------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
India Says Makes Progress in Border Dispute With China
Rumblings of a nuclear frisson as opinions collide
Anger as French nuclear sub to call
Canberra push for tighter heritage rules
Fraser urges rethink on US alliance
New cooperation on the commercial uses of outer space
Sanctions unwarranted, says Pakistan
Pakistan decries US sanctions
India Says Makes Progress in Border Dispute with China
Engage Pak. in talks, says Pranab
A Path to Peace in Kashmir
Japan to restart nuclear reactor
Some Russians try to fight importation of nuclear waste
Russia Defends Plan to Resume Arms Sales to Iran
U.S. Threatens Sanctions on Russia For Reneging on Arms Export Deal
Russia to Resume Iran Arms Sales Talks
Russian Army Chief Says Reform Plans Ready in Weeks
Taiwan Nationalists Face Challenges
Cranston: Finger still on triggers
Energy Dept Creates Fire Commission
Some Goshutes See N-Waste As Big Chance

MILITARY
Aiming for 'big powers'
COLOMBIA: APPEAL FOR PEACE TALKS
A Faulty Colombia Plan
Study of Marijuana for AIDS Is Approved
MIDDLETOWN: MARIJUANA ARRESTS
Drug smuggler spared death in '98 killing of border agent
Crony Capitalists
Russian Dismisses Threat of Sanctions
Money Woes May Close Russian Museum
NEWS OF OTHER LIFE FORMS
A Little Country, a Big Army: Switzerland Debates Its Budget
Time Is Short for U.S. to Join the International Criminal Court
Money and politics

OTHER
A Cruel Choice in New Delhi: Jobs vs. a Safer Environment
Effort to Cut Warming Lacks Time and Unity
Climate Delegates Reject Compromise
Environment Climate Change Could Bankrupt Us by 2065
Company Says Tracing Problem Corn May Take Weeks
Breyer urges 'conversation' on genetics
Police Seek Record of Bookstore Patrons in Bid for Drug Charge
China Conducts a Secret Trial of U.S. Resident in Spy Case
RUSSIA: REBUFF TO U.S. SANCTIONS THREAT

ACTIVISTS
Call the White House to Ask For Executive Clemency for Leonard Peltier
SPAIN: PROTESTS AIMED AT E.T.A
Love for Nature Has Guided Turner's Life
Basque killing spurs massive demonstration


-------- NUCLEAR

India Says Makes Progress in Border Dispute With China

Inside China Today
Nov 24, 2000
http://www.insidechina.com/news.php3?id=224014§ion=default

NEW DELHI -- (Reuters) India said on Friday that it had made significant progress to resolve a 40-year-old border dispute with China, the cause of frosty ties between the giant neighbours.

Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh told parliament that Indian and Chinese negotiators had exchanged boundary maps as the first major step towards delineating their 4,500-km (2,800-mile) Himalayan border.

The maps exchanged at meeting of diplomats and military officials in Beijing earlier this month relate to the less controversial "middle sector" stretching from the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and the new state of Uttaranchal.

"This exchange of maps in the middle sector is the first time ever that this major step has been taken," Singh told the upper house of parliament in a debate on the government's foreign policy.

He said progress in the 545-km (340-mile) middle sector could lay the ground for resolving the northern and eastern stretches of the border.

China holds about 20 percent of the disputed Himalayan territory of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. This comprises a small area New Delhi says Pakistan ceded illegally and the Aksai China area further to the northeast, which India also claims.

China claims large parts of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, both northeastern Indian states.

India and China, the world's most populous countries, fought a brief border war in 1962 and since then have made slow progress in resolving their border dispute.

Ties soured further in 1998 after New Delhi conducted a series of nuclear explosions citing regional threats.

Since then, the two countries have sought to mend ties with a series of high level visits.

Defense Minister George Fernandes told parliament earlier this week that a protest had been lodged with Beijing over the construction of a mule track which apparently juts into the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.

-------- australia

Rumblings of a nuclear frisson as opinions collide

Sydney Morning Herald
24/11/2000
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0011/24/text/features6.html

An independent panel should look at both sides of the debate over the proposed Lucas Heights nuclear waste reactor, writes Daniel Hirsch.

I WAS recently invited to Australia to testify before the Senate inquiry on the proposed Lucas Heights replacement reactor. I am the former director of the Stevenson program on nuclear policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have been an expert witness in several licensing proceedings before the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission involving research reactor sites, and I co-chair an advisory panel overseeing health studies of workers and the nearby community potentially exposed to radioactivity from a Department of Energy nuclear site where a research reactor suffered a partial meltdown.

At Sutherland Shire Council's request I performed a review of the proposed reactor's Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). I was frankly surprised by what I found. Although there is not yet even a design for the reactor, the EIS nonetheless asserts that the radioactive release from the maximum hypothetical accident - the event whose consequences bound all other credible accidents - would result in only about one fatal cancer in the exposed population. Indeed, Environment Australia, in releasing its environmental assessment, asserted that "in the event of a worst-case accident, there would be no need for any evacuations of nearby residents as the risk of radiation fallout is insignificant outside the 1.6 kilometre buffer zone".

I found this quite puzzling as this is to be a very large research reactor, bigger than virtually all civil research reactors in the US. A reactor of this size contains a huge amount of radioactivity - tens of millions of curies. To put this into perspective, permissible levels of radioactivity in the environment are measured in pico-curies - millionths of millionths of a curie.

It turns out, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), the operator of Lucas Heights, had presumed that the maximum accident, its "reference accident", would result in the release to the environment of only about one millionth of the radionuclides being considered (aside from the noble gases, which are not prime contributors to dose in a severe accident). Even so, the projected maximum dose to a member of the public was within a factor of three of the regulatory level for initiating an emergency response offsite, and the projected dose to the population as a whole within a factor of nine of the maximum permitted.

If the projected release were just tenfold higher, a mere 100,000th of the key radioactivity that can get out, the facility fails the siting rules and, as I understand it, cannot be built. And if the release is a few per cent, ANSTO's model predicts many thousands of fatal cancers and doses exceeding the level requiring emergency response extending many tens of kilometres from the site. Releases of a few per cent to tens of per cent of the key radionuclides are standard fare in severe accident analyses and releases far larger than ANSTO assumed have already occurred in such accidents.

So how did ANSTO end up using such a minuscule "maximum" release fraction? By presuming that the "bounding" accident is a basically trivial event in which the only thing you really worry about in reactors - the fuel losing coolant and melting in air, releasing its radioactivity - doesn't happen.

There is great danger, however, in an excessively optimistic attitude towards the safety of a reactor. If one believes a reactor is inherently safe, that nothing one can do to it can cause harm and there is no need even for an emergency plan, that is precisely the attitude that markedly increases risk of something very serious going wrong. In the alternative, an operator who truly recognises how hazardous is the device, having healthy respect for its danger, both reduces risk and increases public confidence.

I was disappointed that ANSTO had declined the Sutherland Shire Council's requests to meet me during my visit and to participate formally in a joint presentation. The response by the reactor's supporters has instead seemed to be a personal attack on its critics. I would respectfully suggest focusing on resolving the technical issues that could affect public health.

To the extent that there are disagreements among experts, the appropriate response, I believe, is an adjudicatory hearing in which experts for all sides testify under oath, are subject to cross-examination, and all the documents relevant to safety are publicly disclosed. That is the practice in the US and the relevant Australian statute requires following "best international practice" with regard to licensing the replacement reactor.

If the reactor proponents are so confident that the reactor will be completely safe, and that their critics are wrong, they should have no fear of a full and fair adjudicatory hearing where their claims can be thoroughly tested and all documents scrutinised. I say this in what I hope is a constructive fashion because in my country adjudicatory hearings have regularly identified serious flaws in reactor proposals that would not have otherwise come to light.

Daniel Hirsch is an American nuclear consultant to the Sutherland Shire Council.

---

Anger as French nuclear sub to call

The Age
Friday 24 November 2000
By PHILLIP HUDSON POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT CANBERRA
http://www.theage.com.au/news/20001124/A33664-2000Nov23.html

A French nuclear-powered submarine will visit Australia next year, despite Defence Department guidelines banning such a visit.

The Federal Government last night confirmed that it would welcome the first visit to Australia by a French nuclear warship - sparking immediate calls by Labor and the Democrats for the visit to be cancelled.

A spokesman for Defence Minister John Moore said the French Government had sought permission for the submarine to visit Australia as part of a French naval visit to the Pacific.

The Defence Department operations manual for "visits to Australia by nuclear-powered warships" states that only nuclear vessels from the United States or British navies are allowed to enter Australian ports.

The US and British Governments have given guarantees to Australia that they will accept absolute liability for nuclear damage resulting from an accident involving their nuclear reactors.But Mr Moore's spokesman said: "The strict interpretation of the guidelines is not the end of the story. The government of the day reserves the right to make a decision on its merits.

"There is no problem with a French nuclear-powered submarine which complies with the same set of operational procedures the Americans follow and is willing to abide by our rules."

The spokesman said Australia would be involved in defence exercises with France, although the visit was subject to the ship meeting safety requirements.

The approval for the visit also comes after community protests at French nuclear tests in the Pacific in the mid-1990s. Mr Moore's office said that was "a separate issue".

It is not yet known which ship will visit which port.

France has six nuclear Ruby Amethyste class attack submarines, armed with conventional weapons. It is believed the recently built French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, which is undergoing sea trials in the North Atlantic Ocean, will not visit Australia.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Laurie Brereton and defence spokesman Stephen Martin said Labor was against the visit by a French nuclear ship.

"Labor sees no compelling reason for Australian government policy to be changed ..." Mr Brereton said.

Democrats foreign affairs spokeswoman Vicki Bourne said last night: "We don't want nuclear warships in our harbors. We do remember the Rainbow Warrior."

Environmental groups attacked the decision, portraying it as contrary to the views of most Australians. Australian Conservation Foundation spokesman David Sweeney said it was "retrograde and regressive. It is completely out of step with the expression that was made so clear only five years ago during the French Pacific testing program. Hundreds of thousands of Australians took to the streets in support of a nuclear-free Pacific. Politicians may have short memories but I don't think the Australian community does".

Friends of the Earth spokesman Bruce Thompson, who also claimed that the decision was contray to public opinion, said ships with nuclear weapons or using nuclear power posed a risk to the environment and should not be allowed in Australian ports.

The issue of nuclear ship visits was thrown on to the political agenda in Victoria last week when Premier Steve Bracks told State Parliament he had "no problem" with nuclear-powered US warships visiting the state.

- with JAMES CHESSELL

---

Canberra push for tighter heritage rules

The Age
Friday 24 November 2000
By CLAIRE MILLER ENVIRONMENT REPORTER
http://www.theage.com.au/news/20001124/A33574-2000Nov23.html

The Federal Government is pushing the World Heritage committee, meeting in Cairns next week, to tighten the rules so that properties cannot be added to the in-danger list without government agreement.

The proposal comes after the government narrowly avoided the embarrassment of the Kakadu National Park being added to the World Heritage in-danger list last year due to the cultural and conservation implications of the Jabiluka uranium mine.

The government has submitted the proposal as an alternative to the official World Heritage working party recommendation seeking legal advice on whether properties can be added to the in-danger list without the consent of the national government.

Australia, which takes over the influential position as the 2001 head of the World Heritage committee next week, was involved in the working party's revision of guidelines for implementing the World Heritage convention.

However, it surprised delegates at preliminary meetings yesterday by presenting separate draft guidelines that would exclude non-government organisations, indigenous groups and other countries represented on the committee from nominating properties for in-danger listing.

A spokesman for federal Environment Minister Robert Hill said Australia was proposing nothing more than was already in the convention.

He said the convention only allowed for sites to be added to the in-danger list if the country concerned requested international assistance for the purpose of protecting the property.

The spokesman said Senator Hill had successfully argued the case at the World Heritage meeting in July last year, convened to consider the Kakadu in-danger nomination by indigenous and green groups.

He said the guidelines were in need of reform because they went further than the convention intended.

He said the government believed a number of other nations shared Australia's position, but as for the working party's recommended reforms, "the committee can decide what it wants".

The convention guidelines say properties may be listed as in-danger provided, among other prerequisites, that assistance has been requested. The guidelines say such assistance "may be requested by any committee member or the secretariat".

But Senator Hill's spokesman said the Commonwealth wanted to spell out that properties could only be listed at the request of national governments because "all of these political types here are lobbying the committee to put our properties on the in-danger list without our consent, and they should be told without doubt, no, that is not possible under the convention".

He said the UN would need to revisit the convention, and rewrite it, if it wanted outside groups to be able to use the convention to punish and embarrass member nations.

"Our position is well known. There is nothing cloak and dagger about it ... It is only the (Greens senator) Bob Browns of the world who want to wage political campaigns against the government by lobbying the committee to act beyond the powers given to it by the convention," the spokesman said.

Senator Brown accused the government of attempting to undermine the integrity of the convention, and downgrade the role of the World Heritage Organisation advisory bodies by handing back all authority to the countries where threatened sites are located.

---

Fraser urges rethink on US alliance

Australian Broadcasting Company
This Bulletin: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 21:50 AEDT
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-24nov2000-94.htm

Australia is being warned to quickly reassess its military relationship with the United States.

In Melbourne tonight, former prime minister Malcolm Fraser said America's proposed anti-missile defence system would make Australia a prime target in any future war.

He says American interests are not the same as Australia's, and the superpower should not be relied on.

Mr Fraser said the weapons system would be destabilising and trigger a new arms race among the nuclear powers.

"An anti-missile defence system for North America would upset that balance," he said.

"Such participation would put Australia in the front line not of Australian but of American defence.

"It would involve a much greater danger to Australia than the current use of the facilities at Pine Gap or for that matter at North-West Cape."

