------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Gore or Bush presidency could present Canada with problems, opportunities
Uranium seizure: Cancer hospital denies report
French submariners see ships as targets
Health fears haunt India's uranium quest
Police Arrest Two, Seize Uranium in Southern India
Iraq Seeks Talks With U.N. Chief on Arms-Inspection
Egypt Restores Ties With Iraq
Kursk Recovery Efforts Halted
Another Note Found in Kursk Sub
RUSSIA: KURSK ABANDONED
Taiwan Opposition Steps Up Attack on President
Opposition Passes Move to Recall Taiwan Leader
California
Los Alamos Scientists Won't Be Fired
Policy differences across the board
Divided Government Emerges As Winner
21st century foreign policy

MILITARY
BRITAIN: UNDER-18 COMBATANTS
AND FINALLY, TODAY'S UPLIFTING STORY
Scientists Downplay 'Space Object'
Men in Space
U.N. CONSIDERING MIDEAST FORCE
Skepticism for U.N. Peacekeeping Force
Pentagon Seeks More Bang to Matériel
Cohen: Too Soon To Link Cole, Laden
States

OTHER
Attack on Clean Air Act Falters in High Court
The Global Case For Tree-Hugging
The Court and Clean Air
Drugs found in tap water
FORESTS ADD TO GLOBAL WARMING
Emission standards argued at High Court
States
The Global Case For Tree-Hugging
NPS, Cerus Lighting a New Fire for Biotech Believers



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- canada

Gore or Bush presidency could present Canada with problems, opportunities

CBC
11/08/00
ROBERT RUSSO
http://cbc.ca/cp/world/001108/w110862.html

WASHINGTON (CP) - The lame joke making the rounds of Canada watchers here concerning George W. Bush's knowledge of his northern neighbour goes as follows: Reporter to Bush: What's the capital of Canada? Dick Cheney whispers to Bush: Ottawa. Bush: I know I ottawa know the answer but I don't.

The joke isn't lost on supporters of Bush's Democratic rival, Al Gore. One of Gore's foreign policy advisers suggested the difference between the two men is that Gore could find Canada on a map.

While it's true that Bush has made just a handful of trips outside the United States and has never travelled to Canada, a Gore administration isn't necessarily the better fit for Canadians.

And no matter who occupies the White House in January, the new president will almost certainly face a narrowly divided Congress that will limit his ability to bring in any radical changes.

The new U.S. chief executive will likely find himself governing as if he were a prime minister presiding over a minority government.

Experts at the Foreign Affairs Department who have made a study of the various electoral scenarios under a Bush or Gore administration believe it will take several months before the direction of that government becomes clear.

A Bush victory could have an immediate political consequence in Canada, where Stockwell Day has begun to narrow a still-large gap between his Canadian Alliance and Jean Chretien's Liberals.

"A Bush win might make a lot of things Day has talked about - tax cuts, smaller government, decentralization - look more mainstream," said Chris Sands, head of the Canada Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"It could hand Stockwell Day the football."

Conversely, a Gore win could indicate that most North Americans aren't prepared to toss out the incumbent parties that have delivered prosperity.

While Bush does not know Canada as well as Gore, several powerful governors from border states will have influence with Bush, such as John Engler in Michigan and George Pataki in New York.

One of these men might even be tapped for a cabinet post in a Bush administration.

Gore is generally believed to share environmental concerns with Canadians. But his ability to deliver on those policies could be curbed by a split Congress.

Bush has said that he would allow drilling for oil in Alaska's national wildlife preserve. Canada has objected to oil flowing from the pristine wildland as a threat to the Porcupine caribou herd and native way of life in the North.

Gore has opposed expanded drilling in Alaska.

Some experts in bilateral relations believe Bush's more aggressive proposals for tax cuts would further widen the productivity gap between Canada and the United States and exacerbate the brain drain southwards.

Gore's tax cuts are so narrowly focused - on lower- and middle-income earners - that the vice-president's pitch for tax reductions wouldn't have as much impact in Canada.

Bush would likely have a better chance of getting fast-track authority from Congress to expand hemispheric trade than Gore. The Democrat's strong ties to union supporters would restrict his ability to gain sweeping fast-track authority.

Bush has promised to scale back the use of U.S. troops in foreign engagements, including peacekeeping missions. That could put further strain on Canada's already weary peacekeepers.

The Texas governor's more isolationist bent has caused concern among Canadian and European diplomats who depended on U.S. military muscle to enact much of their foreign and defence policy in Bosnia and Yugoslavia.

Gore favours a policy known as forward engagement: attempting to solve problems in trouble spots before they explode into crises. This philosophy would be applied in hot-spots such as Rwanda or in attacking climate change, disease and international crime.

"Forward engagement looks a lot like our Human Security agenda," one Canadian official said.

While both candidates support the U.S. National Missile Defense program, Canada prefers Gore's policy of extensive consultations with U.S. allies over Bush's insistence to go it alone if necessary.

Bush also believes the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which has been a lynchpin of international arms control for almost 30 years, is not the cornerstone of peace among the world's nuclear powers.

Gore would attempt to work within the ABM framework if he decided to proceed with a missile defence strategy.

-------- depleted uranium

Uranium seizure: Cancer hospital denies report

The Hindu
Wednesday, November 08, 2000
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/11/08/stories/0408403k.htm

HYDERABAD, NOV. 7. The Bibi Cancer Hospital on Tuesday sought to wriggle itself out of the controversy that surrounded the depleted uranium finding its way from the hospital into the scrap market, saying that `no radioactive material had gone out of the hospital.'

Talking to presspersons here, the Director, Radiation Oncologist, Dr. Viqar Syed, however, admitted that they did sell parts of their decommissioned `Theratron-80 teletherapy' unit to a scrap dealer. The same was done after Kirloskar Theratronics had certified that the unit's source head did not contain any depleted uranium, he said.

Strangely, the hospital authorities failed to give the name of the scrap dealer to whom the source head was sold. "We do not remember the dealer's name," they maintained. Though as per guidelines, the hospital sent two collimators containing depleted uranium to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, the source head was not sent to the BARC.

While relying on the Kirloskar Theratronics certification on `head of the unit not containing any depleted uranium', Dr. Syed, however, did not want to comment when asked on the possibility of the certification having erred on the presence of the radioactive material in the pieces of unit sold in scrap.

Interestingly, the Kirloskar certificate, a copy of which was made available to the press, says: "As per our records, Theratron-80 does not contain depleted uranium." The fact that the certificate makes mention of `our records' and also `our Delhi head office records' could mean that the certification was based only on the records.

Dr. Syed also claimed that Bibi Cancer Hospital had been acting in total compliance of BARC guidelines. "We have been exercising care and caution in handling radioactive material regularly," he said.

He also refuted certain reports that uranium was used in treatment of cancer, saying: "Depleted uranium is only part of the lead shielding which surrounds the source in the cobalt machine."

-------- france

French submariners see ships as targets

Irish Times
Wednesday, November 8, 2000
By Lara Marlowe
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2000/1108/wor15.htm

TOULON LETTER: You have to stand at an angle to fit between the racks of torpedoes, Exocet missiles and mines in the weapons room of the ´Emeraude nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarine. Their subs are the smallest in the world, the French boast. Definitely not for the claustrophobic.

The bright orange mines, forest-green missiles and torpedoes are stacked horizontally facing the firing tubes, just like in the movies.

"The torpedoes have propellors," Cdr Frédéric Renaudeau explains. "They break a ship in two. The missiles go faster; they neutralise a ship, but they won't kill it."

To prove his point, he recalls the 1982 Falklands War. Britain destroyed the Argentine Belgrano with a torpedo; a French-made Exocet crippled but did not sink the HMS Sheffield.

The British nuclear-powered Triumph floated a few hundred metres away, flying the Union Jack while black tiles fell off its wet, whale-like sides. The Triumph and its 11 sister subs were about to be called back after a flaw was discovered in their nuclear propulsion system.

In 1999 the Triumph's sister ship, Splendid, fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at Belgrade, hollowing out ministries the size of city blocks.

Unlike their army counterparts in Kosovo, the British and French navies enjoy chummy relations. "Our navies are about the same size," a French officer explained. "The British are the only ones who understand us. A British frigate escorted the Foch [aircraft carrier] in the Adriatic last year. We don't have the same weapons, but we're complementary."

Capt Yves Boiffin, the commanding officer of the nuclear attack submarine squadron at Toulon, says he is happy to put British officers on his ships. Under the French Presidency of the EU, Paris is pushing hard to strengthen European defence policy, but it is taken for granted that nuclear forces will be the last - if ever - to be integrated. "It's not a technical problem for subs," Capt Boiffin says. "It is directly linked to the way that Europe goes politically."

The French attack subs cannot fire cruise missiles, but that may be rectified in the next generation of Barracuda submarines around 2012, giving them a "sea-land" role.

Sea-land is all the rage in naval strategy. With the Cold War long over, subs are expected to do more than lurk in north Atlantic waters waiting for Soviets. The ´Emeraude did its bit for the Yugoslavian war, preventing the Serbs from using their navy by patrolling the mouth of Kotor harbour in the northern Adriatic.

Nuclear missile-launching submarines, the pioneers of French and British nuclear deterrence in the 1970s, still exist, but since no one can think of anything to fire a ballistic nuclear warhead at, their utility is in question.

But the conventionally armed, cheaper nuclear attack subs, costing about three billion francs (£360 million) each, can gather intelligence, interdict enemy ships, protect surface forces, sow mines and, of course, attack. "Submariners say there are only two kinds of ship," Capt Boiffin says with black humour. "Submarines and targets."

Nuclear attack submarine crews spend up to two months below surface. Being cut off from their families is one of the greatest hardships; they are allowed only one 20-word telegram per week. Seventy-five men live in extremely cramped quarters around the nuclear reactor that powers the submarine. Five years ago 10 crew were killed when a steam pipe exploded in the compartment they were inspecting on the 'ITEmeraude.

Cdr Renaudeau says a collision or fire is his worst nightmare. But for him, life on the ´ITEmeraude is not without poetry. "Sound travels much better through water than air," he says. The French call those who listen to the sounds of the deep their oreilles d'or, their golden ears. They can distinguish between commercial and military shipping, between shrimp and whales.

"Life on a surface ship can be tiring, because the sea moves around you," Cdr Renaudeau explains. "We aren't subject to the movement of the sea. It's so quiet, so calm. You put earphones on and listen and it's magical, like hearing the rain on the roof of a country house at night."

But in the Boys' Own adventure sweepstakes, the Lafayette class stealth frigate must beat the grotty old submarines with their hunt-and-kill ethos. Modelled on the US stealth bomber, the four year-old Lafayette was designed with James Bond in mind. Its smooth surface almost without hard angles and radar-beam-absorbing paint give it the profile of a fishing trawler.

The ship has special quarters for navy commandos, like those who whisked the renegade Christian Lebanese, Gen Aoun, out of Beirut in 1991, or those who might be dispatched to capture suspected Yugoslavian war criminals.

-------- india / pakistan

Health fears haunt India's uranium quest
GRIM SCENE : IN VILLAGE NEAR SLUDGE POND, MANY BLAME MINES FOR DEFORMITIES AND ILLNESSES. BY NEELESH MISRA

San Jose Mercury News
Wednesday, November 8, 2000
Associated Press
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/world/docs/uranium08.htm

JADUGUDA, India -- Deep in the heart of a grassy valley, thousands of laborers are helping build India's nuclear dreams at the country's only uranium mining complex.

