------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
German Minister Doubts U.S. Missile Defense Plan
Radiation cuts risk of arteries reclogging
Putin Writes to Bush
Putin Writes to Bush, Urging Warmer Russia-U.S. Relations
Japan PM Said to Visit U.S. to Meet Bush Next Month
DOD listing of 100 companies receiving contract awards
Harris In No Hurry To Deregulate Ontario Electricity
50 nations see no depleted uranium illness
NATO group: DU does not cause cancer
NATO chief: We will use uranium again
NATO Finds Uranium No Link to Cancer
NATO Committee Sees No Depleted Uranium Illness
Depleted Uranium Rounds Can Cause Cancers in Animals
Science Murky on Health Risk From Depleted Uranium
Uranium Weapons Fallout Part of Our Making
Are We All Getting "Nuked" in Kosovo?
Bush's Letter Causes Stir in Denmark
Nuclear inspectors end visit to Iraq
U.N. Says Iraq Has Cooperated With Weapons Inspections
Bush faces national security test
Nuclear Inspectors Praise Iraq
Iraq calls weapons charges 'a new lie'
No Fixed Deadlines for Nuclear Disarmament
Seismic Waves Analyzed in Sunken Sub
Our Permeable Defense
Plutonium Found in Processing Plants
Contamination at plants source of plutonium
University Cited for Nuclear Breach
GAO: Clinton team broke law to save jobs

MILITARY
Problems plague anti-drug offensive
Troops, rebels gather forces in Colombia
Colombian troops sent near guerrilla haven
Waiting to Inhale
States
India Extends Kashmir Truce Despite Attacks
India extends truce in Kashmir one month
Iraq, U.S. Disagree on Plane Report
Bush Urges Russian Rebel Settlement
Russian Cargo Ship Blasts Off to Guide Mir to Earth
Osprey future in jeopardy

OTHER
Home-Grown Energy's Time to Shine
Refuge's fate lies with Americans outside Alaska
Keep eyes open if you go organic
Crew of Galápagos Tanker Arrested
Oil Spill's Shift in Course Aids Galápagos Mop-Up
LIBERTY: SUIT OVER POSSIBLE CARCINOGEN
Report: Sydney harbor poses hazard
Editorial Roundup
States
In Darwin's Habitat
Callous on Fox Hunting
Disarming the nefarious do-gooders
Biotech deal significant for farmers
Brooklyn Officers Accused as Brazen Robbers
Police Sex-Abuse Complaint May Have Been Mishandled
Trooper Unit Is Investigated in New Jersey
New Jersey Officials to Try to Recover Badges
States
U.S. approves high-resolution spying

ACTIVISTS
EXPECT DEMOCRACY
NO NAFTA for the Americas
Ruling Could Hurt Efforts to Ban Masked Rallies
Nadler triggered pardon
5 Linked to Banned Sect in China Set Themselves on Fire in Protest
Falun Gong followers attempt suicide
Suicide in Tiananmen Square brings tight security
Hawaii
Elephant fur


-------- NUCLEAR

German Minister Doubts U.S. Missile Defense Plan

Wednesday, January 24, 2001
Washington Post
Reuters
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40513-2001Jan24.html

BERLIN, Jan 24-The U.S. plan to build a national missile defence system against rogue rockets is not very realistic, a newspaper quoted German Defence Minister Rudolf Scharping as saying on Wednesday.

"The technical feasibility and the financing of a strategic missile defence are not at all manageable yet," Scharping told Berliner Zeitung daily in a release before publication on Thursday.

The new U.S. administration has pledged to create a missile defence to shield the United States and its allies from missile attacks even if it means scrapping the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibits such systems.

Germany and many of its European partners have made no secret that they believe the project could divide NATO, provoke Russia and China and undo the progress achieved in strategic disarmament talks over the last 30 years.

Scharping called on new U.S. President George W. Bush to discuss his missile plans closely with NATO's European members and also said he was in favour of NATO considering Moscow's proposal to develop a joint defence system with Russia.

Scharping was at the centre of a diplomatic tiff with the United States last week over depleted uranium munitions used by U.S. forces in the Balkans.

The dispute erupted earlier this month when some countries suggested a connection between the munitions and leukaemia and other diseases affecting some young NATO soldiers who served as peacekeepers in Kosovo and Bosnia.

Scharping took the highly unusual step last week of calling in the U.S. charge d'affaires in Berlin to seek more information about possible plutonium traces in the weapons.

During a weekend visit to German peacekeepers in the Balkans Scharping said after summoning the U.S. diplomat he had been told of nine incidents possibly involving depleted uranium munitions at U.S. bases in Germany.

The Hesse state government said in a statement on Wednesday that the United States had said that two reported military accidents in the early 1980s had not involved depleted uranium munitions as initially reported.

---

Radiation cuts risk of arteries reclogging

01/24/2001
USA Today
By The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/nlead.htm

Zapping arteries with radiation after clearing out blockages dramatically cuts the chances they will clog up again, researchers say. Two new studies suggest that the technology can help eliminate the most discouraging complication of angioplasty - the tendency of newly reopened heart arteries to squeeze shut again within a few weeks. Both technologies involve inserting bits of radioactive material into the arteries, where it is left for a few minutes and then removed. One uses beta radiation, which does not penetrate beyond the patient's body, and the other uses gamma radiation, which requires medical workers to be shielded.

Despite the apparent advantages, experts worry that both approaches could cause cancer decades later. In addition, several patients getting gamma radiation developed dangerous blood clots.

The studies were published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, along with editorials by doctors from the Food and Drug Administration and Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. The editorials urged using the new systems with caution until bigger, longer studies confirm their safety and effectiveness.

Each year, some 750,000 Americans undergo balloon angioplasty to squeeze open clogged arteries. In about 60% of cases, doctors also insert a miniature wire coil, called a stent, to try to keep the artery propped open. This cuts the rate of renarrowing - what doctors call restenosis - from the usual 35% to around 25%.

When restenosis occurs, chest pain usually returns, and the usual solution is another angioplasty or a bypass operation. Radiation is the latest attempt to avoid this complication.

"It is very exciting news for us," said Dr. Rohit Arora, chief of cardiology at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, who did not participate in the studies.

The study of beta radiation used a system made by Boston Scientific Corp. and was sponsored by the Prevot Foundation and the Swiss National Science Foundation. The gamma radiation study tested a system made by Cordis, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary, which financed the research.

The study of beta radiation was directed by Dr. Vitali Verin of University Hospital in Geneva and involved 181 patients who were treated after undergoing angioplasty for the first time. Once the blockage was cleared, a radioactive coil was inserted in that part of the artery, then removed after a couple of minutes.

Heart scans six months later found restenosis in 29% of patients receiving the lowest radiation dose and in 15% of those getting a dose twice as high. Among patients who did not have a stent implanted, just 4% at the highest radiation dose suffered restenosis.

The other study used the more common strategy of treating patients who had already undergone a failed angioplasty. After a new angioplasty, doctors inserted a tiny ribbon containing seeds of gamma radiation in 131 patients, removing it after 20 minutes. An additional 121 patients received an identical-looking ribbon but no radiation.

After six months, 28% of the patients who got radiation had restenosis, needed a repeat procedure or had died, compared with 44% in the comparison group. However, several months after the procedure, 5% of the radiation patients developed dangerous blood clots, compared with 1% in the comparison group.

Dr. Martin B. Leon of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York, who directed the gamma radiation study, said he has eliminated that problem in more recent patients by limiting use of new stents and keeping patients on anti-clotting medicines for six to 12 months.

"It means many patients that would have had very poor treatment options or been staring bypass surgery in the face achieve a great result," said Leon, who has worked as a consultant for Cordis.

Arora said the beta radiation system is more likely to pan out because it is easier to operate, the radiation is not widely dispersed and, unlike the gamma system, it has been shown to prevent restenosis after a patient's first angioplasty.

------

Putin Writes to Bush

January 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/russia-usa-letter.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-russia-.html

MOSCOW, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin has written to U.S. President George W. Bush congratulating him on his new job and setting out Moscow's views on how to improve bilateral relations, the Kremlin said on Wednesday.

It said Putin had sent the letter on Tuesday but it gave little detail. He also wrote to former President Bill Clinton to thank him for his readiness to compromise. That sounded like a hint to Bush for what is likely to be a testing time in ties.

``Putin confirmed his continued willingness to act to deepen interaction between Russia and the United States and jointly to find answers to the serious challenges which confront us and the entire international community in the 21st century,'' it said.

The Kremlin said Putin had presented his thoughts to Bush on ``ways to develop Russian-American dialogue further.''

It said he had touched on the question of possible summits and meetings and the agenda for them, but did not elaborate.

Asked for more details on the content of the message, Kremlin spokesman Alexei Gromov told Reuters: ``We are not going beyond what's in our announcement.''

That said, Putin had noted that recent years had shown ``when Russia and the United States act jointly or along parallel lines, it is possible to reach decisions which meet the interests of peace and international stability.''

RUSSIA WANTS TO GET DOWN TO BUSINESS

Russia has repeatedly said it is keen to get down to business with the United States ``without pause,'' particularly on arms control, not least because of Bush's intention of pressing ahead with a National Missile Defence which Moscow opposes.

But the new Republican administration in Washington is unlikely to jump into talks without a review of where relations stand. That goes for economic ties as well as arms control.

Western diplomats also say Washington is still waiting for more details from Moscow on what its proposed joint, limited theatre missile-defence system might look like.

It would involve intercepting missiles soon after take-off, rather than in mid-flight or close to their intended targets.

Letters from the Kremlin to new U.S. presidents are usually delivered in Washington and typically state Moscow's position on the main questions in bilateral relations and identify possible opportunities for meetings between officials at different levels. They do not generally break new ground.

Putin's message to Bush did not seem to be an exception.

His letter to Clinton, as described by the Kremlin, gave the new U.S. president some extra pointers.

``We have proved that if there is a desire and good will we can find mutually acceptable compromises on the most vital issues and augment the positive potential of bilateral relations,'' the Kremlin quoted the letter as saying.

It said Putin had told Clinton that Russia would use just such an approach in dealing with Washington in future.

Bush has other policy priorities and may well have other ideas on the pace and scale of relations. He said in an interview with the New York Times earlier this month aid should be limited to helping dismantle nuclear weapons until Moscow could prove Russia was safe for U.S. investors.

---

Putin Writes to Bush, Urging Warmer Russia-U.S. Relations

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/world/25CND-RUSSIA.html

MOSCOW, Jan. 24 - President Valdimir V. Putin sent a letter to President Bush this week proposing broader Russian-American cooperation and setting out the major issues on which he believes the two countries can cooperate, the Kremlin's press service said today.

Mr. Putin dispatched the letter on Tuesday, along with a second note to former President Bill Clinton expressing gratitude for his "constructive and well-meaning approach" to Russian-American relations, a Kremlin spokesman said.

Mr. Putin's letter to Mr. Bush, the Kremlin said, "confirmed his readiness to work towards broadening interaction between Russia and the United States, and for a joint search for responses to 21st-century challenges both to Russia and to the international community."

"When Russia and the U.S. act jointly or on parallel tracks," the letter stated, "decisions meeting the interests of peace and international stability may be reached."

The message also offered an agenda for future high-level contacts between the two nations. But a spokesman refused to disclose the specifics of the letter, which addresses a relationship that has grown almost frosty in the last two years and could cool even further now that the White House has changed hands.

Whether Russia was offering serious proposals to jump-start a stalled relationship or merely conveying rote congratulations to a new world leader was not clear from the limited texts made available here.

Both diplomatic relations and the average Russian's regard for the United States have markedly sagged since the American-led NATO alliance launched an air war against Russia's closest European ally, Yugoslavia, in early 1999.

Under Mr. Putin, Russia has pursued new alliances with China and India to offset what it calls an American-run "unipolar world," and rekindled old friendships with rigidly anti-American state like Iraq and Cuba.

He has nevertheless stressed that Russia wants warm relations with the United States. For his part, however, Mr. Bush has indicated that he will pay even less heed to Russian foreign-policy concerns than did the Clinton administration, which ignored Moscow's protests against expanding NATO and waging war against Yugoslavia.

Mr. Bush has all but committed the United States to building a limited anti-missile defense system that both Russia and China call a threat to their security and the spark that would ignite a new nuclear arms race.

In Moscow this week, Russian military experts suggested that the Kremlin could respond to such a system by upgrading and expanding its nuclear force with new multiple-warhead missiles, the better to counter what one called "the enemy."

The Bush administration has already signaled that it will take a harder-nosed approach to Russian-American relations. Mr. Bush suggested earlier that aid to Russia should be limited to assistance in dismantling nuclear weapons until its leaders prove they are on a democratic course.

--

Japan PM Said to Visit U.S. to Meet Bush Next Month

January 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-japan-u.html

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori is expected to visit the United States next month to meet George W. Bush, among the first foreign leaders from a top ally to meet the new president, domestic media said on Thursday.

Mori has tentatively decided to make a three-day visit to Washington from February 10, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper said.

But top government spokesman Yasuo Fukuda said it remained unclear when Mori would go.

``At this stage, nothing has been decided on the timing of the prime minister's visit,'' he told a regular news conference.

Bush telephoned Mori on Wednesday to say he wanted to meet soon.

Japanese Foreign Minister Yohei Kono is to visit Washington from Thursday and to hold talks with Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday.

Those talks would pave the way for a Mori visit, Fukuda said.

In a telephone conversation with Mori on Wednesday, Bush stressed the importance of Japan as a key U.S. ally in Asia at a time when the president is crafting his policy toward communist countries in the region such as China and North Korea.

Japan was quick to welcome Bush's victory in the U.S. presidential election and voiced the hope that his Republican administration would give Japan a more prominent place on the diplomatic agenda of its most powerful ally.

But many Japanese officials believe Bush will adopt a tougher line than his predecessor, Bill Clinton, pressing Tokyo to play a greater military role in the region.

Japan and the United States have boosted their military alliance in recent years, a move that has unnerved China.

New defense guidelines drawn up by the two countries in 1999 authorize Japan to provide logistical support to the U.S. military in the event of an emergency in the region.

Some neighboring countries, including China, have repeatedly opposed the guidelines, saying they are intended to protect Taiwan, which Beijing views as a renegade province.

About 48,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Japan, of which about 26,000 are based on the small southern island of Okinawa and constitute a source of strain between the allies amid calls from the local population for them to go.

Tokyo has so far refrained from showing support for the Bush administration's controversial national missile defenseproposal, fearing criticism from China and setbacks to a tentative warming in relations with North Korea.

But Japan is studying with Washington a theater missile defense (TMD) system, a variant of the NMD, aimed at shielding U.S. troops in Asia.

Beijing has repeatedly accused Tokyo and Washington of exaggerating the North Korean threat as an excuse to project their dual military strength in the region, throw a protective arm around Taiwan and contain China's rise as a world power.

-------- business

DOD listing of the 100 companies receiving prime contract awards

PRESS ADVISORY
January 24, 2001
from the United States Department of Defense
http://web1.whs.osd.mil/peidhome/procstat/p01/fy2000/top100.htm

No. 025-P PRESS ADVISORY The Department of Defense announced today that the fiscal year 2000 listing of the 100 companies receiving the largest dollar volume of prime contract awards is now available on the Web

The top ten defense contractors for fiscal year 2000 and the dollar value (in billions) of their prime contracts are as follows:

Lockheed Martin Corp. ($15.1) The Boeing Co. ($12.0) Raytheon Corp. ($6.3) General Dynamics Corp. ($4.1) Northrop Grumman Corp. ($3.1) Litton Industries Inc. ($2.7) United Technologies Corp. ($2.1) TRW Inc. ($2.0) General Electric Co. ($1.6) Science Applications International Corp. ($1.5)

(Note that the main manufacturers of the Trident system, Lockheed and GD, are in the top four. Johns Hopkins University received $351,776,000 in FY 2000 for prime contract awards from the Department of War. - From: Max Obuszewski <MObuszewski@afsc.org>)

-------- canada

Harris In No Hurry To Deregulate Ontario Electricity

January 24, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Wednesday's Canada News Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Canada-Briefs.html?pagewanted=all

TORONTO (AP) -- Ontario Premier Mike Harris said Wednesday the province is in no hurry to deregulate the province's electricity market in the wake of rate hikes in Alberta and California, where soaring prices, shortage-induced blackouts and bankrupt utilities have created a national emergency.

``We are constantly looking at what's happening in other jurisdictions,'' he said. ``When we go (to deregulation) and the timing, we are of course taking a look at all those factors.''

Harris said California's problem, which has seen a tripling of electricity costs in some parts of the state and rolling two-hour blackouts, was primarily caused by a power shortage and high natural gas prices -- neither of which, he said, will affect Ontario.

``We have a very low dependence on natural gas so far in Ontario although we are looking at it into the future,'' Harris said.

He added the Pickering nuclear plant is expected to reopen next year, giving the energy supply a boost.

But Liberal energy critic Sean Conway said power costs are already going up, and cited recent media reports revealing Ontario Power Generation has extended price protection for four years to large industrial users.

He argued Ontario is also subject to the supply shortages and rising costs now plaguing California.

``One of the reasons power is going up is because we are using natural gas to produce electricity,'' he said.

-------- depleted uranium

50 nations see no depleted uranium illness

January 24, 2001
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2001/HEALTH/01/24/health.balkans.reut/index.html

BRUSSELS, Belgium (Reuters) -- A committee of 50 nations hastily set up by NATO two weeks ago has found no evidence so far to support claims that depleted uranium (DU) munitions can cause cancer, NATO said Wednesday.

Soldiers who served as peacekeepers in the NATO-led missions in Bosnia and Kosovo -- where U.S. aircraft fired some 40,000 DU shells -- were no sicker than those who had not, committee chairman Daniel Speckhard told a news conference.

NATO spokesman Mark Laity said it was "quite possible" that tiny traces of highly radioactive plutonium and uranium 236 would turn up in Balkans soil samples now being taken or analyzed by international experts.

"We're not predicting it...we will not be surprised, neither will we be worried," he said, stressing that scientific evidence showed the traces were too small to "add in any way to the existing low-level health risk."

The toxic chemical effects of DU, a heavy metal used for its armor-piercing capability, could cause kidney problems if its dust were ingested in sufficient quantities.

Mere mention of plutonium contamination, however, can trigger political heart attacks among some of Europe's most environmentally sensitive governments.

On Tuesday, in a bid to help European allies allay public fears, a Pentagon spokesman said plutonium traces got into DU rounds made 30 years ago because of contaminated equipment at a nuclear plant, but amounts were incredibly small and harmless.

Plutonium and U-236 would still be in America's DU munitions today, he said, because no new stocks were made since the 1970s.

In Athens, NATO's Supreme Commander Europe, U.S. Air Force General Joseph Ralston, said he would not hesitate to authorize firing DU rounds "tonight," in the unlikely event that peacekeepers or civilians in Kosovo faced a tank attack.

NATO says there is simply no evidence that DU's weak radioactivity can cause cancer. This is questioned by some recent studies which suggest ingested DU emits alpha radiation that can cause significant damage to cells.

"To date no nation has found evidence of an increase in the incidence of illness among peacekeepers in the Balkans compared with the incidence of illness among armed forces not serving in the Balkans," Speckhard said.

"None of the nations reported finding a health link between health complaints of personnel employed in the Balkans and depleted uranium munitions," he added.

Tuesday's standing-room-only meeting of the committee reinforced the report issued last week by NATO's top military medical officers showing no link to cancer, but the committee would continue meeting weekly as "scores" of studies -- national and multilateral -- were carried out.

Speckhard said more than a dozen nations had tested their soldiers or sent teams to the region since the DU scare erupted shortly after Christmas. "To date, based on preliminary findings, there has been no indication of increased levels of radioactivity at any of the sites tested," he said.

Countries on the DU committee include the 19 NATO members and some 30 partners, most of whom have deployed troops in the Balkans missions. They include Malaysia, Argentina, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Azerbaijan.

Laity said NATO had posted a detailed map on its Web site (http://www.nato.int) showing the target sites in Bosnia and Kosovo where DU munitions had been fired. The alliance was determined to provide "maximum transparency and openness," he said. He suggested some European media had handled the issue irresponsibly, failing to look at available scientific facts before deciding to spread fears.

---

NATO group: DU does not cause cancer

January 24, 2001
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/01/24/uranium.nato.02/index.html

BRUSSELS, Belgium -- No evidence exists so far to support claims of a link between depleted uranium (DU) munitions and cancer, a NATO committee has said.

The committee, consisting of 19 NATO members and 30 partners, announced its findings on Wednesday after two weeks of research.

The committee had been hastily convened after some member states became concerned about a possible connection between the U.S. firing 40,000 DU-tipped shells during the 1999 Kosovo war and subsequent cancer-related illnesses among peacekeepers in the region.

Committee Chairman Daniel Speckhard said peacekeepers in the NATO-led missions in Bosnia and Kosovo were no sicker than those who had not.

More than a dozen nations had tested their soldiers or sent teams to the region since the DU scare broke out shortly after Christmas.

He said: "To date, based on preliminary findings, there has been no indication of increased levels of radioactivity at any of the sites tested."

