------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Thanks, Dr. YourNameHere
Admiral Apologizes to Japan Families
Senior Navy official tries to mend ties with Japan
Greenpeace protests at E.ON over Czech N-plant
Uranium fear threatens NATO unity
Uranium scare worries NATO
Iraq Calls Powell's Position 'Rubbish' And 'Stupid'
Powell Proposes Easing Sanctions on Iraqi Civilians
Powell to push easing of sanctions
Putin Swipes at Bush After Winning Seoul's Support
South Korean President Sides With Russia on Missile Defense
Blair comes calling
Defining 'anathema'
Russian Sub's Officer Wrote of Torpedo Blast
Alaska
GOP introduces plan to allow oil drilling in Alaska
Nuclear energy should be used, not feared
Illinois
New Mexico
Study to Take Stock of Reactor's Long-Term Health
Bush Speech Highlights

MILITARY
Bush and Colombian President Meet
Pastrana urges U.S. to meet with Colombian rebels
Surviving Drugs' Ravages to Build a Productive Life
Adjusting Drug Policy
U.S. agents discover tunnel for smuggling drugs
New York
Cocaine or polo shirts?
Who won that war?
Marine in Charge of Troubled Osprey Program Is Being Replaced

OTHER
It's Only Logical things that have happened can happen again
FACT OF THE WEEK
Court Rules Cost Should Not Affect Action on Clean Air
Fears about impact of foot-and-mouth disease grow
Court upholds federal air-quality standards
FARMERS PROTEST
Louisiana
Whitman disagrees
KERIK MAKES ANOTHER ARREST
U.S. Citizen Arrested in Russia
U.S. exchange student arrested in Russia
Varied Portraits of bin Laden Emerge in Embassy Bomb Case
Witness never heard defendant take terrorist oath

ACTIVISTS
Activists Released
New College of California Spring Field Course
students interested in anti-sweatshop internships
DC - Conference on Pinochet Precedent
NOW RALLY/PATRICIA IRELAND TO SPEAK
Fact:
China Lashes Back at Human Rights Critics
China Hones Old Tool:
China's rights record worsens

-
-------- NUCLEAR

Thanks, Dr. YourNameHere

Tuesday February 27
Yahoo News
By W. Blake Gray, From myprimetime.com
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/pt/20010227/co/thanks_dr_yournamehere_1.html

They often have English names, because University of Brentwick sounds more sophisticated to Americans than Diplomas-R-Us.

You find the advertisements in the back of The Economist magazine, offering you a chance to receive an advanced degree through your life experience. Or maybe you get an e-mail offering you the opportunity to pick up a "fully accredited" MBA in three weeks or less.

Diploma mills have been around for decades. However, the business of selling degrees has expanded, thanks to the great global reach of the Internet.

Moreover, the operators of fake schools are getting more sophisticated. When the University of Brentwick was exposed as a phony, the same people just changed the name to University of Devonshire and kept the $30 million-plus annual business rolling, said John Bear, an expert on distance learning who publishes guides to colleges both legitimate and not.

"They have an office in London, but their e-mail comes from Romania. Their printing press is in Israel. Their bank is in Cyprus. The owner lives in Beverly Hills. Who's going to do anything about it?" Bear said.

The British investigator assigned to the case called Bear hoping to learn that the FBI was on the case. But the FBI agent most interested in diploma mills - a Fox Mulder of the bogus sheepskin trade - recently retired, and Bear said nobody has stepped forward to replace him.

"Everyone is saying it's not our problem," he said.

And yet, diploma mills are everyone's problem. When the FBI was more interested, they exposed fake diploma-bearing high-school principals, ministers, corporate executives. Bear testified in a Florida case against a prison psychologist who had bought his doctorate, and he said his friend at the FBI found seven people with fake Ph.D.s at NASA. But it gets worse.

"One diploma mill that specialized in nuclear technology safety had given more than 500 degrees," Bear said.

Nowadays almost all diploma mills are accredited, because there are more than 100 false accrediting agencies, most of them started by the school operators themselves.

"Sometimes they have two buttons on the phone - one for the school, and the other for the agency that accredits the school."

Cash In On Employer Tuition Support
http://rd.yahoo.com/Dailynews/pt/inlinks/*http://www.myprimetime.com/work/jobs_hiring/content/tuition_support/index.shtml

But I Flunked Kindergarten Twice!
http://rd.yahoo.com/Dailynews/pt/inlinks/*http://www.myprimetime.com/work/jobs_hiring/content/overqual/index.shtml

---

Admiral Apologizes to Japan Families

February 27, 2001
New York Times
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Japan-Submarine-Collision.html

TOKYO (AP) -- Acting as a special envoy for President Bush, the Navy's No. 2 officer apologized Wednesday to the families of the nine people missing and presumed dead after a surfacing U.S. submarine hit and sank a Japanese high school's training ship.

The meeting was intended to calm anger in Japan over the Feb. 9 accident off the Hawaiian island of Oahu and silence critics who have said the United States failed to make appropriate apologies for the accident and was slow to disclose details on why it occurred.

``I'm here to request in the most humble and sincere manner that you accept the apology of the people of the United States and the U.S. Navy as a personal representative of President Bush,'' Adm. William J. Fallon told the family members at a gathering in the U.S. Ambassador's residence.

His message appeared to be well received.

``The apology from many sources including the U.S. president has been conveyed to us,'' said Ryosuke Terata, whose 17-year-old son is among the missing. ``We thank you for meeting with us.''

Immediately after his arrival Tuesday, Fallon delivered a letter of apology from Bush to Japan's prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, and conveyed the president's belief in the crucial role the U.S.-Japan security relationship plays in maintaining world peace.

Washington is particularly keen to ease tensions over the Feb. 9 submarine disaster as security ties were strained even before the accident by a series of sex crimes by U.S. servicemen on Okinawa.

Anger exploded just days before the USS Greeneville rammed into the Ehime Maru off Hawaii over an e-mail in which the top Marine on Okinawa reportedly called local leaders ``nuts'' and a ``bunch of wimps.''

He later apologized, but the uproar has yet to die down and several local assemblies have passed resolutions demanding the U.S. military presence on Okinawa be reduced or withdrawn altogether.

Roughly one-half of the 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan are in Okinawa.

In Tuesday's meeting, Mori asked that the United States do the utmost to salvage the sunken Japanese fishing vessel and give a full accounting of the collision. He also reportedly said Japan may try to retrieve the boat on its own if U.S. efforts fail.

Fallon gave few details of the contents of Bush's letter of apology, but Foreign Ministry official Toyohisa Kozuki told reporters the president said American authorities would do what they could to raise the ship.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the letter was ``a sign of the importance the United States places on its relations with Japan and the sorrow that we feel for the people in Japan who have lost their lives and for people who have lost their loved ones.''

Meanwhile, in Honolulu, five Japanese salvage experts and a representative from the Japanese Consulate visited the accident site Monday and got a firsthand look at the wreckage via cameras attached to an ocean surveyor. The Navy is taking videotape of the Ehime Maru to determine whether it can be salvaged.

Hiroshi Sato, chief of the oceanography office of Japan's Foreign Ministry, said the ship appeared to be mostly intact and had settled on the ocean floor in a stable position. However, he said he would have to talk with Japanese officials before determining how they might attempt to raise the vessel.

Nine people, including four students, are missing and presumed dead.

Though the sub's commander issued a statement Sunday expressing his ``most sincere regret'' for the accident, relatives of the missing said they won't accept an apology unless it is made in person.

The nine missing were among 35 people on board the Ehime Maru training vessel when it sank shortly after it was struck by the U.S. nuclear submarine.

The Ehime Maru was operated by a high school for aspiring sailors in Uwajima, a fishing village about 430 miles southwest of Tokyo.

---

Senior Navy official tries to mend ties with Japan

02/27/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-27-apology.htm

TOKYO (AP) - In Washington's latest move to soothe Japanese anger over the sinking of a fishing boat by a U.S. submarine, a Navy admiral on Tuesday delivered an apology from President Bush and prepared to meet with the families of the missing.

Adm. William J. Fallon's arrival in Japan demonstrated the Bush administration's determination not to let the furor over the accident damage security ties with its top Asian ally.

"By coming from Washington to be here in person, I seek not only to apologize, but to promote better understanding between the people of our two nations," Fallon said in a statement upon arrival.

Fallon held a 30-minute meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori and - along with Bush's apologies - conveyed the president's belief in the crucial role the U.S.-Japan security relationship plays in maintaining world peace.

Fallon was scheduled to meet Wednesday at Ambassador Thomas Foley's residence with relatives of the nine Japanese lost at sea. The Navy's No. 2 officer was also to meet Defense Agency Chief Toshitsugu Saito and other Cabinet ministers.

Washington is particularly keen to ease tensions over the Feb. 9 submarine disaster as security ties were strained even before the accident by a series of sex crimes by U.S. servicemen on Okinawa.

Anger exploded just days before the USS Greeneville rammed into the Ehime Maru off Hawaii over an e-mail in which the top Marine on Okinawa reportedly called local leaders "nuts" and a "bunch of wimps."

He later apologized, but the uproar has yet to die down and several local assemblies have passed resolutions demanding the U.S. military presence on Okinawa be reduced or withdrawn altogether.

Roughly one-half of the 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan are in Okinawa.

In Tuesday's meeting, Mori asked that the United States do the utmost to salvage the sunken Japanese fishing vessel and give a full accounting of the collision. He also reportedly said Japan may try to retrieve the boat on its own if U.S. efforts fail.

Fallon gave few details of the contents of Bush's letter of apology, but Foreign Ministry official Toyohisa Kozuki told reporters the president said American authorities would do what they could to raise the ship.

Officials here also will be looking for an explanation over the causes of the accident, and why the United States had been slow to reveal that civilian guests were at the controls of the sub.

Nine people, including four students, are missing and presumed dead.

Though the sub's commander on Sunday issued a statement expressing his "most sincere regret" for the accident, relatives of the missing said they won't accept an apology unless it is made in person.

The nine missing were among 35 people on board the Ehime Maru training vessel when it sank shortly after it was struck by the U.S. nuclear submarine.

The Ehime Maru was operated by a high school for aspiring sailors in Uwajima, a fishing village about 430 miles southwest of Tokyo.

-------- czech republic

Greenpeace protests at E.ON over Czech N-plant

February 27, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9919&newsDate=27-Feb-2001

VIENNA - Greenpeace activists took over the Austrian office of German energy giant E.ON Energie on Monday to protest against future imports of power from controversial Czech nuclear plant Temelin.

Around 20 Greenpeace members took part in the action, which began at around 09.00 a.m local time (0800 GMT), with nine gaining access to the office itself.

The remainder held banners on the street reading "E.ON equals Temelin power" and set off a loud hand-held alarm.

"Nuclear power exports from Temelin to Austria through the back door are completely unacceptable," Greenpeace Austria's energy spokesman Erwin Mayer said in a statement.

"We demand that E.ON stops all electricity contracts with the operators of Temelin CEZ, so long as CEZ insists on continuing with the commissioning of Temelin."

Police broke up the demonstration at around 1500 GMT after the alarm had sounded for over an hour.

Temelin, which is fiercely opposed by its staunchly anti-nuclear neighbour Austria, restarted testing operations late on Friday after a month-long shutdown to deal with faults.

Austrian protestors have frequently blockaded the Czech border with Austria to protest at the $2.6 billion plant, built just over 50 kilometres (31 miles) from Austria.

Its operator, the government-controlled power company CEZ, insists it is a state-of-the-art project and safe.

E.ON said in a statement it imported 1.5 percent of its total power capacity from the Czech Republic and said Temelin, which is not yet connected to the network, had not and did not contribute at all to this figure.

Greenpeace has begun collecting signatures against Temelin and in particular from community heads, in both Austria and the southern German region of Bavaria, promising to boycott any power supplier found to be using Temelin-produced electricity.

It says it has collected signatures from the heads of 217 Austrian communities and 60 Bavarian.

Greenpeace has singled out E.ON, saying the German company was the largest importer of electricity produced in the Czech Republic.


-------- depleted uranium

Uranium fear threatens NATO unity
Perceived health threat could weaken alliance

February 27, 2001
Ottawa Citizen
The National Post
Mike Blanchfield
http://www.nationalpost.com/

OTTAWA - NATO officials are concerned "a legacy of doubt" could weaken the alliance if it does not properly address the controversy over whether depleted uranium poses a cancer risk to its troops.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization fears some of its 19 member countries might opt out of military missions if depleted uranium is, or has been, used in proposed areas of operation.

"This could have profound impacts on future coalition operations and Alliance cohesion," warns a NATO briefing document recently tabled at the alliance's Brussels headquarters.

The document, intended primarily for the eyes of NATO member countries, summarizes the controversy that flared in Europe last month over depleted uranium, and whether it is responsible for a so-called Balkans Syndrome, a label that has been given to unexplained deaths and illness among some alliance troops.

The leukemia deaths of about 20 peacekeepers from Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain and elsewhere raised concerns about whether the 40,000 anti-tank missiles used during the Kosovo and Bosnia bombing campaigns might be posing a health risk. The weapons were tipped with radioactive depleted uranium.

Since the flare-up of the controversy, NATO health officials have presented a calm and confident public response.

At two Brussels press briefings they restated the fact there is no proven scientific link between exposure to depleted uranium and increased cancer rates, but added that because of the concerns raised, the alliance favours further studies of the issue.

While NATO might have science on its side, the internal document expresses concern that political fallout in some countries over the depleted uranium scare could undermine the strength and solidarity of the alliance.

"Public opinion in many European nations is already skeptical about official advice on health issues following a history of confusion and U-turns on BSE or mad cow disease. No matter what the scientific evidence, it is possible that the current debate over depleted uranium munitions will leave a legacy of doubt and suspicion such that certain NATO allies might be unwilling to become involved in operations -- or the aftermath of operations -- where depleted uranium munitions are used."

The document concludes the level of radiation emitted by depleted uranium is too low to cause cancer and that it is "unlikely to be a source of a 'Balkans Syndrome.'"

It recommends a special NATO committee, recently formed to address the issue, ensure the results of further studies are rapidly disseminated.

"It might well be the case that the committee's mandate should be broadened if studies indicate the presence of a health hazard, but exonerate depleted uranium."

The committee includes representatives from 50 countries and five international organizations.

The report also says NATO should adopt a suggestion by the World Health Organization that calls for cleaning up or cordoning off of heavily bombed areas to minimize radiation exposure.

Since depleted uranium re-emerged as a political issue in Europe last month, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for a ban on the substance.

The United Nations Environment Program is gathering data on the radiation levels at bomb sites in the Balkans and is to report its findings in a matter of weeks.

Canada has said voluntary testing of its peacekeepers has shown no elevated levels of cancer.

However, Portugal, Norway and Greece are planning to screen soldiers for the effects of depleted uranium, and Russia and Portugal are sending teams of experts to Kosovo.

UN observers have discovered the presence of radioactivity at eight sites in the Yugoslav province where depleted uranium warheads exploded.

And the U. S. warned its NATO allies 18 months ago that U.S. munitions littering Kosovo's countryside after the 1999 NATO air raids posed potential health concerns.

A document titled Hazard Awareness issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned soldiers and civilians against touching spent depleted uranium ammunition or other contaminated materials, according to news reports.

The reports said personnel handling the heads of anti-tank shells or entering wrecked vehicles should wear protective masks and cover exposed skin, and people involved in the more hazardous clearing tasks should undergo health assessments afterward.

Uranium is one of the heaviest metals, which makes it effective in piercing targets such as tanks or concrete. The depleted form is only mildly radioactive, but its dust is considered dangerous if ingested or inhaled.

John Manley, Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, is in Brussels today for informal meetings with his NATO counterparts. The ministers are to discuss a range of topics including the future prospects for peace in the Balkans and the U.S. plan to build a missile defence system.

Fears for the future of the NATO alliance have been caused by George W. Bush's ambitious plans for a National Missile Defence shield as well as the possibility of closer European integration.

The President's NMD shield has been opposed by some European powers as well as Russia and China. The Chrétien government has been tepid toward the idea.

Some Western allies, particularly France, say the project would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, seen by Russia as the bedrock of arms control, and could tip the security balance on the continent.

Plans for a 60,000-strong European rapid reaction force have been controversial because of concerns it could replace the need for NATO as a global police organization.

William Cohen, former U.S. defense secretary, has warned an independent EU military contingent could destroy NATO.

British General Sir Peter de la Billiere, a former commander in the Gulf War, predicted transAtlantic ties would weaken.

--------

Uranium scare worries NATO
Alliance's unity at risk, internal document warns

01/02/27
Ottawa Citizen
Mike Blanchfield The Ottawa Citizen
http://news.excite.com/news/uw/010227/university-70

NATO officials are concerned that "a legacy of doubt" could weaken the alliance if it does not properly address the controversy over whether depleted uranium poses a cancer risk to its troops.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization fears some of its 19 member countries might opt out of military missions if depleted uranium is, or has been, used in proposed areas of operation.

"This could have profound impacts on future coalition operations and Alliance cohesion," warns a NATO briefing document recently tabled at the alliance's Brussels headquarters, a copy of which was obtained by the Citizen.

The document, intended primarily for the eyes of NATO member countries, summarizes the controversy that flared in Europe last month over depleted uranium, and whether it is responsible for "Balkans Syndrome," a label that has been given to unexplained deaths and illness among some alliance troops.

The leukemia deaths of about 20 peacekeepers from Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain and elsewhere raised concerns about whether the 40,000 anti-tank missiles used during the Kosovo and Bosnia bombing campaigns might be posing a health risk. The weapons were tipped with radioactive depleted uranium.

Since the flare-up of the controversy, NATO health officials have presented a calm and confident public response. At two Brussels press briefings they restated the fact that there is no proven scientific link between exposure to depleted uranium and increased cancer rates, but added that because of the concerns raised, the alliance favours further studies of the issue.

While NATO might have science on its side, the internal document expresses concern that political fallout in some countries over the depleted uranium scare could undermine the strength and solidarity of the alliance.

"Public opinion in many European nations is already skeptical about official advice on health issues following a history of confusion and U-turns on BSE or 'mad cow disease,' " the document says.

"No matter what the scientific evidence, it is possible that the current debate over depleted uranium munitions will leave a legacy of doubt and suspicion such that certain NATO allies might be unwilling to become involved in operations -- or the aftermath of operations -- where depleted uranium munitions are used."

The document concludes that the level of radiation emitted by depleted uranium is too low to cause cancer and that it is "unlikely to be a source of a 'Balkans Syndrome.' "

It recommends that a special NATO committee, recently formed to address the issue, ensure that the results of further studies are rapidly disseminated.

"It might well be the case that the committee's mandate should be broadened if studies indicate the presence of a health hazard but exonerate depleted uranium."

The committee includes representatives from 50 countries and five international organizations.

The report also says NATO should adopt a suggestion by the World Health Organization that calls for cleaning up or cordoning off heavily bombed areas to minimize radiation exposure.

Since depleted uranium re-emerged as a political issue in Europe last month, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling for a ban on the substance.

The United Nations Environment Program is gathering data on the radiation levels at bomb sites in the Balkans and is to report its findings in a matter of weeks.

Canada has said that voluntary testing of its peacekeepers has shown no elevated levels of cancer.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley is in Brussels today for informal meetings with his NATO counterparts.

The ministers are to discuss a range of topics, including the future prospects for peace in the Balkans and the U.S. plan to build a national missile defence system.

-------- iraq

Iraq Calls Powell's Position 'Rubbish' And 'Stupid'

February 27, 2001
Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-un.html?searchpv=reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Iraq Tuesday called Secretary of State Colin Powell's moves to ease sanctions against Baghdad ''rubbish'' and ``stupid,'' but ended two days of talks with the United Nations on a conciliatory note.

While castigating Powell and dismissing the chief U.N. arms inspector as ``a detail,'' Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf said his team would come to New York for another round of talks within weeks. He gave no date, but envoys said it would be after an Arab summit that begins in Jordan on March 27.

``We will come back with feedback,'' al-Sahaf said, adding that the dialogue was not an end in itself but a channel to ''find a way out, to find a solution.''

Expectations were low that the talks, which began on Monday, would yield concrete results. But some U.N. Security Council diplomats have said they would deem them positive if Iraq considered the talks the beginning of a dialogue rather than a one-shot session.

The problem, according to U.N. officials, was that until key members of a divided Security Council reached a common position, Secretary-General Kofi Annan had little to offer in his talks with al-Sahaf. The United States is in the midst of reviewing its policies toward Iraq.

``There is a long way to go. This is just a start,'' one senior U.N. official said. A council diplomat said Iraq wanted to have its say before Washington's new policies were set.

Annan, who will brief the Security Council Wednesday, was hopeful his discussions, the first with a high-level Iraqi delegation in years, would be able ``to move forward.''

Al-Sahaf spent most of the time explaining Iraq's position during the decade-old sanctions, imposed after Baghdad's troops invaded Kuwait in August 1990. But he said solutions could be reached ``if there is a collective willingness.''

