------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Russian Diplomat Defected to U.S.
Russia Worried About NATO Expansion
Bush Goes Global With Campaign Style
China Plays an India Card in a New Strategy for Asia
Asian Stock Markets Close Mixed
Doctor's Studies of Gulf War Syndrome Find Link to Depleted Uranium
Plutonium Found in Greece Park
Yeltsin Hospitalized in Moscow
Taiwan Premier in Nuclear Gridlock with Opposition
Taiwan Premier Backs Plant Decision
A Grisly Mystery in Ukraine Leads to a Government Crisis
Kennedys, Bush To Attend Screening
Max E. Goodwin
AS PIPELINE PROPOSED

MILITARY
EUROPEANS VISIT
Plane with at least 30 aboard hijacked
ARMY BASES CLOSED
U.N. Report Proposes Steps to Fight Global Poverty
New Marine uniforms blend in, but stand out

OTHER
How Secret Experiments May Have Unleashed Cancer Causing Viruses
On Watch for Any Hint of Mad Cow Disease
President Offers Plan to Promote Oil Exploration
Why San Diego, Where Rates First Rose, No Longer Conserves Energy
Whitman, Norton win Senate approval
Public property: no trespassing
Biotech Food: To Be Wary or Not?
Gulf War Syndrome Distinct From Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
Officer, Sobbing, Recalls Secret Life of Crime
A Sheriff's Star Dimmed
Chinese Officials Order Cities to Bolster Riot Police Forces

ACTIVISTS
Thousands demand Wahid's resignation
ELF Making Good on Threat
FTAA/CITIGROUP TEACH-IN IN AT UCHICAGO


-------- NUCLEAR

Russian Diplomat Defected to U.S.

January 30, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russian-Diplomat.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Russian diplomat working at his government's mission to the United Nations in New York quietly defected with his family last October, two U.S. officials said Tuesday.

The diplomat, Sergey Tretyakov, was first secretary at the mission. He defected with his wife, Elena Tretyakova, and other members of the family, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity.

According to their account, Tretyakov expressed an interest in remaining in the United States and was put in touch with U.S. officials. No further details were immediately available, such as what the legal basis would be for defection from a country that has shed its totalitarian past.

While close to a dozen first secretaries are posted at the Russian mission in New York's fashionable upper East Side, there were unconfirmed reports that Tretyakov was a senior aide to Russia's veteran U.N. ambassador, Sergey Lavrov.

Coincidentally, and apparently unrelated to the Tretyakov defection, Secretary of State Colin Powell had his first conversation Tuesday with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the telephone conversation ``was a good beginning.'' In Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Ivanov and Powell agreed to meet ``in the near future for the purpose of exchanging views on the entire range of Russian-American cooperation.'' The ministry said the conversation was ``warm and constructive.''

There was no explanation Tuesday why a Russian diplomat, Tretyakov, would defect in the post-Cold War era as the United States and Russia are not at ideological loggerheads.

Cold War defections were dramatic.

Arkady Shevchenko, a top Soviet diplomat who defected to the United States in 1978, said in his memoirs in 1985 that he had spied for the CIA for more than 2 1/2 years before his defection.

Shevchenko delivered secrets to the United States that included a position paper from negotiations to reduce U.S. and Russian arsenals of long-range nuclear warheads, according to reports in 1985.

Shevchenko, a protege of Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister until mid-1985, first approached the United States and asked to defect in 1975. He was at the time an undersecretary-general at the United Nations in New York.

The CIA, wanting to test his loyalty, put him to work for the United States, Shevchenko said,

``I never had an idea of a long period of spying, but since I was several months with them, ... they could even betray me to the Soviets. I was actually in their hands,'' he said.

Only a handful of top American officials knew that Shevchenko was working for the United States, among them Daniel Moynihan, the former U.S. Senator from New York who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1975.

---

Russia Worried About NATO Expansion

January 30, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Germany.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- NATO's eastward expansion could plunge Russia's relations with the West into crisis, Russian officials warned Germany Tuesday. They also renewed their opposition to U.S. plans for a missile defense system.

Sergei Ivanov, the secretary of President Vladimir Putin's powerful Security Council, gave the blunt warning about NATO to German Defense Minister Rudolph Scharping. Germany is a key member of NATO.

``If implemented, these plans will create a fundamentally new situation in Europe that objectively infringes on Russia's political and military interests,'' Ivanov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. ``This could lead to a serious crisis.''

Former Warsaw Pact nations Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined the Western alliance last year, bringing NATO to the border of Russia's militarily strategic enclave of Kaliningrad, a chunk of Russian territory wedged between Lithuania and Poland but separated from the rest of Russia.

The former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are eager to join NATO. Russia vehemently opposes their membership, which would make Kaliningrad surrounded by NATO and give the alliance another border with mainland Russia.

Unconfirmed reports this month said Russia had sent tactical nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad, possibly as an expression of its opposition to NATO expansion. Scharping told a news conference that Germany had no evidence that Russia had sent such weapons to the enclave.

Scharping also discussed arms control issues, including Russia's opposition to a U.S. plan to deploy a limited missile defense system, with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev.

Russia has steadfastly opposed U.S. proposals to change the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow such a missile defense system and has lobbied U.S. allies in Europe against the proposal.

Sergeyev told reporters Tuesday that Russia would continue to insist on preserving the ABM treaty, calling it a ``cornerstone of international security and stability,'' Interfax reported.

Scharping said at a press conference that although Germany was not part of ABM, his country ``had a strong interest in maintaining and observing the treaty.'' The new administration of President Bush should conduct ``intensive negotations both within NATO and with Russia'' to work out differences over arms control, he said.

He said Russia, the United States and Europe should work together to preserve the existing framework of arms control agreements. ``We must not endanger the international security architecture of arms control and disarmament,'' Scharping said.

Scharping's visit comes ahead of a European security conference Saturday in Munich, Germany, which new U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is expected to attend.

The Munich talks are expected to include discussion of the U.S. missile defense proposal. U.S. leaders say deployment of a missile defense system is necessary to protect the nation against limited ballistic missile attacks by such nations as North Korea and Iran. Russia and China contend that deployment of the system could re-ignite the arms race. Putin proposed an alternative shared European missile defense last year. However, few details have been released, and Scharping said Tuesday that such a system was not yet practical. ``It is senseless to talk about goals that remain only goals and cannot be implemented,'' he said.

---

Bush Goes Global With Campaign Style

January 30, 2001
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/world/30PREX.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 - The call went out from the White House to Malacanang Palace in Manila early one evening last week. Inching his way onto the world stage, President Bush was calling yet another national leader - this time the new Philippine president, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo.

"I think we are the two freshest faces in the presidential ranks," Mr. Bush said, according to a transcript of the conversation that, to the annoyance of White House officials, the Philippine authorities published. The rest of the conversation was an awkward search for common ground, from Ms. Arroyos' observation of how she and Mr. Bush are both the children of former presidents to Mr. Bush's comments about the time.

"It's about past 7 in the evening here so we're actually in different time lines," he said, apparently meaning time zones.

But for Mr. Bush, these calls are more than an exchange of anodyne pleasantries. They are the beginning of a campaign with echoes of the strategy that won him the presidency. For the past 10 days he has been speed dialing around the globe, talking to 13 world leaders, from Saudi Arabia to Japan to Poland.

The president who introduced himself to the American people a year ago with campaign events that were longer on good feeling than substance is using the same technique to manage his first encounters with fellow world leaders. His aim, aides say, is to create a bond before he has to raise contentious subjects "or ask for something." There will be time for all that later, one aide said.

The strategy has yielded some diplomatic oddities.

Though Vladimir V. Putin of Russia wrote a lengthy letter to Mr. Bush last week, Mr. Bush has not talked to the leader of America's former strategic rival and, currently, a worrisome and well-armed former superpower. Mr. Putin has been leading the international effort to oppose an American missile defense system that may require scrapping the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. It is a subject Mr. Bush clearly does not want to tackle yet with Mr. Putin.

And Mr. Bush has put off, at least for now, any discussion with Jiang Zemin of China - a country that he promised during the campaign would no longer be called a "strategic partner." Nor has he talked to any African leaders, though the new Congo president, Joseph Kabila, will be in Washington later this week and seems all but certain to run into Mr. Bush at a prayer breakfast.

Yet the order in which he has made his calls, and the first meetings he has scheduled with other leaders, reveal a few priorities.

Last week the White House made a point of noting that Mr. Bush's first call to a foreign leader was to Vicente Fox of Mexico. It was quickly followed by an agreement that Mr. Bush would take his first trip abroad as president to Mr. Fox's ranch, on Feb. 16 (placing Mr. Bush, coincidentally, within an easy shot of his own ranch in Texas).

The first foreign leader to visit Mr. Bush at the White House will be not Mr. Fox but the prime minister of Canada, Jean Chrétien, who comes here on Monday.

The message, however, is clear: Mr. Bush plans to put his own hemisphere first. His second trip, in fact, is likely to be a hemispheric summit meeting in Quebec to begin discussion of expanding Nafta to a free trade area of the Americas.

"Imagine Bush working in concentric circles," said one senior State Department official who has sat in on the strategy meetings over the president's schedule. "He starts closest to home. Then the allies, in Europe and Asia. After that, and only after that, comes the serious engagement with Russia and China."

In part, that is a strategy intended to build support for the missile defense plan, which has few advocates outside the United States. When Mr. Putin went to visit Mr. Chrétien last month, they issued a joint communiqué stating that "Canada and the Russian Federation agree that the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty is a cornerstone of strategic stability."

This focus on hemispheric allies has brought unhappiness in Europe, where diplomats often cite, with wonder, the fact that Mr. Bush has only traveled beyond America's shores three times (save for trips to Mexico). So the White House is working to prove that Mr. Bush is getting his mind around the European alliance.

When Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain visits on Feb. 23 and 24, Mr. Bush plans to take him to Camp David. Mr. Blair's aides were delighted by the invitation, because they are eager to make sure that the close personal relationship that Mr. Blair had with President Clinton would not interfere with relations with a Republican.

Mr. Blair, too, is hesitant about the missile defense plan, which continental Europe largely opposes. That puts him in an awkward position, because while he wants to show that London is America's most dependable ally, he does not want to appear to cater to its every wish.

Mr. Bush's early wooing of Mr. Blair has the Japanese slightly out of joint, because they, too, believe that they have a special relationship with Washington. They rushed their foreign minister, Yohei Kono, to Washington late last week, hoping to schedule an early visit by Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. In Japanese diplomatic parlance, that means before the arrival of President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea.

Perhaps tellingly, Mr. Bush also called the people who have their hand on the oil spigot - led by King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia - before he called Prime Minister Ehud Barak of Israel. He has yet to speak to the Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat.

-------- asia

China Plays an India Card in a New Strategy for Asia

Tuesday, January 30, 2001
International Herald Tribune
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray IHT
http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=9033

OXFORD, England The recent visit to India of Li Peng, chairman of China's National People's Congress, is a sign of Chinese nervousness about the Asia policies of the Bush administration. Beijing wants to counterbalance the United States in Asia by forming the "strategic triangle" between Russia, China and India that Moscow first proposed two years ago.

But India does not feel as uncomfortable as China with the new administration in Washington. Secretary of State Colin Powell has already observed that the United States should deal more wisely with India which, he noted, "has the potential to help keep the peace in the vast Indian Ocean area and its periphery." Mr. Bush improved on that by promising a visiting Indian politician that he would lose no time in lifting the economic sanctions that his predecessor imposed when India exploded five nuclear devices in May 1998.

Still, Indian officials are apprehensive about Washington's predilection for unilateral action, as in Kosovo, and, in theory at least, advocate a multipolar system as a more effective guarantor of Third World security.

Mr. Li astutely played on this sensibility by declaring that China and India "have the obligation and capability to work more actively to play their due part in the international arena."

Indian officials are also concerned about how Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld will handle missile defense. He presided over a commission which concluded that Russia, China, India and North Korea were potentially dangerous countries whose "growing missile and weapons of mass destruction capabilities have direct effects on U.S. policies, both regional and global, and could significantly affect U.S. capability to play a stabilizing role in Asia."

Such findings, if acted upon by the Bush administration, might yet give the strategic triangle concept proposed by Beijing greater appeal in New Delhi.

India may have added fuel to the fire by recently test launching an updated version of its Agni missile, which has a 2,250-kilometer range. U.S. officials say privately that there are too many highly connected Indians all over America for Washington to worry about the Agni and that it is more relevant that India can now target sites in southern China. Perhaps with just that in mind, Mr. Li reiterated in New Delhi that China "has never taken India as a threat, nor do we intend to pose a threat" to India, and urged his hosts to exorcise the "bogey" of a hostile China.

Despite China's close ties with Pakistan - which India has repeatedly blamed as a source of terrorism in the past - Mr. Li acknowledged Indian worries about the spate of such attacks from abroad. He said piously that it was Beijing's policy "to oppose and condemn international terrorism of all descriptions" and that China held no brief for "any country" that tried to achieve its purpose through violence.

This high-level wooing of India is a major initiative by the Chinese, whose budding "strategic partnership" with Russia, covering arms sales and space cooperation, led to resumed Russian patrolling of the Pacific Ocean. China sees the Russia axis as a way of balancing the United States in Asia. India is tempted to go along and would certainly like to mend fences with Beijing and work for an Asian consensus.

But honeyed words alone cannot heal the wounds of four decades. China is not only Pakistan's principal supplier of missile and nuclear technology and equipment but, in India's view, illegally occupies Indian territory. China was also the harshest critic of the nuclear tests that gave India an effective deterrent against Chinese nuclear blackmail.

Moreover, the relationship between India and China is without substance, while the United States is India's most important economic partner. For all its misgivings about some aspects of American policy, New Delhi is unlikely to give up its increasingly wide ranging relationship with the United States without far stronger evidence of Beijing's desire for an equitable solution of long-outstanding bilateral problems.

The writer, a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and a former editor of The Statesman, in India, contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

---

Asian Stock Markets Close Mixed

January 30, 2001
New York Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Asian-Markets.html

HONG KONG (AP) -- Asian stock markets closed mixed Tuesday, with the key indexes falling both in Tokyo and Hong Kong.

The Japanese benchmark 225-issue Nikkei Stock Average slipped 18.63 points, or 0.13 percent, to 13,826.65. On Monday, the average ended up 149.22 points, or 1.09 percent.

The Nikkei index opened slightly higher following an overnight advance on Wall Street but soon moved into negative territory in the absence of major market-moving news.

Traders were waiting to see whether the U.S. Federal Reserve would announce an interest rate cut in an attempt to stop the American economy from going into recession. The Fed's two-day meeting begins later Tuesday.

In New York overnight, the Dow Jones industrial average gained 42.21 points to 10,702.19 at Monday's close. The Nasdaq composite index finished at 2,838.34, up 57.04.

In currency trading, the U.S. dollar was quoted at 116.54 yen, down 0.35 yen from late Monday in Tokyo and also below its late New York level of 116.74 yen overnight.

In Hong Kong, the blue-chip Hang Seng Index fell 206.75 points, or 1.28 percent, ending at 15,893.07. On Monday, the index had gained 55.61 points, or 0.4 percent.

The Hong Kong market was hit by profit-taking in technology and property stocks, brokers said.

Taiwan shares closed sharply higher on growing hopes that expected U.S. interest rate cuts would help markets in America and Taiwan, analysts said.

The benchmark Weighted Price Index of the Taiwan Stock Exchange rose 112.44 points to 5,792.50.

Investors were buying shares of select technology companies that are expected to post solid earnings and pay hefty dividends for 2000, said Michael Hsu, a deputy manager at Fubon Securities Co.

Trading was volatile, with the key index in negative territory for half the session, as investors were concerned about the political bickering over Taiwan's controversial fourth nuclear power plant.

Elsewhere:

BANGKOK: Thai share prices slumped, pushed down by losses in the banking and finance sectors, dealers said. The Stock Exchange of Thailand index fell 7.33 points, or 2.2 percent, to 325.21.

SINGAPORE: Share prices closed closed higher, as banks and property stocks rallied on expectations of a cut in U.S. interest rates. The Straits Times Index rose 29.47 points, or 1.5 percent, to 1,961.52.

WELLINGTON: New Zealand shares snapped a five-session losing streak to close higher. The NZSE-40 Capital Index rose 16.26 points, or 0.8 percent, to 1991.43.

MANILA: Philippine shares closed lower on continued profit-taking, after last week's heady rally following a peaceful leadership change. The 30-company Philippine Stock Exchange Index fell 17.85 points, or 1.1 percent, to 1,668.43.