The 30 partners who helped in the report include those who deployed troops in the Balkans missions, such as Malaysia, Argentina, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Azerbaijan.

The announcement reinforces the report issued last week by NATO's top military medical officers which denied a link.

And it was backed by comments by NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Joseph Ralston who said it would be "irresponsible" not to use DU-tipped weapons if his troops came under fire in future.

Ralston is on a two-day trip to Greece, meeting defence and foreign officials, to discuss DU and the general Kosovo situation.

'Responsibility to protect soldiers'

He said: "I have a responsibility to protect the soldiers in Kosovo.

"In the unlikely event that KFOR soldiers or citizens were attacked tonight by a tank I would be irresponsible not to use depleted uranium."

Ralston added: "None of the nations reported finding a health link between health complaints of personnel employed in the Balkans and depleted uranium munitions."

NATO spokesman Mark Laity said in an effort to have "maximum transparency and openness" the alliance had posted a detailed map on its Web site showing the target sites in Bosnia and Kosovo where DU munitions had been fired.

But he did admit it was "quite possible" that tiny traces of highly radioactive plutonium and uranium 236 would turn up in Balkans soil samples now being taken or analysed by international experts.

But he added, traces would be too small to be of concern.

NATO's announcement coincides with a four-member team of experts from the World Health Organisation visiting Kosovo to collect information on the possible exposure of civilians to DU and other environmental pollutants.

Erik Schouten, head of the WHO office in Kosovo said: "This mission is here to look at the civilian population in Kosovo and the internationals working here" -- and not with the military personnel in the region.

NATO's committee will continue to meet weekly as "scores" of studies -- national and multilateral -- are being carried out.

---

NATO chief: We will use uranium again

January 24, 2001
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/01/24/uranium.nato/index.html

ATHENS, Greece -- NATO will use depleted uranium (DU) shells in the future if its soldiers are at risk, a high-ranking NATO official has said.

NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Joseph Ralston said on Wednesday it would be "irresponsible" not to fire DU-tipped weapons if his soldiers came under attack.

Some NATO countries fear a link between the DU munitions fired during the Kosovo crisis in 1999 and subsequent cases of cancer-related illnesses among their soldiers, dubbed "Balkans syndrome."

Ralston was speaking as NATO prepared for a briefing on a DU study by its ad hoc committee.

It also coincides with a four-member team of experts from the World Health Organisation visiting Kosovo to collect information on the possible exposure of civilians to DU and other environmental pollutants.

Erik Schouten, head of the WHO office in Kosovo said: "This mission is here to look at the civilian population in Kosovo and the internationals working here" -- and not with the military personnel in the region.

NATO's Ralston is in Greece on a two-day visit to discuss the use of DU weapons, and the general Kosovo situation, with defence officials and the Greek Foreign Minister George Papandreou.

After the meeting he said: "I have a responsibility to protect the soldiers in Kosovo.

"In the unlikely event that KFOR soldiers or citizens were attacked tonight by a tank I would be irresponsible not to use depleted uranium."

NATO has repeatedly said armour-piercing DU bullets were not related to leukaemia or other health problems.

A NATO chief U.S. Admiral James Ellis said: "Research over decades, in many nations, has failed to establish such a linkage."

But he confirmed that "very, very small trace amounts" of plutonium had been identified in some depleted uranium rounds -- "so small as to add nothing to the danger or the risk associated with that."

---

NATO Finds Uranium No Link to Cancer

January 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-NATO-Depleted-Uranium.html

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- A special committee still has found no link between armor-piercing munitions using depleted uranium and cancer among peacekeeping troops who served in the Balkans, NATO said Wednesday.

The 19-member alliance provided concerned nations with detailed maps of Bosnia and Kosovo pinpointing air strikes in which 30mm depleted uranium rounds were fired by American aircraft. The maps also were made available on NATO's Web site.

Depleted uranium, a slightly radioactive heavy metal, is used in anti-armor munitions because of its high penetrating power. U.S. forces fired weapons containing depleted uranium in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995, and in 1999, NATO fired the weapons during its 78-day bombing campaign in Yugoslavia.

Public concern about the munitions has swept Europe in recent weeks as various nations have reported cancer cases among soldiers sent to the Balkans as peacekeepers.

NATO's Ad Hoc Committee on Depleted Uranium was created Jan. 10 as a clearinghouse for information about possible health risks associated with the munitions. It has met twice, Jan. 16 and Tuesday.

``To date, no nation has found evidence of an increase in incidence of illness among peacekeepers in the Balkans compared with the incidence of illness among armed forces not serving in the Balkans,'' said Daniel Speckhard, the panel's chairman. ``None of the nations reported finding a health link between health complaints of personnel employed in the Balkans and depleted uranium munitions.''

Scientists say depleted uranium has about 40 percent of the radiation of natural uranium, which itself is not a health hazard. But since Italy started studying the illnesses of 30 Balkans veterans -- seven of whom died of cancer, including five cases of leukemia -- more than a dozen nations have been testing soldiers serving or having returned from the Balkans.

None have found any traces of depleted uranium, Speckhard said.

A number of other nations have sent teams to the Balkans to analyze the environment for health risks. To date, there has been no indication of increased level of radiactivity at any of the sites tested.

NATO spokesman Mark Laity said the alliance itself was not conducting any investigation, though a number of member countries are. The ad hoc committee is compiling and sharing that information as it comes in.

NATO acknowledged last week that the depleted uranium used in allied munitions contains trace amounts of plutonium, a highly radioactive element. But it said these traces were so small they ``do not add to the low-level health risks.''

---

NATO Committee Sees No Depleted Uranium Illness

January 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-balkans.html

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - A committee of 50 nations hastily set up by NATO two weeks ago has found no evidence so far to support claims that depleted uranium (DU) munitions can cause cancer, NATO said on Wednesday.

Soldiers who served as peacekeepers in the NATO-led missions in Bosnia and Kosovo -- where U.S. aircraft fired some 40,000 DU shells -- were no sicker than those who had not, committee chairman Daniel Speckhard told a news conference.

NATO spokesman Mark Laity said it was ``quite possible'' that tiny traces of highly radioactive plutonium and uranium 236 would turn up in Balkans soil samples now being taken or analyzed by international experts.

``We're not predicting it...we will not be surprised, neither will we be worried,'' he said, stressing that scientific evidence showed the traces were too small to ``add in any way to the existing low-level health risk.''

RISK OF POLITICAL HEART ATTACK

The toxic chemical effects of DU, a heavy metal used for its armor-piercing capability, could cause kidney problems if its dust were ingested in sufficient quantities.

Mere mention of plutonium contamination, however, can trigger political heart attacks among some of Europe's most environmentally sensitive governments.

On Tuesday, in a bid to help European allies allay public fears, a Pentagon spokesman said plutonium traces got into DU rounds made 30 years ago because of contaminated equipment at a nuclear plant, but amounts were incredibly small and harmless.

Plutonium and U-236 would still be in America's DU munitions today, he said, because no new stocks were made since the 1970s.

In Athens, NATO's Supreme Commander Europe, U.S. Air Force General Joseph Ralston, said he would not hesitate to authorize firing DU rounds ``tonight,'' in the unlikely event that peacekeepers or civilians in Kosovo faced a tank attack.

NATO says there is simply no evidence that DU's weak radioactivity can cause cancer. This is questioned by some recent studies which suggest ingested DU emits alpha radiation that can cause significant damage to cells.

``To date no nation has found evidence of an increase in the incidence of illness among peacekeepers in the Balkans compared with the incidence of illness among armed forces not serving in the Balkans,'' Speckhard said.

``None of the nations reported finding a health link between health complaints of personnel employed in the Balkans and depleted uranium munitions,'' he added.

Tuesday's standing-room-only meeting of the committee reinforced the report issued last week by NATO's top military medical officers showing no link to cancer, but the committee would continue meeting weekly as ``scores'' of studies -- national and multilateral -- were carried out.

EVERYONE'S TESTING

Speckhard said more than a dozen nations had tested their soldiers or sent teams to the region since the DU scare erupted shortly after Christmas. ``To date, based on preliminary findings, there has been no indication of increased levels of radioactivity at any of the sites tested,'' he said.

Countries on the DU committee include the 19 NATO members and some 30 partners most of whom have deployed troops in the Balkans missions. They include Malaysia, Argentina, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Azerbaijan.

Laity said NATO had posted a detailed map on its Web site (www.nato.int) showing the target sites in Bosnia and Kosovo where DU munitions had been fired. The alliance was determined to provide ``maximum transparency and openness,'' he said. He suggested some European media had handled the issue irresponsibly, failing to look at available scientific facts before deciding to spread fears.

---

Depleted Uranium Rounds Can Cause Cancers in Animals

January 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/health/health-cancer.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters Health) - Depleted uranium of the same type found in the US military's armor-piercing ammunition has been shown to cause cancer when implanted in the muscles of laboratory animals.

The study is the first of its kind to show that depleted uranium, or DU, can cause cancer in animals. Depleted uranium has been the source of a recent controversy centered mostly in Europe, where veterans' groups have blamed DU-containing rounds for leukemia and other illnesses in military personnel who handled munitions during the Balkans War.

But the study's investigator cautioned that his results do not yet prove that the radioactive metal is dangerous to humans, or that the type of exposure the experimental rats received is analogous to exposure soldiers may have received in the Balkans.

``It's a warning flag that says we shouldn't ignore this. It doesn't mean that (DU) is carcinogenic to humans,'' Fletcher F. Hahn, a senior scientist at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, told Reuters Health.

Hahn and his research team implanted pellets containing 99.25% depleted uranium and 0.75% titanium into the muscles of experimental rats. The combination is identical to the alloy the military uses in its armor-piercing rounds. They implanted a second group of rats with non-radioactive metal pellets to serve as ``controls,'' and injected a third group with a different radioactive suspension.

The investigators found that the soft-tissue sarcomas, a form of cancer, were significantly more likely to occur in the muscles of animals that received the DU-containing implants than in control animals.

``The greater the size of the pellets, the greater the number of tumors produced,'' Hahn said during an interview at a research forum on Gulf War illness sponsored by the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The researchers performed the study with a grant from the US Army, which is concerned about the possible effects of depleted uranium once it is inside the body in solid form. As many as 62 American soldiers were wounded with shrapnel from DU rounds when their tanks or Bradley armored vehicles were hit by friendly fire during the Gulf War.

That is not the same kind of exposure that has caused controversy in Europe over the past month. There, researchers and veterans are concerned about possible cancers resulting from either handling DU rounds or from inhaling radioactive dust left after rounds penetrate armor and vaporize.

So far none of the American men hit with shrapnel has developed cancer, Hahn said. The Army will give his research group $400,000 to $500,000 over the next 2 years to look into the possible mechanisms of DU-induced sarcomas in the animals, he said.

---

Science Murky on Health Risk From Depleted Uranium

January 24, 2001
Associated Press
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/science/science-balkans-urani.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/health/health-uranium.html

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Does depleted uranium pose a cancer risk, or is it a benign legacy of modern warfare?

Many scientists believe the low-level radiation emitted by depleted uranium, used in armor-penetrating NATO munitions in the Balkans and the Gulf War, is too weak to be carcinogenic.

But while most dismiss the ``Balkans Syndrome'' cancer scare among peacekeeping troops patrolling old battlegrounds, they say a more immediate concern is kidney damage from ingesting the metal, which is denser and heavier than lead.

Close monitoring of 63 U.S. Gulf War veterans wounded by ''friendly fire'' show the depleted uranium (DU) shrapnel in their bodies that surgeons could not remove has yet to cause any cancers. While the veterans have high levels of uranium in their urine, none as yet has suffered kidney damage or cancer, nor have they fathered children with birth defects, said Dr. Kelley Brix, deputy chief of research and development for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The most common scientific argument made against the existence of Balkans syndrome is that the radiation from DU munitions have added only 1 percent to background radiation normally absorbed from the ground, food and other sources.

``Whether we like it or not we live in a sea of uranium. What the soldiers were exposed to is much lower than the naturally occurring level,'' said John Boice, scientific director of the International Epidemiology Institute near Washington and an expert on radiation exposure.

But he was speaking before traces of highly radioactive plutonium were detected in DU munitions, reigniting the furor.

Scientists say it is difficult to gauge the risks from DU in the Gulf War because of simultaneous exposures to a veritable ``toxic soup'' in the battlefields.

Possible exposure to chemical and biological weapons, smoke from Kuwaiti oil well fires, an array of powerful pesticides and the controversial vaccines and anti-nerve gas pills administered to soldiers have all been blamed for a range of ailments collectively known as Gulf War syndrome.

LAB RESULTS PROMPT WORRIES

Even the most sanguine scientists say more research is needed to clarify laboratory findings that reveal genetic abnormalities in cultured human cells exposed to DU.

``Depleted uranium is a transforming agent to cells in cell cultures ... (causing) measurable genomic instability,'' said Alexandra Miller, a scientist at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland.

Genetically damaged cells can die, get repaired by the body's enzymes or replicate wildly and grow into a tumor.

Exposed cells may exhibit abnormalities after dividing only twice, or after 40 divisions, Miller said. ``It's the offspring that manifest the damage and it is measured primarily in alpha particle exposures and not as readily with gamma.''

Gamma radiation is emitted by more highly radioactive uranium-235, one of the isotopes separated from natural uranium for use in nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons. The relatively small gamma particles can pass through the body.

In contrast, depleted uranium, which makes up more than 99 percent of natural uranium and is left over after the more radioactive isotopes are extracted, is primarily an alpha particle emitter. The relatively large alpha particles, which were compared to basketballs rolling on a billiard table, are blocked quickly and cannot even penetrate clothing or skin.

But DU could gain entry to the body through the lungs. Upon impact, shards from pulverized DU ammunition catch fire and burn, leaving an extremely fine dust that can be inhaled.

Based on animal studies, DU is highly soluble once inside the body, and can spread to the organs or to bones including the skull, Miller said. It is not clear how inhaling DU that has been oxidized by fire might react inside the body.

Higher-than-normal lung cancer rates among uranium miners, especially smokers, is blamed on years of inhaling radon gas that permeates underground shafts, Boice said. A product of decaying uranium, radon gas decays much faster than DU, meaning it emits many more alpha particles.

``The radioactivity is indeed less (in DU versus radon), but on the other hand an alpha is an alpha. If it traverses a cell it causes the same type of damage,'' Miller said.

NO HEALTH EFFECTS SEEN IN URANIUM PROCESSORS

Boice pointed to piles of evidence accumulated from uranium processing workers that reveals little risk of cancer even after years of inhaling uranium dust, which is referred to as ''yellow cake'' in the industry for its sweet taste.

``These (uranium processing) workers have ingested or inhaled uranium since the early days of theManhattan Project and have demonstrated no health effects, either in terms of cancer or kidney damage,'' Boice said.

Miller, Boice and other scientists agree that the dozen leukemia cases among European peacekeepers serving in the Balkans cannot be blamed on DU exposure because the illness requires at minimum two years to develop.

But Boice and Miller disagree about whether DU can migrate to the bone marrow, where leukemia originates.

Iraq has blamed post-Gulf War outbreaks of cancer and birth defects on what it terms NATO ``cancer bombs.''

Doug Rokke, an environmental physicist involved in Defense Department research into DU and assigned to clean up Gulf War vehicles hit by friendly fire, insists he and other members of his team have been sickened by DU exposure.

Rokke termed government denials a ``massive coverup.'' In his battle to win government medical care for himself and his colleagues, he said their illnesses were a product of the ''toxic mess'' left from the 1990-91 war.

``We have cancer, respiratory problems, birth defects, rashes, kidney problems, eye problems and immune system problems to mention only a few of those who were exposed to depleted uranium,'' Rokke said.

-------

Uranium Weapons Fallout Part of Our Making

Wednesday, January 24, 2001
Sydney Morning Herald
by Dr Helen Caldicott
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0124-03.htm

Australia is far from an innocent bystander to the damage being done by weapons that use depleted uranium

The evil legacy of the depleted uranium, or DU, weapons used by the allied forces in Iraq, Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo is causing a furore in Europe. Seven Italian soldiers who served in the Balkans have died of leukemia, while 30 are seriously ill, 12 with cancer. France, Portugal, Holland, Belgium and Spain also have soldiers who are developing malignancies.

The British Government, facing an anguished and angry outcry from its military veterans, has finally and reluctantly agreed to study the issue.

The Pentagon, however, steadfastly maintains that DU poses no threat to health.

Why should Australians care? Because these DU munitions almost certainly contained uranium mined in Australia.

DU is actually uranium 238. It is what is left after the fissionable element uranium 235 is extracted from the ore used as fuel for weapons and nuclear reactors.

About 700,000 tonnes of this seemingly useless but hazardous radioactive material had accumulated over the past half century throughout the United States until the American military discovered that it was not so useless after all.

Almost twice as dense as lead, it sliced through the armour of tanks like a hot knife through butter. Eureka: it was there and what's more it was free, so DU bullets and shells would be cheap to make as well.

But uranium 238 has other properties. It is pyrophoric, bursting into flames when it hits a tank at great speed.

The fire oxidises the uranium, converting it to tiny aerosolised particles that can be inhaled into the small air passages of the lung where the material often remains for many years.

As far back as 1943, scientists in the Manhattan Project were postulating that uranium could be used on the battlefield as an air and terrain contaminant.

Inhaling it would cause "bronchial irritation" and the acute radiation effects could induce ulcers and perforations of the gut followed by death. Because it is radioactive, uranium 238 can damage cells in the lung, bone, kidney, and lymph glands, causing cancer in those organs as well as cancer of the white blood cells, leukemia.

It is also a heavy metal and causes a kidney disease called nephritis. It is not surprising that Gulf War veterans are excreting uranium 238 in their urine and semen.

Children in Iraq - where over a million pounds of DU in spent shells and aerosolised powder was left by the allies - are reported to have a higher than normal incidence of malignancies and congenital malformations.

Similar reports are emerging from Bosnian and Kosovo hospitals, while studies of children of American veterans seem to show a higher than normal incidence of congenital disease.

Because uranium 238 has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, and plutonium, which is by orders of magnitude more carcinogenic than uranium, has a shorter half life of only 240,400 years, Iraq, Kuwait, Bosnia and Kosovo are now contaminated with carcinogenic radioactive elements forever.

And because the latent period of carcinogenes - that is, the incubation time for cancer - is two to 10 years for leukemia and 15 to 60 years for solid cancer, it is almost certain that the reported malignancies in the NATO troops and peacekeepers who served in the Balkans, and in the American soldiers and their allies who served in the Gulf, as well as civilians who live in these countries, are just the tip of the iceberg.

So what is the Australian connection? The Department of Energy in the US has just admitted that contaminated uranium reprocessed from military reactors had been mixed in with the "pure" DU.

This contaminated uranium also contains traces of plutonium and uranium 236, and probably neptunium and americium - elements which are actually thousands of times more carcinogenic than the uranium 238.

These DU munitions almost certainly contain Australian uranium because the thousands of tonnes of ore we ship routinely to the US is enriched at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion plant in Paducah, Kentucky, the same plant where the DU for weapons is sourced.

Thus the evil legacy of DU is partly Australia's.

When will we act to stop it?

Dr Helen Caldicott is a pediatrician and founder of Our Common Future Party.

--------

Are We All Getting "Nuked" in Kosovo?

January 24, 2001
NATO - KFOR News
Lt-Cdr. Rune Berge
http://www.kforonline.com/news/reports/nr_24jan01.htm

Photo: Burnt tank - S J Lewis RM, http://www.kforonline.com/news/reports/nr_24jan01a.jpg

PRISTINA: For the last couple of weeks, speculations about Depleted Uranium have spread faster in the world press than a storm in the Bermuda Triangle. But still we do not have a proper answer to the main question in this topic: Are we all getting nuked in Kosovo?

"No", says Bernard Kouchner, former United Nations Administrator in Kosovo and one of the founders of Medecins sans Frontieres, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize.

"According to my experience as Health Minister of France, there is no threat here. That is not to say I'm not taking this seriously. On the contrary, I'm suggesting that an independent body, such as Friends of Earth, should come and freely make their own exploration and investigation", he says in an UNMIK press release.

Just a few days before he resigned as the UN Administrator in Kosovo, he visited a site that had clearly been under heavy attack during the 1999 air strikes. At the site, in the town of Klina in western Kosovo, the Italian Brigade's Nuclear Biological-Chemical unit demonstrated their techniques of seeking radiation left by depleted uranium.

"The brigades check continuously all over Kosovo, and continuously they return to see if the level is higher than normal", Dr. Kouchner told media at the scene.

He also mentioned that the results from the tests done on soldiers by the United Nations Environmental Program would be known in February.

"We have also requested Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the head of the World Health Organization, to send specialists to Kosovo to do an investigation on the health of the population."

Questioned whether he is concerned about the risk of depleted uranium, he responded:

"I am concerned, but not worried. We are taking it seriously. But worried about the consequences of an eventual relationship between depleted uranium and cancer? No!"

Same level of radioactivity in Sweden and Italy

Previously in November a scientific team of the United Nations Environmental Program confirmed that there is not a high risk from depleted uranium in Kosovo.

According to NATO, depleted uranium was used in 112 sites in Kosovo. In those sites, scientists measured slightly higher beta and gamma radioactivity during an examination last year.

