------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Missile technology transfer to Pak. continues: India
Kursk Collision Theory Questioned
Russia Will Limit Hardware To Iran
Russia Ending Deal on Arms Negotiated
Russia will not honor Gore's secret arms deal
INEEL likely to make spacecraft plutonium

MILITARY
RUSSIAN PLEDGE ON ARMS SALES TO IRAN VOIDED
Iraq has pipeline to Syria
U.N. Envoy Voices Worry on U.S. Image
Price of Safe Water for All: $10 Billion and the Will to Provide It
Strife Flares in Kosovo; U.N. Aide Says 'Crisis' Persists
UNITED NATIONS GRANT TO FIGHT IODINE DEFICIENCY
THE ABSENTEE VOTE
Cole, African embassy bombings linked
Democrats vs. military
Diplomatic honors

OTHER
U.S. blamed in talks over global warming
Park Service to phase out snowmobiles
From The Hague
Officer Contradicts Accounts of Others in Death
Police Seek Record of a Bookstore's Patrons
Six in dog-attack video released on bail
Handling Communist Spy Files, 3 German Researchers Fall Ill
RUSSIA: JUDGE STAYS IN SPY TRIAL
2 Saudis, With Ties to bin Laden, Linked to Cole Attack

ACTIVISTS
Protesters Turn Up Heat at Hague Talks on Greenhouse Gases
U.S. delegate gets a face full of protesters' wrath
Theodore Monod


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- india / pakistan

Missile technology transfer to Pak. continues: India

The Hindu
Thursday, November 23, 2000
By Our Special Correspondent
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/11/23/stories/02230001.htm

NEW DELHI, NOV. 22. India today cautioned the United States and China that despite their agreements in the past, missiles have continued to proliferate in its neighbourhood.

In a skeptical reaction to the U.S. decision to lift sanctions against China for its earlier transfer of missiles to Pakistan, the Government today pointed out that ``despite assurances to the contrary'' in the past, the transfer of missile technology to Pakistan has not been halted.

India has repeatedly ``voiced its grave concern about missile proliferation and the adverse impact that it has on the security environment in our region,'' a Ministry of External Affairs statement said tonight.

It referred to the proclaimed Chinese ``intentions to take strict export control measures against missile proliferation''.

It is on the basis of this that the Clinton Administration has decided to waive sanctions against Beijing.

India expressed the hope that ``effective implementation of the agreed measures would mark a step in the right direction''.

The Foreign Office expects that Chinese missile proliferation to Pakistan will now stop and that India will ``not have any grounds for complaint in the future''.

The Foreign Office reaction is based on the experience that despite all its concern about the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Washington has been either unwilling or unable to hold Beijing accountable for its many transgressions on the non-proliferation front.

-------- russia

Kursk Collision Theory Questioned

New York Times
November 23, 2000 Filed at 3:51 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Retired navy officers on Thursday objected to suggestions that the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk sank because it collided with another vessel, saying that such a crash would not have caused catastrophic damage.

``There could have been a collision, but it wouldn't have led to such tragic consequences,'' retired Adm. Eduard Baltin said at a conference organized by the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda. He said a crash probably would have dented the submarine's outer hull but would not have crippled it.

The Kursk, ripped apart by a pair of massive explosions, sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea, killing all 118 men aboard. Russian officials -- including Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov -- have said a collision was the most likely cause of the Aug. 12 sinking.

But Baltin and other former navy officers recalled numerous collisions between Russian and Western submarines stalking each other during the Cold War. The vessels always lumbered back to base and were back in service after minor repairs, the former officers said.

A government commission hasn't determined the cause of the disaster. Some experts have suggested a torpedo exploded in the ship's weapons bay. Others have said the explosion could have been caused by a World War II-era mine or an internal malfunction. But government officials have repeatedly said they believe a collision was the mostly likely explanation.

Northern Fleet chief Adm. Vyacheslav Popov said this week that a foreign vessel emitted SOS signals in the sinking area shortly after the disaster. The Russian Navy has searched the seabed for debris that could have been left by a collision but has not reported finding any.

The United States and Great Britain operate submarines in the Barents Sea and had vessels monitoring the Russian naval exercises when the Kursk sank, but both countries have denied their boats were involved in the accident.

The retired submariners also dismissed the mine theory, saying such World War II ordnance would have caused only light damage to the state-of-the-art vessel.

The officers said a fire in the torpedo compartment was a possibility but insisted it would not have triggered an explosion. They said the disaster was likely caused by a combination of several external and internal factors, but they wouldn't describe them, saying the information is classified and they fear arrest by the Federal Security Service.

Some media reports have suggested that the Kursk was testing a new torpedo system that uses a liquid fuel propulsion system, which some sailors consider unstable. That could have exploded spontaneously, but Klebanov has denied the submarine had such weapons aboard.

---

Russia Will Limit Hardware To Iran

November 23, 2000 Filed at 2:58 p.m. ET
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Iran.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- While Russia plans to resume weapons sales to Iran, the Defense Ministry said Thursday it will not supply any hardware capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction.

Russia has notified Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that it will no longer observe a 1995 pledge that it would not sell tanks and battlefield weapons to Iran, a U.S. official has said.

Russia gave as its reason that the pledge it had made to Vice President Al Gore in 1995 had been made public during the presidential campaign, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The shipments to Iran will not include any hardware that can be used to create or deliver weapons of mass destruction, the Russian Defense Ministry said Thursday.

``We fully abide by all international demands on nonproliferation of the weapons of mass destruction,'' the ministry's press service quoted Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev as saying.

The American official said the administration of President Clinton is trying to get Russia to change its mind, warning that if it sold the weapons to Iran, the United States would impose sanctions.

In a note received by Albright a few days before the election, Russia said it would no longer abide by the pledge after Dec. 1, the official said.

The United States had repeatedly accused Russian scientific institutes of selling missile technology to Iran or helping Iran develop weapons by teaching Iranian students, and imposed sanctions against several Russian institutes.

In Iran, news of Moscow's decision was applauded.

The Russian decision would ``help strengthen Russia's relations with independent countries, including Iran, and turn them into long-term and durable relationships,'' state-run Tehran Radio said in a commentary.

Iran has built and tested several missiles, including the Shahab-3, which has a range of 810 miles. Washington denounced a July test of the Shahab-3, which it said could reach Israel or U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.

Iran's defense minister said his country does not need foreign missile expertise because it is already self-sufficient in missile production, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported Thursday.

``The Islamic Republic of Iran is not dependent whatsoever on the outside world to meet its requirements for producing artillery equipment and missiles. We can even export arms,'' Rear Adm. Ali Shamkhani was quoted as saying.

He did not name the United States but he was obviously responding to new U.S. sanctions imposed on Iran and Pakistan for allegedly receiving Chinese missile technology.

Following a new pledge by Beijing not to sell missiles or components to countries suspected of developing nuclear weapons, Washington on Tuesday waived sanctions against Chinese companies that have assisted Pakistan and Iran in the past.

---

Russia Ending Deal on Arms Negotiated

November 23, 2000
New York Times
by Gore By JOHN M. BRODER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/world/23RUSS.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - Russia has notified the Clinton administration that it intends to withdraw from a 1995 agreement negotiated by Vice President Al Gore limiting Russian sales of tanks and other conventional weapons to Iran, officials said today.

The Russian foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, told Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright of the intended action four days before the presidential election.

President Clinton protested the Russian action when he met with President Vladimir V. Putin in Brunei last week, and Dr. Albright has warned Mr. Ivanov that if Russia makes new sales of advanced conventional weapons to Tehran, the Americans could impose economic sanctions against it.

Mr. Ivanov said the Russian decision would take effect on Dec. 1, and administration officials informed Congress of the decision on Tuesday.

The question of possible sanctions will fall to the next president, officials said.

Mr. Gore reached a confidential deal with Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, then the Russian prime minister, in June 1995 to exempt Russia from sanctions for selling weapons to Iran in exchange for Moscow's pledge that it would end all deliveries of sophisticated conventional arms to Tehran by last Dec. 31.

That deal appeared to undercut a 1992 law sponsored by Mr. Gore and Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, that mandated sanctions against countries that sold advanced conventional weapons to nations that the State Department classifies as state sponsors of terrorism. Iran is on that list.

The 1995 agreement permitted Russia to fulfill contracts with Tehran for hundreds of tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery shells and mines. The deal also allowed Russia to deliver a diesel-powered submarine and a number of sophisticated torpedoes to Iran.

