------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
EU takes lead in Korea talks
Europeans Aim for Larger Role
Experts Urges Bush to Reconsider North Korea Accord
China: Hedging Their Bets
EU Seeks to Fill U.S. Role in Koreas
U.S.-Led Plant Beset By Delays
MP questions Govt's alignment with US Govt
South Korean president announces shake-up
South Korea Replaces Foreign Minister
Cheyenne Mountain Proposed for Monument
An Environmentalist's Choice
Should We Be Going Nuclear?
A New Role for Greens: Public Enemy
Lake City's legacy haunts former workers, neighbors

MILITARY
The World Starts Getting in the Superpower's Way
Bush hopes for arms cutoff to Albanian rebels
Swiss May Ease Rules on the Sale of Cannabis
Drug Law Reform: The D.A.'s Speak
Court Rulings Signal a Shift on Random Drug Tests in Schools
Europe to Send Mediators to Korea
Seoul Fears U.S. Is Chilly About Détente With North
Defense Aims for Orbit
Tourist Is Ready for Space
Bush Giving New Life to Old Ideas
Two Die After a Coast Guard Boat Capsizes
Bomber crash in Nevada kills two-member crew

OTHER
Powell's positions split at times from Bush's
More Globs of Oil Foul L.I. Shore
Quarantined Cattle in Texas Face Death
Wolves Die in Park After Dart Shooting
Regulations Czar Prefers New Path
Tainted Food, at America's Table
Abraham says U.S. will not beg OPEC for more oil
Possible contamination forces recall of apples
Group Urges City to Develop as Biotechnology Center
Researchers Find Big Risk of Defect in Cloning Animals
Groups Gear Up to Battle Hemispheric Pact
Verniero Defends His Efforts to Curb Profiling by Police
The Bay of Pigs Revisited, but Arm in Arm
'Nasty Things' Can Intrude on Russian Envoy's Life
Spies Will Be Spies
Security Move Means 500 at F.B.I. Face Lie Detector

ACTIVISTS
Invitation to Gothenburg
Activists to pitch policies in tent
Vandals Chop Down Hundreds of Trees
Greenpeace hero killed


-------- NUCLEAR

EU takes lead in Korea talks

Seattle Times
Nation & World : Sunday, March 25, 2001
By William Drozdiak The Washington Post
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=eurokorea25&date=20010325

STOCKHOLM - European Union leaders said yesterday they will dispatch their own team of mediators to help invigorate the peace process between North and South Korea and fill a breach left by the Bush administration's decision to postpone talks with the North.

Sweden's Prime Minister Goran Persson said he will soon travel to the region in the company of two other European envoys to hold discussions with the leaders of both Koreas about how to expedite reconciliation between their countries and to defuse the nuclear-missile threat posed by the North.

"The aim is to express support for the process started by (South Korean President) Kim Dae-jung, a process aimed at bringing to an end one of the last conflicts with origins in the Second World War," said Persson, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

The decision by the 15 EU leaders, who concluded a two-day summit here, breaks from their past deference to U.S. leadership when dealing with the Korean peninsula and other Asian trouble spots.

European officials said there was unanimity that a bold new initiative was required to compensate for any delay caused by a policy review in Washington, D.C.

Bush has voiced distrust about making any deals with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il.

------

Europeans Aim for Larger Role

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/world/25EURO.html

STOCKHOLM, March 24 (AP) - European Union leaders ended a two-day summit meeting here today exuding optimism about their economies and promising greater assertion in foreign affairs.

The 15 leaders planned to increase their role in the peace efforts between North and South Korea and will send the Swedish prime minister, Goeran Persson, for talks in Pyongyang and Seoul, according to a draft of their final statement.

And they urged the United States to recommit to cutting carbon dioxide emissions as part of a global charter to prevent a deterioration of the world's climate.

The leaders said the steps they were taking to modernize old industries and support new technologies would promote economic growth, which they predicted would be "around 3 percent" during the next year or two.

But they reached a deal on only one top priority - a plan to streamline regulation of financial markets by 2005. They eliminated a reference to low interest rates from their final statement, interpreted as a veiled reminder to the European Central Bank that rates could be lower.

Their draft statement said they would step up their diplomatic efforts in Korea, pledging "substantive talks" with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, on "the full range of issues." Those would presumably include the North's weapons programs, cited by the United States as part of its motivation to develop a missile shield, which many European countries have opposed.

The statement also underscored "the necessity of efficient international action" to prevent a deterioration in global climate conditions.

The Bush administration has said it will not call for national controls on carbon dioxide emissions. On Friday, Mr. Persson and the European Commission president, Romano Prodi, wrote a letter to Mr. Bush expressing "deep concern."

---

Experts Urges Bush to Reconsider North Korea Accord

March 25, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/world/korea-usa-north.html

WASHINGTON, March 26 (Reuters) - A bipartisan group of U.S. foreign policy experts urged President George W. Bush to consider possible revisions to a landmark nuclear accord that has frozen North Korea's nuclear program since 1994.

While stressing there should be ``no unilateral changes by any party,'' the group concluded ``circumstances require a fresh look'' at the pact, according to a letter to Bush released on Monday.

The 28-member working group on Korea of the Council on Foreign Relations was headed by former senior State Department official Morton Abramowitz and James Laney, president emeritus of Emory University.

The letter adds momentum and weight to an option that the Bush administration has already been considering.

Some analysts say tampering with the 1994 Agreed Framework -- under which North Korea froze its nuclear program in return for $5 billion of new nuclear power reactors and heavy fuel oil -- portends more risk than reward.

But the experts said the accord deferred the difficult dismantling of North Korea's nuclear program and significant technical and legal hurdles remain before it can be completed.

They recommended that Bush ``undertake a deliberate and careful review of the status of the Agreed Framework together with Japan, (South) Korea and the European Union,'' which are helping to underwrite the cost of the deal.

``This review should focus on both the remaining challenges to full implementation to the Agreed Framework as well as potential opportunities to engage North Korea on a review of the terms to meet Pyongyang's immediate energy needs.''

The group called it ``striking'' that North Korea recently demanded electrical energy from South Korea until the light-water nuclear reactors promised under the accord are completed.

``The South is under no obligation to provide this energy and should not do so without linking it to the North's obligations under the Agreed Framework,'' the letter said.

``Nevertheless, this new development suggests that some reworking of the 1994 accord might be possible.''

The group stressed, however, that ``the United States should stand by its commitments and its allies and make no unilateral changes to the Agreed Framework.''

It said that despite the recent thaw on the Korean peninsula, Pyongyang has spent the past two years ``building up its capacity to inflict damage on South Korea and Japan with new deployments of artillery, fighter aircraft, special operations forces and ballistic missiles.''

In addition, ``there is scant evidence that Pyongyang is prepared to undertake any substantial economic reforms.''

Still, the experts recommended that ``for now, we should continue to support South Korea's efforts at cooperation and reconciliation while maintaining a robust deterrent and close ... coordination'' between the U.S., Japan and South Korea.

In particular, Washington should continue its partnership with Seoul by initiating a comprehensive security dialogue.

On missile talks with North Korea, the experts said Bush should resume negotiations ``when ready.'' Former President Bill Clinton made progress toward a missile deal but Bush has deferred early reengagement with Pyongyang.

The U.S. ``bottom line'' must include effective verification, provision of assistance to Pyongyang that would not involve sensitive technology transfers, elimination of already-deployed long-range missiles and movement toward reducing the North's conventional military threat, the experts said.

-------- china

China: Hedging Their Bets

March 25, 2001
New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/weekinreview/25ECKH.html

BEIJING - IN China, he is always referred to as "Xiao Bushi," or "Little Bush." The appellation distinguishes George W. from his father but also ties him to a man remembered fondly here as the kind of "pragmatic realist" that officials desperately hope the son will be.

Government leaders and scholars here have watched the new administration with a brave public face and private apprehension. They constantly tell themselves that United States-China ties are too deeply rooted in mutual interest to be upended by moralistic impulses or to permit Washington's reckless arming of Taiwan.

"We have no reason to become rivals or enemies," Deputy Prime Minister Qian Qichen said in New York last week. Still, there is tension as both countries look forward. Both know that China's neighbors see the American presence in Asia as a counterbalance to China's emerging economic and military strength. So American strategists worry about China's program to upgrade its long-backward military, while the Chinese fret that America is determined to hold their country down and may secretly support Taiwanese separatism.

The Chinese are also still waiting to see how Mr. Bush will handle the clashing Republican impulses on China, with military hawks and moral critics within his party as strange bedfellows on one side and traditional realists, who favor engagement, on the other. One sharp issue on which the hawks seem to have the upper hand is national missile defense - a project China intensely opposes, fearing it will make the United States far too arrogant and neutralize China's small nuclear deterrent.

In addition, the possibility that the United States will step back from a cooperative approach to controlling North Korean missiles is considered ominous here. And in his meeting with Mr. Qian on Thursday, Mr. Bush seemed determined to draw attention to the differences between the two countries, including human rights, though he promised to treat China with respect.

The first big test of what Mr. Bush is prepared to do will come as the administration decides what weapons to sell to Taiwan this year. The Chinese have warned that providing America's most advanced naval destroyers, equipped with the Aegis radar system, would cause a serious rift. But in an odd way, this gives Mr. Bush an easy way out. If he punts on Aegis this year, keeping it on the shelf as an implicit potential club, he can still sell Taiwan a group of powerful used Kidd-class destroyers, along with other advanced weapons, and the Chinese, though objecting, will be secretly relieved.

With missile defense, no one expects Mr. Bush to back away from his pledges to forge ahead. But there is a choice of ways to move ahead, some of which could allow China and Russia to feel their own nuclear prowess has not been strategically vaporized.

The Chinese are, of course, hedging their bets, cultivating ties with Russia and promoting Asian economic cooperation as potential counterbalances to American power, and modernizing their military. American officials know that if it feels cornered, China can retaliate by undermining nonproliferation efforts and raising military tensions over Taiwan.

Even as it pushes for the promised sharper edge in dealings with China, the administration has also shown signs of recognizing the pitfalls of aggressive confrontation - that American hostility may bring out the worst in this potential adversary. In the end, the Bush administration may well be nudged, à la Clinton, to the familiar mix of broad cooperation and sharp disagreements, with the Taiwan issue never resolved but never exploding either.

The Chinese mean it when they say their immediate priority is economic development, and much as they hate to acknowledge dependence, they know there is no real substitute for American capital and technology. They also crave Western acceptance as a respectable emerging power. So they can be expected to try, as best they can, to nurture the Bush-pére side of the American president, even as they prepare for the almost inevitable rivalry.

-------- korea

EU Seeks to Fill U.S. Role in Koreas
Envoys Will Attempt To Ease Missile Risk, Build Reconciliation

Washington Post
Sunday, March 25, 2001; Page A01
By William Drozdiak Washington Post Foreign Service
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/asia/A54009-2001Mar24.html

STOCKHOLM, March 24 -- European Union leaders announced today that they will dispatch their own team of mediators to help invigorate the peace process between North and South Korea and fill a breach left by the Bush administration's decision to postpone talks with the North.

Sweden's Prime Minister Goran Persson said he will soon travel to the region in the company of two other European envoys to hold discussions with the leaders of both Koreas about how to expedite reconciliation between their countries and to defuse the nuclear missile threat posed by the North.

"The aim is to express support for the process started by [South Korean President] Kim Dae Jung, a process aimed at bringing to an end one of the last conflicts with origins in the Second World War," said Persson, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

The decision by the 15 EU leaders, who concluded a two-day summit here, breaks from their past deference to U.S. leadership when dealing with the Korean peninsula and other Asian trouble spots. European officials said there was unanimity that a bold new initiative was required to compensate for any delay caused by a policy review in Washington.

"It's becoming clear that the new U.S. administration wants to take a more hard-line approach toward North Korea," said Sweden's Foreign Minister Anna Lindh. "That means that Europe must step in to help reduce tension between the two Koreas, not least because the outside world is so worried about North Korean missiles."

Just before leaving office in January, aides to former President Bill Clinton say, they were close to a deal that would have curbed North Korea's testing program for long-range missiles and fortified safeguards to thwart development of nuclear weapons. But President Bush has expressed skepticism about those negotiations and demanded a reassessment of the proposed agreement before deciding whether to proceed.

Bush has voiced distrust about making any deals with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il. And Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, while not disavowing the engagement policy of the previous U.S. administration, contends that any agreement regarding the nuclear missile threat must be scrupulously checked.

Powell said there are strong objections within the Bush administration to a perceived lack of verification procedures that must be clarified with Kim's government. "We're going to make sure that he understands that some of the things he has put on the table are not ready to be picked up because we have to work on how one would monitor and verify the kinds of things he is talking about," Powell told a group of newspaper editors Friday.

The ambivalence shown by the Bush administration has dismayed the leaders of both Koreas. Senior EU officials said Kim Dae Jung told them he came away deeply disappointed from recent talks with Bush in Washington. He said he feared the hesitation in the U.S. capital might lead to the demise of his "sunshine policy" of peaceful reconciliation with the North, which was launched last June when he signed a joint declaration with the North Korean leader at their first summit meeting in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.

With North Korea hinting it might feel compelled to abandon its moratorium on missile testing and resume its nuclear program, suspicions have grown in Europe that the Bush administration seeks to kill chances of an agreement in order to sustain the "rogue state" threat from North Korea that it has cited as a prime motivation for building a missile defense system.

EU officials said the European leaders agreed over dinner here Friday night that it is important to maintain a dialogue with Pyongyang and instill new momentum in the Korean peace process, even at the risk of antagonizing the Bush administration.

The officials said the idea of a European initiative was first broached by Kim Dae Jung during a visit here after he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize earlier last year. They said Kim Dae Jung stepped up his pleas for an EU role after his disappointing talks with Bush in Washington two weeks ago.

North Korea affirmed its support when Deputy Foreign Minister Choi Su Hon delivered a formal invitation to the Swedish government Thursday night asking that a European mediation team be sent to Pyongyang.

Persson said he plans to travel to both Korean capitals before the end of May. He will be accompanied by the EU's foreign policy czar, Javier Solana, and its external affairs commissioner, Chris Patten. Their mandate is to achieve "early results" that could lead to a second summit between the two Korean leaders and lay down a timetable for reunification of the divided peninsula.

In the meantime, Britain and Germany have opened embassies in Pyongyang, with other European countries expected to follow suit. The EU will also consider an expansive package of development aid for North Korea as an incentive to improve respect for human rights there.

---

U.S.-Led Plant Beset By Delays
Atomic Power Project Key to Korean Accord

Washington Post
Sunday, March 25, 2001; Page A01
By Doug Struck Washington Post Foreign Service
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/world/asia/A50187-2001Mar23.html

SEOUL -- For five hours, a powerful South Korean ferry churned toward the eastern shore of North Korea last week and unloaded an unlikely cargo: 207 men from Uzbekistan, brought to the impoverished country to replace striking North Korean construction workers at a U.S.-led atomic power plant site.

Their arrival was a sign of the latest trouble at the project. Seven years after the United States promised to build two "safe" nuclear plants in a deal to end North Korea's nuclear program, the project is beset with ills.

Planned to be finished in two more years, it will not be completed until the end of this decade -- if then. Meanwhile, the United States and other countries must supply fuel oil to North Korea at costs that have quadrupled. North Korea faces a crucial requirement of revealing its nuclear past before the first plant can be finished, and when the plant is completed, it may not be able to plug into North Korea's feeble power system.

The Bush administration is looking skeptically at the project, some key Republican senators are demanding changes, and North Korea is rumbling with propaganda threats mentioning "war" if the project is not carried forward.

But despite all those woes, almost no one involved with the project expects it to be abandoned.

"There's just no alternative," said Chang Sun Sup, the South Korean ambassador and chairman of the board of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, known as KEDO.

The full extent of the delays, confirmed in recent interviews but not yet publicly acknowledged by KEDO, threatens to increase costs and make an empty promise of the agreement touted as the Clinton administration's greatest foreign policy achievement in Asia. There are many critics on all shores who think it will never be done.

"This is mission impossible," said Jhe Seong Ho, an international law expert in Seoul and a government adviser on KEDO. "It's now in the seventh year, and not much has been done. Realistically, this KEDO plan doesn't look like it's going to work."

"KEDO is almost dead," agreed Yukiko Fukawgawa, a Korea expert at Aoyama University in Tokyo.

"It makes no sense," said Henry Sokolski, head of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington.

President Bush drew the biggest question mark over the project March 7 when he said he does not believe the North Koreans can be trusted.

"I do have some skepticism about the leader of North Korea," he said at a news conference with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung. "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements."

But even aides to Bush, despite the president's remarks, acknowledge there is no evidence of North Korean cheating. Experts on both sides say the agreement has been honored more strictly by North Korea than by the United States.

"North Korea has lived up to their part" of the agreement, said Han Sung Joo, South Korea's foreign minister when the deal was negotiated. "The question is, has the U.S. moved the goal posts along the way?"

Defenders of the project say that despite the delays in construction, the plan already has paid handsome dividends.

"This has kept the nuclear activities of North Korea frozen for seven years. And it has been the initial stage of a sea change in Korea," Desaix Anderson, the executive director of KEDO, said in a telephone interview from New York.

"You can stop it now only if you want to pay the cost: a strong risk of military conflict," he said.

Even critics say the project is irreversible -- in some form -- to avoid returning to a tense standoff with North Korea. "Even the conservatives in Korea think cancellation is too dangerous," acknowledged Jhe.

As the debate simmers, about 1,000 workers -- most of them South Korean -- have been carving into land at the site 20 miles north of Sinpo on the North Korean coastline to prepare for construction of the first plant. They have leveled part of a mountain to get to bedrock, built roads and bridges to haul in equipment, and constructed a breakwater for the barges expected to bring reactor components from Japan, South Korea and the United States. And they are building the housing, water pumps and purifying plants for up to 10,000 employees who may work there at the peak of construction.

They labor in a country in dire need of electricity. North Korea's factories have been idled and its homes routinely blacked out as both the economy and the country's old Soviet-made infrastructure have crumbled.

The project was born in a close brush with war. In 1994, President Bill Clinton ordered battle plans and reinforcements readied to attack North Korea over suspicions that it had removed fuel rods from a small nuclear power plant to reprocess them for weapons.

According to the accounts that emerged later from participants, Clinton and his Cabinet were close to giving the approval to move troops into position when former president Jimmy Carter raced to Pyongyang and brokered a settlement.

The eventual result was called the Agreed Framework. North Korea promised to shelve its nuclear power operations. The United States, Japan and South Korea promised to construct two light-water reactors, a design that experts say does not produce plutonium that can easily be converted for weapons, at a cost of $4.6 billion.

The first nuclear reactor was to be finished by 2003. The supply contract outlining the construction was supposed to be finished in six months. It took two years. And that was only the start of the delays.

There is plenty of finger-pointing about who is responsible. The North Koreans proved to be intractable negotiators, wrangling for months over the tiniest details, to the bewilderment of their counterparts.

"They need the power so badly, it would have been far better for them just to accept any condition and get the power plant a lot sooner. But making concessions is not in their culture," said an official involved in the negotiations who requested anonymity.

Unexpected political crises also buffeted the schedule. In 1996, a furor arose when a North Korean spy submarine accidentally ran aground off South Korea, leading to gun battles with the crew. In 1998, North Korea fired a Taepodong rocket over Japan. In 1999 North and South Korean gunboats exchanged fire on disputed waters. Each incident chilled contacts between the parties for a period, further slowing progress.

"All of these eroded the political support for the project," said Chun Yung Woo, former chief manager of South Korea's KEDO office. "They took the steam out of it."

But there were delays by the United States, too. To the amazement of those who knew the crisis that produced it, the project seemed to quickly move to a back burner in Washington.

A key provision of the agreement, highly sought by North Korea despite its public belligerence toward Washington, was a promise by the United States to relax sanctions and improve ties with Pyongyang.

It didn't happen. Only in 1999, after North Korea threatened to fire a second Taepodong long-range missile, did the United States begin to formally end trade sanctions in return for a missile test moratorium by Pyongyang. North Korea remains on the U.S. list of states sponsoring terrorism, locking it out of much-needed aid from international financial organizations.