Two miles away, deformed children play in small clay huts.

Anti-nuclear activists say the two images are linked -- that radiation from three mines and ponds of uranium sludge is causing disease, physical abnormalities and death among thousands of indigenous people in Bihar, one of India's poorest and least developed states.

Government officials, the mine operators and some radiation experts deny the uranium complex has caused medical problems for the 4,500 employees or the tens of thousands of people living nearby. They blame inbreeding, malnutrition and unsanitary health practices.

There are only a few qualified doctors in the region, and no extensive, independent studies have been made. The mine operators and the activists even report different levels of radiation in the area.

The dispute over possible dangers could spread to other regions as the government steps up its hunt for new sources of uranium. But anti-nuclear activists have only a feeble voice in India, partly because there is little awareness of nuclear issues.

India, which does not import uranium, needs more fuel for its 12 existing and 16 planned nuclear power plants. Nuclear power supplies about 3 percent of India's electricity today and is planned to provide 10 percent by 2005.

The government also needs fuel for its atomic weapons program, which it considers necessary for defense in a region where two of its neighbors, Pakistan and China, have nuclear arms.

But for anti-nuclear activists, health threats outweigh those desires.

Near Jaduguda, activists guided Associated Press journalists to villages near the mining complex where children with deformities live alongside healthy children.

In Bango, a village two miles from a pond full of uranium tailings, 3-year-old Helligo Gop walked silently toward her family's mud house, holding the hand of her younger brother, Haradhan. The children, who have Down's syndrome, gasped after a few steps and sat down to rest, still holding hands.

Bijoy Gop, 5, struggled as he drew a pair of feet on the dusty floor of the village temple. He has only stubs for fingers and toes.

He was surrounded by friends with other afflictions. Kamal Lochan, 5, cannot speak. Rupa, Kamal's 10-year-old sister, is deaf. Sudhakar Gop, 6, cannot hear or speak.

Activists say deformed children are found in many villages in the region; they blame the mine operations.

Ian Hore-Lacy, general manager of the Uranium Information Center in Melbourne, Australia, which is financed by companies involved in uranium exploration, mining and export, disagrees that the health problems are related to radiation.

In a response to questions by e-mail, he said, ``Radiation is not known to cause deformities, or Down syndrome, in humans, except possibly from reasonably high doses, for example from an atom bomb.''

R.K. Gupta, chairman of the state Uranium Corp. of India Ltd., denied any links between the mines and health problems, and accused some activists of raising false charges because of their opposition to India's development of atomic weapons.

``Some people are trying to misrepresent our position because of the country's nuclear program,'' Gupta said.

The task of activists is made harder by tough laws that limit most nuclear-related investigation and research to government agencies.

The first independent study to assess possible radiation hazards in Jaduguda began in July. Surendra Gadekar, a physicist formerly with the prestigious Indian Institute of Science who finances his own studies, took radiation readings at several places.

The background radiation in Jaduguda town was normal, while readings at the tailings ponds were several times higher than normal, said Gadekar, who also is studying the possible effects of radiation in areas around several nuclear power plans. But he said levels were 50 times higher than normal near a playground next to an air vent from the mine.

Uranium Corp. said its laboratory regularly takes radiation readings at 30 different places in the area, including the playground. The laboratory's head, Giridhar Jha, said the readings are a little higher than normal, but not harmful.

Globally, the average background radiation level is about the equivalent of getting 30 chest X-rays a year. The average Indian background radiation level equals about 26 X-rays a year. In Jaduguda, according to Uranium Corp. laboratory's own figures, the background radiation level is about 38 chest X-rays a year.

At the mines, one of them 4,455 feet deep, the ore is crushed, chemically treated and refined. ``Yellow cakes'' of uranium are then loaded into barrels on trains and sent to a nuclear facility in Hyderabad, about 900 miles away, for further processing.

The tailings are sent back to Jaduguda to be dumped as sludge into ponds spread across 150 acres.

Gupta, the Uranium Corp. chairman, and other government officials say children's abnormalities are from severe malnutrition and lack of primary health care in the area, where living standards are the lowest in Bihar.

Thalassemia, a disease that causes deficiency in hemoglobin and that some health activists attribute to radiation, is caused by years of inbreeding among the tribes people, the area's highest local official, Nidhi Khare, argues.

Xavier Dias of the Jaduguda Organization Against Radiation said the local population of about 50,000 is vulnerable to cancer, impotence, skin diseases, Down's syndrome and other disorders. Dias said women in Jaduguda suffer miscarriages and give birth to stillborn or deformed babies.

However, there are few qualified doctors in the area, and no good estimates of how many people are suffering from those problems.

Until a few years ago, people in Jaduguda bathed in the tailings ponds, cattle grazed on the shores and children played soccer close to the tailings, said Dr. N.K. Upadhyay, an environmental biologist. He is studying the area to back a case filed in India's Supreme Court this year by the Jaduguda Organization Against Radiation.

Even now, villagers take home ore and the drums used to transport tailings, said Ghanshyam Biruli, a tribal leader who heads the anti-radiation group.

Dr. Arjun Soren of Bhatin village, one of the few people from the area who has a medical degree, suspects radiation is a problem.

``My aunt died of cancer of the gall bladder. My nephew has thalassemia,'' he said.

Soren was diagnosed with leukemia in July 1999. ``Radiation could be the only reason. I spent my childhood here,'' he said.

Gupta, the Uranium Corp. chairman, said all workers are provided with gloves, masks, helmets, boots and ear muffs to protect them against radiation.

Saluka Ho, a miner who has loaded uranium ore since 1992, said protective measures are not so stringent.

``One week in the year is safety week -- then they give respirators. Otherwise, the gloves and all are for the bosses only,'' said Ho, lying on a bed in a courtyard near his hut. A local doctor said Ho has tuberculosis.

Uranium Corp., which started work in Jaduguda in 1968, is facing opposition elsewhere as it looks for new mining sites.

Dias fears Uranium Corp. will move on soon and leave the area to clean up on its own.

``Since the ore in other parts is much better, we fear the UCIL will shut down the Jaduguda mines and leave the waste here forever,'' he said.

---

Police Arrest Two, Seize Uranium in Southern India

Reuters
November 7, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-crime-i.html

HYDERABAD, India (Reuters) - Indian police have seized 57 pounds of uranium from a home in the southern city of Hyderabad and arrested two men who had been trying to smuggle the radioactive material out of the country.

A senior police official told Reuters late on Monday that the two men had stumbled upon the uranium when they bought a vast quantity of scrap from a private hospital in Andhra Pradesh state for 60,000 rupees ($1,285) in 1998.

The men, who separated the scrap from the uranium, had been trying to smuggle out the material, which would fetch millions of dollars in the international market, police said.

``They were trying to dispose of two parts of radioactive material containing uranium...weighing about 26 kgin Hyderabad city,'' the city's Police Commissioner S.R. Sukumara told Reuters.

Police officials said they were investigating how the hazardous material left the hospital.

The radioactive material had been used in the treatment of cancer patients and was supposed to have been returned to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Bombay.

``Any installation of sensitive equipment containing radioactive material in any institution or its disposal should be done with the approval and under the supervision of BARC since any exposure of this radioactive material is likely to be hazardous,'' Sukumara said.

-------- iraq

Iraq Seeks Talks With U.N. Chief on Arms-Inspection

New York Times
November 8, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/world/08IRAQ.html

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 7 - Iraq has asked for a meeting with Secretary General Kofi Annan to try to break the impasse over arms inspections in the country, United Nations officials said today.

Mr. Annan said he would meet representatives of the Iraqi government at a summit-level meeting of Islamic nations beginning on Sunday in Doha, Qatar.

This is the first time since a new arms inspection plan was adopted by the Security Council last December that the government of Saddam Hussein has sought a meeting with United Nations officials. Iraq is required to cooperate with the new arms panel, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, if sanctions imposed after the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait are ever to be lifted.

The executive chairman of the commission, Hans Blix of Sweden, has assembled a team of inspectors and says repeatedly that the Iraqis know where to find him, but they have made no approaches.

Dr. Blix, who has been touring countries that are Security Council members and is now in Paris preparing for a training course for 58 inspectors from 23 countries, met last week with Mr. Annan to discuss Iraq.

"I will have a chance to talk with the Iraqi leadership in Doha, and I suspect the discussions to be broad- ranging," the secretary general said today. "I think that the Iraqis - as many member states here in this organization - would like to see the impasse we are in broken, and for us to move forward."

But Mr. Annan, who attracted criticism in the United States for meeting with Mr. Hussein in Baghdad in February 1998, said he was not in a position to offer the Iraqis any new ideas. Aides say he is not in a hurry to make another trip to Baghdad.

"Obviously, whatever proposals that will help break the impasse will have to come out of the Council - and with their support," he said.

An agreement he struck with Mr. Hussein in 1998 to allow the resumption of inspections was soon violated by the Iraqis. Later that year, the United States and Britain bombed Iraq because of its refusal to cooperate.

Since then, no inspections have been permitted, except for a routine International Atomic Energy Agency check of known nuclear material. In December 1999, the Security Council, deeply divided on how to proceed, established the new commission. Iraq has refused to deal with it.

Some diplomats caution that the Iraqis may be hoping to renegotiate the terms of the 1999 Council resolution, knowing that a new American president will have to rethink policy on Iraq, since support for comprehensive sanctions is eroding at the United Nations. That resolution allows for merely a suspension of sanctions and only after Iraq has made progress with inspections on the ground. Iraq wants the suspension first.

Moreover, Iraq is expected to try to win support for an end to the air patrols by the United States and Britain over no-flight zones in the north and south of the country. Since those patrols are not United Nations- backed, countries supporting Iraq would have to persuade the United States to suspend the flights in the hope that Iraq would promise to be more cooperative on arms inspections.

Iraq, profiting from high oil prices and without limits on the amount it can sell to raise money for civilian needs, is using its better position internationally to encourage the easing of sanctions.

Today, Saudi Arabia said it was opening a border trading post with Iraq to deliver civilian goods it is selling. Dozens of flights have landed in Iraq in recent weeks, bringing in relief goods and proponents of an end to sanctions. Ministers attending a trade fair in Baghdad have also been arriving by plane - technically permissible if they are not trading in prohibited goods, but nonetheless effectively ending a de facto embargo on all commercial flights to and from Iraq that had held for a decade.

--------

Egypt Restores Ties With Iraq

CAIRO, Nov. 7 (Agence France- Presse) - Foreign Minister Amr Moussa said today that Egypt and Iraq had re-established diplomatic relations, cut off since the Persian Gulf war 1991.

"There are missions of diplomatic representation between Egypt and Iraq, which will be headed by chargé d'affaires holding the rank of ambassador," Mr. Moussa said.

-------- russia

Kursk Recovery Efforts Halted

By David Hoffman
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, November 8, 2000 ; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37663-2000Nov7?language=printer

MOSCOW, Nov. 7 -- Leaving behind a wreath of flowers, the Norwegian seagoing platform Regalia today departed the site of the sunken Russian submarine Kursk after a recovery mission that brought back the bodies of 12 of the 118 victims and shed light on massive damage inside the vessel.

