------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Paper: U.S. to look at Russia aid
Absentee Al
Passing the buck in sub drama
Pakistan, China Move Closer As Nuclear Plant Opens
Baker: Mothballed Soviet Nukes a Time Bomb
The New New World Order: Chaos
Bush 'Realism' May Backfire on U.S.
U.S. Reviewing Aid Meant to Contain Russia's Arsenal
North Korea Opens Up to Other Nations
Decision on the AWE Judicial Review
CZECH REPUBLIC: NUCLEAR PLANT SHUTS
German nuclear waste train back on move
Nuclear waste shipments a must - German industry
New age vs brave new world in German nuke showdown
History of nuclear power in Germany
Key facts on German nuclear waste shipments
Delayed Nuclear Train Reaches Its Destination
Arab Leaders End Meeting in Disarray Over Iraq
N. Korea Warns on Shield
Schroder to Visit Bush, Bearing Europe's New Concerns
Russia's Nuclear Missile Safety Chief Dies
New Russian Atomic Energy Chief Good News for U.S.
Putin Puts Loyalists In Key Security Jobs
Putin Replaces Russia's Defense, Interior and Nuclear Energy Chiefs
Sacred cows in the cross hairs
Draft order shows Chao winning battle to shed nuclear worker program
NUCLEAR-CLEANUP COMPANY WASTED $44 MILLION
Energy Department Releases Historical Studies of Recycled Uranium
Tennessee
Bush 'Realism' May Backfire on U.S.

MILITARY
VENEZUELA: HANDGUNS SHIPMENT
Supreme Court Hears U.S. Argue Against Medical Marijuana
CANADA: HELL'S ANGELS CRACKDOWN
U.S. Vetoes U.N. Council Bid on Palestinian Force
SOMALIA: 7 AID WORKERS FREED
Palestinians keep pushing for observer force
Anti-UNITA curbs found effective
Army Says Unit Is Unprepared for War Duty
Military learns big-business ways
Nevada
Military fears attacks from cyberspace
Wreckage located of second F-15
In the Navy, size does matter

OTHER
ENVIRONMENT STONED SALMON, PISSED ENVIRONMENTALISTS
Canada cooling on Kyoto pact
The costs of bowing out of global-warming treaty
U.S. Going Empty-Handed to Meeting on Global Warming
European Union Voices Concern for Climate Pact
Human Nature: New Hope for Community Gardeners
NEWARK: FOOT-AND-MOUTH WARNING
We Can't See the Forest for the Roads
STEP TOWARD REVERSING CLINTON ON MONUMENTS
Bush defends arsenic delay
Schroeder brings thorny issues to White House
States
Turner keeps talking
Science can wait Kenneth D. Smith
What's for dinner?
Russia snubs IMF on terms for loan
Our Towns: Amnesia Runs Rampant in Testimony
Verniero Admits Being Lax on Profiling Data
Mayor Questions Placement of Critic of Police on Panel
PHILADELPHIA: HOMICIDE COMMANDER REASSIGNED
What a sinkhole
Delaware
Accused spy's lawyers denounce Ashcroft's comments
Lawyer Says Ashcroft Spoke Inappropriately in Spy Case
Former KGB agent new chief of Defense
Demands for a terrorist crackdown irk Greece

ACTIVISTS
Buzz on campus
Zapatista Leaders Make Their Case to Mexico's Congress
VIETNAM: PROTESTS TELEVISED
Zapatistas address Congress, return to jungle
Attack ideas in campus ad, not right to free speech
Up with free speech


-------- NUCLEAR

Paper: U.S. to look at Russia aid
$760 million a year now goes toward safeguarding weapons

MSNBC
03/29/01
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.msnbc.com/news/551580.asp?cp1=1

NEW YORK, March 29 - The White House plans to institute a comprehensive review of U.S. aid to Russia used to stop the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, The New York Times reported Thursday. The review was initiated by the National Security Council, according to the newspaper, which cited an unidentified senior official.

'I don't think there's any issue, really, that's more important than making sure we don't annihilate ourselves through an accident or something.' - HOWARD BAKER Fmr. Senate Majority Leader

THE COUNCIL HAS previously been critical of the programs.

The United States spends $760 million a year trying to help Russia safeguard its weapons and hazardous materials.

The review will examine dozens of programs run mainly by the State Department, Pentagon and Department of Energy that have poured money into Russia and the former Soviet republics since the end of the cold war.

White House and National Security officials declined to comment Wednesday night to The Associated Press on the report.

The wide-ranging programs are designed to help Russia secure its vast nuclear weapons and material and ensure its underpaid nuclear scientists are not lured to work for rogue nations or terrorists.

A senior administration official stressed to The Times that the review is aimed at improving the quality and effectiveness of the programs, and was not aimed at dismantling them.

TENSION GROWS

The review comes at a time of growing tension between Russia and the United States after the discovery of a suspected Russian spy in the top ranks of the FBI,

It received a strong endorsement Wednesday from former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., an influential Democrat who helped to craft nonproliferation programs with Russia.

Nunn said the new administration should take a comprehensive look at the programs, and that the effort "needs better cooperation ... to fit into a broader strategic picture."

President Bush's nominee as ambassador to Japan, former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker Jr., has recommended more money for programs helping Russia safeguard its nuclear materials.

Latest news on Russia

"I don't think there's any issue, really, that's more important than making sure we don't annihilate ourselves through an accident or something," Baker told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday.

"The fact that we haven't blown ourselves up so far is no guarantee that we couldn't still do it," he said. "Or that some rogue nation or rogue group hasn't yet successfully stolen a nuclear weapon doesn't mean they can't still do it if all you've got is a padlock" on a door to prevent theft.

$30-BILLION PROPOSAL

A task force Baker co-chaired with former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler recommended that $30 billion be spent over eight to 10 years to secure or neutralize all of Russia's nuclear weapons-usable material and keep its scientists performing legitimate work.

But government and private sources told the AP that Bush's fiscal year 2002 budget proposes cutting more than $72 million from an Energy Department program that helps eliminate uranium and plutonium from nuclear weapons dismantled in the former Soviet Union.

---

Absentee Al

From: "Slate Magazine" <delivery@slate.com>
today's papers
By Scott Shuger
Thursday, March 29, 2001, at 4:30 a.m. PT

The WP leads with the Senate's vote yesterday to increase the limits applying to any individual's contributions to candidates for federal government office, which would be the first such since 1974. This is also the top national story at the LAT. The NYT fronts the vote, but goes instead with an inside-sourced report that the Bush administration is going to review all American aid programs designed to help Russia contain and control nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Although the story notes growing U.S.-Russia tensions, it also suggests that some of the programs--such as those for deactivating warheads, missiles, silos and sub launching tubes, and for buying weapons-grade enriched uranium--will probably be assessed as worth continuing. Looking shakier in the story: the plutonium disposal program, and the effort to reduce the size of Russia's nuclear cities while keeping its nuclear scientists from taking up weapons work elsewhere. USAT leads with, and the WP and LAT front, a federal court ruling that the First Amendment protects an Internet site and "Wanted" posters that identify and disparage doctors who perform abortions. The decision reverses a $109 million judgment awarded two years ago to some abortion clinics and doctors. The paper quotes one of the appeals judges as concluding this was protected speech because it "merely encouraged" unrelated terrorists, and therefore wasn't an immediate threat to the doctors.

---

Passing the buck in sub drama

Christian Science Monitor
OPINION By Larry Seaquist
THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/03/29/fp9s1-csm.shtml

As a rule, we Americans like public officials from the Harry Truman mold. We hope for stand-up leaders who marry their authority to a "buck stops here" sense of personal accountability. Inclined also to doubt officialdom, we are quick to tune in when someone on the public payroll falls short. Military mistakes collect special attention, partly because they often involve death and destruction, partly because the military's crisp hierarchy can pinpoint authority that a civilian bureaucracy will scatter.

One of the latest front-page examples is the sad case of the Navy's nuclear submarine USS Greeneville. In February, the sub rammed a Japanese fishing trawler in the busy waters off Hawaii. Nine crewmen perished as the rammed ship sank in minutes. It was clear that the man in the dock was the submarine's captain. Thus rose the curtain on a three-act saga to fix accountability for the tragedy and correct the problems that caused it.

We are now at a pause in the action, the intermission before the third act. This is a good time to review the case, less as drama critics - military courts are always good theater - than as citizens wondering how well this particular group of public officials is stacking up in the public-accountability ledger. As we go, let's watch especially for where the buck stops.

These military accident-response dramas play out about the same each time, sometimes in private, sometimes with the press reporting every twitch. When the Navy plays the roles, the admirals taking the stage in Act One, "Damage Control," work to get a grip on what happened. They respond to reporters who want to know more than the Navy probably knows itself. They signal the fleet if it seems there might be a defective part or a faulty procedure hazarding others, and they organize an investigation.

How to do that review and who to lead it become important subplots. A private informal review could look like a whitewash; a formal public inquiry can run out of control when the press and civilian hard-ball lawyers enter. In this first quick-look stage, the admirals will often arrive at a private understanding of what really happened. Navy procedures allow them legally to fire the CO, the ship's commanding officer, on the spot.

In the Greeneville accident, the Navy stumbled through this stage, managing to enrage our Japanese allies and trigger public alarm about a cover-up. The CO publicly accepted full responsibility. The Navy removed him, but the press questioned whether the civilian visitors the Navy put aboard the sub had been a factor. The curtain didn't come down until President Bush deputized a top admiral to go to Japan - and the Navy, perhaps instructed by the White House, chartered a formal public inquiry.

At the end of Act One, the buck was still up for grabs. The sub captain seemed to be a Good Guy, honorably shouldering his responsibility for reckless driving. But the performance of the admirals had planted thoughts among the citizen-audience that the sub's bosses ashore might also belong in the dock. Was the ship merely doing what it had been told to do?

Then came Act Two, "Investigation." Excellent drama and more admirals. Three sitting as a Court of Inquiry called witnesses whose lawyers pointed fingers at various Culprits. We learned that some of the captain's subordinates had not done their jobs well. The captain himself adjusted his earlier claim of sole responsibility to suggest that, yes, perhaps his men had let him down. We in the citizens' jury were about to conclude that the reason for their errors had been the disruption from squeezing civilian sightseers into the sub's small spaces. But the sub's admiral boss insisted to the Court the visitors were not a factor. The Court seemed to accept this and rang down the curtain.

Intermission.

Now the three-admiral Court is off-stage reaching its own conclusions. In a few weeks, we'll see Act Three, "Correction." New procedures may be required of all submarines. The sub's mistakemakers will be admonished, the COs may face criminal charges in a court martial. But unless the plot takes a surprise turn, no admirals will touch the buck.

What are we to make of this? We can congratulate ourselves that our military, unlike some others, subjects itself to such scrutiny. We can applaud Cmdr. Scott Waddle, the sub CO, for being a stand-up guy even if he did shade it a bit. But we are left wondering about those admirals. They exonerated themselves even though this tragedy has "command climate" written all over it.

Command climate is the tone, the atmosphere set by one's seniors. Commander Waddle took his submarine full of visitors to sea on behalf of a chain of admirals that picked the wealthy visitors and OK'd the special excursion, a chain of admirals that made such visits a regular program in their submarines, a chain of admirals that knew of and approved hot-dog maneuvers to impress their visitors. Where does the buck find a home among this hierarchy of joy-ride sponsors?

Did the curtain come down on Act Two prematurely?

Reconvened, the Court of Inquiry could question the civilians who were on board and the admirals who put them there. Perhaps it will turn out that the visitors were irrelevant. Or perhaps it will turn out that guest rides and spectacular maneuvers were something the admirals expected of all their submarines, in which case the buck needs to move higher up.

The White House had to reach in during Act One; perhaps that corrective hand will be needed again before the final curtain.

American citizens need to know that the old-fashioned virtues of accountability still apply to our senior-most officials.

• A retired Navy captain, Larry Seaquist commanded four warships during his career. He is the founder of The Strategy Group, an international network of peacebuilding professionals.

---

Pakistan, China Move Closer As Nuclear Plant Opens

International Herald Tribune
Mar 29, 2001
Agence France Presse
http://www.insidechina.com/news.php3?id=324061

ISLAMABAD -- (Agence France Presse) Pakistan's second nuclear power plant was due to be opened Thursday in what has been hailed as a "model of cooperation" between Beijing and Islamabad.

The Chashma Nuclear Power Plant in Mianwali, central Punjab province, took a decade to build with substantial Chinese aid and expertise.

Military ruler General Pervez Musharraf, who was expected to cut the ribbon, Wednesday lauded the Chinese assistance as "yet another manifestation of close friendship and cooperation that exists between the two countries."

"This important project will go a long way in meeting our fast growing energy requirements," Musharraf told Chinese Minister for Science and Technology Liu Jibin ahead of Thursday's opening ceremony.

Liu delivered a letter from Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, describing the project as a "symbol of traditional friendly relations."

Zhu is to make an official visit to Pakistan in May, Musharraf said after his talks with the science minister.

The trip will be the culmination of a flurry of contacts between the two countries since Musharraf seized power in a military coup in October, 1999.

Musharraf visited China for two days in January 2000 when the two countries strengthened their "strategic partnership," which includes close military and economic cooperation. And a Chinese defense delegation visited Pakistan in August.

"China is keen to extend cooperation and assistance in the nation-building process of Pakistan," Musharraf told a cabinet meeting Wednesday.

"We must make every effort to take advantage of Chinese cooperation and assistance in the development of infrastructural facilities."

Both countries seem eager to nurture their cosy ties as a balance to India's relationship with Russia.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar will visit China next month to mark half a century of close diplomatic ties, a foreign ministry spokesman said Tuesday.

"The visit is aimed at cementing the cooperation between the two countries on the completion of 50 years of diplomatic relationship," spokesman Riaz Mohammad Khan said.

China has been closely involved in Pakistan's missile program but Islamabad insists the cooperation is within the Missile Technology Control Regime.

Late last year Washington slapped sanctions on Pakistan and Iran for receiving missile technology development from China.

The two-year ban on the import of certain U.S. technologies was imposed against the defense ministry and the Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission in Pakistan.

In February, newly appointed Pakistan Air Force Air Chief Marshal Mushaf Ali Mir spent a week in China where he met military counterparts and toured military installations.

That visit was expected to give impetus to a joint venture between Pakistan and China to build a Super-7 fighter aircraft. Pakistan is also interested in buying around 30 F-7 MiG fighter jets from China.

Built with the collaboration of the Chinese National Nuclear Corporation, the Chashma plant will supply 1,840 million kilowatts per hour of electricity to the state power authority.

Chinese companies supplied equipment and helped with the design and manufacture of the plant, which was connected to the national grid in June last year and tested until September.

Another smaller nuclear plant, built with Canadian assistance, has been in operation in Karachi in southern Sindh province since 1971.

---

Baker: Mothballed Soviet Nukes a Time Bomb

Salt Lake Tribune
Thursday, March 29, 2001
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.sltrib.com/03292001/nation_w/83866.htm

WASHINGTON -- President Bush's nominee as ambassador to Japan -- former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker Jr. -- recommended more money Wednesday for a program Bush wants to cut: helping Russia safeguard its nuclear materials.

"The fact that we haven't blown ourselves up so far is no guarantee that we couldn't still do it," Baker told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing called by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., a champion of the U.S. effort on the Russian weapons. "Or that some rogue nation or rogue group hasn't yet successfully stolen a nuclear weapon doesn't mean they can't still do it if all you've got is a padlock" on a door to prevent theft.

Baker said he wasn't challenging Bush's spending plans. He said, however, that securing Russia's vast nuclear weapons and material and ensuring its underpaid nuclear scientists are not lured to work for rogue nations or terrorists "is a competitor of great importance for resources."

A task force Baker co-chaired with former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler recommended that $30 billion be spent over eight to 10 years to secure or neutralize all of Russia's nuclear weapons-usable material and keep its scientists performing legitimate work.

The task force addressed an Energy Department program to eliminate the uranium and plutonium from former Soviet nuclear weapons dismantled through a program sponsored by Lugar and former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga.

Under Nunn-Lugar, the weapons of mass destruction are being destroyed and dismantled. Both programs pay scientists to do peaceful work.

Bush's fiscal year 2002 budget proposes cutting more than $72 million from the Energy program.

---

The New New World Order: Chaos

Los Angeles Times
Thursday, March 29, 2001
By AVIGDOR HASELKORN
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20010329/t000026809.html

A degree of flux and disorder has been a permanent feature of the international system for quite some time. Recent developments, however, raise the question of whether the normal amount of upheaval is being gradually replaced by a state of global anarchy.

For example, the director of the National Security Agency, Gen. Mike Hayden, recently stated that Osama bin Laden, the Saudi exile wanted for a string of terrorist attacks on U.S. targets, has better communications technology than the U.S. In a TV interview, the general claimed that Bin Laden was able to orchestrate almost simultaneous bombings without NSA detection because he "has at his disposal the wealth of a $3-trillion-a-year telecommunications industry that he can rely on. . . . He has better technology." The NSA, on the other hand, is "behind the curve in keeping up with the global telecommunications revolution."

