------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
EU Party Travels to Kaliningrad
EU Gets Russian Assurances on Nukes
Man Recounts Ride in Another US Sub
Hopes fade for finding sub victims
Admiral Raises Questions in Sub Collision
Okinawa Asks U.S. Marines to Leave
Scene at Time of Sub Collision
Ex - Fleet Commander Arranged Sub Tour
Admiral Who Lost Job Set Up Submarine Trip
Submarine crash queries
Civilian describes pulling lever on sub
Visitors on sub guests of admiral
Czech Mission Finds No Uranium Threat in Kosovo
No hazard left in shells, lab reports
Servicemember Advocacy Organization Endorses Gulf War Vet Compensation Bill
China, U.S. Blame Each Other
Conservatives Happy With Bush
Shadow official backs missile shield guarding NATO
Russia Angry On Missile Allegations
Satellites pinpoint Russian nuclear arms
Russian forces conduct massive war-games exercise
To Break Impasse, Taiwan Leader Confirms Reactor Go-Ahead
How would U.S. react now to a '13 days' crisis?
Greenouts
South Carolina
Lost bomb gets more attention
State rejects using OR for waste storage
State nixes bid to store nuke waste at Oak Ridge

MILITARY
U.S., Britain huddle on Libyan sanctions
India in deal to buy Russian tanks
Making A Killing On Weapons Sales To The Destitute
Torture prohibited, China retorts
Talks Resume in Colombia
BUSH MEETING
Bush to meet Pastrana
Colombia peace talks with rebels resume
Antidrug Program Says It Will Adopt a New Strategy
Washington
Militants attack three Kashmir patrols
Israel Denies 'Poison Gas' Use
Astronauts Play Dead Men Spacewalking
Mission Extended for Surprisingly Sturdy Little Spacecraft
Russians delay dumping Mir
New Mexico
William Epstein,
U.N. OFFICE CLOSED
Powell Pledges Strong Support for U.N. Activities
U.N. to Start Congo Deployment Soon
U.N. prosecutor applies pressure for Milosevic trial
Raytheon: Ready for Military Boost
Paying the Troops
Helicopter May Have Been Hit by Load Carried by 2nd Craft
Bush Warns Against 'Overdeployment'
Military finds refreshing change with new commander in chief

OTHER
Iowa
Indiana
Critics Try to Turn Whitman Against Her Emissions Plan
France to Slaughter Cows as Prices Fall Because of Disease Fears
Sun too close? We'll just change Earth's orbit
Arizona
Study finds widespread soil damage
Europe Approves New Genetically Modified Food Control
European biotech firms face hurdles
Two Blood-Donor Bans Set in Mad Cow Threat
Union Seeks New Overseer for New Jersey Troopers
BARRING CAMPUS RAIDS
Louisiana
Panel Discusses Terrorism Practices
Witness Links Defendent to bin-Laden's Military Operation
Terrorists sentenced to nine years in Germany

ACTIVISTS
Masking Up And The Black Bloc:
ACQUITTAL! D.C. DEMOCRACY SEVEN TRIAL ENDS IN VICTORY
French Farmer Appeals Jail Sentence
2 Teens Admit They Set Fires to Help Radical Environmental Group
China's War Against Itself
Students in streets oppose Wahid
Colorado

-
-------- NUCLEAR

EU Party Travels to Kaliningrad

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-EU.html

KALININGRAD, Russia (AP) -- A top European Union delegation traveled to Russia's Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad on Thursday to discuss the impact of EU enlargement on the isolated region tucked between EU candidates Poland and Lithuania.

Once a major Soviet military base, Kaliningrad has been cut off from the rest of Russia since Lithuania became independent with the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. Most troops have now been pulled out of the base, and smuggling and crime are rampant in Kaliningrad.

Kaliningrad's grim airport, where birds nest in the rafters, served as a prime illustration of the economic gap between the enclave and its neighbors.

The EU delegation's main stop in Kaliningrad -- a waste treatment plant partially funded by Sweden to reduce the pollution the region spills into the Baltic -- reflected European concerns about its dismal environmental state.

In the 1990s, Moscow made a halfhearted and much-ridiculed attempt to create a free-trade zone out of Kaliningrad. It fizzled.

And ``the gap in the level of development in Kaliningrad and Poland and Lithuania will become greater every day'' if nothing is done, Kaliningrad Gov. Vladimir Yegorov told European Commissioner for Foreign Affairs Chris Patten on Thursday.

Patten said the European Union considers Kaliningrad a test of the impact expansion will have on neighboring regions and Russia overall.

``Kaliningrad is an important issue on which we can cooperate in a very practical way to make sure enlargement benefits Kaliningrad rather than leading in any way to disadvantage for Kaliningrad,'' he said. ``This is a very important practical issue for cooperation between Russia and the European Union.''

Talks will focus on the environment, visa problems, migration and the transit of goods, said Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency.

Dialogue with the EU comes amid increasingly heated statements by Russian officials assailing President Bush's new administration for calling Russia a security threat.

Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev on Thursday repeated denials that Moscow had deployed tactical nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, as U.S. reports have alleged.

``This is absolute rubbish; there's nothing like it going on,'' Interfax quoted Sergeyev as saying.

Sergei Ivanov, secretary of President Vladimir Putin's powerful Security Council, told the delegation in a Kremlin meeting that Russia hoped for increased cooperation with the EU on security issues.

Russia ``is counting on a dialogue on these questions, with observance of the U.N. charter and other international norms, to allow us to begin forming a new architecture of European security,'' Interfax quoted him as saying.

---

EU Gets Russian Assurances on Nukes in Kaliningrad

February 15, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-russia-.html

KALININGRAD, Russia (Reuters) - Top European Union officials working out a development plan for Russia's Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad said Thursday they had received top-level assurances that no nuclear arms were deployed here.

Russia angrily denied a report in the Washington Times that U.S. intelligence had pinpointed missiles in the impoverished region wedged between EU aspirants Poland and Lithuania.

``I raised the (missiles) issue with (Foreign Minister) Igor Ivanov and he denied it,'' Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh told reporters in Kaliningrad, where the EU delegation spent half a day after meeting senior Russian officials in Moscow.

The report, the second in two months to suggest missile deployment in Kaliningrad, was dismissed by Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev as ``absolute and complete nonsense.''

Kaliningrad Governor Vladimir Yegorov said it was an attempt to scuttle cooperation between the EU and Russia and keep Kaliningrad in limbo as the EU moves toward eastward expansion.

``When active talks between the EU and Russia started (the Americans) invented this devil with horns,'' he said at Kaliningrad airport, where he met Lindh and EU External Affairs Commissioner Chris Patten.

The talks focused on how Kaliningrad's one million residents will cope with changes once Poland and Lithuania join the EU.

The area's problems include widespread poverty, high crime and drug use rates and Soviet-era industry dumping pollution into the Baltic. Residents fear losing their visa-free travel rights to neighboring states.

The Washington Times cited anonymous U.S. intelligence sources as saying satellite photographs refuted Russian denials about the transfer of nuclear arms to the enclave.

The paper originally reported in January that the missiles had been deployed and Kaliningrad's profile was raised further by reports that Germany planned to take economic control of the region in return for some of Russia's Soviet-era debt to Berlin.

Both Moscow and Berlin have rejected any suggestion of a transfer of powers over the region and Thursday Patten was at pains to stress Russia's leading role in Kaliningrad's future.

``We recognize without any reservations that decisions on the main problems facing Kaliningrad have to be made in Russia and Kaliningrad, but we also recognize that we should help,'' Patten said in talks with Yegorov attended by reporters.

NO PROMISE ON SPECIAL STATUS

Yegorov is seeking Western investment and special status for the region known as Koenigsburg when it was part of East Prussia and captured by Soviet troops at the end of World War II.

Local officials talk about turning the region, half the size of Belgium, into a Hong Kong of the Baltic, but Lindh and Patten laid no such deal on the table Thursday.

``I don't think there will be special status, but it is important to get together with Russia and work to solve all the existing problems as well of those of EU accession,'' Lindt said while touring a water treatment plant built by the Germans 120 years ago and now being rebuilt with Russian and Western funds.

Yegorov offered talks on securing visa-free travel to Poland and Lithuania to dispel EU fears that Kaliningrad will leak illegal immigrants and contraband into member states.

Patten said the EU was also interested in the impact of its expansion on Kaliningrad's fishing and transport sectors.

But Russia's role was also paramount, the ex-governor of Hong Kong stressed, if Kaliningrad was ever to be transformed.

``This is a chance for the EU and Russia to cooperate in very concrete terms,'' he said. ``We have lots of summits and meetings, but this is a chance to put real meat in the sandwich.''

---

Man Recounts Ride in Another US Sub

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Submarine-Civilian-Trips.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Civilians aboard a U.S. nuclear submarine three years ago were told they would not be allowed to sit at the controls while the boat conducted an emergency ascent -- the same maneuver the USS Greenville was doing when it rammed a Japanese fishing boat last week near Hawaii.

Aboard the Greeneville, civilians were allowed to sit at the controls just before the submarine rocketed to the surface, Navy officials have said.

The Navy has yet to specify whether there are policies on whether civilians can sit at the controls during special maneuvers.

Don Masterson, who took a trip on the USS Jacksonville, said ``we were told that we could stand near the officers as they were performing their duties, but we were not allowed near the controls during that training.''

Masterson was on board that submarine with his son, Lt. Commander Jeffrey Masterson. He said the emergency maneuver took place with the crew operating the stations -- and was very tense.

``The captain announced an eminent emergency blow,'' Masterson, who lives in Roseville, Minn., said in a telephone interview Wednesday night. ``I was standing right in front of the CON looking over the shoulder of the dive officer. The (officers) switched some switches which forced compressed air into the ballast tanks and it sounded like 100 semi-trucks letting off air. As the water left the tanks, we started shooting to the surface.''

At other times during the two-day trip, Masterson said he was allowed to sit at the controls.

On Tuesday, four days after the accident, the Navy disclosed that two civilians were seated at control positions on the Greeneville at the time it soared to the surface.

Nine men and boys from the fishing vessel are still missing and feared dead, possibly trapped inside the ship, which is resting on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 1,800 feet down. Twenty-six others survived.

Lt. Cmdr. Conrad Chun, a spokesman for the U.S. Pacific Fleet, said it was routine for civilians to be allowed at the controls ``under close supervision.'' But he would not comment on whether it was proper for the civilians to be seated at the controls during an emergency maneuver.

The Navy has a longstanding tradition of taking civilians aboard its ships and submarines. The trips, often called ``tiger cruises,'' began as a way to allow officers to bring their sons along for a trip. They were expanded to include fathers and brothers and now include journalists, Navy supporters and others.

-------

Hopes fade for finding sub victims

2/12/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=40ul86unq5pep

HONOLULU (AP) - With hopes for finding survivors fading, officials investigating the sinking of a Japanese fishing boat by a U.S. submarine said nine missing people may have been trapped as the boat plunged to the ocean bottom. The Japanese asked U.S. officials to raise the ship.

"There is a possibility that the bodies are still in the vessel," Coast Guard Capt. Steven A. Newell said Sunday, more than 48 hours after the collision that has strained U.S.-Japanese relations. Newell said weather was good and the search would continue through at least Monday afternoon.

In a closed, two-hour briefing, relatives and friends of the missing urged officials to raise the Ehime Maru. Japan's prime minister lodged a protest with the United States, also demanding that the ship be raised.

Yoshiro Mori met Sunday with U.S. Ambassador Thomas Foley and asked the United States to "use all available means" to reclaim the ship, said Kazuhiko Koshikawa, Mori's spokesman.

Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, said Monday that "we'll certainly want to talk to the Japanese about what they have in mind."

-----

Admiral Raises Questions in Sub Collision

Thursday, February 15, 2001
Washington Post
By Thomas E. Ricks and Don Phillips
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5382-2001Feb14?language=printer

The commander of the Navy's Pacific Fleet told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in a closed-door meeting yesterday that he did not understand how the captain of a U.S. nuclear-powered submarine had failed to realize that it was surfacing directly beneath a fishing trawler last Friday.

"He should have seen the ship," said Adm. Thomas Fargo said, according to a participant in the hour-long briefing. "It's hard to see how they missed it."

The Navy has not publicly explained the cause of the accident, which sank the Japanese trawler Ehime Maru in 1,800 feet of water off Hawaii, with nine Japanese crew members lost. The Coast Guard said last night that the search will be suspended today. "We have exhaustively searched that piece of ocean," said Rear Adm. Joseph McClelland Jr. He said 12 ships and 11 aircraft were used during the search, in which rescuers looked at 38,000 square miles of ocean.

Fargo's comments on the captain were the first time that a senior officer has suggested that blame may lie with the commander and crew of the USS Greeneville.

The skipper, Capt. Scott Waddle, has been relieved of duty pending investigations of the collision by both the Navy and the National Transportation Safety Board.

Sources close to the probe said that the NTSB's civilian investigators were frustrated that video and sound recording devices in the control room of the submarine were not operating during the accident. The collision took place as the Greeneville practiced an "emergency main ballast blow," a rapid ascent to the surface of the ocean.

Sixteen civilian visitors were aboard the ship, and Navy officials acknowledged yesterday that their presence might have distracted the captain and crew. Two of the civilians -- whose identities and affiliations the Navy has refused to make public -- were seated at important control stations, with crew members closely supervising them, the Navy said.

Asked on PBS's "NewsHour" last night whether there is any evidence that the civilians' presence contributed to the accident, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said: "None whatsoever."

The Navy said last night that the majority of the civilian visitors had been brought aboard the Greeneville at the request of retired Adm. Richard Macke, as thanks for their support of the restoration of the World War II battleship USS Missouri. "In his capacity as a USS Missouri volunteer he referred them to the Navy for embark," or a visit to the submarine while it was underway, said Lt. Commander Conrad Chun, a Navy spokesman in Hawaii.

Macke had been on the list of visitors but was unable to join the group because of work commitments, Chun said.

Macke did not return calls seeking comment.

Had the recording devices been in use, sources close to the investigation said, they might have quickly revealed why the submarine failed to detect the fishing trawler, a 174-foot training vessel for Japanese vocational high school students. The usual procedure, according to submariners, is both to listen for surface ships with passive sonar and to scan the area visually with a periscope before surfacing.

Civilian airliners, locomotives and ships are required to use data recorders that can help in accident investigations. But the military does not require such recorders to be used during routine operations, irking NTSB investigators and highlighting a cultural divide between military and civilian safety philosophies.

Lt. Cmdr. Dave Warner, spokesman for the Navy's Pacific submarine fleet, said yesterday he could not confirm whether the recorders were turned off. "That's part of the investigation," he said.

But another Navy officer familiar with the investigation confirmed that the video recorder, which collects images seen through a submarine's optical periscope, was turned off. He said that is not unusual for a training exercise.

"They normally wouldn't have the optical TV engaged for a routine sweep of the periscope," he said. "That's usually only for intelligence stuff."

But a record of the Greeneville's sound contacts probably does exist, the officer added. He said the Los Angeles-class attack submarine has numerous sonar recorders and computers, and that investigators should be able to recover a record of sonar contacts before the collision.

Because the accident involved a civilian vessel in U.S. waters, the NTSB is in charge of the investigation, with the Navy serving as a party in the probe. The Navy also is conducting a separate investigation, led by Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths, commander of the Pacific Fleet's ballistic missile submarines, based in Bangor, Wash. The Coast Guard, which also has jurisdiction over accidents involving civilian vessels, immediately deferred to the safety board last week.

NTSB board member John Hammerschmidt said Tuesday that no recordings were available from either the sub's periscope or sonar to determine exactly what the crew saw or heard before the collision. Under normal procedures, Navy officials said, a submarine is supposed to surface within about 15 minutes of checking for other vessels with its periscope and sonar.

The recording device for the optical periscope is somewhat like a home video recorder, with a television monitor in the control room. Some sources said that turning on the recorder can degrade the quality of the image on the monitor, which some of the civilian guests and members of the crew would have been watching.

Friction between investigators is not unusual in investigations of accidents involving the military. Some Navy officers have complained that the safety board releases incomplete information prematurely. Safety board investigators, meanwhile, expressed dismay this week that they had learned from reporters, rather than from the Navy, that civilians were sitting at control positions aboard the Greeneville, sources said.

Underlying these minor irritations, however, are long-standing disagreements about cockpit and control room recording devices.

The safety board has pushed for decades to require commercial airlines, railroads, ships and trucks to install sophisticated recorders to help determine what happened in any accident. Airliners have both a cockpit voice recorder and a flight data recorder that often play a major role in crash investigations.

The military, on the other hand, has shown little interest in crash investigation recorders or other civilian safety appliances. Not until after the 1996 crash that killed Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown did the Air Force equip its VIP aircraft fleet with civilian safety devices such as collision avoidance systems.

Former NTSB chairman Jim Hall was upset because older Boeing 737s that crashed at Colorado Springs in 1991 and Pittsburgh in 1996 had flight data recorders that met only minimal requirements. The recorders could not confirm a safety board suspicion that the planes' rudders suddenly flipped to the side, bringing the plane down, nor why such a thing would happen.

Hall began a high-profile campaign that prodded the Federal Aviation Administration to order a gradual transition to much more sophisticated recorders. However, military aircraft are exempt from FAA requirements.

---

Okinawa Asks U.S. Marines to Leave

February 15, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/japan-usa-military.html

TOKYO, Feb. 15 -- In a sign of growing resentment against the U.S. military in Japan, a town assembly on the southern island of Okinawa on Thursday called for the withdrawal of all U.S. Marines from the island.

The assembly in the town of Chatan, north of the Okinawan capital Naha, also unanimously called for the resignation of the commander of U.S. forces on the island, Lt-Gen. Earl Hailston, for describing senior Japanese officials as ``nuts'' and ``wimps'' in a private e-mail.

``If the people at the top have that type of attitude towards the leaders of Okinawa, we realise that there is no way that the problems can be solved other than by the forces leaving,'' said Hisatoku Matsuda, a senior assembly official.

``The comments by Hailston were the final straw.''

The latest tensions in Okinawa come at an awkward time following last week's news that a U.S. nuclear submarine sank a Japanese trawler near Hawaii, leaving nine people missing, presumed drowned.

Both sides fear the submarine disaster could fuel Japanese resentment of the U.S. military presence in Japan.

Hailston had used the offending phrase in an e-mail sent to 13 officers on the island to refer to officials' handling of an incident in which a U.S. Marine corporal lifted a high-school girl's skirt to photograph her underwear.

He has apologised, but outraged lawmakers in two other assemblies -- Okinawa and Ishikawa -- have already adopted resolutions demanding his dismissal.

Chatan's assembly also wants the U.S. military to hand over a Marine suspected in a series of arson attacks last month in Chatan, a town of 25,645 people in which about 56 percent of the land is occupied by U.S. military installations.

Police have prepared an arrest warrant for 23-year-old Marine Lance Cpl Kurt Billie on suspicion of having set fire to several restaurants.

``The U.S. forces have continued to say that they will work together with us to solve the problems that have occured in Okinawa, and consolidate the troops in the prefecture,'' said Matsuda. ``But things haven't been progressing as they should be.''

Tamaki Matsuhide, a Chatan assemblyman in charge of dealing with the U.S. base issue, said the Hawaii incident had no affect on Thursday's resolutions.

``They are two unrelated issues. The resolutions have nothing to do with what happened in Hawaii. It is about what has been happening in Okinawa for years now,'' he said.

BAD MEMORIES

In an ironic twist to Friday's tragedy, Hawaii television reported on Wednesday that a former admiral whose name stirs unhappy memories among many Okinawans was responsible for civilians being on board the submarine that sunk the Japanese trawler.

U.S. Navy officials have said that two civilians were at the controls of the nuclear submarine when it smashed into the boat.

KITV television channel in Honolulu reported that Richard Macke, former commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, had arranged a tour of the submarine by 16 civilians.

The former admiral was forced to take early retirement in 1995 after saying that U.S. servicemen who had raped a Japanese schoolgirl in Okinawa earlier that year should have paid a prostitute instead.

Overall, some 26,000 of the 48,000 U.S. military based in Japan are stationed on Okinawa, whose residents have long objected to the fact that while they have less than one percent of Japan's land area, they host the vast majority of U.S. forces.

---

Scene at Time of Sub Collision

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Submarine-Scene.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nervous but excited, Texas oilman John M. Hall pulled two levers on the nuclear attack submarine Greeneville and quickly sat down as it veered toward the surface.

He was surrounded by real sailors. A few of them, including the captain, had looked around with the periscope before the submarine began its emergency-surfacing exercise.

``I need to take a look,'' the skipper said, according to another passenger on the sub. ``OK,'' he concluded, seeing nothing amiss.

The submarine sank below periscope depth, into the otherworldly serenity of still water, then shot up. For the novices aboard -- and at the controls -- it felt a bit like being in a descending plane.

Built to serve as an unseen, unheard killer, the submarine this time did not see or hear what was above in the choppy waters off Hawaii a week ago.

Everyone heard a loud noise and felt the shudder of an unexpected impact. Cmdr. Scott Waddle let out a startled epithet.

On the Ehime Maru, the stricken Japanese fisheries-training vessel, skipper Hisao Onishi reacted, too. ``Like iron being shredded,'' he said of the hit.

He felt he had sailed his 180-foot trawler ``over some kind of a big building.'' Instead, it was a 360-foot submarine breaking the surface.

The sliced vessel sank quickly, leaving 26 survivors grasping for safety amid diesel oil and debris.

Nine crew members are missing, and Japan is demanding answers about how the collision occurred, why a couple of civilians were allowed at the sub's controls, and whether that made any difference.

On Thursday, two of the civilian passengers described the events on NBC's ``Today'' show, adding to the harrowing accounts from the Ehime Maru's survivors of what happened when the sub rose like a ``whale'' from the sea.


For Hall, it was a chance to do one better than Walter Mitty, the James Thurber character who daydreamed of himself as a Navy pilot and other action heroes to spice his ordinary life.

Hall, identified by his company as a director of Fossil Bay Resources Ltd., of Dallas, was among more than a dozen civilians aboard the Greeneville as part of the Navy's public relations effort to build support.

Heading back to Pearl Harbor in the afternoon, the captain offered Hall and another landlubber a chance to help in a practice emergency surfacing.

``Sure, I'd love to do that,'' Hall recalled saying. ``I was a little nervous about it.''

Hall pulled the two levers of the emergency blow switch, counted out loud for 10 seconds and pushed them back in place, just as he was told. A crewman placed his hands over Hall's to make sure the switch was locked.

That's to ensure ``you don't have a sudden spasm and do something you should not,'' explained Rear Adm. Stephen Pietropaoli at the Pentagon.

Hall went on: ``Immediately you sit down and the submarine began to rise and it came very quickly.''

Another civilian, Todd Thoman, a former employee of Fossil Bay, said a crew member had scanned the surface with the periscope, for two rotations, and then the skipper looked around himself.

In the high-tech Navy, the periscope's view is shown on flat computer screens that many can watch. No one saw anything.

``He brought the periscope down,'' Thoman said of the skipper, ``and we proceeded with the maneuver.''

Pietropaoli, speaking for the Navy, said the second civilian at the controls was at the helm. He said that during an emergency surfacing, the helmsman does nothing more than hold controls in a neutral position while the critical work of raising the sub is done by others.

He said there was no indication the two closely supervised civilians contributed to the collision, but ``we'll continue to look at that.''

When the sub hit the trawler, Waddle exclaimed, according to Hall: ``Jesus, what the hell was that?''

The skipper took the periscope and immediately saw the stricken vessel, even noting its name on the stern. Waddle quickly regained his composure, Hall said.

``He said, 'Would my guests go directly to the crew mess?'''

The civilians were led down one level under the control room and began watching the chaos outside, via a flat-screen monitor showing the view of the periscope.

``Once we saw the ship taking on water and the crew bringing things out, we knew it was going to be devastating,'' Thoman said of the Ehime Maru.

Seconds later, the Greeneville passengers were ushered calmly down another level, to the missile room, as the crew cleared the mess to serve as a rescue staging area.

Attention turned away from the high-tech devices. Out came the ropes.

The civilians helped unlatch some gaffs and pass ropes up to the submariners, as people from the Ehime Maru, shivering and some covered with oil, clung to life rafts and the U.S. Coast Guard steamed to the scene.

---

Ex - Fleet Commander Arranged Sub Tour

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Submarine-Collision-Macke.html

HONOLULU (AP) -- A former commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific asked the Navy to arrange a tour for the civilians who were on board the submarine that sank a Japanese fishing boat, the Navy confirmed Wednesday.

Retired Adm. Richard Macke, who was forced to step down over a controversy with Japan, contacted his former service about the tour ride on the USS Greeneville. Honolulu television station KITV said the members of the excursion were big donors to the USS Missouri Restoration Fund.

Macke, now Pacific Region president for Wheat International Communications Corp., of Vienna, Va., did not return telephone calls to his office or home.

Pacific Fleet spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Conrad Chun said Macke made the tour request.

``Adm. Macke was not on board USS Greeneville, but was scheduled to accompany the group,'' Chun said. ``He did not embark Greeneville due to work commitments.

``As a battleship USS Missouri volunteer, Adm. Macke referred this group of business leaders for a submarine embark (tour trip),'' Chun said.

``There are a variety of groups that embark Navy ships and submarines,'' he said. ``The Navy receives referrals from a wide range of organizations and individuals. It is not uncommon to receive referrals from retired military members.''

Chun stressed that the Navy is responsible for the setting up the tour trips.

The Navy has refused to disclose the identities of the civilians, said to number 15 or 16, citing their right to privacy. It has said they are civic and business officials. The Navy said Tuesday that two civilians were at control positions when the accident occurred

The USS Missouri Memorial Association said it had no involvement in requesting or making arrangements for civilians to tour the submarine. The group is raising money to restore the battleship as a museum.

Macke was forced to apply for early retirement in 1996 after he suggested that three U.S. servicemen who rented a car to allegedly abduct and rape a 12-year-old girl in Okinawa, Japan, should have hired a prostitute instead.

