-------- China
U.S.-China Trade Pact Has Potential to Harm Us
our desire to open that market must not blind us to the realities of the rleationship.
Los Angeles Times
Sunday, January 2, 2000
http://www.latimes.com/editions/ventura/comment/20000102/t000000424.html
By ELTON GALLEGLY
Sometime this year, Congress will vote on whether to extend permanent most-favored-nation status to China. It is a vote tied to China's entry into the World Trade Organization and the only vote Congress has on this momentous agreement.
On one hand, China is a potential boom market for our industries, particularly agriculture. Bringing China into the WTO has the potential to make the Port of Hueneme an even more important portal for Pacific Rim trade. With 20% of the world's population, China is an appealing market. It behooves us to work diligently and intelligently to open it to U.S. sellers.
The other hand carries many pitfalls. China's track record in meeting its obligations under international agreements is not good. China is the only remaining Communist superpower. It has stolen our nuclear secrets and threatens stability in Asia with its belligerence toward Taiwan and others. We ignore that reality at our own peril.
In July, I voted against a one-year extension of China's most-favored-nation status based on two criteria:
* The United States maintains a multibillion-dollar trade deficit with China and has for years.
* China has repeatedly demonstrated an aggressive military stance that includes stealing our most important nuclear secrets. I am not automatically against China's entry into the World Trade Organization but I do have serious concerns. WTO membership carries more protection for the United States than does most-favored-nation status. Most favored nation is a one-way street. It's a unilateral decision on our part to allow China access to our markets with no reciprocal opening on China's behalf. WTO is, at least theoretically, a two-way street. China must meet and maintain certain open-door criteria to remain in the WTO.
Our trade with China historically has been a one-way street. In 1990, our trade deficit with China was $10.4 billion. By 1998, it had climbed to $56.9 billion. In 1999, it is estimated to have been $66.4 billion. China's entry into WTO could ease that deficit but only if the agreement has teeth.
In 1992, China and the U.S. signed a bilateral memorandum of understanding on trade access. China has violated it more than six times.
In 1992, we also struck a deal with China to protect intellectual property, including copyrights on U.S. products.
Today, more than 90% of U.S. copyrights for motion pictures and software in China continue to be stolen by Chinese companies, resulting in the loss of billions of dollars and many thousands of American jobs. Chinese noncompliance has forced us to threaten trade sanctions several times. On the national security front, China was continuing a systematic raid on the designs of our most sophisticated thermonuclear weapons at the same time it was modernizing and pretending to normalize relations with the U.S. Among the stolen designs was information on the neutron bomb, which to date no nation has opted to deploy and, one hopes, none will. Even though China has been caught red-handed, it continues to deny its espionage. Meanwhile, it showcases its belligerence by transferring sensitive missile technology to North Korea and by repeatedly threatening to attack Taiwan.
The U.S.-China agreement can have positive consequences for the U.S., China and, indeed, the entire world. If written well, the agreement would force China to open its markets to U.S. goods and services, which would lower the trade deficit. It could wean China from its passion for subsidies and government interference in its industries. It could educate the Chinese on the rule of law, as opposed to its current system of rule by the whim of its leaders. It could also hasten the spread of democracy within China's borders. Each time a country has opened its economic markets, an open market of ideas has followed.
But we must step carefully. We must not let our desire to access China's markets blind us to China's distaste for democracy, its threat to our national security and its history of violating international laws and agreements. For the WTO agreement to work, it must level the playing field for U.S. exporters and be fully enforceable. Anything less will not open China's markets or advance the historical trend toward truly free trade and the rule of law.
U.S. Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) represents most of Ventura County.
-------- india / pakistan
Indian Cites Pakistan Hijack Link
By Hema Shukla
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, Jan. 2, 2000; 3:22 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000102/aponline152250_000.htm
NEW DELHI, India -- India's top security adviser on Sunday accused neighbor - and nuclear rival - Pakistan of having links with the five men who hijacked an Indian Airlines plane last week, holding 155 people hostage.
Speaking to Star TV, Brajesh Mishra said Indian intelligence intercepted several radio conversations between militant groups in Kashmir, confirming that Pakistan was involved.
"It is clear it is a terrorist state," said Mishra, India's National Security Adviser of longtime rival Pakistan. "The establishment backs terrorism."
The hostages were freed on Friday after being held for eight days, but the crisis raised tensions between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-armed countries that have fought three wars over the past half century.
Two of those wars were over Kashmir. India accuses Pakistan of backing a decade-long insurgency in Kashmir, the Himalayan territory that is divided between the two countries. Pakistan denies the charge and says it provides only moral support to the movement.
The five hijackers acted in support of militant Kashmiris fighting against Indian control of the Himalayan territory. They fled the southern Afghan city of Kandahar on Friday, leaving the airport with three Kashmiri militants who had been released from Indian jails in a deal to free the hostages.
Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia gave the hijackers 10 hours to get out of the country. They remained out of sight Sunday, while India and Pakistan feuded over their identities and their whereabouts.
India claims the five are Pakistani citizens who crossed back into their homeland from Afghanistan, and were near the southwestern city of Quetta.
"We have the names of all the hijackers who are Pakistani and the list of militants they wanted to be released contained majority of Pakistani nationals," said Mishra.
But Pakistan said the men were not Pakistani nationals, had not set foot on its territory, and would be apprehended if they did turn up.
"Under no circumstances will these persons be allowed to enter Pakistan," said the country's Interior Minister Moinuddin Haider. He said Pakistan was on "high alert" to prevent the hijackers from slipping across the border.
Mishra claimed that in one of the messages intercepted by New Delhi - a discussion between members of two different separatist organizations - one man asked why the other had condemned the hijacking, saying that the hijackers were acting on the instructions of Pakistan.
Mishra also said that an alleged refusal by Pakistan to accept some of the sick and injured passengers when the plane temporarily landed at Lahore, indicated Islamabad complicity in the crisis.
"It is clear that Pakistan is showing enmity," said Mishra, who is also Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee's principal secretary. "As long as this enmity continues there can be no talks between us."
Armed with grenades, pistols and knives, hijackers seized Flight 814 some 40 minutes after it took off from Katmandu, Nepal, on a scheduled flight to New Delhi, India, on Christmas Eve.
The plane made stops in India, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates before landing in Afghanistan the next day.
The plane was carrying 178 passengers and 11 crew members when it took off from Nepal. Twenty-seven hostages and the body of the slain man were unloaded in the Emirates.
-------- japan
Japan's Nuclear Power Glitches Cleared Up
Reuters
January 2, 2000 Filed at 2:01 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-nuclear-japan.html
http://news.excite.com/news/r/000102/01/y2k-nuclear-japan2
TOKYO (Reuters) - Computer malfunctions at Japanese nuclear power plants, at least one confirmed as Y2K-related, have all been cleared up and did not affect safety or power generation, company spokesmen said on Sunday.
Five different problems, most connected with data monitoring, emerged at four separate nuclear plants on Saturday, marring Japan's otherwise good performance in the millennium handover.
But all had been solved by the evening, a trade ministry official said on Sunday, adding that there were no new reports of any trouble.
Power company officials said they were still looking into the causes.
At Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc's (TEPCO) Fukushima Number 2 nuclear plant north of Tokyo, data on the position of rods used to control nuclear reactions was not sent to the appropriate computer screen even though the data was present in the computer.
``It is too early to say with certainty that this was Y2K-related,'' said a spokesman for TEPCO, Japan's biggest power utility.
At no time was safety affected and the position of the rods was verified by other means until the problem was corrected on Saturday afternoon, the spokesman said.
Investigations found that the computer had reset its date to February 2036. Technicians corrected the date and operations returned to normal, the spokesman said.
Japan suffered its worst nuclear accident in September. A nuclear chain reaction at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, north of Tokyo, killed one person and exposed more than 100 others to radiation.
The longest-running Y2K glitch was at the Shika nuclear power plant run by Hokuriku Electric Power Co about 300 km (186 miles) northwest of Tokyo, where problems were reported with a system used to send data on radiation emission and the state of the power plant to company headquarters and the government in case of emergencies.
A Hokuriku spokesman said this was cleared up by late Saturday afternoon. ``There is the chance that this was Y2K-related, but we need to investigate further,'' he added.
Another problem at the Shika plant that involved its radiation monitoring system was confirmed to have been due to a Y2K problem, a spokesman for Ishikawa prefecture, where the plant is located, said on Sunday.
He said that when the computer system was updated last year to deal with the Y2K problem, one section was overlooked and remained unable to read the year 2000. Technicians corrected this and normal operations resumed early on Saturday morning.
An alarm for a system processing meteorological data at Tohoku Electric Power Co's Onagawa nuclear power plant in Miyagi Prefecture also went off soon after midnight, but order was restored 10 minutes later with no disruptions to power generation, government officials said.
A trade ministry official said ministry checks revealed that the same alarm had gone off several times in November and December but this was not publicly announced because it was regarded as too minor.
The ministry said in a statement on its Internet home page that tests had been conducted on the alarm system prior to the millennium rollover and it did not appear to be Y2K-related, adding that checks were continuing.
In Fukui in western Japan, Kansai Electric Power Co's Takahama nuclear power plant failed to transmit data on radiation levels from its two monitoring points to the Kyoto prefectural office, where the data was being surveyed, the company said, but transmission was resumed five hours later.
Seven commercial nuclear reactors in the United States also experienced minor computer-related problems believed due to the Y2K problem, but none affected safety systems and they were quickly fixed.
--------
World Back at Work With Few Delays
By Dirk Beveridge
AP Business Writer
Monday, Jan. 3, 2000; 10:16 a.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000103/aponline101612_000.htm
The first major business day of the millennium opened with few signs of Y2K computer glitches, much to the delight of stock markets worldwide. At least two stock indexes hit new heights.
Those returning to work today found energy supplies and corporate computer systems operating smoothly. The U.S. banking system was "running smoothly" this morning, said the U.S. Federal Reserve. Bruce McConnell, director of the International Y2K Cooperation Center, told the CBS "Early Show" that nothing serious was reported anywhere and "the risk is very low at this point."
Not that the Y2K bug was nowhere to be seen: Glitches hit government computers in Hong Kong and mainland China. Police testing the sobriety of drivers in Hong Kong had to enter birth dates on breath-testing machine because of an apparent Y2K malfunction. Courthouse computers in Italy mixed up prisoner dates by 100 years. A few ATM machines shut down.
But there were no reports of calamitous failures some feared - and stock markets responded.
U.S. markets followed the rest of the world with a smooth start to the first trading day of 2000. In early trading, the Dow Jones industrial average was slightly higher, while the Nasdaq composite index, the strongest performer in 1999, was up more than 100 points.
Stock indexes in Hong Kong and Singapore, both of which rang out 1999 at record levels, soared again today. Singapore's main index closed 4.2 percent higher, and Hong Kong shares rose 2.4 percent.
Pakistan, one of the countries experts were most worried about, opened its stock market with success, as did India. In Germany, the index of the top 30 stocks rose 2.8 percent to a record in the first hour, before giving back half those gains by midday.
Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Poland reported no Y2K problems, as did the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the Chicago Board of Trade. Markets in Japan, China, Switzerland and London were closed Monday, but Britain's Cabinet Office reported business as usual and Swiss banks noted no signs of abnormalities.
The French Ministry of Finance announced: "Today, there has been no bug, which is to say that all the great computer and electrical systems around the world successfully passed in the year 2000."
The Y2K bug can affect older computers that read dates only by the last two digits of the year, and can malfunction if they misinterpret 00 as 1900 rather than 2000. Few problems were reported during the millennium rollover at midnight Friday, and experts then turned their attention to today's opening of the financial markets and first business day.
"We're seeing that there were no threatening effects in the companies," Salvador Bellido, vice president of the Spanish Confederation of Medium and Small Businesses, told the private news agency Europa Press. "We think the media pressure worldwide has been excessive. We're beginning to think that all this has been set up for someone's benefit, I don't know if it was Bill Gates or who."
Companies and governments around the world who had set up Y2K response teams began disbanding operations and sending workers home.
But officials gave the same warnings that moviegoers shout near the end of a horror film: The threat's not over yet.
"There'll be a lot more systems brought into play and the likelihood of Y2K events are certainly much greater than they've been," said Sen. Ian Campbell, in charge of Australia's Y2K watch.
The few problems caused by the millennial bug were more a nuisance than a catastrophe.
The Y2K bug infested a computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee but it did not affect operations or workers and was fixed three hours later. Computers at courthouses in Naples and Venice in Italy listed prisoners due to be released Jan. 10 as having completed their terms Jan. 10, 1900.
Government computers in Hong Kong failed to display the correct date, but no records were lost and everything ran smoothly, officials said. Weather observations in part of mainland China had to be made by hand after the circuit board of a solar measuring device in the remote northwestern region of Ningxia failed to roll over to 2000.
In Tokyo, about a dozen small brokerages reported Y2K-related glitches in a record-keeping system. They were quickly fixed. Ten small Hong Kong companies reported minor hardware or software problems possibly caused by Y2K. The heat went out in apartments for about 900 families in Pyongchon, South Korea.
A novelist in China who wrote stories about the millennium bug lost much of his work when the rollover to 2000 crashed his personal computer, destroying all his files. Luckily, Gu Qingsheng had already sent a completed manuscript of his latest novel to his publisher.
A hospital in western Norway reported that an X-ray machine had failed. News reports said cash registers at a handful of 7-Eleven convenience stores also failed there, and some ATM machines weren't working.
There were no Y2K problems at Ohno-ya, a shop specializing in traditional handmade stationery located across from the national Kabuki theater in downtown Tokyo.
Shopkeeper Hiromitsu Yoshino's bookkeeping method is 100 percent Y2K-compliant. "I use an abacus," he said.
--------
How Y2K Scare Helped Businesses
By Bruce Stanley
AP Business Writer
Monday, Jan. 3, 2000; 4:26 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000103/aponline162649_000.htm
LONDON -- Keeping its planes airborne and punctual at the start of the new year was satisfaction enough for Virgin Atlantic Airways, which spent $20 million to inoculate its computers against the millennium bug.
But the airline also got an unexpected payoff for fixing its Y2K problem: The speedy replacement of its piecemeal computer system with a streamlined and more efficient network.
The airline is not alone in securing a tangible business advantage from an unprecedented focus on its computer systems.
The Y2K scare has compelled phone companies, banks, manufacturers and other businesses around the world to make their corporate nervous systems more efficient and cheaper to run. The beneficial by-product is a bright spot amid concern that companies may have overspent to fix a glitch that resulted in far fewer outages than expected.
"The Y2K threat gave us, and our suppliers, a focus and a discipline and a bit more encouragement to make the changes and upgrades we knew we had to get around to making anyway," Virgin spokesman Paul Moore said.
Many of the Y2K-related business improvements have consisted of weeding out aged or superfluous software coding and programs, and of standardizing company software across different business departments.
"We've had an opportunity to dump a lot of redundant software," said British Energy PLC spokesman Bob Fenton. "We were able to say, 'There's bits here we don't need, so why pay for it?"
British Energy, the biggest nuclear energy company in Britain, spent about $48 million to inspect its computer systems and fix any shortcomings. The effort, which Fenton likened to an audit, is already paying off. The company now uses a single kind of spreadsheet software instead of the three it used beforehand.
For Honeywell-Measurex Corp. of Cupertino, California, Y2K was an opportunity to take a comprehensive inventory of its entire network.
"In the course of doing that, we essentially retired all our older mainframe applications," said Rich Walsh, director of information technology for the company, which builds quality-control systems for the pulp- and paper-making industry. Some of these applications had been running for 15 years or longer, he said.
When many Scandinavian firms prepared for Y2K, they found that they had installed software that was getting little if any use, said Bertil Mattsson of the international consultancy Cap Gemini. Companies removed up to 40 percent of their programs as a result, easing the strain on their computer hardware, Mattsson said from his office in Stockholm, Sweden.
Ian Hugo, a leading British information technologist, estimates that in 1999 people updated and improved their computers to the same extent as during the previous three years combined.
Employees have been among the first to benefit. At Corning Inc., a U.S. maker of glass and optical fiber, technical support staff are now better able to identify any in-house computer problems thanks to Y2K-related improvements, said James Scott, Corning's IT director.
The French telecommunications company Cegetel had no regrets over spending $33 million to prepare for the year 2000.
"The money we spent will be recouped in the long term because we now have an excellent, modern network, which has been completely tested and works to perfection. That can only be positive," Cegetel spokeswoman Valerie Piot said.
Because they constantly seek competitive advantages, companies can be expected to claim that their Y2K outlays have helped them streamline their networks and enhance their capabilities.
However, the nature of these improvements for firms that depend on computers for the simplest of operations suggests that customers might benefit in the form of lower energy bills, better phone service and speedier banking.
London-based HSBC Bank PLC, for example, expects to speed up development of new financial services and respond more quickly to customers' needs as a result of the roughly $69 million it spent on Y2K preparations.
--------
How Y2K Bug Money Was Spent
By Ted Bridis
Associated Press Writer
Monday, Jan. 3, 2000; 5:17 p.m. EST
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000103/aponline171714_000.htm
WASHINGTON -- Moved by fear that Y2K technology problems could disrupt everything from telephone calls to electricity, Americans stomped out the once-dreaded computer bug the old-fashioned way - they spent it to death.
The United States, easily the most technology-dependent nation, spent roughly half the world's total repair costs. America's bill for buying new computers and repairing billions of lines of software code came to an estimated $100 billion - or about $365 for each resident.
But three days into the new century, a well-cheered victory of man over machine is raising questions about whether the government and corporate America threw too much at the problem, especially considering apparent victories overseas where far less was spent.
President Clinton's Y2K chief, John Koskinen, suggested Monday that as much as $10 billion may have been wasted in the United States since 1995 as "somebody may have bought something they didn't need or figured it was a great way to get a replacement system."
But Koskinen defended the overall expense as "a marvelous accomplishment" and crucial to keeping the nation's most important computers healthy. To those who suggest money was frittered away, he said: "Corporations don't naively spent hundreds of millions of dollars."
So where did that money go?
The government, which began its Y2K compliance efforts in earnest in 1995, spent $8.5 billion to update and repair its computers while setting up an elaborate monitoring system for each major industry at risk, from nuclear power plants to hospitals. It also aided other countries that were behind in repairs to help insulate the U.S. economy from global problems - and to ensure that foreign nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants were safe.
Americans also got a healthy dose of forewarning, thanks to commercial campaigns that highlighted problems and sold repairs. Computer manufacturers set up help lines and gave away small fixes, known as patches, to repair programs or chips that had the glitch in which some computers might misread the year "00" as 1900 instead of 2000.
Software makers flooded stores with software that promised to catch hidden problems and fix them. And consultants offered pricey new Y2K services to detect, fix and double-check Y2K problems in corporate computers.
After the fixes were deployed, confidence building became key. New computers contained stickers declaring they were "Y2K compliant."
The phone industry, which spent a whopping $3.6 billion to make sure phone systems were Y2K-compliant, ran advertisements aimed at calming the jitters. US West declared in its newspaper ads, which featured the sun rising over trees, that "on Jan. 1 the sun will rise and the phones will ring."
Banks, which fixed computer systems early, kept extra money on reserve in case Americans made a run for cash.
Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America, said questions of excessive spending were inevitable given the remarkably few reports of problems.
"I don't believe it was hype," Miller said Monday. "It was a real problem. So many people worked so hard to solve the problem, we should see this as a sign of success, not cynicism."
Bruce McConnell, head of the United Nations group monitoring Y2K failures overseas, agreed. He called the estimated $200 billion costs worldwide a "responsible and measured approach."
Koskinen said the great Y2K battle would pay dividends for years to come.
For instance, the government discovered that one in every five of its computer systems was outdated or redundant and could be scrapped. Computers were exchanged ahead of schedule with faster, more productive ones.
"History will show that the glitches that continue to come out will continue to remind people that those are glitches today that would have made major system failures," Koskinen said.
The private sector also will benefit from the upgrades.
DaimlerChrysler AG acknowledged it had never taken a complete inventory of all its electronic systems until Y2K came along. And Honeywell-Measurex Corp. of Cupertino, Calif., which builds quality control systems for the pulp- and paper-making industry, weeded out 15-year-old applications from its network.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said the $5 billion spent on Y2K by the energy industry will reduce the likelihood of future power outages or oil disruptions.
"It would have been a disaster to assume a wait-and-see attitude," he said.
--------russia
Yeltsin Transfers Nuclear Codes To Putin
Russia Today
Dec 31, 1999
MOSCOW, Dec 31, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Outgoing President Boris Yeltsin turned over the presidential nuclear missile codes Friday to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Interfax reported. ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse)
---
Clinton Hails Yeltsin
Associated Press
January 2, 2000 Filed at 1:26 p.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Clinton-Yeltsin.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Clinton hailed Boris Yeltsin in a magazine essay as the ``Father of Russian Democracy'' but said how Yeltsin's successor handles such ``unfinished business'' as corruption and the war in Chechnya will determine Russia's place among nations.
Yeltsin's successor, Vladimir Putin, has been a moving force behind Russia's attack on the rebellious region of Chechnya, a campaign of which Clinton has been an outspoken critic. Clinton suggested that the outcome in Chechnya would set the tone for relations between the new leadership in Moscow and other nations.
``The question for President Yeltsin's successors is not only how to liberate Grozny without killing thousands of civilians; it's also whether this war becomes a model for how to deal with other problems involving terrorists and separatists,'' Clinton wrote in the essay that appears in the Jan. 1 issue of Time magazine.
``Russia has to find the right balance between the use of effective force and decent respect for individual rights and international norms,'' Clinton said.
In addition to helping the Russian economy grow, Putin must do more to fight crime and corruption, Clinton said.
``Unless that battle is joined ... the democratic norms and the market economy that have been Yeltsin's prime focus can be undone,'' he wrote.
Clinton also noted there have been ``plenty of strains'' in U.S.-Russian relations and that many observers have questioned the value of partnership between the two nations.
``President Yeltsin and I believed our countries should, whenever and wherever possible, work together on our many common interests and work hard to keep our disagreements from preventing us from cooperating in other areas,'' Clinton wrote, listing the dismantling of 5,000 nuclear weapons, the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Balkans and efforts to liberalize the Russian economy and bolster democracy as successes of the policy of engagement.
``If Russia's new leaders -- the generation to whom Boris Yeltsin gave the stage last Friday -- endorse this as firmly as he did, they will find in America an eager and active partner,'' Clinton said.