But he scoffed at Powell's proposals to allow more civilian goods to reach Baghdad's 23 million people but tighten control on military hardware, calling them ``rubbish from a propagandist, not from a foreign minister.''

``STUPID STATEMENTS'' DENOUNCED

He contended Iraq had met U.N. requirements to rid itself of forbidden arms but the ``sanctions are still there, still in place.'' Now, he said, ``we are hearing stupid statements from the foreign minister of the United States of America, talking about clever sanctions, as if all of what has been done since 1990 is stupid.''

The Iraqi minister also called Hans Blix, the chief U.N. arms inspector and a respected former director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, ``a detail,'' and refused to talk to him while he was in New York.

``Hans Blix is a detail. We are not dealing with a detail.'' he said.

A key condition for lifting the embargoes is allowing arms inspectors to check on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Iraq has refused to let the weapons experts back into the country since December 1998. They left on the eve of a U.S.-British bombing raid intended to punish Baghdad for what Washington and London called its failure to cooperate with weapons searches.

Monday, al-Sahaf ruled out allowing U.N. weapons inspectors to return to Iraq even if the sanctions are scrapped. If they did, he said, they had to visit all countries in the region and ''first Israel because they have atomic arsenals and all other arsenals.''

``There will be no return for any inspectors to Iraq -- even if the sanctions are totally lifted,'' al-Sahaf said.

Al-Sahaf also shrugged off a deal between Washington and Damascus to put Iraq oil exports to Syria under U.N control, saying that Iraq was not pumping oil there.

Industry sources say a pipeline between Iraq and Syria has been pumping about 100,000 barrels of Iraqi oil a day since November, bypassing the U.N. system and putting revenues straight into Baghdad's pocket.

With criticism mounting against sanctions in the Arab world and beyond, the Bush administration is attempting to make sanctions more focused and prevent Iraq from rebuilding its nuclear, ballistic missile, chemical and biological arsenal.

Powell said Washington aimed to form a consensus around a modified package of sanctions against Iraq in time for an Arab summit on March 27.

In Brussels, Belgium, Tuesday, Powell saw the French and British foreign ministers, Hubert Vedrine and Robin Cook, in an effort to get the three Western permanent council members on the same wavelength on Iraq. At the moment, France sides with Russia and China in wanting most sanctions suspended immediately.

Powell also called Annan Tuesday about his talks with the Iraqi delegation, U.N. spokesman Fred Eckhard said.

---

Powell Proposes Easing Sanctions on Iraqi Civilians

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/world/27POWE.html?pagewanted=all

BRUSSELS, Tuesday, Feb. 27 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said on Monday that he had won agreement from Arab nations on a plan to modify sanctions on Iraq by letting in more civilian supplies but sharpening controls on strategic items sought by President Saddam Hussein.

Some American allies in the Middle East and Europe have been calling for a change of the sanctions, but now that his tour of the Middle East is over, General Powell faces a fierce debate in the Bush administration on Iraq policy. He acknowledged that there would be many questions about his plan from hard-liners in Washington.

General Powell said none of the Arab leaders he met with in the last three days, including President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whom he saw on Monday, disagreed with his strategy. "Everyone I spoke to said you've got to go down this track; it's the right thing to do," General Powell said.

"The message I've consistently heard is that overdoing it with the sanctions gives him a tool that he is using against us - and really is not weakening him," General Powell said of President Hussein.

But he said his outline of a plan would be criticized in Washington. "The charges will come that it is weakening," he said. "There will be a lot of people who will want to hear more."

Some hard-liners in Congress and the administration want tougher action, including the arming of Iraqi opposition groups, in an attempt to overthrow Mr. Hussein.

General Powell, speaking to reporters as he flew from Damascus to Brussels late on Monday, seemed to be setting up a test of strength in the administration's foreign policy apparatus, which includes Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney are believed to be more favorably disposed to arming the opposition groups. Mr. Rumsfeld's newly nominated deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, has publicly advocated that policy.

There are others in the administration who agree, believing that the unfinished business of the Persian Gulf war 10 years ago should be completed by the ouster of Mr. Hussein. At ceremonies in Kuwait City today, former President George Bush, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, General Powell and other leaders of the war commemorated the coalition victory against the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

General Powell spent his three days in the Middle East soliciting support for his sanctions plan, which he said would tighten restrictions on Iraq so that Mr. Hussein would not be able to arm his nation with weapons of mass destruction.

As part of his new strategy, Mr. Powell said he had won agreement from Syria to place into a United Nations escrow account revenues that Mr. Hussein was receiving from oil flowing through Syrian pipelines. In the last few months, those revenues have been going into Mr. Hussein's pockets, illustrating the fraying of the sanctions.

The commitment from the Syrian was so firm - Mr. Assad stated it three times during the meeting, General Powell said - that the secretary said he had telephoned President Bush to tell him.

In another development in Syria, General Powell said Mr. Assad had agreed to an American suggestion that peace talks between Syria and Israel could proceed on a parallel track with Palestinian-Israeli talks, if the occasion arose. Talks between Israel and Syria broke down last year during the Clinton administration, which held to the idea that it was possible to conduct only one track of peace talks at a time.

In outlining his plan, General Powell said a lot still needed to be worked out before an Arab League summit meeting in late March in Amman, Jordan, where he said he would like to see a formal consensus. He said he also wanted to take the plan to Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, and the five permanent members of the Security Council. Two of them, Russia and France, have acted in the past to soften the sanctions.

Among the details that need to be sorted out, General Powell said, was how to better seal the borders into Iraq in order to control the smuggling of items that could help the Iraqi leader make powerful weapons. He also said he wanted to review items like refrigerated trucks, water pumps and other items with dual uses that have been blocked by the United States and other nations in the United Nations sanctions committee.

As General Powell took his argument to five Arab countries - Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Syria - his mission was helped by his personal stature as the top commander in the gulf war, and his ability to renew friendships in the region, senior Arab diplomats said. General Powell is close to King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, and is well known to the Kuwaitis.

He was received as a "secretary of state plus," a diplomat said. Another said he was greeted as an "old friend."

Those two diplomats said they believed that General Powell's trip as the first representative of the new Bush administration to visit the Middle East would strengthen his hand in the coming debate among Bush foreign policy officials.

"He is the only one who can say, `I have been out there,' " said one of the diplomats, alluding to General Powell's skepticism about arming Iraqi opposition movements. Other administration officials have said they favor that course of action, which would be very unpopular in the region.

In his confirmation hearings last month, General Powell expressed strong skepticism about arming opposition groups, saying it would be very difficult for the United States to do so with any degree of success. In contrast, Dr. Wolfowitz wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine in the spring of 1999 that "the United States, should be prepared to commit ground forces to protect a sanctuary in southern Iraq where the opposition could safely mobilize."

Enthusiasm for the General Powell's ideas varied by country.

The reception was the coolest in Egypt, an important American ally where President Hosni Mubarak has upgraded diplomatic relations with Iraq and is considering a trade policy with Mr. Hussein. After General Powell's meeting there, a senior State Department official said, the Egyptians offered no ideas.

In Jordan, General Powell said King Abdullah, who rules over the most pro-Iraqi population in the region, wanted to help. But Jordan would need financial assistance in securing its border with Iraq and does not want to be discriminated against as the only bordering state to have to tighten up, the secretary said.

As he moved form capital to capital, General Powell brought military precision to usually phlegmatic diplomatic schedules. Some meetings with leaders lasted only an hour, and his aircraft often took off ahead of schedule.

Unlike his predecessor, Madeleine K. Albright, General Powell talked frequently on the record to reporters traveling with him as he aggressively pushed his sanctions plan.

---

Powell to push easing of sanctions

February 27, 2001
Washington Times
By Ben Barber
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001227221818.htm

DAMASCUS, Syria - Secretary of State Colin Powell will recommend that sanctions on Iraq be eased on a wide range of civilian goods and focused more closely on military equipment and said yesterday he had found "pretty solid support" from regional leaders for the ideas.

The changes are intended to address opposition from Arab allies who complain the sanctions are hurting only Iraqi civilians. But any chance they would pave the way for a return of U.N. weapons inspectors to Baghdad appeared slim after an Iraqi delegation at the United Nations insisted they would not be allowed back under any conditions.

A senior administration official said U.S. objections could be lifted on as many as 1,600 contracts for the sale of consumer and civilian goods to Iraq. The easing could even extend to some "dual-use" items such as refrigerated trucks and water pumps, which are considered to have possible military applications.

Mr. Powell will present his recommendations to President Bush following his return to Washington tomorrow, said the official, who spoke on the condition he not be identified. Asked later how Arab leaders had responded to the proposals during talks in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Syria, Mr. Powell told reporters on board his plane he had "found pretty solid support" for the idea. "Nobody threw me out," he said.

Mr. Powell said the biggest problem would be to tighten sanctions on the small amounts of materials such as fissile material needed to produce weapons of mass destruction. He proposed putting the onus on "getting nations with fissile materials to control it."

"We have to keep the box as strongly closed as it has been without having on our shoulders" the suffering of the Iraqi people, he said.

Asked about the easing of restrictions on dual-use materials, he said the United States "has been very, very strict on dual use," adding that U.S. standards are five to 10 times higher than those of other countries.

Even eggs could be considered a dual-use product because they could be used to manufacture biotoxins and vaccines, Mr. Powell said.

Officials provided details of the plan as Mr. Powell completed a three-day swing through the region that climaxed with a stirring ceremony in Kuwait City to mark the 10th anniversary of the liberation of the Persian Gulf nation by a U.S.-led coalition.

The Gulf war "was a moral fight, a moral battle," said former President George Bush at a solemn ceremony to honor the 148 American troops who were battle-related casualties of the Gulf war.

"I said the United States will never let Kuwait down," Mr. Bush said. "We fought too hard. Too many died to make it happen. I say to these Kuwaiti soldiers: 'You're not alone. Never will be.'"

Kuwaiti officials expressed their appreciation for U.S. backing and pressure on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, who continues to threaten his smaller neighbor. U.S. officials said a 10-year defense agreement providing for the stationing of American forces in Kuwait would likely be renewed in September.

Other Arab leaders, however, have grown increasingly impatient with the 10-year-old sanctions program, which is seen in the region as punishing the Iraqi people without achieving its goal of forcing Saddam to step down.

The senior U.S. official said many of those leaders had responded well to the American plan for adjusting the sanctions. "We found high receptivity. . . . We are quite pleased with the reaction," he said.

The administration is also believed to hope a revamping of the sanctions might lead to an agreement for the return of U.N. weapons inspectors who were barred from Iraq after air strikes in December 1998.

Preliminary negotiations to that end opened yesterday in New York between U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and a delegation led by Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Said Sahaf. But Mr. Sahaf said during a break in the talks that Iraq was not interested in any trade for lighter sanctions.

"There will be no return for any inspectors in Iraq," at least until they have visited other countries in the region and certified that Israel no longer has weapons of mass destruction, he said. Israel is widely believed to have as many as 200 nuclear warheads.

The remark appeared to signal a hardening of Iraq's position. For the past two years, it has said it would again cooperate with the inspections once the sanctions were lifted.

The official on Mr. Powell's plane stressed that the administration hoped to consult with the other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and talk again to Arab leaders before making a final decision on the sanctions. He said they hoped to reach a decision before an Arab summit scheduled to take place in Jordan late next month.

Mr. Powell, speaking to reporters during a flight to Brussels for a NATO ministers' meeting today, said he had won a commitment from Syrian President Bashar Assad to regularize the sale of Iraqi oil through a pipeline to Syria.

He said Mr. Assad had agreed to funnel revenues from the oil sales through the closely monitored U.N. oil-for-food program. It was the most explicit admission by Syria that it was receiving oil through the pipeline, which is reported to be carrying 150,000 barrels of oil per day.

"The president said to me he wants to put the pipeline under U.N. sanctions," Mr. Powell said.

Earlier, many of the 5,000 U.S. troops stationed in Kuwait attended the Liberation Day ceremony in their light-tan desert fatigue uniforms. The troops service and operate U.S. planes enforcing no-fly zones over southern Iraq.

"Obviously, we can't do everything in this world," said Sgt. Donald Tongue from Annapolis, an airman with the 332nd Air Expeditionary Group. "We focus on some of them. We can't spread our forces too thin. I just feel this is one of our priorities."

Retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the 541,000 U.S. troops who defeated Saddam's army in 1991, said he came to the ceremony so "the fallen heroes can see that they did not die in vain -that Kuwait remains free."

"In this cynical world, there are still things worth fighting for and one of those things is freedom," he said.

-------- missile defense

Putin Swipes at Bush After Winning Seoul's Support

February 27, 2001
Reuters
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-korea-r.html?searchpv=reuters

SEOUL (Reuters) - Fresh from winning Seoul's support for his stance on missile defense, Russian President Vladimir Putin took swipes at the United States on Wednesday in a speech to the South Korean parliament.

Putin, on a state visit to Seoul, delivered his strongest appeal in support of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty since George W. Bush came to office. Bush has vowed to scrap the landmark pact if necessary to build a missile defense shield.

The support of South Korea's Nobel Peace Prize-winning President Kim Dae-jung, spelled out in a joint declaration on Tuesday, was a diplomatic victory for Moscow, adding another key U.S. ally to a growing list of those opposed to the Bush plan.

Kim, due to meet Bush in Washington next week, took criticism from right-wingers at home for adopting a stand opposed to the United States, which defends his country with 37,000 troops.

In his speech to the South Korean national assembly, Putin called the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty ``an essential element of the entire system of global security.''

``I am certain that any attempt to withdraw from it would cause a complete collapse of the entire construction of strategic stability,'' he said.

The Cold War-era ABM treaty prohibits Moscow and Washington from developing missile defenses on the grounds that such defenses would encourage both sides to build ever larger arsenals to pierce an enemy shield.

Putin also veered from the prepared text of his remarks to criticize the United States for failing to fully ratify the START-2 arms reduction treaty, which he pushed through his country's parliament last year.

``The Russian Federation has ratified the START-2 treaty, in keeping with its national interests and the interests of the international community,'' he said, looking up from the podium.

``We are waiting for our partners to take steps to meet us.''

KIM BACKS RUSSIA

Although President Kim did not comment publicly on the ABM, his support was made explicit in the joint declaration.

``The Russian Federation and the Republic of Korea agreed that the 1972 ABM treaty is the cornerstone of strategic stability and an important foundation of international efforts on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation,'' it said.

It also contained language, apparently aimed at Washington, calling for the soonest possible implementation of START-2.

South Korea has depended on Washington for its security for five decades, and Kim's decision to side with Moscow on a contentious diplomatic issue alarmed Seoul's conservative press.

The Chosun Ilbo newspaper said it was ``diplomatically premature that South Korea opposes the revision of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty alongside Russia, against the United States trying to build its National Missile Defense.''

``Peace on the Korean Peninsula is not realized only with Korean-Russian cooperation,'' it said.

KOREAN THAW

South Korea's stand is noteworthy because one of Washington's main reasons for building the treaty-busting shield is the missile program in North Korea, which U.S. officials say would be able to strike U.S. territory by the middle of this decade.

Pyongyang stunned the West in 1998 by test-firing a ballistic missile over Japan. Washington says an updated version could hit U.S. territory by the middle of this decade, and Pyongyang could also sell its technology to other ``rogues'' such as Iran or Iraq.

But Russia has repeatedly said a thaw on the Korean peninsula had reduced the threat, while if Washington went ahead with missile defense, that threat would only grow.

In his speech, Putin said Russia was committed to halting the spread of weapons technology in the Koreas.

``The lowering of tensions is impossible without freeing the peninsula from weapons of mass destruction and maintaining its nuclear-free status,'' Putin said.

---

South Korean President Sides With Russia on Missile Defense

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/world/27CND-KOREA.html?pagewanted=all

SEOUL, South Korea, Feb. 27 - Less than a week before he meets President Bush in Washington, the president of South Korea today publicly took Russia's side in the debate over Washington's plan for a national missile defense.

A joint communiqué issued by President Kim Dae Jung with the visiting president of Russia, Vladimir V. Putin, declared that the 1972 ABM treaty limiting anti-missile defenses - which would be threatened by Washington's project - is a "cornerstone of strategic stability" and that it should not only be preserved, but also "strengthened."

The statement by Mr. Kim - whose country is protected with the help of 37,000 American troops - was one of the strongest declarations to date by one of America's Asian allies, and it linked South Korea to European powers who have expressed concern that the United States was pressing forward with missile defenses in a manner that could inspire a new round of nuclear competition by Russia, China and South Asia.

President Bush has asserted that he would withdraw from the 1972 ABM Treaty if necessary in order to build national missile defenses capable of protecting the United States against the threat of a limited ballistic missile attack from countries like North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

It was not immediately clear why Mr. Kim decided to identify with Moscow's view of the issue.

But as the Bush administration shows signs of doubting North Korea's sincerity in dismantling its weapons of mass destruction, Mr. Putin has played an energetic role to push rapprochement forward on the Korean peninsula, flying to Pyongyang last July to meet the reclusive North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, and now preparing to bring him to Moscow for more talks on how to reduce tensions.

It is also possible that the South Korean president's criticism reflects the general concern in Asia that the Bush administration's missile defense plans will isolate China by rendering its nuclear arsenal ineffective.

For South Korea, China has also played a constructive role in working for Korean rapprochement, treating Kim Jong-il to a tour of booming Shanghai this winter and doing similar missionary work with North Korea's hard-line military leaders. Li Peng, the second ranking member of the ruling Politburo in Beijing, is due in Seoul next month for a state visit.

Today's statement cataloged the arms control treaties or agreements that remain unfulfilled as a result of objections to their ratification in the United States. The principle outstanding accords are Start II, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that would cut cold war nuclear arsenals in half, and another that would to ban nuclear testing. Russia has ratified both, and Mr. Kim, in a summit meeting that was largely devoted to business and trade issues, welcomed Russia's act.

Though neither president mentioned the United States by name and, during a brief news conference on Mr. Putin's first day of meetings here, steered questions to economic matters, the object of the communiqué's criticism was unmistakable.

"The Russian Federation and the Republic of Korea agreed that the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty is the cornerstone of strategic stability and an important foundation of international efforts on nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation," the joint statement said. "Both sides expressed their hope that the Start II Treaty will enter into force as soon as possible and that as soon as possible after that, the Start III treaty will be signed and that the ABM Treaty will be preserved and strengthened."

In a reference to the test ban treaty, the statement by the Russian and South Korean leaders said they "appealed to other countries to ratify the treaty without any delays and they also appealed to those countries whose ratification is needed for it to come into effect."

Since he won election a year ago, Mr. Putin has undertaken a diplomatic campaign to persuade the United States to forgo its large-scale missile defense plans and instead develop regional and mobile missile defenses that could be brought to bear against missile threats from rogue states. Russia presented its concept for such a plan to NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, in Moscow last week.

Russia has also sought to show that more intensive diplomacy, such as Mr. Kim's opening to North Korea, might go a long way in reducing the threat from rogue states. To that end, Mr. Putin also has been courting North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-il, in an effort, thus far unsuccessful, to persuade him to abandon his ballistic missile program.

After a day in which Mr. Putin and the South Korean leader discussed the progress between north and south, along with trade, investment and new plans to link both Koreas with Russian and Europe via the trans-Siberian railway, Mr. Putin tonight said Russia was looking for a constructive role for Moscow in linking the economies of North and South Korea through rail and energy projects.

"There is nobody who can lose in this process," he said.

In a toast tonight at a banquet in the ornate presidential palace with sweeping blue-tiled rooflines, Mr. Putin predicted that the north-south dialogue that Mr. Kim engineered last year would "lead to reunification of the Korean nation."

In between the banquets and toasts, however, Mr. Putin's visit here has been a hard slog of negotiations over how to resolve Russia's $1.8 billion debt to Seoul, how to overcome formidable obstacles to building new railway links that still exist on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone, where more than 1.7 million North and South Korean troops still face each other in a high state of readiness for war.

Work on one rail line connecting Seoul, Pyongyang and Sinuiji on North Korea's border with China already has begun, but Mr. Putin is lobbying for the $1 billion rehabilitation of a second line northeast to Vladivostok that would connect South Korea's ports and industrial centers with Russia's impoverished Far East.

Mr. Putin said linking both Koreas with the trans-Siberian railway would cut freight deliveries from the Pacific to Europe from 25 to 12 days, while also providing assistance to North Korea, which would reap more than $100 million a year in revenues.

At a lunch with businessmen today, Mr. Putin made it clear that Russia also has high technology products to offer. "Russia can offer state-of-the-art technology," he said. "For example, we can help other countries launch space devices such as satellites."

Mr. Putin was not as successful in selling Russian arms to South Korea, though some military equipment, including tanker aircraft, helicopters and hovercraft, are part of a proposal to sell weapons and raw materials in exchange for reducing Russia's debt.

