------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Foreign Policy Crew Is Smashing the Crockery
China's U.S. Policy: Hedging Bets
Depleted Uranium: A slow, silent killer
Train wth nuclear waste proceeds to storage facility
First Indian satellite launch fails
Japan govt admits dangers of nuclear power
Diplomat sees the surreal and the sad in N. Korea
Korean Plants Delayed Again
German Leader to Brief Bush on New Realities of Europe
Putin Fires Aides and Brings In Civilians
Food Irradiation Q&As
'Mininukes' Proposed as Deterrent to Small Aggressors
Uranium Miners Get Only IOUs
Workers exposed to plutonium
The Conflict Within
US House Commerce head sees resurgence in US nuclear power
WEST VALLEY: NUCLEAR SHIPMENT PLANNED

MILITARY
Bush denies Aegis sale
Myanamar junta rules out democracy for now
Man Stiches Mouth Shut in Protest
Court Considers Medical Marijuana
Medical marijuana use challenged
Court to decide if patients can get marijuana
Arabs, Split on Iraq and Kuwait, Still Join to Attack Israel
Arab Summit Meeting Ends With Agreement and Discord
SOUTH KOREA: MISSILE CONTROL
Putin makes sweeping Cabinet changes
India aborts first test flight of satellite launcher
War Could Litter Space with Debris - U.S. General
U.S. Vetoes Pro-Palestinian U.N. Resolution
U.S. Veto Blocks West Bank Force
A Job for the U.N.: To Ease the Pain
U.S. vetoes resolution backing U.N. observer force
Arab leaders can't agree on Iraq, Kuwait
House OKs better veterans benefits
Brits find F-15 wreckage, body
Second F-15 wreckage found
Principi vows to cut backlog of VA claims

OTHER
Greens tell EU not to call garbage renewable power
US Congressman calls for energy exploration at monuments
Vt. sheep are killed in Iowa
Disneyland Paris quarantines animals
European zoos call for vaccines
U.S. won't implement climate treaty
Forest chief leaves over Bush policy
UK seeks permission to vaccinate
Kyoto Oh No
Lumber Dispute Threatens U.S.-Canada Trade Ties
Urging Bush to Resist Pressure, Forest Chief Resigns
European Union Says Britain Can Vaccinate 180,000 Cattle
Veterinarian at the Gate, Watching Feet and Mouths
Britain Reluctantly Considers Animal Vaccination
U.S. Won't Follow Climate Treaty Provisions, Whitman Says
ALTAMONT: FARMLAND PROTECTION
Legacy of a Landfill
Germany, EU focus on global warming
Officials to kill 21 cattle, test them for mad cow
EU approves British vaccination plan
Black gold
Cloning Animals: What (Who?) Is Next?
Cop force now up to 6,000 officers
Cop used badge to help drunk
Settlement Talks Stall in Louima Suit
Scapegoat Day Over Profiling on Turnpike
Ex-Aide Recalls a 1997 Racial Profiling Memo
Verniero Denies Withholding Profiling Data
2 Members of Police Review Panel Criticize Plan
HARTFORD CONNECTICUT: 2 FORMER OFFICERS SENTENCED
Police computer messages rife with slurs
China: U.S. scholar admits spying
Russia wants 4 U.S. diplomats out
Lost in America
Russia's Spy Riposte: Film Catches Americans in the Act
Beijing Says Chinese-Born Scholar Is a Spy
Peru quizzes Berenson on activism
PERU: AMERICAN'S TRIAL

ACTIVISTS
Protesters try to derail nuke train
German nuke activists to lose battle, may win war
German police use water cannon on nuke activists
Protests slow German nuclear waste train
German nuclear fuel to resume journey
Nuclear waste train reaches German town
Protest Halts Train With Nuclear Waste
Mexican army dismantles bases
German nuclear protests heat up
Fears of a pre-summit 'greenwash'
Internet links anti-globalists Web sites
Singapore cops warn 2 activists
Hong Kong activists jailed
Vietnamese villagers clash with cops
Direct Action to call attention to US fumigations in Colombia
Gunmen Seize 9 Foreign Medics; Kill 8 Somalis
Zapatistas prepare to address Mexican Congress
German police use water cannon on nuke activists
Protesters force back German nuclear waste train


-------- NUCLEAR

Foreign Policy Crew Is Smashing the Crockery

Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20010328/t000026560.html

Are we heading for a foreign policy train wreck?

The decision of the Bush administration to cool relations with Russia can be explained in rational terms, as retaliation for President Vladimir V. Putin's decision to sell weapons to Iran. The decision to cool relations with China can also be explained as retaliation for Chinese military technology sales to Iraq in violation of the United Nations embargo and specific promises to the U.S. Finally, the decision to stop endorsing South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's opening to North Korea under his "sunshine policy" can be explained with the argument that North Korean President Kim Jong Il keeps trying to obtain more aid by threatening to resume ballistic missile tests--straight blackmail.

What cannot be explained in the context of a rational foreign policy is that all three things were done at once. U.S. leverage on China is enhanced by good relations with Russia and vice versa. To quarrel with both countries at the same time reduces American influence on both countries while increasing their inclination to collaborate in ways that hurt American interests. The Chinese threat to Taiwan, for example, has been increased by its recent acquisition of Russian Sukhoi jet fighters and Sovremenny cruisers armed with missiles effective against U.S. aircraft carriers. It does not make sense for Washington to encourage more intense military cooperation between Moscow and Beijing.

The same is true on the diplomatic front. The Russians and Chinese have frequently disagreed with U.S. foreign policy, but each has preferred to work out its own compromise arrangements with Washington rather than to jointly collaborate against it. For example, when the Russians and the Chinese vehemently opposed the 1999 Kosovo war, they did so separately, without seeking to combine forces against Washington.

As for North Korea, it remains the single most dangerous real-life military threat for the U.S. In an all-out war, its eventual defeat is certain, but with thousands of U.S. troops within range of the huge mass of North Korean artillery and with Seoul exposed to heavy rocket barrages, initial losses could be severe. The U.S. therefore has the strongest possible reasons to support the glacially slow, still tentative but hopeful detente between the two Korean states, for example by implementing Bill Clinton's promise to remove trade prohibitions.

That becomes even more urgent if Washington's relations with Russia and China are set to deteriorate--both have done much to restrain North Korea. During his recent visit to North Korea, Putin tried hard to persuade Kim Jong Il to renounce missile development as categorically as he has renounced the development of nuclear weapons. Moscow's priority is to rehabilitate its distressed far eastern provinces, for which South Korean investment is urgently needed. Likewise, in spite of all the contentions between the U.S. and China, starting with Taiwan, the Chinese have been very cooperative on Korea. They have pressed Kim Jong Il to liberalize while developing cordial relations with South Korea, and without trying to undermine its alliance with the U.S.

It follows that while good relations with Moscow and Beijing favor U.S. interests in Korea, bad relations with both call for an intensified American detente with North Korea to offset the loss of their restraining influence. There is nothing complicated about any of this, it is realpolitik at its simplest: the rational use of power to pursue obvious interests.

So why is the highly experienced Bush team breaking all the rules? The short answer is that there is no Bush "team" but only the contending impulses of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell. All are highly experienced, and each one of them could devise an effective foreign policy if left alone to do the job. As it is, their increasingly overt competition for influence over a rather passive president is badly distorting U.S. foreign policy.

Rice--whose staff has been reduced--is squeezed between Powell's immense prestige at the State Department and Cheney's unprecedented power, which is backed by a much-expanded foreign-policy staff. So she is seeking Pentagon support by staking out the most hard-line position on every issue. "Realism" is her slogan, an academic term much used in the Cold War.

Rumsfeld is Cheney's ally first of all, but his personal standing in Washington requires presidential approval of the national missile defense, which is strenuously opposed by Russia and China, and which is justified above all by the North Korean missile threat. Therefore, Rumsfeld supports Rice against Powell, who is convinced that good relations with Russia and China are far more important than building a missile defense in the future. As a former general, Powell knows that an operational system is many years in the future and evidently believes that the North Korean missile threat can be negotiated away long before then.

Convinced that powerful business lobbies will soon intervene to oppose harsh policies toward Beijing, and that America's European allies will press Washington to restore good relations with Moscow, Powell is playing for time. He has the loyal support of the State Department diplomats who favor continuity and the backing of much of Washington's foreign policy establishment, which in turn influences the mass media. Those same forces failed to stop President Reagan's departure from the continuity of detente, but in those days there was a Cold War to win. Today no victories can be won by quarreling with countries very willing to cooperate with Washington on most things.

Edward N. Luttwak Is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington

-------- china

China's U.S. Policy: Hedging Bets
Beijing Regards the New President With Hope and Apprehension

International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
Erik Eckholm New York Times Service
http://www.iht.com/articles/14981.htm

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 U.S.-$ 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 U.S. 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 President 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 U.S. 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 U.S. hostility may bring out the worst in this potential adversary. In the end, the Bush administration may well be nudged, a 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 U.S. 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-pere side of the American president, even as they prepare for the almost inevitable rivalry.

-------- depleted uranium

Depleted Uranium: A slow, silent killer

Brig (Rtd) M Abdul Hafiz, March 28, 2001
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news2001/nn11107.htm

President Kostunica of Yugoslavia has characterised the use of Depleted Uraniun (DU) weapons as a crime against humanity. He wants the International War Crime Tribunal in the Hague also to look expeditiously into this matter and apportion blame. After the disaster caused by DU weapons both in the Gulf and Balkans, countries like Russia had repeatedly warned NATO about the dangers of using DU.

The trail of the devastation left by the Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons the US and other western countries deployed in the gulf war failed to stir the emotions in the offending countries let alone the question arousing the conscience of the perpetrators of the crimes. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had already fallen victim to the deadly effects of DU munitions used in profusion during the gulf war. After the war thousands of Iraqis developed the symptoms of memory loss, headaches, muscle pain, abdominal pain, dissiness and respiratory problems. The incidence of cancer has increased rapidly and at abnormal rates. Leukaemia in children is especially rampant: it has shown a fourfold rise after the gulf war. The incidence of breast cancer among the women is around four times higher than it was before 1990. Abnormal births have drastically increased since the war. Many American and British veterans of Gulf War also developed syndromes that were euphemistically called the 'gulf war syndrome'. But the DU's primary victims were the people of Iraq where some 300 tonnes of uranium from the spent munitions lay scattered across the battlefields of the Gulf War. A confidential report prepared in 1991 by United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority described the presence of DU in Iraq and Kuwait as a 'significant problem' which would cause "tens of thousands of potential deaths."

Yet the danger of DU evoked no reaction from the Western circles which kept turning it down. The Pentagon, despite mounting evidences to the contrary, continued to insist that the DU was only "very, very mildly radioactive." But there are indications that the US military establishment did have some clue about the lethal nature of DU. An US Navy instruction manual noted that the teams recovering Tomahawk missiles during the test rounds must have radiological protective gadgets. The DU munitions developed by the Pentagon during the late 70s was, in fact, a radioactive byproduct of the enrichment process used in producing atomic bomb and nuclear fuel rods. The material was provided free of cost to weapon manufacturers by nuclear arms industries. During the Gulf War the armour piercing rounds made of depleted uranium were used in a big way. The Tomahawk missiles which went into action from the very first day of operation desert storm were all tipped with DU. The US Army reported that a total of 14000 DU tank rounds were used during the course of Gulf War while another 7000 rounds were fired during the training in the sands of Saudi Arabia. The Pentagon could not but be aware of the resultant concentration of the DU and its potential dangers.

The choice of DU for use in munitions manufacturing was made primarily for its effectiveness and economy. But at no stage the users could have been ignorant about its inherent danger both for the civilians and combatants. Because the US Army Armaments, Munitions and Chemical Command itself states: "When a DU penetrator impacts a target surface, a large portion of the Kinetic energy is dissipated as heat. The heat of the impact causes the DU to oxidise or burn momentarily. This results in smokes which contains a high concentration of DU particles. These uranium particles can be ingested or inhaled and are highly toxic". Even before the gulf war the armament experts in US had warned that the combat conditions with the new weaponry will lead to the uncontrolled release of DU-aerosol. They also warned that the DU exposures to soldiers on the battle field could be significant with potential "radiological and toxicological effects".

The US administration, however, did not care and tended to give clean chit to the use of DU. The scientists close to the Pentagon are at pains to prove it innocuous. The former US secretary of state Ms Madeleine Albright even administered the Europeans not to be "excessively nervous and hysterical about DU." The west woke up only after its own soldiers started dying of the complications believed to have originated from the exposure to the DU. It was only after the complaints of the European government that the eyebrows were raised in the west as to the dangers of the use of DU munitions. Last year soon after the Balkan wars the Italian soldiers started developing "mysterious illness" while seven of then already died of cancer. French and Portuguese peacekeepers in the Balkans were also diagnosed with cancer. As a result, the Norwegian soldiers refused to sign contract to go to Balkans for peacekeeping duties. A group of Belgian soldiers sued their government for the health problems caused to them by service in the Balkans. Five Belgian soldiers who served in Bosnia and Croatia died of cancer.

Bernard Kouchener, the UN administrator of Kosovo brought up the issue of the dangers that DU posed to the region. In the mid-1990s the US combat aircraft used limited amounts of DU ammunitions against former Yugoslavia. But in 1999 during the war over Kosovo NATO resorted to blanket bombing of Yugoslavia using the DU weapons despite documented evidence of extremely harmful effects of the DU piling up in the gulf region. More than 100 places only in Kosovo are littered with DU particles. Kouchener forced the NATO to urgently address the issue but it seemed worried only about the health of its soldiers stationed in the region and not the local people. Only in early January last signs were put up by the UN and NATO warning civilians also to exercise caution while approaching areas in Kosovo where DU were dropped. NATO has, of late, admitted to dropping of 12 tonnes of DU in Kosovo alone. In all an estimated 31,000 DU shells were dropped over Yugoslavia.

President Kostunica of Yugoslavia has characterised the use of DU weapons as a crime against humanity. He wants the International War Crime Tribunal in the Hague also to look expeditiously into this matter and apportion blame. After the disaster caused by DU weapons both in the Gulf and Balkans, countries like Russia had repeatedly warned NATO about the dangers of using DU. Boris Alexeyev, the head of Russia's environmental department in the Defence Ministry said that by using DU ammunition NATO has wilfully violated the agreement on radiation security. However, the most significant development with regard to increasing clamour against the DU weapons took place on 4 January last. On that day European Commission President Romano Prodi became the most important European leader to demand an investigation into the claims that the DU used in the NATO munitions had caused death or illness among Balkan peacekeepers. The German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said that it was not 'right' to use such munitions.

The pressures are being built up even in the United States against the use of DU by the Gulf and Balkan wars Veterans. But there is little likelihood that Pentagon and arms manufacturers would take it in right spirit. The Pentagon, the EU and the UN have all set up Commissions to investigate the risks posed by the DU but at the same time the efforts are afoot to whitewash the investigations. In the US where the public opinion carries considerable weightage a number of scientists and academics have already joined the campaign to justify the use of DU. According to the UN half a million Iraqi children have died as a direct result of decade long sanctions. When asked about the cruelty, former US secretary of state Ms Madeleine Albright memorably replied "It is a price worth paying". With this state of cynicism prevailing in some quarters of US administration and elsewhere it is not surprising that a virtually invisible killing agent like DU has so far been disregarded by the US authorities as well as NATO. But perhaps the tide has turned now when it will be increasingly difficult to ignore the protests against DU ammunitions. The development and use of DU weapons, however, is yet another example of how the nuclear industry in the west works together with military industrial complex to support its military ventures around the world regardless of the consequences.

-------- germany

Train wth nuclear waste proceeds to storage facility

USA Today
03/28/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-28-nuclear.htm

DANNENBERG, Germany (AP) - A train delivering 60 tons of nuclear waste reached this town in northern Germany on Wednesday after a journey from France that was repeatedly halted by protesters who sometimes chained themselves to the tracks.

The final 12 miles of the 375-mile trip to the storage site will be by flatbed truck.

The train entered Dannenberg just before 7:30 p.m. Riot police with armored vehicles and water cannon were posted at crossings in and around the town, where protesters awaited the train.

At a rail depot - sealed off by police and barbed wire - the six containers of reprocessed waste will be loaded onto trucks to be taken to the dump at Gorleben. The final stretch, through a thickly wooded area, was the scene of clashes between police and protesters during the last such shipment four years ago.

The train had been stuck on the heaths some 15 miles short of Dannenberg since Tuesday night. It got under way at about 5 p.m. after an 18-hour delay during which it retreated to a small station.

Police and medical crews worked through the night to dislodge four chained protesters who laid across the tracks in freezing temperatures, removing the last one around noon Wednesday.

"I don't think even these people expected it to last so long," police spokesman Wolfgang Klages said.

The buzz of heavy drills echoed at times through the woods in north Germany. Engineers had to repair tracks after cutting them to free the protesters.

About 500 people who had gathered to support the group sat down on the rails around them. Police using batons eventually pushed them away. Smaller groups had to be cleared from the tracks in several other places along the line.

Other small groups staged occupations on the tracks through Wednesday and several hundred protesters skirmished in Dannenberg with police, who cleared away makeshift roadblocks.

Riot police sent reinforcements to Dannenberg after militants threw stones, fired flares and set a police car afire in the town Tuesday night. Police responded with water cannon and baton charges.

Police said five officers were injured in the clashes, one seriously. Some 600 protesters were taken into custody. The protesters said dozens on their side were injured. About 20,000 police were in action in Germany's biggest security operation in years after militants turned the last transport in 1997 into chaos.

In Berlin, Interior Minister Otto Schily threatened to sue protesters for damage to public property.

"No one has the right to obstruct a transport that meets legal obligations," he said.

The protesters object to what they say is highly dangerous radioactive waste being transported through Germany, and hope to make the transports so costly the government will call them to a halt.

Police vans were stationed along the approach road to the dump at Gorleben and the road was sealed off with barbed wire, while officers on horseback patrolled the nearby forest and heat-sensitive cameras were being used.

German and French leaders agreed on a resumption of nuclear waste traffic last January, with the German government saying it has tightened safety rules for the transports since the previous administration suspended shipments in 1998 because of radioactive leaks on some containers.

Spent nuclear fuel from German power plants is sent abroad for reprocessing, but the contracts oblige Germany to take back the resulting waste.

-------- india / pakistan

First Indian satellite launch fails

EE Times
Mar 28, 2001 (10:30 AM)
By K.C. Krishnadas, EE Times
http://www.eetimes.com
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20010328S0034

BANGALORE, India - India's effort to enter the satellite launch market suffered a setback Wednesday (March 28) when the test launch of an experimental communications satellite was aborted a second before liftoff. The aborted launch of the satellite was followed by a fire on the launch pad that engulfed one of four strap-on boosters used by India's Geosynchronous Satellite Launch vehicle (GSLV). The rocket was designed to lift the experimental payload into a 22,000-mile geosynchronous orbit of Earth.

A new date for the launch of the satellite has not been set.

The launch window for the planned flight extends to April 3. Indian launch officials said only that they are working to fix problems that caused the aborted launch.

The launch was to take place from an Indian facility at Sriarikota, an island off the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Workers there were scrambling to prepare for another attempt to launch the GSLV, which is designed to orbit the experimental satellite carrying two C-band transponders.

Given the projected growth of Indian telecommunications, the spread of the Internet and the increasing number of Indian television channels, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) wants to prove itself capable of placing communication satellites in orbit.

The GSLV program aims to meet the demand for a commercial launch capability within India. Along with telecommunications satellites, the agency wants to be able to launch scientific payloads for other applications like remote sensing. However, western observers fear the launch vehicle may eventually be used for military purposes.

ISRO Chairman K. Kasturirangan said GSLV would be followed by two more developmental test flights before incorporating the advanced launch vehicle into India's satellite launch system.

Huge sums of money would be saved by India if the program succeeds. The Indian government currently pays overseas satellite launch agencies to place Indian satellites in orbit. An earlier series of Indian communication satellites called Insat were placed in orbit by France's Arianespace.

The indigenous launch capability is by far the most challenging effort ever undertaken by ISRO. Had the 160-foot-high GSLV been launched on schedule, it would have marked a major step toward self-reliance by India's launch industry. Observers said it would also have secured Indian entry into the huge satellite launch market dominated by Boeing Corp. and Lockheed Martin in the United States, France's Arianespace, and companies in Russia and China.

India's GSLV program, conceived 10 years ago, has so far cost about $325 million. It has also assumed national significance since the United States led an effort to stop the transfer of cryogenic technology to India by Glavkosmos, the Russian space agency.

India and Russia have long cooperated on scientific and military projects. The U.S. effort to block the technology transfer was prompted by concerns about an escalating arms race between India and neighboring Pakistan. Both states possess nuclear weapons.

Glavkosmos had originally agreed to supply the Indian space agency with cryogenic technology, but the Soviet Union collapsed before the allies could complete a key technology transfer agreement. Russia eventually relented to U.S. pressure and canceled the deal.

Washington has sought to rein in Indian missile tests under the 1987 Missile Technology Control Regime, an agreement among 27 nations designed to restrict exports of missile technology. In 1993, the accord was extended to include all missiles capable of delivering weapons.

-------- japan

Japan govt admits dangers of nuclear power

Planet Ark
JAPAN: March 28, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10274

TOKYO - The Japanese government admitted for the first time yesterday that there are dangers inherent in the use of nuclear power and acknowledged criticisms that industry has been complacent about safety.

"The use of nuclear power has many benefits...but at the same time there are potential dangers implicit in its use that call for an unflagging effort to maintain safety," it said in a white paper on nuclear safety.

Japan has 51 reactors and uses nuclear power to meet one-third of its energy needs.

The annual report by the government's Nuclear Safety Commission cited widespread criticism of the industry after Japan's worst nuclear accident at a uranium reprocessing plant in 1999.

The accident at a plant in Tokaimura, 140 km (90 miles) northeast of Tokyo, and a string of lesser mishaps at other nuclear facilities have severely eroded public faith in an industry deemed overconfident about the safety of nuclear power, it said.

The Tokaimura accident - the world's second-worst since Chernobyl in 1986 - occurred in September 1999 when three workers at a plant privately operated by JCO Co Ltd set off an uncontrolled nuclear reaction that took 20 hours to bring under control.

The poorly trained employees used buckets to pour nearly eight times the proper amount of a uranium solution into a tub, causing a self-sustaining nuclear reaction to occur. The resulting radiation killed two of the workers and forced the evacuation of thousands of nearby residents.

Public anger mounted as details emerged of slipshod production methods used at the facility.

Officials initially downplayed the seriousness of the accident, further compounding a deep-seated public mistrust in Japan's nuclear industry.

"The full disclosure of information is a prerequisite to regaining public trust," the white paper said.

-------- korea

Diplomat sees the surreal and the sad in N. Korea

St. Petersburg Times
March 28, 2001
By PAUL DE LA GARZA
http://www.sptimes.com/News/032801/Worldandnation/Diplomat_sees_the_sur.shtml

WASHINGTON -- As a U.S. diplomat, Wendy R. Sherman was accustomed to formal state banquets.

The flowery toasts. The peculiar dishes.

The polite smiles.

But in May 1999, Sherman attended a banquet in Pyongyang, the capital of communist North Korea. What struck her was the entertainment. In between glasses of California wine -- compliments of the Americans -- and fried pigeon brains -- compliments of the North Koreans -- a group of folk singers performed Clementine and Oh! Susanna in English.

"It was surreal," she says, "because we knew that there were millions of people (in the country) who were starving."

As special adviser on North Korea policy to President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Sherman got rare and often fascinating access to the top leadership of the normally secretive, hard-line Stalinist regime.

But you wouldn't call it a plum job, for the Korean peninsula is among the world's most heavily militarized zones. In the 1990s, North Korea's missile and nuclear programs spawned fears among U.S. officials of a nuclear war, which is why Clinton made it a priority.

Last fall, Sherman and Albright became the first U.S. government officials to meet with Kim Jong Il, 59, the nation's repressive leader.

With the economy in a shambles and with the country of almost 20-million people dying of hunger, Sherman says Kim is reaching out to the West to preserve his power.

Two years ago, as part of a policy review, Sherman traveled to Pyongyang for the first time. It was then that the U.S. delegation, led by former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, was treated to the banquet crooners.

They also got to see the city: the empty streets, the cheerless buildings, the fanatical devotion to Kim. "Every guide -- the guides were generally women -- spoke beautiful English," Sherman, who no longer works at the State Department, said in an interview. "Every other word is, you know, the great leader or the dear leader.

"Every member of North Korea, every citizen of North Korea, wears a lapel button with a picture of Kim Jong Il on it or Kim Il Sung."

Kim Il Sung, the founder of North Korea, is his father. The elder Kim died eight years ago.

During the visit, Sherman said, government officials were "closed, well-indoctrinated, rigid," but the two sides made progress.

Last June, in a diplomatic move cheered by Korea watchers, Kim met with Kim Dae Jung, the president of South Korea. Last fall, he dispatched his chief military man to the White House; in turn, Albright visited Pyongyang.

In the waning days of the Clinton presidency, Washington and Pyongyang almost reached an agreement that would have neutralized North Korea's missile threat, a central justification by the United States for promoting a national missile defense system. In the end, time ran out.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, has launched its own policy review. But a few weeks ago, the president said he did not trust the North Korean leader. He said he was willing to consider arms talks with Pyongyang, but not now.

Sherman said she was disappointed with the tone of the White House, insisting that Washington needs to engage the North to avoid war.

In a recent New York Times op-ed piece, Sherman wrote, "Kim Jong Il is capable of creating a crisis absent a clear signal that negotiations are possible."

Asked what he was capable of doing, she refused to say. In 1998, however, North Korea shocked U.S. defense experts by trying to put a satellite into orbit. In recent days, Pyongyang has stepped up the rhetoric, characterizing the United States as a nation of cannibals.

When Sherman began working on North Korea in 1997, she said experts thought the country would collapse within two years.

But, she said, "because the indoctrination of North Korea is so profound, people truly believe that . . . they are a great country, that their leader brings them all things wonderful."

Sherman and Albright spent 12 hours with Kim. She described him as smart, as someone willing to listen to a good argument.

"He has a sense of humor," she said. But, she added, "In spite of the fact that he watches CNN and uses the Internet, there's still a lot about the world that he does not know."

Asked which moment stood out during her visits with Kim, Sherman mentioned a propaganda event at a stadium. The show featured tens of thousands of people flashing cards that depicted various murals, including a missile.

The invitation came as a surprise. When they walked into the stadium, Sherman, who sat next to Kim, saw something she will never forget: the fruits of indoctrination.

"You know, if you walk in and 250,000 people shout your name for five minutes it has to do something to your psyche," she said. "It's both extraordinary, and at one level frightening, that somebody has that kind of power."

---

Korean Plants Delayed Again
North's Nuclear Project Beset by Labor Problems

International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
Doug Struck Washington Post Service
http://www.iht.com/articles/14985.htm

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 an American-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.

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

President George W. 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 Kim Dae Jung, the South Korean President. "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements."

But even aides to Mr. 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," said Desaix Anderson, the executive director of KEDO, 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 Mr. Jhe.

As the debate simmers, about 1,000 workers - most of them South Korean - have been carving into land at the site 20 miles (32 kilometers) 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, Mr. 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.

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 raised 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 Mr. Bush will do the same.

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.

Mr. Anderson, who is ending a 3 1/2-year term as executive director, is not bothered. 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.

-------- missile defense

German Leader to Brief Bush on New Realities of Europe

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By ROGER COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28CND-GERMAN.html

BERLIN, March 28 - A little more than a decade ago, George W. Bush's father played a decisive role in uniting Germany. On Thursday the President will come face to face with the consequences of that act as he meets a buoyant German Chancellor carrying firm, sometimes confrontational, messages from Europe.

Gone is the Germany that existed in the cold war, sovereign in name but rather less so in reality. Gone is the Germany that knew its interests but seldom dared speak them aloud. In their place is a more confident, assertive nation whose new ambitions Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has come to embody.

"The President's father was dealing with a not fully sovereign Germany, the legacy, if you like, of 20th-century history," said Michael Steiner, Mr. Schröder's chief diplomatic adviser. "Now Germany is a partner without restrictions and what we want to address is not the leftovers of the last century, but the future of this one."

Viewing that future, Germany places a priority on the environment, on controlling global warming, on the development of the European Union as a strategic power with its own military component, on conciliation with Russia, and on ascertaining whether "rogue" threats are also real threats before building missile defense shields against them.

All these positions will strain Mr. Schröder's first meeting with President Bush. But the Chancellor has come to have a reasonable claim to be Europe's most successful politician precisely because he is a conciliator - "the man of reason, the peacemaker," as the Frankfurter Allgemeine recently put it. So no fireworks are likely.

After a shaky start, Mr. Schröder has astutely positioned his Social Democratic Party as a modernizing force for the economy and captured the repressed yearnings of many Germans by speaking of himself as a patriot. He has also deftly co-opted opponents and exploited the opposition Christian Democrats' divisions to emerge as a figure with the authority to tell Mr. Bush what is on Europeans' minds.

These include the food they eat, the air they breathe and the peaceful coming-together of a long-divided Continent. Frank Walter Steinmayer, the Chancellor's chief of staff, said President Bush's decision to expel 50 Russian diplomats had prompted "surprise and deep concern."

So, too, did Mr. Bush's decision to go back on his campaign pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Germany, like most European countries, is committed to the carbon dioxide emission standards set at a 1997 world climate conference in Kyoto, standards that Mr. Bush now appears ready to ignore.

"We are very concerned about the environment, where we see different values," Mr. Steiner said. "And about food, where the attachment to quality and opposition to genetically-modified products is very strong in Europe."

He compared the situation in Britain, where more than 400,000 pigs, sheep and cows have been slaughtered in recent weeks to fight foot-and-mouth disease, to "Armageddon," suggesting this was an illustration that "nature, if it is not respected, strikes back."

Such views may raise eyebrows in the Bush Administration, but Mr. Schröder will put them forcefully. The 1990's were years of profound transformation in Europe, propelled by the hot wars of the Balkans and the cold war's end, and there is a feeling in Berlin that the Republicans have not yet grasped Europe's coming of age.

From Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior staff, as well as from Vice President Dick Cheney and his foreign policy specialists, the Europeans hear - or sense - a certain skepticism.

Their advanced plans to develop a rapid reaction force detachable - but not detached - from NATO are questioned; the slow emergence of the European Union from an economic club to a strategic and political force is doubted.

"The Americans have long encouraged us to get it together, to be more active politically and to learn that foreign policy without any security backing is just window dressing," Mr. Steiner said.

Referring to the embryonic European army that should be in place by 2003, he continued, "Well, we've done that now for cases where NATO does not want to act, but the understanding in Washington seems to be slow." Mr. Rumsfeld and others fear that the force could undermine NATO, duplicate certain functions and cause confusion.

