------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Iranian president prepares to visit Russia
CIA exaggerated Soviet nuclear assessments
Investigator Faults Periscope Search by Captain of Submarine
New Greens leader attacks missile plan
What Game Is Bush Playing With Pyongyang?
Bush and North Korea
France Shifts to Softer Stance as U.S. Plans Its Missile Shield
U.S. May Have Been Cheated in Uranium Sale, Auditors Say
Taking Tour, Federal Official Says Nuclear Plant Is Safe
Uranium sale a lousy deal for U.S.

MILITARY
Panel to Aid Bogotá Talks
Pataki Proposes Changes in Drug Sentencing
LEGALIZING MARIJUANA
Rangers protest black beret decision
Army Rangers Gather to Fight Order on Berets
Relatives of Dead Marines Seek Delay of Osprey Plans

OTHER
Farewell to Radio
Less Fraternite, More Egalite
Timber! Look out for the U.S.
Playing hardball over softwood
Great gray migration
Despite Opposition in Party, Bush to Seek Emissions Cuts
Contagion and Confidence
Foot-and-Mouth Disease
Becoming genomic Just what does it mean anyway?
Facing a bleak future
Judge awards alleged spy's wife $7.1M

ACTIVISTS
Backyard Eco Conference 2001


-------- NUCLEAR

Iranian president prepares to visit Russia

March 10, 2001
CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/meast/03/10/russia.iran.ap/index.html
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/maps/russia.moscow.jpg
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2000/revolutionaryjourney/profiles/khatami.profile.html
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/maps/iran.tehran.jpg

MOSCOW, Russia (AP) -- Russian leaders hope a lengthy visit by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami will bolster arms sales to Tehran -- and they can be certain it will further fuel U.S. concerns over the two nations' blossoming ties.

During a four-day visit starting Monday, Khatami and Russian President Vladimir Putin are expected to sign a broad cooperation agreement -- the first since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution -- and discuss prospects for military cooperation.

Last month, Iran's ambassador to Moscow said Tehran could buy up to $7 billion worth of Russian weapons in coming years, making it a leading customer for Russia's ailing defense industries.

The Russian government has not divulged details of possible arms deals. However, officials speaking on condition of anonymity indicated that Iran had expressed interest in buying S-300 air defense missiles, fighter jets, helicopters, patrol boats and other weapons.

Moscow's military cooperation with Tehran and its assistance in building a nuclear power plant in Iran have caused concern in Washington for years and have been a major point of contention in relations between the United States and Russia.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chastised Russia last month for contributing to the spread of missile technologies to Iran and other nations hostile to the United States.

Russia says it has strictly abided by international agreements banning the proliferation of nuclear and missile technologies. However, Moscow warned Washington in November that it was abandoning a 1995 pledge not to sell tanks and other battlefield weapons to Iran.

The pledge became a hot issue during the U.S. presidential campaign, with Al Gore forced to fend off accusations that he secretly acquiesced to Russian arms sales to Iran as vice president.

As U.S. officials pressed Russia not to sell arms to Iran, Russian Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev paid a high-profile visit to Tehran in December and signed several cooperation agreements, including a document on training Iranian army officers.

Moscow has also dismissed repeated U.S. demands that it cancel a 1995 contract to build the first reactor at Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant by 2003 for an estimated $800 million. The United States claims the Russian technology and know-how could be used to develop nuclear weapons.

Moscow and Tehran argue that the plant can be used only for civilian purposes and would be under control of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Russian and Iran have easily found common language on international issues, such as the situation in Afghanistan, which borders both countries. Both countries oppose the Taleban, the Muslim fundamentalist militia that controls 95 percent of Afghanistan.

The two nations have also developed similar approaches to dividing up rights to oil and fisheries resources of the Caspian Sea among the five nations on its shores.

Russian companies hope Khatami's visit will lead to lucrative orders for oil rigs and other equipment needed to explore Iran's oil and natural gas resources.

---

CIA exaggerated Soviet nuclear assessments

Saturday, March 10, 2001
Seattle Times
Knight Ridder Newspapers
By Jonathan S. Landay
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=cia10&date=20010310
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/03/10/front_page/NUKES10.htm
http://www.pioneerplanet.com/seven-days/sat/news/docs/002630.htm
http://www.sltrib.com/03102001/nation_w/78193.htm

WASHINGTON - For more than 10 years during the Cold War, U.S. intelligence forecasts greatly exaggerated the pace at which the former Soviet Union would improve its long-range nuclear forces, a newly declassified CIA document indicated yesterday.

The summary of a 1989 CIA internal review said every major intelligence assessment from 1974 to 1986 - a period covering at least three presidencies - "substantially" overestimated the Kremlin's plans to modernize and expand its strategic nuclear arsenal.

The document raised new questions about how well the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies judged the Soviet Union's aims and intentions, and the extent to which mistaken analyses influenced U.S. military spending and Washington's defense and foreign policies.

The persistent errors also raise questions about the intelligence community's ability to collect reliable information on today's targets, which are more diverse and even harder for spies to penetrate than the Soviet Union was.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union's force of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarines, and long-range bombers was the U.S intelligence community's primary target. But today's spies must try to keep track of international terrorists, rogue nuclear-weapons programs and computer hackers, and also plumb the minds of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and North Korea's Kim Jong Il, all of which is much harder than counting missile silos in Kazakstan or estimating the wheat crop in Ukraine.

The study is part of more than 19,000 pages of documents that have been declassified for a two-day conference on the CIA's analysis of the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991 that opened yesterday at Princeton University. The documents deleted material still considered important to national security.

Titled "Intelligence Forecasts of Soviet Intercontinental Attack Forces: An Evaluation of the Record," the study reviewed the U.S. intelligence community's projections of efforts to modernize Soviet nuclear forces in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.

The forecasts, known as national intelligence estimates (NIE), were intended to guide the president and his top aides in setting defense and foreign policies, including military spending and the size of U.S. nuclear forces. An NIE represents the consensus of 13 agencies, including the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which frequently disagreed about the severity of the Soviet threat.

The study found that predicting the rate of Soviet nuclear-force modernization "has proven to be the most difficult aspect of Soviet strategic forces to project."

As an example, it cited a 1975 forecast that by 1985 more than 90 percent of Soviet long-range missiles and bombers would be replaced. "In reality, the Soviets replaced less than 60 percent of them," the study said.

"This tendency to substantially overestimate the rate of [Soviet] force modernization occurred in every NIE published from 1974 to 1986, and it was true for every projected force - whether it assumed high, moderate or low levels of effort," the study continued.

In another example, it said an NIE published in 1985 - the beginning of President Ronald Reagan's second term - "projected that virtually the entire [Soviet] ICBM force would be replaced within 10 years."

But by 1989, "more than one-third of the projection period has passed, and so far only about 10 percent of the force is new," the study said.

Another document showed that inaccurate forecasting continued in a 1988 NIE. This one projected that Moscow could field up to 18,000 intercontinental nuclear weapons by the late 1990s if the United States deployed Reagan's proposed space-based national missile-defense system, known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI.

In fact, the cash-strapped Russian military has struggled in recent years to maintain an aging force of some 6,000 nuclear warheads and a deteriorating command and control system.

The study attributed the tendency to overestimate Soviet nuclear-modernization plans to a number of reasons, including the intelligence community's failure "to correctly understand Soviet military requirements."

Intelligence analysts also relied on the rate of a massive Soviet missile buildup in the late 1960s "as a guide for future deployment rates, but that rate of deployment was never approached again," the study said.

Melvin Goodman, a former senior CIA Soviet analyst, said the study bolstered criticism that intelligence assessments of the Soviet threat were deliberately inflated to justify increases in U.S. defense spending and nuclear forces, as well as SDI.

"This is the first time that the CIA has gone on the record confirming the exaggeration of [Soviet] force modernization," said Goodman, who teaches at the National War College in Washington.

Jonathan S. Landay's e-mail address is jlanday@krwashington.com.

------

Investigator Faults Periscope Search by Captain of Submarine

March 10, 2001
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/national/10HAWA.html

HONOLULU, March 9 - Computer simulations of views from the submarine Greeneville's periscope indicate that its captain should have seen a Japanese trawler before the vessels collided last month but did not do his periscope search correctly, a naval investigator said today.

Testifying before the Navy's court of inquiry into the collision, the investigator, Capt. Thomas G. Kyle, said the Greeneville's captain, Cmdr. Scott D. Waddle, had not spent enough time at the periscope and had not raised it high enough to see over seas that were swelling six to eight feet that day.

Captain Kyle also testified that before the submarine rose to periscope depth, Commander Waddle had not properly maneuvered it to clarify the location of two sonar contacts. After the periscope check, the submarine descended again and then surfaced abruptly in an emergency drill, colliding with one of those contacts, which turned out to be the Ehime Maru, a training vessel. Nine of the 35 people aboard were lost, including four teenage students.

For a second day, the three admirals presiding over the court, each of whom is both examiner and judge, used their witness-questioning authority to raise doubts about the actions of Commander Waddle and two other Greeneville officers, Lt. Cmdr. Gerald K. Pfeifer and Lt. j.g. Michael J. Coen.

One member of the court, Rear Adm. Paul F. Sullivan, a former submarine commander, pointedly asked Captain Kyle about the effect of the Greeneville's failure to complete a thorough maneuver known as target motion analysis to calculate precisely the location of the trawler.

When events on board are hurried, "in the back of my head you run the risk that your solutions are not going to be as good as they should be," Admiral Sullivan said.

The computerized periscope- search simulations, based on data collected from the submarine's records and weather reports, re-created the images the periscope would have shown minutes before the collision. One simulation showed the quick searches like those conducted by Lieutenant Coen and Commander Waddle, in which it was virtually impossible to detect the Ehime Maru. Another showed what would have been a standard search, in which the trawler was visible despite cloudy conditions and haze. A third simulation, with the periscope higher out of the water, showed the ship clearly.

Under cross-examination by Commander Waddle's lawyer, Captain Kyle acknowledged that the simulations were hypothetical, since not even the one showing quick searches like the one the skipper made strictly matched the height to which he raised his periscope.

On the whole, however, Captain Kyle's testimony underscored in detail the findings of an investigating admiral who told the court earlier this week that the Greeneville's periscope search had lasted barely 80 seconds.

"Three minutes is the benchmark," Captain Kyle said today.

As the court wrapped up its first week, the Navy announced today that the Greeneville had not suffered structural damage but would require $2 million in repairs to its rubberized hull and rudder.

The Navy is expected to announce next week whether it will try to raise the Ehime Maru.

-------- germany

New Greens leader attacks missile plan

Saturday, March 10, 2001
Environmental News Network
By Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/03/03102001/ap_missiles_42444.asp

An outspoken human rights activist was elected the new co-leader of Germany's Greens party on Friday, and he immediately assailed the United States for its national missile defense plans and airstrikes on Iraq.

Members of the Greens, the junior partner in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's governing coalition, cheered and applauded the speech by Claudia Roth, who was elected with 92 percent support to one of the two top party posts at a national convention.

"The American bombings in Iraq are no way to overcome the dictator Saddam Hussein - quite the contrary," Roth said, laying out her credo to delegates gathered in this wealthy southern city.

"And it's just as right to persuade the Americans that (national missile defense) doesn't mean more security but more confrontation," she said.

Schroeder is expected to raise missile defense and the Middle East when he travels to Washington on March 29 for talks with President Bush. Germany has urged the United States to consult widely over its missile plans, which have angered Russia and China.

Roth, a former manager of an anarchist rock band, was the lone candidate to replace Renate Kuenast, who has sharply lifted the party's standing since taking over the government's fight against mad cow disease in January as the head of a new Ministry of Consumer Protection and Agriculture.

In her speech, Roth also endorsed demonstrations against transports of waste from German nuclear power plants and said the outbreak of mad cow disease in Germany was a chance for the Greens to rally support for their ecology-minded policies.

"Yesterday, people just smiled at us," she said. "Now organic farming is a mainstream movement."

Roth has headed Parliament's human rights committee since Schroeder's Social Democrats and the ecology-minded Greens formed a government in 1998. She represents her party's left wing, where many share her opposition to the airstrikes on Iraq.

