the director of Vieques' El Fortin museum, which is rich in the history of five centuries of foreigners' claims of empire in Puerto Rico.
"This is a historic moment for Puerto Rico," Rabin said of the civil disobedience galvanized by the once unthinkable notion of resisting the claims of the U.S. war machine. "Hundreds of people across the spectrum -- fishermen, housewives, schoolteachers, political leaders -- are united by an issue for the first time."
Various Pentagon officials have insisted that the Vieques war-games theater cannot be duplicated elsewhere and that its loss would result in substandard training for U.S. forces.
But Berrios, 60, a scholar in international law who was educated at Harvard and Oxford universities and Georgetown Law School, cites arguments to the contrary from authorities like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the retiring New York Democrat who trained here as a young sailor and became fascinated then by the power politics of Washington and San Juan.
Berrios even cites the marginal note of sympathy for Vieques from Clinton, leaked by the White House in response to a letter from Berrios. "This is wrong," Clinton jotted in describing the "colonial commonwealth" status of the island.
Here on Yellow Beach, with the guns still safely silenced, Berrios clings to that jotting more than to the latest formal proposal in the administration's effort to solve this one-time backwater problem that now occupies radar screens far beyond the Navy's beachfront observation post.
"Are the planets in alignment?" Berrios wondered with a big smile. He questioned whether Clinton would stand by his personal inclination in the face of Navy complaints and resistance. "If they agree to leave with not one more bomb to fall, we win," Berrios said, snug in his protest camp. "If they arrest us, they lose."
-------- china
China Jails Stanford Researcher for Leaks
New York Times December 5, 1999By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/china-us-spy.html
PALO ALTO, Calif. -- A Stanford University researcher who had been an official in China's missile program has been sentenced to 15 years in a Chinese prison after being convicted of leaking state secrets, Stanford officials said on Friday.
The Stanford president, Gerhard Casper, said the school learned this week that Hua Di, 63, a research associate at the school's Center for International Security and Cooperation, was convicted by a Chinese court of leaking state secrets and sentenced to 15 years in prison. The researcher was arrested a year ago in Beijing while on his first to his homeland in many years.
Hua's family relayed the news of his conviction to Stanford, the school said.
Hua, whom the university said was a former high-ranking official of China's missile program, became an associate at the center in July 1989 and worked on Asian-Pacific issues. He is a a permanent resident of the United States and had plans to become a citizen, his colleagues said.
Shortly before leaving the United States to attend a family funeral in China, Hua underwent surgery for a rare form of male breast cancer and was to have started a chemotherapy program upon his return to Stanford.
A report from a Hong Kong-based human rights group last June said Chinese authorities suspected Hua of leaking missile secrets to the United States military. It said that among the charges against him is that he revealed classified information in a 1992 article about China's ballistic missile program published in an American periodical, International Security.
Hua's arrest was originally kept secret by Stanford University officials, who sought to lobby behind the scenes for a diplomatic solution.
But after the story broke in the Chinese-language news media, the university went public, saying that Hua's research was based on source materials either provided by or approved by Chinese authorities or publicly available.
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright has appealed for his release and asked the United States Embassy in Beijing to take up the case.
-------- russia
U.S. Aide's Arrest on TV
New York Times December 5, 1999By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/russia-arrest.html
MOSCOW -- Russia's domestic security agency took the unusual step Saturday of televising footage of an American diplomat's detention on spying charges.
Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov denied that the diplomat's detention this week was retaliation after the United States detained an American naval officer on charges of spying for Russia since 1994. He said the diplomat, identified by local media as Cheri Leberknight, 33, had been caught "red handed."
The footage showed Ms. Leberknight being held and searched in a Moscow park, then led into what seemed to be a police station.
"You understand I am an American diplomat," she says on the video, taken by the FSB security agency.
"No, we do not yet know," says a voice in the background.
State television said Ms. Leberknight was meeting someone from the Defense Ministry who had revealed secrets for large payments.
-------- britain
Submariner solves a polar problem
Daily Telegraph Sunday 5 December 1999By Macer Hall
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000140326706927&rtmo=02sxbNrq&atmo=02sxbNrq&pg=/et/99/12/5/nsub05.html
A ROYAL Navy rating has developed a mathematical formula, which now bears his name, that has revolutionised navigation for nuclear submarines beneath the polar ice caps.
Paul Batten, a leading operator mechanic, has earned the admiration of the Service's commanders for his solution to the difficulties of negotiating a safe course through the vast, jagged ice formations under arctic regions.
He has had personal congratulations from Geoff Hoon, the Defence Secretary, and from the three most senior admirals in the Navy, who were impressed with his initiative. His formula, now officially named the Batten Method, has become a standard operating procedure for the Navy's fleet of 12 attack nuclear submarines. It also won him first prize in a national competition to find the "idea of the year".