SYDNEY: The Australian share market closed slightly higher, boosted by gains in News Corp. and Cable & Wireless Optus Ltd. The All Ordinaries Index rose 0.6 percent, or 19.1 points, to 3,284.1.

SEOUL: The key index closed slightly lower. The Korea Composite Stock Price Index slippepd 5.20 points, or 0.9 percent, to 591.34.

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian shares closed mixed. The KLSE Composite Index, which tracks 100 blue-chip stocks, edged up 2.83 points, or 0.4 percent, to 722.69.

JAKARTA: Indonesian shares closed higher after feared clashes between supporters of President Abdurrahman Wahid and their opponents failed to take place Monday, dealers said. The The Composite Index rose 0.8 percent, or 3.273 points, to 416.325.

-------- depleted uranium

Doctor's Studies of Gulf War Syndrome Find Link to Depleted Uranium

Tuesday, January 30, 2001
International Herald Tribune
Marlise Simons New York Times Service
http://www.iht.com/articles/9051.htm

PARIS The cancer deaths of 24 European soldiers who served as peacekeepers in the Balkans and the illnesses reported by many others have stirred alarm in Europe about the use of depleted uranium in munitions fired from American warplanes during the conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo.

No one has proved a link between the use of depleted uranium and the deaths or illnesses of Balkan veterans, and many scientists consider such a link impossible. Nor is it clear that cancers are occurring at a higher rate among former peacekeepers than in the population at large.

But the fears often stirred by mention of radiation have sent doctors, military experts and politicians in Europe scurrying for explanations. Among the research they are re-examining is the work of a retired U.S. Army colonel who has insisted that some of the diseases he has observed in Gulf War veterans may be linked to the depleted uranium and uranium 236 isotopes he says he found in their bodies.

Asaf Durakovic began examining Gulf War veterans when he worked as chief of nuclear medicine at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Wilmington, Delaware, in the 1990s. Since that post was abolished in 1997, he has continued his privately funded research in Toronto.

Dr. Durakovic said that, unlike many other institutions involved in testing for uranium, he used mass spectometry tests that measured the relative abundance of each isotope in the body.

He said that his analysis of body fluids of more than 40 American, British and Canadian Gulf War veterans who turned to him kept turning up evidence of depleted uranium and uranium 236, a more radioactive uranium isotope.

Dr. Durakovic said he found these in 62 percent of the sick Gulf War veterans he examined.

Radiation experts in France and Britain said they were now rereading his work because he was the first to report that he found uranium 236 in the urine as well as in the bone tissue of Gulf War veterans. They suspect that its presence indicates that other contaminants may be present.

"This cannot be conventional depleted uranium," said Monique Sene, a physicist who is prominent in France's large atomic research establishment, when asked about Dr. Durakovic's findings. "The ratios he found do not exist in nature. This contains nuclear waste."

Dr. Durakovic, 60, has worked in radiation biology for more than 30 years in Britain, Canada and the United States, which sent him to inspect Soviet nuclear test sites. His work won plaudits from the Defense Nuclear Agency and the U.S. Army research center. Last year, he presented his studies at the conference of the European Association of Nuclear Medicine in Paris. His quest is now also described in a newly published book, "Depleted Uranium, Invisible War," which has received broad news media attention in France.

Dr. Durakovic said that when he started tests on 24 American Gulf War veterans he was asked to examine in 1991 by a colleague at a New Jersey hospital, urine samples were lost and his efforts to get more precise tests were discouraged. Eventually, he said, he was dismissed.

At the veterans hospital in Wilmington, a spokeswoman, Barbara Howell, said Dr. Durakovic's employment ended because "we did not need a full-time nuclear medicine physician." She said no samples had been lost, and that in all samples tested, levels of uranium "were within normal limits." Dr. Durakovic said he never got the test reports.

NATO officials fear that the concern in Europe could lead eventually to a ban on munitions containing depleted uranium, which is an exceptionally hard metal and thus suited for penetrating armored vehicles, like tanks. Both NATO and the Pentagon have brought forward scientists and military experts with evidence that the munitions' low-level radiation is not harmful and that natural uranium is always present in the environment and in the body.

But anxiety among some Europeans rose again this month when laboratories in Switzerland and Finland announced that they had found small amounts of uranium 236 in shrapnel from American weapons found in Kosovo.

Pierre Roussel, a physicist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, said the amount of uranium 236 found was tiny, but added, "The problem is that this isotope can only be produced in a reactor, where it is accompanied by far more radioactive elements."

A Pentagon spokesman and U.S. military doctors admitted that because of possible production flaws, some American depleted uranium contained traces of plutonium, neptunium and americium. He suggested, however, that the amounts were so minute that they posed no danger.

Experts in nuclear medicine in Britain, France and the United States said that they questioned the idea that there was no danger because experiments on animals had shown that uranium particles could get into the bloodstream, organs and bone, where they could deliver low-level radiation.

Military tests have shown that when depleted uranium is blown up, it ignites and turns into tiny hard particles, often less than 10 microns in size that can be inhaled. "They can stay airborne as aerosols, be blown around by the wind and fall down as dust," Dr. Durakovic said. "Because they are the size of microns people can breathe them in." Once inhaled, Dr. Durakovic added, uranium can get into the bloodstream, be carried to the bone, lymph nodes, lungs or kidneys, lodge there, and cause damage when it emits low-level radiation over a long period.

-------- greece

Plutonium Found in Greece Park

January 30, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Greece-Plutonium.html
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/01/30/greece.plutonium.ap.ap/index.html

THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) -- A small amount of plutonium believed smuggled from Eastern Europe was found buried in a park, in a possible sign of increased trafficking of radioactive material, officials said Tuesday.

Metal plates containing about a tenth of an ounce of plutonium and americium, another radioactive element, were found Saturday by Finance Ministry agents acting on a tip.

The ministry's fraud agency is investigating possible link between the plutonium and a cigarette smuggling ring from neighboring Bulgaria, police sources said. The park where the plutonium was found is about 7 1/2 miles outside Thessaloniki, and is often used for picnics and by joggers.

The amount was far less than the plutonium needed to make a bomb. But it raises concern of toxic contamination from the highly dangerous substances.

About 20 pounds of plutonium are used in a bomb, according to U.S. government estimates. But other experts say just over half that amount is needed.

``Plutonium is usually sold for terrorism purposes,'' said the agency's director, Leonidas Kamarinopoulos. ``Plutonium is very dangerous even in this quantity.''

The plates were transported to a safe facility in Athens by members of the state Agency of Atomic Energy, authorities said. Greece has only one small nuclear reactor used for research.

Kamarinopoulos said the find had been reported to the International Atomic Energy Commission in Vienna, Austria, which will try and trace its origin. The plutonium will be transported to its country of origin or one which processes radioactive materials for power generation, he said.

Greece has become a crossroads for various kinds of smuggling, including trafficking in drugs and illegal weapons.

-------- russia

Yeltsin Hospitalized in Moscow

January 30, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Yeltsin.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin was rushed to a hospital Tuesday with a fever and a suspected viral infection -- a reminder of the health problems that plagued him during his presidency.

Yeltsin was taken to the government's Central Clinical Hospital on the western outskirts of Moscow with what doctors believed was an ``acute viral infection,'' his aide Valentin Shevchenko said, according to Russian news reports. An intensive course of treatment will take at least several days, he said.

Shevchenko said Yeltsin's temperature was measured at 100.4 and he was hospitalized to ``avoid risks.'' He said there were no signs of any heart ailment, and Yeltsin's blood pressure and pulse remained normal.

Yeltsin, who turns 70 on Thursday, underwent quintuple bypass surgery in 1996, shortly after winning a second term. He limped from one hospitalization to another in the years that followed -- getting treatment for ailments ranging from pneumonia to bronchitis to ulcers. Each of his ailments caused a political crisis and sometimes triggered succession battles.

Yeltsin abruptly resigned Dec. 31, 1999, six months before the end of his term, turning power over to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and clearing the way for Putin to win the presidency in an early election in March.

Yeltsin has lived in seclusion at his country residence west of Moscow since his resignation, rarely making public appearances or giving interviews.

He publicly criticized his successor for the first time last month, chastising Putin for restoring the music of the old Soviet anthem and for his slow response to the Kursk nuclear submarine disaster.

-------- taiwan

Taiwan Premier in Nuclear Gridlock with Opposition

January 30, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-taiwan-.html

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan's embattled Premier Chang Chun-hsiung defended Tuesday his politically explosive decision to shelve a nuclear power plant, enraging opposition deputies who threatened to recess indefinitely.

Testifying before parliament, Chang listed nine reasons in a 34-page report supporting his decision made last October to halt construction of Taiwan's fourth nuclear power plant -- including inability to handle nuclear waste or potential disaster.

Chang told the 220-member legislature his controversial decision was ``not unconstitutional,'' made the island a safer place and would not lead to power shortages.

But in remarks expected to prolong a political gridlock and further dampen a weakening economy, Chang said any parliament vote to overturn his decision would not be legally binding.

``Even if the Legislative Yuan votes against the decision, it is not necessarily binding,'' Chang said, referring to the opposition-dominated parliament which is certain to vote down the cabinet decision Wednesday.

``Construction of nuclear power plants in Taiwan is neither an economic nor an ideological issue, but an issue of life and survival of the 23 million people and an issue concerning the future welfare of all,'' the premier added.

OPPOSITION THREATENS RECESS

Angry opposition deputies accused Chang of contempt, demanded his resignation and threatened to recess indefinitely -- a move which would drag out a political crisis that has rocked the stock market and unnerved investors.

``He should voluntarily step down,'' said Cheng Yung-chin, legislative whip of the main opposition Nationalist Party. ``We do not rule out the possibility of recessing indefinitely.''

Chang said his departure would not help resolve the dispute over the US$5.5 billion project which is already one-third complete.

Political analysts said Chang -- who assumed office last October -- was likely to fight for his job.

They said opposition deputies lack the guts to propose a vote of no confidence against Chang, because President Chen Shui-bian could dissolve the legislature and call a snap election.

Parliament's four-year term ends in early 2002, and the number of seats held by the Nationalist Party -- ousted by Chen in presidential elections last March -- is widely expected to dwindle after year-end elections.

PRESIDENT OFFERS TO MEDIATE

The President, a member of Chang's anti-nuclear Democratic Progressive Party, has offered to serve as a neutral mediator.

Parliamentary speaker Wang Jin-pyng, a vice-chairman of the Nationalist Party, said Tuesday there would be ``no room for negotiation'' between the ruling and opposition party deputies if the legislature voted down the cabinet's decision.

The parliamentary debate came after the Council of Grand Justices this month censured Premier Chang for not consulting lawmakers on his decision to halt construction of the project.

The island's top judges said the premier's decision was ''flawed'' but stopped short of declaring it unconstitutional.

They ruled that legislature could, as an alternative, pass a bill forcing the cabinet to resume construction of the 2,700-megawatt project.

Premier Chang pledged to make Taiwan a safer place by scrapping the island's three other nuclear plants and showed the legislature a portrait of a deformed child, a victim of a nuclear accident.

He added that the move would not cause any power shortages because the government has plans for alternative power projects.

As of the end of 2000, Chang said, losses incurred from the decision to scrap the project totaled $2.7 billion, much lower than the cost of continuing construction.

The business community mostly favors building the nuclear power plant, fearing electricity shortages in the future. But environmentalists say Taiwan cannot process nuclear waste or deal with potential nuclear accidents.

A few dozen anti-nuclear activists staged a sit-down protest outside parliament in central Taipei for a second day Tuesday.

Monday, an anti-nuclear activist set himself ablaze on the steps of parliament. Other protesters rushed to the aid of Huang Ting-fan, 53, and doused the fire with bottled water. He suffered mostly facial burns.

---

Taiwan Premier Backs Plant Decision

January 30, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Taiwan-Politics.html?printpage=yes
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-01-30-taiwan.htm

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) -- Taiwan's premier on Tuesday defended the decision to scrap a nuclear power project in a raucous debate with opposition lawmakers, who had barred him from parliament for months in anger over the move.

After the new government decided to scuttle the partially built nuclear plant in October, opposition legislators -- who control parliament -- refused to meet with Premier Chang Chun-hsiung and threatened to topple the government.

But on Tuesday, lawmakers allowed Chang, the island's No. 3 ranking leader, to defend the minority government's decision in a special session called to settle months of feuding and gridlock.

Chang argued the plant was unsafe and unnecessary. ``We have lived through an era of poverty, and we are not inclined to waste money,'' he said. ``But this is an issue about the lives and safety of 23 million people ... and about the welfare of our future generations.''

The $5.4-billion project to build Taiwan's fourth nuclear plant -- now one-third complete -- was approved by the former Nationalist Party government, which lost the March election. Opposition lawmakers have argued that the new government could not halt the project without consulting with the legislature.

In heated exchanges during the a daylong question-and-answer period, several lawmakers wagged their fingers and shouted at the premier. Chang politely listened to most as they lectured him or cut him off as he tried to answer questions.

Nationalist lawmaker Chu Li-luan accused Chang of abusing his powers. ``Emperor Chang, how could you dare?'' Chu said. ``It is as if your position is even more important than (President) Chen Shui-bian's.''

So far, Chang has taken responsibility for the decision to cancel the plant, although it was one of the president's campaign promises and a core position of his Democratic Progressive Party.

Lawmaker Wang Tein-ging of the People's First Party accused the premier of being undemocratic. Referring to ousted Philippine President Joseph Estrada, Wang said, ``Estrada ignored public opinion and they took him down.''

The opposition was expected to finish the special session Wednesday by passing a resolution calling for the nuclear plant's completion.

However, Chang said that the government was not obligated to follow the legislature's resolution. He said he hoped the government could work out a compromise with the opposition.

Ho Chih-hui, the Nationalists' caucus leader, said his party would not accept an offer to negotiate a compromise if the government ignores a resolution.

Some lawmakers proposed passing a law that would order the completion of the plant. The premier acknowledged that the government would have to respect the law.

Outside the legislature, a crowd of about 50 peaceful protesters -- including Buddhist nuns in gray robes -- held pictures of nuclear disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. They also rolled out barrels painted yellow to look like storage drums for nuclear waste.

On Monday, a man set himself on fire briefly at an anti-nuclear sit-in outside the legislature. Before torching himself, the man gave an anti-nuclear letter to reporters. He was in stable condition on Tuesday.

-------- ukraine

A Grisly Mystery in Ukraine Leads to a Government Crisis

January 30, 2001
New York Times
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/world/30UKRA.html?pagewanted=all

KIEV, Ukraine, Jan. 26 - The political crisis that has seized Ukraine started with the disappearance last September of Georgy Gongadze, a lanky Georgian-born journalist with a penchant for asking blunt questions about President Leonid D. Kuchma.

It worsened with the discovery in November of a headless body - believed to be that of Mr. Gongadze - and, later that month, the release of secret recordings made under the president's couch by a security man in which Mr. Kuchma appears to order the journalist's abduction or worse. The security agent, who is now hiding in Europe, has beamed his accusations into Ukraine over short-wave radio.

The scandal has set off anti- Kuchma demonstrations in dozens of cities, as well as counterdemonstrations by state workers ordered into the streets or bused to pro-Kuchma rallies. Television and radio journalists say they have been ordered to keep the anti-Kuchma movement off the air.

The whole affair has also touched off a fractious brawl in Parliament, where Mr. Kuchma's political majority has been upended by defections and the formation of a new centrist opposition.

"Never in 10 years has there been this kind of scandal, and no one can see where it is going," said Oleksandr Tkachenko, managing director of Novyi Kanal, an independent television network.

The growing crisis is threatening to undo reforms in a country - a major recipient of American aid - where pensioners are being paid on time for the first time in years and where the economy last year registered a respectable level of growth after a decade of collapse and stagnation. "There is a real potential for a lot of progress that has been made to unravel, and if it does, it could happen really quickly," warned a senior Western diplomat here.

Many political analysts are also trying to figure out whether an unstable Ukraine would lurch back into Moscow's orbit, or pave the way for Mr. Kuchma's exit and the ascendancy of Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, if not through early elections, then in 2003.

At highest risk is the fragile relationship between the president and prime minister. Mr. Yushchenko is a former central banker whose reputation for honesty and commitment to reform have made him a more attractive leader to the West and an object of suspicion for the president.

Mr. Kuchma, a former Soviet rocket factory manager, has led Ukraine since November 1992, first as prime minister and then as president, by balancing Western affections against Moscow's dominance in the country's economy.

But to his critics, corruption has been the dominant feature of Mr. Kuchma's tenure.