The comment was viewed by many as trivializing the rape. It came at a touchy time for relations between the United States and Japan as diplomats and military leaders were negotiating to maintain a U.S. military presence in Okinawa.

Macke also was investigated by the Defense Department inspector general for allegations that he used military aircraft for personal trips and fraternized with female subordinates.

The 190-foot Ehime Maru, a fishing boat owned by the Uwajima Fisheries High School, was split open when rammed by the USS Greeneville as the nuclear-powered attack submarine practiced a surfacing maneuver nine miles off Diamond Head.

Nine men and boys from the fishing vessel are still missing and feared dead, possibly trapped inside. Twenty-six others survived.

---

Admiral Who Lost Job Set Up Civilians' Submarine Trip

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW with JAMES STERNGOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/national/15HAWA.html?pagewanted=all

The submarine trip for civilians that led to the sinking of a Japanese fishing vessel, leaving nine people missing, was arranged by a Navy admiral who was forced to retire in 1995 after he made an offensive remark about the rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl, government officials said yesterday.

Some officials said they were worried that the involvement of the retired admiral, Richard C. Macke, would heighten the anger in Japan over the sinking last Friday, even though he was not on the submarine.

This has been one reason the Navy has refused to disclose the identities of the 16 civilians who were on the submarine, the Greeneville, when it smashed into the trawler off Diamond Head in Honolulu, the officials said. Four students from a Japanese fishing school were among those missing and presumed dead.

Although officials remained steadfast in their refusal to identify the civilians today, they said the group was mostly made up of businessmen and their wives who had donated money to the U.S.S. Missouri Memorial Association. The association is a private nonprofit group that maintains the World War II battleship on which the Japanese surrendered.

A spokesman for the association, Patrick Dugan, said yesterday that he had no information about the donors.

The Navy has said it is not uncommon for guests to participate in such practice drills.

Japanese officials and members of the trawler's crew have already accused the submarine's crew of not doing enough to rescue those on the boat and expressed anger at hearing that civilians may have been at the submarine's controls, although supervised by Navy personnel.

Admiral Macke, 63, was the commander in chief of United States forces in the Pacific in 1995 when three American servicemen pleaded guilty to conspiring to kidnap and rape the girl in Okinawa, an island that is part of Japan.

The admiral lost his job after he said that the rape could have been avoided if the servicemen had simply paid for a prostitute.

The admiral quickly apologized for the remark, saying that it was "the result of my frustration over the stupidity of this heinous and incomprehensible crime." But senior officials in Washington forced him to retire the same day after the Japanese foreign ministry expressed outrage at the comment.

Reached by phone yesterday, Admiral Macke declined to discuss his role in setting up the excursion. The officials said it was not unusual for former high-ranking officers to make such recommendations.

Congressional officials said that Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, commander of the Pacific Fleet, in briefing House and Senate members on the accident yesterday, mentioned Admiral Macke's role. They said Admiral Fargo also said that some of the civilians on the Greeneville were donors to the memorial fund.

Admiral Fargo did not name any of the donors who were on the submarine. The Missouri Memorial's Web site lists more than 100 corporate and individual sponsors who donated from $5,000 to $500,000. They include giant companies like Microsoft and Dell Computer as well as Hawaiian banks and airlines.

Don Hess, the chief operating officer of the Missouri Memorial Association, said in a statement late today that the organization had no role in arranging for civilians to visit the Greeneville. He also said he would not provide the names of any people aboard the Greeneville at the time of the accident who might also have been sponsors of the memorial association.

The Navy regularly takes political leaders, businessmen and journalists on one-day outings to demonstrate submarine capabilities and build support for the force. Submarine officers usually let the civilians operate some of the controls. The Navy has said that two of the visitors on the Greeneville were at certain controls as the submarine rose in an emergency surfacing drill and slammed into the bottom of the Japanese ship.

But Navy officials also said that the civilians were closely monitored by the Greeneville's crew members, and that they could not have done anything to cause the accident. The Navy is investigating how the collision happened, with most officials saying that the submarine's officers may have failed to spot the trawler during sonar and periscope checks before the surfacing drill.

One veteran submarine commander, who asked not to be named, said in an interview that 16 guests crowded into the small control room could easily have distracted the Greeneville's top officers.

"The senior supervisors maybe were paying too much attention to the V.I.P.'s and not enough to what was going on," he said. "I'm quite certain that was a factor."

He added that some submarine commands try to limit the number of visitors to 6 to 12 people.

Admiral Macke, a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War, lives in Honolulu and works as a senior vice president of Wheat International Communications Corporation, a telecommunications company in Reston, Va.

The company's chief executive, Forrest C. Wheat Sr., said in an interview yesterday that none of the company's executives or customers were in the group on the Greeneville.

In refusing to identify the civilians, government officials have said the civilians had not surrendered their rights to privacy by stepping onto the submarine.

Included in the group was a person added at the last minute who was not acquainted with Admiral Macke and was not connected to his group. This person works for a sports publication, Navy officials said.

Late today, the Navy sought to clarify how the trip aboard the Greeneville was arranged and its policy on such cruises. Officials emphasized that any person can suggest visits, but that the Navy is responsible for arranging the cruises and putting together the groups.

Lt. Comdr. Conrad Chun, a Navy spokesman in Honolulu, said that Admiral Macke had referred the group of business leaders, all of them from outside Hawaii, to the Navy. He was supposed to accompany the group, but at the last minute withdrew because of a business obligation, Commander Chun said.

Six senators on the Armed Services Committee attended the Navy's briefing yesterday, including the chairman, John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia, and the ranking Democrat, Carl Levin of Michigan.

According to one Senate aide, the briefing officers asserted that the Greeneville's captain appeared to have followed procedures in checking for other ship traffic just before the surfacing maneuver.

The aide said some senators raised sharp questions about why civilians were at, or even close to, the controls during what was clearly a serious maneuver. The staff member said the attitude of some senators was that the submarine should have been doing only "the equivalent of driving around a parking lot" if civilians were at controls.

One of the attendees said that Admiral Fargo told the senators that the Navy's initial inquiry into the accident is expected to be completed as early as Friday.

One senior Navy official said today that all indications were that the accident was the result of a "total screw-up" on the part of the captain and the crew.

---

Submarine crash queries

02/15/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-02-15-edtwof2.htm

Each day, questions about last Friday's deadly collision of the attack submarine USS Greeneville and the Japanese trawler Ehime Maru get stickier. Among the most troubling:

• Was this a training exercise or a joy ride? Civilians were manning two key control stations when the submarine conducted an emergency drill in which it rocketed 400 feet to the water's surface, smashing into the Japanese fishing boat. Another 14 civilians were along for the ride. Was the "emergency blow" exercise necessary? The answer may lie in ship records showing whether it was performed more often than the quarterly schedule recommended by the Navy. If so, it raises questions about whether the Navy is hosting unnecessary exercises for the amusement of civilians.

• Why didn't the USS Greenville detect the Ehime Maru? The Japanese vessel was in Hawaiian waters off Diamond Head at the time. Detecting its noisy, civilian machinery should have been a cakewalk for sonar operators trained to hear stealthy enemy subs. A properly executed periscope search should have picked up the ship's mast 10 miles out, the Navy says. So far, there are no good answers to this question.

• Why didn't the Greeneville use its more-accurate active sonar? That question takes on added importance given the National Transportation Safety Board's endorsement of active sonar after its investigation into a 1989 submarine accident. In that incident, an attack submarine surfacing off Long Beach, Calif., snagged a cable attached to a tug, pulling the tug beneath the surface and killing one tug crewmember.

The Navy rejected the NTSB's recommendation that submarines surfacing in congested areas should use their active, "pinging" sonar to detect surface vessels - a reliable, but noisy way of detecting objects. While the Navy doesn't prohibit the use of active sonar, the technique, which exposes a sub's position to potential enemies, goes against every grain of a submarine's stealth mission.

Why didn't the Greeneville do more to rescue survivors? Here the Navy offers a plausible explanation involving turbulent seas. While the Coast Guard arrived on the scene almost immediately, survivors were probably better off in their life rafts.

Since the accident, the Bush administration has acted responsibly, officially apologizing for the accident that left nine missing and presumed dead. Ultimately, though, the USA will be judged by how forthrightly it addresses the questions raised by this tragedy.

---

Civilian describes pulling lever on sub before crash

02/15/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-02-15-sub2.htm

HONOLULU (AP) - A civilian who was on the Navy submarine that struck a Japanese fishing vessel said Thursday that he pulled levers for the ascent drill but had a crew member right beside him. He also described how the ship "shuddered" at the impact. Depending on the results of a National Transportation Safety Board investigation, the Navy could file charges against crew members. The civilians also could face legal liability, according to a government official familiar with the case.

Town shocked by civilian account Sub may have strayed out of test area NTSB review uncovers more details Civilian guests under Navy review Submariners hash over 'what if'

On the Web

U.S. Navy Greeneville site

"I was to the left in the control room, and I was asked by the captain if I would like the opportunity to pull the levers that start the procedure that's called the blowdown," John Hall told NBC's Today show.

"I said, 'Sure, I'd love to do that,"' he said.

Hall said the nearest crew member was "right next to me, elbow to elbow. I mean, what's important to know here is you don't do anything on this vessel without someone either showing you how to do it, telling you how to do it, or escorting you around."

On Wednesday, National Transportation Safety Board member John Hammerschmidt had confirmed that a civilian visiting the sub - closely supervised - was allowed to pull the levers that sent the attack submarine Greeneville streaking toward the ocean surface Friday where it sank the Japanese vessel, the Ehime Maru.

"The accident certainly is unusual. In terms of civilians being in those positions - I'm not sure that's unusual," Hammerschmidt said.

Nine people, four of them Japanese high school students, were still missing. The Coast Guard said it could call off the search for them as early as Thursday.

Another civilian, Todd Thoman, told the NBC show that a periscope was "most definitely" used to check the ocean surface before the drill Friday.

"We came up to periscope depth and another member of the crew took the periscope up and made two complete rotations at 360 degrees," Thoman said.

The captain of the submarine, Cmdr. Scott Waddle, made his own check through the periscope, Thoman said. "We saw no vessel and at that point he said 'OK' and he brought the periscope down and we proceeded with the maneuver," he said.

Said Hall: "Everything they do involves a procedure. I recall the captain, after he had done his periscope, I recall him calling out ... or a lot of crewmen calling out to him that they had gone through their procedure and the procedures were OK."

As the submarine surged upward, Hall said, "there was a very loud noise and the entire submarine shuddered."

According to him, Waddle said "Jesus, what the hell was that?" and looked out the periscope and saw the Ehime Maru.

"Everybody at that point was in shock," Hall said.

Waddle has been relieved of duty pending the outcome of the investigation.

On Wednesday, the Navy acknowledged that the Greeneville was about 3,000 yards east of a submarine test and trial area when it surfaced underneath the Japanese vessel.

The Navy initially had said the submarine was within the 56-square-mile training area designated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and marked on nautical charts to caution commercial and recreational craft.

Lt. Cmdr. Conrad Chun, a Pacific Fleet spokesman, stressed that the charts serve only as an advisory and submarines are not restricted to that area.

The Navy has refused to disclose the identities of the 16 civilians visiting on board the Greeneville. It has said they are civic and business officials. The Navy has a longstanding tradition of taking civilians such as relatives of crewmen, Navy supporters and journalists aboard its ships.

Chun said Friday's civilian tour had been arranged by a former commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific, retired Adm. Richard Macke.

Honolulu TV station KITV said members of the excursion were big donors to the USS Missouri Restoration Fund. One of the civilians, Michael Nolan, had helped organize a charity golf tournament in Hawaii last year to benefit the fund, the station said. Nolan and his wife, Susan, confirmed they were on board but wouldn't comment on the collision.

Chun said Macke, as a battleship USS Missouri volunteer, had referred the group of business leaders for the tour but had been unable to join them.

"The Navy receives referrals from a wide range of organizations and individuals," Chun said. "It is not uncommon to receive referrals from retired military members."

Macke was forced to apply for early retirement in 1996 after he suggested that three U.S. servicemen who rented a car to allegedly abduct and rape a 12-year-old girl in Okinawa, Japan, should have hired a prostitute instead.

Macke is now Pacific Region president for Wheat International Communications Corp., of Vienna, Va. He didn't return telephone calls to his office or home.

Investigators will continue interviewing the submarine's crew before deciding whether to interview the civilian guests, Hammerschmidt said.

He said one of those guest had been allowed to flip the ballast activation levers, an action that pushes air through the ballast tanks and sends water rushing out to raise the submarine rapidly to the surface. The submarine's chief of the watch stood next to the civilian and had his hand intertwined with the civilian's as the levers were pulled, he said.

The submarine's helmsman, who controls the vertical movement and direction of the submarine, stood over the other civilian, Hammerschmidt said.

The Ehime Maru was on a two-month training trip with students from Uwajima Fisheries High School in southwest Japan. On Thursday, 15 crew members returned home; the fishing vessel's captain remains in Hawaii.

---

Visitors on sub guests of admiral

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
By Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200121523244.htm

Most of the 16 VIP guests aboard the USS Greeneville when the submarine accidentally rammed and sank a Japanese fishing vessel were recommended for the trip by a retired admiral whose callous remarks got him in hot water with Japan in 1995.

Defense sources told The Washington Times that retired Adm. Richard C. Macke, who commanded all U.S. forces in the Pacific, sponsored a majority of the 16 business leaders on the Greeneville. Some manned control stations during the Greeneville's ill-fated rush to the surface and are a focus of two investigations.

A Navy spokesman in Honolulu confirmed last night that Adm. Macke made the tour request.

"Adm. Macke was not on board USS Greeneville, but was scheduled to accompany the group," Pacific Fleet spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Conrad Chun told reporters. "He did not embark Greeneville due to work commitments."

Cmdr. Chun stressed that the Navy sets up the tour trips and that retired military personnel commonly make such requests.

The Friday accident nine miles off the Hawaiian coast has threatened to strain U.S.-Japanese relations. Some survivors accuse the Greeneville's crew of failing to help in the rescue effort.

The U.S. Coast Guard last night said it could end its search for survivors from the Ehime Maru within 24 hours, saying the nine missing fishing-boat passengers are probably dead.

Adm. Macke's referrals embroil him in a U.S.-Japanese dispute for a second time.

In 1995, during the height of outrage over the rape of a Okinawa schoolgirl by three U.S. servicemen, Adm. Macke outraged the Japanese by telling reporters the accused could have hired a prostitute for the cost of the rental car they used in the crime.

"I think it was absolutely stupid," he said then, adding, "I've said several times, for the price they paid to rent the car, they could have had a girl."

The Navy forced Adm. Macke to give up the prestigious job of Pacific commander and to retire. But his troubles were not over.

In 1996, the Navy censured the four-star officer for maintaining a close personal relationship with a junior female officer. It also said he wasted government money on personal long-distance calls to her.

He once kept an airplane and crew waiting three days during an off-duty stay with the Marine officer at a hotel. Adm. Macke denied the relationship was improper.

The year he was censured, a Vienna, Va.-based firm, Wheat International Communications, hired Adm. Macke as vice president for Pacific Rim operations. The person who answered the phone yesterday at Adm. Macke's Honolulu office said the retired admiral was unavailable to comment.

The Pentagon repeatedly has refused to identify the 16 civilians, arguing that to release the guests' names would violate their right to privacy as citizens.

"I think that when [the Navy] take guests on board, they don't automatically surrender their rights to privacy," said Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman. "And they've asked their names not be released, and we're honoring that."

The Navy and former commanders yesterday defended the practice of inviting guests on brief submarine training missions.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in an interview on PBS' "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" that it is "a very normal thing" for civilians to be aboard Navy ships and submarines at sea. Asked if there was any indication they interfered with the crew he said, "None whatsoever."

He added: "It's not unusual when an aircraft carrier or submarine is steaming that they take distinguished visitors out who have been helpful to the Navy."

The civilians' role in the one-day training exercise has taken on new importance after disclosure this week that two sat at the controls as the Greeneville executed an "emergency blow" from a 400-foot ocean depth to the surface.

In the rush to the surface, the submarine sank the Japanese boat as the sub's rudder opened a gash in the stricken ship's keel.

Navy officials and a submarine ex-commander are downplaying the significance of letting civilians sit at watch stations.

They say the Greeneville's course to the surface is not the key issue. Rather, it is why the ship's commander, Cmdr. Scott Waddle of Austin, Texas, did not detect the 174-foot fishing boat either through passive sonar or a periscope scan of Pacific waters minutes before the Greeneville submerged and executed the "blow."

The Navy has relieved Cmdr. Waddle of command, pending a probe by Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths Jr., a submarine group commander, and by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Another issue is whether the civilians in any way provided a distraction in the control room during the periscope search or while sailors and officers monitored sonar screens as the sub prepared to surface. Living and working space in Los Angeles-class subs, such as the Greeneville, has grown tighter over the years as designers fitted them with updated equipment.

Normally, about six crewmen work in the tight confines of the control room. The Navy has not said how many of the 16 guests were in the room.

Lt. Cmdr. Cate Mueller, a Navy spokeswoman at the Pentagon, declined to discuss these issues pending results of investigations.

The Pacific Fleet alone last year took 1,329 civilian visitors aboard submarines for short training missions, including 213 at the Greeneville home port of Hawaii.

A retired Navy officer, who commanded submarines, said in an interview he routinely took civilians on such public relations trips. The ex-officer, who asked to remain anonymous, also said he allowed the guests to sit at the controls, including the helm that guides direction, during a "blow."

"The 'Silent Service' is trying to get people to understand what submarine life is like," he said. "At the helm, they are actually controlling the boat. But there is a guy standing next to him to make sure he's put on the right degree. During an emergency blow test, there's not much that person does. The ship is moving on the air being pushed into the ballast tank. Like a cork held underneath the water, when you release it the buoyancy brings it to the surface."

The crucial question, the source said, is why the crew apparently failed to detect the oncoming vessel. In the periscope scan, whoever manned the scope may not have had it high enough out of the water. Or, ocean swells may have blocked the periscope's 10-mile range.

In the collision, the ship passed over the Greeneville as it surfaced, indicating the two vessels had been headed directly at each other. In this case, the sub's passive sonar, in a phenomenon know as "bow null" may not have been able to pick up the sounds of propellers or the engine.

Also, the former commander said, water temperature or density may have blocked sound on the surface from sonar detection.

"They did not pick the ship up. Why is the big question," he said.

A submarine has two directional controls manned by a helmsman and planesman. The helmsman controls the course direction by manipulating the rudder. The planesman controls external flaps for vertical movements.

Another crucial timeline is how long the ship took to surface once the periscope came down and the ship submerged to 400 feet.

Navy officials have indicated the time lapse was no more than 15 minutes. One source said the sub only lingered for four minutes.

-------- depleted uranium

Czech Mission Finds No Uranium Threat in Kosovo

February 15, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/health/health-uranium.html
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/science/science-nato-balkans-.html

PRAGUE (Reuters) - A Czech army mission to Kosovo said on Thursday it had detected no threat of uranium contamination to the country's peacekeepers stationed there.

Although the team had not yet completed examination of all samples, results so far showed no evidence of unusual levels of radiation among Czech troops or in the air, water and food in areas where they were based.

``The levels of radiation were normal,'' team leader Major Vaclav Hanzlik told a news conference, adding that he saw no risk for Czech KFOR (Kosovo Force) troops.

The mission was sent in last month after NATO acknowledged that it had used munitions containing depleted uranium during its military campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s.

A number of cases of cancer and other fatal ailments among Balkans veterans from various NATO countries had sparked fears that they were victims of the so-called Balkans Syndrome from being exposed to radiation from the uranium.

Czech Brigadier-General Jan Petras said no such a link had been proved. He said that 169 Czech peacekeepers returning home had already been tested, with more tests to come.

``All tests have proved negative so far,'' Petras said, adding that the Czech army wanted to test every professional soldier returning from Balkans on a regular basis once a year.

``We are looking for ways on how to perform regular health checks when the soldiers retire from the army,'' Petras added.

The Czech army plans to send another mission to Bosnia later this month. Controversy over the use of depleted uranium weapons used by NATO in the Balkans erupted after reports from Italy that six soldiers had died of leukemia.

Britain, along with NATO and the United States, insists there is no proof that depleted uranium weapons pose any health risk.

Cases of cancer have also been reported among soldiers from France, The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Portugal.

-------

No hazard left in shells, lab reports

01/02/15
Seattle Times
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=wdig15&date=20010215

ZURICH-- A Swiss laboratory has found only minute traces of plutonium in depleted-uranium ammunition used by NATO-led forces in the Balkans, Swiss radio reported yesterday.

"It is already clear that only extremely small - if any - traces of plutonium were found in the shells and shell fragments that were checked, and these in no way pose a potential health risk, according to scientists," the radio reported.

The possible danger of contamination from armor and other targets hit by cheap and highly effective shells tipped with depleted uranium during the Gulf War and more recently in southern Serbia has caused an outcry in some countries. Britain and the United States have insisted the risks are minimal.

-------

Servicemember Advocacy Organization Endorses Gulf War Vet Compensation Bill
NGWRC Praises Bipartisan Approach of Manzullo, Shows

February 15, 2001
Patrick G. Eddington
http://www.onelist.com/community/CHE-OAKRIDGE

(Washington, DC) -- The nation's largets post-Cold War veteran and servicemember advocacy organization today praised the introduction of HR 612, the Persian Gulf War Illness Compensation Act of 2001, co-sponsored by Representative's Donald Manzullo (R-Il) and Ronnie Shows (D-MS). "This legislation will help make it easier for Gulf War veterans to get compensated for undiagnosed illnesses, and it extends the presumptive period another full decade," said Patrick G. Eddington, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. "If enacted, this legislation will have a major positive impact on the lives of ill Desert Storm veterans."

The bill tightens the language defining "undiagnosed illnesses," the catch phrase used to describe what is commonly referred to as Gulf War illness, in an effort to overturn the Department of Veterans Affairs nearly 75% rejection rate for such claims. The bill also extends the presumptive period for developing illnesses through the 2011, while giving the Secretary of Veterans Affairs the leeway to extend the presumptive period further.

Eddington also praised the bipartisan approach taken by the bill's co-sponsors.

"In a Congress so closely divided politically, it's reassuring to see that bipartisan cooperation on veterans issues is still the norm. We look forward to seeing a similar measure introduced in the Senate in the very near future."

Eddington noted that then-presidential candidate George W. Bush had promised in the fall of 1999 to make the concerns of Gulf War veterans a major priority for his administration.

Addressing a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire just before Veterans Day, Bush said that the "skeptical looks and paper-shuffling excuses for withholding coverage" would end if he became president. Eddington expressed NGWRC's hope that Bush would remember Gulf War veterans in his State of the Union address.

"Given that he'll deliver the speech on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the Gulf War ceasefire, it would only be appropriate for him to reiterate his campaign commitment to help sick Gulf War veterans. We certainly hope he does."

Community email addresses: Post message: CHE-OAKRIDGE@onelist.com Subscribe: CHE-OAKRIDGE-subscribe@onelist.com Unsubscribe: CHE-OAKRIDGE-unsubscribe@onelist.com List owner: CHE-OAKRIDGE-owner@onelist.com

-------- missile defense

China, U.S. Blame Each Other

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Disarmament.html

GENEVA (AP) -- China accused the United States on Thursday of holding global disarmament talks hostage by pursuing a missile defense system and preparing for warfare in outer space. Washington blamed Beijing for the negotiating gridlock.

And a Canadian mediator overseeing efforts to begin talks on a new arms control treaty said neither nation was willing to consider any change of position. He said the same was true for all major countries with nuclear arsenals.

The discussion went on at the 66-nation Conference on Disarmament, the world's only multinational forum for negotiating arms-control treaties.

``These are not proving good weeks or months at all to be trying to get major powers to agree to start negotiating,'' said Christopher Westdal, Canada's ambassador to the conference and the body's outgoing president.

Chinese Ambassador Hu Xiaodi told the conference that ``the root cause of the stalemate'' was the position of one country. While declining to name the United States, Hu made clear he was talking about Washington for its intentions to deploy a missile defense system in violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Defense Treaty, or ABM.

Hu also said China was ``seriously concerned'' about a weeklong exercise that took place last month at the Space Warfare Center at Schriever Air Force Base, Colo., where 250 of the United States' leading space experts used computer models to simulate a war in space. The scenario was set in 2017.

``International arms control and disarmament efforts are currently at a crossroad,'' said Hu. ``The most outstanding menace comes from the attempts to overthrow the ABM treaty and weaponize outer space.''

U.S. Ambassador Robert T. Grey denied the United States had any intention of deploying weapons in outer space and said a missile defense, if deployed, ``can enhance strategic stability and further reduce the danger that nuclear weapons will ever be used.''

Countries that are ``unwisely and unrealistically insisting on immediate negotiations on a new outer space treaty'' are using ``a diplomatic tactic which has the net effect of blocking discussion'' across the board, Grey said.

Westdal, who since last fall has been trying to get governments to agree to negotiate a new treaty on some aspect of nuclear arms, said he had run into a brick wall. His presidency of the conference ends Friday.

Grey said the United States still thinks the best way forward is to negotiate a ban on the production of ``fissile materials'' -- the plutonium and highly enriched uranium needed to make nuclear weapons.

He said Washington also was willing to consider parallel talks to discuss what the conference could do on outer space and on overall nuclear disarmament -- a widely desired topic for many countries that have no atomic weapons. But such parallel talks would fall short of actual treaty negotiations, U.S. officials stressed.

Russia, another key conference member, has told the conference it strongly opposes President Bush's plans to erect a defense against a limited attack of ballistic missiles.

The United States says it needs such a system to protect against countries such as North Korea or Iran that may be developing nuclear arsenals capable of firing only ``handfuls'' of missiles.

The conference has been deadlocked on starting any new negotiations since it wrote the treaty to ban nuclear test explosions in 1996.