Ldg OM Batten, 32, began pondering the problem during a voyage beneath the North Pole aboard the submarine Trafalgar. He said: "Submariners don't usually worry about a normal dive, but going under ice can be quite nerve-racking. You can see your crew mates getting edgy because they know the vessel can't move up or down into the ice. It's a very strange and dangerous environment. I realised that the method we were using for navigation only gave basic information about the ice features. We could only tell the thickness of the ice directly above the submarine, not what was ahead."
His idea was to use the shadows cast by the ice formations, which can be as big as skyscrapers, to calculate their size and shape. The formula uses information from sonar equipment and trigonometry to produce a three-dimensional map on a lap-top computer. However, exact details of how it works are not being released by the MoD. Ldg OM Batten took three weeks to develop the formula and a further year to adapt it to computer software. His ideas have made underwater charting hundreds of times faster and reduced the risk of collision during polar navigation.
The submariner, who is currently training in electronic engineering at HMS Collingwood, the Navy's weapon engineering and communications school near Portsmouth, said: "My formula works a bit like shining a torch on an Artex ceiling and looking at the shadows. I don't know why nobody thought of it before. Perhaps people were looking for a difficult solution. I always think that the easiest thing works the best. I just wanted an idea to help people out. I never thought of winning awards or getting a formula named after me."
The formula was tested and approved by the Navy's Maritime Warfare Centre before being issued to crews as standard procedure. It was voted idea of the year in a competition run by ideasUK, a networking group for public and private sector organisations whose members include the MoD, British Airways, Marks and Spencer and the Inland Revenue.
The prize, two return tickets to New York aboard Concorde, have led Ldg OM Batten to rethink plans for his wedding next August to Victoria Long, a nurse at the Royal Hospital Haslar in Gosport, Hants. He said: "We were going on honeymoon in Britain but now we've decided to spend it in New York and Boston."
Ldg OM Batten has won several hundred pounds in MoD competitions for his idea but he is not getting any extra pay. He is due to be promoted to petty officer next year. He said: "People have a misconception that if you do something like this you jump up through the ranks, but it is not like that. You still have to go through all the hard work that everybody else does to get promotion."
8 August 1999: Blue submarine will be harder to spot, says Navy
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000140326706927&rtmo=qutxRdd9&atmo=99999du9&pg=/et/99/8/8/navy08.html
8 November 1998: New submarine turns science fiction into fact
http://www.telegraph.co.uk:80/et?ac=000140326706927&rtmo=qutxRdd9&atmo=99999du9&pg=/et/98/11/8/nsub08.html
-------- us alternative energy
Energy: Energy Policy Should Be Refocused in New Year
By Rep. Bruce Vento Roll Call December 5, 1999
Policy Briefing: The Agenda for 2000
http://www.rollcall.com/policybr/pbstory9.html
Today's national energy policy stands in stark contrast to the comprehensive policies enacted 20 years ago. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, our national energy policy debate sparked the furor and passion of every American to the same extent as today's debate on health care reforms.
However, the days of waiting in long lines for gas, shortages of heating oil and a darkened Washington Monument are gone. In their place are lower crude oil prices, the popularity of gas guzzling sports utility vehicles and the explosion of polluting personal recreation vehicles from snowmobiles to jet skis.
Today, our energy policy is driven by personal convenience, not conservation. Profit, cheap gas and the bottom line are the major factors that are considered. The drive to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels has dissipated and been replaced by a drive to get the government out of energy policy.
The effects of this shortsighted policy are all too evident on our lands, air and water, to our health and potentially, in our pocketbook. We are importing more oil than ever before - nearly 50 percent of all oil that we consume. Our health is at risk and our natural resources are being plundered.
The impact of fossil fuels on the environment and on the public's health gives ample evidence that the industrialized world should wean itself from over-reliance on fossil fuels. Although some argue that we lack the "sound science" to irrefutably quantify global warming trends, the fossil fuel-environment connection is apparent and global warming and pollution are increasing.
This century alone, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases have increased 30 percent. The glaciers at Glacier National Park will be nothing but till in 30 years, and this spring we had the report that 1998 was the warmest year of the millennium.
The health effects are also evident. We have all heard the summer warnings for asthmatic children and the elderly to stay inside because of excess air pollutants. One study estimated that 64,000 people in the United States die prematurely from heart and lung disease each year because of particulate air pollution. Among children, air pollutants are associated with an increase in acute respiratory illness.
Unfortunately, the momentum of the early 1980s is being squandered. Both Congress and utilities have reduced spending for electricity research and development.
