-------- NUCLEAR (by country)

-------- australia

Protesters gather at Olympic plot nuclear plant

Planet Ark
AUSTRALIA: August 28, 2000
Story by Brian Williams
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=7954

SYDNEY - New Zealand said on Saturday it had uncovered a possible plot to blow up a nuclear reactor in Sydney during the Olympic Games and protesters gathered at the site to demand its immediate shutdown.

Australian and New Zealand officials played down the seriousness of the threat to Australia's largest city and said the risk of an attack was low.

Demonstrators, including nearby residents, were not placated and converged on the site of Australia's only nuclear reactor to protest that the plant was old, leaky and long a security threat.

Australian officials insisted there was "no credible threat" to the 1950s research reactor, some 25 km (15 miles) from the main Olympic stadium on the outskirts of Sydney.

The New Zealand government and police stressed there had been no arrests linked to the suspected plot by Afghan refugees.

"Relevant Australian authorities have made an assessment and have advised that the risk is low," a statement by Australian Science Minister Nick Minchin said, rejecting the idea of a shutdown.

But residents, Greenpeace and conservation groups all said authorities were taking the threat too lightly.

Sydney has a population of about 4.5 million which could swell by another million during the Sept 15 to Oct 1 Games.

New Zealand police said they had found evidence of a possible plan to attack the reactor during raids on several houses in the country's largest city Auckland in March.

"That material included a map of Sydney highlighting a nuclear reactor and highlighting entrance and exit routes," detective superintendent Bill Bishop, New Zealand's National Crime manager, told New Zealand Radio.

The New Zealand Herald newspaper said police had stumbled onto the evidence when they raided the homes of Afghan refugees during an investigation into a people-smuggling racket to get illegal immigrants from Afghanistan into the country.

"The lounge of a Mt Albert (Auckland) home was converted into a virtual command centre, complete with conference table and maps," the newspaper reported.

Entries in a notebook outlined police security tactics for the Commonwealth Games, held in Auckland in 1990.

LAW AGENCIES IN OTHER COUNTRIES ALSO INVESTIGATING

Security forces in the United States, Canada and Britain were also looking into the possible plot, the newspaper said.

About 20 refugees from Afghanistan and possibly Iran were involved, the newspaper said.

New Zealand Police Minister George Hawkins said arrests were made during the raids but the people involved were charged with only minor offences like passport and immigration offences.

"The police have not arrested anybody for any terrorist act or any potential terrorist act," New Zealand deputy prime minister Jim Anderton said.

New Zealand Foreign Affairs Minister Phil Goff said that when the Games were only a few weeks away "you err on the side of caution".

"There is nothing...that suggests there is a threat on the ground other than somebody had marked the reactor and access to it in a notebook."

But Sydney residents said the city should follow the example of Atlanta, which shut a similar nuclear plant during its 1996 Games.

"Our federal government expects Australians to put up with a huge terrorist threat right on our doorstop, because they don't want people to know it (the reactor) is there," said local council woman Genevieve Rankin.

The plant, used for scientific and medical research, is much smaller than an electricity-generating nuclear reactor, producing only about 10 megawatts of thermal energy compared with 3,000 megawatts from an electricity-generating reactor.

A meltdown would take just eight minutes, leaving no time to evacuate suburbs, anti-plant campaigner Dr Helen Caldicott told a parliamentary inquiry two years ago.

Dr Caldicott said while normal reactors took 40 minutes to melt down, as happened at Chernobyl, Lucas Heights was a highly enriched uranium reactor.

The New Zealand Herald speculated that the plot may have been hatched by sympathisers of Saudi-born Osama bin Laden, suspected by the United States of masterminding the 1998 bombings of two U.S embassies in Africa that killed 220 people might.

Last week Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, in a review of Olympic security, said bin Laden was "an example of the sort of people we clearly monitor as best we can".

Fears of a possible terrorist threat to the Sydney Games were raised in May when police arrested a man whose home near the Olympic Village was packed with explosives.

Australia is mounting its largest peacetime security operation for the Games, fearing the biggest global gathering of the new millennium will be a prime target for terrorists.

----

Head of Olympics Security Says Bomb Plot Not True

Yahoo News
Monday August 28 8:32 AM ET updated 8:47 AM ET Aug 28
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/ts/plot_security_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The head of security for the Sydney Olympics said on Monday a reported plot to blow up Australia's only nuclear reactor during the games had been exaggerated and he did not think there was any threat.

In an interview with NBC's ``Today'' show, New South Wales Police Commissioner Peter Ryan, who is in charge of security for the Olympics, said as far as he was aware there was no threat to the nuclear power station or the Sydney games.

New Zealand police were probing an immigration racket involving Afghan refugees when they stumbled on plans that appeared to point to an attack on the Lucas Heights research nuclear reactor on the outskirts of Sydney during next month's games.

``They had in their possession a street plan of Sydney and unfortunately because a line drawn on the map between Botany Bay and Sydney was near to the nuclear power station, people drew the inference that they were, in fact, planning to attack the power station, which is completely untrue as far as we can tell,'' Ryan told NBC.

He described the Afghan refugee group as an Islamic group allegedly involved so far only in the illegal immigration of people, money laundering and other activities, but ``certainly not terrorism.''

Asked if there was any need to shut down the reactor, which is used for medical and other research, Ryan said it was up to the Australian government to make that decision.

``All I can say is that the story about these people in New Zealand has certainly been exaggerated and as far as we are aware ... there is no threat to the nuclear power station or the Sydney Games.''

Ryan said about 72 countries had contributed their intelligence for the games, adding that while security would be tight visitors would not see troops walking around the streets with machine guns.

---

Business as usual for bemused workers at nuclear reactor

Fox Sports News
Aug 28, 2000
http://www.foxsports.com/wires/pages/29/spt100129.sml

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - While workers joked about a mob of kangaroos being terrorists in disguise, it was business as usual at the small nuclear reactor that became the focus of an Olympic security scare.

Security at the plant appeared unaffected Monday by revelations New Zealand police found evidence five months ago that led them to suspect the reactor was a terrorist target.

A lone security guard, with a holstered pistol, waved visitors through the main gate to the research facility in Lucas Heights - a leafy Sydney suburb on the edge of Royal National Park.

Workers said they were not concerned by weekend reports about the arrests of four people in Auckland who were found with maps highlighting the reactor as well as access and egress routes around the facility.

"People find it slightly bemusing,'' said Stuart Carr, director of radioactive pharmaceuticals at the plant. "People don't think those claims have any credibility.''

About 800 people are employed at Lucas Heights, the only nuclear reactor in Australia. The small reactor, used for scientific and medical research, produces less than 1 percent of the energy produced by a reactor used to generate electricity.

"You can't even make a cup of tea with the temperature of the water in there,'' operations engineer Phil Gough joked during a reactor tour.

Scientists at the Lucas Heights reactor, which was built in 1958 and is scheduled to be replaced by a newer reactor as early as next year, produce radioactive medicines sold to hospitals as far away as Shanghai and also supply irradiated silicon for the semiconductor industry.

Even if terrorists attacked the facility, workers were unsure what threat they could pose. The reactor, about the size of a washing machine, is surrounded by many layers of containment and contains only enough radioactive uranium to fill a coffee cup.

There's a mob of kangaroos on the grounds of the government-operated facility, which has the ambiance of a college campus. Workers jogged at lunchtime Monday, and a security guard read the Bible in between visitors.

New Zealand police said Monday that their investigations so far had concluded there was no serious danger of an attack on the reactor or the Olympic Games.

"Investigations since March have helped us conclude it's a low-level matter, and not a credible threat to the Olympics,'' police spokesman Bill Bishop said.

Suspicions were raised in March when New Zealand police raided a house in Auckland that was the base of a suspected human smuggling ring run by Afghan immigrants.

The police found street maps of Sydney, others marking entry and exit routes to the Lucas Heights reactor and notes on police security tactics at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland.

Bishop rejected reports in the New Zealand Herald that the four people arrested as a result of the raid were supporters of fugitive Afghanistan-based terrorist Osama bin Laden.

"There is no link which we can establish with Osama bin Laden,'' Bishop said.

The four suspects are scheduled to appear in court this week in Auckland on charges related to smuggling and passport fraud. None of the charges is related to terrorism.

The Australian government has said the facility will remain open during the games, although security will be upgraded. Health Minister Michael Wooldridge said the facility needs to stay open to produce radioactive isotopes used to treat cancer.

Lucas Heights is about 16 miles from the Olympic Stadium at Homebush Bay.

A similar reactor located near the Olympic site in Atlanta was shut down during the 1996 Olympics because of concerns terrorists could commandeer the fuel.

International Olympic Committee chairman Juan Antonio Samaranch said during the weekend he was satisfied with security preparations for the Sydney Games.

-------- business

Eurotech, Ltd. Moving to AMEX

From: "Heidi E. Hirst" <hhirst@dccnet.com>
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 14:43:14 -0700

Washington, D.C., August 28, 2000 ---Eurotech, Ltd., the U.S.-based developer of emerging international technologies, has been accepted for listing by the American Stock Exchange. Eurotech expects to move from the OTC bulletin board (or NASD Bulletin Board) and begin trading on the American Stock Exchange effective August 31, 2000. The company will use the symbol EUO. Eurotech is traded also on the Frankfurt exchange.

"This marks a very important milestone for our company,'' notes Chad Verdi, Eurotech's Chairman. "Over the past eighteen months we have seen tremendous growth, both in our portfolio of technologies and in the confidence investors have shown in our ability to turn these technologies into revenue generating assets."

"After reviewing the pressures in the market and how the various exchanges are reacting to those pressures, we decided that an AMEX listing offered our shareholders the best value. As a proud member of AMEX we can build on our past success to create an even stronger financial base," he added.

"Listing on AMEX gives us access to a larger pool of investors as well as the liquidity and trading volume needed to help the market establish an appropriate value on our company," says Chief Financial Officer Jon Dowie.

The move to AMEX tracks with the company's long-term business and financial strategy. The company's focus in the past year has shifted from the acquisition and development of technologies to commercialization, licensing and marketing.

To spearhead the commercialization process, Eurotech has brought on, as Chief Operating Officer, a highly experienced business development specialist and has retained a team of technical experts including Deloitte & Touche to do in-depth product and market analysis.

Eurotech's technology portfolio includes both high-tech applications, like key-less Internet security, and technologically-advanced industrial products, such as polymers and additives.

Two especially promising products are EKOR, an ecologically safe polymer used in the containment of nuclear and other hazardous waste, and Sorbtech SB-1, a new, low-cost, highly absorbent material for oil spill removal.

Many of these technologies were developed in the former Soviet Union and Israel and have not been available in the U.S. Eurotech's criteria for selecting technologies is based on the market potential of each in the U.S. and worldwide, and the fact that each has unique or advanced performance characteristics compared to what is available on the market today.

For further information, please log into Eurotech's website at <www.eurotechltd.com>.

Certain information and statements included in this press release constitute "forward looking statements" within the meaning of the Federal Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors, which may cause the actual results, performance, or achievement of the Company to be materially different from any future results, performance, or achievements expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements.

XXX

For More Information Contact Dawn VanZant at dvanzant@investorideas.com or call Toll Free 1-800-665-0411

-------- china

Washington Times
August 28, 2000
World Scene • Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://208.246.212.80/world/worldscene-2000828212745.htm

Chinese POWs held in mental asylum

HONG KONG - Two Chinese prisoners of war have been found in an Indian mental asylum where they spent the past 35 years, a newspaper reported yesterday.

The two inmates, Shih Liang and Yang Chen, have been held at the Central Institute of Psychiatry in the east Indian state of Bihar since 1965, the South China Morning Post said.

The two were arrested in 1962 during a bloody Sino-Indian border war across the Himalayas and were held at a jail in New Delhi on charges of espionage, it said. Three years later, the Indian army took them to the asylum.

The newspaper quoted India's Home Affairs Ministry as saying that it has no knowledge of the two prisoners.

-------- india / pakistan

Pak. to set up board on nuclear waste

The Hindu
Monday, August 28, 2000
By B. Muralidhar Reddy
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/08/28/stories/03280009.htm

ISLAMABAD, AUG. 27. The Pakistan Government is setting up a nuclear regulatory board for disposal of nuclear waste, according to the Federal Minister for Environment and Local Government, Mr. Omar Asghar Khan.

In an interview to the English daily The News, the Minister said the proposed board would recommend methods of safe nuclear waste disposal. It would chalk out a long-term plan to help the Government cope with the monumental task which has public safety and environmental implications.

The Minister has been quoted as saying that safe nuclear waste disposal methods would be ensured in civil installations in conformity with international environmental standards.

The proposed board would have the responsibility of transportation, storage and geological disposal of nuclear waste. It is expected to keep abreast of new technologies and methodologies for better handling of hazardous substances during the clean-up of nuclear waste.

---

Military Misrule in Pakistan

New York Times
August 28, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/00/08/28/editorial/28mon3.html

Last October, Gen. Pervez Musharraf overthrew Pakistan's democracy, promising to eradicate corruption, revive the economy and open the way for "true democracy." He pledged to restrain nuclear weapons development and pursue peaceful diplomacy with India. Ten months later, he has made little progress with the economy or corruption and has put off the return of democracy until at least 2003. Pakistan still has not signed the nuclear test ban treaty and tensions with India over Kashmir are as dangerous as ever. Now General Musharraf has announced plans for a new political system designed to buttress his own power by excluding the country's top politicians. That would compound Pakistan's problems. A speedier timetable for restoring democracy is urgently needed.

Pakistan's democratic governments have been flawed. But its military dictatorships have blighted its economic and political development and gravely damaged its international reputation. General Musharraf's administration has proved no different. Military rulers claim they can push through reforms because they do not have to make deals with entrenched political interests. But they are beholden to Pakistan's single most powerful interest group, the military and its related intelligence services. Military spending absorbs more than a quarter of Pakistan's yearly budget, diverting resources needed for education and development.

When President Clinton visited Pakistan in February, he made clear America's unhappiness with military rule and with General Musharraf's refusal to cut ties with terrorist groups in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Over the weekend, Don McKinnon, secretary general of the Commonwealth, delivered a similar message. The International Monetary Fund is also unhappy with the slow pace of promised economic reforms. General Musharraf should acknowledge that he is worsening Pakistan's problems and accelerate the return to democratic rule.

-------- mexico

Mexico to hire nuclear auditor within days - gov't

Planet Ark
MEXICO: August 28, 2000
Story by Pav Jordan
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=7955

MEXICO CITY - Mexico will hire an independent auditor "in the coming days" to review the safety of its nuclear facility, Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) Director Alfredo Elias Ayub said on Friday.

"Legislators will be making a decision in coming days between two companies," Ayub told reporters as the environmental group Greenpeace blocked off CFE buildings in Mexico City in protest of the Laguna Verde nuclear plant.

Greenpeace and the CFE have clashed repeatedly in recent months over whether to conduct an independent audit of safety conditions at Laguna Verde, a power plant in the Gulf Coast state of Veracruz which produced about 3.7 percent of Mexico's nuclear power in the third quarter last year.

Legislators are to decide between the Swiss company SGS Group, or Societe Generale de Surveillance and a European group called TUV, Ayub said.

Greenpeace Mexico Director Alejandro Calvillo contended the CFE has all but awarded the contract to SGS and called the selection process a farce.

The Mexican government claims Laguna Verde, a 10-year-old facility about 175 miles (275 km) east of Mexico City, is completely safe but agreed to a safety audit in June after a Greenpeace-sponsored report said it was on the verge of a nuclear catastrophe that could rival Ukraine's Chernobyl.

Carrying placards accusing the government of "cheating the people," protesters accused the CFE of trying to hire auditors that aren't truly independent.

"The CFE never had any intention of allowing an independent audit of Laguna Verde," Calvillo yelled at Ayub, accusing him of excluding Greenpeace from the process of choosing an the plant's auditor.

Ayub replied that the CFE and legislators have consulted with a variety of environmental and social groups to determine selection requirements for an auditor, and pledged to select an independent company that is not influenced by any party.

He said that legislators will make the final decision about who the auditor will be.

"This process cannot be obstructed," he told Calvillo. "We will not influence it, and nor should Greenpeace."

The Laguna Verde plant began operations in 1989. According to Greenpeace, the plant has had at least two major equipment shutdowns in that time, in 1994 and last year. The plant was recently closed down temporarily after a small earthquake hit shook Veracruz state.

-------- russia

Schroeder backs sale of nuke reprocessor to Russia

Aug 28
Reuters
08-28-00

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroederon Monday rejected criticism from his coalition over the planned sale of a plutonium reprocessing plant to Russia by electronics and engineering group Siemens AG.

``There are no security or foreign policy reasons against it,'' Schroeder told journalists in Berlin before a party meeting. ``There is global interest in making weapons-grade plutonium less dangerous through reprocessing.''

Members of the environmentalist Greens, junior coalition partners to Schroeder's ruling Social Democrats, have spoken out against trade in nuclear technology and said Germany should not allow such a sale especially after the country pledged earlier this year to phase out nuclear power.

Schroeder also declared a separate dispute with some Greens over the export of an ammunition factory to Turkey as ended.

``There is nothing to solve. The case is decided,'' he said.

Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the most prominent Green in the cabinet, last week indirectly defended the granting of export approval for an ammunition plant destined for Turkey and called for calm from critics of the deal from within his party.

The approval of the sale of German tanks to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates earlier this year prompted a near-crisis in the Greens' coalition with the SPD.

Fischer had insisted that an order from Ankara for battle tanks should only win an export licence if Turkey showed progress on human and minority rights, but he was outvoted in the cabinet committee which must approve such deals.

Fischer is the most influential figure among the Greens but has little formal power in the party's diffuse leadership structure. He has faced criticism from the ecologist party's vocal ``fundamentalist'' wing over the compromises he has made since joining the government two years ago.

---

The message implicit in Kursk disaster

Christian Science Monitor
MONDAY, AUGUST 28, 2000
OPINION
Jon B. Wolfsthal
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/08/28/fp11s2-csm.shtml

WASHINGTON - The Kursk submarine disaster has grabbed world attention, but there's one question no one is asking: Why are these subs at sea at all? The cold war is over - the reason for keeping them at sea is gone, and the risk the next accident will involve a sub carrying nuclear weapons is unacceptably high.

Throughout the cold war, US and Russian subs played continuous underwater cat-and-mouse. Ballistic missile submarines, equipped with enough nuclear explosives to destroy entire countries, were shadowed all over the globe by hunter "attack" submarines. Countries accepted the risks because sub-based missiles are harder to find and destroy than land-based missiles, and are considered secure second-strike weapons. In the age of hair-trigger nuclear deterrence, this was desirable. The occasional sub accident or incident was tolerated as a cost of keeping the peace, and few argued that the US and Russia shouldn't maintain sub-based missiles.

Since the cold war, US and Russian Navies have gone in different directions. Russia's economic collapse severely affects its ability to maintain its force. Many subs, including newer models, routinely are tied up dockside, rusting away for lack of maintenance. More than a hundred, with radioactive nuclear reactors and weapons-usable nuclear materials, await dismantlement with little security or environmental monitoring. The few operating Russian subs are poorly maintained and their crews poorly trained. They're then forced to sea to conduct exercises simulating cold-war era scenarios.

For its part, the US continues to operate its submarine fleet at near cold-war alert levels. It operates 18 strategic ballistic-missile submarines, four of them ready to launch missiles at all times. Each sub can carry 192 warheads, meaning more than 750 weapons are seconds away from launch right now. In 1994, the Pentagon called for reducing the total number to 14, reductions blocked by Congress. Even in 1994, that number was criticized by some as being too high.

Moreover, there are significant risks and costs to keeping such large arsenals at sea. The odds increase every day that the next Russian sub accident will involve a ship carrying nuclear missiles. In 1989, the Russian nuclear sub Komsomolets sank at sea, reportedly carrying two nuclear-tipped torpedoes, and eventually leaked plutonium from its reactor into the ocean. It's still not clear if the reactors on the Kursk are safe, and Russian claims that no nuclear weapons are on board are impossible to verify. A future accident could easily involve a reactor leak, put nuclear weapons at risk, and lead to widespread environmental damage.

US and Russian subs are trapped in a Catch-22. Keeping US missile subs at sea forces Russia to keep its attack subs out there looking for US subs, and encourages Russia to keep as many strategic missile subs at sea as possible. This, in turn forces the US to keep its arsenal of attack subs artificially high, tracking Russian subs. This all signals third parties, such as India and Iran, that they need sea-based systems if they're to become "real" nuclear powers.

The solution is simple: Keep the subs at home. The US should announce, after obtaining a bilateral commitment from Russia to do the same, that ballistic missile subs will no longer go on routine patrol and will be maintained in their home ports. The US could help Russia dismantle its excess subs as an incentive for Russia to agree. Each site could operate three missile subs, ensuring at least one would be able to put to sea at any time in a crisis. These ships would still be maintained in port, as could their crews, and would only be shipped to sea occasionally for training or in emergencies. The remaining 15 ships could be retired, at a savings of almost $1 billion per year.

The benefits to the US and Russian budgets would be significant, as would be the benefits to global security, moving one more step away from the nuclear brinksmanship of the cold war. It may be too late to save the sailors of the Kursk, but it's not too late to learn from their sacrifice and prevent needless deaths, insecurity, and environmental damage.

Jon B. Wolfsthal is an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

---

Russia to Recover Kursk Bodies in September

Yahoo News
Tuesday August 29
By Konstantin Trifonov
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000829/wl/russia_submarine_dc_124.html

SAINT PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - A Russian minister said Tuesday the recovery of the bodies of the 118 men who died on board the sunken Kursk nuclear submarine would begin next month.

But he played down suggestions, backed Tuesday by U.S. officials, that an exploding torpedo caused the disaster.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov also said the lifting of the wreck of the submarine would begin in around one year and cost $100 million.

``The operation (to recover the bodies) will begin at the end of September and will be carried out by Norwegian and Russian divers,'' Klebanov told a news conference in Russia's second city, home to the agency which designed the Kursk.

He said a Norwegian team would come to St Petersburg on Thursday to discuss how the operation can be carried out.

The submarine plunged to the bottom of the Barents Sea on August 12 with the loss of all hands. Russia carried out days of fruitless rescue efforts before Norwegian divers pronounced the whole crew dead eight days after the accident.

Russia says the cause of the disaster was a collision with a foreign submarine, which caused blasts on board. Western officials have strongly denied this and said the cause was an exploding faulty torpedo on board.

U.S. officials Tuesday said they had acoustical spy tapes which proved this theory. Klebanov denied that any new torpedoes were being tested and that those on board had been in service for 20 years and could not have exploded.

Klebanov said the operation to recover the bodies would be carried out by three diving bells. They would descend to the wreck, 108 meters (354 ft) down, with one Norwegian diver and two Russians on board.

They would cut six holes in the side of the vessel in six sections. The front of the Kursk, almost totally destroyed in the accident, would be cut off altogether, Klebanov said.

``Only Russian divers will go into the vessel,'' he added.

He said the operation would cost around $5.0-$7.0 million. The lifting of the submarine had also been examined at a meeting of the commission he headed, Klebanov added.

``It is most likely that this operation will be purely Russian,'' he said.

``Under the tightest schedule, we think it will take a year. During one year we plan to carry out preparatory work. In one year we must lift the submarine,'' he said.

He gave no details of what was planned but said that the operation could be financed from Russian state coffers and international funds.

---

The 'Kursk' Submarine Disaster Stop this nuclear madness!

By Praful Bidwai
The Praful Bidwai Column
August 28, 2000

It is hard to get over the sheer horror of the last moments of the 118 soldiers who died gasping and choking aboard the Kursk submarine. Their death could not have been more wanton, cruel, merciless, undignified or sordid. And yet, the accident was in some ways only waiting to happen--in line with the 120-plus "incidents" involving Russian submarines since 1956. The disaster holds many lessons for the world, in particular India.

However, the Kursk catastrophe is far from over. Indeed, the radiation danger is only beginning to unfold. According to the Bellona Foundation, a Norwegian environmental group which monitors Russian submarines, the Kursk's two nuclear reactors with their 380 MW output contain an estimated 1,200 kg of highly enriched uranium, mostly uranium-235. This isotope has a half-life of 710 million years. This means that even with radioactive decay, some 600 kg of the material will still be present a mind-boggling 710 million years later. Millions of generations in the region will remain menaced with radioactive poisoning.

Even the short-term environmental hazard from the Kursk is grave. Its reactors are likely to have been damaged in the explosions that sank the Kursk. Even if they aren't, removing them from its twin hulls is an enormously complex and expensive task. It will necessarily entail huge radioactivity exposures. Abandoning the submarine would be even more dangerous. The metal enclosing the reactors will decay, releasing huge amounts of potent toxins, contaminating marine life and eventually endangering humans. Nuclear-powered submarines contain a cocktail of poisons: highly enriched uranium, hundreds of fission products including deadly plutonium, and high chemical explosives, to boot.

Besides the Kursk, there are a total of 110 nuclear submarines in Russia's Northern Fleet whose reactors are still to be dismantled. About 180 subs have been taken out of service since 1991. The Fleet operates in a patently unsafe and increasingly sloppy fashion. And the subs are rapidly corroding. Any day, any month, one or more of the 200-plus nuclear reactors rotting and seething in this poorly guarded fleet could undergo a catastrophic accident. This threat will remain real so long as the nuclear cores are around.

Since 1994, Alexander Nikitin, a former submarine captain, has been doing some whistle-blowing by documenting the Northern Fleet's poor safety practices and warning of disaster. For this, Nikitin was arrested in February 1995 and gravely charged with treason and espionage, which carry a death sentence. Ironically, he had obtained his information from open sources. He was badly harassed and prevented from choosing his lawyer. Last year, however, the courts acquitted him. He now faces another trial on the treason charge!

I interviewed Nikitin less than two months ago in Stockholm. His worst fears have come true: Russian armed forces face massive budget cuts and maintenance standards are falling precipitously. Today, Russia's military runs on $5 billion (compared to the US' $300 billion). More than 70 percent of Russian warships are in disrepair. Many soldiers earn less than $100 a month. Some don't get paid at all. "Vast numbers of soldiers and sailors moonlight," Nikitin said. "This means they pay little attention to their job. Their skills have eroded. A quarter of them are homeless, and most live in acute demoralisation and depression." Two years ago, a young sailor went berserk on a sub and held eight men hostage at gunpoint. Some of the generals who prosecuted the Chechnya war would get regularly drunk by 9 a.m. Such men now sit on the world's biggest nuclear arsenal, with 22,000 weapons!

Even before the USSR's collapse, there were 121 accidents and "incidents" on the country's nuclear submarine fleet. According to "Greenpeace", at least 10 of these seriously damaged nuclear reactors. Meltdowns--the worst possible reactor accidents--occurred in 1979 and 1989. Since 1991, following the economy's near-collapse, safety conditions have probably further worsened.

However, Russia's specific submarine troubles should not obscure the generic problem with nuclear submarines the world over, which have all recorded serious accidents. All nuclear technology is highly hazardous. Submarine reactors are worse because they pack a large amount of energy in a tiny volume (just as nuclear weapons do). They evolved in a breakneck arms race in which safety hardly counted. Today, wrecks of American, British as well as Russian nuclear subs lie on the earth's ocean floor--at least five of them for more than a decade. These include different classes of vessels, large and small. Some caught fire; others had reactor accidents.

There is, of course, an especially sordid quality to the way the Russian authorities handled the Kursk crisis. First, they denied the accident posed serious danger. For fully four days, they refused all external help, boastfully claiming Russian resources were sufficient to handle the job. When the help did come on August 19, they announced that the rear hatch of the vessel was irreparably damaged, when in fact it wasn't. President Vladimir Putin refused to cut short his Black Sea holiday--until it was too late. The British and the Norwegians too delayed sending in assistance or reached Murmansk via a detour.

The Russian nucleocracy, like all nucleocrats everywhere, refused to disclose relevant information, including the names of the sailors (their number too was raised without explanation from 116 to 118), the location of the sub, and circumstances of the accident. According to independent sources, there were two internal explosions, not an external collision, as the Russians claimed. Official estimates of how long the oxygen would last were contradictory. The authorities' behaviour towards the victims' relatives was appalling. Mr Putin's conduct cost him a lot in reputation.

This pattern of behaviour is typical of nuclear establishments everywhere, marked as they are by paranoid and excessive secrecy, and dominated by "experts" who play God but are answerable to nobody and cynically exploit their privileged access to information. In India, we have our own obnoxious Atomic Energy Act of 1962 which allows the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) to withhold any information it likes. (Eminent jurists like V.R. Krishna Iyer term this unconstitutional and undemocratic).

In India, we also have an exact analogue of Nikitin: Capt B.K. Subba Rao, a critic of the so-called Advance Technology Vessel (ATV) or nuclear submarine project which has soaked up Rs. 2,000 crores, but produced little. For questioning the DAE's bungling and incompetent scientists, he too was charged with espionage and jailed for years--until he was honourably acquitted by the Bombay High Court.

India's nuclear and defence establishments work at sub-Russian levels of safety. For instance, of the world's 10 worst performing nuclear reactors, six are Indian. The Tarapur nuclear station is, going by IAEA records, the world's most contaminated. It has the highest radiation exposure per unit of power. The record of the Defence Research and Development Organisation is extremely poor too. Its three biggest projects--the ATV, main battle tank and light combat aircraft--are all embarrassing failures.

The armed services fare no better. Since 1991, the Indian Air Force (IAF) has lost 202 aircraft and 85 pilots. In financial terms, this loss exceeds the IAF's annual budget! In the last six months alone, there were 14 aircraft crashes. Over forty percent of IAF accidents are caused by defects attributable to substandard spares. The army has had its share of catastrophic ordnance explosions, defective equipment and plain duds. (For details, see Praful Bidwai & Achin Vanaik's recent South Asia on a Short Fuse: Nuclear Politics and the Future of Global Disarmament, Oxford, New Delhi, 1999).

Some of these problems are rooted in India's poor safety culture. India is a disaster-prone society with high rates of mishaps, sloppy disaster forecasting, and poor precautionary and relief-provision procedures. India is among the world's largest recipients of toxic waste and unsafe technologies. Industrial accidents occur here four times more frequently than in the US. Fatality in road accidents is ten times higher than in the OECD countries. The point about a generally poor safety culture is simple. If Indian engineers can't control the frequency of mishaps in relatively uncomplicated systems such as road traffic, they can't be trusted to safely handle highly complex systems such as nuclear weapons or submarines.

The conclusion is stark. The chances of a disastrous accident in India's nuclear facilities are unacceptably high, as is the probability of the accidental use of nuclear weapons. The Pakistan story is even worse. This makes South Asia uniquely dangerous. Nuclear weapons are unconscionably destructive not just in their use, but even in the process of manufacture, handling, transportation and deployment. The environmental damage from the US nuclear weapons programme alone is officially estimated at $254 billion--the same order as India's annual GDP! Each stage in the nuclear fuel cycle, and each component of the weapons programme, is fraught with grave hazards. This argument applies a fortiori to South Asia.

Therefore, it would be suicidal for India to go further down the nuclear trajectory. We must abandon the ATV submarine project and declare a nuclear weapons freeze: There must be no testing, manufacture, induction or deployment of nuclear weapons.-end--

----

Russia Sub Joins Other Arctic Debris

Associated Press
August 28, 2000 Filed at 1:41 a.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Arctic-Radioactivity.html

TORONTO (AP) -- Twisted and broken, hundreds of feet down in the Barents Sea, the Russian submarine Kursk joins other nuclear debris sunken or discarded in Arctic waters.

Scientists who study radioactivity in the Arctic say a variety of sources have been responsible for contamination throughout the region in the past 50 years.

Except for isolated sites -- such as the former Soviet underwater nuclear testing ground used in the late 1950s -- scientists say contamination levels are low, posing little threat to people.

``We don't see pervasive contamination at levels that would be of significant radiological concern,'' said John Norton Smith, a Canadian government research scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia.

A 1998 report by the Arctic Monitoring Assessment Program lists several sources of radioactive contamination in the Arctic, including the accidental sinking of a Soviet submarine and a U.S. B-52 bomber that crashed in 1968.

Three decades of Soviet dumping of nuclear waste, including more than 15 reactors from decommissioned ships, and waste from nuclear power and weapons plants in Russia and Europe add to radioactive material in Arctic seas, according to Smith and the AMAP report.

Despite this, whatever radioactive material that has escaped has shown little sign of spreading far before its potency dissipates.

The Kursk, which suffered two explosions and sank on Aug. 12, killing 118 sailors aboard, has two nuclear reactors that Russian officials say shut down when it became disabled. Russia is negotiating with Norwegian and Dutch companies to raise the submarine. Russian officials say there is no sign of unusual radiation levels around the vessel.