On Jan. 19, Mr. Kuchma fired Mr. Yushchenko's energy minister, Yulia Timoshenko, who had been leading the government's efforts to clean up the country's energy industries, the source of the largest corruption.

The scandal could not have come at a worse time, as Ukraine just won reinstatement of a $2.6 billion lending program by the International Monetary Fund after a long suspension imposed for failing to carry out economic reforms.

Mr. Kuchma is also trying to complete negotiations with the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to finance projects critical to boosting Ukraine's flaccid post-Soviet economy. One is the completion of two nuclear power stations of Soviet design needed to replace the electrical output of Chernobyl, the troubled nuclear plant that Mr. Kuchma shut down in December.

Ukraine has been one of the leading recipients of United States foreign aid in recent years, totaling more than $2 billion since it became independent at the end of 1991, much of which has gone to nuclear safety needs.

In a recent interview, Mr. Yushchenko distanced himself from the scandal surrounding Mr. Gongadze's disappearance by criticizing the performance of the police and prosecutors, who answer directly to Mr. Kuchma. In answer to the question of where his loyalties lie, he replied, "To the truth."

"For the interest of Ukraine, it is not only very important to find the truth, but we should also think about stability," he said, noting that the loss of a political majority was already undermining reform.

Outside the prime minister's window, blowing snow raked Kiev as old Soviet trolleys trundled through the bustling business district and past the gilded domes of churches rising from the tree line along the Dnieper River, where ice fishermen worked their lines on the silvery crust.

About 100 demonstrators braved the subzero cold to chant "Ukraine without Kuchma" in front of the Interior Ministry building, at the base of the hill crowned by Mr. Kuchma's presidential edifice, the old headquarters of the Communist Party.

The demonstrators demanded the arrest of Interior Minister Yuri Kravchenko, whose voice can be heard on the tapes telling an irate Mr. Kuchma that something would be done about Mr. Gongadze:

Kuchma: "I'm telling you, drive him out. Throw him out. Give him to the Chechens. (Undecipherable) and then a ransom."

Kravchenko: "We're thinking about it. We'll do it in such a way that --"

Kuchma: "Meaning you drive him out, strip him, (expletive) leave him without his pants, let him sit there."

Kravchenko: "We're studying the situation: where he walks, where he goes. We've got someone sitting there, surveillance. We have to study just a little bit. We'll do it. The team I have is a fighting one - such eagles! - they'll do everything that you want."

The authenticity of the tapes has yet to be established by any independent authority. But among the demonstrators last week, Vladimir Melnik, 60, a retired sea captain, had no doubt about the recordings.

"We have criminal power here," he said, "and there is evidence against Kuchma for the murder of Gongadze." A prominent political writer, Yulia V. Mostova, added in an interview, "In my opinion these tapes call into question whether the president has the moral right to stay in office."

The first 25 minutes of excerpts were made public on Nov. 28 by Oleksandr Moroz, the former speaker of Parliament and Socialist Party leader, who says of Mr. Kuchma: "I don't consider him a criminal in the literal sense. Only a court case can decide this question. But I have no doubt that by his position, he was the cause of this crime."

The initial snippets were taken from an estimated 300 hours of tape spirited out of the country by Mikola Melnichenko, a major in the presidential security service who had been recording Mr. Kuchma's conversations for several years by placing a digital recorder under the sofa in his office. More disclosures are coming, Mr. Melnichenko has said.

"My choice was prompted by my conscience," he told Radio Liberty in a Ukrainian-language broadcast on Jan. 9. "There are no political forces or oligarchs behind me."

Mr. Kuchma's defenders have challenged the authenticity of the tapes, saying they are fabrications, or an edited montage, meant to smear the president. But opposition leaders in Parliament say they consulted experts who verified the recordings as authentic.

Mr. Moroz said a number of officials whose conversations with Mr. Kuchma had been recorded were ready to testify that the recordings accurately reflected their talks.

"There is widespread belief in the Ukrainian establishment that the tapes are authentic, and that in itself is a political factor," said a Western ambassador. Privately, even some of Mr. Kuchma's aides have conceded that the tapes are real and that they accurately convey the often profane and dictatorial manner of Mr. Kuchma in private.

Though Mr. Gongadze is gone, his work is being carried on by his colleagues. Last April he founded an Internet news site, Ukrainska Pravda (www.pravda.com.ua), and his disappearance has made it one of the most popular news sites in the country. With assistance from the United States Embassy, the Web site has received a grant to continue operating for another year.

Mr. Gongadze was born in Georgia in 1968. His mother is Ukrainian, and his father was a member of Georgia's first post-Soviet legislature. Known for his combative style, Mr. Gongadze publicly confronted Mr. Kuchma with tough questions about how the president could have allowed former Prime Minister Pavlo I. Lazarenko to flee Ukraine after Mr. Lazarenko, according to charges filed by prosecutors, plundered the treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Just months after founding the Web site, Mr. Gongadze complained in a public letter to Ukraine's prosecutor general, Mikhailo Potebenko, that he was being subjected to surveillance and harassment.

On Sept. 7 the outgoing American ambassador, Steven Pifer, met with Mr. Gongadze in a show of support for freedom of the press, but to little avail.

"We thought that with moral support from such a powerful friend as the United States ambassador, the authorities would be afraid to try to suppress our activities, but perhaps we were naive," said Mr. Gongadze's closest confidant and colleague, Alyona Y. Pritula, 33.

On Sept. 16, at about 10 p.m., Mr. Gongadze disappeared on his way home.

On Nov. 2 the police found a decapitated body in a wood 75 miles from Kiev. "I found out from the television," said his mother, Lesya, 57. "After that a friend called me and said they found a body without a head and that it was recognized as my son."

Ms. Pritula and another of Mr. Gongadze's friends, Koba Alaniya, drove to Tarashcha and told the local coroner where to look for shrapnel in Mr. Gongadze's wrist, left over from his days as a war correspondent in Abkhazia in 1993.

The coroner immediately found the shrapnel. He showed Ms. Pitula a bracelet and a locket found with the body. Ms. Pritula showed the coroner the other half of the locket. The coroner asked what Mr. Gongadze had eaten that day in September, and the visitors told him watermelon. The coroner found watermelon seeds in the stomach.

But the initial coroner's report was later suppressed.

Now, four months on, Lesya Gongadze refuses to take the body home for burial in western Ukraine until the country's prosecutor states with 100 percent certainty - not 99.6 percent as he stated this month - that the body is Mr. Gongadze's.

By her demands, Ms. Gongadze and many of her son's friends and supporters are hoping to force a murder investigation in which all evidence can be pursued, even into the presidential offices.

Last week the Council of Europe, responding to pleas from the Gongadze family and the parliamentary commission investigating the matter, said it was willing to help establish the truth of the tapes and the identity of the body through forensic tests.

But obstacles abound. Ukrainian police authorities say they have already conducted DNA tests on the body, with assistance from Russia, and they refuse to rule out the possibility that Mr. Gongadze might still be alive.

-------- u.s. nuc other

Kennedys, Bush To Attend Screening

January 30, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Kennedys-Bush.html

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) -- Call it detente-by-film: President Bush has invited members of the Kennedy family to the White House to watch ``Thirteen Days,'' the movie about John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis.

Rep. Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island, Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy have accepted the invitation for dinner and a movie Thursday. Also invited were Caroline Kennedy and her husband, whose representatives did not return calls for comment.

Sen. Kennedy has already met privately with Bush and praised his education plan. But he also is leading the fight against the nomination of Bush's nominee for attorney general, John Ashcroft.

And the senator's son, Rep. Kennedy, has accused Bush of stealing the election and condemned Ashcroft as an agent of the far right.

Rep. Kennedy, 33, said he is hopeful that Bush's invitation is a genuine attempt to reach out to Democrats. But the congressman said he plans to leave policy aside once the movie starts.

The film tells the story of the brief period in October 1962 when the United States and the Soviet Union teetered on the edge of nuclear war. It stars Kevin Costner as Kennedy aide Kenneth O'Donnell and Bruce Greenwood as JFK.

The dinner-and-a-movie night ``is not just a social event,'' said Brown University political scientist Darrell West, author of ``Patrick Kennedy: The Rise to Power.'' ``Bush is trying to demonstrate that he is not a Newt Gingrich-style Republican, that he is tolerant of opposing views and that he is tolerant of individuals even if he doesn't agree with them.''

White House spokeswoman Jeannie Momo did not return calls for comment.

---

Obituaries in the News

January 30, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Deaths.html

Max E. Goodwin

TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) -- Max E. Goodwin, one of the attorneys who won $150 million refund for customers of PSI Energy over an abandoned nuclear power plant, died Jan. 27 of colon and lung cancer. He was 59.

In his largest case, Goodwin sued PSI Energy to refund costs of the Marble Hill nuclear power plant near Madison that it had passed along to customers. PSI, then known as Public Service Indiana, abandoned the unfinished generating station in 1984 because of costs, construction delays and safety concerns.

The case lingered until June 1997, when the Indiana Court of Appeals finally decided Goodwin and other attorneys should receive $14.25 million in fees for their victory.

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

-------- new york

AS PIPELINE PROPOSED

January 30, 2001
New York Times
Metro Business Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/nyregion/30BBRF.html

KeySpan Corporation, the energy company based in Brooklyn, proposed yesterday to build a new natural gas pipeline that would bring gas into the New York metropolitan region from the recently developed fields off Nova Scotia. The pipeline, which would be owned by a partnership formed by KeySpan and the Duke Energy Corporation, would extend 40 miles from existing pipelines in southern Connecticut, cross Long Island Sound, and end at KeySpan's property near the site of the old Shoreham nuclear power plant, about 60 miles east of New York City. Numerous hurdles exist: the plan requires approval by federal energy officials as well as state regulators in Connecticut and New York. Kirk Johnson (NYT)

-------- MILITARY

-------- burma/myanmar

EUROPEANS VISIT

January 30, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/world/30BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

MYANMAR: A European Union delegation began talks with military officials in a visit aimed at pressing the ruling junta to move toward democracy. Today it is expected to visit the opposition leader, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, who is under de facto house arrest. (Reuters)

-------- colombia

Plane with at least 30 aboard hijacked

01/30/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-01-30-colombia.htm

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - A gunman commandeered a passenger plane Tuesday in rebel territory in Colombia with more than 30 people aboard, forcing it to land in the capital, Bogota.

Gen. Hector Fabio Velasco, the commander of the air force, said the hijacker was a leftist guerrilla. An air force officer, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the gunman had told the control tower over the radio that he was a rebel deserter.

The plane belonged to Satena, a national airline, and was hijacked while it sat on the runway in San Vicente del Caguan, the largest town in a rebel enclave in southern Colombia, Velasco said.

Television footage later showed the plane on the tarmac after it landed in Bogota, Colombia's capital.

Velasco said the hijacker was apparently a leftist guerrilla. Other reports said there were three hijackers.

The plane, a German-made Dornier turbo-prop, had 27 passengers and four crew members aboard, said airline spokeswoman Maria Elena Moreno.

Family members of those aboard watched horrified as the plane took off from San Vicente for destinations unknown.

Just before the hijacking, it had landed on a flight from Bogota, with a stopover in the southern city of Neiva.

The southern enclave was ceded by President Andres Pastrana to rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, two years ago to propel peace talks forward.

The government's recognition of rebel control over the Switzerland-sized zone expires Wednesday night, but it has already been renewed several times and is expected to be extended again.

It was the second hijacking in months involving the guerrillas.

In September, a jailed FARC rebel being transported from one prison to another hijacked a commercial flight and forced it to land at San Vicente del Caguan before freeing 21 passengers and crew unharmed. The rebels have refused government demands to turn over the hijacker.

-------- germany

ARMY BASES CLOSED

January 30, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/world/30BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

GERMANY: Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping announced that 39 of 598 bases and 20 other smaller military installations would be closed by 2006 under plans to reduce Germany's military personnel from 310,000 to 282,000. The number of civilians working with the armed forces is to be reduced by about a third, to 85,000. Victor Homola (NYT)

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

U.N. Report Proposes Steps to Fight Global Poverty

January 30, 2001
New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/world/30CND-NATION.html?pagewanted=all

UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 30 - Declaring that no task was more urgent than rescuing 1 billion people in the world from "abject and dehumanizing poverty," the United Nations today proposed dozens of ways to finance the economic development of poorer countries.

A detailed report released on behalf of Secretary General Kofi Annan sketched out no fewer than 87 remedies, many of them intended to attract more private investment and promote trade to offset a decline in foreign aid.

The report recommended "significant and immediate" debt relief for the poorest countries, the reduction or removal of duties and market quotas on exports from developing countries, and mechanisms to reduce the risk of fluctuating markets and commodity prices.

The 64-page report broke fresh ground in calling for "a careful in-depth study" of potential international cooperation on matters of taxation, including tax evasion.

It also suggested setting up a voluntary arrangement to assemble all creditors whenever a country had to restructure its foreign debt. And it raised the possibility, "in exceptional circumstances and where appropriate," of declaring a moratorium on, or canceling a debt when a very poor country cannot make payments.

Developing countries could do more to attract foreign investment, the report said, by reducing corruption and by making financial and legal safeguards sturdier and more transparent.

"The purpose is to get a shared basis of action" among governments, Nitan Desai, the Under Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs, said in releasing the report. "And what you have here is a starting of the process."

The report was compiled from information and advice provided by United Nations agencies and international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Other regional consultations were held last year in Indonesia, Colombia, Ethiopia, Lebanon and Switzerland.

"We are starting with a common purpose," said Enrique Rueda-Sabater, a senior manager of the World Bank who participated in the discussions. "We are trying to reduce poverty. That is a tall order, but a motivating one."

Last September, world leaders attending the Milennium Summit meeting here set a goal over the next 15 years of reducing by half the proportion of people in the world who earn less than $1 a day and who suffer from hunger. The leaders expressed concern about "the obstacles developing countries face in mobilizing resources needed to finance their sustained development."

Mr. Desai said the report released today would be the starting point for international discussions, starting with a preparatory meeting next month and again in April, and concluding with a conference of policy makers in March 2002.

The report noted that the worlds of finance and development are linked through the mechanism of saving and investment. An estimated $7.5 trillion was saved or invested worldwide last year, of which $1.7 billion was invested in developing countries. But the net transfer to wealthy countries amounted to $450 billion, three-fourths of which was absorbed by the United States.

The foreign debts accumulated by many poorer countries, the report said, "have become heavy constraints on their ability to reduce poverty and reach other development goals. While debt relief is just one of various financial assistance instruments, it is important to recognize that in some cases debt burdens represent insurmountable obstacles and need to be addressed urgently."

One proposal said that industrialized countries should open their markets, without duties or quotas, to exports of the least developed and most indebted countries. Furthermore, it said, trade barriers to their agricultural products and textiles should be reduced.

But the report also made clear that developing countries must create a more attractive climate for international companies and investors, with a "transparent, stable and predictable framework for private investment."

It urged countries to do more to fight corruption, explaining that public institutions had to be free of corruption to allocate resources effectively. And to ensure that more people paid taxes, the report said, countries should simplify their tax laws and enforce them vigorously.

Reinhard Munzberg, the International Monetary Fund's special representative to the United Nations, said the intention was to identify criteria was important in wooing foreign investment. "There are things that are expected if one wants to attract these flows," he said.

The report urged countries to make financial services more available for poor people, and especially women.

Recognizing that loss of confidence in financial markets or currencies could trigger multiple financial crises simultaneously and cause panic, it proposed that the International Monetary Fund and other institutions assess the world's capacity to meet emergency demands for cash.

"Knowing that such a mechanism capable of providing such liquidity existed - a `lender of last resort' - could in itself strengthen general and investor confidence in the international financial system," the report said.

Mr. Annan, in an address Sunday, reminded political and business leaders attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that it was in everyone's interest to spread the wealth in a global economy. "If we cannot make globalization work for all, in the end it will work for none," he said.

Expanding on his warning, the report today said, "While the new global environment has benefited a significant number of countries and created opportunities for faster growth and improvements in standards of living, public perspectives increasingly focus on the negative impact of globalization."

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

New Marine uniforms blend in, but stand out

01/30/2001
USA Today
By Andrea Stone
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-01-30-marines.htm

SAN DIEGO - For two decades, all four military branches have worn the same camouflage uniforms. But now, the Marine Corps plans to don new "cammies" that better hide leathernecks from the enemy - but let them stand out from other military services.

Designed with the help of Marine snipers, the new uniform features a digitally generated camouflage pattern. Up close, it resembles computer pixels, but from a distance it blends into the background faster than the current design, Marine officials say.