If Hayden is right about American capabilities in this area, there is cause for much alarm. After all, it has become known during the ongoing trial of some of Bin Laden's followers that he has attempted to buy uranium on the black market. Reports also suggest that Bin Laden's organization has been testing chemical weapons. Moreover, several other terrorist organizations with global networks, such as Hezbollah, which is directly sponsored by Iran, would have little difficulty acquiring communication technology similar to that at Bin Laden's disposal.

As if this was not enough, a CIA report just delivered to Congress on global proliferation activities implicitly confirms that the U.S. has lost the struggle to contain the spread of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The report notes that Russia, China and North Korea are actively assisting countries seeking weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them over long distances. It adds that countries determined to maintain weapons of mass destruction and missile programs have worked to insulate their programs against interdiction and disruption, and they have tried to reduce their dependence on imports by developing indigenous production. Not only is gathering intelligence about such programs becoming increasingly more difficult but, the CIA predicted, the U.S. access to critical world areas would come under threat.

Since the addition of Pakistan and India to the nuclear club has had no adverse impact on world stability, it could be argued that last month's assessment of the German Federal Intelligence Service that Saddam Hussein could have a bomb within three years should be taken in stride. Yet even if Iran and Iraq refrain from actually using nuclear weapons once they acquire them, the kind of international mischief these regimes could sponsor once shielded by their new weapons is frightening.

Moreover, by 2005, the German intelligence service expects Iraq to also possess ballistic missiles with a range of 3,000 kilometers and capable of hitting targets in Europe. Iran is also working on long-range missiles. Both countries would be able to blackmail the U.S. and its allies by holding European cities hostage. As U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Munich Conference on European Security Policy in February: "Terror weapons don't need to be fired. They just need to be in the hands of people who would threaten their use. And it alters behavior. We know that."

There is also growing disrepair among Washington's alliances--the guardians of the existing world order. Japan's dire economic straits and the growing political and economic turmoil in Turkey have worrisome strategic and diplomatic angles. The decline of Japan would certainly allow China to increase its weight in East Asia. This could have troubling implications for Taiwan, especially if the U.S. was increasingly preoccupied elsewhere. North Korea is also likely to resort to new diplomatic and military pressure tactics if Japan's regional clout diminished. Similarly, any weakness on the part of Turkey is likely to be exploited by Iran, Iraq and Syria.

The rise of global anarchy should not be viewed as just the onset of greater international disorder. The coming chaos signifies a paradigm shift whose common denominator is that the "good guys"--the democratic, moderate, peace-seeking members of the international system--may be on the verge of a prolonged and possibly permanent retreat in the face of extremist and aggressive forces. Such international lawlessness is sure to reignite calls for greater isolationism in U.S. foreign policy and to encourage the spread of a Fortress America mentality. Such a posture, however, is guaranteed to make matters even worse, faster.

Avigdor Haselkorn Is the Author of "The Continuing Storm: Iraq, Poisonous Weapons and Deterrence" (Yale University Press, 1999)

---

Bush 'Realism' May Backfire on U.S.

International Herald Tribune
Thursday, March 29, 2001
William Pfaff International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/15017.htm

BOSTON The motive remains mysterious for what seems gratuitous brutality in the Bush administration's approach not only to Russia and China, but also to South Korea and the Europeans.

The White House says it has adopted a "new realism," and George W. Bush's press secretary has repeatedly used that word, or a variation of it, in defending what has been going on. Realism has an established meaning in the vocabulary of foreign relations. It means national policies formulated in terms of power and national interest, setting aside ideology and prejudice, trying to look at things as honestly as possible. But suspicion arises that the Bush administration may think "realism" simply means being tough with other countries, ignoring their official opinions and national interests when these don't please the United States, even when those interests may be legitimate and the opinions serious.

Washington's cursory dismissal of South Korea's successful policy to open up communications with North Korea, its rejection of international concern over global warming and its "take it or leave it" stands on national missile defense and NATO expansion have all tended to alienate or even anger governments with whom the United States needs to work.

A commentator at the Carnegie Endowment says the Bush people are "going to play hardball, and they want to make that very clear, very fast." Hardball that provokes hostility and avoidable opposition is not realism.

The downside of this is illustrated in the administration's recent dealings with Russia on nuclear and proliferation issues. Mr. Bush's secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently called Russia "a nation of proliferators." His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has said "these people will do anything for money." In fact, there has been very little leakage of Russian nuclear resources and expertise. Washington's expulsion last week of 50 identified (and therefore largely neutralized) Russian intelligence people in the United States was a show-off act, not a realistic one. The Russians had made use of a walk-in FBI traitor. What else were they - realistically - supposed to have done? Turn him in to the FBI?

However, the Moscow response to the expulsions could be loss of access for Americans working inside Russia, at sensitive nuclear sites, verifying compliance with treaties on dismantling weapons and making Russian nuclear installations secure. Susan Eisenhower, who runs the security foundation named for her grandfather, the former president, told the London Observer last week, "The Russians are very proud of the fact that there has been so little proliferation, and it is dangerous for the U.S. to undermine that." She added that this kind of administration talk, and the spy expulsions, "probably mean that the administration is not as sympathetic to the monitoring cooperation program as was the case in the past, and that is very serious indeed." Mr. Rumsfeld has made another uselessly provocative comment, this time concerning war with China. Mr. Bush has said that he intends to conduct "a respectful but firm" policy toward China. But in a White House briefing, Mr. Rumsfeld said one reason the U.S. needs arms reconfiguration is because the Far East is the most likely future theater for U.S. operations, and new-generation, long-range nuclear bombers capable of operating from U.S. bases are needed "to fight and win a nuclear war."

The only dispute between the United States and China capable of provoking violence concerns Taiwan. The United States opposes any attempt by China to enforce its claim on Taiwan by attacking the island. But it is a long step from there to Chinese-American nuclear war.

Mr. Rumsfeld's news seems to be that Washington is getting ready. A calmer judgment would be that he actually is giving voice to a chronically belligerent fraction of the rightist policy community in Washington, which thinks that battle for world domination between Chinese and American superpowers is next on history's agenda. This is a minority Washington opinion. As China still is a poor country, crippled by overpopulation, lacking intercontinental missiles or strategic air forces, possessing less operational nuclear capability than Britain, France or Israel, Mr. Rumsfeld's concerns are premature.

Such statements subvert reasonable U.S.-$ Chinese relations and undermine efforts to find a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question. They also reiterate the critical question of what the Bush administration really thinks.

The policy advertised as realism may really be composed of ideology and demagogy. In that case, it is dangerous, first of all to the United States, because it is deeply unrealistic.

---

U.S. Reviewing Aid Meant to Contain Russia's Arsenal

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29POLI.html

The White House is starting a comprehensive review of all American aid programs to Russia set up to stop the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, a senior administration official said yesterday.

The broad review, initiated by National Security Council officials who have previously been critical of some of these programs, is likely to change significantly how Washington spends more than $760 million a year trying to dismantle former Soviet nuclear, biological and chemical complexes and prevent unconventional weapons and hazardous materials from being either sold to rogue states and terrorist groups or stolen by them.

The senior official said that several of the programs, such as the Department of Energy's $173 million program to strengthen the security and accounting for fissile material at nuclear weapons storage sites, appeared to be "very effective." Others, several administration officials said, may not be money well spent, like the more than $6 billion long- term effort to help Russia and the United States dispose of 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium each. Programs deemed ineffective could be sharply reduced, or even scuttled, officials said.

The review comes at a time of growing tension between Russia and the United States fueled by the administration's discovery of a suspected Russian spy in the top ranks of the F.B.I., its determination to build a shield against nuclear missiles, and its criticism of Russia for selling nuclear technology to Iran.

The administration's adoption of what it calls a "realistic" or "unsentimental" approach to Russia has prompted Russian officials to accuse Washington of being out of step with the times, intent on reviving cold war policies, and abandoning the previous administration's effort to treat Russia as a partner.

Hence, the administration's review of nonproliferation policies risks heightening tensions with Russia at a time of great internal change in that country.

It could also fuel concerns among Democrats and other critics of President Bush's more conservative stance toward Russia that the administration might use the review to punish Russia for selling technology to Iran or to justify deep cuts in nonproliferation programs. The senior administration official stressed yesterday that the review was aimed at improving the quality, effectiveness and transparency of the nonproliferation programs.

Its goal is not to punish Russia or undermine American commitment to helping Russia safeguard dangerous weapons material and prevent the theft, diversion or sale of unconventional weapons and expertise.

"This is not a challenge to Russia or an effort to dismantle nonproliferation programs," the official said. "This is about enabling the progress we've made to continue and making nonproliferation programs even more effective. We want to strengthen nonproliferation."

The review is examining dozens of programs run mainly by the State Department, Pentagon and Department of Energy that have poured millions of dollars into Russia and the former Soviet republics since the cold war. Most were created by the Clinton administration, but a few began as Congressional initiatives backed by former President George Bush.

The wide-ranging programs have tried to help Russia dismantle its vast unconventional weapons complexes, safeguard nuclear and other hazardous materials and prevent the former Soviet scientists who produced them from selling their products and skills to rogue states and terrorist groups.

The review is parallel to a broad review of Russia policy by the White House recently but separate from it. The nonproliferation review will be conducted by senior officials at the National Security Council and is expected to last six to eight weeks, officials said. In the meantime, the official said, the programs will continue.

Officials said it was also separate from the across-the-board cuts in fiscal 2002 budgets that the Office of Management and Budget has asked agencies to make to accommodate President Bush's proposed tax cuts.

According to the review's "terms of reference," portions of which were read to a New York Times reporter, it will explore, among other things, the "cost-benefit ratio" of each major program and how well it serves America's national interest, whether Russia and other countries should shoulder a larger share of its cost, and whether the program should have a "sunset" provision to ensure it does not continue after its objectives have been met. It will also evaluate whether Russia has been sufficiently supportive of the program and examine whether there are other programs that might better serve nonproliferation goals or better ways of coordinating the programs.

While the official was reluctant to discuss the administration's attitudes towards specific programs in advance of the review, he said that the "scorecard" of the Department of Defense's Cooperative Threat Reduction programs, which received $458 million from Congress in this fiscal year, was "pretty impressive." By the end of 2000, an administration official said, those programs, among other things, had deactivated 5,288 missile warheads, destroyed 419 long-range nuclear missiles and 367 silos, eliminated 81 bombers, 292 submarine missile launchers and 174 submarine missiles, and sealed 194 nuclear test holes and sites in Russia and other former Soviet republics.

The official also praised the Department of Energy's program that permits the United States to buy and convert 500 metric tons of highly enriched uranium, the equivalent of 25,000 warheads, to low-enriched uranium that can be used as commercial fuel in nuclear reactors. Administration officials said that since the agreement was reached in 1994, about 110 metric tons of such uranium has been purchased and converteded.

Administration officials and other experts criticized two programs - the Department of Energy's $6 billion effort to dispose of Russian and American plutonium, to which Congress has appropriated $280 million to date, and its Nuclear Cities Initiative. Established in September, 1998 to stop the brain drain from Russia's vast, closed nuclear cities and reduce the size of the massive complexes, the program has been pummeled on Capitol Hill. In fiscal 2000, Congress halved the initiative's budget and placed other conditions on spending.

The impending review received a strong endorsement yesterday from an influential Democrat who helped pioneer nonproliferation programs with post-Communist Russia. Former Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia said that any new administration "should take a comprehensive look at programs to reduce the threat of weapons, materiel, and know-how coming out of the Soviet Union." The programs, he added, "need better cooperation and to fit into a broader strategic picture."

Mr. Nunn, who now chairs the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a private group financed by Ted Turner to reduce the threat of nuclear and other unconventional weapons, presided this week over a conference in Atlanta on nonproliferation challenges in Russia. He said that both Russian and American participants would "favor strengthening those programs," despite some frank discussion of their weaknesses.

Senator Nunn said that he hoped the review would give such programs a higher priority in the new administration.

Howard Baker, the former Senate majority leader from Tennessee whom President Bush has nominated as ambassador to Japan, urged the administration not to cut money for nonproliferation programs in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday.

Senator Baker was co-chairman of an Energy Department-backed task force that recommended that $30 billion be spent over 8 to 10 years to help secure or neutralize Russia's nuclear weapons-usable material and keep its scientists conducting legitimate work.

Ronald F. Lehman II, a former director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Reagan and Bush administrations and a champion of cooperation with Russia in nonproliferation, told the committee that all of the programs would benefit greatly from a "bold review" and a "clearer vision of goals, strategy, and priorities."

A concern among Democrats was articulated by Kenneth N. Luongo, a former Clinton administration official who is executive director of the Russian American Nuclear Security Advisory Council, which promotes American-Russian cooperative security initiatives. He said that while he welcomed a review in principle, he feared that it might not be fair and might reflect the administration's biases. "A prejudiced review that looks at what can be eliminated, and not what can be improved, is missing an enormous opportunity and is likely to further rile relations with Russia," he said.

---

With U.S. Pulling Back, North Korea Opens Up to Other Nations

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29KORE.html

TOKYO, March 28 - With the Bush administration signaling a go-slow approach toward North Korea, that country has pushed its diplomacy into high gear in recent weeks, establishing ties with a wide variety of countries.

For Pyongyang, a capital struggling with electricity shortages, the opening has created an unaccustomed parade of officials from countries including Britain, Germany, Australia and New Zealand. Western diplomats say the ties are helping outsiders break important ground with one of the world's most mysterious and isolated governments.

The most visible product of the opening was the European Union's surprise announcement last week that it would soon begin a high-level effort to promote reconciliation between North and South Korea. The move comes just as the United States has signaled a pause in its efforts to engage North Korea.

Following a time-honored pattern in which diplomatic missions pave the way for commercial interests, major European companies like Siemens AG of Germany and Asea Brown Boveri of Switzerland have reportedly begun prospecting for business opportunities in North Korea, focusing especially on the dilapidated electricity industry.

A notable diplomatic shift came earlier this month when Germany negotiated a protocol that calls for its diplomats to enjoy freedom of movement in North Korea.

The protocol, which is already being taken up by other European countries in their talks with Pyongyang, would also give free movement to German relief workers and free access to German journalists.

The German-North Korean accord calls for overland access to the country via China, for the first time. It also provides for talks on human rights and arms proliferation issues, both past American priorities.

"We don't know whether this will be like Ostpolitik, and take a long time, or not," said Oliver Schramm, a German diplomat in Seoul, South Korea, referring to West Germany's longtime policy of engagement with Communist East Germany. "Somehow, at least on paper, it looks like we have made a big breakthrough."

American officials asked for their reaction to the opening have sought to share the credit. "Blame it on us," asserted one Western diplomat in Seoul, who said the Clinton administration had urged American allies to establish ties with North Korea.

But European officials also said the rush of diplomats into Pyongyang raised delicate issues for the Bush administration, which has emphasized its lack of trust in North Korea's leadership, and the difficulty of verifying any accords with it.

Most immediately, the rush of outside diplomats seems likely to spark a familiar debate over how best to deal with undemocratic states: isolation or engagement. Aware of this tension, many European diplomats have sought to play down their differences with Washington - while pursuing a starkly contrasting policy.

"We want very visibly to show that we support the process of closer engagement between the two Koreas, and we have been speaking with our American colleagues and our Japanese colleagues to search for ways to do that," said Antony Stokes, a British diplomat in Seoul. "We want to use our bilateral relationship with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea to support this process. The process allows us to raise our concerns in matters that are important to us, which are very similar to issues of importance to the United States and Japan. But we think that by establishing relations, we are in a position to do so more effectively."

-------- britain

Decision on the AWE Judicial Review

From: "Fred Dawson" <fwp_dawson@hotmail.com>
March 29
Report on the decision on the Aldermaston Judicial Review as reported
by Graham Spence, icBerkshire

The Environment Agency says it is 'delighted' with today's () High Court decision not to terminate the independent nuclear Trident Missile Project in Berkshire.

Handing down judgement in the test case, Mr Justice Turner rejected submissions by anti-nuclear activists that Trident was illegal as it contravened international law that banned mass destruction weapons unable to distinguish between civilian and military targets.

The case is likely to have widespread repercussions in peace campaign circles.

It was brought to court by anti-nuclear campaigner Emmannuella Marchiori and the Reading-based Nuclear Awareness Group citing Atomic Weapons Establishments plc (AWE) - who run the Trident project - and the Environment Agency as respondents.

Mr Justice Turner also refused the activists leave to appeal and ordered them to pay costs, estimated to be more than £100,000. One of the key aspects of the case was the claim that the Environment Agency's decision to allow radioactive discharges from the missile sites was illegal.

This too was rejected by the court after lawyers for the Environment Agency and AWE argued that residents near the sites are less at risk from radiation than people in Cornwall, where background radiation levels are high.

Commenting today, the Environment Agency said the court's ruling confirmed the issuing of new authorisations for radioactive discharges to AWE last year was 'both lawful and in the public interest'.