-------- china

Christian Science Monitor
NOVEMBER 24, 2000
NEWS IN BRIEF
by Robert Kilborn, Judy Nichols, and Sara Steindorf
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/11/24/fp24s2-csm.shtml

New cooperation on the commercial uses of outer space was promised by the Clinton administration after China's government made its strongest commitment to date not to sell nuclear missile technology abroad. The move also brought a reprieve from US economic sanctions that could have undermined delicate relations with the Beijing Communist regime. China agreed in 1998 not to transfer whole missile systems to other nations. But it has taken a more ambiguous approach to the sale of individual components and dual-use technology that could end up in weapons systems, and US intelligence reportedly has tracked such sales to Pakistan, Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

-------- india / pakistan

Sanctions unwarranted, says Pakistan

The Hindu
Friday, November 24, 2000
By B. Muralidhar Reddy
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/11/24/stories/01240009.htm

ISLAMABAD, NOV. 23 Pakistan has dubbed the latest U.S. sanctions over alleged missile technology transfer from China ``unjustified and unwarranted'' even as political parties have said that the sanctions are a reflection of the failure of the military government on the diplomatic front.

A spokesman of the Pakistan Foreign Ministry has said the country's missile technology programme is consistent with the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) and its missile development programme would not be affected by the sanctions.

In a statement the Pakistan Foreign office said ``Pakistan has indigenous missile development programme which is part of our nuclear deterrent and indispensable to our security. This programme will be maintained and will not be affected by any discriminatory regimes such as MTCR''. It said the U.S. had first raised the question of alleged transfer of missile technology by China to Pakistan in early 90s and the question resurfaced recently during the China- U.S. consultations. China has categorically denied the charge of supply of any missile technology or missiles to Pakistan, which violated the MTCR guidelines. Pakistan has also refuted the charge.

The Foreign Office said the U.S. has neither provided any evidence of the alleged transfer nor discussed the matter with Pakistan. ``It is our hope that the U.S. will review the decision and remove these latest sanctions as well as those which it had imposed on many Pakistani civilian facilities two years ago''.

In a separate statement issued from London the former Prime Minister, Mrs. Benazir Bhutto, expressed concern over the new curbs and said they could only further isolate Pakistan. ``A democratic Pakistan enhances the international reputation of a country enabling it to make better diplomatic efforts to secure its position in the world community'', she has said.

China flays sanctions

PTI reports from Beijing:

China today criticised sanctions imposed by the United States on Pakistan and Iran for obtaining missile technology from Beijing as unpopular and said such assistance was normal in state-to- state relations.

``The U.S. Government, in accordance with its own domestic law, imposed sanctions on others. The U.S. is the only one in the world to do so and this is not popular, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mr. Sun Yuxi said.

---

Pakistan decries US sanctions

Christian Science Monitor
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2000
By Agence France-Presse
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/11/24/fp7s3-csm.shtml

ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - On Wednesday, Pakistan criticized as "unwarranted and unjustified" new US sanctions imposed Tuesday because the US says Pakistan and Iran eceived missile technology from China.

"The United States has raised the issue of alleged transfer of missile technology by China to Pakistan from time to time over the years," foreign ministry spokesman Riaz Mohammad Khan said.

"China has always responded and maintained that it never transferred any technology to Pakistan contrary to the guidelines of the MTCR (Missile Technology Control Regime), which it voluntarily accepts," the spokesman said.

The two-year ban on the import of certain US technologies was imposed against the defense ministry and the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission in Pakistan, state department official Richard Boucher told reporters in Washington.

"The new sanctions will actually have very limited economic effect, but they do send a strong signal that the United States opposes these countries' missiles programs," the US official said.

Pakistan has been under US sanctions since 1990 over the nuclear issue when Washington slapped an embargo on military sales and stopped delivery of 28 F-16 planes bought by Islamabad in 1989.

The US imposed further penalties after Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in response to Indian detonations in May 1998 leading to suspension of international loans and direct US development assistance.

Japan's annual assistance, worth around $600 million, also remains frozen, with Tokyo linking resumption of the aid to Pakistan signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).

However, the European Union has spared Pakistan, saying saying isolation would worsen the problem. "We do not want to see Pakistan isolated," a EU mission leader Dominique Girard said.

---

India Says Makes Progress in Border Dispute with China

Reuters
11/24/00
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-india-c.html

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India said on Friday that it had made significant progress to resolve a 40-year-old border dispute with China, the cause of frosty ties between the giant neighbors.

Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh told parliament that Indian and Chinese negotiators had exchanged boundary maps as the first major step toward delineating their 2,800-mile Himalayan border.

The maps exchanged at meeting of diplomats and military officials in Beijing earlier this month relate to the less controversial ``middle sector'' stretching from the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and the new state of Uttaranchal.

``This exchange of maps in the middle sector is the first time ever that this major step has been taken,'' Singh told the upper house of parliament in a debate on the government's foreign policy.

He said progress in the 340-mile middle sector could lay the ground for resolving the northern and eastern stretches of the border.

China holds about 20 percent of the disputed Himalayan territory of Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. This comprises a small area New Delhi says Pakistan ceded illegally and the Aksai China area further to the northeast, which India also claims.

China claims large parts of Sikkim and Arunachal Pradesh, both northeastern Indian states.

India and China, the world's most populous countries, fought a brief border war in 1962 and since then have made slow progress in resolving their border dispute.

Ties soured further in 1998 after New Delhi conducted a series of nuclear explosions citing regional threats.

Since then, the two countries have sought to mend ties with a series of high level visits.

Defense Minister George Fernandes told parliament earlier this week that a protest had been lodged with Beijing over the construction of a mule track which apparently juts into the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh.

---

Engage Pak. in talks, says Pranab

The Hindu
Friday, November 24, 2000
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2000/11/24/stories/02240009.htm

NEW DELHI, NOV. 23. The foreign policy of the Vajpayee Government came under attack today with the Opposition led by the Congress questioning the manner in which it has been conducted.

Participating in a discussion in the Rajya Sabha on the international situation, the Congress leader, Mr. Pranab Mukherjee, commented on the policy of not opening talks with the military regime in Pakistan.

While welcoming the peace initiative in Jammu and Kashmir, he said even in the past there were attempts to vitiate the atmosphere. Pakistan must be engaged in a serious dialogue, he said and sought to bring out the variance in the Centre's approach, stating that while the Government shunned talks with Pakistan it was holding a dialogue with authorities in Myanmar.

Mr. Mukherjee said the foreign policy was being shaped under the dictates of `another power' and that the Government must take the initiative in its hands.

Mr. Mukherjee said the Congress Government had followed a policy of being a nuclear threshold state and urged the world to de-weaponise. He said now that option was closed by the Vajpayee Government and after going nuclear, the Government should spell out the status on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Earlier, initiating the discussion, the External Affairs Minister, Mr. Jaswant Singh, sought to outline the broad policy contours which dictated the foreign policy.

He said time had come to alter the thinking on the concept of neighbourhood which had expanded these days and was not limited to the confines of geographic locations.

Dr. L.M. Singhvi of the BJP defended the policy and outlined the Government's achievements. The decision to go nuclear was not an option but was a result of the other developments. He said nuclear disarmament was the only way out though India had turned nuclear. Mr. Sanjay Nirupam (Shiv Sena) opposed the Government's policy on Jammu and Kashmir while Mr. C. Ramachandraiah (TDP) wanted the Government to be wary of the developing relations with Israel. Mr. Eduardo Falerio (Congress) sought a white paper and a comprehensive discussion on foreign policy. The discussion remained inconclusive.

---

A Path to Peace in Kashmir

New Times
November 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/opinion/24FRI2.html

India's announcement of a one-month cease- fire in its perennially troubled state of Kashmir is welcome. It was immediately dismissed by local Muslim rebel groups and Pakistan, but Muslim political parties in Kashmir have given a more positive response. The Kashmir conflict is a potential trigger for nuclear war. It has also led to grievous human rights violations in India's only Muslim-majority state. Several parties to the fighting have now expressed interest in a political solution. If Kashmiri rebel groups would reconsider their initial rejection, India's cease-fire could be a first step toward achieving one.

Kashmir's hereditary ruler, a Hindu, chose to join India shortly after the subcontinent was partitioned in 1947. Pakistan has never accepted that decision and has actively supported Muslim separatist groups ever since. India and Pakistan twice went to war over Kashmir, and the state is now divided between them along a military line of control. For the last 11 years, militant Muslim groups have waged an armed insurrection against Indian rule, and Pakistan sent forces into Kashmir last year. New Delhi has stationed more than 250,000 troops in the state, and at least 30,000 people have been killed in the fighting.

The last attempt at a cease-fire came in July, at the initiative of the largest Muslim rebel group, the Hizbul Mujahedeen. That hopeful effort broke down when Hizbul insisted that Pakistan be included in peace negotiations and India refused. The same issue has led Hizbul to dismiss India's new cease- fire. But both sides should consider a compromise that might lead to a Pakistani role in the talks some time after they have gotten under way.

Compromises have not come easily on Kashmir because both India and Pakistan see the issue as fundamental to their national identities. Pakistan was founded as a homeland for the subcontinent's Muslims. India sees retaining Kashmir as essential to its identity as a secular and multicultural state.

Too many lives have already been sacrificed to these incompatible visions. With both India and Pakistan now possessing nuclear weapons and missiles, a peaceful solution to the Kashmir dispute must be found. India's cease-fire, which is to take effect with the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan next week, can be a first step toward exploring one. Broadly inclusive peace talks should be the next.

-------- japan

Japan to restart nuclear reactor
Accident-tarnished Monju facility will reopen soon

MSNBC
11/24/00
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.msnbc.com/news/494284.asp
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Japan-Nuclear-Power.html

TOKYO, Nov. 24 - Japan on Friday approved the reopening of an accident-tainted nuclear reactor and defended its nuclear policy as vital for a resource-poor nation.

Japan's Atomic Energy Commission decided to restart Japan's experimental Monju fast-breeder reactor as soon as possible. The reactor was shut down in December 1995 following an accident in which several tons of sodium leaked from its cooling system.

The plan reaffirmed Tokyo's commitment to nuclear power, and it comes with public trust in the industry shaken by a series of mishaps and cover-ups including an accident last September at a reprocessing plant northwest of Tokyo that killed two people and exposed hundreds to radiation.

Friday's plan didn't specify when the reactor, about 220 miles west of Tokyo will be back in operation.

Japan relies almost entirely on imports for oil and other natural resources. The government is betting heavily on nuclear power to achieve a measure of long-term energy self-sufficiency.

-------- russia

Some Russians try to fight importation of nuclear waste
Residents of already contaminated regions try to stop nation from becoming dump for all.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution
FRIDAY • November 24, 2000
Margaret Coker - Cox Washington Bureau
http://www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/epaper/editions/friday/news_a3e131f256ae62951072.html

Chelyabinsk, Russia --- Stacks of leaflets dwarf the motley activists huddled among half-empty tea cups and overflowing ashtrays for a strategy session aimed at defeating the latest government attempt to import nuclear waste to their back yard.

One in the group suggests mass e-mail messages and another newspaper editorials. The idea of lobbying their local member of parliament draws laughter and skeptical shaking of heads.

''Moscow officials are snobs. They want nuclear power and weapons. They don't listen to our views. Officials treat us mostly with contempt,'' says Nataliya Mironova, head of the Movement for Nuclear Safety, a group of students, professionals and grandmothers struggling to save this Siberian city and the surrounding region from further environmental degradation.

Welcome to the world of political activism, Russian-style. In a country where political freedom is still new, few of the pillars that buttress American democracy exist here. Most notable is the lack of public participation in creating laws or accountability for government policies and spending.

But in a minor triumph for citizen participation this week, the Duma, the lower house of parliament, postponed a vote on three draft laws Mironova's group has fought to overturn.

The bills, backed by the Atomic Energy Ministry (MinAtom), would overturn current federal law and allow the importation of nuclear waste for the next 10 to 15 years. Under the proposed legislation, Bulgaria, Taiwan and Switzerland, for example, could send nuclear waste and spent fuel to Russia and ''lease'' storage space for it --- specifically, at a storage facility in Mayak, 48 miles from Mironova's home. Meanwhile, Russia would recycle the fissile material, producing plutonium it could resell to nuclear countries or use in its own nuclear power plants.

''This law is bad for many reasons,'' said Mironova, a 50-year-old mother of two, sitting in a rented three-room downtown Chelyabinsk apartment the group transformed into an office. ''It would make Russia the world's nuclear dump site.''

Russia's nuclear industry has a checkered history. Residents of this region 1,200 miles east of Moscow had no idea at the time that major nuclear accidents occurred in 1955 and 1957 at Mayak, the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapons factory.

They also didn't know that Mayak workers were dumping nuclear waste into the Techa River, a waterway used by tens of thousands of people for drinking, bathing and watering crops.

''We just called it the 'river sickness' when people's hair and teeth started to fall out,'' said Gosman Kabirov, a teacher turned environmentalist from Muslimovo, one of the villages downstream from Mayak. ''No one told us why people were dying so young.''

In the last 10 years, the human fallout because of the Soviet Union's nuclear programs has been well-documented. Some 61 million out of 145 million Russians live in towns with dangerous levels of contamination, according to the state environment committee, an agency recently disbanded by President Vladimir Putin.

In Muslimovo, a bleak farming settlement of 4,500 people, the cancer rate is three times the national average and one of every three children has birth defects, villagers say --- although they are barred from examining official medical statistics on orders of the Mayak administration, a mix of military and civilian personnel from MinAtom. Little money has been given to clean up the land, rehabilitate people or relocate families.

Some Duma legislators say the profits from importation and treatment of nuclear waste --- an estimated $100-billion-a-year international business, according to Russian scientists --- could be used for environmental cleanup. MinAtom says Moscow would net $21 billion from countries licensing their nuclear waste to Russia, and an amendment tacked onto one bill stipulates a percentage of this amount for environmental projects.

''This is the only way for the problems to be fixed,'' said Duma Deputy Svetlana Gvozkina, a co-sponsor of the legislation.