Russia violated the 1999 deadline, saying it needed more time to complete the deliveries under existing obligations, thereby irritating the United States, which complained to Russian officials. But by its latest action, Russia has now signaled its intent to enter into big new weapons contracts with Iran, American officials conclude.

The Russian action was reported in The Washington Post this morning.

Republicans in Congress and former officials who are advising Gov. George W. Bush harshly criticized the deal when details of its terms were first reported in The New York Times in mid-October. They complained today that the administration failed to act as Russia repeatedly violated what they called a flawed and unenforceable agreement.

"It comes as no great surprise that Russia has abrogated its commitments under the secret Gore-Chernomyrdin deal," Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said in a statement today. "The vice president cut a deal to look the other way on Russian transfers of weaponry to Iran for the past five years. But it is now clear that they can no longer turn a blind eye to Russia's actions."

Mr. Gore has cited his cooperation with Mr. Chernomyrdin on a variety of issues as one of his major accomplishments as vice president and an important part of his qualifications for the presidency.

The Russian move surfaced a day after the administration announced that China had pledged to stop exporting missile parts and production technology to countries developing nuclear weapons, including Iran and Pakistan. In exchange, the administration agreed to waive economic sanctions for past transfers of missile parts and production equipment.

In the case of Russian arms sales to Iran, administration officials said today that they were weighing retaliatory steps against Russia. They added that they hoped that Moscow would reconsider its withdrawal from the agreement.

A spokesman for Mr. Gore referred all questions to the State Department. An official of the Russian Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Mr. Ivanov said in his letter to Dr. Albright, which was dated Nov. 3, that Russia was backing out of the understanding because of recent news reports about the 1995 Gore- Chernomyrdin deal. The agreement, signed in Moscow on June 30, 1995, concludes with the words, "This aide-mémoire, as well as the attached annexes, will remain strictly confidential."

Dr. Albright replied to Mr. Ivanov that "there will be consequences for Russia, including the possibility of sanctions if Russia proceeds with its plans for unilateral withdrawal," said Richard A. Boucher, the State Deparment's chief spokesman. "We are continuing to discuss this with Russians."

Officials in Congress who were briefed on the Russian action on Tuesday expressed anger that it was concealed from them for two weeks after Dr. Albright received the Ivanov letter.

A Republican aide said he was particularly disturbed that State Department officials defended the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement in the weeks before the election even as the Russians were preparing to abandon it. "The whole idea was to get past the presidential thing without this thing blowing up on them," the aide said.

A State Department official defended the administration's silence, saying that the secretary of state and other officials were quietly trying to persuade the Russians to reconsider.

---

Russia will not honor Gore's secret arms deal

Washington Times
November 23, 2000
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-20001123214114.htm

Russia is pulling out of a 1995 arms agreement signed by Vice President Al Gore after portions of the pact were disclosed in The Washington Times, U.S. officials said yesterday.

White House spokesman P.J. Crowley said the administration would retaliate for any unilateral withdrawal from the 1995 agreement, known as an "aide-memoire," aimed at curbing Moscow's conventional arms sales to Iran. The White House will impose economic sanctions required under U.S. weapons proliferation laws.

"The Russians informed us that as of Dec. 1 they intend to withdraw from the aide-memoire," Mr. Crowley said. "They cited recent press leaks and publication of selected portions of the aide-memoire as a pretext for withdrawal."

The Times published sections of the aide-memoire on Oct. 17. The agreement, signed by Mr. Gore and then-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, was first reported a week earlier by the New York Times. The Gore campaign said the disclosures were politically motivated.

According to Mr. Crowley, President Clinton raised the Iran arms agreement with Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting in Brunei last week.

"We have told them at the highest levels that there will be consequences, including sanctions, for unilateral withdrawal," Mr. Crowley said.

The United States concluded the agreement because it was "in our interests," he said. "If the Russians withdraw, it will have serious implications not only for our security but for the security of our friends and allies in the Middle East."

The sentiment was echoed at the State Department. Spokesman Phil Reeker said of the Russian notification: "We're very troubled by that" because continuing to arm Iran would have "serious implications" for regional security.

On Capitol Hill, Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman, chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said the agreement fell apart because it was poorly put together.

"Such a misguided policy of acquiescence to Russian arms transfers to Iran has not been able to withstand public scrutiny, and has now collapsed of its own weight," the New York Republican said. "It is hoped that the administration will now proceed expeditiously to impose sanctions required under U.S. law, which previously had been waived by the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement."

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov informed Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright of Moscow's intentions in a note that arrived several days before the Nov. 7 election. The administration is negotiating with Moscow to try to prevent the Russians from pulling out, U.S. officials said. The note, first reported yesterday in The Washington Post, said the Russians would resume arms sales on Dec. 1.

The issue could be raised by Mrs. Albright during meetings with Russian officials in Vienna, Austria, at an upcoming meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. However, officials said it is not clear yet that Mrs. Albright will attend the session, which begins Monday.

The agreement, classified "secret," reveals that the Clinton administration agreed not to impose sanctions required under U.S. law if Moscow promised to halt conventional arms sales to Iran by Dec. 31, 1999.

The agreement states that the United States would "take appropriate steps to avoid any penalties to Russia that might otherwise arise under domestic law."

It also says the United States would "pursue steps that would lead to the removal of Russia from the proscribed list of International Traffic in Arms Regulations of the United States" - which limits U.S. arms and defense-related technology sales.

Congress is investigating the agreement and Republicans have said the administration appears to have violated the law by ignoring proliferation statutes and by keeping Congress in the dark on the matter.

Lawmakers also are investigating a second document, a classified 1995 "Dear Al" letter from Mr. Chernomyrdin to Mr. Gore that outlines Russia's nuclear transfers to Iran and calls on the vice president to keep the arrangement secret from Congress.

According to a third classified document, a letter from Mrs. Albright to the Russian foreign minister sent in January, Russian arms sales to Iran continued after the December deadline.

In a "Dear Igor" letter to Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, Mrs. Albright stated that the aide-memoire kept the United States from imposing sanctions. "Without the aide-memoire, Russia's conventional arms sales to Iran would have been subject to sanctions based on various provisions of our laws," she stated.

Moscow's decision "to continue delivering arms to Iran beyond the Dec. 31 deadline will unnecessarily complicate our relationship," Mrs. Albright said.

The 1992 Iran-Iraq Nonproliferation Act requires the imposition of sanctions for "destabilizing" arms sales to either Middle East country. A 1996 amendment to the 1962 Foreign Assistance Act also requires sanctions on nations that provide lethal military assistance to a nation designated as a state sponsor of terrorism. Iran is on the State Department's terrorism sponsor list.

The Chernomyrdin letter outlining nuclear dealings with Iran urged the vice president to keep details secret from Congress. Congressional aides said the advice was followed and Congress was never told about the nuclear arrangements.

Mr. Chernomyrdin stated that Russian nuclear assistance to Iran is part of a program to build a nuclear reactor, train Iranian technicians in Russia and deliver nuclear fuel to Tehran from 2001 to 2011.

A U.S. analysis of the assistance, which accompanied Mrs. Albright's letter, stated that the Russian aid "if not terminated, can only lead to Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapons capability."

"Such a development would be destabilizing not only for the already volatile Middle East but would pose a threat to Russian and Western security interests," the analysis stated.

Despite Moscow's claim to limit nuclear assistance, numerous U.S. intelligence reports have shown that the aid to Iran is continuing outside the declared limits, U.S. officials have said.

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

-------- idaho

INEEL likely to make spacecraft plutonium
Reactor would produce radioactive isotope needed to power craft bound for Pluto

Spokane Spokesman-Review
Thursday, November 23, 2000
Associated Press
http://www.spokesmanreview.com/news-story.asp?date=112300&ID=s883426

TWIN FALLS, Idaho _ A type of plutonium used to power spacecraft will likely be produced at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said the INEEL is the preferred site along with Oak Ridge, Tenn., for producing the plutonium-238 that will then be processed in Tennessee.

A final decision on the project is expected in January. INEEL officials said testing would begin next year but actual production of the isotope is several years away.

The INEEL, which already produces various isotopes, was preferred over the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where there was significant opposition to restarting the reactor needed for the work.

Although plutonium-238 is the most radioactive form of plutonium, INEEL spokesman Brad Bugger said it poses no significant safety risk. It is not the plutonium isotope used in bombs.

"It's no different from any of the other isotope production work we do and have been doing safely for decades," Bugger said on Wednesday. "We make industrial and medical isotopes now, and this is no different."