---

Conservatives Happy With Bush

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-GOP-Conservatives.html

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP)-- Vice President Dick Cheney told conservative activists Thursday he and President Bush will govern in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, who remains wildly popular with the group.

Cheney, speaking at the winter meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, promised quick action on a much-debated missile defense system, urged quick passage of tax cuts and pledged to create a more civil tone in Washington.

``The president's tax cut is pro-growth and America needs it now,'' Cheney said. ``It lets overcharged taxpayers keep more of their own money, giving our economy the boost it needs.''

The tax cut was the hot issue at the CPAC meeting. Several conservatives said earlier in the day the $1.6 trillion over 10 years that Bush has proposed is the minimum tax cut the country needs. Bush had been scheduled to address the gathering, but the group was told he couldn't make it because of his trip to Mexico on Friday.

Cheney reminded the conservatives that Reagan addressed their group two decades ago about the challenges before them, not about the Republican election victory.

``Twenty years later, thanks to his leadership, the world we live in is much as he envisioned it, with Americans enjoying the fruits of a long economic expansion, and freedom expanding with it around the globe,'' he said.

``The last time Americans received major tax relief was in 1981,'' Cheney said. ``Since then, taxes have been inching their way back up.''

Cheney pledged the administration would rebuild the military power of the United States and he promised to push ahead with the missile defense system.

``At the earliest possible date, this administration will build and deploy a defense against ballistic missiles,'' Cheney said. He said the military will be restructured ``to make our forces lighter and easier to move, harder for our enemies to find and more lethal in action.''

He restated Bush's recent pledge to spend $5.7 billion to improve better pay, better training and better housing.

Cheney said the administration would aggressively pursue its principles, but ``would show a decent regard for other points of view.''

``We take seriously the responsibility to be honest and civil,'' he said. And he told the crowd that the administration has hundreds of young ``Americans from different backgrounds and different walks of life.''

Earlier in the day, conservatives said they were wary when they first heard candidate Bush talk about reaching out to Democrats and label himself a ``compassionate conservative.'' But they say they've been delighted with what they have seen from the new president.

``When he began the campaign, there was a great deal of skepticism,'' said David A. Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, the main sponsor of the conference, which is attracting about 3,000 activists.

``He just found a different way of saying the same thing. We don't care if they call it bleu cheese,'' Keene said.

Bush has shown ``how easy it is to hornswoggle liberals,'' said Anne Coulter, an author and political commentator. ``All you have to do is go around calling yourself nice. He just treats liberals like small children having nightmares. Darn if it didn't work.''

House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas welcomed the chance to speak at the conference.

``They've been looking for compassionate conservatives,'' said DeLay, nicknamed ``the Hammer'' for his persuasive abilities in the House. ``I'm a compassionate conservative, durn it. Conservatism is compassionate.''

DeLay said amid all the talk of bipartisanship in Washington, it is important ``to remember the difference between bipartisanship and appeasement.'' He said conservatives ``have never tolerated hypocrisy and deception.''

---

Shadow official backs missile shield guarding NATO

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
By David R. Sands
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001215222338.htm

Europe should work with the United States on a missile shield that would protect all of NATO, rather than mindlessly oppose the idea from the sidelines, the defense spokesman for Britain's Conservative Party said yesterday.

"Far too many European leaders are still resisting any call to cooperate with the United States against threats that are plainly there," said Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservatives' shadow secretary of state for defense, in an address here yesterday.

Mr. Duncan Smith, who would become Britain's defense secretary if the Tories pull off an upset in general elections widely expected this spring, has been a sharp critic of the Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Mr. Blair has tried to balance widespread skepticism in Europe over the missile defense idea against the determination of the new Bush administration to proceed with deployment.

Mr. Duncan Smith said Britain has traditionally played a "bridging role" in defense disputes within NATO.

"Sadly, we don't seem quite to be stepping up to that role" in the missile defense debate, he said.

Mr. Bush and his senior advisers argue that the missile defense shield is needed to protect the United States from the growing threat of attacks from rogue nations such as North Korea and Iraq.

Russia and China remain staunchly opposed to the idea, fearing the shield could in time overwhelm their own nuclear forces.

Many European leaders, including French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, have expressed deep doubts about the U.S. plan. Skeptics in Europe have argued that the threat has been overstated, the Russian response will be harsh, and a global arms race could result as adversaries try to counteract the U.S. shield.

Missile defense is expected to be a primary topic of discussion when Secretary of State Colin Powell travels to Brussels later this month for a meeting of NATO's foreign ministers.

President Bush also reached out to Beijing this week, relaying a message through visiting Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien to Chinese leaders that the United States wants to begin direct talks on the defense idea.

Mr. Bush "has agreed that he wants a lot of discussion to occur," a Canadian official in Shanghai quoted Mr. Chretien as saying. "He has to convince his partners and they are not quite ready, the technology is not quite ready, but he thinks he has a very good case."

Mr. Duncan Smith made clear yesterday he does not favor a missile shield that only protects the United States.

"I never talk about national missile defense," he said. "I talk about ballistic missile defense, because that is what this should all be about."

But he issued a strong warning against a possible "grand compromise" that has been floated, in which the Europeans would drop their opposition to the U.S. defense plan in return for U.S. acquiescence to a proposed European Union defense force separate from NATO.

Mr. Duncan Smith said the European force, which Mr. Blair backs, "would not extend European defense capabilities by one iota. It would not buy a single new bullet or supply a single new soldier."

-------- russia

Russia Angry On Missile Allegations

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-US.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Top Russian defense officials Thursday fiercely rejected U.S. charges that Russia is spreading missile technologies to Iran and North Korea and warned the allegation could deeply mar relations.

At least four senior Russian officials slammed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld -- who made the charges -- and accused him of using Cold War rhetoric. They alleged that he is beholden to U.S. defense contractors who would stand to benefit from the development of a new national defense system.

The comments followed an interview with Rumsfield Wednesday on PBS' ``NewsHour With Jim Lehrer'' in which he called Moscow ``part of the problem.''

``They are selling and assisting countries like Iran, North Korea and India and other countries with these technologies, which are threatening other people, including the United States, Western Europe and countries in the Middle East,'' Rumsfeld said.

Despite Thursday's tough talk, Russian officials expressed hope that Moscow and the new administration of President Bush would be able to calmly discuss the divisive issues of nuclear nonproliferation, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty and NATO expansion.

Gen. Leonid Ivashov, head of the Defense Ministry's international relations department, led the verbal crusade against Rumsfeld, telling the Interfax news agency ``Russia is irreproachably fulfilling its international obligations, including under the regime of nonproliferation of missile technologies.''

Tough talk coming from senior officials of the Bush administration has deeply irritated the Kremlin, particularly Senate testimony last week by CIA Director George Tenet, who lumped Russia together with Osama bin Laden and China as global threats.

Rumsfeld said it made no sense for Russia to export missile technologies but then protest U.S. attempts to defend itself against missiles. He stressed that the proposed missile defense shield would protect the nation only against small-scale attacks, not the massive sort that Russia could launch.

Russia and many of the United States' NATO allies believe the missile defense would render useless the ABM treaty, considered a keystone of nuclear nonproliferation.

Maj. Gen. Vladimir Belous, head of Russia's Center for International and Strategic Studies, said Rumsfeld's remarks were reminiscent of Cold War times.

``Judging by experience, ill-considered statements may only do damage to the relations between the great powers in the delicate sphere of nuclear nonproliferation,'' Belous told ITAR-Tass.

However, the sharp talk by Russian defense officials may well just be the Kremlin's own rhetorical answer to what some senior officials in Moscow consider a U.S. propaganda campaign aimed at winning concessions from Russia before real talks start on key nuclear issues.

There were signs that Kremlin pragmatists are prepared for serious dialogue.

``I expect a calm dialogue between Russia and the United States and both sides will take into account all aspects of this issue,'' Sergei Ivanov, a close ally of President Vladimir Putin and head of Russia's powerful Security Council, said Thursday.

---

Satellites pinpoint Russian nuclear arms in Baltics

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
By Bill Gertz
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001215224952.htm

U.S. spy satellites have located the exact position of Russian tactical nuclear weapons in the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, contradicting Moscow's contention that it had not transferred the battlefield arms.

Satellite photographs first revealed the transfers June 3 when the weapons were spotted aboard a Russian military train at a seaport near St. Petersburg, according to U.S. intelligence officials.

A second intelligence breakthrough took place June 6 when spy satellites detected the arrival of the nuclear arms in Kaliningrad, said officials familiar with intelligence reports who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The weapons were moved by ship from the Russian port to a special nuclear storage bunker near a military airfield in Kaliningrad, a small Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea.

The satellite photographs have refuted Russian government denials about the transfer or deployment of nuclear arms in Kaliningrad. The transfers were first reported by The Washington Times on Jan. 3.

"The Russians are denying it, but we know better," said one defense official. Debate within the U.S. government has ceased on the nuclear transfers.

The disclosure of the tactical nuclear arms transfers prompted statements of concern by the governments of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Moscow has refused inspections of all military facilities in Kaliningrad by those governments.

Polish Defense Minister Bronislaw Komorowski called for inspections of Kaliningrad to determine whether the nuclear arms were deployed there. The State Department did not support the call for inspections, even though Poland is now a member of the NATO alliance.

Under an informal agreement reached between the United States and Russia in 1992, Moscow was to remove all tactical nuclear weapons from forward-deployed areas and said they had done so.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last month dismissed reports of the nuclear arms in Kaliningrad as "rubbish."

U.S. intelligence is still trying to determine the exact type of the nuclear arms. They were described in reports as either nuclear naval, ground forces or air-delivered weapons.

The weapons in Kaliningrad are based in what the Pentagon calls a nuclear storage site, a special facility used to house nuclear arms.

The intelligence photographs, gathered by the Pentagon's array of reconnaissance satellites, confirmed suspicions dating back to 1998 about the deployment of tactical nuclear arms in Kaliningrad, the officials said.

Russia has between 4,000 and 15,000 tactical nuclear weapons, none of which is covered by formal U.S.-Russian arms control agreements. They include short-range missile warheads, nuclear-armed torpedoes and air-dropped nuclear bombs.

A Pentagon spokesman told The Washington Times last month that the deployment of tactical nuclear arms to Kaliningrad violates Moscow's pledge to keep the Baltic region a "nuclear-free" zone.

The nuclear transfers were not reported in formal Pentagon intelligence reports until December, fueling speculation among some officials that the information was withheld from U.S. government policy-makers for diplomatic reasons. Intelligence officials denied the information was withheld.

After the disclosures last month, the State Department sent a formal diplomatic note to the Russians asking for an explanation of the deployment.

The Russian government replied by repeating Moscow's public denials insisting that there were no nuclear arms in Kaliningrad, U.S. officials said.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser during the Carter administration, said the nuclear arms in Kaliningrad are a political problem more than a serious strategic worry.

"It tells us something about the dogged attitudes of the Russian military and political leaders," Mr. Brzezinski said in an interview.

"It's conduct you would not expect from a responsible government that generally wants to be part of the partnership of the European community, as Putin has indicated," Mr. Brzezinski said.

"No one likes to be sitting next to nuclear weapons, stored or unstored," he said.

But efforts by Polish and Baltic-nation governments to seek nuclear inspections will be difficult because there are no formal agreements allowing such reviews, Mr. Brzezinski said.

As for Russian government denials, Mr. Brzezinski said: "The fact that the Russian government denies it . . . is probably an affirmation that it is true."

Richard Perle, a senior defense official in the Reagan administration, said the movement of the weapons would be a concern if it is part of a Russian strategy against NATO.

Moscow said in 1998 that it would deploy nuclear weapons into forward areas of Europe in response to the expansion of the NATO alliance. The 1999 expansion brought in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have expressed an interest in joining the alliance.

As for the weapons themselves, Mr. Perle said, they are "not a deep concern."

"The movement of nuclear weapons from one location to another might have troubled me in the Cold War, but not now," said Mr. Perle, an adviser to George W. Bush during the presidential campaign.

---

Russian forces conduct massive war-games exercise

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
By Bill Gertz
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001215225141.htm

Russian military forces are engaged in a large-scale exercise involving strategic and conventional military forces that will include three long-range missile flight tests in the next several days, according to defense and intelligence officials.

The exercises, involving the "triad" of strategic land, sea and air forces, began Monday and involved Russian strategic bomber intrusions into Japanese airspace and flights near Norwegian airspace. The flights prompted a protest from Tokyo.

Such exercises in the recent past have involved simulated conflicts with the United States and other NATO members, and the officials said they expect that scenario for the weeklong war games.

"They are running a big strategic forces exercise," said one official. "It's larger than we've seen for a long time."

The official said, however, that the Russians have taken steps to structure the exercise in ways to avoid rankling some Western governments. He did not elaborate.

An intelligence official said the Russians notified the U.S. government of the missile flight tests - involving a road-mobile ICBM and two submarine-launched ballistic missiles -through a new U.S.-Russian missile warning center.

The warning center was set up to avoid the dangerous incident several years ago when Russian nuclear forces went on alert in response to a Norwegian scientific rocket that was mistaken by the Red Army for a U.S. submarine-launched missile.

The highlight of the exercise will be the flight test of the SS-25, Moscow's first road-mobile intercontinental missile. The SS-25 has a range of up to 8,500 miles.

From Russian missile submarines, an SSN-18 missile and an SSN-23 missile will be test-launched during the exercises, said the officials. The triple-warhead SSN-18 and quadruple-warhead SSN-23 missiles have ranges of up to 5,000 miles.

Russian strategic bombers involved in the maneuvers include Bear H and Tu-22 Backfire and Tu-160 Blackjack - long-range nuclear-capable bombers operating in both the eastern and western parts of Russia.

The bombers have been flying out of bases in Anadyr, in the Russian Far East; Tiksi on the Laptev Sea near the Arctic Circle; and Engels Air Base west of Moscow, the officials said.

Russian Il-78 tanker aircraft also have been sent to the edges of the vast Russian Federation and have been spotted in aerial refueling of Russian warplanes.

In addition to strategic forces, Russian conventional forces are involved, according to intelligence officials. Troops of the Russian Border Guards and Federal Security Service have been mobilized.

Russia's military press reported Monday that motorized rifle and airborne divisions are participating, along with air force and air defense troops.

"The war games . . . aim at checking notification systems, combat and mobilization readiness of several military districts, as well as readiness of armed services," Russia's military news agency stated.

A parachute drop of an airborne division is expected today near the town of Ivanovo, and aerial bombing raids also will be carried out, the news agency said.

Analysts view the exercises as timed to exert political influence on the new Bush administration and its plans for a national missile defense, which Moscow opposes.

"These [exercises] appear to be Russia deciding to deal with the West after the fashion of the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, namely to bluster in order to try to prevent an American strategic overture, in this case missile defense," R. James Woolsey, a former CIA director and arms control negotiator, said in an interview.

"I very much hope and believe that these sorts of Russian tactics will backfire both with Europe and with the United States."

Russia recently revised its military doctrine to call for greater reliance on nuclear weapons, since conventional forces are deteriorating under the severe economic problems facing the country. Russian military forces were unable to defeat rebels in Chechnya during several years of fighting.

The exercises are being directed by Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and the chief of the general staff, Gen. Anatoly Kvashnin. Russian President Vladimir Putin is expected to take part in the exercises tomorrow.

U.S. intelligence officials said all three officials utilized the Russian nuclear command and control briefcase, known as a cheget, as part of the exercises.

Japan's Foreign Ministry protested what it said were violations of Japanese airspace by several Russian aircraft, including bombers that were met with Japanese interceptor aircraft.

Russia denied airspace incursions. "We again analyzed all the actions of our pilots, and there were no violations of Japan's airspace," Mr. Sergeyev was quoted as saying by the military news agency.

Russian bombers also flew near Norway's coast but did not intrude on the Scandinavian nation's airspace, according to Col. John Espen Lien of the Norwegian Supreme Defense Command.

The current Russian exercises followed incidents in October and November when Russian fighter-bombers buzzed the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in the Sea of Japan in a sign of hostility.

The maneuvers also come on the eve of the first talks next week between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov in Cairo, and a visit to Moscow by NATO Secretary-General George Robertson.

The exercises are expected to conclude tomorrow.

So far, there have been no Russian bomber flights near U.S. or Canadian territory, although military officials said they are closely monitoring the exercises and are prepared to scramble U.S. Air Force interceptor jets in response.

A Pentagon spokesman said that "we are aware of the exercise" and that it was similar to U.S. maneuvers carried out "to maintain readiness."

-------- taiwan

To Break Impasse, Taiwan Leader Confirms Reactor Go-Ahead

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/world/15TAIW.html

HONG KONG, Feb. 14 - Desperate to break a political impasse that has all but paralyzed Taiwan, President Chen Shui-bian's government confirmed today that it would resume construction of a partly built nuclear power plant.

Prime Minister Chang Chun- hsiung said the government had yielded to opposition pressure to revive the $5.5 billion project over the fervent objections of its own party for the sake of "political stability and economic development."

Although Mr. Chen's retreat may mollify the opposition and calm the agitated stock market, experts said it could badly weaken the president as he confronts other divisive issues, notably relations with Beijing.

"If he didn't give in and the opposition continued to harass him, it would have had a very unsettling effect on politics and economics," said Parris H. Chang, a legislator and member of Mr. Chen's Democratic Progressive Party. "But once you show you are weak and can be pushed around, the opposition may not let you go cheaply."

Mr. Chen's position was already parlous. Last year he swept the Nationalist Party out of power after 55 years of governing in Taiwan, but only after the party had splintered because of internal dissension. The Nationalists kept a huge majority in the legislature, which they have used to hogtie Mr. Chen's administration.

When the president shelved the power plant, making good on a campaign promise, the Nationalists threatened to hold a vote to recall him from office. They backed down after the public failed to rally behind them, but they continued to assail Mr. Chen in the legislature and the courts.

As the two sides exchanged vitriol, the economy began to sputter and its stock market hemorrhaged.

"The nuclear plant issue signifies a breakdown in confidence in the government, not only in energy policy, but in economic policy," said Mayor Ma Ying-jeou of Taipei, a rising star in the Nationalist Party.

For Mr. Chen, the biggest headache may not be the Nationalists, but members of his own party, many of whom say they believe that he betrayed party antinuclear principles. Hard-line leaders said they planned to march on Feb. 24 at an antinuclear rally in Taipei.

"The decision has shattered the dreams of our supporters," said Chung Chin-chiang, a Democratic Progressive legislator.

Feelings are especially raw in Kungliao, the coastal town in northern Taiwan where the power plant is rising. "The decision was nothing but a betrayal of conscience and cheating of the public," said the township chief, Chao Kuo-tung.

The plant is not the only issue that could put Mr. Chen in conflict with his party. Its platform espouses formal independence for Taiwan, a stance that has led Beijing, which views Taiwan as a breakaway territory divided from the Chinese mainland by civil war, to refuse to negotiate with Mr. Chen.

Since he was elected, Mr. Chen has distanced himself from independence while not flatly disavowing it. If he enters talks with Beijing, experts said, he risks further disapproval in his party.

Parris Chang, the legislator, said he believed that the Chinese government would not force Mr. Chen's hand for a few months, because Beijing is lobbying to be chosen this summer as host of the 2008 Olympic Games.

Other experts said that with legislative elections in December, Mr. Chen's party had little choice but to support its standard-bearer.

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

How would U.S. react now to a '13 days' crisis?

02/15/2001
USA Today
By Newton N. Minow
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-02-15-ncguest1.htm

After my wife and I saw the movie Thirteen Days, we remained sitting silently in the dark theater for a few minutes, unable to move. We were frozen back in time to our own days in Washington during the Cuban missile crisis.

Like others in the audience old enough to remember October 1962, I thought about where I was, how frightened I was for my family and the world - and how much has changed since then, not all of it for the better of our country.

As President Kennedy's chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), I was in New York on Oct. 22, 1962, working with European and American broadcasters to develop international communications satellites. At 7 a.m., I received an urgent call from Pierre Salinger, Kennedy's press secretary, who simply said, "National emergency! Get to the White House at once." I raced to the next shuttle flight and was in the White House in less than two hours.

Salinger was waiting with Don Wilson, deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency, which then supervised the Voice of America (VOA). Soviet missiles with nuclear capability were in Cuba, they said, aimed at the United States. Kennedy, who would speak to the nation at 7 p.m., wanted his speech translated into Spanish and sent by VOA to the Cuban people.

VOA radio signals to Cuba were completely jammed by Cuba and the Soviet Union, but VOA engineers had found six U.S. commercial radio stations that broadcast strong signals into Cuba. My assignment was to arrange for these commercial stations to carry the VOA and the president's message to the Cuban people at 7 p.m.

"One condition," Salinger added. "This is a deep secret. You can't tell the stations what is going on." As an inexperienced 36-year-old, I mumbled OK and raced to my office.

I swore our senior FCC staff to secrecy and explained the assignment. They were aghast. This, they said, violated every rule they could think of; no commercial station had ever been taken over, even during wartime. But this was more urgent: We were trying to avert nuclear war.

Working with VOA engineers, we quickly determined there were seven broadcast stations, not six, plus two shortwave stations capable of reaching Cuba, and that AT&T could patch a line from the VOA transmitters to all nine stations without delay. I also brought in a senior FCC commissioner, Robert Bartley, our national defense expert. Bartley was the nephew of former House speaker Sam Rayburn. I figured that would help once news of this reached Congress.

After we had the technology in place, I told Salinger I had to inform the stations and request their cooperation. By this time, rumors were spreading of a national emergency, and Salinger didn't want that done because of the risk of leaks. But when I insisted, he said use your own best judgment. I called each station and asked that the person in charge give us a phone number where we could reach him or her at 6 p.m. for an urgent conference call from the White House. And, I added, this was a national emergency, with lives at stake - no leaks, please.

There were no leaks. At 6 p.m., Bartley, Salinger and I called the nine stations' representatives. We requested their help as citizens and asked that they announce at 7 p.m. that their stations would broadcast the VOA in Spanish to Cuba. All agreed. As I left the White House, I saw President Kennedy and gave him a thumbs up: The Cuban people would hear his speech. I went home, listening to the speech on my car radio. More scared than I had ever been as a soldier in the China/Burma/India theater during World War II, I hugged my wife and children and prayed.

The next morning, I was invited to part of the meeting of the executive committee dealing with the missile crisis. American intelligence reported that many Cubans had heard the VOA loud and clear. Our plan had worked. President Kennedy looked at me and said let's do it again tonight. I left to start all over again. This went on every night for the duration of the week.

Then it was all over. Several weeks after the crisis ended, a few of the stations called and asked where they should send their bills. I asked, what bills? They politely said they had canceled evening commercials for a week; who was going to make up the revenue losses? They had a point, but I had no budget for this. Nor did anyone else. Finally, I suggested to Salinger that the president invite the broadcasters to lunch in the White House to thank them personally and have their pictures taken with him. This worked. No bills were sent.

The next year, however, the president of a small religious college asked to see me. His college, he said, had both a radio and a TV station. The radio station was doing fine, but the TV station had a minor technical regulatory problem at the FCC. I said I was sorry to hear that. He then looked in my eyes and said, "Chairman Minow, do you remember when you asked us to help you and the president with our radio station during the Cuban missile crisis, and we helped in every way we could?" I said, "Yes, I remember." He then looked even more deeply into my eyes, took my hand, and said, "Chairman Minow, in view of how we helped you, do you think you could find it in your heart to ..." I interrupted him and said, "I got your message. Consider it done."

I later called the staff and asked that the technical regulatory question be dropped. Today, I'd probably be investigated by a special prosecutor, but I would do it again.

Those memories, prompted by seeing Thirteen Days, made me reflect on how dramatically things have changed. In 1962, I saw how powerful the blockade was in putting pressure on the Soviet Union and Cuba to back down. But while we were cutting off Cuba from supplies, we were opening up Cuba to information, and that, too, played a role. Today, the VOA has the techniques and power to surmount jamming. Technologies such as communication satellites, the Internet and cable networks such as CNN have erased national boundaries. Like Joshua's trumpet, they make old walls tumble down.

But while a new world has opened up, another world has closed down. I wonder whether we could get the same level of cooperation today that made our efforts possible in 1962, when news organizations held their stories and broadcasters gave up their evening broadcast time. Everyone did this without rancor, jockeying for position or bureaucratic wrangling.

The Cuban missile crisis lasted 13 days. In today's information age, would President Kennedy have been forced to act in 13 hours? Or even 13 minutes? I worry less today about whether we have the technology to respond than about whether we have the character.

Newton N. Minow was Federal Communications Commission chairman from 1961 to 1963.

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

Greenouts

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
Kenneth D. Smith
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-2001215192728.htm

By most measures, Intel chief Craig Barrett is just the kind of civic-minded, self-sacrificing executive that California is counting on to help the state overcome its dependence, even its addiction, to energy. He turns his office lights out during daylight hours, dims others and turns off the air-conditioning in the building as needed. On top of that, he runs a neatly trimmed chip-manufacturing business without creating the sort of pockmarked landscape and environmental degradation that comes with the operating instructions of old, hard-line manufacturing and mining operations.

It's all true, but Mr. Barrett is under no illusions that the solutions to California's energy problems are more Barretts and more Intels. Far from it. Mr. Barrett has announced that his company won't expand in the state's "Silicon Valley" or in California, now in its 30th day of a high-level "energy alert," because the possibility of rolling blackouts threatens to ruin his products and cost the company millions of dollars. While state officials pleaded with large users Wednesday to reduce their use, Mr. Barrett has said flatly that the state needs more electricity. "Nuclear power is the only answer," he told Bloomberg News, "but it's not politically correct."

In comments to the National Press Club earlier this month, Scott McNealy, founder and chairman of Sun Microsystems Inc., echoed those of Mr. Barrett. "I'm happy to take the lead and take the arrows if that's what it takes," he said, "but you know I think the politicians have got to step up and start driving this and come up with a better energy policy that includes nuclear power. Certainly Japan, Europe and all of our international competitors have figured that out."