"We don't consider that risky, because the same level of radioactivity is found in natural background in some areas in Sweden and Italy", Pekka Haavisto, Chief of UNEP Assessment Team, said in Pristina in November last year.

The team of 14 scientists, which he led, was also in Kosovo last October. On their second trip to Kosovo, the scientist examined eleven sites in southern and western Kosovo, taking soil and water samples, plus taking vegetation samples including milk samples from cows at the sites visited.

He called for precautions to be taken especially when dealing directly with penetrates and sabots at the sites, as the final conclusions of the scientific assessment team can only be made after obtaining the results from laboratory analyses.

"In Kosovo you have many other more serious environmental risks connected to the air pollution, waste treatment and management", Haavisto also added.

--

Use of DU weapons could be war crime

ITALY, Rome -- NATO's use of depleted uranium could be investigated as a possible war crime, the chief prosecutor for the international war crimes tribunal has said.

Carla del Pronte told Italian state TV on Sunday: "If we have sufficient elements we will be obliged to investigate" as to whether the use of the heavy metal in the Balkans conflicts constituted a war crime.

Numerous NATO member states, including Italy, are currently carrying out their own health and scientific investigations into a possible link between the use of the radioactive weapons used during the Balkan wars and cancer-related deaths among servicemen serving in the region.

The latest country to embark on an investigation is Switzerland. Its defense ministry said on Sunday that it's planned to check the health implications of DU weapons test-fired in central Switzerland 30 years ago.

U.N. plays GENEVA, Switzerland -- The World Health Organisation (WHO) says it is "unlikely" that depleted uranium ammunition used by NATO troops could have caused cancer.

The Geneva-based United Nations health agency on Friday issued its first recommendation on the ammunition since the beginning of the current controversy over potential health risks.

The body concluded it was "unlikely" that exposure to NATO weapons containing depleted uranium could have led to a higher risk of cancer among military personnel who served in the Balkan conflicts.

But it said that it was planning a study to "assess whether there has been an increased rate of cancer amongst military personnel who served in the Gulf War or Balkans, as well as amongst exposed populations," CNN reports.

-------- greenland

Bush's Letter Causes Stir in Denmark

January 24, 2001 Filed at 2:02 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Greenland-Bush.html

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) -- A thank-you note from President Bush to Greenland's premier caused a stir Wednesday when several Danish lawmakers accused the new administration of bypassing Copenhagen on a foreign policy matter.

Greenland, the world's largest island, is a semiautonomous Danish territory with no say when it comes to foreign policy and defense issues.

Bush's note, thanking Greenland Premier Jonathan Motzfeldt for a telegram congratulating him on his election, briefly refers to the U.S. Air Force Base in Thule, in northern Greenland.

``The future presents enormous opportunities,'' Bush said in the undated letter. ``Like you, I am eager to work together on issues of mutual concern, like the Thule base.''

An early warning radar at the base would have to be upgraded if Washington decides to deploy a proposed missile shield by 2005, which the Bush administration favors but Russia and several other countries oppose.

Greenland opposes the missile shield, but Motzfeldt, who has pressed for more foreign policy influence, said he would welcome the chance to sit at the negotiation table.

``We understand (the letter) as if they want to talk to us and I'm glad for that,'' Motzfeldt told Danish public radio. The local Greenland government released the faxed letter Tuesday.

Per Stig Moeller of Denmark's opposition Conservative Party said the note was ``clumsily formulated because it gives Greenland the impression that they will discuss the Thule radar on a bilateral level with the Americans.''

The leader of the far-right Danish People's Party, Pia Kjaersgaard, called on the Danish government to ``intervene and tell the Americans that discussions and negotiations about Greenland are done through Denmark.''

The Social Democratic-led government has not commented on the letter.

U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Lela Margiou said the administration would continue ``close consultations with Denmark and Greenland'' on the issue.

A 1951 defense agreement between the United States and Denmark set up four, rent-free U.S. Air Force bases on Greenland. All except Thule have since been shut down.

-------- iraq

Nuclear inspectors end visit to Iraq

January 24, 2001
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/meast/01/24/iraq.weapons.ap/index.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- International Atomic Energy Agency experts praised Iraq for cooperating with an inspection completed Wednesday, but refused to say whether they had found any evidence Iraq was restarting banned weapons programs.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/maps/iraq.baghdad.jpg

The visit came as Iraq prepared to sit down with the United Nations to determine whether broader monitoring of its nuclear and other weapons programs could resume, and as the new U.S. administration made clear it will take a hard line on Iraq.

The Vienna-based IAEA, which is the United Nations' nuclear agency, has worked since 1991 with a U.N. inspection team created specifically for Iraq to oversee the destruction of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and the missiles used to deliver them. U.N. sanctions imposed to punish Iraq for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait cannot be lifted until inspectors report Iraq is weapons-free.

The U.N. team created to monitor Iraq's weapons programs has not had inspectors in Iraq since 1998, when members left shortly before the United States and Britain launched a bombing campaign to punish Iraq for refusing to allow the inspectors to do their jobs.

IAEA inspectors have been in Iraq since 1998, but the agency said in a report last year it couldn't be sure that Iraq wasn't rearming.

Wednesday, Ahmed Abu Zahra, head of the four-man IAEA team, refused to comment when asked whether the group had found evidence Iraq was rehabilitating its nuclear weapons facilities.

But Abu Zahra said "everything went well, we found good cooperation from our counterparts in Iraq and from the Iraqi Atomic Energy Organization."

Abu Zahra said the team had inspected and measured nuclear material containing low enriched, natural and depleted uranium. He said the data collected would be further analyzed and evaluated in Vienna and the results made public later.

The team then headed by road to neighboring Jordan, from where the experts will fly to Vienna.

In talks with the United Nations scheduled to begin Feb. 26, Iraq is hoping to move toward ending the sanctions, while the United Nations will push for the return of weapons inspectors.

Iraq has demanded that sanctions be lifted immediately, saying it has rid itself of its weapons of mass destruction. Under U.N. resolutions, the sanctions cannot be lifted until the Security Council is satisfied that Baghdad is free of such weapons.

Diplomats have said in New York that France, one of Iraq's closest allies on the Security Council, wants the United States to clarify when it would support lifting sanctions, what it sees as the remaining questions, and what financial controls it envisions putting in place to ensure that Iraq doesn't rebuild its weapons programs, diplomats have said in New York.

Britain, which has joined the United States in taking a hard line on Iraq, is reviewing its whole Iraq policy, but British officials have stressed that such a review is only natural considering a new U.S. president is in place.

U.S. President George W. Bush, in office less than a week, has said in several interviews that he would use military force against Saddam Hussein if it could be demonstrated the Iraqi leader was rebuilding his arsenal. But Bush conceded that might be hard without weapons inspectors.

U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Iraq has been rebuilding plants capable of producing chemical or biological weapons. In a television interview Tuesday, Iraqi Trade Minister Mohammed Mehdi Saleh dismissed such suggestions as "the new American administration's first lie."

---

U.N. Says Iraq Has Cooperated With Weapons Inspections

Wednesday, January 24, 2001
Fox News
Associated Press
By Waiel Faleh
http://www.foxnews.com/world/012401/iraq.sml

BAGHDAD, Iraq - U.N. nuclear experts praised Iraq for cooperating with an inspection completed Wednesday, but refused to say whether they had found any evidence Iraq was restarting banned weapons programs.

The visit came as Iraq prepared to sit down with the United Nations to determine whether broader monitoring of its nuclear and other weapons programs could resume, and as the new U.S. administration made clear it will take a hard line on Iraq.

Iraq also said Wednesday that it would welcome a U.N. team to work out how to spend $530 million authorized by the United Nations for use in rebuilding the country's ailing oil industry.

Under the U.N. oil-for-food program, Iraq can sell its oil but its proceeds, monitored by the United Nations, must go for humanitarian needs and other specific uses. Iraq is under sanctions that can only be lifted once U.N. inspectors confirm it has ended its programs to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Almost all of those inspections have been halted since 1998, when the U.N. inspection team pulled out of Iraq ahead of U.S.-British bombings. It has not been allowed back since.

The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, however, has continued its inspections focusing on Iraq's nuclear capabilities. Last year it said in a report that it couldn't be sure that Iraq wasn't rearming.

Ahmed Abu Zahra, head of the four-man IAEA team, said that in its latest visit, "everything went well, we found good cooperation from our counterparts in Iraq and from the Iraqi Atomic Energy Organization."

But he refused to comment when asked whether the group had found evidence Iraq was rehabilitating its nuclear weapons facilities.

Abu Zahra said the team had inspected and measured nuclear material containing low enriched, natural and depleted uranium. He said the data collected would be further analyzed and the results made public later.

In talks with the United Nations scheduled to begin Feb. 26, Iraq is hoping to move toward ending the sanctions, while the United Nations will push for the return of weapons inspectors. Iraq has demanded that sanctions be lifted immediately, saying it has rid itself of its weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Iraq has been rebuilding plants capable of producing chemical or biological weapons - a claim Iraq denied Tuesday, calling it the "first lie" of the newly-inaugurated administration of President Bush.

Iraqi Oil Minister Amer Mohammed Rashid said U.N. experts would arrive in mid-February to discuss plans on boosting Iraq's oil exports with the $530 million authorized by the U.N. Security Council in December.

Rashid said Baghdad wants rebuild a pipeline though Syria and build a new one through Jordan.

Iraq exports its oil from two terminals approved by the United Nations: the southern terminal of Mina al-Bakr on the Persian Gulf and Turkey's Ceyhan terminal on the Mediterranean.

Iraq has begun work on its side of a pipeline to Jordan's Red Sea port of Aqaba, but the Jordanians have yet to start building their side of the pipeline. A pipeline through Syria to a Lebanese port on the Mediterranean lays idle.

---

Bush faces national security test

1/24/2001
Morning Coffee Edition
InfoBeat News
Associated Press
By TOM RAUM
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=9nae813a99i56
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-Foreign.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush came into office talking tough about confronting Saddam Hussein over chemical and biological weapons. But developments in the Persian Gulf suggest he'll face the same problems in outmaneuvering the Iraqi leader that his father and President Clinton did before him.

Saddam and the larger issue of tensions in the Middle East are shaping up as Bush's first tough national security test.

U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Iraq has been rebuilding plants capable of producing chemical or biological weapons.

``What we don't know is what's going on in those facilities,'' Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said Tuesday. ``And that is a cause for concern to us, given Saddam Hussein's past track record of obfuscation and denial of his (weapons) programs.''

Bush's national security team is also troubled about a new assertiveness shown by Saddam and his followers _ including a proposal by his son, a member of the Iraqi Parliament, that maps be modified to show Kuwait as a part of Iraq.

Saddam has been seeking to raise his standing in the Arab world and attempting to tie his country's plight to that of the Palestinians. In a televised speech last week marking the 10th anniversary of the start of the Persian Gulf War, he appealed to fellow Arabs to unite against foreign influence in the Middle East.

``We understand, going in, that this is still a dangerous man,'' Bush said in a recent interview.

Further destabilizing the region: Tuesday's breakdown in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. The talks in Taba, Egypt, ended abruptly when Israel recalled its delegation after two Israelis were killed, apparently by Palestinian gunmen, in the West Bank.

Clinton invested an enormous amount of time and energy in his final year trying to nudge the Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward.

Bush said he would try to maintain that commitment. And Secretary of State Colin Powell talked by telephone on Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. But underscoring a lower level of involvement was the absence of any U.S. representatives at the talks.

``The United States will decide, in this new administration, on the exact structure and form of its involvement. And we'll tell you about that when it's time,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday.

Powell, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Vice President Dick Cheney, as defense secretary, helped the United States make war on Saddam Hussein in 1991. And both have issued hawkish statements on dealing with him now.

Furthermore, Bush said in several interviews that he would use military force against Saddam if it could be demonstrated the Iraqi leader was indeed rebuilding his arsenal.

But Bush conceded that might be hard without weapons inspectors. ``Therein lies the problem,'' he told The Associated Press. ``There is (satellite) imagery. We may catch him moving a giant weapon. I don't know. We'll see.''

Iraq agreed at the end of the Gulf War to dismantle chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. U.N. weapons inspectors left before the United States and Britain mounted ``Operation Desert Fox,'' a December 1998 bombing campaign to punish Iraq for refusing to allow the inspectors to do their jobs. Saddam has refused to let inspectors return.

``Absolutely we ought to have inspectors back in there, but there doesn't seem to be much consensus for it right now,'' Bush said.

Bush inherits ``a whole new set of problems'' on Iraq, said Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

``Backlash from the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians makes it harder for him to deal with friendly Arab states. And so many powers want to get back into Iraq, invest in its energy, get a share of rebuilding its economy'' that unilateral military action by the United States would find little international support, Cordesman suggested.

Meanwhile, illegal oil shipments from Iraq are reportedly going by either sea or pipeline to Syria, Turkey and Jordan.

The reports that Iraq may be covertly building weapons of mass destruction is being taken seriously by Bush's national security team. But aides suggested that, unless provoked by Saddam militarily, the administration is unlikely to rush to take any overt steps.

``It's too soon to address that question,'' said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

He said Bush ``will continue to make sure that we work to protect our interests in the Middle East, including, of course, Iraq.

---

Nuclear Inspectors Praise Iraq

January 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-UN.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- U.N. nuclear experts praised Iraq for cooperating with an inspection completed Wednesday, but refused to say whether they had found any evidence Iraq was restarting banned weapons programs.

The visit came as Iraq prepared to sit down with the United Nations to determine whether broader monitoring of its nuclear and other weapons programs could resume, and as the new U.S. administration made clear it will take a hard line on Iraq.

Iraq also said Wednesday that it would welcome a U.N. team to work out how to spend $530 million authorized by the United Nations for use in rebuilding the country's ailing oil industry.

Under the U.N. oil-for-food program, Iraq can sell its oil but its proceeds, monitored by the United Nations, must go for humanitarian needs and other specific uses. Iraq is under sanctions that can only be lifted once U.N. inspectors confirm it has ended its programs to develop chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

Almost all of those inspections have been halted since 1998, when the U.N. inspection team pulled out of Iraq ahead of U.S.-British bombings. It has not been allowed back since.

The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, however, has continued its inspections focusing on Iraq's nuclear capabilities. Last year it said in a report that it couldn't be sure that Iraq wasn't rearming.

Ahmed Abu Zahra, head of the four-man IAEA team, said that in its latest visit, ``everything went well, we found good cooperation from our counterparts in Iraq and from the Iraqi Atomic Energy Organization.''

But he refused to comment when asked whether the group had found evidence Iraq was rehabilitating its nuclear weapons facilities.

Abu Zahra said the team had inspected and measured nuclear material containing low enriched, natural and depleted uranium. He said the data collected would be further analyzed and the results made public later.

In talks with the United Nations scheduled to begin Feb. 26, Iraq is hoping to move toward ending the sanctions, while the United Nations will push for the return of weapons inspectors. Iraq has demanded that sanctions be lifted immediately, saying it has rid itself of its weapons of mass destruction.

U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Iraq has been rebuilding plants capable of producing chemical or biological weapons -- a claim Iraq denied Tuesday, calling it the ``first lie'' of the newly-inaugurated administration of President Bush.

Iraqi Oil Minister Amer Mohammed Rashid said U.N. experts would arrive in mid-February to discuss plans on boosting Iraq's oil exports with the $530 million authorized by the U.N. Security Council in December.

Rashid said Baghdad wants rebuild a pipeline though Syria and build a new one through Jordan.

Iraq exports its oil from two terminals approved by the United Nations: the southern terminal of Mina al-Bakr on the Persian Gulf and Turkey's Ceyhan terminal on the Mediterranean.

Iraq has begun work on its side of a pipeline to Jordan's Red Sea port of Aqaba, but the Jordanians have yet to start building their side of the pipeline. A pipeline through Syria to a Lebanese port on the Mediterranean lays idle.

---

Iraq calls weapons charges 'a new lie'

January 24, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001124212111.htm

BAGHDAD - Iraq yesterday characterized as a "new lie" U.S. charges that factories that could be used for making chemical or biological agents have been rebuilt since U.S.-British air strikes on the country in 1998.

"Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction," Trade Minister Mohammed Mehdi Saleh was quoted by the Qatari satellite television network Al-Jazeera as saying.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that three factories were located in an industrial complex in Falluja, west of Baghdad.

A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was not known whether the plants were producing chemical or biological agents because with no international weapons inspectors on the ground, "we can't see inside."

-------- russia

No Fixed Deadlines for Nuclear Disarmament,
Says Russian Foreign Ministry

Jan 24, 2001
Russia Today
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=265696

MOSCOW -- (Agence France Presse) Russia is doing everything it can to prevent the proliferation of nuclear arms, but sees no need to set exact deadlines for the destruction of its nuclear stockpile, a foreign ministry spokesman said Tuesday.

"We're still against counterproductive and unrealistic attempts by the radicals to force us into drawing up a fixed schedule for liquidating our nuclear arms," the foreign ministry's spokesman Alexander Yakovenko said.

"Still, we are prepared for reasonable compromise in order to meet the demands for further steps in the nuclear disarmament process," he added.

Yakovenko said that Russia "treats the disarmament process in a responsible and practical manner" and called for coordinated efforts by all countries to help implement the non-proliferation system.

Russia had recently said it was ready to accept further limits to its missile arsenal provided the United States abandons its controversial plan to set up a national anti-missile defense shield.

Moscow had repeatedly warned that creating such a shield could spark a new arms race, endangering the implementation of disarmament treaties. ((c) 2001 Agence France Presse)

---

Seismic Waves Analyzed in Sunken Sub

January 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russian-Submarine.html

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- Analysis of seismic waves supports conclusions that two onboard explosions, not a collision, destroyed a Russian submarine in August, killing all 118 crew members.

The first explosion was relatively small, consistent with a misfiring torpedo aboard the Kursk, according to a report by Arizona and New Mexico researchers published Tuesday in the geophysical journal Eos. That blast was followed about two minutes later by an explosion 250 times larger than the first, the researchers said.

Most investigators have said they believed an explosion sank the sub in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12, but Russian researchers have left open the possibility of a collision -- possibly with a ship shadowing the sub.

The Eos authors, led by Keith Koper and Terry Wallace of the University of Arizona, say their data were collected by a network of seismic stations used in part to monitor a Russian nuclear test site 500 miles from the location of the Kursk sinking. Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists Steve Taylor and Hans Hartse participated in the study.

``The main shock is consistent with the explosion of approximately five tons equivalent TNT detonated near, or on, the sea floor,'' they wrote.

That second blast was likely caused by fire from the first blast setting off other torpedo warheads or propellant fuel, Wallace said Tuesday by e-mail from Chile, where he and Koper are doing other research.

Divers who entered the sub found two notes written by sailors trapped in a rear compartment after the explosions. One note described 23 crew members as suffering from carbon monoxide poisoning from a fire and the other described how its author was writing by feel in the dark.

Taylor, reached in Los Alamos, said the research team is not suggesting either blast was a nuclear explosion. The report refers only to conventional explosives.

In December, an American diver who worked on the Kursk recovery team said damage he saw convinced him the sub blew up.

``From what I saw, it was obvious it exploded,'' Don Degener, 48, said from his home near Kansas City.

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

Our Permeable Defense

January 24, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/opinion/L24DEF.html

To the Editor:

The decision of the Defense Department not to scapegoat individual commanders for the terrorist attack on the destroyer Cole is clearly the proper one (news article, Jan. 20). There was a failure of imagination up and down the chain of command, not just in the port of Aden.

But there is a larger lesson here that should be heeded. How can we be sure that the proposed multibillion-dollar missile defense shield will not just as easily be breached by a determined terrorist ruse, or that a comparable failure of imagination will not turn what is supposed to be a technological marvel into a monumental waste of resources - a Maginot Line in the sky?

DAVID A. JOHNSON Asheville, N.C., Jan. 21, 2001

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

Plutonium Found in Processing Plants

January 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Pentagon-Plutonium.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Pentagon has tracked traces of plutonium in U.S. ammunition used in Kosovo to contaminated equipment at plants in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee. Officials said there was no danger to soldiers, but a researcher expressed concern for people who worked at the plants decades ago.

Plutonium is one of the deadliest substances known, but so little tainted the depleted uranium used to make armor-piercing bullets that officials say they are not worried about extra health or environmental concerns for the troops from the United States and other countries involved in Kosovo.

``We have seen nothing in our studies that would indicate that this has more than an insignificant amount of impact on either personal health or the environment,'' said Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman.

Quigley said someone exposed to a millionth of an ounce of the material would inhale ''1/23 of a quadrillionth of a gram of plutonium, corresponding to an estimated increase in fatal cancer risk of about one in 13 trillion.''

Physicist Marvin Resnikoff, who has studied plutonium contamination in the government's gaseous diffusion plants, said Wednesday that if any plutonium is in the ammunition, ``It has to be the merest trace'' because of the way plutonium reacts during processing.

``I can understand why there's concern,'' said Resnikoff. ``Plutonium is an extremely toxic material. But I wouldn't necessarily dispute their finding that it's not a serious hazard. There is not going to be much in there.''