As the Soviet Union was collapsing, Seoul offered $1.45 billion in credits to Moscow to establish diplomatic relations, thus undercutting one of North Korea's chief patrons. As Russia has failed to repay the credits, interest charges have increased it to $1.8 billion.

---

Blair comes calling

February 27, 2001
Washington Times
Arnold Beichman
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-200122720131.htm

Remarkable yet unexamined is the significance of President Bush's (a) travel schedule and (b) White House visitors from abroad. This schedule is informing European leaders that a new American foreign policy is in the making, one which the statist bureaucrats of the European Union (EU) may have every reason to distrust.

Here's how the presidential schedule has shaped up:

The first Bush trip outside the United States was to meet Mexico's new head of state, President Vicente Fox Feb. 16.

The first foreign leader to have visited the White House was Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien.

The first European leader to have visited the White House was British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Feb. 23. Unlike Germany, France and Russia, Britain is offering cautious support for U.S. missile defense even as French and German official opinion is against it.

No leaders from Germany, France or other West or East European countries are scheduled at this writing nor is any presidential overseas trip imminent. The charter members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) - the United States, Canada and Mexico - get the first White House go-around.

That was President Reagan's concern - make sure of your friends on the North American continent. Then Britain and the "special relationship," the long-standing Anglo-American partnership which, for example, finds American and British fighter planes in a joint operation over Iraq while continental Europe - France and Russia - look on disapprovingly. And it was noted that in his press conference Feb. 22 that Mr. Bush said that "Britain and the United States have got a special relationship."

Today, some are asking, why not make it the "North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement," to include Great Britain, whose biggest export market is the United States, its closest ally? The question is quite relevant since British public opinion is divided both on continued membership in the existing EU and on whether to give up the pound sterling in favor of a new single currency, the euro, scheduled to start circulating next January within 12 of the 15 EU countries. One in three Britons wants withdrawal from the 15-member-state EU and there is even more division on the pound versus the euro. The influential Euroskeptic London Daily Telegraph has been pushing a reorganized NAFTA to include Britain.

Conservatives are sharply divided about EU membership. Former Prime Minister Lady Thatcher was prepared to deliver a speech earlier this month calling upon Britain to get out of the EU, which she has called the "Brussels superstate." William Hague, the Conservative leader, prevailed upon her not to make the speech. But she'll make it sometime. This lady's not for squelching.

At stake in this triangular relationship - the United States, Britain and the EU - is the future of NATO which during the Cold War was a guarantor of Western European security against the Soviet Union. Now the EU is planning a 60,000-strong European rapid reaction force by 2003 prepared to go anywhere in EU or non-EU countries to keep the peace or to keep local quarrels local. National missile defense has been a target in continental Europe led by the EU. That opposition by the EU has openly concerned Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who, at a European meeting in Munich a few weeks ago, managed in his address not to mention the EU's existence.

It's too early to tell what the Bush administration's attitude will be toward the EU. There is certainly a difference between the political culture of the Eurocrats, almost all of whom are social democrats, and the Bush administration, particularly on such issues as trade unionism, labor costs and social benefits, arms control, free market economics. There is a latent anti-Americanism among the EU leaders headquartered in Brussels because of its successful capitalist economy.

The real crisis in the EU will come when the 15 state delegations sit down sometime next year to write the "loi fondementale," the constitution for European Union. Such a document when ratified by the member states would consummate their integration as the "United States of Europe." That was the phrase of Aristide Briand, a French foreign minister, whose idea it was three-quarters of a century ago.

Arnold Beichman, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is a Washington Times columnist.

---

Defining 'anathema'

February 28, 2001
Washington Times
Inside Politics Greg Pierce News and political dispatches from around the nation.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inpolitics.htm

Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening apparently sees himself as a spokesman for black people everywhere.

"I think if I see one more picture of [President Bush] reaching down and patting little black kids on the head I'm going to go absolutely crazy, because the policies he is proposing are anathema to African-Americans," USA Today columnist DeWayne Wickham quotes the Democratic governor as saying "over a bowl of gumbo at B. Smith's, a trendy Washington restaurant."

Among policies that the columnist suggested are "anathema" to blacks and white liberals such as Mr. Glendening: Tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare reform, and a missile-defense shield.

-------- russia

Russian Sub's Officer Wrote of Torpedo Blast, Izvestia Says

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/world/27KURS.html

MOSCOW, Feb. 26 - A newspaper here reported today that a note scrawled by an officer aboard the submarine Kursk and found by divers last summer said the vessel sank because of an explosion caused by a torpedo that apparently misfired.

The report, in Izvestia, said the note confirmed "the most unpleasant and unwanted version" of the accident in August. Military officials have repeatedly suggested that the sinking was caused by a collision with a mine or a foreign submarine.

A government commission investigating the accident reported this month that an exploding torpedo followed by detonations in the torpedo compartment caused the Kursk to rupture, sending it and the 118 crew members to the floor of the Barents Sea.

But the military, up to and including Defense Minister Igor D. Sergeyev, has maintained that it is highly likely that the torpedo was set off by a collision. As recently as November, the head of the investigative panel said divers had found "serious visual evidence" of such a collision, including deep grooves along the submarine's bow. The United States and Britain, among others, have flatly denied that their subs collided with the Kursk.

The officer's note is one of two found by divers who retrieved bodies from the sub in October and early November. The commander of the turbine room, Lt. Capt. Dimitri Kolesnikov, wrote the first note. The Navy has not provided more than a general description of the second note. But Izvestia quoted anonymous military officers who said they had read the message. They said it was written by Lt. Cmdr. Rashid Aryapov, who held a senior position in the sixth compartment, the site of the nuclear reactor.

Commander Aryapov, whose remains were recovered and buried in Ulyanovsk, was one of at least 23 crew members who weathered the initial blasts and survived for at least an additional nine hours in the aft compartment. He would have been one of the officers responsible for assessing damage after the accident.

The newspapers reported that his note, written on a page torn from a detective novel, had been found wrapped in plastic and stuffed in his clothes. As described in Izvestia, Commander Aryapov's note attributes the disaster to "faults in the torpedo compartment, namely, the explosion of a torpedo on which the Kursk had to carry out tests."

Russian investigators and American intelligence experts have said the initial blast was followed a few minutes later by a second explosion, up to 250 times larger, that apparently consumed four or five torpedoes and blew a hole in the hull.

The note is said to state that the blasts caused the sub to tumble violently, sending equipment flying through compartments, setting off small fires and seriously injuring many crew members.

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

Alaska

01/02/27
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Anchorage - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says it plans to go to Amchitka Island in the western Aleutians this summer to look for bombs, grenades and mortar shells left over from years of military work on the island. In addition, old military buildings will be demolished and pits of drilling muds left over from atomic testing in the late 1960s and early 1970s will be capped.

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

GOP introduces plan to allow oil drilling in Alaska

February 27, 2001
Washington Times
By Patrice Hill
http://www.washtimes.com/business/default-2001227222726.htm

Senate Republican leaders introduced legislation yesterday to promote U.S. energy development, including opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling, and pledged to pass the plan by summer.

The long-term measures in the bill will not do much to relieve today's sky-high natural gas prices and electricity shortages, they said, but they could prevent a repeat of the past year's energy crisis in future years.

The bill includes increased funding to help the poorest Americans cope with high home heating and cooling costs. Crafted by Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank H. Murkowski, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and others, it would permit drilling for oil and gas in vast areas of the outer continental shelf as well as Alaska. It also features tax and regulatory incentives for conservation and development of oil, gas, coal, nuclear and renewable fuels.

"The biggest threat to our prosperity is the energy situation," said Mr. Lott, Mississippi Republican, chronicling how the energy crunch started with a record spike in gasoline prices last summer that turned into a home heating crisis this fall and the California electricity debacle this winter.

"It's time to do something about it," he said, adding that the shortages of gas and oil that caused last year's problems have been building for 25 years as Americans put off energy development in favor of environmental preservation. "If we don't do this, we will have far worse problems in the future."

Senate Budget Committee chairman Pete V. Domenici, New Mexico Republican, said high energy prices already have shaved 0.4 percent off U.S. economic growth in the last year and are a major culprit in the sharp economic slowdown that threatens to turn into recession this year.

"We have an energy crisis," he said, predicting that the rolling blackouts experienced in California this winter could "ripple across America" unless the country moves swiftly to expand its energy infrastructure. "We need the facilities to transport our energy. We will balance these needs with the needs of the environment."

Mr. Murkowski, Alaska Republican, said his bill is designed to reduce dependence on imported oil from about 55 percent today to 50 percent by 2011 - a goal that cannot be met without tapping the Arctic reserves, which are estimated to hold between 3.2 billion and 16 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil.

The higher estimate would yield enough oil to replace imports from Saudi Arabia - the world's largest oil producer - for 30 years, Mr. Murkowski said.

Joining the Republicans in sponsoring the legislation was Sen. John B. Breaux, a leading centrist Democrat from Louisiana, though he did not appear to speak for the bill yesterday. Democrats and some liberal Republicans who oppose opening the Arctic reserve did not speak out yesterday.

But environmental groups came out in full force against the bill's strong emphasis on developing new energy sources. They urged greater fuel conservation through regulatory measures such as higher corporate average fuel economy standards for cars and sport utility vehicles.

The heated rhetoric from environmentalists ensures a pitched battle over the bill in Congress this year. Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, already has pledged to filibuster any legislation that would open up the Arctic reserve to drilling.

"America needs an energy strategy, not a drilling frenzy in the Arctic," said Mark Van Putten, president of the National Wildlife Federation. He said the bill would jeopardize more than 100 species of birds, caribou and other wildlife that rely on the refuge's coastal plain for feeding and giving birth.

"America cannot drill its way to energy security," he said, noting that the nation has only 3 percent of the world's known oil reserves and will always depend on imports from the Middle East. He added that the Republican bill gives only "lip service" to alternative energy sources such as solar and wind power.

Mr. Murkowski said his bill, which contains hundreds of provisions addressing nearly every facet of energy production, delivery and consumption, is only a starting place. It will be amended by legislation the Bush administration is drafting and will present to Congress in the next six weeks, he said.

Mr. Murkowski already has dropped provisions contained in a draft version of the bill that were favorable to big oil companies like Exxon Mobil, which he said are enjoying handsome profits and don't need federal aid.

The bill retains tax credits for small domestic operators of low-volume oil and natural gas wells, to help to keep the wells operating when energy prices fall like they did in 1998. Oil companies also would get a break when prices are depressed on the federal royalties they pay for offshore drilling.

Environmentalists decried the bill's proposed easing of environmental regulations on coal-fired power plants that convert to "clean-coal" technologies.

"It's a polluters dream, but a nightmare for public health and the environment," said Becky Stanfield of the Public Interest Research Group.

--------

Nuclear energy should be used, not feared

February 27, 2001
Excite News
The Daily Universe
Brigham Young U.
http://news.excite.com/news/uw/010227/university-70

(U-WIRE) PROVO, Utah -- From nuclear energy to atomic bombs, Americans have distaste for the atomic tool that captured the attention of the world when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

From that day through the end of the Cold War, the United States and the USSR battled for supremacy in atomic science.

Along with atomic bombs, the harnessing of nuclear energy resulted from the competition. Americans need to rethink their disdain for nuclear energy. When fact is separated from myth, its benefits far outweigh its costs.

Legend has it that when Arco, Idaho became the first city to be powered entirely by nuclear energy many residents covered their power outlets with aluminum foil hoping to avoid radiation.

That ignorance still thrives. Two main fears are associated with nuclear power: its radioactive byproducts and the risk of plant malfunctions.

In reality, no person in the United States has ever died from the radioactive part of a nuclear reactor. The modern nuclear reactor is as safe as any coal-burning power plant or hydroelectric facility.

Even the infamous Three Mile Island incident resulted in no identifiable injuries, although the plant was destroyed.

But spent nuclear fuel still must be considered. It is true that nuclear power plants produce radioactive waste that won't decompose for thousands of years.

The U.S. government could severely decrease the time of decomposition by lifting the prohibition on the recycling of spent fuel it instituted in 1977.

When spent fuel is recycled, plutonium is created, along with the substance used in nuclear reactors. Although plutonium cannot be used for nuclear energy, it is useful in making atomic weapons.

Fear of increased plutonium supplies coming into the hands of terrorists prompted the recycling prohibition.

Plutonium decays much faster than unrecycled nuclear fuels. Since 1977 the plutonium supply in the world has increased steadily. The technology required to produce a nuclear weapon prevents any terrorist group from developing one.

If a group had that technology, the U.S. prohibition would not prevent the group from gaining plutonium.

Still, even with the shorter lasting byproducts, nuclear energy still produces a significant amount of dangerous waste.

Coal, the most popular source of energy, also produces waste in the form of polluting smoke. Hydroelectric plants are the least polluting of the three top energy sources in the United States, but their effect on the environment has great consequences.

Some costs must be paid for the energy we use, but nuclear power has an advantage over the others. Nuclear waste is measurable and regulate-able. Coal-powered power plant owners do not have any responsibility for paying for their pollution.

How could they? They may be penalized for polluting over a certain point, but generally they bear no cost for the pollution they produce.

The full cost of their product, therefore, is not reflected in the cost of the product. Nuclear energy's byproducts, on the other hand, have to be handled very carefully.

The government already regulates the handling and storage of nuclear by products. Companies spend billions every year for waste handling. Their storage facilities are designed, quite effectively, for keeping the dangerous substances from mixing with groundwater and other important natural resources.

Ultimately, the price of nuclear power includes all of the cost society bears in producing. Unlike coal production, nuclear waste management is factored in the price. The result is a source of power that will keep waste to a minimum because more waste equals less profit.

People either pay higher prices or reduce energy consumption. The United States currently faces an energy crisis.

False conceptions and a bad law keep Americans from embracing a safe, clean energy source.

-------- illinois

Illinois

01/02/27
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Clinton - Officials at the Clinton nuclear plant did not notify area news media and DeWitt County emergency officials when the nuclear reactors shut down twice since December. Industry critics say the two emergency shutdowns should be publicized. Plant owner Exelon Nuclear said the shutdowns posed no threat to public safety and it isn't required to report them.

-------- new mexico

New Mexico

01/02/27
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Los Alamos - Los Alamos National Laboratory has burned 1,000 tons of wood in an open area on the lab's southern boundary. Firefighters and emergency crews monitored the fire, which began Sunday. A lab spokesman said conditions were favorable, since the ground was still wet from snow. A fire intended to clear underbrush last May burned out of control and left 400 families homeless.

-------- new york

Study to Take Stock of Reactor's Long-Term Health

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/nyregion/27NUKE.html?pagewanted=all

For the last two months, the Indian Point 2 nuclear plant has been generating almost as much angst as electricity. A series of leaks, shutdowns and errors has alarmed elected officials and delayed Consolidated Edison's efforts to get the plant back into full operation.

Experts and even some critics agree that these incidents have been mostly routine, and would not have drawn so much attention had they not followed the accident that released a puff of radioactive steam a year ago.

But that accident is about to produce some more serious fallout: a report by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, to be made public on Friday, is expected to examine underlying problems of the kind that made the steam leak possible.

The report could be far more revealing than the recent technical problems at the plant, 35 miles north of Manhattan in Buchanan.

"It's looking at longer-term issues, like emergency preparedness at the plant, the program for identifying and fixing problems, and reactor safety repair programs," said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the commission. "It goes to more to long- term health of the plant than to immediate issues."

Those issues would be important for any reactor, but are critical for the survival of Indian Point, which Con Edison plans to sell in June to Entergy Nuclear for $602 million. Entergy has made it clear that it does not plan to have the kinds of errors and resulting long shutdowns the plant has had under Con Ed.

Both companies will be paying close attention to the report, the result of a monthlong inspection by 13 experts drawn by the N.R.C. from its offices around the country. The inspection was completed earlier this year. The companies were careful not to disclose what they know about the findings, but hinted that the report would spot some problems.

Michael R. Kansler, senior vice president of Entergy Nuclear Northeast, said the inspectors had "identified some issues that need to get added into the pile of things they need to work on."

The genesis of the inspection was the accident on Feb. 16, 2000, when a tube in a steam generator cracked, allowing about 5,000 gallons of radioactive water to leave the containment building. No one was injured, and officials said the leak posed no threat to public safety.

The N.R.C. later decided to conduct the in-depth inspection of Indian Point 2 after learning that the last inspection of the generator, in 1997, had been done wrong. Better interpretation of inspection data would have shown that the generator was likely to leak, the commission said.

That was only one of a series of misjudgments by Con Ed, which built the plant 27 years ago. In hindsight, it is clear that the utility's response to the generator leak was poor. It moved ahead with plans to plug the faulty tube and resume operation, but the N.R.C. rejected that idea, saying the steam generators needed more analysis.

Con Ed decided to replace the generators, but not until mid-August, when it was far too late to restart the plant for the summer, the period of peak electricity demand. The company had plodded down the wrong path for months, paying about $600,000 a day for replacement power while it tried to restart the plant using the old steam generators.

Last month, when the new generators were at last installed and operators tried to reopen the plant, they mismatched heat production with the flow of cooling water - an unremarkable mistake, except that an internal study by the company later concluded that workers might have moved faster than they should have, feeling pressure from supervisors to restart the reactor.

And there were worrisome problems in operations even before last February's accident. In August 1999, a malfunction made the reactor shut down suddenly, an event that was once common but which the industry now says should happen no more than once every couple of years at a plant. Emergency diesel generators that were supposed to start automatically did not do so; the operators, busy with a number of complications, failed to take adequate notice that some control room instruments were being powered by emergency batteries, until the batteries died.

Incidents like that have led to long shutdowns at other plants. And the February accident resulted in an almost yearlong shutdown that ended Jan. 28, when Indian Point 2 returned to full power.

Regulated utilities like Con Edison have historically endured such long shutdowns, but independent power generation companies like Entergy say they have not and cannot.

Entergy plans to own Indian Point through a corporate subsidiary that has limited assets, and is thus less able than traditional utilities to weather a protracted shutdown. Mr. Kansler said in an interview that Entergy was going to run the plant better than Con Ed has, and did not anticipate the kind of long shutdowns that Indian Point 2 and its near-twin next door, Indian Point 3, have endured under previous ownership.

Entergy promises to consider the N.R.C. report carefully. "This is a very opportune time for that type of inspection, because it's hopefully going to give the public assurance that the people running the plant are going to run it well," Mr. Kansler said. If problems are found, he said, "we're going to go after those just like it happened on our watch."

That may take time to achieve, given the spate of smaller problems. The plant was taken to half power last week to allow repair of a pinhole leak in a water pipe; full power was restored over the weekend.

But several elected officials, including Senator Charles E. Schumer and the Westchester County executive, Andrew J. Spano, have withdrawn their calls that the plant be closed, saying that the N.R.C. has reassured them of its safety.

And even some critics say the recent troubles have been exaggerated because of last February's accident.

"Because of the notoriety that Indian Point 2 has, everything's getting escalated one or two levels at least," said David Lochbaum, the reactor expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit safety group.

He said it was possible the plant could do better under new management. "You make a few changes at the top and send people the right messages, and the plant workers want to do the right thing," he said. "You point them in the right direction, and they'll get the job done."

-------- us nuc politics

Bush Speech Highlights

February 27, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-Speech-Highlights.html?searchpv=aponline

Highlights from President Bush's budget speech on Tuesday night at the Capitol:

EDUCATION -- Called education his top priority and said reading is ``the foundation of all learning.'' Bush said his budget calls for spending on reading programs to be tripled over the next five years to $5 billion. Bush also called for character education in school, saying that values are important. He also said that when shoools fail, parents and students parents and students should have different options.

TAX CUT -- Vigorously defended his $1.6 trillion in tax cuts, calling the tax rate of 15 percent too high for those who earn low wages. He said the cut would be retroactive, but did not say how far back it would extend. He proposed a rate of 10 percent and said no one should pay more than a third of the money they earn in federal income taxes. He said he would reduce taxes for married couples and double the child tax credit to $1,000 per child. He also said the the death tax should be repealed.

DEBT REDUCTION -- Asked for $2 trillion in debt reduction.

MILITARY -- Requested $5.7 billion in increased military pay and benefits, health care and housing. Bush said that his budget will ``transform our military,'' and ``discard Cold War relics, and reduce our own nuclear forces to reflect today's needs.'' He said the nation must pursue a missle defense program to ensure the nation's security.

ENVIRONMENT -- Proposed providing $4.9 billion in resources over five years for the upkeep of the nation's national parks.

CHURCHES AND CHARITIES -- Adressing concerns about the seperation of church and state, he said the ``government cannot be replaced by charities or volunteers.'' But he quickly added that the nation should support the ``good works of these good people who are helping neighbors in need.'' He proposed allowing all taxpayers to deduct their charitable contributions. He said estimates show this could encourage as much as $14 billion a year in new charitable giving. He announced that his budget provides more than $700 million over the next 10 years for a Federal Compassion Capital Fund, which will ``provide a mentor to the more than one million children with a parent in prison, and to support other local efforts to fight illiteracy, teen pregnancy, drug addiction, and other difficult problems.''