Mr. Schröder's success is inseparable from the way he has managed to capture the spirit of a new Germany in a new Europe, one where Berlin stands at the center of the Continent and feels more free than ever of the burdens of the past.

For this reason it is important to him to project the confidence of a nation deeply committed to the Atlantic alliance, but not an alliance where Washington refuses adjustments to its power.

The Chancellor will emphasize the fact that the end of the division in Europe requires a deep strategic rethinking, officials said. NATO must remain as the core of what the Germans now call "a zone of tranquillity" - one that should be extended where possible - but its response to the world around it requires review.

In some ways this position corresponds to the Bush Administration's view that, with the mutual assured destruction of a nuclear world now outdated, new defense systems are required.

But if Germany has softened its opposition to a the missile defense system proposed by Mr. Bush, it remains guarded, particularly with respect to the so-called rogue states against which such a system would be deployed.

For example, Germany draws a clear distinction between North Korea, which it believes may not exist in a decade just as East Germany has disappeared from the map, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Germany pushed hard for the European decision last weekend to send a diplomatic mission to the Korean Peninsula to support Kim Dae Jung's so-called sunshine policy toward North Korea at a time when Mr. Bush has indicated a preference for a harder, or at least more cautious, line.

"The message from the administration has been: we cannot afford lazy thinking in a changed world," Mr. Steiner said. "But you must be consistent. To replace an old enemy by a handful of rogue states would be a form of laziness. Let's not adopt a blanket attitude toward places like North Korea and Iraq that pose very different problems."

-------- russia

Putin, in Big Shakeup, Fires Aides and Brings In Civilians

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28CND-RUSSIA.html

MOSCOW, March 28 - President Vladimir V. Putin replaced his defense and interior ministers today and fired the atomic energy chief in the most extensive set of personnel changes in his year-old government. He also emphasized that he was putting civilians in key posts "as a step towards the demilitarization of society in Russia."

In a statement from the Kremlin, Mr. Putin said "the time has come" to put in place a new team that will execute plans debated for nearly two years over how to reconcile Russia's drastically reduced defense resources with its ambitions to be a more effective military power - and salesman of nuclear energy - in the post-cold-war era.

Reform plans call for reducing Russian armed forces by about a third by 2003, revamping military industries and expanding the nuclear energy sector by turning Russia into the world's largest long-term repository of spent nuclear fuel and industries to reprocess it.

Kremlin officials said Mr. Putin's personnel selections reflected his desire to put in place trusted aides who are mostly younger or from political or professional backgrounds more attuned to Mr. Putin's policy goals of streamlining the armed forces and for rebuilding defense and atomic industries to function more competitively at home and internationally.

Mr. Putin replaced Marshal Igor D. Sergeyev, 62, as minister of defense, transferring him to new duties as a presidential aide. In his place, Mr. Putin appointed Sergei B. Ivanov, 48, who has served as national security adviser and who, like Mr. Putin, spent a career in Russia's intelligence services.

Russian officials emphasized that Mr. Ivanov was the first civilian to head the defense ministry, though Mr. Ivanov held the rank of lieutenant general in the successor agency to the K.G.B., the Federal Security Service.

Last fall Mr. Ivanov was given the task of managing the downsizing of Russia's armed forces. "He was the head of the group which worked out the main parameters of reform and it would also be just to entrust him with bringing them to life," Mr. Putin said.Since last August, Mr. Putin's security council has been discussing a plan to reduce Russia's armed forces from its current 1.2 million to about 850,000. At the same time, defense spending would be increased over the next decade to improve living standards for soldiers and modernize weapons. Russian defense spending for 2001 is $8 billion, out of the $40 billion national budget.

Kremlin aides said Mr. Putin had become impatient with the pace of reform under Marshal Sergeyev, a former strategic rocket forces chief who publicly clashed with leading generals over how to allocate resources between Russia's conventional and strategic nuclear forces. Strategic forces have been independent of the general staff. Mr. Putin said today that he had created new "land forces" and "space forces" commands within the armed forces.

On Wednesday night Mr. Ivanov pledged to make the army "more professional, mobile and more combat-ready."

Mr. Putin made a rare foray across the gender barrier and appointed a woman, Lyubov K. Kudelina, to the post of deputy defense minister. A deputy finance minister, she has overseen the defense budget in the government and her move into the male bastion of the defense ministry foreshadows a stronger balance-sheet approach to sorting out how to allocate the country's limited defense expenditures, officials said.

Replacing Mr. Ivanov as secretary of the powerful national security council will be Vladimir B. Rushailo, who has served as Minister of Interior and who has presided over a number of military disasters in the rebellious republic of Chechnya, where Russian interior troops have been inserted as garrison forces only to be caught in a number of deadly ambushes because of poor planning or security.

Up to now Mr. Rushailo has not been considered among the strongest of Mr. Putin's security chiefs and this month the interior minister embarrassed the Kremlin by stating publicly that he did not consider bribery a form of corruption.

Still Mr. Putin has placed Mr. Rushailo at his right hand, and said the security council "will be paying more attention" to security in the northern Caucasus, especially Chechnya. Mr. Putin also said the council would focus on "the fight against corruption, money laundering and unlawful export of capital," and he appointed the acting head of the tax police, Vyacheslav F. Soltaganov, as Mr. Rushailo's deputy.

Still, it was not immediately clear whether Mr. Rushailo would fulfill the same role of confidante and foreign policy adviser that Mr. Ivanov has played in the past year. "Ivanov will still be a very important person," said Andrei A. Kokoshin, a former national security adviser.

To replace Mr. Rushailo, Mr. Putin chose the veteran lawmaker Boris Gryzlov, head of the pro-Kremlin Unity faction in Parliament formed in 1999 to support Mr. Putin's bid for the presidency. The appointment of Mr. Gryzlov caught many lawmakers by surprise since he does not have a law enforcement background. But as a trusted Putin supporter from Mr. Putin's hometown of St. Petersburg, Mr. Gryzlov's presence at the helm of the powerful domestic police agency will "help break up the clannishness of the ministry," a Kremlin aide said.

In one of many surprises today, Mr. Putin accepted the resignation of Yevgeny O. Adamov, the minister of atomic energy, who until last week was considered among the most powerful technocrats in the Cabinet as he pushed, with Mr. Putin's apparent support, for a dramatic expansion of nuclear power industries in Russia to provide half the country's energy by mid-century. Mr. Adamov has been an unfailing booster for international sales of Russian reactor technology to China, India and Iran, where Russia's role in rebuilding the Bushehr nuclear station has drawn sharp criticism from Washington.

Last week Mr. Adamov took a high-profile role in marshaling political support for a critical vote in Parliament allowing Russia to import spent nuclear fuel from reactors all over the world.

At the last minute, Parliament voted overwhelmingly to delay consideration of the bill after weeks of protest from environmental groups, which challenged Mr. Adamov's vision of Russia's nuclear future. Mr. Adamov's business dealings in the United States, where he maintains bank accounts and, with his wife, control several companies, was also questioned by critics.

Among Mr. Adamov's more contentious proposals has been to build a new generation of so-called fast breeder reactors that could make use of Russia's huge stockpile of uranium and plutonium produced for nuclear weapons.

Aides to Mr. Adamov said today that his removal came as a shock. "Yesterday, he was taking part in a meeting of the board," said one aide. "He was energetic, he was joking" and discussed "putting into operation five new power units." In Mr. Adamov's place, Mr. Putin picked Aleksandr Y. Rumyantsev, director of the Kurchatov Institute, where the first Soviet atomic bomb was designed. Mr. Rumyantsev, 55, has headed the institute since 1994.

It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Adamov's removal and the appointment of Mr. Rumyantsev, also an ardent supporter of nuclear power, meant any change in Russia's ambitious plans to expand its nuclear power sector and promote a plutonium-based fuel cycle. Wednesday night Mr. Rumyantsev said he supports Mr. Adamov's plans for importing spent fuel for reprocessing, but said such a project "should be carefully discussed."

-------- u.s. food irradiation

Food Irradiation Q&As

mercola.com
03/28/01
http://www.mercola.com/article/Diet/irradiated/irradiation.htm

Question: Is irradiated food safe to eat?

Answer: No.

Irradiated food has caused a myriad of health problems in laboratory animals (and people in a few studies), including chromosomal damage, immune and reproductive problems, kidney damage, tumors, internal bleeding, low birth weight, and nutritional muscular dystrophy.

Irradiation leads to the formation of Unique Radiolytic Products, mysterious chemical compounds that have not been identified or studied for their potential harm to humans. These products are free radicals, which set off chain reactions in the body that destroy antioxidants, tear apart cell membranes, and make the body more susceptible to cancer, diabetes, heart disease, liver damage, muscular breakdown, and other serious health problems.

Irradiation does nothing to remove the feces, urine, pus, vomit and tumors often left on beef, chicken, and lamb as the result of filthy and inhumane slaughterhouse conditions. These conditions have worsened as conveyer belts have speeded up (400 cow carcasses are processed per hour nowadays) and public oversight of slaughterhouses has been reduced.

Irradiation can spawn mutant forms of E. coli, Salmonella and other harmful bacteria, making them more difficult to kill.

Irradiation destroys vitamins, nutrients and essential fatty acids, including up to 95 percent of vitamin A in chicken and 86 percent of vitamin B in oats. In some foods, irradiation can actually intensify the vitamin and nutrient loss caused by cooking.

Irradiation can lead to the formation of carcinogens and other toxic chemicals such as benzene, formaldehyde, octane, butane and methyl propane in certain foods.

Irradiation can corrupt the flavor, texture and other physical properties of certain foods, leading to meat that smells like a wet dog and onions that turn brown.

Irradiation kills beneficial microorganisms, such as the yeasts and molds that help keep botulism at bay, as well as the microorganisms that create the aromas that tell us when food has gone bad.

Question: Are irradiation facilities safe?

Answer: Not always.

According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 45 accidents at U.S. (food and medical-supply) irradiation plants were recorded from 1974-89, at least two of which were covered up by irradiation company executives, some of whom were criminally charged in federal court and given prison time.

Irradiation plant workers are exposed to dangerous radiation hazards. Several have died or been exposed to near-fatal doses of radiation at facilities throughout the world.

Irradiation plants emit smog-forming, ground-level ozone into the environment.

Neighbors and the environment are endangered by plants that use radioactive cobalt-60 or cesium-137, which must be replenished after several years of use. Most of the cobalt-60 comes from a facility in Canada, creating transportation hazards when "fresh" material is driven to and waste driven from the plants.

Irradiation encourages the proliferation of nuclear technology at a point in history when a vast majority of Americans and people throughout the world are demanding that we back away from the use of nuclear material. A facility in Florida is owned by a company associated with a Canadian outfit that has sold nuclear technology to China, India and Pakistan.

Question: Did U.S. officials thoroughly study irradiation before legalizing it?

Answer: No.

The FDA relied on only 5 of more than 400 scientific studies to determine that irradiated food is safe to eat. Of those five, only three have been published in peer-reviewed journals. In two of the studies, researchers used doses of radiation at or far below those approved by the FDA, rendering the studies virtually if not completely useless.

The agency has rejected every study that has drawn into question the safety of irradiation.

The FDA used 38 studies that agency scientists once declared "deficient" to support the safety of irradiated food.

The FDA has not followed its own rules that require elaborate toxicological experiments be conducted before legalizing irradiation, including a requirement that the Unique Radiolytic Products generated by the process be subjected to in-depth testing.

The FDA has begun to conduct and approve expedited reviews of food irradiation applications from industry, admitting-in at least one-that certain packaging materials may not be safe when exposed to radiation.

No long-term studies have been done on the consumption of irradiated food, a problem the FDA admits but has done nothing to correct.

Question: Can the research into food irradiation be trusted?

Answer: Not all of it.

Research conducted at public universities is increasingly industry-funded. A prominent Iowa State University professor who's been researching food irradiation for many years was just hired by Titan Corporation, a leading irradiation company (and erstwhile defense contractor). And, Titan recently entered a research contract with Texas A&M University.

Much of the early research into food irradiation, done during the 1960s and 1970s, was conducted by an Army-hired firm that was eventually convicted of fraud for fabricating the results of its work.

Very little toxicological testing has been done on irradiated food during the past 20 years. New, updated tests should be performed with the benefit of improved scientific methods.

Question: Is food irradiation good for the economy?

Answer: No.

Food irradiation encourages the further consolidation of the food production, processing, distribution, marketing and retailing industries by giving the advantage to giant companies that can afford this prohibitively expensive technology. In the process, the food product marketplace is further homogenized and family farmers are put at a greater disadvantage.

If the U.S. government allows imported food to be irradiated-as it may do in the near future-more of our fruit, vegetables and meat will come from other countries, resulting in the closure of farms and the loss of agricultural jobs here at home. Plus, this imported food will be older, more bland and less nutritious than food grown in the U.S.

Food irradiation adds unnecessarily to the cost of food when less expensive alternatives are available. A recent survey by Consumers for Science in the Public Interest showed that irradiated ground beef being sold in the Midwest cost up to 75 cents more per pound-more than 40 percent higher than non-irradiated beef-and that the irradiated beef contained 25 percent fat.

Question: Are consumers receiving credible information about food irradiation?

Answer: No.

Many "unbiased" supporters of food irradiation in reality work on behalf of the food industry. The corporate-funded American Council on Science and Health, for instance, is chaired by A. Alan Moghissi, whose anti-environment and anti-consumer positions include fighting the removal of asbestos from schools and proclaiming that higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a good thing for the agriculture industry.

Food irradiation companies have been increasingly successful in getting the media to call irradiation "pasteurization," which is an entirely different process by which microorganisms are killed by quickly heating and cooling food.

Companies that irradiate with "e-beam" technology such as the Titan Corporation are seeking to distinguish themselves from companies that irradiate with gamma rays from radioactive sources. This is highly misleading, as both e-beam (electrons fired from a linear accelerator at nearly the speed of light) and gamma rays (high-frequency electromagnetic waves) are forms of ionizing radiation-meaning that they obliterate the bonds that hold atoms and molecules together and create new chemical compounds.

Furthermore, Titan and other irradiation companies are comparing irradiating food with cooking food in a microwave oven. This comparison is bogus. The radiation used to irradiate food is ionizing, meaning that it drastically changes the chemical composition of food (see above). Microwave radiation is non-ionizing, meaning that the chemical structure of food is largely left intact.

Question: Should vegetarians care about irradiation?

Answer: Yes.

Food processing companies aren't irradiating just meat. Fruit and vegetables are being irradiated, too-all of which suffer nutrient destruction as bad or worse than in meat. Spices such as garlic powder and paprika are being irradiated as well, and can be added to processed foods without being labeled.

Everybody should be concerned about E. coli contamination. Irradiation does nothing to prevent this and other harmful bacteria from winding up in drinking water supplies. Just last may, E. coli-tainted drinking water killed at least seven people and sickened more than 2,000 others in Ontario, Canada.

Public Citizen's Critical Mass and Energy Project

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

'Mininukes' Proposed as Deterrent to Small Aggressors

Albuquerque Journal
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
By John J. Lumpkin Journal Staff Writer
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/288250news03-28-01.htm

The United States should develop a class of nuclear weapons geared toward deterring small aggressors with big ideas, Sandia National Laboratories director C. Paul Robinson told weapons experts Tuesday.

Robinson, seeking ways for the nation's nuclear weapons complex to remain relevant in the post-Cold War world, outlined a two-tiered capability he urged the United States to develop. His comments came at the Nuclear Security Decisionmakers' Forum being held this week in Albuquerque.

The first is continuing the capability of the Cold War - many long-range nuclear weapons that balance U.S. forces with "the only nation in the world that can threaten the actual existence of the United States" - Russia.

The second, however, would be new.

Robinson proposed a class of small, relatively low-yield nukes that would be satellite-guided and therefore extremely accurate. Current nuclear weapons avoid satellite guidance and other complex systems, as the electromagnetic pulses in the opening stages of a nuclear war would disable most sensitive electronics on Earth and in orbit.

But these new weapons would be used to deter the Irans, Iraqs and North Koreas of the world, because they would enable the United States to kill those countries' leadership and military without killing a lot of civilians, Robinson said.

These weapons would prevent these countries from using any of their own weapons of mass destruction, including chemical and biological weapons, he said.

"The highest goal is to deter aggression," he said.

Robinson and others have come out in support of "mininukes" before. But earlier pitches had not framed those weapons as a way to prevent war.

In an aside, he said China could conceivably build up its nuclear forces to approach those of Russia and the United States. The U.S. missile defense program, backed by the Bush administration, could incite such a buildup, as China would build more nukes to overcome any defenses, he said.

Robinson had some dissenters at Tuesday's forum, which drew lab officials, contractors and arms-control activists. One speaker told Robinson he didn't believe that any nuclear weapon could be used on underground bunkers without massive collateral damage.

Robinson's comments about the role of nuclear weapons in the emerging world situation struck a sharp contrast to the familiar set of laments pronounced by other speakers at the forum.

Morale at the labs is low; talented, experienced scientists are retiring and being replaced with those who have not taken part in actual nuclear tests; and not enough funding is being put into infrastructure and weapons maintenance, speakers said.

They repeatedly hailed Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., for his efforts to secure $500 million for infrastructure improvements at the national labs and weapons plants.

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

Uranium Miners Get Only IOUs
Money Runs Out for Ill Workers

International Herald Tribune
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
Michael Janofsky New York Times Service
http://www.iht.com/articles/14987.htm

GRAND JUNCTION, Colorado Of all the reminders of Bob Key's Cold War effort of mining uranium for U.S. nuclear weapons programs, none stands out more than the tank of oxygen tethered to his throat. Mr. Key, 61, has pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lungs that is often fatal. A recent tracheotomy helps air flow to his lungs through a tube connected to the tank.

A decade ago, Congress recognized the contributions of Mr. Key and other uranium miners and passed the Radiation Exposure and Compensation Act of 1990. Signed by President George Bush, the law established one-time payments of up to $100,000 to miners or their families and to people who lived downwind from the nuclear test sites in Nevada. Last year, Congress increased the payout to $150,000, added new medical benefits and expanded the number of workers eligible.

But after years of smooth operations, the program is broke. Scrambling last year to pass President Bill Clinton's final budget, lawmakers never debated the Justice Department's request for additional money to cover the expanded program even as new applications were pouring in, and by May nothing was left. And Congress has been reluctant to act until it decides how to apportion the surplus and how much to cut taxes.

As a result, for the first time, claims from hundreds of eligible applicants like Mr. Key have been put on hold, with many of them receiving IOU letters from the Justice Department, which administers the program, saying that their requests would be processed only after Congress appropriated more money.

And the demand is increasing. Claims from 1,600 applicants under the original law are pending, and the department estimates that as many as 1,050 new applicants are expected to file for benefits this year, a number that would raise the cost of the program to more than $80 million. "It's been a bureaucratic travesty," said Representative Scott McInnis, a Republican from Grand Junction, a city in western Colorado, who introduced legislation this year seeking $84 million to restore the program. "These people are due their compensation. There is nothing to be adjudicated. The money is owed. The debt is due."

For now, Congress has not decided how or when to continue the program. Lawmakers are discussing the possibility of legislation as part of the current year's budget to provide money right away. Meanwhile, almost 200 people who have been approved for the money are still holding the IOUs, including relatives of some miners who died of their illnesses while waiting.

Most workers had no idea that the yellow ore they were mining could eventually destroy their health. Wayne Hill, 69, who has lung cancer, said a tin cup hung at the entrance to one mine for miners and drivers to drink water dripping out of the rocks. "It was cool, clear water," he said. "I didn't know it was going to make me light up."

Mr. Key, who worked in the mines from 1959 through 1963, said he was never warned of the health consequences of exposure to uranium. "I'm bitter about it," he said. "I know I owe taxes this year. I'm just going to tell them to take it out of my IOU."

-------- colorado

Workers exposed to plutonium

Denver Post
Mar. 28, 2001
By Theo Stein Denver Post Environment Writer
mailto:newsroom@denverpost.com
http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0328f.htm

- Eleven cleanup workers at the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant most likely breathed in plutonium dust dislodged during demolition work at the highly polluted Building 771 last fall, a new report has concluded.

The report, issued by cleanup contractor Kaiser-Hill, identified a number of potential causes ranging from crews handling items in the contamination area without respiratory protection to lax housekeeping and dusting practices.

It also identified a range of training and procedural recommendations designed to limit future exposures, but concluded that it's impossible to completely prevent workers from coming in contact with some radioactive waste.

The amount of radioactivity to which the 11 workers were exposed was within federal and Department of Energy guidelines, Kaiser-Hill spokeswoman Jennifer Thompson said.

"Kaiser-Hill takes any worker exposure very seriously, and we remain fully committed to the safe, accelerated closure of Rocky Flats," said Marc Spears, vice president for Kaiser-Hill's engineering, environmental, safety and quality programs.

Still, Thompson said that given the nature of the job, workers must expect they'll be exposed to small amounts of radioactivity.

"We're not going to be able to get the job done with zero exposure," Thompson said. "There are things we can do to reduce the dose. But we're not going to eliminate exposures from nuclear decommissioning work."

The radioactive dose received by 10 of the 11 exposed workers fell between 6 and 60 millirems, the report concluded. Results for the 11th worker are not yet available.

The federal limit for radiation workers is 5,000 millirems a year. Thompson said Kaiser-Hill's internal guidelines specify workers should receive no more than 500 millirems in a single year.

By contrast, people are ordinarily exposed to about 400 millirems of radiation from natural sources every year.

Workers were tested as a precaution after safety inspectors noted a minor paperwork error involving an air monitor.

Tests on 11 employees working in the area revealed they had been exposed to radioactivity. The company said all 11 were wearing "the required level of personal protective equipment." The equipment apparently didn't include respiratory protection.

The report also identified other factors that may have contributed to the problem, including a lack of adequate ventilation, the reuse of respiratory equipment by workers, and monitoring equipment not designed to detect the low levels of contamination that led to the dose received by the workers. Dave Abelson, director of the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, said his members had not had time to review the report, which was submitted March 15 and made available Monday.

Abelson's group has urged the Energy Department and KaiserHill to vigorously investigate the source and scope of the problem.

"We certainly intend to examine this report, as well as other investigations that are ongoing," he said.

-------- us nuc politics

The Conflict Within

By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A2881-2001Mar27?language=printer

The New York Times, serving in one of its traditional roles as the voice of the foreign policy establishment, reports this week, in the words of a front-page headline, that the "Bush Team's Counsel Is Divided on Foreign Policy." Two intra-administration factions, it seems, are fighting to shape the new president's foreign policy: "an ideologically conservative Pentagon and a more moderate State Department."

The clear suggestion in the Times article is that, while "in an ideal world there is nothing wrong with the president's receiving clashing recommendations," in the real world, and particularly in the case of George W. Bush, "public ideological cleavages" are not a good thing. Why not? Well, the Times is too polite to put it quite this way, but the danger is that Mr. Bush is so ignorant that he might actually allow the conservative view to prevail.

To state the threat in the delicate language of Times-speak, "Mr. Bush, who is inexperienced in foreign affairs, has acknowledged that he will rely on his most senior policy advisers. So as the competition among them intensifies, Vice President Dick Cheney, who collected his own foreign policy specialists, more powerful than any gathered by previous vice presidents [more powerful than any gathered by previous vice presidents! My God!] is likely to be an important arbiter . . . [and] Mr. Cheney is seen as leaning more toward the Pentagon."

It is all true enough. The Bush administration is indeed divided on the fundamentals of foreign policy, with Secretary of State Colin Powell heading a faction that favors a softer, sweeter approach and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld leading those who would prefer to take a harder line in dealing with the world's hard cases. And the early indications are that the hard-liners will win. Indeed, in every test so far, the hard-liners have won.

When Powell told reporters that sanctions against Iraq should be eased so as "to relieve the burden on the Iraqi people," White House and defense officials put out the word that the secretary of state was speaking for himself, and Bush promptly and publicly brushed Powell back: "Saddam should not read into our discussions about making [Iraq] policy more effective any weakness in our position." Hard-liners such as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Cheney's national security adviser, I. Lewis Libby, are openly pushing for a policy of arming the Iraqi opposition groups in a bid to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime; the president has done nothing publicly to suggest he opposes such talk.

The administration's decision to expel 50 Russian diplomats for espionage activity was, on one level, a traditional spy-game move, a punishment for the Robert Hanssen embarrassment. But, as former Russian prime minister Yevgeny Primakov has noted, it also reflected the administration's desire to demonstrate that it does not, in its dealings with Russia, intend to display the "flabbiness of the former administration." In the same vein, regarding the Palestinians, this president has made it clear he has no interest in pursuing the endless pleading that won his predecessor nothing but the humiliation of last year's Camp David fiasco.

This month, Bush told South Korean President Kim Dae Jung that he would not resume any time soon the Clinton administration's talks with North Korea aimed at persuading that nation to stop building its long-range ballistic missile program. Bush's position, which seems reasonable enough, is that he is not opposed to a deal here, but that he would like first to ensure that tough safeguards are in place to guarantee compliance with the deal. This is not the way the Clinton administration approached North Korea, but Bush does not care for the Clinton way. When Powell, again apparently speaking for himself, announced that the Bush administration would "pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off," the White House politely but quite firmly "clarified" Powell's statement out of meaningful existence.

So, it is clear enough, the hard-liners have the president's sympathies and the warm-and-fuzzy thinkers do not. What is not so clear is why anyone thinks this is so terrible. First, it is not manifest that "public ideological cleavages" are bad; second, it is not manifest that the hard-liners' triumphs in such a debate are also bad. We have had eight years of a foreign policy that frequently rested on the notion that wishing can make a thing so, or at least can make it go away -- and it can, for a while, if by "away" one simply means "off the evening news." Now is the time for dealing with the realities of what was left behind, and that is a logical time to listen to the realists.

----

US House Commerce head sees resurgence in US nuclear power

Planet Ark
USA: March 28, 2001
Story by Patrick Connole
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10271

WASHINGTON - Nuclear power is on its way back and the once-dying industry could play an important role in helping the nation grapple with electricity shortages, the Republican head of the House Energy and Commerce committee said yesterday.

Although no new U.S. nuclear power plants have been built in 25 years, Republican lawmakers are taking a closer look at how the industry could fit into a broad national plan to boost domestic energy supplies and limit oil imports.

Rep. Billy Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican, said the federal government needs to make it easier for nuclear power generation to remain a vital component of the national energy mix.

"There should be no question that the nation's energy problems would be much worse without the nuclear industry's impressive and safe track record of sustained output," Tauzin said in a statement delivered at a House energy subcommittee hearing.

"Recently, I have noticed the initial stages of a resurgence of interest in nuclear power. The current energy crisis has helped us to understand that natural gas and coal should not be the only fuel sources for developing future generating capacity."

Environmentalists generally oppose expansion of the nuclear industry, saying the plants produce huge amounts of radioactive waste that must be safely stored for hundreds of years.

20 PCT OF U.S. ELECTRICITY FROM NUCLEAR POWER

Nuclear power from 103 commercial plants currently provides 20 percent of U.S. electricity generation.

Coal, which fuels a sizable number of U.S. power plants, dirties the air. Natural gas-and oil-fueled power plants have become more expensive and have other environmental issues.

But the future role of nuclear power is clouded because plants are aging and no new nuclear plants have been permitted in this country since 1975.

Added to that is the continuing battle over nuclear waste.

Some 40,000 tons of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods are now stored at scores of plants despite a requirement that the Department of Energy build a permanent repository.

The most likely site in Yucca Mountain, Nev., has not been approved yet. The Republican-led Senate failed last year to override then-President Bill Clinton's veto of legislation to start building a repository in the Nevada desert.

Tauzin's remarks echoed the sentiments of Vice President Dick Cheney, who last week said nuclear power could help alleviate concerns about global warming.

"If you want to do something about carbon dioxide emissions, then you ought to build nuclear power plants. They don't emit any carbon dioxide. They don't emit greenhouse gases," Cheney said on MSNBC television.

Cheney leads a White House task force preparing recommendations for President George W. Bush on how the nation could boost domestic energy supplies. While the recommendations are being prepared, House and Senate Republicans are forging ahead with their own legislative proposals.

WASTE DANGEROUS-GREEN GROUPS

Environmentalists blanch at the idea of using nuclear power as an answer to global warming concerns, or even as a potential source of new generation.

Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy organization, last week said that despite what Cheney believes, nuclear power cannot be considered a zero-emissions fuel source.

"Contrary to the vice president's assertions, nuclear power is not capable of combating global warming because of the exorbitant cost of reactors and the long lead time needed to build them," the organization said.

It also said the steps needed to generate nuclear power, like mining uranium and enriching radioactive fuel, add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Tauzin told the House panel that the following areas could be addressed by federal regulators or Congress to make nuclear power more viable:

* Require the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to administer its rules "in a consistent and even-handed manner that does not discourage companies from future investment."

* Prepare the NRC to renew as many as 30 reactor licenses that are set to expire in a few years. Thus far, the NRC has renewed licenses to extend the life of five nuclear reactors.

* Train "rusty" NRC staff for possible future requests to gain permission to construct a nuclear reactor.

* Work harder to solve the nuclear waste issue, since Tauzin said "it is not safe to store spent nuclear fuel in dozens of locations across the country."

* Reauthorize the compensation and liability provisions of the Price-Anderson Act that are to expire in August 2002.

Tauzin said without the measures, the industry would likely not construct or operate new nuclear facilities.

-------- us nuc waste

WEST VALLEY: NUCLEAR SHIPMENT PLANNED

New York Times
March 28, 2001
Metro Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/nyregion/28MBRF.html

A train will carry a large shipment of nuclear waste from western New York through 10 states to Idaho over the summer as part of the $1.6 billion cleanup of the West Valley Demonstration Project. A date has not been set. The privately owned Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessed nuclear fuel rods at the West Valley site near Buffalo until 1972. In 1980, the state and federal governments agreed to clean up the site. The fuel assemblies are destined for the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, until the federal government builds permanent storage. (AP)

-------- MILITARY

Bush denies Aegis sale

Washington Times
March 28, 2001
Tony Blankley
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010328-152868.htm

President Bush decided late last week to deny Taiwan´s request to purchase Aegis-class guided missile destroyers, according to a source with links to former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, retired Adm. Thomas Moorer.

This previously unreported decision reflects a win for Secretary of State Colin Powell over the Pentagon, which, in the internal administration debate, was believed to be supporting the sale. The decision also puts President Bush at loggerheads with more than 60 congressional Republican senators and congressmen, who sent him a letter last week urging the sale. There are some senior officials within the Bush administration who hope to reverse this presidential decision before it is publicly announced.