Not only are people mentioning the "N"-word in public places these days, some are open to energy proposals considered all but politically impossible. The Bush administration has made clear that it would like to explore for oil in a disappearingly small portion of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, a frozen wasteland invariably described as "pristine" by those who have never had to visit the place.

It wasn't supposed to happen like this. The way most environmentalists viewed it, the energy blueprint for the United States was anything but cramped. Demand for electricity was supposed to flatten out about the time that consumers finally sated themselves with washers and dryers and other conveniences of the 20th century. So predicted the Union of Concerned Scientists in 1980. Even if they couldn't get enough, they could use the most energy-efficient appliances and, further, conserve their use of them rather like Mr. Barrett. Too little fuel to heat your house? Put on a sweater. Too little gasoline? Drive less.

The premise of the conservation argument rests on logic guaranteed to topple in a spring breeze. To tell the likes of Intel and Sun that conservation is a substitute for power, says Fred Smith of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is rather like telling a starving man that while he might need a meal from time to time, more dieting is really the answer. But such arguments were good enough for Sacramento voters in 1989 when they voted 53 percent to 43 percent to close the Rancho Seco nuclear plant about 25 miles outside the city. And apparently it is still good enough for voters in California, where it takes 12 months, about $30 million and 17 assessments on everything from effects on wildlife to historical significance to get permission to build a power plant. Consequently, one hasn't been built there in a decade.

What's happened during that period, of course, is the emergence of an electricity-guzzling Internet-based industry. By one estimate, it amounts to as much as 13 percent of the overall demand for power in the United States. Electricity demand in Silicon Valley alone has shot up 33 percent since 1996, reports Forbes magazine. It takes energy to get around in cyberspace. It takes energy to run the tens of millions of personal computers that essentially didn't exist 10 years ago. It takes energy to run the routers, the servers and the factories that make them. The industry's appetite for electrons is only going to grow as consumers, unconvinced about the nobility of technological benightedness, try out wireless communications.

Critics argue that while technology has increased demand for power, the "net effect" of the Internet is actually to reduce demand. E-mail, for example, would reduce the number of trips persons make to the Post Office, the need for overnight delivery, the slaughter of trees to make paper and so on. It sounds fine in theory, but in practice it hasn't worked out that way. As energy consultant Mark Mills testified before Congress a year ago, consider "the long-promised energy savings from telecommuting. Certainly telecommuting uses less fuel than driving your car. But auto and air travel is up even with the rise of telecommuting. The reasons are complex, but even the co-inventor of the Internet himself has concluded: 'The Internet has the funny effect of increasing the amount of travel.' " [Vinton Cerf, senior vice president of Internet Architecture, MCI WorldCom].

Anyway the microchips fall, the Internet industry needs fuel. It can be nuclear, coal, gas, oil, anything reliable. California and the nation starve that industry at their own risk. E-mail: Ksmith@washingtontimes.com

Kenneth Smith is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Times.His column appears on Thursdays.

-------- south carolina

South Carolina

01/02/15
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Simpsonville - High amounts of uranium found in three wells last week aren't surprising, a professor said. Uranium is a common element in bedrock in the Upstate, said Ken Sargent, environmental professor at Furman University. More than 50 times the safe level of uranium was found in the wells. Residents were told to use bottled water for drinking and cooking.

---

Lost bomb gets more attention

Web posted Thursday, February 15, 2001
Savannah Morning News
By Noelle Phillips
http://www.savannahnow.com
http://www.savannahmorningnews.com/smn/stories/021501/LOCtybeebomb.shtml

A nuclear bomb dropped off the coast of Tybee Island 43 years ago has never surfaced, but its legend continues to bob along.

The Tybee Island City Council is holding a meeting at City Hall at 7 p.m. today to talk about the bomb. The public is invited.

The meeting comes on the heels of a Department of Energy report leaked to the media this week. Among the report's findings:

* The bomb is expected to have been buried five to 15 feet in ocean floor.

* The bomb lacks a key plutonium capsule needed to cause a nuclear explosion, but it does contain some radioactive uranium and explosives.

* If left undisturbed, the largest risk is heavy metal contamination, but that would not be harmful to drinking water.

* Explosives inside the bomb should not spontaneously ignite. If it did explode, shock waves would not exceed 1,000 feet.

* Weapon recovery would be hazardous to personnel.

U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., asked the Air Force and Department of Energy in July to study the missing bomb, and he requested a report by the end of December. He has not seen the full report but has heard about the leaked version.

"They've taken a fairly in-depth, intelligent look at it," Kingston said. "They're taking it seriously. At the same time, the conclusions aren't anything anybody should lose sleep over."

Still, Kingston said he will encourage the Department of Energy and Air Force to try to pinpoint the bomb's location before ruling out any recovery attempts.

It isn't clear where the bomb landed in February 1958, when an Air Force B-47 bomber collided with an F-86 during training exercises. When the bomber pilot couldn't safely land the disabled plane with the bomb on board, he got permission to jettison it over Wassaw Sound. It's apparently been buried in the ocean floor ever since.

Military reporter Noelle Phillips can be reached at 652-0366 or at phillips@savannahnow.com.

-------- tennessee

State rejects using OR for waste storage

Thursday, February 15, 2001
The Oak Ridger
Associated Press
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/021501/stt_0215010020.html

The state has rejected an overture from the U.S. Department of Energy to use Oak Ridge facilities as a temporary storage site for western-bound nuclear waste.

"This is not an option," Gov. Don Sundquist said in a letter Wednesday to the DOE manager who oversees waste operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. "Tennessee will not become an interim radioactive waste storage facility for the DOE complex."

The DOE was considering the possible shipment of so-called transuranic waste from Battelle Laboratories in Ohio to Oak Ridge for storage. Transuranic waste is a particularly hazardous category of nuclear waste, involving radioactive materials such as plutonium.

Walter Perry of DOE's Oak Ridge office said the agency was interested in storing the Ohio waste in Oak Ridge until it could be treated, packaged and sent to the New Mexico disposal facility.

It's not clear how many shipments would be involved, although a DOE letter indicates the storage needs involve about 100 drums or 10 truckloads.

However, the Oak Ridge treatment plant currently under construction by Foster Wheeler Environmental is not expected to begin operation until late 2002, with initial shipments in early 2003.

That means the transuranic waste from Ohio probably would be stored at Oak Ridge for at least a couple of years.

"It's an outrage," Justin Wilson, the policy deputy to Sundquist, said Wednesday evening. "We're not going to be a dumping ground for DOE.

"We want very much to work with the Department of Energy wherever possible on national solutions. But, to this, the response is real simple: No. We're not going do it."

In his letter to DOE, Sundquist said the state would consider treating and packaging out-of-state waste on a "case-by-case basis" once the Oak Ridge treatment plant is operational and once Oak Ridge waste is being routinely shipped to New Mexico.

On the Net:
DOE's Oak Ridge Operations:www.oakridge.doe.gov/

---

State nixes bid to store nuke waste at Oak Ridge

February 15, 2001
Knoxville News-Sentinel
By Frank Munger,
mailto:twig1@knoxnews.infi.net
http://www.knoxnews.com/news/politics/23823.shtml

OAK RIDGE -- The state has strongly rejected an overture from the U.S. Department of Energy to use Oak Ridge facilities as a temporary storage site for western-bound nuclear waste.

"This is not an option," Gov. Don Sundquist said in a letter to the DOE manager who oversees waste operations at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. "Tennessee will not become an interim radioactive waste storage facility for the DOE complex," Sundquist wrote in the letter, dated Wednesday, to Dr. Inez R. Triay, manager of DOE's Carlsbad (N.M.) Office.

A DOE spokesman confirmed that federal officials were considering the possible shipment of so-called transuranic waste from Battelle Laboratories in Ohio to Oak Ridge for storage.

Transuranic waste is a particularly hazardous category of nuclear waste, involving radioactive materials such as plutonium.

Walter Perry of DOE's Oak Ridge office said the agency was interested in storing the Ohio waste in Oak Ridge until it could be treated, packaged and sent to the New Mexico disposal facility. It's not clear how many shipments would be involved, although a DOE letter indicates the storage needs involve about 100 drums or 10 truckloads. However, the Oak Ridge treatment plant currently under construction by Foster Wheeler Environmental is not expected to begin operation until late 2002, with initial shipments to WIPP in early 2003. That means the transuranic waste from Ohio probably would be stored at Oak Ridge for at least a couple of years.

"It's an outrage," Justin Wilson, the policy deputy to Gov. Sundquist, said Wednesday evening. "We're not going to be a dumping ground for DOE.

"We want very much to work with the Department of Energy wherever possible on national solutions. But, to this, the response is real simple: No. We're not going do it."

In his letter to DOE, Sundquist said state authorities would consider treating and packaging out-of-state waste for WIPP on a "case-by-case basis" once the Oak Ridge treatment plant is operational and once Oak Ridge waste is being routinely shipped to New Mexico.

Frank Munger can be reached at 865-482-9213 or twig1@knoxnews.infi.net.

-------- MILITARY

U.S., Britain huddle on Libyan sanctions

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200121521300.htm

NEW YORK - Hours before a U.N. Security Council meeting on Libyan sanctions, envoys from the United States and Britain met Tripoli's U.N. ambassador yesterday to discuss ways to lift the embargoes at an unspecified date.

No action is expected in the council, where developing countries have been pushing for an end to the embargoes, now that the trial is over for two Libyans accused in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988.

All 259 persons aboard the Boeing 747 were killed along with 11 persons on the ground.

-------- arms sales

India in deal to buy Russian tanks

Afternoon Edition - 2/15/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=2rc5g3hpra41a

NEW DELHI, India (AP) - India on Thursday signed a deal reportedly worth $600 million to buy and assemble 310 Russian T-90 tanks. The deal was signed in the presence of Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov and Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes.

Russia has said it can begin delivery of the tanks within a month and will sell 124 of them fully assembled. The rest of the tanks will be assembled in a factory in the town of Avadi in southern Tamil Nadu state.

The agreement follows two years of negotiations and trials of the tanks in India's Rajasthan deserts.

India approved the deal last April, and a memorandum of understanding was signed in October during the visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Neither side would say how much the deal was worth. However, Indian news media have quoted defense sources as saying the amount is $600 million.

------

Making A Killing On Weapons Sales To The Destitute

February 15, 2001
International Herald Tribune
By Cesar Chelala

In recent public statements, Pope John Paul II, former President Bill Clinton and the World Bank president James Wolfensohn, have called attention to the urgent need to end world poverty. Lost among their proposals to remedy the situation is the need to curb arms sales, particularly those by leading industrialized nations to heavily indebted developing countries.

Curbing those sales to developing countries is not only a critical move toward peace but also a very practical way to diminish poverty.

Global arms sales in 1999 rose to $30.3 billion. According to figures from the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the United States strengthened its position as the biggest arms dealer. In 1999, U.S. contractors sold nearly $11.8 billion in weapons.

That figure represents more than a third of the world's total, and more than all European countries combined. Since 1990 the United States has exported more than $133 billion worth of weapons to countries around the world.

In 1999, Russia's arms sales amounted to $4.8 billion, Germany's to $4 billion and France and Britain's to almost $900 million. Russia was the country which had increased its sales most dramatically, from $2.6 billion in 1998.

Russia has begun a major effort to increase its sales to more countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

It is estimated that two-thirds of global arms sales go to developing countries. In that regard, the United States and Russia were the leading arms selling countries.

Although in recent years the biggest buyers have been in the Middle East, many developing countries, some of them with anti-democratic regimes, have been important buyers. They have purchased arms instead of supporting health and social programs aimed at the poorest sectors of their populations

Pakistan has received missile-related technical assistance from China, which has also provided such technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

The unrestrained proliferation of arms sales to underdeveloped countries not only has hindered their economic development but has also fueled humanitarian crises, particularly in such African countries as Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi, Angola and Sierra Leone.

While weapons are recycled regionally, significant new shipments continue to reach some of those countries, particularly from China and countries of the former Warsaw Pact.

All supplier countries become accomplices in the human rights violations committed with these weapons, as countries which supplied weapons to the Serbs well know.

Another example of arms sales increasing the possibility of conflict is the case of Greece and Turkey. Although the two countries have for decades threatened to go to war over Cyprus, in 1997 the United States sold more than $270 million worth of weapons to Greece and almost $750 million worth to Turkey.

There is increased pressure for an international code of conduct on arms transfers, with 17 Nobel Peace Prize laureates leading the effort.

In 1999 the European Union passed a voluntary code that commits member countries to increased consultations regarding arms sales.

The World Bank has applied important measures of debt relief aimed at the poorest, most indebted countries in the world. In Africa, debt repayments consume annually one-third of export earnings. Debt relief, however, is not the only way to combat poverty. Education is one of the most effective measures to diminish it and improve the health status of the poorest sectors of the population.

In addition to debt relief measures and providing support to education programs, the World Bank should require that all recipients of aid devote no more than a small percentage of their GNP to arms purchases, and that only for self-defense. The writer, an international medical consultant, contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

-------- china

Torture prohibited, China retorts

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200121521300.htm

BEIJING - China yesterday denied claims by Amnesty International that torture is regularly carried out by Chinese officials, maintaining that the practice is strictly prohibited.

Even though a new Amnesty International report on torture cited examples from state media, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao said, the London-based group "often made irresponsible remarks concerning China according to rumors and hearsay."

The press spokesman said China prohibits torture and promised that "those who torture will be punished in accordance with law." He noted that China ratified a U.N. agreement against torture in 1988.

-------- colombia

Talks Resume in Colombia

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/world/15COLO.html

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Feb. 14 (Reuters) - Colombia's main rebel force resumed peace talks with the government today after a three-month break, with both sides signaling an interest in reducing the war's impact on civilians.

Negotiators from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country's most powerful guerrilla group, met with government officials in a southern demilitarized enclave for closed-door talks for the first time since November.

The 37-year-old war has claimed more than 35,000 civilian lives in the last decade.

---

BUSH MEETING

February 15, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/world/15BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

COLOMBIA, U.S.: President Bush will meet with President Andrés Pastrana in Washington this month to discuss a Washington-backed aid package to fight drug traffickers and their guerrilla allies, the White House announced. The meeting, set for Feb. 27, will offer Mr. Bush an opportunity to review the American role in helping Colombia cope with threats posed by organized crime, a decades-old civil war and a faltering economy. Last year Congress approved $1.3 billion in mostly military aid for Colombia. Christopher Marquis (NYT)

---

Bush to meet Pastrana

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
Embassy Row James Morrison News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
http://www.washtimes.com/world/embassy-2001215215131.htm

Colombian President Andres Pastrana will visit President Bush on Feb. 27 to discuss his efforts to fight drug trafficking and negotiate with rebels who benefit from the illegal narcotics trade.

"The visit is an opportunity for the president and President Pastrana to discuss the situation in Colombia and progress in implementing Plan Colombia," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said in a statement.

"The meeting reflects President Bush's interest in the Western Hemisphere and, in particular, gives him an opportunity to express support for President Pastrana's efforts in Colombia."

The United States has agreed to pay $1.3 billion toward Mr. Pastrana's plan to encourage peace with the Marxist rebels, strengthen democratic institutions and promote economic growth. Plan Colombia, which also involves military moves to shut drug plantations protected by the rebels, is expected to cost $7.5 billion.

Colombian Foreign Minister Guillermo Fernandez de Soto was in Washington this week to meet Secretary of State Colin Powell.

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

---

Colombia peace talks with rebels resume

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200121521300.htm

BOGOTA, Colombia - FARC, the main rebel force in Colombia, resumed peace talks with the government yesterday after a three-month break, with both sides signaling an interest in reducing the war's impact on civilians.

Negotiators from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), Latin America's oldest and most powerful guerrilla group, sat down with government officials in a southern demilitarized enclave for closed-door talks for the first time since November.

In conjunction with the new beginning, FARC turned over 62 child guerrillas to Colombian authorities. The children, ranging in age from 12 to 16, had spent up to three years with the group.

-------- drug war

Antidrug Program Says It Will Adopt a New Strategy

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By KATE ZERNIKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/national/15DARE.html?pagewanted=all

In a striking shift, leaders of the nation's most widely used program to discourage drug use among schoolchildren have acknowledged that their strategy has not had sufficient impact and say they are developing a new approach to spreading their message.

DARE - for Drug Abuse Resistance Education - has grown so rapidly since its founding 18 years ago that it is now taught in 75 percent of school districts nationwide and in 54 other countries.

Police officers who teach the program have become central figures in the lives of elementary school students, and the program's red logo has taken on iconic status on T-shirts and bumper stickers in thousands of communities.

But with its efforts drawing increasing criticism that they don't work, DARE officials and independent researchers have quietly worked for two years to develop a new curriculum and plan to introduce it in Washington today. The new program is aimed at older students than the current one and relies more on having them question their assumptions about drug use than on listening to lectures on the subject. Controlled studies of about 50,000 students will begin in six cities and their suburbs, including New York, in the fall.

DARE has long dismissed criticism of its approach as flawed or the work of groups that favor decriminalization of drug use.

But the body of research had grown to the point that the organization could no longer ignore it. In the the past two months alone, both the surgeon general and the National Academy of Sciences have issued reports saying that DARE's approach is ineffective; several cities, most recently Salt Lake City, have stopped using the program.

DARE is also responding to a new hardnosed mentality among federal education officials, who distribute about $500 million in drug prevention grants each year. Starting last year, the Department of Education said it would no longer let schools spend money from its office of safe and drug-free schools on DARE because department officials did not consider it scientifically proven. The new curriculum buys the program time to prove that it does work.

The revisions also reflect a shift in efforts to dissuade children from using drugs. Founded by the Los Angeles Police Department in 1983, the DARE program was infused with the spirit of then-First Lady Nancy Reagan's "Just Say No" approach.

The new strategy reflects research that criticized that approach as simplistic, and some other research that suggested that the DARE program occasionally encourages drug use, by making it seem more prevalent than it is.

"Our feeling was, after looking at the prevention movement, we were not having enough of an impact," said Herbert D. Kleber, the head of DARE's scientific advisory panel who is also medical director of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University. "There was a marked rise in drug use. Our job was to answer the question, how can we make it better?"

The DARE approach has been a mix of different messages about drug abuse and violence, but at its core it involves police officers visiting elementary schools to tell students the dangers of drugs and the importance of self-esteem, and offering them different ways to say "No."

More than 30 studies have been conducted of the DARE program, and the two most frequently cited studies both reached the same conclusion: Any effect the program has in deterring drug use disappears as students enter senior year of high school or college.

One six-year study by the University of Illinois found that the program's effects were off by senior year of high school; in fact, it detected some increased drug use by suburban high school students who had taken the program. And a 10-year study by the University of Kentucky found the DARE program had no effect on students by the time they were 20 years old.

"There's quite a bit we can do to make it better and we realize that," said Glenn Levant, president and founding director of DARE America, based in Los Angeles. "I'm not saying it was effective, but it was state of the art when we launched it. Now it's time for science to improve upon what we're doing."

The new DARE program is being developed at the University of Akron in Ohio by Zili Sloboda, who as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse wrote a list of principles to guide drug-prevention programs. The program's development is underwritten by a $13.7 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropy devoted to health care.

The new program will work largely on changing what are known as "social norms" among students. The idea, which has been shown in limited studies to reduce drinking on college campuses, is that traditional prevention programs may lead students to overestimate how many of their peers use drugs. Because teenagers are so open to peer influence, the students then begin to aspire to that "norm" and think they must use drugs to fit in.

DARE's focus will shift from its current audience of fifth-grade students to those in the seventh grade, and will add a booster program in ninth grade, because students in the higher grades are more likely to experiment with drugs.

The new program also changes how police officers are used, having them serve more as coaches than as lecturers. The officers are to encourage students to challenge the social norms in discussion groups; the intended result is that the students will conclude on their own that they do not need to use drugs to fit in.

Students are also to do more role- playing, with an emphasis on how to make decisions, and to discuss the effects of media and advertising.

Dr. Sloboda said that, as head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, she had been concerned that DARE was not a proven program. But, she and others emphasized, it is far from the only program that does not work - it has simply drawn the most criticism because it is the largest.

Indeed, DARE has enjoyed broad support, from Congress to local school boards and newspapers. It gets about $1.7 million from the Department of Justice; $215 million in indirect benefits from police departments that pay the salaries of the officers; and about $15 million in corporate support. An industry has developed around the program and the sale of T-shirts, bumper stickers and textbooks; DARE affinity credit cards are even available.

The new program took seed in 1999, when the departments of Education and Justice, tired of the warring between researchers and DARE, brought the two sides together at meetings in Washington.

At the same time, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation was looking for a drug prevention program to finance. DARE had the network in schools, but a program that the foundation said was less than effective. Other researchers had promising strategies but no access into schools.

"There's a gap between what we know and what we practice," said Nancy J. Kaufman, vice president of the foundation. "We knew we had better prevention technology that was not being applied, we knew there was this increase in drug use among young people, and we said, `You know what, we think we can change this. Let's stop the rhetoric and fighting and see if we can't craft something better.' "

DARE was open to change.

"Neither the message nor the messenger was sacred," said William F. Alden, a former deputy director of DARE. "Only the mission was."

The cities tentatively selected to feature the new program are New York, Baltimore, Houston, Denver, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The new curriculum, Dr. Sloboda said, will be tested in 80 high schools and the 176 middle schools that feed them - half the schools will continue using the curriculum they do now, including the old DARE program in some cases, and the other half will use the new DARE program.

Students will be surveyed before and after seventh and ninth grade, and interviewed more extensively after eighth, tenth, and eleventh grade.

"We'd like to see them never use drugs, but realistically, people understand that for a great number of adolescents, they might try something at least once," Ms. Kaufman said. "The later you can have them do that, the older they are, and hopefully they will decide not to. With age comes reason."

---

Washington

01/02/15
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Walla Walla - County narcotics detectives have begun staking out fertilizer tanks. The tanks contain anhydrous ammonia, which is sometimes used to make methamphetamine. Sheriff Mike Humphreys says makers of the illegal drug have been increasing their thefts from the tanks.

-------- india/pakistan

Militants attack three Kashmir patrols

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200121521300.htm

JAMMU, India - Separatist militants attacked three army patrols in the disputed territory of Kashmir on Tuesday, killing two soldiers and injuring three others. Nine separatists died, the Indian military said.

The three patrols were operating in Poonch district, about 130 miles northwest of Jammu, Kashmir's winter capital, following the massacre of 13 villagers in the area last week, Gen. P.C. Das said.

In a separate clash yesterday, a soldier was killed and nine persons, including policemen, were injured when they were ambushed by militants in Baramullah, just north of Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital.

-------- israel

Israel Denies 'Poison Gas' Use

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Israel-Palestinians-Gas.html

JERUSALEM (AP) -- The Palestinian Authority has asked foreign medical labs to investigate its claims -- renewed Thursday by Yasser Arafat and strenuously denied by Israel -- that Israeli troops are using ``poison gas'' on Palestinian civilians.

The Israeli army denied the charges, saying that its soldiers use ``standard tear gas'' and smoke bombs against Palestinians. Army spokesman Brig. Gen. Ron Kitrey accused the Palestinians of fabricating the symptoms.

After viewing footage of Palestinians treated for gas inhalation, former Israeli army surgeon-general Eran Dolev said he saw no signs of perspiration, vomiting or skin burns, symptoms of exposure to nerve or mustard gas.

``This resembles more than anything else just a state of anxiety. We're not talking here about poisonous gas,'' he said.

The charges -- a renewal of accusations made by the Palestinians in the past -- emerged this week after Israeli soldiers and Palestinian gunmen battled for two nights in the Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis.

The Israeli army said troops fired smoke bombs to drive out gunmen.

However, about 60 Palestinians treated at Nasser Hospital for gas inhalation showed symptoms such as spasms, fainting and severe burning in the eyes and throat, said Dr. Yasser Sheikh Ali.

``We do believe it's a poisonous gas and we asked the help of Egypt and Jordan to identify the gas,'' Sheikh Ali said. Their blood samples, chest and stomach X-rays, as well as remnants of gas canisters, were sent to foreign medical labs, Palestinian medical officers said.

After examining some of the Palestinians, physicians with Doctors Without Borders said the patients suffered stomach pains and loss of control of reflexes -- symptoms not typical of tear gas and smoke bombs.

``It seems it's a new type of gas,'' said Yves Lallinec of the French-based doctors group. ``People are shaking, are excited and they have convulsions.''

Television footage taken of Palestinian patients showed them twisting on their hospital beds. One man opened and closed his eyes as he squirmed and another clutched his stomach.

In November 1999, Soha Arafat, the Palestinian leader's wife, said in the presence of then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton that ``intensive, daily use of poison gas by Israeli forces'' had caused an increase in cancer rates among Palestinians.

The former first lady later said such ``baseless'' accusations harmed the peace process.

On Thursday, Arafat repeated the claim that Israel was using ``poisonous gas'' against Palestinians.

He also reiterated a charge he made last month that Israel uses ammunition tipped with depleted uranium. The Palestinians have offered no evidence for the claim, which Israel denies.

--------- space

Astronauts Play Dead Men Spacewalking

February 15, 2001
New York Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/science/15SHUT.html

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Feb. 14 - Two astronauts ventured outside the space shuttle Atlantis today on the United States' 100th spacewalk, wrapping up work on the International Space Station's new science laboratory and taking turns playing dead.

The spacewalkers, Thomas D. Jones and Cmdr. Robert L. Curbeam Jr. of the Navy, conducted an emergency drill known as the dead-guy test, for dragging an incapacitated astronaut to safety.

It was their third and final spacewalk of the mission and the 100th time that Americans walked in space. Edward White II, a Gemini astronaut, made the nation's first spacewalk in 1965. His excursion lasted 21 minutes, while the outing today was five and a half hours long.

Before going back inside, Mr. Jones and Commander Curbeam paid tribute to Mr. White - who died in a launching pad fire in 1967 - and all the other Americans who performed spacewalks over the decades.

