------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
*Radiation alert under ozone hole in southern Chile
*CZECH REPUBLIC: NUCLEAR PLANT OPENS
*Czech nuclear plant gets green light
*Czechs Start Nuclear Plant, Anger Austria
*No 'tilt' toward India
*Don't Fear Saddam
*Lawyers call for phased pull-out from nuclear energy
*Top North Korean official en route to Washington
*Clinton, North Korean Meet to Try to Ease Tensions
*North Korean Envoy Starts Washington Meetings
*Clinton meets with top N. Korean minister
*Russian Barge Held Radioactive Cargo
*Profiling Safeguards
*ENERGY DEPARTMENT INVESTIGATING BIAS
*WEAPONS OVER WORKERS

MILITARY
*Drug-related crimes keep Colombian army busy
*Biker bosses back at the table
*U.S. Companies Tangled in Web of Drug Dollars
*Alaska's Voters to Decide On Legalizing Marijuana
*Tories Fail Tough Test on Drugs
*Northwest Heroin Use Is Epidemic
*TURKEY: NATO WAR GAMES
*Pakistan's Record on Rights Criticized
*No concession to Iran
*N. Ireland's story
*N. Korea Celebrates Party's Start
*North Korean Visits U.S.
*HOLGER JENSEN: Please remit payment
*IRAQ: TURKEY FLIES IN RELIEF
*NEWS OF OTHER LIFE FORMS
*Underground Fire Smolders in Peat Bog

OTHER
*Car-Makers Say Diesel Isn't Just for Trucks Anymore
*'A trillion-dollar market'
*In Caribbean, Endangered Iguanas Get Their Day
*Record Ozone Hole Refuels Debate on Climate
*Paying for Conservation
*Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich On Human Nature, Genetics and the Evolution of Culture
*Genetics without guesswork
*Officials taken to alleged burial site
*Baltimore's top cop sets example
*Board to investigate botched raid
*CITY COUNCIL HEARING ON POLICE
*Back Channels: The Intelligence Community
*Pentagon Can't Find Ex-C.I.A. Chief's Disks
*DEUTCH'S DISKETTES STILL MISSING
*The war on whistle-blowers
*Clinton, N. Korean Meeting Called 'Positive'

ACTIVISTS
*Confront the Transatlantic Business Dialogue in Cincinnati November 15-19
*SUZUKI INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION
*RadTimes # 65
*Chernobyl Victims Demand More Aid
*Women give full voice to concerns
*March for Palestine loud but peaceful
*University of Hawaii students are planning a protest
*CRANK IT UP


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

-------- chile

Radiation alert under ozone hole in southern Chile

Planet Ark
CHILE: October 10, 2000
Story by Chris Aspin
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=8499

PUNTA ARENAS, Chile - A wide swath of southern Chile was on alert yesterday as dangerous levels of ultraviolet radiation hit peaks because of the depletion of the protective ozone layer over the Antarctic.

Health authorities warned the 120,000 residents of this wool and fishing city - one of the few populated areas beneath the ozone hole in the southern hemisphere - not to go out in the sun during the day.

The ozone hole over the Antarctic this year has reached its deepest since scientists began measuring it 15 years ago, with more than 50 percent depletion being recorded throughout most of the hole, United Nations experts said on Friday.

That has left this windy city 1,400 miles (2,240 km) south of Chile's capital, Santiago, - and also the Argentine city of Ushuaia on the nearby island Tierra del Fuego - open to harmful ultraviolet radiation which can cause skin cancer and destroy tiny plants in the food chain.

The tip of the Americas, south of the Patagonia wilds where Britain's Prince William is on a character-building expedition, is the only landmass outside the Antarctic exposed to ultraviolet radition from the ozone hole.

WARNING NOT TO GO OUT INTO THE SUN

"We are warning people throughout the region not to go out in the sun between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m.," said Lidia Amarales, the health minister in Chile's most southerly Magallanes and Antarctic Region, where Punta Arenas is the provincial capital.

Health authorities called an orange alert - the second most dangerous level in a scale of four - in which ultraviolet (UV) exposure can cause skin burns in 7 minutes. A red alert can provoke burning in 5 minutes.

"If people have to leave their homes they should wear high factor sun creams, UV protective sunglasses, wide brimmed hats and clothing with long sleeves," said Amarales.

Dr. Claudio Casiccia, head of the ozone department at the University of Magallanes, said ultraviolet radiation levels hit an all-time peak Saturday. "We are slightly below that level now but still on alert," he said.

Despite the alert, many local residents walked the streets unprotected yesterday. "I have to go to buy bread and scarcely have money for that, so forget the sunglasses and suncream," said Adriana Cerpa, a 28-year-old housewife.

Experts from the United Nations' World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Friday the ozone hole is at its deepest level on record and that "near total destruction" of the ozone in some layers of the stratosphere had been observed since the middle of September, much earlier than in previous years.

CHEMICALS CAUSING OZONE DEPLETION

Chemicals - including chlorine compounds used in refrigerants, aerosol sprays and solvents and bromine compounds used in firefighting halogens - are blamed for causing depletion.

Extremely low temperatures in the stratosphere during the southern hemisphere's winter spark off the chemical ozone depletion, a process that accelerates as the region enters spring-time.

For more than a decade, the hole has appeared in late August or early September, with the phenomenon peaking in the first week or two of October, a clear sign that greenhouse gases are eating away the earth's protective layer.

All 12 monitoring stations around the rim of the Antarctic have reported measurements of ozone this spring that are 50-70 percent below the norms in the years 1964-1976, before the ozone hole was detected, the Geneva-based WMO said.

An image released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on Sept. 8 showed a hole appearing as a giant blue blob, totally covering Antarctica and stretching to the southern tip of South America.

NASA said the hole spread over 11 million square miles (28.3 million square km), an area three times larger than the land mass of the United States.

-------- czech republic

CZECH REPUBLIC: NUCLEAR PLANT OPENS

New York Times
October 10, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/world/10BRIE.html

Over the objections of Austria, a nuclear power plant 40 miles from the Austrian border was activated after the operators got the go-ahead from the Czech State Office for Nuclear Safety. Austria has threatened to block the Czech Republic's entry to the European Union over the issue, and protesters have blocked border crossings into the republic. Katka Fronk (NYT)

---

Czech nuclear plant gets green light

Washington Times
October 10, 2000
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports

PRAGUE - Workers took the first steps yesterday to begin activating a controversial nuclear-power plant 30 miles from the Austrian border.

The plant at the small village of Temelin has been a source of friction between the two countries, with some activists demanding a halt to the project. In a symbolic protest, hundreds of Austrians blocked two border crossings with the Czech Republic yesterday.

The first fission reaction was expected in 20 to 30 hours, and energy from the plant's first 1,000-megawatt reactor will be available for commercial use in December.

---

Czechs Start Nuclear Plant, Anger Austria

EUROPE
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41004-2000Oct9?language=printer

TEMELIN, Czech Republic--Workers took the first steps to activate a new nuclear power plant 30 miles from the Austrian border, intensifying a dispute with Austria over the plant's safety. Thousands of Austrian environmentalists blocked the largest border crossing in protest.

The plant has caused the Czech Republic's sharpest diplomatic conflict with its western neighbors since the end of communism. Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel wrote to Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman Sunday asking him to postpone Temelin's activation and repeating an Austrian threat to obstruct Prague's efforts to join the European Union.

The State Office for Nuclear Safety gave permission for the start-up of the first reactor of the Temelin nuclear plant, a Soviet-designed facility that will operate with a Western control system. The first nuclear chain reaction is expected sometime today, and plant director Frantisek Hezoucky told reporters the reactor will be in full operation in five months.

A second reactor is to be completed 15 months after the first becomes operational.

-------- india / pakistan

No 'tilt' toward India

Washington Times
October 10, 2000
Embassy Row James Morrison
News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
http://208.246.212.80/world/embassy-20001010212212.htm

"Tilt." That is such a Cold-War word, and Karl Inderfurth says it has no place in the lexicon of diplomacy regarding U.S. policy toward India and Pakistan.

The assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs insisted in an interview with the Voice of America that the United States favors neither regional rival on the subcontinent.

A VOA reporter mentioned the recent Washington visit of Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, who also received the rare honor of addressing a joint session of Congress.

Mr. Vajpayee's visit followed President Clinton's five-day trip to India in March, when he stopped briefly in Pakistan to confer with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who leads the military government. Mr. Clinton's trip marked the first time an American president visited India in 22 years.

All that led the VOA reporter to remark that the visits are evidence of a great strengthening of U.S.-Indian relations since the end of the Cold War 10 years ago.

"In fact, some observers claim to detect a tilt in U.S.'s policy away from the U.S.'s Cold War ally, Pakistan, and toward India," the reporter noted.

Mr. Inderfurth responded that such talk about a "tilt' is outdated.

"I think it's important to note that really 'tilt' is Cold War terminology," he said in the interview that was broadcast over the weekend on VOA television's "On The Line" show.

"It was said during the Cold War that India tilted toward the Soviet Union and that Pakistan tilted toward the United States. During that time the United States was seen as tilting toward Pakistan.

"That's over. The Cold War is over. . . . And we believe that 'tilt' is really no longer a meaningful term to use in the context of our relations in South Asia.

"We're not tilting toward either country, India or Pakistan."

Mr. Inderfurth said the United States has a "growing relationship with India" and a "long-standing friendship with Pakistan."

"But neither relationship is targeted or directed at the other," he insisted. "This is not a zero-sum game."

-------- iraq

Don't Fear Saddam

Washington Post
Tuesday, October 10, 2000 ; Page A25
By Jim Hoagland
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41007-2000Oct9.html

The savagery of the Palestinian-Israeli violence of the past 10 days blows open new opportunities for deadly mischief by Saddam Hussein and other Arab extremists. The overly cautious effort by President Clinton at containing Saddam is being rapidly overtaken by the new crisis in the Middle East.

Fear has been a constant companion and a poor counselor for Clinton on Iraq. Like the raven of Edgar Allen Poe, fear has perched in the Oval Office for nearly eight years, cawing to Clinton: "Don't."

In its final days, the Clinton administration has been moving to provide new support to Saddam's democratic opposition and to take baby steps toward dealing with Iran, the dictator's neighboring enemy. Better in extremis than never.

But the changes also underscore how needlessly hesitant Clinton was on Iraq while he had a relatively free hand to act. In an atmosphere of Islamic holy war on Israel, trying to maintain a coalition against Saddam becomes infinitely harder.

Fearful of being dragged into war by Iraqi guerrilla forces he once covertly supported, Clinton abandoned the guerrillas five years ago. Fearful of being dragged into war over U.N. arms inspections, he abandoned the inspections two years ago. Fearful of international criticism, he has submitted to travel and economic sanctions against Iraq being shredded daily by Russia, France, Turkey and Arab nations "friendly" to Washington.

A trickle of international flights, border openings and calls for lifting the economic embargo on Iraq has turned into a flood since violence erupted in the West Bank and Gaza on Sept. 28. Saddam has actively sought to exploit the poisonous atmosphere, promising Arabs he will send guns and troops to help Palestinians exterminate Israelis. What Clinton feared, his policies have helped produce.

Fear itself becomes a weapon that foes can learn to wield against America. Saddam has bought two years of unimpeded work on weapons of mass destruction by manipulating Clinton's valid but overdrawn concerns.

Those concerns have centered on the (undeniable) dangers of confronting this Arab dictator directly and on the less tangible impact of his fall on the region. The Arabist-leaning bureaucracies of the State Department and the Pentagon fear Iraq's possible disintegration, Iran's rise in the Persian Gulf power sweepstakes and the impact of democracy, should that come to Iraq, on neighboring Arab oil monarchies.

Such concerns underpin the roadblocks the administration has thrown up to Republican-led congressional efforts to get money, guns and training to Saddam's foes. Now, some of the roadblocks are being bypassed, under pressure from Vice President Al Gore.

After months of stalling, the State Department announced last week agreement to provide $4 million over five months to the Iraqi National Congress, the most significant anti-Saddam dissident organization. Another $4 million grant for the INC may follow early next year.

Details of the funding were not released. But they were outlined to me by INC and State Department sources. Getting a satellite television station and a new radio network broadcasting into Iraq this autumn is the INC's most urgent priority in its $1.8 million public information budget.

The State Department will also provide $425,000 to fund INC distribution of humanitarian relief in southern Iraq, with food and medicine likely to come from the Pentagon. And State offers the INC $190,580 to open regional offices in Tehran and Damascus.

Chicken feed as these things go? Yes. The CIA used to spend $300,000 a month on the INC. But the funding puts out new lines to countries with a serious interest in Saddam's downfall. Syria has a new leader in Bashar Assad, and Iran's leadership has been dancing an increasingly complex minuet of opening to the world, including the United States.

The INC will handle all contact with Iran to establish its office. But the U.S. funding for the office will be seen in Tehran--and by Saddam--as a step forward in the U.S.-Iran minuet. It will drive Saddam nuts, which is fine with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Albright is not cowed by the bureaucracy's Iranophobia, and she seems to understand the perils of allowing fear to dictate policy.

So perhaps does Gore, who broke with the Democratic Party leadership to vote for Operation Desert Storm a decade ago. As he gradually gets control of administration policy through the election campaign, it tends to reflect his more hawkish views.

Or this may be a ploy, a $4 million investment in reducing Gore's vulnerability: The INC would have nothing today if Senate Republicans had not pushed and harried the Clinton-Gore team to give them support. And George W. Bush's foreign policy advisers include people who have understood and fought Saddam's evil every step of the way, even when others on the Bush team did not.

But Gore should get the benefit of the doubt at this stage. Whether he or Bush wins, an era of policy stained by fear should be coming to an end. Saddam should soon be deprived of his most effective weapon.

-------- japan

Lawyers call for phased pull-out from nuclear energy as part of human rights

Tue, 10 Oct 2000
JPS <jpspress@twics.com>

TOKYO OCT 10 JPS -- The Japan Federation of Bar Associations has adopted aresolution calling for nuclear power plants to be phased out.

The resolution was adopted at the Federation's 43rd Convention for Human Rights Defense held on October 5 and 6 in Gifu Prefecture. It stated that Japan with its policy of continuing its excessive dependence on nuclear energy is isolated from the world in which the trend is towards getting away from nuclear power generation and developing renewable energy sources. It also pointed out the undemocratic decision-making process by which over 90 percent of the national budget for research and development of energy goes to nuclear energy.

Aimed at a drastic change from such a policy, the resolution proposes the following five points: (1) a ban on the new construction and extension of nuclear plants and phased abolition of the existing plants; (2) legislation to promote publicly funded R&D of renewable energy; (3) administration on nuclear energy safety and regulation separate from administrative bodies promoting nuclear energy; (4) an end to reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel; and (5) a freeze on the policy of dumping high-level radioactive waste underground and more R&D seeking disposal options.

A symposium on energy policy was held as part of the convention for human rights defense, with the attendance of about 200 lawyers and 450 citizens. A Kobe University professor alerted the audience to the danger of dumping radioactive waste underground in earthquake-prone Japan. He criticized the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Organization's report for underestimating the danger. (end item)

JPS 10-030

U.S. pressured local parties and unions to scrap "Non-nuclear Kobe Port Formula"

TOKYO OCT 10 JPS --It was learned late last September that the U.S. consul general for Osaka and Kobe pressured local political parties in Kobe City to allow U.S. warships to visit Kobe Port in defiance of the city's ban on the entry of nuclear armed ships (the Non-Nuclear Kobe Formula).

Last May, U.S. Consul General in Osaka-Kobe Robert Ludan suggested this to representatives of ruling parties of the Kobe government (the Liberal Democratic Party, the Democratic Party of Japan and the Komei Party), and in August, he exchanged views with three port workers' unions.

In November 1999, in a meeting with assembly members of Osaka Prefecture, Osaka City, Hyogo Prefecture, and Kobe City, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Thomas Foley called for the non-nuclear formula to be abandoned, hoping that U.S. vessels' entry will be realized while he is in office.

Then last March, Secretary of Navy Richard Danzig made a similar demand in talks with Japan's Defense Agency Director General Tsutomu Kawara.

Akahata on October 7 pointed out that behind the pressure is U.S. military plans based on the new Japan-U.S. Defense Cooperation Guideline and the War Laws, quoting Ludan as stating to Kobe Shimbun, a local daily (February 28) that U.S. warships, if allowed to enter Kobe Port, will carry out training for the defense of Japan.

The Non-Nuclear Kobe Port Formula was unanimously adopted by the Kobe City Assembly in March 1975 which requires every warship entering Kobe Port to submit certificates stating that it carries no nuclear weapons. Although U.S. warships visited the port 432 times during 15 years till 1975, this has effectively blocked further U.S. warship calls at the port because of the U.S. policy which refuses to discuss the existence of nuclear weapons.

Legislation of a similar formula with Kobe's is spreading to other local governments such as Kochi Prefecture, Otaru City and Hakodate City in Hokkaido, and New Zealand has enacted a non-nuclear law.

Also the United Nations NGO Millennium Forum last May called for getting the Kobe Formula to be adopted by the governments of the world, and the 2000 World Conference against A and H Bombs stressed the need to develop the Kobe-Formula policy.

To counter this, the U.S. consulate general for Osaka and Kobe has sent a letter to a democratic organization in Hyogo which has protested to the call by the U.S. cruiser Vincennes at Osaka Port. In 1998, helped by Japan's Foreign Ministry, a Canadian warship called at Kobe Port without submitting a non-nuclear certificate.

The Kobe City Government maintains that it will call on any foreign ships to submit such a certificate. Thus whether to defend or scrap the Kobe Formula has become a hot issue. (end item)

JPS 10-032

Peace organizations call for opposition to largest ever joint Japan-U.S. forces exercises

TOKYO OCT 10 JPS -- Two Japanese peace organizations October 6 published an appeal calling on the Japanese people to oppose the largest-ever Japan-U.S. forces' joint exercises scheduled for November, the first under the War Laws.

In the appeal, the Japan Peace Committee and the Central Action Committee against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty said that the joint exercises are a series of actions to put into practice the War Laws.

The U.S. Forces and the Japan Self-Defense Forces are now planning to hold comprehensive military exercises from November 2 through 18. It will include exercises for the search of U.S. soldiers, the rescue and evacuation of non-combatants from areas in conflict, and land combat.

If it is carried out as scheduled, a number of localities hosting military bases of the two forces will have to be involved in areas ranging from Misawa City in the northern prefecture of Aomori to Sasebo City in the southern prefecture of Nagasaki, plus Okinawa.

The appeal calls on all those who will be affected by the exercises to take part in the movement against the dangerous undertaking by setting up a nation-wide network to exchange information that might be useful for the struggle.

The appeal also calls for success of the October 21 concerted action against the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty and the Japan Peace Conference 2000 scheduled for November in Okinawa. (end item)

JPS 10-034

Local residents terrified by U.S. low-flying exercises

TOKYO OCT 10 JPS -- As U.S. low-altitude flight exercises continue terrifying local residents in the Chugogu region (western Japan), about 100 residents from towns directly affected by the exercises met to discuss the damage from those exercises on October 7 in Geihoku Town in Hiroshima Prefecture.

The U.S. low-flying training frequently take place around Hiroshima and Shimane prefectures, disturbing and even terrifying the residents' lives.

In the symposium organized by Geihoku Town and citizens' groups, the town mayor said that he understands the residents' anxieties about possible accidents during the U.S. military practice. Over 90 percent of towns people have testified that they witnessed U.S. aircraft flying at a very low altitude, he said. Recently the low-flying aircraft have been witnessed on Sundays, national holidays, and even at night, the mayor complained.

A schoolmaster said that some pupils start to cry because of aircraft's sonic booms and its appearance. He added that he is worried about adverse effects low-altitude flight might have on the children's mind.

A citizen reported that he daily witnesses bombing exercises by U.S. fighter aircraft near a civilian airport.

A village mayor said he will make efforts to get a quiet sky back in cooperation with residents and peace organizations as well as the government. (end item)

-------- korea

Top North Korean official en route to Washington

CNN
October 10, 2000 Web posted at: 9:23 a.m. HKT (0123 GMT)
http://www.cnn.com/2000/ASIANOW/east/10/09/n.korea.usa/index.html

WASHINGTON -- North Korean President Kim Jong Il's right-hand man is expected to arrive in Washington on Monday night after leaving California earlier in the day.

Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok is serving as special envoy for the reclusive Kim, son of the founder of the ailing communist nation. His visit is aimed at improving his country's relations with an old foe and may include discussions about a new security plan for the divided Korean Peninsula.

Planned for more than a year, Jo's visit offers further evidence of North Korea's intent to emerge from its historic reserve toward the outside world.

It also comes in tandem with a thaw in relations between North and South Korea, which culminated in the June summit between Kim Jong Il and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

Tough, modern, outward-looking

Little is known about Jo, a soldier of 50 years and the first vice-chairman of the country's national defense commission. He arrived Sunday in San Francisco, California, for a one-day stopover before continuing on to Washington.

A former air force commander, he is described as tough and highly nationalistic. But Jo also has a reputation by North Korean standards for being modern and outward-looking.

Published accounts say he is 78 years old, but an official biography provided by North Korea listed only his military and official appointments.

Jo has been involved in the North's rapprochement with South Korea. Analysts say Jo's active role illustrates how Kim Jong Il has brought a military long associated with hard-line policies into the gradually warming relations on the Korean peninsula.

Leader likely to discuss ballistic missiles

While in Washington, Jo is slated to meet with U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Once enemies during the 1950-53 Korean War, United States and North Korea have no diplomatic relations but have been talking about opening liaison offices in Washington and Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, as a first step toward exchanging ambassadors.

http://www.cnn.com/2000/ASIANOW/east/10/09/n.korea.usa/n.korea.pyongyang.lg.jpg

Among their likely topics: U.S. fears about North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile technology as well as its military sales to governments Washington opposes.

The United States has a keen interest in learning from Jo about Kim Jong Il's proposal to give up ballistic missile programs in return for foreign assistance with launching North Korean satellites.

As a representative of the Pyongyang government, Jo is expected to express the country's official desire to be removed from the U.S. State Department's list of terrorist-sponsoring nations.

Last week, the two countries took a minor step forward on terrorism when they issued a joint statement agreeing to exchange information and work toward removing North Korea from the State Department list.

But the North Koreans have yet to comply with a U.S. demand that they expel members of the extreme leftist Japanese Red Army who hijacked a Japanese airliner to North Korea in 1970.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman, coordinator of U.S. policy toward North Korea, tried last week to downplay expectations that the visit will lead to breakthroughs.

"The very fact of this visit is important and I believe historic," she said. "We are hopeful, of course ... that we will make progress on issues as well. But I think that remains to be seen, because this is a long process."

CNN Hong Kong Bureau Chief Mike Chinoy and Reuters contributed to this report.



---

Clinton, North Korean Meet to Try to Ease Tensions

Reuters
October 10. 2000 Filed at 4:36 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-korea-u.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States and North Korea held their highest level meeting ever Tuesday, seeking to ease tensions a half century after they fought each other in the Korean War.

President Clinton met Jo Myong-rok, second-ranking official to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, for about 45 minutes in the White House Oval Office for talks a U.S. official described as ''very positive, direct and warm.''

Jo, vice chairman of North Korea's National Defense Commission, was the most senior official to visit Washington from the secretive, Stalinist state, which in recent years has sought to end its diplomatic isolation.

U.S. officials hope his three-day visit will serve to promote reconciliation between Pyongyang and Seoul following the historic June summit between North Korea's Kim and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

Washington also hopes to make some progress in persuading North Korea to rein in its nuclear and ballistic missile weapons programs and to meet conditions to lose Pyongyang's U.S. designation as a ``state sponsor of terrorism.''

In a sea change from the hostility and suspicion that have largely marked relations since the 1950-53 Korean War, U.S. officials described the Oval Office talks in upbeat terms and both sides stressed a desire for more constructive ties.

