------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
A Navy captain speaks of his shock
Sub probe sheds light on VIP tours
Divergent Voices Heard in Bush Foreign Policy
Sub's Crew May Have Hesitated to Question Captain
Backing Beijing Into a Corner
Commander's inability to spot boat caused collision
German Greens accept nuclear waste transports
Pak. capable of more nuke tests
Russia and Iran agree arms deal
U.S. wary of Russia's ties to Iran
Iran, Russia defy U.S. with pact
Iran and Russia Sign Oil and Weapons Pact
Seoul announces aid to North Korea
Russia Won't Dump ABM if U.S. Deploys Missile Shield
Visiting Chinese to Urge Bush Not to Sell Arms to Taiwan
Lack of cash delays salvage operation
CIA Is Stepping Up Attempts To Monitor Spread of Weapons
Atomic dustbin
Outraged by sale of DOE land for $54/acre

MILITARY
At least five killed in military accident in Kuwait
Senate report urges arms for Taiwan
Colombian rebels suspend peace talks
Venezuela, Colombia ties threatened
Bush: Scrap public housing drug push
Concerns voiced over OxyContin drug
Grieving relatives want restrictions on drug
Inconsistent containment
Mandela Suggests Park in Korea DMZ
Mir Space Station Will Plunge to Earth Next Week
Russia buys $200 million in Mir insurance
2 Stubborn Factions Divide Coming U.N. Meeting on Racism
5 reported dead in U.S. navy accident
G.I. Don't Knows
U.S. Navy Jet Drops Bomb Over Kuwait, Killing Several
Hungry soldiers

OTHER
The Problems with Irradiated Food
Thai farmer's coconuts fuel green hopes
Some envision time when oil won't be king
Renewable condor Cuisinarts
US seeks neighborhood help amid energy crisis
Green groups push Bush for utility plant cleanups
The 72-ounce veggie burger?
Food source for fish disappearing
Paper: Wood type leaks arsenic
British foot-and-mouth cases spread
U.K. vet urges meat ban compliance
Off Road Vehicles Create Conflict in California
Oil Is a Matter Of National Security
Alcoa Goes Green
Some British farmers may not be following rules
Trial begins in suspected Y2K terror plot
Potato talks
Disease spreads in Britain
Queen Noor urges US to lead on landmine ban
More minorities report cop problems
'Profiling' directive rallies two sides
Somebody Will Be Watching You Eventually
Sharon to ask Bush to release spy
Ashcroft orders FBI security review
Algerian faces conspiracy charges
Ashcroft promises to probe FBI's security procedures
Inside Russia's Hacking Culture
Terrorism trial to begin Monday
Spanish martyrs step closer to sainthood
Sharon says Arafat guards behind terror

ACTIVISTS
CEREMONY FOR RELEASE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS IN BURMA
Premiere showing of counter inauguration video
International Day Against Police Brutality
4/25 SALEM NUKE CHERNOYBL 15TH ANNIV. PROTEST
Info on Domenici nuclear bill
Riot cops quell Malaysian violence
Iran arrests activists in Tehran
Spaniards protest water project
Zapatistas march into Mexico City
From outlaw to folk hero
Cops blamed for Ukraine violence
2-Week Trek Culminates in Rally for Indian Rights
Inquiry Delves Into Razing of Cottages in Line for Historic Status


-------- NUCLEAR

"I Was Begging God"
A Navy captain speaks of his shock and remorse in the aftermath of his sub's fatal collision off Hawaii

Time
MARCH 12, 2001 VOL. 157 NO. 10
BY TERRY MCCARTHY; SCOTT WADDLE
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,101328,00.html

Scott Waddle was the commander of the U.S. submarine Greeneville when it sank the Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru off Hawaii on Feb. 9, killing nine people. Waddle was relieved of his command, and this week he faces a Navy court of inquiry into the episode. Though he has been advised by his lawyer not to discuss the events leading up to the collision, he spoke to TIME's Los Angeles bureau chief Terry McCarthy about the aftermath, his feelings and the controversy over making apologies to the families of the deceased.

I was born on Misawa Air Force Base in northern Japan--my father was career Air Force. We had a Japanese family who lived close by, and the mother, Toma Sugo, looked after me when I was young. My first language was Japanese. So I know how they do funerals. I know the honor in a Japanese family.

On the first Sunday after the accident, I wanted to accompany Admiral [Thomas] Fargo to meet the families [of the dead Japanese], but I was told by someone higher up that feelings were running high and that I should not go. So on Tuesday night last week [Feb. 27], I went to meet the Japanese Consul General, Minoru Shibuya, and Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Yoshio Mochizuki [who was visiting Hawaii], and I presented them with letters of apology to Prime Minister [Yoshiro] Mori and to the nine families of the deceased. I wanted them to see my face and know my apology and my emotions are sincere. In those letters I told the family members I will make apologies in person when the opportunity presents itself.

If I have to get in a rowboat and row to Japan, that is what I will do. During the interview, I lost my composure. I told them I apologized for losing my composure as a naval officer, but I did not regret losing my composure as a man who feels deep regret for the tragedy.

Shortly after the collision I raised the periscope and looked back to see what we had collided with. I was dumb struck. I had no idea any other vessel was in the area. I saw it listing to starboard and back to the stern. I remember crying out, "God, please get them off that ship." Within a minute or two it was upright and going down. I was begging God to get them off--and it was as if something died inside me.

It has been said that we were reluctant to render assistance [by opening the hatches to take on survivors]. But with the swell and the surge at the edge of the submarine, we would have overturned the lifeboats. The sub was like a seawall. That is why we waited for the Coast Guard to arrive. Twenty-six were saved by the Coast Guard, but when the captain said nine more were still missing, it was as if my heart had been ripped out of my chest.

But the captain has to maintain composure, and I did, at that tragic moment. On Saturday, having been reassigned, I was able to address the crew over the announcing system, and I reminded them to maintain integrity, to remember what they saw, not to add or embellish anything, because the truth will get us through this event. I loved my crew and feel proud to be a naval officer. That day I kind of felt like Job in the Old Testament--I lost my crew, lost my command and felt my faith was being tested.

Since the accident, the crew members have been sending me e-mails and letters of support. When I speak to them they still call me Captain, and I have to keep reminding them I am not their captain anymore. That is hard.

My career is terminated--an accident of this sort, whether or not I am exonerated, will end my career. As a man of honor, integrity and truth are important to me. Whatever mistakes were made, we need to find out what they were and make sure they don't happen again, make sure those lives were not lost in vain. My last acts as a naval officer will be to ensure there is closure for the families and that the truth is determined.

---

Sub probe sheds light on VIP tours

InfoBeat News
JEAN CHRISTENSEN
Associated Press Writer
Afternoon Edition - 3/12/2001

http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406372433 PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) - While a court of inquiry continues to delve into the events aboard the USS Greeneville the day it sank a Japanese ship, the investigation also has cast light on the Navy's use of civilian visitors.

The program, which allows guests onto submarines and other Navy ships to garner outside support, is unlikely to survive in its current form, one military expert said.

``The program of distinguished visitors on submarines is certainly dead for the foreseeable future - not because they had any direct contribution to this, but it just doesn't look good,'' said Gary Solis, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel and judge advocate who teaches military law at West Point.

Whether the program ultimately survives won't easily be resolved by the three admirals overseeing the court of inquiry that enters its second week Monday.

Sixteen civilians from five states were on the Greeneville for what was to be a six-hour excursion south of Oahu on Feb. 9. Most, if not all, were crowded into the submarine's control room during an emergency surfacing drill that sent the Greeneville rising into the hull of a high school fisheries training vessel from Uwajima, Japan.

The Ehime Maru sank in 2,000 feet of water, killing nine men and boys.

The court of inquiry could result in policy changes and courts-martial for the submarine's now-relieved captain, Cmdr. Scott Waddle; the executive officer, Lt. Cmdr. Gerald Pfeifer; and the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Michael Coen.

The admirals also must examine the implementation of the ``distinguished visitor embarkation program.''

Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths Jr., who led the preliminary investigation of the collision, has played down the fact that two guests supervised by crew members were at key controls during the drill, and that another was allowed to blow the horn that notified the crew of the impending rapid ascent.

But Griffiths determined that the guests, simply by their presence, may have had a passive role in the tragedy.

A fire control technician, who had the job of analyzing sonar data and plotting contacts with surface ships, told investigators he didn't notify Waddle about a contact in the area and even stopped plotting an hour before the collision because of the crowded conditions.

The submarine also was running 43 minutes behind schedule because lunch for the visitors ran late, Griffiths said. He said the crew later performed sonar and periscope checks much more quickly than Navy standards dictate.

The Pacific Fleet had 21 at-sea tours for a total of 307 guests on fast-attack submarines like the Greeneville last year, an average of 15 guests per trip, according to Navy estimates. Three times as many went to sea on bigger ballistic missile submarines. And including carriers and other surface ships, the Pacific Fleet had a total of 7,836 guests on 158 trips last year, down from 11,440 guests on 233 trips in 1999.

``We think it's important that the American public see their ships, submarines and aircraft,'' said Lt. Cmdr. Flex Plexico, spokesman for the Pacific Fleet. ``The whole purpose of that submarine is to protect and defend our American public. It only seems logical that the American public would have an opportunity to see their submarine, and more importantly to interact with our sailors.''

The need for public education is greater now that there are fewer people in the general population who have either served in the military or know someone who has served, he said.

The Greeneville went to sea with civilians twice in 1999 and three times last year.

``I got the impression that Greeneville is frequently tapped (for civilian tours) when she's available because she's good at it,'' Griffiths testified last week.

Following the trawler sinking, the Pentagon ordered commanders not to allow civilians to operate military equipment until a review has been completed.

---

Divergent Voices Heard in Bush Foreign Policy

New York Times
By JANE PERLEZ
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/world/12DIPL.html

WASHINGTON, March 11 - First, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell suggested that the administration would continue tentative steps toward normalizing relations with reclusive North Korea. Less than 24 hours later, President Bush offered a warier view, and officials scrambled to quash the notion of real fissures opening in the new foreign policy team.

But the gap in tone between the president and his senior diplomat raised the question of whose voice was dominant in foreign policy, and in the longer term, which opinions would prevail.

It is still early, Bush officials say, adding that they are busy reviewing policies - from Iraq to North Korea, from missile defense to Taiwan - in order to decide in which direction to head.

The early, very public disagreements could put factions in the Republican Party at odds with one another, leaving Mr. Bush to pick a policy and risk alienating some faction, and possibly allies overseas.

Beyond discordant notes over Korea, where some 37,000 American troops are stationed, and over Iraq, where his father fought a war 10 years ago, Mr. Bush faces looming questions in areas like the Balkans, where American troops are also deployed. He and his foreign policy team must decide whether to deploy a missile defense system, and determine a policy on the Middle East, where American leadership has often proven crucial.

In the last week, General Powell, the first of Mr. Bush's foreign policy appointments, appeared to march to a different drummer from that of his colleagues - Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser - in areas of importance to Republicans.

The Secretary of State used his recent Middle East trip to articulate a new look at Iraq that concentrated on tightening sanctions involving arms and money while easing sanctions that affected ordinary Iraqis.

But when General Powell returned home, he heard complaints from conservatives in Congress asking why he had been so soft. Where was the policy to overthrow President Saddam Hussein? The secretary slightly adjusted his statements, saying the administration was in contact with the Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, and was studying "other things" that might be done.

The pressure on the State Department to become more serious about removing Mr. Hussein is likely to mount from both the White House and the Pentagon.

Mr. Cheney has built a cohesive group of foreign policy experts, a group that may become a decisive power center.

The vice president, who is viewed as more conservative, and General Powell, who is seen as more pragmatic, served together in the administration of Mr. Bush's father - Mr. Cheney as defense secretary and General Powell as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff - and the two men acknowledged their different political outlooks then.

John Hannah, who worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where there is support for the overthrow of Mr. Hussein, is among the foreign policy experts working for Mr. Cheney. Last week, Mr. Hannah met with people who have long favored the use of force to get rid of the Iraqi leader.

At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul B. Wolfowitz, signed a public letter in 1998 calling for Mr. Hussein's overthrow. So did several people now in competition for senior Pentagon jobs, including Peter Rodman of the Nixon Center; Zalmay M. Khalizad of the Rand Corporation; and Doug Feith, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense.

On North Korea, General Powell remarked to reporters the day before the South Korean leader, Kim Dae Jung, arrived last week that the administration would pick up talks with North Korea that the Clinton administration left incomplete. The remark was interpreted as meaning the new administration would move forward on missile negotiations.

The next day, the general said "we have to not be naïve about the nature of this threat" of North Korea. Then, Mr. Bush, who had been briefed for his meeting with Mr. Kim by Ms. Rice, said it was not clear that the North Koreans were "keeping all terms of all agreements."

After two days of back and forth, the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said General Powell had always agreed with the administration policy of "realism," "emphasis on North Korea's proliferation activities" and "verification."

One reason for the different tones between General Powell and Mr. Bush was that the general was unaware of how strongly Mr. Bush felt about North Korea and its Communist government, several State Department officials said.

Foreign policy experts said it was well known that there were different voices in the administration, and it might be too early to predict permanent splits.

"I don't think there is a proven case of deep fissures," said Leslie H. Gelb, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. "The main reason you see the disputes in public is that senior people don't have their teams in place and they haven't had a chance to meet on a sustained basis to work out their policies."

---

Sub's Crew May Have Hesitated to Question a Trusted Captain

New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/national/12HAWA.html

HONOLULU, March 11 - Several hours into the submarine Greeneville's short voyage on Feb. 9, a junior officer aboard verbally prodded his captain, Cmdr. Scott D. Waddle, and the second in command, Lt. Cmdr. Gerald K. Pfeifer.

The submarine was running late, the junior officer, Lt. Keith A. Sloan, the submarine's navigator, told his superiors, and risked missing its scheduled return to port.

In some of the world's militaries, such a comment would be tantamount to insubordination. Anything that even appeared to question the authority of a commander would draw a stern rebuke, perhaps worse.

But Lieutenant Sloan's warning, described as a "professional reminder," reflected traits that the Navy, like the other armed services, tries to instill in its officers, especially those on warships: Speak up, when necessary, even if commanders might not like what they hear.

"I have it under control," Commander Waddle replied.

In the end, he did not. And fatefully, Lieutenant Sloan was almost alone in stepping forward that day.

Investigators testifying before a rare court of inquiry at Pearl Harbor Naval Station over the last week outlined a series of errors by the captain and crew in the moments before the submarine surfaced abruptly and collided with a Japanese trawler called the Ehime Maru.

They did more than that, too. The investigators also opened a rare window on the cloistered, tight-knit world of a submarine crew in action, and on the relationship that men preparing for war have with their commander, who can be a feared icon or a trusted father figure, sometimes both.

In the military, order and discipline are paramount, command authority absolute. At the same time, it has long been thought that the greatest strength of the American military is its empowerment of junior officers, sergeants, chiefs, even the enlisted troops, to speak their minds.

"We instill the mind-set that if we're about to go on the rocks, it doesn't matter if you're a boatswain's mate, you turn around and say, `Yo, skipper, what the hell are you doing?' " a senior naval officer said. Nowhere is that more true than aboard submarines, where life and death in the deep depend on clarity of communication and where a smaller crew gives greater weight to each individual's decisions.

"A submarine is really different," Vice Adm. Bernard M. Kauderer, a retired commander of the Atlantic submarine fleet, said in an interview. "In a submarine - and it's very difficult to describe - there is a sense and a need for teamwork. There is a bond between the captain and his officers, between the captain and his petty officers and between the officers and the crew."

What was most striking, then, about the first week of testimony was the disclosure that in the minutes before the collision some subordinates aboard the Greeneville had reservations about Commander Waddle's orders, or information that might have changed them, and yet failed to challenge him.

Investigators have puzzled over why on that day on the Greeneville, described repeatedly in testimony as having one of the best captains and crews in the Pacific submarine fleet, the system broke down. The Greeneville slammed the Ehime Maru, its rudder knifing through the vessel's hull. Nine of the Ehime Maru's 35 crew members, including four high school students, were lost at sea.

"This is not a ship where you would be shot for talking to the commanding officer," Rear Adm. Charles H. Griffiths, who conducted the Navy's preliminary investigation, testified. Admiral Griffiths included "command climate" as one of five factors that may have led to the collision. "He was a very nurturing commanding officer who was universally revered by his crew."

It was that reverence, Admiral Griffiths suggested, that may have worked against Commander Waddle that day. The commander's past successes were such that "it may have substantially broken the inclination of the crew as a whole to give him timely and forceful backup" when things started to go wrong.

Most significantly, a fire-control technician, Petty Officer First Class Patrick T. Seacrest, calculated from a sonar reading that the Ehime Maru was only 4,000 yards away but for reasons that are unclear failed to notify his senior officers.

"This is one thing that could have changed history," Admiral Griffiths testified.

The civilian lawyer representing Commander Waddle before the court, Charles W. Gittins, has emphasized the failure of the fire-control technician to give the commander the information he needed, suggesting that the collision would never have happened otherwise.

But when it came to keeping the Greeneville from its collision course, there were other errors of omission.

As the submarine neared the end of its operations, behind schedule because of a prolonged lunch with its 16 civilian visitors, Commander Waddle rushed his crew through a series of maneuvers to prepare the submarine for surfacing, according to Admiral Griffiths's investigation.

Riding deep underwater, the captain ordered the officer of the deck at the time of the accident, Lt. j.g. Michael J. Coen, to prepare to raise the submarine to periscope depth within five minutes. Bringing a submarine that close to the surface, with its conning tower just below the waves and the body about 60 feet down, is one of the most dangerous maneuvers a submarine does.

Before rising toward the surface, the submarine completes a maneuver called "target motion analysis," in which it makes a series of turns in order to better calculate the bearing, rate and distance of the sonar contacts it has made.

The process normally takes at least 10 minutes. In this case, two investigators told the court last week, the Greeneville completed only one turn and was finished in six minutes. Once the submarine reached its periscope depth, Lieutenant Coen and then Commander Waddle scanned the horizon for ships, also in what investigators described as a rushed manner, spending only 80 seconds for a search that should have lasted at least three minutes.

Commander Pfeifer, the Greeneville's executive officer and second in command, told investigators he had reservations about the speed with which Commander Waddle was moving through these preparations.

But Commander Pfeifer, who is supposed to play devil's advocate to his superior, did not raise his concerns, privately or publicly.

"I don't know why he didn't bring them up," Admiral Griffiths said. But he theorized that Commander Waddle's style, which he described as "very explicitly involved" - may have paradoxically worked against him with Commander Pfeifer and others aboard. Lieutenant Coen, serving at sea for the first time since leaving the Navy's nuclear training program, was relatively inexperienced and less likely to challenge the directions he was receiving.

Likewise, Admiral Griffiths suggested that the fire-control technician, an experienced petty officer, did not report the nearby sonar contact because he had seen Commander Waddle talking directly with the sonar operators and may have felt that the commander knew better what their readings showed. The petty officer "felt physically benched," Admiral Griffiths said.

Another factor may have been the presence of the civilian visitors and their escort, Capt. Robert L. Brandhuber, chief of staff for the Pacific submarine fleet. The visitors had crowded into the claustrophobic control room to watch a demonstration of the abilities of one of the Navy's premier fighting vessels.

After they arrived, the fire-control technician stopped manually plotting bearings of sonar contacts because of the crowding. Admiral Griffiths suggested they may have created a "passive" barrier to clear, effective communications. In an interview, Mr. Gittins agreed that there was "some sort of distraction from normal ship's operations."

"I don't know why the breakdowns occurred," Mr. Gittins said, "but I am starting to hold the view that it was the civilians and their presence that distracted the crew."

It was the Greeneville's reputation - and Commander Waddle's - that brought the civilians to the submarine that day.

Captain Brandhuber is among those expected to testify when the court of inquiry resumes its investigation on Monday, trying to resolve what even the court's presiding officers consider a mystery.

"It's obvious we have an engaged, aggressive and knowledgeable captain that the crew stands behind," the court's senior officer, Vice Adm. John B. Nathman, said at one point last week. "It creates a certain conflict for us that we're sitting here."

---

Backing Beijing Into a Corner

New York Times
By TREVOR CORSON
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/opinion/12CORS.html

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - When President Vladimir Putin of Russia announced his interest in joining the United States and Europe in a missile- defense program, it appeared that old adversaries might be coming together. But one significant adversary, China, would be left out. China is terrified of a missile-defense system that would make its own nuclear force impotent. The inclusion of Russia, at least from China's point of view, would only further endanger global security.

Russia has not really been the problem since the Reagan administration. Indeed, President George H. W. Bush briefly pursued a joint Russian-American anti-ballistic missile system. It had been proposed by Boris Yeltsin in response to Mr. Bush's advocacy of missile defense - a situation rather similar to that today. Then as now, none of the American missile defense systems being considered could reduce the deterrent of Russia's several thousand warheads. The only major power threatened by the new round of missile defense proposals is China. And the chief effect of Russia's offer of cooperation would be to radically destabilize global security dynamics by backing China into a corner.

American intelligence estimates China has between 16 and 20 single- warhead nuclear missiles. Beijing has announced that if the United States begins work on any missile defense system, China will increase its nuclear missile force tenfold.

The Bush administration argues that missile defense is necessary in the Pacific to protect the United States from attack by North Korea. But it seems unlikely that the world's sole superpower needs to build such a system to guard against an impoverished "rogue state." At least, Beijing could be forgiven for assuming that North Korea's missiles provide an excuse to use missile defense to disarm China - and to protect Taiwan.

For China, an American missile shield and Taiwan are inevitably connected. If the United States builds an effective national missile defense, China will have no nuclear deterrent to discourage American intervention in a conflict over Taiwan. China is therefore likely to interpret American missile defense as a revival of the military alliance between the United States and Taiwan, an alliance Washington de-emphasized 30 years ago.

In 1992, President George Bush reversed a longstanding policy, and inflamed tensions with Beijing, by selling F-16 jets to Taiwan. This time, Beijing is prepared to see President George W. Bush effect a far more significant policy reversal, and will react accordingly. Just last week, China noted "drastic changes" in the world and announced an unprecedented increase in military spending. A rapid expansion of China's nuclear program seems likely to follow.

The hazard of the Bush administration's commitment to missile defense is that it could push the Chinese into an arms race. To the Reagan and Bush strategists now back in power, this is the approach that defeated the Soviets. But it could have unintended, and very dangerous, consequences.

Trevor Corson, managing editor of Transition at Harvard University, writes frequently on East Asia.

---

Commander's inability to spot boat caused collision

USA Today
03/12/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-12-sub.htm

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) - The failure of USS Greeneville Cmdr. Scott Waddle to detect a Japanese trawler through his periscope led to the fatal collision between the two ships, the head of the Pacific Fleet's submarine force testified Monday. "This is the meat of the matter: The commander officer ... has the absolute obligation to make sure the area is free," said Waddle's boss, Rear Adm. Albert Konetzni. "That's what caused this collision, plus the fact that the stars and the moon and a few other things weren't going right."

Konetzni took the stand as a Navy court of inquiry into the Feb. 9 accident entered its second week. He called Waddle "one of my best friends," but also squarely placed responsibility for the accident on the commander's shoulders.

The investigative hearing could lead to courts-martial of Waddle; the Greeneville's executive officer, Lt. Cmdr. Gerald Pfeifer; and the officer of the deck, Lt. j.g. Michael Coen.

The submarine was demonstrating a rapid-surfacing drill for 16 civilian guests when it rammed the Ehime Maru and sent it plunging to the ocean floor. The vessel, carrying 35 people, was on an expedition to teach high school students the commercial fishing trade. Nine people, including four students, were killed.

A Navy investigator testified last week that several factors contributed to the accident, including a communications barrier created by the civilian guests being crammed into the control room.

Konetzni dismissed that, however, insisting the civilians "had nothing to do with this - not a thing."

"Joy ride?" he scoffed. "Forget it."

Voicing his support for civilian ride-alongs, Konetzni noted that thousands of guests have toured submarines safely prior to this accident. He called the public relations program critical for "understanding what our sailors are doing on the line to defend freedom. We need to continue these."

He admitted, however, that this particular tour probably shouldn't have gone forward because a training mission it was to coincide with was canceled. Waddle, after conferring with his squadron commander, deemed the training unnecessary but decided not to cancel the tour.

Konetzni said the collision comes down to Waddle's inability to see the Ehime Maru through his periscope and the fact that sonar operators didn't have enough time to properly analyze data tracking surface vessels.

Coen and Waddle performed an 80-second periscope search at depths of 60 and 58 feet. Testimony has shown periscope scans are typically done in three minutes and that the officers had several more feet available on the periscope that they didn't use.

"You'd better get as much pole out there as you possibly can, because that's your obligation," Konetzni said, adding that more time would have allowed sonar analysts to determine a vessel was close.

"It's a team endeavor, and when the team doesn't work right, bad things happen," he said. "Time allows integration of the team."

The Greenville's fire control technician had data showing another ship was close but never reported it. He told investigators he assumed his data was incorrect when Coen and Waddle reported seeing no other boats during the periscope search. He also said the civilians blocked his access to the officers.

The technician, Petty Officer 1st Class Patrick Seacrest, and the sonar room supervisor have been appointed military attorneys at their request, the Navy said Monday. The three admirals presiding over the court of inquiry could name additional parties to the investigation at any time.

Also under scrutiny during the hearing has been Capt. Robert Brandhuber, Konetzni's chief of staff. Brandhuber accompanied the civilians aboard Greeneville and was the senior officer on the ship. The court panel has questioned whether he should have sensed something was amiss and stepped in.

Konetzni defended Brandhuber, saying he was in the back of the control room during the maneuver and didn't know anything unsafe was happening.

Four more Japanese family members arrived Sunday to observe the court, while several who attended the first week returned home. Before Monday's session, Waddle bowed to the families and told a Japanese official he'd like to meet with them to offer an apology. He apologized to the other family members last week.

The captain of the Ehime Maru also arrived in Hawaii over the weekend. Hisao Onishi was scheduled to testify later this week.

The Navy, meanwhile, was expected to announce a decision this week on whether to salvage the Ehime Maru.

-------- germany

German Greens accept nuclear waste transports

March 12, 2001
Story by Mark John
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10054

STUTTGART - Germany's Greens voted on Saturday not to support blockades of upcoming atomic waste shipments, putting government responsibilities before their tradition at the heart of the anti-nuclear movement.

Delegates at a congress in Stuttgart in southern Germany, where Greens hope to revive their flagging national poll ratings in two state elections on March 25, voted in favour of a motion put forward by the party leadership.

It argued the party could not send members into potentially violent clashes with police over a series of rail shipments from France, due shortly after the state votes, that are expressly permitted under the nuclear phase-out plan agreed last year by Green Environment Minister Juergen Trittin.

"When we made the agreement, we knew shipments back to Germany would be necessary," said Trittin in an appeal to the congress before it voted overwhelmingly against blockades.

"We have legal and political obligations. We can't simply dump our waste on our next-door neighbour's doorstep".

Under the agreed motion, the Greens - since 1998 junior partners in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's government - "will not encourage protests, blockades or other actions" but can join peaceful demonstrations near the shipments.

Six so-called "Castor" rail containers of reprocessed German waste are due in coming weeks to travel from the La Hague reprocessing plant in France to the Gorleben interim storage facility in northern Lower Saxony state.

ANTI-NUKES LOBBYISTS KEPT OUT

Castor transports have been suspended for three years following a radiation scare. The last shipments in 1998 involved one of the largest security actions in postwar Germany as riot police used water cannon to prevent protesters from mounting rail sit-ins and other blockade bids.

Aware of the potential damage to their already flagging poll ratings by being associated with such protests, top Greens had successfully persuaded some rebellious regional branches to join their motion before the party congress.

In an unusual move for a Greens congress, anti-nuclear lobbyists who turned up for the meeting were refused entrance and had to be content to demonstrate outside.

"They won't let us in - they think we are too dangerous," said a 20-year-old protester from Munich called Theresa, who said she was prepared to sit on rail tracks and demonstrate "as peacefully as possible" in Gorleben.

"We are not saboteurs or terrorists," she said.

Under a hard-fought deal with Germany's power industry, the country's 19 nuclear reactors - which produce around a third of its electricity - are to be gradually phased out over about two decades.

Nuclear waste transports for reprocessing are permitted until 2005 under the deal. After that, it is envisaged that a central storage facility will be created for remaining waste.

While the congress decision marks yet another victory for Greens moderates over the dwindling number of so-called party "Fundis", or fundamentals, some delegates feared it could drive a core group of traditional voters away from the Greens.

"We can't appear to have split away from the anti-nuclear movement," said one. "But now it looks as if we have".

-------- india / pakistan

Pak. capable of more nuke tests

The Hindu
By Our Special Correspondent
Monday, March 12, 2001
http://www.indiaserver.com/thehindu/2001/03/12/stories/03120006.htm

ISLAMABAD, MARCH 11. Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of Pakistan's nuclear programme, has said that Pakistan is capable of conducting more nuclear and missile tests.

Speaking to presspersons in Karachi on Saturday after attending the board of governors meeting of Sir Syed University of Engineering and Technology, Dr. Khan, however, hastened to add that it was up to the Government to take a decision on the question of conducting further tests.

Considering the stated position of Pakistan that it would observe a moratorium on conduct of further nuclear tests, it is not clear what provoked Dr. Khan to make the observations.

Islamabad has consistently maintained since its May 1998 nuclear tests that it would observe a moratorium on further tests.

However, the moratorium is subject to the condition that India does not conduct further tests.

Dr. Khan was quoted as saying that work on improving the efficiency and range of Pakistan's locally built `Ghauri' and `Shaheen' missiles was in progress.

-------- iran

Russia and Iran agree arms deal

CNN
March 12, 2001 Web posted at: 11:46 AM EST (1646 GMT)
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/03/12/khatami.russia.02/index.html

MOSCOW, Russia -- Russia and Iran have pledged to increase trade in conventional weapons and nuclear energy co-operation.

The agreement, signed on Monday, comes amid opposition in the United States to the growing ties between Iran and Russia.

The first broad co-operation agreement between the two nations since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution was signed by Iranian President Mohammad Khatami and Russia's Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.

It promises increased co-operation in the nuclear energy sphere -- beyond Russia's current construction of a reactor at Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant -- and increased Russian arms sales to Iran.

Iran's ambassador to Moscow said recently that Tehran could buy up to $7 billion worth of Russian weapons in coming years, making it a leading customer for Russia's ailing defence industry.

No details of the arms deal were divulged, but Russian officials have indicated that Iran had expressed interest in buying S-300 air defence missiles, fighter jets, helicopters, patrol boats and other weapons.

Putin, who defended the arms sales against criticism that they risk violating international agreements, said: "We believe that Iran has the right to ensure its security and defend itself.

"Russia is also interested in such co-operation for economic reasons. And the political reasons are that we believe that Iran must be an independent, self-sufficient state capable of defending its national interests."

The U.S. lists Iran among "rogue states" and believes it sponsors terrorists. It suspects Russia of helping Iran to develop military nuclear technologies -- charges denied by both countries.

Moscow has dismissed U.S. demands that it cancel the $800 million Bushehr nuclear plant contract.

