------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Putin to Meet Leaders of 2 'Rogue' Nations
India, China to discuss nuclear differences
NATO Is 'an Essential Forum' for the Missile-Defense Debate
Bush Can't Afford to Ignore Missile Defense, Envoys Tell Europeans
U.S. Offers Aid on Missile Defense
Canada Forges Diplomatic Ties with North Korea
Europe warms to missile defense
Government Reimburses Nuclear Weapons Contractors for Legal Bills
Chretien, Bush Strike Up the Bond
Top Chinese Official to Make U.S. Trip in March
MORE THAN DEPLETED URANIUM?
"Clearly, Gulf War veterans are suffering,";
North Korea's energy woes probed
The Missile Offensive
Russia issues missile defence warning
U.S. strategy to isolate China on NMD
NATO Is 'an Essential Forum' for the Missile-Defense Debate
Ivanov worried by U.S. shield
Russia: U.S. missile shield doomed
Russia Urges Alternative to U.S. Missile Shield
Russia Says U.S. Antimissile Plan Means an Arms Race
Russia Dismisses U.S. Missile Plan
The Indecisive President
Nuke plant talks bog down in Taiwan
Missile Defense Test Planned
Pentagon moving ahead on missile shield
Biden: Missile defense could spark arms race
Defense Veteran Chosen as No. 2 at Pentagon
URANIUM AND YOU
Energy Demand to Slow Along with Economy
GOP Senators To Pitch Energy Bill
Key Hanford cleanup late

MILITARY
Experts say cover-up protected Hirohito
Who's Defending Rockefeller Drug Laws? The Prosecutors
Indiana
FOREIGN AFFAIRS The War Saddam Won
U.N.: Leaders must tackle poverty
Likely remains of U.S. soldier repatriated

OTHER
Ill wind blows some good, boosts UK windpower
Arsenic Problem
Supplements raise mad cow concerns
Aquarium workers ate rare turtle
EIA Kicks Off National Initiative to Reuse and Recycle Used Electronics
Rare Salt - Water Camel May Be Separate Species
Bush delays new forest regulations By Audrey Hudson
Biotech Food
Iowa farmers sue over biotech corn
We are not amused
House panel to investigate allegations of Rich spying
The Embassy Bombings Trial
Embassy Bombing Trial Witness Recounts Birth of Terror Group
First witness testifies in embassy bombing trial
Trial starts for four in blasts at embassies

Activists
Protesters Want Urkaine President Out
PETA: Set 'Wally Gator' free
Mexican students protest
Urgent letter on Ecuador
Protest against adjustment escalates in Ecuador
Protesters nearly drown out WTO press conference
Fair Trade Advocacy Internships Available
People's Summit on Globalization


-------- NUCLEAR

Putin to Meet Leaders of 2 'Rogue' Nations
Campaign Aimed at U.S. Missile Defense Plan

Tuesday, February 6, 2001
International Herald Tribune
New York Times Service
Patrick E. Tyler
http://www.iht.com/articles/9803.htm

MOSCOW President Vladimir Putin plans to play host to the presidents of North Korea and Iran in Moscow this spring, Russian officials say, as part of his campaign to demonstrate to Western leaders that diplomacy and arms control may go a long way toward eliminating the ballistic missile threat that is driving the Bush administration to develop an anti-missile system.

After a weekend in which senior Bush administration officials made a series of appearances on television and at a European security conference in Munich to reaffirm their intention to press forward with testing and deployment of an anti-missile system, Russia responded Monday with a warning that it was prepared along with other nations - China presumably among them - to resort to an arms race to ensure that its own strategic deterrent force would not be weakened.

And Mr. Putin, by signaling his plans to meet the leaders of two of the three "rogue" nations that most concern Washington, is positioning Russia to play a constructive, if also self-interested, role in addressing the post-Cold War security issues on which the Bush administration has centered its national security strategy.

At the same time, Mr. Putin is playing on the deep skepticism in Europe over Washington's determination to rearrange the strategic landscape. The deployment of a missile shield would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Russia is promoting its own proposal to make further deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals while cooperating with Europe and the United States to develop regional missile defenses that could be brought to bear against threatening nations.

The Russian campaign will play out over several months in advance of the summit meeting of leaders from the largest industrial countries, who will convene in July in Genoa, where Mr. Bush will make a diplomatic debut.

The Iranian president, Mohammed Khatami, is due in Moscow next month for discussions on trade and military cooperation. Mr. Putin notified the Clinton administration last autumn that Russia would not adhere to a private agreement made with Al Gore when he was vice president to end conventional arms sales to Teheran, which is rebuilding its military in the face of a resurgent Iraq. But Iran's secretive ballistic missile program, which has received help from Russian scientists, and Iran's suspected nuclear weapons program are of greatest concern to Washington.

After Mr. Khatami's visit in March, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, plans to arrive in Moscow in late April, diplomats have said. Mr. Putin made a surprise visit to the North Korean capital last summer and opened negotiations to persuade Mr. Kim to give up his quest to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten Japan and the United States. Mr. Kim has offered to forgo further ballistic-missile development in return for Western assistance in launching civilian satellites.

It remains to be seen whether the negotiations will result in a concrete reduction of ballistic-missile threats. But speaking in Munich on Sunday, Mr. Putin's national security assistant, Sergei Ivanov, said:

"Restraining the so-called rogue nations - to use the American terminology - may be carried out more effectively from the standpoint of both cost and effectiveness by means of a common political effort. The situation in North Korea is the obvious example, which a year ago seemed much worse than it does today."

Mr. Ivanov's remarks followed those on Saturday by the U.S. defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who sought to allay European concerns by offering to help extend any anti-missile shield to Europe. Mr. Rumsfeld also pledged that the Bush administration would undertake extensive consultations with its allies and with Russia before taking any decision to pull out of the 1972 Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty, which bans national missile defenses.

Though Mr. Rumsfeld seemed satisfied that he had given European leaders a reasoned set of arguments that the United States was seeking no advantage in pursuing missile defenses and that Washington was determined to be a master of its own security, a number of senior congressional Republican worried aloud on the return flight to Washington that the United States had isolated itself while driving Europe and Russia closer together.

As Mr. Putin was preparing his diplomatic moves, the Russian defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, made a number of pointed comments Monday on the military implications of the Bush administration's planning.

Marshal Sergeyev, the former commander of Russia's strategic rocket forces labeled the American anti-missile proposal "son of 'Star Wars.'" Marshal Sergeyev also predicted, in remarks to the Swedish defense minister, Bjorn von Sydow, that the Bush administration would not be able to persuade most Western nations to abandon "the entire system of agreements which has led to strategic stability in the world" and to support American actions that would cause "those agreements to be scrapped."

Russia has asserted that if the United States withdraws from the 1972 treaty that bans nationwide anti-missile defenses, all of the strategic arms accords negotiated over the past 30 years would be invalid because they were based on the common principle of prohibiting an arms race in defensive weapons.

Marshal Sergeyev indicated that Russia in the meantime was making contingency plans to respond, not with a new missile buildup, which it cannot afford, but with "asymmetrical" technologies that would penetrate any missile shield.

"A lot of money was invested in those programs," he told the Interfax news agency, before they were abandoned at the end of the Cold War, "but we still have them and can take them up again."

Though American officials have repeatedly asserted that an anti-missile of 100 interceptors would not be initially directed at or effective against Russia's large arsenal of 3,000 or more strategic delivery systems, the Russian military establishment continues to express doubt that any American anti-missile shield would remain a limited system.

But Konstantin Cherevkov, a senior missile scientist at the Russian Space Academy, said last week in a newspaper commentary that "Russia considers the American position deceptive."

"There is reason to believe that the fielding of national anti-ballistic missile infrastructure would allow for a subsequent increase in its capabilities, to a level that would fully block our retaliatory capability," Mr. Cherevkov said.

---

India, China to discuss nuclear differences

Tuesday, February 06, 2001
The Hindu
By C. Raja Mohan
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2001/02/06/stories/0206000a.htm

NEW DELHI, FEB. 5. Senior officials from India and China will discuss here this week a wide range of international and regional security issues, including differences over nuclear non- proliferation and global arms control.

With Sino-Indian relations on the upswing, the big question is whether New Delhi and Beijing will try and find a way to manage their nuclear divergence better, which has cast a shadow on their ties.

India and China, however, share some positions on global disarmament, for example their commitment to total elimination of nuclear weapons. But the differences are quite sharp on most other issues.

India remains deeply troubled over what it sees as ``continuing Chinese nuclear and missile cooperation with Pakistan''. China either blandly denies it or insists that its nuclear and missile cooperation with Pakistan is in tune with its international legal obligations.

Beijing's attitude towards Indian nuclear and missile programmes is another matter of concern for New Delhi. Unlike the other major powers, China has been somewhat reluctant in giving up its formal emphasis on a rollback of India's nuclear and missile capabilities.

The two countries are also expected to exchange views on the plans of the new U.S. administration to press ahead with building defences against missiles. China is leading an international campaign against the plans, and could be looking for India's support on this issue.

India may, however, find it difficult to completely separate its concerns about Chinese proliferation of missiles in its neighbourhood and the emerging prospects for the deployment of missile defences in the region.

While India and China might be some distance away from thinking about cooperation on global arms control, a frank and candid exchange of views, diplomatic observers here say, would at least lead to a better appreciation of each other's nuclear concerns.

Mr. Wan Yi, Assistant Minister in the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is arriving here later this week for the second round of security dialogue.

The Indian delegation will be led by Mr. T.C.A. Rangachari, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs. Other senior officials dealing with disarmament issues will also join the Indian delegation.

India and China agreed to discuss their mutual nuclear concerns at the official level when the External Affairs Minister, Mr. Jaswant Singh, travelled to Beijing in June 1999.

The first round of the dialogue was held in early 2000 in Beijing. When the Chinese Foreign Minister, Mr. Tang Jiaxuan, came here last July, the two sides decided that the talks should be elevated to the level of additional secretaries.

---

NATO Is 'an Essential Forum' for the Missile-Defense Debate

Tuesday, February 6, 2001
International Herald Tribune
Joseph Fitchett IHT
http://www.iht.com/articles/9799.htm

NATO's top civilian official, Secretary-General George Robertson, will be deeply involved in consultations among Washington and the European capitals in the alliance about U.S. plans to deploy a missile defense system designed to intercept a small number of incoming ballistic missiles. He spoke to Joseph Fitchett of the International Herald Tribune about the changing political climate surrounding the proposal.

Q: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced U.S. intentions without a lot of details but with a lot of determination in a speech last weekend in Munich. Do you think it changed other nations' reluctance to get to grips with the issue?

A: Indeed, it did. Now the European allies have to accept that the Americans really intend to go ahead. Of course, the Bush team has redefined the program, much more ambitiously.

The new goal would offer some protection not just to the United States but to allies if they want it and to deployed forces as well. It might be based on ships as well as on land. That will require quite a lot of thinking to work out. Now that the question of "whether" it's going to happen has been settled, I want an engagement inside NATO between the Americans and the other allies about the "how" and the "when."

Q: Is NATO the right institution to discuss missile defense?

A: It's an essential forum. It's where the allies are, and it's the first port of call for the U.S. administration. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made it clear to me that NATO remains that for the new Bush administration. Keeping the allies abreast of U.S. thinking is an absolute priority, so I expect that engagement to start at the earliest possible opportunity.

Q: Do you feel that the Bush administration's approach can overcome opposition to missile defense that has been vehement among allied leaders and some sections of public opinion in Europe?

A: For that, we'll have to see what precisely is on offer. There's an assumption that Europeans are opposed to missile defense. But all the European publics have been told so far is that missile defense could destroy a foundation stone of arms control by ending a treaty [the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between Washington and Moscow in 1972].

The way it took off in America and Congress was that people were told that there's a threat from the proliferation of ballistic missiles with mass-destruction warheads and that, yes, there's something we can do about it. So do it, people said. European publics have not really heard that yet.

But European leaders are starting to acknowledge that there is a new threat. And when you look around, most of the states or entities that might use a few nuclear missiles are a lot closer to Europe than they are to the United States of America. But that point is not being made yet in Europe, not even in the press, so it hasn't reached public opinion. The real debate hasn't taken off yet in Europe.

The interesting point is that there is now a recognition by leaders - American, European and even Russian - that there is a new threat from the proliferation of ballistic missiles that has got to be dealt with. The Americans have said how they're going to deal with it. The Europeans are being offered a chance to share in that.

Q: The Russians have been vehemently opposed to U.S. moves that would end the curbs on missile defense imposed by the ABM Treaty. But Mr. Rumsfeld hinted in Senate testimony that Moscow might be interested in a deal. What's your analysis?

A: The Russians still have an official message, like a headline: no missile defense, no change to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But when you look closely, the Russians are also saying that they are going to produce a program for European missile defense. Now they've even starting to talk about ideas of boost phase interception to destroy missiles as they lift off. I'm not sure how that could be compatible with the ABM Treaty.

We'll have to see when the actual details of their proposal are put on the table and they come to the consultative NATO-Russia council. As you see, all these security questions eventually end up in NATO's lap.

---

Bush Can't Afford to Ignore Missile Defense, Envoys Tell Europeans

Tuesday, February 6, 2001
International Herald Tribune
Joseph Fitchett
http://www.iht.com/articles/9751.htm

MUNICH Henry Kissinger put it starkly to his European audience here last weekend: No American president can neglect an alternative to using nuclear weapons against a small nation poised to launch a ballistic missile at the United States.

The alternative, he said, is missile defense, whose technologies for intercepting incoming missiles promise now to be able to offer some protection against limited nuclear attacks.

The former secretary of state's plea was perhaps the most emotional in a weekend that represented the Bush administration's first real effort to sell Europe on its plan for an expensive system to defend against missile attacks.

When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld later argued that it was "a moral issue" for the United States to try to build a missile defense system, even the skeptical Europeans, who were numerous among the defense ministers and experts at the Munich Conference on International Security, understood that the new administration will not easily be swayed from the controversial plan.

Realists on the European side are already talking about trade-offs - such as American support for a stronger European defense role - in exchange for their acquiescence in a missile-defense program they vehemently oppose but are beginning to suspect is inevitable.

In urging allies to rethink their own objections to the Bush administration's decision to build a shield against limited nuclear attacks, Mr. Kissinger said that "total vulnerability should not be the price the United States is asked to pay" for trans-Atlantic solidarity.

Evoking his own feelings from the years in office when he often reviewed the devastating casualty figure from a nuclear strike, Mr. Kissinger said that no American leader, aware of the potential of emerging defensive technologies, could accept a situation in which "extinction of civilized life is one's only strategy" when faced with even a small nuclear attack.

The thrust of these presentations, backed by similar pleas from U.S. senators of both parties, was that the post Cold War world must change the old rules of deterrence, notably the theory of mutual assured destruction, in trying to cope with the most alarming current threats.

Those doctrines, and the arms control apparatus accompanying them, were credited with preventing a nuclear strike between the superpowers. But they are no longer adequate, U.S. officials say, in an era when the threat is liable to come from a suicidally reckless foe, perhaps a defeated leader ready to lash out with a nuclear weapon regardless of whether it would expose his country to annihilating retaliation.

The Bush administration's commitment to defensive technologies stems from a view that new research, unfettered by previous restrictions designed to respect arms control treaties, will enable the United States to protect itself - and its allies - from being attacked or intimidated by a country or terrorist group with a handful of long range missiles and nuclear warheads.

Mr. Rumsfeld is personally committed to missile defense: He headed a high level U.S. commission three years ago that shook up American views that rogue states were a remote nuclear threat. The commission's view, that a rogue state could catch the West off guard in this decade, started a groundswell of support in Congress for missile defense on the grounds that the threat effectively exists now.

"No U.S. president can responsibly say that his defense policy is calculated and designed to leave the American people undefended against threats that are known to exist," he said in Munich.

In resisting programs designed to intercept incoming missiles, critics have often argued that no system will ever be impenetrable. But Mr. Rumsfeld put the argument the other way: From a presidential viewpoint, he said, "a system of defense need not be perfect; but the American people must not be left completely defenseless."

He evoked the dilemma of a U.S. leader in a crisis and facing a few hostile nuclear missiles beyond the reach of ground troops. "He would be in a position where he had no choice but preemption," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

In other words, a nuclear strike could be brought on by American weakness in failing to develop anti-missile defenses. If there was at least some protection for American cities and for American forces in combat theaters, he suggested, U.S. leaders would have more room for maneuver short of a nuclear strike.

U.S. weakness in the face of even small nuclear threats, he said, could incite other countries to be recklessly aggressive and might fuel weakness in Washington. "When you're vulnerable, you're inclined to withdrawal, acquiescence," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

The European allies have shunned the subject of missile defense as an expensive new challenge and one that could shake up the scaffolding of arms curbs based on the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

By barring effective anti-missile defenses, the treaty encouraged Washington and Moscow to limit and finally start reducing their offensive arsenals because each side was confident that its rival remained vulnerable to attack.

The Bush administration has no intention of abandoning nuclear deterrence as a protection for the United States and for its allies, officials said in Munich.

Even if Washington and Moscow ultimately agree to cut their long-range arsenals down to 1,500 nuclear warheads, they said, it would leave Russia with more than enough missiles to be confident of overcoming any foreseeable U.S. defense.

A formula for accommodation with China looks more difficult because Beijing's nuclear intercontinental arsenal contains only a few hundred warheads.

But the problem may be susceptible to a political solution because Chinese leaders' main concern is to ensure that any missile shield is not used to promote independence for Taiwan, experts said in Munich.

---

U.S. Offers Aid on Missile Defense
Rumsfeld hopes to build support by helping allies

Sunday, February 4, 2001
San Francisco Chronicle
New York Times
Michael R. Gordon,
mailto:feedback@sfgate.com
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/02/04/MN157276.DTL

Munich -- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried yesterday to defuse opposition to the Bush administration's anti-missile plans by offering to help European nations and other allies to deploy missile defenses.

But while Rumsfeld assured European allies that the United States would consult with them on its anti-missile plan, he did not address in any detail one of the Europeans' principal concerns: how an anti-missile defense can be reconciled with strategic arms control and a productive relationship with Russia.

"The United States intends to develop and deploy a missile defense designed to defend our people and forces against a limited ballistic missile attack, and is prepared to assist friends and allies threatened by missile attack to deploy such defenses," Rumsfeld said in a speech to an annual conference of top political officials and defense specialists.

He underscored that President Bush was determined to proceed with an anti- missile defense of U.S. territory even if it could not overcome the objections from the Russians, Chinese and Europeans. He described a missile defense as nothing less than a moral imperative.

Missile defense was hardly the only sensitive issue yesterday. The Bush administration has reacted warily to the European Union's move to develop a 60, 000-strong rapid reaction force by 2003. While not opposing the initiative, Rumsfeld was clearly skeptical, and stressed the need for great care to ensure that the EU does not detract from NATO.

Bush's fatigue with the Balkan peacekeeping mission also remains a continuing source of anxiety in Europe. Rumsfeld said little on the subject yesterday, saying that the matter was under review at the White House.

The United States and Europe also have to decide how to proceed with NATO expansion, a topic that greatly worries the Russians.

But as European leaders have challenged the missile plan in recent weeks, the issue has come to the fore. The main European concern is that deployment of an anti-missile shield will undermine the framework of nuclear arms control and spoil relations with Russia.

As French President Jacques Chirac put it last month, a U.S. missile defense "cannot fail to relaunch the arms race in the world."

Russia has sought to stoke European fears, warning that it may abandon strategic U.S.-Russian arms constraints if the Bush administration abandons the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and deploys an anti-missile system.

The head of the Russian Security Council, Sergei Ivanov, is due to address the conference today, raising the specter of a U.S.-Russian tussle for European opinion.

In his attempts to sway European opinion, Rumsfeld presented several arguments. He insisted that anti-missile defenses could be reconciled with arms control, shying away from comments he made in congressional hearings that the ABM treaty was an anachronism.

He also sought to turn long-standing European concerns about U.S. isolationism or military intervention into arguments for missile defenses.

Without a missile shield, he suggested, future U.S. leaders might turn isolationist in a crisis and shrink from confronting a missile-wielding Third World aggressor. Alternatively, he warned, a U.S. leader might be forced to carry out a pre-emptive strike against a rogue nation.

"A system of defense need not be perfect; but the American people must not be left completely defenseless," Rumsfeld said. "It is not so much a technical question as a matter of a president's constitutional responsibility. Indeed, it is, in many respects, a moral issue."

Rumsfeld's case was helped by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., who told the meeting that there was a general consensus in Washington that some sort of missile defense should be deployed.

"The question from an American point of view is not whether we will have a national missile defense, but when and how," Lieberman said. "This is not a technologically feasible program now. We are some years away."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger also joined the call for missile defenses, adding to the sense of inevitability.

The European response to Rumsfeld's proposal was respectful, if restrained. German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer appeared to speak for most of his fellow European foreign ministers when he said that European nations were glad that the new administration in Washington wanted to consult them on the anti- missile plan, but that a missile program must not come at the expense of arms control. That is a difficult balancing act that neither the Americans nor the Europeans were prepared to discuss in detail.

Rumsfeld, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, has been in office for two weeks. The rest of the Bush administration is also still in its infancy.

Still, Rumsfeld's offer to help the Europeans and other allies deploy defenses raised a number of tricky questions.

The administration has yet to explain which land-based, sea-based or space- based systems it would use. As a result, it is impossible to say how long it would take to develop a system, what it would cost or to what extent it would require modification of the ABM treaty.

---

Canada Forges Diplomatic Ties with North Korea

February 6, 2001
Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-canada-.html

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada said Tuesday it had established diplomatic relations with North Korea, the isolated impoverished Stalinist state that is slowly opening up to the outside world.

Canada becomes the fourth member of the Group of Eight powerful nations -- after Russia, Italy and Britain -- to fully recognize the heavily-armed state of 22 million people, which the West fears still has the potential to destabilize large parts of the Far East.

``The situation has changed there and we have come to the conclusion that dialogue is better than isolation,'' Prime Minister Jean Chretien told reporters.

Foreign Minister John Manley said that Canada believed forging closer relations with Pyongyang was the best way to contribute to security, non-proliferation and humanitarian challenges in the region.

``Establishing diplomatic relations will create formal channels through which Canada and North Korea can further enhance communications and cooperation and develop a closer understanding of each other,'' Manley said in a statement.

In the last two months Britain and the Netherlands have established diplomatic relations with North Korea. Two weeks ago the German cabinet approved plans to move forward with cementing diplomatic ties with Pyongyang.

A senior Canadian official said Ottawa supported South Korean President Kim Dae-jung's ``sunshine policy'' of engagement with North Korea. ``We want to help the South Korean sunshine policy. We think we have a small role to play. I certainly think Canada has a role to help the North Korean government and officials along in internationalizing themselves,'' he told Reuters.

Britain said in December that engagement and not estrangement was the best policy toward the Stalinist country, which until recently was branded by the West as a pariah for its isolationism and aggressive nuclear proliferation policies.

The United States is currently trying to reach agreement with North Korea under which Pyongyang would stop producing and selling ballistic missiles in exchange for foreign help in launching satellites.

POLITICAL EXCHANGES

The Canadian official said Ottawa and North Korea, which need to agree on the number of diplomats in each country, were unlikely to open embassies within the next year or so.

``We're not going to open an embassy in Pyongyang for political reasons. We're going to open an embassy -- and it would be a small one -- when there's enough business going back and forth,'' the official said.

He said such business would include political exchanges, visits by non-governmental organizations, Canadian aid programs and commercial business.

``The ball is to some extent in the North Korean court. If they're very forthcoming and allow us access and everything else -- which of course we've insisted upon -- it moves the (ball) forward and makes it easier.''

Manley told reporters that until Ottawa opened an embassy in Pyongyang, Canada's ambassador to Beijing would handle diplomatic relations with North Korea. The closest official North Korean representation to Ottawa is in New York.