---
Putin Cites Chechnya As Political Priority
New Russian Leader Visits Combat Zone
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 2, 2000; Page A17
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/02/137l-010200-idx.html
MOSCOW, Jan. 1-Acting Russian President Vladimir Putin spent his first night in power in war-ravaged Chechnya, visiting troops and declaring that a key task facing Russia's next elected leader will be solving the problems in the breakaway region.
Putin's trip to Chechnya came just hours after Boris Yeltsin's surprise resignation. He visited the pacified town of Gudermes to award 200 officers hunting knives inscribed before his unexpected elevation, and bearing only his title as prime minister.
"The trip was planned about a month ago," Putin told reporters in Dagestan, the Russian region east of Chechnya. "We did not know that Boris Nikolayevich [Yeltsin] would take the decision he did."
But Putin sounded themes that he is likely to press during his presidential campaign in the next three months. Speaking in a hangar-like building in Gudermes, he equated victory in Chechnya with the preservation of Russia. "This is not simply about restoring honor and dignity to the country. This is about how to bring about the end of the breakup of Russia," he told the soldiers. "That is your fundamental goal."
Putin has not publicly outlined his plans for the country since Yeltsin stepped down on New Year's Eve. He told reporters traveling with him that as acting president he would consider changes in the cabinet he inherited from Yeltsin, but focused his remarks on the war in Chechnya, the issue that has propelled him to popularity.
In Washington, President Clinton congratulated Putin on being selected and assured him that "we are always together on the core points," White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said. In a 10-minute morning telephone call, Clinton told Putin he believes the new leader is "off to a good start," and that the transition is "encouraging for democracy in Russia," the Associated Press reported.
The energy and determination Putin projects appeals to the Russian public. His New Year's performance contrasted with the activities of many of Russia's political and financial elite, who spent New Year's Eve at a gala dinner and concert at the Bolshoi Theater. Seats reserved for Putin and his wife were empty.
Television reports noted the bravery Putin showed by taking the trip. Putin's helicopter was denied permission to land in Gudermes, so he traveled by road, a dangerous act given the chance of a guerrilla ambush.
While Putin was in Gudermes, the Chechen capital of Grozny 20 miles away was under a fierce air assault. Russian troops have been trying to seize Grozny for a week, but Chechen defenders have used sniper fire, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades to keep them at the edge of the city.
Television footage from mountain overlooks shows devastated buildings and continuous shelling and bombing. On Friday, Russia fired three Scud ballistic missiles into Chechnya, U.S. officials reported. Such is the battering of Grozny that, when it is not foggy, the city is still encased in a smoky haze caused by fires and soot from explosions. Thousands of civilians reportedly are trapped in the city.
Fighting is also widespread south of Grozny, where the Russians are trying to dislodge rebels from mountain hamlets and block infiltration of ethnic Chechen rebels from Georgia.
Russian casualties have been steady, and reportedly relatively heavy the past few days. On New Year's Eve, eight Russian soldiers were killed, according to Gen. Vadim Timchenko, speaking from Mozdok, the campaign's military headquarters about 60 miles northwest of Grozny. Military officials told independent NTV television that as many as 10 soldiers a day had been killed. "Bandit groups are putting up fierce resistance in Grozny. We have to fight for every street, every house," said Gen. Valery Zhuravel.
In an interview Thursday with the Reuters news agency from a secret location near Grozny, Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov said that the war had barely begun. He said his forces were inflicting heavy losses on the Russians and repeated his call for internationally supervised peace talks.
One of the risks for Putin is that the war could go sour before presidential elections likely to be held in March. It may be difficult to sustain the notion that Russia is only fighting bandits and terrorists as it continues to suffer significant casualties. Official figures, which rise and fall, put the number at about 450 Russians killed in the four-month-old campaign.
In an apparent attempt to preempt criticism, Putin said, "Whoever will become the future president of Russia will be obligated to solve the problem of fighting terrorism. He will be obligated to solve the tasks . . . in Chechnya."
He repeated the bottom line for negotiations with the separatists: renunciation of terrorism; turning over fugitive Chechens; and the release of all kidnap victims.
Putin is popular among Russian generals, some of whom have threatened to resign if the assault on Chechnya is curtailed. In a rare foray into politics, Zhuravel told NTV that the military supports Putin's appointment. "We not only understand this, but approve of it and think it is good for Russia," he said.
Chechen officials expressed disappointment with Putin's initial remarks on the crisis as acting president. "Each day, the war is widening the gulf between Russia and Chechnya," Chechen Vice President Vakha Arsanov told the Interfax news agency.
Yeltsin was absent from public view today and reportedly resting at his country home near Moscow.
The lightning handover of power created a national sensation, but not so much as to upset Russia's celebration of New Year's. So many officials abandoned Moscow for home or the countryside around the capital that Putin canceled a meeting scheduled for Sunday with party leaders in the newly elected legislature.
--------us nuc facilities
In new role, executive faces downsizing a weapons plant
Philadelphia Inquirer
January 3, 200
William C. Haight has been promoted to head a new energy programs component of Lockheed Martin's Cherry Hill-based technology services unit.
As president, he will lead the energy-related programs that the defense contractor manages for the U.S. and British governments. He also will aggressively compete with six rivals for about $4.5 billion a year in U.S. energy-related defense work, as well as in the growing overseas market.
His biggest operation by far is the government's Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., which began under World War II's Manhattan Project. "We basically run the plant for the Department of Energy," Haight said.
His unit recently won a contract to play a similar role for Britain's Atomic Weapons Establishment, which manufactures Trident missile nuclear warheads.
Lockheed Martin Energy Programs includes Lockheed's Technology Ventures Corp., a business incubator in Albuquerque, N.M., that helps emerging companies "in all aspects of science and technology," Haight said.
These operations had been part of a Lockheed Martin subsidiary that handled environmental remediation and defense-related energy work.
Under a restructuring announced in the fall, Lockheed is selling its environmental businesses, and its energy programs are being folded into the technology services unit on Route 70 in Cherry Hill, headed by Michael F. Camardo.
Haight will continue to maintain an office in Cherry Hill, but will spend much of his time in Washington to be closer to the government agencies that are his customers. Most recently, he had been vice president of technology for Lockheed Martin Services.
His biggest challenge, he said, will be downsizing the Tennessee nuclear weapons plant, "a very complex and challenging operation with in excess of 4,000 employees."
As with downsizings anywhere, he said, "the plant is losing workers who are more senior and knowledgeable." When people are worried about losing their jobs, companies have to work hard to keep employees focused, he said.
Haight said he saw synergy between downsizing and pursuing new business. "There's an opportunity to roll people from existing jobs into new business." And, he said, you can use lessons learned in downsizing "to give more value for the dollar than competitors offer."
- Henry J. Holcomb
---
Big Moment Comes and Goes, Without Any Disasters in Sight
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By MARC LACEY
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/01/biztech/articles/02bunk.html
WASHINGTON -- It was three hours before midnight on Friday and John A. Koskinen did not appear worried a bit. His head was back. His eyes were closed. And a flight attendant aboard the last Delta Shuttle flight of 1999 from New York to Washington was urging him, to no avail, to return his seat to the upright position.
"Excuse me, sir," the attendant said, pulling at the seat. "Excuse me." It was three hours before midnight and the federal government's Year 2000 coordinator, President Clinton's point man on the potentially debilitating computer problems, was fast asleep.
That is not to say that Mr. Koskinen was not taking the arrival of the new year seriously, or that he had written off the possibility of devastating computer trouble. "Some people have said, 'Why does this guy look so relaxed?' " Mr. Koskinen said. "If I had any worries, they were at the beginning. The last two months, I've slept well every night."
Mr. Koskinen, a former government budget official and corporate turnaround expert, had been on the job for more than a year and a half when the big moment finally arrived. He had held countless strategy sessions, conference calls, tests, drills, press briefings, public hearings and closed-door meetings. And even his brief shut-eye aboard Delta Flight 1769 was work-related. By catching a nap aboard the nearly empty flight, Mr. Koskinen was reassuring the public about the safety of the nation's airlines.
He had arranged his quick trip to La Guardia Airport and back so he would be in the air at 7 p.m. Eastern time -- midnight in the world of aviation, when the air traffic control system encountered the year 2000.
"Happy New Year," he said casually when the big moment arrived. The 727 he was aboard kept flying. He settled into his seat. As far as crises go, this one was a snoozer.
The federal government's round-the-clock $50 million command center had all the hubbub of an insurance office. There were no officials running around in commando attire. No shouted cries. No distress.
"It's a pretty sedate atmosphere," said one staff member, who left midway through the night to ring in the new year at home. "People are making phone calls and making reports, but there's not much occurring."
Officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission reported minor year 2000 computer problems at nuclear plants in New York, Arkansas, Arizona, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Minnesota. They said none of the problems forced shutdowns or prompted safety concerns.
The problems at two New York plants were typical. The New York Power Authority's Indian Point 3, about 30 miles north of New York City, and Nine Mile Point 1, near Oswego, both had problems receiving weather data. They were corrected, officials said.
Other problems reported today included one with the security system at a field office for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that forced officials to post guards outside. Mr. Koskinen declined to identify the the office.
Several electric utilities have reported errors on computer clocks, but they did not affect power plants.
Windshear alert systems at six airports -- in Tampa, Denver, Atlanta, Orlando, Chicago O'Hare and St. Louis -- displayed an error message. The problem was fixed within two hours. Similar problems were reported at airports in Toledo, Ohio; Lansing, Mich.; Charleston, W.Va. and Moline, Ill.
Airports in Rochester; Greensboro, N.C.; Memphis and Birmingham, Ala., displayed the date 1900 on their computers, but operations were not affected. The F.A.A. had fixed the problem at other airports and was reviewing why those airports were not corrected.
Government officials warn that Year 2000 problems may still crop up in the days ahead, when businesses open on Monday morning and the world's computers first begin operating in a Year 2000 world.
"It is far too early for us to feel totally satisfied and declare victory," Mr. Koskinen said at a briefing early this morning after the new year had begun in the Central time zone. "I think we have three or four more days of careful, close monitoring before we can truly determine how successful we've been."
In addition, computer experts point out that problems could arise on Feb. 29, when computers have to deal with a leap year. On that date, Mr. Koskinen will be back in the command center -- dressed in a suit and tie, not camouflage -- ready for the worst.
---
Fuel for the Future
New York Times
January 2, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/00/01/02/letters/l02epa.html
Related Articles
Old Plants With New Parts Present a Problem to E.P.A. (Dec. 26, 1999)
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/early/122699epa-coal.html
To the Editor:
Re "Old Plants With New Parts Present a Problem to E.P.A." (news article, Dec. 26): Old coal-fired plants should serve as opportunities, not problems, for the Environmental Protection Agency.
If the E.P.A. can show that it can make emissions from coal-fired electric plants "clean" without putting the utility companies out of business, then its leverage with other industries, like the automobile industry, would be greatly enhanced. The agency should encourage emissions from coal-fired electric plants to be cleaned with fuels from coal-feed stocks.
Abandoning old plants and building new ones leaves behind damage to both the economy and the environment, and raises electric prices for consumers. The dangers of nuclear power and the rising price of oil make coal the most logical fuel for electric generation in the future.
STEVEN B. GREEN Sag Harbor, N.Y., Dec. 27, 1999
---
Small earthquake rattles windows in Alabama, Tennessee
Nando Media
January 2, 2000 5:52 p.m. EST
http://www.nando.com/noframes/story/0,2107,500149337-500181581-500741818-0,00.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000102/aponline170654_000.htm
ELKMONT, Ala. (http://www.nandotimes.com) - A small earthquake rattled windows across Alabama and southern Tennessee on Sunday morning, but there were no reports of injuries or serious damage.
The earthquake had a magnitude of 2.7, according to the U.S. Geologic Survey's National Earthquake Information Center. It struck Limestone County just south of Elkmont at 9:04 a.m. and lasted about 10 seconds.
"My husband went outside and he didn't know what it was. He thought Browns Ferry, the nuclear plant, had blown up," said Nella Harrison, who lives near Elkmont.
Police phone lines were jammed with calls from nervous residents, but no injuries or major damage was reported.
At the Limestone County Sheriff's Department, officers didn't "the faintest idea" what had happened at first, said dispatcher Tammy Waddell. "Everybody was afraid it was an explosion."
--------us nuc weapons
MILLENNIUM 2000 The missed apocalypse: US, Russian experts exult at avoiding atomic misunderstanding
Boston Globe
1/2/2000
By Judith Crosson, Reuters
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/002/nation/The_missed_apocalypse_US_Russian_experts_exult_at_avoiding_atomic_misunderstanding+.shtml
PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. - US and Russian military specialists, who had toiled together to prevent computer bugs from causing nuclear accidents, voiced elation yesterday that there had been none.
They also said they would remain vigilant through the project's completion in mid-January.
''It was a great success. As I've said before, we prepared well for it. Everything has gone just as we thought it would,'' Major General Thomas Goslin, director of operations of the US Space Command, told reporters after the new year had arrived throughout the globe.
Since Thursday morning, Russian and US military staff have sat together at a spot called the Center for Year 2000 Strategic Stability, at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
The cooperation had been devised to ensure that the world's two largest nuclear powers were in direct contact as the year 2000 arrived, in case a computer mistakenly indicated a nuclear missile launch.
Russia and the United States have the most sophisticated warning devices. They could pose the threat of a mistaken ballistic missile launch if there was an unfounded indication of an incoming missile.
''I'm sure the activity will be a very good foundation for future cooperation,'' a Russian Air Force colonel, Sergei Kaplin, told reporters.
US and Russian authorities are planning to establish a full-time joint missile launch monitoring program that will be based in Moscow. No timetable has been set.
Goslin said it was too early to assess what lessons have been learned from the project, although officials have said they would like US crews to speak Russian.
This story ran on page A19 of the Boston Globe on 1/2/2000.
---
Doomsday in Akron
Akron Beacon Journal
Published Sunday, January 2, 2000
By Mark J. Price
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/docs/002543.htm
Is it safe yet? If you're reading this, we must be in the clear.
The world didn't end.
The Y2K computer bug didn't unleash a nuclear doomsday as some had feared.
It's been a long time since Akron residents worried seriously about missile attacks. Atomic warfare was a distinct possibility in the 1950s and 1960s.
Those were the days of the Soviet Threat. The Red Menace. The Hammer and Sickle. The Communist Plot.
Akron, the Rubber Capital of the World, was considered a likely target for the Soviet Union if war ever erupted. The Commies would bomb the manufacturing city to destroy the U.S. supply of tires.
Akron's destruction was first theorized in a March 1946 article in the Akron Beacon Journal -- only seven months after the United States had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, to end World War II.
``Here's What Would Happen If An A-Bomb Fell On Akron,'' an article by Washington correspondent Rayy Mitten, graphically described the city's potential demise.
``An atomic bomb exploding a couple of hundred feet about the First Central Tower building any weekday in Akron would kill at least a third of the city's population instantly,'' Mitten wrote. ``Roughly another third would be injured horribly. And the majority of them would die later from bodily effects of the blast, burns from hundreds of fires started or the emission of radium-like rays at the moment of the blast.
``Nearly every person walking on Main, Mill, Howard, High, Market and other downtown streets would be killed outright.''
In the early 1950s, the U.S. government produced a series of Cold War films that were meant to alleviate public fears about nuclear destruction. Titles included You Can Beat the A-Bomb, Duck and Cover and Survival Under Atomic Attack.
To say the least, the propaganda movies had dubious advice. Surviving an atomic bomb, according to film narrators, was as simple as hiding in a ditch and covering one's head with a newspaper.
Such movies were shown to pupils in classrooms across America.
``I do remember the atomic bomb threat. I was in grade school at the time,'' says Mary Stone, 51, who attended Akron's Mason Elementary School in the 1950s.
``We did have bomb drills. They would herd us up just like a fire drill and take us into the basement of the school. And I do remember fallout shelter signs were in the hallways -- not even realizing that it wouldn't have mattered anyway . . . We had to put our heads down in our lap, cover our heads and be very still.''
Dave Smith, 50, of the Ellet area of Akron, says the brick hallways at St. Vincent's grade school were where students took refuge during drills in the late 1950s.
``I just recall going out in the hallway. . . . If you're ever in their halls, they're all solid, except for the doors, which had a little bit of glass in them. Even as a little kid, it seemed `somewhat' safe.''
Drills became just another part of the school routine. When the alarm bells sounded, pupils weren't exactly concerned about a Soviet attack.
``I never really thought about it,'' Smith says. ``I was a kid. It was just another drill.''
Stone doesn't remember being scared during the drills. ``When I started to worry was when I got a little older,'' she says. ``I remember the Cuban missile crisis'' of 1962.
Smith recalls going with his father to look at bomb shelters at a trade show in the 1950s. Hundreds of Akron residents built shelters as a safeguard against attack.
``I do remember adults talking about bomb shelters,'' Stone says. ``I always thought it would be something to live like in a cave.''
In August 1965, the Beacon Journal again tackled a sinister topic in the fictional story ``Nuclear Bomb Brings Fiery Death for Akron.''
Reporter John de Groot painted a terrifying picture -- even ghastlier than the 1946 article.
``A fiery fist slams into the center of Akron,'' he wrote. ``The missile, carrying a five-megaton hydrogen bomb, explodes some 500 feet above the city. It strikes with the force of 500 million tons of TNT. At the center of the blast, the temperature rises to 9,000 degrees. . . .'
``Snap your fingers. In that amount of time, buildings are melted and thousands of people vanish in the half-mile circle of instant death.''
Obviously, it never came to that. Akron and the rest of the world were spared nuclear annihilation. The Cold War ended in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.
We survived the Cold War. We survived Y2K.
Breathe easy while you can. Something else is bound to frighten us as the 21st century progresses.
Mark J. Price is a Beacon Journal copy editor. He can be reached at 330-996-3769 or send e-mail to mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.
---
Die Hard THE PLUTONIUM FILES;
America's Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War;
The Dial Press: 580 pp., $26.95
By THOMAS POWERS
Los Angeles Times
Sunday, January 2, 2000
By Eileen Welsome;
http://www.latimes.com/news/health/medicine/20000102/t000000244.html
Of all the lies uttered by mendacious public servants during a century notorious for official deceit, perhaps none registers colder or more deliberate than the claim by Gen. Leslie Groves in a Senate hearing in November 1945 that radioactive poisoning can bring death "rather soon, and as I understand it from the doctors, without undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die." Which doctors, exactly, could have delivered this cheering news to the general who ran the Manhattan Project, created the atomic bomb and ended the war with Japan by destroying two cities and killing plus or minus 150,000 Japanese, mostly civilians?
Not Dr. Stafford Warren and Dr. Shields Warren (unrelated), who both went to Japan at Groves' behest to study the effects of radiation and recorded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki a devil's textbook of horrors--burns, bloody diarrhea, an inability of the bone marrow to continue making blood cells, a stripping of the epithelial layer of the gastrointestinal tract leading to dehydration and runaway internal infection and other equally ghastly conditions.
Nor could the general have concluded that radiation afforded a "pleasant" death had he listened to the doctors who attended Harry Daghlian, a Los Alamos technician who stopped a runaway chain reaction with his hand during a nuclear experiment a week after the Japanese surrender. Soon afterward, he felt a "tingling sensation" in his hand, "tingling" being an oddly benign word to describe the terrible chain reaction set off within his body. Mercifully he lapsed into a coma, and within three weeks he died. A government check for $10,000 was given to Daghlian's family in exchange for release forms signed on the day he died that absolved the government of any responsibility for his death.
Clearly it was disingenuous for anyone connected to the Manhattan Project to pretend that radiation was not dangerous. Even before the atomic bomb was developed, scientists had considered using radiation as a weapon of war. J. Robert Oppenheimer told his friend and colleague Enrico Fermi in May 1943 that he didn't think it worth pursuing radiological warfare "unless we can poison food sufficient to kill half a million men." Radiological weapons, as it turned out, were hard to deliver while bombs were easy and just as lethal. Most of the deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were from the blast and its heat, but thousands more died of radiation poisoning--a fact fully anticipated by bomb makers at Los Alamos.
So why did the general lie when he testified before the Special Senate Committee on Atomic Energy? The general lied because he feared that an impressionable public would oppose the creation of nuclear bombs once it grasped the horrors of the bomb's destructive effects and realized that we had crossed from the permissible to the impermissible in war. Groves did not want Americans to feel guilty about the manner of their victory over Japan, and he did not want them to reject in disgust a weapon of unprecedented power and utility.
At the same time it is only fair to say that neither Groves nor Stafford Warren, who presided seriatim as chief doctor for the Manhattan Project, and Shields Warren, who served on the Atomic Energy Commission, really knew how dangerous various forms of radiation could be. Furthermore, they did not know how much radiation constituted a danger--the so-called "tolerance dose." To credit them, however, they did set out before the end of the war to learn all they could about the effects of radiation on the human body, through the usual method of scientific inquiry: conducting experiments.
The dark history of the long research effort that followed is one of the two great secrets tightly held by the powers that be in the American bomb-making community; the other is how to ignite hydrogen in a hydrogen bomb. Fifty years after the experiments began, our knowledge of their fact and their extent has been greatly expanded by Eileen Welsome, a reporter at the Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico.
In 1987, Welsome discovered a reference in an Air Force report on the disposal of radioactive animal carcasses. A public information officer at Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque gave her a stack of documents and, on one, Welsome's "eye fell on a footnote describing a human plutonium experiment." But it took her a decade to expand this footnote into "The Plutonium Files," Welsome's effort to explain how these experiments were conceived, justified, conducted, financed and concealed.
When scientists started studying the lethal effects of radiation, they focused their attention on the element plutonium. Glen Seaborg, who discovered plutonium, said, "It is fiendishly toxic, even in small amounts." What initially surprised scientists at Los Alamos who were using plutonium in the construction of the atomic bomb was how quickly, despite discreet handling of the material, it showed up in the laboratory's waste water. In addition, early tests of lab workers' feces and urine revealed plutonium contamination in levels that were "just frightfully high." Obviously, it was pernicious stuff. Laboratory experiments proved their worse suspicions: Plutonium injected into rats migrated to their bones; breathed in as an aerosol it lodged in the alveoli of the rats' lungs. But how did plutonium behave in humans? What was the "tolerance dose" and how could it be reliably measured?