Environmentalists think otherwise. The international environmental group Greenpeace argues that the proposal creates greater possibility for accidents, especially since the nuclear waste would be transported over vast distances to Siberian storage sites. Kabirov, who has fought MinAtom for 10 years to secure health records and scientific data for Muslyumovo, believes the motive behind the laws is mainly venal.

''MinAtom is trying to make a new business for themselves. There is no transparency in our country that would allow us to see where the money goes,'' said the affable Kabirov, 40.

At least some lawmakers agree. Deputy Viktor Opikunov, a co-author of the draft legislation, said that the parliamentary faction supporting the bills decided to take a ''one-month time-out . . . to explain the issues more fully to more deputies and the public.''

Even with some support in Moscow, environmentalists say their real hope rests with the decision the government makes on their unprecedented campaign to hold a national referendum on the issue of nuclear waste imports.

In late summer, some 200 citizens groups organized a two-month canvassing blitz, collecting 2.5 million signatures in support of a referendum that would allow citizens a vote on whether they wanted to make legal the importation of nuclear materials. Now, the Central Election Committee has to validate the signatures, and then the Supreme Court must approve the procedure. If there is no glitch, the referendum must be held within three months of the court's approval.

''They are sincerely ignorant,'' Robert Nigmatulin, co-author of the laws and brother of the deputy minister at MinAtom, said of the referendum organizers. ''They react with emotion and not with the facts. I'm telling you the proposal is perfectly safe. That's not my opinion. That is a scientific fact.''

This disdain makes Mironova's coalition wary, especially given MinAtom's lobbying influence and the support shown to their proposal by a U.S.-based group called the Non-Proliferation Trust Inc., which is run by a who's who of former CIA brass and military officers, including William Webster and Adm. Daniel Murphy.

ON THE WEB: The Non-Prolifer-ation Trust: www.nptinternational.com

---

Russia Defends Plan to Resume Arms Sales to Iran
No weapons of mass destruction, they say

San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, November 24, 2000
Anna Dolgov, Associated Press
mailto:chronfeedback@sfchronicle.com
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/11/24/MN25501.DTL

Moscow -- While Russia plans to resume weapons sales to Iran, the Defense Ministry said yesterday that it will not supply any hardware capable of delivering weapons of mass destruction.

Russia has notified Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that as of Dec. 1,

it will cease observing 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 to the Washington Post.

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

"We fully abide by all international demands on nonproliferation of the weapons of mass destruction," said Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev.

The Clinton administration is trying to get Russia to change its mind, warning that if it sells weapons to Iran, the United States would impose sanctions.

That threat received a frosty response yesterday from Foreign Minister Ivan Ivanov.

"You cannot speak to Russia in the language of ultimatums," he said. "The language of sanctions is not the kind of language you can use with Russia."

The United States has 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 the institutes.

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

It will "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.

"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 waived sanctions Tuesday against Chinese companies that have assisted Pakistan and Iran in the past.

---

U.S. Threatens Sanctions on Russia For Reneging on Arms Export Deal

Salt Lake Tribune
Friday, November 24, 2000
BY JOHN DIAMOND CHICAGO TRIBUNE
http://www.sltrib.com/11242000/nation_w/46888.htm

WASHINGTON -- The Clinton administration is threatening to impose new sanctions on Russia for reneging on a 1995 deal struck by Vice President Gore to halt Russian arms exports to Iran.

Administration officials confirmed Wednesday that Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov sent a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright four days before the presidential election declaring that as of Dec. 1, Russia would no longer abide by the agreement.

In response, the administration is threatening to impose targeted sanctions on any Russian government agency or private business that sells restricted weaponry to neighboring Iran.

"We've told the Russians at the highest level that there will be consequences, including the possibility of sanctions if it proceeds with its plan," said White House spokesman P.J. Crowley. "We're troubled by the Russian decision. It could have serious implications for our security in the Mideast and the security of our friends and allies."

Despite Russia's commitment over the past five years to refrain from selling sensitive weapons and technology to Iran, the U.S. intelligence community says those sales have continued at an aggressive pace. Administration officials worry Russia's decision to abrogate the deal between Gore and then-Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin will open the floodgates for the sale of nuclear and chemical weaponry and know-how, as well as missile technology, to Iran.

Public word of the setback came a day after the United States and China reached a deal to curb Chinese export of missile technology to such countries as Iran and Pakistan.

The deal struck Gore struck with Chernomyrdin became controversial in the closing weeks of Gore's presidential campaign. Republicans seized on news reports that the agreement contained a secret "aide memoir" that waived sanctions on Russia for selling Iran less sophisticated weaponry. Republicans charged Gore with deliberately keeping Congress in the dark about an agreement that lawmakers would almost certainly have opposed.

Gore responded that the "secret" portion of the agreement with Russia had been described to journalists and lawmakers at the time. He emphasized that the agreement allowed Russia to sell Iran only antiquated weaponry that would not upset the balance of power in the region, while banning the sale of more sophisticated missile and nuclear technology.

The flap took up valuable time in the Gore's campaign homestretch but did not appear to cause serious damage.

But the collapse of an agreement with Russia to prevent weapons proliferation points to what critics of the administration say has been a consistent weakness of U.S. dealing with Russia and China. The administration has been naive in reaching agreements with Moscow and Beijing that those governments have then failed to uphold, the critics charge.

The Clinton administration is trying to convince Russia to adhere to the Gore-Chernomyrdin deal and White House officials held out some hope that Moscow could yet be convinced to abide by its earlier commitments.

In the letter to Albright, Ivanov complained that publicity about what was supposed to have been a secret addendum to the agreement undercut the viability of the deal. Albright sent Ivanov what officials described as a brusque letter of reply. The two have had rocky relations on many issues over the past year.

Last week, President Clinton pressed Russian President Vladimir Putin on the issue, warning Putin of the possibility of sanctions and urging him to reconsider his decision. The administration was hoping to reverse Russia's position before the collapse of the Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement became public. But administration officials confirmed the developments after the Ivanov letter was disclosed Wednesday in a column in The Washington Post.

Republicans, who were from the beginning sharply critical of the Gore-Chernomyrdin deal, said its demise now requires a stern response from Washington.

"It comes as no great surprise that Russia has abrogated its commitments under the secret Gore-Chernomyrdin deal," said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., who led hearings on the deal. "Russia never adhered to those commitments in the first place. It continued to transfer weapons to Iran and, in fact, signed at least $200 million in new deals after signing the aide memoir."

Republicans, citing U.S. intelligence reports, say that purportedly antiquated weaponry sold to Iran under the deal has included a Russian Akula-Class submarine.

Russian export controls on more sophisticated arms sales have had only limited impact on the flow of weapons and technology to Iran, according to the CIA.

Also, the CIA reported, Iran is seeking nuclear-related technology "from a variety of foreign sources, especially Russia."

The United States has had no diplomatic relations with Iran since the hostage crisis of the late 1970s. Over the past few years, overtures from both Tehran and Washington have suggested an interest in both countries in renewing ties at some level.

But the State Department continues to list Iran as a terrorist-sponsoring nation. Also, the administration is concerned that Iran is seeking to enhance its military capability not just to discourage any renewal of hostilities to Iraq but also to pose a threat to Israel and check the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf.

---

Russia to Resume Iran Arms Sales Talks

Reuters
November 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-russia-.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will start talks with Iran soon on resuming arms sales to the Islamic republic, the senior cabinet minister in charge of Russia's defense industries was quoted as saying on Friday.

News agencies said Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov shrugged off U.S. threats to impose sanctions in retaliation, saying Russia was doing no more than some of Washington's NATO allies.

U.S. officials warned on Thursday Russia might face economic sanctions if it pulled out of a 1995 agreement restricting sales of conventional weapons to Iran.

Russia plans to withdraw on December 1 from the pact signed by Vice President Al Gore and Russia's then prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin.

``We have not conducted negotiations on new contracts with Iran during the validity of the accord,'' Interfax news agency quoted Klebanov as saying.

The United States should monitor the activities of its NATO partners ``who have already started working with Iran on military-technological cooperation,'' he added.

He did not say what weapons systems Russia was considering selling to Iran, although Tehran is known to be interested in building Russian-designed MiG-29 fighter jets and T-72C main battle tanks under license.

Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov expressed surprise at the U.S. outburst, saying there was no reason for ``sharp comments or outrageous declarations.''

``Russia respects all its international commitments,'' he said, dismissing suggestions that Russia had broken any arms control agreement.

Flamboyant ultranationalist leader Vladimir Zhrinovsky said contracts with Iran could be worth millions of dollars a year to Russia and keep hundreds of factories busy.

Russia's ties with Iran are a sensitive issue in the United States, which has sought to isolate Tehran for allegedly sponsoring terrorism.

Washington has halted funding to Russian institutes it suspects of providing Iran with missile technology and has called on Moscow to pull out of the Bushehr nuclear power station project on the Gulf.

---

Russian Army Chief Says Reform Plans Ready in Weeks

Reuters
November 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-ru.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The head of Russia's armed forces said on Friday plans for proposed military reforms would be submitted to President Vladimir Putin early next month.

The Kremlin's advisory Security Council earlier this month approved controversial large-scale cuts in the military, and Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov was quoted as saying overall reductions would involve 600,000 people over five years.

``In early December we will present plans for the construction and development of the armed forces during 2001-2005...for the approval of the president, and it will be discussed at the Security Council,'' General Staff Chief Anatoly Kvashnin told reporters.

He was speaking after appearing at closed door hearings in the State Duma lower house of parliament on military reform.

Independent military news agency AVN quoted a deputy chief of general staff, Yuri Baluyevski, as saying more than 30 documents had been prepared on the reforms.

The reductions are aimed at creating leaner but more mobile, better equipped and more cost-effective forces.

The Security Council has said there are more than three million people in uniform in Russia, including police and others not usually included in lower Western estimates of Russia's defense strength.

Under the proposed reforms, Kvashnin has championed deep cuts in Russia's nuclear forces, which currently have the status of a separate branch of the armed forces alongside the army, navy and air force.

Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev, who ran the missile forces during the then-Soviet Union's nuclear superpower days, has favored their holding onto their separate status, while Kvashnin has proposed putting them under air force command.

Duma deputies who listened to Kvashnin said they were wary of the political consequences of excessive cuts in nuclear forces, especially without an agreement by Washington to make similarly deep cuts.

``It provokes anxiety that intended cuts to the strategic forces will be deeper than what is planned in the United States,'' said Alexei Arbatov, deputy head of the Duma's Defense Committee and a member of the liberal pro-Western Yabloko party.

Alexei Mitrofanov, a member of nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party, said a nuclear arsenal was an essential part of being a superpower, and Russia would lose influence if it did not maintain its deterrent.

``We and the United States are the only countries which could wipe out the whole world in 25-30 minutes,'' he told reporters. ''After such reforms, the West wouldn't even offer Putin a hot cup of tea.''

-------- taiwan

Taiwan Nationalists Face Challenges

Associated Press
November 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Taiwan-Nationalist-Birthday.html

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- The party that toppled China's last dynasty and controlled Taiwan's presidency for five decades celebrated its 106th birthday on Friday, taking a brief break from its struggle to regroup after last spring's humiliating election defeat.

Six months after it lost the presidential vote, the Nationalist Party is getting a slow start on its goals of attracting younger members and shedding its reputation for corruption. There are also signs that schisms are hindering the party's efforts to plot a steady future course.

But most political watchers agree that the Nationalists have been a dominant force in Taiwanese politics for too long to fade away. The party still controls the legislature and is one of the world's richest political organizations, with assets conservatively estimated at $3.7 billion.

On Friday, a few hundred die-hard Nationalists gathered outside the party's 12-story brown Italian marble headquarters, just blocks from the presidential palace. They waved red, blue and white flags, sang patriotic songs and watched Nationalist chairman Lien Chan bow three times before a bust of the party's founder, Sun Yat-sen.

Sun established the party in mainland China on Nov. 24, 1894, with the central goal of overthrowing the Qing Dynasty, which eventually collapsed in 1912. The party, also known by its Chinese name Kuomintang, or KMT, was later forced to leave China and retreat to Taiwan in 1949 when the Communist Party seized the mainland.

Through many of their decades of control in Taiwan, the Nationalists used repressive martial law to limit the influence of the opposition. But the party eventually allowed democratic reforms, including direct presidential elections that cost it the presidency: Lien placed a distant third in the last presidential election after a popular Nationalist politician, James Soong, ran as an independent and split the vote.

Since Lien's loss to Chen Shui-bian of the small Democratic Progressive Party, the Nationalists have been a hostile opposition party, refusing to cooperate with the new government.

Lien continued Friday to bash Chen's leadership.

``Since the political change, Taiwanese have overwhelmingly felt pessimism, despair, depression and unease,'' he told the party faithful.

Recently, the Nationalists led an opposition push to recall Chen, accusing him of violating the constitution by not consulting with the legislature before scrapping a nuclear plant. They backed off the recall campaign after it became clear the public opposed it.

DPP lawmaker Lin Cho-shui offered another possible motive -- that the Nationalists also shelved the recall effort because they knew it would have led to another presidential campaign that Lien would have lost.

The recall effort also exposed cracks in the Nationalists' facade of unity.

For much of the past decade, one of the party's dominant factions was led by former President Lee Teng-hui, who recruited local Taiwanese politicians to replace old guard Nationalists whose roots were in China. Lee's followers were generally regarded to be lukewarm about reuniting with China -- one of the most important issues in Taiwanese politics.

In recent weeks, there have been signs that Lee's faction has been pushed to the side, said Lu Ya-li, a political science professor at National Taiwan University.

``They are no longer talking in public so much,'' Lu said.

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

Cranston: Finger still on triggers

Evansville Courier & Press
11/24/00
By ERIC BRAZIL
San Francisco Examiner - Scripps Howard News Service
http://www.courierpress.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi?200011/24+finger112400_news.html+20001124

LOS ALTOS HILLS, Calif. - Former U.S. Sen. Alan Cranston has become an abolitionist.