Manley said that since 1997 Ottawa had donated approximately C$30 million ($20 million) in humanitarian aid to North Korea through the United Nations World Food Program and Canadian aid organizations.

The Canadian official said Ottawa might be able to increase its aid to North Korea, which has been badly hit by drought and natural disasters over the last few years.

------

Europe warms to missile defense

February 6, 2001
Washington Times
By David R. Sands
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-200126213247.htm

The Bush administration's missile defense plan may not prove as tough a sell in Europe as expected.

While China and Russia remain staunchly opposed to the idea, cracks in the once-solid skepticism of NATO's European allies have been widening noticeably since President Bush took office.

Javier Solana, the former NATO secretary-general who now sets security policy for the European Union, told reporters in Washington yesterday that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty - which forbids the kind of system Mr. Bush says he is determined to build - "is not the Bible."

"For us Europeans, what we would like is for the major powers to [reach a deal] by consensus if possible," he said.

But he added that the United States has the "right to deploy" such a system if it concludes it will enhance its national security.

And Lord George Robertson, Mr. Solana's successor as head of NATO, told a news conference in Brussels yesterday that "there has to be an acceptance [among U.S. allies] that the decision on missile defense was made in the U.S. presidential election."

Analysts said the Bush administration deserves credit in its first weeks for skillfully changing the debate over national missile defense (NMD), promising closer consultation with allies over the effect of the system while leaving no doubt that the United States is moving ahead with testing and deployment.

"I don't think the Clinton administration really took a proactive role in pushing missile defense," said W. Bruce Weinrod, a senior Pentagon official under President George Bush in the early 1990s. "They either didn't explain the idea or explained it in a halfhearted way."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in his first visit to Europe since taking over at the Pentagon, left little doubt in an address in Munich on Saturday that a U.S. missile defense system would be built, whatever the international repercussions.

Mr. Rumsfeld also argued that the United States' NMD concept was defensive and would strengthen trans-Atlantic ties.

"The Bush people have been doing a very good job of making missile defense seem inevitable to the Europeans," said Clay Clemens, an analyst on European politics at the College of William and Mary.

"The attitude right now is a lot less than enthusiasm but a fair deal more than resignation, and that's a shift," he said.

Kim Holmes, a foreign policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, said he found during a recent European tour that opposition from officials and analysts in Europe weakened appreciably when the "national" was dropped from NMD discussions.

"If it's pitched as a system that doesn't leave the allies out, they tend to like it a lot more," he said.

He also said the Bush administration's evident determination to proceed had robbed critics of a crucial debating point.

"You immediately jump past the whole issue of deployment, where the Russians and Chinese will try anything to delay the process or create problems," he said.

Already, the opposition Conservatives in Britain and the Christian Social Union in Germany have come out in support of the U.S. missile defense plan, particularly if the proposed shield can be extended to Europe.

Although neither party appears poised to take power, the fact that they have been able to embrace the U.S. idea demonstrates the changing nature of the debate in Europe, Mr. Clemens said.

The endorsement by Britain's Conservatives has put the Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair in a bind, with national elections widely expected this spring.

Mr. Blair and Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who visits Washington this week, have been forced to reconcile widespread European doubts about the idea with their desire to preserve Britain's "special relationship" with the United States as a new, conservative administration takes power here.

Friedbert Pfluger, who chairs the European policy committee for Germany's center-right Christian Democratic Party, said the Bush administration had been much more open in discussing missile defense concepts than its predecessor.

"The whole spirit of the discussion is much more sensitive in tone and spirit to European concerns compared to a year ago," said Mr. Pfluger, whose party also recently said it was willing to consider the NMD idea on its merits.

The NMD debate in Europe has shifted so quickly that American critics accuse the Bush administration of trying to create a false impression that the battle is over.

"Once again, proponents of missile defense are putting the cart before the horse," said John Isaacs, president of the anti-NMD Council for a Livable World.

"Rumsfeld is trying to give the illusion that deployment is inevitable, when there is no workable technology ready for development," he said.

It remains true that no Western European leader has enthusiastically endorsed the U.S. missile defense plan. Mr. Pfluger said that public sentiment in Europe is largely skeptical of the plan and that most people in Germany aren't ready to abandon the ABM Treaty and other Cold War barriers to missile defenses.

"But we have to be open to the idea of escaping the world of deterrence," he said. "Why should deterrence be forever?"

-------- business

Government Reimburses Nuclear Weapons Contractors for Legal Bills

February 6, 2001
Associated Press
KATHERINE RIZZO Writer
http://www.statenews.org/news/2001/febuary/ap-020601-02.html

WASHINGTON (AP) - When ailing workers or their survivors sue federal contractors over exposure to deadly chemicals or radioactive material at weapons plants, taxpayers routinely get the company's legal bill.

The arrangement often frustrates those whom former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson liked to call Cold War veterans.

"It's terrible,'' said Corrilla Kelly, the widow of a 27-year veteran of the Fernald uranium processing plant in southwest Ohio. "How do you fight all the money of the government?''

Her late husband, Herbert Kelly, spent eight years trying to get workers compensation for lung cancer he blamed on his workplace. He was challenged at every turn by government-reimbursed lawyers who suggested his illness was caused by cigarettes he had given up 15 years before getting sick.

David Norgard, who worked at Brush Wellman Corp.'s Elmore, Ohio, plant and is suing the beryllium maker, said "it really did hit hard'' to learn the government reimburses the company for legal fees.

"It's very upsetting,'' he said. "I think the company was responsible and the company ought to pay.''

Workers suing Brush contend the company could have done more to protect them from an incurable lung disease blamed on exposure to beryllium, a metal used in nuclear weapons production.

Brush maintains that, through the years, it tried to protect the health of its workers based on what was known at the time. It also said it has helped employees with confirmed Chronic Beryllium Disease get state workers compensation.

"To our knowledge, there is no current or former Brush Wellman employee with confirmed CBD who have not been successful in establishing a workers' compensation claim,'' said Hugh D. Hanes, the company's vice president for government relations.

Some of the workers suing say that's not enough.

Brush spokesman Patrick Carpenter said it was company policy not to discuss litigation, but that it defends lawsuits aggressively and pursues indemnification from the government whenever allowed by its contracts.

For decades, military contracts have allowed companies that handle dangerous or radioactive material to be reimbursed for responding in court or before state workers compensation boards to employees who blame their illnesses on workplace exposure. Taxpayers also pick up the tab for lawyers to fight claims by weapons plant neighbors.

How much the government has reimbursed Brush, other vendors, and the companies that ran its weapons plants during the Cold War era has not been documented.

The Energy Department has no estimate, and because of the transition to the new administration could not make an official available to discuss the issue.

The last time congressional auditors looked at the issue, in 1994, the General Accounting Office found that reimbursing contractors for the cost of litigation - not including the cost of fighting workers compensation claims - was $40 million in fiscal year 1992.

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by lawyers for some of the workers showed that in just a handful of large cases, including a class action suit against the former operators of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state, the government has paid outside lawyers more than $94 million.

"In a normal lawsuit, the cost of litigation is part of the reasoning that goes into settling,'' said Louise Roselle, a Cincinnati lawyer who represents weapons plant workers and neighbors in lawsuits against the contractors.

"These lawyers have no incentive to settle, and the government doesn't seem to care. We have four cases in this firm that are 10 years old or older. All four involve weapons plants,'' she said. "They could have settled a lot of cases for the money they've already spent.''

"It gives the contractors essentially unlimited resources to fight individual workers,'' agreed David Michaels, the Energy Department's top health official under Richardson.

"But I could make the argument either way. The companies were paid lots of money to do this work, but their specifications were set by the federal government, which assumed a responsibility for what happened,'' he said.

Some of the companies involved in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb, worked for $1 a year but insisted on indemnification from lawsuits.

Subsequent contractors were better paid for the dangerous, secretive work, but also were indemnified.

In recent years, the Energy Department's legal office has reined in reimbursements for fighting workers with illness claims, Michaels said. A new law passed late last year also ordered the government to stop fighting claims from workers with specific illnesses that are easily connected to on-the-job exposure at a weapons plant.

For others, the new law instructs the government to stop fighting the claims if special medical boards rule in the workers' favor. Those boards, have not yet been set up.

-------- canada

Chretien, Bush Strike Up the Bond

Tuesday, February 6, 2001
Washington Post
By DeNeen L. Brown and Dana Milbank

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and President Bush emerged from a meeting and dinner at the White House last night pledging friendship and promising to consult each other on issues facing the two countries, including drilling in the Arctic, trade and a proposal to build a ballistic missile shield.

"I assured him that we will consult and keep him abreast of decisions that we make here that will affect Canada and peace in the world," Bush told reporters after the meeting....

"There was a long interchange on energy," said a senior administration official, who asked not to be identified. "They agreed to consult. The president said the missile defense [systems] were in the planning phases. There is a new reality in the world." ...

-------- china

Top Chinese Official to Make U.S. Trip in March

February 6, 2001
Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/china-usa-visit.html

BEIJING, Feb 6 - China's foreign policy tsar, Qian Qichen, will travel to the United States next month in the first visit by a senior Chinese official under the George W. Bush administration, diplomats said on Tuesday.

The visit by Vice Premier Qian, a foreign affairs veteran who overseas China's policies toward Taiwan, was seen as a key gesture by China in maintaining continuity in bilateral ties after Republican Bush moved into the White House last month.

President Bush is not expected to meet his Chinese counterpart Jiang Zemin until October, when China hosts an informal summit of Asia Pacific leaders in Shanghai.

Hanging over bilateral ties, however, are a host of perennial thorny issues, including Taiwan and human rights, as well as U.S. plans to build an anti-missile shield in the face of strident opposition by China, Russia and others.

In another effort to keep ties on an even keel under the new U.S. administration, U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher held talks with Premier Zhu Rongji in Beijing on Tuesday, a day before Prueher was slated to travel to Washington, U.S. diplomats said.

CHINA WANTS TO TALK TAIWAN

China and the United States exchanged words last month, when Beijing rejected fresh U.S. condemnation of its harsh, 18-month-old crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement and said further criticism would harm relations.

But Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi, asked by reporters on Tuesday about Qian's visit, made it clear Taiwan was foremost in Beijing's mind.

``The Taiwan issue is the core issue and the most sensitive question in China-U.S. relations,'' Sun told a news conference.

The spokesman reiterated China's demand that the United States uphold the ``one China'' policy, under which Washington recognises only Beijing's government and shuns official ties with the self-governing island.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has reiterated America's long-standing commitment to the ``one China'' principle, but also underscored U.S. opposition to reunification of Taiwan with the mainland by force.

Powell also promised to provide for Taiwan's defence needs, as Washington has done even after opening diplomatic relations with Beijing in 1979.

The dispatch of Qian to Washington has been welcomed by diplomats because last month he introduced some flexibility to China's tough terms for contacts with Taiwan, which has been separated from the mainland since the end of a civil war in 1949.

In what China billed as a ``major goodwill gesture'' to Taiwan, Qian said any formula could be discussed, including a loose confederation, to reunify mainland China and Taiwan.

SPACE PLANS SLAMMED

Sun also reiterated China's demand that the United States scrap its National Missile Defence (NMD) scheme, which calls for building a shield to protect the United States from missile attack by hostile states, including Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

China has steadfastly opposed the NMD system, fearing that even a limited U.S. missile shield would neutralise its modest strategic arsenal and force it to enter a costly arms race.

Sun also expressed ``deep concern'' over a space war game the U.S. air force conducted last month in Colorado.

``This exercise again makes it clear that the militarisation of outer space is a pressing problem,'' Sun said and urged all powers to avoid an arms race in space.

Chinese media have attacked the space war game, following statements by participants that drills aimed at finding out how to defend U.S. satellites and destroy enemy ones took China as the adversary in a hypothetical conflict in 2017.

-------- depleted uranium

MORE THAN DEPLETED URANIUM?

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2001
Christian Science Monitor
WORLD Today's Story Line:
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/02/05/fp6s2-csm.shtml

The possibility that US tank-piercing ammunition used in the Balkans wars contained more than just depleted uranium (DU) has prompted scientists to reexamine their skepticism about health risks to veterans, The Associated Press reports. As the Monitor reported Jan. 18 (see story), European nations are concerned that cancer cases reported by European veterans were linked to DU. Scientists assumed the bullets were made of raw uranium ore. But now the Pentagon says ammo used in the 1999 Kosovo conflict was tainted with traces of plutonium, neptunium, and americium - byproducts of nuclear reactors that are much more radioactive than DU. Last week, NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson said that Balkans peacekeepers have not been shown to suffer health damage from DU ammunition. US officials say the shells contained mere traces of plutonium, not enough to cause harm.

http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/01/18/p7s1.htm

---

Some Gulf War Veterans May Suffer from Chemicals at Home
"Clearly, Gulf War veterans are suffering,"

Jul.2000
Eric Sabo, Medical Writer
http://cbshealthwatch.health.aol.com/aolmedscape/p/G_Library/Library_print.asp ?RecID=217578&Channel=nan&ContentType=Library

Nearly a decade after US troops went to battle against Iraq, many Gulf War veterans still complain of strange aches and pains, fatigue, bouts of dizziness, and memory problems. Though some experts doubt that these symptoms are the result of the Gulf War, there is a continuing worldwide debate over what's causing this mysterious disorder.

The symptoms of MCS may be real, but the causes are not so apparent.

Investigators from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas recently found that some Gulf War veterans may have suffered damage to parts of the brain that control coordination and balance. They say this may be the consequence of exposure to low levels of nerve gas, and of the pyridostigmine bromide pills soldiers took to protect themselves from it. Other possible explanations for Gulf War syndrome include smoke from oil well fires, contaminated sand, extreme weather conditions, depleted uranium, pesticides, infectious diseases, and stress.

But the cluster of ailments that plague Gulf War veterans are very similar to the symptoms of another little-understood illness: multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS).

Instead of nerve gas drugs, however, those with MCS say that their troubles lie with common chemicals and household items. A whiff of hairspray, laundry detergent, even deodorant can leave chemically sensitive people just as sick as those who served in the Gulf War.

War Hits Home

These striking similarities have prompted suggestions that Gulf War syndrome is really just a battle-hardened version of MCS, which some see as a psychological problem rather than a physical one. A new study finds that some Gulf War vets are highly sensitive to chemicals that most people can tolerate and that their reactions could stem from imaginary causes. These findings, published recently in the Archives of Internal Medicine, do not discount that Gulf War syndrome exists, but they do help identify a group of soldiers who react to smells that exist in both war and peacetime.

"This study doesn't explain Gulf War syndrome more than any others do," says Donald Black, lead researcher and a psychiatrist at the University of Iowa College of Medicine. "Their illness is still a mystery, but we're exploring a concept so that we can identify people and study them."

Further Mystery

The discovery that some veterans potentially suffer from MCS does not do much for hope of an explanation. Medical organizations including the American Medical Association do not consider multiple chemical sensitivity a bona fide disease because there is no hard proof that common household items lead to physical ailments. The symptoms may be real, but the causes are not so apparent.

"One of the typical complaints is anxiety when they smell a prominent odor," says Dr. Black. "Many are probably odor phobic."

"Clearly, Gulf War veterans are suffering," says Dr. Bradley Doebbeling of the University of Iowa, who also worked on the study. "The $100,000 question is: 'What from?'"

The Iowa team interviewed more than 3,600 National Guard Reserves who either served in Iraq or were stationed in the United States during the Gulf War. They surveyed the soldiers about their physical and mental health. Compared to troops who remained in the United States, Gulf War veterans were more than twice as likely to report MCS symptoms like strong aversions to vehicle exhaust,cosmetics, or smog. Many chemically sensitive vets also said they were treated for psychological problems before the war, which may help explain their unusual reactions to generally tolerable chemicals.

"One of the typical complaints is anxiety when they smell a prominent odor," says Dr. Black. "Many are probably odor phobic."

Emotional Problems: Common (I Wonder Why)??

Other research suggests that nearly half of people with MCS also suffer from some form of mental illness. MCS can affect how patients respond to common chemicals. A smell that is fine for some is a potential threat to people with MCS. When Canadian researchers had people with chemical sensitivities inhale different combinations of oxygen and carbon dioxide, 50-90% experienced panic attacks. In contrast, only 5% of the healthy volunteers responded as dramatically to the same breathing tests.

This doesn't mean that people with MCS suffer from some phantom illness. Anxiety and depression are very real conditions and treating these problems, some suggest, may help relieve the symptoms linked to chemical exposure. "If they are depressed, we know how to treat that," says Dr. Black. "Part of problem is that there are a group of doctors going around and telling people they need to withdraw and not expose themselves to these dangerous chemicals, which in my view just promotes illness behavior."

Lawyer Diagnosis

Not everyone agrees that MCS is a mental disorder: Many patients go to extraordinary lengths to avoid contact with chemicals. One study found that 97% of those with chemical sensitivities had stopped activities outside their home and more than 60% even cut back on spending time with their family. Although MCS is not a medically recognized illness, the federal government prevents employers from discriminating against chemically sensitive workers on a case-by-case basis. Hundreds of MCS patients have filed suit against companies for not accommodating their alleged chemical ailments. "Multiple chemical sensitivity may become a disease by a legal fiat," notes Dr. Roy Dehart of the University of Oklahoma.

Whether MCS is caused by something in the air or in the mind, experts say that chemical sensitivity can be as disabling as any other disease. Gulf War veterans who suffer these same disturbing symptoms may find that the answer to their problem is closer to home.

"There is no simple answer to Gulf War illness," said Dr. Claudia Miller of the University of Texas at San Antonio in recent congressional hearings. "But if we concentrate less on the original toxicants and more on the underlying disease mechanism, I believe we can make progress in understanding why these people are sick and what we can do to help them."

--

Some Gulf War Veterans May Suffer from Chemicals at Home

Just a note: the medical diagnosis of MCS is provable with appropriate testing and improvable with appropriate treatments. It is, however, an inconvenient and has the potential of being a devastating diagnosis (because the cause and effects are provable) for the chemical, pharmaceutical and government (DOD) industries. Has been provable for quite a few years. However, them that controls the big bucks controls the medical research, the media and the medical industry. The chemicals we have been told for years are 'good' for us have been poisoning us and our government, if one researches it, is the main 'allower' of this to happen - we were sold out to big money. Vaccines are NOT safe or effective yet the vaccine industry is protected from law suit by congressional action, which also allows them to not do studies on the effectiveness or long term effects (if you count 3 weeks as long term). Mercury is an extremely toxic metal and disintegrates into the body via, main source, DENTAL fillings. Fact. ADA holds the patent on this poison. Flourides and chlorine are TOXINS added to our everyday uses and 'forced' on us by paid off congressmen and industrial giants looking for a 'profitable' way to discard industrial waste. Convenience, crap foods are taking over the grocery and the meals kids get at school, devoid of nutrition and high in pesticides. Soda and junk food sold in schools because the schools get $ to allow them there (specific brands priority). DU is toxic and radioactive, along with other radioactive metals yet DOE 'reclassifies' them and releases them for use (incorporation) into multiple productrs distributed all over (not kept track of so no 'trail' of illness/death). Solution to pollution is dilution, guys. CFIDS is the fastest growing illness in the US and the world. It sure appears to me that MCS follows CFIDS. Chemical cause, doesn't make sense to have a 'chemical' cure. Especially when this is proven. Scientific research designed to produce facts takes a back seat to industry/government desires when it comes to cause and liability.

Laura

--

Comments:

I have no doubts the odor phobia exists, same things happen around OR from too much fluorides exposures. Allergies also.

The mystery ills are fabricated, there are direct links to toxic exposures and harm to the immune system. Chemical toxics added onto the persistent ones causing more of the ills can literally be felt as these toxics temporarily affect the immune cells performance.

With snake bites the first area to be highly affected is the lymph system, same with other toxics as well.

-------- korea

North Korea's energy woes probed

Saturday, February 3, 2001
Environmental News Network
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/02/02032001/ap_korea_41804.asp

North Korea has agreed to open itself up to South Korean officials who will inspect its power industry before deciding whether to provide surplus electricity to the energy-starved communist nation, the Seoul government said Saturday.

Like food shortages, energy shortfalls in North Korea are severe. Power failures are common even in Pyongyang, the North's capital, and travelers have reported seeing public buildings and homes without heating and electricity during the country's frigid winter.

North Korea requested 500,000 kilowatts of electricity from South Korea in late December when they held high-level talks in Pyongyang dealing exclusively with economic cooperation. The meeting was an outgrowth of last June's historic summit in which the leaders of the two Koreas agreed to work together toward reconciliation.

The South has said it will consider the North's electricity request only after a joint survey of its energy shortages. The two Koreas exchanged agreements Saturday calling for the unprecedented joint field survey to begin within the month.

South Korean officials say most of the North's aging Russian-made power plants can now produce 2 million kilowatts a year, about a third of their original capacity.

In 1994, North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear program. In return, the United States, Japan and South Korea are building two modern reactors in a rural village in the northeastern part of North Korea.

The light-water reactors will replace Soviet-designed graphite-moderated reactors, which experts say produce greater amounts of weapons-grade plutonium. Completion of the first reactor had been scheduled for 2003, but delays have pushed the date back several years.

Separate talks on other projects key to rapprochement on the divided Korean peninsula - building a cross-border railroad and highway, an industrial park in the North and a dam near the border - will begin either in February or March, Seoul's Unification Ministry said in a news release.

Besides economic exchanges, the two Koreas also are promoting humanitarian projects such as temporary reunions of families separated by the 1950-53 Korean War. They will hold another round of such reunions for 100 separated family members from each side Feb. 26-28, the third since the June summit.

In the months since the June summit, the two Koreas have made more progress toward reconciliation than in the five decades since they were divided in 1945.

The Korean War ended without a peace treaty, and the border between North and South Korea remains closed, with about a million troops standing guard on each side.

Meanwhile, North Korea on Saturday accused Japan of stockpiling nuclear fuel to make atomic bombs.

Japanese officials say fuel rods produced by the Belgian company Belgonucleaire from plutonium reprocessed by France's state-owned nuclear group Cogema and shipped from France to Japan will be used to generate energy at a Japanese nuclear power plant.

But North Korea claimed in the state-run newspaper Minju Joson that Japan intends to use the fuel to build atomic weapons. The article was carried by the North's official foreign news outlet, KCNA, monitored in Seoul.

-------- missle defense

The Missile Offensive

Tuesday, February 6, 2001
International Herald Tribune
THE WASHINGTON POST
http://www.iht.com/articles/9836.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30996-2001Feb5?language=printer

THE BUSH administration appears to have concluded that the best defense of security initiatives opposed by U.S. allies is a good offense. Over the weekend Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld insisted to a conference of skeptical NATO officials in Munich that the development and deployment of a ballistic missile defense system was nothing less than a moral imperative, "not so much a technical question as a matter of the president's constitutional responsibility." The United States, he said, is prepared to consult with Europe; but the Europeans need to get over their Cold War-era worries about an arms race or Russia and accept that America's defense needs have changed.

There is a strategy behind these statements. By creating a sense that missile defense is inevitable, the administration hopes to defuse a potentially divisive debate within NATO before it can get hot. That would have the added benefit of neutralizing an emerging Russian strategy of fomenting European opposition, and encourage Moscow to seriously negotiate the modification or scrapping of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, perhaps in conjunction with strategic nuclear arms reductions.

Still, it is striking how little seemed to lie behind Mr. Rumsfeld's opening gambit. On the plane to Munich, he conceded that he was not prepared to talk about any specifics of the missile defense initiative, and said that he had had only one meeting on it so far as defense secretary. Mr. Bush and his advisers have yet to spell out what sort of defense system they favor, and there seem to be sharply divided opinions about it within the Republican Party. Some want to proceed with the limited 100-interceptor system pursued by the Clinton administration, even though it has failed two out of three flight tests so far; other experts, including some close to Mr. Rumsfeld, back a sea-based system, a space-based system or some combination of all three. Only one thing seems certain so far: The Bush administration's first budget will contain nothing close to the massive spending increases that would be required to put any of the missile defense projects on the fast track.