Washington claims the technology could be used to develop nuclear weapons, but Moscow and Tehran say the plant can be used only for civilian purposes.

Russia says it has 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.

Putin and Khatami -- the first Iranian leader to visit Moscow in nearly 40 years -- also signed an agreement opposing any pipelines across the seabed of the Caspian, indirectly referring to U.S. efforts to persuade Kazakhstan to ship oil across the sea instead of through Russia.

"Our region more than at any time in the past needs calm and stability," Khatami said.

"To achieve stability and peace we don't need any extra-regional forces. Just the opposite, any alien presence may undermine the stability."

---

U.S. wary of Russia's ties to Iran

Philadelphia Inquirer
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Monday, March 12, 2001
By Vladimir Isachenkov
http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/03/12/national/RUSSIRAN12.htm

MOSCOW - Russian leaders hope a lengthy visit this week 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 today, Khatami and Russian President Vladimir V. 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 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 between the United States and Russia.

Defense Secretary Donald H. 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 had 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 says 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.

Russia and Iran have easily found common language on international issues, such as the situation in Afghanistan, which borders both countries. Both countries oppose the Taliban, 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 countries 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.

---

Iran, Russia defy U.S. with pact

InfoBeat News
VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
Associated Press Writer
Afternoon Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406372298

MOSCOW (AP) - The presidents of Russia and Iran promised Monday to increase trade in weapons and cooperation in nuclear energy in defiance of U.S. efforts to discourage their nations' blossoming ties.

Vladimir Putin and Iranian President Mohammad Khatami also spoke out against foreign involvement in the energy-rich Caspian Sea area _ an implicit criticism of U.S. interest in the region.

``Our region more than at any time in the past needs calm and stability. ... Any alien presence may undermine the stability,'' Khatami said at the start of the Kremlin talks.

``Iran is a key country in the region,'' Putin said after he and Khatami signed the first broad cooperation agreement between Moscow and Tehran since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution. ``Our assessments of the situation in the region and the world coincide to a large degree.''

No agreements on arms sales were signed, but Putin pledged to provide Tehran with weapons despite strong U.S. protests. For years, Moscow's military cooperation with Tehran has caused concern in Washington, which accuses Iran of sponsoring terrorists.

``We believe that Iran has the right to ensure its security and defend itself,'' Putin said.

``Russia is also interested in such cooperation for economic reasons. And the political reasons are that we believe that Iran must be an independent, self-sufficient state capable of defending its national interests,'' Putin said.

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

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

Putin said that Russia would only provide Iran with ``defensive'' weapons, adding that such sales wouldn't violate international agreements.

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

Moscow has also brushed off repeated U.S. demands that it cancel the $800 million Bushehr nuclear plant contract. The United States claims the Russian technology could be used to develop nuclear weapons, but Moscow and Tehran argue that the plant can be used only for civilian purposes and will remain under international control.

Putin said that Russia may bid for construction of more nuclear reactors in Iran. ``Iran has plans to expand its nuclear energy sector, and Russia is interested in taking part in such work,'' he said.

Putin and Khatami avoided any direct reference to the United States in their comments before reporters, but indirectly opposed U.S. policy in the Caspian Sea region in a joint statement.

``The legal regime and methods of use of the Caspian Sea resources is the littoral states' business,'' they said. ``Any interference by third parties is inadmissible.''

The United States has strongly supported a pipeline that would export the Caspian oil through Turkey, bypassing Russia and Iran.

---

Iran and Russia Sign Oil and Weapons Pact

New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/world/12CND-RUSSIA.html

MOSCOW, March 12 - Breaking openly with both the United States and his predecessor Boris N. Yeltsin, President Vladimir V. Putin formally agreed today to resume sales of Russian conventional arms to Iran after a six-year hiatus.

At a Kremlin meeting with Iran's president, Mohammed Khatami, Mr. Putin also reiterated Russia's intention to help Iran complete a long-stalled nuclear power plant that some American experts contend could advance Iran's nuclear weapons program.

The two announcements, neither unexpected, came during the first meeting in four decades between Iranian and Russian heads of state. The warm session was billed in advance as a diplomatic turning point.

Just as clearly, it was a pointed signal to the Bush Administration by both the Iranians and the Russians that they intend to limit American influence in the Middle East by both diplomatic and military means.

Economically, Russia is interested in cooperation. And politically, Iran should be a self-sufficient, independent state that is ready to protect its national interests, Mr. Putin said.

The chief foreign affairs official at the Russian Defense Ministry, General Leonid Ivashov, said the scope of Russian-Iranian arms deals was a private matter between two sovereign states.

"Some may like this cooperation; some not," he said. "Our countries will continue working together to our advantage."

The advantages for Russia are considerable: hard currency from arms sales; work for the country's idle weapons-production lines; and more money and influence from military training and repair work in a critical Persian Gulf nation not far from its borders.

Mr. Putin has employed much the same formula of arms sales and diplomacy to revive faded alliances with India, China and other states that drifted away from the Russian orbit after the end of the Cold War.

For its part, Iran finds an ally who shares many of its predilections, among them opposition to neighboring Turkey and an expanding NATO alliance, and a desire to limit United States influence in central Asia, where American- and Russian-backed pipelines are fiercely competing to control the flow of oil newly found in the Caspian Sea.

It undoubtedly was not lost on the Kremlin that Iran is a hot-button state to Americans. Iran, a former key regional ally, turned into an enemy of Washington after the Islamic revolution and the seizure of 51 Americans kept hostage at the United States embassy in Tehran from late 1979 to early 1981.

Washington has quietly sought to improve relations with Iran in recent years, but to little avail. Officially, Iran remains on a list of rogue nations that American experts believe could threaten the Middle East with nuclear or chemical weapons and ballistic missiles within a few years.

The United States said today that it was disappointed at Mr. Putin's announcement. But the immediate effect on the United States' relations with Russia was unclear, in part because the scope of cooperation between Iran and Russia also remains unclear.

"We are particularly concerned about sales of advanced conventional weapons or sensitive technologies, things like nuclear technology," the State Department spokesman, Richard Boucher, said. "It's up to the Russians and the Iranians to specify in more detail what they may or may not be doing."

The Central Intelligence Agency identified Russia as a supplier of ballistic missile technology to Iran in an annual report on weapons proliferation released last month.

Russia strongly denies the charge, although officials at some Russian research institutes have acknowledged training Iranians in areas that the United States considers sensitive.

Mr. Putin said today that Iran seeks only defensive arms and that Russia would adhere strictly to international weapons-proliferation restrictions in its sales. No deals were signed at today's meeting, and it was not clear when arms deliveries would begin.

Russia sold some $5 billion in weapons to Iran from 1989 to 1995, in no small part for its defense against the Iraqi army, which under Saddam Hussein waged war against Iran for much of the 1980's. The sales stopped after 1995, when then-President Yeltsin signed a secret accord with the United States forswearing further arms sales or technical aid to Iran's military programs.

The Kremlin repudiated that accord after it became public during the 2000 American presidential election, and last December the Russian defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, paid the first high-level Russian visit to Iran since 1979 to lay the groundwork for new arms sales.

The Moscow daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta reported that weapons shipments could commence in the second half of this year, and include spare parts for existing Russian-made aircraft and Cold War-era battle tanks.

But Russian deputy prime minister Ilya Klebanov told the Interfax news service today that Iran hopes to buy one of Russia's most advanced air-defense system, the S-300 anti-missile complex, which is said to track and kill as many as six low-flying cruise missiles or aircraft at a time.

"The question is what this does for the regional military balance," Thomas Graham, a political analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said today. "Does it give Iran a certain capacity in the Persian Gulf region that it didn't have before? And will it be destabilizing or not? That's what we1ll be looking to find out."

Russia's nuclear agreement to finish a reactor at the Persian Gulf military port of Bushehr raises different issues.

The United States has argued that Iran has little need for new nuclear generating capacity and that the reactor could be used to aid what Washington says is Iran's clandestine nuclear-weapons program. In 1999, the United States imposed economic sanctions on seven Russian companies and three institutes that it accused of abetting Iranian nuclear efforts.

Both Russia and Iran adamantly deny that the Bushehr reactor has any military use, and Russia says that its construction work is supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency. For its part, Iran says it is prepared to spend some $1 billion on new contracts with Russian companies for work on the plant and related facilities.

-------- korea

Seoul announces aid to North Korea

InfoBeat News
JAE-SUK YOO Associated Press Writer
Afternoon Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406370710

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - Ahead of high-level talks with North Korea, South Korea said Monday that it would ship $18 million of aid to the impoverished North in hopes of boosting reconciliation on their divided peninsula.

The plan to send clothes, food, medicine and other supplies came one day after President Kim Dae-jung returned to Seoul after a meeting in Washington with President Bush.

At that meeting, Bush expressed support for Kim's policy of engaging North Korea but said he was skeptical of its leader, Kim Jong Il, and would not immediately resume negotiations on the North's missile program.

Kim Dae-jung said he would relay U.S. concerns to North Korea, a promise that his government might be able to fulfill at a fifth round of Cabinet-level talks with the North that begin Tuesday in Seoul.

South Korean officials said they plan to discuss the reconciliation process that began last year and set new projects for the rest of 2001.

The topics are expected to include the arrangement of more reunions of separated family members, sports games and other exchanges, and a planned visit to South Korea by the North Korean leader.

The aid package, to be shipped to the North by the end of this month, includes: 1.5 million pieces of children's underwear, 12,000 tons of apples, pears and potatoes; malaria vaccines for 100,000 people; 1,300 gallons of pesticide and 100 manual sprayers.

Opposition leaders have accused Kim Dae-jung of being too generous with the North, saying he is not pushing the Pyongyang government hard enough for gestures of reconciliation.

``We don't want to make a fuss about humanitarian aid. But we would like to urge the government to impose a stricter rule of reciprocity when dealing with the North,'' said Chang Kwang-keun, a deputy spokesman of the main opposition Grand National Party.

North Korea, which suffered famine in the 1990s that killed hundreds of thousands of people, depends on outside aid to feed its 22 million people. Past South Korean government aid was mostly rice, corn and fertilizer.

At Cabinet-level talks with the South in December, North Korea appealed for 500,000 kilowatts of free electricity but rejected a South Korean proposal to conduct an extensive joint survey of the North's energy situation, instead suggesting a limited study.

The Korean peninsula was divided into the communist North and pro-Western South in 1945. The 1950-53 Korean War between the two ended without a peace treaty, and their border remains sealed.

-------- missile defense

Russia Won't Dump ABM if U.S. Deploys Missile Shield

Excite News
By Andrei Shukshin
March 12, 2001
http://news.excite.com/news/r/010312/13/politics-usa-russia-dc

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A senior Russian general ruled out Monday any hasty reaction by Moscow if the United States started deploying the national missile shield Russia opposes.

Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, head of the Defense Ministry's international cooperation department, said Russia would not immediately abandon the key 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty even if it saw Washington violating it.

"Russia will not precipitate the collapse of ABM. We will consult with European and other states and try to stop the process even after the United States clearly begins to deploy the system," Ivashov told a news conference.

"On this road, there is such thing as a point of no return."

Ivashov repeated Russia's opposition to Washington's proposal to create a National Missile Defense (NMD) umbrella to protect its territory from a surprise rocket attack by "rogue states," such as Iran or North Korea.

He also dismissed as meaningless President George W. Bush's suggestion to drop the term "national" to make the scheme more palatable for west European countries still suspicious of it.

Russia says NMD is primarily aimed against its own nuclear arsenal and would amount to tearing up ABM, which it sees as the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence. The treaty limits the anti-missile systems the United States and Russia can deploy.

The comments by Ivashov, a hawk within Russia's military establishment, appeared to suggest that cash-strapped Moscow would have to live with the system since Bush appears determined to proceed with it. His Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has called the ABM treaty "ancient history."

Ivashov said that even if U.S. workers started pouring the concrete foundations of missile launch pads in Alaska for the shield Moscow would keep using political means to try to persuade Washington to change its mind.

Last year, President Vladimir Putin threatened Russian withdrawal from all disarmament agreements if Washington proceeded with the anti-missile shield.

The United States has offered to extend NMD to cover Europe to encourage its NATO allies to back the plan.

Moscow has tried to rally European support behind an alternative scheme, submitted to NATO, which stresses diplomatic efforts to defuse any crisis but could ultimately involve stationing missiles close to countries causing concern.

A senior Russian arms control diplomat dismissed what he said were suggestions in the West that Moscow's plan amounted to an acknowledgement that "rogue states" posed a real missile threat which had to be tackled by military means.

"I tell you, this absolutely does not correspond to our view," Yuri Kapralov, director of the Foreign Ministry's Security Affairs and Disarmament Department, told Reuters in an interview. "It's wishful thinking."

---

Visiting Chinese to Urge Bush Not to Sell Arms to Taiwan

New York Times
By CRAIG S. SMITH
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/world/12CHIN.html

SHANGHAI, March 11 - Deputy Premier Qian Qichen, the highest-ranking Chinese official to visit Washington in two years, is expected to urge President Bush next week not to sell more advanced weapons to Taiwan.

Mr. Qian, a former foreign minister, continues to play a key role in Taiwan policy and will be visiting just weeks before Mr. Bush must decide which weapons the United States will sell Taiwan this year.

Under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the United States is obligated to provide Taiwan with equipment to defend itself, and in April the two sides conclude their annual arms sales talks, one of the most fractious issues in Chinese-American relations.

Beijing is concerned that Mr. Bush will take a more aggressive stance than his predecessor, and is bothered by Mr. Bush's rhetorical shift toward describing China as a "strategic competitor," rather than the "strategic partner" seen by the Clinton administration.

Perry Link, a China scholar at Princeton University, said: "Qian is a skilled diplomat and smooth talker and wants, I think, to smooth things out with the new Bush people, try to get them as far as possible back to where the Chinese government had the Clinton people, both in general - viewing China as a partner more than an adversary - and on the particular issue of arms sales to Taiwan."

Last year, President Clinton deferred making a decision on selling Taiwan Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles and Aegis radar systems.

But Taiwan's request for the ships remains on the table. The Aegis system could someday be adapted for use in the kind of naval theater missile defense which Mr. Bush supports but China vehemently opposes.

Taiwan has indicated that it may also ask the administration to sell it four Kidd-class guided-missile destroyers, which are less powerful than the Arleigh Burke ships but would nonetheless be the largest and most powerful in Taiwan's Navy.

Either class of ships would represent the most significant weapons transfer by the United States to Taiwan since Mr. Bush's father sold it 150 advanced F-16 fighter aircraft in 1992. China charged that the sale breached a 1982 joint communiqué in which Washington vowed not to increase the quantity or quality of arms sold to Taiwan.

Mr. Qian was quoted Friday by the state-run, English-language China Daily as saying the Taiwan issue was "not only a problem left over by China's civil war, it is also the result of U.S. military intervention as the United States has kept selling advanced weapons to Taiwan."

Those comments followed a warning on Tuesday by Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan that the United States should recognize the "serious dangers involved" in providing more weapons to Taiwan.

Mr. Qian is likely to emphasize that a relaxation of tensions between China and Taiwan could be undone by more arms sales.

Beijing has supported a series of low-level official contacts with Taiwan politicians. Direct shipping links have also begun with the Taiwan islands of Quemoy and Matsu.

Mr. Qian has made overtures to Taiwan by softening Beijing's language on its terms for re-unification.

"What we adhere to is one China that embraces the mainland and Taiwan," China Daily quoted him as saying on Friday. "We understand the aspirations of Taiwan compatriots to maintain the status quo."

Mr. Qian said he would also discuss with American officials China's opposition to the proposed development of a missile defense system.

The United States will be eager to hear how China proposes to spend its increased military budget. Beijing announced last week that military spending would rise 17.7 percent this year, compared with a 12 percent increase last year.

Mr. Qian's five-day visit to Washington and New York will begin March 18. His visit coincides with the March 19 session of the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, where Washington is expected to support a motion condemning China's abuses of human rights.

He is scheduled to see Mr. Bush on March 22, and is likely to ask him if he will visit China for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to be held in Shanghai in October.

-------- russia

Lack of cash delays salvage operation

Washington Times
March 12, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001312213142.htm

MOSCOW - A lack of cash has forced Russia to delay an operation to raise the sunken nuclear-powered submarine Kursk from the Arctic seabed, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said yesterday.

Interfax quoted Mr. Klebanov as saying that the Kursk, which sank in the Barents Sea in August, killing all 118 men on board, would probably be raised in early autumn, rather than in July or August, as was initially planned.

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

CIA Is Stepping Up Attempts To Monitor Spread of Weapons

Washington Post
By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 12, 2001; Page A15
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/europe/A55503-2001Mar11.html

Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet last week created a unit with 500 analysts, scientists and support personnel to focus on nonproliferation and arms control issues, calling the spread of missile technology and "weapons of mass destruction" a growing global threat.

The Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center will bring three existing CIA analytic staffs together under Alan Foley, a veteran Soviet military analyst. As head of the Arms Control Intelligence Staff, he has spent the last three years supporting arms control treaty negotiators.

In his new role, Foley will assume responsibility as well for the existing Nonproliferation Center, which dealt with a broad range of proliferation issues, and the Office of Transnational Issues' Weapons Intelligence Staff, which is composed largely of scientists and engineers. He will report to Tenet.

One senior CIA official said last week in an interview that 500 people sounds like a large staff to deploy directly on nonproliferation issues.

In reality, the official said, the U.S. intelligence community is stretched "very thin" trying to keep pace with the spread of nuclear arms in South Asia; proliferating ballistic missile technology throughout Asia and the Middle East; and attempts by terrorist groups and numerous countries to acquire or develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

Delivering the CIA's annual assessment of worldwide threats last month, Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that Russia, China and North Korea have continued in the past year to sell missile technology to Iran, Pakistan and other countries.

In discussing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Tenet singled out the activities of Russian defense firms. He said they supplied ballistic missile technology last year to Iran, India, China and Libya, although he did not name the companies or specify what they sold.

He also said Russia provided assistance to Iran's civilian nuclear program that "could be used to advance its weapons programs as well."

Last week, in announcing creation of the Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation and Arms Control Center, Tenet said he was striving for "increased synergy on key missile and nuclear issues as well as better integration between payload and delivery system analyses."

"By including all weapons, we will also be better able to surge and grow on issues such as advanced conventional weapons, missile defense and space-related systems," Tenet said. "This is a move that many in the weapons field have endorsed and called for over the years."

Tenet's creation of the center and increased emphasis on nonproliferation also reflect heightened focus in this area on Capitol Hill. Conservative members of Congress, in particular, have grown concerned in recent years by China's weapons proliferation activities and its efforts to acquire through espionage advanced U.S. nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

In 1999, a House select committee chaired by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) concluded that China had "stolen or otherwise illegally obtained U.S. missile and space technology that improves [its] military and intelligence capabilities."

-------- ukraine

Atomic dustbin
John Darwell risked his life when he photographed the Chernobyl exclusion zone. But at least they gave him a pair of protective wellies.

The Guardian
Monday March 12, 2001
Phil Daoust reports Phil Daoust Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4150231,00.html

John Darwell knows a thing or two about nuclear contamination. He lives 20 miles from the Sellafield reprocessing plant and has spent most of the past six years photographing the landmarks of the atomic age: Los Alamos, where the Americans developed the atom bomb; Trinity, where they first tested it; Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, where a power station came terrifyingly close to meltdown. And he was in Japan in 1995 for the 50th anniversary of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nevertheless, he still felt worried as he neared the exclusion zone around Chernobyl power station, site of the world's worst nuclear accident. Thirty-one people died immediately after the reactor fire in 1986; Ukraine has blamed the radiation that spewed out for at least 8,000 more deaths. More than 130,000 people had to be evacuated, and, 15 years on, soldiers still bar entry to 2,800 sq km of land around the power station.

"It was grey and overcast, one of those really murky days," Darwell recalls. "I was thinking, 'What am I doing here? What am I doing here? ' And then my driver started playing The Road to Hell, by Chris Rea. And I thought, 'That about sums it up.' "

Yet what he found on the other side of the checkpoint was far more complex. "Part of me was expecting a devastated wasteland but everything was growing and lush. The locals did point out mutations - like branches growing on trees where they shouldn't be - but the zone is almost like a wildlife park. There's no folk, so you see herds of elk and wild boar wandering around. Mind you, some of them were showing mutations too."

Darwell's photographs from that trip in late 1999 can now be seen in a book and exhibition called Legacy. There's the snap he took while waiting to pass through the outer cordon, still 30km from the power station - a dog resting in the middle of the road, as if that's the last place it would be disturbed. It brings to mind the beautiful beast from Stalker, Andrey Tarkovsky's eerie 1979 movie. That too featured a danger zone guarded by gun-toting guards, almost empty of humans and green with an obscene fertility.

Inside Chernobyl's exclusion zone, weeds grow knee-high, trees poke up through abandoned homes, flowers bloom among fire engines used during the crisis and too radioactive ever to serve again.

There's no artifice to Darwell's pictures, no fancy filters or tricksy angles, so you have to think about the subject rather than its presentation. One shot shows half a dozen military helicopters slowly rotting in a field, the red stars on their fuselages still visible. How bad must things get, you marvel, for a government to throw away aircraft? And then you remember the pilots who died after dumping their loads of sand and chemicals onto the flaming core of reactor number four.

The Ukrainians spent six months removing and burying contaminated material from around the reactor: machinery, buildings, trees, soil. Of course, the clean-up claimed more lives. Darwell visited a landfill site at Buryakovka, and there's something shocking about his picture of a nondescript field with a radiation hazard sign planted where a scarecrow should be. He was led around by workers with Geiger counters, who steered him away from any hot spots.

The Ukrainians were protected by the sort of paper masks used by decorators. Darwell was slightly better off: he had been lent a pair of wellies when he passed through the zone's inner cordon, 10km from the power station. He also wore a special badge to record his exposure, but could not have it checked until he returned to Britain. "The best way to describe it is a miner's canary - only you don't know it's dead until three weeks later."

When Chernobyl went mushroom-shaped, it took the authorities a day and a half to begin bussing the locals out. At first they claimed the power plant was simply venting steam as usual. Darwell's pictures suggest the panic that ruled once the truth got out: a kindergarten floor scattered with crushed dolls; dodgem cars abandoned between bumps; portraits gathering mildew on mantelpieces; washing left on clothes lines.

It took Darwell 18 months to get permission to visit the exclusion zone, so he made the most of his three weeks there. He took in the power station itself, which only closed down last December ("It was like visiting a factory - we went and had tea at the canteen"), many of the 70 empty villages and the city of Pripyat, which bars visitors whenever the radiation readings blip upwards. "It's all concrete," he explains. "It absorbs radiation like a giant sponge. They can't even knock it down because the dust would be too dangerous."

In the world's most radioactive city, among all the rubble and rust and peeling paint, he photographed a lecture room full of charts cataloguing enemy nuclear weapons and the pointless precautions to be taken in the event of a missile strike.

The zone's guards were relaxed chaps, keen to talk about fishing and show their snapshots of the giant catfish they caught in Chernobyl's outflow. So Darwell's scene of a militia man standing alone in the middle of a field "to prevent homeless people from moving into the village" may raise a hollow laugh. Yet a few of the older locals have returned, feeling safer in their old homes than in the prefab blocks on the edge of Kiev, where too many of their friends have sickened and died. The government seems to have decided it's not worth trying to kick them out again.

So there they are living off the contaminated land, growing crops, using wells, keeping cattle. In the village of Opachichi, Darwell drank the milk from the local cows, which was "rather frightening". "A little radiation is very good for you," one of the locals told him. "It will make your hair grow - look at the vegetables and flowers." There's a lovely shot of a couple called Nicholai and Anastasia, who must be in their 60s or 70s, sitting in their Soviet-floral-horror sitting room and looking as if they've got a bit of a buzz on. The villagers make their own vodka and, when Darwell dropped in, the pair plied him with moonshine for five hours. "I was absolutely out of my mind," he says.

Elsewhere, three babushkas from the same village pose with their buckets by a well; one of them tells a great story that sadly finds no place in the book's brief introduction. She was a PoW in Germany during the second world war and walked all the way back to Ukraine. "Later," says Darwell, "her husband left her and the house burned down . . . and then there was Chernobyl." But she returned a second time.

Darwell's book gives her no words, so let's use what Tarkovsky's Stalker said when he found himself back in his own strange world: "Everything I have is here. Here in the zone. My happiness, my freedom, my dignity." Chernobyl's returnees may be happy to live with the risks of low-level radiation, but Legacy ends on a sombre note. "The concrete sarcophagus surrounding the damaged reactor is now in imminent danger of collapse. This would lead to a second Chernobyl disaster, with tons of highly radioactive dust released into the atmosphere. Some scientists believe the probability of this happening within the next few years to be 'extremely high'."

So is this the most alarming trip Darwell has ever made? Oh no, he says. "There's only one place I've ever had trouble. They actually came with dogs and guns when I was photo-graphing. I was on the public highway but they didn't seem to appreciate that fact. As soon as I turned up, the police would arrive. It got to a point where they'd just recognise my car.

"Yes, Sellafield was slightly hairy."

• Legacy the book is published by Dewi Lewis, price £10.99. The exhibition is at Tullie House, Carlisle (01228 534781), until April 1.

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

-------- tennessee

Outraged by sale of DOE land for $54/acre

Monday, March 12, 2001
Letters to the Editor
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2001/nn11075.htm

To The Oak Ridger:

I would like to express my outrage at the recent sale of 182 acres of DOE riverfront property to an Oak Ridge land developer for $54/acre.

As it was pointed out in an article by the Knoxville News-Sentinel, this property was deemed of significant biological importance by the Nature Conservancy, yet it was virtually given away, not to somebody like TWRA, but to a developer.

What do you think they'll charge for this property? I recently saw a piece of property near the intersection of Highway 62 and Outer Drive, and the Realtors wanted $40,000 plus for about 1.5 acres.

What's wrong with this picture? If I remember the article correctly, the government spokesperson said that they thought this was a fair value for this piece of property. It probably was in 1895!

Obviously the government's process for evaluating what property is worth is extremely flawed. Is it any wonder why most of the world laughs at us and the United States government is $6 trillion in debt?

Here was a chance to do the right thing and protect some of our water frontage and they blew it again. Whatever happened to "no net loss of wetlands"?

What a slap in the face of citizens who want to leave something of value to future generations! Shame on everyone associated with this.

Ron Hoff Clinton

-------- MILITARY

At least five killed in military accident in Kuwait

USA Today
03/12/2001 - Updated 05:05 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-12-kuwait-accident.htm

WASHINGTON - A U.S. Navy F/A-18 jet accidentally dropped a bomb on military personnel during a training exercise Monday at a bombing range in northern Kuwait, killing at least five people, including four Americans and one New Zealander, Pentagon officials said. Details were sketchy and there was confusion among Pentagon officials over the number of deaths. Officials initially said it was five but then raised the figure to six before going back to five. Two of the Americans killed were from the Army and two were from the Air Force, said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Brett Bartos, a consul at the New Zealand Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, told The Associated Press that a New Zealander was killed in the accident. He refused to give any other details.

Col. Ahmed al-Rahmani of the Kuwait Defense Ministry told Kuwait TV that six people were killed and some of those injured were in critical condition. He did not elaborate. A short time later some Pentagon officials who had previously reported six fatalities said the correct number was five.

There was no official Pentagon announcement of the accident or the number killed and injured. Officials gathering details would discuss the matter only on condition of anonymity.

One Pentagon official said an estimated 10 people were injured. A second official said no civilians were involved.

President Bush, traveling in Panama City, Fla., opened a speech on his budget proposals and military spending with brief mention of the accident in Kuwait.

"I'm reminded today of how dangerous service can be. We lost some servicemen today in Kuwait in a training accident," Bush said. "I hope you'll join me in moment of silence for those soldiers and their families. God Bless."

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman would say only that there had been a "training accident" and that there were an unspecified number of casualties.

The accident happened at the Udairi bombing range in Kuwait, about 28 miles from the Iraqi border. One official said those killed and injured were involved in a multinational training exercise in which ground forces direct strike aircraft to specific targets. It was not clear what went wrong Monday.

An official said the Navy plane, flying from the USS Harry S. Truman aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, dropped what was believed to be a 500-pound gravity bomb. The circumstances of the accident were not immediately clear.

The United States military has operated regularly from airfields and an Army base in Kuwait since the 1991 Gulf War, when a U.S.-led coalition expelled the occupying Iraqi army from the tiny Persian Gulf nation.

---

Senate report urges arms for Taiwan

Washington Times
By Bill Gertz
March 12, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001312222124.htm

A new Senate staff report concludes that Taiwan urgently needs advanced weaponry, intelligence warning data and joint exercises with U.S. forces to counter the growing military threat from China.

"It is time to admit that continuing our current policy toward Taiwan will guarantee the destruction of that island democracy by China's rapidly expanding military forces," the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff concludes.

The report reveals the first official details of Taiwan's latest annual arms requests to the United States. It was based on visits to Taiwan last month and meetings with senior Taiwanese military, intelligence and political leaders. A copy was obtained by The Washington Times.

China's government opposes all U.S. weapons sales, and Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen is due in Washington next week.

The staff report calls for setting up direct communications between Taiwanese and U.S. militaries, including hot lines or video-conferencing between the Pentagon, the Hawaii-based Pacific Command and Taiwan's Defense Ministry.

"Ideally, an entire series of operational links should be established that allow U.S. and Taiwan aircraft, ships and shore units to communicate," the report says. "Without this, chaos will certainly ensue should hostilities break out."

It also calls for operational training programs with U.S. forces and the Taiwanese military, including joint exercises. "Taiwan's military needs to work with ours," the report says.

Taiwan wants to buy these weapons systems from the United States:

• Four Aegis-equipped guided missile destroyers, to improve Taiwan's capability to defend against aircraft attacks. "Taiwan wants, and Taiwan needs, Aegis destroyers to provide it with an adequate sea-based air defense and [command and control] system to deal with rapidly developing PRC air and naval threats."

• Four Kidd-class destroyers to provide a more immediate defense before the first Aegis ships are delivered in 2009.

• P-3 submarine-hunting aircraft with longer-range and more accurate missiles and torpedoes that will help Taiwan counter any Chinese blockade.

• High-speed anti-radiation missiles (HARM) to counter new Chinese S-300 surface-to-air missiles deployed near Taiwan.

• Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) and longer-range guided bombs capable of hitting land targets.

• AIM-120 air-to-air missiles based in Taiwan instead of Arizona, as the Clinton administration demanded, when it approved the missile sale last year.

• Aircraft identification equipment to help Taiwanese pilots avoid being shot down by mistake.

• Night vision goggles and helmet-sighted air-to-air missiles, to balance similar systems recently acquired by China from Russia.

• Radar-illumination detection equipment for Taiwan's domestic jet fighters and guidance systems for those fighters' missiles.

• Naval ship-to-ship missiles and anti-aircraft missiles.

• Submarines to counter Chinese plans to blockade the island during a conflict.

• Longer-range and more accurate artillery for Taiwanese ground forces, and Apache attack helicopters equipped with advanced radar. These arms would be used by ground forces against an invading Chinese military force.

• Advanced armored vehicles and tanks for use against Chinese amphibious forces.

• Long-range radar systems to detect missile launches and aircraft.