``This was an excellent start,'' Ambassador Wendy Sherman, coordinator of U.S. policy toward North Korea, told reporters, saying both sides had summarized their positions in a meeting that was more ceremonial than substantive.

In the making for a year, Jo's visit marked a gradual thaw in U.S.-North Korean relations driven largely by U.S. fears of North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile technology and its military sales to governments that Washington dislikes.

The United States fought with the South during the Korean War and has remained a staunch ally of Seoul ever since, stationing 37,000 troops in the country.

Sherman told reporters Jo gave Clinton a letter from Kim, son of the founder of North Korea, which said U.S.-North Korean relations were at an important point and expressed ``the hope that we would improve it further.''

UNIFORM SENDS SIGNAL?

In a visit as important in symbolism as in substance, Jo changed out of the gray business suit he wore to the State Department Tuesday morning and into full military dress for his White House talks with Clinton.

U.S. officials saw this as a signal that Pyongyang's military is solidly behind the opening to the United States after years of enmity.

``He was also, I think, conveying a very important message to us and to the citizens of North Korea and of the region that this effort to improve relations is one that is shared not only by the civilian side, by the foreign ministry, but by the military as well,'' Sherman told reporters.

On his arrival Monday night, Jo said he hoped his visit would ``remove deeply rooted and age-old distrust'' and promote U.S.-North Korean relations ``consonant with the environment of peace and reconciliation prevailing on the Korean peninsula.''

Sherman suggested the meeting between Clinton and Jo was relatively relaxed for such a rare meeting, with some flashes of humor and give-and-take exchanges.

``The vice marshal noted that he had spend his life in uniform,'' she said. ``By the end of the visit ... after having made a very forceful and warm presentation ... the president noted that he thought he would be a pretty good politician.''

Separately Tuesday, the United States said it was discussing food aid for drought-stricken North Korea with U.N. agencies but the issue had not been discussed so far with Jo. Boucher said Washington would await the assessments of U.N. agencies before deciding how much more it would donate.

Jo's visit followed an agreement between Washington and Pyongyang last Friday to exchange data on international terrorism and to work toward taking North Korea off the U.S. list of ``state sponsors of terrorism.''

The main requirements for being dropped from the list are that North Korea expel Japanese Red Army members who hijacked a Japanese airliner to North Korea in 1970 and make a public denunciation of terrorism.

The two countries have no diplomatic relations but have been talking about opening liaison offices in Washington and the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, as a first step toward exchanging ambassadors.

U.S. officials said the United States was also interested in learning more from Jo about Kim Jong-il's proposal to give up North Korea's ballistic missile programs in return for foreign assistance with launching North Korean satellites.

---

North Korean Envoy Starts Washington Meetings

Reuters
October 10, 2000 Filed at 8:48 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-korea-n.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A top North Korean official began meetings in Washington on Tuesday on the first such visit since the 1950-53 Korean War.

Jo Myong-rok, a soldier with 50 years of service, paid a courtesy call on his host, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, as the special envoy of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, son of the founder of the secretive Stalinist state.

Washington hopes the three-day visit by Jo, the vice chairman of the National Defense Commission and the highest ranking North Korean after Kim Jong-il, could further heal ties between the former Cold War enemies.

After his brief call at the State Department, Jo will head to the White House for talks with President Clinton.

Albright will host a dinner later on Tuesday for Jo, who is due to meet with Defense Secretary William Cohen on Wednesday.

Washington wants to talk to Jo about his country's weapons programs, its status as a ``state sponsor of terrorism'' and how to reduce tensions on the Korean peninsula.

One U.S. official said Washington was hopeful that the meetings could lead to a further ``step-by-step'' reduction in tensions between the former enemies.

``What is significant about this meeting is we have been looking for a so-called high-level visitor to come to the United States to reciprocate from a meeting that Dr.Perry made to Pyongyang last year,'' he said, referring to a groundbreaking visit in 1999 by the former U.S. defense secretary who had been coordinating American policy toward North Korea.

U.S. OFFICIALS SEE SIGNAL OF BETTER TIES

Kim's decision to send Jo, his second in command, came as a surprise to Washington, the official said.

``I think that's a signal from North Korea that they want to work at improving relations with the United States,'' he added.

Jo's visit follows an agreement between the two countries last Friday to exchange data on international terrorism and to work toward taking North Korea off the U.S. list of ``state sponsors of terrorism.''

The two countries, enemies in the Korean War, have no diplomatic relations but have been talking about opening liaison offices in Washington and the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, as a first step toward exchanging ambassadors.

``We'll have a chance to talk about how they view the North-South dialogue and how they want to see a further reduction in tension in the Korean peninsula,'' the U.S. official said.

He said the United States also was interested in learning more from Jo about Kim Jong-il's proposal to give up ballistic missile programs in return for foreign assistance with launching North Korean satellites.

Jo's visit has been in the making for almost a year and reflects a gradual thaw in U.S.-North Korean relations, driven largely by U.S. fears of North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile technology and its military sales to governments that Washington dislikes.

It has gone in tandem with a rapprochement between North and South Korea, which culminated in the June summit between Kim Jong-il and South Korean President Kim Dae-jung.

---

Clinton meets with top N. Korean minister

USA Today
10/10/00- Updated 02:58 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncstue03.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - In a groundbreaking encounter, President Clinton met Tuesday with a senior North Korean official and outlined his concerns about Pyongyang's policies in a number of areas, including missile development.

Clinton spent an hour with Cho Myong Nok, first vice chairman of North Korea's National Defense Commission and right-hand man to Pyongyang's supreme leader, Kim Jong Il.

Cho presented Clinton a personal letter from Kim. White House spokesman Jake Siewert said the letter offered proposals for easing tensions on the peninsula.

He said the administration will determine ''whether we can build on the progress that's already been made in the region'' since the leaders of North and South Korea had their summit meeting in June.

Clinton is the first American president to meet with a North Korean official.

Ambassador Wendy Sherman, the top State Department adviser on North Korea policy, told reporters after the meeting that Cho explained North Korea's concerns in what she described as a ''forceful and warm presentation.''

At another point, she called the session ''very positive, direct and warm.''

''This was meant to be an introductory and very historic meeting between the president of the United States and a personal special envoy of Chairman Kim Jong Il and I think this was a very good beginning to our visit,'' she said

Clinton outlined his concerns to Cho but Sherman said the meeting was not a negotiating session. ''This was not a substantive bilateral,'' she said.

Sherman said it was significant that Cho wore his military uniform to the White House because it showed the North Korean top brass, not just the civilian leadership, is eager for closer ties.

Cho was wearing a business suit when he began his day with a courtesy call on Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at the State Department. He turned up at the White House little more than an hour later wearing his military uniform. As he made his rounds during the morning, he made no public comment.

He was scheduled some sightseeing in the afternoon. After a meeting with congressional leaders in the early evening, he was to be guest of honor at a State Department dinner presided over by Albright.

The deferential treatment given to Cho is unusual considering the fact that the two countries do not have diplomatic relations.

He is the highest ranking North Korean official to visit Washington.

With tens of thousands of U.S. troops deployed in South Korea for decades, tensions on the peninsula have been an American obsession. Despite skepticism in some quarters, officials believe recent developments offer the prospect of a peaceful evolution.

In a written statement he issued Monday night on his arrival in Washington, Cho said he shared that optimism.

''It is an important task before our two governments to promote the (bilateral) relations onto a new stage consonant with the environment of peace and reconciliation prevailing on the Korean peninsula at this historic moment into a new century.''

''During our visit we will do our best to have frank discussions with American leadership so as to remove deeply rooted and age-old distrust and make an epochal change in advancing the relations between our two countries onto a new stage.''

In June, Kim Jong Il had what was widely seen as a highly successful summit with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung. That same month, Clinton eased economic sanctions against North Korea that had been in place since the Korean War.

The talks here were expected to focus on North Korea's missile development program and the possibility of Pyongyang's removal from the State Department list of countries alleged to sponsor international terrorism.

After an overnight visit to San Francisco, Cho arrived in Washington on Monday night. Besides Clinton and Albright, he also planned talks with Defense Secretary William Cohen.

During his stay on the West Coast, Cho's host was former Defense Secretary William Perry, who stepped down recently as an adviser to Clinton on North Korea. Cho's visit reciprocated a Perry visit to Pyongyang in 1999.

Don Oberdorfer, a Korea expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, said U.S. officials were ''amazed and pleased'' when the North Koreans offered to send Cho to Washington. The administration had been expecting a lower ranking official from the foreign ministry.

''The main concerns of the U.S. are regarding military and security issues. This guy is in a much better position to speak to those than a foreign ministry type,'' Oberdorfer said.

He described Cho as a top general who is outranked only by Kim Jong Il himself on the defense commission.

Clinton acknowledged last week that he strongly supported reconciliation and said he saw Cho's visit as a step toward achieving that goal.

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Russian Barge Held Radioactive Cargo

Associated Press
October 10, 2000 Filed at 11:38 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Radioactive-Materials.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- A river barge that overturned in Russia's Far East over the weekend was carrying radioactive materials in a sealed container, the Ministry of Emergency Situations revealed Tuesday.

No radiation has leaked from the three-ton container holding iridium-192, which is now resting on the bed of the Amur River near the village of Keselevka, about 3,900 miles east of Moscow, ministry spokesman Viktor Beltsov said.

Russian news agencies had reported that the barge was carrying diesel fuel in barrels when it capsized Saturday.

Beltsov said some barrels with diesel were on board, as well as food, consumer goods and metal. He could not say how the container would be raised from the river bed.

The ministry was informed of the radioactive cargo only Tuesday, said spokeswoman Irina Andreyanova. She could not say why the ship operators had not immediately notified her ministry, which is partly responsible for responding to nuclear accidents.

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

-------- new mexico

Profiling Safeguards

ABC News
10/09/00
By H. Josef Hebert The Associated Press
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/profiling001009.html

Energy Secretary Acts Against Racial Profiling Energy Secretary Bill Richardson noted there are "enough instances ..." to raise suspicion that discrimination has occurred at the Energy Department. (Linda Spillers/AP Photo)

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 - Amid lingering resentment among Asian-Americans over the Wen Ho Lee case, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson announced safeguards today to guard against racial profiling within the department or among its private contractors.

Richardson said he would "not tolerate even hints" of racial profiling and ordered his inspector general to investigate whether any such activity has occurred.

"We have made progress addressing concerns of racial profiling, but more needs to be done," Richardson said.

Richardson said in an interview that he remains convinced that Lee, Taiwan-born former Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory scientist, was not singled out in an espionage investigation because of his Asian background.

Still, said Richardson, there are "enough instances throughout the complex" to raise suspicion that such discrimination may have occurred in other circumstances.

Once and for All

"I want to eliminate once and for all any future suspicions," he said, although not elaborating on specific cass. "I will not tolerate even hints of racial profiling."

In addition to the inspector general's probe, Richardson ordered revision of outside contracts to include guarantees against racial profiling; and he ruled that a contractor can be forced to pay for failing to deal with profiling.

Richardson acted against a backdrop of resentment among Asian-Americans about handling of the Lee case, an issue that could have political overtones just weeks before the presidential election.

"This case, perhaps more than any other cause we've seen, has really galvanized the [Asian-American] community, more than campaign finance reform, more than welfare reform," said Victor Hwang, an attorney for the San Francisco-based Asian Law Caucus.

Attempt to Deflect?

Hwang, whose group has joined a lawsuit Lee filed against the government charging privacy infringement, said he views the additional actions by Richardson "as a way to deflect an external investigation."

Asian-Americans have joined into a growing political force especially in such key states as California. Many Asian-American activists have been outspoken critics of the Clinton administration's treatment of Lee, from singling him out early on as virtually the only target in a lengthy espionage investigation to confining him for nine months without opportunity for bail.

Last month Lee, 60, who was fired from his job at the Los Alamos nuclear weapons lab in March 1999, was freed from jail after the government dropped all but one of 59 security violation charges. He was never charged with espionage, and no evidence surfaced that he provided secrets to anyone.

The Lee case "has been resolved. We think the matter is closed," Hwang said. The broader issue remains of others who may have been or still are being singled out because of race, Hwang said in a telephone interview.

For three years prior to Lee's firing at Los Alamos, he was the primary focus of an FBI investigation into the alleged loss in the 1980s of one of the country's most sophisticated nuclear warheads.

Intelligence experts since have said if China obtained the information, it could have come from many sources.

Richardson and Attorney General Janet Reno have denied Lee was singled out because of his race or national origin. The former counterintelligence chief at Los Alamos, Robert Vrooman, has insisted that Lee was.

"Every time Lee's motive was discussed, I came down to his ethnicity," Vrooman reiterated at a Senate hearing last week.

---

THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
TUESDAY OCTOBER 10, 2000
http://morrock.com

ENERGY DEPARTMENT INVESTIGATING BIAS: U.S. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has opened an investigation of potential bias in his agency, and has ordered safeguards put in place to guard against ethnic profiling in the department or among its private contractors. Richardson's moves were prompted by criticism of the government's handling of disgraced physicist Wen Ho Lee -- but Richardson said Lee was not singled out because of his Chinese ethnicity.

-------- ohio

DEADLY ALLIANCE | PART 1: WEAPONS OVER WORKERS
Decades of risk: U.S. knowingly allowed workers to be overexposed to toxic dust

October 10, 2000
BY SAM ROE BLADE STAFF WRITER
http://www2.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artikkel?Avis=TO&Dato=99999999&Kategori=SRDEADLY03&Lopenr=9999095&Ref=AR&AvisData=TO

Over the last five decades, the U.S. government has risked the lives of thousands of workers by knowingly allowing them to be exposed to unsafe levels of beryllium, a material critical to the production of nuclear weapons.

As a result, dozens of workers have contracted beryllium disease, an incurable, often-fatal lung illness.

In the Toledo area alone, at least 39 workers have contracted the disease after being exposed to levels of beryllium over the federal safety limit. Six of these workers have died.

A 22-month investigation by The Blade shows that the U.S. government clearly knew, decade after decade, that workers in the private beryllium industry were being overexposed to the hard, lightweight metal, which produces a toxic dust when manufactured or machined.

But federal officials continued to subsidize and encourage the industry to produce beryllium despite numerous government, scientific, and company reports showing that the material could not be made without putting workers in extreme danger.

Some workers were exposed to levels of beryllium dust 100 times above the safety limit, the government's own contemporaneous records show.

When safety regulators tried to protect workers, they ran up against an overwhelming alliance: the beryllium industry and the defense establishment.

Protection of the industry has reached all the way to the White House cabinet, where in the 1970s President Carter's Defense and Energy secretaries helped kill a safety plan.

They feared the plan would cut off beryllium supplies for weapons, and that would "significantly and adversely affect our national defense," U.S. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger wrote to two cabinet members at the time.

The Blade investigation, based on tens of thousands of court, industry, and recently declassified government documents, reveals a decades-long pattern of the government putting beryllium production and costs ahead of worker safety.

"The [government] cannot stand for a cessation of production," one federal official, Martin Powers, told colleagues in 1960 in response to health concerns.

Dr. Peter Infante, director of standards review for the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, says the government has done a poor job protecting beryllium workers.

"These are all deaths and disease that could have been prevented," Dr. Infante says. "That's the sad thing about it."

Victims ask why

Victims question why the government risked their lives for weapons.

"We're killing ourselves trying to kill someone else," says Gary Renwand, a 61-year-old who contracted the disease at the country's largest beryllium plant, outside Elmore, O., 20 miles southeast of Toledo.

Among the local workers who have died:

Gary Anderson, a former Elmore high school football star.

Marilyn Miller, the wife of a dairy farmer in Bradner.

Ethel Jones, a Fremont, O., resident whose son, Eric Johnson, also contracted the disease.

Others have had their lungs so ravaged that they can no longer breathe on their own.

"If they had told me I'd end up hooked up to an oxygen tank my whole life I would have run away from the damn place," says Butch Lemke, who was overexposed at the Elmore plant and has been on oxygen for 15 years.

No one knows how many people have ever contracted the disease. Researchers estimate 1,200 documented cases nationwide and hundreds of deaths. But they say the disease often is misdiagnosed or goes undetected.

And it is difficult to determine how many victims have had exposures above the safety limit.

This much is clear: Beryllium disease has emerged as the No. 1 illness directly caused by America's Cold War buildup.

"I know of no other disease that we can document that is solely attributable to the work that we have conducted in the production of nuclear weapons," says Dr. Paul Seligman, director of the Energy Department's Office of Health Studies.

Among The Blade's findings:

Decade after decade, the government has knowingly allowed workers at privately operated beryllium plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania to be exposed to amounts of beryllium dust far above the U.S. safety limit. The plant outside Elmore, owned by Cleveland-based Brush Wellman Inc., has never consistently complied with the safety limit in all parts of the facility.

Production and costs have been put ahead of safety even when workers were in danger. In one case, federal officials said it was policy that saving money would come before safety when choosing some beryllium suppliers.

Safety enforcement by OSHA has been virtually nonexistent. Even though dozens of workers have contracted beryllium disease at the Elmore plant, several of whom have died, OSHA has conducted only one full inspection of the facility in the past 20 years.

Even though beryllium is a highly toxic material, the government has little idea which companies are using it, how many people are exposed, and whether they are being protected. This means thousands of Americans may be exposed to dangerous amounts of beryllium and not even know it.

Despite mounting illnesses and deaths, the government has not tightened exposure limits in 50 years. It has tried only once, and the Carter administration stepped in and helped kill the plan.

Long a strategic metal, beryllium is lighter than aluminum and six times stiffer than steel. It makes nuclear weapons more powerful, missiles fly farther, and jet fighters more maneuverable.

And it has been critical to the space program, having been used in the early Mercury missions, the space shuttle, and the Mars Pathfinder.

But when the metal is ground, sanded, or cut, and the resulting dust inhaled, workers often develop a disease that slowly eats away at their lungs. About a third with the illness eventually die of it.

Scientists still consider the illness mysterious Scientists still consider the illness mysterious - even bizarre. Tiny, invisible amounts of beryllium dust can be deadly; the federal exposure limit - 2 micrograms per cubic meter of air - is equivalent to the amount of dust the size of a pencil tip spread throughout a 6-foot-high box the size of a football field.

And while some people are unaffected by the dust, others get sick at seemingly insignificant exposures. So researchers think some people are genetically susceptible to the illness. Those individuals often develop the disease years after their last exposure to beryllium - up to 40 years later.

Federal officials have not been oblivious to the illness. Millions of dollars have been spent to improve safeguards and identify victims.

And it is unknown whether every single beryllium worker has been overexposed; the available exposure data are too sketchy.

Nor is it known precisely what constitutes a safe exposure. Exposures over the federal limit do not seem to guarantee illness, and exposures under the limit may not guarantee safety. In fact, more and more scientists think that people can get sick at levels under the limit.

What remains clear is that over the years, beryllium plants with close governmental ties have consistently exceeded the federally mandated safety limit with the government's full knowledge, and workers in those facilities have gone on to develop the disease.

Martin Powers, a former U.S. Atomic Energy Commission official in charge of obtaining beryllium for the government in the 1950s, says federal officials knew about the high exposures and tried to control them.

But he says the government did not want to shut the plants because that would mean stopping weapons production.

"What is the greater risk? To possibly expose people to health injury in the plant or shut down the national defense?"

Mr. Powers, who left the government to become a beryllium industry executive, says workers, at times, were put at increased risk for national security reasons.

"You know you are putting them at increased risk. You hope the risk doesn't materialize, doesn't become a reality."

The Energy Department, which is responsible for maintaining the nuclear weapons arsenal, says there are no substitutes for beryllium. So as long as America wants bombs, workers will face dangers.

"Building weapons is an extraordinarily risky process," the Energy Department's Dr. Seligman says.

Some victims say they knew there was a risk, but they didn't know they were being overexposed.

Brush Wellman, America's largest beryllium producer, says it has always posted air test results on plant bulletin boards and has discussed high exposures with employees.

But it acknowledges that by the time high dust counts are discovered, workers have already been overexposed.

Magical metal turns deadly Discovered in France in 1798, beryllium wasn't produced commercially in America until the 1930s. When it was, it was extracted from beryl and bertrandite ores and processed through a series of chemical steps.

Among the first uses of beryllium: fluorescent lights. Workers coated the insides with beryllium-containing phosphors to help make the glass tubes glow.

At the time, beryllium dust was considered harmless. No one wore respirators, and no one appeared to be getting sick.

Then came World War II.

Suddenly, the U.S. government needed tons of beryllium for the top secret Manhattan Project, the $2 billion effort to build the world's first atomic bomb.

Beryllium plants signed government contracts and began shipping orders to Manhattan Project sites. To maintain the secrecy of the project, shipments were in unmarked packages, identified only by code names, such as Product 38.

"The word 'beryllium' should never be used," one government document warned.

In 1943, federal officials ran into a problem that threatened supplies: Beryllium workers, many in the Cleveland area, began developing a mysterious illness.

They were coughing, losing weight, and becoming breathless. Many recovered, but some grew sicker and died.

A Cleveland Clinic doctor concluded in 1943 that beryllium dust was toxic. But the U.S. Public Health Service, in a report that same year, thought some other agent was to blame.

As the controversy brewed, the government stepped up its beryllium orders. When the factories couldn't keep up, the government spent millions to expand them.

By the mid-1940s, dozens of people had become sick, both at Manhattan Project sites and in the fluorescent light industry.

And the mysterious disease was exhibiting a new twist. Researchers studying the fluorescent light industry concluded in 1946 that workers were getting sick months - even years - after their last exposure to beryllium. No one was recovering from this form of the illness, which would become known as chronic beryllium disease.

By now, most scientists and industry leaders agreed that beryllium dust was toxic.

The government recommended safety improvements and supplied respirators for some workers. But it was also deeply concerned about its image.

A 1947 secret report by the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC, warned that the disease "might be headlined, particularly in non-friendly papers, for weeks and months - each new case bringing an opportunity for a rehash of the story. This might seriously embarrass the AEC and reduce public confidence in the organization."

Despite mounting sickness, the AEC remained "acutely interested in maintaining and expanding production of beryllium," according to the report, which was recently declassified.

The agency's mission - building nuclear weapons - depended on it.

"The AEC appears to be stuck with beryllium," the report said, "and hence stuck with the public relations problem."

Disease strikes Lorain residents Just weeks after the government outlined its public relations fears in 1947, a tragedy began to unfold: People living near a beryllium plant in Lorain, O., started coming down with the disease.

One 28-year-old woman dropped to 85 pounds. Another became so weak she had to remain in bed.

Government officials were stunned. Never before had people been known to contract metal poisoning by living near a factory.

Fear in Lorain spread quickly. Citizens stormed a city council meeting, and Councilman Leo Svete had to pound the gavel for 15 minutes to restore order.

The AEC took air samples around the plant, and the Ohio Health Department announced it would conduct a rare and massive project: It would X-ray as many Lorain residents as possible.

X-ray stations were set up at schools, JC Penney, and Abraham Motor Sales. In all, 10,500 people were X-rayed - a fifth of the entire city.

And when the inquiry was over, 11 citizens who had never set foot in the plant were found to have the disease.

The wife of one worker got it by handling her husband's dusty work clothes. But the other victims, the AEC found, got it strictly from beryllium air pollution.

Among them: 7-year-old Gloria Gorka, a chubby girl with curly hair.

"We noticed she kept panting and had a hard time breathing when she exerted herself in the least little way," recalls her father, Joseph, an 81-year-old now living in Florida. "We just thought she was having a hard time getting over the measles."

When her schoolteacher called and said Gloria was having difficulty walking up one flight of stairs at school, her parents took her to a doctor. But there was nothing anyone could do.

"It was so sad," recalls her 79-year-old aunt, Angela Barraco. "By the time she died she was nothing but skin and bones."