"And here we are now," Mr. Jones said. "We think in the years to come in the very near future, we'll see not only the construction of the space station completed, but spacewalkers will take their place not only in low-Earth orbit, but back on the moon and back on the asteroids and perhaps even to Mars."

The mood lightened toward the end of the spacewalk, as the astronauts took turns hauling each other into the shuttle's outer vestibule.

Commander Curbeam was the first to be rescued. His goal was to be as motionless as possible. But he was free to keep on talking.

"Just got to watch that antenna there," Mr. Jones said as he hauled the commander toward the hatch of the space shuttle, their suits cinched together by waist tethers.

The two completed several more mock rescues, and the manager of the spacewalk project office, Gregory Harbaugh, said he was relieved to see the test go so well. When Mr. Harbaugh carried out a similar test in 1993, he encountered great difficulty.

NASA estimates that 152 more spacewalks will be needed before construction of the space station is completed in 2006. The outing yesterday was the 16th devoted to station assembly. Twenty-two spacewalks are planned this year, the most by American astronauts in a single year.

The Atlantis is scheduled to undock from the space station on Friday and return to Earth on Sunday.

---

Mission Extended for Surprisingly Sturdy Little Spacecraft

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By WARREN E. LEARY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/science/15ASTE.html

LAUREL, Md., Feb. 14 - The first spacecraft to land on an asteroid got a reprieve from a scheduled communications shutdown today and will stay in contact with Earth a little longer.

NASA officials said they decided to extend the mission of the NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft by 10 days to allow more data to be collected from the 1,100-pound craft that unexpectedly survived touchdown on the asteroid Eros on Monday in remarkably good condition.

The barrel-shaped craft, the size of a subcompact car, soft-landed on Eros at a speed of about four miles an hour, and appeared to have little damage, said officials here at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which designed, built and operated the spacecraft for NASA. The feat is remarkable because the craft is an orbiter never meant to land on the space rock.

"Not only did the spacecraft survive," Dr. Jay Bergstralh, a NASA official in charge of solar system exploration, said at a news conference, "it's evidently intact and we have remained in regular communication with it."

NASA wants to take advantage of the spacecraft's survival by staying in contact with its Deep Space Network antennas. Communications had been scheduled to end today, exactly one year after the craft went into orbit around Eros.

Engineers signaled NEAR, for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, to turn on its gamma ray spectrometer, an instrument intended to determine the composition of material on the surface of the asteroid and a few inches below. The instrument previously scanned Eros from miles above, scientists said, and now was in a position for a more detailed examination from a couple of feet above the surface.

"This is an unprecedented opportunity," the lead scientist for the project, Dr. Andrew F. Cheng, said. A closer examination may help scientists match meteorites found on Earth, some of which come from asteroids, with Eros, Dr. Cheng said. In addition, he said, determining the amount of iron, potassium and other elements in surface material could help scientists determine whether Eros was once subjected to heating or melting billions of years ago when it was formed.

Dr. Bergstralh said the potential dividend of the added spectrometer readings justified extending the mission. "These measurements have the potential of improving the precision of our knowledge about these abundances by a factor of 10," he said.

Dr. Robert W. Farquhar, the mission director, said the spacecraft landed more gently than expected and apparently did not do a high bounce off Eros before settling down, as had been believed on Monday. The craft, which landed 650 feet from its projected landing site, made a short hop or jiggle when it touched down, but its engines cut off immediately. Because NEAR landed in the middle of the last of five engine firings to slow it down, it had been believed that the craft popped up as high as 300 feet after first contact, engineers said.

"People are saying this was a controlled crash," Dr. Farquhar said. "No, it wasn't. This was a soft landing." He said the touchdown on Eros, which has one-thousandth the gravity of Earth, was probably gentler than landings on the moon, Venus and Mars by craft built for such a task.

On Tuesday, NEAR mission control sent a signal to the craft 196 million miles away and ordered it to cancel a preprogrammed engine firing set for today. Engineers had added the instruction to be a last resort in case the spacecraft had landed in an orientation that prevented communication with Earth, with the idea of popping the ship up in hopes that its antennas would point in the right direction. The spacecraft landed in such a favorable position that the maneuver was unnecessary.

Mission officials said the craft appeared to be resting in a tripod position, with its weight on its base and the tips of two of the four solar power arrays that form a cross on the other end. The craft is positioned to get ample power from the solar panels, but because its main antenna is pointing away from Earth, communications are going through a backup, low-gain antenna at a data rate of 10 bits per second, thousands of times slower than normal.

Dr. Joseph Veverka of Cornell University, head of the mission's imaging team, said the spacecraft took 69 detailed pictures during the final three miles of its descent; 40 had been expected. The craft's telescopic camera kept producing sharp images as close as 400 feet from the surface, Dr. Veverka said, and surprisingly showed details as small as a half-inch in size.

The images showed boulders, buried craters, cracked rocks and evidence of soft material shifting around on the asteroid by some unknown process, he said.

"These images have presented us with a bag full of mysteries that will have us scratching our heads for years to come," Dr. Veverka said.

---

Russians delay dumping Mir

02/15/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-15-mir.htm

MOSCOW (AP) - Russian space officials on Thursday put off the tentative date for dumping the Mir space station until mid-March, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

The 15-year-old station would be brought down between March 13 and March 18, the news agency said, citing Sergei Gorbunov, chief spokesman of the Russian Aerospace Agency. The dumping had previously been scheduled around March 6.

Experts have predicted that atmospheric conditions during the later period would allow more of the orbiter to be burned up as it enters the Earth's atmosphere.

The government reluctantly decided late last year to finally bring down the Mir, once the symbol of Russia's space glory but more recently the source of persistent safety worries. Launched on Feb. 20, 1986, Mir has been home to more than 100 cosmonauts and foreign astronauts, but it has been plagued in recent years by accidents including a fire and a near-fatal collision with a cargo ship in 1997.

When the dumping date comes, a cargo ship docked with the Mir is to fire its thrusters and send the 137-ton station hurtling from its orbit.

The remnants should land in the Pacific Ocean, near 47 degrees south latitude and 140 degrees west longitude - about halfway between New Zealand and Chile. Officials have said that chunks of the Mir, some weighing up to 1,500 pounds, would survive the fiery re-entry and splash into the ocean half an hour after the orbiter enters the atmosphere.

---

New Mexico

01/02/15
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Albuquerque - Spending substantially more on exploring space is vital to the survival of humanity, astronaut John Young told an international forum on space and technology. Young, 70, said a larger share of the federal budget surplus should be dedicated to space exploration. He participated in seven NASA launches, including trips to the moon.

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

William Epstein,
U.N. Disarmament Official, Dies at 88

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By PAUL LEWIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/world/15EPST.html

William Epstein, a United Nations official involved in promoting disarmament for more than 20 years, died on Friday in New York. He was 88.

Mr. Epstein participated in negotiating pacts like the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1968 and the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972.

In 1997 he took his last United Nations job, working until 1999 as an adviser to Ambassador Richard Butler, head of the special commission in charge of eliminating weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Mr. Epstein was one of the first staff members at the United Nations. He worked with the preparatory commission that planned the world organization in London in 1945 before joining the secretariat the next year at its first temporary headquarters at Hunter College in Manhattan.

He worked with Ralph J. Bunche on the Special Committee on Palestine, which drew up a plan in 1947 to partition the territory into Jewish and Palestinian states without defined borders and with Jerusalem as an international city.

Rejected by the Arab world, the plan was approved the same year by the General Assembly, which led to the proclamation of the State of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war.

Then Mr. Epstein moved to disarmament, which became his passion. He became director of the United Nations Disarmament Divison and represented the secretary general at the 18-nation Disarmament Committee from 1962 to 1973 and later at the Geneva Conference on Disarmament. The work of the conferences led to the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 and the Seabed Arms Control Treaty of 1971, as well as the Nonproliferation Treaty and the Biological Weapons Convention.

Mr. Epstein also organized the Declaration on Peace and Disarmament signed by all living Nobel Peace Prize laureates and presented to the United Nations in 1970, on its 25th anniversary.

From 1965 to 1967, he represented the secretary general at the Commission for the Denuclearization of Latin America and helped draft the Treaty of Tlatelolco, creating a nuclear-free zone in Latin America and the Caribbean.

After retiring in 1972, Mr. Epstein was a senior fellow with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research, and until 1986, he was a disarmament and arms control consultant to the secretary general.

Mr. Epstein was born in Canada, and educated at the University of Alberta and the London School of Economics. In addition to articles, he published a standard reference work, "The Last Chance: Nuclear Proliferation and Arms Control."

Surviving are his wife, Edna, of Portland, Ore., and a son, Mark, of Washington.

---

U.N. OFFICE CLOSED

February 15, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/world/15BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

AFGHANISTAN: The Taliban militia has ordered the United Nations Special Mission to Afghanistan to close its office in Kabul. This action follows new United Nations sanctions against the Taliban and a United States demand that the militia close its political office in New York. Barry Bearak (NYT)

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Powell Pledges Strong Support for Wide Spectrum of U.N. Activities

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/world/15NATI.html

UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 14 - Stepping into the heart of an organization grown wary of Republicans, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell sought today to assure Secretary General Kofi Annan that he could count on the Bush administration's strong support across a wide spectrum of United Nations activities.

General Powell, who requested the meeting before his trip to the Middle East, discussed Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other issues with Mr. Annan for more than an hour. Meeting reporters after the talks, Mr. Annan said relations with Washington were on "a very good footing," and he joked that he was "extremely happy that the secretary of state's first visit outside the U.S. is to the U.N."

The secretary of state, who praised Richard C. Holbrooke, the former American envoy to the United Nations, for his work in solving, at least in large part, the problem of American debts to the organization, went further than most Republicans in pledging to cooperate with the United Nations in working on social and economic problems. Leading Republicans have criticized programs to build democracy and ease disparities in wealth around the world.

General Powell told reporters that he had expressed strong support for the work of the United Nations, and said he and the administration "look forward to working very closely with the secretary general and other colleagues within the U.N."

On the Middle East, General Powell said that he and Mr. Annan had been in constant contact in recent weeks and that both were talking with leaders in the region, "encouraging them to act as leaders and statesmen to get the violence down, to get the economic activity moving again, so the people see hope in their lives once again." Only then could peace efforts resume, he added, and he called for aid to the Palestinians.

Asked about Iraq, General Powell had no objections to a high-level meeting between Mr. Annan and an Iraqi delegation here this month. "I think talks can always be useful," he said. "And it would be presumptuous of me to suggest to the secretary general what he might or might not talk about."

But he added that the United States, while beginning a review of its stand on Iraq, would steer its policy somewhere between moderation and belligerency and in any case would not modify its support for international sanctions.

"We are constantly looking at ways of making it possible for us to be assured that there are no weapons of mass destruction and there are no programs under way that would produce weapons of mass destruction, and at the same time do it in a way that does not hurt the Iraqi people," the secretary said. "We have sympathy for the people of Iraq. We have sympathy for the children of Iraq. We see a regime that has more than enough money to deal with the problems that exist in that society, if only they would use that money properly."

This week, the United Nations again warned Iraq that it should be spending more of its oil windfall on helping the most vulnerable people living under a decade of sanctions.

The secretary of state reiterated opposition to the International Criminal Court, whose treaty President Clinton signed on Dec. 31. "We have no plans to send it forward to our Senate," General Powell said.

He said that it should not be a cause for concern that he had not yet named an ambassador to the United Nations. "I assured the secretary general," he said, "that in the not too distant future he will see the naming of a permanent representative."

---

U.N. to Start Congo Deployment Soon

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/congo-democratic-summ.html

LUSAKA, Feb 15 (Reuters) - African leaders edged closer to silencing the guns in the Democratic Republic of Congo on Thursday as Zambia announced a deployment date for U.N. observers and Kinshasa agreed to internal talks to end the war.

But analysts said total peace still required a nod from defiant Rwandan President Major-General Paul Kagame, who boycotted Thursday's summit.

Zambian President Frederick Chiluba, mediator in the Congolese conflict, said the United Nations would begin deploying a long-delayed peacekeeping force on February 26.

``We welcome this move and we hope the United Nations will also move quickly on matters of disarmament in the Congo,'' Chiluba told a summit to revive the stalled peace process in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The shaky peace deal signed in 1999 also received a major boost when another rebel group, the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC) led by Jean-Pierre Bemba, ratified a disengagement plan also approved by other groups and the African armies involved in the war.

Under the disengagement plan agreed to last year, Congo's allies -- Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe -- agreed to pull their forces back at least 15 km (nine miles).

Uganda also agreed to a 15-km pullback, while Rwanda, which supports the largest rebel group, said its forces would retreat 200 km (120 miles) from the positions they now hold.

The leader of the largest rebel group fighting in the Congo, Alphonse Onusumba, pledged to uphold the latest agreements and said his movement would work to end the conflict in Africa's third largest country.

``We commit ourselves to working for peace in the Congo, so our people can live in harmony,'' he told the summit.

Onusumba is the leader of the Congolese Rally for Democracy, which controls the entire east of the Congo and some parts of the southeast Katanga province and is backed by Rwanda.

PARTIES URGED TO HONOUR LATEST AGREEMENT

Chiluba urged all parties to honour the latest agreement, saying: ``I fear if we do not honour our own agreements then the international community will treat Congo with cynicism.''

In a significant step towards ending the fighting, new Congolese President Joseph Kabila reversed the policy of his assassinated father Laurent and accepted former Botswanan leader Ketumile Masire as facilitator for an all-inclusive peace deal.

``In order for us to accelerate the peace process, I will in the next few days be inviting the former president of Botswana, Sir Ketumile Masire, to discuss the modalities of relaunching the inter-Congolese dialogue that has been stalled,'' Joseph Kabila told the summit.

The young president also extended an olive branch to the rebels and their backers Rwanda and Uganda and urged them to reciprocate his peace moves.

``We stretch out our hands. We extend our hands in a gesture of peace. We expect the same from our brothersand from the aggressors (Rwanda and Uganda),'' Kabila said.

``The Congo has been under occupation for three years now, an unjust occupation, and it is time for that occupation to end,'' he added to loud applause from the delegates.

Diplomats said Kabila's decision to invite back Masire marked a giant step towards reviving the fragile peace agreement signed in Zambia in 1999.

But analysts warned that implementing the latest parts of the ceasefire deal still required the nod from Rwanda. They said hopes for an end to the war remained elusive so long as Rwanda stayed outside the deal.

``It is very important that Rwanda is taken on board in order for the latest deal to be implemented,'' Claude Kabemba, an analyst at Johannesburg's Institute for Policy Studies, told Reuters.

``Without Rwanda it will be practically difficult if not impossible to implement what has been agreed upon today,'' he said.

Belligerents in the 30-month-old war signed the agreement in Lusaka in 1999, but implementation failed because Kinshasa would not allow U.N. peacekeepers to be deployed.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the U.N. force to Congo would comprise 500 military observers protected by some 2,500 troops.

---

U.N. prosecutor applies pressure for Milosevic trial

02/15/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-15-milosevic.htm

PODGORICA, Yugoslavia (AP) - The chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor met with leaders of Yugoslavia's smaller republic Thursday, seeking to bring pressure against Belgrade to extradite former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and other suspects for trial.

Carla Del Ponte held talks with Montenegrin President Milo Djukanovic a day after he pledged "full cooperation" with the tribunal based in The Hague, Netherlands, which seeks to try Milosevic for alleged atrocities in Kosovo.

"It is the obligation of the democratic Montenegrin leadership to provide full cooperation with the tribunal and to make sure that all those charged be handed over to the court," Djukanovic told local Montena television.

Del Ponte was expected to demand the extradition of any war crimes suspects that might show up in Montenegro - including Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, who reportedly occasionally visits his ailing mother in northern Montenegro.

A few dozen pro-Milosevic protesters demonstrated in front of the building where Del Ponte held her meetings, chanting, "We Won't Give You Up, Slobo."

Last month, Del Ponte was rebuffed by the new, pro-democracy authorities in Serbia, the larger Yugoslav republic, as well as by Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica on her demands for extradition of Milosevic and other war crimes suspects.

Del Ponte apparently was hoping that a pledge of cooperation by Montenegrin authorities would increase pressure on Belgrade.

Del Ponte intends to visit Rome and Brussels next week, before traveling to other European capitals and the United States. She is seeking continued Western support in her attempts to put Milosevic and other key war crimes suspects on trial in The Hague.

Pro-democracy leaders in Serbia and on the federal, Yugoslav, level, who ousted Milosevic last October, insist that the former president should first be tried at home.

The United States has urged Kostunica to cooperate with the tribunal and given him until March 31 to make good on the issue or risk losing financial aid worth around $100 million.

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

Raytheon: Ready for Military Boost

February 15, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-arms-raytheo.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Raytheon Co. (RTN.N), the third-largest U.S. defense contractor, said on Thursday it was well positioned to take advantage of any growth in military spending under the new administration of President George W. Bush.

``We are convinced we are particularly well placed for what is likely to be among the most generously supportive programs,'' said Raytheon Chairman Dan Burnham.

Bush has said he plans to revitalize the U.S. armed forces, but has curtailed spending plans until Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld carries out a review of the military.

Speaking to investors at an S.G. Cowen aerospace conference in New York, Burnham said that the company is focusing on the military sector as one of its key drivers for growth.

``Over the next five years, you ought to expect to see from us what I told you a year ago you would see from us. Expect to see nice growth in EPS, north of 10 percent,'' he said.

In the fourth quarter of last year, Raytheon's earnings from continuing operations rose to $190 million, or 55 cents per diluted share, from $74 million, or 22 cents a share, in the year-earlier period.

The company's first priority in using its cash flow remained paying down debt and improving its balance sheet, Burnham said.

In defense electronics, Burnham said Raytheon expected growth in its missile defense, shipboard electronics, network centric warfare and multi-intelligence businesses.

``Each of these initiatives represents a growth opportunity for us as we are closely aligned, we think, with the priorities of the new administration,'' Burnham said.

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Paying the Troops

February 15, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/opinion/15THU1.html

Defense has been this week's theme at the Bush White House, with three successive speeches dwelling on different aspects of the administration's ambitious national security agenda. The latter two speeches dealt with the important and contentious subjects of reforming the way the Pentagon buys weapons systems and a more restrictive approach to foreign peacekeeping missions. We want to dwell today, however, on the subject with which Mr. Bush quite properly began - the pay, housing and morale of American troops.

There is such universal agreement on the need for improvement that the subject often gets passed over with quick discussion and quick fixes. Mr. Bush recognizes that military personnel form the foundation of all defense policy. So he has turned the nation's and Congress's attention to the most shamefully underfunded portions of the nearly $310 billion defense budget. Everyone's attention should stay there until something is done to improve the economic status and living conditions of the armed forces, especially its enlisted men and women.

On Monday Mr. Bush proposed a $5.7 billion increase in the amount to be spent on compensation and benefits in next year's Pentagon budget. Of this, $1.4 billion would go to pay, $3.9 billion to health care and $400 million to housing. Some of that will have to be diverted from other military programs, but pay and benefits have long been shortchanged.

Currently, an entry-level recruit gets a basic salary of just under $1,000 a month, plus housing and allowances. A master sergeant with 18 years' service makes about $3,000 a month. Those figures include two recent increases provided by the Clinton administration, amounting to a little less than 9 percent. An additional 3.9 percent raise was scheduled for next year. Mr. Bush's proposal pushes that up to 4.6 percent. That is a healthy increase. But more will be needed in the years to come. More than 5,000 American military personnel still need food stamps to balance their monthly budgets.

Housing conditions are even more scandalous. Of the 300,000 military housing units, 200,000 are rated inadequate by the service's own minimal standards. Problems vary from too few bedrooms and bathrooms for the families housed in these units to health-threatening conditions like lead-based paint and asbestos. Much military housing is old and rundown and needs to be replaced.

Mr. Bush's $400 million increase for housing will help only a little. Congress would have to appropriate about $20 billion for the military to rebuild all the substandard units. Since that is unlikely to happen anytime soon, the services should expand the recent practice of negotiating partnerships with private developers to meet military housing needs.

In other defense speeches this week, Mr. Bush has made clear that once Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has completed a thorough review of current Pentagon strategies and programs, the administration is likely to seek big spending increases for new weapons systems. To his credit, Mr. Bush has directed his first military spending requests to the area where more money is most obviously and urgently needed.

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Helicopter May Have Been Hit by Load Carried by 2nd Craft

February 15, 2001
New York Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/national/15COPT.html

HONOLULU, Feb. 14 - A soldier aboard one of two Army helicopters that crashed on a night training flight, killing six men, said today that he believed a Humvee carried on a sling beneath one of the copters struck the rotor on his aircraft, sending both plunging to the ground.

The military said that there was a light rain on Monday night when the accident occurred and that the pilots were wearing night-vision goggles.

"As we came in above treetop level, I saw something smack into our rotor blades," the soldier aboard the flight, Sgt. First Class Leslie E. Frye II, said in a telephone interview from his home. "I believe it was the Humvee underneath" the other helicopter.

Sergeant Frye's helicopter crashed on a dirt road, and he and the 10 other soldiers aboard were injured. The other helicopter went down in a ravine about 100 yards away, killing all six people on it.

The sergeant said he and his fellow soldiers had been riding on the No. 1 helicopter in a group of four and had been assigned to secure a landing zone for the other Black Hawk copters.

Sergeant Frye said his helicopter "hit the ground like a sack of rocks. We were like a fish out of water, bouncing and shaking."

A spokeswoman for the 25th Infantry Division at Schofield Barracks here, Maj. Cynthia Teramae, confirmed that one helicopter had been carrying a sling load but said that the crash was still under investigation.

Major Teramae said Sergeant Frye was "speculating."

A team from the Army Safety Center at Fort Rucker, Ala., was brought in to investigate.

Flags were flown at half-staff today for the victims of the helicopter accident. The four soldiers still hospitalized were listed in stable condition.

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Bush Warns Against 'Overdeployment'

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/politics/15BUSH.html?printpage=yes

YEAGER FIELD, W.Va., Feb. 14 - President Bush said today that he would send American forces overseas more judiciously, warning that "overdeployments" strained troops, their families and, in the case of members of the National Guard and Reserves, their civilian employers.

"I'm worried that we're trying to be all things to all people around the world," Mr. Bush told a group of those employers in a meeting today at the headquarters of the West Virginia National Guard in Charleston.

Mr. Bush, who often warned in last year's presidential campaign that proliferating peacekeeping and humanitarian operations were sapping the military, said his administration would not precipitously withdraw from operations already under way, like those in Bosnia and Kosovo.

He pledged, however, to redefine the military's mission so that the armed services "trained and prepared to fight and win war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place."

He also said he intended to focus the mission of the National Guard on "homeland defense" against terrorist attacks - a recent recommendation of a panel on national security headed by two former senators, Gary Hart and Warren B. Rudman.

"There will be no precipitous withdrawal from the commitments we inherited," Mr. Bush said, addressing a concern raised in many European capitals about the Bush administration's intentions for the 4,300 American troops in Bosnia and nearly 6,000 in Kosovo.

"But as we go forward we will be careful about troop deployment - judiciously use our troops," he added. "We understand that overdeployments not only affect those on active duty, but also affect those in the Reserves and Guard."

Mr. Bush made his remarks as he visited a military base for a third consecutive day, outlining his defense policies and priorities. Today's visit to this airfield at the edge of Charleston - headquarters of the Air National Guard's 130th Airlift Wing - focused on the nation's "citizen soldiers."

In recent years, the roughly 870,000 members of the Guard and Reserves, who serve a minimum of a weekend a month and two weeks a year, have become increasingly involved in overseas operations, from hurricane relief in Central America to peacekeeping in the Balkans and patrols in the skies over Iraq.

Those deployments - like the 130th's three-month stint in Germany last year shuttling supplies in and out of Bosnia and Kosovo - have expanded the roles of the Guard and Reserve, but also created strains on families and employers, something Mr. Bush heard firsthand today.

"It's not only a tension for employer to employee," Mr. Bush said in his remarks to the employers, which included managers from companies like Toyota, DuPont and Arch Coal. "It's tensions often times between husband and wife. And overdeployments, constant deployments really create a severe issue for morale all throughout the military."

Hershel Sims, president of an insurance company called Accordia, told Mr. Bush that the pace of deployments created friction even among companies that support the reservists who work for them. "Our people and our companies are caught in the middle," Mr. Sims said.

As he did on his visits to Fort Stewart, Ga., and the Norfolk Naval Station in Virginia this week, Mr. Bush culminated his day with an address to military members and their families. While the other speeches outlined his budget priorities and strategic vision, today's address in a hangar here at Yeager Field had the feel of a political rally as much as a policy speech.

Mr. Bush defeated Al Gore in West Virginia last November despite the state's reputation as a Democratic stronghold in presidential races. "This is a state of good people, good folks, down-to-earth folks," Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Bush, whose own tenure in the Texas Air National Guard was questioned in the campaign because of gaps in his service, offered no specific proposals for easing those tensions beyond his pledge to minimize the use of American forces overseas. Neither did he provide guidelines for deciding when he would choose to deploy troops.

In the hangar, Staff Sgt. John J. Anthony, an Army reservist, was among those preparing to deploy. His unit, the 554th Adjutant General Company, is about to send 32 reservists to Kosovo to handle the mail for roughly six months.

He started working as an assistant plant manager for a new plastics factory in Ridley just last October and now finds himself being called to active duty.

"Like my family, they don't like to see it," he said of his employers, "but they're supportive."

Mr. Bush singled out employers for praise. "You put love of country above love of profit," he said.

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Military finds refreshing change with new commander in chief

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
By Joseph Curl
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001215225333.htm

President Bush, in less than a month in office, has gained the respect and admiration of the military, a battle his predecessor lost even before he became commander in chief.

Where Mr. Bush made good on promised pay raises for soldiers, President Clinton gave the armed forces a battle over open homosexuals. Where the new president promises fewer deployments intended "just to keep warring parties apart," Mr. Clinton set a record for peacetime missions.