"This decision ensures the Atomic Weapons Establishments at Aldermaston and Burghfield remain under effective environmental regulation," said an Agency spokesperson.

"If we had not issued authorisations then the sites would have fallen back under control of the Ministry of Defence and out of independent regulation.

"The current regulatory system - which has applied since 1993 - has offered the public unprecedented levels of access and scrutiny to the process of determining discharge limits at Aldermaston.

"It has also ensured large and continuing reductions in the facilities' discharges into the environment.

"The challenged authorisations provide for further reductions still, including the end of all discharges into the River Thames."

fwp_dawson@hotmail.com

-------- czech republic

New York Times
March 29, 2001
Victor Homola
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29BRIE.html

CZECH REPUBLIC: NUCLEAR PLANT SHUTS A nuclear plant at Temelin, about 35 miles from the Austrian border, was shut down after a technical problem, a spokesman said. The plant, which has suffered repeated problems since being started up last October, has recently set off huge protests in Austria. (NYT)

-------- germany

German nuclear waste train back on move

Planet Ark
GERMANY: March 29, 2001
Story by Alastair Macdonald
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10288

DAHLENBURG, Germany - A train laden with atomic waste resumed its journey to a north German waste dump yesterday after anti-nuclear activists had forced it to a halt by chaining themselves to the tracks.

With police running alongside to check for further sabotage on the line, the train - pulling six casks of radioactive waste - edged out of Dahlenburg station where it had retreated following an overnight blockade lasting 15 hours.

Police said that with the threat of further actions from thousands of protesters it was unclear when the shipment would reach the Dannenberg depot some 25 km (16 miles) away from which the waste will be transferred to the nearby Gorleben facility.

"We have time and we won't allow ourselves to become unsettled," said a police spokesman.

"The main thing for us is to bring the transports in," he said of so-called "Castor" shipments of German waste which set out from a French reprocessing plant on Monday.

By 1600 GMT it had reached the small country station of Leitstade, roughly halfway between Dahlenburg and Dannenberg.

FREEZING TEMPERATURES

A handful of anti-nuclear activists who had forced the train to halt by chaining themselves to the tracks were earlier removed by police who used pneumatic drills and heavy bolt cutters to dislodge them.

One of the protesters from the anti-nuclear group Robin Wood 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 at the scene.

After two days of violence that have seen 110 arrested and 80 charged with offences ranging from endangerment of rail traffic to insulting a police officer, authorities stepped up one of Germany's largest peacetime security operations.

From Leitstade it was possible to see riot police stationed every few metres (yards) into the distance on both sides of the track, while three water cannon stood in the station and several helicopters buzzed overhead.

From Dannenberg, the shipments of waste are due to be unloaded onto trucks for a final 25-km journey by truck to the Gorleben dump on the Elbe river.

Activists say they are unlikely to stop the waste reaching Gorleben but aim to make the transports economically and politically unviable, given the huge security presence needed to safeguard them. Some 20,000 police have been drafted.

"If they can't send their waste to France then the reactors will have to be shut down," said Matthias Hofmann, a 27-year-old student from Hanover. He described the blockades as "strangulation tactics" on German nuclear plants which do not have their own reprocessing facilities.

Under pressure from France to reduce a backlog of German waste at its La Hague reprocessing plant near Cherbourg, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder in 1998 lifted a transport ban that had been imposed on safety grounds.

Two cargoes a year are now planned.

The transports are part of a deal struck with industry last year to phase out Germany's 19 reactors by about 2025 - a timeline considered too long by anti-nuclear activists. Germany has no reprocessing facilities of its own.

Most people in the European Union's most populous country are opposed to or at least wary of nuclear energy. The German media have struck a neutral tone towards the blockade, noting that the overwhelming majority of protesters were peaceful.

---

Nuclear waste shipments a must - German industry

Planet Ark
GERMANY: March 29, 2001
Story by Vera Eckert
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10291

FRANKFURT - Germany's atomic power lobby said yesterday that, despite massive protests by anti-nuclear activists, there was no alternative to controversial overland shipments of nuclear waste.

The German Atomic Forum (ATF) said the transports, from a French reprocessing plant to a storage site in north Germany, were enshrined in an accord last year with the Berlin government to gradually phase out nuclear power.

"We regret the massive protests regarding the transport of reprocessed waste from France to Germany, but Germany's transport commitments are legally binding and cannot be circumvented," said Christian Wilson, spokesman for the Forum.

"The government fully supports this view."

Germany's nuclear industry - whose 19 plants generate a third of the country's electricity - fought a tough rearguard action after Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder came to power in 1998 pledging to scrap nuclear power.

Threatening massive damages claims, the industry sought to keep its nuclear plants operating for as long as possible, eventually settling for a deal to shut off the last reactor by around 2025.

Significantly, the nuclear pullout accord has not yet been ratified by parliament and there remains a risk that it could unravel, one environmental expert warned.

"It is not certain that this compromise will hold," said Christof Timpe of the Oeko Institut in Freiburg. "The relevant contracts have not yet been signed."

NO EARLY SHUTDOWN

The nuclear industry was unimpressed by environmentalists' efforts to force an early nuclear shutdown by rendering the shipments unviable - both politically and financially.

But, three days into the protests, there was no doubting that the activists had scored a publicity coup by delaying the arrival of six "Castor" containers and tying up 20,000 police in one of Germany's biggest peacetime security operations.

Germany has no reprocessing facilities of its own, and around 15 more such transports are expected at a rate of about two a year until 2005. Protesters say they create dangers of radioactive contamination.

Petra Uhlmann, spokeswoman at utility E.ON , said there was "no reason to put pressure on the government. We assume the transports will be carried out." E.ON has interests in 12 of Germany's nuclear plants.

In last year's nuclear consensus deal with Berlin's centre-left govenrment, the industry won guarantees that reprocessed waste may be transported back to Germany until 2005.

By then, utilities plan to have built interim storage facilities directly at their plants to avoid such transports.

Reprocessing is just one - lucrative and space-saving - option of dealing with atomic waste and is currently estimated to cover 10 percent of German atomic waste volumes.

The interim sites will allow nuclear waste to cool down for a required 30-40 years before going into a permanent and final repository, which has yet to be chosen and prepared for usage.

The utilities would have to build these sites at costs of around 50 to 100 million marks each, although central storage sites at Gorleben and Ahaus, near the Dutch border, could hold all of the nuclear waste until final decommissioning.

---

New age vs brave new world in German nuke showdown

Planet Ark
GERMANY: March 29, 2001
Story by Alastair Macdonald
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10292

DANNENBERG, Germany - This small north German town, with its cobbled streets of half-timbered houses set in marshy meadows close to the river Elbe, is under siege.

A camp of tents and wagons, smoking fires, strumming guitars and youthful laughter sat on the edge of town yesterday, occupied by roaming bands of environmental activists many hundreds strong. It lent Dannenberg a mediaeval air it must once have had - save for the police helicopters clattering overhead.

The protests that stopped a rail shipment of nuclear waste from reaching a storage dump at nearby Gorleben are very much of today.

Once on the West's frontier with Communist East Germany, Dannenberg has become a battlefield in another war of the worlds - the brave new world of 20th-century technology and the new age dream of a greener, cleaner world in the 21st.

As the sun burned off the morning frost from the meadows, a couple of hundred people sallied forth from their camp and made for the rail line before being blocked by a phalanx of police.

The odd banner flew. The police, in their green helmets and visors, shields and body armour, looked like Teutonic knights facing down a peasants' revolt. Then, from the back, came one stone, then more, a flare that set the grass alight, a bottle.

Batons raised but seeming determined to stick to promises of restraint, the police forced the crowd back down a narrow road.

One young man was left on the ground, struck, his friends said, by a policeman. An ambulance was called. Black-clad hard-core activists organised a rearguard, forming a human chain across the street and giving ground to cover the retreat.

Despite that defeat, the news from the front is that the old world may be losing the war, no matter how often the law comes out on top in these skirmishes. With every day that passes, the cost of 20,000 police on overtime is shifting the economics of nuclear power in Germany - just as the protesters want.

"OUR PARENTS' GARBAGE"

"This is our parents' garbage," said 20-year-old Alex, from Hamburg. He raised his wraparound shades, squinted in the spring sun and blinked away the effects of a tear gas-scented night.

"Of course, we have to clear it up and the train has to get to Gorleben eventually. But we're going to make it so expensive for the government that they're going to have to shut down the reactors now. Our generation doesn't want nuclear power."

His ripped jacket declares "Keep Warm - Burn the Rich".

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's coalition, which includes the Greens, has pledged to phase out atomic power by about 2025. But that is too far off for many, even though critics argue Germany would be short of electricity if its 19 reactors shut down now.

Thousands of mostly young people have converged on the 25-km (16-mile) stretch between Dannenberg and Dahlenburg, where the train of waste from German reactors, returning from reprocessing in France, had to retreat during a night of violence.

As the authorities worked yesterday to remove activists who had used quick-drying cement to fuse themselves to the track, it was anyone's guess when the train might reach Dannenberg, where the containers must finish the trip by road.

Most troubling for the authorities and the nuclear industry may be the breadth of support for the protesters. Some 40 years separated one local pensioner from them. But little in spirit.

"Thirty years ago I was protesting against nuclear missiles in East Germany," she said, pausing with her shopping on the high street. "I understand these youngsters. I don't want atomic power, either. But my bones are too old to sit on the tracks."

---

CHRONOLOGY - History of nuclear power in Germany

Planet Ark
GERMANY: March 29, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10293

BERLIN - Energy-poor Germany relies on nuclear power for around a third of its electricity but it also has a long history of protest against nuclear plants.

The following are key dates in the history of German nuclear power:

1960 - West Germany's first industrial nuclear power plant opens in Kahl. This plant closes in 1985.

1966 - Rival Communist East Germany begins operation of its first nuclear power plant, a Soviet-designed model.

1975 - Fire at the East German plant of Lubmin on the Baltic Coast almost causes the core to melt down.

1978 - Communist East Germany starts storing nuclear waste at a mine in Morsleben. It is closed in 1998.

1980 - The Greens, who became a nationwide force with their anti-nuclear campaign slogan "Atomkraft? Nein, Danke" (Nuclear Power, No Thanks), form a political party in West Germany.

1984 - West Germany begins first nuclear waste transports to intermediate-term storage in village of Gorleben - then near the East German border - amid protests.

1986 - The Soviet Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster heightens German fears over nuclear safety. Surveys show a majority of Germans oppose the use of nuclear power.

1989 - Last of West Germany's 19 nuclear power plants begins operation. Germany decides against building its own nuclear waste reprocessing plant, relying instead on plants in La Hague in France and Britain's Sellafield.

1990 - Unified German government finishes closing down last of eight nuclear power plants in the formerly Communist east.

1995 - First nuclear waste transports to Gorleben in Castor containers (Casks for Storage and Transport of Radioactive Materials) from La Hague. Similar shipments follow in each of the next two years, sparking protests.

1997 - Huge demonstrations meet Castor transports amid biggest-to-date postwar police operation of 30,000 officers.

March 1998 - Policeman guarding shipment of nuclear waste hit and killed by a train at a time of large protests. Two months later, the government halts nuclear waste transports because of safety fears over Castor containers. In the autumn, the Greens enter the government coalition for the first time.

June 2000 - Coalition government including Greens agree with utilities to phase out nuclear power by the mid-2020s.

March 26, 2001 - Castor transport from French reprocessing plant resumes after government says it is safe. Protesters ignore calls by Environment Minister Juergen Trittin, a Green former protester himself, to avoid violent confrontation and try to block rail line despite massive police mobilisation.

---

FACTBOX - Key facts on German nuclear waste shipments

Planet Ark
GERMANY: March 29, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10294

BERLIN - Following are key facts about nuclear waste shipments from France to Germany. Anti-nuclear activists were blockading a rail transport yesterday near its destination in northern Germany.

WHY?

Germany has 19 nuclear reactors, generating 34 percent of its electricity. These use uranium rods which must be replaced every three to four years. Under deals agreed with the French nuclear processing company Cogema in the late 1970s, German power companies send their used fuel to France, where 96 percent is recycled as uranium and one percent as plutonium for re-use in reactors leaving three percent radioactive High Level Waste (HLW), which must ultimately be disposed of by Germany.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's centre-left coalition with the environmentalist Greens party, elected in 1998, agreed last year with electricity generators, which are privately owned, to phase out all reactors by around 2025.

But in the meantime they generate hundreds of tonnes of radioactive waste a year which will go for reprocessing to France until 2005, when unprocessed waste will be stored on-site at German nuclear plants until a final storage site is chosen.

WHEN?

May 1996: First train brings waste back from France to new German interim storage site at Gorleben, south of Hamburg.

1997: Two further trains carrying Castor (Cask for Storage and Transport of Radioactive Material) containers holding canisters of waste make trip to Gorleben, despite protests.

March 1998: Last waste transport in Germany before resumption in 2001. German waste, not reprocessed in France, taken to Ahaus, near Muenster.

May 1998: France halts Castor transports after radiation contamination detected on some casks. Germany bans transports.

July 1998: France resumes moving waste in Castor casks.

Sept 1998: Schroeder's Social Democrats win power with Greens. Pledge to phase out nuclear power. No move to lift ban on transports so no further waste taken from France, angering French who refuse to take more spent fuel till backlog cleared.

Jan 31, 2001: Schroeder agrees with French President Jacques Chirac to resume transports. Some German reactors had been in danger of closure as storage capacity for used fuel ran out.

March 26, 2001: Train carrying six Castor containers leaves Cogema's La Hague reprocessing plant and crosses German border after dark. Protesters chaining themselves to the track halt train near destination yesterday. Some 15 more transports are expected at rate of about two a year.

WHERE?

Starts: Waste leaves Cogema's La Hague reprocessing plant 25 km (16 miles) west of Cherbourg, by road for Valognes rail terminal, 40 km (25 miles) away. Loaded onto train.

Border: At Lauterbourg, between Strasbourg and Karlsruhe.

Ends: At Dannenberg rail depot, between Hamburg and Berlin and 1,500 km (950 miles) from La Hague, containers loaded onto trucks to be driven to Gorleben storage facility, 25 km away.

Gorleben is a temporary storage plant comprising warehouses. It can hold up to 420 Castor-type casks. Exploratory work has been done on turning a disused local salt mine into a permanent repository for the waste - Germany has none at present - but a final decision does not have to be taken before 2015.

HOW?

Waste is vitrified into a borosilicate glass and placed in canisters which are in turn placed in heavy protective containers. The Castor HAW 20/28 CG iron containers being used hold up to 28 canisters. They stand 6.1 metres (20 feet) tall and 2.5 metres (eight feet) in diameter and weigh 112 tonnes.

Helium-sealed and shielded for radioactivity, they are intended to withstand a nine metre drop, heat of 800 degrees Celsius and submersion in 200 metres of water.

---

Delayed Nuclear Train Reaches Its Destination
Violent Clashes in Germany Halt It 17 Hours

International Herald Tribune
Thursday, March 29, 2001
John Schmid International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/15105.htm

FRANKFURT - After a daylong delay and frequent clashes between anti-nuclear protesters and thousands of German police, a train carrying 60 tons of nuclear waste reached its destination Wednesday night.

The train had been stopped for 17 hours in the rural northern plains 25 kilometers (16 miles) from its destination of Dannenberg after four activists had chained themselves to the tracks so securely that crews worked for 14 hours with acetylene torches and jackhammers to remove them.

As the train pulled into Dannenberg around 7:30 p.m., it was escorted by seven helicopters overhead, and more than 1,000 policemen turned water cannons on remaining demonstrators and repeatedly charged into them to keep the tracks clear.

At the Dannenberg railhead, the six 10-ton waste containers were to be put on flatbed trucks to be taken the last 20 kilometers to the dump at Gorleben, a small town that has become the focal point for the anti-nuclear movement. That trip was to be made on Thursday.

Four years ago, the last time nuclear waste was transported to Gorleben, the police and anti-nuclear protesters clashed in the area's thick woods.

The protesters, who want Germany to close its 19 nuclear reactors, are trying to make the transport of reprocessed fuel so difficult and expensive that the government will have no choice but to abandon nuclear power.

"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," said Jurgen Satari, a spokesman for the environmentalist group Robin Wood, whose members manacled themselves to the rails.

"Of course we know we cannot halt it indefinitely, but we can drive up the political price," he said. "We want the nuclear power plants shut down immediately."

The latest day of protests left one police officer with a broken leg, four others injured and a police van set ablaze. Some radicals pelted security officials with stones and at least one demonstrator was knocked unconscious. The police, who responded with rubber bats and water cannons in the subfreezing air, arrested 40 and detained another 120 overnight. Another officer was accidentally run over by a police car in the melee and was rushed by helicopter to a nearby hospital.

The cross-country demonstrations against the shipment and storage of nuclear waste in Germany put Greens Party politicians in the federal government on the defensive and complicated the government's long-stalled plans to gradually shut down the nation's reactors.