Smith, who studies radioactivity in Arctic waters, said the Kursk reactors would be safe in the short term if they remained intact.

``The only problem would be if any of the containment structures ruptured,'' he said. The threat of leakage increases with time, though, because the reactors on the Kursk never were intended to sit forever on the bottom of the ocean, Smith added.

The AMAP report said the only other known case of a sunken active nuclear submarine -- the April 7, 1989, fire aboard the Komsomolets near Bear Island in the Norwegian Sea -- caused little known contamination beyond the vessel. The submarine had a nuclear reactor and two torpedoes with mixed uranium-plutonium warheads, the report said, and small amounts of radioactive material leaked out of the reactor where the vessel lies, more than a mile deep.

``The likelihood of a large-scale release from the Komsomolets is small,'' the report said. ``Even if the containment material corrodes with time, most of the activation products will have decayed before they are released. Studies in the surrounding area show only minor contamination from the submarine.''

AMAP, which is run by the eight-nation Arctic Council comprising Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States, tracks the condition of the Arctic environment.

Its 1998 report said the existing contamination appeared to pose little health risk to people -- either through direct exposure or in the food chain through fish and other marine life.

---

U.S. Navy Hopes Sink With Kursk?

Washington Post
Monday, August 28, 2000
By William M. Arkin Special to washingtonpost.com
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26606-2000Aug25.html

Let me make one thing clear: The Russians had a submarine accident, not the U.S. Navy. There is no evidence that the Navy had anything to do with the loss of the Kursk, and the accident was not the result of a submarine cat-and-mouse game still played despite the end of the Cold War, as some would claim.

Having said all of that, one can't help but ask what implications the loss of the Oscar-class submarine, Russia's newest, has on the U.S. Navy. The question is particularly germane in a presidential campaign where military readiness surprisingly has become an issue and there is a scramble underway to increase defense spending.

Naval submariners would argue that they should get a lion's share of any increase, and that the United States needs more submarines, as many as 20 more, to fulfill significantly greater responsibilities since the end of the Cold War.

It is an argument that seems somewhat ridiculous in the face of the Russian accident.

The Silent Service

This year, the Navy celebrates the 100th anniversary of its submarine forces. Submarines, submariners say, are responsible for victory in the Cold War. "Our attack boats constantly held their boomers at risk," retired Adm. James D. Watkins, former chief of naval operations, said at this year's submarine force centennial birthday ball in April.

"We could find the Soviet submarines, they couldn't find ours, and both sides knew it. And that knowledge on the part of the Soviet leaders led them to the conclusion that any nuclear exchange with the United States would be an assured loser for them."

For a while, the game did continue. But in 1992, when the USS Baton Rouge and a Russian Sierra-class submarine collided in the Barents Sea, then-Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin personally asked President Clinton to reduce U.S. surveillance, and any aggressiveness ended.

"I can say, without any equivocation, that there was no U.S. vessel involved at all in the accident," Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, Pentagon spokesman, says. But beyond that, the Pentagon "doesn't discuss" submarine operations.

We do know, however, that two attack submarines, including the USS Memphis, and the USS Loyal, an intelligence ship entered the Barents Sea to take a closer look at the rare full-fledged exercise begun by the Russian Northern Fleet on Aug. 10. The schedule of events included bomber flights, a ballistic missile submarine launch and cruise missile firing from the Kursk.

We only know that the Memphis was in the area because it pulled into Bergen, Norway, on Aug. 18 to curious local press, who also were assured that the submarine was not involved in any collision. Silence, and stealth, allows the deployments, but it has also precipitated much speculation about American involvement.

Stealthy Needs

For years now, long before the Kursk accident, the U.S. Navy has not been talking about its Russian counterpart as a threat. One reason is that Russian submarine patrols have shrunk from 55 in 1991 to 16 in 1999, according to U.S. intelligence data obtained by Joshua Handler, a doctoral candidate at Princeton University.

If there ever were tensions with the Russians, attack subs would quickly mobilize to shadow Russian missile boats. But these days, the main function of attack submarines is intelligence collection. According to the Navy, such missions have doubled since the end of the Cold War, while boats have declined from a peak of 100 in the 1980s to 56 today.

Earlier this year, the Joint Chiefs of Staff completed a top secret study projecting attack submarine requirements into the future. It concluded that 72 percent of peacetime tasking by 2015 would be for intelligence collection, meaning that the Navy submarine force could not go below 55 boats and should grow to 68 submarines by 2015 and 76 by 2025 to meet all the "requirements" of the regional commands.

Adm. Frank Bowman, the Navy's director of nuclear propulsion, admitted to reporters July 27 that these numbers were both "cost prohibitive" and "pragmatically undoable." The Navy currently is building one Virginia-class attack submarine a year (at a cost of some $2 billion for the initial boats) and would have to increase its building schedule to four a year in order to meet these "needs." Given that the Navy is in the process of turning perfectly good submarines into razor blades to "downsize" the force, it isn't surprising that Bowman says Los Angeles- class subs scheduled to be decommissioned may be retained by refueling their reactors.

The Price of Silence

Even if one is able to separate an image of the Kursk accident and Russian decay from U.S. Navy excellence, the question still remains whether we really need more subs.

At the birthday ball, Adm. Watkins described an increasingly transparent world of global television, commercial satellites and the Internet, saying that "our national security jewels must remain much more hidden from view than in the past." The Navy describes the next generation of smart sensors and communications that will extend the reach of surveillance submarines and transform them into real-time reporting posts, sending out swimming, crawling, flying machines the size of cell phones that will be able to take photos, listen to communications and detect tanks or mines to keep tabs on a potential enemy.

Is all of this just concocted to find new missions to justify existing and future submarines, or is it indeed innovation being built into a versatile platform to respond to worldwide requirements? The Navy's not really saying because it's not in the nature of the submarine force to open itself up to outside scrutiny. Unless they change this tack and come up for air, I imagine they'll have a hard time convincing most people that their needs are indeed real and not just selfish. And, I imagine American submariners will be surprised to find that the Kursk disaster rubs off on them in a variety of unexpected ways.

Contact William M. Arkin at william_arkin@washingtonpost.com.

-------- ukraine

Water Leaks Into Chernobyl Plant

Associated Press
August 28, 2000 Filed at 10:48 a.m. EDT
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/i/AP-Ukraine-Chernobyl.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000828/wl/ukraine_chernobyl_1.html

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- A large amount of water has leaked into the sarcophagus covering a reactor destroyed in the 1986 explosion at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but radiation levels in the water flowing out of the structure are normal, officials said Monday.

Water has seeped into the giant sarcophagus since it was built, but more than twice as much leaked inside last month following heavy rains. As a result, water for the first time entered nine rooms, officials monitoring the sarcophagus said in a statement.

Radioactivity levels in the water coming out of the shelter were still at permitted levels, the statement said.

The sarcophagus was hastily constructed to cover the reactor that exploded and caught fire in 1986, spewing a giant radioactive cloud over parts of Europe in the world's worst nuclear disaster.

With the help of foreign funds, Ukraine is trying to make the structure environmentally safe. It is believed to contain tons of radioactive fuel and dust.

Only one of Chernobyl's four reactors is still operational. Due to international pressure, Ukraine has promised to shut down the plant for good in December.

-------- u.s. nuc facilities

-------- new mexico

Justice isn't possible
Wen Ho Lee faces trial in nuclear secrets but what's the truth?

Evansville Courier & Press
08/28/00

By DAN THOMASSON - Scripps Howard
http://www.courierpress.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?200008/28+justice082800_news.html+20000828

Someone gave away our nuclear secrets, and if it wasn't Wen Ho Lee, which looks increasingly the case, then who was it?

The FBI seems incapable of solving the puzzle of how the information that allowed the Chinese to cut decades off the development of nuclear missile technology got from Los Alamos, N.M., or Livermore, Calif., or wherever to Asia. Meanwhile, those in charge of the investigation are conceding they may have misled the court about Lee, who has been shackled in leg irons.

A judge Thursday finally ordered Lee freed, but not until Tuesday, when conditions of the release will be set.

The judge made the right decision. There was no indication that Lee would be a risk to flee. The fact is that whatever damage has been done has been done, and while justice always is good, it may not be possible in this instance.

The major culprit in the handing over to the Russians of our nuclear capability almost 60 years ago was a misguided, barely post-pubescent genius, Ted Hall, who still is alive and never spent a day in jail and has no regrets about helping to balance the world's atomic power. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed as part of the wholesale theft of Manhattan Project secrets, but Hall's role was far more serious. The truth about the earlier Los Alamos theft came in a stunning work by reporters Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel.

The government never has accused Lee of espionage, only of mishandling classified information by downloading and copying it. The whole matter has been tossed into a tizzy by the testimony of the FBI's main agent in the case that he gave misleading statements in two separate hearings last December in which Lee was denied bail. FBI agent Robert Messemer's latest testimony all but shattered the "evidence" previously used to bring charges against Lee.

Make no mistake. This is a hugely serious matter, and Lee's role in it, even if found, as he contends, to have been for the most innocent motives, deserved the scrutiny it has gotten.

There are, after all, seven files still missing, and while there is testimony that they would be of no use to a foreign power, who can be certain? The government contends that Lee downloaded some of our top secrets. Former top Los Alamos scientists and officials, however, insist much of the data already was in the public domain. Lee says he was just backing up his own files.

The lack of professionalism in this investigation is amazing. From the beginning, both the nuclear regulatory agency and the FBI underestimated its seriousness and were slow to react when it became clear the Chinese were far ahead of where they would be normally, posing yet another threat to our security. The two agencies then typically overreacted to public pressure for an explanation.

The White House also seemed to have moved far slower than one would expect, apparently ignoring FBI warnings about Chinese spying and attempts by the Chinese military and intelligence to "buy in" to the 1996 presidential election.

The Lee trial will begin in November. Perhaps some of the answers to this mystery will be revealed, or perhaps not. It is not too far-fetched to speculate that nothing will come of this case, that Lee will be exonerated or convicted of some downsized charge and that it may take nearly 60 years, as it did in the case of Ted Hall, for the real truth to emerge.

---- new york

S.2519 - Nuclear Workers excluded from compensation bill

Date: 8/28/00 10:52:24 AM Eastern Daylight Time

I sent this out this morning. I suggest that the rest of you do the same, or we are going to get really screwed.

Jack Shannon <Jacksha1@aol.com>

John P. Shannon
262 Jones Road
Saratoga Springs, NY 12866 518-587-3245

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Senator 212-661-1395 [Fax]

and

Senator Charles Schumer 26 Federal Plaza Sweet 31-100 NY, NY 10278 1-212-486-7693 [Fax]

Dear Senators Moynihan and Schumer:

I worked as a Nuclear Physicist, Nuclear Engineer and Manager of Health and Safety at the Naval Reactors Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory [KAPL] for a period of thirty years. During this period I was exposed to excessive levels of Radiation, on many occasions, and to Beryllium on at least one occasion.

We now find that the Energy Employees Occupational Illness and Compensation Act of 2000 [S.2519], to be voted on later this year, has excluded KAPL and it's subsidiary facilities from the act using the following language in S.2519:

101 (a)(2)(b)(B) EXCLUSION- The term shall not include any naval reactor facility covered under Executive Order No. 12344.

I also have proof that hundreds of present and former workers were exposed to excessive levels of radiation and that perhaps as many as one hundred and fifty workers may have died as a result of exposers to radiation and/or asbestos.

I would like a review of the reason for this exclusion and an inquirer into why it is that those people who have spent their entire working lives inside, what many would consider the most dangerous Nuclear Facility in the United States, are now excluded from compensation payments due to workers at all other Nuclear Facilities.

Radiation and Beryllium kills and maims Naval Reactor Workers as well as Nuclear Workers in the rest of the Nation.

Respectively Submitted,
John P. Shannon

-------- us nuc politics

Peacekeeping Helped Cheney Company

By Karen Gullo
Associated Press Writer
Monday, Aug. 28, 2000; 3:25 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000828/aponline152555_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- The company run until this month by former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney has reaped more than $2 billion in federal contracts to support U.S. troops on some of the peacekeeping missions that George W. Bush says have helped run down the military.

U.S. deployments in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia and elsewhere - the kinds of missions Bush has pledged to reduce if elected - have meant big contracts for Dallas-based Halliburton Co., which Cheney, the GOP vice presidential candidate, headed from 1995 until he retired two weeks ago.

What started out as a $4 million contract in 1992 to help the government plan how to provide meals, tents, toilets and laundry for troops sent on missions to far-flung lands has grown substantially for Halliburton, an oil-services conglomerate.

Halliburton's Brown & Root Services subsidiary has received the lion's share of the Pentagon's troop support business in the years since the Persian Gulf War, which Cheney helped direct as secretary of defense under Bush's father.

A big chunk of the business came in 1995 when troops were sent to Bosnia. The Army paid Brown & Root $546 million to provide logistical support for over 20,000 American soldiers in Bosnia, Croatia and Hungary. The company had already earned $269 million on the contract.

Two years later Brown & Root received a sole-source contract worth $405 million to continue support services in Bosnia. Last year the company beat out one other bidder to win a five-year Army contract to support U.S. peacekeeping troops in the Balkans region. Originally awarded for $900 million, work under that contract has now reached $730 million and could go to more than double that figure because more troops were sent to Kosovo last year.

Another contract for support services awarded this year by the Navy will bring in at least $300 million.

The government has hired Halliburton for dozens of other jobs, from a $100 million contract to improve security at U.S. embassies and consulates to a $40 million contract to maintain labs at the National Institutes of Health.

Brown & Root and Army officials say the company won the logistics contracts fair and square.

"There's no doubt Dick traveled around the world and had an impact on our global business," said Larry Pope, president of Brown & Root. But in deals with the U.S. government, Cheney didn't have any direct bearing on the awards, he said, adding that Brown & Root doesn't have a lock on the business - it has lost a few federal contracts to competitors.

Brown & Root was given the sole-source contract in May 1997 to continue supporting troops in Bosnia because the Army decided it would be cheaper to keep the same contractor than find a new one, said Capt. Joan Kibler, spokeswoman for Army Corps of Engineers, which awarded the contract.

Brown & Root has worked for the government for years; it did construction work for the military during the Vietnam War. But a surge in U.S. troop deployments and the Pentagon's growing reliance on private companies to provide logistics services have been a boon for Brown & Root.

"The current administration helped set the course for them to build the business," said Maj. Joe Bigelow, spokesman for the Army, which has given the company more than $1 billion in business since 1998. "Five years ago there was no Bosnia or Kosovo."

This past weekend, Cheney said the military has "too many commitments" for the size of U.S. forces. And Bush has repeatedly accused President Clinton and Vice President Al Gore of overcommitting U.S. soldiers to overseas peacekeeping missions while cutting military budgets.

Bush says that if elected, "I will tell our friends and allies, we care for you, we will strengthen our alliances, but if there needs to be troops on the ground to keep warring parties apart in your neighborhood, you get to be the peacekeepers."

Gore says more diplomacy in advance would limit the need to send soldiers to crises abroad.

A cutback in overseas missions "will reduce our business," said Pope. However, Halliburton derives less than 10 percent of its revenue from federal contracts, said Wendy Hall, a company spokeswoman. Brown & Root's revenues were $1.6 billion last year; Halliburton had nearly $15 billion in revenues.

Brown & Root's contracts are "cost-plus-award-fee" deals, meaning the company is reimbursed for its costs and also gets an incentive fee - usually up to 9 percent - based on performance.

Except for some problems in the beginning of the Balkans support mission, "generally their marks were usually very good to excellent," said the Army's Kibler.

Complaints about escalating costs for the Bosnia peacekeeping mission in 1997 prompted a review by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

The GAO said costs increased because the Army increased the number of troop camps and didn't monitor the contractor properly and because the contractor was slow to provide cost estimates. The problems were later corrected, the GAO said.

---

Some major contracts won by Halliburton Co.'s Brown & Root Services subsidiary to provide logistic support services for U.S. troops overseas:

1992-1997
Missions supported: Somalia, Zaire (Rwanda refugee crisis), Haiti, Southwest Asia, Italy (troops patrolling no-fly zone over Bosnia out of Aviano air base), Bosnia. Value: $815 million.

1997-1999
Missions supported: Bosnia, Hungary, Croatia. $405 million.

1999-2004
Missions supported: Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Hungary. $1.8 billion (estimate).

-------- u.s. nuc weapons

For Today's Defense, New Priorities

New York Times
August 28, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/letters/l28mil.html

To the Editor:

Re "Defense in the 21st Century" (editorial, Aug. 21): Two defense issues the presidential candidates should address are how to pay for the military we need and how to deal with threats beyond current capabilities.

The oceans and friendly neighbors that helped protect us in the past are irrelevant in an age of cyberspace and suitcase-size weapons of mass destruction. Developing new means to combat these threats will require cooperation between government and business to protect critical infrastructure, develop methods of tracking terrorists' assets, improve intelligence and create workable export controls.

How can we pay the tab? Start with the billions of dollars the Defense Department wastes each year operating an aging infrastructure and maintaining unneeded bases. Why not follow the lead of American business and take advantage of information technology, outsourcing and privatization?

RICHARD D. HEARNEY Washington, Aug. 23, 2000

The writer, a retired Marine Corps general, is president of Business Executives for National Security.

---

Code Name: Mainstream Can 'Open Source' Bridge the Software Gap?

New York Times
August 28, 2000
By STEVE LOHR
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/08/biztech/articles/28code.html

In a report to President Clinton last year, a group of leading computer scientists warned that the nation faced a troubling "software gap."

The group, made up of corporate executives and university researchers, said that programmers simply could not keep pace with exploding demand for high-quality software -- the computer code needed for everything from Internet commerce to nuclear weapons design. To bridge the gap, the group said, the nation must not only train more skilled programmers but also explore fresh, even radical, approaches to developing and maintaining software.

In a new report, the group, known as the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee, will recommend that the federal government back "open source software as an alternate path for software development," according to a draft copy of the report, which will be sent to the White House and published in a matter of weeks.

"Open source software" seems a radical approach indeed. The term stands for both an iconoclastic philosophy and a software development model: software is distributed free and its "source code," or underlying instructions, are published openly so that other programmers can study, share and modify the author's work.

The open-source model represents a sharp break with the practices of the commercial software business, which considers source code a company's private property -- usually guarded jealously and shared only rarely, under strict licensing terms.

But open source, once viewed as an ideological movement at the fringes of computing, is moving into the mainstream -- largely because the spread of the Internet and personal computers make it easy for programmers to collaborate in far-flung, voluntary teams.

Open-source software has already made real inroads with a pair of showcase success stories: the Linux operating system for computers used alone or in networks, and the Apache software system for so-called server computers used for Web sites.

Linux and Apache have attracted the support of established companies like I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard, and startups like Red Hat and VA Linux. Both open-source programs have done best in the market for Web server software. Apache is used on 63 percent of Web servers, according to Netcraft, a research firm, while Linux is the operating system on 36 percent of Web servers.

The movement's fans say that open-source development, if widely adopted, has the potential to help fill the software gap by more efficiently delivering high-quality software. And open source, they add, is forcing the software industry to rethink its traditional development practices and its business strategies.

The point, they say, is not to destroy the profit motive that has helped make software a $175 billion-a-year business worldwide. The goal instead is to bring software development into the Internet era by sharing knowledge widely, allowing programmers to build on each other's work and accelerate the pace of software debugging and improvement.

Companies in the open-source economy would make money mainly by tailoring programs for customers, and with service and support. Software, open-source advocates say, would increasingly become a service business -- compared with the the traditional model of shipping proprietary code, shrink-wrapped, as if it were a manufactured good.

"I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the Internet and open-source initiatives are the free marketplace way of dealing with the extremely complex software issues we are facing," said Irving Wladawsky-Berger, an I.B.M. executive and a member of the presidential advisory committee.

Even Microsoft is taking open source seriously, if warily. "This issue of open source cuts to the core of the software business," said Jim Gray, a Microsoft researcher and a member of the presidential advisory group. "It is a real challenge, masked by a great deal of hype."

The new report by the technology advisory panel is another sign that open source is an emerging force. The recommendations focus mainly on developing software in a rarefied niche of computing -- the federally financed supercomputing centers devoted to over-the-horizon research in fields like modeling the atmosphere and simulating nuclear explosions.

Yet the report also notes that open-source development could have "a profound economic and social" impact, and it clearly regards the supercomputing centers as technology incubators for the marketplace. (It was a team from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, after all, that helped spawn the Web revolution by creating the Mosaic browser, Netscape's precursor, in 1993, and that built the server software that became the foundation of the Apache project.)

"High-end computing should be a good test bed if you want to find out if open source can produce high-quality, complex software," said Larry Smarr, co-chairman of the open-source panel of the presidential advisory committee, who was head of the Illinois supercomputing center in the Mosaic days.

The Economics Collaboration, Yes, With Profit in Mind

For all the momentum of the open-source model, uncertainties abound. Making the transition from a movement to the mainstream, industry analysts say, will mean overcoming some daunting cultural, business and legal obstacles.

The origins of open-source development go back to the 1970's and the academic traditions of freely publishing research, subjecting work to peer review and sharing one another's discoveries. The early idealists, led by Richard M. Stallman, a revered programmer, believed deeply that all software should be free and that commercial software was all but immoral.

But the leading figures in the open-source movement today, however, have a more pragmatic bent. They believe in open-source development mainly, they say, because it produces better software and service -- not because it is morally superior to the traditional commercial model. They are all for capitalism, and they welcome investment.

"If open source is to succeed, it has to have a business justification," said Brian Behlendorf, one of the creators of Apache, and the founder and chief technology officer of Collab.Net, a San Francisco start-up company that helps companies design and run projects using open-source techniques.

"A lot of people are in the open-source community because they think it is the right thing to do," he added. "But charity only goes so far. You've got to make it sustainable."

Of the estimated five million software programmers worldwide, Mr. Behlendorf figures that fewer than 50,000 participate in open-source projects. "The goal is to bring what works from open source into this other 99 percent of the programming community," he said.

Collab.Net, founded last year, has about two dozen clients, including Sun Microsystems, Oracle and Hewlett-Packard. Some of its customers are experimenting with distributing source code freely. But others are proceeding more cautiously, perhaps sharing some of their proprietary code with business partners and customers as a way to improve the quality and speed of its software development projects.

"To me," said Bill Portelli, president of Collab.Net, "this is not about software being free. It's about the open-source practices and principles -- a methodology for fast, effective collaboration."

Collab.Net charges fees for consulting, education and coordinating software projects. Indeed, the business model for open-source development is based on the premise that software is a service and that the companies seeking to profit from it are service suppliers.

The commercial software business, open-source advocates say, is locked in an industrial-era "factory model" of shipping programs out the door as "finished goods." Instead, such advocates say, software should be seen as more like a living organism that is best fed and cared for in the open-source environment. Even Microsoft, they note, has said recently that its software effort will evolve into a service business.

The Model 'Lone Craftsman' Vs. Collaborators

So far open-source development has been more of an Internet-age breakthrough in engineering management than a progenitor of new technologies.

The two marketplace triumphs of open source, after all, are derivative rather than truly innovative. Linux is a version of the Unix operating system, and the Apache Web server was derived from software developed at the Illinois supercomputing center.

For this reason, some experts say the promise of open source is being overstated. William N. Joy, a founder and chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, created and distributed an open-source version of Unix two decades ago at the University of California at Berkeley. The Internet, he now says, has changed the context of things, making collaboration easier. But real innovation, he says, remains the work of a few.

"The truth is, great software comes from great programmers, not from a large number of people slaving away," Mr. Joy said. "Open source can be useful. It can speed things up. But it's not new, and it's not holy water."

Open-source enthusiasts reply that Mr. Joy is correct when it comes to the conceptual insight needed to forge a new direction in software. Truly creative insights, they concede, will remain the bailiwick of the "lone craftsman" programmer. But they hurry to add that breakthrough innovation, while important, is only a small part of the software economy. More than 75 percent of the time and cost of a software project is typically consumed by what the open-source approach is meant to do best: debugging, maintaining and tweaking the code.

Such work may seem mundane, but it represents a huge problem-solving challenge that determines the speed of development as well as the reliability of software.

So when Linus Torvalds released an experimental version of Unix onto the Internet as a student at the University of Helsinki in 1991, it may not have been breakthrough software. As the Web took off, though, he soon found himself the steward of a developing operating system project, dubbed Linux, spurred by the voluntary contributions of programmers around the world. In the book "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," Eric S. Raymond, an open-source evangelist, observed that Mr. Torvalds was "the first person who learned how to play by the new rules that pervasive Internet access made possible."

The Precedent Learning Lessons From Netscape

The new rules can be disorienting. Netscape Communications learned some hard lessons after it opened the source code on its Internet browsing software in early 1998. By then, Netscape, following Microsoft's lead, had been forced to give its browser away. But browser market share was still important to Netscape because its software server sales and service contracts depended on the popularity of its technology.

By making its browser an open-source project, Netscape hoped to enlist the widespread support among open-source programmers eager to help the company in its battle against Microsoft. The open-source project was called mozilla.org -- a playful combination of Mosaic, the original browser, and Godzilla. But the effort drew only limited support.

Developers typically join open-source projects for the challenge of solving interesting software problems and the resulting recognition of their peers. That works best when a software program is designed as many pieces, or modules, so "there is a lot of frontier to homestead," in open-source parlance.

But Netscape's browser was a big batch of programming code that was not designed in modules. "That made it hard for even strong hackers to come in, stake a claim and do interesting work," said Brendan Eich, a leading programmer and one of the six founders of mozilla.

Corporate attitudes slowed things down as well. At first, for example, the Netscape programmers were reluctant to post their comments in the online area accessible to outsiders, preferring to post them instead on in-house lists for Netscape engineers. "There was a whole mindset that had to change," Mr. Eich observed.

The mozilla open-source project was weakened further by staff defections after Netscape agreed to be acquired by America Online in November 1998.

Yet the project was also overhauled in the fall of 1998 in ways that laid the groundwork for a turnaround. The mozilla leaders adopted a modular code base called Gecko -- named after a small, fast lizard -- for rendering Web pages.

Gradually, more outside developers joined the open-source browser effort. Mr. Eich, the lone founding member of mozilla still with Netscape, rattles off the names of several outside programmers who have made significant contributions. Bugs are fixed quickly. "More eyes looking at the code really helps," he said.

Earlier this year, America Online released a preview version of its next-generation browser, Netscape 6.0, long delayed but praised in the trade press for its streamlined design and novel features.

By now, Microsoft seems to be entrenched as the leader in browsers for personal computers. Still, the Netscape browser is at least a counterweight to Microsoft on the desktop. Beyond that, Netscape 6.0 is designed for post-PC computing -- to run easily on everything from cell phones to hand-held Internet appliances.

"We've rounded the corner at mozilla," Mr. Eich said.

The mozilla effort is also being watched as a model for licensing -- a crucial issue for open source. There are many kinds of open-source licenses, but they all require contributors who modify an open-source program to make those improvements available to all members of the project. The most restrictive licenses require any code that touches an open-source program to be made available freely. "To some companies, that is a terrifying thought," said Lawrence Rosen, executive director of the Open Source Initiative, an education and advocacy group.

The mozilla license is an effort to let open source and proprietary software coexist peacefully. Its license applies to each of the software files -- building blocks of code -- in the open-source browser. If someone modifies one of those files, the improvement must be given back to the project as open-source code. But if a company mingles some of its own proprietary software files with the browser, those separate files can remain its private property.

That kind of accommodation, industry analysts say, is a step toward making open source acceptable to corporate America. "Open source can't go mainstream unless it finds ways to work with companies that have very different business models and believe that intellectual property can be owned," said James F. Moore, president of Geopartners Research, a consulting firm. "That's a big challenge."

-------- MILITARY (by country)

-------- argentina

Up Against Argentina's Stonewall

Washington Post
Monday, August 28, 2000 ; A19
By Noga Tarnopolsky
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34269-2000Aug27.html

In our overinformed age, there is probably no knowledge more valuable than that relating to the unknown, unobserved and unexplained death of a human being. Families that have lost a relative to an unknown fate live parched lives, desperate for any scrap of data that might ease their misery.

In Argentina, some 30,000 people "disappeared" at the hands of government forces between 1976-1983, so it is not surprising that Madeleine Albright made headlines in Argentina last week when she promised human rights groups she would "undertake the declassification of archives relating to the repression of the 1970s and to Operation Condor." Operation Condor was an agreement among the military dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay on the exchange--in fact, illegal expatriation--of detainees.

I have yet to find the word for "closure" in Spanish. In fact, in the Latin America I know, the very concept seems alien. In Argentina, no one except the generals really knows what happened. Not one of the surviving relatives of the tortured "desaparecidos"--the disappeared--knows how, where or why their relatives died.

In 1983, as the military government was falling, Gen. Cristino Nicolaides, then the army's chief of staff, issued an order to burn all documents. Absent firsthand testimony of the bonfires, it is unclear to what extent this order was obeyed. Nevertheless, for 17 years, Argentina's democratic governments have refused to conduct a serious search for documents relating to the dictatorship or to the disappeared by claiming that Gen. Nicolaides's order had been carried out, and that in consequence there is nothing worth looking for.

Inconveniently, documents pop up all the time. When papers relating to the desaparecidos appear, say, in a police station in the northern city of Rosario, as happened a few months ago, the press reports on the find, and the government does nothing.

In April a dusty warehouse in Buenos Aires revealed, among other things, personal letters and identification belonging to Argentine citizens who remain among the disappeared. The warehouse is part of a bank that is operated by Argentina's Interior Ministry. The former minister of interior, Carlos Corach, and his son, Hernan, who ran the bank, claimed total ignorance about the material.

And so it goes. For whatever reason, the powers that be in Argentina are disinclined to investigate what documents can still be found. Last March Gen. Martin Balza, the recently retired chief of staff of Argentina's army, announced that he believes documents relating to the disappeared still exist, and he implied they are in the hands of the army or the navy. Did the government immediately went into overdrive looking for this stuff? Did the justice minister called for immediate action?

No. None of that.

For more than 20 years, thousands of Argentines have tried to reach some sort of closure, by and large in vain. Argentina has no Freedom of Information Act and no other legal method whereby families can try to find out what, in fact, happened to their relatives.

Emilio Mignone, an attorney who died last year, filed brief after brief trying to find out who had killed his 24-year-old daughter, Monica, a social worker, and why. His surviving daughter, Isabel Mignone del Carril, who lives in Washington, tells me she just filed another request for information. I asked her why, knowing her sister is dead, she keeps her father's excruciating search going.

"I just need to know how Monica died, the date she died, what they did to her," she says quietly.

"I want to know how they killed her. We guess they threw her into the river, but I want to know."

Thousands of people are in Mignone del Carril's shoes.

Next year will mark 25 years since the military junta took power in Argentina. As mandated by law, the United States will begin to declassify all information dating back to 1976, including documents relating to that coup.

That the declassification will take place with or without Albright's word takes much of the punch out of her promise. Even worse is what she neglected to promise, or even to mention--for example, that information related to these massacres is still being concealed in Argentina. In letters to Albright and to the president of Argentina, Sen. Ted Kennedy has spearheaded an effort to declassify these Argentine documents, but his inquiries have gone unanswered.

Albright should use her influence on the government in Buenos Aires to declassify and make public whatever information it has, however uncomfortable it may be. Moreover, the government of the United States can provide succor to thousands of families by offering Argentina such practical assistance as help in enacting its own version of the Freedom of Information Act.

The writer is a journalist who is a working on a book about the "disappeared" members of her family.

-------- arms sales

From "Rogues" to Rivals?

Hoover Institution
August 28-September 4, 2000
by Charles Hill
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/hill.html
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/pubaffairs/we/current/hill_0800.html

Charles Hill is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.

The State Department's announcement about no more "rogue states" is a policy shift worth pondering. Recently the United States has given dictatorships one break after another: paying one not to export missile technology; dropping our leverage over another's human rights abuses; providing permanent normal trade relations; easing sanctions; pulling back from inspections; providing "respect" for those once reviled; even apologizing for America's past mistakes.

The cold war's central concept was containment, contested dramatically by the division of four countries: Germany, China, Korea, and Vietnam (along with Cuba, and the Florida Strait between the Cuban capitals of Havana and Miami). The collapse of communism knocked out only one: East Germany. The others survived-as did communism's clients Iraq, Syria, and Libya-and continue to inflict misery on masses of people. With Iran's theocracy they are forming an international proliferation league for weapons of mass destruction.