Her views have put her in conflict with Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, the Greens' most popular politician. The party has closed ranks behind Fischer and Environment Minister Juergen Trittin in recent weeks amid a furious partisan debate over their past as leftist radicals. Fischer was to address delegates Saturday.

In Germany's long-running debate on immigration, Roth has also strongly defended keeping borders open to victims of political persecution. In the Greens' two-member chairmanship, she will complement Fritz Kuhn, a pragmatist and Fischer ally.

The national convention was also meant to rally Greens activists for two state elections this month and dampen infighting over the party's stand on protests against nuclear waste transports, just weeks before Germany and France resume such shipments.

With activists calling for a revival of demonstrations and blockades that disrupted transports of radioactive waste from German power plants in the 1990s, Greens leaders have drafted a compromise saying the party can't endorse violent protest, but not rejecting peaceful demonstrations.

Party leaders say they do not want to endanger a consensus plan with German utilities to phase out nuclear power over the next few decades.

------- korea

What Game Is Bush Playing With Pyongyang?

Saturday, March 10, 2001
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Thomas L. Friedman
http://www.iht.com/articles/13002.htm

NEW YORK Pay attention to the brouhaha at the White House on Wednesday, when President George W. Bush shot down the hopes of President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea that the Bush team would quickly resume negotiations with North Korea. This episode highlights the fine line between a tough, effective foreign policy and a tough, ineffective foreign policy, and it raises the question: On which side of that line does Mr. Bush plan to reside?

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who represents the pragmatic, hard-nosed internationalists within the administration, declared that the Bush team intended "to pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off" in negotiations with North Korea to curb its production and sale of ballistic missiles. But Mr. Bush, after meeting Mr. Kim on Wednesday, brusquely indicated that the missile talks with the North would not be resumed anytime soon.

What gives? This is the second time in two weeks that General Powell has been out of step. Last week it was his signaling a willingness for "smarter," but smaller, sanctions on Iraq to hold our Arab allies together. That sparked grumbling from the Dick Cheney-Don Rumsfeld camps.

Question: Is the Bush foreign policy going to be a more hard-nosed internationalism, in which we galvanize our allies around tougher policies toward North Korea, Iraq, Russia and China but still get meaningful things done and hold our alliances together? Or is it going to be an ideologically driven, hard-line approach in which the White House is always looking over its shoulder at the right wing of the Republican Party, and our allies become alienated and nothing meaningful gets done?

Personally, I think there is nothing wrong with Mr. Bush, in his first dealings with North Korea, coming on as a real skeptic. Kim Jong Il, the "dear leader" of North Korea, is a wild man who understands only force and thinks that is all we understand too. That is why whenever his people are starving more than usual, and he needs a quick influx of potatoes, he digs a suspicious, reactor-size hole and we pay him with potatoes or oil or a harmless reactor to stop. It is sort of silly, but it has worked to keep peace and restrain the North's nuclear capabilities. Given this background, though, it is legitimate for Mr. Bush to signal the North that we are not buying that carpet again.

But then what? One approach says: "We don't have an interest in just letting North Korea collapse, because it could blow up the whole peninsula and even threaten Japan. So we're going to take a very hard-nosed approach to securing a verifiable deal that would curb North Korea's missiles and promote rapprochement with South Korea."

The other approach says: "We're the tough guys. We don't really believe in arms control. And we don't care if North Korea collapses. Deep down we don't ever want a deal with North Korea, because that would eliminate the very missile threat we've been hyping to justify spending $60 billion on a missile defense shield. If the allies don't like it - too bad."

Which is Mr. Bush's approach?

You have to wonder whether Mr. Bush knows. He said Wednesday that when it comes to North Korea, "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements." But as the New York Times reporter David Sanger pointed out, the United States has only one agreement with North Korea - the 1994 accord that froze its plutonium processing. Bush aides admitted there was no evidence that this deal was being violated.

Later a White House official, trying to clean up for the president, said Mr. Bush was referring to concerns about whether North Korea would comply with a future deal, even though he didn't use the future tense. "That's how the president speaks," the official said.

Well, if that is how he speaks, is that how he thinks? Confused? Which approach Mr. Bush adopts depends in part on how he understands North Korea's past behavior. But if he does not understand that, or he is so wedded to his own Star Wars missile shield he does not want anything to get in the way, or he is so worried about being accused by Republican hard-liners, as his father was, of being a "wimp" that he will never take Yes for an answer from the North - then, Houston, we have a problem.

-------

Bush and North Korea

March 10, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/opinion/L10KOR.html

To the Editor:

Re "Bush Tells Seoul Talks With North Won't Resume Now" (front page, March 8):

Why should it be necessary for a new president to cast aside the work of a former president if it has merit? Apparently, that's just what President Bush is doing in reference to our relationship with both Koreas.

Much time and effort was expended by the Clinton administration in an attempt to bring North Korea, a rogue nation with plutonium processing plants and nuclear capabilities, into an agreement on the use of missiles. There was hope of normalization of relations between the two Koreas. Toward this end, the South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung, has worked with fervor and has received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. Why not continue with this policy? FRANCINE FLEISHMAN Boca Raton, Fla., March 8, 2001

• To the Editor:

Re "Bush Tells Seoul Talks With North Won't Resume Now" (front page, March 8):

It looks as if we will have that missile defense even if it takes renewed tension on the Korean peninsula.

HOWARD MCELROY Southampton, N.Y., March 8, 2001 The writer is a retired Foreign Service officer.

-------- missile defense

France Shifts to Softer Stance as U.S. Plans Its Missile Shield

Saturday, March 10, 2001
International Herald Tribune
John Vinocur
http://www.iht.com/articles/13029.htm

PARIS France has shifted gears from its direct opposition to the Bush administration's plans for a National Missile Defense system, joining Germany and Britain, for the time being, in willingness to consult with the United States about the project.

This means that the administration probably has 18 months to two years in which it can operate in developing the program without the risk of its becoming a major source of dissension within the Atlantic alliance. It also signifies that until the United States lays out the specific architecture of the plan, the Americans probably have succeeded in avoiding active opposition to it beyond the expected sources in Russia and China.

The defense system, which the United States maintains can protect it and its allies from attacks by so-called rogue states without great disruption to existing arms control agreements, is still in an early, conceptual stage.

Britain has said that it considers a missile defense achievable. Germany, after initially expressing opposition, has moved off that position to accepting as a fait accompli the United States' intention to go ahead with the plan, and is now asking questions about the possibility of participation in the missile shield's industrial development.

Last month, President Jacques Chirac described France as "enormously" concerned about the U.S. plan, saying that it was certain to incite nuclear proliferation, create strong international tensions and result in vast costs.

The undertaking, he said, "to us hardly seems a priority for responsible men with a certain vision of the future."

But none of that tone was evident when Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine, in response to a reporter's question after a meeting Thursday night with Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer of Germany, described the current French view.

Rather, Mr. Vedrine adopted an almost nonjudgmental vocabulary. "France and Germany," he said, "have expressed questions. It's a bit difficult to be very precise in making an analysis because we don't know what" the U.S. plan consists of. He added: "What's important is that consultations begin. We've remarked that Secretary of State Powell has started discussions with NATO and Russia."

The French recalibration reflects the observation here, acknowledged privately by a French official, that neither Germany nor Britain, however skeptical they may be about the missile shield and its policy implications, wants to do battle on the issue.

For France, the missile shield, if extended to U.S. allies, would raise existential questions about the value of its own nuclear deterrent, while increasing Europe's dependence on the United States. But for the time being, the French, well after the Germans and the British, appear to have reasoned that aggressively opposing the shield means more loss than gain.

For one, an opposition stance parallel to that of Russia at a time when the French have invested heavily in smooth movement toward construction of a European pillar in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could only irritate their alliance allies and European Union partners.

As important to France, the change in tone means moving its position on an essential strategic issue to a point less obviously out of step with that of Germany.

This comes at juncture when it is making great efforts to convince the Germans that there is energy and utility left in the French-German tandem, once called the motor of European progress but now referred to by Mr. Fischer as its "flywheel," an object whose purpose, as defined by Webster's, is "opposing and moderating by its inertia any fluctuation of speed in the machinery with which it revolves."

U.S. Assures Allies on Defense

The United States has assured its allies that it will help them develop defenses against long- and short-range missiles and said President George W. Bush will visit NATO headquarters in Brussels in June, Reuters reported from Washington.

The NATO secretary-general, George Robertson, held separate talks Thursday with Mr. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that appeared aimed at reassuring Europeans who are worried over Mr. Bush's plan for a National Missile Defense.

Mr. Rumsfeld also met the German defense minister, Rudolf Scharping, who said there was agreement, including in Moscow, that there was a new threat and that missile defense should be part of a "long-term and comprehensive" strategy against it. But, speaking to reporters, he said that any missile defense system must be integrated into NATO's overall "Strategic Concept" agreed two years ago at a Washington summit meeting that enshrined the need for arms control and reduction.

"It is a question of confidence within NATO, and question of credibility in international affairs, that this is not only rhetoric," Mr. Scharping said. Talks on missile defense must be accompanied by talks on deep cuts in nuclear weapons, he said. Mr. Rumsfeld, speaking at a joint Pentagon news conference with Mr. Robertson that "theater" defense against short-range attack was as important to many nations as a shield against long-range missiles was to the United States.

"What's 'national' depends on where you live, and what's 'theater' depends on where you live," he added, addressing concerns in Europe and elsewhere that a successful long-range defense for the United States could leave allies vulnerable.

Mr. Robertson later met Mr. Bush at the White House. The National Security Council spokeswoman, Mary Ellen Countryman, said they discussed NATO enlargement, NATO's missions in the Balkans and "NATO's role in building a Europe whole, free and secure."

They also discussed missile defense, noting Russia's recent "conceptual concession that defense systems should play a role in countering the threats of the new security environment," Ms. Countryman said. And they talked about European plans for a defense force. Mr. Bush, as he did in a meeting with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain two weeks ago, said he would favor the force as long as it did not undermine NATO.

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

U.S. May Have Been Cheated in Uranium Sale, Auditors Say

Saturday, March 10, 2001
Salt Lake Tribune
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.sltrib.com/03102001/nation_w/78207.htm

WASHINGTON -- When the government put enriched uranium estimated to be worth $10 million up for sale, it expected a good return. Instead, the U.S. Treasury received a scant $76,051, raising the ire of Energy Department investigators.

A private contractor, who handled the sale, reaped millions of dollars, according to auditors.

After a review of the sale, the department's inspector general concluded that the contractor, who prepared and packaged the uranium and negotiated the deal, was paid $3.4 million for "questionable costs."

On top of that, Fluor Fernald Inc., received a $675,430 fee for handling the deal, nearly 10 times what the government made on the 1997 sale, said the inspector general's report recently made public.

Still, the deal was vigorously defended Friday by the contractor and by the Energy Department office at the Fernald weapons plant near Cincinnati, where the uranium was located and is being disposed of as part of a general cleanup project.

"We don't think the sale was a bad deal," said Glenn Griffiths, deputy director of the DOE site office at the Fernald facility. He said the alternative to the sale was to declare the uranium a waste and face huge disposal costs.

Under the sale agreement, neither the name of the buyer nor the specific sale price can be made public for five years, said Griffiths. Other department sources said the company is a foreign uranium fuel provider.

There were contradictory explanations Friday on how much money actually was paid for the 978 metric tons of uranium, which the buyer resells after it is diluted as commercial reactor fuel.

-------- new york

Taking Tour, Federal Official Says Nuclear Plant Is Safe

March 10, 2001
New York Times
By WINNIE HU
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/nyregion/10NUKE.html

BUCHANAN, N.Y., March 9 - The top federal regulator overseeing nuclear reactors sought today to dispel any doubts about Indian Point 2, and toured the plant with several officials who had once openly questioned its safety.

In his first inspection of the plant, the regulator, Richard A. Meserve, chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was joined by Senator Charles E. Schumer and United States Representative Sue Kelly, among others. Although Mr. Meserve plans to visit all 103 commercially operated nuclear reactors in the nation, he said he was particularly interested in Indian Point 2 because of community concerns.

