------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Bush Targets Russia Nuclear Programs for Cuts
Contaminated Food Sickens Millions
U.S.-Japan summit
UNEP, IAEA Depleted Uranium Missions
Missile Shield Risk
Putin's Rocket Challenge
Bush Targets Russia Nuclear Programs for Cuts
Cash-poor Russia lobbies for nuclear waste
No-Nuke Activist Faces Radioactive Facts

MILITARY
Commander escapes from prison in Colombia
Arming the Heavens
Arms race in outer space?
Preparing for the end, Mir's orbit drops slightly
Module packed with trash, ready to go

OTHER
A 24-Hour Lab Meeting on Mad Cow Illness
California Eyes Area Forgotten by Time
On Returning to a Green and Contagious Isle
Industry Has Powerful Allies on Drilling Bill
Drill, Say Alaskans, Who Know Their Pockets Are Lined With Oil
How the C.I.A.'s Judgments Were Distorted by Cold War Catechisms

ACTIVISTS
Students Protest Over Ad
The Post-Sharpton Sharpton
Girl who set self ablaze on Tiananmen dies
Civil disobedience tackled


-------- NUCLEAR

Bush Targets Russia Nuclear Programs for Cuts

Washington Post
Sunday, March 18, 2001; Page A23
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20489-2001Mar17.html

U.S. programs that pay to help Russia reduce and safeguard its nuclear weapons and materials have been targeted by the Bush administration for cuts of 12 percent below his year's level and 30 percent below the figures proposed in the Clinton administration's fiscal 2002 budget, according to congressional and nongovernmental sources.

Rose E. Gottemoeller, former director of nonproliferation and national security at the Energy Department, said she has been told that the $1.2 billion proposed by the previous administration for Russian programs had been reduced by President Bush's Office of Management and Budget to $800 million, which is $73 million below the current year's figure.

Gottemoeller, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called the proposed budget cuts a "shame." A spokesman for Energy, Joe Davies, said Secretary Spencer Abraham "is still working on budget figures" and that no final number is expected until April.

Gottemoeller said the "Nuclear Cities" program, which this year provided $30 million to help former nuclear scientists get nonmilitary work, would be cut to $6 million.

The nuclear materials protection and security program, which helps pay for improved security over Russia's stockpiles of plutonium and enriched uranium, received $154 million this year. Under the Clinton budget, it would have risen to $217 million. Under Bush, it is set to drop to $139 million.

Energy's plutonium disposal program, in which the United States and Russia change weapons-grade material so it cannot be used for bombs, is set to rise from $200 million this year to $217 million under Bush. That is well below the $400 million proposed by the Clinton administration to enable construction of a facility to begin processing the nuclear materials.

Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that handles the Energy nonproliferation budget, said Friday that the Russian programs "don't deserve to be cut as much as they are thinking."

In the House, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), whose district includes Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which participates in the programs, said that "dramatic cuts to these programs . . . may cripple our efforts to secure nuclear material in Russia and ensure that Russia's nuclear physicists are gainfully employed in non-defense-related industries."

But sentiment appears to be growing in Congress to cut aid to Russia in response to Russian sales of weaponry and nuclear power plants to Iran. Last week, Rep. Joseph M. Hoeffel III (D-Pa.), a member of the House International Relations Committee, sent Bush a letter signed by a bipartisan group of 29 House members calling for a halt in Russian aid programs.

---

Contaminated Food Sickens Millions Despite Advances

New York Times
March 18, 2001
By GREG WINTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/health/18FOOD.html

Tapeworm and botulism have been all but eradicated in this country, and new technologies from freeze-drying to irradiation have been developed to make food safer. But because of changing eating habits and more choices of foods, Americans may be more likely to get sick from what they eat today than they were half a century ago.

The frequency of serious gastrointestinal illness, a common gauge of food poisoning, is 34 percent above what it was in 1948, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Not all scientists agree with that conclusion - some say that food poisoning is as common as in the immediate postwar years, but not necessarily more so - yet there is no doubt about the scale of the problem.

Every year, the agency says, 5,000 deaths, 325,000 hospitalizations and 76 million illnesses are caused by food poisoning.

One of those sickened was Taylor Lake Holt, a cheerful 7-year-old boy from Anchorage. Taylor, a cancer patient who had just ended a yearlong ordeal with chemotherapy in 1999, celebrated with a smoothie made with unpasteurized Sun Orchard orange juice. Within a day, he had to be rushed back to the hospital, where it took him four more days to recover.

The juice, it turned out, contained salmonella. The company later explained that it had met rising demand by bringing from Mexico a tanker truck of unpasteurized orange juice, chilled with contaminated ice. The company and regulators agree that this probably caused an outbreak that infected more than 400 people. One elderly man died.

Why, in an age of technologies that protect food, is food poisoning at least as common as it was a half- century ago?

For one thing, people are eating more fresh fruits and vegetables without cooking them, increasing the chance of infection through bacteria or viruses. For another, people are eating more precooked foods, like seafood salads and deli meats, which are more dangerous than traditional sit-down meals served right off the stove or out of the oven.

What is more, the variety of foods available has expanded considerably faster than the government's ability to inspect them. In the last decade, grocery stores have doubled the number of items they stock, from every corner of the world, some carrying new organisms that scientists still cannot identify, much less treat.

In fact, the amount of contaminated food that reaches store shelves only to be recalled for posing health risks has reached its highest level in more than a decade.

"We do have a real problem," said Joe Levitt, food safety director for the Food and Drug Administration.

Amid the proliferation of foods, the F.D.A.'s resources to scrutinize them have scarcely changed, often making consumers the first to test a product's safety. A healthy person can withstand most infections, but older people have weaker immune systems and the population is aging, leading many scientists to worry that more Americans are becoming more susceptible to food-borne illness.

"We are the canaries in the coal mines," said Dickson Despommier, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. "The moment someone gets sick, we say, `Don't eat that food.' It's a miracle that the system doesn't break down more."

Unappealing though they may be, many contaminated products recalled last year, from batches of moldy Gatorade to ammonia-tainted ice cream, do not pose serious threats to health, manufacturers say. When outbreaks do occur, the food industry adds, better surveillance has quickened the ability to track down the cause, helping to make the nation's food supply, already the safest in the world, more trustworthy than ever.

And the industry says it has made much progress in making food safer. In fact, the illnesses caused by contaminated juice came in spite of stringent new F.D.A. rules for the juice industry in the wake of earlier outbreaks. And Sun Orchard, an Arizona company, had already increased safety by steam-cleaning oranges and bathing them in chlorine to kill bacteria.

Although much of the fear surrounding food safety focuses on meat and poultry, especially beef, the General Accounting Office estimates that 85 percent of food poisoning comes from the fruits, vegetables, seafood and cheeses that are regulated by the F.D.A. and claim a larger share of the American diet each year. And poisoning from such foods can be every bit as deadly as that from meat and poultry.

Still, the F.D.A. has less than a tenth of the inspectors of the Department of Agriculture, which regulates the meat and poultry industry. So while U.S.D.A. inspectors examine meat before it gets to grocery freezers, the F.D.A. must increasingly rely on the companies it regulates to keep their factories clean and their products safe.

Now, with slightly more than 400 inspectors to ferret out violations in 57,000 plants across the nation, the F.D.A. inspects food manufacturers about once every eight years. Some health officials, consumer advocates and epidemiologists doubt that without more of a presence the F.D.A. can catch contaminated food at the source and prevent it from getting into the food supply.

"The F.D.A. is simply going from crisis to crisis and attempting to put out the fires," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit group.

The critics have some evidence. Last year, recalls of F.D.A.-regulated products rose to 315 - the most since the mid-1980's and 36 percent above the average since the agency began keeping track 15 years ago. In every instance, the food had already made its way to store shelves before any contamination was discovered, either by regulators or by manufacturers, and often remained there for months.

"Any reasonable person would worry about it," said George Grob, deputy inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A. "If the inspection process worked really well, there would be fewer recalls. That's why you do inspections: to prevent any contamination from occurring in the first place."

In contrast with its strict supervision of blood banks or mammography centers, the F.D.A. is not required to visit food plants regularly. And as the agency's workload has increased faster than its budget, particularly in the realm of approving new drugs, food safety inspections have fallen to about a third of what they were in the 1980's.

"The core mission of the agency, which has been to inspect food and ensure its safety, has eroded," said one senior Health and Human Services official.

With imported foods, the F.D.A. is at a particular disadvantage. In the last four years alone, the number of foreign food items increased by 50 percent, from 2.7 million items in 1997 to 4.1 million last year.

The responsibility of examining that avalanche falls to a cadre of just 113 federal import inspectors, and the force has grown by only 3 workers since 1997. As a result, the F.D.A. inspects less than 1 percent of all imported foods, according to the General Accounting Office.

It is all but inevitable, health officials say, that at least some of those imports will be contaminated. Last April, a California bean sprout grower, Pacific Coast Sprout Farms, shipped in seeds from China and Australia. Germinated in warehouse- sized shelters, the sprouts caused a salmonella outbreak from Oregon to Massachusetts. At least 67 people fell ill, 17 of whom sought treatment in hospitals.

Not only were the imported seeds contaminated, health officials say, but the company grew them using only a tenth of the amount of cleansing agent recommended by the F.D.A. And although the company found evidence of contamination before sending the sprouts to market, it did not order a recall until after an outbreak had spread.

The C.D.C. now says that food is responsible for twice the number of illnesses in the United States as scientists thought just seven years ago. Many of the illnesses stem from improper handling of food, either by kitchen workers or consumers themselves, but some health officials say this has always been the case and, if anything, treatment of food has improved over the years.

At least 80 percent of food-related illnesses are caused by viruses or other pathogens that scientists cannot even identify. As for the diseases researchers do know, while a number of common ailments like salmonella have tapered off in recent years, other, more serious illnesses appear to be on the rise. Cases of E. coli infection, for example, have more than doubled in the last five years, to 4,341 in 2000 from 1,667 in 1995, although some of the increase may be a result of better reporting, scientists say.

The food industry agrees that better scrutiny is needed, because not all companies can afford to run tests in their factories.

"Be it right or wrong, the vast majority of foods are not required to be tested for pathogens," said C. Thomas Leitzke, director of inspections for the Wisconsin health department. "The plants are not required to do it, and in most cases don't."

Many health officials worry that as consolidation transforms the food industry from countless local farms to a handful of giant corporations that ship their products worldwide, the reach of contaminated food is expanding, magnifying problems when they do occur.

"Even if you doubled the number of inspectors, you still only look at a small percentage of the food," said Dr. Dennis Lang, infectious disease officer at the National Institutes of Health. "But the mere promise that it might be inspected makes people take notice. They'll make sure their plant is clean."

------

U.S.-Japan summit unlikely to yield much progress

USA Today
03/18/2001 - Updated 07:03 PM ET
By Mark Memmott and James Cox, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-18-japansummit.htm

WASHINGTON - President Bush meets Monday with a Japanese prime minister who is enormously unpopular at home and is widely expected to be out of office as soon as next month.

There's little chance of substantial progress on issues that nag U.S.-Japan relations and little chance that the leaders of the world's two largest economies will be able to do or say much to reassure shaky financial markets about the global economic outlook.

It's even unclear from their public statements just how tough Bush administration officials want to be with Japan on the key issue of whether it's doing enough to resuscitate its gasping economy.

So what's the point of the luncheon summit with Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori?

"Some reasons you do things are right, some wrong, some partisan, some non-partisan, and some are just because of the way the world is. That's the way it is with Japan," says Bowman Cutter, deputy director of President Clinton's National Economic Council in 1993-96.

In other words, experts say, if it's important to Mori and to the Japanese people that the new U.S. administration follow tradition and make sure that one of the president's first meetings with a foreign leader be with the prime minister of Japan, then so be it.

It's also important, they agree, that the Bush administration signal the world right away that Japan remains a critical ally because of the many significant common interests the two countries share.

"The world needs to see the two of them appearing as if they're working together," says William Breer, a former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.

Monday's meeting comes amid U.S.-Japan tensions over:

Which country is more to blame for a weakening global economy and falling stock prices. The United States has been particularly frustrated with what it sees as slow progress on cleaning up Japan's debt-plagued banking system and reforming its economy to unleash consumer spending. The Bush administration's attitude toward North Korea, which has missiles that pose a potential threat to Japan. U.S. officials have said Bush will move more cautiously than Clinton did in improving relations with North Korea. The deaths of nine people, including four teenagers, aboard a Japanese fishing boat that was accidentally rammed by a U.S. Navy submarine.

The meeting also comes as Mori appears to be headed out of office. Elected just less than a year ago after being chosen leader of the dominant Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Mori's popularity ratings are now near single digits.

He was widely criticized for not interrupting his golf game when word reached him of the fishing boat disaster. He's seen both within and without Japan as ineffectual and out of touch. He has maintained, for example, that Japan's economy is sound even as reports show growth has virtually stopped.

Last week, he said he would push up the date of the LDP's leadership election from September to April. The move is seen as setting in motion selection of a new leader and therefore a new prime minister. "This is a guy who has no substantive interests and is a total lame duck. What can possibly come out of this?" asks Adam Posen, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington.

"He's a hollow suit," says Steve Clemons, executive vice president at the New American Foundation, a centrist public-policy think tank. "The administration is doing a favor for Mori" by letting him have a "foreign policy swan song."

The get-together is of at least some value "because Mori will be replaced by someone from the same party," says Joseph Nye, dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant secretary of Defense for international security affairs. So when the leaders talk about nagging issues or mutual concerns such as China, Bush will know his message will get through to those in control, Nye says.

But on the critical issue of Japan's economy, it's unclear just what message Bush will send. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has said the new administration will not take a cue from the Clinton White House, which was known to repeatedly lecture Japan about what it should do to boost its economy and help shore up global growth.

O'Neill's view appears to fit with a bipartisan report written late last year that many experts view as a virtual blueprint for Bush administration policy toward Japan. Prepared for the National Defense University by a group that included Nye and new Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, it advocates "quiet, behind-the-scenes coordination of (U.S.-Japan) strategies" and a renewed focus on the broader U.S.-Japan relationship.