The anti-nuclear movement developed deep roots in Germany as a result of cold-war missile deployments on German soil and the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine. Nuclear-power opponents balk at the high-level lethal wastes produced by the reactors, which experts recommend should be stored in isolation for 10,000 years. Germany has no permanent storage sites and uses Gorleben's warehouses as a temporary storehouse.For this week's shipment of spent fuel from a French reprocessing plant back to Germany, the government dispatched some 30,000 police and special units, along with helicopters and armored cars, in one of the biggest German peacetime security operations.

The demonstrations reverberated in the ministries in Berlin in anticipation of next year's federal elections. Although two generations of Germans have used violent means to oppose nuclear power, this week's protests resonate in an unusually complicated political environment.

The shipment of spent radioactive fuel represents the first such consignment since the environmental Greens party joined the federal government in 1998. No longer a protest party, the Greens were forced to reverse their once-ardent positions and now grudgingly support nuclear waste transit within Germany.

Rank-and-file Greens now denounce their leaders as traitors and have drained one of the governing parties of support just before next year's elections. The Greens slumped in two separate weekend statehouse elections, and they have been falling in popularity since they joined the government. Getting rid of nuclear reactors is the overriding reason why many Germans vote Green.

The party's two top leaders had planned to join the demonstrations as an act of solidarity, but on Wednesday canceled abruptly. The party leaders, Claudia Roth and Fritz Kuhn, said they had to take care of party business in Berlin, but commentators said the party could not afford to have the pair associated with the violence.

The Berlin government on Wednesday said it had hit fresh obstacles in its plans to gradually decommission the nation's reactors. Led by the Greens, the government under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder negotiated a "consensus agreement" with the power industry meant to phase out nuclear plants over the next three decades under a flexible schedule. The phaseout was a cornerstone in the election manifesto of the Greens.

But the industry has not yet signed the consensus agreement and lawmakers have not been able to agree on how to draft legislation that enshrines it into law. On Wednesday, Wilhelm Schmidt, a parliamentary leader from Mr. Schroeder's Social Democratic Party, said the phaseout legislation had suffered new delays. Talks with industry remain very difficult, he said.

Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the French Greens activist, this week called his German counterparts "schizophrenic."

"They are for the government compromise and they are for the demonstrations," he told the French newspaper France Soir.

-------- iraq

Arab Leaders End Meeting in Disarray Over Iraq

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29ARAB.html

AMMAN, Jordan, March 28 - The meeting of Arab leaders billed as a step toward regional harmony pledged new financial support for the Palestinian government today, but the arguments on lifting United Nations sanctions against Iraq collapsed in bitterness.

The two-day meeting, an attempt to resume regularly scheduled annual gatherings for the first time since Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, ended with the two countries trading accusations of who 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," against Iraq, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi foreign minister, told a news conference.

The Kuwaitis, while agreeing with other nations that sanctions imposed against Iraq after the invasion should end, refused to accept any Arab League resolution that lacked an explicit Iraqi promise not to threaten Kuwait again. While Saudi Arabia backed Kuwait on the issue, Mr. Sahhaf of Iraq, said, "It's not from Iraq that the British and U.S. aircraft attack Iraq every day, killing Iraqi people and violating our sovereignty."

Sheik Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti foreign minister, who headed his country's delegation, said, "Iraq has caused the Arab summit to fail and not Kuwait."

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

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

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

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

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 monthly from the Israeli government, representing items like customs duties and payroll taxes, 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.

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

-------- missile defense

N. Korea Warns on Shield

Washington Post
Thursday, March 29, 2001; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9079-2001Mar28?language=printer

WORLD In Brief TOKYO -- North Korea's state-run media accused the United States and Japan of moving ahead with joint development of Washington's proposed anti-missile defense system, saying that could push the North to respond with force.

"If they continue to provoke military confrontation with North Korea -- following this path to war -- we will have no option but to respond with firm resolve," said the commentary on the North's official Korean Central News Agency.

The threat followed an accusation Tuesday that the United States has been trying to derail rapprochement between South and North Korea as a prelude to war between the divided neighbors.

The news agency has accused the United States and Japan of fabricating missile threats from the North to justify the missile defense program.

Associated Press

---

Schröder to Visit Bush, Bearing Europe's New Concerns

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By ROGER COHEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29GERM.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 during 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, a Social Democrat, has astutely positioned his 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.

The concerns 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 international conference - standards that President 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 over 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.

-------- russia

Russia's Nuclear Missile Safety Chief Dies

Russia Today
Mar 29, 2001
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=324515

MOSCOW -- (Reuters) The man in charge of the safety of Russia's vast nuclear missile arsenal has died from injuries he suffered in a car crash last month, the Strategic Rocket Forces said on Thursday.

A spokesman told Reuters that Major-General Vladimir Grigoriev had died on Saturday after a series of unsuccessful operations. He was involved in a car crash in Tatarstan, a region east of Moscow, on February 15.

---

New Russian Atomic Energy Chief Good News for U.S.

International Herald Tribune
Mar 29, 2001
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=324499

MOSCOW -- (Reuters) Russia's appointment of a new atomic energy minister could be good news for a U.S. administration anxious to keep Iran from obtaining Moscow's nuclear know-how, industry experts said on Thursday.

"President Vladimir Putin's decision to fire Atomic Energy Minister Yevengy Adamov is a significant event in the area of nuclear non-proliferation," said Vladimir Orlov, director of the Center for Policy Studies in Russia, in a statement.

Adamov was replaced on Wednesday by Alexander Rumyantsev, the head of the Kurchatov Institute, one of Russia's leading nuclear laboratories. Part of his job will be to ensure Russia's stocks of fissionable material do not fall into the hands of terrorists or states bent on acquiring nuclear arms.

But he has yet to take a public stance on proliferation issues. Moscow insists it is respecting all its international obligations to prevent the spread of nuclear material and know-how. But critics say Adamov's bids to sell Russia's civilian nuclear technology abroad undermined this claim.

The outgoing minister was the prime mover behind India's import of nuclear fuel for its Tarapur power plant, a deal which a dismayed U.S. State Department said raised questions about Russia's commitment to nuclear non-proliferation.

Adamov also wanted to sell Tehran three reactors in addition to a nuclear power plant under construction at Bushehr, in the Gulf, causing further consternation in Washington.

A DEAL TOO FAR?

The daily business newspaper Kommersant said Adamov had been dismissed because the Kremlin was unhappy that he had been "excessively active in reaching nuclear deals with Iran," long a U.S. bogeyman.

"With tensions rising in relations with the United States, Adamov's Iranian projects were inappropriate," Kommersant said. Significantly, Adamov was the only minister not given a new job in Wednesday's reshuffle, it said.

Proliferation issues have been at the heart of a transatlantic slanging match between Washington and Moscow since U.S. President George W. Bush took office.

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has accused Moscow of being an "active proliferator" of missile and nuclear technology, which justified the U.S. decision to go ahead with a $60 billion national missile defense shield denounced by Russia.

German police foiled at least two bids to sell nuclear material stolen from Russia in the 1990s. The U.S. Carnegie Endowment think tank has said conspirators tried to steal 18.5 kilograms (40.7 pounds) of weapons-usable material as recently as 1998.

The think tank said less than a tenth of Russia's highly enriched uranium stockpile has been made useless for weapons.

Also in Rumyantsev's in-tray is a plan by his predecessor to import nuclear waste for treatment in Russia. Parliament last week delayed a vote legalizing the imports.

In televised comments on Wednesday, the new minister said the project was "reasonable, but concretely how this should be carried out must be carefully discussed".

Adamov's project, which supporters said could earn Russia $20 billion over two decades, enraged ecology groups and liberals who said it would turn Russia into the world's nuclear dustbin. They say such a scheme is madness in a country whose own storage facilities are in a pitiful state.

---

In Kremlin Shuffle, Putin Puts Loyalists In Key Security Jobs

Washington Post
Thursday, March 29, 2001; Page A18
By Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser Washington Post Foreign Service
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6029-2001Mar28?language=printer

MOSCOW, March 28 -- President Vladimir Putin today installed loyalists to oversee the military and domestic security forces and ousted several holdovers from Boris Yeltsin's cabinet in his first government shake-up since taking over the Kremlin a year ago.

Putin described the shake-up as a historic effort to assert civilian control over the armed forces in a country where generals traditionally run the military and security ministries. But it also marked an attempt to cement control of a government that he had left largely intact since rising from obscurity to succeed Yeltsin.

Under the reorganization, Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev was sacked and replaced by security council chief Sergei Ivanov, perhaps Putin's closest adviser and, like Putin, a KGB veteran. Putin tapped Boris Gryzlov, his chief legislative ally in the State Duma and head of the pro-Kremlin Unity party, to take over the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which has supervised much of the war in Chechnya that has dragged on for more than 18 months.

"As you can see, we have civilians coming to key posts at military institutions," Putin said. "This is done consciously. This is a step toward the demilitarization of Russia's public life."

In making the moves, Putin signaled impatience with the lack of progress in restructuring the military and ending the current Chechen conflict. "I would like the security council in today's situation to pay more attention to the problems of the Northern Caucasus," he said. As for his stalled military reform program, he added, "It is high time to get down to the practical implementation of our plans."

In a surprise move, Putin also forced out Atomic Energy Minister Yevgeny Adamov, who had come under fire in parliament for alleged corruption. Adamov promoted a widely criticized plan to open up Russia as a repository for the world's spent nuclear fuel, a proposal that was supposed to have cruised to final passage in the Duma last week only to be tabled at the last moment.

While a major shake-up had been expected, Putin spared the chief target of domestic criticism, Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. But it may be only a temporary reprieve. Putin plans to give his annual address to parliament Tuesday and hinted of more to come. "There are other changes that will catch the public's attention," he said.

For several of those he unseated today, Putin softened the blow by giving them other titles. Outgoing Internal Affairs Minister Vladimir Rushailo was appointed head of the Kremlin security council to replace Ivanov. Sergeyev was kept on as a presidential aide.

Nonetheless, the decision was a stinging one for Sergeyev. Just this month, he sent a letter to Putin asking to be retained. But evidently he lost a months-long fight with Anatoly Kvashnin, chief of the general staff, who has been pushing for more spending on conventional troops at the expense of the nuclear forces favored by Sergeyev.

Other decisions announced today included the dismissal of the head of the tax police, Vyacheslav Soltaganov. The tax police have become an especially feared force in Russia, sending teams of masked, armed agents to raid homes and businesses. Putin also appointed the first woman as a deputy defense minister, Lyubov Kudelina.

The moves won wide approval in Moscow, particularly the notion of civilian control of the armed forces. "It's one of the great principles of a democratic society to have civilian control of the military and other organizations," Andrei Kokoshin, a former secretary of the security council, said in an interview. "It's a very important symbolic move."

Ivanov may be a civilian now, but until last year he was a general in the Federal Security Service, the domestic successor to the KGB. At 48, he shares a similar biography with the president. Like Putin, he was born in St. Petersburg and became a spy, in his case posted in Britain, Finland and Kenya. Ivanov is considered a hard-liner at a time of increasing tensions with the United States following recent tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions.

Gryzlov only recently arrived on the political scene. Another product of St. Petersburg, he was a behind-the-scenes political organizer there until he was unexpectedly appointed head of Unity. Since then, Gryzlov, 50, who has a degree in radio engineering, has been Putin's most reliable soldier in the Duma.

Pushed aside for the Putin allies were remaining insiders from the Yeltsin "family," as his inner circle was known, particularly Rushailo and Adamov, seen as close to Boris Berezovsky, the business tycoon who has fallen out of favor in the Putin era.

Rushailo, whose interior ministry troops have handled much of the fighting in Chechnya, recently asserted that officials who accept money to influence their actions are not necessarily corrupt. "Do not mistake bribe-taking for corruption," he said, according to the news agency RIA.

At the height of the debate over Adamov's nuclear waste proposal, the Duma's anti-corruption committee produced a report on his personal business activities and demanded a criminal investigation. Adamov, the report alleged, set himself up in business with a U.S. partner in the early 1990s, winning contracts from the atomic ministry at the same time he headed a top-secret institute there.

"Environmentalists in the whole world are applauding this decision," Tobias Muenchmeyer, a Russia nuclear expert at Greenpeace, said after Adamov was sacked. Putin had to make the move because he told the public "that there wouldn't be Yeltsin-style corruption anymore and Adamov didn't fit into this."

---

In High-Level Shake-Up, Putin Replaces Russia's Defense, Interior and Nuclear Energy Chiefs

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29RUSS.html

MOSCOW, March 28 - President Vladimir V. Putin replaced his defense and interior ministers today and dismissed the country's atomic energy chief in the most extensive set of personnel changes in his year- old government.

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

Mr. Putin emphasized that he was putting civilians in key posts "as a step toward the demilitarization of society in Russia."

Plans call for reducing the 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 plants to reprocess it.

Kremlin officials said Mr. Putin's personnel selections drew on people who were mostly younger and more attuned to the president's policy goals for streamlining the country's armed forces and for rebuilding military and atomic industries to compete at home and abroad.

Mr. Putin replaced Marshal Igor D. Sergeyev, 62, as defense minister; he becomes 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, although he held the rank of lieutenant general in the K.G.B.'s successor agency, 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," Mr. Putin said, "and it would also be just to entrust him with bringing them to life."

Kremlin aides said Mr. Putin had become impatient with the pace of reform under Marshal Sergeyev, a former chief of strategic rocket forces who clashed with leading generals over how to allocate resources in the conventional and strategic nuclear forces.

Strategic forces have been independent of the general staff. Mr. Putin said today that he had created new commands for land and space forces within the military.

Tonight, Mr. Ivanov pledged to make the army "more professional, mobile and more combat-ready." Mr. Ivanov has been a confidant to Mr. Putin and he "will still be a very important person," said Andrei A. Kokoshin, former national security adviser.

Since August, Mr. Putin's security council has been discussing a plan to reduce Russia's armed forces from their current strength of 1.2 million members to about 850,000. At the same time, military spending would be increased over the next decade to improve living standards for soldiers and modernize weapons.

Russian military spending for 2001 is $8 billion, out of the $40 billion national budget.

Mr. Putin made a rare foray across the gender barrier and appointed a woman, Lyubov K. Kudelina, to the post of deputy defense minister. As a deputy finance minister, she has overseen the military budget, and her move into the male bastion of the Defense Ministry foreshadows a stronger balance-sheet approach to the armed forces, officials said.

Replacing Mr. Ivanov as secretary of the powerful national security council will be Vladimir B. Rushailo, who has served as interior minister and who has presided over a number of military disasters in the rebellious region of Chechnya, where Interior Ministry troops have been sent as garrison forces only to be caught in a number of deadly ambushes.

Up to now Mr. Rushailo has not been considered among the strongest of Mr. Putin's security chiefs, and this month he embarrassed the Kremlin by saying 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.

In replacing Mr. Rushailo, Mr. Putin chose a veteran lawmaker from his hometown of St. Petersburg, Boris V. Gryzlov, 50, the head of the pro-Kremlin Unity faction in Parliament. The faction was 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 having a trusted Putin supporter like Mr. Gryzlov at the healm of the powerful domestic police agency will "help break up the clannishness of the ministry," one 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 to be 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 to provide half of the country's energy by midcentury.

Mr. Adamov has been an unfailing booster for sales of Russian reactor technology to China, India and Iran; the dealings especially have drawn sharp criticism from Washington.

Among Mr. Adamov's controversial proposals has been one to build a new generation of fast breeder reactors that could make use of Russia's huge stockpile of uranium and plutonium produced for nuclear weapons. Aides to Mr. Adamov today said his removal came as a shock.

In Mr. Adamov's stead, Mr. Putin named 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. He is also an ardent supporter of nuclear power.

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

Sacred cows in the cross hairs
In every branch of the military, major changes in the wind
The M-1A1 Abrams battle tank.
At 70 tons, it's hard to kill, but just as hard to get to the battlefield.

MSNBC
03/29/01
By Michael Moran MSNBC
mailto:michael.moran@msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.com/news/550115.asp?cp1=1

WASHINGTON - Call it the Cold War hangover. In every branch of the American military, the very weapons that made the U.S. the world's pre-eminent power of the last century are now under scrutiny. Certainly no foreign power currently threatens the Army's tanks, the Navy's aircraft carriers or the high-tech warplanes of the Air Force. Yet these powerful weapons may be undermined by new developments in technology and new threats abroad. For the man now running the Pentagon, opportunity and peril lace the choices ahead.

IN WHAT IS shaping up to be a major housecleaning, the new defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, appointed Andrew Marshall to head up a strategic review of U.S. military capabilities. Marshall, a Pentagon veteran with an iconoclastic reputation, is known to favor a clean break with many of the weapons that helped win the Cold War.

According to officials and outside experts interviewed by MSNBC.com, the review is expected to recommend changes that until now were considered radical: shifting future defense funds away from the giant aircraft carriers, tanks and warplanes that now dominate the force toward a new generation of lighter, smaller, stealthier weapons.