Deferring any big spending or firm decision on missile defense until a thorough review can be conducted, and a workable technology found, seems a wise course. But it's worth noting the gap between that necessary process and the aggressive diplomatic posturing. Perhaps the new administration will succeed in convincing the world that a U.S. missile defense is inevitable if it declares it loudly and from the beginning. But as the Munich conference showed, Mr. Bush has much else to discuss with the Europeans, including the proposal for a European defense force separate from NATO and future deployments -- or withdrawals -- of American troops in the Balkans. The risk is that instead of resolving these difficult and pressing questions, Mr. Bush's relations with Europe will be shaped in their opening months by debate over a weapons system that has not yet been chosen, proven or paid for, and that, even in the best of circumstances, won't materialize for years.

--------

Russia issues missile defence warning

February 6, 2001
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/02/06/russia.missiles/index.html

MOSCOW, Russia (CNN) -- A proposed U.S. scheme to develop a system to destroy missiles in flight would be ineffective against Russian technology, Russia's defence minister has warned.

Igor Sergeyev said old Soviet technologies developed in the 1980s to oppose Ronald Reagan's Star Wars plan could easily pierce the proposed U.S. National Missile Defense (NMD) system.

The minister added: "We had three mighty programmes to asymmetrically counteract U.S. missile defences during Reagan's Star Wars. We still have them and can take them up again."

He said that the Soviet Union had spent enough money on the programmes to take them beyond the stage of research and development at the moment when they were halted.

Sergeyev warning follows a threat by a leading Russian security official that U.S. plans to deploy an anti-missile system would lead to a new arms race.

Sergei Ivanov, secretary of Russia's security council, said the plan would undermine world stability, and he offered Washington talks on substantial arms cuts if it abandoned the scheme.

Russia also says developing the NMD system would effectively rip up the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which was designed to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

"The destruction of the treaty will result in the annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new arms race," Ivanov said.

Defence and security officials from Europe and Asia also expressed concern at Washington's plan to press ahead with its missile system.

At a conference in Munich on Sunday, they said it could spur a new international arms competition and scuttle existing accords such as the ABM Treaty.

Sergeyev said U.S. faith in its defence concept was misplaced. "The Americans may regard these systems as unique, but we do not share their opinion," he said.

"These are really complex technologies, but complex technologies, as a rule, are not reliable."

Sergeyev added that the Russian military could offer its U.S. counterparts proof that missile defence "wouldn't give absolute confidence in its inviolability."

"On the contrary, it will trigger a new spiral in the arms race and ruin the existing system of arms control," Sergeyev said.

Moscow has fiercely opposed U.S. proposals to modify the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow for the deployment of NMD which U.S. officials say is needed to guard against threats from countries such as North Korea and Iraq.

The new U.S. Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has stressed the missile defence plan is being developed in the interest of global security.

--------

U.S. strategy to isolate China on NMD

Tuesday, February 06, 2001
The Hindu
By F.J. Khergamvala
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2001/02/06/stories/0306000b.htm

TOKYO, FEB. 5. To all intents and purposes, the U.S. has conveyed to China that it should get used to the idea that the U.S. will deploy a missile defence system, but specific objections from Beijing will be dealt with in a bilateral arrangement.

Strategically, the U.S. will divide and rule the missile defence arrangement of a scheme yet to be proven technologically and financially viable.

This is the sub-text of two very recent events. One, the just concluded European security meeting in Munich and addressed by the U.S. Defence Secretary, Mr. Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Next, as reported by The New York Times, a visit to China last week by a group of unofficial U.S. experts to discuss the matter with China. Beijing made available not just its academia to the visiting group, but its officials too.

The agenda: to extort transparency out of the Chinese on their arsenal, to reach an understanding about the size of a U.S. missile defence shield and, though unstated, to assure Beijing that a shield over Taiwan will not be sufficient to encourage secessionist elements on the island to go too far.

At the meeting in Munich, Mr. Rumsfeld addressed some of Russia's concerns, shared fully by major European powers, notably France and Germany.

Apparently, without talking one on one with Moscow, he thought it premature to address how the intent to deploy the theatre missile defence (TMD) within a newly structured nuclear relationship and the West's relationship with Russia.

At no stage did Mr. Rumsfeld home in on China's objections to missile defence. The Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which Mr. Rumsfeld explicitly stated was dated, due to a whole lot of reasons, is a bilateral treaty.

It has little or nothing to do with China. The overall strategy now appears to be to create a wedge between Russia and Europe, within Europe and between Russia and China. The East Asia aspect will be taken care of by dealing with China bilaterally. Russia and China are drafting a strategic partnership treaty document.

One of its fringe purposes, according to analysts, is to try and prevent Russia from doing a deal with the U.S. on missile defence. Incidentally, quite notably, for the first time a top U.S. official and his delegation dropped the term ``national'' from the term national missile defence, thus definitively broadening its scope to a global level, with the emphasis on protecting U.S. forces deployed globally and allies.

This brings the China concern into sharper focus and it could not be lost on Beijing that its own position on bilateral negotiations with the new U.S. administration will be conditioned by at least five factors.

The ability to withstand and expend resources on an arms race with the U.S.; its penchant for doing bilateral deals instead of subscribing to international arms treaties has left it without a buffer unlike the old ABM which the Russians are sheltered by; China's ability to join forces with Russia; the effectiveness of its so-called Pakistan-Iran card and most vital, the Taiwan factor.

China is probably under no illusion on two other counts. That, despite its apparent silence, Japan is the U.S.'s foremost partner in one leg of the triad, namely the sea based TMD.

Japan is already spending money into the LEAP or Light Exo- atmospheric Project, eventually to be mounted on Japan's Aegis class vessels. Next, that everybody knows a TMD will be deployed in East Asia, ostensibly and at the very least to provide the outer concentric to defend the 100,000 U.S. forces in the region, in Japan, in South Korea and aboard vessels. Conversely, everybody knows that despite China's objections, Beijing itself is going ahead with increasing its own mobile nuclear forces.

China's Vice-Premier, the foreign policy czar, Mr. Qian Qichen heads to the U.S. next month with the apparent purpose of influencing a U.S. decision in April on Taiwan's annual arms purchase request. This is obliquely connected to the TMD. Mr. Qian's primary effort is to coax the Bush administration to follow its predecessor in denying Taiwan the Arleigh-Burke class vessels bearing the Aegis equipped battle-management systems. It is only on an Aegis equipped vessel can a sea based missile interceptor complex be deployed. Anyhow, the new arms race is on. It will take a lot of resistance for India and Pakistan not to join, or a lot of money as entry fee.

---

NATO Is 'an Essential Forum' for the Missile-Defense Debate

Tuesday, February 6, 2001
International Herald Tribune
Joseph Fitchett IHT
http://www.iht.com/articles/9799.htm

NATO's top civilian official, Secretary-General George Robertson, will be deeply involved in consultations among Washington and the European capitals in the alliance about U.S. plans to deploy a missile defense system designed to intercept a small number of incoming ballistic missiles. He spoke to Joseph Fitchett of the International Herald Tribune about the changing political climate surrounding the proposal.

Q: Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced U.S. intentions without a lot of details but with a lot of determination in a speech last weekend in Munich. Do you think it changed other nations' reluctance to get to grips with the issue?

A: Indeed, it did. Now the European allies have to accept that the Americans really intend to go ahead. Of course, the Bush team has redefined the program, much more ambitiously.

The new goal would offer some protection not just to the United States but to allies if they want it and to deployed forces as well. It might be based on ships as well as on land. That will require quite a lot of thinking to work out. Now that the question of "whether" it's going to happen has been settled, I want an engagement inside NATO between the Americans and the other allies about the "how" and the "when."

Q: Is NATO the right institution to discuss missile defense?

A: It's an essential forum. It's where the allies are, and it's the first port of call for the U.S. administration. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld made it clear to me that NATO remains that for the new Bush administration. Keeping the allies abreast of U.S. thinking is an absolute priority, so I expect that engagement to start at the earliest possible opportunity.

Q: Do you feel that the Bush administration's approach can overcome opposition to missile defense that has been vehement among allied leaders and some sections of public opinion in Europe?

A: For that, we'll have to see what precisely is on offer. There's an assumption that Europeans are opposed to missile defense. But all the European publics have been told so far is that missile defense could destroy a foundation stone of arms control by ending a treaty [the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between Washington and Moscow in 1972].

The way it took off in America and Congress was that people were told that there's a threat from the proliferation of ballistic missiles with mass-destruction warheads and that, yes, there's something we can do about it. So do it, people said. European publics have not really heard that yet.

But European leaders are starting to acknowledge that there is a new threat. And when you look around, most of the states or entities that might use a few nuclear missiles are a lot closer to Europe than they are to the United States of America. But that point is not being made yet in Europe, not even in the press, so it hasn't reached public opinion. The real debate hasn't taken off yet in Europe.

The interesting point is that there is now a recognition by leaders - American, European and even Russian - that there is a new threat from the proliferation of ballistic missiles that has got to be dealt with. The Americans have said how they're going to deal with it. The Europeans are being offered a chance to share in that.

Q: The Russians have been vehemently opposed to U.S. moves that would end the curbs on missile defense imposed by the ABM Treaty. But Mr. Rumsfeld hinted in Senate testimony that Moscow might be interested in a deal. What's your analysis?

A: The Russians still have an official message, like a headline: no missile defense, no change to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. But when you look closely, the Russians are also saying that they are going to produce a program for European missile defense. Now they've even starting to talk about ideas of boost phase interception to destroy missiles as they lift off. I'm not sure how that could be compatible with the ABM Treaty.

We'll have to see when the actual details of their proposal are put on the table and they come to the consultative NATO-Russia council. As you see, all these security questions eventually end up in NATO's lap.

-------- russia

Ivanov worried by U.S. shield

February 1, 2001
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/02/01/geneva.shield/index.html

GENEVA, Switzerland (Reuters) -- Russia's foreign minister has called for "active dialogue" with the U.S. over its proposed National Missile Defense (NMD) programme.

Speaking a day after Russian President Vladimir Putin and the new U.S. President George Bush had their first telephone conversation, Igor Ivanov suggested a set of fresh measures which he said would preserve their Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.

Measures to dispel perceived "new missile threats" would include setting up the agreed joint U.S.-Russian Missile Launch Data Exchange Centre and international cooperation regarding theatre missile defence systems, Moscow's top diplomat said on Thursday.

Following his speech to the United Nations Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Ivanov headed for Berne for talks with his Swiss counterpart, Joseph Deiss.

Those talks were expected to include the politically explosive case of former Kremlin aide Pavel Borodin, held in New York last month on a Swiss arrest warrant for suspected money laundering in connection with refurbishment of the Kremlin.

Bush favours constructing the shield --- at an estimated cost of $60 billion -- to protect America from so-called rogue states, such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, but the 1972 ABM pact bans such systems.

"We think it necessary that an active and meaningful dialogue on this topic be resumed with the new U.S. administration as soon as possible," Ivanov declared.

Stability concerns

Quoting Roman philosopher-statesman Lucius Seneca, he said: "Some medicines are more dangerous than diseases themselves."

Ivanov added: "As an alternative to a national missile defence system we propose a whole package of constructive political and diplomatic measures. Their aim is to dispel concerns -- not only by the United States -- about the so-called 'new missile threats' while preserving the ABM Treaty."

Ivanov reiterated Russia's call to negotiate with the United States on a START-III pact to cut their arsenals of strategic nuclear warheads to 1,500 each, instead of 2,000-2,500 each. "We are ready subsequently to consider even lower levels," he added.

The U.N. body's 66 member states include the five official nuclear powers (Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States) and nuclear-capable India and Pakistan.

Russia, China and Pakistan have strongly criticised the proposed U.S. missile shield which they say would violate ABM and upset global strategic stability.

Ivanov called on the Geneva talks -- mired in a stalemate for four years -- to launch negotiations to ban an arms race in outer space and also to ban production of nuclear bomb-making fissile materials (plutonium and highly enriched uranium).

"It is high time that a reliable international legal 'safety net' be created in this respect. Efforts and resources of our space agencies should be aimed at peaceful, including commercial, cooperation," Russia's foreign minister said.

In a speech, British envoy Ian Soutar called the fissile talks "an essential step" in nuclear disarmament, but said the time was not ripe for full-fledged negotiations on outer space.

---

Russia: U.S. missile shield doomed

February 2, 2001
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/02/02/defence.us/index.html

GENEVA, Switzerland -- Russia has urged U.S. President George Bush to ditch plans for a missile defence system, warning he is embarking on a go-it-alone policy that is "doomed to failure".

The comments, from Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, came as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld prepared to discuss the controversial proposals on a visit to Europe on Saturday.

Ivanov -- speaking at a meeting of the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva -- said it was "illusory" for "even the most powerful" country to think it could independently create "isolated islets of well-being and stability in today's world."

Instead he said every country should stick to "painstaking disarmament negotiations" and outlined alternative steps to reduce the threat of nuclear war.

Moscow's proposals would preserve the 1972 U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibits nationwide missile defences.

During the presidential campaign, Bush pledged to make a National Missile Defense shield (NMD) a priority, even if it meant abandoning the ABM Treaty.

Rumsfeld, a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, has already called the treaty "ancient history."

He will become the first top official in Bush's administration to discuss defence with European allies when he addresses the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy, in Germany.

A day of meetings with analysts and security leaders -- including the British, German and French defence ministers -- could set the tone for cross-Atlantic security ties under Bush.

"It underscores for him (Rumsfeld) the importance of NATO, of Europe," said a senior U.S. official.

Support for NATO

Nuclear arms control is just one area of concern for members of NATO and other European allies of the U.S..

They are also worried that about 10,000 U.S. Army peacekeepers might be quickly pulled out of Kosovo and Bosnia because of administration concern that the mission is stretching America's post-Cold War military.

"Those people are going to read carefully what (Rumsfeld) says about three issues in a potential minefield: missile defence, peacekeeping and the European defence initiative," said Robert Hunter, another former U.S. ambassador to NATO.

Rumsfeld told his first news conference at the Pentagon last week that he and Bush strongly supported NATO but the president was determined to proceed with the NMD plan to protect both the U.S. and its allies.

"We want assurances that there will not be any charging ahead on NMD without full consultation and no premature disengagement from the Balkans," one European Union diplomat said.

"The Germans especially feel that it's important to get these kinds of assurances," added the diplomat, who asked not to be identified.

A third critical issue expected to be raised at the Munich meeting is European defence improvement and Washington's insistence that a rapid-reaction military force being formed by the European Union should not weaken the NATO military alliance.

Former Defense Secretary William Cohen said repeatedly that Washington had no problem with the European force but that planning for any separate military operations must be carried out under the auspices of NATO.

---

Russia Urges Alternative to U.S. Missile Shield

Friday, February 2, 2001
International Herald Tribune
Elizabeth Olson
http://www.iht.com/articles/9477.htm

GENEVA Pressing a campaign against plans by the Bush administration to build a national missile defense, the Russian foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, urged the other nuclear powers Thursday to work together to find an alternative.

Mr. Ivanov made his case to the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, a 66-nation negotiating forum on arms control based in Geneva, one day after President George W. Bush called the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.

But whether the two presidents discussed the issue of national missile defense has not been disclosed.

The 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty bars such a system, which the Bush administration says it wants to build to protect the United States against attacks by so-called rogue nations.

In his remarks, Mr. Ivanov laid out Russian proposals to preserve the treaty, such as establishing a joint center in Moscow to exchange missile-launch data and "a broad international cooperation, open to all states, in the area of theater missile defense."

After his speech, Mr. Ivanov left for Bern, where he was expected to request the dismissal of the case against Pavel Borodin, a Russian official who is being held in New York on a Swiss arrest warrant for allegedly taking tens of millions of dollars in kickbacks from two Swiss companies that renovated Kremlin buildings.

Mr. Putin raised Mr. Borodin's situation in his telephone conversation with Mr. Bush, expressing hope for a solution to the politically sensitive case.

Mr. Borodin, who headed the Kremlin's property-management office under Boris Yeltsin when he was the president, is being held by the United States while Swiss officials prepare to extradite him to Geneva for questioning.

Swiss officials have been resisting efforts to free Mr. Borodin.

------

Russia Says U.S. Antimissile Plan Means an Arms Race

February 6, 2001
New York Times
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/06/world/06RUSS.html?pagewanted=all
http://www.herald.com/content/today/news/national/digdocs/086684.htm

MOSCOW, Feb. 5 - Two days after American officials told their European counterparts that the United States intended to go ahead and develop a national missile shield - but only after extensive consultations - Russia responded today with a sober warning that it is ready to resort to a new arms race to ensure that its strategic rocket forces will not be undermined.

At the same time, President Vladimir V. Putin was said to be preparing a diplomatic offensive to meet the leaders of two of the so-called rogue nations whose ballistic missiles are of greatest concern to Washington.

President Mohammad Khatami of Iran is expected in Moscow next month for discussions about trade and military cooperation, and diplomats here and in Tehran said the two leaders would discuss ways to control the spread of ballistic missile technology. The United States has expressed longstanding concerns about Russian assistance to Iran's ballistic missile program.

Then, in late April, diplomats said, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, is expected to come to Moscow, which would be his longest-distance diplomatic visit to date. Mr. Putin made a surprise visit to the North Korean capital last summer and opened negotiations to persuade Mr. Kim to give up his quest to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile that could threaten Japan and the United States.

Mr. Kim has offered to forgo further ballistic missile development in return for Western assistance in launching civilian satellites, but his statements have yet to be set down in any binding accord.

As Mr. Putin was preparing his diplomatic moves, Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev said today that Russia was making contingency plans to respond to the Bush administration's antimissile plans. He said Russia was not planning a new missile buildup, which it cannot afford, but "asymmetrical" technologies that would penetrate any missile shield.

"We had three mighty programs to counteract asymmetrically the national missile defense systems of the United States during the period of Reagan's Star Wars," he said.

He told the Interfax news agency that "a lot of money was invested in those programs" before they were abandoned at the end of the cold war. "But we still have them," he added, "and can take them up again."

Marshal Sergeyev, the former commander of Russian strategic rocket forces, labeled the American antimissile proposal "son of Star Wars," and predicted, in remarks to the visiting Swedish defense minister, Bjorn von Sydow, that the Bush administration would not be able to persuade its allies to abandon "the entire system of agreements, which has led to strategic stability in the world" and to support American actions that would cause "those agreements to be scrapped."

The defense minister's statements and Mr. Putin's diplomacy were another effort by Russia to play on the deep skepticism that already exists in Europe over the United States' determination to rearrange the strategic landscape. An American national missile shield would violate the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which the Bush administration wants to amend and which Moscow now calls the "cornerstone of strategic stability."

Russia is promoting its own proposal to make further deep cuts in the nuclear arsenals, while cooperating with Europe and the United States to develop regional missile defenses that could be brought to bear against threatening states.

By signaling his plans to meet the leaders of two of the three nations about which Washington is most concerned, Mr. Putin was positioning himself to play a self-interested role in trying to address the post-cold- war security concerns on which the Bush administration has centered its national security strategy. Russia's diplomatic campaign will play out over several months in advance of the meeting of leaders of the largest industrial countries, in July in Genoa, where Mr. Bush will make a diplomatic debut.

Speaking in Munich on Sunday, Mr. Putin's national security assistant, Sergei B. Ivanov, argued that "restraining the so-called rogue nations - to use the American terminology - may be carried out more effectively from the standpoint of both cost and effectiveness by means of a common political effort." He added, "The situation in North Korean is the obvious example, which a year ago seemed much worse than it does today."

Mr. Ivanov's remarks followed those on Saturday by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who sought to allay European concerns by offering to help extend any antimissile shield to Europe. He also pledged that the Bush administration would undertake extensive consultations with its allies and with Russia before making any decision to pull out of the 1972 treaty.

Though Mr. Rumsfeld seemed satisfied that he had given European leaders a reasoned set of arguments that the United States is seeking no advantage in pursuing missile defenses and that it is determined to be the master of its own security, a number of senior Republican members of Congress worried aloud on the return flight to Washington that the United States was isolating itself while driving Europe and Russia closer together.

In Washington today, the former NATO secretary general, Javier Solana, who is now the foreign policy chief of the European Union, said that while the United States had the "right to deploy" an antimissile shield, doing so "has consequences that go far beyond" putting such a system in place.

Before meeting Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser to President Bush, Mr. Solana told reporters, "We have to start talking, and I hope whatever is done is beneficial to the alliance and to the stability of the world."

Russia has asserted that if the United States ultimately withdraws from the 1972 treaty, all of the strategic arms accords negotiated over the last 30 years will become invalid because they are based on the common principle of prohibiting an arms race in defensive weapons. American officials have repeatedly asserted that an antimissile system of 100 interceptors initially would not be directed at or effective against Russia's arsenal of 3,000 or more strategic delivery systems. But the Russian military establishment continues to express doubt that any American antimissile shield would remain a limited system.

Konstantin V. Cherevkov, a senior missile scientist at the Russian Space Academy, wrote last week in a newspaper commentary that "Russia considers the American position deceptive."

"There is reason to believe that the fielding of national antiballistic missile infrastructure would allow for a subsequent increase in its capabilities, to a level that would fully block our retaliatory capability," he wrote. ---

-----

Russia Dismisses U.S. Missile Plan

February 6, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-US-ABM.html
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1mmucj88me9jj

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev dismissed a proposed U.S. national missile defense as ineffective, saying that it could easily be defeated by the old Soviet technologies developed in the 1980s to oppose Ronald Reagan's Star Wars plan.

``We had three mighty programs to asymmetrically counteract U.S. national missile defenses during Reagan's 'Star Wars,''' Sergeyev was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

He didn't give details, but said that the Soviet Union had spent enough money on the programs to take them beyond the stage of research and development at the moment when they were halted.

``We still have them and can take them up again,'' Sergeyev said Monday.

Such methods could include adding more warheads to Russia's new single-warhead Topol-M missile or use of decoy warheads to confuse defenders.

Sergeyev said U.S. faith in its defense concept was misplaced.

``The Americans may regard these systems as unique, but we do not share their opinion,'' he said. ``These are really complex technologies, but complex technologies, as a rule, are not reliable.''

Sergeyev added that the Russian military could offer its U.S. counterparts proof that missile defense ``wouldn't give absolute confidence in its inviolability.''

``On the contrary, it will trigger a new spiral in the arms race and ruin the existing system of arms control,'' Sergeyev said.

China on Tuesday also criticized the systems as a threat to international stability and arms control efforts. Expressing China's ``serious concern,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi warned that missile defenses ``will have a far-reaching and extensive negative impact on the global and regional strategic balance and stability.''

Such systems ``go against the trend of the times and be detrimental to international disarmament and arms control efforts,'' Sun said at a twice-weekly media briefing in Beijing.

Moscow and China are the leading critics of U.S. proposals to modify the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow for the deployment of a nationwide defense. U.S. officials say one is needed against threat from countries such as North Korea and Iraq.

Beijing worries that system could blunt its limited nuclear deterrent. It also fears a more limited theater missile defense for U.S. allies in East Asia could frustrate China's attempts to bring Taiwan under its control.

President Vladimir Putin has told the new U.S. administration that Moscow expects the United States to abide by the ABM treaty.

U.S. officials have dismissed the objections. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Saturday that calling the proposed modifications a threat to arms control was ``off the mark.''

Rumsfeld insisted that the U.S. system would be too limited in scope to devalue the deterrent value of Russia's arsenal, which includes thousands of nuclear weapons.

--------

The Indecisive President

Tuesday, February 6, 2001
By Masha Lipman,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30979-2001Feb5?language=printer

MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin is generally regarded in the West as a strong leader, determined to manage his country with a firm hand. That seems to be a principal consideration in U.S. policy toward Russia: whether he is too strong -- a virtual autocrat.

But at the end of Putin's first year in power, there's another way of looking at his regime. It is, I believe, characterized less by authoritarianism than by a profound and harmful indecisiveness.