SOCIAL PROGRAMS -- Said he wants to increase spending next year for Social Security and Medicare and other entitlement programs by $81 billion. To save the program, Bush says his budget creates a program that allows people to invest part of the money traditional put into Social Security.

HEALTH CARE -- Dedicated $238 billion to Medicare next year alone, which he said is enough to fund all current programs and to begin a new prescription drug benefit for low-income seniors. He alluded to a patient's bill of rights, suggesting that people who want to get the medical care should ``not be forced to go to court because they did not get it.''

FUTURE FUNDS -- Set aside almost a trillion dollars over 10 years for additional needs.

ENERGY CRISIS -- Called for a national energy policy, saying that he has already asked federal agencies to work with California officials to help speed construction of new energy sources.

-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

Bush and Colombian President Meet

February 27, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Colombia.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush on Tuesday rejected Colombian President Andres Pastrana's bid for U.S. involvement in discussions with Colombia's largest leftist guerrilla group.

During their 45-minute meeting Tuesday, Bush rejected Pastrana's suggestion that the United States resume contacts with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC. Pastrana's government has been engaged in slow-moving peace talks with the FARC in hopes of ending Colombia's 37 years of war.

Pastrana said Monday he hoped the United States would take part in a meeting scheduled next month.

``We will not be,'' Bush told reporters. ``This is an issue that the Colombian people and the Colombian president can deal with. We'll be glad to help Colombia in any way to make the peace. We'll be glad to help the Colombian economy through trade. But I won't be present for the discussions.''

A senior administration official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said the United States generally supports ``efforts at peace in Colombia,'' but was adopting a wait-and-see attitude toward the FARC because of its involvement in the slayings of three U.S. missionaries in 1999.

The two leaders discussed issues ranging from trade and drug eradication to human rights and Colombia's overall efforts to shake off its recession, the official said. They also talked about the Summit of the Americas conference to be held in Canada in April.

Declaring himself a friend of free trade and foe of narco-trafficking, Bush pledged to bolster anti-drug efforts in Colombia and said -- with a sprinkling of Spanish -- that he would have his trade negotiator, Robert Zoellick, take up the issue of lowering trade barriers through renewing the Andean Trade Preference Act.

``Por supuesto,'' Bush said. ``Absolutely. It's a very important treaty. Yes, ma'am, I'll be pushing it. I'm a free-trader.''

The 10-year-old act is to expire in December. Two senators have said they will propose renewing it for five years and expanding it much like a trade pact passed for Caribbean basin countries.

Pastrana said he wants the Andean act expanded ``so that we could get some economic and commercial benefits'' to better enable Colombia to fight off drug traffickers.

``That's a way, also, of going forward in the fight against drugs,'' Pastrana said. ``He was very committed, you know, in this process of engaging the U.S. government in helping the Andean region.''

Bush said the United States would work with Colombia to counter narcotics trafficking.

``We're fully aware of the narcotics that are manufactured in his country,'' Bush said. ``I also told him that many of them wouldn't be manufactured if our nation didn't use them. And we've got to work together to not only help Colombia, but help our own country.''

The meeting concluded Pastrana's four-day visit. Before it took place, the State Department issued a report condemning the human rights record of Pastrana's government as ``poor.''

Those realities include soldiers and police committing murders, security forces working with right-wing paramilitaries and high-ranking officials rarely being held accountable for crimes, the department said in its annual report examining human rights worldwide.

Despite concerns of abuses, the United States has been tightening its relationship with the armed forces in Colombia, the third largest recipient of U.S. military aid. Colombia is receiving combat helicopters and troop training under a $1.3 billion anti-drug aid package approved last year.

---

Pastrana urges U.S. to meet with Colombian rebels

February 27, 2001
Washington Times
By Tom Carter
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001227222424.htm

Colombian President Andres Pastrana, in Washington to meet with President Bush today, said the United States should sit down to discuss peace with Colombia's Marxist, drug-trafficking guerrillas.

Mr. Pastrana, speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill, said the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, widely known by its acronym FARC, last week invited several European Union and Latin American nations to Colombia to discuss peace. On Friday, the United States and Cuba were invited to attend.

"I think it is positive if the United States is at the table," said Mr. Pastrana, just after meeting with Rep. Henry J. Hyde, Illinois Republican and chairman of the International Relations Committee.

The United States in the past has met with members of the FARC, who have been engaged in a 37-year insurgency against the government of Colombia. But Washington broke off discussions after three U.S.-Indian rights activist missionaries were kidnapped and executed by the FARC in 1999.

The United States has refused to meet with the FARC until those responsible for the murders are turned over for trial.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Pastrana said Colombia would be responsible for ensuring justice if the men were turned over to authorities. He said the March 8 meeting should be used to move the peace process forward.

Mr. Pastrana is in Washington for a four-day visit that culminates with his meeting today with Mr. Bush.

The main purpose of this visit is to lobby for trade preferences that would allow Colombian textiles into the United States duty-free. He also is pushing for more money for social programs and for more open U.S. support in the peace process.

In yesterday's meeting with Mr. Hyde, Mr. Pastrana sought to calm the growing concern on Capitol Hill that his Plan Colombia, which seeks to bring peace to Colombia and end its drug trade, is not going as planned.

During the past week, two helicopters - a Huey II and a Black Hawk - which were given to Colombia by the United States, came under hostile fire from FARC rebels.

The Huey II, a police helicopter that was involved in crop fumigation, was shot down in an area that - according to Plan Colombia -should have been cleared by the Colombian military. According to Mr. Pastrana, the Colombian military arrived after the fact.

"Mr. Hyde asked Pastrana, where was the military [in the attack], and Mr. Hyde pressed Pastrana hard on the sincerity of the guerillas, in light of their continuing attacks," said a senior Republican aide. "Mr. Pastrana promised there would be penalties" if the FARC did not stop the attacks.

Washington analysts said that Mr. Pastrana understands that he cannot bring peace to Colombia without outside international pressure on the FARC.

"He wants the United States to play a much more active role in the peace process," said Michael Shifter of the Inter-American Dialogue. Mr. Shifter said that outside pressure from the United States or even the United Nations is needed to negotiate peace in Colombia.

The United States pledged $1.3 billion to back Pastrana's Plan Colombia, a $7 billion strategy to eradicate drugs, reform the judicial system, end human rights abuses and persuade peasants to plant alternate crops. About 80 percent of the total is for military aid.

-------- drug war

Surviving Drugs' Ravages to Build a Productive Life

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By AARON DONOVAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/nyregion/27NEED.html

Ray Ptomey speaks so quietly and is so modest in his manner that it is hard to imagine that he was once on anyone's hit list. But more than a decade ago he was shot five times by men who wanted him dead.

He was a cocaine dealer and had knowingly stepped onto another dealer's turf. "I was in the street," said Mr. Ptomey, now 47, "doing what I wasn't supposed to be doing."

Mr. Ptomey's competitors shot him five times in the abdomen, neck and shoulder and left him for dead on an East New York sidewalk.

"They were trying to send a message," he said, adding that he had been in that particular line of work only a week.

The shooting was the worst moment of his life, but also, perhaps, the luckiest.

He was taken to Brookdale Hospital, where he stayed for a month and a half. Now the only physical reminder of that cold night is the opening in his lower abdomen created by the colostomy he had to have.

After leaving the hospital in 1988, Mr. Ptomey began using heroin to ease his pain. He stayed on heroin for six years, during which time he survived on welfare. His first step out of drug dependency came in 1994, when he enrolled in the city's methadone program, which provided him with a means to overcome his heroin habit.

But it wasn't until he started baby- sitting for his 7-month-old grandson, Tharay, in 1998 that Mr. Ptomey realized he needed to find a job and stop using drugs completely. "I couldn't look at him and still be doing funny things," he said. "I wanted to be a good sight for my grandson."

He told his methadone counselor that he wanted to find a job, and she referred him to a job counselor, who sent him to take an aptitude test at Kings County Hospital Center. After the test, workers at the hospital recommended that he enroll in a state program, Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities, that helps find employment for disabled people and training if they need it. His counselor from the program, James Samuels, referred him to a job training program at the Brooklyn Bureau of Community Service, one of the seven local charities supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.

At the agency, Mr. Ptomey began working with Mfon Ukpe, who evaluated his job skills. The agency offers training in several fields, including custodial and maintenance services, food services and messenger work.

Mr. Ptomey was most interested in working as a custodian. After training in basic job skills, including how to dress for work and for a job interview, how to conduct himself during an interview and how to show respect toward supervisors, Mr. Ptomey was temporarily placed as a custodian and maintenance man at a branch of Independence Community Bank in downtown Brooklyn.

After several months as a temporary worker supervised by the Brooklyn Bureau, Mr. Ptomey was hired as a full-time employee.

When he was hired, Mr. Ptomey did not have enough money for the steel-tipped shoes and the blue uniform needed for the job, so the Brooklyn Bureau used $160 from the Neediest Cases Fund to buy them for him.

"We thought it was our duty," Mr. Ukpe said. "We make sure we give people what they need to get back on their feet."

Mr. Ptomey credits officials of the Brooklyn Bureau with helping him to succeed.

"They really helped me stay focused," he said. "They allowed me a chance to work, which kept my mind occupied and kept me on the straight and narrow."

---

Adjusting Drug Policy

February 27, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/opinion/27TUE1.html

It is rare for a Hollywood movie to stimulate meaningful debate about social policy, but that has been the case with "Traffic," Steven Soderbergh's gritty depiction of the drug wars that has been nominated for an Academy Award as best picture. With its disturbing images of middle-class teenage addiction, outgunned American counter-narcotics agents and corrupt Mexican drug officials, the movie has touched a nerve at a time of flux in the nation's decades-long campaign against illicit drugs. With new leadership both in Washington and in Mexico, this is a good time to think anew about the most effective ways to deal with a social problem that has fueled widespread violence and corruption and destroyed countless lives.

The White House has yet to declare its intentions on drug policy, and has not nominated a replacement for Barry McCaffrey as the director of national drug control policy. But President Bush and members of his cabinet have made comments lately that suggest they may be willing to shift the emphasis of American policy from eradicating the supply of drugs to reducing the demand for them. Mr. Bush, on his recent visit to Mexico, acknowledged that American consumption was "the main reason why drugs are shipped through Mexico to the United States."

"Traffic's" depiction of bribes and torture in Mexico, including the collusion of Mexico's top drug official with one of that country's most notorious drug syndicates, is based on well-documented events of the late 1990's. Mexico's president, Vicente Fox, has pledged to eradicate corruption. But the limits of such a campaign were underscored in January when one of Mexico's most infamous drug barons, Joaquin Guzman, escaped from prison, apparently after bribing guards.

In talks planned for today with President Andrés Pastrana of Colombia, Mr. Bush has an opportunity to review the $1.3 billion aid package known as Plan Colombia, which he inherited from the Clinton administration. The plan is skewed toward using military force to shut down the drug trade in Colombia, an approach that could entangle American troops in that nation's protracted civil war while doing little to stem the flow of narcotics north.

There is a place in American policy for efforts to interdict drug shipments overseas, and to prevent the cultivation of crops that are used to make drugs. Law enforcement programs in the United States must also play a role. But these programs cannot succeed without a more robust effort to curtail the demand for drugs at home. The bulk of the federal government's $19.2 billion annual drug-fighting budget is still spent on interdiction and enforcement. Yet the number of hard-core users of cocaine has remained steady over the last decade at around 3.5 million. The number of hard-core heroin users, meanwhile, has risen from 600,000 in the early 1990's to 980,000 today.

Studies have consistently shown that treatment programs for addicts are far more cost-effective than enforcement and interdiction in reducing drug use. During the campaign last year Mr. Bush pledged to provide an additional $1 billion over five years for treatment to help close the gap between the 5 million Americans addicted to illegal drugs and the 2.1 million who currently receive treatment. That by itself would be a laudable achievement.

Mr. Bush has acknowledged his own problems with alcohol earlier in life. Shortly before taking office, he told CNN that drug treatment programs needed to be strengthened. "Addiction to alcohol or addiction to drugs is an illness," he said. "And we haven't done a very good job, thus far, of curing people of that illness." As a Republican with a conservative base, Mr. Bush may be better placed than Bill Clinton was to bring a reluctant Congress around to that view. He should use the powers of his office to do so.

---

U.S. agents discover tunnel for smuggling drugs

02/27/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-02-27-drug-tunnel.htm

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) - Federal agents discovered a 25-foot dirt tunnel that was apparently being used to smuggle drugs across the Mexican border, and seized 840 pounds of cocaine from the Arizona house at one end of the passage.

The crude, hand-dug tunnel - fitted with a string of bare electric bulbs - runs from the Nogales house to the sewer system, which leads in turn to a dry streambed along the Mexican border called the Nogales Wash.

"The drugs probably were smuggled from Mexico through the wash, into the sewer pipe, then into the tunnel and into the house," U.S. Customs spokesman Roger Maier said.

The tunnel, discovered Monday, was connected to the sewer by a hinged metal hatch.

No immediate arrests were made.

"At this point, we have no idea how long it was there, but it appears from the evidence that it had been utilized for some time," Maier said.

The discovery came as agents were investigating possible smuggling at the home, which is about three-quarters of a mile north of the Mexican border. Agents found no one at home but noticed dirt between a window blind and window.

Customs agents searched the home and discovered 198 cocaine bricks valued at $6.5 million wholesale.

The tunnel had lights but no ventilation, Maier said.

The tunnel was the sixth discovered in Nogales. The first was found in 1995, running from a point near the wash to an abandoned Methodist church. Three more tunnels were discovered in 1999 and one last year, all coming off sewer pipes branching off from the Nogales Wash.

The Nogales Wash is frequently is used by drug smugglers and illegal immigrants.

---

New York

01/02/27
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Buffalo - Two men and a woman were found fatally shot in an apartment where drug-packaging material was stored. Autopsies showed each victim had been shot at least once in the head. One victim had an extensive criminal history, police said. The bodies were discovered Sunday evening by a tenant in the apartment below who noticed water dripping from the ceiling.

---

Cocaine or polo shirts?

February 27, 2001
Washington Times
Embassy Row James Morrison News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
http://www.washtimes.com/world/embassy-2001227215213.htm

The war against drugs in South America can be reduced to a choice between cocaine or polo shirts, according to a leading Peruvian trade advocate.

Diego Calmet, on a visit to Washington last week, urged the United States to lift import tariffs on Peruvian textiles so as to remove the temptation for cotton farmers to take up the illegal production of coca, the plant from which cocaine is made.

Mr. Calmet also fears that the war on drugs in neighboring Colombia might push the problem into Peru, our correspondent Tom Carter reports.

"Cotton is a basic substitution crop for coca. If the tariffs were lifted, we think we could generate half a million new jobs in agriculture and keep the farmers from going back to growing coca," said Mr. Calmet, who braved the snowstorm last week to lobby members of Congress for the extension and expansion of the Andean Trade Preferences Act (ATPA).

He said Peruvian clothing exports, including high-end cotton golf shirts designed and sold under the Ralph Lauren and Polo labels, make up less than half of 1 percent of U.S. clothing imports, but lifting the tariff could boost Peru's exports by as much as 40 percent.

Mr. Calmet, who represents Peruvian clothing makers, said that clothing manufactured in Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America is sold in the United States without protective tariffs, while Peruvian clothing is hit with a duty of 21 percent.

Peruvian textiles account for a small percent of U.S. imports, but that is a major market for Peru, he said.

"We are not asking for money, and the product we produce does not hurt American producers. The purpose is to create legal employment. This is the way to fight drugs."

The lifting of these tariffs "is a matter of prime importance for the government of Peru," added Roberto Rodriguez, an economics officer for the Peruvian Embassy and Mr. Calmet's host in Washington.

Mr. Calmet said that Peru, which is in the midst of political upheaval and is experiencing 70 percent unemployment, is afraid that the United States is only concerned about drugs coming from Colombia. He praised Plan Colombia, which is being funded in part with $1.3 billion in U.S. tax money, but he said pressure in Colombia could be a disaster for Peru. Peru will receive about $42 million in the plan.

"The price of coca is going up, and there is the balloon effect," he said, noting that when drug traffickers are "squeezed" in one part of Latin America, they shift their operations to other countries.

"Peru has been very effective in its fight against drugs, but we are at a critical moment now," said Mr. Calmet.

-------- iraq

Who won that war?
Best not to look

February 27, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/pruden.htm

Those girlish noises on the eastern horizon are the sound of Saddam Hussein giggling.

Well, why not?

The government in Kuwait, retrieved from clammy Iraqi embrace by the Persian Gulf War a decade ago, invited some of the principals back for a celebration yesterday, or at least a commemoration, and from the popping of the champagne corks (or whatever pops at a Muslim gala) you might have imagined the Kuwaitis and their American rescuers won that war.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, dropping in from his first tour of the Middle East, made the ritual pledge that "freedom will live and prosper in this part of the world" despite everything Saddam Hussein can do. That's expecting a lot from something as fragile as freedom, particularly in a grim part of the world where freedom is a foreigner, grudgingly tolerated.

"Aggression," he said, echoing the earlier President Bush on that long past day 10 years ago, "will not stand." Then he joined Mr. Bush and Norman Schwarzkopf, the U.S. commander in the Persian Gulf War, to lay a wreath at the American Embassy in remembrance of the 148 Americans killed in the desert.

Alas, Saddam's aggression does stand, and in Iraq, it is standing fully upright.

The rest of the world laughed when Saddam portrayed abject military defeat as his personal triumph. No one laughs at him now. He is the most important Muslim politician anywhere, the unrepentant enemy of the United States, archfoe of the civilized, the intimidator of the brave peace processors at the United Nations. The Muslims whom those 148 Americans (Christians, mostly) died to protect demand now that the United States relieve Saddam's pain.

Americans sometimes learn lessons slowly and only with difficulty. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Middle East. If a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, as Dr. Johnson famously observed, ingratitude is the bastard child of sacrifice. You could ask anyone within spitting distance of Suez.

Colin Powell heard a chorus of complaint, bluster and whimper at every stop on his Middle Eastern tour, and was told over and over that the new American president owes it to the Arabs in general and the Iraqis in particular to ease the sanctions imposed by the United Nations in an attempt to make Saddam keep evil at a minimum.

The sobs and bluster seem to be working. In Damascus, the nexus of much of the trouble-making in the Middle East, the general indicated - diplomats never "say" if they can "indicate" -that he will recommend that President Bush ease the curbs on civilian goods to Iraq, even civilian goods that can be easily converted to military use.

The general comes home tonight after meeting with Bashar Assad, the president of Syria, and Farouk al-Sharaa, the foreign minister, to discuss the sanctions and - no hooting, please -Middle East "peace" efforts. Since the general has banned the use of that thigh-slapper of a term, "peace process," recognizing the home truth that processed peace is to peace as Velveeta is to cheese, he probably had to work at it to keep a straight face in his discussions with the Syrians.

The United States will consult with France, which is always on the lookout for opportunities to subvert and obstruct; with Russia, which sees continued trouble in the region as its path back to pretense if not power; with China, which has helped build the air bases from which Saddam's planes threaten American and British aviators, and with various Arab governments, who cry buckets of tears over the plight of Iraqi civilians but are nevertheless willing to risk nuclear disaster at Saddam's hands if that's what it takes to kill the Jews. Some process. Some peace. A decade hence somebody else can lay a wreath in remembrance of a fresh crop of American corpses.

"We want the world to know our quarrel is not with the people of Iraq," Gen. Powell said in Kuwait, "but with the regime in Baghdad." True enough. It's Saddam who has the quarrel with the people of Iraq, and it is Saddam who will manipulate concessions so that whatever mercy the good-hearted Americans deliver will be so strained that the Iraqi people will never see it.

Saddam can't expect to roll George W. Bush in the way he rolled Bill Clinton, but he won't have to. He kicked out the United Nations arms inspectors, to perfect his germ-warfare weapons and his nuclear experiments without being disturbed. The West, softheaded as usual, contented itself with mere military victory in 1991, and now there's a new threat. This is what cannot be left to stand.

Saddam Hussein isn't entitled to much, but so far he's earned the giggle.

Wesley Pruden is editor in chief of The Times.

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

Marine in Charge of Troubled Osprey Program Is Being Replaced

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/national/27OSPR.html?pagewanted=all

WASHINGTON, Feb. 26 - The Marine Corps colonel who has managed the troubled V-22 Osprey program since 1997, a period when two Osprey crashes killed 23 marines, has been denied a promotion to brigadier general and will retire in June, service officials said today.

But the Marine Corps officials said the colonel, Nolan Schmidt, was not bypassed for promotion because of the V-22 program's many problems, which have included production delays, cost overruns and fatal crashes.

They also asserted that Colonel Schmidt was not pressured to leave, saying he had decided months ago to retire this year, his 28th in the Marine Corps.