The new camouflage uniform, which is being tested by Marines on Okinawa, Japan, and at bases in California, is expected to become standard issue this summer.

The uniform is the brainchild of Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones, who pines for the days when enemy forces and friendly allies could distinguish Marines from other U.S. troops.

Jones already has ordered Marines to wear only green T-shirts to separate them from soldiers, who wear brown.

"I want Marines to look differently, to be looked at differently," Jones told USA TODAY last week en route to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot here. "I don't want them to be confused with anybody else."

Especially that other ground force, the Army. Its leader, Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, caused his own sartorial stir a few months ago by ordering all soldiers to start wearing black berets this year.

To make sure no one outside the Corps wears the new cammies, the service plans to patent the design, which includes tiny Marine eagle, globe and anchor insignias.

More than 20,000 Marines offered design comments on the new uniforms, which feature no-iron material and chest pockets placed at an angle for easy access.

The new outfit also includes new brown suede boots that won't need a spit polish.

-------- OTHER

How Secret Experiments May Have Unleashed Cancer Causing Viruses

January-February 2001
New Dawn
By Leonard Horowitz
http://www.newdawnmagazine.com.au/Articles/BioApocalypse.html

The American people, along with the rest of the world's population, have been under attack by insidious lethal enemies. Most people cannot perceive or conceive that shadow governors are engaged in hideous biological and chemical experiments on unwitting populations. Minority and ethnic groups especially at risk for toxic exposures, many being done in the name of "public health."

The recent widescale spraying of malathion and Anvil, two known chemical carcinogens and immune system toxins, to allegedly prevent West Nile Virus attacks within several northeastern American states, is just one example of such "public health policy" based on no rational science. Most people are incapable of realising the scope and depth of such crimes against humanity. Perceiving, rather, their impotence in altering the course of history, and fearing the fight of a crusade, people rationalise their inefficacy or indifference in human terms - "Don't tell me. That's just the way it is. I can't do anything about it anyway, so I'd rather not know."

During the past two decades, at least six internationally known authorities advanced theories that the AIDS virus (HIV-1) was developed by biological weapons researchers, and either accidentally or intentionally transmitted it with the help of the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and the United Nations World Health Organisation (WHO). A 1969 US military appropriations document obtained through the Freedom of Information Act called for $10 million for the development of AIDS-like viruses by 1975. In fact the National Academy of Sciences / National Research Council had informed the Department of Defense (DOD) that:

[I]t would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, these agencies, with help from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the (US) National Cancer Institute (NCI), and the Rockefeller and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations played leading roles in the development of cancer viruses for vaccine research and germ warfare. By 1969, the WHO had provided "prototype virus strains" for more than 592 virus laboratories in more than 35 different countries. That year, four of the most active centres, including the NCI and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), distributed 2,514 strains of viruses, 1888 ampoules of experimental vaccines, and about 100 samples of cell cultures throughout the WHO's viral network. 70,000 virus isolations were reported by 1970, and many, cultured for further study, were breaking out of the laboratories that tested them.

In March of 1970, WHO consultants even reported the likelihood of massive cancer epidemics from such virus outbreaks. Such "biological agents," they noted, "may be used... to achieve the simultaneous infection of key groups of people, and the military consequences might well be of major importance...." However, they warned of the "calculated risk that a virulent mutant might appear and spread rapidly to produce an uncontrollable epidemic on a large scale...."

These consultants also predicted that as a consequence of such biological attacks, "mass illnesses, deaths, and epidemics" would require the WHO and allied agencies to furnish supplies and personnel to deal with the resulting medical emergencies.

The first viruses and retroviruses used for cancer and biological weapons research passed through the NCI. Among the premier labs specifically researching, developing, and testing immune system destroying viruses was the Cell Tumor Biology Laboratory at the NCI. This was headed by Dr. Robert Gallo - the notorious alleged co-discoverer of the AIDS virus. To date it remains uncertain when Gallo discovered HIV. It was reported Gallo's discovery followed the French Pasteur Institute's Luc Montagnier's discovery of LAV, an identical virus, in 1984, but new evidence suggests he may have genetically engineered the virus as early as 1970 along with biological weapons contractors at Litton Bionetics - a subsidiary of the mega-military weapons producer Litton Industries, Inc.

Dr. Gallo's behaviour is, in fact, highly suspicious. As chronicled by bestselling deceased author Randy Shilts in And the Band Played On, and more recently by Eleanor Burkitt in The Gravest Show on Earth, Gallo's collaborative efforts in search of the AIDS virus were deceitful and repugnant. The authors' charged Gallo's ego was largely responsible for delaying international progress in search of the AIDS virus. Following his alleged find, patents were filed on his and the NCI's behalf keeping the French from sharing the royalties associated with the AIDS virus, its culture mediums, cell lines, experimental reagents, and tests associated with its discovery, diagnosis, and treatment. In an unprecedented act of politics and misplaced faith, Gallo was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in 1994 for several counts of misconduct and scientific fraud.

Gallo's Research Anthology

Gallo's early publications document his intimate association with Litton Bionetics - sixth on US Congress's list of major Army biological weapons contractors for 1969. The literature describes a vast number of experiments in which Gallo and co-workers bioengineered simian monkey viruses, which were humanly benign, to cause a variety of cancers. In fact, Gallo's focus was on the principle model used by cancer virus theorists between 1962 and 1972 during the NCI's generously funded, yet largely secret, "Special Virus Cancer Program" - the leukemia-lymphoma-sarcoma complex. Leukemias and lymphomas, which were rare at that time, and Kaposis sarcoma, which was virtually nonexistent, are now the most common cancers associated with HIV infection.

During the early 1970s, Gallo's teams extracted the nucleic acids from these harmless simian monkey viruses, infused their empty envelopes with cat leukemia RNA, along with chicken sarcoma RNA, to produce mutants that produced a laundry list of diseases as seen in AIDS patients today. In fact, to enable the virus to jump species, Gallo and Litton Bionetics researchers cultured these newly created germs in human white blood cells to alter their envelope characteristics. This altered the viruses' envelop proteins and allowed the germs to attach to and move through human cell membranes, ultimately altering the cellular DNA - the blueprint of life. Most astonishing, in a 1970 publication of the National Academy of Sciences, Gallo and company celebrated these efforts by offering them to NATO's military scientists for further investigation and testing.

HIV-1, HIV-2, and the "Big Bang"

Clearly, the mass of scientific evidence indicates the development of HIV-1, and its progenitor HIV-2, evolved during the early 1970s. Allegations that HIV had been found in tissues of people who died with AIDS-like diseases before that time have been scientifically and wholly debunked. According to Dr. Gerald Myers, chief molecular geneticist at the US government's Los Alamos Laboratory, something major happened in the early 1970s to convert HIV-2, or similar simian viruses, into HIV-1. This could easily have resulted from Gallo and Bionetics experiments in which HIV-2-like viruses were cultured in human WBCs.

During the 1996 National AIDS conference in San Francisco, I asked Dr. Max Essex, Director of Harvard's AIDS Institute, and co-discoverer of HIV-2 in West African women, an important question. "How, other than through vaccines, might HIV-2, a known simian monkey virus laboratory contaminant, not found in monkeys in the wild, come to be circulating in African women?" Vaccines, principally made from monkey serum extracts, and tainted by man-made monkey virus mutants, occurred to me to be the only plausible explanation.

Essex explained he did not know. He only informed me how his monkeys became contaminated. "Other researchers had inoculated them with human tissues [for various non-HIV related experiments] before they got to our lab," he said. In other words, human experiments were again implicated. The question remained - how did African natives come by HIV-2 and HIV-1 infections in the first place?

Gallo's speculation that the AIDS virus, like his earlier leukemia virus discovery, HTLV-1, naturally jumped species from African green monkey to man is far-fetched, if not totally absurd, especially in light of what was done in his and affiliated labs in Bethesda and Northwest Uganda to create human leukemia, sarcoma, and immune system destroying viruses. Clearly, these man-made creations most plausibly emerged from NCI and DOD affiliated laboratories. However, the question of accidental versus genocidal transmission remains.

Early Targeting of Minority America

As many as two-thirds of African Americans recently surveyed believe the AIDS epidemic may be genocide. Upon what evidence are such beliefs based? The targeting of gay and civil rights leaders and groups at home and abroad by the FBI and CIA during and after the McCarthy era is well documented. The gay rights movement was seen by American intelligence officials, such as J. Edgar Hoover, as communist inspired. Black nationalist groups and civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King were likewise considered communist beneficiaries.

During the late 1960s through the 1980s, the CIA worked to: 1) prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups and the beginning of a "true black revolution," and 2) prevent the rise of a black "messiah." 360 disruptive American intelligence operations developed under the Communist Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) Black Nationalist Hate Group's umbrella, including "Operation Chaos" which ran from 1968 until 1974. Dr. Henry Kissinger, as National Security Advisor, played a pivotal role in this program during the Nixon era, personally oversaw major CIA and FBI intelligence operations, and directed the military chiefs of staff to consider these perceived threats to national security and world economic order.

Only days after the DOD requisitioned $10 million from Congress to fund the development of AIDS-like viruses, on July 29, 1969, the House Republican committee, chaired by the Honorable George Bush of Texas, cited the urgent need for population control activities to fend off "a growing Third World crisis." Indeed, there was extreme American displeasure with Black African culture and its growing socialist threat. Africa, particularly the resource wealthy central African nations, would not be allowed to fall under communist control. Thus, the roots of Third World foreign policy was established under Kissinger's anticommunist direction.

During this period, President Nixon appealed for urgent action for population control. African economic, military, and "humanitarian" policies were shaped by Kissinger, Nixon, and later Jimmy Carter to force compliance with American economic and political objectives. Subsequent World Bank, NASA, and even National Academy of Sciences (NAS) activities in Africa expressed the imperialist philosophy. USAID and WHO sponsored immunisation programs in central Africa, likewise, reflected American intelligence interests, and were even used by CIA agents to infiltrate the region. The appointment of Dr. Henry Kissinger in 1968 as National Security Advisor - the most influential position in the Nixon White House - is noteworthy. Kissinger's alternate was Mr. Roy Ash, the President of Litton Industries - among the world's largest military weapons contractors, and parent company of the Army's biological weapons contracting firm Litton Bionetics with whom Dr. Robert Gallo of the NCI worked.

Litton military contracts, during the first Nixon administration, exceeded $5 billion. Litton Bionetics received approximately $2 million a year during this time under one NCI contract entitled, "Investigations of Viral Carcinogenesis in Primates." Another contract called for Bionetics to supply NCI researchers throughout the world with primates for cancer studies. At this same time, Congress supplied the DOD with the same allotment, $2 million a year, for AIDS-like virus development.

Gallo and Bionetics researchers John Landon and Robert Ting directed the NCI effort whose "proposed course" was the continuation of studies wherein "an RNA-dependent DNA polymerase [unique enzyme identical to the one found in human leukemia and AIDS viruses] similar to that associated with RNA tumour viruses... [would be] isolated, purified and concentrated 200-fold, making possible its further characterisation and study in relation to the leukemic process in man... with increased emphasis on monitoring and intensive care of inoculated animals to determine if active infection occurs, effects of infection, and degree of immunosuppression when used." This was, of course, more than six years before Gallo's alleged discovery of HTLV-1, and fourteen years before his alleged discovery of the AIDS virus. "Further studies of human neoplasms at [the] molecular level will continue," the scientists wrote.

And though the researchers added, "inasmuch as tests for the biological activity of candidate human viruses will not be tested in the human species," they clearly intended to develop "another system... for these determinations and, subsequently for the evaluation of vaccines or other measures of [cancer] control" in humans.

Kissinger's Contributions

All of this occurred while Henry Kissinger controlled The Defense Program Review Committee, which considered the funding requests for military expenditures including biological weapons. Upon taking office as advisor for national security, Kissinger ordered Melvin Laird to reassess America's biological weapons capabilities. His subsequent public urging of Nixon's signing of the Geneva Accord, outlawing the use of biological weapons, contradicted his secret appropriations directives which guaranteed the CIA's ability to stockpile biological weapons for covert operations as late as 1975, and likely beyond.

Between 1969 and 1976, Kissinger also directed the powerful 40 Committee that authorised covert actions by the CIA in Central Africa in the vicinity where AIDS and Ebola first broke out. Ebola initially struck a South African woman in 1975, and then several hundred people in southern Sudan and northern Zaire in 1976. AIDS, of course, was initially seen simultaneously in Central Africa and New York City in 1978. Under Kissinger's National Security Council directives, USAID began focusing vast resources on controlling Third World populations by the late 1960s. A computer search of "USAID" "Population Control," "Vaccines," and "World Health Organisation" literature between 1970 and 1975 revealed 733 "USAID-Population Control" studies. The same search after 1975 found none. The entire field of "Population Control" had vanished from view. The subject heading had been terminated and replaced with the more comforting "maternal and child health."

A review of US Department of State Bulletins revealed that by 1976 Joseph Califano, who had advised Kissinger to appoint Alexander Haig as his White House assistant, took the lead in attacking "rapid population growth" in the Third World. His subsequent policies included the authorisation of USAID funds for Merck, Sharp & Dohme (MSD) - related hepatitis B vaccine studies in central Africa - studies that had actually begun cooperatively with Litton Bionetics researchers during their "investigation of viral carcinogenesis in primates."

The paper trail, in the scientific literature, linking MSD investigators with Gallo and Bionetics researchers who conducted cancer virus and hepatitis B vaccine studies simultaneously in New York City and Central Africa between 1970 and 1974 is lengthy but clear. Through the New York City Blood Bank (NYCBB) and other biological weapons contractors at the New York University Medical Center (NYUMC), as early as 1969, that is, shortly after Kissinger became NSC director, high risk humans were inoculated with the first doses of experimental hepatitis B vaccine. Just as the NCI-Bionetics research team proposed would be their course of action, the new vaccine was composed of live and attenuated viruses that had only been tested on monkeys. More astonishing, MSD researchers worked in cooperation with Gallo's group at the NCI and Litton Bionetics, and combined, they conducted similar studies in Central Africa under US Army and USAID contracts. A "Drug Development Branch" of the NCI served as a conduit of experimental viruses, vaccines, and drugs between Gallo and company and MSD. Thus, the alleged channel through which HIV-tainted hepatitis B vaccines passed between the NCI, Bionetics, and MSD was operating by 1970.

At that time, besides hepatitis, massive multicomponent vaccine trials were underway in Central and West Africa. Twenty country immunisation programs supported by USAID, the CDC, the WHO and MSD tested for the first time several combined vaccines including measles, smallpox, and others. During this period, plans to prompt Congressional legislation freeing MSD and other vaccine producers from liability and costly litigation from personal injury claims related to immunisation were made. "Propaganda campaigns" were then initiated at home and abroad.

One document, discovered during this author's search of the scientific literature, expressed a view among leading government scientists that race, socioeconomic status, concerns over "national security," and the safety of the white middle class should be the principle motive behind Third World and domestic immunisation practices. "In the United States, the central cities will continue to seethe with immunisable diseases and thereby create a significant risk to other parts of the society until these people ['Spanish-Americans and Negroes'] are regularly included in immunisation practice," Dr. J. D. Millar from the CDC warned.

Other "Special Virus Cancer Program" reports published in 1971 and 1972 by the NCI were serendipitously discovered by the author in the basement of the government documents department at Davis Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. These books document that Litton Bionetics supplied all other NCI contractors, including those in New York City, with experimental monkeys, monkey viruses, monkey virus "hybrids" (that is, genetically altered monkey viruses), infected monkey tissues, cell lines, and other reagents needed to facilitate primate cancer studies and the development of vaccines. Only one percent of this entire program's budget went towards assuring biohazard containment. This money was paid to Dow Chemical Company under a separate contract.

Despite Dow's efforts, researchers working in New York City for MSD and the NYUMC, in 1974, reported "more than 70%" of their quarantined caged monkeys had been environmentally contaminated with hepatitis and other viruses. Yet, this did not stop these authorities from developing the first four lots of experimental hepatitis B vaccine that was used on the first human-guinea-pigs between 1970s and 1974 simultaneously in Central Africa and Manhattan.

Thus, all it might have taken was one monkey, infected by NCI researchers at Litton Bionetics's laboratories, with an AIDS-like virus infection, or even its neighbour, to have spread the virus through the first hepatitis B vaccine lots "containing 200,000 human doses," to cause the AIDS pandemic we have today.

The CIA and AIDS

In 1975, following a storm of public outrage over the CIA's involvement in Watergate, the agency was investigated and chastised by the Rockefeller Commission and two Congressional committees.