Equally problematic was the U.S. pledge to provide North Korea with 500,000 tons of heavy fuel oil annually until the first reactor is built. Congress has balked as the increase in oil prices boosted the cost from about $25 million in 1995 to $100 million this year. The Clinton administration scrambled to find other donors -- "We went with a tin cup, even to Vietnam," said one official -- but there is no guarantee Bush will do the same.

The most recent blow came when General Electric, which was supposed to supply the main turbine generators for the reactors, pulled out of the project in December. GE demanded that the United States and South Korea take all the risk for liability if there were any nuclear-related accidents at the plants, and the governments refused.

"Two years were unnecessarily wasted over the liability issue," said Chun. "The United States went to extreme lengths to avoid any legal liability. And when the direct party to the agreement is so obsessed with avoiding any responsibility, Japan and South Korea could hardly do more." GE's place was filled by a Japanese corporation, Hitachi-Toshiba, which is not so demanding about liability.

"It seemed the Americans lack the will to carry out this agreement," said Jhe.

"North Korea has kept its promise word for word. They have frozen their nuclear program" said Hak Soon Paik, a North Korea specialist with the Sejong Institute in Seoul, an independent think tank. "But the Americans haven't kept their promises."

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has said the administration will honor the deal, in a statement widely seen here as revealing divisions in the Bush administration over Korea policy. But key Republican senators want the United States to replace the plans for a nuclear plant with coal-burning generators, and they say they think Bush will agree.

"Bush's insistence on verification will make it very unlikely that the nuclear reactors will ever be completed in North Korea," Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.), chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said in a recent speech in Washington.

KEDO and its contractors blanch at the idea. They say such a replacement would not save money or time; all the agreements won after years of tortuous bargaining would have to be rewritten, contracts would be broken and new sites would have to be picked for smaller coal-fired plants.

Furthermore, South Korea, which is paying 70 percent of the cost and also getting most of the contract business, would balk. "It is just not feasible," agreed Ambassador Chang.

The substitution is urged by opponents such as Sokolski, writing in The Washington Post, who warned that the KEDO project, "when fully implemented would result in a massive expansion of North Korea's nuclear materials production base. It could produce between 75 to 150 bombs' worth of nuclear material annually."

"That is sheer nonsense," said Cheon Seong Whun, an arms control expert at the Korea Institute for National Unification and a skeptic of North Korean intentions. "It's so misleading it makes me mad." Such extraction is hugely difficult and would require a large reprocessing effort far beyond North Korea's technical or financial means, he and other experts said. And the fuel in the plant will be under strict control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

North Korea has reacted angrily to the prospect of a unilateral change in the deal. Such a move would be "tantamount to a declaration of war," Radio Pyongyang and Korean Central Radio said Monday. Observers dismiss that as shrill propaganda. But they do not dismiss Pyongyang's past pattern of provoking a crisis to engage in brinkmanship bargaining.

Even without a change, the project faces more hurdles. North Korea must meet IAEA standards before crucial nuclear components will be delivered. That will involve allowing "special inspections" of sites where IAEA experts may find evidence that North Korea lied when it denied it had diverted plutonium to try to make fuel for an atomic bomb.

Some say North Korea will balk at those inspections. Others disagree. "All it takes is for Kim Jong Il to 'discover' that their past statements were in error" when they denied they had diverted plutonium. "It's not like he cares about his international reputation, or that he needs to 'spin' it for domestic consumption" to account for the inconsistency, said one official.

North Korea also needs to find a way to rebuild its power grid. There is universal agreement the grid is so decrepit that hooking a reactor to it risks a nuclear accident. KEDO has refused North Korean requests to do the work, roughly estimated to cost between $300 and $700 million.

Anderson, who is ending a 3 1/2-year term as executive director,is unperturbed. He said he believes Pyongyang will get financial help from somewhere to rebuild the grid in time, or a technical solution involving grid-sharing with South Korea and China might be devised.

"It's inevitable that a complex situation like this would not go perfectly," he said.

The labor dispute was an example. North Korea provided unskilled laborers for the site preparation work at $110 per month -- generous in an impoverished country where average annual income is estimated at $714. But when workers found out that South Korean technicians on site got more than $2,000 a month, they demanded a raise to $600 a month.

"We were going to do something to let them save face, but they asked too much," said one official. The workers struck; North Korea pulled half of them off the site, apparently expecting KEDO to give in. Instead, KEDO recruited workers from Uzbekistan who were glad to work for $110 a month and brought them to the site last week past stunned North Korean officials.

"At every step along the way, this project has faced problems," said Peter Hayes, head of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley, Calif., which studies energy issues in North Korea and has built windmills there. "But now, it's difficult to see what could stop it."

"Everybody needs this," Anderson agreed. "You have to balance this project against the cost of armed conflict."

-------- missile defense

MP questions Govt's alignment with US Govt

Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Sun, 25 Mar 2001 1:01 AEST
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-25mar2001-6.htm

Federal MP Carmen Lawrence says the Federal Government's alignment with the United States is not in Australia's interests, as the US prepares to shift its defence policy.

The Member for Fremantle and former Labor premier of Western Australia says John Howard has basically signed up to George W Bush's nuclear missile defence system.

Dr Lawrence attended a protest rally in the WA port of Fremantle yesterday, timed to coincide with the departure of the French nuclear powered submarine Perle, which had been taking part in training exercises with the Australian navy off the coast of Perth.

Dr Lawrence, who is also the leader of a Parliamentary group called "Parliamentarians for a Non-Nuclear future", says the close alignment of John Howard to the American Government puts Australia in a dangerous position.

"That's a great worry for the Labor Party, it's a great worry for the parliamentarians who look to a nuclear-free future," she said.

"It's unnecessarily provocative, it's likely to lead to further escalation in a nuclear arms race and Australia should be taking the lead at winding that back, not winding it forward."

---

South Korean president announces shake-up

USA Today
03/25/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-25-skorea.htm

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - President Kim Dae-jung replaced nearly half his Cabinet on Monday in an effort to allay public discontent with his government's handling of the economy and other domestic issues.

One of the most prominent officials who was let go was Foreign Minister Lee Joung-binn, who was held responsible for a series of policy fumbles related to Kim's delicate rapprochement process with North Korea.

The shake-up had been anticipated for weeks after Kim, whose popularity has plunged in recent opinion polls, expressed disappointment with the performance of some of his Cabinet members.

Park Joon-young, a presidential spokesman, said nine out of 22 ministers were replaced.

Kim kept Prime Minister Lee Han-dong, whose job is largely ceremonial. He replaced most of his economic ministers, but the government's economic reform program was expected to remain in place. Critics have accused the government of not implementing the reforms fast enough.

Lim Dong-won, 65, head of the government's National Intelligence Service, was named to head the Unification Ministry, which handles Seoul's so-called "sunshine" policy of engaging North Korea. He replaced Park Jae-kyu.

The appointment of Lim, a key supporter of Kim's policy, indicated that there would be no change in South Korea's engagement policy toward the North's communist government. South Korea fears cooling ties between Washington and Pyongyang will slow its own efforts to reconcile with the North.

Han Seung-soo, 63, who served as ambassador to the United States under former President Kim Young-sam, was appointed foreign minister.

The resignation of his predecessor, Lee, had been expected since Saturday, when he abruptly canceled a trip to Chile and Mexico. Lee had planned to leave Monday for Santiago, Chile, to attend the first conference of the foreign ministers of the East Asia-Latin America Forum.

Lee had come under fire in connection with a joint statement issued during Russian President Vladimir Putin's February visit to Seoul. The statement called the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty a "cornerstone of strategic stability."

Some observers interpreted the statement as a sign of Seoul's opposition to a U.S.-proposed national missile defense system, which Russia says would violate the ABM treaty.

South Korea, a close ally of the United States and host to 37,000 U.S. soldiers, later denied taking a stance on U.S. missile defense, saying Washington had never sought its backing on the project.

Kim was aiming for a broader mandate with the shake-up: two new Cabinet members are from his ruling party's coalition partner, the United Liberal Democrats. The new foreign minister, Han, was tapped from the splinter opposition Democratic People's Party.

The three-party alliance, forged by Kim's own Millennium Democratic Party, is an attempt by the government to expand its political clout to cope with public criticism.

The president fired his health and welfare minister last week in response to angry criticism of a weakened social welfare system.

Other new Cabinet members included Defense Minister Kim Dong-shin, Commerce and Industry Minister Chang Jae-shik, Construction and Transportation Minister Oh Jang-sup and Maritime Affairs Minister Kang Woon-tae.

Shin Kun, a former vice justice minister, was named to head the National Intelligence Service, which is South Korea's equivalent of the CIA. He once served as the No. 2 man in the agency at the start of the Kim government.

---

South Korea Replaces Foreign Minister

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/world/25WIRE-KORE.html

SEOUL, March 26 (Reuters) - South Korea named a new foreign minister on Monday as part of a sweeping shake-up of nine cabinet posts.

The shuffle comes as President Kim Dae-jung tries to contain damage from a series of recent controversies, including a flap over Washington's controversial missile defence plan.

Kim appointed Han Seung-soo, a former commerce minister and ex-ambassador to the United States, to the foreign affairs post.

Han replaces Lee Joung-binn, who disclosed what analysts said was confidential information on Friday when he said Washington had asked Seoul to express support for the National Missile Defence System during the president's recent summit with U.S. President George W. Bush.

The disclosure came as Seoul tried to repair earlier damage over the NMD issue, caused by a joint statement with Russia just prior to the summit which suggested South Korea was critical of the U.S.-backed NMD plan.

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

Cheyenne Mountain Proposed for Monument

Salt Lake Tribune
Sunday, March 25, 2001
By John Diedrich KNIGHT RIDDER NEWS SERVICE
http://www.sltrib.com/03252001/nation_w/82756.htm

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station and other Cold War sentinels could become national monuments under a bill sponsored by Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo.

Hefley spokeswoman Sarah Sheldon said if that happens it would have no effect on the mountain's mission and probably would do little besides provide recognition.

Cheyenne Mountain is home to the North American Aerospace Defense Command nerve center and many Space Command operations.

Missile warning, space control and air warning are the three main missions of the mountain. Hefley's legislation directs the U.S. Interior Department to compile a list of possible sites to commemorate the Cold War during the next three years. It was approved unanimously Thursday by the House Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, headed by Hefley.

Hefley sponsored the bill because some of the sites that played a role in the Cold War are being closed, Shelden said.

The Air Force recently did a study of its important Cold War sites, which gave Hefley the idea for his bill.

"He thinks there should be recognition we engaged in the Cold War and that we won it," she said.

Sites that might be considered include nuclear missile silos in northeastern Colorado and Wyoming and bunkers intended for Congress and the president's administration on the east coast, Shelden said.

Cheyenne Mountain was not specified in the bill as one of the sites to consider, she said, but "when [Hefley] sees what [Cold War sites there are], Cheyenne Mountain has to be on that list."

Cheyenne Mountain was designed as an air defense bunker to guard against Soviet nuclear bombers coming from the north.

The first blast into the mountain was in April 1961. In 367 days, 700,000 tons of granite was removed with 1.5 million pounds of dynamite. The mountain became fully operational in 1966.

Military officials with Cheyenne Mountain hadn't heard of Hefley's bill on Friday. They said the mountain played an important role in the Cold War and continues to figure heavily in national defense, including in a National Missile Defense system.

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

An Environmentalist's Choice

San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, March 25, 2001
Donald A. Blackburn San Francisco Chronicle
mailto:chronfeedback@sfchronicle.com
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/25/ED135922.DTL

THE QUIET energy crisis is getting quieter as the oil companies convince the nation that more drilling for oil and natural gas is the only way to solve the problems of higher energy costs and potential blackouts.

Without coal and nuclear energy and new technologies -- such as the Pebble Bed Modular Nuclear Reactor and the Vanadium Redox Battery load-leveler -- using oil and gas to generate electricity will only increase the cost of those vital resources, affecting every aspect of our lives.

Products made from fossil fuels will increase in the price as a result of the increase in price of the raw materials. The cost of fertilizer, for instance, is extremely sensitive to gas prices. If gas is burned to generate electricity, the price of fertilizer rises, and agriculture suffers. When agriculture suffers, food prices are dramatically increased.

Furthermore, over 50 percent of the nation's homes are heated with natural gas. As gas prices increase, those people suffer.

Why are we so easily fooled? Are we sheep? We squander our resources, yet we still want to lead the world.

We need to wake up and use clean and efficient nuclear power to generate electricity. In so doing, we will keep our air clean and prevent the depletion of the ozone layer.

Isn't it time to ask why the United States, the world leader in technology, has caused a nuclear waste crisis?

So-called nuclear waste is a problem peculiar to America. It was the Carter administration, in an admirable attempt to prevent the proliferation of atomic weapons, which outlawed breeder reactors. However, the legislation resulted in the proliferation of nuclear waste, but other nations succeeded anyway in developing nuclear bombs.

If it is not weapons proliferation that makes nuclear energy so unattractive, perhaps it is safety. But, if nuclear reactors are so unsafe, why do we allow our sons and daughters to live and work on nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, eating and sleeping next to the reactor?

Certainly it can't be radiation exposure that is the problem, for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation notes that the average American receives 240 mrem of radiation exposure per year from Mother Nature, while the average exposure from a nuclear power plant is less than 0.02 mrem per year. (The millirem or "mrem" is a unit used to measure the effect of radiation on the human body. The millirem is a very small measurement of radiation. Smoking a cigarette produces 14 mrem; a chest x-ray produces between .5 and 1 mrem.)

The United States should build standard reactors, based on those found in Navy vessels but all of the same design, and place them near cities all across the nation, with the size depending on population. Cities would limit their reliance on transmission lines and the national grid. The local power plant would guarantee an uninterrupted power supply for approximately five years before refueling.

Unlike in other power plants, fuel represents a fraction of the costs of running the plant. As an example, 5 pounds of uranium (approximately $40 at today's prices) can supply all the electricity needs of an average household for about 10 years. To supply those same needs, we would require 6,000 gallons of oil or 60,000 pounds of coal.

In 1999, production costs for nuclear power at 1.83 cents per kilowatt-hour (kwh) were lower than for any other reliable energy source. For comparison, coal costs 2.07 cents per kwh, oil-fired plants cost 3.18 cents per kwh and natural gas plants cost 3.3 cents per kwh.

Think of not only the savings in fuel and generation costs over those 10 years, but also the savings to our environment in terms of greenhouse gases not emitted and ozone not depleted and air not polluted with noxious emissions.

Numbers are not sufficient to express those savings.

Donald A. Blackburn has drilled for uranium and worked in uranium mines. He calls himself "an environmentalist for nuclear energy" and lives in Wickenburg, Ariz.

------

Should We Be Going Nuclear?
A 'Dinosaur Technology'

San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, March 25, 2001
Peter Asmus San Francisco Chronicle
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/03/25/ED135921.DTL

THE ELECTRICITY supply crunch that has crippled California and much of the West has provoked talk of restarting Rancho Seco, the only nuclear reactor to be closed down by a ballot initiative vote. It hapened way back in 1989.

The desire to restart a nuclear reactor is just a pipe dream since the Rancho Seco plant near Sacramento is being dismantled. But the call for greater reliance upon splitting atoms to generate electricity offers clear evidence that nuclear power advocates are trying a comeback.

They look at power supply shortages and growing evidence of the negative effects of global climate change. They see a need to add electricity generating capacity that does not add to pollution spewing from smokestacks of the dirtiest power sources: huge coal-fired power plants and small diesel generators.

It is true that nuclear energy does not contribute to global climate change.

And the new Pebble Bed Modular Reactor may well leak less, greatly reduce catastrophic meltdown risks and use less uranium fuel. But nuclear power is far from being clean or green. Consider the following:

-- In nuclear fuel processing, the uranium enrichment process depends on great amounts of electricity. Most is provided by dirty fossil fuel plants issuing all the traditional air pollution emissions not released by the nuclear reactor itself. Two of the nation's most polluting coal plants in Ohio and Indiana, for example, produce electricity primarily for uranium enrichment.

-- Nuclear power plants release dangerous emissions in the form of radioactive gasses, including carbon-14, iodine-131, krypton and xenon.

-- Uranium mining mimics techniques used for coal and similar issues of toxic contamination of local land and water resources arise -- as do unique radioactive contamination hazards to mine workers and nearby populations. Abandoned mines contaminated with high-level radioactive waste can continue to pose risks for as long as 250,000 years after closure.

-- Nearly 90 percent of the U.S. uranium deposits have been found in the Rocky Mountain States, the vast majority on Native American lands. Do we really need to find new ways to degrade the lands of our own indigenous peoples?

-- Concerns about chronic or routine exposure to radiation are augmented by the supreme risk of catastrophe in the event of power plant accidents. A major failure in the nuclear power plant's cooling systems, such as the rupture of the reactor vessel, can create a nuclear "meltdown." Catastrophic accidents could easily kill 100,000 people or more.

I first learned about the electricity industry by way of the battle to close Rancho Seco, which had grabbed national headlines because of a long list of problems that resulted in local rate increases exceeding 200 percent.

I was hired by a national energy trade publication to cover the battle.

There were rumors of drug use, and even sex orgies, under the immense cooling towers. The picture painted by some insiders was of an operations crew comprised of a bunch of yahoo cowboys that would fit right into an episode of "The Simpsons" TV show.

Over the next 13 years, I learned the ins and outs of the electricity business, the world's largest -- and most polluting -- industrial enterprise. The industry is both boring and complex, which historically has led to ignorance about its activities. Decisions authorizing a spate of nuclear plants were made, for example, with little scrutiny of their economic or environmental impacts.

The consequences of those decisions, and the government subsidies that helped promote the fiction that they were cost effective, helped set the stage for today's electricity crisis.

The United States, with its 103 operating nuclear power plants, is already the world's top consumer of electricity generated from nuclear fission. Still, we have yet to build a federal repository for nuclear waste. Given the fact that reactors currently in operation produce about 2,000 tons of high-level waste every year, calling for greater reliance on nuclear power is supremely irresponsible.

And the fact that Republicans such as state Sen. Tom McClintock, Northridge;

and Frank Murkowski, Alaska, and Pete Domenici, New Mexico, in the U.S. Senate, are calling for more nuclear power is truly mind-boggling. Never has there been a more subsidized, socialized power technology. Virtually all countries that derive the greatest amount of electricity from nuclear -- France, Lithuania, Ukraine, Sweden -- feature central planning and socialistic energy policies.

Free market energy policies suggest smaller, smarter and cleaner power sources. It was the $5 billion in cost overruns at Pacific Gas & Electric's Diablo Canyon that helped build momentum for deregulation, for the emergence of truly clean alternative energy sources. The last thing California, and the country, should embark upon in these volatile times is the dinosaur technology that is nuclear power.

Peter Asmus is author of "Reaping The Wind" and "Reinventing Electric Utilities," both published by Island Press.

---

A New Role for Greens: Public Enemy

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/weekinreview/25KAHN.html

WASHINGTON - PRESIDENT BUSH has declared that, once again, the nation has an acute shortage of energy. But the enemy his administration has identified is not one of the usual suspects: profligate usage, OPEC or Saddam Hussein. Instead, it is environmentalism.

As Mr. Bush's energy team prepares a comprehensive energy strategy, its members are meeting with conservationists as well as oil industry lobbyists. But the team has begun outlining what sounds like a supply-side crusade under an anti-green flag.

Among the measures under consideration, according to administration officials and some Congressional and industry experts, are: easing clean-air rules for coal-fired power plants; loosening federal standards on river flows to protect fish; giving refiners relief from diverse anti-pollution standards in different states; allowing states to control drilling rights on some federal lands; pushing construction of nuclear plants; and, the headline grabber so far, opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration.

Mr. Bush has not been shy about taking on environmentalists: last week, he reversed a Clinton administration executive order that tightened arsenic standards for drinking water, a boon to the mining industry. And in a preview to his approach to energy policy, he dropped a campaign pledge to require power plants to control emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Spencer Abraham, the energy secretary, called the drafting of the energy plan a search for a middle ground between environmentalists and industry. But he sounded the new battle cry at a Washington energy conference last week, ridiculing a recent newspaper ad from a pro-conservation group, which argued California should solve its electricity shortages by a crash efficiency plan.

He cited a study his department prepared that claims that the United States will need 1,300 new power plants during the next 20 years. It was the Clinton administration's folly, he said, to think that the nation could limit demand and just let supply take care of itself.

"Through neglect or complacency or ideology, this approach has led us to the crisis we face today," he said.