But then this week, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Congress the Bush team will not take a "laissez-faire attitude" toward Japan's economic problems. He said U.S. officials will give Mori "the benefit of our thinking on this matter."

Posen says Bush and his aides should be blunt. "If I was briefing the president, I'd tell him we have a ticking time bomb in the Japanese banking system," Posen says. "We have to convince these guys that for all our talk about the security relationship being primary, we will not let them drag the rest of the world's economy down."

-------- depleted uranium

UNEP, IAEA Depleted Uranium Missions to Bosnia-Herzegovina,Yugoslavia and Iraq -

solange
Press Release 01/03
Sunday, March 18, 2001 11:28 PM

The IAEA is considering holding a training course to improve the understanding and skills of specialist staff from concerned countries. The main focus will be on measurement methods and the assessment of risks from depleted uranium and other radioactivity.

This is totally unacceptable for an organisation whose "principal objective is to promote and increase the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and the well being of humanity" (statutes of the iAEA)

See also article IV of the NPT

With such a heavy conflict of interest, we see immeditely in which way they will "IMPROVE THE SKILLS" of specialist staff in concerned countries.

We have to oppose confront this in the largest possible manner

Please, everybody, help
Yours in Peace
Solange Fernex

Présidente Ligue Internationale des Femmes pour la Paix et la liberté, Section Française 114, rue de Vaugirard 75006 - Paris

fax: 03.89.40.78.04

De: diane d'arrigo <dianed@igc.org>

Société: NIRS Répondre à: dianed@nirs.org Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:22:27 -0500 Objet: UNEP, IAEA Depleted Uranium Missions to Bosnia-Herzegovina, Yugoslavia and Iraq - Press Release 01/03

A previous press release from UNEnvironment Programme and IAEA on the WHO study of du.

http://www.iaea.org/worldatom/Press/P_release/2001/prn0103.shtml

Daily Press Review IAEA Newsbriefs Press Releases Current Archive Multimedia DG Statements Booklets Back

Copyright </worldatom/copyright.shtml>, (c) International Atomic Energy Agency

PR 2001/03 (25 January 2001) Jointly issued by UNEP and IAEA

UNEP and IAEA Exploring the Possibility of Sending Depleted Uranium Missions to Bosnia-Herzegovina, The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Iraq

Vienna/Nairobi -- Mohamed ElBaradei, the Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Klaus Toepfer, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), have agreed to consider ways and means to respond to requests for fact-finding missions to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Iraq where depleted uranium (DU) was used during military conflicts. The two organizations will co-ordinate their action with the World Health Organization, which has recently decided to send a team to study the health effects of depleted uranium in Iraq, as well as with other relevant UN system organizations.

Pekka Haavisto, Chairman of UNEP's Depleted Uranium Assessment Team, is meeting today with UN officials in Sarajevo for consultations on a possible future mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Mr. Haavisto will visit Belgrade tomorrow to meet with officials of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

The IAEA is considering holding a training course to improve the understanding and skills of specialist staff from concerned countries. The main focus will be on measurement methods and the assessment of risks from depleted uranium and other radioactivity.

The possibility of sending fact-finding missions to Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Iraq follows last year's mission to Kosovo by the UNEP-led DU Assessment Team. UNEP will wait for the scientific findings of the report of the Kosovo mission, expected to be released in early March, before it embarks on new DU field assessments.

or more information:

UNEP:
Robert Bisset - Robert.Bisset@unep.org Tel: 254 2 623084, Fax: 254 2 623692
Tore Brevik --Tore.Brevik@unep.org Tel: 254 2 623292, Fax: 254 2 623692
Michael Williams -- Tel: 41-22-917-8242

IAEA:
Melissa Fleming -- m.fleming@iaea.org Tel: 43 1 2600-21275, Fax: 43 1 2600-29610

-------- missile defense

Missile Shield Risk

New York Times
March 18, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/opinion/L18MISS.html

To the Editor:
Re "Backing Beijing Into a Corner," by Trevor Corson (Op-Ed, March 12): The Bush administration appears prepared to commit the United States to a national missile defense. By ignoring overwhelming international opposition, President Bush and his advisers risk sacrificing United States peace and security.

Construction of a missile shield would likely set off a nuclear arms race with China, in effect marking the end to 40 years of steady nuclear arms reductions around the world. Pitting China against the United States in a renewed cold war would threaten to undermine the stability and peace of the entire world.

The Bush administration stands ready to advance the hands of the doomsday clock ever closer to midnight. The price is too great.

CLAYTON SWOPE Notre Dame, Ind., March 12, 2001

-------- russia

Putin's Rocket Challenge

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, March 18, 2001; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18254-2001Mar17?language=printer

Rockets have symbolized political will throughout history. Francis Scott Key glorified their red glare in "The Star-Spangled Banner." Hitler's V-2, Brezhnev's SS-20 and Reagan's Peacemaker were statements as well as weapons. So were Saddam's Scuds and the U.S. Patriots that were sent up to intercept them during the Persian Gulf War.

Now a new Russian missile has come to symbolize the strategic crossroads that Russian-American relations approach. President Vladimir Putin has made the S-300 defensive system, which uses rockets to shoot down incoming rockets, a leading indicator of the chances for cooperation or confrontation with the West.

An atmosphere of uneasy interlude prevails in the White House and the Kremlin in the absence of significant communication between the two power centers since the U.S. presidential election. President Bush has met Putin's repeated appeals for an early substantive meeting by hanging out a sign that says: "Don't bother us. We're thinking."

Putin has now responded with a burst of unilateral thinking of his own. When NATO Secretary General George Robertson visited Moscow last month, Putin outlined a plan to share the S-300 and its subsequent models with the European members of NATO to provide a territorial missile defense against attack from "rogue states."

Putin engages in chutzpah on a global scale. Pointedly excluded from the nine-page plan given Robertson for discussion within NATO was any cooperation with the United States, which Putin said does not face as immediate a threat as do the Russians and Europeans. Moscow and the European capitals would consult on the problem and keep Washington informed.

So heavily conditioned as to be militarily meaningless, the Putin plan nonetheless carries political messages about Moscow's determination to develop alternatives to Bush's far more ambitious vision of U.S. missile defense. Robertson dutifully warned Putin that attempting to split the Europeans off from Washington would fail, according to two accounts of the conversation.

Putin's alternatives would all involve working within the framework of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. In a major shift from Clinton foreign policy, Bush has instructed his aides to think outside the constraints of that treaty in coming up with a missile defense plan -- and to design the system they think the United States needs regardless of the treaty's provisions. Clinton sought a system that would require only modification of the treaty.

The S-300 system is a sophisticated set of tracking devices and rockets that can reportedly intercept as many as six missiles or aircraft at one time. It was not designated by number in the plan given NATO, but an accompanying sketch left no doubt about what Moscow has in mind, according to reports from European, American and Russian officials aware of the plan's contents.

Absent from the new Russian proposal is any mention of the more ambitious approach of shooting down missiles immediately after launch in their "boost phase."

This approach, which Bush once expressed interest in studying, would have offered the prospect of close American-Russian cooperation on a global system of missile defense. But it is now dismissed by senior Russian officials in Moscow as "some engineer's dream" that did not pan out.

New attention was focused on the S-300 last week when Iran asked Putin to sell the Russian weapon to Tehran. News reports did not indicate that the Russian leader bothered to inform the Iranians of a moment of historic irony: Iran was one of the four "rogue states" Putin listed as a potential missile threat to Europe and Russia that the S-300 could help counter. (Iraq, North Korea and Pakistan were the others, I am told.)

It is a small unintended tribute to Bush's persistence on the subject that Putin has put forward a missile defense system as the strategic symbol of this uncertain moment. The Russian's plan is a straightforward political challenge spelled out in hardware: Missile defense will be a matter of cooperation or of confrontation between Russia and NATO. Each side will have to choose where its interests lie.

And Russia's disclosure that it is considering an Iranian request for the S-300 system is Putin's deliberate reminder of the risks of confrontation.

The Russians will unveil their missile defense plan in detail this spring to the Permanent Joint Commission they run with NATO. Bush will then travel to Brussels in mid-June for a working meeting with NATO's other leaders and go on to Sweden for a U.S.-European Union summit. Rockets, in one form or another, will guide his steps toward the crossroads ahead.

----

Bush Targets Russia Nuclear Programs for Cuts

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 18, 2001; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20489-2001Mar17?language=printer

U.S. programs that pay to help Russia reduce and safeguard its nuclear weapons and materials have been targeted by the Bush administration for cuts of 12 percent below this year's level and 30 percent below the figures proposed in the Clinton administration's fiscal 2002 budget, according to congressional and nongovernmental sources.

Rose E. Gottemoeller, former director of nonproliferation and national security at the Energy Department, said she has been told that the $1.2 billion proposed by the previous administration for Russian programs had been reduced by President Bush's Office of Management and Budget to $800 million, which is $73 million below the current year's figure.

Gottemoeller, now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, called the proposed budget cuts a "shame." A spokesman for Energy, Joe Davies, said Secretary Spencer Abraham "is still working on budget figures" and that no final number is expected until April.

Gottemoeller said the "Nuclear Cities" program, which this year provided $30 million to help former nuclear scientists get nonmilitary work, would be cut to $6 million.

The nuclear materials protection and security program, which helps pay for improved security over Russia's stockpiles of plutonium and enriched uranium, received $154 million this year. Under the Clinton budget, it would have risen to $217 million. Under Bush, it is set to drop to $139 million.

Energy's plutonium disposal program, in which the United States and Russia change weapons-grade material so it cannot be used for bombs, is set to rise from $200 million this year to $217 million under Bush. That is well below the $400 million proposed by the Clinton administration to enable construction of a facility to begin processing the nuclear materials.

Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that handles the Energy nonproliferation budget, said Friday that the Russian programs "don't deserve to be cut as much as they are thinking."

In the House, Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-Calif.), whose district includes Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which participates in the programs, said that "dramatic cuts to these programs . . . may cripple our efforts to secure nuclear material in Russia and ensure that Russia's nuclear physicists are gainfully employed in non-defense-related industries."

But sentiment appears to be growing in Congress to cut aid to Russia in response to Russian sales of weaponry and nuclear power plants to Iran. Last week, Rep. Joseph M. Hoeffel III (D-Pa.), a member of the House International Relations Committee, sent Bush a letter signed by a bipartisan group of 29 House members calling for a halt in Russian aid programs.

----

Cash-poor Russia lobbies for nuclear waste

Seattle Times
Nation & World : Sunday, March 18, 2001
By Susan B. Glasser The Washington Post
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=russnukes18&date=20010318

MUSLYUMOVO, Russia - As a Red Army draftee in the 1950s, Nikolai Gidenko helped build a dam on the Techa River, sometimes immersed in water up to his knees.

What Gidenko didn't know then was that the Techa River was a nuclear-waste dump, a river of radioactivity carrying contamination from the top-secret nuclear facility nearby. Today, Gidenko receives 200 rubles a month - less than $8 - as compensation for the radiation to which he was exposed. In his village of 4,500 people are six cemeteries, five already full.

Which makes it all the more surprising when Gidenko unhesitatingly answers yes when asked if he favors the latest plan of Russia's cash-poor leaders: creating a haven for the world's nuclear leftovers.

In exchange for what the government estimates could be a $21 billion windfall, the Russians intend to open their doors to more than 20,000 tons of spent fuel from foreign nuclear reactors for storage and possible reprocessing. Some likely will end up in Gidenko's back yard.

Nationwide, the proposal has spurred the biggest grass-roots opposition movement in Russia's 10 years of democracy.

But this region of the Ural Mountains almost 1,000 miles east of Moscow, which environmentalists call "the most polluted place on Earth," has more radioactive waste than 20 Chernobyls. And here, local leaders are lobbying for their share of the radioactive paycheck.

"I am in favor of importing the nuclear waste," Gidenko said last week in his wooden cottage, the temperature outside 20 degrees below zero. "They will reprocess it into fuel, and it will be cheaper for the population. They claim that electricity will be free."

With the apparent support of President Vladimir Putin, the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, gave preliminary approval in December to the nuclear imports. More than 90 percent of the lawmakers voted for it, despite polls showing more than 90 percent of Russians against it.

"They have dollar signs in their eyes," said activist Natalya Mironova, who belongs to an environmental movement that gathered an unprecedented 2 1/2 million signatures for a national referendum to block the foreign waste - only to see the Central Election Commission invalidate just enough signatures to throw it off the ballot.

To opponents, the fight is a morality tale about a country whose leaders are so cynical they would mortgage their land's health for some ready cash. It's also a political puzzle: In the increasingly authoritarian politics of the Putin era, no one is sure whether, or how, public pressure can influence the small group of policy-makers that will decide the matter.

Experts on both sides of the debate agree that Russia's stated reason for getting into the nuclear-waste business is legitimate: Nearly 60 years into the Atomic Age, Russia has a huge stockpile of nuclear waste from its own reactors and insufficient money to handle it. Even without importing waste, some experts say, Russia's storage facility near Krasnoyarsk could be full in a few years.

Several nuclear specialists argued that the importing plan might not be as bad as the alternative: a nuclear-waste-storage crisis and no resources to deal with it.

"Our problem is we have no money," said Nikolai Ponomarev-Stepnoi, deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, the leading Russian state nuclear-research facility on Moscow's outskirts.

Taking in spent fuel from abroad is the only commercially sensible solution, he said.

But numerous logistical and diplomatic problems confront Russia's entry into this business. Most significant is whether Russia intends to store the fuel, or recycle it for nuclear-power stations.

The United States opposes reprocessing spent fuel because the process extracts plutonium that could be used in nuclear weapons. As much as 70 percent of the world's spent nuclear fuel originated in U.S.-designed reactors, so even though it sits at nuclear-power plants from Asia to Western Europe, the contracts give final say to the United States on where it ends up. If Washington, D.C., doesn't approve, Russia's $21 billion dream will go unrealized.

In Russia, however, the Atomic Energy Ministry has talked almost exclusively about reprocessing, not storing, the spent fuel.