The isotope is used to generate electricity and "keep things from freezing up," Bugger said.

The plutonium-238 produced at the laboratory will be used on the spacecraft NASA wants to send to Pluto after 2020. The mission would use most of the plutonium produced at the laboratory.

It will be produced in the Advanced Test Reactor, the site's only operating reactor. It also performs research on fuel for the U.S. Navy's nuclear powered ships.

The anti-nuclear Snake River Alliance said the decision to process the isotope in Tennessee frees Idaho of dealing with the large amount of liquid radioactive waste the processing generates.

-------- MILITARY

Morrock News, Thursday, Nov. 23, 2000
THE MORROCK NEWS DIGEST
Fast, free and independent http://morrock.com

RUSSIAN PLEDGE ON ARMS SALES TO IRAN VOIDED: Russia has dropped a five-year-old pledge not to sell weapons to Iran, the Washington Post reports. Russia complained that key details of the pledge, which it made in 1995 to Vice President Al Gore, had been compromised by reporting in the U.S. press during the presidential election campaign. "U.S. officials speculate that the Russians were already looking for a pretext to renounce the agreement so they could pursue new arms contracts with Iran," wrote Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland.

-------- iraq

Iraq has pipeline to Syria

USA Today 11/23/00- Updated 01:03 AM ET

http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwsthu02.htm

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The United Nations said Wednesday it had received assurances that Syria isn't illegally importing oil from Iraq, although Iraq is getting its pipeline to Syria ready.

A Syrian oil industry source, speaking in Damascus on condition of anonymity, said 150,000 barrels of oil pumped from the Iraqi city of Mosul arrived Wednesday in Baniyas, Syria, the Mediterranean terminal of the pipeline.

But the source said the oil was not for export, and was pumped purely to test the pipeline.

The head of the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, Benon Sevan, received similar assurances from the Iraqi and Syrian missions on Wednesday, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

''The Iraqis deny that they are exporting oil through the newly reopened pipeline to Syria, saying that they are simply taking the necessary measures to get it ready for the eventual export of oil,'' Eckhard said. ''The Syrian mission informed the Iraq Program that they are not importing oil through the pipeline.''

Britain, nevertheless, has asked for an urgent meeting of the U.N. sanctions committee on Iraq to take up the matter of the Syrian pipeline - and also the recent gift of an airplane to Iraq from a Qatari national. British officials said the gift violated sanctions barring countries from selling or supplying such goods to the Iraqi leadership.

Unauthorized Syrian imports of Iraqi crude via the pipeline would also violate U.N. sanctions since the United Nations has only authorized Iraq to export oil at two ports: the Turkish Mediterranean port at Ceyhan and at Mina al-Bakr, Iraq's offshore platform in the Gulf.

Security Council members have said they would consider adding another export route, but only if the pipeline is approved and if the export revenue falls under the U.N. oil-for-food program.

''That would mean that the payments would go under U.N. control in order to ensure that the money is used for the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Wednesday in Washington.

Iraq has been barred from selling its oil on the open market since a sweeping trade embargo was imposed after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The oil-for-food program allows Iraq to sell unlimited amounts of oil provided the proceeds are used to buy food and medicine for its people.

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

U.N. Envoy Voices Worry on U.S. Image

New York Times
November 23, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/world/23HOLB.html

UNITED NATIONS, Nov. 22 - With barely a month to go until a decision on an American request to pay lower dues to the United Nations, Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke said he was afraid that his yearlong campaign for the cuts could be stalled by nations that think no one is in charge in the United States.

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Holbrooke said that to counter the impression that the United States government is somehow frozen in crisis while presidential votes are being recounted in Florida, he will invite a series of high-ranking members of Congress to the United Nations to keep the issue of budget reforms alive.

If no action is taken on American requests for lower payments, Mr. Holbrooke said, a recently improving attitude in Washington toward the United Nations, marked by larger allocations of money, could quickly reverse.

"If we don't get reform, we're going to run the risk that the Congress will start reducing the U.N. money again," he said.

Among the leading politicians planning to visit New York are: Senator Joseph R. Biden, the Delaware Democrat who is the ranking minority member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the Armed Services Committee; and Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican and member of the budget and foreign relations committees.

Mr. Holbrooke said that staff members representing Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, will also visit. Mr. Helms, a leading critic of the United Nations, has been ill and cannot make the trip, officials said.

"There's no question that there will be a concerted push for delay at the U.N.," Mr. Holbrooke said, "led by countries that don't wish to see any change because they might have to pay more, and who will argue that in a climate of political uncertainty the U.N. should wait for the United States to settle its affairs and get a new administration.

"We're arguing exactly the opposite: that the U.N. should present the new Congress and the new administration with a reform package on three elements."

The three elements that Mr. Holbrooke, under Congressional pressure, has been seeking to change are the size of American payments to the regular United Nations budget, to the peacekeeping fund and to the operations of the peacekeeping department itself.

On all three issues, the United States has met resistance from a range of nations, sometimes for different reasons. Many diplomats predict that American dues will not be reduced unless a majority of nations decide that further alienating American critics of the United Nations would be foolhardy. Most of the strongest critics are Republicans.

Part of the problem with the battle for reduced American dues is that diplomats here and politicians in Washington are not seeing the dispute in the same terms. Americans portray their goal as an overall revamping of all United Nations assessments. Peacekeeping assessments, for example, are operating on a 28-year-old scale widely acknowledged to be out of date. Many countries have become richer since then - nations like Singapore, Brazil and the major oil-producers - and are therefore able to pay more.

But at the United Nations, the bid for new American assessments is viewed as the spectacle of the world's richest country seeking to avoid paying assessments commensurate with its share of world G.N.P.

Mr. Holbrooke said this argument was fallacious. Using charts, he pointed out that the United States had never been assessed regular budget dues equal to its share of world G.N.P., beginning in 1946, when Americans had a 50.7 percent share of the world economy and were assessed 39.89 percent of the United Nations budget.

Peacekeeping presents a separate problem because the United States is assessed 30 percent of peacekeeping costs but has been paying only 25 percent since the mid-1990's, thereby automatically increasing its peacekeeping debt yearly.

Mr. Holbrooke said what was lost in this dispute over dues was the size of voluntary American contributions beyond dues, to all United Nations programs and agencies. He estimated the United States' contributions in the 2001 fiscal year at $2.5 billion to $3.5 billion.

The disparity of the estimate relates to an unrelated dispute holding up the combined budget appropriations for the Commerce, Justice and State departments and to Congressional demands for changes at the United Nations in return for money that has already been authorized.

---

Price of Safe Water for All: $10 Billion and the Will to Provide It

New York Times
November 23, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/world/23WATE.html

GENEVA, Nov. 22 - Forty percent of the world's six billion people still lack sanitation though it could easily be provided, according to a United Nations report issued today.

More than a billion people lack the most basic water supply, said the study, backed by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children's Fund.

"It is not a question of cost but of priority," said Richard Jolly, chairman of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council, sponsored by the W.H.O.

Bringing water and sanitation to all would cost $10 billion a year, Mr. Jolly said. That, he added, is "one- tenth of what Europe spends on alcoholic drinks each year, about the same as Europe spends on ice cream and half of what the United States spends each year on pet food."

Governments have made some improvements over the past decade, but they have scarcely kept up with population growth in the developing world, the Global Water Supply and Sanitation Assessment said.

Moving faster would pay big dividends in lives saved, the study said. Safe water and sanitation could cut one-third of the number of diarrhea cases every year - currently 4 billion worldwide resulting in 2.2 million deaths.

The report follows the start in March of the council's campaign, Vision 21, that urges a move away from high-tech, high-cost projects. It holds that responsibility should be given to individual householders and local community organizations.

Some 500 public health, water and sanitation experts will meet on Friday in Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil, for a conference on the program, which aims to halve the number of people without access to hygienic sanitation and safe water by 2015.

That "is within the world's grasp and the grasp of any country that chooses to make the modest resources required available," Mr. Jolly said.

In all, 2.4 billion people worldwide lack access to basic sanitation, the report said. They account for 40 percent of the world's population.

Asia had the worst sanitation, with 1.77 billion people short of adequate facilities. The figures came from nationally representative household surveys rather than from governments, the study said.

Africa performed by far the worst in terms of drinking water, the report said. It estimated that 300 million people on the continent, more than a third of the population, have no fixed supply.

Even for those who do, "we are not talking about safe water supply because we have no means to actually measure the safety of the water," said an official of the World Health Organization, José Hueb.