The Indian Point 2 plant, 35 miles north of Manhattan, closed in February 2000 after a small leak of radioactive water. The plant was restored to full power on Jan. 28 of this year, but has been plagued by minor leaks and mishaps that, while posing no immediate threat, have eroded the credibility of the plant's operator, Consolidated Edison.

Mr. Meserve stressed today that Indian Point 2 was safe over all, though he acknowledged that "there continue to be challenges." Last week, nuclear inspectors cited a backlog of reports about problems at the plant and a lack of preventive maintenance. "After a very extensive effort of inspecting the plant," Mr. Meserve said, "the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is comfortable that this plant is safe and has an adequate margin of safety."

Mr. Meserve also said that the reactor protection system, which triggers shutdowns during equipment failures, was functioning acceptably, even though it had been wired differently from the way it was designed. An engineer working for a contractor at the plant quit recently in a dispute over the reliability of the system.

Mr. Meserve's conclusions were echoed by Senator Schumer and Representative Kelly, both of whom had raised questions about the plant's safety as recently as two months ago.

Although Senator Schumer noted that Con Edison was "initially not vigilant enough," he said that the utility was now "doing a very good job."

Representative Kelly, one of the most outspoken critics of the plant, also said that Con Edison had made improvements. But when asked whether she had changed her mind about Indian Point, Ms. Kelly said she had not.

"There are still some things here at the plant to be concerned about," Ms. Kelly said. "The thing is, as we get people like Chairman Meserve here, Senator Schumer walking through the plant, we get a higher level of understanding at a place where it will make a difference."

Nuclear regulators and several elected officials called upon Con Edison to address perceptions of dangers at the plant. Stephen Quinn, a vice president at the utility, said it had sent daily status reports to elected officials since January, and had established a toll-free hot line to answer questions and allow people to sign up for tours. He said that the company would also hold public meetings. "We've got to get word out that we're taking care of business," he said, "so that people can have confidence in us."

-------- ohio

Uranium sale a lousy deal for U.S.
Government gets $76,051; handler of process gets millions

Saturday, March 10, 2001
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
By H. JOSEF HEBERT
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/national/uranium10.shtml

WASHINGTON -- When the government put enriched uranium estimated to be worth $10 million up for sale, it expected a good return. Instead, the U.S. Treasury received a scant $76,051, raising the ire of Energy Department investigators.

A private contractor, who handled the sale, reaped millions of dollars, according to auditors.

After a review of the sale, the department's inspector general concluded that the contractor, who prepared and packaged the uranium and negotiated the deal, was paid $3.4 million for "questionable costs" that should never have been allowed.

On top of that, Fluor Fernald Inc. received a $675,430 fee for handling the deal, nearly 10 times what the government made on the 1997 sale, said the inspector general's report recently made public.

Yet, the deal was vigorously defended yesterday by the contractor and by the Energy Department office at the Fernald weapons plant near Cincinnati, where the uranium was located and is being disposed of as part of a general cleanup project.

"We don't think the sale was a bad deal. We told the IG (inspector general) that and that's still our position," said Glenn Griffiths, deputy director of the DOE site office at the Fernald facility. He said the alternative to the sale was to declare the uranium a waste and face huge disposal costs.

Under the sale agreement, neither the name of the buyer nor the specific sale price can be made public for five years, Griffiths said. Other department sources said the company is a foreign uranium fuel provider.

According to the IG investigation, Fluor Fernald Inc., the managing contractor for environmental cleanup at Fernald, estimated the sale would get the government $5 million to $7 million. Instead, the government received $76,051 after all fees and other costs were calculated.

There were contradictory explanations yesterday on how much money actually was paid for the 978 metric tons of uranium, which the buyer resells after it is diluted as commercial reactor fuel.

Ken Morgan, a spokesman for the DOE's Ohio field office, said the amount was "substantially less" than the $10.5 million "projected sales revenue" cited by the IG report. Griffiths said the number was essentially corrected, but included all of the costs involved, including preparing the material, which was in many different forms and not properly packaged or analyzed.

But Griffith said the $5 million to $7 million profit projections were made in 1990 before the market for uranium softened dramatically. He said the material was advertised as early as 1992, but no buyer was found for five years.

-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

Panel to Aid Bogotá Talks

March 10, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/world/10COLO.html

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, March 9 - The government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia invited 10 countries today to form a panel to assist two-year-old peace talks. A communiqué listed the countries as Canada, Cuba, Spain, France, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and Venezuela.

The announcement was made a day after diplomats from 25 countries - the notable absentee being the United States - visited negotiators in the rebels' southern enclave to demonstrate support for peace.

The rebel group, known as FARC, the largest rebel group here, has been fighting for 37 years.

-------- drug war

Pataki Proposes Changes in Drug Sentencing

March 10, 2001
New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/nyregion/10DRUG.html

Nearly two months after he pledged to loosen the state's strict mandatory sentencing laws for drug offenders, Gov. George E. Pataki released a detailed bill yesterday that would reduce prison sentences in some instances but would also add new penalties for marijuana convictions. He also wants to reduce the state parole board's authority to grant early release from prison.

Mr. Pataki, a Republican, has long campaigned against parole in general. He has ended parole for those convicted of repeated violent felonies. He has pushed to end parole for all felons, though that has failed to pass the Assembly.

Now, as part of his package of proposed drug laws, he is calling for what is known as determinate, or definite, sentences for drug offenders. Under the proposal, an inmate would have to serve a fixed minimum sentence, as ordered by a judge. Currently, the state parole board decides when an inmate can be released under parole supervision.

"It's a continuation of the governor's belief in determinate sentencing," said Caroline Quartararo, a spokeswoman for the State Division of Criminal Justice Services. "We're putting an end to the parole board's discretionary power over sentencing and putting that decision-making back into the hands of the judges, where it belongs."

The governor's bill also loosens some of the most restrictive sentencing laws: it significantly reduces minimum sentences for the most serious nonviolent drug offenses, for instance, and provides for treatment instead of or in addition to prison time for some drug felons.

But even as some of Mr. Pataki's most vehement critics praised those aspects of the bill yesterday, the fine print of his proposal drew alarm as well. Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, the group leading the charge to overturn what are known as the Rockefeller laws, said he worried about whether these measures, if they became law, would ultimately place even more low-level dealers behind bars, and for longer.

"In fact it may have very, very little effect, or it may actually increase the number of people being sent to state prison," Mr. Gangi said. "The governor took a few steps politically in the direction of drug law reform, but our concern is that he's slipping back from that posture."

New York's Rockefeller-era laws largely apply to hard drugs, like heroin and cocaine, and sentencing is based on the quantity of drugs along with the defendant's past felony record. Judges have no discretion over whether a convicted drug offender should be imprisoned, and they cannot take into account whether any violence was committed. Critics say these laws have crowded prisons with low-level drug dealers and addicts who need treatment. For several years, the critics have pressed for greater judicial discretion over sentencing - a move vigorously contested by the state's prosecutors and their allies in Albany.

The governor's proposal would reduce penalties for the most serious nonviolent drug offenders: those convicted of class A felonies, now punishable by a minimum sentence of 15 years to life, for instance, would have their sentences reduced to a minimum of 8 1/3 years to life.

Under his proposal, those who are arrested repeatedly on charges of marijuana sales and possession would face felony charges, instead of misdemeanor charges as they do now. His bill would also stiffen penalties for possession and sale of large quantities of marijuana, and impose tougher sentences on those arrested on drug charges in parks.

How the governor's bill will fare with the Democrats in the Assembly remains unclear. Eileen Larrabee, a spokeswoman for the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, said the Democratic conference would take up the matter next week when the legislative session resumes.

---

LEGALIZING MARIJUANA

March 10, 2001
New York Times
Elizabeth Olson (NYT)
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/world/10BRIE.html

SWITZERLAND: The government has proposed legislation that would permit consumption of marijuana and hashish, acting on findings of a study that showed use of the substances is pervasive. Under the proposed law, the police could ignore cultivation and trading of small amounts of soft drugs and devote more resources to large-scale production and export. The legislation faces scrutiny by Parliament, where passage is far from certain.

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

Rangers protest black beret decision

03/10/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-10-army-berets.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - About 200 protesters gathered Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial to demonstrate against Army plans to issue black berets to all its soldiers - an honor that had been reserved exclusively for the elite Rangers for more than two decades.

"Why would someone harm such a noble heritage?" former Ranger Bob Black asked the crowd.

The Rangers are a small, elite force chosen for some of the Army's most hazardous and demanding missions. Organizers said the memorial to President Lincoln was chosen as the rally site because the former president briefly served as a ranger himself, albeit in 1832 as a member of an independent group of volunteers called rangers who fought Indians on the Illinois frontier in 1832 and bore little resemblance to modern-day Rangers.

But as part of an Army effort intended to boost morale and promote unity, the berets will become standard issue for all soldiers starting June 14 - the Army's birthday.

But the protesters rejected those efforts.

"It's just not the way to do it," said former World War II Ranger John Kormann of Chevy Chase, Md. "I've seen young soldiers almost transformed during Ranger training. To some nice person sitting behind a desk, what will it mean to them?"

The only other distinguishing feature of the Rangers' uniform is a patch worn on the right shoulder.

According to the Army's Web site, armor and armored infantry troops were permitted to wear the black beret from 1973 until then-Chief of Staff Bernard W. Rogers banned unofficial headgear in 1979. Rangers were authorized the beret under a 1975 regulation.

The Rangers' efforts to reverse the decision have gained the attention of President Bush. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said last week that Bush had asked the Department of Defense to review its decision.

But Army spokeswoman Elaine Kanellis said Friday that the Army is not aware of any formal or informal requests from the White House for a briefing on the matter.

Protest organizers shuttled between Capitol Hill offices last week, hoping to build support for their cause. Their supporters include Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., whose state is home to the 75th Ranger Regiment headquarters at Fort Benning.

Also, former Ranger David Nielsen, 30, completed his 700-mile walk that started Feb. 10 from Fort Benning to the nation's capital. About a dozen other former Rangers joined him for the last leg of the trip, and they marched Saturday across the Potomac River to the rally.

Nielsen, of Leesburg, Va., said he walked in protest, hoping to draw attention to the issue.

---

Army Rangers Gather to Fight Order on Berets

March 10, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/national/10BERE.html

WASHINGTON, March 9 - Three former Army Rangers have marched into Washington in advance of a rally on Saturday where former Rangers, their families and supporters will gather to protest an order that black berets, the Rangers' distinctive headgear, will be worn by all of the service's 480,000 active- duty soldiers and officers.

Completing the last leg of his 750- mile trek this week from Ranger headquarters at Fort Benning, Ga., David Nielsen arrived here flanked by two other former Rangers.

The former Rangers spent today trekking around Capitol Hill - exchanging their rucksacks for legal folders - meeting with lawmakers to garner support for overturning the order issued by the Army's top general that all active-duty soldiers and officers wear the black berets. The former Rangers said they had enlisted at least 30 members of Congress.

President Bush has now entered the fray, with the Pentagon reviewing the decision, at his request, Scott McClellan, a White House spokesman, said in an interview today.

But Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld denied that on Thursday. "I have not asked the Army to do anything particular about that," Mr. Rumsfeld said in a Pentagon news conference.

Last October, the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, ordered that all soldiers and officers be issued the black beret, the exclusive symbol of the Army's elite infantry force, the Rangers. The new caps will be issued on June 14, in time for the Army's 226th birthday.

The black beret, General Shinseki said, "will be a symbol of unity, a symbol of Army excellence, a symbol of our values."

But the former Rangers reject that argument.

"The beret is earned, not issued," said Jason C. Denny, a former Ranger who marched 450 miles to Washington from Fort Bragg, N.C., to protest the Army's decision.

"We want the beret to be sanctified," Mr. Nielsen said, pointing to President John F. Kennedy's decision in 1962 to reserve the green beret for Army special forces units. Army airborne troops wear a red beret. The black beret became the exclusive symbol of the Rangers in 1975; before that, it was worn by a variety of Army units.