And where Mr. Bush, a former Texas National Guard pilot, snaps off a salute with the best of them, Mr. Clinton, who dodged the Vietnam draft, had to attend a remedial "saluting class."

"There's been a sea change at the top," one sailor said after Mr. Bush addressed Navy officials at Norfolk Naval Station on Tuesday. "A lot of us were disgusted with President Clinton for his sexual misconduct, his dodging the draft for Vietnam.

"President Bush, on the other hand, is one of us. And he's going to look out for us."

While none of the soldiers or sailors interviewed this week at military bases from Norfolk to Savannah, Ga., would speak on the record, several said they still loathed Mr. Clinton.

"Clinton was a dog. Bush is a dog-faced soldier," one sergeant in the Army's 3rd Infantry Division said when the president visited Fort Stewart, Ga., on Monday.

In his speech there, Mr. Bush belted out a hearty "Hooah," an Army salute, to a throng of camouflage-clad soldiers who referred to themselves as "dog-faced soldiers." The troops bellowed back their own barracks-shaking "Hooah."

Other overt signs have emerged that the men and women of today's military share a deeper bond with their new commander in chief.

When naval officers in Norfolk bestowed upon the former pilot a general purpose aviator's jacket -noting that it came complete with Air Force wings - a sailor shouted over the loud applause - "He earned it."

Tracked down afterward, the staff sergeant said he just couldn't help himself.

"I was just so sick and tired of the way Clinton treated the military, and so damn happy about the way Bush is treating us," he said. "And I know I speak for a lot of others when I say, 'It's about time.'"

Mr. Clinton's stint as commander in chief went bad even before he was elected in 1992.

During the presidential campaign, reports emerged that he had participated in anti-war protests while a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in England and obtained deferments to avoid being drafted for Vietnam, "a war," he said, "I opposed and despised with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America."

As the scandal blew up around him, Mr. Clinton tried various explanations, first saying he planned to join the Reserve Officers Training Corps but didn't, then claiming the Vietnam-era draft system "plainly favored" well-educated young men "who had options that they could use that others didn't."

"He doesn't know us, doesn't know the first thing about us," one Marine said at the Norfolk ceremony. "You don't necessarily have to be in the Marines to be a good commander in chief, but it helps if you don't hate our guts."

The draft scandal, as others during his term often did, dissipated. But at the outset of his presidency, Mr. Clinton became embroiled in the issue of homosexuals in the military. His "don't ask, don't tell" policy that eventually emerged was looked upon as inadequate from both sides.

Other reasons mentioned by soldiers and sailors for mistrusting Mr. Clinton were the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which led to his impeachment, and a last-day-in-office admission that he had lied under oath.

"You think it was a coincidence that we're bombing places on the day he's going to be impeached?" one Army officer said.

On Dec. 16, 1998, the day before the full House was due to start debate on impeachment, Mr. Clinton ordered a U.S. missile attack on Iraq. Several prominent Republicans publicly suggested the attack was a last-ditch effort to delay the impeachment debate.

Mr. Clinton went so far as to say his role as commander in chief meant he was on "active duty," invoking a 1940 clause intended to shield active military personnel from civil litigation - in his case, a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by former Arkansas employee Paula Jones.

Five recipients of the Medal of Honor - the highest U.S. military decoration awarded to soldiers for gallantry in action - took out full-page newspaper ads to deplore the action.

Mr. Bush, on the other hand, has proposed increasing the flagging military budget by $15 billion beginning Oct. 1 for pay raises, increased health benefits and improved housing. Over the last three days, he visited Army troops, Navy officers and reservists, promising to each that he would deliver on his campaign promises.

He is beloved by members of the armed forces not so much for what he has done - unproved accusations early in the presidential campaign claimed he had pulled strings to get into the Texas National Guard - but for his father's military successes.

The elder Mr. Bush, who celebrated his 75th birthday by parachuting from 12,500 feet over his presidential library in Texas, was wildly applauded by the Navy officers when his son mentioned his name.

Like his father, Mr. Bush does not believe the military should be sent to mediate foreign disputes.

"I'm worried that we are trying to be all things to all people around the world," Mr. Bush said yesterday at the West Virginia National Guard in Charleston. "The mission of the United States military [is] to be trained and prepared to fight and win war, and therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place."

From 1950 to 1989, the 3rd Infantry Division was deployed 10 times on missions ranging from all-out wars to humanitarian operations. During Mr. Clinton's term, members of the division were deployed 30 times, often on peacekeeping and disaster-relief missions, according to the U.S. Army.

"We have to define what we're doing," said one 3rd Infantry Division soldier, who will deploy soon to Kosovo to continue a peacekeeping mission. "We were all over the place before, but now, finally, I think we're going to have a little discipline."

As for the salute, Mr. Clinton had trouble from the beginning of his term.

"He seemed to be working out his internal conflicts every time he tentatively raised his hand," former White House strategist George Stephanopoulos wrote in his book "All Too Human: A Political Education." "The tips of his fingers would furtively touch his slightly bowed head, as if he were being caught at something he wasn't supposed to do."

National Security Adviser Anthony Lake was sent to confer with Mr. Clinton about his salute, and it "grew crisper," he wrote.

Soldiers said Mr. Bush has the right salute, whipping his hand up so quickly that photographers often complain that they missed the picture.

"Now that's a salute," a 3rd Infantry Division sergeant said.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Iowa

01/02/15
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Des Moines - A study says Iowa could become a national leader in renewable energy by harnessing the wind. The Environmental Law and Policy Center says Iowa has enough wind energy to meet all its electricity needs. The goal to have 8% of the state's electricity coming from renewable energy sources by 2010 and 22% by 2020.

-------- chemical weapons

Indiana

01/02/15
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Newport - Engineering problems at a pilot chemical neutralization plant in Corpus Christi, Texas, could delay completion of a Newport plant designed to destroy the deadly VX nerve agent under an international treaty. The Corpus Christi plant is a scale model of a $300 million reactor being built at the Army's Newport Chemical Depot, which is to dispose of tons of VX nerve agent by April 2007.

-------- environment

Critics Try to Turn Whitman Against Her Emissions Plan

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/nyregion/15WHIT.html?pagewanted=all

TRENTON, Feb. 14 - New Jersey environmentalists, joined by a group of anonymous employees of the Environmental Protection Agency, today called on the agency's new administrator, Christie Whitman, to reject an emissions-credit trading program that she herself had introduced as governor.

They warned that the program was rife with pitfalls and could allow air polluters to claim credit for phantom reductions in toxic emissions without fear of detection by regulators. They said the New Jersey program, if blessed by the E.P.A. under Mrs. Whitman, was likely to be used as a model for similar efforts in other states.

The two groups are the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club and members of a self-described whistle- blowers' organization called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. They also called on the E.P.A.'s inspector general to see whether the public's health had been jeopardized by what they called the agency's failure to follow important recommendations made in several earlier analyses of emissions-credit trading programs nationwide.

"The whole process reeks," said Jeffrey Tittel, chapter director of the Sierra Club. "And it's now under the jurisdiction of a new E.P.A. administrator, who's directly responsible for this program."

But officials at the E.P.A. and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection dismissed the criticisms as out of date, saying the two agencies had worked closely to correct early weaknesses in the program and to provide for effective regulatory oversight.

At issue is one of the hallmarks of Mrs. Whitman's environmental record as New Jersey's governor: a five-year-old policy that encourages companies to reduce their emissions of nitrogen oxides, which blend in the air to form smog, and volatile organic compounds, which include toxic chemicals like solvents that evaporate into the air.

Under the program, companies that go beyond required emissions reductions receive credits that they can sell to other polluters or save for later use themselves. Buyers of such credits can cash them in rather than cutting their own emissions.

New Jersey's so-called open-market emissions trading program also allows different kinds of polluters to exchange credits across industries and geographic areas; in other words, an inner-city factory with dirty smokestacks, faced with astronomical costs to clean up those smokestacks, could instead buy credits from a suburban company that had upgraded its fleet of trucks to reduce emissions from exhaust.

In keeping with Mrs. Whitman's philosophy - which her critics have long argued is too trusting of polluters - New Jersey relies on companies participating in the program to certify that their reductions in emissions are accurate. New Jersey's "buyer beware" policy warns purchasers of pollution credits that they will be held responsible if state inspections prove that the seller's claims were false or inflated. But critics say only spot checks are possible because inspections and enforcement by air-quality regulators have been drastically reduced in recent years.

At a news conference here today, Sierra Club officials released internal E.P.A. documents that they said had been provided by agency employees angry that the agency seemed ready to approve New Jersey's emissions-credit trading program, as well as those of several other states.

The documents included the results of a 1999 review by the E.P.A. of 10 trades of emissions credits by New Jersey companies. None of the 10 were consistent with the E.P.A.'s requirements for such trades.

But Mary Mears, a spokeswoman for the E.P.A. region that covers New Jersey, said the state had since revisited those 10 trades and demanded more information from the companies involved. "E.P.A. will take a look at those 10 trades," she said. "And keep in mind, if we do determine that any are invalid, then we can declare they're invalid, and then they get taken off the table."

Ms. Mears and other E.P.A. officials said they were indeed likely to approve New Jersey's emissions- credit trading program, provided the state made several last-minute changes. "We stand behind this program, and we believe this is a program that actually results in a reduction in pollution," Ms. Mears said.

But Mr. Tittel warned that the stakes were high. According to figures from the State Department of Environmental Protection, most of the credits that companies have accumulated have yet to be used.: there are 511,832 credits, or 25,600 tons, of nitrogen oxides, in the state's "bank," compared with only 21,150 credits, or 1,060 tons, that have been used so far. And there are 11,420 credits, or 570 tons, of volatile organic chemicals in the bank, compared with 2,703 credits, or 135 tons, that have been used.

State officials acknowledge that E.P.A. approval is likely to speed the use of the credits already on hand.

Or, in the view of Mr. Tittel: "This action is E.P.A.'s sign-off on the scheme. It turns Monopoly money into real money. All those bogus trades and violations will become as good as gold."

---

France to Slaughter Cows as Prices Fall Because of Disease Fears

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/world/16CND-COWS.html

PARIS, Feb. 15 - The French government today announced plans to slaughter up to 10,000 cattle a week in order to support beef prices forced down by the mad cow disease crisis.

The agriculture minister, Jean Glavany, called it an emergency measure and said the beef would be frozen for sale later. He did not explain where it would all be stored. The whole continent already has a backlog of both frozen and pulverized cattle because many diners, restaurants and institutions have stopped buying beef out of fear of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease.

His comments seemed aimed to appease small ranchers who have been protesting around the country all week. On Wednesday, ranchers invaded a Rhone Valley slaughterhouse and burned imported Argentine beef.

Because beef prices have fallen as much as 80 percent, the ranchers have also been demanding that the government pay them between $140 and $500 for each head of cattle that they cannot sell. Mr. Glavany blamed the European Union for his inability to buy the cattle directly, saying that E.U. subsidy rules prevent him from making cash handouts.

He did promise to take the ranchers' case to the next meeting of the continent's agriculture ministers, which will be in Brussels on Feb. 27.

"If Brussels refuses to listen to the distress of French ranchers, I will take up my responsibilities in accord with the Prime Minister and we will then re-examine the situation," he promised.

Because mad cow disease, a brain-wasting, fatal illness, is thought to have originated in scrapies, a disease found in sheep, France's food-safety agency made a related announcement today. It called for a ban on eating brains from sheep or goats more than six months old and suggested destroying all spleens and intestines from the animals.

---

Sun too close? We'll just change Earth's orbit

02/15/2001
USA Today
By Dan Vergan
http://usatoday.com/news/science/astro/2001-02-15-orbit.htm

Anyone worried about the sun frying Earth sometime in the next billion years can rest easy: Astronomers have devised a way to move our planet to a safer orbit.

In a paper accepted by the journal Astrophysics and Space Science, planetary scientist Don Korycansky of the University of California-Santa Cruz and colleagues detail a plan to remove Earth from its current orbit to a cooler one using "gravitational slingshot" tugs provided by massive asteroids or comets redirected to pass nearby.

"Large-scale planetary engineering is possible with technical procedures we know about now," Korycansky says.

The researchers say mankind will need a scheme like this to save Earth's atmosphere from the heat of the sun, predicted to grow 11% hotter over the next 1.1 billion years.

The plan would entail sticking a fusion-powered rocket or solar sail on a 62-mile-wide asteroid, or comet, to nudge it out of orbit - a simple "engineering problem," Korycansky says. While not plentiful, such sizable objects do dwell in the Kuiper Belt region of icy bodies orbiting in the region of Pluto.

The plan would have the asteroid give Earth a gravity tug as it passes by. Then the asteroid would slingshot around the sun and loop around Jupiter for another return trip past Earth. Each round trip would last 6,000 years.

Over millions of years, the gravity assists would pull the planet from 93 million miles away from the sun - too close - to a comfy 140 million-mile orbit, Korycansky estimates.

However, he and his colleagues note a few drawbacks:

We may lose the moon. The gravity tugs might spin Earth faster, shortening a day to a few hours. Mars and Venus apparently need Earth to stay in their orbits. The scheme might pull Jupiter 10 million miles closer to the sun, disturbing the asteroid belt and sending more rocks hurtling onto our planet. A miscalculation might send the 62-mile-wide asteroid slamming into Earth, which "would sterilize the biosphere most effectively, at least to the level of bacteria," the astronomers warn.

"Their analysis shows that it works, but I don't think we'd want to do it this way," says astronomer Jack Lissauer of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.

A story about the analysis carried by BBC Online caught the attention of astronomers concerned with ways to deflect asteroids aimed at the Earth. A gravity slingshot may represent one way to handle such hazards, Lissauer suggests.

"If we don't destroy ourselves, we have a billion years to figure this one out," he adds. "Who knows what technology we will have in just 1,000 years?"

In the final analysis, he compares the planet-moving scheme to primitives figuring out a way to build the Golden Gate Bridge out of rope. "We could do it, but who'd want to?"

---

Arizona

01/02/15
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Flagstaff - Government officials and environmentalists have teamed up on a project to show the value of getting rid of tamarisk trees along the Colorado River. The non-native noxious shrubs push out native plants that provide food and shelter for birds. Under a demonstration project, tamarisks are being cleared out from a patch near the river and will be replaced by native plants.

Georgia

Augusta - The family-owned Boyceland Dairy filed a lawsuit claiming improperly treated Augusta sewage sludge poisoned crops and cattle. The suit specifies that the city applied at least 23.4 million gallons of the sludge intended as free fertilizer to Boyce property from 1986 to 1998. The Boyces want a jury trial and unspecified damages, including compensation for their land.

Hawaii

Honolulu - A rarely seen jellyfish nearly 2 feet across was discovered in Kaneohe Bay, near the University of Hawaii's Institute of Marine Biology on Coconut Island. The purple and white sea jelly is too large to exhibit in any Waikiki Aquarium tank. It was released back into the bay. The species was first identified in 1983.

Missouri

Branson - Water quality at Table Rock Lake is suffering from excessive sewage and stormwater runoff, producing algae, a state report confirmed. When algae blooms die and decay, oxygen in the water is depleted. Officials fear the deteriorating water quality will hurt tourism, an important part of the area's economy.

New Hampshire

Bedford - The discovery of a fifth bald eagle nesting site in New Hampshire could pose a problem for state highway planners. The nest is next to a planned access road to Manchester Airport. Audubon Society wildlife biologist Laura Demming said building a road in the area would destroy the site as eagle habitat. Transportation officials say they will consult with state and federal biologists. Eagles are protected by state and federal law.

--------

Study finds widespread soil damage

2/15/2001
Infobeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=2rc5g3hpra41a

WASHINGTON (AP) - Scientists who studied the world's farmland with satellite maps found widespread damage to soil quality and said irrigation is draining underground water supplies faster than they can be replenished. Either farmers switch to farming methods that improve soil conditions and use less water or they won't be able to feed the world's growing population, according to the report released Wednesday by the International Food Policy Research Institute.

About 16% of the world's farmland is free of fertility problems, or "constraints," such as chemical contamination, acidity, salinity or poor drainage, the report found. In parts of Asia, as little as 6% of farmland is free of such problems. North America has the largest share of the best land at 29%.

Aluminum contamination is high enough on 17% of the farmland worldwide that it's toxic to plants, and salt deposits are a significant problem on irrigated land.

Nearly 4 million acres of farmland is lost to excessive salt every year, or about 1% of irrigated area worldwide, the report said.

Depletion of organic matter in soil also is widespread, reducing fertility and moisture retention and increasing emissions of carbon dioxide into the air, which is believed a factor in global warming, the report said.

-------- genetics

Europe Approves New Genetically Modified Food Control

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/health/15FOOD.html?pagewanted=all

PARIS, Feb. 14 -- The European Union Parliament passed a measure today that establishes strict rules on genetically modified organisms, preparing to end Europe's unofficial moratorium on bioengineered seeds and food.

The overwhelming 338-to-52 vote was cast despite intense suspicions about genetically modified foods. But the strictness of the new controls responds to those fears. The rules govern the testing, planting and sale of crops and food for humans and animals and the testing and sale of pharmaceuticals.

Under the rules, companies have to apply for licenses that will last 10 years and pass approval processes. All genetically altered products will be tracked in a central database that will also mark the locations of all crops.

A separate bill to set tough food labeling and tracing requirements is to be ready by April, and it is widely expected to pass in some form.

With the changes, the three-year-old moratorium may end soon, perhaps by next year, replaced by systematic rules. "The earliest you could expect approval for a product is spring of next year," said David R. Bowe, the British legislator who wrote the bill. He theorized that varieties that did not flower or were meant solely for animal consumption could gain approval sooner than others.

Under European Union law, all 15 member countries are required to make their laws conform to the new rules in 18 months. Several governments, including those of France and Denmark, said they would resist approvals.

A spokeswoman for the Parliament said defying the law would open the countries to a suit in the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg to force compliance.

"These are the toughest G.M.O. laws in the world," Mr. Bowe said, using shorthand for genetically modified organisms. "Even the Greens can't say they're not strict enough."

In much of the world, in fact, the modified substances have been welcomed.

Many members of European Green parties were among the 85 abstentions today, as they fear the demise of the informal moratorium.

Mr. Bowe foresaw as much, saying this is "the beginning of the end" of the ban. Fourteen farm products are "waiting on the shelf" for consideration, including two types of corn, a tomato, a beet, a chicory, a rapeseed for canola oil and a cotton, he said. And because all have been planted in the United States for up to a decade, Mr. Bowe added, producing documentation for regulators should not be difficult.

In America, the use of genetically modified seeds in 65 percent of the products on supermarket shelves was hardly questioned until last year, when an animal-feed corn with a potential allergen in it was found in taco shells and when manufacturers of baby food refused to use genetically modified ingredients.

But the modified forms are far more demonized here, where they have effectively been outlawed since April 1998, when the last new crop type was approved. British newspapers call them "Frankenfoods," and supermarkets in France post signs saying all their food is "sans O.G.M.," without genetically modified organisms.

Critics like José Bové have become popular heroes for tearing up greenhouses full of test plants. Last week, a prosecutor asked for a three-month sentence for Mr. Bové for raiding an agronomy center in Montpellier.

But European scientists and some politicians have been sounding an alarm. If Europe banned such biotechnology, the United States would outstrip the Continent in an important field, and the brain drain would worsen as scientists left for greener prospects across the Atlantic.

There is little popular understanding of the science here. Polls say a majority of Europeans see the foods as a health hazard. Like McDonald's, another target of Mr. Bové, the innovation is portrayed as an assault by cold greedy American technology on tasty European food and the close-to-the-soil European farmer.

However fanciful that notion may be, the Europeans have lost much of the high ground in the trans-Atlantic debate over the last year because of back-to-back scandals. One case, mad cow disease, is generally believed to result from cows being fed the ground-up bodies of infected sheep. It has been found everywhere from Ireland to Italy.

In the second case, cattle feed has been found with human sewage and carcinogenic dioxins.

After the vote today, the Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace International said the stricter rules should still not allow the ban to be lifted.

The French government issued a statement saying it and the governments of Austria, Denmark, Greece, Luxembourg and Italy all wanted the moratorium kept in place. But Mr. Bowe pointed out that the six countries had helped draft the law and had always had enough votes to block it in the European Council if they had wanted to.

He suggested that they were pandering to their voters and said, "I know it's bizarre and not consistent, but since when has consistency been a virtue in European politics?"

In the European Union, four varieties of genetically modified corn were approved before the moratorium. But they are rarely grown, because European processing companies will not buy them. Imports from the United States have fallen to extremely low levels, the National Corn Growers Association said.

Modified soybeans are approved only as animal feed. Little is now imported. But the mad cow problem may force cattle growers to seek high-protein feeds.

The labeling laws expected in April would require that any food item with any content from a genetically modified crop be labeled. Even a soft drink would have to be labeled, if it contained sugar made from engineered corn or beets, even though there is no genetic material in the sugar, and it is chemically identical to other sugar.

There has been no requirement to label bags of seeds, although modified seeds are sometimes mixed in with regular ones. Last year, farmers in several countries were shaken when they found that some bags that they had planted contained some modified seeds. There were demands for their whole crops to be destroyed in the field.

The vote today also called for phasing out the use of marker genes for antibiotic resistance, first in products and then in the laboratory. The genes -- useful to scientists because they can tell whether a subtler genetic change has been simultaneously made by dosing a plant with antibiotic -- are controversial because of fears that they will help spread antibiotic resistance.

-------

European biotech firms face hurdles

2/15/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=2rc5g3hpra41a

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - Biotech firms are heralding a new law that ends the European Union's ban on licensing genetically modified products, but a more daunting hurdle - consumer wariness - makes it unlikely that Europe will see a sudden biotech boom. EU nations formally approved new rules on labeling and monitoring genetically modified products on Thursday, lifting a three-year ban on licensing new biotech foods. France and Italy abstained. The nations now have 18 months to implement the law. However, each country retains the right to approve new biotech products, making it possible for individual governments to keep the ban in effect.

France, Italy, Denmark, Austria, Luxembourg and Greece have indicated that they may require stricter safeguards before approving new genetically modified foods.

The European Commission, the EU's executive body, said it hoped the new law would be enough to persuade governments to stop blocking the licensing of new biotech products.

Genetic engineering in agriculture involves splicing a gene from one organism, such as a bacterium, into a plant or animal to confer certain traits, such as drought tolerance or insect resistance, in plants.

Cruise pollution inquiry expands

(AP) - Federal prosecutors in Florida have expanded their investigation of pollution by the cruise ship industry to include the parent company that runs Norwegian Cruise Line. NCL Holdings said it has voluntarily reported to federal authorities that an internal investigation found "a pattern of violations of environmental law on several of its ships." NCL "has done everything to correct those problems," Norwegian Senior Vice President Robert Kritzman said Wednesday. Kritzman, the company's general counsel, said federal authorities have requested more information from Norwegian and the company has complied. He declined to say more.

Justice Department spokeswoman Cristine Romano declined to comment on the inquiry into NCL, which operates eight ships with ports of call in Alaska, Asia, the Caribbean, Hawaii, the South Pacific and other locales.

The industry has been under increasing scrutiny since 1999, when the Justice Department - working with the U.S. Attorney in Miami - settled fraud and pollution allegations against Royal Caribbean. The cruise line agreed to pay $27 million after the Coast Guard discovered that cruise line employees had routinely dumped oil into coastal waters.

-------- health

Two Blood-Donor Bans Set in Mad Cow Threat

February 16, 2001
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/16/health/16MADCOW.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 15 -- The government will soon ban certain frequent travelers to France and Portugal from donating blood as a precaution against mad cow disease, but officials said today that they feared that American Red Cross plans for a far stricter ban might cause shortages of blood.

The Food and Drug Administration is about to forbid blood donations by anyone who lived or traveled in France or Portugal for a total of 10 years since 1980.

The agency already prohibits donations by anyone who spent a total of six months in Britain between 1980 and 1996, when that country was the center of the mad cow problem. The widened ban comes as the illness has spread to France and Portugal.

Officials of the Red Cross, which collects half of the United States' blood supply, told the drug agency this week that they were leaning toward refusing donors who had spent three months in Britain or one year elsewhere in Europe.

The F.D.A.'s blood chief, Dr. Jay Epstein, said today that a stricter ban could worsen already tight blood supplies, particularly in New York City, where 25 percent of the red cell supply is imported from F.D.A.-approved European blood banks.

The Red Cross estimated that its ban would cut nationwide blood donations by 6 percent, while the F.D.A.'s standards would cut them by less than 1 percent.

-------- police

Union Seeks New Overseer for New Jersey Troopers

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By ROBERT HANLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/nyregion/15TROO.html

The head of the union representing New Jersey's state troopers is urging that the force no longer be supervised by the state attorney general, whom he criticized for dropping drug and weapons charges against 128 people who claimed they were victims of racial profiling.

In a two-page statement reflecting deep disenchantment with the state's latest response to profiling, the union president, Edward H. Lennon, said yesterday that a "clear, consistent and pervasive anti-trooper bias" existed in the office of the attorney general, John J. Farmer Jr.

On Feb. 2, Mr. Farmer announced that he was reluctantly dropping charges against the 128 defendants, saying that the accusations of profiling could make their cases difficult to win, and that prosecuting the cases would hinder the state's effort to move beyond the allegations against state troopers.

Mr. Lennon said that his union, which represents all 1,650 troopers below the rank of sergeant, planned to make dismissal of the cases an issue this election year and that it would propose legislation to remove the state police from the attorney general's jurisdiction. Instead, it would propose making the department a cabinet-level agency under the direct control of the governor.

Mr. Lennon said in an interview after his statement was distributed in the State House in Trenton that the transfer would give the head of the state police, Col. Carson J. Dunbar Jr., more control over the department's day-to-day operations. "We would have a career law enforcement officer running the division, rather than an attorney," Mr. Lennon said.