To answer these questions, 18 human subjects--all of them under medical care but none of them informed of what was being done to them--were injected with plutonium. These experiments were conducted between April 1945, a month before the end of the war in Europe, and July 1947--at a time when no one believed that plutonium promised medical benefit. In the files about these experiments obtained by Welsome under the Freedom of Information Act, all reference to the identity of subjects and doctors had been deleted in order to protect the privacy of the participants. Someone failed, however, to delete a reference to Italy, Texas, the hometown of a subject known as CAL-3. When Welsome called the City Hall, the woman who answered the phone recognized CAL-3 from the bare facts.
"You're looking for Elmer Allen," she said. "But he died a year ago. Do you want his wife's number?"
Eventually, by patient detective work, Welsome identified all but one of the 18 patients in the plutonium experiments and uncovered numerous other efforts to study the effects of radiation on human subjects. The research began just as the world was learning about experiments conducted by Nazi doctors during World War II, and although the so-called Nuremberg code prohibited such abuses, it only made American authorities more cautious and secretive. The phrase "informed consent" was coined in 1947 by Carroll Wilson, general manager of the Atomic Energy Commission, but no effort was made to put the concept into practice. A 1953 set of guidelines for conducting human experiments, prepared for the secretary of defense, was never circulated among officials below the level of the secretaries of the Army, Navy and Air Force.
Among the subjects whom Welsome cites, none of them informed in any meaningful sense:
* 829 expectant mothers given "cocktails" of radioactive isotopes of iron between 1945 and 1947 by a prenatal clinic at the Vanderbilt University Hospital.
* 74 boys at the Fernald State School near Boston, a kind of cross between a reformatory and a hospital for disabled youths, who were fed radioactive iron and calcium mixed into milk and oatmeal between 1946 and 1953. "You had to drink the milk. That was the thing," one of them remembered.
* 131 men in the Oregon and Washington state prison systems whose testicles were exposed to as much as 600 rads of ionizing radiation between 1963 and 1971. At the conclusion of the experiments, each man was paid $100 to undergo a vasectomy.
* 90 cancer patients, most of them black, who were exposed in the Cincinnati General Hospital to levels of total body irradiation so high that the exposure alone may have killed 19 of them.
* Thousands of U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen exposed to radiation during above-ground atomic testing to assure Congress, the public and the Pentagon that the bomb could "safely" be used in war.
This long but incomplete list gives a sense of the magnitude of the official effort but barely hints at the torment and injury suffered by the victims, presented in rich human detail by Welsome in a compelling narrative of what happens when science and morality are "wrapped in the flag." Her portraits of leading officials are vivid and subtle, wonderfully capturing the deep moral ambivalence of men like Shields Warren, who put the kibosh on plans to expose prisoners serving life sentences to total body irradiation but in other cases found ways to say yes or look the other way. There are few heroes in this book; one who deserves special mention is Audrey Holliday, a Washington state official who learned of the experiments on prisoners in July 1969 and vigorously protested the exploitation of "captive populations" as if "they are already destroyed as human beings."
Far more common were researchers who told Welsome or official investigators that they had lost their files, couldn't remember who gave the orders, were out of the room when injections were given, didn't know if consent had been obtained, believed subjects were "hopelessly" or "terminally" ill and insisted that all those "premature deaths" would have happened anyway.
"I was appalled and shocked," said President Clinton's first Energy secretary, Hazel O'Leary, when she learned of the experiments in 1993. "It gave me an ache in my gut and heart." But the advisory committee appointed by Clinton to investigate eventually suffered a failure of nerve, in Welsome's view. Its findings, which were released in 1995, she believes were watered down, explained away, filled with excuses, muffled by evidentiary doubts and uncertainties.
Clinton, however, rose to the occasion and personally extended the nation's apology with a moral clarity much admired by Welsome, but the accounting stopped there. No official was willing to call "premature death" a euphemism for homicide. There were no prosecutions, nobody was fired, lawsuits were mostly settled out of court, many questions were answered ambiguously. * * * Did the doctors learn anything remotely worth the suffering inflicted? Apparently not, because the doctors, apparently burdened by their consciences, were reluctant to follow up their experiments or publish their findings. The two main things the doctors most wanted to learn--"the tolerance dose" for radiation and how to measure the level of human exposure--remain mysteries.
Most troubling, perhaps more than the experiments, is the arrogance of officials and scientists willing to lie about important matters of public safety for reasons of official convenience. In 1948, engineers at the Hanford reactor in Washington refused to reveal dangerous levels of radiation discovered in fish and ground water "until reasonable solutions to these problems are available." Keeping the reactors going was the highest priority in this case, not the safety of the public.
A few years later, the Atomic Energy Commission, hoping to move atomic testing from the Pacific back to the American Southwest for reasons of convenience, admitted "how shockingly little" it knew about the dangers of fallout. In the end, Shields Warren decided to issue no warnings to the downwind public--to stay indoors, for example--because any recommendations at all would have made plain the one thing the commission was at greatest pains to conceal: that nuclear tests were dangerous.
If the government lied about the danger of nuclear testing, can we trust it to tell us the truth about acid rain, global warming or the safety of deep storage for nuclear waste? The answer, unmistakably suggested by Welsome's book, is no. We must answer such questions on our own.
- - -
Thomas Powers Is the Author Most Recently of "Heisenberg's War:
the Secret History of the German Bomb."
----
A Cold War Relic Signs Off
New York Times
January 2, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/010200thisweek-review.html
For schoolchildren in the 1950's or 60's, there were few sounds more terrifying than the wail of an air raid siren. No matter that it was only a test: The sound will forever conjure up visions of Soviet jets and mushroom clouds.
But 50 years after cities from coast to coast installed the early warning systems, the sirens have become little more than annoying relics of the cold war. This year, Baltimore will become the latest city to abandon the system and its tests of 122 sirens that blared from speakers around town each Monday at 1 p.m. A new network of radio-controlled sirens, which do not require routine testing, will be installed to alert people to impending natural disasters or terrorist attacks.
Other cities have put the old systems to similar use. Tornado-prone Omaha tests its system once a month, and San Francisco, which is prone to earthquakes, runs a test every Tuesday at noon. But why anyone would need a siren to tell them that there had been an earthquake is an open question. JANE FRITSCH
---
Michiganians optimistic for coming century
Detroit Free Press
January 2, 2000, 7:14 PM
http://www.freep.com/news/statewire/sw3747_20000102.htm
DETROIT (AP) -- Michigan residents say the future holds good things for the world, the nation and themselves, according to a poll.
Sixty-eight percent of those polled said they were very optimistic about their own future, while 25 percent were somewhat optimistic, The Detroit News reported Sunday.
Five percent said they were not very optimistic, 1 percent were not optimistic at all, and 1 percent said they did not know.
The telephone poll of 400 people was conducted for the newspaper by Mitchell Research & Communications Inc. in late November. The results have a margin of error of 5 percentage points.
People questioned were somewhat less optimistic about the outlook for the nation and world, but large majorities still expressed confidence in the future for them as well.
Forty percent were very optimistic and 42 percent somewhat optimistic for the nation's future. Twelve percent were not very optimistic, 4 percent not optimistic at all, and 3 percent did not know.
For the world, 28 percent were very optimistic, 47 percent somewhat, 16 percent not very, and 5 percent not at all optimistic. One percent did not know.
Those polled also were asked about their fears for the future:
--46 percent said they thought families would become more distant in the new century, 37 percent said families would become closer, 11 percent expected no change and 6 percent did not know.
--25 percent said they were very worried about international terrorism against the United States, 45 percent somewhat concerned, 19 percent not very concerned, 11 percent not concerned at all, and 1 percent did not know.
--34 percent were very concerned that laws and ethics would not keep up with technical advances, 31 percent somewhat concerned, 17 percent not very concerned, 14 percent not concerned at all, and 4 percent did not know.
--11 percent said they were very concerned there would be a nuclear war in their lifetime, 31 percent somewhat concerned, 23 percent not very concerned, 35 percent not concerned at all, and 1 percent did not know.
Asked to name the nation's leading problems, the top 12 answers were: 17 percent said crime or drugs, and 12 percent said morals or family values; eight percent said education; 6 percent economy or jobs; 6 percent peace; 5 percent health insurance; 4 percent foreign affairs; 4 percent government; 3 percent environment; 3 percent poverty; 3 percent children; and 2 percent race relations.
--------us nuc weapons facilities
Malfunction at Tenn. Nuke Plant
Las Vegas Sun
January 02, 2000
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/archives/2000/jan/02/010200301.html?nuclear+OR+plutonium+OR+uranium+OR+radioactiv%3F%3F%3F+OR+missile%3F
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) -- The Y2K bug infested a computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Y-12 nuclear weapons plant but it did not affect operations or workers, Energy Department officials said Sunday.
The exact nature of the malfunction was not disclosed because the computer controls a classified function. It was corrected in about three hours, said Department of Energy spokesman Frank Juan.
Juan said it is the first of the plant's 280 systems to experience a Y2K problem. Officials will continue to monitor all systems at the plant next week, Juan said.
The Y-12 plant makes warhead components for the MX missile system and is the primary uranium storage site for the nation's nuclear arsenal.
---
Y2K computer glitch reported at Tennessee nuclear weapons plant
The Associated Press
NewsFlash 01/02/00 5:50 PM Eastern
http://wire.nj.com/cgi-bin/nj_nview.pl?/home1/wire/AP/Stream-Parsed/FINANCIAL/f0028_AM_Y2K-NuclearWeapons http://www.boston.com/dailynews/002/economy/Y2K_computer_glitch_reported_a:.shtml
http://www.canoe.ca/TopStories/glitch_jan2.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000102/aponline174833_000.htm
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) -- The Y2K bug infested a computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Y-12 nuclear weapons plant but it did not affect operations or workers, Energy Department officials said Sunday.
The exact nature of the malfunction was not disclosed because the computer controls a classified function. It was corrected in about three hours, said Department of Energy spokesman Frank Juan.
Juan said it is the first of the plant's 280 systems to experience a Y2K problem. Officials will continue to monitor all systems at the plant next week, Juan said.
The Y-12 plant makes warhead components for the MX missile system and is the primary uranium storage site for the nation's nuclear arsenal.
---
The Physicist's Biggest Puzzle
Lee's Motives, Possible Damage in Atomic Secrets Case Remain a Mystery
Washington Post
Sunday, January 2, 2000; Page A03
By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/02/141l-010200-idx.html
ALBUQUERQUE-He flashed a wan smile and a timid wave to his friends and supporters when he first appeared in court, clutching a large brown mailing pouch stuffed with documents. But his placid face showed little else as former colleagues took the witness stand to denounce his deceptive behavior.
And when U.S. marshals finally led him back to solitary confinement last Wednesday, Wen Ho Lee showed no emotion, deepening the mystery of this once obscure nuclear weapons scientist whom government prosecutors now call an "unprecedented" threat to national security.
Why did he copy enough computer data to design a nuclear warhead when he didn't need all that information for his work? Why did he transfer top-secret computer codes to unsecure tapes? What happened to seven of the tapes? And if Lee destroyed them--as he claims--how, when and where did he do it?
Lee and his attorneys answered none of those questions last week as they tried unsuccessfully to persuade U.S. District Judge James A. Parker to release Lee on bail while he awaits trial for allegedly mishandling classified information, a felony charge that could put the 60-year-old scientist in prison for life.
Parker cited the lingering questions as he ruled, after three days of testimony, that no combination of bail restrictions could protect the country from the possibility that Lee might somehow pass the missing tapes to a foreign power.
And so the year of Wen Ho Lee ended much as it began, with government officials again calling the former physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory a potential spy. Only now it is clear that Lee's alleged offense--downloading enough top-secret data to "change the world's strategic balance," as one expert testified--is potentially far more serious than the alleged theft by China of some information about the design of the W-88 warhead.
That is where it all began last March, when government officials fired Lee from his job at Los Alamos and identified him as their prime espionage suspect in an investigation into how China apparently obtained a few scraps of classified data about the W-88, America's most sophisticated nuclear weapon.
The espionage probe ignited a political furor in Washington, triggered a reorganization of the Department of Energy and dominated the Sunday morning talk shows for weeks last spring. But the case was murky from the start; some observers pilloried Lee as the most dangerous atomic spy since Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, while others called him a victim of spy hysteria on the part of China bashers.
When government officials first identified Lee as a suspect in the W-88 case, they knew nothing of his computer downloading, which was discovered only after Lee was fired and his office searched.
Federal officials acknowledged in April and May that they had no evidence to show that Lee spied for a foreign country, even as they launched the largest computer investigation in FBI history and weighed criminal charges against Lee for the downloading.
While all this was underway, a House select committee chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) made the espionage probe a cause celebre, only to have the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board lambast the FBI and Department of Energy for prematurely focusing on Lee as the source of the W-88 leak. Other congressional committees reached similar conclusions.
By late summer, it even appeared for a time that Lee might avoid criminal prosecution altogether, as Los Alamos's former head of counterintelligence and two other officials involved in the investigation accused the government of singling out Lee as a suspect on the basis of his Chinese ethnicity.
But even after the FBI announced that it was going back to square one in the W-88 investigation and its agents expanded the probe beyond Lee and Los Alamos, he remained the focus of an investigation aimed at finding the missing tapes.
Lee was indicted Dec. 10 on 59 felony counts of mishandling 806 megabytes of computer codes and databases. This is the equivalent of more than 800,000 pages, a virtual catalogue of the nation's entire nuclear weapons program.
His colleagues expressed astonishment in testimony last week that any scientist with a top secret Q clearance could have committed so grievous an offense. They left no doubt that they too were mystified about why Lee lied to colleagues and methodically assembled all the know-how a foreign power would need to build nuclear warheads.
Government prosecutors, equally in the dark about Lee's motives, professed no such surprise at what they called his "surreptitious" and "nefarious" conduct. With FBI special agent Robert A. Messemer on the witness stand, they set out to document a "pattern of deception" by Lee stretching to 1982, when he telephoned a fellow scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who was then under investigation for espionage and offered his assistance.
Questioned by the FBI, Lee initially denied knowing the other scientist and admitted making the call only after FBI agents told him they had it on tape. That pattern continued, Messemer testified, after Lee traveled on Los Alamos business to Beijing in 1986 and 1988 and filed false trip reports on his return. It wasn't until Lee took a polygraph test 10 years later, in December 1998, that he admitted having a clandestine meeting in a hotel room with a Chinese official during his 1988 trip, Messemer testified.
And it wasn't until a February 1999 polygraph indicated that Lee was being deceptive, Messemer told the court, that Lee admitted helping Chinese nuclear weapons scientists to solve specific problems during his 1986 and 1988 trips.
When Lee was asked in a March 5, 1999, FBI interrogation whether he had ever received correspondence from Zheng Shaoteng, Messemer said, Lee responded that he had received only a Christmas card from the head of China's Institute of Applied Physics and Conceptual Mathematics.
But when FBI agents searched Lee's home outside Los Alamos in April, Messemer said, they found a letter in Lee's garage from Zheng requesting that Lee send him some unclassified information from Los Alamos. "Doctor Lee, in his assertions to the FBI, has made a number of misleading or false assertions," Messemer said.
Each time that Lee transferred nuclear secrets from secure to unsecure computer systems, he lied to the Los Alamos computer by typing in that the files he was transferring were unclassified, according to testimony from Messemer and several Los Alamos officials. And to copy the unlawfully downloaded files onto even less secure portable computer tapes, they said, Lee lied to a colleague, saying that he wanted to copy a resume.
A hint of Lee's likely defense emerged as his attorneys aggressively cross-examined Messemer and the Los Alamos officials, asserting that their client failed to take a number of obvious steps that would have been expected from someone seeking to cover his tracks.
He failed to change file names, left classified data sitting on his unsecure office computer for six years, even called the help desk at Los Alamos's computer center in February and asked for instructions on deleting files.
John Cline, one of Lee's attorneys, established during cross-examination that Lee deleted large quantities of classified data from his unsecure computer and erased classified material from two portable tapes in early 1999 after it became clear that he was under investigation for espionage and about to lose his Q clearance.
While prosecutors cited these deletions as attempts by Lee to cover his tracks, Cline argued that they were part of a pattern by Lee to expunge classified material from his files because he soon would no longer be authorized to work with it.
Cline also sought to show that the material downloaded by Lee was related to his work; that scientists with Q clearances were permitted to put classified material onto portable tapes (though not in the way Lee did); and that there were no explicit rules prohibiting the destruction of tapes containing classified information.
At one point, Cline hinted at what might be called the "pack-rat defense," asking a Los Alamos official: "Did you ever conclude that Doctor Lee had a penchant for keeping things?"
Back in the courtroom gallery, among Lee's friends and supporters, the pack-rat defense was often mentioned as a possible explanation. "He had a wonderful collection of codes and code manuals," said Don Marshall, Lee's next-door neighbor, fellow weapons scientist and staunch defender.
Chris Mechels, a former employee of the top-secret X Division at Los Alamos where Lee worked, added that Lee's copying of computer files took place in 1993 and 1994, when the national laboratory was making a chaotic transition between computer networks and more than a few scientists were worried about losing files.
Mechels also noted that Lee's downloading took place shortly after he received notice that he might be laid off and could have represented an attempt to maintain access to his life's work. While that wouldn't make the downloading proper, Mechels conceded, it provides at least a plausible rationale for his actions.
But all these theories, coupled with the pattern of deception alleged by prosecutors, only complicate the puzzle. Even Marshall was perplexed by Lee's activities and his misstatements to authorities. "It is troublesome," Marshall said. "It would be nice to hear [Lee] comment on it."
In the end, Lee's lawyers argued that he deserved to be freed on bail because the government had no proof that he had ever disclosed, or planned to disclose, any of the secret data to a foreign country. But prosecutors countered that it was Lee who failed to show proof of having destroyed the tapes.
And if this were not mystery enough, Scott Larson, an FBI computer security expert, testified that there is no way to know whether a foreign intelligence service or sophisticated hacker broke into Lee's unsecure computer and read any of the classified files.
Such an intrusion is possible, experts said, because Lee's computer password and user name are known to have moved across the Internet in plain text and could have been stolen with relative ease.
"We don't know whether someone came in and took it all?" asked prosecutor Robert Gorence.
"That's correct," Larson said.
AT A GLANCE: Wen Ho Lee Case
MARCH, 1999: A Taiwan-born scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Wen Ho Lee is fired for security violations. He had been under investigation since 1996 in connection with the 1980s theft of W-88 warhead information.
APRIL: After learning that Lee had transferred top-secret nuclear codes to his unsecured computer, the Energy Department shuts down computer systems at all its weapons labs because of concerns about possible espionage.
MAY: Secretary Bill Richardson announces an overhaul of security and counterintelligence activities at the Energy Department, including creation of a "security czar."
A House select committee issues a 700-page report saying China had obtained nuclear secrets about all U.S. warheads through a 20-year campaign of espionage.
DEC. 10: After hearing evidence for several months, a grand jury in Albuquerque issues a 59-count indictment accusing Lee of removing nuclear secrets from a secured Los Alamos computer. Lee is arrested and pleads not guilty.
SOURCE: Associated Press
---
Bail Is Denied for Los Alamos Scientist
JAMES STERNGOLD
New York Times January 2, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/library/review/010200thisweek-review.html
On the surface, the hearings in the case of Wen Ho Lee, the scientist accused of mishandling sensitive nuclear secrets at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, were simple. Dr. Lee sought to be released on bail.
He was refused bail a second time, but not before the hearing was turned into a mini-trial of both Dr. Lee and the security at government weapons labs.
Prosecutors called Dr. Lee devious in his efforts to bypass security precautions.
The defense, however, showed that Dr. Lee had downloaded the secret data easily onto computer tapes, had left evidence in the open and had even called the lab to ask how to delete some files. The last was an act that prosecutors called especially nefarious.
--------us nuc waste
Yucca's yearly price tag hits $7.4 billion
Las Vegas Sun
January 02, 2000
By Benjamin Grove <grove@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/archives/2000/jan/02/509657040.html?nuclear+OR+plutonium+OR+uranium+OR+radioactiv%3F%3F%3F+OR+missile%3F
WASHINGTON -- Yucca Mountain project managers will spend $685,000 on travel this year, about $30 million developing a nuclear waste container designed to last 10,000 years and $235,000 to sponsor a scholarship program for black college students.
A review of the $352.5 million Yucca Mountain budget for fiscal year 2000 offers a look at how the U.S. Department of Energy is spending the money it gets from Congress to develop a tomb for the nation's nuclear waste.
An analysis also reveals a few interesting line items tucked into the budget's folds. Perhaps none is more interesting than the grand total: $7.4 billion in 1998 adjusted dollars has been spent on the controversial and ambitious waste storage project since its inception in 1983.
The Yucca Mountain repository will cost an estimated $43.6 billion before it is completed in 2116, according to DOE budget documents.
"Before the department makes a recommendation to the president, we need to know everything possible about whether and how Yucca Mountain could function as a repository," Ivan Itkin, director of the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, said in a press release. "Our current budget will allow us to continue the scientific and technical work that is necessary to do that."
Itkin's written statement was prepared by the DOE's communications office. DOE press officers said DOE employees who provided information for this story could not be identified.
While DOE officials say Yucca expenditures represent money well spent, a number of taxpayer and environmental groups oppose the spending. A coalition of critics next month will release the sixth "Green Scissors" report targeting what its members believe is wasteful government spending, including Yucca. Yucca has been on the list every year.
"For the DOE, when it comes to Yucca Mountain, ignorance is bliss," said Anna Aurilio of the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, an environmental and consumer group that co-authors the Green Scissors report. "When data show that their own (safety) guidelines could be violated, then they change the guidelines rather than disqualify the site."
Since 1983 the DOE has been analyzing Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, to determine whether it is safe to store all of the nation's nuclear waste -- eventually more than 77,000 tons of it -- inside the mountain.
The high-level radioactive waste now sits at nuclear power plants all over the nation. Trucks and trains could begin hauling the waste to Nevada as early as 2007, according to legislation pending in Congress.
Most of the money that pays for Yucca comes from the pockets of people who use electricity generated by nuclear power plants. Those ratepayers pay a utility tax into a Yucca fund, now at about $15 billion.
But taxpayers also pay for Yucca because the U.S. Department of Defense has produced high-level radioactive waste making weapons and powering nuclear sea vessels. Taxpayers have paid $1.2 billion so far and owe another $1.5 billion by 2010, DOE officials said.
Eventually, taxpayers will have paid for about 25 percent of the cost of Yucca because defense waste would be stored there.