"All colonels are considered for brigadier general," said Lt. David Nevers, a Marine Corps spokesman. "Only a fraction rise to the flag level rank. And very few in the acquisition field rise to that level. Very, very few. So it's not at all unusual that a program manager would find themselves retiring at the rank of colonel."

But Colonel Schmidt's retirement is viewed by some critics of the Osprey as part of a broader effort by the Marine Corps to restore faith in the $40 billion program, which is the focus of at least two separate investigations and is widely considered a prime target for budget cuts by Congress and the Bush administration.

One of those investigations, by the Department of Defense inspector general, is looking into accusations of falsified maintenance records at the Osprey base at New River, N.C. Colonel Schmidt, who is based at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Maryland, has not been implicated in that probe.

But a second investigation, by a four-member panel of military officials and aviation experts, is looking at several decisions by Colonel Schmidt as part of a broader review of the Osprey's safety record, effectiveness and cost. That panel is expected to issue a report to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld in April.

Colonel Schmidt could not be reached for comment tonight. But in a letter to the editor published last month in The Morning Star in Wilmington, N.C., Colonel Schmidt defended the Osprey, saying, "After six years of extensive testing and more than 4,000 hours of flight, we believe the MV-22 to be safer and far more capable than the Vietnam-era helicopter it will replace."

The Marine Corps wants to spend more than $30 billion to buy 360 of the tilt-rotor Ospreys, which can cruise like an airplane and hover like a helicopter, to replace its CH-46 and CH-53D helicopters. The Navy and Air Force are scheduled to buy an additional 98 Ospreys by 2015. The aircraft is manufactured by the Boeing Company's helicopter division and Bell Helicopter Textron.

Among the many things under review by the four-member panel are the program office's decision to postpone or cancel a series of tests intended to check the Osprey's maneuverability in potentially dangerous aerodynamic conditions. Under Colonel Schmidt's direction, the office conducted only 33 out of 103 scheduled tests to try to cut costs and keep the program from falling further behind schedule, according to an investigation by the Marine Corps last year.

Congressional and Pentagon investigators say some of those canceled tests were intended to shed light on a rare but deadly phenomenon, known as vortex ring state, which can cause a rotor aircraft to lose lift and fall out of the sky.

Vortex ring state is thought to have caused the crash of an Osprey in Arizona last April that killed all 19 marines on board.

The four-member panel is also reviewing a crash in December in North Carolina that killed four marines. The accident has been linked to a leaky hydraulics line and a computer software failure that prevented a backup hydraulics system from working.

Some investigators contend that Colonel Schmidt should have ordered tests on the computer system that could have revealed the software problems. But Marine Corps officials say they do not know whether Colonel Schmidt was responsible for those decisions.

The Osprey's problems long predate Colonel Schmidt's tenure as program manager. Virtually since its inception in the early 1980's, the program has been plagued by maintenance problems, cost overruns and design shortcomings.

In 1989, Dick Cheney, who was then secretary of defense, tried to kill the Osprey, saying it was too expensive, but he was overruled by Congress. In 1991, a V-22 crashed on its first flight, injuring two people. And in 1992, a second V-22 prototype plunged into the Potomac River after an oil fire ignited on board, killing all seven of its passengers.

But it has been in the last year, a time when the Marines were pushing hard to get the aircraft into final production, that the V-22 has had its most spectacular and deadly mishaps.

Col. Dan Schultz, who works in the Pentagon for the deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for air programs, is scheduled to replace Colonel Schmidt as the V-22 program manager in June.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

It's Only Logical things that have happened can happen again

rvi.net
http://www.rvi.net/~fluoride/logical.htm

"There are established principles of inductive logic which are associated historically with William of Ockham and Sir Isaac Newton. They are used in the empirical sciences for the discovery or identification of causes in nature. Given a strong trend or association observed in nature, take the simplest and most fitting explanation as the cause, unless and until the contrary be shown. Likewise, attribute like causes to like effects, unless and until the contrary be shown. Finally, where cause and effect in certain circumstances are fairly ascertained by proper experiment, such cause and effect may be generalized throughout the universe, unless and until the contrary is shown."

John Remington Graham and Pierre-Jean Morin, Highlights In North American Litigation During The Twentieth Century On Artificial Fluoridation Of Public Water Supplies, Journal of Land Use & Environmental Law, Vol 142, 1999.

http://www.law.fsu.edu/journals/landuse/Vol142/graham1.htm

--

fluorosis

Fluorosis is a word meaning chronic fluoride poisoning. There are two classifications: dental and skeletal.

Dental fluorosis occurs while the teeth are developing - prior to birth as well as during childhood. The very mildest cases consist of a barely perceptible loss of translucency and increased porosity in dental enamel, and are usually described as beautiful white teeth. In moderate and severe cases there may be brown and black stains and pits which are clearly visible.

Skeletal fluorosis may occur at any age from early childhood to advanced old age, depending on daily dosage, length of exposure, and individual differences in tolerance. However, fluoride affects the entire individual in ways not necessarily associated with bones or teeth.

fluoridation

Fluoridation is the addition of any fluoride compound to a public drinking water supply in order to bring the concentration up to the so-called "optimal" level for maximum dental benefits with minimal harm to developing teeth. In most cases, this concentration is believed to be about one part per million - one milligram per liter of water.

Generally speaking, fluoride added to drinking water is the recovered liquid waste from smokestack scrubbers in the artificial fertilizer industry.

retention of ingested fluoride

For healthy, young, or middle-aged adults, approximately 50 percent of absorbed fluoride is retained by uptake in calcified tissues, and 50 percent is excreted in the urine. For young children, as much as 80 percent can be retained owing to increased uptake by the developing skeleton and teeth.

Nat'l Academy Press, Dietary Reference Intakes for Calcium, Phosphorus, Magnesium, Vitamin D, and Fluoride (1999)

http://www.nap.edu/books/0309063507/html/index.html

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risk factors

"The risk of fluorosis is increased by factors such as high protein diets, residence at high altitude, and certain metabolic and respiratory disorders that decrease pH. Factors that increase urinary pH and decrease the balance of fluoride include vegetarian diets, certain drugs and some other medical conditions."

Determinants and mechanisms of enamel fluorosis. Whitford GM, Department of Oral Biology, School of Dentistry, Medical College of Georgia, Augusta 30912-1129, USA. Ciba Found Symp 1997;205:226-41; discussion 241-5

Why are fluorides added to drinking water?

The answer is simple: follow the money. It is much too expensive to dispose of toxic fluoride wastes in any other manner.

Fluorides are one of the most abundant elements in the earth's crust. Mining and manufacturing release huge quantities of fluoride into the environment, as does the burning of coal. Automobile exhaust and cigarette smoke contain fluoride. All foods and beverages - other than fluoride-free water - contain some quantity of fluoride.

"Fluoride is being dumped into the air and water in ever­increasing quantities, and is one of the most toxic of the major pollutants."

The Many Faces of Science. Sciquest, May/June (1979) volume 52, no 5, p. 30­31, Edward Groth III, Senior Staff Officer, National Research Council

"Airborne fluorides have caused more worldwide damage to domestic animals than any other air pollutant."

Air Pollutants Affecting the Performance of Domestic Animals, Agricultural Handbook No. 380, Robert J. Lillie, 1970, U.S. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare.

symptom recognition

"The hazards to human health are not fully appreciated and are under-reported."

Endemic fluorosis. McGill PE, Stobhill Hospital NHS Trust, Glasgow, UK. Baillieres Clin Rheumatol 1995 Feb;9(1):75-81

In fact, chronic fluoride poisoning is not even a reportable disease in the United States. Physicians are not trained to recognize the signs, and have been told there were hundreds of safety studies which ruled out the possibility.

Nonetheless, "chronic effects of fluoride on the skeletal system have been described in India, Ceylon, China, South Africa, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the United States, Canada, and Europe."

Biologic Effects of Atmospheric Pollutants FLUORIDES, Committee on Biologic Effects of Atmospheric Pollutants, Division of Medical Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 1971

"Many (cases) have undoubtedly passed unnoticed, since a high proportion of them have been erroneously diagnosed as benign and malignant bone tumors, chronic osteomyelitis, chronic polyarthritis, rheumatoid disease, and tabetic arthropathy or Paget's osteitis deformans."

Radiological Aspects of A New Type of Bone Fluorosis, Periostitis Deformans, Radiology 87:1089-1094, 1968

total daily fluoride intake

With fluoride, as with anything else, dose is the poison.

During the early 1940s the typical U.S. diet provided only about 0.2 to 0.3 milligrams of fluoride daily. Water fluoridated at one part per million provided one milligram of fluoride per liter. All in all, this provided children in fluoridated areas with an average of 0.04 milligrams of fluoride per kilogram of body weight per day (0.04 mg/kg/day). Adults, whose nutritional requirements are lower per pound of body weight, ingested about 0.02 mg/kg/day. Generally speaking, the total daily intake for both children and adults would not have exceeded 1.5 to 2.0 mg/day.

McClure, Frank J., Ingestion of fluoride and dental caries --quantitative relations based on food and water requirements of children 1 to 12 years old, American Journal Diseases of Children (Vol 66, page 362, 1943)

safety studies

In 1945 McClure wrote, "Epidemiological studies of the non-dental effects of fluorine, as ingested in fluoride domestic waters, are extremely few in number and very limited in scope."

Non Dental Physiological Effects of Trace Quantities of Fluorine, Journal American College of Dentists - 12:50, (1945)

Typically, those with chronic illness and diseases known to affect bone structure were excluded. Methods were generally confined to X-Rays incapable of detecting the earlier pre-crippling phases of skeletal fluorosis.

Pathologic Studies in Man After Prolonged Ingestion of Fluoride in Drinking Water, Public Health Reports 73:721-723, 1958. [safety study]

inadequate methods

The simple fact is this: There have been no safety studies in which the researchers used methods capable of detecting cases of chronic fluoride poisoning - but failed to find them - in any naturally or artificially fluoridated area in the United States or elsewhere. On the contrary, in spite of an appalling lack of knowledge on the part of physicians and the general public, many cases have been documented and published in the peer-review scientific journals. Crippling skeletal fluorosis has occurred at daily doses widely believed to be entirely safe. Simple logic dictates it can happen again.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, "Without statements about the power of the tests, the implication of finding no-effect is construed to be that no effect exists ... further study is indicated. ... Three reports confirm the belief that renal patients have a lower margin of safety than the average person. ... One case of symptomatic skeletal fluorosis (radiculomyelopathy) has been reported from an area in Texas with natural fluoride at 2.3 -3.5 ppm in the water. (1965). There have been two cases of suspected skeletal fluorosis (based on X-ray evidence in the United States with fluoride at 2-3 ppm in the drinking water (1972). The combination of renal impairment and very high water intake was thought to account for these findings."

Drinking Water and Health, Safe Drinking Water Committee, National Academy of Sciences, NAS/NRC, 1977.

"Fluorine is known to bind calcium in the body, causing ionic calcium to decrease; this, in turn, causes secondary hyperparathyroidism ... Renal stones, reported to be common in endemic fluorosis areas, are capable of accumulating considerable amounts of fluorine. ... Although the exact genesis of renal stones in fluorine toxicity is not known, it is conjectured that insoluble calcium fluoride is deposited in the urinary tract as a nucleus around which other salts are deposited."

Trace Elements in Human and Animal Nutrition (Fifth Edition) Edited by Walter Mertz, U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, Beltsville, Maryland, 1987 p371 (Krishnamachari)

increasing risks

By 1991 the U.S. Public Health Service had noted an increase in dosage to a total exceeding 6 mg/day in fluoridated cities, with approximately equal portions delivered via drinking water, foods, other beverages, and dental products.

Review of Fluoride Benefits and Risks, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991

Although there is no established safe daily dosage of fluoride for children, it was generally agreed during the 1940s that a ten percent incidence of the very mildest form of dental fluorosis was a fair trade-off for the alleged sixty percent reduction in dental decay. By the 1980s, however, the fluorosis rate had risen to eighty percent in one fluoridated area, with fourteen percent falling into the category of moderate or severe.

Health Effects of Ingested Fluoride, National Research Council, 1993

The most important thing to keep in mind about fluoride and fluoridation is this: more is not better.

non-dental symptoms of chronic fluoride poisoning

A search of the scientific literature on the subject indicates that fluoride is a cumulative toxin. Exposure can result in a combination of osteosclerosis, osteomalacia and osteoporosis of varying degrees as well as exostosis formation. In a proportion of cases secondary hyperparathyroidism is observed with associated characteristic bone changes. Contrary to earlier thinking, severe crippling forms of skeletal fluorosis are seen in paediatric age group too. Increased metabolic turnover of the bone, impaired bone collagen synthesis and increased avidity for calcium are features in fluoride toxicity. Osteosclerotic picture is evident when small doses of fluoride are ingested over a long period of time during which calcium intakes are apparently normal while osteoporotic forms are common in paediatric age group and with higher body load of the element. Alterations in hormones concerned with bone mineral metabolism are seen in fluorosis.

Krishnamachari KA, Prog Food Nutr Sci 1986;10(3-4):279-314

"Pain is a cardinal feature due to arthritic lesions and to secondary peripheral nerve involvement."

Krishnamachari, Trace Elements in Human and Animal Nutrition, edited by Walter Mertz, USDA, 1987

"Early cases may be misdiagnosed as rheumatoid or osteo arthritis."

World Health Organization, Fluorides and Human Health, 1970

In India, where skeletal fluorosis is taken seriously, the early symptoms of overdose are reported to include one or more of the following: nausea, loss of appetite, gas formation and nagging pain in the stomach, chronic diarrhea, chronic constipation, persistent headache, unusual fatigue, loss of muscle power and weakness and pain, excessive thirst and frequent urination, depression, tingling sensation in fingers and toes, and allergic manifestations.

Susheela, A.K., Fluorosis - Early Warning Signs and Diagnostic Test, Bulletin of the Nutrition Foundation of India, 10:2, April 1989.

Scientists say fluoride may possibly poison and alter enzyme and hormonal systems in the fetus causing disturbances to osteoid formation and mineralization. Knock-knees, bowlegs, and saber shins develop when walking begins. Combinations of osteomalacia, osteoporosis, and osteosclerosis result in a spectrum of bone changes from an early age.

The spectrum of radiographic bone changes in children with fluorosis. Christie DP, Radiology 1980 Jul;136(1):85-90

In the United States, where skeletal fluorosis is not yet recognized as a serious threat to public health, fluoride is added to water intentionally. Many scientists say a daily intake derived from a multiplicity of sources which is now generally considered as "safe," may in fact be potentially harmful over long periods of time.

Fluoride and bone: an unusual hypothesis. Smith GE, Xenobiotica 1985 Mar;15(3):177-86

Symptoms may be present far in advance of bone changes which can be seen or detected by the use of X-Rays or other bone density studies.

Endemic Fluorosis, Medicine 42:229, 1963

Disturbances in soft tissues in chronic intoxication with fluorine develop early, usually long before the onset of typical changes in teeth and skeletal bones.

Non-skeletal forms of fluorosis., Zhavoronkov AA Arkh Patol 1977;39(3):83-91

Complaints include:

nonspecific joint and muscle pains Occupational fluorosis through 50 years: clinical and epidemiological experiences. Grandjean P, Am J Ind Med 1982;3(2):227-36 headaches, gastrointestinal symptoms Hydrofluorosis in the Fluoridated Milwaukee Area, Fluoride - 10(4), October (1977) H.T. Petraborg, M.D. calcification of the interosseous ligaments in the extremities Kondo T, Asanuma S, Sakurai S, Tamura K, Ando M, Saku Central Hospital. Nippon Igaku Hoshasen Gakkai Zasshi 1997 Jun;57(7):425-6 subclinical inflammatory reaction Susheela AK, Jethanandani P, Department of Anatomy, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi. Clin Biochem 1994 Dec;27(6):463-8 articular pain and limitation of motion Industrial fluorosis., Boillat MA, Baud CA, Lagier R, Donath A, Dettwiler W, Courvoisier B. Schweiz Med Wochenschr 1976 Dec 11;106(50):1842-4 gastrointestinal symptoms as well as mucosal abnormalities Dasarathy S, Das TK, Gupta IP, Susheela AK, Tandon RK, Department of Gastroenterology, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi, India. J Gastroenterol 1996 Jun;31(3):333-7 spinal cord compression at the cervical and dorsal level due to vertebral osteosclerosis A, Fredj M, Ben Ammou S, Tounsi H, Haddad A, Unite de neurologie, hopital Charles-Nicolle, Tunis, Tunisie. Rev Med Interne 1995;16(7):533-5 locomotor disability ranging from simple mechanical back pain to severe, crippling, combined locomotor and neurological impairment Endemic fluorosis. McGill PE, Stobhill Hospital NHS Trust, Glasgow, UK. Baillieres Clin Rheumatol 1995 Feb;9(1):75-81

fibromyalgia?

" ... reduction in the diameter of the intervertebral foramina and of the spinal canal ... severe spastic quadriparesis in flexion accompanied by distressing spasms and urinary incontinence"

Neurological complications of endemic skeletal fluorosis, with special emphasis on radiculo-myelopathy. Haimanot RT, Department of Internal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia. Paraplegia 1990 May;28(4):244-51

acute poisoning

Initial symptoms of toxicity are a result of the local action of fluoride on the mucosa of the gastrointestinal tract. Vomiting, abdominal pain, nausea, and diarrhea are followed by paresthesia, hyperactive reflexes and tonic and clonic convulsions. No system of the body can be considered exempt, and death is usually due to respiratory paralysis or cardiac failure. Many of the signs and symptoms of acute fluoride toxicity are a result of the calcium-binding effects of fluoride.

Goodman and Gilman, The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, Macmillan 1975; World Health Organization, 1970

early reports of fluoride effects

"Differences in drinking and culinary habits of individuals may also cause quite a variation in their total fluorine intake, which in turn will influence the effect ... we are dealing with a low-grade chronic poisoning of the formative dental organ, in which case some individuals may show a more severe reaction than others having a comparable fluoride intake. ... There is some indication that there is an apparent tendency toward a higher incidence of gingival disturbances in areas of relatively high fluoride concentration (more than 4 ppm). ... Epidemiologic studies have shown that from the continuous use of water containing as much as 1 part per million of fluorine, the very mildest forms of dental fluorosis may develop in about 10 per cent of the group."

Dean, H. Trendley, Endemic Dental Fluorosis or Mottled Enamel, Journal, American Dental Association, 30:1278, 1943

"From observations made by one of us (HTD) in areas of relatively high fluoride concentration (more than 4.0 ppm) there is, likewise, sufficient evidence to suggest an apparent tendency to a higher incidence of gingivitis."

Dean, H. Trendley, Some Epidemiological Aspects of Chronic Endemic Dental Fluorosis, American Journal of Public Health, 26:567, 1936

warning from National Academy of Sciences top fluoride expert

"The most important and widely disregarded fact about dental fluorosis is this: no safe established daily intake exists, i.e., the maximal amount in mg fluoride which consumed daily does NOT produce cosmetically damaging extensive white areas or brown stain in some individuals has not been fixed.

"Among the many effects of fluoride (real or purported) are a few that have been so well studied that quantitative dose-effect relations can be estimated albeit with variable numerical certainty. Only three of these effects have been observed in man: acute poisoning -death following a single dose; chronic poisoning -crippling fluorosis, the final stage of advanced osteofluorosis, first detectable as an increase in the radio-graphic density of the skeleton (osteosclerosis); and dental fluorosis. Five other chronic fluoride effects have been well studied in experimental animals: kidney injury, anemia, interference with reproduction, changes in thyroid structure or function, and body weight loss.

"Crippling fluorosis as an occupational disease follows exposures estimated at 10 to over 25 mg of fluoride daily during periods of 10-20 years."

Harold C. Hodge, Ph.D., The Safety of Fluoride Tablets or Drops, Continuing Evaluation of the Use of Fluorides, AAAS Symposium, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1979 pp 255-256

case reports

"Our interest was aroused recently in a case that presented as a diagnostic riddle. In the elderly man, carcinoma of the prostate with widespread osteoblastic metastasis is not difficult to diagnose when the typical roentgenographic picture appears ... Another possibility in the differential diagnosis, because its roentgenographic findings are similar to those of carcinoma of the prostate with widespread bony metastasis, is fluoride osteo-sclerosis." (73-year-old retired farmer from South Dakota)

Fluoride Osteosclerosis Simulating Carcinoma of the Prostate With Widespread Bony Metastasis: A Case Report, Journal of Urology, 96:944-946, (1966) Gilbaugh & Thompson

"The patient was born in Spur, Texas, where the fluorine content of the drinking water ranges up to 1.2 parts per million, and lived there until the age of seven years. ... all the teeth showed a severe degree of mottled enamel." (skeletal fluorosis case report)

Linsman, Crawford & McMurray, Fluoride Osteosclerosis from Drinking Water, Radiology, 40:474 May, 1943 (see erratum, June)

"A 54-year-old female resident of Wellston, Okla, was found to have osteosclerosis on a routine chest roentgenogram. Subsequent investigation disclosed the cause of her osteosclerosis to be fluorosis secondary to the ingestion of well water."