In Moscow, critics say the Atomic Energy Ministry's plan is to use the foreign funds not for storage, or even to clean up existing environmental disaster zones, but to finance nuclear empire-building. Already, the ministry has announced plans to finish 10 new nuclear reactors.

"The atomic ministry is acquiring the power it had in Soviet days, when it was an empire inside the empire, untouchable by anyone," said Alexei Yablokov, a founder of Russia's modern environmental movement. "But in reality, the ministry lacks money to finance its grand plans. To get the money, they will have to store this nuclear waste. Of course, it's very difficult for them to explain to people that we are taking for storage everybody's waste. So they pretend they will be reprocessing it and gaining valuable resources."

The government's nuclear-safety commission has feuded with the ministry in hopes of blocking the foreign-waste proposal.

Such policy nuances are lost here in the Urals, where nuclear pork-barrel politics has taken hold in anticipation that Mayak, the secret nuclear facility up the river from the tainted village of Muslyumovo, will be the recipient of foreign spent fuel.

In the capital, Chelyabinsk, a government-run newspaper proclaimed that "billions of dollars for the region" await.

Two hours north of Chelyabinsk, in the closed city of Ozersk, the same argument is being made to the 10,000-plus workers at the Mayak nuclear plant, Russia's most important nuclear facility.

Mayak houses the country's only factory for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel but is equipped to work only with fuel from Soviet-built reactors. Accepting spent fuel from other countries will require a major upgrade Mayak cannot afford.

"They say, `It is necessary to do this. Then everyone will live here like in a fairy tale,'" said Ozersk sociologist Nadezhda Kutepova. Her father came here to clean up a 1957 explosion that was the second-largest nuclear accident in history; he died 20 years later of colon cancer.

Among Ozersk's more than 80,000 residents, she said, nostalgia flourishes for Soviet times, when the dangers of working at the nuclear plant were accompanied by higher wages, unrationed food and such luxuries as candy. "In Ozersk, people think those golden times will return," she said. "No one is thinking about the ecological damage; no one is thinking about nuclear weapons. We are only interested in our wages."

In a rare interview, Mayak General Director Vitaly Sadovnikov portrayed the proposal as a matter of economic survival. "Mayak is definitely interested in such an activity, as any enterprise is interested in work," he said.

Mayak's nuclear catastrophes - the 1949-56 dumping in the Techa River, the 1957 explosion and a 1967 cloud of radioactive dust from a nuclear waste-filled lake - have exposed more than 450,000 people to dangerously high levels of radiation, according to scientists who have studied them. The environmental disasters were a state secret until the waning days of communism. Sadovnikov insists safety is no longer an issue at Mayak.

Even among Mayak's relatively privileged workers, 64 percent of 700 Ozersk residents said they were against the proposal in a survey Kutepova conducted last fall.

"But they will not speak up," she said. "There is a code of silence. `Yes, my father died. Yes, my relatives are ill. But I'll be paid my wages and I'll be silent.'"

Ramses Faizullin, 16, decided not to be silent. He lives in one of the villages near Mayak that was relocated from the banks of the Techa years before he was born. Even so, Ramses was born with radiation disease; his head is abnormally large and he coughs incessantly. He was hospitalized three times last year.

In December, Ramses wrote to Putin and the State Duma, pleading with them to block the plan.

"I do not want to have children like myself," he wrote. "We have suffered our fill from this radiation as it is; every week, they bury somebody in our village."

-------- us nuc waste

No-Nuke Activist Faces Radioactive Facts

Los Angeles Times
Sunday, March 18, 2001
By DANA PARSONS
mailto:Dana.Parsons@latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/editions/orange/ocnews/20010318/t000023636.html

It's a scary phrase from what seems like a bygone era, but which suddenly is a lot more current.

Nuclear waste dump site.

Those of us not well-versed in nuclear-power lingo tend to recoil when hearing the words. Not in my backyard? How about not in my state? How about the dark side of the moon?

With that in mind, the saving grace down through the years had always been that we tended to associate nuclear dump sites with places like New Jersey or remote, barren locales.

Uh, would you believe the beaches of Southern California?

The California Coastal Commission, whose objections just last week prompted a developer to scrap a San Clemente project, turned around and said yes to building a storage facility at the 34-year-old San Onofre power plant south of the city.

The two projects are unrelated, but one can only chuckle at their juxtaposition in the same week.

No to houses and commercial development; yes to nuclear waste.

Commission members were quick to say their jurisdiction in such matters is limited but that the panel needed to sign off on the storage facility requested by Southern California Edison, which operates the plant.

Edison officials said they need the facility for long-term storage of the plant's used-up uranium rods--something the federal government once promised but never delivered. San Onofre plant officials say the storage facility will be safer than the temporary cooling ponds now in use.

As has always been the case with nuclear power, we laypeople have to take their word for that.

That was much easier to do before Three Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986. Those power-plant disasters helped shape a generation's aversion to nuclear power and essentially put a stop to building more nuclear facilities in the United States.

That's the way it should stay, says longtime anti-nuclear activist Marion Pack of Norco.

And yet, she knows that doesn't quite address the matter at hand: what to do with the radioactive fuel rods.

I can hear Pack's frustration crackling over the phone line as she talks about that.

"I'm not saying cooling ponds are the best place for them," she says. "There's no good place for them, and I find it unconscionable that we continue to generate more of it when we don't know what we're going to do with what we have."

I'm going to assume nuclear-waste storage is not an area of expertise for Coastal Commission members. Pack knows that too, which only makes her more frustrated.

The commission's action is simply a reaction to the fact that the federal government hasn't created any long-term storage facilities for nuclear waste.

So Pack finds herself in an odd position. It's not that the new storage facility is horrible. After all, expended rods can't cool off in the ocean.

"They have to stay somewhere," she says. "I don't want to advocate for their hasty removal, either. It's the dilemma we've created for ourselves when we decided to use nuclear fuel. There is no good way to store spent nuclear fuel rods."

For those of us who thought these discussions were a thing of the past, we may have to bone up on our nuclear-power jargon because the state's electricity crisis has people talking nuclear again.

Advocates convinced of its safety know they'll have to do a better job this time around selling it to the public.

Pack fears the state's crisis might create a more receptive audience. "We've had a nuclear waste site on the beach ever since San Onofre went into operation, in reality," she says, a reference to the temporary cooling ponds.

But to her way of thinking, when you play with nuclear, you're playing with fire.

"I think people should be a little more aware," she says, "of what's sitting down at the southern border of the county."

Dana Parsons' column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times' Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.

-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

Commander escapes from prison in Colombia

USA Today
03/18/2001 - Updated 05:22 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-18-colombia.htm

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - A paramilitary commander accused of organizing a massacre of 38 people has escaped from a Bogota prison, four days after suspected drug smugglers freed themselves from the same institution, a newspaper reported Sunday.

Martin Villa, a right-wing paramilitary leader, walked out of Modelo Prison on Feb. 25 by apparently disguising himself as a visitor and then simply walking out, according to interviews the El Tiempo newspaper conducted with prison authorities.

Prison officials did not notify the chief prosecutor's office until after March 9, according to the article, which did not say why they took so long to reveal Villa's escape. Prison officials have declined to comment on the reported escape.

El Tiempo, Colombia's leading daily, published a document signed by a prison inspector reporting Villa's absence. The report was addressed to the warden, Edgar Novoa.

Villa is accused of leading a February 2000 massacre in which 300 fighters from the rightist paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, tortured and killed 38 villagers in El Salao in Bolivar State after accusing them of working with leftist guerrillas.

Villa, who was transferred to Modelo last April, is believed to be one of paramilitary chief Carlos Castano's most trusted commanders. Guards were supposed to have been watching him around the clock.

Four days before he walked out of the prison, two suspected drug smugglers escaped from the same prison. Juan Velez and Pablo Hoyos were arrested along with 52 others during a police sweep last November and were awaiting extradition to the United States. It wasn't clear how they escaped.

Deaths from massacres and assassinations linked to the AUC rose from 400 in 1998 to 1,560 last year. Human rights groups and the U.S. State Department have accused Colombia's military of collaborating with the AUC against the leftist insurgency.

Severing those ties is a key requirement for the government to continue receiving U.S. aid. Washington is supporting Colombia's drug-fighting initiative through a $1.3 billion aid package in mostly military hardware and training.

Villa was the third top-ranking paramilitary member in recent years to escape from a government prison, said Robin Kirk, a Colombia specialist at the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch.

"We have noticed a lack of special measures for these prisoners given their history of escape," said Kirk.

The victims of the Feb. 16 massacre included a six-year-old girl and an elderly woman. Some were tortured and raped.

In an interview shortly after the slaughter, Castano admitted that his men were responsible.

-------- space

Arming the Heavens

San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, March 18, 2001
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/18/ED217078.DTL

"IF THE U.S. is to avoid a 'Space Pearl Harbor' it needs to take seriously the possibility of an attack on U.S. space systems."

You might think this is the opening of a science fiction novel. But these words appear in a federal government document. Specifically, this is the conclusion reached by the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, which presented its long-awaited recommendations to Congress on Jan. 11, 2001.

Chaired by Donald H. Rumsfeld -- before President Bush appointed him secretary of defense -- the commission seeks to protect American military and surveillance satellites from future attacks. To thwart such aggression, the commissioners recommend that the United States develop a space-based "military capability" to defend its space "assets."

Just as Rumsfeld delivered this report to Congress, President Bush decided to suspend all further military expenditures and asked the new secretary of defense to conduct a complete review of the armed services, including their strategies and weapons.

Although no one knows what Rumsfeld will ultimately conclude, he has already provided us with a disturbing vision of how he imagines America's military future.

America will prepare to fight in space. The U.S. will control space to maintain strategic dominance on Earth.

If adopted, the Rumsfeld report could ignite an arms race that would make the proliferation of nuclear bombs seem almost quaint.

In Rumsfeld's view, space is the next arena of warfare. While politicians debate whether the United States should build a defensive national missile defense, the Rumsfeld commission regards a ground-based missile defense as the first step in deploying space-based weaponry, which could become an offensive threat.

His is not an isolated view. In a recent issue of the New Republic, Senior Editor Lawrence Kaplan suggests we drop all pretenses and admit that "missile defense is about preserving America's ability to wield power abroad. It's not about defense. It's about offense. And that's exactly why we need it."

U.S. weaponry is obsolete, says Rumsfeld. The next president must "have the option to deploy weapons in space to deter threats and, if necessary, defend against attacks on U.S. interests."

The Rumsfeld report proposes a full-scale effort to prepare for space warfare. It recommends, for example, that the president declare space a national security priority, that a Space Advisory Group report directly to the president and that the Air Force create "a Space Corps" that will eventually morph into "a military department for space." With these steps, the report concludes, the United States will gain "the capability to use space as an integral part of its ability to manage crises, deter conflict, and if deterrence fails, to prevail in conflict."

The resolve to build a space-based military is hardly new. Much of the commission's report is, in fact, a tamer and toned-down version of documents already published by the U.S. Space Command, which the Pentagon established in 1985 to "help institutionalize the use of space."

These documents, readily accessible on the Web site of the U.S. Space Command (www.spacecom.af.mil/usspace), reveal a more ominous vision of space- based warfare. The cover of one document, called "Vision for 2020," depicts a laser weapon shooting a beam down from space, zapping a target below. Beneath this sci-fi image crawl the words: "U.S. Space Command -- dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investments."

"Vision for 2020" emphasizes how the global economy will widen the gulf between "the haves" and the "have-nots." By deploying space-based weaponry and surveillance, however, the United States will have the ability "to control space" and from space, "to dominate" the Earth below.

U.S. military leaders are blunt in describing their plans for space warfare.

"It's politically sensitive, but it's going to happen," Gen. Joseph Ashy, former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Space Command, told Aviation Week & Space Technology in 1996.

"Space is the ultimate 'high ground,' " reported "Guardians of the High Frontier," a 1997 U.S. Air Force Space Command report. "Tomorrow's Air Force will likely dominate the air and space around the world," declares "Almanac 2000," recently published by the U.S. Space Command.

All this, remember, was before George W. Bush became president.

Yet candidate Bush never hid his enthusiasm for Star Wars. On the campaign trail, he repeatedly proposed that the United States leapfrog over the next generation of weapons -- still meant for fighting the Cold War -- and proceed directly to high-tech weapons. By choosing Donald Rumsfeld, Bush appointed a man whom the Washington Post has called the "leading proponent not only of national missile defenses, but also of U.S. efforts to take control of outer space."

Spending billions of tax dollars to deploy space-based weaponry is a serious matter, though most Americans seem unaware of an idea that appears to be gaining currency -- including the cash -- within government. Last year, for example, a multimillion-dollar contract was signed for a "Space-Based Laser Readiness Demonstrator."

The militarization of space would violate international law. In 1967, the U. S.-initiated Outer Space Treaty banned all nations from deploying weapons in space. Last year, 163 nations voted to reaffirm that U.N. agreement.

Three nations abstained and refused to support the resolution: The United States, Israel and Micronesia.

So, is Donald Rumsfeld's "strategic review" a charade? Have the decisions already been made?

Some experts and activists think so.

An editorial in the Economist recently argued that "the long-promised transformation of the American defense system from a Cold War fighting force to the high-tech -army of the future" is finally going to take place. The Center for Defense Information has criticized the "concerted effort in the administration" to push ahead with the militarization of space.

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, says, "We have this one chance, this one moment in history, to stop the weaponization of space from happening."

If he is right, the American people face an urgent need to become informed about our government's future military plans.

Look up at the heavens. Imagine laser or nuclear weapons orbiting in space. Then decide whether space-based warfare will make you feel any safer here on Earth.

------

Arms race in outer space?
War Planning For Outer Space Right Now

From: "Bill Smirnow" <smirnowb@ix.netcom.com>
Sunday, March 18, 2001
Philadelphia Inquirer By Karl Grossman
USA Space Command Web Site: http://www.spacecom.af.mil/usspace

The United States is seeking to make space a new arena of war.

This is in violation of the intent of the basic international law on space, the Outer Space Treaty (OST) of 1967. The OST, ratified by most of the world's nations, sets aside space for "peaceful purposes."