The Rumsfeld review, expected to be made public next month, affirms the thinking of many military strategists who have been arguing for a decade for a fundamental change toward a leaner, nimbler military. Supporters of this view also see these lightly manned and ultimately more expendable weapons as the missing element in America's arsenal, and the tools best suited to fight the kinds of conflicts foreseen in the 21st century.

These new missions include:
Regional wars and support for peacekeeping missions.
Surviving highly capable missile systems in the hands of U.S. foes.
Strikes against terrorist bases deep inside hostile territory.
The need to be able to operate over the vast distances of the Asia-Pacific region.

PLAYING TO U.S. STRENGTHS

"Winning a conflict in Asia," according to Elliot Cohen, a strategic warfare expert, "will mean long-range warfare, with dispersed, mobile or concealed basing, and the kinds of forces that can sustain a long, perhaps only intermittently violent, clash in the air, at sea and in space." Andrew Krepinevich, a former Pentagon colleague of Marshall's who now heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says the current U.S. lead in military power provides a unique opportunity to experiment with new ideas particularly well timed to the Rumsfeld report.

"As other countries grab onto technologies to make things difficult for us, we need to exploit our potential advantage - information and technology - which allows us to operate forces that are highly dispersed and highly integrated at the same time," Krepinevich says. "You no longer need to concentrate combat capability in one platform like a carrier or one air base."

In fact, many argue that concentrating so much power and so many American personnel on any platform or base invites catastrophe.

"The knock on the military is that we're always training to win the last war, not the next one," said one senior military officer with knowledge of the panel's work. "Could we build more big-deck carriers and Abrams tanks and still be untouchable? Maybe. But the smart thing to do is take advantage of the huge lead we have and really match our tools with the scary new world out there."

Experts say the scope of the changes the military must react to in the near future will be more dramatic than any since World War II, which saw the advent of mechanized warfare, carrier warfare and bombing campaigns.

"For nearly half a century, the U.S. military organized itself to fight a short, extremely intensive battle in Europe from large fixed bases dispersed over relatively short distances," Cohen notes.

WARNING SIGNS

The experiences of the 1990s - from the Gulf War to Somalia to Kosovo - provided ample evidence of the need for lighter, faster forces. The Army learned in Somalia and Kosovo the price of building its doctrine around the 70-ton M1A1 Abrams tank, which cannot be airlifted into battle in large numbers using the rough, smaller airfields of the developing world.

No ground war ever developed in Kosovo, but had the U.S. decided to invade, the Army's tanks would have taken months to show up. Even when the Abrams tanks had reached Albania's main port, their weight would have collapsed 10 of the 12 bridges between the port and the Kosovo border.

As a result, the Army is now training "interim brigades" that would ultimately be outfitted with a new armored vehicle far smaller than the Abrams and capable of being shipped by air right into the combat zone. The Army's heavy armored commanders scoff at this idea. But Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki has championed it and the Rumsfeld report is likely to endorse it.

"You have to get to the battle to fight it," said Brig. Gen. Paul Eaton, who commands one of the interim brigades now being trained at Fort Lewis in Washington State. "There are folks in the Army who say we're just 'dumbing down' the heavy brigade. But we're not designed to go up against tanks in open terrain. That will still take tanks. In the long run, though, we want to be smaller, faster and invisible, and just as tough."

THE NEW MISSILE THREAT

The Navy, too, has found itself trying to adapt Cold War weapons to fight new enemies. Navy carriers effectively pounded Iraq during the Gulf War and Serbia during the Kosovo conflict. But the Navy also understands that improved missiles in the hands of its foes will mean the days of putting large aircraft carriers into confined waters like the Persian Gulf are numbered.

It is "unthinkable," in the words of one Marine general, that an adversary will ever again sit back as Saddam Hussein did in 1990 and allow the kind of buildup that took place on Iraq's border before the Gulf War.

"They will saturate the ports, railheads and airfields with missiles," said the general, recounting the results of a war game in which a U.S. force attempted to prevent a Central Asian nation from being overrun. "With our current heavy tanks, short-ranged fighters and carriers forces," the general said, "we simply had no way of getting to the battle."

ENTER STREETFIGHTER

To equip the Navy to operate in dangerous coastal waters, Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski is championing a concept known as "streetfighter." Cebrowski is proposing a new class of small, fast, lightly manned carriers, missile ships and submarines. Several catamaran-hulled designs are under consideration for these ships, including a 6,000-ton pocket aircraft carrier known as Corsair, and a 3,000-ton missile-laden attack ship called Sea Lance. Neither would replace existing vessels, but going forward, some believe they may do the kinds of jobs that larger warships won't be able to perform effectively.

Cebrowski also understands that a political window has opened in Washington. "We have elbow room right now, and we should be using it to put ourselves another generation ahead of the competition, not perfecting the weapons that won the Cold War" he says.

RETHINKING BASES

The missile threat also affects U.S. military bases around the world. The Air Force and the Marines both operate under the assumption that their bases in places like Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia or Turkey will be available as staging areas in a crisis.

In the longer-term, however, many believe the missile threat to such bases - especially the threat posed by China's increasingly large and capable force - will make them virtually useless in a crisis. With these missiles, writes Paul Bracken, an authority on defense and intelligence issues at Yale University, "Beijing not only turns America's Asian bases into hostages; she also inhibits U.S. power in the whole Pacific basin."

Meanwhile, the Air Force is spending $69 billion over the next decade to purchase 339 F-22 Raptor fighters, replacing the aging but still capable F-15.

While no one doubts the formidable capabilities of the F-22, Andrew Krepinevich notes that the new aircraft may be irrelevant if its bases are destroyed.

"No one is out there trying to build an air force to match the U.S. Air Force," said Krepinevich. "If I'm an adversary, I'm not going to challenge you in the air, what I'm going to do is target your bases with missiles. You have to question the value of air superiority fighters against missile forces."

Krepinevich and others also suggest that more money should be devoted to developing UCAVs - Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles - which would take pilots out of harm's way. The technology for highly capable fighter drones is still years away, but given the service life of modern fighter aircraft - 30 years or more - Krepinevich says "the value of the F-22 may depreciate awfully quickly."

PAINFUL CHOICES AHEAD

Such dilemmas make these changes painful to the military, which often fights for as much as a decade to get new weapons systems approved and is loath to see them pared back once production lines start to roll.

Yet the battle over the shape of the future military has been joined in a manner not seen in decades. Just as it took Nixon to go to China, it may take Rumsfeld and Marshall - a pair of Cold Warriors in their late 60s - to challenge the primacy of aircraft carriers, heavy tanks and fighter jets at the Pentagon.

Michael Moran is senior producer, special reports, at MSNBC. Part II of The Secret Empire, a look at the explosion in America's commitments abroad since the Cold War ended, appears next Thursday, April 5.

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

Draft order shows Chao winning battle to shed nuclear worker program

ohio.com
Thursday, March 29, 2001
BY KATHERINE RIZZO Associated Press Writer
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/018017.htm
http://www.ohio.com/bj/news/ohio/docs/017336.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Labor Secretary Elaine Chao appeared Thursday to be winning a battle over custody of an entitlement program for job-contaminated nuclear workers.

The Office of Management and Budget circulated a draft executive order handing the program over to the Justice Department. Chao concluded her department did not have the right kind of expertise and asked that the Justice Department be put in charge.

A union lobbyist said he feared such a move would make it impossible for dying workers to quickly get the checks and medical benefits they've been promised.

``What they have just done is pour cement boots over this program,'' Richard Miller said. He had pressed to make the Labor Department the new program's home base on behalf of the union representing workers at 11 sites in the nuclear weapons complex.

The proposed order -- which is not the administration position unless President Bush signs it -- would amend an order by President Clinton, who put the Labor Department in charge, and defy Congress, which appropriated money to the Labor Department to set up the program.

It is supposed to give $150,000, plus medical care to workers with cancer or incurable lung disease because of their Cold War-era exposure to radiation, beryllium or silica.

The lawmakers who designed the program wanted the Labor Department to run it on the theory that experience with black lung and other compensation programs would let it prepare quickly to evaluate medical claims by the nuclear workers.

Chao, however, concluded her department did not have the right kind of expertise and asked that the Justice Department be put in charge.

Despite assuring senators in February that the Labor Department was up to the task, Chao said she ``soon found that the Department does not have the experience or expertise in radiation cases to adequately serve these workers.''

Chao's position was supported by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah. Hatch is one of the originators of a small, Justice Department-run program that has compensated some miners who got sick while digging uranium ore without protection from radiation.

Her position was vehemently opposed by the lawmakers who created the new program, the unions that asked for the new program and some dissatisfied beneficiaries of the decade-old Justice Department program. All said the nationwide network of offices, administrative law judges to mediate disputes and other infrastructure made the Labor Department the right choice.

Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said the new program is expected to generate about 2,500 successful claims a year. That compares with about 360 successful claims in the Justice Department's program for the miners, uranium millers and victims of airborne radiation from above-ground nuclear bomb tests.

``Can such a huge increase of work be handled and the injured workers still get their benefits in an efficient manner? Many of these people don't have time to wait. They're sick now and can't wait while the government tweaks its bureaucracy,'' he said.

``The best plan is to send this program through the biggest pipeline, and I think that's Labor,'' Voinovich said.

Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Ohio, whose southern Ohio district includes a uranium processing plant, said ``I think it's shameful,'' and pledged to introduce legislation requiring the Labor Department to take over.

``I think (Chao) has thumbed her nose at Ohio's two senators, at me and other bipartisan members of Congress for no reason other than her staff doesn't want to do the work,'' he said.

Strickland had organized lawmakers from eight other affected districts to press to keep the program in the Labor Department.

Sens. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., George Voinovich, R-Ohio, Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., and Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., wrote similar letters.

Many of the uranium miners for whom the Justice Department-run program was intended are Navajo. A tribal leader weighed into the dispute on Thursday, asking that the both the new program and the old program be sent to Chao's team.

Dr. Taylor McKenzie, Navajo Nation vice president, said his tribe believed the Labor Department was better suited to run those programs because it operates other programs that paid out 2.5 million medical claims last year.

The law creating the new compensation program offered medical care to the miners. If eligibility decisions are left to the Justice Department, ``This move will make the promised medical benefits for uranium miners another broken promise,'' McKenzie wrote.

That Justice Department program has a tiny staff, and applicants have complained of long backlogs and rules that made it difficult for sick miners to prove they qualified for compensation payments.

That program also has had to rely on Congress providing money for the payments, and many sick miners got IOUs instead of checks because enough funds weren't appropriated.

As an entitlement, the new program won't have that problem; checks will go out automatically.

The new program already has $60.4 million in start-up funds, some of which was earmarked for radiation dose reconstruction by the Department of Health and Human Services. The bulk of the appropriation, though, could be moved to the Justice Department.

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NUCLEAR-CLEANUP COMPANY WASTED $44 MILLION, U.S. SAYS

Columbus Dispatch
Thursday, March 29, 2001
By Nancy Zuckerbrod Associated Press
http://libpub.dispatch.com/cgi-bin/documentv1?DBLIST=cd01&DOCNUM=14400

WASHINGTON -- The company that manages the cleanup at nuclear facilities in Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee cost taxpayers an extra $44 million because it didn't meet commitments to cut staff by using subcontractors, the Department of Energy inspector general has concluded.

The Energy Department awarded a $2.5 billion contract to Bechtel Jacobs in 1997 to manage the cleanup of nuclear facilities in Piketon; Paducah, Ky.; and Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Bechtel Jacobs subsequently hired the previous contractor's employees but eventually was supposed to move people to the payroll of subcontractors who were to be awarded bids for fixed-priced contracts.

"Bechtel Jacobs did not use competitive, fixed-price subcontracts or reduce staffing to the extent proposed,'' Inspector General Gregory Friedman wrote.

A company spokesman said yesterday that the unusual nature and size of the project were factors the report didn't take into account.

Bechtel Jacobs won the contract in large part by stating it would cut costs and speed up the cleanup by subcontracting more than 90 percent of the work and reducing staffing by about 80 percent, the inspector general said.

But as of September, Bechtel Jacobs subcontracted less than 60 percent of the original work outlined in the project and reduced staff through the transition to subcontractors by 58 percent, the report said.

The Energy Department did not incorporate the proposed goals into its contract with Bechtel Jacobs, which limited the agency's ability to hold the company accountable, the report stated.

Friedman concluded that the Energy Department could have saved $44.1 million last year had Bechtel Jacobs met the terms of its proposal.

Bechtel Jacobs spokesman John Schlatter said the audit should have given the company credit for contracts that were already established by the Energy Department and that Bechtel decided to continue, even though they were generally not competitively awarded on a fixed-price basis.

The company thought that continuity was important in some instances, he said.

Schlatter also said Bechtel Jacobs did not outsource as much as originally planned because it underestimated how much work it thought it should do itself.

"It's not uncommon for things to be somewhat different on the job than what was proposed,'' Schlatter said of the company's inability to reduce staff to the degree that was expected.

In its response, the Energy Department said that the report failed to take into account that the Bechtel Jacobs contract was a "first of a kind'' award for the department.

The contract had unique provisions on work force transition and subcontracting, the department said.

------

Energy Department Releases Historical Studies of Recycled Uranium
Differing Operational Practices Result in Data Inconsistencies Among Studies

March 29, 2001 -
DOE NEWS MEDIA
CONTACT: Dolline Hatchett, 202/586-5806; Joe Davis, 202/586-4940
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/legacy/releases/pr01045.html

The Department of Energy (DOE) today released nine site-specific studies that examined the historical movement of recycled uranium throughout the Department's complex. The studies represent the fifth installment of a comprehensive effort begun by the department in September 1999 to address worker concerns associated with the historical use of recycled uranium at the Gaseous Diffusion Plants in Paducah, Kentucky, Portsmouth, Ohio, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

The nine reports cover the following 12 sites: Hanford, Wash.; Savannah River, S.C.; Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory, Idaho; Fernald, Ohio; (including West Valley, N.Y.; Weldon Springs, Mo.; and RMI Inc. Ohio); the Gaseous Diffusion Plants in Paducah, Ky.; Portsmouth, Ohio; Oak Ridge, Tenn.; the Y-12 Plant, Tenn.; and Rocky Flats, Colo.

The reports, as well as a project overview that describes the approach used to prepare the reports, are available on the web at http://tis.eh.doe.gov/legacy/. The reports provide a general understanding of the flow and characteristics of recycled uranium at individual sites. They identify where recycled uranium and trace amounts of other radioactive contaminants could have concentrated or been released, including historical periods, activities and concentrations, which may be useful for identifying potential worker exposure.

Thousands of historical records were retrieved and analyzed to compile the data used in these studies. Based on this information, DOE has a good preliminary understanding of the characteristics and trace contaminants in the major streams of recycled uranium.

However, because of differing operational practices, different designations for recycled uranium used by the sites in historical records dating back to 1952, and the extensive blending operations used by the sites, there are data inconsistencies among the reports. Because of these inconsistencies, the numeric totals of the sites cannot be calculated to yield an accurate accounting of the amount of recycled uranium across the DOE complex.

To resolve these inconsistencies, and build on historical records, the Department's Office of Plutonium, Uranium, and Special Materials Inventory has been charged with conducting a follow-on study to develop a historical mass balance for uranium -- including recycled uranium. The nine recycled uranium reports will be used in the study.

A brief press conference call will be held today at 3 p.m. for interested media who would like more specific information on the recycled uranium project. Please call (202) 586-5806 to receive the call-in number and to confirm your participation by noon today. - DOE -
------ tennessee

Tennessee

USA Today
03/29/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Knoxville - The board of the Tennessee Valley Authority approved a plan to convert 33 metric tons of highly enriched uranium into commercial reactor fuel. TVA plans to use the fuel, once earmarked for use in nuclear bombs, at its Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama as early as 2005.

-------- us nuc politics

Bush 'Realism' May Backfire on U.S.

William Pfaff
International Herald Tribune
Thursday, March 29, 2001
Los Angeles Times
http://www.iht.com/articles/15017.htm

BOSTON The motive remains mysterious for what seems gratuitous brutality in the Bush administration's approach not only to Russia and China, but also to South Korea and the Europeans.

The White House says it has adopted a "new realism," and George W. Bush's press secretary has repeatedly used that word, or a variation of it, in defending what has been going on. Realism has an established meaning in the vocabulary of foreign relations. It means national policies formulated in terms of power and national interest, setting aside ideology and prejudice, trying to look at things as honestly as possible. But suspicion arises that the Bush administration may think "realism" simply means being tough with other countries, ignoring their official opinions and national interests when these don't please the United States, even when those interests may be legitimate and the opinions serious.

Washington's cursory dismissal of South Korea's successful policy to open up communications with North Korea, its rejection of international concern over global warming and its "take it or leave it" stands on national missile defense and NATO expansion have all tended to alienate or even anger governments with whom the United States needs to work.

A commentator at the Carnegie Endowment says the Bush people are "going to play hardball, and they want to make that very clear, very fast." Hardball that provokes hostility and avoidable opposition is not realism.