AEC officials concluded that the victims had been exposed to surprisingly minute levels of beryllium. They recommended that citizens should no longer be exposed to more than .01 micrograms per cubic meter of air - an amount invisible to the naked eye.

The limit was the first air pollution standard in American history.

As for the limit inside beryllium plants, officials weren't sure what to do. They discussed the matter for weeks, and then an AEC health official and a medical consultant to the fluorescent light industry settled on 2 micrograms while riding in a taxi.

This limit, based largely on guesswork, was dubbed "the taxicab standard."

Officials knew workers might become ill at lower levels, a 1958 AEC report states, but "because of the relatively small numbers of people involved," it was seen as "an acceptable risk."

Costs made a priority over worker safety Publicly, the government was cracking down.

While the AEC was setting limits on pollution, the U.S. Public Health Service was convincing fluorescent light companies to stop using beryllium.

Government officials issued warnings about the lights already in use: Children shouldn't use them as lances, and burned-out tubes should be broken under water.

But unbeknownst to the public, the government was embracing beryllium, ordering more for weapons.

In fact, in 1949 the AEC adopted a policy that weapons production and economics would come before worker safety when the United States was choosing some beryllium suppliers.

One top official who was upset about this, records show, was Wilbur Kelley, manager of the AEC's New York office.

In the summer of 1949, he and his staff were concerned that the government was planning to buy beryllium hydroxide - the vital feed material for all beryllium products - from a plant outside Reading, Pa., operated by the Beryllium Corporation.

Mr. Kelley had reason to be concerned: Dust in the plant was hazardously high, and several workers had died.

In a series of letters, Mr. Kelley pleaded with his AEC colleagues not to buy beryllium from the firm.

"The AEC cannot avoid knowing that every time it enters into a contract for the production of beryllium in what it knows to be a medically unsafe plant the lives of an unknown number of people may be placed in jeopardy," he wrote.

The government, he wrote, "cannot shirk its moral responsibility in this matter."

But at a meeting of top AEC officials in Washington, Mr. Kelley was informed that, except in certain contracts, the government would no longer bear "the responsibility for health conditions associated with the procurement and production of beryllium materials," minutes of the meeting state.

It was decided that "further consideration of medical reasons would be dropped and that all consideration of the proposed arrangement with the Beryllium Corporation would be based strictly on economics."

It is unclear whether the AEC went ahead and bought beryllium from the Beryllium Corporation. But the government continued its association with the firm.

The AEC owned a small building on plant grounds that cast beryllium metal. The Beryllium Corporation ran the casting operation under a government contract.

For the next 20 months, from the summer of 1949 to the spring of 1951, workers in that building were exposed to dust up to 100 times the safety limit, records show.

Conditions in Beryllium Corporation's main plant were worse: Some workers were exposed to dust 500 times the limit.

And many people went on to get beryllium disease.

In fact, in the 10 years following Mr. Kelley's repeated warnings about the Beryllium Corporation, at least 37 people either working at the plant site or living nearby developed the illness, studies show.

Among them: a woman who paid weekly visits to a relative's grave in the cemetery across the street from the plant.

Plants kept open despite dangers The 1950s brought the Korean War and the arms race, the Cold War and the space race. America's desire for beryllium had never been greater.

The government didn't want a repeat of the Lorain neighborhood tragedy, and so it paid Brush Beryllium, the predecessor to Brush Wellman, to build and operate a plant far from residents.

The site: tiny Luckey, a farming community 15 miles south of Toledo. Here, only one or two farmhouses would be near.

And for the first time, the government had a safety standard - the one adopted in 1949 - to limit the amount of dust workers could be exposed to.

But year after year, records show, dust counts in the Luckey plant were high. Workers were even overexposed in the lunchroom.

Instead of closing the plant, the government eased enforcement of the rules, allowing workers to be exposed to levels five times higher than previously permitted.

But even with the relaxed rules, the plant couldn't keep the dust under control.

Eight years later, in 1957, the plant was replaced by a larger one 10 miles away near Elmore.

Under government contract, Brush Beryllium built, owned, and operated the plant. In return, the government agreed to buy 50 tons of beryllium over five years. The AEC signed a similar contract with the Beryllium Corporation for a plant outside Hazleton, Pa.

Both contracts had a health clause: If dust levels were consistently high, the government could close the plants.

Again, workers were overexposed throughout the 1950s and 1960s, industry and government records show. Dust counts at Elmore were regularly five times too high; some levels at Hazleton were 4,000 times over the limit.

Yet the Elmore plant was never shut, and the Hazleton plant was closed only once for about a month, according to a deposition by Mr. Powers, the former government and industry official.

The beryllium companies tried to meet the safety limit but to no avail. A Brush doctor blamed the failure on production demands, "triggered primarily by the space program."

One Brush document says every time the government considered closing the Elmore plant, "the Navy and AEC weapons people objected because they needed the metal for nuclear weapons and Polaris [missile] parts."

AEC officials, correspondence shows, weren't sure what to do about the high exposures.

One official wrote that better equipment had been suggested, but "this would increase the cost of beryllium by ten times," and "the plants would have to be shut down and rebuilt."

"The extra cost would be undesirable, but the latter factor is unacceptable because of AEC need for the metal."

Still, as bad as the dust counts were, they were improving and the disease rate appeared to be dropping. In fact, some officials thought the exposure rules might be too strict.

In 1960, a dozen AEC officials met to discuss the issue. They concluded that the plants, dangerous or not, must remain open, minutes of the meeting show.

"The [government] cannot stand for a cessation of production," one official stated.

That official was Martin Powers, in charge of buying beryllium for the AEC. But he was also responsible for ensuring that the beryllium plants were not overexposing workers.

Four months after this meeting, Mr. Powers left the government to work for one of the firms he had been responsible for monitoring: Brush Beryllium.

He would spend the next 26 years as a top executive with the company, often handling the government contracts and overseeing the health and safety program.

Today, Mr. Powers, 77, is retired from Brush but remains a paid company consultant. The government, he says, didn't know for sure that workers were going to be harmed by the overexposures. But he acknowledges the AEC was taking a risk that they might.

"I think there were certainly cases where you might have allowed marginal activities to exist hoping - but not really knowing - that they were going to be all right."

He says pressure on the AEC to keep plants running was enormous. He recalls receiving a phone call from an admiral who was livid about AEC plans to phase out a plant.

"This admiral called me and said, 'You will not shut that goddamn plant down. What are you, out of your goddamn-picking mind? I've got submarines out there. We need missiles.' "

Mr. Powers says he didn't agree with some government decisions. He says that the AEC for one or two years, about 1949 and 1950, insisted that Brush not put warning labels on beryllium products shipped to AEC facilities because it didn't want to alarm workers there.

Officials who made that decision, he says, "just didn't apparently feel it was their province to worry about the health issues."

Numerous workers would eventually develop beryllium disease after being overexposed in the 1950s and 1960s.

Among them: Gary Renwand, an Oak Harbor, O., resident who worked 35 years at Brush's Elmore plant.

Company records show that he was frequently exposed to high levels of dust - some amounts five times the safety limit.

Now, he is often in and out of St. Charles Mercy Hospital, battling heart and lung problems related to his disease. On one such day, he sits up in bed and recalls making beryllium re-entry shields for space capsules and watching the capsules on TV careen back to Earth.

"I thought, 'Hey, we made that shield.' And I was proud. I was part of this. A new era."

He forces a laugh.

"Young and dumb," he says.

Only once in the last five decades has the U.S. government tried to tighten exposure limits.

That was in 1975, when OSHA proposed cutting the exposure limit in half - from 2 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 1.

The plan met tremendous opposition from the beryllium industry and U.S. weapons officials. Energy Secretary James Schlesinger warned that the plan might drive beryllium firms out of the metal business and cut off U.S. supplies.

"The loss of beryllium production capability would seriously impact our ability to develop and produce weapons for the nuclear stockpile and, consequently, adversely affect our national security," he wrote in 1978 to Labor Secretary Ray Marshall and Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano, Jr.

Secretary Schlesinger wanted the scientific basis for the plan reviewed. Defense Secretary Harold Brown made a similar request.

So the plan was delayed until outside experts could review it. In the end, the experts concluded that the science behind the safety plan was indeed valid.

But the plan never went through.

One factor: In 1979, the Cabot Corp., now the owner of the beryllium plant outside Hazleton, Pa., quit making beryllium metal, leaving Brush Wellman as the sole U.S. supplier.

Almost immediately, the government cut a secret deal with Brush, according to government and industry records. Brush promised to continue to supply the Energy Department with beryllium for its weapons; in return, the agency promised to:

Pay Brush a one-time 35 per cent price increase.

Not develop other sources of beryllium.

Try to persuade OSHA to drop its safety plan.

Within a few years, OSHA's safety plan died.

Throughout the fight, one thing remained constant: Workers continued to be overexposed.

Today, more than 50 years after the disease was discovered, the rate of illness is higher than ever.

A study published in 1997 found that 1 in 11 workers at the 646-employee Elmore plant either have the disease or an abnormal blood test - a sign they may very well develop the illness.

And while dust counts at the Elmore plant are much improved, some remain over the legal limit, company records turned over in court cases show.

OSHA is responsible for inspecting the plant and making sure dust counts are low. If not, inspectors can write citations and issue fines.

But years have gone by without an inspector setting foot in the plant, OSHA records show.

When inspectors have found high dust counts, Brush Wellman has escaped penalties.

In fact, OSHA records show, Brush has never paid one cent for high exposures at any of its several facilities nationwide.

OSHA officials says there are simply not enough inspectors to regularly check the plants.

"We have about 2,000 compliance officers to cover 6 million work sites that employ more than 100 million workers," says OSHA spokesman Stephen Gaskill, who recently left the agency.

"So to say that we are spread thin is a severe understatement."

To make matters worse, no one knows what companies - from large corporations to small machine shops - are handling beryllium and whether safeguards are in place.

"There are beryllium-copper golf clubs now being used," says Dr. Peter Infante, OSHA's director of standards review. "Where are those being tooled and polished?"

Thousands of companies are believed to handle beryllium, but no one knows how many workers are potentially exposed. Estimates range widely, from 30,000 to 800,000.

Improvements, officials say, are in the works.

The Energy Department says it is spending millions to improve ventilation and air monitoring at government-owned sites. And Brush Wellman says it is improving equipment and work practices to reduce exposure.

Theresa Norgard, wife of disease victim Dave Norgard, of Manitou Beach, Mich., says she has heard such promises before. "Tired, worn-out phrases," she says. "Different time periods, same messages: 'Mistakes were made.

Now we're doing better. We're doing everything we can.' " Time and time again, she says, the government sacrificed the workers.

"They were just like pieces of equipment. They were disposable. They were dispensable. They weren't even seen as being human."


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

-------- colombia

Drug-related crimes keep Colombian army busy

Washington Times
October 10, 2000
By Steve Salisbury SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/world/default-2000101022922.htm

BOGOTA, Colombia - The army has long been involved in fighting narcotics trafficking, but it is not widely known that the blurring of the drug trade with other crimes- money-laundering, counterfeiting, credit-card fraud, cell-phone cloning - has pulled it into law-enforcement actions far beyond the war on drugs.

An example is Operation San Martin, carried out 13 months ago in Cali, Colombia's third-largest city. There the 80-man anti-narcotics Comando Especial del Ejercito (CEE) pulled off a sting operation and arrested two suspects on charges of distributing bogus greenbacks.

This reporter accompanied CEE agents during the sting and at the moment of the arrests. The details provide a rare glimpse of how the Colombian army has integrated intelligence and operational actions in a law-enforcement role.

Roberto, 46, was a small fish, and it showed in his disheveled appearance. But the balding ex-cop boasted that his boss, nicknamed El Gordo (The Fat One), had ties to criminal operations of the late Helmer El Pacho (The Sluggard) Herrera, the last of the seven top leaders of the Cali cocaine cartel to be captured.

The Sluggard was murdered in a Colombian prison on Nov. 5, 1998, by a visitor posing as his lawyer, and Fats had gone his own way.

El Gordo needed money

He was feeling heat over money Herrera's people said he owed them, according to Roberto. But Roberto said El Gordo was not limiting himself to drug trafficking; he was also selling counterfeit U.S. dollars.

This was also the story that Fernando, not the real name of an undercover CEE operative, said he had heard from an informant. Interviewed on army ground rules of anonymity, Fernando said he informed the CEE's commander, a lieutenant colonel, about the tip.

Seeing a possible connection with drug trafficking, the colonel authorized Fernando to tell the informant he should ask Roberto to call a feigned potential buyer of counterfeit dollars named "Juano." What Roberto did not know was that Juano was in fact Fernando, a sergeant with 18 years' experience and a ranking member of the CEE's three-man communications surveillance and intercept unit called the Centro para la Recoleccion de Informacion (CRI).

Hungry for a commission from El Gordo, Roberto called "Juano." Fernando pretended interest in buying counterfeit dollars and got Roberto's phone number from caller ID, so further calls from that phone could be monitored.

Thus began the monthlong operation called San Martin.

In a climate where competition between Colombia's national police and armed forces for anti-narcotics support from Washington make unit successes and headlines important, the CEE, which reports directly to Gen. Fernando Tapias Stahelin, the armed forces chief, decided to handle the operation alone.

A 'sting' was the answer

Anything remotely connected to narcotics was within the CEE's purview, so bringing in the police and possibly sharing the credit for success was not necessary. But having a prosecutor present to carry out judicial searches was.

In September 1999, a prosecutor was not permanently attached to the CEE, though one is now. So to make a legal arrest alone, the army had to catch those committing a crime in the act. The solution was a "sting."

Two or three weeks after their first phone conversation, Fernando won Roberto's confidence enough to set up an afternoon meeting in the dusty small town of Juanchito, just outside Cali. Another CEE undercover operative posed as Fernando's taxi driver.

They met outside a seedy, palm-thatched motel near the Cauca River. Roberto showed up on foot a couple of hours late, and nervous. Fernando was dressed casually, wearing wire-rimmed eyeglasses. As Fernando later recalled, Roberto looked at his short haircut with suspicion.

Roberto told P, the agent posing as a taxi driver, that "Juano" looked like a cop. P laughed this off, telling Roberto that he had worked for "Juano" before, and that he was really a duro - a hard guy.

When a police car pulled up about 200 feet away and the officers emerged to search people nearby - including two soldiers in plainclothes serving as back-ups for Roberto and his driver - "Juano" confirmed his hoodlum credentials by pulling a handgun from under his shirt and stashing it in a nearby tree.

Establishing confidence

The CEE backups showed the policemen their military ID cards and asked them not to let Roberto see the soldier's pistols. The cops obliged, but the later appearance of motorcycle policemen passing by spooked Roberto. He said El Gordo was waiting nearby with the counterfeit cash, aborted the meeting just before sundown and walked off, crossing the two-lane highway that runs parallel to the river.

This outcome made the CEE operatives wonder whether Roberto was really selling funny money or just bluffing.

The answer came a few days later when Roberto called "Juano" to set up another rendezvous.

On a September afternoon, a CEE intelligence captain, a corporal, a Colombian civilian shooting instructor assisting the CEE, and this reporter got into a green Chevy Blazer. We were all in civilian clothes, leaving the sprawling base of the 3rd Brigade in southern Cali.

The captain drove north along Cali's broad Quinta Street for about 15 minutes, weaving through heavy traffic, and made a right turn that took us past the Pascual Guerrero soccer stadium.

The captain dropped the corporal off in front, on the side of the street away from the stadium. Driving around the block, he dropped me off and I walked up a side street and turned a corner to where I could see the corporal.

Setting up the arrest

Monitoring and coordinating by radio, the captain drove around, several blocks away. Meanwhile, a white Mitsubishi van holding a squad of CEE commandos in camouflage fatigues parked out of sight a few blocks away.

After about 20 minutes, the clunky yellow taxi driven by P came into view, slowly following Fernando and Roberto walking downhill along the street in front of the stadium. Fernando had left the cab up the hill to join Roberto on the sidewalk.

The two men crossed the street and entered a cheap restaurant called Video Cafe on the ground floor of an orange-brick, two-story building on the street corner. P parked at the curb about 75 feet past the restaurant. The area stank of food fried in rank grease.

Fernando and Roberto sat at a table in back, away from a clutch of noisy patrons, but they remained in view from the street because there was no front wall.

Fernando was a little nervous, he later recalled, but he covered it up by taking a domineering stance. He had told Roberto he would bring 10 million Colombian pesos (about $5,000) for the transaction.

Maneuvering the end game

When Roberto asked him for the money, Fernando replied: "What money? Show me yours first. What I bring is real money. What you bring me is paper."

The deal the two had struck was that Fernando would pay 14,000 Colombian pesos (about $7) for each counterfeit $100 bill, and 5,000 pesos for each counterfeit $50 bill.

Roberto then shrugged at a tall, dark fellow standing near a street vendor at the corner.

"That man is El Gordo, but he is very nervous," Roberto replied when Fernando asked.

El Gordo beckoned to Roberto, who joined the big guy near a double-parked red Hyundai Excel. El Gordo wore a simple white plaid shirt, but it looked elegant in contrast to Roberto's green T-shirt and old jeans.

El Gordo slid into the driver's seat, started the Hyundai's engine and drove forward a bit. He handed a blue-and-white plastic bag to Roberto through the front passenger window.

Roberto walked back to sit with Fernando and pushed the bag toward him.

"Get that away from me," Fernando snapped. "Let's go to the taxi to do this."

There they met P, who was standing beside the cab. Fernando took a peek inside the bag and saw the counterfeit greenbacks.

Roberto was getting edgy. "Here is yours," he said, lifting the plastic bag. "Where is mine? In the bag in the taxi, right?"

Calling in the troops

Roberto was referring to a blue shoulder bag Fernando and P had put in the back seat of the taxi to create that impression. But Fernando replied that the money was in another car and said he would call his bagman, Jorge, to bring it.

Fernando dialed a number on his cell phone and handed it to P. "Bring the money," P told "Jorge," really a CEE sergeant. Those words were the signal for soldiers to move in.

Within 30 seconds, the commandos drove up and a there was a commotion. Fernando and P had drawn their 9 mm pistols. Roberto tried to run. Clutching his pistol with two hands,

Fernando aimed at Roberto, ordering him to freeze.

Commandos armed with U.S.-made M-16 A-2 rifles were pouring out of the van, fanning out among stunned patrons at the cafe's sidewalk tables to secure the area. Noises of confusion rose from the crowd.

"It's him, it's him," Roberto shouted to the commandos, pointing at Fernando as he tried to escape. But the commandos had choreographed the arrest with Fernando, and they seized Roberto without a struggle.

During the capture of Roberto, El Gordo backed the Hyundai around the corner and tried to drive away, but P ran over, stepped in front of the car and aimed his pistol at him.

Anticlimax but a precedent

The CEE plainclothes corporal, some of the commandos, their lieutenant and another plainclothes CEE intelligence captain who had arrived separately swarmed to the red Hyundai.

El Gordo got out of the car. No one was hurt. Soldiers examined his papers and those of a number of people on the street corner.

El Gordo denied having anything to do with the bag of counterfeit cash. But he and Roberto were hauled off to a detention room at the CEE compound on the Third Brigade base. The red Hyundai was also taken there and impounded.

At the military base offices, the CEE men counted $81,450 in counterfeit 100s and 50s.

The bills were hard to spot as fake with the naked eye, but their texture seemed too smooth.

The arrests were a fleeting victory for the CEE.

El Gordo was released from jail after a few weeks, and Roberto apparently walked free not long afterward.

However, the CEE's success in coordinating intelligence and operational actions to carry out police-style work has had a lasting impact on military anti-narcotics operations and seems to promise more.

-------- drug war

Biker bosses back at the table

Montreal Gazette
Tuesday 10 October 2000
AMANDA JELOWICKI and NELSON WYATT The Gazette; CP
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/001010/4659015.html

For the second time in two weeks, the kingpins of Quebec's most notorious biker gangs gathered for a meeting, again prompting speculation the two sides are attempting to reach a truce in their bloody five-year turf war over the province's illegal-drug trade.

At the end of September, the outlaw bikers sat down in a conference room at the Quebec City courthouse for unknown reasons, infuriating politicians, police and the public. The latest summit took the shape of a dinner party Sunday night at the Bleu Marin, a trendy restaurant on Crescent St.

Like the Quebec City meeting, the hosts of the Montreal soiree were Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) Boucher and Frederic (Fred) Faucher, interim head of the rival Rock Machine. Sunday's guest list included about 20 of their lieutenants, radio reporter Claude Poirier and a photographer from the crime tabloid Allo Police.

The bikers turned up without a reservation and mingled at the bar while waiting for a table, Bleu Marin manager Matteo Scanzano said.

They wore street clothes until after dinner, when it was time for the photograph. "When they walked in, they were dressed like anyone else. When they made a picture together, that's when they put on their famous jackets," Scanzano said.

The group occupied a long table in the middle of a dining room crowded with other patrons.

Boucher and Faucher sat facing each other in the centre, flanked by their respective lieutenants.

"The restaurant was very crowded. They sat and ate and drank like normal people," Scanzano said. "The majority had seafood and fish and some pasta (to eat), and some had meat."

While provincial police said they were aware of Sunday's meeting, they said it would not affect their efforts to crack down on outlaw biker gangs.

"Yes, we learned about it," Surete du Quebec spokesman Isabelle Gendron said, "but it doesn't change anything at all. I don't know if this means (there's a truce). You should ask them. We don't have a comment on this right now."

The two journalists, invited to capture the moment, were called to the restaurant by the bikers shortly after 7 p.m., Poirier said in interviews yesterday.

"To my great surprise, when I arrived with Allo Police photographer Michel Tremblay, there were 20 or 25 people sitting around the table," he said. "On one side was Nomads leader Mom Boucher, and on the other side was interim Rock Machine leader Fred Faucher. (The Nomads are an elite chapter of the Hells Angels.)

"They were in the middle of eating and were accompanied by several of their lieutenants. There were handshakes and accolades all around after the meeting.

"These people weren't very talkative, though. I asked if they would do an interview," said Poirier, who did not sit with the bikers. "They said they didn't want to do an interview and that the photo would be worth 1,000 words.

"After the photo was taken, they asked us to leave, and we left."

The photo is to be published in Allo Police on Friday.

The gang leaders and their lieutenants drank champagne after the meal.

A police cruiser pulled up in front of the restaurant toward the end of dessert, attracted there by several bikers who had gone outside for some fresh air. Several of the gang members were briefly detained by the police, Poirier said, while Boucher and Faucher slipped out. There were no arrests.

There are unconfirmed reports that the bikers have reached a truce in the war over control of Quebec's lucrative illicit-drug trade. Since the fighting started in 1995, more than 150 people have been killed, including an 11-year-old boy who was a bystander when a car bomb exploded.

Also last month, crime reporter Michel Auger, who has covered the biker war extensively for the tabloid Journal de Montreal, was wounded by gunfire in the newspaper's parking lot.

Biker experts speculated yesterday that the two attention-grabbing gatherings were designed to ease public pressure on the criminal gangs.

"What's important is that it was once again done in public," said Yves Lavigne, author of three books on the Hells. "These bikers could easily meet in private and no one would know there is a peace deal going on, but they want the public to know because this gets the public off their back."

Lavigne suggested the Hells, who he said were winning the turf war, had started laying the groundwork for a peace treaty at the beginning of the year, taking a lower profile except for when they attend gang funerals.

He noted the Hells signed peace treaties with rival gangs in the Scandinavian countries in 1997 and in the United States in 1998 and 1999.

"They all want to make money and they realize that war hurts the bottom line," Lavigne said from Toronto. "The last treaty to be signed, if it is signed, will be with the Rock Machine."

Staff-Sgt. Jean-Pierre Levesque, a biker expert with the Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, likened Sunday's dinner to the September 1997 love-in between the Hells and Bandidos in Denmark.