But the U.S. administration and military have other ideas.

"In the coming period the United States will conduct operations to, from, in and through space in support of its national interests both on the Earth and in space," declares the recently released report of the "Space Commission" chaired by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Stressing that it is "possible to project power through and from space in response to events anywhere in the world," the report declares that "missions initiated from Earth or space . . . would give the United States a much stronger deterrent and, in a conflict, an extraordinary military advantage."

The 13-member panel, formally called the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization, recommends a transition of the U.S. Space Command, which now coordinates U.S. space military activities, into a "Space Corps," a separate military entity like the Marine Corps.

The report follows up a series of military reports that call for the United States to "control space" and from it to "dominate" the Earth below. These include the "Vision for 2020" report of the Space Command, its cover depicting a laser weapon shooting a beam from space zapping a target below. Vision for 2020 then proclaims the Space Command's mission - "dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect U.S. interests and investment."

Vision for 2020 compares U.S. military plans for space to how centuries ago "nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests," how the empires of Europe ruled the waves and thus the world.

The Space Command's Long Range Plan says, "Space power in the 21st century looks similar to previous military revolutions, such as aircraft-carrier warfare and Blitzkrieg." A Space Command logo: "Master of Space."

Far more than words are involved. About $6 billion a year - plus funds in the "black" or secret budget - have in recent years been going to U.S. space military programs.The Alpha High-Energy Laser, a TRW space weapon, last year was test-fired for the 22d time.

The Space-Based Laser, a joint TRW, Lockheed Martin and Boeing project, got the go-ahead last year. Its "lifecycle cost" is between $20 billion and $30 billion. In December, the Pentagon chose Stennis Space Center in Mississippi as its development site - and that was under the Clinton administration. In President Bush, we have an administration far more gung-ho for "Star Wars."

And although U.S. citizens may not be familiar with the full extent of what is going on, the nations of the world are. Because of the U.S. plans, there was a United Nation vote in November on a resolution for "Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space." It sought to "reaffirm" the OST, specifically its provision that space be kept for peaceful purposes. More than 160 nations voted yes. We abstained.

It was a Philadelphian, Craig Eisendrath, who as a young foreign service officer at the State Department in the 1960s, was instrumental in drafting the OST. "We sought to deweaponize space before it got weaponized," he explains.

Our leadership may think this country can control space and dominate the Earth below, but other nations will not sit back and accept that. They will respond in kind. There will be an arms race and inevitably war in space.

Our friend and neighbor Canada is leading a U.N. initiative (strongly backed by Russia and China) to strengthen the OST with a ban on all weapons in space. (The treaty now bans nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction.) Space could be kept for peace and mechanisms put in place to assure compliance. But our country opposes Canada's effort.

"If the U.S. is allowed to move the arms race into space, there will be no return," says Bruce Gagnon, coordinator to the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power In Space (www.space4peace.org). "We have this one chance, this one moment in history, to stop the weaponization of space from happening."

There's only a narrow window to prevent the heavens from becoming a war zone.

---

Preparing for the end, Mir's orbit drops slightly

USA Today
03/18/2001 - Updated 03:00 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-18-mir.htm

MOSCOW (AP) - The Mir space station continued its slow fall toward Earth on Sunday, gliding down 1.6 miles over a 24-hour period, Russian news reports said.

Russia space controllers are allowing Mir to descend gradually in preparation for an operation later this week to dump aging station in the Pacific Ocean.

Now in its final orbits after 15 years in space, the craft flew at an altitude of about 143 miles above the Earth's surface on Sunday, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

When it falls to about 135 miles, or just another eight miles, a cargo ship attached to the station is to fire engines to push the Mir into the thicker layers of the atmosphere, where it will break apart and burn.

The exact timing depends on atmospheric conditions. It was originally scheduled for Wednesday, but the final descent may be put off until Thursday or Friday, Russian space officials have said.

Russia reluctantly decided to dump the Mir last fall after numerous glitches and breakdowns and after private investors failed to come up with funds to keep the station in orbit.

---

Module packed with trash, ready to go

USA Today
03/18/2001 - Updated 03:30 PM ET
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-18-spacetrash.htm

SPACE CENTER, Houston (AP) - Discovery's astronauts pulled a trash-filled cargo carrier off the international space station on Sunday and placed it back aboard the shuttle for a late-night departure.

The Italian-built carrier, named Leonardo, came off easily. But the process leading to its removal from the space station dragged on for five hours longer than planned because of a series of nagging problems.

Andrew Thomas, the shuttle crane operator, was relieved when he finally had Leonardo latched down in Discovery's payload bay for return to Earth.

"Tell the folks back there that Leonardo is going to be coming home soon," he radioed Mission Control.

The welcome news came just 18 hours before Discovery was due to pull away from space station Alpha, carrying Leonardo and the three men who lived aboard the orbiting outpost for 4.50 months.

Bill Shepherd, the space station's first commander, and Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev were launched to the space station on Oct. 31 from Kazakstan and moved in two days later.

Last week, they were replaced aboard Alpha by Russian commander Yuri Usachev and American astronauts Jim Voss and Susan Helms, who flew up on Discovery for a four-month stay.

Discovery arrived at space station Alpha on March 10. Two days later, the shuttle crew attached the Leonardo cargo carrier to the station. Five tons of gear came out of the carrier and one ton of stuff - empty food cartons, packing foam, dirty clothes, old equipment - went in.

Saturday night's closing of Leonardo was delayed by last-minute packing. The 10 astronauts and cosmonauts also fell behind because of concern over the shuttle's main computers and leaky hoses in the vestibule between Leonardo and the space station.

Experts at Mission Control feared the computers' software may have been corrupted by the astronauts' hasty reactivation of two computers earlier in the day. The pilots did not wait the necessary 10 seconds before switching on the second computer as per written procedures, but flight director John Shannon said the pilots were following orders.

Luckily, the software was not corrupted and did not have to be reloaded, a lengthy procedure never attempted in space.

"It was just good fortune" that the software was not ruined, Shannon said.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

A 24-Hour Lab Meeting on Mad Cow Illness

New York Times
March 13, 2001
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/13/health/13CONV.html

Dr. Thomas Pringle, a biochemist, never planned to become an authority on mad cow disease.

After years of teaching college biology, an inheritance allowed him to set up a small foundation dedicated to environmental issues in the Pacific Northwest. He became interested in chronic wasting disease - a related malady in deer and elk - and that led him to mad cow disease.

Today Dr. Pringle, 55, runs the Sperling Biomedical Foundation out of his home in Eugene, Ore., gathering information on transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, including mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease, the human ailment Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or C.J.D., and a new variant of C.J.D., which people contract from eating affected beef. All are believed to be caused by aberrant proteins called prions.

"My main interest is in annotating the prion gene family within the Human Genome Project," Dr. Pringle said recently. The project recently identified more than 30,000 human genes and published their DNA sequences on public databases. Each day, Dr. Pringle's prion disease Web site (www.mad-cow.org) collects articles and research papers written about these diseases, from this country and abroad. "It is intended as a model for intensive annotation of any supergene family," he said. "I believe it is ethically important for scientists to inform public debate on highly complex topics with major policy components."

He spoke by phone from his home.

Q. You have been tracking mad cow disease for five years now and have established a Web site on the topic (www.mad-cow.org). How did you get involved with this project?

A. I got interested in mad cow disease via chronic wasting disease in deer and elk. I went on the Internet and found information that was just an eye-opener to me involving the risks to wildlife and humans. The scientist who was maintaining the site had other things to do, so I sort of took it over. I meant to add a few links and stories, but here I am five years later. The story never died.

Q. What do you want to achieve with the Web site on mad cow disease?

A. In 1996 the Web was just getting started. I wanted to do a disease Web site that showed how the Internet could be used to do original research based on published information and how it can become the scientific medium of the future. As the paradigm for a disease Web site, madcow carries news and has unlimited space for scientific papers, complex graphics, annotations and interactive models. I would not carry nearly so much news on the Web site if the news would only let up.

Q. Who visits the Web site on mad cow disease?

A. It's a meeting ground for scientists from all over the world. The Web site is a place where they can place a research paper after it's been accepted for publication. But instead of waiting six months for it to appear in print, they can share information right away, unless the journal in question objects, which most do not. It's also a place where families can get help. My dad died from a dementia at age 80, so I can relate to what people are going through. When families get a diagnosis of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, they don't understand what it means. They get it mixed up with the new variant of the disease in England that is related to mad cow disease. So they come to me really confused. Their needs are not being met by health professionals. I put them in touch with support groups on the Web, and that can help a lot.

Q. Where do you get your information for the mad cow Web site?

A. Many scientists are more than happy to share information with me. Some information gets leaked to me. I try to develop a relationship with a postdoc in every major lab, and I talk to many principal investigators. I see myself as directing a virtual mega-lab. All these other labs are there to report back to mission central, where some sense is made out of it. One frustration for me is that research results have really gone underground in last five months. A race is on to develop diagnostic tests for live animals and blood tests for humans. The big companies funding the research don't want any information put on the Web. But I think open dissemination of all information is the only answer to this disease.

Q. What are your qualifications to run a mad cow Web site, and how much time do you spend on it?

A. On the sheepskin side, Harvard undergraduate, graduate work in molecular biology at U.C. San Diego and Ph.D. in mathematics at University of Oregon. Former college professor at the University of Texas medical school and Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. I've gotten very fast at assembling and synthesizing data. I have a lot of people helping me.

Q. Do you ever feel you are a threat to officials in government laboratories or the cattle industry who don't like what you have to say?

A. When I first started this, friends said, "Tom, some rancher is going to come by your house at night and poison your dog." Well, now I know they wouldn't do that. They've hired a public relations agency instead that is trying to discredit me as just another gadfly. I don't make the news. I don't write the articles. I don't create the events. I'm basically a clearinghouse for information that everyone wants. The problem for industry and government is that this disease is out of anybody's control. Companies can't prevent, say, Taiwan from banning the import of cosmetics containing cow by-products. It can't change the number of positive tests for mad cow disease in German cows.

Q. What can companies be doing about mad cow disease that they are not?

A. Where industry has gone wrong is in listening to P.R. people. The mad cow epidemic is not an information management issue. It is not a perception problem. It's a disease that won't go away. Instead of saying it was not a problem in the United States, they could have started a research program years ago. Now when the press asks them, "Is there a risk in the United States; is it zero; or is it small; and if it's small, how small?" the government doesn't have answers. Industry doesn't have answers. Without ultrasensitive tests, it's hard to provide a satisfactory answer to the public.

Q. How big a threat is mad cow disease in American-born and -bred animals?

A. I don't expect the British strain of mad cow disease to be much of a problem here. The main fear is that our own cattle may carry a different strain of the disease that is distinct from the British strain. There's no evidence one way or another if such a homegrown disease would be a threat to humans. But we've had many potential sources of infection including deer, elk and sheep infected with similar diseases.

Q. Are we likely to see a case of the human form of mad cow disease in this country?

A. Yes. But I'm not one of those who believes that the disease has already occurred in the United States and has been covered up. But based on the number of Americans exposed while living in or visiting Europe, it is just a matter of time.

Q. What is it about mad cow disease that is so frightening?

A. Dementias are very disturbing to people because they are so embarrassing. You lose bowel and bladder control, go blind and become entirely dependent on others. It's especially hard to see this in a 20- to 40-year-old person. And there is so much uncertainty. There are too many routes of exposure. You'll never know how a person got the disease.

Q. Should Americans be worried about mad cow disease?

A. People tell me that they know the risk of being exposed to an infected cow is very small, but if one in a million American cows are naturally infected with the disease and those cows make it into the food supply, somebody's got to eat them. At the same time, we have no evidence that American cattle have ever caused this disease in humans. Nor do we know what causes 85 percent of cases of sporadic C.J.D. So much is unknown.

Q. What should Americans who have lived abroad, especially in England, do about possible exposure to mad cow disease?

A. I tell them that they should not worry all that much but should monitor developments. There are 60 million people living in Britain who are massively exposed and who ate many more hamburgers. We need to wait and see how big the problem gets in England.

Q. When people ask you what you eat, what do you say?

A. I read a fair number of autopsy reports and see what this disease can do. So I'm much more conscious of what I eat. I wouldn't touch a lambchop given the levels of scrapie here in the Willamette Valley. I would not eat oxtail soup or a T-bone steak. I occasionally eat fish and chicken. But canned tuna fish weirdly can have bovine casings, so I don't eat that. French wine is sometimes clarified with bovine blood, and I probably unwittingly drank some of that at some point. I avoid English cheeses. Basically all my food is locally produced. I'm not interested in food that I don't know where it came from.

Q. Is there any cause for optimism about containing mad cow disease?

A. I don't see this as the collapse of Western civilization. But I feel that the English opened a Pandora's box pretty badly, pretty widely. It was because of their various rounds of half measures that they failed to restrain themselves on exports and brought everyone else into this disease. We are at a real watershed. How much should we focus on containment and how much on cure? Containment efforts pit one country against the next with every nation looking out for itself. We should put a larger effort into curing the disease.

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California Eyes Area Forgotten by Time

New York Times
March 18, 2001
By BARBARA WHITAKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/national/18COVE.html?pagewanted=all

LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. - On a bungalow at the beach here, a clock is stopped at shortly before the hour of 4. "Crystal Cove Standard Time," reads a sign below.

It is a fitting greeting for visitors who happen on this tiny Orange County enclave, where time has in many ways stood still. A decrepit boardwalk is half buried in sand. Bungalows, some in desperate need of repair, date to the 1920's. The Pacific Ocean here is home to kelp forests and breeding grounds for bottlenose dolphins.

But for residents who lease the bungalows and for Crystal Cove State Park in general, the real world is bearing down. Change is coming to the park, with its 3.2 miles of coastline between Laguna Beach and Corona del Mar and its 46 beach bungalows, which are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Though the state recently decided against going through with a plan it had reached with a private developer who was going to turn Crystal Cove into a $35 million luxury resort, it still sent eviction notices to all the bungalow tenants. The state said it needed to remedy sewage pollution problems while coming up with a plan to restore the bungalows and assure public access to the park. The state has not decided how the restored bungalows will be used.