• Sharing of U.S. missile early warning data, like that currently provided to several Persian Gulf states and Russia.

• An integrated U.S. command and control system that would allow Taiwan to conduct combined arms warfare using naval, air and ground forces.

The staff report concludes that current U.S. policy toward Taiwan is "outdated, dangerous," and could lead to a conflict between Taiwan and China that would involve the United States.

The report, written by Asia-Pacific affairs specialist Jim Doran, describes current U.S. arms policies as pro-Beijing because they avoid all sales or ties to Taipei that will upset China.

"Specifically, Taiwan desperately needs more advanced, longer-range weaponry, early warning capabilities, and better [command and control] capabilities," the report states. "It also needs several new hardware platforms, particularly submarines and advanced destroyers."

The document sets out many of the 30 items on the Taiwan government's secret list of arms requested in January, say Bush administration officials.

Disclosure of the requests comes as the Bush administration is debating whether to approve sales of advanced arms to Taiwan, reversing the policy of the Clinton administration, which sharply curbed weapons transfers as part of its friendlier relations with China.

The detailed Taiwanese weapons requests contained in the congressional report appear to be the first time Taiwan's military has broken U.S. government policy, requiring that such details be kept secret from the U.S. Congress.

"The report shows the Taiwanese military is growing more alarmed by the Chinese military buildup and is seeking help from Congress to deal with it," says one administration official.

The latest weapons requests are said to reflect a new Taiwanese defense concept of preparing to fight Chinese attackers by engaging them 50 miles off Taiwan.

According to the staff report, the Chinese military threat is growing and includes hundreds of new short-range missiles deployed along the coast, acquisition of advanced Russian ships, missiles and warplanes, and a growing "information warfare" capability - the ability to attack computer-based infrastructures.

"Taiwan's military believes the [People's Liberation Army] is moving toward a quick strike . . .' solution' to the Taiwan 'problem' that can be effected before U.S. forces, should they be ordered to, have a chance to arrive on the scene," the report says.

-------- colombia

Colombian rebels suspend peace talks

InfoBeat News
MICHAEL EASTERBROOK Associated Press Writer
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369455

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - Colombia's second-largest guerrilla group has suspended discussions with the government in apparent protest of a U.S.-backed military operation to wipe out drug crops. Peace advocates urged them to resume talks Sunday.

The National Liberation Army, which has been fighting the government for more than three decades, broke off discussions Friday that were aimed at beginning formal peace negotiations, the official government news agency ANCOL reported Saturday.

``This is an impasse that we hope to overcome,'' government peace envoy Camilo Gomez said.

The U.N. human rights director in Colombia urged the two sides to resume talks on Sunday.

``The most important thing now is to not lose what has been gained, and a lot has been gained,'' Anders Kompass said.

Gomez said rebel commander Pablo Beltran sent him a message breaking off talks by e-mail late Friday. Although its exact content wasn't revealed, it is believed the group was protesting a military offensive to clear the way for U.S.-backed aerial fumigations of coca fields in Bolivar State.

The rebels consider the campaign in north-central Colombia an unwelcome foreign intervention.

Washington is backing Colombia's anti-drug campaign with a $1.3 billion aid package that includes military hardware and training for Colombian counternarcotics troops. The drug crops are guarded by leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitaries, which earn millions of dollars a year from the nation's narcotics industry.

The Bolivar fumigations began last month when low-flying airplanes backed by helicopter gunships began spraying herbicide on crops of coca _ the raw ingredient of cocaine.

Sprayings launched last December in southern Colombia have destroyed some 72,000 acres of coca, according to U.S. and Colombian officials. Critics say the sprayings are also killing food crops, causing illnesses and leaving farmers with no other source of income.

The talks so far have focused on a deal proposed by President Andres Pastrana's government: To create a 1,120-square-mile demilitarized zone in northern Colombia as a site for peace talks with the National Liberation Army, known as the ELN.

Experts say the 5,000-strong ELN has been debilitated by a string of military defeats and is ready to end its insurrection. It freed 42 captive police and soldiers in December to advance discussions with the government.

Colombia's government has been holding turbulent peace negotiations with the nation's largest guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, for two years.

FARC chief Manuel Marulanda said Saturday that a humanitarian exchange of captive police and soldiers for guerrillas could occur within 10 days. Dozens of foreign envoys urged an exchange of ill prisoners during a key round of negotiations last week.

---

Venezuela, Colombia ties threatened

InfoBeat News
CHRISTOPHER TOOTHAKER Associated Press Writer
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369485

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Venezuela 's release of a Colombian rebel hijacking suspect threatens to hurt relations between the two countries, already tense because of allegations that Venezuela's government has ties with Colombia's leftist rebels.

Jose Maria Ballestas was arrested in Caracas on Feb. 13 and released two days later, Venezuelan Interior Minister Luis Miquilena said on Saturday. He said Colombian police participated in the sting operation that led to the arrest.

Before the announcement, Venezuelan officials said that they could not confirm that the rebel fighter had been captured _ even after Colombian Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez released a video showing him being handcuffed by Venezuelan police.

Ramirez released the video after a Colombian news magazine published an article on the capture and accused the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez of freeing Ballestas as a favor to the Colombian guerrillas.

``This incident obviously shows that there are ties with the Colombian rebels,'' said Fausto Maso, an independent political analyst and radio host in Venezuela.

Tension between the neighboring countries has increased recently amid allegations that Chavez' government, which includes a handful of former Venezuelan guerrillas, maintains secret ties with Colombia's two major leftist rebel groups _ the National Liberation Army, or ELN, and the Armed Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Chavez, a leftist who led a failed coup attempt in 1992 and was elected president in 1998, denies that his government has ever collaborated with Colombian rebels. He says his contact with the guerrillas is only aimed at furthering the peace process and preventing Colombia's 37-year armed conflict from spilling over into Venezuela.

After making the announcement, Miquilena said he was optimistic that the incident would not damage relations with Bogota.

``We are not going to permit this to ruin relations between the two countries,'' he said.

But Anibal Romero, a political science professor at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, said the incident would anger Colombia and prompt the neighbors to suspend diplomatic relations soon.

Pedro Alcantara, an opposition lawmaker, said the incident ``creates a very negative climate for Colombian-Venezuelan relations and will definitely hurt bilateral trade between the two nations.''

German Bula, Colombia's ambassador to Venezuela, is expected to state Colombia's position regarding the Ballestas case this week.

Ballestas is accused in Colombia of leading an ELN hijacking of an Avianca domestic flight in April 1999. The rebels forced the plane to land in rebel territory and kidnapped 41 passengers and crew members.

Venezuela did not hand Ballestas over to Colombian authorities after his arrest because he requested political asylum, Miquilena said.

Along with a Colombian woman whose name was not released, Ballestas was freed because suspects who are not caught red-handed cannot be detained for more than 48 hours without charges. The Venezuelan government is considering charges against Ballestas provided by Colombia's attorney general's office.

Miquilena said the couple is under strict surveillance to prevent them from leaving Venezuela, but would not disclose their whereabouts.

-------- drug war

Bush: Scrap public housing drug push

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/12/2001

WASHINGTON (AP) - Since the first Bush administration, federal dollars have paid for security officers, alarm systems and after-school activities for youngsters in poor public housing projects. President Bush, however, has proposed scrapping the Public Housing Drug Elimination Program, saying it has had "limited impact" and that "regulatory tools such as eviction are more effective at reducing drug activity in public housing."

Program supporters are worried about the message it would send to public housing residents, who themselves fear it may imperil their safety.

In his proposed budget for 2002, the president wants to give public housing leaders about half of the $310 million allocated this year for the program for security, higher utility rates or other needs. Part of Bush's approach is getting religious groups involved in neighborhoods

The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees a variety of housing programs mainly for the poor, "is going to be one of the lead agencies in the faith-based efforts," said Robert Woodson Jr., deputy chief of staff at HUD. A program supporter, Rep. John LaFalce, D-N.Y., said Bush's idea would, in effect, tell families trying to raise their children in public housing that "drug dealers are welcomed back" and that combating crime no longer is a priority.

---

Concerns voiced over OxyContin drug

InfoBeat News
ROGER ALFORD Associated Press Writer
Afternoon Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406371893

HAZARD, Ky. (AP) - Pharmacists call OxyContin a painkiller. Cindy Fugate disagrees, the pain still sharp after her mother's death from abusing the synthetic morphine.

``I catch myself wanting to talk to her, but I can't,'' the 16-year-old said. Her mother overdosed on OxyContin or Oxy, prescription pills that authorities say have become a drug of choice among addicts.

Norma Ratliff knows the pain too: Her son was shot to death by two men who rifled through his pockets looking for OxyContin. And Franklin McIntosh was jailed after robbing a bank to fund his Oxy addiction.

``Once they get hold of you, you do anything it takes to get more,'' said McIntosh, 46, a former motorcycle shop service manager.

In the past year, OxyContin overdoses have resulted in at least 59 deaths in Kentucky's mountain region, authorities said. In Virginia, 32 deaths have been connected to abuse of the drug.

Concern is being voiced in several states as more illicit drug users discover OxyContin, often used to treat cancer patients. Users grind up the tablets and snort the powder, or mix it with water and inject it like heroin.

The drug is more popular than cocaine or heroin because it produces a high that is more euphoric than other narcotics, said Kentucky prosecutor Joseph Famularo.

In addition to a spate of deaths, authorities report an accompanying increase in crime, such as robberies of pharmacies, residential burglaries and bank heists, as users steal to feed their addictions.

Kentucky police in February arrested more than 200 people in a single day on OxyContin-related charges.

Officials from five states and the federal government met with the drug's manufacturer, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., earlier this month to discuss solutions to the problems.

``We want to do everything we can to make sure this medicine is used for patients for whom it is appropriate and that it is not given to those who don't need it or who would abuse it,'' said Dr. J. David Haddox, senior medical director for health policy at Purdue Pharma.

While the company maintains the drug is safe when used properly under a physician's supervision, it's planning programs to educate health care providers about prescription drug abuse, and inform doctors about tamper-resistant prescription pads.

Critics say the preventative measures don't go far enough. A Virginia physician is circulating a national petition to ban OxyContin, even though he recognizes the benefits for patients with chronic pain.

``By light years, the harm outweighs the benefits,'' said Dr. Art Van Zee of the St. Charles Community Health Clinic.

Van Zee has the support of relatives like Cindy Fugate, who was awoken by a 2:30 a.m. phone call and told her mother had died.

``I just dropped the phone and started crying,'' said Fugate.

Her mother, Sandra Fugate Riddle, was at a roadside motel shooting up with friends when she died. Her family isn't sure how long she had been abusing the drug. But they say Riddle, once a caring single parent, had distanced herself as she became more deeply involved the underground drug community in the months before her death.

Cindy now lives with her aunt. Her 14- and 13-year-old brothers are wards of the state. ``I stay depressed,'' she said. ``I just don't really think about much other than wanting her back.''

Ratliff's 27-year-old son, Chad, was shooting OxyContin with two men when they got into an argument over a drug debt.

Prosecutor Elizabeth Graham said Chad Ratliff was shot in the head and his pockets were then pilfered for OxyContin.

Ratliff blames both the men and the drug for her son's death. ``How many more people are going to have to die?'' she asked.

---

Grieving relatives want restrictions on drug

USA Today
03/12/2001 - Updated 01:31 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-12-oxycontin.htm

HAZARD, Ky. (AP) - Pharmacists call OxyContin a painkiller. Cindy Fugate disagrees, the pain still sharp after her mother's death from abusing the synthetic morphine.

"I catch myself wanting to talk to her, but I can't," the 16-year-old said. Her mother overdosed on OxyContin or Oxy, prescription pills that authorities say have become a drug of choice among addicts.

Norma Ratliff knows the pain too: Her son was shot to death by two men who rifled through his pockets looking for OxyContin. And Franklin McIntosh was jailed after robbing a bank to fund his Oxy addiction.

"Once they get hold of you, you do anything it takes to get more," said McIntosh, 46, a former motorcycle shop service manager.

In the past year, OxyContin overdoses have resulted in at least 59 deaths in Kentucky's mountain region, authorities said. In Virginia, 32 deaths have been connected to abuse of the drug.

Concern is being voiced in several states as more illicit drug users discover OxyContin, often used to treat cancer patients. Users grind up the tablets and snort the powder, or mix it with water and inject it like heroin.

The drug is more popular than cocaine or heroin because it produces a high that is more euphoric than other narcotics, said Kentucky prosecutor Joseph Famularo.

In addition to a spate of deaths, authorities report an accompanying increase in crime, such as robberies of pharmacies, residential burglaries and bank heists, as users steal to feed their addictions.

Kentucky police in February arrested more than 200 people in a single day on OxyContin-related charges.

Officials from five states and the federal government met with the drug's manufacturer, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., earlier this month to discuss solutions to the problems.

"We want to do everything we can to make sure this medicine is used for patients for whom it is appropriate and that it is not given to those who don't need it or who would abuse it," said Dr. J. David Haddox, senior medical director for health policy at Purdue Pharma.

While the company maintains the drug is safe when used properly under a physician's supervision, it's planning programs to educate health care providers about prescription drug abuse, and inform doctors about tamper-resistant prescription pads.

Critics say the preventative measures don't go far enough. A Virginia physician is circulating a national petition to ban OxyContin, even though he recognizes the benefits for patients with chronic pain.

"By light years, the harm outweighs the benefits," said Dr. Art Van Zee of the St. Charles Community Health Clinic.

Van Zee has the support of relatives like Cindy Fugate, who was awoken by a 2:30 a.m. phone call and told her mother had died.

"I just dropped the phone and started crying," said Fugate.

Her mother, Sandra Fugate Riddle, was at a roadside motel shooting up with friends when she died. Her family isn't sure how long she had been abusing the drug. But they say Riddle, once a caring single parent, had distanced herself as she became more deeply involved the underground drug community in the months before her death.

Cindy now lives with her aunt. Her 14- and 13-year-old brothers are wards of the state.

"I stay depressed," she said. "I just don't really think about much other than wanting her back."

Ratliff's 27-year-old son, Chad, was shooting OxyContin with two men when they got into an argument over a drug debt.

Prosecutor Elizabeth Graham said Chad Ratliff was shot in the head and his pockets were then pilfered for OxyContin.

Ratliff blames both the men and the drug for her son's death. "How many more people are going to have to die?" she asked.

-------- iraq

Inconsistent containment

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • March 12, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-2001312143744.htm

Exactly what will be the outcome of the review of U.S. policy towards Iraq has been the cause of much debate and conjecture here in Washington. Spurring that debate was Vice President Dick Cheney, who said in an interview with The Washington Times that not only did the sanctions regime need an overhaul, but perhaps also American thinking on U.N. weapons inspections. Last week, Secretary of State Colin Powell was on Capitol Hill, and in testimony before House and Senate panels, took pains to deny that inspections were to be taken off the table. Furthermore, on Friday President Bush delivered the message himself.

In an interview with Bill Sammon of The Washington Times, Mr. Bush denied that his team was being soft on Saddam Hussein, but said, "What we are doing is taking a weak policy and strengthening it." That sanctions are a leaky and unpopular policy is indeed the case, and Mr. Bush says, "Our mission is to be realistic about the problem we face." Mr. Bush again brought up the subject of smart sanctions, targeted at weapons-related technologies, as more palatable to Iraq's Arab neighbors, whose support would be needed in the effort to contain Saddam long-term. Mr. Bush also issued a warning to Saddam not to take courage from the debate going on here in Washington. "Saddam should not read into our discussions about making the policy more effective any weakness in our position," he said. "As a matter of fact, instead of standing by and having a sanctions regime that's weak, we are going to put a sanctions regime in that is strong. And our policy will continue to be containment of Saddam."

It is good to get these reassurances from the president himself, but more will be needed in fairly short order. Saddam is most certainly watching and has in the past proved himself an expert on exploiting weakness and uncertainty, both at the White House and the United Nations. Furthermore, there is much at stake here, indeed, more even than decisions about Middle East politics and containment of an unscrupulous dictator.

In a sense, this was also the new administration's first encounter with the reality of a complex foreign policy issue, but it will not be the last, and there is still a way to go before policymaking becomes a smooth operation for the Bush foreign policy team. Before the election, when all were united in the goal of winning, it was still clear that differences would necessarily arise, particularly among the Reaganites and the Bushites. The conflict between an ideological and a pragmatic approach to policy-making will probably keep playing itself out, resulting in uncertainty. The rest of the world is watching as mixed signals come and go from NATO enlargement to the Balkans to Korea to the Middle East. The sooner the Bush White House can arrive at a consistent policy - and consistency with its highly credibly foreign policy program outlined during the presidential campaign - the better.

-------- korea

Mandela Suggests Park in Korea DMZ

InfoBeat News
PAUL SHIN Associated Press Writer
Afternoon Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406371891

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) _ Nelson Mandela proposed Monday that a ``peace park'' be built in the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas, one of the Cold War's last frontiers.

Mandela, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former president of South Africa, made the suggestion at a dinner with fellow prize winner South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, government officials said.

Kim said he would relay the proposal to North Korea and discuss it, the presidential press service said.

``If we move forward with the spirit of reconciliation and generosity your excellency showed, I believe there will be a bigger advancement in our history of reconciliation and cooperation (between the two Koreas),'' Kim said at the dinner.

Also Monday, Mandela toured an exhibit of photographs, books and sculptures dedicated to him.

``All this makes me feel close to South Korea, which has been fully democratized,'' Mandela said in front of a sculpture of him holding the prison bars in a solitary cell.

A fighter against racial separation, or apartheid, Mandela, now 82, lived 18 of his 27 years in prison in a solitary cell in South Africa.

Mandela flew into Seoul on Saturday for his first meeting with Kim.

Although they had never met, the two men kept in touch from afar. In 1995, Kim translated Mandela's autobiography, ``Long Walk to Freedom,'' into Korean.

When Kim ran for president two years later, he received a special gift from Mandela: an old wristwatch with a cracked leather band that Mandela wore in prison. Mandela hoped it would bring good luck to Kim, who went on to win the election

-------- space

Mission Done, Mir Space Station Will Plunge to Earth Next Week

New York Times
By WARREN L. LEARY
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/science/12CND-MIR.html

WASHINGTON, March 12 - After much speculation and many delays, Mir is finally coming down - hard, hot and soon.

The massive Mir space station, one of the most successful space ventures in history, is to end 15 years of circling the earth in about a week. With final nudging from the rockets of an attached cargo ship, Mir will dive into the atmosphere in a last, searing display of bravado as its blazing remains head for an isolated target spot in the South Pacific.

The space station, which was a pinnacle in the space program of the former Soviet Union and a source of pride in Russia, has been slowly sinking into lower orbits for months. In January, Russia sent an unmanned Progress cargo ship with extra fuel to Mir to guide it on a final controlled plunge into the ocean.

Mir, weighing more than 135 tons with all its connected modules and parts, will be the largest object ever brought down from space. Most of the station is expected to burn up as it enters the atmosphere, but 20 to 25 tons will probably continue to plunge toward the earth, including chunks weighing hundreds of pounds. Russia has spent months planning the descent and assuring the world that it can be done safely.

Last week the Russians changed their plan for bringing down Mir, which is in an orbit about 150 miles up and dropping more than a mile a day as atmospheric drag slows it. Instead of taking Mir out of orbit at the 150-mile altitude, as originally planned, they decided to let the station continue to descend ever faster and begin a series of rocket firings to guide it in when Mir reaches an altitude of about 137 miles.

``Mir's deorbit is tentatively set for March 20, give or take a day,'' said Viktor Blagov, deputy chief at Russia's mission control in Korolyov, near Moscow. Waiting until the station is closer leaves more fuel for the final maneuvers, officials said.

On Mir's final day in space, controllers plan to stabilize the slowly rolling station before the attached Progress freighter fires its engines at least twice to push the low point of the spacecraft's orbit deeper into the atmosphere at a point above the target area. When the station is aligned with its target, the Progress will perform a long final engine burn to drop Mir out of orbit and into the atmosphere at a steep angle toward its target in the Pacific.

Mir is now so close to the earth that scientists predict it will have come down on its own at the end of the month in an uncontrolled plunge somewhere along its flight path, which covers 80 percent of the planet. The Russians have worked hard to avoid this potentially destructive alternative and bring Mir down in a safe place.

Mir's remains are supposed to come down in the Pacific in an area 1,850 miles east of the southern tip of New Zealand, a region with no islands and little air and sea traffic. The debris is supposed to fall in an elliptical ``footprint'' midway between New Zealand and Chile, a target area perhaps 1,000 miles long, and about 120 miles wide at the beginning, tapering down to 20 or 25 miles at the end.

The Mir complex consists of a large core launched in 1986 and five major laboratory and systems modules attached over 10 years. Also aboard is a docking compartment for visiting American space shuttles and the Progress freighter. Four of the laboratory sections are attached at right angles to the core like a clover leaf and most of the segments have winglike solar panels attached to their sides.

As Mir dives into the atmosphere, experts said, aerodynamic forces will first strip off the solar panels and thermal radiators of sheet aluminum, which should flutter to the ocean. Ruptures caused by parts tearing off and air friction generating heat as high as 3,000 degrees will probably cause the pressurized modules to break loose and explode, creating a display of smoking, incandescent fragments plummeting through the sky.

Experts expect 40 propellant tanks, many large batteries, metal storage boxes and heavy metal bulkheads to survive re-entry to hit the ocean at the narrow end of the target area at speeds of up to 150 miles an hour. Some lighter debris, possibly including clothing and insulating foam, should float down into the broad end of the impact zone.

Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist for orbital debris studies at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, and other experts say the Russians have more experience bringing down used spacecraft than anyone else. Since 1978, they have taken five early Salyut space stations and 80 Progress spacecraft out of orbit in the same Pacific area, Mr. Johnson said.

``The most recent space station to descend over the Pacific was Salyut 6,'' he said. ``That weighed 40 tons and came down in July of 1982. The deorbiting technique is exactly the same. Mir's just a bit bigger.''

While experts are confident that the Russians can bring down Mir as planned, there are concerns. Japan, Australia and New Zealand, near Mir's final orbit, have set up monitoring groups that could rush aid to citizens should debris hit their countries. Last week, the 16 states of the South Pacific Island Forum, including Papua New Guinea and the Cook Islands, asked Russia for assurance that debris would not threaten them.

To help relieve this anxiety, the Russian Aviation and Space Agency took out a $200 million insurance package with three Russian companies, backed by Western insurance syndicates, to pay for any damage by Mir.

History shows some reason for concern when large spacecraft come down, though none are known to have caused serious injuries, deaths or major property damage.

When Mir's predecessor, Salyut 7, re-entered on Feb. 7, 1991, Soviet ground controllers ran low on fuel and tried to direct the 80,000-pound craft into the Atlantic Ocean by putting it into a tumble. The maneuver failed and Salyut 7 came in over Argentina, scattering debris over land.

Perhaps the most memorable re-entry was that of the first American space station, Skylab, on July 11, 1979. NASA engineers had limited control over the 165,000-pound station, which had no rockets to guide it in.

Controllers changed the Skylab's orientation in space to increase or reduce atmospheric drag to shift its entry point.

Skylab fell into the Indian Ocean, as NASA predicted, but the craft proved sturdier than engineers had predicted and did not break up as quickly as forecast.

Pieces traveled farther than expected, falling harmlessly in western Australia.

Dr. William Ailor, director of space debris studies for the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, Calif., said the chances were quite small that a person would be hurt by space debris, which is constantly raining in, unnoticed by most people. The risk of being hurt by a piece of a falling spacecraft is about one in a trillion, he said, compared with the 1 in 1.4 million chance of being hit by lightning.

But Dr. Ailor said Mir's controlled re-entry still posed risks because so many things could go wrong, like engine misfirings, the station tumbling too much or too little in its final stages or coming apart in an unexpected way.

``Everything has to go right for this to work as designed,'' he said. ``A lot of things can happen in the lower atmosphere that you can't predict.''

The United States has encouraged Russia for years to abandon Mir and concentrate its meager resources on the new International Space Station being built in orbit by a consortium of 16 nations, led by the United States and Russia. Now that Mir is coming down, NASA is careful to say that this is Russia's decision and that the United States is playing only a minor role by passing along tracking information.

Although NASA has no major role in Mir's re-entry, the agency is interested in what happens as a lesson that may apply when the larger International Space Station has to be brought down in 20 or 30 years, said Dr. Jack Bacon, a space station engineering expert at the Johnson Space Center.

``We are anxious to get any information we can about bringing in an object of this size so that we can refine our own re-entry scenarios,'' Dr. Bacon said.

Because Russia can track Mir only when it is over its territory, Moscow has asked the United States and Europe to monitor the space station's descent as well. Information from this will help Russian controllers refine their maneuvers and determine whether Mir comes down where it is supposed to.

The United States Space Command, which monitors 8,300 earthly objects in space from its headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., will use radar and telescopes to provide Russia with information about Mir's trajectory, and about atmospheric conditions.

Maj. Perry Nouis, a spokesman for the command, said the data would be fed to Johnson Space Center, which would then relay it to the Russian control center using high-speed links set up between the two for the International Space Station.

As the Russians fine-tune Mir's descent, Major Nouis said, the Air Force will relay increasingly precise predictions about where the station will enter the deep atmosphere on its final pass. About two hours before entry, the Space Command will issue its main prediction of the time Mir will leave orbit, plus or minus 15 minutes. Space Command involvement will end after it verifies that Mir is no longer in orbit, Major Nouis said.

The American tracking information will also be fed to the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, where it will be shared with the White House and interested agencies, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the State Department and the Federal Aviation Administration.

---

Russia buys $200 million in Mir insurance

USA Today
03/12/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-12-mir.htm

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia has taken out $200 million in insurance policies to cover possible damages after the Mir space station is dumped in the South Pacific this month, a space official was quoted as saying Sunday.

The 15-year-old Mir, once the crowning achievement of the Russian space program, has deteriorated in recent years and is to be taken out of orbit on March 20 in a controlled, fiery plunge into the Pacific Ocean between Australia and Chile.

Much of the 150-ton station is expected to burn up from atmospheric friction as it streaks toward Earth, but officials estimate that some 1,500 fragments weighing a total of up to 27 tons could reach the surface.

Although Russia has extensive experience in dumping spacecraft in the ocean - such as the cargo ships that supplied Mir - the prospect of the huge station's plunge has unsettled many. Japan has been especially concerned, because Mir is expected to pass over its territory on its final, low orbit.

The Russian Aerospace Agency this week reached agreements with three Russian insurance companies for damage restitution policies worth $200 million, agency spokesman Sergei Gorbunov said, according to the news agency Interfax.

The report said the policies' premiums cost the cash-strapped space program between $600,000 and $1.4 million of the insured amount.

Mir is being allowed to drift down from its normal orbit of about 250 miles to about 135 miles, at which point a cargo ship attached to the station is to fire its engines to push the Mir into its plunge.

As of Sunday evening, Mir had descended to an altitude of 153 miles, the ITAR-Tass news agency cited Mission Control as saying.

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

2 Stubborn Factions Divide Coming U.N. Meeting on Racism

New York Times
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/world/12RACE.html

UNITED NATIONS, March 9 - A four-day meeting intended to bring some coherence to the agenda of an international conference on racism in August ended today in Geneva with virtually every major issue still in dispute, human rights officials said.

European countries and a bloc of Asian, African and Latin American nations are growing increasingly divided over what the conference will address, said Michael Colson, executive director of U. N. Watch, a private monitoring group based in Geneva. The United States has stood largely on its own, he said, but supports Europe on many issues.

Some diplomats say it is too early to declare the conference agenda in trouble. "I don't think this meeting was ever intended to come to any final conclusions on the document," a Western diplomat said. "It was supposed to be an initial reading, and we have finally started to do that. You've got 100 or so delegations in the room and everyone is making suggestions."

Nevertheless, a second, previously unscheduled working-group session may now have to be planned.

Mr. Colson said India, Pakistan, Iran and Syria dominated the meeting, which began on Tuesday. The four have tried to limit discussion to the Asian and Middle Eastern platform adopted last month at a regional meeting in Iran to firm up the August agenda. "They are largely playing out of the same song book," he said.

Australia and New Zealand were barred from attending the Iran meeting by the Asian nations, which - together with Middle Eastern and Pacific nations - sought to curb all discussion of issues they did not want included on the agenda of the August conference, which is to be held in Durban, South Africa.

The theme of the conference is broad: racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance are all part of its title. That approach had encouraged groups around the world that say their experiences with discrimination are never heard in this kind of forum. But leaders of a number of groups found themselves barred from attending the Iran meeting, among them the Bahais and representatives of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Benny Widyono, a leader of Gandi, a relatively new Indonesian rights organization fighting for an end to racism and discriminatory laws against Indonesia's ethnic Chinese people, was among those who left the Iran meeting dissatisfied. In an interview here this week, he said neither his organization nor groups representing the ethnic Chinese of Malaysia had been able to get their cases included on the Asian agenda for Durban. Advocates for dalits, or untouchables, in India also remained unacknowledged.

"There are 43 legal documents in Indonesia that discriminate against minorities," Mr. Widyono said. "We wanted to ask for their repeal. Most of these were instituted by President Suharto as a punishment for all Chinese."

Mr. Widyono said he did not believe that participants in the Iran meeting had acted out of malice toward ethnic Chinese - an ethnic Papuan from Indonesia was also sidelined - but rather that the Iranians, backed by other large Asian nations, had organized the conference in a way that effectively kept unofficial campaigns from being aired.

Various groups feeling that they have been excluded from the planning of the conference will have another chance to lobby when a final preparatory meeting takes place in Geneva from May 21 to June 1.

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

5 reported dead in U.S. navy accident

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 3/12/2001

WASHINGTON, (AP) - A U.S. Navy plane accidentally dropped some form of munitions on a bombing range in Kuwait on Monday, killing five people, including four Americans, Pentagon officials said. Details were sketchy. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman would say only that there had been a "training accident" and that there were an unspecified number of casualties.

Other officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said five had been killed, including four Americans. The nationality of the fifth was not immediately known.

The accident happened at the Udari bombing range in Kuwait. The United States military has operated regularly from airfields and an Army base in Kuwait since the 1991 Gulf War, when U.S. forces expelled the occupying Iraqi army from the tiny Persian Gulf nation.

---

G.I. Don't Knows

"Slate Magazine"
By Scott Shuger
Monday, March 12, 2001, at 4:19 a.m. PT

Yesterday's LAT opinion page has an admirably clear puncturing by ex-Reagan administration Pentagon official Lawrence Korb of several myths about the U.S. military cited by defenders of a military spending increase, including President Bush: 1) If military compensation is adjusted to include the fair market value of their housing allowances, 99 percent of those in uniform do not qualify for food stamps; 2) Adjusting for inflation, the last Clinton defense budget was higher than the one Donald Rumsfeld presided over when he was defense secretary at the height of the Cold War; 3) During the 1990s, peacekeeping operations accounted for less than 2 percent of DOD spending. And only 3 percent of the active force and 2 percent of the total force including reserves were deployed in various non-war operations; 4) The percentage of quality recruits--high school grads and/or those making average or above on qualification tests--is higher now than at any time during the Reagan administration.