That year, word had leaked from the Army's "special," that is, secret operations division at Fort Detrick, Maryland that the CIA was illegally storing stockpiles of deadly bacteria, viruses, and other toxins. As a result, a Select Committee To Study Governmental Operations With Respect to Intelligence Activities met to investigate. Senator Frank Church presided.

The Church hearings exposed much about the illegal storage of biological weapons (BW) by the CIA, and their intended use in covert operations. Unfortunately, the American news media, focusing on a single neurotoxin purified from shellfish, failed to report the most incriminating facts. The CIA, according to director Bill Colby, planned to use its more lethal biologicals in "covert operations" as directed by the National Security Council, then directed by Henry Kissinger. Ultimately, the investigators and the media shielded Kissinger from the Church Committee's indictments along with other chief decision makers.

In fact, the CIA's BW operation began as early as 1947 with the agency's metamorphosis from the OSS. Following the war, the CIA exfiltrated more than 900 Nazi scientists to America, including Hitler's chief biological weapons developer Dr. Erich Traub. At that time, Kissinger, then in his late twenties, served as General Alexander Bolling's chief translator. Bolling directed American intelligence at the time and was "Godfather" to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), the agency that ran the Nazi exfiltration program - Project Paperclip.

Kissinger's other intelligence assignments by 1948 included overseeing Nazi hunting efforts in more than twenty German towns, and instructing other intelligence officers in Nazi tracking tactics at the European Command Intelligence School in Oberammergau. Thus, I was not surprised to learn that the Defense Department's request for funding a five-year AIDS-like virus development program, beginning in 1970, came when Kissinger oversaw the 40 Committee which authorised the budget and covert activities of the CIA. The AIDS-like viruses were readied by 1975.

History records that following the American forces withdrawal from Vietnam, Kissinger immediately focused anticommunist undertakings on the resource wealthy region of Central Africa. Zaire and its neighbours Angola and Sudan were specifically targeted. CIA Director William Colby's 1975 Church Committee admission then that his agency's interest in BW was for offensive uses during covert operations at the very time the CIA was secretly operating at full force in this region - ground zero for the AIDS and Ebola outbreaks - is noteworthy.

Nathan Gordon, Chief of the chemistry branch of the Technical Services Division of the CIA gave additional testimony of the agency's possible use of extensive virus stockpiles to assistant intelligence agency scientists in their work on mass immunisation projects, vaccine development, and cancer research. This was precisely the work conducted by NCI contractors including Merck, Sharp & Dohme and Litton Bionetics in Bethesda and Northwest Uganda, and New York collaborators at the New York University Medical Center and the infamous New York Blood Bank - the source of more than 10,000 HIV infections among American hemophiliacs.

Moreover, Church Committee discussions focused on congressional testimony which documented that the CIA had, in fact, been receiving "deadly poison[s]" manufactured by the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and delivered to Fort Detrick for use in human experiments and covert operations. Additional 1977 hearings published in the Congressional Record note that "George W. Merck, of the prominent Merck pharmaceutical firm," had been appointed by President Roosevelt, during World War II, Director of the War Research Service charged with overseeing America's biological weapons industry.

The CIA in Africa

Between 1970 and 1975, Kissinger ordered the CIA to begin a major covert military operation against MPLA (communist bloc backed) "rebels" in Angola. Indebted by over $4.5 billion to the International Monetary Fund, Zaire, headed by President Mobutu - paradoxically regarded as one of the world's richest men with "a personal fortune put at $2,939,200,000 [1984 estimate] banked in Switzerland" - was wooed by NATO allies during the 1970s to be a staging area for CIA backed, Portuguese, French, and South African, mercenaries. American corporate investment, notably in copper, aluminium, and diamonds, doubled following a 1970 visit by Mobutu to the United States. Major investors included Rockefeller's Chase-Manhattan Bank. In 1975, however, Mobutu turned against NATO allies. He proclaimed his intention to nationalise foreign owned enterprises, and expelled the American ambassador. He ordered his military to arrest CIA agents, and placed some of them under death sentences.

The following year, in October 1976, the Ebola virus broke-out in fifty-five Zairian villages, first killing people who had received injections. Mobutu then ordered his army to seal off the Bumba Zone with roadblocks and shoot anyone trying to leave. By the end of 1976, the Zairian leader had reconciled his differences with American intelligence and, thereafter, continued to reap his Western allies' economic and "humanitarian" aid.

About the same time, Mobutu signed an agreement with a West German company named OTRAG (Orbital Transport-und Raketen-Aktiengesellschaft). The company leased 260,000 square kilometres of eastern Zaire for military/industrial purposes. The contract gave OTRAG sovereign rights to territories inhabited by 760,000 people in the region not far from what is now called, "The AIDS Highway."

Believed to be of military and intelligence gathering significance to NATO, OTRAG's principals included several Nazi scientists including Dr. Kurt H. Debus, who worked as director of the Cape Canaveral space program until 1975 before transferring to Zaire. Richard Gompertz, OTRAG's technical director, presided over NASA's Chrysler space division. Lutz Thilo Kayser, OTRAG's founder and manager, when young was quite close to the Nazi rocket industry, often called 'Dadieu's young man,' a reference to Armin Dadieu, his mentor, who served as prominent SS officer and as Goring's special representative for a research program on storing uranium.

In 1977, at the height of OTRAG's activity in Zaire, Litton Industries, Bionetics's parent, received $5 million for medical electronic equipment from its Hellige division, in Freiburg, West Germany. Much of Litton's NATO and West German sales during this period appear to have been earmarked for OTRAG, which may have been subcontracting at the behest of the DOD through Bionetics.

Concurrently, cooperative efforts were recorded by NATO and WHO officials to coordinate preparations for facing possible epidemics from biological warfare. These circumstances deserve further investigation especially considering the recent outbreaks of the world's most feared and deadly viruses. Marburg, Ebola, Reston, and AIDS share the dubious distinction of breaking out in or around areas of CIA/NATO, Bionetics, or OTRAG operations.

The CIA and The Hot Zone

The Hot Zone, the alleged "terrifying true story," that remained on the New York Times best-seller list for more than two years, was certainly frightening. Its content, however, when measured against government documents and scientific reports, was barely true. Few realise its author, Richard Preston, received a $20,000 literary grant from the Sloan Foundation to produce this Random House act of counterintelligence.

An investigation into Alfred P. Sloan's background revealed his foundation: (1) supported black educational initiatives consistent with the CIA's COINTELPRO Black Nationalist Hate Group campaign; (2) administered "public management" research and mass-media-public-persuasion experiments completely consistent with the CIA's Project MKULTRA; (3) funded much of the earliest cancer research involving the genetic engineering of mutant viruses; (4) funded population control studies by Planned Parenthood-World Population, New York; (5) funded the Community Blood Council of Greater New York, Inc., the "council of doctors" who established the nefarious New York City Blood Bank; (6) maintained Laurance S. Rockefeller, the director of the Community Blood Council of Greater New York and the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, as chairman of the board of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and a trustee for the Foundation; (7) gave in excess of $20,000 annually to the Council on Foreign Relations; and (8) maintained among its "marketable securities," 16,505 shares of Chase Manhattan Bank stock (in 1967) along with 24,400-53,000 shares issued by Merck & Co., Inc. (at least until 1973).

In addition, Sloan researchers contributed various reagents to the NCI's Dr. Robert Gallo during his early retrovirus research, and Sloan is well known for its links to the AIDS pharmaceutical industry.

Could it be that the individuals and institutions most likely to have created HIV and its relatives are now the ones most capitalising on its effects? Surely the AIDS pandemic is big business. In the words of Alfred P. Sloan, "ignorance of the principles of capitalism and free enterprise is both a danger and an opportunity." Undoubtedly, the millions of HIV/AIDS patients and their families will find it harder than the Sloans to appreciate the opportunity.

Leonard G. Horowitz, D.M.D., M.A., M.P.H. is an internationally known authority in public health education, a Harvard graduate and independent researcher, and one of healthcare's most captivating motivational speakers. This article is based on Dr. Horowitz's book Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional? (Tetrahedron, Inc., 1998; ISBN:092355012-7; US$29.95). Please direct lecture and book requests to Tetrahedron Publishing Group, P.O. Box 2033, Sandpont, Idaho, USA; (208) 265-2675; (800)336-9266; Fax: (208) 265-2775, or visit web site at http://www.tetrahedron.org. Alternately, Australian readers can obtain Emerging Viruses from Infinity Bookshop, Tel: (02) 9212-2225.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 64 (January-February 2001)

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On Watch for Any Hint of Mad Cow Disease

January 30, 2001
New York Times
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/health/30MAD.html?pagewanted=all

If the human form of mad cow disease - or, in medical lingo, new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease - is ever found in the United States, the first person to see it will probably be Dr. Pierluigi Gambetti, a soft-spoken Italian scientist who is on a mission to protect the American people from the devastating disorder.

Dr. Gambetti is a neuropathologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and director of the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center, a special laboratory set up by the nation's pathologists and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention four years ago to watch for the disease in the United States.

During that time, Dr. Gambetti and his colleagues have examined brain tissue from nearly 500 Americans who died from unusual neurological conditions. Of these, 292 people were found to have classical forms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or C.J.D., a progressive neurological disorder characterized by dementia and loss of motor control, which afflicts about one in a million Americans a year. Others had brain tumors or diseases that mimic C.J.D.

So far, none has shown signs of the "variant" C.J.D. seen in western Europe. Variant C.J.D. is a new disease, Dr. Gambetti said. If it did appear, he said, "I would know it instantly from looking at tissue samples. It would jump out at me."

Variant C.J.D. is contracted from eating beef products laced with infectious prions - the aberrant proteins believed to cause mad cow disease and all forms of human C.J.D. The cow disease first appeared in Britain in the mid-1980's and has since spread via contaminated animal feed to herds in France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein.

The first human cases linked to eating contaminated beef were diagnosed in 1996 in Britain. Thus far, 92 people have died or are dying from variant C.J.D. - 88 in Britain, 3 in France and 1 in Ireland.

While the death toll is small, many Europeans are panicked because no one knows how many animals may be harboring mad cow disease or how many people may be incubating variant C.J.D. and passing it on to others through contaminated blood, organ donations or contaminated surgical instruments (prions can survive standard sterilization techniques).

Mad cow disease has not been found in any cattle in the United States. But fear and confusion have also spread to the United States, said Dr. Ermias Belay, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

In part because of the similar terms used to describe both ailments, many Americans mistakenly think people they know who died of classical C.J.D. have died of the variant form instead. For example, doctors may tell family members their loved one died of a disease similar to mad cow disease. People hear only the words "mad cow disease" and think that is what caused the death, Dr. Belay said.

Dr. Gambetti is an expert on prion diseases, also known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, that are caused when a normal prion protein folds into an abnormal shape and no longer breaks down inside the body. Such misfolded proteins produce havoc in nervous tissue, often leaving sponge-like holes in many parts of the brain. When an animal or person eats or is exposed to tissues containing abnormal prions, their own prion proteins are converted into the deadly abnormal form. Prions can also misfold on their own accord and give rise to disease. Occasionally, genetic mutations lead to prion diseases that run in families.

Given the natural incidence of prion diseases, an estimated 280 to 300 Americans should be found to have some form of C.J.D. each year, Dr. Gambetti said. It is very important to look at all or most of those cases, he said, "so we don't miss the atypical case or a new source of infection."

Unfortunately, the surveillance center is seeing only about 40 percent of C.J.D. cases nationwide, Dr. Gambetti said. If neuropathologists do an autopsy, tissue is usually prepared properly and sent to the center for examination. Dr. Gambetti sends a letter each year to every pathologist in the country outlining the procedures.

But many families, physicians and hospitals are not aware of the surveillance center, Dr. Gambetti said. Or if they are, they sometimes choose to not participate. Some families cannot afford the cost of transporting the body to an autopsy center. Some hospitals will not bear the cost of the brain autopsy, which runs at least $1,500 per body, and pathologists sometimes refuse to carry out an autopsy for fear of catching the disease, even though safe procedures exist, Dr. Gambetti said.

To remedy this, Dr. Gambetti said, he would like expand the surveillance effort in the United States so families and hospitals can be reimbursed for autopsies. Special nurses might be trained to work with families while patients are still alive to gather information about their habits.

Surveillance centers in Canada, Britain and other European countries work directly with families and neurologists, he said, and are seeing most if not all cases of C.J.D. in their respective nations. Each spends about a million dollars a year to track a much smaller population. The United States surveillance center has an annual budget of $100,000. A Congressional appropriations committee recently authorized an additional $140,000 a year.

Dr. Belay said that neither the Centers for Disease Control nor Dr. Gambetti was authorized to reach out directly to the nation's neurologists and general practitioners who care for C.J.D. patients to increase surveillance efforts. States have sole authority over their own medical practices, he said, and only they can institute policies to track a disease like variant C.J.D., which has not turned up in this country.

Many states, including New York, are doing an excellent job of following C.J.D. trends and encourage their doctors to send tissues to Dr. Gambetti, Dr. Belay said. Other states are not doing much at all.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tracks prion diseases nationwide through death certificates, Dr. Belay said. More than 85 percent of C.J.D. patients die less than a year after their symptoms begin. They display a set of diagnostic criteria that, by the end of life, are unmistakable.

The centers believe that physicians do a good job of describing the disease on death certificates, Dr. Belay said. From 1979 to 1998, 4,751 deaths due to C.J.D. were reported in the United States. The median age at death was 68.

The centers follow up on any C.J.D. patient who died under the age of 55, Dr. Belay said. This is because variant C.J.D. tends to strike younger people and it is prudent to check these cases more closely. Officials go through state health departments to obtain clinical records on about 30 younger patients a year, he said.

They look for the clinical profile of variant C.J.D., which begins with overt psychiatric symptoms and shows different results on several standard brain assays. The variant disease also lasts an average of 14 months. If brain tissue is available, it is sent to Dr. Gambetti, who can confirm the diagnosis.

Nevertheless, Dr. Gambetti said he was worried because 60 percent of C.J.D. cases in this country are not being examined with advanced tissue analysis techniques. Still, the cases Dr. Gambetti has been to examine have been helpful. He and his colleagues, by virtue of seeing so many cases in a short period, have identified six types of sporadic C.J.D., including a sporadic form of the disease that strikes young people.

"We couldn't have known that without seeing many cases," he said.

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President Offers Plan to Promote Oil Exploration

New York Times
January 30, 2001
By JOSEPH KAHN and DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/politics/30ENER.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 - President Bush said today that he was "deeply concerned" that the power crisis was "spreading beyond the California borders" and vowed to make it easier for companies to explore, exploit and transport oil and gas for the production of more electricity.

In a meeting in the Oval Office this morning, which the president described as the first in a series to deepen his involvement in energy issues, Mr. Bush named Vice President Dick Cheney to head a task force that he said would devise ways to reduce America's "reliance upon foreign oil" and to "encourage the development of pipelines and power- generating capacity in the country."

While Mr. Bush did not offer concrete proposals today to help California, he appeared to be using its acute electricity shortage to help sell a long-term national energy strategy he often discussed during the presidential campaign.

He said he intended to act "boldly and swiftly" to enact his plan, which includes an effort to pass legislation allowing drilling in protected areas of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and granting waivers to states that seek to run older plants at full capacity - even, administration officials said, if that means violating clean air standards.

"There's a long-term issue as well, and that is, How do we find more energy supplies, how do we encourage conservation on the one hand and bring more energy into the marketplace?" Mr. Bush told reporters.

"And a good place to look is going to be A.N.W.R.," he continued, using the abbreviation for the Alaskan wilderness area.

He added, "I campaigned hard on the notion of having environmentally sensitive exploration at A.N.W.R., and I think we can do so."

Today's assignment puts Mr. Cheney at the center of an issue he knows well as the former chief executive of the Halliburton Company, the oil services giant. Halliburton and its rivals would all probably benefit from an aggressive government push to promote exploration and to weaken environmental controls.

Elements of Mr. Bush's plan will clearly face opposition from environmental groups and some Democrats in Congress. But just as predictions of rising government surpluses and the slowing economy gave a lift to his sweeping tax-cut initiative, the California crisis has aided Mr. Bush's efforts to sell an energy policy that in more normal times would probably have faced intense opposition.

Senator Frank H. Murkowski, an Alaska Republican and chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said that the California situation had made people wake up to a looming energy crisis.

"With the previous administration we could not even get an acknowledgement that we had an energy problem in this country," said Mr. Murkowski, whose committee will hold hearings on Wednesday about California's electricity situation. "People are now starting to realize that if you just rely on outsiders for your energy you will pay the piper."