There are reasons to go easy on these regimes. There is little domestic support for a hard-line stance and lots of international displeasure with sanctions. There is a sense that ex-rogues pose no threat, harming their own people more than others. There is fear that unless we prop them up they might lash out or just disintegrate, burdening South Korea, for example, as West Germany was burdened ten years ago; better to help them make a "soft landing." Above all is the belief that globalization will make them prosperous, which in turn will make them democratic. So we needn't worry; history will do our work for us.

These regimes are aware of this "American theory" and determined to prove it false by acquiring economic strength while staying politically closed. With China as exemplar they can envision an alternative to America's model in the form of national socialism, that is, fascism. Highly nationalistic, glorifying the state and "the people," political power is concentrated in an elite always ready to use the army and police. Vast social programs enclose every aspect of life. The economy is designed to take full advantage of the global market to strengthen the state, and private economic activity is encouraged this far and no farther. "Market socialism" rules, and democracy is regarded as a menace to the strength of the nation. Russia shows signs of leaning this way.

American trade and investment, pressures to build structures of law, civil society, and free expression, can have an effect. Most of all the United States needs to see these regimes and their evolving coalition for what they are and to hold them to account. Dinosaurs they may be, but they have fended off extinction and may have perceived a new way to thrive.

-------- australia

Australia to limit U.N. visits Rights panel critical of aborigines' status

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Alan Thornhill -
Associated Press
Tuesday, August 29, 2000
http://www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/epaper/editions/tuesday/news_93ba8fc515c562aa00c3.html

Canberra, Australia --- Stung by criticism over its treatment of aborigines, the Australian government said today it will restrict visits by U.N. human rights teams, calling for an overhaul of the U.N. committee system.

After a review of Australia's involvement with U.N. committees, the Cabinet announced it would scale down its contact with the global body. Australia has been a member of the United Nations since it was formed in 1945.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said Australia will no longer allow U.N. committees to visit, nor will it meet requests for information unless there was a ''compelling reason'' to do so.

Earlier this year, the U.N. Human Rights Committee found mandatory sentencing laws in two Australian jurisdictions discriminated against aborigines, and it criticized the government for failing to overrule them.

Australia's original inhabitants, aborigines are a minority of 386,000 mostly impoverished people in a population of 19 million. After 212 years of white settlement, aborigines are the least-employed, least-educated, least-healthy and most-jailed segment of Australian society.

U.N. committees also criticized the government's policy of holding illegal immigrants in detention camps while their refugee applications are determined, and for allowing uranium mining in a World-Heritage-listed park. Australia's opposition Labor party criticized the government's move.

-------- britain

Sierra Leone in Talks to Free British troops

New York Times
August 28, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/world/leone-hostages-rts.html

FREETOWN, Aug 28 - Sierra Leone's government will continue discussions on Monday with renegade soldiers who have made demands for the release of 11 British troops held hostage since Friday.

The so-called West Side Boys want food, medicine and the release of one of their leaders from prison in return for freeing the Britons and one Sierra Leonean soldier who was captured with them.

"The government is appealing for the immediate release of these hostages with no preconditions," one official said.

British and United Nations personnel were also involved in the negotiations, government officials said, adding they were hopeful the men would be released within a few days.

Military sources said an intensive search for the men was also underway by British, Sierra Leone and U.N. troops.

British Armed Forces Minister John Spellar confirmed that contact had been made with a leader of the West Side Boys.

"We're very pleased that he has been able to report that the 11 of our forces and also the liaison officer from the Sierra Leone army are being well treated and also being fed," Spellar told Sky television.

The West Side Boys are soldiers from the former Sierra Leone army who claim allegiance to the military junta that ruled the country from a 1997 coup until being ousted in early 1998.

Former Junta Leader Calls for Release of Hostages

Former junta leader Johnny Paul Koroma called on Sunday for the release of the 12 men.

In a letter to the fighters, Koroma said: "The continuing holding of people coming to Sierra Leone to assist in the peace process does not augur well. I therefore ask you that, the earlier the better, you free the British soldiers."

Koroma told Reuters he was not only asking them to free the captives "but also demanding that (they) get out from the bush and disarm to the United Nations peacekeepers to join the peace process."

The fighters have disregarded earlier appeals from Koroma to surrender.

Radio contact with the British soldiers was lost at about 1545 GMT on Friday when they were in the Masiaka-Forodugu area about 100 km (60 miles) east of Freetown.

About 400 British troops are in Sierra Leone training a new army and the abducted soldiers are part of training mission.

British soldiers intervened in May when rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) took hundreds of U.N. peacekeepers hostage and a civil war peace agreement fell apart.

The U.N. hostages were later released and Britain withdrew most of its forces, except for the training detachment.

The West Side Boys at first fought alongside government forces in May against their former allies in the RUF but they took to the hills in the area where the Britons were abducted when the makeshift alliance unravelled.

British officials would not comment on a report in Britain's News of the World tabloid on Sunday that a 12-strong squad from the Special Air Service (SAS) had been sent to rescue the soldiers.

-------- chem and bio weapons

Belgian denies paying Nato bribe in Basson trial

Foreign Affairs News Source: Sunday Times
by Miss Antiwar
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za%2Fhome%2Fnews03.asp
08/28/00
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a39a9a5f654f9.htm

A former business partner of chemical warfare expert Dr Wouter Basson on Friday denied that he paid bribe money to North Atlantic Treaty Organisation officials for chemical and biological warfare secrets.

The money was allegedly paid on behalf of Basson, who headed the apartheid government's initiatives to set up chemical and biological warfare capabilities.

Jaap Cilliers, appearing for Basson, put it to Belgian businessman Bernard Zimmer that he paid cash to certain Nato officials in Belgium on behalf of Basson to obtain technology.

Zimmer admitted that he paid sums of cash to certain people in Belgium, but said he did not know if they were working for Nato, and that it did not matter because nothing was ever handed to him in exchange.

He conceded that he might on occasion have complained to Basson about the people he had to deal with on Basson's behalf, but denied that he facilitated funds and cash for the SA Defence Force and the Civil Co-Operation Bureau in Europe.

Zimmer also denied ever asking Basson to sign deliberately false documents regarding certain transactions to provide himself with a cover story.

"I don't believe your extraordinary, funny, strange stories. I don't believe these James Bond type stories.

"I regarded Basson as a businessman who had funds and different interests in America, Switzerland and some on the continent. The money was used for normal, proper business transactions.

"I never devised a scheme to disguise the origin of funds (such as money from a drug deal with Croatia).

"It's simple. Basson wanted to set up holdings and assets somewhere outside South Africa," he said.

Although Zimmer knew that Basson was a member of the SADF, he insisted that he never knew about Basson's connections with the chemical and biological warfare programme, dubbed Project Coast.

He also did not regard Basson as "a rather wealthy soldier" because Basson had introduced himself as a heart specialist, and could make "a lot of money".

He never though it strange that Basson was able to provide him with millions of dollars at a time.

Basson has pleaded not guilty to 61 charges ranging from fraud involving more than R80-million to murder, conspiracy and drug trafficking.

The state alleges that he used SADF funds to set up a vast private business empire spanning several continents. - Sapa

-------- china

China intensifies anti-Dalai Lama campaign
The Dalai Lama's influence inside Tibet is still strong

BBC News
Monday, 28 August, 2000, 11:04 GMT 12:04 UK
By Rupert Wingfield Hayes in Beijing
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/asia-pacific/newsid_899000/899578.stm

The Chinese Government appears to be intensifying its campaign against the influence of the Dalai Lama inside Tibet.

Chinese state media confirms that schools and universities in Tibet have been told to step up their propaganda campaign against what it calls the 'infiltration' by the Dalai Lama clique.

Tibetan exile groups say the campaign goes much further and has led to the expulsion of monks from monasteries, house to house searches and threats against individuals suspected of supporting the exiled Tibetan leader.

The groups say the new campaign against the Dalai Lama has been going on for several months.

They say it has included the expulsion of 30 monks from one of Tibetan Buddhism's oldest temples, and house to house searches for religious objects and photographs of the exiled Tibetan leader.

They say the primary target of the campaign has been government workers and communist party members, who have reverted to practising Buddhism.

They say some families have also been ordered to withdraw their children from Buddhist schools in India, or risk losing their jobs.

Schools campaign

None of the accusations in the reports have been confirmed by the Chinese government.

But there are other indications that an intensified campaign is under way.

Last week communist party officials in Lhasa announced a major campaign in Tibet's schools and universities.

The main focus, they said, would be to oppose the influence of the Dalai Lama.

The campaign was described as part of an intense and complex struggle.

Exile groups say the campaign comes in response to the defection of the Karmapa Lama, the third highest figure in Tibetan Buddhism.

The Chinese government had been grooming the fifteen year old Lama to become the pro-Beijing leader of Tibetan Buddhism and to lend legitimacy to Chinese rule over Tibet.

Late last year the Karmapa Lama suddenly disappeared from Tibet turning up a month later in India and leaving Beijing's Tibet policy in tatters.

---

China Seizure Halts Delivery of U.S. Book

New York Times
August 26, 2000
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
http://www.nytimes.com/library/financial/082800china-book.html

Thousands of copies of a new book by a former official White House photographer were confiscated by Chinese customs officials as the books were being prepared for shipment from a bindery in southern China, effectively blocking its release in the United States.

The publisher and printer said the book, "The Clinton Years," was seized because among its 227 black-and-white photographs was a picture of President Clinton clasping hands and chatting at the White House with the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. The Chinese government opposes the Dalai Lama, who has lived in exile since China's invasion of Tibet in 1959, because he remains a symbol of cultural and political separatism to his Tibetan followers.

The decision to block the book's shipment startled publishers and printers in the United States who have come to rely on Hong Kong and southern China as a center for making illustrated books.

The seizure also stands in contrast to the image that the Chinese government is striving to present to the American public, as the Senate prepares to take up a bill this fall to normalize trade relations with China. In an effort to smooth the legislation's passage, China's State Council Information Office and its Ministry of Culture are spending $7 million on an elaborate exhibition of Chinese culture that is touring cities across the United States.

"This is a very stupid time to do this," said Patricia Schroeder, president of the American Association of Publishers and a former member of Congress. "To exercise political censorship, dealing with freedom of religion, over a book about the president of the United States -- that is just not very wise right now."

A White House spokeswoman declined to comment.

The printing was arranged by Palace Press International, an American company in San Francisco, Calif., which acts as a broker between publishers and printing companies in Asia. Gordon Goff, the director of Palace Press, which hires printers in China for about 500 titles each year on behalf of about 300 publishers, said he was stunned when he learned of the book's seizure last week.

The book is an album of photographs taken by Robert McNeely while he was Mr. Clinton's official photographer from 1992 to 1998. President and Mrs. Clinton approved the use of the photographs, but they have no financial stake in the book.

The publisher is Callaway Editions in New York. The first batch of 8,000 copies of the book had already been bound and shipped to the United States at the beginning of August. But about three weeks ago the Chinese officials seized the next 16,000 copies, which had been printed in Hong Kong and sent to Schenzen for binding.

Mr. Goff said that about two weeks ago Chinese officials also impounded the entire 10,000-copy first printing of another book, "Celestial Gallery," a collection of colorful Tibetan Buddhist art which Palace Press was also handling for Callaway Editions. Mr. Goff said Palace Press was appealing to officials in Beijing, in hopes of having the books released.

Printers and publishers including Mr. Goff, the printing giant R. R. Donnelley & Sons, the art book publisher Harry N. Abrams, and others said that they had not previously heard of Chinese customs officials blocking shipment of books for religious or political reasons. Last year, for example, Palace Press successfully shipped from China 10,000 copies of "The Dalai Lama," a daily meditation and prayer guide published by a small American publisher.

Zhang Yuanyuan, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said after consulting with Chinese cultural officials who are visiting the United States, that China maintained a consistent ban on the production of printed material deemed to be politically sensitive, like depictions of the Dalai Lama, even in books intended for export.

"It is the consistent policy of the government to actually control the political content of printed materials," Mr. Zhang said. "Such books were never allowed to be printed on Chinese soil, and, if in the past they were not intercepted at the border, it was just a coincidence."

Mr. McNeely took the photograph that has offended the Chinese on April 28, 1994, as the Dalai Lama held Mr. Clinton's hand during a meeting at the White House. An introduction by the historian Douglas Brinkley notes that Mr. Clinton met with the Dalai Lama in the vice president's office that day instead of the Oval Office out of deference to the Chinese government.

In another picture, the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin, signed a gift book for President Clinton, who looked on without enthusiasm. The book was a history of Tibet. The Chinese president had just told President Clinton "that when he finished reading it he would understand why Tibet is and always has been a part of China," Mr. McNeely recalled.

The confiscation of "The Clinton Years" and "Celestial Gallery" comes at a crucial time for Callaway Editions. Until recently, Callaway had been a book packager -- conceiving ideas for illustrated books, hiring artists and writers and selling the finished products to other publishers.

But for this fall, Callaway is publishing its own books for the first time. Mr. McNeely's photographic study of the Clinton administration, planned for release in September, was to be Callaway's most heavily promoted book of the season. But the delay of shipment by Chinese officials could push the release past the fall season and even until after Mr. Clinton is out of office.

"We're in a difficult position right now," said Nicholas Callaway, the company's founder. Still, he noted, the Chinese censorship may have backfired. "What the officials don't realize is they are going to immortalize these books," he said.

Because making illustrated books is complicated and expensive, American book publishers have long sent much of their illustrated book production overseas, where labor is cheaper. Printers in Hong Kong and southern China, in particular, have earned a reputation for high-quality production and low-cost labor.

Manufacturing an oversized book like "Celestial Gallery," for example, which entails polychromatic images and a hand binding, costs about $20 a copy to produce in China, compared with about $50 a copy in the United States.

Told of the books' seizure, critics of freer trade with China were quick to note the irony of a book about a staunch free-trader like President Clinton running afoul of China's censors. "The concept of free trade is compromised when you are dealing with a government that is unwilling to respect individual rights like freedom of expression," said Mickey Spiegel, a research consultant with the nonprofit organization Human Rights Watch. "In this case, free trade puts the Chinese government in the position of being able to censor what Americans read."

---

Book seized over picture of Dalai Lama

USA Today
08/28/00- Updated 04:38 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#towe

BEIJING - Chinese customs agents have seized 16,000 copies of a book of photographs of President Clinton because one picture showed him holding hands with the Dalai Lama, a company involved in the publishing said Monday. The book, ''The Clinton Years,'' has more than 200 images, among them the one with the Dalai Lama and Clinton at the White House on April 28, 1994. It is an extreme example of China's obsession with denying publicity to the exiled Tibetan leader, vilified for decades by the Chinese government and the target a four-year-old campaign to break his influence among Tibet's fervently Buddhist people.

-------- colombia

Colombia's neighbors worry about spillover from U.S.-backed offensive

Boston Globe
08/28/00
By Andrew Selsky,
Associated Press,
8/28/2000
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/241/world/Colombia_s_neighbors_worry_aboP.shtml

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) On the eve of President Clinton's visit to Colombia, neighboring countries are growing increasingly worried about a planned U.S.-backed drug war and some are even preparing for a possible spillover by sending troops to the borders.

The offensive to be carried out by Colombian soldiers trained by Green Berets and other U.S. special forces is expected to displace thousands of people.

The rebels, who earn millions of dollars from a drug-protection racket, have vowed to fight the Colombian troops, who are to be deployed on U.S.-donated combat helicopters. Eighty-three U.S. troops are currently training soldiers from a new 1,000-member anti-narcotics battalion at a military base in southern Colombia. A total of 3,000 Colombian soldiers are to be deployed in the offensive, expected to begin next year.

Ecuador, which lies to the south of Colombia and is within sight of Colombian cocaine-producing plantations, has doubled its border forces to 4,000 troops, the Ecuadorean Defense Ministry said.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees has sent delegates to the Ecuador border region and is considering building a camp to hold some 5,000 Colombian refugees.

On Colombia's northwestern frontier with Panama, fighting between rebels and government troops has crossed the untamed border region in recent years, and thousands of Colombian refugees have crossed into Panama.

Panamanian officials fear the situation will only get worse when the anti-drug war heats up.

''Although we are not in the position to say whether or not this plan should be carried out, I personally believe it would be better if it was not,'' Panamanian Interior Minister Winston Spadafora said Thursday.

Spadafora said he has requested aid from the United Nations to prepare for spillover.

On Colombia's eastern border, Brazil has reportedly begun beefing up security along its 960-mile frontier with Colombia, amid fears the anti-drug offensive could send Colombian guerrillas fleeing into Brazil or prompt coca-growers to move into its vast Amazon jungle.

Brazil is also worried that any defoliants used to combat Colombian drug production could damage its rain forest, a Brazilian Foreign Ministry official said Thursday in Sao Paulo.

Meanwhile, relations between Colombia and Venezuela, which borders northeastern Colombia, have hit a sour note over the planned anti-drug offensive and Colombian officials' accusations that the Venezuelan army has been funneling weapons to Colombian rebels allegations the Venezuelans deny.

After Venezuela's Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel said in a radio interview last week that violence in Colombia threatened neighboring countries, Colombian Foreign Minister Guillermo Fernandez shot back that Rangel was showing ''a lack of respect for Colombia.''

Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori also warned last week the anti-drug offensive could threaten regional stability.

Tensions and fears persist despite efforts to quell them by both Colombian and U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Clinton's new envoy to Colombia, Anne Patterson.

Patterson has called the concerns ''a little exaggerated,'' but said Washington would do what it could to help remedy any problems.

Colombia has also sought to calm the fears, with Fernandez offering assurances in an interview Friday that the government plans major social programs in drug-producing areas to help people displaced by the fighting and to discourage them from fleeing into neighboring countries.

Demand is growing in Colombia for officials to cool the situation.

''The Colombian conflict is becoming more of a concern for the security of our five neighbors,'' the Bogota daily El Espectador noted in an editorial Saturday. ''It's not easy being the nucleus of a conflict, but if that is our luck, we must learn to manage the situation.''

Colombia's widening conflict is expected to be among the top agenda items at the South American Presidents Summit, to be held in Brasilia on Thursday, the day after Clinton's visit to Colombia. Clinton is not attending that summit.

On Monday, three leading human rights groups criticized the Clinton administration for aiding the Colombian military, saying President Andres Pastrana's government has failed to meet any of the human rights criteria set by Congress.

Clinton waived several of the conditions and released $1.3 billion in mostly anti-drug aid for Colombia last week. The conditions were aimed at overcoming military abuses and bringing human rights violators to justice.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) all assailed Clinton's decision.

----

Colombia Rebels Vow Oil Attacks Ahead of Clinton Visit

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
By Karl Penhaul
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/pl/colombia_usa_dc_4.html

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Just days ahead of President Clinton's visit to Colombia, Marxist ``petro-guerrillas'' have vowed to continue their biggest-ever offensive against one of the Andean nation's top oil fields and main pipelines in protest at ``U.S. intervention''.

In an undated communique, obtained by Reuters on Monday, the rebels appeared to link the sabotage to Clinton's Aug. 30 visit but also pledged to continue attacks after that trip.

``The National Liberation Army rejects outright Plan Colombia and will maintain its offensive before and after Aug. 30 against the Cano Limon pipeline in protest at U.S. intervention,'' the communique said, referring to U.S. aid to a $7.5 billion plan to combat drug trafficking and leftist guerrillas in Colombia.

State-run oil company Ecopetrol said Monday that production at the country's second largest oil field, run by U.S. multinational Occidental Petroleum Corp (NYSE:OXY - news), remained paralyzed after three weeks.

The 490-mile (780 km) pipeline that pumps crude from the 105,000 barrel per day Cano Limon field in northeast Arauca province to the Caribbean coast port of Covenas also remained crippled after being blown apart by more than 20 rebel bombs since July 23, most recently on Saturday.

Oil is Colombia's top export earner, bringing in $2.28 billion revenues in the first half of this year and more than one-third of the total value of exports.

The oil industry, which produces some 710,000 bpd, is also one of the main magnets for foreign investment in this nation ravaged by three-decades of civil conflict.

A unit of the National Liberation Army (ELN), Colombia's second main rebel group, has claimed responsibility for the longest sustained offensive on the pipeline since it opened in the mid-1980s.

Bad For Oil Investment

``Plan Colombia'' is the name given by President Andres Pastrana to a U.S.-backed carrot-and-stick strategy designed to fight the booming drug trade and force the country's estimated 22,000 Marxist guerrillas to moderate their radical socialist demands at slow-moving peace talks.

Last month, Clinton signed off on a record $1.3 billion package of mostly military aid which forms the backbone of Plan Colombia, whose total cost is estimated at $7.5 billion over three years.

Pastrana launched peace negotiations with the larger, Soviet-inspired Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in January 1999 but has still not agreed terms for the start of talks with the Cuban-influenced ELN.

The Cano Limon-Covenas pipeline has been blown up at least 57 times this year, according to Ecopetrol. Last year, it was dynamited a record 76 times.

The current wave of attacks is, however, by far the most serious in the 15-year history of the pipeline and the field.

Three weeks ago, Occidental declared force majeure on production, a legal move allowing temporary suspension of contract obligations. The measure has only been declared five times since the field opened in 1985 and any previous force majeure declaration had lasted eight days at most.

``This is a very complex situation. It's a bad sign for investors. If this situation persists then oil companies will not invest in Colombia,'' Senator Hugo Serrano, a leading member of the Senate Energy Commission, told Reuters Monday.

According to government figures issued earlier this month, foreign oil companies pulled out more than $424 million investments from Colombia's oil industry in the first quarter this year.

Reserves Running Low

Ecopetrol chiefs, however, highlight the more than 20 association contracts signed with foreign companies in the year so far, compared with just one in the whole of last year, as evidence of an upturn in the oil industry's fortunes.

Almost all those contracts are for six-year exploration contracts followed by 22-year production contracts.

Colombia, which currently has around 2.3 billion barrels of proven reserves, is set to become a net oil importer by 2005 if no major new finds come on stream before then. Experts estimate Colombia may have some 37 billion barrels of potential oil reserves but much of that lies in the 50 percent of the country controlled by the FARC and ELN.

---

Clinton to Show Support for Colombian Democracy

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
By Steve Holland
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/pl/colombia_usa_dc_3.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Clinton makes a day-long visit to Colombia on Wednesday to show support for the people there in what the United States calls a ``life-or-death struggle'' against drug traffickers and Marxist rebels.

Clinton's trip comes as U.S. military advisers have begun training two special army battalions that will protect police missions to destroy drug plantations and labs in guerrilla-controlled areas of southern Colombia.

Clinton will hold formal talks with Colombian President Andres Pastrana and have lunch with him in the Caribbean coast resort of Cartagena during a trip in which he will take as much time flying to and from Colombia as he will spend on the ground.

The president will also inspect drug interdiction efforts in the Port of Cartagena and meet some members of the Colombian national police as well as talk to a number of widows of police officers who were killed in the line of duty.

Pastrana is to take him on a tour of a new justice building where low-income people can have greater access to the justice system -- Colombia's attempt to strengthen the rule of law.

A televised address by Clinton to the Colombian people is to air there on Tuesday night, hours before he arrives.

``Colombia's people are engaged in a life-or-death struggle to preserve their democracy,'' said White House National Security Adviser Sandy Berger.

He laid out the grim facts of life in the South American nation: 2,500 kidnappings in the past year, many cases of extortion and massacres by paramilitaries and insurgents, drug trafficking that funds an insurgent conflict and feeds crime, and an economy in recession with unemployment at 20 percent.

But one of the most important facts behind the United States' $1.3 billion aid package for Colombia over two years is that Colombia now supplies more illicit drugs to the United States than any other country.

According to the State Department, 90 percent of the cocaine in the U.S. market comes from Colombia as well as up to two-thirds of the heroin on the East coast.

``The United States has an interest not only in stopping the flow of narcotics from Colombia but also in ensuring the stability of one of the hemisphere's oldest and most accomplished democracies,'' said U.S. Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering.

Most of the $1.3 billion in aid is to back the military for a drive against drug traffickers and armed rebels protecting cocaine and heroin production in Colombia.

Critics of the plan to bolster the Colombian army say it could drag the United States into a Vietnam-like quagmire fighting well-armed Marxist guerrillas who control half the countryside and are financed by drug profits.

Colombia's neighbors fear the militarization of the drug war will push the fighting over their borders, along with waves of refugees and displacement of the drug trade itself.

``We believe in fact that there is quite wide understanding in the hemisphere of this effort,'' said Pickering. Meanwhile, he said, ``those who speak against it have not offered any alternative solutions.''

Clinton last week waived human rights conditions in order to begin releasing the U.S. assistance, a decision that troubled some Democratic politicians who had urged the Clinton administration to use the conditions as a way to pressure Colombia into improving its human rights record.

Human rights organizations complain that Colombian military officers who have committed serious abuses are routinely acquitted and dozens of prominent human rights cases go unsolved.

Pickering said Pastrana is well aware of U.S. concerns about human rights, and last week sent a letter committing his government to a key objective, that all military personnel credibly alleged to have committed gross violations of human rights be tried in civilian courts instead of military courts.

Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, and a bipartisan delegation including Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat, are to accompany Clinton.

---

Colombian Port Dresses Up for Clinton Visit

New York Times
August 28, 2000
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/americas/082800colombia-clinton.html

CARTAGENA, Colombia, Aug. 27 -- At 84, Antonia Sarmiento, nearly toothless and dressed in tattered rags, has seen a lot of tragedy in her life but never a miracle.

But last week Mayor Gina Benedetti de Vélez knocked at the door of her shabby clapboard shack to say the local government would rebuild her house for no charge. President Clinton will be visiting the House of Justice across the street, the mayor explained, and he should not have to see such misery in Cartagena.

"Bill Clinton is a saint brought to me from Heaven," said a smiling Mrs. Sarmiento, a widow of a police officer who lives, with a disabled son, on the charity of family members.

Watching workmen struggle to complete the front facade in time for Mr. Clinton's visit on Wednesday, she added, "I'd love to invite him inside for a bowl of sancocho" -- a stew of chicken, potatoes and plantains -- "but he would never visit a house like this."

Since local officials learned a month ago that President Clinton would be coming to this splendid Spanish colonial port of soaring church steeples and mounted cannons, they have rushed into a breathless urban renewal campaign perhaps not seen since Sir Francis Drake sacked the city in 1586. A thousand workmen are widening sidewalks, fixing cracked streets, whitewashing government buildings and planting palm trees.

"This is the most important event in Cartagena's history since President Bush came here in 1990," said Mayor Benedetti. "But this is even bigger."

Mr. Bush's visit here to a regional presidential anti-narcotics conference -- with the usual bevy of reporters and camera crews -- helped bring a 34 percent increase in tourists the next year, local officials say.

But the number of tourists has decreased because of the country's expanding war with Marxist guerrilla groups, from 865,379 tourists in Cartagena in 1994 to 535,103 last year. So people here are hoping that this visit will cause another surge in tourism, this city's most important industry.

Mayor Benedetti is lobbying to urge Mr. Clinton and his daughter, Chelsea, to ride through the old city in a horse-drawn carriage, Cartagena's answer to Venice's gondolas, to show off its quaint narrow streets shaded by rococo balconies draped by lush tropical flowers.

She also hopes to have a word with Mr. Clinton to press him to grant Cartagena an exception to the State Department travel advisory warning that Colombia is an exceptionally risky place for American tourists.

No detail has been left to chance to create the perfect pictures and sound bites.

About 150 homeless children have been removed from the streets to "recreational centers" on the outskirts of the city, and 1,500 kiosk owners have been told to haul their rickety wares off the presidential route on Tuesday and Wednesday.

One thoroughfare along the beach, which taxi drivers have taken to renaming Avenida Clinton, has been closed for a complete repaving.

"It's like a girl fixing up her house for her boyfriend's first visit," said El Tiempo, Bogotá's leading newspaper, "and asking that her parents and brothers behave themselves to make the best impression."

The round-the-clock grooming effort will cost the city $1 million -- a handsome sum for a city with an annual budget of $160 million -- to fix up the route Mr. Clinton will take during his eight-hour visit.

And that does not count the contributions being made by the local telephone, electric and water companies to fix up damaged pipes, street holes and faulty wiring, or the efforts of store owners, who are washing down everything from their curtains to welcome mats.

The Clinton visit has produced an almost giddy response from Cartagena residents, who never seem to tire of telling visitors that they live in an oasis far from the kidnappings and massacres that characterize the rest of the country.

Actually, Cartagena is well below other Colombian cities in terms of crime and violence, and there have not been any serious incidents here since two bombings in 1989, one by the Medellín drug cartel and one by a Marxist guerrilla group.

"President Clinton's visit will show the world that not all Colombians are bad," said Dimas Ortiz Rondońo, 58, a lottery ticket seller who wears rosary beads around his neck and works beside the old slave market in the Plaza de los Coches, which Mr. Clinton is scheduled to visit. "And then the tourists will flock back to us."

As Víctor Prieto Castro, 53, a reporter for the local Victoria AM radio station, looked for foreign correspondents to interview, he was excited about covering the biggest story to come his way in some time.

"You can't buy this kind of publicity," he said. "We couldn't be happier. This trip is going to give Colombia a whole new image."

Not all Cartagena residents are so certain a that one-day visit by Mr. Clinton will make a lasting difference for a country that has suffered four decades of conflict, or for a Caribbean tourist destination that most cruise ship companies would just as soon pass to keep their passengers calm. Some even express concern that Mr. Clinton's presence could attract a terrorist attack, which could ruin the city's reputation forever.

Leonor Sánchez, 40, a guide at the 17th-century Palace of the Inquisition, said she was happy that Mr. Clinton is scheduled to visit the Plaza de Bolívar outside the palace. But she said she was not sure that it was a good idea for Mr. Clinton to visit the building's torture chamber or the room upstairs where, she contends, Dominican priests used to indulge in wild orgies during their breaks from punishing Jews, homosexuals and witches.

"This is the dark side of Colombia's history, when power was terribly abused," said Ms. Sánchez, a jolly woman with an encyclopedic knowledge of the old ways of stretching and mutilating bodies. "He could get the bad impression that we have always been a violent country."

---

Preparing for the boss

Washington Times
August 28, 2000
Embassy Row James Morrison
News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.

Anne Patterson, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, is busy attending to the last details for President Clinton's first visit to the war-torn South American country on Wednesday.

Mrs. Patterson is under double pressure as she prepares for the boss and finds her way around the U.S. Embassy in the capital, Bogota.

The newly arrived ambassador presented her diplomatic credentials to Colombian President Andres Pastrana only last week.

After the meeting at the presidential palace, Mrs. Patterson told reporters that she will work for the speedy delivery of $1.3 billion in U.S. aid for Plan Colombia, Mr. Pastrana's strategy to fight the country's vast cocaine and heroin trade and deal with Marxist guerrillas who profit from the drug smuggling.

She also tried to ease concerns of the leaders of neighboring countries who fear Plan Colombia will only exacerbate the civil war. "I believe that fears of the effect [of the U.S. aid] on neighboring countries has been exaggerated a bit, but we are conscious of the fears of Colombia's neighbors and will do everything we can to help them," she said.

Mrs. Patterson is a former ambassador to El Salvador. She was deputy assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs from 1993 to 1996. She replaced Ambassador Curtis Kamman, who retired earlier this month.

Diplomatic traffic

Tomorrow

• Sen. Enrique Gomez Hurtado of Colombia, who addresses invited guests at the Heritage Foundation about U.S.-Colombian relations and President Clinton's upcoming visit to Colombia.

To contact James Morrison, call 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail morris@twtmail.com

-------- drug war

Drug trafficker beheaded

USA Today
08/28/00- Updated 04:38 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#towe

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - A Nigerian man convicted of smuggling cocaine and heroin in Saudi Arabia was beheaded Monday, according to the Interior Ministry. Issa Mohammed Adam was executed in the western city of Jiddah for smuggling undisclosed quantities of drugs. Monday's execution brings the number close to 90 in the country this year. Human rights organizations have criticized the executions, saying Saudi Arabia often fails to give the accused fair trials.

---

USA Today
08/28/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Iowa

Des Moines - The number of inmates in prison for drug crimes has more than doubled in the past five years, reflecting Iowa's crackdown on illegal drugs, according to a study. The state report said 1,611 inmates were classified as drug offenders, up 108% from 773 inmates in 1995.

-------- iran

Iranian vigilantes clash with reformists

USA Today
08/28/00- Updated 04:38 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#towe

TEHRAN, Iran - Hard-line vigilantes clashed with reformist students in western Iran, leaving a policeman dead, Iran's state-run radio said Monday. The clashes, which began Thursday and reached a climax Sunday, injured 25 to 30 students in the city of Khorramabad, about 300 miles southwest of Tehran, a student leader said. The confrontations put an end to a democracy seminar - slated to end Wednesday after a week - when local authorities told student organizers Sunday they could no longer guarantee security for the sessions.