Congress has done so in its quest to reduce the federal budget, or, some may argue, to stymie "backdoor" attempts to implement the Kyoto Protocol, while utilities streamline for a deregulated environment. If this trend continues, air quality will continue to decline because there is no incentive to upgrade old, operationally cheap coal-fired power plants that are exempt from clean air standards.
The Clean Air Act, although effective in specific areas, has failed to force the nation's oldest, most polluting power plants to conform with modern clean air technology. As a result, 10 percent of the plants burning fossil fuels today release upwards of 50 percent of the pollutants released by power plants.
Nuclear power, once touted as the "clean" energy solution for our nation, has been exposed as a flawed technology leaving a waste legacy that will last millennia. If action is not taken now to store our nation's growing stockpile of nuclear waste, we will face a national crisis in 10 short years when 78 of the nuclear power plants operating in the United States will have no room left to store their nuclear waste.
It is time to refocus our energy policy. This policy should be about more than cheap gas.
It should be about the long-term viability of our natural resources and the physical and economic health of the American public. When we look to the past to develop policies for the future, what has become clear is that Congress has spent too much time addressing the short-term energy needs at the expense of a long-term energy policy that would be less reliant on fossil fuels.
Although industrialized society's reliance on energy will not decrease, Congress has the ability to mitigate its effects by pledging to protect the people and the land in the short-term, and by investing in alternative energy solutions to meet future energy needs for the long-term. To accomplish those goals, Congress should:
End the exploitation of our public lands and natural resources as a quick energy fix. Upholding the primacy of the Clean Water Act over strip mining practices that dump tons of waste in our streams and rivers is a first step. Congress can demonstrate its commitment to reducing this nation's reliance on fossil fuels by permanently protecting a fragment of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain as wilderness.
At best, this area would provide a 51-day supply of oil. But at what cost? The destruction of the last remaining five percent of fragile arctic tundra, the splintering of the 130,000-strong Porcupine River caribou herd and the loss of a 1,000-generation-old Gwich'in Indian culture.
Cut emissions. Air pollution knows no boundaries. It is a global problem that requires international cooperation and a national commitment to protecting the global community.
The first step toward making that commitment a reality occurred in 1997 when the United States and more than 160 other nations signed the Kyoto Protocol. As one of the leading producers of greenhouse gas emissions (20 percent of all emissions), the United States should be a leader in ratifying and implementing this agreement. It's time for Congress to force the utilities to clean up their act by forcing old power plants to comply with the Clean Air Act.
Develop alternative energy sources. The stranglehold of foreign oil can only be broken through conservation and the development of alternative sources. Green power, including biomass, solar and wind, increasingly offer a cost-efficient, clean and viable alternative to fossil fuels. The solar silicon cells manufactured from one ton of sand could produce as much electricity as burning 500,000 tons of coal.
Encourage energy conservation. Energy conservation efforts offer the best hope for businesses and individuals. A simple step of replacing an incandescent light bulb with a compact florescent bulb reduces electric bills by $67 over the life of the bulb and will save 400 pounds of coal from being burned. Holding SUVs, minivans and pickups to the same fuel efficiency standards as cars would save one million barrels of oil every day and would cut U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 240 million tons once the standards are fully phased in.
Although Congress cannot foresee the stability of the energy market, it can and should prepare to develop a clean and efficient energy sector that, if thoughtfully planned, can improve our environment with little harmful effect to the consumer.
Investment in clean air technology, the development of alternative energy sources, the revitalization of our national conservation efforts and a resolution to the nuclear waste storage problem now will lay the foundation for a sound energy policy in the new millennium.
Rep. Bruce Vento (D-Minn.) is a member of the Resources Committee.
-------
Energy: Nuclear Waste to Top Panel's Agenda
By Sen. Frank Murkowski, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Roll Call December 5, 1999 Policy Briefing: The Agenda for 2000
http://www.rollcall.com/
From burying nuclear waste to un-burying Meriwether Lewis, of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition team, the agenda for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee promises to be interesting in the year 2000.
While the nuclear waste bill, S. 1287, has already been sent to the Senate floor, we have a good deal of work remaining to see the measure through to passage. Although Senate support is strong, bipartisan debate is expected to be intense with President Clinton and the Nevada delegation against the proposal.
High-level nuclear waste is stored at 80 sites in 40 states. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act promised to take that waste and store it at a single facility by 1998. Because the government has defaulted on that obligation, the liability to the taxpayer for nonperformance is estimated at between $40 billion and $80 billion.
My bill, S. 1287, would allow the Department of Energy to take title to the waste produced by power-generation facilities in the nation, at the site of the facilities - if the plant owners agree. Eventually, after a facility is licensed for construction, the waste would be removed to a single facility. Billions of dollars have been spent to try to license the facility at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert where hundreds of nuclear blasts took place.