---

Relatives of Dead Marines Seek Delay of Osprey Plans

March 10, 2001
New York Times
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/national/10OSPR.html

ARLINGTON, Va., March 9 - In emotional testimony, relatives of four marines who died in a V-22 Osprey crash last year told Pentagon investigators today that they believed the aircraft had been rushed into service before it was safe, and they urged the Marines to put the problem-plagued program on hold.

Their voices often cracking with emotion, the relatives, three wives and a sister, asserted that Osprey pilots had not been properly trained to fly the innovative aircraft and that its manufacturers, Boeing and Textron Inc.'s Bell Helicopter unit, may have withheld vital information from the Marine Corps about potential aerodynamic problems.

"I feel the program was pushed too hard and too fast," said Trisha Brow, the wife of Maj. John A. Brow, the pilot of an Osprey that crashed in Arizona last April 8, killing all 19 marines on board. "There is so much political pressure to do this program, it is like a runaway train."

When she began her remarks, Mrs. Brow held up a color photograph taken in 1999 of 11 Osprey pilots standing in front of one of the ungainly looking aircraft, which can take off, land and hover like a helicopter and cruise like an airplane. Four of those pilots died in two crashes last year, along with 19 other marines.

The testimony came in the first public hearing by a four-member panel that is conducting a sweeping review of the Osprey's cost, safety and effectiveness. The panel is expected to complete its work next month and send a report to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that will help determine the future of the $40 billion program.

The inspector general for the Department of Defense is conducting a separate investigation into accusations that high-ranking Marine Corps officers pressured marines at the Osprey's base at New River Air Station in North Carolina into falsifying maintenance records.

The Marine Corps wants to buy 360 of the aircraft to replace Vietnam- era helicopters. The Marines have grounded their eight remaining Osprey until the investigations are finished.

The women, who were accompanied today by lawyers, did not claim to have anything other than public reports and their own instincts to back up their assertions about the manufacturers, whom they are planning to sue. The father of Lance Cpl. Jason T. Duke, a marine who died in the crash last April, filed a negligence lawsuit in Arizona today against the manufacturers.

Spokesmen for Bell and Boeing said they had not seen the lawsuit, and they declined to comment on today's testimony.

The widows of two Osprey pilots also said today they were outraged that the Marine Corps had attributed the April crash to "human errors" by the pilots, and they urged the panel to clear their husbands of any responsibility for the crash.

"To accuse my husband of not only causing his own death but contributing to the death of 18 others is something the Gruber family cannot live with and should not have to," said Dr. Connie Gruber, the wife of Maj. Brooks S. Gruber, the co-pilot in the Arizona crash. "I cannot begin to express to you how this wrongful accusation compounds our pain."

Military investigators attributed the April crash to a relatively rare aerodynamic condition known as vortex ring state, which occurs when a rotor-blade aircraft descends too rapidly while moving forward at slow speed. It can cause such aircraft to lose lift suddenly; and in the case of the Arizona crash, it caused the Osprey to flip over and plummet to the ground, where it crashed in a fireball, investigators said.

The Marines Corps blamed the crash on "human factors," concluding that the pilots apparently caused the Osprey to enter into vortex ring state by trying to land it too quickly at too steep an angle.

Lawyers for the widows said that the manufacturers and the Marine Corps had failed to adequately test the unusual and potentially deadly effects of vortex ring state on the Osprey, which, unlike a helicopter, has rotors mounted on wings. That configuration caused the Osprey to flip over when it entered vortex ring state, experts have said.

The lawyers, citing Pentagon reports, also said that the flight simulators used to train Osprey pilots were not programmed to simulate vortex ring state. And the flight manual contained virtually no information to help pilots recognize the start of the condition or how to escape it, they said.

"Pilot error? Human factors? Hogwash," said Brian J. Alexander, one of the lawyers.

The panel also heard from military analysts and a professor of aerodynamics who argued that the aircraft would be extremely valuable for military and commercial purposes because of its speed, power and range.

"Don't abandon a concept that is the most revolutionary thing that has come out of aerospace on the aeronautics side in the last probably 40 or 50 years," said Dr. Daniel P. Schrage, director of the Center of Excellence in Rotorcraft Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

-------- OTHER

Farewell to Radio

March 2001
Alley Reporter
by Robert W. McChesney

Radio is the quintessential people's medium. It is the least expensive medium to produce a quality product and the least expensive medium to receive. It is ideally suited to local, decentralized content and popular participation in production. Due to low production costs, radio is also ideal for creative innovation. Nor does it does not require any technical expertise or even literacy to use radio effectively. Even in the Age of the Internet, by all accounts good old radio is going to be around for a long time still, at least as long as there are automobiles. And in places like Africa and parts of Asia, radio will be the dominant medium for another generation.

In the United States, however, radio is anything but the people's medium. It is the private preserve of a small number of billionaires who are falling all over themselves to better serve the needs of Madison Avenue. I do not wish to romanticize the nature of U.S. radio broadcasting from bygone days, but the fact is that the present day radio is nothing short of pathetic.

The reason is clear. There are only a few dozen radio channels in a given community. In 1996 the Telecommunications Act greatly revised the rules for radio station ownership. Back in the 70s and 80s, firms could only own around a dozen stations nationwide and no more than two in a single market. The 1996 law, rammed though by the powerful corporate radio lobby without a shred of debate or media coverage, eliminated any restriction on the number of stations a firm could own nationally, and raised the limit in a single market to eight, in the largest communities.

Since the law passed, there has been a complete reformation of U.S radio, with well over half the 11,000 commercial station changing hands. Small station groups can not compete with the giant chains so they sell out. Radio is now dominated by a small handful of firms that own hundreds of stations each. Every market is now dominated by two or three firms that are "maxed out" with eight stations each. The quality of radio has plummeted. With little competition, the amount of advertising is up to 18 minutes per hour, according to one industry trade publication, well over the figure for a decade ago. Also, localized news and production has been dropped for vastly less expensive standardized fare. You could be blindfolded and airdropped into Louisiana, Oregon or Vermont and probably hear the same oldies song or Rush Limbaugh show on the local radio.

Clear Channel, which owns around 800 stations, has shined the light on the new world order of corporate radio. It usually houses all eight stations it owns in a given community on one floor of a building. Each "station" gets one room about the size of a closet where it can transmit standardized fare. The remaining office space is mostly for the ad salespeople.

In other industries, like computers or automobiles, there might be arguments that having fewer owners is necessary for economies of scale that will eventually translate into product innovation and lower prices for consumers. No such claims can be made in radio. All the advantages accrue to the owners, none to the public. The stations now cost a fortune, not because the cost of production is high, but because stations are worth so much as part of these massive radio chains. It is a rip-off, pure and simple. And the rip-off has nothing to do with free markets; it is entirely due to a corrupt change in the law regulating the publicly owned radio spectrum.

The rational solution would be to only allow one station per owner, period. The cost of stations would plummet, while the quality and diversity and local orientation would skyrocket. Everyone would benefit except the radio-owning billionaires who currently floss their teeth with politicians' underpants. So don't hold your breath expecting any policies to improve matters.

In fact, the radio monopolists have won two incredible anti-democratic victories in the recent past. First, the FCC enacted a very cautious plan to permit low-power FM radio broadcasting in the open slots on the dial in 2000. This would have permitted a handful of noncommercial locally run stations, that cost only $2,000 using new technology to transmit a great signal, into every market. But the radio giants used their leverage on Capital Hill to get a rider effectively killing "microradio" attached to a budget bill Clinton could not veto. The last thing the radio giants want is genuine competition for "their" listeners.

Second, radio is in the process of being converted from analog to digital. With the transfer to digital, it would be fairly easy to add another 30-50 radio stations in every market. But the corporate radio bosses don't want any competition, so that won't happen. Under pressure from the radio kingpins, the FCC is going to permit digital radio to remain as is, except for the technical changeover, and be the private plaything of the same wonderful radio giants who are presently carpetbombing the nation with stale content and tons of commercials. The radio giants promise us that with digital radio, "the change will be so simple, most listeners won't notice any difference at all."

Wow, that sure is good news, eh?

-------- environment

Less Fraternite, More Egalite

Saturday, March 10, 2001
By Jeremy Derfner

Bush has been keeping busy recently, to hear the NYT tell it. The paper offers a third story chronicling the activities of the president on its front. Bush wants to cut coal-burning power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas believed to contribute to global warming. The bill, which Bush promised to pursue during his campaign, will also limit the plants' emissions of other gases which cause acid rain and contribute to smog. The president is backed by influential Republicans in Congress, including Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, chair of the Senate Environmental Committee. The bill is opposed by conservative Republicans and some coal, oil and industry groups, who worry that such regulation of carbon dioxide emissions would be costly and conflict with Bush's desire to raise supplies of fossil fuels.

---

Timber! Look out for the U.S.

Saturday 10 March 2001
Montreal Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/editorial/pages/010310/5075757.html

Canada looks likes it's going to get nailed again on softwood lumber. The usual U.S. coalition of lumber mills and politicians from timber states is ganging up on Canadian producers, making the same old arguments that the federal and provincial governments are unfairly subsidizing our lumber industry.

We've been down this road many times before. Softwood lumber has been an issue of contention between the two countries for almost 20 years. U.S. arguments about unfair Canadian trade practices have been found repeatedly to be without merit.

Nevertheless, under intense pressure from the U.S. lumber lobby and its political allies, Canada caved in five years ago and signed an agreement capping exports to the U.S. and imposing a tax on anything above that threshold.

The agreement is set to expire at the end of this month and U.S. protectionists are aroused again. After enlisting the support of half the U.S. Senate, as well as the new U.S. trade representative, Robert Zoellick, they're threatening to file anti-dumping and subsidy charges and ask for penalty duties on Canadian lumber. If they're successful, a nasty trade war could follow.

The real issue here isn't subsidy, it's the fact that Canadian lumber has managed to claim one-third of the American market, worth more than $10 billion.

That simply galls American producers, who claim they can't compete with "unfair" advantages enjoyed by their Canadian competitors.

But how unfair are those alleged advantages?

The Americans are upset at the way Canadian lumber is priced. Most of the lumber cut in the U.S. comes from private forests. Only about 5 per cent comes from federal or publicly held lands and that portion is usually acquired through competitive bidding. By contrast, lumber in Canada is cut from Crown lands and is charged stumpage rates set by provincial governments.

That's not exactly a perfect free-market mechanism but Canada's stumpage rates, low as they may look, do not tell the full story of the costs borne by Canadian producers. What's more, several investigations have found that stumpage rates have not had much effect on the prices charged for Canadian lumber in the U.S. market.

What should really embarrass the Americans are the protectionist practices in their own back yard. This week, it was reported the U.S. Forest Service is auctioning off timber tracts to U.S. producers at an annual loss of $126 million. A taxpayer group in the U.S. called it "a blatant case of corporate welfare."

The Cato Institute, a Washington-based, free-market think-tank, has found a few other American lumber practices that aren't exactly fair. These include: special capital-gains treatment for timber sales, an exemption from fuel tax for helicopters used in logging operations; an investment tax credit for reforestation and special write-offs for timber-growing costs. The combined annual revenue loss to the U.S. government is at least $600 million.

In addition to federal subsidies, several states offer direct aid to the logging industry.

If the Bush administration is serious about the cause of free trade, it should resist the calls for action against Canadian lumber. At next month's Summit of the Americas in Quebec City, President Bush is expected to issue a clarion call for a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. But if the U.S. can't lead by example, it's free-trade rhetoric won't count for very much.

---

Playing hardball over softwood

Saturday 10 March 2001
Montreal Gazette
BRIAN KAPPLER
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010310/5075315.html

Canada and the U.S. are ready to rumble, yet again, over softwood. How this plays out will be a major test of Canadian diplomacy - and of the Bush administration's intellectual honesty.

Softwood lumber, from conifers such as pine and cedar, is used in construction, mainly of housing. We sell the Americans about $11 billion worth every year, a third of their supply. We could sell them more, but in 1996 Canada signed a "Softwood Lumber Agreement" (SLA), which in effect limits our sales into the U.S.