-------- iraq

Spending Iraq's Money

New York Times
August, 28 2000

To the Editor:

You report (news article, Aug. 23) that the Clinton administration is lobbying for the state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corporation to collect $15.9 billion from Iraq as compensation for oil and gas sales lost during the Persian Gulf war. One wonders how the United Nations compensation commission arrived at this figure, which exceeds Kuwait's total export revenues last year.

The $15.9 billion in question is equivalent to roughly $700 for each citizen of Iraq, where infant mortality has reached fourth-world levels because of the collapse of the country's public-health infrastructure. By way of comparison, Iraq's education budget last year amounted to roughly $10 per citizen. Russia's "political" objections to the current sanctions regime might be better described as humanitarian ones. Washington's support for the Kuwaiti claim is scandalous.

JEFF RIGSBY San Francisco, Aug. 23, 2000

-------- japan

Govt to introduce midair refueling aircraft for Air SDF

Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 16:28:32 +0900
From: JPS <jpspress@twics.com> Subject: JPS2000828-2

TOKYO AUG 28 JPS -- In the budget request for FY 2001, the Defense Agency proposes purchasing a 23.8 billion yen midair refueling aircraft for the Air Self-Defense Force. The Liberal Democratic Party's joint panel related to defense issues on August 25 endorsed it.

Akahata on August 27 said that the introduction of the aircraft would terrify Asian countries because it would mean Japan becoming an even greater military power, running counter to the recent growing movement in Asia towards solving disputes through peaceful means.

The agency has once raised this demand to implement the current "mid-term defense buildup plan" (1996-2000), but because of criticism from China and other neighboring countries, proposed it to be achieved within the next five-year plan (2001-2005).

In the 1970s, the government declared in the Diet that it would not seek to possess midair refueling aircraft. (Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, on April 10, 1973 in the House of Councilors Budget Committee)

Both the ASDF's F-15 anti-aircraft fighters and F-4 fighters, which will be deployed from next September with greater capability for ground attack than the F4's, are equipped with midair refueling devices. The DA plans to deploy 130 F-2 fighters in total.

The introduction of a midair refueling aircraft indicates that Japan will have a major air force capable of launching a full-fledged attack against the neighboring countries. This would infringe even on Japan's "exclusively defense-oriented policy." (end item)

----

Panel on new U.S. base in Okinawa avoids "15-year termination" issue

Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 16:11:00 +0900
From: JPS <jpspress@twics.com> Subject: JPS2000828-1

TOKYO AUG 28 JPS -- The central government and Okinawa's local governments met on August 25 in Tokyo to discuss details of the plan to construct a state-of-the-art U.S. Marine Corps base in Nago City.

The new base has been planned as the substitute for the U.S. Marine Crops Futenma Air Station in Ginowan City in Okinawa.

Both sides, including the Okinawa Prefecture governor and mayors of Nago City and two other municipalities, agreed that the issue of a 15-year time limit for the new U.S. base would not be discussed.

While arguing that the new base should be as small as possible with enough measures for safety and environmental protection, they also agreed that it should be designed to provide functions which U.S. Futenma Air Station had and functions as a civil airfield.

This indicates that the full-scale work that has just begun is aimed at maintaining an operational sortie base of U.S. Marine Corps unit in Okinawa, accompanying a function as a civil airport, said Akahata on August 26.

On imposing a 15-year term limit on the new U.S. base, the local side maintained that it should be discussed separately. But the central government declined to prepare another table.

Koshin Nakamoto, deputy secretary general of the Nago Council against U.S. On-Sea Heliport, criticized the Okinawan governor and mayors for "deceptively continuing to call for 'separate consultation' even though their assertion has been rejected."

Even a conservative Nago City assembly member supporting the new base plan says that it is quite impossible to strike a separate deal on the '15-year limit issue' and the 'basic plan' because everything concerns details of the agreement on the use of the new base.

In Nago, various new base plans have been published associated by major construction companies in Japan and the U.S., including a call for the reclamation of the sea at about 3 kilometers off the Henoko district of the city.

Sogi Kayo of the Association of Dugong said, "A military base for war is incompatible with local residents' peace and the environment."

"Ever since the Henoko district was named as the new base site for U.S. war operations, the residents have felt as if they were sentenced to death. There is no alternative but to stop the base plan," he said. (end item)

-------- korea

S. Korea Expected to Demand N.Korea Return Pows

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/wl/korea_north_talks_dc_1.html

SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea is expected to press North Korea to return Korean War prisoners and others allegedly abducted by the North over a half-century of Cold War hostility at ministerial-level talks starting on Tuesday.

The two Koreas, whose ties have warmed considerably following June's historic summit in Pyongyang, may discuss steps to reduce tension on the world's most militarized border at the Aug 29-31 talks in the North Korean capital, media reports said on Monday.

Five officials from Seoul, headed by South Korean Unification Minister Park Jae-kyu, will meet their North Korean counterparts, said Unification Ministry spokesman Kim Hyun-doo

``They are likely to discuss the reconnection of the inter-Korean railroad and the transfer of South Korean POWs in the meeting,'' he said.

Park said earlier this month he planned to raise the issue of returning South Korean war prisoners and abductees held in the North at the talks.

``But we're not sure how discussions over the issue will go,'' said ministry spokesman Kim.

The South Korean government has been criticized by the main opposition Grand National Party for not demanding the return of the South Koreans in exchange for repatriating long-term North Korean prisoners held in the South.

Seoul will return 63 North Korean spies, freed over the last several years, to Pyongyang on September 2.

Kim declined to confirm media reports that military issues will be among main agenda items for the talks.

The Joongang Ilbo newspaper, quoting a high-ranking government official, reported on Monday South Korea will propose a meeting between South Korean Defense Minister Cho Sung-tae and his North Korean counterpart Cho Myung-rok at the talks.

The newspaper said Seoul will propose regular meetings between the two ministers, the establishment of a military hotline and a joint panel on military affairs.

It said a meeting between the defense ministers could take place in September, if the North accepts the proposal.

``I can't confirm it and we have no official response to the reports,'' Kim said.

The two sides may also talk about holding more reunions of families separated before and during the traumatic events of the 1950-53 Korean War, Kim said.

Earlier this month, 100 elderly North Koreans and an equal number of South Koreans met in Seoul and Pyongyang with family members they had not seen for a half-century.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il mentioned to visiting South Korean media executives recently that more reunions could be held in September and October.

Park may talk about another round of reunions and setting up a permanent meeting point for divided families at this week's talks, Kim said.

``But the issue is more likely to be discussed at the next Red Cross meeting,'' he said.

South Korea on Sunday proposed to hold a meeting of the rival Korean Red Cross organizations at the U.N. truce village of Panmunjom on September 5. North Korea has yet to respond.

The reunions arranged by the two Red Crosses have been the highlight in a series of conciliatory gestures marking the rapprochement of the old foes.

But skeptics in Korea and abroad note little progress has been made on reducing the military threat on the peninsula, where a million soldiers face off in one of the last legacies of the Cold War.

At the first round of ministerial-level talks in Seoul in late July, the two sides agreed to reopen liaison offices at Panmunjom, the one point of contact along the four-km (2.5 mile) wide Demilitarized Zone that divides North and South Korea.

First used in 1992, but abandoned by the North in 1996, the liaison offices will provide an alternative to meeting under the auspices of the United Nations.

The two Koreas have also agreed to open road and railway links, with work expected to begin next month.

The railway would link the Korean peninsula to China and Siberia and ultimately to Europe, prompting South Korea's President Kim Dae-jung to dub it ``the iron silk road.''

The two Koreas are still technically at war because the 1950-53 Korean war ended in an armed truce, not a formal peace treaty.

-------- myanmar

Fourth night of stand-off as Burma blocks Aung San Suu Kyi's convoy

The Independent
28 August 2000
By Peter Popham in Delhi
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Asia_China/2000-08/burma280800.shtml

The Burmese democracy leader and Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was yesterday still locked in contention with the Burmese military authorities, and preparing to spend a fourth night with her supporters in two vehicles on the outskirts of Rangoon.

Ms Suu Kyi, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 after the ruling junta annulled the 1990 general election which the party she leads, the National League for Democracy (NLD) had won by a landslide, was prevented from travelling beyond the capital region on Thursday after setting out with about a dozen party colleagues with the intention of travelling south.

Ms Suu Kyi and her colleagues crossed the Yangon River by ferry and then were collected by a car and a pickup to make the onward journey. But before they had travelled more than a few minutes they were stopped by police, and penned in a narrow lane off the main road, hemmed in by two government trucks. The tyres of the two vehicles were also let down.

Ms Suu Kyi has been in conflict with Burma's military government ever since 1988 when a democratic uprising was ruthlessly suppressed with the loss of thousands of lives. Between 1989 and 1995 she was held under house arrest. Today she is free to visit her party's headquarters in central Rangoon, but whenever she tries to venture further the authorities find pretexts for preventing it.

In the summer of 1998 she tried four times to leave the capital, but each time was stopped. On the last occasion she stayed in her car for 13 days before returning home on her doctor's advice.

The authorities are working hard to put an acceptable spin on this latest confrontation with their most awkward citizen. "Daw Suu Kyi and her personal chauffeur, together with 14 travel companions, are still continuing their rest in Dala township today," the government said in a statement. "Until safety conditions improve, Daw Suu Kyi is visiting Dala township, a small but charming and scenic town..."

She was free, they said, to "continue staying by the roadside as long as the conditions remain safe" - implying that if they decided they had had enough and she must be taken home, they would say that conditions were no longer safe.

---

Asia Aung San Suu Kyi showdown enters fifth day, no resolution in sight

Yahoo News
Monday, August 28 12:47 PM SGT
http://sg.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/asia/article.html?s=singapore/headlines/000828/asia/afp/Aung_San_Suu_Kyi_showdown_enters_fifth_day__no_resolution_in_sight.html

YANGON, Aug 28 (AFP) - Aung San Suu Kyi's showdown with Myanmar's regime outside Yangon dragged on into a fifth day Monday, after her party vowed she would force the authorities to acknowledge her right to travel freely.

Aung San Suu Kyi and a dozen members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) have now spent four nights camped out in two vehicles in the township of Dallah, which lies on the other side of the Yangon River from the capital.

At the ferry pier in downtown Yangon where the group departed Thursday in defiance of a ban which confines the opposition leader to the capital, party members milled around her car which was still parked by the jetty.

Vendors were cleared from the area but commuters still made their way back and forth from Dallah.

The 55-year-old Nobel laureate and her party were waved down on the outskirts of Dallah as they attempted to travel on to Kawhmu for a meeting of the party's youthwing.

Aung San Suu Kyi refused the military's request to turn back, in her first attempt in two years to test the junta's restrictions on her movement around the country.

In August 1998 she spent 13 days in a tense stand-off on a bridge outside Yangon until illness and dehydration forced her to return home.

Her party vowed Sunday that the opposition leader would fight a "war of endurance" to force the regime to allow her to travel freely and to go about legitimate party business.

She would remain on the isolated road unless she was allowed to travel on or forced to return home, it said.

NLD central committee member U Nyunt Wai said the confrontation was aimed at pressuring the authorities to acknowledge the right to freedom of movement in Myanmar.

"Daw Aung San Suu Kyi is ready to endure all sorts of discomfort for as long as it takes," he told AFP.

"The purpose is ... to let everyone know, including the people of Burma, the military authorities, as well as the world, that we have the basic democratic right to travel freely in our own country."

Although she was released from house arrest in 1995, Aung San Suu Kyi's movements are closely monitored by the military regime which has been in control of Myanmar in various guises for nearly four decades.

The government has argued that travel in the area is dangerous and that the Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters were stopped for their own safety.

"The government encourages Daw Suu Kyi to return home and continue her political activities in a more secure environment in Yangon," it said in a statement Sunday.

"However, she and her companions remain free to continue staying at Dallah township and the government will also provide her with necessary assistance to enable her to carry out her political activities successfully there."

The international community has expressed its outrage over the stand-off, with the United States, European Union, Britain and France demanding the junta lift the blockade immediately.

They also reminded Myanmar's generals that they would be held accountable for the welfare of Aung San Suu Kyi and her supporters.

The NLD won a convincing victory in 1990 elections but the results have never been recognised by the military, which has carried out a campaign of intimidation against the opposition since the student uprisings of 1988.

---

Opposition Attacks Myanmar Rulers on Suu Kyi By Aung Hla Tun

Yahoo News
Monday August 28 8:53 AM ET updated 8:53 AM ET Aug 28
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/wl/myanmar_leadall_dc_13.html

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar's pro-democracy opposition accused the country's military rulers on Monday of violating human rights with travel restrictions on Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who is locked in a roadside stand-off near Yangon.

As Suu Kyi spent a fifth day in her car in the town of Dala, her National League for Democracy (NLD) sent a letter to the government demanding she be allowed to travel freely and saying the authorities were responsible if she came to any harm.

``The actions of the authorities amount to a violation of democracy and human rights,'' said the NLD, which won 1990 elections by a landslide but was never allowed to govern.

``The place where the NLD leaders are being held is unsuitable for people to stay overnight, and their health will be affected after some time. If this happens, those who stopped them and those who ordered them to do so will be entirely responsible.''

The 55-year-old Suu Kyi, her driver and 14 NLD members were halted by police in Dala on Thursday as they headed south of the capital in two vehicles and have been there ever since.

It was the first time Suu Kyi had tried to leave Yangon since another roadside confrontation in 1998 that ended after 13 days, when deteriorating health and dehydration forced her to return home in an ambulance.

Suu Kyi was under house arrest for six years until 1995 and her movements remain severely restricted.

Government Says Protecting Suu Kyi

The government says Suu Kyi was stopped for her own safety as ``separatist terrorist groups'' were in the area, and insisted it was doing everything to ensure her comfort. It has said she is free to stay in Dala but is encouraged to return home.

``Since this morning government officials have provided Daw Suu Kyi and her companions with some beach umbrellas and a new mobile bathroom to ensure her maximum comfort and well-being,'' the government said in a statement on Monday.

But the NLD said it would refuse medicines and treatment offered by the authorities. It said that if travel in the area was dangerous, the government had been lying when it said it had brought peace to the country.

``The authorities have to lift the restrictions as soon as possible,'' the NLD statement said.

Several countries have criticized the treatment of Suu Kyi, with the United States and European Union demanding that she be allowed to travel freely.

But the government says they had misunderstood the situation, and insisted Suu Kyi was being provided with ample supplies.

To support its assertion, it released six more photographs said to show Suu Kyi and her companions during their ``rest at ... Dala town, a small but scenic and charming town which is a 10-minute boat ride from Yangon.''

Suu Kyi was visible in one of the photographs, in a group of people the government said were visiting a nearby family house.

Another showed men beside Suu Kyi's car ``trying to put more food and other amenities into an already overloaded trunk,'' according to the caption.

Photographs released over the weekend showed the group's two vehicles -- a saloon car and a pickup truck -- parked beside a dirt track. Journalists have not been allowed to visit the scene.

(With additional reporting by Andrew Marshall in Bangkok)

---

Myanmar Says Treating Defiant Suu Kyi Well

Yahoo News
Monday August 28 6:13 AM ET
By Aung Hla Tun
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/wl/myanmar_dc_1.html

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar's military government insisted on Monday it was doing everything to ensure the comfort and safety of pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi as she spent a fifth day in her car in a roadside protest outside Yangon.

``Since this morning government officials have provided Daw Suu Kyi and her companions with some beach umbrellas and a new mobile bathroom to ensure her maximum comfort and well-being,'' the government said in a statement.

The 55-year-old Nobel laureate and more than a dozen members of her National League for Democracy (NLD) were halted by police on Thursday as they headed south of the capital in two vehicles, and have been locked in a stand-off ever since.

It was the first time Suu Kyi had tried to leave Yangon since another roadside confrontation in 1998 that ended after 13 days when deteriorating health and dehydration forced her to return home in an ambulance.

The government says Suu Kyi is being prevented from traveling beyond the town of Dala for her own protection, due to threats of violence by ``armed separatist terrorist groups.'' It has asked her to go home but says she is free to remain in Dala.

In its statement, the government said Suu Kyi and her companions were ``still continuing their rest at Sarpachuan ward of Dala town, a small but scenic and charming town which is a 10-minute boat ride from Yangon.''

Myanmar Hits Back At Critics

Several countries have criticized the treatment of Suu Kyi, with the United States and European Union demanding that she be allowed to travel freely.

The government says critics had misunderstood the situation.

``Apparently there is some misunderstanding of the current situation in Myanmar, so we would like to clarify some basic points to those who are criticizing us irresponsibly,'' it said.

``Like any government in the world, the government of Myanmar has a fundamental obligation and responsibility to protect its citizens from acts of violence from terrorist organizations and unlawful armed groups.''

The NLD won elections in May 1990 by a landslide but has never been allowed to govern.

Suu Kyi was under house arrest for six years until 1995 and her movements remain severely restricted. The government's statement said people in Dala ``are carrying on with their daily life, and business is as usual in this small booming town.''

But it said some locals were concerned about her presence.

It quoted a local earthenware pot seller called Sein Sein as saying: ``I hope she returns home to Yangon and leaves us alone with our peaceful and normal life.''

The government says Suu Kyi is being provided with ample food and water, and to support its assertion released five photographs of Suu Kyi's ``visit to Dala'' over the weekend.

One showed several men laden with plastic carrier bags walking along a path toward the parked cars, with the caption: ''Suu Kyi's travel companions coming back from shopping at nearby food stores in time for high-tea.''

Another picture showed the group's two vehicles -- a saloon car and a pickup truck -- parked beside a dirt track. Journalists have not been allowed to visit the scene of the stand-off.

Suu Kyi was not visible in any of the photographs.

The government said on Monday that Suu Kyi had visited some homes in Dala during her time there, and that her companions ''enjoy visiting downtown Dala as well as taking daily dips in the Sarpachuan stream.''

(With additional reporting by Andrew Marshall in Bangkok)

-------- nigeria

http://www.pub.whitehouse.gov/uri-res/I2R?urn:pdi://oma.eop.gov.us/2000/8/28/9.text.1

THE WHITE HOUSE
August 26, 2000

Office of the Press Secretary (Abuja, Nigeria)
For Immediate Release

FACT SHEET
U.S.- Nigerian Cooperation on Peacekeeping and Military Reform

Nigeria has demonstrated an important commitment to regional stability and peacekeeping, spending an estimated $10 billion over the last ten years on peacekeeping operations. As the largest country and preponderant military power in the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS,) Nigeria provided most of the "muscle" deployed by ECOMOG, the military arm of ECOWAS to restore democratic governments in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

The United States has contributed over $100 million to these ECOMOG efforts. The Nigerian military, with the size, experience and readiness to undertake peacekeeping and stability missions, has been an important partner for U.S. engagement.

President Obasanjo has demonstrated important commitment to military reform, to end corruption and human rights abuses, and to provide enhanced training on the role of the military in a modern democracy.

Train and Equip. Nigeria has offered at least five battalions for service in Sierra Leone in the United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) peacekeeping mission. The U.S. Department of Defense is training and equipping these troops on a priority basis. This "Train and Equip" program will:

-- Provide Nigeria training and equipment worth $42 million for a robust peacekeeping mission;

-- Provide the forces trained increased ability to conduct and coordinate complex operations;

-- Employ a "train the trainer" approach in which Nigerian officers and non-commissioned officers train their troops under the supervision of U.S. Special Forces;

-- Provide personal gear, medical equipment, communications, non-combat vehicles, rifles, mortars, machine guns and ammunition; and

-- Provide human rights training.

Training of the first battalion has already begun. All five battalions should be ready for deployment by next summer.

Military Reform. In early 1999, the Government of Nigeria accepted the United States' offer to assist in Nigeria's military reform efforts. USAID has provided $1,000,000 for Phase I of an intensive three-part study of Nigeria's military. Phase I included the development of an action plan for professionalizing the Ministry of Defense and the Armed Forces, rationalizing force structure, establishing democratic values and strengthening civil-military relations. Phase II, scheduled to begin in September 2000 and last approximately one year, and Phase III of the study will help Nigeria implement the action plan, a central element of which is the institutional reforms needed to ensure more effective civilian control of the military. The United States and Nigeria have agreed to share the $7 million cost of the Phase II effort. Upon completion of Phase II, a third phase for sustainment will be undertaken.

Additional U.S. programs to help with the reform of Nigeria's military include:

International Military Education and Training (IMET.) $600,000 in FY 2000 funds have been allocated to enable Nigerian military officers and civilian Ministry of Defense officials to attend U.S. military educational institutions through the U.S. Department of Defense's IMET program.

Expanded-IMET (E-IMET.) DOD's "Expanded" IMET program funded, in FY 2000, participation by Nigerian senior officers in the following courses, which may also be offered in FY 2001. (Funds for this program were derived from the $600,000 IMET allocation):

-- Legal Considerations for Military and Peacekeeping Operations; -- Senior International Defense Management Course; and -- Executive Program in Civil-Military Relations

-------- russia

RUSSIA Torpedo test may have sunk Kursk

London Sunday Times
August 28 2000
FROM GILES WHITTELL IN MOSCOW
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/08/28/timfgnrus01001.html

A BOTCHED test launch of a new type of torpedo has emerged as the most likely cause of the Kursk submarine disaster, even as Russian officials claim that an "external collision" was involved.

Two civilians on the Kursk when she sank were testing torpedos that may have exploded on launch, detonating the blast that tore open her bow and sent her to the seabed.

There was speculation that the torpedos were either a new weapon designed to leave the water, fly in the air and re-enter water to attack other submarines, or a new version of a silent rocket-powered weapon.

Reports at the weekend said that the men, from the Dagdizel naval weapons centre in Dagestan, were aboard "to supervise and check if the torpedo was working as it should". A Dagdizel official denied that the men had been working on a new torpedo design, but days after the blast the Red Star military newspaper reported that the Kursk had been carrying liquid-fuel propelled weapons.

Officers, including Gennadi Lyachin, the Kursk's captain, had complained that the liquid fuel system could explode inside a torpedo tube, making it more dangerous than the compressed-air one it replaced.

Aleksandr Nikitin, a former submarine captain, said he was "almost positive" an accidental torpedo explosion had caused the disaster. He said claims now being investigated by Russian secret police, that an "unidentified object" had hit the Kursk and caused the explosions, were "ridiculous".

---

Kursk sank when secret weapons tests went wrong, says whistleblower

Sydney Morning Herald
08/29/00
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0008/28/world/world2.html

Cambridge, Massachusetts: The submarine Kursk was sunk when secret munitions testing went disastrously wrong, igniting highly inflammable propellant and detonating missile and torpedo warheads, according to a former Russian naval officer and Western military experts.

Mr Alexander Nikitin, a former submarine captain, who served a jail term but was later cleared on appeal for exposing the dangers of radiation leaks from Russia's aging fleet, said he believed the Kursk was sunk by explosions of a new type of torpedo the submarine was testing.

A report in the London Sunday Times said two civilian experts from a Russian military plant were conducting secret munitions tests aboard the Kursk, which sank after the hull was ripped apart.

The final moments of the doomed craft have been pieced together by Western military experts, who believe a test weapon misfired. The resulting explosions blew a huge hole in the right-hand side of the Kursk's nose, where the torpedo room is located.

Any members of the crew who may have survived had no time to close watertight doors, or to send distress signals.

Self-sealing emergency hatches failed because the submarine's control systems were knocked out, and it is unlikely any crew members survived longer than 60 hours because all air pockets were gradually flooded, The Sunday Times said.

A Russian human rights group has said it will sue President Vladimir Putin and the Government for a cover-up and inefficient action after the Kursk sank.

"We want them to tell the truth about what happened to the Kursk," the head of the group Mothers' Right, Ms Veronika Marchenko, said.

"Let a court judge them as guilty so they must apologise before the court."

A military court has formally opened a criminal investigation into the sinking, Interfax agency quoted police as saying.

Meanwhile, a Kursk crew member's mother denied she had been forcibly sedated as she berated a Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Ilya Klebanov, after television footage of her being injected by a government doctor was shown around the world.

Mrs Nadezhda Tylick, whose 25-year-old son died aboard the submarine, issued a statement saying the injection had been requested by her husband for her heart condition.

However, as a wife living in a close military community it was difficult to judge whether she made the statement voluntarily, The Sunday Times said.

Mr Nikitin also said during a talk at Harvard University that some radiation could be expected to begin leaking from the wreck of the Kursk within a few months, adding to the danger in the region from other Russian submarines, mothballed but still loaded with nuclear fuel.

The Boston Globe and agencies.

---

Putin ups nuclear sector money after sub tragedy

Planet Ark
RUSSIA: August 28, 2000
Story by Adam Tanner
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=7962

MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin ordered the creation of new sea rescue centres and higher pay for Russia's nuclear weapons workers on Friday, in his latest handouts to the military since the Kursk submarine disaster.

Putin's decisions followed a 20 percent pay raise for the armed forces and police which he ordered on Thursday.

The sinking of the nuclear-powered submarine Kursk, and Russia's inability to launch a quick, effective rescue effort, highlighted the impoverished state of the post-Soviet Russian military.

Russia's failure to mount an effective rescue after the Kursk went down in the Arctic Barents Sea on August 12, meant that it was a Norwegian team that finally managed to open the submarine and discover that all 118 crew members had died.

Emergencies Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Friday new rescue centres would be set up for each of Russia's four navy fleets. Moscow was forced to admit after the Kursk sank that it has no divers trained and equipped to operate below 60 metres (180 feet).

Putin said in an emotional television interview on Wednesday that more money for the military would be forthcoming. He said his goal was a compact and professional force that would meet Russia's needs despite post-Soviet economic reality.

Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, visiting a top-secret nuclear research centre, said the intention was not to start a new arms race, but to bring Russia's nuclear arsenal down to a "minimum level" needed to maintain security.

ANY PRICE FOR A STRONG MILITARY?

Putin, who rose to power on the heels of a military campaign in the breakaway Chechen republic, has presided over a tussle among the top brass over how far to cut back nuclear forces to focus limited resources on conventional arms.

His advisory Security Council called for broad nuclear weapons cuts a week before the Kursk sank, but the details of the plan and the extent of the cuts have not been made public.

Putin's moves to boost military spending in the wake of the Kursk disaster may prove popular.

A poll of 1,500 Russians by the Public Opinion Fund showed 49 percent felt that Russia is "a great power and needs a strong army at any cost," up from 29 percent four years ago.

"During these tragic days, the president has received his strongest support from those millions and millions of non-naval specialists, who feel it was wrong, if not criminal, to 'reform' the army as they have in recent years," the Nezavisimaya Gazeta daily wrote on Friday.

Highlighting the government's focus on the nuclear sector, Kasyanov toured Sarov, the leading atomic research city.

"Russia is not working toward a build-up of nuclear arms, but toward lowering them to the minimal possible level," Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

He also said the Kursk did not pose an environmental threat. "The level of radiation is normal and we have no concerns," Interfax quoted him as saying.

Navy and nuclear experts in Moscow said the sub's two nuclear reactors shut down seconds after the accident and that there was no risk of them restarting or blowing up.

So far no radiation leaks have been detected, but environmentalists say there is a risk of problems in the future if the Kursk remains on the sea bed.

----

Russian officials say no nuclear threat from Kursk

Planet Ark
RUSSIA: August 28, 2000
Story by Andrei Shukshin
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=7949

MOSCOW - Russian nuclear industry officials sought to reassure the public on Friday that the Kursk submarine lying at the bottom of the Barents Sea poses no threat to the environment.

Tests carried out by Russian and Norwegian experts near the wreck have detected no radioactive contamination but ecological organisations have said it is only a matter of time before the Kursk's two reactors leak.

"The state of the main barriers which limit and contain the spread of radioactivity from the (reactor's) active zone...is such that it completely rules out the possibility of an ecological disaster from a radiation leak," Alexander Kiryushin, whose company designed the reactor, told a news conference.

Kiryushin, flanked by a dozen nuclear officials and researchers, said experts from his design bureau had concluded that the Kursk reactors shut down seconds after the accident and that there was no risk of them restarting or blowing up.

The nuclear-powered Kursk sank on August 12 within minutes of an explosion of yet unknown origin that ripped open its bow, destroying the front sections and flooding most of the craft.

Russia has said the Kursk had no nuclear weapons on board.

Ecologists, including the international pressure group Greenpeace, have called on Russia to lift the wreck, saying leaving it on the sea bed would inevitably lead to an environmental disaster.

Russia has said it will consider lifting the Kursk though experts have expressed doubts about the project's feasibility.

Vladimir Uryvsky, head of the Atomic Energy Ministry's division of navy power plants, said the Kursk's reactors belonged to the third especially-safe generation of nuclear power generators, designed to withstand the most severe shocks.

Uryvsky described the reactors as having only minimal piping for circulation of radioactive substances and a top-notch automatic shutdown system.

Environmentalists say nuclear reactors' extensive piping is one of their most vulnerable points during a major accident.

Viktor Zakharov, head of the navy's radiation, chemical and biological protection service, said there were plans to attach special detectors to the body of the submarine to allow real-time monitoring of the radiation situation on board.

He said Russia would not hamper any international efforts to conduct independent monitoring of possible leaks from the Kursk.

Uryvsky said the reactors's shells were made of extremely durable materials and would not be damaged by contact with sea water for dozens of years.

He said extensive research of the damage to the hull needed to be carried out before any attempt to lift the Kursk to avoid it breaking in two and spewing radiation into the water.

----

Russia Sub Joins Other Arctic Debris

Yahoo News
Monday August 28 1:41 AM ET updated 6:13 AM ET Aug 29
By TOM COHEN,
Associated Press Writer
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20000828/wl/arctic_radioactivity_1.html

TORONTO (AP) - Twisted and broken, hundreds of feet down in the Barents Sea, the Russian submarine Kursk joins other nuclear debris sunken or discarded in Arctic waters.

Scientists who study radioactivity in the Arctic say a variety of sources have been responsible for contamination throughout the region in the past 50 years.

Except for isolated sites - such as the former Soviet underwater nuclear testing ground used in the late 1950s - scientists say contamination levels are low, posing little threat to people.

``We don't see pervasive contamination at levels that would be of significant radiological concern,'' said John Norton Smith, a Canadian government research scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Nova Scotia.

A 1998 report by the Arctic Monitoring Assessment Program lists several sources of radioactive contamination in the Arctic, including the accidental sinking of a Soviet submarine and a U.S. B-52 bomber that crashed in 1968.

Three decades of Soviet dumping of nuclear waste, including more than 15 reactors from decommissioned ships, and waste from nuclear power and weapons plants in Russia and Europe add to radioactive material in Arctic seas, according to Smith and the AMAP report.

Despite this, whatever radioactive material that has escaped has shown little sign of spreading far before its potency dissipates.

The Kursk, which suffered two explosions and sank on Aug. 12, killing 118 sailors aboard, has two nuclear reactors that Russian officials say shut down when it became disabled. Russia is negotiating with Norwegian and Dutch companies to raise the submarine. Russian officials say there is no sign of unusual radiation levels around the vessel.

Smith, who studies radioactivity in Arctic waters, said the Kursk reactors would be safe in the short term if they remained intact.

``The only problem would be if any of the containment structures ruptured,'' he said. The threat of leakage increases with time, though, because the reactors on the Kursk never were intended to sit forever on the bottom of the ocean, Smith added.

The AMAP report said the only other known case of a sunken active nuclear submarine - the April 7, 1989, fire aboard the Komsomolets near Bear Island in the Norwegian Sea - caused little known contamination beyond the vessel. The submarine had a nuclear reactor and two torpedoes with mixed uranium-plutonium warheads, the report said, and small amounts of radioactive material leaked out of the reactor where the vessel lies, more than a mile deep.

``The likelihood of a large-scale release from the Komsomolets is small,'' the report said. ``Even if the containment material corrodes with time, most of the activation products will have decayed before they are released. Studies in the surrounding area show only minor contamination from the submarine.''

AMAP, which is run by the eight-nation Arctic Council comprising Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the United States, tracks the condition of the Arctic environment.

Its 1998 report said the existing contamination appeared to pose little health risk to people - either through direct exposure or in the food chain through fish and other marine life.

---

Chechnya Is Quieter, but Still a Deadly Quagmire

New York Times
August 28, 2000
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/082800russia-chechnya.html

TSENTORA-YURT, Russia, Aug. 23 -- The Russian-appointed leader of Chechnya gestured toward the crowd that had gathered to wish him a happy 49th birthday at his heavily guarded home in this Chechen town. Some, he noted dryly, could well be rebel agents.

"They are everywhere and nowhere," Akhmad Kadyrov said with a shrug. "Some of them might even be among these people."