The residents of the bungalows, which rent for about $500 to more than $2,200 a month, seem resigned to eviction, which has been hanging over them since the state bought Crystal Cove and the bungalows more than 20 years ago. The cottages have been leased from the state since then.

"This is kind of an end of an era," said Russell Williams, as his sons, ages 2 and 4, the fourth generation to come here, bounced on beds in the three-room shack his grandmother bought with a friend decades ago.

That era goes back to silent-movie days, when filmmakers who wanted to evoke the South Seas would come to the cove, where the bungalows originally had thatched roofs. More recently, part of "Beaches," the Bette Midler movie, was filmed here.

The bungalow residents had sued to delay their evictions, scheduled for April 1, until the state presented a plan that would guarantee the future of the cottages, said Deborah Rosenthal, their lawyer.

[In an agreement reached on March 13, they said they would move by July 8 and drop their suit.]

Hundreds of area residents and environmentalists turned out in January to oppose a development plan under a 1997 agreement between the administration of Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, and Michael Freed, who developed the upscale Post Ranch Inn at Big Sur, Calif. Under the deal, Mr. Freed's group, Crystal Cove Conservancy Partners, was to restore bungalows to create a "vintage California beach resort" with a restaurant, a swimming pool, parking spaces and an educational center.

Opponents of the project were recently joined by a voice that held particular sway, that of Joan Irvine Smith, the great-granddaughter of the man who once owned and developed much of Orange County and whose descendants sold Crystal Cove to the state in 1979 for $32.5 million.

In a recent interview at her ranch in nearby San Juan Capistrano, Mrs. Smith, 67, recalled what her mother, Athalie Richardson Irvine Clarke, would say as they drove through the hills overlooking Crystal Cove.

" `Your grandfather wanted this to be a park, your father wanted this to be a park and I want this to be a park,' " Mrs. Smith recalled. " `You must save this park for the people.' "

Donald W. Murphy, a former director of the State Parks and Recreation Department, said that assuring public access to Crystal Cove Park, which totals about 2,800 acres, and restoring the cottages, had been the main concerns of officials when developing a plan. The state turned to a private developer, Mr. Murphy said, because it lacked the money to restore the cottages on its own.

But recently, Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, and Mr. Freed reached an agreement under which the state would buy Mr. Freed out of the deal for $2 million. The planning for restoring the cottages has been restarted and the state will soon begin work on the pollution problem, which is expected to cost $10 million to remedy. There is also the question of who will pay the estimated $35 million cost to restore the bungalows.

State officials say they intend to seek far more public comment on planning for the park, and Mrs. Smith has helped establish the Crystal Cove Conservancy to monitor the restoration, in the area's best interest.

Asked what she wanted for the area, Mrs. Smith chuckled, thinking aloud about all the interests that have competed over the years for control of the cove.

"If this could end up being the home of the California gnatcatcher and the coastal sage," she said, speaking of the threatened songbird and the disappearing plant, "that would certainly be poetic justice."

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On Returning to a Green and Contagious Isle

New York Times
March 18, 2001
By ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/weekinreview/18COWE.html?pagewanted=all

GRASMERE, England - PEOPLE like to say - with relief or regret - that the past is another country, and that is true of Britain today. I know because I lived there then and live here now. And nothing has brought the message home more forcibly in the past few weeks than the land itself as it has confronted the scourge, yet again, of disease.

When I left Britain to live abroad, more decades ago than I care to recall, the countryside was still seen as a place of wholesome food, fresh air and rude health. The farmers provided our sustenance - slabs of beef, churns of creamy milk, bricks of cheese - and we consumed it with gusto in the era before cholesterol- awareness crimped the diet.

The nation's poets, like William Wordsworth, who lived and wrote in this part of the English Lake District 200 years ago, had reveled in nature's bounty as "apparelled in celestial light." In the era before package vacations to Spain or Cyprus, these mountains and valleys were a playground for those released from the northern grime of a faltering Industrial Revolution that still choked the cities with smog and turned rivers murky.

True - Britain being even more class-bound than it is today - the toffs (as we called the upper crust) enjoyed their not inconsiderable swaths of the land by shooting grouse and catching salmon or holding house parties and riding to hounds (as they still do), while the rest of us settled for hobnailed hiking boots, youth hostels and cheap poles to catch coarse fish. But these great hills and valleys, where I spent much of my adolescence, defied class: some of the greatest mountaineers of the day had grown up as working-class plumbers, displacing the tweedy professional classes, literally, at the summits of the sport. Far from the cities, as nowhere else, the English were united in shared assumptions and self-confidence.

A couple of years back I returned to a different Britain to live. After mad cow disease - as now with foot-and-mouth, and last year with swine fever - the land had come to be seen as a source of pestilence, its offerings tainted. If we eat beef, will we sicken? Are the vegetables some genetic creation akin to Frankenstein's monster? Are the farmers themselves the yeomen of yore or manipulators of subsidies, indifferent to the health of their livestock and those who eat it as long as the payments come through from Brussels and London?

THE foot-and-mouth outbreak, which started Feb. 19, has taken the doubts a step further. As part of the restrictions supposed to curb the disease, footpaths and walking trails, even canal towpaths and lake shores, have been closed to the public. This year, I realize that the walking boots stowed in my flat in London will stay there until the measures are lifted. No one - toff or otherwise - has trodden England's mountains for three weeks, and the restrictions are likely to last for weeks more, if not months. Wordsworth wrote of wandering "lonely as a cloud" among the springtime daffodils. Anyone doing that here in the Lake District today would risk a $7,500 fine for venturing off the paved road.

The burden of extreme pain, obviously, lies with farmers and others - hoteliers and shopkeepers and suppliers in rural economies that depend on visitors - not to mention the hundreds of thousands of sheep, pigs and cows that will be killed and incinerated on gruesome pyres.

But for the rest of us, a secret bond with the land has been broken - because we can't set foot on it.

Of course, the past is another country in many other ways. The Industrial Revolution drew men and women from the land into William Blake's "dark satanic mills." And in postindustrial Britain the mills themselves, along with farming, have receded as Britons migrated increasingly to the jobs offered in service industries concentrated in the urbanized south around London; this too has shifted the focus away from the land.

True, there are still those who hanker for Evelyn Waugh's notion of the countryside as a place dotted with great estates where the upper classes cavort in hunting pink and tuxedos.

And there are many more for whom modern pressures enhance the idea of a weekend break, a walk in the hills as an escape from "the vast city, where I had long pined/A discontented sojourner" (Wordsworth, again). These days, tens of thousands of middle-class Britons own second homes in the countryside, mimicking the grand country house tradition of Waugh's novels. In a nation of some 60 million people, 15 million people visit the Lake District every year.

Naturally enough, class distinctions persist. The royal family exemplifies the upper end of the market, decamping from country castle to urban palace as appropriate to the seasons. But the unspoken similarity with plain folk is that town and country complement one another, each fulfilling different needs in the same soul. Even Wordsworth had his urban moments, most famously in his paean to London in 1802, which begins: "Earth has not anything to show more fair."

For all that, there has been a seismic shift. With the advent of the wired world, there is less of an attraction for the Napster generation in areas like this, where cellphone signals do not penetrate and television reception can be poor to nonexistent. Agriculture contributes a mere 1.8 percent to national wealth. With the decline of the countryside's importance, the relationship between city and country has become a persistent and difficult subplot of British politics, rooted in the suspicion among country folk that Tony Blair's anti-hunting, citified New Labor government harbors a visceral, unspoken resentment of rural Britain.

And some old assumptions of invulnerability have simply disappeared.

True, this is a less deferential, feistier, richer nation. But with the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, the conceit that England is still what Blake called a "green and pleasant land" has collided with tabloid headlines informing Britons that their disease-ridden animals have made them the lepers of Europe. That particular malediction has arrived after a relentless catalog of curses - not just mad cow disease, but also the crumbling of institutions like the wreck-prone railways and the creaking health and education services, not to mention the unusual floods that have befallen the land in recent months.

Not far from here, another event the other day offered a bittersweet reminder of earlier times. Divers on a lake called Coniston Water raised the wreck of the Bluebird, a high-speed boat in which Sir Donald Campbell, a national hero, died while trying to break his own speed record of 276 miles per hour in 1967, the same year as Britain's last major brush with foot-and-mouth disease.

Television coverage showed a grainy Movietone News clip of Sir Donald before the 300-mile- an-hour crash. "The British, when they make their minds up," he said, "can jolly well overcome all obstacles and achieve anything." His own destiny seemed to contradict that assertion, offering, perhaps, a portent of things to come.

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Industry Has Powerful Allies on Drilling Bill

New York Times
March 18, 2001
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/politics/18ENER.html

WASHINGTON, March 17 - When Senator Frank H. Murkowski of Alaska, the chairman of the Natural Resources Committee, introduced his broad energy proposal, he made sure to publicly thank, by name, the many lobbying groups who helped shape the bill.

The praise was well deserved. The legislation is loaded with tax breaks for the oil, coal and nuclear energy industries. It also seeks to lift a ban on oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal that has sparked a fierce and expensive lobbying war.

This week the coal and oil industries got more good news. President Bush, reversing a campaign pledge, decided not to try to curb power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, which many say causes global warming. The decision, which came after industry lobbyists and Republican lawmakers pressured Mr. Bush, sent a shudder through environmental advocacy groups.

These back-to-back successes illustrate the influence of the oil, coal and nuclear energy industries now that Republicans are in control of Capitol Hill and the White House. But perhaps the greatest test to their new-found power over the environmental groups will come in the months ahead as Congress grapples with the question of drilling in the Arctic refuge.

"Our hope is that the new administration will bring balance to the debate," said Jack Gerard, president and chief executive officer of the National Mining Association, who was a member of Mr. Bush's energy advisory group during the transition. "They will say, `How do we find that middle ground?' "

Just as environmental groups contributed lavishly to Democrats, the oil, gas and coal industries directed record-breaking sums to Republicans in the last election. Oil and gas companies and their trade groups contributed a total of $14 million in 1999 and 2000, with more than $10 million going to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan election research group. The coal mining industry gave $3.8 million, 88 percent of it to Republicans.

But the industry's power extends far beyond cash donations. The White House is stocked with former oil executives, beginning with Mr. Bush, who led his own oil company in Texas. Others with ties to the industry include Vice President Dick Cheney, who has created an energy task force; Donald L. Evans, the commerce secretary; and Condoleezza Rice, national security adviser.

The automobile industry is also well represented. Andrew H. Card Jr., Mr. Bush's chief of staff, was formerly chief lobbyist for General Motors, and Spencer Abraham, the energy secretary, a former Republican senator from Michigan, reaped more campaign donations from the automobile industry last year than any other lawmaker, the Center for Responsive Politics said.

Energy industry lobbyists say the benefits of such well-placed allies are obvious: oil, coal and nuclear energy companies are no longer the presumed villains, and access to the White House is no longer a problem.

"After not talking to the White House for eight years, it's a bit of fresh air," said Roger Herrera, executive director of Arctic Power, a group with the sole purpose of lobbying for drilling in the Arctic refuge.

As the House and the White House prepare to overhaul Senator Murkowski's bill in the coming weeks, no energy battle looms larger than the one over drilling in the refuge, a stretch of tundra on Alaska's North Slope.

The issue is expected to come up first in April or May, as part of Congress's budget resolution, and the drilling is supported by President Bush. The proposal narrowly passed the Senate last year but was dropped from the budget resolution.

Environmental groups argue that the refuge, which is protected from oil exploration until Congress says otherwise, should be sacrosanct. Oil drilling, they say, would hurt the land, would endanger migrating caribou and polar bears, and would not recover enough crude to make the effort worthwhile.

"There is unified opposition to drilling in the Arctic," said Betsy Loyless, political director for the League of Conservation Voters. "The environmental community will pull out all the stops for a big win."

Several groups have already mobilized. This week, the Audubon Society began a television advertising campaign that features caribou and geese running across the refuge in summer, then shifts to a shot of the Exxon Valdez tanker. The commercial asks, "Do we really believe there won't be any more spills?"

The group has also set up a Web site that enables people to send letters directly to Congress and is holding what it calls house parties in 11 states. Defenders of Wildlife, a national conservation group, set up a Web site in January that has generated 800,000 e-mail messages and faxes to Congress.

But what their opponents lack in mobilizing the grass roots, they make up for in money and powerful connections.

Arctic Power, a nonprofit group formed in 1992, includes oil industry officials, Alaska union leaders and business groups on its board.

"We're running it to the extent that we can like a political campaign because that's what it is," said the group's leader, Mr. Herrera, a former oil company geologist. "The environmentalists are throwing tens of thousands of people at this. I hope we can match them in political strategy."

Drilling supporters say environmentalists are purposely exaggerating the potential for damage and underestimating the amount of oil in the refuge, which Mr. Herrera said could prove to be the largest oil field in the world. They also point out that only 1.5 million of the refuge's 19 million acres would be available for drilling and that new technology has made oil exploration more sensitive to the environment.

In the last few weeks, Arctic Power has hired the well-connected lobbying firm of Patton Boggs. It has also hired Qorvis, a public relations firm, and Alex Castellanos, the media consultant who worked with President Bush on his campaign advertisements. The group plans to preview its own television and radio advertisements next week.

Arctic Power expects the oil industry to step up its efforts in the battle over the refuge in the coming months. The State of Alaska, which stands to benefit from lifting the ban, has taken the lead in lobbying and has given $1.75 million to the group.

The group also has powerful allies on the Hill. Senator Murkowski, whose bill seeks to increase energy production and reduce reliance on foreign oil, has spearheaded the campaign for drilling. The effort has the support of the rest of the Alaska delegation: Senator Ted Stevens, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and Representative Don Young, chairman of the Transportation Committee.

Many Republicans and some Democrats say it is time to curb the influence of environmental groups and become more pragmatic. Power failures in California, and this winter's steep natural gas prices, have helped their arguments.