Only 35 percent of waste water is treated in Asia, a figure that dwindles to 14 percent in Latin America and a "negligible" proportion in Africa, the report said.

---

Strife Flares in Kosovo; U.N. Aide Says 'Crisis' Persists

New York Times
November 23, 2000
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/world/23KOSO.html

BELGRADE, Serbia, Nov. 22 - Yugoslav authorities warned today that the region could be facing the risk of a new war after violence grew with attacks on Serbian targets in Kosovo and southern Serbia.

The head of Kosovo's United Nations administration, Bernard Kouchner, also expressed concern in a statement reading in part: "As I have repeatedly said, Kosovo remains in crisis. The conflict between the two communities is not over."

The warnings came after a bomb exploded in Pristina on Tuesday night, half demolishing the home of the Serbian representative in Kosovo, killing one man and injuring several others. Fighting also flared on the boundary between Kosovo and Serbia, with the Serbian government reporting that one policeman was killed and three were missing.

The violence was immediately blamed on Albanian extremists beginning a new campaign against the Serb community in Kosovo and a new offensive in an ethnic Albanian area of southern Serbia.

The Democratic Party leader, Zoran Djindjic, also warned of increasing instability as Serbia and Kosovo continue to adjust to changes in the region.

Dr. Kouchner said that the attack was aimed at the United Nations mission in Kosovo, known as Unmik, which was trying to encourage reconciliation between Albanians and Serbs and to allow for thousands of displaced Serbs to return to the province.

In one attack, Stanimir Vukicevic, the head of the Yugoslav government's liaison committee with the international administration in Kosovo, escaped injury in the blast to his home on the outskirts of Pristina. Two people were injured and one, a driver, died later in a hospital.

Serbian officials in Belgrade linked the bomb blast to an attack on Serbian police officers in the southern Presevo region near the Kosovo boundary. They said Albanian gunmen crossed over from Kosovo in the night and began an attack with mortars and artillery. The Serbian policeman died when he and other officers went to investigate.

The Presevo valley is an area mostly populated by ethnic Albanians but is outside Kosovo and remains under control of the Serbian military and police. Albanian rebel fighters have control of one or two villages in the area and frequently attack Serbian policemen in the area, laying mines on the roads and engaging in firefights.

American troops, part of the NATO-led peacekeepers in Kosovo, are stationed on the boundary of eastern Kosovo, and their job is to prevent the movement of weapons and guerrillas across the boundary.

Western diplomats and peacekeepers have also put pressure on Albanian leaders to cease support for the insurgents who number at the most a few hundred. A spokesman for the Kosovo peacekeeping force confirmed they had seen some small- arms and mortar fire on the Serbian side of the boundary Tuesday. But he dismissed claims that large numbers of guerrillas had crossed into Serbia overnight.

Interior Minister Zoran Zivkovic and Mr. Djindjic, both leaders of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia that swept former President Slobodan Milosevic from power last month, demanded an urgent meeting between the peacekeeping officials in Kosovo and Yugoslav security forces.

"We warn the international public that tolerating such incidents could lead to a new hotbed in the Balkans," Mr. Djindjic said. "We demand that international organizations ensure security in the region."

---

New York Times
November 23, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/world/23BRIE.html

UNITED NATIONS GRANT TO FIGHT IODINE DEFICIENCY The U.S. Fund for Unicef, an American support group for the United Nations' Children's Fund, has been given a $15 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for a joint Unicef-Kiwanis International campaign to eliminate iodine deficiency affecting more than 1.5 million people, more than a third of them children. Iodine deficiency is the leading preventable cause of mental retardation. Barbara Crossette (NYT)

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

THE ABSENTEE VOTE
Bush Sues to Reinstate Rejected Military Votes

New York Times
November 23, 2000
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/politics/23OVER.html

TALLAHASSEE, Fla., Nov. 22 - Gov. George W. Bush sued election officials in 13 Florida counties today for rejecting the absentee ballots of members of the military serving abroad, capitalizing on an issue that has been a public relations boon to the Republicans and that could determine the fate of hundreds of votes for the presidency.

Republicans have said that on Friday night, when the count of overseas absentee ballots took place, Democrats made a systematic effort to disqualify as many military votes as possible, a charge repeated by Mr. Bush's lawsuit, filed in State Circuit Court here. Overseas votes generally heavily favor the Republican candidate, and Mr. Bush took 62 percent of those that were allowed.

It is not clear how many votes could be reinstated on the grounds Mr. Bush's suit cites, though it could be hundreds, and the suit does not offer a number.

Mr. Bush's suit identifies 13 counties where, it contends, the largest number of military ballots were invalidated, and they do not include the Democratic strongholds of Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties. The 13 counties, according to The Associated Press, rejected 646 ballots.

Democrats have conceded that they sought to knock out as many ballots as they could, but they maintained that it was strictly on legal grounds, and without concern for whether the ballots were military or civilian.

County election officials across the state, in both parties, said that the rules the Democrats cited in trying to disqualify ballots were the same ones the county canvassing boards had long used.

But Democrats, unable to find an effective public response to the accusation that they were trying to disenfrachise men and women in uniform, have been forced into retreat.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the running mate of Vice President Al Gore, and State Attorney General Robert A. Butterworth, who headed Mr. Gore's Florida campaign, have urged the canvassing boards to reconsider at least some discarded military votes.

Today, in Austin, Tex., Mr. Bush said that Mr. Gore "should join me in calling upon all appropriate authorities in Florida to make sure that overseas military ballots that were signed and received on time count in this election." He did not mention the suit, which had not yet been filed.

Republican officials close to Mr. Bush said that they viewed the issue as a clear winner for them, both in the struggle for public opinion, and in collecting more votes in a race where Mr. Bush leads by fewer than 1,000 out of 6 million cast.

"We're going to get those military ballots in, one way or the other," one Republican official said.

Jenny Backus, a spokeswoman for the Gore campaign, dismissed the lawsuit as a public relations move.

"We think that every legally cast military ballot should be counted," Ms. Backus said. "But we have respected the decisions of the locally elected canvassing boards to interpret the law and put it into practice."

Last weekend, county canvassing boards considered more than 3,700 overseas absentee ballots that had arrived after Election Day, with observers from both parties watching and, at times, challenging ballots. Of those, more than 1,500 were rejected without being opened because they did not meet the detailed legal requirements for such votes, according to an unofficial tally by The Associated Press. Among those that remained, Mr. Bush received 1,380 votes to 750 for Mr. Gore.

Democrats contended that fewer than half of the rejected ballots were military, while Republicans said that more than half were. Most counties did not keep track.

The reason Democrats cited most often in trying to disqualify ballots was that they had no postmarks, as required by Florida law. That tactic has proved to be the most damaging to them politically because the armed services often fail to postmark mail, and Republicans have accused the Democrats of victimizing military people for something that was beyond their control.

Mr. Bush's suit seeks to reinstate not only those ballots, but those thrown out because they were not dated, or because the signatures on the ballots did not closely match those on the absentee ballot requests, or because the county had no record of such requests.

Interviews with officials in several counties indicate that perhaps fewer than 100 ballots were thrown out solely for lack of a postmark. Many others were thrown out for reasons that would be hard to dispute - for instance, that the voter had already voted, or was not registered to vote in that county.

Many counties, responding to Republican complaints, refused to throw out ballots that lacked postmarks, even though they had done so before. The canvassing board in Escambia County, for instance, one of those Mr. Bush sued, voted to keep 50 such ballots in the count. And other counties reported that while they had thrown out a number of ballots without postmarks, they also had other flaws that made them unacceptable, like no voter signature.

Mr. Lieberman and Mr. Butterworth have said that any ballot thrown out purely because it did not have a postmark should be allowed.

---

Cole, African embassy bombings linked

USA Today
11/23/00- Updated 01:47 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/nwsthu03.htm

SAN'A, Yemen (AP) - A composite sketch of one of the two suspected USS Cole suicide bombers appears to match that of a man wanted for questioning in connection with the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Africa, a Yemeni source close to the Cole investigation said Thursday.

The suspect's name was not given.

A senior U.S. law enforcement official in the United States declined to comment on the reported resemblance. But the official did say that since the beginning of the Cole investigation there have been a number of threads that appear to link the case to the bombings in East Africa.

U.S. investigators have said the Cole attack bears the earmarks of operations carried out by followers of Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire and Afghanistan war veteran whom officials say ordered the Africa bombings. The simultaneous August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed 224 people.