Some environmentalists criticized Mr. Bush's approach sharply, arguing that he used California as an excuse to push an oil industry agenda bearing at best an indirect relationship to the electricity troubles.

"It's just irresponsible to lead Americans to believe that new drilling in Alaska is going to have an impact on their electricity bills," said Adam Kolton, Arctic campaign director for the Alaskan Wilderness League. "Frankly, it does not even pass the laugh test. There's simply no link between the problems in California and the wildlife refuge."

Mr. Bush's 10-year, $7.1 billion energy policy focuses mainly on oil and gas development, not the shortage of power generation and bottlenecks in distribution that have contributed to the California crisis. He wants to offer tax incentives to promote domestic oil production, as well as ease restrictions on drilling for oil and natural gas in parts of the 1.5 million- acre Alaskan refuge. Fully exploiting Alaskan reserves would probably require building a pipeline to ferry natural gas to mainland markets.

Those steps would do little to relieve the acute shortage of electricity that has forced California to issue its highest electricity alerts for two weeks running, warning that power might be cut off at any moment to selected parts of the state.

In an interview today, Mr. Bush's chief economic adviser, Lawrence B. Lindsey, also described a series of short- and medium-term steps that he said the administration could "encourage and help states to take."

Acting on requests from California and other states hit by high prices and energy shortages, he said the Bush administration could issue pollution waivers that "would allow older plants to come on stream" in peak periods. Such plants in California now pay fines when they operate, adding to the financial burden on utilities, which cannot pass the higher production costs on to consumers.

Power generating companies are staunch opponents of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, signed into law by Mr. Bush's father. The law sets deadlines for every city to meet health standards for air quality, though it gives states some flexibility in carrying out the standards. California has some of the nation's strictest air pollution control measures.

So far, California has not requested federal easing of environmental law, and Gov. Gray Davis has said that the state can extract itself from its electricity debacle without abandoning clean air targets.

But other states are seen as eager to allow some older, coal-powered plants to run for a longer time and might be eager to take advantage of a more flexible federal approach.

Mr. Lindsey also spoke of constructing new, higher-capacity transmission lines. "The governors in Utah and Wyoming tell me that they have excess power now, but they can't get the electricity to California," he said. Such construction, of course, is also likely to run into opposition from those who oppose the building of new lines. Similarly, gas turbine power could be increased in California, he said, but only with the construction of new gas pipelines.

"Every idea is a tradeoff," Mr. Lindsey said, noting that the current federal requirements that out-of- state utilities sell more power to California "is causing problems now in Arizona and Oregon."

Bush administration officials have not offered many concrete proposals to help California secure electricity supplies. They have argued that the problem stems from the state's botched effort at deregulation and that the solution lies within the state, where Governor Davis and the legislature are considering proposals to relieve the debt burden of utilities, to make consumers pay more and to let the state government arrange long- term purchases of power from independent generating companies.

Mr. Lindsey noted today that higher prices to consumers "would certainly encourage conservation." But he said that was a state decision. Moreover, Governor Davis fears that big increases in the retail price of electricity could prove politically disastrous for him.

Mr. Bush has largely stuck to his pledge to make California resolve its struggle without large-scale federal aid. He agreed last week to extend a Clinton administration emergency order that required power generators in neighboring states to use surplus generating capacity to supply California. But that policy is highly unpopular among those states, and Mr. Bush said it would not be extended beyond Feb. 7.

Mr. Bush said today that the electricity problem went well beyond California, though he did not propose measures to deal with power problems in other states.

Several states in the Northwest have complained repeatedly that federal orders to sell surplus power to California have forced them to drain water tables for hydroelectric plants, endangering their own energy resources and potentially damaging the environment.

Rates are also rising around the region. The Bonneville Power Authority, which has provided cheap electricity for decades to its Northwest customers, said it plans a 60 percent increase in rates over the next five years because of the ripple effect from California's problems.

The White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer, said today that Arizona had also suffered collateral damage because aluminum plants there were forced to shut down for lack of power. He said farmers in neighboring states were hit by power shortages as well.

"Energy represents approximately 6 percent of our nation's G.D.P., and the costs for consumers for energy are going up, nationally as well, of course, as in California," he said.

Along with Mr. Cheney, Mr. Bush's energy task force includes Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill; Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham; Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans; Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman and Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta. It is also to include the Environmental Protection Agency administrator-designate, Christie Whitman, and the Interior secretary-designate, Gale A. Norton.

---

Why San Diego, Where Rates First Rose, No Longer Conserves Energy

January 30, 2001
New York Times
By LAURA M. HOLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/national/30CONS.html?pagewanted=all

SAN DIEGO, Jan. 25 - It was here, in the heat of last summer, that consumers got their initial lesson in how painful California's experiment with deregulation could be.

With electricity supplies short and the state's power grid on the brink of collapse, wholesale electricity costs nearly tripled, and the San Diego Gas and Electric Company, the first utility in the state freed by deregulation, passed those costs on to its customers. Homeowners took to the streets, and businesses threatened to leave the city, California's second largest.

Logic would suggest that San Diego consumers, having felt the price shock that the rest of the state so far had been shielded from, would be wiser about using electricity than other Californians. But the price shock was too short.

In September, California legislators called off the experiment, capping retail electrical rates at 6.5 cents a kilowatt hour, the average market price paid in the month before the summer crisis.

Now, six months later, San Diegans are back to their old ways.

Electricity use, which dropped 9 percent in August, is back up to precrisis levels, according to San Diego Gas and Electric. Rather than investing in insulation or energy-efficient air-conditioners, consumers here seem to be hovering between denial and defiance.

"I feel I do all that I can to conserve," said Vicki Barber, an escrow coordinator for a real estate broker in San Diego. "But I'm not going to spend all this money upgrading my house when it doesn't matter anyway."

As a test laboratory of consumer behavior when the cost of a necessity skyrockets, San Diego seems confused by how politicians reacted when consumers here revolted last summer, demanding relief.

In September, when California legislators restored the lower rates, residential and small-business rate payers received credits on their utility bills - even though the credits are really a postponed debt that is expected to come due as soon as 2002. And it is true that the utility's largest customers are already paying market rates.

Still, Jeannie Thompson's reaction was typical. In August, Ms. Thompson, the branch manager of a Coldwell Banker real estate office in the Pacific Beach district, made it her business to turn off office lights and computers every night. "When the news first came out, you wanted to do your part," she said.

Then, in October, the office got its credit, and "we started to go back to the way things were before."

Economists look at San Diegans' behavior and draw this lesson: Consumers must suffer a lot before they willingly give up comfort and conveniences they have grown used to.

"Summer should have been a wake-up call," said Peter Navarro, associate professor of economics and public policy at the University of California at Irvine. "You can't blame San Diego consumers for not doing anything, because legislators stepped in and lowered prices. If the discomfort isn't of a lengthy duration, the adjustments to behavior that need to take place won't."

Indeed, in a recent paper, a group of energy experts and economists, including two Nobel Prize winners, made the same point, saying that if consumers knew the true cost of electricity, they would conserve more.

Even Gov. Gray Davis seems to be backing away from his promise that rates would not rise.

But San Diego consumers, once again insulated from rate increases, have shrugged off the crisis, in part because they have taken to heart the governor's oft-repeated claim that the problems are the fault of out-of- state power generators that need to be reined in.

"Ask these people if they feel safe at night," Pete Phelps said wryly of those generators. Mr. Phelps, an airline pilot, was, with his wife, Pat, loading a 50-gallon water heater into the back of his pickup truck at a Home Depot near the San Diego Sports Arena.

Mrs. Phelps added, "You don't know what is legitimate, who to believe."

So the Phelpses have done little in recent months to conserve, except turning off lights, as their monthly electricity bill has climbed to $130, from about $85, in the past two years. Their new water heater was billed as "energy efficient," and while it should save them $150 a year, they did not buy it with conservation in mind. "I spill that in beer money," Mr. Phelps said.

High prices alone cannot change consumer behavior, Mr. Navarro, the economist, said. If consumers, for instance, believe that turning off lights benefits someone other than themselves, they will feel no incentive to conserve. That, he said, is the situation in the Pacific Northwest, where many residents believe that any power they save will simply be diverted to hot tubs in the San Francisco suburbs.

But in San Diego, people have gotten a particularly mixed message. To begin with, high rates did not last long enough to make an impact. Rather, the lingering impression was that legislators would step in to protect consumers at any cost.

The math, said Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute, was simple.

"If you go from 6 cents to 22 cents to 6 cents, then the response will be to weather the storm," Mr. Borenstein said, referring to the price of a kilowatt hour. "But if it stays at 22 cents, then it makes sense for people to go out and invest in ways to save energy."

Mr. Borenstein drew a parallel to the gasoline shortages of the 1970's. At first, he said, motorists demonized Middle East oil producers, as lines of cars snaked around gasoline stations, waiting for rationed supplies. Only after high prices persisted did consumers begin to change their habits, buying more fuel-efficient cars, he said.

Still, some San Diegans insist that they are pitching in.

"I have not put the heat on," said Ms. Thompson, the real estate agent. "I close my doors and put on a sweater."

But she has not had an energy audit of her home, a service provided by San Diego Gas and Electric, or bought energy-saving appliances.

During last summer's price spike, surveys by San Diego Gas and Electric found that 91 percent of its 1.2 million users did not think the utility was being wholly honest with them about the crisis, said Stephen L. Baum, chairman of Sempra Energy, the utility's parent company. And there is bound to be more anger, now that the utility has requested a surcharge of about 16 percent in March, to pay off $450 million it owes its power suppliers.

Higher rates will also make life harder for people who are just getting by. At a recent outdoor farmer's market in El Cajon, a working-class town 15 miles east of San Diego, Heidi Van Horn, a massage therapist, and her fiancé, Bernie Herloss, a handyman, were supplementing their $1,200 monthly income by selling grilled bratwurst and hamburgers to hungry shoppers.

For the two-bedroom apartment they share, the couple have $200 in past-due energy bills. Those bills hover at about $100 a month, up from $55 two years ago. "We aren't one of these high-rollers who make $9 an hour," Ms. Van Horn said. "We either pay the electricity or have the phone shut off."

Even so, she said, they do what they can to conserve, turning down the thermostat or turning off the occasional light. But their apartment building is poorly insulated. Cold wind seeps in through closed windows, and the heating vents are near the ceiling, where the warmth is wasted. Their only energy-efficient light bulb is the one that came in the mail from San Diego Gas and Electric.

And the two birds and the iguana they keep, Ms. Van Horn said, would die if she turned off any of the three heat lamps that run continuously in the apartment.

She would never consider getting rid of the pets. Ms. Van Horn said. "They are family."

---

Whitman, Norton win Senate approval

01/30/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-01-30-norton.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Former New Jersey Gov. Christie Whitman and ex-Colorado Attorney General Gale Norton won Senate approval Tuesday to direct the nation's environmental and natural resources policies.

The Senate voted unanimously to confirm Whitman as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency after voting 75-24 minutes earlier to accept President Bush's choice of Norton to be secretary of the interior.

The votes left all of Bush's Cabinet seats but one - that of attorney general - filled just 10 days after his inauguration.

At her confirmation hearing earlier this month Whitman promised "a strong federal role" on environmental protection but also said she will review several regulations issued in the last month of the Clinton presidency, including controversial and expensive new diesel standards.

Norton, a past advocate of state's and property rights, encountered more opposition in becoming the government's chief steward for half a billion acres of federal land and natural resources as secretary of the interior.

Republicans said they were confident that Norton could balance both preserving and developing those resources.

"She grew up in Colorado, she understands what wilderness means," said Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H.

Democrats said they only hope that Norton doesn't live up to their worst fears.

"I hope she listens to this and proves me wrong," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. "She's out of the mainstream of thought."

Senators from both parties agreed during three hours of debate Monday to support Norton's nomination despite remaining questions about her views on land management. The nomination of Whitman, New Jersey's governor, also was scheduled for discussion and a floor vote Tuesday, while the Senate Judiciary Committee could vote on Ashcroft Tuesday.

"Because of the promises she made at the hearing, I will support her," Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said of Norton. "I'm willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. I expect her to honor those commitments she's made to me and other senators."

At her confirmation hearing last week before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Norton, 47, a former Colorado attorney general, and her Republican allies portrayed her in a different light from what her record as a champion of logging, grazing and mining interests would suggest.

Senate Democrats including John Breaux of Louisiana and Dianne Feinstein of California also expressed support for President Bush's nomination of Norton. "She is a person that can bring a management-type of philosophy to this job," Breaux said.

Bingaman said he holds reservations about Norton, noting that she declined to outline her ideas on subjects important to him. One was whether she will seek to undo national monuments created by former President Clinton or to change the 1906 Antiquities Act that was used in creating them.

Eight Democrats joined 10 Republicans on the committee in sending Norton's nomination to the Senate for consideration. Only Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., voted against her.

Wyden said he also would vote no Tuesday, because he was not convinced that Norton would work to bridge the difficult gap between environmental groups and industry, and "evidence does not demonstrate that she will be tough with polluters." Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., issued a statement saying she also planned to vote against Norton.

Sierra Club spokeswoman Melanie Griffin predicted a substantial though largely symbolic protest vote Tuesday against Norton.

"We want ensure that Bush and Norton understand they do not have a mandate to open up our public lands to development by mining, oil and timber industries," she said.

Environmentalists have lobbied intensely against Norton, saying the one-time protege of Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt would favor oil exploration and development ahead of protection of the nation's public lands.

Republican senators from Western states said they believe Norton will not alter the broadly based "multiple use" policy for public lands that includes consideration both for environmental protection and local economic interests.

"She is certainly a conservative conservationist," Sen. Craig Thomas, R-Wyo., said. "These two things are not incompatible."

---

Public property: no trespassing

January 30, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-200113019545.htm

In the closing weeks of his administration, President Clinton issued an executive order imposing a ban on road construction on 60 million acres of federal land. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the rule prohibits road construction and reconstruction except in cases where lives or property are threatened by catastrophic events, and also disallows the "cutting, sale, and removal of timber in inventoried roadless areas," except all but essentially cosmetic reasons.

The rule dead-ends any development of such land, whether for logging, mining, or even simple tourism. The most obvious targets of the initiative - the industries that environmentalists would like journalists and the public to consider the face of the opposition to it - certainly have felt its effects. A spokesman for Arch Coal Inc., which owns a mine in Colorado, told the Rocky Mountain News, "This has a very real potential of crimping our ability to expand," and timber companies have voiced similar concerns. Even the Forest Service has acknowledged that jobs will be washed away.

Additionally, however, the rule effectively ends the access of Americans to their own lands. As Rep. James Hansen, chairman of the House Resources Committee pointed out, "The majority of vehicles on forest roads aren't owned by loggers, miners or drillers. They are owned by people like you and me. President Clinton has just shut the American people out of 60 million acres of their own land." Wyoming Sen. Craig Thomas opined, "This is the last gasp of a hostile Clinton agenda to drive people off their public lands."

In a statement announcing the rule, the Forest Service claimed that its responsibility to "consider the whole picture" mandated the bypass of local (and thus, individual) concerns. Demonstrating tunnel vision and arrogance in equal proportion, the statement continued, "If management decisions for these areas were made on a case-by-case basis at a forest or regional level, inventoried roadless areas and their ecological characteristics and social values could be reduced though road construction and certain forms of timber harvest." Building a bridge to what seems the hoped-for terminus of the rule, the Forest Service claimed, "Local land management planning may not always recognize the national significance of inventoried roadless areas and the values they represent in an increasingly developed landscape."

In other words, the rule is designed to circumvent development of any sort, and driving people off, or at least not allowing them to drive through public lands at all, is an acceptable way to do so. Yet public lands, regardless of whatever "social values" the intellectual gremlins at the Forest Service endow them with, are a public trust to be utilized by all Americans.

Historian Daniel Filner observed of the great conservationist, President Theodore Roosevelt: "Roosevelt's commitment to federal action to ensure land access to all socioeconomic classes was fostered in part by his belief that wilderness recreation . . . engendered in men the qualities essential for good citizenship."

During his inaugural address, President George W. Bush called Americans to take the path to citizenship. He could encourage them to take that road by taking down Mr. Clinton's "no trespassing signs."

-------- genetics

Biotech Food: To Be Wary or Not?

January 30, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/opinion/L30BIO.html

To the Editor:

Re "Biotechnology Food: From the Lab to a Debacle" (front page, Jan. 25):

I disagree with the view expressed in your article that "food biotech is dead." The ability to make specific changes and additions to crop genomes presents an enormous opportunity for improving the quality and nutritional value of the food we eat. For instance, "golden rice," which expresses the precursor of vitamin A, promises to reduce blindness in developing countries.