The deal gives U.S. producers a captive market and drives up consumer prices. The average new American home costs at least $800 U.S. extra because of the SLA, say economists at the Cato Institute, a U.S. free-market "think tank."

The SLA, which covers only Quebec, Ontario, B.C. and Alberta, expires March 30. That's why you're reading and hearing about a "trade war."

But when you look closely, the issue is not simply "us vs. them." It's also "us vs. us" and "them vs. them."

American producers want to renew the SLA. But Canada has allies, if we can use them: U.S. home-builders, native-American groups and other low-housing-cost activists want true free trade.

In Canada, producers in the four provinces covered also hope for free trade. But Atlantic producers, now exempt from the limits and fearful of U.S. protectionism against all Canadian wood, want the SLA renewed.

And some conservation groups favour anything that would reduce logging.

'When will they learn?'

So, does Canada compete unfairly, as charged, by means of various subsidy mechanisms?

Through successive disputes in the 1980s and 1990s, official inquiries and academic research have found Canadian practices to be generally legitimate and appropriate - and that there are certain American subsidies, too.

"We are right every time," says Pierre Pettigrew, Canada's trade minister. "When will they learn?"

"They" are American lumber producers, who have friends in high places.

A chorus of U.S. lawmakers has now called upon the Bush administration to seek a political solution ("Crush them Canucks, George!") rather than sticking with principles of free trade.

Just two weeks ago Stephen Kelly, the No. 2 U.S. diplomat in Canada, was saying that Robert Zoellick, the top U.S. trade negotiator, would be looking for "creative solutions" and "new ideas" on softwood.

But now Zoellick has been ordered off the ice; Bush seems ready to send the goons over the, errr, boards.

Both sides are talking tough. Lumberman Rusty Wood, who speaks for U.S. producers, has vowed to tell Congress some "dirty little (Canadian) secrets."

We're the Real Free-Traders

One of these might be, hypothetically, that some Quebec wood is shipped to the U.S. via Atlantic Canada, thus eluding SLA limits.

Tom Stephens, a now-retired American who was chief executive of MacMillan Bloedel, this week advised Canadians to resist U.S. pressure.

The Americans want more access to Canadian oil, gas and electricity, he said, and so Ottawa should "remind U.S. policymakers that without Canada's energy, they had better learn to speak Arabic and read by candlelight."

And former Ontario premier Bob Rae, now a lawyer for Canadian lumber firms, this week invoked a line U.S. Ambassador Gordon Giffin used two years ago, when grumbling about Canadian magazine protectionism: "Open trade is a two-way street." Translation: "We can hurt you, too."

Well, it's the strutting phase. Ultimately, though, Canada need not fear trade tribunals, nor American public opinion. And for once we're the real free-traders.

What we do have to worry about is the U.S. political system, in which timber barons with big campaign-donation chequebooks can make politicians forget their principles. George W. Bush is supposed to be a big free-trader, but this will be a good test of his actual commitment.

When the dust settles and testosterone levels abate, Canada's winning condition, so to speak, may well prove to be that Canada has plenty of allies stateside: would-be home-buyers, lumber retailers, construction workers ...

Are Canadian diplomats adept enough to help those groups tip the balance in Congress?

We'll know soon.

---

Great gray migration
Every spring, thousands of whales swim north from Mexico to Alaska

Saturday 10 March 2001
Montreal Gazette
Vancouver Sun
DAWN HANNA
http://www.montrealgazette.com/travel/pages/010310/5071590.html

A telltale spray of mist rose from the ocean a few hundred metres from the boat. "Whale!" someone shouted. And we motored a couple of hundred metres closer, cut the engine and drifted on the rolling blue-gray waves of the Pacific Ocean.

All was silent. Then a whoosh broke the quiet and an enormous gray head broke the surface of the water not more than 25 metres away. A chorus of "oohs" and "aahs" erupted simultaneously from the boat.

It's hard to say exactly what it is about seeing a whale reduces most people to incomprehensible mutterings and transfixed stares. It could be the beast's sheer size - up to 14 metres in length and 32 tonnes in weight - or its unmistakable wildness. But I believe it's the feeling that we've come eyeball to eyeball with a creature who is as aware of his world as we are of ours and who seems to look at us with both curiosity and camaraderie.

It's these kinds of experiences that bring people to the west coast of Vancouver Island during March and April, when the gray whales are making their northward migration. And it is then that Tofino and Ucluelet and the Pacific Rim National Park that lies between the two celebrate with the Pacific Rim Whale Festival.

This year, the festival runs March 15 to April 1. It kicks off with a gala and fundraiser at the posh Wickaninnish Inn and closes with a golf tournament and dinner. In between are about 70 special events including a seafood-chowder cook-off, an art show, readings, lectures, contests, a First Nations display and a Parade of Whales.

As well, viewing stations will be set up, from Grice Point in Tofino through Pacific Rim National Park to Amphitrite Point in Ucluelet. And tour companies will be busy shuttling whale-lovers to both protected waters and the open ocean.

By the time the gray whales reach the west coast of Vancouver Island, they are about halfway through their 9,000-kilometre migration. From the warm, shallow lagoons of Baja California in Mexico, they wend their way north to the icy waters of the Bering and Chukchi seas off Alaska. It is one of the longest known migrations of any mammal.

While visiting here, these leviathans feed on tiny bottom-dwelling invertebrates. Like many other giant whales, the gray (eschrichtius robustus) dines on tiny creatures it catches with its baleen, which are a series of overlapping plates made of the same stuff fingernails are made off.

What makes the gray different, however, is that he doesn't filter his meal out of huge mouthfuls of water as does his cousins, the blue and the humpback. Instead, he dives to the ocean floor and scoops great mouthfuls of silt, strains out the water and mud and swallows what remains, usually worms, crabs, tiny shrimp and small fish.

"I've actually seen them feeding in Grice Bay," said Duane Bell, who manages the Middle Beach Lodge in Tofino. "That's surprised me, because it's so shallow in there. One time when I was canoeing, I saw a gray whale feeding in water so shallow that its pectoral fin was right out of the water."

Bell said gray whales can sometimes be spotted from the oceanfront deck of the lodge. "They come right through Templar Channel and around Grice Point and into the bay," he said. "You see the occasional spout or tail going by."

Still, the best way to see gray whales is to get out on the water on one of the boats that operate out of Tofino and Ucluelet. They range from zippy, rigid-hull Zodiacs to covered vessels that provide more protection from the elements. Most companies, put some of their revenues into gray-whale research, including projects that study the migratory habits, the feeding patterns and the behaviour of gray whales in the area.

Researchers are also studying the deaths of grays along the west coast in recent years. Last year, about 300 corpses washed up on the beaches, and the year before that it was 275. While scientists are not yet concerned - the population is stable at about 20,000 - they are watching closely.

Back on the boat, we, too, were watching the whales closely. Through my binoculars, the whale's skin looked like a landscape of its own. There were scratches and nicks and pastures of white barnacles. I suspected, too, that there were loony-size orange whale lice tucked in his skin folds, even though I couldn't see them.

What must that skin feel like, I wonder? And while a part of me contemplates the water temperature and the possibility of an impulsive swim, the whale slipped beneath the waves. Somehow, the ocean felt more like home.

If You Go

Pacific Rim Whale Festival: For information on the Web, check out www.island.net/~whalef/ Phone (250) 726-7742, or write to Box 999, Ucluelet, B.C. V0R 3A0.

Tofino: For more information on whale-watching tours and accommodation, check out the Tofino Chamber of Commerce Web site at www.island.net/~tofino/ Phone (250) 725-3414, fax (250) 725-3296 or write to Box 249, Tofino, B.C. V0R 2Z0.

Ucluelet: Check out the Chamber of Commerce Web site at www.dist.ucluelet.bc.ca Phone (250) 726-4641, fax (250) 726-4611, or write to Box 428, Ucluelet, B.C. V0R 3A0.

Pacific Rim National Park Reserve: On the Web at parkscan.harbour.com/pacrim/ Phone (250) 726-7721, fax (250) 726-4720 or write to Box 280, Ucluelet, B.C. V0R 3A0.

---

Despite Opposition in Party, Bush to Seek Emissions Cuts

March 10, 2001
New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/politics/10GAS.html

The Bush administration, some influential Republicans in Congress and several big owners of coal-burning power plants have joined in advocating something long sought by environmental groups and Democrats: cuts in the plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas widely thought to contribute to a global warming trend.

The cuts would come as part of a larger bill controlling carbon dioxide and three other emissions from the power plants: sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and mercury, a toxic heavy metal.

Mr. Bush promised in his campaign last fall to seek such a bill, and Christie Whitman, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has reasserted that pledge in recent days.

Cuts would constitute the nation's first restrictions on carbon dioxide, a gas that has no direct effect on human health - in fact, it is the bubbles in beer - but that many scientists have concluded is already altering ecosystems and weather patterns as it accumulates in the atmosphere.

But the prospect has spawned a fierce lobbying effort by conservative Republicans and some coal, oil and industry groups, which are urging Mr. Bush to abandon his campaign stance and any mention of carbon dioxide.

The opponents say laws requiring carbon dioxide cuts would harm the economy and clash with the administration's goal of raising supplies of fossil fuels.

"This is a colossal mistake," said Myron Ebell, director of global warming policy for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington group that advocates free markets and limited regulation and has attacked the administration recently. "If they persist, there will be war."

Still, many people on both sides of the issue say chances have never been better for legislation to limit the emissions from power plants, which produce about 40 percent of the nation's carbon dioxide output.

Mr. Bush's commitment on carbon dioxide - articulated in a couple of short sentences deep in an energy policy paper released on Sept. 29 - was a sharp shift for a politician who had long avoided making definitive statements on the seriousness of global warming.

The change went largely unnoticed in the campaign, but has now bubbled up like a suddenly opened bottle of warm seltzer because of a confluence of recent events.

First, several Republicans in important positions in Congress are preparing to propose power-plant legislation that would limit carbon dioxide, most significantly Senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who is chairman of the Senate Environment Committee.

Mr. Smith and other proponents of the bill say the bill is needed to simplify life for utilities facing a growing, unpredictable maze of federal and state laws governing all manner of emissions.

At the same time, the energy task force, headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, is rushing to complete its initial plan for turning Mr. Bush's promises on energy and the environment into programs.

And legislatures in many states where air pollution is an issue - including New Hampshire, Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan - are moving toward passage of bills that limit the four emissions. Growing numbers of power-plant operators now regard as inevitable some sort of restrictions, and would prefer one federal standard to a patchwork of confusing regulations.

Some environmental advocates, Democrats and moderate Republicans say that Mr. Bush's support for a comprehensive bill could provide crucial momentum. Past efforts foundered because of the political divide between the Clinton administration and Congress.

"Having George W. Bush seriously looking at carbon dioxide as part of a four-pollutant approach on power plants really demonstrates that you can't ignore CO2 any more," said Jennifer L. Morgan, climate policy director for one conservation group, the World Wildlife Fund.

Opponents of the legislation include coal and oil companies, business groups, and conservatives in Congress who doubt that climate change poses a significant threat and fear that restrictions on utilities would be costly - and would eventually be applied to other carbon dioxide sources, notably cars and trucks.

More than half the nation's electricity is produced by burning coal, which generates the most carbon dioxide per watt of any fuel. So any restrictions on carbon dioxide would probably lead to a shift toward other options, like natural gas, and would inevitably have some economic impact, though estimates range widely.

Some conservatives also fear that any greenhouse-gas limits would signal that the Bush administration is planning to complete the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty negotiated under the Clinton administration that would commit the United States and 37 other industrialized countries to larger cuts in greenhouse gases. The treaty has not yet been ratified by any industrialized country.

Negotiations about vital details broke down in November and are scheduled to resume in July. During the campaign, Mr. Bush criticized the treaty, saying that it would harm the economy by raising fuel prices and that it unfairly excluded large developing countries like China and India from obligations to reduce their gas releases.