"The Hells and Bandidos decided to meet and make a big show of it," he said. At that meeting, the gangs bought TV time and were shown smiling and shaking hands.

"They said there was no war and now it was a truce, no need for special laws or to kick them out of the city."

The Hells love the publicity, Levesque said.

"They play a game. They like rubbing it in the face of the police."

Constable Ian Lafreniere, a Montreal Urban Community police spokesman, said he was not impressed by the biker meeting.

"It won't change anything in the way we deal with criminal biker gangs," he said.

Allison Hanes of The Gazette contributed to this report.

---

U.S. Companies Tangled in Web of Drug Dollars

New York Times
October 10, 2000
By LOWELL BERGMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/national/10PESO.html

On a rainy day last June, a group of corporate executives gathered in a conference room at the Justice Department for a meeting with Attorney General Janet Reno and other top government officials.

The executives represented some of the pillars of corporate America - Hewlett-Packard, Ford Motor Company, Whirlpool. The session was not publicized because those at the meeting shared an unlikely and potentially embarrassing problem: their companies, they feared, were being singled out in the nation's war on drugs, and neither they nor the government was quite sure what to do.

With the intensifying federal crackdown on money laundering, agents had been tracking drug money into the accounts of American corporations and their distributors and dealers. In fact, federal officials said, about $5 billion a year in Colombian drug money is used to buy goods and services - from cigarettes to computer chips - from American companies.

What makes that possible is a system known as the black-market peso exchange, a complex money trade that law enforcement officials say has become increasingly important to the Colombian narcotics trade.

The system - really a network of currency brokers with offices in New York, Miami, the Caribbean and South America - is essentially an underground money market that lets the traffickers exchange American dollars for Colombian pesos. Those dollars, which stay in the United States, are then bought by Colombian companies that use them to buy American goods for sale back home.

But the government's efforts to seize that money have put it on a collision course with corporations, which say they are victims with no way of knowing that they and their distributors are being paid with drug money.

As they met on June 6, those executives, lawyers and law enforcement officials found themselves grappling with a conundrum: when does drug money stop being drug money? How far does a company's responsibility go?

The questions have been confronting law enforcement officials for years.

"What are we going to do?" asked Greg Passic, a former drug enforcement agent who now advises the government on the economics of the narcotics industry. "We've got the Fortune 500 involved in our drug- money laundering process."

For a long time, because of lax enforcement of United States currency laws, the drug traffickers were able to launder billions of dollars through American financial institutions. A crackdown in the 1980's pushed traffickers to what they saw as a virtually fail-safe system for getting back their profits - the black-market peso exchange.

Their growing reliance on that system shows how deeply the drug trade has become entwined in the legitimate economies of the United States, Colombia and other nations.

Colombian officials said that as much as 45 percent of their country's imported consumer goods are bought with money laundered through the peso exchange.

On the American side, law enforcement officials said the exchange has largely eliminated the trade deficit with Colombia. The market, said the customs commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, "is the ultimate nexus between crime and commerce, using global trade to mask global money laundering."

So far, no large American company has faced criminal charges. And companies have almost always been able to prevent federal officials from keeping money that has been seized.

But in the last few years, as frustration has risen, the government has taken a tougher line. There have been Congressional hearings intended to put companies on notice by name. Prosecutors have issued warnings and stepped up efforts to seize laundered money.

At the same time, the government has encouraged companies to institute "know your customer" policies similar to those used in the financial industry. The policies gave dealers and distributors techniques for recognizing money laundering. Thus educated, the government thought, the companies would be less able to argue that they simply could not have known.

In drawing the line between legitimate and illegitimate profits, the government must not only prove that the money came from drug deals; it must show that the recipient "knew or should have known" its source.

In the war on drugs, that line has proved very fuzzy.

Trading Dollars for Pesos

Congress passed the first money- laundering laws in the early 1970's - requiring, among other things, that banks report any cash transaction over $10,000 - but the laws were loosely enforced. By 1979, the Federal Reserve Bank in Miami had more cash than the other federal reserve banks combined.

It took the uproar over the cocaine epidemic in the early 80's for banks to comply with the law. And with the resulting crackdown, traffickers resorted to the black market, which for decades had provided Colombian businesses with dollars at less than the official exchange rate of 2,000 pesos to the dollar. The rate in Colombia is fixed by the government.

One peso broker recently agreed to describe how the system works.

The process begins when the broker receives a call from a Colombian drug trafficker or his American representative. The two negotiate an exchange rate for pesos, usually 30 percent to 40 percent below the fixed rate. So $10,000 might be worth 12 million pesos instead of 20 million at the official rate.

The dollars are then delivered to the broker, who promises to deliver pesos to the trafficker's bank account after the dollars are sold to Colombian businesses. The dealer's insurance is the broker's knowledge that to do otherwise would almost surely mean death.

The broker maintains several runners - "smurfs," in law enforcement lingo - who deposit the cash into hundreds of United States bank accounts in amounts of less than $10,000, to avoid scrutiny.

At the same time, the broker's office in Colombia negotiates with business people there who want cheap dollars to buy everything from consumer goods to helicopters.

Usually, that exchange rate is 20 percent below market, so a business owner in Colombia might pay 16 million pesos, instead of 20 million pesos at the fixed rate, for $10,000.

The pesos are then transferred - in this example, 12 million pesos - to the traffickers' accounts. The broker keeps the difference, 4 million pesos in this instance. Then at the businessman's direction, the dollars in the American banks are used to pay for American goods.

The peso brokerage is one part of the process that supplies Colombia with inexpensive goods from the United States and around the world. Colombian authorities said the goods were often smuggled into the country, costing Colombia more than $300 million a year in tax revenue.

Colombia has made collecting that lost revenue a priority. But the black market has considerable appeal because it puts a lot of inexpensive foreign goods on the Colombian market.

The exchange has also increased American exports to Colombia.

"This is positive for U.S. business, there is no doubt about it," said Mike Wald, who runs a consortium of law enforcement agencies in Florida focusing on the peso exchange. "The Colombian, if he pays less for his dollars, can buy more goods. That's a pretty obvious economic fact. But we have to realize where this money originates. It's drug money."

Tangled With Drug Money

Two companies that have turned up in the American government's anti-laundering efforts are Phillip Morris and Bell Helicopter Textron.

Phillip Morris products in particular have been a major presence in Colombia. Marlboro cigarettes are readily available at prices investigators said indicated that they were bought with black market dollars and smuggled into the country.

Earlier this year, Phillip Morris was sued in the Eastern District of New York by the Colombian tax collectors. The federal lawsuit accused the company of being involved in cigarette smuggling and in the laundering of drug proceeds.

Phillip Morris has denied the allegations, saying that it did not know its products were being exploited for money laundering. In addition, without admitting wrongdoing, it recently signed an agreement with Colombia, pledging to stop its products from entering the black market or being used to launder money.

In 1995, in Federal District Court in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Phillip Morris's former distributors in northern South America were indicted for laundering $40 million in black market pesos.

A member of the defense lawyers said the money was used to buy Phillip Morris cigarettes, liquor and other products for the Colombian market. But the defense team member said the defendants did not know that the money came from drug sales.

Phillip Morris severed its relationship with the defendants in 1998 and said it did not know that its products were being smuggled or that black market money was used to buy them.

In another case, Bell Helicopter is challenging the seizure of $300,000 from its accounts, money, according to court documents, that was generated by drug smuggling.

It was part of more than $1 million that the United States believed was supplied a peso-exchange broker to buy a Bell aircraft. The helicopter was seized in Panama at the request of the United States.

The case has become a sore point for American law enforcement in part because the helicopter was sold to a Colombian businessman linked to the country's right-wing paramilitaries.

Seeking Cooperation

The deepening struggle between prosecutors and business executives is what led to the meeting with Attorney General Reno and other government officials, including Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder and Deputy Treasury Secretary Stuart E. Eizenstat. The companies invited were Hewlett-Packard, Ford, General Motors, Sony, Westinghouse, Whirlpool and General Electric Company, Treasury officials said.

None of the companies returned phone calls seeking comment, except General Electric and Sony. Sony said it would have no comment. But General Electric's counsel, Scott Gilbert, said his company instituted a strict compliance program five years ago, after reports that its refrigerators were being used in money-laundering operations.

As part of its policy, Mr. Gilbert said General Electric warns dealers to be aware of "red flags" - a customer's lack of interest in discounts, an unwillingness to give information about the company, or unusual forms of payment like large amounts of cash or checks written on the account of a third party.

The new policy has cut sales of appliances to Latin America by 23,000 units, or over 20 percent, said an executive at General Electric.

Alan Dooty, a customs official, said the companies had been selected for the June meeting because their products had shown up in the black market in Colombia. The exception was General Electric, which he singled out as a "good citizen."

Before the meeting, some of the companies expressed concern that they would be punished. But once they arrived, Mr. Dooty said, they were assured that the government was seeking cooperation.

A follow-up session in July bogged down in legal murk.

An industry representative familiar with the meeting said: "The Justice and Treasury Departments realized that they were trying to identify drug money that had morphed, been transformed, in layers of transactions involving distributors, authorized dealers, financing arrangements with unregulated money lenders called `factors' and the other realities of commercial life."

More meetings are scheduled for this fall.

---

Alaska's Voters to Decide On Legalizing Marijuana

New York Times
October 10, 2000
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/politics/10ALAS.html

ANCHORAGE, Oct. 5 - "Vote Yes Prop 5," proclaims the large yellow mural painted on the side of a building here, complete with a large cannabis leaf. A poster on the window offers a quote from Ronald Reagan, though he has certainly not endorsed this particular measure: "Government exists to protect us from each other. Where government has gone beyond its limits is in deciding to protect us from ourselves."

And just inside the door here at the headquarters of Free Hemp in Alaska are more than a dozen versions of pamphlets offering reasons for Alaskans to support the broadest marijuana legalization initiative ever to appear on a state ballot.

One pamphlet proclaims that marijuana is a far safer drug than alcohol, another says that passage of the measure would "free police resources to fight real crime."

And a third, "Marijuana and the Bible," has a drawing of Jesus Christ and observes: "Nowhere in the Bible does it forbid people to grow, use or smoke cannabis hemp."

Here, in a state that many Alaskans like to describe as the most libertarian in the nation, voters are being asked in the Nov. 7 election to say "yes" to marijuana in a single, sweeping measure that would not only legalize consumption of the drug for anyone age 18 and over but also create automatic amnesty for those convicted of marijuana-related charges and even require the state to consider restitution for such people.

Supporters of Proposition 5 are visible all over Anchorage, holding up roadside banners, handing out the leaflets, displaying stickers on their car bumpers. They gathered signatures from more than 41,000 registered voters to get the measure on the ballot, more than twice the needed number and a figure that represents nearly 10 percent of the voters in the state. And if marijuana users are derided by drug critics as laid- back and apathetic, the frenetic energy that many are bringing to the cause belies that image.

"It's a travesty that we lock people up and make criminals of them for personal use of marijuana," said James Garhart, a 51-year-old messenger who says he has used marijuana "semi-daily" for years and now spends most of his free time working for the Yes-on-5 campaign.

"I think most people believe it's simply not a sane policy," Mr. Garhart said, "So I think this will pass."

Some opponents of the measure fear that the measure will pass because, they say, supporters are running a campaign that appeals to Alaskans' libertarian, leave-me- alone instincts and that often refrains from using the word marijuana. The leading organizations for the measure have names like "Free Hemp in Alaska" and "Hemp 2000," championing a cousin of marijuana that has many industrial uses and only a tiny fraction of the drug's psychoactive properties.

"I'm concerned that the word is not getting out about what this measure would do," said Wev Shea, the United States attorney here during the Bush administration and now a lawyer in private practice, who is a leading critic of the measure. "This thing is so overbroad, unless you really take the time to look at it, you don't realize the vast scope of it."

The measure has plenty of prominent critics, including Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat who calls it "foolish and dangerous," and Chief Duane Udland of the Anchorage police, who has warned that the measure could create a "drug culture" that would attract wayward elements from all over the world.

Many state leaders remain confident that there is no way the measure will pass, with many citing the recent Alaska Poll, a periodic statewide survey conducted by David Dittman, a prominent pollster here.

Of 518 residents surveyed in the last 10 days of September, 42 percent said they were "strongly against" the measure and 19 percent "generally against," while 35 percent indicated they were supporting it.

Alaskans voted two years ago to legalize the medicinal use of marijuana, and Mr. Dittman said there might be strong support for decriminalizing the drug in some fashion because the state electorate did indeed have libertarian tendencies.

"There's certainly an element of that in the Alaskan mentality, but it does not extend to amnesty, to restitution, to the idea that marijuana would all of a sudden be legal for teenagers," he said. "I think that's where they went too far."

Beginning in 1975, under a right-to- privacy ruling by the Alaska State Supreme Court, residents were allowed to possess small amounts of marijuana; in 1990, voters decided to recriminalize the drug. Still, private use of marijuana is rarely prosecuted here and, in interviews on the streets, it is clear that many Alaskans find that situation acceptable.

But that hardly means the measure will pass. For one thing, many voters seemed concerned that it would legalize the drug for people as young as 18. After all, Alaskans must be 19 to buy cigarettes and 21 to buy liquor.

Others said the amnesty was simply too broad or expressed fears, as one man put it, that passage of the measure would "attract a lot of the deadwood to move up to Alaska, get their check and get stoned." (Oil revenues enable the state to send a check from the so-called Permanent Fund to every Alaskan: this year, nearly $2,000.)

At the busy offices of Free Hemp in Alaska, workers answer phones and hand out brochures. People, some curious and some committed, wander in for information. A big sign reads: "Absolutely! No smoking anywhere, anything in the building."

Sil DeChellis, the treasurer of Free Hemp, explained that he and many other workers on the campaign detested cigarette smoke.

Next door, at the Cafe Pax, a coffee shop where an espresso machine sits under a large picture of Bob Marley taking a drag on what certainly looks like a marijuana cigarette, the chairman of Free Hemp, Al Anders, ticked off the ways he thought life in Alaska would improve if Proposition 5 passed.

"We'll save money on law enforcement costs, and the police can fight real crime," he said.

"We'll have a stronger economy, and some increase in tourism," continued Mr. Anders, who said he did not like to smoke marijuana because it aggravated his bronchitis. ("I prefer it in my chili," he said.) And, he added: "There may be more government revenue, because people will figure out how to tax it."

---

Tories Fail Tough Test on Drugs

New York Times
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/world/10BRIT.html

LONDON, Oct. 9 - Fresh from claiming to have unified his quarrelsome party, the Conservative leader, William Hague, was obliged today to abandon a vaunted new hard-line policy on first-time drug offenders after seven leadership associates said they had smoked marijuana in their youth.

The proposal, put forward at the upbeat Conservative Party conference last week, called for $150 minimum fines and criminal records for people caught with small amounts of soft drugs in their possession or even in their bloodstream. It was the centerpiece of a "zero tolerance" law- and-order approach that the party is adopting as strategy in the election expected in the spring.

The plan was immediately attacked by police officials and social organizations as draconian and unworkable and by senior figures in the party, who feared that it would cost them votes from young people and their parents. But Mr. Hague said he had approved it in advance and would stick by it.

The uproar exposed a dispute between authoritarian and libertarian branches of conservatism that appears to be replacing the issue of Britain's relationship with Europe as the party's main source of internal discord.

The Mail on Sunday asked the 22 members of the shadow cabinet - the men and women who are the out- of-power party's counterparts to government cabinet officers - if they had ever taken drugs. Eleven, including Mr. Hague, said they had not. Two declined comment, and two could not be reached. But seven admitted that they had.

The confessions were bashful ones, with the acts attributed to college- age curiosity and youthful interest in experimenting. "It was quite hard to go through Cambridge in the 1970's without doing it a few times," said Francis Maude, the shadow foreign secretary.

"Some friends put dope in my pipe," said Oliver Letwin, whose responsibility is the treasury.

David Willetts, the opposition's social security minister, said: "I was once offered cannabis at university. I had two puffs. I didn't like it."

The pun-loving British press had a merry weekend writing of principles going to pot, careers going up in smoke and party members who, hoping to be perceived as compassionate conservatives, found themselves seen instead as High Tories.

What was particularly damaging to the image of a freshly united party was evidence that the confessions had been deliberately planted by the liberal faction of the Conservatives in an effort to humiliate the leader of the hard-line wing, the shadow home secretary, Ann Widdecombe.

The Mail on Sunday is a newspaper with an authoritative voice among the Tory rank and file.

Miss Widdecombe brought cheering delegates to their feet on Wednesday with a stem-winding speech outlining the tough measures. Her address followed by a day a similarly bravura performance by Michael Portillo, the other well-known figure in the shadow cabinet, who set out a vision of the party's future as one more inclusive and tolerant of minorities, gays and other people marginalized by Tories in the past.

When Miss Widdecombe was asked later whether she approved of this social tolerance approach, she appeared to draw a defiant line in the sand by saying she did not know what the phrase meant.

Mr. Hague flew back from a long postconference weekend in Spain and promptly announced that the proposal "needs further consultation, discussion and debate." He said the drug proposals were back "on the table" and open to revision.

"We realize there are concerns about some of the proposals we have made," he said. "And so we are going to go to the police, to the medical profession, to drug rehabilitation workers, to teachers and to parents around the country and have this honest debate about drugs."

Asked whether he had confidence in the seven officials, he said: "Of course. Any cabinet or shadow cabinet that faces up to these problems is going to include people who 20 or 30 years ago had some experience of drugs. It would be extraordinary if it didn't."

To the extent that the dispute exposed shortcomings in Tory policy formulation and presentation, it undermined the central theme of the party convention - that after losing disastrously in 1997 and lagging far behind Labor in the polls until recently, the party was now "ready for government."

Peter Ainsworth, the shadow culture secretary - who was among those admitting college-age drug use - expressed frustration with this aspect of the episode. "The policy needs to be looked at again," he said. "And it needs to be discussed. And that would be a help, frankly, when making policy."

---

Northwest Heroin Use Is Epidemic

Washington Post
Monday, October 9, 2000 ; Page A03
By Rene Sanchez Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35383-2000Oct8?language=printer

SEATTLE -- The junkies drift along downtown streets, scrounging for change and another hit. They cluster in alleys waiting for community vans to arrive with clean needles. And by the hundreds they straggle into Kim Murillo's health clinic here every month, doped up and wiped out by heroin.

"We're seeing so many people," she said. "Many of them are desperate to quit, but the habit can be extremely hard to break. They think they need it to survive. It's such a vicious cycle."

It is also an epidemic. No region in the country is having a deadlier struggle with heroin than the Pacific Northwest. The problem is not new, but all signs suggest that it has been getting worse.

Deaths from heroin overdoses have more than doubled in King County, which includes Seattle, over the last decade. They have risen so much in the nearest metropolitan area, Portland, Ore., during the same time that the drug is now ranked among the leading causes of death among white men there age 25 to 54.

Treatment centers in both cities are handling record numbers of heroin cases. Needle exchange programs are besieged with demand. Jailed criminal suspects commonly test positive for the drug. By some estimates, there are now as many as 20,000 heroin addicts around Seattle. In a report this summer, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called s ome of those statistics the most severe in the nation. Heroin use has been rising across the country, but the overdose fatality rate in the Northwest is twice as high as the national rate.

"We have a pretty big chronic user population, and it seems like more and more young people here keep getting recruited to the heroin scene," said Gary Oxman, the director of the Multnomah County Health Department, which covers Portland. "It really is exacting a large social toll on the community."

Heroin has become a drug of choice, and a public health scourge, in the Northwest for many reasons. It is plentiful, usually smuggled into the port here or north of the border in nearby Vancouver, then whisked down the Interstate 5 corridor by a sophisticated network of traffickers. It is also getting cheaper, often sold for only about $20 a dose. And what's available on the streets is mostly a crudely refined "black tar" heroin made in rural Mexico. Its potency is wildly unpredictable and thus more dangerous for addicts.

Both Seattle and Portland also are magnets for transient youths fleeing the otherwise largely rural Northwest. Without steady jobs or any other ties to the area, they easily can fall prey to the heroin culture because it is communal and easy to find. "For some this seems to fill a spiritual void," Murillo said.

Drug counselors say that underground circles embracing the drug have thrived particularly since Seattle became popularized last decade as a hip haven for "grunge" slackers, artists and musicians. Some local officials even wonder if the frequently rainy, cloudy weather in the region contributes to heroin use.

In Portland, Oxman said he believes the heroin problem in the Northwest intensified when traffickers changed their marketing strategy and essentially put the drug on sale. "They figured out it was more profitable to have more people hooked at a lower price," he said.

The clinic that Murillo directs, Stonewall Recovery Services, aids one of the most troubled groups of addicts, young gay men and lesbians. Some live on the streets of the clinic's neighborhood, which is near downtown and filled with fashionable coffee shops and restaurants. But it is also a hub for the heroin trade.

Murillo's staff counsels about 400 addicts a month. The clinic distributes about 36,000 clean needles to heroin users each month, hoping to protect them from diseases such as hepatitis or AIDS. It also enlists a brigade of recovering addicts to roam the area and try to persuade other drug users to get help.

"A lot of people want to quit, but the availability of heroin around here makes it almost impossible for them to stop," said one of those outreach workers, a 26-year-old addict named Luke, who declined to give his last name for fear of arrest. "You can find it almost on any corner."

Dressed all in black with a ponytail, he said that some addicts resist treatment because they no longer see any other way to live. "Once you experience the escapism, it can become your god," he said. "But people are dying. Some of this stuff is so bad that when they do a big slam, it knocks them out."

Here and in Portland, officials are fighting the problem in part by expanding programs that provide addicts with methadone, an opiate that satisfies a craving for heroin without the same destructive effects. They are also dispatching more health workers into the field to seek out and help heroin junkies. But hundreds of addicts still spend months on waiting lists for treatment.

Seattle Mayor Paul Schell recently appointed a community task force to study how the city can better treat heroin addiction. Health officials also are urging the county and the state to shift its philosophy more toward "harm reduction" than abstinence. Giving addicts CPR lessons or safe injection rooms supervised by nurses, they say, could save lives, reduce crime, and slowly but surely lure junkies in from the street for medical help to break their habit. But some elected officials say the steps could promote more heroin use.

Police also are cracking down. Last month, after a two-year undercover investigation, Seattle narcotics investigators and federal agents arrested nearly two dozen people and charged them with running one of the more organized heroin distribution rings in the city. But they suspect other traffickers are still rolling up and down the Northwest's I-5 corridor. "If you're transporting anything like this, Seattle is conveniently located," said Capt. Jim Pryor, the commander of Seattle's vice and narcotics unit.

The recent raid temporarily dried up some of the heroin market in Seattle. Yet it also could have some dire consequences. Health officials are bracing for a new rash of overdoses because heroin addicts desperate for a fix that has been harder to find lately apparently have been buying and injecting even cruder forms of the drug, or mixing it with other drugs.

"They have been needing much more to get high," Murillo said. "But then something stronger suddenly comes along and they don't realize it."

Last year, about 110 people each in metropolitan Portland and Seattle died from heroin overdoses. More than 1,500 heroin addicts are now in treatment around Seattle.

Officials say the victims are a diverse group. Some are middle-aged and middle class and held a wide range of prosperous jobs until they succumbed to addiction.

"They aren't necessarily just the young, inexperienced, rock-crazed types that people expect," said David Solet, an epidemiologist in the King County Health Department.

In both Portland and Seattle, public health officials say they are starting to see encouraging results from recent steps to expand treatment and needle exchanges and from the greater use of recovering addicts as mentors to junkies. Overdose deaths have even declined a bit lately. No one is predicting a swift end to the heroin crisis, though. A decade of soaring overdose rates suggests the problem is hardly just a passing fad.

"We're making progress, but we're in for a long struggle," Oxman said. "Among young people, this has become just another drug. And I wouldn't say that heroin has just been glamorized to them. The main thing is that it has been normalized. It's regarded with a lot less concern and fear than it once was."