With the same relentless, disciplined energy that characterized his 40-year career in Democratic politics, Cranston is leading a global crusade for the abolition of all nuclear weapons.

Cranston, who retired from the Senate in 1992 after four terms, now devotes full time to running the Global Security Institute, which he founded to advance the case for abolition.

Cranston, 86, acknowledged that consciousness raising in the United States on the nuclear weapons abolition issue is a formidable task.

"Concern about nuclear weapons is about No. 18 (in the polls).

"They just don't think it's a serious problem, and young people don't have any memory of the Cold War."

In fact, the threat posed by nuclear weapons "is more dangerous now than it was during the Cold War," he said, because "terrorists and rogue state leaders are not under the restraints they were then."

Besides, he said, "there has been no significant change in nuclear policy by the U.S. and Russia since the end of the Cold War. ... They still have thousands of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert status that can be fired in 45 seconds."

"Launch-on-warning is still followed by both countries, and they follow the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD). It boggles the mind, but they do."

Peace and the establishment of some sort of world authority to deal with issues that transcend the capability of individual nations have been consistent themes in Cranston's career.

The Global Security Institute, headquartered at the Presidio and at Cranston's home office here, has persuaded more than 100 international civilian leaders, including 44 past and presidents and prime ministers, to sign on to its nuclear weapon elimination initiative.

The institute's full-page ad appearing last month in The New York Times, calling on the American government to "commit itself unequivocally" to negotiate worldwide reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons, made it clear that Cranston had attracted a powerful constituency.

---

Energy Dept Creates Fire Commission

Associated Press
November 23, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Fire-Commission.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- An advisory group of fire experts has been asked to examine ways to improve the government's ability to deal with wildfires that might threaten Energy Department nuclear facilities, the department announced.

The creation of the new advisory commission was prompted by this year's numerous wildfires in the West, some of which directly threatened Energy Department facilities. A massive wildfire in New Mexico burned parts of the government's Los Alamos National Laboratory last March.

The advisory group will ``help identify and correct any deficiencies in emergency preparedness at department facilities across the country,'' said the department in a statement.

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson

``Because the risk is so great and the stakes are so high -- no less than life and death -- we have to do more to prevent and prepare for fires,'' said Energy Secretary Bill Richardson in announcing the new 16-member commission.

The group will include engineers, firefighters, attorneys and other fire experts.

-------- us nuc waste

Some Goshutes See N-Waste As Big Chance

Salt Lake Tribune
Friday, November 24, 2000
BY HANNAH WOLFSON
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.sltrib.com/11242000/utah/47025.htm

SKULL VALLEY RESERVATION -- It's easy to find the West Desert on a map of the United States: pick out the Great Salt Lake and head south.

There are jackrabbits and mule deer, ranchers and their sheep. There are tiny mining towns turning to dust and a little city -- Tooele -- which gets bigger every day. And there's the Tooele Hazardous Industry Zone, home to some of the most toxic operations in the country.

Now a tiny band of American Indians want to turn their reservation into one of the country's largest nuclear waste dumps. Opponents say there may be no way to stop them. "We are doing this to the whole Great Basin. You can't graze cattle, the minerals are gone, the water's not suitable for human inhabitation. We've made it profitable the only way we know how," said Chip Ward, author of Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West.

"If you can turn the Great Plains into the breadbasket of the nation, you can turn the Great Basin into the nation's wastebasket."

Key Supporter: Leon Bear knows the boundaries of his tribe's land by heart.

From the reservoir that provides water to his village, Bear sweeps his arm across the parched valley, pointing out the fences and smokestacks that ring the last remnant of his tribe's traditional lands.

To the north, a magnesium plant sits on the shore of the Great Salt Lake; to the south, the Army tests anti-nerve gas equipment on a stretch of desert as large as Rhode Island. A bombing range and hazardous-waste incinerator are just over the crest of the Cedar Mountains to the west; to the east sits a stockpile of chemical weapons and the incinerator plant that is destroying them.

"I could throw up my hands," said Bear, the Goshutes' tribal chairman and the project's main supporter. "They made that an industrial waste zone out there. Nobody asked the Goshutes, 'Do you mind if we do this out here on your traditional territory?' Nobody said, 'Hey, it could be dangerous for you guys to be out here.' When a neighbor does that to you, you don't want to be like them. So we gave our neighbor, the state of Utah, an opportunity to be a part of this, and the first reaction was, 'Over my dead body.'"

Opponents, including other members of the tribe and even Bear's cousin Sammy Blackbear, say the plan could endanger the wildlife of the West Desert, human health, the region's economy and even national security.

But that has not stopped Bear from pressing forward with the project, which he says could be the only way to save his dying tribe.

If Bear gets his way, about a square mile of the reservation will be fenced off for nuclear waste, and 450 acres will be built up with concrete pads. On top will sit 16-foot tall, concrete-and-steel casks filled with radioactive rods -- as many as 4,000 of them holding 40,000 metric tons of used nuclear reactor fuel.

The fuel will come from Private Fuel Storage (PFS), a consortium of eight power companies from California, New York, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Florida and Alabama. Neither PFS nor the Goshutes will say what the deal is costing.

'Better Future': PFS also has promised to build a cultural center on the reservation to revive the tribe's fading language and crafts, Bear says, and has pledged to give Goshutes and other tribes the first shot at jobs at the storage site.

"More jobs, more money, and a better future for your children," says a PFS brochure touting the project.

The money is sorely needed. Most of the estimated 150 Goshutes have fled the 17,000-acre reservation for Nevada, Tooele and Salt Lake City. Fewer than 30 remain, most living in a tiny cluster of run-down trailers and dirt roads. Jobs are virtually nonexistent, except for the cashier position at the Pony Express, a sparsely stocked convenience store and gas station opened on the reservation a few years ago.

It's not that the tribe hasn't tried. At the entrance to the village, the last few examples of one failed project -- portable toilets and showers built for the military -- sit unused in an empty corral. Down the road, three huge metal sheds, built to test rocket engines, are empty.

There were only two real options left: nuclear waste and gambling, an industry Mormon-dominated Utah considers nearly as toxic. Bear says a casino is part of the Goshutes' long-term plan, but he is nervous about borrowing money or sinking capital into another risky project. With the PFS lease, he says, the tribe still has control if the project turns sour.

"How can you blame Leon?" said Ward, who is one of the project's main opponents. "What's he going to do? Grow food? No one's going to buy a tomato off this land."

But some Goshutes say the plan is tearing the tribe apart.

"The split is with the native traditions," said Margene Bullcreek, who grew up on the reservation and lives there now. "We believe in our reservation as Mother Earth and we're allowing our Mother Earth to be contaminated if we bring this waste onto our reservation."

It's a far cry from the old days, when thousands of Goshutes roamed the Utah and Nevada desert, gathering native plants and taking down the occasional deer.

That changed in the first half of the 19th century, when the first Mormon settlers arrived. They pushed the Goshutes west into the dry, desolate Skull Valley -- once just a pass-through area for the tribe.

The Mormon settlement stretched as far as Iosepa, a town established in 1889 to house converts from Hawaii. Today, the cemetery just north of the Goshute reservation, dotted with gravestones in English and Polynesian, is all that remains.

But the West Desert was not left untouched. As World War II began, Tooele County's vast salt flat and uninhabited terrain drew the military's attention.

In 1940, 1.8 million acres were turned into the Wendover Army Air Base. It's where B-29 crews honed their skills at a new technique: how to drop an atomic bomb without being destroyed by the resulting shock wave.

Today, the West Desert includes the Utah Test and Training Range, where the Air Force tests F-16 fighters and cruise missiles; Dugway Proving Grounds, a test center for chemical and biological weapons; Deseret Chemical Depot, which holds the Army's stockpile of nerve and blistering agents; and the Tooele Chemical Demilitarization Facility, where those chemicals are being destroyed.

Other industries followed on the military's heels. They include Safety Kleen, which runs a hazardous waste dump and incinerator; and Envirocare of Utah, which stores low-level radioactive waste and wants to take higher-level radioactive materials left over from dismantled nuclear power plants.

And then there's Magnesium Corp. of America, which regularly tops a federal list of the nation's biggest air polluters. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the plant released 57 million pounds of toxic air pollutants in 1998, mostly chlorine gas and hydrochloric acid.

Toxic Past: If the nation's spent nuclear fuel ends up in the West Desert, it would be in keeping with the region's toxic past.

"There is certainly a history of getting on bended knee out here for these types of projects," said Steve Erickson of Downwinders, one of the groups opposing the Goshute project. "The Great Basin has often been perceived as a vast, useless wasteland."

Tooele County's government has helped keep the door open by signing a contract with PFS. The consortium says it will guarantee payments of up to $300 million for the county's support and services.

County Planner Nicole Cline said the county is only protecting itself.

"It's not that Tooele County wants or will ever want to be the nation's dumping ground. We oppose that concept," she said. "Hey, we're going to be a watchdog on this thing, and if we see a truck being mishandled, we're going to be the first ones to scream because it's in our backyard."

Opposition: Tooele Mayor Charlie Roberts said most residents seem unconcerned.

"I see an occasional letter to the editor in the local paper, but it's not the issue you'd think it would be," Roberts said.

The city's population went from 13,000 to 24,000 in the past six years, and residents are more worried about schools and rush-hour traffic.

But awareness of the project might be increasing: earlier this month, pro-PFS County Commissioner Gary Griffith was voted out of office in favor of Democrat Gene White, who campaigned on his opposition to the proposal.

There is plenty of opposition outside of Tooele County.

Leading the charge is Gov. Mike Leavitt, who first said the project would go through "over my dead body" and even tried to take control of the roads around the reservation as a way to block any progress.

He has support from Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson and others who think transporting the waste on Utah's rail lines could lead to a catastrophe. They are joined by California, which argues such a disaster could indefinitely shut down Interstate 80 and hurt the state's exports.

Even Rep. Jim Hansen, a traditional foe of the environmentalists, has come out against the project and may have the most potent argument of all. Because the land lies under airspace used for the Utah Test and Training Range, he says, the casks could be hit by a wayward cruise missile or F-16. Or it could force the Air Force to limit use of the range, which could expose the nearby Hill Air Force Base to a shutdown.

Despite the protests, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already approved the safety measures for the project, and Bear says it's time for outsiders to admit they can't stop the project.

"They want us to be self-determined and they want us to be self-governed, and yet when we make these judgments, they don't like it," Bear said. "All Indians, all nations, we're all at a crossroads right now. We're going to have to support our people. We don't expect the state of Utah to do it. We don't expect the federal government to do it anymore, like we used to. We want to do it ourselves, and that's what we're trying to do now."

-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

Aiming for 'big powers'

Washington Times
November 24, 2000
Embassy Row News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
James Morrison
http://208.246.212.80/world/embassy-20001124213420.htm

Former French Premier Michel Rocard, in his effort to control the illegal global market of small arms, is taking aim at some "big powers" that he accuses of trying to weaken the initiative.

Mr. Rocard, in a telephone interview with reporters in Washington, listed the United States, Russia, China, Egypt, Algeria, India and Israel as the leading countries advocating limits on proposals to track the sale of handguns, assault rifles and other light weapons that fuel many of the world's conflicts.

Mr. Rocard said "parochial big-power interests impede the preparatory process" of a conference on small arms planned next year by the United Nations.

Those countries want to restrict controls to the illegal sale of weapons, while Mr. Rocard, co-chairman of the Eminent Persons' Group on the Smalls Arms, supports controls to track the legal sale of weapons because many of them end up on the black market.

-------- colombia

New York Times
November 24, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/world/24BRIE.html

COLOMBIA: APPEAL FOR PEACE TALKS President Andrés Pastrana urged the FARC, the country's biggest rebel group, to renew talks to end the civil war, now in its 36th year. Mr. Pastrana gave the rebels a zone in southern Colombia to try to propel peace talks forward, but the talks have gone nowhere. The period of rebel dominion over the zone expires Dec. 7, and Mr. Pastrana must decide whether to extend the deadline or send in troops. (AP)

---

A Faulty Colombia Plan

New York Times
November 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/opinion/L24COL.html

To the Editor:
Re "Key House Leader Withdraws Support for Colombia Aid Plan" (news article, Nov. 17):

It has long been clear that Plan Colombia, the $7.5 billion strategy drafted jointly by American and Colombian officials and passed by Congress, will neither stop drugs from reaching Americans nor stabilize Colombia. But new objections from Representative Benjamin A. Gilman, formerly one of the plan's strongest supporters, show how awful the plan truly is.

Mr. Gilman may have problems only with the details, but as history shows, the whole concept of fighting drugs with force is always a failure. The outcome of Plan Colombia can only be more violence and increasing involvement by the United States in the affairs of South America.

STEPHEN YOUNG Roselle, Ill., Nov. 18, 2000

-------- drug war

Study of Marijuana for AIDS Is Approved

New York Times
November 24, 2000
National News Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/national/24NATI.html

SAN MATEO, Calif., Nov. 23 (AP) - The Drug Enforcement Administration has approved a study in which a California county will give government-grown marijuana to 60 AIDS patients to assess its benefits.

The 12-week study in San Mateo County, south of San Francisco, could begin as early as January, said Mike Nevin, a county supervisor. The study was approved on Wednesday.

In 1996, Californians passed Proposition 215, which allows the possession, cultivation and use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. Putting the measure into effect has proved difficult, however, as lawmakers struggle to agree on prescription and distribution guidelines.