The real danger, he said, was to workers unknowingly exposed from the 1950s to the 1970s, when plutonium contamination was kept secret by plant operators.

The government revealed in 1999 that plants in Piketon, Ohio; Paducah, Ky.; and Oak Ridge, Tenn., had handled recycled uranium containing plutonium, neptunium and technetium-99, all of which are highly toxic.

``In those plants, we found trace elements in the equipment,'' Quigley said. ``The source of the (munitions) contamination, as best we understand it now, were the plants themselves.''

Countries that sent peacekeepers to Bosnia and Kosovo have recently been looking for links between the depleted uranium ammunition fired by U.S. warplanes and illnesses later contracted by veterans.

Germany, Italy, Switzerland and the European Parliament have called for a moratorium on using the ammunition.

Australia is testing its soldiers for radioactive exposure. Italy is studying the illnesses of 30 Balkans veterans, seven of whom died of cancer, including five cases of leukemia.

Germany sent troops to a former military compound in Bosnia to measure radiation, and reported finding no indication that plutonium was present in the ammunition found there.

NATO said Wednesday that its special committee on depleted uranium has found no link between the armor-piercing ammunition and cancer among peacekeeping troops.

The committee was informed about the plutonium traces, Quigley said.

Depleted uranium munitions were employed during NATO's 78-day air campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, and in Bosnia during 1994 and 1995.

--------

Contamination at plants source of plutonium in munitions

Wednesday, January 24
Agence France Presse
Pentagon

WASHINGTON, Jan 23 (AFP) - Plutonium and a highly radioactive isotope, U-236, found in US depleted uranium (DU) munitions has been traced to the use of contaminated equipment at US government plants where the heavy metal was produced during the Cold War, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Pentagon spokesmen said that the amounts found in US stocks of depleted uranium were minute and the risk to health or to the environment was insignificant. "We have seen nothing in our studies that this would have more than an insignificant impact either on personal health or the environment," said Rear Admiral Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman. "It is just incredibly small quantities here that we're talking about both in the armor and in the munitions themselves," he said. But the disclosure that DU munitions contain even trace amounts of highly toxic plutonium as well as U-236 has outraged Germany, whose defense minister protested the Pentagon's failure to keep its allies informed.

NATO has been struggling for weeks to allay fears in some European countries that a rash of reported cancer cases among veterans of Balkans peacekeeping missions were linked to exposure to depleted uranium ordnance fired by US forces during conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo. Quigley said a NATO committee set up to look into the depleted uranium issue has been informed in recent days about the plutonium found in US DU stocks. It was detected as early as 1999 in the course of an investigation by the Department of Energy into contamination at its processing plants in Paducah, Kentucky; Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Piketon, Ohio, defense officials said.

The investigation found that all three plants during the 1950s through the 1970s were contaminated by operations involving recycled uranium that contained plutonium, neptunium and technetium-99, defense officials said.

Depleted uranium produced with the contaminated equipment itself became contaminated with plutonium and the other transuranic elements, they said.

Trace elements of U-236, which normally would not be found in depleted uranium, also were noted when depleted uranium stocks were checked in 1999, said Lieutenant Colonel Paul Phillips, a Pentagon spokesman. "The source of the contamination as best we can understand it now was the plant themselves that produced the depleted uranium during the 20 some year time frame when the DU was produced," said Quigley.

-------- new mexico

University Cited for Nuclear Breach

January 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Lab-Violations.html

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (AP) -- The Department of Energy said Wednesday it had cited the University of California for violations of nuclear safety rules at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The citation, listing several infractions, detailed an incident in March in which eight workers were exposed to airborne plutonium during a leak. Investigators said the mishap could have been prevented.

``Up to three workers may have received exposures that exceeded the annual regulatory limit set for this work; one worker's exposure has been estimated at over five times the annual limit,'' the department said in a news release.

The citation claimed plutonium was released when a worker disturbed a loose connection in an airtight device that allows workers to handle hazardous materials without being exposed to radiation.

By law, the university and the lab are exempt from fines.

``Our institution will take the necessary steps to correct safety deficiencies,'' said Los Alamos director John Browne.

Lab spokesman John Gustafson refused to provide details about what measures could be taken against the university, which has until Feb. 19 to refute the claims.

The Energy Department did not return calls seeking further comment.

-------- ohio

GAO: Clinton team broke law to save jobs

1/24/2001
InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=9nae813a99i56

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Clinton administration violated federal law when it went around Congress to save the jobs of workers at a soon-to-be-shuttered Ohio uranium plant, congressional auditors said Tuesday.

The General Accounting Office said the plan to keep the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in a standby mode, thus sparing some 1,000 layoffs, cannot legally be financed in the way devised by former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.

Richardson said putting the plant on standby was done as an offshoot of a program to privatize government uranium enrichment operations. He arranged to have $725 million in leftover privatization funds returned from the Treasury, then went to Piketon, Ohio, and promised to spend $630 million of it there to protect the Portsmouth jobs.

``You were there for us when we won the Cold War. Now we're going to pay you back,'' he told workers at the plant.

Moving the $725 million did not require congressional approval. The GAO said establishing a technology demonstration project at Piketon and putting the plant on standby are not legitimate expenses of privatization and therefore violate the Antideficiency Act.

That law allows agency decision-makers to be reprimanded, suspended or fired if they obligate the government to spend money that Congress hasn't formally approved. In this case, the decision-makers were Clinton administration political appointees who left when the Bush administration took over Saturday.

-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

Problems plague anti-drug offensive

1/24/2001
InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition
By ANDREW SELSKY
Associated Press Writer
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=9nae813a99i56

SANTA ROSA DEL GUAMUEZ, Colombia (AP) - Villagers vividly recall the planes swooping in at treetop level, trailing a fine mist of herbicide over fields of coca, corn and banana, with combat helicopters clattering overhead.

For the governments of the United States and Colombia, the aerial spraying mission in the Indian village of Santa Rosa del Guamuez was among the first in a controversial counterdrug effort in the world's largest cocaine-producing region.

But already the strategy is running into problems and fueling deep resentment. The planes killed not only coca _ the base ingredient of cocaine _ but the food crops and pasture.

``The helicopters came with a great noise. They were heavily armed. You could see the machine guns,'' recalled resident Virgilio Queta of the morning of Jan. 6.

Government investigators are inundated with complaints from farmers, and are finding that some complaints of non-drug crops being sprayed are true.

Juan Martinez, of the government ombudsman office, confirmed that some pasture sprayed with herbicide had died. Even the pasture of the mayor of La Hormiga, the main town where the missions have centered, was fumigated.

A three-hour hike by Martinez and Associated Press journalists around Santa Rosa showed that the herbicide landed mostly on the coca crops, many of them on farms smaller than an acre. The government and U.S. officials had given assurances that mainly large-scale ``commercial'' plantations would be targeted.

The fields in Santa Rosa looked like moonscapes, with only deadened branches of the formerly robust green bushes sticking above the brown ground.

Adjacent food crops were shriveled and yellowed from the herbicide, as well as some of the jungle. Tribal fish farms were also sprayed, the Indians said.

Santa Rosa's residents, members of the Cofan and Paez tribes, resent the spraying and wonder if their ancestral lands will recover.

``We are natives here,'' Angelina Queta, a 58-year-old Cofan woman, told Martinez. ``If this land is ruined, we are not going to ask the government to relocate us from our homeland _ so treat it with respect.''

Plan Colombia _ President Andres Pastrana's anti-drug initiative that Washington is financing with $1.3 billion including helicopters and training for Colombian troops _ envisions a mass-scale fumigation of Putumayo, the state where Santa Rosa sits.

An average of 2.7 gallons of the herbicide glyphosate is sprayed on each 2{ acres of coca. There are at least 138,000 acres of coca in Putumayo, said Gonzalo de Francisco, Pastrana's point man for the state.

De Francisco is trying to get small-scale coca producers to eradicate their crops manually in exchange for government development aid, and said he already has signed up 2,000 families. A week after Santa Rosa was sprayed, its residents agreed to destroy the rest of their coca in return for aid.

Unless more do so, thousands more gallons of herbicide will fall on Putumayo, a verdant Amazonian region bordering Ecuador. De Francisco defended the fumigation strategy, saying it was preventing far greater environmental damage caused by the coca producers.

In addition to the vast acreage of rainforest that has been felled for the planting of coca, 10.8 million gallons of pesticides, herbicides and agents such as gasoline, sulfuric acid and ammonia are used in Putumayo annually to grow coca and convert it into cocaine, the government said.

Resistance to the campaign by leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary gunmen who ``tax'' cocaine production has been muted so far. De Francisco said the aircraft had received only four bullet hits, with no injuries to crew members, since fumigation began around Christmas in Putumayo.

Most of the missions are in areas where paramilitary forces have ousted the rebels in recent fighting. The paramilitary members are loosely allied with the military, and have said they don't plan to resist the fumigation missions.

But the rebels are ready to battle the U.S.-supplied helicopters.

``If they fly low around here, we'll be throwing lead up at them,'' vowed a young rebel who manned an ambush point alongside a highway an hour's drive from La Hormiga.

---

Troops, rebels gather forces in Colombia

01/24/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-01-24-colombia.htm

PUERTO RICO, Colombia (AP) - Colombian army troops were on alert near a rebel safe haven Wednesday and more reinforcements poured in, just days before the scheduled end to the so-called demilitarized zone.

Army Col. Romulo Vasquez said hundreds of rebel soldiers also have been mobilizing in the area, a chunk of land in southern Colombia twice the size of New Jersey.

"We're in a state of alert," Vasquez said.

President Andres Pastrana ceded the zone to rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, two years ago to kick-start peace talks and have a site for them to take place. He must decide by Jan. 31 whether to renew the FARC's control over the zone, as he has done several times.

But the FARC suspended talks in November, and with no sign that either side will make concessions, Colombia's military was preparing for a possible escalation of fighting in the 37-year civil war.

Light tanks rumbled through the streets of Puerto Rico, an hour's drive from the main town in the zone, San Vicente del Caguan, as the army built up its presence outside the borders of the zone.

"We are deploying troops where they can be most effective regarding the situation that can come up on Jan. 31," said army Gen. Arcensio Barrero.

Pastrana was cutting short a trip to Europe because of the crisis and was due to return to Colombia on Sunday.

Civilians were fearing the worst.

"Both sides have their 'Plan B' and are demonstrating their strength," said Francisco Javier Munera, the archbishop of San Vicente del Caguan. "There won't be combat between the two sides, but a dirty war. If the peace process is interrupted, we will have an apocalypse."

Munera called for Pastrana and FARC leader Manuel Marulanda to meet to try to defuse the situation. The mayor of San Vicente del Caguan, Nestor Ramirez, said that if the government does not renew the demilitarized zone, it must protect the civilian population.

Most of the 3,000 people killed in the war each year are civilians, attacked by right-wing paramilitary gunmen or leftist rebels after being accused of supporting the opposing side.

Pope John Paul II on Wednesday decried the rising violence, appealing for end to kidnappings, bombings and attacks linked to drug trafficking.

"I am also asking all parties to promote an effective and honest dialogue," he said in a special appeal during his weekly general audience. "It is time to return to the Lord of Life, so that he moves the hearts of Colombians and makes them understand that they are one large family."

---

Colombian troops sent near guerrilla haven

January 24, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001124212111.htm

BOGOTA, Colombia - The Colombian army said yesterday it airlifted about 600 counterinsurgency troops to an area near a leftist guerrilla safe haven as attempts to revive peace talks to end a 4-decade-old civil war stalled before a key deadline.

The dispatch of the troops, who were reinforcing about 2,500 government soldiers based near a Switzerland-sized area under the control of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), came after rebel leader Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda Monday rejected government proposals to restart formal peace talks.

President Andres Pastrana must decide by Jan. 31 whether to allow the FARC to remain in the demilitarized territory in southern Colombia that he granted the rebels two years ago to start a peace dialogue.

-------- drug war

Waiting to Inhale

Wed, 24 Jan 2001
Advocates for Self-Government <advo@best.com>
Liberator Online, Vol. 6, No. 2

Waiting to Inhale, by veteran libertarian journalist Alan Bock, covers the history of medical marijuana (from 1500 B.C.!), the medical controversy over marijuana, the California Prop 215 campaign to legalize medical marijuana, and much more.

This is about more than just medical marijuana -- it touches on states' rights, individual liberty, medical freedom and more.

David Boaz of the Cato Institute says this is "...the only book you'll need on the growing political movement to give individuals access to marijuana for medical purposes."

Great, informative and up-to-the-minute reading on one of today's hottest issues, written with a libertarian perspective!

Learn more -- including quotes from Stossel, Friedman and others -- in our "Product Review" section this issue, below. Thank you!

PRODUCT REVIEW:
Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana
by Alan W. Bock. Quality paperback, 286 pages

In 1996 Californian voters, in the teeth of opposition by the Drug War establishment, passed Proposition 215, the Medical Marijuana initiative. Most local governments took account of the will of the people, but certain people in the state government, and the drug warriors in the federal government, fought it, or ignored it.

This resulted in people, like best-selling libertarian writer Peter McWilliams -- an AIDS and cancer sufferer -- being arrested by federal troopers for doing something that was perfectly legal under state law. (McWilliams died as a direct result.)

Waiting to Inhale, by veteran libertarian journalist Alan Bock (Orange County Register) covers the history of medical marijuana (from 1500 B.C.!), the medical controversy over marijuana, the campaign and its aftermath. Great, informative and up-to-the-minute reading on one of today's hottest issues!

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"Waiting to Inhale is a vivid, compelling presentation of the evil and inhumanity of federal marijuana policy. This book should move Alan Bock up to the top of the Drug Czar's List of Enemies." -- James Bovard

"This is an important book with far-reaching policy implications. Alan Bock carefully documents the irrational governmental controls on the use of marijuana for medical purposes. More importantly, Bock systematically constructs a compelling argument for legalizing the use of medical marijuana." -- Jim Doti, President of Chapman University

"A balanced account by a veteran journalist detailing the political treachery and cowardice that kept the will of the California voters from being implemented on medical marijuana." -- Joseph McNamara, former police chief of San Jose, California

HOW TO ORDER THIS GREAT BOOK We are pleased to offer Waiting to Inhale: The Politics of Medical Marijuana by Alan W. Bock for just $18.95 (plus shipping). And please note: shipping is FREE if you order over $100 of books from the site below!

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This will take you to a site at the Laissez Faire Books online catalog. Laissez Faire Books is the world's largest seller of books on liberty, and we are pleased to be able to offer this book in partnership with them.

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You can also, of course, place your order to the Advocates by phone, mail or fax. Call us at 1-800-932-1776, or see below for further contact information.

This offer is good through Wednesday, February 7, 2001.

-

DEA Planning to Ban Hemp Products, Create Idiotic New Drug Crimes

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has officially announced that it intends to ban most now-legal hemp products in the United States -- including all hemp foods, hemp ingredients, and hemp nutritional supplements made from sterile (non-psychoactive) hemp seeds. These legal products are currently quite popular. The DEA wants to kill these new industries.

Currently, it is against the law to grow hemp in the U.S., but raw hemp and hemp products may be imported. Once imported, hemp products may be possessed, used, and sold just like any other legal commodity. This has been U.S. law for 63 years.

The DEA is attempting to achieve this radical change in U.S. policy quietly, through creating an "interim rule" establishing the ban. An interim rule has the force of law once it is published in the Federal Register, which can be done without vote or public comment. Several federal agencies must agree to the proposed rules before they can become effective. The Department of Justice has already done so. The others are Customs, Treasury, Commerce, and the Office of Management and Budget.

According to the Coalition to Save Hemp, a coalition formed to fight the new regulations, it is possible, maybe even likely, that the DEA will also ban personal-care hemp products. Since hemp-based shampoos, soaps, lotions, and so forth come into contact with the human skin, the DEA may argue that they convey THC (the primary active ingredient in marijuana) into the human system, even though there is no known evidence that this is possible. (It is impossible to get a psychoactive effect from hemp-based shampoos and soaps.)

According to the DEA, the consumption of legal hemp products is "confounding our federal drug control testing program." The DEA claims the use of hemp products could cause individuals to test positive for marijuana, even if they are not using marijuana. (Opponents cite studies claiming this is nonsense.)

The DEA essentially wants to treat hemp and hemp products just like marijuana. This means that hemp will have the same legal status as marijuana -- and heroin.

Based on current drug penalties, the Coalition speculates that if these rules become law, literally millions of Americans could become criminals overnight merely for possessing salad dressing, cakes, shampoos, lotions, soaps and other products that have the slightest amount of naturally occurring THC.

Also, extrapolating from current law, those who are arrested for shampoo, salad dressings and so forth could, theoretically, face up to one year in federal prison and a $10,000 fine -- the same penalties they would face if they were arrested for possessing a small amount of marijuana.

If someone is arrested with a stockpile of (currently legal) hemp products that weighs hundreds of pounds, The Coalition to Save Hemp says the defendant could face a 5- or 10-year mandatory minimum prison sentence -- or even the death penalty (!) -- under federal law, for the illegal possession of non-psychoactive shampoos and soaps.

That may sound outlandish, and perhaps the DEA won't go that far. But who knows, really? The history of the Drug War is filled with brutal, illogical, intrusive and idiotic ideas that became law. Arresting and jailing people for owning soap and shampoo fits right in.

The Coalition To Save Hemp has created a Web site with more information on the proposed regulations: http://www.SaveHemp.org The Drug Reform Coalition Network also has information at this site: http://www.drcnet.org/wol/165.html#hempembargo

(Source: Coalition to Save Hemp/DRC-Net/ Thanks to Roy Lieberman)

---

01/24/01
USA Today
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Arkansas

Benton - A marijuana possession charge was dropped against a Dallas man who exited an interstate after being warned of a drug checkpoint ahead. Prosecutors say a recent U.S. Supreme Court opinion prevented them from using 79 pounds of pot found in the car as evidence. The decision invalidated police searches during traffic checkpoints for the express purpose of drug eradication.

South Dakota

Tea - A Sioux Falls man was among the 140 people pardoned by President Clinton. Greg Sands was arrested in 1989 on a federal drug charge and served two years in prison. Sands, 42, now runs a drywall business and speaks to children and prisoners about drug abuse.

Utah

Ogden - A man accused of possessing peyote says the charges violate his constitutional right to worship and should be dismissed. Police seized 3,500 peyote buttons at Nick Stark's Ogden Canyon home in July after a woman reported he had hosted a ceremony featuring the hallucinogenic drug. Stark, 49, claims to be a member of the Oklevueha Earthwalks Native American Church.

-------- india/pakistan

India Extends Kashmir Truce Despite Attacks

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By CELIA W. DUGGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/world/24INDI.html

NEW DELHI, Jan. 23 - India extended its cease-fire in Kashmir today despite attacks by Pakistan- based Islamic militants who are fighting against Indian rule of Kashmir, a Himalayan territory that both India and Pakistan claim.

In announcing that the unilateral cease-fire would continue for a third month, External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh criticized Pakistan for having failed to rein in the Lashkar-e-Toiba, a militant group that claimed responsibility for assaults in recent weeks on the historic Red Fort here in the Indian capital and on an airport in Srinagar, the summer capital of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir.

"It is regrettable that Pakistan has not recognized the demand of time for peace and continues to promote, encourage and abet cross-border terrorism," Mr. Singh said after a meeting of ministers who are involved with security that was led by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. "This must cease."

But Mr. Singh said the government had nonetheless decided that its cease-fire, set to expire Friday, was worth extending.

"The government believes violence must be ended and peace, which has been welcomed by the people of Jammu and Kashmir, given every chance," he said.

Mr. Singh did not spell out what India has to gain from the cease-fire. He said a resumption of talks with Pakistan, which broke off a year and a half ago after a Pakistan-backed incursion into Indian-held Kashmir, still awaited a more "conducive atmosphere."

The Foreign Ministry in Pakistan, reacting to the announcement, said the cease-fire would be meaningful only if India also agreed to start negotiating with Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir conflict. It also questioned the sincerity of the cease-fire to date.

"Indian forces have violated the declared suspension of combat operations and continued a campaign of terror against the Kashmiri freedom struggle," the ministry said.

Experts here said the government believed that its suspension of counterinsurgency operations could help garner international support for its approach on Kashmir, as well as win back some credibility among Kashmiris who are sick of a war that has been going on since 1989.

India and Pakistan have fought two wars over Kashmir since they gained their independence from Britain in 1947. Islamic Pakistan insists that Kashmir, which is majority Muslim, be allowed to choose whether to be part of Pakistan or India. India, majority Hindu, maintains that Kashmir is an integral part of its secular polity.

India has long refused any international mediation of the conflict. But it wants the United States and other rich nations that debt-ridden Pakistan depends on financially to pressure Pakistan to stop supporting the insurgency in Kashmir with arms and money.

"The government wants to show how reasonable it is and how unreasonable the Pakistanis are," said P. R. Chari, director of the Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, a research group here.

Pakistan contends that it gives the militants only moral, not material, support. It has responded to the Indian suspension of counterinsurgency operations by sharply reducing its firing across the so-called Line of Control, the area that divides the parts of Kashmir controlled by India and Pakistan.

In response to India's second extension of its cease-fire, Pakistan said it was conducting a partial withdrawal of troops from the line of control.