A task force within the administration is reviewing its stance on the treaty and other climate issues. But last week, Mrs. Whitman told a gathering of environment ministers from the Group of 8 - the leading economic powers and Russia - that the review "does not represent a backing away from Kyoto."

Perhaps the strongest proponent of controlling greenhouse gases within the administration is Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill. As chairman of Alcoa, he spoke forcefully of the threat posed by the atmosphere's carbon dioxide levels, which have risen 25 percent since the late 1800's. "There is no doubt about this issue," he said in a 1998 speech.

Despite the intensifying effort to sway Mr. Bush from the power-plant bill, supporters of the legislation say that if it is written the right way it can eventually be passed with the president's support.

They point to the unequivocal language used in Mr. Bush's Sept. 29 position paper, which stated that he would seek legislation that would "establish mandatory reduction targets for emissions of four main pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide."

Not only that, proponents say, the same paper promoted the difference between his mandatory cuts and the proposal of his rival. "Vice President Gore has advocated only a voluntary program," Mr. Bush said.

One impediment to a bill is a sharp battle line drawn by some in industry against language that would label carbon dioxide as pollution. That classification would bring it under the umbrella of the Clean Air Act.

But a bill could be written that controls the gas while stating it is not a "pollutant," according to William F. Tyndall, vice president for environmental services and federal affairs at the Cinergy Corporation, a power company based in Cincinnati that has a fleet of coal-fired plants around the Midwest but supports a comprehensive plant cleanup.

"We've been promoting this idea and see it as an elegant solution to a very difficult situation," Mr. Tyndall said. "I think it has a real shot."

Cinergy, American Electric Power - a huge coal-dependent midwestern power company - and some other utilities say they would accede to the limits in the expectation that the bill would provide flexibility. That could come in the form of allowing utilities to trade emissions credits earned by reducing emissions or planting forests, which sop up carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and store the carbon in wood and soil.

Just as important, Mr. Tyndall said, such a bill would eliminate uncertainty about future regulation, making it much easier for a company to decide which of its existing power plants to improve, which to shift to cleaner fuels like natural gas, and which to shut down.

For the moment, the White House is giving no signal about whether it will stick with the campaign position, with the first glimpse of its policy likely to come when Mr. Cheney's task force provides its initial findings on how to restore the country's energy balance. That report could be completed later this month.

In the meantime, opponents have built up their pressure, most visibly in sharp attacks on Mrs. Whitman for reaffirming in recent statements Mr. Bush's pledge to include carbon dioxide in a cleanup of power plants.

One e-mail message distributed recently to Congress, reporters and a list of conservatives by the Greening Earth Society, a group financed by coal-based utilities, described Mrs. Whitman as Christine Todd Browner - an allusion to Carol M. Browner, the E.P.A. administrator under President Clinton.

Yesterday, though, officials at the White House and E.P.A. said that Mrs. Whitman had not been pressured to change her remarks, though she was apparently nudged gently to tone things down. "They are backing her up," said an E.P.A. official, referring to White House officials. "No one is telling her not to speak. Everything she said was in his campaign message. They're just saying let's have some caution in the public statements until we are finished with this review."

---

Contagion and Confidence

March 10, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/opinion/10SAT3.html

Foot-and-mouth disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease, are radically different kinds of illnesses. Foot-and- mouth disease, which last appeared in the United States in 1929, is an old agricultural enemy - endemic in much of the world, highly contagious, debilitating to young animals, but seldom harmful to humans. Mad cow is caused by an agent whose existence was largely undreamed of until a few years ago - an abnormal protein called a prion. Mad cow is not contagious, but it is invariably fatal to animals and, in the form of the new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, to humans infected by it.

What these two diseases share is an aftermath - the slaughter of entire herds of infected and potentially infected farm animals. This is a preventive measure that has turned Britain, where 127 farms have been infected so far with foot-and- mouth disease, into an agricultural inferno. First came the herd destructions that followed the diagnosis of mad cow in the late 1980's. Now the herds with foot-and-mouth disease are being destroyed.

The reason for all this killing is that both diseases are extraordinarily difficult to stop. Despite a ban on importing British beef and cattle, mad cow, which cannot be passed from animal to animal, has nonetheless spread to other European countries through contaminated feed. Preventing the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, which can be carried by the wind and on human clothing, is vastly more difficult. The movement of people, animals, animal byproducts and other farm products must be strictly controlled wherever the disease is suspected. In Britain, nearly every animal-related activity has come to a halt, shutting down race meetings and hunting of every kind, closing all the national parks and making travel in the countryside extremely difficult. The European Union has imposed restraints on livestock trading and extended a ban on meat imports from Britain. In the United States, Senator Tom Daschle has called for a temporary ban on all livestock imports and for the labeling of imported meat.

The outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, coming on top of mad cow, has created in Britain a sense of profound unease. The effect on public confidence and the general economy is alarming, but the effect on farmers is devastating. They are compensated for the destruction of their animals, but there is no possible compensation for the emotional and cultural loss when a farmer sees a herd put to the flames.

It looks like the end of a way of life, the latest blow in an ongoing British agricultural tragedy that has included mad cow, a recent outbreak of swine fever and commodity prices that have been sharply affected by the strength of the pound against the euro. Wherever it may have spread in Europe, governments must do what they can to ensure that foot- and-mouth disease is controlled. But in Britain especially the government must do everything it can to see that farmers continue to farm and to ensure public confidence in the vitality of agriculture.

---

Foot-and-Mouth Disease
Wrapping British Farmers in Isolation

March 10, 2001
New York Times
By SARAH LYALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/10/world/10BRIT.html

HEWISH, England, March 7 - In the scheme of things, the decision to shut the farmers' skittles league because of fears of foot-and-mouth disease might not seem like much. But in a struggling rural community where people can work 14-hour days, seven days a week without a break, the sport, similar to bowling but conducted in pubs over beer, can be a lifeline.

"For some farmers, that's their one night out a week," said Simon Wetherall, who runs an organic dairy and vegetable farm in this tiny village. "A lot of farmers live and breathe farming and just don't go off the farm. It's a very, very isolating business."

Although foot-and-mouth disease, found in Britain two weeks ago, has led to obvious upheaval on a grand scale - animals quarantined or killed, exports halted and the country effectively sealed off - it is the smaller things that tend to matter here in the heart of farm country on the Somerset-Dorset border.

The disease has not actually reached Hewish. The closest suspected case is eight miles away. But no one wants to take any chances.

Farmers have stopped gathering in groups and visiting other farms because they are terrified of inadvertently spreading the virus, which affects hooved animals but can be transmitted by people, clothes, equipment or even the wind. These days, the farmers communicate mostly by telephone and fax.

The few people whom they do allow on their land, like those who drive from one dairy farm to the next to collect the daily milk yield, are forced to disinfect themselves and their equipment laboriously after each stop. Even farmers whose land is free of the disease say they feel as if they are in quarantine.

Shirley Hardisty, who runs the Rose and Crown pub not far from Hewish, has seen the crisis at close range and felt its ripple effects. Business at the pub, almost entirely from farmers or people connected with farming, fell 50 percent last week. The butcher who supplies pork has shut because the ban on animal movements means most slaughterhouse are closed, and he cannot obtain new meat. The butcher who supplies beef has two weeks' worth left. And the man who provides logs for the fire has stopped delivering, because the land where he collects wood is off limits.

That is not all. The livestock markets that service local farmers are closed. Companies that rely on farmers' business like animal haulers, equipment service centers and machinery dealers have in many cases had to suspend work or send employees on enforced vacations. In nearby Crewkerne, the dealer for big machinery who used to supply farms here has shut its branch for good.

"If it goes on too long like this, we would have to look at layoffs," said Charles Snell, an animal hauler whose 10 trucks are idle in his lot and who is losing thousands of dollars a week. He works with several hundred farms and described the farmers as "very very depressed."

"They're just standing still right now," Mr. Snell said.

[On Friday, agriculture officials announced that animals on 20 additional farms had been confirmed as having foot-and-mouth disease, the worst one-day increase, putting the total of infected farms across Britain at 127. About 73,000 animals have been destroyed in hopes of stopping the spread of the disease.]

Even on a good day, Hewish, with 40 houses, can by no stretch be described as a hub of social excitement. "We have no pub, no shops, and you've already seen the exciting thing, the telephone box," Mr. Wetherall, the dairy farmer, said, using the English term to refer to the community's one landmark, a telephone booth.

In normal times, though, the winding country roads hum with activity, farmers driving tractors, haulers moving cows and sheep to market, people going about the normal noisy business of rural life. In these extraordinary times, the only sign of life in front of John Stoodley's dairy farm down the road from Mr. Wetherall's on a recent day was a pair of ducks splashing in a puddle left by all the rain.

Mr. Stoodley, who has the ruddy face and battered mud-stiffened clothes of a man who has lived on a farm for all of his 68 years, looked almost like a prisoner on his own land. Standing inside the gate, he was separated from the outside by a "Keep Out" sign and by a murky vat of disinfectant into which visitors have to dip their shoes when entering or leaving the property.

"Everything is shut," Mr. Stoodley said. "I can't move anything. I can't buy anything. I can't sell anything."

It has all become too much for him, he added, and he plans to close the farm, started by his father, at the end of the month.

Because of changes in the marketplace that favor large producers over small farmers like Mr. Stoodley, he had decided, even before foot- and-mouth struck, that he would need to close up shop. Things have been very, very hard for him and his neighbors in the last few years.

Sitting in his farm office at the other end of the road, hardly able to keep still with nervous energy, Mr. Wetherall, a fifth-generation farmer, described a community barely keeping afloat. Drowning in what they say are onerous bureaucratic requirements, both from the European Union and the British government, farmers have in recent years had to contend with the extended mad cow crisis, as well as with a strong pound that favors cheaper imports and works against British exports internationally. Markets in Britain tend to be controlled by a small number of huge suppliers, in turn in thrall to supermarket chains, with a result that farmers are locked into low prices.

Even as fixed costs for fertilizer and equipment have increased, for example, farmers get about 30 percent less for their milk today than they did in the mid-1990's.

Around Hewish, the last year or so has been particularly bad. Mr. Weatherall, bringing home £7,800 (about $11,400) a year in income from the farm, become overwhelmed by stress, split from his wife and, for a while, took antidepressants.

A friend, a 29-year-old farmer with two children, hanged himself in October. Another friend, 35, tried to hang himself in January. He was cut down by his father at the last minute and remains in intensive care in the hospital.

And a third farmer, in his mid-50's, bled to death in the fall when his arm was sliced off by a piece of faulty milling equipment that he had bought cheaply, in an effort to cut costs, a week before.

Mr. Wetherall has trouble sleeping at night, and he recently started chain-smoking again, after having quit for years. "I'm 34, but I feel 102 at the moment," he said.

What is happening here is mirrored in farming neighborhoods across Britain. In the last two years, 51,000 people have left jobs in agriculture, nearly 10 percent of the labor force of 557,000 people. In 1999, according to the National Farmers' Union, an average of more than one farmer a week committed suicide.

Arriving as it has at such a troubled time, foot-and-mouth disease has seemed to many to be just one more disaster in a long chain.

At the Rose and Crown, Marcus Corr, 53, another dairy farmer, said he could not see a way clear. "I believe that a lot of farmers are going to go out with foot-and-mouth disease and never come back," he said.

-------- genetics

Becoming genomic Just what does it mean anyway?

01/03/10
MSNBC
By Glenn McGee, Ph.D.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/529409.asp?cp1=1

Feb. 10 - Ticker tape parades and high-wattage celebrations of the mapping of the human genome are wearing a little thin, if you listen to those who gather around the coffee pot in America's top scientific labs. But even if the scientists aren't queasy and excited, the rest of us are just learning how fast and how far genetic research has come. The world of genomics represents the most significant shift in our lifestyle since the adoption of personal computers.

University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics

IF YOU ARE like me, you won't be able to read the articles about the human genome in the prestigious journals Nature and Science. To those untrained in genetics, the articles are no more comprehensible than the actual DNA code itself - TAC, CTA, GAC and so on - the various three-letter combinations, strung together in various forms, carrying the instructions for making all organisms.