While the administration requested the take-title provision, it is still threatening to veto the bill because the bill supports radiation release standards issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, not the Environmental Protection Agency.
This seems strange when you realize that all nuclear facilities in this nation today are storing waste, if they have it, under NRC regulations. In addition Nevada's own administrative code calls for a standard of exposure that "does not exceed 100 millirems per year." S. 1287 would result in a standard one-quarter of that. EPA's counterproductive proposed regulations would apply a standard designed for tap water to ground water - making the standard unattainable - and the facility unlicensable. This leaves waste stored all around our country in facilities that were not designed for that purpose.
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) has indicated he will bring up the bill early in the new year.
As mentioned, the committee may examine what historians consider to be one of the 10 great historical conundrums of the last 1,000 years: whether Meriwether Lewis, of the famed Lewis and Clark expedition team, committed suicide.
His relatives want to know, and they want to give him a Christian burial. One of the country's top forensic scientists, James Starrs, professor of law at Georgetown University, has petitioned the National Park Service for permission to exhume the explorer from his resting place in the Tennessee hills. He has the support of Lewis' descendants, three state governors and a former Senator named Al Gore (D-Tenn.).
Gov. Meriwether Lewis died under mysterious circumstances on Oct. 11, 1809, at Grinder's Inn, a way station on the Natchez Trace, some 75 miles south of Nashville, Tenn. Many researchers believe it would not have been possible for Lewis to shoot himself twice, as some documents indicate.
His body is believed to be interred there today, below the physical monument that honors him. At the time of his death, Lewis was en route to Washington, D.C., from his post in St. Louis, Mo., where he was serving as Thomas Jefferson's appointed governor general of the Louisiana Territory. The National Park Service has been disinclined to grant the permit to exhume the body. A hearing may be in order to examine this issue.
An important subject on our schedule is my proposed legislation on electric restructuring that was circulated in October. The measure includes repeal of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act and repeal of the Public Utilities Holding Company Act. It includes provisions clarifying the division between federal and state jurisdiction, with states responsible for the retail side and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission responsible for interstate transmission.
The measure protects electric reliability and encourages the creation of regional transmission organizations. After conferring with my committee members over the break, I expect to proceed to hearings. If there is consensus, we will move forward to markup. It also has an eminent domain provision to help address market power and to bring new supplies of power to consumers.
Another measure that needs to be resolved is impact assistance for the states who have outer-continental shelf oil and gas drilling off their shores. The House Resources Committee on Nov. 10 passed a version of this bill, H.R. 1345, by a 37-12 vote. The Senate bill, S. 25, co-sponsored by Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and myself, is still pending in the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Both the House and the Senate measures seek to take a portion of the revenues from outer-continental oil and gas drilling and apply it to impact assistance and conservation programs.
Western Republicans disagree with the federal land acquisition portions of these measures. Yet, the President has been successful every year in acquiring more and more land for conservation and this year was no exception. In the of Interior and Commerce-Justice-State Appropriations measures there is some $657 million for the President's proposed Lands Legacy program. This is about two-thirds of what he asked for ($1.03 billion) in his original budget request. He asked for $413 million in federal land acquisition, and received nearly $412 million. That's more than he would have received under S. 25, as introduced.
It is my hope that we can resolve issues on S. 25 and move forward with a chairman's mark that can provide increased funding for state habitat and wildlife conservation programs and urban parks, while guaranteeing funding to our coastal states for important programs to protect coastal ecosystems, and funding for state-side parks and recreation.
Looking to our future as the century turns, it is time to have hearings on global climate change bills. S. 882, the Murkowski-Hagel-Byrd measure, would create a $2 billion research, development and demonstration program designed to develop and enhance new technology to help stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
This would be a cost-shared partnership with industry to spur innovation and technology. It would also improve the provisions in existing law that promote voluntary reductions in greenhouse gas emission. And, finally, it would establish greater accountability and responsibility for climate change and related matters within the Department of Energy by establishing a statutory Office of Global Climate Change.
In addition, Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) has introduced two bills to require the federal government to focus climate research on sound science, examine the economic effect of climate change alternatives and publish detailed reports on all federal climate change activities.
Another hearing will involve a measure, S. 1608, sponsored by Craig and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), which would stabilize payments to rural counties affected by reductions in timber sales.
Finally, we expect to hold oversight hearings on the President's new proposed roadless area review and the Antiquities Act. Both seem to be measures aimed at evading the normal processes for designating wilderness or monuments. The Antiquities Act allows the President to designate national monument areas without input from the state or its people, and without review under the National Environmental Protection Act. Designating areas as roadless makes them de facto wilderness without designation by Congress. Congressional oversight is called for in this situation.