---

New York Times
November 24, 2000
Metro Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/nyregion/24MBRF.html

NEW JERSEY

MIDDLETOWN: MARIJUANA ARRESTS A man and his nephew were arrested and charged with running what the police called a marijuana growing and packaging operation out of their house in Middletown. The police raided the home of the man, James Klitsch, 48, and his nephew, John Lowing, 39, early Tuesday, and said they found about 120 marijuana plants in the house, some as high as four feet. The police also seized packaged marijuana, equipment and $10,000 in cash. The two men were being held in the Monmouth County Jail in lieu of $50,000 bail each. (AP)

---

Drug smuggler spared death in '98 killing of border agent

Washington Times
November 24, 2000
By Jerry Seper THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://208.246.212.80/national/default-2000112422211.htm

A drug smuggler convicted in Arizona in the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent faces life in prison rather than the death penalty at his January sentencing as part of a deal with Mexico to spare his life in exchange for his extradition to this country to stand trial.

Bernardo Velarde Lopez, 28, was convicted Tuesday by a federal jury in Tucson in the June 1998 killing of Border Patrol Agent Alexander Kirpnick, gunned down near Nogales, Ariz., while he and his partner sought to arrest four men hauling marijuana into this country.

Agent Kirpnick, 27, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1988, died from a gunshot wound to the head. He and his partner, Agent Steven Heiden, had responded to investigate "hits" from sensors hidden inside Potrero Canyon, just west of Nogales, a favorite route for drug smugglers.

Velarde was found guilty in the murder of a federal agent and possession of a firearm during a drug-trafficking crime, resulting in death, conspiracy and drug charges.

The United States agreed with Mexican authorities not to seek the death penalty in exchange for Velarde's extradition to this country to stand trial. Facing a life sentence without the possibility of parole, Velarde will be sentenced Jan. 25 before U.S. District Judge John Roll in Tucson.

Federal prosecutors said Velarde, of Nogales, Mexico, and three other men were attempting to smuggle 110 pounds of marijuana over the border when they were confronted by Agents Kirpnick and Heiden. Agent Kirpnick was shot as he disappeared behind some brush while attempting to arrest Velarde, prosecutors said.

The agent was rushed to a Tucson hospital, where he died four hours later.

After the shooting, all four suspects fled into the desert, although Agent Heiden located Manuel Gamez as he sought to return on foot to Mexico. Gamez later was convicted on charges of marijuana smuggling and sentenced to 12 years in prison. He identified Velarde as the shooter.

Velarde was arrested in Nogales by Mexican police and extradited to the United States to face trial in Agent Kirpnick's death five months later.

Agent Kirpnick's June 3, 1998, death was followed five weeks later by the murder of Border Patrol Agents Susan Lynn Rodriguez, 28, and Ricardo Guillermo Salinas, 24. They were killed during a gunfight in a cornfield near San Benito, Texas, about 20 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border.

The two agents had responded to a call for assistance to search for a murder suspect and died when the suspect stepped out of the field and fired numerous shots at them with an AK-47 semiautomatic rifle.

Agent Rodriguez, the daughter of retired El Paso Deputy Border Patrol Chief Steve Williams, was the first female Border Patrol agent killed in the line of duty. The suspected gunman, Ernest Moore, 25, was wounded during the Texas shootout and died 10 hours later at a hospital. Police said Moore was the son of a Harlingen, Texas, police detective.

The deaths of Agents Kirpnick, Rodriguez and Salinas prompted the Justice Department to review the Border Patrol's operational policies, while insisting that the agency remain aggressive in its enforcement efforts. The review was led by Deputy Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., and proposed ways to better protect the agents who work along the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border.

"We still plan to be aggressive in our enforcement of the immigration laws," Mr. Holder said at the time. "We will not back down. We are determined to do the job that the American people expect us to do on the border with regard to illegal immigration and also the flow of drugs."

Part of the Holder plan included the recruitment of 1,000 new Border Patrol agents, most of whom have been and will be assigned to the U.S.-Mexico border. The recruitment effort continues.

-------- myanmar

Crony Capitalists

New York Times
November 24, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/opinion/L24MYA.html

To the Editor:

You assert that "the rise of crony capitalism in the ashes of failed socialism is hardly unique to Myanmar" ("The New Burmese Leisure Class: Army Capitalists," news article, Nov. 21).

In fact, crony capitalism is, for traceable historical reasons, endemic in the nominally post-colonial world and has characterized adamantly anti-socialist economies like those of Kenya, Nigeria, Papua New Guinea and Fiji.

ANDREW HORN Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 21, 2000 The writer is a fellow at the W. E. B. DuBois Institute, Harvard University.

-------- russia

Russian Dismisses Threat of Sanctions

Washington Post
Friday, November 24, 2000; Page A50
By David Hoffman Washington Post Foreign Service
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55180-2000Nov23.html

MOSCOW, Nov. 23 -- Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov today brushed aside threats of possible sanctions by the United States over Russia's decision to continue sales of conventional weapons to Iran.

"You cannot speak to Russia in the language of ultimatums," Ivanov told reporters in Warsaw at the end of a visit to Poland. "The language of sanctions is not the kind of language you can use with Russia."

His comments came on the heels of warnings from Congress and the Clinton administration that the United States may impose sanctions if the Kremlin abandons a 1995 pledge not to sign new contracts to sell tanks and other weapons to Iran. Ivanov notified Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright four days before the U.S. presidential election that the Russian government will not observe the pledge after Dec. 1.

Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, who disclosed Ivanov's note, said Russia blamed disclosure of significant details of the deal before the election. However, U.S. officials expressed belief that this was just a pretext and speculated that Russia is seeking lucrative new arms contracts in Iran.

The 1995 agreement was signed by Vice President Gore and then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin. It waived U.S. sanctions for past Russian arms sales to Iran in return for a promise that Moscow would complete those contracts by the end of 1999 and would not sign new contracts with Iran after that. The Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement drew fire from congressional Republicans who have been critical of the Clinton administration's engagement with Russia.

Although Ivanov did not specifically comment today on the Iran letter, the Interfax news agency, citing "sources in Russian power structures," confirmed that Russia is pulling out of the 1995 agreement and said the decision "reflects positive changes" in Iran.

Konstantin Kosachev, deputy head of the Duma committee for foreign affairs, said in a radio interview that Russia was "forced" to make the deal with Gore in 1995.

"We remember how difficult were the times in 1995. We remember how Russia was interested in the support of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and developing normal relations with the United States," he said. "This is why this agreement was bondage for Russia, as they say. It was forced, but at that stage, it corresponded to Russian interests."

He said Russia is breaking the deal now because "Russia simply had no time to carry out some of the contracts that it was supposed to complete, and second, there exists a huge and very profitable for Russia range of cooperation. These are supplies of spare parts to the equipment which had been provided earlier for conventional weapons--fighter planes, tanks, cannons. . . ."

Kosachev said Russia is interested in supplying Iran for another decade. Iran buys about 6 percent of Russia's military exports, he said, and "for Russia this is enormous money."

The Gore-Chernomyrdin agreement covered non-nuclear weapons such as tanks and airplanes. But in response to the threat of sanctions, Russian officials responded today by repeating an assertion that Russia adheres to its international obligations not to proliferate weapons of mass destruction.

The United States has long pressed Russia to curb transfer of nuclear and missile technology to Iran. The United States has imposed sanctions on some Russian scientific institutes suspected of supplying materials or designs for nuclear weapons to Iran.

Russia has recently reorganized its arms export agency and remains a major exporter of conventional arms. Iran is reportedly interested in purchasing Russian-made S-300 surface-to-air missiles, as well as attack planes, shoulder-fired missile launchers and helicopters.

---

Money Woes May Close Russian Museum

Associated Press
November 24, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Sakharov-Museum.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- The artifacts of Soviet repression and post-Soviet human rights abuses displayed in Moscow's Sakharov Museum may soon have nowhere to hang.

The museum, dedicated to dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov, will close its doors next month unless it finds new funding, its director warns. And its painful, powerful exhibits -- letters Sakharov wrote from internal exile, barbed wire from gulag labor camps, sketches by children made homeless by Russia's current war in Chechnya -- will be packed away.

Although its content is highly political, the museum's woes don't stem from government pressure. The problem, director Yuri Samodurov says, is that Russia lacks a culture of corporate giving, wealthy private donors and experience managing private, nonprofit organizations.

Also, as memories of Soviet horrors fade amid the time-consuming turmoil of today's Russia, fewer and fewer people seem interested in what the museum has to say.

``We are searching with all our strength for Russian investment, but it's not working,'' Samodurov said. ``In Russia there is no experience and no tradition of nongovernment museums. We are discovering for ourselves how to survive.''

So far, to museum workers' dismay, that has meant they rely almost entirely on U.S. and other foreign funding to tell a very Russian story. Since opening in 1996, the Sakharov Museum and human rights center has failed to find Russian donors and has exhausted $1.7 million in start-up money that came largely from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

A U.S. diplomat in Moscow said this week that a new grant was under negotiation. If approved, it would provide about a six-month reprieve but would not solve the museum's deeper problems, the diplomat warned.

Other non-governmental organizations in Russia pin the museum's troubles on the country's legal system: It does not allow companies to write off charity donations on taxes, and it taxes NGOs more heavily than in the West.

Also, the museum's political bent and U.S. backing may be scaring domestic investors away, Samodurov said.

The museum, in an elegant two-story building that once housed a police station, documents the dissident movement and mass persecutions by the Soviet secret police. Displays include an execution order by dictator Josef Stalin and guitars used to accompany protest songs.

It also highlights more recent abuses, particularly in two wars in Chechnya over the past decade. Human rights groups accuse Russian troops in the breakaway republic of summary executions of civilians and prisoners and of looting Chechen homes -- charges Russian commanders deny.

``Our society and government even now don't understand what we are rejecting of our past, and what we are preserving. Our museum has a very clear position on this point, and it is not popular,'' Samodurov said.

Meanwhile, memorial ceremonies for the millions killed or exiled in Soviet repressions shrink every year as labor camp survivors die off and former democracy activists focus on surviving in the new Russia.

``Many people today view (the museum) with indifference,'' said Yuri Zapol, president of Russia's biggest advertising company, Video International.

Zapol was among the few executives who responded to the museum's appeals for corporate help. He has helped publicize its predicament and has promised a personal donation. But there are no plans for the company to sponsor the museum, he said.

``In the history of Russia there weren't that many people on the scale of Sakharov. Unquestionably, our society needs such people,'' he said. ``But not everybody is of my opinion.''

Sakharov, a physicist who helped develop the Soviet nuclear bomb, later became an eloquent, outspoken critic of the Communist regime. In 1979, he was banished to the city of Gorky. Released by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986, Sakharov helped spearhead the democracy movement in the waning days of the Communist regime before he died in 1989.

-------- space

NEWS OF OTHER LIFE FORMS

DayTips' Strange News: 11/24/00
DayTips.Com Daily Lists
Strange News

Paul Allen -- the co-founder, with Bill Gates, of Microsoft -- is reportedly using his enormous wealth to aid in the search for life in outer space. According to the Seattle Times, Allen -- whose fortune is estimated to be in excess of $28 billion -- has donated nearly $12 million to fund a radio telescope "farm" in California that will search the heavens for radio waves. His interests are not totally out of this world, though. Allen, according to the publication, has also donated $4 million to help the city of Seattle finish an outdoor museum and he is active in a music center for kids dedicated to his hero, the late Jimi Hendrix.

-------- switzerland

A Little Country, a Big Army: Switzerland Debates Its Budget

New York Times
November 24, 2000
By ELIZABETH OLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/world/24SWIS.html

WALLBACH, Switzerland - With 360,000 soldiers at the ready, Switzerland has one of the larger armies in the world, and it is part of every Swiss man's life from 18 to 20. It is also one of the most expensive armies.

Now Swiss officials want to streamline the army, cutting it to 120,000 people, with 80,000 reservists. But to the consternation of the government, the shape of the new army could be decided in significant part by a countrywide referendum on Sunday.

If citizens approve a proposal on the ballot, the military's $3 billion budget would be cut by one-third, a move that Swiss leaders say would cripple the country's military ability, and cost thousands of civilian jobs.

But the Socialist Party and development-aid groups that want to use the money cut from the military budget for social causes and international peace disagree.

They argue that since the cold war ended, other countries have cut their military expenses by one-third, in contrast to only a one-tenth reduction in Switzerland. And for a small country, with just seven million people, the army is far too large, they say.

"The right method is to compare costs," said Werner Marti, a major in the infantry, of Glarus. The cost per soldier in Switzerland is more than one-third higher than in France and Norway and more than four times higher than in Austria, he said. "The security situation has changed very quickly and starkly, and we only need a simple army for our country," he said.

Those opposed to a large army also believe that the country could do without expensive high-tech items like its Leopard 2 tanks and its FA-18 fighter jets.

Even though Switzerland has not been in a war in nearly two centuries, the country's president, Adolf Ogi, who also serves as defense minister, is campaigning across the country against the initiative. And he has powerful backing, including his own Swiss Peoples Party, which surged to popularity in parliamentary elections a year ago.

"Armed conflicts remain a reality everywhere in the world, and many not far away from Switzerland," he said. Crises in the Balkans have twice brought large inflows of refugees to Switzerland.

The Swiss military budget has already fallen by 28 percent since 1987, and further cuts would be "unacceptable and dangerous," according to the government. Also at risk are as many as 20,000 military-related civilian jobs.

Underlying the government's vigorous lobbying is a debate about whether Switzerland will remain neutral and isolationist or move, as most government ministers prefer, into the broader European community, with the defense commitments that would entail.

Closer to home, they worry that the vote will test national sentiment for its army. The country considered abolishing the army in 1989; that was rejected by 65 percent of voters. A decade later, some believe it is time for more than an overhaul. But Alfred Boll, a lieutenant colonel who is a computer services salesman in civilian life, said, "For real protection, you have to spend your money."

His colleague, Jack Rohner, also a lieutenant colonel and a computer company owner, would take army involvement a step further.

"In Yugoslavia, we just sat there and stared while people were being killed, mutilated and raped by the thousands," he said. "If we want to be a member of the international family, we have to be capable to do something; that is the price you pay."

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

Time Is Short for U.S. to Join the International Criminal Court

New York Times
November 24, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/world/24COUR.html

More than 100 nations will be watching the Clinton administration over the next two weeks for an indication whether the United States will sign the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court.