Maybe that's an overly simplified explanation, but you get it: The fact that we can't read them is the point.

The trick to understanding genomics is that long strings of genetic information are becoming linked to one another and to complex information about human health. Not all of this information is about the genes that you inherit - genomics also deals with the effect that viruses, mutagens and aging have on genes, and the effect that damaged genomes have on organisms.

Genomics has introduced new concepts about genetics, but more importantly it has taken most of the work of genetics out of the lab and replaced it with something that looks a lot more like computer programming than "bench" science.

In giant "computer farms," software and hardware turn bits of human cells into massive databases, and the resulting genomic programs are rapidly working their way into every aspect of human life.

Genetics was an interesting but complex science that explained how we inherit particular traits. Genomics is a shift in how we see ourselves, our potential, our families and our society.

It is also a business, a much faster moving kind of science that has vastly outstripped our social conversation about genetics.

Like the evolution of live music first into albums, then into CDs and now onto the Internet, the development of genomics is happening very quickly. Ten years ago it would have been unthinkable for a healthy woman to remove her own breasts because her mother had breast cancer. Today a genomic aberration is often the most real thing about a disease, and it can be patented, emailed and traded on the stock market.

The transition to being genomic is part of a transition to a more digital lifestyle. My genes will soon fit on the digital chip implanted in a smart card in my wallet, so clinicans can easily refer to it when I get sick.

PREVENTION-BASED MEDICINE

Already the first sign of genomic living is in full bloom: Society has moved from medicine based on disease to medicine based on susceptibility and prevention. Eventually, for less than $1,000, a doctor will swab a few cells from inside your cheek, pop them into a DNA sequencing machine and, voila, a computer will spit out a complete reading of your unique genetic makeup - all 30,000 of your genes, together called your genome. From that, physicians can pinpoint flawed genes, predicting what diseases you are likely to develop years in advance of any symptoms and prescribing drug therapy based on your genetic makeup.

Drugs are already being tested to identify whose genome is best for what agent. Is your genome antidepressant-resistant? Does your wife's genome mean she cannot eat steak, or your neighbor's mean that he is more likely to spread deadly infections? Understanding how your genome puts you at extra risk or special advantage will be a critical part of being genomic.

Still to come are answers to new kinds of questions: about genomic privacy, about the ownership of our genomes and about what kind of babies will be born in the genomic era. Will parents take advantage of genomics to improve upon their children's traits?

As genomics continues to develop in the next decade, its influence on agriculture, computing, manufacturing, education and politics will expand even more.

So what should we as a society be doing?

New laws about genetic privacy and discrimination are a good start, but without a way to understand the new operating system of genomics, we are a lot like the astronaut Dave confronting the famous computer HAL in Stanley Kubrick's classic movie about technology out of control, a film aptly named 2001.

We don't really know how to turn genomics on or off, and we can't quite figure out whether it is working for us or against us. Only one thing is certain about the new world of genomics: The time has come to begin talking about what it means to be genomic.

MSNBC Columnist Glenn McGee PhD, Editor-in-Chief of the American Journal of Bioethics, professor of bioethics at University of Pennsylvania and author of "The Perfect Baby," is writing a book entitled "Being Genomic."

-------- homeless

Facing a bleak future
Quebec's homeless have little education and poor health,

Saturday 10 March 2001
Montreal Gazette
CATHERINE SOLYOM
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010310/5075301.html

Dope - as he is known to his friends - has been running away from foster homes, group homes, his mother and the street for almost four years.

At 18, he has a Grade 9 education, no work experience and problems with illicit drugs and the police.

His future looks bleak and he is not alone. A new study on homelessness released yesterday shows Dope is typical of people living on the street.

Based on in-depth interviews with 757 people at drop-in centres, shelters and soup kitchens in Montreal and Quebec City, the results paint a disturbing, albeit somewhat predictable, portrait:

- 86 per cent are men.

- 87 per cent are francophone.

- 20 per cent are age 18 to 29, 44 per cent are 30 to 44 and 35 per cent are 45 or older.

- 41 per cent have completed high school.

- 20 per cent have children younger than 18.

- 75 per cent live on welfare as their sole source of income.

Prepared by the Montreal-centre regional health board, the study also revealed that most of the people on the street have major physical and/or mental-health problems.

Despite their youth, 70 per cent reported chronic health problems and 13 per cent had infectious diseases like hepatitis, tuberculosis or AIDS.

Sometimes, it's hard to see which came first, the problems or the street, said the study's main author.

"A lot of their physical problems come from living in very poor sanitary conditions," said Louise Fournier, of the Montreal-centre regional health board. "Then when we look at the high rates of hepatitis and AIDS, it's often a consequence of intravenous drug use and the environment they live in."

Fournier, who conducted a similar survey 10 years ago, said she was not surprised by the findings, only by the lack of access to medical help - 25 per cent of interviewees had no medicare card.

Their mental-health problems are no less daunting, she said. Seventy per cent have illnesses like manic depression and schizophrenia; 10 per cent were schizophrenics compared with one per cent of the general population.

Fournier said all of these problems combine to make the homeless very hard to reach. "It's very easy for them to slip through the health-care net. The system has a responsibility, but it's also a very difficult clientele. They have mental problems, drug problems, legal problems. They are not easy patients."

Still, new services have to be offered that are better adapted to homelessness, Fournier said. "If the homeless don't always go to their appointments, the health system has to go to them."

Fournier could not say how that might work. The study raises more questions than it answers. Recommendations will have to wait until the second instalment of the study, expected in June, which will attempt to answer why people end up on the street.

In the meantime, Rev. Emmett Johns, known as "Pops" to Montreal's homeless, has a few ideas.

Most teenagers, like Dope, who come to the Dans La Rue day centre on Ontario St., were "placed" in the system and then abandoned, he said.

"Some were placed 34 times before they reached 18 and then that's it. It's 'Don't call me, we'll call you.' They leave the foster home with their belongings in a garbage bag and the cab-driver asks, 'Where do you want to go?'

Only they have no place to go, Johns said. They end up on buses to Montreal or Quebec City - and wind up on the streets. And there's a reason why the study included fewer young women - sometimes, there's a pimp already waiting for them outside the foster home or at the bus terminal.

What Johns sees at the day centre, however, are grounds for optimism. To try to address the very problems raised in the study, the centre offers high-school equivalency classes to 46 people at a time so they can land jobs and improve their lives.

Johns proudly shows off their marks: "This guy got 100 per cent in math! Can you believe that? He must be a genius!"

There is also a doctor, a psychologist and art and occupational therapists available at the centre.

Johns said the key to any improvement to services is that they are multi-disciplinary and adapted to the people who need them, not the other way around.

"Studies like this have been done before and there's no concerted effort to do anything about it. If you consider the human family, these are all brothers and sisters who need a helping hand. But often the silk glove conceals a metal fist, and you either do it their way or the highway. Here, we do it their way and it works. There's no reason why others can't do it, too."

- Catherine Solyom can be reached by phone at (514) 987-2289 or by E-mail at csolyom@thegazette.southam.ca

-------- police

Judge awards alleged spy's wife $7.1M

03/10/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-10-cuban-spy.htm

MIAMI (AP) - A woman who sued Cuba after she unwittingly married an alleged Cuban spy has been awarded $7.1 million in compensatory damages.

Ana Margarita Martinez said she married Juan Pablo Roque in 1995 without realizing the relationship was a cover for his work.

Circuit Judge Alan Postman ruled Friday that the award will come from frozen Cuban assets held by the U.S. government, but he denied her request for punitive damages saying they couldn't be sought from the Cuban government.

"I wish the award could have been higher, not so much for my sake, but that the Cuban government would feel more pain." said a tearful Martinez.

The couple's 11-month marriage has been annulled.

In 1992, Roque swam to the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay and requested political asylum, saying he was a disenchanted Cuban officer. He volunteered to work with Brothers to the Rescue, which patrols the waters off Cuba in search of people trying to flee the island.

On Feb. 23, 1996, Roque vanished from the home he shared with Martinez and her two children. The next day, Cuban jets shot down two planes flown by the exile group, killing four.

Roque was indicted in absentia as part of an alleged 14-member Cuban spy ring.

The families of three of the passengers of the downed planes have been awarded $96.7 million in frozen Cuban assets.

-------- activists

Backyard Eco Conference 2001

Sat, 10 Mar 2001
Citizens for Alternatives to Chemical Contamination
<cacceco@earthlink.net>
(http://home.earthlink.net/~cacceco/eco2001.1.html)

NOTE: Feel free to print out the registration form below and submit it to our registrar.

Love your Mother---Safe Food, Good Communities and Honest Politics May 11,12,13 Mystic Lake YMCA Camp Clare County, Michigan

Greetings!

Well - if adversity tends to promote environmental activism, then the next few years should be exciting and busy!

CACC is again offering to "First Time Adult Enrollees" a 20% discount off their total cost.

We are presenting another fine mix this year of great speakers, talented musicians and artists, fabulous food and a fun learning experience for the kids.all in a peaceful, beautiful setting!

Please come and share a day or the weekend with us. Bring a friend and meet new ones.

Peace!

John Witucki, For the CACC Board

The Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Campaign will hold an all-afternoon planning meeting Saturday, preparing for the Third Great Lakes Anti-Nuclear Action Camp to be held in Michigan in late summer. Consisting of several regional safe-energy organizations, the group is actively working to rid the Great Lakes Bio-Region of all hazardous nuclear reactors and contamination sites.

The camp aims to:

Educate about nuclear power hazards, and promote safe-energy alternatives

Train the next generation of safe-energy activists, both on energy related issues and in skills needed to become effective activists and organizers, and Environmentalists attending ECO are welcome to attend.

KEYNOTERS

Merrill Clark A certified organic farmer/marketer herself since the early 1980's, Merrill Clark has seen the industry and state certification activities sputter, then take major steps forward to not only keep up, but also excel in certain activities. She is also co-chair of Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance (MOFFA) and coordinated two MOFFA Harvest Festivals at Washtenaw College near Ann Arbor and at the Ingham County Fairgrounds in Mason. She and her family own Roseland Organic Farms in Cassopolis, MI, an 1800 acre diversified beef and grain farm which features 100's of acres of wetlands, natural marl, ponds, woodlots, a papaw patch, a cottage market, and a goodly array of John's recyclables.

THE GIFT OF LAND..AND GOOD FOOD

How we treat the gifted land on which we all walk and from which we retrieve our food is an indication of how much we cherish our own lives and the lives of those that follow.

This talk will examine how the artlessness of typical food production in this country is taking a toll on the Earth and its resources, as well as on the health of all the Earth's inhabitants.

Can organic food production step up to the proverbial plate and put plentiful, nutritious and clean food on that plate for consumption by this county's families? What are audience members doing to bring clean food to their family tables? Is there enough organic food available to you or do you just do "the best you can" at the shelves of a Meijers?

With the passage this winter of part one of the Michigan Organic Food Products Act, agencies engaged in overseeing the policies related to conventional agricultural production will shift gears to promote and regulate organic production and marketing. Some don't want to see MDA anywhere near organic farm fields and others wonder about the typical and often contradictory "promote and regulate" roles of the Department. The USDA has also just released a final rule on organic food standards for public comment. Keep an ear to the ground.

Greg Coleridge

Greg Coleridge is the Director of the Economic Justice & Empowerment Program of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker social action organization, where he currently works on issues of campaign finance reform, environmental cleanup, and corporate power and democracy. He is co-coordinator of the Ohio Committee on Corporations, Law and Democracy, which in 1998 published Citizens over Corporations, a brief history of corporate power and democracy in Ohio. He received the Public Service Achievement Award by the national group Common Cause in 1998. Corporate Fairy Tales and Democratic Myths: From the Commerce Clause to Santa Clause

Our political culture is filled with myths. None may be more powerful and dangerous than the myth that our system is "democratic". Authentic democratic self-expression in our communities and nation is simply not possible, in a culture that defines money as free speech, corporations as persons, and property as beyond democratic control. Nor can we hope to have a voice in decisions that affect our lives if we continue to believe that the Constitution exists to protect all equally, that the Bill of Rights is as expansive as it can be, and that judges and courts are objective, neutral and "above politics". We need to debunk such myths and begin to build a reality which is grounded on ideas, institutions, and programs which affirm the voices of every person and works in harmony with democrats (note the small "d") in other communities and nations.