The Aegis, named after the Greek God Zeus´s invincible breastplate, includes the Navy´s most advanced computer-controlled radar system that, when paired with state-of-the-art vertical launch systems, is capable of countering all current and projected threats to a naval battle group and inland targets. Taiwan has urgently requested the weapon system to offset China L1 Ks growing M9 missile buildup across the 100 mile-wide Taiwan Strait.

To put pressure on Taiwan to accept Beijing´s sovereignty, the Chinese currently have about 300 such missiles provocatively placed, and are adding about 50 a year. They also have acquired from Russia the fourth generation Su-27 fighter, four diesel-powered KILO class submarines and two Sovremenny class destroyers with "Sunburn" anti-ship cruise missiles.

Based on these facts, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Jesse Helms issued a report on March 8 that concluded: "Taiwan wants, and Taiwan needs, Aegis destroyers . . . to deal with rapidly developing air and naval threats."

Mr. Bush´s decision to deny the sale provides us with the first measure of his strategic Asian vision. Last week, deputy Chinese Prime Minister Qian Qichen met for 55 minutes with the president, where Mr. Qian made denial of the Aegis sale China´s most important objective. The Chinese claim to fear that if Taiwan had the Aegis system (which would take eight to ten years to bring on line) it could encourage Taiwan to resist Chinese pressure, lead to greater cooperation between Washington and Taiwan and strengthen the pro-independence movement in Taiwan.

But Taiwan and its Republican allies in Congress argue that selling the Aegis and other advanced weapon systems would provide Taiwan with the confidence to negotiate a peaceful resolution of its differences with Beijing. It has been, and remains, bipartisan American policy to encourage peaceful, uncoerced negotiations between Taiwan and the mainland leading to a united, single China. Thus, whether greater Taiwanese military strength would lead to Taiwan seeking independence (as China claims) or peaceful negotiations (as the Republicans and Taiwan argue) is the central analytical point in dispute. The other great imponderable is whether a sale of the Aegis to Taiwan would drive China into a more dangerous, strategic hostility to the United States, or whether it would render the Chinese more realistic and cooperative in the face of such American toughness.

Mr. Qian had threatened, prior to his meeting with Mr. Bush, that the proposed sale of the Aegis system would increase the chance of military conflict. But Bush officials said that he was "more restrained" in his Oval Office comments directly to the president.

According to the New York Times, after that meeting, Bush administration officials said that the president would make a decision on the exact package of arms sales to Taiwan in April, but that "the Chinese could best affect shipments by working to reduce tensions along the Taiwan Strait." But Mr. Bush´s quick apparent decision against Taiwan would seem to belie that explanation by unnamed administration officials.

During the presidential campaign, Mr. Bush highlighted his differences with Bill Clinton on China. In a major national defense speech in September 1999, Mr. Bush emphasized the need to counter the Chinese missile threat, although he did not speak specifically about the Aegis system, which the Chinese believe could eventually become a platform for a regional missile shield.

More recently, Mr. Bush has called China a "competitor," and had signaled that he intends to tilt his Asia policy away from China and towards Japan an alliance that has been the foundation of our Asia policy for almost a half-century. Bill Clinton had tilted to China, going so far as to call China a "strategic partner," snubbing Japan at China´s request and turning down Taiwan´s request for the Aegis system, again at China´s request.

But when Mr. Bush came to this first big decision on Asian military policy, he continued Mr. Clinton´s position. While opposing the Aegis sale hardly constitutes an embrace by Mr. Bush of Mr. Clinton´s overall China strategy, it is a missed opportunity to match action to rhetoric. He will surely get further opportunities but they won´t get any easier; and they will get more urgent.

E-mail: tonyblankley@erols.com

Tony Blankley is a columnist for The Washington Times. His column appears on Wednesdays.

-------- burma/myanmar

Myanamar junta rules out democracy for now

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By AYE AYE WIN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540382

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) - The military junta on Tuesday ruled out a speedy transition to democracy, but indicated it was willing to work with opposition groups to bring stability to Myanmar.

In a speech to mark Armed Forces Day, junta leader Gen. Than Shwe said Myanmar experienced ``chaos and instability'' when it adopted multiparty democracy after gaining independence from Britain in 1948.

``Lessons from history teach us to act with caution forever,'' he said.

The military has ruled Myanmar since a coup in 1962. The current group of generals took power in 1988 after crushing a pro-democracy movement. The junta refuses to surrender power to the opposition National League for Democracy party of Aung San Suu Kyi, which won 1990 elections.

However, Than Shwe's 20-minute speech carried a conciliatory tone by not castigating the National League for Democracy or Suu Kyi.

The junta is reportedly engaged in closed-door talks with Suu Kyi despite detaining her to her home since Sept. 22 for her pro-democracy work.

Than Shwe did not mention the talks, but indirectly referred to a need for reconciliation.

``When solving problems among us, conflict and confrontation will only worsen matters rather than bring about solutions,'' he said. ``We need to collectively work in building our country with amity.''

The Armed Forces Day speech is considered the most important indicator of the government's position. It was delivered at the Resistance Park near the capital's Shwedagon temple. All leading members of the ruling State Peace and Development Council, as the junta calls itself, attended.

Armed Forces Day celebrates the founding of the army under the leadership of Gen. Aung San, Myanmar's independence hero and Suu Kyi's father.

Aung San led an uprising against the Japanese occupation during World War II in 1945. After the war, Britain granted independence to Myanmar, then known as Burma.

The National League for Democracy held a modest ceremony to commemorate the occasion at party headquarters in Yangon, the capital.

-------- drug war

Man Stiches Mouth Shut in Protest

BIZARRE NEWS - Wednesday, March 28, 2001

GOTEBORG, Sweden - A 35-year-old Sweden inmate appealed his three-year sentence for a narcotics violation, but the reduction request was denied. In protest, the man stitched his lips together last week and has not eaten since. How this could possibly help his case we really aren't sure. How did a criminal even have access to a needle and thread? According to Uno Rodin, head of the prison, "Needles have never been considered a safety problem, and nobody had imagined that this could happen." The inmate will further appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.

---

Court Considers Medical Marijuana

New York Times
March 28, 2001 Filed at 4:17 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Scotus-Marijuana.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court took a first look at prescription pot Wednesday, hearing arguments on an issue that has pitted the federal government against cancer, AIDS and other patients who sometimes regard marijuana as a wonder drug.

As far as the federal government is concerned, marijuana is illegal and should remain so. Federal enforcement efforts have led to confrontations and arrests in California and other Western states.

The issue for an openly skeptical Supreme Court is whether a patient's need for marijuana trumps a 1970 federal law that classifies it as an illegal substance with no known medical value.

President Bush supports federal prohibitions on marijuana, but also respects states' rights to pass voter initiatives, as was the case in California, spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

``The president is opposed to the legalization of marijuana, including for medicinal purposes,'' he said Wednesday.

Lawyers for the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative in California want to make what they call a ``medical necessity'' defense in federal court, and argue that federal judges and juries have the power to decide if the drug is warranted.

Several justices seemed to think that approach was a stretch at best.

``I thought the medical necessity defense was for an individual,'' Justice Antonin Scalia said. ``You would extend it to the person prescribing the drug, and even to opening a business,'' to dispense it.

``That's a vast expansion beyond any necessity defense I've ever heard of,'' Scalia said.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seemed to agree.

``You're asking us to hold that this defense exists ... with no specific plaintiff before us, no specific case,'' Kennedy told the club's lawyer, Gerald Uelmen.

The court's ruling is expected by the end of June.

A ruling for the Oakland club would allow special marijuana clubs to resume distributing the drug in California, which passed one of the nation's first medical marijuana laws in 1996.

A ruling for the federal government would not negate the California voter initiative, but effectively would prevent clubs like Oakland's from distributing the drug openly.

One of the most vocal opponents of legalized prescription marijuana is Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton administration's drug policy director. He once dismissed the practice as ``Cheech and Chong medicine,'' a reference to the comedy team that celebrated pot-smoking.

Advocates of medical marijuana say the drug can ease side effects from chemotherapy, save nauseated AIDS patients from wasting away or even allow multiple sclerosis sufferers to rise from a wheelchair and walk.

There is no definitive science that the drug works, or works better than conventional, legal alternatives. Nonetheless, nine states have laws allowing the legal use of marijuana to treat a host of ailments.

Scalia challenged Uelmen to list medical emergencies that could require marijuana treatment.

``Death, starvation, blindness,'' Uelmen began.

``Stomach ache?'' Scalia interrupted with an edge of sarcasm.

Representing the government, Barbara Underwood, a holdover from the Clinton administration Justice Department, said the 1970 Controlled Substances Act ``leaves no room for the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative'' and others to act as ``marijuana pharmacies.''

Bush's choice as chief advocate before the Supreme Court, Theodore Olson, has not been confirmed by the Senate.

Several states are considering medical marijuana laws, and Congress may revisit the issue this year. A measure to counteract laws like California's died in the House last year.

Activists on both sides gathered outside the court.

The Clinton administration sued to stop distribution by the Oakland group and five other California clubs in 1998.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, brother of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, sided with the government. All the clubs except the Oakland group eventually closed down, and the Oakland club turned to registering potential marijuana recipients while it awaited a final ruling.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, ruling that medical necessity is a legal defense. Charles Breyer followed up by issuing strict guidelines for making that claim.

Stephen Breyer will not participate as the other eight justices consider their ruling. Should the court divide 4-4, the appeals court ruling would stand.

Voters in Arizona, Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington also have approved ballot initiatives allowing the use of medical marijuana. In Hawaii, the Legislature passed a similar law and the governor signed it last year.

The case is United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, 00-151.

---

Medical marijuana use challenged

USA Today
03/28/2001
By Joan Biskupic, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/court/2001-03-28-marijuana-usat.htm

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court appeared unconvinced Wednesday by arguments that seriously ill patients should be able to use marijuana to ease their suffering without fear of violating federal drug law. During a vigorous hour-long session, some justices seemed sympathetic to the plight of patients who say they have no alternatives. But a majority did not appear ready to effectively override federal law by allowing a "medical necessity" defense for marijuana use.

The case before the court rose from California, where voters in 1996 adopted a proposition to allow medical marijuana. The U.S. government responded by moving to block the state law's effect, leading to one of the high court's most-watched cases this term.

The case pits public health groups and civil libertarians against anti-drug forces and parents' organizations. It measures the nation's "war on drugs" against efforts to find alternative therapies for cancer, AIDS, multiple sclerosis and other complex illnesses.

Besides California, eight other states have laws allowing the medical use of marijuana. The federal government says that although those initiatives may exempt marijuana use from state prosecution, federal anti-drug laws still apply.

Acting U.S. Solicitor General Barbara Underwood urged the court to reject arguments for a "medical necessity" defense that would spare patients and their marijuana providers from federal prosecution or civil lawsuits. She said that in outlawing marijuana, Congress rejected the idea that the drug has any benefits.

"There is currently no accepted use for the drug," she said, adding that it also is highly likely to be abused. She asked the justices to reverse a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that there could be a common-law "medical necessity" defense to federal drug statutes. Reversing an order that shut down cannabis clubs, the appeals court cited a "public interest in the availability of the doctor-prescribed treatment (to) relieve the pain and suffering of a large group of persons."

Lawyer Gerald Uelmen, representing the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Co-op, argued that the court should adopt that rationale. Uelmen said people facing "imminent harm" should be able to take advantage of marijuana's benefits. The drug is known for easing the nausea that comes with chemotherapy, stimulating the appetite of AIDS patients and relieving the misery of other conditions such as multiple sclerosis.

"The (medical necessity) defense should be available to any patient in any state," Uelmen said, regardless of whether a state has legalized marijuana.

"It's a sweeping proposition," declared Justice Anthony Kennedy. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was similarly skeptical of having a "blanket medical necessity defense' that could supersede federal law that bans the possession or distribution of marijuana.

Chief Justice William Rehnquist asked how truly desperate patients might be screened from those who simply want to use marijuana. He was sympathetic to the government's argument that if Congress had believed there was a valid medical use, it would not have included it under the strictest controlled-substances laws. Other justices focused on the needs of seriously ill people for whom conventional treatments fail.

"Should we assume there are no such people?" Justice John Paul Stevens asked. Underwood said yes.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a recent cancer survivor and chemotherapy patient, asked about evidence in court filings that the drug has been used to relieve patients' vomiting and other conditions. "Am I wrong in thinking there has been quite a bit of this going on in the medical profession?"

Underwood said there are alternatives to the drug.

Justice David Souter focused on the government's effort to undermine California's Proposition 215 by seeking an injunction in federal court to block cannabis clubs from distributing marijuana, rather than by prosecuting users or providers. Souter questioned whether the government did that because it could never win a prosecution in a jury trial. He cited the popularity of California's medical marijuana law.

Underwood said the Justice Department wanted to resolve the dispute with a single move, particularly because it adamantly disputes the medicinal claims. In this case, a district court judge rejected the clubs' "necessity" defense but then was overturned by the 9th Circuit. (The district court judge was Charles Breyer, brother of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Justice Breyer recused himself from Wednesday's case.)

The tension over the case was evident in the many briefs filed here. The National Organization for Reform of Marijuana Laws told the justices that "this case is not about a right to get 'stoned,' ... (but) the right of personal medical choices of the chronically and terminally ill." On the other side, the Family Research Council said legalizing medical marijuana would change "attitudes toward the perceived dangerousness of illicit drug use."

Also Wednesday, the justices considered whether U.S. copyright law requires publishers to get permission from freelance writers before putting the writers' stories from print editions into electronic databases.

The New York Times, backed by media groups including Gannett Co., which publishes USA TODAY, says the electronic versions made available to commercial services are successors to microfilm and microfiche. The Times says they are not new uses of the work that infringe on an author's copyright. Freelancers say the electronic versions are new uses of their work.

---

Court to decide if patients can get marijuana

USA Today
03/28/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/court/2001-03-28-marijuana.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Marijuana is an illegal drug, even if voters like the idea of using it in medical therapy, the federal government argued Wednesday as the Supreme Court took a first look at the debate over prescription pot.

The court's watershed ruling, expected by June, likely would settle whether patients may get marijuana as a "medical necessity" even though it is an illegal drug under federal law.

A ruling for the Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative would allow special marijuana clubs to resume distributing the drug in California, which passed one of the nation's first medical marijuana laws in 1996.

A ruling for the federal government would not negate the California voter initiative, but would effectively prevent clubs like Oakland's from distributing the drug.

Several justices seemed skeptical of the marijuana-as-medicine argument in general, and of the notion that marijuana distributors have what the club's lawyers call a medical-necessity defense in court.

That defense would essentially have a judge or jury agree that someone's need for the drug overrides the law. If that is so, the someone should be an actual patient, rather than a business organized to dispense or sell drugs, Justice Antonin Scalia suggested.

"That's a vast expansion beyond any necessity defense I've ever heard of," Scalia said.

Justice Anthony M. Kennedy seemed to agree.

"You're asking us to hold that this defense exists ... with no specific plaintiff before us, no specific case," Kennedy told the club's lawyer, Gerald Uelman.

At the White House, spokesman Ari Fleischer said Bush supports federal prohibitions on marijuana, but also respects states' rights to pass referendums like California's. "The president is opposed to the legalization of marijuana, including for medicinal purposes," he said.

A vocal assortment of interest groups and activists supporting the use of marijuana as medical treatment mounted an energetic public relations campaign ahead of Wednesday's oral arguments, and activists on both sides gathered outside the court.

One woman carried a picket depicting a red "Stop" sign. It read: "Stop arresting patients for medical marijuana."

On the other side, Scott Rich of the conservative Family Research Council said endorsing marijuana as therapy sends the wrong message to young people.

"Marijuana is not good medicine, to put it simply," he said.

A ruling against the club would mean the government could prosecute distributors aggressively in federal court, regardless of whether states have approved medical marijuana use. That would force providers underground or out of business altogether, advocates of medical marijuana say.

California Attorney General Bill Lockyer is backing the Oakland club, arguing that the state has the right to enforce its law allowing seriously ill patients to use marijuana.

Some patients and doctors say the drug relieves nausea, improves energy levels and helps combat the symptoms of ailments ranging from cancer to AIDS to glaucoma and multiple sclerosis.

The Clinton administration sued the Oakland group and five other California distribution clubs in 1998, arguing that the clubs broke federal drug law by distributing, and in some cases growing, marijuana for medical use.

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, brother of Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, sided with the government. All the clubs except the Oakland group eventually closed down, and the Oakland club turned to registering potential marijuana recipients while it awaited a final ruling.

Last year, an appeals court revived the case by ruling that "medical necessity" is a legal defense, and Judge Breyer followed up by issuing strict guidelines for making that claim.

Before leaving office, the Clinton administration appealed to the Supreme Court.

The government said the Oakland club flouted the law and continued to distribute marijuana after an order to stop. Then-Solicitor General Seth Waxman also rejected the notion that marijuana could be a medical necessity, and said Congress had spoken clearly on the issue in the broad 1970 law that regulated drug distribution.

A lower court "may not override those determinations by reweighing the scientific and medical data and social policies considered by Congress, the attorney general and the secretary of health and human services, and concluding that the public interest supports the illegal distribution of marijuana," Waxman wrote in legal papers.

Justice Breyer will not participate as the other eight justices consider their ruling. Should the court divide 4-4, the appeals court ruling would stand and the marijuana club would be back in business.

Voters in Alaska, Colorado, Maine, Nevada, Oregon and Washington also have approved ballot initiatives allowing the use of medical marijuana. In Hawaii, a similar law was passed by the legislature and signed by the governor in June 2000.

The case is United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers Cooperative, 00-151.

-------- iraq

Arabs, Split on Iraq and Kuwait, Still Join to Attack Israel

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28ARAB.html

AMMAN, Jordan, March 27 - Arab leaders repeatedly expressed support today for the Palestinian rebellion against Israeli rule, sometimes using the issue to camouflage a deep Iraqi-Kuwaiti rift that is blocking any joint effort to lift United Nations sanctions against Iraq.

At the first regular Arab summit gathering in more than 10 years, some of the most soaring oratory came from President Saddam Hussein, whose speech, delivered by a deputy, painted Iraq as the savior of the Arab people.

Ending with the line, "May God damn the Jews!" President Hussein said Iraq was ready to "liberate" Palestine and threatened that other Arab leaders would face the wrath of their people if they did not take part.

President Bashar al-Assad of Syria also used his speech to lash out at Israel. He said that in electing Ariel Sharon, a man viewed in the Arab world as a killer for his long association with deadly attacks on Palestinians, the Israelis showed they were not interested in peace.

In a slight departure from the past, some of the younger leaders said pointedly that speeches were not enough. King Abdullah II of Jordan, along with the young Syrian president, noted that summit meetings had been producing oratory for years and that the Arab on the street wanted more.

Despite such comments, there was no immediate sign that this gathering, an attempt to return to regular annual meetings (a custom interrupted by the Persian Gulf war in 1991), would move very far beyond speeches.

Meeting over the weekend, foreign ministers failed to find a middle ground between the Iraqi and Kuwaiti positions on the sanctions.

"What has been proposed to us until now is not acceptable," Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, told reporters today. Iraq wants Arab leaders to break the sanctions, to condemn American and British air patrols over Iraq and to encourage regular civilian flights to Baghdad.

The Kuwaitis, while agreeing the sanctions should end, balked at any Arab stance that lacked an explicit commitment by Iraq not to threaten Kuwait again.

"Iraq is responsible for the violation and destruction of Arab solidarity when it invaded Kuwait more than 10 years ago," Muhammad Salem al- Sabah, Kuwait's minister of state for foreign affairs, said in an interview. "So Iraq should be called upon to take serious measures to restore confidence in its neighbors."

The ban on Iraq's using its air space in the south is not negotiable, he said, adding that the British- American patrols have "a direct impact on the security of Kuwait." Saudi Arabia has backed the Kuwaiti demands.

In this divided atmosphere, President Hussein may have tried to appeal over the heads of the Arab leaders, to Arab public opinion.

The fact that neither his speech nor that by the Kuwaiti deputy prime minister even mentioned their differences underscored just how far the two sides are from any reconciliation, despite remarks by King Abdullah, echoed during the day, about the need for Arabs to resolve their disagreements.

President Hussein focused instead on Israel, saying seven million Iraqis were willing to fight to capture Israel for the Palestinians. "By God we will bring them with an army whose end will be in Baghdad and its forefront will make the criminal Zionist invaders' and occupiers' blood run cold," he said.

The speech, which was read by Izzat Ibrahim, vice president of the Revolutionary Command Council, said the blockade of Iraq and the battle of the Palestinian people should be considered one issue. Ignoring either one will "be considered as disregarding the will of our people in our countries," an implication that those who opposed the idea were influenced by outside powers.

Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, used his remarks to the gathering to suggest that Iraq comply with Security Council resolutions, saying, "The Iraqi leadership will achieve more through cooperation with the international community, including its neighbors, than through confrontation."

President Assad lambasted Israel in his speech, carrying on a theme started by his father that Syria remain Israel's most implacable foe.

In electing Mr. Sharon to be their leader, President Assad said, Israelis had chosen a man who hated anything to do with Arabs and had dedicated his career to killing them.

"We say that the head of the government is a racist, it's a racist government, a racist army and security force," he said, adding that by extension, "It is a racist society and it is even more racist than the Nazis."

To show his support for the Palestinians, Mr. Assad met with Yasir Arafat, whom his father had ostracized for decades, especially after the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement of 1993.

In his speech Mr. Arafat, sounding frustrated, requested some tangible support from the Arab governments to alleviate the suffering caused to Palestinians by the Israeli economic blockade of their territories.

Despite pledges of $1 billion last October, little money has been paid, largely because of Arab misgivings about corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians have asked for $40 million a month for six months to help them meet their payroll and to keep government institutions afloat, but the working paper prepared by Arab foreign ministers here talked about soft loans instead.

Jordan's information minister, Taleb al-Rifai, said that an Arab League committee formed to study the issue had recommended the $40 million a month and that it remained up to the leaders here to endorse the sum.

Arab commentators were divided on the possible results of the summit meeting, which is to end Wednesday.

Some said merely getting together and being able to approach the subject of Iraq was progress, but others were already labeling the gathering a failure.

They were echoing the perception on the street that the kings, presidents and prime ministers of the region were bowing to American pressure not to lift the sanctions against Iraq, nor to really help the Palestinian people.

---

Arab Summit Meeting Ends With Agreement and Discord

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28CND-ARAB.html

AMMAN, Jordan, March 28 - The summit meeting of Arab leaders billed as the return to regional harmony pledged new financial support for the Palestinians today, but the arguments on lifting United Nations sanctions against Iraq collapsed in bitter acrimony.

The two-day meeing, an attempt to resume regularly scheduled annual gatherings for the first time since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, ended with each country trading accusations with the other about which one was responsible for the failure.

"The Kuwaiti delegation sought to prevent the summit from coming up with a resolution that would open the door to lifting the embargo," Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi foreign minister, said at a news conference.

He also mocked Kuwaiti demands that any lifting of the sanctions be linked to Iraq's not menacing its neighbor. "It's not from Iraq that the British and U.S. aircraft attack Iraq every day, killing Iraqi people and violating our sovereignty," he said.

For its part, Kuwait denied it wanted to see a continuation of the economic sanctions, which were imposed immediately after the invasion. "Iraq has caused the Arab summit to fail and not Kuwait," said Sheik Sabah al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti foreign minister, who headed his country's delegation. "I feel hurt that Iraq refuses even to make its people happy."

Iraq demanded that Arab leaders break the sanctions, condemn American and British air patrols over Iraq and resume regular civilian flights to Baghdad.

The Kuwaitis, while agreeing with everyone else that the economic sanctions should end, refused to agree to any Arab League resolution that lacked an explicit Iraqi commitment not to threaten them again. Saudi Arabia backed Kuwait.

Mediators, including King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, worked until the very last minute trying to bridge the differences between the two sides. But officials said the Iraqis balked at language demanding that they fulfill United Nations resolutions passed after the war.

On the question of support for the Palestinian Authority, officials said that the leaders of the 22-member Arab League had agreed to lend them $40 million a month for the next six months. The leaders pledged $1 billion in aid last October, but little of it was paid because of misgivings about corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, said he was pleased with the new pledges as well as other summit meeting decisions. These included resolutions condemning Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, a demand that Israel sign the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and a call for Arab countries to avoid economic ties with Israel.

"There were very strong decisions that have been accepted by all the members,"he said.

Despite the condemnations of Israel, the Arab leaders also voiced support for peace negotiations. The final communiqué said they were committed to the idea of peace in the Middle East based on the idea of exchanging land for peace.

The Authority is supposed to receive $65 million a month from the Israeli government, representing things like customs duties and payroll taxes due the Palestinians that Israel collects, said Saeb Erekat, a member of the Palestinian delegation.

That money has not been disbursed since October, when violence between the two sides rekindled. Mr. Erekat said that the withheld tax money usually went to pay the salaries of 114,000 government employees as well as for health, education and other services.

"The important thing this time is that we managed to get an expeditious transfer of the amounts, especially to pay for the salaries," he said. "We hope to be able to be able to pay it back as soon as the situation normalizes."

In passing, the Arab leaders also welcomed an Iraqi pledge to donate nearly $1 billion to the Palestinians, although the United Nations Security Council, which must approve the spending of Baghdad's oil earnings, has rejected the proposal.

In a final decision, Amr Mousa, the Egyptian foreign minister for the past decade, was appointed the new secretary general of Arab League. He is replacing another Egyptian, Esmat Abdel-Meguid, who served two five-year terms.

-------- korea

SOUTH KOREA: MISSILE CONTROL

New York Times
March 28, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28BRIE.html

South Korea has joined the Missile Technology Control Regime in a special session of its 32 member nations in Paris, the Foreign Ministry said. In order to win acceptance, Seoul agreed not to produce missiles with a range beyond 186 miles and a payload of more than 1,100 pounds. South Korea had limited its missiles to 112 miles under an agreement reached in 1979 with the United States but wanted the longer range in order to be able to strike targets in most parts of North Korea. Don Kirk (NYT)

-------- russia

Putin makes sweeping Cabinet changes

USA Today
03/28/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-28-putin.htm

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia's President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday made his most sweeping Cabinet changes since becoming president a year ago, naming his Security Council chief as the new defense minister.

The changes came amid a growing climate of distrust with the United States as well as signs that Russia's modest economic upswing is slowing down.

Changes in Putin's Cabinet, which is made up largely of holdovers from former President Boris Yeltsin, had been expected.

Putin replaced Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev with Security Council chief Sergei Ivanov, the first civilian defense minister in post-Soviet Russia.

Western governments had long recommended that Russia follow the practice of putting a civilian in charge of the military. However, Ivanov, a longtime KGB veteran in the Soviet era, holds the rank of general in the powerful Russian security services.

In a surprise announcement, Putin named Boris Gryzlov, a leader of the pro-Kremlin Unity party and a newcomer to Russias' political elite, as the new interior minister, who is in charge of police and interior troops.

Those two appointments mean that Putin has now placed his own loyalists in charge of two key ministries.

Ousted Interior Minister Vladimir Rushailo was named chief of the Security Council, an influential advisory body to Putin.

The other changes included replacing embattled Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeny Adamov with Alexander Rumyantsev.

Explaining his decision, Putin said the changes would help "demilitarize" Russia's public life. He also said the shakeup is linked with the changing situation in and around breakaway Chechnya, where car bombs this weekend killed at least 23 people.

-------- space

India aborts first test flight of satellite launcher

USA Today
03/28/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-28-india.htm

NEW DELHI, India (AP) - The first test flight of a satellite launcher meant to catapult India into the club of space powers was aborted Wednesday when one of its engines appeared to catch fire while on the launch pad.

Flames could be seen enveloping one of the rocket's four Russian-made engines - called strap-on engines.

"We admit it is a setback," said K. Kasturi Rangan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization. The setback occurred at the space port at Sriharikota on India's southeastern coast, 1,050 miles south of New Delhi.

"From preliminary assessment, we found that one of the strap-on engines did not develop the required thrust, so the computer automatically ordered a shutdown," Rangan said.

It will take time for scientists to determine what went wrong and no date has been set for a new launch, he said.

The satellite launcher was designed to carry commercial payloads into space to orbit at the same speed as the earth rotates. That allows satellites to remain above the same point of land and transmit television and other communication signals.

India hopes to enter the multibillion dollar commercial satellite business.

The satellite launcher, the product of 10 years of effort by Indian scientists, was to carry a 3,100 pound payload and has a total weight of about 400 tons.

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War Could Litter Space with Debris - U.S. General

Wednesday March 28
by Charles Aldinger
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010328/sc/arms_space_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Warfare high above Earth could litter space with speeding debris that might rip into commercial satellites and space shuttles, the U.S. military's space chief warned on Wednesday.

Air Force Gen. Ralph Eberhart said instant intelligence and communications were so important to the United States and other nations that future enemies might consider blowing up each other's satellites.

``First and foremost, I´m concerned about the debris in space and not knowing what´s going to happen once you blow it (a satellite) up,´´ with a projectile, the head of the U.S. Space Command told reporters.

``I have to admit that I would also be concerned about the threshold that you cross if you do that ... what it might mean in terms of weapons in space and other space activities,´´ the general added.

Eberhart said the military was already tracking some 9,000 orbiting objects, some as tiny as a fountain pen, and that commercial satellites and shuttles were threatened by junk moving at thousands of miles (kilometers) an hour.

Paint Fleck 'Can Ruin Your Day'

``Even a (speeding) fleck of paint can ruin your day if you are in the shuttle,´´ he told reporters.

Eberhart, who heads the North American Aerospace Defense Command for the United States and Canada, said the Pentagon was also increasingly worried about the ability of China, North Korea, Iran, Iraq and even ``terrorist´´ groups and drug cartels to disrupt computers using electronic ``cyber warfare.´´

``We (the United States) have become so reliant on our computer systems, our information, that as we train and exercise and are involved in contingency operations we have come to take those capabilities ... for granted,´´ he said.

The United States is in the process of developing a space policy, including a decision on whether anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons should be used in the blackness beyond the atmosphere. Eberhart said he thinks that destroying another country's communications or spy satellites using a projectile would be ``a last-ditch option.´´

Negotiations, disrupting satellite links electronically or even bombing ground communications stations might be preferable to launching weapons in space, he said.

``I would much rather use negotiations. I would much rather interfere with the uplinks and downlinks, I would much rather ... bomb a ground station,´´ Eberhart told reporters.

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

U.S. Vetoes Pro-Palestinian U.N. Resolution

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28CND-NATIONS.html

UNITED NATIONS, March 28 - The Bush administration cast its first veto in the Security Council late Tuesday night, ending a weeklong marathon debate and decisively scuttling Palestinian hopes for a United Nations observer force in the Israeli-occupied territories in the foreseeable future.

The United States has used its veto only five times in the council since the waning days of the cold war in 1990. All but one of them have been on resolutions about the Middle East.