THE Bush arsenal includes pointing out that a proliferation of "green tape" has made blocking energy projects on environmental grounds too easy, and that it has cost the nation an adequate fuel supply. And the Bush team also points the finger at people who use environmental rules to simply pursue their own narrow interests.

"We've had an approach that isn't balanced because it's been so easy to stop projects," said Vice President Dick Cheney, who is heading the energy team. "Nobody wants to be able to see a transmission line from their front yard. Nobody wants a gas pipeline through their community. Nobody wants a power plant in their county. It's going to be very important that we change the circumstances."

Part of the Bush focus comes out of politics. Environmental groups gave generously to Democrats, while Republicans collected $10 million of the $14 million in political contributions by oil and gas companies and their trade groups, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

There is also the question of experience. Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and Donald Evans, the commerce secretary, who is also a member of the energy team, are themselves oil industry veterans. They are very aware that the clean-air act of 1970, as amended in 1990, is the industry's bête noire. And there is no question that it has forced companies to reduce output from older power plants and refineries.

Yet some of the measures under consideration have, at best, a tangential relationship to the electricity shortage in California. Mr. Bush's backing of legislation introduced by Senator Frank Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, to open a part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration will do nothing to increase the nation's capacity to produce electricity. Oil is not a major fuel for power plants.

Natural gas shortages are a different story. Because it is a clean-burning fuel, power generators have come to rely heavily on it to produce electricity. What seemed like an endless bounty of cheap gas a few years ago now seems more precarious. Prices have soared, and strains on gas pipelines are obvious.

But it's not clear that natural gas is in crisis. Natural gas has been so cheap for so long that companies have not had the incentive to fully exploit known reserves or invest in new infrastructure. High prices - as opposed to government incentives - could work to secure more supply relatively quickly, many experts argue. And while it is true that community groups have made it difficult to build gas pipelines, the mother of them all - a $10 billion gas superhighway from Alaska's North Slope to the lower 48 states - has been stalled for economic reasons, not environmental ones.

WITH California experiencing rolling blackouts and other parts of the country, including New York, worried about shortages this summer, it seems sound enough to review environmental controls. But the administration also seems to be tailoring the problem to fit a narrow, deregulatory solution long favored by the industry.

What Mr. Bush is calling an energy crisis - scattered shortages of electricity generating capacity and last year's isolated gasoline price spikes - is more complex than the label suggests. An anti-green approach, which focuses on how environmental controls have helped create the problem, may obscure how they could also be part of the solution.

"I haven't heard a single word from them about energy efficiency," said Representative Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts, a Democrat. "Our nation's competitive advantage is technology, not oil reserves, so we ought be using that technology to make our society more efficient."

A recent study by five national laboratories under the Department of Energy found that market-based energy efficiency policies, like tax credits for fuel-efficient vehicles, could reduce the growth of energy demand by a third through 2010.

David Nemtzow of the Alliance to Save Energy says that energy efficiency regulations Mr. Clinton promulgated at the end of his term, most notably new standards for air conditioners, could reduce projections for future energy needs by 50,000 megawatts through 2020. That's one-eighth of the total projected growth in demand during that period.

Yet the president's budget framework envisions cutting funding for energy efficiency and renewable energy programs by 30 percent, Congressional experts who have been briefed on the planned cuts said. And in what seems like a bit of smash-mouth budgeting, the administration has even suggested linking funding for efficiency programs to royalties from Arctic drilling.

-------- missouri

Lake City's legacy haunts former workers, neighbors

Kansas City Star
03/25/01
By JOE ROBERTSON - The Kansas City Star
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/local.pat,local/37753a41.325,.html

It doesn't matter that a network of monitoring wells breathes computer readouts every 20 seconds.

It doesn't matter that regulatory agencies with acronyms like EPA, MDNR, NRC, ATSDR and more have examined the hazardous-waste cleanup at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in eastern Jackson County.

Despite all the assurances that health threats are safely secured today, the government's environmental scientists say they can't be so reassuring about the past.

And with no scientific study to measure the long-term health effects -- if any -- Lake City's legacy continues to haunt nearby residents and former workers at the plant, which employed more than 10,000 during peak years.

"Think about what was going on," Bob Parkey said. He was remembering when he was in the Army, testing weapons in Fort Benning, Ga., during the Vietnam War -- an era when Lake City also built and tested experimental ammunition.

"It was pandemonium," Parkey said. "We knew we had lost our first war. The military had lost prestige and lost people. An entire industry and way of life was in disarray. Records (to the extent they are gathered today) were not being kept."

Parkey is among several nearby residents who have gone to public hearings held by the government at the plant at the intersection of Missouri 7 and 78 to discuss cleanup concerns. They will meet again Tuesday night.

The government will try to resolve questions over the use and cleanup of depleted uranium at Lake City.

It's not that Parkey thinks he has anything to fear. He is perfectly comfortable, he said, to have moved his family where his back yard faces the northern boundary of the 3,955-acre facility. He can hear the guns boom and watch the red tracers light the sky at night.

He believes the Environmental Protection Agency's on-site manager, Garth Anderson, who said, "We sincerely believe...that there is nothing that should generate concern whatsoever."

But all the air sampling that shows no urgent hazard today can't measure what hazards were or were not present when the Army was machining and test-firing the radioactive rounds in the 1960s and early 1970s.

"Since air-monitoring data from past operations at (Lake City) are not available," reads the current public health assessment by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, "ATSDR cannot determine whether exposures to levels of air contaminants...occurred in the past."

The fact that the Army was using the depleted uranium in a spotter round that was designed to mark targets for a portable nuclear weapon -- neither of which ever made it out of the experimental stage -- is telling, Parkey said.

"We were fighting a war," he said. "The attitude was totally different then. You didn't take the same care. The people who worked there (at Lake City) at that time, that's who we should be worried about."

Haunting questions

On a gray day on the plant's perimeter road, Nancy Sue Scott points out a car window at homes behind winter-brown trees and dry grass. She mentions people she knows, people she knew. Some are sick. Some are dead.

She attends many of the public hearings, although she is resigned to the notion that government officials can't tell her any more than her doctors.

They can't say whether the years she spent through the 1960s working at Lake City have anything to do with the near-failure of her kidneys or the anemia and aches that plague her.

The same goes for others. People everywhere get sick for any number of reasons. She understands that. Some neighbors, even some family members, don't believe the plant is to blame, she says.

"But I can't help but wonder."

The plant, now the sole supplier of small-caliber ammunition to the Army, was rushed into operation from the ground up in nine months in 1941, records show. The plant still produces some 3 million rounds a day, mostly bullets for M-16 rifles. That is less than half the production during World War II and the Vietnam War, officials said.

The buildings still stand where Scott worked with ammonia on machines that made blueprints, she said. She remembers how they frequently opened windows and cranked up fans to ventilate the room, pulling in air from across the plant.

"I believe a lot of my problems have been from working out there," she says. "I may be wrong, but I still believe it."

No cover-up

The information plant officials gathered to address depleted-uranium concerns came from records that have been available to the public all along, said Bill Melton, Lake City's contract operations officer.

When engineers 14 years ago began cleaning up two buildings where depleted uranium had been used, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission monitored their work and issued regular reports, he said. A historical summary of depleted-uranium use came from an archive search the Army conducted five years ago.

Melton might not be able to put his hands on enough definitive analyses to allay every fear, he said, but he believes many indications exist that plant operators were aware of potential hazards.

A 1961 report by what then was called the U.S. Army Environmental Hygiene Agency describes radiological screenings of workers, measures of radiation levels and favorable critiques of the plant's policies and procedures.

When the 1970s ushered in the EPA and other agencies with new standards, Melton said, the plant required little renovation.

"There was care exercised even 40 years ago," Melton said.

Lake City's chief engineer, Paul Anthamatten, added, "and they did it absent today's standards. They weren't cavemen who built this."

Greg Perry, a nearby resident and member of the plant's Restoration Advisory Board, said he recognizes it may be difficult to account for actions taken decades ago.

But the numerous questions scrawled in the margins of his bent-eared copy of the ATSDR report leave little doubt that he still wants some answers.

"I know they're working on it," Perry said. "They're trying to address my questions."

Like Parkey and Scott, he's keeping expectations in check.

"There are too many odd-shaped pieces to this puzzle."

To reach Joe Robertson, call (816) 234-7806 or send e-mail to jrobertson@kcstar.com.

-------- MILITARY

The World Starts Getting in the Superpower's Way

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By MARC D. CHARNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/weekinreview/25CHAR.html

THE world can be hard on a new president. John F. Kennedy acted early - and reaped disaster - at the Bay of Pigs. Bill Clinton got the same result by not acting in Rwanda, and by waiting to act in Bosnia. Both came to publicly rue their missteps.

George W. Bush, too, will soon have to decide when, or whether, to use American power - but in a world far different from the one Kennedy or Mr. Clinton faced.

Gone is the cold war, with its assumed need to act everywhere. But gone, too, is the moment when Bill Clinton took office, when the world seemed to wait deferentially on the American president's decisions.

The world's other leaders now have had a decade of living with America as the lone superpower, and they are starting to form new strategies and partnerships - sometimes in ways America may not like.

This shift in relationships, it has to be said, is a matter of interpretation. Sometimes disagreements make countries adversaries. Sometimes calling them adversaries makes for disagreements. And the Bush administration is far more inclined than its predecessor to see China, Russia and North Korea in particular as cold war-style adversaries, rather than potential partners. The abrupt expulsion last week of scores of Russians accused of spying, retaliation for the discovery of an alleged F.B.I. mole, showed clearly that this administration is prepared to address Russia in cold-war style.

But it is also true that the image overseas of America as the "indispensable" power, in Madeleine K. Albright's famous phrase, has evolved. America may still be supreme - and the most desired partner if interests can be made to coincide - but many lesser powers, including some with substantial resentments, are not quite so wary of offending it.

Take the Middle East, where eight years ago Saddam Hussein had been vanquished, but the Arab coalition that had fought him still trembled at his name. It had nowhere to turn for security but to America. In 1993, even Yasir Arafat had to turn to peace talks with Israel, which gained him America's blessing. Now, as a new Palestinian uprising and the crumbling of sanctions against Iraq attest, there are alternatives to doing America's bidding on all the key regional questions - and Arab leaders are at least exploring them.

Something similar is happening in Eastern Europe, where a resurgent Russian nationalism has spurred President Vladimir V. Putin, despite Russia's economic weakness, to rebuild relationships with other former Soviet republics in hopes of slowing NATO's expansion. It is happening in the Americas, where President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has helped lead OPEC to a new solidarity based on higher oil prices.

That is why President Bush's agenda last week was so interesting. A new hand in foreign affairs was confronting some of the most serious and fastest-changing challenges to the way America works its will across the globe. He met with the prime ministers of Israel and Japan, and with China's deputy prime minister. Meanwhile, NATO was facing decisions about how to quell the latest Balkan fighting, and the almighty American economy was giving the world jitters.

Here are several glimpses of how these challenges look from outside Washington, or at least outside the White House, and of why the new American president may not have the last word on how they work out.

-------- arms sales

Bush hopes for arms cutoff to Albanian rebels

USA Today
03/25/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-25-us-macedonia.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush said Sunday that he hoped U.S. and NATO efforts will prove effective in helping Macedonia quell the conflict with Albanian rebels in near the Kosovo border.

"I'm hoping, of course, that the government is stable and we're able to seal off the border to prevent people and arms from getting to the rebels," Bush told reporters as he returned to the White House after a morning jog.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush was referring to "the stepped-up patrols intended to interdict Albanian-extremist weapons shipments."

The administration offered Saturday to help Macedonia improve its military capabilities.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a telephone conversation with Macedonia's president, Boris Trajkovski, said the United States and its NATO allies stand ready to "assist in improving their military capabilities where necessary and supporting their efforts to bolster a democratic, multiethnic state," the State Department said.

The efforts reflect the White House's concerns that Macedonia could become a war zone like other former Yugoslav republics.

Bush said Friday night that the insurgents in Macedonia are falsely claiming to be advancing the cause of the Albanian minority and said the rebels' violent methods "are hurting the long-term interests of ethnic Albanians in Macedonia, Kosovo and throughout the region."

-------- drug war

Swiss May Ease Rules on the Sale of Cannabis

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By ELIZABETH OLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/world/25CANN.html

BERN, Switzerland - Once a month, Didier, a clean-cut 37-year- old government worker, stops by a little shop called Growland, just around the corner from the city's elegant concert hall. Like 10 other shops in Bern, Growland sells hemp products and is listed in telephone directories under cannabis.

Didier, who declined to give his full name, said he was a regular smoker and had come to stock up. So did a steady stream of other customers.

While the sale of cannabis for smoking at Growland and its competitors is illegal, that law is not strongly enforced in this part of Switzerland. Drug laws are applied more strictly in the French-speaking western part of the country, where Didier lives. And that is why he comes here, instead of buying at home in Neuchâtel, an hour away. "It's not a problem," he said. "Everybody knows you can come to Bern and get it."

But even if laws remain unevenly enforced for now, more and more Swiss, it seems, openly flout them and more police officers overlook it. The scent of marijuana can be found on trains, in stations and in restaurants, and cannabis is available for home delivery from Internet sites.

In fact, a government survey in February found that as many as one in four people in this nation of seven million have smoked marijuana. Among the 90,000 estimated to smoke daily, nearly one-third are teenagers. An additional 500,000 are thought to smoke occasionally.

Faced with such numbers, officials announced in early March that they were bowing to "social reality" and would take steps to remove the penalties for consumption of marijuana and hashish, also made from hemp, and lift some restrictions on their sale and production.

The move to liberalize its laws has put Switzerland at odds with its neighbors, which have tougher laws regulating drug use. It has also drawn anger from some United Nations agencies, which were already critical of a Swiss program that provides needles and heroin to certain hard-core addicts in an effort to reduce crime and the spread of AIDS.

Swiss officials say they are setting a new course on soft drugs - simply because the traditional one is not working. "Young people don't understand anymore why it's forbidden when there are so many problems with alcohol and cigarette smoking," said Dr. Martin Büchi, a federal health department official.

Health officials are struggling to find ways to control the use of marijuana among teenagers. The draft law would allow sale of small amounts to Swiss residents at least 18 years old. And the shops would not be able to advertise, though some already do.

The proposed changes - which are unlikely to take effect until 2003 - have inevitably invited comparison with the Netherlands, where marijuana "coffee shops" have become nearly a part of the national identity. Switzerland's controlled opening of the cannabis market, once approved by Parliament, could go further than the law in the Netherlands, where cannabis consumption is only partly decriminalized.

Critics say the changes will create a magnet for "drug tourists" in a country where young people already flock to hike, ski and take part in other adventure sports.

Dr. Büchi insists that the measure still discourages use of other drugs like heroin, cocaine and Ecstasy. They will remain illegal, although violations will not necessarily be prosecuted, officials say. Although all details of the law have to be worked out, proponents - including officials in Bern - say the police would be able to concentrate on large-scale producers and traders.

Passage of the measure is far from sure. The right-wing Swiss People's Party says it will fight any such change in a national referendum. In 1998, voters rejected a broader initiative to legalize all drug consumption.

But Swiss federal authorities believe that liberalizing cannabis is likely to attract widespread support because it "takes into account the social reality," said Ruth Dreifuss, the former president and social welfare minister - and because 53 percent of those polled in February said they approved of decriminalizing soft drugs.

If it comes to a vote, the government can count on support from an unlikely group: farmers. The government says hemp is being grown on hundreds of acres - maybe thousands - around Switzerland.

Growing hemp is legal as long as the tough, fibrous plant is not sold for production of narcotics (parts of the plant are used to make fabric or cosmetics). The proposed law would legalize growing hemp for smoking as long as it was sold in Switzerland.

Earlier this year, the federal drugs commission estimated that sales for smoking could exceed $1 billion a year - something farmers, hard pressed by declining subsidies and the impact of mad cow disease, would welcome.

---

Drug Law Reform: The D.A.'s Speak

New York Times
March 25, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/opinion/L25DRUG.html

To the Editor:

Prosecutors oppose the wholesale dismantling of our current drug laws based, among other reasons, on historical experience ("Drug-Sentencing Battle in Albany," editorial, March 19). In the 1960's and 70's, New York experimented both with diversion of drug offenders to treatment on a large scale and with discretionary sentences. The treatment experiment failed because of inconsistent screening of offenders, poor retention, the absence of effective sanctions and inefficient after care.

Judges, frustrated by seeing the same offenders again and again, were among the first to call for mandatory sentences. Without the leverage of such sentences, judges were unable to sanction repeat offenders effectively. Moreover, wide disparities occurred in sentencing between similarly situated defendants.

We should approach changing our drug laws with caution and not embrace simplistic solutions that jeopardize the dramatic progress that has been made in reducing violent crime in our city.

RICHARD A. BROWN Queens District Attorney, Kew Gardens Queens, March 20, 2001

•To the Editor: Your March 19 editorial omits an important issue relating to reform of the Rockefeller drug laws. The laws play a significant role in diverting drug offenders into treatment.

The "threat" of the laws (a minimum sentence of two to four years) and the second felony offender law often persuade chronic drug offenders to choose treatment over jail time. This "choice" represents more than $18 million in reduced costs of incarceration, health care, welfare and recidivism in Brooklyn alone.

Reform of the laws should not grant the judiciary unfettered discretionary sentencing without granting prosecutors the right to appeal. In some cases, disagreements between justices and prosecutors as to a defendant's motive (addict versus profiteer) have emerged. Allowing prosecutors to appeal a sentence would permit the appellate court to decide if sentencing was impartial and reasonable.

CHARLES J. HYNES District Attorney, Kings County Brooklyn, March 19, 2001

•To the Editor:
Re "Drug-Sentencing Battle in Albany" (editorial, March 19):

The test of whether overdue reform of the draconian Rockefeller drug laws will be resolved over the opposition of the state's District Attorneys Association is if appropriate compromises can be reached by the "three men in a room" - the governor and the Senate and Assembly leaders, Albany's true power brokers.

Enlightened leadership can achieve reform through realistically calibrating drug levels, encouraging drug treatment for low-level nonviolent offenders, and ensuring that career drug traffickers do not use treatment programs to avoid jail time.

Too many have been jailed for too long to ignore the possibility of a consensus solution devoid of election-year distractions.

ROGER B. ADLER President, Kings County Criminal Bar Brooklyn, March 22, 2001

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Court Rulings Signal a Shift on Random Drug Tests in Schools

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By JODI WILGOREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/national/25DRUG.html

Six years after a United States Supreme Court ruling upheld random drug testing of student athletes, spurring hundreds of school districts to adopt similar policies, several recent court decisions have struck down broader programs that test nonathletes.

Some experts say the newer rulings reflect a shift in the public's approach to preventing drug use.

Last week, the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, in Denver, said the Tecumseh, Okla., school district violated students' constitutional rights by requiring drug tests for anyone who participated in interscholastic activities.

Early this month, a federal judge rejected mandatory drug testing for all students in grades seven through 12 in Lockney, Tex., a town northeast of Lubbock. And state courts in Indiana, New Jersey, Oregon and Pennsylvania have expressed similar reservations about such policies in the last seven months.

"The political and legal atmosphere is really changing," said Graham A. Boyd, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's drug policy litigation project, which has brought most of the school cases. "There's not just the knee-jerk reaction against any effort to challenge a policy that purports to be about pursuing the war on drugs."

The move toward drug testing, and the recent rulings against it, come amid a broader school safety crackdown that has restricted student freedom. Districts are increasing the use of metal detectors and locker searches, and sometimes discipline students for even speaking or writing about violence.

At the same time, however, the national attitude toward the drug war has shown signs of changing. Several governors have recently suggested a shift in emphasis from punishment to prevention, and the Supreme Court has rejected random drug tests twice this term, in cases involving pregnant women and highway checkpoints.

For educators, the question of drug testing is part of a perennial balancing act between protecting students' rights and protecting their safety.

"How do we help them stay out of trouble, stay off drugs, and still respect their privacy and teach them about their constitutional rights?" said Julie Underwood, general counsel for the National School Boards Association, which helped defend the Oklahoma policy but opposes testing for all students as in Lockney and another small Texas town, Sundown, southwest of Lubbock.

"In the public schools, it's a wonderful place for students to learn about life in a democracy," Ms. Underwood said. "You don't want students to feel like they are in a police state."