"We're not going to be talking about rolling back existing protections," said Representative Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican who is chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee. "We're talking about finding ways to achieve those results in a more flexible manner."

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Drill, Say Alaskans, Who Know Their Pockets Are Lined With Oil

New York Times
March 18, 2001
By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/national/18ALAS.html?pagewanted=all

ANCHORAGE, March 15 - Last fall, every man, woman and child in Alaska received a $1,963.86 check from the state - the annual dividend paid from the royalties the state receives for the huge oil operations in the vast North Slope fields along the Arctic Ocean. There is no income tax here, no state sales tax, again courtesy of the oil revenues, which financed 84 percent of the state budget last year.

But for Alaskans who benefit from this optimistically named Permanent Fund of oil money, there is a troubling statistic: oil is coursing down the Trans-Alaska Pipeline at just half the peak rate of the 1980's of two million barrels a day, the State Division of Oil and Gas says.

All of which goes a long way toward explaining why here in Alaska, there is strong support, in some quarters ferocious, for President Bush's plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling, which could extend the financial bonanza another decade or two.

And behind that support is another uncomfortable reality. As much as Alaskans like to cultivate their rugged, self-reliant image, many need financial help to get along here, and they get it: from oil money and from the federal government, which gives more money per capita to Alaska than to any other state, according to census figures. It still takes a very hardy breed to live in the bush or ride out a dark Alaska winter, but in some ways, the last frontier is the last great welfare state.

Support for drilling in the Arctic refuge is not universal here. Some describe the dependence on oil money as a "dead end" and say the real future ought to lie in tourism, which has boomed in recent years to an industry generating more than $1 billion, surpassing logging and vying with fishing as the No. 2 source of jobs and income. And others say the state would reap eternal shame by despoiling the Arctic refuge.

"We shouldn't sell our soul," said Charlotte Phelps, a counselor for crime victims here in Anchorage.

But oil and gas remain king, contributing about $8 billion to the state's economy in 2000. And the Permanent Fund ended the fiscal year at a record $28 billion, producing the largest dividend for Alaskans in state history and preserving an old joke here that Alaska is "Saudi Arabia, without the heat."

Thus, many here say, Alaska must find a way to keep the oil flowing. The refuge, which federal geologists estimate has 3 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil beneath its tundra, seems to many to be the best bet.

"If the oil keeps decreasing, it'd be a real disaster for this state," said Mark Dawson, a project manager for a construction company here. "We just don't have a whole lot else to fall back on."

While some national polls have found that a majority of Americans are opposed to drilling in the refuge, polls in Alaska have generally shown strong support for the president's plan, and the state legislature once voted 59 to 1 in favor of a resolution urging that course. Congress will have the final say.

On Monday, engaging in a bit of belt-tightening, the State Senate Finance Committee slashed in half the money allocated by the House to pay nurses at the state's Pioneers nursing homes, but it ratcheted up spending for the private group that is lobbying to open drilling in the refuge, offering the group $1.5 million "for education efforts to open coastal plain," the prime area for oil in the refuge, and an additional $250,000 "for educational media efforts for targeted Congressional districts."

For good measure, the committee even added $100,000 to help an Eskimo village, Kaktovik, which lies along the Arctic Ocean in the refuge and whose leaders generally support drilling for oil as an economic boon to their area, deal with an onslaught of media interest generated by the Congressional debate over the issue.

"Camera crews are dropping in out of the blue to interview people who are totally confused by it all," Mayor Lon Sonsalla of Kaktovik wrote to State Senator Donny Olson, Democrat of Nome. "The result could be disastrous."

In any event, the drilling debate is a huge topic of news here. Alaska is so deeply dependent on oil that a historian at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, Prof. Stephen Haycox, goes so far as to say the state operates as a sort of "colonial economy."

"We don't produce much of anything we use here, other than oil," Professor Haycox said.

And that of course makes the state deeply vulnerable in an oil bust, which occurred when the price fell from about $40 a barrel at the beginning of the 1980's to $9 by 1986.

Nine out of 15 banks based in Alaska failed then, and some 30,000 residents among the Anchorage area's 200,000 left, said Professor Haycox, author of "Alaska - An American Colony: A New History," which will be published this year by the University of Washington Press.

In recent years, oil prices have been relatively strong, and in at least one sense the economy is probably more diversified. The Permanent Fund is actually invested in a huge range of stocks, mutual funds and real estate projects around the nation, with the annual earnings paid out as dividends to anyone who has lived in Alaska for at least a year.

But paradoxical as it sounds, the state is facing something of a budget crisis in spite of having this huge fund. As direct oil revenues dwindle, many state leaders say, Alaska will not be able to meet its obligations without considering either an income tax or a sales tax - or somehow dipping into the Permanent Fund to stave off those alternatives.

Nobody has been able to sell voters on any of those ideas. A year and a half ago, more than 80 percent of Alaskans voting in a special statewide advisory election opposed a proposal to divert some of the fund to pay for state government operations.

"Politically, it's just very difficult to suggest using the earnings from the Permanent Fund for anything other than the dividends," said Prof. Scott Goldsmith of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska here.

Alaska may yet continue for a while to live off its resources by tapping huge natural gas reserves or drilling for new oil in the refuge or elsewhere. But the big question is whether anything can ever begin to approach fuel as a mainstay of the Alaskan economy.

"People have been debating that in Alaska for years, and no one's ever solved it yet," Marianne Rostron, a retired accountant born and reared in Alaska, said the other day as she did errands in downtown Anchorage.

Dick Ward, a real estate broker here, scoffed at the notion that anything could ever replace oil and gas as an economic engine.

"Sure, of course it would be a hell of a lot better if we were diversified, but that's just not very realistic," said Mr. Ward, who, like many here, said he had spent time working "up north" in the oil fields near Prudhoe Bay. "We're too far away from everybody else. Even if we got a real manufacturing industry going, the shipping costs would be enormous."

Tourism has been growing as visitors flock to see Alaska's spectacularly wild scenery, from the glaciers along the Inside Passage to the mountains of the Alaska Range, but it brings in just a fraction of the money brought in by oil.

There is another source of income here: federal spending. Alaska edged out Virginia and Maryland as the state with the highest per capita federal spending, at $8,521, according to a Census survey last year. Professor Haycox said that federal spending, including money for military bases here, accounted for roughly one-third of the economy.

In some ways, Alaska's high ranking is perfectly understandable. The cost of living is higher here than almost anywhere else in the nation, in part because the state is so vast, and providing basic services like health care and transportation can prove to be extremely complicated.

But Alaska has also long drawn attention in Washington for the remarkable influence of its tiny Congressional delegation. Its three members - Senator Ted Stevens; Senator Frank H. Murkowski, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and prime advocate of drilling in the refuge; and Representative Don Young, all Republicans - have a combined total of more than 80 years of federal legislative experience.

Mr. Stevens, the senior senator and chairman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, is particularly noteworthy in this regard. He is so adept at getting money for his state that the federal dollars directed here are often referred to by Alaskans simply as "Stevens money."

The term was coined years ago as something of a joke, but it has since become a routine part of discourse, as in this editorial in The Anchorage Daily News last summer: "The dividend amount has become a little like Ted Stevens money, an economic force all its own and something we'd just as soon keep in the family."

Mr. Stevens and his fellow Alaska politicians came under attack just this last week by Citizens Against Government Waste, which issued a report saying that Alaska led the nation in "pork-barrel spending." It came up with a tally of $766 a person in what it considered to be questionable financing, or 30 times the national average, and cited as one example a $176,000 grant to the Alaska Reindeer Herders Association.

"I'm sure Santa Claus will be pleased with that," said Senator John McCain of Arizona, who attended the group's news conference, criticizing the appropriations process.

But the 77-year-old Mr. Stevens, after whom the international airport in Anchorage is now named, said Alaskans were only receiving their "fair share of federal spending," and he took to the Senate floor on Wednesday to express particular umbrage at the group's criticism of a program to install runway lights on airstrips in some remote Alaskan villages. Such lights, he said, can be a matter of life and death, enabling a plane to land for someone who requires a medical evacuation.

"I not only am proud that the Senate acceded to my request for runway lights in last year's appropriations bills," said the senator, who survived a 1978 airplane crash in Alaska that killed his first wife, Ann, and four other people. "I want to put the Senate on notice that this year I am going to seek funds so that every village in Alaska has runway lights."

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How the C.I.A.'s Judgments Were Distorted by Cold War Catechisms

New York Times
March 18, 2001
By PHILIP TAUBMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/opinion/18SUN3.html?pagewanted=all

When I was based in Moscow for this newspaper during the early years of Mikhail Gorbachev's run as Soviet leader, I sometimes wondered what the Central Intelligence Agency was telling President Ronald Reagan about the rapidly changing state of the Soviet Union. Now I know.

The answer was delivered the other day by Federal Express. It came in the form of two red CD-ROM's adorned with a hammer and sickle. They contain nearly 20,000 pages of what were once some of Washington's most secret documents, the C.I.A.'s assessments of the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991. The reports were recently declassified by the C.I.A. and were the subject of a conference earlier this month at Princeton University attended by many former agency analysts. Here, at my fingertips, was the best intelligence that hundreds of billions of dollars in spy hardware and manpower had bought for the United States.

After hours of reading about the Gorbachev era, I am sorry to report that the government didn't get its money's worth. In paper after paper, the C.I.A. seemed reluctant to let go of the cold war, even long after Mr. Gorbachev made it abundantly clear that he wanted to reduce international tensions and discard Moscow's ideological outlook on the world. The agency was more open-minded about Mr. Gorbachev's domestic reforms and eventually produced some insightful examinations of social, political and economic change. But even on these matters, the C.I.A. was slow to appreciate the alterations that Mr. Gorbachev was making, and many of its best papers were dated by the time they reached policy makers.

I offer these judgments with a healthy dose of humility. During the initial months of Mr. Gorbachev's rule in 1985 and 1986, his intentions were unclear and his foreign and domestic programs were not fully formed. Later, as the social and political forces he unleashed at home and in Eastern Europe raced beyond his control, no one could predict with certainty where they would lead. The American journalists stationed in Moscow during this period struggled with these questions as well.

The C.I.A. record is also not yet complete. The two disks cover the entire course of the cold war, yet they contain only a sampling of the assessments produced over more than four decades, ending with Mr. Gorbachev's last year in office. A limited batch of other assessments dealing mostly with military matters was declassified earlier.

As more documents enter the public domain in coming years, scholars will continue to debate the agency's overall performance, including the core issue of whether the C.I.A. accurately gauged Moscow's military and economic strength. Liberal critics argue that the agency exaggerated Soviet power, leading the United States to spend more on its military forces than needed. Conservatives contend that the agency underestimated the Soviet threat.

My partial review of reports from the new disks suggests that the agency acquitted itself reasonably well on economic matters in the 1970's and early part of the 1980's, accurately forecasting and tracking the economic stagnation that gripped the Soviet Union during many of those years. The newly declassified materials do not resolve the debate about Soviet military power.

On the narrower issue of the Gorbachev reforms, I found many of the papers to be maddening. The discussions of Mr. Gorbachev's diplomatic moves betray an inflexible cold-war mindset. That is understandable in the months after he assumed power and presented a series of arms reduction proposals that seemed aimed more at influencing world opinion than at actually making agreements with the United States.

But as Mr. Gorbachev persisted in his arms control efforts, and in late 1988 announced reductions in Soviet military forces and the withdrawal of six tank divisions from Eastern Europe, the agency remained unimpressed. While acknowledging that Mr. Gorbachev was making bold changes in foreign policy, the agency's dreary February 1989 analysis of these steps said Moscow's broad strategy remained steeped in the Leninist tradition of trying to exploit contradictions between capitalist powers. Just nine months before the Kremlin stood aside as the Berlin Wall fell, the C.I.A. was confidently asserting that Moscow's long-range objectives included preserving Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and driving a wedge between Western Europe and the United States.

Americans should be grateful that Mr. Reagan and his secretary of state, George Shultz, paid little heed to the agency's moldy views and instead pursued a variety of diplomatic initiatives with Mr. Gorbachev, based on their personal interactions with the Soviet leader. Mr. Reagan, of course, also pumped up Pentagon spending, which added to the economic pressures on Moscow.

On the domestic side, I found plenty of thoughtful reports about important issues, including growing opposition within the Soviet Union to the war in Afghanistan and the corrosive effect of the Chernobyl nuclear accident on the Kremlin's authority and credibility. One especially notable economic analysis in July 1987 concluded that Mr. Gorbachev's campaign to relax censorship and to promote limited forms of democracy could eventually undermine his power and provoke party conservatives to remove him. That report was prescient, but too many studies trailed developments rather than anticipating them or covered trends well after they had become apparent.

One lesson of this record is that intelligence agencies must be wary of conventional thinking and assumption-driven analysis. The C.I.A. was a creature of the cold war, so much so that it could not imagine that Soviet behavior might change in fundamental ways that would allow the Berlin Wall to fall and democratic ideas to gain ground in Russia.

Another message is that while sophisticated spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping techniques can monitor military forces, keep track of crop yields and intercept communications, the social and political fabric of a society can be understood only by people living in it. Many of the top agency officials who supervised the preparation of these reports never set foot in the Soviet Union during the cold war. Secrecy restrictions barred them from going.

If these documents are a chronicle of the limits of intelligence, they are also powerful evidence of the importance of opening sealed archives so citizens can review the performance of their government. Robert Gates began the systematic effort to declassify intelligence assessments when he served as director of central intelligence in the early 1990's. He is quick to defend the agency's record in assessing the Soviet Union. Thanks to his enlightened leadership in opening the files, Americans can now form their own judgments.

-------- activists

Students Protest Over Ad

New York Times
March 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/national/18PAPE.html

PROVIDENCE, R.I., March 17 - Friday's edition of Brown University's student newspaper made it to newsstands today, a day late and protected by the campus police because of protests over an advertisement denouncing reparations for slavery.

The paid advertisement ran once, on Tuesday, in the newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald. A coalition of mostly minority student organizations took all the issues of Friday's newspaper as a protest. The edition was reprinted for distribution today.