Putin walks and talks confidently enough, to be sure, and he has built up unprecedented public approval. He is so popular (76 percent trust him, according to the most recent poll) that no political party would take the risk of calling itself the opposition. He has made the powerful business tycoons compliant and the unruly governors obsequious. He has gone a long way toward destroying the independent media company Media-Most. This does indeed make him look authoritarian.

But does Putin have any idea of what he wants to do with the immense power he has accumulated -- of how he wants Russia to evolve? Instead of exercising his will to make up for lost time and speed badly needed reforms, Putin has avoided making decisions; he ducks the hard choices.

In the meantime, elements in the Russian establishment jockey for power. Among the top military brass, for example, the conflict between the defense minister and the chief of the general staff has gone on for months. Their argument is over strategic missiles vs. conventional weapons.

For a while it seemed that Putin would fire one or the other of the combatants -- military reform was ostensibly among his primary goals. Yet he invariably pretends there is no conflict and refuses to take sides.

Meanwhile, on Putin's liberal economic team, an impassioned battle over the strategy for economic reform rages in broad daylight. Veteran reformer Anatoly Chubais quarrels with the president's economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, over restructuring the electric energy monopoly. In December they got into a TV debate so emotional that the anchorman had to get up from his seat and spend a good 10 minutes trying unsuccessfully to pacify them.

This may have made for good television but it did nothing to clarify the government's goals in reforming its gigantic electric company, or to tell people just who has the ultimate authority in making such decisions. President Putin sat out the whole thing.

Last month Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov announced that Russia would not make a debt payment due in January to the Paris Club of creditor countries. Illarionov responded with vehement public criticism. Putin made a general statement that debts should be paid, but not at the expense of the government's social obligations. He did not say how these two demands might be reconciled or when the Paris Club could expect to receive its money.

In an even more striking example of indecision, Putin recently withdrew from the Duma amendments to the Russian criminal procedure law aimed at strengthening human rights -- amendments that he himself had introduced. It is believed he pulled them back after meeting with the chief prosecutor and the head of the state security service.

The Kremlin staff itself is divided into two camps, one made up of former aides to Boris Yeltsin, the other of Putin's former colleagues from the Leningrad KGB. After a year in office Putin has not fully opted for one or the other camp in many spheres of government. He did fire his energy minister yesterday, but he almost never expresses his preferences in the various struggles going on around him. He thus drives all conflicting parties to believe he is on their side. All of them pledge allegiance to the president, but in the meantime use secret levers and roundabout ways to pursue their own goals.

Putin's vacillation proved fatal during the Kursk submarine disaster, when he failed to quickly accept proffered foreign aid. Afterward he pretended not to have noticed that his top military commanders had either been unaware of the state of their own rescue equipment or had lied to their commander in chief. They got away with their misinformation and, seeking not to be held responsible for the deaths of 119 sailors, claimed without evidence that the tragedy was the result of a collision with a NATO submarine. Putin chose not to comment.

There are different theories about the causes of Putin's indecision. He may cherish the seeming consensus, for in spite of all the overt disputes and covert conflicts, prominent political figures stop short of criticizing the president. Or it may be that on many issues Putin genuinely doesn't know whose side he is on.

Whatever the causes, Putin's irresolution is damaging for Russia. As each group seeks to turn things its own way, the country's unmanageability grows. Concerns about Putin's KGB instincts have risen over the past year, but in fact he hardly looks like a Russian Pinochet. He has not displayed a taste for that dictator's bloody methods, nor does he have the clarity of purpose or will to implement them. In today's Russia the danger of disorder and government inefficiency is more imminent than the threat of authoritarianism.

The writer is deputy editor of Itogi magazine, which is owned by Media-Most.

-------- taiwan

Nuke plant talks bog down in Taiwan

2/6/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1mmucj88me9jj

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Negotiations over resuming construction of a nuclear plant became bogged down Tuesday as powerful opposition lawmakers insisted that the government restart the project before talks continue.

The feud over the plant, which the government wanted to scrap, had appeared to be close to a settlement.

Officials sent a new proposal to the opposition on Tuesday morning, offering to reinstate the $5.4 billion project with conditions. But hours later, the opposition complained that the proposal failed to say that the government was following a resolution the legislature passed demanding that construction begin immediately on the plant, one-third complete.

The government's proposal also said that lawmakers chosen in year-end elections should be able to decide whether new funds could be spent to complete the project. This would effectively give lawmakers the power to cancel the plant.

But opposition lawmakers have insisted that once the project is reinstated, it must be completed to avoid wasting more of taxpayers' money.

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

Missile Defense Test Planned

February 6, 2001
New York Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Missile-Defense.html
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/02/06/missile.defense.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- While President Bush's national security team ponders missile defense options, the Pentagon office in charge of the project may have a first test of a critical new component as early as next month, officials said Tuesday.

The Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization also is planning another attempt to shoot down a mock nuclear missile in space, probably in May or June, using the same technologies that produced a spectacular failure last July, the officials said. Two of the last three attempted missile intercepts failed.

Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has met three times with Ronald Kadish, the Air Force general who runs the missile defense office. Rumsfeld gave Kadish no indication he should change direction. ``His guidance to Gen. Kadish is, `press on,''' Quigley said.

Aside from the technical issues yet to be resolved, Russian and Chinese officials offered reminders Tuesday that whatever the design of a U.S. national missile defense, it will be controversial.

In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi warned that American missile defense ``will have a far-reaching and extensive negative impact on the global and regional strategic balance and stability.''

In Moscow, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev asserted that a U.S. missile defense could easily be defeated by technologies the former Soviet Union developed in the 1980s in response to President Reagan's Star Wars plan that was a more ambitious attempt to defend against all-out missile attacks.

``We had three mighty programs to asymmetrically counteract U.S. national missile defenses during Reagan's 'Star Wars,''' Sergeyev was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. He gave no details. Although the programs were halted, ``We still have them and can take them up again,'' he said.

At a European security conference in Germany last Saturday, Rumsfeld said President Bush intends to deploy a national missile defense. But first Rumsfeld is reviewing the status of the project the Bush administration inherited from the Clinton administration and is considering how to fulfill Bush's pledge to provide a missile shield that would cover not only the United States but also its allies.

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said Tuesday he believes the administration must clarify what kind of missile defense it wants, so Congress can assess it. ``We are talking about trillions of dollars difference,'' depending on how expansive it is, he said.

Among the administration's options are to supplement a ground-based missile defense system -- as is currently in testing -- with a sea-based system which could provide wider coverage but will take longer to deploy. The ground-based system, as foreseen by the Clinton administration, would protect all 50 U.S. states against a small-scale attack by missiles with relatively unsophisticated decoys.

Bush has indicated he wants a more robust system, although that raises technical, political and financial questions. Rumsfeld hinted that decisions on how to proceed are unlikely for at least several weeks.

In the meantime, Kadish's office is preparing for the first flight test of a prototype for the rocket boosters that would be based in Alaska and would carry aloft the warhead-busting ``kill vehicle,'' which is designed to find its missile target in space and destroy the target by slamming into it at high speed.

Together, the rocket booster and the kill vehicle form the ``weapon'' in a missile defense system.

Up to now the Pentagon has been using an older booster as a stand-in for the one being developed by Alliant Techsystems and Orbus. In last July's intercept attempt, the booster failed to send the required electronic signal to make the kill vehicle separate from the booster. So the kill vehicle's ability to perform the crucial final tasks -- finding its target and maneuvering into its path -- could not be tested.

Last September, Kadish told Congress that delays in producing the new booster ``threaten to be that major problem that could significantly impede'' progress toward a deployable missile defense.

In a test tentatively set for March or April, the prototype booster is to be launched westward from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., into the Pacific Ocean. It will not attempt to intercept a missile.

Another such test is planned for summer, and by early next year the Pentagon hopes to launch the new booster from the Army's Kwajalein missile range in the central Pacific eastward toward the U.S. West Coast -- a trajectory that would give project engineers a better assessment of the effects of the Earth's rotation on the flights of both the interceptor missile and the missile used as the target.

---

Pentagon moving ahead on missile shield

02/06/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-02-06-missile2.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - While President Bush's national security team ponders missile defense options, the Pentagon office in charge of the project may have a first test of a critical new component as early as next month, officials said Tuesday. The Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization also is planning another attempt to shoot down a mock nuclear missile in space, probably in May or June, using the same technologies that produced a spectacular failure last July, the officials said. Two of the last three attempted missile intercepts failed. The officials, speaking on condition they not be identified, said test preparations are going ahead in the absence of orders to the contrary from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld has been briefed in recent days by Ronald Kadish, the Air Force general who runs the missile defense project office.

Aside from the technical issues yet to be resolved, Russian and Chinese officials offered reminders Tuesday that whatever the design of a U.S. national missile defense, it will be controversial.

In Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi warned that American missile defense "will have a far-reaching and extensive negative impact on the global and regional strategic balance and stability."

In Moscow, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev asserted that a U.S. missile defense could easily be defeated by technologies the former Soviet Union developed in the 1980s in response to President Reagan's Star Wars plan that was a more ambitious attempt to defend against all-out missile attacks.

"We had three mighty programs to asymmetrically counteract U.S. national missile defenses during Reagan's 'Star Wars,"' Sergeyev was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. He gave no details. Although the programs were halted, "We still have them and can take them up again," he said.

At a European security conference in Germany last Saturday, Rumsfeld said President Bush intends to deploy a national missile defense. But first Rumsfeld is reviewing the status of the project the Bush administration inherited from the Clinton administration and is considering how to fulfill Bush's pledge to provide a missile shield that would cover not only the United States but also its allies.

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said Tuesday he believes the administration must clarify what kind of missile defense it wants, so Congress can assess it. "We are talking about trillions of dollars difference," depending on how expansive it is, he said.

Among the administration's options are to supplement a ground-based missile defense system - as is currently in testing - with a sea-based system which could provide wider coverage but will take longer to deploy. The ground-based system, as foreseen by the Clinton administration, would protect all 50 U.S. states against a small-scale attack by missiles with relatively unsophisticated decoys.

Bush has indicated he wants a more robust system, although that raises technical, political and financial questions. Rumsfeld hinted that decisions on how to proceed are unlikely for at least several weeks.

In the meantime, Kadish's office is preparing for the first flight test of a prototype for the rocket boosters that would be based in Alaska and would carry aloft the warhead-busting "kill vehicle," which is designed to find its missile target in space and destroy the target by slamming into it at high speed.

Together, the rocket booster and the kill vehicle form the "weapon" in a missile defense system.

Up to now the Pentagon has been using an older booster as a stand-in for the one being developed by Alliant Techsystems and Orbus. In last July's intercept attempt, the booster failed to send the required electronic signal to make the kill vehicle separate from the booster. So the kill vehicle's ability to perform the crucial final tasks - finding its target and maneuvering into its path - could not be tested.

Last September, Kadish told Congress that delays in producing the new booster "threaten to be that major problem that could significantly impede" progress toward a deployable missile defense.

In a test tentatively set for March or April, the prototype booster is to be launched westward from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., into the Pacific Ocean. It will not attempt to intercept a missile.

Another such test is planned for summer, and by early next year the Pentagon hopes to launch the new booster from the Army's Kwajalein missile range in the central Pacific eastward toward the U.S. West Coast - a trajectory that would give project engineers a better assessment of the effects of the Earth's rotation on the flights of both the interceptor missile and the missile used as the target.

---

Biden: Missile defense could spark arms race

02/06/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-02-06-missile.htm
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1mmucj88me9jj
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Europe-Defense.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON (AP) - A senior Senate Democrat predicted Tuesday that China will make a "gigantic leap" in its arsenal of long-range nuclear weapons if the Bush administration goes ahead with a missile defense program.

Sen. Joseph R. Biden of Delaware said that in a chain reaction, India would respond with its own nuclear buildup, causing Pakistan, in turn, to do the same, while Japan "will go nuclear."

"That doesn't make one feel better," Biden said at a Capitol Hill news conference. And, he asked rhetorically, "Do you think the Soviets are going to give up their SS-18 missiles?" referring to a provision of the 1992 START II agreement with the United States.

Biden, senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he could support a limited U.S. missile defense, coupled with a deep cutback in the U.S. arsenal. But President Bush and his top advisers have spread confusion by delaying a decision on the kind of program they would undertake, he said.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell are talking about different programs, Biden said. "The administration has to decide what they want to do."

The options include a national missile defense, a limited one, and a defense against accidental launches by another country, Biden said. "We are talking about trillions of dollars difference.

"The train has not yet left the station," Biden said of the debate he hopes to encourage in the United States, where, he said, most are uninformed about the cost and potential risk of the Bush administration policy.

Even so, the European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and NATO's secretary-general, Lord Robertson, acknowledged Monday the United States cannot be deterred from deploying a national missile defense despite misgivings among the allies and Russia.

"The United States has the right to deploy," Solana said before meetings with Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security assistant.

Were there any doubt, Powell told Solana that "we intend to move forward" on the program, according to State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

And in Brussels, Belgium, where NATO has its headquarters, Robertson said Europe must bow to the inevitability of U.S. deployment of an anti-missile defense system. What's more, Robertson denied there are any divisions in the alliance on the issue.

"I think people wanted to find a split between America and Europe on the issue of missile defense," Robertson said after meeting with the European Union's political and security committee.

"The United States has made it clear that it intends to deploy some effective missile defense system and there has to be an acceptance that that was the decision made in the election campaign and we should treat it seriously and with respect," the former British defense minister said.

On an equally touchy issue, Europe's determination to create its own military corps to respond to crises, Solana was unyielding. He said the principle was established a decade ago when Bush's father was president and reaffirmed several times at summits in the Clinton years.

"We don't have to create a fuss about something that is not new," he said over breakfast in a hotel near the White House.

Later, Boucher said, "We just haven't reached full agreement within NATO and between NATO and the European Union on how some of these mechanisms should work."

Boucher said Powell wanted to know whether the force would be a complement to NATO and whether the Europeans would pay for it. He said Powell wanted to make sure "that we not try to duplicate the capabilities of NATO."

The two troublesome issues were aired at a two-day conference in Munich, Germany, last weekend amid signs the United States and its allies were being driven apart.

"These are very manageable problems," Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said after the Conference on Security Policy. "We ought to relax and talk it through."

Other observers were not so sanguine even though Rumsfeld offered to help the Europeans with a missile defense while the Bush administration proceeds with trying to erect a shield against what it says are potential threats from North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

Russian President Vladimir Putin's national security assistant, Sergei B. Ivanov, said a vast missile defense program would undermine international stability and touch off an arms race, including one in outer space. Europeans also have been critical.

Solana, taking a softer tone, said Monday the Europeans want to get involved in a dialogue with the Bush administration about the program. And, in a conciliatory gesture, the Spanish diplomat said the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibited a national missile defense, was between the United States and the Soviet Union, not Europe, and was revised in 1974. "It's not a Bible," he said.

Indeed, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush "intends to pursue that matter in consultation with our allies. He believes it's a very effective way to protect America and our allies."

Powell indicated at his Senate confirmation hearing last month that the administration would approach Russia about changing the treaty to fit U.S. plans and would consider reducing the U.S. arsenal of offensive nuclear weapons.

------

Defense Veteran Chosen as No. 2 at Pentagon

February 6, 2001
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/06/politics/06DEFE.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 - Paul D. Wolfowitz found himself at the center of a political firestorm eight years ago when as under secretary of defense for policy he drafted a document calling on the United States to use its military might as the lone superpower to prevent the rise of strategic competitors.

Foreign capitals denounced the notion, and the first Bush administration quietly excised it from its post- cold-war strategy, but the episode cemented Dr. Wolfowitz's reputation as a conservative intellectual known for hawkish views on everything from Russia to Iraq to national missile defense.

Today, President Bush announced that he intended to return Dr. Wolfowitz to the Pentagon, this time as deputy secretary of defense, responsible for managing the Pentagon's sprawling bureaucracy and, perhaps more than his predecessors, involving himself in foreign policy. Dr. Wolfowitz's nomination requires Senate confirmation.

"Wolfowitz will be stronger from a policy point of view than many of his predecessors," said Lawrence J. Korb, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations and former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration. "He's very close to the vice president and the president. A lot of people who've had that job have never met the president before."

Dr. Wolfowitz, now 57, rejoins a cadre of senior national security officials returning to office after eight years in political exile.

As under secretary of defense for policy from 1989 to 1993 - essentially the Pentagon's third-ranking position - he worked closely with Dick Cheney, now the vice president, and Gen. Colin L. Powell, now secretary of state. Dr. Wolfowitz was particularly instrumental during the Persian Gulf war, bolstering Mr. Cheney's case for an aggressive response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and managing sensitive diplomacy with key allies like Israel.

Dr. Wolfowitz has also over the years worked closely with his new boss, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld. When Mr. Rumsfeld took over Senator Bob Dole's flailing presidential campaign in 1996, he tapped Dr. Wolfowitz as the campaign's foreign policy adviser - a role he reprised last year as one of "the Vulcans," Mr. Bush's closest advisers in that field.

He also served as a member of the Rumsfeld Commission, the panel that in 1998 warned that the United States was increasingly vulnerable to attack by long-range ballistic missiles from countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq. The commission's report became one of the most influential documents in American military planning.

Dr. Wolfowitz had himself been a candidate for the top job at the Pentagon, as well as that at the Central Intelligence Agency. However, some in the Bush transition team questioned whether his intellectual rigor and academic approach would prove ineffective in reining in the Pentagon's bureaucracy - an important part of the deputy's job.

There is no question, however, that he brings considerable experience to the job. Mr. Korb referred to Dr. Wolfowitz as "the most qualified person nominated to be No. 2 at the Pentagon."

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Ithaca, N.Y., Dr. Wolfowitz studied mathematics and chemistry at Cornell University and later earned a master's degree and a doctorate from the University of Chicago in political science and economics.

From 1973 to 1977, he worked in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, serving for a time as a special assistant during the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT. He later served as an assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and as ambassador to Indonesia during the Reagan administration before joining the first Bush administration.

Dr. Wolfowitz became dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1994.

He is known for sharp, hawkish views. In 1998, he told a Senate committee that the United States should arm opponents of Saddam Hussein and provide air cover, if necessary, as they liberated the country. "Anti-tank weapons, in particular, could have a powerful equalizing effect," he said at the time.

-------

URANIUM AND YOU

01/02/06
tompaine.com
http://www.tompaine.com/print.php3?id=1863

How Many Birth Defects and Cancers Should Be Allowed in the Name of National Security? Arjun Makhijani is president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park, Maryland.

It's no secret that nuclear weapon states have harmed many people, and particularly weapons production workers, in the name of national security. But how this slow attack on health and the environment was carried out is still largely unknown and little understood. Through extensive research during the last two decades, a picture of the damage has begun to emerge from the fog of denial and propaganda in only one nuclear weapon state -- the United States.

That picture is far from reassuring: The government and its contractors deliberately emphasized production at the expense of health, routinely violating health and safety regulations, deliberately misleading workers so as not to arouse concerns or give hazardous duty pay when both were clearly warranted.

Sloppy, incompetent science was a routine part of this dismal picture. The Department of Energy has admitted that, until 1989, no effort was made to calculate workers' internal radiation doses -- even though many were inhaling and ingesting radioactive materials. IEER's work on data from the Fernald plant near Cincinnati, Ohio, where uranium for plutonium production reactors was processed, showed that in the 1950s and early 1960s, most workers were in fact overexposed due to uranium inhalation. Many probably also suffered kidney damage due to the toxicity of uranium as a heavy metal. Yet officials reassured them that they were not being harmed.

As such information has become public, workers and their advocates have demanded justice. The United States recently passed legislation giving most injured radiation workers the right to apply for compensation and medical treatment.

The harm has extended well beyond factory boundaries to workers' families, neighbors and the general public. For example, an official study by the U.S. National Cancer Institute showed that during the 1950s, a large portion of the U.S. milk supply was contaminated with iodine-131, a carcinogen, due to fallout from the Nevada test site.

No other government has yet made as broad an admission of potential harm from radiation as the United States, though some modest programs are in effect for a limited number of people in some places.

In Russia there are still practically no raw data available to independent researchers. Secrecy also holds sway in the other relatively open countries -- France, India, and Britain. The situation in China, Pakistan, and Israel is far worse.

The pattern of keeping health and environmental abuses of their own people secret in the name of national security is anti-democratic to the core. It presumes that the people would not make sacrifices for the security of their countries, and it presumes that top nuclear bureaucrats can make life or death decisions in defiance of established laws without the informed consent of the people.

Moreover, the damage caused by the nuclear states has extended well beyond their borders. Though the maps of contamination published by the National Cancer Institute magically stop at the borders of Canada and Mexico, atmospheric testing nonetheless permeated their milk too. Uranium miners in non-nuclear weapon states have also been injured. And test sites have polluted former colonies, such as Algeria and Polynesia. Yet, no proper accounting has been done. But then, why would nuclear weapon states be accountable to people beyond their borders when they have failed to be accountable to those within?

Much of the harm from nuclear weapons production and testing was knowingly inflicted. For instance, a 1960 editorial in the engineering alumni magazine of the University of California noted that "nuclear testing has so far produced about an additional 6,000 babies born with major birth defects [worldwide]." Yet, it added "you must weigh this acknowledged risk with the demonstrated need of the United States for a nuclear arsenal." The editorial did not explain why children in Nigeria or Costa Rica or Indonesia should have major birth defects so that the United States could have a nuclear arsenal.

All of this raises troubling questions about how national security policy has been formulated. If the nuclear weapons establishment can knowingly and secretly harm the very people it claims to protect, how can one be sure that the security policies themselves are not largely motivated by bureaucratic self-preservation rather than by the interests of the community at large?

This is by no means a rhetorical or theoretical question. There is strong evidence, for instance, that the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki was motivated in part by the desire to justify the huge expenditure on nuclear bombs during the Manhattan project. The nuclear establishment feared that if the bombs were not seen as highly useful in the war effort, there would be relentless investigations for waste of money after the war. Such investigations would, no doubt, also have dimmed the prospects for continued large nuclear weapons budgets after the war.

The public needs to engage in a wide-ranging discourse about the health and environmental harm that nuclear weapon states have inflicted upon their own people as well as those beyond their borders.

An International Truth Commission to lead this discourse should not only examine the nature of that harm, and whether it was deliberately inflicted; it should recommend ways in which people can hold nuclear weapons establishments accountable. It should also determine whether the security arguments that have been claimed for nuclear weapons have been constructed to perpetuate the nuclear weapons industry and bureaucracy. Such an examination would be of some considerable relevance today, given that nuclear weapons establishments are still refusing to meet their nuclear disarmament commitments under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and that people are still getting ill and dying from the harm that nuclear weapons establishments have inflicted upon them.

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

Energy Demand to Slow Along with Economy

February 6, 2001
Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-energy-usa-d.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Government forecasters on Tuesday predicted slowing demand for energy this year as the once red-hot American economy cools, but warned supplies of key fuels like natural gas may fall short in energy-starved California due to logistical problems.

California, now grappling with power shortages and two major utilities on the brink of bankruptcy, will have supply problems persisting over the next two years, according to the U.S. Energy Department's Energy Information Administration.

``The situation in California is characterized by low natural gas storage, natural gas bottlenecks, high demand and low hydro and nuclear electric power availability,'' said the EIA, an independent statistical agency.

The storage and pipeline problems will continue ``with no obvious end visible over the next two years,'' the agency said.

The government projections focused mainly on general energy issues, like expectations for energy demand with a ``soft landing'' of the already slowing economy. A slowdown means U.S. electricity demand will grow by 2.3 percent this year, compared with 3.6 percent last year.

EIA analyst Dave Costello said the agency's numbers by no means predict a recession, but indicate the trend is for slower economic times.

``We don't assume a recession by any means, but it is tending more in that direction,'' Costello said.