Mr. Kadyrov ought to know. He has already survived several assassination attempts, including one two months ago, which was averted when a huge bomb was discovered along the road 100 yards from his house. Last year, a bomb that was apparently intended for Mr. Kadyrov killed five of his relatives.

It is just another week in Chechnya, a battered, dispirited but proud Caucasus land that continues to present Russia's gravest security challenge. A year after Russian troops poured into the region, the breakaway republic is no longer the scene of major Russian artillery barrages and pitched battles involving thousands of soldiers against rebels who are seeking an independent republic.

But the war has not gone away. Russian casualties continue every week as the fighting has shifted from large-scale assaults to skirmishing and ambushes that have turned Chechnya into a nasty quagmire for the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, and his top generals.

Almost everyone seems to agree that Russian firepower alone cannot bring an end to the fighting and that a political solution is necessary. That is where Mr. Kadyrov is supposed to come in, but so far a resolution of the conflict seems as distant as ever.

"The war can't be ended by military means," Mr. Kadyrov said. "We Chechens have to stop it ourselves. If we can't, the war will go on for 10 or 20 years."

In the baking summer heat, Chechnya often seems deceptively quiet. There is a weary routine about the searches at the Russian checkpoints, the noisy helicopter flights to and from the Russian strongholds and the bustle at Chechen marketplaces.

Even a good day, however, can be grim and frighteningly unpredictable.

Grozny, Chechnya's nominal capital and a ruin of a city, still lacks gas, electricity and any visible efforts at restoration. Only a few thousand people still seem to live there, but now they include rebels who have managed to sneak back into city.

They shoot at the Russian checkpoints at night, prompting noisy fire fights that residents say keep them awake. Squads of Kalashnikov-bearing Russian soldiers move past the kiosks and makeshift shops but do not linger long. In one brazen attack this week, two Russian soldiers were shot to death at point-blank range while they were shopping in Grozny's central market.

"It's becoming more and more dangerous," said Yuri Vasilkov, a 19-year old draftee from the southern Russian town of Taganrog, who was manning a Grozny checkpoint. "A major attack could come at any time -- tonight, tomorrow, now."

Officially, Russian generals contend that this is nothing to worry about. The guerrilla attacks, they insist, are just the final phase of a terrible war that is all but won. The military, in fact, has already made plans to station a permanent garrison in Chechnya to secure the peace.

It consists primary of the army's newly created 42nd Division, whose members are being sent to four strategic locations. With 15,000 members, the unit is larger and better equipped than most. But at Borzoy, a mountain village that sits astride a potential rebel supply corridor to Georgia, half of the division's troops are young conscripts with no previous experience in Chechnya. The other half are "kontraktniki," essentially mercenaries who often have some military experience and fight for pay.

"This is peace," insists Col. Andrei Fyodorov, 39, who commands the Borzoy detachment. "The situation is under control."

Other Russian officers, however, have a dimmer view. They say the rebels may only have several thousand full-time fighters compared with the approximately 80,000 soldiers and policeman the Kremlin has sent to Chechnya. But the rebels have also adapted their tactics.

Instead of mounting large and costly attacks against major Russian bases and troop concentrations, the rebels plant mines, set off bombs and try to pick off small groups of soldiers -- pinprick attacks that are slowly bleeding Russian forces.

According to official statistics, 17 Russian troops were killed and 52 wounded last week, a tranquil week by Chechnya standards. All told, more than 2,500 Russian fighters have been killed and 7,500 wounded in the last year.

The rebels have also sought to infiltrate village administrations throughout Chechnya, hoping to gain control of food and other supplies so they can divert them to their fighters in the woods and mountains. When Russian officials uncovered a rebel camp last month in the Shatoy mountain region they discovered that it was filled with goods sent to aid the civilian population.

Village officials who resist the rebels are often the targets of attacks, along with their relatives. In the last two weeks, local officials in Meskety, Nozhay-Yurt and Urus-Martan have been attacked.

"Yes, we have cases where local administrations have been infiltrated," Mr. Kadyrov said. "We are setting up a new commission now to check all of the officials in Chechnya, to find out who is charge of what and check all aspects of what they are doing."

Certainly, nobody knows the difficulty of controlling Chechnya better than Mr. Kadyrov, whom Mr. Putin appointed two months ago to administer the republic. Mr. Kadyrov is the first Chechen leader to be installed by Moscow since 1996.

A former Muslim cleric, Mr. Kadyrov opposed the Russians during the first Chechen war, from 1994 to 1996, which routed Russian forces and gave Chechnya de facto independence. Mr. Kadyrov supported Aslan Maskhadov, the Chechen commander who became the first president of the breakaway republic after that war.

But after Islamic militants based in Chechnya invaded neighboring Dagestan and Russian troops responded by invading Chechnya, Mr. Kadyrov broke with Mr. Maskhadov and decided to work with the Russians. Each has denounced the other as a traitor, dimming the already bleak prospect for negotiations.

Mr. Kadyrov appeared relaxed at his birthday celebration with his family and Chechen officials, even as machine-gun toting bodyguards stood by, chanting Muslim prayers before feasting on lamb, potatoes and soft drinks.

"It does not matter if we are part of Russia or independent," Mr. Kadyrov said. "What does a man really need? He needs a permanent job and salary. And he needs to be able to leave his house safely to go work and to come back safely in the evening. That is what freedom means. And where should we go? We are surrounded by Russia."

To encourage a political solution, he has negotiated with several field commanders, including Ruslan Gelayev. Several minor rebel leaders have come over to his side. But Mr. Kadyrov says he will never make a deal with Shamil Basayev or Khattab, two of the best-known rebel commanders, or with Mr. Maskhadov.

Some critics doubt that Mr. Kadyrov will be able to establish his authority in Chechnya. They note that he cannot even control Bislan Gantamirov, a former mayor of Grozny who was jailed for embezzlement and released by the Russians so that he could fight on their side. Unlike Mr. Kadyrov, Mr. Gantamirov controls a Chechen militia, and he has especially close ties with much of the Russian military.

When Mr. Kadyrov fired some local officials loyal to Mr. Gantamirov, the former Grozny mayor led a band of his men to Gudermes, the administrative capital and site of Mr. Kadyrov's government headquarters. It was a blunt show of force, and relations between the two pro-Moscow Chechens are still frosty.

"Kadyrov does not have the means to control the situation inside the Chechen republic," said Malik Saidullayev, a Chechen businessman and a rival.

Mr. Kadyrov asserts that he can prevail. He plans to attend a religious conference in the United States and, making use of his common ground with them as a former cleric, ask the Arab members not to provide the financial support that has been coming in to the rebels from Muslims around the world.

His hardest task, however, is to persuade the Chechen people that they have more to gain by accepting Russian control over their republic and putting down their guns. For all the Russian firepower, he says, the fighting will not end until ordinary Chechens stop giving aid and sanctuary to the rebels.

"We are hiding them," Mr. Kadyrov said. "We Chechens, not Kadyrov. We give them shelter. We feed them. If we closed all the doors to them, then everyone would see them. This is the only way to solve this problem."

---

An Evolving Russia

New York Times
August 28, 2000

To the Editor:

One need not condone the Russian government's initial reaction to the sinking of the Kursk submarine (news article, Aug. 22) to decry attempts by the news media, both Western and Russian, to find it evocative of the bad old days of the Soviet era.

That mind-set suggests that the Soviet Union was a static, presumably totalitarian, political entity. But the "new thinking" of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the former Soviet president, was not an aberration but the culmination of evolutionary changes that commenced with Stalin's death.

Juxtaposing the new Russia with a static Soviet Union obscures the reality about both. But it speaks volumes about the limitations of our own prevailing post-cold-war triumphalism.

WALTER C. UHLER Philadelphia, Aug. 24, 2000

-------- space

Russia successfully launches military satellite

CNN
August 29, 2000
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/08/29/russia.militarysatell.ap/index.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia successfully launched a military satellite Tuesday from the Baikonur launch pad in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, Russian news agencies reported.

A Proton-K booster rocket lifted the Kosmos-series satellite into space just after midnight local time, and the satellite entered its designated orbit six hours later, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

Russia's Strategic Missile Force, the aerospace arm of the military that is responsible for launching spy satellites and other military payloads, could not be reached for comment.

The number of Russian military satellites has dropped significantly because of the government's cash shortage following the Soviet collapse, but Russia has tried to regain lost ground with a stepped-up launch schedule this year.

Tuesday's blastoff was the second reported launch of a Kosmos satellite in 2000.

---

Converted Russian missile launch postponed to September

CNN
August 28, 2000
http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/space/08/28/space.russia.launch.reut/index.html

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) -- Officials postponed the launch of a converted Russian SS-18 rocket booster carrying commercial satellites for the second day in a row on Saturday.

Officials at the launch site said the 1000 GMT launch had been postponed from Kazakhstan's Baikonur cosmodrome because of engine problems. The next launch date was set for an unspecified date in September.

On Friday a programming failure caused an automatic shutdown just before launch, which was to have put five foreign commercial satellites into orbit.

Soviet-era SS-18 short-range ballistic rockets -- nicknamed "Satan" in the West because of their fearsome power -- are being converted under a joint Russian-Ukrainian space venture.

-------- taiwan

Taiwan Holds Olive Branch Out to China

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
By Benjamin Kang Lim
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/wl/taiwan_china_dc_2.html

TAIPEI (Reuters) - President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan's pro-independence ruling party held out an olive branch to arch-rival Beijing on Monday, leaving open the possibility of eventual reunion with China.

``We don't have a predetermined stance, but we also cannot have a predetermined conclusion,'' Chen said, referring to whether Taiwan should reunify with China or declare its independence.

``Any option is a possibility, but it must respect the free will and the final choice and decision of Taiwan's 23 million people,'' Chen told a news conference when asked if reunification was out of the question.

Analysts saw Chen's statement as an attempt to accommodate Beijing, which has threatened to attack if Taiwan declared statehood. But they said he risked alienating his most ardent supporters who demand nothing short of independence.

A survey conducted by Chen's pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) showed that 87 percent of Taiwan respondents preferred the status quo between the two sides.

Tensions between democratic Taiwan and its giant communist neighbor have been simmering since Chen swept to power in March presidential elections, ending more than five decades of Nationalist rule.

Chen, who took office in May in the island's first ever democratic transfer of power, has offered China soothing words, easing tensions somewhat.

But ties reflect an uneasy stalemate because he has refused to bow to Beijing's demand that he unequivocally embrace its cherished ``one China'' principle.

Beijing considers Taiwan a breakaway province and has also threatened invasion if the island dragged its feet on reunion.

Consensus Building

Chen, who returned last week from his first overseas visit, said Taiwan is a democracy and needs to build a broadly based consensus on whether to reunify with China, the world's most populous nation with 1.3 billion people.

``No country, government, political party or individual can presumptuously help Taiwan's 23 million people make a unilateral decision,'' he said.

Chen sidestepped the thorny issue of whether he would assume the chairmanship of the National Unification Council, the previous administration's top advisory body on reunification.

The Nationalists, who fled into exile on Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war to the Communists, espouse reunification with a democratic China, and set up the council in 1990.

To skirt controversy surrounding the council, Chen set up a 25-member ``supra-party'' task force earlier this month to create a consensus on how to deal with China.

But the main opposition Nationalist Party, which still dominates the legislature, and the fledgling People First Party refused to climb on board, questioning the group's legitimacy.

Chen urged opposition parties to stop boycotting the council.

He said the National Unification Guidelines, a blueprint for reunification drafted by the council in 1991, are not impeccable and can be revised.

Opposition leaders have said they opposed any changes to the guidelines that would provoke China.

China's official Xinhua news agency said whether Taiwan's president assumes the council chairmanship and whether the island revises the guidelines have a ``benchmark effect.''

Xinhua said there was no way tensions could be eased and ties improved if Taiwan's leaders refused to kowtow to the ``one China'' that the world has only one China, of which Taiwan is an inseparable part.

---

Taiwan Says No Predetermined Stance on China Union

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
By Benjamin Kang Lim
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/wl/taiwan_china_dc_1.html

TAIPEI (Reuters) - President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan's pro-independence ruling party held out an olive branch to arch-rival Beijing on Monday, saying he has no predetermined stance on whether to reunify with China and that any scenario is a possibility.

Analysts saw Chen's statement as an attempt to accommodate Beijing, which has threatened to attack if Taiwan declared independence. But they said he risked alienating his most ardent supporters who demand nothing short of statehood.

Chen, who returned last week from his first overseas visit, said he was not prejudiced on the explosive issue of whether the island should reunify with its giant communist neighbor.

``We don't have a predetermined stance, but we also cannot have a predetermined conclusion,'' Chen said, apparently referring to whether Taiwan should reunify with or declare independence from China.

``Any option is a possibility, but it must respect the free will and the final choice and decision of Taiwan's 23 million people,'' Chen told a news conference, his third in as many months in office.

Tensions between Taiwan and China have been simmering since Chen, from the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, swept to power in presidential elections in March, ending more than five decades of Nationalist rule.

Chen, who took office in May in the island's first ever democratic transfer of power, has offered China soothing words, easing tensions somewhat.

But ties reflect an uneasy stalemate because he has refused to bow to Beijing's demand that he unequivocally embrace its cherished ``one China'' principle.

Beijing considers Taiwan a breakaway province and has threatened to attack if the island dragged its feet on reunification.

Chen said Taiwan is a democracy and would need to build a broadly based consensus on whether to reunify with China, the world's most populous nation with 1.3 billion people.

``No country, government, political party or individual can presumptuously help Taiwan's 23 million people make a unilateral decision,'' he said.

Chen sidestepped the thorny issue of whether he would assume the chairmanship of the National Unification Council, the previous Nationalist administration's top advisory body on reunification.

The Nationalists, who fled into exile on Taiwan in 1949 after losing a civil war to the Communists, espouse reunification with a democratic China, and set up the council in 1990 to handle reunion.

To skirt around controversy surrounding the council, Chen set up a 25-member ``supra-party'' task force earlier this month to create a consensus on how to deal with China.

But the main opposition Nationalist Party, which still dominates the legislature, and the fledgling People First Party refused to climb on board, questioning the group's legitimacy. Chen said the National Unification Guidelines, a blueprint for reunification drafted by the council in 1991, are not impeccable and can be revised. But he did not elaborate.

Taiwan's opposition leaders have said they opposed any changes to the guidelines that would provoke China.

-------- ukraine

Water Leaks Into Chernobyl Plant

The Associated Press
08-28-00
From: Ndunlks@aol.com

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - A large amount of water has leaked into the sarcophagus covering a reactor destroyed in the 1986 explosion at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but radiation levels in the water flowing out of the structure are normal, officials said Monday.

Water has seeped into the giant sarcophagus since it was built, but more than twice as much leaked inside last month following heavy rains. As a result, water for the first time entered nine rooms, officials monitoring the sarcophagus said in a statement.

Radioactivity levels in the water coming out of the shelter were still at permitted levels, the statement said.

The sarcophagus was hastily constructed to cover the reactor that exploded and caught fire in 1986, spewing a giant radioactive cloud over parts of Europe in the world's worst nuclear disaster.

With the help of foreign funds, Ukraine is trying to make the structure environmentally safe. It is believed to contain tons of radioactive fuel and dust.

Only one of Chernobyl's four reactors is still operational. Due to international pressure, Ukraine has promised to shut down the plant for good in December.

-------- u.n.

Setting up the United Nations for failure

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • August 28, 2000
http://208.246.212.80/op-ed/ed-house-2000828162228.htm

The United Nations has failed in its goal to "save succeeding generations from the scourge of war." Indeed, rather than resolving conflicts in some cases, it has aggravated them. So says a surprisingly candid report written by a panel of 10 foreign policy and security experts chosen by the U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. The experts' report - to be considered by U.N. leaders Sept. 6-8 at the Millennium Summit in New York - provides an extensive and illuminating view of the shortcomings of U.N. peacekeeping policies as well as detailed suggestions for reform.

Among other things, the report criticizes the Secretariat for muzzling itself and for approving missions that don't have enough support from member countries: "In advising the [U.N. Security] Council on mission requirements, the Secretariat must not set mission force and other resource levels according to what it presumes to be acceptable to the Council politically. By self-censoring in that manner, the Secretariat sets up itself and the mission not just to fail but to be scapegoats in the future."

Sierra Leone was one example of an unprepared mission gone bad. When the United Nations force of 8,700 peacekeepers - a conglomeration of African and Asian troops on foreign territory who couldn't communicate with each other - went up against rebel leader Foday Sankoh's armed Revolutionary United Front (RUF), they didn't just fail to stop the violence. The guerilla force - as many as 45,000 troops that had been killing, raping and maiming thousands of people since 1991 - took 500 peacekeepers hostage and continued to threaten the safety of the local civilian population. "You don't want to have to turn your back on a Sierra Leone," says Brian Atwood, the U.S. delegate to the panel, "but you're probably better turning your back than sending in an inadequate force."

The problem, the report said, was that the United Nations had deployed troops with too little experience, too little in common in terms of culture or training, and too little equipment and preparation. In that line, the panel recommends that the United Nations have an "on-call list" of 100 officers who could be sent out to the conflict zone as military observers on seven days' notice. If needed, a military brigade (around 5,000 troops) would then be sent to join them, also on 30 to 90 days' notice. This brigade would come from a group of nations that had already formed a military partnership.

But that solution has problems of its own. The 100 officers would not have trained together and could come from all over the world without the benefit of a single unifying strategy. With respect to the military brigades, the United Nations is assuming that member states would take it upon themselves to form casual military partnerships under United Nations leadership in peace time. The Secretariat would review the troops and the richer nations would give what was needed to the developing countries, essentially creating a softer, kinder NATO.

Though the panel is to be commended for its excruciatingly honest reflection of the challenges that exist within the United Nations, it will be keeping military experts and peacekeeping strategists awake at night for some time contemplating not just the existing problems facing the United Nations but the uncertainty of the solutions to them.

-------- u.s.

Raytheon Workers Strike Over Job Security

New York Times
August 28, 2000 Filed at 5:54 p.m. ET
By Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-raytheon-str.html

ANDOVER, Mass. (Reuters) - Hundreds of angry strikers surrounded Raytheon Co's (RTNa.N) (RTNb.N) Patriot missile-making plant on Monday after shooting down a contract they said failed to include job security.

About 3,000 members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1505 voted to reject the No. 3 U.S. defense contractor's final offer on Sunday.

``What do you want on your tombstone?'' one union worker shouted as managers and salaried workers drove out of the plant at day's end. Most drivers kept their eyes straight forward as about 30 police officers kept the 300 or so strikers from swarming the cars.

The radar and missile maker, which said in July it would try to slice $1.2 billion by the end of the year from its $10.4 billion first-half debt load, has about 94,000 workers worldwide, with 13,000 in Massachusetts.

At one point in 1995, Lexington, Mass.-based Raytheon had 19,000 workers in Massachusetts. Local workers have complained as the company has slowly transferred jobs to Arizona and California, even after unions lobbied to help Raytheon win a controversial state tax break aimed at saving manufacturing jobs in Massachusetts.

``We helped them get that tax break and now they've screwed us,'' said Joe Donlin, a 46-year-old tool and dye maker.

Donlin bitterly remembered then-U.S. Defense Secretary and now Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney visiting Raytheon's Andover plant along with then-President George Bush.

``We worked around the clock when they needed us,'' he said. ''We were heroes then.'' Raytheon's Patriot missiles were credited with playing a crucial role in the 1991 Gulf War.

Now, U.S. Rep. Martin Meehan, a Democrat, was visiting the workers, walking the line.

``It's time for the company to come back and give job security,'' Meehan told a cheering crowd. ``I don't think it's asking too much to guarantee that jobs stay in Massachusetts. I won't support these programs in Washington, D.C., not if all of the jobs go to Tucson.''

Raytheon spokesman David Polk told Reuters the company's final offer included job security with assurances that the Patriot and Hawk missile programs would remain in Massachusetts.

In addition the company offered a total of 14 percent in wage hikes over a four-year period.

``These pay raises are no good if the jobs won't be here four years from now,'' said Robert Walker, 47, a maintenance technician on the Patriot program.

Raytheon stock closed on Monday down 7/16 to 28-9/16, still sharply lower than its a 52-week high of $69-4/16. In recent weeks, after narrowly beating Wall Street's estimates for the second quarter, the stock has recovered somewhat from its 52-week low of 17-8/16.

During the past decade, Local 1505's leverage with the company has weakened as its membership has dwindled to about 3,000 from 10,000 in 1991. The union's leadership has also come under fire amid charged that it rigged the June 16, 1999 election of 16 officers.

U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Donald Stern filed a civil suit against the union in July seeking to invalidate the results and force a new election.

But the strike should ``not have much effect on the company,'' said JSA Research analyst Paul Nisbet, who follows the defense sector. ``These are government contracts and government contracts are reasonably favorable (to companies) when it comes labor issues,'' he said.

Nisbet, who had Raytheon as a buy in July, now has it as a hold saying ``At 29 the stock is pretty fully valued.''

---

Shipyard Workers Strike

Associated Press
August 28, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/f/AP-Shipyard-Strike.html

BATH, Maine (AP) -- Giant cranes that help build Navy destroyers stood idle Monday as 4,800 shipyard workers at Bath Iron Works went on strike for the first time in 15 years.

Members of the Machinists union overwhelmingly authorized the walkout over wages and job security Sunday, hours before their previous contract expired. No new talks were scheduled.

Separately, nearly 3,000 workers went on strike Sunday in Massachusetts at another defense contractor, Raytheon Co., maker of the Patriot missile.

At Bath, the strike shut down production at one of only two U.S. shipyards that build Aegis-class destroyers. The last strike at BIW was a 99-day walkout in 1985. The shipyard is one of Maine's biggest private employers, with 7,600 workers.

Shipyard spokeswoman Sue Pierter said the company, a subsidiary of General Dynamics, felt that its contract offer was fair and that the workers' rejection of it came as a surprise.

``I want what I'm worth, and General Dynamics can well afford it,'' said Paul Avery, a shipyard rigger. As managers arrived at work, dozens of shipbuilders waved signs and taunted them.

Members of two other unions, representing designers and clerical workers, joined pickets outside BIW, but others crossed the lines to work.

The shipyard proposed a three-year contract with wage increases of 4 percent this year, 3.5 percent next year and 4 percent in 2002. It also contained a $500 signing bonus. The company said the proposal would increase an average production worker's wage-and-benefit package from $41,000 to $48,000 a year at the end of the contract period.

But workers said the $41,000 figure is misleading. The wage portion is only $32,000 a year on average for union workers, said Dale Hartford, a union negotiators.

Union negotiators pushed for raises of 8 percent the first year and 7 percent in each of the following years.

While wages are a big concern, several strikers said issues relating to cross-trading -- rules allowing workers to perform more than one job -- are more important. The company wants to remove job-security protections for workers who are displaced by others who take over their jobs.

``This is the issue: Working side-by-side with each other and then the next week one of them is on the street,'' said union negotiator Tony Provost.

At Raytheon, workers walked out at 10 of the company's Massachusetts plants. Most work at the Andover plant, which makes most of the Patriot missiles. Hawk defense systems are also manufactured there.

The Raytheon employees' union, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said Raytheon's proposal for a four-year contract does not offer enough protection of manufacturing jobs.

---

Hurtful Defense Cuts Began Under Clinton, Cheney Says

New York Times
August 28, 2000
By MICHAEL COOPER
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/camp/082800wh-cheney.html

Dick Cheney acknowledged yesterday that the military cutbacks he and Gov. George W. Bush have campaigned against began when he was defense secretary for Mr. Bush's father, but he blamed the Clinton administration for making "far deeper" cuts that he said had left the military "in decline."

"With respect to this question of when the cuts started, we obviously began reductions as the cold war ended in 1990 and '91, in the aftermath of Desert Storm," Mr. Cheney said yesterday on the ABC program "This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts," one of three Sunday morning talk programs he appeared on to discuss military preparedness.

"But we started with a reduction of 25 percent in force structure," Mr. Cheney continued. "They've gone far beyond that. The number of divisions in the U.S. Army has gone from 18 to 10. The number of wings in the Air Force has gone from 24 to 13. The number of ships in the Navy has gone from almost 600, now headed to less than 300. So they've cut far deeper, Sam, than anything anticipated during my watch in the Pentagon."

The Republicans have seized on the issue of military strength since Mr. Bush told the Republican National Convention earlier this month that the military is "low on pay, parts and morale." Mr. Bush said that two divisions of the Army were not ready for duty -- a claim rebutted by the Pentagon, which said that two units had been unprepared last fall, when soldiers were deployed in Bosnia and Kosovo, but were now "combat ready."

Yesterday, Mr. Cheney echoed many of Mr. Bush's assertions, saying that the armed forces suffered from low morale, unreadiness and difficulty recruiting and retaining personnel.

"I think if you match our forces today up against any others around the world, we've got the best force," Mr. Cheney said on the NBC program "Meet the Press." "The problem is it's in decline, and this administration has done very little to reverse that decline."

He strongly criticized Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, for disputing the Bush campaign's assessment, saying, "The only conclusion I can draw from Al Gore's comments about all this is that either he doesn't know what's going on in the U.S. military or he chooses not to tell the truth about it."

The Gore campaign took exception. "I think Bush and Cheney have lost all credibility on the defense issue," said Doug Hattaway, a campaign spokesman. "America has the strongest, most capable fighting force in the whole world. Mr. Cheney has already admitted that the military downsizing began under the Bush-Quayle-Cheney administration. The Clinton-Gore administration stopped this free fall and enacted the largest military investment since Reagan."

Juleanna Glover Weiss, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, said that no one had more credibility on military issues than Mr. Cheney, who, as secretary of defense under President Bush, oversaw the Persian Gulf war of 1991. "Vice President Gore is trying to sweep the military preparedness issue under the rug so he can be held blameless," she said.

On all three morning programs, Mr. Cheney was asked about an issue that has dogged him in recent weeks: the fact that upon his retirement this month as head of Halliburton, an oil services company, he was given millions of dollars' worth of stock options that he cannot exercise for more than a year -- giving him a potential conflict of interest if he is elected vice president, since he will have a vested interest in the price of Halliburton stock.

He repeated his assertions that he would do whatever was necessary to avoid any conflict of interest, saying that he had "smart people" working on the problem and that his options ranged from giving any increase in the value of the stock to charity to maneuvering so the price of the stock could be fixed before he entered office.

Asked on the CBS program "Face the Nation" if he would consider giving up the stock options that have not vested, Mr. Cheney said: "Well, I'd like not to have to give away all my assets in order to serve the public. I don't think that's required; it shouldn't be."

---

Military Reserves Are Falling Short in Finding Recruits

New York Times
August 28, 2000
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/082800reserve-short.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 -- The nation's military Reserves are increasingly struggling to fill their ranks with new recruits, even as the Pentagon relies on them more heavily than ever to conduct operations around the world, according to military officials and Pentagon documents.

In each of the last three years, the Army, Naval and Air Force Reserves have each fallen short of their recruiting goals; last year, the Air Force Reserve missed its objective by nearly 40 percent, signing up only 7,518 of the 11,791 recruits it needed. Only the Marine Corps Reserve has steadily recruited enough new troops in recent years.

The recruiting problems have continued -- with the three Reserve forces unlikely to make their targets by the time the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30 -- even though the active-duty services have turned around their own dismal recruiting record after an infusion of recruiters, increased advertising and enlistment bonuses, according to Pentagon records.

For the first time since 1997, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps are all expected to meet their recruiting goals this year, an achievement Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and other officials have attributed in part to sharper marketing strategies and a string of military pay increases.

But the difficulty in persuading young men and women to sign up as part-time soldiers, sailors and airmen has been a sobering counterpoint. It is also raising questions about the Pentagon's strategy of turning to the 864,000 members of the Reserves and National Guard for humanitarian missions, peacekeeping operations and combat.

In fact, the increased demands on the Reserves, which have resulted in more missions overseas, is one of the reasons cited as an obstacle to filling units that not so long ago required reservists to set aside only a weekend a month and two weeks a year.

The military's readiness -- particularly efforts to recruit new soldiers and re-enlist the ones it has -- has become an issue in this year's presidential campaign, and the latest recruiting numbers could provide fodder for both Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush.

While Mr. Gore can point to the recruiting turnaround for the active forces, Mr. Bush can emphasize the shortages on the Reserves' side.

"We have the same concerns about morale, recruiting and re-enlistment for the Reserves as we do for the regular forces," a spokesman for the Bush campaign, Ray Sullivan, said on Friday.

The Gore campaign did not respond to questions about Reserve recruiting.

Many of the recruiting challenges facing the Reserves are the same ones that have besieged the entire military in recent years. The economy is thriving, creating more, better-paying alternatives to military service. More and more high school graduates also are heading directly to college, while there has been a steady decline in young people expressing any interest in enlisting in the military.

The Reserves, however, are facing unique problems. Traditionally, the largest pool of Reserve recruits has been made up of people leaving full-time active duty, but as all the services have shrunk from their cold war levels, so has that pool.

There is also evidence that people leaving active duty are less willing to join the Guard or Reserves. In the last three years, the percentage of those leaving the Army who said they would consider continuing to serve part time has declined to 21 percent from 41 percent, according to the Army Reserve.

Officials attribute that at least in part to the increased missions of the Guard and Reserves. Reservists, once described as "weekend warriors," are now serving beside their full-time counterparts in operations from the Persian Gulf to the Balkans. The average Air Force reservist served 58 days last year, while air crews served 110.

"Kids getting off active duty right now are looking at what we're doing and they're saying, 'Whew! I'm not going to join the Reserves or the Guard. I mean you're going where I just came from,' " Maj. Gen. David R. Smith, vice commander of the Air Force Reserve Command, said during an interview earlier this month in his headquarters at Robins Air Force Base in central Georgia.

General Smith and senior Pentagon officials said the problem had not yet become a crisis, but they acknowledged that the difficulty in signing up part-time soldiers, sailors and airmen has created spot shortages, especially in units, like medical companies, requiring special skills.

The National Guard has done better meeting its recruiting goals nationally this year and last, but individual states have fallen short, including Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, some of which are 5 percent to 10 percent below their authorized strength.

The decline in recruits with prior military service has also meant the Reserves have had to rely on enlistees with no experience, resulting in higher training costs and less seasoned units.

"It continues to be a challenge," Charles L. Cragin, the assistant secretary of defense for Reserve affairs, said in an interview on Friday. "Obviously, if it continues, you're going to have an impact on units."

Mr. Cragin and Reserve commanders said they had watched the trends in recruiting and retention closely, but in recent years much of the attention, and money, has gone to reversing the recruiting slide in the active forces.

The Air Force, for example, paid for television advertising for the first time last year -- increasing its overall advertising budget to $76 million from $22 million the year before -- but the campaign focused almost entirely on recruiting for active duty. The Air Force Reserve's advertising budget, by contrast, fell to $8.5 million this year from $8.9 million.

The Air Force also increased the number of recruiters by nearly 400 this year, to 1,450, and, in addition, it temporarily assigned 169 more. The Air Force Reserve has only 146 recruiters in the field this year.

While active-duty recruiting campaigns appear to have had some success -- with the Air Force, for example, already reaching this year's goal of 34,000 recruits, after falling 1,700 short last year -- the efforts have yet to trickle down to the Reserves.

After falling short by more than 4,000 recruits last year, the Air Force Reserve is projected to fall nearly 2,000 short of a smaller target of only 11,321 recruits this year. The Naval Reserve is projected to fall short of its target of 18,410 by as many as 4,000, a year after missing its target by 4,700 recruits.

Officials point to the slight improvements from a year ago as a hopeful sign. In fact, with a month to go in the fiscal year, the Army Reserve may still meet its target, officials said, and any shortage may be offset by an increase in reserve re-enlistments.

The Reserves have attributed their recruiting problems to a variety of factors, but General Smith and other officials at Robins Air Force Base said the most significant was the dwindling size of the active force.

When the Air Force, like all the services, was shrinking through the 1990's, there were thousands of airmen and officers leaving active duty who chose to stay in the Reserves, often to keep their pensions.

"With the number we were processing, people were walking in the door," said Lt. Col. Kevin L. Reinert, deputy chief of Reserve recruiting. "Now we have to beat the streets."

All of the Reserves have increased signing bonuses, especially for slots that require specialty skills. Doctors who join the Army Reserve can now receive as much as $40,000 to pay off medical school bills.

The Air Force Reserve is also focusing much of its efforts on the dwindling pool of those leaving active duty. At Robins, every airman or officer who leaves has to meet with the base's "in service" recruiter, Tony E. Vinson, an amiable master sergeant who has the persistence of a door-to-door salesman.

"If there's a position for them out there, we'll find it for them," Sergeant Vinson said.