Stephanie Mills

Stephanie Mills is an author, editor, and speaker who has been working in the ecology movement since 1969. Leland Press will publish her fifth book, Epicurean Simplicity in spring of 2002. Mills lives in Northern Michigan.

Life is a Mystery "Resisting the Techno-Craze, Respecting the Wild"

Stephanie will urge a radical re-thinking of our society's drift toward the synthetic. Authenticity and renewal; inspiration and instruction, can best be found in the wild: self-willed natural areas and free people. Heedless technology would compromise human nature and nature itself. Time to struggle to preserve earthly reality! and to celebrate the non-technological wonders of evolutionary time.

SPEAKERS:

Edward C. Lorenz

"Update on St. Louis/Pine River"

Mr. Lorenz teaches both history and political science courses and directs the Public Affairs Institute. He also heads the Community Advisory Group (CAG) in Gratiot County that began with a focus on the environmental problems resulting from the operation of the Velsicol Chemical Company who dumped thousands of tons of DDT in the Pine River and other regions near St. Louis. The Velsicol plant also was famous for the accident that led to mixing cattle feed with the fire retardant PBB in 1973, one of the worst food chain contamination accidents in history. Consequently, the communities have two active Superfund sites and a river with the highest levels of DDT ever documented in this country (up to 44,000 ppm). The shared sense of indignation and frustration that surfaced as a result of these initial meetings empowered the community to form a community advisory group. This group, incorporated as the Pine River Superfund Citizens Taskforce, continuously monitors the clean up and provides a forum for community input. Mr. Lorenz will provide an update on the cleanup and on their federal lawsuit.

Lisa Gue

National Nuclear Waste policy-Deadly Directions

Lisa Gue is a policy analyst on nuclear waste issues for Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program, with a specific focus on fighting the proposal for a high-level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Based in Washington, D.C., Lisa monitors this issue in congress and the federal agencies. Last summer she worked on the Radioactive Roads and Rails campaign, teaming up with local groups in six states to host events aimed at raising awareness among citizens, politicians, and the media about the dangers associated with transporting high-level nuclear waste.

Lisa studied international development at the University of Calgary, in Western Canada. She was centrally involved in student activism at local and national levels. She worked internationally with non-governmental groups in Europe on globalization issues before coming to Public Citizen last year.

Cheryl Collins/Terry Gill

Protecting Streams through Citizen's Monitoring

Cheryl resides in Oakland County, Michigan with her husband Bill, a wetlands Consultant. She is a founding member of the Thumb Bioregional Alliance (TBA). Cheryl was one of the original members of both the Mill Creek Coalition - organized to oppose 17 miles of dredging of Mill Creek in St. Clair County - and Don't Waste Michigan Site #2 Chapter - which helped defeat siting of a Low Level Radioactive Waste Facility in St. Clair County. Cheryl also served on the St. Clair County Solid Waste Planning Committee. With Terry Gill, Cheryl helped organize monitoring of Mill Creek.

Terry has been an outspoken advocate for preserving our environment for many years. She has served as a board member of the Michigan Environmental Council, the St. Clair County Solid Waste Planning Committee, the Low Level Radioactive Waste institute for Research and Education and Greenwood Township's planning commission. She is also the Project Manager of the Mill Creek Volunteer Monitoring Project (MCVMP) that is part of the Michigan DEQ' s "Michigan Volunteer Monitoring Program". The MCVMP compares data collected by volunteers from sections of Mill Creek that have been recently dredged to data collected from sections of the creek, which remain natural, and sections of the creek where river restoration techniques have been applied. Some of the types of data collected include stream wildlife, water characteristics (runs, rifles, pools, eddies), stream bank habitat, bank erosion, stream shading and sediment depth. Dramatic results of the first year of data collection have shown the value of river restoration versus conventional dredging. The report and the project itself have sparked considerable interest and praise from state regulators.

Amanda Hathaway/Dennis Fox

MUCC and Toxics Issues

Amanda is a Public Relations Specialist who joined MUCC in June of 1997. She previously worked as an Environmental Education Specialist in MUCC's Education Department for three years and as Assistant to the Michigan State Parks Adventure Program for several years prior, bringing public attention to this free summer interpretive program showcasing Michigan's natural resources. She has received Bachelor's degrees in Science and Technology Studies from Lyman Briggs. She also holds a Master's degree in Agricultural and Natural Resources Communications and in Park, Recreation and Tourism Resources with an emphasis on marketing, all from Michigan State University.

Dennis Fox, MUCC Land Use and Waste Issue Staff Contact. Dennis is an Environmental Policy Specialist who joined MUCC in May of 1999. Previously he worked as a Policy Analyst for the Senate Democratic Caucus in Lansing for seven years on agricultural, administrative rules, environment, land use, and natural resources issues. He received a Bachelor' s degree in Political Science - Pre-Law from Michigan State University.

Amanda will introduce participants to the Michigan United Conservation Clubs (MUCC) with a multimedia presentation, outlining the organization's history, mission, goals, and organizational structure. Dennis Fox will then detail MUCC's work on toxics, including local, state and federal efforts. Both speakers will highlight ways in which participants can become informed of or involved in MUCC's conservation work.

Tom Shea

Michigan Peace Team -Civil Disobedience Workshop

After a brief assessment of participants experience and knowledge of civil disobedience, this session will involve participants in a combination of information, reflection, and an emphasis on practice exercises around three main questions about civil disobedience: How does theory relate to practice? What are the skills involved in practicing civil disobedience? What are some expected and unexpected outcomes?

Tom Shea is a long-time member of the twenty-two year old Faith and Resistance movement in Michigan and currently a senior trainer for Michigan Peace Team. He has personal experience from a number of civil disobedience actions.

Youth Programs:

The backyard Eco Conference Youth Program sets this gathering apart from any other. Activities have been designed to capture the interest and involvement of the three groups. All young people are expected to be enrolled in Eco's Youth Programs for the duration of the conference, except for the tiniest babies. Unsupervised children are not permitted as they are not only at risk for themselves but lead to the disruption of planned activities.

Eco Youth 2001

Explore, explore, explore. 2000 Eco Conference Youth are in for fun and adventure. Friday evening and night the youth will be responsible for checking in at our Arts and Crafts building. There they will find out the weekends planned activities. All youth are expected to be enrolled with the youth program. Young ones under 6, should be registered with our Earthcrawlers program. Earthcrawlers are supervised all day and parents are asked to dedicate half a day with the toddlers. Meals at Eco are times for everyone to eat together and share the day's experiences.

Every acre, every wetland and hillside will see the footprints of our group. Mystic Lake Camp is big so be ready to hike, play animal survival, build shelters, have campfires, sing songs, draw, paint and sculpt. With a diverse age group, we will all work together to make sure everyone has fun. Sometimes there will be activities just for the more mature youth. And for the younger youth, high energy and creative programs will be played all day.

Youth programs conclude with the day's seminars and workshops. Saturday we will have an evening campfire and Sunday concludes the weekend with a drum circle and song dedication.

Eco Youth Friend will be lead by Alayne Speltz and her talented staff. If you are interested in playing with us or leading an activity call (517) 544-2844.

Electronic Communications Email, the Internet, and Beyond -

Joseph Badura

Building on similar sessions offered in previous years, Joseph will offer one-on-one and small group assistance with negotiating the resources of the word wide web, establishing an email account and the basics of electronic communication. A sign-up sheet will be available at Registration to schedule times for individual assistance. Small group sessions will be offered throughout the weekend.

Eco Food:

The conference opens with a potluck supper Friday evening, so remember to bring a dish to pass. We'll supply beverages.

Mike Everetts of Petoskey is bringing his "Real Food" Dream Kitchen to Eco again! Mike has planned a delicious menu of natural foods with an emphasis on whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables.

Volunteer help is always appreciated in the kitchen; especially at the end of the conference for clean up!

Eco Auction:

The Eco Auction is an opportunity to bring something special to the Eco Conference to donate to help support the work of CACC. A silent auction will be held throughout the weekend, with individual items being auctioned off before the group. Previous "prizes" have included handmade cards, artwork, a water filtration kit, composter and a bed and breakfast weekend.

All contributions donated for this purpose are, of course, tax deductible and will be acknowledged.

Eco Arts and Music:

Victor McManemy has been a feature of all of the past Eco Conferences. His songs are a call to action, whether describing the mistreatment of indigenous peoples or the abuse of our environment. It has been said that the waters of the Great Lakes flow in the veins of the life-long Traverse area resident.

Tim Joseph sings the old songs along with some new ones. A founder and organizer of the Spirit of the Woods Music Festival, Tim has always had a love for the people's music. When not playing the guitar and banjo he's a stonemason and carpenter from the Manistee County town of Brethren.

Fine Arts Exhibit:

Gretchen Michaels will again be returning to provide another glimpse at the endless possibilities of integrating Fine Arts and Environmental Education.

This year we will have a chance to learn the "Art of Paper Making". From our first teachers, the paper wasps, to the contemporary Eco-Art form, explore papermaking with Gretchen. Create note cards, baskets and collages with natural fibers, plants and pulps.

All materials and equipment will be available through out the weekend. While enjoying the paper making process, you will contemplate both the aesthetic and pragmatic sides of the paper industry. This inter-generational art activity will send you home with a unique art piece as well as a renewed awareness of the quantity and quality of 21st century paper production. As in past years, Gretchen Michaels is coordinating the collection and display of arts that celebrate the Earth through painting, sculpture, drawings, photograph, and writings. If you want to exhibit art at Eco, contact Gretchen at 248-628-7463 in the evening.

NOTE: 20% Discount on total for all first time adult Eco Registrants - Plus a Free Gift!

Conference Fees
Adult Registration 50.00 x = $________

Registration
Student (with ID) 25.00 x = $________
Youth Program 25.00 x = $________

Name__________________________________
Address_________________________________
City___________________________________ State/Province__________________Zip______
Telephone Day ( )____________________
Telephone Evening ( )____________________

List the persons registered with this form. Please give complete names and information on each person. Attach additional sheet if needed. Name Adult(M/F) Child Age (M/F) Name Adult(M/F) Child Age (M/F)

Name Adult(M/F) Child Age (M/F)
Name Adult(M/F) Child Age (M/F)

[ ] Reservation for Technical Tree Climbing (limit 6 adults) FOOD:

Meal Pass - 5 meals 25.00 x = $________
Single Meal Ticket 5.50 x = $________
Child's Meal Pass 12.00 x = $________
Single Child's Meal 3.00 x = $________
(Child 8-14, free below 8, 15 + adult)

HOUSING:

Rough camping (tent/site) 5.00 = $_______
RV Parking (no hookups) /site 7.50 =$_______
Cabin (per person) 20.00 x = $_______ CACC Membership
Individual 25.00 $_______
Family 30.00 $_______ Organization 50.00 $_______
Donation $_______
Total Amount $_______

to CACC Eco Conference Registrar 564 Parkway Gladwin, MI 48624

Full refunds granted prior to May 5. No refunds thereafter. Attention College Students - A discounted registration fee and free camping is offered to students with college/university identification. Please bring your ID with you to the conference to confirm your discount.

Early Registration Bonus! - All adult registrations postmarked by May 5 will receive a Backyard Eco Conference tote bag featuring the CACC logo. Registrants after that date will have the opportunity Send with your check made out to purchase a bag at Eco.

Scholarships - A limited number of scholarships are available. Call the Eco Registrar at 517-426-5540 (evenings) for details. Conference Schedule

Friday May 11

3:00-8:00 Registration

5:30-7:00 Potluck Dinner (Please bring dish to pass!)

7:00-8:00 CACC's Annual Meeting

8:00-10:00 Merrill Clark "The Gift of Good Land..and Good Food"

10:00-12:00 Informal Reception (Music, Socializing) Victor McManemy, Tim Joseph and friends

Saturday May 12

7:00-8:30 Breakfast