The Regalia served as the platform for a diving mission that spanned more than two weeks and explored several damaged compartments in the nuclear-powered attack submarine that sank Aug. 12 in the Barents Sea. The departure came after Russian commanders decided to go no farther into the ship because of dangers to the divers. The Regalia was leased from the Norwegian unit of the Dallas-based oil services company Halliburton.

Although not all the information gleaned by Russian divers has been made public, statements of navy officials in the course of the recovery effort have pointed to an explosion that originated in the nose, where the torpedo compartment is located, and reached the rear, where the largest group of sailors was found. Traces of fire were found in the rear of the sub, and the forward compartments were turned into vaults of twisted pipes and metal by the explosion.

A Russian government investigating commission headed by Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov was to meet in Moscow on Wednesday, officials said. So far, Klebanov has said there are three explanations for the sinking: a collision with a foreign sub, hitting a World War II floating mine, or an internal explosion. Western and some Russian experts have said a blast in the torpedo room, which exploded the on-board weapons, is the most likely explanation.

The commission is expected to discuss possible reasons for the disaster, but officials have said a full answer may not come until next year, when Russia has said it will raise the sub.

In the fourth compartment, the living quarters, divers today abandoned efforts to go farther because damage was so severe--and debris so dense--that they could not move. Divers inserted a remote-control device into the fifth compartment, where the nuclear reactor is located, navy spokesman Capt. Vladimir Navrotsky told Russian television.

He said divers decided not to enter the fifth compartment because, to reach the victims, they would have had to climb to a lower deck through an opening that was only 1.9 square feet, and the bulky underwater gear required at least 2.4 square feet. He said damage to the reactor in the fifth compartment was reduced by the cushioning effect of the forward bulkheads.

Navrotsky said it was "impossible to cut further" holes in the sub without weakening it structurally. Divers sliced windows in the dual-hulled vessel to explore the damage inside.

Before departing the scene, divers made a survey of the area around the Kursk and also examined the first compartment using a video camera, Navrotsky said. Navy officials have said little about the condition of the first compartment.

----

Another Note Found in Kursk Sub

November 8, 2000 Filed at 10:44 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- The mission to recover remains from a sunken Russian nuclear submarine has turned up a second note on a sailor's body, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said Wednesday, according to the Interfax news agency.

The note was written shortly after the submarine Kursk sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, crippled by explosions, with 118 men aboard, Klebanov told the commission investigating the sinking, the report said.

It was not clear if the note contained information that would help determine the cause of the accident. But, like a previous note found on a sailor's body, it gives a terse description of the trapped sailors' desperation.

``The general feeling is bad ... the pressure is increasing ... we can't last more than a day,'' the note says in part, according to Interfax.

The note was found on the body of a sailor in the submarine's stern compartment, where the other note also was recovered. That note told of how 23 sailors had crowded into the compartment but were unable to get out the compartment's escape hatch.

Klebanov said that pictures taken of the submarine during the operation to recover bodies has produced new evidence supporting the theory that the accident was caused by a collision with another vessel, possibly a foreign one, news reports said.

The evidence includes videotape footage showing a dent in the submarine's upper section, he said. But Klebanov said other possible causes of the accident are being considered and that no final determination had yet been made.

Russian officials have said the disaster was most likely caused by a collision, pointing to the presence of foreign military vessels in the Barents Sea during the military exercises in which the Kursk was taking part.

Both Britain and the United States had submarines in the Barents Sea, but deny their vessels were in the area of the Kursk. Other observers have said the sinking most likely was caused by a torpedo exploding in a tube.

The sinking was a trauma for Russia, both because the demise of one of its most modern vessels underlined the cash-strapped Navy's troubles and because of the government's slow and apparently confused response.

Russia held off for days on accepting foreign offers of help even as its own divers struggled ineffectually to open the Kursk's escape hatch. Norwegian divers eventually opened it within hours of arriving on the scene, but found the submarine filled with water.

---

New York Times November 8, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/world/08BRIE.html

EUROPE

RUSSIA: KURSK ABANDONED The navy command called off the search for more bodies aboard the sunken Kursk nuclear submarine, after divers determined that further searches for bodies would be too dangerous. In all, Norwegian and Russian divers recovered 12 bodies from the submarine, which sank off northern Russia in August, killing its crew of 118 sailors. Sabrina Tavernise (NYT)

----------- taiwan

Taiwan Opposition Steps Up Attack on President

Reuters
November 8, 2000 Filed at 3:26 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-taiwan-.html

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's opposition, angered by the scrapping of a nuclear plant, stepped up its attack on President Chen Shui-bian on Wednesday, but analysts questioned whether it could muster enough clout to oust the embattled leader.

``Give the people another chance to vote,'' read a half-page advertisement by the main opposition Nationalist Party in a leading newspaper.

It cited slumping share prices, a weakening currency and flagging investor confidence since Chen took power in May in Taiwan's first ever democratic transfer of power.

Similar advertisements were broadcast on prime-time national television opposing the government's anti-nuclear campaign.

Already under fire over an anemic stock market and murky or poorly executed economic policies in his first few months in office, Chen enraged the opposition last month when his anti-nuclear cabinet scrapped a $5.5 billion nuclear plant.

The plant, now one-third complete, had been a pet project of the Nationalists, who ruled Taiwan for 55 years until they were ousted by Chen in presidential elections in March.

Premier Chang Chun-hsiung, a member of Chen's Democratic Progressive Party, said the cabinet has decided to hand over the dispute over the nuclear power plant to the Council of Grand Justices.

It was not clear whether such a move would appease the opposition.

THREATS TO DISMISS CHEN

The offensive came just a day after a Nationalist-led opposition coalition in the legislature forged ahead with threats to dismiss Chen by revising rules on ousting the head of state.

On Tuesday the opposition-dominated legislature passed legislation by 131 votes to 66 requiring any motion to dismiss the president be voted on in public instead of by secret ballot.

The amendment was designed to prevent any opposition deputies who might be inclined to quietly support the president from publicly breaking ranks with the coalition.

The next step for the opposition would be to raise a motion in the legislature to dismiss the president, though the Nationalists have not said when they would make such a move.

The Nationalists' decision-making Central Standing Committee held its weekly meeting on Wednesday and vowed to go ahead with the dismissal bid.

``This is an issue of right or wrong,'' Nationalist spokesman Jason Hu told reporters.

Leaders of Taiwan's three main opposition parties are scheduled to meet on Saturday to discuss when to table the dismissal motion.

STOCKS REGAIN SOME GROUND

The stock market, which had been battered since the political crisis erupted, was taking the advantage of temporary calm on the political front.

The benchmark TAIEX shot up 3.24 percent to close at 6,067.94 after a 3.89 percent rally on Tuesday.

Some opposition figures fear twin disasters last week -- the crash of a Singapore Airlines jet that killed 82 people and a devastating typhoon that killed at least 62 people -- might have diverted public attention, causing the dismissal bid to lose momentum.

After Chen apologized to Nationalist leader Lien Chan on Sunday over the timing of the nuclear plant decision, some Nationalist deputies have shown signs of softening and said Chen should be given a second chance.

The government decision to halt construction was announced shortly after a fence-mending meeting between Chen and Lien and was perceived by Nationalist members as a slap in the face.

If Tuesday's vote was a barometer, the votes of independent deputies would be critical in determining whether Chen would be able to hang on to his presidency.

Both sides are courting the independent votes.

---

Opposition Passes Move to Recall Taiwan Leader

New York Times
November 8, 2000
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/world/08TAIW.html

BEIJING, Nov. 7 - Taiwan's opposition alliance took an important legal step today in its threatened campaign to oust President Chen Shui-bian, passing procedures for a recall motion in Parliament.

The measures will take effect in two weeks. Then, if two-thirds of the Parliament supports a recall, a public referendum on the fate of Mr. Chen, who has been in office less than six months, would be held in 60 days.

The recall talk has opened bitter divisions, with Mr. Chen's supporters calling it reckless overkill by sore losers while his opponents say he has endangered Taiwan's economy and violated the Constitution.

Leaders of the Nationalist Party, which lost the presidency for the first time in 50 years but which still has a majority in Parliament, say they are pursuing drastic action because Mr. Chen violated the law by canceling a partly complete nuclear power plant that was financed by Parliament.

They also accuse Mr. Chen of arrogantly refusing to bow to political realities and blame him for a large drop in the stock market, and they recently joined forces with two former rival parties to pressure Mr. Chen into sharing power or else.

Mr. Chen took office in May, in the first transfer of power from the Nationalists, who had governed Taiwan for half a century. He was hampered from the outset because he won with 39 percent of the vote, as the traditional Nationalist majority was split by the breakaway candidacy of James Soong, and because his own Democratic Progressive Party held fewer than one-third of the parliamentary seats.

If the opposition pursues a recall, it will need to attract several independent legislators, and the outcome would be close, experts said. The rules passed today would aid the Nationalists because they would require that voting on the motion be public, deterring party members from breaking ranks.

Belatedly, Mr. Chen has tried to be conciliatory. On Sunday, he issued a videotaped apology to the Nationalist leader, Lian Chan, for humiliating him on Oct. 27, when the decision to cancel the nuclear plant was announced less than one hour after the two men had held a public meeting to discuss compromises.

Public anger at Mr. Chen over the incident appears to be waning, and Nationalist politicians, although calling the apology inadequate, have said Mr. Chen could avoid a recall by entering a coalition government. That is something that Mr. Chen has promised in the past to avoid.

The immediate issue dividing Mr. Chen and the opposition is the nuclear plant, a source of debate for years. Some leaders on both sides say they hope that the issue can be sent to the Supreme Court to decide which branch has the power to kill the project. The dispute reflects ambiguities in the Constitution, which combines elements of a presidential and a parliamentary system.

But to insure that Mr. Chen does not back down, opponents of the power plant, who are also his core supporters, are planning a large demonstration on Nov. 12 in Taipei.

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

-------- california

USA Today
11/08/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

California

San Luis Obispo - Workers found a fake bomb inside a small office building at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant. The device was made out of a clock and batteries attached to a putty-like substance resembling plastic explosives. The device was found during a routine security check, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff's Department said.

-------- new mexico

Los Alamos Scientists Won't Be Fired

By Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, November 10, 2000 ; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55188-2000Nov9?language=printer

The University of California has decided not to fire scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory who were involved in the temporary disappearance of two computer hard drives containing highly classified information about U.S. and foreign nuclear weapons, a university spokesman said yesterday.

But a U.S. official said some Los Alamos employees still could face "significant" sanctions, including suspensions without pay for several months and removal from management for lengthy periods, if they are found responsible for misplacing the hard drives or trying to cover up their disappearance.

The hard drives, each about the size of a pack of cigarettes, contain information that a rapid-response team from Los Alamos could use to disarm a nuclear weapon in the event of an accident or terrorist threat. They were reported missing from a vault on May 31 and were found two weeks later behind a copying machine in the same area of the lab. Physical evidence led the FBI to believe the drives had been placed behind the copier shortly before they were recovered. The FBI has questioned numerous employees, including members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), in a seven-month criminal investigation that is still continuing, officials said.

The team's leader, Bradley A. Clark, was warned in September by the University of California, which manages Los Alamos for the Energy Department, that he might be dismissed for failing to tell his superiors about the missing hard drives for almost a month. But Jeff Garberson, a UC spokesman, said yesterday that university officials have decided no firings are warranted.

"There is no [recommendation for] termination of an employee," Garberson said. "It was one of the options under consideration early. As the review continued and the university was able to interview more people and learn more, it was clear that a termination was not one of the options."