Brown's interim president, Sheila Blumstein, backed the paper's decision to run the advertisement and said the theft would be investigated.

The advertisement by the conservative writer David Horowitz was rejected by several student papers.

---

The Post-Sharpton Sharpton

New York Times
March 18, 2001
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/18/magazine/18SHARPTON.html?pagewanted=all

The Rev. Al Sharpton was wandering the halls of the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, his hair combed neatly behind his ears, a three-piece, pinstriped suit hanging loosely from his bulbous frame, a cell phone to one ear and an aide at his back. This was a hearing day for President Bush's cabinet nominees on Capitol Hill, so the halls of the Congressional office buildings were bustling with television crews and reporters, which Sharpton had anticipated, and they all rushed over as soon as they saw him, which Sharpton had also anticipated. Another news conference done, this one denouncing John Ashcroft's nomination to be attorney general, Sharpton turned back up the hallway when he, quite unexpectedly, found himself chest to chest with Gen. Colin L. Powell, there for his confirmation hearings to become the nation's first black secretary of state.

Powell is one of the few black political figures who are actually better known than Al Sharpton today, though the two men could hardly have taken more different paths to their places in life. Sharpton invokes Powell, though not necessarily by name, as an example of the way black leaders should not act; the general is the kind of person Sharpton has in mind with a mocking riff he does on stuffy, conservative, upper-class blacks who "tilt their head a little and talk out of the right side of their mouth" and who look down on people like a certain New York organizer and agitator who keeps an office in Harlem and calls himself just Rev. Fittingly enough, Powell's escort is Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina, who, upon spotting Sharpton, blanches and then stares vacantly away from the scene that is unfurling before him.

"Reverend Sharpton -- how are you?" Powell said, grasping Sharpton's hand.

"Congratulations, general: you did well," Sharpton responded.

"We're going to do well," Powell responded, abandoning any pretense of small talk. "I think it's going to be an administration for all the people -- and we'll convince you of that."

Sharpton arched an eyebrow. "We'll see," he said.

"We will see," Powell said, smiling politely. "This is my wife, Alma."

Powell and his entourage glided up the hall, but Sharpton stopped to consider his moment: Gen. Colin Powell treating Al Sharpton like a peer in the halls of the nation's Capitol, and Sharpton's equally poised response to this new symbol of the American political establishment. Not long ago, Powell would almost surely have responded to such an encounter by increasing the pace of his step. Sharpton turned to the photographers in the hallway and said, "I think you just got your shot."

It has been more than 13 years since Al Sharpton embraced the cause of Tawana Brawley, the black Dutchess County teenager who claimed she was raped, identifying himself with a case that made him at once indelibly famous and, in many circles, politically toxic. Court proceedings stemming from that episode have continued almost ever since; most recently, he has resisted -- he would say he is negotiating -- an order to pay $65,000 in damages to the former Dutchess County assistant district attorney whom he accused of raping Brawley. The girl's tale of rape and abuse is one that no impartial judge or jury has ever accepted, but one that Sharpton, despite the strong urging of such self-described admirers as Edward I. Koch, former mayor of New York, has declined to renounce, to his lasting detriment.

It was the kind of debacle that should have ended any hope Sharpton had of becoming a national political force and limited his audience to the few hundred people, almost all black, who show up every Saturday morning for his rollicking sermons at his National Action Network headquarters on Madison Avenue and 124th Street. And it is why the mere mention of Sharpton's name draws, to this day, startlingly different reactions in different neighborhoods of New York: he is seen as inspirational or repellent; as the principled civil rights leader battling police brutality and a hostile mayor or as the publicity-seeking huckster, willing to ride the misery of others to fame.

For all of that, Sharpton has endured -- through the terms of two New York mayors and, soon, a third. He has run for office three times and has staged a series of "reinventions" of himself -- losing 83 pounds, cutting his hair, dressing like a lawyer, renting a satellite office in the Empire State Building. Sharpton has a glossy photograph of himself shaking hands with President Bill Clinton at last year's White House Christmas party on top of a pile on his desk in Harlem. How many people can boast of, in the space of a year, engineering the first Democratic presidential debate in Harlem and summoning virtually every major elected Democrat in New York to his second-floor headquarters for the annual celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday in January, which perhaps could be more aptly called a celebration of Al Sharpton. "Spitzer -- you get over here," Sharpton barked with a grin and a jerk of his thumb to the state attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, who had mistakenly settled in with the mayoral candidates. "You statewide; this is my city section."

At 46, with streaks of gray glistening through his flattened hair, Sharpton has surely matured. But into what? Sharpton could run for mayor again, and he would almost surely lose, encouraging a new round of stories likening him to a Tom Wolfe caricature and inviting his own marginalization. Not surprisingly, Sharpton has told associates that he is unlikely to go down that road again this year. It is noteworthy, then, that Sharpton is spending more and more time traveling outside of New York these days. He is presenting himself -- from Washington to Florida, from Selma to Birmingham -- as a sort of post-civil-rights civil rights leader. More astonishingly, it is a claim to authority that no one is disputing.

The fact that a man this flawed, albeit one this talented, finds himself on the brink of this kind of opportunity suggests more than the success of Sharpton's relentless campaign for redemption and his tireless handling of the media. It is testimony to the enervated condition of the national civil rights movement today, as it struggles to find its role and mission, and searches, impossibly of course, for the next Martin Luther King. If King asked people to climb with him to the mountaintop, Sharpton's vision of civil rights is decidedly less grand. "Our fight is to preserve what our fathers won; to stabilize it and increase it," Sharpton said mildly.

That may be enough. The battle in Florida, and what Sharpton refers to as the see-lection of George W. Bush, have given a clarity -- relevance might be a more appropriate word -- to black protest politics that was largely absent under Clinton. The acknowledgment by the Rev. Jesse Jackson that he fathered an illegitimate child could not have come at a more opportune time for Sharpton, who had already been discreetly trying to elbow his mentor into the history books. Sharpton's foil of the past eight years, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, will leave City Hall at year's end, and Sharpton has chosen a new politician to join him on the field: a president whose policies he says are worse for blacks than even those promoted by Giuliani. "Rudy Giuliani has trained me to fight anybody," he said. "If I can handle Giuliani for eight years, George Bush I can fight half asleep."

Sharpton is a man of intelligence and charm, but what has distinguished him in New York is his mastery of process, politics and media. He is not a great social visionary or a deep political philosopher. But at a time when many black leaders and scholars suggest that there is no longer such a thing as the civil rights movement -- at least in the conventional sense of the word -- there doesn't seem to be a great demand for visionaries or philosophers. And Sharpton of all people recognizes that history has plopped him in a very large spotlight on a very empty stage. "I have the hunger to do it, because I really -- well, who else is out there?" he asked.

"Drudge? What is Drudge?"

Al Sharpton was seated in the front seat of a town car driving him to National Airport, staring out the window as he absorbed the information coming in by cell phone: The Drudge Report Web page had posted an item previewing the publication of the National Enquirer story about Jackson's young child. Sharpton had known this was coming and had already begun to consider its political implications -- for Jesse Jackson and for Al Sharpton. And from the moment Sharpton landed back in New York, he was the model friend. "How you doing?" Sharpton whispered hoarsely over the telephone to Jackson the next morning, when the story had moved, as Sharpton had predicted it would, from The Enquirer onto the front pages of many mainstream newspapers. "I spoke to a lot of people today. Everybody's praying for you." Sharpton offered himself up as Jackson's first defender to the morning television news programs. With a reporter and photographer seated with him in his office, Sharpton flitted between his speakerphone and cell phone as he conspicuously proclaimed his loyalty to Jackson. "He always stood up for us," Sharpton said into the phone. "I'm making a statement today." There were nine television cameras waiting as Sharpton sauntered slowly out to make his statement in the big hall outside his office, with the photo of Jesse Jackson standing with Sharpton hanging on one wall and a carved, three-foot-high wooden fist tucked in a corner across the room. "My grandmother used to tell me that life is not about falling down, life is about getting up," Sharpton said, sounding mournful. "And sometimes, when you fall, the challenge is to get up and keep going. And real friends give them room to get up."

There were some black leaders who, as Sharpton noted later, had remained silent that day. Still, this was a turn of events that may well have benefited Sharpton nearly as much as it hurt his friend in Chicago. The story emerged at a time of tension between the two, and when Sharpton had shown signs of growing restless in New York. The episode gave him an opportunity to affirm his loyalty to Jackson. Sharpton had for weeks been urging his followers to ignore reports about the discord, insisting that they were efforts by the media to stir up trouble. Characteristically, he used charm and humor to make the point in one of his weekly sermons at the House of Justice, the name that Jackson bestowed on Sharpton's headquarters. "You can bite someone that you love," Sharpton said, referring to Jackson. "I bite fried chicken every day. When I went down South to see my grandmother, chickens used to disguise themselves as pigs, because they knew if I saw them, they would be heading for the frying pan. They'd walk around my grandmother's yard going, 'Oink, oink, oink!'"

But pigs and chickens aside, Sharpton has made little secret of his unhappiness with the state of black politics and of his view that Jackson's time had passed. As soon as Bush's election was settled, he began speaking disparagingly of civil rights leaders who had chosen to work inside the system under Clinton. It was obvious whom Sharpton had in mind. "Those of us that stayed true to the traditional civil rights stance of holding representatives accountable don't have a lot of readjusting to do," he said over breakfast at a diner on Florida Avenue in Washington. "Because even if we were basically supportive of the president's political agenda, we never stopped challenging him on policy issues: welfare reform, the crime bill. I had a huge march here last year on racial profiling. It's not like we've got to go back, it's not like I got to mobilize our forces. We never demobilized. A lot of guys who kind of cashed in their chips and became part of the establishment are now trying to go back and re-establish themselves in the community, and it's been a difficult transition. One, the community is different, a lot of them are younger and don't know them, and two, some of the older people don't trust them. They say: 'Where you been? Where you been?'"

The dominant public image of Jesse Jackson in recent years, Sharpton suggests, was at Clinton's side during the former president's time of marital difficulty, "which is certainly not a profile of civil rights leadership." Sharpton often notes that the age difference between himself and Jackson, 13 years, is about the same as the difference between Jackson and Martin Luther King. Jackson, he suggests, reached his pinnacle sometime in the 1980's. "He is still relevant, but I think he's certainly seen his peak days," Sharpton said one evening on the way to Brooklyn. "His star kind of has fallen in the community. I still say he was my mentor and teacher. But hey -- Muhammad Ali can't fight no more, but he's still a great champion."

In January, Sharpton assembled black political leaders at a Harlem church to show support for Jackson, in town for the first time since the news broke about his out-of-wedlock daughter. Two of the most recognizable black leaders in America today sat elbow to elbow on the stage, Jackson appearing wan and humiliated, Sharpton bouncing and swaying to the swelling chords of gospel music and grinning at the television cameras packed in the pews. Sharpton stopped for a moment to survey which black leaders had actually turned out for Jesse Jackson on this cold winter night in Harlem. And then he leaned over to his 59-year-old mentor.

"Let me go back and get the Geritol," Sharpton whispered slyly.

Jackson had expressed annoyance to associates over news reports that quoted "sources close to Sharpton" disparaging Jackson. As the minister knows, there really is no such thing as sources close to Sharpton: there is only Sharpton. Jackson, in an interview, chose his words carefully when asked to assess Sharpton, suggesting that he considers at least some of Sharpton's success to be little more than a consequence of being there. "Al has created a definite national niche," Jackson said a few days before the Enquirer story. Only time will tell how broad it will get. He has endured, over a period of time. There's a longevity factor: he's been around critical stuff for a long time."

Jackson grew indignant at the suggestion that his own time had passed. "Leadership is driven more by relevance than age," Jackson said, a drop of acid in his voice. "Mandela was a hero of South Africa at 76. That's a romantic notion of leadership. Leadership is not given out according to age or gender." Asked about Sharpton's argument that there was a price to be paid for working inside the system, Jackson responded by -- well, by not. "I'm not sure what that means," he said tersely.

Jackson has some notable advantages over Sharpton, and it is hardly certain that his recent difficulties, including the publicly raised questions about his finances, will marginalize him as much as those sources close to Sharpton might anticipate. These two men operate on different planes: on the same recent Sunday morning, Jackson was a guest on "This Week" on ABC; Sharpton was the guest on the pretaped morning interview show of ABC's New York affiliate. The night that Sharpton arranged the Jackson rally, Jackson was in town for a display of his own influence: his Wall Street Project. Jackson was the first black man to run a serious campaign for president; and he used his candidacy to shape the Democratic Party platform in 1988 almost as much as did the views put forth by Michael Dukakis, the man who won the nomination.

For his part, while Sharpton may not have easy access to corporate boardrooms in America, he can arrange, in a flash, a full-fledged protest, with television coverage that would make the candidates for mayor jealous. "I don't think the average white New Yorker understands the infrastructure I have," he says. "We have an organization. I have 12 people on payroll." Still, he remains more of an outlaw, a renegade: it's politics on the edge. There are stylistic differences as well. Jackson is a commanding and regal presence. Sharpton lacks that kind of gravity. But one thing that makes Sharpton endure is his style: unpretentious, self-effacing and ironic, as he offers a constant patter of self-commentary on the scenes in which he is a player. In early January Sharpton was late for a joint news conference with Jackson at Riverside Church in Manhattan, and he worried that his tardiness would be portrayed as an affront to Jackson. When he finally arrived, 22 minutes after it was scheduled to begin, he rushed over to Jackson, bowed deeply, in a pseudodramatic act of contrition, and made as if to kiss Jackson's hand. It is difficult to imagine Jesse Jackson -- or Dr. King -- trying a stunt like that, but it disarmed Jackson, and Sharpton won the moment. People who meet Sharpton, as opposed to just reading about him or seeing him on television, usually like him.