The Cole attack came on Oct. 12 in the Yemeni port of Aden. Two suicide bombers brought a small boat laden with explosives alongside the Cole and detonated it while the destroyer was refueling, killing 17 U.S. sailors and injuring 39. U.S. and Yemeni officials have said the attack appeared to be a carefully planned, well-financed operation, and the bomb materials were expertly prepared.

American officials have said they believe the operation was carried out by a network of small cells of two or three people, probably from one or more anti-American Islamist organizations, including the Islamic Jihad, Egypt's al-Gamaa al-Islamiya and bin Laden's followers. All have connections to Afghanistan and are believed to have had operations in Yemen.

Officials have suggested that the attackers may have come from various Arab countries, including Yemen, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and that they may be operating from Afghanistan, Yemen, or possibly both countries.

U.S. agents have also speculated that Yemeni officials at various levels may have been somehow involved in the bombing. Dozens of low- and mid-level Yemeni officials were detained for questioning last week, though none of the officials or suspects have yet been formally charged.

In the weeks immediately following the Cole bombing, there was tension between U.S. officials from the FBI and Yemeni authorities over American access to evidence and suspects.

However, U.S. agents have recently had a greater role in the investigation. Over the past few days, U.S. investigators in Aden have attended several interrogations of six men considered to be the main suspects, said the Yemeni source, who spoke on condition of anonymity. They had already been allowed to question eyewitnesses.

Bin Laden, who lives in exile in Afghanistan, was indicted in 1998 on 24 counts of murder and various other charges related to the 1998 embassy bombings.

---

Democrats vs. military

Washington Times
November 23, 2000
Inside Politics News and political dispatches from around the nation
Greg Pierce.
http://208.246.212.80/national/inpolitics.htm

"As the post-election impasse continues in Florida, military e-mail circuits are aflame with denunciations of Al Gore and the Democratic Party," writes Mackubin Thomas Owens, professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

"Members of the U.S. military at all ranks are enraged at what appears to be a systematic attempt on the part of the Democrats to exclude as many military absentee votes as possible," Mr. Owens said in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal.

"Gore operatives in Florida have managed to get more than 1,500 ballots disqualified. Service members are appalled at the hypocrisy of Mr. Gore's call to make sure that 'every vote counts' while absentee military ballots are being thrown out, often for errors that are not the voter's fault but the result of problems with the military mail system.

"But angry as they may be at what appears to be an effort on the part of Democrats to disenfranchise them, most are not surprised. They see this episode as just one more battle in the ongoing culture war between the core of the Democratic Party and the U.S. military.

"Yes, a culture war. Democrats may deny it, but there is a perception on the part of the U.S. officer corps that the Democratic Party is engaged in an unprecedented campaign against the military. While officers recognize that there are many pro-defense Democrats, they believe that the core of the party is hostile to military culture."

---

Diplomatic honors

Washington Times
November 23, 2000
Embassy Row News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
James Morrison
http://208.246.212.80/world/embassy-200011232142.htm

Sen. Richard G. Lugar and former Sen. Sam Nunn will be honored for their efforts to reduce international conflicts when the American Academy of Diplomacy holds its annual awards dinner next month.

Mr. Lugar, Indiana Republican, and Mr. Nunn, Georgia Democrat, will receive the Excellence in Diplomacy Award for their Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program.

The academy will also recognize Herman J. Cohen, a former assistant secretary of state, for his book, "Intervening in Africa: Superpower Peacemaking in a Troubled Continent," and William H. Gleysteen Jr. for his book, "Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis."

The awards will be presented at a Dec. 6 luncheon for invited guests at the State Department.

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

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

U.S. blamed in talks over global warming

USA Today
11/23/00- Updated 08:41 PM ET
By Ellen Hale, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncsthu02.htm

THE HAGUE - Negotiators desperately tried to cobble together a compromise plan Thursday for implementing an international treaty on global warming, but many feared a watered-down effort that would do more harm than good.

Leaders of the United Nations conference on climate change extended the meeting an extra day, until Saturday, in hopes of reaching an agreement, but key issues remained divisive, and many countries blamed the United States for putting the negotiations at risk of failure.

The meeting was designed to hammer out details of the 1997 conference held in Kyoto, Japan.

The deliberations hit a low note Wednesday when a protester hurled a jam-and-cream pie at chief U.S. negotiator Frank Loy , whose defense of the use of "sinks" as credit for cutting greenhouse gases has angered many of the 180 countries here. Sinks are forest and agricultural land that absorbs carbon dioxide. Loy, meanwhile, proposed establishing a $1 billion "bank" in which industrialized nations contribute a portion of their pledged emissions reductions to developing countries to help mitigate the impact of global warming. Carbon dioxide is one of the major greenhouse gases, which scientists say are gradually accumulating in the atmosphere and forcing the planet to heat up. The warming is melting glaciers, pushing up sea levels and causing recent flooding and severe storms, some scientists say.

While industrialized countries now produce the lion's share of greenhouse gases, emissions from developing countries will outstrip them within two decades.

Under the proposal, countries that produce the most emissions would be the largest contributors to the fund. Loy estimated the U.S. contribution to the fund would be as much as $500 million over five years.

"It could be a very creative funding mechanism that Congress and the taxpayer don't have to worry about," said Alden Meyer, director of government relations for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Still unresolved, however, were several major issues:

The United States and Europe continued to squabble over claiming so-called sinks as credit for reducing emissions.

Critics contend the United States could wipe out more than half the emissions reduction target it set at the Kyoto conference by using "loopholes" such as sinks and emissions trading.

Europe also is demanding that a minimum amount of emissions reductions - no more than half - be accomplished through direct domestic action such as pollution control in each country.

Some countries, including Russia and Japan, argue there should be no binding agreement to penalize nations that do not meet their targets. Europe wants to impose financial penalties, while the U.S. proposes that emissions debts accrue with interest. Under the U.S. proposal, countries that don't meet their emissions target reductions would have to submit a plan for how they will meet their emissions to target levels.

Whether a treaty on climate change can succeed without the United States seems doubtful. Under the agreement reached in Kyoto, 55% of emissions from industrialized countries from 1990 levels must be covered for the agreement to be ratified. The United States alone accounts for 36% of emissions from developed countries.

A more "realistic definition of success" may be needed, said Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. Deliberations are so complex, Claussen said, that it may not be realistic to resolve all the issues in one sitting.

Treaty talks could be carried over until next year, at a meeting scheduled in Morocco. "We would rather see some major issues put off than to have a poor agreement that we must live with for the next 50 years," Meyer said.

But to not have the United States involved, said French environment minister Dominque Voynet, "would be scandalous."

---

Park Service to phase out snowmobiles

USA Today
11/23/00- Updated 08:22 AM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/ndsthu02.htm

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) - Hoping to protect wildlife and the natural sights and sounds of Yellowstone and Grand Teton, the National Park Service has decided to phase out the use of snowmobiles in both parks.

The ban, which had been expected, drew harsh words from congressional leaders and business owners in Montana and Wyoming concerned about the economical impact. Conservation groups praised it.

''Whether or not you are a snowmobile user, it is not overstating things to say that the recreational and use rights of everyone to access public lands are at stake when a federal agency makes no real effort to accommodate them,'' said Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo.

Recreational use of snowmobiles is already limited at nearly all national parks, recreational areas and monuments. Teton and Yellowstone, the nation's first park, had been exempt until now.

Snowmobile use will be phased out beginning next year and will be banned by the winter of 2003, when the only motorized recreational access to the parks will be by snowcoach, Park Service regional director Karen Wade said Wednesday. The coaches usually carry eight to 10 passengers.

''Our obligation in managing winter use in these parks is to ensure that public activities we allow conserve park resources and values for future generations,'' she said. ''Unfortunately, snowmobiles have been shown to harm wildlife, air quality and the natural quiet of these parks.''

Researchers from the Park Service issued a report last year that said snowmobiles produce nearly all the air pollution in Yellowstone. Snowmobiles emit 100 times as much carbon monoxide and 300 times as much hydrocarbons as do automobiles, according to the report.

''This is a viable option, both economically and as a way to see the park,'' Yellowstone spokeswoman Marsha Karle said.

More than 62,500 snowmobiles entered Yellowstone from last December to March, Karle said. Banning snowmobiles is expected to cost the region $16.5 million and about 400 jobs.