On the council table since last week was a resolution sought by the Palestinians to align the Security Council behind both a criticism of Israel and demands for a protection or observer force, and to do this it before the opening of the summit-level meeting of Arab heads of government in Amman this week. The deadline passed on Tuesday, but the Palestinians pressed on, backed by a bloc of nations from the Nonaligned Movement, which has gained strength in the council this year.

Britain, France, Ireland and Norway worked through the last week, including on Saturday, Sunday and through much of Monday night, to draft a compromise. A "protection mechanism" was suggested, but only for future study. Meanwhile, the council had to squeeze in or set aside work on Congo, Sierra Leone, Macedonia and East Timor. Among some Europeans diplomats there were signs of growing annoyance and quiet fury.

Last night, when the Palestinians demanded a vote and the United States cast a veto, the four European members abstained. Ukraine did not vote. The nine other council members - China, Russia, Bangladesh, Jamaica, Mali, Tunisia, Colombia, Mauritius and Singapore - backed the Palestinians.

The United States never agreed even to consider the mention of a force, which Israel has repeatedly rejected under both the Barak and Sharon governments, and which Secretary General Kofi Annan has described as unworkable without the consent of both parties.

A similar bid by the Palestinians in December failed to get the nine votes required for adopting a resolution in the 15-member council. Then Russia abstained. Now with relations in a less friendly mode between the United States and Russia, diplomats say, the Russians gave the Palestinians their pyrrhic victory.

In Moscow today, a foreign ministry statement said that Russia was disappointed that a way could not be found to use the potential of the United Nations to ease the violence in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. A ministry spokesman said that Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov had discussed the issue with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Tuesday.

James B. Cunningham, the American representative on the council, said: "The U.S. casts this vote with great regret. It should not have been necessary and this draft should not have been put to the vote."

Mr. Cunningham, the acting American ambassador to the United Nations until John Negroponte is confirmed by the Senate, called the resolution "unbalanced and unworkable."

"It is more responsive to political theater than to political reality," he said.

Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian representative at the United Nations, who had personally pressed for the resolution, said this was a missed opportunity. "This is unfortunate, especially in the light of the fact that this is a new administration and we were hoping for this administration to demonstrate a more balanced position," he said after the vote.

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U.S. Veto Blocks West Bank Force

New York Times
March 28, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28VETO.html

UNITED NATIONS, March 28 - The United States used its veto power late Tuesday to kill a Security Council resolution urging creation of an observer force to protect civilians in the West Bank and Gaza.

The vote was 9 to 1. Ukraine did not vote. In favor were Bangladesh, Colombia, Jamaica, Mali, Mauritius, Singapore, Tunisia, Russia and China. Abstaining were Britain, France, Ireland and Norway.

Supporters of the Palestinians said they had pushed for a vote before an Arab summit meeting ended in Jordan, on Wednesday.

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A Job for the U.N.: To Ease the Pain

New York Times
March 28, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/opinion/L28NATI.html

To the Editor:

In your March 26 editorial endorsing Kofi Annan for a second term as secretary general of the United Nations, you note the need to strengthen the organization's peacekeeping department, which at times has been slow to respond or unprepared for the challenges it faced.

When peacekeepers do not keep peace, killing continues and refugees flee, often requiring a costly response to the resulting humanitarian crisis.

Two United States congressmen recently proposed that the United States urge the United Nations to establish a security force of 6,000 trained police and soldiers that could be deployed quickly, and only, by a United Nations Security Council resolution, thus giving the United States veto power over the use of such a force.

A ready force would help the international community maintain order and reduce suffering and limit pressure on the United States to act unilaterally in response to humanitarian crises.

KENNETH H. BACON President, Refugees International Washington, March 26, 2001

•To the Editor:

Re "Mr. Annan's Winning Record" (editorial, March 26):

The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, has raised the visibility not only of Africa and the fight against AIDS, but also of the need to protect people from "wholesale slaughter" in their own countries.

He has insisted that sovereignty should not be a shield for crimes against humanity and declared that there is a "developing international norm in favor of intervention to protect civilians."

But Mr. Annan needed the support of Asian governments for re-election as secretary general, some of which have pressured him to back off his position on protecting civilians from their own governments.

In particular, China continues to insist on governmental prerogative to mistreat its citizens without being brought to heel by the international community. Let's hope Mr. Annan stands firm.

ROBERTA COHEN Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution Washington, March 27, 2001

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U.S. vetoes resolution backing U.N. observer force

USA Today
03/28/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/mideast/2001-03-28-un-force.htm

http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540556

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The United States vetoed a resolution Tuesday backing a U.N. observer force to help protect Palestinians after marathon efforts to reach a compromise failed. Acting U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham cast the "no" vote - the first U.S. Security Council veto in four years. The four European council members abstained and nine other members approved. Ukraine didn't cast a vote.

"The United States casts this vote with great regret," Cunningham said. "It should not have been necessary, and this draft should not have been put to a vote."

Earlier Tuesday, negotiators had said they were close to a compromise with the Americans on a watered-down resolution calling for the immediate end to six months of clashes between Israel and the Palestinians that have left over 400 people dead.

But with negotiations dragging on, the Palestinians' allies in the Security Council finally pressed for a vote Tuesday night. They said they wanted a decision from the council before a summit of Arab leaders in the Jordanian capital, Amman, concludes Wednesday.

Israel had vehemently opposed sending a U.N. observer force and wanted direct talks with the Palestinians instead.

The vetoed Palestinian resolution instructed Secretary-General Kofi Annan to consult with the parties and report back to the Security Council. The resolution "expresses the readiness of the Council to act upon receipt of the report to set up an appropriate mechanism to protect Palestinian civilians, including through the establishment of a United Nations observer force."

In December, a Palestinian call for a U.N. observer force failed to get the minimum number of votes required for adoption. But since then, the membership of the council has changed, and the Palestinians on Tuesday secured the necessary nine "yes" votes.

That forced the United States to veto the resolution to keep it from passing. Generally, the five permanent council members try to refrain from vetoing resolutions since they can inflame passions on the ground and anger U.N. members resentful that they alone can essentially dictate U.N. policy.

The veto was the 73rd by the United States and the 248th in U.N. history. The last time the United States cast a veto was March 21, 1997, when it quashed a resolution demanding that Israel immediately stop construction at a settlement in east Jerusalem.

Beginning late last week and through the weekend, negotiators had been working on a compromise resolution that was designed to avert a U.S. veto - and persuade the Americans to either support the resolution or abstain.

The compromise text had made no mention of a U.N. observer force to protect Palestinian civilians. Instead, it requested Annan to consult with the parties "on setting up a protection mechanism, to contribute to the protection of Palestinian civilians."

As late as Tuesday afternoon, a deal had seemed close.

The compromise draft was worked out by a small negotiating group including ambassadors from the United States, Britain, France, Bangladesh, Jamaica, Tunisia and the Palestinian U.N. envoy, Nasser Al-Kidwa. Al-Kidwa said there were probably two or three points that still required negotiation with the United States.

But late Tuesday, after the United States indicated it was not yet ready to approve the compromise text, the Palestinians resurrected their call for an observer mission and forced a vote.

On Tuesday, Israel's U.N. Ambassador Yehuda Lancry reiterated a long-standing Israeli position, saying: "Once Yasser Arafat puts an end to the violence, that is the best protection for the Palestinians."

The Palestinians have been demanding a resumption of peace talks at the point where negotiations ended under former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. But Israel's new prime minister, Ariel Sharon, has said negotiations should be based on prior agreements.

---

Arab leaders can't agree on Iraq, Kuwait

USA Today
03/28/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-28-arabsummit.htm

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) - The Arab summit has failed to reach an agreement on how to resolve the conflict between Iraq and Kuwait, the Arab League secretary-general announced Wednesday.

Esmat Abdel-Meguid interrupted a live broadcast of the concluding session of the summit to say that the leaders were unable to reach consensus on future relations between Iraq and Kuwait.

He said King Abdullah II, who took the one-year rotating presidency of the Arab summits, would conduct further consultations.

The summit's final communique made no reference to Iraq, but a separate document, the Amman Declaration, calls for lifting sanctions against Iraq and coordinating on humanitarian issues related to prisoners and the missing in Iraq and Kuwait.

The final statement, read by Abdel-Meguid in the closing session, expressed the leaders discontent with the late-night U.S. veto of a resolution backing a U.N. observer force to help protect Palestinians.

"The Arab leaders expressed their total rejection of the American pretexts in this regard and called on the U.N. Security Council to provide the necessary protection to the Palestinian people," he quoted the final communique as saying.

Ministers and heads of state had been meeting for six days in an effort to hammer out a deal on Iraq. On Wednesday morning, six heads of state met with Izzat Ibrahim, head of Iraq's delegation, in an attempt to make further headway.

Iraq demands that the final statement flatly call for the lifting of U.N. sanctions imposed after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. It also wants the lifting of two no-fly zones patrolled by the United States and Britain, as well as the resumption of flights to and from Iraq.

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, who largely depend on the Western powers for protection, have shown some flexibility toward easing sanctions but have vehemently rejected the lifting of the no-fly zones, saying they are in place for their protection.

Kuwaiti Foreign Minister Sheik Sabah Al Ahmed Al Sabah said Iraq had turned down the latest proposal.

Ibrahim made no reference to the proposal in a brief statement, only asking that President Saddam Hussein's letter to the summit, which Ibrahim read Tuesday, be archived in the permanent records.

Calling for international protection for Palestinians was one of the items agreed to by the leaders in their first day of talks, according to an Arab diplomat speaking on condition of anonymity. He said they also agreed to adopt a recommendation to pay the Palestinian Authority $40 million a month for six months to cover salaries, health and education costs.

Even President Bashar Assad of Syria, whose country has had bumpy relations with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, backed the Palestinians Tuesday. And he criticized Israel for electing Ariel Sharon as prime minister.

"To know the reality of the coming peace, it is necessary to know the reality of the Israeli street," Assad said in impromptu remarks interrupting the official text of his speech. "It is a racist society and more racist than Nazism."

Other issues cleared off the agenda included confirming the nomination of Egyptian Foreign Minister Amr Moussa as the new secretary-general of the Arab League and agreeing to hold the next summit in Lebanon, the diplomat said.

In a session broadcast on Jordan state television Wednesday, the leaders announced their unanimous endorsement of Kofi Annan for a second term as U.N. secretary-general, the first time the Arab League has reached consensus over a U.N. chief.

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

House OKs better veterans benefits

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By JANELLE CARTER Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540252

WASHINGTON (AP) - Death benefits would be increased for survivors of service members killed in a string of recent disasters under a bill approved Tuesday by the House.

The provision, part of a broad veterans' benefits package, passed on a 417-0 vote. It makes retroactive to Oct. 1 an increase that had been scheduled to take effect April 1. Under the measure, which still must be taken up in the Senate, maximum death benefits rise by $50,000, to $250,000.

The aim of the retroactive provision is to cover families such as relatives of the USS Cole victims, who were killed during an Oct. 12 terrorist bombing in Yemen.

Also eligible would be the families of the victims of the March 3 crash of a cargo plane in Georgia in which 18 members of the Virginia Air National Guard and three Army crewmen were killed.

``Our military has recently suffered numerous tragedies,'' said Rep. Jo Ann Davis, R-Va., and author of the survivor benefit provision.

Passing the measure shows ``the families and beneficiaries of these servicemen that we do indeed care,'' Davis said.

Added Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, ``Recent events have shown that even military training exercises and routine duty can result in the loss of life to our service members.''

Just Monday, two U.S. fighter jets disappeared in the Scottish Highlands. Searchers Tuesday recovered the wreckage of one jet and one body. Also Monday, a U.S. Army reconnaissance plane crashed in Germany, killing two pilots.

The Bush administration already has come out in support of the survivor benefit provision.

The remainder of the benefits package expands education assistance to cover independent study and certificate programs. The bill also makes job and other transition assistance available to veterans earlier in their service.

A second measure passed in the House would authorize $550 million over two years for construction projects at veterans' medical facilities. That measure passed 417-0 and also still needs Senate approval.

``Deferring these obligations is the same thing as not keeping these obligations,'' said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., and chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee. ``We want world class health care for our veterans.''

Earlier in the day, a bipartisan group of House and Senate lawmakers introduced legislation that would increase education benefit for veterans. Under the bill, the education benefit would increase over three years from its current rate of $650 a month to $1,100 a month. Veterans groups have long complained that the education benefit has not kept pace with college costs.

The bills, H.R. 801 and H.R. 811, can be found at http://thomas.loc.gov

---

Brits find F-15 wreckage, body

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By AUDREY WOODS Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540461

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28SCOT.html

LONDON (AP) - Search teams found a body and the wreckage of an F-15 jet near a mountaintop in the Scottish Highlands where two U.S. fighter planes disappeared, the Royal Air Force said Tuesday.

The aircraft _ each with one pilot on board _ disappeared 45 minutes after taking off Monday from Lakenheath air base, 75 miles northeast of London.

The U.S. Air Force at Lakenheath identified the missing men as Lt. Col. Kenneth Hyvonen and Capt. Kirk Jones. There was no immediate indication of their ages or home states.

British and American military helicopters and search planes, plus police, air force and civilian rescue teams, carried out a land and air search amid thick cloud and snow whiteouts. Wind chill readings in the 40-knot winds reached minus 11 degrees, the Royal Air Force said.

F-15 wreckage and one body were spotted Tuesday near the summit of 4,296-foot Ben Macdhui, the tallest peak in the Cairngorms, which rise in the central Highlands of Scotland and are Britain's highest mountain range.

``The body was found in the vicinity of an aircraft wreck on the eastern side of Ben Macdhui which has been confirmed as the remains of an F-15,'' a statement from the Royal Air Force said.

The F-15 accident and the crash Monday of a U.S. Army reconnaissance plane in Germany that killed two pilots are the latest in a string of American military accidents in recent weeks.

In Washington, Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said recent fatal U.S. military accidents do not necessarily mean there is a problem with force readiness.

``They're not all the same type of airplane. They're not all in the same part of the world. They're not all doing the same sort of mission. It's very diverse,'' Quigley told a Pentagon briefing.

``And the overall safety record for the year so far seems to be quite good,'' he said.

The crashed reconnaissance plane, a twin-propeller Army RC-12 used to locate radar and electronic communications, went down in a forest near Nuremberg, Germany. The aircraft had been returning to its base in Wiesbaden.

The dead pilots were identified as Chief Warrant Officer George A. Graves, 44, and Chief Warrant Officer Lance Hill, 43, of Paradise, Calif.

Also Tuesday, a German military helicopter crashed in Meppen, Germany, killing all four people on board, army spokesman Siegfried Schaefer said.

Fatal training accidents are by no means rare. On March 3, an Army C-23 Sherpa crashed in Georgia, killing all 21 people on board. On March 12, five American servicemen and one New Zealand army officer were killed when a U.S. Navy F/A-18 mistakenly hit them with bombs during training in Kuwait.

On Feb. 12, two Army Black Hawk helicopters collided during a nighttime training session in Hawaii, killing six soldiers.

Statistics show that U.S. military aviation has become safer overall in recent years. For the fiscal year ended last Sept. 30, the military aviation accident rate was 1.23 per 100,000 flight hours, the lowest ever recorded.

Fifty-eight people in the military were killed in aviation accidents during that period, including one of the worst in years _ a Marine Corps V-22 Osprey crash last April that killed all 19 Marines aboard.

---

Second F-15 wreckage found

USA Today
03/28/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-28-jetfound.htm

LONDON (AP) - Rescuers working in blinding snow found wreckage of a second missing American F-15 fighter jet on Wednesday in the Scottish Highlands, the U.S. Air Force said. The search for the pilot was suspended as darkness and the weather closed in, and the operation was to resume at dawn. The plane's tailpiece was found near Ben Macdhui in the Cairngorm mountains, where the first of the missing single-seat planes and the body of Lt. Col. Kenneth J. Hyvonen Jr., 40, were found Tuesday.

Searchers on Wednesday found the tailpiece of the second plane about 400 yards from the first wreckage site, said a spokesman for the Royal Air Force, which has been conducting air and ground searches in heavy snow.

The tailpiece was identified by its serial number.

The two aircraft vanished 45 minutes after taking off at midday Monday from Lakenheath air base, 75 miles northeast of London.

The U.S. Air Force at Lakenheath identified Hyvonen, of Michigan, as the pilot found dead. The missing man is Capt. Kirk Jones.

British and American military helicopters and search planes, plus police, air force and civilian rescue teams, have been searching by land and air in thick cloud and snow.

Royal Air Force searchers and the Braemar Mountain Rescue Team have been concentrating on an area to the north and east of 4,300-foot Ben Macdhui.

Avalanche risk made the search perilous, the Royal Air Force said Wednesday.

"Apart from cold and driving snow, we are facing the hidden danger of sudden avalanches. We are having to keep an absolute watch on the snow every second," said flight Sgt. Al Sylvester, leader of the RAF's mountain rescue team. "The search itself in the snow is extremely hard but the avalanche danger is making it all but impossible."

The Air Force said Hyvonen, commissioned in 1984, was assistant director of operations of 48th Operations Support Squadron.

The Air Force did release Jones' home state, but the Arizona Republic newspaper reported that he graduated from Arizona State University.

Chad Steel, an Arizona State senior who met Jones and his wife at the Lakenheath air base in July, told the paper "everyone (in the squadron) seemed to love him."

---

Principi vows to cut backlog of VA claims

Washington Times
March 28, 2001
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200132822464.htm

Veterans Affairs Secretary Anthony J. Principi said yesterday one of his highest priorities is to cut by half the backlog of 500,000 disability claims filed by veterans.

"Clearly, we have a real crisis on our hands and we've got to take immediate steps to reduce that backlog," Mr. Principi told reporters and editors at a luncheon interview at The Washington Times.

New demands from Congress to extend benefits for the community of 25 million veterans and their families, as well as productivity problems within the department, have caused the backlog, Mr. Principi said.

Claims currently require from six to seven months to settle and appeals can take up to two years, he said.

One federal appeals judge told the secretary it has become almost routine for some claims to be dismissed because veterans died before their cases were heard.

Mr. Principi faults the Clinton administration for not dealing with the problem. "I don't believe it was addressed to the degree it should have been in the previous administration," he said. "I inherited it, and I need to fix it and we will do so."

Mr. Principi said he also is conducting a review of the department's health care system, as was mandated by President Bush.

He wants to "bring good business sense" to the Veterans Affairs bureaucracy and will privatize some of the department's services if that will improve efficiency.

The department has adopted a new computer software program that sharply cut employee productivity. "It was designed to improve the quality of our work and it improved the quality, but it caused productivity to be cut by at least a third, maybe half," he said.

Other processes in the system for handling benefits "have caused a stranglehold" over the entire system, he said.

"We have shot ourselves in the foot by implementing programs that may be visionary and strategically sound for the long term, but have a real, real short-term negative impact on productivity."

A commission has been set up to address the backlog in order to cut the number of claims to 250,000 by 2003.

The Veterans Affairs Department is in charge of a range of programs for veterans, including health benefits, pensions, burials, home loans, education benefits and vocational rehabilitation.

Among the department's client population of 24.4 million veterans are 5.5 million World War II veterans (who are dying at the rate of 1,500 a day); 5,300 World War I veterans who are 100 or older; 3.9 million Korean War veterans; 8 million Vietnam veterans; 1.7 million Gulf war veterans; and one widow of a Civil War veteran, whom she married when he was 70 and she was 13. The last Union veteran died in 1956 and the last Confederate veteran died in 1958.

Mr. Principi said the department is beginning a consolidation of its 172 hospitals nationwide and preparing to better serve an aging veteran population. By 2010, almost half the veteran population will be over 65 and a significant portion will be over 85, he said. The biggest shift in infrastructure will be a change from hospitals to assisted-living facilities.

On another issue, the veterans secretary also said that despite spending some $150 million in research, the cause of Gulf war illness remains unknown.

"We don't have any concrete answers as to what has happened there," Mr. Principi said.

The illness has produced symptoms that include fatigue, aching muscles, poor sleep and irritability in some 70,000 of the 700,000 military personnel who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Mr. Principi said one theory being studied is that a combination of factors produce the syndrome, including drugs taken by service members, insect bites from sand fleas or smoke from oil fires set by retreating Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Greens tell EU not to call garbage renewable power

Planet Ark
EU: March 28, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10272

BRUSSELS - Greenpeace warned the European Union yesterday that plans to classify some forms of waste incineration as "renewable" energy would lead to a proliferation of unpopular new incineration plants.

EU governments want to classify the burning of biodegradable municipal waste alongside more commonly acknowledged "green" power sources such as wind and solar - a move which could give it special status as the 15-nation bloc tries to increase the amount of power it gets from non-fossil fuels.

But Greenpeace says such a move would undermine efforts to recycle waste, devalue the notion of environmentally friendly renewable energy and encourage incineration, which some studies show can cause adverse health effects.

"To promote these toxic incinerators as a source of renewable energy is shameful," Paul Johnston of Greenpeace Research Laboratories told a news briefing.

Johnston has co-written a report for Greenpeace which shows a number of scientific studies have found links between emissions and residues from incinerators and hazards to human health such as cancer, heart disease and respiratory problems.

"The EU Council should not be advocating the use of incineration, they should be phasing it out," Johnston said.

The draft EU law on renewables is still going through the legislative process and Greenpeace is hoping the clause on incineration will be deleted by the European Parliament, which shares law-making powers with national governments on the issue.

The law sets non-binding targets for each EU country to increase its share of renewable energy, aiming to increase the proportion of renewables in total EU electricity production to 22 percent by 2010 from 14 percent now.

Energies classed as renewable can expect to get favourable treatment from policy makers as governments try to reach their targets.

Greenpeace said the inclusion of incinerating biodegradable waste to recover its energy would be to confuse a polluting form of waste disposal with a clean "biomass" energy production which involves burning wood or other energy crops.

"This directive (EU law) will become a directive to promote incinerators which is not what was intended," Greenpeace spokesman Lorenzo Concoli said.

Increasing the use of renewables is a key part of the bloc's effort to reduce its output of "greenhouse gas" emissions blamed for contributing to global warming.

Rules on the disposal of biodegradable waste such as vegetable peelings, paper and cardboard are becoming increasingly tighter as EU regulations limiting the amount that can go to landfill dumps come into force.

But Greenpeace says burning it is not a solution as the non-recyclable biodegradable waste does not give off the necessary heat to generate electricity.

The environmental group wants to see greater use of composting to deal with biodegradable waste. The EU's executive Commission is drafting a strategy paper to promote composting.

-------- energy

US Congressman calls for energy exploration at monuments

Planet Ark
USA: March 28, 2001
Story by Christopher Doering
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10285

WASHINGTON - A Republican lawmaker urged the Bush administration to consider exploring for oil, natural gas, and coal in a half-dozen U.S. national monuments declared by former President Bill Clinton after a government agency said the sites may contain "high" or "moderate" amounts of fuel.

The U.S. Geological Agency (USGS), which helps estimate the country's oil and gas reserves, released a study last Friday on the fuel potential in lands designated as national monuments by former President Clinton between 1996 and this year.

Environmental groups are worried the study could help a Republican effort focused on rolling back sound policy decisions made by Clinton, and are calling for development of alternative energy sources and conservation to help meet U.S. energy needs.

The USGS was commissioned to do the study by the House Resources Committee, headed by Utah Republican and Clinton administration critic James Hansen. Hansen said the report shows the national monuments could provide energy to "indefinitely" solve what some say is a nascent U.S. energy crisis.

MONUMENTS COULD HELP U.S. ENERGY PROBLEMS

Clinton's national monument designations, some of them made at the last minute, have drawn sharp criticism from many Republicans who would like to use the sites for energy exploration and other activities such as logging.

"A foolish Clinton administration locked up these lands, under protest from Republican and Democratic Members of Congress," Hansen said in a statement he released on Friday.

Hansen added that the USGS findings of likely oil and gas resources in national monuments - including two in California - was "ironic" as that state battles a chronic shortage of electricity.

"Californians are enduring shortages and price spikes while large reserves of both oil and natural gas sit in the heart of their state," he added.

The USGS rankings were based on identifying specific rocks and environmental conditions typically found to generate petroleum. The study did not give quantitative data projecting how much oil, gas and coal reserves may exist in the monuments.

The agency's study said five of 21 national monuments were ranked as having a "high" or "moderate" likelihood of oil and gas reserves.

One of the monuments, the Grand Staircase Escalante Monument in Utah, has a "high" likelihood of deposits of clean-burning coal and coal-bed gas, the study said.

ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS REMAIN CONCERNED

Environmental groups, however, are worried that by undoing Clinton era measures, the Bush administration and Republican lawmakers will be giving energy companies access to areas that have much to offer besides hydrocarbon energy deposits.

Green groups say the United States should work toward establishing long-term energy solutions with renewable sources like wind, biomass, solar and geothermal energy. They also encourage the administration to develop policies promoting energy conservation.

"When we look at these lands, we need to look at all of their values other than oil, gas and coal such as archeological resources, wildlife habitats, paleontology, all kinds of recreational and scenic values," said Pamela Eaton, regional director for the Wilderness Society's office in Colorado.

"When we look at solving our energy issues, the last place we should look are places that have high values for other things like the monuments," she said.

Former President Clinton used the 1906 Antiquities Act to create nearly two dozen national monuments on existing federal lands without consulting Congress, a move that infuriated some western Republicans. The law allows the president to designate national monuments to protect objects of scientific and historic interest.

The Clinton administration declared nearly 2 million acres of land as national monuments, making them off limits to commercial development.

The USGS, which is part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, identified the following monuments as likely containing oil, gas and coal reserves. Each also was ranked as having small, medium or large amounts of reserves.

* California Coastal National Monument - high probability of small amount of oil.

* Canyons of the Ancients (Colorado) - high probability of medium amount of oil.

* Carrizo Plain (California) - high probability of large amount of oil, plus high probability of large amount of natural gas.

* Hanford Reach (Washington) - moderate probability of large amounts of natural gas.

* Upper Missouri River Breaks (Montana) - moderate probability of medium amount of oil, plus high probability of large amount of natural gas.

* Grand Staircase Escalante (Utah) - high probability of high amount of coalbed gas.

-------- environment

Vt. sheep are killed in Iowa

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540627

AMES, Iowa (AP) - All 260 Vermont sheep suspected of having been exposed to a form of mad cow disease have been killed, and tissue samples were being tested Tuesday at a U.S. Department of Agriculture veterinary laboratory.

Before the flocks were sent to Iowa, four sheep tested positive in Vermont for transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or TSE, a family of diseases that includes bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, and scrapie, a common sheep disease that doesn't affect humans.

Scientists at the National Veterinary Services Laboratory here said they were running a series of blood and tissue tests on the carcasses. They said they would know within two or three months how many of the sheep were carrying TSE.

The East Friesian milking sheep, seized from two farms in Vermont, were imported before an epidemic of mad cow disease prompted a ban on European livestock in 1997. The animals were thought to have been exposed to contaminated feed.

An epidemic of mad cow disease devastated the British beef industry in the 1990s. Nearly 100 people in Europe have died of a human form of BSE since 1995, but no cases have been confirmed in the United States.

The USDA also said Tuesday it was tracking a handful of cattle imported from Britain before the 1997 ban. None of the animals had shown any illness, said USDA spokesman Jim Rogers.

``It's my understanding they are going to be bought and destroyed, but none of them have ever entered the human or animal food chain,'' said Ed Curlett, a USDA spokesman.

---

Disneyland Paris quarantines animals

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540422

PARIS (AP) - Disneyland Paris has halted horse-and-carriage rides and put about 80 animals in quarantine as a precaution against foot-and-mouth disease, the amusement park's operator said Tuesday.

Under advice from French veterinary officials, Disneyland Paris has locked up animals that could carry or contract the disease _ horses, deer, goats, sheep and donkeys, said David Roizen, a spokesman for Euro Disney, which operates the Disneyland Paris resort.

Officials are most concerned about attractions in which people have contact with such animals. The quarantine started in early March.

The ``Critter Corral'' attraction, which features the flavor of an Old West farm, no longer has goats, donkeys and sheep. The only farm animals left there now are geese and chickens, he said.

Disneyland Paris, located just east of Paris, is 22 miles away from the town of Mitry-Mory, where France's second case of foot-and-mouth disease was reported on Friday.

Foot-and-mouth disease strikes cloven-hoofed animals like sheep, pigs and cows. It is easily spread by afflicted animals or carriers such as humans and horses. The disease is not dangerous for people.

---

European zoos call for vaccines

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
BY CHRIS FONTAINE Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540429

LONDON (AP) - Zoos and wildlife parks terrified by the unyielding march of foot-and-mouth disease petitioned the European Union on Tuesday for permission to vaccinate to protect their rhinos, antelopes and giraffes.

The Southlakes Wild Animal Park, located at the epicenter of the outbreak in northern England, has isolated its cloven-hoofed wildlife to try to ward off the disease, which has been confirmed on a farm just 10 miles away.

Park director David Gill _ already frustrated by a sharp drop in visitors and with five tigers facing starvation because he can no longer find fresh red meat _ can't understand why vaccinating his animals is even an issue.

``The zoo world is totally unrelated to the farming world. Our animals are totally separated from the food chain,'' said Gill, who has giraffes, African antelope and rare Indonesian wild pigs that could all potentially catch the virus.

``If we could vaccinate, we could relax,'' he said.

The European Union fears that even a limited vaccination program could cause member states to lose their disease-free trade status on world livestock markets because inoculated animals bear the same foot-and-mouth antibodies as infected animals.

Veterinary experts from the 15-nation bloc said Tuesday they were seeking the advice of international trade bodies after several European zoos requested vaccines.

``We've got to respect international rules which say either you vaccinate or you don't. There's no middle way,'' Beate Gminder, public health spokeswoman for the EU Commission, told reporters in Brussels.

The Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health determines the foot-and-mouth status of its 157 members. An official said Tuesday it was awaiting individual requests from countries that may want to vaccinate zoo animals.

Vaccination against foot-and-mouth has been barred in Europe since 1991. Current EU regulations call for the destruction of any cloven-hoofed animal that catches the highly contagious disease. More than 500,000 sheep, cows and pigs have already been culled in Britain.

For zoos, this could mean the slaughter of critical breeding pairs of endangered species.

At the Antwerp Zoo, 30 miles away from the EU debate, a herd of extremely rare okapi, a giraffe-like animal from the war-ravaged Congo basin, has been left vulnerable by the regulations.

Should the outbreak _ centered in Britain, but also affecting Ireland, France and the Netherlands _ reach the zoo, it could mean the deaths of 10 percent of all okapis in captivity. Only a handful are believed to live in the wild.

``It is a real problem,'' zoo director Roland Van Bocxstael said. ``If they have to be destroyed it would be a real disaster.''

A foot-and-mouth outbreak in northeastern India is threatening the world's largest concentration of one-horned rhinos.