---

U.S. Navy Jet Drops Bomb Over Kuwait, Killing Several

New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/world/12CND-KUWAIT.html

A United States Navy carrier jet practicing a bombing run over Kuwait today accidentally dropped a 500-pound bomb on some military observers, killing four Americans and a New Zealander. At least 5 other soldiers were injured, among them two Kuwaitis.

The Navy aircraft, a F/A-18 Hornet, was reportedly flying from the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, an aircraft carrier deployed in the Persian Gulf. The F-18 was participating in annual military training exercises with Kuwait under a 10-year defense pact between the two countries.

The accident occurred at the Udairi military firing range in the desert of northwestern Kuwait, about 30 miles south of the border with Iraq. No Kuwaiti civilians were reported killed.

Two of the American fatalities were serving in the Air Force and two were in the Army. Their names have been withheld until the next of kin can be notified. The observer from New Zealand was identified as Acting Major John McNutt, 27.

Air Force Lt. Col. Joseph Lamarca, a spokesman at the United States Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Fla., said earlier that the numbers of dead and injured were still tentative.

The training accident took place shortly after 11 a.m. Eastern time, when it was already dusk in Kuwait.

The United States has maintained a military presence in Kuwait since driving out Iraqi forces during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. An estimated 5,000 Americans are stationed with the military in Kuwait.

At the start of a speech today in Panama City, Fla., President Bush took note of the deaths and asked his audience to observe a moment of silence.

"I'm reminded today of how dangerous service can be," Mr. Bush said. "We lost some servicemen today in Kuwait in a training accident."

---

Hungry soldiers

Washington Times
March 12, 2001
Inside the Beltway
John McCaslin
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inbeltway.htm

Sen. John McCain continues to warn about the "shocking disarmament" of the U.S. military under the Clinton administration.

"In the wake of our stunning victory in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, most Americans don't realize that the armed forces that won those battles no longer exists," Mr. McCain, a POW during the Vietnam War, writes on behalf of Citizens Against Government Waste.

Mr. McCain offers these statistics:

• Nearly 12,000 military personnel are on food stamps.

• The Army's strength has been cut in half - 40 percent of its helicopter fleet can't peform its missions.

• The 1999 Navy personnel shortage topped 18,000.

• The Air Force is projected to be 2,000 pilots short in 2002.

John McCaslin, a nationally syndicated columnist, can be reached at 202/636-3284 or by e-mail: mccasl@twtmail.com.

-------- OTHER

The Problems with Irradiated Food:
What the Research Says

From: magnu96196@aol.com
Mon, 12 Mar 2001 04:52:02 EST
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/rad-food/Factsheetprobswradfoodwhatresearch.htm

In the course of legalizing the irradiation of beef, chicken, pork, fruit, vegetables, eggs, juice, spices and sprouting seeds--a process that has spanned nearly 20 years--the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has dismissed or ignored a substantial body of evidence suggesting that irradiated food may not be safe for human consumption. The following is a sampling of research--appearing in scientific journals and other publications--that raise questions about the FDA's assertions that people who eat irradiated food have nothing to worry about.

Reproductive Problems, Cancer in Mammals

"A careful analysis by FDA of all [Army] data present (including 31 looseleaf notebooks of animal feeding test results) showed significant adverse effects produced in animals fed irradiated food... What were these adverse effects?... A decrease of 20.7 percent in surviving weaned rats... A 32.3 percent decrease in surviving progeny of dogs... Dogs weighing 11.3 percent less than animals on the control diets... Carcinomas of the pituitary gland, a particularly disturbing finding since this is an extremely rare type of malignant tumor."

--Spiher, A.T. "Food irradiation: An FDA report." FDA Papers, Oct. 1968.

Fatal Internal Bleeding in Rats (I)

"A significant number of rats consuming irradiated beef died from internal hemorrhage within 46 days, the first death of a male rat coming on the 11th day of feeding. This rat became sluggish on the 8th day of the regimen and started refusing food. He continued [to be] morbid during the next two days, did not eat any food, lost weight and appeared anemic. He was found dead on the 11th day. Post-mortem examination showed hemothorax [chest injury], the blood had not clotted; there was bleeding also in the epididymis [tubes at the back of the testes]."

--Metta, V.C. et al. "Vitamin K deficiency in rats induced by feeding of irradiated beef." Journal of Nutrition, 69:18-21, 1959. (Co-sponsored by the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army)

Fatal Internal Bleeding in Rats (II)

"Hemorrhagic death had occurred in all males fed irradiated diets by day 34... There is evidence to suggest that inefficient absorption of vitamins, i.e. vitamin K, from the intestinal tract may contribute to a deficiency state." [Note: Vitamin K plays a major role in blood clotting.]

-- Mellette, S.J. and Leone, L.A. "Influence of age, sex, strain of rat and fat soluble vitamins on hemorrhagic syndromes in rats fed irradiated beef." Federation Proceedings, 19:1045-1048, 1960. (Co-sponsored by the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army)

Fetal Deaths in Mice

"Freshly irradiated diets produced elevated levels of early deaths in [mice fetuses]... The increase in early deaths would suggest that the diet when irradiated has some mutagenic potential."

--Anderson, D. et al. "Irradiated laboratory animal diets: Dominant lethal studies in the mouse." Mutation Research, 80:333-345, 1981.

Embryo Deaths in Mice

"Feeding of mice for two months before mating with 50 percent of the standard complete diet irradiated with [gamma rays] provokes a significant increase of embryonal deaths,... probably to be interpreted as a dominant lethal mutation associated with gross chromosomal aberrations, such as breaks repeatedly found to be induced by irradiated materials."

--Moutschen-Dahmen, M. et al. "Pre-implantation death of mouse eggs caused by irradiated food." International Journal of Radiation Biology, 18:201-216, 1970.

Radioactive Organs and Excrement in Rats

"Considerable amounts of radioactivity were present in the liver, kidney, stomach, gastrointestinal tract, and blood serum of rats [fed irradiated sucrose solutions]... Radioactivity was present in urine and feces samples.

--De, A.K. et al. "Biochemical effects of irradiated sucrose solutions in the rat." Radiation Research, 37:202-215, 1969.

A Thalidomide Warning (I)

"The thalidomide disaster might have been prevented if an easily performed investigation of possible cytotoxic effects in plant cells had been made. It must be acknowledged that any compound causing [cellular] damage must be considered a potential hazard to any living cell or cell system--including man."

--Lofroth, G. "Toxic effects of irradiated foods." Nature, 211:302, 1966.

A Thalidomide Warning (II)

"Irradiating can bring about chemical transformations in food and food components resulting in the formation of potential mutagens, particularly hydrogen peroxide and various organic peroxides... It is now realized, especially since the thalidomide episode, that [older testing] protocols do not detect the more subtle population hazards such as mutagens and teratogens... In view of the serious consequences to the human population which could arise from a high level of induced mutations, it is desirable that protocols for irradiated food should include in vivo tests on mammals for possible mutagenicity."

--Schubert, J. "Mutagenicity and cytotoxicity of irradiated foods and food components." Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 41:873-904, 1969. (Co-sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and Food and Drug Administration)

A Host of Problems

"Numerous studies have been carried out to ascertain whether cytotoxic effects occur when unirradiated biological test systems are cultured or fed with irradiated media or food. In such studies, adverse physiological (growth retardation and inhibition), cytological (mitotic [cell division] inhibition and chromosome aberrations) and genetical (forward and reverse mutations) effects have been observed in a wide range of test systems, ranging from bacteriophages to human cells... The available data suggest that [a variety of free radicals] may act as the toxic and mutagenic agents."

--Kesavan, P.C. and Swaminathan, M.S. "Cytotoxic and mutagenic effects of irradiated substrates and food material." Radiation Botany, 11:253-281, 1971.

A Cancer Warning

"An increase in concentration of a mutagen in food by irradiation will increase the incidence of cancer... It will take four to six decades to demonstrate a statistically significant increase in cancer due to mutagens introduced into food by irradiation... When food irradiation is finally prohibited, several decades worth of people with increased cancer incidence will be in the pipeline."

--Tritsch, G.L. "Food Irradiation." Nutrition, 16:698-701, 2000.

Mutations in Fruit Flies

"An increase in the rate of mutation has been found in Drosophila melanogaster [fruit flies] reared on a basic medium that was irradiated with a sterilizing dose (150,000 rads) of cobalt-60 gamma rays... Visible changes were two to six times more frequent in the irradiated series than in the controls,... [such as] half-thorax, vestigial wings and incurved wings." [Note: Fruit flies have long been a dependable bellwether for determining the potential mutagenicity of substances.]

--Swaminathan, M.S. et al. "Mutations: Incidence in Drosophila melanogaster reared on irradiated medium." Science, 141:637-638, 1963.

Fatal Vitamin E Deficiency in Rats

"A considerable number of the second litter of the experimental group [of rats that ate irradiated beef] died... Symptoms observed were marked edema [fluid buildup] of the face, ruffled hair coat, general incoordination, spastic hopping gait, and sometimes complete loss of movement with dragging of the hind quarters. Those pups most severely affected often became completely prostrated a short time before death... In no case were these symptoms noted in the control group... The probability [is that the pups] were suffering from the characteristic muscular dystrophy syndrome (commonly referred to as nutritional muscular dystrophy) known to result from a marginal vitamin E intake."

--Poling, C.E. et al. "Growth, reproduction, survival and histopathology of rats fed beef irradiated with electrons." Food Research, 20:193-214, 1955.

Chromosomal Damage to Human Cells (I)

"Irradiated sucrose solutions ... were extremely toxic to human lymphocytes [white blood cells]. Mitoses [cell divisions] were inhibited... Degenerated mitoses were observed and the chromosomes were grossly damaged. The chromatin [DNA] material was clumped or the chromosomes appeared shattered or pulverized... In contrast, treatment with unirradiated sucrose at the same concentration had no apparent effect on the mitotic rate and the chromosomes were not visibly damaged." [Note: Such "in vitro" experiments are often used to determine the mutagenicity of substances.]

--Shaw, M.W. and Hayes, E. "Effects of irradiated sucrose on the chromosomes of human lymphocytes in vitro." Nature, 211:1254-1255, 1966.

Chromosomal Damage to Human Cells (II)

"Leukocyte [white blood cell] cultures from four different healthy human males [underwent] a considerable inhibition of mitosis and chromosome fragmentation. [Additional] research would be extremely prudent."

--Kesavan, P.C. and Swaminathan, M.S. "Cytotoxic and radiomimetic activity of irradiated culture medium on human leukocytes." Current Science, 16:403-404, 1966.

Toxic Chemical Formed in Food Containing Fat (I)

"When food containing fat is treated by ionizing radiation, a group of 2-alkylcyclobutanones [toxic chemicals] is formed... To date, there is no evidence that the cyclobutanones occur in unirradiated food... In vitro experiments using rat and human colon cells indicate that 2-dodecylcyclobutanone (2-DCB)... is clearly cytotoxic and genotoxic."

--Delincee, H. and Pool-Zobel, B. "Genotoxic properties of 2-dodecylcyclobutanone, a compound formed on irradiation of food containing fat." Radiation Physics and Chemistry, 52:39-42, 1998. (Co-sponsored by the International Consultative Group on Food Irradiation)

Comments:

As introduction, The Public Citizen Group, from which this URL data originates, was Founded by Ralph Nader in 1971.

Currently it looks like the food irradiation industry is being caught not doing the research on the mechnism for irradiation damage to food and how the free radical products and chemical decomposition compounds generated affect the cells of the body. Based on these oversights it appears the food irradiation industries are going to be sued for false advertising. With the data above it appears they will soon be sued for much more than false advertising.

The food irradiation appears much like the Govt selling of fluoridation without looking at the cell mechanism and how it long term damages the human immune system macrophage response in the lymph nodes. Some of the irradiation of food reactive chemical generation effects appear to be affecting this same mechanism.

Food irradiation was introduced based on kids dying from E-coli infections from beef processing. Some of this problem is being driven by damaged immune resistance from the many chemicals in the food chain that lower the human resistance to pathogens in general. Food irradiation was a kill the pathogen in food patch for that, but it appears the oversights from the industries poor research may drive even more diseases mechanisms and further damage human immune resistance, leading to a huge proliferation of diseases. In the long run, this is hardly a beneficial process.

Bottom line: Food irradiation appears harmful to human health and needs to be ended.

-------- alternative energy

Thai farmer's coconuts fuel green hopes

March 12, 2001
Story by Dominic Whiting
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10061

SAMUT SONGKRAM - A Thai farmer has found his own solution to global warming and the stagnation of Thailand's rural economy - his coconuts.

"Coconut trees can do everything," said Kitti Maneesrikul, a village primary school teacher and coconut farmer in Samut Songram province, 75 km (47 miles) south of Bangkok.

"You have food from the flesh, wood from the trunk, drink from the juice...and now I've had coconut oil in my car engine for four months," he said.

Environmentalists say Kitti's coconuts offer cheap and clean fuel which could be copied by others to help millions of poor farmers across Southeast Asia and other tropical regions.

Coconuts have long provided a staple income for Thai farmers but only recently has their oil been used for fuel.

Oil is extracted from the dried flesh of coconuts and used for frying. After using it for cooking, Kitti filters the oil and adds a small amount of kerosene - one part per 20 - to give it a little extra "kick".

The fuel is suitable for trucks and industrial engines, does more miles per gallon and is 30 percent cheaper than diesel.

Kitti and his family use the coconut oil in a pick-up truck and a lorry, saving about 5,000 baht ($115) a month.

"I make about 300 litres of fuel each week," he said. "I prefer to buy used coconut oil from street stall vendors who have used it to fry donuts, but you can use pure coconut oil.

"We are buying used oil which otherwise would be thrown away, often into the river. Secondly, the fuel is much cleaner than diesel."

GLOBAL WARMING

Kitti says burning coconut oil does not produce carbon dioxide - one of the causes of global warming.

The government, while keen to tap into the potential of Thailand's yield of more than a billion coconuts a year, says more research must be done. Recent research in Sweden has questioned the benefits of some alternative fuels, by suggesting that rapeseed oil, considered one of the best alternatives to fossil fuels, produces 10 times more cancer-causing pollutants than diesel.

"We know people have been using coconut oil, but we want to do more research before telling people they can use it," said an official at the National Energy Policy Office.

"But we do think it could be very useful for agricultural machines and fishing boats."

Other alternative fuels used in vehicles include ethanol in Sweden, Brazil, Australia, Canada and Mexico, and palm oil, which is being developed as a fuel in Malaysia.

The environmental group Greenpeace says governments in Southeast Asia are obstructing the up-take of renewable fuels.

"At the moment policy is in favour of large scale hydroelectric projects and fossil fuels, which are only cheap because of the huge government subsidies. No subsidies are being given to renewables," Greenpeace's Southeast Asia Campaign Manager Athena Ballesteros told Reuters.

"We are facing a climate emergency and it is time to embrace solutions - a switch away from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy," said Greenpeace energy campaigner Penrapee Noparumpa.

DIESEL UP, COCONUTS DOWN

With little government regulation over what people put in their engines, farmers who have been suffering from an economic crisis, high fuel costs and low commodity prices are turning to coconut oil because of the bottom line.

"We firstly decided to experiment with coconut oil in our vehicles because the price of diesel got so high and the price of coconuts fell from 10 baht to two," Kitti said. Kitti has had some success in spreading the use of his alternative fuel. His brother, Tanate, and several friends use it in engines on their shrimp farms, and the brothers are teaching others how to make it.

"Two or three people come to us each day, sometimes from other provinces, to see how we make it... About 10 families are using it here in the village and we've had no problems at all, but other people are afraid because they think their cars will be damaged or blow up," Tanate said.

In coconut-rich southern Thailand, the use of the oil is more widespread, and some ferries to the holiday island of Koh Samui are using it instead of diesel. One company running three boats estimates it saves 440,000 baht ($10,000) a month.

"People say only the rich have choices, but I think we've shown the poor can also take the future into their own hands," Kitti said.

---

Some envision time when oil won't be king

Washington Times
By Tom Carter THE WASHINGTON TIMES SPECIAL REPORT
March 12, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001312215130.htm

Revolutionaries are at the gate. It may be already too late. The age of oil is coming to an end.

When Saudi Sheik Ahmed Saki Yamani uttered those words last year he surely did not have Rep. Constance A. Morella in mind, but the Maryland Republican is a revolutionary. She recently bought and now drives a 60-miles-per-gallon Toyota Prius, a hybrid vehicle using both electric and gasoline power.

"Technology is the real enemy," the sheik warned members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting States (OPEC). "It will reduce oil consumption and increase production from other areas.

"The Stone Age came to an end not for a lack of stones, and the oil age will end but not for a lack of oil," said Sheik Yamani, a former Saudi oil minister, a founder of OPEC in its present form and now a private consultant in London.

Mrs. Morella, for her part, relishes her role as an iconoclastic crusader to end U.S. dependence on foreign oil.

"You should see my little green car. It is green just like the technology it represents," she said. "It is so good, technologically and in terms of saving gas."

Mrs. Morella is one of five members of Congress who have either bought or are on a waiting list for one of the innovative gasoline-electric hybrids, the first such car to be widely marketed. Christine Todd Whitman, the new chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, has looked into buying one.

Adds Mrs. Morella: "It's spacious, has trunk space. It's quiet and it gets better mileage in the city than on the highway. Everyone who sees it loves it."

Toyota this year expects to sell Americans 12,000 of the vehicles, which are powered by a hybrid electrical and internal combustion engine with almost zero emissions. Another 50,000 already are on the roads worldwide, mostly in Japan, and a hybrid minivan is about to go into production.

Not far behind, Honda has introduced its 70-mpg Insight, also a gasoline-electric hybrid. Ford is rolling out its hybrid 40-mpg Escape sport utility vehicle as well as a fuel-cell car in 2003. And DaimlerCrysler expects to have its hybrid - the HyPer - in commercial production before 2005.

"It is not here yet, but the oil endgame has begun," said Jason Denner of the Rocky Mountain Institute, an alternate technologies research and development company. "If everyone drove [a fuel-efficient car], we wouldn't have to import oil from OPEC."

Sheik Yamani "is right; it is going to happen," said Ed Porter, research manager of the American Petroleum Institute. "The question is when. The time frame is what is important. Even if there were a breakthrough today, it would take 10 to 20 years to make a difference in the market."

Brendon Prebo, a spokesman for the Ford Motor Co., said it is generally accepted that the automobile industry will be able to sell 100,000 low-emission, fuel-efficient vehicles a year in the United States by 2010.

The United States consumes almost 20 million barrels of oil a day, more than half of that - some 13 million barrels - for transportation. If 60-to-80-mpg vehicles ever win a significant share of the market, it will mean serious trouble for oil-producing nations.

"The real victims will be countries like Saudi Arabia with huge reserves, which they can do nothing with - the oil will stay in the ground forever," Sheik Yamani predicted.

Mr. Denner agreed, saying OPEC leaders like Saudi Arabia and Venezuela "are making their last play to make some money" before the age of oil comes to an end.

Others in Washington, especially those responsible for short-term energy concerns, are skeptical.

A three-year study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies concluded in February that U.S. dependency on foreign oil is growing along with consumption, and an energy-dependent United States will be at increasing risk of economic blackmail from hostile nations like Iraq and Iran.

While some 60 percent of the world's oil supply now comes from non-OPEC nations, the study predicted that by 2020 half of the world's petroleum needs "will be met from countries that pose a high risk of internal instability."

The study said a crisis or a military conflict is "highly likely" in one or more of the world's key energy-producing countries.

But a growing number of oil industry executives and analysts, environmentalists, technology gurus and futurists consider the sheik's soothsaying on the mark.

William Ford Jr., chairman of the Ford Motor Co., has said alternate technologies - in particular the fuel cell - will replace the internal combustion engine within 25 years.

"I believe fuel-cell vehicles will finally end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine as the dominant source of power for personal transportation," he said last October. "Fuel cells could be the predominant automotive power source in 25 years." He said his company would have a test fleet of fuel-cell vehicles on the road by the end of this year.

The U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of Defense (DoD) have for years been spending millions on research and development of alternative technologies to heat and cool buildings and to run everything from Bradley Fighting Vehicles to motor-pool cars.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DoD unit that, in conjunction with private enterprise, created the Internet and numerous silicon-chip innovations, is betting on the hydrogen fuel cell and other alternate technologies.

"Currently, there are several technologies that are being demonstrated on a large scale," said Robert Kripowicz, acting assistant secretary for fossil fuel in the Department of Energy.

"Commercial-scale technology will be introduced in the next two or three years. The technology is there. The problem is the high cost. There will be market penetration when the price comes down."

Control Risks Group (CRG), a private international security firm, recently warned its Fortune 500 business clients that the introduction of high-tech vehicles will change the world, possibly at the expense of their diversified investment portfolios.

"There is little doubt that the [U.S. federal alternative technologies program] will succeed in its initial aim. Widespread introduction of 80-miles-per-gallon vehicles, say from 2010, would have a major impact on world oil demand," said a CRG report released in October.

Should that happen, the report cautioned that foreign investors, the ruling families in the Middle East, who tend to buy their public support with oil revenues, "could lose crucial support and be removed."

In a domino effect, migrant laborers in the Middle East from Pakistan, India and the Philippines - who depend on oil and ancillary work to send remittances home -would be out of work, the report added.

On the positive side, reduced demand for oil could force Saudi Arabia and other oil-dependent economies to tighten their tax systems and liberalize their economies.

In an article in Foreign Affairs magazine, Amy Meyers Jaffe, senior economist for Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, and Robert A. Manning of the Council on Foreign Relations argued that cheap and abundant oil portends instability throughout the world.

"This scenario of plenty could destabilize oil-producing states, especially those in the ellipse stretching from the Persian Gulf to Russia," they wrote.

Several analysts noted that developing countries are embracing the newest technologies, for instance, by adopting cell phones and satellite communications without ever going through the stage of telephone lines strung on telephone poles.

"China is skipping 100 years of Alexander Graham Bell technology. That could happen with fuel-cell technology, too," said Sheila Lynch, of the Northeast Advanced Vehicle Consortium, which is funded in part by DARPA.

Another research paper, from the Thunderbird Graduate School of International Management, concludes "oil will cost $5 a barrel in 2010," compared with about $28 a barrel at present.

"The price of oil might be $5 a barrel in 2010 or $40, nobody really has any idea, but, the effect [of a price drop] for Venezuela would be catastrophic," said Norman Bailey, a senior fellow at the Potomac Foundation who specializes in Latin American oil.

The price of oil is determined by supply and demand. Global demand today is at about 73 million barrels a day. The world has an enormous supply - more than 1 trillion barrels of "recoverable" reserves, and while demand is growing, it is not growing fast enough to outstrip supply for at least 40 years, according to the American Petroleum Institute.

Add new discoveries, which are being found every day, and the ability to use newer, cheaper technologies to extract more of what is already known to be in the ground, and the estimate of recoverable reserves balloons from 1 trillion barrels to more than 4 trillion barrels.

"For all practical purposes, oil is abundant and inexpensive," said Ibrahim Owiesz, a professor of economics at Georgetown University who has studied the oil industry for 50 years.

That is why OPEC has been doing everything in its power for 30 years to control the supply. For the first 70 years of the 20th century, until the advent of OPEC, the price of oil was fairly constant, at under $2 a barrel.

Since then OPEC has managed, for the most part, to keep a handle on supply. It costs an OPEC nation between $1 and $1.50 to produce a barrel of oil. If OPEC nations can stay in agreement and dictate the amount of oil available on the world market, it can keep the price fairly high, in the range of $25 a barrel.

This cycle of oil scarcity and glut has been repeated at least three times in the past 30 years, causing wild price swings from a low of $8 a barrel in 1998 to $35 a barrel last August.

U.S. refineries, which turn the oil into heating oil, gasoline and other products, are producing at near capacity. No one has invested in building new ones for 20 years because environmental regulations make new refinery construction both expensive and risky.

The Prius, which sells for about $20,000 fully loaded, is three times as efficient as the average car powered by a gas-burning internal-combustion engine. The hybrid technology is seen by most experts as an interim technology that will be replaced when hydrogen fuel-cell technology becomes cheaper and more accessible.

Car enthusiasts, who find identity and spiritual succor in the rumble of a V-8 with a 400-horsepower engine, dismiss the "green cars" as appliances.

"The Honda Insight gets 70 miles per gallon and it costs only $18,500. The car gets zero gas emissions. The problem is nobody is buying them," said Jerry Taylor, director of natural resources at the Cato Institute, who recently went car shopping. "Nobody cares about fuel economy when fuel is relatively cheap."

Still, a lot of people are betting on hydrogen fuel cells as the power for future transportation.

"People won't accept vehicles that are not better than what we have today, but they will buy them - for the same reason people buy CDs instead of record albums. They are better. That time is coming, sooner than most people think," said Mr. Denner.

---

Renewable condor Cuisinarts

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • March 12, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-house-2001312144128.htm

The future looks rather dim, if, as House Science Committee Chairman Rep. Sherwood Boehlert stated at the first committee hearing of the 107th Congress, "renewables and . . . efficiency are the keys to our energy future."

Despite the $10.3 billion that U.S. taxpayers lavished on the research and development of renewable energy between 1978 and 1998, (according to a 1999 General Accounting Office report) non-hydro renewables, such as wind and solar power, made up less than 5 percent of total energy production in the United States in 1999 and only 2.5 percent of electricity generation.

Nor is that likely to increase anytime soon. According to committee witness Mary J. Hutzler, director of the Energy Department's Office of Integrated Analysis and Forecasting, "The share of total energy consumption that is derived from renewable sources" will be approximately the same in 2020 as it is today.

One reason is that power generated by fossil fuels still costs far less per kilowatt hour (kwh) than power generated by renewables. While the efficiency of renewables has increased, non-renewables have kept pace and are expected to continue to do so. Besides, renewables have other failings. Joel Darmstadter, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, testified to the committee that because "wind and solar generation are dependent on the weather and cannot always be dispatched to meet load, cost-per-kwh comparisons may understate the economic challenge faced by these technologies."

Moreover, renewable sources of energy also come with unique environmental costs. In 1999, the Audubon Society opposed the building of electricity-generating windmills in now-benighted California, calling them "condor Cuisinarts." The burning of biomass such as trees results in essentially the same chemical byproducts as burning coal, and even the thought of nuclear power is enough to send environmentalists scurrying into the trees.

Yet thanks in part to phantom fears of global warming, many environmentalists and policy-makers are strong advocates of the increased use of renewable energy resources. Mr. Boehlert said that for a variety of reasons, "business as usual" energy scenarios are unacceptable.

However, solutions advocated for increasing the demand for renewables are even less acceptable. Dr. John P. Holdren, a professor at Harvard in both the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and the Kennedy School of Government, advocated a variety of heavy-handed measures, including tighter fuel standards, and the implementation of "either a carbon tax or its equivalent in the form of a tradeable carbon-emissions permit system." Other committee witnesses advocated similar measures.

Mr. Boehlert argues that "renewable energy and energy efficiency need to be part of a comprehensive energy policy." However, their benefits should not be overestimated, and their costs should not be overlooked.

-------- energy

US seeks neighborhood help amid energy crisis

March 12, 2001
Story by Susan Schneider
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10059

MEXICO CITY - Faced with the prospect of rising oil prices, low crude stockpiles and lingering scarcity of power in the West, the United States on Friday enlisted the help of North American trade allies Canada and Mexico to help bail it out of an energy crisis.

U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, on the heels of meetings this week with Mexican Energy Minister Ernesto Martens and Canadian Natural Resources Minister Ralph Goodale in Mexico City, said the three nations agreed to work together to develop a unified energy strategy.

"At this historic meeting, we agreed on the need for a strategy that promotes regional integration and helps meet the needs of the people of North America," Abraham said in a prepared statement that provided no details.

The three-nation pact comes as the U.S. confronts a litany of energy woes. The troubles began last year as first gasoline and then heating fuel bills leaped to record levels, which was followed by rolling electricity blackouts in power-strapped California.

And the United States could soon face a new jump in the price it pays for crude as the powerful oil cartel OPEC cartel appears ready to cut global supplies for a second time in three months. The group will meet in Vienna next week.

As part of the move by the members of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico and the United States also agreed to work on increasing electricity infrastructure and other energy links along their shared 2,100 mile (3,400 km) frontier.

Mexico has already agreed to supply a small amount of electricity to power-strapped California, although Mexico - Latin America's second-largest economy - can provide little help in the short term since its own spare power capacity is low.

Mexico also ships the bulk of its oil exports northward, while the Untied States supplies Mexico with natural gas.

Canada, meanwhile, is already the largest supplier of energy to the United States, providing, for example, about 35 percent of the natural gas used by California, the most populous U.S. state.

HEMISPHERE-WIDE EFFORTS

U.S. President George W. Bush has said he wants to make energy security a priority of U.S. foreign policy and build strong ties with energy-producing nations in the Western Hemisphere.

To further this goal, energy ministers from Canada to Argentina were in Mexico City this week to talk about how to forge energy ties.

Abraham told reporters on Friday that he expected the hemisphere to cobble together an energy plan within the next couple months.

"I'll be reporting back to the president that there is a lot of interest across the board, I think, within the hemisphere, to work in a cooperative way to build relationships to integrate systems," said Abraham following a ceremony with Mexican President Vicente Fox.

As part of the Americas energy integration effort, the nations hope to free up trade, reform regulations to pave the way to efficiency and transparency, find strategies for rural electrification and improve conservation, said Canada's Goodale.

Mexico's Martens, meanwhile, said the fast-growing need for natural gas is already binding the region together.

"Without a doubt, natural gas is one of the principal agents that has accelerated regional integration," said Martens, whose country is the world's No. 5 oil producer.

-------- environment

Green groups push Bush for utility plant cleanups

Planet Ark
March 12, 2001
Story by Patrick Connole
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10058

WASHINGTON - A coalition of 13 organizations on Friday called on President George W. Bush to fulfill what they termed a presidential campaign pledge to clean-up pollution generated by electric power plants.

The groups, which include the American Lung Association, Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth, cited a Sept. 29 Bush campaign announcement that he would require "all power plants to meet clean air standards in order to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide within a reasonable period of time."

In a letter to Bush dated Friday, the groups said Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Christine Todd Whitman has already made public her support for the so-called "four pollutant" emission reductions.

Whitman on Thursday told Reuters that the agency was still formulating its carbon dioxide plan. Some lawmakers oppose regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, as do many energy and utility companies.

The letter to Bush said a four pollutant plan was needed.

"A comprehensive pollution control program for power plants, such as you outlined, is needed to address a wide range of urgent public health and environmental problems that threaten all Americans and the hospitable climate that blesses our planet," it said.

The EPA in two recent Supreme Court decisions won wide berth in setting clean air regulations, upsetting attempts by industry groups to force stricter guidelines on the agency's authority to write and enforce such rules.

Other groups signing the letter to Bush were: Americas Ocean Campaign, Environmental Defense, Izaak Walton League of America, League of Conservation Voters, National Environmental Trust, National Parks and Conservation Association, Natural Resources Defense Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Union of Concerned Scientists and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

----

The 72-ounce veggie burger?
With fears of Mad Cow Disease rising, this Texas steak house may have to expand its menu

MSNBC
01/03/12
By Geoffrey Cowley
NEWSWEEK
http://www.msnbc.com/news/538946.asp

March 12 issue - Peter Stent was a seasoned dairyman, but he had never seen anything like this. Just before Christmas, in 1984, one of his cows at Pitsham Farm in South Downs, England, started shedding weight, losing its balance and acting as skittish as a cat.