The downside of this is illustrated in the administration's recent dealings with Russia on nuclear and proliferation issues. Mr. Bush's secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, recently called Russia "a nation of proliferators." His deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, has said "these people will do anything for money." In fact, there has been very little leakage of Russian nuclear resources and expertise. Washington's expulsion last week of 50 identified (and therefore largely neutralized) Russian intelligence people in the United States was a show-off act, not a realistic one. The Russians had made use of a walk-in FBI traitor. What else were they - realistically - supposed to have done? Turn him in to the FBI?

However, the Moscow response to the expulsions could be loss of access for Americans working inside Russia, at sensitive nuclear sites, verifying compliance with treaties on dismantling weapons and making Russian nuclear installations secure. Susan Eisenhower, who runs the security foundation named for her grandfather, the former president, told the London Observer last week, "The Russians are very proud of the fact that there has been so little proliferation, and it is dangerous for the U.S. to undermine that." She added that this kind of administration talk, and the spy expulsions, "probably mean that the administration is not as sympathetic to the monitoring cooperation program as was the case in the past, and that is very serious indeed." Mr. Rumsfeld has made another uselessly provocative comment, this time concerning war with China. Mr. Bush has said that he intends to conduct "a respectful but firm" policy toward China. But in a White House briefing, Mr. Rumsfeld said one reason the U.S. needs arms reconfiguration is because the Far East is the most likely future theater for U.S. operations, and new-generation, long-range nuclear bombers capable of operating from U.S. bases are needed "to fight and win a nuclear war."

The only dispute between the United States and China capable of provoking violence concerns Taiwan. The United States opposes any attempt by China to enforce its claim on Taiwan by attacking the island. But it is a long step from there to Chinese-American nuclear war.

Mr. Rumsfeld's news seems to be that Washington is getting ready. A calmer judgment would be that he actually is giving voice to a chronically belligerent fraction of the rightist policy community in Washington, which thinks that battle for world domination between Chinese and American superpowers is next on history's agenda. This is a minority Washington opinion. As China still is a poor country, crippled by overpopulation, lacking intercontinental missiles or strategic air forces, possessing less operational nuclear capability than Britain, France or Israel, Mr. Rumsfeld's concerns are premature.

Such statements subvert reasonable U.S.-$ Chinese relations and undermine efforts to find a peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question. They also reiterate the critical question of what the Bush administration really thinks.

The policy advertised as realism may really be composed of ideology and demagogy. In that case, it is dangerous, first of all to the United States, because it is deeply unrealistic.


-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

New York Times
March 29, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29BRIE.html

VENEZUELA: HANDGUNS SHIPMENT The government of Switzerland has banned the sale of a shipment of handguns to the Venezuelan Army, fearing that the weapons could end up in the hands of left-wing guerrillas in Colombia. A spokesman for the Swiss Foreign Ministry said the action was taken because Venezuela is a center for illegal arms dealings. Larry Rohter (NYT)

-------- drug war

Supreme Court Hears U.S. Argue Against Medical Marijuana

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/politics/29SCOT.html

WASHINGTON, March 28 - Although the Supreme Court is usually solicitous of states' rights, that attitude appeared today to stop well short of endorsing the medical use of marijuana, which California voters authorized in a 1996 referendum despite a federal law that considers marijuana to have "no currently accepted medical use."

Two lower federal courts in California have held that a marijuana distribution center in Oakland could invoke "medical necessity" as a defense against the federal government's effort to get an injunction to stop the operation of the "cannabis clubs." The clubs sprang up around the state after passage of California's Proposition 215, entitled the Compassionate Use Act.

Hearing the government's appeal, the justices were openly skeptical that a defense of "medical necessity" could be properly recognized.

When Gerald F. Uelmen, the lawyer for the Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, said the lower courts had recognized only a "limited exception" for people who could show that they had a serious need for marijuana and lacked any reasonable alternative, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy interjected, "It doesn't sound limited at all."

Justice Kennedy said the lower courts had effectively engaged in a "huge rewriting" of the federal law that places marijuana within schedule I of controlled substances, those with no accepted medical use.

The federal government responded to the adoption of Proposition 215 not with criminal prosecutions of marijuana providers and users, but by seeking a federal court injunction to stop the cannabis clubs from distributing the drug. As a legal matter, the argument today was not directly about the validity of Proposition 215 itself but about what discretion the lower courts had in responding to the request for the injunction.

Given this narrow focus, the Supreme Court is unlikely to issue a definitive ruling on the future of the growing number of medical marijuana initiatives, which have now been adopted by nine states. The medical use of marijuana by individual patients and doctors, as opposed to distribution through the pharmacy-like cooperatives, is not directly at issue.

Several justices today questioned the government's approach, suggesting that its reasons for pursuing a civil injunction rather than criminal prosecution were not only tactical but cynical, perhaps even a misuse of the federal courts' authority to issue injunctions.

"Isn't the real concern behind this that with the passage of the California proposition and the popularity within the California population that that necessarily entails, it will be very, very difficult for the government ever to get a criminal conviction in a jury trial?" Justice David H. Souter asked Barbara D. Underwood, the acting solicitor general.

Ms. Underwood said that because in the government's view "there simply is no medical necessity defense at all," it was more efficient to "get it resolved systemically in a civil proceeding that simply presents that legal question" by means of an injunction rather than in a series of criminal prosecutions.

California itself was not a party to the case, but the California attorney general, Bill Lockyer, filed a brief on behalf of the Oakland cooperative. "The federal government threatens to cross the line of state sovereignty and interfere with a traditional state right," the attorney general said. Mr. Lockyer said states had a "traditional right to regulate for the health and welfare of their citizens."

The California Medical Association also supported the Oakland group, as did civil liberties and drug policy organizations and a group of local sheriffs and officials from other states that have adopted medical marijuana initiatives.

The briefs contain considerable information about current practices of using marijuana to combat glaucoma, the nausea of chemotherapy, and the wasting syndrome of AIDS. There is also debate in the briefs over whether a legal drug called Marinol, a synthetic version of the active ingredient in marijuana, offers the relief that some patients find in smoking marijuana.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who endured a course of chemotherapy last year as treatment for colon cancer, made it clear that she had read the briefs with care and interest. Addressing Ms. Underwood, the government's lawyer, Justice Ginsburg referred to one description of one cancer patient "who was constantly vomiting, and the only thing that calmed him down" was marijuana. "That is not an uncommon experience," she said, asking: "Am I wrong in thinking that there has been quite a bit of this going on in the medical profession?"

Ms. Underwood replied, "I don't know how much of it has been going on." She added that although federal agencies were not yet persuaded of the benefits of medical marijuana, they were continuing to study it to determine "whether it has the effect that's described."

The medical-necessity defense recognized by Judge Charles Breyer of Federal District Court in San Francisco is narrowly defined. It applies only to those who suffer from a "serious medical condition"; who will "suffer imminent harm" without access to marijuana; whose condition or symptoms will be eased by marijuana; and who had "no reasonable legal alternative" to the drug.

Because Judge Breyer is the younger brother of Justice Stephen G. Breyer, Justice Breyer has recused himself from the case, United States v. Oakland Cannabis Buyers' Cooperative, No. 00-151, and only eight justices heard the argument this morning.

---

New York Times
March 29, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29BRIE.html

CANADA: HELL'S ANGELS CRACKDOWN A task force of 1,700 Royal Canadian Mounted Police and Quebec police officers fanned out across the province and arrested more than 100 members of Hell's Angels, seizing weapons and drugs from the motorcycle gang. Since 1994, a violent turf war between the Hell's Angels and a rival gang, the Rock Machine, has left about 150 bikers dead and numerous buildings destroyed by bombs. Anthony DePalma (NYT)

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

U.S. Vetoes U.N. Council Bid on Palestinian Force

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29NATI.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 scuttling Palestinian hopes for a United Nations observer force in the Israeli-occupied territories.

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 veto have been on resolutions about the Middle East.

On the council table since last week was a resolution to align the Security Council with Palestinian criticism of Israel and demands for a protection or observer force. The Palestinians had wanted the vote to take place before the opening of the Arab summit meeting in Jordan this week. The deadline passed on Tuesday, but they 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 drafting 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. Some Europeans diplomats showed signs of annoyance, even quiet fury.

When the Palestinians demanded a vote on Tuesday night and the United States cast a veto, the four European members voted to abstain. Ukraine did not vote at all. The rest of the council - 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 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. At that time Russia abstained. Now, with relations less friendly between the United States and Russia, diplomats say, the Russians sided with the Palestinians.

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

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

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

Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian representative at the United Nations, said an opportunity had been missed.

"This is unfortunate," he said after the vote, "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."

---

New York Times
March 29, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29BRIE.html

SOMALIA: 7 AID WORKERS FREED Three United Nations relief workers and four staff members of Doctors Without Borders who were abducted during a gunbattle on Tuesday in Mogadishu were released unharmed, a spokesman for the United Nations said in New York. Those released included an American working for Unicef, Sheldon Yett. But four more United Nations officials from Britain, France and Belgium are still missing. All the workers were conducting a cholera vaccination campaign. Barbara Crossette (NYT)

---

Palestinians keep pushing for observer force

USA Today
03/29/2001 - Updated 03:21 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/mideast/2001-03-29-observers.htm

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The Palestinians are determined to keep pressing the United Nations for an international observer force, despite two defeats in the Security Council because of Israeli opposition backed by the United States.

They could make a third attempt to get the 15-member Security Council to approve a resolution. They could revive a watered-down, European-drafted compromise text that both sides came close to agreeing on during marathon talks. Or they could call a special session of the General Assembly.

"We will always keep coming back," Palestinian envoy Nasser Al-Kidwa said Wednesday, a day after the U.S. veto of the latest Palestinian resolution.

The Palestinians, largely the victims in six months of Mideast violence, enjoy overwhelming support from developing countries. They would almost certainly win easy approval for a resolution calling for U.N. observers in the 189-nation General Assembly, where no vetoes are allowed. But General Assembly resolutions are not legally binding - unlike resolutions in the 15-member Security Council.

David Malone, president of the International Peace Academy, a New York think tank, said the main problem for the Palestinians is that the only idea they've put forth - a U.N. observer force - must have the support of the opposing sides to operate. Israel remains vehemently opposed to any international force, warning that it could escalate violence and further destabilize the region.

Israel's U.N. Ambassador Yehuda Lancry reiterated Wednesday that the only way to protect the Palestinian people is to resume negotiations and end the violence.

The U.S. veto late Tuesday night capped five days of almost round-the-clock negotiations that focused on a watered-down European draft that did not include U.N. observers, but mentioned a "mechanism" to help protect Palestinians.

But when it became clear that Washington still had problems with the text, the Palestinians demanded a vote on their original resolution, provoking the U.S. veto.

Acting U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham said the European draft is still on the table and "we'll continue to work on it," he said.

---

Anti-UNITA curbs found effective

Washington Times
March 29, 2001
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001329212012.htm

LUANDA, Angola - U.N. sanctions against Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi's UNITA movement are proving extremely effective, the chairman of a U.N. Security Council committee said yesterday.

UNITA (the Portuguese acronym for the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola) has been fighting the Luanda government since Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975. The latest round erupted in 1998 after a peace accord crumbled.

"The sanctions regime has operated extremely effectively in the last year and will continue to work even more effectively," Richard Ryan, Ireland's ambassador to the United Nations and chairman of the sanctions monitoring group, told reporters.

Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos agreed.

Timorese leader quits parliament

DILI, East Timor - Independence leader Jose Alexandre "Xanana" Gusmao resigned yesterday as head of East Timor's interim parliament, complaining that political squabbling was hampering preparations for full independence.

In a letter to East Timor's U.N. administrator, Sergio Vieira de Mello, Mr. Gusmao said the National Council, which consists of 36 members appointed by the United Nations, no longer reflects the views of the people.

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

Army Says Unit Is Unprepared for War Duty

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/national/29MILI.html

WASHINGTON, March 27 - The Army has downgraded one of its 10 active duty divisions to the second- lowest rating for wartime readiness, citing a lack of training and personnel caused by peacekeeping work in the Balkans, Pentagon and Congressional officials said.

The move means that President Bush faces a problem he accused the Clinton administration of ignoring: how to keep the military honed and ready for combat when troops are dispatched across the globe to help maintain peace.

Pentagon officials said the downgrading of the Third Infantry Division, based at Fort Stewart, Ga., did not pose a serious problem for the military. But it is likely to add fuel to a continuing debate in Congress over whether the services, particularly the Air Force and Army, are being overused overseas, as Mr. Bush often asserted in last year's campaign.

The action also comes as the Bush administration is reviewing the Pentagon's requirement that the armed services be prepared to fight major wars almost simultaneously in two regions, for example in the Persian Gulf and the Korean peninsula.

That requirement, which has been in place since Mr. Bush's father was president, sets a standard for readiness that the Army has had difficulty meeting in recent years, and that some administration advisers contend should be modified or scrapped.

The Pentagon has lowered the readiness rankings of divisions before, and Army officials said the Third Infantry Division remained a capable and well-equipped force. But nearly 4,000 of the Third Division's soldiers have been unavailable for the training needed to keep soldiers ready for battle because they have been in Bosnia since October. That argument is countered by some troops and their officers, who have said that peacekeeping duty in the Balkans sharpened their proficiency.

But given the official readiness requirements, the Third Infantry Division's commander, Maj. Gen. Walter Sharp, downgraded its readiness rating to C-3, meaning it would require weeks, and perhaps months, of preparation before it could be deployed for wartime duty.

"If we had to have all 10 divisions available, the Third would be one of them," a Pentagon official said. "But they would not be one of the first responders. They are not at the leading edge as far as who is ready to fight."

The decision to downgrade the division was made in February, but it was disclosed only when the Pentagon sent its most recent readiness report to Congress this month.

At the recommendation of NATO, the Pentagon is reducing American troops in Bosnia by 750 soldiers. That will leave nearly 3,000 Third Division soldiers in the country until October, when their mission there is scheduled to end. About 2,500 Third Division soldiers are scheduled to go to Kosovo in May.

Congressional officials declined to comment on the downgrading. But Pentagon officials say the news is likely to embolden members of Congress who view peacekeeping missions as demoralizing for troops and a drain on the Pentagon budget.

Many military officials have said that unanticipated costs of peacekeeping have taken money from other important accounts for maintenance, construction and equipment.

Mr. Bush has seemed to take that view. In last year's presidential campaign, Mr. Bush and his running mate, Dick Cheney, asserted that the military had been poorly equipped and paid, demoralized and overworked under the Clinton administration. To underscore their argument, they cited two divisions, the 10th Mountain and the First Mechanized Infantry, which were briefly classified as C-4 - the Pentagon's lowest rating - in late 1999.

But like the Third Infantry Division, those two divisions were rated as unready for war not because of budget cuts or low morale but because many of their soldiers were helping to keep peace in Bosnia and Kosovo, Pentagon officials asserted.

Last month, in a speech on military policy at Fort Stewart, President Bush told members of the Third Division: "While you're serving us well, America is not serving you well. Many in our military have been overdeployed and underpaid."

Mr. Bush added, "You are the most deployed units in the Army. But you live on a base that has some of the least developed infrastructure."

Bush advisers suggested in the campaign that he might try to reduce American military commitments overseas, including in the Balkans, but Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last month that United States forces would remain in the Balkans as long as NATO required.

The Pentagon has tried to address the strains of peacekeeping by relying more heavily on the National Guard and Reserves for such missions.

Some military experts, including advisers to the Bush administration, have also contended that many of the military's readiness problems would disappear if the Pentagon dropped its plans to fight and win two major regional wars at one time.

But many senior Pentagon officers, and some Congressional leaders, say that the nation's ability to wage major wars on two fronts acts as an important deterrent to potentially hostile states like North Korea.

The readiness system is intended to pinpoint war-fighting deficiencies in every unit's equipment, transportation system, personnel and training. But some experts consider it arcane and inflexible because it can give lower scores to forces involved in military operations.

In the case of the Third Division, its commander determined that although "the Third Division is fully resourced and ready to accomplish its current operation mission in the Balkans," it was not fully prepared for "high intensity combat operations" because of training concerns, a Pentagon report said.

Those training concerns stemmed from the fact that Third Division units in Bosnia had been unable to participate in "command and control" exercises at Fort Irwin, Calif., that simulated large-scale battle conditions.

Pentagon officials said that until those units returned from the Balkans this year and underwent training to reorient them toward combat and away from peacekeeping, the division would remain at a lower state of readiness, possibly into next year. "Any unit coming out of the Balkans is going to face special challenges as far as their war-fighting skills are concerned," a Pentagon official said. "Not that they wouldn't be survivable, they just wouldn't be as proficient."

---

Military learns big-business ways

USA Today
03/29/2001 - Updated 04:14 AM ET
By Alan M. Webber
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-03-29-ncguest1.htm

If you want to understand what's going on in the often-traditional, slow-changing world of the military, the best place to look for clues is the highly competitive, fast-changing world of business.