The court would be the first such permanent body set up to try individuals accused of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.

On Monday a two-week preparatory meeting is to begin at the United Nations. The United States is expected to announce its final position during this session.

Until Dec. 31, a nation can indicate its support for the court by signing the treaty, even if ratification is not immediately likely.

So far, 115 nations - including all of Europe and the NATO governments, except the United States - have signed and 22 countries have ratified the treaty. After Dec. 31, a country will have to ratify before it can join.

Administration officials have said they support an international court. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright was instrumental in establishing temporary tribunals for the Balkans and Rwanda, which are seen as precursors of a permanent body.

But objections from the Pentagon have forced the administration to demand a guarantee that no American officer or civilian official on duty abroad will fall under its jurisdiction.

Senator Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who is chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, has vowed that the court would be "dead on arrival" if the administration sends the treaty for ratification. Diplomats at the United Nations assume this view would be strengthened by a Republican administration in Washington, and look to the departing Clinton administration as a last chance.

Richard Dicker, a counsel at Human Rights Watch, said that in mid- October, Washington in effect hardened its position against prosecution and offered the same opportunity to other non-signers if they pledged to try their own citizens charged with infractions, as the United States now does in courts-martial and civilian courts. This proposal violates the 1998 treaty establishing the court, he said, and moreover is unnecessary.

"The court's statute, the rules of procedure and evidence and the elements of crimes more than adequately address the risk of an unjustified prosecution of a United States national," he said. "An outright exemption would codify a two- tier system of justice: one for the United States and another for the rest of the world."

President Arthur Robinson of Trinidad and Tobago, who in 1989 first introduced the motion in the General Assembly that ultimately established the court, said in an interview in New York this week that it was "a most significant achievement in the history of mankind."

"This court recognizes that persons can be held individually responsible for violations of international law," he said. "And the statute does not differentiate between persons in authority and anyone else," which he called a "dramatic step" in international law.

Mr. Robinson recalled that it was the United States that had established the principle of trials for the worst crimes against humanity and crimes of war by insisting on the Nazi trial at Nuremberg, when Stalin and Churchill were satisfied to have offenders shot without a hearing.

"The U.S. wanted trials so that the world could see the gravity of the offenses," he said. "Nuremberg established individual guilt. Now there is a tremendous acceptance internationally for this kind of court."

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

Money and politics

Washington Times
November 24, 2000
Inside the Beltway
John McCaslin
Political tidbits and other shenanigans from around the nation's capital.

"I graduated with honors from the Naval Academy in 1984 and served as a captain in the United States Marine Corps," writes an Arnold, Md., resident. "I served as both a logistics officer and as a company commander for the Headquarters Company Command Element 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit.

"During the time our unit was deployed to the Persian Gulf (1987-1988) we were awarded the Navy Unit Citation and Meritorious Unit Citation and I received the Navy Achievement Medal.

"While deployed outside the United States, I sent back my taxes. I suspect that they arrived without a postmark, yet the U.S. government processed my taxes."

State of the nation

As an active-duty U.S. Marine stationed in Virginia - but registered to vote in Florida - Jim Diehl, upon return from an overseas assignment, went to the Virginia Division of Motor Vehicles in Springfield to obtain a driver's license.

"I checked the block NO when asked if I wanted a voter-registration card for Virginia," he tells Inside the Beltway. "Curiously, I received not one, but two voter-registration cards. It makes you wonder how many you get if you check 'yes.'"

Reagan progress

The 650-ton island house has been placed atop the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan, to be christened at Virginia's Newport News Shipbuilding on March 4, 2001.

In the absence of her ailing husband, Nancy Reagan will serve as the ship's sponsor. Fittingly, just before the island house, or control center, was lowered onto the deck, the prospective commanding officer of the ship, Capt. John W. "Bill" Goodwin, removed the gold aviator wings from his uniform and placed them forever beneath the towering structure.

Next to the wings, he placed a pure silver-and-gold medallion, minted after one of President Reagan's "Four Pillars of Freedom," and inscribed with the words "National Pride."

John McCaslin can be reached at 202/636-3284 or by e-mail at mccasl@twtmail.com.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

A Cruel Choice in New Delhi: Jobs vs. a Safer Environment

New York Times
November 24, 2000
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/world/24INDI.html

NEW DELHI, Nov. 23 - This teeming city of 14 million is one of the smoggiest in the world, and it is parted by a river that has been compared to a sewer. But after the Supreme Court took steps last week to compel Delhi to clean itself up, thousands of people took to the streets in violent protests, demanding that the dirty old factories stay open.

Mobs torched buses, threw stones and blocked major roads on Monday. Factory owners and workers poured into the streets again Tuesday. And schools for more than three million children were closed Tuesday and Wednesday.

The city was calm today, but workers say they will be back on the steps of the Supreme Court next Tuesday when it holds another hearing on whether to hold Delhi, the state that includes the capital, in contempt for failing to close what Delhi officials estimate at more than 90,000 small factories - many of which pollute residential areas - that employ close to a million people.

It is a classic developing-world conflict between competing priorities: clean air and water to protect public health, and jobs to help struggling workers survive.

The workers' panic rose in the last week as Delhi state officials fanned out to shutter some of the worst polluters after contempt proceedings began in the Supreme Court. After riots broke out Monday, Delhi's lawyer begged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to "go slow" in requiring the state to close the factories, citing intelligence reports that protesters planned to rush the court itself and Parliament.

But the Supreme Court, tired of waiting for Delhi to shut down the industries - the court has issued repeated orders and deadlines for action since 1996 - had clearly lost patience, saying, "The court will not withdraw its orders just because hooligans have taken to the streets."

The Supreme Court said it based its repeated orders to close the polluting industries on the premise that health is the overriding concern.

Large swaths of residential Delhi are pocked with tiny factories, many of them little more than dank sweatshops on the ground floors of tenements. One neighborhood whose lanes are lined with these units is Vishwash Nagar, in the northeastern part of New Delhi.

Dirty water can be seen gushing from drainage pipes affixed to the sides of tenements into narrow open drains along both sides of the streets. The water then flows into the Shahdara Drain, a dirty creek that feeds into the once magnificent but now heavily polluted Yamuna River.

Vishwash Nagar's streets are clogged with bicycle rickshaws, pushcarts and scooters, but its normally industrious workers were idle Wednesday, standing in angry clumps in the streets under the smog that obscured all hints of blue sky.

The factory owners, on strike against the court ruling, have pulled down their metal shutters.

Ashok Mehta, who owns a shop that makes industrial molds, led the way into the two dark, windowless rooms where his 10 men labor over three oil-spattered machines. Faded posters of Hindu gods are taped to the walls. The smell of oil fumes hangs in the close air.

"We're sandwiched between the Supreme Court, which says we're hooligans, and the government, which is coming to close our units," Mr. Mehta said.

Two of his men had come in that day though they were not working.

Sanjay Kumar, the 20-year-old son of a fruit vendor who bicycles to work, said the $35 a month he earns there helps his family survive. He wondered how he would find another job if the factories were closed.

His gaunt 25-year-old co-worker, Vinod Kumar, who makes $55 a month after five years there, said he is the sole breadwinner supporting his mother and father. "If these factories are relocated or closed down, we will die with empty stomachs," he said.

Back outside, the workers clustered together, grumbling. A portly man in a white sweater vest stood at the fringes of the crowd, and it was not until he had left them behind and crossed the Shahdara Drain and a busy thoroughfare that he felt safe enough to talk, though he said he was afraid of retaliation and would not let his name be used.

He is a real estate agent and officer in the Vishwash Nagar Residents Welfare Association, and he wanted it known that the air, water and noise pollution the factories produce is a curse on the neighborhood. The owners rent the ground floors of the tenements, then don't pay up and refuse to move, he said. Many use powerful spray painters that produce noxious fumes.

"We live here," he said. "We have to bear the brunt of this pollution."

The Delhi government moved to close down the polluting factories only in the last week after the Supreme Court asked city authorities to explain why Delhi should not be held in contempt for failing to act after the earlier orders.

Delhi officials admitted in court that they licensed 15,000 industrial units in residential areas in violation of the court's earlier orders.

But Delhi may yet get some relief from the Indian government, which has jurisdiction over the capital city's master plan. The federal urban development minister, Jagmohan (he uses only one name), told Parliament today that the government may change the definition of a household industry to allow more nonpolluting industrial units to operate legally in residential areas.

"Government is keen to find a fair and just solution for all concerned," he said.

The court is requiring that factories operating illegally in residential areas be closed and relocated, but some environmental researchers question this approach. Delhi is growing at such a rapid rate that it would likely swallow up the same industries again in a matter of years, they say.

The experts say the factories are believed to pose a greater danger to water than to air quality. Scooters, motor rickshaws and diesel buses are responsible for most of the air pollution that gives so many Delhi residents persistent hacking coughs, they said.

R. K. Pachauri, director of the Tata Energy Research Institute, a nonprofit group that researches environmental issues, said the city and the central government have both failed to document the extent of the problem posed by industrial units in residential areas or to help the small operators clean up their operations.

"What we're seeing is the Supreme Court jumping in because there's a vacuum," he said.

---

Effort to Cut Warming Lacks Time and Unity

New York Times
November 24, 2000
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/science/24CLIM.html

THE HAGUE, Friday, Nov. 24 - The vise tightened sharply early this morning on negotiators seeking a treaty to curb global warming, yet many delegates, even as they headed into the final 24 hours of talks, said they remained far from consensus.

Disputes festered among blocs of countries large and small, rich and poor, over what rules, tools and penalties should be used to stem the flow of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Scientists say those gases, from smokestacks, tailpipes, and burning forests, are contributing to a potentially calamitous warming trend.

Some bleary-eyed lobbyists from private environmental groups said they saw progress in the form of a summary of key sticking points distributed late Thursday night. It contained language that they said could protect the atmosphere and satisfy the interests of dozens of countries.

"It seems to take care of the two worst ends of this environmentally," said Kalee Kreider, the director of climate programs for the National Environmental Trust, a private group based in Washington. And some delegates said that the penalties for failing to meet commitments under the treaty appeared to be largely ironed out.

But some delegates, environmental groups, and lobbyists representing businesses affected by provisions governing fossil-fuel use said the summary still contained land mines that could destroy the effort.

The proposed treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, was drafted by more than 170 countries in 1997 in Japan, and this session was intended to complete the fine print. If enacted, it would commit three dozen industrialized countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 to at least 5 percent below emissions in 1990. So far, no industrialized countries have ratified the pact.

The European Union and the United States remain far apart on key provisions, including the amount of credit a country could get by investing in climate-protection projects abroad and how much credit toward emissions cuts could be gained by using forests to absorb carbon dioxide.

And developing countries, including giants like China and oil exporters like Saudi Arabia, pressed for large payments from industrial powers to help them adapt to impending changes in climate and sea level.

"They have caused the problems, they have made the whole world unsafe," said Sani Daura, the Nigerian minister of the environment. "We have the highest stakes, and unfortunately they have not been able to come to terms with our concerns."

Many environmental campaigners had complained about parts of the treaty that they said would allow countries to get credit toward emissions goals simply by protecting existing forests, which sop up carbon dioxide, the dominant greenhouse gas.

They had also denounced treaty language that would allow rich countries to buy emissions credits from Russia, which gained the credits simply because its economy - and emissions - had shrunk after the fall of Communism.

Both options would be constrained under the fresh summary of the text, which was issued late Thursday night by Jan Pronk, the president of the meeting, called the Sixth Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, better known here as Cop 6.

Through the first nine days of the two-week meeting, Mr. Pronk, the gruff, plain-spoken Dutch environment minister, assumed the role of referee, public advocate, and cattle prod, pressing legions of delegates to work late into the night to hash out details.

After hearing from the main negotiating blocs, he distilled their essential positions into 13 slim pages, prompting hundreds of delegates, lobbyists, and observers to sprawl on the blue carpet, sifting the text for problems or progress.

The summary infuriated some delegates from wealthier countries, who saw a heavy-handed effort to impede plans for an unfettered trading system that would allow one country to get credit toward emissions goals for investing in cleaner power plants or other new technologies abroad.

But Mr. Pronk, at a news conference Thursday night, said the summary was a pragmatic effort to cut through competing interests.

One sign that a compromise might be achievable was the observation by many participants that no one seemed particularly satisfied.

"We need a decision, a decision on all key issues," said Mr. Pronk, who turned the screws at a news conference Thursday night by noting that the meeting hall had to be vacated for a convention by Saturday afternoon.

The environmental and financial stakes are enormous, with the treaty constituting a pioneering effort to create a binding agreement under which industrialized countries would not only cut emissions, but invest billions of dollars in projects in poorer countries to prevent new emissions as their economies grow.

---

Climate Delegates Reject Compromise

Associated Press
November 24, 2000 Filed at 2:34 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Climate-Conference.html

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- Negotiators at environmental talks here Friday abandoned attempts to reach a detailed agreement on controlling global warming and were instead discussing a broad political statement, a conference spokesman said.

The conference was likely to conclude Saturday with a joint statement of principles, including some numbers and specifics on some of the issues, conference sources said. Such a statement would be a significant retreat from the original objective of filling in all the details left open three years ago when nations agreed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gas, but would still be a step toward a global warming treaty.

``The way forward now, given the difficulties, is to have a broad political agreement'' with technical details to be worked out in the next few months, spokesman Michael Williams said.

``We have hundreds of pages of technical documents. We are not going to be able to grind through it all by tomorrow,'' he said.

Both of the two main negotiating blocs at the U.N. conference criticized an emergency proposal by conference chairman Jan Pronk as unacceptable.

European Union delegates said Pronk's compromise plan to break a deadlock over fundamental issues was bad for the environment, allowing countries too much leeway to avoid honoring greenhouse gas reductions they committed to three years ago in Kyoto, Japan.