On the other hand, Lee Veness, a lawyer who defended the Lockney district, said: "Why should we only pick on athletes? You either test them all or none."

Districts began adopting suspicionless drug testing in large numbers after the 1995 Supreme Court decision that said mandatory testing of athletes in Vernonia, Ore., was legal because athletes were at the center of a drug problem in the district, and because the students had accepted some invasion of privacy by volunteering for teams where they shared locker-room showers.

In 1998, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, upheld an Indiana program testing students in nonathletic extracurricular programs, which set off a wave of such policies around the nation. (The Indiana policy was challenged again on state constitutional grounds and has been struck down, a decision that is on appeal.)

The federal decision in the Indiana case conflicts with the more recent ruling in the Oklahoma case, laying the groundwork for a possible return to the United States Supreme Court on the question of testing for nonathletes. (The Oklahoma ruling also said the district had failed to prove it had a significant drug problem caused by those who were being tested, leaving open the possibility that a similar policy at another school might be upheld.)

"It goes back and forth; it's kind of a pendulum," Ms. Underwood said. "We're establishing the boundaries."

Though the crucial legal questions concern where students' constitutional rights diverge from adults' rights and how schools are to handle their "in loco parentis" responsibilities, there is also a debate over whether drug testing of high school students is an effective deterrent.

Student surveys indicate that drug testing reduces drug use, but social workers and other experts say testing can be counterproductive by making drugs seem more appealing to rebellious teenagers or driving them to harder-core drugs, like heroin, that are less easily detected in urine tests.

Last year, 41 percent of high school seniors and 36 percent of sophomores said they had used drugs in the past year, down from 42 percent of seniors and 39 percent of sophomores in 1997, according to the Monitoring the Future study at the University of Michigan. Among eighth graders, 20 percent of those surveyed last year said they had used drugs in the previous 12 months, down from a high of 24 percent in 1996.

"There's a drug problem in America's schools," said Linda M. Meoli of the Center for Education Law, which defended the school district in the case in Tecumseh, a rural town about 45 miles southeast of Oklahoma City. "They have drug dogs, they have policemen, they have cameras, and there are still drugs in the school. They have to try everything they possibly can."

Lindsay Earls, the Tecumseh student who brought the lawsuit, succumbed to her third drug test on Tuesday, the day before her court victory. It will be her last, as she will graduate in May and will head for the University of Oklahoma, where she plans to major in political science before going to law school.

"It's not any of their business what medications I'm taking, whether or not I'm using drugs," Ms. Earls, 18, said. "I feel like that's my parents' business."

"I've seen that you really can change someone's life through the law," she said. "Our Constitution's a beautiful thing, and people need to be willing to stand up and fight for it."

-------- korea

Europe to Send Mediators to Korea

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-EU-Summit-NKorea.html

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- The European Union said it will send mediators to North and South Korea to help spur on the peace process, following the Bush administration's decision to suspend talks with Pyongyang.

The 15 EU leaders, ending a two-day summit on Saturday, said Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson will lead a delegation to Seoul and Pyongyang for talks with the countries' leaders.

``The aim is to express support for the process started by (South Korean President) Kim Dae-jung, a process aimed at bringing to an end one of the last conflicts with origins in the Second World War,'' Persson said at a news conference.

No official date has been set for the visit, but Persson said it could occur by late May.

The EU leaders said they decided to increase their role on the Korean peninsula because they were disappointed in the Bush administration's approach on North and South Korea.

The Clinton administration apparently was close to an agreement with North Korea to curb both development of long-range ballistic missiles and export of dangerous technology.

But President Bush claimed a missile agreement with North Korea could not be verified and said he would postpone negotiations with Pyongyang. Seoul officials expressed concern that Bush's tough stance might derail their engagement with the North.

Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh said in an interview with TV4 on Saturday that EU leaders felt it was necessary to fill the void left by Washington.

She said reducing tension between the two Koreas was important ``not leastly since the outside world is worried about North Korean missiles.''

The European leaders said they hoped for early results from their efforts, including ``a second inter-Korean Summit,'' referring to a historic meeting between the Korean leaders last summer.

In North Korea, they pledged ``substantive talks'' with Kim Jong Il on ``the full range of issues of concern to them and to the Union.''

Sweden holds the six-month, rotating EU presidency until July 1. The South Korean president raised the idea of a summit between Persson and the North Korean leader when he visited Sweden after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

North Korea has slowly opened to the West in recent years. Experts say its main motive is obtaining overseas aid to rebuild its economy, devastated by years of disastrous weather and mismanagement.

The Korean Peninsula was divided into the communist North and pro-Western South in 1945. The Korean War ended in an armistice, not a peace treaty.

---

Seoul Fears U.S. Is Chilly About Détente With North

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/world/25KORE.html

SEOUL, South Korea, March 23 - Before visiting Washington early this month for his first meeting with President Bush, the South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung, was bubbling with ideas about how to sustain the momentum in his quest to reconcile his nation with its long-hostile neighbor, North Korea.

There was talk of signing a joint peace declaration with the North, formally ending hostilities decades after the end of their civil war. South Korea was considering supplying electricity to its energy-poor neighbor. And there were expectations of a return visit to Seoul this spring by the North's leader, Kim Jong Il, following up on a summit meeting last June in Pyongyang.

But just two weeks after Mr. Kim returned from the White House, Koreans are describing his meetings with the Bush administration instead as an abrupt and sobering end to the most active phase of their president's groundbreaking policy of reconciliation with the North.

Mr. Bush's reception, while carefully respectful, has been widely perceived here as a firm reining in of an ally whose impassioned engagement with North Korea had shaped this region's diplomacy for nearly two years.

Instead of expecting new initiatives with the North, many here now wonder if Mr. Bush's attitude will leave President Kim enough maneuvering room to pursue his so-called sunshine policy much further.

The Bush administration has tried to soften the impression that Mr. Kim was undermined during his visit. "Personally, I was a bit surprised by all of the reports that President Kim was somehow dissed," said a Western official who participated in the talks. Agreement on Mr. Kim's four main objectives, he said, had been "achieved before he even stepped off the plane."

In fact, the meeting with Mr. Bush got off to a near disastrous start because of what the South Korean government called erroneous reports that Mr. Kim had sided with Moscow against the new administration's interest in building an antimissile shield.

Later, said Korean foreign policy experts who were close to the diplomacy, the United States cautioned South Korea about providing substantial energy assistance to the North, and has pointedly not been encouraging about the peace memorandum idea as well.

In a departure from the diplomatic focus of the last few years on North Korea's missiles and weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration began emphasizing the North's conventional artillery and armor on the border with the South. Washington is now urging the North to remove them as a sign of good will, which many here believe is unrealistic.

"The artillery are a threat that we want to resolve, but it is not an immediate issue, and some people wonder why the U.S. is being so tough on such an issue all of a sudden," said Jin Wook Choi, director of North Korean studies at the Korean Institute for Unification Studies.

The Bush administration also repeatedly emphasized reciprocity, a notion that some here say can be applied so narrowly so as to forestall any future progress.

"Our position is that given the reality on the Korean Peninsula, it is more appropriate to see reciprocity in a comprehensive manner," said Foreign Minister Joung Binn Lee. "We are 10 times the size of North Korea in economic terms, and we have twice the population."

Even while energetically denying that South Korea sided with Russia on the missile defense issue, aides to Mr. Kim say they were pressed to declare their support for the Bush administration's national missile shield development plans.

Beyond the pure policy considerations, though, for Mr. Kim the American decision to pause in its engagement with North Korea comes as a huge personal and political setback.

Mr. Kim has less than two years remaining in his presidency, and may not run again under South Korea's single-term system.

By choosing not to follow up on the Clinton administration's talks with North Korea on missiles and control of nuclear weapons and by postponing any engagement with Pyongyang, political experts here say, the Bush administration has inadvertently helped put Mr. Kim on the defensive at home.

"Many Koreans in fact saw President Kim's sunshine policy as a kind of expensive appeasement policy, and those who opposed it in terms of transparency will question it more openly now," said Hack Sung Kang, professor of international relations at Korea University.

Selig S. Harrison, an expert on Korea at the Century Foundation, a public policy group in Washington, said the economy enabled the opposition to undermine him on the North Korea issue. "Still," he said, "there are certain things that President Kim can go ahead with, regardless of what the United States does."

-------- space

Defense Aims for Orbit

Albuquerque Journal
Sunday, March 25, 2001
By John J. Lumpkin Journal Staff Writer
http://www.abqjournal.com/scitech/285859scitech03-25-01.htm

The military has long given signs it is willing to take warfare into space. Under the Bush administration, it might get that chance. But arms-control advocates, technological hurdles and international treaties promise to make the venture controversial, expensive and possibly damaging to U.S. relations with allies and competitors.

Proponents argue that taking the ability to make war into space, initially through armed satellites and space-based missile defenses, will become vital to national defense in the next 20 years. Other countries, China primarily, are reportedly working on ways to disable U.S. satellites, which have become essential to both military and civilian information-gathering and communications.

Opponents believe that one of humanity's oldest habits - fighting - should remain here on Earth. They accuse the United States of exaggerating any threat, to the benefit of military budgets and contractors.

Both sides note that New Mexico's defense-research complex is playing a major role in preparations for the potential militarization of space.

Advantage sought

In the military's lingo, space war is "space control" or "space superiority."

"In 2020, if not sooner, adversaries will essentially share the high ground of space with the United States and its allies," says the "Long Range Plan" of the U.S. Space Command. "The United States must be prepared to ensure our space advantage over an enemy."

Until his appointment as Bush's secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld headed a blue-ribbon panel studying U.S. vulnerabilities in space. Its conclusion: the U.S. is at risk of a "space Pearl Harbor" unless it takes measures to defend its satellites.

Rumsfeld listed "defense of space assets" among his top priorities. "It's vital to our national security," said Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan and director of the Center for Security Policy, a conservative Washington think-tank. "It's vital for our commercial competitiveness."

The United States, easily the world's leading space-faring nation, has plenty of "space assets."

Satellites' roles

For the military, satellite-based global positioning systems guide missiles to their targets and give ground commanders an extremely accurate view of the positions of their forces. Spy satellites, able to track fleet and troop movements, provide automated reconnaissance and mapping. They also serve as an early warning of long-range missile launches.

For civilians, satellites aid weather prediction, connect pagers and wireless phones and provide video feeds for television.

Small and fragile, satellites' main defense is that they are hard to reach.

But not impossible. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union developed anti-satellite missiles that could be launched from high-flying jet aircraft.

Newer anti-satellite weapons could be based on the ground or in orbit. Many would use lasers or electromagnetic pulses to jam or disable the electronics on their targets.

China's official news agency reported the country is working on "parasitic" satellites that would attach themselves to U.S. orbiters and wreck them.

Another, relatively crude, satellite killer would be a nuclear weapon detonated near orbit. The resulting electromagnetic pulse could wipe out whole constellations of satellites.

Satellites and their ground-control stations are also subject to cyber attacks. While sophisticated encryption techniques make it difficult to eavesdrop on satellite communications, U.S. scientists are looking at ways to "harden" them to hackers.

In the future, military officials will also face the ambiguous question of whether attacking another nation's space assets - without killing its citizens - constitutes open warfare.

"A lot of people were tossing that around," said Rob Hegstrom, who ran a recent space wargame at Schriever Air Force Base, Colo. "We may want to look at how we define those things."

Seeking high ground

But long-range plans suggest space war will involve more than battling satellites controlled from the Earth's surface. Military documents suggest that lasers and "kinetic-energy weapons" that drop guided metal rods could destroy targets on the Earth's surface.

The military refers to space as "the ultimate high ground." This is an offshoot of a fundamental principle of warfare: it is advantageous to be above your enemies, whether at the top of a hill or in orbit.

Of the four military services, the Air Force is taking the lead in pursuing space warfare. Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., and other officials, however, have said space is such a priority that a fifth branch, a "Space Corps," should be created.

Armaments in space won't come cheaply. It costs about $10,000 to launch a single pound of material into orbit with the space shuttle or a traditional rocket. It will at least be more than a decade before the United States has a less-expensive space plane launch system to lower that to $1,000 a pound. Space warfare would have to compete for military money with other undertakings, including new jet fighters and helicopters, missile interceptors, and force readiness improvements.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, recently estimated that the U.S. spends about $6 billion a year on its military space efforts, about 2 percent of the nation's $300 billion annual defense budget. The GAO report noted that the Air Force's plans call for billions more annually.

Advocates argue that preparing for space warfare is unavoidable - that if the United States doesn't put weapons in orbit, another country will.

"We know from history that every medium - air, land and sea - has seen conflict. Reality indicates that space will be no different. Given this virtual certainty, the U.S. must develop the means both to deter and to defend against hostile acts in and from space," the Rumsfeld report says.

Orbital imperialism

Opponents say it's the other way around: U.S. weapons in space will force other nations to build their own. They argue space can be maintained solely for peaceful purposes.

"If any nation has a lot to lose by allowing space to become an arena of war, it's us. We have got all that stuff up there," said Karl Grossman, a journalism professor at The City University of New York and a crusader against the militarization of space. "Once we move into space with weaponry, you've got to expect other nations are going to meet us in kind. Inevitably there will be war in space."

Grossman and other activists accuse the United States of fomenting a new orbital imperialism. They charge that elements of the military view space control as a way for the U.S. to further dominate global affairs, much as European empires used superior navies and technology in previous centuries.

The United States is party to treaties that govern some aspects of space warfare, but they do not outlaw all weapons in space.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 prohibits weapons of mass destruction - like nuclear weapons - to be based in space. Arms-control advocates note this provision was pushed by the United States during the Cold War, when Soviet space capability appeared to exceed ours. They would like to see this treaty extended to all weapons in space.

138 nations back treaty

In November 1999, the United Nations voted to reaffirm the treaty, highlighting the provision that space is to be used for "peaceful purposes." One hundred thirty-eight nations voted to do so; the United States and Israel abstained.

China and Russia make frequent statements against putting weapons in space, and arms-control advocates hail those nations' support of various treaties.

Don't buy it, says Gaffney, noting China's work on the parasitic satellite. "It suggests to me they are very cynically utilizing arms-control as a device for curbing the capabilities of those who observe international treaties and obligations, while they ignore them," he said.

Rarely does a nation forgo an advantageous military capability as the arms-control advocates are asking to United States to do. South Africa, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan have given up nuclear weapons. Numerous nations have signed treaties disallowing chemical and biological weapons.

Efforts to develop a defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles, called "Son of Star Wars" by opponents, also drive some of the U.S. military's efforts to go into space. Star Wars was the Reagan administration's plans for missile defenses based in orbit.

Star Wars went away, but some of its ideas didn't. The Air Force is developing a space-based laser to shoot down ICBMs after 2020 or so. The military acknowledges such a weapon would violate treaties.

The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, now with Russia and some of the other Soviet successor states, prohibits space-based missile defenses. Because it also prohibits ground-based continental missile defenses like those under development, the Bush administration has indicated it might withdraw from the treaty.

N.M. weapons research

Development and operation of space-based weapons have ties to most of the surviving defense contractors, as well as to bases in four states: Alabama, Colorado, California and New Mexico.

Alabama is home to the Army's missile defense efforts, some of which involve space-based sensors. California has the Air Force's launch facilities at Vandenburg Air Force Base and the Space and Missile Systems Center, a procurement base, at Los Angeles Air Force Base.

Colorado, with Space Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, is the military's space headquarters and operations center for space missions. In January, units at Schriever Air Force Base, Colo., played the first space "wargame," set in 2017, in which fictional countries similar to the United States and China faced off in orbit.

New Mexico, meanwhile, with Air Force bases, White Sands Missile Range and the Energy Department labs, is home to most of the research for space weapons and related technology.

N.M. programs

Some of the military space programs in New Mexico:

KIRTLAND AIR FORCE BASE

Air Force Research Laboratory, Space Vehicles Directorate - Kirtland personnel: 816. Budget: $241 million. Researches military satellites and manned spacecraft. This includes work on hardening satellites against attack and developing "inspector" and surveillance satellites.

Air Force Research Laboratory, Directed Energy Directorate - Kirtland personnel: 600. Budget: $130 million. Researches lasers and microwave weapons that would be useful in space.

The directorate includes Starfire Optical Range, which develops telescopes that can provide detailed imagery of satellites, and the Satellite Assessment Center, which is studying the vulnerabilities of satellites to lasers.

Space and Missile Systems Center, Test and Evaluation Directorate - Kirtland personnel: 330. Budget: $109 million. Plans and conducts test programs for new space equipment "to support the exploitation of air and space," according to its Web site.

Space Based Laser Integrated Flight Experiment program headquarters - Kirtland personnel: 13. Kirtland budget: $1.5 million. Proposes to launch a laser-armed satellite into orbit after 2012. The experimental satellite would be a prototype for a constellation of 20 to 40 satellites that would shoot down intercontinental ballistic missiles. The headquarters is in the process of moving to Kirtland from a California base.

HOLLOMAN AIR FORCE BASE

4th Space Surveillance Squadron - Mobile unit that searches for near-Earth satellites.

746th Test Squadron - Personnel: 138. Budget: $15.8 million. Tests weapons guided by global positioning system satellites.

55th Space Weather Squadron, Detachment 4 - Watches the sun for solar "weather" - like flares and storms - that can damage satellites and spacecraft.

Balloon research and operations - Part of Kirtland's Space Vehicles Directorate. Can cheaply launch equipment to near-space conditions using high-altitude balloons.

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE

High-Energy Laser Systems Test Facility - Personnel: 13 plus numerous contractors. Budget: $28.2 million. Tests military lasers. In 1997, the Army fired its big MIRACL laser at a U.S. satellite in orbit. It hit it, but the test did not provide any useful data, the military said.

18th Space Surveillance Squadron, Detachment 1 - Personnel: 19. Budget: $144,700. This unit, almost entirely civilians in a complex near Socorro, operates wide-angle telescopes that track satellites in higher orbits above the Western Hemisphere.

Sources: U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army.

------

Tourist Is Ready for Space

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/science/25NASA.html

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., March 24 - Despite pressure from NASA to back off, a California businessman is pressing ahead with plans to visit the International Space Station as the world's first space tourist.

Russian space officials guaranteed the businessman, Dennis Tito, a seat aboard a Soyuz rocket to the space station in exchange for up to $20 million. On Friday, Mr. Tito said he was certain he would be aboard when it blasted off on April 30.

"I'm not a spoiler here," said Mr. Tito, 60.

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

Bush Giving New Life to Old Ideas About Possible Changes at the Pentagon

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/politics/25MILI.html

WASHINGTON, March 24 - When President Bush delivered his first major speech on military affairs last month, vowing to "challenge the status quo" by investing in new technologies, his words sounded familiar to many military analysts.

"On land, our heavy forces will be lighter, our light forces will be more lethal," he said in Norfolk, Va. "In the air, we will be able to strike across the world with pinpoint accuracy, using both aircraft and unmanned systems. On the oceans, we will connect information and weapons in new ways, maximizing our ability to project power over land."

To seasoned military analysts, Mr. Bush's speech recalled a 1997 report by a Congressionally chartered group known as the National Defense Panel, which recommended a set of far-reaching ideas for modernizing the military.

Speed, stealth, global range and technology would win the day in future wars, the panel concluded. And it urged the Pentagon to transform its strategies and weaponry, even canceling weapons programs to make money available for new ones.

The panel's report was widely praised by military experts - and then widely ignored by many officials in Congress and the Pentagon, who dismissed its more ambitious proposals as too radical or too vague.

"It was a bit discouraging to us that it did not get a more energetic reception," said Richard D. Hearney, a retired Marine Corps general who sat on the panel.

But the Bush administration has given new life and credibility to the panel's work. Not only has Mr. Bush embraced some of its broad themes, but his secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, has also undertaken a sweeping review of Pentagon policies with the help of several former defense panel members. Mr. Rumsfeld briefed President Bush for the first time last Wednesday on that strategic review, which is not expected to be finished for several weeks.

Many military analysts are now asking whether the Bush administration will have more success selling transformation to Congress and the Pentagon than the original sponsors of the National Defense Panel did.

Supporters of transformation say yes, arguing that Mr. Bush appears ready to invest far more political capital in sweeping military change than his predecessor was.

"It will be difficult to break out of the rut we're in," said Representative William M. Thornberry, a Republican from Texas who sits on the House Armed Services Committee. "But I do think the administration is committed to doing that."