In the past, business and the military have learned from each other, borrowing the best ideas on strategy and structure, training and tactics back and forth across the boundaries of "business as war" and "war as business."

Today, the military sees the same challenges that business has been facing and is now adopting the same approaches - which is why President Bush has made major efforts to recast what it means to work in the armed forces.

Bush's budget proposal, which included money to raise the salary of military personnel by 4.6%, and $1 billion to recruit and retain top-notch personnel, is an accurate reflection of the new realities that businesses already understand and that the military is beginning to learn.

New Reality No. 1: There's not enough talent to go around.

Companies have known this for most of the past five years, which is why the blue-chip management consulting firm, McKinsey & Co., authored a report with the military-sounding name, "The War for Talent."

But it's even more true for the military, which has found it increasingly difficult to fill its ranks with recruits who are looking for a ticket to the future in the uniform of our country.

So what's the Army's solution? Learn from business! It's becoming common practice these days for the Army to offer recruits a cash signing bonus, help in paying off student loans and a higher starting pay rate to get qualified individuals to join up. Part of Bush's proposal would be to also pay bonuses to retain personnel with special skills.

Why are these kinds of special deals necessary today, when back in "the good old days" all that was necessary was a flag, a marching band and a sense of national honor? Because there are simply more choices today, more opportunities, more interesting and attractive entry-level positions in all kinds of industries - even in the middle of a national economic slowdown.

So if you want to enlist more than your fair share of the talent out there, whether you're a company or a branch of the armed services, you have to compete for it.

New Reality No. 2: The brand called "you" is the strongest brand there is.

Management guru Tom Peters coined the phrase and wrote the book, The Brand You, thinking primarily of the new rules of business. It's not just companies and products that are brands, Peters said. It's each one of us as individuals. If you want to be in charge of your own future, take control of your own career trajectory, then you have to think of yourself as a brand and build your skills, your accomplishments and your market value the same way companies build products into brands.

In the world of the military, the same message applies. Want to attract talent into the Army? Promise them that they'll be part of "An Army of One" - the new tag line for Army recruiting.

Does this mean that the Army - or a company - will be filled with anarchic individualists who care nothing for their team, their unit or their participation in a larger organization? Absolutely not. As Peters pointed out, the best way to build your own brand in a company is to become a "go to" guy: an indispensable part of the team, a great contributor to every project.

What the Army has realized in its "An Army of One" campaign is that loyalty is a two-way street: The best way to build a strong organization is one strong person at a time.

New Reality No. 3: Leadership involves the grassroots level.

The notion of an organization shaped like a pyramid, with one stand-alone leader at the top and a host of followers cascading down below is an image that business actually inherited from the old-style military.

Now, the armed services, like business before it, are rethinking what leadership looks like - and, more importantly, how to practice that new leadership.

Consider the case of Michael Abrashoff, who moved from a stint in the Pentagon to commanding the USS Benfold, a Navy destroyer and part of the Pacific fleet. When he took command of the ship, Abrashoff pursued the unconventional strategy of inviting each of the enlisted men and women in the crew into his private quarters, where he asked them three questions: What do you like about the Benfold? What do you hate about the Benfold? What would you like to change about the Benfold?

The result? More than $1 million in savings from the crew's suggestions, some of the best morale in the Navy on board the Benfold and an award as the best ship in the Pacific fleet.

The lesson: Leadership - in a company or in the military - has to exist at all levels. (Which is why "An Army of One" also makes sense: Every recruit has to be a leader.)

New Reality No. 4: It's a networked world.

The technology of today has not only changed how companies compete, it has also profoundly changed how wars are fought (or, for that matter, prevented). In a networked world, companies equip their sales force with laptops and cellphones, beepers and personal digital assistants, making it possible for individuals to be both on their own and tied into the network.

Now, in a networked world, the military equips its armed forces with the same technology, making it possible for fighting men and women to scout out new terrain, scope out the enemy, pursue a sensitive mission - and do it both on their own and as part of a larger team.

So if you're wondering why the Army is borrowing slogans from the business world, the answer is ...

New Reality No. 5: The attitudes and attributes of work and war are increasingly similar. Whether you're trying to build the best company, or create the most skilled branch of the armed services, you face the same challenges and have access to the same approaches.

In the end, it all comes down to talent, leadership and technology - no matter which world you may inhabit.

Alan M. Webber is founding editor of Fast Company magazine and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

---

Nevada

USA Today
03/29/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Las Vegas - A federal conspiracy trial has begun for three family members accused of collecting more than $300,000 in benefits in the case of a Marine who faked his own death in 1994. Staff Sgt. Arthur Bennett committed suicide in jail in 1999, three months after a federal grand jury indicted him, his mother, two of his brothers and his former wife in his death hoax.

---

Military fears attacks from cyberspace

Washington Times
March 29, 2001
By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-2001329223321.htm

The commander of the U.S. Space Command said yesterday he is worried about China's growing capability to conduct computer warfare against U.S. military networks.

Air Force Gen. Ralph E. Eberhart also said North Korea, Iran, Iraq and other nations are working on cyber-attack capabilities that threaten the U.S. military's increasing reliance on information systems.

Regarding the Chinese, he said: "We see it espoused in their doctrine, but we don't know if they in fact intend to use it, when and how they would use it and what the triggering mechanism would be.

"It concerns us when we see these capabilities out there," Gen. Eberhart said during a breakfast meeting with defense reporters.

Like the use of satellites for communications, "we've become so reliant on our computer systems, our information, and as we train and exercise and are involved in these contingency operations, we've come to take those capabilities . . . for granted," he said.

China's official military newspaper, Liberation Army Daily, stated in 1999 that the Chinese military planned to elevate information warfare to a separate service on par with its army, navy and air force.

U.S. intelligence officials have said China has conducted military exercises involving information attacks. China also is suspected of conducting some computer attacks on Taiwan's computer infrastructure.

Computer warfare could involve blocking the military's use of computers by introducing viruses or firing electromagnetic bursts to disrupt operations.

Or, "worse yet, display information on our computers that was wrong," Gen. Eberhart said.

Military commanders are more concerned about acting on falsely supplied computer information than having no information at all. Loss of computer access is less of a problem because those engaged in combat could rely instead on intuition or experience on the battlefield, he said.

"The worst thing to do is have the wrong information and act as a result," Gen. Eberhart said.

The U.S. Space Command, which the four-star general heads, is located in Colorado. It provides warning of a possible missile attack, tracks objects in space and would be in charge of conducting warfare involving space weapons.

Recently, the command became the military unit in charge of what the Pentagon calls "computer network defense" and its offensive counterpart, "computer network attack."

The military has "a long way to go" in preparing for cyber-battle, he said.

The problem is that the technology and techniques of computer network attackers in the hands of potential enemies keeps advancing as the military develops ways to deter and stop them.

"Right now we're pretty good at what I call a 'burglar alarm,' like a burglar alarm that you would have on your house so that when somebody opens the window or crawls inside we know they are there," he said. "What we need is a neighborhood watch. We need to

know when they are getting close." That will require better monitoring of computer networks for unusual activity. "The sad part of this is that although we worry about state-sponsored . . . capabilities out there from other nations, this is an area where terrorists can certainly play, this is an area where [drug] cartels can play," Gen. Eberhart said.

Checking the origin of computer network attacks is difficult and it is hard to discern whether an attack comes from a foreign state, a terrorist group or a teen-age hacker, he said.

Asked which countries he worries about in addition to China, Gen. Eberhart said: "I think that you'll see North Korea obviously is becoming interested in this. I think you'll see Iraq and Iran are interested in developing these capabilities."

India and other technologically advanced countries, while not in the same category, also could carry out information warfare, he said.

"Any country that has that type of activity in terms of computer networks, in terms of software development, I think you could assume they could apply that for military purposes, if they so choose," he said.

Although he did not mention Russia, other U.S. intelligence officials have said Moscow is working on computer network-attack capabilities.

On offensive cyber-warfare, Gen. Eberhart said, "We're looking at all applications of computer network attack."

The general said his command conducted a war game earlier this year that played out a space warfare scenario in 2017 between unidentified nations that planned a conventional invasion, and a country with well-developed space attack capabilities.

Gen. Eberhart said the United States has a rudimentary anti-satellite weapon "on the shelf" that could be used in a conflict but that blowing up satellites is a "last ditch option."

---

Wreckage located of second F-15

Washington Times
March 29, 2001
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001329212012.htm

LONDON - Rescuers scouring the Scottish Highlands in atrocious weather discovered wreckage from a second U.S. F-15C warplane yesterday, three days after two single-seat fighters and their pilots disappeared.

Civilian and military rescue teams have braved freezing temperatures, heavy snow, high winds and avalanches to search for two U.S. airmen and their planes, which disappeared while on a low-flying exercise Monday.

"We have found the tail part of the second aircraft some 400 yards from the wreckage of the first," said a spokesman for the Royal Air Force.

-------

In the Navy, size does matter
Smaller, faster ships on the drawing board

By Michael Moran
MSNBC
March 29, 2001
http://www.msnbc.com/news/546846.asp?cp1=1
http://a799.ms.akamai.net/7/799/388/038ca2a031a280/www.msnbc.com/news/955359.jpg


NEWPORT, R.I. _ Consider the following scenario: It is August 2015 and the U.S. president receives reports that an American air base in the Mideast has been attacked. All evidence points to Iraq's Uday Hussein, son of the now deceased Saddam, as the mastermind. Unlike his father, Uday possesses a formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles and tactical nuclear weapons. What are the American president's options?

THE 2001 RESPONSE would probably involve America's giant aircraft carriers, floating cities that carry more air power than most air forces.

But in 2015, the idea of putting 5,000 American sailors in range of Iraq's latest missiles would be foolhardy. As formidable as they are, the Nimitz-class carriers simply can no longer venture close enough to shore to put Iraqi targets within range of their aircraft.

Nor can the president risk launching long-range missiles, fearing such a move could be mistaken by China or another nuclear rival as an attack on them. Finally, Stealth bombers that performed so well at the end of the last century have been compromised, too, their secrets leaked out in sloppy technology transfers.

THINKING SMALL

For a growing cadre of senior officers and military experts who appear to have Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's ear, the way to prevent this dilemma lies in "Streetfighters," a totally new class of smaller, faster, stealthier vessels that will expose a far smaller crew to the increasingly dangerous coastal waters of the nation's foes. These ships would be integrated in a single battlefield computer network, enabling commanders to move and strike with unprecedented precision.

In a series of exclusive interviews with MSNBC.com, Navy officials sketched out their vision of how a Streetfighter force might work and why, in the changing environment of the 21st century, the ships of the Cold War fleet may not suffice.

Among these vessels is a fast-moving missile attack ship built on a catamaran hull known as Sea Lance, along with a towed "arsenal barge" loaded with Tomahawk missiles. Sea Lance could operate with unmanned midget submarines and fast assault craft capable of moving 1,000 troops and their equipment in and out of battle zones at speeds of up to 50 knots.

The most dramatic proposal, and the one likely to prove most controversial for a service built around the big carriers, is a plan to build a new class of pocket aircraft carriers known as Corsairs. MSNBC.com has learned that the Navy envisions the Corsairs as a carrier of only 6,000 tons with a crew of about 20 sailors. It might carry only a half dozen Joint Strike Fighters, the aircraft now being developed for the Navy and Air Force. Ultimately, the Corsairs would field UCAVs - unmanned combat air vehicles.

Vessels like the Sea Lance or the Corsair might be built on the order of several hundred million dollars, compared with the $4 billion price tag of a Nimitz carrier. Not only would it allow the Navy to operate in coastal waters even as the missile power of its foes increase; it would also allow the United States to provide air cover for smaller deployments like the peacekeeping missions in Haiti or East Timor - missions typical of the post-Cold War era that currently tend to divert a giant Nimitz-class carrier.

"The key is some balance of large deck areas and much smaller Streetfighter/Corsairs," said William Turcotte, chairman of the National Security Decision Making Department at the Naval War College in Rhode Island. "You could, with numbers of Streetfighter derivatives, take additional risk, spread the opponent's targeting problem and bring complex, distributed and (computer) networked fire power."

As one civilian expert put it more frankly: "No one wants to say it outright, but Streetfighter is a synonym for expendable. That sounds harsh, but war is harsh."

SEA CHANGE?

Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski, president of the Naval War College, is Streetfighter's most passionate proponent. He views these ships as a means of bridging the gap between the great fleet of the Cold War, built to battle the Soviet Navy in deep water, and the new missions of the 21st century, which will often call for the Navy to strike at targets deep inland.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that Rumsfeld's review will recommend that the U.S. Navy stop building the big-deck Nimitz-class carriers that have been the focus of the fleet - and its budgets - for generations. Instead, the report will recommend that money be diverted to build smaller carriers that the Navy can afford to put at risk in the coastal waters of a foe bristling with missile forces of its own.

That approach echoes what Cebrowski has been saying for years. "In an age of missile proliferation, do you send a Nimitz into the Persian Gulf so its planes and missile ships are in range of their targets?" asked Cebrowski. "Not in 10 years, you don't."

The story on the Rumsfeld report ran through the fleet like an Exocet missile, sparking lively derision on Internet military bulletin boards and in chat rooms. Some in Congress, too, rose to defend the carriers - among them members of the Virginia delegation, home to the Navy's Atlantic Fleet headquarters and Newport News Shipbuilding, which has a contract to build CVN-77, the final Nimitz carrier.

Cebrowski and other supporters are quick to point out that the Corsairs are not meant to replace the large aircraft carriers.

"There still is no better way to show the flag, and certainly there is no better way to keep other world powers from thinking they can challenge the U.S. on the high seas," says Andrew Krepinevich, a former Pentagon official and an influential voice on these issues. "Of course, the Navy remains dominated by carrier officers. As with the Army and all the services, the old-timers will make an argument that says, 'If it isn't broke, don't fix it. We've got the world's best military, we won the Cold War, what's the issue?'"

CATAMARAN AHOY

One way or another, Cebrowski and his supporters intend to press the argument. Cebrowski has asked the Navy for approval to lease a huge catamaran for experiments with the fleet.

One such ship, leased by the Australian Navy and put into service as the HMAS Jervis Bay, stunned U.S. Seventh Fleet personnel during peacekeeping operations around East Timor in 1999. The craft is built by INCAT, an Australian manufacturer that makes fast cargo haulers for the Pacific trade and is capable of hauling 1,000 troops and their equipment at speeds nearing 45 knots. That is more than twice the speed of any such vessel in the U.S. Navy, and when it arrived in East Timor, it unloaded at a pace the new class of Navy assault ships can't match.

In a military cable obtained by MSNBC.com, an officer on board the USS Tarawa, an American assault ship involved in the maneuvers with the Jervis Bay last year, gushed about its potential as a fast assault ship and even a platform for aircraft. "Ship self-defense systems combined with the ship's small radar cross section would make the catamaran less vulnerable to air threat. ... The craft has an unparalleled potential as a force multiplier."

None of this is likely to displace the role of the Nimitz-class carrier in the short-term. Even if CVN-77 turned out to be the last of its kind, it would join nine others launched since 1975. Given the big ships' long service life of up to 50 years, the Nimitz-class will be part of the fleet well into the 21st century.

Still, the idea that these behemoths might not be at the center of naval strategy is hard for many in the Navy to accept. And that sets the stage for a battle that pits those who see the carriers as increasingly vulnerable to cheap enemy missiles against those who command them, pilots who fly off them and the politicians whose districts build and play host to them.

Michael Moran is senior producer, special reports, at MSNBC. Part II of The Secret Empire, a look at the explosion in America's commitments abroad since the Cold War ended, appears next Thursday, April 5.


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

ENVIRONMENT STONED SALMON, PISSED ENVIRONMENTALISTS
Spurred by fish concerns, enviros are sounding the alarm over an innocuous-sounding chemical.

Willamette Week
by NICK BUDNICK nbudnick@wweek.com
http://www.wweek.com/html2/environment.html

Paul Engelking sadly explains why he dropped one of his favorite pastimes. "The fish have enough problems," he says, "without me trying to put them on a hook."

Engelking, a chemistry professor at the University of Oregon, can walk you down the familiar list: destruction of habitat by loggers, toxic runoff from cities, fertilizers and pesticides from farms.

And now this: fluoride.

Engelking is the scientific muscle behind a number of environmentalists opposing Senate Bill 99, a bill that would mandate adding the cavity-fighting chemical to Oregon's supplies of drinking water.

The enviros have nothing against healthy teeth. They're simply questioning whether the perceived benefits of water fluoridation are worth the risk it poses to fish--particularly salmon.

"My concern about fluoridation is this is just one more nail in the coffin," says Engelking. "And there are a lot of other people lining up to put nails in. It will be a miracle if we go another 50 years and still have a salmon run in Oregon."

Fragile, heroic and breathtakingly beautiful, salmon are the Jodie Foster of the fish world. The numbers of chinook and coho salmon have plummeted in the Northwest since the turn of the century. In 1999, with nine Northwestern runs of salmon and steelhead on the brink of extinction, the federal government placed them on the endangered species list.