Moreover, because plants are capable of performing diverse chemical reactions, we anticipate that this technology will improve the production and availability of pharmaceuticals and will prevent environmental damage through cleaner, safer chemistry.

Genetic engineering has many advantages over traditional breeding: it is faster, more precise and can introduce genes tailored to confer beneficial properties.

PAUL BERG Stanford, Calif., Jan. 26, 2001 The writer, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, is professor emeritus at Stanford University.

To the Editor:

Genetically engineered crops are just the first altered foods that the biotech industry has pushed through the compromised United States regulatory apparatus (front page, Jan. 25). The industry is awaiting approval to bring genetically engineered salmon to our dinner plates.

Marine scientists have warned that these fish could wreak ecological havoc when they escape into open seas, yet United States regulations are wholly inadequate to assess this risk. The Food and Drug Administration, the federal agency with the least expertise in environmental protection, has assumed oversight of these salmon, leaving more competent scientists out of the loop. Consumers and environmentalists are right to question the government's approach, which seems to put political considerations ahead of scientific precaution.

CHARLES MARGULIS Baltimore, Jan. 26, 2001 The writer is a specialist at the Greenpeace Genetic Engineering Campaign.

To the Editor:

Re "Biotechnology Food: From the Lab to a Debacle" (front page, Jan. 25): The opposition to genetically modified food involves the same mentality - emotional and ill informed, antiscientific and anticorporate - as the opposition to nuclear power. Will we have to wait until people begin to starve in the United States before the benefits of technology will be recognized by the majority?

S. THOMAS BOND Jane Lew, W.Va., Jan. 26, 2001

To the Editor:

You illustrate well why many citizens are deeply skeptical of the oversight of biotech foods and ingredients (front page, Jan. 25). But the controversy over genetically engineered food is not just a question of good or poor strategy on the part of industry. It is a question of substance: there are still no long-term studies of the environmental or health effects, and without labeling, health studies will be difficult, if not impossible.

MARGARET WEBER Adrian, Mich., Jan. 26, 2001 The writer is coordinator of corporate responsibility, portfolio advisory board, Adrian Dominican Sisters.

To the Editor:

Your Jan. 25 front-page article about biotech food confirmed my experiences as a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee member who was part of the deliberations on Calgene's Flavr Savr tomato and Monsanto's bovine growth hormone.

As a consumer representative on both committees, I had to be convinced that the sponsors had done their scientific homework, and considered it my duty to express the concerns that the public would surely voice. The Calgene team brought a respectful, scientific attitude, explaining what it knew and how it knew it, and admitting what it didn't know. Monsanto greeted expressions of consumer concern about milk produced with its product with disdain.

The question is whether industry observers of Monsanto's fortunes in this context will learn the obvious lesson: the concerns and questions of the public, even when not informed by the highest level of scientific knowledge, deserve respect and response.

MARSHA N. COHEN San Francisco, Jan. 28, 2001 The writer is a professor at Hastings College of the Law, University of California.

-------- health

Gulf War Syndrome Distinct From Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

Jan 30, 2001
Reuters Health
Magnu96196@aol.com

SEATTLE - Although there is symptomatic overlap between Gulf War syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), the two conditions are distinct, according to study findings presented here.

"Gulf veterans are more likely to report neurologic symptoms and they are more likely to report more gastrointestinal problems and more likely to report skin and rash conditions," Dr. Lea Steele told Reuters Health during the American Association for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome's Fifth International Conference.

"The symptoms of both [conditions] are very similar," acknowledged Dr. Steele, who is with the Persian Gulf War Veterans Health Initiative. But the syndromes seem to "encompass different disease pathways," she said, adding that "some of those disease pathways may overlap in Gulf War veterans and civilian patients with chronic fatigue syndrome."

In an interview with Reuters Health, Dr. Steele said that veterans with Gulf War illness will probably find they are better accepted and their symptoms better managed by physicians who are also treating CFS patients. "The chronic fatigue syndrome doctors are the ones with probably the most expertise in dealing with the symptoms," she pointed out.

In the past some research suggested that some Gulf War veterans actually had chronic fatigue syndrome, not a new illness, Dr. Steele noted.

She studied 1548 veterans who had served in the Persian Gulf War. The prevalence of CFS was 7% among Gulf War veterans. However, the pattern of symptoms reported by veterans who met criteria for CFS differed from that reported by CFS patients in the general population.

For example, chronic headache, diarrhea, skin rashes, and night sweats were more prominent among Gulf War veterans meeting CFS criteria than in CFS patients generally.

"Ultimately this [study] will increase interest in this area," said Dr. Leonard Jason, a professor of clinical psychology at DePaul University in Chicago. "Groups of activists are now going to Congress saying we need to have services for people with Gulf War illness. The Veterans Administration will do that work, and clearly, then, that sets up the foundation for those people who didn't go to war and are also sick."

-------- police

Officer, Sobbing, Recalls Secret Life of Crime

January 30, 2001
New York Times
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/nyregion/30COP.html?pagewanted=all

The fear of getting caught had passed, as had the shame of pleading guilty before a federal judge to charges of armed robbery and murder conspiracy. So the only thing that remained for Anthony Trotman yesterday was to tell the tale of his startling transformation from a New York City police officer to a member of a brazen Brooklyn robbery gang.

Mr. Trotman spent more than four hours on the witness stand in Federal District Court in Brooklyn testifying at the trial of James Woodard, who is accused of being one of Mr. Trotman's accomplices in the violent gang. Crying so often that a courtroom official had to bring him a wad of tissue, the former officer said he beat up drug dealers, robbed a jewelry store, even plotted to kill a federal prosecutor and a fellow detective - all while serving as a patrolman in the 77th Precinct in Bedford- Stuyvesant.

"I've done some terrible, terrible things," Mr. Trotman said.

It was the first time since pleading guilty last week that Mr. Trotman, 35, had spoken of his secret life of crime. He not only told the jury that his former partner, Jamil Jordan, had introduced him to the gang, but he also painted a sordid picture of life in his precinct, where, according to his testimony, a handful of officers had been breaking the law for years.

For example, Mr. Trotman testified that he and another officer, Keith Manley, stole $200 or $300 from a woman they were sent to escort home from Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. A third officer, Adam Schachtel, once stole a wad of money he was supposed to have stored for safekeeping after it was found at a crime scene, Mr. Trotman said.

The two officers named by Mr. Trotman were placed on desk duty last night, and the department began an investigation of the allegations, said Charles V. Campisi, chief of the Internal Affairs Bureau. Both have been on the force since 1986. Officer Manley has been at the 84th Precinct for five years; Officer Schachtel is now at the 69th Precinct.

The 77th Precinct was the location of a notorious corruption scandal in the 1980's, when a dozen officers known as the Buddy Boys were charged with robbing drug dealers and committing other crimes. But senior police officials said yesterday that routine annual audits in recent years to check for corruption in the precinct had not found any compelling evidence that any officers other than Mr. Trotman and Mr. Jordan had done anything wrong.

"This is not a corruption scandal," said Assistant Chief Thomas P. Fahey, a department spokesman. "This is a couple of officers who did bad things."

The lion's share of Mr. Trotman's testimony yesterday was filled with stories of his own criminal past.

When Mr. Jordan was arrested on Jan. 24, federal prosecutors released a complaint that said he and Mr. Trotman had conspired to kill Michael Paul, a detective in the 77th Precinct who had testified against them in a gun case in 1997. But in a new twist yesterday, Mr. Trotman admitted that he and Mr. Jordan had also toyed with the notion of murdering Dan Alonso, the federal prosecutor who worked on the gun case.

Mr. Trotman said that he had been lying and committing crimes for nearly his entire 11 years on the force. He said he once kidnapped a drug dealer in the Bronx with his fellow gang members and beat the man senseless while wearing his police officer's shield. He said he once robbed another drug dealer and handcuffed him to the steering wheel of a car.

On patrol one day, Mr. Trotman said, he and Mr. Jordan stopped a car and stole about $7,000 from the driver. On another day, he said, he and Mr. Jordan stole from a corpse.

Mr. Trotman confessed to having a network of informers who would tip him off to criminal opportunities. He said one man would tell him where he could find drug dealers to rob. Another man, he testified, would alert him when people carrying large amounts of cash were passing through areas he patrolled.

With so many tales of mayhem spilling from Mr. Trotman's mouth, it was easy to forget that he was not the defendant in the case but merely a witness. Indeed, only one of the crimes that Mr. Trotman mentioned yesterday - the 1997 armed robbery of H. L. Gross Jewelers in Garden City, N.Y. - was directly linked to Mr. Woodard, the man on trial.

Mr. Trotman testified that he went to the store with another gang member, Vere Padmore, ostensibly to look at engagement rings. He later returned with the entire gang, including Mr. Woodard - this time to rob the store with gun in hand.

The only other time that Mr. Woodard was the focus of the trial was before Mr. Trotman came into the courtroom.

Mr. Woodard's lawyer, Philip Katowitz, had said that Mr. Trotman would not be able to pick out his client. So Judge Frederic Block created what amounted to an ad hoc lineup in the courtroom gallery.

There was a problem: Mr. Woodard is black, and there were only a few other black men in the room. So Judge Block asked the prosecution to find some more "nonwhite folks" in the courthouse for balance.

"It's a bit disturbing that we can't find more minority persons in a United States courthouse," Judge Block said while court officials scoured the building for men who looked even remotely similar to Mr. Woodard. "What does it say for us?"

Eventually, two or three other black men were found, and Judge Block arranged them in the gallery. He had Mr. Woodard take a seat among them. Mr. Trotman easily picked the defendant out.

"These things happen," Judge Block said after the identification was made. "You never know during a trial what may materialize."

---

A Sheriff's Star Dimmed
by Deputies and Dogs

January 30, 2001
New York Times
By DAN BARRY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/nyregion/30SHER.html?pagewanted=all

GOSHEN, N.Y., Jan. 25 - There were the dogs, for example: for a while, officers were using German shepherds in the county jail, which was unorthodox as well as unfortunate for the inmates being bitten. There were also the incidents of sheriff's deputies straying from their appointed duties, including one who ran off to Mexico with $130,000 in bail money.

But what finally pushed the Orange County executive, Joseph G. Rampe, into action were the accusations in a lawsuit filed by the state attorney general last September. It alleged that deputy sheriffs had pocketed proceeds from bogus raffles, kept scant accounting records for the two nonprofit foundations they ran, and enlisted reserve volunteers to steal cameras and clothing from a Wal-Mart - all on the pretense of benefiting the Orange County Sheriff's Department.

The lawsuit - which seeks fines as well as the recouping of about $117,000 in missing money - also alleged that Sheriff H. Frank Bigger, the county's top elected law enforcement official, either knew or should have known about the abuses. It charges that he ignored repeated complaints about the key player in the purported embezzlement: a close adviser and part-time deputy sheriff whose passion for flashing lights, guns and other police accouterments kept getting him in trouble.

"To tell you that all of it didn't have an influence on me wouldn't be telling the truth," Mr. Rampe said, his tone betraying the strains of understatement.

Ever so gently, Mr. Rampe challenged the power structure by dedicating $150,000 in this year's budget to study the role of sheriff in an old- style rural county that is evolving into a bedroom community to New York City. Maybe the study will suggest that a little tinkering is needed, or maybe that the sheriff's office be abolished; either way, Mr. Rampe said, the time has come to take a good hard look.

Sheriff Bigger, whose surname reflects his perceived stature in the community, has denied any wrongdoing, and has suggested that the sudden interest of Eliot L. Spitzer, the attorney general and a Democrat, in a Republican bastion, Orange County, is purely political. But he has also agreed to cooperate with the county's study, some say through gritted teeth.

Whatever the study leads to, it presents a threat to an office that in much of New York State is part exalted position and part throwback to the days of English settlers. Peter Kehoe, the executive director of the New York Sheriff's Association, said that the sheriffs of New York - whose duties vary from county to county - investigate most of the felony crimes in upstate, but often find themselves trying to escape unflattering stereotypes.

Westchester County did away with its Sheriff's Department 20 years ago, and other counties, including Putnam, are considering it. The given reasons range from desires for greater efficiency to concerns about improper behavior. But Mr. Kehoe said he attributed the trend to power- hungry county leaders. "Every county executive I ever met wanted to be his own little general," he said, "with their own little police department to protect those they favor and go after those they don't."

Also not helping Sheriff Bigger is the sudden scrutiny of Orange County law enforcement. Earlier this month, Mr. Spitzer requested a federal monitor for the Wallkill Police Department, whose members are accused of pulling over female drivers to solicit dates, stalking and harassing critics, and generally behaving as though the law were a concept foreign to them.

Sheriff Bigger, 69, is a classic New York State sheriff, a veteran of the Korean War, a retired state trooper, larger than life and always present at barbecue benefits to share a laugh - except with reporters, whom he generally shuns. He is his own man, in the truest sense, with little legislative and executive meddling into a fief that includes a new $90 million jail, a $31 million budget, and a staff of 300 deputies and correction officers that is about to grow by another 67 employees.

The sheriff's autonomy created occasional tension with Mr. Rampe and the County Legislature, although they had no desire to fight with a likable sheriff. Still, they did not enjoy finding out about the dog-bites- inmate incidents through a federal lawsuit, or reading critical stories in The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, including the one about his office's giving supporters dashboard permits that said their cars were "on official police business."

Then, last September, the attorney general filed a lawsuit that said a piece of the Bigger law-enforcement domain had crossed the line of legality - thanks in part to the faith he had put in a man named Harry Ryttenberg.

Mr. Ryttenberg has alternated between working as an assignment editor for local television stations - he now works for WWOR-TV, Channel 9, - and as a spokesman for public agencies. He is also a law enforcement buff who, in 1991, joined the Orange County Sheriff's Department as a part-time, unpaid officer who happened to live in Westchester County.

In 1996, Sheriff Bigger put Mr. Ryttenberg in charge of the reserve unit, a group of about two dozen volunteers who generally worked at local fairs and events. The sheriff, who declined to comment for this article, told state investigators that he promoted Mr. Ryttenberg because of his "good contacts" in government and the media. The sheriff had an election coming up in 1998.

Both Sheriff Bigger and Mr. Ryttenberg were directors for the Orange County Sheriff's Foundation, with Mr. Ryttenberg overseeing raffle sales that were intended to help reservists pay for their tuition at a training academy. In 1996, reservists sold nearly $27,000 worth of raffle tickets, but investigators say that none of the money was deposited in the foundation's bank account.

Then, in 1997, Mr. Ryttenberg established the Orange County Reserve Deputy Sheriffs Foundation, ostensibly to raise money for reservists' uniforms and equipment. Sheriff Bigger was not a director of this nonprofit group; he later said that he instructed Mr. Ryttenberg to keep the foundation's activities separate from those of the department, even though the reservists were distributing literature bearing the sheriff's name and photograph.

The fund-raising activities intensified, investigators say, with reservists sent out seven days a week to sell tickets for three simultaneous raffles. One reservist later complained that they had become "professional beggars." And if reservists did not spend enough time hawking tickets, several later complained, Mr. Ryttenberg would go to their homes and confiscate their badges.

At the time, a lot was going on down at the Wal-Mart in Wallkill. While he was stationing reservists at tables inside the store to sell tickets, investigators say, Mr. Ryttenberg was charging the store for security services in cash that has yet to be traced. In addition, William J. Kilgallon, the attorney general's lead investigator in the case, charged in an affidavit that Mr. Ryttenberg was having the reservists "steal goods systematically from Wal-Mart."

The scheme began innocently, with Wal-Mart allowing reservists to take a few boxes of baby wipes and film as donations to their child-fingerprinting program, Mr. Kilgallon said. But "the shopping list became refined," he said, as the reservists began taking more and more items. A deputy and his wife allowed supplies for the reserve unit to be stored at their business, but were shocked when they came upon crates and crates of Wal-Mart merchandise.

"Cameras, there was after shave, special lights, flashlights, lots of flashlights, clothes," the wife, Jeanette Burpoe, told investigators. "Like it was funny, because the clothes were the same types of uniforms we had to purchase, like Dickie pants, black belts, you name it, they had it."

When Jeanette and Jim Burpoe demanded that the merchandise be removed, investigators say, two reservists had to make repeated trips with trucks to haul it all off to another deputy sheriff's garage. There still was not enough room.

In 1998, a new director joined the foundation's board - Maria Ingrassia, a member of a prominent Republican family who had spent years working with nonprofit organizations in the county. She began asking to see the paperwork for all the raffles, but was rebuffed again and again. "Harry thought that I would be pliable, that I was a woman from a political background and would never ask questions," she said. "And I started to ask a lot of questions."