Mr. Farmer declined to respond to the union's statement. "It would be inappropriate to comment," said his spokesman, Chuck Davis, with no explanation.

A spokesman for Acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco said it was premature to comment on the union statement because Mr. DiFrancesco had not seen it or talked with Mr. Lennon about plans to seek the legislation. The spokesman, Tom Wilson, said that Mr. DiFrancesco fully supported Mr. Farmer's decision to drop the charges.

"He did what he believed was in the best interest of the people of New Jersey," Mr. Wilson said of Mr. Farmer.

Colonel Dunbar said that there was "tremendous disappointment" and a "lot of confusion" within state police ranks, but that he disagreed with the union's desire to put the department under the governor's direct control.

"In my 15 months here, I've had pretty much all the freedom I want," Colonel Dunbar said. "I've had a tremendous amount of independence, whether people want to believe it or not."

In addition, he said a transfer would be impractical because the attorney general's office would still assign lawyers to prosecute defendants arrested by troopers, no matter who oversaw the department's operations.

Colonel Dunbar also defended Mr. Farmer's decision to seek dismissal of the 128 cases as "courageous," and he appealed to troopers not to take the action personally. "In life, tough decisions have to be made, and they're often difficult decisions," Colonel Dunbar said, adding that he would now focus on working to ensure that arrests by troopers could withstand legal challenge.

"We did our job good before," he said. "We just have to do our job better in the future. Everything we're doing is viewed through an absolute microscope, and we're not being given the benefit of the doubt anymore. We just have to go back and re-educate so there's no question whatsoever about the legality of what we do."

Mr. Lennon said he had written the statement with the help of a lawyer, without any input from other officers in the union, the State Troopers Fraternal Association of New Jersey. He said it represented the sentiments of the troopers. As for trooper morale, he said: "These are some of the lowest times I've seen."

In the statement, he contended that the 128 cases were dropped because of "political expediency."

"Dumping drug and gun cases is not an option," the statement said. "The only thing the attorney general's office didn't do was give these people back their drugs and guns with an apology. Is this what the people of New Jersey want? It's not what we want."

In the interview yesterday, Mr. Lennon argued that instead of dropping the cases, the attorney general should have taken them to court, so troopers could testify about their stops and justify them and then let a judge or jury decide if the 128 people were victims of racial profiling.

"They were not all profiling stops," he said. "I'm confident these stops were done with probable cause - speeding or weaving in and out of lanes. To throw them all out is disgraceful."

---

BARRING CAMPUS RAIDS

February 15, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/world/15BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

IRAN: The reformist Parliament passed a bill that would bar security forces from campuses and seminaries. The measure comes after a 1999 police raid on a university hostel in which dozens of students were injured. The state news media said deputies approved the bill, setting stiff jail sentences for forcible entry into campuses, allowing police intervention only in emergencies. It still needs to be approved by the Guardian Council, a conservative body. (Reuters)

---

Louisiana

01/02/15
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Natchitoches - A former Natchitoches Parish sheriff's deputy pleaded guilty to five counts of possession of a controlled dangerous substance, a felony. Christopher DeVargas was arrested last February after allegedly obtaining a prescription illegally. He resigned from the sheriff's office after his arrest.

North Dakota

Jamestown - People with overdue library books might soon get a visit from the police. Alfred Dickey Public Library director Daphne Drewello said starting March 1, people who have large numbers of overdue books will be reported to authorities and possibly charged with theft. About $7,500 in materials have been checked out in the past three years and not returned.

West Virginia

Charleston - Mayor Jay Goldman proposed laying off 25 police officers and 25 firefighters and closing three fire stations to cut $1 million from the $52 million budget. Charleston's business and occupation taxes are running behind projections, and health care costs are up. The city has 177 police officers and 204 firefighters.

-------- terrorism

Panel Discusses Terrorism Practices

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Defeating-Terrorists.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Political threats from the barrel of a gun should be met by punishing governments that help terrorists, a panel on how democracies should deal with terrorism was told Thursday.

The advice came from former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and David Trimble, Protestant first minister of Northern Ireland's new power-sharing government, members of a panel on Capitol Hill sponsored by a conservative think tank and Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn. Panel members discussed challenges facing the Bush administration and the United States.

Netanyahu said the principal requirement for dealing with terrorism is punishment of complicit nations. He mentioned Russia and China as examples of countries that provide weapons to terrorists and terrorist states and said other countries that provide terrorist havens are equally guilty.

Iran and Iraq ``will soon have'' nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, which will make ``what we've experienced for the last few decades child's play,'' Netanyahu said.

Describing Russia as one of the world's worst proliferators of weapons through technology, advisers and materials, Netanyahu said: ``The most important thing the United States can do is ... try to stop this flow of the technology of death,'' principally by exerting economic and political pressure.

The same goes for China, Thompson said.

``I don't think we can continue to reach out a hand of friendship, reach out with trade, while ignoring the thing that really poses a direct threat to our country, and that is their massive proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,'' Thompson said.

The panel noted others who abet terrorists by harboring them, providing false identity documents and such.

``It's been a long time since we punished terrorists, and an even longer time since we punished the territories from which they operate,'' said Richard Perle, assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and a fellow of the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, the forum's sponsor.

``I would rather see us devote less attention to tracking down terrorists and bringing them to justice and more attention to clobbering the territory from which they operate,'' Perle said.

``In fighting terrorism, it is important to hit not only the terrorists themselves but also those who give them the wherewithal to operate,'' Netanyahu agreed.

Asked how one deals with a terrorist, Netanyahu said he took a hard line with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat when he was prime minister, insisting that Arafat's Palestinian Authority jail terrorists and collect weapons in occupied areas.

``I insisted that Arafat take action to curb violence. You simply do not accept it,'' he said.

Trimble said people must be prepared for a long process of reconciliation, such as his current extended effort to pressure the Irish Republican Army into negotiations to give up its stockpile of arms.

The transition period from violence to peace, he said, ``may be a long time.''

``We should not be pessimistic,'' Trimble said. ``You should never get into a situation of thinking there's something special about terrorism that makes it impossible to deal with.''

---

Witness Links Defendent to bin-Laden's Military Operation

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/world/15TERR.html?pagewanted=all

An Egyptian-born flight instructor who worked freelance as Osama bin Laden's pilot said yesterday that he once helped the bin Laden organization buy a $200,000 decommissioned military jet in order to ship Stinger antiaircraft missiles from Pakistan to Sudan.

The flight instructor, Essam al Ridi, was testifying at the trial of four men accused of joining with Mr. bin Laden in an international terrorism plot that eventually led to the bombings of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998.

The explosions killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and wounded more than 4,000.

Mr. al Ridi told the jury that one of the defendants, Wadih El-Hage, had acted as Mr. bin Laden's representative in the airplane deal and that Mr. El-Hage had explicitly said that the plane would be used to transport the Stingers, which are shoulder-mounted American missiles.

It was one of the first times during the trial, before Judge Leonard B. Sand in Federal District Court in Manhattan, that Mr. El-Hage, 40, was directly linked to military operations for Mr. bin Laden's group, Al Qaeda, which is Arabic for the Base.

A naturalized American citizen who was living in Texas when the bombs in Africa went off, Mr. El- Hage has maintained through his lawyers since his arrest that he is a legitimate businessman who worked for Mr. bin Laden's "commercial interests."

Mr. al Ridi described himself as an old friend of Mr. El-Hage's, and as he leaned forward into the microphone to speak, Mr. El-Hage barely glanced at him. The few times that Mr. El- Hage did look at Mr. al Ridi it was with an inscrutably vacant gaze.

It was 1993, Mr. al Ridi said, when Mr. El-Hage called him from Khartoum, Sudan, where Al Qaeda was based, and told him that Mr. bin Laden wanted to buy a jet. Mr. El- Hage, he said, gave him certain specifications: the plane could cost no more than $250,000 and needed a flight range of at least 2,000 miles.

After weeks of browsing, Mr. al Ridi said, he found an old T-39 aircraft in a boneyard, or a lot for decommissioned planes, in Tucson, Ariz. He said he bought it, refurbished it and flew it himself to Khartoum, where he handed over the keys to Mr. bin Laden at a heavily armed dinner party that Mr. El-Hage also attended.

The prosecution has argued that Mr. El-Hage, a slender man with long black hair parted in the middle, was Mr. bin Laden's personal secretary and helped his boss set up front companies in Kenya. He has been charged in the terrorism conspiracy as well as with lying to a federal grand jury convened in the case.

In 1997, for example, he told the grand jury that he never knew that Al Qaeda's former military commander, Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, had died the year before in a Tanzanian ferry accident. During the afternoon session yesterday, prosecutors set out to prove that Mr. El-Hage did, in fact, know of Mr. al-Banshiri's death.

To that end, they called a Tanzanian man named Ashif Mohamed Juma to the witness stand. Mr. Juma squirmed and wrung his hands as he told the jury that he was actually traveling on the overloaded ferry with Mr. al-Banshiri when it sank on Lake Victoria in 1996.

After describing a scene of horror - dead bodies floating on the lake and survivors scurrying across the hull of the overturned boat - Mr. Juma said that Mr. El-Hage tracked him down in Tanzania after the accident to find out if Mr. al-Banshiri's body had ever been found.

The witness went on to say that Mr. El-Hage had another motive for the visit: Mr. Juma owed about $12,000 or $15,000 to an associate of Mr. al-Banshiri. Mr. El-Hage sent a letter asking for the money back, Mr. Juma said, but it was ignored. So Mr. El-Hage returned to Tanzania some months later, Mr. Juma said, to once again demand the money.

"We don't know about tomorrow or what might happen to you," Mr. Juma quoted Mr. El-Hage as saying. After that, Mr. Juma said, he signed a written note promising to repay the money, though he never did.

During cross-examination, Joshua L. Dratel, one of Mr. El-Hage's lawyers, got Mr. Juma to admit that he had told federal agents investigating the case that his own brother, Sikander, had signed the lease for an apartment at 43 New Runda Estates in Nairobi where, prosecutors say, the bomb eventually used against the embassy in Kenya was built.

Mr. Juma also admitted that his brother had signed the papers on behalf of a man named Haroun Fazil, who was indicted in the embassy bombings case but remains at large.

One thing that has slowly emerged in the trial is the extraordinary scope of the American investigation into the embassy bombings and Al Qaeda.

Federal agents were able to obtain 30 minutely detailed photographs of Mr. bin Laden's jet after Mr. al Ridi crashed it into a pile of sand during a botched landing in Khartoum more than five years ago. They also got video clips of corpses from the ferry accident being hauled into a Tanzanian soccer stadium.

Although the jury had expected yesterday to hear the cross-examination of Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, one of Mr. bin Laden's former top aides, it was postponed because Mr. El- Hage's chief lawyer, Sam A. Schmidt, was out with the flu.

---

Terrorists sentenced to nine years in Germany

02/15/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-15-terrorist.htm

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) - A former terrorist was convicted Thursday and sentenced to nine years in prison for a 1975 attack on an OPEC meeting in Vienna, after a trial that focused attention on some German leaders' radical past.

Hans-Joachim Klein was convicted on charges of hostage-taking and three counts each of murder and attempted murder in the attack allegedly masterminded by Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, whose real name is Ilich Ramirez Sanchez.

The four-month trial revived memories of social unrest that rocked Germany 30 years ago - and the role some present-day politicians played during it. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, a former Klein friend, testified in the trial.

Fischer was called as a character witness for Klein, testifying about their shared past in 1970s street clashes with police. Fischer, who went on to become a prominent member of the Greens party and served in Hesse state government during a decades-long political transformation before he became a Cabinet member, said he urged Klein not turn to violence.

But Fischer's testimony, which drew huge media attention, also raised questions about whether he had done enough to distance himself from the violence of the era.

Klein, 53, admitted taking part in the attack, but denies killing anyone.

The prosecution had demanded 14 years in jail for Klein, arguing the three victims were killed only to promote the terrorists themselves, who claimed they had wanted OPEC to show more support for the plight of the Palestinians.

Prosecutors also said they made allowances for Klein because he gave the court new details about the Revolutionary Cells terrorist group that planned and carried out the attack and said he now regrets his involvement in the operation.

Defense lawyers were seeking an eight-year sentence, arguing it would be a "gate to humanity" for Klein and offer him the chance to return to normal life after his release.

The judge acquitted co-defendant Rudolf Schindler, 57, who Klein claims recruited him into the Revolutionary Cells. Prosecutors were seeking five years in prison for Schindler, who refused to testify.

Klein was arrested in September 1998 in France. He was extradited to Germany for trial because he is a German citizen.

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Masking Up And The Black Bloc:
A Pre-Seattle History

by Daniel Dylan Young
infoshop.org
http://www.infoshop.org/texts/blackbloc_young.html

"Those in authority fear the mask for their power partly resides in identifying, stamping and cataloguing: in knowing who you are...our masks are not to conceal our identity but to reveal it...Today we shall give this resistance a face; for by putting on our masks we reveal our unity; and by raising our voices in the street together, we speak our anger at the facelessness of power..."

--from a message printed on the inside of 9000 masks distributed at the June 18th, 1999 Carnival Against Capital which destroyed the financial district of central London

At the WTO protests in Seattle last year, somewhere from 100 to 300 anarchists and others dressed up in black and systematically trashed the storefronts of odious multinational corporations. Since then the tactic of the "Black Bloc" has been getting quite a bit of attention from different people concerned with social change. All sorts of upper middle class, trust-fund progressives and liberals have prattled on moralistically to great length about how there is no room for such behavior in their movement. At the same time, the Black Bloc in Seattle inspired a renewed interest in militant protest tactics which do not placate authority or bow to its power. The N30 Black Bloc, along with many other aspects of the events in Seattle, has also inspired radical anarchists to stop hiding out inside liberal activist groups with reformist agendas, and start being more vocal in their demands for revolution and total social change. Besides the rapid proliferation of anarchist publications and organizations, clear evidence of this resurgence of anarchism in the United States can be seen in the large Black Blocs which were present on April 16th in Washington D.C., at the Democratic and Republican National Conventions this summer, and at many other marches, protests and actions from sea to shining sea. For good or ill, it seems that in the last year the Black Bloc has become an American tradition, and it all started with those brave kids back in Seattle.

Or did it? In fact, November 30th was far from the first time that a large group of radicals dressed up in black with black masks in order to engage in militant protest in anonymity and solidarity. The Black Bloc as an agreed upon protest tactic may be as much as 20 years old. Its origins in fact lie with the European Autonomen or autonomists, a radical social movement that didn't even necessarily proclaim itself anarchist, though many of its tactics and ideas have become widely appreciated and adopted by self-proclaimed anarchists.

About Autonomy

Autonomia, Autonomen, or autonomists have been the names used for various popular social change and countercultural movements in Italy, Germany, Denmark, Holland and other parts of Europe in the last 3 decades. All these different movements have sought to radically oppose authority, domination and violence anywhere that they exist in contemporary life (which is pretty much everywhere). Autonomy in this case does not mean some kind of regional superiority complex or isolationism, as with statist nationalism, nor does it mean individual autonomy at the expense of the majority, as is the the basis of capitalism. What autonomists value and desire is the freedom for individuals to choose others with whom they share an affinity, and band together with them to survive and fulfill all of their needs and desires collectively, without interference from greedy, violent individuals or huge inhuman bureaucracies.

The first so-called autonomists were those individuals involved in the Italian Autonomia movement that got its start during the Hot Autumn of 1969, a time of intense social unrest. Throughout the 1970s in Italy a widespread movement for total social change was initiated by autonomous groups of factory workers, women and students. Capitalists, labor unions and the statist Communist Party bureaucracy had nothing to do with this movement, and in fact worked hard to repress and stop it. Yet the power structure was often at a loss with how to deal with the near complete refusal of large areas of the population to obey the rules and orders of authority.

Despite the rapid proliferation of direct action, strikes, rent strikes, mass squats, streetfighting, university occupations and other popularly supported radical actions during the 1970s, the Italian movement eventually subsided. This was partly due to violent attacks, imprisonment and murders of radicals by the police and the Communist party-controlled central government. At the same time the response to this escalation of state violence was often an escalation of terrorism by elite radical urban guerilla groups. This self-defensive terrorism often served to turn people away from a large scale, public social change movement. Some chose to become more militant and secretive, while others abandoned politics all together for a seemingly more peaceful life of obedience to authority.

Building Revolutionary Dual Power -- The Culture of the Autonomen

Though the revolutionary potential of the Italian Autonomia in the 1970s died down, their vibrance, confidence and empowerment was an inspiration to young people in West Germany in the 1980s. Inspired also by the Amsterdam squatters' movements and youth organization in Switzerland, young Germans in Berlin, Hamburg and other major cities began building their own autonomous culture and social groups based upon radical resistance and alternative ways of life.

The direction and composition of radical organization in West Germany in the 1980s was partly determined by the reigning economic recession and the forms it took. Because of the well established connections between industrial unions and the German government, the effects of this recession were felt not so much by blue collar workers, but by young people who found it increasingly impossible to secure jobs and housing and thereby move out of their parents' home and become socially and financially independent. Therefore points for autonomous youth mobilization included the stifling conformity of rural German society and the nuclear family, serious housing shortages, high unemployment--as well as the continued illegal status of abortion and government plans for a massive expansion of nuclear power.

As a result of economic recession and flight to the suburbs, at the end of the 1970s huge tracts of buildings in different German inner cities, especially West Berlin, lay abandoned by developers or government agencies. Squatting these buildings was a viable option for impoverished young people looking for independence from the nuclear family home. Vibrant squatters' communities grew up in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin, the Haffenstrasse squats of Hamburg and in other concentration points. The cornerstone of these communities was communal living, and the creation of radical social centers: infoshops, bookstores, coffeehouses, meeting halls, bars, concert halls, art galleries, and other multi-use spaces where grassroots political, artistic and social culture were developed as an alternative to nuclear family life, TV dreams and mass-produced pop culture.

From these safe social spaces grew major grassroots initiatives to fight nuclear power; to break down patriarchy and gender roles; to show solidarity with oppressed people throughout the world by attacking the European-based multinational corporations or financial institutions like the World Bank; and after German reunification, to fight the rising tide of conservative neo-Nazism.

Similar initiatives for alternative living as resistance were percolating in the 1980s (and in some places much earlier) in Holland, Denmark and elsewhere throughout northern Europe. Eventually all of these northern Europeans living in decentralized social groups dedicated to creating a non-coercive, non-hierarchical society became collectively labeled as "Autonomen." Over time the autonomists' ideas and tactics also migrated throughout the reunited post-Iron Curtain Europe. I personally have visited radical autonomous social centers in England, Spain, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, and the Czech Republic.

Hardline Oppression, Militant Resistance, And the Origins of the Black Bloc

From the beginning the West German state did not take kindly to young Autonomen, whether they were occupying nuclear power plant building sites or unused apartment buildings. In the winter of 1980 the Berlin city government decided to take a hardline against the thousands of young people living in squats throughout the city: they decided to criminalize, attack and evict them into the cold winter streets. This was a much more shocking and unusual action in Germany than it would be in the U.S., and created much popular disgust and condemnation of the police and government.

From December 1980 on there was an escalating cycle of mass arrests, street fighting, and new squatting in Berlin and throughout Germany. The Autonomen were not to be cowed, and each eviction was responded to with several new building occupations. When squatters in the south German city of Freiburg were mass arrested, rallies and demonstrations supporting them and condemning the police state's eviction policy took place in every major city in Germany. In Berlin on that day, later dubbed "Black Friday," upwards of 15,000 to 20,000 people took to the streets and destroyed an upper class shopping area.(1)

This was the seething cauldron of oppression and resistance from which the Black Bloc was birthed. In late 1981 the German government began legalizing certain squats in an attempt to divide the counterculture and marginalize more radical segments. But these tactics were slow to pacify the popular radical movement--especially since the period of 1980-81 had seen not only a brutal treatment of squatters but also the largest police mobilization in Germany since the reign of the third Reich in order to attack non-violent, sitting protesters at the "Free Republic of Wendland," an encampment of 5000 activists blocking the construction of the Gorleben nuclear waste dump.(2) Even formerly ardent pacifists had been radicalized by the experience of sustained, violent police oppression against diverse squats and activist occupations.

In response to violent state oppression radical activists developed the tactic of the Black Bloc: they went to protests and marches wearing black motorcycle helmets and ski masks and dressing in uniform black clothing (or, for the most prepared, wearing padding and steel-toed boots and bringing their own shields and truncheons). In Black Bloc, autonomen and other radicals could more effectively fend off police attacks, without being singled out as individuals for arrest and harassment later on. And, as everyone quickly figured out, having a massive group of people all dressed the same with their faces covered not only helps in defending against the police, but also makes it easier for saboteurs to take the offensive against storefronts, banks and any other material symbols and power centers of capitalism and the state. Masking up as a Black Bloc encouraged popular participation in public property destruction and violence against the state and capitalism. In this way the Black Bloc is a form of militance that mitigates the problematic dichotomy between popularly executed non-violent civil disobedience and elite, secretive guerilla terrorism and sabotage.

Autonomen Black Bloc Accomplishments

Black Blocs, Autonomen militance, and popular resistance to the police-state and the New World Order spread among European youth in the 1980s.

Though Dutch radicals did not begin calling themselves "Autonomen" until around 1986, earlier Dutch counterculture activists shared tactics, organizing structures and militancy with self-proclaimed autonomists. Holland's squatting movement really got started around 1968, and by 1981 more then 10,000 houses and apartments were squatted in Amsterdam, and there were around 15,000 squats in the rest of Holland. Squatted restaurants, bars, cafes, and information centers were commonplace, and the organized squatters (usually referred to as "kraakers") had their own council to plan the movement's direction and their own newsradio station.(3)

Although some Dutch autonomists rejected wearing ski masks while in Black Bloc(4), the movement was no less militant. One book about the Dutch squatters movement reports that "Ever since the beginning there had been a 'black helmet brigade' which felt it had joined battle with municipal social democracy."(5)

Battles at the evictions of Amsterdam squats often featured the construction of huge barricades and walled-in squatters tossing furniture and other projectiles of all shapes and sizes out the window at riot police below. In the early years there were certain limits to the violence which Dutch squatters would use to retaliate against police attacks. However in 1985 when a squatter named Hans Kok died in police custody after being arrested during a particularly brutal raid and eviction, the ante was upped. Following the news of his death a night of fiery destruction reigned in Amsterdam, with even police cars set on fire in front of many different precincts. Said one squatter: "Everyone had the idea, now we'll use the ultimate means, just before guns anyway: mollies...Everyone went around with mollies in their pockets, everyone had full gasoline cans...it was the new action method."(6) Though Hans Kok's death and the fiery retribution that followed had a negative effect on the popular squatters' movement, the new militancy of tactics proved useful in some activist circles. In 1985 the Dutch Anti-Racist Action Group (RARA) mounted a successful campaign to force the Dutch supermarket chain MARKO to divest from South Africa: the campaign was accomplished through a series of extremely expensive and damaging firebombings of MARKO's stores and offices.(7)

In Germany in 1986 mounting police attacks and attempted evictions against a complex of squatted houses in Hamburg called the Haffenstrasse were met with the counteroffensive of a 10,000 person march surrounding at least 1500 people in a Black Bloc, carrying a huge banner that read, "Build Revolutionary Dual Power!" At the march's end, the Black Bloc was able to successfully engage in street fighting that put the police on the retreat. On the following day fires were set in 13 department stores in Hamburg, causing nearly $10 million in damage.(8)

That same year, the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant brought new militance to demonstrations against nuclear power plants under construction in Germany. Once account of these anti-nuclear demonstrations reported, "In scenes resembling 'civil war,' helmeted, leather-clad troops of the anarchist Autonomen armed with slingshots, Molotov cocktails and flare guns clashed brutally with the police, who employed water cannons, helicopters and CS gas (officially banned for use against civilians."(9)

In June of 1987 when Ronald Reagan came to Berlin, around 50,000 people demonstrated in the streets against this Cold War-mongering old man, including a 3000 person Black Bloc.(10) A couple of months later police antagonism against the Haffenstrasse intensified again. In November 1987 residents and thousands of other Autonomen fortified the complex, built barricades in the streets and fought off police for nearly 24 hours. In the end the city chose to legalize the squatters' residence.(11)

Over ten years before Seattle and the American WTO protests, the Autonomen mobilized a similar event with a greater number of resisters. In September of 1988, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund met in Berlin. Autonomen used this meeting as a focal point for worldwide resistance to global corporate capitalism and government's destruction of grassroots autonomy and community. Thousands of activists from throughout Europe and the U.S. were mobilized, and 80,000 protesters met the bankers (at least 30,000 more than in Seattle).(12) The totally outnumbered police and private security at the event attempted to maintain order by banning all demonstrations and brutally attacking any public assembly, but riots still ravaged fashionable upper class shopping areas (as was tradition).

Pre-Seattle Black Blocs In the U.S.A.

In November of 1999 the Black Bloc tactic seemed new to many Americans partly because the actions and ideas of the autonomist movement in Europe were mostly blacked out of the American media and have been barely written about at all in English. However, ignorance of the Black Bloc also stems from the fact that most Americans get news of domestic events from a corporate-controlled media that ignores any happenings that don't fit their view and purposes, and which represents every event that takes place as singular spectacle disconnected from past and future, to be forgotten in a blur even when it is only a few months old.

Radicals in the U.S. have never been totally ignorant of the actions and ideas of European autonomists, and the development of the punk rock subculture in the U.S. throughout the 1980s in many ways mirrored that of the autonomists. By the beginning of the 1990's anarchists and other radicals in the U.S. were masking up at marches and protests to build solidarity and create anonymity for militants.

When the Gulf War was going one protest in the streets of Washington D.C. included a Black Bloc that smashed in the windows of the World Bank building. That same year on Columbus Day in San Francisco a Black Bloc showed up to help show militant resistance to the continuing genocide of North American domination by Europeans.(13) Personally, the largest Black Bloc that I've ever seen was at the Millions March For Mumia in Philadelphia in April of 1999. I'd say there were at least 500 dressed in Black, masked up, and carrying banners such as "Vegans For Mumia." Though there was no street fighting and no particularly noticeable property destruction, some kids did manage to get into a parking garage along the march route, climb to the roof and wave the black flag.