The United States, which leads the other main negotiating group and was widely seen as the main beneficiary of the new proposal, released a statement saying it considered the plan ``unacceptably imbalanced.'' The delegation canceled its daily press briefing, saying it did not want to jeopardize negotiations by airing details at that stage.

French Environment Minister Dominique Voynet, representing the EU, said the plan would actually permit greenhouse gas emissions to increase, instead of forcing them to decline.

However, both sides pledged their commitment to reach a deal.

The major contentious issues surround U.S.-sponsored proposals that involve ways to meet the emission reduction targets with alternatives to scaling back the burning of fossil fuels.

The United States, the world's leading polluter, along with Canada, Japan and Australia don't want any limitations on creative ways to achieve compliance.

Last week, the United States proposed among other things, that nations should be awarded credits for existing agricultural and forestry lands because they absorb the key greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and thereby offset some of the emissions that scientists say are warming the atmosphere.

Opponents say such programs give credit for doing nothing and would mean countries could pollute more than they otherwise would have been allowed to.

Under the Pronk plan, ``you tolerate a 3 percent across the board increase in emissions by 2010,'' Voynet said. ``We had an agreement for minus five point something. We are not here to undo that.''

Environmental organizations were resting all their hopes on the EU. As delegations remained behind closed doors formulating their positions on the latest proposals, activists marched to the EU discussion room chanting: ``EU stay strong; You can do it; save the climate.''

``We believe this is a win for the United States,'' said Jennifer Morgan of World Wildlife Fund.

The plan means that governments do not have to take action at home to reduce emissions, added Roda Verhayen of Friends of the Earth.

``The EU needs to face down the U.S. The U.S. is hoping the EU will blink first. The EU must not blink,'' said Bill Hare of Greenpeace International.

European delegates said they are prepared to make a deal but not at any cost.

``We want the success of this conference,'' said German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin. ``But the benchmark for us is environmental integrity ...''

He said the proposal was so watered down that it was ``weaker than the text of the Kyoto Protocol,'' a 1997 treaty that set targets for global emissions reductions.

Negotiators from more than 180 countries are under pressure to strike a deal on reducing greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are heating up the earth's atmosphere. They have until Saturday to agree on ways of meeting targets for emissions cuts.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, worldwide emissions of heat-trapping gases must decline to 5.2 percent below their 1990 levels by 2012.

Carbon dioxide and other gases that store heat in the atmosphere are primarily produced by cars, power plants and factories.

Scientists believe a slight rise in earth's average temperature is already thawing polar ice caps, flooding low-lying islands in the sea and may be linked to hurricanes, decertification, and other extreme weather events.

---

Environment Climate Change Could Bankrupt Us by 2065

Lycos News
November 24, 2000
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/nov2000/2000L-11-24-11.html

THE HAGUE, The Netherlands, (ENS) - The sixth largest insurance company has warned that damage to property due to global warming could bankrupt the world by 2065.

Transportation is the fastest growing source of carbon emissions. (Photos courtesy David Suzuki Foundation)

Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki, director of general insurance development at CGNU, told delegates attending the international climate change summit in The Hague that the rate of damage caused by changing weather will exceed the world's wealth.

CGNU is a top five European life insurer and the United Kingdom's largest insurance group.

"Property damage is rising very rapidly, at something like 10 percent a year," he told a briefing at the 6th Conference of Parties (COP 6) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, yesterday. "We've still not yet really begun to see the effects of climate change in the West. What we are seeing so far is largely the result of more people living in areas which are becoming more dangerous.

"But once this thing begins to happen, it will accelerate extremely rapidly, as the IPCC report makes clear."

Dlugolecki contributed to a Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report due out next year. The IPCC consists of more than 2,500 scientists from around the world, and its first assessment report in 1990 was used as the basis for negotiating the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Dlugolecki said that the current rate of growth of damage of 10 percent a year will exceed Gross Domestic Product by 2065. He added that the insurance industry was in danger of "running out of money," to deal with the disasters.

"This stark warning must help focus the minds of everyone sitting round the negotiation table at the climate summit," said Mark Johnston of Friends of the Earth. "We've all seen the storm warnings, now we are being told the financial forecast. These talks must not fail to produce a deal that will prevent future climate chaos."

Some scientists believe extreme weather events will become more frequent as the world warms.

Dlugolecki proposes a more radical approach to climate change than is being discussed at COP 6. The concept, known as contraction and convergence, has long been promoted by the London based group the Global Commons Institute (GCI).

GCI describes itself as an independent group of people whose aim is the protection of the "Global Commons." It fears the world may be driven beyond the threshold of ecological stability by the relentless pursuit of economic growth.

The 10 year old group has proposed a contraction and convergence framework under which all countries are allocated tradable quotas of a global emissions budget. As the global budget contracts the distribution between countries gradually converges, reaching equal per-capita levels.

Put simply, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases caused by human activity must be cut drastically, but every country should have an equal right to use the fuels which emit carbon. Huge cuts in emissions from developed nations should allow a corresponding emissions rise from developing countries.

"If Contraction and Convergence is adopted as the tool for managing CO2 and other greenhouse gases, there will be a transition to a point (convergence) where future entitlements to emit will have become proportional to population," says GCI on its website http://www.gci.org.uk/

In projections, GCI suggests 2045 will be the year of convergance. It says population forecasts could become critical and be the subject of negotiation. "However, it could be counterproductive to create an incentive for countries to increase their share of the global emissions budget through population growth," says CGI.

"We suggest that a starting position should be that Annex One countries are treated as stable from 2000 forward, and that non-Annex One countries are treated as stable from the Convergence year (2045) forward.

Annex One countries are the 38 industrialized countries, plus the European Union, committed to making cuts in greenhouse gas emissions under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

-------- genetics

Company Says Tracing Problem Corn May Take Weeks

New York Times
November 24, 2000
By BARNABY J. FEDER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/business/24CORN.html

It might take weeks to figure out how the insect-killing trait in genetically altered StarLink corn migrated into a variety of corn that was not supposed to be genetically modified, according to the Garst Seed Company, the producer of the corn.

Garst, which announced on Tuesday that it had encountered the biological mystery while testing samples of corn seed marketed as early as 1998, said it might also take weeks to sort out how widespread the problem was and whether any of the corn had made it into the food chain.

Garst's announcement was just the latest twist in a biotechnology controversy that began in September with the discovery that small amounts of corn from StarLink crops, which were supposed to be sold only for animal feed or industrial use, had shown up in taco shells and other food products.

StarLink corn, which was invented by Aventis CropScience, the agricultural division of the Aventis Corporation, contains a gene that produces a protein called Cry9c, which is toxic to corn borers and related insects. StarLink has no known health effects on humans, and similar toxins are widely used in agriculture. But the Environmental Protection Agency decided in 1997 that Aventis's technology should be kept out of human food because laboratory tests indicated that the protein might cause food allergies.

Biotechnology critics jumped on the unauthorized spread this year of StarLink into the food chain as proof of how hard genetically engineered traits are to segregate once they are in the agricultural marketplace. Many critics argue that much of the technology should be banned until stricter controls and better assessments of any potential long-range effects are in place.

Garst's announcement this week opened up a new front in the battle by suggesting that breakdowns in segregation can come even before the seed reaches the farmer.

"This blows a lot of assumptions out of the water," said Margaret Mellon, senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. "How do you regulate risks that manifest themselves even before the product is out there?"

The new controversy involves a strain of corn called 8481 that Garst bred for growing conditions in the heart of the Midwest.

One version of the corn sold in 1998 had the StarLink trait but the other, known as 8481IT, did not. Or so Garst thought. After a few farmers complained that tests showed their supposedly unmodified 8481 carried the StarLink gene, Garst began investigating and concluded that small amounts of StarLink had apparently made their way into 8481IT seed grown in 1997 for the 1998 market.

Garst said it did not know whether the transfer came during pollination as the seed was being grown or through mixing of seeds after harvest. Garst said there was no sign of a similar problem in 8481IT it raised in 1999 or 2000 but that some of the 1998 supply had been stored and sold in those years.

A bit of the 1998 supply might be on the market this year, as well, said Jeffrey W. Lacina, a spokesman for Garst, which is based in Slater, Iowa. But Garst is carefully screening all seed it is selling for the 2001 planting season to make sure that none of it contains the StarLink gene, Mr. Lacina said on Wednesday. Indeed, Garst said its push to make sure that this year's products are pure and to contact anyone who bought 8481 in the past is keeping it from tracking down what happened in 1997 as rapidly as it would like.

The Agriculture Department responded swiftly to Garst's announcement by calling for a meeting on Monday of industry representatives, researchers, policy experts and economists to discuss Garst's findings and the appropriate response. But Garst's timeline for gathering crucial data on the cause and scope of the problem suggests it may be hard to reach any conclusions.

The new controversy is also certain to be felt on Tuesday in Washington when the Environmental Protection Agency holds a meeting on Aventis's petition for an agency ruling that StarLink corn can be accepted in food for the next four years. One of the arguments is that so much of the StarLink corn has been accounted for and directed to permitted uses since the controversy erupted that whatever is left will not be enough to present a food-allergy threat.

The entire 2000 StarLink crop amounted to less than one-half of 1 percent of the nation's corn harvest. Aventis has withdrawn its registration for StarLink, and no new StarLink crops are to be planted in 2001.

A ruling allowing whatever StarLink is in the food chain to simply pass through might save millions of dollars in testing and food recalls. But critics say the 8481 developments this week raise new questions about how far beyond the StarLink crops themselves the potential risks run.

---

Breyer urges 'conversation' on genetics

USA Today
11/24/00- Updated 03:09 PM ET
By Richard Willing, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/ncsthu01.htm

Leading a rare public crusade, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is calling on scientists and others to help judges better understand what he calls the "moving target" that is the field of genetics.

Breyer called Tuesday for an "ongoing conversation" - new seminars, working groups and permanent research bodies - in which lawyers, economists, scientists and the biotechnology industry can advise judges not just on how science works but on the likely impact of court decisions.

"Rapid developments in genetic research have led to calls for legal change, namely (in) patent law," Breyer said during a conference at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

"But what about granting patents on a mere gene fragment (or) for the isolation of cell membrane receptors? I'm frightened to death as I approach words like that."

Breyer called Tuesday for an "ongoing conversation" - new seminars, working groups and permanent research bodies - in which lawyers, economists, scientists and the biotechnology industry can advise judges not just on how science works but on the likely impact of court decisions.

He identified three areas where the need is greatest: the patenting of genes, genetic testing to predict disease and storing genetic information on databases to convict criminals and free the innocent.

"Traditionally, some have believed that we need not know science but only law to make decisions," Breyer said. "This view is increasingly unrealistic. Since the implications of our decisions in the real world often can and should play a role in our legal decisions, the clearer our understanding of the relevant science, the better."

The Supreme Court is the quietest of the federal government's three branches, and it is rare for court members to speak out on public issues.

But Breyer's Kennedy School appearance marked at least the third time this year that he has given a speech or written a magazine article on the need to educate science-innocent judges.

"Our court consists of nine judges, seven men and two women, appointed for life," he explained to the Kennedy School audience. "Four of us were law teachers, eight of us were appellate court judges, six of us previously practiced law. None of us has a background in the natural sciences."

Observers such as Christopher Asplen, director of the Justice Department's National Commission on the Future of DNA Evidence, called Breyer's speech remarkable. "It's great that he has engaged on the issue and that he has showed such concern for how what the (Supreme) Court does plays out in the real world," Asplen said.

The Supreme Court has decided only one major genetics case, issuing a decision in 1980 that permitted the patenting of human and non-human genes. But that is likely to change, Breyer noted.

One likely issue: privacy questions raised by genetic tests that can predict disease risks not only for the person tested but for other family members.

"There is a sense that some people should have a chance to get at the private medical records (of others)," Breyer said. "But on the other hand, when the results of genetic testing can mean so much, people want more than ever to keep that private.''

-------- police

Police Seek Record of Bookstore Patrons in Bid for Drug Charge

New York Times
November 24, 2000
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/national/24BOOK.html

DENVER, Nov. 23 - In the course of raiding a 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 had been 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 constitutional guarantees 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 believed 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 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 it became moot later 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."

-------- spying

China Conducts a Secret Trial of U.S. Resident in Spy Case

New York Times
November 24, 2000
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/world/24CHIN.html

BEIJING, Nov. 23 - A United States resident arrested in China on spying charges after she helped publicize the government's crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement was tried today under a veil of secrecy.

The resident, Teng Chunyan, tipped off foreign reporters to Falun Gong protests and helped arrange interviews with members of the banned group. She was charged with passing intelligence to foreign organizations, according to diplomats and a Falun Gong spokeswoman.

Ms. Teng, a Chinese citizen with permanent-resident status in the United States, could face 10 years in prison if convicted - or more if the information she is accused of passing on is deemed highly important.

After a three-hour trial, Beijing's No. 1 Intermediate People's Court recessed without issuing a verdict, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. Ms. Teng was represented by two lawyers but her family members were barred, the rights group said.

An official with the prosecutor's office who identified himself as Mr. Zhao confirmed Ms. Teng's trial on spying charges, although court officials denied knowledge of the case.

The officials' reticence is typical for cases involving alleged state secrets, a concept intentionally left vague in partly unpublished laws. The campaign against Falun Gong is a sensitive political issue in China, where Communist officials are embarrassed by their inability to quash the popular meditation movement.

Ms. Teng joined Falun Gong last year in New Jersey, and her acupuncture clinic in New York became an informal clubhouse for the group, said Gail Rachlin, a Falun Gong spokeswoman in New York. Ms. Teng went to Beijing in February and, under the name Hannah Li, helped publicize the crackdown and was in contact with foreign journalists on and off for several months.

The indictment, dated Sept. 13, also accused Ms. Teng of taking reporters to interview Falun Gong members in southwestern Beijing on Feb. 7. It said the police detained her on May 13 and formally charged her two months later.