WHEN THE VET CAME to investigate, the animal was acting completely crazy-drooling, arching its back, waving its head, threatening its peers. And by the time it died six weeks later, Stent was seeing the same symptoms in other cows. Nine were soon dead, and no one could explain why. The vet dubbed the strange malady Pitsham Farm syndrome, since it didn't seem to exist anywhere else. Little did he know.

Alison Williams was 20 years old at the time, and living in the coastal village of Caernarfon, in north Wales. She was bright and outgoing, a business student who loved to sail and swim in the nearby mountain lakes. But her personality changed suddenly when she was 22. She lost interest in other people, her father recalls, and quit school to live at home with her parents and her brother. She still enjoyed the outdoors, but she took to sitting alone on her bed, staring out the window for hours at a time. By 1992, Alison was having what her doctors diagnosed as nervous breakdowns, and by 1995 she had grown paranoid and incontinent. "A month before she died, she went blind and lost use of her tongue," her dad recalls. "She spent her last five days in a coma."

SOMETHING BIGGER?

Anyone with a television has heard such stories, maybe even sussed out the connection between them. Mad-cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), has killed nearly 200,000 British and European cattle since it cropped up on Pitsham Farm. The human variant that Alison Williams contracted has claimed 94 lives as well. What few of us realize is that these tolls could mark the beginning of something vastly bigger. No one knows just how BSE first emerged. But once a few cattle contracted it, 20th-century farming practices guaranteed that millions more would follow. For 11 years following the Pitsham Farm episode, British exporters shipped the remains of BSE-infected cows all over the world, as cattle feed. The potentially tainted gruel reached more than 80 countries. And millions of people-not only in Europe but throughout Russia and Southeast Asia-have eaten cattle that were raised on it.

It's possible, of course, that the worst is already behind us. After dithering for a decade, governments in the United Kingdom and Europe have lately taken bold steps to control BSE. The number of bovine cases is now falling in Britain-and the United States has yet to even report one. American officials banned British cattle feed in 1988, as soon as scientists implicated it in BSE, and later barred the recycling of domestic cows as well. The U.S. government, the cattle industry and many experts now voice confidence in the nation's fire wall and say the risk to consumers is slight. In truth, however, America's safeguards and surveillance efforts are far weaker than most people realize. And in many of the developing countries that now face the greatest risk, such efforts are nonexistent. How many of the world's cattle are now silently incubating BSE? How many people are contracting it? The truth is, we don't know. "We have no idea how many deaths we're going to see in the coming years," says Dr. Frederic Saldmann, a French physician who has recently seen both cows and people stricken in his country. "We've been checkmated."

Mad cow is the creepiest in a family of disorders that can make Ebola look like chickenpox. Scientists are only beginning to understand these afflictions. Known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs, they arise spontaneously in species as varied as sheep, cattle, mink, deer and people. And once they take hold they can spread. Some TSEs stick to a single species, while others ignore such boundaries. But each of them is fatal and untreatable, and they all ravage the brain-usually after long latency periods-causing symptoms that can range from dementia to psychosis and paralysis. If the prevailing theory is right, they're caused not by germs but by "prions"-normal protein molecules that become infectious when folded into abnormal shapes. Prions are invisible to the immune system, yet tough enough to survive harsh solvents and extreme temperatures. You can freeze them, boil them, soak them in formaldehyde or carbolic acid or chloroform, and most will emerge no less deadly than they were.

ILL-TEMPERED SHEEP

The prion story starts in the 1730s, when shepherds in Britain and Europe described the disease we call scrapie. Like Peter Stent's cows, afflicted sheep would grow ill-tempered and wobbly. Then, over three to six months, they would suffer seizures, paralysis, blindness and death. Scrapie is still common in sheep, but doesn't seem to strike people. As far as we know, no one has ever gotten sick by eating infected mutton.

Dr. Carleton Gajdusek knew nothing of scrapie when he landed in Papua New Guinea in the 1950s. But Gajdusek, an American pediatrician and virologist employed by the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, soon encountered something similar. A strange neurological disease was killing the Fore people of the country's Eastern Highlands-especially the women and children. The Fore called the condition "kuru," which means shaking or shivering, and they knew its 16-month progression well: tremors and an unsteady gait, followed by slurred speech, joyless laughter and, finally, stupor and death.

The Fore knew kuru as a curse cast by sorcerers. Like most outsiders, Gajdusek suspected it was an epidemic disease, somehow related to the tribe's eating habits. Fore men supplemented their bean-and-sweet-potato diets with small game, but women and children lacked protein. The women had recently created a ritual to fill the gap. Instead of burying dead loved ones, they ate them. As Richard Rhodes recounts in his 1997 book, "Deadly Feasts," "They did not eat lepers or those who died of diarrhea, but the flesh of women killed by [kuru] they considered clean."

KURU AND CANNIBALISM

The link between kuru and cannibalism seemed clear enough. But as he examined living patients, Gajdusek saw no outward signs of infection-no fever, no inflammation-and culture tests turned up nothing suspicious in their spinal fluid. By sending autopsy samples to his colleagues back in Maryland, Gajdusek did learn that the patients' brains resembled those of people with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), a rare and fatal brain condition that German researchers had discovered in the 1920s. Both conditions filled the brain with "vacuoles," small cavities resembling the holes in a sponge. And despite some differences, they ran essentially the same course. But that only deepened the mystery. As far as anyone knew, CJD was just a biochemical fluke, a disease that strikes randomly and infrequently all over the world. Kuru was spreading like a plague.

Gajdusek published several reports on kuru over the next couple of years, and one of them caught the attention of Dr. William Hadlow, a scrapie expert. Hadlow noticed that the vacuoles in Gajdusek's kuru brains resembled those he'd seen in sheep. The symptoms sounded familiar, as well. In a letter to The Lancet, Hadlow listed the parallels between kuru and scrapie, and posed a tantalizing question. Studies had shown that healthy animals developed scrapie when injected with a sheep's diseased brain tissue. What would happen, he wondered, if you injected a healthy animal with brain tissue from a kuru victim? Would this disease spread in the same way?

To find out, Gajdusek and a colleague started injecting chimps and monkeys with the ground brains of Fore tribeswomen. By 1965 they had shown that kuru was transmissible. Gajdusek then repeated the experiment with brain tissue from an American CJD victim and got the same result. These astonishing discoveries helped control kuru in New Guinea. They also won Gajdusek a Nobel Prize. He had shown that scrapie, kuru and CJD could all spread and kill in the same manner. Unfortunately, the responsible pathogens were still unknown. And as it turned out, eating one's relatives was not the only way to contract them.

GLAND HARVESTING

While Gajdusek and his colleagues were investigating kuru, other scientists were pursuing the secrets of growth and maturation-and making equally thrilling discoveries. Endocrinologists had found a rich store of hormones in the pituitary, a pea-sized gland near the front of the brain. And by the early 1960s they had shown that one of these substances-human growth hormone-could help dwarves reach more normal heights. Human cadavers were the only known source of hGH, and demand was intense. So in 1963, the federal government created a National Pituitary Agency to harvest and distribute the glands. Over the next two decades, roughly 8,200 kids got hGH through the agency, and similar programs cropped up throughout Europe.

All seemed well until 1984, when a troubling pattern emerged. In its common "sporadic" form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is rare in people under 50. Yet patients who'd received growth-hormone injections were getting the disease in their 20s. By spring 1985 there were four such cases on record, and the implication was obvious: the medical establishment had created the high-tech equivalent of a Fore funerary feast. No one knew how many pituitary donors had been silently incubating CJD, or how many recipients were now set to die from it. But 27,000 of the world's children had received injections when the practice was stopped on April 20. As Dr. Paul Brown of the NIH wrote later that year, America now faced the "ominous possibility of a burgeoning [CJD] epidemic." (Twenty-two cases have now been recorded in U.S. hormone recipients, and new ones are still turning up each year.)

Britain faced an epidemic as well, and hormone recipients were not the only ones at risk. Peter Stent had just lost those nine cows when the hGH crisis came to light, and other English farmers were soon having similar experiences. In 1986, pathologists discovered that Pitsham Farm syndrome was yet another variation on scrapie, kuru and CJD-a bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. And when the toll continued to rise, health officials started considering defensive measures. In 1988, they mandated the destruction of stricken cows and halted the use of cows, sheep and other ruminant animals in cattle feed. Unfortunately, they underestimated the threat they faced.

TAINTED FEED

BSE was by now so rampant that existing feed supplies were infecting hundreds of cattle every week. But because most of the infected cows were still healthy, the epidemic appeared small. Instead of seizing all potentially tainted feed, the government gave farmers and feedlots five weeks to use up their inventories. And instead of barring cow and sheep offal from all feed products, the new rules focused narrowly on feed intended for British cows. Beef byproducts continued to circulate in pig and chicken feed, which proved impossible to segregate from cattle feed on farms and in factories. And because the new rules said nothing about exports, Britain's banned cattle feed flooded other countries for another eight years. From 1988 to 1996, Asian nations alone bought nearly a million tons.

Meanwhile, people continued to eat as much beef as ever. The British government dismissed concerns about the food supply, but there were soon clear signs that BSE could spread beyond cattle. The disease started cropping up in zoo animals and domestic cats, which were receiving beef byproducts in their feed. Then researchers succeeded at transmitting BSE from a cow to a pig through injections of brain tissue. Each finding caused a new wave of public concern, forcing the government to adopt new precautions. By late 1990, health officials had banned a list of highly infectious cow parts-the brain, spinal cord, spleen, thymus, tonsils and intestines-from all food products, human or animal. Yet the government continued to insist that people had no cause to worry.

"Beef is one of the great unifying symbols of our culture. The Roast Beef of Old England is a fetish, a household god, which has suddenly been revealed as a Trojan horse for our destruction." - THE GUARDIAN

Britain's chief medical officer was still denying any risk in 1993 as Alison Williams, the young Welsh woman, drifted into a stupor. But everything changed two years later, when pathologists examined the brains of Williams and several other young adults who had died of what looked like CJD. In addition to the spongiform vacuoles that are the hallmark of the disease, their brains were littered with large, flower-shaped plaques. And their lesions were concentrated not in the cerebral cortex (the usual locus of CJD damage) but in the cerebellum, a globular structure perched near the base of the brain. In short, their tissue samples had BSE written all over them. In 1996, Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell went before Parliament to announce that BSE had spawned a new human disease: a "variant of CJD," or vCJD. "Beef is one of the great unifying symbols of our culture," The Guardian lamented in an editorial. "The Roast Beef of Old England is a fetish, a household god, which has suddenly been revealed as a Trojan horse for our destruction."

FEWER CASES REPORTED

Finally, almost a decade after the first cow got sick, Britain banned any recycling of farm animals and stopped exporting meat-based cattle feed. The country has since spent billions destroying cows more than 30 months old, regardless of their apparent health, and disposing of the remains. Some 500,000 tons of ground carcass are now stored at 13 sites around the country. Sealed tankers transport the stuff to high-temperature incinerators. The ashes are then buried. Thanks to these belated efforts, British farmers are now reporting only 30 BSE cases a week, down from 1,000 or more in the early '90s.

For the rest of the world, the worst almost surely lies ahead. A dozen European countries have now reported BSE in native-born cows. Spain and Germany recently saw their first cases, after years of insisting that their herds had been spared. And the United Nations is urging non-European countries that imported British offal during the 1980s and '90s to consider themselves "at risk" for BSE and its human variant. vCJD is still concentrated overwhelmingly in the United Kingdom, home to 89 of the 94 the known cases. But the epidemic is young. France's first victim, Arnaud Eboli, was a 17-year-old martial-arts enthusiast when he fell ill three years ago. His mother, Dominique, recalls how he grew ever more agitated and irritable, often crying and sometimes screaming at her, "I'm going crazy! I have mad-cow disease!" He stopped walking or talking last May and lost consciousness in August, but his frail shell still occupies a bed at home. "I don't even remember what he was like anymore," his mother says.

The United States, to its credit, has shown foresight. Most experts believe we now have the safeguards in place to prevent widespread outbreaks. In the years since BSE was first recognized, the federal government has banned feed imports from affected countries, barred the use of domestic ruminants in cattle feed, even outlawed blood donations by people who spent more than six months in Britain between 1980 and 1996. Not a single mad cow has been reported in this country, and consumers seem confident that the meat they're eating is safe. "We have no indication that consumption is falling," says Alisa Harrison of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. "Actually, beef demand is on the increase."

NOT LOOKING HARD ENOUGH?

But it's a bit early to conclude that America is prion-proof. Spongiform encephalopathies have turned up in American sheep, deer, elk, mink and people in recent decades. And though BSE has not been seen in U.S. cattle, some experts suspect we're just not looking hard enough to find it. Over the past decade, animal-health officials have examined brain tissue from 12,000 "downer" (nonambulatory) cattle without finding any BSE. Some 2,300 downers tested negative last year-proving, says Gary Weber of the Beef Association, that the U.S. infection rate is fewer than one cow in a million. Other experts say he's wrongly assuming that only downer cattle can have BSE, when infected cows may look healthy for five years. Germany appeared BSE-free when it tested only downers, says Marcus Doherr, an epidemiologist who helped design Switzerland's testing program. "Now, with very intensive screening, they have found over 30 cases within two months."

If BSE did show up in this country, could we keep the disease from spreading? Agriculture officials say the ban on bovine cannibalism would prevent the kind of explosion Britain experienced early on. Perhaps, but this country's feed rules are neither as strict nor as well enforced as you might think. Since cows and sheep are prone to TSEs, the government bars the use of cow and sheep byproducts in their feed. But since pigs and poultry don't exhibit TSEs outside the laboratory, they can eat anything. That's not a problem in itself, unless pigs are more susceptible than we realize. The trouble is, it's nearly impossible to keep the different products apart-and a feed kernel the size of a peppercorn can transmit BSE. From 1988 until 1996, Britain used the current U.S. standard. There was so much cross-contamination-in rendering plants, in feedlots and in barnyards-that an estimated 60,000 cattle were infected as a result. Would that system work any better here? The record isn't encouraging. Just six weeks ago a Purina outlet in Gonzales, Texas, called a feedlot in Floresville to explain that an employee had inadvertently spiked a recent shipment of cattle feed with offal intended only for other animals. More than 1,200 cattle were already munching the stuff when the call came.

There is no evidence that the feed was tainted. Even so, Purina purchased the affected cattle and pledged to keep them out of the food chain (presumably by destroying them). Purina has also announced that it will stop using sheep or cattle in any of its products. And the American Feed Industry Association is now pushing its members to create separate "production lines" within their factories to prevent such commingling. But these reforms are voluntary, and the feed companies' past record doesn't inspire confidence. In a study published last fall, the General Accounting Office found that 20 percent of the 1,700 U.S. companies handling both restricted and unrestricted offal "did not have a system... to prevent commingling and cross contamination."

TOXIC TONICS?

The United States lags in other areas as well. Studies (and common sense) suggest that brain-destroying prions are more likely to show up in meat torn from a cow's spinal column than, say, a rump roast. Though Britain now bars the sale of such high-risk tissues, U.S. law still permits it (unless the tissue comes from a high-risk country). An American hot dog, for example, can contain up to 20 percent "mechanically separated meat," which the government describes as "a paste-like and batter-like meat product produced by forcing bones with attached edible meat under high pressure through a sieve ..." And because dietary supplements remain largely unregulated in this country, their manufacturers can peddle the most potentially dangerous tissues as tonics. Atrium Inc.'s Brain 360 promises 360mg of "raw brain concentrate (bovine)." Atrium's Pituitary Whole provides 40mg of raw pituitary, also from cows. And PhytoPharmica's Adrenal-Cortex Fractions include raw bovine lung, heart, kidney, spleen and brain, all in one caplet.

Grotesque oddities or public-health threats? It's impossible to say. We tend to assume the best until confronted with evidence to the contrary. But if the story of BSE teaches us anything, it's that paranoia pays. Who would have worried about eating a cheap British burger in 1985? Who would have deprived a stunted child of a chance to grow tall in the 1960s or '70s? Wendy Nofi reached nearly five feet with the help of human growth hormone. She married, had three kids and lived happily in Bethpage, N.Y., until 1995, when she started losing her balance. "She always felt like she was on a boat, kind of rocking," her husband, Michael, recalls. You know the rest of the story. Her vision blurred. She stopped walking and swallowing and lost all bowel and bladder control. By the time she died in 1998, she had spent two years on a feeding tube. "There were absolutely no guidelines for screening the pituitaries," her husband now marvels. "Really, they didn't screen anything." Of course not. No one had gotten sick.

With Anne Underwood in New York, Adam Rogers in Washington, Andrew Murrin Los Angeles, Karen Springen in Chicago, William Underhill and Michelle Chan in London and Scott Johnson in Paris.

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Food source for fish disappearing

InfoBeat News
TAMMY WEBBER Associated Press Writer
Morning Coffee Edition
3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369700

CHICAGO (AP) - A primary source of food for young fish is quickly disappearing from the Great Lakes, according to scientists who fear it could jeopardize decades of progress in restoring fish populations.

Diporeia, half-inch-long shrimplike crustaceans, have vanished from Lake Erie and are declining at alarming rates in lakes Michigan, Ontario and Huron _ a phenomenon scientists suspect is linked to zebra mussels, a Black Sea native that arrived in this country in the late 1980s.

``It's one of those issues that is just so scary because ... we have seen such recovery (of fish species) in the 30 years since the Clean Water Act was passed,'' said John Gannon, science coordinator at the U.S. Geological Survey's Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor, Mich. ``We had this wonderful success story running and then one of the main food sources starts to disappear.''

The demise of diporeia could have dire consequences for many types of fish, scientists said. Many fish that eat diporeia in turn are eaten by larger fish such as salmon and lake trout. The problem has not affected such sport fish, but white fish, which are commercially harvested, have suffered.

Exactly what is causing the disappearance of diporeia, which live on lake bottoms, remains a mystery.

One theory is that zebra mussels, thumbnail-sized mollusks that arrived in the ballast water of oceangoing ships, are competing with diporeia for the same food _ and winning, said Marc Tuchman, an environmental scientist in the Environmental Protection Agency's Great Lakes National Program Office in Chicago. Both dine on bacteria and algae, but the mussels multiply rapidly and can filter vast amounts of water.

There also is speculation that there is enough food but mussels are extracting from it a nutrient essential to diporeia, that mussels introduced a pathogen lethal to diporeia, or that a mucouslike substance excreted by mussels is killing diporeia, said Thomas Nalepa, a research biologist at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab in Ann Arbor. The lab is part of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.

Researchers have found no diporeia in Lake Erie since the early 1990s _ Tuchman said fisheries experts have reported a dramatic decline in rainbow smelt and young white fish there. Also, diporeia levels have collapsed in Lake Ontario and are disappearing from shallow waters of southern Lake Michigan.

Their numbers have declined in Lake Huron, but have not disappeared in any locations there yet, Tuchman said. In colder Lake Superior, where there are few zebra mussels, diporeia continue to thrive.

In the last few years, diporeia also have begun disappearing from deeper waters of northern Lake Michigan. In waters off Manistique, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, for example, researchers found 10,000 diporeia per square meter in 1997, but none in 2000.

Gannon said that is particularly alarming because white fish , which feed on diporeia and are important commercially, have made a phenomenal recovery in the upper Great Lakes in the last 15 years.

Fish may develop a taste for other food , such as mysis, a shrimplike organism similar to diporeia. But that could put a strain on mysis populations, researchers said. The EPA plans to monitor mysis and other fish food.

In areas of Lake Michigan where diporeia disappeared, white fish even began eating zebra mussels, which weren't very healthy for them, Nalepa said. He said the fish, whose guts became packed with shell material, were so skinny that fishermen could no longer get a fillet off them.

The diporeia decline has not yet affected sport fish such as trout and salmon because their food _ including alewives and smelt _ still are finding alternatives to diporeia, researchers said.

But the lack of diversity _ especially if bottom-feeding fish begin to decline _ eventually could affect popular species, they said.

``The fish that are affected now are not glamorous fish like trout or salmon,'' said Randy Owens, a fishery biologist studying Lake Ontario for the U.S. Geological Survey in Oswego, N.Y. ``It's just that, from a scientific standpoint, we will have big void in whole food web out here.

``We would be getting down to a system where we're just depending on a few fish to keep things going, instead of a wide variety of fish,'' he said. ``If something happens to the alewives and smelt, then it's crunch time on trout and salmon.''

Scientists say they fear the diporeia disappearance is just beginning, and say the area in which they are declining expands every year.

``It may be slow or it may be fast, but a decline is occurring, and we will see more and more impacts on fish,'' Nalepa said.

He said he believes the decline of diporeia is related to zebra mussels, although he's not sure how and, in some cases, there is no obvious connection. In St. Joseph, Mich., where diporeia disappeared within six months in 1992, researchers had never found a zebra mussel, he said.

But most disturbing is that there doesn't appear to be any way to stop the disappearance, Tuchman said.

``Unfortunately, all we can do is keep eye on it, monitor it, note the decline and hope it reverses,'' he said. ``There is nothing we can do.''

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Paper: Wood type leaks arsenic

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369412

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (AP) - A type of pressure-treated wood used to build several playgrounds, decks and picnic tables leaks arsenic at levels higher than state environmental officials consider safe, a newspaper's investigation found.

The wood, banned as environmentally hazardous in many countries, is sold in lumber stores across the United States. It is widely used in Florida because it stands up to termites, beetles and humidity.

The arsenic comes from chromated copper arsenate, a powerful pesticide injected into the wood that can leak into soil around it, The St. Petersburg Times reported Sunday based on a study from a laboratory hired by the newspaper.

Small doses of arsenic can be fatal, and long-term exposure can cause cancer, but it is unclear whether contact with arsenic leaking from posts and boards is dangerous. Most home supply stores sell picnic tables made of the wood, even though wood-treatment companies say it should never be used for cutting or food-preparation.

The laboratory conducted soil tests near the sunken posts at five wooden playgrounds. Every test detected levels of arsenic above the levels the state considers safe.

The wood industry says its studies show the wood is safe.

``Is it safe? The answer is: Yes, it is perfectly safe. We don't see a problem,'' said Scott Ramminger, president of the American Wood Preservers Institute.

The industry has fought efforts to ban CCA-treated lumber in Minnesota.

Switzerland, Vietnam and Indonesia have banned CCA-treated wood , and Japan, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Australia and New Zealand have restricted or proposed restrictions for it. Connecticut health officials issued a warning three years ago that said children who frequently play on CCA-treated playgrounds come in contact with a major source of arsenic.

The Environmental Protection Agency banned most arsenic pesticides years ago but made an exception for pressure-treated wood.

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British foot-and-mouth cases spread

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369505

LONDON (AP) - While British government officials insisted the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease was under control, 25 new cases were reported Sunday - the highest daily total so far.

The Agriculture Ministry confirmed a total of 164 cases in the United Kingdom since the disease was first identified in Britain on Feb. 20.

More than 114,000 animals have been destroyed, and another 30,000 are awaiting slaughter to keep the highly contagious disease from spreading further, the Agriculture Ministry said.

``It's under control,'' Agriculture Minister Nick Brown said Sunday. ``What we don't know is how much is incubating, which spread before the movement restrictions were put in place.''

Brown said he could not tell how long cases would continue to emerge.

``They all trace back to the original source of infectivity,'' he said. ``We are still dealing with outbreaks that had spread before the movement restrictions took place.''

He said nearly 500 veterinarians were dealing with the disease, including experts from the United States, Australia and continental Europe.

Livestock movement has been severely restricted. The European Union has closed all livestock markets and banned imports of meat, livestock and milk products from Britain in response to the disease.

Movement by other animals and by people in the countryside has been discouraged, and people making necessary trips are being asked to walking through troughs of disinfectant.

New cases reported around the country Sunday included outbreaks in Scotland, Wales, the Lake District of the northwest, Devonshire in the south, and Kent in the southeast.

Foot-and-mouth disease _ which strikes cloven-hoofed animals such as sheep, pigs and cows _ is easily spread by afflicted animals or by carriers such as humans, horses and wild animals. It can also become airborne, though officials say it seems to have spread through the air only several times during this outbreak.

Meat from an infected animal is safe to eat, but animals that recover from the disease produce less meat or milk. A country that imports livestock touched by the disease risks infecting its own herds, endangering its export business.

There have been no confirmed cases in the rest of Europe, but a farm in northern Germany was sealed off Sunday after calves showed symptoms similar to those of foot-and-mouth.

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U.K. vet urges meat ban compliance

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406371772

LONDON (AP) - Some farmers and others are not adhering to tight restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, imperiling the nationwide drive to bring the epidemic under control, Britain's chief veterinarian warned Monday.

Nine new outbreaks of the highly contagious livestock ailment were confirmed Monday, bringing the total number of cases to 173, officials said.

Livestock movement has been severely restricted since the epidemic started three weeks ago. The European Union has closed all livestock markets and banned imports of meat, livestock and milk products from Britain in response to the disease. Animal transport within Britain was also sharply curtailed.

Movement by people in the countryside has been discouraged, and those who travel to rural areas are being asked to walk through troughs of disinfectant.

Even so, chief veterinarian Jim Scudamore said there was ``anecdotal evidence that people have gone from one farm to another without taking necessary precautions.''

Sunday saw the confirmation of 25 new cases, the biggest one-day total so far. Agriculture Minister Nick Brown has insisted, however, that the outbreak is under control, despite ``second- and third-wave infections'' coming to light now.

Prime Minister Tony Blair met Monday with Brown and Scudamore to assess the continuing crisis. The disease poses no medical threat to humans but is devastating Britain's farming sector.

Destroying herds is considered the only way to eradicate the disease, and 116,000 animals have been killed since the outbreak began. Another 40,000 are marked for culling, agriculture officials said.

Foot-and-mouth disease - which strikes cloven-hoofed animals such as sheep, pigs and cows - is easily spread by afflicted animals or by carriers such as humans, horses and wild animals. It can also become airborne, though officials say it seems to have spread through the air only several times during this outbreak.

Meat from an infected animal is safe to eat, but animals that recover from the disease produce less meat or milk.

The outbreak has caused tensions between Britain and the Republic of Ireland, which fears the disease will make its way there from across the border in Northern Ireland. Ireland's natural resources minister, Hugh Byrne, has sharply criticized Britain's handling of the outbreak.

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Off Road Vehicles Create Conflict in California

Mon, 12 Mar 2001
By Cat Lazaroff
[HardGreenHerald] #8

DAVIS, California, March 9, 2001 (ENS) - Many public lands in California, ranging from national forests to wilderness areas, are becoming too damaged - and in some cases too dangerous - for the public to enjoy, finds a first of its kind report. The study by the California Wilderness Coalition blames dirt bikes and other off road vehicles for damaging and despoiling the state's public lands.

Based on an exhaustive examination of state and federal records, the 68 page study by the Davis based California Wilderness Coalition contains numerous on the ground case studies of areas throughout California that have been spoiled by off road vehicles (ORVs).

"It was shocking to unearth the widespread, off road vehicle damage to our deserts and forests," said Teri Shore, report author. "With so few wild places left to find peace and quiet, and so many animals disappearing from our landscape, it's time to reign in the motorized takeover of Californian's favorite places."

The report concludes that California's public resources, including soil, watersheds, habitat and water quality, are being severely degraded by poorly managed off road vehicle use. In addition, the outdoor experiences of numerous hikers, campers, equestrians and skiers are being ruined by conflicts with dirt bikes, snowmobiles and other ORVs, the report charges.

California contains a diverse range of natural habitats, ranging from a mountains to forests, rocky shorelines to desert lands. The Golden State is also among the most traveled regions of the U.S.

tortoise

Crushed desert tortoise in the Desert Tortoise Natural Area in the Mojave desert (Photo by Kristine Berry)

Each year, millions of tourists visit California to enjoy its scenic treasures. But many find it impossible to escape the din of motors, either on roads or off.

"No corner of the state has been spared the destruction of natural places by out of control off road vehicle use," said author Shore. "It's tragic how much permanent damage has been done to our lands by unmanaged off road use."

RIDING LEAVES PERMANENT SCARS

Motorized off road vehicles are made to be ridden in the backcountry. But their tracks are visible for generations, and their impacts often permanent.

Hundreds of thousands of these vehicles travel California's backcountry each year. When irresponsibly used, or improperly managed, they cause damage to sensitive soils, degrade critical wildlife habitat, trespass onto private property and closed areas, and shatter the quiet.

In the Jawbone and Dove Springs open riding areas, 20 miles north of the town of Mojave, decades of overuse have cleared topsoil from some areas, leaving behind bare bedrock. All but the largest shrubs have been stripped from more than 1,000 acres, and another 500 have been completely denuded.

The use is so heavy that, according to one report, after a rainfall, "the water formed a thick slurry of the loose soil, which flowed out over the canyon floor much like a lava flow, burying plants and trapping burrowing animals." Another study found that some upper slopes lost as much as one foot of surface soil over 13 years due to motorcycle use.

Wildlife has largely disappeared as well. Off road vehicles race across the land, crushing desert tortoises and their burrows, and impacting the kangaroo rat and pocket mouse populations as well.

In the Algodones Dunes of southeast California, considered California's off roading mecca, out of control ORV use has turned dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of off roaders visit the Algodones Dunes each year, creating a land management and public safety fiasco.

On crowded holiday weekends, lawlessness escalates to the point where near riot conditions prevail.

The dunes have become unsafe for family recreation activity due to the use of drugs and alcohol, and the problems of lawlessness that occur with such use, according to a Bureau of Land Management report. BLM rangers have been threatened and deliberately run over.

"The problem has advanced to the stage that the normal, law abiding citizens are fearful of using the area," said a recent BLM report.

ORV RULES HARD TO ENFORCE

Off road vehicle users regularly disregard the law and trespass into wilderness and other closed areas, as well as onto private property, the study found. Irresponsible off road vehicle use poses special problems for law enforcement, and irresponsible riders are extremely difficult to catch.

The case studies featured in the report describe damage to California's natural areas, but also detail how California residents, visitors and landowners are literally being run out by off road vehicles.

"The very places where California residents and visitors go to enjoy the peace and quite of the great outdoors are the same places where the silence is shattered by noisy dirt bikes and aggressive all terrain vehicles," said California Wilderness Coalition executive director Paul Spitler.

In the Lake Tahoe Basin, for example, illegal off road riding is rampant, the Coalition found.

In recent years, land managers in the basin have reported increased complaints about riding close to or inside residential areas, trespass into closed areas and wilderness, destruction of wet meadows and other highly sensitive areas, and new trails being cut into rehabilitated trails and roads.

According to the U.S. Forest Service, off road vehicle users have created new, unauthorized routes, creating erosion and sedimentation that may further diminish the clarity of California's most famous lake.

At the Knoxville Recreation Area, near Clear Lake, federal officials have abandoned their management and law enforcement responsibilities, opening the door to widespread abuse and lawlessness.

For more than 15 years, the remote chaparral hillsides and serpentine barrens of Knoxville Recreation Area have been subjected to mostly unregulated motorcycle riding, four wheeling and random target shooting.