Conservationists in Kaziranga National Park, in the eastern state of Assam, are organizing vaccination camps to create an immune belt around the preserve.

Several zoos in infected European countries have closed or restricted access to vulnerable animals to prevent visitors from bringing in the disease. Others require visitors to walk through disinfectant footbaths.

Gill said closure is not an option for his wildlife park, just one of hundreds of hard-hit tourist destinations in Cumbria county, site of more than one-third of Britain's more than 600 foot-and-mouth cases.

With visitor rates already down 90 percent, he says the park might not reopen if it is forced to close.

``People think that by staying away they are doing us a favor,'' Gill said, adding that his Sumatran and Amur tigers will likely run out of food on Thursday because of a ban on livestock movement.

``Please, please come to our zoos,'' he said. ``Don't leave us to starve to death. Don't leave an uncertain future for our animals.''

---

U.S. won't implement climate treaty

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By JOHN HEILPRIN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540298

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration has no plans to implement the climate treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, because it's clear Congress won't ratify it anyway, the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

``We have no interest in implementing that treaty,'' EPA Administrator Christie Whitman told reporters, although she said the president continues to believe that global warming is an issue of concern.

She said the administration will remain ``engaged'' in international negotiations on ways to address climate change. But it was unclear what position the administration intends to take to the next United Nations meeting on the Kyoto accords, scheduled for this summer.

Whitman repeatedly noted that the Senate voted 95-0 against the United States taking any action on climate change unless developing countries also take some measures to reduce heat-trapping ``greehouse'' gases, which are mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels.

The Kyoto agreement calls for industrial nations to reduce emissions _ at least for the time being. The United States would be required to cut emissions about a third by 2012.

Bush on a number of occasions has expressed his opposition to the Kyoto accord, which the Clinton administration had viewed as essential to dealing with the risks of climate change.

Whitman noted that no other industrial country has ratified the agreement. ``We are not the only ones who have problems with it,'' Whitman said.

Three weeks ago, Whitman in a memo urged Bush to continue to recognize global warming as a serious concern, arguing that to back away from the issue would be damaging both domestically and internationally.

``Mr. President, this is a credibility issue for the U.S. in the international community. It is also an issue that is resonating here at home,'' she wrote in the March 6 memo. ``We need to appear engaged.''

The memo came a week before Bush announced he would not endorse legislation regulating carbon dioxide, reversing a position he had taken during his presidential campaign.

On Thursday, Whitman defended the memo.

``My job as the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and as a member of the Cabinet is to provide the president with my best take and what I think is in his best interest,'' she said.

``He has the broad picture and he needs to make a decision based on all the factors that he sees that I don't take into account as the administrator of the EPA,'' she continued. ``I am fully comfortable with his decision on this.''

Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., a leading advocate of the need to address global warming, said that the White House had undermined Whitman.

He said, ``The question is being asked: Does she speak for the administration, and will she be able to enforce environmental laws and seek others where necessary?''

---

Forest chief leaves over Bush policy

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By KATHERINE PFLEGER Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540312

WASHINGTON (AP) - Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck, who tangled repeatedly with timber and mining interests during his four-year tenure, is stepping down because of differences with the Bush administration over the agency's future, a former senior aide says.

Dombeck could have stayed until the end of April, longer if asked. Instead, he told his boss, Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, he was resigning effective Saturday and planned to tell the agency's leadership Tuesday.

``It was made clear in no uncertain terms that the administration wants to take the Forest Service in another direction,'' said Chris Wood, who served as Dombeck's top aide until Friday. But ``it is very cordial.''

A fisheries biologist by training, Dombeck, 52, took over the service in January 1997 and reshaped it from a government agency considered to be a friend of the timber industry to a cautious guardian of about 192 million acres of national forests.

As chief he worked to conserve old-growth forests, expand protections for wilderness areas and increase funding to fight wildfires and protect communities.

Perhaps one of Dombeck's most notable initiatives, but one facing multiple legal challenges, will be the roadless plan, a ban on road-building and logging in 58.5 million acres of national forest lands, except in the rarest of circumstances.

The ban originally was to have gone into effect March 13, but President Bush postponed it until May 12 so he could review it. Timber interests had sought a court injunction to stop the ban.

During his tenure Dombeck made enemies of some Western Republicans and the timber and mining industries. ``His objective is to terminate harvesting in the national forests,'' Sen. Frank Murkowski, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has said.

Last week the Interior Department, bowing to mining groups, decided to suspend new hard-rock regulations for public lands that would have strengthened environmental standards. The new rules were imposed on former President Clinton's last day in office.

In departing, Dombeck wrote Veneman a six-page letter outlining 10 recommendations for the agency.

Among them:

-The Bush administration should not negotiate a settlement with those opposed to the road-building ban.

-The agency should complete an inventory of old-growth forests and ensure their conservation.

-The federal government should increase funding for employees who protect wilderness areas, an effort Dombeck expanded and raised in importance within the agency when he made it a separate program.

---

UK seeks permission to vaccinate

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By ROBERT BARR Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540419

LONDON (AP) - Britain's devastating outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease has been traced to swill fed to pigs on a northern farm and may have come from meat imported illegally or food smuggled in by a passenger, the agriculture minister said Tuesday.

The government announced a ban on swill and said it would seek the European Union's permission to vaccinate livestock, though Agriculture Minister Nick Brown emphasized there was no decision yet on whether to begin a vaccination campaign.

``This is an unprecedented outbreak which has not yet reached its peak,'' Brown told the House of Commons as the number of confirmed cases rose to 682.

Britain has sought to avoid vaccination because it would keep other nations' doors shut to livestock exports. Nations that vaccinate lose their ``foot-and-mouth free'' status on world markets because inoculated animals are difficult to distinguish from those carrying the virus.

``Vaccination is no easy option. It would be expected to delay full return to international trade, at least for the region affected, and would be likely to require tight additional controls, at least in the area concerned,'' Brown said.

Zoos around Europe, fearing the disease could lead to the slaughter of endangered species, also petitioned the European Union for permission to vaccinate if necessary. EU veterinary experts were to consider the requests from zookeepers and the British government on Wednesday.

Authorities have traced the outbreak in Britain to a farm at Heddon-on-the-Wall in northern England, where pigs were fed swill, a feed made from food discarded by humans.

Brown said it was unclear how the disease, an Asian strain first identified in India in 1990, entered Britain. It might have been brought in an illegal shipment of imported meat, he said, or it may have come on food carried by an arriving passenger.

By the time the first case was identified near London on Feb. 20, Brown said, the disease had spread far across the country.

``By Feb. 23, when infection was confirmed at Heddon-on-the-Wall, infected animals had already spread through markets and dealers to Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway, Devon, Cheshire, Herefordshire and Northamptonshire,'' Brown said.

Cumbria in northwestern England, Dumfries and Galloway across the border in Scotland, and Devon in southwest England have been especially hard-hit by the disease.

Brown said it was difficult to nail down the spread of infection because some sheep apparently were bought and sold outside markets, and there was no record of the transactions.

Bobby Waugh, the farmer at Heddon-on-the-Wall, told reporters Tuesday that he was confident his farm was not the source of the infection.

``I have been treating swill and feeding pigs for more than 25 years since new regulations were introduced in 1974 and have never had a problem,'' Waugh said. ``I honestly don't think I am at the heart of this.''

Swill was once a common food for pigs, but its use has declined in Britain. Currently fewer than 2 percent of pigs get it.

Ben Gill, president of the National Farmers Union, said a ban on swill was ``taking a hammer to hit the wrong point.'' The feed is safe if it is cooked according to regulations, he said.

``The real issue is how did this illegal importation take place?'' Gill said on Channel 4 television news.

``Was it a personal import, as we have seen examples in ports around the country, or was it an illegal commercial import, which we know takes place with false manifests? We don't have at the ports the sort of rigid controls that other countries have.''

Opposition Conservative lawmakers renewed criticism of the government for what they said was foot-dragging in controlling the disease.

``If the government decides that some form of vaccination is necessary it will, in effect, be admitting that its other policies have failed,'' Conservative lawmaker Tim Yeo said, drawing a sharp response from the normally placid Brown.

``Frankly I don't need telling to get on with it and nor do the officials on the ground,'' Brown said. ``There are some very hard choices to be made and there is not a single recommendation that anyone could make that doesn't have a good argument against it.''

In France, Agriculture Minister Jean Glavany said Tuesday that vaccination ``has not been excluded'' but the government hoped to avoid it, fearing ``catastrophic'' economic consequences for farmers. France has two confirmed cases.

Danish authorities suspended livestock exports as veterinarians investigated three suspected cases of foot-and-mouth disease in the west of the country.

The EU allowed farmers in most of Northern Ireland to resume exports of fresh meat, unpasteurized dairy products and untreated hides, but continued restrictions in a border district where one case of disease was found on March 1.

The Czech Republic said it would drop restrictions at the border with Poland but foot-and-mouth precautions would continue along the borders with Germany and Austria, at least until April 5.

------

Kyoto Oh No

From: "Slate Magazine" <delivery@slate.com>
Slate - Today's Papers
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
By Scott Shuger

The WP fronts a report carried inside elsewhere that EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman told reporters yesterday that the Kyoto protocol for emission reduction--signed by the U.S. but not ratified--is (in the paper's words) "dead as far as the administration was concerned." The Post has the extra dimension of an "administration source" saying that the White House recently sought advice from the State Department about how the U.S. can legally withdraw its signature from the agreement. The paper foresees a stunned reaction from European Union officials. Showing (in Charles Peters' wonderful phrase) a real instinct for the capillaries, the WSJ puts its coverage of Whitman's press conference under a headline about how the Bush administration is diverting some money from her budget to state environmental agencies and saves Kyoto for the sixth paragraph.

---

Lumber Dispute Threatens U.S.-Canada Trade Ties

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By ANTHONY DePALMA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/business/28LUMB.html

With only days to go before an agreement limiting Canadian lumber exports to the United States expires, chances for quickly resolving one of the most contentious trade disputes between the United States and Canada have dimmed, and both sides are preparing for what could become a costly trade war.

Lawyers for the American lumber industry, including mill operators, landowners and wood product manufacturers, are preparing to file anti- dumping and countervailing-duty complaints against Canada on Monday, the first working day after the agreement on lumber exports expires. They contend that wood exports are unfairly subsidized by the Canadian government.

Representatives of the principal Canadian lumber producers are coordinating a strategy for countering the moves by their American counterparts.

At the same time, trade officials in Ottawa and Washington continue to hold out the possibility, albeit slim, of reopening negotiations, perhaps by appointing a panel of experts to find a way to keep the dispute from escalating while protecting the interests of both sides. But expectations of avoiding a confrontation are low.

"The chances of a settlement at this time are slim to none," said Scott Shotwell, executive director of the Coalition for Fair Lumber Imports, which represents parts of the lumber industry in the United States.

Bob Plecas, president of the British Columbia Lumber Trade Council, has been meeting with lawyers in Washington this week to ensure that they are ready to respond if the United States industry makes good on its threats to file complaints.

"We are making sure the hatches are battened down," Mr. Plecas said, "and that we're ready to take this on as early as Monday morning."

Of the $1 billion a day in trade that crosses between the United States and Canada, few sectors are as important as construction-grade lumber. Depending on prevailing prices, which are very volatile, $6 billion to $12 billion a year in lumber is taken from Canadian forests and shipped to the United States. Thousands of jobs in both countries depend on the current balance of trade in wood used in home construction, furniture and other products.

The conflict is also casting a shadow on the normally close relations between the United States and Canada. President Bush is scheduled to attend the Summit of the Americas in Quebec next month. His trade and hemispheric relations priorities would be weakened if a trade war with America's closest trading partner was brewing when he landed.

Fifty-one senators sent a letter to Mr. Bush earlier this month urging him not to permit Canadian producers open access to the American lumber market, where prices have already fallen because of Canadian competition. According to the letter, more than 100 American lumber mills have closed in the last six months.

The five-year agreement that expires this weekend imposed a fee on softwood lumber - the wood of spruce, fir and pine trees - imported from four large lumber-producing provinces above a set level, now set at 14.7 billion board feet. A fee of $50 per thousand board feet is charged on the next 650 million board feet of lumber above that threshold.

In exchange for the fee rule, American producers had to agree not to bring anti-dumping or countervailing-duty complaints against Canada.

The United States and Canada have been at odds over lumber since the Great Depression. American lumber producers have repeatedly complained that provincial governments, which own more than 90 percent of the forests from which lumber is cut, subsidize the industry with below-market cutting fees to protect logging and mill jobs.

In the United States, 58 percent of timberlands are privately owned, and harvesting rights are usually sold at market rates or auctioned off.

The Canadian industry insists that its cutting fees reflect the actual cost of replenishing forests and should not be considered a subsidy.

Robert B. Zoellick, the new United States trade representative, has suggested imposing a special tax on Canadian lumber imports, an idea Canada has rejected. Canada's trade minister, Pierre Pettigrew, backs the panel-of-experts approach that helped settle a United States-Canada dispute over salmon fishing. The trade officials are not scheduled to meet before the current lumber agreement expires.

"There's no specific action being planned," said François Lasalle, a spokesman for Mr. Pettigrew. "We will see exactly what happens next Monday."

If the American lumber industry does file complaints with the United States Department of Commerce on Monday, decisions could take a year; Canadian lumber imports would be tariff-free in the meanwhile.

---

Urging Bush to Resist Pressure, Forest Chief Resigns

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/politics/28FORE.html

WASHINGTON, March 27 - In a letter of resignation, the chief of the Forest Service urged the Bush administration today to "withstand political pressure" and leave in place rules that would bar road building across some 60 million acres of federally owned land.

The chief, Michael P. Dombeck, was a primary architect of that plan and other conservation measures in a four-year tenure during which he led the agency through a time of tumultuous change.

Mr. Dombeck, a career Forest Service employee, decided to step down after Bush administration officials told him they wanted to move "in a different direction," said Chris Wood, a former top aide.

Still, Mr. Dombeck, 52, used his departure to defend not only the roadless policy but also other Clinton administration initiatives, like the protection of old-growth forests. Those plans set Mr. Dombeck at odds with mining and timber interests.

Virtually all these initiatives are under review by the Bush administration, which has said it will try to do more to promote development and conservation on public lands.

"Please remember that the decisions you make through your tenure will have implications that last many generations," Mr. Dombeck wrote to Ann M. Veneman, the agriculture secretary, who oversees the service.

Mr. Dombeck's announcement came three days before a federal court in Idaho is scheduled to hear the first of several legal challenges to the road rule, which was made final in January, during President Bill Clinton's last week in office.

In advance of the hearing, the new administration has chosen not to offer a substantive defense of the rule, and it has postponed its effective date for 60 days, until May 12, to allow further review.

The tactics have prompted speculation that the new administration might work with the plaintiffs, which include the State of Idaho and Boise Cascade, the timber company, to limit the effect of the rules, which would apply to nearly a third of national forest lands. In his resignation letter, Mr. Dombeck warned against such a course.

"Doing so," he wrote, "would undermine the most extensive multi year environmental analysis in history, a process that included over 600 public meetings and generated 1.6 million comments, the overwhelming majority of which supported protecting roadless areas."

The rules would ban road building and most timber cutting in the areas, but in practice their effect would reach much further, effectively barring most off-road vehicles and new oil, gas and mining operations.

Mr. Dombeck, a fisheries biologist by training, was the agency's 14th chief. He seemed mild-mannered in most appearances, but that only partly masked what admirers viewed as a commitment to conservation and critics saw as hostility to the agency's traditional management role.

During his tenure, Mr. Dombeck clashed often not just with timber and mining interests but with some Western Republicans, like Senator Larry E. Craig of Idaho, who as chairman of a major forest subcommittee has been one of the timber industry's most forthright defenders.

In a letter last July, Senator Craig accused Mr. Dombeck of being "arrogant" and "slightly delusional" for his outspoken advocacy of the roadless plan in the face of opposition from industry and Western states.

In a statement, Senator Craig said of Mr. Dombeck that "We have not always agreed on policies developed for the national forests during the Clinton administration," but added that "I admire Mike's commitment to his principles and goals."

Environmentalists, for their part, praised Mr. Dombeck's policies.

"He was the first person to make the Forest Service realize its role as a conservation agency rather than a timber agency," said Bill Meadows, president of the Wilderness Society, a conservation group, which honored Mr. Dombeck at a reception in Washington earlier this month.

"I'm really saddened by the fact that he is leaving just as the new administration is failing to defend his roadless policy," Mr. Meadows said. "He was such a hero, and I think the entire Forest Service changed under his leadership, so I think it will be a huge loss."

But the Society of Professional Foresters, whose members include those employed by the forest products industry, has suggested that Mr. Dombeck had leaned too far in the direction of conservation.

A spokesman, Jeff Ghannam, said the group hoped the new administration "will select a leader who values the role forest management plays in ensuring the health and productivity of the nation's forests."

Mr. Dombeck's achievements in his four years included a 65 percent rise in the agency's budget, with most of the increase allocated to new efforts to help protect forests and communities against wildfires.

Mr. Dombeck also put the agency on a track to set as a formal goal the conservation of old-growth forests. Though he issued instructions in January to spell out that goal in a manual, the guidance remains unwritten and could be reversed by a new chief.

Among candidates to succeed him, administration and Congressional officials named several senior Forest Service employees, including Dale Bosworth, the regional forester in Montana, and Lyle Laverty, a former Montana regional forester who now directs the agency's fire plan.

As a career employee, Mr. Dombeck had been protected through May from reassignment by the new administration.

But Mr. Wood, his former aide, said that Mr. Dombeck preferred to step down now and to retire altogether from the agency.

"The job of chief is too difficult for someone to serve as a place holder, and Dombeck wants to remain an advocate for conservation," Mr. Wood said.

---

European Union Says Britain Can Vaccinate 180,000 Cattle

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28CND-FOOT.html

CARLISLE, England, March 28 - As Britain prepared to slaughter hundreds of thousands more healthy sheep that may have been exposed to foot-and-mouth disease, the European Union gave its permission for the government to reverse policy and vaccinate up to 180,000 cattle.

Union officials said any vaccination would be limited to the hardest-hit English counties, Cumbria and Devon. European governments have resisted calls for a wider immunization campaign, warning of disastrous consequences for livestock exporters, who would lose disease-free status on world markets.

British scientists say the country's sheep are too numerous and dispersed for vaccination to be effective, but by immunizing cattle they may be able to slow the spread of the disease.

A switch to a fiercely debated vaccination program fueled assertions by some government critics that, after more than five weeks of rampaging infections through hundreds of farms and the killing of 441,000 pigs, sheep and cows, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government was only now acknowledging that its policy of destroying animals had failed.

In Parliament on Tuesday, Agriculture Minister Nick Brown called the epidemic "an unprecedented outbreak that has not yet reached its peak." An additional 59 cases were confirmed Tuesday, bringing the total to 694. As of Wednesday, the figure had risen to 702.

While Mr. Brown did not commit the authorities to vaccination, he did say that the government "is considering whether to use vaccination."

The government has resisted vaccination out of concern it would hurt Britain's livestock and meat exports. Current tests cannot distinguish between an infected animal and a vaccinated one, making it difficult to prove that animal products are not diseased.

The European Union outlawed vaccination against foot-and-mouth disease a decade ago in order to qualify member countries' livestock and meat as free of both foot-and-mouth disease and vaccine for export to countries that included the United States.

Britain banned all meat and livestock exports when the outbreak was first identified on Feb. 19. But Mr. Brown said Tuesday that Britain had asked the European Union for "a contingent decision permitting the use of vaccination during the present outbreak, so that it can be deployed immediately if we conclude that is the right approach."

Earlier Tuesday, Mr. Blair himself said that a switch to vaccination, which "may have seemed utterly unpalatable a short time ago," was now "on the agenda."

Tim Yeo, the Conservatives' agriculture spokesman, said that by adopting vaccination, the government would be "admitting that its other policies have failed."

But for all the debate about vaccination, there was no sign Tuesday that the government was slowing its mass cull. More than 700,000 animals have been marked for destruction.

By Tuesday night, military and other authorities had readied mass animal graves on the Welsh island of Anglesey, at Birkshaw Forest in southern Scotland and at a disused airfield at Great Orton near this northwestern city, where some 16,000 infected animals have already been buried. The huge pits are to be used mainly to bury apparently healthy sheep brought from farms within a two-mile radius of infected animals. The slaughter began on Anglesey Tuesday and are to begin at Great Orton airfield Wednesday, the authorities said.

Mr. Brown, the agriculture minister, also said Tuesday that the likely source of the disease was a farm in northeastern England at Heddon-on-the-Wall, where there was speculation that pigs had been fed contaminated swill containing illegally imported meat. The highly contagious disease was then carried by air to nearby sheep. The account awoke memories of Britain's earlier battle with mad cow disease, which was also ascribed to cows' being fed animal matter.

Mr. Brown proposed a ban on the use of swill - used to feed fewer than 1 percent of Britain's 7.2 million pigs and usually made up of leftovers from restaurant, hospital and school meals. He also urged the introduction of a 20-day "standstill" period during which animals would not be transported after arriving on farms.

The speed with which the disease has spread has been linked to the distances animals now travel between farm, market and slaughter.

By the time foot-and-mouth disease was identified at Heddon-on-the-Wall, four days after it had first been diagnosed at a slaughterhouse in Essex, 200 miles to the south, "infected animals had already spread through markets and dealers to Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway, Devon, Cheshire, Herefordshire and Northamptonshire" - areas stretching from southwest England to Scotland.

Mr. Brown also said it had been difficult or impossible to track the movements of infected sheep because of unrecorded animal sales. The remark reinforced suspicions among some farmers that the government was seeking to shift part of the blame to questionable farming practices.

The most contentious issue facing the government, though, is whether it should resort to vaccination, a tactic some critics call unreliable.

"I don't think the basic scientific view has changed," said Chris Bostock, director of the Institute for Animal Health, who has criticized vaccination. "What has changed is what's happening in the field, and whether the circumstances now match those in which you would choose to use emergency vaccine."

The discussion is laden with scientific disputes, and the bottom-line question of the long-term economic impact and even politics. The crisis has prompted heated debate over whether Mr. Blair should put off plans to seek re-election in May.

In a telephone interview, Professor Bostock said the debate involved two approaches to vaccine: whether it was to be used as an emergency measure, or as "long-term policy, which means you are accepting that you have endemic disease."

Since the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak started, Britain has rejected both approaches on the grounds that vaccination would damage the export business and not necessarily work. But, with the government itself acknowledging that the epidemic has yet to peak, it is now being considered to reinforce mass culling to build a "firebreak" around the worst infected areas in Cumbria, Devon, southern Scotland and parts of Wales.

Foot-and-mouth disease, which afflicts cloven-footed mammals, is not normally fatal in animals and rarely affects humans. However, the disease produces painful blisters in the mouths and feet of infected animals which, before they recover, become not commercially viable through weight loss.

Even when they do recover, they must be slaughtered before countries or regions regain their coveted status as disease- and vaccine-free exporters - a process that can take up to a year.

Prof. Julian Wimpenny, from the Cardiff School of Biosciences, said "the technology exists now that can distinguish between an animal that's infected and one that's immunized."

But Professor Bostock at the Institute for Animal Health countered that, saying that while new forms of testing were being developed that might enable veterinarians to judge the health of a herd, "even the best test available is not reliable on an individual animal."

Moreover, he said, "vaccinated animals are not necessarily protected against infection. They can still be infected and they can still act as a potential source of infection."

Britain has identified the virus afflicting its livestock as one called Pan Asian Type O. But that is only one of seven main types, all of which respond to different vaccines, and there are up to 80 sub-types. The Animal Health Institute holds 500,000 cattle-size doses of the vaccine against the Pan Asian Type O virus, and 10 million more doses are thought to be available elsewhere in the European Union. But Britain has some 44 million sheep, 11.3 million cattle and 7.2 million pigs.

Within Europe, the Netherlands has treated a far smaller outbreak with vaccination surrounding an infected area, coupled with the slaughter of infected animals and healthy ones within a two-mile radius.

Such is the scale of the disease in Britain, however, that delays in removing culled animals from farms and even their incineration on pyres that draw smoke across the countryside have helped spread the disease. "You cannot guarantee that you are not putting virus particles into the atmosphere" from the pyres, Professor Wimpenny said.

The British authorities and some scientists have argued that vaccination, even as an emergency measure, is unreliable, costly and would divert personnel from destroying animals. Not only that, vaccination can take one or two days to take effect, meaning that animals could pass on the disease during that period.

But the counterargument, which the government now seems to be considering, is that, as an emergency measure, vaccination would act as a reinforcement to mass culling.

"You can use vaccine very quickly and still cull animals," said Peter Midmore, a professor of rural studies at the University of Wales.

"The role for vaccination is to achieve widespread protection and lower the risk of infection."

---

Veterinarian at the Gate, Watching Feet and Mouths

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By CHARLIE LeDUFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/nyregion/28PROF.html

THERE is a man in southern Queens who, in defiance of conventional wisdom, earns his oats by staring gift horses in the mouth.

Dr. Khawaja N. Ahmad is the veterinarian at Kennedy International Airport and works for the United States Department of Agriculture. He is the keeper of the gate, a man of science and rationality who stands between the rash of animal diseases sweeping through Europe and the well- being of livestock here in the United States.

"I enjoy a good steak," said the doctor, who prefers his beef well cooked for reasons of savoriness and safety and avoids pork altogether. "I eat meat every day. I'm not worried about anything in this country and it is my job to keep it that way."

Foot-and-mouth disease is spreading through Europe, and the doctor and his three inspectors are on full alert to keep it out. The foot-and-mouth virus strikes cloven-hoofed animals: cows, goats, pigs, deer and sheep. It causes blisters in an animal's mouth and on its feet. In advanced stages, hooves fall off and mouths become so blistered that it is impossible for the animals to chew, Dr. Ahmad said. The animals lose weight and are no longer able to produce milk or meat or wool, and so are worthless.

The disease can be fatal to animals and is extremely contagious, the doctor said. Witness the macabre photos from Europe of smoldering animal pyres. Foot-and-mouth does not affect people, but the contagion can be carried by humans, horses, birds and even the wind.

No animal from a country with known cases of contagious disease may enter through Kennedy without Dr. Ahmad's say-so. And now, air travelers who might have had contact with farm animals must submit to their shoes and luggage being sprayed with bleach or a sodium carbonate solution.

"The procedures we have are No. 1 in the world, 100 percent," said Dr. Ahmad, 55, a thin man with a crisp, punctilious manner of speech. "Basically, until proven innocent all animals are considered guilty."

The doctor began his morning at 8:30, when a shipment of horses arrived from the Netherlands on Polar Air. The doctor and his inspector put on white protective suits before going near the horse carriers.

"These are very nice, very pretty riding horses," he said, as he stared into their mouths looking for blisters. He looked at their hooves. Blood samples were drawn. The horses were scrubbed with a vinegar solution and their hooves cleaned.

The animals were put in a sealed truck and driven to a quarantine location upstate. European horses must be quarantined for 3 days before clearing the blood test. African horses must wait for 60 days, because of a disease known as African horse sickness. South American horses are held for 7 days.

After the horses were shipped off to quarantine, the doctor went back to his office. His is an ordered, compartmentalized existence. He works in Building 77, a rectangular green block on the edge of the airport with square, drab offices that lead into smaller square, drab offices. Dr. Ahmad's office has a large square window and few personal flourishes.

He has grown old there, he said. He has punched the clock at Kennedy Airport for the Department of Agriculture since 1979, after he left private practice.

These days are actually easier than they were three years ago, Dr. Ahmad said. That was when the federal government banned the importation of live cloven-hoofed animals to prevent the spread of mad cow disease, which has caused millions of dollars in livestock losses in Europe. A human strain, Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, has killed at least 88 Europeans.

That leaves Dr. Ahmad with 3,700 racing horses, gift horses and stud horses to administer to, and a whole roost of exotic birds imported every year through Kennedy Airport.

"These days I deal more with calls from the press and airlines inquiring about the latest regulations," he said.

Dr. Ahmad said his love for animals goes back to his childhood in Lahore, Pakistan. His family kept milk cows and a parrot named Poly. "I loved that bird very much," he said. "It had a vocabulary of 200 words."

HIS father was an engineer with the Department of Irrigation. The son went off to the national university of agriculture to study veterinary medicine, where he eventually received a doctorate in veterinary science.

He immigrated to the United States in 1972 and did two years of postgraduate studies at the University of Hawaii. He joined the Agriculture Department in 1979. He and his wife have three children, two of whom are attending medical school. The family cannot have pets, since Customs Service veterinarians are banned from keeping animals at home to avoid transmitting diseases.

As he is every workday, Dr. Ahmad was crisply dressed in a white shirt emblazoned with the Agriculture Department seal, a black sweater vest, black trousers, highly polished shoes, departmental tie and a silver watch. He hair was cut neatly in the Caesar-wearing-laurels style. His nails were clipped in precise half-moons and were extremely clean.

"One hundred percent control," he said, clucking his tongue for emphasis. "That's all I do. Control."

---

Britain Reluctantly Considers Animal Vaccination

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By ALAN COWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28FOOT.html

CARLISLE, England, March 27 - As Britain prepared to slaughter hundreds of thousands more healthy sheep that may have been exposed to foot-and-mouth disease, the government indicated today that it might reverse policy and use vaccination against the outbreak.

A switch to a fiercely debated vaccination program would fuel assertions by some government critics that, after more than five weeks of rampaging infections through hundreds of farms and the killing of 441,000 pigs, sheep and cows, Prime Minister Tony Blair's government was only now acknowledging that its policy of destroying animals had failed.

In Parliament, Agriculture Minister Nick Brown called the epidemic "an unprecedented outbreak that has not yet reached its peak." An additional 59 cases were confirmed today, bringing the total to 694.

While Mr. Brown did not commit the authorities to a switch to vaccination, he did say that the government "is considering whether to use vaccination."

The government has resisted vaccination out of concern it would hurt Britain's livestock and meat exports. Current tests cannot distinguish between an infected animal and a vaccinated one, making it difficult to prove that animal products are not diseased.

The European Union outlawed vaccination against foot-and-mouth disease a decade ago in order to qualify member countries' livestock and meat as free of both foot-and- mouth disease and vaccine for export to countries that included the United States.

Britain banned all meat and livestock exports when the outbreak was first identified on Feb. 19. Now, Mr. Brown said today, Britain has asked the European Union for "a contingent decision permitting the use of vaccination during the present outbreak, so that it can be deployed immediately if we conclude that is the right approach."

Earlier today, Mr. Blair himself said that a switch to vaccination, which "may have seemed utterly unpalatable a short time ago," was now "on the agenda."

Tim Yeo, the Conservatives' agriculture spokesman, said that by adopting vaccination, the government would be "admitting that its other policies have failed."