Sharpton is where he is today because he has mastered the process of politics and media at a time when questions of philosophy and agenda have become so murky. He has a better sense of how the news business works than some of the people who cover him. Sharpton has a full-time public relations person on his payroll and appears to spend half his waking hours tending to his press coverage. Even in New York, Sharpton stands tall as a pressmonger: he was reminiscing in his office recently about the first sermon he preached, on July 9, 1959, when he was 4 years old, at Washington Temple Church in Brooklyn. Sharpton paused for a moment, and Representative Jose E. Serrano, Democrat of the Bronx, who was seated across the desk, interjected archly: "Later that same day, he held a press conference on toxic art supplies for children." Even Sharpton had to laugh.

Sharpton is a difficult figure to profile because he is always trying to anticipate his story and graciously trying to arrange his life to fit -- or alter -- the story line. Is Al Sharpton going national? Suddenly, Sharpton is musing aloud about the challenges of being a national civil rights leader. Just how influential is the new Al Sharpton? There he is on the intercom to his secretary, ordering up a run of phone calls -- Get me David Dinkins! Get me Maynard Jackson! Get me Johnnie Cochran!" -- that provide more anecdotal material than any profiler could ever ask for. Has Al Sharpton achieved a new-found respectability? On one of his trips to Washington, he showed up unannounced at the office of Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr. and watched as Jackson's aides rushed out to summon the Illinois congressman back from session to greet his guest. "Part of being influential is when you can interrupt a congressman from the floor," he said helpfully.

"This is the most educated, economically resourceful generation of blacks in the history of our country. And we have less to show for it than we have ever had."

It is Sunday morning on Staten Island, and Al Sharpton, wearing a shiny black robe with red trim and an embroidered cross on each lapel, is preaching at the First Central Baptist Church to the biggest turnout anyone there can remember. Congregants are hanging over the balcony, spilling out the front door and down the stone steps. All to hear this guest preacher berate the black men, women and children who came to church that Sunday morning.

"Nobody is blowing up your car," Sharpton bellowed from the pulpit. "Nobody is shooting you at your back door. Nobody is rolling bulldozers over you. Nice job. Nice car. Credit cards in your pocket. And you too lazy and ungrateful to do what someone else did for you 30 years ago." Rolling on his feet, dabbing sweat off his forehead with a white handkerchief, pushing his belly up against the pulpit, Sharpton, who does not have a congregation of his own, reminded his audience of the 1963 march on Washington, about the men and women who "had to ride all night because the motel wouldn't rent them a room. Some of them had a greasy paper bag with fried chicken sandwiches because there was no restaurant that would serve them a meal. Some of them had to ride for miles holding their body because they couldn't even use the public toilet. But they dreamed for us.

"The sickness of our day is that most of us have lost our dream," he continued. "What do you mean, Sharpton? Well, in the 60's, when we had nothing, we could look at the culture and tell how we dreamed. Aretha Franklin singing 'Respect.' James Brown singing 'Black and Proud.' Well, let's go from there to now. Because from Aretha, queen of soul, we have gone to Niggas With Attitude. Somewhere along the way, our ambition died. We were beaten down and submitted and gave up our dream." Sharpton's sermon roared into its peroration, a rolling, rhythmic growl, as off to the side, the church organist started punctuating each rising phrase with a chord, and Al Sharpton began -- to sing!

In my life . . . I've had to cry sometime./In my life . . . I walked alone sometime.

I have been lied on!/Cheated!/ Misleaded!/ I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I

I've been up. . . . /I've been down./I've been leveled . . . to the ground.

I've been stabbed!/I've been indicted!/But through it all/I -I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-

I trusted in God!

And then, with one last roar, Al Sharpton executed two 360-degree spins on his heavy heels and collapsed in a sweaty heap on his chair.

This was more than just another Sunday-morning performance by Sharpton. It was a shout of frustration from the pulpit, an attempt to rouse a middle-class black constituency whose taste for social action has faded with the relative contentment of the Clinton years. And it was a sermon that could have been voiced by any of the people who continue to describe their line of work as civil rights activist. "It's much more difficult to organize and mobilize young people today than it was 35, 40 years ago," said Martin Luther King III, who today is the president of his father's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. "It's certainly not impossible, but when it comes to issues of race, there's a veil over them, and they appear to be less visible to a generation that did not have to ride in separate facilities, that can in fact go to the movie theater and enjoy any film they want to, and go to any restaurant to eat." Sharpton suggests that this change is a direct consequence of the accomplishments posted by King's father. "We are fighting the success of our movement," Sharpton said. "Blacks have benefited more. You have more blacks in college, you have more blacks making money. So they feel they can afford to be less political." Sharpton and King argue that the issues facing black Americans today are no less urgent than they were 35 years ago; they are just less obvious. That is why the election of George W. Bush was not exactly a cause of distress at the National Action Network headquarters; it has given Sharpton something to shout about at his sermons and rallies.

Sharpton's sermon on Staten Island was intended to shame his audience into going to Washington for his "shadow inauguration," a counterpoint to the real inauguration going on up the street. But the appetite for this kind of protest is not what it was. The diminution of Louis Farrakhan's movement after his Million Man March is an indication in large part of the limited market for street protest. Sharpton surely realized how unlikely it was that his middle-class Staten Island crowd would ever make the five-hour drive to Washington on a wet winter morning. Still he disputed any suggestion that it meant that he was out of step with the people he would like to lead. "Even if they don't participate, they realize the necessity of it, which is why they'll support me even if they don't go to a march," he said.

But Jesse Jackson was on to something when he moved away from the streets and the pulpit to run for president and later created the Wall Street Project to lobby for employment and contracts for blacks. "There is not a civil rights movement anymore," said H. Carl McCall, the state comptroller who is trying to become New York's first black governor. "The civil rights movement has changed. I think the issue now for the African-American community is political empowerment, economic empowerment. In a sense, the civil rights era has migrated to those new major issues."

If the fight is about economic empowerment, then there are arguably no better symbols of this than Jesse Jackson or McCall. And if it is about black political empowerment, is there any better symbol of that than Colin Powell himself? Sharpton is a political hurricane in New York City. But he has little hope of ever becoming mayor. By contrast, Powell, McCall and David N. Dinkins, the first black mayor of New York City, are not protest anythings: they are symbols of political empowerment. Sharpton can point out that they have reached their stations by building on the struggle of the people who rode buses or who got beat up 30 years ago -- but that was the point, wasn't it? There are moments when Sharpton seems like a Japanese soldier stranded on a Pacific island, still fighting World War II. His signature issue is battling police abuse, and white and black politicians praise his advances in that area. But while police misconduct was fertile ground for remediation and protest in the 1990's, it may prove to be a less compelling issue in this decade, as cities like New York and Los Angeles have begun, if grudgingly, to respond to the very issues so effectively raised by Sharpton. There is no Bull Connor rushing forward to defend the police officers who pull over black drivers randomly. Sharpton starts his Saturday morning rally with a responsive shout -- No justice!" he says; "No peace!" his audience shouts back -- but its resonance is a function of what is in the headlines. In fact, much of what is in Sharpton speeches is derived from the morning headlines. Representative Charles B. Rangel, the Democrat who took Adam Clayton Powell's seat in Harlem, says that Sharpton calls him in Washington all the time to talk politics. But Rangel said he cannot recall a single time when Sharpton inquired about the status of a piece of pending legislation.

Al Sharpton was sitting in the back corner of a white stretch limousine that was taking him through a cold night from Baltimore to Washington for a television interview. As always, Sharpton was restless, checking his cell phone for messages, jiggling in his seat, humming gospel songs to himself -- and raising the subject of Tawana Brawley.

It always comes back to Tawana Brawley. Sharpton and his supporters like to say that everyone else keeps bringing up the episode. But the truth is that it is Sharpton who raises it, and he does it often. His insistence on revisiting the case suggests his appreciation of just how damaging it continues to be. "Where it has cost me some acceptance, in some circles, it also in my own soul has made me strong -- and has caused me to have a national following of people who say, 'He will stand up for what he believes and he will not sell us out,'" Sharpton said, his voice drifting forward from the shadows in the darkened back corner of the limousine.

"I mean, how long are you going to talk about Tawana Brawley?" he said, the frustration obvious in his voice. Sharpton even raises the subject with his supporters. "I stood up and believed in the honor of a young woman, when I was 32 years old," he said at a Saturday morning rally. "You're putting a man in the White House who was driving drunk older than that. He was drunk! Hel-lo? So what kind of standards you put on him?" (In fact, Bush was 30 at the time of his drunk-driving arrest.)

"It's like Hymietown with Jesse Jackson," Sharpton says at still another point, this time artfully pressing one of the less fortunate moments in Jackson's career into the defense of his actions in the Brawley case. "It will always come up. But I think over the course of time, it loses its influence."

And yet, it is hard to imagine anything that has so checked Sharpton's political authority. Ed Koch says Sharpton promised to mount a pulpit and apologize for his advocacy of Tawana Brawley's case but then reneged. Sharpton denies that. Whatever the case, Koch, who had for a moment emerged as the single most credible validator Sharpton could ask for, has drawn a curtain between himself and Sharpton. "'I don't think you're a racist, and I don't think you're an anti-Semite,'" Koch said he told Sharpton. "'I just think you're a demagogue. But you can get over that, and you could be a first-class leader.'" Some of Sharpton's associates suggest that he has not repudiated Brawley because he fears it would distress his strongest supporters. Sharpton says he has stuck by Brawley for one simple reason: he believes something happened to her. Whatever the case, Sharpton now appears set in his decision and prepared to live with its consequences.

In New York, the consequence is that few people believe that the city's best-known black public figure has any chance of becoming its second black mayor. It is one more reason why expanding the boundaries of his playing field must seem so tempting: to go someplace where those images of Sharpton standing next to Tawana Brawley aren't quite so raw. Of course, it all gets back to Sharpton. His moment may indeed be here. The question, though, is not whether the nation is ready for Al Sharpton but whether Al Sharpton is ready for the nation.

Adam Nagourney covers politics for The Times.

---

Girl who set self ablaze on Tiananmen dies

USA Today
03/18/2001 - Updated 05:26 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-18-china.htm

BEIJING (AP) - A 12-year-old girl who set herself on fire in Tiananmen Square in a purported protest against China's crackdown on the Falun Gong meditation sect has died in a Beijing hospital, government-run television said Sunday.

Liu Siying died Saturday night of sudden heart troubles at Jishuitan Hospital, where she had been receiving treatment since she and four others set themselves ablaze on Jan. 23, Chinese Central Television said.

One of the four, Liu's mother, died that day on the square. The three others are still in the hospital's burn unit.

The Chinese government has said the five were members of the Falun Gong spiritual group, which it banned 19 months ago as a threat to social order and communist rule.

Falun Gong has denied that the five were members, saying its teachings do not condone suicide.

Beijing seized on the group suicide on the traditional Chinese New Year's Eve to drive home its message that Falun Gong is an evil cult that callously pushes its members to acts of self-destruction.

Gruesome images of the five ablaze or their blackened bodies lying on Tiananmen's gray flagstones were beamed on national television.

Government propagandists focused in particular on Liu, showing photos of a smiling, pretty girl in a school uniform and then footage of her writhing charred face crying out for her mother.

The campaign has apparently been effective, creating genuine revulsion for the sect among Chinese. After weeks in early January when state media said hundreds of Falun Gong followers were being rounded up daily on Tiananmen Square, demonstrations by the group have also seemed suddenly to decline.

Falun Gong attracted millions in the 1990s with its mix of traditional Chinese religion, health exercises and the teachings of founder Li Hongzhi, a former government grain clerk now in the United States.

It was outlawed in July 1999 after the group surprised Chinese officials when more than 10,000 members surrounded the leadership's living compound in Beijing in a demonstration to demand official recognition.

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Civil disobedience tackled
Protesters-in-training get ready for summit at 2-day boot camp

Montreal Gazette
Sunday 18 March 2001
CHARLIE FIDELMAN The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010318/5023988.html

The world of protests and civil disobedience comes complete with a list of dos and don'ts:

- If police drag you away, go limp like a rag.

- Don't slash or inflict violence on the horses of mounted police.

- Should a police dog get your arm in a bite, do not attempt to yank it out.

"Avoid brusque movement, say 'Good doggie,' and let calm prevail," instructed Philippe Duhamel of Operation SalAMI - a coalition of community, student, labour and women's groups opposed to globalized trade - at a two-day training camp yesterday to prepare for the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City next month.

150 People Attended

More than 150 people attended the seminars - on such topics as free trade, globalization, and law and resistance - held at the downtown campus of Universite du Quebec a Montreal.

Duhamel's day-long session on the intricacies of non-violent civil disobedience was a star attraction, drawing more than 40 participants.

"Know what the police are capable of and don't let fear overtake you," explained Duhamel before demonstrating an immobilizing neck hold and other moves police use to discourage protesters from hanging around.

Duhamel is a veteran of the Seattle demonstration two years ago, in which 30,000 protesters opposing the World Trade Organization paralyzed the Pacific Northwest city, leading to violent clashes with police.

The Seattle demo was a benchmark for protesters and police.

"I was there as a student of demonstrations. I was in the field learning tactics," said Duhamel, who has been arrested "more times than I can count" since Operation SalAMI was established three years ago. For nearly two years, the coalition has been preparing for the Summit of the Americas, he said, in opposition to the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement that 34 heads of state are expected to sign.

"We came back from Seattle enthusiastic about attempting to shut down the summit, but it became obvious that it's not a realistic goal," Duhamel said.

Today, the strategy is to inform the public about free-trade issues and "to make this a success for social change," he added. Opponents say the agreement will strip nations of power, overriding local laws that protect the poor and the environment.

But not everyone is willing to go so far as to get hauled off to jail.

High on Duhamel's suggestion list is a measured understanding of risks.

"Go as far as you can, but not beyond," he said.

"If they have to arrest 200 people sitting down and resisting, they're not going to tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Come with me please.'"

Duhamel's techniques will come in handy, said Richard Lefebvre, who is organizing a protest in his home town for "mothers, grandmothers and professionals" who cannot go to Quebec.

Mental-health worker Irene Rant said she's pleased with much of the theory dispensed in the workshop, "even though it will take more than one session to learn what to do when police dig their fingers into your eyes.

"Still, it's less scary if we know what to expect," she added. "The important thing is not to panic."

------- Onelist (submissions from subscribers)