-------- europe

TURKEY: NATO WAR GAMES

New York Times
October 10, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/world/10BRIE.html

A NATO exercise involving 21,000 troops, 70 ships and 170 aircraft began with submarine maneuvers off the Turkish coast in the Aegean Sea. Seven nations are taking part in the exercise, which will extend through Oct. 25. The exercise brings Greek and Turkish forces side by side for a third time this year. (AP)

-------- india/pakistan

Pakistan's Record on Rights Criticized

New York Times
October 10, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/world/10RIGH.html

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Oct. 9 - In a report released today, human rights advocates accused Pakistan's military government of suppressing press freedom and not acting to stop violence against women during its first year in power.

The report of the independent Human Rights Commission cited an increase in violent attacks against women by religious conservatives, saying the government, which overthrew an elected government on Oct. 12, 1999, has emboldened the conservatives by keeping silent.

The government gave no immediate response to the report.

-------- iran

No concession to Iran

Washington Times
October 10, 2000
Embassy Row James Morrison
News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
http://208.246.212.80/world/embassy-20001010212212.htm

Senior members of the House International Relations Committee are determined to maintain a tough policy on Iran.

Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Florida Republican, and Gary Ackerman, New York Democrat, will release a statement on behalf of a majority of the committee at a news conference tomorrow at 11 a.m. in Room 2255 of the Rayburn House Office Building.

They will oppose any diplomatic overtures to try to improve relations as long as Iran persecutes Jews, violates human rights and sponsors terrorism.

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

-------- ireland

N. Ireland's story

Washington Times
October 10, 2000
Embassy Row James Morrison News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
http://208.246.212.80/world/embassy-20001010212212.htm

Sean Farren came to Washington to explain Northern Ireland's new story - one of hope, not violence.

"For too many years the 'troubles' meant that many doors in the U.S. were closed to us. People simply didn't want to hear the Northern Ireland story," said Mr. Farren, the province's minister for higher and further education, training and employment. "Now all that has changed."

Mr. Farren said the people of Northern Ireland hope the 1998 Good Friday Accords brought a permanent end to the "troubles" - about 30 years of Catholic-Protestant violence.

"We are building a very special relationship that is bringing opportunities for people on both sides of the Atlantic," he said.

"I have no doubt that the discussions I have had so far with a wide range of people here in the U.S. capital have helped to build further on that relationship.

"I am also hopeful that we have sown seeds which will ultimately lead to very real and concrete developments that will be of benefit to people throughout Northern Ireland."

On his visit last week, Mr. Farren held talks with Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. He visited officials at the State and Labor departments and at the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

He also visited Georgetown University and Northern Virginia Community College, which have special programs with Northern Ireland.

"There can be no doubt that a special relationship has developed between the United States and Northern Ireland, a relationship that has brought great benefits to both sides," he said.

-------- korea

N. Korea Celebrates Party's Start

Associated Press
October 10, 2000 Filed at 11:59 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-NKorea-Anniversary.html

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- More than a million North Koreans gathered in their capital Tuesday to watch a military parade and swear loyalty to leader Kim Jong Il in a state-orchestrated celebration, South Korean television reported.

Looking down from a lofty granite balcony, Kim smiled or clapped his hands as column after column of goose-stepping soldiers and flower-carrying citizens paraded past to mark the 55th anniversary of the founding of his ruling Workers Party of Korea.

The plaza and boulevards at the heart of the North Korean capital, Pyongyang, were filled with people carrying red paper flowers and with students and party members clad in bright clothes and carrying banners, Seoul's SBS TV reported.

``Let's follow General Kim Jong Il every step of his way!'' read a giant sign on a float.

Kim, wearing his trademark Mao jacket and thick-rimmed glasses, did not make a speech during Tuesday's two-hour celebration, which was broadcast live in North Korea. The parade and rally were the largest the communist North has staged in recent years.

In a sign of thawing relations, Seoul allowed 42 civic and dissident leaders to travel to the North to take part in the anniversary celebrations. SBS also was allowed to send a crew.

Unlike past celebrations, this one did not include anti-South Korea slogans or displays of missiles, rockets, tanks and other heavy weapons. Soldiers marched with rifles or hand-carried grenade-launchers, according to SBS footage.

Seoul officials interpreted that as a decision by Pyongyang to nurture a thaw with its old Southern foe, which is now the North's key aid provider. North Korea has been so devastated by natural disaster and diplomatic isolation that it depends on outside aid to help feed its 22 million people.

In North Korea, the military is the backbone of the political system. The 1.1 million-member military is the world's fifth largest, armed with long-range missiles and chemical weapons.

North Koreans ``should get united in one mind and purpose around the Great Kim Jong Il, their destiny and banner of victory,'' Pyongyang's official Korean Central News Agency quoted Vice Marshal Kim Yong Chun, chief of the army general staff, as saying in a speech.

Restaurants in Pyongyang were packed for the occasion. Despite scattered rain, children lined up for ice pops and noodles.

North Korea did not announce how many soldiers and civilians took part in Tuesday's celebrations. But SBS said over a million people turned out, including hundreds of thousands of soldiers and party members who shouted, ``Long live General Kim Jong Il.''

Kim took power after his father, the founding president of North Korea, Kim Il Sung, died in 1994.

Cold War tensions between the two Koreas have eased significantly since their leaders met for the first time in June and agreed to work toward reconciliation and unification.

The Korean peninsula was divided into the communist North and the pro-Western South in 1945. They fought a three-year war in the early 1950s.

---

North Korean Visits U.S.

New York Times
October 10, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/world/10KORE.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 - A senior North Korean leader arrived in Washington tonight for the first visit to the United States capital by an official from Pyongyang since the 1950-53 Korean War.

Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok came here as the special envoy of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, and is the highest-ranking North Korean ever to visit Washington. He plans to hold talks with President Clinton and other top officials.

The United States sees Marshal Jo's visit as an important step toward reducing tensions on the Korean peninsula.

-------- u.n.

HOLGER JENSEN: Please remit payment

Nando Times
October 9, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT
Scripps Howard News Service
http://www.nandotimes.com/opinions/story/0%2C1098%2C500267004-500414775-502550095-0%2C00.html

(http://www.nandotimes.com) - The annual battle for money has begun at the United Nations and once again the world body is casting a critical eye at its richest and biggest deadbeat.

The United States is $1.8 billion in arrears, two-thirds of what is owed by all other U.N. member states. Most of this debt is for peacekeeping costs, which have risen to $2.7 billion a year for 18 missions stretching from Sierra Leone to East Timor.

To clear up any misconception, there are no U.S. troops serving under U.N. command in any peacekeeping mission. Bosnia and Kosovo, which do have GIs, are NATO missions under U.S. command. The only Americans involved in U.N. peacekeeping are 36 military observers at six different missions and 809 civilian policemen who volunteered as private citizens.

Basically, Washington operates on the principle that unless U.N. peacekeeping directly advances U.S. interests, others should do the dirty work.

Rep. Sam Gejdenson, D-Conn., suspects that peacekeeping operations in Asia and Africa are given more critical scrutiny than those in Europe or the Middle East, suggesting some kind of bias. Duh! As a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, the United States can veto any peacekeeping mission every time it comes up for a six-month review.

The irony is that it keeps authorizing them, even though our government then refuses to fund them.

Congressional committees have already slashed one-third off the $739 million in peacekeeping contribution requested by the Clinton administration for fiscal year 2001, which itself falls far short of the U.N. assessment. The House Appropriations Committee wants to eliminate funding for missions in Africa, and the Senate committee has gone one step further by seeking to rescind $212 million already approved by Congress for peacekeeping in 2000.

This comes on top of congressional holds on $235 million in U.N. peacekeeping funds last year and lawmakers' reluctance to approve an additional $107 million for peacekeeping in a supplemental appropriations bill requested by the Clinton administration for 2000.

As for past arrears, Congress has agreed to pay back $926 million over three years, but only if all 189 members in the U.N. General Assembly agree to reduce the U.S. share of the U.N's administrative budget from 25 percent to 22 percent and the peacekeeping budget from 31 percent to 25 percent. Chances of that happening any time soon are slim.

Washington contends that the present rate structure is unfair and outdated, which it is. U.N. dues are pegged to a nation's share of the world economy based on gross national product back in 1973. Because they have the final say on peacekeeping missions, the Security Council's five permanent members the United States, France, Britain, Russia and China are surcharged while a group of emerging nations get a huge discount.

This scale does not take into account the growing economies of such nations as China, Russia, Brazil and Gulf oil producers, who pay a fraction of peacekeeping costs because they were considered poor when the rate structure was first designed 27 years ago.

But if the American assessment is unfair, that of Europe is more so. The United States and the 15-nation European Union both have GNPs approximating 29 percent of the world economy. Yet, while our government demands a reduction of its U.N. dues to 25 percent or less, the Europeans finance 36.6 percent of the regular U.N budget and 39 percent of peacekeeping costs.

Congressional cuts also fly in the face of President Clinton's pledges at the Millennium Summit in New York, where he joined other leaders of the Security Council in promising stronger and more effective U.N. peacekeeping.

Separately, Clinton signed an agreement with Russia acknowledging "the special role and responsibility of the permanent members in peacekeeping financing."

Last month the Congressional Black Caucus, which has 38 Democratic members, wrote a letter to other members of Congress pleading for more support for U.N. peacekeeping, warning of dire consequences for Africa if it was excluded from any U.S. peacekeeping assistance.

"The world can't go around without a police department," said Rep. Donald Payne, D-N.J., head of the group's foreign affairs task force. But Congress is definitely against providing one, or paying others to do the job.

Holger Jensen is International Editor of the Denver Rocky Mountain News. E-mail at hjens@aol.com

---

IRAQ: TURKEY FLIES IN RELIEF

New York Times
October 10, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/world/10BRIE.html

MIDDLE EAST

Turkey became the ninth country to send a token relief flight to Baghdad, the latest in what has become an almost daily show of support for Iraq. The flight, which received clearance from the United Nations, came three weeks after France and Russia first challenged 10 years of United Nations flight sanctions on Iraq. (AP)

-------- u.s.

NEWS OF OTHER LIFE FORMS

DayTips' Strange News
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 03:56:45 -0700

STRANGE NEWS

The Los Angeles Times reports that efforts by the military to protect rare wildlife on West Coast bases have been so successful that, in a quirky twist of fate, growing bird and animal populations may now be squeezing the troops out of their training areas. The military's sprawling bases and bombing ranges in the West offer the opportunity to stage training exercises over vast areas of territory that reflect the fluid, fast-moving battles of modern warfare. Most were established when there were few human neighbors and plenty of available land for wildlife. But that's changed now -- with most of coastal Southern California covered with housing developments, leaving bases such as Camp Pendleton and the Coronado Naval Amphibious Base near San Diego as the only habitat remaining for a variety of birds and animals. The military is required to set aside areas for animals. Those protections, however, have been so successful that some species are experiencing a population boom that requires the military to set aside additional land for nesting. "We are in the unhappy position of being penalized for our success," said Jay Hanson, the Navy's top natural resources manager for Southern California.

---

Underground Fire Smolders in Peat Bog

New York Times
October 10, 2000
National News Briefs By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/national/10NATI.html

VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif., Oct. 9 - Firefighters battling a blaze in this arid region were relieved last month when the fire headed for a large wetland - until it went underground, igniting an ancient peat bog.

"What we thought was our saving grace turned out to be our worst nightmare," said the fire chief at Vandenberg, Tom Stevens.

Nearly a month later, firefighters are gingerly stepping around the smoldering bog as they search for ways to contain the fire. Crews were banned from entering the bog after one firefighter sunk to his waist in the charred, foul-smelling mess. He was not hurt.

Four water cannons operate continuously in an effort to soak the peat and disperse the stinking smoke that blankets the area. Experts say peat bog fires can smolder for years.

After seeking advice from experts from wetter regions, fire officials are considering using a crane to drag a giant bucket through the bog, bringing the fire to the surface so crews can extinguish the embers.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Car-Makers Say Diesel Isn't Just for Trucks Anymore

Fox News
Monday, October 9, 2000
Adrienne Mand
http://www.foxnews.com/national/100900/diesel_mand.sml

Ron Cogan remembers the downside of driving a diesel-powered Mercedes sedan 15 years ago: a loud engine and sputtering exhaust spewing form his tailpipe.

"It was dirty. It was smelly," said Cogan, publisher of the Green Car Journal, which covers the interaction of automobiles and the environment.

But a new generation of cleaner, high-tech diesel cars that are all the rage in Europe will debut in America in the next several years, offering a fuel-efficient alternative to gasoline reliance. And drivers who think of diesel engines as only fit for Mack trucks or pokey clunkers may be in for a surprise.

"Diesel has a very significant future in our nation's plans for energy," said Allen Schaeffer of the Diesel Technology Forum. "It's not just for big trucks anymore."

Fueling the interest, in addition to rising oil prices that promise to linger, is a new system that makes the diesels feel more like their gasoline-powered counterparts. The "common rail" technology works by burning precise amounts of fuel under intense pressure. This provides for much peppier pickup at slower speeds, without the rumbling and black exhaust of earlier models. Plus, the fuel is still used efficiently.

For example, Schaeffer said, the gas version of the Volkswagen Jetta gets 26.7 miles per gallon, while the diesel model gets 43.6 mpg.

In Europe, analysts predict nearly one in three new cars sold this year will run on diesel. And it's clearly become more stylish - BMW's luxury "7" series offers engines that run on diesel.

Thad Malesh, director of the advanced automotive technologies group at J.D. Power and Associates, said if the models sell well, domestic auto makers could be convinced to create more.

"What we need is someone like a BMW or a Mercedes bringing in an upscale car," he said. "They need someone to demonstrate that these engines are acceptable for people who are well-heeled."

There has been progress on the American side as well. A joint venture between GM and Isuzu Motors produced the new Duramax Diesel 6600 engine, which will debut as an option on 2001 Chevy and GMC heavy-duty trucks. Last year it became an option on medium-duty models. The engine offers fuel economy that is 15 to 20 percent better than GM's current 6.5 turbo diesel engine, according to the company.

One auto industry expert, however, cautions that it will take some bureaucratic jostling before diesel can become widely available to American consumers. David Cole, director of the Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation at the University of Michigan, said the Department of Transportation, which is pushing for more fuel economy, must work with the Environmental Protection Agency to devise a plan that does not compromise the goal of reduced greenhouse emissions.

"The fact is that with the modern, high-tech diesel, there really is very little difference in terms of noise and smoothness compared to our regular (vehicles)," Cole said. "It would be unfortunate if we were not able to take advantage of that in this country."

Several other obstacles may delay diesel's re-emergence, Malesh said. Current emissions standards are too tight for diesel - in California, the particulate matter in its exhaust is labeled a toxic air contaminant. Also, the EPA will require lower-sulfur gasoline and diesel by 2004, which is needed to operate the new diesel cars but is not readily available in the States now.

Once the kinks are worked out, however, diesel cars promise to be a viable alternative to gas-guzzlers, Cogan said.

"I think you should be able to get into a diesel vehicle in the next several years and you won't know whether it's diesel or gasoline," he said.

---

'A trillion-dollar market'
Hydrogen-fuel firm Stuart Energy Systems kick-starts successful IPO

Montreal Gazette
Friday 6 October 2000
JOAN WALTERS Southam News
http://www.montrealgazette.com/technology/pages/001006/4642298.html

The latest in a string of alternate-energy offerings expected to attract investors this fall made its Toronto debut yesterday, spurred by looming deadlines for zero-emission or lower-pollution motor vehicles around the world.

Stuart Energy Systems Corp., a hydrogen-fuel company with blue-chip backers, saw its 5.7-million-share issue rise a satisfying $3 in the first hour of trading after launching at $26. But shares closed up a mere 45 cents at $26.45 on trading of 1.9 million shares.

The outcome was no surprise to chief executive Andrew Stuart, who sees achieving the full potential of the alternate-fuel sector as a long, hard road.

'Very Big Market'

"We look at this as a convergence of events that is the beginning of the beginning for a company like us. This is a very, very big market, a trillion-dollar market, and we can do this over time."

The company - which works with Ballard Power Systems Inc., Ford Motor Co. and the joint-venture company of billionaire investor Li Ka-shing - is looking for gross proceeds of $150 million to expand in the next few years.

Analysts agree the sector is increasingly attractive, even though mainline investors might not have caught on yet and the fuel technology is not market ready.

But major car companies have already set some target dates to introduce alternate-fuel cars, pushed by regulatory deadlines for replacement of high-pollution fuels.

California - the world's toughest jurisdiction - along with Massachusetts, New York and high-pollution Asian countries are proceeding with zero- or low-emission rules.

The hard-nosed California Air Resources Board, for example, ruled in September it will stick to its deadline of requiring 10 per cent of new cars sold by major auto manufacturers to have zero-emission technology for the 2003 model year.

"It means about 100,000 cars of the roughly one million sold in this state for that year will have to be zero-emission vehicles," the board's Jerry Martin said yesterday.

"If the manufacturers don't comply, and that means make sure they sell their allotted number out of the market total, there are fines and other penalties," Martin said.

This will require expansion of California's pilot project of about 2,300 electric vehicles, along with the introduction of alternatives like hydrogen to power fuel-cell cars.

Stuart is already working with Ballard, of Burnaby, B.C., a world leader in fuel cells.

Stuart Energy Systems makes the hydrogen fuel that one type of Ballard cell requires.

The two have a demonstration project with Coast Mountain Bus Co. in suburban Vancouver, using Stuart's system of electrolysis to produce fuel-calibre hydrogen, which can be compressed for fuel, as gas is compressed for existing natural-gas cars.

"We located our fuel tanks in the Port Coquitlam bus garage," Stuart said.

"We take water and electricity É and right there in the transit garage we manufacture the hydrogen fuel. We then put it on the buses at night, when they come home."

Stuart is also working with Ford to test a fuel-distribution device that could be used by individual car-owners with hydrogen-fueled vehicles.

Fuel Problems

"Companies like Ford very much want to be able to sell massive quantities of zero-emission cars in the future, not just to corporate fleets, but to individuals," Stuart said.

Right now, however, there is no way to be assured of getting fuel - making it necessary for companies like Stuart to develop that technology as well.

"You could maybe look at the model for electric-vehicle charging which is already in place in California. There you can get your electric vehicle charged at Costco, Wal-Mart, or Home Depot."

Stuart, based in Toronto with offices in Grand'Mere, Vancouver and Pasadena, also is involved in a hydrogen-fueled bus project in Palm Springs, Calif., backed by the U.S. Department of Energy.

International consortiums, including one involving Stuart, are working on introducing hydrogen and similar non-polluting motor-vehicle fuels elsewhere in the world.

The prospects for widespread commercialization are so strong that Cheung Kong Infrastructure, a division of Li Ka-shing's Cheung Kong Holdings Ltd., in August formed a joint venture with Stuart to find ways of distributing hydrogen fuel in Asia and the South Pacific region.

-------- environment

In Caribbean, Endangered Iguanas Get Their Day

New York Times
October 10, 2000
By MARK DERR
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/science/10IGUA.html

While hunting hogs deep in the rugged Hellshire Hills of Jamaica one day in June 1990, Edwin Duffus rescued a large lizard from his dogs and carried it four hours by foot and bicycle to his home and ultimately to Kingston's Hope Zoo.

There, Dr. Peter Vogel, a herpetologist at the University of the West Indies, and Rhema Kerr, a zoo curator, identified the lizard as a Jamaican iguana, believed extinct for nearly 50 years.

The rediscovery inspired an intensive effort to save both the Jamaican iguana and the dry tropical forest of the Hellshire Hills that is its last redoubt. After several exhaustive surveys, Dr. Vogel has estimated the iguana population at fewer than 100.

"The Hellshire Hills has the most significant natural dry forest left in the Caribbean," Dr. Vogel said. "Preserving it is key to the Jamaican iguana's survival and to maintaining the area's biodiversity."

The Jamaican iguana's return from oblivion also focused international attention on the plight of all West Indian iguanas, said Dr. Allison C. Alberts, head of ecology at the San Diego Zoo. In 1997, the World Conservation Union declared these iguanas of the Caribbean islands "the most endangered lizards in the world" and organized a group of scientists devoted to their preservation.

Dr. Alberts is co-chairman of that group and the editor of a report issued by the World Conservation Union in August that summarizes what is known about the genetics, evolution and ecology of West Indian iguanas, the threats to their survival and programs to preserve them. The two most imperiled, she said, are the Anegada iguana, found only on the island for which it is named in the British Virgin Islands, and the Jamaican iguana. The Anegada iguana was once common on Puerto Rico and throughout the Virgin Islands.

Genetic analyses to be published in The Journal of Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution show that the Anegada iguana is the oldest member of the genus Cyclura, dating back 15 million to 35 million years. The research was conducted by Catherine Malone, a doctoral candidate in genetics at Texas A&M University.

As the Caribbean archipelago took its present shape, wind and ocean currents occasionally carried iguanas to more western islands, where, isolated, they evolved into 8 species and 16 subspecies. Every major island has its own species of Cyclura iguana, and Hispaniola has two. (Two species of iguana found on islands of the Lesser Antilles are from a different genus.)

Next to the Anegada iguana, Ms. Malone found the Jamaican iguana to be the most genetically distinctive and biologically important species of the group. But inbreeding necessitated by its small numbers has forced the Jamaican iguana into a genetic bottleneck, making it susceptible to dangerous mutations, parasites and disease.

Before European colonization, West Indian iguanas were the largest terrestrial herbivores on their islands, where they dwelled in dry forests and thorny scrub. The lizards can live 40 years, and some, like the Jamaican and Cuban iguanas, can reach five feet in length and weigh around 17 pounds. The iguanas played an important role in island ecology, Dr. Alberts said. According to her recent research, seeds passing through the iguanas' digestive tracts and then dispersed germinate faster and grow better than others.

The iguanas' only natural predators were raptors and snakes. They also served as an important food for the Indians, and are still eaten on some islands. But Europeans and their animals have greatly altered the ecology of the Caribbean archipelago. Goats strip bare the vegetation on which iguanas feed; pigs and cattle disturb nests; cats, rats and Indian mongooses feast on hatchlings and eggs; and dogs kill mature animals.

More recently, resorts and housing developments on some Caribbean islands have reduced iguana habitats to almost nothing and forced scientists to move animals to safe havens on small, unpopulated islands. But sometimes there is little to eat and no place for an iguana to hide.

"There has been an 80 percent decline in the population of the Anegada iguana since the 1960's, due mostly to feral cats," Dr. Alberts said. In 1997, with fewer than 200 Anegada iguanas thought to exist and none reaching maturity, biologists began collecting hatchlings and raising them in a special site for release when they are too large for cats to attack. But the key to their preservation, experts agree, is removal of the feral cats.

The situation in Jamaica is more complex, Dr. Vogel said. Once so abundant in southeastern Jamaica that the coastal area around Kingston was named the Liguanea Plain, the native word for the lizards, the iguana population crashed after the human population doubled in the second half of the 19th century and the Indian mongoose was introduced in 1872. Imported to kill nocturnal rats devastating sugar cane fields, the mongooses feasted instead on bird, snake and reptile eggs and hatchlings.

In developed areas, cats and dogs contributed to the slaughter. By the end of the 1940's, the Jamaican iguana was generally considered extinct.

The conservation effort begun in Jamaica in 1990 has concentrated on protecting the last two nesting sites in the south-central Hellshire Hills and collecting half the hatchlings and raising them at the Hope Zoo, which now holds 100 juveniles. After three to four years, when they are too large to be mongoose prey, some of these iguanas are released. Others are kept as a genetic reservoir.

Since 1996, biologists have released 26 iguanas, each equipped with a miniature radio transmitter for monitoring their movements. For the first several years, the abrasive limestone of the Hellshire Hills quickly destroyed the special vests holding those transmitters. So last year, after being approached by researchers, the Nike company provided vests custom-made of abrasive-resistant fabric, said Richard Hudson, a conservation biologist for the Fort Worth Zoo, who works extensively in the Caribbean.