Many analysts say that a major shift in military policy almost always faces stiff opposition from Congress, the armed services and the weapons industry. If Mr. Bush tries to scrap a jet fighter program, build smaller ships or shrink the Army - all ideas suggested in the 1997 report - he will have to spend his capital lavishly, analysts contend.

"I think the Bush administration could have a major problem selling most of this because it doesn't intersect with existing political constituencies," said Loren B. Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a military policy group. "In fact, it collides with them."

On Friday, the Bush administration got a preview of the kind of frosty reception such sweeping proposals could receive on Capitol Hill. When the idea of building smaller aircraft carriers was floated in a Washington Post article about Mr. Rumsfeld's briefing of the president, Senator John W. Warner, a Republican from Virginia who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee, issued a sharp reply.

"Carriers have been, are and will be for the foreseeable future an absolute essential part of our deterrence force and, if required, our offensive first-strike force," Mr. Warner, a former secretary of the Navy whose state is where aircraft carriers are built, said in a statement.

Then, in a tart reminder that Congress, not the administration, will decide what Pentagon programs get money, he added: "Congress will definitely have a voice in the new Bush initiatives to keep America strong. As history shows, a president proposes and Congress disposes."

In recent weeks, Republicans in Congress have also raised sharp questions about closing military bases and "skipping a generation" of weapons systems, ideas frequently invoked by the Bush administration.

"This will require real strength at the top if they are going to make it happen," said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat who has been a leading advocate of military transformation. "There will be a lot of resistance."

The National Defense Panel was created by Congress in 1996 to study the military's efforts to address future threats. It concluded that a cornerstone of Pentagon policy - planning to fight two major wars simultaneously - was becoming obsolete, serving only to justify the military's size and structure.

The panel also asserted that China would become an increasingly important factor in world affairs, warned against terrorist attacks within America's borders and urged the United States to be more aggressive in defending its space satellites.

And it predicted that the proliferation of nuclear weapons, cruise missiles and other powerful weapons would make American forces overseas more vulnerable, forcing the United States to rely increasingly on unmanned aircraft and long-range bombers.

Finally, it argued that taxpayers would probably not support a major increase in military spending, recommending that the Pentagon find money for new technologies by canceling older weapons programs, cutting back on peacekeeping missions overseas and closing excess bases. But the panel avoided recommending specific programs to be killed.

The panel's report clearly reflected the influence of Andrew Marshall, a longtime Pentagon analyst and respected military futurist, members said. Mr. Marshall is now helping to direct a review of national military strategies for Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Rumsfeld has appointed three former National Defense Panel members to help in his strategic review: Gen. James P. McCarthy, Adm. David E. Jeremiah and Andrew F. Krepinevich, the director of a military policy organization called the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. A fourth panel member, Richard L. Armitage, has become deputy secretary of state.

With the help of nearly a dozen task forces that are looking at issues ranging from missile defense to military pay, Mr. Rumsfeld is expected to make some hard budget decisions in the next month or two about which programs will shrink, grow or die. To avoid a contentious debate before he has even made up his mind, Mr. Rumsfeld has ordered the review panels to work in strict secrecy, preventing panel members from knowing the identities of their counterparts on other panels.

Despite the secrecy, Mr. Krepinevich, an influential protégé of Mr. Marshall's, laid out a detailed prescription for the services in Congressional testimony earlier this year.

He called for canceling the Joint Strike Fighter and cutting the number of F-22 fighter jets the Air Force could buy. He said the Air Force should consider buying more B-2 bombers; endorsed letting the Marine Corps continue building the V-22 Osprey, the crash-plagued tilt-rotor aircraft; and proposed letting the Navy experiment with small "street fighter" ships linked together by advanced technology to protect larger ships near shore.

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Two Die After a Coast Guard Boat Capsizes on Patrol in Lake Ontario

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/nyregion/25BOAT.html

BUFFALO, N.Y., March 24 - Two Coast Guard crewmen died today after their boat capsized in the icy waters of Lake Ontario. The crewmen, along with two others, had been patrolling the Niagara River along the United States-Canada border, and all four were in the water for hours.

"A four-foot wave hit the bow of the boat, swamping it and flipping it over," said Adam Wine, chief petty officer at the Coast Guard's Buffalo station.

The 21-foot, rigid-hull inflatable was found floating bow up along the lake shore about one mile east of the mouth of the river. The crewmen were rescued soon after midnight about three miles northeast of the river, Chief Wine said.

Petty Officer Scott Chism, 25, a boatswain mate from Lakeside, Calif., and Seaman Chris Ferreby, 23, a native of Morristown, N.J., were both in cardiac arrest and suffering from hypothermia when they were pulled out of the water. They died this morning, Chief Wine said. Officer Chism was married with two children. Seaman Ferreby and his wife had an infant.

"It's possible they went in the water as early as 8 p.m., and they were rescued around 12:30 a.m.," Chief Wine said.

The other crewmen, Michael Moss and William Simpson, machinist mates, were conscious during the rescue. Treated for hypothermia, they both recovered quickly.

The boat embarked on a law enforcement patrol about 7:40 p.m. Friday on the lower Niagara River near Lake Ontario. A big part of the crew's mission was to intercept any illegal immigration across the border.

---

Bomber crash in Nevada kills two-member crew

USA Today
03/25/2001 - Updated 05:01 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/digest/nd1.htm

LAS VEGAS - A German air force fighter-bomber crashed in a sprawling military training range, killing both crew members, military officials said Sunday. Nellis Air Force Base officials said the Tornado bomber crashed late Friday in the restricted area of the base's training area, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The crash was being investigated by German and U.S. air force officials. Germany is one of five foreign nations that sent aircraft to participate in the Red Flag mock-combat aerial exercises being conducted at the base.

-------- OTHER

Powell's positions split at times from Bush's

USA Today
03/25/2001 - Updated 08:31 PM ET
By Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-25-powell.htm

WASHINGTON - Colin Powell is learning that it may be harder than he thought to exchange his Army stripes for diplomatic pinstripes.

A moderate on domestic and foreign policy issues, President Bush's secretary of State has emerged as a lonesome dove in an administration filled with hawks.

Powell is eager to use his new diplomatic tool kit to resolve disputes through negotiations. But he has been at odds with a president and colleagues who prefer a harder line on foreign policy. Some recent examples:

Earlier this month, Powell was stressing that "good things are waiting" for the North Koreans if they improve their behavior, while Bush was saying he doesn't trust North Korea. Powell was forced to recant his pledge "to pick up where President Clinton left off" on engagement with the North.

Powell's State Department was allied on the losing side with environmentalists and foreign governments when President Bush decided to retreat on a campaign pledge to combat global warming by limiting carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. power plants.

Powell has been more supportive of Europe's plan to create its own military force than Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who fears it will undermine NATO.

Powell faces potential conflicts within his own department, where Bush has nominated hard-line conservatives to key positions: John Bolton, undersecretary for arms control, and Otto Reich, undersecretary for Latin America.

Powell's push to revamp sanctions against Iraq to let more civilian goods into the country in return for a halt to illicit Iraqi oil exports has sparked criticism from Capitol Hill Republicans, who say the administration seems to be easing up on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Powell also has shown scant confidence in London-based Iraqi exiles, whose campaign to overthrow Saddam has been backed by Rumsfeld.

"These are nuanced differences," says James Lilley, a former U.S. ambassador to China and South Korea. But "Powell is not a hawk and never has been."

Although he spent most of his career in the military, Powell, 63, is a reluctant warrior. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Bush's father, Powell was not eager to use U.S. forces to drive Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1990. But Bush insisted on liberating Kuwait. Once that objective was achieved, Powell pushed for a cease-fire that allowed thousands of Iraqi troops to escape back to Iraq.

Powell declined to be interviewed, but State officials dismiss the idea of a rift between Powell and Bush's other foreign policy heavyweights: national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney.

Still, Powell can't compete with Rice for access to the Oval Office. Rice, Bush's chief foreign policy adviser since the presidential campaign, has an office near the president's and is the last person to brief Bush before he meets with foreign leaders. In dealings with China and North Korea, she has advocated a harder line than Powell, administration sources say.

Chas Freeman, a former diplomat with expertise ranging from China to the Persian Gulf, says Powell is a lonely voice on many issues in part because of the nature of his post. "The secretary of State is the only person in government apart from the director of the CIA whose job requires taking the views of foreigners into account," Freeman says. "If official Washington is at odds with the rest of the world, that puts the secretary of State in a difficult position."

Frank Carlucci, secretary of Defense and national security adviser under President Reagan, agrees that the secretary of State is "the loneliest job in government."

Carlucci, Powell's mentor from their days together in the Nixon administration, recalls fierce infighting between Reagan's first Defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, and then-Secretary of State George Shultz over covert arms sales to Iran, which Weinberger supported and Shultz opposed. The challenge for the new administration, he says, "is not whether there will be disagreements, but how they resolve them."

Powell's domestic views are so centrist - he supports affirmative action and abortion rights - that the Democrats tried to enlist him as a vice-presidential candidate in 1992. In the end, Powell rejected overtures from both parties to run for elective office.

Powell turned down President Clinton's offer to be secretary of State in 1994, but he agreed to take the post under Bush last year after refusing the then-Texas governor's entreaties to be his running-mate.

A poised figure with polished speaking skills, Powell has made several verbal slips since becoming the nation's top diplomat. He called Taiwan by its official name, "Republic of China," even though it is U.S. policy to refer to the island only as "Taiwan." And he referred to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, although the United States does not officially recognize the city as the Israeli seat of government.

But such gaffes haven't hurt Powell's standing at the State Department, where he is viewed as a hero for consulting with low-level officials and fighting to increase the department's budget. "They love him at State," Carlucci says.

Now his challenge is to get Bush to love his approach to international affairs. Associates say that despite some early setbacks, Powell is confident that he can move Bush's foreign policy toward the center, as he helped do as Reagan's national security adviser in the waning years of the Cold War.

"He's having the time of his life," says close friend Ken Duberstein, who served as Reagan's chief of staff when Powell was national security adviser. "No one should ever underestimate Colin Powell."

-------- environment

More Globs of Oil Foul L.I. Shore as Officials Start Cleanup Effort

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By SHERRI DAY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/nyregion/25OIL.html

Globs of oil continued to wash up along a 25-mile stretch of Long Island's North Shore yesterday and cleanup efforts were expected to intensify today following a spill that apparently originated with a tank barge in Long Island Sound.

Officials have not determined how much oil seeped into the water, but the cleanup is expected to continue for three or four days.

Mark Lowery, a spokesman for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, said the impact on wildlife appeared to be small.

"We really don't expect much at this point because when it's in the water, this oil is pretty firm," he said.

State environmental officials yesterday found three dead double- crested cormorants, and oil on six birds, including two swans and two ducks, all of which appeared to be otherwise unaffected.

Last night, officials discovered that oil had washed up in Port Jefferson and Stony Brook Harbors, said Capt. David Pekoske of the United States Coast Guard. The balls of oil were most concentrated around West Meadow Beach, eastern Port Jefferson Harbor, Cedar Beach and Wading River, officials said.

The oil is thought to be the type used to run power plants. Officials suspect that it may have come from a 350-ton barge owned by Moran Towing Corporation of Greenwich, Ct. The barge was carrying 54,000 barrels when it left New York Harbor for a power plant in Connecticut last week, said Edmond J. Moran Jr., a senior vice president for the company. Workers reported a six-inch hole in the barge on Tuesday.

Mr. Moran stopped short of accepting full responsibility for the spill, but his company hired three firms to mount the cleanup.

Coast Guard officials are investigating the spill's origin.

---

Quarantined Cattle in Texas Face Death Over Mad Cow Disease

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/health/25CATT.html

COLLEGE STATION, Texas, March 24 - At least 21 cattle quarantined in Texas will soon be killed as part of a plan to ease concerns that some may have mad cow disease, agricultural officials say.

The cows, imported four years ago from Germany for breeding, were isolated when the outbreak of mad cow disease erupted in Europe, officials said. Soon after, the United States banned the importation of cattle from the European Union. Such animals already in the United States were quarantined.

The disease can be passed to humans who eat infected meat. In cattle, the illness is believed to be caused by contaminated feed.

None of the cattle in Texas have shown symptoms of the disease, formally known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy. Because of that, they were not seized.

Nevertheless, agriculture officials have decided to take no chances, an official with the Texas Animal Health Commission said.

"They will be euthanized," an agency spokeswoman, Carla Everett, told the Bryan-College Station Eagle. "There is no question of that. The only question is when. It will be this spring."

Brain tissue from each animal will be sent for testing to the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

When the cattle arrived in Texas four years ago, eight were sent to Colorado and one to California. Those animals were killed and tested for the disease. The test results were negative.

The quarantined cattle are owned by several people in Texas, but officials will not specify what part of the state they are in.

"We will not reveal the location of any of those animals, to protect those farmers from any undue scrutiny," Jerry Redding, a spokesman for the federal Agriculture Department, said. "We have legal agreements with all of the farmers who own the cattle that came in from Europe that they won't sell them without letting us know."

Lelve Gayle, associate agency director for the Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostic Lab at Texas A&M University, said the quarantine restrictions were imposed only when federal authorities considered them necessary.

"They don't crack down real hard unless they've got a good reason to do so," Mr. Gayle said.

The quarantined animals were allowed to mingle with other cattle, Hallie Pickhardt, a spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department, said.

"Even if they tested positive, there is no danger of them spreading the disease just by standing next to another cow," Ms. Pickhardt said. "The only way this disease can be spread is by eating contaminated feed."

---

Wolves Die in Park After Dart Shooting

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/national/25WOLF.html

ANCHORAGE, March 24 - Three wolves in the Denali National Park and Preserve have died after being shot with tranquilizer darts, prompting the park to suspend a wolf-collaring program until an investigation is completed.

The decision was announced Friday by the park's acting superintendent, Ralph Tingey.

The wolves were found dead last week. Preliminary examinations of two of the wolves indicated that they had been weakened by infection, said Gordon Olson, the head of the park's research program.

The park is currently home to about 100 wolves, though the number fluctuates from about 90 to 130, Mr. Olson said.

The dead wolves had been among 10 that were tranquilized as part of a long-term research program at the park. Biologists monitor the population and shifts in the wolves' territory and also study the predator-prey relationship in the park, he said.

Over the 15 years of the program, 327 animals have been captured and there have been eight capture-related deaths, including the three this year, park officials said.

---

Regulations Czar Prefers New Path

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/politics/25RISK.html

BOSTON, March 22 - For more than a decade, a Harvard professor named John D. Graham has raised money, eyebrows and hackles by arguing that in many cases the cost of environmental rules vastly exceeds the benefits.

Dr. Graham, the founder and director of a Harvard center that receives most of its money from industry, has become a pivotal figure in the battles over environmental regulation by arguing a theme that is pleasing to his donors' ears. He asserts that Americans would be far better off if, for example, the money devoted to pesticide control were spent on very different priorities, like hospital emergency rooms, even if in considerably smaller sums.

And now Dr. Graham is preparing to bring that view to the new administration. He is President Bush's nominee for a job that would make him a regulations czar, the head of an office in the Office of Management and Budget that must pass judgment on every regulation drawn up by some 50 government agencies. The job would give Dr. Graham enormous clout.

His nomination as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs has thrilled industry lobbyists and others who see it as a sign that the new administration intends to give more weight to strict cost-benefit tests.

But the nomination has troubled many environmentalists and some scholars, who say his ostensibly neutral research is far from objective. They say Dr. Graham would be a worrying addition to an administration they contend has already shown a penchant for disguising political decisions in a veil of objectivity.

"The whole strategy is not to criticize regulation per se," said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, an advocacy group, "but to stop it through paralysis-with-analysis."

Dr. Graham has not spoken publicly since he was nominated this month. Nominees often leave questions for confirmation hearings before the Senate's Government Operations Committee. Hearings have not been scheduled. No member of the committee has publicly voiced opposition to Dr. Graham.

As an academic, Dr. Graham, 44, has advocated a number of health and safety regulations, like seat belt requirements, on the ground that benefits clearly exceed costs. But he has been more skeptical about most environmental rules, arguing in one 1995 study that in terms of cost-effectiveness, certain Environmental Protection Agency regulations lag behind other agencies by a factor of hundreds, at a median cost of some $7.6 million per year of life saved. A more widely used calculation would try to determine the cost for each life saved, but Dr. Graham argues that what is most important is the total years of life saved.

In a 1996 speech, Dr. Graham told an audience at the Heritage Foundation that "environmental regulation should be depicted as an incredible intervention in the operation of society." His defenders, like William L. Kovacs, vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs at the United States Chamber of Commerce, say he is a realist whose work has helped provide a more solid foundation for industry complaints about excessive federal regulation.

"This is a guy who says, `Look folks, when you go home you have a one-in-60 chance of dying in an auto accident,' and no one does very much about it," Mr. Kovacs said. But, he added, with "some theoretical cancer risk of one-in-a-million or one in five million, you have people proposing a new regulatory structure."

In practice, Dr. Graham's ability to recast regulatory priorities would be somewhat restricted. A ruling by the Supreme Court this year upheld a prohibition in the Clean Air Act and other environmental legislation that expressly forbids federal agencies from considering costs as a factor in their decision making, directing that the agencies seek to do everything feasible to protect human health.

But even so, he would have enormous influence, so much so that some industry lobbyists regard the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs as one of the most important agencies in the government, overseeing regulations whose cost to the economy has been measured by economists at $700 billion a year.

While the office cannot veto any regulations the various agencies propose, it must review all of them, under executive orders. And in disputes with agency chiefs, the administrator is rarely overruled by the president.

Under the administrator Wendy Gramm in the mid-1980's, the office was known within government as a "black hole" that swallowed up proposed health, safety and environmental regulations, and some of Dr. Graham's critics say they fear that, under his leadership, it would deserve the same moniker.

The 1995 study that Dr. Graham wrote with graduate students compared the cost-effectiveness of more than 500 life-saving interventions, like seat belts and radionuclide emission controls at uranium fuel plants, on the basis of available data. The study found that cost-efficiencies ranged from those like seat belts, whose cost Dr. Graham estimated was essentially nothing per year of life saved, to those like the emissions controls, whose cost he estimated at $34 billion per year of life saved.

To ignore the "life-saving opportunities" of such cost-benefit analysis, he said in testimony before Congress in 1995, would represent "a shocking display of statistical murder."

Dr. Graham was testifying at the time in favor of legislation by Senator Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican, that would have required that any new regulation issued by the government pass a strict cost-benefit test. That bill was opposed by the Clinton administration, and it was defeated. A new, less strict measure now before Congress would require such tests, and if the costs exceeded the benefits, agencies would have to try to justify regulations in writing.

In both the environmental organizations and in the academic world, Dr. Graham's critics say that nothing is inherently wrong with cost- benefit analysis, and that it should be considered a useful analytical tool. But as a gauge of any regulation, it must try to take account of many uncertainties, and the assumptions made will have an enormous effect on the conclusions.

"It's not inherently good or inherently bad," said Dr. David Ozonoff, chairman of the department of environmental health at Boston University's School of Public Health. "It's inherently biased."

Dr. Ozonoff said that much of the research carried out at Dr. Graham's Harvard Center for Risk Analysis has amounted to "having the client shoot an arrow, and then the analyst paints a target around it."

Sixty percent of the center's annual budget of $3 million comes from private gifts and grants, most of them from industry trade organizations and large companies, including Monsanto, ExxonMobil, 3M, Alcoa, Pfizer, Dow Chemical and DuPont.

The center's reports have tended to reflect the view of industry, as in a study last summer, sponsored by AT&T Wireless Communication, that concluded that the hazards of talking on a cell phone while driving were relatively small.

In the early 1990's, Dr. Graham solicited money from Philip Morris at a time when he was criticizing the E.P.A.'s conclusion that second-hand smoke was a carcinogen, people close to him said. Accepting tobacco money violated the policy of the School of Public Health, of which the risk-analysis center is a part, and Dr. Graham was ordered to return the money. He later accepted an equivalent gift from Kraft, a Philip Morris subsidiary, the same people said.

But in interviews, even several critics of Dr. Graham's work said they felt sure that his views predated his fund-raising. And some supporters of Dr. Graham offered testimonials to his objectivity.

"I think they're afraid of him because they're afraid he'll be effective," W. Kip Viscusi, a professor of law and economics at Harvard Law School, said of Dr. Graham's critics.