Appliances, TVs, computers and other large items have been found blown up and riddled with bullet holes. Long time landowner Jim Erasmy warns his wife and women in general not to hike the area alone.

"Families come to the Knoxville area thinking that they have a safe place for their children to learn to ride. Instead they've entered an area with no rules, no road signs, and no real BLM presence," said Erasmy. "The risk of getting shot while riding off road vehicles, hiking, horseback riding ... is a real and ever present danger."

Sometimes, ORV use may have disastrous effects. The Willow Fire, which burned 63,000 acres in and around San Bernardino National Forest and destroyed several homes in 1999, "was strongly suspected to be from OHV riders leaving an unattended campfire," according to a government report.

WINTER PROVIDES NO RELIEF

Each winter, the Reds Meadow area of the eastern Sierra Nevada becomes a popular snowmobile playground. Numerous snowmobilers ignore the rules and cross into campgrounds, wilderness areas and even Devil's Postpile National Monument. In most cases, the offenders are never cited or even confronted by law enforcement officers.

Dozens of other violations have been reported to the Inyo National Forest, including willful trespass into wilderness, Devil's Postpile, and closed campgrounds; destruction of property; damage to vegetation; and physical threats to area residents.

Tops of trees were snapped off. Campgrounds, signs and private property were routinely wrecked by rogue riders. Sometimes the polluting machines crashed and overturned into creeks and streams, spilling gas and oil into waterways.

Bob Sollima, caretaker at Reds Meadow, describes the scene he witnesses in winter.

"It seems that all the snowmobile pilots had 'moto-jump mania,' getting air off anything including buildings and vehicles. In one winter, I tallied damages to fences, hitch rails, a stone barbecue, a roof, my truck, windshield, two tree squirrels, a pine marten, and a fire hydrant [that] was sheared off," Sollima said.

"Some of the snowmobile abuses I've seen in the Reds Meadow Valley over the years, in times of low snowpack, are environmental damage to treetops, meadows, trails, creeks, lakes and the river," Sollima continued. "I've seen two snowmobiles stuck in the San Joaquin River, two submerged in Sotcher Lake and three overturned in creeks, spilling gas and oil into the water."

A PLAN FOR THE FUTURE

A recent ORV policy issued by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management is "absolutely toothless," doing little to correct existing problems, charges Coalition executive director Spitler.

"We have done what the federal land management agencies have long failed to do: document the severe and widespread environmental impacts of unmanaged off road vehicle use," said Spitler. "Just as you would not allow a dirt bike to tear up your front yard, we should not allow dirt bikes and other off road vehicles to destroy California's unique national forests and other public lands."

The Coalition's report presents a 15 point plan for creating a more balanced and fair off road vehicle policy in California. This plan aims to:

Minimize damage to California's landscapes, Reduce conflicts between motorized recreationists and other public land users, Prevent the harassment of landowners by motorized recreationists, Reduce illegal riding and trespass into wilderness areas, and Balance motorized recreation with other public land uses, such as hiking, horseback riding, mountain biking, hunting, fishing and camping.

The plan proposes federal reforms, state legislative reforms and state administrative reforms aimed at determining appropriate ORV use and mapping approved areas, enforcing existing rules, and restoring damaged areas.

California's state government should increase state funding for repairing ORV damage and preventing future damage, the report suggests. Currently, the state provides millions of dollars each year to support the acquisition, development and operations of ORV facilities and areas on federally managed lands, through its ORV grants program.

But some of the responsibility for paying for ORV damages should fall on the users themselves, the Coalition proposes. Registration fees for ORVs should be linked to emissions levels, the report argues.

Higher emission vehicles - usually older models with less efficient engines - should be charged higher fees. The group says that this would create a positive incentive to reduce emissions from ORVs.

"This report documents for the first time how people and places across the state of California are suffering from out of control off road vehicle damage," said author Shore. "The deserts and forests that we all love and want to enjoy are being scarred forever and may never recover from decades of irresponsible off road vehicle use."

The report and supporting materials are available online at: http://www.calwild.org/pubs/reports/orv/presscenter.htm

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Oil Is a Matter Of National Security

New York Times
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/opinion/L12OIL.html

To the Editor:

Re your March 5 editorial "A Narrow Energy Bill," which opposed my National Energy Security bill:

The legislation would establish a balanced and comprehensive energy policy - a policy necessary to meet our growing energy demands and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

We rely on foreign markets to provide 56 percent of our oil - and that will rise to two-thirds by the end of the decade, putting much of our own fate and future, including how we heat our homes and schools, in the hands of foreign governments, often hostile to American interests.

We must not only encourage the use of alternative fuels and increase energy efficiency, but we must also boost our own domestic supplies. With rising energy costs expected to cut 2 percent off our economic growth, we simply cannot afford the alternative.

FRANK H. MURKOWSKI Washington, March 8, 2001 The writer, an Alaska Republican, is chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

•

To the Editor:

Passage of Senator Frank H. Murkowski's bill calling for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and national forests of the Rockies (editorial, March 5) would be the surest sign yet that we know the price of everything but the value of nothing.

Suddenly, because gas prices have risen and California messed up deregulation, the oil industry is trying to create a panic that would undo decades of wise conservation decisions. The hit list includes not only the Arctic refuge but also rare treasures like Bridger-Teton National Forest and the Red Desert of Wyoming, and the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana.

We have plenty of oil and natural gas reserves available for at least two decades without going to our last wild areas and replacing grizzlies and elk with derricks and pipelines.

BOB EKEY Regional Dir., Northern Rockies The Wilderness Society Bozeman, Mont., March 6, 2001

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Alcoa Goes Green

New York Times
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/opinion/L12ALC.html

To the Editor:

The assertion by Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill that retaining his Alcoa stock poses no conflict of interest is wrong (Business Day, March 9). From Day 1 he has positioned himself as a chief advocate of taking action on global warming. At President Bush's first cabinet meeting, Mr. O'Neill reportedly handed out a speech he gave in 1998 where he said that the two most important issues facing mankind were "nuclear holocaust" and "the potential for global warming."

High on environmental activists' list of preferred policies is increasing automobile fuel-efficiency standards. Such a policy would require greater use of aluminum in car manufacturing to lower vehicle weight. If Mr. O'Neill refuses to divest himself of his aluminum stock, he must stop his global warming lobbying campaign.

PAUL GEORGIA Washington, March 9, 2001 The writer is an environmental policy analyst, Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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Some British farmers may not be following rules

USA Today
03/12/2001 - Updated 07:20 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-12-foot.htm

LONDON (AP) - Some farmers and others are not adhering to tight restrictions aimed at stopping the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, imperiling the nationwide drive to bring the epidemic under control, Britain's chief veterinarian warned Monday.

Nine new outbreaks of the highly contagious livestock ailment were confirmed Monday, bringing the total number of cases to 173, officials said.

Livestock movement has been severely restricted since the epidemic started three weeks ago. The European Union has closed all livestock markets and banned imports of meat, livestock and milk products from Britain in response to the disease. Animal transport within Britain was also sharply curtailed.

Movement by people in the countryside has been discouraged, and those who travel to rural areas are being asked to walk through troughs of disinfectant.

Even so, chief veterinarian Jim Scudamore said there was "anecdotal evidence that people have gone from one farm to another without taking necessary precautions."

Sunday saw the confirmation of 25 new cases, the biggest one-day total so far. Agriculture Minister Nick Brown has insisted, however, that the outbreak is under control, despite "second- and third-wave infections" coming to light now.

Prime Minister Tony Blair met Monday with Brown and Scudamore to assess the continuing crisis. The disease poses no medical threat to humans but is devastating Britain's farming sector.

Destroying herds is considered the only way to eradicate the disease, and 116,000 animals have been killed since the outbreak began. Another 40,000 are marked for culling, agriculture officials said.

Foot-and-mouth disease - which strikes cloven-hoofed animals such as sheep, pigs and cows - is easily spread by afflicted animals or by carriers such as humans, horses and wild animals. It can also become airborne, though officials say it seems to have spread through the air only several times during this outbreak.

Meat from an infected animal is safe to eat, but animals that recover from the disease produce less meat or milk.

The outbreak has caused tensions between Britain and the Republic of Ireland, which fears the disease will make its way there from across the border in Northern Ireland. Ireland's natural resources minister, Hugh Byrne, has sharply criticized Britain's handling of the outbreak.

---

Trial begins in suspected Y2K terror plot

By Martin Kasindorf, USA TODAY
03/12/2001 - Updated 04:11 AM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-12-ytwok.htm

LOS ANGELES - An Algerian man arrested at the Canada-U.S. border with a carload of explosives goes on trial here today, charged with plotting bombings to devastate last year's millennium celebrations.

Seattle canceled a giant millennium party at the Space Needle after Ahmed Ressam was seized two weeks earlier in Port Angeles, Wash. He had a reservation at a motel near the 605-foot-tall landmark.

Last May, President Clinton linked Ressam with Islamic militant Osama bin Laden, saying the smuggled bombmaking materials were "the same material used by bin Laden in other places."

But facts in the international conspiracy case are murky. Federal prosecutors may not have all the answers regarding bin Laden's alleged involvement and the intended locations of bombings. "We don't know exactly what they're going to say once they get to trial," says Ressam's lawyer, federal public defender Tom Hillier.

Investigators theorize that planned targets were the Space Needle, New York City's Times Square or Los Angeles-area airports. A destructive incident at any of the sites might well have been the nation's worst incident of international terrorism since the World Trade Center explosion in New York City in 1993.

U.S. Customs agents stopped Ressam for questioning at a ferry terminal. At the wheel of a rental car, he was shaking nervously and "sweating gumdrops," officials said. A search of the trunk revealed four timing devices and enough explosives for three powerful bombs. Ressam bolted. He was tackled after a foot chase and an alleged carjacking attempt.

Ressam pleaded not guilty to a nine-count indictment. He faces at least 50 years in prison if convicted on all counts. One count alleges that Ressam conspired with another Algerian, fugitive Abdelmajid Dahoumane, to destroy unspecified buildings.

Ressam's arrest touched off a hunt for associates in the USA and Canada. Abdelghani Meskini and Mokhtar Haouari, who were neighbors in Algeria, were indicted in New York in January 2000 on charges of aiding Ressam in his U.S. mission. Meskini pleaded guilty to eight counts Thursday. He agreed to testify against Ressam if asked.

Richard Clarke, the White House chief of counterterrorism, says that bin Laden's al-Qa'eda network appeared to have been preparing simultaneous Y2K attacks aimed at Americans in Jordan, Yemen and the USA. Bombing attempts went awry or were foiled by arrests, Clarke said.

Last year, federal investigators say, Meskini informed them that Ressam's role in the scheme was to leave the explosives-laden car in a parking lot for pickup by someone else.

Prosecution documents suggest that Ressam learned how to make explosives in 1998 at a camp run by bin Laden in Afghanistan. Earlier, Algerian authorities had jailed him for 15 months as a suspected member of the violent, anti-government Armed Islamic Group. He fled Algeria in 1993. Deported from France for illegal entry, he moved to Montreal in 1994.

Ressam is on trial in absentia in Paris as an accused member of the radical Islamic "Roubaix gang," which is suspected in a subway bombing in 1996 and several bank robberies.

His U.S. trial was moved from Seattle because of pretrial publicity there and tighter security available at the federal courthouse here. Proceedings are expected to take a month.

The case has no known direct connection to the current New York City trial of four alleged followers of bin Laden. They are accused of conspiring in the bombings in 1998 of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The blasts killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

---

Potato talks

Washington Times
March 12, 2001
Embassy Row News and dispatches from the diplomatic corridor.
James Morrison
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-2001312211529.htm

U.S. and Canadian diplomats are always fond of promoting the close relations between the two countries. But trade disputes often end in food fights.

Such is the case with Prince Edward Island potatoes.

Canadian Agriculture Minister Lyle Vanclief came to Washington last week to try to persuade Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman to lift a ban on the potatoes imposed because of an outbreak of a potato fungus.

Canadian officials complain that the United States is taking advantage of what they insist is a minor outbreak of fungus to impose a wholesale ban on Prince Edward Island potatoes and benefit American potato growers.

Mr. Vanclief told Miss Veneman that the potato crop will rot within weeks unless Washington reopens the U.S. market.

"Hopefully, we will settle this soon," he told reporters.

"We'll continue to consult with the Canadian government and try to resolve the issue as soon as we can," Miss Veneman's spokesman, Kevin Herglotz, said.

Mr. Vanclief also argued against a ban on Canadian livestock, as proposed by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. The South Dakota Democrat said the United States must determine whether Canadian livestock is free of foot-and-mouth and "mad cow" diseases. Unlike the outbreaks in Europe, neither disease has been reported in the United States or Canada.

---

Disease spreads in Britain

Washington Times
March 12, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001312213142.htm

LONDON - While British government officials insisted the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease was under control, 25 new cases were reported yesterday - the highest daily total so far.

The Agriculture Ministry has confirmed 164 cases in the United Kingdom since the disease was first identified in Britain on Feb. 20.

More than 114,000 animals have been destroyed and another 30,000 are awaiting slaughter to keep the highly contagious disease from spreading further, the Agriculture Ministry said.

-------- land mines

Queen Noor urges US to lead on landmine ban

Planet Ark
USA: March 12, 2001
Story by Deborah Zabarenko
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10062

WASHINGTON - Jordan's Queen Noor urged the United States on Thursday to bring its leadership to a global ban on landmines, continuing a crusade of Britain's late Princess Diana.

Noting that the United States is one of a handful of hold-out nations who have not joined a two-year-old treaty to ban land=mines, the queen said U.S. support was key.

"Without the support of regional powers like Russia, China, India, Pakistan and especially the United States, the treaty will never achieve its aims," she said at a National Press Club luncheon. "Everyone who cares about this issue is deeply concerned that the United States has not joined the ban."

She said U.S. leadership was "essential" on landmines: "We need your influence to stigmatize landmine-abusing nations. We need your example and energy to rally the resources for the task."

The queen, widow of Jordan's late King Hussein, testified on Capitol Hill on the landmine issue on Wednesday, and praised a measure expected to be introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives to help the victims of landmines recover.

Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, said he planned to introduce the Landmines Survivors Assistance Act, which would authorize the president to provide foreign aid to pay for physical rehabilitation and prosthetics for landmine survivors.

The measure would also authorize support for disabilities advocates and educators abroad, and for efforts to provide training and counseling to the survivors themselves, Lantos said in a statement.

FIGHT AGAINST LANDMINES

Queen Noor's presence in Washington was part of a week-long push for the fight against landmines, and she called this an opportune moment to promote U.S. support for the treaty.

"I pray, God willing, that President (George W.) Bush will lead the United States to remove ... landmines, from the path walked by so many in the global community," the queen said.

She said she was motivated to join the movement against landmines because of "many, many years of direct personal contact with the humanitarian consequences of landmines planted in the Middle East."

Asked whether she was following in the footsteps of Princess Diana, who took up the landmine cause before her death in a 1997 Paris car crash, Queen Noor demurred.

"I wouldn't say I've followed in her footsteps because her contribution was unique, in that her public persona was unique, but ... I feel one of a large family who have been working on this issue for many decades and very privileged to work with so many who have given so much to a cause that is so important to so many around the world."

At an earlier event on Thursday, Jerry White, an American landmine survivor and head of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines, also called on Bush to join the anti-landmine campaign.

"Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide cannot walk roads without fear of a landmine explosion," White said. "How soon will your call to compassion lead the United States to the landmine ban?"

-------- police

More minorities report cop problems

InfoBeat News
3/12/2001
Morning Coffee Edition
KAREN GULLO Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369637

WASHINGTON (AP) - Blacks and Hispanics were twice as likely as whites to report the use of force in encounters with police, said a report that also showed black drivers were more likely than whites to be stopped, searched, handcuffed or ticketed than whites.

Two percent of blacks and Hispanics who had face-to-face encounters with police in 1999 reported force or threatened force, compared to just under one percent among whites, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics reported Sunday.

The report comes as Attorney General John Ashcroft has asked Congress to authorize a national study of racial profiling _ the practice by law enforcement officials of singling out people based on their race. Ashcroft said he wants to get a measure of how prevalent the practice is at local traffic stops.

``I think this is an issue of such importance and magnitude that we should ... make sure we do what's necessary to correct any abuse,'' said Ashcroft. ``It's wrong.''

Ashcroft, asked Sunday on ABC's ``This Week'' about previous racial profiling studies, said he was ready to act to stop the practice but wanted to first work with Congress on another study.

``Obviously, if it is not promptly undertaken then frankly we will move forward,'' he said.

The new Justice Department report said that while the 1999 survey of ``contacts'' between the public and police shows that black drivers are stopped more often than whites, that ``is not necessarily evidence of racial profiling.''

``To form evidence of racial profiling, the survey would have to show that ... blacks were no more likely than whites to violate traffic laws and police pulled over blacks at a higher rate than whites,'' the report said.

The survey didn't look at those factors, so it ``cannot settle the question of whether or to what extent racial profiling exists,'' the report said.

A little over 12 percent of black drivers were pulled over in 1999, compared to 10.4 percent of whites and 8.8 percent of Hispanics. Black and Hispanic drivers were twice as likely to be physically searched or have their vehicles searched and were more frequently ticketed than whites.

Overall, the study showed that 21 percent of U.S. citizens had encounters with police and force was involved in about 1 percent of those cases. About 422,000 people aged 16 or older out of a total of 44 million people who had encounters with the police said officers used or threatened to use force against them.

About one in four said they did something to provoke officers. The vast majority of those who experienced force were male and under age 32.

The survey involved over 80,000 people and was carried out during the last six months of 1999.

---

'Profiling' directive rallies two sides

Washington Times
By Steve Miller
March 12, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001312221911.htm

President Bush's instructions to federal agencies to begin collecting racial data on traffic and street stops, to make good on his promise to end racial profiling, has rallied both civil rights leaders and law enforcement officers.

The Rev. Al Sharpton on Wednesday made his way to Capitol Hill, beseeching any lawmaker who would listen to meet with "victims" of racial profiling.

This has upset law enforcement officers, including many black officers. "Some groups are never going to be satisfied," Maurice Foster, executive director of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement, says of those seeking to end profiling.

Profiling of all kinds is a long-standing method of police work, but the new urgency to end it has divided officers on the street and law enforcement administrators.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, announcing his assessment of profiling on March 1, said that through the compilation of data, "we would be able to develop a summary of the types of contacts that exist between federal law enforcement officials and the public, to estimate the extent of such contacts. . . ."

The attorney general supports Rep. John Conyers Jr., Michigan Democrat, in his advocacy of the Traffic Stops Statistics Study Act, which the last three Congresses have declined to enact.

Mr. Ashcroft's goal of implementing strict record-keeping of the racial data involving traffic and street stops is opposed by certain law enforcement officials because it could keep police officers off the streets, says Robert Scully, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations.

Furthermore, the fear is that the demand for record keeping at the federal level will be felt almost immediately at the municipal level.

"This is going to take more of the valuable time away from police work to do more administrative work," says Mr. Scully, whose group represents 225,000 police officers. "And when you see Congress scrambling to address an issue, you can bet on the local level that people will do the same."

Mr. Scully says the extra administrative work will undermine the quality of policing in many areas. "The overall effect will be less time on the street. The idea behind police work is to protect and to serve, you will be taking valuable time away from officers," he says.

The president's instructions don't play well on the streets, say many officers.

"You don't need to be in Washington to understand somebody's intuition," says Clyde Venson, executive director of the National United Law Enforcement Officers Association.

Profiling, minus its "racial" aspect, is acknowledged by most law enforcement groups to be a part of policing. The group of teen-agers -black, white or brown - wearing colors, for example, is generally a sign of gang affiliation.

"If I'm told that the suspects are a group of Hell's Angels, who do you think I'm going to be looking for?" says Sheriff A.J. Johnson of Eagle County, Colo.

The practice of racial profiling first gained public attention in the mid-1980s, when the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) released guidelines that "profiled" drug couriers in several states.

In 1986, the DEA's Operation Pipeline called on police departments across the country to search for narcotics traffickers on major highways.

The racial or ethnic background of typical dealers varied depending on the area. In some regions, for example, agencies were told that Hispanics and West Indians dominated the drug trade and therefore warranted extra scrutiny.

Sheriff Johnson thought the idea was good policing policy and tracked drug dealers driving through Colorado, using Operation Pipeline guidelines beginning in 1988. Then his deputies pulled over two black men with three pounds of crack cocaine in their car in 1989.

A civil lawsuit followed, charging the widespread use of profiling, that cost the department nearly $1 million in damages. Sheriff Johnson is no longer enthusiastic about profiling and is wary of the Bush administration's data-collecting initiative.

He says his department was ahead of others in that it routinely collected data of traffic stops on its own initiative. But in court, after using a procedure advocated by federal authorities, the collected figures were used as part of the plaintiff's case.

"I gathered a bunch of numbers and they were used against me," says Sheriff Johnson, who is now in his fifth term. "With this new idea, what is going to happen is that departments are going to start calculating their stops, and say, 'Well, I stopped X amount of blacks, so now I have to stop X amount of whites to balance it out.'

"And so much of the time you don't even know the race of the person you are pulling over."

At least eight states have undertaken studies of ticket issuances, searches and traffic stops over the past decade. Some have found no indication of profiling, such as a 1999 analysis of ticketing by state troopers in Texas.

New Jersey State Police compiled data in 1988 that showed that 76.3 percent of all drug and weapons arrests on the New Jersey Turnpike involved blacks, but administrators said race was not a factor in the arrests.

The president's instructions addresses an issue that may or may not be solved by data collection, says David Harris, a University of Toledo law professor who has written extensively about racial profiling.

"The effect of the data collection bill is the beginning of a process," Mr. Harris says. He notes the irony of a Republican president championing an issue that has been advocated mostly by Democrats.

"Already the Bush administration has pushed this further than the Clinton administration. [Clinton] never went to the Hill and said this is a huge priority," Mr. Harris said.

-------- spying

Somebody Will Be Watching You Eventually

Forbes
03.12.01, 12:01 AM ET
John C. Dvorak, Forbes.com
http://www.forbes.com/2001/03/12/0312dvorak.html

Imagine, as you drive, someone somewhere is watching your movement on a map on the Internet. They can tell exactly where you are and at what speed you are traveling. They can see where you've been for the last two weeks. How long you stayed. When you left. Is this cool or creepy? You tell me.

Probably cool if you have a fleet of trucks you need to monitor. So pave the way for @Road (nasdaq: ARDI - news - people). Located in Fremont, Calif., @Road uses the established telecommunications infrastructure to create systems that track and dispatch fleet vehicles, police, ambulances, school buses, cabs and eventually your spouse and kids.

@Road has pieced together a unique system using cell phone packet data networks, global positioning system satellite service and the World Wide Web to make a system that allows, for example, a radio car company to know exactly where each car is driving at any given moment. This is done with the Internet. A dispatcher can simply go to the @Road Web site and a map comes on the screen with all the information presented graphically and downloadable for analysis.

Its main product, FleetASAP, costs about $300 to $500 per vehicle for installation and about $50 per month per vehicle to operate. It consists of a small message console/computer that stores and forwards detailed information about location and movement of the vehicle interface to a global positioning system receiver all hooked to a dual-mode cell phone. The cell phone is attached to the unit via the auxiliary connector and transmits telemetry data and messages back and forth between the driver and the dispatcher over the various low-speed (19.2 kbps) data networks that operate in parallel with the cell phone system (with identical coverage).

The two primary data networks used by @Road are CDPD (cellular digital packet data, used by AT&T [nyse: T] and others) and the newer iDEN (integrated dispatch enhanced network) developed by Motorola (nyse: MOT - news - people) and used by Nextel (nasdaq: NXTL - news - people). The console/computer stores telemetry data during any voice calls, then forwards them over the packet data network when the caller is finished.

By using three in-place technologies (the Web, CDPD/iDEN and GPS), @Road avoids the costly expenses of previous monitoring schemes that required dedicated triangulation radio systems and infrastructure development. More importantly, @Road has managed to get a patent on its business method and infrastructure utilization.

There is no reason why @Road can't become the standard in the industry. It has about 35,000 customers and according to CFO Tom Hoster, it needs around 200,000 customers to get to the break-even point. The company, which reported a loss of $48.8 million on revenue of $10.6 million over the past 12 months, expects to break even sometime next year. After that, profits should soar due to the subscription income that Hoster sees as a razor blade model for making money. The stock looks like an interesting speculation as it hovers around $3 after reaching $9.13 on its Sept. 29 IPO.

For operators of mobile fleets, the benefits of such a system are obvious. The system allows employers to better monitor activities of drivers and is particularly appealing to dispatchers who can now orchestrate the fleet. School districts can install the system in school buses and parents can go on the Web and see exactly where their children's bus is on a map. "This is particularly important in places like Minnesota where you don't want to send a child out for the bus in below-freezing weather when the bus is miles away," says John Lankes, vice president of product development.

But it's the consumer angle that I find most fascinating. The company confirmed that it will roll out an inexpensive consumer service to eventually compete with General Motors' (nyse: GM - news - people) OnStar. Because the system "knows" where you are, you can ask vague questions such as "Computer, where is the nearest gas station?" and get meaningful answers. It should also impinge companies like LoJack by providing a universal way of monitoring vehicle location.

The future is dicey, though. A consumer system could eventually incorporate Bluetooth wireless technology. This would allow the @Road device to wirelessly connect to your cell phone via the Bluetooth wireless protocol, which is designed for devices such as this to transparently communicate. For example, Becky gets in the car and the car would link with the cell phone and allow the car to be monitored remotely. This would happen automatically. The phone would forward the telemetry information as needed to the @Road system and be available for monitoring over any computer with a Web browser. Dad could go to the Web and see exactly where Becky has gone and where she is parked.

And this immediately leads to the hot topic of the next decade: privacy. At a visit to the @Road facility, I sensed that the company wasn't too keen to deal with these issues, hoping that perhaps the concept of opt-in would prevail. Privacy apologists are always talking about opt-in. Broadly speaking it means "option to go in." The idea behind opt-in is that nothing works unless you tell the system you want it to work. You, for example, "opt-in" to be tracked. But in the case of family monitoring, the parents will naturally opt-in for the child. Wives will opt-in for the husband.

The next generation of GPS-equipped cell phones combined with Bluetooth technology and systems like the @Road online maps will make it effortless to track and record your every move. The only way out of this watch-dog world is to turn off the systems. But how many people are willing to disconnect from their cell phone lifestyle nowadays? Nobody, is my guess. @Road is on to something.

---

Sharon to ask Bush to release spy

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369496

JERUSALEM (AP) - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Sunday he would ask President Bush to release a convicted Israeli spy when the two leaders meet next week.

Jonathan Pollard, a former civilian analyst for the U.S. Navy, is serving a life sentence at a federal prison in Butner, N.C. He was convicted in 1985 of spying for Israel.

``I think that it will be very, very important if Jonathan Pollard will be freed after so many years in prison,'' Sharon told CNN in an interview Sunday.

Sharon and Bush will meet March 20 in Washington for the first time since taking their respective offices. When asked if he will use the opportunity to seek Pollard's release, Sharon said ``I'll do that.''

A spokesman for Sharon, Raanan Gissin, said that the agenda of the Sharon-Bush meeting had not been finalized, but ``no doubt this is one of the issues that would be on the agenda.''

``It's a moral obligation to fight for someone who served the state of Israel,'' Gissin said.

It was a ``definite mistake'' for Israel to recruit Pollard, Gissin said. ``But it's time to put things behind us and let him go after he served for so long.''

The Pollard case raises strong feelings of loyalty to the state in Israel, especially among right-wingers. Since nationalists helped sweep Sharon to a landslide victory over Ehud Barak in Feb. 6 elections, the premier is expected to push the United States to release Pollard.

Barak repeatedly asked President Clinton to free Pollard, who was convicted of espionage for giving Israel tens of thousands of top-secret documents.

Clinton reportedly considered releasing Pollard on two occasions as part of Israeli-Palestinian peace deal in an effort to encourage the Israeli public to accept painful concessions to the Palestinians.

A 1998 request for Pollard's release nearly derailed a U.S.-brokered accord when then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly linked his agreement to the deal with clemency for Pollard. The Clinton administration considered his release again when the president issued pardons before leaving office in January, but Pollard was not on the list.

Israel has acknowledged that Pollard was its agent and every Israeli prime minister has asked the United States to release him.

---

Ashcroft orders FBI security review

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369519

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Justice Department's internal watchdog will investigate FBI security procedures in light of charges that former agent Robert P. Hanssen sold U.S. secrets to Russia for 15 years without being detected.

The inspector general's inquiry, ordered by Attorney General John Ashcroft , could lead to a recommendation of discipline ``if there was any wrongdoing by anybody aside from Hanssen in this case,'' department spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said Sunday.

A similar investigation by the CIA's inspector general investigation in 1994 led to the reprimand of 11 senior intelligence officers in the Aldrich Ames spy case.

This IG's investigation will be conducted simultaneously with a separate review ordered by the Justice Department immediately after Hanssen's arrest last month. William Webster, a former CIA and FBI director, is evaluating the FBI's internal security procedures and will recommend changes to prevent future espionage cases.

The IG general would be ``following avenues that might not otherwise be determined productive avenues for examination'' by Webster, Ashcroft said Sunday on ABC's ``This Week.''

He said Hanssen, a 25-year FBI veteran and counterintelligence expert, was responsible for ``a grave loss'' in national security.

Hanssen, 56, is accused of giving Moscow 6,000 pages of secret U.S. documents since 1985 in exchange for than $1.4 million in cash and diamonds. He was arrested Feb. 18 after authorities said he dropped off a package of documents at a Virginia park for his Russian contacts

Congressional leaders sought the investigation, Tucker said. In 1994, after Ames' arrest, they also pressed for answers and threatened CIA budget cuts.

Ames, a veteran CIA officer, spied for the former Soviet Union for more than eight years, authorities said. He pleaded guilty in 1994 and was sentenced to life in prison, avoiding a trial and the prospect that the CIA would be pressured to disclose sensitive information.

Ashcroft would not say if there is an effort to reach a plea agreement with Hanssen, but he said officials wanted to ``maximize our ability to protect the national interests.''

The FBI was criticized after Ames' arrest that time for not doing enough to determine how he supplied sensitive information to the Soviet Union. As part of the CIA investigation, the FBI was instructed to enhance training and communications to avoid similar spy problems.

FBI spokesman John Collingwood said recommendations made in the inspector general's 1997 report were implemented and had a direct bearing on Hanssen's arrest.

---

Algerian faces conspiracy charges

InfoBeat News
LINDA DEUTSCH AP Special Correspondent
Afternoon Edition - 3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406372254

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Fifteen months after his arrest threw Seattle into pre-millennium panic, an Algerian man faces trial for terrorist conspiracy charges in a case likely to add pieces to the puzzle of Islamic terror groups.

Ahmed Ressam, 33, said to be a graduate of Osama bin Laden's training camp for terrorists, was set to go on trial Monday in federal court. It would be the second ongoing trial probing bin Laden's shadowy organization.

Ressam is accused of entering Washington state aboard a ferry from Canada with a car loaded with bomb making materials. His intention, authorities say, was to set off explosions that would kill hundreds at U.S. millennium celebrations.