All the released iguanas have survived, leading Mr. Hudson and other biologists to conclude that the lizards are "hard-wired" for life in the wild.

Last year, Dr. Vogel said, a released female nested for the first time. But a captive breeding program under way at the Hope Zoo and six American zoos has failed to produce any offspring, for still unknown reasons.

Since 1997, field workers have trapped and killed mongooses in iguana territory. They also try to persuade dog owners - usually pig hunters and people who gather hardwood for charcoal - to keep their pets out of the area. But, Dr. Vogel cautioned, each year the charcoal makers push deeper into the Hellshire Hills in search of mature trees, driving the pig hunters before them. Without greater protection, he fears that dogs and people may overrun the iguanas' range.

Last fall, the government of Jamaica established the Portland Bight Protected Area, including the Hellshire Hills, but the preserve is not yet being managed and there are plans to build roads and houses and to mine limestone in the forest's interior, Dr. Vogel said. Until those plans are dropped, conservationists fear for the iguana and a number of other species that live only in the Hellshire Hills.

While recognizing that the Jamaican iguana and several of its cousins still teeter on the brink of extinction, biologists seeking to rescue the endangered animals remain optimistic that they will succeed, in large part because of increasing public awareness in the Caribbean and abroad.

Mr. Hudson said flatly that none of the West Indian iguanas were going extinct.

---

Record Ozone Hole Refuels Debate on Climate

New York Times
October 10, 2000
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/science/10OZON.html

The hole that opens in the ozone layer over Antarctica each southern spring formed earlier and grew bigger this year than at any time since satellites have been monitoring the polar atmosphere, scientists have reported.

The finding renewed suspicions among atmospheric scientists that global warming could be indirectly abetting the chemical reactions that destroy ozone, but many still say the growth of the hole could also be the result of natural, albeit unusual, variations in Antarctic weather and other conditions.

In early September, several weeks before it normally reaches its peak, the hole expanded to a record 17.1 million square miles, an expanse larger than North America, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. By comparison, in 1981, according to the atmospheric agency, it covered just 900,000 square miles.

Since its peak in September, the hole, which changes shape day by day as it is molded by globe-spanning winds, has extended several times over the southern tip of South America, as it has in a few years over the last decade.

With this year's record following records in 1996 and 1998, some atmospheric scientists are beginning to express surprise at the persistence of the phenomenon, which is caused largely by reactions between ozone and a group of synthetic chemicals that have been banned and whose concentrations are starting to decline in the air.

"I've been very much expecting to see a turnaround, a leveling off," said Dr. Michael H. Proffitt, the senior scientific officer at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, which issues a series of bulletins each fall tracking the progress of the ozone hole.

The hole is closely watched because the stratosphere's diaphanous layer of ozone - molecules consisting of three oxygen atoms - absorbs ultraviolet rays, which could contribute to skin cancers and cataracts and threaten agriculture and ecosystems if they reached the surface.

The annual ozone hole is the legacy of decades of emissions of a group of synthetic chemicals, mainly chlorofluorocarbons, or CFC's, that destroy ozone in the presence of sunlight. The chemicals were once popular in aerosol sprays, plastic foams, refrigerants and firefighting equipment, but have nearly all been phased out under voluntary moves by industry and the 1987 Montreal Protocol.

In the early 1970's, when scientists first reported that CFC's could destroy ozone, some theorized that the effect would be most discernible in the highest reaches of the atmosphere over the tropics, partly because of the abundance of sunlight.

But in 1985 British scientists found the huge loss of ozone each spring and summer over the South Pole.

"That was the surprise of the century," Dr. Proffitt said.

Subsequent research determined that the effect is focused mainly high over Antarctica, and to a smaller degree the North Pole, because ozone destruction is most vigorous when extremely frigid temperatures create clouds of ice particles in the stratosphere, generally 9 to 12 miles above the surface, that intensify the chemical reaction.

The putative link with global warming, Dr. Proffitt and other scientists say, comes because it is thought that a buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping industrial gases, while warming the lower atmosphere, actually acts in the opposite way in the stratosphere, causing it to radiate more heat to space and grow colder than it would otherwise be.

Another cause of stratospheric cooling is simply the loss of ozone itself. Without ozone, this layer of the atmosphere does not absorb the energy arriving from the sun as ultraviolet radiation, making the thin air even cooler.

The more cold high air, the more ice clouds, Dr. Proffitt said. More ice clouds mean CFC's and other ozone- destroying chemicals can more efficiently do their work.

Over the last five years, Dr. Proffitt said, measurements of stratospheric temperatures in October over Antarctica have shown an unusually large area cold enough to form ozone-destroying clouds. In the latest ozone bulletin, issued last week, Dr. Proffitt noted that the average expanse of extremely cold stratospheric air from 1995 to 2000 has been double that seen in any other five-year period.

Even so, he said, it is too soon to say definitively that a general global warming trend is responsible for this high-altitude cold snap, and the resulting growth in the ozone hole.

Other atmospheric scientists agree that, for several decades to come, the ozone hole will probably exhibit a lot of variability, and possibly more growth, before the global ban on CFC's and other ozone-destroying chemicals finally reduces concentrations enough to see the layer repair itself at the poles.

Through this span, unpredictable variations in polar weather will probably have more influence on the condition of the ozone layer than anything else, said Dr. Michael J. Kurylo, the manager of upper atmosphere research for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

"What we get in any one season is going to be driven by meteorological circumstances from year to year," he said.

For residents of Punta Arenas, Chile, and Ushuaia, Argentina, ports that sporadically have been visited by the edge of the ozone hole, there is little to worry about one way or the other, said Dr. Paul A. Newman, an atmospheric physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

In September and October, the peak months for the ozone hole, the sun is too low in the sky to pose much of a sunburn or cancer threat, he said.

"When the hole passed over Punta Arenas this time, it was 35 degrees that day," Dr. Newman said. "Nobody was really out there getting a suntan."

------

Paying for Conservation

New York Times
October 10. 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/opinion/L10CON.html

To the Editor:

Re "Congressional Dos and Don'ts" (editorial, Oct. 3):

The conservation financing plan passed by Congress is a poor substitute for the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, which passed the House by a 3-to-1 bipartisan majority and has the support of at least 63 senators.

Yet instead of a Senate vote on the act, a handful of Congressional appropriators cut a deal with the administration: a one-year appropriation with promises that may or may not be kept for future financing in succeeding years. This is far short of the nearly $3 billion guaranteed each year for the next 15 years by the act.

While some may embrace the limited gains the substitute measure might provide, America deserves nothing less than the truly historic conservation financing that only the Conservation and Reinvestment Act would bring.

MARK VAN PUTTEN President and Chief Executive National Wildlife Federation Vienna, Va., Oct. 9, 2000

-------- genetics

A CONVERSATION WITH /
Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich On Human Nature, Genetics and the Evolution of Culture

New York Times
October 10, 2000
By NATALIE ANGIER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/science/10CONV.html

WASHINGTON - Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich, a professor of biology and population studies at Stanford University, believes in evolution - or, more precisely, in evolutions. He believes in Darwinian evolution, of course, and the premise that life evolves through genetic mutations coupled with the crucible of natural selection.

But more important, he believes in the power of cultural evolution - all the nongenetic changes that human societies and individuals undergo, from decade to decade and moment to moment, including changes in language, technology, ethics, behavior, alliances, enmities, schemes and visions.

It is because he believes so profoundly in the power of cultural evolution to shape human behavior that he has written a new book called "Human Natures: Genes, Cultures and the Human Prospect," which seeks to counterbalance the popularity of neo-Darwinism and behavioral genetics with a recognition that culture should not be ignored in our effort to understand who we are, where we're going, and what we're doing.

Dr. Ehrlich also displays a bit of personal evolution. Since the publication of his spectacularly successful and often harshly criticized book "The Population Bomb" in 1968, his ideas about the threat of overpopulation, as well as other environmental crises, have grown more nuanced, though no less fiercely held. His appearance, too, lately has evolved, through the addition of a short, gray- and-white beard that gives him the look of a fisherman in want of a corncob pipe - or a village preacher in search of a soapbox.

Dr. Ehrlich, 68, took a seated soapbox recently at the Mayflower Hotel here to talk about his new book, his past missteps, and the ever-evolving tragicomedy called humankind.

Q. Did you name your book "Human Natures" deliberately, to emphasize your belief that there isn't just one genetically hard-wired human nature, but many different natures?

A. Yes, everybody who thinks about the problem closely realizes that there is no such thing as a fixed human nature, but rather an interaction between our genotypes, the genetic information we have and the different environments we live in, with the result that all our natures are unique.

A main theme of the book was to emphasize the gigantic role that cultural evolution plays in making individuals different, and in making groups different. I'm hoping to counter a view that I'm afraid is all too common among the American public, that all of our behavior is controlled by our genes, and that there are genes that code for aggressiveness, acquisitiveness and so on.

The truth is, You can never remove culture from the mix. There's some really interesting work coming out on how culture affects how we think, and how our brain develops. The new results suggest, for example, that Japanese people raised in Japan and the Japanese raised in this country actually think differently about the world.

Q. Cultural evolution is one of those things that we all know goes on, but none of us really knows what it means. Do you have your own definition?

A. Cultural evolution, from a biologist's point of view, and I think from the point of view of most social scientists, can be defined most simply as change in the body of nongenetic information that we human beings have, including what's stored in our brains, what's stored in our books, our buildings, our computer disks, our films, and obviously it's changing all the time. Cultural information can change much more rapidly than genetic information.

It's not constrained by the human generation time, which is about 20 years, and it's not constrained in the direction in which it flows or in the number of people who can acquire that information. My grandchildren may not be able to give me genes, but they can, and do, teach me things, which to an extent restructure my brain.Charles Darwin was able to teach me things. Plato has passed on information to me over thousands of years.

Q. So how do we benefit by thinking about the importance of cultural evolution?

A. When you look at situation in the world today, the physicists, the biologists, the ecologists, we all pretty much know what's wrong in general terms, particularly with the environment, and we know what direction we ought to be moving in, but we don't have much of a clue about how to get there. That's because we don't know how cultural evolution works, and we don't even acknowledge that it's going on.

I'm employed by an institution that's trying to change cultural evolution - it's called Stanford University. In upstate New York there's a place that's another attempt at changing cultural evolution, called Sing Sing. But there are pitfalls in trying to change human behavior without being aware or honest about it.

Stalin sure tried to change human behavior, and what a disaster that was. Somewhere there's got to be a careful line in which we try to influence people's behavior, because we're always trying to do that anyway, but to do it in a more open, coordinated and well-informed way.

Q. Is it really possible to take a biologist's approach to the study of cultural evolution?

A. So far, a general view of cultural evolution has eluded us, but that doesn't mean it's not worth trying. Obviously very small things can have enormous impact. Look at Chang and Eng, the Siamese twins who were joined at the chest. They had virtually identical genotypes, and you can't imagine two people being raised in a more similar environment. Yet one was dominant, the other submissive, one was a drunk, the other sober, and they even sometimes voted for opposite parties in elections.

Their story tells us right off the bat that genes don't control you. It also tells us that very small differences in upbringing and environment can escalate into very different outcomes. We ought to be looking at what these small differences are, how early they can act and how we might put them to good use.

Q. How do you propose that an understanding of cultural evolution might be put to use?

A. Well, apart from the four or five contrarians who say we shouldn't worry about global warming, the vast majority of the scientific community says it's a problem, and that we should be paying attention and doing something about it. But you tell me how you get Americans out of their automobiles and S.U.V.'s, and convince them that gasoline prices today - which, incidentally, are very similar in terms of constant dollars to the gasoline prices of the 1950's - are too low, not too high, as everybody is complaining.

That's one reason for writing the book. I'm saying, let's look at our history as a species to figure out what that will tell us about how we might change.

Q. What do we learn by looking at our deep prehistory?

A. We learn that the rates of some kinds of cultural evolution are getting faster and faster. For millions of years of our prehistory, there was very little change in our culture. We had the same stone tools for hundreds of thousands of years. Then about 50,000 years ago, all of sudden culture changed very dramatically, and you started to get art, much finer tools and the start of a period of increasingly frequent revolutions - in agriculture, printing, industry.

Since the spacing of cultural revolutions is getting shorter, that's something we should pay attention to. There's also a mismatch in the speed of evolution of our technology compared with the evolution of our ethics. If you understand that simple thing, which many people don't, then a lot more effort might be put into play by our society to see how we might speed up evolution of our ethics.

Q. What about the argument that it's better to let the free market make whatever changes need changing, rather than to try to socially engineer such changes?

A. There are many things that markets do better than we can with command and control, and there are many environmental problems that can use an even greater infusion of market principles than we have today. But the markets don't account for everything, like so-called externalities.

The price you pay for gas at the pump doesn't include the costs of air pollution, or cleaning up rivers if oil spills into the ground, or the time wasted in traffic jams from all the cars on the road. If the market could totally capture all these other things, then the market alone would probably do the job. But there's not the slightest sign that we can internalize the externalities.

Q. You've been accused of being a Jeremiah and a fearmonger, and your critics love to point out how wrong some of your predictions in "The Population Bomb" were.

A. The book was a tract written with a very explicit purpose, and that was to bring the population issue into the then-building discussion of the environment. Would I say today everything I said back then? You show me a scientist who believes everything he believed 32 years ago, I'll show you a nut. Obviously I've learned a lot.

My analysis of agriculture was off. I thought there were going to be a lot of large-scale famines, as did a lot of other people. It turns out that, while there have been some large famines, and though about 10 million people a year still die of things related to food shortages, the food problem has improved overall. We underestimated the speed with which farmers would adopt the green revolution.

Yes, I was naïve when I wrote "The Population Bomb." But in my view, the basic situation hasn't changed, except to get worse. The environment is deteriorating, we're using up our natural capital, and someday, we don't know how, that's going to get us. But if we get smart, we might be able to dodge that bullet.

---

Genetics without guesswork

USA Today
10/10/00- Updated 08:53 AM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/comment/edtwof2.htm

The principle of natural selection is heartless. It doesn't care whether a child is born with a fatal genetic flaw. It doesn't care whether a species is brought to extinction by the hand of man. Heartbreak is for humans. And so, thank goodness, is the science of "reprogenetics."

In the first of two immensely reassuring recent news items, a Denver couple gave birth last month to a baby boy who as an embryo had been genetically selected to provide essential cells for his older sister, who suffers a rare genetic disease. In the second, scientists reported this week that they cloned an endangered species, the oxlike gaur, and implanted the embryo in a cow.

These events have raised multiple alarms. In the absence of consensus and regulation, bioethicists worry about a future in which this technology allows the creation of human embryos purely for the organs they can donate. And if the wealthy can manipulate the DNA of their offspring, how many generations will pass before society is split between genetic haves and have-nots?

Part of the answer is that we already make such less-than-holy choices. Parents have babies to continue the family name, to work the farm, as companionship for their eldest. And society already favors the intelligent and beautiful, who frequently choose among themselves for mates.

Another part of the answer is that the critics are correct. The nation needs to begin a dialogue about genetic selection, lest research be guided only by ambition. The ability to revive near-dead species (and perhaps even some, such as Spain's bucardo mountain goat, that are now extinct) is exciting science. But is it fair to revive a dead species if there's no place for it to survive in the wild?

In the end, the immediate answer is not nearly as dreamy as any of that. Who would challenge a couple's desire to have two healthy children instead of a single dying one? Likewise, it may prove difficult to find a place in the changing world for anachronistic species. But is there any debate that, faced with an estimated 100 extinctions a day worldwide, the effort shouldn't be made?

Science marches on, and its progress is even more implacable than Darwin's cold law of natural selection. You can worry about the future, but you can't say that's a bad thing.

-------- police

Officials taken to alleged burial site

USA Today
10/10/00- Updated 12:52 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndstue03.htm

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The former lover of a disgraced police officer at the center of a police corruption scandal has led authorities to a trash-filled Tijuana ravine where she claims he buried three bodies.

Sonia Flores, 23, took U.S. and Mexican investigators to a secluded site where she alleges former officer Rafael Perez and his partner, David Mack, buried the bodies of three people they allegedly killed, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.

Winston Kevin McKesson, an attorney representing Perez, has said Flores' allegations are false and that she is just seeking attention.

Mack's attorney, Donald M. Re, and the Los Angeles Police Department did not return phone calls seeking comment.

The newspaper quoted some law enforcement sources as saying they doubt Flores' allegations, but steps have been taken to check her claims.

Flores told the Times last week she saw Perez and Mack kill two people during a botched cocaine deal in the 1990s.

Perez has been convicted of stealing cocaine from a police evidence room. He shared information about corruption in the Rampart station as part of a plea bargain for a lighter sentence. His allegations that other LAPD officers planted evidence led prosecutors to seek dismissals of 100 criminal cases.

Mack is serving a 14-year sentence in federal prison for robbing a bank in 1997 while he was an officer.

Flores told the Times she watched the two officers kill a young man and his mother in late 1994 or early 1995 during a botched drug deal in an apartment near the Rampart station.

Flores said she later traveled across the border with Perez and Mack when they dumped the body of another woman - allegedly a girlfriend of Mack's.

She claims the pair told her that they planned to bury the third body along with the two other corpses in a garbage dump in the hills overlooking Tijuana.

Flores said she did not see the men bury the woman but was taken to the site later by a Tijuana officer who showed her mounds of dirt where the bodies allegedly had been buried.

An anonymous U.S. official told the Times that Mexican authorities were placing conditions on any excavation, and U.S. federal authorities were balking at many of the demands.

The official would not elaborate on the differences.

The U.S. attorney's office didn't immediately return a call to The Associated Press for comment.

Mexican authorities were particularly interested in her allegation that a Tijuana police officer helped with the burials, Flores said.

If true, Flores' allegations could hurt Perez's credibility as a witness against four former colleagues whose trial started last week on corruption-related charges.

The FBI has conducted forensic tests on the apartment where Flores alleges she witnessed the killings. Investigators also seized another LAPD officer's car, which Flores says was used to transport the bodies.

---

Baltimore's top cop sets example

USA Today
10/10/00- Updated 08:41 AM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/comment/columnists/wickham/wick151.htm

When Edward Norris was named Baltimore's top cop earlier this year, a lot of people in Baltimore thought he was the wrong man for the job.

Prior to coming to Baltimore, Norris had been a high-ranking member of New York City's police department and played a major role in developing and implementing the policing strategies that sharply cut the Big Apple's crime rate - and which, many of that city's minority leaders charged, gave rise to vicious acts of police abuse.

Chief recasts his image

The selection of Norris, who is white, didn't sit well with many activists in Baltimore, a crime-ravaged city with a majority-black population. But in the five months since he has taken command of the city's 3,200-member police force, Norris has moved quickly to recast his image and that of the cops he leads.

He has done it by going out into city neighborhoods to sell his crime-fighting strategies in face-to-face meetings with his detractors. He assured city residents that he'd be as aggressive in rooting out bad cops as in combating Baltimore's high crime rate. So far, Norris has been true to his word.

The city's crime rate dropped 13% during the first nine months of the year. While Norris didn't become police commissioner until May, he was hired as chief deputy in January and was made the point man in the city's campaign to overhaul its crime-fighting efforts.

Last week, Norris produced an equally impressive result when he announced the arrest of one of his officers. The six-year veteran was caught in a sting - a joint operation between Baltimore police and the FBI - that Norris designed to snare bad cops. The officer allegedly picked up a bag of crack cocaine that had been planted on a park bench by undercover cops. He later used the drugs to accuse a burglary suspect of drug possession. The officer, who denies any wrongdoing, has been charged with criminal misconduct.

There's a lot Norris could teach other police departments and the politicians who rush blindly to their defense. The same day Norris called a news conference to announce the arrest of his officer, word leaked out that federal prosecutors have concluded that a street-crime-fighting unit of New York's police department routinely engaged in racial profiling. But instead of accepting the findings, which mirror earlier studies done by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and New York's attorney general, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani circled his wagons - an action that will widen, not reduce the rift between cops and many of the people they are sworn to protect.

In his retreat to the barricades, Giuliani is not alone.

Police departments on defensive

Police departments in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio - both now the subjects of Justice Department investigations - have decried any suggestion that their officers commit civil-rights violations or engage in racial profiling. Their denials come amid widespread complaints that cops in these cities stop and harass minorities for no good reason.

Last month, after years of fending off charges of police misconduct, Los Angeles officials agreed to have a federal judge and independent monitor oversee a reform of the nation's second-largest police force. This concession comes on the heels of the city's worst police scandal and a local charge that officers assigned to investigate this wrongdoing failed to conduct a thorough probe and tipped off one suspected bad cop that his home was about to be searched.

What this nation needs more of are police chiefs such as Norris who move aggressively to defuse tensions between cops and the people they serve before these conflicts result in costly - and divisive - investigations and court fights.

What we can do without are police leaders and their political allies who treat every charge of police misconduct as a potential Pearl Harbor - an attack that should be repulsed at any cost.

---

Board to investigate botched raid

USA Today
10/10/00- Updated 04:36 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/digest/nd1.htm#catholic

LEBANON, Tenn. - The mayor has formed a board to investigate a drug raid in which police officers went into the wrong house and shot a man to death. Five officers burst into the home of John Adams, 64, while he was watching television last Wednesday night. Police say he fired at them first with a sawed-off shotgun and they responded. Adams was shot at least three times and died later at a Nashville hospital. Police admit a mistake was made. Two officers have been placed on paid administrative leave. Others involved in the raid are being investigated by the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.

---

New York Times
October 10, 2000
Metro Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/nyregion/10MBRF.html
Tomorrow

CITY COUNCIL HEARING ON POLICE The Council's Committee on Public Safety has scheduled a hearing on the Police Department's anti-narcotics and anti-gang programs. Committee Room, City Hall, Manhattan, 10 a.m. Information: (212) 788-6850.

-------- spying

Back Channels: The Intelligence Community

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 10, 2000 ; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41002-2000Oct9?language=printer

The fiscal 2001 Intelligence Authorization Act passed last week by the Senate could easily be renamed the National Security Scandal Response Act, containing sections inspired by the Wen Ho Lee investigation, the John Deutch probe and a string of security gaffes at the State Department.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) drafted the Lee provisions, trying to use the federal code to keep the government from repeating key mistakes in its investigation of suspected Chinese espionage at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Specter's language requires the attorney general to personally review all high-level requests for secret wiretaps and search warrants, since Attorney General Janet Reno delegated a request to wiretap Lee's telephone to a subordinate.

Specter also includes a provision stating that judges may consider "past activities" of a target in determining whether to grant a secret wiretap under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, since Reno's subordinate determined that certain questionable conduct by Lee was too old to be relevant.

Finally, Specter's legislation requires the FBI director to communicate in writing with departments and agencies whose employees are under active counterintelligence investigation, since the Department of Energy kept Lee in his sensitive job long after FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said he could be removed.

"Even the Democrats thought this was important enough to move on," said Specter, whose Senate Judiciary subcommittee is examining the government's decision to charge Lee last December with 59 felony counts for downloading nuclear secrets--and then drop all but one count in a plea agreement last month.

REPORTING DEUTCH: What might be called the Deutch provision in the Intelligence Authorization Act stems from CIA Director George J. Tenet's 18-month delay in notifying Congress that the CIA was looking into serious home computer security violations by Deutch, its former director. Deutch was stripped of his security clearances and remains under criminal investigation by the Justice Department.

The authorization bill, now in conference committee, requires the CIA to inform the House and Senate intelligence committees about all investigations by the CIA inspector general into all top CIA officials, current or former, acting or confirmed.