The bulk of this year's Yucca budget, $256.5 million, will be directed to private contractors for ongoing studies inside the mountain, according to DOE officials.
For example, scientists are analyzing how intense heat produced by decaying nuclear waste affects the mountain rock. They are studying how water moves through the mountain and how vulnerable Yucca is to an earthquake or volcano.
In October, at the start of the new fiscal year, the DOE's Yucca payroll listed 19 contractors with 1,574 full-time employees, according to DOE documents.
That number had swelled to the equivalent of 1,947 full-time employees in September. That month marks the end of the fiscal year, when contractors pull employees from other projects and pay more overtime hours to meet deadlines on Yucca projects.
TRW Environmental Safety Systems holds the most lucrative contract: $56.5 million this year and $59.8 million next year, according to DOE officials. TRW is in charge of the engineering, design and management of Yucca projects. The company's 10-year contract was estimated to be close to $1 billion when it was signed in 1991.
Other top contractors include San Diego-based engineering and technology research firm Science Applications International Corp. ($33.7 million next year); Boise, Idaho-based construction firm Morrison-Knudsen Corp. ($18.2 million); Charlotte, North Carolina-based Duke Engineering & Services, Inc. ($15.5 million); and University of California-managed Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ($12.9 million).
Scientists at six laboratories around the nation are conducting research on metals to be used for nuclear waste containers. They have the unusual task of developing a cask that could safely hold nuclear waste at least 10,000 years.
Lynchburg, Va.-based Framatome Cogema Fuels now leads the effort, working closely with Lawrence Livermore. Engineers at Lawrence Livermore are studying how metal and alloy samples, some just 1 inch by 1 inch, stand up over time when exposed to varying temperatures, humidity and moisture levels.
Lawrence Livermore engineers now say a nickle, chrome and tungsten alloy called C-22 or "hastalloy" could last 10,000 years.
"It's our belief for this type of environment this is the best material available," said Al Lingenfelter, an engineer at Lawrence Livermore.
In the past two years Framatome officials have fabricated several mock-up sample carbon-steel containers. The test versions of the cylindrical "waste storage packages" are about 4 feet long, about 10 feet shorter than the actual containers will be. Both the mock-ups and the actual containers will be about 5 feet wide.
Framatome officials this spring and summer plan to fabricate a new test C-22 container. They also are developing a titanium "drip shield" that would be placed over the container to protect it from water inside the Yucca repository.
"These tests are being conducted by some of the best scientists in the United States," said Tom Coleman, Framatome vice president for government relations.
Some of the smaller Yucca expenditures are the most intriguing. One seems to have nothing to do with nuclear waste.
The Yucca budget includes $235,000 allocated for a scholarship program for 10 minority college students. The program grew from an executive order signed by former President George Bush that requires the federal government to support historically black colleges and universities.
So the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which manages Yucca, launched a scholarship program for 10 students a year. The goal is to propel more minority scientists into the work force. OCRWM offers the students $8,000 each for tuition and fees, plus a $600 a month stipend during the school year for a total of $134,000 a year.
The rest of the $235,000 goes to "administrative overhead costs," such as program recruiting, student orientation and application reviews, said a DOE program administrator who asked not to be identified.
Yucca managers also budget for travel: $685,000 next year. That's roughly a $3,500 average for each of the 196 full-time OCRWM employees, although the DOE doesn't keep a list of how many of them take trips each year, said DOE spokeswoman Gayle Fisher.
Yucca staffers travel between offices in Nevada and Washington and labs elsewhere and attend conferences, such as the International Conference on Geologic Repositories held in Denver in October.
Yucca managers also attend several overseas conferences, Fisher said. For example, Yucca policy advisor Abe Van Luik went to Paris for four days in October to deliver a Yucca briefing to a multinational conference.
Of course, part of the Yucca budget is allocated for salaries, including benefits and overtime: about $20 million for the 196 full-time employees. That's roughly a $102,000 average. DOE officials said it was difficult to calculate how much they spend on overtime.
DOE officials stressed that the employees are well paid because they are skilled professionals and doctorate-wielding specialists such as nuclear engineers and public-policy specialists.
DOE documents list 45 general engineers, two nuclear engineers, two nuclear industry specialists, 16 physical scientists and 38 program managers among those on the payroll.
Among the expenditures that were axed from this year's budget was a $1.9 million information exchange program between Yucca scientists and the engineers inside Krasnoyarsk-26 in Siberia. Yucca managers had to trim their budget after they requested $409 million this year, and Congress gave them only $352 million.
Krasnoyarsk-26 was a once-proud jewel of the former Soviet Union's nuclear empire. The city was built at the foot of a mountain hiding three nuclear reactors that spit out tons of plutonium for weapons of the Cold War. The nation's top scientists toiled in secrecy for decades inside the barbed wire confines of the remote, 7-square-mile city that Soviet leaders denied even existed.
These days Krasnoyarsk-26 is the victim of a crumbling economy: Only one reactor inside the mountain works, plant workers go unpaid and security is waning, according to recent news reports. But scientists there have first-hand knowledge of how nuclear waste affects a mountain.
"The Russians may not have seen it this way, but (Krasnoyarsk-26) has now become a good example of a reactor heating rock," said Fisher. She said Yucca officials would have spent the $1.9 million to collect Krasnoyarsk-26 records and write reports.
DOE budget officials pen the first draft of each year's Yucca budget. From there, the budget eventually becomes part of the president's budget request. The Yucca budget is part of the DOE's budget, which is a part of the mind-numbing 3,000-page Fiscal Energy and Water Appropriations bill.
An excerpt:
"Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations require numerical predictions of the effectiveness of the multiple barrier concept to mitigate a potential release to the natural environment and minimize radionuclides transport to potential human receptors." (From page 1,488 of the House Fiscal Year 2000 Energy and Water Appropriations bill.)
In other words, scientists need money to test whether stored nuclear waste might leak and harm people.
It's then up to Congress to approve the appropriations bill. Few elected representatives or senators actually study the reams of budget documents for Yucca in any detail, DOE officials say. Congressional aides do most of the in-depth review each year between February and June or July.
"It's more than a cursory review, I can tell you that," said the DOE financial officer. "They ask many good questions."
The House and Senate then haggle over bottom lines and eventually agree on a final allocation. This year the House had approved $281 million for Yucca; the Senate approved $355. A special committee of the two houses settled on the final $352.5 million.
The budget process for next year already is under way. The DOE plans to ask for $386 million for Yucca for 2001, according to DOE documents.
According to budget projections, the Yucca project will need between $600 million and $1 billion a year between 2005 and 2040. The budget then quickly levels off to about $50 million a year until 2116 when the project is complete.
-------- us spying
THE MILITARY
In One of Few Problems, Link to Spy Satellite Fails
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/mil-military.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 1 -- A computer failure caused by the arrival of the year 2000 cut communications with one of the nation's secret spy satellites for two to three hours on Friday night and continued to hobble its operations today, Pentagon officials said.
A computer system at a ground station of the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that runs the military's spy satellites, failed at 7 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, or midnight Greenwich Mean Time, the standard to which many military systems are synchronized.
The satellite continued to operate normally, but the disruption made it impossible to process the information it was transmitting back to earth, the officials said. No other satellites were affected.
Deputy Secretary of Defense John J. Hamre said at the Pentagon today that officials had been able to rely on "backup procedures" to resume processing the satellite's feed within two to three hours, but they could do so at "less than our full peacetime level of activity."
"It was only for a matter of a few hours when we were not able to process information," Dr. Hamre said. "We are now. And we'll be back to normal operations very soon."
Even so, he called the failure significant and said it was the most notable disruption attributed so far to the 2000 rollover, for which the Pentagon spent $3.6 billion to prepare. Despite fears of widespread problems, the nation's military reported only a few other minor disruptions as the new year arrived, including a power loss in the remote outpost of Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean.
Dr. Hamre and other officials would not say exactly where the computer problem occurred or disclose other details, such as what part of the globe was temporarily invisible to their eyes in space. Senior officials said that in an emergency they would be able to take surveillance photos by other means, such as U-2 spy planes.
The National Reconnaissance Office, based in Chantilly, Va., operates about two dozen intelligence satellites, including five that take photographs or radar images, eight that intercept communications and eight that monitor ocean traffic, said John E. Pike, a military and intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.
Although the Pentagon refused to identify the satellite, one military official indicated that it was one that took images. Mr. Pike said the information broadcast by the five photographic or radar satellites was processed at Fort Belvoir, Va., an Army base near Washington.
---
Pentagon Withheld News of Major New Year's Computer Failure
Washington Post
Sunday, January 2, 2000; Page A08
By Roberto Suro
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/02/135l-010200-idx.html
On New Year's Eve, top Pentagon officials withheld news of a major Y2K computer glitch that had cut access to a critical satellite intelligence system, telling reporters only after the big millennial celebrations in Washington and New York had finished.
Throughout Friday evening, Pentagon officials told members of the news media that the change to the year 2000 was proceeding without a hitch throughout the defense establishment. But yesterday the same officials revealed that a major computer failure occurred shortly after 7 p.m. EST--which is midnight Greenwich Mean Time, the time standard for many satellite systems.
A ground-based computer system that processes information from a major satellite intelligence network failed after 2000 began at Greenwich Mean Time, and the military lost the ability to collect data from the satellites, Deputy Defense Secretary John J. Hamre said yesterday at a Pentagon news conference.
"We did have one significant problem, one that I had wished we hadn't had, but we did," Hamre said. "One of our intelligence systems, a satellite-based intelligence system, experienced some Y2K failures last night shortly after the rollover of Greenwich Mean Time. And for a period of several hours, we were not able to process information from that system."
However, at a 9:30 p.m. briefing Friday, more than two hours after the system went down, the Pentagon denied that it was having any problems with computers misreading a two-digit date of 00 as 1900 rather than 2000.
"We've been monitoring the state of the world very closely, and particularly our systems, as we rolled past Greenwich Mean Time at about 1900 this evening, 7 p.m. And I'm happy to report and continue to be encouraged to report that all the Department of Defense systems remain in green status," Rear Adm. Robert Willard, head of the Y2K task force for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced at the Friday briefing.
"Our systems thus far are free of year 2000 glitches," he added.
As Willard was speaking to reporters, military programmers were completing a temporary repair of the processing unit that allowed it to start working again, though at reduced capacity, officials said.
Asked yesterday why the breakdown was not reported to the public on New Year's Eve, Hamre said he arrived at the Pentagon as Willard was giving the briefing and did not learn about the problem until a half-hour later.
From 11 p.m. to midnight EST, Hamre hosted a small reception in his offices for members of the news media and Pentagon officials who were keeping the millennial watch--including Willard. There was extensive informal conversation about Y2K matters, but even though the intelligence system had been fixed for more than an hour at that point, no mention was made that it had had any problems.
Even after officials and reporters watched the fireworks at the Washington Monument from the Pentagon parade ground and returned to the Pentagon's public affairs offices, officials continued to insist that all systems were operating flawlessly.
Around 2 a.m., well after the crystal ball had descended at Times Square and the nationwide live television audience had shrunk substantially, word of the computer failure was leaked to reporters.
"We did not want to release incomplete information," said a senior Pentagon public affairs officer.
-------- us foreign policy
U.S. Foreign Policy Outlook Better
Associated Press
January 2, 2000 Filed at 1:51 p.m. EST
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-US-Hopeful-Diplomacy.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Almost imperceptibly, the Clinton administration has put together a string of foreign policy advances, a trend reassuring to officials with memories of what was a decidedly grim international picture just a few months ago.
As a new year begins, officials are highlighting a modest revival of U.S.-Chinese relations following a long period in the deep freeze. Prospects for peace in the Mideast have brightened and there have been long strides toward a permanent settlement in Northern Ireland. The situation in Kosovo has stabilized. And a sore point with much of the rest of the world -- the United States' skipping out on its dues owed the United Nations -- has been partially put to rest.
For Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, officials say there was no moment more discouraging than the lonely, late night trek she made to the Chinese Embassy last May 7 to apologize to Ambassador Li Zhao Xing for the accidental NATO bombing of Beijing's Embassy in Yugoslavia.
Besides the three Chinese who were killed and the many injured, another casualty was U.S.-Chinese relations, which the United States had been assiduously nurturing. After the bombing, ties with Beijing went into a deep freeze for months.
It was a difficult time for President Clinton and his foreign policy team and not only because of the problems with China. Israelis and Palestinians were not implementing the U.S.-brokered Wye River agreement they had reached in October 1998. Perceived military posturing by North Korea was generating anxiety in Northeast Asia. And there were grave doubts about whether NATO's air war over Yugoslavia would produce a positive outcome.
Now, almost eight months later, grounds for hope exist. Some reasons:
--U.S.-Chinese relations have revived somewhat after their mid-year chill. The two countries were able to reach a trade agreement this past fall that will enable China to join the World Trade Organization, which sets rules for international commerce.
--With the help of almost 50,000 mostly-European forces, the situation in Kosovo has stabilized for the time being. NATO's air war over Yugoslavia proved far more effective in bringing Yugoslavia to heel than skeptics had believed. All Kosovo Albanians who were evicted from the province by Yugoslav forces have returned. But the goal of ethnic harmony between the Albanians and Serbs seems far off.
--With a nudge from U.S. diplomacy, Israeli and Syrian leaders have resumed peace talks for the first time in almost four years. A crucial new round of discussions begins on Monday in West Virginia. Meanwhile, the tone of Israeli-Palestinian relations has improved markedly but progress on substance remains difficult.
--North Korea has bowed to U.S. insistence that it not go ahead with a test of a long-range missile. The prospect of a new test on the heels of one in 1998 had been causing alarm in much of Northeast Asia. Officials caution, however, that it is too early to declare victory in their bid to wean Pyongyang on to a peaceful path.
--With an assist from the United States, a new Protestant-Catholic government has taken power in Northern Ireland, where war has flared intermittently for 30 years. Resistance to disarmament by paramilitaries remains a potential obstacle to a lasting peace.
--An enormous headache for the administration was eased when Congress voted in December to pay $926 million in U.N. arrears over three years. U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke called the vote a ``terrain-changing event.''
``The Clinton administration has made a lot of progress in foreign policy,'' says Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic chairman of the House International Relations Committee who now heads the Wilson Center, a research group.
``The big relationships are heading in the right direction,'' he says, citing U.S. ties with Japan and the European Union. One question mark among analysts, however, is the future of U.S.-Russian relations now that Boris Yeltsin has stepped down as president.
Helmut Sonnenfeldt of the Brookings Institution isn't sure the positive trend of recent months means very much.
``We have a whole host of things that in some respects are better. Whether they are fundamentally better you can't tell,'' he says.
John Bolton, a one-time top aide to former Secretary of State James A. Baker, believes 2000 will be fraught with dangers.
``The past year has been a year of things that didn't happen,'' Bolton says. There could be military tensions with China, he says, at the time of Taiwan's presidential elections in March, much as there were when the last such elections were held, in 1996.
Also, Bolton also is concerned that Iraq may be developing weapons of mass destruction with impunity now that more than a year has passed since President Saddam Hussein forced U.N. weapons inspectors out.
A U.N. Security Council resolution approved last month authorizes a new weapons inspection system but Iraq says it won't cooperate. For Saddam, the downside of this stance is that U.N. economic sanctions against Iraq, now almost nine years old, will remain in place.
State Department spokesman James Foley says Iraq is increasingly isolated in the Middle East. Citing the progress Israel and its neighbors have been making, Foley says, ``The forces of peace are back in the ascendance. It is not a regional context that is beneficial to Saddam.''
Hamilton also finds Iraq a worrisome problem but says the United States must also deal with a larger issue, one that relates to the preeminent place of the United States as a global military and economic power.
``How do we use it for good and for the achievement of American and national interests?'' he asks. That's the great challenge in foreign policy as we move into the year ahead.''
--------terrorism
KEEPING WATCH
With Fears of Terrorism, Precautions Will Continue
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/010200terrorism-alert.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 1 -- Law enforcement and intelligence officials in the United States and around the world remained on a high state of alert today because of the possibility of terrorism, even as they expressed relief that the year 2000 began without any sign of significant disruptions caused by criminal or extremist groups.
Federal authorities said that as a precaution they would maintain significantly greater staffing levels of counterterrorism forces, and urged state and local authorities to do the same for at least a week or two.
At the same time, the officials acknowledged that they had received no credible or specific threats inside the United States since the arrest on Dec. 14 of an Algerian trying to enter the United States from Canada with a car carrying explosives and timing devices.
Today, several officials expressed satisfaction that their biggest fear, that foreign or domestic terrorists would stage an attack involving one of the many huge public gatherings celebrating the arrival of the year 2000, never materialized. A lesser, but still significant, concern was that cyberterrorists might attack computer networks, but that fear also diminished as the clock wound into the new year.
All through the long night on New Year's Eve and into today, American intelligence and law enforcement officials kept vigil at command posts for any signs of trouble. A response center inside the Central Intelligence Agency's counterterrorism offices has been operating 24 hours a day for the past few days. But C.I.A. officials reported all quiet as the new year arrived, with no evidence of imminent terrorist action.
At the F.B.I.'s command center, the Strategic Information and Operations Center in Washington, agents remained on duty on 12-hour shifts and will remain on duty for several days. All of the agency's field offices were also on increased alert status. One senior law enforcement official said, "So far so good, but let's see what happens in the next few days."
In the United States, the frequent government warnings of terrorist threats in the weeks leading up to New Year's Eve reflected the unusually high anxiety levels among counterterrorism officials. The alerts and advisories may have held down turnout at some events, but appeared to do little to dampen the jubilant mood at many of them.
The warnings, which emphasized that Americans should be vigilant at home and careful if traveling abroad, gained credibility in the days leading up to New Year's Eve because of evidence that at least some groups were trying to stage attacks. The State Department travel advisory urged caution through the middle of January.
In Jordan, 13 people were arrested last month in connection with a suspected plot by Islamic radicals linked to a Saudi-born militant, Osama bin Laden, to attack celebrations in Jerusalem and at the Vatican.
Still, the only specific evidence of a terror plot followed the arrest of Ahmed Ressam as he sought to enter Washington State from Canada. That arrest led federal agents to suspect that Mr. Ressam and his associates were mounting an effort to detonate a bomb within the United States.
As a result, federal authorities have arrested several people who they believe may have some connections to Mr. Ressam, and they have interviewed others. Two people arrested trying to enter Vermont across the Canadian border are also thought to have ties to an Algerian terrorist group, and on Thursday, an antiterrorist force staged a dramatic dawn raid in Brooklyn to arrest Abdel Ghani, a 31-year-old Algerian believed to be an accomplice of Mr. Ressam.
F.B.I. agents also arrested five men in Boston, three of whom were known to be Algerian. On Friday, federal agents completed interviews with several dozen people in the United States believed to have some ties to Mr. Ressam, in a move that American officials hoped would glean more information about him and serve as a deterrent to other potential terrorists.
The possibility that Mr. bin Laden's network might strike on New Year's Eve was clearly the biggest nightmare that haunted American intelligence and law enforcement officials as they prepared to guard the celebrations. Those fears prompted the Clinton administration to encourage several nations in the Middle East and elsewhere to order precautionary arrests of suspected terrorist sympathizers in December. The officials said that there was no hard evidence, though, that those arrested were preparing to take action.
--------y2k
New millennium welcomed in trouble-free celebrations
The Irish Times
Saturday, January 1, 2000
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/breaking/2000/0101/break3.htm
11 a.m. - Worldwide wrap-up of millennium eve celebrations: President Bill Clinton pledged the United States would uphold the torch of freedom as north America became the last continent to usher in an apparently crisis-free millennium with extravagant celebrations.
At their midnight time, the major western US cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas joined New York and Washington to celebrate with fireworks, balloons and confetti.
"The sun will always rise on America as long as each new generation lights the fire of freedom," Mr Clinton said before setting off fireworks in Washington. "Our children are ready and so again the torch is passed to a new century of young Americans."
Across the US there were no reported major security breaches or incidents despite fears that extremist groups might try to attacks or mar US millennium celebrations.
Seattle had cancelled its planned centre city party because of fears of a terrorist attack after the arrest near the city two weeks ago of an Algerian allegedly transporting bomb-making equipment.
There were no immediate reports of major computer problems, which had been feared because of systems not recognising the year change. The government said all was well with air traffic control.
Countries from Britain and Germany to China issued early Y2K bug all-clears but some independent experts warned against complacency. Minor blips were noted in the French banking system and at US power units.
Earlier, celebrations rolled across the Atlantic from Europe to Rio de Janeiro as millions of Brazilians led the Americas into the millennium with major computers apparently ticking smoothly past the midnight hour. After Rio, it was the turn of Buenos Aires, Caracas and other South American cities.
Cuba, whose leader Dr Fidel Castro rejects January 1 as the start of the new millennium, ushered in the New Year with exhortations of revolutionary fervour instead of the fireworks and street-parties seen elsewhere around the world.
Dr Castro, for whom January 1st marks the anniversary of his 1959 revolution, backs the view of some historians and experts that the millennium does not begin until January 1st, 2001, because the Christian era did not use the digit zero and therefore started with the year one.
FIREWORKS AND PRAYER:
People across Europe, Africa and Asia had already enjoyed their millennium moment, celebrating through the night with fireworks, champagne, entertainment and prayer.
Pope John Paul, praying before 130,000 young people in St Peter's Square, asked God to bless this moment of festivity and good wishes, that it may be the promising beginning of a new millennium filled with joy and peace.
In Russia, where experts had grave fears about the Y2K computer bug affecting the rickety nuclear power industry, no problems were reported.
US and Russian military experts working together at an Air Force base in Colorado to avert any nuclear missile disaster from the millennium bug breathed easier after most of the world ushered in the year without incident.
Russia's missile chief said the world's second largest nuclear power had kept its promise and avoided any millennium computer bug problems.
Col-Gen Vladimir Yakovlev said even before the New Year dawned he would be marking the occasion by letting off fireworks rockets in his yard with his children - the only launches he envisaged for the night.
Fears of critical computer problems stem from older systems which were programmed with only the last two digits of a year. If the glitch was left uncorrected, computers could misread 2000 as 1900, causing systems to malfunction or even crash.
BIG BEN RINGS IN GMT:
Fingers had stayed crossed until midnight GMT - the global time standard based on the London suburb of Greenwich, which is used by air control systems around the world.
The witching hour was rung in by Big Ben, and a firework show on the Thames was said be visible in space. Queen Elizabeth joined hands with Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair to sing the traditional Auld Lang Syne New Year anthem.