---

India extends truce in Kashmir one month

January 24, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001124212111.htm

NEW DELHI - India extended its 2-month-old truce against militants in Kashmir for another month yesterday, prompting a guarded reaction from rival Pakistan and scorn from separatist guerrilla groups.

"The government believes violence must be ended and peace . . . given every chance," Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh said in a statement after a meeting of the Cabinet committee on security.

"The present phase of peace . . . is being extended, in that hope, by another month," he added.

-------- iraq

Iraq, U.S. Disagree on Plane Report

January 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Iraq-US.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq claimed Wednesday that its air defense units hit an allied aircraft during a U.S.-British raid on the northern part of the country -- a claim the United States denied.

In a statement carried by the official Iraqi News Agency, the Iraqi military said allied aircraft attacked civilian targets in three northern provinces. The statement did not say whether there were any casualties in the attack.

``Our heroic anti-aircraft missile units and gunners hit one of their warplanes,'' said the statement. ``Enemy ravens were forced to return to the bases of evil and aggression in Turkey.''

In a statement from the Germany-based European command, the U.S. military confirmed an allied strike on northern Iraq in response to anti-aircraft artillery fire. But it said all coalition aircraft departed the area safely.

Iraq has previously claimed to have hit allied aircraft, but it has never provided evidence.

British and American aircraft regularly patrol the no-fly zones over southern and northern Iraq. The zones were established after the 1991 Gulf War to protect Shiite Muslim rebels from Iraqi government forces in the south and Kurds in the north.

Iraq does not recognize the no-fly zones and has been challenging allied aircraft since December 1998.

-------- russia

Bush Urges Russian Rebel Settlement

January 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Russia.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration urged Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday to open talks with rebels in restive Chechnya and seek a political settlement.

It is the only way to bring peace and stability to the region, the State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. He also urged Russia to take serious steps to deal with social and economic problems in Chechnya.

Russian troops moved into Chechnya in September 1999 following rebel attacks on Dagestan and apartment bombings in Moscow and other Russian cities that were blamed on the insurgents.

This week, Putin signed a troop reduction plan and turned over command of the war to Russia's chief security agency, saying a new strategy was needed to secure control of Chechnya.

Reacting skeptically, Boucher said, ``We've seen announcements of troop withdrawals from Chechnya before, but frankly, Russia's presence in Chechnya remains massive. The fighting has continued and there are continuing incredible reports of humanitarian abuses against the civilian population by Russian troops.''

Boucher added: ``It remains to be seen whether this announcement represents a change in Russian strategy that could resolve the stalemate in Chechnya.''

While Boucher said it remained to be seen whether Putin had taken a ``real step,'' he also said, ``It doesn't preclude the need for a political settlement.''

Asked if the Bush administration agreed with the Clinton administration that Chechnya should remain part of Russia, Boucher said, ``We have not changed our view of the status of Chechnya in any way.''

Still, a new relationship appears to be evolving, with President Bush's determination to push ahead with a national defense against missiles at the core.

Like former President Clinton's decision to expand the NATO military alliance, the ambitious program is sure to unnerve Russia and prompt the new administration either to respond with no more than a few placating words or to pursue a deal designed to entice the Russians into going along.

One approach could be to negotiate deep cutbacks in U.S. and Russian long-range nuclear warheads beyond the 50 percent reduction called for by the 1992 START II treaty.

That might help ease Russia's anxieties about the U.S. arsenal. But whatever choice Bush makes, Secretary of State Colin Powell made clear at his Senate confirmation hearing that ``our relations with Russia must not be dictated by any fear on our part.''

For example, he said, if the new administration decides on another expansion of NATO, ``We should not fear that Russia will object; we will do it because it is in our interest.''

Powell depicted Russia as ``a great country'' that could derive enormous benefits from its relations with the United States. He did not describe the relationship in terms of benefit to the United States, though.

In the meantime, a panel advising the Energy Department issued a report that urged Bush to appoint a high-level official at the White House to oversee U.S. efforts to help safeguard nuclear stockpiles in Russia and to stem the spread of nuclear technology.

``It is going to take someone who is at a high level to make sure this issue is not lost among other national security issues,'' Lloyd Cutler, a former White House counsel who served on the panel, said at a news conference.

``The most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen or sold to terrorists or hostile nation states and used against American troops abroad or citizens at home,'' the report found.

-------- space

Russian Cargo Ship Blasts Off to Guide Mir to Earth

January 24, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/science/space-mir.html

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan, Jan. 24 -- A Russian cargo vessel has blasted off from Kazakhstan for the Mir space station to guide the doomed orbiter back to Earth to be safely ditched in the Pacific Ocean, Mission Control said on Wednesday.

``The rocket blasted off on time at 7:28 a.m. (0428 GMT) and everything is going normally,'' a spokeswoman said by telephone from Mission Control outside Moscow.

At 7:40 a.m (0440 GMT) she said: ``The rocket is in orbit and all systems are working well. It is due to dock with Mir on January 27 at 8:30 a.m. (O530 GMT).''

Russia's plans to ditch Mir in March hit a snag last week when ground control postponed the current cargo ship flight after a sudden power failure knocked out Mir's navigation system, making docking impossible.

Yuri Semyonov, head of Russian rocket-builder Energiya which owns Mir, told reporters after the launch at Baikonur in Kazakhstan that the station's designers intended to use Mir's engines to align it during docking rather than the gyroscopes that ground to a halt last week.

But Semyonov said the recent glitches showed Mir was a station reluctant to die.

``As for Mir, everything has been prepared for docking, although the station is resisting,'' Semyonov said, referring to last week's sudden shut-down of the main computer.

``I want this to be the final mission to Mir. We should do everything possible to ensure a safe descent of Mir.''

The Progress craft is ferrying more than 2.5 tonnes of fuel to Mir. Earthbound engineers will use the craft to nudge Mir out of orbit late next month and start its descent.

SAFETY CONCERNS PERSIST

The Progress vessel is also carrying extra oxygen supplies in case an emergency crew has to be dispatched from Earth to prepare the station manually for its demise, space officials have said.

Corrosion and age have taken the shine off the jewel in Russia's space crown and made Mir a safety hazard, a series of technical glitches bedevilling preparations for its descent and sparking fears of an uncontrolled re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

In December a power outage cut all links between Mir and ground control, the worst communications breakdown in its 15-year history.

Although contact was restored after 24 hours, unnerved space chiefs later admitted that they feared at one stage they would never regain control of the 130-tonne craft.

If all goes to plan most of Mir will burn up on re-entry, the remainder falling into the Pacific Ocean some 1,500-2,000 km (900-1,200 miles) off Australia.

Mir's space marathon began on February 20, 1986, and the craft set a host of endurance records, but in recent years its aura has been tarnished by a string of mishaps, including an almost catastrophic collision with a cargo vessel, an onboard fire and a string of main computer failures.

When a private consortium failed to find enough cash to keep Mir aloft, the government signed its death warrant, heralding the end of a piece of space history.

Moscow will now focus its limited financial resources for space exploration on the $60 billion International Space Station (ISS), a 16-nation venture which will build on Mir's legacy.

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

Osprey future in jeopardy

01/24/2001
USA Today
By Dave Moniz and Andrea Stone
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-01-24-osprey2.htm

The Marine Corps' Osprey program faced threats to its survival in Congress on Wednesday in the wake of the disclosure that a Marine officer altered maintenance records for the tilt-rotor aircraft. The Marines' top general called for an independent Pentagon investigation into the tampering incident, but the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee said that did not go far enough.They called for a probe outside the Pentagon and warned that the program would be halted unless the military can restore confidence in the Osprey.

The aircraft, under development since 1982, can adjust its propellers to take off and land like a helicopter and fly like an airplane. But it also has been plagued by safety problems, which came to light again last week when the Marines acknowledged that a commander had falsified maintenance records.

Gen. James Jones, the Marine Corps commandant who requested Wednesday that a Pentagon inspector general take over the inquiry, told USA TODAY, "It's clear it needs a fully vetted investigation." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved Jones' request that the Defense Department's top investigator take control of the inquiry. The Marine Corps ceded control of its V-22 Osprey investigation to the Pentagon's inspector general, citing the "nature and gravity" of allegations that an Osprey squadron commander asked subordinates to falsify maintenance data.

Jones' request came amid rising concerns from lawmakers and Pentagon officials about the viability of the $30 billion hybrid aircraft. In a letter Wednesday to Rumsfeld, Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., and Carl Levin, D-Mich., called for an investigation outside the Pentagon altogether:

"This program will not be able to move forward unless and until the Defense department has restored confidence in the integrity of the V-22 (Osprey) program and the people managing it."

Warner told USA TODAY that others besides Lt. Col. O. Fred Leberman, the Osprey commander accused of altering the records, may be involved in the incident.

Leberman was fired last week after the Pentagon received an anonymous tip that the aircraft's maintenance records were being altered to make its performance look better. The Marines have been trying to determine whether Leberman, who has acknowledged falsifying the records, was pressured by higher-ups. The Osprey suffered two crashes last year that killed 23 Marines.

A Pentagon evaluation last November criticized the aircraft's poor maintenance record and questioned its safety. Even so, some Pentagon officials say the report went easier on the Osprey than it should have.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Home-Grown Energy's Time to Shine

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/national/24GRID.html?pagewanted=all

UKIAH, Calif., Jan. 18 - Down a 32-mile dirt road, where turkey vultures ride the thermals above fir-fragrant hills, there is a corner of Northern California blissfully immune from rolling blackouts, Stage 3 power alerts, melting ice cream and frozen alarm clocks.

In this home of back-to-the-landers and hippies in hiding, a wee bit of smugness has set in among those who make their own electricity and like it that way - people like Dale Glaser, 56, a retired teacher who, he said, came here 30 years ago to "unplug from society." He lives in a seven-sided yurt with an indoor hammock and is completely off the conventional power grid.

"I knew what is happening was coming," Mr. Glaser said of the state's bad energy karma, as he stood beside his sprawling high-tech solar array and Air 403 windmill. "It's about taking responsibility. You become the power plant."

In recent days, millions of Californians have found themselves systematically thrown off the grid. Not Mr. Glaser. He and nearly 100 neighbors hidden in the hollows above the Mendocino coast, 110 miles north of San Francisco, moved here in the 1970's to embrace many alternatives, including alternative energy.

Here and in other active pockets, including Taos, N.M., the fierce but tiny ranks of off-the-gridders have largely comprised "the Birkenstock, granola-eating crowd," in the words of Daniel Kammen, an associate professor of energy and society at the University of California and director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the university.

Now, that may change. It has become easier to live off the grid, Mr. Kammen said, because the prices of alternative energy systems, especially photovoltaic panels, have decreased and their efficiencies have improved.

"Solar systems have typically cost between 15 and 18 cents for every kilowatt generated," Mr. Kammen said. "Five years ago, when conventional power cost 4 to 5 cents an hour, that sounded terrible. But with prices for fossil fuel power as high as 15 to 20 cents per kilowatt hour and higher, it's now suddenly wildly more competitive."

New incentives, like a state rebate - only for those connected to the grid - help provide for the installation of photovoltaic panels, small wind systems and fuel cells that operate on renewable fuels. About 30 states, including California, also have laws to give consumers credit toward their utility bills when they generate electricity back into the grid, known as spinning the meter backwards.

In Berkeley, Gary Gerber, a contractor who installs solar and other energy-efficient equipment, is getting a lot of desperate phone calls these days. "As soon as the lights go off, the light bulb goes on," he said.

The grid has long been the bane of back-to-the-landers here, who in the Hatfield-McCoy days of the early 1970's used to cut down the power wires for fencing. ("Nice piece of wire," recalled Ross Burkhardt, an early energy pioneer.)

But historically, the grid is a relatively new phenomenon, said David Freeman, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Until the 1930's and 1940's, when the public power movement brought electricity to rural areas, "there wasn't a grid," Mr. Freeman said. Now, it covers the vast majority of the country.

Mr. Freeman, who once ran the Tennessee Valley Authority, said that Silicon Valley businesses revving up their own emergency generators were the latest indication that self-sufficiency might no longer be confined to hippies.

"If the old order keeps sputtering, the new order - self-generation - will come in," he said. "And it ought to."

Ideally, he added, consumers will use an array of alternative power sources, with the grid as a backup.

Here in Mendocino County, on rural routes christened Fred MacMurray Lane and Toosteepta Drive, Mr. Glaser and his neighbors pioneered a scrappy, self-sufficient life independent of the grid that seems suddenly prescient.

Mr. Glaser's shelter has evolved from the days when friends lived in tepees and a sink was defined as a hole lined with rocks. In the beginning, his power was cobbled together from golf-cart batteries, garden spray nozzles and used solar panels propped with a stick. Now, his washer-dryer, toaster, blender, vacuum cleaner - he does not skimp on appliances - are run exclusively by the sun and wind and water from a nearby pond.

"It was about making a statement," he said. "To me the sun has always been the energy of the future."

No one knows precisely how many people across the country are living completely off the grid. "They're very hard to find," said Richard Perez, editor of Home Power: The Hands-on Journal of Homemade Power, published every other month and based in Ashland, Ore. "They don't pay electric bills."

Mr. Perez estimated that at least 8,000 families are living off the grid in California, and more than 45,000 families nationally, with Humboldt and Mendocino Counties in California as the hotbeds. The cost of an average solar system for a family of four is $14,000 to $18,000, he said.

In this rugged landscape, where traveling to see a neighbor can feel a bit like going on safari, electrical independence seems hard-won.

"Every day is a power issue for us," said Lynn Meadows, 49, a physician's assistant, who lives with her husband, Bob Dress, a carpenter, in a circular handbuilt house with a garden on the roof. "We're always aware of power - how much we're using, what the weather's doing, how the batteries are holding up, whether the pond is overflowing.

"You can't turn the dryer on when the computer is on or it will erase everything."

The state's energy travails seem distant in this land of hot tubs and wood stoves, where driveways come with signs like "You're on Holy Ground: Mother Earth." But it has put residents here, who are keenly aware of the earth's cosmic energy, or qi, in a philosophical mood.

"We're a species of convenience," said Urmas Kaldveer, 59, a teacher and environmental scientist. "But there's a price to pay."

Tracking the nuances of nature, Mr. Kaldveer noted, is demanding. He recalled an incident in which a bear bit through his gravity-fed water line, and only he could fix it.

"It's muddy, it's cold, and you're slipping on the sides of the creek," he said. "Suddenly you see bear marks and say, `What's my karma here?' Our culture is not used to addressing situations like that."

Off-the-gridders here are nostalgic about the days when they used car batteries to power up Crosby Stills Nash & Young on the stereo. And the turmoil buffeting the state has brought a pervasive sense of luck.

"At the time it seemed the wisest thing to do, to live more softly and make fewer demands," Mr. Kaldveer said. "Now, we have all the energy we need."

Sitting snugly in her yurt, Ms. Meadows added, "We're the only safe place."

About an hour west of here, in the woods near Mendocino, Michael Potts, author of "The New Independent Home: People & Houses That Harvest the Sun, Wind & Water" (Chelsea Green), was comfortably ensconced in his off-the-grid home, feeling a Zen calm as power cutbacks swirled around him.

He has become suddenly popular among friends on the grid, he reported by telephone. Even if the power is out on Sunday, Mr. Potts said, "I'm going to be watching the Super Bowl."

-------- environment

Refuge's fate lies with Americans outside Alaska

01/24/2001
USA Today
By Nick Jans
http://usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-01-24-ncguest1.htm

In the little Alaska timber and fishing town where I work, the buzz is out. Pimple-faced high school kids and grizzled loggers alike are talking about dropping everything and going to technical school to study welding or diesel mechanics. In the next year or two, everything's going to bust loose in the northland, and they want to be ready.

The cause of the almost universal optimism is simple: Bill Clinton is out, and George W. Bush is in. The lean years for Alaska are over; statewide, it's open season on dozens of resource-development projects, ranging in size from large to enormous - everything from timber contracts to mines to natural-gas pipelines.

The undisputed brass ring on the carousel is, without a doubt, the oil-bearing strata in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska's upper right-hand corner. How much oil is there depends on whom you ask and how the numbers are tweaked, but no one disputes the fact that there are billions of barrels waiting to be tapped. The economic stakes, both for Alaska and the oil industry, are immense, and the majority sentiment statewide always has been enthusiastically in favor of immediate development. Only a veto-supported blockade by the Clinton administration kept ANWR tantalizingly out of reach for the past eight years; now a Republican victory holds the promise of an open door.

Even before the election had been decided, pro-development drum-beating neared a crescendo. Republican Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska wrote opinion essays touting an ANWR go-ahead in both The Washington Post and the Juneau Empire; then came the persistent scuttlebutt that Alaska Gov. Tony Knowles (although a Democrat, also an ANWR oil booster) was on the short list for a Bush Cabinet post, either Energy czar or Interior secretary.

That the rumors proved unfounded only serves to underscore the rampant wishful thinking that characterizes Alaskans, most of whom are yearning for the next boom. A hundred years ago, it was fueled by gold; then came timber and fish; most recently, the North Slope oil fields and pipeline, which propelled the state into lavish, heady prosperity during the late 1970s and early '80s. Now it has been nearly 20 years, and the easy money has petered out. It's time for another economic fix.

Alaska's half-million citizens as a whole are among the least conservation-minded folks in the entire nation. You'd think that proximity to so much vast, natural beauty would foster some sort of protectionist fervor; instead, it results in an odd complacency bordering on contempt - perhaps because there seems to be no end to the land, or its resources.

But that sense of limitless bounty, riches without consequence, is an illusion, as it has been since our nation's early "Westering" days. Even Alaska, like a giant nibbled to death by ducks, gradually is succumbing to our apparently insatiable urge to build and destroy. In the case of ANWR, we need to decide what's more important: at best a few more years' worth of gasoline and fuel oil, or a place beyond time, an untouched, mountain-rimmed landscape where caribou and wolves wander, something to show our children and grandchildren that we were not entirely unwise.

The oil wells aren't the issue. Their footprint is relatively small. But oil fields drag a huge logistical tail - roads and pipelines and gravel pits and bridges - and therein lies the rub. Also, in the end, the haul road will become public highway, and when you can drive a Winnebago from Florida into ANWR, circle the wagons for good. The caribou and grizzlies may well survive in some fashion, as Murkowski claims; a wilderness pierced by a highway will not.

And a conquered ANWR is bound to open a floodgate of lesser, but still huge, projects statewide that have far less symbolic pizazz. How will pro-conservation forces, already dispirited, mount an effective media campaign to bar a mining road here and a clear-cut there? Many of the real battles, the ones upon which preserving much of Alaska's wild lands depend, are notably lacking in sex appeal. If there ever were a Stalingrad for the environmental movement in Alaska, it's ANWR.

As an Alaskan, my interest is admittedly partisan. As a longtime resident of the remote northwest Arctic region, where the road system has yet to reach, more partisan still. The fact that virtually our entire congressional delegation, the governor and the average Alaskan will consider me a posy-sniffing tree-hugger for daring to oppose pro-development policies puts me out somewhere in left field. This despite my owning a small arsenal of hunting weapons, including an honest-to-gosh assault rifle with a 20-round clip. For two decades, I hunted and fished with my Inupiat neighbors for much of what I ate, and killed enough animals to make an ardent "sportsman" seem like a pacifist. Yet Alaska is so redneck at its core that many would label me a New Age weirdo.

My point is, you can't count on Alaskans to safeguard the land they so bitterly and wrongly claim is theirs to do with as they please. If ANWR is to remain what its initials spell out - an Arctic national wildlife refuge - then many Americans from other states must raise their voices and make it so.

It was set aside as a national treasure, not another industrial park. Would we sell Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon for a few cents less at the gas pump?

Alaskan writer Nick Jans is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

---

Keep eyes open if you go organic

01/24/2001
USA Today
By David Longtin and David Lineback
http://usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-01-24-ncguest2.htm

Largely because of food-safety concerns, more people are buying organic, and there's more in their supermarkets to buy. This month, for instance, Dole Food Co., the world's largest producer and marketer of fruit and vegetables, added organic bananas to its lineup.

Although organic brands still are less than 1% of the global food market, their share expands by 10% to 20% a year. By some estimates, organic foods could constitute 20% of the world's total diet within a decade.

A month ago, the U.S. Department of Agriculture published the first national organic-food standards. By the summer of 2002, USDA-certified food - grown without biotechnology, synthetic pesticides or man-made fertilizers - will be in produce bins nationwide.

But these products will deliver few, if any, of the benefits most people expect.

A recent poll shows that 67% of consumers think the foods USDA certifies as "organic" will be superior to conventional foods. Many believe that organic brands taste better and are more nutritious, safer to eat or gentler to the environment.

USDA's new standards provide a concrete definition of what makes certain foods "organic." But organic brands are not superior to other products in:

• Taste and nutrition. Blind taste tests published in leading scientific journals consistently show that people cannot distinguish organic and conventional foods. And when labels are switched, consumers display a marked preference for the phony "organic" products. Research also confirms that organic and conventional foods almost always have the same nutritional value, despite usually heftier prices for organic brands.

• Pesticide residues. Under current standards, average consumers receive a daily dose of pesticides at least several thousand times below the level government experts consider safe. So if you buy organic foods just to avoid such residues, you get no bang for your extra bucks.