STATE SECURITY: The bill, meanwhile, says the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research cannot "retain or store" so-called sensitive compartmented information--the government's most highly classified materials--unless Tenet certifies that I&R is in compliance with all intelligence community security directives by Jan. 1, 2001.

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, drafted the provision after the State Department's inspector general reported that lax security procedures plagued the department's handling of SCI documents. Shortly thereafter, FBI officials disclosed that Russian spies had planted a bug in a sensitive State Department conference room. And shortly after that, State Department officials reported that a laptop filled with highly classified information was missing.

PLUGGING LEAKS: Scandals aside, the authorization bill's most controversial provision may be Shelby's language that makes leaking any type of properly classified information a felony punishable by up to three years in prison.

In debate on the Senate floor, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said he hoped the new provision would not be used by federal prosecutors "as a justification for investigations of journalists."

"If a leak statute were to become a back door for bringing the investigative apparatus of the federal government to bear on the press, we would be sacrificing our democratic institutions for the sake of protecting a few secrets," Biden said.

Shelby concurred. "I agree with the senator from Delaware 100 percent, and I can assure this body that in passing [this provision], no member of the Select Committee on Intelligence intended that it be used as an excuse for investigating the press."

TERRORISM OUT: Counterterrorism language drafted by Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), meanwhile, didn't make it into the authorization act. Kyl wanted to include key recommendations made earlier this year by the National Commission on Terrorism, offering provisions that would have tightened controls over biological pathogens and cracked down on terrorist fundraising. But Kyl's language proved too controversial to consider so late in the game.

----

Pentagon Can't Find Ex-C.I.A. Chief's Disks

New York Times
October 10, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/10/10/politics/10AGEN.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 9 - Pentagon investigators have been unable to locate computer disks on which a former director of central intelligence, John M. Deutch, stored a journal containing classified information while he was working at the Defense Department.

Mr. Deutch has declined to be interviewed about the whereabouts of the disks, created when he was deputy defense secretary in the mid- 1990's, officials said.

"There's no way to tell what their ultimate disposition might have been without talking to Dr. Deutch, and he has declined requests for our investigators to talk with him on this or other topics," said a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley.

Officials with the Central Intelligence Agency have already concluded that Mr. Deutch improperly recorded government secrets in a private journal about his government experiences. He stored the journal on electronic storage cards in his tenure as head of the spy agency.

While the storage cards he used at the C.I.A. have been recovered, the Pentagon was unable to locate the disks Mr. Deutch created in his Defense Department days, when he began the journal, officials said today.

The Pentagon has been conducting a damage assessment to determine whether his action jeopardized national security. The Justice Department also is investigating whether any criminal charges are warranted.

Mr. Deutch's lawyer declined comment today, citing the investigations. Mr. Deutch cooperated with the C.I.A. investigation, and earlier this year apologized for sloppy handling of classified information.

At the C.I.A.'s urging, Pentagon criminal investigators began their own inquiry in February into Mr. Deutch's handling of classified information when he was the No. 2 defense official from 1993 to 1995.

They concluded that he began compiling the journal in his tenure at the Pentagon and stored it on disks.

"Dr. Deutch was known to transport these floppy disks in his shirt pocket," the investigators wrote.

The investigators also found that Mr. Deutch began to experience technical problems with the disks at the end of his tenure at the Pentagon, prompting him to change to higher- capacity storage cards at the C.I.A.

In their final draft report, Pentagon investigators also found that Mr. Deutch "declined departmental requests that he allow security systems to be installed in his residence," where he sometimes worked on classified documents.

The government has not charged Mr. Deutch with any wrongdoing.

The Pentagon investigators raised concerns about lax Pentagon computer security.

They noted that some computers the former official used were donated to schools without the hard drives being destroyed. When investigators found the computers, they were able to recover significant Pentagon information.

---

THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
TUESDAY OCTOBER 10, 2000 :: EMAIL EDITION
http://morrock.com

DEUTCH'S DISKETTES STILL MISSING: Computer disks that former CIA Diretor John Deutch used to store a personal journal that is thought to have included classified information are still missing, the Associated Press reports. Deutch has reportedly refused to talk to investigators from the Pentagon about the whereabouts of the disks.

---

The war on whistle-blowers

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • October 10, 2000
http://208.246.212.80/op-ed/ed-house-20001010213742.htm

Congress will vote this week on legislation to criminalize whistle-blowing by government employees. If approved, this legislation would severely curtail the public's access to information which is embarrassing to government officials and important for Americans to know.

Already, U.S. law prohibits government employees from leaking information that would compromise national security, reveal covert agents, aid foreign governments or disclose cryptographic information. If Congress passes a provision included in the Senate Intelligence Authorization Act of 2001, government officials could face three years in jail and a fine of up to $10,000 for leaking classified information. Since the government marks even the most arcane materials classified, this legislation would give government broad ability to prevent all kinds of information from reaching the public. Government employees would clearly be less inclined to leak classified documents to reporters if threatened with jail time. The legislation further infringes on the First Amendment right to free expression.

The Senate recently passed the legislation and the Justice Department has endorsed it. The House hasn't yet voted on the legislation passed in the Senate and will be reviewing it this week in the House-Senate conference.

At the conference, lawmakers would be wise to remember the overall benefit of unauthorized disclosures. The leaking of the Pentagon Papers in the early 1970s, for example, gave Americans a much greater understanding of how their country became embroiled in the Vietnam War. And reporter Bill Gertz of The Washington Times, whose defense and intelligence sources are the envy of investigative reporters all over town, has been instrumental in informing Americans about weapons proliferation and the threat posed by rogue nations. The Far Eastern Economic Review reported in its Oct. 12 issue, "Almost every embarrassing story about China - from its suspected military cooperation with North Korea and Pakistan to alleged spying activities at U.S. nuclear laboratories - first reaches the public through a Gertz story. He is the journalist to whom frustrated intelligence officers and congressional aides turn when they have damaging information about China to leak." The article said that "government officials are incensed that many of Gertz's scoops are based on top-secret intelligence reports."

But rather than criminalize unauthorized disclosures to journalists, government officials should instead do a better job of protecting strategic defense technology. The purpose of this legislation is to shield government from embarrassment, rather than protect vital state secrets. The House should reject it out of hand, and the Senate should be ashamed of approving it.

-------- terrorism

Clinton, N. Korean Meeting Called 'Positive'

Washington Post
Tuesday , October 10, 2000
By Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44553-2000Oct10?language=printer

President Clinton met this morning with a top North Korean military commander, the first encounter ever between a U.S. president and a senior official of the communist nation, which is only now emerging from a half-century of isolation.

Jo Myong Rok, the vice chairman of North Korea's powerful National Defense Commission, bore a letter from North Korean leader Kim Jong Il that conveyed ideas on building a better relationship with the United States, the White House said. But no agreements emerged from the largely introductory encounter, which was "very positive, direct and warm," said Wendy Sherman, a special adviser to Clinton on Korean affairs.

During the 45-minute session in the Oval Office, Sherman said, Clinton summarized America's principal concerns about North Korea, including its missile program, its alleged support for terrorism and the U.S. desire for help in recovering the remains of American soldiers who fought in the 1950-53 Korean war.

Despite those concerns, U.S. officials are optimistic that North Korea has begun a tentative opening to the world, and they want to foster reconciliation between North and South Korea, whose presidents held a historic summit meeting in June.

"This was an excellent start," Sherman said after the White House meeting. "We look forward to continue the very positive and frank . . . discussions as we try to improve the relationship between our two countries."

The United States originally had expected North Korea to send a Foreign Ministry official to Washington. The fact that Kim chose to send Jo, a top aide and military commander, "conveys a very important message to us and the citizens of North Korea . . . that this effort to improve relations is one shared not only by the civilian side, the Foreign Ministry, but by the military as well," Sherman said.

She noted that Jo wore a business suit to a meeting this morning with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright but changed into fully military dress for his session with Clinton.

In July, Albright had met North Korea's foreign minister in Bangkok, in what was then the highest diplomatic contact ever between the two countries.

Key to improving relations, from the administration point of view, is winning assurance from North Korea of a commitment to abandon its ballistic missile program. In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin reported that Kim had offered to give up missile development efforts in exchange for international help in launching scientific and communications satellites. A few weeks later, Kim seemed to back off from that position, reportedly telling South Korean businessmen that he was joking.

One of North Korea's principal goals in the talks seems to be to win its removal from the State Department's list of countries that sponsor international terrorism. Sherman said North Korea has made progress toward that goal, although it still has a way to go, she said, declining to be more specific.

On Friday, the United States and North Korea issued a joint statement pledging to exchange information and to move to end support for terrorism. The statement noted the importance of forswearing terrorism, of refusing to harbor terrorist groups and of fighting terrorist acts.

"We think this is an important public statement about the intentions of North Korea," Sherman said, adding, "There are still steps [to be taken]." Though Clinton did not engage in negotiations or deal in depth with his concerns, Sherman said "we certainly expect" that the issue of missiles will be discussed during the remainder of Jo's three-day visit, which ends tomorrow.

Albright will host a dinner for Jo this evening. He also has meetings scheduled tomorrow with other senior administration officials, including Secretary of Defense William Cohen.

-------- activists

Confront the Transatlantic Business Dialogue in Cincinnati November 15-19

From: "Mexico Solidarity Network" <msn@mexicosolidarity.org>
To: <msn@mexicosolidarity.org>
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 11:35:39 -0500

THE COALITION FOR A HUMANE ECONOMY PREPARES FOR THE CONFERENCE OF THE TRANSATLANTIC BUSINESS DIALOGUE

The Coalition for a Humane Economy (CHE) is a Cincinnati based organization that promotes public awareness and a greater understanding of the issues and policies concerning global and national economic trade. CHE seeks to elucidate and expose the nature of the decision-making processes that characterize and affect the climate of economic trade. A climate in which the public has input and is involved is a more just and democratic one towards which CHE endeavors. In such an effort, CHE is sponsoring a week of activity, known as "CHE 2000" to coincide with and as a response to the Sixth Annual CEO Conference of the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD), scheduled to take place November 16-18, 2000 at the Omni Netherland Plaza, Downtown Cincinnati, Ohio.

THE RESPONSE OF CHE TO THE TABD CONFERENCE

Highlights of the CHE 2000 agenda include:

November 15th-educator seminars; lecture from 7-9pm by Bob Cohen, author of Milk, Deadly Poison.

November 16th-press briefing from 12-1pm; a teach-in on the topic of Globalization, co-sponsored by the Citizens Trade Campaign and featuring many national speakers from 6-10pm.

November 17th-covergence on Washington Park at 10:30am for a rally followed by a march to the Omni Netherland Plaza; interfaith ceremony with a "call to consciousness vigil" and a multicultural gala celebration will takeplace in the evening.

November 18th-" The Pig Puppets Procession".

November 19th- "Farewell" to the TABD at the Greater Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport.

Throughout CHE 2000, an "Ask Me about the TABD" T-shirt campaign will be active. More specific details of CHE 2000 will available upon development and can be tracked on CHE's website, www.che-2000.org. Aside from CHE 2000, and as an ongoing commitment to the goal of educating the general public, CHE is locally hosting a series of weekly town meetings or workshops, starting October 18th, ranging in topic from "the relationship between media and large corporations" to "the possible effects of bioengineered, genetically modified foods upon human health." Also, one lecture event featuring Ralph Nader is being confirmed.

CHE invites all interested persons and groups to Cincinnati to participate in all of these crucial, news-worthy events. CHE encourages ongoing communication between all groups who plan to participate here in Cincinnati. All details for local events and for CHE 2000, which CHE anticipates will have a national scope, including information on housing, travel, legal and medical concerns, contacts, and convergence will be available on the CHE website. The CHE hotline telephone number (513)588-8883 can also be called for more information as well as for volunteer opportunities.

ABOUT THE TABD

The TABD, often described as "an experiment in entrepreneurial democracy" is a network of US and European Business interests formed in 1995 that issues recommendations on trade policy to the US government and the European Union (EU). By its high success in influencing the US and the EU governments to adopt into policy its recommendations that are designed to eliminate barriers to trade, the TABD has come to exemplify the role of corporations in trade policy: that wealthy business interests continue to enjoy the special privilege of crafting, in effect, the laws for the global and national economies. Timothy J. Hauer, Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade noted, in fact, "virtually every market-opening move undertaken by the US and EU in the last couple of years has been suggested by the TABD." The invariable result of the TABD's recommendations to eliminate many barriers-both real and perceived- to trade is the deregulation and self-regulation of industry-a scenario that has aroused much criticism of the argument that some of the barriers to trade need to exist in order to protect consumers, workers, the environment, and other facets of human rights that could be affected by uncontrolled economic sprawl.

THE TABD IN THE WTO The TABD also puts forth an agenda for the World Trade Organization (WTO) and enjoys high transparency or voting power in the WTO, having stated that it "fully supports the rules and principles of the WTO. The WTO ministerial meetings in Seattle in the December of 1999 did not come to completion amid protests by many and diverse groups for labor, human and civil rights, consumer safety, environmental preservation, and more, all of whom had felt that the WTO was failing to recognize, address, and incorporate these issues of great public concern into their world-wide economic agendas.

-- "These students are going to have to find out what law and order is all about."

Brig. General Robert Canterbury, Noon, May 4, 1970 (minutes before his troops shot 13 unarmed Kent State students, killing four)

http://www.kent.edu/may4

---

SUZUKI INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 11:49:41 -0700 (PDT)
From: DanBeeton@excite.com

SUZUKI INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION THIS SATURDAY 9 CITIES IN THE US, AND JAPAN, U.K., AND CANADA!! BE A PART OF IT!!

WHEN: Saturday, October 14, 12:00 pm, noon.
WHERE: Fitzgerald's Suzuki, 10915 Georgia Ave, Wheaton, MD.

To the DC-BAN community,

This is a reminder notice that the International Day of Action to get Suzuki out of Burma is THIS Saturday, October 14. We are expecting demos to take place in nine different U.S. cities as well as in the U.K., Canada, and in Japan, where the campaign is growing largely due to the communication, coordination, and hard work of our new DC-BAN member, Sayuri Miyazaki.

We are also planning a *surprise* day of call-ins and emailings to Suzuki on Friday, the 13th. More info to follow...

Locally, we will again be targetting the Fitzgerald's Suzuki dealership in Wheaton, MD. While this location is a favorite target partly because it is Metro-accessible, we are also inspired by the outrageous tactics that the management of this dealership has used against us. They have made it clear that they do not care about why we are protesting their dealership, although we have made repeated overtures to talk with them, and to provide them with materials, all to no avail.

However, we are not about to become disillusioned by their stubborness. Rather, such actions as calling the police on us, heckling us, and printing up signs that proclaim "Fitzgerald's Supports Democracy and Human Resources" demonstrate that we are having an impact. We are causing them to lose business, and it is bothering them. If we continue, eventually they will seek a solution to the problem by going to the corporate HQ, and we will have accomplished our mission with this dealership...

Below is more information from Jeremy on the International Day of Action. I hope you all can make it for what will be, hopefully, our largest Suzuki protest to date!

In solidarity, Dan

*On October 14th, 2000 the Free Burma Coalition will host an International Day of Action Against Suzuki. On this day, protestors in nine U.S. cities and Canada, England, Japan and the Philippines will protest in front of Suzuki dealers. In the United States, the cities include Washington DC, Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Portland, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Chicago, New Haven, Boston, and the list continues to grow...

We are excited that, in Japan, the Transnational Corporation Monitor of Japan and the Consumer Union of Japan will send a letter to Suzuki Headquarters in Japan to support the democracy movement by pulling out of Burma in favor of the International Action Day on October 14th.

We are distributing thousands of "Boycott Suzuki, Sidekick to Oppression" bumper stickers and tens of thousands of pamphlets. Our message will be loud and clear: as long as Suzuki continues to help prop up Burma's brutal dictatorial regime, we will boycott Suzuki.

Over the past few months we have tried to call Suzuki and ask them to leave Burma. Instead of giving us a response, they have simply denied that they are doing anything wrong and refused to answer our request. At Fitzgerald Suzuki in Wheaton, Maryland, the Suzuki dealer bought signs that read "Fitzgerlad Auto Supports Democracy and Human Rights." Clearly, this is an outright lie and an attempt to whitewash the fact htat Suzuki's partner in Burma is none other than the infamous Saw Lwin, former director of military training for Burma's brutal army.

Suzuki National has responded by claiming that they are not part of Suzuki Japan. They changed their web page to read "Note that this website is intended for the customers and Suzuki products in the continental United States only." They are clearly attempting to save face by claiming that they have nothing to do with Suzuki's partnership in Burma.

Worst of all, even though we found evidence that Suzuki is only finishing about two cars per day in Burma, they still refuse to close their shop. In other words--instead of doing the right thing and refusing to support the Burmese regime, they continue to lose money on their investment. Not only is their investment horrible for the people of Burma, it is horrible for the companies finances.

Most shockingly, throughout the past two weeks when Aung San Suu Kyi, Burma's hero and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner has been repeatedly arrested and harrased and over 100 of her supporters have been jailed and torutred, Suzuki has remained quiet. Such silence in the face of awful atrocities is akin to support of the horrific practices of the military regime.

Suzuki does not deserve our money or patronage. Their overt support and silence in face of great injustice only serves to perpetuate the suffering of the 50 million people of Burma. Aung San Suu Kyi has repeatedly called on international corporations to stay out of Burma: "Until we have a system that guarantees rules of law and basic democratic institutions, no amount of aid or investment will benefit our people." Levis Strauss echoed that cry, stating that ""It is not possible to do business in [Burma] without directly

supporting the military government and its pervasive violations of human rights."

The worst aspect of Suzuki's partnership in Burma is that it is producing vehicles with the Ministry of Industry (2), the same Ministry that produces arms for the regime. Just as it was discovered that Nissan was producing infantry vehicles, we expect that Suzuki will in the near future as well. Their partner in the deal--General Saw Lwin, is the former director of training for Burma's army--the same military that has brutally suppressed the Burmese people for nearly 40 years.

Please join us and organize a demonstration in front of a Suzuki dealership in your hometown or (if you are in the United States) call 1-877-MY SUZUKI between 9:00 and 5:00 pm Pacific Time and tell them that you will continue your boycott until Suzuki does that right thing and leaves Burma. If you are in a different country, find Suzuki's telephone number and call them to let them know that you will boycott their products until they leave Burma.

---

RadTimes # 65

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 11:43:53 -0700
From: radman <resist@best.com>
RadTimes # 65 - October, 2000
An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities.

"We're living in rad times!"

Contents: In the Aftermath of Seattle: Backlash Reigns
--Philadelphia Protesters Trusted Wrong Volunteer
--Withering Democracy
--Protest Against the Trans Atlantic Business Dialogue
--Security Detail Linked stories: *The Right To Radio

In the Aftermath of Seattle: Backlash Reigns
<http://www.foreignpolicy-infocus.org/progresp/vol4/prog4n37.html>
By Tom Barry

Although the violence in Seattle was widely condemned by citizen leaders, much of the rhetoric used by these same leaders fosters a violent backlash. Clearly, the militancy of the demonstrations has successfully focused media--and to some degree public--attention on the institutions of global economic governance. There is also growing recognition by global leaders that the negative impacts of globalization need to be addressed. Seeing this success, antiglobalization groups have adopted "shut it down" strategies at international meetings of globalization forums and institutions. The hope was that successive Seattle-modeled protests would delegitimize the institutions of global governance and draw in greater numbers of disaffected citizen groups, coalescing them into a truly international movement that can turn around globalization.

The analysts associated with this movement often lend intellectual support to the anarchist backlash on the streets. In his recent book, American University professor Robin Hahnel, a frequent contributor to Z magazine, writes: "We must act like Lilliputian Luddites first and stop corporate-sponsored globalization by any means necessary." For many in the antiglobalization movement, this campaign against globalization is the defining struggle of our era--a life and death struggle that requires all means necessary to stop corporate forces.

One possibility is that such a backlash movement could indeed be successful at undermining the credibility and legitimacy of current institutions. In the process of stressing the importance of national sovereignty and local development, such a movement may also help build a global consensus against all forms of global governance--a frightening scenario. Another possibility is that the media and public will grow weary of street demonstrations of disaffected youth, the message of the reformers will be lost in the cacophony of street battles, and the concerns and positive agendas of the antiglobalization coalition will be dismissed.

In the aftermath of DC, Melbourne, and Prague, it is time to ask what the agenda of this movement is with respect to multilateral global governance. The movement makes reference to the power of the U.S. Treasury and the Washington-to-Wall Street axis of power in corporate-led globalization. But the protests have focused not on America's central role, but on the institutions of multilateral governance that include most of the world's governments. In the U.S., this anti-global governance strategy has great resonance with those among the left and the right who appeal to the sanctity of national sovereignty.

One of the most striking inconsistencies among progressives is their ambivalent embrace of multilateralism. In the political/security arena, multilateralism is supported as the only viable method for advancing international peace and security. Multilateralism in the form of the UN is strongly supported, and unilateralism by the U.S. is consistently condemned. The citizen movements focusing on global economic issues make no such principled declaration in support of multilateral governance, however. The political leaders of other nations, like those of the U.S., are regarded to be the servants of corporate and elite rule. When making the critique that the current governance institutions are incapable of reform, many global economy activists do not at the same time assert that some form of multilateral economic governance is fundamentally important.

The succession this year of attempts to shut down the multilateral institutions should raise serious questions about just where the global economy movement is going.

--

Philadelphia Protesters Trusted Wrong Volunteer
He drove them right into custody
October 1, 2000, Philadelphia Inquirer
by Craig R. McCoy and Linda K. Harris

With police helicopters swooping overhead, the protesters dashed in twos and threes to the waiting van.

The 1995 Ford Econoline sped off, bound for Center City. Nervous and full of energy, the demonstrators were ready to leap from the van and block traffic during the Republican National Convention for as long as seven hours.

Their mission was carefully planned and rehearsed, but there was one thing the protesters hadn't bargained on.

Behind the wheel of the van was Harry, a burly man with a trim goatee. Though his passengers didn't realize it, Harry was an undercover state trooper.

He drove the 18 activists right into police custody. Their operation didn't last seven hours. Seven minutes, maybe.

The police duping of that vanload of demonstrators on Tuesday, Aug. 1, the most tumultuous day of street protest during the convention, was a pivotal episode in a weeklong battle of wills.

Protesters were bent on paralyzing Center City intersections on a day when Philadelphia was in the national spotlight. Police were just as determined to keep that from happening.

The protesters' planning was extensive but not without flaw. Before getting into the van, the group even donned diapers - so a trip to the bathroom need not force anyone to give up a position during the blockade. However, the usual adult diapers weren't available that day, so the protesters put on ill-fitting baby diapers.

And the protesters hadn't counted on the state police penetrating their ranks.

This account is based on interviews with demonstrators arrested in the van - including the Texas couple who unwittingly gave the keys to their van to the undercover agent - and with officials, including one familiar with the undercover operation.

The protesters' target was 12th and Arch Streets, outside the Convention Center, where many Republican delegates were touring a replica of the Oval Office and Air Force One at the popular PoliticalFest exhibit.

That Tuesday morning, the protesters gathered initially in the courtyard of the so-called puppet warehouse at 41st Street and Haverford Avenue, the massive stone building where 75 activists were arrested that afternoon.

There, the protesters made several dry runs of the blockade. They clustered in the courtyard as though in a van and then pantomimed leaping forward, as though jumping onto a street.

It was "a pretty pathetic rehearsal," one participant said later.

Since the convention, the warehouse and its purpose have lingered in controversy. Although many protesters have insisted that the warehouse was used only to create satirical puppets, a massive float and banners, those in the van acknowledged that it was the initial staging area for their operation.

In the warehouse, participants sorted out their roles, with some agreeing to ride in the van to face eventual arrest for the illegal street blockade, and others choosing "low-risk" supporting roles.

Harry elected a supporting role.