Meanwhile, the U.S. attorney in New Mexico, Norman Bay, met in Washington yesterday with FBI and Energy Department officials to discuss the investigation. "We are trying to bring this to a conclusion, but the FBI has still got some work to do," one official said.

The FBI, which has administered polygraph exams to some scientists, believes the disks went missing long before May 7, when two NEST team members went into the vault to retrieve important materials as a wildfire threatened the lab.

"The fire story was part of the coverup," a government source said, adding that the FBI thinks that NEST leaders, including Clark, learned the drives were missing much earlier.

For more than two months, there has been pressure on the FBI to bring an end to the inquiry because of the disruption it has caused to the lab's work. The bureau, however, has not been able to determine exactly what happened, because none of the suspects has agreed to cooperate fully, officials said.

On Sept. 12, Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Budget Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee that approves funds for Los Alamos, called on Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis J. Freeh to wrap up the investigation because it was "creating a morale situation that is not very good." Energy Secretary Bill Richardson also has asked Reno and Freeh to conclude the matter.

If Bay decides there is not enough evidence to prosecute someone for mishandling classified information, it would be up to the Energy Department or its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the nuclear weapons complex, to determine what other disciplinary action would be appropriate.

Garberson declined to name any of the Los Alamos officials involved but said they faced sanctions ranging from disciplinary letters in their personnel files to "substantial suspensions."

Meanwhile, the fallout from various inquiries is continuing to affect the lab. On Monday, in response to staff complaints, Los Alamos Director John C. Browne said in a lab newsletter that there was both good and bad news. On the one hand, he said, he was concerned about "recent congressional actions increasing polygraph requirements" on employees; on the other hand, he felt positive about "the announcement by Secretary Richardson that he was going to enter into negotiations to renew the [University of California] contract until 2005."

Many congressional critics of security at the labs have called for Richardson to sever the contract with the university. Instead, he has begun looking for a subcontractor to handle security while the university maintains control over scientific operations.

-------- us nuc politics

Policy differences across the board

Sydney Morning Herald
Date: 08/11/2000
By GAY ALCORN

Washington: In the final hours of the campaign the issues were more thematic than specific, with the exception of social security, which both candidates have hammered away on, and which is of vital importance to elderly voters.

These are the keys issues in the race for the White House.

• Abortion Pro- and anti- abortion groups say this election is crucial because the finely balanced judges on the Supreme Court, which rules on abortion measures, are aging. The new president could appoint up to four new judges.

Gore Supports a woman's right to an abortion.

Bush Supports a constitutional amendment that would ban abortions except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the mother is at risk. Says he would not insist new Supreme Court justices oppose abortions.

• Campaign finance The presidential, state and congressional campaigns are expected to have spend a record $US3 billion ($5.7 billion). The explosion has been in "soft money", unlimited and unregulated donations to political parties from business, unions and individuals, which critics say has corrupted politics.

Gore Would ban soft money in Federal elections, supports public financing of elections, and would make TV stations provide free airtime for candidates during final campaigning.

Bush Would ban soft money from companies and unions, but not individuals. Opposes public financing.

• Education States provide the vast majority of education funding, but both candidates say it is their first priority and would spend more money.

Gore Opposes vouchers for parents to send children to private schools if local schools are failing. Would give tax credits for university tuition, cut class sizes and improve poor facilities.

Bush Supports vouchers. Would spend more on early reading programs and disadvantaged children.

• Foreign policy/Defence Both candidates are internationalists and free traders, and both would spend more on the military.

Gore Continuation of Clinton policies of free trade and democracy promotion, with "forward engagement" - anticipating problems before they occur - his central platform. Would support humanitarian missions when in the national interest. Supports national missile defence if Russia could be convinced to amend the Anti-ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Supports Kyoto global change treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban (CNTB) treaty.

Bush Believes US troops are "over-extended" in peacekeeping missions. Supports large national and theatre missile defence system and would cancel the ABM treaty with Russia if necessary. Opposes Kyoto and the CNTB treaty.

• Guns A high school shooting last year made gun control an issue, in a nation in which 40 per cent of households have at least one gun. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is supporting Republican candidates, and anti-gun groups are supporting Democratic candidates.

Gore Would make new hand-gun buyers obtain a photo licence, would limit gun purchases to one a month.

Bush Supports the NRA position of enforcing existing laws, rather than passing new ones, but also supports an instant background check before guns are bought.

• Health The government Medicare program for health insurance for seniors does not cover prescription drugs, and prescription costs are prohibitive. There are 44 million Americans without insurance.

Gore Says he will expand the government scheme to include prescription drugs. Promises that all children will have insurance by 2005.

Bush Promises a private-sector prescription drug benefit under the existing Medicare program and subsidies for low-income Americans.

• Social security Retirement scheme paid for with the payroll taxes of younger workers. As baby boomers age there will be fewer workers to support it.

Gore Would use $US2.2trillion of the surplus to support the scheme and reduce the debt.

Bush Supports partial privatisation of Social Security by allowing participants to invest a portion of their payroll taxes in the stock market.

• Taxation America is now in its longest period of economic expansion in history.

Gore Says he will continue the prosperity. Offers $US480 billion in tax cuts favouring the poor and middle class.

Bush Says a big tax cut is justified and would create incentive for investment and boost economic growth. Offers a 10-year, $1.6 trillion tax cut to all Americans, although a large portion of it goes to the wealthy.

---

Divided Government Emerges As Winner

Associated Press
November 8, 2000 Filed at 7:18 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-ELN-Analysis.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In an election for the ages, the presidency remains in doubt, the House remains Republican by the slenderest of threads and the GOP Senate majority teeters, depending in part on the longevity of 97-year-old Strom Thurmond.

And not even Thurmond, who first won local office in 1928, has ever seen another election like this one.

And as close as it is -- George W. Bush and Al Gore each went to bed early Wednesday morning with victory a possibility in the race for the White House -- divided government emerged the winner by far. It's a safe bet little thought has been given to building a governing majority in a country that split its ballots almost exactly down the middle.

``Our campaign continues,'' Gore's campaign manager William Daley told hopeful Democrats waiting out a long, rainy night in Nashville.

``Unbelievable,'' said Bush adviser Karen Hughes after Gore called the Texas governor to retract a concession offered in an earlier conversation.

Clearly, tax cuts, health care, Medicare and a debate over the defense missile shield will have to wait for another day. Confirming new Supreme Court justices, if any retire, should be interesting.

Should Bush win Florida and the White House with it, his call for an era of civility in Washington will be almost wholly dependent on the Democratic leaders in Congress. Should Gore take the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2001, he'd be confronted with at least one chamber of Congress controlled by the political opposition.

Organizing the House for business figures to be, if anything, more complicated than it has been the past two years.

Republicans must elect new chairmen to replace those who were term-limited in the heady days of the Contract with America six years ago. Democratic leader Dick Gephardt has yet to publicly discuss the results of the House elections, or offer any hint of his own plans.

``Dick Gephardt's goal was to run against a do-nothing Congress,'' Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said in an election-night interview. ``Now is the time to put politics aside.''

The House trend showed Republicans in control, but with a handful of races still out, likely to suffer losses in their already meager majority.

In the Senate, Democrats whittled the Republican advantage by half or more. With a Washington state race still too close to call, the GOP held a majority of 50-49. But that could yet change if Gore wins the White House and Sen. Joseph Lieberman resigns his Senate seat to become vice president.

If so, his seat would go to a Republican by virtue of Connecticut GOP Gov. John Rowland's authority to appoint a replacement.

Other possible departures are talked about openly by aides in both parties.

Thurmond, for example, who walks unsteadily on the arm of an aide, is two years from the end of his term.

All of this makes some of the other remarkable developments of the evening seem mundane by comparison.

New Yorkers elected first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Senate, a first for the spouse of a president. Now her husband will have the opportunity to attend her oath-taking in the very chamber where he was tried on impeachment charges two years ago.

Missouri voters cast their ballots for a dead man, the late Gov. Mel Carnahan, with full knowledge that his widow will be appointed to that seat.

Carnahan's victory at the ballot box is unlikely to be the last word on that race, though. Republicans have talked openly of a lawsuit, noting that the Constitution requires a senator to be ``an inhabitant'' of their state when elected.

Beyond that, the GOP leadership would be confronted with a decision of whether to challenge Mrs. Carnahan's credentials.

The presidential race alone was closer than any in history.

By a lot.

In 1968, Richard M. Nixon barely beat Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey by 0.7 percent of the vote. In 1960, John F. Kennedy defeated Nixon by 0.2 percent of the vote. But in both those cases, the Electoral College outcome was clear.

This time, with votes tallied from 96 percent of the precincts, Gore had 47,242,846 and Bush had 47,101,968 votes. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader was at 3 percent and Pat Buchanan barely registered.

The Electoral College showed Bush with 246 votes and Gore 255. It takes 270 to win. Florida, Oregon and New Mexico were unsettled, but the Sunshine State was the key. And there, nearly 12 hours after the polls closed, Bush held a lead of fewer than 2,000 votes.

Recount to follow.

David Espo has covered national politics for The Associated Press since 1980.

---

21st century foreign policy

Washington Times
November 8, 2000
Helle Bering
http://208.246.212.80/op-ed/ed-column-2000118203621.htm

Americans will be looking at the face of their next president Wednesday morning, the new leader of this great nation, wondering what lies ahead. It has been a grueling, exciting 16-month process, which again leaves one to marvel at the extraordinary, and ultimately unique institution of American democracy. No other country in the world elects its leaders quite the way Americans do.

As this page goes to print, it is too early for results. Still, whether the front page today carries the picture of President Bush or President Gore, both will find challenges and problems to be faced in the international arena. With the example of the outgoing Clinton administration as a cautionary instance, the new crop of presidential advisers ought to have grappled with the direction they want to set for the next four years.

International issues to be confronted are succinctly discussed in the new collection of essays published by the Potomac Foundation, "U.S. Leadership in the 21st Century," edited by Paula Dobriansky, head of the Washington office of the Council on Foreign Relations, and Bruce Weinrod, managing director of International and Trade Associates, and a former assistant secretary of defense under President Bush. It is, of course, probable that a Bush administration would find rather more to like here than a Gore administration, given that a number of the contributors are veterans of the Bush and Reagan administrations and some have been among George W. Bush's advisers in the campaign.

"Given the complexity of the current environment, the traditional Cold War categories and formulations are no longer adequate; nor is a reflexive approach which advocates policies primarily because they run counter to those of the present administration. What is needed, rather, is a positive framework based upon deeply rooted U.S. principles and values but adapted to the new realities of international politics in the 21st century." Such a framework must have "political, security, and economic dimensions," the editors write.

After watching Americans flocking to the polls yesterday, in the orderly exercise of their democratic rights, it is easy to appreciate the fundamental point made by Lawrence Lindsay, economic adviser to Mr. Bush, that "America is not just a country; it is also a cause." He adds: "The universality of our belief in political, cultural, and economic freedom is what attracted people to our shores and made them Americans." It is important not to lose sight of that dimension.