Ms. Rachlin said that Ms. Teng's husband, an American citizen whom she would not identify, flew to Beijing to monitor the trial, although diplomats in touch with the man earlier said China had refused to grant him a visa.

The United States Embassy in Beijing said it had no information on Ms. Teng. American diplomats are not required to provide legal assistance to residency holders.

Falun Gong drew millions of adherents in the 1990's to its slow- motion exercise and ideas culled from Taoism and Buddhism and those of Li Hongzhi, the founder, who now lives in the United States.

Worried that the group's size and organizational prowess could challenge the Communist Party's monopoly on power, China banned the group in July 1999, branding it a dangerous cult.

-------- terrorism

New York Times
November 24, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/world/24BRIE.html

RUSSIA: REBUFF TO U.S. SANCTIONS THREAT Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov appeared to rebuff Washington's threat of sanctions if Moscow withdraws from a 1995 agreement to end its supply of conventional weapons to Iran. Speaking in Warsaw, Mr. Ivanov did not refer directly to Russia's notice of intent to withdraw from the agreement, but he criticized Washington's efforts to control trade to nations, including Iran, regarded as supporters of terrorism. Patrick E. Tyler (NYT)

-------- activists

Call the White House to Ask For Executive Clemency for Leonard Peltier

From: Ravi Khanna <oneworld@igc.org>
Fri, 24 Nov 2000 16:18:45 -0800

Dear Friends,

As you know, the FBI Agents Association and the Society of Former FBI Agents have organized a telephone campaign to the White House in an attempt to discourage a grant of executive clemency for Leonard Peltier. Combined, the two organizations have membership in the tens of thousands. They have purchased a toll free number for their membership to utilize when calling the White House.

Clearly their financial resources far outweigh our own. However, it is critical that we do not allow the FBI to drown us out. Therefore, we have also purchased a toll free number for Leonard Peltier supporters, who are unable to afford the long distance calls, to use. That number is: 1-877-561-1364. The Leonard Peltier Defense Committee will be paying by the minute for all toll free calls, a cost that will be extremely exorbitant. Calling the regular White House number (202-456-1111) on a daily basis averages about $2.00 -$5.00 a week per person. If you cannot afford this amount, or if you or people you know do not have access to long distance calling, please utilize our toll free number. If you can afford the $2.00-$5.00 a week, please do not use the toll free number. Don't be discouraged by the FBI's campaign. We still outnumber them by far, and if everyone does their part, we can win.

Many of you have asked why we do not make the FBI's toll free number available for Peltier supporters. Our lawyers have warned that doing so could result in disputes with the FBI, legal or otherwise, which we need to avoid.

Because of the drawn out presidential election, it has become more difficult to predict when a decision on Leonard's clemency will be made. After the Thanksgiving weekend concludes, please continue flooding the White House with daily calls (the lines are open M-F from 9-5am Eastern time, closed on holidays). Your calls count now more than ever. To refute the FBI's message, it is important that we stress to operators the following:

We support clemency because Leonard Peltier never received a fair trial, and the US Prosecutor has since admitted several times that he does not know who killed the agents. Literally no evidence of his guilt exists, and yet he has served over 24 years in prison. Ending this injustice would be an honorable step toward reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples across the United States.

Please keep up the good work, and continue to let us know about anyrevealing comments made by White House operators. We can do this! Thank you!

In Solidarity, The LPDC

Call the White House Comments Line Today Demand Justice for Leonard Peltier! 202-456-1111

Be in New York City December 10th Peltier Walk For Freedom!

Leonard Peltier Defense Committee PO Box 583 Lawrence, KS 66044 785-842-5774 www.freepeltier.org

Forwarded by:

Ravi Khanna, Director 1world communication P. O. Box 2476 Amherst, MA 01004 Phone: 413-323-7629 Cell: 413-530-9640 Fax: 413-323-9348 E-mail: oneworld@igc.org Web-site: http://www.1worldcommunication.org Signup to join 1world list. Get updates and participate in discussions. Send a blank e-mail to: 1worldcommunication-subscribe@topica.com

---

New York Times
November 24, 2000
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/world/24BRIE.html
EUROPE

SPAIN: PROTESTS AIMED AT E.T.A. Crowds estimated at 900,000 people, many with signs saying "E.T.A. No," protested in Barcelona against the killing of a former government minister, the 21st killing blamed on the Basque separatist group E.T.A. this year. Prime Minister José María Aznar and the Socialist leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, joined the march to protest the shooting on Tuesday of Ernest Lluch, 63, health minister from 1982 to 1986. (AP)

---

Love for Nature Has Guided Turner's Life

New York Times
November 24, 2000
By PETE BODO
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/24/sports/24BEAU.html

BOZEMAN, Mont. - Knee-deep in the clear, chilly waters of Cherry Creek, on the Flying D ranch, Reed Beauregard Turner expertly casts a grasshopper dry-fly tight to a grassy bank, where pugnacious brown trout lurk. He could hardly be described as a young man with the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Actually, the 32-year-old Turner bears the load for only the 1.7 million acres accumulated since 1987 by his father, the billionaire Ted Turner.

Before then, the elder Turner was perhaps best known for saving nothing more ecologically significant than a struggling major league baseball team called the Atlanta Braves. But through his land acquisitions, Ted Turner, 61, has recast himself as a visionary environmentalist as well as the largest private landholder in the United States. While he has cranked out the checks at a pace that invites writer's cramp, the stewardship of those enormous, noncontiguous ranches and properties scattered mostly through the Western United States has become the lifework of the second youngest of Turner's five children, the one known as Beau.

Vaulting out of the family pecking order to become the de facto manager for the Turner properties, Beau Turner has a daunting mandate: to pursue ranching and related, sustainable enterprises while promoting conservation, with a bias toward native species.

On various ranches, the Turners' livestock is bison (over all, their herd numbers about 30,000 head), which are indigenous to the West but, unlike cows and sheep, do not graze down to bare earth. The Turners are also working to restore the endangered prairie dogs - which most ranchers consider vermin - as well as the black-footed ferret, a predator of prairie dogs.

Breaking rank with most ranchers, the Turners also support the reintroduction of wolves. They are hoping that the wolves from nearby Yellowstone National Park will colonize the Flying D, even if some predatory animals will eventually be shot.

The Turners' vision is taking shape on a vast, closely watched canvas, with Beau Turner doing most of the brushwork.

"Beau's not just involved with the properties; he's on innumerable boards," his father said. "His job is to oversee a massive amount of property and to be a leader in the environmental movement."

Beau Turner is the chairman of the board for the Turner Endangered Species Fund and a trustee for the family-run Turner Foundation, which awarded almost $50 million in grants last year, almost all of it to environmental groups and projects.

Arguably, Beau Turner is already the most influential citizen/environmentalist in the nation. That power occasionally causes him some stress - although not as much as he experienced as a 10-year-old during the waning days of the Cold War, when the combination of his father's "negativism" about global politics and Beau's obsession with world peace caused him to have nightmares about a nuclear holocaust.

"Sometimes I wake up at night thinking how much is at stake, and realizing how big this job really is," Beau Turner said recently. "But I love what I do more than anything else on earth. And what's more important, I remind myself that in the end it's all about people. I'm working with a great team, and I trust them so much that it really takes the pressure off and calms me down."

The major parties in the conservation and environmental movements, which span a broad spectrum of green, recognize the power and wealth that comes along with the Turner sanction, even though some proactive aspects of the Turners' operations and their philosophical underpinnings - such as timber harvesting and big-game hunting - may be at cross-purposes with those organizations' mission statements.

"Beau, like Ted, seems like a dyed- in-the-wool conservationist," said Donal O'Brien Jr., chairman of both the National Audubon Society and the Atlantic Salmon Federation U.S. "They are also very private and individualistic, which means they don't partner as often with other groups as some might like."

Family, and Friends

The glints of gray that have appeared lately in Turner's dark, lank hair seem incongruous in someone so fundamentally boyish that he exuberantly describes a sizable trout as "the mack daddy of the pool," and often addresses any companion as Bubba. Lanky at 6 feet 2 inches tall, he shares his father's apparently boundless energy, a penchant for oral - and physical - articulation, and an inability to express convictions with anything less than undiluted passion.

"I'm closer to Beau than anyone else, because of our environmental work together," Ted Turner said. "It's not just about family, it's a working relation. In fact, I play down the father-son thing, like I do with all my kids. Beau is a grown man, and I don't want to influence him unduly in a parent-child context. But that is almost impossible."

Beau acknowledges their similarities.

"I'd say I'm only about 10 percent different from Dad," he said. "And that's mostly expressed in the things we focus on, and occasionally in politics."

But, Ted Turner said, his son may also have the power to sway him.

"A lot of influence people have is subliminal," the father said. "Maybe I wouldn't have been as expansive in our real estate acquisitions if I didn't know there was somebody coming along behind me with an intense love of the outdoors and the preservation of species."

Beau described his relationship with his father as a "close friendship" that survived the upheaval all the Turner children endured in 1987, when their father divorced Jane Smith Turner, the second of his three wives, and the mother of the three youngest children.

"Divorce is always a shock to a family, but at least we weren't little kids," said Beau, who was a sophomore at The Citadel. He remains close with his mother. "I'm kind of proud that even if I really mess up on something, and Dad lets me have it, we deal with it like professionals. There aren't all those hurty feelings like you might have if there were larger family issues involved.

"I think we turned out pretty well rounded. We kids are extremely close" - all of the Turner children are active trustees for the Turner Foundation - "and we all work."

Populist and Nature Lover

As a child, Beau Turner worked for every cent he received from his father, and developed such an interest in finance that he began trading stocks at age 16. He secured his financial independence during the recent stock-market boom, which he characterized as a "gold rush" that embodied the American dream: "A bunch of geeky kids holed up in the basements of their suburban, middle-class homes wound up becoming the new captains of American industry. I'm a guy who believes in a strong middle class, and to me it doesn't get any better than that."

Indeed, with his penchant for hot dogs and Mexican food washed down with endless cups of convenience- store coffee, and his backslapping, gregarious manner - in the streets of this friendly, midsize western town, it seems he never meets a passer-by he does not like - Turner is at heart a populist. He is a baseball fan who has played catcher, and he expresses a curiosity about golf, as if unsure that he fits into that sport's demographics.

Beau Turner's wife of about a year, Elizabeth Gannon Hunt, is a contributing editor for Veranda magazine and, like her husband, an accomplished bowhunter and angler. They live at the Flying D from May through November in a modest, one- story log cabin of barely 1,000 square feet. The home is crowded with framed family photographs and trophies of majestic elk and mule deer.

"We're also renovating an old house we bought in Charleston," Hunt said, adding almost apologetically: "Being a Texan, the Montana winter is just too harsh for me."

Turner's cabin does not have a garage for his Ford pickup truck, which he bought because he believes that Ford is the automaker most committed to developing alternate fuel vehicles.

"We don't need a bigger house than this," he said. "It's important to live in a way that complements what you believe."

Ted Turner said his son's love for the environment is not new.

"When Beau was a little boy, he was just fascinated with the outdoors, more so than the other kids," Ted Turner said. "And not just hunting and fishing, but observation and the general nature experience."

Yet Beau did not intend to make it his lifework. After quitting the baseball team at The Citadel to concentrate on his studies (he struggled with learning disabilities), Beau had his heart set on attending the Wharton School. He had an 11th-hour change of heart and ended up at Montana State, where he immersed himself in wildlife biology.

Striking a crooked grin, he confesses that while he has finished all his coursework, he has yet to write the thesis that would earn him a master's degree. "Things kind of began to snowball with the properties at the time," he said, "but I still hope to earn that master's someday."

Leader of the `New West'

Beau Turner is, albeit unofficially, part of a larger movement that is trying to shape a New West - a place where the traditional cattle rancher and his livestock are no longer sacred cows, where a chorus of often cacophonous voices lobby for nonagricultural interests, ranging from increased recreational opportunities to predator reintroduction to protection of federally held lands from logging to low-fee cattle grazing.

In this equation, Turner, who considers himself bipartisan, is broadly conservative.

Citing the beliefs of his father and Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, Turner argues that the rich should bear a relatively heavy tax load. He also contends that inheritance taxes are driving the struggling ranches out of business and subsequently opening up too much environmentally sensitive land to development. Turner believes that providing landowners with tax incentives to promote conservation and species protection will produce better results than federal land acquisition programs.

"The government always ends up paying exorbitant prices for land," he said, "and it has virtually no ability to manage what it has. Huge tracts of government-owned land currently are being environmentally degraded, by everything from federally supported logging to invasive, noxious weeds.

"Private stewardship generally is more successful."

Mostly, though, Turner likes to repeat his mantra: "It's all about the people." In the course of poring over thousands of applications for help from the Turner Foundation, he says, he has learned to sniff out agendas that are rooted in self-interest rather than good science. His deepest wish, he says, is to see biology become the trusted compass for the environmental movement.

"There's way too much bickering among people both outside and within the broad environmental movement - between the backpackers and ranchers, the animal-rights advocates, preservationists, hunters and all the rest," he said. "You just have to let go of your prejudices and keep your mind open. Let the biology decide, and remain open to what it's telling you and where that might lead.

"Sure, science is inexact. But right now, it's still the most reliable thing thing we have."

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Basque killing spurs massive demonstration

Washington Times
November 24, 2000
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports

BARCELONA, Spain - Nearly a million people took to the streets here yesterday to protest the slaying of a much-loved and highly respected former government minister - the 21st killing blamed on the Basque separatist group ETA this year.

Behind a banner proclaiming "Catalonia for Peace. ETA No," center-right Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, his Socialist predecessor, Felipe Gonzalez, and dozens of other politicians from across the country led the march to protest Tuesday's shooting of 63-year-old Ernest Lluch.

Police initially put the crowd size at 100,000, but Barcelona City Hall later increased it to 900,000. The sea of people, many carrying small placards reading "ETA No," swarmed its way along seven blocks from downtown Barcelona's Paseig de Gracia to Plaza Catalunya square.

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