But for all the debate about vaccination, there was no sign today that the government was slowing its mass cull. More than 700,000 animals have been marked for destruction.

By tonight, military and other authorities had readied mass animal graves on the Welsh island of Anglesey, at Birkshaw Forest in southern Scotland and at a disused airfield at Great Orton near this northwestern city, where some 16,000 infected animals have already been buried. The huge pits are to be used mainly to bury apparently healthy sheep brought from farms within a two- mile radius of infected animals. The slaughter began on Anglesey today and will begin at Great Orton airfield on Wednesday, the authorities said.

Mr. Brown, the agriculture minister, also said today that the likely source of the disease was a farm in northeastern England at Heddon-on- the-Wall, where there was speculation that pigs had been fed contaminated swill containing illegally imported meat. The highly contagious disease was then carried by air to nearby sheep. The account awoke memories of Britain's earlier battle with mad cow disease, which was also ascribed to cows being fed animal matter. Mr. Brown proposed a ban on the use of swill - used to feed fewer than one percent of Britain's 7.2 million pigs and usually made up of leftovers from restaurant, hospital and school meals. He also urged the introduction of a 20-day "standstill" period during which animals would not be transported after arriving on farms.

The speed with which the disease has spread has been linked to the distances animals now travel between farm, market and slaughter.

By the time foot-and-mouth disease was identified at Heddon-on- the-Wall, four days after it had first been diagnosed at an abattoir in Essex, 200 miles to the south, "infected animals had already spread through markets and dealers to Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway, Devon, Cheshire, Herefordshire and Northamptonshire" - areas stretching from southwest England to Scotland.

Mr. Brown also said it had been difficult or impossible to track the movements of infected sheep because of unrecorded animal sales. The remark reinforced suspicions among some farmers that the government was seeking to shift part of the blame to questionable farming practices.

The most contentious issue facing the government, though, is whether it should resort to vaccination, a tactic some critics call unreliable.

"I don't think the basic scientific view has changed," said Chris Bostock, head of the Animal Health Institute, who has criticized vaccination. "What has changed is what's happening in the field, and whether the circumstances now match those in which you would choose to use emergency vaccine."

The discussion is laden with scientific disputes, and the bottom-line question of the long-term economic impact and even politics. The crisis has prompted heated debate over whether Prime Minister Blair should put off plans to seek re-election in May.

In a telephone interview, Professor Bostock said the debate involved two approaches to vaccine: whether it was to be used as an emergency measure, or as "long-term policy, which means you are accepting that you have endemic disease."

Since the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak started, Britain has rejected both approaches on the grounds that vaccination would damage the export business and not necessarily work. But, with the government itself acknowledging that the epidemic has yet to peak, it is now being considered to reinforce mass culling to build a "firebreak" around the worst infected areas in Cumbria, Devon, southern Scotland and parts of Wales.

Foot-and-mouth disease, which afflicts cloven-footed mammals, is not normally fatal in animals and rarely affects humans. However, the disease produces painful blisters in the mouths and feet of infected animals which, before they recover, become unfit for sale through weight loss. Even when they do recover, they must be slaughtered before countries or regions regain their coveted status as disease- and vaccine-free exporters - a process that can take up to a year.

Prof. Julian Wimpenny, from the Cardiff School of Biosciences, said "the technology exists now that can distinguish between an animal that's infected and one that's immunized."

But Professor Bostock at the Animal Health Institute countered that, saying that while new forms of testing were being developed that might enable veterinarians to judge the health of a herd, "even the best test available is not reliable on an individual animal."

Moreover, he said, "vaccinated animals are not necessarily protected against infection. They can still be infected and they can still act as a potential source of infection."

Britain has identified the virus afflicting its livestock as one called Pan Asian Type O. But that is only one of seven main types, all of which respond to different vaccines, and there are up to 80 sub-types. The Animal Health Institute holds 500,000 cattle-size doses of the vaccine against the Pan Asian Type O virus, and 10 million more doses are thought to be available elsewhere in the European Union. But Britain has some 44 million sheep, 11.3 million cattle and 7.2 million pigs.

Within Europe, the Netherlands has treated a far smaller outbreak with vaccination surrounding an infected area, coupled with the slaughter of infected animals and healthy ones within a two-mile radius.

Such is the scale of the disease in Britain, however, that delays in removing culled animals from farms and even their incineration on pyres that draw smoke across the countryside have helped spread the disease. "You cannot guarantee that you are not putting virus particles into the atmosphere" from the pyres, Professor Wimpenny said.

The British authorities and some scientists have argued that vaccination, even as an emergency measure, is unreliable, costly and would divert personnel from destroying animals. Not only that, vaccination can take one or two days to take effect, meaning that animals could pass on the disease during that period.

But the counterargument, which the government now seems to be considering, is that, as an emergency measure, vaccination would act as a reinforcement to mass culling.

"You can use vaccine very quickly and still cull animals," said Peter Midmore, a professor of rural studies at the University of Wales.

"The role for vaccination is to achieve widespread protection and lower the risk of infection."

---

U.S. Won't Follow Climate Treaty Provisions, Whitman Says

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/politics/28WHIT.html

WASHINGTON, March 27 - The Bush administration has no plans to carry out the international climate treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, the chief of the Environmental Protection Agency said today, because it is clear that Congress will not ratify it anyway.

"We have no interest in implementing that treaty," the agency administrator, Christie Whitman, told reporters, although she said the president continued to believe that global warming was an issue of concern.

Mrs. Whitman said the administration would remain "engaged" in international negotiations on ways to address climate change. But it was unclear what position the administration intended to take to the next United Nations meeting on the Kyoto accords, scheduled for this summer.

Mrs. Whitman repeatedly noted that the Senate voted 95 to 0 against the United States' taking any action on climate change unless developing countries also took measures to reduce their emissions of heat-trapping gases. The main such gas, which many scientists link to global warming, is carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

The Kyoto agreement calls for industrial nations to reduce heat-trapping gases. The United States, for example, would be required to cut its emissions about a third by 2012.

Mr. Bush has on several occasions expressed opposition to the Kyoto agreement, which the Clinton administration had viewed as essential to dealing with the risks of climate change.

Mrs. Whitman noted that no other industrial country had ratified the agreement and added, "We are not the only ones who have problems with it."

---

ALTAMONT: FARMLAND PROTECTION

New York Times
March 28, 2001
Metro Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/nyregion/28MBRF.html

The state will provide more than $12 million to protect farmland from development in 11 counties. The money will not only keep the land in agricultural production, it will also preserve the rural character of the surrounding areas, Gov. George E. Pataki said yesterday during an appearance at a farmers' market here. The latest grants bring to more than $40 million the money put toward protection of farmland since 1996. Parcels must be kept in active agricultural production and in areas facing development pressures to qualify for the program. (AP)

---

Legacy of a Landfill

New York Times
March 28, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/opinion/L28FRES.html

To the Editor:

Your March 24 Op-Art about the closing of Fresh Kills landfill reminded me that a significant gauge in evaluating past civilizations is the remains of the architecture and structures of its great cities. When the millenniums have erased the ephemeral structures that now constitute New York City, Fresh Kills will be the city's lasting monument and indicator of the great fountainhead across the Hudson.

MARK J. MULDER Austin, Pa., March 26, 2001

---

Germany, EU focus on global warming

USA Today
03/28/2001 - Updated 10:00 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-28-warming.htm

BERLIN (AP) - German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder will urge President Bush not to back off a key accord against global warming when the two leaders meet for the first time Thursday in Washington.

Schroeder will also use the one-day trip to raise European concerns about American plans for a missile defense and U.S.-Russian tensions, a German government official said.

But most immediately, Europeans are dismayed at Bush's recent announcement that he would not seek curbs on carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. industry, contrary to a campaign pledge.

"We hope the Americans will change their mind, because we Europeans think we have the better arguments," said the German official, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity this week before he trip. "The chancellor will explain the European position."

Schroeder wrote to Bush this month urging him to rethink his stand on pollution but has received no reply, the official said.

The Bush administration is reviewing its stand on the treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, ahead of a U.N. climate conference in July. But Christie Whitman, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said Tuesday the administration has no plans to implement the accord because Congress would never ratify it.

Schroeder also was to meet Congressional leaders in Washington.

"It is important that the U.S. accept its responsibility for the world climate," Schroeder said in an interview in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times. "They are the biggest economy in the world and the heaviest energy consumers."

The Kyoto agreement calls for industrial nations to reduce emissions of so-called greenhouse gases blamed by scientists for heating up the Earth's atmosphere. The United States would be required to cut emissions about a third by 2012.

Also Wednesday, the European Union Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstroem said she found Bush's decision not to ratify the climate treaty "worrying."

In a statement issued in Brussels, Belgium, she said the 15-nation EU is committed to implementing the treaty and expressed her dismay over Bush's position.

Bush on a number of occasions has expressed his opposition to the Kyoto accord, which the Clinton administration had viewed as essential to dealing with the risks of climate change. Bush has said he did not think mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions were necessary.

Bush's statements have thrown a wrench into upcoming talks aimed at finding a solution as to how the protocol would be implemented. United Nations talks on implementing the Kyoto agreement and cutting greenhouse gas emissions resume July 16 in Bonn, Germany.

---

Officials to kill 21 cattle, test them for mad cow

USA Today
03/28/2001 - Updated 10:17 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-28-texas-cattle.htm

AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - A handful of cattle imported from Germany before a 1997 ban on European livestock will be destroyed to test whether the animals were exposed to mad cow disease, officials said Wednesday.

The 21 animals from five ranches around the state will be killed and their remains incinerated while samples of their brain tissue will be sent to a national laboratory in Ames, Iowa, Animal Health Commission officials said.

The cattle are being destroyed as a precaution because of public concern over mad cow disease, state officials said.

Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, has never been detected in U.S. cattle, but has infected herds in Europe since the mid-1980s.

An epidemic devastated the British beef industry in the 1990s. Nearly 100 people in Europe have died of a human form of BSE since 1995, but no cases have been confirmed in the United States. The disease attacks the brain and spinal cord.

The cattle were among 29 imported from Germany in 1996 and 1997 before the ban. All had been under quarantine since March 1997, after health officials traced them to their current owners.

The owners, who were not identified, had declined to sell the animals for $2,000 per head to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. They waited until the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, the Texas Beef Council and the Texas Cattlefeeders Association raised an additional $57,000 for total compensation of $99,000.

None of the imported cattle have shown signs of the disease, said Carla Everett, a spokeswoman for the Animal Health Commission.

The USDA this week was also testing tissue samples of 260 Vermont sheep suspected of having been exposed to a form of mad cow disease.

Before the flocks were sent to Iowa for slaughter, four sheep tested positive in Vermont for transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, or TSE, a family of diseases that includes mad cow disease, and scrapie, a common sheep disease that doesn't affect humans.

Scientists at the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Iowa said they would know within two or three months how many of the sheep were carrying TSE.

------

EU approves British vaccination plan

USA Today
03/28/2001 - Updated 05:00 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/footandmouth/2001-03-28-vaccinate.htm

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - European Union veterinary experts Wednesday approved a request from Britain for authorization to vaccinate up to 180,000 dairy cattle against foot-and-mouth disease in an effort to contain the epidemic in the worst-hit areas, an EU official said.

The European Commission must still formally approve the measure before vaccinations in Britain can go forward, but that is regarded as a formality. The EU official who confirmed the veterinary experts' decision spoke on condition of anonymity.

British Agriculture Minister Nick Brown has said Britain has not yet decided whether to move to vaccinations, but the government wants to have the option because of the sheer scale of the epidemic which has now infected over 700 farms.

EU officials said any vaccination campaign would be limited to the English counties of Cumbria and Devon, which are among the hardest hit areas.

EU governments have resisted calls for a wider immunization campaign, warning of disastrous consequences for livestock exporters. Nations that vaccinate lose their "foot-and-mouth free" status on world markets because inoculated animals are difficult to distinguish from those carrying the virus.

---

Black gold

Washington Times
March 28, 2001
John McCaslin
Inside the Beltway
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inbeltway.htm

Interior Secretary Gale Norton will accompany at least a half-dozen senators to Alaska this weekend, where they will get a firsthand look at the oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The Washington delegation begins its Alaska trek in Valdez, the terminus of the 800-mile Alaska pipeline, will overnight in Fairbanks, then journey north to Prudhoe Bay, Deadhorse, and eventually into the refuge and the Eskimo villages of Kaktovik and Nuiqsut, "where they are going to have a little bit of a potlatch for us," notes Alaska Sen. Frank Murkowski.

Potlatch is a ceremonial feast in which Eskimos traditionally distribute lavish gifts that require reciprocation.

Whether that will be oil and the prosperity brought with it remains to be seen.

-------- genetics

Cloning Animals: What (Who?) Is Next?

New York Times
March 28, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/opinion/L28CLON.html

To the Editor:

Re "Researchers Find Big Risk of Defect in Cloning Animals" (front page, March 25):

You write that cloned animals have serious defects because "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." But isn't that how these animals are supposed to have evolved in the first place?

PHILLIP JOHNSON Berkeley, Calif., March 25, 2001 The writer is emeritus professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.

•To the Editor:

Re "Researchers Find Big Risk of Defect in Cloning Animals" (front page, March 25):

The safety problems with cloning are a compelling reminder of the distance between laboratory discoveries and human applications. Exciting research findings do not necessarily herald clinical benefits. Almost always, many years and many false starts precede actual medical improvements.

We should keep this in mind when we hear about promising advances in other scientific areas, like stem cell, gene transfer and cancer research. The human body is exquisitely complex. Developing therapeutic interventions is inevitably a slow and difficult process.

REBECCA DRESSER St. Louis, March 25, 2001 The writer is a professor of law and ethics in medicine at Washington University.

-------- police

Cop force now up to 6,000 officers

Montreal Gazette
Wednesday 28 March 2001
NICOLAS VAN PRAET The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010328/5080360.html

The spectre of potentially violent protesters and the terror-trail of damage that goes from one city hosting international forums to another means massive security for the Summit of the Americas is absolutely necessary, says Quebec's public security minister.

And Serge Menard, who was himself a protester when he was in university, said privately he thinks "a significant portion" of protesters today don't really understand why they're protesting.

Menard said 6,000 police officers are training for the coming summit meeting, which suggested an increase as other sources to date pegged the number at 5,000.

The minister explained the large number by saying: "There are types of situations that we have to prepare for that we didn't predict in the beginning" like protesters throwing Molotov cocktails.

"We know that they want to perform spectacular acts to get international attention," he said of the more militant protesters. "We know that there are groups that are preparing some violent acts."

At past global summits, the more radical anti-globalization demonstrators trashed stores and set fires.

Protest groups yesterday decried the increased police presence at the meeting of 34 heads of state as overkill.

"It's a climate of terror that they're creating," said Ian Renauld-Lauze, a member of CASA, the Summit of the Americas Welcoming Committee.

"Every week, police announce new measures of repression," said the Ligue des Droits et Libertes:

The group, of which Menard was one of the founders, called for political leaders to put police power in check.

Yesterday, the minister desperately wanted to assure the public that that's exactly what will happen.

"We are giving as much importance to the security of peaceful protesters and to the respect of their rights as to the security of the participants of the Summit of the Americas," Menard said.

"Our security measures are not designed to intimidate anybody."

Some protesters and residents here have said a huge police presence will spark violence and that freeing up spaces in local prisons amounts to intimidating protesters.

The minister countered: "That's like saying firefighters are responsible for starting fires."

The tactics of groups like the Black Bloc "concern us enough to justify our preparations," the minister said.

In fact, the Black Bloc is not a formal, organized group but a loose connection of individuals bound together by a certain planned tactic or duty - tactics that can include selectively destroying property, which many anarchists consider symbols of a repressive capitalist system.

The Quebec government has freed up spaces in local prisons to be humanitarian, the minister said.

"It's not a hotel. But there will be beds, you can wash, you can eat hot meals, you can meet with lawyers; there will be interpreters and international observers."

The minister said Quebec is readying itself in three ways. First, police will be trained to react to peaceful protest and violent protest. Experts on crowd reaction will give police "psychological preparation" so "police can keep their cool," Menard said. Second, crown lawyers will prime police for one full day on the legal rights of protesters and the use of legitimate force. Finally, police discipline will be enforced to make sure that officers follow orders from their commanders.

Four commanders, one from each police force involved, will give officers the orders. Every officer will be identified by a number on his helmet during the summit. News cameras and other cameras play a part in ensuring officers don't lash out at protesters without reason, Menard reasoned.

---

Cop used badge to help drunk Facing 10 years in prison

Montreal Gazette
Wednesday 28 March 2001
GEORGE KALOGERAKIS The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010328/5080626.html

A South Shore police officer was found guilty yesterday of trying to save a friend from drunk-driving charges by flashing his badge at a crime scene.

Eric Turcotte faces up to 10 years in prison following his conviction on charges of obstructing justice.

He was a part-time police officer for the Saint-Constant/Delson force when a friend wrapped his car around a stoplight pole early one morning in October 1998.

The friend, Francois Brisson, walked from the accident scene on Highway 132 and Georges Gagne Blvd. in Saint-Constant to Turcotte's home, knocking on his window to wake him up.

Turcotte went to the accident scene and found two Surete du Quebec officers examining the smashed Volkswagen Jetta and scratching their heads about where the driver went.

Turcotte showed the two officers a wallet with his badge and asked them to step away from a crowd of people for a talk.

The 29-year-old rookie officer told them Brisson was the driver but asked the SQ to substitute his own name as the one behind the wheel because he was sober.

They refused. And Turcotte didn't insist.

Bartender Made Call

He later told police that Brisson's knock at his window wasn't the first time he saw his friend that night.

At 3 a.m., a bartender at a nearby club called Turcotte to say his friend was drunk.

Turcotte went to pick him up. He took Brisson's car and drove his friend back to Turcotte's home to sleep it off.

But Brisson refused to stay there, and got back behind the wheel of his car and took off. That's when he had the accident.

The day after the crash, Turcotte went to see his union delegate at the Saint-Constant/Delson force.

Turcotte, who was nervous and crying, said he made a mistake, according to the union delegate.

The delegate told him to stop worrying about his friend and get a lawyer for himself.

Union Delegate

Quebec Court Judge Denis Bouchard said Turcotte's defence in the case is unbelievable.

Turcotte's lawyer said his client only asked the SQ officers to put his name down on the official form as a witness, not the driver. They misunderstood him, the lawyer added.

But the judge said that doesn't make sense.

If all Turcotte asked the SQ officers to do was cite him as a witness, why would he go see his union delegate, admit to a mistake, cry or need a lawyer?

Turcotte has already been fired by his police force, which is now called the Roussillon intermunicipal police force after a merger.

Defence lawyer Alain Dubois told the judge he plans to ask for an unconditional discharge, which would leave Turcotte without a criminal record and theoretically able to get another police job. Sentencing arguments will be held in May.

Brisson, 31, of Delson, was found guilty in 1999 of drunk driving and fined $350. He also lost his license for a year.

---

Settlement Talks Stall in Louima Suit Against City and Police Union

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/nyregion/28LOUI.html

Settlement talks in Abner Louima's federal lawsuit against the city and the police union have stalled, and a judge has postponed a conference in the case scheduled for today, according to court papers and people familiar with the case.

Several lawyers involved in the civil rights case filed by Mr. Louima, who was tortured by a police officer, said last week that they hoped that a tentative $8.6 million settlement would be signed at the meeting scheduled for today, when lawyers were to meet at the conference before Cheryl L. Pollak, the magistrate judge overseeing the case.

But Magistrate Pollak issued a brief order yesterday postponing the conference without setting a new date. And she strengthened and put in writing an earlier oral order barring any discussion of the case by the parties to the lawsuit. The order also applies to their lawyers, employees and agents.

As a result, lawyers involved in the case were unwilling to talk yesterday about why the tentative settlement appeared to have stalled.

The tentative accord included no reference to changes in police practices that Mr. Louima, a Haitian immigrant, had sought to try to ensure that, in his words, no one else would suffer as he did.

On Aug. 9, 1997, Officer Justin A. Volpe forced a broken broomstick into Mr. Louima's rectum as he lay handcuffed on the floor in the bathroom of the 70th Precinct station house in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn.

One person familiar with the case said talks to work out the final details broke down because Mr. Louima's legal team was angered by news accounts suggesting that he had "caved in" by abandoning his demands for reform.

Last week, people who had been briefed on the talks said that the city had agreed to pay Mr. Louima $7 million, and that the police union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, had agreed to pay him $1.6 million. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani acknowledged last week that he had agreed to the deal.

The $7 million would be the largest sum the city has ever paid in a police brutality lawsuit, the city comptroller's office has said, and any payment by the union would mark the first time it had been successfully sued in such a case, lawyers said.

The lawsuit named the P.B.A. along with the city, contending that the union and the city were ultimately responsible for what had happened because they had encouraged a climate in the Police Department that fostered misconduct. One officer convicted of trying to cover up the role of a colleague in the attack was a police union delegate at the time of the assault.

Mr. Volpe was convicted of carrying out the attack and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. Five other officers were convicted of taking part in the assault, covering up the role of a colleague or lying about what they knew about the attack. All have been fired.

Last week, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has been an adviser to Mr. Louima since the assault, said Mr. Louima had assured him that there would be no settlement unless police changes were also promised.

Sanford A. Rubenstein, one of Mr. Louima's lawyers, cited the magistrate's order yesterday in refusing to discuss the case.

"As I have said in the past, we are negotiating, we continue to negotiate in the hopes of coming to an amicable disposition," Mr. Rubenstein said.

Joe Mancini, a spokesman for the P.B.A., and Lawrence Khan, the chief litigating assistant in the corporation counsel's office, which is handling the case for the city, both declined to comment, citing the magistrate's order against discussing the case.

---

Our Towns: Scapegoat Day Over Profiling on Turnpike

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By MATTHEW PURDY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/nyregion/28TOWN.html

TRENTON -- For the last week, state senators have been sharpening the blade for Peter G. Verniero.

Mr. Verniero was Gov. Christie Whitman's attorney general when New Jersey made its final, fumbling attempt to deny the existence of racial profiling by state troopers on the turnpike. It turned out to be as effective as denying the existence of the turnpike itself would have been.

So when the Legislature opened hearings on racial profiling last week, intended to purge the state of the sins of its past, there was little doubt who would end up the villain.

Mr. Verniero is now a justice of the State Supreme Court. But he might as well be a sheep with foot-and-mouth disease. When Mr. Verniero appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, he will be confronted with all the painful questions of the racial profiling in what promises to be a spectacle of officials taking aim at one of their own.

That's why he gets grudging sympathy from unusual quarters.

"They have to pick someone to blame it on," said Barbara Smith of Montclair, the mother of a black state trooper who is suing the state for discrimination. "They can't say they all had a piece of it."

If only the issue was that short and simple, she said. "I recall sitting in my living room, having a meeting and discussing with other parents how to teach our children what to do if they're stopped by the police," said Ms. Smith, remembering an event from 20 years ago as she watched the hearings yesterday.

Just as racial profiling is a symptom of the nation's larger racial divide, the effort by New Jersey's politicians to disentangle themselves from it reveals another face of the divide. All of the minorities at the hearing are in the audience, watching the mostly monochromatic state power structure work its way out of a jam.

"It's like slavery," said Venus Hannah of Plainfield, who was watching the hearings. "The Caucasians were fed up with it and wanted something done about it."

The state has taken steps in the past to deal with racial profiling, particularly at the beginning of the administration of Gov. Jim Florio in the early 1990's. But it's hard for some in the audience not to marvel at how a political switch was thrown in the last two years, and the language of outrage completely replaced the longstanding official silence.

"I guess politicians wait until it's the right time," James Settle, the pastor of the Faith In Jesus Christ Mission Church in Newark, said with a hint of sarcasm. "Five years ago, four years ago, that wasn't the time to do it, and there were no black people who could make them do it."

BUT off camera, racial profiling on the turnpike is still a political rumble strip at the State House, a subject worth steering clear of if you want a smooth ride.

"I can't talk to you and that's my boss coming down the hall," a young black man who works for the Legislature said when asked for his personal views of the hearings.

An African-American employee in a legislative office of the State House basement, asked his opinion of the hearings, declined to comment with a wry smile. "Just take a walk down the street," he said, motioning outside the State House. "You won't have to go far."

Indeed. "They just noticed this?" said Kevin Wisely, 23, an immigrant from Guatemala working at a jewelry and electronic store three blocks from the State House. "It's been going on forever."

Across the street from the State House, Diannia L. Jones, a data entry clerk for the State Health Department, said she had experienced racial profiling. The instances included twice being confronted by the police, once with guns drawn, who thought she was Joanne D. Chesimard, a convicted killer of a state trooper who escaped from a New Jersey prison and wound up in Cuba. "Do the police think all black women look like Joanne Chesimard?" she asked.

Ms. Jones, 42, said she was gratified that the hearings were happening, "but it's bad, because it's been going on for a long time but people didn't want to face it."

Across the street, in the State House, the politicians are now eager to face it. Or at least they are eager to have Mr. Verniero face it.

He was a big cheese at a young age. Counsel to the governor, attorney general, justice of the Supreme Court. But Mr. Verniero has been cut down to size by racial profiling. Now he's just cheese. And today, he'll be standing alone.

---

Ex-Aide Recalls a 1997 Racial Profiling Memo He Gave Verniero

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By LAURA MANSNERUS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/nyregion/28TROO.html

TRENTON, March 27 - A former aide to Peter G. Verniero told a legislative committee today that he gave Mr. Verniero data that he thought should be passed along to federal civil rights investigators who were examining racial profiling by the New Jersey State Police.

The former aide, Alexander P. Waugh Jr., now a Superior Court judge, testified that when Mr. Verniero was state attorney general, he gave him a memo dated July 29, 1997, with documents including findings from one state police station that blacks and Hispanics accounted for nearly two-thirds of the drivers searched by troopers.

When he later asked Mr. Verniero about the report, Judge Waugh said, "The attorney general said to me, `I don't know' or `I haven't read it yet,' and then I lost track."

Mr. Verniero, now a State Supreme Court justice, is the central character at the hearings and is scheduled to testify for a full day Wednesday. Judge Waugh was the latest in a series of witnesses who have told the State Senate Judiciary Committee that Mr. Verniero was given documents that should have alerted him to discriminatory practices by state troopers; the committee is trying to determine whether he knew about such evidence before he acknowledged in April 1999 that profiling was "real, not imagined."

At the time, Mr. Verniero had just been nominated to the Supreme Court and, after brushing aside legal challenges and public complaints for two years, was suddenly answering growing criticism of his office. He was also under increasing pressure from the Justice Department.

He has maintained, both in testimony two years ago and in a 79-page statement released yesterday, that he was given only sketchy statistics from the state police and believed assurances that racial profiling was not a problem.

The same committee questioned Mr. Verniero in earlier hearings on racial profiling in April 1999, and again two weeks later, during his court confirmation hearings. On those occasions, the senators asked Mr. Verniero what he knew about evidence of profiling. Now the committee also wants to know whether Mr. Verniero answered truthfully when he said the issue "crystallized in my mind" only in the spring of 1998, when the shooting of three black and Hispanic men during a stop on the New Jersey Turnpike drew national attention.

Tonight, another former aide, First Assistant Attorney General Paul Zoubek, testified that when they were preparing for the April 1999 hearings, Mr. Verniero told him that he had only recently seen the damaging information from the state police.

Mr. Zoubek acknowledged that the state's investigation of troopers' conduct all but collapsed when Mr. Verniero was confirmed by the Senate and Mr. Zoubek stepped in as acting attorney general. He said shutting it down was his own decision.

In his testimony earlier, Judge Waugh repeatedly voiced misgivings about his own inattention as he described documents ignored, edited or lost as the attorney general sought to avoid a court challenge from the Justice Department. At the time, Judge Waugh was in charge of answering the department's requests.

"This situation is a public official's worst nightmare," he said. "In hindsight, you see things that should have been done differently and I wish I had done them differently."

The committee also heard today that the attorney general's office did not give the defense requested data on traffic stops during the long-running case in which a trial court found a "de facto policy" of profiling.

William H. Buckman, a defense lawyer in the so-called Soto litigation in Gloucester County, testified that he asked prosecutors to produce any documents favorable to the defense, as they are constitutionally required to do, but received none of the reports on highway stops and searches that were later found.

Mr. Buckman said he was told by the deputy attorney general handling the case, John M. Fahy, that the information was not relevant or was too burdensome to obtain.

The judge in the Soto litigation ruled in 1996 that the prosecution's evidence obtained in searches of the defendants' cars was tainted by the conduct of the state police in traffic stops on the turnpike.

The state brought an appeal before Mr. Verniero took office; he continued to defend the police until 1999, when the appeal was withdrawn.

Judge Waugh, who was the first executive assistant attorney general, left the office in January 1998, about a year and a half after the Justice Department inquiry began. He said that after top aides discussed the department's request for documents with Mr. Verniero in late 1996, "if I got a document I thought he should see, I would send it to him."

Like the two deputy attorneys general who testified last week that they received and passed along information from the state police, Judge Waugh said the attorney general understood the importance of the data showing that minority drivers were much more likely than whites to have their cars searched.

---

Verniero Denies Withholding Profiling Data

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/nyregion/AP-Racial-Profiling.html

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- New Jersey's former attorney general denied Wednesday withholding evidence of racial profiling by state troopers from federal investigators but said he regrets not questioning police more thoroughly about allegations they targeted minority drivers.

Verniero, now a state Supreme Court justice, said he agreed to appear before a state Senate committee investigating racial profiling so the public could better understand what transpired during his tenure as attorney general.

``Racial profiling has existed for many years. I hope we can arrive at the day when this humiliating ... practice is stamped out,'' Verniero said.

Senate investigators are examining the state's response to racial profiling, including whether Verniero initially tried to squelch evidence of it.

Verniero first admitted state police were targeting minorities in an April 1999 report issued one year after two white troopers fired shots at a van stopped for speeding on the New Jersey Turnpike and wounded three men, all minorities.

The day before releasing the report, Verniero had announced an indictment against the troopers accusing them of falsely reporting that some black motorists they pulled over were white. Witnesses have testified that Verniero rushed to release the report because the Justice Department planned a civil rights lawsuit.

The troopers have said they fired in self-defense, thinking the van's driver was trying to run them over.

Some witnesses have testified that Verniero received a study in May 1997 that said minorities made up 90 percent of people searched during traffic stops. Similar findings in Maryland led to federal oversight prohibiting racial profiling in the state.

Verniero denied knowing of the 1997 statistics at the time and said he had never instructed anyone to withhold them.

He also defended the timing of the indictment against the troopers, which aides feared could jeopardize the investigation of the shooting itself.

Verniero said he wanted to take action before the shooting's one-year anniversary because the public was losing confidence in the attorney general's office and the state police.

``It was a time in my office where credibility was an issue. The public had lost faith in the police's ability to police itself,'' Verniero said.