On his wall is a map showing every Air Force Reserve unit in the country, and he quizzes every prospect about where they plan to settle after leaving the force. He also offers them training courses or, more significantly, positions that might not require them to deploy overseas as often as they did on active duty.

In fact, the rising number of missions, or "ops tempo," appears to be a significant reason why people with prior service are less willing to join the Reserves. Five of 19 questionnaires Sergeant Vinson had would-be reservists fill out cited ops tempo as their main reason for leaving.

Many officials agreed that the increasing likelihood that a part-time reservist would be mobilized has contributed to recruiting problems, but they disagreed on the extent.

"The folks who are coming in now kind of know that it's likely they will be called up," said Maj. Gen. Thomas J. Plewes, chief of the Army Reserve. "They know you won't be sitting around the Reserve centers like in the old days, like when I first came in the Reserves, trying to figure out something to do."

There is no question that the pace of deployments has forced more and more reservists to juggle their military service with their civilian jobs and families, what General Smith called "the Reserve triad." And that has clearly made some prospects, either those with previous service or those without it, think twice about joining or staying in the Reserves.

At the same time, however, some of the reservists called up most often -- including those in Army Reserve civil affairs units responsible for dealing with citizens abroad -- actually have a higher rate of re-enlistment than the rest of the force.

"When they get an opportunity to take part in a contingency operation, it is actually a morale booster," said Col. F.C. Williams, commander of the 419th Fighter Wing at Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah, which just sent 165 people and a squadron of F-16s to Turkey to conduct operations over northern Iraq.

The wing has had its recruiting woes. Colonel Williams said he expected to miss his recruiting goal of 220 by as many as 65. Part of that shortage, however, will be offset by improvements in re-enlistments, which he attributed to pay increases and the satisfaction derived from deployments.

Still, he said, there are limits. In the last four years, the wing has deployed reservists to Turkey for more than a month three times and to the Persian Gulf once. That has put a strain on reservists, their families and their civilian employers.

"I'm not sure," Colonel Williams said, "where the line is."

---

Government VP To Speak At Air Force IT Show
Beery Will Highlight the Importance of E-Commerce in Government Procurement

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
Press Release Beyond.com
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/000828/ca_beyond_.html

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 28, 2000--Don Beery, vice president of the government systems group for e-commerce services provider Beyond.com(tm) (Nasdaq:BYND - news), will be speaking at the Air Force IT show in Montgomery, Ala. tomorrow Tuesday, Aug. 29, 2000.

Beyond.com will also be exhibiting their automated delivery, deployment and license management system for network administrators, named Atlas. The show draws over 4,000 attendees from all commands within the Air Force and throughout the Department of Defense.

Beery will be speaking at 9:15 AM at the Civic Center in Montgomery. He will present a case study on ``Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership of Software for the Government, using E-Commerce and Technology.''

``Air Force IT managers and systems administrators are constantly looking to streamline efficiencies and reduce the costs associated with the procurement, distribution and management of software assets along with ways to improve service,'' said Beery. ``Our Atlas technology and e-commerce capabilities enable our government customers to realize the benefits of large software acquisitions while recognizing cost reductions now and in their future maintenance budgets. We are pleased to increase the knowledge regarding this technology to new government users.''

Beery brings over 18 years of IT industry experience to his current role as vice president of the government systems group for Beyond.com. Prior to joining Beyond.com, Beery was director of business development and sales at Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Eastman Kodak Company. Prior to that, he served as financial coordinator for EDS's ASIMs contract for the Department of the Army.

---

Former Recruiter for Racism Helps Military Confront Hate

Washington Post
Monday, August 28, 2000 ; A17
By Doug Johnson Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34241-2000Aug27.html

FORT LEONARD WOOD, Mo. -- T.J. Leyden, a hulking man with a closely shaved head and tattoos covering half his body, struts back and forth in front of an auditorium packed wall-to-wall with soldiers.

The faces staring back at him reflect many races and ethnic groups, but that doesn't stop Leyden from blurting slurs. His words--shocking epithets that cause the crowd to shift uncomfortably--identify those he routinely assaulted and ridiculed as a neo-Nazi in the military.

Leyden, 34, explains how he was a leading skinhead recruiter and organizer for 15 years, and how he did some of his most successful recruiting on U.S. military bases.

"I looked for the young, scared white kids who just wanted a group to fit in with," he said. "We warned them of a New World Order and offered them the chance to get aboard."

Now, Leyden uses his unique brand of bluntness to spread a different kind of warning to the military bases he once targeted.

"The U.S. military is the best trained group of people in the world. And that's why the racist groups send their people here--to get trained," he told the soldiers at Fort Leonard Wood, an Army base in central Missouri. "If you don't think it's happening here, you need to wake up."

The former Marine is waging a war against the hate groups he once embraced. As a full-time consultant for the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Task Force Against Hate, Leyden travels the country speaking to thousands of military personnel and law enforcement officials about his experiences in the white supremacy movement and the recruitment methods he used.

"When I joined the Marines, I brought my racism and bigotry with me. I had a swastika tattoo two inches high on my neck and hung Nazi flags on my barracks walls. There was no way the Marines could have denied I was a racist," he said. "Yet, as long as my commanding officers thought I was a passive Nazi, it was okay with them."

The U.S. military is aware of the presence of racism in its ranks. A 1994 House Armed Services Committee report found that overt cases of racism and subtle forms of discrimination existed at some military facilities.

Four years ago, the secretary of the Army created a Task Force on Extremist Activities after the slaying of a black couple in what prosecutors said was a skinhead initiation rite in Fayetteville, N.C.

Three white soldiers from nearby Fort Bragg were charged in the case. Follow-up investigations led to the discharge of 19 other soldiers who allegedly followed some type of skinhead ideology.

The Army has taken steps since then to flush out extremists.

"The task force is gone, but its legacy continues," said Maj. Ryan Yantis, an Army spokesman.

New rules require Army personnel to "reject participation in extremist organizations and activities." Army recruiters can also reject people who display racist tattoos.

Still, groups do slip through the cracks. Nine Marines were released from a base in San Diego last year because of racist activity, Leyden said.

When he was a Marine, Leyden said, he did most of his recruiting for the neo-Nazis at bars, inciting racially motivated fights between Marines and then backing his "new white buddies" in the scuffle.

Change for Leyden came about four years ago, after watching his 3-year-old son recoil at seeing blacks on television. At first, he was proud of his son's revulsion. But a slow, steady transformation changed his mind, he said. Pressure built from his family including his brother, a police officer, to leave the group "Hammerskins."

"I am always shocked by the number of people I talk to that don't know diddly about these groups," he said. "There are people who still think racism doesn't exist."

---

Chinese military gets lesson in U.S. thinking

Washington Times
August 28, 2000
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2000828224544.htm

Twenty-five senior Chinese military officers are in Boston to learn details about U.S. decision-making that critics say will help China fight the United States in a conflict over Taiwan.

The People's Liberation Army (PLA) officers arrived Saturday. They include 24 senior colonels and one navy captain who will spend two weeks at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, according to Clinton administration officials close to the program.

The officers are there to hear lectures by current and former U.S. national security officials who have discussed how the United States would respond to a crisis over Taiwan.

"Most of the officers are intelligence collectors or technology collectors," said one knowledgeable official.

Other visiting officers are from components of the Chinese military involved in directing unconventional warfare against the United States, a key element of China's emerging war-fighting strategy.

"The Chinese plan to use this information to manipulate the U.S. decision-making process and paralyze us during a crisis," said one official. "And many of these visiting officers are involved in just that type of activity."

The group includes colonels from the Central Military Commission, the top Communist Party organ that controls the military; the PLA general staff department, and various regional military command headquarters units.

It is the third group of colonels to attend Harvard as part of its "China Initiative," which was set up in 1997 with a $1 million grant from Nina Kung, a Hong Kong businesswomen who heads Chinachem, a chemical manufacturer with extensive ties to mainland China.

In the past three groups, the Chinese have questioned their lecturers on U.S. decision-making in a crisis, the officials said.

Another Chinese objective for what Harvard calls its executive program for Chinese security affairs is to conduct "political influence operations" - spreading propaganda aimed at influential academics and U.S. policy-makers that China's military buildup poses no threat to the United States.

A second propaganda theme of the colonels' is to discredit any U.S. officials or Americans who view China as a potential enemy.

Officials said China does not allow similar two-week exchange programs for U.S. military officers at a major Chinese university. Visits to China by U.S. military officers are severely restricted, the officials said.

The colonels' visit coincides with a disputed military exchange program underway that involves Pentagon-sponsored visits by Chinese officers to sensitive U.S. military facilities.

A group of Chinese officers, including three generals, was briefed last week on U.S. joint war-fighting training and simulation, an area the Chinese military is seeking to improve. They also are scheduled to visit the U.S. Pacific Command, which would be in charge of all U.S. forces in the Pacific.

That visit drew protests from Sen. Robert C. Smith, New Hampshire Republican, and Rep. Tom DeLay, Texas Republican, who questioned whether the visit violated a U.S. law passed last year that prohibits helping China develop its war-fighting expertise.

Officials said colonels who arrived at Harvard on Saturday are part of a "loophole" in the legislation that set up the Smith-DeLay guidelines for U.S. military exchanges. The Harvard program is not sponsored or funded by the Pentagon.

It was set up in 1997 by Joseph Nye, a former Clinton administration assistant defense secretary who is dean of the Kennedy School. Mr. Nye was the official viewed as the author of the Pentagon's soft-line policy toward China. He once stated that if China is treated like an enemy, it will become an enemy.

Since the accidental bombing of the China Embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, last year, China in official writings has stated that the United States is its main enemy.

Former Bush administration arms control official Robert Blackwill, who at one time directed the China military program at Harvard, could not be reached for comment. Mr. Blackwill was in charge of drafting the Republican Party's platform during the presidential convention earlier this month.

Other Harvard officials involved in the program did not return telephone calls seeking comment on the colonels program.

After the Smith-DeLay guidelines became law, Pentagon lawyers rejected the arguments of critics who questioned the legality of the Harvard program, the officials said. The lawyers said allowing Pentagon and other U.S. officials to take part in the program would not violate the legal guidelines.

Last year, a senior Pentagon intelligence officer, Army Lt. Col. Lonnie Henley, sat in on the entire two-week program. During an earlier session, the Pentagon's top China policy-maker, Kurt Campbell, lectured the colonels.

Officials said the colonels this year are expected to seek answers on how U.S. policy toward Taiwan will be affected if Republican George W. Bush is elected president.

The Texas governor supports the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act that passed the House by a wide margin and is pending before the Senate. The act would bolster U.S. defense ties to Taiwan.

Mr. Bush's key campaign national security adviser, Condoleeza Rice, has said she does not regard China as a threat.

Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's Davis Center for Russia Studies, has said he supports a similar Harvard exchange program with Russian officers. But he questioned the Chinese military program. "Almost all the Chinese are intelligence people," he told the Boston Globe.

According to U.S. intelligence sources, in order to win Chinese government cooperation, Harvard provided assurances to the Chinese military that U.S. intelligence agencies, namely the CIA and FBI, would not seek to recruit any of the visiting PLA officers as spies.

The agreement also calls for restricting access to the Harvard campus by FBI counterintelligence agents engaged in surveillance of intelligence activities carried out by the colonels.

----

Readiness is not improving

August 28, 2000
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2000828224346.htm

U.S. military combat readiness, a hot debate in the presidential elections, continues to suffer two years after the Pentagon acknowledged shortfalls.

The Navy is short on sailors and ships at sea. The Air Force lacks 1,200 pilots and continues a downward trend in readiness. Army soldiers complain of reduced training time and morale.

But the services have plugged holes in recruiting and retention of some critically needed personnel after Congress and the White House increased pay and benefits.

The root of the problem, analysts and soldiers say, stems from President Clinton's decision in 1993 to double five-year Pentagon cuts, to $128 billion, that had been put in place by President Bush and his defense secretary, Richard B. Cheney.

The post-Cold War reductions were followed by Mr. Clinton sending troops on a record number of peacetime deployments in the 1990s, including major conflicts against Iraq and Serbia.

Equipment wore out. Spare parts dried up. And personnel, weary of months overseas, quit.

"You cut the force by more than a third, you cut the budget by 40 percent and then you raise the number of deployments by 300 percent and that's a situation that is going to make trouble inside the military," said retired Army Col. Joseph Collins. Col. Collins spearheaded an expansive study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies that concluded in January that morale and readiness were down across the military.

Col. Collins said morale has been boosted by pay increases and better retirement benefits, but the problem still exists.

"You have had the strange situation of a decline in perceived readiness affecting morale," he said. "Everywhere we went we had people tell us we are tired of doing more with less."

The two major presidential candidates made their cases last week in speeches before the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Republican George W. Bush and his running mate, Mr. Cheney, charge that the Clinton-Gore administration let readiness slip to dangerously low levels.

"There is an enormous amount of evidence out there . . . that the question in terms of readiness and morale, the problems with recruiting, problems with retention, that the military is in trouble today," Mr. Cheney said yesterday on NBC. "They've cut too far. They've cut too deep. They've also added commitments. A big part of the difficulty . . . is the force is spread too thin."

On ABC's "This Week," the former defense secretary said: "There are serious problems out there in respect to the overall quality of the force. There's no question that we've got a great military today, but it's headed in the wrong direction."

Based on his discussions with military people, he said, "either Al Gore doesn't know what's going on in the U.S. military, or he's chosen not to tell the truth about it."

Vice President Al Gore and Democrats counter that the problem is more complex than Mr. Cheney presents and the U.S. military is the world's finest, proving itself once again in the 1999 air war over Serbia.

Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who followed Mr. Cheney on NBC, said: "Dick Cheney is flat wrong, and George Bush is flat wrong, about questions of preparedness." He blamed the booming civilian economy for problems with military recruiting and retention but said the Clinton administration is working to change that with pay increases and other personnel moves.

Still, he said, "We have the best trained, most extraordinary military in the history of humankind."

Both are right, analysts say, so the issue may settle on which man can make the stronger case. The armed forces are less combat ready than eight years ago, but still are top dog among all the world's armies.

Mr. Cheney acknowledged as much: "If you match our forces today up against any others around the world, we've got the best force. The problem is it's in decline, and this administration has done very little to reverse that decline."

Personnel in the field told The Washington Times their units are still hampered by spare-parts shortages, old equipment, condensed training hours and, in some cases, poorly trained technicians in a rapid turnover of personnel.

In addition to these soldiers' testimonies, other sources report similar problems:

• The bipartisan Senate Armed Services Committee budget report this May states: "Aging equipment, spare parts shortfalls, manning and experience gaps continue to manifest themselves in terms of declining mission capable rates and decreasing unit readiness ratings. . . . Most troubling are indications that problems are emerging in the readiness of forward-deployed and first-to-fight units."

• The Army has set up a special panel to figure out why it is losing so many captains - its future field commanders. Two recent surveys showed the captains are disenchanted with peacekeeping missions and Army leadership.

• The Navy is short on seamen. It puts the at-sea shortfall on any given day at "less than 10,000." It's fleet has shrunk from 443 ships in 1993 to 316, a figure even below Mr. Clinton's target of 346. The shortage means ships and sailors are at sea more often to cover the Navy's worldwide commitments.

• The Air Force needs 13,424 active-duty pilots, but remains about 1,200 short. The gap has stabilized, however. The mission-capable rate of major weapon systems such as fighters and bombers sits at 73 percent, a 10 percent decline since 1991, and a further erosion the past two years.

An Air Force statement to The Times says, "Ten-year trend shows a steady decline in readiness as measured in percent of top two readiness categories. Though steps have been taken to arrest the decline, overall readiness (combat and non-combat forces) continues to decrease from 92 percent in 1990 to 78 percent today."

Two officers interviewed by The Times contended commanders submit unrealistically rosy readiness reports up the chain of command to protect their chances of promotion.

"It irks me to hear the chairman of the Joint Chiefs say that everything is hunky-dory," an Army helicopter pilot said, referring to Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton. "You see that so much in the leadership. A unit will have a training exercise and the troops will note a huge number of deficiencies. When the final 'after action' report comes out, though, all the leadership is seeing who can praise each other the most."

"Yes, Governor Bush is right," said an Army special operations officer who, like other active-duty people, asked to remain anonymous. "I am in Special Forces and no matter what, morale will be higher than in a normal unit. But it is a wearing thing for us also. We do too many missions to too many places. We do it with less money, less training time."

Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine, has not injected himself into the presidential debate. But he does defend the state of today's military - and in effect his own stewardship - when questioned by reporters.

"We are ready. We are prepared," Mr. Cohen told reporters Aug. 18. "As a matter of fact, I think morale is increasing. Hopefully in the next few weeks I'll be able to come to you and lay out exactly where we are on retention, recruitment and what I see as an increase rather than a decrease in morale."

Many defense experts agree that the Ronald Reagan military buildup of the 1980s produced the finest military ever fielded. The volunteer force developed an unmatched esprit de corps, from aircraft maintenance workers and infantrymen to sailors and combat pilots.

In fact, Mr. Cohen has repeatedly said that decade's modernization enabled the force to carry out an array of missions in the 1990s.

Since Mr. Clinton took office, the military has operated under intense operational and social pressures. Commanders have been embroiled in an endless debate on homosexuals. Pentagon political appointees launched an unprecedented campaign to wipe out sexual harassment, creating an array of sensitivity sessions and urging people to file complaints.

The real rub occurred when Mr. Clinton began deploying forces around the world on a record 48 peace enforcement and combat missions by 1999, costing $30 billion.

The Army, Navy and Air Force all missed recruiting goals for the first time since the late 1970s.

The Navy could not afford necessary flying hours for pilots on shore between carrier deployments. The result: Some units did not reach acceptable readiness levels until their carrier actually arrived on station.

"Training readiness has been degraded among our non-deployed forces, particularly among the aviation community," Adm. Jay Johnson, then chief of naval operations, told a Senate committee in 1999.

A senior Senate defense staffer issued a report earlier this year that painted a poor picture of Air Force-Navy pilot training. "At our premier air combat training facilities, we have too few instructor pilots, too few aircraft for them to fly; old, sometimes structurally failing aircraft. . . ." said the report. "These aging aircraft are inadequately supplied with spare parts and they routinely lack basic weapon system components that student pilots will be required to use in combat."

During the Kosovo conflict last year, the Air Force Air Combat Command (ACC) in Langley, Va., wrote a bluntly worded memo, obtained by The Times.

"Our operational units are suffering," it said. "Numerous ACC units have low sortie ratings due to inadequate spares support. Few serviceable spare engines, depleted wartime spare kits. Although the leading causes vary by unit, inadequate funding in '96 and '97 was the underlying cause."

In the Army, two of 10 active divisions were not combat ready for a brief period. It missed recruiting goals in 1998 and '99, forcing planners to lower standards and offer huge increases in sign-up bonuses to meet this year's quota.

At first, the Pentagon refused to acknowledge the problem. In fact, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (with the exception of Marine Corps Gen. Charles Krulak) in February 1998 told Congress' military committees that the state of the military was good.

But congressional Republicans knew otherwise based on anecdotal information reaching Washington. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, Mississippi Republican, sent Mr. Clinton a letter saying the force needed an infusion of quick cash. The president was noncommittal.

The Senate Armed Services Committee then held hearings to shed light on the problem. Staffers worked behind the scenes to persuade the Joint Chiefs to publicly admit the force was in trouble and to ask Mr. Clinton for more money.

The gambit worked. The chiefs reversed themselves in the fall of 1998, admitted there were shortfalls and urged Mr. Clinton to offer up more money, which Congress topped with extra cash.

Unwittingly, the Republicans' quick action may be helping Mr. Gore. Increased defense budgets allowed the services to put more recruiters in the field and increase inducements. Pilots received higher retention bonuses. Spare-parts assembly lines started up again. Training hours increased. Retention improved.

"There are some structural problems that we have, particularly in our support elements, that need to be corrected," Ret. Gen. George Joulwan, former supreme commander of NATO, said on "Fox News Sunday." "But we have, I think, a ready Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines to do the job assigned."

• Joyce Howard Price contributed to this report.

---

USA Today
08/28/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

North Carolina

Raleigh - About 500 officers swarming a neighborhood near North Carolina State University dampened this year's back-to-school parties. The annual Brent Road bash has attracted thousands of partygoers from other state schools and from military bases. Military police enforced orders declaring the area off-limits for service members.

South Carolina

Charleston - Citadel officials say the state military college is drawing students worldwide. The latest freshman class of 650 has cadets from 44 states and seven countries. The school received a record of nearly 2,000 applications. There are 31 female cadets, and minorities make up 14% of the group.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

WORLD'S LARGEST WIND ENERGY INSTALLATION PLANNED FOR TEXAS

AmeriScan: August 28, 2000
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/aug2000/2000L-08-28-09.html

HOUSTON, Texas, August 28, 2000 (ENS) - The largest single wind energy installation of its kind will be located on the 3,141 foot King Mountain near McCamey in west Texas. Reliant Energy has formed an unregulated affiliate, Reliant Energy Renewables Inc., to construct 160 wind turbines, each of which can generate 1.3 megawatts. The King Mountain Wind Ranch is designed to be the largest single wind power installation in the world in terms of capacity. "The wind ranch complex can produce more than 200 megawatts of renewable power, using only the natural environment - the West Texas wind - to rotate giant turbine blades to generate the electricity," says company official Jeff Ferguson. "That means we are not dependent on the fossil fuels that would normally be required on a continual basis to generate the electricity, such as natural gas or coal."

Wind turbines at Bushland, Texas (Photo courtesy Sandia National Lab)

Construction on the facility will start this fall, and the wind farm will be built and operated by Cielo Wind Power LLC, and Renewable Energy Systems (USA) Inc. Reliant will buy the electricity for resale. "As a result of Reliant Energy's progressive position on wind energy, millions of gallons of water resources will be conserved, tons of air emissions will be eliminated, and hundreds of jobs will be created in rural Upton County," said Walter Hornaday, president of Cielo. Reliant will also generate electricity from methane gas at 12 landfill sites in the state, to produce 44 megawatts of power. The methane will be collected from shallow wells drilled into each landfill, and will reduce the escape of uncontrolled methane into the atmosphere.

* WORLD'S LARGEST SOLAR PARKING LOT OPENS IN CALIFORNIA

SACRAMENTO, California, August 28, 2000 (ENS) - The electric utility in Sacramento has commissioned the largest parking lot solar system in the world. The Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) has installed almost 14,000 solar photovoltaic (PV) modules in the main parking lot of the California State Fair. Cal Expo opened on August 18 and will continue until Labor Day on September 4. The 540 kilowatt (kW) solar system captures the sun's energy to generate sufficient electricity for 180 residential homes. The modules are mounted on 20 sun tracking platforms to follow the sun as it arcs across the sky. In addition to providing green power for the utility, the PV modules also provide an oasis of shaded parking in a desert of scorching blacktop. The installation provides 1,000 shaded parking spaces and features a display explaining how solar technology works to visitors to Cal Expo. Each cantilevered structure has three rows of PV panels. Each of the 20 arrays, made up of 685 modules, is 130 feet long, 42 feet wide and 14 feet high.

Solar panels provide shade for 1,000 cars on the fairgrounds (Photo courtesy SMUD)

The project is the latest commercial installation under SMUD's PV Pioneer I program, where the utility retains ownership of the solar equipment that feeds renewable energy directly to the power grid. In the PV Pioneer II program started last year, customers own the solar equipment and sell excess electricity back to SMUD. SMUD has the largest utility owned distributed solar energy system in the U.S., with more than 600 customers involved in the two PV programs. The total installed capacity of solar energy systems exceeds 7,000 kW.

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Alternative vehicles - the race to build a cleaner car

By Jim Motavalli and Jennifer Bogo,
E Magazine
Monday, August 28, 2000
http://enn.com/features/2000/08/08282000/alttrans_30737.asp

Only public transportation can really solve the problems of gridlock and polluted skies in U.S. cities, but the prospects for a rail and bus renaissance aren't great.

"The car will not vanish, so we must clean it up," writes Hank Dittmar of the Surface Transportation Policy Project.

Only public transportation can really solve the problems of gridlock and polluted skies in U.S. cities, but the prospects for a rail and bus renaissance aren't great.

The Bay Area Rapid Transit system provides mass transportation services for the greater San Francisco Bay area.

The United States has poured $329 billion into new highway construction in the past 40 years without raising much public indignation, but the halls of Congress are full of cries for the elimination of Amtrak subsidies, which have cost us all of $20 billion since 1971.

In his book "Future Drive: Electric Vehicles and Sustainable Transportation" (Island Press), Daniel Sperling notes, "Even a herculean doubling of transit ridership would lessen vehicle trips in the United States by only 4 percent, resulting in much less than a four percent reduction in emissions and energy use." Obviously, he adds, we could do more by cleaning up car technology.

Fortunately, that cleanup is under way, if only in fits and starts. Driven by air pollution legislation, the threat of global warming and a suddenly animated international competition, car makers are making quantum leaps forward in technology. The new vehicles, with both hybrid (gas and electric) and fuel cell drive-trains, promise to not only greatly reduce pollution, but also to perform better, be more reliable, cruise farther and last much longer than anything the public has ever seen. This could be, in short, a whole new evolution of the automobile, at a time when such progress is desperately needed.

The first hybrid cars, the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight, roll out this year. Both get more than 60 miles to the gallon. Fuel cell cars, which promise to liberate us from internal combustion altogether, will take longer, but Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Toyota and Honda have all made commitments to produce them by 2004. Fuel cells may soon power our watches, our laptop computers and our homes.

Most environmentalists don't love cars, and they shouldn't. But as urban sprawl continues apace in the new century, we're only adding to our auto addiction. Cleaner cars are worth at least a loose salute.

-------- environment

Green Hopeful Pursues Reconciliation

Albuqueque Journal
Tuesday, August 29, 2000
By Tania Soussan Journal Staff Writer
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/110985news08-29-00.htm

Green Party vice presidential candidate Winona LaDuke told an Albuquerque crowd Monday that government and politics need a strong dose of reconciliation.

She said people need to come to terms with one another and with the environment.

"Our strategy is one of reconciliation," LaDuke said of the Green Party. "We must hold that in our hearts and not let that go. ... Let us have the courage to engage America in a new dialogue."

About 150 people who gathered at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center gave LaDuke plenty of applause and a standing ovation.

The running mate of Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader also was scheduled to appear in Santa Fe and on the nationally syndicated radio program "Native America Calling," which is broadcast from Albuquerque.

LaDuke lives on the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota and is a member of the Mississippi band of Anishinaabeg. She is an author and environmental activist.

She said she spent time as a teen-ager working on uranium and coal mining issues in New Mexico.

In a 30-minute talk Monday, LaDuke outlined problems ranging from environmental degradation to a large rift between rich and poor Americans.

"We have in this country, however, no absence of solutions and no absence of money to fix it," she said. "What we have is an absence of political will."

If elected, LaDuke said, she would support alternative energy, hemp farming, breaching dams to assist salmon spawning, more unions and tax reform to take breaks away from corporations.

LaDuke, who turned 41 last week, cut questions short because she is breastfeeding her newborn baby during breaks between campaign appearances.

"I don't see Dick Cheney nursing any children," she said.

Cheney is the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee.

Barbara King of Albuquerque said she welcomed LaDuke's call for reconciliation. "That's important," King said. "It's not just us and them, whatever the issues are."

Martha Dominguez of Albuquerque said she is a committed Green Party voter.

"Both Winona LaDuke and Ralph Nader are giving us an option, an option that is not available right now with the two parties," she said.

Albuquerque resident Tom Lockwood said he liked what LaDuke had to say but hasn't decided for whom he will vote.

"She brought up some issues that all people should be concerned about, Democrats and Republicans included," he said.

Nader will be in New Mexico on Sept. 7 and 8.

---

Protecting the Earth

New York Times
August 28, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/28mon1.html

Earlier this month, scientists spotted a patch of open ocean about a mile wide at the North Pole, where the ice is normally six to nine feet deep. This remarkable discovery followed close on the heels of a prediction from Norwegian scientists that the polar icecap could disappear, at least in summer, in 50 years. To most climatologists, the thinning of the sea ice is further proof of the warming of the earth's atmosphere, a potentially disruptive trend that hardly mainstream scientists now dispute.

This is the sort of thing that Al Gore loves to talk about, but so far global warming has barely entered the presidential campaign. In fact, except for a three-day period when Mr. Gore talked about energy policy, environmental questions generally have been hidden behind big-ticket items like Social Security, taxes and national defense. But few issues are as vexing and contentious as those that touch on the relationship between people and nature -- issues like clean air, the degradation of the oceans and marine life, the preservation of open space and biodiversity, and climate change.

The nation faces two broad environmental imperatives. The first is to continue the momentum of the last 30 years, a period when Congress moved legislatively to clean up the damage inflicted by the Industrial Revolution and to give environmental concerns equal weight with economic development. The second is to help the rest of the world grapple with problems that override national boundaries, like global warming and destruction of biodiversity.

Domestically, the green revolution took wing under Richard Nixon, who presided over the creation of an astonishing body of environmental law. It accelerated under Jimmy Carter, and burst forward again under Bill Clinton, who is ending his term with a series of intricate regulatory moves designed to outfox a hostile Congress and add millions of acres of threatened wilderness to the public domain before he leaves office. But at no time could this progress be taken for granted. President Ronald Reagan's appointees did their best to thwart the will of Congress through inertia and lax enforcement. In 1995, the Gingrich Republicans came very close to rescinding some of the country's basic environmental protections.

The attitude of the White House is decisive. Mr. Reagan's appointees undermined existing law because the president did not care. The Contract With America gang failed because Mr. Clinton did care. So it goes, throughout government. Whether the Army Corps of Engineers, which for decades loved to build dams and straighten out free-flowing rivers, serves or damages the environment depends on whom the president appoints as its civilian chief and whether he keeps an eye on it. Similarly, when the bureaucracy finally gets around to using its existing statutory authority to regulate industrial farmers who foul rivers with animal waste, it will be because some chief executive has ordered it to.

The global issues are of course less amenable to Washington's influence, but these problems cannot begin to be solved without presidential involvement. Put simply, the less-developed world, including China, will not reduce emissions of the gases that contribute to global warming unless the industrialized nations do. The industrialized nations, meanwhile, cannot move forward without the active participation of the United States, the world's biggest producer of those gases. But Congress has refused to force industry to clean up emissions. Nor has it offered industry any incentives to do so. Though Mr. Clinton helped negotiate the Kyoto agreement on global warming in 1997, he chose not to spend further political capital on the issue.

So far, Mr. Gore has taken a more assertive approach than Gov. George W. Bush on all of these questions. Mr. Gore helped devise the administration's aggressive regulatory strategies under the clean air and water laws and fortified Mr. Clinton's resolve to oppose Republican efforts to weaken those laws. He can also be expected to continue Mr. Clinton's efforts to guard and expand the public lands. In Texas, Mr. Bush has pursued a cooperative approach emphasizing voluntary solutions to environmental problems, and has said that as president he would turn over "significant" authority to local governments. While he supports the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, he has criticized important administration initiatives on wilderness protection and has promised to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration.

Global warming, of course, is Mr. Gore's signature environmental issue, and he is likely to give it a kind of prominence that Mr. Clinton did not. He has also unveiled an ambitious and fairly detailed menu of subsidies and market incentives aimed at helping industry achieve dramatic reductions in greenhouse gases. Mr. Bush agrees that global warming is a problem, but so far he has given no details of what he would do about it. The candidates' positions on warming reflect the overall pattern of the campaign to date on environmental matters. Mr. Bush has expressed general concern for these issues, and on Friday singled out the preservation of tropical forests as a priority in his diplomacy with Latin America. But Mr. Gore has outlined more detailed remedies and conveyed a more muscular attitude about enforcement.

---

Discarded computers create waste problem

USA Today
08/28/00- Updated 09:58 PM ET
By John Yaukey, Gannett News Service
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndsmon14.htm

They once cost thousands of dollars and were considered a major investment meant to last.

Now computers sell for hundreds of dollars and are obsolete 18 months after they're out of the bubble wrap.

Rapid innovation in computer hardware is dramatically cutting the cost and useful life of modern computers, creating a national solid waste problem.

Computers are more than just clunky trash; they're loaded with such toxic substances as lead, cadmium, mercury and chromium that can leach into soil and contaminate groundwater.

"It's still a small fraction of the waste stream, but it has every prospect of growing," says Elizabeth Cotsworth, director of Solid Waste at the Environmental Protection Agency. "So now's the time to start thinking about it on the policy level."

Indeed, the problem has huge potential.