''Not to say we won't be able to see a way to make it work over time,'' said Fred Rice, the operations manager in West Yellowstone. ''But, unfortunately, the mandated time frame ... doesn't give us the flexibility we need to try to make up those lost revenues.''

GOP Sen. Conrad Burns of Montana said the Park Service ''has chosen to ignore common sense, avoid public input and adopt a radical policy shift.''

---

From The Hague

Washington Times
November 23, 2000
Inside the Beltway
John McCaslin
Political tidbits and other shenanigans from around the nation's capital.
http://208.246.212.80/national/inbeltway.htm

Washington-based counsel Christopher Horner was hard at work this week in The Hague, representing the Cooler Heads Coalition of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) at the current round of U.N. global-warming negotiations - until somebody carted off his tools from the exhibition hall.

Needless to say, the majority of the delegates to the negotiations are dedicated "globalist greens," eagerly pushing the Kyoto Protocol and an anti-development solution to climate change. Mr. Horner's coalition, as its name suggests, encourages a "cooler heads" approach when addressing global warming.

The amusing part, as you'll read in Mr. Horner's urgent dispatch to CEI, is the remarkable intolerance for any message that doesn't toe the establishment line.

"The tactic to suppress dissent on the way toward suppressing energy consumption is to steal, cover up, or lose all materials disagreeing with the right-think," Mr. Horner writes. "They even stole my table, as apparently the easiest way to cart away all of the materials on it - just a pathetic, bare space where my assigned spot had been."

-------- police

Officer Contradicts Accounts of Others in Death of Suspect at Orange Police Station

New York Times
November 23, 2000
By RONALD SMOTHERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/nyregion/23ORAN.html

NEWARK, Nov. 22 - An Orange, N.J., police officer who said he saw a suspect the night he died in police custody contradicted his fellow officers' written reports today, testifying that the suspect did not collapse after entering a room in Police Headquarters.

The officer, Guido Aguiar, a five- year veteran of the force, said the suspect, Earl Faison, was unable to walk unassisted when he saw him on April 11, 1999, in the Orange police station. Some of Mr. Aguiar's colleagues testified this week that they saw officers beat Mr. Faison and spray pepper spray in his face.

Mr. Faison, 27, who was suspected in the killing of Officer Joyce Carnegie three days earlier, died later that night. Another man later pleaded guilty to the officer's killing.

Testifying today in the federal trial of five officers charged with violating Mr. Faison's civil rights, Officer Aguiar said he never witnessed any beatings or pepper sprayings.

But he added that he never saw Mr. Faison standing upright or moving unassisted from the time he was subdued by officers on a street in downtown Orange to the time, about 15 minutes later, when he died on the floor of the warrant squad office at Police Headquarters.

Officer Aguiar was shown enlargements of reports written by two of the defendants, former Lt. Thomas Smith, 38, and Officer Paul Carpinteri, 34, that described Mr. Faison as walking into the office and collapsing. An assistant United States attorney, Patty Shwartz, asked if those descriptions were accurate.

"No, they are not accurate," said Officer Aguiar, who maintained throughout his testimony that whenever he saw Mr. Faison he was either on the ground and pinned by other officers, being dragged or pulled along by others, or lying motionless, bruised and breathing shallowly on the floor of an isolated stairwell at Police Headquarters.

He said that he and three other officers had to carry the suspect, who weighed more than 200 pounds, from the stairwell to the warrant squad office, where emergency medical technicians tried unsuccessfully to revive him before taking him to the Orange Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.

Officer Aguiar, however, said that he never saw any officers strike Mr. Faison, and that while he smelled pepper spray in the stairwell, he never saw Officer Brian Smith, 31, spray the suspect, as other witnesses said they did.

Officer Aguiar's testimony came in the third week of the trial in Federal District Court here. The five officers on trial are accused of brutalizing Mr. Faison after he was picked up as a suspect in the shooting of Officer Carnegie.

On the stand, witnesses have described that time as a chaotic and emotional one for the city's police, who were angered and saddened by the death of Officer Carnegie.

Those emotions came through dramatically today in Officer Aguiar's description of the scene in the stairwell.

He said that as Mr. Faison lay motionless and handcuffed on the floor, his eyes closed, one of the officers on trial - Tyrone Payton, 34 - unholstered his gun and, with tears streaming down his face, shouted at the unresponding suspect on the floor, "Why did you have to kill her?"

Officer Aguiar said he carefully approached Officer Payton, placed his hand on Officer Payton's and helped the officer guide the gun back to the holster.

"It was a small room, and God forbid that the gun went off," he said of the crowded stairwell, which he said held at least five officers. Testimony is scheduled to resume on Monday.

---

Police Seek Record of a Bookstore's Patrons

New York Times
November 23, 2000
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/national/23BOOK.html

DENVER, Nov. 22 - In the course of raiding an illegal methamphetamine laboratory in a trailer home last March in the Denver suburb of Thornton, agents of a local drug task force found two books, "Advanced Techniques of Clandestine Psychedelic and Amphetamine Manufacture" by an author named Uncle Fester and "The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories" by Jack B. Nimble.

Outside the trailer, the agents found an envelope from one of Denver's most cherished retailers, the Tattered Cover Bookstore, in which they believe the books were mailed to one of the occupants.

Investigators believe that if they can tie up one loose end - confirming that the books were received by the person named on the envelope - they can be certain the recipient was the laboratory owner and they can arrest him. Lt. Lori Moriarty, the task force commander, said that would "turn a probable cause case into proof beyond reasonable doubt."

And the surest way to do that, Lieutenant Moriarty added, is by retrieving the sales record from Tattered Cover, which investigators have tried through a search warrant.

But using sales receipts of books to solve a crime has raised concerns among booksellers, publishers and privacy groups, who are watching the case closely for its implications on the First Amendment's rights of free speech and privacy. Because of this, the store owner, Joyce Meskis, has refused to comply with the warrant, arguing that customers, even suspected felons, have a right to privacy no matter the subject of the books they buy.

"This is about access to private records of the book-buying public," Ms. Meskis said in her office at the store. "If buyers thought that their records would be turned over to the government, it would have a chilling affect on what they buy and what they read."

Lieutenant Moriarty said investigators had identified six suspects in the case, four of whom they believe lived in the trailer at the time of the raid and were later evicted. Only one of the six was arrested, on a weapons charge, but the other five are free. Because of a lack of other evidence, Lieutenant Moriarty said, investigators are not certain which of the suspects actually owned the illegal laboratory.

That is why they need the sales records, she said, to start what investigators believe could be a string of arrests. None of the suspects have been identified by the authorities.

But Ms. Meskis's lawyer, Daniel N. Recht, said that the search warrant, which initially sought all records over a 30-day period involving the buyer of the two books, amounted to nothing more than "a fishing expedition" that would prove little even if records confirmed that the books had arrived in the envelope.

Ms. Meksis, offering a rationale for the purchase of sensitive or controversial material, said, "Just because I buy material on the Third Reich doesn't make me a Nazi skinhead."

Mr. Recht won a temporary restraining order to stop the search. A hearing followed, and last month Judge J. Stephen Phillips of Colorado District Court ruled that the government's request for a month of records was too broad. But the judge said investigators had a right to see any records that would confirm that one of the suspects was the buyer of the two books.

Today, Mr. Recht filed an appeal of Judge Phillips's ruling with the Colorado Court of Appeals.

Until now, the most prominent case involving efforts to obtain bookstore records involved Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel investigating President Clinton, who used a subpoena in 1998 in an effort to learn what books Monica Lewinsky had bought from Kramerbooks & afterwords in Washington. Mr. Starr's effort was blocked when a federal judge ruled that the request was too broad, and later, it became moot when Ms. Lewinsky agreed to cooperate with Mr. Starr's office.

Theresa Chmara, counsel for the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, a nonprofit group in Washington, said a case similar to the one here was under way near Kansas City, Kan., where the authorities were trying to obtain records of sales from three Borders bookstores in a drug investigation.

"It all comes down to a First Amendment issue, the right to free speech, the right to receive information," Ms. Chmara said of all three cases. "There may be lots of reasons people read books. There also may be lots of people who read these two books who never come near an amphetamine lab."

Lawyers for the task force are arguing that the case has nothing to do with First Amendment issues. In court papers, they argued that investigators have no interest in the suspect's "thoughts or reading materials, per se."

"But they are interested," the lawyers wrote, "in conclusively establishing the identity of the person who was operating a meth lab - an activity which is neither legal nor protected under the First or any other constitutional amendment."

Ms. Meskis said the public reaction to her legal stance had been overwhelming, with hundreds of phone calls and e-mail messages urging her to stand firm.