---

Tainted Food, at America's Table

New York Times
March 25, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/opinion/L25FOOD.html

To the Editor:

Re "Contaminated Food Makes Millions Ill Despite Advances" (front page, March 18):

Your article tells only part of the story. More and more farmers in the United States and in other countries, like Mexico, who export to the United States have put in place rigorous food- safety programs that encompass planting, irrigation, reduced pesticide use and exacting sanitation steps at harvesting, packing and transporting.

Many of these farmers contract with independent third-party certification companies that post their reports on the Internet for wholesale buyers at supermarket chains. These can also be accessed by consumers. Two of the best known are in California: Scientific Certification Systems and Primuslabs.com.

KATHLEEN VANDERVOET Communications Director, Fresh Produce Assn. of the Americas Nogales, Ariz., March 20, 2001

•To the Editor:

Your March 18 front-page article about food-borne illnesses emphasizes the need to reform our archaic food- safety system. To address this public health problem, President Bill Clinton established the Council on Food Safety to review the federal food-safety system and recommend reforms. I was co-chairwoman of the task force that performed that review.

The council recommended legislative reform to create a risk-based, prevention-oriented system for all food products. Most important, it emphasized that reform should not weaken any existing statutory authorities.

As your article points out, food production, distribution and consumption patterns have changed. The Bush administration and Congress should carry out the council's recommendations.

CATHERINE E. WOTEKI Washington, March 20, 2001 The writer was under secretary for food safety, Department of Agriculture, 1997-2001.

•To the Editor:

Your March 18 front-page article about food-borne illness seemed to suggest that only an increase in government inspections would enhance the safety of our food supply. But it has been the cornerstone of food policy that the food industry, not government, has the primary responsibility for ensuring food safety. It is industry that is on the front line of food safety research, application of safety programs, and self-inspection.

There is no conflict of interest in the industry's taking the lead role on food safety; enhanced food safety is in the best interests of not only consumers but of the food industry as well.

KELLY JOHNSTON Exec. V.P. of Government Affairs and Communications, National Food Processors Association Washington, March 22, 2001

•To the Editor:

Healthy adults usually recover from food poisoning on their own. But without effective antibiotics, food- borne diseases can be life-threatening for the elderly or people whose immune systems aren't working well, like chemotherapy or AIDS patients (front page, March 18).

Yet the effectiveness of antibiotics is in a steep decline, a legacy of years of overuse. In agriculture, animals are fed antibiotics throughout much of their lives, even when they aren't sick. The antibiotics promote slightly faster growth and compensate for unsanitary, stressful conditions in crowded "factory farms." The only way to ease the threat of food poisoning by antibiotic-resistant bacteria is to limit the inappropriate use of antibiotics, both on the farm and in human medicine.

REBECCA GOLDBURG New York, March 20, 2001 The writer is senior scientist at Environmental Defense.

•To the Editor:

I was happy to see your attention to the risk of getting sick in the United States from eating contaminated food ("Contaminated Food Makes Millions Ill Despite Advances," front page, March 18). But the United States already has one of the safest food supplies in the world. Yet nearly 800 million people worldwide don't get enough food to eat, safe or otherwise.

And 1.2 billion people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water, which almost all Americans take for granted. Lack of safe water leads to an estimated 250 million cases of water-related diseases a year and 5 million to 10 million deaths. These deaths are easily prevented. While we should do what we can to make our food safer to eat, we should also keep a broader perspective.

PETER H. GLEICK Oakland, Calif., March 19, 2001 The writer is director of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security.

---

Abraham says U.S. will not beg OPEC for more oil

USA Today
3/25/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-25-oil.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration will not go "begging the OPEC countries or anybody else" to increase oil production as long as the United States has untapped reserves that could ease an energy pinch, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Sunday.

Making the case for oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Abraham said no one should be surprised that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries recently chose to cut output to keep prices high.

"They have decided to put their own interests first, and I think that's something the American people need to recognize," Abraham told "Fox News Sunday." "We are not going to take the approach of begging the OPEC countries or anybody else with respect to oil production."

Abraham's comments come amid concern about power shortages and blackouts in California, as well as the possibility of soaring electricity and gasoline prices across the country this summer.

Democrats argue that there are other ways to improve the country's energy efficiency than drilling in the Arctic refuge and that fuel should not come at the expense of the environment.

Some Democrats say President Bush, a Texas oil man, is wrongly using the California energy crisis to make his argument, when the state is suffering a shortage of electricity, not oil.

During the presidential campaign, Bush repeatedly talked of pressuring OPEC to keep oil production reasonable. He suggested his administration would be able to sway OPEC nations better than President Clinton's was. Some Republicans described Clinton's approach as embarrassing "tin-cup diplomacy."

Abraham said the Bush administration will make the argument to OPEC leaders that the supply and demand of the market should determine price, not cartel manipulations. Beyond that, the United States will not supplicate.

"We should not expect OPEC to necessarily just do what the United States considers in its best interests. And I think that just argues for us to develop more energy resources here at home," Abraham said.

Development of Alaskan reserves is a critical element of Bush's energy strategy. The refuge could hold as much as 16 billion barrels of oil, larger than reserves in neighboring Prudhoe Bay, although the oil would not be available for a decade.

Bush has acknowledged that opening the Arctic refuge to drilling may be a hard sell in Congress. Senate Democrats have pledged to block legislation that would lift the refuge's protection.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said the refuge should remain pristine and that it is "completely fraudulent" for Republicans to suggest that America's dependency on oil is going to be solved by drilling in the refuge.

"It might at most ... mean a difference of 2 to 3% of our total supply, only for a short period of time," Kerry told CBS' "Face the Nation."

He also said Republicans are wrongly holding California up as an example of why the nation should drill. "In California, only 1% of the entire electricity grid of California comes from oil. They're trying to sell the notion that this is going to address California. It doesn't address California," he said.

Environmental Protection Agency head Christie Whitman said the amount of oil believed to be in the refuge could supplant the total currently being bought from Kuwait - for 30 years.

"Do we want to keep bringing it by tanker by Kuwait?" Whitman asked on CNN's "Late Edition."

And Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, who appeared with Kerry on CBS, said if predictions of the amount of oil in the refuge proved true, "it would be the largest oil field found in the last 40 years in the world."

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Possible contamination forces recall of apples

USA Today
03/25/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-25-applerecall.htm

WENATCHEE, Wash. (AP) - Fresh Products Northwest is recalling its "Crunch Pak" Fresh Sliced Apple packages in 17 states because of possible bacterial contamination.

Recent samples show some packages may be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, the company said on Saturday.

The organism can cause serious or fatal infections in children, and the sick and elderly. It also can cause miscarriages and stillbirths among pregnant women. Others may get fevers, headaches, stiffness, nausea, abdominal pain and diarrhea.

The problem was discovered during routine analysis, and no illnesses have been reported, Fresh Products said.

The product was distributed to wholesalers and retailers in Arizona, California, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin.

All "Crunch Pak" varieties are included in the recall. Recalled products will have a "best if used by" date of March 21 through April 11 printed on the bag or carton label, the company said.

The company said it is working with the Food and Drug Administration.

Fresh Products Northwest is a joint venture of the Medford, Ore.-based Naumes Inc. and Dovex Fruit Co. of Wenatchee.

-------- genetics

Group Urges City to Develop as Biotechnology Center

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By TERRY PRISTIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/nyregion/25BIOT.html

Once a week, Dr. Jeffrey V. Ravetch, a professor of molecular genetics and immunology at Rockefeller University, hops the shuttle to visit MacroGenics, the new biotechnology company he helped to found in Rockville, Md.

"I would have loved to have had a company up here," Dr. Ravetch said. But with lab space nearly impossible to find in New York, he said, he had to look elsewhere for a home for the company.

Scientists and entrepreneurs have long complained that state and city officials have been too slow to recognize the potential that the biotechnology industry holds for the city. Now the New York City Investment Fund, a private effort intended to stimulate job growth, is urging officials to provide at least $100 million in direct subsidies and tax incentives. With that level of public commitment, private industry would be willing to come up with another $400 million, the fund contends.

Gov. George E. Pataki has proposed spending hundreds of millions of dollars on biotech and biomedical research upstate. Legislative leaders have made similar pledges that would include projects in the city, like the science park that the New York University School of Medicine has proposed for city-owned land near Bellevue Hospital Center on the East Side of Manhattan.

But Kevin S. Corbett, the chief operating officer for the state's Empire State Development Corporation, said that academic institutions in the city had not made a persuasive case for public financing of biotech projects.

"If you look at this from an economic standpoint, the downstate economy is extremely hot," Mr. Corbett said. "In Buffalo, Albany and Rochester, the money can go a lot further."

According to the investment fund, about 30 new businesses a year emerge from the city's top nine research institutions, but nearly all of them migrate to other states. The biotech industry in the city consists of only about 35 companies, employing fewer than 2,000 people. And New York State has only 87 of the nation's 1,612 biotech companies.

"There is an opportunity for New York to become one of the the top three biotech centers if we move right now," said Kathryn S. Wylde, the investment fund's president.

What is needed in the next five years, the fund said in a report, is about a million square feet of space at rents fledgling companies can afford. Government aid is necessary, the fund says, because developers would have to charge an annual rent of up to $55 a square foot to make a reasonable profit, far higher than the $25 a square foot that it says start- ups can pay in their first year.

The lab shortage is not the only reason New York has been left behind. Investors in fledgling companies contend that New York academics are less inclined to seize commercial opportunities than their peers elsewhere. "We have phenomenal hotbeds of expertise here," said Mark Leschly, the managing director of Rho Management, a venture capital company in New York. "But often the people doing it don't want to be part of a commercial setting."

Despite the drawbacks, some developers with experience in biotech are eyeing New York. Alexandria Real Estate Equities, of Pasadena, Calif., a landlord for many pharmaceutical and biotech companies around the country, is planning to open an office in New York and hopes to attract small biotech companies as well as larger pharmaceutical companies from Europe, said Joel Marcus, the chief executive. "There are some pretty big challenges," he said, such as recruiting workers to an expensive city.

LCOR, a real-estate company that specializes in public-private partnerships and was chosen to develop the commercial portion of Queens West in Hunters Point, recently met with top officials of several medical institutions, including Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University, to discuss including a biotechnology center.

Officials at LCOR said that public support would be necessary for a biotech center at Queens West. "If the region wants a new industry, it needs to be induced," said Peter T. Gilpatric, a senior vice president.

Mr. Corbett of the Empire State Development Corporation, however, said the institutions seeking to build a biotech center at Queens West "have yet to present a coherent case for why they need a subsidy." He cited the Lennox Tech Enterprise Center, a high-tech incubator that opened outside Rochester in 1998. It received state funding, but only after the academic community there united behind it and the private sector showed that it was willing to make a substantial investment.

The only existing biotech incubator in the city is the Audubon Biomedical Science and Technology Center at Columbia University, which opened in 1995. Columbia is planning to build a second incubator building on a city-owned parking lot next to the center. Mount Sinai Hospital is also eager to put up a new research building that would contain incubator space, officials there said.

And New York University's School of Medicine is leading the effort to build the East River Science Park on city-owned land on First Avenue between 28th and 30th Streets, in partnership with the Veterans Administration, Bellevue, and Hunter College. Last summer, the city's Economic Development Corporation designated the site as a science park.

State lawmakers say they are eager to help the biotech industry take hold in the city. The State Senate has proposed a $500 million fund to support biotech and is committed to providing $30 million for the East River Science Park, said Senator Roy M. Goodman, who represents the East Side. Last week the Assembly unveiled a plan that includes $125 million in capital funds. The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, said he hoped that a peer review process, rather than politics, would determine how the money is allocated.

This kind of help cannot come too soon for Dr. Samuel D. Waksal, the chief executive of ImClone, the city's largest biotech employer, with 120 people at its New York headquarters in Lower Manhattan. Dr. Waksal said his company, which makes anticancer drugs, expected to add 100 employees next year.

"We're looking in the city," he said. "We don't want to move."

---

Researchers Find Big Risk of Defect in Cloning Animals

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By GINA KOLATA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/science/25CLON.html

Four years after researchers in Scotland startled the world by announcing that they had cloned a sheep named Dolly, scientists say evidence is mounting that creating healthy animals through cloning is more difficult than they had expected.

The clones that have been produced, they say, often have problems severe enough - developmental delays, heart defects, lung problems and malfunctioning immune systems - to give pause to anyone thinking of cloning a human being. In one example that seems like science fiction come true, some cloned mice that appeared normal suddenly, as young adults, grew grotesquely fat.

It is not that one particular thing goes wrong or one specific aspect of development goes awry, researchers say. Rather, leading cloning experts and developmental biologists said in recent interviews, the cloning process seems to create random errors in the expression of individual genes. Those errors can produce any number of unpredictable problems, at any time in life.

Before Dolly's debut in 1997, scientists thought mammals could not be cloned. But now they have cloned not only sheep but also mice, cows, pigs and goats. With mice, they have even made clones of clones on down for six generations. Dolly is apparently normal. Two infertility specialists recently announced that they wanted to clone humans.

Initial fears - that clones would age rapidly or develop cancer - turned out to be unfounded, scientists said. But as scientists gained more experience, and tried to discern why efforts so often ended in failure, new questions about the safety of cloning arose. Fewer than 3 percent of all cloning efforts succeed.

In cloning, scientists slip a cell from an adult into an egg with its genetic material removed. The egg then reprograms the adult cell's genes so that they are ready to direct the development of an embryo, then a fetus, then a newborn that is genetically identical to the adult whose cell was used to start the process. No one knows how the egg reprograms an adult cell's genes, but that, scientists think, is the source of the cloning calamities that can occur. The problem, they say, seems to be that an egg must do a task in minutes or hours that normally takes months or years. In the months it takes sperm to mature, their genes are being reprogrammed. The same thing happens in eggs, where over years they slowly mature in the ovaries. And this reprogramming must be perfect, scientists say, or individual genes can go amiss at any time in development or later life.

"With cloning, you are asking an egg to reprogram in minutes or, at most, in hours," said Dr. Rudolph Jaenisch, a professor of biology at the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "That's where the major problem is."

All the evidence so far, scientists say, indicates that the breathtakingly rapid reprogramming in cloning can introduce random errors into the clone's DNA, subtly altering individual genes with consequences that can halt embryo or fetal development, killing the clone. Or the gene alterations may be fatal soon after birth or lead to major medical problems later in life.

Some scientists say they shudder to think what might happen if human beings are cloned with today's techniques. While arguments over the ethics of human cloning have dominated the debate, these scientists say the real issue is the likelihood that clones would have genetic abnormalities that could be fatal or subtle but devastating. Until that problem is solved, they say, human cloning should be out of the question.

"It would be morally indefensible," said Dr. Brigid Hogan, a professor of cell biology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Dr. Jaenisch said, "It would be reckless and irresponsible," adding, "What do you do with humans who are born with half a kidney or no immune system?" And, he said, what about the possibility of creating children who appear to be normal but whose genes for neurological development work improperly?

Scientists say they see what appear to be genetic problems almost every time they try to clone.

For example, some mouse clones grow fat, sometimes enormously obese, even though they are given exactly the same amount of food as otherwise identical mice that are not the products of cloning. The fat mice seem fine until an age that would be the equivalent of 30 for a person, when their weight starts to soar, said Dr. Ryuzo Yanagimachi, a University of Hawaii researcher who first cloned these animals and has studied cloning's consequences in them.

Cloned mice also tend to have developmental abnormalities, taking longer to reach milestones like eye opening and ear twitching, Dr. Yanagimachi has found.

Cow clones are often born with enlarged hearts or lungs that do not develop properly, said Dr. Mark E. Westhusin, a cloning expert at Texas A & M University in College Station, Tex. Dolly herself, while apparently healthy, grew fat and had to be separated from the other sheep and put on a diet. But her experience is difficult to interpret since it is hard to draw conclusions about a propensity to obesity from one animal.

The genetic effects most often seem to be fatal at the very start of life, researchers say. With cattle, for example, 100 attempts to create a clone typically result in a single live calf, Dr. Westhusin said.

Cloning mice is more efficient, Dr. Yanagimachi said. But even then, only 2 percent to 3 percent of his attempts succeed.

"Cloned embryos have serious developmental and genetic problems," Dr. Yanagimachi said, which usually kill them before birth. Just after birth, he said, more die, usually of lung problems. He added that inbred strains are much harder to clone than hybrid strains of mice, which makes sense, he said. Inbred animals have much less genetic diversity and so less opportunity to bypass genetic errors than hybrid animals.

Dr. Westhusin says that when he thinks about what happens in cloning, "it's a wonder it works at all."

Scientists knew that every cell in the body has the same genes so, in theory, all the instructions for making a new copy of an adult are present in every cell. But most of the genes in an adult cell, like a skin cell or a brain cell or a liver cell, are silenced. That is why those cells, which have reached their final stage of development, never change. A skin cell does not turn into a heart cell. A brain cell does not turn into a liver cell. And no one expected an egg cell to be able to reprogram such an adult cell, somehow stripping its genes bare of their chemical masks.

Dr. Jaenisch and Dr. Westhusin say that from preliminary molecular biology experiments they are starting to see confirmation of their belief that reprogramming can go awry. They are looking at molecular patterns of gene expression in embryos created by cloning and comparing them to the patterns in embryos created by normal fertilization. Their results so far are consistent with their hypothesis that reprogramming can result in random errors in almost any gene.

But scientists say that every species is different, and it remains possible that it will be easier and safer to clone humans than it is to clone other species.

Mouse eggs are fragile, Dr. Jaenisch said, which may complicate efforts to clone. The solutions used to bathe cattle embryos while they are grown in the laboratory seem to create a large-calf syndrome, resulting in large placentas and huge calves that often die around the time of birth. But clinics for in-vitro fertilization have vast experience in growing human embryos in the laboratory and have perfected the method.

Some - like Dr. Richard Rawlins, who directs the in-vitro fertilization laboratory for the Rush Health System in Chicago - say it is only a matter of time before someone announces that a human has been cloned. "In my opinion," he said, "all it takes right now is time, money and talent." The only question is who will do it first, he added. It may be the two fertility experts who recently announced that they wanted to clone a human, Dr. Panayiotis Zavos of the Andrology Institute in Lexington, Ky., and Dr. Severino Antinori, a fertility doctor in Rome. Or it may be a relative unknown.

Academic scientists say they would not dare to think of cloning a human at this time. The very experiment would be so controversial that they would become scientific pariahs, said Dr. Alan H. DeCherney, chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California in Los Angeles. "You'd ruin your career," he said.

In the meantime, the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight Investigations will hold hearings on human cloning on Wednesday, with a witness list including ethicists and scientists.

-------- imf / world bank / ftaa

Groups Gear Up to Battle Hemispheric Pact

Los Angeles Times,
Sunday, March 25, 2001 Page C1
By GARY POLAKOVIC, TIMES ENVIRONMENTAL WRITER

· Trade: Environmental activists will lead an assault on the far-reaching agreement. Critics see it as a threat to jobs, democracy and natural resources.

Environmental and labor groups that took to the streets of Seattle two years ago to protest global corporate power are preparing for a new clash over a far-reaching free-trade agreement for the Western Hemisphere.

The new front in the fight against globalization is the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which 34 nations, including the United States, have spent seven years crafting. The pact is aimed at knocking down trade barriers to create the world's largest trading bloc, stretching from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to Patagonia in Argentina.

Completion of the pact is a priority for President Bush and an opportunity to prove his commitment to free trade, which the White House and business interests deem critical to the U.S. economy and say would improve living standards and stabilize democracies in Latin America.

But environmental advocates and labor groups are mobilizing resistance to the pact, calling it a threat to democracy, jobs and natural resources. Using tactics similar to those deployed to disrupt the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, organizers are planning to turn out tens of thousands of demonstrators at key trade meetings next month.

The objections are an outgrowth of mounting frustration that environmental and labor concerns are not being taken seriously by most of the nations that would constitute the FTAA. Nongovernmental organizations are excluded from the trade negotiations.

Latin American governments vigorously oppose including environmental protections in the agreement. They fear developed countries would wield regulations as a form of eco-protectionism and they point to unruly protests as a reason to keep activists out of trade meetings, which are conducted in secret.

Bush also has opposed linking environmental and labor standards to trade agreements, although Democrats in Congress have advised his trade representative, Robert Zoellick, to reconsider that position.