A report of fluorosis in the United States secondary to drinking well water. Felsenfeld AJ, Roberts MA, Department of Medicine, Wadsworth Veterans Administration Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA 90073. JAMA 1991 Jan 23-30;265(4):486-8

warnings from National Academy of Sciences

"Recent studies indicate that the total intake of fluoride is as high as 3 mg/day rather than the earlier figure of 1.5 mg/day, primarily because of increases in the estimated levels of fluoride in food. (1970) Balance data presented by Spencer also suggest a higher retention by bone, nearly 2 mg/day rather than the 0.2 mg/day indicated earlier. ... These findings are important . . . a retention of 2 mg/day would mean that an average individual would experience skeletal fluorosis after 40 yr, based on an accumulation of 10,000 ppm fluoride in bone ash." (this is phase three crippling skeletal fluorosis)

"There was an observation in the Kingston-Newburgh study that was considered spurious and has never been followed up. There was a 13.5% incidence of cortical defects in bone in the fluoridated community but only 7.5% in the nonfluoridated community. ... Caffey noted that the age, sex, and anatomical distribution of these bone defects are 'strikingly' similar to that of osteogenic sarcoma.

"The 'moderate' dental fluorosis shown by Hodge and Smith (1965, p. 443) in a community with "about 2 ppm" would be objectionable to most, if not all, parents, although there seems to be little consumer research on the matter.

"As noted above, the possibility of mutagenesis due to HF is potentially important in cancer of the stomach. Ingested fluoride ion can become HF in the stomach because the pH of HF is 3.18 and the pH of the stomach without food is generally about 1. Although stomach cancer rates show no consistent indication of a relationship to fluoridation in the United States, the much higher stomach cancer rates in Japan are related to intake patterns that are compatible with a hypothesis that fluoride is the crucial factor involved.... "

NAS/NRC, Drinking Water and Health, 1977

minimize the risk

"Recommendations are made to minimize the risk to human health from fluoride ingestion

"The recommended water fluoride concentrations for ranges of mean temperature in the United States is 0.7 -1.2 mg/L, established after a series of elegant studies in the 1950s that related fluoride concentrations in drinking water to fluorosis prevalence and severity in different climatic regions in the United States. The results of those studies were confirmed by further research a decade later. As was the case with all fluoride research at that time, drinking water was virtually the only source of measurable fluoride. (Foods usually contained only trace amounts of fluoride.) Recent estimates of daily intake of fluoride from food and drink by North American children up to 2 years of age are 0.01 -0.16 mg/kg in areas without fluoridation and 0.03-0.13 mg/kg in areas with fluoridation."

Health Effects of Ingested Fluoride, Subcommittee on Health Effects of Ingested Fluoride, Committee on Toxicology, Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology, Commission on Life Sciences, National Research Council, August 1993.

dental fluorosis may be health hazard

"Studies of dental fluorosis indicate that children's exposure to fluoride has increased since the 1970s.

"Dental fluorosis... might be more than a cosmetic defect if enough fluorotic enamel is fractured and lost to cause pain, adversely affect food choices, compromise chewing efficiency, and require complex dental treatment.

"The most effective approach to stabilizing the prevalence and severity of dental fluorosis, without jeopardizing the benefits to oral health, is likely to come from more judicious control of fluoride in foods, processed beverages, and dental products, rather than a reduction in the recommended concentrations of fluoride in drinking water. But applying such a policy would be formidable; reduction of fluoride concentrations in drinking water would be easier to administer, monitor, and evaluate."

Health Effects of Ingested Fluoride, Subcommittee on Health Effects of Ingested Fluoride, Committee on Toxicology, Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology, Commission on Life Sciences, National Research Council, August 1993 p 47-48

fluoridation does not reduce dental decay, may cause bone cancer, and increases the risk of lead poisoning

" .. the world over, including the U.S.A., --there is either no significant difference -- or more often, people using fluoridated water have significantly more caries. ... even very small amounts of fluoride cause brittle hard to repair teeth. ... the act of fluoridating water increases lead exposure especially to children because of two facts -a. The fluoride added to drinking water often has up to 400 mcg of lead per liter and b. the corrosive action of fluoride extracts lead from pipes and solder joints increasing lead exposure of the young. (Babies up to 3 months absorb 16 times as much lead per unit body weight than adults. ... the levels of fluoride found in the bones of rodents who had osteosarcoma was lower than the level found in human adults exposed to allowable levels of fluoride. ... with the exception of fluoride, no other compounds including radioactive compounds, have been able to produce osteosarcomas in rodents."

Letter from William L. Marcus, Ph.D., Senior Science Advisor, Office of Science and Technology, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, June 13, 1995 - EPA fired Dr. Marcus for refusing to remain silent on the cancer risk issue. The judge who heard the lawsuit he brought against EPA over the firing made that finding - that EPA fired him over his fluoride work and not for the phony reason put forward by EPA management at his dismissal. Dr. Marcus won his lawsuit and is again at work at EPA. Documentation is available on request. Why Epa's Headquarters Union Of Scientists Opposes Fluoridation.

http://www.rvi.net/~fluoride/whitepaper.htm

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conclusion

Although the abnormally white teeth of the milder forms of dental fluorosis can be seen in any group of children today, the non-dental effects of chronic poisoning are not widely understood or recognized by health professionals. Sadly, it appears that some of the more active anti-fluoridationists are also in the dark.

It is understandable that Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch would sue me for saying he can't name a legitimate safety study. He probably believes his own publications, and is satisfied with X-Rays or epidemiology based on death certificates. Most pro-fluoridationists believe their own press.

However, it is disappointing to find the following description on the newly organized international Fluoride Action Network, headed by Dr. Paul Connett.

"The early symptoms of skeletal fluorosis, a fluoride-induced bone and joint disorder which impacts millions of people in India, China, and Africa, mimic the symptoms of osteoarthritis."

50 Reasons to Oppose Fluoridation by Paul Connett Ph.D.

http://www.fluoridealert.org

This statement does little in terms of increasing awareness of the signs of fluoride poisoning. In actual fact, if we were to count the number of Americans who have complained of one or more of the symptoms which can be caused by excess fluoride, virtually everyone would be included.

Without studies capable of distinguishing between symptoms caused by fluoride and symptoms caused by something else, one cannot say fluoridation has not caused adverse health effects. Therefore, it is quackery when any physician claims that fluoridation can do no harm. Total dosage is total dosage. Cause and effect is clearly established. Current total daily fluoride dosage is well within the range that has caused adverse health effects in the past.

The simple fact is this: the claim for hundreds of safety studies is bogus. No one can name one that used appropriate methods because there were none. However, even if the safety studies had used appropriate methods, the existence of case reports means that safety is an illusion.

The pro-fluoridation propaganda cannot stand the test of Ockham's razor. If no one has looked, and no one is looking, how can we expect anyone to see?

Comments? ... E-mail Darlene Sherrell
mailto:darlene@caribsurf.com?subject=it's_only_logical

See Additional References and Comments from Andreas Schuld
http://www.rvi.net/~fluoride/logical.htm#clues

http://www.rvi.net/~fluoride/index.htm

27 February 2001
Additional References and Clues ...

from Andreas Schuld, Parents of Fluoride Poisoned Children (PFPC)

All symptoms in fluoride poisoning are identical to the known symptoms of thyroid dysfunction. ... the very most obvious issue: fluoride and iodine.

In India they deny fluoride/thyroid cancer, while in China it is openly acknowledged. It has all become a political game.

As you know, you can give identical fluoride doses to two people, and both will have different symptoms.

This is due to what is called the "individual thyroid resistance".

Depending what your thyroid status is, you will have different degrees of "fluoride poisoning".

Dental fluorosis is enamel hypoplasia. It occurs during the times the enamel is forming. For decidious teeth, this also includes the gestation period. Skeletal fluorosis already occurs in the fetus due to transferred fluoride in the placenta.

Check these:

"Fluoride levels in maternal urine and amniotic fluid and fluoride content in fetal femur and pathological change in fetal femur appeared a positive correlation between them. Femur fluoride content and pathological change of bone in fetuses born to mothers with mottling teeth were significantly greater than to those without them. Pathological change in fetal femur presented dose-response relationship with their bone fluoride content. When the latter reached greater than 500 micrograms/g, pathological changes occurred in 90% of the bone. "

Shi J, Dai G, Zhang Z - "Relationship between bone fluoride content, pathological change in bone of aborted fetuses and maternal fluoride level" Zhonghua Yu Fang Yi Xue Za Zhi 29(2):103-5 (1995) (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov id=7796679)

"In a high endemic fluorosis area in Guizhou, China, 40 human fetuses delivered by induced abortion during the 5th-8th month of gestation were utilized to study dental embryonic samples under transmission electron microscope (TEM). Compared with normal controls, ultrastructure findings in the ameloblast cell organs include swelling of mitochondria, enlargement of SER, increase in RNA granules and RER. This study suggests that the irregularities of the collagenous fibers and crystallites are due to the maldevelopment of the ameloblast Tome's processes, which explains the mechanism of motteled enamel."

Zhan Y, Du L, Zhan C - "A study on human dental embryology in an endemic high fluorosis region" Zhonghua Bing Li Xue Za Zhi 24(1):36-8 (1995) (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov id=7781114) Department of Histology and Embryology, Guiyang Medical College.

risk factors

...there is also race, gender, etc.
(see:fluorosis_blacks, race_sex_age, altitude)
http://www.bruha.com/fluoride/html/fluorosis_blacks.html
http://www.rvi.net/~fluoride/index.htm
http://www.rvi.net/~fluoride/index.htm

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FACT OF THE WEEK

February 27, 2001
"TwistedHumor.com"
Fact Of The Day Newsletter "Strange...Weird...Bizarre...TRUE!"
http://www.twistedhumor.com/newsletters.shtml

The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later, in full view, they were both eaten by a killer whale.

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Court Rules Cost Should Not Affect Action on Clean Air

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/national/27CND-SCOTUS.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 - The Supreme Court today unanimously upheld the way the federal government sets clean-air standards, rejecting an industry argument that regulators must balance the desire for clean air with the cost of having it.

The court rejected what had been considered the most important challenge to the 1970 Clean Air Act in the statute's history when the justices held that the Environmental Protection Agency need not - indeed cannot - consider the costs of achieving the air standards that it sets.

The act "unambiguously bars cost considerations" from the process of establishing air standards, "and thus ends the matter for us as well as the E.P.A.," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court.

"Were it not for the hundreds of pages of briefing respondents have submitted on the issue, one would have thought it fairly clear that this text does not permit the E.P.A. to consider costs in setting the standards," Justice Scalia wrote. "The language, as one scholar has noted, `is absolute."'

The ruling applies only to the Clean Air Act. It has no effect on, say, government regulations meant to protect water or wildlife and the costs that industries might incur in meeting standards for those purposes.

Justices Clarence Thomas, John Paul Stevens and Stephen G. Breyer wrote concurring opinions emphasizing different facets of the court's finding. The texts of the opinions in Whitman v. American Trucking Associations et al, No. 99-1257, can be read on the Supreme Court's web site: www. supremecourtus.gov.

The American Lung Association issued a statement in which it called the ruling "a victory for the Clean Air Act and for the health of the American people."

And Edward W. Warren, a lawyer for the industry groups that had challenged the Clean Air Act, said he was disappointed. "We're no worse off than we've been all along," Mr. Warren told The Associated Press. "But we didn't win."

The justices also rejected industry arguments that the E.P.A. usurped lawmaking powers from Congress when it set tougher standards for soot and ozone in 1997. Still, the ruling was not an absolute victory for the Environmental Protection Agency. The justices found fault with the E.P.A.'s way of implementing ozone standards and said it was up to the agency to rectify various ambiguities.

Today's ruling was on an appeal by the administration of President Bill Clinton from a ruling in May 1999 by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which had invalidated the standards the agency set in 1997. (The case was originally entitled Browner v. American Trucking Associations, after Carol Browner, who was Christie Whitman's predecessor as administrator of the E.P.A.)

When the case was argued in the Supreme Court last Nov. 7, several justices expressed sharp skepticism about the trucking group's arguments.

Today's ruling reflected some of that. Justice Scalia acknowledged the industry's arguments that the cost of implementing a health standard might produce health losses, "for example, by closing down whole industries and thereby impoverishing the workers and consumers dependent upon those industries."

"That is unquestionably true," Justice Scalia said, "and Congress was unquestionably aware of it" when it passed the Clean Air Act.

---

Fears about impact of foot-and-mouth disease grow

02/27/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-27-footmouth.htm

LONDON (AP) - Horse racing was canceled throughout Britain, a major international rugby match was called off and the government extended restrictions on the movement of livestock as fears about the impact of foot-and-mouth disease mounted Tuesday.

Outbreaks of the highly contagious livestock ailment were identified in six new sites, bringing the number of sites where cases have been confirmed to 18. About 7,000 cattle, pigs and sheep have been slaughtered in an effort to stop the spread of the disease, but it shows no signs of ebbing.

As the agriculture ministry scrambled to trace the intricate path of the virus, Prime Minister Tony Blair called an emergency Cabinet meeting at Downing Street. Agriculture Minister Nick Brown later announced that restrictions on livestock movement around the country would be extended through March 16.

Farmers will be allowed to move healthy animals to slaughterhouses and markets only with strictly enforced precautions to prevent them from spreading the infection.

Farmers believe as many as 25,000 sheep, cattle and pigs passed through three markets at the center of the outbreak during the week before moving livestock within Britain was banned Friday.

Foot-and-mouth disease, which afflicts cloven-hoofed animals, spreads very easily. Although humans almost never catch it, they can carry it on boots and clothing. The virus can also be transmitted by contact between animals, through the air or through contaminated feed.

Fans of racing, rugby and hiking were also feeling the disease's impact.

The Jockey Club, which runs horse racing in England, announced that races would be suspended at least until March 7. The fate of the Cheltenham Festival - a prestigious steeplechase meeting scheduled for March 13-15 - was in doubt.

"We believe that, by having a short break, racing is giving itself the best chance of continuing in the long run," said Paul Greeves, director of the British Horseracing Board.

Ireland suspended all horse and horse and greyhound race meetings, and a major rugby match between Wales and Ireland in Cardiff on Saturday was scrapped because of fears Irish fans could carry the disease home.

Britain's government granted local authorities the power to close footpaths to walkers, and Dartmoor National Park, a popular hiking area in southwest England, was shut to protect the 60,000 cattle and sheep that graze there.

Some worried farmers have even urged Blair to postpone a national election expected this spring, fearful the campaign would increase travel through the countryside and possibly spread the virus.

A butchers' trade group said many members were having trouble obtaining meat and feared their businesses would not weather the outbreak. If domestic supplies run out, the higher cost of imported meat could drive customers away, said Graham Bidston, head of the National Federation of Meat Traders.

"Small butchers can't survive in these circumstances for long," he said.

The new cases of the virus identified Tuesday spanned the country, from Anglesey in north Wales to Northamptonshire, north of London. They followed five new cases that cropped up Monday.

The sudden escalation - after a weekend lull in which only one new case was reported - gripped the country with new fears of a repeat of the epidemic in 1967, when nearly half a million livestock were slaughtered.

Bonfires have lit up affected areas as authorities incinerate about 7,000 slaughtered animals. Another 5,000 have been killed in continental Europe, where no cases have been found but authorities fear the disease could spread.

France said Tuesday it would destroy 20,000 sheep imported from Britain this month, and the European Union extended its import ban until March 9.

Even if the foot-and-mouth outbreak is quickly contained, Chief Veterinary Officer Jim Scudamore has warned that an export ban, imposed two days after the first case was discovered Feb. 19, could remain in place for up to six months after eradication.

---

Court upholds federal air-quality standards

02/27/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/court/2001-02-27-cleanair.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld the way the federal government sets clean-air standards, rejecting industry arguments that officials must balance compliance costs against the health benefits of cleaner air.

The ruling, a major boost for the federal Clean Air Act, said the law does not require the government to consider the financial cost of reducing harmful emissions when it sets air-quality standards.

The justices also ruled against industry arguments that the Environmental Protection Agency took too much lawmaking power from Congress when it set tougher standards for ozone and soot in 1997.

But the court ordered the EPA to reconsider the standards it set for ozone, saying the agency's interpretation of a section of the Clean Air Act was unreasonable.

The Clean Air Act "unambiguously bars cost considerations" from the process of setting air-quality standards, "and thus ends the matter for us as well as the EPA," Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court.

The federal law, "which ... we interpret as requiring the EPA to set air quality standards at the level that is 'requisite' - that is, not lower or higher than is necessary - to protect the public health with an adequate margin of safety, fits comfortably within the scope of discretion permitted by our precedent," Scalia wrote.

All nine justices agreed on the result of the ruling, although sometimes for different reasons.

The Clean Air Act, enacted in 1970, is the nation's premier environmental law, and the industry challenge was viewed as the most significant environmental case in years. The Clinton administration had told the justices the dispute had profound implications for Americans' health.

The law requires the EPA to set national air-quality standards to "protect the public health." The agency is to use criteria that "accurately reflect the latest scientific knowledge" for identifying pollution's effects on health.

Business groups that long have chafed under the clean-air law argued that the EPA was setting standards without clear criteria and without considering the financial costs of complying with them.

The Clinton administration argued that the nation's air is cleaner than when the Clean Air Act was adopted. Government lawyers said the EPA considers compliance costs in deciding how states will try to meet the clean-air standards, and the law is intended to drive the creation of new technology for doing so.

A federal appeals court had ruled that the EPA went too far in adopting new standards in 1997 to reduce smog and soot. The court said the government interpreted the federal law so loosely that it usurped Congress' authority.

However, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected industry's argument that the government must weigh financial costs against health benefits. It relied on a 1980 appeals court ruling that barred the EPA from considering costs when it set air-quality standards.

The Supreme Court decided the appeals court was right in ruling the EPA could not consider costs in setting air-quality standards, but wrong in saying the agency unlawfully usurped Congress' authority.

On the ozone issue, the justices ruled against the EPA's implementation of revised ozone standards in areas whose ozone levels exceed the maximum allowable amount.

"We therefore find the EPA's implementation policy to be unlawful," Scalia wrote. "It is left to the EPA to develop a reasonable interpretation" of the ozone standards.

Not since 1935 had the Supreme Court invalidated a federal regulation by saying too much of Congress' lawmaking power had been handed over to federal officials. A number of laws give federal agencies broad regulatory authority, including the Federal Communications Commission's authorization to regulate broadcast licensing in "the public interest."

The 1997 air standards limited ozone, a major component of smog, to 0.08 parts per million instead of .12 parts per million under the old requirement. States also were required to limit soot from power plants, cars and other sources to 2.5 microns, or 28 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

Industry groups that challenged the clean-air rules included the American Trucking Associations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers and three states - Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia.

A friend-of-the-court brief supporting the clean-air rules was filed by New York, California, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Vermont.

The cases are Browner v. American Trucking Associations, 99-1257, and American Trucking Associations v. Browner, 99-1426

---

FARMERS PROTEST

February 27, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/world/27BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

BELGIUM: As fears grew that foot-and-mouth disease could have joined mad cow disease in crossing from Britain, farmers clashed with riot police outside an emergency meeting of European Union farm ministers in Brussels. The protesters, many on tractors, brought parts of the city to a standstill and were repelled by police officers with water cannons as the farmers, seeking aid to meet the crisis, tried to break down barbed-wire barriers. Belgium banned the transport of all sheep and goats inside the country. Germany closed all its livestock markets for a week, and together with the Netherlands began slaughtering thousands of animals imported from Britain. Paul Meller (NYT)

---

Louisiana

01/02/27
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Alexandria - A Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement agent sued her supervisor for allegedly spreading a false rumor about her sex life. Carla Rachal of Natchitoches filed the lawsuit in Rapides Parish. The defendants include the Wildlife and Fisheries Department and Rachal's supervisor, Lt. Kelly Fannin. Fannin said he'll sue Rachal for making false accusations.

Massachusetts

Framingham - Residents and a town official want the Environmental Protection Agency to extend its cleanup of mercury contamination around a former textile dye factory in Ashland to include two reservoirs rendered useless by the pollution. Anglers have been warned not to eat fish from the Sudbury River for two decades because of the mercury.

Montana

Libby - The Environmental Protection Agency has begun a second round of tests to determine the extent of asbestos contamination in home insulation here. Recent tests have shown hundreds of people have developed lung abnormalities due to asbestos exposure from a defunct vermiculite mine. Last year the EPA took dust samples from dozens of homes.

---

Whitman disagrees

February 28, 2001
Washington Times
Inside Politics Greg Pierce News and political dispatches from around the nation.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inpolitics.htm

Environmental Protection Agency chief Christine Todd Whitman on Monday took issue with President Bush's decision to reinstate a ban on U.S. funding for lobbying for abortion overseas.