Frustrated by Sheriff Bigger's refusal to look into the matter, Ms. Ingrassia said, she did the only thing she could think of. "I dropped a dime," she said, by calling the attorney general's office.

Mr. Ryttenberg has denied any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, other problems were developing for Mr. Ryttenberg, who was then the spokesman for the State Housing and Community Renewal Department. In late December 1998, the governor's office received an anonymous letter detailing Mr. Ryttenberg's penchant for acting like a highway patrol officer.

In 1995, for example, he followed a 17-year-old girl into her home in New Windsor after she failed to show him the registration for the car she was driving. When he heard her father's voice, state records indicate, he left so abruptly that the girl's parents notified the local police about a possible police impersonator.

Soon an extremely accurate composite sketch of Mr. Ryttenberg was faxed to area law enforcement agencies, including the Sheriff's Department. The New Windsor police dropped the matter after Sheriff Bigger promised an internal investigation that never took place.

In early 1999, Mr. Ryttenberg resigned from the Sheriff's Department, citing his health. A few months later, the attorney general's office began looking into his legacy there. It ultimately alleged that of the $180,000 raised by the raffles overseen by Mr. Ryttenberg, more than $117,000 was unaccounted for. In addition, it charged that $41,000 had been diverted into his personal account, while $7,300 went into another deputy's account.

When questioned under oath, Mr. Ryttenberg invoked his constitutional right against self-incrimination 104 times. Reached last week, he said, "We deny all these allegations, and when it comes our day in court I'm confident that I'll be vindicated."

Although Sheriff Bigger declined to talk with this reporter, he issued a lengthy statement in September to deny any wrongdoing, to maintain that his "purported ties" to Mr. Ryttenberg were "extremely thin," and to accuse Mr. Spitzer of playing politics and tarring him through "guilt by association."

To which Mr. Spitzer replied: "It is fair to hold him accountable. The evidence was sufficient for him to be put on notice that Mr. Ryttenberg's behavior needed to be controlled. And it was Mr. Bigger's responsibility to do so."

Meanwhile, Mr. Rampe, a pharmacist by profession, has decided not to seek re-election, and will be spending more time at a Radio Shack outlet he owns. As for Ms. Ingrassia, she recently decided to change her party affiliation to Democrat. She said that decision came after she was assigned to sit at a table by herself at an Orange County Republican dinner packed with friends of the sheriff. She left after the Pledge of Allegiance.

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Chinese Officials Order Cities to Bolster Riot Police Forces

January 30, 2001
New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/30/world/30CHIN.html

BEIJING, Jan. 29 - The Chinese authorities, facing constant protests by aggrieved workers and farmers and a prospect of unending defiance by die-hard Falun Gong believers, have ordered cities across the country to augment their anti-riot police.

Reflecting the leadership's obsession with "social stability," which has reached a new pitch as China seeks to be awarded the 2008 Olympic Games, the Ministry of Public Security has ordered "intensive efforts" to build up anti-riot squads and said they are "expected to play key roles in handling group violence and terrorism cases."

Large municipalities like Beijing and Shanghai must establish anti-riot units with at least 300 members, other provincial capitals must have specialized units of at least 200 and other cities must also develop forces in keeping with their needs, according to the report by the New China News Agency.

The country has already created a one-million-member People's Armed Police, a paramilitary force with training in crowd control, as the primary bulwark against unruly demonstrations, and further growth in these forces is expected as well. Units of the armed police, sometimes using tear gas and occasionally using live ammunition, are frequently used to disperse irate crowds of unpaid workers or complaining farmers. Large numbers of the troops are also stationed in restive Tibet and in the western region of Xinjiang, to help fight a separatist movement of Uighur Muslims.

China's leaders were privately embarrassed in 1989, when poorly prepared police were overwhelmed by swelling pro-democracy demonstrations. The authorities finally used army combat troops to clear the streets of Beijing, resulting in hundreds of deaths from often-indiscriminate fire and bringing worldwide condemnation.

Since then, officials have bolstered the numbers, training and equipment of the People's Armed Police, in hopes that they can handle incidents with more skill and less deadly force.

Ordinary police forces, which also carry weapons, were also supposed to improve their crowd-control capacities after 1989, but the announcement this weekend indicates that progress has been limited. "If the anti-riot police are not competent and lack necessary training and equipment," an official from the ministry of public security was quoted as saying, they will be "hardly capable of maintaining social peace and stability."

One reason for building up riot units inside of urban police forces may be to give the local police the ability to respond more quickly to a developing disturbance, said Murray Scot Tanner, an expert on Chinese law enforcement at Western Michigan University

Many outside experts believe that the People's Armed Police - which were expanded in part by incorporating unneeded units of the army - have never received enough money and specialized equipment to become a uniformly adept riot-control force, able to handle extreme situations without bloodshed.

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Thousands demand Wahid's resignation

January 30, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200113021941.htm

JAKARTA, Indonesia - In scenes reminiscent of protests that helped topple the former Suharto dictatorship, thousands of students broke down parliament's gates yesterday and demanded President Abdurrahman Wahid quit over his reported involvement in two corruption scandals.

Police subdued protesters with warning shots and tear gas. Although the riot was not as violent as past clashes, officers beat some protesters during running battles.

An estimated 10,000 protesters marched through the streets of the capital against Mr. Wahid. At the state palace, a relaxed head of state maintained he had done no wrong, and told reporters he would not resign.

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ELF Making Good on Threat
Officials Fear Increased 'Ecotage' by Elusive Activists
Jan. 30
By Dean Schabner
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/elf010130.html

- The Earth Liberation Front has carried out more than 100 acts of destruction in the last five years, wreaking $37 million worth of damage. To date, police have one suspect, and the group, leading a rising wave of environmental extremism, is promising to escalate its attacks. STORY HIGHLIGHTS Apocalyptic Environmentalists, Political Cynics Violent Terrorists or Religious Radicals Expanding Scope, Extending Range

Last week, investigators got their first break, arresting Frank Ambrose, of Indiana, in connection with a tree spiking incident for which the ELF claimed credit. Law enforcers, however, are not calling it a major breakthrough in their five-year war with the elusive activists.

"It's always a positive when there is some success," said Tom Lyons, a U.S. Forest Service special agent in charge of law investigation in the Northwest. "That can only help to deter and show law enforcement agents' intent to deal with this issue nationwide. It's well publicized that organizations like ELF operate in small cells around the country, and this man's ties [to ELF] are the subject of speculation."

The "elves" of the ELF have become more and more active since they claimed responsibility for setting fires that caused $12 million worth of damage at the Vail Mountain ski resort more than two years ago. According to the activists and the law enforcement agencies that battle them, there's likely to be a lot more of their costly mischief.

"This year, 2001, we hope to see an escalation in tactics against capitalism and industry," ELF said earlier this month in a communique to Craig Rosebraugh, the Portland, Ore., man who acts as unofficial spokesman for the group. In the statement, ELF also claimed responsibility for a fire at a lumber company office in Glendale, Ore., that did $400,000 worth of damage.

Crime fighters in the FBI and the Forest Service are taking them at their word, especially considering that the Bush Administration has been talking about opening the national parks to mining and logging and stepping up the search for oil in the Alaska wilderness.

"It's a question that's been on my mind and on a number of people's minds," said Kim Thorsen, Forest Service department director of law enforcement and investigation. "The new administration's policies are different from those in the past. It's very possible that this coming summer season is going to be very contentious, if we start cutting more trees and we start mining. It's an issue we're going to have to be very aware of."

David Szady, the special agent in charge of the FBI's Portland division, said that ELF has already begun to increase its activity, noting that though there was nothing as spectacular as the Vail incident last year, 2000 was the group's busiest yet.

Apocalyptic Environmentalists, Political Cynics

ELF claimed responsibility for 16 fires last year at construction sites for luxury homes in Colorado, Arizona and New York, and law enforcement officials link them to the Anarchist Golf Association, which destroyed two grass seed research centers in Oregon. The group is also blamed for a fire at a Forest Service tree biogenetic research site in Wisconsin. In all, they claimed responsibility for $2.2 million worth of damage in 2000.

While Thorsen seemed ready to link the possibility of more "ecotage" to the policies of the administration in Washington, at least one person who has studied the movement sees no reason to believe that ELF cares at all who is in the White House.

Bron Taylor, a professor of religion at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh who has studied the radical environmental movement for more than a decade, said that one of the defining elements of the activists is their political cynicism.

"With these guys, I don't think they look at any administration as being better than any other," Taylor said.

Taylor, who has published dozens of articles in scholarly journals dealing with various aspects of the environmental movement, said he gained his understanding of the activists not just from their public statements and actions, but from numerous interviews, many conducted anonymously with people he said he believed were ELF members.

"You can't understand these guys if you don't understand the ethical and spiritual motivations behind them," Taylor said. "There are continuities between their ethical and spiritual motivations, and those that have motivated the environmental vanguard for the last 125 years. You have grafted onto that a particular reading of environmental science and of governmental politics that tends to be on the one hand apocalyptic in terms of its view of the environment and on the other deeply cynical in its political analysis."

Violent Terrorists or Religious Radicals

He describes their reverence for nature as a religious feeling related to the beliefs of Native Americans in which all living things have souls and are seen as sacred.

According to Taylor, "deep ecologists" such as those in ELF have a firm belief in three essential tenets: That ecosystems have an inherent worth that cannot be judged in relation to human needs; that human actions are bringing the earth toward mass extinctions; and that political action is insufficient to bring about the wholesale social changes needed.

Because of their rejection of the possibility that government will make the kind of policy changes they deem necessary, ELF activists are not concerned about swaying public opinion, in Taylor's reading of the group. Their goal, he says, is to create a situation in which it is simply unprofitable for lumber companies to cut down trees or construction companies to build luxury "trophy homes" in wild areas.

While this makes them ready to take actions that are considered by much of society to be radical, their reverence for nature and their belief - whether articulated or not - that life in any form is sacred, keeps them opposed to intentionally harming other people, even their ideological opponents.

"It is a laugh to me when they call us violent or terrorists," Lee Dessaux, a hunt saboteur said in a 1997 interview quoted in Taylor's article "Religion, Violence and Radical Environmentalism: from Earth First! to the Unabomber to the Earth Liberation Front" in Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence. "I say, if we were, don't you think we'd have killed people by now?"

They still haven't either killed or seriously hurt anyone in more than 100 incidents over five years since they burned a truck at Forestry Service office in Oregon, but law enforcement officials fear it is only a matter of time.

"They keep saying that we're not going to hurt anyone, and I think they're sincere, but what happens is you can't control the zealots - we saw that with [Oklahoma City bomber Timothy] McVeigh," Szady said. "Our other fear is that someone is going to be killed accidentally."

Expanding Scope, Extending Range

Not only has ELF picked up its pace, it seems the "elves" have also begun to branch out and move around the country. Whereas early on their ecotage was primarily directed at the logging industry, and primarily in the Northwest, their recent campaign against suburban sprawl brought them attention in the Northeast.

"These people are popping up all over," Szady said. "The names can change, but we think the people are the same."

To date, it seems that the FBI and others trying to catch the "elves" haven't been able to find out for sure, though. Szady refused to say whether the FBI has had any success attempting to infiltrate ELF, but there have been no arrests in any of major the incidents for which "elves" have claimed responsibility.

"We have to take a very coordinated effort on the local, state and federal level, with all involved agencies working together," he said. "We're also hoping to get cooperation from the people in those organizations who might feel that some members have stepped over the line."

The Indiana arrest, carried out by state Conservation agents, shows that various law enforcement organizations are cooperating in the fight against ELF, but doesn't mean an end is in sight.

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FTAA/CITIGROUP TEACH-IN IN AT UCHICAGO, MARCH 2-4, 2001

Tue, 30 Jan 2001
stephanie ashley lane
salane@midway.uchicago.edu

*Come to Chicago!

A Call To Action! Roadshow Global Justice Tour 2001 Conference: Citigroup, the FTAA and Global Forest Destruction March 2-4, 2001 University of Chicago

Heard about the upcoming talks for the Free Trade Area of the Americas? Wonder why the April meeting is being held in Quebec, a walled city? And why has the text of the FTAA negotiations so far been kept a secret?

Initiated in 1994 by the 34 countries of North and South America (excluding Cuba), the Free Trade Area of the Americas, an expansion of the North America Free Trade Agreement, would create the world's largest free market zone -affecting 650 million people and $9 trillion in capital. Governmental FTAA talks have been accompanied by the corporate sector every step of the way, and their discussions have been held behind closed doors, under a veil of secrecy. The Free Trade Area of the Americas will deepen the negative effects of NAFTA we've seen in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. over the past seven years and expand NAFTA's damage to the other 31 countries involved. The dire results of NAFTA prove that the FTAA will provide only disastrous results for the exploited peoples of the American continents. (courtesy of stopftaa.org)

A group called Call To Action (CtA), made up of young, inspiring activist organizers who have worked with the Rainforest Action Network, Ruckus Society, Earth First!, the Student Alliance to Reform Corporations (STARC) and many community groups, are going to be leading the Global Justice Tour 2001 conference here in Chicago, a MIDWEST GATHERING for their caravan across the northern US, as they make stops at campuses along the way enroute to Quebec City for the April meeting of the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

CtA is giving grassroots issue and skills training to activists and organizers nationwide, in the hopes of building a new generation of environmental and social justice activists with the skills and vision necessary to create fundamental social change. They also want to help foster networks between traditionally isolated movements including the environmental, human rights, social justice, globalization and labor movements, by including activists from a wide range of backgrounds, as well as giving Chicago-based organizations workshop space to talk about their own campaigns and actions. Finally, by focusing on Citigroup as one of many multinational beneficiaries of FTAA talks, CtA hopes to increase awareness about Citigroup's policies of redlining and predatory lending; private prison construction and strike breaking; environmental destruction and forced relocation; as well as its influences in international trade policy and third world debt, through grassroots campaigning, media campaigns, and non-violent civil disobedience.

This conference will feature workshops on:

[-Informational-] The Prison Industrial Complex Citigroup Campaign (History, How-To, Tips..) FTAA Basics (including Quebec City updates!) Predatory Lending and Redlining Forest Defense: Boise Cascade and Staples Race and Class Gender and Sexuality Issues Globalization and Popular Economics [-Skill Building-] Strategic Campaign Design Guerrilla Theatre Media Direct Action (including blockades and strategies) Consensus and Facilitation Organizing 101 Legal Workshop for Direct Action and Mass Action Non-Violent strategy and tactics Corporate Research

Also, there will be numerous local organizations leading informational workshops on (preliminary list): Prison Advocacy and Justice Labor Movement update Indigenous rights and organizing/ ending the SOA Jubilee 2000 and debt-relief Redlining, Gentrification and the effects of TIFFs in the Chicago area Engaging the Community in Environmental Activism Connecting with our Neighbors: How student activists can reach out to surrounding communities

Contacted organizations (or hopeful contacts) include: Alliance for Responsible Trade Jobs with Justice People for Community Recovery Rainbow Push Coalition Student Labor Action Project Woodlawn Development Organization

Event Speakers and Workshop Leaders include: Nisha Anand, Free Burma Coalition, Field Organizer for War Resisters League Randall Smith, Art and Revolution, C-Beyond, Food Not Bombs Laura Close, STudent Alliance to Reform Corporations outreach coordinator; organizer on wilderness defense and social justice issues Michael Faith Rubenstein, field organizer and researcher for Rainforest Action Network and the Coastal Rainforest Coalition

Other Speakers TBA.

A protest against Citibank and Citigroup is also in the works

The Global Justice Tour Conference will run from Friday, March 2 through Sunday, March 4, 2001, on the campus of the University of Chicago, in Hyde Park, Chicago, Illinois. Everyone is welcome! We're expecting an attendance of 150 to 200 primarily student activists from all over the Midwest, but the conference will also be open to the greater Chicago and Midwest activist communities.

Registration will soon be available online at www.calltoaction.org: $10 for students, $15 for non-students. Food and housing (if needed) for the weekend will be provided.

Any questions, comments, etc.? Contact: Stephanie Lane salane@midway.uchicago.edu 773.752.6518

Also check out: http://www.calltoaction.org

WHY IS IT THAT THE FTAA MEETINGS IN APRIL ARE BEING HELD IN A WALLED CITY? NO FAST TRACK FOR TRADE LEGISLATION! NO GLOBALIZATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION! www.quebec2001.org www.stopftaa.org www.calltoaction.org www.corpreform.org