"The environmentalists make a difference in the sense that the president won't get authority to negotiate the FTAA unless these issues are addressed," said John Mizroch, president of the World Environment Center and a member of the Trade and Environment Policy Advisory Committee to the U.S. Trade Office.

Trade ministers of the participating nations are scheduled to meet April 6 in Buenos Aires to discuss draft language of the pact. Heads of state will meet April 20 at the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City to discuss the FTAA, among other issues. The nations have agreed to complete the pact by 2005.

Detractors are planning to stage demonstrations along U.S. borders in the weeks leading up to the trade talks.

Critics of the FTAA object to provisions allowing private corporations to sue governments for creating alleged trade barriers -- language similar to the so-called Chapter 11 provision in the North American Free Trade Agreement.

FTAA opponents are rallying around a case in which a Canadian company, Methanex Corp., seeks nearly $1 billion because California banned the gasoline additive MTBE. The dispute arose under NAFTA, but critics say more such cases will arise.

They say the Chapter 11 language could open the door to challenges of other state laws, including California's Coastal Zone Management Act and local growth-control measures that corporations deem an impediment to trade.

"The Methanex case is the loudest warning bell of the sorts of outcomes that the FTAA could result in," said David Waskow, trade policy coordinator for Friends of the Earth. "Trade agreements are making it possible for corporations to reap enormous benefits, but without ensuring there are restraints or controls to make sure health and the environment are protected."

The dispute pits Vancouver, Canada-based Methanex against the U.S. government over Gov. Gray Davis' decision to ban MTBE in California. The smog-fighting gasoline additive was banned after it was found to have polluted water wells from Lake Tahoe to Santa Monica.

Methanex says that decision harmed its methanol-producing business and has asked an arbitration tribunal to award it $970 million in compensation. If the tribunal rules in the company's favor, U.S. taxpayers might have to pay the bill.

"This is about damages and expropriation of our product," said Methanex spokesman Brad Boyd, adding that MTBE is safe. "There was intentional discrimination against MTBE in California."

In another Chapter 11 case under NAFTA, a tribunal recently sided with Metalclad Corp., based in Newport Beach, and directed Mexico to pay $16.7 million in compensation because that country's environmental laws blocked a hazardous-waste plant. The regulations amounted to an expropriation, according to the panel's ruling, which Mexico is contesting.

The potential for these kinds of trade disputes to multiply has prompted Canada to oppose incorporating the NAFTA provisions into the hemispheric trade pact. On the other hand, U.S. companies, as well as Mexico and other Latin American countries, are reluctant to include environmental protections in the trade treaty.

Expanded free trade across the hemisphere is of particular concern to environmental activists because of the natural and cultural resources at stake in Latin America.

Critics say the trade agreement could lead to consequences such as:

· New scrutiny by trade partners of local laws protecting rain forests.

· Claims for compensation resulting from import restrictions on wood or agricultural products that might bear exotic pests.

· Ownership disputes between indigenous people and biotech companies arising from limits on bio-prospecting.

The U.S. Trade Representative's Office has begun a review of the FTAA to determine how it could affect the environment. U.S. officials say developing nations that become trade partners would benefit from access to pollution cleanup technology at lower prices.

"Free-trade agreements raise levels of economic growth in Latin American countries and, as people become more affluent, they will demand stricter environmental controls. You see this all over the world as countries build a middle class that pays more attention to environmental issues," said David Vogel, professor at Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley.

Free-trade advocates say expanded commerce and fewer protectionist barriers increase efficiency by opening markets to companies that produce goods and services at lower cost, regardless of national origin.

Exports to FTAA countries account for nearly half of all U.S. exports. Mexico is now the second largest trading partner of the United States, and jobs supported by NAFTA trade have increased 33%, to 2.6 million, since 1993, according to the U.S. Trade Office.

"The environmental concerns are often a smoke screen for uneasiness over the viability of a particular law. I see no reason why a free-trade agreement would have any impact on environmental laws," said Jonathan Huneke, vice president of the U.S. Council for International Business, which represents 300 multinationals, including IBM Corp., AOL Time Warner Inc. and General Motors Corp.

But it will fall to Congress to set parameters for U.S. negotiators in the FTAA. This year, it will consider whether to grant the Bush administration "fast-track" authority that would enable the White House to present a completed trade pact for ratification without possibility of amendment.

Critics oppose fast-track because it means Congress would have to approve all or nothing once the finished pact returns for consideration. But at the same time, they acknowledge it provides them an opportunity to leverage a more important role for environment and labor concerns.

Said Stephen Porter, senior attorney for the Washington-based Center for International Environmental Law: "The political reality is that, in this country, the FTAA will not pass unless it deals with these social issues."

-------- police

Verniero Defends His Efforts to Curb Profiling by Police

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By IVER PETERSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/nyregion/25INQU.html

FLEMINGTON, N.J., March 24 - Days before he is to appear before a State Senate committee, Supreme Court Justice Peter G. Verniero has broken the traditional silence of a member of New Jersey's highest court to defend how he handled the state's racial profiling scandal while he was attorney general.

After months of being portrayed by Democrats, by his fellow Republicans and by state police officials as the official who dragged his feet on recognizing that state troopers were singling out minorities for traffic stops and car searches, Mr. Verniero has begun a carefully controlled public relations campaign. He has met with reporters of his choosing, talking about the pain the controversy has caused him and saying that the public picture of him that has emerged is unfair.

"It's not one person that's portrayed me unfairly," he said in an interview today, "but the image that is being portrayed generally in the public discussion is of someone who has been derelict in his duties or worse, and that is not the Peter Verniero I know."

Much of the image that Mr. Verniero objects to was filled in this week in days of Senate committee testimony and in the last year in thousands of pages of testimony and government records released about his office's response to accusations of racial profiling.

In part, they paint a picture of a Peter Verniero who was loath to admit that the state police, under his jurisdiction as attorney general, often used race to decide whom to stop and search; whose office has been accused of withholding evidence from federal civil rights investigators; and who shortly before his confirmation hearings as a nominee for the State Supreme Court intensified the prosecution of two state troopers involved in the 1998 shooting of three black and Hispanic men during a traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Mr. Verniero had held his silence about those accusations since his confirmation to the Supreme Court in May 1999. Yesterday, meeting with a reporter from The Star-Ledger of Newark in his Supreme Court office, he said he looked forward to facing the committee. Today, in an interview in the old Union Hotel with reporters he had selected, he expressed regrets but defended his early support of the police.

Mr. Verniero said today that he was slow to concede the reality of racial profiling because statistics available to him predated reforms that he and his predecessor, Attorney General Deborah T. Poritz, had put in place, and because state police leaders assured him that troopers were not practicing racial profiling.

"I'm human, I'm susceptible to all the human frailties," he said. "Looking back in hindsight, I wish that I had asked more searching questions of the state police. I didn't. I didn't for good and valid reasons - I was their lawyer, I trusted them and I believed in them, and no one at the time was telling me, `Don't trust them.'"

In his comments today, he addressed the often-criticized statements that he made as attorney general: that not until the turnpike shooting in April 1998, did he receive new information about instances of profiling that crystallized his thinking, as he put it then, on the issue.

At that point, he said today, "We began to learn - or I began to learn - for the first time that there was a possibility that troopers were falsifying their records" to conceal the disproportionate number of minority drivers being stopped. "Now, in my mind," he said, "there could be no debate over what that means. That's not open to some sort of subjective discussion. And so that was the beginning of my realization that indeed racial profiling was a serious issue."

In talking to reporters, Mr. Verniero was clearly worried about his reputation, said David Rebovich, a political scientist at Rider University in Lawrenceville. "We're talking about a former attorney general and now a Supreme Court justice," Mr. Rebovich said, "and the public will not tolerate someone in those positions acting like a politician. Hence I think he had to come forward and offer some explanation."

In going public, Mr. Verniero also showed that he wanted a chance to tell his version of events before he faces what all sides have acknowledged will be tough questioning on Wednesday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, especially by the committee's ranking Democrat, Senator John A. Lynch, who has been scathingly critical of Mr. Verniero, and by its special counsel, Michael Chertoff, a former United States prosecutor. As Mr. Verniero's lawyer, Robert Mintz, said earlier in the week, "We're not going to wait to have to choose between the three alternative answers Mike Chertoff deems acceptable."

-------- spying

The Bay of Pigs Revisited, but Arm in Arm

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/world/25CUBA.html

PLAYA GIRÓN, Cuba, March 24 - Alfredo Durán was 24 and gripped by dreams of glory when he hit the beach at the Bay of Pigs on April 17, 1961, a patriot in the ranks of Brigade 2506, the Central Intelligence Agency's Cuban invasion force.

"I thought the Marines would be right behind me," he recalled, and together they would overthrow Fidel Castro.

The Marines never came, but in the chaos of battle he and three fellow invaders had a chance of a clear shot at Mr. Castro himself as he commanded the counterattack.

"Good thing you didn't shoot me," Mr. Castro told Mr. Durán on Friday. "My guys would have shot you, and neither of us would be here."

Mr. Castro's guys almost did kill Mr. Durán, now 64 and a lawyer in Miami. He survived capture and 18 months' imprisonment to become a past chairman of the Florida Democratic Party and a past president of the Brigade 2506 Veterans' Association, which expelled him for coming to Cuba for an unprecedented conference of soldiers, former spies and scholars for whom the Bay of Pigs is a never-ending battle.

"I really thought the most emotional moment for me would be meeting Fidel Castro," he said.

"But the most emotional moment was meeting the artillery officer who spent 48 hours trying to kill us," he added.

Introducing the two, Mr. Castro said, "Sit down next to the man you were shooting at," and when they shook hands, scores of old cold warriors - the Cuban officers, the C.I.A. men, the anti-Castro brigadistas - all applauded.

In that instant, Mr. Durán said, "I realized all my hate and remorse was gone."

There were moments like that all through the conference, two days of talking history that ended here today with a ceremony on the beaches along the Bay of Pigs, a three-hour drive from Havana.

At one beach, Playa Larga, Mr. Durán stood together with Col. Ángel Jiménez González, who led the Cuban counterattack there. "We didn't know what kind of force the Cubans were facing," Colonel Jiménez González said. "All we knew was that Cuba was being attacked."

Mario Cabello, 58, who works for a trucking company in Miami, met the Cuban pilot, Nilo Carreras, who sank the ship that Mr. Cabello was aboard off the Bay of Pigs. He told Mr. Carreras that it was a good thing he hit the ship, the Houston, below the waterline since it was loaded with fuel and surely would have exploded if hit amidships.

Mr. Carreras, who later became a general and now is nearly blind, shook with laughter.

Mr. Cabello recalled that the director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, said the Cuban exiles the C.I.A. had trained had to be deployed or they would publicly denounce the agency if the invasion were scrubbed. The exiles, the director had warned, posed "a disposal problem."

Mr. Cabello observed, "The only disposal problem was that we were disposable."

Over a long lunch on Friday, Mr. Castro told his guests, who included Sam Halpern, who as a C.I.A. officer undertook efforts to assassinate his host in the early 1960's, that the Cuban veterans of the Bay of Pigs had never had a real reunion and that he, their commander, was learning things he had never known.

For example, he found out that it was his own vice president, José Ramón Fernández, who had given the orders not to shoot at two United States destroyers monitoring the battle. A good move, Mr. Castro reflected, since sinking the ships would have led to all-out war.

"It was surreal," said Robert Reynolds, chief of the C.I.A.'s Miami station during the Bay of Pigs, who was also at the lunch. "Here was Fidel talking - and he talked nonstop - about all the mistakes he made" during his guerrilla campaign to overthrow Cuba's dictatorship in the 1950's, "and telling us how he would have run the Bay of Pigs himself, not with one big invasion, but with 10 small ones. I never imagined this, not in my wildest dreams."

Even after the Bay of Pigs, the United States dreamed of eliminating Mr. Castro. Late on Friday, Mr. Castro read from a March 1962 Pentagon paper proposing ways to justify a military invasion of Cuba, including blowing up an American ship in Guantánamo Bay or carrying out terrorist acts in the United States and blaming Cuba.

"How do you negotiate with people like that?" he asked, according to participants at the conference.

Today Playa Girón is a beach resort, with palm-frond umbrellas and lounge chairs where the fiercest battles once took place.

But what began at the Bay of Pigs continues today, in a kind of cold war between the governments of the United States and Cuba, with Washington still supporting policies and people to undermine Mr. Castro, who clings to his shopworn revolutionary slogans and defies the superpower offshore.

Mr. Fernández called the Bay of Pigs "an inevitable battle" that "led to no solution at all" and "it continues to this day."

Peter Kornbluh, an analyst at the National Security Archive, a foreign policy research group in Washington, and an organizer of the conference, said, "This dialogue stands in sharp contrast to what's being discussed, and the civility of the conversations between old adversaries should be an example for U.S.-Cuban relations."

Wayne Smith, a young diplomat at the United States Embassy in Cuba from 1958 to 1961, and chief of the State Department's Cuban interests section from 1979 to 1982, said: "The Bay of Pigs didn't work. And here we are 40 years later still trying to fund the internal opposition in Cuba. We haven't learned anything."

Fidel Castro has not changed much either, but as the 70- and 80- year-old veterans of the battle shared their stories, thinking and sometimes laughing out loud about a Caribbean island's victory over the United States, there was a strangely mellow feeling of reconciliation in the air.

"When old enemies gather after years of battle, there's a special feeling that only they can understand," Mr. Smith said. "They have lived through the battle, and they share that. And it's amazing how much old enemies can accomplish by sitting down and talking."

At the end of the day, the five returning survivors of Brigade 2506 laid a wreath at Playa Girón "to pay honor," Mr. Durán said, "to all those Cubans who died on those beaches," both his comrades who died and the men they killed.

---

'Nasty Things' Can Intrude on Russian Envoy's Life

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By MARC LACEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/world/25EMBA.html

WASHINGTON, March 24 - Russia's ambassador to the United States, Yuri V. Ushakov, was host at an elegant soiree for some of Washington's most prominent people recently, just as the latest spy scandal between the two countries was exploding. "I felt sorry for him," said Robert S. Strauss, who was the guest of honor at the party at Mr. Ushakov's residence.

Despite the caviar, the suckling pigs and the Stoli vodka to help the guests wash it all down, it was a slightly awkward affair. Mr. Strauss, who knew what everybody was gossiping about, brought up the matter of the once-secret American tunnel under the Russian Embassy that was suddenly all over the news.

"Tunnels and spies and this wonderful evening - that's typical of our wonderful Russian-American relationship," said Mr. Strauss, a former American ambassador to Moscow.

Mr. Ushakov loosened up enough to joke about the tunnel, even as Moscow was expressing its concern to the United States Embassy there. "If we find it," Mr. Ushakov told a society reporter, "perhaps we can use it as a sauna."

The latest back and forth over espionage may harken back to the tense days of the cold war, but even with the current precarious relationship Russia's diplomatic style has clearly evolved in recent years.

"Past Soviet ambassadors really didn't mingle much - partly because they weren't invited," said Esther Coopersmith, a Washington socialite who has known every ambassador from Moscow since Anatoly Dobrynin, who spent almost two decades representing the Soviets. "Mr. Ushakov is so different from the others. He brought flowers to my house for Thanksgiving. He's involved in charity. He is sweet."

In an interview on Friday, he came across as taciturn but friendly, a gracious host but a guarded one who admitted that he had a lot on his mind that he could not talk about.

Some of Washington's Russia experts consider Mr. Ushakov less steeped in the issues than some past ambassadors. "It may be extraordinary skill on his part but no matter how volatile the situation being discussed, he seems to have nothing to say," one American official said.

Mr. Ushakov said over tea that he works long hours, partly because the time difference forces him to send cables to Moscow late at night. When time allows, he spends an occasional weekend on Chesapeake Bay at a summer house. "I do like Washington life but sometimes it's too much and you need something else," he said.

Because of the latest crisis, Mr. Ushakov said he had delayed a trip to Moscow in which he was going to visit his mother and his bosses. One of his campaigns as ambassador is to open up Russia's imposing edifices in the United States to more Americans so they are not regarded, as he put it, "as spy nests."

"All of these spy stories are part of this relationship, but I think they are a minor part," he said.

Mr. Ushakov is eager to change the subject, and he has had ample experience since arriving here in trying to block the front pages out of his mind when he steps out at night.

The welcoming party organized for him on his arrival in September 1999 came during the allegations of Russian money laundering. "I would like to tell you about Russians," he said. "Not all are criminals, not all are thugs and bandits."

The grand opening of the Russian Cultural Center in Washington later that year coincided with the detention of a Russian diplomat for eavesdropping on the State Department.

Last year, Mr. Ushakov was host at a sculpture exhibit on the suffering that children face around the world, even as Russia was being criticized for atrocities in Chechnya.

"Better not to comment on nasty things," Mr. Ushakov, who is 54, told a reporter at the cultural center opening. "There are too many problems in our bilateral relations. This week was just as difficult as other weeks."

Mr. Ushakov, a graduate of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, wrote his thesis on the foreign policy of the United States. This week, he received some on-the-job training in how to navigate Washington's social circles and its political ones simultaneously.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told Mr. Ushakov on Wednesday that some of his colleagues suspected of spying had to go home. Moscow has retaliated in kind. Mr. Ushakov disputed characterizations that he was "summoned" to the State Department, saying he had sought such a meeting to discuss an array of issues, and General Powell had brought up espionage.

"It's a normal part of the job," Mr. Ushakov said of his "very polite" meeting with General Powell, which was not unlike another conversation about another spy case he had with his predecessor, Madeleine K. Albright. "It happens from time to time. You have to be a realist. It will also happen in the future."

But the tit for tat will not change Mr. Ushakov's next big social gathering: a champagne supper next month to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the city of St. Petersburg.

---

Spies Will Be Spies

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By DAVID WISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/opinion/25WISE.html

WASHINGTON - Newspaper readers and television viewers over the past few days might have been forgiven for thinking they were caught in a time warp, a throwback to the bad old days of Dr. Strangelove and superpower conflict. The expulsion of 50 Russian diplomats from the United States and Russia's quick retaliation in kind feel like something out of the cold war. But despite all the rhetoric, these actions, at least for the intelligence agencies on both sides, do not signal a return to the cold war. For them, it never ended.

Nothing on the grand scale of the current expulsions has been seen since 1986, when a round of retaliations began in August with the espionage arrest in New York of a Soviet intelligence agent employed at the United Nations. A week later, Nicholas Daniloff, an American correspondent for U.S. News & World Report, was arrested in Moscow. Over the next two months of tit for tat, 25 Soviet diplomats were expelled from the United States, Moscow ejected five Americans, and then Washington banished 55 more Soviets.

But that was during the cold war. Although Mikhail Gorbachev had begun his policy of glasnost, the long- standing tension between the two countries continued. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, many observers assumed that everything would change. It didn't, at least in the intelligence business. The cold war was over, but nobody told the spies.

For a while, the Russian espionage presence in Washington, New York and San Francisco did diminish. Fewer officers of the S.V.R., the successor to the foreign intelligence arm of the K.G.B., plied their trade, although Russian military intelligence was as active as ever. By 1996 or 1997, however, the number of S.V.R. officers is said by senior intelligence officials to have crept back up to cold war levels.

The immediate cause of the current decision to expel 50 Russians was the arrest last month of the former F.B.I. agent Robert P. Hanssen, who is accused of spying for Moscow since 1985. But the Clinton administration and the F.B.I. tried for years, with no success, to pressure Russia to reduce its espionage operations in this country. The Hanssen arrest provided the Bush administration with an excuse to crack down. But there are pluses and minuses to this decision.

Expelling Russian diplomats, many of whom are intelligence officers, will probably cause some disruption of Russian espionage activities in this country, like the use of recruitments or "walk-ins" who might be providing secrets to Moscow. And it will temporarily reduce the surveillance burden on the F.B.I., which has been hard-pressed to watch the spies not only of Russia but of other nations.

This round of expulsions, however, increases the problems of the C.I.A., which has never had as many spies in its Moscow embassy and consulates as the Russians have in this country. Now the agency will lose officers in Russia, thinning its ranks even further. The C.I.A. has traditionally and vigorously opposed mass expulsions of Soviet and Russian diplomats for fear of such reductions.