U.S. manufacturing has contracted in recent months due to stagnant consumer demand, steep energy costs and ballooning inventories. To help, the Federal Reserve last month cut short-term interest rates by a full percentage point. At the same time, the EIA raised its projections for U.S. electricity demand in 2001. That is due in part to a change in the way the EIA calculates demand, adding the sales of power marketers in states where electricity markets are deregulated.

OIL DEMAND CUT FOR 2001

The slowing economy will also affect petroleum use.

The EIA trimmed its estimate for domestic petroleum demand growth this year to 1.7 percent from a previous forecast of 2.5 percent. U.S. oil product demand should average 19.85 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2001, up 340,000 bpd from last year.

Relatively modest increases in airline fares mean that jet fuel consumption will increase by about 2.3 percent this year.

``That demand is bolstered by continued increases in disposable income (despite a slowing overall economy) and taming of ticket-price inflation to 3 percent from the 8 percent of the previous two years,'' the agency said.

Americans' disposable income is likely to increase this year, despite an economic downturn, because of tax cuts and lower interest rates, the EIA said.

Gasoline demand will increase this year to about 8.51 million bpd, up from last year's 8.38 million bpd.

But U.S. gasoline inventories going into the busy summer driving season will be low, which could cause a repeat of the wild price swings that consumers saw last year, it warned.

``The situation of relatively low inventories for gasoline could set the stage for some regional imbalances in supply that could once again bring about significant price volatility in the U.S. gasoline market,'' EIA said.

The agency said it was ``fairly confident'' that retail heating oil prices already hit their winter peak, due to warmer weather than expected in the Northeast in January and robust heating oil production that has been running several hundred thousand barrels a day over last year's pace.

U.S. crude oil production is expected to increase by a tiny 10,000 bpd, or 0.2 percent, this year to 5.85 million bpd. The United States imports more than half of the petroleum it uses.

BUSH, CONGRESS PONDER ENERGY

The new government energy data comes at a time when Senate Republicans are preparing a wide-ranging bill aimed at boosting oil and gas supplies.

U.S. Senate Energy Committee chairman Frank Murkowski said on Tuesday he will delay until next week the introduction of the legislation. Murkowski met with Vice President Dick Cheney to discuss the bill and when it should be introduced.

Cheney, who was named by President George W. Bush to head a White House task force on energy issues, also met with other lawmakers on Tuesday to discuss the energy legislation.

The bill would implement many of the energy polices Bush promoted on the campaign trail, including opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil and gas drilling.

The legislation aims to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil to 50 percent by 2010.

The legislation also contains language to improve the nation's electricity transmission grid and provides tax incentives to increase the production of renewables like wind, solar and geothermal.

---

GOP Senators To Pitch Energy Bill

February 6, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Energy-Congress.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Republican energy legislation to be introduced next week will focus on boosting clean coal technology, revitalizing the nuclear industry and finding new sources of oil and natural gas including drilling in an Arctic wildlife refuge, according to a draft of the bill.

Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairman of the committee that will take up the legislation, discussed the measure during an hour-long meeting Tuesday with Vice President Dick Cheney, who heads a presidential task force on energy.

Murkowski said the meeting ``revolved around the realization that we have an energy crisis in this country'' and that ways must be found to produce more energy and rely less on oil imports.

The legislation will outline a goal of cutting foreign oil imports from the current 56 percent to 50 percent by 2010, said Murkowski. It would require an annual report to Congress on progress toward meeting the goal.

The Republican bill, parts of which will be met with stiff resistance from Democrats, is likely to be merged with a broad energy plan being developed at the White House. Cheney told senators that plan is expected to be completed in 45 to 60 days.

But it is clear congressional Republicans and the White House are moving along parallel lines on the energy package, its importance magnified in recent weeks by the electricity supply problems in California and soaring natural gas prices nationwide.

While the GOP legislation will include some measures aimed at boosting renewable energy sources and energy conservation its focus will be on boosting energy production.

``It's a blank check to the oil, gas and nuclear industry,'' said Erich Pica, an economic policy analyst for Friends of the Earth.

Among the bill's most controversial provisions will be opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas development. Most Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans oppose drilling in the Alaska refuge which is viewed by environmentalists as a national treasure needing protection.

President Bush has repeatedly called for developing the reserve's oil and gas resources, maintaining it can be done while protecting the environment.

While some senators contend it could jeopardize the energy package's approval, Murkowski said that both Bush and Cheney are convinced the refuge drilling provision should be in the bill.

Despite the recent turmoil in the California electricity markets, the legislation does not attempt to address the broad question of electricity reliability, nor the national question of electricity deregulation.

The draft legislation, however, calls for streamlining siting requirements on electric power plants, electricity transmission lines and natural gas pipelines.

It also proposes:

--A string of tax incentives aimed at promoting clean coal technology and continued reliance of coal, which currently produces more than half of the nation's electricity.

--Tax breaks for oil and gas development, including for marginal producers and so-called ``stripper wells.''

--A reduction in royalty payments for deep-water oil and gas developments.

--New incentives, including federal payments, for increased power production from nuclear plants and to help design and develop a next-generation nuclear power plant.

As Bush proposed during his campaign, the legislation would require that some of the proceeds from oil and gas leases in the Arctic refuge be used for research and promotion of renewable energy sources.

It also proposes a revival of tax credits to homeowners who use solar, wind or other renewable energy; ratchets up the fuel efficiency requirements for federal vehicle fleets and provides general tax credits for hybrid gas-electric motor vehicles.

-------- washington

Key Hanford cleanup late, short Slow start on K Basin spent fuel assemblies raises doubts about future of riverside work

Tuesday, February 6, 2001
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By LINDA ASHTON
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/local/hanf061.shtml

YAKIMA -- The effort to move corroded nuclear fuel from old, leaky storage pools has fallen behind schedule and is running short of money, threatening an accelerated cleanup plan for the Hanford nuclear reservation's Columbia River corridor.

The more money and time it takes the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractors to clean up the K Basins -- just 400 yards from the Columbia River -- the more "the idea that DOE is going to complete cleanup along the river by 2012 is slipping away," Doug Sherwood, Hanford project manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said yesterday.

In December, contractor Fluor Hanford began moving the highly radioactive spent fuel from the K Basins to a new dry storage vault in the center of the 560-square-mile reservation in south-central Washington.

Under the legal guidelines for cleaning up Hanford, Fluor and the Energy Department are to remove 51 multicanister "overpacks" -- huge steel baskets filled with about 300 fuel assemblies each -- from the K West Basin by Sept. 30.

"Now, they're talking more like 21 by September," Sherwood said. "That's what is troubling to us."

Michael Turner, a spokesman for Fluor Hanford, said crews are still learning the process, working out problems and trying to determine how better to streamline the operation.

"They'll work out the bugs," Turner said. "Obviously, our intent is to step it up. Our full intent is to meet the milestones."

Initially, EPA was pleased with the work Fluor and DOE put into the spent nuclear fuel project last year, preparing for the first fuel transfer in December.

But $12 million in cost overruns less than halfway through the fiscal year and the fact that only two transfers -- on Dec. 7 and Feb. 1 -- have been made is not sitting well with the federal regulator.

"We've got a real budget problem right now, and almost all of the activities that they would take to get back on schedule will end up costing more money," Sherwood said.

The $12 million in overspending came during testing and evaluation, originally budgeted for the previous fiscal year, that left Fluor with $171 million to do $183 million worth of work this fiscal year.

DOE has asked Fluor to come up with a plan by Feb. 16 to deal with the shortage within the acceptable budget variance of 5 percent and say how it will meet legal deadlines for moving the fuel from the basins, he said.

Turner said Fluor is working on an interim plan now and expects to meet the necessary requirements, despite announcing earlier this month that it planned to lay off as many as 300 workers to cut costs.

There are 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel, including 4 tons of plutonium, in the K West and K East basins. Hanford, which made plutonium for nuclear weapons for 40 years, is the nation's most contaminated nuclear site. Total cost of cleanup is now estimated at $55.6 billion through 2046.

-------- MILITARY

Experts say cover-up protected Hirohito

February 6, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200126212233.htm

TOKYO - Japanese military leaders tried to cover up germ warfare attacks on China during World War II, fearing Emperor Hirohito would be blamed for the war crimes, Japanese historians testified yesterday.

The historians were testifying before the Tokyo District Court as witnesses for a group of Chinese demanding an apology and reparations for the deaths of relatives who they claim were the victims of the germ warfare.

Citing newly obtained letters and documents, Takao Matsunaga, a history professor at Tokyo's prestigious Keio University, said Japanese leaders were "desperate" to keep the germ warfare secret because they were afraid then-Emperor Hirohito would be held responsible.

Hirohito died in 1989 and was succeeded by his son, Emperor Akihito.

-------- drug war

Who's Defending Rockefeller Drug Laws? The Prosecutors

February 6, 2001
New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/06/nyregion/06DRUG.html?pagewanted=all

ALBANY, Feb. 5 - As the push to ease New York State's mandatory drug-sentencing laws draws the once-improbable support of leading Republican lawmakers, one influential interest group has refused to join the chorus: prosecutors across the state, who regard the so-called Rockefeller drug laws as their most powerful weapon against drug dealers.

Last week, the prosecutors, a politically potent cadre, spoke up and intensified their lobbying against softening the mandatory sentences. The New York State District Attorneys Association, representing all 62 county prosecutors, wrote a letter to Gov. George E. Pataki, who has pledged to ease the laws, as well as to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno.

The District Attorneys Association has put in calls to lawmakers and has selected a panel of prosecutors from Rochester to Queens to meet with the governor. It has scheduled a briefing with members of the Republican-controlled Senate, perhaps the prosecutors' strongest allies here. And it has been invited to meet with Mr. Silver, a Democrat, who in the coming weeks is expected to release his own proposal to soften drug laws.

Under current laws, judges have little discretion over whether a drug offender will be imprisoned, and if so, for how long. Instead, they must operate within a range of minimum and maximum sentences that take into account only the amount of the drug seized and the defendant's felony record - not whether the crime involved violence.

Two weeks ago, Governor Pataki announced his intention to change this. His plan would allow for shorter mandatory terms for drug offenders serving some of the longest sentences, treatment instead of incarceration in some cases, and some sentencing discretion for judges.

The judicial restrictions now effectively give prosecutors far greater control of cases, allowing them to use the threat of long sentences to squeeze plea bargains from some prisoners and to force others into drug treatment.

"My concern is that we not go too far in giving away our discretion," the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, said in an interview. "This is the first year where I've sensed something is going to happen."

Political activism is unusual for the state's prosecutors, who are only occasionally outspoken on legislation. None of the state's other law enforcement groups with a stake in the issue - police chiefs, sheriffs, the state correction officers union - have been as outspoken.

The most radical part of the governor's proposal - reducing the mandatory terms for those serving the longest - is not entirely objectionable to prosecutors, since it addresses a symbolically important but relatively small clutch of drug offenders. A bill has yet to be introduced, but once it is, both sides say, the real fight will be over the fate of the lower-level drug offenders and over whether judges, instead of prosecutors, will decide who goes to treatment and who goes to jail, and how long the sentences will be.

"We can't live with a system that takes out of prosecutors' hands the right to send predatory drug dealers to prison," said the Schenectady County district attorney, Robert M. Carney, who is president of the statewide association.

Over the years, mandatory sentencing laws have been credited for locking up some of the biggest drug dealers for long periods of time, and blamed for imprisoning, also for long periods of time, drug addicts who turned to crime only to fuel their habits.

It is widely acknowledged that the drug laws, enacted in 1973, crammed court dockets and state prisons. (New York's prison population has begun to drop only recently.)

Among the 70,000 inmates in the state, 21,000 are there on drug charges, and of those, about 4,200 are first-time felons. And although national studies have shown that most drug users are white, 95 percent of the drug offenders in state prisons are black or Hispanic.

Advocates for easing the drug laws, including Catholic bishops, prisoners' rights groups and politicians representing the blacks and Latinos who bear the brunt of drug crimes and drug laws, point repeatedly to issues of cost, effectiveness and fairness. The Rockefeller drug laws, their argument goes, imprison scores of low-level drug offenders who need treatment, not jail.

A report promoting the benefits of treatment was released last week by the Correctional Association of New York, the main group beating the drum to overturn the drug laws.

Citing outside research, the report found that treatment as an alternative to prison and treatment programs inside prison were less costly and better at reducing repeat offenses than incarceration alone.

As those hoping to change the stringent sentencing laws have gained political will from the decline in violent crime, the other side, too, has used the decline to assert its case. "Violent crime is down dramatically in New York State and, in our view, one of the main reasons for the decline is the vigorous enforcement of our drug laws," says the letter from Mr. Carney, sent to the lawmakers last Wednesday. "It would be extremely shortsighted to respond to these outstanding reductions in violent crime by taking away the very tools we have used so effectively to make our communities safer."

The district attorneys say that their voices have been drowned out by tales of drug mules unwittingly bringing cocaine into the country and first-time offenders put away for years and years. So lately, they have been advancing their own tales: a woman whose husband was killed by a drug offender, drug gangs that once ruled the mean streets of their towns, statistics that show how many drug offenders now in prison are in fact repeat felons (two-thirds, they say). Dealing drugs, they insist, is an inherently violent business.

"My greater concern is that in this whole discussion, we seem to be conceding that no violence comes of this," said a frustrated Mr. Johnson. "I'm not conceding that. People need to be reminded of everything that goes along with the drug trade."

As political strategy, it behooves the state's prosecutors to place themselves to the right of Mr. Pataki and to let the Assembly Democrats stake out a position to his left. And so in interviews last week, prosecutors from Schenectady County to the Bronx were careful not to say they were against anything in his proposal. But prosecutors have long opposed anything other than allowing appellate court judges to review some sentences. The governor's latest proposal goes further than that, and the Assembly bill is expected to go further still.

"The signal we are sending up there is you've got to move with a great deal of caution," said the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown. "You can't just go ahead and dismantle these laws, because they've been very successful at lowering the level of violence."

Mr. Brown, a 16-year veteran of the state bench who is still referred to as Judge Brown, these days finds himself in the unlikely role of arguing against judicial discretion. Judges, he delicately points out now, are under other pressures. "They have enormous calendars, they have cases to try," said Mr. Brown. "The pressure they are under is to try to get people into treatment. Prosecutors are in the best position to make independent judgments."

Judges, not surprisingly, generally support greater judicial discretion, and Chief Judge Judith S. Kaye has expressed cautious support for softening the mandatory sentences.

Much of what the governor has proposed is not what the prosecutors fear most. His most ambitious proposal would affect prisoners convicted of class A1 felonies - the sale of two ounces of cocaine or heroin or possession of four ounces of the same substances. In January, there were only 618 such offenders behind bars.

Mr. Silver, the Assembly speaker, has said the governor has not gone far enough to ease the harshest sentences for low-level offenders, but Mr. Silver has not divulged the specifics for his own plan.

Privately, his aides say, the most contested areas of negotiation will be the range of minimum and maximum sentences for lower-level felonies. The battle will be over how much money will be allocated for treatment, and over whether judges will be able to decide whether drug offenders go to prison or to treatment. It is unlikely, they say, that the entire sentencing decision will be given over to judges.

---

01/02/06
USA Today
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Indiana

Greenwood - Police discovered $200,000 worth of marijuana and methamphetamine in a Greenwood woman's home. Investigators described Mary Cheever, 37, as a drug dealer with connections to Hispanic drug cartels in South America. Cheever, her boyfriend, her two teenage children and two men believed to be working for her were arrested on several drug charges after an anonymous tip led police to the home.

Texas

Fort Worth - Authorities are investigating whether a Mansfield boot camp possessed and distributed narcotics illegally. State agents have examined the camp's medical records and supplies, and a spokesman said the company is cooperating. The boot camp is owned by Florida-based Correctional Services Corporation.

-------- iraq

FOREIGN AFFAIRS The War Saddam Won

February 6, 2001
New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/06/opinion/06FRIE.html

DOHA, Qatar - The Bush team has a full-fledged public relations disaster on its hands in the Arab world.

From the smallest pistachio seller here on the shores of the Persian Gulf to the highest Arab ministers, there is not only total opposition to any Bush plans to tighten sanctions on Saddam Hussein until he is squeezed out of power, but in fact virtually unanimous support for lifting sanctions immediately.

America has lost the propaganda war with Saddam. Period. And before the sanctions regime collapses entirely, the U.S. needs to find a way to at least salvage an international ban on all weapons sales to Iraq, with border inspections, so that Saddam's military power is contained - and forget about using endless economic sanctions to get rid of him. They are not sustainable.

Especially after Ariel Sharon wins the Israeli election today. Judging from many conversations here, the Arab street is poised to say to the Bush team: "Let me get this straight. You want us to join America in imposing sanctions on the Iraqi leader who smashed Kuwait, while America accepts the Israeli leader who smashed Lebanon? Not a chance."

The U.S. effort to isolate Saddam has died of many causes. For one, Saddam totally outfoxed Washington in the propaganda war. All you hear and read in the media here is that the sanctions are starving the Iraqi people - which is true. But the U.S. counter-arguments that by complying with U.N. resolutions Saddam could get those sanctions lifted at any time are never heard. Preoccupied with the peace process, no senior U.S. officials have made their case in any sustained way here, and it shows.

You would never know from talking to people in the gulf that just a few weeks ago Saddam Hussein's son Uday put forward a "working paper" to the Iraqi National Assembly calling for a new emblem that showed Kuwait "as an integral part of greater Iraq." You would never know that Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, recently declared that "Kuwait got what it deserved." You would never know that during the period from June to December 2000, despite all the hunger among the Iraqi people, the U.N. reported that Saddam bought only $4.2 billion worth of food and medicine for his people - even though under the U.N. oil-for-food program he had $7.8 billion to spend.

No, all you hear now are the sorts of arguments that Egypt's foreign minister, Amr Moussa, made at the Davos Forum last week: "We can't expect that the people of Iraq live under sanctions forever. . . . Since the war, public opinion in the Arab world has moved 180 degrees." Many here would agree.

Even if Colin Powell came to the gulf to make the right arguments, he would have an uphill battle. For one thing, Washington has forgotten how different Iraq looks from the Arab world. The leaders of the small Persian Gulf sheikdoms are very good at calculating the balance of power. They know the difference between the mirage and the oasis, and they know that as long as Saddam is posing no immediate military threat to them, his army is still a useful counterweight to their more dangerous historic enemy - Iran.

At the same time, on the Arab street the notion that at least one Arab country, Iraq, has weapons of mass destruction that can balance Israel's is very popular. Moreover, the daily Arab TV diet of pictures of the Palestinian uprising and the Israeli retaliations has produced a gut desire on the Arab street to poke a finger in America's eye.

Finally, the Arab street no longer accepts the logic of sanctions - that if you squeeze Iraq long enough the Iraqi people will oust Saddam. It is widely felt that Arab leaders can never be ousted by the "people." It never happens in this neighborhood. As one Qatari intellectual said to me: "If your sanctions on Castro have not worked for 40 years to get rid of him, and he is right next to you, why do you believe that they will work to get rid of Saddam?" For the most part, the Iraqi opposition groups (funded by the U.S.) are viewed as corrupt outsiders who would be rejected by the Iraqi body politic in the unlikely event they ever did oust Saddam.

Bottom line: If Colin Powell tries really hard, launches a real P.R. campaign against Saddam, he might be able to hold together the sanctions long enough to get them lifted in an orderly way and replaced by a U.N. ban on all military sales to Iraq. If you think otherwise, well, I have some lakefront property on the Saudi-Qatari border I'd like to sell you.

-------- u.n

U.N.: Leaders must tackle poverty

2/6/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1naifk0oe5412

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Efforts to cut global poverty in half by 2015 will fall flat unless world leaders shift the focus from cities to rural areas where millions of the poorest people live, a new U.N. report says. The report by the International Fund for Agricultural Development said 75% of the 1.2 billion people living on less than a dollar a day are in rural areas where the economy is based on agriculture.

"Current development efforts grossly and increasingly neglect agricultural and rural people," said Michael Lipton, director of the Poverty Research Unit at Sussex University in England.

At the Millennium Summit in September, nearly 150 world leaders pledged to halve the number of people living in extreme poverty by 2015, but the report said aid has yet to be directed to where it is needed most. The value of aid to agriculture fell by two-thirds between 1987 and 1998 while overall investments in agriculture and rural areas also decreased, said the agency, known by its initials IFAD.

While poverty decreased dramatically from 1970 to 1990, Lipton said that the pace of the decline has stalled in the last decade. To halve poverty in 15 years, 30 million people need to escape poverty every year, but currently only 10 million are doing so, IFAD said.

The failure is especially acute in sub-Saharan Africa, where the rate of poverty reduction is particularly slow.

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

Likely remains of U.S. soldier repatriated

02/06/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-06-cambodia.htm

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) - U.S. officials on Tuesday sent back to the United States what are believed to be the remains of one of the last American soldiers killed in combat during the Vietnam War era.

More than 150 people attended a solemn ceremony at the airport of the Cambodian capital where a box containing the remains was covered in a U.S. flag and loaded onto a plane to be sent to an Army laboratory in Hawaii for positive identification.

It could take a year or more for the remains to be identified and the victim's family informed.

The remains were located by a team of about 50 Americans and Cambodians last week on Tang Island, off the Cambodian coast in the Gulf of Thailand.

The U.S. lost 18 servicemen in a battle there in May 1975 when three helicopters went in to rescue the crew of a civilian cargo vessel captured by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, which had taken over the country the previous month.

The island was much better defended than U.S. intelligence reports had indicated, and the civilian crew of the merchant ship Mayaguez was not even on the island when the attack took place. The debacle was the last U.S. combat engagement in Cambodia or Vietnam.

The remains are thought to be of a combatant killed early in the May 1975 battle. U.S. forces were prevented by heavy Khmer Rouge fire from retrieving his body, U.S. Ambassador Kent Wiedemann said.

Richard Wills, the excavation team's chief anthropologist, confirmed that a Khmer Rouge veteran had pointed out the spot where the U.S. serviceman was buried. The remains were recovered one day before the end of a one-month search and excavation mission.

Wiedemann said at the airport ceremony that it was a day of "pride and gratification," describing the deaths of U.S. servicemen in the region as being for a noble cause.

Warfare pitting U.S.-assisted governments against communist insurgents in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam ended in 1975 with communist victories in all three countries.

When combat ended in Southeast Asia, the number of Americans unaccounted for totaled 2,583 Americans, including 74 in Cambodia.

"Soldiers came here with selfless motives on behalf of freedom ... and to fight for the nation's security," Wiedemann said.

The remains of a three-person U.S. Marine Corps machine gun crew left behind during the Tang Island battle will be sought in March 2002, said Col. Jeff Smith, the U.S. mission commander.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Ill wind blows some good, boosts UK windpower

UK: February 6, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9704

LONDON - Storms which swept through Britain late last year caused misery for some people but pushed up wind power output.

The British Wind Energy Association said power generation from the country's wind turbines was roughly 125 percent normal levels in the last quarter, a period when demand traditionally rises.

"It's one of the best synergies you could ask for; we produce more electricity just as people want more", said the association's chief executive Nick Goodall in a statement.

Overall, 2000 was a record year for the British wind energy industry with annual gerneration of almost one billion units of electricity, an increase of 10 percent on 1999 figures.

During 2000, 65 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity was commissioned, representing almost double the previous two years combined.

But despite the growth, Goodall warned Britain needs to be installing about 350 megawatts each year to meet government's target of producing 10 percent of electricity from renewable power by 2010.

Britain, Europe's windiest nation with enough wind to meet the country's electricity demand three times over, currently boasts 409 megawatts of installed wind power capacity.

While this may be enough to power 260,000 homes each year it is a long way behind the level of wind power some European countries muster.

Germany is the world's leading wind country with over 4,000 megawatts of capacity, while Danish installed wind power capacity is 1,700 megawatts, providing the country with 10 percent of its electricity. The target is for 50 percent by 2030.