Britain was ablaze with thousands of flaming beacons in spite of a string of jinxes that barred passengers from London's giant new ferris wheel and left many guests ticketless for the "top people's" Millennium Dome party at Greenwich.
THREE MILLION GERMANS CHEER:
Three million people cheered in the millennium at the biggest party in German history that stretched from the centre of west Berlin to the middle of the formerly communist eastern sector of the city.
Fireworks displays lit up German skies, ending with a final bang the turbulent 20th century that brought defeats in two world wars and a 40-year Cold War division.
STRANGERS KISS IN RED SQUARE:
Russians, taking in their stride the news that President Boris Yeltsin had resigned, launched into vodka-fuelled parties. Champagne corks popped, firecrackers banged and stranger kissed stranger in Red Square.
Ukraine's Chernobyl atomic power plant, site of the world's worst nuclear accident and a source of international nervousness, entered 2000 without a hitch. "Everything is fine," shift manager Mr Olexander Oleseyuk said.
But the celebrations were not all trouble-free. South Africa's first city Johannesburg marked the new millennium violently its notorious Hillbrow district resembling an urban war-zone as revellers pelted police with bottles.
In France, half a million people entered the new century without electricity following storms that have killed 83 people. More than 1.2 million people crowded central Paris but a big panel on the Eiffel Tower counting down to midnight failed a few hours before the big moment.
The first reported baby of the millennium - a boy - was born in New Zealand at 12.01 a.m. in Auckland, a television news station said. (Reuters)
---
Y2K Experts Shift Focus to Market Openings
New York Times
January 2, 2000 Filed at 12:48 a.m. ET
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-milleni.html
SINGAPORE (Reuters) - The world's computers appear to have ridden out the millennium bug without a sneeze, with experts turning their focus to Monday when big financial markets and businesses reopen.
As revelers watched the sun rise on 2000, they found that lights still shined, bank machines spat out cash, telephones functioned and planes stayed airborne.
Predictions of cyberspace chaos proved as empty as the prophecies of Christian doomsday cultists in Jerusalem, leaving experts to question whether the $600 billion price tag to immunize business and government against the Y2K bug was necessary.
The fears were that computers would read 2000 as 1900 and shut down. But industry and government officials warned against premature celebrations.
Until millions of workers switch on their computers on Monday, air-traffic control systems handle a full load and global banking systems pump money smoothly through Tokyo, London and New York, they cannot know whether the Y2K bug still lurks in networks, ready to disrupt ordinary life.
BEST LAID PLANS
``The best laid plans of mice and men are apt to go astray, but this seems to have worked out fine,'' said Michael Dorfsman, spokesman for the U.S. Bond Market Association.
The Chicago futures exchanges will be the first major international market to start electronic trading at 5:30 p.m. local time Sunday. Officials said tests on trading floors Saturday went without a hitch.
Earlier, no digital disasters struck any of the world's stock or bond markets or banking systems when the date tripped from 1999 to 2000.
Stock markets in Australia, New Zealand, Manila, Bangkok and elsewhere reported passing grades in Y2K testing. Across Asia, markets, telecommunications and other infrastructure officials reported all systems were go.
So smoothly were U.S. systems operating overall that the federal government on Saturday evening began scaling back from its virtual war footing.
``It is possible that as early as Wednesday we could go just to the day shift,'' said Y2K trouble-shooter John Koskinen after sending home half of the 800 people on 24-hour shifts.
Even countries where chaos and disruption can be daily ordeals reported plain sailing.
Venezuela, engulfed by deadly mudslides and floods earlier this month, said its oil industry operations were working normally. So were oil operations in Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation where experts feared its chaotic infrastructure would buckle.
ALL-CLEAR AT JAPAN N-PLANTS
Of the 170 countries reporting their Y2K status to the International Y2K Cooperation Center, 133 of them said 11 sectors, including power and telecommunications, were operating normally, according to the Washington-based center.
Computer malfunctions at Japanese nuclear power plants, possibly connected with the Y2K bug, had all been cleared up, company spokesmen said on Sunday.
Five different problems, most connected with data monitoring, emerged at four separate nuclear plants on Saturday.
Japan suffered its worst nuclear accident in September. A nuclear chain reaction at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, north of Tokyo, killed one person and exposed more than 100 others to radiation.
At Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado, Russian and U.S. military experts were elated after working around the clock in an unprecedented show of cooperation to prevent missiles from being launched by a Y2K computer bug.
``It was a great success,'' said Maj. Gen. Thomas Goslin, director of operations of the U.S. Space Command. ``Everything has gone just as we though it would.''
Operations of a U.S. spy satellite were disrupted, however. For several hours, the Y2K bug idled intelligence gathering until a ground back-up system kicked in, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre said.
The nearest hint of a problem in the international energy systems came in Turkey's monitoring of a pipeline from Iraq. Oil was kept flowing by switching the computer date back to 1995 from 1999.
Other than that, ``it's a green light across the world,'' said David Knapp, head of the markets division of International Energy Agency.
In London, home of the Greenwich meridian, ministers said the bug could still strike.
Margaret Beckett, the minister in charge of navigating Britain through any potential millennium bug problems, said that any bugs were more likely to surface over the coming days as people went back to work.
Beckett added that vigilance was needed up until February 29 -- it being a Leap Year, February has an extra day -- when computer crashes have also been forecast because of the unusual date.
---
Wis. Family Spent $20,000 for Y2K
Associated Press
January 2, 2000 Filed at 1:18 a.m. EST
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Y2K-Big-Spender.html
HUDSON, Wis. (AP) -- Dennis Olson is a little disappointed: After all, he spent $20,000 on food, drinking water, medical supplies and a generator to prepare for Y2K-related chaos that never happened on New Year's Day.
``It's a little bittersweet to see it end this way,'' said Olson, a 41-year-old electrical engineer and computer consultant.
Olson, who has a wife and two teen-age sons, feared the Y2K computer bug might bring power shortages or water-system failures or even government-imposed martial law. He said he logged more than 1,000 hours on the Internet chatting with like-minded survivalists.
``I studied everything there was to know about the power grid, the just-in-time supply system, fuel shipments, food storage, communications and martial law,'' he said. ``I even have a medical kit equipped for minor surgery.''
As for the 400 boxes of Hamburger Helper in his basement, the 175 pounds of pasta, 50 bars of soap, nine tubes of toothpaste and other supplies -- they may be needed yet, Olson said Saturday.
``This is hardly over,'' he said. ``Thank God, we got through to night. I did the happy dance. But I don't think we're out of the woods until May or June. Plenty of computer problems can turn up between now and then.''
If they don't, Olson said he would likely donate some provisions to organizations serving the needy.
---
Final Bid of $10M for Y2K Web Site
Associated Press
January 2, 2000 Filed at 3:12 a.m. EST
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-Y2K-Domain-Name.html
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Bidding for the Internet domain name ``www.year2000.com'' closed Saturday at $10 million -- a record if the sale goes through.
The domain name is now used for a Web site run by Peter de Jager, a Canadian computer consultant who was among the first to sound the Y2K alarm. In an announcement to subscribers, de Jager and partner Cliff Kurtzman said the name has served its purpose well and ``can undoubtedly be put to better use'' in 2000.
The online auction site eBay accepted 13 offers by the end of bidding at 1 a.m. EST Sunday, according to the auctioneer's Web site. No names were disclosed and an eBay spokesman said it typically takes three business days to determine whether a bid is legitimate.
The cost of virtual real estate has been rising sharply as more companies seek a place on the Internet. The record for a domain name sale is $7.5 million. A Houston entrepreneur sold ``business.com'' to eCompanies, a business development firm founded by former Disney Internet chief Jake Winebaum and Earthlink founder Sky Dayton.
If the year2000.com sale goes through, the material on the site will be moved.
Bidding was supposed to end Friday night as the new year arrived in the Central time zone. The sale was extended because eBay closed its site for last-minute Y2K testing.
---
STAYING BEHIND
What Millennium? Let Others Make Merry, Cuba Will Wait a Year
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By DAVID GONZALEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/010200cuba-anniversary.html
HAVANA, Jan. 1 -- Cuba did not celebrate the start of the third millennium today.
This is not a political statement, even if the Communist Party's refusal to fade away after the collapse of the Soviet Union or the continuing United States trade embargo make Cuba feel like a time capsule crammed with dowager buildings and revolutionary slogans. It is only an acknowledgement -- made on the front page of Granma, the official newspaper -- that since the Christian calendar began with the Year One, the new millennium actually starts on Jan. 1 next year.
So while the rest of the world jumps the gun on the party, Cuba, Communist or otherwise, ever insistent on following its own political and social path, will linger in the 20th century for one more year.
Contrary to rumors, neither Madonna nor the Three Tenors showed up in Havana on Friday night. There were no fireworks or huge crowds cheering on the stroke of 12, a result of both tradition and politics. Cubans traditionally spend New Year's Eve at home with friends and family, waiting until midnight to toss buckets of water out the window in a ritual that symbolizes saying goodbye to the past year's bad luck and hard times.
And ever since Jan. 1, 1959, when the dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Havana, the New Year is more important for commemorating the day when cheering throngs embraced Fidel Castro and his triumphant revolutionaries.
While Cuba officially remains on the verge of the millennium, its people have grown accustomed to the feeling of being on the cusp of a new era. They have learned to improvise and survive in an economy that, despite modest growth, has yet to lift their family situations. So it was that an elderly artist chuckled as he reflected on whether the year 2000 held any special meaning for him.
"Here, every day is the turn of the century," he said. "The problem is tomorrow. Our preoccupation is tomorrow. What problems are we going to have tomorrow?"
Recent weeks have brought contrasting flashes of yesterday and tomorrow. In numbers not seen since the early days of the revolution, tens of thousands of people have marched in boisterous rallies demanding the return of Elián González, the 6-year-old refugee who is at the center of a custody dispute between relatives in Miami and his father in Cuba. In the millennium's last cold war battle, some 100,000 protesters in the city of Santiago revived visions of the old revolutionary fervor on Thursday with their broadsides against American imperialism.
"Cuba is in a time warp," said a diplomat.
"In the 21st century Cuba is not going to have Fidel. He is not going to be around forever. There is going to be a change and we would like to see it occur in a way that assures democracy and progress."
But reminiscent of the days before it started importing revolution, Cuba is eagerly importing tourists who sip daiquiris in new hotels or trot out their best high school Spanish as they bargain down the price of bongos or portraits of Che Guevara.
Three hundred Italian and Canadian tourists ushered in the New Year under the dome of the stately Capitol building, which is used as a museum and convention center, feasting on Champagne and lobster.
In Old Havana, several hundred tourists paid $100 each to dine under the stars in the plaza outside the cathedral, ringed by twinkling wreaths hanging from the balconies. As tourists, some in black tie and slinky gowns, roamed about, ordinary Cubans without the cash to join the bash looked on curiously from the roped-off entrances to the plaza.
"What can I believe?" said Yordanka Hernández, who lives in a cul-de-sac off the plaza. "They should do this for us, the Cubans. Instead, this is for foreigners. As a Cuban, imagine what I think. We earned it. We're struggling. Struggling for Elián."
In a building overlooking the plaza, small groups gathered in tiny apartments, clinking glasses of rum or dancing to music from boom boxes as they waited to eat their dinner of pork, rice and yuca.
"We celebrate with what we have," said Roberto Leyva. "Let everybody have their own way. Cubans live among brothers. He does not live thinking about the people out there."
He expected that the New Year observance would bring with it some official declaration about the revolution's challenges after 41 years.
"The comandante will have to talk about the revolution in the millennium," he said. "For me, this is the best. Here, there are no assaults, you can walk anywhere. Fidel has created this. If God exists, that God is Fidel."
Tourists flowed through the streets, as they do most days, taking pictures. Although street vendors grouse that the tourists often pass by looking but not buying, they are a source of much-needed hard currency. They also bring a curiosity about an island that is suffused with near-mythic meaning.
"I am a disillusioned old-time Communist," said Allesandro Damiani, an Italian tourist who works for the European Community. "I wanted to find out if ideology is stronger than climate and latitude, or the other way around.
I found latitude and climate are stronger."
Mr. Damiani said Cuba's opening up to tourism was inevitable since the collapse of the Soviet Union, which helped subsidize the government here.
But he also thought it was jarring to see class distinctions he thought had vanished with the revolution slowly arise between Cubans who work in tourism and have access to American dollars and Cubans who do not and are paid in Cuban pesos.
One of those Cubans who has a few more dollars is Manuel Licea, a singer who first rose to fame in the 1950's with the island's top orchestras. Though he is fond of his smokes and rum-tinged espresso, he is still in fine voice, and has become famous again through his appearances on the wildly popular "Buena Vista Social Club" and "Afro-Cuban All Stars" recordings. Since then, he has traveled to Europe and the United States, playing the traditional Cuban music known as son for people who remembered it from decades past.
"The century began with the son," he said. "It will end with the son."
In the 1950's he used to greet the New Year in clubs, serenading tourists with irresistible guarachas that sent their hearts racing or dreamy boleros that brought tears. The songs, like one titled "If You Cook the Way You Walk, I'll Eat the Scraps," also helped ordinary folks suffering under the dictatorship forget their worries.
This New Year, though he was performing in Mexico, his thoughts were with easing the animosity between Cubans who have long been divided since the revolution split families and friends.
"I hope for something miraculous in the millennium," he said during a rehearsal break at the Egrem Studios in Havana a few days ago. "I hope the Cubans who are in other countries will reach an understanding between those who are here and those who are outside. Music, like sport, is something we can do to help that understanding. That is my dream. Before I have to go to where we all have to go, to at least see that for 24 hours. Then I can die."
---
THE HYPERBOLE
Countdown Worth the Wait vs. a Big Ho-Hum
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By JAMES BARRON
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ny-mil-hype.html
Before the countdown, the cork-popping, the confetti and the computer worries -- indeed, long before most people had personal computers -- there was the anticipation. And no one did more anticipating than Edward L. Woodyard, who spent 16 percent of the 1900's anticipating the arrival of 2000.
Mr. Woodyard, a screenwriter from Armonk, N.Y., had so much time to spend ruminating on 2000 because he made his reservations for New Year's Eve 1999 back in 1983, when the hotel in Times Square where he finally did his celebrating on Friday night was a half-finished skeleton of steel and concrete.
"I decided if other people were thinking like I was, I'd better get my reservations in because when the time comes, it was going to be a mob scene," he said.
As predictions go, that was a safe one -- Times Square was, in fact, a mob scene. He was above it, looking down on Times Square from the 44th floor of the Marriott Marquis. It seemed the perfect place to consider whether the arrival of 2000 lived up to its billing.
People could easily argue about that for the next thousand years -- or at least the next thousand hours, which turns out to be 41 2/3 days. As litmus-test questions go, this one could prove as complicated as the kind that try to elicit whatever it is that separates liberals from conservatives, Martians from Venusians or Maria Callas fans from Renata Tebaldi aficionadoes. In other words, was the Champagne flute half full or half empty?
"It's way overhyped, but that's the modern world," said the restaurateur Warner LeRoy, putting himself in the second category and suggesting that New Year's Eve brought the first backlash of the 21st century (or the last backlash of 20th): "Most of the people I know stayed home."
To be sure, some promoters canceled their pricey New Year's celebrations for lack of paying customers; One television network canceled its daylong special for lack of stations to broadcast it.
And some thought that much too much had been made of possible problems as 1999 rolled over to 2000.
"It was overhyped, definitely," said Alan Gross of Brooklyn, who spent New Year's Eve at home. "I was hoping my computer wouldn't work because I'd have an excuse to buy a new one." He booted up after midnight and was disappointed by the lack of drama. "It was working just fine," he said. "Unfortunately."
Mr. Woodyard's answer, on the other hand, was affirmative if a bit inarticulate; after a lot of partying, even screenwriters find themselves fumbling for nouns and adjectives, as well as hoarse from shouting "10, 9, 8, 7" and so on.
But yes, he said, 2000 was worth the wait. "I was almost speechless. I don't have words for it." He tried four: "Spectacular. Phenomenal. Overpowering. Wow."
Tthen there were the naysayers, who may or may not also be doomsayers, but that is another story.
"Pity the poor millennium: It never had a chance to get off the ground," said Mark Mitten, who registered the word "billennium" as a trademark because, he said, 2000 was the beginning of the second millennium. He also has a trademark on something called the "millennium hype-o-meter" on his World Wide Web site, www.millenniumhell.com.
"Overburdened by Y2K fears, over-the-top parties and marketing hype, it seemed to have lost any of the potential it had to be a noble occasion, worthy of waiting a thousand years for," said Mr. Mitten. "With all the overkill, it was hard to know if it had any significance at all."
And so the arrival of 2000 brought a kind of seesawing. There were those who thought it was the greatest thing in the last thousand years, or at least in the last four. Waterford crystal, which made the ball that slid down the pole on 1 Times Square at midnight, credited it with a 30 percent increase in sales last year, double the company's annual growth rate since 1996. Waterford, in fact, sold out of seven millennium-related keepsakes that cost as much as $200.
The buildup included warnings that there would be no corks to pop: that there would be a Champagne shortage. But late last week, some stores were cutting prices they had raised back when they thought they would be at a different point on the supply-and-demand curve.
Still, Korbel considered 2000 a manufacturer's dream: It had nothing left to ship to stores by the time Dec. 31 dawned. "With this being the most active week for Champagne sales," said Andrew Varga, the Korbel Champagne brand general manager, "we knew we're going to be wiped out."
But were people hyped out?
Not Jeffrey Katz, an owner of 1 Times Square. "People didn't understand, including myself, how you could do this all day long and not get tiresome," he said, "but it was a thrill."
Not Peter Coleman, a vice president of the Times Square Business Improvement District, the semigovernmental organization that was one of the organizers of the celebration in Times Square.
"We didn't hype this," he said. "We were trying to fulfill people's dreams."
And Mr. Woodyard certainly seemed close to fulfillment.
His New Year's Eve plans began in October 1983. "My wife was pregnant, and I was talking to my brother-in-law," he said. "We were trying to figure out when this baby would graduate from high school. I went, 'Holy cow, I know the millennium doesn't start till 2001, Arthur C. Clarke and all that, but the party is when all those zeros turn over, so let's have a big blowout when the zeroes turn over.' And then I said, 'The only place to be in the world is Times Square.' "
In 1983, he said, the only hotels in Times Square were the kind that charged hourly rates. But he knew that Marriott was building one on Broadway.
"I called up the reservations clerk on the 800 number," he said. "I said, 'You may think that I'm out of my mind, but I want to make a reservation for 16 years from now in your hotel that isn't built yet.' There was this long pause, and the woman said, 'You'll have to speak to my supervisor,' and I did. And that person said I'd have to talk to her supervisor. Finally, they patched me all the way into the executive headquarters in Washington, and the executive vice president said, 'Sure, we'll take the reservation.' "
Lucy Bossert, a spokeswoman for the hotel, said that its cylindrical core was about half finished when Mr. Woodyard called in 1983. Eventually Marriott offered Mr. Woodyard a suite with two adjoining bedrooms free, and he checked in with a group of relatives that included cousins from Minnesota and Virginia and his son, Christopher, whose birth led to the reservation-making in the first place. (The hotel did not rent other suites for New Year's Eve; it charged $2,000 for a four-night package for regular rooms.) And Mr. Woodyard started considering the where-were-you-when question.
"Our generation remembers where we were when Kennedy was assassinated and our parents remember V-E Day, when that happened," said Mr. Woodyard , who remembered going to Times Square as a child for New Year's Eve in 1958. "This was one of those things: where were you at the beginning of the millennium, when all those zeros turned over. I remember what fun I had as a kid, and I think this was 50 times that. What was 1958 in comparison with 2000? The Edsel is long gone. Do we remember the Edsel? No. Well, we remember it with some trepidation. I don't think we'll be forgetting the millennium."
Some wish may that they could. Kenneth H. Walker, a onetime architect who holds the registered trademark for the numerals 01-01-00, said his licensing and merchandising efforts had generated more than $100 million in sales, only about half what he had expected -- "a good double," he called it, not the home run he had been counting on in 1998.
"The reality is, the millennium never materialized into being the event of the last 1,000 years that I think a lot of people thought it would be," he said. "The hype and all the articles you read about the hype were indeed true: It was overhyped. Most of what you read about with the hype was the New Year's Eve celebration greed, the hotels, the cruise ships charging ridiculous amounts of money for participation. I think that took away from things like ours."
---
For Millennium, the Web Offered a Worldwide Vista
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By AMY HARMON
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/01/biztech/articles/02cyber.html
By the time midnight struck in Maui, even the Internet's most dedicated harbingers of millennium doom had to concede that things had turned out better than they expected.
"Does anyone still think TEOTWAWKI will happen??" typed one presumably sleep-deprived Y2K watcher, using the favorite chat-room shorthand for "the end of the world as we know it." Her virtual comrades on Timebomb2000.com were remarkably silent.
But as the year 2000 dawned in cyberspace, the sense of anticlimax was tempered by a new faith not so much in technology but in humanity's ability to harness it.
"Noticed that a sense of global community was one of the take-away messages of the past 24 hours," said another posting, signed "Diana." "Whatever our challenges, and there will be many (not necessarily computer-related), these images of shared experience will be fixed in people's minds. It has the potential to make us stronger and more resilient."
Whether it was because people stayed home to avoid technological disaster or because they logged on to make sure it had not happened, millions wove the Internet into their New Year's Eve. By midnight on the U.S. East Coast, the EarthCam site, which showed pictures of celebrations in every time zone, was receiving thousands of visitors a minute. America Online reported that its traffic dropped just before midnight and surged again immediately after.
As friends and families zapped e-mail updates across time zones, and the more ambitious broadcast their parties on the World Wide Web, many said the computer network made for a more intimate sense of world celebration than what they could watch on television.
Ross Himona, an educator in Wellington, New Zealand, wrote to a list of dozens of correspondents as his country slipped into the year 2000.
"I'm still here!!" Himona said. "The world didn't come to an end, the Universe seems intact, and the dreaded apocalyptic y2k bug didn't devour us all, I think. And the thousands of kids down at the Wellington waterfront couldn't care less. They're having a party. Are you all still out there? Or is New Zealand the only country to survive? Am I the only person left in the Universe? Speak to me someone!!"