American leadership in economic terms, therefore rests on two pillars - strength and vision. That takes a strong dollar, which means foregoing the short-run domestic political advantages that derive from dollar manipulation (and which characterized President Clinton's first term) and it means a strong commitment to free trade, guided by the rules and arbitration of the World Trade Organization. It means building a "global financial architecture" that injects more realism and accountability into international financial transactions, i.e. a more modest role for institutions such as the International Monetary Fund. Universal principles are also the foundation for democracy-building, which is addressed here by Constantin Menges, professor of International Studies at Georgetown University. He divides it into two categories, democracy-building as a matter of principle, and "strategic democratization" - the kind designed to turn foes into friends. Few would disagree that a world of democracies is more likely to be a friendly place; the real question is what means do we use to promote it. Mr. Menges lists a range of options for support of pro-democracy forces, none of which include the use of force, which as we saw in Haiti, ultimately did not do much good.

The United States, however, also has interests that are truly national, and it should be no shame to acknowledge this - after all, every other country does. That involves in military terms national missile defense to protect the American heartland and forces abroad. It involves nursing strong military alliances in Asia and Europe. Refreshingly, the section on "U.S. Interests in Europe," authored by Jeffrey Bergner, former staff director for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sees an advantage for the United States in a unified Europe - an argument not often heard in these parts. While acknowledging that relations may become more complicated, he sees no threat to U.S. interests were the EU to produce a military force that could act independently. "Let us suppose further, for example, that the European Union would use this force to remove Milosevic from power in Serbia and impose a stable peace in the Balkans. What would be wrong with that? Would that threaten U.S. interests?" In other words, American leadership and allied burden-sharing ought not to be exclusive.

The real challenge for the next president will be to combine the idealism which, even if ineffectually, has underpinned the Clinton foreign policy, with the sense of realism and seriousness of purpose that is the trademark of Republicans. If you go too far in one direction, messianic rhetoric and bungled, overextended operations are the result. Go too far in the other, and narrowly defined national interest becomes too limiting. Ronald Reagan managed to get it right in the last phase of the Cold War. The next president will still be looking for the formula for the 21st century world.

E-mail: helle.bering@washtimes.com.

Helle Bering is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. Her column appears on Wednesdays.


-------- MILITARY

-------- britain

New York Times
November 8, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/world/08BRIE.html

Europe

BRITAIN: UNDER-18 COMBATANTS Amnesty International urged the British Army to stop sending recruits under 18 to serve in combat. The London-based rights group said that in the year to March 1999 the British armed forces recruited 9,466 under-18's, more than a third of the total intake. Amnesty said Britain had a policy of deploying such recruits in armed conflicts, adding that under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Britain ratified in 1991, childhood ends at 18. (Reuters)

-------- space

AND FINALLY, TODAY'S UPLIFTING STORY

"DayTips.com" <info@daytips.com>
Wed, 08 Nov 2000 04:59:12 -0800

Okay, Chicken Little wasn't right. And scientists have retracted their prediction that there's a 1-in-500 chance that an object now speeding toward Earth will hit the planet in 2030. But the Los Angeles Times quotes the scientists saying there's a 1-in-1,000 chance it could hit the Earth on Sept. 16, 2071. It was the second embarrassing retraction in two years. In 1998, scientists at the Minor Planets Center in Cambridge, Mass., announced that a mile-wide asteroid had a small chance of hitting the Earth in 2028. That prediction was retracted a day later when more calculations were made. Last week, scientists with NASA's Near-Earth Objects Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the International Astronomical Union announced there was a 1-in-500 chance that an object could hit the Earth in 2030. But Monday, they said additional observations improved predictions of the object's path and suggest it will pass no closer to the Earth than 2.7 million miles on that date -- 11 times the distance from the Earth to the moon. The object - known as SG344 - is either a small asteroid about 200 feet in diameter or a spent Apollo-era rocket booster.

---

Scientists Downplay 'Space Object'

New York Times
November 8, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/science/08ASTEROID.html

LOS ANGELES -- Scientists who announced last week that a mysterious space object had a 1-in-500 chance of striking the Earth in 30 years have retracted their prediction, saying it poses little threat.

The object, which is either a small asteroid or piece of space junk, has virtually no chance of hitting the planet in 2030. However, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena said there's a 1-in-1,000 chance it could hit Earth in 2071.

``This object is much more interesting than threatening,'' said Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program.

Scientists downgraded the chance of a collision in 2030 after examining additional observations. The new data ``effectively ruled out the chance of an Earth impact in that year,'' according to the program's Web site.

Predictions of the path of the object now indicate it will pass no closer than 2.7 million miles to Earth -- about 11 times the distance from the Earth to the moon.

The object, designated 2000 SG344, is either an asteroid about 200 feet in diameter or a 35-foot-long Apollo-era rocket booster. It was discovered Sept. 29 through a telescope in Hawaii.

Before the new data was revealed, Yeomans had said that if the object was an asteroid it could create a ``fairly sizable nuclear blast'' if it struck the Earth.

The retraction and downgrading was the second embarrassing asteroid announcement in recent years. Scientists at the Minor Planets Center in Cambridge, Mass., generated headlines worldwide in 1998 when they announced that a mile-wide asteroid had a chance of hitting Earth in 2028. The prediction was retracted a day later when further calculations were made by JPL.

That incident led the International Astronomical Union to create new guidelines for announcing events of such magnitude. New rules call for announcements to be made after astronomers reach a consensus that a risk to the planet exists and states that an announcement be made publicly within 72 hours of such findings.

Yeomans said the new observations were released Friday shortly after he held a news conference.

``We followed the rules to the letter,'' he said. ``I have no regrets. I'd do the same thing again.''

---

Men in Space

New York Times
November 8, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/opinion/L08SPA.html

To the Editor:

Bryan Burrough (Op-Ed, Nov. 1) bemoans the fact that nobody in the media or the public seemed to notice that we've launched a crew to the International Space Station.

But that's really not too surprising. Indeed, it may be a hopeful sign that space development and activity are finally becoming accepted endeavors.

Mr. Burrough is concerned that the only time the space station will appear in the news is when something goes wrong. But that's O.K. for a mature enterprise; the only news you see reported in aviation - one of the world's major industries - is when there are problems or accidents.

In fact, space is already a major industry. Commercial space revenues last year were $76 billion - more than double the government civil and military space budgets worldwide.

JERRY GREY Reston, Va., Nov. 2, 2000

The writer is director of aerospace and science policy, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

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

Morrock News, Weds., Nov. 8, 2000
THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
Fast, free and independent http://morrock.com

U.N. CONSIDERING MIDEAST FORCE: The U.N. Security Council gathered in private, away from the public and media, on Wednesday to hear a Palestinian request that the U.N. send forces to Israel to protect Palestinian civilians. Palestinians want at least 2,000 U.N. soldiers. Israel and the U.S. oppose the demand.

---

Skepticism for U.N. Peacekeeping Force

New York Times
November 8, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/world/08NATI.html

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 7 - Secretary General Kofi Annan said today that he does not see how a United Nations force could be inserted between Palestinians and Israelis unless both sides agreed to it. The Palestinians are asking for an international "protection force" for the West Bank and Gaza. Israel's prime minister, Ehud Barak, has ruled out such a mission.

Diplomats say the Security Council, which is planning to discuss the Mideast crisis in general terms on Wednesday, is unlikely to act anytime soon on the Palestinians' request.

The Palestinian observer mission here has circulated a proposal calling for a United Nations force of 2,000 uniformed monitors in territories occupied by Israel since 1967. The troops would provide "safety and security for Palestinian civilians," according to the plan. Five Security Council resolutions since 1987 have called for protection of the civilian Palestinian population.

Diplomats here are divided on the prospect of any peacekeeping force being stationed in Israeli- occupied territory. The United States has warned that any resolution that condemns the Israelis will be vetoed. Russia, with the war in Chechnya to consider, and China, with calls for action in Tibet, are generally opposed to intervention on principle.

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

Pentagon Seeks More Bang to Matériel

November 8, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/business/08ARMS.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - The Pentagon issued new guidelines this week that are aimed at obtaining better value in purchases of everything from bombs to ballistic missiles to bandwidth.

The new rules, 18 months in the making, place greater emphasis than previous ones on making products and systems from different vendors work together smoothly. They also give preference to off-the-shelf commercial products over those developed especially for the military, often over years. The guidelines instruct managers to tailor acquisition strategies to avoid "technology leaps of unknown cost or timing," the Pentagon said.

"It is the way we need to do business if we want to get the best technology we have to our war fighters more quickly and at a lower cost," Jacques Gansler, the under secretary of defense who is responsible for purchasing, said in a statement.

The new policy covers everything the Department of Defense buys with its $53 billion budget for weapons and other equipment and supplies.

----

Cohen: Too Soon To Link Cole, Laden

November 8, 2000 Filed at 2:14 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Ship-Attack.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Defense Secretary William Cohen said Wednesday it is too early to conclude that suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden was behind the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.

Speaking with reporters in his Pentagon office, Cohen was asked whether evidence collected so far by U.S. and Yemeni investigators points to bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire who is wanted by the FBI in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa.

``We can't say that at this point,'' Cohen responded. ``That's a conclusion that hopefully the FBI will be able to reach (soon), in terms of who is responsible and who we can hold accountable. Osama bin Laden is one that we will continue to look at, but it is by no means definitive at this point as to who was responsible for this.''

Bin Laden has called for a holy war on the United States and vowed to drive the U.S. military out of the Middle East.

The Cole, a guided-missile destroyer, was refueling in Aden harbor on Oct. 12 when a small boat loaded with explosives maneuvered to the ship's side and detonated the bomb, blowing a 40-by-40-foot hole in the hull and killing 17 sailors.

Cohen said U.S. investigators in Yemen are ``still getting good cooperation'' from Yemeni authorities, but he knew of no breakthroughs.

The Cole, meanwhile, continued its journey aboard the heavy-lift ship Blue Marlin en route to the United States. Navy officials said Tuesday no final decision had been made on whether the Cole would return to its home port at Norfolk, Va., or to a shipyard in Maine or Mississippi. The Navy intends to repair the $1 billion ship and return it to service.

---

USA Today
11/08/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Maryland

Annapolis - A third Naval Academy football player was indicted in a sexual assault against a female midshipman in June. Shaka Amin Martin, 21, of Danville, Va., was charged with second-degree rape and assault. The junior starting linebacker was arrested after a sample of his DNA matched evidence collected at the scene.

Ohio

Dayton - Some business leaders say western Ohio is trying to drum up community support for efforts to reverse job losses at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Since 1988, employment at the base has dropped to 22,200 from nearly 30,000. Also, the base's economic impact in terms of payroll and contracts has dropped from $3.7 billion to $2.4 billion.

Oklahoma

Tulsa - Foul-smelling and bitter-tasting water from Lake Eucha was attributed to too many nutrients from chicken waste used as fertilizer. About half the city's 500,000 customers get drinking water from the lake. Officials have discussed drawing water from Lake Hudson, and the Grand River Dam Authority has agreed to allow the city to do that.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Attack on Clean Air Act Falters in High Court

New York Times
November 8, 2000
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/08/national/08SCOT.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - The most potent legal attack on the Clean Air Act in the statute's 30-year history, startlingly successful in a federal appeals court here 18 months ago, floundered visibly at the Supreme Court today.

In an intense two-hour argument, justice after justice expressed the view that whatever the burdens and uncertainties of life under the sweeping statute as it is currently interpreted, alternative approaches would not solve those problems and might well create new ones, for other federal regulatory laws as well as for the Clean Air Act.