-------- environment

Arsenic Problem

February, 2001
Outside Magazine
http://www.outsidemag.com/magazine/200102/200102arsenic1.html

America's Little (Well...) Actually Kind of Serious (Um...) Maybe It's Worse Than We Thought (Hmmm...) Pretty Damn Big (Gulp!) Arsenic Problem

Meet the proud residents of the nation's arsenic capital. Now, will someone please explain to these good people why poison's a bad thing? By Bill Donahue

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING ABOUT Fallon, Nevada, population 8,300, is how ordinary it is-how old-timey and rock-ribbed. Sure, the main drag, U.S. 50, is a four-lane highway lined with modern American cheesemongers: Wal-Mart, Safeway, Taco Bell, McDonald's. But look past that gaudy facade. Stand out on Williams Avenue some morning, early, when the casino traffic is slow and the little sprinklers on every green lawn are going swish-swish-swish against the brutal, oncoming desert sun, and gaze north toward Rattlesnake Hill. There on top, hard by the municipal water tanks, stands a 50-foot-high steel crucifix. The city owns that cross, and every Good Friday since 1924 a small flock of pilgrims has journeyed from the town cemetery up to its base. Follow their route a ways and pretty soon you'll come into the old town center, built just after the Newlands Irrigation Project of 1903 diverted Truckee River water to Fallon, turning it into a patchwork of alfalfa and corn fields, the self-described "Oasis of Nevada."

Oh, what an oasis it seems. There's an Elks Club and a VFW Hall, of course, and over at the Lariat Motel the reader board blares GOD BLESS AMERICA. Good idea. The little towns of America need blessing, every one of them. But Fallon...let's just say Fallon could use something more-like a ritual cleansing. The reason is nefarious indeed: arsenic. In a nation where more than 3,000 municipalities were found in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act as recently as 1998, piping water tainted with illegal levels of pollutants ranging from lead to cryptosporidium, Fallon has a greater concentration of arsenic in its drinking water than any other town its size or larger in the United States. Its municipal reserves contain 100 parts per billion. It sounds miniscule, but that 100 ppb is toxic enough, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, to pose a 2 percent cancer risk above the national norm to anyone who spends 30 years drinking it. You can't see the poison and you can't smell it, but it's there, slowly weakening Fallonites' immune systems, and scientists are fretfully analyzing it.

The University of California at Berkeley Arsenic Health Effects Research Program is now studying the "water consumption patterns...cigarette smoking, chlorination of drinking water, diet, and occupational history" of 200 northern Nevada residents suffering from severe bladder maladies, 15 of them from the Fallon area. The Berkeley study is focused on bladder cancer-which renders patients' urine putrid, speckled with blood, and afloat with thimble-size flecks of flesh-and views arsenic as the culprit. Nevada state epidemiologist Randall Todd is also investigating whether arsenic is behind a severe increase in children's leukemia cases. Six Fallon-area children were diagnosed with the disease between March and July of last year; no other rural Nevada county has ever reported more than one case in a year. "Fallon," pronounces Jon Merkle, an EPA environmental scientist, "is the Mount Everest of arsenic situations. No other U.S. city comes close."

Well, almost. According to a recent Natural Resources Defense Council list (dubbed "Arsenic and Old Laws"), the University of Oklahoma in Norman comes in with the second-highest arsenic level, at 78 ppb, followed closely by Cheney, Kansas, at 65 ppb. The Berkeley folks are also studying 200 bladder cancer patients in Kings County, northern California, where arsenic levels reach 50 ppb. But no other community is situated on top of a water source as toxic as the Basalt Aquifer, a 15-mile-long underground pool that sloshes through the arsenic-rich rock beneath Fallon.

Still, Mayor Ken Tedford is the picture of small-town placidity. An ample, genial fellow, he sips his coffee out of a white mug labeled-you guessed it-MAYOR. Sometimes he comes to the office straight from his tire shop down the street, wearing his Goodyear Tires shirt. He's so respected, he ran unopposed in the last election. At the moment, however, the mayor is perspiring. I'm asking him if he drinks the water.

"Look," he says, "I drink the water, and I'm more at risk from the Diet Pepsi I drink all day. People have been drinking a little arsenic here for a long time."

It's true. Arsenic is common throughout the arid mining country of the West and is laced through the soil of the Great Plains, New England, and central California. In fact, 22 million Americans drink arsenic-tainted groundwater every day. And now, more than 26 years after President Gerald Ford signed the Safe Drinking Water Act, the EPA is finally coming to their aid. By June 21, 2001, the agency is expected to lower its limit for what it considers a safe level of arsenic in drinking water from 50 to 5 parts per billion.

Water providers, both public and private, won't have to bear the cost of this decree immediately. Large providers-those serving 10,000 or more users-will need to comply with the new arsenic standard by 2004; smaller providers, like Fallon's Municipal Water Department, will have until 2006. What's more, the EPA currently has $4.6 billion, allocated by Congress, to loan to communities that need to upgrade. But with more than 6,000 water suppliers, most of them rural, faced with having to install new systems to filter or dilute their water, the costs will escalate quickly. The EPA estimates that the necessary changes will cost the suppliers and their clients $374 million annually for the next 20 years.

Fallon is already feeling the financial squeeze. In a stern letter last August, the EPA informed Mayor Tedford that Fallon must meet the current standard of 50 ppb-in other words, build a filtration plant costing between $7 and $10 million-by September 2003 or face fines of up to $27,500 per day. The city has pledged to meet the new limits and has already secured $1.4 million in federal funding, but building and operating a new treatment plant could cost each household as much as $3,000 over the next 20 years. No matter what they end up doing-raising citizens' water bills, issuing a bond, or appealing to the EPA for more loans-it's going to be expensive.

"With a timetable like theirs, don't you think they're just trying to punish a small-town mayor?" Mayor Tedford peers up at me, his brown eyes as soft and plaintive as a wounded badger's. "If we build this plant, our water bills skyrocket. We lose the Oasis of Nevada. Our town turns to dust."

I ask the mayor how he'd feel if some of his neighbors died of arsenic poisoning before Fallon's filtration plant was finished. "It won't happen," he says. "Arsenic isn't a health problem here. I mean, where are all the dead bodies?"

Tedford's answers sound rehearsed-or worse, callous and evasive-but they are based on an unwavering loyalty. After all, his grandfather, a mulepacker who emigrated to Fallon from Nova Scotia in 1911, was one of the town's earliest mayors, and his uncle also served in the post. How could the current Mayor Tedford concede that the water coming down from the Old Rugged Cross is poison? How could anyone? In the only vote Fallon has ever held on arsenic, a 1979 ballot measure that asked if residents wanted a filtration plant, 95 percent voted no.

"My wife drank this water through four pregnancies, and all of my children are fine," the mayor says. Our time is up. He stands to guide me to the door, then stops to point out a photo of himself looking somewhat starstruck and goofy-grinned beside four hoary men, his mayoral predecessors. "Now, if arsenic was really a problem," he asks, "don't you think these guys would have done something about it?"

AH, DENIAL. IT'S AN IMPULSE that has guided not only the city of Fallon, but the federal government's arsenic policies for nearly four decades. The 50 ppb arsenic limit was originally set in 1942 by the U.S. Public Health Service. Since 1962, when the Public Health Service first suggested reducing the limit to 10 ppb, the feds have become more fully aware that drinking arsenic-laden water can lead to bladder, skin, lung, kidney, and liver cancer.

So what's been holding them back? Not surprisingly, a 57,000-member trade group called the American Water Works Association, which has consistently decried the costly prospect of treating water for arsenic. The American Water Works Research Foundation, a think tank funded largely by water utilities, has also helped stall the EPA by giving it extra homework-asking questions about, say, the arsenic content in food and the difference between the myriad molecular types of the toxin. "They're not the tobacco industry; they do some good science," says Paul Mushak, a North Carolina toxicology consultant who's been cowriting arsenic studies for the EPA since 1981. "But they also glom onto issues that complicate things."

And the last thing the EPA needs is more complications. "There's a mind-set of economic caution there," says Mushak. "There's a big division in the Office of Drinking Water between the toxicologists and the engineers, and the engineers' attitude is, 'If you can convince us one-hundred-point-zero percent that we should lower the standard, we will. But not until then.'"

Sufficient proof took the better part of a century. In June 1999, the National Academy of Sciences published an exhaustive analysis of hundreds of arsenic studies going all the way back to 1887, when the British Medical Journal first reported the results of a dubious treatment for arsenic-caused skin cancer ("Both hands were amputated; the patient died 18 months later..."). The linchpin was a 1968 research project conducted by the Taiwan Health Ministry which examined 40,000 villagers who had drawn water from arsenic-tainted wells for at least 45 years; it definitively proved that arsenic causes skin cancer. The Academy's 1999 report was clear: The current arsenic limit "does not achieve EPA's goal for public-health protection and, therefore, requires downward revision as promptly as possible." The toxicologists in the Office of Drinking Water had been vindicated.

But old errors linger, hauntingly. The worst arsenic problem the world now faces developed out of a well-meaning but ultimately misguided UNICEF project begun during the 1970s. To wean Bangladeshi villagers off the pond and river water they shared with cows and buffalo, UNICEF helped construct over a million tube wells without testing the groundwater for arsenic. Now, more than 35 million people are drinking water that contains 100 or more ppb of arsenic, and cancer rates in Bangladesh have soared. Tens of thousands of people have skin spotted like spoiled fruit, with warts and sores covering their hands and feet. Allan Smith, director of Berkeley's Arsenic Health Effects Research Program, who has done fieldwork in Bangladesh, grimly predicts that hundreds of thousands could die with prolonged exposure. "High levels of arsenic in drinking water pose one of the biggest environmental cancer risks ever found," he says.

Do the good people of Fallon somehow have the pluck to transcend this risk? Bruce Macler, a drinking-water toxicologist for the EPA, answers with an emphatic no. "With the exception of tobacco," he says, "arsenic is probably the most proven toxin in the world. But that doesn't mean you can point to a smoking gun in Fallon. The problem is that 25 to 30 percent of the population nationwide gets cancer. You lose the arsenic-caused cancer in the noise of other cancers, and except in extreme cases-something like the epidemic in Bangladesh-you can't establish cause and effect. You stem epidemics by managing risk in the face of uncertainty. Fallon needs to do that. Until it does, people will die of arsenic poisoning."

Which brings us back to denial. Many small towns will openly shirk the new laws for as long as they can. Brian Maas, the director of water enforcement for the EPA, is braced for a fight. "This is a tough regulation for people to swallow," he says. "The arsenic is naturally occurring. Nobody did anything wrong to get it there, so people don't feel they should have to pay to remove it. And how can I make them? If you do the math, the EPA is nobody. I've got 70 people working for me-75 on a good day-and that's for all water laws, not just arsenic. In a given year, we have 20,000 providers in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act. So yeah, we'll have arsenic violators."

Including Fallon?

"Absolutely not," Maas says. "Once we go after somebody, we don't give up. We'll bring Fallon into compliance."

TO WHICH THE CITIZENRY responds: Not so fast, EPA man. Antifederalism is something of a local tradition in Fallon. The town's earliest pioneers came from back East, New Englanders drawn to Nevada's Lahontan Valley in the early 1900s by the U.S. Reclamation Service, whose Newlands Irrigation Project promised "boundless opportunities" for farmers willing to charm potatoes, carrots, asparagus, and celery out of the desert. The promise was bogus. The soil turned saline, the crops were scraggly, and the yeomanry got riled. By 1915, Fallon farmers seriously considered forming a militia to wrest control of the dams and canals along the Truckee and Carson Rivers from the federal government. A handful of farmers and ranchers managed to eke out a living, and still do; nowadays they sardonically refer to the feds as "the Mafia."

But walking the streets of Fallon one morning, I found that, to many locals, poison is not funny. "I don't even give this water to my dog," said one shop owner. Inside the Overland Hotel, a woman slumped on a bar stool and sucking on a cigarette told me she bathes her three-year-old in bottled water. A motel desk clerk protested that even though he only showers in the local water, the skin on his hands is always dry and cracking; at times it bleeds. "I feel nothing but itching all over my body," he said.

None of these people would give their names, perhaps for good reason. Every day, the Lahontan Valley News runs a column called Sound Off!, in which the vitriolic remarks made by anonymous callers to a voice-mail box at the paper are printed for all to read. Arsenic is a favorite topic in Sound Off!, and worrywarts a favorite target. In one recent issue, for instance, when a reader reported losing his or her mother to arsenic poisoning, a subsequent caller asked to see a copy of the autopsy report, adding, "There has never been a reported fatality from arsenic in the city water system." Another caller flatly averred that Fallon is getting "shafted" by the EPA.

No doubt both of these social theoreticians are fans of Dr. Gary Ridenour, an internist whose office sits on the south end of town. Ridenour is something of a cult hero in Fallon. When he first moved to Nevada from St. Louis 18 years ago, his only claim to fame was being the primary care physician for the late wrestling great André the Giant. He has since gained some notoriety. In 1993, a federal grand jury accused him of illegally distributing diazepam, the antianxiety drug best known by the brand name Valium, and of owning an unregistered sawed-off shotgun. Ridenour stood his ground. "I'm not guilty and I'm going fishing," he told the Lahontan Valley News that July. One hundred and fifty people called him to offer support. After he pleaded guilty to the illegal distribution charge a year later, his appointment book remained full.

Dr. Gary, as he is known, is a short, stout 53-year-old with a wispy beard and a wry grin. When I visited him one afternoon in his office, he had a set of prepared remarks scrawled on a legal pad-a spiel he has no doubt recited many times before, but with no less glee. Ridenour does not dispute that Fallon has arsenic in its water; he disputes the EPA's claims that the toxin needs to be regulated. "The feds want to control our lives," he announced, a pair of reading glasses riding low on his nose. "This arsenic scare-it's just big government trying to tell locals how to take care of their citizens. It's bad medicine."

On the bookshelf behind him, Dr. Gary had a collection of snake oil bottles-a shrine featuring Hamlin's Wizard Oil and The Great Doctor Kilmer's Swamp Root. Next to that hung a chilling poster depicting a Nazi SS officer and a gun-toting official from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms wearing identical snarls. Its caption: "Poland, Warsaw Ghetto, 1944. America, Waco, Texas, 1993."

"Arsenic!" Ridenour blurted. "It's ridiculous. In 18 years of office visits, 30 patients a day, I've never seen anyone test high for arsenic. I've checked the blood serum on 200 people-nothing. If they want to address a real health problem here, why don't they go out to Sand Springs Mountain, 30 miles away, and clean up the two pounds of unexploded plutonium left from the underground nuclear test they did in 1963? They don't do that because that would cost too much money. This arsenic thing, it's an easy kill for them. They just go into a few rural communities and say, 'Shut down your wells.' And then-bingo!-they've got a high-profile victory."

The doctor had a point. Fifty years ago, the U.S. government laid claim to huge swaths of Nevada desert, bombed it, littered it with radioactive waste, and turned it into a top-secret playground for "black ops" (see Area 51). Considering the proximity of Sand Springs Mountain, one would think the government would have tested Fallon's water for traces of plutonium. Apparently not. According to the EPA's Jon Merkle, plutonium testing is not required, so no one's done it.

"Here in Nevada," Ridenour said, "there used to be a group called NEVER: Nevadans Ever Vigilant, Ever Resistant. That spirit, I think, is still alive. The water here is safe. I drink it every day and my only complaint is that it makes scotch and water taste, well, a little off." He paused, smirking at me over his reading glasses.

"Off?" I said.

Ridenour tipped his head back slightly, like a wine connoisseur searching for the mot juste. "It's just... a little blunter," he said. "That's it-it's blunter."

THROUGH THE CENTURIES, arsenic has killed far more than the taste of mixed drinks. A basic component of Planet Earth-it inhabits slot number 33 on the periodic table-arsenic stepped onto the human stage in the eighth century when an Arab alchemist named Gber distilled a white powder called arsenous oxide. It soon became the poison of choice, along with strychnine, for murderers. Among its most famous victims were Napoléon Bonaparte and Emma Bovary, whose fictional demise Gustave Flaubert described with excruciating accuracy: "She grew whiter than the sheet her clenched fingers were digging into. Her tongue hung at full-length from her mouth; her rolling eyes grew dim like the globes of two lamps about to go out." This would have undoubtedly been followed by erythematous skin eruptions, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, muscular cramps, and swelling of the eyelids, hands, and feet.

Terry Bennett Jackson, a 48-year-old Fallon homemaker, has endured her own brand of torture. In 1966, when she was 13, Jackson lived on a small ranch outside Fallon that had a well drilled straight into the heart of the Basalt Aquifer. One day she came home from school with brown splotches on her neck. "The kids are making fun of me," she told her mother, "and I

can't wash the spots off. I'm not going back to school until you find out what's wrong with me."

A full week of medical tests ensued. Finally, at a doctor's behest, Jackson's mother had the water her family had been drinking for three years tested. It contained, she learned, 2,750 ppb of arsenic; the well sat on a mineral deposit 27 times more arsenic-rich than the ground underlying Fallon's municipal tanks. The damage was done. Jackson's stepfather contracted bladder cancer in 1980 (he's currently in remission); Terry and her mother have battled skin cancer for years.

"The arsenic settled in my organs," Jackson told me one morning as we sat in the living room of her split-level home just north of town. She was soft-spoken and sounded more weary than angry about what has happened to her. "Every day in eighth grade I had to make two trips to the school nurse for these shots that were supposed to pull the poison out like a magnet. The shots were extremely painful....My mother tried to convince the city there was a problem, but they just laughed her off. They didn't want to face up to it."

Now, of course, they have to. When the EPA ordered Fallon last August to reduce the arsenic level in its water, the agency also stipulated that the city provide monthly progress reports on its search for an "arsenic removal method." Last September, the city looked into two possible methods: "enhanced coagulation," in which metal salts are dissolved in the water to attract arsenic particles, and "strong-base anion exchange," in which the water is run through a resin that captures the arsenic. In its November report, Fallon said it was testing enhanced coagulation. Arsenic-free water is a long way off, but the city has grudgingly agreed to meet the EPA's 2003 deadline. "We're certainly gonna try," says Mayor Tedford.

Terry Bennett Jackson isn't convinced. "I think they're stupid," she said of Fallon's sluggish city fathers. "I don't want to be here."

THE WHOLE TIME I was in Fallon, I couldn't get a photo from the Lahontan Valley News out of my mind. It was of an ancient, sun-shriveled individual sitting in a crowded auditorium, being honored as "Eldest County Resident." Here must be the town's foremost survivor, I thought. Here was a person who had thrived while drinking poisonous water. I felt that I had to raise a glass of Fallon's finest with her.

Her name was Penelope Venturacci. An Italian immigrant, she had lived in Fallon since 1927, when she and her husband Edward came west to start a ranch. Now, at 99, she spent her afternoons at her daughter Rena Bell's home, on D Street. On my last day in town, I grabbed the two wax-paper-wrapped glasses in my room at the Lariat and drove over to Rena's small ranch house.

Penelope was inside on the wraparound couch, perched in front of the big-screen TV, a bottle of Aquafina at her side. She couldn't talk to me, really. A stroke in 1993 reduced her voice to a scarcely audible squeak; she now communicated mostly in Italian, through her daughter, but the language barrier somehow afforded us a warm rapport. Gradually it became clear that there were two distinct chapters to her life: the years before "the accident," a time of hope and of hard work on the ranch; and the years since, a time of sadness and loneliness, and of grimly following her doctor's orders to drink only bottled water.

"Is it OK," I asked Rena, "if she just has a sip?"

"Oh, it's OK," said Rena.

I unwrapped the glasses and filled them up at the sink. And then-why not?-I exclaimed, "Salute!"

"Salute!" Penelope responded.

We drank. And then Penelope Venturacci choked. Her eyes bulged, and she began to cough violently. I watched in rapt terror as her daughter slapped at her back-whap, whap, whap-until eventually the old woman sat upright and, smiling, squeaked one more time. Her daughter translated.

"That,"she said, pointing at the Aquafina, "comes in a bottle; it's filtered. But that"-she pointed now at the tap water-"it is good. It comes from the earth."

Bill Donahue related the strange tale of Lloyd Pye and his Starchild in May 2000.

---

Supplements raise mad cow concerns

2/6/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1naifk0oe5412

WASHINGTON (AP) - Dr. Scott Norton was browsing through herbal supplements when he spotted bottles containing not just plants but some unexpected animal parts: brains, testicles, tracheas and glands from cows and other animals. The Maryland physician sounded an alarm: How can Americans be sure those supplements, some imported from Europe, are made of tissue free from mad cow disease? Norton's complaint has government scientists scrambling to investigate a possible hole in the nation's safety net against mad cow disease and its cousin that destroys human brains.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, has never been found in this country. Nor has the human "new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease" that people in Britain, France and Ireland caught apparently from eating BSE-infected beef.

The government has taken steps to guard against BSE spreading here, such as banning the importation of European beef imports and the use of even domestic cow remains in U.S. cattle feed. But critics are pointing to some loopholes far removed from beef: Just what dietary supplements or bulk ingredients containing cow brain or nerve tissue might be slipping from Europe through U.S. ports?

Recently, the FDA quietly cracked down on some vaccine manufacturers after discovering they improperly imported certain European animal-derived ingredients. Supplements are far less closely regulated, and the FDA inspects less than 1% of all imports under its jurisdiction.

Ex-administration targets land

WASHINGTON (AP) - Federal officials sent out a memorandum two days before President Clinton left office specifying how landowners must meet the Endangered Species Act if they use federal lands to access their private property. While the government says it is just putting down on paper what has been policy, the timber and mining industries call the memo - a joint effort of the Interior, Agriculture and Commerce departments - another example of unfair and onerous regulation.

Federal officials say the memo only clarifies the procedures landowners must follow in applying for permits to access federal lands. A timber company, for example, must have such a permit to build a road through a national forest to get to its own land.

Landowners must get direct approval from the Fish and Wildlife Service or National Marine Fisheries Service. Or, they can certify to the Forest Service and BLM that they will abide by the wildlife and fisheries agencies' biological opinions on land use.

The two-page memorandum was signed by the heads of the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The policy will be in effect for one year while the agencies evaluate the process.

2 states push Canada on pollution

TORONTO (AP) - Pollution from Ontario power plants is sickening Americans, the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut said in a letter asking Canada's government to assess the situation. The letter to Environment Minister David Anderson from Eliot Spitzer and Richard Blumenthal, the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut, includes strong accusations in seeking an environmental assessment of three Ontario Power Generation coal-burning plants.

With Prime Minister Jean Chretien meeting President Bush on Monday, the timing of the Jan. 31 letter was intended to raise the issue as the leaders discuss U.S.-Canadian relations.

The letter cited pollution from Nanticoke, the largest coal-fired plant in North America, along with the Lakeview and Lambton plants. All three are in southern Ontario, and tracking of their emissions shows the pollutants blow into New York and spread into New England, according to Spitzer and Blumenthal.

One paragraph, noting a recent study that attributed premature deaths in upstate New York to power plant emissions, said the study failed to include the much-greater amount of pollutants crossing the border from southern Ontario.

The mortality rate in the Buffalo area attributed to U.S. power plant emissions already exceeded the level in New York City, the letter said. If the effects of the Canadian plants were included in the study, it said, "the Buffalo area mortality rate undoubtedly would have been significantly higher."

Norway approves contested wolf hunt

OSLO, Norway (AP) - Despite environmental protests, authorities on Monday approved a hunt for nine wolves in southern Norway - part of a region where the animals had once been hunted to near extinction. Wolves have been protected in southern Scandinavia for more than 20 years and their numbers have increased to about 100. But Norwegian farmers complain that the animals are killing their livestock and pets.

Swedish environmental authorities, meanwhile, say there needs to be twice as many wolves in the region - southern Norway and Sweden - in order to sustain the species.

The Norwegian government's Natural Resources Directorate announced Monday it was allowing a hunt for nine wolves in one family group to start Saturday and end April 6 in Osterdalen, an inland valley about 95 miles north of Oslo.

The World Wildlife Fund-Norway immediately pledged to challenge the permit, and Sweden's environment minister expressed concern over the decision.