By acting forcefully, President Bush is trying to send a macho, tough-guy signal, consistent with other hard- line noises coming out of Washington these days. But with what result? A Russia headed by President Vladimir Putin, a former K.G.B. officer, is unlikely to stop spying just because some of its people are kicked out. In time, new spies will happily arrive to take their places. Washington and New York are regarded as plum assignments for agents in the S.V.R. The F.B.I. can take some comfort in the knowledge that some of the replacements will be new and inexperienced. But many will be old hands, veterans of espionage assignments in other countries. And even new spies learn fast.

The spying will continue, because on both sides the temptation is too great to stop. All countries want to learn each other's secrets, and that desire did not end with the cold war. Presidents - on both sides - demand information on which to base their policy decisions, and secret information is highly prized. Intelligence obtained clandestinely has a special cachet. In this country, the S.V.R. targets military, technological, cryptographic, economic and political information. Many of its officers are smooth, sophisticated and well- trained. Russia is willing to pay millions of dollars to its best sources, as Moscow did to Aldrich Ames, its mole inside the C.I.A. who was convicted of espionage in 1994.

Washington, in turn, maintains a vast intelligence apparatus, estimated to cost $30 billion a year, ranging from satellites whirring overhead to human spies on the ground. In a 1994 speech, then C.I.A. director R. James Woolsey declared frankly, "What we really exist for is stealing secrets." Yuri Kobaladze, the former spokesman for the S.V.R., was equally candid. "There are friendly states," he said in 1993, "but not friendly intelligence services."

David Wise, the author of "Cassidy's Run: The Secret Spy War Over Nerve Gas," is writing a book about the Robert Hanssen case.

---

Security Move Means 500 at F.B.I. Face Lie Detector

New York Times
March 25, 2001
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/politics/25FBI.html

WASHINGTON, March 24 - The F.B.I. will give lie-detector tests to about 500 employees with access to intelligence information starting next week, the first new security step in the wake of the arrest of Robert P. Hanssen, the F.B.I. agent accused of spying for Russia, an agency spokesman said today.

Among the employees who will face the first polygraph exams of their careers are about 150 top managers at F.B.I. headquarters here, as well as special agents in charge of regional offices. "These are people in positions that place them in contact with highly sensitive material," said Paul Bresson, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In addition, Louis J. Freeh, the director of the F.B.I., has ordered a review of all "sensitive investigations" to determine if other employees had access to information outside their regular duties, according to a memorandum sent to F.B.I. employees last week.

Mr. Freeh has long opposed expanding the use of lie-detector tests, but security experts say Mr. Hanssen may have been caught sooner had he been subjected to periodic polygraph exams. Mr. Hanssen, accused of spying for Moscow since 1985, was never given a polygraph test in his 25-year career.

Attorney General John Ashcroft said on March 1 that the F.B.I. would begin to use polygraph testing more often in monitoring agents involved in counterintelligence and would more closely audit access to computers and other information.

The timing and scope of the expanded lie-detector tests was first reported this week by the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.

Mr. Ashcroft has acknowledged that polygraph tests are not completely reliable, and estimated that about 15 percent of such exams showed a false positive. Mr. Ashcroft has also noted that polygraph tests failed to uncover past betrayals, including that of Aldrich H. Ames, the C.I.A. officer who passed at least one lie-detector test after he began spying for the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, Mr. Ashcroft, as well as experts like William H. Webster, a former F.B.I. director who is heading a review of the Hanssen case, have said that broadening the use of polygraph tests on F.B.I. employees is a necessary step in combatting national security breaches.

All outside job applicants to the F.B.I. have been required since 1994 to submit to polygraph tests to screen for drug use and other disqualifying employment conditions, Mr. Bresson said. Agents with access to specific classified material have also been tested periodically, he said.

The new questioning of the 500 employees will focus on counterintelligence issues and any contacts with foreigners, Mr. Bresson said. The employees will not be asked about their drug use, sexuality or finances.

-------- activists

Invitation to Gothenburg

From: Non-violence Network of Gothenburg <ickevald@goteborg.utfors.se>
Sun, 25 Mar 2001

1. The EU summit and the George W. Bush visit

During the first six months of 2001, Sweden acts as chairman of the European Union. The period culminates in a summit in Gothenburg, the second biggest city of Sweden, during June 14th-16th. Thousands of politicians, bureaucrates, journalists and photographers from all over Europe will attend the meeting, as will George W. Bush, the newly elected president of the USA.

Meanwhile, a wind is blowing from the grassroots of Chiapas to Seattle, Melbourne and Prague, penetrating into the centres of the global fortresses, making their thick walls shiver. We are people who have had enough of being controlled by the great global economic institutions. We want to take control over our own lives, as communities, as peoples and as citizens. We demand our right to political power, now only in order to drop the Third World debts, or to establish new environmental laws, or to challenge the WTO, the IMF or the EU. It's about realizing a new tomorrow, where everybody can choose what kind of society they want to live in.

We strive after gathering the whole broad, motley crowd of political grassroots from all over Europe, demanding a new global political and economical order, based on people's needs and the ecological conditions, instead of the capitalistic laws of profit.

2. The Non-violence Network of Gothenburg

The Non-violence Network of Gothenburg is a network for non-violence activists preparing for the EU summit. We are activists who mean that it is far from obvious that the demonstrations and actions always come about as peaceful as the majority of the participants would like. This in spite of the fact that these demonstrations in advance mostly are launched as "non-violent".

The network works with three different things:

- Nonviolence training.

We mean that it is required that we are actively trained in non-violence, in order to prepare ourselves for situations that otherwise easily might become violent. Before the demonstrations, it is therefore desirable that all participants are able to take part in non-violence trainings. That is why we offer trainings for activists preparing for the EU summit. During the trainings, we discuss and prepare for different situations that could be reality during for example the demonstrations and the mass action in June. If you or your organization are interested in participating in one, in Gothenburg or at other places in the Nordic countries, please mail us at ickevald@goteborg.utfors.se.

- Dialogue.

We believe that the risk for violence will increase if all parts (non-violent activists, militant activists, police...) have strong hostile images of each other. All police officers are not "fascists" and stone-throwing activists are not "hooligans". We arrange meetings between activists with different views on non-violence, as well as between activists and the police.

- Action.

We are preparing a non-violent mass action on June 15:

3. Mass non-violent direct action on June 15th (J15)

Together with groups such as Globalization from Below in Stockholm (http://www.motkraft.net/globaliseringunderifran) and Ya Basta! in Finland and Italy (http://www.valkohaalarit.org), the Non-violence Network of Gothenburg is planning a mass non-violent direct action on June 15th (J15). As a part of the action, we are going to set up a tent camp near the centre of the EU summit from June 5th and onwards. The tent camp symbolizes our right to be where the important decisions are going to be taken. We will also have big spokescouncil meetings and non-violence trainings before the action.

Before noon on June 15th, we will try to intrude the EU summit, with different non-violent methods such as human ladders, rope ladders, and so on... Ya Basta! in Finland, Italy and Sweden are going to organize a part of the action, where hundreds of protected activists dressed in white overalls are going to try to push their way through the cordons.

With the actions, we want to symbolize how we, the people, are being excluded from the areas where the important decisions, affecting us all, are taken. We feel that our so called representatives at the EU summit don't bring forward our opinion about Fortress Europe, all motorways being built, the emerging police state with Schengen, the growing power of transnational corporations, the militarization of the EU and so on. Once inside the conference centre - if we get that far - we will state our demands.

A special website for the J15 action is currently being set up. Check out http://www.j15.org during the following weeks and months!

4. Other activities in Gothenburg

Apart from the Non-violence Network of Gothenburg, lots and lots of groups and organizations are planning activities before and during the summit:

Gothenburg Action 2001

The large coalition demonstration "GBG2001" is planned for Saturday, June 16th, 2001. A permit for 25,000 demonstrators has been applied for. As the EU summit is scheduled to end at noon, the demo is scheduled to begin no later than 10 am.

"GBG2001" is also planning a public meeting on the morning on June 15th, just before the J15 action.

The coalition "GBG2001" are planning many different activities, amongst them common seminars and panel debates, starting on Wednesday evening and continuing to Sunday. These will be held in Folkets Hus and "Fritt Forum" area near the square Järntorget.

More information: http://www.gbg2001.org

Fritt Forum

Fritt Forum is an activist group created especially for the counter summit. They have several circus tents of varying sizes that will be in a centrally located area, near many other activities. The tents will be filled with different cultural and political activities, debates and lectures. There will also be concerts, food and info stalls for different political groups. If you want to get in contact with Fritt Forum in order to book a stall or gig, visit their website at: http://www.forumgoteborg.org

Network Gothenburg 2001

An anti-EU coalition has scheduled a demonstration for Friday, June 15th at 6 pm. This demonstration is expected to be considerably smaller.

SAC

SAC, the Swedish revolutionary syndicalist union is planning a series of seminars and an international meeting with its sister unions and organisations. Representatives from the Spanish CGT, French CNT-F, German FAU, American IWW, unions in South Africa and Siberia and the union of landless farmers in Bangledesh will be participating. A series of workshops for revolutionary workers within specific industries and services will also be organised. The Gothenburg Local Federation of SAC has their offices and bookshop near Järntorget as well. More information can be had from gbg2001@sac.se.

Women's School

The Women's School in Gothenburg is planning a "For Women Only Centre" at their centrally located spaces. Anarcha-feminists are also planning activities there. You can contact the anarcha-feminists at: aktivistemma@spray.se

Network Against Racism

The Swedish Network Against Racism is planning an "Anti-Racist Centre" at Musikens Hus, located not far from the Järntorget area. Many of the groups in this network are planning activities here, including a series of lectures and workshops. Some larger lectures will be held in the Fritt Forum area. In addition, the European-wide, anti-racist network United will be holding its bi-yearly conference in Gothenburg from Friday, June 8th to Tuesday June 12th. Many United representatives will remain in the city and participate in the anti-racist centre activities.

Reclaim the City

Rumours about a massive street party on the evening of June 15th are circulating. However, at the moment we don't know if these rumours are true.

Attac, Friends of the Earth...

Several organizations, such as Attac and Friends of the Earth, are planning their international congresses in connection to the other activities in Gothenburg.

5. How to get to Gothenburg

Gothenburg is a city with more than half a million inhabitants, located at the west coast of Sweden. We suggest you get here by train, bus or boat. We can recommend the bus company Eurolines, http://www.eurolines.com/ and the boat company Stena Line, http://www2.stenaline.com/servlets/index.

The following is the website of the Gothenburg Tourist Office. It has general information about the city and an interactive map: http://www.goteborg.com/en/stadsguide/index.html

6. Accommodation

At the moment, Gbg2001 are looking for accommodation places for thousands of activists. So far, 1500 activists are going to be able to stay at Hvitfeldtska gymnasiet, a school situated close to Vasaplatsen in central Gothenburg. We suggest that you visit the home page http://www.gbg2001.org, where there will soon be information in English about this. We expect around 20 000 - 30 000 people to be coming to Gothenburg, and negotiations with the authorities are taking place in order to overtalk them to provide accommodation (it's also in their interest not to have people sleeping in the parks).

7. Legal information

Sweden differs from most western countries in the respect that citizens of non-Nordic countries are not afforded the same legal rights as Nordic citizens. This is true even for EU citizens. In this space we will explain the differences and your rights in the Swedish legal system.

Identity Documents

According to Swedish law, you are required to have valid identity papers on your person at all times. For Nordic citizens this is a national identity card [such as a drivers license], for EU citizens this refers to an identity card that notates citizenship and for non EU citizens this refers to a passport.

Borders

For travel between the Nordic countries, Nordic citizens are not required to have a passport. This "Passport Freedom" is, principally only applied in short distance travel, such as by ferry between Copenhagen and Malmoe or Finland and Sweden. It also applies to cars crossing the border into Sweden with Nordic registration numbers. In practice, all persons arriving by air travel are required to show their passport at airport customs.

Most "international borders", such as airports, ship terminals and train and car traffic from Denmark have strict border controls. In these cases it's always good to remember that the different seminar arrangements and the Gbg2001 demonstration on Saturday are all legally certified events and intended attendance at these are reason enough to be allowed entry. If a border guard gives you a hard time remember this!

Drugs

Sweden has strict drug laws, which are differ greatly from those of neighbouring Denmark. It is strongly recommended that you not attempt to bring drugs into the country.

Medical

Medical care is available at both public and private clinics. Citizens of some countries are covered by special agreements which entitle them to reduced costs for medical care. Citizens from other countries must pay the entire cost of treatment and medicine. It is advisable to arrange a special sickness insurance before you start your trip.

Visa

At the moment, we don't have any information about which citizens that will need a visa. We suggest that you check with the Swedish embassy in your country. At the address below you will find a list of all Swedish embassies in the world:

http://www.utrikes.regeringen.se/inenglish/missions/index.htm

8. Contact information

Home pages

At the moment we don't have any information in English on the web, but check out these sites regularly:

http://www.ickevald.org (The Non-violence Network of Gothenburg) http://www.j15.org (The J15 action)

Mailing lists

We have two mailing lists in English and two in Swedish: nonviolence-gbg2001-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (Newsletter in English) massaction-gbg2001-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (Discussion about J15 in English) ickevald-info-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (Newsletter in Swedish) ickevald-gbg-subscribe@yahoogroups.com (Discussion list in Swedish)

Gbg2001 has a newsletter in English: GBG2001-news-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Ya Basta! has a discussion list in English: yabasta-gbg2001-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

If you have questions, please contact us! Also, mail us if you are going to come to Gothenburg, and tell us how many you are!
ickevald@goteborg.utfors.se +46-(0)736-17 96 60
Welcome to Gothenburg! Reclaim non-violence!

---

Activists to pitch policies in tent

Montreal Gazette
Sunday 25 March 2001
CHARLIE FIDELMAN The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010325/5065581.html

As leaders of 34 countries wine, dine and mingle at the finest hotels inside a fortified security zone, a parallel summit will be doing business in a heated tent in Quebec City's Old Port.

An estimated 2,000 people - many of them from human-rights, education, religious and labour groups - will serve as hosts at their their own gathering, the second Peoples' Summit of the Americas, April 17-21.

Although the alternative summit comes to a close as the official Summit of the Americas begins, ''alternative protest'' activities will continue as the official talks proceed.

On the agenda of the unofficial summit: "society-friendly" alternatives to counter whatever agreements are hashed out by the bigwigs at the official version.

But since the contents of the first draft of the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement - the pact the 34 nations at the official summit are striving to achieve - are still secret, the Peoples' Summit will base its discussion forums on the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The event will be a call for solidarity, according to organizer Diana Bronson of the Montreal-based, federally funded Rights and Democracy, one of the groups supporting the alternative summit.

"It's an attempt to put educational, social, environmental and human-rights priorities at the forefront of any trade agreement that will affect our lives," Bronson said.

"We, along with 300 organizations throughout the hemisphere, have been calling for the (draft summit agreement) to be released for many months, and we don't have it.

''And that just fuels the worst fears about what's in the trade agreement."

The Peoples' Summit is also hampered by a shoestring budget - less than $300,000 in provincial and federal funding - as well as the massive fortified security zone that will be set up around the official meetings.

About 5,000 police officers have been assigned to the leaders' summit in an attempt to keep away protesters and participants in the alternative gathering.

But the first Peoples' Summit - held in Santiago, Chile, in 1998 - went smoothly without police intervention, Bronson pointed out.

"There were no barriers, no walls - and this is in Chile, the country of Augusto Pinochet. No police. It was a completely free-flowing atmosphere that took place in a couple of hotels," Bronson recalled.

The two organizing groups for next month's Peoples' Summit - Common Frontiers and the Reseau Quebecois sur l'Integration Continental - are scrambling to find more meeting rooms in Quebec City "and begging for hotel rooms" for participants, Bronson said.

Some churches are opening their basements to lodge participants, she added.

Public events booked before the security zone was established had to be moved, including a "teach-in," a multi-media event that will now be held in the tent at the Old Port.

Access to the Peoples' Summit series of day-long forums - on such topics as agriculture, women and globalization, education, agriculture, human rights, and the environment - is by pre-registration or invitation only, because of space restrictions.

But other events, most in the heated tent in the Old Port, are open to the public. They include the opening ceremonies April 17, a concert April 20 and the teach-in.

A public forum on April 21, titled Fight for the Americas, is expected to attract a crowd with public figures like Canadian activist Maude Barlow and French activist farmer Jose Bove, among others, scheduled to speak on the threats they perceive in globalization.

On April 19, alternative-summit participants will vote on a declaration on an alternative hemispheric agreement on behalf of the Peoples' Summit.

The goal is to have participants agree on a common statement despite the wide-ranging concerns of the various groups, which include the Canadian Auto Workers, the Canadian Farmers' Union, the Sierra Club, Oxfam Canada, the Canadian Federation of Students and the Quebec Federation of Labour, to name a few.

The Peoples' Summit is to end with a peaceful march and demonstration April 21.

An estimated 15,000 to 25,000 participants are expected to join the demonstration against the proposed trade pact, which they view as a government-to-government process that fails to deal adequately with labour and environmental issues, as well as with the growing global income gap between rich and poor.

"We see that the (Free Trade Agreement of the Americas) document is being kept secret and only businesspeople and government heads are being allowed access," said Richard Renshaw of the Ottawa-based Canadian Religious Conference, which represents 28,000 leaders of religious organizations and is taking part in the Peoples' Summit.

Trade pacts "have always brought terrific hardships to poor people, the marginalized, the homeless, the single mothers," Renshaw said. "I've seen it in Latin America and I've seen it in Canada.

"What we want is for governments to maintain control over social programs as a public service for the common good and not for private profit."

Globalization is often presented as a plus for women because it's supposed to open more doors to employment, said Diane Matte of the Quebec Women's Federation, which is organizing the women's forum and other activities at the Peoples' Summit.

"But we've seen losses in rights and social and working conditions," Matte said.

"And usually women end up poorer."

"Unfortunately, the other side of the barricades think they have the truth. But I can tell you that (those) discussions are always behind closed doors, and ... usually among white men."

It's the so-called marginalized activists who will provide the more interesting reflections on the planet and humanity's future, Matte said.

"Luckily, there are more and more of us who are positioning ourselves for a real democratic debate on economic and social development."

- Organizers of the Peoples' Summit will be holding an information meeting tomorrow at 7:30 p.m. at Centre St. Pierre, 1212 Panet St. (metro Beaudry). Admission is free. For information, telephone (514) 982-6606, Local 2001.

- Information on how to register for Peoples' Summit forums is also available on the summit's Web site: www.sommetdespeuples.org/en.

------

Vandals Chop Down Hundreds of Trees

New York Times
March 25, 2001
National News Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/25/national/25NATI.html

CORVALLIS, Ore., March 24 (AP) - Hundreds of poplars being used in research projects were cut down or killed this week by vandals apparently singling out genetically engineered trees, Oregon State University officials say.

A representative of a group called GenetiX Alert, which works with organizations that oppose genetic engineering, said a group claiming to be "concerned O.S.U. students and alumni" was responsible.

The Oregon State Police and the F.B.I. were investigating.

The trees were part of a research program to study ways to control flowering, fertility and cross-pollination.

Steven Strauss, a professor of forest science, said some of the trees had been genetically engineered and others were produced with conventional hybrid breeding techniques.

---

Greenpeace hero killed

Australian News Network
25mar01
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,1831374%255E401,00.html

THE founder of Greenpeace International has been killed in a head-on collision on a country road in central Italy.

Police said David Fraser McTaggart, 68, was alone in his car.

The other driver, Dino Belli, 74, died and his wife was injured.

The accident happened on Friday, 30km from the Umbrian city of Perugia.

Canadian-born McTaggart lived in Italy and had an olive farm in Umbria.

In 1972 he galvanised the international environmental movement when he sailed his small boat into a French nuclear testing site in the Pacific Ocean at Mururoa atoll.

He went on to build support in Europe for Greenpeace, forging an alliance in 1979 between national factions of the organisation. He was Greenpeace's chairman until 1991.

"He was the last medieval knight, capable of great symbolic acts for the environmental cause," Gianfranco Bologna, a spokesman in Italy for the World Wildlife Fund, said.

Grazia Francescato, president of the Italian Green Party, called McTaggart "a figure of extraordinary force" and "an example for all of us".

McTaggart was a driving force behind campaigns to save whales, stop the dumping of nuclear waste in the ocean, block production of toxic wastes, end nuclear testing and protect Antarctica from exploitation.

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