The Global Future of the Black Mask

The symbol of the black-masked autonomist militant has spread to the third world as well. As the North American Free Trade Agreement's destructive neo-liberalalizing economic policies took effect on January 1st, 1994, a guerilla uprising took place in Chiapas, a state in southern Mexico. The uprising sought to create space for the development of autonomous social organization among downtrodden Mayan indigenous peoples. The armed wing of this struggle for community autonomy and direct democracy without coercion or hierarchy has been and continues to be the Zapatistas, men and women who wear black balaclavas (similar to ski masks) whenever they appear in public. Many autonomists and anarchists have visited and tried to help them in their struggles with knowledge, money, materials and by building inernational awareness and solidarity of the situation in Chiapas.

Back in Germany, the Autonomen are seeing dark days. It is said that in the past squatters held at least 165 large, five-story apartment buildings in eastern Berlin, but by late 1997 only 3 remained.(14) Legalizing some squats while brutally evicting others has been an effective policy for the police state. Many people living in legalized squats are unwilling to rock the boat by encouraging or expressing solidarity with militant tactics practiced by other squatters, and this marginalization makes it easier for the squatters to lose out in street-fighting against an increasingly militarized police force.

The resurgence of neo-Nazism in what once was East Germany and other areas of the country has meant no end of troubles for German Autonomen. They face violence and death from neo-Nazi attacks, especially in most of eastern Germany which neo-Nazi gangs police as a "no-punk, no-foreigner zone." Massive amounts of Autonomen time and effort goes into organizing to oppose the spread of neo-Nazism, but this means neglecting the tasks of developing new viable alternatives to authoritarian society, one of the main original goals of autonomists. "Antifa" or anti-fascist organizing brings the Autonomen into more and more violent confrontations with the German police, who basically support neo-Nazi groups and their nationalist, racist ideologies--when individual police officers aren't directly involved with fascist groups.

Rumour has it that many militants in areas of northern Europe where the Black Bloc was a common demonstration tactic have been increasingly given it up, as it has ceased to serve its purpose. The forces of state repression have caught on, and use ever greater technological, legal and physical force to observe, isolate, pursue and target those involved in Black Blocs. A similar process is taking place in the U.S., with a resurgence of COINTELPRO-style tactics aimed at radicals who oppose the global capitalist-statist American empire.

Whether the Black Bloc continues as a tactic or is abandoned, it certainly has served its purpose. In certain places and times the Black Bloc effectively empowered people to take action in collective solidarity against the violence of state and capitalism. It is important that we neither cling to it nostalgically as an outdated ritual or tradition, nor reject it wholesale because it sometimes seems inappropriate. Rather we should continue working pragmatically to fulfill our individual needs and desires through various tactics and objectives, as they are appropriate at the specific moment. Masking up in Black Bloc has its time and place, as do other tactics which conflict with it.

1. Katsiaficas, George. The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements And The Decolonization of Everyday Life. New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1997, p. 91.

2. Katsiaficas, p. 82

3. Katsiaficas, p. 116

4. Katsiaficas, p. 116.

5. ADILKNO. Cracking The Movement: Squatting Beyond the Media. Trans. Laura Martz. New York: Autonomedia, 1990. p. 25.

6. ADILKNO, 123

7. Katsiaficas, 119.

8. Katsiaficas, 128.

9. Katsiaficas, 211.

10. Katsiaficas, 131.

11. Katsiaficas, 130.

12. Katsiaficas, 131.

13. Mid-Atlantic Infoshop. "Black Bloc For Dummies." <http://www.infoshop.org/blackbloc.html>

14. Thompson, A. Clay. "Street Battles--German Squatters Squeezed to Near Extinction." <http:www.pacificnews.org/jinn/stories/3.21/971014-squatters.html>

Last updated: February 7, 2001

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Contents:

--Sorry, Wrong President
--Masking Up And The Black Bloc: A Pre-Seattle History
--The Phony President
--The Resurgence of Citizens' Movements
--Special forces spied on crowds during Olympics
--Church to Be Seized for Unpaid Taxes
--We'll create GM humans by 2020, says researcher

The Resurgence of Citizens' Movements by Paul Hawken

We are beginning a mythic period of existence, rather like the age portrayed in the Bhagavad Gita, in The Lord of the Rings, and in other tales of darkness and light. We live in a time in which every living system is in decline, and the rate of decline is accelerating as our economy grows.

The commercial processes that bring us the kind of lives we supposedly desire are destroying the earth and the life we cherish. Given current orporate practices, not one wildlife reserve, wilderness, or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy. We are losing our forests, fisheries, coral reefs, topsoil,water, biodiversity, and climatic stability. The land, sea, and air have been functionally transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste. Feeling the momentum of loss at the beginning of a new century, one wants to close one's eyes. Yet that is the very thing that will bring forth ruin.

I believe in rain, in odd miracles, in the intelligence that allows terns and swallows to find their way across the planet. And I believe that we are capable of creating a remarkable future for humankind. In the United States, more than 30,000 citizens' groups,nongovernmental organizations, and foundations are addressing the issue of social and ecological sustainability in the most complete sense of the word. Worldwide, their number exceeds 100,000. Together,they address a broad array of issues, including environmental justice, ecological literacy, public policy, conservation, women's rights and health, population growth, renewable energy, corporate reform, labor rights, climate change, trade rules, ethical investing, ecological tax reform, water conservation, and much more.

These groups follow Gandhi's imperatives: Some resist, others create new structures, patterns, and means. The groups tend to be local, marginal, poorly funded, and overworked. It is hard for most groups not to feel justified anxiety that they could perish in a twinkling. At the same time, a deeper, extraordinary pattern is emerging. If you ask these groups for their principles, frameworks, conventions, models, or declarations, you will find that they do not conflict. Never before in history has this happened. In the past, movements that became powerful started with a unified or centralized set of ideas (Marxism, Christianity, Freudianism) and disseminated them, creating power struggles over time as the core mental model or dogma was changed, diluted, or revised.

This new sustainability movement did not start this way. Its supporters do not agree on everything-nor should they-but remarkably, they share a basic set of fundamental understandings about the earth, how it functions, and the necessity of fairness and equity for all people in partaking of its life-giving systems. This shared understanding is arising spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and cohorts. And it is spreading throughout this country and the world. No one started this worldview, no one is in charge of it, no orthodoxy is restraining it. I believe it is the fastest-growing and most powerful movement in the world today, unrecognizable to the American media because it is not centralized, based on power, or led by charismatic white males. As external conditions continue to worsen socially, environmentally, and politically, organizations working toward sustainability multiply and gain more supporters.

We will never recover what we have lost. It will take 5 million years to restore the diversity of lost species. Nevertheless, in 50 years we can begin the very necessary work of restoration. We can begin to reduce carbon in the atmosphere; recharge aquifers; bring back lands that have been taken by deserts; create habitat corridors for buffalo, panthers, and gray wolves; and thicken our paper-thin topsoil. What is possible in 50 years is a world that is wonderfully messy and deliriously creative. It doesn't fit a single scenario written anywhere by anyone. As for the United States, it will not be a country defined by technologies, measured in money, or summarized by demographics. It will be, perforce, a country in a world defined by the acts of restoring life on Earth-dancing, donning costumes, singing, performing rituals, enjoying magic, praying, worshiping, and playing. This is the work of carefully reconstituting what has been lost by creating conditions conducive to life.In 50 years, America will be a culture whose industrial materials cause no damage to anyone, on the short term or the long term; it will be a society that emulates the design brilliance of nature, which we have yet to fully appreciate. The great work of this era will be extraordinary for defining its goals not solely in terms of a decade or even a century, but of millennia. The American people will have thrown off the tyranny of compressive time, coercive work, and erosive competition. It will be a country still rent by massive discontinuities as the momentum of today's world extends far into the future, but it will be a country that is connected, aware, and committed to the future. It will be an America that can see, and can see that it knows all it needs to know to sustain and honor life.

That alone will distinguish it from where we are today.

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Paul Hawken is the author (with Hunter and Amory Lovins) of Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution and The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability.

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ACQUITTAL! D.C. DEMOCRACY SEVEN TRIAL ENDS IN VICTORY FOR DEFENDANTS

February 15, 2001

WASHINGTON, DC -- The trial of the D.C. Democracy Seven, arrested for protesting Congressional oppression of the District of Columbia last summer, concluded at 1:30 p.m., Thursday, February 15 at D.C. Superior Court with "not guilty" verdicts for all defendants. Each defendant faced a maximum penalty of six months in jail and/or a $500 fine.

The mood in the courtroom as the verdicts were read was tense. As the verdict for each defendant was read by the jury foreperson, the mood shifted to relief as it became clear that all were to be acquitted.

Afterward, defendant Steve Donkin said, "If the government thinks it can intimidate D.C. residents by prosecuting these cases, then it better think again. D.C. residents are going to continue to demand full citizenship rights until we get them."

This trial was the second resulting from an incident on July 26, 2000, when Donkin, Martin Thomas, Karen Szulgit, Tanya Snyder, Queen Mother ShemaYah, Debby Hanrahan and Bette Hoover were arrested in the U.S. House of Representatives Visitors' Gallery for allegedly chanting "D.C. Votes No! Free D.C.!" during a Congressional vote on the District of Columbia Appropriations Bill. At the Seven's first trial last October, prosecutors dismissed without explanation charges faced by Thomas. The remaining six defendants went to trial and received a hung jury, at which point the judge declared a mistrial and government prosecutor Andrew Lopez immediately asked for a new trial.

During the two days of testimony in the current trial, the prosecution called upon two U.S. Capitol Hill police officers to testify and showed a C-SPAN videotape of the alleged disruption to the jury. Non-voting Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) testified for the defense that Congressional proceedings were never disrupted by the "commotion" in the Visitors' Gallery that day. She also testified extensively about her role in Congress as a non-voting delegate, particularly as it applies to her inability to have any influence on the process by which Congress annually approves D.C.'s budget.

The jury of 12 District of Columbia residents deliberated for three hours on Wednesday afternoon and returned on Thursday morning for two more hours of discussion before they rendered their unanimous verdict.

The D.C. Appropriations Bill enables Congress to control the city's budget, the domain of municipal authorities in all other U.S. cities. Congressionally imposed budget cuts in public funding programs have precipitated current local crises such as the impending elimination of many emergency health care services provided by D.C. General, the city's only public hospital. Other actions such as the federal takeover of D.C.'s judicial system and the transfer of thousands of inmates to a privatized prison system are inherent in congessional control of local affairs.

The Appropriations Bill also includes riders that overturn locally passed legislation. These riders have prohibited D.C. from enacting Initiative 59, passed overwhelmingly by D.C. voters in 1998, which would allow use of medical marijuana by patients with serious and terminal illnesses. The riders also have gutted other programs passed by the city's voters, including D.C.'s locally funded needle exchange program designed to control the spread of HIV. Also they have restricted use of local money to fund family planning for low-income women; and prohibited use of city funds to sue Congress for D.C. voting rights.

Attorney Paul R. Hurst of Steptoe & Johnson, LLP, joined the defendants' legal team, which also included attorneys Reginald Williamson and Veda M. Carney, both of whom represented defendants pro bono at the last trial. Defendants and defense attorneys are available for interviews. More information is available by clicking www.standupfordemocracy.org.

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French Farmer Appeals Jail Sentence

February 15, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-France-Activist-Trial.html

MONTPELLIER, France (AP) -- A French sheep farmer who became a resistance fighter against unchecked globalization appeared before a court Thursday to appeal a three-month jail sentence for wrecking a McDonald's restaurant.

Jose Bove, 47, rose to fame in August 1999 when he and nine others used farm equipment to dismantle a McDonald's branch under construction in Millau, in the foothills of France's Massif Central mountains.

In September, a Millau court sentenced Bove to three months in prison for the act. Eight defendants convicted with him, receiving sentences ranging from $265 in fines to two-month suspended prison terms, are also appealing.

During Thursday's hearing, rock music from an outdoor anti-globalization festival organized by Bove's supporters wafted into the courthouse. Several hundred people milled about food stands in a nearby park, where a glass of wine and a slice of Roquefort on toast went for $1.50.

On the stand, Bove compared the McDonald's trashing to the Boston Tea Party and the storming of the Bastille prison during the French Revolution. His testimony drew applause from spectators and visibly irritated the prosecutor, who asked him to ``stop overacting.''

``We found ourselves in an intolerable situation, and couldn't let ourselves get walked on,'' Bove said.

Bove and his codefendants argued that French farmers had been ``taken hostage'' by a U.S. surtax on a string of European luxury products -- including Roquefort cheese, a product of the Millau region. They argued that their only recourse was radical action.

The surtaxes, backed by the World Trade Organization, were a counter measure to protest Europe's rejection of U.S. hormone-treated beef.

``Eighteen months later, we are still victims of the American surtaxes,'' Bove told reporters, puffing on his pipe. ``The WTO is running our lives.''

The case was expected to run through Friday, though the court was unlikely to render an immediate decision.

Bove and his radical union, the Farmers' Confederation, hopes some 10,000 people would attend Friday for a carnival-like sideshow outside the courtroom -- similar to one held outside his original trial.

Mustachioed, pipe-smoking Bove, nicknamed ``Robin Hood'' by his fans, is involved in two other trials this month.

On Feb. 9. a prosecutor asked a court to sentence Bove to three months in prison for raiding a research greenhouse and destroying more than 1,000 genetically altered rice plants in June 1999.

On the sidelines of the McDonald's appeal, a separate appeal was underway Thursday. In that case, a Montpellier prosecutor was trying to reverse a court's decision not to convict Bove on charges of briefly holding captive three Agriculture Ministry officials at a government building in Rodez, France, in 1999. The prosecutor recommended two months in prison for Bove. The court will issue its decision March 22.

He already has spent three weeks in jail for sacking the McDonald's.

Bove's protests have taken him to Papeete, Tahiti, where he protested French nuclear testing, and Seattle, where he helped lead a raucous counter-summit to the WTO meeting in November 1999.

Bove recently took part in an anti-globalization forum in Brazil, where he was arrested for occupying a local soybean farm in protest of genetically engineered crops.

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2 Teens Admit They Set Fires to Help Radical Environmental Group

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By AL BAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/nyregion/15ELF.html

CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y., Feb. 14 - Two Suffolk County teenagers told a judge in United States District Court here today that they helped to carry out a radical environmental group's underground campaign of arson and destruction in recent months.

As part of a plea negotiation worked out with federal prosecutors, the teenagers, Matthew T. Rammelkamp, 16, and George Mashkow Jr., 17, each pleaded guilty as adults to one count of arson conspiracy before Magistrate Judge William D. Wall.

In doing so, they joined a third high school student, Jared McIntyre, 17, the son of a New York Police Department sergeant, who pleaded guilty to arson on Friday.

The youths are believed to be the first to cooperate with federal agents investigating a wave of arson and vandalism attacks claimed by the Earth Liberation Front, a militant environmentalist group that has long operated in Western states like Colorado and Oregon.

Today, Mr. Rammelkamp, a high school junior and honor student, said he was a member of the group, known as ELF. He said that in December and January, he plotted with others to set fires in newly built subdivisions and to burn construction equipment.

"I obtained and received information from the ELF Web site and used that information in furtherance of that conspiracy," Mr. Rammelkamp said as his mother, father and lawyer stood by his side. "I and others then reported, by press release, those acts."

Earlier this week, Elaine D. Close, a spokeswoman for ELF in Portland, Ore., said the teenagers had not notified the group's press office of their identities.

The plea did not mention an attack last July on a cornfield in Cold Spring Harbor that was being used to conduct genetic research. Investigators are trying to find out who is responsible for that and other acts of violence in Suffolk County that ELF has claimed in recent months, officials said.

Mr. Rammelkamp's lawyer, Thomas F. Liotti, said his client had no choice but to admit his membership in ELF to avoid more criminal charges.

"He believes he is a member of ELF, but there is no specific instructions, no membership card, no dues that are paid," Mr. Liotti said after the proceeding, saying that the plot was misguided and had been inspired by the group's Internet message condemning urban sprawl.

"This is a little bit McCarthyesque," Mr. Liotti said of the charges. "What organizations are terrorist organizations? Can 16-year-old kids be charged in federal court?

"I don't think the federal government should be involved in this case. To me, it is nothing more than an arson case, and he should be afforded youthful-offender treatment in state court."

The assistant United States attorneys prosecuting the cases, George A. Stamboulidis and Gary Brown, declined to comment on the proceedings.

In his plea earlier today, Mr. Mashkow, also known as KCi, admitted his role in a Dec. 9 fire that destroyed a nearly completed condominium at a complex known as Birchwood at Spring Landing, causing about $200,000 in damage.

He also told the judge that he and others took part in setting an unfinished single-family house afire on Dec. 19, according to a witness in the courtroom.

Mr. Mashkow's lawyer, Charles C. Russo, said: "I am not representing an environmental activist. I am representing a 17-year-old misguided kid who basically made the monumental mistake in his life."

Mr. Russo said Mr. Mashkow did not claim membership in ELF and hoped that his remorse would allow him to avoid jail time.

Under federal sentencing guidelines, the youths face a sentence of 5 to 20 years each. They each face a maximum fine of $250,000 and the possibility of paying restitution of up to $358,000.

Mr. Mashkow and Mr. Rammelkamp were released on $1,000 bail each. No date has been set for sentencing.

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China's War Against Itself

February 15, 2001
New York Times
By DAVID OWNBY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/15/opinion/15OWNB.html

MONTREAL - China's Liberation Army Daily recently condemned the Falun Gong movement and its leader, Li Hongzhi, as "Western anti-Chinese forces" - a new wrinkle in a government campaign to group Falun Gong with the Branch Davidians and Aum Shinrikyo as apocalyptic doomsday cults, and which began by dismissing the spiritual movement as a trick played on the superstitious and the illiterate.

Most Chinese Falun Gong practitioners I have met in North America, however, are youngish and highly educated - most often in the hard sciences - and feel that their practice of Falun Gong has reacquainted them with aspects of Chinese cultural tradition that had been ignored since the Communist Revolution in 1949. But in the context of modern Chinese history, traditionalism can be subversive, and Falun Gong - by bringing together science, spirituality and Chinese nationalism - has proved to be explosive.

Since the 19th century, the central dilemma of China's history has been how to remain Chinese while becoming modern. Science has been perceived by Chinese intellectuals and the Chinese state as the solution to that dilemma. Science was first understood as little more than a handy - if formidable - bag of technological tricks that had enabled the West to build strong armies and that China could borrow in her turn. The notion that traditional Chinese culture could be preserved beneath a protective outer shell of Western science and technology was summed up by the slogan "Let Chinese learning serve as our foundation, and Western learning as our practical orientation."

In the 20th century, it became clear that science was more than tricks and that the scientific method might pose a challenge to traditional Chinese culture. Many Chinese intellectuals were prepared to make the painful admission that Chinese culture needed changing and hoped that science, as a neutral, universal methodology, would propel China forward - perhaps even past the West. The supposedly scientific character of Marxism-Leninism was an important factor in its adoption by Chinese intellectuals, and a romance of science continues to permeate Chinese culture to this day.

That attitude is critical to understanding Falun Gong. Li Hongzhi, its founder, sees his message not only as a return to a neglected spiritual tradition, but also as a major contribution to modern science. Quarks and neutrinos figure in Mr. Li's writings as frequently as Buddhas and bodhisattvas, and he insists that truth, benevolence and tolerance are the physical qualities of the universe, not simple moral platitudes. In surveys I have circulated at Falun Gong "experience-sharing" conferences in Montreal and Toronto, practitioners identify the intellectual content of Mr. Li's teachings - in particular, his physics - as equally or more important than spiritual enlightenment when they explain what drew them to the movement. Indeed, the greatest difference between Falun Gong and the larger qigong movement, from which it emerged in 1992, is precisely Li Hongzhi's emphasis on "scientific" theory.

Widespread practice of all forms of qigong - a varied set of exercises, meditative techniques and spiritual practices, based on ancient Chinese wisdom - spawned a mass movement of some 200 million people in China in the 1980's. Even now, most Chinese accept that qigong is real and helpful in achieving physical and mental well- being. The Chinese state once supported qigong, including the Falun Gong variant, and established the Chinese Qigong Scientific Research Association in December 1985 to coordinate and finance experiments to prove that qigong has a scientific basis. (Official support for qigong lasted well into the 90's.) At a time when Deng Xiaoping was opening China to bring in Western technology, China was investing in qigong, hoping to prove the existence of an indigenous science. For a brief, heady moment, it was possible to be modern and Chinese at the same time, as the twin goals of China's modern experience came into focus.

But during the past decade, qigong and Falun Gong grew faster than the state could have imagined or controlled. In China's newly energized economy, qigong masters - charismatic men and women in their 40's and 50's who claimed to have studied with elderly sages who had direct knowledge of China's spiritual heritage - sold books and audio- and videocassettes, and organized national tours with mass rallies in which paying customers were said to have experienced trance, possession and a variety of otherworldly states.

The authorities could not control the message. Qigong as Chinese science gave way to moral exhortations, supernatural powers and miraculous cures, all of which took as their point of departure traditional Chinese culture as defined by qigong masters and practitioners. The qigong boom had the air of a cultural revitalization movement, although one should hasten to add that traditions are always transformed as they are revitalized.

The Chinese Communist Party survived the catastrophic failure of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution by liberalizing the economy and appealing to patriotism. But the party's proud victories against the Japanese and the Nationalists of Chiang Kai-shek are now more than 50 years old. China's rapid economic development has brought with it inequality, corruption, and "Western" consumerism. Qigong and Falun Gong have offered a return to a timeless cultural pride based on reasserted Chinese values. Neither appears to have had overt political ambitions at the outset. But their evocation of a different vision of Chinese tradition and its contemporary value is now so threatening to the state and party because it denies them the sole right to define the meaning of Chinese nationalism, and perhaps of Chineseness.

David Ownby, associate professor of history at the University of Montreal, has published widely on Chinese secret societies and is author of a forthcoming book on Falun Gong.

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Students in streets oppose Wahid

February 15, 2001
Washington Times
By Ian Timberlake
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001215222611.htm

JAKARTA, Indonesia - President Abdurrahman Wahid is facing the most severe political crisis of his 16 months in office with the battle to oust him over corruption charges boiling out of parliament and onto Indonesia's streets in daily protests by angry students.

But the student movement has been stung by accusations that it is manipulated and perhaps even funded by the embattled president's opponents, some of whom are seen as part of the "New Order" - the regime of former dictator Suharto, who was toppled in May 1998 after massive student protests.

Anti-reform forces are widely believed to turn to people like Eggi Sudjana when they want to make a point on the streets. Mr. Sudjana, a 41-year-old lawyer, denies the student movement is organized but concedes he has advised students of the need to topple Mr. Wahid.

He chuckles at the suggestion he is one of the people behind the current demonstrations.

"If I am the one organizing, I have to be near them. I must be out there. I'm not. I just got back from Japan. I'm a busy man," he said.

Student demonstrations peaked in late January and early February when several thousand protesters blocked a highway outside parliament as the House of Representatives discussed a committee report that implicated Mr. Wahid in two financial scandals.

"There are New Order forces manipulating the student movement, yes," said Todung Mulya Lubis, a prominent lawyer. "I think a lot of people in parliament suddenly converted themselves to reform, when in the past they were part of the New Order. . . . I think it's disgusting, actually."

Offering little concrete evidence, the House report claimed Mr. Wahid was involved in the illegal transfer of $4 million from the state food agency called Bulog. It also accused him of failing to officially declare a $2 million donation from the sultan of neighboring Brunei.

As massive student protests continued, the House earlier this month voted to censure Mr. Wahid, a nearly blind centrist Muslim cleric who is known as Gus Dur. The formal memorandum effectively gives him four months to respond before parliament can begin impeachment proceedings.

"We see the indications that Gus Dur is implicated in KKN, so we ask him to resign," said Andre Rosiade, 22, a Trisakti University accounting student. KKN are the Indonesian initials for corruption, collusion and nepotism, which was a standard rallying cry for demonstrators opposed to the Suharto regime.

Mr. Rosiade is president of the Trisakti University Student Executive Body, or BEM. Leaders of the University of Indonesia student movement are also officials of BEM, a body that exists at a number of campuses and which critics charge is closely linked to another group, the Association of Islamic Students (HMI).

Hendardi, a Jakarta human-rights lawyer who represented East Timor's resistance leader, Xanana Gusmao, said that among the HMI alumni is Akbar Tandjung, leader of the Golkar Party, which backed Suharto. Golkar is now the second-largest group in parliament and a fierce critic of Mr. Wahid.

Another HMI alumnus is Mr. Sudjana.

"This isn't like the student movement of 1998," Hendardi said. "It's engineered."

Golkar members are not the only ones who want Mr. Wahid out, but the party has become the focus of anger for the president's supporters, thousands of whom rallied last week before trashing Golkar Party offices in East Java province.

Yesterday, about 10,000 supporters of Indonesia's beleaguered president rallied in his political stronghold to protest the corruption accusations against him.

There were no reports of violence during the demonstration in the town of Jember, about 510 miles east of Jakarta in eastern Java, police said. Other recent demonstrations by Wahid loyalists have ended with mobs stoning or torching offices of political rivals.

"There is a convergence of interests to get rid of Gus Dur," a Western diplomat said.

"I think he will have to go at some point," the diplomat said. "Those who decided to move against him are really very determined."

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Colorado

01/02/15
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Colorado Springs - Some students are protesting as schools across Colorado begin state-mandated testing. Kids at Sierra High School say the Colorado Student Assessment Program tests place undue stress on students and that schools should not be judged on exam performance. Under Gov. Owens' education plan, funding for schools is tied to assessment test results.
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