Verniero's report and indictments against the troopers were released just after then-Gov. Christie Whitman nominated him to the state Supreme Court.

Whitman, now the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has said Verniero did ``nothing wrong'' in his handling of racial profiling allegations but that she and Verniero were slow to realize profiling was a problem.

---

2 Members of Police Review Panel Criticize Plan for Expanded Power

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/nyregion/28CCRB.html

Two members of the independent agency that investigates complaints of police abuse in the city yesterday sharply criticized the way the Giuliani administration planned to expand the agency's powers, saying that it would undermine the panel's credibility and independence.

The two members of the agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, have said they support expanding the panel's powers. In a meeting at the board's Manhattan offices yesterday, however, they expressed serious concerns about the way the administration plans to put the expansion into effect.

The plan to expand the board's power, announced by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik in January, would give the review board the authority to prosecute officers that it found had committed abuses. Currently, the board investigates cases and sends its findings to the Police Department, which prosecutes them.

One of the primary issues discussed yesterday was whether new legislation would be required to transfer prosecuting powers to the board. The administration's chief lawyer, Corporation Counsel Michael D. Hess, wrote in a ruling on the plan dated Friday that the commissioner's charter- mandated authority to prosecute officers could simply be delegated to the board. Therefore, the administration contends, no new legislation would be needed.

But William F. Kuntz II, the board's longest-serving member, argued that without legislation giving power to the board, the ultimate authority would remain in the hands of the commissioner, who could withdraw it at any time.

"If we're going to have this responsibility, we should have the authority, and it should be done in a lawful manner," Mr. Kuntz said.

Another serious concern, Mr. Kuntz said, was the city's insistence that the plan take effect by May 7. To meet that deadline, the city proposed assigning Police Department lawyers to the review board to prosecute cases until the agency could hire its own prosecutors.

Such a move, Mr. Kuntz said, would send the wrong message to the public. "What's the rush to do this?" he asked at a meeting of a board committee set up to review the proposed changes. "If we're going to do it, let's get a terrific chief prosecutor in that the public and police have confidence in; let's hire up a staff."

The concerns of Mr. Kuntz, who has served on the board since 1987 and was appointed by the City Council, were shared by Charles M. Greinsky, also a Council appointee.

After the hearing, a spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani dismissed Mr. Kuntz's concerns. "Any time there is innovation, there are bound to be naysayers," said the spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel. "Only in government circles would four and a half months be considered rushing. This plan was announced in January; it will be implemented by May."

Critics have long complained that police prosecutors too often fail to act on credible cases referred by the review board. In particular, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have said the disciplinary process has been too weak to curb brutality, and they have been negotiating with the city to change the process. Officers, on the other hand, frequently complain that the disciplinary process is influenced by internal department politics.

During the two-hour session of the board committee, Mr. Kuntz, at times angry and at times sardonic, dissected the city plan, which was laid out in a draft memorandum of understanding and in Mr. Hess's ruling. He questioned whether board prosecutors would have as much access as police prosecutors have had to information from the personnel files of accused officers.

He also cited concerns raised by the police unions. The unions have joined in opposition to the plan, saying that they had not been consulted and that some issues raised by the proposals are subject to collective bargaining.

Mr. Kuntz also said the city had provided no details on how it would expand the board's budget to handle the increased responsibilities. And he dismissed the temporary assignment of Police Department prosecutors to the review board, noting that the department's disciplinary system has long come under fire, not only from department critics but also from a mayoral panel.

"I don't want people dressed up as C.C.R.B. prosecutors who work for the police," he said. "I am not going to be party to a charade."

For the administration to put the plan into effect by May 7, a majority of the 13-member board must vote by Friday to endorse the memorandum and the proposed changes to the agency's rules. The measure must be put to a vote by Friday because, under city law, proposed changes to the administrative code must be published 30 days in advance to allow for public comment.

Frank H. Wohl, the board chairman, can either call a full board meeting for Friday for a vote or delay it until the next scheduled board meeting on April 11, in which case the city would be unable to put the measure into effect on May 7.

---

HARTFORD CONNECTICUT: 2 FORMER OFFICERS SENTENCED

New York Times
March 28, 2001
Metro Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/nyregion/28MBRF.html

Two former Hartford police officers were sentenced to probation yesterday for their role in the sexual abuse of prostitutes in the Hartford area. The former officers, Salvatore Abbatiello III, 37, and Jose Pizarro, 36, had pleaded guilty to federal charges. Mr. Abbatiello admitted being present while another officer had sex with prostitutes. Mr. Pizarro admitted providing fellow officers with a camera used to take nude pictures of the prostitutes. Mr. Abbatiello was sentenced to two years' probation, and Mr. Pizarro received 18 months' probation. (AP)

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Police computer messages rife with slurs

USA Today
03/28/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-28-police.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The District of Columbia police chief is promising to find and punish officers who sent racist, vulgar and otherwise derogatory computer messages through the department's communication system.

"If that's half the force, I'm going to deal with it swiftly," Chief Charles Ramsey said Wednesday.

Ramsey quietly launched an audit of police e-mails three weeks ago, and last week was informed that large numbers of messages included ethnic and racial slurs, sexually inappropriate content and offensive comments about homosexuals.

"There aren't many folks who weren't offended by this," Ramsey said in a WTTG-TV interview. He said he had hoped to keep confidential an investigation by the department's Internal Affairs Division but that someone leaked the information to the media.

"This has compromised the investigation," Ramsey said, adding that it may be more difficult to complete the probe.

A sampling of the more than 4 million messages sent over a year's period indicated that perhaps 3 million dealt with legitimate police business. Those included license and background checks and other operational matters. The chief said the remaining 25% showed evidence of improper use of the system.

"We've got a lot of vulgar language being used, and there's some evidence of racial profiling," Ramsey said, adding that white, black and Hispanic officers were involved.

Of the 572,063 people who live in the district, more than 75% are racial or ethnic minorities.

Police officials concede that perhaps 10% of the 3,560 officers now on the force may have been involved in sending inappropriate messages. The chief said the number could be lower or higher.

Some of the e-mails reportedly include content about illegal drug use by officers and sexual activity on the job.

"It's pretty bad," said Ramsey. He has promised to refer any evidence of criminal activity or civil rights violations to the Justice Department.

-------- spying

China: U.S. scholar admits spying

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By MARTIN FACKLER Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540355

BEIJING (AP) - In its first specific accusation against a detained U.S.-based scholar, China said Tuesday that she has confessed to spying for foreign intelligence agencies.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman refused to elaborate or say for whom Gao Zhan allegedly spied. But he rejected Washington's requests that the Chinese-born political scientist be released, saying the case was being investigated ``according to law.''

``Evidence has shown that Gao Zhan accepted missions from overseas intelligence agencies and took funds for spying activities,'' spokesman Sun Yuxi told a news conference.

Previously she was accused of endangering state security, a vague charge often used against dissidents and independence supporters in Tibet and the Muslim region of Xinjiang in the northwest.

Gao, her 5-year-old son Andrew and husband, Xue Donghua, were detained at Beijing's airport on Feb. 11 and whisked away in separate cars. China has said the boy, a U.S. citizen, was held at a Beijing kindergarten.

Xue and his son were reunited and released 26 days later. Gao remains held in an undisclosed location.

Xue denied that his wife was a spy.

``Her research, travel to Taiwan and publications are purely academic _ nothing political,'' Xue said in a statement released Tuesday by Radio Free Asia, a U.S. government-financed broadcaster.

``As for the so-called `overseas funding,' all those who conduct research in any American universities know that researchers usually get funding from all sources,'' Xue's statement said.

The detentions have created a diplomatic row that has risen all the way to the White House. Last week, President Bush said he would bring the case up with visiting Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen.

China had hoped Qian's visit, the first to Washington by a Chinese leader since Bush took office, would set a positive tone for its dealings with the new administration.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday there was no substance to the accusations against Gao.

``We still continue to urge the Chinese government to release Ms. Gao immediately so that she can be reunited with her family in the United States,'' Boucher said. ``We are looking for a more forthcoming response from the Chinese.''

The U.S. Embassy in Beijing has lodged a formal protest of China's failure to inform it of the boy's confinement, as required by treaty whenever a U.S. citizen is detained.

The Embassy also appealed for Gao's release on humanitarian and human rights grounds.

China has said the boy was never in police custody and was well looked after.

Xue and Gao are permanent U.S. residents who have applied for American citizenship. The family was detained as they were ending a three-week visit with family for Chinese New Year.

A research fellow at American University in Washington, Gao has written about Chinese politics and traveled twice to Taiwan, the island democracy that Beijing views as a renegade province.

She is the third Chinese-born researcher in as many years to be detained during a visit home. A Stanford University expert on China's military arrested in 1998 was sentenced last month to 10 years in prison on espionage charges.

---

Russia wants 4 U.S. diplomats out

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By DAVID McHUGH Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540494

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia followed through Tuesday on its vow to retaliate for a U.S. decision to expel four Russian diplomats, giving a U.S. official the names of four American diplomats who must leave Moscow.

The four weren't identified. U.S. officials were still studying the list, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in Washington. He called the expulsion order ``unwarranted and unfortunate,'' refusing to rule out retaliatory action.

Moscow's move follows the announcement last week that four Russians were being told to leave the United States within 10 days in connection with a spy scandal, and that 46 more Russians would be told to leave by summer.

A statement from Russia's Foreign Ministry said the names were given to U.S. Deputy Chief of Mission John Ordway. Spokesmen for the ministry and the U.S. embassy declined to give the employees' names or other details.

The statement said the employees were ordered to leave for ``activities incompatible with their diplomatic status,'' a phrase usually used for allegations of spying.

The United States last Thursday declared four Russian diplomats persona non grata and gave them 10 days to leave. It also told 46 others to leave by July 1. The expulsions follow the arrest of veteran FBI agent Robert Hanssen on charges of spying for Russia.

``The actions we took were a direct response to the Hanssen case and the longstanding problem of Russian intelligence presence in the United States,'' Boucher said. ``With our action, we considered the matter closed.''

U.S. officials have said Russian officials informed them that 46 U.S. diplomats would have to leave Russia by this summer.

Expulsions are a standard way for one country to express displeasure about another country's spying operations.

Hanssen's arrest this month _ he allegedly spied for Moscow for 15 years _ aggravated relations between the two countries.

Russian-American relations began the 1990s with a burst of optimism after the fall of the Soviet Union and communism, but have been edgier over the past two or three years. Irritants have included the NATO-led bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, which Russia opposed, and U.S. plans for a national missile defense.

The United States in turn has criticized Russia's war against separatist rebels in Chechnya and has objected to Russian plans for weapons sales to Iran.

But the two countries continue to cooperate on a host of programs, including law enforcement and arms control.

---

Lost in America

Slate
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
By Jeremy Derfner, Amanda Fazzone and Sian Gibby
http://slate.msn.com/cx/OtherMags/01-03-26/OtherMags.asp_3FShow_3D3/26/2001

New York Times Magazine, April 1 The cover story details the difficult relocation of the Lost Boys of Sudan, who journeyed from the killing fields of Sudan, to a refugee camp in Kenya, and finally to cities and towns throughout America. Three Lost Boys recently moved to Fargo, N.D., chasing the American dream, but so far have found mostly alienation, financial struggle, and rich American food that gives them diarrhea.

... A piece asks if teen opera sensation Charlotte Church is classical music's redemption or its ruin. She sells millions of records and brings new listeners into the fold, but her voice is not fully mature, she keeps moving further into the murky netherworld where true opera and popular music meet, and part of her appeal is physical (à la Britney Spears).

... An article describes a man's search to prove that his father's death was a CIA plot, not a suicide. The official CIA story: Frank Olson took LSD as part of a brainwashing experiment in 1953, freaked out, and jumped out a window. But Eric Olson believes the CIA dropped his father out the window because he had doubts about the morality of the experiments and therefore posed a security risk. -J.D.

---

Russia's Spy Riposte: Film Catches Americans in the Act

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28RUSS.html

MOSCOW, March 27 - Indulging its own version of spy mania, Russia's intelligence services released television film on the main news channels tonight showing United States military attachés buying information from a Russian agent.

The news programs also broadcast an audio tape of a Russian scholar, currently on trial for espionage, phoning Capt. Robert Brannon, a senior American naval attaché here, and discussing what kind of armaments were aboard a Russian intelligence ship sent to the Balkans during the NATO military campaign in 1999.

In a day of Russian protest and bluster following the Bush administration's decision to expel 50 Russian diplomats for espionage, Moscow again summoned the ranking American diplomat here, John Ordway, and gave him the names of four diplomats who must leave the country within 10 days. Russian law enforcement officials promptly identified one of the diplomats as Paul A. Hollingsworth, a first secretary at the embassy. Embassy officials said they would not comment on the identities of those expelled.

The Russians did not demand the expulsion of the C.I.A.'s Moscow station chief, a United States intelligence official said. The station chief, like his counterpart in the Russian S.V.R. in Washington, is known to the host government, and is the official liaison channel for contacts between the security services. The United States did not expel the Russian station chief in Washington, either.

The Russian action was virtually identical to the American move.

Moscow declared four American diplomats persona non grata, and demanded that 46 others leave by July, the official said. By this afternoon in Washington, none of the United States diplomats - presumably C.I.A. officers under diplomatic cover - had left Moscow.

Though both President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia have said they hope that the espionage crisis will not harm relations between the two countries, it seemed clear that Russian officials were seeking to discredit American arguments that it was Russia's overexuberance that brought on the crisis.

The conflict has spilled over to the diplomatic field, with Russia's Foreign Ministry lashing the Bush administration over the meeting of senior American diplomats in Washington with Ilyas Akhmadov, a representative of the Chechen rebel leadership that the Russian Army has been trying to defeat. Moscow's protest carried a more indignant tone today after three car bomb attacks during the weekend attributed to Chechen militants killed 22 people. All the attacks were in the Stavropol region, which adjoins Chechnya.

"After the Stavropol events," said Aleksandr Yakovenko, a Russian Foreign Ministry official, "after all those bloody terrorist acts, this meeting in Washington looks immoral to say the least."

At the same time, Mr. Putin's government appeared to be going out of its way today to accentuate its initiatives in places where the Bush administration has either hesitated to become more deeply involved, as in Israel, or has resorted to military force, as in Iraq.

In a message to the Arab summit conference in Jordan, Mr. Putin proposed suspending all economic sanctions against Iraq on the condition that it accept a "revival of international monitoring" that would prevent it from pursuing "banned military programs."

As for Israel and the Palestinian territories, Mr. Putin said the "most burning issue" now was to normalize the situation by Israel's "lifting blockades, including economic ones, from the West Bank and Gaza and ending violence."

On the spy front, a state television broadcast opened with a man standing at a telephone booth near the American Embassy in Moscow. He was placing a call to Captain Brannon, stationed here as a naval attaché since 1998. The caller, Anatoly Popov, was identified as a Russian convicted of attempted hijacking in 1976.

The video documented how a meeting was arranged at a cafe near the embassy. While Captain Brannon paced the sidewalks near the restaurant, two unidentified American military attachés were shown meeting with Mr. Popov and paying him $400 for a maritime chart of the Yenisei River delta area in northern Siberian. Mr. Popov also promised to provide a map of "minefields."

In the broadcast, Mr. Popov said he later turned himself in, fearing arrest.

In a second episode involving Captain Brannon, the television broadcast played an audio tape of a telephone conversation between the naval officer and Igor Sutyagin, a researcher at Russia's U.S.A. and Canada Institute charged in 1999 with revealing state secrets after he helped compile a book on Russia's strategic nuclear arsenal. The book was based on unclassified literature and his own scientific analysis.

Mr. Sutyagin's defense has rested on the assertion that he never had any access to classified materials. On the audio tape, he answered Captain Brannon's questions about what kind of armaments were aboard the Russian intelligence ship Liman.

Captain Brannon was interested in whether the crew of the Liman was equipped with shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles as it prepared to leave for the Balkans. Mr. Sutyagin said the ship did not have such weapons. Mr. Sutyagin wanted to know if Captain Brannon had received his fax, and the American replied that he had, adding that he had been much more pleased with the "envelope" Mr. Sutyagin had sent.

The contents of the "envelope" were not disclosed, but a Russian commentator said that when Captain Brannon's name came up in the trial of Mr. Sutyagin, the American official left the country abruptly. He later returned.

---

Beijing Says Chinese-Born Scholar on Visit From U.S. Is a Spy

New York Times
March 28, 2001
By ERIK ECKHOLM
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28BEIJ.html

BEIJING, March 27 - The Chinese government today accused a United States-based sociologist who has been held in isolation for more than six weeks of being a paid spy for "overseas intelligence agencies."

But a government spokesman offered no details of the allegations, in a case that has caused puzzlement and outrage among American officials and scholars.

The sociologist, Gao Zhan, a research fellow at American University in Washington, had come to China with her husband and 5-year-old son for a three-week visit with relatives, her husband said. They were detained at the Beijing airport on Feb. 11 as they checked in to fly home.

The son, who was born in the United States and is an American citizen, was separated from both parents and kept in a government nursery for 26 days before he and the father were released and allowed to return to their home in Virginia.

The Chinese authorities did not tell the American Embassy of the boy's detention, in violation of an agreement requiring notification within four days when a citizen is held for any reason, and the embassy has protested. The parents have permanent resident status in the United States but are Chinese citizens.

State security agents ignored the parents' plea to let the boy stay with his grandparents, who live in China. In Washington last week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called the boy's treatment outrageous, and General Powell and President Bush urged a visiting Chinese official last week to secure Ms. Gao's release.

At a news briefing today, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Sun Yuxi, said, "Evidence has shown that Gao Zhan accepted missions from overseas intelligence agencies and took funds for spying activities."

Asked whether Ms. Gao had spied for the United States, a State Department spokesman in Washington said, "There is no substance to these allegations," and repeated the call for her immediate release.

Ms. Gao's husband, Xue Donghua, a computer engineer with Electronic Data Systems, said he was mystified. "I totally believe that all her activities were academically related," he said today in a telephone interview.

Ms. Gao's research is focused on women's and family issues and the only money she received was research grants from American foundations, Mr. Xue said. He said he had been blindfolded and taken to a house outside Beijing, where he had been kept for 26 days.

-------- terrorism

Peru quizzes Berenson on activism

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By RICK VECCHIO Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540510

LIMA, Peru (AP) - Lori Berenson, the American on trial for alleged collaboration with leftist guerrillas in Peru, insisted Tuesday that she worked only as a secretary _ and not a military aide _ to a top Salvadoran guerrilla leader years ago.

Berenson, 31, said she was personal assistant to Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a commander of El Salvador's former Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN.

``We are concluding that you were with a person who acted in the military wing of the Farabundo Marti and that he acted in the political wing,'' said presiding magistrate Marcos Ibazeta, grilling Berenson about her role with the FMLN.

Berenson said she was involved solely in the peace talks that ended El Salvador's civil war in 1992. She pointed out that the ex-guerrilla is now a congressman, who goes by his real name, Leonel Gonzalez.

``I don't know where you are getting the idea that I worked in the military wing,'' she said. ``I did no work related to that.''

In San Salvador last week, Gonzalez confirmed that Berenson was his personal secretary and told The Associated Press that Berenson ``never had any relationship with our military structures.''

A secret Peruvian military court convicted Berenson of treason in 1996 and sentenced her to life in prison for allegedly helping Peru's Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement plan a thwarted takeover of Congress.

But after years of pressure from the United States, Peru's highest military court overturned the conviction in August, leading to the new civilian trial that began last week on the lesser charges of ``terrorist collaboration.''

Prosecutors allege she rented a house in 1995 as a hide-out for the Tupac Amaru rebels and collected information with the wife of the group's top commander for a planned attack on Congress.

Berenson denies the charges and maintains she did not know her housemates were rebels.

During Berenson's cross-examination Tuesday, Ibazeta asked the former Massachusetts Institute of Technology student about her decision to drop out of school in the late 1980s to devote herself to a U.S. movement that supported El Salvador's leftist rebels.

She said she believed the Salvadoran guerrilla movement was ``legitimate in that there was no other way to change what for them was unjust.''

Her lawyer, Jose Luis Sandoval, who has argued that Berenson was duped by the Tupac Amaru guerrillas, said Tuesday that the court was trying to convict her for her political ideals.

``Obviously, ideas, opinions and beliefs cannot stand as criminal evidence for a trial,'' he said after Tuesday's proceedings. ``Her opinions should not be evidence for this trial, but they're clearly trying to use them that way.''

During opening testimony last week, Berenson accused authorities of manufacturing evidence, forcing witnesses to testify against her, and politically manipulating her case.

---

PERU: AMERICAN'S TRIAL

New York Times
March 28, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28BRIE.html

Lori Berenson, the American on trial charged with collaboration with leftist guerrillas, was questioned about her work as secretary to a top El Salvadoran guerrilla leader. Ms. Berenson, 31, said she had been personal assistant to Salvador Sánchez Ceren, a commander of El Salvador's Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front but did not work in its military operation, only on the peace talks that ended El Salvador's civil war in 1992. (AP)

-------- activists

Protesters try to derail nuke train

Australian News Network
28mar01
From The Times, AFP
http://news.com.au/newspulse/pulseframe/0,4711,1839783^401,00.html

ANTI-NUCLEAR protesters sabotaged a railway track and clashed with German police as a heavily guarded train full of radioactive waste travelled from France to northern Germany for burial in a salt mine.

Within minutes of its midnight border crossing near Karlsruhe, police said they had to drag about 15 demonstrators off the tracks in front of the slow-moving train.

Environmental groups, angry at a German government decision to resume waste shipments three years after they were suspended over safety fears, say 10,000 demonstrators are ready to converge on the area of the shipment's final destination.

About 30,000 police and special forces were in position along the 500km route from the border to the storage site at Gorleben, south of Hamburg, hoping to avert running battles that attended the last waste shipments in 1997.

Greenpeace staged a token demonstration as the train rolled out of a station near the French recycling centre at La Hague on Monday. Five locomotives are involved in the transport, two travelling ahead to make sure the line has not been sabotaged. At the beginning and the end of the train there are carriages filled with riot police - 1200 in all. The train has to stop for regular radioactivity checks - the police then disembark and surround the stations while the Geiger counters are put to work.

The protesters are furious that Germany's Green Party, junior partner in the Government of Gerhard Schroder, is allowing the nuclear transports to continue. Green Party leaders say they oppose violent protests against what has been called the "hot train", and argue that waste transports are essential if the Government is to achieve its ambition of closing all atomic power stations within 30 years.

Nineteen reactors provide a third of Germany's electricity but Mr Schroder's Centre-Left coalition struck a deal with the industry last year to phase out nuclear power by around 2025, a deadline many Greens supporters regard as far too long.

It has also left the problem of what to do with waste in the meantime. Many years' worth of it had built up at La Hague before Germany took some back in three shipments in 1996 and 1997.

In the face of French reluctance to reprocess further German waste before Germany took more back, Mr Schroder agreed to a resumption of shipments in January. About two a year are planned for the next few years, French officials say.

Police arrested several youths wearing balaclavas as they tried to rip up a stretch of rail near the Gorleben burial site on Monday. In Dannenberg, from where the waste will make the final 25km journey to Gorleben by road, a further 150 protesters were encircled by the police. All along the route, action is planned, such as the tugging down of electric cables and human blockades of railway lines and stations.

Police have pledged to be tougher against protesters than four years ago, when they used truncheons, tear gas and water cannon to repel the demonstrators.

"We will be more determined than last time and we will act rather than react," said Hans Reime, the police commander. "Nevertheless, I will try everything in my power to prevent injuries."

---

German nuke activists to lose battle, may win war

Planet Ark
GERMANY: March 28, 2001
Story by Mark John
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10273

GORLEBEN, Germany - In dozens of camps in woods surrounding the Gorleben atomic waste dump, anti-nuclear protesters prepared yesterday for a battle they know they cannot win.

The demonstrators, many of them locals angry that their sparsely inhabited region on the river Elbe has been earmarked as a nuclear dumping ground, have their sights on the long term.

"We've no illusions that we can stop the waste reaching the store, but we want to make these transports so expensive that they are neither economically feasible nor politically justifiable," said pensioner Helmut Piethers, one of a band of activists huddled around a campfire by the road to the waste dump.

Few believe they will overcome the mass police presence to seriously delay the arrival of containers of reprocessed nuclear waste from France that are edging through Germany by rail and are due to be delivered on Wednesday.

The quiet roads within 15 km (10 miles) of Gorleben were lined with police vans on the lookout for protest actions like the blockade of a railway bridge.

The mood on both sides was still remarkably relaxed, but that may change as the waste nears its Gorleben dumping ground.

VIOLENCE EXPECTED

"When we start doing our sit-ins tomorrow (Wednesday), the police will be a metre deep here," said a local campaigner, pointing to a stretch of road being patrolled by five mounted policemen.

"Sure, they will use violence to get us off, but because of all the journalists it will be more limited than four years ago," he said of the last transport into Gorleben, when police were criticised for what some called needless brutality.

Many of the demonstrators were not yet sure how they would react when the inevitable clashes with police do come.

"In that situation, the differentiation the media makes between the 'peaceful' demonstrator and the violent is totally artificial," said one demonstrator.

Such a distinction has been sought by the Greens party, struggling to contain anger among their supporters over transports they permitted last year in an accord to phase out nuclear power by the mid-2020s.

The appeal made by the ecologist party earlier this month for its members to refrain from sit-ins or other blockades had little relevance for many of those here.

"Politicians just give you blah-blah," said Susanne Hampf, a local veteran of protest actions who rues her support for the coalition of the Greens with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats in the 1998 general election.

She said past demonstrations had actually changed government policy, discouraging one plan to build a waste reprocessing plant here. "This is the only way we can get results," she said.

---

German police use water cannon on nuke activists

Planet Ark
GERMANY: March 28, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10286

DANNENBERG, Germany - Clashes between German riot police and environmental activists trying to stop a nuclear waste train worsened yesterday as police fired water cannon to disperse protesters.

Police said they fired after protesters in the north German town of Dannenberg shot flares in the direction of the gathered police ranks.

"The situation has become more grave. Protesters have fired flares on police, including helicopters, there are reports that activists are preparing attacks with vinegar acid and a police car was set on fire," a police spokesman said.

The train is carrying slag from a French plant that reprocesses fuel rods from German reactors. It is the first such shipment since a ban imposed three years ago and it has required one of the biggest peacetime security operations Germany has ever seen to keep the line open.

The train was halted near the town of Dahlenburg about 14 km (nine miles) from Dannenberg after activists damaged a section of track by chaining themselves to the line. The six wagon-sized containers were to be unloaded at Dannenberg and moved 25 km (16 miles) by road to Gorleben on Wednesday.

---

Protests slow German nuclear waste train

Planet Ark
GERMANY: March 28, 2001
Story by Folkert Lenz
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10278

LUENEBURG, Germany - Hundreds of German environmental activists brought a heavily guarded nuclear waste train to a brief halt yesterday by rushing massed ranks of riot police, but the controversial cargo rolled on toward its goal.

Carrying slag from a French plant that reprocesses fuel rods from German reactors, the first such shipment since a ban imposed three years ago took one of the biggest peacetime security operations Germany had ever seen to keep the line open.

After a day of cat-and-mouse between demonstrators and the law, including sporadic protests as the train wove a secret route across the heart of Germany, several hundred activists surged through police lines near Lueneburg and blocked the transport some 50 km (30 miles) short of its destination.

Police had some 20,000 officers on hand along the route to try and prevent the battles that marred previous shipments.

It still took them well over an hour to drag the protesters from the tracks - largely without violence - to let the train continue towards the Gorleben nuclear storage facility.

Some activists chanted slogans, others sang folk songs and hymns. About 200 were detained in a special police train.

Others, forced off to the side of the tracks, jeered when the waste eventually rumbled past them at walking pace. One man leapt from a low bridge onto one of the white, armoured waste casks, known as Castors, forcing it briefly to a stop again.

Others earlier used inflatable power boats to dodge police.

The cargo was due at Dannenberg late in the evening, from where the six wagon-sized Castor containers were to be unloaded and moved 25 km (16 miles) by road to Gorleben on Wednesday.

Under pressure from France to ease a backlog of German waste at its La Hague reprocessing plant near Cherbourg, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder lifted the transport ban imposed on safety grounds in 1998. About two cargoes a year are now planned.

CALLS FOR CALM

Environment Minister Juergen Trittin, one of Schroeder's ecologist Greens coalition allies and himself once a protester at Gorleben, called for calm. He sees the waste shipments as an integral part of deal he struck with the electricity industry last year to phase out Germany's 19 reactors by about 2025.

But protesters say they want not so much to block the waste altogether - it has to go somewhere - but to make handling it so expensive that the industry shuts down its reactors now.

"We want to make these transports so expensive that they are neither economically feasible nor politically justifiable," said pensioner Helmut Piethers, huddling by a campfire near Gorleben.

While younger "eco-warriors" are in the vanguard of taking on police, Piethers was not atypical among the angry thousands gathered around Gorleben, on the western bank of the river Elbe.

Organisers expect 10,000 people to block the trucks on Wednesday. Last time, police used water cannon to force the road open.

Germany sends spent fuel rods to France where most of the uranium is recovered. The small amount of waste is heated into a form of glass which is then sealed in metal canisters.

Each Castor - the name is short for Casks for Storage and Transport of Radioactive Material - holds 28 canisters and weighs over 100 tonnes. The canisters will be kept in warehouses at Gorleben pending a decision in several years time on their final disposal. One possibility is burial in a nearby salt mine.

---

German nuclear fuel to resume journey

CNN
March 28, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/03/28/germany.nuclear/index.html

DANNENBERG, Germany -- A cargo of nuclear fuel being carried on a train blocked by anti-nuclear protesters is due to continue its journey by road.

The protesters managed to prevent the heavily guarded train laden with nuclear waste travelling through Germany on Tuesday.

They eventually brought the train to a halt in the north of the country after attaching themselves to the tracks using chains and concrete.

Police decided early on Wednesday to reverse the train to the previous station for unspecified maintenance while trying to clear the track.

The 60-tonne convoy was due to switch from rail to road at Dannenberg to make the last 25 kilometres (16 miles) of the journey on Wednesday morning.

The train, which was transferring six casks from a French plant that reprocesses fuel rods from German reactors, had been travelling to a nuclear storage site at Gorleben on the River Elbe.

Despite one of the biggest peacetime security operations Germany has ever seen, the train was stuck at Sueschendorf, 25 kms (16 miles) away from Dannenberg.

Although police used large drills to cut the protesters from the line, they were also forced to replace sections of track damaged by the cutting process.

The six wagon-sized containers were due to be unloaded on reaching Dannenberg and transferred to trucks for a 25-km (16-mile) road journey to Gorleben. Police said unloading would take between eight and 12 hours.