• Environmental safety. Organic farmers dogmatically insist that "natural" pesticides always will be safer than man-made compounds used by conventional farmers. But that's not so.

Problems with organic insecticide

For instance, manufacturers of the organic insecticide rotenone, faced with mounting government concerns, have decided to stop selling it for use on cranberries, cereal grains and harvested tomatoes. A study in Nature Neuroscience showing that rotenone can produce a Parkinson's-like illness in rats may hasten this natural toxin's departure from the market.

Conventional farmers, in contrast, have spinosad, a synthetic alternative to rotenone that seems far safer for mammals and other non-targeted species.

Copper sulfate, a fungicide more commonly used by larger organic growers, is a broad-spectrum poison that can threaten field workers' safety, render soil infertile and contaminate groundwater. Conventional farmers may use it, but they also have new synthetic fungicides, such as strobilurin-based compounds, that seem readily biodegradable and almost completely non-toxic to plants and animals. Such eco-friendly pesticides gradually will replace more noxious ones.

Pests can grow resistant

Organic growers, who largely have used the same pest-control techniques for decades, say conventional farmers are on a "pesticide treadmill" that keeps requiring new chemicals as parasites evolve defenses against older ones. But organic pesticides and even seemingly innocuous techniques such as crop rotation also have fostered resistant insect strains. As they try to feed ever more of the world, organic growers may face their own pest-management treadmills.

Organic foods offer no special culinary, health or safety benefits, and growing them carries its own ecological burdens. So eat what you like, but don't believe you can save the planet - or yourself - merely by buying organic foods.

David Longtin is a freelance writer. David Lineback is director of the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the University of Maryland.

---

Crew of Galápagos Tanker Arrested

New York Times
January 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Galapagos-Spill.html

PUERTO BAQUERIZO, Galapagos Islands (AP) -- As rangers worked Wednesday to net wildlife stained and dazed by an oil spill, authorities arrested the captain of the leaking tanker and pledged stronger protections for these islands renowned for their unique animals and birds.

Capt. Tarquino Arevalo and 13 crewmen from the tanker Jessica were ordered confined to a military base on San Cristobal island pending formal charges, Merchant Marines Vice Adm. Gonzalo Vega said Wednesday.

The captain and the tanker's owners could face two to four years in prison if convicted of negligence or crimes against the environment. Ecuadorean Environment Minister Rodolfo Rendon said he was pushing to have them all jailed pending the investigation.

The arrests come eight days after the Jessica ran aground off San Cristobal Island, one of the Galapagos chain. Over the days that followed, the ship leaked at least 185,000 gallons of diesel fuel into this fragile ecosystem, one populated by species found nowhere else in the world and an inspiration for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

The ship ran aground after a signal buoy was mistaken for a lighthouse, said Capt. Ramiro Morejon, chief of control and marine monitoring for Galapagos National Park. He blamed human error.

Only one pelican and two seagulls are known to have died. But dozens of other birds and marine animals -- sea lions, seagulls, blue-footed boobies and albatrosses -- also have been affected, officials at the Galapagos' sprawling wildlife park said.

And while scientists here say the spill could have been much worse, the long-term environmental damage to the islands 600 miles off the mainland remains unclear.

``We are trying at all costs to prevent the fuel from reaching land,'' said biologist Harry Reyes, who helped set up a perimeter of buoys around the spill.

One environmental workers said Wednesday that the spill was under control.

``We were very worried at first, but what has happened is not so grave,'' Carlos Valle, the Galapagos coordinator for the World Wildlife Fund, told The Associated Press.

Treading carefully over fuel-slicked rocks on Wednesday, park ranger Navil Segovia approached one pelican, sluggish and stained black with diesel fuel.

He netted the bird, then carefully embraced it around its chest, its wings folded in. The pelican was then loaded onto a vehicle and taken to a control center, where it will be cleaned before being released.

``It wasn't difficult to catch because it was dazed,'' Segovia said.

About 200 volunteers, park rangers and environmental experts searched for affected wildlife along the shores of San Cristobal and Santa Fe Island, 37 miles to the west, home to large colonies of sea lions and marine iguanas. Four sea lion cubs were cleaned and released Wednesday, said park director Eliecer Cruz.

Some conservationists fear the fuel will sink to the ocean floor, destroying algae vital to the food chain and threatening marine iguanas, sharks, birds that feed off fish and other species.

Conservationists worldwide demanded that Ecuador take greater steps to protect the Galapagos. And Rendon said the country is doing so: He said new legislation is being written to require special permission and insurance for all vessels entering the Galapagos with more than 10 gallons of fuel aboard.

Shipping authorities have confirmed that the Jessica was not insured for environmental contamination, he said. International shipping rules require such insurance for vessels carrying 2,000 tons of fuel, while the Jessica had only 300 tons aboard, Galapagos park officials said.

``We are writing up the regulations to establish what fuels can enter the Galapagos, and moreover, that the minimum amount possible is used,'' Rendon said.

The 28-year-old tanker Jessica regularly transported diesel and bunker, a heavy fuel used by tour boats, from the mainland into the Galapagos, Ecuador's main tourist attraction. It was carrying a cargo of some 234,000 gallons of fuel when it hit bottom 550 yards off San Cristobal, the easternmost island in the archipelago.

Thousands of gallons were safely removed from the tanker after it hit, but much more spilled into the water. Authorities had suspended oil recovery operations and were waiting out rough tides when the last of the ship's cargo -- an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 gallons of fuel -- spilled out late Tuesday, apparently after pounding surf tore new ruptures in the hull.

---

Oil Spill's Shift in Course Aids Galápagos Mop-Up

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/science/24GALA.html?pagewanted=all

QUITO, Ecuador, Jan. 23 - With oil spills now covering more than 775 square miles of pristine waters in the Galápagos Islands and continuing to spread, Ecuador has declared a state of emergency and is stepping up its efforts to prevent the slicks from contaminating habitats that are home to some of the world's rarest marine and bird species.

To the relief of conservation and salvage teams that have been working in the area of the remote archipelago, a sudden shift in winds and sea currents appeared to be aiding those efforts today. As a result, most of the 144,000 gallons of spilled oil, which had been drifting westward toward islands with large animal populations, are being driven in a more northerly direction, away from inhabited areas.

"We seem to have avoided a tragedy, but we still have serious problems ahead of us," said Rodolfo Rendón, the environment minister of Ecuador, which has governed Galápagos Islands since the mid-19th century. Because of the shift in wind and currents, he added, "the levels of contamination are much lighter than had been expected" just a few days ago. The shift has also produced high waves, however, halting efforts to recover more fuel.

The crisis began a week ago today, when an Ecuadorean tanker loaded with 243,000 gallons of diesel and bunker fuel went aground on a reef just off San Cristóbal, the easternmost island of the archipelago. Rescue teams were able to remove some of the fuel, but on Friday night the vessel's cargo hold cracked, and oil began leaking into the Pacific Ocean.

Compared with environmental disasters like the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska in 1989, which involved about 11 million gallons, the accident here is small. But the Galápagos Islands, about 600 miles off the Pacific coast of South America, are one of the most delicate environments in the world, full of species of marine iguanas, giant tortoises and penguins that live in isolation and are found nowhere else.

It was precisely that exotic diversity of wildlife that led Darwin to the theory of natural selection and has made the Galápagos Islands a shrine for modern-day scientists. Visiting in 1835, Darwin was struck by slight differences in finches and tortoises as he moved from one island to another and called the archipelago "a little world within itself."

So far, however, the immediate damage to wildlife appears to have been minimal. The Charles Darwin Foundation, a private group that operates the main scientific research station in the Galápagos Islands and the www.galapagos.org Web site, reported today that only 16 juvenile sea lions, about 50 pelicans and 20 boobies had been affected by the slick.

Scientists said that the longer the oil remained on the surface, the more it would block the rays of the sun and oxygen vital to marine life, from plankton to fish. That could, they said, affect the entire food chain in the Galápagos Islands, with dire results for biodiversity in the archipelago.

"We have been relatively lucky so far, but it is still going to take us 30 months of work to be able to clean up this mess," Fernando Espinoza, secretary general of the foundation, said in an interview here today. "Right now we are diverting money from our other projects, but we estimate that the monitoring and recovery work is going to cost $1 million, and right now we don't have even one dollar of that."

The devastating oil spill comes with Ecuador in the midst of a furious national debate about the future of the islands, which are the country's main tourist attraction and one of the world's most important natural research laboratories.

Late last year, local fishermen attacked conservation installations, blocked ports and harassed tourist groups in the islands to protest government-imposed limits on their lobster and sea cucumber harvest.

Because much of the spilled fuel was destined for cruise ships that take tourists from island to island, fishermen have been quick to blame their adversaries in the Tourism and Environmental Ministries for the problem. In addition, the World Wide Fund for Nature is calling for limitations on commercial shipping in Galápagos waters, parts of which have already been designated a marine reserve.

Environmental groups and the local press have also been critical of the Ecuadorean government's handling of various aspects of the crisis. Local press reports said that rescue vessels were slow to leave the mainland and that cleanup efforts were initially delayed as a result of disputes over who would pay the costs and how to dispose of the spilled fuel.

"The Ecuadorean state was not prepared for this and was slow in responding when it did happen," said Ricardo Moreno, executive director of Fundación Natura, the country's leading environmentalist group. "As a result, we lost precious time after the ship ran aground in which it might have been possible to avoid the spill altogether."

Ecuadorean officials have said the accident was a result of human error, with the captain of the tanker, the Jessica, confusing a buoy for a lighthouse. There have also been questions raised about the seaworthiness of the vessel, which was at least 30 years old, did not have oil spill insurance and yet was still permitted by inspectors from the Ecuadorean merchant marine to set sail.

Mr. Rendón said today that "some lapses could exist" in government inspection procedures, and that an investigation of every aspect of the accident was under way. But he added, "On the part of the Ecuadorean government, we have been fulfilling our responsibility."

---

LIBERTY: SUIT OVER POSSIBLE CARCINOGEN

January 24, 2001
New York Times
Metro Briefs
Maria Newman
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/nyregion/24MBRF.html

NEW YORK - About 100 residents of the village of Liberty, in upstate New York, have filed a lawsuit against the village and two gas stations owned by Exxon Mobil that they say were responsible for contaminating the town's water supply with a possible carcinogen. The substance is methyl tertiary butyl ether, or M.T.B.E., a gasoline additive that is a possible cause of cancer. The residents said a state environmental report alerted them to the danger.

---

Report: Sydney harbor poses hazard

1/24/2001
InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=9nae813a99i56

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) - As temperatures soared in Sydney on Wednesday, authorities cautioned residents against cooling off with a swim in the city's harbor, where pollution levels were 1,000 times above acceptable levels. The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper reported that pollution from sewage overflows draining into the landmark harbor posed a major health hazard. Sydney Water's annual assessment of its environmental performance found that the aging sewer system overflowed into the harbor and two major rivers an average of 124 days a year, the paper reported. State-run Sydney Water blamed the problem on the government's policy of channeling profits out of the company at the end of each year.

---

Editorial Roundup

January 24, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Editorial-Rdp.html?pagewanted=all

Here are excerpts from editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:

Jan. 23 The (London) Times, on the Galapagos spill:

An oil spill in waters just half a mile off one of the world's great bird sanctuaries, the Galapagos Islands, raises questions about how to safeguard waters of special scientific interest.

These islands administered by Ecuador are where Charles Darwin developed his theories of natural selection in 1835; the land mass has been made a national park to protect the 5,000 species of bird and beast, nearly half of them unique to the islands ... Yet, while the islands themselves are sensitively protected, last Friday's accident shows that the waters around them are vulnerable.

One sensible way to extend protection to the seas has come from the World Wide Fund for Nature. It wants the Ecuadorean government and shippers to designate the Galapagos as a ``particularly sensitive sea area'' (PSSA). A PSSA would simply give Ecuador more clout than international law usually allows coastal states to impose good practice on passing ships.''

The PSSA is a recent invention. Only two exist, one around Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the other off Cuba; their effectiveness is not yet proven ... Yet it is time to restore common sense in the risky business of commercial shipping; though imperfect, a PSSA would be a good start.

---

01/24/01
USA Today
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Idaho

Burley - Livestock will be barred from thousands of acres in Sawtooth National Forest for three years to let the land recover from last summer's wildfires. About a dozen ranchers graze their livestock in Cassia and Twin Falls counties. Scott Bedke, a state representative and president of the Idaho Cattle Association, said he hopes to reach an alternative solution with the Forest Service.

Maryland

Baltimore - The Army Corps of Engineers has approved the dredging of four waterways in Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties over the objections of conservation groups and the Environmental Protection Agency, which say the projects would harm underwater bay grasses. Corps officials contend that the dredging actually could promote grass growth.

North Carolina

Saunook - The Environmental Protection Agency proposed cleaning up a pesticide-contaminated subdivision in Haywood County. The soil cleanup should be finished in two years, the EPA said, but the groundwater will need about 30 years of cleansing. Barber Orchard, the subdivision built in a former apple orchard, is contaminated with arsenic and other pesticides.

Vermont

Montpelier - About 100 Vermont pharmacies will exchange old thermometers for mercury-free models at no charge, Gov. Dean said. The Catch the Fever Campaign will run Feb. 1-15. Exposure to mercury can lead to neurological problems, especially in children and pregnant women.

---

In Darwin's Habitat,
Homo Sapiens Looms

January 24, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/opinion/L24GAL.html

To the Editor:

Re "Oil Spill Moves to Center of Galápagos Ecosystem" (news article, Jan. 23):

The oil spill in the Galápagos Islands is simultaneously a desecration, a prophecy and a very specific warning.

It is a desecration because the islands are a pristine refuge for many unique wildlife species that played a pivotal role in the formulation of the most significant scientific insight of the 19th century - Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. It is a prophecy because it reminds us how agonizingly vulnerable even the most protected and studied wild areas are to casual human oversight. And it is a warning to all those who think it is a good idea to drill for oil in some of this country's most exceptional wilderness areas.

DAVID HAYDEN Wilton, Conn., Jan. 23, 2001

---

Callous on Fox Hunting

January 24, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/opinion/L24FOX.html

To the Editor:

Re "Glory of the Fox Hunt" (letter, Jan. 22):

The writer refers to a ban on fox hunting in England as "the latest effort on the part of the animal extremists to foist their intolerant views on everyone else." Since when is protecting an innocent living thing from the terror and pain of being torn apart limb by limb intolerance? Do the supporters of fox hunting have no compassion or empathy whatsoever?

To torture any sentient being for sport and then to justify it by citing the number of people employed in the slaughter is obscene. LISA AURELLO Brewster, N.Y., Jan. 22, 2001

---

Disarming the nefarious do-gooders

January 24, 2001
Washington Times
Tony Blankley
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-2001124234937.htm

Gosh, this is fun. In the first day on the job, our new president has already rendered the pro-abortionists half crazed with fury by blocking taxpayer funding of foreign abortions. The abortionists are so cute when they get mad. It was actually worth it to watch CNN, just to see them clench their little fists and shake them in the general direction of the White House. And that's not all. Before breakfast on Monday President Bush also put a stop to dozens of 11th-hour Clinton regulations.

One particularly nefarious Clinton regulation that Mr. Bush reversed would have permitted smaller holes for Swiss cheese. The Bush presidency didn't come a moment too soon. The whole point of Swiss cheese is the holes. Without the rescinding of this regulation we would all have had to waste valuable time around the breakfast table carving out proper-sized holes before enjoying our traditional Swiss cheese on white toast with marmalade. Apparently Mr. Clinton was indifferent to the fact that the hole in the Swiss cheese is the natural habitat of the endangered Seville orange marmalade.

According to the Associated Press: "The last minute flurry [of Clinton rules followed by Bush rescissions] left some in the federal bureaucracy wondering Monday what they could enforce - and couldn't." What a wonderful image that evokes. If we can just maintain this state of bureaucratic confusion and paralysis for the remaining eight years, our country will, in Abraham Lincoln's words, "experience a new birth of freedom."

Megan Durham of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is quoted by the AP as being perplexed as to whether they are permitted to deny human use of land currently being enjoyed by the "arroyo southwestern toad." Following the Israeli West Bank precedent, now is the moment for hardy bands of southwestern ranchers to quickly build farm houses in the toad's domain - it's always harder to drive people out than to block their entry.

Mr. Bush's reversal of another Clinton regulation protects our right to take helicopter sightseeing tours over national parks. Not content to make it hard for Americans to drive around our national parks, Mr. Clinton's 11th-hour regulation would have banned even aerial tours of these national treasures. I can tell you from personal experience, there is no better way to enjoy our national parks than by helicopter. You need not waste days marching about on the ground, catching your Bermuda shorts on thorns or getting dirt all over your safari suit. You can see each national park better by helicopter in only 45 minutes. Then it's back to the hotel for a drink on the verandah.

The president must, of course, deal with the great issues of war and peace, Social Security and Medicare. But for most of us, the daily threat to our freewheeling American lifestyle is posed by the remorseless, ant-like advance of legions of federal bureaucrats spreading pointless and irritating regulations to snare us as we attempt to live our free lives. I hope that Mr. Bush will not stop rescinding federal regulations. If he can rescind just two freedom-snuffing regulations a day, he will have eliminated 11,680 of them by the end of his second term, and life will be measurably better.

I find myself surprisingly exhilarated by the knowledge that we are about to have our federal government run by men and women who will get up in the morning unencumbered by the liberal urge to meddle in our lives. As one who has worked as a political appointee in a federal department, I would like to take this opportunity to give some advice to the thousands of young schedule C political appointees who are, even now, entering the dreaded bureaucracy.

First of all, when your department gets a scolding letter of inquiry from Senator Hillary, misplace it. After her staff has written two or three increasingly frustrated letters, send back a form letter thanking her for her inquiry. Then, wait four or five months before assigning it to the laziest, most incompetent GS4 you can find (there will be many of them). Monitor his or her work carefully, making sure that your department's reply is never responsive to the senator's request.

Let your staff go home early. If they are not at their desks, they can't harm the country. Unless you happen to be working in one of the few offices that does something useful for citizens, create a reorganized office chart so that any crafty bureaucrats who have learned how to interfere in people's lives are assigned to new responsibilities. Usually it will take them several months to figure out how to use their new powers to disrupt freedom. If they are quick learners -reorganize again.

See the movie, "Bridge on the River Kwai" as a cautionary tale. In that movie, an English army officer is captured by the Japanese during World War II. He is so proud of his efficiency that he ends up building a bridge for his captors that they can use for their war-making against England. You are in enemy territory. Subvert from within. Godspeed.

Tony Blankley is a columnist for The Washington Times. His column appears on Wednesdays.

-------- genetics

Biotech deal significant for farmers

1/24/2001
Associated Press
InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition
By MIKE GLOVER
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=9nae813a99i56

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - The creator of a genetically modified corn that ended up in the food supply and prompted the recall of taco shells and other products has agreed to pay millions in compensation to farmers and grain elevators across the country.

Estimates of the cost to Aventis CropScience range from $100 million to $1 billion.

``We're talking about massive amounts of grain,'' Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said Tuesday. ``This is a significant agreement.''

Miller said the four-year agreement between Aventis and 17 states, mainly in the Midwest, calls for the company to pay farmers up to 25 cents per bushel for tainted corn, and reimburse them for other losses. The total amount of grain has not been determined.

In a statement, the company said it is pleased with the agreement. The deal does not prevent farmers or other individuals from suing the company.

At issue is StarLink, a genetically modified corn. Approved for industrial use and as animal feed, it was never licensed for human consumption because of questions about whether it can cause allergic reactions.

Some of it was mixed with other varieties of corn in 1999 and again last year. StarLink was withdrawn from the market last fall and taco shells were recalled nationwide.

Federal officials have also tested more than 100 product samples for StarLink. Among the products collected for testing were tortillas, corn meal, corn chips, puffed corn snacks, corn syrup and baby food.

Many farmers and grain elevators have been unable to sell their corn because of fears it may contain StarLink.

Aventis had already agreed to compensate farmers and assist with marketing. The agreement now gives state officials the legal footing to intervene if the company does not live up to its promises.

The states signing the agreement are: Iowa, Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

Farmers and grain elevator owners seeking damages can find an application procedure posted on the company's Web site or contact the attorney general's office. The deadline to apply is Feb. 15.

Shares of Aventis were up 63 cents to close at $76.81 Tuesday on the New York Stock Exchange.

-------- police

Brooklyn Officers Accused as Brazen Robbers

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/nyregion/24PLOT.html

Two police officers were part of a brazen Brooklyn robbery gang for several years, federal authorities said yesterday, holding up drug dealers, plotting armed robberies of businesses and even using a patrol car and police raid jackets for a robbery scheme.

The two officers, both assigned to the 77th Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, became so reckless, according to court papers unsealed yesterday, that they are accused of a crime sure to send shock waves through the force: conspiring to murder a fellow officer.

The target of the conspiracy, a veteran detective, had testified in an unrelated case in 1997, contradicting the officers' statements and leaving them open to federal perjury charges, the court papers said.