The case brought two closely intertwined issues before the court. One was whether the law, as interpreted by the Environmental Protection Agency, provides so little guidance on how to set permissible levels of pollutants as to amount to an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power to the executive branch.

This question reached the Supreme Court as an appeal by the Clinton administration from a ruling in May 1999 by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The appeals court invoked the long-discredited "nondelegation doctrine," which the Supreme Court had last used to strike down a federal statute in 1935, to invalidate standards for ozone and small airborne particles that the Environmental Protection Agency had issued in 1997.

The second issue, brought before the justices by the coalition of industry groups that had been successful at the appeals court, offered a way to preserve that victory while at the same time avoiding the constitutional earthquake that could result from striking down the clean air standards - and, by implication, many other federal regulations - as reflecting impermissible delegations of Congressional authority.

The industry group is arguing that a new interpretation of the Clean Air Act to require the agency to weigh the costs and benefits of each regulation would provide the statutory guidance the appeals court found lacking, thus avoiding the nondelegation analysis that was unlikely to attract a Supreme Court majority in any event.

"We're talking about a world of limited resources," Edward W. Warren, representing the American Trucking Associations, the United States Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups told the court. Without a cost-benefit requirement, he said, "the agency has the freedom to take us all the way down to de- industrialization, and that can't be."

The approach was creative, but the allies that Mr. Warren needed on the bench did not materialize. "I don't see how it helps your delegation problem to add `the economy' to the ineffable pot of things the administrator is supposed to consider," Justice Antonin Scalia said. He added: "If you're going to stop a cough, is $1,000 too much? What does it cost to stop a cough - $2,000? $3,000? It's just as indeterminate."

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who before he joined the court had written approvingly of using cost-benefit analysis in administrative law, echoed Justice Scalia.

"I could ask the same question about picking out trucking routes or airline routes," he said, adding, "There's no scale in heaven, or anything other than judgment." Later in the argument, he told Mr. Warren that cost-benefit analysis was a "formal discipline" and added, "I don't see how you import cost-benefit analysis into the statute."

Mr. Warren replied that he was not suggesting "econometrics" but rather "a common sense way" of evaluating "competing considerations in a systematic way."

"That's all we're talking about," he said.

"It seems to me you're creating another morass," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said at one point. What exactly did he want the agency to do, she asked.

"What every other health, safety, and environmental agency does," Mr. Warren replied, adding, "The norm is to do the kind of weighing and balancing I'm talking about."

Complicating this already complicated case is the fact that the District of Columbia Circuit, in a 1980 decision known as Lead Industries, interpreted the Clean Air Act to bar the kind of cost-benefit analysis for which Mr. Warren was arguing.

Although the Supreme Court declined at the time to review that decision, it remains binding as precedent on the appeals court, which is why the appeals court used nondelegation rather than statutory analysis to reach the result of invalidating the 1997 standards.

The industry coalition is asking the justices to disavow the appeals court's 1980 ruling. It derives its statutory argument from the language of the Clean Air Act, which requires the Environmental Protection Agency to set air quality standards at levels "requisite to protect the public health." Mr. Warren told the court that public health itself is a discipline that incorporates a cost-benefit analysis as it considers how to achieve the greatest public good with limited resources.

However, the justices appeared quite resistant to placing on "public health," which is not defined in the statute, the full weight of the industry's argument.

"In one sentence, what is your proposed standard?" Justice Sandra Day O'Connor asked Mr. Warren. She said, "I've listened to a lot of vague language from you, and I don't understand what you're saying."

Mr. Warren replied, "Public health contemplates the consideration of competing factors, including costs, in seeking to decrease population sickness and increase longevity." He added, "I don't know how you can live in a world of limited resources" without weighing costs and benefits.

"Well, we have lived with it for 20 years," Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist commented dryly.

The justices were attentive to Solicitor General Seth P. Waxman's two-pronged presentation. He argued that the Clean Air Act, properly interpreted, did not use cost considerations in the standard-setting process but that the statute gave enough guidance to the Environmental Protection Agency in other ways to avoid a delegation problem. The solicitor general relied on the same statutory phrase as Mr. Warren, "requisite to protect the public health," but to very different purposes.

"Requisite means sufficient but not more than necessary," he said. The heart of his argument was that in the Clean Air Act, Congress established a two-part regulatory process. In the standard-setting phase, he said, the agency was to use the latest scientific knowledge to protect the public from the effect of air pollution.

"Congress made a rational decision as to the most serious problem facing America in 1970, air pollution," Mr. Waxman said. He said Congress created an "expert agency" and gave it the mission: "Just tell us, based on your best judgment, what level would be safe to set for the whole country."

Consideration of costs and technical feasibility are supposed to come in at the second phase, he said, that of deciding how and on what schedule the standards should be put into effect. In the ensuing 30 years, Mr. Waxman said, Congress has "adjusted implementation in response to problems of cost and feasibility" but has never changed its instructions to the agency on how to set the actual standards.

If the agency prevails in Browner v. American Trucking Associations, No. 99-1257, that will not be the end of the case, or the end of judicial review for the new ozone and particle standards. The standards would still be open to challenge before the appeals court under the Administrative Procedure Act, a law that applies to nearly all federal regulations and that authorizes federal judges to invalidate agency action as "arbitrary and capricious."

---

The Global Case For Tree-Hugging

Washington Post
Wednesday, November 8, 2000 ; Page A27
By Thomas E. Lovejoy
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37671-2000Nov7.html

There's more going on this month than elections. Next week a conference begins at the Hague at which one of the most important decisions ever made about the global environment will be taken.

The parties to the Convention on Climate Change will decide to what extent trees and forests can be used to offset the growing concentrations of greenhouse gases. This convention comes on the heels of a recent draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicating a substantial human role in global warming to date and projecting the highest temperature increase yet for the coming century (3 to 11 degrees). It will also play out amid compelling evidence that climate change is more imminent than previously thought.

It's well known that the polar ice is melting, but an eye-opening report last fall, based on data collected by nuclear submarines traveling under the Arctic ice cap, showed it happening faster than we knew. The declassified data reveal the polar ice sheet is 40 percent thinner than it was in the period from 1958 to 1976. Never thick to begin with, it is now only six feet on average, and thinning by four inches a year. The implications are that based on averages, the ice cap will break up within 20 years. A more recent model suggests it may take up to 50, but the result will be the same: a major change in global environment caused by warming.

Even less noticed is that glaciers in the world's tropical zones are disappearing, and on the same time scale. Whether in the Andes or on the African peaks of Mount Kenya and Kilamanjaro, glaciers present for more than 10,000 years are receding at such a rate that they will all disappear in 20 years.

The conclusion is obvious: We need to do everything we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions right now. It has been obvious almost from the beginning that that means reducing consumption of fossil fuels through alternative energy, energy conservation and efficiency. What has been less known is what can be done with trees and forests. That is the crucial matter to be considered next week.

Forests figure substantially in the global carbon cycle: Every year, deforestation (releasing the carbon held in forests) contributes between 1 billion and 2 billion tons of carbon as CO2 to the atmosphere. Reducing deforestation, important for lots of reasons, can make a big difference. So can planting trees and reforesting--since growing trees convert C02 into the living tissue and cellulose of wood.

What is needed is a set of rules to make a carbon market work effectively--and not perversely. A carbon market is essentially one in which an emitter finds it more economical to pay for absorption or for emissions avoided by others. An old coal-fired plant could pay for reforestation, for example.

It would be foolish for such a market to encourage the destruction of existing natural forests or other important natural areas to replace them with fast-growing (carbon-absorbing) plantations, especially when plenty of already converted land is available and ready for such plantations. And there is no point in paying for protection of a natural forest because of the service it provides in carbon storage if that merely deflects deforestation to another natural forest (in that case, net deforestation doesn't change).

There are technical issues as to how much carbon is stored in different kinds of forests and the different rates of carbon uptake. Clearly, too, any plantation or forest conservation projects need to take into account the concerns of local people. All these things can be dealt with.

The key concept involves the "offsets" in a sort of carbon market that involves trades between nations by which one country's industry can avoid reducing its own emissions by paying for things that reduce emissions or absorb carbon in another place--by paying for cleaner technology, say, or using conservation to reduce emissions from forest burning. But currently the only sanctioned offsets are those based on technology. There is pretty much of a standoff among nations over the question of whether forests should be treated the same way.

European nations tend to take the attitude that if forests are included, the United States, which produces 24 percent of all emissions, will use the forest "loophole" to meet its targets by fostering forest projects in other countries--and thus avoid getting serious about cutting its own fossil fuel emissions. Some nongovernmental organizations hold a similar view--not without justification, considering that Congress has yet to ratify the Kyoto Protocol of the convention with its woefully small targets for emission reductions.

Nonetheless, carbon that is sequestered constitutes greenhouse gas not emitted. If the United States would be willing to limit the amount of credit it gets from such sources to demonstrate its seriousness about also dealing with fossil fuel emissions, it should allay such concerns.

Unfortunately, Brazil, like the Europeans, is also against the inclusion of natural forests in this regime, in part for reasons that aren't entirely clear. If it's a matter of sovereignty, the Brazilians should remember that this is a strictly voluntary mechanism; any nation that does not wish to participate with forests would not be required to do so. In the meantime Brazil's position stands in the way of many countries (including all other Latin American nations except Peru) that would like to have forests included.

The great irony is that natural forests and their biological diversity are likely to suffer terribly from climate change, with massive dieback and huge loss of species under almost any scenario. Thus inclusion of forests--with proper rules--could be the single most important achievement for biological diversity, as well as a very important step toward reducing climate change.

When the parties meet in the Hague, forests should be included in principle, and the means should be provided to work out the right rules. To do otherwise would be a heavy blow to forests, to biological diversity conservation and to the effort to deal with climate change. The two great nations of the Western hemisphere, the United States and Brazil, hold the keys. In the meantime, the Arctic ice cap continues to melt.

The writer is a Smithsonian scientist working at the World Bank.

---

The Court and Clean Air

Washington Post
Wednesday, November 8, 2000 ; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41044-2000Nov8.html

THE SUPREME Court yesterday heard oral arguments in a case that goes to the core of Congress's ability to assign complex regulatory questions to the federal agencies qualified to make appropriate judgments about them. At issue in the case is the Environmental Protection Agency's effort in 1997 to achieve further reductions in air pollution. Industry groups challenged the EPA's standards for soot and ozone pollution, and last year the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the new EPA air quality standards were invalid. The standards, the court held, were based on no "intelligible principle" and consequently involved an improper delegation of Congress's legislative authority to the executive branch. The Supreme Court agreed to review the lower court holding, but it threw the government a curve ball as well. It also agreed to consider whether the Clean Air Act--the law under which the EPA was proceeding--requires the agency to consider the costs of regulating, as well as the public health benefits of reducing air pollution, in setting its standards. Both questions were argued yesterday.

If the court rules the wrong way on the delegation question, it will have profound consequences for government regulation. Congress, pretending to no specialized scientific expertise, routinely and properly passes difficult scientific questions to agencies staffed to handle them. The legislature enacts laws that state general principles; agencies figure out how to set regulatory standards to advance those principles. While there are surely some types of delegation so sweeping that they would violate the Constitution, the courts have approved far broader delegations than this one in the past. To affirm the lower court's holding would deal a serious blow to the modern regulatory state.