This is by no means an all-inclusive list of the priorities for the committee in the new year, but it is meant to be a snapshot of what can be expected in the new session in the new millennium.
Sen. Frank Murkowski (R-Alaska) is chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
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'The day of reckoning'
Nuke plants running out of space as they wait for Yucca decision
By Benjamin Grove - grove@lasvegassun.com - Las Vegas Sun December 05, 1999 http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-gov/1999/dec/05/509553588.html
CALVERT CLIFFS COUNTY, Md. -- Fishing boats bob on the steel-blue Chesapeake Bay near this picturesque shore. Surrounding fields are a fading summer green. Forests are awash in red, gold and rust.
White-tailed deer dart into the woods. A bald eagle soars. Sea breezes blow.
This beautiful setting seems a strange place to find one of the nastiest substances on Earth.
But nestled on this former Maryland tobacco farm is the state's only nuclear power plant, where two 850-megawatt nuclear reactors generate electricity for 450,000 households -- and 35 to 40 tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste a year.
The waste at Calvert Cliffs is like any other produced by 103 reactors at 72 plants nationwide: spent uranium fuel rods stored in pools of water inside the plants.
This waste is a sample of the radioactive material bound for permanent storage in Nevada under a current proposal. Calvert Cliffs and the rest of the nation's plants want to store their waste in a single site -- a geologic repository -- inside Yucca Mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
"The plants are running out of space," said Steve Unglesbee, spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's powerful lobbying arm. "The day of reckoning is here."
A glimpse inside Calvert Cliffs offers some insight into the nuclear industry's campaign to make Nevada a nuclear burial ground.
Nuclear power plants in operation since the late 1950s have stored their own waste, mostly in concrete, steel-lined pools of water. But the pools were not designed to store waste forever.
"A safer way to deal with the fuel is to have it in one central location," said Calvert Cliffs spokesman Karl Neddenien. "The Nevada desert is a perfect place where the waste can be carefully supervised and monitored. Everything shows that the American public wants an answer to this problem. They don't want it sitting here."
In 1982 a federal law directed the U.S. Department of Energy to study sites where America could store its nuclear waste for eternity. A 1987 law, sometimes dubbed the "Screw Nevada Bill," made Yucca Mountain the only site under consideration. Today scientists are conducting a battery of tests inside a 5-mile-long tunnel in Yucca to determine the site's suitability.
The DOE now hopes to complete its analysis and recommend Yucca by 2001, then open it by 2010, or in 2007 at the earliest. Trucks and trains eventually would haul 77,000 tons of waste to Nevada from Calvert Cliffs and the nation's 71 other plants, most located east of the Mississippi.
Officials had thought Yucca would be open by Jan. 31, 1998, when the DOE by law was required to take custody of the waste. But the date came and went with Yucca far from finished.
Meanwhile, waste continues to pile up at the nation's power plants, about 36,500 tons so far.
Calvert Cliff's 25-by-108 foot waste storage pool contains about 1,500 bundles of 12-foot-long spent fuel rods stored in underwater racks. The pool was originally designed to hold about 900 bundles but has been "re-racked" to accommodate more.
The fuel rods are submerged in 38 feet of 85-degree water that cools the radioactive rods and insulates them from the world.
The pool is tightly controlled. Technicians remove jewelry, use tethered tools and wear scrubs without pockets or buttons around the water.
"We can't make change for a dollar at the pool," jokes system engineer Scott Hargus.
The rods, full of spent uranium oxide pellets not much bigger than a pencil eraser, were once at the core of the nuclear reactor. The depleted pellets are still highly radioactive after four to six years of nuclear fission, or atom splitting, that produces extreme heat.
Because the waste pool is full, Calvert Cliffs constructed two concrete bunkers to store more waste in a wooded enclave near the plant. Plans call for three more bunkers for a total cost of $43 million.
Spent fuel rods are moved to the outdoor bunkers after seven to 10 years in the pool, when the rods have lost most of their heat and radioactivity.
Three times a year a heavy, slow-moving truck hauls the waste from the pools to the bunkers. The material is still dangerous enough that radiation experts and armed guards, wary of terrorists, plod alongside the truck during the move.
Technicians then slide the casks into slots in the bunker, like bodies on a drawer in a nuclear morgue.
The casks are designed to last decades -- at least 30 years beyond the life of the plant, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Calvert Cliffs is one of 18 plants nationwide that have built expensive storage casks because their waste storage pools are full. Thirty-two more plants will fill their pools in the next five years.