His shocking arrest was one factor that motivated Seattle officials to cancel celebrations at the Space Needle.

Federal prosecutors say the arrest exposed an international terrorist plot that has resulted in three other arrests in Washington, Montreal and New York.

Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council adviser in charge of counterterrorism at the time, has said that bin Laden planned to hit U.S. targets worldwide in the first days of 2000, causing hundreds of casualties.

``What if January last year had started with 1,000 Americans dead at six or seven locations around the world?'' Clarke has said. ``We came very close to having that happen.''

He said that attacks were thwarted by arrests including the apprehension of Ressam by customs authorities at Port Angeles, Wash. on Dec. 14, 1999. Authorities believe that Ressam planned several West Coast attacks at the New Year.

Bin Laden, who lives in Afghanistan, is a Saudi millionaire and the alleged mastermind of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people. Authorities have linked bin Laden to the Oct. 12 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, when two suicide bombers detonated their explosives-packed boat next to the warship as it refueled in Aden, killing 17 U.S. sailors and wounding 39.

Four men are currently on trial in New York for the embassy bombings. Federal prosecutors there have tried to the men to bin Laden, who also is charged in the blasts but remains at large. Terrorism experts say Ressam and several others implicated with him in the millennium plot trained in Afghanistan camps where bin Laden's Al Qaida group develops terrorists.

Ressam's federal trial was transferred to Los Angeles because of widespread publicity in Washington state.

He is currently on trial in absentia in France where prosecutors allege he was part of a group that bombed a Paris subway in 1996 and more recently was the alleged Montreal link in a network that supplied false passports and documents to Islamic militants worldwide.

According to a revised indictment filed in February, U.S. prosecutors may go further than the French in trying to link bin Laden to Ressam's ``cell,'' which allegedly includes the other Algerians arrested in the Northeast.

One of those men, Abdel Ghani Meskini, 33, pleaded guilty in New York last week to federal conspiracy charges in connection with Ressam's alleged explosives smuggling. He agreed to cooperate with the government. Another man faces trial in New York, and a third may still be at large.

---
Ashcroft promises to probe FBI's security procedures

March 12, 2001
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001312223214.htm

Attorney General John Ashcroft said yesterday that the FBI will be examined in an internal Justice Department probe to determine how accused former agent Robert Philip Hanssen managed to sell secrets to Russia for 15 years without being detected.

Making the talk show rounds yesterday, Mr. Ashcroft also said that the department would review procedures regarding presidential pardons and answered numerous questions on race issues.

The usually reticent Mr. Ashcroft discussed the fallout of espionage charges against Mr. Hanssen, a counterintelligence expert who had worked at the FBI for 27 years.

Mr. Ashcroft said on ABC's "This Week" that the agency would be scrutinized in an internal Justice Department investigation to determine how Mr. Hanssen, who is charged with selling intelligence information to the Soviet Union and then to Russia, was able to do so without being noticed.

The attorney general said he had ordered the department's inspector general to review FBI security procedures. Mr. Ashcroft said the inspector general would be "following avenues that might not otherwise be determined productive avenues for examination."

He added that Mr. Hanssen was responsible for "a grave loss" in national security.

Mr. Ashcroft also discussed the subject of President Clinton's last-minute pardons on "Fox News Sunday."

He said the Justice Department is reviewing its procedures to ensure that federal prosecutors and crime victims are made aware of clemency applications.

Mr. Ashcroft said he was "troubled about a variety of things in relation to the pardons. I think pardons ought to be used to correct problems in the justice system, not to reward friends or otherwise."

The attorney general said he has decided to review procedures so prosecutors and victims "are adequately heard" when the department is considering a pardon.

The Bush administration has said that White House Counsel Al Gonzales was working with the Justice Department on a general review of policies, with an eye toward developing rules for issuing presidential pardons.

"Obviously this president is concerned that he do those things which are appropriate, and we're reviewing our pardon procedures to make sure that we provide him with the best possible basis for his decision-making," Mr. Ashcroft said. "And we all know that it is the president's decision to make as to whether or not pardons are granted."

Mr. Ashcroft also defended his stance on the nomination of Missouri Supreme Court Justice Ronnie White, who was Mr. Clinton's nominee in 1999 for a seat on the federal bench in Missouri.

The attorney general, at that time a Missouri senator, called Justice White "pro-criminal" and did not support his nomination.

"I don't believe I made a mistake in representing his record," Mr. Ashcroft said on NBC's "Meet the Press." He added that, if placed in the same circumstances, he would do the same thing again.

Mr. Ashcroft's opposition to the White nomination was viewed by many black leaders as a sign of his insensitivity on race issues. He has been trying to improve relations with black leaders since his congressional approval as attorney general in January.

Mr. Ashcroft has lunched with the Congressional Black Caucus, issued a mandate to lawmakers to assemble a bill that will address racial profiling and, yesterday, noted that he has asked that eight new attorneys be assigned to follow voting rights issues.

Mr. Ashcroft said on "Fox News Sunday" that he supported a "special program to make sure that we not only assure the right of individuals to have access to voting locations, and that every citizen understands that he or she is eligible to vote when properly registered, but that we also have the right kind of integrity in the voting process."

Referring to accusations by many black leaders that during the presidential election in Florida minorities were barred from access to the voting booths, Mr. Ashcroft said that if there was evidence that lawfully registered voters had been denied their right to vote, "the Justice Department is interested. And when we find credible evidence that would support a prosecution, we'll make that prosecution."

--------

Inside Russia's Hacking Culture

by Michelle Delio
Mar. 12, 2001 PST
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,42346,00.html

Security experts were not surprised by the FBI's warning last week that more than 1 million credit card numbers have been stolen from e-commerce websites in the last 12 months by crackers who took advantage of a hole that could have been patched with software that was made available three years ago.

But a bit of intrigue was added to that report: Most of the dirty work was being done by "organized hacking" groups in Russia and the Ukraine.

Security experts weren't surprised about that, either.

Many of their peers in the Western world say Eastern Europe's computer crackers and hackers are the most skillful in the world -- far superior to the so-called "script kiddies" who have gained a fair amount of notoriety.

"We call Russia the Hackzone because there are so many of us here, and we are so good at what we do," said Igor Kovalyev, a self-described cracker living in Moscow. "Here hacking is a good job, one of the few good jobs left."

Kovalyev claims he is often hired to "have fun" with the websites and networks of his employer's competitors.

He is paid 3,000 rubles per job -- about $104 American. It may not sound like much, but a college professor gets paid about $150 per month.

"The Russian hacking scene is incredibly sophisticated," said Ken Dunham, senior analyst at Security Focus. "These guys are excellent programmers and they really understand networks --- how to get in and out without a trace."

Russian crackers have been at the center of some notorious computer crime cases.

Vladimir Levin, in one of the first online theft cases to be prosecuted, was sentenced to three years in prison for removing $3.7 million from various Citibank accounts in 1995. Levin accomplished this with a personal computer and a dial-up connection to the Internet.

More recently, in October 2000, Microsoft discovered that its network had been breached, admitted that the crackers had probably had a good look at software projects under development, and said that the trail led back to an address in St. Petersburg, Russia.

"Russian crackers do amazing things with very limited computing power. They are smart and they cover their tracks very well," said Frank Voden, a consultant with U.K. firm TechSolutions.

"And they have excellent programming skills, which many of the so-called crackers in the U.S. do not possess. These Russian guys aren't just downloading tools and running them without knowing what they are doing. They know exactly what they are doing."

Alexei Badkhen, a 32-year-old Moscow resident, who describes himself as a "secret security guy," said that cracking and hacking is an important part of the underground culture in Russia, as it is in many other countries.

But he feels that there is more approval for Russia's crackers throughout Russia than there is elsewhere.

"When I was in school, in the 1980s, we were encouraged to hack American software. We had to dissect the programs to understand them so that we could make them work on our systems," he said. "So we say we were the first country to have a hacker culture. And Russia gives excellent technical education, but you have many highly skilled people with no jobs."

Badkhen believes that many Russian teenagers start cracking because they want to get on the Internet but can't afford the costs of the service. So they learn how to steal passwords.

"Plus, the person says, 'How can I afford to spend two months' salary on a copy of (Microsoft) Office? I cannot,'" Badkhen said. "But I can spend a half-month salary and get a CD burner that lets me make many copies of software. What is the better investment?"

Badkhen said that hacking and cracking is a fairly open activity in Russia, and said he often goes to Moscow's Gorbushka market to purchase pirated copies of software and CDs filled with the latest cracking tools.

"We don't download the tools so much, as you maybe would in other countries, because our connections to the Internet are slow and the phone service goes bad a lot," he said. "So we trade by CD at the markets. The police come often and take the CDs away. But new copies are easy to make."

Badkhen said a copy of Microsoft's Windows 2000 was available at the market on Monday for about 60 rubles (US $2.09); along with Office 2000, priced at 55 rubles.

But he prefers to focus on the homemade CDs, which have bright labels advertising their wares. "Hackers Toolkit," "All You Need to Start Hacking," and "Hack the World" are some of the titles Badkhen remembers seeing recently.

Most of the better cracking CDs cost about 80 or 90 rubles.

Badkhen said that he can also buy pirated software at some newsstands, along with "snacks and vodka -- so you go home, eat, drink and play with your computer. What could be a better night?"

Russia does officially forbid cracking and hacking, with prison sentences of up to 10 years plus fines. A special technical crime department has been established as part of the Russian Interior Ministry, but the government has "bigger things to worry about," Badkhen said.

"Plus we were taught to share, that people who have one thing should share those things with their community. So we share software. And we help you to share also the information on your networks."

American websites are a favorite target of Russian crackers, something that Badkhen said really escalated when the U.S. became involved in the dispute between Serbia and Kosovo.

"Many of us felt that what the U.S. was doing to the Serbs was wrong, and we retaliated by attacking government websites and big companies. I know that your White House was attacked many times, and so was the defense computers. Did your newspapers not mention this?" Badkhen asked.

The attacks were reported, and the FBI confirmed in press statements that the "Moonlight Maze" attacks allowed Russian hackers to access nonclassified but sensitive information from Department of Defense computers.

Kovalyev said that stealing credit card numbers is the "best resume" for a Russian cracker. But other popular activities are studying the ways to "get into networks of foreign businesses, plus virus writing, and password discovery," said Kovalyev, who believes that Russian websites such as Hackzone and the "launched in Russia" Drink or Die are the most sophisticated of all hacking sites.

"You should tell American hackers to learn Russian," Kovalyev said.

Both Kovalyev and Badkhen said they heard that Russian crackers had gotten "good information" from the Microsoft crack in October.

"Let me say that we know very well the insides of the software used on many websites," Kovalyev said. "And so we know where the holes are. But you make it easy by not fixing even what you can fix. And so we visit. Hello!"

-------- terrorism

Terrorism trial to begin Monday

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition
3/12/2001
LUIS CABRERA
Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369558

PORT ANGELES, Wash. (AP) - This working-class port town on America's northwest tip seems an unlikely focus for an international probe involving Osama bin Laden, the USS Cole and the French terrorist hunter who helped put Carlos the Jackal behind bars.

But Port Angeles, prosecutors say, is where a plot to usher in a bloody U.S. millennium began to unravel.

At the center is Ahmed Ressam, 33, the soft-spoken Algerian whose trial on terrorist conspiracy charges begins Monday in Los Angeles.

He was arrested 15 months ago after taking a ferry boat to Port Angeles from Canada. Customs agents said they noticed him sweating and shuddering during routine questioning.

When agents popped the trunk of Ressam's rented sedan, they found nitroglycerin and other bomb-making materials. The charges he faces include plotting a terrorist attack and possessing explosives.

``It just shocked me,'' said Cindy Englebertson, clerk at the Necessities and Temptations gift shop, across the street from the ferry dock. ``We go around with our car doors unlocked and our houses unlocked here. We're not used to this.''

Gerald Slaminski, the U.S. Customs port director for Port Angeles, whose usual worries are undeclared knickknacks and the occasional marijuana smuggler, now has to plug staffing holes as his four full-time agents fly to testify against Ressam in Los Angeles, where the trial was moved after too much media attention in Seattle.

``I'd love to know why he came through here, from his perspective. But I don't suppose he'll ever tell us,'' Slaminski said.

At the ferry terminal, where agents briefly question or inspect about 60 cars twice a day from Victoria, British Columbia, Slaminski recalled the day, Dec. 14, 1999, his agents saw Ressam break away and tear through the downtown streets.

Ressam ran several blocks before trying to force his way into a woman's car outside the Elks hall, Customs agents said. The door was locked, and agents crushed him to the ground.

Ressam had a one-night reservation at a motel near Seattle's Space Needle, where the city's millennium celebration had been planned.

When Ressam fell in Port Angeles, so did a plot by alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden to blow up U.S. ships in the Middle East, American tourists in Jordan and unsuspecting Millennium revelers inside U.S cities, according to Richard Clarke, former President Clinton's top terrorism adviser. Arrests followed in New York, Vermont, Montreal, Ireland and elsewhere.

Bin Laden, a Saudi millionaire living in Afghanistan, is blamed for several attacks on U.S. targets, including the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. He also was linked to the Oct. 12 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, when two suicide bombers killed 17 U.S. sailors and wounded 39.

Ressam reportedly was trained in bin Laden's terror camps and fought for the rebel Armed Islamic Group before fleeing Algeria in 1994. He already is being tried in absentia in France, where prosecutors allege he was part of a group that bombed a Paris subway in 1996 and more recently was the Montreal link in a network that supplied false passports and documents to Islamic militants worldwide.

The French connection promises to add some color to the Los Angeles trial . French terrorist hunter and investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere, nicknamed ``The Cowboy'' because he wields a .357 Magnum and rides in a bullet-proof car, is expected to provide key Los Angeles testimony. Bruguiere, who helped put terrorist Carlos the Jackal behind bars, testified in federal court in Seattle in January.

According to a revised indictment filed in February, U.S. prosecutors may go further than the French in trying to link bin Laden to Ressam's ``cell,'' which allegedly includes the other Algerians arrested in the Northeast. One of those men, Abdel Ghani Meskini, 33, pleaded guilty in New York last week to federal conspiracy charges in connection with Ressam's alleged explosives smuggling. He agreed to cooperate with the government. Another man faces trial in New York, and a third may still be at large.

Lead U.S. prosecutor Jerry Diskin has declined to discuss the case against Ressam. Documents filed by defense attorney Thomas Hillier suggest his team may argue that Ressam was an unwitting courier who had no idea what was in the trunk of his car.

---

Spanish martyrs step closer to sainthood

Washington Times
March 12, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/world/nobyline-200131221537.htm

VATICAN CITY (AP) - With an appeal for an end to terrorism in today's Spain, Pope John Paul II beatified a record number of candidates for sainthood - 233 nuns, priests and lay people who died in Spain's civil war.

The biggest-ever batch of beatifications yesterday reflects the pontiff's determination to give his faithful lots of role models, including many from modern times. The previous record of beatifications in one ceremony was the 1877 beatification of 206 Japanese martyrs by Pius IX.

Beatification is the last step before possible sainthood, or canonization.

The Spaniards who were beatified yesterday were among hundreds who died at the hands of leftists waging anticlerical campaigns during the 1936-39 civil war. They were declared martyrs by the pope.

Beatification usually requires the Vatican's certification of a miracle in which the person intercedes between humans and God. In the case of martyrdom, that requirement is waived.

Strong applause rang out when John Paul, reading his homily in Spanish, invoked the names of the newly beatified in a plea for an end to terrorism blamed on Basque separatists in Spain.

"Terrorism is born of hatred and in turn feeds it," John Paul said, his voice sounding tired and at times quite hoarse during the two-hour ceremony. "No motive, no cause or ideology can justify it. Only peace can build peoples. Terror is the enemy of humanity."

Since a cease-fire ended a little more than a year ago, 22 killings have been blamed on the ETA separatist group, which wants to carve out a Basque homeland in the land straddling France and Spain. Since its struggle began in 1968, ETA has claimed some 800 killings.

Almost all of those beatified yesterday died in 1936 in the province of Valencia at the hands of leftist forces battling Gen. Francisco Franco. A few others were from Catalonia.

The civil war broke out when Gen. Franco led a revolt against Spain's leftist democratic government. Gen. Franco won the war, which claimed about 500,000 lives.

With the latest beatification, John Paul has beatified 1,227 people in more than 100 ceremonies. He has raised 447 candidates to sainthood since he became pope in 1978.

In comparison, in the previous four centuries a total of 1,310 candidates were beatified and 300 raised to sainthood.

John Paul called the latest group to be beatified a "model of coherence of life, constancy in faith and reconciliatory spirit."

---

Sharon says Arafat guards behind terror

Washington Times
March 12, 2001
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001312213142.htm

JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon accused Yasser Arafat's bodyguard unit yesterday of carrying out terrorist attacks against Israel and said he could not hold peace talks with the Palestinian leader in the current climate of violence.

Mr. Sharon has in recent weeks been restrained and diplomatic when speaking of his longtime rival, and had held out the possibility of an early meeting. But in an interview with Fox News Channel, Mr. Sharon criticized of Mr. Arafat and said no talks were planned.

"Most of the terrorist acts at the present time are carried out by Palestinian armed forces, security services and even the [forces] closest to Arafat, that is, what you call Force 17, the presidential guard," Mr. Sharon said.

-------- activists

INVITATION TO CEREMONY TO CALL FOR RELEASE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS IN BURMA

From: ncgub [mailto:ncgub@ncgub.net]
Thursday, March 08, 2001 8:04 PM

Dear Friends of Burma:

In coordination with the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB), the Joint Action Committee (JAC) of the democratic Burmese community in the Washington Metropolitan area requests the pleasure of your company at the ceremony to call for the release of political prisoners in Burma, including student leader Min Ko Naing, who was arrested on March 23, 1989. The event will also coincide with the anniversaries of the "White Bridge Affair" and "Hmaine Centennial Crisis", which fall on March 16 and 23 respectively. As a prelude to the 1988 nation-wide Mass Uprising in Burma, the White Bridge Affair is one of the bloody riots between the students and security forces of the then Burmese government led by U Ne Win. On March 16, 1988, while on the march as a protest against the dictatorship, several students were beaten and arrested by the riot police on the bank of Inya Lake adjacent to the Rangoon University main campus. On March 23, 1976, Rangoon University students marched toward the tomb of Sayagyi Thakin Kotaw Hmaine, one of the greatest patriots and authors in the nation's history. The military intelligence and police arrested many students.

Please join us to call for the release of political prisoners and commemorate the historic anniversaries of White Bridge Affair and Hmaine Centennial Crisis.

Date: Saturday, March 17, 2001
Time: 4:00pm - 8:00pm
Place: 815 Fifteenth Street, N.W. 10th Floor Conference Room (Above the Office of the NCGUB) Washington, D.C.

(By Metro, take orange or blue line/to McPherson Square Station/exit Franklin Square & 14th Street)

Dinner will be served.

Contact:
NCGUB --- (202) 393-7342
U Tin Maung Thaw ---(703) 834-5670
Ma Ahtar --- (301) 762-0006
Ko Aung Saw Oo --- (240) 221-0941
Ko Yin Aye --- (301) 770-1499
Ko Yin Htwe --- (301) 585-1809

---

Premiere showing of counter inauguration video

From: "Chris Strohm" <chris.strohm@iwpnews.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 10:27:18 -0500

The Washington DC Independent Media Center (www.dc.indymedia.org) presents the premiere showing of "Not My President!" -- a groundbreaking 28-minute video documentary that captures the protests and street actions during the inauguration of George W. Bush.

The video will be shown at The Velvet Lounge, 915 U Street NW, on Monday, March 19 at 9:30 pm. The Velvet Lounge is located across the street from the U Street/Cardozo Metro stop.

Produced by the New York City IMC, this documentary combines footage from the DC-IMC, NYC-IMC, I-Witness Video, Paper Tiger TV, Time's Up and others, to unveil the true face of our military state, the voice of the people, and the popular resistance to the unprecedented 2001 presidential-election coup.

"Not My President!" is the work of more than two dozen independent videographers and several organizations who joined forces to bring you what the corporate media and the executive office don't want you to see: the real voices from the streets.

While the networks broadcast a combined total of 10 minutes protest coverage, the NYC-IMC brings you the untold story from the front lines of dissent.

"Not My President!" features members of the NYC Radical Cheerleaders, the anonymous Black Bloc, the Direct Action Network, the Black Panthers, N.O.W., Students for an Undemocratic Society (SUDS), The Shadow Inauguration, the International Action Center, undercover cops/government agents, "ordinary americans" and everyone in-between, with original beats & music by Ahques/O.T.H.E.R.S. Productions.

A general meeting of the DC-IMC will be held at the Velvet Lounge at 7:30 pm, before the film screening begins. Agenda items include plans for upcoming coverage of DC-based events and the Free Trade Area of the Americas protests. For more information, call the DC-IMC at (202) 452-5936 of visit www.dc.indymedia.org

---

International Day Against Police Brutality

From: "Jamie Loughner" <jamieandjoe@hotmail.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 11:55:41 -0500

Police Brutality Action Day March 15

Angela Davis Cop Watch Campaign Against Racial Profiling Against The Walls 7165 N 42nd St. Milwaukee, WI 53209 (414) 228-9962 E-Mails kmurphysmith@aol.com kmurphysmith@againstthewalls.org ADCopwatch@againstthewalls.org againstthewalls@netzero.com URL http://www.againstthewalls.org

Dear Colleagues:

FIFTH INTERNATIONAL DAY AGAINST POLICE BRUTALITY MARCH 15, 2001

"March 15, 2001, marks the fifth year of this international day of protest and solidarity against police brutality. It first began in 1997 as an initiative of the Black Flag collective in Switzerland along with the help of COBP (French acronym for Citizens Opposed to Police Brutality) of Montreal. Since its first year, the International Day Against Police Brutality (IDAPB) has been a success. This date was chosen because on March 15th, two children were beaten by the Swiss police..." (COBP URL - http://www.tao.ca/~cobp/bar.html)

The Angela Davis Cop Watch, Campaign Against Racial Profiling, and Against The Walls encourages other USA-based antipolice/antipolice violence groups to get involved with the international day of protest.

For further information regarding International Day Against Police Brutality - March 15th, 2001. This is an opportunity for us all to take action on a global scale?

Contact: Citizens Opposed to Police Brutality (COBP) c/o The Alternative Bookshop 2035 St. - Laurent 2nd Fl. Montreal, Quebec Canada H2X2T3 E-mails: cobp@hotmail.com (Tell Dee That I Sent You.) seahorse@odysee.net

---

4/25 SALEM NUKE CHERNOYBL 15TH ANNIV. PROTEST

Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001
From: Norman & Karen Cohen <norco@bellatlantic.net>

Coalition for Peace and Justice and the UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave., Linwood, NJ 08221; 609-601-8537 or 609-601-8583 (8583: fax, answer machine); norco@bellatlantic.net; UNPLUG SALEM WEBSITE: http://www.unplugsalem.org/ COALITION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WEBSITE: http:/www.coalitionforpeaceandjustice.org The Coalition for Peace and Justice is a chapter of Peace Action.

NO CHERNYOBL FOR SALEM NO CHERNYOBL FOR FISH THE UNPLUG SALEM CAMPAIGN'S COMMEMORATION OF THE 15TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE CHERNYOBL ACCIDENT: WEDNESDAY, APRIL 25TH 4-6 PM ON THE SALEM NUKE ACCESS ROAD

SPEAKERS INCLUDE:

DR.JUDITH JOHNSRUD: Director, Environmental Coalition on Nuclear Power, WILL TALK ABOUT HER CHERNYOBL EXPERIENCES

TONY TOTAH: Marine Biologist, Clean Ocean Action
FRIEDA BERRYHILL: Delaware's Best Known Anti-Nuke Activist
JANE NOGAKI: New Jersey Environmental Federation
JERRY COLEMAN: Green Party Candidate for Governor
MIKE EWALL: Pennsylvania Environment Network
BOB NAPE: Philadelphia Solar Society
NORM COHEN: COORDINATOR, UNPLUG SALEM CAMPAIGN
BERNARD AUGUST: Committee on Plutonium Economics
AARON KROMASH: Coordinator, Burlington Greens

MUSIC BY DENNIS DONNELLY, BLUESMAN EXTROADIANAIRE
SEE OUR SOLAR POWER DISPLAY!
SPECIAL APPEARANCE BY THE TOOTH FAIRY (BRING YOUR BABY TEETH!)

FOR MORE INFORMATION, RIDES, ETC: CONTACT UNPLUG SALEM CAMPAIGN, 321 BARR AVE, LINWOOD NJ 08221; NORCO@BELLATLANTIC.NET WWW.UNPLUGSALEM.ORG 609-601-8583

---

Info on Domenici nuclear bill

Date: Mon, 12 Mar 2001 16:37:42 -0500
From: michael mariotte <nirsnet@nirs.org>
Organization: NIRS

Dear Friends: This is a press release and fact sheet put together by NIRS and SECC on the bill introduced by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-NM) last week. We can also send you copies in Word format if you'd like to copy and distribute them. We will put the text of the bill, S 472, on NIRS' website as soon as possible.

Michael Mariotte NIRS

SAFE ENERGY COMMUNICATION COUNCIL NUCLEAR INFORMATION AND RESOURCE SERVICE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Monday, March 12, 2001 Contact:Paul Gunter, NIRS 202-328-0002 Linda Gunter, SECC 202-483-8491 Anna Aurilio, US PIRG 202-546-9707

SUSTAINABLE ENERGY ORGANIZATIONS BLAST DOMENICI BILL AS MERE NUCLEAR INDUSTRY WISH LIST TO CONGRESS

Nuclear industry watchdog groups blasted Senator Pete Domenici's (R-NM) introduction of the "Nuclear Energy Electricity Assurance Act of 2001" as nothing more than an invitation to legis-late the nuclear industry's wish list. The Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS), Safe Energy Communication Council (SECC) and U.S. Public Interest Research Group today said that the Domenici bill, along with provisions of Senate Energy Committee Chairman Frank Murkow-ski's (R-Alaska) National Energy Security Act, indicates that the nuclear industry is successfully cashing in its campaign chips. But dealt the losing hand are the American people, who would have to suffer the additional radiation poisoning and environmental destruction enactment of these bills would cause. It is difficult to even imagine more anti-environmental legislation than Domenici has offered.

"This is a federal life-support system for a nuclear industry that has failed every market test and lost the public's confidence," said Paul Gunter, Director of the Reactor Watchdog Project for NIRS. Gunter was referring to the Assurance Act's provisions for a transfusion of federal subsi-dies to nuclear utilities and contractors and the elimination of meaningful public participation in the regulatory oversight process. These incentives include federal intervention to renew the in-dustry's unique liability insurance, curtail the public's right to know and legally intervene in safety and licensing issues at atomic reactors, and stem the closure of university nuclear engi-neering programs due to dwindling enrollments.

"Look-out taxpayers! Congress is slopping the nuclear power hogs yet again," said Scott Den-man, SECC's Executive Director. "Last week it was Senator Murkowski. This week it's Senator Domenici's turn to dump $400 million a year into the nuclear power industry's trough. The bill's largess run the gamut for the abominable to the questionable, including vague, new "gift accep-tance authority" for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," said Denman.

"This bill does nothing to solve energy problems," said Anna Aurilio, staff scientist for U.S. Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG). "Instead of supporting energy efficiency programs and clean renewable energy sources that don't generate radioactive waste, this bill would worsen our energy problems by diverting hard-earned tax dollars to corporate welfare for the nuclear in-dustry."

The bill would do the industry's bidding to speed the construction of new reactors through fed-eral subsidies for cost competitiveness studies of "advanced" nuclear designs versus natural gas plants, by encouraging the dubiously-safe extension of operational cycles up to six years between refueling, and helping the industry boost power ratings at existing reactors. The bill proposes to "level" the playing field by deeming the nuclear industry an "environmentally-preferable" prod-uct and pulling federal funding from domestic and international organizations that oppose nu-clear power development, such as the World Bank.

This is despite the fact that last November at the COP6 climate change conference in The Hague, the world's nations-including the U.S.-overwhelmingly rejected nuclear power as a means of addressing global climate concerns.

The Domenici bill would reopen federal spending for the failed strategy of reprocessing high-level atomic waste, and would provide federal funds for research and development of the "transmutation" of radioactive waste, not unlike the ancient quest to change lead into gold. The bill would seek to improve NRC "efficiency" by stripping the public's ability to participate in the regulatory process through legally-defined hearings. The NRC itself is proposing a similar ap-proach to abandoning its commitment to public participation by issuing a proposed rule to ensure that relevant hearings before the NRC are informal, rather than meaningful "adjudicatory" court-room processes.

"Senator Domenici is attempting to singlehandedly rebuild the nuclear power industry, which has failed every economic and environmental test imaginable," said Michael Mariotte, executive director of NIRS. "If nuclear power were truly a technology that could provide clean power for the 21st century, it wouldn't need legislation like this. The reality is that nuclear power is the most environmentally-destructive means of producing electricity every devised. We already have safer, clearner and cheaper means of producing the electricity we all need."

--

NUCLEAR INFORMATION AND RESOURCE SERVICE SAFE ENERGY COMMUNICATION COUNCIL

"NUCLEAR ENERGY SUPPLY ASSURANCE ACT OF 2001" S. 472

By Senator Pete Domenici, (R-NM), with Sens. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Frank Murkowski (R-AK), Mary Landrieu ( D-LA ), Larry Craig ( R-ID ), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Michael Crapo (R-ID), Bob Graham (D, FL), James Inhofe (R-OK), George Vucanovich (R-OH), Chuck Hagel (R-NE), & Fred Thompson (R-TN).

SENATOR DOMENICI ENVISIONS AN UNFETTERED NUCLEAR POWER PROGRAM

The bill claims that nuclear power is "essentially" emissions-free by ignoring the significant carbon emissions from uranium mining, milling, enrichment and nuclear fuel fabrication. Atomic power generates both high-level and low-level nuclear wastes that have been historically mismanaged. Reactor operation results in routine releases of long-lived and bioaccumulating radioactivity to the air and wa-ter along with chemical contaminants and destructive thermal pollution. Accidental releases of radia-tion are an increasing risk with reduced regulations, human error and age-related deterioration of reactor safety systems. Eventually a mountain of contaminated materials from the reactor parts to the ra-dioactive soil beneath closed reactors must be managed as toxic nuclear waste.

TITLE I: SUPPORTS THE CONTINUED AND EXPANDED USE OF NUCLEAR POWER

Extends nuclear accident indemnification authority and increases liability caps Amends the Price-Anderson Act by extending the limited liability for the nuclear power industry to 2012 and raising the liability cap from $7 billion to $10 billion. Studies performed for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) place property damage costs as high $314 billion (1982 dollars)

Authorizes $124 million (FY 2002) for nuclear power promotion and infrastructure development. The bill would provide funds to the Nuclear Energy Research Initiative ($60 million)

The Nuclear Energy Plant Optimization Program ($15 million), and the Nuclear Energy Technology Program ($15 million) to subsidize power increases at existing reactors, increase domestic uranium mining and enrichment, and $34 million to stem the closure of university nuclear engineering programs due to dwindling enrollments

Authorizes $54 million (FY 2002-2004) for uranium mining, conversion, and enrichment

The DOE would develop a $30 million (FY 2002-2004) cost share with the domestic uranium industry to further develop leaching mining technologies with minimal spending for environmental restoration

DOE would further subsidize low-enriched uranium conversion services ($24 million, FY 2002-2004)

Requires NRC to report to Congress on progress towards fast tracking new designs

The NRC would submit a report on progress toward expediting the licensing of new reactor designs.