It would be only somewhat less objectionable for the court to hold that the EPA must consider costs in its initial assessment of what air pollution levels are consistent with the public health. Cost-benefit analysis should and does have a place in regulatory policy-making. But in writing the Clean Air Act, Congress decided to have the EPA initially consider only the levels of pollutants that would protect the public health with an "adequate margin of safety." The costs of achieving those levels figure in at a later phase--that is, in deciding how communities will reach the targets. The law is clear on this point, and both the EPA and the courts have read it correctly for many years. Shifting gears now would be a blow both to environmental protection and to legitimate congressional authority.

---

Drugs found in tap water
Teen finds antibiotics in public supplies

USA Today
11/08/00- Updated 02:29 PM ET
By Kathleen Fackelmann, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/life/health/general/lhgen115.htm

High school student Ashley Mulroy was reading a science magazine two years ago when she learned that European scientists had made a disturbing discovery: Drugs of all kinds, including antibiotics, were flowing in rivers, streams, groundwater and even in tap water.

That began a science project in which the 17-year-old searched for and found antibiotics in the Ohio River. She also found those drugs in the drinking water in her hometown of Wheeling, W.Va. She is one of the first in the USA to look for such drugs in the nation's drinking water supply.

Mulroy's work recently won the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, an international science competition sponsored by ITT Industries. More important, her study highlights an emerging scientific issue with alarming implications.

Some experts fear that even low levels of antibiotics fouling the nation's water supply may help create superbugs: microorganisms that have evolved to survive an antibiotic's lethal assault.

Public health experts already have noted the rise of infection after infection that cannot be stopped with the usual arsenal of antibiotics.

And the superbugs may be causing "tens of thousands" of deaths in the USA each year, says Abigail Salyers, an expert on antibiotic resistance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Consider these reports:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers have found antibiotics in North Carolina's Neuse River, a source of drinking water.

Another EPA chemist reports finding several drugs, including a common antibiotic, in river water outside a southern U.S. city.

Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey have found antibiotics in many water samples taken from streams across the nation.

These findings "raise a big red flag," says Stuart Levy at Tufts University in Boston. The antibiotics aren't harmful on their own. Rather, Levy and others worry that waters laced with these drugs could breed bugs that can shrug off the killing effects of the wonder drugs, such as penicillin.

Mulroy's science project got started after she read "Drugged Waters," a 1998 article in Science News that gave a chilling account of the drugs, including antibiotics, floating in European waters.

"I remember thinking the story had really bad implications," Mulroy says. So she decided to test for antibiotics in the Ohio River near her home.

Over a 10-week period, Mulroy and her mom got into the family car and drove for miles to test sites along the Ohio River.

In the end, she got her river water samples back to the Linsly School, a private school that she attended in Wheeling. She looked for three common antibiotics: penicillin, tetracycline and vancomycin. She found all three drugs in low concentrations (parts per trillion) in the Ohio River. Water samples taken from sites near livestock or dairy farms had the highest concentrations of antibiotics, Mulroy says.

Large farming operations in the USA often keep hogs, chickens and other animals in crowded, dirty pens and rely on low doses of antibiotics to keep diseases at bay. Antibiotics also are given to healthy animals to fatten them for market.

Scientists know that antibiotics given to animals (or to humans) don't get fully metabolized in the digestive system and end up being excreted. In a farming operation, that waste can make it into the runoff or groundwater, which eventually makes it into a nearby stream, and in this case, the Ohio River.

River samples taken near local hospitals also revealed antibiotics, albeit at slightly lower concentrations, Mulroy says. Antibiotics may leach into the groundwater around hospitals if cases or bottles of expired drugs are dumped into a landfill, she says.

Do such drugs get into water flowing out of the kitchen tap? Mulroy's study suggests that they do.

Mulroy also took samples of water from three taps in Wheeling, Moundsville and Procter. All three, including water from the drinking fountain at her school, were contaminated with the antibiotics in question. The concentrations were less than those found in the river water, she says.

Water flowing from the Wheeling tap comes from a municipal water-treatment facility that relies on sand filtration to clean the water. That method, the primary method of water treatment in the USA, doesn't remove antibiotics or other drugs from the water.

The other two samples of public water came from wells. The fact that they also had antibiotics suggests that groundwater is contaminated, Mulroy says.

However, Mulroy's study also suggests a potential fix for waters laced with drugs such as antibiotics. She says that an activated charcoal filtration system removed most of the antibiotics in the tap water.

Agricultural effect

The USA produces more than 50 million pounds of antibiotics each year. Experts estimate that 60% are used to treat humans. The other 40% go to farming operations.

New research suggests that the latter doesn't stay on the farm.

Joseph Bumgarner at the EPA, Michael Meyer at the U.S. Geological Survey and their colleagues have identified antibiotic contamination of surface water near two North Carolina hog farms. Such farms, which often keep 50,000 animals in close quarters, create huge pools of manure called "lagoons."

These hogs routinely receive doses of antibiotics, including chlortetracycline, lincomycin and sulfamethiazine. Sure enough, the team found those three antibiotics in the lagoons and in samples from nearby streams, which empty into the Neuse River.

The river water samples also contained the antibiotics, Bumgarner says. The Neuse River supplies the Raleigh-Durham area with its public water. The researchers have yet to test the tap water there.

The team did find an antibiotic flowing from a tap on one of the hog farms. That tap drew its water from a well, a finding that suggests groundwater is laced with the drugs, Meyer says.

Preliminary results from this study also suggest that bacteria in the streams have acquired resistance to common antibiotics, Bumgarner says.

Studies on a hog farm in Iowa and a chicken farm in Ohio produced similar results, Meyer says. Some experts, including Karen Florini of the Environmental Defense in Washington, D.C., are urging the Food and Drug Administration to ban the use of antibiotics to speed the growth of farm animals.

Recently, the FDA took a step in that direction by announcing its intent to ban two antibiotics used by poultry farmers. Florini's group and others also are calling on EPA to control the pollution in runoff from factory-farming operations. But EPA's Bumgarner says the agency doesn't have enough information to take such a step.

Worrisome findings

Human waste also contains antibiotics, and instead of going into a lagoon, it gets flushed down the toilet. EPA chemist Tammy Jones-Lepp wanted to find out whether the antibiotics in sewage would survive a wastewater-treatment facility.

Jones-Lepp collected water downstream from two such facilities in an unnamed southern city. She found that the treated river water contained low levels of azithromycin, an antibiotic often prescribed to children for ear infections.

The results suggest that treatment plants, although they filter out some contaminants, don't remove all traces of drugs such as antibiotics.

Effects still unknown

"It's clear antibiotics get into the environment," says Tamar Barlam, director of the Antibiotic Resistance Project at the Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C. But scientists have yet to determine the impact of such contamination on human health, especially when the antibiotics, and other drugs, are present at minute levels, she says.

David Bell at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta says there's not enough scientific data to say that environmental contamination plays a big role in generating antibiotic resistance.

Far more important, he says, is the fact that humans have abused antibiotics by taking them unnecessarily.

The overuse of antibiotics by the agricultural industry also plays a big role in creating superbugs, Bell says.

Farmers who feed healthy animals a steady stream of antibiotics can set the stage for human illness in this way: Bacteria in the digestive system of the animal can develop resistance to antibiotics. Humans who then eat undercooked meat from the infected animal can suffer an infection - one that can't be treated with that antibiotic, Bell says.

Levy and others would argue that environmental contamination might pose a more serious problem than previously recognized. Levy says those relatively harmless bugs, like the E. coli in Mulroy's study, can develop genetic traits to repel antibiotics. Once they have that genetic ammunition, they can trade the information to other bugs relatively easily, he says.

That means that a bug that doesn't cause human disease could pass along its genetic trick to a bug that does. The result, Levy worries, would be a bacterium that has evolved the capability to do an end-run around the most powerful drugs of the modern century.

The USA lags about a decade behind researchers in Europe who have found antibiotics and many other drugs in the waters there. Indeed, Mulroy's study is one of the first to look at the public water supply in the USA.

Although other scientists must confirm her study, Mulroy has contributed something important to the field.

"This really is a testimony to our kids," Levy says.

For information on the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, see the Web site of the Water Environment Federation: http://www.wef.org/publicinfo/stockholm/index.jhtml

---

Morrock News, Weds., Nov. 8, 2000
THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
Fast, free and independent http://morrock.com

FORESTS ADD TO GLOBAL WARMING: Researchers in Britain said Wednesday that forests might speed up global warming rather than keeping it at bay. At the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, scientists warned that planting large forests in the hope of absorbing carbon dioxide could actually add to the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, because as temperatures go up forests emit more of the gas blamed for creating the so-called hothouse effect. . . . That report comes as international environment ministers ready themselves for a major conference on global warming and climate change next week at The Hague.

---

Emission standards argued at High Court

Washington Times
November 8, 2000
By Frank J. Murray THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000118211441.htm

The Clinton administration's top courtroom lawyer assured the Supreme Court yesterday the Environmental Protection Agency mandate to curb auto and truck pollution at any cost won't drive the nation "into the Stone Age."

"You seem to be trying to reassure us we won't be without automobiles in the country . . . but now you seem to be saying you can't assure that," Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told Solicitor General Seth P. Waxman.

The high-stakes case pits industry against Congress' power to expand regulation of pollution without regard to an estimated $50 billion a year cost and the loss of jobs.

The law doesn't require us "to take our society to zero," Mr. Waxman told the court, insisting Congress had constitutional authority to give EPA power to consider only the effect on public health when setting emission standards.

"On the other hand, some people say we're going to go back to the Stone Age, which was very unhealthy for some people," Justice Stephen G. Breyer said during a debate otherwise laden with obscure acronyms that bordered on what he called "fuzzy science."

"It's hard to know what costs will be with technology that doesn't yet exist," Justice Breyer said.

Mr. Waxman said the Clean Air Act would never "get to zero" on standards for ozone and soot, "because you don't have to get to zero to achieve the results the law mandates."

The solicitor general personally argued two cases as he led the federal effort to overturn a 1999 decision by the U.S. Circuit Court for D.C. blocking enforcement of air standards imposed in 1997.

Defending the lower court ruling were the American Trucking Associations and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which said that EPA estimates a $720 billion cost for businesses to comply with ozone standards alone.

"If EPA can issue revised standards, God help us," Justice Antonin Scalia said yesterday, asking if "when EPA changes [the standards] it has to consider if it's going to take us back to the Stone Age."

"This interpretation of the statute makes no sense from any perspective," said Edward W. Warren, a D.C. appeals lawyer representing the ATA and the Chamber.

He said industry can't live with standards that don't consider the economics of public health.

"We have lived with it for 20 years," replied Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist who was unusually quiet during the extraordinary two-hour hearing.

"I've listened to a lot of vague language from you and I don't understand what it is that you're saying," Justice O'Connor told Mr. Warren.

"This is the way you consider what's best for the public, by taking economic interests into account," he replied. "We're talking about what Benjamin Franklin called prudential algebra."

Mr. Waxman discounted scare talk, saying EPA cannot set standards at or below background levels and never has seen a need to ban internal combustion engines, the type used in most cars and trucks.

The solicitor general said the Clean Air Act lets EPA consider only health effects by pollutants that are adverse and not trivial.

"They have to be medically significant to a sufficient population to create a public health effect," he said during Justice Scalia's extended but unfruitful inquiry into how EPA Administrator Carol M. Browner decides where to draw the line.