Late last year, the Norwegian Natural Resources Directorate said it was considering killing two packs, with 17 to 20 animals in all. Directorate spokesman Trond Boe said Monday's decision to hunt nine wolves was "clearly a compromise."

---

Aquarium workers ate rare turtle

2/6/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1mmucj88me9jj

MIAMI (AP) - Flesh from a protected species of sea turtle that died at the Miami Seaquarium was turned into stew and eaten by two workers - Dr. Maya Dougherty, a veterinarian, and Chris Plante, an animal care supervisor. No charges were filed because the Seaquarium's permit to handle endangered species didn't specifically say how dead animals were to be disposed of, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission Lt. John D. West said.

The leatherback sea turtle had died of injuries caused by a collision with a boat. Leatherbacks, one of the rarest sea turtle species, are protected under the Federal Endangered Species Act.

Seaquarium general manager Robert Martinez sent workers a memo after the incident last April warning them to properly dispose of animal carcasses or face disciplinary action or termination.

"This is the absolute height of stupidity," said Dolphin Freedom Foundation and Seaquarium critic Russ Rector. "We're changing the name to the Miami Seaquarium and Barbeque."

Fire burns lake bottom in Fla.

MOORE HAVEN, Fla. (AP) - A 30,000-acre fire burned along the dry bottom of Lake Okeechobee, forcing the temporary evacuation of at least one lakeside campground.

Firefighters were holding the blaze at bay Tuesday.

The fire jumped the lake's retaining dike in spots, but no homes or businesses were damaged and no injuries reported. About 50 people were asked to leave a campground for a few hours Sunday because of smoke, said Angela Snow of the Glades County Emergency Management Agency.

Scientists said the fire might be a boon for the lake, which has been choked by grasses not native to Florida and has seen its bird and fish populations sag. "We had all that good wind and it just swept right through that stuff," said Wade Phillips, a local fisherman and marina worker.

But Dan Thayer of the South Florida Water Management District said he feared local residents may have started the blaze on purpose, which is a felony.

Authorities haven't determined the cause of the fire, which apparently started Friday north of Moore Haven.

------

EIA Kicks Off National Initiative to Encourage Consumers to Reuse and Recycle Used Electronics

Thursday - February 1, 2001
eiae.org
http://www.eiae.org/whatsnew/news.cfm?ID=26
Contact: Rob Nichols (rnichols@eia.org) 703-907-7790

EIA kicks off national initiative to encourage consumers to reuse and recycle used electronics New website, www.eiae.org, launched today

Arlington, Virginia -- The Electronic Industries Alliance [EIA] today unveiled an industry-led effort to encourage consumers to reuse and recycle used electronics such as TVs, PCs, VCRs, and cellphones. The effort, named the Consumer Education Initiative, or CEI, includes a website (www.eiae.org) that directs users to local charities, needy schools, neighborhood and community demanufacturers, and other local and national recycling programs that collect used electronics.

"With the growing number of obsolete electronics, it is essential that the U.S. high tech industry proactively develop programs to preserve and protect the environment, and the Consumer Education Initiative is a big step in that direction," said EIA President Dave McCurdy. McCurdy continued, "Our goal is simple: we aim to lessen the environmental impacts of our products throughout their entire life cycle, from design to end-of-life."

The Consumer Education Initiative is a comprehensive web-based information resource that provides consumers and others with information on recycling and reuse opportunities for used electronics. The program is a result of hundreds of meetings with federal, state and local government officials, industry representatives, environmental groups, and reuse, recycling, and disposal organizations.

EIA staff has been working on the CEI for over a year, and this issue is now on the radar screens of the industry's highest officials. EIA's governing body, a sixty-member group of Chief Executive Officers, has designated sound environmental reuse and recycling of electronics as one of the top four issues facing the high tech electronic industry along with trade, broadband deployment, and information and network security. "This emerging challenge has been elevated by our CEOs as one of the top issues facing our industry," McCurdy said.

The heart of the CEI is the website. Once on the website, a consumer simply clicks on his or her state. The site will list various options, including donation sites at schools and charities as well as industry and government-run collection, reuse and recycling programs. In addition, the website will contain pertinent facts and background on used electronics, helpful links, and information on other industry-led efforts to reduce the impacts of our products on the environment.

"We've found that consumers don't want to simply throw away their old PC or TV, but they don't know what do to with them. This website will help consumers reuse and recycle obsolete electronic products by giving them to charities or donating them to a school," McCurdy noted.

To raise awareness of the website, participating manufacturers have agreed to include an industry statement in product owner manuals, company web sites, or product packaging and literature, directing consumers to the CEI web page. EIA is also briefing state, local and national legislators and lawmakers on the program, including officials from the new Bush Administration and the newly sworn-in 107th Congress. At the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, - the nation's largest high tech trade show, hosted by the Consumer Electronic Association - EIA staff distributed t-shirts to thousands of attendees that read, "DON'T TRASH YOUR PC, GO TO WWW. EIAE.ORG INSTEAD TO LEARN ABOUT REUSE AND RECYLING PROGRAMS FOR USED ELECTRONICS."

[Contact Rob Nichols at rnichols@eia.org to receive a .jpg photo of the t-shirt]

The Electronic Industries Alliance (EIA) is a partnership of electronic and high tech associations and companies committed to shared knowledge and shared influence. Our mission is to promote market development and competitiveness of the U.S. high tech industry through domestic and international policy efforts. Comprised of more than 2,100 members that provide two million jobs for American workers, EIA represents 80 percent of the $550 billion U.S. electronics industry. EIA's sector associations and members represent consumer electronics, telecommunications, electronic components, government electronics and information technology, semiconductor standards, and philanthropic interests.

---

Rare Salt - Water Camel May Be Separate Species

February 6, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/science/science-environment-c.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/science/science-species-camel.html

NAIROBI (Reuters) - A rare breed of wild, salt water-drinking camels found in China and Mongolia are now thought to be a different species from their domesticated cousins, the United Nations said on Tuesday.

But the wild Bactrian camels, who apparently have hairier knee caps and a larger space between their humps than domesticated Bactrians, are threatened with extinction by hunters who plant land mines near water holes to butcher them.

Although the wild two-humped or Bactrian camel has been known about for years, scientists never realized it was genetically different from domesticated breeds until the animals were observed drinking salt water.

DNA tests have not yet been completed but U.N. environmentalists say other tests have shown there is a significant difference in the genetic make-up of the wild Bactrian from the domesticated.

``We cannot say we are 100 percent certain, but all the evidence seems to point toward it being a new species,'' Rob Hepworth, a senior biodiversity official with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), told a news conference in Nairobi.

Scientists say there are only about 1,000 of the camels living in Asia, which would make the species more endangered than the Giant Panda.

But they believe that up to 600 of the rare breed live in an uninhabited area that was used by China for nuclear testing over the last 41 years and are threatened by hunters who have moved into the region since testing ended in 1996.

``We found land mines put by the salt water springs,'' said John Hare, leader of the expedition and founder of the Wild Camel Protection Foundation.

``So when the camels come to drink they step on them, BANG! They are blown to pieces and picked up as meat.''

There were also known to be about 300 more animals in Mongolia's Gobi desert and in 1999 a team of British and Chinese scientists found another 169 in the Kum Tagh sand dunes in northwest China near Tibet's Arjin Shan mountains.

---

Bush delays new forest regulations

February 6, 2001
Washington Times
By Audrey Hudson
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200126224026.htm

The Bush administration yesterday delayed a rule banning road-building and most logging in the nation's forests, following through on its promise to re-examine a slew of regulations issued by President Clinton during his final days in office.

Mr. Clinton hoped to secure his environmental legacy by effectively prohibiting natural resources development on 58 million acres of public land.

However, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card issued a Jan. 20 memo to all agencies requesting that new rules and regulations be blocked to "ensure that the president's appointees have the opportunity to review any new or pending regulations."

The action was published yesterday in the Federal Register , making it official and delaying implementation of the contentious rule from March 13 to May 12.

The delay is "necessary to give department officials the opportunity for further review and consideration of new regulations consistent with the . . . memo," said Kevin Herglotz, spokesman for the Agriculture Department.

Mr. Herglotz would not speculate on what, if any, changes would be made to alter the regulations, which he described as hundreds of pages of complex technical documents.

"This regulation is in the review process; no decision has been made at this time," Mr. Herglotz said.

House and Senate Republicans were critical of the Clinton administration for bypassing Congress and restricting land use through the federal regulatory process. Republican leaders had urged Mr. Bush to overturn or delay the rule.

Hundreds of public meetings were held throughout the country on Mr. Clinton's forest plan, and the U.S. Forest Service received 130,000 public comments on the issue.

Environmentalists supported the ban, but opponents, mostly Westerners, said it would endanger forest health through uncontrolled insect infestation.

Lawmakers said new roads are needed to gain access to the woods to fight forest fires. Last year, 92,000 wildfires swept across 7.3 million acres.

Republicans also said public input was ignored.

They said the outcome of studies by the U.S. Forest Service was prejudiced from inception to reflect Mr. Clinton's wishes to limit development and public access to nearly one-third of the nation's forests.

Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, Connecticut Democrat, and Rep. Henry A. Waxman, California Democrat, yesterday sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget expressing their concerns over Mr. Card's memo, which they said could reverse decisions that protect public land and the environment.

"In our capacity as ranking members on the Senate Governmental Affairs and House Government Reform Committees, we intend to closely monitor the implementation of the Card memorandum, particularly where it applies to measures to protect health and safety, consumers, and the environment," they said in the letter to Mitchell E. Daniels, OMB director.

"Although we understand the desire of the incoming administration to review new and pending regulations, we are concerned that the Card memorandum could be used to undermine long-needed safeguards," the letter said.

Meanwhile, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee plans to hold hearings to review the process and determine whether the regulations can be overturned by Congress, said a committee spokesman.

House Resources Committee Chairman James V. Hansen said his committee also will "vigorously" review the regulations.

"I will make it a priority to undo this kind of reckless, last-minute maneuvering," the Utah Republican said after the final regulation was announced Jan. 4.

"The American people deserve thoughtful, rational policies that allow local management and public enjoyment of their own lands," Mr. Hansen said. "They don't deserve this last-minute manipulation and grandstanding by a man desperate for a legacy."

-------- genetics

Biotech Food

February 6, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/06/opinion/L06FOO.html

To the Editor:

Re "A Food Fight for High Stakes" (Week in Review, Feb. 4):

Your article fairly examines the ethical arguments over distributing genetically engineered food to hungry nations.

A related argument concerns growing genetically engineered crops in the United States. That could reduce farmers' exposure to pesticides, protect beneficial insects from widespread spraying and cut water pollution and land erosion. Too many critics cavalierly dismiss such benefits.

We must get beyond the "either- or" attitude toward biotechnology. Comprehensive regulation and increased financing can help safeguard the environment while conventional and novel agricultural techniques are used to increase productivity, protect farmers' lives and incomes and alleviate hunger overseas.

MICHAEL F. JACOBSON Washington, Feb. 4, 2001 The writer is executive director, Center for Science in the Public Interest.

---

Iowa farmers sue over biotech corn

2/6/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1mmucj88me9jj

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) - A class-action lawsuit has been filed in Polk County District Court on behalf of Iowa farmers who believe they lost money because of consumer fears caused when an unapproved biotech corn wound up in the nation's food supply. The lawsuit filed Monday seeks compensation for farmers who grew other approved varieties of corn, but believe concern over the StarLink mix-up led to lower corn exports and prices last year.

Des Moines attorney Roxanne Conlin said the Iowa court system can provide quicker relief for Iowa farmers than similar lawsuits pending in federal court.

Federal class-action lawsuits were filed on behalf of non-StarLink growers nationwide in December against Aventis. One was filed in Cedar Rapids and another in East St. Louis, Ill.

StarLink, which was genetically engineered to resist European corn borers, was never was approved for human consumption because of unresolved questions about whether a special protein it contains can cause allergic reactions.

-------- police

Police: "We are not amused"

Tue, 6 Feb 2001
Reaching out to 739,417 Bizarre News readers around the globe

OMAHA, Nebraska - In police parlance he is known as a "jumper," someone who wants to commit suicide by jumping from some high place.

This particular jumper was threatening to do the deed by leaping from an overpass into traffic. While police tried to talk him down a hacker managed to break onto the police radio frequency, and broadcast the Van Halen song JUMP for three and a half minutes. As officers were negotiating all of the police radios suddenly blared, "...might as well jump... go ahead jump!"

Police say the man clutching an overpass fence couldn't have heard the broadcast, however police chief Don Carey was still not amused. In a display of acumen and discretion Carey called the broadcast, "inappropriate."

Police say someone who found a lost or stolen police radio might have transmitted the song. The jumper was eventually talked down safely.

-------- spying

House panel to investigate allegations of Rich spying

02/06/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/2001-02-06-rich.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Congressional investigators are looking into the question of whether financier Marc Rich, who was pardoned by President Clinton in his last days in office, may have been involved in spying during his flight from U.S. authorities, a congressional source said.

The House Government Reform Committee, which plans a hearing Thursday on the pardon, is looking into tips it received that Rich may have provided intelligence data to other countries, the House source said Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

People "in the intelligence community" have been in contact with the committee, but the panel probably will not bring the issue up at the first hearing because members don't have enough information from American intelligence officials, the source said.

The allegations were first reported Monday in the New York Post, which said Rich had a relationship with the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency.

A letter from former Mossad chief Shabtai Shavit to Clinton saying Rich provided assistance to the Israeli spy agency was among the documents released by Rich lawyer Jack Quinn to support the Rich pardon, the newspaper said.

Messages left with Shavit on Monday were not answered.

"The government of Israel considered Rich a critical ally and the president took that seriously when he considered the pardon request," former White House spokesman Jake Siewert told the Post.

Rich has been based in Switzerland since 1983, just before he was indicted in the United States, accused of tax evasion of more than $48 million, fraud and participating in illegal oil deals with Iran.

Clinton, in one of his last acts, pardoned Rich, which led to the congressional investigation in the House and Senate.

Among the witnesses the House panel plans to call Thursday are Quinn, who was Clinton's White House counsel until 1997; Eric Holder, the Justice Department's No. 2 official, and former White House Counsel Beth Nolan.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans a hearing next week on the pardons Clinton granted during his last days in office.

-------- terrorism

The Embassy Bombings Trial

February 6, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/06/opinion/06TUE1.html

The terrorism trial that opened yesterday in Federal District Court in Manhattan presents an extraordinary challenge to the impartial administration of justice in the United States. The four defendants are accused of participating in a homicidal conspiracy of terror against the United States during much of the last decade, including the 1998 bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Because the attacks were so repugnant, and the defendants are foreign-born, the prosecutors and the court bear a special obligation to insure that the case is handled fairly and in full compliance with the rights that must be accorded to every defendant in a criminal case.

The need for extra vigilance should not be underestimated, given the brutal nature of the crimes and the breadth of the conspiracy outlined by the government. Two of the defendants are charged with directly assisting in the embassy bombings, which killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 4,000. The other two are accused more broadly of involvement in a global conspiracy spanning Asia and Africa that prosecutors say is directed by Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile now believed to be living in Afghanistan. In their opening statement to the jury yesterday, prosecutors linked the conspiracy to the 1993 ambush of American troops in Somalia in which 18 soldiers died.

The government indicted 22 men, including Mr. bin Laden, on charges of participating in the international conspiracy. Only two others, besides the four on trial, are in American custody. One pleaded guilty. The other is likely to be tried later. Even so, the current trial is based on more than 100 pages of charges and is expected to last 9 or 10 months and involve more than 100 witnesses from six countries.

The proceedings have already generated unusual and difficult questions for the presiding judge, Leonard B. Sand, who has a long and distinguished record of protecting the rights of defendants. Last week he decided to allow prosecutors to use statements given overseas by three of the defendants, including a confession, even though the suspects were not offered lawyers at the time they were questioned. Judge Sand, ruling orally from the bench to expedite the case, said he was satisfied that the statements made by the defendants were voluntary, not the product of any coercion.

But under the Supreme Court's 1966 Miranda decision, the standard that American courts use to determine if statements are voluntarily given and thus admissible as evidence, suspects must be informed of their right to legal representation before they are interrogated. As the Supreme Court reaffirmed last year, interrogations in police custody can be inherently coercive, even in the absence of explicit threats or violence. We are troubled by Judge Sand's decision to deviate from strict adherence to the Miranda rule because the interrogation took place in a foreign country, Kenya, that makes no provision for legal representation. But we also understand the problem that any judge would confront in a terrorism case in determining whether providing a lawyer was feasible under the circumstances overseas. We await a written ruling that details Judge Sand's reasoning.

Judge Sand and the prosecution team must make every effort to preserve the rights of the defendants. Terrorists attack physical targets for political ends. In this case, nothing would suit Mr. bin Laden more than to see the United States betray its judicial principles by failing to give the defendants a fair and just trial.

---

Embassy Bombing Trial Witness Recounts Birth of Terror Group

February 6, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/06/nyregion/06CND-TERR.html

Osama bin Laden, the fugitive Saudi financier accused of masterminding the 1998 American embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya, interpreted the Koran to persuade followers that they were not betraying their Islamic beliefs in killing civilians, a major government witness testified today in federal court.

Taking the stand in the trial of four men accused in the bombings, the witness, Jamal Ahimed Al Fadl, said that Mr. bin Laden formed a secret organization, Al Qaeda, in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. Mr. Al Fadl said he was one of the first to swear allegiance to Mr. bin Laden, and ran the group's payroll.

That job was eventually passed on to Wadih El-Hage, one of the four defendants in the embassy bombing case, he testified. Nearly simultaneous bombings of the American embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, on Aug. 7, 1998, killed 224 people and wounded thousands.

In testifying about the activities of Mr. bin Laden in exile in Afghanistan, the witness also revealed details about himself. Mr. Al Fadl, whose identity had been kept secret until the opening of the trial, had been known only by the code name CS-1.

The prosecutor, Paul W. Butler, promised that the witness would outline Al Qaeda's workings and structure and the roles of its members.

Today, Mr. Al Fadl disclosed that he was originally from Sudan. He said he lived in Brooklyn from 1986 to 1988, as well as in Atlanta and North Carolina.

In Brooklyn, he said, he attended a mosque that recruited people to fight Soviet occupation in Afghanistan during the 1980s. He agreed to go, and received general as well as explosives training there, and fought on the front lines.

Mr. Al Fadl was testifying under a deal with the government that called for him to plead guilty to an unspecified terrorism charge.

The other defendants are Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a 27-year-old Tanzanian; Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, a 24-year-old Saudi; and Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, a 35-year-old Jordanian. Mr. al-'Owhali is charged with directly assisting in the Nairobi bombing, and Mr. Mohamed is charged with directly assisting in the Tanzani bombing. Both could face the death penalty if convicted. Mr. Odeh and Mr. el-Hage are accused of participating in a broad conspiracy by Mr. bin Laden to murder Americans.

On Monday, Mr. Mohamed's lawyer, Jeremy Schneider, appeared to concede his client's guilt in the Tanzania bombing, but may have been intending to win the jury's sympathy if the panel convicts him and must consider whether or not to impose the death penalty.

Mr. Schneider said his client ground TNT, loaded it onto a truck and knew he was helping to assemble and deliver a bomb, but was acting under the orders of ``higher-ups'' without knowing their identities or goals. He said Mr. Mohamed was not aware of the bomb target, the timing of the attack or that Americans might be victims.

Mr. Butler said Mr. al-'Owhali also had confessed to investigators that he helped carry out the Nairobi bombing. The trial, which could last for 9 to 10 months, is being held under heavy security in Federal District Court in Manhattan before Judge Leonard B. Sand.

---

First witness testifies in embassy bombing trial

02/06/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-02-06-bombingtrial.htm
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1mmucj88me9jj

NEW YORK (AP) - Prosecutors called their secret witness Tuesday in the trial of four men charged in the deadly bombings of two U.S. embassies, a Sudanese man who testified he was one of the first members of fugitive Osama bin Laden's terror network. Jamal Ahmed Alfadl, the first witness called in the trial, said bin Laden formed the al-Qaeda group in the late 1980s to ''change our governments.'' ''We have to do something to take them out,'' he quoted bin Laden as saying about the U.S. military. ''We have to fight them.''

Alfadl, who now lives in the United States, told jurors he was one of the first people to swear allegiance to the group, and was told by bin Laden he had "to be patient and follow the orders of the emir."

Alfadl, now living in the United States, testified after U.S. District Judge Leonard B. Sand told courtroom artists they were not permitted to draw his face.

Prosecutors had kept Alfadl's identity secret until he took the stand, one day after Assistant U.S. Attorney Paul Butler said that the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of the embassies were the work of al-Qaeda and part of a worldwide conspiracy to kill Americans.

Twelve Americans were among 224 people killed when the bombs went off nearly simultaneously at embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Alfadl, referred to in court papers only as CS-1, has pleaded guilty to an unspecified terrorism charge in a deal that called for him to serve as a witness.

The decision to call Alfadl as the first witness was part of a strategy by prosecutors to show the bombings resulted from an army of well-trained Islamic militants who did not want to put down their weapons after forcing the former Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Alfadl, speaking in heavily accented English, described moving to the United States in the middle 1980s to attend school. He spent time in Georgia, North Carolina and Brooklyn, N.Y., where he attended a mosque actively recruiting people to fight in Afghanistan.

He said he agreed to train at several camps in Afghanistan, where he met bin Laden.

Asked by prosecutors how much a Muslim must sacrifice if he is summoned to participate in a holy war, he replied, "Your family, your kids, your money, your business, you have to give everything."

He said he fought on the front lines of the war before going to more camps for training in explosives.

In 1989, he said, he again met bin Laden, who was thinking about creating al Qaeda because "everything's over in Afghanistan."

"He said we want to change our governments," Alfadl recalled.

Prosecutors contend bin Laden has been on a terrorism spree for more than a decade in a bid to force governments to reject Western values and adhere to his extreme interpretation of Islamic law.

The effort has landed bin Laden on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List, got him indicted in the embassy bombings case, resulted in a $5 million reward for his capture and isolated him in Afghanistan, where authorities believe he is in hiding.

---

Trial starts for four in blasts at embassies

February 6, 2001
Washington Times
By Betsy Pisik THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-200126215427.htm

NEW YORK - The U.S. government yesterday opened its trial against four men charged in the deadly 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, accusing them of conspiring with Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden to "kill Americans anywhere in the world they can be found."

The four defendants "each helped the best way they could, and in the end 224 men, women and children from Kenya, Tanzania and America lost their lives," prosecutor Paul Butler told a packed federal courtroom yesterday morning. "For that, this trial seeks justice."

Mr. Butler described the impact of the two blasts Aug. 7, 1998, saying they were strong enough to reduce buildings to piles of rubble. In addition to the 224 killed, including 12 Americans, the blasts injured thousands and destroyed the embassies and nearby buildings.

"What it did to human beings that day defies description," Mr. Butler said. "Words and numbers cannot describe the horror."

After a monthlong jury selection, the government opened its trial against the men, accusing them of participating in a global conspiracy of terror to "kill Americans anywhere in the world they can be found."

The defendants have pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy and murder.

Mohamed Rashed Daoud Owhali, 24, of Saudi Arabia and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 27, of Tanzania could get the death penalty if found guilty of making the bombs or transporting them to the embassies, as outlined in the 308-count indictment.

Wadih Hage, 41, a Lebanese-born U.S. citizen living in Arlington, Texas, and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, 35, of Jordan face life in prison without parole for reportedly participating in bin Laden's terrorist organization, al Qaeda.

Their trial, conducted in the same courtroom where the United States prosecuted the suspects in the World Trade Center bombings, is expected to take about a year.

A fifth defendant, Ali Mohamed, already has pleaded guilty. His plea agreement is sealed, and it is unknown whether he will testify at the trial. A total of 22 men have been indicted in relation to the embassy bombings, but 13 of them - including bin Laden - are still at large.