"Consumers are going to pay an additional $5 billion more by 2010 if a central storage facility is not built," Unglesbee said. "By 2015 the cost goes to $7 billion. It is a money-ratepayer issue."
The Prairie Island plant in southeastern Minnesota could one day become the first plant to close due to a waste storage crunch.
"We're faced with the possibility of shutting our plant down in 2007," said nuclear projects manager Scott Northard, of Northern States Power, which operates Prairie Island.
Prairie Island filled its waste pool years ago and will fill 17 steel waste casks outside the plant in the next seven years. Minnesota law prohibits more than 17 outdoor casks, so plant managers are scrambling for options, including U.S. federal court.
Northern States is the lead plaintiff among several plants that filed lawsuits against the DOE because the department didn't take their waste in 1998 as promised.
Plant managers point to their ratepayers. Homeowners nationwide who use nuclear-generated electricity had dumped $15 billion into a fund hoping that Yucca would have been opened by 1998. The Minnesota ratepayers have spent millions more to construct the 17 casks.
Federal courts ruled that the DOE is indeed obligated to take the waste, even with no place to put it. The plants await an award in appeals court.
"We are asserting that the federal government is liable for $1 billion -- with a B -- worth of damages because of a breach of contract," Northard said. "They gave us an ironclad guarantee that they would take the waste by Jan. 31, 1998, which seemed reasonable at the time. You know the rest -- they didn't meet their end of the bargain."
The nuclear industry is now preparing for early next year when the latest version of a nuclear waste bill will be debated in Congress. The bill would allow for waste shipments to be delivered at Yucca as early as 2007.
Nevada's Democratic Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid will argue against the bill. Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, will lead the bill's supporters. Whispering in the ears of all four will be members of a coalition of nuclear interests, including power plant managers, politicians ranging from mayors to state legislators and a number of lobbyists.
"We've been awfully concerned about pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into this national nuclear waste fund to identify, characterize and prepare a high-level disposal site at Yucca Mountain," said Dennis Schornack, a radioactive waste commissioner for Michigan Gov. John Engler. "We've put a lot of money in and not gotten much progress."
Michigan has four nuclear reactors.
"States for the last several years have been trying to get Congress to live up to its obligation to remove nuclear waste," said John Strand of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.
Others working the pro-Yucca circuit include Idaho state lawmaker Jack Barraclough, a retired hydrologist who has studied waste storage.
"Nature never creates an ideal location, but Yucca comes as close as you could find," said Barraclough, who works closely with Sen. Craig on the waste issue. "The Department of Energy and Congress have not held up their obligation. We can solve the waste problem but there doesn't seem to be enough political will to do it."
Augusta, Ga., Mayor Bob Young is another politician who has become active on the issue. He visited Yucca Mountain last summer.
"I heard the people out there in Nye County on their concerns and I understand their concerns," Young said. "But those of us who live in communities where waste is being stored temporarily have concerns, too. We're very confident with the science that has been used to determine Yucca is a suitable site."
The Nuclear Energy Institute likely will continue to take the most visible role in lobbying Congress. The institute pledges to continue lobbying for Yucca until it opens.
"The fuel can be stored safely on site (at power plants), but it gives you an added measure of safety and efficiency to consolidate the fuel in a dry and remote location and get it away from the nation's oceans, lakes, rivers and bays," Unglesbee said. "It makes environmental sense."
Related stories:
Senators gear for next round of Yucca battles 5 Dec. 09:35:01
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-gov/1999/dec/05/509553587.html
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Senators gear for next round of Yucca battles
By Benjamin Grove - grove@lasvegassun.com - Las Vegas Sun December 05, http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-gov/1999/dec/05/509553587.html
WASHINGTON -- The Senate's two leading supporters of storing nuclear waste in Nevada are preparing for fierce battle with Nevada Sens. Richard Bryan and Harry Reid.
Sens. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, want to send the nation's nuclear waste -- eventually 77,000 tons -- to Nevada for permanent storage. Waste now stored at nuclear power plants across the nation would be shipped to Yucca Mountain 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas as early as 2007, according to the latest nuclear waste storage bill.
Craig and Murkowski are gearing up for another debate on the bill to come after Congress resumes Jan. 24. The two will continue to clash with Bryan and Reid, Democrats who are well known for opposing waste storage in Nevada.
"The biggest problem is what to do with the waste and in this country it's a political problem," Craig said. "It's not a scientific problem. It's not an engineering problem. It's purely political -- 'Not In My Back Yard.' "
Murkowski and Craig spoke recently with the Sun in separate interviews. Together they received more than $140,000 from nuclear industry-related political action committees between 1994 and 1998.
"This is something the country has to do," Craig said. "We cannot sit idly by and let nuclear waste pile up across the country."