Consider the average PC: 5 to 8 pounds of lead (to protect the user from radiation) in the cathode-ray tube screen alone. Circuit boards typically contain several pounds of cadmium, mercury and chromium. The whole package is housed in brominated, flame-retardant plastic.

In 1998, more than 20 million computers hit obsolescence, but only 11% were recycled. Experts say that's only going to get worse, as computers get increasingly cheaper, faster and more disposable.

By 2005, 350 million machines will have reached obsolescence, with at least 55 million expected to end up in landfills, according to the National Safety Council.

Consider also the backlog. About three-quarters of all computers ever bought in the USA are sitting in warehouses, attics, basements and closets, the council says.

Part of the problem is the wild success of the hardware and software industries, something physical chemist Gordon Moore foresaw long ago when chips were something you ate with dip.

In 1965, working with Fairchild Semiconductor, he predicted the number of math-crunching transistors that computer engineers could cram onto a chip would double every 18 months. That offhand comment, later codified into Moore's Law, has proved one of the most enduring axioms of the electronic age - computers become obsolete about every 18 months.

The good news is that most computers are highly reusable, and up to 97% of the parts can be recycled either as upgraded components for use in other computers, or melted down as scrap.

"There's just no need to throw this stuff into the landfill," says Michael Magliaro of New Hampshire-based DME Electronics Recycling, one of the largest recyclers of computers and other electronics. "Even if you can't reuse the parts, it's easier, cheaper and better for the environment to extract the valuable metals out of this stuff and reuse them than it is to mine them. At no level is an old computer trash."

Industry in general is aware of this, according to regulators and electronics recyclers, in part because they have no choice.

Companies routinely donate old computers to schools and charities. And those they dispose of must be handled in accordance with the U.S. Code's Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which means separate from regular trash.

It's the consumer that's the problem. The EPA doesn't regulate residential computer disposal - at least for now - which means in most places, all those chemicals and lead can go out to the curb, off to the landfill and eventually into groundwater.

Regulators say most of the problem with consumers is timing and knowledge.

Often when someone upgrades to a new PC, they put the old one in a closet, unable to part immediately with something in which they have invested significant money.

"The problem with that is you have a machine at or approaching obsolesce sitting around for another year in the closet," Cotsworth says. "So by the time you give it to a school or a charity, it's so out of date, it's almost useless. If you're going to donate your old computer, you want to do it while it's still got some life left in it."

The next step is recycling. But qualified handlers, who usually deal primarily with industry, are few, far between and not well known among consumers.

"As a rule, anytime the consumer has to look hard for a means of disposal, they're going to give up and (indiscriminately) throw out whatever they're trying to get rid of," says Steve Rowe, a Washington state-based attorney specializing in environmental law and policy.

In the absence of federal guidelines, states and communities are taking spotty action:

Massachusetts recently became the first state to forbid the disposal of computer monitors in landfills.

California's environmental agencies encourage consumers to donate or recycle.

Meanwhile, Goodwill and other charitable groups traditionally linked with old furniture and clothing are taking computers.

Mindful of their role as producers of computer waste, the industry is developing materials that can be recycled more easily.

IBM has teamed with Cornell University, for example, to produce an epoxy that can be easily removed from PC components, making them more convenient to recycle.

Recyclers such as Magliaro, who have a good view of the problem from production to disposal, are optimistic that improved computer design, increased public awareness and better recycling infrastructure - the business can be lucrative - will work together to help solve the problem. "Soon it will be like your car battery or your oil - when it's dead, you take it to a local facility for proper disposal," he says. "There's no reason this should be that complicated."

---

USA Today
08/28/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Delaware

Wilmington - Northern Delaware's air contains some of the USA's highest concentrations of toxic pollutants, some of which are linked to cancer, a federal environmental study has found. State officials attribute it to the state's location in the densely populated, industrialized Northeast corridor.

Illinois

Chicago - Air pollution from planes at O'Hare International Airport raises the risk of cancer beyond acceptable levels in surrounding areas, according to a study commissioned by neighboring suburbs. They cite it as another reason to oppose airport expansion, but Chicago officials point to two city-funded studies last year that showed that most of the area's air contamination comes from trucks, cars and factories.

New Hampshire

Manchester - Loons are benefiting from a statewide ban on lead fishing sinkers. In January, the state became the first in the USA to prohibit use of certain sizes of lead, which poisons loons if they eat it. Since then, there has been only one known death of a loon from lead weights, compared with eight to 10 deaths last summer.

---

'You are wrong'

Washington Times
August 28, 2000
Inside the Beltway John McCaslin
Political tidbits and other shenanigans from around the nation's capital.
http://208.246.212.80/national/inbeltway.htm

Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, last week denounced former President Carter for calling on President Clinton to make the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain a national monument.

Mr. Carter made the call during a visit to Alaska. In a letter to his fellow Democrat, Mr. Knowles said the ex-president "used our state as a media prop and platform to project your message to President Clinton."

In the two-page letter to Mr. Carter, the Alaska governor used the phrase "you are wrong" four times, as in: "You are wrong in calling for executive action at the midnight hour instead of an open, public democratic process."

-------- police

After Mass, Police Chief and Mayor Call for Unity

New York Times
August 28, 2000
By ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/regional/082800ny-mayor.html

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his new police commissioner took their community relations campaign to an Upper West Side church yesterday, attending a Mass and speaking again about the need for unity among the city's varied people.

It was the second Sunday in a row of churchgoing for the mayor and Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik, who has made clear since his appointment a week ago that he considers improving police relations with the city's ethnic and racial groups a major part of his mandate.

"Everybody that doesn't have a political agenda, they are talking about the same thing: uniting people," Mr. Kerik said, alluding to criticism last week by some black leaders who suggested his efforts are more show than substance. "That is what I want to do with the New York City Police Department."

The two were greeted warmly at Holy Name of Jesus Roman Catholic Church on West 96th Street, first with applause during the service and later with handshakes and even some hugs from parishioners as they stood just outside the church, which celebrates Mass in three languages.

"How has God blessed New York City?" Mr. Giuliani said at the conclusion of the Spanish-language service to the roughly 400 members of the congregation, made up largely of natives of Central and South America. "We are the most diverse city. We are the city that speaks the most languages in the history of the world. We practice every religion: on Friday at mosque, on Saturdays at the synagogue, on Sunday at the churches in all languages."

Mr. Giuliani urged churchgoers to respect their neighbors as well as police officers and discussed the need to reduce crime and his belief that the New York City police are "better than any police department in the country" at working with people from diverse cultures.

But the mayor, who was criticized this year for his unapologetic reaction to the police shooting in March of an unarmed black man, acknowledged yesterday that work remained to be done on community relations. "We need to reach out," he said.

Mr. Kerik urged church members to join community councils that advise precinct commanders, groups that he said would receive much more attention during his tenure, and reminded them about the department's campaign to recruit more black and Hispanic officers, noting that applications for the entrance exam are being accepted until Oct. 6.

Their visit to the church, which came one week after a visit to a predominantly black church in East New York, Brooklyn, seemed to impress the parishioners.

"Maybe we are going to work together," said one member, Milagros Stanly, 59. "Maybe."

---

USA Today
08/28/00
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Michigan

Grand Rapids - A law that takes effect today makes it easier for police to arrest people suspected of committing misdemeanors. The law will allow police to make arrests for minor offenses without a warrant. Previously, such arrests were limited to more serious crimes such as murder. The ACLU says it fears police may abuse their discretion.

---

Police perplexed in dealing with cybercrime
Buyer, beware: Consumers getting ripped off on Net

USA Today
08/28/00- Updated 09:23 PM ET
By Alison Gerber, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndsmon12.htm

When Sherry Dukes tried to buy two rare Barbie dolls from a man she contacted over the Internet, she lost $600.

Had the money been stolen from her house or car, the police in Augusta, Ga., likely would have tried to track it. But because Dukes sent the money to Seattle, 2,818 miles away, the police told her there wasn't much they could do.

Dukes, 47, tracked down 25 others who said they'd been scammed by the same man. She sought help from state and federal authorities. "One agency would just turn us over to another agency," she says. "Lord, it was frustrating."

Dukes' situation, law enforcement experts say, is common: Local agencies won't take cybercrime cases because they are unsure how to treat them or because the suspect is in another state. Meanwhile, such cases usually aren't significant enough to interest federal agencies.

The result: Thousands of petty crimes orchestrated over the Internet often go unpunished. The scope of the problem is revealed in a study by the Internet Fraud Complaint Center, a joint project of the FBI and the Justice Department. The center says it has received more than 1,000 consumer complaints a week since May.

Law enforcement has seen a burst of so-called cybercops -- officers who patrol the Internet's underbelly to police the pedophiles, stalkers, scam artists and other predators who lurk in cyberspace. The bulk of those officers work for state and federal agencies or large police departments.

Police in small towns and counties often are not equipped to track Internet crime. That's what Dukes ran into when she tried to tell authorities about her situation.

"Six hundred dollars isn't chicken feed, but after a while, I wasn't even worried about the money," Dukes says. "It was the point of it. A crime had been committed, and nobody would help."

Local departments are struggling to deal with a range of issues concerning cybercrime:

The cost of training officers to track computer crime. Training options also are limited.

Whether they have jurisdiction if the victim and the suspect are in different towns or states.

Losing manpower. Every officer working cyberspace is one less officer fighting bad guys on a community's streets.

Local departments often rely on state and federal agencies, but those officers juggle heavy cybercrime caseloads.

In Dukes' case, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle took the case, and this year, it brought charges against a man accused of defrauding online buyers of $15,000. But that didn't happen until Dukes had been turned down by several other agencies.

Donald Daufenbach , a senior special agent with the U.S. Customs Service, says it makes sense for federal agencies to handle Internet crimes because they often cross state borders.

"But we're all getting inundated with these calls," he says. "There are days when I receive 15 cases referred to me alone. You can't keep up with it. In the federal system, the threshold is larger. And you look at the typical scam on the Internet, it's not that big."

The result, Daufenbach says: The Internet "has created a world in which petty crime can exist."

William Tafoya , a professor of Criminal Justice at Governors State University in University Park, Ill., and a retired FBI agent, says he regularly gets calls from victims of cybercrime who can't get help from police. The crimes range from a disgruntled employee who sabotaged a database to Internet scams.

"In the last few years, there's been an emphasis on tracking Internet criminals, but mostly, the emphasis is on pornographers and pedophiles," Tafoya says. "For the most part, there's an insignificant commitment of money and investigators."

A bill introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., would provide $25 million for training state and local law enforcement officials and for prosecuting cybercrimes. Smaller departments need to know how to handle complaints, even if the case is handed to another agency, Leahy says. "We train them to collect blood samples, fingerprints and bullets," he says. "But sometimes, when they've got a computer crime, they don't know how to preserve the evidence."

Leahy's bill is awaiting action by the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Meanwhile, local departments that set up computer crimes units often face resistance, says Cmdr. Dave Pettinari of the Pueblo County Sheriff's Office in Colorado.

That office, which has 70 officers, set up a high-tech crimes unit last October and has handled 22 cases, including stalking, child pornography, hacking and counterfeiting.

"Naysayers said, 'Why are you forming this unit? You'll only have one crime a year,'" Pettinari says. "It was a very difficult thing to convince the powers that be that we needed to have someone doing this full-time."

Other small- and mid-size departments face similar challenges.

"With the Internet, if the victim could be here and the suspect is in Corpus Christi (Texas), we've got to go there to interview them," says Yost Zakhary , the police chief in Woodway, Texas, which has a force of 24 officers. "It's not like just going across town. It's expensive and time-consuming."

Zakhary's goal is to have an officer trained in computer crime in a year. He estimates the training will cost $30,000 to $40,000.

Even so, he says, it's something the department should do because state and federal agencies simply won't be able to handle every Internet case. "Sometimes, it'll be left to the local department, and we have to be prepared," he says.

Some regions tackle cybercrime with task forces that allow various agencies to pool expertise. The Computer Law Enforcement of Washington is a group that local, Washington state and federal agencies formed in March to fight cybercrime.

The idea is to avoid duplicating efforts, state Assistant Attorney General Lana Martuscelli says.

Task forces require a shift in mindset in police and community leadership, says Richard Myers, the police chief in Appleton, Wis.

"If I have a full-time officer doing this, and 60% of the time they're off working with another department, it's not going to take long before my elected officials say, 'We don't need that position,'" he says. "It's going to require a new way of thinking."

The National White Collar Crime Center in Fairmont, W.Va., has been training state and local law enforcement in fighting cybercrime for four years. It trains 1,500 people a year, compared with the 200 it trained in its first year.

-------- spying

American granted new trial in Peru

USA Today
08/28/00- Updated 04:38 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/nw1.htm#towe

LIMA, Peru - Peru's military tribunal has voided the life sentence of Lori Berenson, an American woman charged with terrorism, opening the way for a new trial in a civilian court, her lawyer said Monday. Berenson, 30, a New York native and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student, was convicted by a secret military court in 1996 for helping rebels with the leftist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement plan an attack on Peru's Congress. Peruvian authorities thwarted the attack. Berenson's defense attorney said that she would remain in prison until a civilian trial. Berenson's parents have carried out a campaign to free their daughter, who has been held living in harsh conditions in Peruvian prisons. The decision came despite the longtime insistence by President Alberto Fujimori that she is a terrorist and will serve her full sentence in Peruvian prisons.

---

CIA turns over evidence in Pan Am bombing

USA Today
08/28/00- Updated 12:25 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/nlead.htm

CAMP ZEIST, Netherlands - The case of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people, took a new and historic turn Monday. The CIA has given a foreign court access to secret dispatches from one of its spies. The spy, a former Libyan agent who offered his services to the CIA, will be in court this week to present key evidence. Lawyers for two Libyans accused in the Lockerbie case have been given revised texts of dispatches from Libyan double agent Abdul Majid Giaka. Over the weekend, the CIA withdrew its censorship of parts of the cables it previously deleted from Giaka's dispatches. Newly revealed information included references to CIA payments to Giaka and his request to secure a waiver from Libyan military service. This is the first time that the CIA has turned over evidence to a foreign court.

---

Borrowing Gertz

Washington Times
August 28, 2000
Inside the Beltway John McCaslin
Political tidbits and other shenanigans from around the nation's capital.
http://208.246.212.80/national/inbeltway.htm

As part of a program to improve security, the State Department since May has been giving security briefings to 7,000 employees.

Are they warned to watch out for Russian spies planting bugs in conference rooms?

Or keep their eyes open for thieves among private contractors, who could lift laptops with classified information?

Nope.

Instead, two State Department officials can't resist telling us that one of the main targets of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security briefings is Bill Gertz, a reporter for The Washington Times, and his recent best-selling book, "Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security," a critical assessment of the Clinton administration's defense and national security policies.

One briefer told employees "this is a bad book" because it contains an appendix with classified documents, published to bolster the author's argument.

The briefer added to one audience: "Don't buy it, go to the library and get it."

Reached for comment, State Department spokesman Andy Laine replied the briefer "doesn't disparage" the book.

Rather, he explains, the department is holding up the Gertz book as "an example of somebody leaking classified information."

-------- terrorism

Peru Grants U.S. Woman Civilian Trial

Yahoo News
Monday August 28
By Alistair Scrutton
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000828/ts/peru_berenson_dc_3.html

LIMA (Reuters) - Peru's top military court on Monday granted a surprise civilian retrial to Lori Berenson, a U.S. woman jailed for life as a Marxist guerrilla, in a move that could resolve a four-year irritant in relations with Washington.

``There is a new, civilian trial for Berenson,'' said the New York woman's lawyer, Grimaldo Achahui. ``The new trial should in theory begin almost immediately,'' he said, adding that Berenson would remain in jail until the new trial began.

A statement from the Supreme Military Justice Commission, giving no reasons, said it had decided not to act further on Berenson's case and was sending it to civilian courts.

The commission annulled a 1996 treason verdict by a secret military court which found Berenson, 30, had been a member of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement (MRTA) and helped plot an abortive attempt to storm Peru's Congress.

She will now be tried on ``terrorism'' charges that carry the same maximum sentence of life in jail, her lawyer said.

The case has been a source of friction in relations with the United States, which has urged Peru to hold a civilian trial for Berenson on the grounds that the military court denied her due process.

Berenson's supporters say the military court did not permit her lawyer to give evidence or cross-examine witnesses.

The U.S. embassy in Lima welcomed the decision to hold a new trial. ``We are very pleased... We are looking for a fair and open trial and one that meets due process standards,'' a spokesman told Reuters.

Her parents said they were glad the Peruvians had recognized their ``mistake'' but told a news conference in New York there was no justification for Peru to detain their daughter a single day more.

``It is not possible for Lori to have a fair trial in Peru under present conditions,'' her father, Mark Berenson, said.

Her mother Rhoda said: ``It's a very important first step. We know if we persevere, we're going to get her home.''

Berenson, who maintains she is innocent and staged a brief hunger strike early this year, suffers from poor vision and a circulation problem that has caused her hands to swell after four years in cold, dimly lit cells on a poor diet.

Monday's ruling came as a surprise because President Alberto Fujimori has previously refused to grant a new trial. He has won accolades locally for his hardline stance on the issue.

Peruvians, who suffered through fierce guerrilla wars in the late 1980s and early 1990s, generally have little sympathy for the American and believe the courts treated her the same as anyone else accused of being a rebel.

But since his May re-election, which the opposition boycotted and condemned as fraudulent, Fujimori has faced international pressure to clean up his human rights image and restore credibility to Peru's democracy.

Some opposition commentators said the Berenson ruling was a tactic to defuse U.S. criticism of the conditions surrounding the elections in which Fujimori won a third term.

Peru argues its secret trials -- often conducted by hooded judges -- stemmed a flood of releases of suspected rebels in civilian courts where judges feared reprisals. It also acknowledges military judges trying guerrilla cases imprisoned hundreds of innocent people.

Fujimori's tough stance since he came to power in 1990 has battered MRTA and the larger Shining Path group, whose armed struggle to impose a communist state have cost about 30,000 lives since 1980.

The Berenson decision was announced as government and opposition parties negotiate democratic reforms brokered by the Organization of American States.

---

American Woman Wins New Trial in Peru

New York Times
August 28, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/late/28cnd-peru.html

LIMA, Peru -- Peru's military tribunal has voided the life sentence of Lori Berenson, an American woman charged with terrorism, opening the way for a new trial in a civilian court, her lawyer said Monday.

Berenson, 30, a New York native and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student, was convicted by a secret military court in 1996 for helping rebels with the leftist Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement plan an attack on Peru's Congress. Peruvian authorities thwarted the attack.

Berenson's defense attorney, Grimaldo Achahui, told Radioprogramas that Peru's Military Tribunal had overturned Berenson's sentence, but that she would remain in prison until a civilian trial.

"We have fought to the last moment so that she would be judged in a civilian court where she will avail of due process with all guarantees of a right to a defense," he said.

"This does not signify that she will be granted liberty. (The case) will pass immediately to the civil prosecutor," he added.

Berenson's parents have carried out a campaign to free their daughter, who has been held living in harsh conditions in Peruvian prisons. The decision came despite the longtime insistence by President Alberto Fujimori that she is a terrorist and will serve her full sentence in Peruvian prisons.

Berenson has maintained she is innocent of the charges that she helped the alleged plot, which involved taking over Congress and bargaining for the release of imprisoned rebels.

Radioprogramas reported that military authorities had released a statement that the military tribunal overturned Berenson's sentence on Thursday. Military representatives were not immediately available to confirm the report.

"We haven't had anything confirmed. Certainly, it's a great relief if the government of Peru has finally recognized that it was mistaken in its charges against Lori and that it has dismissed its case in the military tribunal after all these years," said Berenson's mother, Rhoda Berenson, from New York.

"But any effort by the government to seek a new trial would clearly be wrong under all these circumstances and a further violation of fundamental human rights," she added.

Berenson has said that she was not allowed to present evidence at her trial or to question prosecution witnesses and that the judge wore a hood.

U.S. Embassy officials in Lima, who for years have pressed for a civilian trial for Berenson, said they were trying to obtain independent confirmation of the radio report.

-------- activists

World religious leaders convene peace summit

Washington Times
August 28, 2000
By Larry Witham
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000828221212.htm

Hundreds of world religious leaders today will enter the United Nations General Assembly hall in a procession of prayer, for the first time taking a spiritual agenda to the heart of the political body.

The Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders, assembling more than 1,000 participants from 12 world faiths, will work on proposals to end armed conflict, poverty and harm to nature.

"A number of conflicts in the world are based on religious differences," said Bawa Jain, secretary-general of the event, which ends Thursday.

He said religious harmony is a first step for world faiths to help political bodies with conflict resolution, as an "early warning system," and for global education.

"We've tried to steer away from the political," said Mr. Jain.

With political topics off-limits, attendance has been possible for such religious leaders as Rabbi Meir Lau, chief rabbi of Israel, and Muslim World League leader Abdullah Salaih Al-Obaid.

"Many participants have never engaged in meetings like this," said Mr. Jain, who noted that Hindu swamis, Peruvian shamans and Buddhist sages are all participating.

The only hitch so far has been the exclusion, in deference to China, of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan Buddhist leader. After protests, he was invited to give a closing talk Thursday at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, but he would not accept an invitation "made out of compulsion."

"This is an issue the organizers of the meeting have known all along," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said, noting the "sensitivities" of member states.

"You try to make progress, take progress, as you get it," said Mr. Annan, who addresses the religious leaders tomorrow.

The unprecedented meeting, which unfolds inside the United Nations today and tomorrow before moving to the hotel, was born of "conversations" between Mr. Annan and media leader Ted Turner a year ago.

It has been organized as a non-governmental organization, or NGO, with an advisory board of international religious leaders and funding by Mr. Turner's Better World Fund and other well-known foundations. Mr. Turner is honorary chairman.

"What I hope the U.N. will find is the appropriate way for its peace work to relate to our religious communities," said the Rev. Leonid Kishkovsky, an Orthodox leader with the World Conference on Religion and Peace. "Religion is part of the solution, but could not carry the whole burden."

The summit has the blessings of the Vatican, which is sending Cardinal Francis Arinze, head of inter-religious work. The head of the World Council of Churches, the Rev. Conrad Raiser, also will be present.

The event has been criticized by some evangelicals, and some interfaith activists are wary of a proposed International Advisory Council of Religious and Spiritual Leaders under the United Nations.

"It would weaken the witness of these religious leaders because they would be . . . bogged down in the political culture of the U.N.," Brother Wayne Teasdale of the Parliament of World Religions told Religion News Service.

The conservative Family Research Council said the summit would not defend "religious freedom around the world and will more likely offend the values of the pro-life and pro-family faithful."

Still, top evangelical Anne Graham Lotz, a Southern Baptist and daughter of the Rev. Billy Graham, will go to deliver his message.

And so will the Rev. Richard Cizik, a Presbyterian who heads the Washington office of the National Association of Evangelicals.

"We felt it better to have someone there and see it from the inside," he said. "Our stand on religious liberty will not change. We want to bring a voice on the reconciling nature of the Gospel."

More than 60 U.S. spiritual figures will attend, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, and the Greek and Armenian Orthodox archbishops.

Like many faiths, the Bahais have a human rights grievance -about Iran - but will not use the summit to protest.

Bahai Secretary-General Albert Lincoln will speak on the "moral vacuum" that threatens the world's children and cite Bahai founder Baha Allah on "the reformation of this age" and religion's aid to "unity and concord."

The summit opens today with an afternoon procession into the U.N. building led by a Buddhist peace activist. Prayers will fill the hall today and speeches tomorrow.

The last two days divide participants into sections on religious amity, conflict resolution, poverty and the environment. They will look at cases around the world and report their conclusions.

They plan to issue a Declaration for World Peace and, Mr. Jain said, announce formation of the council. "I hope on the closing plenary to announce that," he said.

---

Capture the flag

Washington Times
August 28, 2000
Inside the Beltway John McCaslin
Political tidbits and other shenanigans from around the nation's capital.
http://208.246.212.80/national/inbeltway.htm

Georgia Reps. Cynthia A. McKinney and John Lewis, both Democrats, do not display the Georgia flag in their offices.

The two lawmakers have chosen to make a "quiet protest" against what they consider the Georgia flag's "divisive" Confederate symbol, reports Jeffrey McMurray of the Associated Press.

Miss McKinney says the state flag "should be laid to rest," but Mr. Lewis says "there's very little we can do" to change the flag's design, adopted in 1956.

The flag is not expected to be a major campaign issue in Georgia this year. A poll earlier this year showed that 56 percent of Georgians want to keep the flag, with only 31 percent wanting to change it.

Some Republicans say Georgia Democrats "are trying to have it both ways" on the flag issue, Mr. McMurray writes. Republicans says Democrats are "trying to use the flag as a tool to attack GOP supporters, yet avoid messing with it, fearing the wrath of voters."

Rep. Jack Kingston, Georgia Republican, said Democrats may be plotting a "back-room plan" to decide the issue in 2002 statewide referendum, a move Mr. Kingston said "would bring out the vote and help their side" in the off-year election.

--------

OneList subscribers:

NucNews - Please circulate -- help educate! - http://prop1.org

1. NucNews 00/08/28 - Daybook; Announcements
From: Ellen Thomas <prop1@prop1.org>

3. Denmark shows You can make a difference on NMD/Star Wars
From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign <nonukes@foesyd.org.au>

---------

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 08:38:41 -0400
From: Ellen Thomas <prop1@prop1.org>
Subject: NucNews 00/08/28 - Daybook; Announcements

1) Washington Daybook - August 28, 2000 - Washington Times, Agence France-Presse http://www.washtimes.com/national/daybook-2000828213036.htm

1 p.m. - Nuclear Regulatory Commission holds a meeting of the advisory committee on reactor safeguards planning and procedures subcommittee. Location: Room T-2B1, 11545 Rockville Pike, Rockville. Contact: 301/415-7360.

Middle East peace process discussion - 9 a.m. - The National Press Club hosts a Morning Newsmaker news conference featuring Zalman Shoval, foreign relations department head of the Likud Party, and former Israeli ambassador to the United States, discussing "The Middle East Peace Process." Location: First Amendment Room, National Press Club, 14th and F streets NW. Contact: 202/662-7593.

Colombia news conference - 12:30 p.m. - Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Washington Office on Latin America hold a news conference on the eve of President Clinton's trip to Colombia to release a special report with the latest human rights developments in Colombia. Location: Human Rights Watch Conference Room, Suite 500, 1630 Connecticut Ave. NW. Contact: 202/544-0200, ext. 302.

2) Activist Announcements

- Disarmament in the General Assembly [From: Felicity Hill <flick@igc.org>] If you would like to be on an email list to receive reports and updates from the Disarmament Committee of the General Assembly (starting October 3), this email is useful to you. Please send an email to me at mailto:flick@igc.org to get on this short term, single purpose list which will provide a weekly update, or more as activity in the 1st Committee reaches a peak towards the start of November.

- PLEASE SIGN THIS LETTER BY EMAILING HELIO INTERNATIONAL <mailto: helio@globenet.org> PETITION ADDRESSED TO THE CHAIR AND MEMBER STATES OF THE U.N. COMMISSION ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

We the undersigned NGOs active in development, environmental, disarmament and human rights issues express our deepest regret and extreme concern that nuclear energy seems to have been included in the draft agenda of CSD-9 and that this declining and unsustainable industry might be allocated space in the related exhibition.

We consider any focus on nuclear energy to be both against the spirit of Agenda 21 and the mandate of the U.N. CSD. Moreover it is contrary to the interests of developing countries which require sustainable, mostly decentralized, low-cost energy systems, adapted both to their needs and their endownments in capital, resources and labour.

Most countries are now committed to phasing out, or not developing nuclear energy. They also formally oppose the inclusion of nuclear energy into the projects of the Clean Development Mechanism to be established under the Kyoto Protocol.

At its last meeting, the G-8 stated its commitment to "encourage and facilitate investment in the development and use of sustainable energy, underpinned by enabling domestic environments, (which) will assist in mitigating the problems of climate change and air pollution. To this end, the increased use of renewable energy sources in particular will improve the quality of life, especially in developing countries." .......

Non-G8 countries are also taking similar stances. Turkey has just cancelled plans initiated in 1992 for a nuclear plant at Akkuyu. Prime Minister Bulent Evecit said in official public statement that, "the world is abandoning nuclear power". Worldwide, nuclear power has been plagued by high cost, erratic performance, endemic technical problems, the risk of catastrophic accidents, and environmental problems such as routine radiation releases, radioactive waste management and the high cost of decommissioning.

However, hardpressed nuclear vendors, mainly U.S., Canadian, French and German corporations, are eyeing the developing world as a 'last gasp' market for their products and are stepping up their lobbying efforts at U.N. conferences, including the Climate Change negotiations.

Therefore, we, the undersigned NGOs, urge you to preserve the integrity of the CSD process by ensuring that all non-sustainable energy technologies, particularly nuclear energy, are excluded from CSD9 debates, exhibitions and other activities. The CSD should focus on promoting clean, secure and sustainable forms of energy for the welfare of present and future generations as per the aim of Agenda 21. Signatures: NAME ORGANISATION FULL ADDRESS

Send to mailto:helio@globenet.org Website: http://www.globenet.org/helio

------------

Message: 3
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2000 17:18:53 +1000
From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign <nonukes@foesyd.org.au>

Denmark shows You can make a difference on NMD/Star Wars

John Hallam Friends of the Earth Sydney, 17 Lord Street, Newtown, NSW, Australia, 2042 Fax (61)(2)9517-3902 ph (61)(2)9517-3903 nonukes@foesyd.org.au http://homepages.tig.com.au/~foesyd

With a decision on NMD imminent, the emails and faxes of the Danish PM have it seems, been swamped with anti- stars wars messages.

The same needs to happen in the US, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, and Australia.

While a decision may or may not happen tomorrow it is certainly likely in the next 1-3 weeks.

We are crossing our fingers and hoping it does not happen before the release of the big NMD letter on Sept 6th.

If you are an individual you can definitely make a diference

--If you are in the US, by letting President Clinton, and the presidential candidates know that you absolutely oppose 'Star Wars'/NMD and that you want the US to take the initiative in nuclear disarmament.

--If you are elsewhwere, ask your government to let the US government know that it doesn't want them to proceed with Star Wars and that your government will not allow use of its facilities for that purpose.

If your government has already done that as the governments of France, Germany, Sweden, the UK, and many other places have, ask them too keep up the pressure.

The fax number of President Clinton is 1-202-456-2461 (Al Gore has the same number)
The fax number of Bush is 1-512-637-8800
The fax number of Prime Minister Tony Blair is 44-171-925-0918
The fax number of Gerhard Schroeder is 49-228-56-2357
The fax number of the Danish prime Minister is 45-33-11-1665.
Australians should fax foreign minister Downer on 61-2-273-4112 and
prime Minister Howard on 61-2-6273-4100.

The Danish example shows that this really does make a big difference.

So do it now.
Happy faxing!
John Hallam

------------------------------------------------------------------

DOEWatch List ----A Magnum-Opus Project
Subscribe online: http://www.onelist.com
DOEWatch page: http://members.aol.com/doewatch

1. DOE official had consulting work lined up before departure
From: magnu96196@aol.com

2. Digest Number 81
From: GByngFISHM@aol.com

3. Former Y-12 worker's family finds both puzzles, answers in records
From: magnu96196@aol.com

4. Work-related asthma puts ORNL employee on disability
From: magnu96196@aol.com

5. Our Views: City proceeding responsibly on DOE tax issue
From: magnu96196@aol.com

6. Close vote on city-DOE poll
From: magnu96196@aol.com

7. Uranium miners find more than ore in them thar hills
From: magnu96196@aol.com

8. The Damage in DNA Brookhaven lab finds a way to pinpoint radiation's effects
From: magnu96196@aol.com

9. County fights company's radioactive waste plans
From: magnu96196@aol.com

10. Russian Be for sale----European brokers
From: magnu96196@aol.com

11. Water Leaks Into Chernobyl Plant
From: Kalynda <Kalynda@wizard.com>

12. Fwd: Schroeder backs sale of nuke reprocessor to Russia
From: Kalynda <Kalynda@wizard.com>

13. Green Tea Consumption Enhances Plasma Antioxidant Capacity
From: magnu96196@aol.com

------------

Message: 1
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 07:41:30 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

DOE official had consulting work lined up before departure
Job lined up while at DOE site: report Critics say the revolving-door practice compromises DOE's ability to hold its contractors accountable.

http://www.paducahsun.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?/200008/28+01Bi_news.html+20000828+news

Jimmie Hodges had lined up consulting work for a company seeking a government contract before quitting as the Department of Energyâ€(tm)s site manager at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant. When he resigned his government job Oct. 1, 1999, Hodges already was described as a key employee of ELR Consultants in a proposal the company submitted on Sept. 10 for a contract paid for with Energy Department money, according to a report Sunday in The Courier-Journal of Louisville.