But Mrs. Whitman said she respected Mr. Bush's stance on most other issues and the two had agreed to disagree on abortion, Reuters reports.

President Reagan in 1984 imposed the Mexico City policy, which says that groups that perform, subsidize or seek to legalize abortion overseas cannot receive U.S. funds.

Bill Clinton scrapped it when he became president in 1993, and Mr. Bush revived it last month as his first foreign-policy act upon just two days after taking office.

"I was sorry he did that and I obviously don't agree with that," Mrs. Whitman told CNN's "Crossfire." "But you know something? Nobody agrees with somebody else 100 percent."

She added: "You know, we disagree on that issue. He knows it, I know it. We go forward from there."

-------- police

KERIK MAKES ANOTHER ARREST

February 27, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/nyregion/27MBRF.html

MANHATTAN: For the third time since becoming the police commissioner less than a year ago, Bernard B. Kerik, left, took part in a street arrest. Mr. Kerik told reporters yesterday that he was driving around the Hamilton Heights section of Harlem on Sunday with his security detail when they noticed one man chasing another. When one man got into a van on West 142nd Street, Commissioner Kerik and others detained both men. They found that the van had been reported carjacked and arrested the two men on various charges, including unauthorized use of a motor vehicle. Diane Cardwell (NYT)

-------- spying

U.S. Citizen Arrested in Russia

February 27, 2001
Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-US-Arrest.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian security officials on Tuesday announced the arrest on drug charges of a U.S. Fulbright scholar they alleged had intelligence training -- and said it was a reminder that Russia must be vigilant for foreign spies.

John Edward Tobin, a 24-year-old graduate student at Voronezh State University in central Russia, was detained while purchasing drugs, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, said in a statement.

He was charged with illegal possession of drugs, which can bring up to three years in a Russian prison, said Pavel Bolshunov, an FSB spokesman in Voronezh.

Bolshunov said Tobin had not been caught spying, but that he had been trained at elite intelligence-related institutions: Fort Jackson, S.C., the biggest Army basic training base in the United States, from 1994-5; the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., where he studied Russian in 1996; and a military intelligence school in Fort Huachuca, Ariz., from 1995-6, where he earned a certificate as an interrogation expert.

The head of the local Fulbright program office, Joseph McCormick, said it was the first time a Fulbright scholar had been detained in Russia, but program officials declined to comment further on the case.

The U.S. State Department rejected suggestions that the arrest was part of a new spy war, and that the renowned Fulbright program is a front for training U.S. spies. ``Any allegations of such connections are absurd,'' spokesman Philip Reeker said in Washington.

Tobin graduated last year from Middlebury College in Vermont with a bachelor's degree in international studies, and the Monterey institute confirmed that he attended there. There was no immediate comment from the other institutions.

``In our opinion, he came here for country and language training. He speaks without an accent, knows slang very well, and dialects,'' Bolshunov said.

``One does not want to believe it, but a fact remains a fact -- now one cannot rule out that there may be other Americans in Russia who are connected with the special services and who hold recommendations from the U.S. Department of State,'' Bolshunov was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency. ``Therefore, the Federal Security Service should be on the alert.''

By stressing the alleged intelligence angle, the security service -- the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB -- seemed intent on turning what would have been a normal drug arrest into another Russian-American spat. Russian media followed its lead, with major networks calling the arrest ``the latest spy scandal.''

Last year, a Moscow court convicted U.S. businessman Edmond Pope of espionage for obtaining the plans for a high-speed torpedo, and throughout the inquiry FSB officials maintained Western spies were stepping up their activity in Russia.

A Russian arms control researcher, Igor Sutyagin, is currently on trial on charges of spying for the United States. The FSB says that he used his academic work as a cover for espionage, but his supporters say his case is intended to intimidate Russian scholars from maintaining foreign contacts.

The State Department said a U.S. consular official had visited ``the arrested U.S. student'' in the Voronezh jail. The State Department said the man had not signed a privacy waiver so it could not divulge other information.

Independent NTV television reported that police detained Tobin at a nightclub in Voronezh, 300 miles south of Moscow, on Jan. 26 for possession of 1.5 grams of marijuana, and that he was formally put under arrest Feb. 1.

Tobin's lawyer, Vladimir Kulinich, said on Russia's state-run RTR television that his client was arrested after he failed to appear for a summons.

---

U.S. exchange student arrested in Russia

02/27/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-27-russiaex.htm

MOSCOW (AP) - A U.S. citizen studying on a Fulbright grant was arrested for alleged drug possession this month in central Russia, security officials announced Tuesday.

They also alleged that he had U.S. intelligence training, and that his arrest was a signal that the Federal Security Service - the main successor to the Soviet KGB - had to be vigilant.

The FSB said in a statement that a graduate student named John Edward Tobbin was seized in Voronezh, about 300 miles south of Moscow, while purchasing drugs. It did not identify the substances.

An FSB spokesman in Voronezh, Pavel Bolshunov, said that Tobbin was charged with "illegally keeping drugs with no intention of selling them," and that he faced up to three years in prison. He is currently being held in a four-man jail cell, the Interfax news agency reported.

A U.S. Embassy official confirmed a U.S. exchange student had been arrested on drug charges. However, the official said the man had not signed a privacy waiver so the embassy was not free to divulge any further information on his case.

The head of the local Fulbright program office, Joseph McCormick, said it was the first time a Fulbright scholar had been detained in Russia.

"Nothing like this has ever happened before," McCormick said.

Tobbin's hometown has not been named. However, the FSB said he had previously been a student at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., which is run under the aegis of the U.S. Defense Department, and that he had been in training at a military intelligence school in Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

"According to information at our disposal, John Tobbin received access to work with secret documents in May 1997," the FSB said in a statement.

Zhanna Sokolova, the dean of foreign students at Voronezh State University, said Tobbin got into a fight in a cafe, and police intervened.

"As we understand it, when they noticed there was no smell of alcohol, they searched him and found marijuana," she said.

A house search uncovered more of the drug, she said.

Independent NTV television reported that police detained Tobbin at a nightclub in Voronezh on Jan. 26 for possession of 1.5 grams of marijuana, and that he was formally put under arrest Feb. 1.

Bolshunov said Tobbin had received a diploma from the Fort Huachuca school as an interrogation expert.

"In our opinion, he came here for country and language training. He speaks without an accent, knows slang very well, and dialects," Bolshunov said.

He said that Tobbin had not been involved in espionage.

"But he does have perfect training, he graduated from elite (spy) schools, his Russian is perfect, he had access to classified information."

"One does not want to believe it, but a fact remains a fact - now one cannot rule out that there may be other Americans in Russia who are connected with the special services and who hold recommendations from the U.S. Department of State," Bolshunov was quoted as saying by Interfax. "Therefore, the Federal Security Service should be on the alert."

-------- terrorism

Varied Portraits of bin Laden Emerge in Embassy Bomb Case

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/world/27TERR.html

On a typical weekend, the witness said, Osama bin Laden liked to relax at his farm near the Blue Nile in Sudan, where he spent time riding horses. His followers would often accompany him, the witness went on, and they would picnic on the grounds of the farm or swim or amuse themselves by playing soccer.

The witness, L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a former member of Mr. bin Laden's group, gave this bucolic glimpse of his old cronies at a lengthy cross-examination yesterday at the embassy bombings trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

But a prosecutor argued that the glimpse was incomplete: one man who often played soccer at Mr. bin Laden's farm was no mere weekend reveler, he said, but a terrorist who had once bombed the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan.

What emerged in court yesterday were just these types of conflicting portraits of Mr. bin Laden and his international organization, Al Qaeda, which is Arabic for the Base.

The government contends that the four defendants - Wadih El-Hage, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali - joined with Mr. bin Laden in a terrorist plot that eventually led to the bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa in 1998. The defense, on the other hand, spent a lot of time yesterday trying to suggest that a person could associate and even work with Mr. bin Laden and not be a terrorist.

The day began with Sam A. Schmidt, a lawyer for Mr. El-Hage, getting Mr. Kherchtou to concede that a number of people he dealt with while stationed in Nairobi, Kenya, on behalf of Mr. bin Laden were not members of Al Qaeda.

The man who ran one of Mr. bin Laden's agricultural companies, for example, was not an official Al Qaeda member, the witness said, nor were several engineers and laborers who worked for Mr. bin Laden's road-building company.

Mr. Schmidt has maintained that Mr. El-Hage is a legitimate businessman who dealt only with Mr. bin Laden's commercial interests.

Although Mr. Kherchtou has said that Mr. El-Hage was sent to Nairobi in 1994 to act as his boss, he added under questioning yesterday that Mr. El-Hage spent at least part of his time engaged in building a trade in precious stones and starting a company that dealt in ostrich meat.

More important, Mr. Kherchtou told the jury that he was unsure whether Mr. El-Hage had ever taken Al Qaeda's oath of "bayat," a pledge to obey the group at any cost.

He did, however, say that Mr. El-Hage was highly regarded by Mr. bin Laden for having been one of the first men to travel to Afghanistan in the early 1980's to struggle against the invading Soviet Army.

Mr. Kherchtou, 36, was called last week as a government witness. He testified that he was a sworn member of Al Qaeda and was sent to Nairobi to enroll in flight school with a plan to become Mr. bin Laden's personal pilot. He also admitted to being a convicted terrorist, and yesterday the defense revealed that he had pleaded guilty to unspecified charges related to attacks on American soldiers in Somalia.

The government has accused Al Qaeda of training the guerrilla fighters that killed 18 soldiers in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, in October 1993. Mr. Schmidt interrogated Mr. Kherchtou briefly about his dealings in Somalia. The questions established that the group had a presence there long before United Nations forces or American soldiers arrived.

Edward D. Wilford, one of Mr. Odeh's lawyers, asked Mr. Kherchtou about his own client. The government has accused Mr. Odeh of setting up a fishing business to support Al Qaeda members.

Under questioning, Mr. Kherchtou said Mr. Odeh's company was created "to support himself and others." Mr. Wilford also used his cross-examination to tease out of Mr. Kherchtou an admission that Al Qaeda members would not have to obey Mr. bin Laden's orders if they did not adhere to Islamic law.

---

Witness never heard defendant take terrorist oath

02/27/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-02-27-trial.htm

NEW YORK (AP) - Defense lawyers in the embassy bombings case had tough questions for a key prosecution witness who had previously linked their clients to Osama bin Laden's alleged terrorist group.

L'Houssaine Kherchtou had identified one of the four defendants, Wadih El-Hage, 40, as a trusted associate of bin Laden during testimony last week.

But on cross-examination Monday, he conceded that he had no "actual knowledge" if El-Hage ever swore allegiance to al Qaeda, bin Laden's alleged group.

Kherchtou had identified another defendant, Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, 35, as someone he met at training camps operated by al Qaeda, saying Odeh later began training others, though he could not recall Odeh's specialty.

On cross-examination, he was questioned whether he knew that Odeh's actual role at the camp was to assist people with medical needs, a question that cast Odeh as a humanitarian rather than a terrorist.

"I do not recall but it could very well be so," Kherchtou said.

El-Hage and Odeh are two of four men accused of bombing U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, as part of a holy war declared by bin Laden. The blasts killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured thousands.

El-Hage, a naturalized U.S. citizen, has acknowledged that he worked for exiled Saudi millionaire bin Laden. But El-Hage's attorney, Sam Schmidt, maintains that his client was too busy pursuing legitimate business ventures to be involved in terrorism.

Kherchtou - a former al Qaeda member who lived with El-Hage in Nairobi in the mid-1990s - said he often saw El-Hage at a computer, but did not know what he was working on.

Prosecutors say a search of El-Hage's home found a computer report in which an aide of El-Hage admitted that the Kenyan cell of bin Laden's group was responsible for killing U.S. military personnel in Somalia in 1993.

Kherchtou is the second admitted terrorist to testify about the inner workings of al Qaeda as part of a plea deal.

If convicted of conspiracy, El-Hage and Odeh could get life sentences. Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-'Owhali, 24, and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 27, could face the death penalty if found guilty of murder conspiracy.

-------- activists

Activists Released

Tue, 27 Feb 2001
HNJ
"Vickie Kostic" <vkostic@hotmail.com>

All 3 Homes Not Jails activists arrested on Monday have been released this evening around 7 PM. They will have to appear in court at a later date to answer charges of unlawful entry.

At a press conference today the group has vowed to continue the fight for homeless people in Washington DC.

HNJ also reported that Blanca Aquino was able to talk to Jim Graham's office and they made Hagner Management agree to begin repairs on their fire-ravaged building starting this weekend. HNJ activists attribute this breakthrough to the publicity the takeover has created. Blanca Aquino was the intended beneficiary of the takeover - after she failed to get Jim Graham and Hagner Management to act. Also benefiting are 27 other families that used to live in that building. If only for that, HNJ considers the takeover a success, despite the arrest of 3 activists.

Vickie

---

New College of California Spring Field Course at Joshua Tree National Park
for New College Students and open to the General Public

Tuesday, February 27, 2001
THE ENGAGED NATURALIST
"Patricia Cook" <dragonfly@eriecoast.com>

One week field course on Buddhist contemplative practices and the ecology of Joshua Tree National Park.

April 23rd to 30th, 2001

Instructors: Philip M. Klasky, M.A., and Pema (Nancy) Clark, M.A.

During this week-long, three-unit field class, we will travel to one of the most beautiful national parks in the country to study the unique ecological relationships that form this enduring yet fragile desert environment. There will be daily meditations, dharma talks and training in Buddhist methods of contemplation in order to deep our appreciation and understand of extraordinary desert landscape. Lectures will combine Buddhism and ecology in an interdisciplinary manner.

Ecology and Geology, Daily Meditation, Journal Writing, Current Environmental Issues, Dharma Talks, Art Work, Plant and Wildflower Identification, Contemplative Training, Hiking, Plant and Animal Adaptations to Desert Environments, Cultural Geography, Resting in Silence, Play

Students will carpool and come prepared for camping and meals at the Sheep's Pass Group Camp in Joshua Tree National Park.

ORIENTATION MEETING: 7:00pm, Thursday, April 19th in Room 22 at New College of California, 766 Valencia Street (between 18th and 19th), San Francisco, California.

FEES: $50 for New College students, $150 to $250 (sliding scale) for the general public.

TO REGISTER: New College San Francisco students call Jon Garfield at (415) 437-3425, New College North Bay students call Carolyne Stayton at (707) 568-3090. General public registration call (415) 752-8678. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Call Philip Klasky at (415) 752-8678 or Pema Clark at (541) 552-1769.

Instructors Clark and Klasky hold master's degrees in Geography and Human Environmental Studies. Clark has been a long-time student of Tibetan Buddhism and recently completed a traditional three-year retreat. She is currently a resident teacher at Kagyu Sukha Choling Center in Ashland, Oregon. Klasky is a teacher, writer, environmental activist and ethnographer and is project director for Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Storyscape Project.

---

students interested in anti-sweatshop internships

Tue, 27 Feb 2001
"mike sysiuk" <msysiuk@hotmail.com>

APPLY BY MARCH 14th!

United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) is seeking applicants to participate in an intensive, summer-long international immersion project, the Collegiate Apparel Research Initiative (CARI), in summer 2001. CARI is an effort to build deeper relationships with organizational partners in strategic regions of the world with the intentions of:

(a) directly supporting the work of our partners in producing regions,

(b) informing the development of the U.S. movement for international human and worker rights, and

(c) seeking strategic possibilities and partnerships for future campaignwork that would coordinate the leverage of the U.S. movement with the struggles of working people in each region.

The USAS International Solidarity committee will select up to 25 students to participate in the project in 3-5 sites throughout the world. Sites currently being considered include: Mexico, Honduras, Dominican Republic, and Indonesia. Criteria for the selection of applicants will be determined with local organizations partnering with USAS in the project. For some, but not all, sites language proficiency or fluency will be required. Applicants may state a preference of a region they would like to be placed in, although final placement will be determined by the USAS International Solidarity committee and our international partners. The program will begin the week of June 4th, and most projects will extend into mid-August, although some may be shorter.

Specific research projects will be structured together with organizations partnering with USAS in the immersion project and may vary by region. Some may research working conditions in specific factories, others may continue research initiated by our partners about the effects of export processing zones on surrounding communities, and still others may focus on developing materials or workshops with our partners for use in worker education or outreach programs. Last year, the first summer USAS piloted the CARI project, a student team in Indonesia distributed worker surveys and researched the priorities of different labor, women's rights, and human rights groups around Jakarta. In Honduras, each member joint U.S.-Honduran team divided into pairs during the week and lived with a family in a community along the north coast of Honduras, where they researched the effects of the export processing zones on health, transportation, and commerce in surrounding communities. They met on weekends in San Pedro [lost text] with ERIC, the Jesuit organization leading the immersion project to compare notes and make plans for the following week.

Food, housing, airfare, in-country transportation, and other in-country expenses, as well as a weekly stipend, will be provided in the program.

However, those applicants who are selected will be asked to work with USAS staff and CARI project coordinators in the months leading up to the beginning of the project to fundraise on their campuses or in their communities to help cover the costs of their participation in the program. Flexibility will be given to help make the immersion project accessible to everyone, regardless of financial circumstances.

Applications are due by March 14. Please return applications to cariprogram@hotmail.com.

Collegiate Apparel Research Initiative Summer Immersion Program Application

I. PERSONAL INFORMATION

If you are accepted as a CARI participant, we will need to contact you at various points over the next couple of months. Please provide your school contact information and any information that will help us get in touch with you once the semester has ended.

Name: University: Expected year of graduation: Major(s): Gender: Date of birth: Class Year (X one): 1__ 2__ 3__ 4__ 5+__ Graduate__ Other__:___________ Passport #, Date and Place of Issuance

SCHOOL CONTACT INFORMATION Street address City, State Zip Telephone number Email address Date you will leave this address

SUMMER CONTACT INFORMATION (if applicable) Street address City, State Zip Telephone number Date you will arrive at this address

1. What is your preferred form of communication?

2. When are we most likely to reach you by phone?

3. When during the summer are you available to participate? When are you not available? (Please mention dates when school ends and begins)

4. If you are accepted to this program will you definitely participate?

II. EXPERIENCE

1. Have you ever traveled abroad before? If you have, please write a few sentences about each program/trip you were on, what your experience was like, and how you think that experience might help you on a CARI program.

2. Please send us a resume that includes:

a. Past internship experiences b. Positions of responsibility or leadership that you have held c. Organizing experience d. Volunteer work e. Relevant academic coursework or research f. Relevant individual or group projects g. Anything else that you think we should know about

This can take the form of a formal resume or simply be a list of experiences and accomplishments. Please include *brief* descriptions.

3. Have you been involved with United Students Against Sweatshops or Anti-sweat work in the past?

III. SKILLS

1. Can you speak a language other than English? Would you consider yourself fluent proficient, intermediate, or a beginner? Are you comfortable conversing in that language? Can you hold an interview in that language? Could you write a report or translate materials to that language?

2. What computer skills do you have? Include Web or Desktop publishing skills.

3. Have you ever fundraised before? Briefly describe what you did.

4. Have you ever been an organizer? Please write a few sentences describing the experience.

5. Have you ever conducted research or studied any fields that might be helpful in the CARI program, such as women's studies, international relations, (labor) economics, public policy, regional studies, ethnic studies, immigration, cultural anthropology, sociology, statistics, medicine, community health or law.

6. Do you have professional writing and/or editing experience?

7. Do you feel your current coursework and/or job(s) is writing intensive?

8. What media and communication skills do you have?

9. Have you ever conducted sociological/anthropological field investigations? Briefly describe.

10. Have you ever worked abroad for an extended period of time? Describe your work and some of the difficulties you had to overcome.

11. Do you have any other skills you would like to mention?

IV. CARI PARTICIPATION QUESTIONS

These questions will help us place you in an internship that is right for you. Please put thought into these questions and answer each in fewer than 8 sentences.

1. Why do you want to participate in CARI?

2. Describe your ideal CARI internship experience. What kind of organization would you want to work with? (a union? A health non-governmental organization? A student group conducting research?) What geographical areas are you interested in?

3. What personal qualities do you have that make you a good applicant?

4. Who do you think a CARI internship benefits most?

4a. How (if at all) can the CARI program and the international solidarity work help the struggle against exploitative working conditions? How do you think it can specifically help the student aspect of the struggle? 4b. How can US interns help workers and international organizations?

4c. How do you think that the CARI experience would better prepare you to be active in the anti-sweat movement? How do you foresee your role in the movement?

5. What are some considerations that we must be sensitive to when working in a foreign country?

5a. What do you anticipate the worker-student relationship to encompass?

5b. Can an internship program be damaging to the people you will interview? What can be done to avoid this?

5c. Are you apprehensive about interacting with workers, local organizers, or local students?

6. Do you have concerns about the program itself? Do you have any questions that you would like us to answer?

7. We may need help raising the full cost of the program. Could you help raise/pay for part of your own program fee? Could you participate in this program if USAS covered expenses but did not offer a stipend? (Please answer this question honestly. Your response will not bias our decision in any way.)