Himona said he heard back from friends and relatives from Wales to Seattle as the night circled the globe. "The Internet is person to person," he wrote in an e-mail, "like the small family celebration we had last night."
At midnight in Bosnia, Elizabeth Sweeney, 26, a U.S. Army captain stationed at Eagle Base in Tuzla, wrote to her boyfriend at Fort Knox, Ky. "Happy yes i am," she said, "and happy new year too, you make me happy. It is almost 1 am here. Fun little party. Lots of fake champagne spraying everywhere and lots of noise. I am sooo sleepy I am going now, before I REALLY fall asleep at the computer."
Not all New Year's connections on the Internet were quite so poignant. At midnight in Louisville, Colo., Shane Bower, 28, and his eight friends took a break from their computers to drink some Champagne. Bower's "clan" had been playing Quake, a computer game, both with one another and over the Internet with players around the world.
Every once in a while, Bower said, someone in some other time zone would type "happy new year" in the game's chat box and he would realize that something momentous was going on outside his game.
"Time is kind of meaningless when I turn on the computer," said Bower, a chemical engineer. "All of a sudden it's six hours later, and this time, it was like, all of a sudden it's the new millennium."
Several Web sites served as gathering places for engineers and novices alike to post observations of computer-related problems in their corner of the world, or lack thereof.
At 1:23 a.m. in Duesseldorf, Germany, Udo Remmes, a radiologist, wrote to a site called Zone2000: "No breakdowns or other problems. River Rhine still flowing. Dog and daughter sleeping. Bit more of fireworks tonight. Nearly same procedure as last year -- sorry -- as every year. However, happy New Year."
From Manama, Bahrain, David Hyams, a retired businessman, also gave assurances to the world. "All is well," Hyams, 74, wrote. "Computer is working, the net is up, there is a dial tone, and lights are on. Best wishes to all."
Hyams said he had talked with his daughter, Amy, in San Francisco earlier in the evening using Yahoo Messenger, a program that allows voice chat over the Internet.
On the online auction site eBay, some people's concerns were more prosaic. Bidding continued through the night, except for two periods when the company took its servers offline for Y2K-related maintenance.
"Looking for small grandfather clocks that stand anywhere from 10 inches to 2 feet in height," one bidder with an America Online e-mail address said in a posting shortly after midnight. "Can anyone help?
In the eBay online cafe, another person was offering "100 batteries, 200 gallons bottled water, 300 hundred rounds 30/06, etc. -- cheap!!!"
Of course, some of those who had actually collected such supplies were not yet ready to laugh about it on New Year's Day.
"We always knew this wasn't a one-day event," one defiant doomsayer wrote on a year 2000 preparedness site. "We have to wait and see what happens."
"Well, Happy New Year anyway," responded someone who signed himself Yawn2K. "Better luck next apocalypse, survivalists."
---
Prison Inmate Sews Eyes, Lips Shut
Associcated Press
January 2, 2000 Filed at 1:44 p.m. EST
By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/a/AP-BRF-Eyes-Sewed-Shut.html
CONCORD, N.H. (AP) -- A prison inmate sewed his eyes and lips shut with dental floss because he feared the new year, officials said.
New Hampshire State Prison guards found the inmate, who was serving time for cocaine possession, covered in baby powder and clutching a Bible on Friday night, said Mark Wefers, chief of internal investigations at the prison.
``The inmate told corrections officers he was in fear of the new year,'' Wefers said.
The prisoner, whose name wasn't released, used needles that guards found in his cell. It was not clear where he got the needles.
The inmate suffered some blood loss, but not enough to warrant a trip to the hospital. He was being held at the prison for psychological and medical evaluation.
---
THE ENTERTAINMENT Around the World, Artists Make Joyful Noise
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By BRUCE WEBER
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ny-mil-events.html
Beneath the cacophony of exploding fireworks, there was music and dancing around the world on Friday night as entertainers of every stripe, and their fans, set about proving that art, if not eternal (who knows?), at least provides a worthy human tribute to the last, and the next, 1,000 years.
Yes, there was a disappointment here and there. The Javits Convention Center extravaganza in Manhattan, with the headliners Andrea Bocelli, Aretha Franklin and Sting, was canceled, a casualty of poor ticket sales. And in Jerusalem, a performance of Handel's "Messiah" was canceled as well, after a rabbinical ban on public celebrations that would violate the Sabbath.
But from the pyramids in Giza, Egypt, where the passage of a millennial moment is old hat (this is the sixth) and 50,000 people attended a new opera by Jean-Michel Jarre, a French composer of New Age electronic music; to the ancient temple at Angkor Wat, Cambodia, where traditional ballet dancers performed in the company of 2,000 prayer-offering Buddhist monks; to Rio de Janeiro, where three million samba dancers packed Copacabana Beach; to Berlin, where 60 bands played on 10 stages for a three-mile-long party that stretched across the once divided city; to Istanbul, where in Taksim Square, the Turkish band Athena rocked the casbah; to Las Vegas, where Bette Midler and Barbra Streisand made diva lovers swoon, the new era clicked over to a sometimes hopeful, sometimes wistful but generally joyful noise.
In New York, where the 24-hour celebration in Times Square saluted the cultures of the world in hourly performances that reflected the year 2000's incremental arrival around the globe, Billy Joel, a hometown boy (well, O.K, a Long Island boy) rang in the occasion at Madison Square Garden with a nostalgic medley of his best-known pop ballads.
"I wrote this for my first ex-wife," said Mr. Joel, beginning a rendition of "Just the Way You Are." His show infused good feelings with wry melancholy, as evidenced by a particularly yearning version of "New York State of Mind" and even the dolorous opening measures of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata.
The atmosphere of pleasant familiarity was repeated, albeit on a smaller scale, in myriad clubs around the city, as it doubtless was in cities everywhere.
In Sunnyside, Queens, on a stretch of Queens Boulevard where halal meat markets, Turkish grocers and taquerias sit side by side and the newsstand sells papers in eight languages, Avenging Disco Godfather, a five-piece Celtic rock band, made its weekly appearance at Tailors Hall. In the one-room pub with a roaring fire and a candlelit chandelier, 75 regulars gathered for an Irish new year. The band covered classics by the Beatles and Janis Joplin with a lilting Irish skew.
Meanwhile, in the distinctly less intimate Florida Everglades, 80,000 people gathered for a midnight-to-dawn concert by the rock band Phish on 500 acres on the Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, home to a tribe that first had contact with European explorers half a millennium ago. Amid oak, cypress and palm trees, the party included hot-air balloons, two Ferris wheels and a ballet troupe, not to mention a handful of nudists and men on stilts. Many in the crowd had traveled from around the country to hear the band, which has achieved the kind of cult following that once adhered to the Grateful Dead.
Last summer, the city of Chicago commissioned a millennium line dance, the "milly," sort of a Midwestern macarena, from a local choreographer, Harrison McEldowney. Set to a tune by another Chicagoan, Wade Hubbard, it was danced just before midnight Friday by the 3,500 celebrants at the McCormick Place Lakeside Center for a dinner presided over by Mayor Richard M. Daley.
After the millennium turned, the milly gave way to a more conventional boogie -- and in the end, a series of conga lines, with Maggie Daley, the mayor's wife, leading one.
In Las Vegas, in the 20th time zone to enter the new year, Barbra Streisand gave a rare performance at the MGM Grand, the same place she last appeared in six years ago, when the hotel opened.
Then, an anxious Ms. Streisand took the stage for the first time in 20 years. This time, appearing confident and excited, she sang to a sold-out house of 13,000 people and repeatedly brought them to their feet during the two-and-a-half-hour show. They all carried flashlights they had been given as they entered -- in case the power failed, which it didn't.
At the stroke of midnight, silver, white and gold confetti dropped in the arena as Ms. Streisand sang her final number -- "People," of course.
Nowhere was there an extravaganza to match "The Twelve Dreams of the Sun," a three-hour song cycle staged as an opera, with more than 1,000 musicians, dancers and singers and based on an ancient Egyptian myth about the daily dusk-to-dawn journey of the sun and the gifts it bestows on humanity during its passage: time, protection, wisdom, eternity, fidelity, memory, courage, space, innocence, celebration, purity and freedom. The anthemic work by Mr. Jarre melded electronic music with Western jazz and Arabic rhythms and melodies, and the music and dancing was augmented by a spectacular laser show against the backdrop of the pyramids and the great Sahara.
"I hope the new millennium will witness international understanding," Mr. Jarre told the crowd. A sentiment grand and bland, perhaps, but appropriate, no? Somehow, everywhere, grand or grandiose, glorious or gloomy, maudlin or moving, artists rose to the occasion because they had helped define it. That was the case for the lonely practitioner as well as the celebrated star.
To wit: Not long before midnight Friday, Donald Green sat at a card table on West Third Street in Manhattan peddling his poems, as he has done almost daily over the last decade. He has bound some of his poems, handwritten, into a volume. He had only 13 of them; well, 12 now. Asked for a millennium poem, he chose "Hope," reprinted here for the first time:
Does life have within it the ability to return?
The Earth offers flowers
The Earth greets the dead
The body still seed
So if the world through war
Was turned to debris
Can there be energy to settle on space
And rise?
Now human life may be on other planets
And life filled with humanity
But if there is war
Wouldn't it be great if we could come again?
---
THE SPIRITUAL SIDE
Far From Noisemakers, Meditation and Prayer
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By BARBARA STEWART
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ny-mil-faith.html
At midnight on Friday, while the screams of millions of partygoers rocked the city, James Karb, a 36-year-old Manhattan resident, was celebrating, too -- but much more quietly. He and about 100 others skipped the usual big night out and spent the final hours of 1999 meditating at the New York Shambhala Center, a Tibetan Buddhist center in Chelsea.
"I wanted something peaceful to bring in the New Year," said Mr. Karb, a high school science teacher who said he had been meditating for a few years. "I definitely didn't want to be part of the craziness. I wanted to be in a more centered spot."
So, apparently, did thousands of other New Yorkers, who turned down invitations to parties and instead spent New Year's Eve at churches, at synagogues, at meditation centers, at concerts of sacred music, and at Jewish Sabbath dinners.
While New Year's Eve is primarily a secular holiday, it has a spiritual aspect for some faiths, including members of the Russian Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches.
For Jews, Friday night, as always, was the start of the weekly Sabbath.
Some synagogues organized large group Sabbath dinners. Other observant Jewish families simply spent Friday night the way they always do -- together, at dinner.
Ayelet Mehlman, said she and her family -- her husband, Aaron Mehlman, who is the rabbi at Ohav Sholom synagogue on West 84th Street, her three young daughters, and her aunt -- gathered for her usual, lavish Friday night dinner.
"In the end, the best nights are the ones you spend with your family," she said, after describing a menu of homemade gefilte fish, chicken mole and apple kugel. "In Times Square, they're trying really hard to have a good time. Here, we don't have to try so hard."
At Shout for Joy, a small Baptist church in the Bronx, some 60 worshipers did not have to strain to have a good time, either, said Gloria Green, the pastor. "We just prayed to the Lord and felt the glory," said Ms. Green, who said she gave a sermon on another version of "Y2K -- Yes to the King."
Despite the variety of the worshipers' New Year's Eve celebrations, all agreed that the best part was the atmosphere of community and sacredness.
Nancy Begnel, 44, a health-care consultant, attended St. Bartholomew's, an Episcopal church on East 50th Street.
"It was wonderful," she said. "So moving." With the idea of beginning the New Year with health, a healing service was held there, and -- atypically -- nearly all 300 worshipers waited in line to be prayed over, yet nobody seemed to mind, Ms. Begnel said.
And if a New Yorker can smile while waiting in line, there has to be hope for peace in the city in 2000.
---
THE OVERVIEW
For 2000, Rave Reviews All Around After an Anxiously Anticipated Opening Night
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By N. R. KLEINFIELD
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/regional/ny-mil-cleanup.html
In the bleary afterglow of the pulsating mass party in Times Square, New Yorkers awoke yesterday to a city that in the year 2000's first hours of innocent youth looked and behaved pretty much the way it did in 1999. Things worked. The terrorists stayed home.
Gerard Vitti, a maintenance worker who had to report to his job at Manhattan Plaza at 6 a.m. and thus slept as the 1990's expired, got up and welcomed the 2000's by testing an electrical outlet in his Bronx apartment. Sure enough, it worked. He flicked on the radio. No blackouts. No bombs. Just another workday.
"Everything was fine, so I hopped on the subway," he said, noting that it too clacked down the tracks just the way it did all through the 1990's. "It has turned out to be a normal Saturday morning, more or less."
In the wake of a hyperbolic night when so many fidgety people did their cork popping in their own homes, New York stepped into the new year a little sleepier, a little messier, but with any throbbing headaches relieved considerably by the excess of normality.
Times Square itself, immobilized for a day by celebrators and cheer, was untidy but intact. Police estimates of the turnout of possibly two million people for the elongated extravaganza was quadruple the conventional New Year's Eve crush. And yet the merrymaking, watched carefully by unprecedented might from the city's police force, proceeded with exceptional bonhomie and minimal reports of misconduct. The lights still shone and no terrorists intruded on the gaiety.
Early yesterday, under dank skies, a new morning shift of people who could not extinguish their celebratory urges continued to wander into the party scene. Steve Delladonna, 26, of Mamaroneck, N.Y., and Tara Berrigan, 25, of Niagara Falls, had reached Times Square around 4:30 p.m. Friday, and there was already no room. Unable to edge close enough to see anything worthwhile, they retreated to their hotel at 7:30 and settled for watching the ball drop on television. At 8 yesterday morning, they finally got to really see Times Square. "I've never seen so much garbage in my whole life," Ms. Berrigan said.
Two teenagers from Brooklyn, their eyes barely open after an all-night rave party in Sayreville, N.J., wobbled through Midtown awestruck by how unchanged it all was.
"We thought everything would be burned and barren," said Viktor Ryshkov, 17.
"I guess the timer on the bomb wasn't Y2K compliant," said his friend, Gene Sigalov, also 17.
In a news conference at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square yesterday morning, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani shoveled praise on New York for being, in effect, very un-New York -- cheerful, well-behaved, polite. Summing up the celebration, the mayor said, "We feel very happy this morning that we were able to enter the new millennium, celebrate it with the grandest and largest New Year's celebration in the city and do it in a peaceful way and in a way we demonstrate the way in which New York City is every day of the year."
Was he describing New York or Sioux Falls?
The police reported only 14 arrests during the 26-hour Times Square marathon, mostly for disorderly conduct.
They handed out 69 summonses, the bulk of them for carrying open containers of alcohol. The authorities received an uncommonly steep 48 bomb threats, including one involving the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, though the mayor said all of them were bogus. On a typical day, the city gets about 16 bomb threats.
Around 7:30 yesterday morning, however, a small makeshift explosive device blew out a window of a catering kitchen at 542 West 46th Street. No one was injured.
In the opening hours of 2000, the police said that there were nine incidents of gunfire, mostly people shooting at one another. No one was killed, though there were several serious injuries. On a rooftop in Harlem, the police confronted two men firing guns into the air. One of the men, who had a shotgun, was shot in the buttocks by the police and was hospitalized.
In Times Square, the magical moment arrived after a seemingly unending succession of highly choreographed festivities that began at 6 a.m. Friday and marked the hourly expiration of 1999 across the globe with puppets, costumed dancers and carnival performers.
One minute before midnight, Dr. Mary Ann Hopkins, a surgeon being honored for her work in war-ravaged countries as a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, pushed the button that sent a half-ton Waterford crystal ball sliding down the flagpole atop One Times Square. The specially composed "Anthem for the Millennium" blasted from speakers lining a dozen square blocks.
As the illuminated globe touched down, that poignant numeral, "2000," beckoned luminously. Fireworks exploded in the chilly sky and three tons of confetti coated the crowd. Thousands of balloons swirled lazily into space. An exultant roar of uncontained joy erupted from the crowd that could be heard in Trenton.
Of the 14 arrests, two men were arrested in a single incident, and accused of assaulting a police officer. Another man was arrested on a charge of having a pistol.
Then there was the man from Saranac, Mich. Identified as George James, 29, he was discovered by police officers in a parking garage on West 53rd Street walking around with handcuffs. The officers had stepped into the garage to use the bathroom. When they searched Mr. James's heavily lived-in van, they found a raft of pornographic magazines and a loaded shotgun.
Mr. James, who works as a repair truck dispatcher for a cable television company, was charged with several counts of illegal possession of a weapon. The police said he told them that the shotgun was for his own defense, and they said there was no evidence that he intended to use it.
There is always an untidy side to New Year's Eve -- the drunken driving incidents, the barroom brawls -- and while this one was not spared from such blemishes, neither was it inordinately marred by them. Hospital emergency rooms in the city reported that activity there was generally quieter than normal. In New Jersey, fog and iced-over roads did cause a spate of traffic accidents, but nothing exceptional.
In Times Square, after the $7 million extravaganza finally lapsed at 8 a.m. and the last red-eyed stragglers limped on their way, sanitation crews driving their mechanical brooms whirred down the avenues to scoop up innumerable flattened party hats and noisemakers. The City Sanitation Department estimated that it would end up collecting 35 tons of garbage, double the normal residue, at a cost of $3 million. Save for stray confetti here and there, the department expected to be done tidying up before this morning.
For the most part, affability reigned throughout the region. The first breath of new life was said to have been taken at Sisters of Charity Medical Center in Staten Island. Rebekah Yi was born one second after midnight, weighing 6 pounds 13 ounces.
One of the best ways to start a year is with $100 million. Someone did, for there was just one winning ticket in the New York Millennium Million drawing on New Year's Eve. The prize winner was not identified, but the ticket was sold at the Garden Check Cashing Service, six blocks from Times Square.
Scores of parties, large and small, persisted hours into the beginning of 2000.
Ted Field, the movie and record producing chairman of Interscope Communications and notable for his trendier than trendy New Year's Eve bashes, resurrected the infamous Studio 54 discothèque for a glittery party of 2,000 of his dearest friends, most of them too young to remember when Studio 54 was Studio 54, rather than a cabaret theater. At midnight, champagne flowed from the rafters as women adorned in silver bikini bottoms and go-go boots gyrated to Prince's "1999."
---
THE FINANCE INDUSTRY
Bank Offices Stay Open for Few Customers
New York Times
January 2, 2000
By BLAINE HARDEN
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/national/mil-banks.html
Show me my money.
That was what several banks and brokerage houses across the country had feared hearing from crowds of nervous clients on the first morning of the Year 2000.
To show customers that their money had not vaporized, a few offices stayed open all night, and many others opened early yesterday morning.
There were, however, few worrywarts to reassure and fewer panicked withdrawals of cash, according to representatives of the banks and brokerage houses that opened. In more than a few lonely branch offices, employees wondered why they had gotten up early and had come to work, only to look at each other.
"How are we going to keep occupied today with our entire staff in here?" asked Susan Langdon, manager of the branch of Charles Schwab at Lincoln Center in Manhattan.
The discount brokerage firm opened 300 of its 340 branches across the country yesterday, and the customer traffic was light, according to Greg Gable, a spokesman for Charles Schwab in San Francisco.
In the Lincoln Center branch, which opened at 9 a.m., the front door had been unlocked for 45 minutes before the first customer walked in to find Ms. Langdon and six other investment advisers eager to calm his nerves.
He did not want to be calmed. He wanted to set up an account to buy technology stocks online.
By mid-afternoon, only five customers had come into the Lincoln Branch office, and Ms. Langdon had sent three financial advisors home.
So it went across much of the country.
In the Cleveland area, despite an advertising campaign touting its hours on New Year's Day -- along with a $25 cash bonus to new checking account customers and half-point discount on installment loans -- Metropolitan Bank & Trust had only one customer waiting at its branch in Mayfield Heights when it opened at 11 a.m.
Eleanor Bader, dressed in a short coat with a fur collar, stopped at the bank to see if her Social Security check had cleared early, not to verify that her savings account was safe.
"I had no doubts," Ms. Bader said about the bank's Year 2000 readiness. "I was just worried about my Social Security check."
Later in the day a handful of customers called to check on the safety of their certificates of deposit.
In West Virginia, where 10 branches of the City National Bank were open all night, customer volume was light and there were no significant withdrawals of cash, according to Matt Call, executive vice president.
"The whole point of this is to discourage people from taking out their money," Mr. Call said, noting that the plan seemed to have worked better than anticipated.
---
'00 Worries Emergency Crews Sent Home After New Year's Fears Fizzle
Washington Post
Sunday, January 2, 2000; Page A01
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/02/170l-010200-idx.html
All appeared quiet on the millennial front yesterday, as a new year and a new epoch creaked into glitch-free gear. Water flowed, e-mail scrolled and ATMs did their crisp duty in defiance of the double-zero plague.
Y2K, the morning after, was more sigh than shout. When dawn broke peaceably, authorities across the region began paring their around-the-clock emergency crews, sending weary officials home if their duties did not involve public safety.
Fireworks company inspectors checked the Washington Monument for burns from yesterday morning's big show, and pronounced the obelisk fit. Workers bagged champagne corks and beer bottles on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial. Visitors ambled in thin streams through the day's more mellow millennial events.
Though the future may beckon--in years that now begin with a "2"--the day seemed most notable for everything that didn't happen the night before: the electrical grids that didn't short-circuit, the sewage that didn't cascade into the streets, the terrorists who stayed home.
"The transition was smooth, operations were very successful," said Erik Christian, the District's deputy mayor for public safety. As of midnight, he said, "all systems were go, and nothing has changed since. We're just remaining vigilant. Upbeat and vigilant."
In Maryland and Virginia, officialdom similarly pronounced the new year gremlin-free. Spokesman David Weaver said of Montgomery County's $50 million effort to banish computer bugs, "An anticlimactic end to this whole affair is exactly what we hoped for."
Fairfax computer programmers arrived at the county's government center at 10 a.m. to begin two days of testing before the workweek begins. And no problems were reported in Manassas Park, the town of fewer than 10,000 residents that spent $77,000 on an emergency shelter, including $11,000 for rations.
D.C. Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) called the trouble-free celebration "another milestone" for a city struggling to repair its government and its image alike. He called the District a "city now resurgent."
The mayor went on to say that the District's computers are functioning properly and will be ready for business tomorrow, despite the city's late start in battling the Y2K computer bug. This weekend's events show, Williams said, that "now we have a government that's able to do more than one thing at a time."
All the talk of bugs and glitches and things that go WARNING: RESUME FAILURE in the night caused Walter and Judie Rupinski to buy water--with ample wine as a backup. The Great Falls residents watched the millennial celebrations from home Friday night, but emerged yesterday to survey the scene.