"Since the Kramerbooks case," she said, "we have learned as booksellers that the First Amendment needs to be protected. We know now that we have options, and we just don't turn over anything without going through the entire process."

---

Six in dog-attack video released on bail

Washington Times
November 23, 2000
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://208.246.212.80/world/worldscene-20001123205816.htm

PRETORIA, South Africa -Six white policemen charged with setting dogs on three black migrant job-seekers in a videotaped attack that sparked widespread outrage were released on bail yesterday.

"The court could not find that it is in the interest of justice that bail be denied," Magistrate Allan Cowan said, setting the surety at $256. Outside the court, demonstrators shouted "one settler, one bullet" and demanded the policemen be jailed.

The men left the court in three armored trucks and were to be released from the police stations where they have been held for two weeks since amateur video of their reported assault on Mozambican job seekers was shown on state television.

The video shows five laughing white policemen repeatedly setting dogs onto three black men who scream and plead for mercy as the animals bite their legs, arms and, in one case, genitals.

Public Prosecutor Christo Roberts had insisted the policemen should remain in detention for their own safety and for the protection of witnesses, including one who stole a video of the 1998 assault and sold it to the state broadcaster

-------- spying

Handling Communist Spy Files, 3 German Researchers Fall Ill

New York Times
November 23, 2000

By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/world/23GERM.html

BERLIN, Nov. 22 - Three civil servants studying records left behind by East Germany's secret police, known as the Stasi, have complained of ailments ranging from stomach pains to insomnia after handling contaminated files, officials said today.

The documents had belonged to operatives of the Stasi's technical operations section. Neither the purpose of the files nor the precise chemicals found on them was disclosed.

"This is a particularly revolting legacy of the Stasi," said Marianne Birthler, head of the agency charged with overseeing publication of files produced by East Germany's Ministry for State Security.

"We are only just beginning our inquiries," she told reporters at a news briefing convened after a German newspaper quoted one employee as saying he had fallen ill after handling Stasi documents.

The files are part of the paperwork recovered from Stasi headquarters after it was stormed by victims of its surveillance in the 1989 uprising that toppled the Berlin Wall. Work on the technical operations section began only last year.

Since last March, three out of five employees on the team evaluating the records reported symptoms including insomnia, nosebleeds, stomach pains, lack of concentration and breathing problems.

One of them, Thomas Auerbach, was quoted in today's Frankfurter Allgemeine as accusing senior officials of knowingly exposing employees to health risks.

Ms. Birthler, who took over the so- called Gauck agency - named after her predecessor, the former East German civil rights activist Joachim Gauck - only last month, denied the agency had acted irresponsibly.

But she did not explain why work on the files was not halted until July, three months after symptoms were reported.

"There are certain contradictions which need explaining," said Ms. Birthler, a member of the Greens party and a former regional education minister.

The files were uncovered as part of investigations into evidence that the secret police bombarded arrested opponents of the East German government, from dissidents to artists, with radiation while ostensibly taking their photographs. There have been reports of victims developing illnesses such as leukemia.

Gauck officials said the same Stasi operatives experimented with a range of chemicals to come up with new invisible inks and to secretly mark letters sent and received by the targets of their surveillance.

Bernd Eisenfeld, one of the officials leading the inquiry, said he thought it unlikely the files had been deliberately poisoned, but that they might have been accidentally contaminated as Stasi officials rushed to hide evidence shortly before the collapse of their government.

---

New York Times
November 23, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/world/23BRIE.html
EUROPE

RUSSIA: JUDGE STAYS IN SPY TRIAL Lawyers for the former American naval intelligence officer Edmond Pope failed to win the dismissal of the judge presiding over his espionage trial. The motion followed earlier defense requests to remove the chief prosecutor because his son was a member of the Russian security service team that brought the case. The judge also refused to disqualify contested testimony alleging that Mr. Pope had sought to purchase classified plans for a high-speed torpedo system. Patrick E. Tyler (NYT)

-------- terrorism

2 Saudis, With Ties to bin Laden, Linked to Cole Attack

New York Times
November 23, 2000
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/world/23YEME.html

SANA, Yemen, Nov. 22 - Yemen's prime minister said today that the investigation into the attack on the American destroyer last month had identified the bombers as two Saudi citizens with Yemeni family roots who fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

The two men have personal profiles so closely parallel to that of Osama bin Laden, whom the Federal Bureau of Investigation is seeking on terror charges, that Yemeni investigators have concluded that Mr. bin Laden, a Saudi Arabian whose family also hails from Yemen, was at least indirectly involved in the attack. So far, though, they have no proof.

The Yemeni prime minister, Abdel Karim al-Iryani, said in a telephone interview that a group of Yemenis who helped carry out the Oct. 12 attack on the destroyer Cole, which killed 17 sailors, would go on trial as early as January in Aden, where the attack took place.

He also said many of these suspects were so-called Arab Afghans, a label widely used by Middle Eastern governments to refer to Arabs recruited to fight in Afghanistan in the 1980's. Thousands of such recruits were later transferred to Yemen and established Islamic terror groups linked to previous attacks on American targets.

If the Yemeni authorities try suspects in the Cole bombing, Yemen will be courting a major dispute with the F.B.I. It favors a wider-ranging pretrial inquiry into the possibility of high-level Yemeni involvement in the bombing.

Yemeni officials have said their investigations limit official Yemeni involvement in the bombing to about six Arab Afghans in low-level government posts in and around Aden. This group, investigators say, helped the bombers obtain false Yemeni identity documents, a four-wheel- drive vehicle, a boat, a large quantity of a plastic explosive usually used by the military, and three safe houses in Aden.

In the six weeks since the Cole attack, the F.B.I. has been engaged in a sometimes bitter tug of war with the Yemenis over the tight constraints imposed on F.B.I. agents by Yemen in the Cole inquiry. It has been two weeks since Mr. al-Iryani spoke of an imminent policy change that would allow broader rights to the F.B.I. here, including the right to monitor Yemeni interrogations through a two-way mirror or via a live video relay. But details are still being thrashed out.

This has left about 20 F.B.I. agents unable to nominate witnesses or suspects, or to talk to them. The Yemenis have instructed them that the inquiry will not "ascend the ladder" from the low-level Yemenis arrested so far to senior officials in Sana, the capital, who have had strong ties to Mr. bin Laden in the past.

Other Yemeni officials said today that blood tests being conducted in Yemen on the relatives of the two men thought to have carried out the bombing were intended to test an F.B.I. theory that at least one of the attackers may have been involved in the bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa in August 1998 Nearly 300 people, including 12 Americans, were killed in those attacks.

Mr. bin Laden has been in hiding in Afghanistan for several years. He has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Manhattan for his role in the embassy bombings, and the United States has offered a $5 million reward for his capture.

According to Yemeni officials, the effort to link the embassy bombings with the attack on the Cole hinges on matching the blood tests taken from Yemeni relatives of the suspected Cole attackers with samples of tissue and flesh found on the Cole after the bombing. Results would then be compared with DNA evidence gathered during the investigation of the embassy bombings.

F.B.I. officials said they had gathered "confetti-sized" human remains from the upper decks of the Cole. These were thought to be from the two men who pulled a fiberglass skiff alongside the warship and detonated a bomb.

Prime Minister al-Iryani, a 67- year-old Yale-educated biogeneticist, said Yemeni authorities had no proof now that Mr. bin Laden was involved in planning the Cole attack. But he noted that Mr. bin Laden came from a family that migrated to Saudi Arabia in the 1950's from the remote eastern Yemeni province of Hadhramaut, which borders Saudi Arabia.

Mr. al-Iryani said Yemeni investigators had determined that the two men who attacked the Cole were from Hadhramaut.

Other Yemeni officials identified one of the suspects in the bombing as Abdul Mohsen al-Taifi, a Saudi citizen, and said the F.B.I. considered him a suspect in the East Africa bombings. Prime Minister al-Iryani had said previously that the second suspect in the attack, who used the pseudonym Muhammad Ahmed al- Sharabi, also came from a Hadhramaut family.

Establishing that the Cole bombing was ordered, or at least inspired, by Mr. bin Laden would strengthen the F.B.I.'s theory that Mr. bin Laden is directly responsible for a succession of attacks on American targets. In a report on global terrorism it released earlier this year, the State Department said Mr. bin Laden's network - known as al Qaeda, Arabic for "the base" - has claimed, or been found, to have had a role in almost every major Middle East- inspired terrorist attack on Americans in the past decade.