The waste debate likely could come down to an important issue: Who should set standards for radiation emitted by stored waste at Yucca Mountain? Reid and Bryan advocate the Environmental Protection Agency's standard: 15 millirem per year, with a separate 4 millirem standard for ground water.
Craig and Murkowski prefer the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's standard: 25 millirem.
"What we want is to make sure that the measuring is under a regulation that allows waste to go to Yucca," Murkowski said.
Craig and Murkowski say the EPA standard is so low it could disqualify Yucca as a waste site.
"The EPA has reduced the radiation standard to a drinking water standard that is unreasonable and unrealistic," Craig said. "If anyone sits in front of the TV, you will receive more radiation than is being proposed for Yucca Mountain."
Bryan and Reid say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should not set standards because it has a cozy relationship with power plants.
"(Murkowski and Craig) can't say, 'We don't like what the EPA says.' They can't just pick another agency that agrees with their position," Reid said in a recent interview with the Sun.
The Nevada senators said they were confident 32 other senators would oppose the bill -- enough to sustain a veto, which President Clinton has threatened to use if the bill passes.
"The lynchpin of all of this has always been the presidential veto," Bryan told the Sun.
Craig said the Nevada senators have used "inflammatory rhetoric" in attempts to kill the bill. Both Craig and Murkowski say Nevada's senators are unfairly trying to scare other senators by overstating the dangers of transporting waste. Military waste has been moved around the United States for years without one injury, they argue.
"Clearly, you can move the stuff safely," Murkowski said. He added, "They move it in Europe all the time, by ship, by train, by truck. It can be very easily done."
Craig and Murkowski are upset that Congress has allowed nuclear waste to accumulate for so long at the nation's power plants and at Department of Defense sites.
It's safer, cheaper and more efficient to store the waste in one place, Craig said. Yucca seems the safest place to store it, he said. Scientists have been studying Yucca for years to determine if it's the best location for waste, with no final conclusions.
Murkowski assumed the lead role in advocating Yucca because he is chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, he said. Alaska has no stored nuclear waste.
"I have an obligation to address the oversight and we all have a responsibility to do something with it," Murkowski said. He said Clinton was irresponsible for "ducking" the issue.
"They don't want to have to do it on their watch," Murkowski said. "Our technology created this and we have a responsibility to resolve this. Our bottom line is that we welcome a better solution. This is what Congress decided a long time ago -- long before I got here -- that this is what we would do.'
Craig and Murkowski said they support funding for accelerated transmutation, a process of breaking down waste faster than it would normally decay, but not in lieu of proceeding with Yucca. The government needs to pursue both transmutation technology and permanent waste storage at Yucca, they said.
Craig said senators are likely to debate the nuke waste issue for more than a week in February or March.
"It's been debated quite a bit," Murkowski said. "There's not a lot left to debate. I think the temperament of the senators is that if it isn't us, then it will be those that follow. It won't go away."
-------- us nuc weapons facilities
Plans for giant nuclear sculpture are stalled
The Oregonian 12/05/99 3:04 PM Eastern The Associated Press
http://flash.oregonlive.com/cgi-bin/or_nview.pl?/home1/wire/AP/Stream-Parsed/OREGON_NEWS/o1871_AM_WA--NuclearSculpture
RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) -- Artist Jim Acord's grand plans for a giant monument of the nuclear age at the Hanford nuclear reservation have stalled.
Acord left the Tri-Cities nearly two years ago, after he failed to generate enough support for his vision, and has recently been working in England.
The studio he abandoned is still filled with faded radiation warning signs, sketches, nuclear manuals and random junk.
"He was the starving artist," recalled retired Hanford nuclear engineer Wanda Munn.
She and a few other Tri-City scientists shared Acord's dream of an ambitious Hanford monument that could last thousands of years.
His patrons formed a small nonprofit group to buy an old auto body shop and its half-acre compound for $45,000 in 1991 to be the artist's studio.
The monument was supposed to cover 10 to 20 acres of the Hanford nuclear reservation's 560 square miles. Huge stone slabs and unused rodlike nuclear fuel assemblies were to be erected on a scale exceeding England's Stonehenge.
Hanford was created by the Manhattan Project to make plutonium for nuclear weapons, and now contains a huge volume of radioactive waste.
Acord's plans included scenes of Marie and Pierre Curie discovering radium, and the mushrooming cloud of the first atomic bomb.
But Munn last saw Acord in February 1998, shortly before he went to England for a conference.
That he hasn't returned should be no surprise. Acord, who grew up in Seattle, lived much of his 55 years as a Bohemian hobo.
Munn first met Acord in the mid-1980s when she and a few other Tri-Citians protested at a Seattle art show.