"Once it passed Moscow," Walter Rupinski said of the arrival of Y2K, "I felt pretty safe."
Sarah Meyers said she bought water and batteries, only to conclude that the reality "didn't live up to the hype." Remembering a power outage a year ago, her husband, Matt Meyers, added, "We had more problems last year in Fairfax."
On the sunny day-after, cleanup workers stripped the Mall of millennial trash--cigarette butts, champagne bottles, lone mittens. A few groups of people walked with their eyes to the ground, scavenging for souvenirs from the previous night's revelry.
This day felt different from the one before, said 27-year-old Ansu John of Herndon, wearing a New Year's Eve 2000 party hat. "All my reference points are in the 20th century," she mourned.
At the District's Main Street Millennium festivities on Constitution Avenue, Pookie Hudson and the Spaniels were doo-wopping their way through a 1960s medley by 11 a.m. The mayor estimated that 100,000 people attended the event on New Year's Eve.
"People talk about the diversity of Washington. Last night, the diversity of Washington danced," Sandy McCall, the festival's executive director, said yesterday. "It's too bad that it was overshadowed by what was going on at the Lincoln Memorial. As impressive as that was, that was People magazine. This was really truthful."
Many partygoers who made their way to the Reflecting Pool on Friday night said they felt shortchanged by the two minutes of midnight fireworks and the way the Lincoln Memorial event was staged for television and an elite audience chosen by the White House, not for the tens of thousands on hand. There were long silences during commercial breaks, while the largest fireworks didn't erupt until nearly 1 a.m., after thousands had departed.
The pyrotechnics appeared to leave the Washington Monument unscathed, despite National Park Service worries that threatened to cancel the sizzling display at the last minute. Workers draped a $60,000, 500-foot sheet of fireproof material across the monument to protect it from more than 700 cigar-sized fireworks lashed to its scaffolding.
"There's no discoloration on the material at all," Scott Raso, a Fireworks by Grucci technician, said as workers began the three-day task of dismantling the display. The event was designed to the second, but a nude reveler in the Reflecting Pool almost busted the timing.
As the final 10 minutes to midnight ticked by, fireworks technicians realized that a naked man was splashing back and forth in the cold, thigh-deep water. Miles of control cables that technicians had worked for two weeks to install were in danger.
"My heart stopped," said Grucci's Jeff Engel, as he watched the man near a string of fireworks designed to race like a fuse from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument. "He was in the middle and was . . . touching wires and jumping over wires."
Engel ran from a command trailer and got ready to jump in. But the man climbed back out and lost himself in the crowd. The cables were intact.
"When that monument was lit," Engel said, "my heart was in my throat."
Although authorities reported no computer-inspired Y2K dramas, the area's roadways claimed casualties of a more human sort. A driver died in a one-car crash on Foxhall Road in Northwest Washington, and a 16-year-old high school junior was killed in a two-vehicle accident in Fairfax County. Another crash took two lives in the Jamestown area of Virginia on Friday night.
Two accidents led to five deaths in Maryland. Ed and Olivia Thomas, a father and daughter returning home from a New Year's Eve church service in Baltimore, died in Howard County early yesterday when their disabled car was struck from behind. Police charged the driver of the offending car with manslaughter and drunken driving.
The Howard County Courthouse was busy on New Year's Eve, not with oaths, but vows. A dozen couples were married at 12:05 a.m. by Circuit Court Clerk Margaret D. Rappaport.
Exactly when the clock struck was a relative matter. At the U.S. Naval Observatory, Gaithersburg sisters Gracie Cohen, 9, and Erica Cohen, 11, counted down to midnight with the U.S. armed forces' most accurate clock.
Three. . . two . . . one!
Silence.
The gold ball stuttered and finally dropped, about two seconds into the year 2000.
It was the second glitch of the day for the country's official timekeeper. The observatory arranged an Internet posting that tracked the time, second by second. But as the new year swept into the United States, viewers of the observatory's site saw the date as Jan. 1, 19100.
Better luck in the year 20100.
Staff writers Petula Dvorak, David Fallis, Sylvia Moreno, Fern Shen, Martin Weil and Jamie Stockwell contributed to this report.
---
How Did It All Go Right?
Officials, Experts Happily Seek Answers to Y2K Riddle
Washington Post
Sunday, January 2, 2000; Page A01
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/02/172l-010200-idx.html
Not so long ago, a Y2K computer catastrophe seemed inevitable. Few believed that the world's businesses, governments and technicians could band together to test hundreds of millions of computers and tens of billions of electronic devices, painstakingly fix any problems and then check them all again to ensure the repairs worked.
Even the most optimistic specialists predicted moderate disruptions: Some cities would certainly lose power. Phone systems might fail. Banking records could disappear.
But when clocks rolled into 2000, and officials from New Zealand to Hawaii checked their monitors, even the most sanguine forecasts seemed too dire, leading many to question why the much-feared Y2K glitch was such a dud--even in Russia, China, India and other nations seen as particularly vulnerable to failures.
So what went right?
Technology analysts offered a combination of answers yesterday. They credited the unusual cooperation among businesses and governments worldwide to address the issue. They cited the unprecedented mobilization of people, money and executive attention for the repair effort. And they wondered whether some of their previous assumptions--specifically about the technological dependence of less-developed countries--had been off the mark.
"We may have overstated the impact of technology on the infrastructure in a lot of developing countries," said Matt Hotle, a vice president at the Gartner Group, a technology consulting firm that predicted early last year that Y2K could create "significant disruptions" in such nations.
In Paraguay, for instance, where the government waited until mid-1999 to start tackling the glitch, the country's Y2K coordinator had predicted widespread power outages, water shutdowns and phone disruptions. But as of yesterday afternoon, all basic services, including electricity, telephones and water, were functioning normally.
"At this moment, everything is working," said Walter Schafer Paoli, the former coordinator. He attributed the poor, landlocked nation's success with Y2K to redoubled efforts to fix computers in the final weeks of 1999 and a discovery that many government services were less reliant on computers than initially thought.
"When they began to do the repairs, they found the problem was not as bad as they believed," Schafer said.
The same assessment was given yesterday by officials in Washington, who expressed surprise that there were no reports thus far of major disruptions in Russia and China. "I think the reason we're not seeing anything too serious there is that the systems in those countries were not highly vulnerable to the Y2K bug in the first place," said Bruce McConnell, the director of the International Y2K Cooperation Center, a United Nations-funded organization that has been closely monitoring date-related problems.
The civil infrastructure--the power, water and phone systems--in those countries often does not depend heavily on computers, he said. And in some cases where it does, foreign governments and businesses have been able to accomplish their repair work in a shorter time than their American counterparts because they opted for programming shortcuts that are less common in the United States, such as rolling a computer's internal clock back to 1979, because the days of the week match those of 1999.
With regard to the United States and other developed countries, industry executives and government officials cited the massive outlay of cash--estimated at $100 billion domestically and a half-trillion dollars worldwide--that was spent to hire programmers and buy new computers. They defended the spending yesterday as necessary to deal with the Herculean technology challenge.
"I don't know anyone who's spent any time on this problem at all who doubts that, had the effort not been made, had the money not been spent, we would be in a very different situation here right now," said White House Y2K czar John A. Koskinen.
In the District, which earmarked $140 million to wipe out Y2K bugs, city officials kept an old Department of Public Works computer application running into the new year--even though it had been replaced by a new system. Sure enough, just after midnight, it listed the year as 1900.
"The fact I think we haven't seen many problems was not because there really wasn't a Y2K issue," said Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D), who called the glitch "a once-in-a-lifetime event."
"It threatened the very foundation and infrastructure of the city, the basic delivery of services in the public and the private sector," Williams said. "It's very, very hard to say what cost is too high. You know no one's doing a cost-benefit analysis of Normandy. We had to do Y2K. It's on that order of magnitude."
Although much of the Y2K spending was devoted to simply making older computer systems operate normally this year--the electronic equivalent of patching a flat tire--some of the money went for new machines that likely will make businesses and government agencies more efficient. The repair effort also has given many organizations, for the first time, a census of all their computer systems and helped them weed out antiquated technology.
"We know ourselves technologically better than at any time before," said Rear Adm. Robert Willard, a Y2K coordinator at the Defense Department, which spent $3.6 billion on Y2K preparations.
After almost a full day to monitor computer systems, U.S. government officials yesterday reported a series of minor Y2K glitches scattered across the country as well as one potentially serious disruption: A military reconnaissance satellite system was inoperable for several hours last night.
The problem hit a ground-based computer system responsible for processing data from a network of intelligence satellites shortly after the rollover passed midnight Greenwich Mean Time (7 p.m. EST), which is the time standard for many satellite systems, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre said.
The processing station had been extensively tested, but not when the satellites were in the configuration they were in on New Year's Eve, defense officials said. Simulations did not pick up a problem that developed in the combination of the date rollover and positioning functions, the officials said.
By yesterday afternoon, the processing station was still not at "normal peacetime operation." Pentagon officials would not disclose the nature of the intelligence gathered by the satellites.
Other minor Y2K-related errors hit seven nuclear plants, including one in Arkansas where workers were denied entry through automatic doors because a Y2K software patch had not been installed on a radiation monitoring unit. None of the problems affected safety systems, officials said.
Wind-shear alert systems failed at airports in Tampa, Denver, Atlanta, Orlando, Chicago and St. Louis during the midnight rollover, but technicians were able to quickly re-start the systems to clear the error. Several electric utilities also reported glitches with clocks used to synchronize management systems. And in Omaha, a security access system malfunctioned at a federal building, freezing doors in the open position; to get the doors to shut, technicians reset the computer clock to 1972.
The absence of more serious disruptions pleased government officials. At a news conference yesterday afternoon, Koskinen gushed that the nation was in "much better shape than anyone would have predicted."
Still, Koskinen and others cautioned that additional problems probably will be discovered on Monday--and through the next several weeks--when companies and government agencies reopen for business. "It's far too early to declare victory," Koskinen said.
McConnell, of the international Y2K center, warned that organizations still could face some "inconveniences, headaches and hiccups over the next few days."
That was a message voiced even more strongly by people who believed the Y2K glitch would cause serious disruptions, even in the United States. Paula Gordon, a visiting research professor at George Washington University who earlier this year wrote a paper asserting that "Y2K is not a solvable problem," maintained yesterday that serious trouble could still occur over the next several months as hidden errors degrade computer systems.
"There will still be a major fallout," Gordon argued. "We should not be lulled into thinking this problem is over."
But other Y2K skeptics expressed surprise and relief yesterday about how smoothly the switch to the new millennium has gone, with no regrets about the hundreds of gallons of water they collected, along with the canned food, batteries and backup heaters.
In fact, some of the naysayers gave themselves credit for the glitchless Jan. 1. "If we had sat around and said nothing, we might all be sitting in the dark," said Burke resident Gail Fialkow, secretary of the Northern Virginia Y2K Community Action Group, which encouraged area residents to stockpile goods for the inevitable chaos it believed would occur when 2000 arrived.
Jay Golter, the group's leader, said that "in hindsight, some of the things I did were not necessary, but if you replay the tape, I'm not sure I'd do much different."
Golter, who said he was not surprised by how smoothly the transition went in the United States but had expected serious problems in other areas in the world, stocked more than 100 two-liter bottles of water and attached large barrels at the end of his four downspouts.
He now intends to use the water in his garden. And he's sure his family will use most of the canned food he bought, although he said he wouldn't have purchased a $600 wood stove if it weren't for his concerns about Y2K.
In a few weeks, his Y2K group will hold a potluck dinner. "Perhaps we'll have rice and beans"--commonly stockpiled fare--"or we might use that as an occasion to drop off the extra food at a food bank," he said. After all, he noted, his family is not fond of all the bags of dried beans he bought as a precautionary measure.
Staff writers Stephen Barr, John M. Berry, William Claiborne in Chicago, Caroline E. Mayer, Sylvia Moreno, Don Phillips, Michael D. Shear, Alan Sipress, R. Jeffrey Smith in Rome and Roberto Suro contributed to this report.
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Something to Celebrate: A Return to Normalcy
Washington Post
Sunday, January 2, 2000; Page A09
By Marc Fisher
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/02/133l-010200-idx.html
Party over, fireworks spent, the world awoke yesterday to a fresh start and a sweet surprise: Nearly everything worked and no one had attempted any new terror.
Father Time cupped his generous hand over the fears and worries of the world as 2000 was born into a day of peace, 1/1/00--zeros and ones aptly signifying the dawn of the digital millennium.
The hype receded, as did the mounds of trash left over from exotic, if somewhat forced, celebrations. And a certain suspicion mounted: Had all the worry, all those intimations of calamity, been merely a case of millennial jitters?
In the sleepy Pacific nation of Fiji, the first Sunday of 2000 was celebrated much as any other, with morning church services and beach parties. The dreaded Y2K computer crisis never made it to Fiji, and an assistant police commissioner, Moses Driver, said: "The Y2K bug was the biggest and the last fraud of the century."
Everywhere, normalcy displaced hype. On Massachusetts Avenue in the District, the Countdown to the Millennium display outside the U.S. Naval Observatory grounds stood blank, finished. Messiah-cam, an online camera trained at the Ascension Chapel on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, last night showed an empty space around the cylindrical chapel at the site where Scripture says Jesus ascended to heaven. And in the streets of London, sweepers collected four times the trash normally found after a New Year's Eve.
There were an unusual number of bomb threats, some of which delayed celebrations. If you searched for it, trouble could be found: a drunken brawl here, a despairing homicide there. In remote northern South Africa, a gunman opened fire at a New Year's party, killing four men.
At the U.S. border with Canada near Alexandria Bay, N.Y., U.S. Customs officials late Friday night stopped a man from entering the country after he made threatening statements about exploding something. The man, whom officials would not identify, was turned over to Canadian authorities.
In New York, a pipe bomb exploded outside a catering business on 46th Street between 10th and 11th avenues at 7:30 a.m. yesterday, causing little damage and injuring no one. New York's police commissioner, Howard Safir, said the bomb may have been related to labor disputes with the caterer.
In North Bay, Ontario, the earth moved--literally, as the Canadian Geological Survey recorded a moderate earthquake that registered 5.2 on the Richter scale--yesterday morning. The 10-second tremor, the most powerful to strike the area since 1935, rattled dishes for 200 miles around, as far south as Rochester, N.Y., but no injuries or serious damage were reported.
But after all the warnings and all the precautions, that was it. The story was survival, not disaster. From brass gongs in Asia to the 1,070-pound Waterford crystal ball that dropped over the dizzy decadence of Times Square, the year 2000 was ushered in with self-conscious public celebration.
The fireworks were unique, spectacular. The Washington Monument emerged from its fiery starring role in the capital's show unscathed. But not everyone felt like greeting 2000 with a slam bang. Many parties were canceled at the last opportunity, either because of lack of interest or threat of terrorism; many other event organizers announced that ticket sales had been disappointing.
In Los Angeles, relieved authorities exhaled after one of the safest holiday nights in memory--a result city officials credited to the huge number of nervous residents who simply camped at home. Five city-sponsored New Year's celebrations around the region each drew only a few thousand people.
"All that hype," said Trevion Stokes, a Los Angeles police officer on duty at a city emergency center. "For the last seven months, and especially the last few weeks, I feel like all I ever heard about was Y2K. I guess there's always going to be hype, but man, this was absolutely phenomenal. And now today, no one is really even talking about it. It's just another day."
Were all those no-shows thumbing their noses at the loudest riffle of calendar pages in history? Not necessarily. Many were safe at home, phoning relatives and preparing their own parcels for posterity: homemade time capsules, letters from parents to children, lovers' embraces designed to be remembered forever.
And there was television, living up to its hype for once, displaying the dazzling array of human behavior around the planet.
Amid the joyful noises, quieter moments stood out. Hundreds gathered at West Quoddy Head Light in Lubec, Maine, the nation's easternmost point, shortly after 7 a.m. yesterday to witness the first sunrise of 2000. They sang the Star-Spangled Banner by the dawn's early light.
They could breathe easy. The Y2K bug appeared to have been eradicated, swept off the table of global worries by a concerted application of high-tech Raid, as a virtual army of consultants and government computer mavens painstakingly rejiggered old machines to recognize the march of time.
Phones, power, air traffic, trains, street lights--check. "All bug and no bite," concluded the Singapore Straits Times.
At Missouri's Y2K Operations Center in Jefferson City, the state's chief information officer, Mike Benzen, valiantly tried to provide news nuggets. His best offering: In Brookfield, balloons from a New Year's celebration tangled in power lines and caused a 20-minute power outage in one neighborhood.
Governments and businesses worldwide spent an estimated $500 billion identifying and fixing the computer snafus, but had it been necessary? There were a few scattered computer glitches that resulted from old machines that had not been programmed to recognize the flip from the 1900s to the 2000s.
U.S. and French military officials reported minor incidents. The Pentagon said it could not process information from a reconnaissance satellite system for several hours Friday night because of a Y2K problem. On the Everything2000.com website, the date appeared as January 1, 192000. In Alabama, the bracelet placed on new mother Ligia Christl's wrist at Huntsville Hospital just after midnight on New Year's Day listed newborn Julia Amalia Christl's age as 100.
But the problems were small enough that everyone could chuckle over the boy in England who cut the cables to his home computer because he thought bugs were trying to crawl in.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency immediately announced that it will cut by half the 700 people it had searching for Y2K bug problems at 10 centers around the country.
White House Y2K czar John A. Koskinen admitted that "one of the questions you've begun to see surface a little around the edges is, 'Well, has this all been hype?' "
"The Y2K computer bug has been rendered harmless," Ralph Beedle, chief nuclear officer at the Nuclear Energy Institute, declared flatly.
But some techies insisted that the way is not yet clear, that computers might still act up over the next few days or weeks. The Gartner Group, a technology research company, said that less than 10 percent of all Y2K failures will happen right away and that most will strike over the course of the year. But how many will listen seriously to such concerns now?
In Austin, where more than a quarter-million revelers welcomed the new year, Alvin Moulden stood on Congress Street on the morning after, watching workers dismantle a mammoth stage. Knowing almost nothing about computers, Moulden said he believed all the warnings about Y2K and woke up yesterday a bit surprised to see the world still functioning.
"We were sitting right there contemplating it just before midnight," said Moulden, 49, laughing and pointing to a bench near an office tower. "We figured all the rich people were going to check their computers to see how much money they had, and it was going to come up zeros. And we'd be seeing them all jumping out of those windows up there." He shook his head and added: "It was just hype and all that, I guess. The lights are on. People have their money."
His friend, Vincent Fagen, 31, sipping coffee after a night of merry-making, was not so sure the danger has passed. Fagen, like Moulden, didn't bother stocking up on emergency supplies but, he said, "I just thought it was all going to end--electricity going off, elevators crashing and what not. But it's not over yet. It's only the first day. The year's just beginning."
Scott McPherson, Florida's state Y2K coordinator, admitted he had been worried New Year's Eve, although not in the way he had feared. "We were worrying about falling asleep around here," he said at his Tallahassee headquarters after an all-night vigil.
But McPherson said authorities did not overreact to the mysterious possibility of widespread computer failure. "We'll never know what might have happened had we not engaged in what we engaged in," he said. "For any of the Monday morning quarterbacks out there who might have speculated that this was going to be a non-event anyway, I would disagree very vehemently and show them reams of data to back me up. We're not out of the woods yet."
And at least some laymen were willing to accept that. "I don't feel bamboozled in the least," said John Kerekes, a political consultant from Germantown, Md., who worked laboriously New Year's Eve making sure his home computer was backed up. He has only contempt for those who say the vast Y2K preparations were for naught. "Isn't hindsight wonderful?" he said.
Somebody out there bought all those gallons of water and packages of batteries that were missing from supermarket shelves for the past week. But it was hard to find anyone to admit it yesterday. "Not even candles," Shams Uddin, manager of Manhattan's Broadway Diner, said proudly.
"I bought gallons of water and double-A batteries," volunteered Raymond Aristed, one of the diner's waiters. But then he laughed and confessed, "I didn't buy anything. The thing that worried me most was terrorism."
The threat of terrorism remained just that, even though it caused the cancellation of some festivities and a ratcheting up of security at many others.
In Anchorage, Alaska, a fireworks celebration was briefly shut down and 20,000 people were evacuated from a downtown neighborhood late Friday after a bomb threat. Police found nothing.
President Clinton and his wife delivered the traditional Saturday radio address jointly after having stayed at the White House millennial party until 3:30 a.m. "We're deeply grateful that the celebrations were both jubilant and peaceful, here and all around the world," Clinton said.
And for all those apocalyptics, millennialists and conspiracy buffs around the world who had spent the latter days of the 1900s warning that the end was nigh--we're still here!
In Jerusalem, where authorities were so nervous about apocalyptic fringe groups that they tripled the security presence around the city Friday, all was quiet on a fairly typical Saturday Sabbath. Police had arrested several dozen visitors in recent weeks on suspicion they might turn violent with the new year. On New Year's Eve they detained at least two more, including one who announced he had been sent by God and another who shouted, "The end of the world has arrived!"
The lack of tumult this weekend is no guarantee that the Holy Land is finished with eccentric prophets and extremists who believe the year 2000 heralds the end of days, experts say. Israeli psychiatrists report a sharp increase in cases of "Jerusalem Syndrome," a condition in which travelers who are overcome to be walking in Jesus's footsteps sometimes fancy themselves Biblical figures.
Gregory Katz, a psychiatrist who runs the emergency room at the Jerusalem Mental Health Center, said he had seen five cases of "Jerusalem Syndrome" in the past week--not counting those brought in by police New Year's Eve. About 60 such cases were reported last year, nearly twice the usual annual number. Most were Europeans and Americans. Katz says he is prepared for a further increase this year.
"The place to be a prophet is Jerusalem," he said with a wry smile.
In much of the non-Christian world, the year 2000 was someone else's holiday, a TV spectacle that did not jibe with the Muslim, Hindu, Hebrew and other calendars. In Cuba, where New Year's is ordinarily a big deal, the Castro government spurned millennial celebrations, decreeing that the global party was a year too early because the new millennium actually starts in 2001.
One hundred years ago, The Washington Post welcomed the new century without a word about it on the front page, choosing instead to focus on insurgency in the Philippines and customs fraud in Cuba. Inside the paper, a story noted that "with a faint flicker and feeble sputter, the candles of 1899 were snuffed as the clocks struck the hour of 12." There was fresh snow on the ground and sleigh bells echoed through the city's streets.