In the months after the detective's testimony, the pair, using a mobile computer in their police car, tracked down the detective's home address and drove by with an accomplice in tow to plan his murder, the court papers said. They never followed through, but the pair's testimony eventually caught up to them last June, officials said, when the Police Department accused them of lying to federal prosecutors and fired them.

The accusations revealed in court papers yesterday echoed a notorious corruption scandal in the same police precinct 14 years ago, when a dozen officers known as the Buddy Boys were charged with robbing drug dealers and other crimes. This case, however, did not appear to be part of a wider pattern, federal prosecutors and police officials said yesterday.

But the level of brazen criminal behavior detailed in court papers was as serious as has surfaced in the department in several years. It raised questions about how the two officers were able to operate undetected, robbing drug dealers in three boroughs, as the court papers say they did, and in the case of one officer, leaving work early one day in 1997 to take part in a $500,000 jewelry store robbery in Garden City on Long Island.

The firing of the officers last summer for lying about a gun arrest was unrelated to the crimes with which they have been charged, police officials said. Their shadow lives of crime came to light when one of the former officers, Anthony Trotman, 35, was charged with the Long Island jewelry store robbery in a federal indictment on Jan. 11.

Mr. Trotman, who had been on the force for 11 years, then began cooperating with federal authorities. The information he provided led to a criminal complaint unsealed yesterday against the second former officer, Jamil Jordan, 28. Mr. Jordan is charged with conspiring to commit robberies, credit card fraud and conspiring to murder the detective.

Yesterday, neither the lawyer for Mr. Jordan, Frank Handelman, nor the lawyer representing Mr. Trotman, Valerie Amsterdam, returned calls seeking comment.

Mr. Jordan was arraigned before Magistrate Judge Marilyn D. Go in federal court in Brooklyn yesterday afternoon. Magistrate Go held Mr. Jordan without bail.

In the same courthouse, the trial of one of the other men prosecutors say was part of the robbery crew, James Woodard, was getting under way. Jack Smith, an assistant United States attorney, told jurors in Mr. Woodard's trial that they would hear testimony from Mr. Trotman, who as a police officer had robbed drug dealers and, on Aug. 1, 1997, helped carry out the 36-second armed robbery at H. L. Gross jewelers in Garden City. The crime, which netted $500,000 in jewelry, was the second trip to the store by the crew. Four months earlier, without Mr. Trotman, four of the men used the same smash-and- grab tactics to hammer through the shop's glass display cases and grab as many watches and other pieces of jewelry as they could carry, officials said.

Officials said the crew conducted surveillance of their robbery targets; usually chose days when the weather was bad for their robberies, to slow the police response; and used a Lexus as a getaway car.

---

Police Sex-Abuse Complaint May Have Been Mishandled

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/nyregion/24COP.html

GARDEN CITY, N.Y., Jan. 23 - A Nassau County police officer in the unit that investigates police misconduct may have mishandled a woman's complaint that she was sexually abused by a plainclothes police officer last August, officials said today.

The officer was told about the woman's allegations on the day she made them but never filled out the proper form to begin an investigation, officials said. One should have been prepared immediately, the police said.

The woman, who works as an exotic dancer, said the incident happened in early August, when in the early morning she was driving home from her job in Suffolk County on the southbound Seaford-Oyster Bay Expressway. She said she was stopped near Hempstead Turnpike by a plainclothes police officer in an unmarked car on the suspicion of drunken driving.

The woman, whom the police refused to identify, said the officer had shown his badge and had driven her in his car to a remote, wooded location. Once there, he forced her to perform oral sex on him, she said, then drove her back to her car and released her without arresting her.

Deputy Inspector Peter A. Matuza, a police spokesman, said the Police Department was investigating an officer in the Eighth Precinct who matched a description provided by the woman. Police officials refused to identify that officer.

The woman reported the incident to the Eighth Precinct, in Levittown. She also spoke to other officers, and the matter was forwarded to detectives, the police said. Detective Sergeant Kevin Smith, another police spokesman, said that someone from the precinct then notified an officer in the Internal Affairs Unit, which investigates all charges of police misconduct. But he said the officer in the Internal Affairs Unit "may have misinterpreted what he should have done with that information." He said the officer simply logged the information in a book that was not forwarded to supervisors.

In September, the precinct detectives forwarded the case to the special-victims squad, which investigates allegations of sex abuse. But it was not until last Thursday that the Internal Affairs Unit and other high-ranking police officials took over the case.

Inspector Matuza said Eighth Precinct officers were also under investigation and had not yet been cleared of violating any departmental procedures or guidelines.

Herbert R. Faust, the chief of detectives for the department, said investigators, both in the precinct and in the Internal Affairs Unit, might have mistakenly believed that the woman's claims concerned a police imposter. He said, "The department is looking at it, that it is a policeman, but until someone is charged we are talking assumptions."

---

Trooper Unit Is Investigated in New Jersey

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By ANDREW JACOBS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/nyregion/24TROO.html

Investigators with the New Jersey State Police are looking into the existence of a secret group of officers that some troopers contend has been harassing and hounding them in an effort to silence those seen as making trouble for the force, which has been racked by accusations of racial profiling.

John R. Hagerty, a spokesman for the state police, said yesterday that officials were investigating whether the group existed and if so, what it did. Troopers who are suing the state police say the group, which calls itself the Lords of Discipline, retaliated against them for complaining about certain practices, including search-and-seizure operations that involved racial profiling.

"The state police Office of Professional Standards is involved in an ongoing investigation involving a purported group called the Lords of Discipline," Mr. Hagerty said.

The allegations about the group's existence were first reported yesterday in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Philip J. Moran, a lawyer who is representing more than three dozen troopers with harassment and discrimination cases against the state police, said yesterday that several troopers had recently come forward with allegations that they had been threatened and harassed after complaining of illegal police procedures.

The force, with 2,700 troopers, has been under intense scrutiny since April 1998, when two troopers shot and wounded three unarmed black and Hispanic men during a traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike. The troopers, John Hogan and James Kenna, are facing criminal charges in the shooting, which set off a national furor over the practice of racial profiling.

Mr. Moran said his clients have detailed incidents of vandalism, threatening notes and rumor campaigns aimed at destroying their reputations. The troopers said the incidents were the work of the Lords of Discipline, a loose-knit group of a dozen or so white officers based in Troop A, which covers South Jersey.

"The group is like a modern-day SS," Mr. Moran said. "They're racists, sexists and anti-Semites."

One of Mr. Moran's clients, Trooper John Oliva, said he had been verbally harassed and given poor performance evaluations after complaining to superiors about the officer who was training him, whom he had accused of using discriminatory standards for stopping drivers. Mr. Moran said Trooper Oliva was also handed a note by a superior that warned him to "start doing what you're told to do." The note, Mr. Moran said, also suggested that he would not be given backup support in dangerous situations.

Trooper Oliva, who joined the force in November 1998, took a stress-related leave last month. Mr. Moran said he planned to file a suit against the state police on his behalf on Friday.

Another of his clients, Trooper Kimberly Zollitsch, has already filed a sexual harassment suit against the force, claiming that she was terrorized by the Lords of Discipline. Testifying before an administrative law judge in November, Trooper Zollitsch said the group drove nails into the tires of her car, vandalized her locker and destroyed her equipment in an effort to drive her out of the force.

Edward H. Lennon, president of the State Troopers Fraternal Association, said he had never heard of the organization. "This is the first I've heard of them," he said.

Mr. Hagerty of the state police would not say how long the investigation had been going on.

Mr. Moran said state police leaders have long known about the group. He said an internal-affairs report documenting the Lords of Discipline has existed for at least four years. "This shows that in the state police, it's business as usual," he said. "Nothing has changed."

The current investigation began, he said, only after the group's members inadvertently destroyed a locker they thought belonged to Trooper Oliva. The locker, as it turned out, belonged to another trooper.

When that trooper found his locker vandalized and tried to reach inside, a piece of jagged metal cut a tendon in his right arm. The incident, Mr. Moran said, was brought to light after the trooper decided to seek $75,000 a year in disability payments from the force.

---

New Jersey Officials to Try to Recover Badges That Sheriff Illegally Sold

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By ROBERT HANLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/nyregion/24SHER.html

MORRISTOWN, N.J., Jan. 23 - As a close aide to the ousted Bergen County sheriff pleaded guilty today to illegal fund-raising in the office, law enforcement officials said they would try to retrieve special badges improperly doled out to contributors last year.

The officials said they were worried that the authentic-looking "honorary special deputy" badges, which were sold in violation of state law, could wind up in the hands of criminals or others posing as police officers.

And in another spinoff of the Bergen County corruption inquiry, the state's 21 county sheriffs plan to meet Wednesday and discuss the tradition of giving so-called courtesy cards to friends and supporters. Some of the cards appear to be official sheriffs' credentials and could lead to abuse, said the Camden County sheriff, Michael McLaughlin, who was installed last month as president of the State Association of County Sheriffs.

Sheriff McLaughlin said he did not distribute the cards and lacked the authority to ban the practice in other counties. "We're going to discuss the upside and downside of anyone that has a courtesy-card program," he said. "Anything that disparages the image of the sheriff we should do away with."

The Bergen County sheriff, Joseph L. Ciccone, 40, pleaded guilty here on Jan. 11 to two counts of illegal fund- raising and was forced from office, after a seven-month investigation into his department by the state attorney general and the county prosecutor.

Today, a 27-year-old sheriff's investigator, James McLarnon, pleaded guilty to one count of misconduct for illegally demanding campaign contributions from colleagues in the sheriff's office.

Under a plea bargain, Mr. McLarnon, of North Bergen, agreed to cooperate with investigators, and officials agreed to recommend that he not be imprisoned. They also dropped two charges filed against him when he was arrested in November. One of the counts involved sale of the badges and the other dealt with extortion for taking money from sheriff's officers in exchange for promotions, said James W. Glassen, a deputy attorney general in the state's division of criminal justice.

Mr. Glassen said the investigation was continuing.

Mr. McLarnon was considered a close associate of Mr. Ciccone, the former sheriff, who appointed Mr. McLarnon an investigator under a special state law shortly after he took office in January 1999. The law frees 15 percent of the sheriff's officers in Bergen and Essex Counties from the state requirement that officers receive police training and take a Civil Service exam before their appointment.

One of the counts Mr. Ciccone pleaded guilty to was illegally selling 454 badges for $250 to $1,500 to contributors to his re-election campaign. "We're concerned that people that have these badges will try to use them for inappropriate or illegal reasons," said Lucia Van Wetering, an assistant Bergen County prosecutor helping direct the investigation.

In December, a 37-year-old man carrying a gun tried to get past a metal detector at Kennedy Airport by showing one of the honorary Bergen badges and saying he was a police officer. He was arrested for criminal impersonation. Officials also said today that three drivers stopped in the state since November for traffic violations displayed the badges in an effort to get favorable treatment. The drivers all received summonses for the traffic violations.

Ms. Van Wetering said the authorities had the names and addresses of all those who paid for the badges and would write them in coming days, asking them to surrender the badges to the county prosecutor's office. She said officials would not file charges against anyone who bought a badge.

---

01/24/01
USA Today
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

New Jersey

Newark - An internal investigation by the New Jersey State Police has found evidence supporting allegations that a secret group exists within its ranks, spokesman John Hagerty said. Two troopers on stress leave say the Lords of Discipline harassed them through threatening notes and vandalism.

-------- spying

U.S. approves high-resolution spying by commercial satellites

Wednesday, January 24, 2000
World Tribune
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
http://www.worldtribune.com/Archive-2001/ss-tech-01-24.html

WASHINGTON - The United States has awarded a license to produce the first commercial images with a resolution of a half-meter.

The license was granted as part of a contract awarded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to operate a commercial remote sensing spacecraft capable of providing half-meter resolution imagery of the Earth. The license was granted to Space Imaging in what sets a precedent in the U.S. satellite industry.

The license is the result of a successful lobbying effort by the space industry, which overcame administration objections to providing such high-resolution reconnaissance images. Israel had urged that U.S. companies be banned from distributing images of the Jewish state out of concern that they would end up in the hands of its enemies, Middle East Newsline reported.

"We are pleased with the outcome of the license process," John Copple, chief executive officer of Space Imaging. "There are many people who have contributed to advancing this remote sensing policy. Now we will be able to keep pace with the rapid changes in technology for our next generation systems."

The company plans to launch its new satellite in 2004.

Space Imaging's satellite imaging system will provide half-meter resolution black-and-white and two-meter resolution color imagery. This will include images of such objects as trees and farm animals.

Executives said the resolution is not accurate enough to identify people.

In 1992 the Congress passed a bill that enables U.S. companies to build and launch commercial imaging satellites to compete with similar foreign ventures. In 1994 the president signed a directive that further defined the government's remote sensing policies and approved one-meter resolution satellite imagery.

In 1999, Lockheed Martin launched the Ikonos satellite, which produces images of one-meter resolution.


-------- activists

EXPECT DEMOCRACY - 17 FEBRUARY 2001

Reply-to: "Ted Dooley & Kristi Holmquist" <614grand@winternet.com>
From: "Ted Dooley & Kristi Holmquist" <614grand@winternet.com>

Wed, 24 Jan 2001

Hello friends and acquaintances,

On Saturday, 17 Feb 2001, there's going to be a meeting and you oughta be there! Jim Hightower, Granny D, Ronnie Dugger and your friends will all be there. Don't get left home alone. Come on out and let's get together.

I'm attaching the flier and press release for the event (which I hope you can open. Sorry for any double or triple postings. I want to get this out to as many as I can and some of you are on more than one list.

I'm also attaching the press release to this letter. I can't figure out how to attach the flier itself. Oh well. Read the attachment. Or you can go to our website www.afd-minnesota.org and click on "Expect Democracy" for details.

Tickets can be purchased in advance from most of the sponsoring/endorsing groups listed. I strongly recommend advance tickets because seating is limited. I'm going to have some tickets myself, but I'll be gone on a vacation until 13 February. So you can either email me and I'll try to respond on the 13th, or you can call (651-227-5801) and leave a message to make arrangements to buy a ticket when I return or from Kristi. Or you can go to the website of a sponsor or endorser and contact them for tickets.

Don't miss it! This one's going to be fun.
Ted Dooley
PS. Again, sorry for any double postings. See you on the 17th!!!!

HUMORIST HIGHTOWER, CAMPAIGN REFORMER GRANNY D WILL RALLY PROGRESSIVES TO "EXPECT DEMOCRACY"

January 13, 2001 CONTACT: Andy Driscoll - 651-293-9039 Email: andy@driscollgroup.com

St. Paul, MN -- Down home humor with a political bite, a great-grandmother's tenacity and a visionary for change will headline "Expect Democracy," a rally of progressive Minnesotans at 7:00 PM Saturday, February 17th in the sanctuary of Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, 511 Groveland in Minneapolis. Texas political humorist and author, Jim Hightower, tops the list of speakers joined by the indefatigable campaign finance reformer, Granny D, 91-year-old Doris Haddock, and the articulate and widely published reporter and author, Ronnie Dugger, founder and co-chair of the Alliance for Democracy.

Surrounding their inspiring calls for campaign reforms and ceasing corporate dominance of American politics will be music by the ubiquitous siren of progressive folk song - Larry Long, joined by the electric voices of the Greater St. Paul Church of Minneapolis Gospel Choir under the direction of Darrin Thomas.

"Expect Democracy" is the second annual gathering of Minnesota advocates of progressive politics and polices sponsored by several progressive groups in the Twin Cities, including the Minnesota chapter of the Alliance for Democracy, the Green Party of Minnesota, the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers, Ruminator Bookstore and the Peace and Justice Committee of Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church. Participating organizations include the Great River Earth Institute, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, the Resource Center of the Americas, Minnesota Alliance for Alliance Action, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Democrats 2000, Progressive Minnesota, Minnesota ACORN and the Pulse Newspaper of the Twin Cities.

Hightower, author and radio commentator, is a former Texas Commissioner of Agriculture - an elected position. A popular populist, he's a sought-after speaker, known for his humorous straight talk about politics and the human condition. His latest book, "If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates" looks at politics in the new millennium, described by commentator Arianna Huffington as a literary Molotov cocktail. It follows the funny, but maddening "There's Nothing in the Middle of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos."

Doris Haddock - Granny D - likely the oldest protester ever thrown in the slammer for demonstrating for campaign finance reform, spent 14 months walking 3,200 miles for the cause, arriving in Washington, DC last February after starting out New Year's Day in Pasadena, California January 1, 1999 behind that year's Rose Bowl parade. And she's still going - still walking, her most recent trek last fall across Missouri for a clean elections ballot proposition. In the process, she's been a favorite of radio and television news programs, talk shows and newspaper columnists. She resides in Dublin, New Hampshire.

Ronnie Dugger has been writing for newspapers since the age of 13. Another Texan by birth, he's spent a career writing on issues of social justice and a return to democratic rule. Dugger's belief that Americans must seize the word Populism from "its many hijackers - the Wallaces, the Dukes and Gingriches" (1995) punctuates much of his writing, a no-nonsense collections of books and articles raising the clarion call for re-taking control of the democratic process and breaking the grip corporations have used to squeeze average citizens out of power over their own and the country's leadership and policy genda. Dugger is founder and co-chair of the 4-year-old Alliance for Democracy, a national movement to advance the those goals of "de-corporatizing" the culture.

"Expect Democracy" is part of a weekend of events bringing progressive citizens and organizations together to organize and plan for future political action and education of the larger community. Friday evening at 7 PM, Paul Cienfuegos, director of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County in Arcata, California, will bring his tour of public talks and workshops on "Why Do Corporations (like Target and Cargill) Have More Rights Than You?" to the William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul. Cienfuegos urges communities to hold town forums examining the question of whether it's even possible to have a democracy when the law allows corporations to wield so much power and wealth.

Further information and interview scheduling is available by calling Andy Driscoll, Communications, 651-293-9029 or emailed at andy@driscollgroup.com. The Alliance for Democracy's Minnesota website is at: http://www.afd-minnesota.org.

---

Calendar/All-Call Day to Congress January 25th:
"NO NAFTA for the Americas - NO FTAA"!

Digest Number 143
24 Jan 2001
From: a16-international-planning@egroups.com

Mon, 22 Jan 2001 15:22:07 -0500 From: "Robert Naiman" <naiman@cepr.net>

From Global Trade Watch re: FTAA and April Actions.
There is a partial preliminary calendar at the bottom.
Robert Naiman

Please post widely!

We are launching the "Spring of Action against the "NAFTA for the Americas/FTAA" - and we are kicking it off with an All-Call day this coming Thursday, January 25th. Below is also a calendar of events scheduled - e-mail us additions and updates that are happening and we will add them to the calendar!

ACTION ALERT - ACTION ALERT - ACTION ALERT

All-Call Day to Congress Thursday, January 25th: "NO NAFTA for the Americas - NO FTAA"!

Thanks to the good work of fair trade advocates, a Congressional majority rejected so-called "Fast Track" trade negotiating authority a few years ago, which President Clinton requested to expand NAFTA. Well, the White House decided to ignore the will of Congress and the public. The U.S. Trade Representative's office has spent the last several years working behind closed doors to create "NAFTA for the Americas" -- a hemisphere-wide NAFTA expansion formally called the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), including 34 countries. The fact that these talks are going on is an insult to democratic decision-making, but the likely effects are a horror. And now President-Elect Bush has named FTAA a top priority of his new Administration! Based on the seven-year legacy of NAFTA, here's what we can expect from this proposed agreement:

* Challenges before free-trade panels on laws and regulations that protect public and workplace health and safety, and the environment.

* A push for privatization and corporate control of education, water utilities and other essential services on which we all depend.

* Continuing the "race-to-the-bottom" where multinational corporations cut living-wage union jobs in the U.S. and relocate in Latin America, where they can avoid labor laws and unions, and exploit sweatshop workers instead.

* More "investor-to-state" disputes, allowing big business to sue governments directly if they feel that their profits are being limited by regulations that protect workers, citizens and the environment.

BUT THE BIGGEST CATCH IS THAT MEMBERS OF CONGRESS -- THE ONES WITH CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY TO OVERSEE THESE NEGOTIATIONS -- DON'T KNOW ABOUT THESE "NAFTA FOR THE AMERICAS" NEGOTIATIONS! The USTR has never gotten Congressional approval to enter into negotiations that will eventually bind the U.S. to this agreement. For the most part, Members of Congress don't even know it's going on. Since the USTR isn't exactly knocking on Congressional doors to reveal what it's up to, it is our job to make sure that our elected officials and our communities get informed about these outrageous negotiations that are now taking place! A summit meeting between all the countries in the hemisphere is coming up in Quebec City, Canada in April. There, concrete negotiations will start around a draft text of the FTAA! These negotiations will include MAI-like investment issues, services, food and farm policy, privatization, deregulation, and investor-to-state disputes. Thousand of activists will gather in Quebec and there will be dozens of Solidarity Actions around the hemisphere in opposition to the FTAA negotiations (stay tuned for more information about creating or joining a local solidarity action in your community).