At the time, Hanford was vilified as a nuclear "bomb factory." Fed up with west-side contempt for anything nuclear, some Hanford scientists decided to picket the gallery's anti-nuclear show.
Acord walked out and invited the Tri-Citians inside.
"Jim defused the situation and got us talking to each other," Munn recalled. The engineers and artists talked about their philosophies and found they saw beauty in much the same way.
"Both physics and art are the search for truth," said Seattle sculptor Peter Bevis.
Such thoughts drew Acord to Hanford. In 1989, he and wife Margaret Morrisey moved to Richland.
He tried in vain to persuade the Department of Energy to donate land. A Northwest quarry donated two huge slabs of granite. His ideas fascinated people, and he became a popular traveling lecturer.
And there the dream stalled.
Acord's wife, a painter, was used to living among Seattle's metropolitan art community. She hated Richland and they divorced.
Tight on cash, Acord moved into the body shop. He left periodically to earn money stonecarving in Seattle, welding in Alaska or lecturing before any group that would listen.
Depression gnawed at him. His electricity was turned off. He spent cold winters in the unheated shop, reading by candlelight, sleeping on top of a work bench.
In Nottingham, England, Acord has been artist-in-residence at the physics department of Imperial College. College officials approached Acord about being their first artist-in-residence in March 1998, when he spoke at a conference in London.
Acord says his Hanford concept may have been too complicated.
"The whole scale of Hanford is overwhelming. ... I probably should have taken a smaller, more bite-sized chunk."
His tenure at Imperial College has just ended. He does not know if he will stay in England. But Acord's Hanford vision remains.
"Not a day goes by that I don't think about the studio (in Richland). But I can't think of any way to make it work over there. I'm stumped," he said.
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Biohazard
by Ken Alibek Search Amazon for other books by or about Ken Alibek.
Rating: ... "Outstanding." Reviewed by: David Smillie
http://www.bookideas.com/reviews/science/biohazard.htm
Full Title: Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World.
Chilling.
Disturbing.
Creepy.
Those are just a few of the words that came to mind while I was reading Biohazard by Ken Alibeck. And that surprised me. I tend to be a bit blasé about the risk of biological weapons, perhaps because so often we hear from people who don't know what they're talking about.
And that certainly can't be said of Ken Alibeck. You see, until recently Alibeck was known as Kanatjan Alibekov ... the deputy director of the Soviet Union's germ warfare projects. To read him casually discussing the procedures they used to grow up tonnes of anthrax spores, or how they tested various lethal brews on monkeys staked to a deserted island is truly chilling.
Alibeck (with an assist from Stephen Handelman) does an excellent job on a book that is half biography and half germ warfare explanation. It's meticulous in its details, and on occasion, surprisingly funny. Anyone who doubts whether or not Iraq had a germ warfare program should read Alibek's account of how he tried to cover up his own country's program. The exact same tricks are being used today that were used a decade ago in the USSR.
The book's style is eminently readable ... nothing spectacular, but in this case it's clearly the content that drives the book forward. The litany of dark projects Alibek worked on ... and the impact it could have had on human life had they ever been used is truly disturbing. And for me, even more so. I can easily see how I, as a young molecular biologist, could easily have gone down the same road, had I lived in a different time, a different place.
And while Alibek's tale of past projects is truly dark, it's nothing compared to his warning about the present. At the end of his book, he relates how he's been approached on several occasions by foreign governments to lend them his expertise. And he also relates how many of his former co-workers have ended up in countries like North Korea and Iraq.
Ultimately, Biohazard isn't a great book. The style is a bit uneven at times, but as it's such a fascinating first-person account of a very dark part of our past, it's definitely worth a read. And as the risk from biological weapons will probably only increase, it's information you should know.
--
Plum Island : A Novel
by Nelson Demille
Takes you to top secret biological research facility in Long Island. Effective analysis of the dangers, makes you wonder how much of the fiction is truth.
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NEW WORLD DISORDER
Free Speech vs. Free Trade
By TIMOTHY EGAN New York Times December 5, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/120599wto-seattle-review.html
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White House Miscalculation Led to Talks Without a Focus
NEWS ANALYSIS / THE SHIPWRECK IN SEATTLE
By DAVID E. SANGER New York Times December 4, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/120599wto-assess.html
Related Article
The Overview: Seattle Talks on Trade End With Stinging Blow to U.S.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/120599wto-talks.html
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Saying No to W.T.O.
By MICHAEL KAZIN New York Times December 5, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/oped/05kazi.html
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Seattle Talks on Trade End With Stinging Blow to U.S.
By JOSEPH KAHN and DAVID E. SANGER New York Times December 5, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/120599wto-talks.html