TITLE II: SPEEDS THE CONSTRUCTION OF NEW NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS

Authorizes $3 million (FY 2002) for the Nuclear Power Plant Completion Initiative

The DOE would seek proposals for the completion of unfinished U.S. reactors and provide a list of potential sites for federal loan guarantees to finish the abandoned reactors by December 31, 2004

Authorizes $15 million (FY 2002-2003) to speed the Early Site Permit Program. The DOE would encourage private sector applications for new reactor sites by December 31, 2003

Authorizes $50 million (FY 2002) to study and develop Generation IV nuclear reactors

The DOE would evaluate new advanced reactor designs for their competitiveness and report to Congress by December 31, 2002 for selection of a conceptual design by September 30, 2004

Authorizes $25 million (FY 2002) for resolution of new reactor licensing issues

The NRC would study and identify designs for new reactor systems by incorporating modeling, experiments, and risk-informed licensing, that could also be used with current reactor designs.

TITLE III: ASSURES A "LEVEL" PLAYING FIELD FOR NUCLEAR POWER

Provides for nuclear power as an "environmentally-preferable purchasing program"

Establishes that no federal procurement policy can discriminate against or exclude nuclear power from purchasing decisions; nuclear power "shall be considered an environmentally preferable product."

Provides for an increase in nuclear power generation as an "emissions-free" electricity source

Nuclear power is defined as emissions-free under the Clean Air Act and is allowed to receive emissions trading credits.

Prohibits discrimination against atomic power in international development programs

The government would prohibit funds to support domestic or international organizations, such as the World Bank, engaged in financing, development or underwriting of electricity production if they fail to include "emission-free" nuclear as an eligible option.

TITLE IV: RE-EVALUATES NUCLEAR WASTE POLICY

Re-evaluates high-level radioactive waste as a subject for permanent burial

The DOE Office of Spent Fuel Research is established to research, develop and demonstrate technologies for the treatment, "recycling" (read, reprocessing), and disposal of irradiated fuel

Authorizes $10 million (FY 2002) for development of an irradiated fuel "recycling" program

The DOE would research and develop a "cost-effective" reprocessing research plan by 2015.

TITLE V: ESTABLISHES THE NATIONAL ACCELERATOR SITE

Authorizes $160 million (FY 2002-2003) for the development of the advanced accelerator

The DOE is provided $40 million (FY 2002- 2003) to develop the advanced accelerator program with a mission to combine accelerator production of tritium and the transmutation of irradiated nuclear fuel

A transmutation program could cost over $300 billion, according to DOE, take many decades to im-plement and would raise serious international nuclear weapons proliferation concerns.

TITLE VI: FURTHER STREAMLINES NRC OVERSIGHT

Eliminates the exclusion of foreign ownership of U.S. reactors

The Act would amend the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 by deleting the prohibition of a foreign gov-ernment or entity from owning and operating U.S. reactors

Eliminates the NRC antitrust review and enforcement of nuclear utilities

The NRC would no longer have the statutory authority to regulate nuclear utility antitrust provisions

Provides for gift acceptance authority and criteria for the NRC employees

NRC commissioners and employees would be able to "accept, hold, utilize, and administer gifts of real and personal property for the purpose of aiding or facilitating the work of the Commission."

Simplifies the NRC public hearing procedures

The NRC would expand its elimination of meaningful democratic public participation by replacing the formal adjudicatory hearing process (the right to discovery and cross-examination) with an informal proceeding of pleadings on safety-related amendments and exemption requests for existing operating licenses, license extensions and transfers.

For more information, contact: Paul Gunter, Nuclear Information and Resource Service, 1424 16th Street NW, #404, Washington, DC 20036; 202.328.0002; f: 202.462.2183; nirsnet@nirs.org; www.nirs.org

---

Riot cops quell Malaysian violence

InfoBeat News
3/12/2001
Morning Coffee Edition

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) - Riot police backed by trucks with water cannon fanned out across Kuala Lumpur's poor suburbs Sunday to quell ethnic violence that has killed five people in four days. Fights between Malays and ethnic Indians broke out early Sunday in at least two more areas on the outskirts of the city, and three people were attacked with knives overnight, said police Deputy Inspector-General Jamil Johari.

At daybreak, hundreds of police manned checkpoints and stood in groups on street corners in riot gear.

Residents said the violence stemmed from a dispute between an Indian funeral procession and Malays celebrating a wedding. They said a drunken Indian man kicked over a chair at the Malay party, leading to a fight that quickly escalated amid racial friction in the area. Racial divisions are a sensitive issue in Malaysia.

Riots in 1969 between the dominant Malay Muslims and ethnic Chinese, the largest minority, left hundreds dead. Ethnic Indians - who are Hindu - account for 8% of Malaysia's 22 million people.

Report: Jailed Chinese is freed

BEIJING (AP) - A pro-democracy activist imprisoned in China since 1990 has been released one year before completing his 12-year sentence, a human rights group said Sunday. Xu Jianxiong is the fourth jailed veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests to be given early release in the past two months, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said. The releases come as Beijing presses its bid for the 2008 Summer Olympics. China's human rights records has been a stumbling block for such bids in the past, and Beijing released other dissidents in its unsuccessful campaign for the 2000 Summer Games. Xu, 31, was freed Saturday by the No. 2 Prison in Weinan, a city in the western province of Shaanxi, the Hong Kong-based Information Center said.

After the government crushed the 1989 Tiananmen protests, Xu was arrested in March 1990 for forming an activist group in his hometown of Xi'an, the Shaanxi provincial capital, the Information Center said. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison on charges of counterrevolutionary activity. The sentence was later extended by two years after he was accused of fighting with prison guards.

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Iran arrests activists in Tehran

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition
3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369586

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Security forces on Sunday arrested some 40 dissidents attending a meeting at the home of a prominent political activist, the wife of one of the detainees said.

Mahdiyeh Mohammadi said she heard about the arrests from the family of Mohammad Basteh-Negar, the political activist who hosted the meeting in northern Tehran.

Members of the Religious Nationalist Alliance _ which is close to the dissident Freedom Movement of Iran that opposes the country's clerical rule _ were in attendance

Among those arrested was Mohammadi's husband, Ahmad Zeidabadi, a leading reformist journalist who stood trial last month on charges of insulting Iran's supreme leader. He is best known for his political analyses in the now-banned magazine Iran e Farda.

Also arrested were Basteh-Negar, the meeting's host; Habibollah Peyman, a leading dissident activist; university professor Reza Raiis-Toosi and journalist Ahmad Zeidabadi.

It is not clear why the men were rounded up.

Reformist allies of President Mohammad Khatami have been locked in a power struggle with hard-liners, who control powerful state organs including the judiciary and security forces.

Hard-liners have closed down 32 publications, all but one of them pro-reform newspapers, and jailed over two dozen reformist journalists and political activists in the past year.

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Spaniards protest water project

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition
3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369439

MADRID, Spain (AP) - More than 100,000 people marched through Madrid on Sunday in the latest of a series of rallies against a $23 billion plan to divert huge amounts of water from Spain's biggest river to dry areas far to the south.

City police estimated that 120,000 attended the rally, but organizers put the number at 400,000. Many came to the Spanish capital from the northeast Aragon and Catalonia regions, which protesters say stand to lose out most if the eight-year plan goes ahead.

Demonstrators _ some dressed up as droplets of water _ waved red and yellow balloons and played music as they inched their way along broad boulevards and emptied into the Puerta del Sol, a downtown plaza. Another big rally was held Sunday in Zaragoza, capital of Aragon.

The Madrid rally was called by a 26-strong coalition of ecological groups, farmers' associations, labor unions and political parties.

The controversial mega-plan calls for building 120 dams to transfer 26 billion gallons of water per year from the Ebro to the Mediterranean coast areas of Valencia, Almeria and Murcia.

The government says the Ebro has water to spare and the resource must be shared among Spaniards.

Ecologists say the plan is misguided, insisting that water shortages in the south would be better solved by more efficient use of existing resources and other means. They also say the project will cause serious harm to the Ebro by raising salinity levels.

The plan was approved by the Cabinet in February despite warnings from engineers and hydrologists and is now before Parliament, where center-right Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has a majority.

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Zapatistas march into Mexico City

InfoBeat News
JOHN RICE Associated Press Writer
Morning Coffee Edition
3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369458

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Fulfilling a vow in their declaration of war seven years ago, Mexico's masked Zapatista rebels led a march into the heart of Mexico City on Sunday to press their demands for Indian rights.

Winding up a two-week tour of southern Mexico, the Zapatista leaders became the first rebel group to ride openly into the city since revolutionary leaders Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata _ the rebels' namesake _ did it in 1914.

The 23 masked rebel commanders and their leader, Subcomandante Marcos, rode a flatbed truck into the city's main plaza, to chants of ``You are not alone'' from an estimated 75,000 cheering supporters gathered there.

Both new President Vicente Fox and the Zapatista National Liberation Army hope to benefit from the event. The rebels want to win support as a political force. Fox hopes it will help him achieve what two previous presidents failed to do: persuade the rebels to abandon their guns.

But the arrival was not quite as the rebels envisioned it when they shocked the world by emerging from obscurity to seize several cities in the southern state of Chiapas on Jan. 1, 1994, the very day Mexican officials were celebrating enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Instead of ``conquering the Mexican federal army,'' the goal they set in their declaration of war, the 24 Zapatista leaders have found themselves touring the country in a bus caravan protected by federal police.

Instead of ``liberated'' Mexican civilians, they find themselves accompanied by hundreds of foreign supporters who see the Zapatistas as exemplars of the struggle against the global financial system.

The ``evil government'' against which they rebelled was toppled last year: not by armed leftist insurgents but peacefully, at the polls, by Fox, a former Coca Cola executive whose pro-market leanings the leftist rebels deeply distrust.

Fox's welcome of the Zapatista march has been so effusive that Marcos has accused him of trying to turn it into a Fox march.

``Welcome Subcomandante Marcos, welcome to the Zapatistas , welcome to the political arena, the arena of discussion of ideas,'' Fox said in a radio address on Saturday. Fox said the rebel tour was proof of the new democracy ushered in when he broke the former ruling party's 71-year grip on the presidency.

The Zapatistas used their bus caravan from the Chiapas jungle village of La Realidad to barnstorm for sweeping constitutional reforms that would grant Mexico's roughly 10 million Indians more local autonomy and guarantee them schools and radio stations in their own languages.

They have also repeatedly expressed wariness of Fox. In an interview published Sunday with the magazine Proceso, Marcos said he and Fox were ``diametrically opposed.''

``We are part of the world moving toward recognizing differences, and he is working toward hegemony and homogenizing, not just the country, but the world,'' Marcos said.

But the differences may be negotiable. Speaking of himself, Marcos conceded he was ``more of a rebel seeking social change'' than a revolutionary.

Fox's first act in office was to send the Indian rights bill to Congress, and has freed scores of Zapatista prisoners and closed several army bases. But the rebels insist others be freed and more bases near their strongholds be closed before peace talks can start.

The heavily publicized tour has apparently boosted the Zapatistas' popularity. On Wednesday, the Mexico City newspaper Reforma said a telephone poll showed that 45 percent of people had a favorable view of Marcos, up from 34 percent in February. The poll had a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.

That may be linked to the fact that other polls show increasing numbers of Mexicans consider the Zapatistas a political rather than a military organization _ even though they are avowedly at war with the government.

``They've haven't appeared as an armed force for quite some time,'' said Antonio Leyva, 46, one of the thousands who gathered in the city's main plaza to see the Zapatistas.

Leyva, a sociologist, welcomed the change, in a country with a long history of uprisings that were brutally repressed. ``What they (the Zapatistas) are doing, and in part what the government is doing, is unprecedented.''

The Zapatistas have roots in Indian peasant organizations, church activists and a Leninist guerrilla group from northern Mexico.

Their only significant military success was the seizure of the Chiapas towns. Fighting with the government lasted only 12 days before a cease-fire took hold.

Peace talks with the government started in February, but have been stalled since 1996 in a dispute over how to guarantee Indian rights _ the first of six subjects to be discussed with the government en route to a peace agreement.

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From outlaw to folk hero,
Mexico's masked man strides into the capital A seven year fight

The Guardian
Monday March 12, 2001
Duncan Campbell and Jo Tuckman in Mexico City The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,450351,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0%2C3604%2C450352%2C00.html

The unimaginable happened. The Zapatistas, led by their masked commandantes and their enigmatic leader Subcommandante Marcos, finally entered the heart of the capital of the nation with which they have been at war for seven years.

While the images of Fidel Castro and his guerrilla band entering Havana in 1959 and the victorious Nicaraguan Sandinistas entering Managua in 1979 may be fixed in the memory, this entrance was remarkable in that these rebels not only came unarmed but also with a welcome from the president of the country that made them outlaws.

The Mexican press was in no doubt as to the significance of the day. "Marcos takes the capital!" said one newspaper. "They're taking the plaza!" said another. La Prensa summed up the mood with the word "unimaginable".

At dawn, the caravan of Zapatistas and their supporters from around the world was already stirring and breakfasting on tamales in the sports complex in Xochimilco on the outskirts of Mexico City where they had been billeted for the last night of their 16-day pilgrimage from Chiapas.

They had come in pursuit of constitutional rights for the country's 10m indigenous people, around 10% of the population, and yesterday was the culmination of the journey that had taken them through 12 states. As the 2,100-mile trek ended, they were joined by public figures from around the world: human rights ambassador Danielle Mitterand, Portuguese Nobel prizewinning author Jose Saramago, and the French anti-multinational activist Jose Bove.

The Zocalo, the spectacular centre of the capital, the largest city square in the world after Red Square, awaited them, but the only sights trained from the rooftops and behind the belfries were those of the swarms of photographers and camera crews from around the world.

It was in 1914 that Emiliano Zapata, the man who gave his name to the current movement, rode in revolutionary triumph into the same Zocalo, flanked as it is by the 16th century cathedral and the national palace.

Yesterday the street vendors there were busily selling Zapatista masks, T-shirts, mugs, jugs and recorded music, Marcos scarves and action dolls complete with pipe and balaclava, mixed with images of Che Guevara.

"The image of Marcos is a response to romantic and idealistic expectations, he is the white man in the midst of indigenous people, close to the idea of a kind of Robin Hood," said Marcos himself on the eve of the Zapatistas' entrance, acknowledging the extraordinary cult that has surrounded him since the 1994 uprising and explaining the tactics behind the march: "We did not have another way out, the only way to make ourselves strong was to come out [of the jungle] to march."

Watching the Zapatistas on their final push, Santos Orozco, 67, a canal boatman said: "They are the defenders of the poor, not just the indigenous."

The Zapatistas marched on the capital, disdaining an invitation from President Vicente Fox to meet in the presidential palace. Marcos accused Mr Fox of trivialising the indigenous cause. "He wants to turn a serious movement into a primetime event," said Marcos. "It would be a hollow media event."

The transformation of the Zapatistas from a tiny, ill-armed, barely trained guerrilla fighting force to what is in effect an international cultural movement was emphasised yesterday by the remarkable mixture of supporters flocking the streets, from the capital's smartly turned-out bourgeoisie to body-pierced and pink-haired punks carrying placards proclaiming the Zapatistas as their inspiration, to dungareed Italian anti-globalisers and three generations of Mexican families waving Zapatista National Liberation Army flags.

Even hours before the march was due to arrive, as bands played and Aztec dancers performed, the Zocalo was already crowded and alive with excitement and anticipation. More than one little boy will have the chance in years to come to ponder photos of himself perched on his father's shoulders wearing a balaclava and with a toy pipe in his mouth.

President's welcome

President Fox was not in the Zocalo. However, he was generous in his welcome, which he hopes will bring him a major political gain with a peace accord.

"Welcome Subcommandante Marcos, welcome Zapatistas, welcome to the political arena," was the president's message. Not that Marcos is yet ready to take off his mask and his guerrilla uniform.

"What he has to understand and what everyone else has to understand is that we are not a political force as such, we are an armed group doing politics," said "El Sub", warning that if the peace talks failed and the Zapatistas' demands for constitutional autonomy and equality for indigenous people were not met, other more militaristic groups would be less amenable to peaceful solutions.

And while polls do show overwhelming support for the march and Mexico's need to act over trampled indigenous rights, not everyone is sympathetic to the Zapatistas. With the rebels already on the fringes of the capital the head of the country's biggest employers' organisation, Jorge Espina Reyes, called them "irresponsible utopian demagogues".

But in the square yesterday the banners and T-shirts proclaimed: "We are all Marcos", and for a moment at least, the Zapatistas, who have had such an astonishing physical and metaphorical journey, must have felt it was true.

---

Cops blamed for Ukraine violence

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition
3/12/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406369511

KIEV, Ukraine (AP) - Ukrainian opposition leaders claimed Sunday that agents of the police provoked violence that broke out during a large demonstration against President Leonid Kuchma last week.

The clashes, the most violent in a series of mostly peaceful anti-Kuchma protests that began in December, erupted Friday after about 18,000 demonstrators marched through Kiev to the presidential administration building.

People in the crowd began throwing rocks and a Molotov cocktail, touching off fights that injured police and protesters. Police have arrested 217 people, mostly members of an ultranationalist group.

Opposition lawmaker Taras Chornovil said Sunday that the people throwing rocks and firebombs were not protesters. He claimed they were police agents and accused the police of ``a very rude provocation.''

Kuchma, who has faced widespread protests by opponents who accuse him of involvement in the death of a critical journalist last fall, said Saturday that there could be no dialogue with violent protesters.

``If they act through threats, in the manner that was demonstrated yesterday, where are grounds for talks?'' said Kuchma, who has denied the accusations and dismissed protesters' calls for him to step down.

Several of the people arrested Saturday have been convicted and sentenced to jail terms of two to 15 days, officials said. The Interfax news agency said 87 of them remained in custody on Sunday.

------

2-Week Trek Culminates in Rally for Indian Rights in Mexico City

New York Times
By GINGER THOMPSON and TIM WEINER
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/world/12MEXI.html

MEXICO CITY, March 11 - The Zapatista rebels took their cry for Indian rights to the heart of Mexico's capital today, as roughly 100,000 supporters filled the city square for an act of political theater that has transfixed the nation.

After a two-week procession from a jungle hideout, the rebels' leader, who calls himself Subcommander Marcos, stood in the huge square, his back to the colonial facade of the national palace, raised his fist in the air and proclaimed, "We are here to shout for and to demand democracy, liberty and justice.

"The government thinks that today marks the end of an earthquake," the rebel leader said. "They think that we are just a photograph, an anecdote, a spectacle.

"Those in high places know it but do not want to say it," he said.

"After today, the people who are the color of the earth will never again be forgotten."

The Zapatista movement demands that the government stop mistreating its minority Indian population. Some 10 million people of indigenous descent live among Mexico's roughly 100 million people. They are disproportionately poor, illiterate, malnourished and disenfranchised, and traditionally have been treated as second-class citizens.

"It is time that this country stop being an embarrassment, dressed in the color of money," Subcommander Marcos said.

He and his fellow rebel leaders arrived in the square on the back of a tractor-trailer truck, waving at a throng that included poor Indians in colorful clothes, government bureaucrats and university professors, pierced and painted punks, committed Catholics, gays and lesbians, farmers from faraway villages, their shoes so caked with dirt they looked as if they had walked all the way.

Subcommander Marcos, who the government contends is a radical professor turned rural rebel, has become this country's most popular leftist. His weapons have been poetic, if occasionally impenetrable, communiqués of resistance, cunning political maneuvers, and insults - some cutting, some comic, some simply crude.

President Vicente Fox, the target of many of those barbs, has turned the other cheek, embraced the rebel leader's goal of enacting an Indian rights bill, and told him, in a Saturday radio address, "Welcome to the political arena."

The masked band of rebels, marching to the capital under the protection of government forces, appear to have impressed millions of Mexicans, if opinion polls are true.

While opponents see the Zapatistas as a guerrilla theater troupe with a political base no deeper than a T- shirt, many supporters in Mexico see their cause as just and their demonstrations as a symbol of the nation's new democracy.

The Zapatistas started out two weeks ago from their strongholds in the southern state of Chiapas. The poorly armed group began a short but bloody uprising in Chiapas on Jan. 1, 1994, the day that the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect in Mexico, the United States and Canada. They have been fighting with words ever since.

"We are not the spokesmen for Indian people," Subcommander Marcos said. "We are a voice of many voices. We are their reflection and their cry."

He and 23 fellow leaders traveled more than 2,000 miles through 12 states in a roundabout route to the capital, stopping at rural backwaters, tourist towns and industrial centers, drumming up support for the Indian rights bill, called the San Andrés Accords, which President Fox has submitted to Congress.

The accords would grant limited forms of autonomy to indigenous people, such as the right to elect tribal councils for local rule. Opponents say the accords could balkanize the country into regions run by constitutional codes and others ruled by Indian customs. The critics say those customs would deny women's rights and forbid secret ballots.

The accords are a constitutional amendment that would require a two-thirds majority vote to win passage. The rebels say they will not leave the capital until the accords become law.

Millions of Mexicans - at least those who read the newspapers and watch television news - have watched with wonder at the unfolding political play.

Subcommander Marcos, habitually puffing his pipe and wearing a ski mask, has challenged President Fox, who has responded by supporting the principles of the Zapatistas' cause and inviting the rebel leader to the presidential palace. Subcommander Marcos, in turn, has kept his mask on and spurned face-to-face negotiations with the president.

Mr. Fox wants the rebels to restart peace negotiations with the government. He says he will stake his considerable political capital on pressing Congress to pass the indigenous rights bill. On Saturday, he pointed out that the rebel caravan could never have happened under previous administrations.

"This march demonstrates that we already live in a mature democracy where anyone can express himself; where anyone can complain," he said, "and where anyone can shout or criticize the president."

The 24 rebel leaders vow to address members of a congressionally appointed peace commission on Monday with their masks on.

Conservatives in Congress have objected to the idea of negotiating with cloaked revolutionaries, but for the moment Subcommander Marcos and his comrades have the political wind at their backs. Subcommander Marcos is the first rebel leader to take his movement to the capital since Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata stormed the city in 1914.

And the Zapatistas have paid careful tribute to their namesake, visiting his children and laying a wreath on the grave where he was buried after he was assassinated in 1919.

"The history of Mexico has been a history of revolution," said Manuel Camacho Solís, who served in 1994 as the government's first commissioner for peace in Chiapas. Referring to Subcommander Marcos, he said: "The heroes of Mexico are men like him, men who first rose up in arms. Revolution is not condemned in this country."

The rebels never presented a real military threat, he said, and as for their masks, "This has been a very authoritarian country, in which those who have dared to fight against the powerful are applauded, and in which people understand that a rebel would have to hide his identity or else be destroyed."

Many of those who gathered to see the Zapatistas also wore masks, in solidarity with the rebels. Nyla Escobedo, a 28-year-old housewife from the middle class suburb of Santa Fe, had a dove of peace painted on one cheek. "By making himself faceless," she said of Subcommander Marcos and his mask, "he wears all our faces."

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Inquiry Delves Into Razing of S.I. Cottages in Line for Historic Status

New York Times
By DAN BARRY
March 12, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/12/nyregion/12DAY.html

The spiritual legacy of Dorothy Day, a founder of the Catholic Worker movement, may be secured by the ongoing efforts to have her canonized by the Vatican. But in her beloved Staten Island, the good intentions of city officials and preservationists failed to protect her physical legacy from the crush of a bulldozer - an act that in itself is churning up questions of wrongdoing.

Last month, a bulldozer destroyed the modest beachfront bungalow where Day sought quiet after a tumultuous lifetime of emphasizing personal responsibility to the poor. The demolition stunned the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which thought it had a nonaggression pact with the developer. In fact, the agency was just four days from formally nominating the site for historic preservation.

Now, the City Department of Investigation is conducting an inquiry into the demolition of what some city officials say was a virtual religious shrine. It is collecting all related records from every city agency involved, including the Department of Buildings, which issued the demolition permit. Several city officials say the investigation focuses on the application for the permit, which they say seems to have been doctored or amended.

And the Staten Island district attorney, William L. Murphy, said Friday that his office had begun an independent investigation and was awaiting reports from the city agencies.

For city officials and preservationists, the case of the Dorothy Day cottage has brought the stinging realization that the subject of so much planning simply no longer exists.

"I was just horrified," said Terri Rosen Deutsch, the chief of staff for the landmarks commission. "Because you stand now where she used to sit, and you realize why this place was important to her."

But for John DiScala, the developer, the case is less about a would-be saint than about a well-intentioned builder, persecuted by preservationists, hobbled by bureaucrats and maligned by the press. "I don't have the Dorothy Day concept," he said. "In other words, I'm not going to turn the other cheek and let them hit me again."

Mr. DiScala denied doing anything underhanded to obtain the permit. And he said he doubted that Day, who died in 1980 at the age of 83, ever lived in the cottage, a position that does not conform with photographs of Day there or with the recollections of Catholic Worker colleagues. "If they can prove that" Day lived there, he said, "I will build a monument in her honor. I will change the name of the street to Dorothy Day Circle."

Given Day's famous embrace of pacifism and the pastoral, the current controversy that bears her name seems alternately sad and ironic.

By the early 1970's, Day was internationally famous for her war protests, her spiritual writings and, most of all, her commitment to the poor. But she was also in her mid- 70's; bent, gray and more than a little weary. In search of quiet, she turned again to Staten Island, where she had lived and converted to Catholicism many years earlier.

An attractive site was Spanish Camp, a 17-acre parcel on the shores of Raritan Bay that was owned by the Spanish Naturopath Society, a group interested in nature and vegetarianism. For decades, its members spent summers there, but one by one they sold their bungalows while the society collected rent for the land. It was there, in 1972, that the Catholic Worker bought a battered bungalow along Marino Boulevard as a place for Day to rest, read and find renewal in the sounds of the sea.

After Day died in 1980, the Catholic Worker continued to own her cottage - and two others nearby on Marino Boulevard - until 1998. That year, the society sold the land to a group of developers, led by Mr. DiScala, who planned to demolish the bungalows and build a subdivision of three dozen large homes, which he intended to sell for up to a million dollars each.

In a borough in which encroaching development is an ever-present concern, the proposed subdivision met opposition. And there was the memory of Day to consider; Cardinal John O'Connor, the Roman Catholic archbishop of New York, had recently announced plans to propose her for sainthood.

In May 1999, Mr. DiScala and the landmarks commission struck a deal. He agreed to donate the Dorothy Day cottage and two other bungalows to a nonprofit foundation that would be created to oversee their preservation, while the commission informally proceeded to have that property declared a landmark. In return, the commission agreed to support him in securing city permits for the subdivision.

Ms. Deutsch said the proposal was unusually complicated and time-consuming. The nonprofit foundation, eventually called the Friends of the Dorothy Day Cottages, had to be set up. And questions about the site itself had to be resolved: Should it include a museum? A restroom? A caretaker's home?

In January 2000, the landmarks commission sent a memorandum to the Department of Buildings to say that it planned to hold a public hearing on designating the property as a landmark. It added, "Please note this in the Department of Buildings system so that it is clear that these three cottages are not to be demolished."

The warning was neither legally binding nor, it seemed then, necessary. The next month, a consulting group retained by Mr. DiScala sent a letter to the city that in part expressed agreement that the "Doris Day cottages are of great historical significance." At the time, the letter's reference to Doris Day the actress, rather than Dorothy Day the activist, seemed funny, not cavalier.

The Buildings Department gave Mr. DiScala permission to demolish dozens of cottages at Spanish Camp, virtually everything but the Day cottage and the two nearby. Still, he said, he became frustrated by the slow pace of his development and the increasingly complicated nature of the Dorothy Day project.

David Goldfarb, a representative of Friends of the Dorothy Day Cottages, said that at a meeting in September, Mr. DiScala rejected several foundation requests, like having a caretaker live on the property and including parking for visitors. "I said, `If you deny everything, what's the point of us being involved?' " Mr. Goldfarb recalled. " `Why would we support your development?' "

But Mr. DiScala said he took this attitude as a threat. "I can't be strong-armed and blackmailed," he said.

Then, two months ago, landmarks commission officials asked for access to the property to take measurements, which they said they told Mr. DiScala was the last step before scheduling a hearing on the landmark designation. He refused, prompting a meeting on Jan. 31 at which he complained about the foundation's attitude and the commission's assistance in securing permits.

When that meeting ended, commission officials said, they thought the Dorothy Day project was moving forward.

On Feb. 6, less than a week later, the Staten Island office of the Department of Buildings received an application to demolish three more cottages on Marino Boulevard. Two days later, Mr. DiScala said, he picked up the approved demolition permits from the mailbox of an assistant, and the next day, Feb. 9, a bulldozer rumbled toward the Dorothy Day cottage.

The landmarks commission's counsel, Mark Silberman, said that when a caller alerted the commission that afternoon that the Dorothy Day cottage was being demolished, he immediately telephoned Mr. Di Scala's lawyer, Paschal Corbo. A few minutes later, he said, Mr. Corbo called back to say, " `I'm embarrassed to say that's right.' "

Mr. Corbo did not return a telephone call seeking comment.

Initial waves of disbelief were followed by fits of bureaucratic self- examination. Perhaps the landmarks commission should have moved faster; perhaps the Department of Buildings should have been more diligent.

In the end, though, city officials said, there was little they could have done to stop the demolition.

At the same time, suspicion arose. Jerome X. O'Donovan, a city councilman from Staten Island, said that a high-ranking building official told him there was "something wrong and fraudulent" about the demolition permit, and he called for an investigation. Within a few days, the Department of Investigation had demanded all original documents related to the Spanish Camp development from the landmarks commission, the Department of Buildings and the Department of Planning.

The inquiry centers on a supplemental document related to earlier approvals that Mr. DiScala had received to demolish other cottages. It is a copy of a waiver that freed him from a requirement to build fencing around cottages approved months earlier for demolition. But according to city officials, three addresses had been freshly typed onto the copy of that waiver: the addresses for the Day cottage and the two nearby.

It remains unclear who added the addresses, or whether the additions were illegal. But one city official said that the waiver was amended in a way that would give a counter clerk the impression that the demolition request was routine, and that there was no need for further paperwork that might attract more scrutiny.

Mr. DiScala denied knowing anything about a fence waiver. He said that city investigators had contacted him and that he planned to tell them anything they wanted to know: "There's nothing to hide here."

Mr. DiScala says he knows he has earned the wrath of the city. He was recently slapped with a series of citations for illegally tearing down trees on the property, and the landmarks commission is moving ahead with plans to designate a much larger slice of his land - including the former site of the Day cottage and four other cottages still standing - as a landmark.

"The thing I did was not maybe the greatest thing in the public eye of this group," he said, but he reiterated his right to do it.

He paused before adding: "And where's the proof that this woman lived in this cottage?"

------- Onelist (submissions from subscribers)