The sounds a century later were more piercing. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, the singer whose anthem "1999" dominated the airwaves over the past two New Year's weekends, yesterday saw his vision of apocalypse dissipate in the quiet advent of a new day.
But when I woke up this mornin', could've sworn it was Judgment Day
The sky was all purple, there were people runnin' everywhere
Tryin' 2 run from the destruction, U know I didn't even care
Cuz they say 2000 zero zero, party over, oops, out of time!
Contributing to this report were correspondents William Drozdiak in Berlin, Lee Hockstader in Jerusalem, Steven Pearlstein in Toronto and Keith B. Richburg in Fiji, and staff writers William Claiborne in Chicago, Paul Duggan in Austin, Lynne Duke in New York, Sue Anne Pressley in Miami, Rene Sanchez in Los Angeles and Fern Shen in Washington.
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Chicago Markets On Y2K Financial Frontline
Sympatico
01/02/99
By Daniel Sternoff
http://www.ab.sympatico.ca/news/Fullstories-Reuters/rcb8.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The global financial system will know whether the Y2K computer bug has indeed been exterminated when major markets reopen after the millennium holiday, beginning with Chicago futures trading Sunday night.
The date change to 2000 from 1999 has caused no major malfunction to the world's financial infrastructure, and analysts say surging stock markets should stage a post-millennium rally as trading opens.
``There is going to be a slight sigh of relief,'' said William Cheney, chief economist for John Hancock Funds.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) will kick off eurodollar, currency and stock index futures trading on its Globex electronic trading system at 5:30 p.m. local time (2330 GMT) Sunday.
Shortly thereafter, Treasury bond futures dealing will start on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT).
Several hours after Chicago futures trading starts, stock and bond trading begins for the year in Hong Kong and Singapore as Monday morning rolls across Asia.
Continental European bourses and Wall Street follow suit in later time zones, while Tokyo and London reopen only Tuesday.
``We expect business as usual,'' said Margaret Draper, spokeswoman for the U.S.-based Securities Industry Association.
The SIA has cautioned, however, that it will not rest easy until the first trades of the millennium have been executed, processed and settled, a procedure taking up to three days.
Exchanges in a spate of emerging markets -- Bangladesh, Oman, Kuwait, Egypt and Bahrain -- have reported bug-free dealing Saturday and Sunday.
A few glitches popped up in Japan, where the Financial Supervisory Agency (FSA) said Sunday one foreign bank and 15 domestic brokerages had reported Y2K-related system problems. The FSA said 14 of the 15 had fixed the problems Sunday.
The FSA, which did not identify the institutions reporting the glitches, said the foreign bank had identified problems that might result in the loss of historical data when customers try to retrieve system transaction information.
Foreign exchange traders and dealing systems were reporting no problems as markets girded for normal activity Monday.
Meanwhile, as the capitalist world declared itself largely bug-free, Communist-run Cuba chimed in to say the global fears were probably part of a capitalist conspiracy to boost the computer industry.
The Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth) state daily newspaper said the Y2K flap ``raised the suspicion that the immense investment in computers was due to an audacious market maneuver.''
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Federal Reserve Board said, however, that the quiet rollover justified the multibillion- dollar efforts to quash the Y2K bug.
While firms and investors will remain wary of potential Y2K snags, the end of catastrophic Y2K anxiety should refocus markets on the specter of rising interest rates in Europe and the United States.
With Y2K out of the way, central bankers faced with buoyant economic growth will have one less reason to hold off raising interest rates, analysts said.
Surging equity markets shrugged off Y2K concerns and a rising rate environment in December, and analysts said stocks were poised to resume their upward march.
Stock markets were expected to enjoy their usual ``January effect,'' or the annual rally in the first four trading days in January, stemming from tax and portfolio-related transactions.
Emerging markets may be in for an extra boost in any rally, as investors who had shied away, due to technology infrastructure concerns, buy back in.
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Bug-Free World Set For Y2K Test On Monday
SYMPATICO NEWSEXPRESS NATIONAL NEWS
Sun, Jan 2nd
By Richard Baum
http://www.ab.sympatico.ca/news/Fullstories-Reuters/rcn1.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Minor glitches at hospitals and nuclear power stations were the only signs on Sunday of the millennium bug biting as a weekend of tests suggested computers will continue their smooth transition into 2000 when much of the world returns to work on Monday.
Financial industry employees around the world spent a second day testing trading systems to ensure they could recognise the year 2000, and analysts said relief that the bug had not triggered any disasters should boost global stock markets.
Nevertheless, industry and government officials warned against premature celebrations. Until millions of workers switch on their computers on Monday, air-traffic control systems handle a full load and global banking systems pump money smoothly through Tokyo, London and New York, they cannot know whether the Y2K bug still lurks in networks, ready to disrupt ordinary life.
So far, however, predictions of computer chaos have proven as empty as the prophecies of Christian doomsday cultists in Jerusalem. As millennium celebrations wound down on Sunday, lights still shone, bank machines delivered cash, telephones functioned and planes stayed airborne.
The few reported problems were small, although the fact that they came at hospitals and nuclear power stations despite vigorous checks suggested computer experts were right to warn of the bug's potential for disaster.
PROBLEMS IN SWEDISH HOSPITALS
Three Swedish hospitals said they had experienced millennium bug-related problems on Saturday with some heart monitoring equipment, but it was now working properly and had not threatened patients' safety.
In Japan, a problem with a radiation monitoring system at a nuclear power plant on Saturday was confirmed as a millennium bug.
Four other computer malfunctions at nuclear plants in Japan, which suffered its worst nuclear accident in September, may also have been caused by the bug. All had been cleared up by Sunday.
In Germany, a salesman who logged into his home banking computer account found a malfunction had inflated his wealth to more than 12 million marks ($6.2 million) -- as of December 30, 1899. But it was unclear this was due to the millennium bug.
And in Italy, a computer-regulated clock on a church campanile in a small northern town chimed earlier than usual on New Year's Day, a local news agency reported. Checks revealed the computer thought it was 1980 instead of 2000.
Such problems were few and far between. Across the world, markets, telecommunications and other infrastructure officials reported all systems were go.
So smoothly were U.S. systems operating overall that the federal government on Saturday evening began scaling back from its virtual war footing.
``It is possible that as early as Wednesday we could go just to the day shift,'' said President Bill Clinton's Y2K trouble-shooter John Koskinen. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, on standby to handle any crisis, sent home half of its 800 people on 24-hour shifts.
The only incident noted on the website of the International Y2K Cooperation Centre was for Gambia, which reported computer problems in some government departments due in part to the bug.
MARKETS SET TO OPEN
The next big test will come when major financial markets open for the first time this year, starting with the Chicago futures exchanges at 5:30 p.m. local time (2330 GMT) on Sunday.
Officials said tests on trading floors on Saturday went without a hitch, as did checks on exchanges in Asia and Europe on Sunday.
Japan's financial watchdog, the Financial Supervisory Agency, reported minor glitches at one foreign bank and 15 domestic brokerages. But it said 14 of the 15 brokerages had already fixed the problems while those remaining were unlikely to develop into major headaches even if they were not solved by Tuesday.
The few stock exchanges open on Sunday, in Egypt and some other Moslem nations, reported no problems, although foreign exchange trading in Bangladesh was suspended until Monday as a precaution.
Global stock markets should greet the absence of major problems with a modest relief rally on Monday, analysts said.
Emerging markets may be in for an extra share of any rally, as investors who had shied away due to technology infrastructure concerns buy back in.
WALL STREET OFFICIALS URGE CAUTION
But Wall Street officials cautioned that their Y2K evaluations were still not complete.
``We feel completely confident but we're not going to say we've accomplished anything until we accomplish it,'' Don Kittell, executive vice president of the U.S. Securities Industry Association, said on Saturday.
``We don't want to give the impression that December 31 has come and gone and everything's terrific. Although we've had such good news so far with infrastructure, many businesses have not operated in production mode yet,'' he said.
Margaret Beckett, the minister in charge of navigating Britain through any potential millennium bug problems, said vigilance was needed up until February 29.
Some computers may be programmed to think 2000 is not a leap year as years divisible by 100 normally are not. Those divisible by 400 are, however.
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It's Not a Small World, After All
In a Global Age, New Year's Revelries Showcased Local Pride
Washington Post
Sunday, January 2, 2000; Page A17
By T. R. Reid
Washington Post Foreign Service
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/02/128l-010200-idx.html
LONDON, Jan. 1-A Scotsman in a green tartan kilt tweedled his bagpipe from the roof of Edinburgh Castle. A bare-chested Samoan blared a conch shell on the beach. A Native American danced in feathered headdress outside Denver's city hall. At the easternmost point of New Zealand, Kiri Te Kanawa sang a Maori karanga. On the biggest stage in Tokyo, Suizenji Kyoko spun in her kimono as she belted out "The Light of the Firefly," Japan's home-grown version of "Auld Lang Syne."
On the first night of what is supposed to be a century of "globalization," the images that danced across our TV and computer screens were in fact intensely local. If it was Marshall McLuhan's "global village" that greeted the year 2000 Friday night, it was a village with one heck of a lot of ethnic neighborhoods.
As the planet's 6 billion people woke up on New Year's Day, with the spent champagne corks still on the floor and the TV news still showing fireworks over various global landmarks, there wasn't even agreement about what year was being celebrated. Jews, Japanese, Muslims, and Chinese all count the years their own way. And in Ethiopia, a small but proud state that writes its own ticket on matters pertaining to the calendar, it is still 1992.
Contemporary technology has brought the world closer together. Billions of people watched the New Year's parties in Kiribati, Colombo and Caracas on live TV. People everywhere have seen that darling black-haired boy born in Wellington, New Zealand, one second after midnight: celebrated as the first child of the millennium. At New Year's parties around the world, people ate American Big Macs, exploded Chinese fireworks and emptied bottles of French champagne.
But the irony of this wired-up, online, Starbucks-studded world is that it is less connected in many ways than what we had before telephones, television, and the World Wide Web. On the first day of 2000, this planet is a more local, more various, and less unified than it was on the first day of 1900.
At latest count, there were 188 sovereign nations on Earth--not to mention scores of independence movements hoping to carve out yet another rectangle on the globe. Almost all are eager to take advantage of the benefits of globalization, but almost all are equally wary of its pitfalls.
Even the world's great technical achievement this New Year--the global drive to squelch the Y2K computer bug--sparked different assessments in different corners of the globe.
How computer systems are managing will not be fully known until Monday or Tuesday, when banks, other businesses and governments go back to work. But so far, the few known Y2K problems have been so minor as to be laughable. Example: Several hundred customers of Britain's Portman Building Society were mailed monthly statements dated "Jan. 7, 1900." This provoked chuckles, and an announcement that the bank will send out amended statements Tuesday.
In the Western press, the conquest of the Millennium Bug is being treated as a famous victory of man over machine. But in much of the Third World, the absence of Y2K problems will probably strengthen the notion that the computer scare was a scam all along, a panic manufactured to force poor nations to hire high-priced programmers from the rich ones. A newspaper in Dar es Salaam argued that Tanzania was "Y2Krazy" to pay European consulting companies to solve a nonexistent problem.
"We run into this all the time," noted Chris Webster, an executive with the Paris-based consulting firm Cap Gemini. "We warn some government or business that the 2000 problem is a serious threat. And people respond, 'You would say that, wouldn't you? You're trying to sell us services.' "
In the end, the worldwide bill for Y2K services came to $500 billion or so. And it created a billion-dollar credibility problem for the developed world. The term "Y2K" has become another piece of evidence--along with genetically modified "terminator" seeds, anti-dumping laws, and global financial institutions run by bankers from New York and London--that globalization is just another way for rich nations to dominate poor ones.
Even if that perception is true, though, the old patterns of political dominance have given way to a much more complex geopolitical reality.
A century ago, huge swaths of the world map were colored pink, red, or yellow, depicting the territory controlled by a few European colonial powers. Across the vast sweep of Asia, from Egypt to the China Sea, hundreds of millions of people were subjects of the British queen. China was nominally independent, but the minister of trade and commerce in the Imperial Chinese court in Beijing was an Englishman.
The hijacking drama played out in south Asia last week was a complicated mess to resolve because it involved three governments--India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan's Taliban--plus a rebel movement in the Indian state of Kashmir. Things would have been considerably simpler if such an event had occurred in 1900. Back then, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Kashmir were all mere sub-provinces under the firm control of the British Raj that maintained a unified government over the entire subcontinent.
European colonial rule around the world continued for half of the 20th century. In his comprehensive geographic study "Inside Asia," published in 1939, John Gunther observed, with complete absence of irony, "As everybody knows, the greatest Asiatic power is Great Britain."
It's rather poignant to be here in Britain as the century ends, for the print media and television are full of memoirs looking back to the glory days a hundred years ago. Today, Britain is still a wealthy and important player, but it has been reduced to supporting roles in a global drama where America commands center stage. Even the ever-optimistic prime minister, Tony Blair, conceded recently that his country has experienced "a century of decline."
It's important for Americans to remember that history will eventually bring an end to the current "American century," just as it did to the Roman centuries (c. 100 B.C. to 300 A.D.), the Spanish century (the 16th), the British century (c. 1815 to 1945), and the various Chinese centuries that President Jiang Zemin was crowing about at the Beijing celebration Friday night.
What kind of world will the next century bring? With the huge population and growing financial power of East Asia, it's not far-fetched to foresee a Chinese, or perhaps an East Asian, century. If current growth trends continue, the next "Chinese century" might begin about the time the New Year's babies of 2000 reach middle age.
But many prognosticators say the era of the superpower, of dominance by a single nation-state, is coming to an end. They suggest instead that the new century will belong to huge regional collectives--a unified Europe, for example, or an expanded NAFTA, or an Asian confederation built on Chinese manpower and Japanese money.
And while the various space probes over the past 40 years have yet to find life in the void, it is not entirely science fiction to speculate that, over the next 100 years, something will be found Out There. That could lead to a genuine state of "globalization" on Earth as mankind unites to face another civilization.
The key problem with these ideas of global union and regional confederation is the glorious diversity seen on those TV broadcasts from around the world on New Year's Eve.
As this weekend made clear, the 6 billion people on Earth still glory in their local costumes, customs, credos and calendars. They will globalize, to a degree--but only as long as they can do it in their own language and their own way.
That point came through vividly Saturday afternoon at Picadilly Circus as London hosted an event it proudly calls "the biggest New Year's parade on Earth" (a title also claimed by similar extravaganzas in Sydney and Pasadena).
There were American cheerleaders with red and white pon-poms. There were East African drummers and Jamaican steel bands and a Japanese string ensemble, complete with an instrument known as a koto on a rolling platform. There were Pakistanis in turbans and French motorcyclists in helmets and the Iowa State Cyclones football team, which didn't make a bowl game and decided to march through central London instead. Near the end of the three-hour promenade came a perfect troupe of bagpipers in red tartan kilts and white spats playing "My Bonnie Lassie"--and the entire pipe band was composed of Indians from the Shree Muktajeevan temple here in England.
It was globalization on parade, 2000-style--an intensely, noisily, and proudly localized form of globalization.
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Letter for the Y2K Information Center
Special Delivery: A Postal PR Moment With a Few Glitches
Washington Post
Sunday, January 2, 2000; Page A09
By Stephen Barr
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-01/02/122l-010200-idx.html
The U.S. Postal Service, often derided by techies as "snail mail," pulled a Y2K stunt yesterday to cast itself as a quick and nimble letter carrier able to span the centuries. But, like the computer bug, the event had a few glitches.
White House presidential adviser John A. Koskinen had just begun a briefing on year 2000 computer glitches here and abroad when a man in a black tuxedo barged onto the podium, saying, "Package for Mr. Koskinen."
The carrier handed Koskinen a U.S. Postal Service "Express Mail" package postmarked early Friday morning in San Francisco and guaranteed for noon Saturday delivery in Washington.
Koskinen, who was sleep-deprived after a long night--and morning--at the White House's $50 million Y2K command center, fumbled his lines. "This is an actual FedEx package . . . from Los Angeles," he said, inadvertently giving a plug to a Postal Service rival.
He also prefaced his remarks by saying the delivery "looks staged"--and he was mostly right.
The package, containing "Celebrate the Century" stamps, did not come from any ordinary citizen, but the postmaster of San Francisco. The package also did not carry a street address, just Koskinen's name, title and organization. But the package did contain a nine-digit zip code.
The person in the tuxedo, who had waited out on the street in order to whisk the package past security guards and to the briefing room, was Jon Leonard, the Postal Service's Y2K communications manager.
Postal Service spokeswoman Beverly Burge said the holiday delivery was "a great way to show the system was working before, during and after the date change."
The package's 2,800-mile trip involved not only postal computers but coordinated handoffs to truckers and the commercial jetliner that carried mail between the two coasts, she said.
"It's one of the first pieces of mail delivered in the new millennium," Burge said.
Koskinen elicited chuckles from reporters when he concluded, "Now the question is, would we have told you if it didn't arrive? And we'll leave that to others to determine."
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Y2K menace at bay but snafus may still crop up
San Jose Mercury News
Posted at 4:22 p.m. PST Sunday, January 2, 2000
BY STELLA DAWSON
http://www.mercurycenter.com/nation/nationwire/docs/48562l.htm
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000102/wl/yk_leadall_4.html
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/000102/c7.html
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The Y2K menace remained at bay for the second day in a row, with officials saying the next test comes Monday when workers boot up their computers and trading kicks off in major financial markets.
Minor millennium computer glitches cropped up in Japan's nuclear power plants, medical equipment in Scandinavia and data-processing systems in Israel, but were fixed quickly.
The hiccups give a taste of what may happen as billions of people return to work on Monday and find snafus that experts say may takes months to resolve.
``There is still a mess that will have to be cleaned up,'' said Bill Gates, chairman of software giant Microsoft Corp., on Cable News Network's Larry King Live on Saturday.
But in general the technological dawning of the year 2000 has been so trouble-free that communist-run Cuba suggested fears of the Y2K bug was nothing more than a capitalist con job.
``The chaos that had been predicted was merely a scare,'' said a front-page editorial in the state daily Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth).
The billions of dollars spent fixing computers so that they accurately read the rollover from 1999 to the zeros in the date 2000 ``raised the suspicion that the immense investment in computer was due to an audacious market maneuver,'' it said.
Industry and government officials, though, were far from complacent, warning that risks of computer meltdown are not yet behind them.
Computer Associates International Inc., a major software company, warned it had discovered a destructive computer program called ``Armagidon'' and a virus that leaves an ugly face with the Portuguese words ``Feliz Ano Novo'' or ``Happy New Year'' on the screen, showing hackers are ready to exploit Y2K fears.
GLOBAL MARKETS POISED FOR Y2K TAKEOFF
Huge global testings of stock, bond and currency markets in Tokyo, London and New York, however, brought early rewards.
Chicago's dynamic futures markets -- often among the first to signal trouble when global financial turmoil hits -- opened on Sunday without a hitch.
``There were no problems; the market opening on time. Everything is running smoothly,'' said Chicago Mercantile Exchange spokesman Bill Burks.
The CME trades eurodollar, currency and stock index futures contracts on its electronic trading system Globex.
Meanwhile, in electronic trading on the Chicago Board of Trade's system, Treasury bond futures hit a new contract low as business kicked off, signaling market expectations for higher U.S. interest rates to curb economic growth if Y2K remains no obstacle.
Foreign exchange dealings in Hong Kong and Singapore, the next major markets in line as Monday rolls across the time zones, began quietly with traders saying business will be minimal as banks test systems.
Analysts are so confident the Y2K bug has been squelched for now that they predict a euphoric rally in global markets.
``We start a whole new year; people are flush with cash. That money is going to seek a home in the markets,'' said Peter Cardillo, director of research at Westfalia Investments.
The Federal Reserve said its 24-hour command center was keeping up the vigilance. But staff were relieved after no problems turned up processing checks and electronic payments with several hundred customers. The U.S. Treasury even held a successful mock bond auction.
``Obviously we are confident, but there is still a question mark,'' said Doug Tillet, spokesman for the New York Fed.
Regulators are waiting to see if trades with settlement dates in 2000 clear smoothly on Monday, and then the first stock trades executed this year won't settle until Thursday.
Top Wall Street officials are optimistic.
``The evidence suggests there probably will be very little disruption,'' former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, now chairman of Citigroup's executive committee, told CNN.
Bug-free trading proceeded in a handful of stock exchanges that were open over the weekend -- Bangladesh, Oman, Kuwait, Egypt and Bahrain -- with many reporting modest gains as Y2K jitters eased.
Tokyo and London markets will wait until Tuesday to open because of holidays.
European bourses, central banks and regulators reported all systems were ready to go when trading resumes on Monday in most continental European countries.
Japan's financial watchdog, the Financial Supervisory Agency, reported minor glitches at one foreign bank and 15 domestic brokerages. But it said 14 of the 15 brokerages had already fixed the problems and predicted no major headaches.
MINOR GLITCHES, NO DISASTERS
In Israel, which returned to work on Sunday, software companies were busy fixing numerous Y2K-related glitches in data-processing services caused by the shutdown of computers.
Baruch Gindin, managing director of the Gartner Group Middle East, said those were little more than irritants -- and a preview of what may happen all over the world as billions of people return to work.
An X-ray machine stopped working in Norway. Heart monitors failed in three Swedish hospitals. But no patients were endangered the problems quickly fixed.
In Japan, a problem with radiation monitoring at a nuclear power plant was confirmed as a millennium bug. Four other computer malfunctions at other nuclear plants may also have been caused by the bug. All had been cleared up by Sunday.
In Germany, a salesman who logged into his home banking computer account found a malfunction had inflated his wealth to more than 12 million marks ($6.2 million) -- as of Dec. 30, 1899. But it was unclear this was due to the millennium bug.
Such problems were few and far between. Across the world, markets, telecommunications and other infrastructure officials reported all systems were go.
The West African country of Gambia, singled out by a Y2K monitoring Web site as have problems especially with government computers, said all systems were go.
``We are getting normal electricity, the telecoms are fine, as you can see the e-mail is functioning, the banks are OK,'' said Paoa N'jie, a Gambian Y2K task force official.
The Y2K bug stems from mainly older computer systems programd to read only the last two digits of a year. If the glitch was left uncorrected, computers could misread 2000 as 1900, causing systems to malfunction or even crash.