7a. Do you have access to any institutional grants/fellowships? Do you require any letters or documents from USAS-CARI or any of the local participating organizations?

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DC - Conference on Pinochet Precedent

Tue, 27 Feb 2001
DanBeeton@excite.co.

American University Washington College of Law and the Institute for Policy Studies cordially invites you to join us for a conference on:

THE PINOCHET PRECEDENT: Individual Accountability for International Crimes

March 26, 2001, 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

AU Washington College of Law 4801 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Rm. 603 Washington, DC

The arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London represented one of the most important events in international human rights law. The Pinochet case, together with recent efforts to establish an International Criminal Court, have brought worldwide attention to possibility of ending impunity for international crimes, while also highlighting some of the difficulties of moving towards the globalization of justice.

This conference will bring together jurists and legal scholars from around the world to share experiences and carefully examine national and international mechanisms for holding individuals accountable for international crimes. Panelists will trace the development and impact of the Pinochet case and will examine the experiences of other cases that have grown out of the so-called "Pinochet precedent." We will also consider the questions of whether the United States is falling short of its obligations to hold perpetrators of international crimes accountable and how we can create a legislative and judicial framework for universal jurisdiction in this country.

8:30 a.m. Check-in/Registration

9:00 - 9:15 Welcome Claudio Grossman, Dean, American University Washington College of Law

9:15 - 11:00 PANEL 1-THE PINOCHET CASE: ORIGIN AND IMPACTS

Samuel Buffone, Ropes and Gray, U.S. lawyer for Letelier-Moffitt families
Rep. Juan Bustos, lawyer in "Caravan of Death" case against Pinochet in Chile
Joan Garcés, attorney who led the case against Pinochet in Spain
Naomi Roht-Arriaza, Hastings College of Law
Richard Wilson, American University Washington College of Law
Stacie Jonas (moderator), Director, IPS Bring Pinochet to Justice Campaign

11:00 - 11:15 Break

11:15 - 1:00 PANEL 2-LESSONS FROM OTHER UNIVERSAL JURISDICTION CASES

Reed Brody, Human Rights Watch
Judge Giancarlo Capaldo, oversees Italian case on "Operation Condor"
Pascal Kambale, legal advisor for Senegalese case brought against Hissene Habré, former dictator of Chad
Rep. Marcos Rolim, director of Brazilian Congressional Committee on Human Rights, seeking to prosecute Alfredo Stroessner
Sophie Thonon, lawyer for French cases against Argentine and Chilean officials
Claudio Grossman (moderator), Dean, American University Washington College of Law

1:00 - 2:45 LUNCH

2:45-4:15: PANEL 3-U.S. ACCOUNTABILITY MECHANISMS: CHALLENGES AND ADVANCES

Shawn Roberts, Center for Justice and Accountability
Michael Tigar, American University Washington College of Law
José Miguel Vivanco, Americas Watch, Human Rights Watch
Peter Weiss, Center for Constitutional Rights
Robert Goldman (moderator), American University Washington College of Law

4:15 - 4:30 BREAK

4:30 - 5:45 PANEL 4-ROLE OF THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT AND AD-HOC TRIBUNALS

Christopher Hall, (invited), Amnesty International
Judge Gabrielle McDonald, (invited), Former President of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
Diane Orentlicher, American University Washington College of Law
Carlos Slepoy, lawyer for Spanish cases against Argentine and Guatemalan officials

5:45 - 6:00 Wrap-Up Marcus Raskin, Distinguished Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

6:00 - 7:00 Reception

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Conference Fee: $15; WCL Students: Free Low income attendees should contact Stacie Jonas at IPS, (202) 234-9382 ext. 239.

Please make check payable to "American University, Washington College of Law" or send the following information for Visa, MC, AmEx or Discover:

Card Type, Card Number, Expiration Date, Name on Card, Billing Address.

To register, please send the name of the conference, your name, affiliation, address, phone, fax and email address along with the appropriate payment to:

Office of Special Events and Continuing Legal Education American University, Washington College of Law 4801 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Suite 407 Washington, DC 20016-8181

You may also forward this information via fax to (202) 274-4079 or register on-line by clicking "Event Registration" at http://www.wcl.american.edu/secle.

QUESTIONS

For more information, please contact either Stacie Jonas, Director, IPS Bring Pinochet to Justice Campaign at (202) 234-9382 ext. 239; or Robert Guitteau, Jr., Executive Director, Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, American University, Washington College of Law at (202) 274 -4180.

SPECIAL NEEDS

Any person with special needs who would like to attend the conference should contact WCL Special Programs at least five days in advance at: (202) 274-4075 or via email at secle@wcl.american.edu.

PARKING

To help maintain good relations with our neighbors near the law school, we ask that you refrain from parking on neighborhood streets. Parking may be available in the law school's underground pay lot at the rate of $1.00 an hour or in the pay lot across the street.

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NOW RALLY/PATRICIA IRELAND TO SPEAK

Tue, 27 Feb 2001
"Jeff Bale" <dicenksoy@hotmail.com>

People may have heard by now that the National Organization for Women is starting to move. They have called an Emergency March to Save Women's Lives for April 22 in DC. The timing is less than fortunate, but the issues are critical--defending abortion rights and access to birth control for all women.

Michele from ISO went to their first organizing meeting on Monday, and they are very open to working with the FTAA coalition to plan together for that weekend, e.g. swapping speakers, literature, and general coordination.

Finally, Patiricia Ireland will be joining the "Tell Bush We Won't Go Back!" conference the ISO is organizing this Saturday, for the 4pm panel. Broadening out the forces who want to challenge globalization at home and abroad is exactly what we need right now. Having groups like NOW start to make those connections is tremendous. We hope to see you there!

Jeff Bale ISO

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Fact:

Tue, 27 Feb 2001
"TwistedHumor.com"
Fact Of The Day Newsletter
http://www.twistedhumor.com/newsletters.shtml

Fact Of The Day Newsletter "Strange...Weird...Bizarre...TRUE!"

Two animal rights protesters were protesting the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn, Germany. Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.

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China Lashes Back at Human Rights Critics

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/world/27CND-CHINA.html

BEIJING, Feb. 27 - The Chinese government lashed out in frustration against critics of its harsh crackdown on the Falun Gong spiritual movement today, making strenuous new efforts to paint the group as evil and murderous.

On a day when human rights issues dominated official agendas in Beijing, the Chinese Government also responded angrily to the State Department report issued on Monday condemning China's human rights record in the year 2000, and issued its own counter-report on the "U.S. Human Rights Record in 2000" that detailed, for example, the large number of deaths by gunfire, the role of big money in election campaigns and the growth in the prison population.

China is trying to polish its human rights image, in part to aid its bid to host the 2008 Olympics. Today the visiting United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, said that officials had indicated that China might ratify a key United Nations rights treaty, the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as early as Wednesday. But it was not clear, she said, whether China would fully accept the most sensitive clause in the covenant, which calls for free labor unions.

In a meeting with China's foreign minister, Ms. Robinson made a special plea on grounds of compassion for the release of a prominent democracy advocate, Xu Wenli, who was sentenced in 1998 to 13 years in prison and is said to be ill with hepatitis. She said Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan had promised to look into the matter.

At a news conference specially called today by the State Council, or cabinet, the head of a recently established anti-cult office likened the outlawed Falun Gong group to an "illegal drug addiction," with similar deadly risks to practitioners and society.

"Tens of thousands of families have been destroyed" by the practice of Falun Gong, said Liu Jing, chief of the state council office for the prevention and handling of cults. The office was established last fall, as the campaign to stamp out the group seemed to falter and unrepentant members began demonstrating in Tiananmen Square.

Falun Gong, started in 1992 by Li Hongzhi, a former low-level official who now lives in the United States, had attracted millions of Chinese with its blend of traditional meditative techniques and promises of spiritual salvation. It was outlawed in July 1999 after the group staged an audacious demonstration outside the leadership compound in Beijing to demand official recognition.

The widely reported harassment, arrests and beatings of believers have attracted growing international censure as violating individual rights - a source of great frustration to officials here who say that other countries have also taken decisive, even violent actions to control "evil cults" and that critics are imposing double standards.

In meetings with senior officials here over the last two days and in a briefing for reporters, Ms. Robinson described her deep concern over the manner in which the Falun Gong crackdown has been conducted.

"I emphasized that it's important to bear in mind at all times that individual Falun Gong members have human rights that must be respected," she said.

"It is very clear that the rights of individual members are being violated," she told reporters after an international expert meeting on China's system of "re-education through labor." That system, under which police authorities can send people accused of minor crimes to prison camps for up to three years with no judicial oversight, has reportedly been used to detain thousands of Falun Gong believers.

Ms. Robinson said she told China's justice minister that if China is to comply with internationally accepted standards of civil rights, as it says it intends to, then the labor re-education system must be abolished. "There is no due process," she said at the press briefing. "The system is inherently arbitrary."

She said that the minister, Zhang Fusen, defended the system - which is often used to jail drug users, prostitutes and petty criminals as well as political and religious dissidents - as an important tool for rehabilitating people. But he did say it was open to improvement, Ms. Robinson said. China's parliament is currently discussing how to revise the law governing labor re-education.

Mr. Liu, the head of the anti-cult office, would neither confirm nor deny the estimates by human rights monitors that 5,000 or more defiant Falun Gong believers had been summarily taken to labor re-education camps, and had often been maltreated.

But he painted a radically different picture of these prison farms than is normally given by former inmates and foreign human rights experts.

"The legitimate rights of people receiving re-education through labor are fully guaranteed by law," he said. The camps are governed by principles of "education, persuasion and redemption," Mr. Liu said, and inmates are treated "like teachers treat students, like doctors treat patients, like parents treat their children."

Nor would Mr. Liu comment directly on reports that more than 100 Falun Gong members had died in police custody, instead changing the subject to what he called the high toll the "evil cult" has exacted.

By Government estimates, more than 136 practitioners have committed suicide, seeking a path to heaven "at the instigation of Li Hongzhi's heresies," even before the group was outlawed in July 1999, he said. At least another 103 more have killed themselves since then, he said, including the woman who died in the attempted group immolation in January.

Counting those who have died because they refused to seek medical care, believing Falun Gong's mystical powers would cure them, the movement has caused 1,660 deaths, Mr. Liu asserted.

Falun Gong leaders insist that the founder and spiritual master, Mr. Li, has never called on practitioners to commit suicide - that in fact he forbids it - and has not demanded that followers forgo medical treatment.

Of followers known to have died of disease, the Government has not tried to determine how many were attracted to the spiritual movement as a last desperate measure, after they had already been diagnosed with fatal cancers or other diseases.

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China Hones Old Tool:
'Re-educating' Unruly

February 27, 2001
New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/27/world/27CHIN.html?pagewanted=all

BEIJING, Feb. 26 - He had been detained for six months in 1989 for helping to organize a strike, and later he tried to sue the police on behalf of an exiled labor leader, so Zhou Guoqiang, a lawyer and longtime human rights advocate, knew he was on thin ice. Still, he was surprised in 1994 at the pretext they used to jail him.

Mr. Zhou and some friends were planning to distribute T-shirts bearing Communist slogans such as "Labor is Sacred" in a cheeky effort to assert workers' rights. But soon after the first samples were delivered to his home, the police picked up Mr. Zhou, and they held him in a Beijing detention center for nearly a year as they considered what charges to bring.

"They couldn't find any way to pin a criminal prosecution on me," Mr. Zhou, 46, said in a recent interview in Beijing. "So I ended up being sent for labor re-education instead."

To silence this man who was seen as a troublemaker, the police used a procedure that is now central to the debate over human rights and the rule of law. On the vague rationale that Mr. Zhou was stirring up "social turmoil," they sent him without trial to a labor camp in the frigid northeast for a three-year stay. It was one of nearly 300 such camps that, according to official figures, now hold some 260,000 Chinese for offenses deemed too minor to warrant criminal prosecution.

While "re-education through labor" is mainly used to deal with petty criminals - above all these days drug offenders and prostitutes - it has also been frequently used to silence political dissidents like Mr. Zhou and religious renegades including, in the last year and a half, thousands of defiant believers in the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

In an unusually blunt challenge issued today in Beijing, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson, demanded that China abolish the labor re-education system altogether, calling it an "inherently arbitrary" form of detention that imposes forced labor as a punishment, in violation of internationally agreed standards.

She made her appeal as the United States State Department issued its annual human rights report, saying that conditions in China have worsened dramatically.

Many Chinese legal experts have also argued that the system, which in practice allows the police to jail people for up to three years without trial or any other judicial review, is deeply flawed. They also say the system, which evolved through a series of inconsistent decisions, was never authorized in a comprehensive law by the national Parliament as required by recent legal reforms.

But an internal drive to eliminate or radically restructure the labor re-education system has fizzled in the face of strong opposition from the security and justice ministries, which have argued that its value as a tool for keeping order has been proved in the struggle against Falun Gong.

The power this system gives the police was certainly evident in Mr. Zhou's case: his advocacy of free labor unions, an official notice of his sentence said, was "intended to intensify social contradictions and stir up trouble."

So Mr. Zhou, with no genuine chance to mount a defense or appeal, was taken by train to the Shuanghe Labor Re-education Camp, a prison farm near the Russian border, where the inmates were mainly young pickpockets, burglars and brawlers. In the camp, Mr. Zhou recalled, "both guards and prisoners used the word `education' sardonically: "It meant you'd been locked up in a small cell and struck with electric prods or beaten, and afterward you'd have to write a self-criticism saying that you'd been re-educated."

At this camp in Heilongjiang Province, which has a reputation as one of the toughest in the system, the inmates were subjected to another form of torture every day: during the long hours between breakfast and the second and final meal in the late afternoon, no one was allowed to use the toilet.

As Chinese legal practices are subjected to international scrutiny, the labor re-education system has emerged as one of the clearest violations of international standards, including the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights that China has signed and says it will one day ratify.

The system began in the 1950's as a means of punishing "counterrevolutionaries" who committed no major criminal acts and slackers who refused to perform assigned work. Over the years, all kinds of petty crimes have been added to the list, giving the police enormous leeway. Normally, the decision to sentence people to labor camps is in the hands of city-level police authorities.

Resort to this system of "administrative" as opposed to "criminal" detention has actually increased over the last decade of general improvements of the legal code - mainly reflecting the government's efforts to fight rising crime and drug abuse. According to a new report by Human Rights in China, official sources indicate that about 100,000 people were serving in labor camps at any time in the 1980's.

But as of December, Chinese officials have said, 260,000 people were being held in the system, 60 percent of them for offenses involving "disturbing public order" and 40 percent for offenses involving drugs.

The government has not revealed how many Falun Gong followers have been sent to labor camps without trial, but the group itself and human rights monitors estimate the number at 5,000 or more. Chinese newspapers have described hundreds of Falun Gong adherents being held at a single labor camp and claimed that many were "cured" thereof their beliefs.

In the last several years, re-education through labor has become the subject of lively debate in Chinese legal journals, with some experts calling for its abolition and others, while asserting that it has legitimate uses, calling for some form of judicial oversight and other protections against capricious detention.

One of the most unfair aspects, many experts say, is the extremity of the sentences, which often surpass those given by criminal courts for seemingly worse offenses.

Xu Yonghai, a physician who, after signing a human rights manifesto in 1995, was sentenced to two years in a labor camp but then inexplicably kept in a Beijing detention center for the entire term, recalls meeting a rural man in the center who had been sentenced to one and a half years in a labor camp for stealing a belt.

"Just 1 belt!" Mr. Xu recalled in an interview. "He should have stolen 10 belts," Mr. Xu said, in which case he would have been criminally charged and given a shorter sentence.

At the Beijing meeting today, a workshop on "punishment of minor crimes" being held under a technical cooperation agreement between China and the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Ms. Robinson called for "a serious review leading to the abolition of the practice of re- education through labor."

That China would agree to such a meeting at all is a sign of the wide unease with current practices here. Parliament is said to be near adopting partial reforms in labor re-education, possibly including judicial review of sentences and a shortening of the maximum terms.

But in the clenched-fist atmosphere surrounding the campaign against Falun Gong, Chinese experts no longer dare to call for abolishing the system and some have said they are even afraid to discuss the topic with a foreign reporter.

Earlier this month, Wang Yunsheng, who directs the Justice Ministry's Bureau of Re-education Through Labor, said a new law on labor re-education may be issued soon, but stressed the continued need for such a system.

"For such a populous nation as China," he was quoted as saying in the official China Daily, "the re-education through labor system, which aims at stopping those on the verge of committing serious crimes, is an effective one for reducing crime."

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China's rights record worsens

February 27, 2001
Washington Times
By David R. Sands
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001227221617.htm

China's human rights record "worsened" in 2000, with "numerous serious abuses" of religious, political and press freedoms, the State Department said yesterday in its annual survey of global human rights practices.

The report, the 25th in a series and the first issued under President Bush, also criticized rights violations in two U.S. allies, Israel and Colombia, while praising the democratic revolution that overthrew the regime of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia.

Michael E. Parmly, acting assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor, confirmed yesterday that the Bush administration will sponsor a resolution critical of China at a U.N. conference on human rights to be held in Geneva in April. The Clinton administration supported such resolutions.

The report cites China's crackdown on Tibetan activists and followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, evidence of torture, and suppression of political dissent over the past year in condemning Beijing's record.

"I think if you read the report, it's hard to come to a conclusion that a resolution is not justified," said Mr. Parmly, who said the United States will not only sponsor the resolution but "put in the effort necessary" to enlist other nations to condemn China.

T. Kumar, director of Asia policy in the Washington office of Amnesty International, said the report's use of the word "worsened" was key in the section on China.

"This was the first test for the Bush administration, and we're very happy to see that they passed it," he said.

But Mr. Kumar said human rights groups would be watching closely for the "policy follow-up," including the use of top officials such as Secretary of State Colin Powell to lobby for the U.N. resolution.

China today denounced the report, saying Beijing would soon respond with a catalog of U.S. rights abuses, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

"The U.S. report on human rights around the world had nothing to say about America's own human rights situation," said China's Cabinet.

China has long denounced U.S. criticisms in the annual reports as misguided and hypocritical. Officials in Beijing, who this week are hosting U.N. human rights chief Mary Robinson, yesterday vowed not to let up in the campaign against Falun Gong believers, whom they say are part of a movement secretly planning to undermine the government.

"If the cult is not removed . . . the process of China's reform, opening up and socialist modernization drive will be affected," said an editorial in today's edition of the official People's Daily.

The State Department report faulted both Israeli security forces and the Palestinians for the violence that has plagued the region since September.

Israel, the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, was guilty of using "excessive force" in dealing with Palestinian street protests, according to the report.

"There were numerous credible allegations that [Israeli] police beat persons in detention," the report said. "Detention and prison conditions, particularly for Palestinian security detainees held in Israel, do not provide inmates with sufficient living space, food and access to medical care."

But Mr. Parmly said Israel was facing a very difficult situation on the ground.

"If the violence stops, I believe the abuses will stop," he said.

And Colombia, another major recipient of U.S. assistance, came in for sharp criticism even as President Andres Pastrana was in Washington for talks with Mr. Bush today on joint efforts to deal with drug trafficking and a brutal, long-running guerrilla war.

While the report noted that guerrilla and paramilitary forces committed most of the abuses, "the authorities rarely brought higher-ranking officers of the security forces and the police charged with human rights offenses to justice."

Mr. Pastrana, speaking with lawmakers during a visit to Capitol Hill yesterday, called the Colombia section "a fair report in terms of the reality that we are living under in Colombia."

"The president is the first one to suffer" when human rights are violated, Mr. Pastrana said.

The department report covers about 195 countries and territories and serves as a guide in setting U.S. policy.

Lengthy passages in the latest report detail human rights abuses and political repression in such repeat offenders as Iraq, Burma, Belarus, Cuba and North Korea.

The report also found that human rights had deteriorated in 2000 in Indonesia, which has been wracked by violent clashes between government forces and various separatist movements. Mr. Parmly said many of the "very troubling" abuses had proved beyond the ability of Indonesian President Abdurrahman Wahid to control.

"It is the absence of government more than a misbehaving government," he said.

The government of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe came in for particularly sharp criticism this year, cited for its open support of a "campaign of political violence and intimidation" against opposition parties and white landowners.

"The government's poor human rights record worsened significantly during the year, and it committed serious abuses," the report said.

On the positive side, the report praised the ouster of Mr. Milosevic in Belgrade and moves toward greater democracy in Nigeria, Ghana, Mexico and Peru.

But the China passages will likely prove the most contentious, with Mr. Bush facing a decision this spring on possible new arms sales to Taiwan and scheduled to visit China this fall for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum summit.

Mr. Parmly stressed that there were some positives in China's record last year, particularly in economic freedom and access to information.

But the progress came in spite of the government, not because of it, he added.

"The bottom line is that the [Chinese] government strives to suppress any activity that it perceives as a threat to the government," Mr. Parmly said.

• Tom Carter contributed to this report.

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