EPA may only take into account a pollutant's effects in the air that people breathe, said Mr. Waxman, who listed the range of effects from death and emergency room admission to slight coughs.

"A cough is not like a death, obviously," Justice Scalia said. "Is there anything that does not count?"

Mr. Waxman said EPA would not consider a hypothetical risk or "some effect on the biology of a cell."

"This is something Congress can't fix without rewriting the statute," Mr. Warren said in asking the justices to rule for the first in 65 years that Congress unconstitutionally delegated too much power to a federal agency.

While questions of Congress' power to delegate and EPA's authority to ignore economic factors are in two cases that will be decided separately, they were linked yesterday.

Justice Scalia said Mr. Warren's main argument to consider cost in setting secondary standards undermined his position that Congress may not delegate authority to set such standards.

In the same tone of cross-examination, when Mr. Waxman mentioned EPA's reports to Congress on issues other than public health effects, Justice O'Connor asked, "Why would Congress want that advice on economic and social effects if it didn't want the EPA to consider those effects?"

---

USA Today
11/08/00
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Arkansas

Stamps - A Utah company has expressed interest in acquiring hazardous wastes at the old Red River Aluminum plant that some residents say had caused them health problems. A biologist overseeing the site's cleanup said the Imco chemical company contacted the Environmental Protection Agency. He did not say how Imco plans to use the byproduct of aluminum production.

Kentucky

Inez - Dozens are seeking to recover losses in court from property damage stemming from the massive sludge spill at Martin County Coal Corp. At least 44 people have joined lawsuits claiming negligence and seeking unspecified damages from the Oct. 11 spill, the largest in U.S. history.

Nevada

Reno - Global warming could accelerate the spread of exotic plant species, crowding out native varieties and increasing the risk of devastating wildfires in Nevada and other arid Western regions, researchers from Nevada's higher education system reported in the science journal Nature. Two non-native grasses were largely blamed for contributing to Nevada's record 1999 fire season.

--------

The Global Case For Tree-Hugging

By Thomas E. Lovejoy
Wednesday, November 8, 2000 ; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37671-2000Nov7.html

There's more going on this month than elections. Next week a conference begins at the Hague at which one of the most important decisions ever made about the global environment will be taken.

The parties to the Convention on Climate Change will decide to what extent trees and forests can be used to offset the growing concentrations of greenhouse gases. This convention comes on the heels of a recent draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicating a substantial human role in global warming to date and projecting the highest temperature increase yet for the coming century (3 to 11 degrees). It will also play out amid compelling evidence that climate change is more imminent than previously thought.

It's well known that the polar ice is melting, but an eye-opening report last fall, based on data collected by nuclear submarines traveling under the Arctic ice cap, showed it happening faster than we knew. The declassified data reveal the polar ice sheet is 40 percent thinner than it was in the period from 1958 to 1976. Never thick to begin with, it is now only six feet on average, and thinning by four inches a year. The implications are that based on averages, the ice cap will break up within 20 years. A more recent model suggests it may take up to 50, but the result will be the same: a major change in global environment caused by warming.

Even less noticed is that glaciers in the world's tropical zones are disappearing, and on the same time scale. Whether in the Andes or on the African peaks of Mount Kenya and Kilamanjaro, glaciers present for more than 10,000 years are receding at such a rate that they will all disappear in 20 years.

The conclusion is obvious: We need to do everything we can to reduce greenhouse gas emissions right now. It has been obvious almost from the beginning that that means reducing consumption of fossil fuels through alternative energy, energy conservation and efficiency. What has been less known is what can be done with trees and forests. That is the crucial matter to be considered next week.

Forests figure substantially in the global carbon cycle: Every year, deforestation (releasing the carbon held in forests) contributes between 1 billion and 2 billion tons of carbon as CO2 to the atmosphere. Reducing deforestation, important for lots of reasons, can make a big difference. So can planting trees and reforesting--since growing trees convert C02 into the living tissue and cellulose of wood.

What is needed is a set of rules to make a carbon market work effectively--and not perversely. A carbon market is essentially one in which an emitter finds it more economical to pay for absorption or for emissions avoided by others. An old coal-fired plant could pay for reforestation, for example.

It would be foolish for such a market to encourage the destruction of existing natural forests or other important natural areas to replace them with fast-growing (carbon-absorbing) plantations, especially when plenty of already converted land is available and ready for such plantations. And there is no point in paying for protection of a natural forest because of the service it provides in carbon storage if that merely deflects deforestation to another natural forest (in that case, net deforestation doesn't change).

There are technical issues as to how much carbon is stored in different kinds of forests and the different rates of carbon uptake. Clearly, too, any plantation or forest conservation projects need to take into account the concerns of local people. All these things can be dealt with.

The key concept involves the "offsets" in a sort of carbon market that involves trades between nations by which one country's industry can avoid reducing its own emissions by paying for things that reduce emissions or absorb carbon in another place--by paying for cleaner technology, say, or using conservation to reduce emissions from forest burning. But currently the only sanctioned offsets are those based on technology. There is pretty much of a standoff among nations over the question of whether forests should be treated the same way.

European nations tend to take the attitude that if forests are included, the United States, which produces 24 percent of all emissions, will use the forest "loophole" to meet its targets by fostering forest projects in other countries--and thus avoid getting serious about cutting its own fossil fuel emissions. Some nongovernmental organizations hold a similar view--not without justification, considering that Congress has yet to ratify the Kyoto Protocol of the convention with its woefully small targets for emission reductions.

Nonetheless, carbon that is sequestered constitutes greenhouse gas not emitted. If the United States would be willing to limit the amount of credit it gets from such sources to demonstrate its seriousness about also dealing with fossil fuel emissions, it should allay such concerns.

Unfortunately, Brazil, like the Europeans, is also against the inclusion of natural forests in this regime, in part for reasons that aren't entirely clear. If it's a matter of sovereignty, the Brazilians should remember that this is a strictly voluntary mechanism; any nation that does not wish to participate with forests would not be required to do so. In the meantime Brazil's position stands in the way of many countries (including all other Latin American nations except Peru) that would like to have forests included.

The great irony is that natural forests and their biological diversity are likely to suffer terribly from climate change, with massive dieback and huge loss of species under almost any scenario. Thus inclusion of forests--with proper rules--could be the single most important achievement for biological diversity, as well as a very important step toward reducing climate change.

When the parties meet in the Hague, forests should be included in principle, and the means should be provided to work out the right rules. To do otherwise would be a heavy blow to forests, to biological diversity conservation and to the effort to deal with climate change. The two great nations of the Western hemisphere, the United States and Brazil, hold the keys. In the meantime, the Arctic ice cap continues to melt.

The writer is a Smithsonian scientist working at the World Bank.

-------- genetics

NPS, Cerus Lighting a New Fire for Biotech Believers

thestreet.com
11/8/00 6:47 PM ET
Dane Hamilton Staff Reporter
mailto:dhamilton@thestreet.com

It's not hard to find rosy talk of billion-dollar products these days in biotech.

And while investors have been badly burned in the past, they're still gobbling up the talk and buying shares in dozens of speculative drug and medical products companies. That's keeping biotech indices high, albeit down from last spring's height of hype.

Judging from presenters at this week's Prudential Vector Healthcare conference, it's not hard to see why. Top companies in the industry, it seems, are preparing to unleash a horde of new drugs onto the market. Who knows? Some could be really profitable. The way some of these smaller biotech stocks have been moving, there's clearly no shortage of believers.

Big, Big Plans

Take NPS Pharmaceuticals (NPSP:Nasdaq - news). Hunter Jackson, the CEO of this midsize Salt Lake City biotech, could be arrested by the hype police except for the fact that he obviously believes the NPS story.

And apparently, so does Amgen (AMGN:Nasdaq - news), which licensed NPS' hormone treatment for overactive thyroid glands, a condition that depletes calcium and bones in a half-million U.S. patients. Importantly for the companies, there isn't any drug treatment on the market for the condition.

"We believe there is a very high probability of clinical and commercial success" for the drug, called AMG073, Jackson told a packed room of investors at PruVest's New York conference Wednesday. "It's a drug of tremendous medical importance."

Asked later if statements like that aren't a bit brazen, considering today's litigious society and the challenges of gaining Food and Drug Administration approval, Jackson is unfazed. "It's hard to imagine that the FDA would scuttle this," he says flatly. Good thing for safe harbor statements.

Hopefully for investors, the FDA will cooperate, since NPS wants to sell another 3 million shares in a follow-on offering to boost its cash balance to a healthy $190 million. And the stock has been rewarding investors: It jumped from just over $3 a year ago to close just shy of $50 Wednesday.

Be Prepared

But if AMG073 bites the dust for some reason, NPS has ALX1-11, an osteoporosis drug in late-stage development that NPS claims could reverse the course of the bone-thinning disease afflicting millions of elderly people. Currently, treatments like hormone replacement therapy and Merck's (MRK:NYSE - news) Fosamax mostly keep the disease in check, not reverse it.

Comeback? Nasdaq biotech index rebounds

But NPS and others like Eli Lilly (LLY:NYSE - news) say parathyroid hormones are the future, if they can get them to work right.

"We expect this product to completely change the standard for care for osteoporosis," says Jackson.

Talk Talk

A tall order, perhaps. But NPS isn't alone. Scios (SCIO:Nasdaq - news), of Sunnyvale, Calif., is brimming with similar confidence over Natrecor, a new treatment for congestive heart failure, a weakened heart condition afflicting some 5 million people in the U.S.

Scios will present final-stage clinical trial data on Natrecor next week at the American Heart Association meeting, a major medical conference, and plans to seek FDA approval by the end of the year.

But Scios is already laying plans for marketing the drug through soon-to-be-announced partnerships, a mark of confidence for a product that could yet face setbacks, particularly before the FDA. No matter, says Scios CEO Richard Brewer: "There's big room for a new therapy."

It's always good to have a backup, and Brewer talked up some juicy tidbits about a new rheumatoid arthritis drug that it hopes will be a cornerstone in a next generation of drugs to feed a growing $6 billion market for the debilitating bone disease.

The drug, called SCIO-469, is aimed at being a combination COX-2/Anti-TNF compound, covering two big bases that have proved successful in the last year for treating the disease. They are the hugely successful COX-2s, which include Merck's Vioxx and Pharmacia's (PHA:NYSE - news) Celebrex, and the other major successes, anti-TNF drugs like Enbrel from Immunex (IMNX:Nasdaq - news) and American Home (AHP:NYSE - news).

Trust Me

Nor was confidence lacking at PruVest presentations from Cerus (CERS:Nasdaq - news), which makes a blood purification system backed by health care giant Baxter (BAX:NYSE - news), or InterMune (ITMN:Nasdaq - news), which markets Actimmune, a treatment for a variety of pulmonary and infectious diseases. Both companies say their products could generate billions of dollars in sales, helping to feed investors' insatiable appetite for that chimeric mix of high growth and low risk.

Still, some investors say they aren't seeing as much of the hype that preceded earlier biotech bubbles, such as when many stocks hit a peak earlier this year, backed by momentum traders with a slavish and unqualified love of anything to do with tech, bio or otherwise.

"Companies have learned from the past that they have to have a good business model," says David Blaustein, a fund manager with Oracle Partners, a Connecticut hedge fund with holdings in biotech. "All that makes this time a little different."

Send letters to the editor to letters@thestreet.com.
mailto:letters@thestreet.com

------- Onelist (submissions from subscribers)