Scott Haws, 33, and his wife, Anne Harkness, 42, of Dallas, agreed that Harry could drive their van as they planned to take part in the street lockdown.

"He volunteered to do it," Haws added.

Harry had won the trust of the protesters by working hard to help build a massive satirical political float dubbed "Corpzilla."

That Tuesday, after an hour of rehearsals at the warehouse, members of the group scattered at noon, agreeing to rendezvous at 2 p.m. at the Comet coffee shop and espresso bar, about five blocks from the closely watched warehouse.

As they gathered there, the demonstrators learned that the warehouse was under siege, surrounded by police who eventually arrested everyone inside.

In affidavits justifying search warrants for the warehouse and the Ford van, state police later revealed that several troopers, working undercover, had infiltrated the warehouse.

State police officials have declined to elaborate on the clandestine operation, but a government official familiar with the undercover work has confirmed what the protesters ruefully came to suspect: that Harry, the man behind the wheel of the Econoline, was a state trooper.

Protesters say Harry was among four men who had arrived at the warehouse from Wilkes-Barre five days earlier. A protester named James McGuinness, 44, who has lived in Washington for the last 14 months, let them enter the warehouse.

"They came in the daytime," said McGuinness, who was in charge of security at the warehouse. "They said they were stagehands and they were carpenters. They said they were there to support the unions. Since Seattle, there's been a lot of union participation. A lot of people in unions don't look like activists."

The four men drew suspicion in some quarters. With their short hair, well-kept goatees, ignorance of politics, and taste for Yuengling beer - an exception to the no-alcohol rule was made for them - they seemed a little "off."

Still, they quickly proved hard and capable workers, practically building "Corpzilla" by themselves.

Adam Eidinger, 27, of Washington, and his girlfriend, Alexis Baden-Mayer, 26, of Alexandria, Va., became friendly with the carpenters. Eidinger had a special interest in the float: he had rented the flatbed truck on which "Corpzilla" was built. The money came from movie director Robert Greenwald, who had just released the Abbie Hoffman biopic Steal This Movie!.

As Aug. 1 approached, according to Eidinger, the four carpenters urgently pushed to have some role in the coming street protests.

" 'We want to do some direct action,' " Eidinger recalled one saying.

" 'And we want to do it with you.' "

On Tuesday afternoon, Harry showed up with the other three union carpenters at the Comet coffee shop. His three companions were sent away.

When the protesters dashed out in groups to the van, Harry climbed behind the wheel.

"Here's the keys," Haws told him. "You're now the captain."

With Harry driving, the van took off. Some of the passengers began to assemble "lock boxes" - contraptions rigged with pipes, wire, chain and mountaineering clamps - which the demonstrators planned to wear to link themselves together, starfish-like, to slow the police job of prying them off the street.

"There was a lot of excitement and energy in the van," Haws said. One protester cautioned: "Everybody take a deep breath."

The excitement soon turned to high anxiety.

Almost immediately, the activists noticed what they took to be an unmarked police car behind them.

"Within the first 60 seconds, someone yelled out, 'We're being followed,' " said Eidinger, a self-employed publicist. "The jig was up pretty quickly."

"Within minutes, there were cops. It was very obviously planned from the beginning," said protester Soliman Lawrence, 20, of Tallahassee, Fla.

Soon, a train of police cruisers was visible behind the van, and what the demonstrators believed were unmarked police cars pulled in front of and beside it.

As a police escort took shape, the van rolled west on the Schuylkill Expressway, heading toward the Vine Street Expressway interchange and Center City. Inside, more aggressive protesters suggested that they should leap out right there and block the expressway.

Haws recalled the hurried debate. Other people suggested driving straight into New Jersey.

"What are we going to do? Do we want to just drive away, abort the plan? There was talk of committing the action where we were," he recalled.

Said Eidinger: "We were trying to keep everyone calm in the van. Being followed by the police was something we never anticipated."

Demonstrator George Ripley, 52, who had been riding in the passenger seat next to Harry, quickly realized that the protest in Center City wasn't going to happen.

"We should have driven out of town," said Ripley, who recently moved to Washington from Homer, Alaska.

Harry finally stopped at Vine and Eighth Streets.

"He rolled the window down and asked why we were being pulled over," Haws said. "They said it was because the tags were expired, which was untrue. They asked him to step out of the car.

They took him away."

There, by the highway, the test of wills continued. Police ordered everyone else out of the van. About half refused.

On a day when even the asphalt sweated, police then reached into the van and hauled limp demonstrators out one by one to face misdemeanor charges. Handcuffed, the protesters were carried into a waiting police bus.

Sitting there, the protest thwarted, the 18 activists looked around and came to a startling realization: Harry wasn't among them.

--

Withering Democracy
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman

For all but the ideologically committed or deluded few who believe corporations and their executives make contributions out of a sense of civic obligation, there can be little doubt that the U.S. campaign finance system is fundamentally corrupt, and corrupting.

But it would be a mistake to make this observation and reach the obvious conclusion that the current system of private contributions must be replaced by a system of public financing, and then fail to dig further. Because the available campaign finance data provides a host of insights into the pattern of corporate investment in politics and politicians in the United States.

Superb new data collections from the invaluable Center for Responsive Politics (CRP, data at <www.opensecrets.org>) detail the nature of major industrial sector contribution patterns over the last decade, compiling contributions from individuals affiliated with industries, political action committee (PAC) contributions and soft money donations (made to the political parties). Here is some of what their data shows:

1. Every single major industrial sector except for communications/electronics now favors the Republican Party. The CRP industry groupings are: agribusiness; communications/electronics; construction; defense; energy/natural resources; finance/insurance/real estate; health; transportation; and a catch-all miscellaneous business category, including liquor, casinos, chemicals, food, advertising, steel production and textiles.

The communications/electronics contributions lean slightly toward the Democrats, powered by contributions from Hollywood. The TV/movie/music sector, constituting about a third of overall donations from the communications/electronics sector, gives more than 60 percent of its contributions to Democrats.

2. Despite the overall tilt to the Republicans, every major industrial sector contributes large sums to the Democrats as well. Agribusiness and energy/natural resources, two of the most pro-Republican industries, gave the Democrats $69 million and $64 million, respectively, in the election cycles from 1990 to 2000.

3. The only reliably Democratic supporters are lawyers/lobbyists (reflecting trial lawyer contributions) and labor. Lawyers/lobbyists directed nearly 70 percent of their contributions to the Democrats. Labor sent more than 90 percent of its monies to the Dems.

4. The major shift to the Republicans followed the 1994 elections, in which the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress. Corporate contributions generally flow to the majority party, both because it has more incumbents and the companies seek to win influence with those in office, and because the majority party controls the legislative agenda.

5. Of the major industrial sectors, agribusiness, construction, energy/natural resources and transportation, plus the miscellaneous business category, appear firmly entrenched in the Republican camp. They favored the Republicans even when they were the minority in Congress, and now favor them by large margins. The health industries and finance/insurance/real estate both give about 60 percent of their contributions to the Republicans, while defense gives an even higher share to the GOP, but each of these sectors split their contributions relatively evenly when the Democrats controlled Congress. Communications/electronics companies now divide their contributions evenly, and favored the Democrats in the elections through 1994.

6. The broad sector totals may in some cases obscure differences within industry groupings. For example, in the energy sector, while oil and gas have always been staunchly Republican, now giving more than three-fourths of their contributions to the Party of Lincoln, electric utilities have tilted more Democratic. Although about two-thirds of utility money now goes to the Republicans, utilities favored the Democrats when they controlled Congress. In the finance sector, real estate firms and securities/investment banks have shaded more Democratic than insurance companies and commercial banks. The former now give about 43 percent of their monies to the Democrats, while insurance companies and commercial banks give only one-third to the minority party. In general, however, industrial sectors appear to act in concert.

7. Specific sector contributions spike at certain periods, correlating with Congressional consideration of major legislation of interest to particular industries. Agribusiness contributions rise prior to adoption of the periodic Farm Bill. Communications/electronic contributions nearly doubled from 1994 to 1996, prior to adoption of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Contributions from the finance sector skyrocketed as the financial deregulation bill was wending its way through Congress.

8. Over the past decade, the overarching trend in corporate campaign contributions has been rapidly upward. Corporate contributions in the 2000 elections are already about 50 percent higher than in the 1992 presidential election year -- and there's still plenty of time to go this year.

9. Labor is no counterbalance for the Democrats. Although unions direct more than 90 percent of their contributions to the Democrats, corporate contributors outspend them by more than 11 times.

10. George W. Bush is massively outdistancing Al Gore in corporate contributions. Bush leads in every corporate sector. In the most competitive sector, communications/electronics, Bush's contributions are 25 percent higher than Gore's. In the agribusiness, energy/natural resources and transportation sectors, Bush is pulling in nearly 10 times more money than Gore.

This is no way to run a democracy. When both parties' financial lifeline are connected to corporate interests, the democratic credentials of the political system are called into question. The system formally remains one of one person, one vote, but is it the people or the corporations who rule? ---- Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999).

--

Protest Against the Trans Atlantic Business Dialogue
<http://www.n16.org/>

DIRECT ACTION PROTEST AGAINST THE T.A.B.D. NOVEMBER 16 - 18 DOWNTOWN CINCINNATI OHIO OMNI NETHERLANDS HOTEL - 5th and Race St.

November 16-18, the Trans Atlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) will be having their annual CEO conference in Downtown Cincinnati, Ohio at the Omni Netherlands Hotel. European Union Parliament, U.S. congress, and more than 200 American and European CEOs and business leaders will meet to talk about issues that impact transatlantic trade and develop recommendations on how to best boost global trade and investment. The T.A.B.D. makes recommendations that will set the tone for World Trade Organization policy. Over 50% of T.A.B.D. recommendations have been adopted for the WTO. One such corporation in attendance at the conference, BASF, who's plant in Cincinnati blew up in the early 1990's killing two workers, injuring many more and also caused millions of dollars in damage will help with these negotiations! The TABD claims to "offer an effective framework for enhanced Cooperation between the transatlantic business community and the governments Of the EU and US. An informal process whereby European and American companies and business associations develop joint EU-US trade policy recommendations, working together with the European Commission and U.S. administration." It's plain to see that the Trans-Atlantic Business Dialogue means more money and control in the pockets of top CEO and government officials so just like the WTO in Seattle and the IMF/World Bank in Washington DC demonstrations it is time to voice our opposition. Join together and publicize the disastrous effects of global capitalism to people both outside and inside the United States. We need to converse to world economic and business leaders that we will not calmly tolerate labor and agricultural annihilation before our eyes. What is left before us, our only hope for a just and equal society, YOU! Start talking to within communities about organizing affinity groups to come and converge in Cincinnati Ohio November 15, 16, 17, 18 to make aware the growing nature of these undemocratic institutions. Join in workshops and educational demonstrations of real democracy where we organize from the bottom up. Our convergence upon Cincinnati will be a symbol that we want to totally eradicate and abolish the injustice of global economic control by a few. No longer shall human life, animals and the environment be substituted for personal gain! Come be apart of mass demonstrations, direct action and civil disobedience to show the TABD that we will not tolerate their current policies of global takeover by institutions that cater profit before people. Without a peoples response to this matter we waive our right to practice the democratic process and put it into the T.A.B.D's hands.

--To subscribe to the Cincinnati Direct Action email list --For current and up to date info please email: <CincinnatiDA-subscribe@egroups.com> If you would like to get involved please contact : <Cdac3@hotmail.com>

For more on the Trans Atlantic Business Dialogue see <www.tabd.org>.

Website for direct action protest with updates, housing, and current information on N16 protests and teach-ins at <www.n16.org>.

--

Security Detail
By Patrick Beach <pbeach@statesman.com>
American-Statesman Staff
Thursday, October 5, 2000

As many as 150 of the country's richest moguls are coming to Austin for the big Fortune 500 summit this month. With murmurs of protests in addition to the usual security concerns that go with such an event, you're likely to see more edgy-looking guys in suits than when George W. Bush comes to town to pick up his mail.

Those would be the bodyguards, the Kevlar-vested, concealed-weapon-carrying, surveillance-mike-talking-into paid protectors of the very rich and very targetable. Here then, a bodyguard FAQ:

What's a bodyguard?

In Texas, it's a private security officer who, in addition to being licensed to carry a concealed weapon, has had additional training to become a Personal Protection Officer, or PPO.

Have any of the Fortune 500 CEOs, in fact, contracted with Austin security firms to watch their backs while they're here?

We'd tell you, but then we'd have to kill you.

No, really.

Many top CEOs contract their own security details that travel with them. However, it's conceivable that if Michael Dell's guy eats some bad tuna fish, Dell could hire an Austin firm for the day.

Are you saying Michael Dell has bodyguards? Cool.

"I probably shouldn't mention specific company names, but there are large computer companies in Austin that have their own officers, and I have trained some of those," says Sam Langford, owner of Austin Security Concepts Inc.

Does bodyguard training include learning the lyrics to "I Will Always Love You"?

I have a gun. Are you sure you want to be asking that?

What about "Have Gun, Will Travel"?

Um . . . yes. Although that was technically called "The Ballad of Paladin."

"A soldier of fortune is a man called Paladin," right?

"Paladin, Paladin, where do you roam?" Right.

OK, I need a bodyguard. How much will it run me?

In Austin, generally anywhere from $45 to $75 an hour for each PPO. Not cheap, but if somebody is legitimately worried about safety and security, the value is incalculable.

And what happens after I hire you to protect me?

Jeff White of Austin's Statewide Patrol says it goes like this: There's a background interview to determine why the subject feels she or he needs protection. Then the firm determines whether the principal needs one guard, or four, or 10.

"You put one guy or two guys on somebody who needs 10, not only is your client compromised but so are your guys," says Kevin Moore of Emerald P.I. <www.emeraldpi.com>.

Itineraries and travel routes are reviewed and, in some instances, locations are reconnoitered in advance.

Says White: "I've ridden in limos and I've ridden in bulletproof Suburbans."

Langford: "They would provide executive security, plan the visit, coordinate with local law enforcement, coordinate their security efforts along with the itinerary of the client. It varies with the person. There are PPOs that will travel with the person. Traveling outside the state of Texas is a little trickier because gun laws vary from state to state."

Every situation is different.

"Whoever the individual is, each person has a unique threat assessment," says Moore. "The CEO of Coca-Cola is going to have a different assessment than the president of Colombia or Michael Dell. You want to have as much information about the person and where they're heading. No one likes surprises. If there is a surprise, they'd like to have the ability to respond and have a backup."

Let's say I want to be a bodyguard. What kind of cool gear would I have?

White has a wireless surveillance microphone ($200), a Glock ($475),concealment holsters ($250) and, of course, the hopefully named bulletproof vest ($400).

"I wouldn't guard a taco stand in this town without my vest on," White says.

And what's involved in the training?

We'd tell you, but-

You used that joke already.

Right. Well, there's the diamond formation, a fairly self-explanatory method for surrounding the client with four PPOs. There's proper takedown of suspects, use of the force continuum (from verbal warning to deadly force), specialized shooting and the like. Officers also learn to be wary of potential diversions-a scuffle on the other side of the room might, in fact, be aimed at distracting the PPOs.

"You always have to be aware," White says. "Not obsessed or paranoid, but aware."

Prospective CEO-guarding PPOs also are required to take a personality inventory test and undergo a psychological evaluation to make sure they don't have, you know, significant mommy issues or something.

What glamorous bodyguarding assignments has White had?

Well, he kept an eye on some really expensive photographs at a private gallery opening. He's wearing a suit, walking around, looking at the photographs, saying, "I find this piece very interesting."

"I'm not an art critic, I'm just a bodyguard. I had no idea what I was talking about," he says.

What if somebody starts shooting?

Not likely at an art gallery, but, according to "The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook," the thing to do is get as far away from the shooter as rapidly as possible. The book also recommends running in a zigzag pattern to make yourself more difficult to tag.

And gunfights go on for hours and hours, right, like in a John Woo movie?

Get real. Most gunbattles, says White, are over in three seconds. And they're never in slow motion.

How many PPOs are there in Texas?

According to the Texas Commission on Private Security, 396.

And people are attracted to this line of work because of . . .

"The intrigue," White says. James Bond and all that. At the same time, "It's not so cool. It's very serious. You can't get caught up in the glitz of riding in the limo. You follow your guy to the bathroom."

---

Chernobyl Victims Demand More Aid

Associated Press
October 10, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Ukraine-Chernobyl-Protest.html

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Some 500 demonstrators gathered outside Ukraine's parliament Tuesday to demand continued aid for victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and people who worked on the cleanup.

More than 2.2 million people in Ukraine are eligible for benefits stemming from the April 1986 accident, according to the Interfax news agency. The protesters alleged the government is trying to cut benefits in the 2001 budget.

The protesters also demanded that the government pay overdue benefit payments, provide $714,000 for events organized by the Chernobyl Union non-governmental organization and index pensions and subsidies to inflation going back to 1996.

The protest was timed to coincide with parliamentary hearings on new government programs for medical care and reclamation of land polluted in the Chernobyl accident.

A government spokeswoman denied that the government had made major cuts in benefits for the Chernobyl victims in the draft budget.

``The privileges were not cut on a scale to cause such a protest,'' said Svitlana Sova, a spokeswoman for the Emergency Situations Ministry. She said the government had cut some subsidies for telephone use.

---

Women give full voice to concerns
Hundreds take to streets to mark first day of World March of Women

Montreal Gazette
Tuesday 10 October 2000
DEBBIE PARKES The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/001010/4659509.html

Motorists honked horns, a woman in a bright red dress on a tenement balcony smiled and raised a fist in the air, and even a sheepdog at the end of a demonstrator's leash seemed to bark in approval as hundreds of women marched through the east end yesterday, the first day of the Montreal segment of the World March of Women.

Holding banners and placards high, the protesters shouted slogans demanding an end to poverty, more subsidized housing and the elimination of violence against women worldwide.

As the marchers made their way under a train overpass, their thunderous applause and singing was loud enough to make at least one child cry.

The march took several hours and ended about 5 p.m. outside Place des Arts, where the east-end group met up with a second group of several hundred marchers who had started their walk in Point St. Charles. Estimates of the total number of people who took part in the rally ranged from 1,500 to 3,000.

Outside Place des Arts, music and entertainment celebrated the official launch of this week's activities.

At stops during the march, speakers pointed out what they feel is needed.

Housing Complex

On Fullum St., marchers learned about Project MAP (Meres Avec Pouvoir), a housing complex under construction for 30 young single mothers.

The Quebec government's financial contribution to the project is much appreciated, but the province still needs to put more money into low-cost housing, said Manon Masse, co-ordinator of the Federation des Femmes du Quebec.

For Manuela Peterson, who pulled her two daughters, Maya, 5, and Malaika, 3, behind her in a green plastic wagon, the Montreal segment of the world march was not an event to be missed.

Even when it was still a year away, she told her daughters about it as part of a conscious effort to make them aware of the issues women face, she said.

She and her daughters also plan to take part in the main event on Saturday - when participants are to come together from across the province for a march from Lafontaine Park to the downtown core. On that day, Peterson's husband and young son also plan to take part.

Other participants in yesterday's event included Patricia Larivee, a social-work student at the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, who said she's become even more aware of the poverty that many women face since starting an internship at a women's centre.

Men Joined March

Men also joined yesterday's march, though they were clearly in the minority.

"On matters of poverty and equity, women seem to have a gift at getting things moving," said Danny Raymond, 35, who's made a career of disposing of used needles from east-end parks and alleys. "They do much more than men."

Other stops during yesterday's event included a community centre for gays and lesbians, the Comite Social Centre-Sud, a lobby and support group; and Stella, an organization that comes to the defence of sex-trade workers, who face violence and discrimination.

Other neighbourhood marches are to take place throughout the week in Montreal, with a national march to take place in Ottawa on Sunday.

The World March of Women, organized mainly by Quebec women, incorporates events taking place around the world. It was inspired by a women's "Bread and Roses" anti-poverty march in Quebec in 1995.

This year's worldwide series of events culminates on Oct. 17, when a delegation of women from 159 countries is to meet in New York with United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

- For more information on World March of Women activities, telephone (514) 252-3049 or check the Web site at www.ffq.qc.ca.

---

March for Palestine loud but peaceful

Montreal Gazette
Tuesday 10 October 2000
LYNN MOORE The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/001010/4659510.html

An estimated 5,000 people took part in a loud but peaceful pro-Palestinian march that wound its way without incident through downtown Montreal yesterday.

The marchers stopped briefly in front of the United States consulate on St. Alexandre St. and held a closing rally in front of the Israeli consulate on Peel St.

"We are trying to show that the support given to Israel is not merited or wanted," said Salam Elmenyawi, chairman of the Muslim Council of Montreal, a principal organizer of yesterday's event.

"No justice, no peace," and "Zionism is a crime; long live Palestine" were among the chants taken up by men, women and children as the marchers claimed a good chunk of the Ste Catherine St. shopping district.

At one point, the march stretched five blocks along Ste. Catherine from McGill College Ave. to St. Alexandre St.

Montreal Urban Community police closely monitored the event, which was videotaped by at least one officer. The riot squad was on standby but not needed as the protest was orderly and without incident, police spokesman Constable Jean Gravel said.

RCMP Watching

Members of the RCMP unit assigned to protect consulate personnel also watched the march from vehicles along the way and from inside the building housing the Israeli consulate.

The protest march began at 2:30 p.m. on Sherbrooke St. in front of McGill University and began breaking up about 5 p.m.

Among the marchers was McGill student Dana Barazi, whose family lives in Palestine. If nothing else, she said, the march should generate more awareness about Palestine and, in turn, more support for its beleaguered residents.

"In North America, sometimes there is little awareness. You tell people you are from Palestine and they say, 'Where?' " Barazi said.

The shooting death of 12-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Aldura was featured in yesterday's speeches, and many placards carried by protesters made reference to his death.

About 10 days ago, a French TV crew captured the sobering images of Mohammed and his father cowering by a wall as they were fired on by what were identified as Israeli solders. The footage of the unarmed father trying to protect his child from a barrage of bullets was shown around the world.

'Mixed emotions'

Also watching yesterday's protest were American tourists Mary-Jane and James Medeiros. The couple said they had "mixed emotions" about the protest and the situation in the West Bank, where almost 90 people have been killed in recent violence.

The Medeiros said they live in a predominately Jewish neighbourhood in Massachusetts and appreciate the Israeli position.

On the other hand, their son-in-law's family hails from Lebanon and, through that family, they have been exposed to the other side of issue.

"It's difficult for us. We honestly feel this is not a good time" for either the residents of the West Bank or anyone who seeks peace in the troubled area, James Medeiros said.

Many of the speakers during yesterday's protest complained that the United States government blindly supports Israel. The Medeiros were asked their position on that stance.

"The (U.S.) Democratic Party has a vice-presidential candidate who is Jewish. How can we not say we totally, 100 per cent support Israel?" James Medeiros asked.

---

USA Today
10/10/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Hawaii

Honolulu - University of Hawaii students are planning a protest today over what some say is a lack of community involvement in the search for a new UH president. Students say big business is overrepresented on a 17-member committee named to help search for a successor to Kenneth Mortimer, who will step down in June.

---

CRANK IT UP

Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 03:56:45 -0700

STRANGE NEWS

Hootie and the Blowfish and rapper Rah Digga headline a free concert Wednesday at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. It's part of Rock the Vote's Election 2000 bus tour. One mile away, at Wake Forest's Wait Chapel, the second presidential debate between George W. Bush and Al Gore will take place. Organizers are preparing for a crowd of 10,000, and invitations have been extended to the Bush and Gore campaigns and to third-party candidates Ralph Nader, Harry Browne, John Hagelin and Pat Buchanan. The bands will break from 9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. (EST) as the crowd watches the debate live on two jumbo TV screens. Rock the Vote's Election 2000 bus tour is a 25-city campaign that aims to register and educate young voters.

------- Onelist (submissions from subscribers)