On Thursday, January 25th, government officials and corporate fat-cats from around the world will meet in Davos, Switzerland to work out ways to keep the profits-over-people system going. That same day, thousands of civil society representatives will meet in Porto Alegre, Brazil to organize resistance to corporate rule and the FTAA. Here in the U.S., let's use the 25th to deliver a first-of-the-new-Congress wake-up call to our representatives! Let's flood their offices and make sure that they get a loud and clear message from the people that got them elected: NO "NAFTA for the Americas" - NO FTAA!

Call the Capitol Switchboard (202-224-3121) and ask the trade staffers for your Representative and Senators:

* Do they know that NAFTA expansion negotiations are going on?

* Will they ask USTR to make the FTAA draft text and related U.S. documents public?

* Will they commit to oppose the "NAFTA for the Americas"?

For more information on "NAFTA for the Americas" and how YOU can be part of the Campaign of Inquiry to uncover the truth about these negotiations, visit www.tradewatch.org or call Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch at 202-546-4996.

--

"NO NAFTA for the Americas - NO FTAA"! SPRING OF ACTION CALENDAR

The U.S. Trade Representative's office has spent the last several years working behind closed doors to create "NAFTA for the Americas" -- a hemisphere-wide "Free Trade Area of the Americas," or FTAA. The proposed FTAA agreement would: expand to a total of 34 countries NAFTA's legacy of undermining policies that protect workers, the environment and public health; allow big business to sue governments for cash compensation for profit losses due to those public interest regulations ("investor to state" lawsuits); push to privatize education, water utilities and other public services on which we all depend; and continue the "race-to-the-bottom," where multinational corporations dump higher-paid union workers in the U.S. and exploit sweatshop workers in Latin America instead. Who can stop corporate globalization in the Americas? YOU CAN! A big meeting of the 34 negotiating governments is coming up in Quebec City, Canada in April. Talks there will focus on a variety of issues, including MAI-like investment issues, services, agriculture, and more. Between now and April, there will be important actions and events for fair trade activists around the U.S. to participate in: holding your elected officials accountable through all-call days and meetings; protests and demonstrations; teach-ins; caravans; and all culminating in a MASSIVE DAY OF ACTION ALL OVER THE HEMISPHERE ON APRIL 21ST!

Below is a preliminary Calendar of Events. This certainly is not an exhaustive list. We would appreciate any additions you might have to it (e-mail alesha@citizen.org). Look for reminder alerts, talking points and specific suggestions for action at www.tradewatch.org, and via email and fax, as each date approaches. For now, mark your calendars for these days and pass the word to others!

Thurs., Jan. 25 - FTAA U.S. All-Call Day: Mark the start of the 107th Congress by sending a wake up call to returning and newly elected Representatives and Senators: people are concerned about NAFTA for the Americas! Call them at 202-224- 3121 to ask what they know about the negotiations. Ask them to oppose FTAA AND Fast Track -- the undemocratic method the Administration will try to use to get FTAA approved with as few checks and balances as possible.

Feb. 16-26: Presidents Day Recess: YOUR elected officials will be at home, waiting to hear from their constituents on issues that concern them. Make sure they hear about FTAA! Get a coalition of fair trade activists together, schedule a meeting with the Member/Senator -- or show up at their "town halls" in your hometown -- and ask them to oppose the FTAA.

Thurs., Feb. 22 - FTAA District All-Call Day: Your Members of Congress will be at home for the President's Day recess, so be sure they know they can't hide. Call them at their district offices (numbers in the blue pages of your local phone book) as well as calling their staff in Washington, DC (through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121).

Thurs., Mar. 22 - FTAA Issue All-Call Day: We'll be asking everyone to make calls to Congress and the USTR -- talking points and specific targets TBA -- to highlight specific labor, environmental and other concerns about NAFTA for the Americas.

Wed., Apr. 18 - FTAA Summit All-Call Day: As the Summit of the Americas gears up in Quebec City, we'll be contacting officials once again to let them know what's happening with the negotiations, and demanding that they stand with citizens in opposition to "profits over people" trade deals!

Sat., Apr. 21 - Hemispheric Day of Action on FTAA: This is THE day! Thousands of activists will converge for public education events and protests in Quebec...and thousands more will stage Solidarity Actions in hometowns throughout the Americas to demonstrate the broad citizens' resistance to a pro-corporate FTAA. Start planning YOUR event now! It can be anything from a press conference to a protest to a teach-in to street theater or whatever else you want to do. Remember, the more we can link FTAA to local struggles, the more it will resonate with people in your community.

There will also be caravans and teach-ins traveling through large parts of the country. In the southeast, email Soliman Lawrence, solilawrence@yahoo.com; for northeast info email Mike Morrill at ftaa@pcan.org; for CA, contact Mike Dolan, mfrancisdolan@yahoo.com). Also, a group called Call to Action is doing a national Pacific-northwest-to-Quebec tour; contact them at campaigns@calltoaction.org.

Margrete Strand Rangnes Field Director Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch 215 Pennsylvania Ave, SE Washington DC, 20003 USA mstrand@citizen.org Ph: + 202-454-5106, Fax: + 202-547 7392 To subscribe to our MAI Mailing List, send an e-mail to mstrand@citizen.org, to unsubscribe, send an e-mail to mstrand@citizen.org. Indicate which listserv you wish to be unsubscribed from.

---------

Ruling Could Hurt Efforts to Ban Masked Rallies

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By ERIC LIPTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/nyregion/24MASK.html

Manhattan Criminal Court judge ruled yesterday that a New York State law prohibiting masked gatherings does not apply to peaceful political rallies, a decision that could undermine efforts to ban masked rallies by groups like the Ku Klux Klan.

Judge Gregory Carro made the ruling in considering charges against 14 self-described anarchists who were arrested last May 1 during a demonstration in Union Square Park.

The 14, who wore bandanas covering everything but their eyes and foreheads, were charged with violating an 1845 law banning the wearing of masks at public demonstrations. That same law was used by the Giuliani administration in 1999 to prevent masked Ku Klux Klan members from holding a peaceful rally in Manhattan, although the group ultimately went ahead with the demonstration anyway, without their traditional white hoods.

Judge Carro declined to dismiss the charges against the 14 anarchists, but his ruling offered a new interpretation of the law, said Arthur Eisenberg, legal director for the New York Civil Liberties Union, and Ronald Kuby, the lawyer for the 14 anarchists.

The judge concluded that the 1845 law prohibits the wearing of a mask only during a gathering that has "no legitimate purpose," or when the participants are engaged in "lawless activity." The Constitution protects an individual's right to wear a mask during a peaceful political demonstration, the decision says. "It is clear that on its face, New York's antimask law regulates conduct, not speech," the ruling says.

The charges were not dismissed against the 14 because the judge needed to examine the details of their rally to determine if they met his interpretation of the law. Some of the 14 were also charged with resisting arrest.

The Ku Klux Klan is still appealing the city's prohibition on its masked rally, and Mr. Eisenberg said the ruling by Judge Carro would be cited in that federal court appeal.

---

Nadler triggered pardon

January 24, 2001
Washington Times
Inside Politics Greg Pierce News and political dispatches from around the nation.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inpolitics.htm

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, New York Democrat and an ardent advocate of gun control, was behind Bill Clinton's presidential pardon of terrorist Susan Rosenberg, the New York Post reports.

Miss Rosenberg, a member of the Weather Underground, was serving a 58-year sentence for weapons possession, and was a suspect in a Brink's robbery in Nyack, N.Y., that left two policemen and a guard dead.

A spokesman for Mr. Nadler said a rabbi had provided the congressman with "compelling information" from Miss Rosenberg's parole hearing and that Mr. Nadler had let the White House counsel's office know the concerns of Miss Rosenberg's family.

Mr. Nadler was a prominent defender of Mr. Clinton during impeachment.

---

5 Linked to Banned Sect in China Set Themselves on Fire in Protest

January 24, 2001
New York Times
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/24/world/24CHIN.html?pagewanted=all

BEIJING, Jan. 23 - Five people believed to be members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual group doused themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire in the middle of Tiananmen Square this afternoon, a dramatic act of protest on the eve of China's most joyous holiday, Spring Festival, or Chinese New Year.

One women died and the four other people were severely burned "in two suicidal blazes," said the New China News Agency.

The self-immolation and very public suicide is the most dramatic act so far in the 18-month war of wills between the Chinese government and Chinese members of Falun Gong, which the government has labeled an "evil cult."

While small acts of defiance by individual Falun Gong members have become a daily occurrence in Tiananmen during the last year, they have been mostly silent affairs that passed in the blink of an eye, as the police snatched banners and hustled protesters into vans.

They pale in comparison with today's chilling scene. Witnesses described Falun Gong members staggering across the vast expanse of the square, arms raised in the group's meditative pose and flames streaming from their bodies.

Police officers rushed to douse the flames and erected a shield to keep onlookers from seeing the injured and the dead, said a CNN television crew whose members witnessed the event and were detained briefly. And their tapes were confiscated.

One man from the protest was carried to a police van with burns on his face.

Such scenes are certainly anathema to the Chinese leadership, which is going all out to win the 2008 Olympics for Beijing, over the objections of human rights groups. Tiananmen Square, the political epicenter of Beijing, is slated to be the setting for beach volleyball.

Falun Gong spokesmen in New York and Hong Kong immediately distanced the group from today's event, expressing skepticism about whether the dead and injured were Falun Gong members.

"In Chapter 7, the first sentence says it is forbidden to take a life - that includes to take your own," said Gail Rachlin, a New York-based spokeswoman for the group, referring to the writings by the group's founder, Li Hongzhi, a Chinese citizen now in exile in the United States. "So when the Chinese government talks about all these people committing suicide, it's not true. It's totally against what we believe."

The Chinese government had clearly been bracing itself for the potential of intensified protests by Falun Gong, both during the Chinese New Year celebration this week and again when the International Olympic Committee visits Beijing at the end of February. This week, the police had taken extra precautions and hoped to head off spectacles.

During the holiday period last year, small groups of Falun Gong members were constantly popping up in the square, unfurling small banners or adopting meditation poses. As has generally been the case, most were poor middle-aged people from the countryside.

Hundreds, at least, were arrested in that holiday period. And a number were pushed and kicked as they were herded into police vans, sometimes with foreign television cameras rolling. Some were ultimately sent to labor camps, but many were sent back to their home provinces for "education" - often lectures by local officials - the government policy at that early stage of its battle with the group.

Since then both sides have become more intransigent.

Falun Gong blends Buddhism, Taoism and the eclectic philosophy of Mr. Li with slow-motion exercises that followers say do miracles for their physical and emotional health. It denies any political agenda.

On Jan. 1, Mr. Li sent out a message on the Web site of the group suggesting that its cardinal principle of "forbearance" might not always be appropriate. And protest activity has become increasingly defiant as members have started covertly pasting up the group's leaflets in subway stations and slipping them under apartment doors.

Since late last year, the numbers of protesters arrested on the square have been increasing - often dozens a day - and the government has become increasingly frustrated. In addition, some protesters are coming to Beijing without identity papers and have refused to tell the police where they are from, making it hard to return them to their home areas.

Since the group was banned 18 months ago, hundreds of thousands of members have been detained by the police, at least briefly. More than 10,000 are in labor camps and an unknown number have been committed to psychiatric hospitals, according to human rights groups; they say they have confirmed that about 100 have died from beatings.

In recent weeks, the Chinese state news media have stepped up propaganda against the group, calling it a tool of foreign anti-Chinese forces and defending the government ban as "the will of the Chinese people."

"The people have expressed their deep concern over the cult's harmful effect on families, the health of the Falun Gong practitioners themselves, China's social stability as well as its illegal profits," the government news agency said.

Last week several newspapers contained long accounts about hundreds of Falun Gong members who had been released from labor camps or whose sentences had been reduced, generally after giving up their practice and denouncing the spiritual group. At least one of those members, a sculptor named Zhang Kunlun who holds both Canadian and Chinese passports, denied once he had returned to Canada that he had broken ties with Falun Gong.

A brief report about the suicide today put out by the news agency said the five "cult members," who were all from Kaifeng, in Henan Province, had been "hoodwinked by the evil fallacies of Li Hongzhi." The gruesome event was not reported on the television news.

The square remained open into the evening, but on a freezing day police officers generally outnumbered the usual strollers and tourists. After the immolation, there were at least a few of the more commonplace Falun Gong protests on Tiananmen, which are by now regarded with only mild curiosity by Beijing residents.

In late afternoon, as a middle-aged man in a worn padded jacket tried to unfurl a small yellow banner - only to be escorted away by police officers - an onlooker remarked, "Another one from the countryside."

Still, there were signs of the disaster that had come earlier in the day: Fire extinguishers had been added to the array of police vans and other equipment that now routinely graces the square. The police were frisking people and checking identity papers, giving extra scrutiny to those who carried water bottles, smelling the contents to check for gasoline.

---

Falun Gong followers attempt suicide

1/24/2001
InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition
Associated Press
By MARTIN FACKLER
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=9nae813a99i56

BEIJING (AP) - Five Falun Gong followers set themselves on fire Tuesday in China's Tiananmen Square, the most radical act yet by sect members in defiance of the communist government's 18-month ban on their movement.

One follower died in the attempted group suicide, which prompted police to tighten security and then close the square in the opening hours of China's lunar new year.

After weeks of words, both the spiritual movement and communist government have turned to brasher tactics.

Falun Gong has stepped up demonstrations in recent weeks and issued warnings by founder Li Hongzhi of more vigorous action to protest the crackdown. The government has fought back by intensifying vilification of the sect in state-controlled media and supporting a nationwide campaign to collect a million signatures.

The campaign is the government's first effort to make people publicly support the ban and is reminiscent of communist political movements _ from the 1950-53 Korean War to the radical Cultural Revolution in the 1960s.

``It's a way of forcing people to be a bit upfront,'' said Gerry Groot of Adelaide University in Australia. ``This is real classic 1950s tactics. That's exactly what they did during the Korean War to try to undermine the Americans.''

The government's efforts have accelerated with the approach of Wednesday's lunar new year, China's biggest holiday. Police expected the same mass protests that marred celebrations last year, but still the suicide attempt only hours before threatened protests surprised them.

The five sect followers doused themselves with gasoline in the middle of the square and set themselves on fire in two ``suicidal blazes,'' the government's Xinhua News Agency said.

Police rushed to the site, Xinhua said. The brief report added that one woman burned to death and the surviving injured were taken to a hospital.

A producer and cameraman with CNN witnessed the protest. CNN reported that one man sat down, poured gasoline on himself and then set himself on fire. Moments later, the journalists saw four more people on fire, staggering forward, their hands raised in a meditation pose.

Police confiscated CNN's videotape and detained the journalists for 90 minutes. Officers at the Tiananmen Square police station refused comment, referring all questions to Xinhua.

The group suicide attempt brought even tighter security, which blocked all but a few dozen revelers from gathering on the square to welcome the Year of the Snake. As firecrackers crackled around Beijing after midnight, police cleared even them from the square.

Early Wednesday, police checkpoints ringed the square as officials weeded out sect members from the crowd. At pedestrian underpasses and crosswalks leading to the vast plaza, police checked identification papers and searched bags.

State media have accused followers of committing suicide at the instigation of sect leader Li Hongzhi, something Falun Gong has denied. Tuesday's self-immolation appeared to be the first independently confirmed suicide attempt by group members.

But in New York, Falun Gong members denied any connection to the suicide and called the reports another attempt by the Chinese government to defame the spiritual movement.

``This so-called suicide attempt on Tiananmen Square has nothing to do with Falun Gong practitioners because the teachings of Falun Gong prohibit any form of killing,'' the group said in a statement. ``Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of the practice, has explicitly stated that suicide is a sin.''

The group drew millions of followers in the 1990s, preaching a mix of slow-motion exercises and eclectic ideas that followers say promote health and good citizenship. The government outlawed the group in July 1999, accusing Li, now believed to be living in the United States, of deceiving practitioners and causing the death of 1,600 followers.

With Beijing bidding this year to host the 2008 Olympics, China is keen to gain the upper hand in the struggle. Its repression is taking its toll on the group, with thousands forced to recant in deprogramming centers and labor camps. A Hong Kong-based rights group counts 104 deaths from abuse in custody.

``We don't want cults, these poisons, to harm our society,'' said Wang Yusheng, secretary-general of the China Anti-Cult Association, whose drive to collect 1 million signatures has received intensive coverage in state media.

``If Falun Gong practitioners can go to Tiananmen Square to create disturbances, then we can organize and rouse the masses behind a 1 million-signature campaign,'' Wang said.

Wang estimates that between 50,000 to 80,000 practitioners are still participating in illegal Falun Gong activities. But ``there are 1.2 billion Chinese and so many members of the public who are dissatisfied and disgusted with Falun Gong,'' he said.

Over the lunar new year, campaigners plan to set up booths at traditional temple fairs in Beijing to collect signatures. The signatures will be sent in March to Geneva for the annual meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Commission, where China wages a yearly battle to avoid scrutiny of its rights record.

---

Suicide in Tiananmen Square brings tight security

01/24/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-01-24-falungong.htm

BEIJING (AP) - Police checkpoints ringed Tiananmen Square on Wednesday to head off threatened protests by the outlawed Falun Gong sect a day after five members set themselves on fire in China's symbolic heart. The fiery protest left one woman dead, injured the other four and signaled a dangerous turn in the intensifying 18-month-old standoff between the spiritual movement and the communist government. In response, Beijing police imposed the tightest security in the square in years, marring Wednesday's start of the lunar new year, China's biggest public holiday.

Hundreds of uniformed police and plainclothes security officers, their walkie-talkies crackling in the cold winter air, patrolled the vast plaza and its immediate surroundings.

At pedestrian underpasses and crosswalks leading to the square, police checked identification papers, searched bags, made people turn out their pockets and open their coats and jackets, and looked down their sleeves to see if they were hiding anything inside.

To test whether people were affiliated with the sect, police made some repeat the phrase "Falun Gong is an evil cult" or made them denounce Li Hongzhi, the group's U.S.-based founder, asking: "Is Li Hongzhi a good or bad egg?"

The inspections weeded out some sect members, while a few others still managed to protest. A man climbed atop a mound of shoveled snow inside the square and held up a banner before police, rushing at him from three sides, knocked him over. One officer pressed a knee into the protester's body, pinning him to the ground until a van drove up.

"Falun Dafa is good," another man shouted from inside a police van, using an alternative name for the group. Witnesses saw police leading four other people away, among them a man in his mid-30s who held up a red banner.

Despite the few flashes of protest, the intense security enforced calm on the snow-brushed square. Families, couples and groups of visitors strolled and snapped photographs. The scene was a marked contrast to last lunar new year, when police kicked and pummeled protesters to quash scattered outbursts of defiance in scenes of violence since repeated on major holidays.

Falun Gong attracted millions of followers in the 1990s with its slow-motion exercise and New Age philosophy that believers say promote health, good citizenship and supernatural powers.

Practitioners have waged a sustained campaign of civil disobedience in Tiananmen ever since the government banned the group in July 1999, accusing it of misleading followers, causing deaths and threatening Communist Party rule.

Tuesday's attempted group suicide appeared to mar the largely peaceful image of the sect's campaign. The five, soaked with gasoline, set themselves on fire, according to the government's Xinhua News Agency and a CNN camera crew, which witnessed the protest.

CNN reported that four of the protesters staggered forward, their bodies on fire and arms raised in a pose of meditation typical of Falun Gong.

Spokesmen for group founder Li, in New York, denied the protesters were Falun Gong and said the act was part of a Chinese government smear campaign.

"This so-called suicide attempt on Tiananmen Square has nothing to do with Falun Gong practitioners because the teachings of Falun Gong prohibit any form of killing," the group said in a statement.

The statement said more than 120 practitioners have died in custody but noted that China has only acknowledged a few deaths and attributed them to natural causes or suicide.

Still the attempted group suicide came after weeks of intensifying rhetoric on both sides. Li has called for more aggressive action against the government crackdown. But with Beijing bidding this year to host the 2008 Olympics, the government is keen to gain the upper hand in the struggle.

---

01/24/01
USA Today
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Hawaii

Honolulu - Dozens of gay rights activists completed a seven-day, 110-mile around-the-island march on Oahu to raise public awareness of their push for civil unions. The activists are seeking a legal opinion from the state attorney general's office clarifying Hawaii's legal obligation to provide the full rights and benefits of marriage to same-sex couples through civil unions.

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Elephant fur

Inside the Beltway
Political tidbits and other shenanigans from around the nation's capital.
January 24, 2001
Washington Times
John McCaslin
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inbeltway.htm

Laura Bush has barely had time to hang up the fabric coat she wore to the inauguration, but PETA, or People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is taking no chances. They're asking the first lady to make sure any fur in her White House wardrobe is strictly faux.

In a letter to the new first lady, PETA asks Mrs. Bush to continue a bipartisan policy dating back to President Nixon, who made famous his wife's compassionate choice of a "respectable Republican cloth coat" over an ostentatious mink.

Subsequent first ladies, PETA notes, have also declined fur, including Laura Bush's mother-in-law, Barbara, "who refused to wear a $10,000 fox fur offered to her for her husband's inaugural ceremony." "Elephants and donkeys agree - all animals want to keep their skins," says PETA spokeswoman Lisa Lange.

John McCaslin, a nationally syndicated columnist, can be reached at 202/636-3284 or by e-mail (mccasl@twtmail.com).

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