Organisers said 10,000 people were taking part in the protests, and dozens have been arrested along the route.

Activists were also chained to other stretches of track along the route and further delays to the train looked likely.

Police used water cannon against protesters on Tuesday and there were some scuffles.

A spokesman said five policemen were slightly injured, while demonstrators reported 56 injuries during Tuesday's clashes.

Nuclear deal

Protesters earlier brought the train to a halt near the town of Dahlenburg about 14 kilometres (nine miles) short of Dannenberg on Tuesday night after chaining themselves to the rails.

Officers said that within minutes of the train crossing the French-German border near Karlsruhe on Monday, police had to drag about 15 demonstrators off the tracks in front of the slow-moving train.

The transports are part of a deal struck with the electricity industry last year to phase out Germany's 19 reactors by about 2025.

Germany sends spent fuel rods to France where most of the uranium is recovered. The small amount of waste is heated into a form of glass which is then sealed in metal canisters.

---

Nuclear waste train reaches German town
Shipment was stopped by activists cemented to rails

MSNBC
03/28/01
http://www.msnbc.com/news/550094.asp?cp1=1

DANNENBERG, Germany, March 28 - A train delivering 60 tons of nuclear waste reached this town in northern Germany Wednesday after a journey from France that was repeatedly halted by protesters who sometimes chained themselves to the tracks. Demonstrators threw stones and fireworks at police who responded by firing water cannon as the train pulled into Dannenberg.

POLICE AND MEDICAL crews worked through the night to dislodge four chained protesters who laid across the tracks in freezing temperatures, removing the last one around noon Wednesday.

"I don't think even these people expected it to last so long," police spokesman Wolfgang Klages said.

The buzz of heavy drills echoed at times through the woods in north Germany. Engineers had to repair tracks after cutting them to free the protesters, some of whom cemented their arms into the bed of the rail line.

About 500 people who had gathered to support the group sat down on the rails around them. Police using batons eventually pushed them away. Smaller groups had to be cleared from the tracks in several other places along the line.

The action, by an environmentalist group called Robin Wood, held up the shipment of six casks of reprocessed nuclear waste for 16 hours.

'HATS OFF'

One border guard said the blockade action had clearly been planned well in advance. "Hats off. They really did a good job here," he said.

Officers covered the shivering activists with blankets and handed out helmets to protect them against the bitter cold.

One of the protesters was a 16-year-old girl who was carried away on a stretcher to receive urgent medical care following her night on the tracks in near-freezing temperatures. "She looked in a bad way," said one onlooker.

The train got stuck at Sueschendorf, 16 miles from the railhead where the containers were due to be transferred to flatbed trucks for their final journey to Gorleben on the Elbe river.

Backed up by helicopters and water cannons, some 20,000 police have been deployed in one of Germany's largest peacetime security operations.

On Tuesday, police used water cannon against protesters firing flares and throwing stones and said the scuffles were mostly provoked by leftwing activists, some of whom used slingshots to pelt police with stones. A spokesman said five policemen were slightly injured, while demonstrators reported 56 injuries during Tuesday's clashes.

TWO TRIPS A YEAR PLANNED

At Dannenberg, loading is expected to take between eight and 12 hours before the six wagon-sized containers make their final 16-mile road journey to Gorleben.

Under pressure from France to reduce a backlog of German waste at its La Hague reprocessing plant near Cherbourg, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder lifted a transport ban imposed on safety grounds in 1998. Two cargoes a year are now planned.

The transports are part of a deal struck with the electricity industry last year to phase out Germany's 19 reactors by about 2025 - a timeline considered too long by anti-nuclear activists.

"Our goal is not just to delay the transports - it is also to get the political message across that these transports are crazy and have to stop," Robin Wood's Satari said. "We want the nuclear power plants shut down - immediately."

Germany sends spent fuel rods to France where most of the uranium is recovered. The small amount of waste is heated into a form of glass that is then sealed in metal canisters.

Each container holds 28 canisters and weighs more than 100 tons. The canisters will be kept in warehouses pending a decision in several years time on their final disposal.

---

Protest Halts Train With Nuclear Waste

Los Angeles Times
Wednesday, March 28, 2001
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/20010328/t000026653.html

A heavily guarded train laden with nuclear waste from a French plant that reprocesses fuel rods from German reactors was brought to a halt in northern Germany today by activists who chained themselves to the tracks despite a massive police presence.

Police had to replace sections of track damaged as they cut free the protesters so that the train could continue to its final destination, a nuclear storage site at Gorleben on the Elbe River.

Search the archives of the Los Angeles Times for similar stories about: Demonstrations - Germany, Nuclear Waste. You will not be charged to look for stories, only to retrieve one.

------

Mexican army dismantles bases

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540536

SAN CRISTOBAL DE LAS CASAS, Mexico (AP) - Troops tore down fences, barricades and barracks on Monday and began moving out of one of the last army bases that leftist rebels had demanded closed as part of a drive to move toward peace talks.

The gradual dismantling of the base at Guadalupe Tepeyac began on Wednesday and was continuing. The army has occupied the position since a 1995 government offensive in areas of southern Chiapas state where support for the Zapatista rebels runs high.

President Vicente Fox has shuttered five bases and promised to close this and another army camp west of San Cristobal, thus meeting the rebels' demand that seven bases be dismantled. Fox has said two of the bases will be turned into community centers for local Indians.

Rebels had accused the government of announcing the base closure without complying.

Rebel supporter Hector Morales watched from a distance as soldiers carted off army equipment ranging from typewriters to clothing. Morales recalled how many of the Tojolabal Indian residents fled to the surrounding hills when the army moved in 1995.

``Those who fled want to come back here, to their village, because they're very poor,'' said Morales.

Fox has also released about 100 Zapatista supporters from jail _ another 10 walked out of Chiapas prisons Monday _ and sent an Indian rights bill to congress, all actions demanded by the rebels as a precondition to returning to peace talks stalled since 1996.

The rebel leaders are scheduled to have another demand fulfilled Wednesday, when they will be allowed to address legislators on the floor of congress.

---

German nuclear protests heat up

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By STEPHEN GRAHAM Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540472

DANNENBERG, Germany (AP) - Riot police used water cannons to break up anti-nuclear protesters Tuesday in northern Germany, one of a series of battles across the country with people seeking to block a train delivering radioactive waste.

One policeman was injured when protestors threw stones and several soaked protesters hurried to find shelter from the freezing temperatures following the clash at the railway depot in Dannenberg, the end of the rail portion of the voyage for the 60-ton convoy.

The delivery from France prompted Germany's biggest police operation in years, bracing for conflict with militant protesters who turned the last such shipment in 1997 into chaos. Up to 20,000 police were in action.

The train was expected to arrive here late Tuesday and then complete the last leg of the 375-mile trip across Germany by road early Wednesday. Flatbed trucks will bring the six containers _ each with about 10 tons of radioactive waste sealed in 28 glass casks _ to the Gorleben nuclear waste dump.

Groups of protesters across the country sought to block the train's progress Tuesday by chaining themselves to the train tracks. The protesters object to what they say is highly dangerous radioactive waste being transported through Germany, and hope to make the transports so costly the government will call them to a halt.

The protests escalated as the night wore on in Dannenberg, police said. A group of militant demonstrators fired flares at the officers, destroying one of their vehicles in what Uwe Ruppe, a police spokesman, described as ``massive'' clashes between the two.

About 4,000 protesters huddled around bonfires to stave off bitter temperatures outside the depot here.

Outside Dannenberg, a group of eight Greenpeace activists succeeded in stopping the train just short of its destination by chaining themselves to the tracks in a complex mass of steel chains and heavy locks laced beneath the rails, Stefan Schurig, a Greenpeace spokesman said.

Police said the convoy was halted some 16 miles short of Dannenberg by four people who attached themselves to the line.

``We'll sleep in the open tonight and come back in the morning,'' vowed Jascha Luedeke, a 17-year-old protester from Hipzacker. ``The government has got to see how many people are against this.''

Police vans were stationed at 40-yard intervals along the approach road to the dump at Gorleben, while officers on horseback patrolled the nearby forest and heat-sensitive cameras were being used.

Throughout the day Tuesday, the convoy was greeted by sporadic protests as it chugged northeast from France, where the waste from Germany was reprocessed. It took a detour to avoid the university city of Goettingen, where hundreds of people briefly occupied the tracks. Dozens of people were arrested along the route.

The unloading of the containers was expected to take up to 12 hours, during which they will be measured for radioactivity.

Protesters, many of them young and most wrapped up heavily against the unseasonable cold weather, converged on Dannenberg. The train terminal was sealed off behind barbed wire and a heavy police presence.

The road to Gorleben was also sealed off with wire, as police were keen to avoid a repeat of the clashes four years ago, when protesters threw stones and bottles and police responded with batons and water cannons.

German and French leaders agreed on a resumption of nuclear waste traffic last January, with the German government saying it has tightened safety rules for the transports since the previous administration suspended shipments in 1998 because of radioactive leaks on some containers.

Spent nuclear fuel from German power plants is sent abroad for reprocessing, but the contracts oblige Germany to take back the resulting waste.

The transport put the Greens party _ the junior partner in the governing coalition _ in a tough position, facing accusations of betrayal from some of its core supporters.

The party's parliamentary leader, Kerstin Mueller, welcomed the ``public pressure'' exerted by peaceful protests. But its top officials insisted that the transport was necessary to further government plans to phase out nuclear energy.

---

Fears of a pre-summit 'greenwash'

Montreal Gazette
Wednesday 28 March 2001
MICHELLE LALONDE The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010328/5080359.html

In what environmentalists fear will be a "greenwash of the Summit," Environment Minister David Anderson will host a two-day meeting of 34 environment ministers from across the western hemisphere in Montreal tomorrow.

Anderson said yesterday he will try to persuade his colleagues in other countries to push their governments to get an environmental side accord on to the agenda of the Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit beginning April 19 in Quebec City.

But environmental activists are treating tomorrow's meeting as a dry-run for the full-scale protests expected in Quebec City. No formal deals are expected at the Montreal meeting and, timed as it is, just three weeks before the Quebec City summit, there are worries that a prime opportunity to focus on environmental-related trade issues will be squandered.

Elizabeth May, executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, says she fears the environment ministers are getting together mainly to create the image that environmental issues are being looked after, while a trade deal with potentially devastating environmental impacts is being worked out behind closed doors. No environment ministers have been invited to the trade talks in Quebec City. Unlike the North American Free Trade Agreement, the FTAA deal is so far unlikely to include a side accord on environmental issues.

"One could have a hopeful analysis, that they will challenge the trade sides of their government and exert some pressure on them. On the other hand, one could be concerned that it is an attempt to greenwash the FTAA," May said.

While environmentalists would like to see the Canadian government refuse to sign any free trade deal that does not include strong environmental protection, Anderson said Canada will not go to the talks with that kind of ultimatum.

He said an environmental side accord is "certainly a Canadian objective."

"That doesn't mean to say we are making it a precondition, in the sense that there will be no discussions a month hence unless there is success in the next three days," he said.

May notes that the environmental side accord of the North American Free Trade Agreement is flawed but at least there was an attempt to protect a country's right to legislate to protect its environment.

She says trade deals without strong side agreements on environment, human rights, and labour standards encourage a "race to the bottom." The countries with the cheapest available labour, poorest environmental standards and little regard for human rights attract the most investment because they offer the highest profit margin. Other countries then face economic pressure to follow suit.

May points to several examples where NAFTA has compromised Canada's ability to protect the environment. An Ohio waste-disposal company called S.D. Myers is currently suing Canada for $40 million under provisions of NAFTA's Chapter 11 because Canada temporarily banned the export of PCBs. In another case, Canada tried to ban the toxic gasoline additive MMT, and was forced to back off and settle out of court, paying a penalty of $20 million.

Organizers of tomorrow's protests in Montreal say no violence or civil disobedience is planned. A "call for non-violent action" was sent out by three groups: Operation SalAMI, SOS Gaia, and the Table of Convergence in opposition to the Summit of the Americas, asking protesters to meet in front of the Hotel Omni on Peel and Sherbrooke Sts., where the ministers are meeting, at noon.

---

Internet links anti-globalists Web sites, E-mail, chat rooms, news groups all abuzz with summit plans

Montreal Gazette
Wednesday 28 March 2001
ALLISON HANES The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010328/5080826.html

In the 1960s, it was the music of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez that empowered the protesters who fought for civil rights, the banning of nuclear weapons and an end to the Vietnam War.

Today, it's the Internet that powers the anti-globalization activists who descend on international summits to fight against what they see as corporate influence and the sacrifice of human rights for the sake of trade.

For protesters preparing for the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City next month, the Internet - from Web sites to E-mail, to chat rooms, to news groups - is abuzz with plans for organizing and mobilizing hundreds of groups from dozens of countries.

"It makes certain things possible that could never happen otherwise, mainly the co-ordination of information and ideas over long distances," said David Graeber of the New York City chapter of the protest group Ya Basta!.

Many participant groups have posted long polemics outlining their reasons for opposing the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which is to be negotiated April 20-22 in Quebec by the leaders of 34 countries.

Local groups are using the Web to co-ordinate activities with protesters coming from Latin America, the United States and Europe.

One Quebec City group, Operation Quebec Printemps 2001, is taking requests for lodging via E-mail. "We have 10,000 requests for housing," OQP2001 member Shawn Stensil said. "I had one call from Thunder Bay (Ont.) and another from South Carolina."

Public Citizen, a group founded by consumer activist Ralph Nader, has everything from what to expect from police to tips for driving in Quebec.

"Turning right on a red light is illegal in the province of Quebec (except in a few trial cities,)" a link on Public Citizen's site advises. "Drivers are as bad as in Boston. ... In Quebec City, they have a specialty for ignoring pedestrian crossings."

While the Internet is an essential organizational tool and useful for sharing ideas, anti-globalization activists say it has its limitations.

"In a certain way the whole spirit of the movement is against what the Internet stands for," said Graeber of Ya Basta!.

He calls it a terrible medium for debate and decision-making because the leaderless groups that make up the anti-globalist movement tend to operate by consensus - a task that requires compromise and understanding.

"The Internet tends to bring out macho posturing ... and create a contentious and competitive atmosphere," Graeber said. "Debate is still done face to face, mostly over beer."

Philippe Duhamel, a member of the Montreal-based group SalAMI, said access to the Internet is an issue for those in the international movement.

"Those who are plugged in tend to be middle-aged white men," Duhamel said. "More than 50 per cent of the world population has never touched a phone."

Still, outside observers see the Internet and anti-globalist forces as inextricably linked.

"Like the Internet itself, the anti-globalist movement is a body that manages to survive and even thrive without a head," states a confidential Canadian Security Intelligence Service brief about the outlook for protests to be held in Canada. "The agile use of the Internet allows co-ordinated actions with minimal resources and bureaucracy."

The documents also say CSIS needs to be on the alert for anarchist groups that might be hatching plans for politically motivated violence.

"Encryption by some groups suggests that some of the activities planned could be illegal," a declassified document said.

And, CSIS points out, the Internet itself has been used for protest: anti-globalization "hacktivists" launched attacks against corporations in conjunction with protests at the G8 summit in Cologne, Germany, in 1999.

One expert believes the Internet has been a major catalyst in the evolution of the present-day protest movement - which like the Web itself is international in character, global in outlook and immense in scale.

"It can't be underestimated. It's absolutely huge," said Ron Deibert, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. "It has boosted the organizational and intellectual capacity of civil society around the world."

Deibert has traced the roots of the use of the Internet by the anti-globalist movement to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Though the technology was rudimentary, civil society groups used the Internet to draft an Earth Charter.

The next landmark, he said, was the movement against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, or MAI.

Deibert said he was struck by the Internet's mobilization power when he learned that a motion adopted against the MAI by Mississauga, Ont., city council and one passed in Berkeley, Calif., were identical - both taken from a sample motion posted on the Web site of Public Citizen.

"(The Internet) is fueling this revolution," Deibert said.

"In the past, world politics was a game of states and citizens were spectators. It's very simple when you're only dealing with states, but what happens when you open the doors to other groups? How you include them and who gets to decide? That's the question of the 21st century."

- Some Web sites:
- Public Citizen: www.citizen.org
- OQP2001: www.oqp2001.org
- SalAMI: www.alternatives-action.org/salami/HTML_an/prempageA.html

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Singapore cops warn 2 activists

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By STEVEN GUTKIN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540391

SINGAPORE (AP) - Police issued warnings Tuesday to two civil rights activists who helped organize a protest over Singapore's law allowing detention without trial.

Author and activist James Gomez said he ``reluctantly'' accepted the warning, but said it showed Singapore's Speakers' Corner is insufficient without the freedom to assemble. Authorities set up the forum in a public park last September, allowing citizens to address the public without a permit for the first time.

Several dozen human rights activists gathered at Speakers' Corner for International Human Rights Day on Dec. 10, waving banners and chanting slogans against the Internal Security Act. It was a rare act of defiance in Singapore and a test of official promises that restrictions on free expression are being eased.

Gomez was later ordered to appear before police to answer questions about whether he and his group, a civil rights organization called Think Center, engaged in illegal assembly.

Think Center provided what it said was a copy of Tuesday's police warning to Gomez.

``The police have decided to administer you a stern warning in lieu of prosecution,'' it read. ``You are hereby warned for the said offense and if you commit any similar offense in future, action may be taken to prosecute you in court.''

Police said they had no immediate comment on the warning.

Gomez and Kevin Liew, the other activist who received a warning Tuesday, held a news conference Tuesday night in Speakers' Corner to discuss the police warnings.

``The reason you don't see anyone speaking today, apart from this press conference, is because of the fear generated'' by the investigations, Liew said.

Police on Friday denied Think Center a permit to hold a rally to support an opposition politician who faces ouster from parliament because of his inability to pay fees stemming from defamation lawsuits brought by officials.

A police statement said ``potential law and order problems'' might arise at such an event.

Singapore leaders argue strict laws help maintain social stability.

---

Hong Kong activists jailed

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540369

HONG KONG (AP) - Three pro-democracy activists were sentenced Tuesday to seven days in jail for disrupting a legislative session.

Veteran demonstrator, Leung Kwok-hung, interrupted a question-and-answer session between lawmakers and Hong Kong's political leader, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa in October, shouting ``Down with Tung'' and demanding full democracy in Hong Kong.

Leung, known locally as ``Longhair,'' stunned political observers by collecting 18,000 votes in an unsuccessful run for a Legislative Council seat in September.

Co-defendants Koo Sze-yiu and Ng Kung-siu were also jailed Tuesday.

Leung was convicted last month of desecrating Hong Kong's flag under a law passed just hours after China reclaimed the former British territory in July 1997. A magistrate suspended a fine provided Leung stays out of trouble for a year.

Leung acknowledged scrawling slogans on the red-and-white Hong Kong flag but insisted it was his constitutional right.

Leung has vowed to keep protesting against China and the Hong Kong government, which he claims does not represent the interests of the people.

Last year, Leung was jailed for two weeks for interrupting a similar Legislative Council session.

---

Vietnamese villagers clash with cops

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 3/28/2001
By TINI TRAN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406540376

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - Villagers clashed with police after authorities tore down a Protestant church in the central highlands province of Gia Lai recently, officials said Tuesday.

The events of March 10 offer the first detailed account obtained by The Associated Press of Vietnam's efforts to control religious practices and clamp down on ethnic unrest since February protests in the area.

Three men identified as protest leaders, Siu Puoh, Siu Thuc and Kpa Thap, and other ``stubborn elements'' were arrested for trying to stop police from dismantling a prayer house in Plei Lao hamlet in Chu Se district, 35 miles south of the provincial capital of Pleiku, a local police official said on condition of anonymity.

The official said some people were wounded in the clash between members of the Jarai tribe and police. The official refused to say how many people were arrested or how many officers were involved.

A Chu Se district official said that the three men arrested as leaders forced villagers to donate money to build the wooden prayer house.

International human rights groups have criticized Vietnam for religious repression, citing its crackdown on Protestant ``house churches'' which have taken hold in ethnic minority areas.

Last month, thousands of mainly Christian hill tribespeople protested in the central highlands provinces of Gia Lai and Daklak against land encroachment and government repression of their Protestant faith.

Vietnam accused a U.S.-based exile group, the Montagnard Foundation, of instigating the unrest, saying the group sought an independent nation for ethnic minority people.

The U.S. State Department has urged Hanoi to grant diplomats access to the region. On Tuesday, a Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said, ``Foreign visitors are welcome when local governments can arrange their schedules.''

Vietnam's poor record on human rights and religious freedom is expected to be a major obstacle to a trade deal with the United States.

---

Direct Action to call attention to US fumigations in Colombia -
US activists will bring the visuals to Washington, DC

From: "SOA Watch/NE" <soawatch@hotmail.com>
Wed, 28 Mar 2001

SOA Watch got informed that a group of US activists is planning a nonviolent direct action to call attention to the devastation caused by US sponsored aerial spraying of Monsanto's "Roundup Ultra" in Colombia.

The cherry blossom trees in the US Capitol will be the target of a large scale spraying action on the weekend of the Cherry Blossom Parade (March 31 - April 1) - coinciding with the SOA Watch Days of Resistance. This action will bring the vivid reality of the fumigations to the Nation's Capitol. In the past months, tens of thousands of hectares of crops and rainforest have been decimated by aerial spraying of "Roundup Ultra," a herbicide containing the toxic chemical glyphosate. The herbicide is linked to a variety of eye, respiratory, skin and digestive ailments. This fumigation program is destroying plants, killing birds, mammals and aquatic life in the fragile Amazon ecosystem. The spraying which purportedly targets coca crops (the raw material for cocaine), is part of a 1.3 billion dollar aid package from the US known as "Plan Colombia."

General Montoya, who was trained at the School of the Americas (SOA) and has been also an instructor at the SOA, is responsible for the implementation of "Plan Colombia" in the Putamayo region and has been directly linked to paramilitary groups.

The action will be in solidarity with efforts that have been taken by various other individuals and groups to stop the fumigations in Colombia. Indigenous leaders, farmers, governors from the affected regions in Colombia, as well as human rights activists and concerned US citizens, continue to come to Washington DC to lobby Congress. Colombian peasants and farmers vehemently oppose the spraying and ask for support of manual eradication of the coca plant. Protests and direct actions have taken place and will continue to take place throughout Colombia as well as in the United States. We value every step taken to stop not only the fumigations but to defeat "Plan Colombia" as a whole and to bring fundamental change to the corrupt US foreign policy.

We are grateful to our sisters and brothers in Colombia for their inspiration and invitation to accompany them in their struggle for social and economic justice.

For more information on "Plan Colombia" and the fumigations visist: www.soaw-ne.org www.usfumigation.org For more information about the SOA Watch Days of Resistance visit: www.soaw.org

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Gunmen Seize 9 Foreign Medics; Kill 8 Somalis

New York Times
March 28, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/28/world/28SOMA.html

UNITED NATIONS, March 27 - Six officials from the World Health Organization and Unicef and three representatives of Doctors Without Borders were taken hostage today by gunmen in Somalia, the United Nations spokesman said.

At least eight Somalis were reported killed and another Somali employed locally by Unicef, the United Nations children's fund, was also reported missing.

At least 30 other people were wounded. Rival clans and Somali troops were in the fray in Mogadishu.

The spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said that the missing foreign officials - three Britons, one American, one Algerian and one Belgian - and their Somali aide were captured in a gunfight at a compound used by Doctors Without Borders.

The missing Doctors Without Borders representatives are from Spain and France. All the aid workers were in a convoy set to do cholera vaccinations.

The Associated Press reported from Mogadishu that the fight started because of a feud between guards at the compound and gunmen from a rival, anti-government militia in a city that has been attempting to recover from nearly a decade of clan warfare.

A spokesman for the attacking militia told the news agency that the foreigners were safe and would be released.

The United Nations said its office in Nairobi, Kenya, had made contact with five of the abducted officials held in a house in Mogadishu.

The other four missing aid workers were thought to be in two other locations, a United Nations spokeswoman in Nairobi, Sonya Green, said.

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Zapatistas prepare to address Mexican Congress

USA Today
03/28/2001 - Updated 12:02 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-28-zapatistas.htm

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Leaving behind their guns but not their masks, Zapatista rebels prepared to take the floor of Mexico's Congress on Wednesday to argue for an Indian rights bill.

Leaders of the Zapatista National Liberation Front were to begin speaking at midday to an extraordinary session of both senators and Congressmen - and to a live television audience nationwide.

"This marks the start of a new stage," said rebel supporter Silvia Mendoza, a 20-year-old economy student, as she waited outside the massive congress building in Mexico City.

"It could be the start a new stage of dialogue and peace, or an other stage of struggle," Mendoza said. "It's in the government's hands."

The argument over letting the rebels take the main podium of Congress created a bitter division within Mexico's newly independent legislature - and even in President Vicente Fox's own National Action Party.

Over the weekend, National Action Sen. Diego Fernandez de Cevallos accused Fox of acting as a "publicist" for the rebels.

"He has done badly by promoting them and worse by spoiling them," Fernandez said, complaining about the president's repeated concessions to the small rebel group.

Rarely if ever has a guerrilla movement gained so much - or been given it - while posing so little military threat. Actual fighting lasted only 12 days seven years ago. More than 145 people died before a cease-fire took hold.

But the rebels' call for greater Indian rights is popular both in Mexico and abroad. Hundreds of foreigners like Giancarlo Podda, 47, of Cagliari, Italy have followed the Zapatista's monthlong bus tour through Mexico, and some waited expectantly outside congress.

"I think today is the most important moment, because now dialogue truly starts," Podda said.

And while polls show that most Mexicans oppose armed conflict, many no longer see the Zapatistas or their most visible leader, Subcomandante Marcos, as guerrillas.

The masks and military garb that once recalled the bloodstained marketplace of Ocosingo in January 1994 are now associated more with the smoke that drifts from Marcos' pipe and with the acid wit - sometimes poetic, sometimes vulgar - of his communiques.

At issue is a set of major constitutional amendments that would give Mexico's 10 million Indians greater political autonomy, as well as the right to use their languages in schools and on radio stations, and to share in the wealth taken from their lands.

Former President Ernesto Zedillo's government signed an agreement on those points with the Zapatistas in 1996. But he rejected the bill meant to enact the agreement, saying it would compromise Mexican sovereignty and unity.

Since taking office Dec. 1, ending 71 years of single-party rule, Fox has reversed Zedillo's policy of isolating the rebels deep in Chiapas state.

Fox sent the Indian rights bill to Congress, welcomed foreign rebel supporters, freed rebel prisoners, has been closing seven army bases and welcomed their support-gathering march across the country to Mexico City.

He angered some members of his own party by urging Congress to let the Zapatistas speak from their podium, just as the lawmakers are exploring unprecedented independence from the presidency after decades of servility under the previous Institutional Revolutionary Party.

With National Action blocking a full joint session of congress, the 24 rebel leaders will technically be speaking before a committee meeting in the main chamber of Congress.

In one of their few conciliatory gestures of recent days, the rebels have said that they will accept modifications to the rights bill - though how many is unclear.

Fernandez and some other congressmen say the present bill would create conflicting systems of law in some parts of Mexico and strip legal rights from people living in autonomous zones.

----

German police use water cannon on nuke activists

REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
March 28, 2001
<http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10286>

DANNENBERG, Germany - Clashes between German riot police and environmental activists trying to stop a nuclear waste train worsened yesterday as police fired water cannon to disperse protesters. Police said they fired after protesters in the north German town of Dannenberg shot flares in the direction of the gathered police ranks.

"The situation has become more grave. Protesters have fired flares on police, including helicopters, there are reports that activists are preparing attacks with vinegar acid and a police car was set on fire," a police spokesman said.

The train is carrying slag from a French plant that reprocesses fuel rods from German reactors. It is the first such shipment since a ban imposed three years ago and it has required one of the biggest peacetime security operations Germany has ever seen to keep the line open.

The train was halted near the town of Dahlenburg about 14 km (nine miles) from Dannenberg after activists damaged a section of track by chaining themselves to the line.

The six wagon-sized containers were to be unloaded at Dannenberg and moved 25 km (16 miles) by road to Gorleben on Wednesday.

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Protesters force back German nuclear waste train

Wednesday, March 28, 2001
By Kai Pfaffenbach
<http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/03/03282001/reu_train_42773.asp>


Anti-nuclear protesters who dodged security forces to chain themselves to railtracks forced a train bearing atomic waste on Wednesday to retreat near the end of its journey to a dump in north Germany.

Riot police broke up a separate blockade attempt further down the tracks after charging a group of some 200 activists who staged a sit-in on the line. Wielding pneumatic drills and heavy bolt cutters, police freed three of the five protesters who had attached themselves by their arms to tubes cemented into the bed of the rail line but they could not say when the train could move again.

"Once the people have been removed, the tracks will need to be repaired," said a police spokesman on the scene in Sueschendorf, 25 km (16 miles) from the Dannenberg depot where the waste is due to be unloaded onto flatbed trucks for its final journey by truck to the Gorleben dump on the Elbe river. "It could take 10 minutes or it could take hours," he added.

The train, travelling since Monday from a waste reprocessing plant in northern France, withdrew to nearby Dahlenburg for refuelling and maintenance.

The action, carried out overnight by an environmentalist group called Robin Wood, delayed further the arrival of the six "Castor" containers of reprocessed nuclear waste which had been scheduled on Tuesday.

"It's an amazing success to force the Castors to turn back," said one protester, saying this was the first such retreat since controversial transports of reprocessed waste starting in 1995.

Some 20,000 police have been deployed to guard the shipments in one of Germany's largest peacetime security operations.

A group of around 200 activists briefly staged a separate sit-in protest on the tracks in Dannenberg before being charged by baton-wielding riot police. A small number of protesters responded by firing flares and throwing stones before retreating. One was knocked unconscious during scuffles.

"It was a shame, we could have had a good peaceful occupation of the track with two or three hundred people," said Matthias Hofmann, a 27-year-old student from Hanover who said he had taken part in many anti-nuclear protests. "If they can't send their waste to France then the reactors will have to be shut down," he said, describing the blockades as "strangulation tactics" on German nuclear plants which do not have their own reprocessing facilities.

Police deployed water cannon and detained nearly 600 people Tuesday evening after protesters fired flares and threw stones. They said the scuffles were provoked by leftwing activists, some of whom used slingshots to pelt police with stones.

If and when the train reaches its destination at Dannenberg, loading is expected to take between eight and 12 hours before the final 25-km (16-mile) road journey to Gorleben.

Under pressure from France to reduce a backlog of German waste at its La Hague reprocessing plant near Cherbourg, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder lifted a transport ban imposed on safety grounds in 1998. Two cargoes a year are now planned. The transports are part of a deal struck with the electricity industry last year to phase out Germany's 19 reactors by about 2025 a timeline considered too long by anti-nuclear activists.


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