The reclusive scion of a prominent Saudi family, bin Laden is said to be orchestrating his jihad, or war, against Americans from Afghanistan.

Mr. Butler said yesterday that the two bombings "were neither the beginning nor the end of a terrorist plot to kill Americans" but part of a campaign that had begun in the mid-1980s.

"Bin Laden saw this as an opportunity to use well-trained soldiers to overthrow governments he did not like," Mr. Butler, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the jury in his 45-minute opening remarks. He said bin Laden's followers shared his "extremist philosophy."

Prosecutors have assembled a case that is to include the testimony of 100 witnesses from six countries and thousands of pieces of evidence, including photographs from the crime scenes, forensic evidence, ballistics reports and chemical analyses.

A detailed confession from Mr. Owhali could be the most damning evidence in the prosecutors' pile of exhibits.

The Saudi apparently told FBI agents that he had met with bin Laden six weeks before the bombings and even rode along on the truck used to deliver the Nairobi bomb. He also said that Kahlfan Khamis Mohamed rented a house in Tanzania in which to assemble the bombs.

Defense attorneys have tried for nearly a month to convince Judge Leonard B. Sand to throw out the confession, which they say was obtained without the knowledge of Mr. Owhali's attorneys.

Defense attorneys took the floor yesterday afternoon, seeking to convince the jury of six men and six women that their clients were good men who could never violate the national laws, or those of Islam.

Sam Schmidt, one of Mr. Hage's lawyers, acknowledged that his client traveled on behalf of bin Laden, but said that "he only related to bin Laden as a businessman."

Security has been reinforced around the already imposing Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Courthouse, which is surrounded by federal buildings and historic landmarks. Security for the area, called Foley Square, has been dramatically reinforced for the trial, which is expected to last a year.

High-resolution surveillance cameras will record activity around the courthouse and inside the courtroom as well.

Heavy-duty steel barricades -manufactured by the same company that designed security for the Supreme Court and the Pentagon - have been installed at either ends of the street running beside the courthouse. They can be lowered to allow traffic to pass or lifted to halt a speeding truck.

Yesterday, heavily armed uniformed guards, often with bomb-sniffing dogs, patrolled the area, which was nearly deserted because of the chilly wind and damp snow.

• This article is based in part on wire-service reports.

-------- activists

Protesters Want Urkaine President Out

February 6, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/06WIRE-ROMA.html

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) -- Thousands of protesters demanded the resignation of President Leonid Kuchma over a scandal involving a missing journalist, burning portraits of him on Tuesday and chanting for a ``Ukraine without Kuchma.''

Many of the roughly 5,000 demonstrators had marched to the capital from provincial towns, and carried banners giving their hometowns along with huge pictures of the president with his face crossed out.

Watched by police, the protesters gathered at a tent camp set up in December and then made their way through snowy streets to the parliament building, chanting all the while.

There were small scuffles when some protesters tried unsuccessfully to push through a police cordon.

The protest followed the scandal over accusations Kuchma played a role in the disappearance of Heorhiy Gongadze, an opposition journalist who criticized alleged high-level corruption. Gongadze disappeared in September, and authorities say a headless body found in woods outside Kiev is probably his.

The release of what purports to be a recording of Kuchma fuming in obscene language about Gongadze to his top security officials has galvanized an unusual alliance of opponents from both parties on the left and right.

Kuchma has fiercely denied he issued orders to silence the journalist. The recording was made by a former bodyguard and released by an opposition lawmaker.

One group took part in Tuesday's protest after walking for days from the western city of Zhytomyr, located about 90 miles from Kiev. Other protesters came from as far away as the Black Sea port Odessa, 250 miles to the south.

The column to parliament was led by Oleksandra Oliyarnyk from Lviv in western Ukraine. She held a platter heaped with dried flowers, a sheaf of wheat, beans and bread -- a traditional Ukrainian talisman called an ``oberih,'' believed to protect people from evil.

``God will save Ukraine, if we free it from Kuchma,'' Oliyarnyk said.

The demonstration was briefly disrupted by a scuffle between protesters and scores of young men carrying black flags, who said they were anarchists. They smashed more than a dozen tents with the staffs of their flags, then ran away, witnesses said.

The recent solidarity between those on the left and the right is rare in a country deeply split between those nostalgic for Soviet days and those committed to a free market. All are frustrated by corruption, which has stalled the economy growth and scared away foreign investors.

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PETA: Set 'Wally Gator' free

2/6/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1naifk0oe5412

BURLINGTON, Iowa (AP) - For years, Gator's Restaurant and Lounge has had a reptilian mascot on display in a large glass tank by the cash register. But Amy Rhodes has complained to the restaurant that it is cruel to keep Wally Gator penned up.

Rhodes, of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, wrote to the restaurant Friday saying Wally should be sent to a sanctuary where he can live among his own kind. Rhodes' organization said restaurant patrons had complained about Wally's captivity.

"Nobody has said anything to me in 12 1/2 years," said restaurant owner Wally Day, for whom the toothy 2-foot reptile is named.

Rhodes' letter said alligators can live to be 50 years old and are "incredibly intelligent and sensitive animals."

Day said Wally isn't even an alligator. He's a dwarf caiman, a member of the crocodile family, and he was purchased from a pet store. "If I'm in trouble with one caiman, then the pet store must really be in deep trouble," Day said.

Professionals come in regularly to bathe Wally and check his condition. They also clean his new 6-foot tank, Day said. "He's got his own heat rock and everything. He seems happy - really happy."

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Mexican students protest

2/6/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=1mmucj88me9jj

MEXICO CITY (AP ) - Members of a dying strike movement blocked branches of Latin America's largest university and marched on Mexico City's main avenues Tuesday to commemorate the first anniversary of a police raid that ended their nearly 10-month school takeover.

Members of the self-named General Strike Council barred workers of the National Autonomous University of Mexico from entering the rector's building and prevented 50 employees from leaving the school of political and social sciences by forcing them to take off their pants and shoes, the government news agency Notimex reported.

Despite the disruptions - which also included a separate march by about 200 students opposing the strikers - university officials said 80% of the school's facilities were open and operating normally.

The 291-day strike was launched to protest plans to raise annual tuition, which had been just a few cents, to the equivalent of dlrs 140. The university backed down, but a small core of radical students continued to occupy the campus.

Marchers want Ukraine president out

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Thousands of opposition protesters from around Ukraine marched Tuesday through the capital, Kiev, decrying rampant corruption and demanding the ouster of President Leonid Kuchma.

Carrying portraits of Kuchma with his face crossed out, about 5,000 demonstrators marched from a tent camp in central Kiev that opposition activists have occupied since December to parliament, chanting "Ukraine without Kuchma!" The demonstration comes amid a growing uproar over allegations that Kuchma, elected to a second five-year term in 1999, played a role in the September disappearance of a journalist who was critical of the government.

Tuesday's march was the second this week supported by both left-wing and right-wing parties - rare solidarity in a country deeply split between those nostalgic for the stability of Soviet days and those committed to a free market. All are frustrated by corruption, which has stalled economic growth and scared away foreign investors.

The demonstrators came from all over Ukraine.

4 dead in Bangladesh protests

BRAHMANBARIA, Bangladesh (AP) - Police fired on protesters demanding the release of jailed Islamic clerics in clashes Tuesday that left at least six people dead and nearly 100 others injured, media reported.

Police opened fire and used tear gas to scatter hundreds of Islamic activists, who were throwing stones, waving bamboo sticks and hurling homemade bombs while marching through the streets of Brahmanbaria, the United News of Bangladesh news agency said.

The identity of the dead were not immediately available, while 25 of the more seriously wounded included two policemen, the independent news agency reported.

The protesters also forced schools, shops and offices to close and stopped traffic, paralyzing the eastern Bangladesh town, 50 miles from the capital, Dhaka. The violence follows a call by the country's top opposition alliance for a nationwide general strike on Wednesday to protest the clerics' arrest on Monday.

China judge sentenced over Falun Gong

BEIJING (AP) - A Chinese court has sentenced a judge to seven years in prison for spreading teachings of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement, a rights groups reported Tuesday, amid a campaign to punish sect members within government ranks. Hu Qingyun, an appeals court judge in southern Jiangxi province, was arrested on July 21, 1999, the day the communist government outlawed Falun Gong as a public menace. Hu was charged with running an illegal business that sold 200,000 copies of Falun Gong books, the Information Center for HumanRights and Democracy said.

Hu used his knowledge of the legal system to have some charges against him thrown out, but he was finally sentenced Jan. 10 by a district People's Court in Nanchang, Jiangxi's capital, the Hong Kong-based center said. Hu is appealing, the center said.

The court refused to comment.

In recent months, the government has begun prosecuting people identified as die-hard sect followers. Falun Gong attracted millions of Chinese in the 1990s, touting its blend of slow-motion exercises and eclectic teachings as a promoter of health, morality and enlightenment.

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Urgent letter on Ecuador

Tue, 06 Feb 2001
Karen Hansen-Kuhn <neil@econjustice.net>
Please reply to Karen Hansen-Kuhn <KHK@DEVELOPMENTGAP.ORG> with sign-ons

Dear Friends,

As you may know, Ecuadoran indigenous, labor and other civil-society organizations have launched a massive campaign to reject the IMF-imposed adjustment program in that country. They have encountered repression, including mass arrests and several deaths resulting from confrontations with the police. The civil-society groups are planning a national strike tomorrow, 7 February, and there are serious concerns that the violent measures employed by the government will escalate. We are in regular contact with SAPRIN-Ecuador as the situation unfolds. Please consider signing the letter below in order to support the civil-society efforts and to put pressure on the government to end the repressive measures and open a dialogue. Given the urgency of the situation, please send sign-ons (name, title, organization) to me (khk@developmentgap.org) by noon tomorrow. We are preparing a factsheet with more information on the situation in Ecuador that we will distribute shortly.

People in the DC area will also be gathering tomorrow from 8:45am to 9:30 in front of the Ecuadoran Embassy at 15th and Euclid to protest the repression and support the Ecuadoran people's demands. Contact Soren Ambrose at 50 Years Is Enough (202-544-9355, soren@igc.org) for more information on that effort.

Thanks, Karen Hansen-Kuhn DGAP

--

Dear President Noboa:

We write to you as representatives of U.S. civil-society organizations concerned about the impact of IMF-and World Bank-imposed structural adjustment programs around the world. We are alarmed by reports of violent suppression by your government of the legitimate public protests against the most recently implemented adjustment program in Ecuador. We urge you to cease this repression and to launch a national dialogue to find lasting solutions to the pressing economic and social problems confronting your country.

We understand that over the past 20 years, the IMF and World Bank have made the implementation of adjustment programs a condition of financial support to the government of Ecuador. Our colleagues in Ecuador inform us that these programs and the specific economic policies they embrace have placed the major burden of adjustment on the nation's poor and working people, its small farmers and businesses. The IMF's and the World Bank's insistence on the application of a new round of economic measures has put dignified living conditions even further beyond the reach of large segments of the Ecuadoran population. Many of us are also in contact with representatives of those international institutions regarding their role in this crisis.

We have also been informed that attempts at peaceful dialogue on this issue, including the SAPRI process in which the Bank, your government and civil society have been engaged, have not led to any meaningful change in the policy positions of the government or the international financial institutions. This is particularly troubling given the findings emanating from SAPRI that document the negative effects of many adjustment measures. It is therefore understandable that, when the IMF-supported economic measures were announced in December, affected citizens and civil-society groups would organize themselves to find and use other means to express their dissent regarding the continuation of these policies. What is not acceptable, by any international norm, is that these peaceful protests have now been met with state violence and repression in order to fend off public opposition to these policies. It has been reported that several indigenous people have been killed and some seriously wounded by public security forces, while others have begun a hunger strike to demand a repeal of the recent economic adjustment measures.

The way forward to resolving the economic problems in Ecuador, or in any other country, will be found neither through military force and the restriction of rights nor through the imposition of adjustment measures that lead to further social exclusion. We urge you to immediately cease the violent repression of public protest against the adjustment policies and to seek real and lasting solutions through an expanded national dialogue involving a broad range of social actors representative of the diversity of Ecuadoran society in order to create a just and inclusive economic program.

Sincerely,

* Karen Hansen-Kuhn The Development GAP 927 Fifteenth Street, NW - 4th Floor Washintgon, DC 20005 - USA Tel 202-898-1566 Fax 202-898-1612 E-mail: Karen Hansen-Kuhn <khk@developmentgap.org> Web www.developmentgap.org

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Protest against adjustment escalates in Ecuador

Tue, 06 Feb 2001
Neil Watkins <neil@econjustice.net>

PROTEST IN ECUADOR ESCALATES - INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND CITIZENS' GROUPS CALL FOR REPEAL OF IMF-IMPOSED STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT POLICIES

GOVERNMENT RESPONDS WITH REPRESSION - SEVERAL INDIGENOUS PEOPLE KILLED OR WOUNDED AND HUNDREDS ARRESTED

Indigenous peoples in Ecuador have been mobilizing over the past month to demand the repeal of new IMF-backed economic measures announced by the Ecuadoran government in late December as part of an ongoing structural adjustment program. The measures involve the removal of subsidies on cooking fuel and gasoline, causing the former to double in price and the latter to increase by 25%, and a 75% increase in transportation costs.

The IMF's insistence on the application of these measures -- as well as a 3% increase in the value-added tax which is still pending -- has put access to dignified living conditions even further beyond the reach of large segments of the Ecuadoran population. The escalating protests in recent days are not only in response to these economic measures but to the overall structural adjustment program that has intensified with Ecuador's conversion to the US dollar last year.

Beginning on 21 January, indigenous groups led by CONAIE (Confederation of Indigenous Nations of Ecuador) organized marches and blockaded roads in the countryside and cities in half of the country's 22 provinces. Farmworkers, students and others also joined in supporting these protests. The government sent military forces to disperse many of these peaceful demonstrations with force, using teargas and weapons, that resulted in several indigenous people injured, some by bullets, and several hundred arrested.

In response, on 26 January, indigenous organizations called for a national mobilization from communities across the country and a convergence on the nation's capital, Quito. The government responded with further repression. Quito was militarized when as many as 10,000 indigenous people arrived over the course of several days. After gathering on the grounds of the Polytechnic University, they were surrounded by military troops who have cut off water and electricity and have intermittently been stopping food and medicine from being brought in and indigenous people from leaving.

Attempts at dialogue between indigenous leaders and the government have failed to produce any results, as the government has shown no willingness to discuss economic policy or refrain from using force against peaceful protest. Indigenous leaders have presented a series of demands, including an end to the repression and an open dialogue on economic policy, and insist on meeting directly with President Noboa. The government responded by declaring a state of national emergency on 2 February, suspending citizens' basic constitutional rights -- including freedom of association and mobilization, as well as protection from arbitrary search and seizure. Several dozen indigenous people then escalated their protest by beginning a hunger strike.

While tensions have mounted in Quito, road blockades and marches have nearly paralyzed 12 provinces. The use of force by 300 troops to disburse the blockade of a bridge in the Amazon region on 5 February resulted in at least two indigenous people killed by gunfire, including a 14-year-old who was shot in the head, and some 20 wounded. Nevertheless, 5,000 indigenous people returned the next day to blockade the same bridge.

Media censorship has made it difficult to ascertain the extent of the mobilization and protest, particularly outside the capital, and to be certain of the number of people killed or wounded by military gunfire or the number arrested. Human rights activists in Ecuador say they have not seen the current level of repression in their country in the last 20 years.

Indigenous peoples have been joined by trade unionists, farmworkers, students, academics, environmentalists, small-scale producers, women's groups and others to resolutely demand the repeal of IMF-supported economic measures. They are putting their lives on the line to stop structural adjustment in Ecuador, affirming that this economic model is clearly neither politically nor economically viable. They want to open a policy dialogue with the government to formulate an alternative economic program.

As the government has not shown willingness to enter into such a dialogue, a national strike has been called for 7 February by a coalition of trade unions, professional associations and others in support of the indigenous mobilization and to demand a repeal of the economic adjustment measures and an open dialogue on the national economic program.

While the Ecuadoran government is repressing protest by large segments of society against economic adjustment measures, the IMF and World Bank, who are responsible for designing and promoting these policies, remain silent.

Over nearly 20 years, the IMF and the World Bank have made the implementation of structural adjustment programs a condition of financial support to the government of Ecuador. These programs and the specific economic policies they embrace have placed the major burden of adjustment on the nation's poor and working people, its small farmers and businesses. This is clearly evidenced by the recently concluded SAPRI process in Ecuador -- a tripartite initiative to assess the impacts of structural adjustment policies in which the World Bank, government and SAPRIN civil-society network have been jointly involved.

The SAPRI process of consultation and participatory research on the impact of adjustment in Ecuador since 1982 concluded that trade and financial-sector liberalization in Ecuador have led to a marked contraction in the national productive apparatus, particularly of small and medium-scale enterprises, as well as a greater concentration of productive resources. This, in turn, has increased unemployment and underemployment while, along with labor-market "flexibilization" policies, reducing job security. The lack of adequate, stable employment and the further concentration of wealth have generated an increase in poverty and a deterioration in the living conditions of a majority of the Ecuadoran population, conditions that have been extensively documented.

Furthermore, the research reflected the belief held by a majority of citizens that a policy of universal subsidies on certain basic goods -- such as gasoline, electricity and cooking fuel -- is necessary until support for the reactivation of national production generates adequate employment and greater income for the poor and middle-income segments of society. Researchers concluded that targeted subsidies are unviable in Ecuador, where the target group is comprised of the majority of the population and continues to increase. They recommended a reorientation of macroeconomic policy to reactivate production, increase employment generation and substantially improve income levels before removing subsidies or applying measures that negatively affect the living conditions of large segments of Ecuadoran society.

(For information in Spanish, see the web site of CONAIE http://conaie.nativeweb.org)

SAPRIN Secretariat/The Development GAP 927 Fifteenth Street, NW - 4th floor Washington, DC 20005 - USA Tel: 202/898-1566 Fax: 202/898-1612 E-mail: Stephanie Weinberg <sweinberg@developmentgap.org> SAPRIN Secretariat <secretariat@saprin.org> Web: http://www.saprin.org

Neil Watkins <neil@econjustice.net> World Bank bonds boycott campaign Center for Economic Justice 1830 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20009 phone: (202) 299-0020 fax: (202) 299-0021 web: www.worldbankboycott.org

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Protesters nearly drown out WTO press conference

Tue, 6 Feb 2001
"David Levy" <dglevy@cepr.net>
The Independent:
Courtesy of CommonDreams.org.

"[T]he protesters...make me want to vomit"--Michael Moore, WTO chief.

I wonder if the person who arranged that press conference still has her/his job...

--D.

Published on Tuesday, February 6, 2001 in the Independent / UK

WTO Chief: Seattle Protesters Make Me Sick by Andrea Hopkins in Canberra

Canberra, Australia -- The head of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Mike Moore, lambasted antiglobalisation protesters yesterday, saying that they made him want to be sick.

A new global free trade round was a moral imperative in the face of an impending slowdown in America, Mr Moore said. "The people that stand outside and say they work in the interests of the poorest people ... they make me want to vomit. Because the poorest people on our planet, they are the ones that need us the most," he said on a visit to the Australian capital to promote the need for a new round of free trade negotiations.

As he spoke, a small but vocal group of protesters pounded on the windows of the National Press Club, at times nearly drowning out his speech, chanting: "Michael Moore kills the poor." They blocked the driveway to prevent his car leaving.

Trade ministers from the WTO's 140 member countries will meet in Qatar in November in a renewed attempt to launch a global trade round after the failure of talks in Seattle in 1999, which were marked by massive anti-globalisation protests.

Mr Moore said that while dialogue with globalisation opponents was important and politicians needed to listen to their people, the success of the new talks was paramount. An American economic slowdown had the potential to spur trade talks but could also threaten free trade.

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Fair Trade Advocacy Internships Available

Tue, 06 Feb 2001
"Jessica Roach" <JROACH@citizen.org>

The Citizens Trade Campaign, a coalition of environmental, labor, family farm, consumer, and religious organizations committed to promoting environmental and social justice in trade policy, is currently looking for two full-time interns. Interns will function as a contact between the many different progressive organizations within our fair trade coalition, and will gain exposure to a diversity of globalization issues. Interns will also aid in research, coordinating field efforts, media outreach, and will assist Congressional lobbying efforts. Upcoming campaigns will include Fast Track and the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Interns are expected to do a substantial amount of administrative support work, but will also be involved in a considerable amount of research and writing or grassroots/media organizing.

APPLICATION DEADLINE: until filled

TO APPLY: Send resume, cover letter, and writing sample to Gretchen Gordon, Citizens Trade Campaign, PO Box 77077, Washington, D.C., 200013-7077 (202) 624-8136, fax (202) 624-6901, email - ggordon@fairtradenow.org

Compensation: Paid

Please state in cover letter when you are available to begin work.

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People's Summit on Globalization / March 8-11 2001

Tue, 6 Feb 2001
STARC <starc@mail.corpreform.org>

From: "The People's Summit on Globalization" psummit@ucsu.colorado.edu

Greetings and Salutations,

The Coalition for Economic Justice, a diverse coalition of students and community organizers, presents 'The People's Summit on Globalization,' a conference to educate, empower and unite people striving for justice in the face of corporate globalization, March 8-11, 2001 in Boulder, Colorado.

This non-partisan conference aims to bring keynote speakers, panelists, community members, students, workers, educators and other global citizens to learn about the effects of economic globalization and to address the power structures that affect our world. Some of our keynote speakers include Dr. Vandana Shiva, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange, and other leaders and workers in the struggle for justice.

More than just a 'conference' in the traditional sense, we will be training, planning and networking with each other to better organize and mobilize ourselves for future action and education.

All participants are invited free of charge. We do, however, ask the following:

1) For free food and access to housing, please register early by going to http://powerful.as/people.

2) Please pass this email along to your email lists and spread the word to other interested groups. A conference brochure is attached for your convenience and for getting the word out to those w/out computer access.

3) Please visit our website periodically for updates and any changes concerning the Summit. http://powerful.as/people. Phone: (303) 492-5024 or (303) 492-5449.

PROGRAMMATIC INFORMATION

please visit our website at http://powerful.as/people for the most current and complete information

Invited Speakers include:

Vandana Shiva Chol Soon Rhie Danny Kennedy Kevin Danaher Njoki Njehu Ignacio Ibarra Raquel Sancho Amy Goodman Tom Hansen Willie Begay Mark Rand James Markusen Carlos Zorilla Keith Maskus Barry Poulsen

Panels Include:

Int'l Trade: Good or Bad Immigration and Globalization Who Controls the Media? Resource Development or Exploitation? Role of Direct Action Jobs with Soul FTAA Update and Action Women's Rights in Globalization Globalization and Its Impacts on the Biosphere Effects of Development on Indigenous Peoples BP Amoco/Tibet Trends in the Labor Movement

Workshops include:

Ruckus Training Anti-oppression Cop Watch (know your rights) Youth Organizing Prison Industrial Complex Street Medic Mexico Solidarity Network FTAA Direct Action Political Theater Puppet Making Alternative Media Workshop Non-violence Action on GM Foods Globalization and Agriculture World Bank Bonds Boycott Living an Integrated Life Community Building Radical Cheerleaders Citigroup and Ecological Destruction Sweatshop labor Eco-Physiological Awareness Sanctions on Iraq School of the Americas Colombian Militarization Campus Organizing Canvassing Tearing Down the Borders Alternative Fuels Legal Observer training

Note: Panels and Workshops subject to change

Again, please visit our website to register and for more information, including bios on the speakers.

http://powerful.as/people

Thank you.

TPSG
The People's Summit on Globalization is being sponsored by the CU Coalition for Economic Justice.

The University of Colorado at Boulder c/o The Coalition for Economic Justice Campus Box 207, UMC 183 Boulder, CO 80309

phone (303)492-5024 fax (303)735-2315 web http://powerful.as/people

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