The department said the bin Laden organization, financed by a family inheritance estimated at $300 million, botched three bombings in Aden in December 1992 that were aimed at American troops billeted there. There were no casualties among the Americans.

Yemeni officials and West European diplomats say that Mr. bin Laden was spotted in Sana in April 1998, two years after he had fled Saudi Arabia for Sudan and, later, Afghanistan.

It was also barely four months before the August 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, barely three hours' flying time south of Yemen.

According to these accounts, Mr. bin Laden was spotted by Yemeni intelligence agents entering Sana and staying at the home of a powerful tribal leader, Sheik Mohammed bin-Shajieh, at that time regarded as one of Saudi Arabia's most powerful allies in Yemen.

One Yemeni official said that when Mr. bin Laden supposedly made the trip, he was already wanted by the United States for questioning in a string of terrorist attacks. He probably traveled on one of the small ships that ply a centuries-old trading route between the Makran region of western Pakistan and the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula.

The report of Mr. bin Laden's trip to Sana could not be confirmed with F.B.I. officials, and Clinton administration officials have denied it. But if the trip occurred, it appears that Mr. bin Laden traveled about 1,350 miles to Yemen from his hiding place in Afghanistan without stumbling on any of the international tripwires set up to apprehend him.

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Protesters Turn Up Heat at Hague Talks on Greenhouse Gases

New York Times
November 23, 2000
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/23/science/23CLIM.html

THE HAGUE, Nov. 22 - Protests at climate-treaty talks here reached a high pitch today. Demonstrators climbed into the rafters of a central room, blockaded doorways, passed out Christmas stockings stuffed with coal and splattered the top American negotiator with a cream pie at a news conference tonight.

The incident occurred halfway through the second week of contentious talks, due to wind up on Friday, in which delegates from 175 countries are debating ways to slow emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, chiefly from burning fossil fuels.

The meeting, seeking to create environmental and economic policies to carry out a treaty negotiated in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, has been the focus of a growing protests. The demonstration today centered on contentions that loopholes would prevent cuts in the use of fossil fuel.

The United States under secretary of state for global affairs, Frank E. Loy, had just begun defending the American stance in the talks, which has been criticized by European officials and environmental groups as too weak, when a woman jumped from her seat and threw the pie in his face.

Wiping whipped cream from his lip, Mr. Loy cut short his talk and later issued a statement that said: "On the eve of Thanksgiving, pumpkin pie would have been a more traditional choice, but what I really want is a strong agreement to fight global warming. I'm headed back to the negotiating table right now with that aim."

Environmental groups that are lobbying delegations and observing discussions disavowed the attack. "Many are frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations and the lack of domestic action against global warming," said a letter issued by several dozen environmental groups. "However, we believe there are more constructive ways to achieve our goals of preventing dangerous climate change."

The Kyoto Protocol calls for industrialized nations to reduce their combined greenhouse-gas releases by 2012 to a level at least 5 percent below emissions in 1990.

Earlier today, negotiators said, some progress had been made on several important sticking points, including the roles of nuclear power and the situation in Russia, where emissions have plunged because of economic decline. That has produced a windfall of pollution credits that Russia might eventually sell to countries that are unwilling or unable to reduce emissions.

Nuclear power has been a pivotal issue for the European Union and many environmental groups, which have pressed to have it excluded from a list of technologies that wealthy countries could export to poor countries to help them avoid future emissions of carbon dioxide.

But Canada, China and the United States oppose such a ban. And France, despite its outward opposition, relies heavily on nuclear plants for its electricity.

Tonight, it appeared that language was evolving that would give strong preference under the treaty to less controversial nonpolluting options like wind turbines, but would not explicitly banish nuclear plants.

Separately, Russia proposed that any income it received from selling pollution credits would go into a "green fund" that would be used to pay only for energy-efficiency projects. Bill Hare, the chief representative of Greenpeace International and a longtime critic of Russia's selling its pollution credits, said the proposal was a move in the right direction. "This looks like a positive initiative," he said.

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U.S. delegate gets a face full of protesters' wrath

Washington Times
November 23, 2000
By Patrice Hill THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/business/default-20001123214314.htm

THE HAGUE - Protesters denouncing "rich Western nations" yesterday threw a pie in the face of the United States' chief negotiator even as U.S. representatives were making headway in the global-warming talks.

Capping a day marred by protests, U.S. Undersecretary of State Frank E. Loy was just beginning a press briefing when one woman threw the custard pie and another woman stood on a chair and started ranting against the U.S. position -unpopular in Europe - against imposing deep energy cuts on its citizens.

A U.N. staffer quickly picked up the screaming protester, carried her out of the room and deposited her onto the street. The other woman walked out on her own. U.N. security officials said the Dutch police arrested the pie-throwers without identifying them.

Demonstrators descended on the contentious negotiations throughout the day, occupying meeting rooms, disrupting discussion groups, climbing the rafters and dropping balloons - and destroying phone lines and equipment wherever possible.

More than 100 people protesting against nuclear power were arrested as they began a march on the U.S. Embassy to protest its stand favoring the use of nuclear power to comply with the treaty, which was drafted in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. Police later released 90 of the protesters and said they kept about 20 in custody because they refused to give their names.

The treaty requires the United States to cut its energy use and emissions by one-third between 2008 and 2012. Europe, Japan and other developed countries also must cut their emissions of the gases thought to cause global warming, like carbon dioxide.

The United States, Canada, Japan and Australia say businesses should be able to help developing countries build nuclear power projects, which are free of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases. The United States has said it is "flexible" on the tactic, however, and Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, recently came out against it.

The U.S. view has made headway in the second week of the negotiations, with most countries except the 15-nation European Union agreeing that there should be no restrictions on such technologies as long as they help to attain the treaty's goal of cutting carbon emissions.

In a small concession to win Europe's agreement, the United States has proposed giving preferential treatment to the small, renewable energy projects using wind and solar power that environmentalists prefer. U.S. negotiators say their proposed compromise has been well-received.

The protesters organizing yesterday's "Nuclear Walk of Shame" sensed the turn of events. "The protocol is in danger of becoming a trade treaty and the most corporate-friendly environmental treaty in history," one protest group, the Carbon Wars Collective, said in a manifesto posted on the Internet calling for more demonstrations.

The budding victory on the question of Third World energy projects is rare at a conference where the United States has been regularly vilified and portrayed by environmentalists, Europeans and Third World delegates as the bad guy for trying to get out of harsh emissions cuts.

The humiliation of Mr. Loy seemed to symbolize the treatment Americans have received at the conference. As he walked out of the briefing room wiping pie off his face, Mr. Loy quoted former President John F. Kennedy as warning "against being swayed by those who confuse rhetoric with reality."

Mr. Loy contrasted the Americans' pragmatic approach with the lofty but unattainable goals of many of the conference participants.

"We want to do the possible, recognize reality, make a deal," he said.

Major environmental groups participating in the negotiations said they didn't know who the pie-throwers were and disowned the incident.

Paul Risley of Environmental Defense noted that many other high-profile officials have been "pied" recently, including Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and former International Monetary Fund Managing Director Michel Camdessus.

"You're not a celebrity unless you've been pied," he said.

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Theodore Monod

Associated Press
November 22, 2000
Obituaries in the News By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Deaths.html

PARIS (AP) -- Theodore Monod, one of France's earliest and most outspoken environmentalists and an expert on the Sahara desert, died Wednesday. He was 98.

Monod was a member of France's Academy of Sciences since 1963.

A tireless traveler who found spiritual and psychological strength from the desert, Monod, a vegetarian, once trekked 600 miles in the Sahara to prove he could exert himself physically without eating meat.

The son of a Protestant minister, Monod was a pacifist and ardent defender of human and animal rights. Every summer since 1983, he held a three-day fast to mark the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan in 1945 -- the moment, he said, when the Christian era ended.

Honorary Professor of Natural Sciences at the Museum of Natural History in Paris since 1974, he was regarded as an expert on crustaceans and fish.

Monod directed the Institut Francais d'Afrique Noire in Dakar, Senegal from 1938 to 1965, during which time he spent long periods exploring the flora and fauna of the Sahara.

He is believed to have traveled about 3,230 miles on foot or by camel through the desert.

Monod also authored many books including ``Meharees,'' ``The Hippopotamus and the Philosopher,'' ``Bathyfolages,'' ``Le Desert'' and ``Memoirs of a Naturalist Traveler.''

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