The company, based in Oak Ridge, Tenn., got a $200,000 contract in December from the Paducah Area Community Reuse Organization, a group that has received $8.4 million in taxpayer money to find jobs for laid-off workers and new uses for the uranium plant.

Hodges had been a member of the Paducah reuse organization board when ELR made its proposal for the contract to find ways to reuse 9,700 tons of radioactive nickel stored at the plant, the newspaper reported.

Several attempts to reach Hodges for comment were unsuccessful.

Energy Department lawyers at Oak Ridge told Hodges in a letter after he quit that it was legal for him to work for the consulting firm, according to organization board minutes.

However, critics noted that many Energy Department officials have resigned to go to work for contractors, bidders or consultants. They say it compromises DOE's ability to hold its contractors accountable.

"The whole revolving-door thing undermines the integrity of DOE's credibility and its management," said Robert Alvarez, a former assistant secretary of energy who is now an Energy Department critic.

Arjun Mahkijani, a nuclear critic and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Washington, said, "It's really a very serious problem. Not only are individuals going to work for contractors," but many "have their eye on doing that" while still working for DOE.

"I think they cannot provide truly sound advice and make sound decisions that benefit the taxpayers and cleanup if they are eyeing jobs with contractors, because their pocketbook has been in conflict with their intellect," he said.

Among the Energy Department officials who have gone to work for contractors are two former top managers at its Oak Ridge offices, Joe LaGrone and Jim Hall, the newspaper reported.

LaGrone was hired by British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., a company that won a DOE contract to recycle metal at Oak Ridge. Hall went to work for Westinghouse, which was bidding on a DOE contract at the time.

Steve Wyatt, an Energy Department spokesman, said both men complied with the law and avoided becoming involved in matters that would have posed a conflict. Moreover, Wyatt said that because of the highly specialized and technical nature of nuclear work, the services of departing employees are in demand by contractors.

Hodges had firmed up his job with ELR Consultants before leaving his position as the Energy Department's Paducah site manager. At the time, Hodges did not publicly disclose his plans but said his departure was not related to controversy about DOE's slow cleanup at the Paducah plant.

In a Sept. 10 proposal to the Paducah reuse organization, ELR had listed Hodges as one of three "key personnel" who would work on the contract, according to an Oct. 1 letter from a lawyer representing ELR.

ELR was the only bidder on the contract, though the organization says it asked for bids from more than 50 groups. The Oct. 1 letter from attorney Wallace Conaway indicated that the company was confident it would land the job.

The lawyer described Hodges as an "anticipated future ELR employee" and said ELR intended to make him a "deputy program manager" who would report to Bill E. Lindsey, a former executive with two of the companies operating the Paducah plant.

Hodges' new job was announced at the Oct. 20 meeting of the Paducah reuse organization board. The minutes show that the board then appointed a "technical committee" to negotiate with ELR that included several people with whom Hodges had worked closely.

They included Myrna Redfield, who was subordinate to Hodges in the DOE site office; Dale Jackson, who succeeded Hodges as interim site manager; and Jimmy Massey, then the Paducah manager of DOE cleanup contractor Lockheed Martin, who worked closely with Hodges for years.

Also on the committee was Larry Jackson, an executive from the United States Enrichment Corp., the private company that leases and operates the plant, which enriches uranium for nuclear power plant fuel.

Henry Hodges, an official of a state-funded regional planning agency that provides staff to the Paducah reuse organization - and no relation to Jimmie Hodges - defended the appointments.

"We are talking about things that are so technical that we must make use of the technical and expert advice we have available to us on the PACRO (board) regardless of the special interests in the room," he told the board. "It is our responsibility to acknowledge those special interests and to work together in the best interests of PACRO."

Board members were not unanimous in their comfort with the arrangement.

John Driskill, a board member who is a security guard at the plant, said he disagreed with Hodges taking the job with a contractor that the reuse organization was about to hire.

"I'm not saying Jimmie has done anything wrong, but the appearance of it looks bad," Driskill said recently.

ELR's contract began Jan. 1, 2000. The company's scope of work calls for it to develop numerous policies and protocols and offer consulting advice on how to realize a profit from reusing nickel at the plant.

-------------

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 11:56:21 EDT
From: GByngFISHM@aol.com

Digest Number 81

Does anyone have any furthur research information on the use of Bacillus Subtillus/Bacillus Mycoides or Fusarium Fungus? Perhaps slide pictures or the effects on human health? Thanks, K.B.

------------

Message: 3
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 12:56:25 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Former Y-12 worker's family finds both puzzles, answers in records

August 28, 2000
By Frank Munger
News-Sentinel staff writer
http://www.knoxnews.com/science/munger/fm08282000.shtml

Mary Lankford remembers her daddy as a sick man. "He'd get pneumonia at the drop of a hat," said Lankford, who cared for her father, Archie Douglas, for many years after he retired in 1963 from the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge.

Besides his continuous lung problems, Douglas dealt with colorectal cancer, a heart condition and oh-so-many other ailments.

It's remarkable that he lived to be 90 years old.

"We buried him on his 91st birthday," Lankford said. "He didn't get to enjoy his retirement, but he lived. It was just grit and determination."

That he lived so long seemed even more remarkable to Lankford after she began looking at her father's records at Y-12.

The Rockwood resident is among a growing number of people -- former employees or relatives of deceased employees -- who are requesting medical documents and other work-related papers from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge facilities.

Amy Rothrock, who oversees the document requests at DOE's Oak Ridge office, said there have been about 640 requests for work-related records so far this year. That's the most ever, she said, surpassing the previous peak of about 400 in 1997 when concerns about beryllium exposures at Y-12 got news attention.

Because of the large number of requests for records, the system is getting clogged. Rothrock said it's taking about two months to complete an individual's request, more than double the time normally required.

She doesn't expected a letup any time soon.

"We're trying to cope with that, using existing resources," Rothrock said.

Many requests are inspired by news reports about work-related illnesses at the nuclear plants and the possibility of financial compensation, an issue being considered in Congress.

Lankford said she just wanted to see if there was anything in her father's work records that might explain why he was sick all the time.

She was surprised at what she found and puzzled, too.

The packet of medical charts show that Douglas was constantly visiting the plant's infirmary and in and out of hospitals for some illnesses that might be related to his work as a machinist's helper.

Following Douglas' visit to the Y-12 medical facility in July 1961, two years before his retirement, the attending physician wrote:

"This is one of the most unhealthy men I have ever seen working. I am unable to actually establish a diagnosis of anything specific, but I am most suspicious of a malignancy, probably G.I. (gastrointestinal)."

There are numerous references to abdominal pains and the possibility that Douglas might have cancer.

Lankford was disturbed particularly by a June 1961 dispensary record, where the doctor wrote: "This may be only a gastroenteritis, but in view of the age of patient ... and change in blood picture a G.I. malignancy is a definite possibility. I did not, of course, discuss this possibility, for obvious reasons, but I told patient it could be serious and that he should see his family physician."

Lankford wondered what the "obvious reasons" were for not discussing the possible cancer, whether it a reluctance to unduly alarm her father or something more sinister.

Douglas eventually was diagnosed with colorectal cancer but not until the 1980s, a few years before his death.

For every bit of information Lankford found in the records, there were several more questions.

She remembers when he was sent to Vanderbilt Medical Center sometime in the 1950s, when she was just a young girl. She didn't know what was wrong with him then and still doesn't, but she recalls that he was kept in isolation and family members couldn't get near him, although they could wave to him through glass windows.

Lankford now wonders if the lung problems that plagued her father might have been related to beryllium exposures at the nuclear weapons plant, and she's still waiting on other documents that may give details on those exposures.

In one of his medical records, dated Sept. 3, 1959, there is a notation that Douglas was not to work in beryllium. "Restriction is permanent," the document said, indicating he was perceived as being vulnerable to the metal that's known to cause chronic beryllium disease -- an incurable respiratory ailment.

Lankford said she doubts she'll ever get any money from the federal government, but she would like to know what happened to her father in Oak Ridge.

"I want to know the full history," she said.

Frank Munger can be reached at 482-9213 or by e-mail at twig1@knoxnews.infi.net.

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Message: 4
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 17:02:57 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Work-related asthma puts ORNL employee on disability

August 28, 2000
by Paul Parson Oak Ridger staff
http://www.oakridger.com/

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in The Oak Ridger's three-part series on Ronald Morrison, whom doctors have diagnosed with illnesses related to his work at an Oak Ridge Department of Energy facility. Tuesday's stories will focus on Morrison's illnesses and how they have affected his life.

"Funerals are cheaper than medical care," declares Ronald Morrison.

Sitting in his office at his Harriman home, Morrison, a former Oak Ridge National Laboratory employee, holds a copy of his insurance claims abstract to prove his point.

Morrison, whom doctors have diagnosed with illnesses related to his work at the federal facility, has single medical expenses that start at $6.59 and drastically climb to $25, $394.08, $1,600, $3,628, $8,088 and $12,132. The average cost of a funeral is $5,300.

But Morrison isn't complaining. With the exception of a few, the bills have all been paid even though he had to fight to get that accomplished.

It's a fight that began in August 1993 when the now 52-year-old Morrison was assigned to the boot shop, Building 3502, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. As a spray booth operator, Morrison would spray a mixture of chemicals -- methyl ethyl ketone, xylene and methylene dinaline, among others -- onto a mold, which would in turn form a urethane rubber compound.

Morrison, who started working for ORNL in 1989, had no prior experience with hazardous chemicals and says he was told he didn't need any because he would be taught everything he needed to know. However, Morrison says no formal classes were offered and only minimal spray technique instructions were given by a fellow employee who had been taught by his predecessor.

When he expressed concerns about the work, Morrison was told there were no safety hazards to worry about.

However, Morrison would soon discover he might have something to worry about.

In late 1993, he began having breathing problems and notified management officials. But he didn't make a connection between his problems and the spraying operation until a co-worker went on leave to be with his ill wife. That's when Morrison was assigned to do more spraying and his breathing problems increased.

After the co-worker returned, Morrison, for a short time, did less spraying and had fewer problems. But soon he was back to spraying the boots more frequently and says his health began to deteriorate again.

Morrison began seeking medical treatment for breathing problems in August 1993. However, his breathing problems worsened and he began seeing pulmonologist Charles Bruton in August 1995.

Then, in late 1996, he told a supervisor that a chemical mixture he'd been working with had coated his glasses and he needed authorization for a new pair.

When he went to the ORNL optician, Morrison told her he had a problem she'd probably never seen before. He said she then bet him a quarter that there wasn't a problem she hadn't seen. But, after failing to remove the chemical mixture from the glasses, the eye specialist gave Morrison the quarter, he said.

Eventually, Bruton diagnosed Morrison as having work-related asthma, and Morrison was transferred to the position of plastic welder where he stayed until going on disability in July 1997. More illnesses would follow.

In early 1997, Morrison filed a workman's compensation complaint against Lockheed Martin Energy Systems. That case was settled with Morrison and his attorneys proving his illnesses were work-related.

Lockheed Martin Energy Systems, which managed ORNL at the time of Morrison's exposure, declined to comment. The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Operations office had not responded to a request for a statement by late this morning.

===========

Comments:

It is good to see the ORer begin to consider and report a worker illness problem.

Interesting to note the problem with the glasses. If this was damage to a glass lense from the chemical that frosted it--------there is only one thing that eats glass. And its known to cause asthma.

-------------

Message: 5
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 17:15:59 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Our Views: City proceeding responsibly on DOE tax issue

August 28, 2000
http://www.oakridger.com/

U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp certainly meant well when, during a visit to this newspaper's office last week, he admonished city officials not to "bite the hand that feeds you."

Rep. Wamp was referring to the saber-rattling of late by the city against a Department of Energy which does not pay its fair share to local government in lieu of taxes, and whose land management and environmental legacy has made the city's economic development efforts all the more difficult.

Certainly the Republican congressman means well by his remarks, even if the admonition helps to underscore the problem of the city's subservient role to DOE.

But it must be remembered that city fathers mean well also. Their effort to acquire a fairer share of revenue in lieu of taxes from Washington, or to gain federal release of added local lands for development, is done with current and future generations of Oak Ridgers in mind.

And, to their credit, city fathers have toned down the rhetoric a notch. There is simply no need, at this juncture, for talk of lawsuits. What both the city and DOE instead need is a compromise which serves shared interests; interests which need not be in conflict.

The Oak Ridge City Council is moving responsibly toward just that kind of agreement.

---------

Message: 6
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 17:20:14 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Close vote on city-DOE poll

August 28, 2000
by Donna Smith Oak Ridger staff
http://www.oakridger.com/

Should local officials take action to get more money from the Department of Energy? The votes on last week's Community Poll question about this issue were 25-20 in favor of the city's getting more funds.

The question reads, "Oak Ridge City Council plans to hire a legal and legislative firm to define options the city can take to get more state or federal money because the Department of Energy's presence here has damaged the city's economic development capabilities. Officials of the city, Roane and Anderson counties are also exploring other ways to get more money from the federal government because DOE owns much of the land in Oak Ridge and doesn't pay property taxes. Are local officials acting properly?"

Twenty-five votes were received for "yes, the local governments should receive more funds"; 20 were received for "No, the local government officials are biting the hand that feeds them because DOE is a major employer."

This is not a scientific or random poll. It was designed for interactivity and entertainment on the Web.

This week's question asks, "Barbara Phelps, an Oak Ridge Board of Education member, has posed several questions relating to tuition to be paid by students living outside Oak Ridge to attend city schools. Among them was what the financial impact would be if Oak Ridge teachers who live outside Oak Ridge didn't have to pay tuition to send their children to school in Oak Ridge. Should Oak Ridge teachers who live outside the city have to pay tuition for their children to attend school in Oak Ridge?"

Click hereto vote in this week's community poll. Votes can also be e-mailed to dsmith2@oakridger.com, faxed to 482-7834, or mailed to Donna Smith, The Oak Ridger, P.O. Box 3446, Oak Ridge, TN 37831.

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Message: 7
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 17:35:22 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Uranium miners find more than ore in them thar hills

August 27, 2000
http://search.newschoice.com/GPC_StoryDisplay.asp?story=d:\index\newsarchives\donred\fea\20000827\408813_seffs825.txt

During the 1950s, after the arrival of the atomic age, a great uranium rush occurred. In the race for development of nuclear energy, U.S. government scientists faced a shortage of uranium. Knowing that there was an abundant supply of uranium on the Colorado Plateau, the government encouraged treasure hunters to help in the search. A generous bonus of $10,000 was the incentive for anyone who discovered and mined the radioactive ore. The incentive worked, and there followed a uranium rush far more energetic than the 1849 California gold rush.

Prospectors on the high and dry Colorado Plateau would find the description of the land of 150 million years ago, when the uranium deposits were laid down, difficult to imagine. At that time Utah was a lush, tropical, humid land similar to the Amazon River Basin of today. A lowland of dense jungles and glades, it was crossed by an abundance of muddy streams and dotted with ponds, lakes, and swamps. Plant-eating dinosaurs hid fearfully beneath protecting foliage while huge carnivorous dinosaurs crashed and thundered through the forests searching for prey.

The fortune hunters concentrated their search for the yellow minerals in the many ancient stream channel deposits. Here organic material could be found in great abundance, especially if the deposits had been laid down in a tropical environment. A major method of preservation is replacement of organic matter with inorganic matter. Usually groundwater carries the minerals that will petrify the preserved material. The most common is silica, but occasionally the groundwater also carries valuable mineral matter such as uranium.

In the Utah desert, the uranium mineral carnotite was one of the fossilizing materials. As a result, many of the fossils found on the Colorado Plateau of Utah are radioactive, including ancient trees and many dinosaur remains. One petrified log, over 100 feet long and 4 feet in diameter, yielded more than 100 tons of uranium ore valued at $230,000 - doubtless the most valuable log ever discovered. In July 1955, a geologist discovered an almost complete skeleton of a stegosaurus.

Encased in a layer of volcanic ash, it had been killed in an eruption that also killed all the scavengers that would have fed on its remains. Despite its value as a scientific treasure, the stegosaurus met the same fate as the petrified log. The results, however were less impressive, for it yielded a minimal harvest of uranium. Successful prospectors often tried to mine the deposit themselves rather than sell it to professional mining companies. Few novices were aware of the dangers of radioactivity.

Because most of the mining was done underground in well-defined shafts, uranium minerals surrounded the workers in the walls, ceilings, and floors of the shaft. They were constantly bombarded with deadly radioactivity. The number of miners who paid with their lives in their quest for riches will probably never be known. One such event involved three brothers who struck a very rich deposit of carnotite near Cortez, Colorado. Since all three were mining engineers, they were able to set up an efficient mining operation that was producing only high-grade ore.

So rich was the deposit that at the end of a day's work the brothers emerged covered with yellow dust and were amused at the value of the residue they washed away. Little did they realize that each moment they spent underground took them closer to disaster, for they were constantly subjected to concentrated radioactivity from all directions. The yellow dust they took home simply ensured that the work hazard was still with them. In less than two years the three brothers had become quite rich; they were also dead of radiation poisoning, leaving behind three extremely wealthy widows.

By the end of the 1950s the U.S. government was well supplied with uranium ore. The government discontinued the$10 000 bonus incentive when their demand for the product was fully satisfied, and the great uranium boom came to a screeching halt. All that remained was a supply of treasure tales to add to the folklore of the West.

One of the best-known stories that circulated on the Colorado Plateau during the 1950s concerned a miner who had prospected around the turn of the century. He was excavating a carnotite mine for its vanadium content. Carnotite, like many ore minerals, yields more than one metal when chemically refined. On the Colorado Plateau, carnotite is the chief ore mineral of uranium, and also yields vanadium.

The miner was unable to extract vanadium at a profit because the ore had too much of the "worthless"uranium. He abandoned the mine but kept its location a secret. When the boom of the 1950s began, the miner realized his good fortune and set out to reclaim his old mine. But too much time had elapsed and he was unable to relocate his old diggings. He became a familiar figure to prospectors - an ancient, battered weatherworn miner leading an equally weather-beaten mule. His disappointment must have become unbearable and one evening as he sat staring into his campfire, he pressed the cool muzzle of his pistol to his head. He was found shortly by a party of prospectors, slumped over with a bullet through his brain. At last he had found peace.

Phil and Nancy Seff the authors of "Petrified Lightning," and "Our Fascinating Earth."Uranium miners find more than ore in them thar hills

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Message: 8
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 17:43:32 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

The Damage in DNA
Brookhaven lab finds a way to pinpoint radiation's effects on structure

08/22/2000
by Earl Lane Washington Bureau
http://www.newsday.com/coverage/current/discovery/tuesday/nd1168.htm

SCIENTISTS LONG have known that ionizing radiation, such as X-rays or gamma rays, can cause potentially serious breaks in the DNA molecules that carry the genetic instructions for each cell.

Widely separated nicks or breaks in a single strand of the DNA helix generally are repaired by the body's natural defense mechanisms. But when the damage is clustered, such as closely spaced breaks in both strands of DNA's double-helical staircase, the consequences can be much more serious.

If not repaired, double-strand breaks, as they are called, can trigger the death of the host cell or turn it cancerous. And some scientists have argued that double-strand breaks are but part of the story since they do not seem to account for all of radiation's observed lethality and cancer-causing effects in cells. The problem has been finding ways to reliably assess other types of radiation-induced damage clusters in DNA that also may have consequences.

Now, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a technique to identify and measure other kinds of damage clusters. The damage sites can include lesions in close proximity to each other, including single-strand breaks or missing or oxidized bases. Bases are the chemical subunits that link the two complementary strands of a DNA molecule. Damaged or missing bases can cause spontaneous mutations that lead to cancer.

The new method has allowed the Brookhaven team to locate and count the complex damage sites on DNA molecules. Surprisingly, the researchers have found that double-strand breaks may account for only about 20 percent of the sites.

The other types of radiation-induced damage clusters-while little studied over the years-seem to account for most of the sites.

"It's clear that double-strand breaks are not the whole story," said Betsy Sutherland, a biochemist who leads the Brookhaven research effort. She is assisted by Paula Bennett, a biology associate at the lab.

The new assay method could help researchers sort out some of the most vexing questions in radiation biology, Sutherland said, including whether the body can efficiently repair other types of cluster damage in a cell's DNA in addition to double-strand breaks. The technique also may shed light on how radiation-induced damage mimics or differs from the normal wear and tear on DNA from sunlight and other harmful agents.

New insights on radiation damage at the molecular level also should help scientists to better assess the proper doses in radiation therapy to kill cancer cells and to better weigh the risks of ionizing radiation for nuclear workers or astronauts exposed to cosmic rays on long spaceflights.

The Brookhaven researchers first bombard a sample of human DNA with radiation. Then they use special enzymes (supplied by collaborators Jacques Laval and Olga Sidorkina in France) that cut DNA strands at the sites of specific kinds of damage, such as a missing base.

If an enzyme cuts both strands of the DNA in question quite close together, Sutherland said, it indicates damage in close proximity on the two strands of the DNA molecule. The snipped fragments can be made to migrate through a gel that separates them by length. The researchers can count the relative frequency of isolated vs. clustered DNA damage as well as the identity of the damage sites.

In theory, the damage clusters could result from multiple radiation "hits," each producing one lesion in the DNA. But the early experimental results at Brookhaven suggest that each damage cluster results from a single radiation track. That means that damage clusters are formed by low as well as high doses of radiation, the researchers report.

Despite decades of study since the dawn of the Atomic Age, scientists still have much to learn about the effects of radiation on the body.

"Many labs have looked at double-strand breaks," Sutherland said. "Some of them are repaired very rapidly, others more slowly. It's not clear at this point exactly what makes a double-strand break repairable or not so repairable." Nor is it clear whether cells can efficiently repair other types of cluster damage. The new lab technique, described in recent articles in the journal Biochemistry and in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, should help scientists sort out such questions.

Sutherland said the Department of Energy, which funds Brookhaven, wants to know if the damage clusters her group has been studying are identifiably different from the sorts of damage from events that are a part of normal life.

For example, simply breathing oxygen can produce chemical complexes in cells called free radicals, which can damage bases on DNA. Sutherland theorizes that such radicals may produce isolated bits of DNA damage compared to the closely spaced damage clusters typical of ionizing radiation. Such radiation can create showers of secondary particles that can wreak localized havoc on the DNA, she said.

There has been a long-standing and contentious debate on the health effects of low-level radiation. Epidemiologists have had a tough time trying to tease out the possible impact in large populations exposed to low amounts of radiation over time. Researchers would like more information on the events that low doses of radiation might trigger at the molecular level. Accordingly, the Brookhaven team is looking to increase the sensitivity of its technique.

In the current studies, DNA samples were irradiated with roughly the equivalent of 100 rems of radiation (A rem is a standard measure of radiation exposure. The occupational exposure limit for nuclear workers in the United States is 5 rems per year. The annual background radiation from natural sources is about 1/3 of a rem.) At the radiation level used, the researchers determined there were about 2.4 double-strand breaks, about 3.6 clusters of missing bases and about 6.6 clusters containing oxidized bases per million DNA bases studied. While the numbers seem small, if the flaws-particularly when clustered-are not repaired or poorly repaired, it may spell trouble.

Sutherland said the team eventually would like to irradiate DNA samples with lower-level doses more akin to those we receive during certain medical diagnostic procedures or from natural background sources such as cosmic rays and radioactive minerals.

"The effects of most types of complex DNA damage in cells and how they are repaired are completely unknown," Sutherland said. "The only way to find out about them is to make careful measurements, and we have a way to do that now."

------------

Message: 9
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 17:49:38 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

County fights company's radioactive waste plans

The Associated Press
8-28-00
http://www.thesunnews.com/news/stories/C05-1541428810086.htm

RALEIGH, N.C. | A proposal by Carolina Power & Light to create one of the largest collections of high-level radioactive waste in the nation is getting a closer look.

The Atomic Safety and Licensing Board Panel, a panel of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ordered CP&L this month to evaluate the risk of a hypothetical disaster drawn up by critics. The panel wants to consider in November what both sides say about the what-if scenario before another step is taken in allowing the company to increase its waste storage at its Shearon Harris nuclear plant.

So far, the board has rejected most of the critiques, made by Orange County, while the NRC concluded in December that the plan was environmentally safe. The order delays CP&L's plan by at least four months and came at the urging of Orange County commissioners and environmentalists who have raised safety concerns about the plan for about two years.

CP&L has been trying since late 1998 to expand its storage of radioactive waste at its nuclear plant in Wake County. The plant has two unused pools made for reactors that were never built. The pools inside a cavernous building would be filled with radiation-deadening water.

``We have already responded that we believe it is remote and speculative,'' CP&L spokesman Mike Hughes said about the hypothetical disaster. ``What we are attempting to do now ... is to provide more detailed information that without a shadow of a doubt demonstrates that Orange County's accident scenario is indeed not credible.''

Opponents of CP&L's radioactive waste plan say the panel's order confirms a fact rarely discussed outside obscure NRC documents.

``If you look at the worst case of a reactor accident and spent fuel pool accident, they're very similar,'' said David Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer turned industry whistle-blower.

Concern about the safety of spent fuel handling prompted Lochbaum to leave his job at a Pennsylvania power plant and take a position at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group in Washington. NRC officials said that Lochbaum's criticism of spent fuel handling prompted the agency to strengthen safety measures at some reactors.

CP&L and Orange County have until Nov. 20 to make their case on the safety issues. Afterward, the safety panel could recommend granting the permit or take one or both of two actions sought by Orange County: order a comprehensive environmental impact study and/or hold a hearing pitting the county's nuclear consultants against those of CP&L and NRC.

Like every utility using nuclear plants, CP&L generates electricity with pencil-thin uranium pellets encased in zirconium metal and bundled in 12-foot ``fuel assemblies.''

The company is running out of room to store these fuel assemblies from its nuclear plants because the federal government has failed to open a permanent repository in Nevada for the nation's used nuclear fuel.

CP&L was already using the Harris site to store waste from that reactor and from older plants in Southport, N.C., and Hartsville.

The expansion would increase its storage capacity from 3,548 fuel assemblies to 8,265, which could make one of the largest collections of high-level radioactive waste in the United States.

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Message: 10
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 18:32:30 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Russian Be for sale----European brokers

Beryllium Offer
Date: 8/25/2000 9:47:19 AM Eastern Daylight Time
From: PSA_Personenschutz_GmbH@t-online.de (Jens Sieloff)

Sir: I`an in the position to offer You Beryllium with the following specs:

Atomic Number 4
Atomic Weight 9,013
Crystalline structute - density packed heagonal
Density,g/qbm 1,8477
Melting Point 1284 C
Terminal conductivity W/cm K 0,358
Coefficient of linear expansion at 25 C -(9,8-14,3) 10 - 6
Thermal neutron absorption cross-section B/at 0,009
Impact strength,kgm/qmm 0,016 - 0,02
Elastic modulus,kgm/qmm (27-30) 10
Electrical resistivity at 25 C Um om cm 3,5 - 6,0

Chemical composition
Iron 0,25
Aluminium 0,04
Manganese 0,03
Silicon 0,04
Copper 0,02
Magnesium 0,04
Nickel 0,04
Carbon 0,1
Nitrogene 0,03
Oxygen 0,3
Beryllium assay, % min. 99,0

Country of Origin: Russian Federation
Quantity: up to 20000 Kilogramms
Delivery: by plane
Payment: by Bank Guarantee
Independent Analysis: due to buyer`s order

Kindly note that I am as well in the position to guarantee monthly deliveries by plane.

If You are interested in kindly send me a message.

Yours sincerely
Winfried Haefferer Tel.: +49 30 82 00 86 23 Facs: +49 30 82 00 86 10 Mobile Phone: 0172 988 45 60

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Message: 11
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 15:38:14 -0700
From: Kalynda <Kalynda@wizard.com>

Water Leaks Into Chernobyl Plant

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - A large amount of water has leaked into the sarcophagus covering a reactor destroyed in the 1986 explosion at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but radiation levels in the water flowing out of the structure are normal, officials said Monday.

Water has seeped into the giant sarcophagus since it was built, but more than twice as much leaked inside last month following heavy rains. As a result, water for the first time entered nine rooms, officials monitoring the sarcophagus said in a statement.

Radioactivity levels in the water coming out of the shelter were still at permitted levels, the statement said.

The sarcophagus was hastily constructed to cover the reactor that exploded and caught fire in 1986, spewing a giant radioactive cloud over parts of Europe in the world's worst nuclear disaster.

With the help of foreign funds, Ukraine is trying to make the structure environmentally safe. It is believed to contain tons of radioactive fuel and dust.

Only one of Chernobyl's four reactors is still operational. Due to international pressure, Ukraine has promised to shut down the plant for good in December. -- Kalynda Tilges Nuclear Issues Coordinator Citizen Alert P.O.Box 17173 Las Vegas, NV 89114 702-796-5662 702-796-4886 fax Kalynda@wizard.com http://www.igc.org/citizenalert

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Message: 12
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 15:47:01 -0700
From: Kalynda <Kalynda@wizard.com>

Schroeder backs sale of nuke reprocessor to Russia

BERLIN, Aug 28 (Reuters) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroederon Monday rejected criticism from his coalition over the planned sale of a plutonium reprocessing plant to Russia by electronics and engineering group Siemens AG.

``There are no security or foreign policy reasons against it,'' Schroeder told journalists in Berlin before a party meeting. ``There is global interest in making weapons-grade plutonium less dangerous through reprocessing.''

Members of the environmentalist Greens, junior coalition partners to Schroeder's ruling Social Democrats, have spoken out against trade in nuclear technology and said Germany should not allow such a sale especially after the country pledged earlier this year to phase out nuclear power.

Schroeder also declared a separate dispute with some Greens over the export of an ammunition factory to Turkey as ended.

``There is nothing to solve. The case is decided,'' he said.

Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the most prominent Green in the cabinet, last week indirectly defended the granting of export approval for an ammunition plant destined for Turkey and called for calm from critics of the deal from within his party.

The approval of the sale of German tanks to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates earlier this year prompted a near-crisis in the Greens' coalition with the SPD.

Fischer had insisted that an order from Ankara for battle tanks should only win an export licence if Turkey showed progress on human and minority rights, but he was outvoted in the cabinet committee which must approve such deals.

Fischer is the most influential figure among the Greens but has little formal power in the party's diffuse leadership structure. He has faced criticism from the ecologist party's vocal ``fundamentalist'' wing over the compromises he has made since joining the government two years ago. -- Kalynda Tilges Nuclear Issues Coordinator Citizen Alert P.O.Box 17173 Las Vegas, NV 89114 702-796-5662 702-796-4886 fax Kalynda@wizard.com http://www.igc.org/citizenalert

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Message: 13
Date: Mon, 28 Aug 2000 22:29:31 EDT
From: magnu96196@aol.com

Green Tea Consumption Enhances Plasma Antioxidant Capacity

August 17, 2000 WESTPORT (Reuters Health) - Drinking as little as 300 mL (10 oz) of green tea significantly increases the total antioxidant capacity of plasma, according to a report in the July issue of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Epidemiologic studies have reported a lower incidence of coronary heart disease and cancer among drinkers of green tea, the authors explain, but few studies have measured its antioxidant effects.

Dr. W. K. Min, from the University of Ulsan College of Medicine, in Seoul, Korea, and colleagues measured the total antioxidant capacity of plasma in 10 healthy subjects 1 hour and 2 hours after they drank tea prepared from 2.5 g (in 150 mL water), 5.0 g (in 300 mL), or 7.5 g (in 450 mL) green tea leaves.

Although antioxidant capacity did not increase significantly after 150 mL of green tea, plasma antioxidant capacity rose 7% at 1 h and 6.2% at 2 hours after consumption of 300 mL of green tea, the authors report.

Similarly, consumption of 450 mL of green tea was associated with a an increase in plasma antioxidant concentrations of 12.0% increase at 1 h and 12.7% at 2 h, the investigators note.

These increases are similar to those previously reported after ingesting 300 mL of red wine (18% at 1 h and 11% at 2 h), the researchers explain.

"With these findings we could assume that antioxidant effect of green tea is sustained for at least 2 h," the authors conclude.

"Green tea and red wine are readily available drinks that contain high levels of antioxidants," Dr. Min told Reuters Health. "Although green tea contains less antioxidant effect than red wine, green tea is considered to have high value as favorite food or drinks as it does not contain alcohol."

"The roles of each component of green tea in the increase in antioxidant capacity still need further investigation," Dr. Min added, "as do the potential clinical benefits of antioxidant increases after taking green tea."

Eur J Clin Nutr 2000;54:527-529.