Gov. John Kitzhaber has made salmon recovery a priority; Mayor Vera Katz used her State of the City address to designate Willamette River recovery a priority, citing a goal of "abundant salmon."

Engelking argues that such goals will be undermined if lawmakers pass SB99, a seemingly innocuous measure to add fluoride to Oregon's drinking water. It's an argument that fluoridation proponents dismiss as sheer lunacy.

"There have been no studies to say this has been detrimental to fish life," asserts Dr. H. Whitney Payne, the state dental director who has been spearheading SB99.

In reality, however, there have been several studies saying just that, including one in Oregon that dates back nearly 20 years. The studies have found that even small amounts of fluoride, which is an anaesthetic, make fish, particularly salmon and rainbow trout, dazed and stupid (well, more stupid). And scientists say the hazards are much greater in Northwestern states.

John Stein, a National Marine Fisheries Service ecotoxicologist in Seattle, says water in western Oregon and Washington is unusually "soft," a quality that increases the amount of fluoride absorbed by the fish that swim in it. "Fluoride is pretty toxic, and the softer the water, the more toxic it is," says Stein, who heads the environmental conservation division at the NMFS's Northwest Fisheries Science Center.

Fluoride's threat to salmon is taken so seriously in Canada that British Columbia set a special soft-water standard of 0.2 parts per million. Les Swain, water quality manager of the B.C. Ministry of Environment, says some of the most compelling evidence for that decision came from Oregon.

Between 1982 and 1986, Douglas Dey and a fellow NMFS biologist conducted a groundbreaking study of fluoride's environmental effects at the John Day Dam on the Columbia River. His study won an award from the American Fisheries Society, an association of fisheries biologists.

Dey set out to solve a mystery. Why were so many salmon dying at the dam?

He discovered that low levels of fluoride emitted by an aluminum smelter upstream were making the salmon too stoned and lethargic to climb fish ladders. It took the dazed critters about a week to traverse the dam, compared to the usual one day--and more than 50 percent of the salmon died before making the trip.

Once the smelter above the dam was forced to reduce its fluoride emissions, the salmon death rate was cut by a factor of 10. Subsequent studies confirmed fluoride's effects and found that salmon, when given a choice, avoid fluoridated waterways, says Dey.

"It's a serious problem when the salmon can't even negotiate the fishway because of a very small amount of toxin," says Bill Bakke, a founder of Oregon Trout who currently heads the Native Fish Society of Oregon. Bakke, one of the few environmentalists contacted by WW who had heard of Dey's study, opposes SB99, saying that the risk posed by fluoridation "can't be tolerated if we're going to recover the fish."

The idea behind fluoridating water is that whenever we quench our thirst from the tap, we'll slow down the cavity-causing bacteria in our mouth.

The problem is that 99 percent of the fluoride goes right down the drain and into our rivers, as sewage-treatment plants don't remove the chemical. Studies have shown that sewage plants in fluoridated communities can emit fluoride at about 1.2 parts per million--six times the level allowed in British Columbia.

Although the fluoride is diluted well downstream, our major rivers already have traces of fluoride from sources that include smelters and microchip factories. Engelking's testing on the Willamette River, for example, has found levels of fluoride at 0.1 and 0.2 ppm, already pushing what salmon can handle.

Engelking is especially worried that tributaries, key to salmon spawning, would hold higher concentrations of fluoride because there would be less dilution. The Tualatin River, for example, already tests as high as 0.5 ppm fluoride.

Travis Williams, executive director of Willamette Riverkeeper, says the risks to salmon should be balanced against doubts over the effectiveness of fluoridation.

In the last six months, a British government study, considered the most comprehensive fluoride review ever, echoed a Canadian government study in saying the benefits of fluoridation and evidence for its safety are much less than previously thought.

It prompted an ABC News commentary which proclaimed that "the required level of evidence is just not there" to make the case for fluoridation.

"It makes you wonder," says Williams. "Would we get a better bang for the buck if kids got free toothpaste, with better education to brush every day?"

Williams isn't the only one posing such questions. Elisa Dozono, spokeswoman for Mayor Vera Katz, says lawmakers need to look at Dey's study as they consider SB99. "The mayor is concerned about this," she says, "and believes that if there could be an impact on Portland's fish recovery efforts, it should be part of the discussion."

Gov. John Kitzhaber has not taken a position on the bill.

---

Canada cooling on Kyoto pact

Montreal Gazette
Thursday 29 March 2001
MICHELLE LALONDE The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010329/5088603.html

As the United States prepares to seal the coffin of the landmark 1997 Kyoto treaty on global warming, Canada's main negotiators on climate change are talking like the pallbearers.

"We cannot have an effective Kyoto accord without the U.S.," Environment Minister David Anderson said yesterday in Montreal.

U.S. President George Bush said in a recent letter to U.S. senators he is opposed to the Kyoto protocol, which commits 38 developed countries including Canada and the U.S. to reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.

But it is reported that the White House has sought advice from the State Department on how the U.S. can legally withdraw its signature from the deal.

The Washington Post yesterday quoted the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as saying: "We have no interest in implementing that treaty."

Canadian environmental groups yesterday called on Canada to show leadership on the climate change issue by recommitting to the Kyoto protocol.

"We have to stand up with other countries and say the deal is not dead and we will take action," said Gerry Scott, climate change campaign director for the David Suzuki Foundation.

But Anderson and his chief negotiators on climate change tried to lower expectations that the Kyoto deal will be signed when the parties reconvene in Bonn, Germany, after their failed talks last November in the Hague.

"There will not be final agreement in Bonn; I think that's a fair prediction," Paul Fauteux, co-chairman of Canada's delegation to the climate change negotiations, told The Gazette.

"But I don't think the process ends there. I don't think the absence of final agreement in Bonn means that the Kyoto protocol is dead. That doesn't mean the Kyoto Protocol won't be dead for other reasons. But I don't think that absence of a final agreement in Bonn necessarily means that Kyoto is dead."

The Bush administration now wants developing countries like China and India to commit to reductions as well.

Because developed nations have contributed the lion's share of greenhouse gases into the earth's atmosphere while developing nations will feel the worse effects of climate change, it was agreed in Kyoto that action should be taken by developed nations first.

Canada also appears to be rethinking this fundamental issue.

"There are only 38 countries that are under the Kyoto umbrella," Anderson said. "The other countries of the world have no responsibility to reduce greenhouse gases. That is one of the problems."

The climate-change talks fell apart in the Hague last November mainly because the parties could not agree on how it should be implemented. The U.S., Canada and four other developed countries known as the "Umbrella Group" were branded the Bad Boys of the talks because they were seen as pushing for loopholes to avoid real changes in North American energy consumption patterns.

The Umbrella Group wants to see nations get credit for planting or protecting forests and agriculture lands at home and abroad, because plants absorb carbon dioxide, a major culprit in climate change, from the atmosphere. They also want credit for introducing cleaner technology projects in developing countries, and they want to be able to buy and sell "carbon credits" between countries. The European Union wants limits on how much of the targets can be reached by these methods.

Anderson defended these concepts yesterday, stridently denying that they are loopholes. He said Canada still plans to meet its Kyoto target of a 6-per-cent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels.

---

The costs of bowing out of global-warming treaty
In addition to environmental harm, critics say White House move will hurt European relations.

Christian Science Monitor
THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 2001
By Brad Knickerbocker (bradknick@aol.com) and Francine Kiefer (kieferf@csps.com) Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/03/29/fp3s1-csm.shtml

President Bush's decision to reject the international treaty on global warming presents a major challenge to US relations with Europe, and it calls into question the diplomatic work done on climate change dating back to the 1992 Earth Summit.

But it comes as no surprise to those who have watched this fledgling administration put together its program on energy and the environment. Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have all said recently that the Kyoto Protocol - signed by 38 nations in 1997 - is flawed in that it would harm the US economy and does not deal with pollution in developing countries.

EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman confirmed the administration's position this week when she said, "We have no interest in implementing that treaty."

Without being specific, White House officials say they're working on an alternative plan for reducing the greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide) that most experts say are the cause of global warming.

"The president does care about global warming," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday. "He believes it is a serious matter, and the administration is committed to working with our allies on a plan that includes developing nations as well as developed nations."

Other nations could go ahead

Still, Bush's dismissal of the Kyoto treaty threatens to spark a major transatlantic row with European allies, who are all committed to the protocol. Many are likely to try to implement it even without Washington's participation.

French Environment Minister Dominique Voynet recently warned Ms. Whitman that "my country is ready to undertake discussions on putting the Kyoto Protocol into practice in an open spirit, ready to debate any topic. It is not, however, prepared to enter into a ... discussion that calls the Kyoto Protocol itself into question."

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is expected to voice European dismay forcefully when he meets Bush in Washington today.

US environmental groups are furious as well.

"Declaring the Kyoto negotiations dead - rather than proposing changes which would make it acceptable - will delay action on global warming for years and years," says Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust.

The Kyoto Protocol (named for the Japanese city where it was signed) requires the United States to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Without major changes in energy generation and transportation, however, this could be very difficult to accomplish since the country and its economy have continued to grow at a steady pace.

Early in his first term, President Clinton tried to impose a "carbon tax" that would have forced reductions. That got nowhere in Congress, and since then the Senate (which ratifies treaties) has gone on record by a 95-to-0 vote as generally opposing what the Kyoto negotiations produced.

Since the Earth Summit in 1992, where the groundwork for Kyoto was laid, many US business leaders (including some in oil production and auto manufacturing) have come to accept the reality of global warming, and many have taken specific steps to reduce their industry's greenhouse-gas emissions.

Others stress the need to aggressively pursue new technologies that would help reduce the apparently changing climate. These might include clean coal technology, new power-generation systems for automobiles, and more efficient means of production for energy-intensive industries like steel.

"The president has said repeatedly that he does believe that one of the answers to a lot of these environmental issues ... is the evolution of technology so we have the proper balance of reducing pollutants and making certain that our economy remains strong," says spokesman Fleischer.

"What's needed is an international framework that allows for the transfer of these technologies from the industrialized world to the developing world where they're critically needed," says Glenn Kelly, executive director of the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group that opposes the Kyoto treaty.

Hot under the collar in Europe

None of this is expected to mollify US allies in Europe, however.

In their view, the US pulling out of Kyoto represents a major setback, since this country, with its large cars and relatively low fuel prices, produces a significant percentage of the world's greenhouse gases. Many see Bush's call for technological fixes as a US attempt to go it alone in a way that could further delay emissions reductions by decades.

Kjell Larsson, Swedish environment minister, yesterday described Whitman's comments as "really appalling," but said he hoped to "find a joint basis for discussions." Sweden holds the rotating presidency of the European Union.

"If that is not possible, if the Americans are so determined ... of course we have to continue with other countries, although the difficulties will be much bigger if the country with the biggest emissions is not part" of the treaty, he added. "No one has pointed to any way out except the Kyoto Protocol."

• Staff writer Peter Ford contributed from Paris.

---

U.S. Going Empty-Handed to Meeting on Global Warming

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/science/29WARM.html

WASHINGTON, March 28 - With an international meeting of environment officials scheduled to begin on Thursday, the United States will be in the position of having no policy on global warming, which will be the main issue at the gathering.

The Bush administration reconfirmed today that it opposed the Kyoto Protocol, the international treaty to fight global warming, and would not submit it for Senate ratification.

"The president has been unequivocal," the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said. "He does not support the Kyoto treaty. It is not in the United States' economic best interest."

Mr. Fleischer, who was asked at a White House briefing to clarify the administration's stance, said the administration was developing other strategies to deal with change in the world's climate.

The meeting of the Western Hemisphere's environment ministers will be the first such gathering since the Bush administration announced earlier this month that it would not seek to regulate power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, a decision that amounted to effective abandonment of the Kyoto accord.

"We're going into the lion's den unarmed," said a senior administration official who expressed deep frustration that a new policy had not yet been formulated.

The American delegate to Thursday's meeting will be Christie Whitman, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, who had advised against the decision on power plant emissions but was overruled by the White House. At a news conference on Tuesday, Mrs. Whitman repeated the White House's position that it had "no interest" in carrying out the treaty negotiated in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan.

Administration officials sympathetic to Ms. Whitman's position said she had tried in vain to obtain clear instructions about how to answer questions from United States allies concerned about the carbon dioxide policy. The administration's new stance reverses a campaign pledge made by President Bush and was at odds with the position that Ms. Whitman outlined to other environment ministers just four weeks ago at an international conference on global warming in Italy.

"She's essentially not been given anything to say," one senior official said of the two-day meeting in Montreal, adding that the only thing Ms. Whitman would be able to state authoritatively about the administration's position on global warming was that it was the subject of a cabinet-level review.

Several foreign leaders, including the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, have been outspoken in their criticism of the administration for its opposition to the Kyoto accord. Mr. Schröder is to meet with President Bush at the White House on Thursday, and global warming is expected to be high on their agenda.

A senior official who defended the White House position said foreign governments should not be surprised either by Mr. Bush's opposition to the Kyoto accord, which he has criticized since early in the presidential campaign, or by the lack of a policy so early in a new administration.

"Diplomatically, we're hearing a lot of criticism from a lot of countries, and I suppose at every meeting we go to we'll hear more," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "At the same time, it's been no secret what the president's position on the treaty has been."

The murmurs of dissent within the administration reflected a view attributed to Ms. Whitman that the White House had been unwise to declare its opposition to the Kyoto pact before it could point to an alternative.

In a memorandum to Mr. Bush earlier this month, before the decision on carbon dioxide emissions, Ms. Whitman warned that most other industrialized nations regarded the Kyoto accord as "the only game in town."

"There's a real fear in the international community that if the U.S. is not willing to discuss the issue within the framework of Kyoto, the whole thing will fall apart," Ms. Whitman wrote in the memorandum, whose contents were first reported in The Washington Post.

"Mr. President, this is a credibility issue (global warming) for the U.S. in the international community," she wrote. "It is also an issue that is resonating here at home. We need to appear engaged and shift the discussion from the focus on the K-word to action, but we have to build some bonafides first."

The Kyoto accord would require the United States and other industrialized countries to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases by an average of 5.2 percent by 2012 compared with their 1990 levels. The United States and more than 100 other countries signed the treaty, but no industrial country has yet ratified it. An effort by the Clinton administration to win its ratification by the Senate was defeated 95 to 0.

In the United States, most industry representatives have strongly opposed the accord, warning that it would impose enormous costs on the American economy.

An official of the Global Climate Coalition, which reflects industry views, said today that the Bush administration had a right to sever any association with the Kyoto treaty's specific guidelines for emissions reductions.

"There's a fundamentally more effective way of dealing with climate change, which is one based on technological development, and that's the one we support," the official, Glenn Kelly, said.

But a former Clinton administration official, David B. Sandalow, who helped to negotiate the 1997 accord, said the stance would undercut American credibility.

"It's a textbook case of unilateral diplomacy, which rarely works and always brings resentment," Mr. Sandalow said.

An environmental group, Friends of the Earth, called the American stance "environmental isolationism."

The meeting of environment ministers that begins in Montreal on Thursday will include representatives of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and other countries from the Western Hemisphere in advance of a meeting of heads of state in May that will be known as the Summit of the Americas.

In terms of global warming, a more important gathering will take place in July, when heads of state have been invited to Bonn under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Global Warming, which President George Bush signed in 1992. That meeting had initially been scheduled for May, but was postponed at the request of the current administration.

---

European Union Voices Concern for Climate Pact

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By PAUL MELLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29GLOB.html

BRUSSELS, March 28 - The European Union expressed dismay today at the latest confirmation by the Bush administration that it opposed a treaty to combat global climate change.

On Tuesday, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christie Whitman, said that because Congress was unlikely to ratify it, the Bush administration had no interest in carrying out the so-called Kyoto Protocol. The accord, reached in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, would reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide by 5.2 percent by 2012 from 1990 levels.

Today, the European Union's environment official, Margot Wallstrom, said the Bush administration's continuing opposition to the treaty was worrying. While the 15-nation European Union is willing to discuss details of the treaty and problems, Ms. Wallstrom said, it is not willing to scrap the whole protocol.

The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, reconfirmed today that President Bush opposed the pact, in part because it did not bind developing nations to curb emissions.

Ms. Wallstrom's comments came a day before Mr. Bush is to hold his first meeting in Washington with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany. Last week, Mr. Schröder reportedly sent a letter to Mr. Bush asking him to abide by the agreement.

"We hope the Americans will change their mind, because we Europeans think we have the better arguments," a German government official said.

Other European heads of state have voiced concern at the United States stance.

Prime Minister Wim Kok of the Netherlands said at a European summit meeting in Stockholm last week that there was no point in the European Union striking a climate agreement only with Japan, Australia, Canada and other developed nations.

"If others behave irresponsibly, we can try to show a sense of responsibility," Mr. Kok said, "but we need to focus on involving all those who started down the road to Kyoto."

And Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel of Austria told reporters, "We need to insist that the United States fulfills its duty."

The United States is seen as the biggest single contributor to heat- trapping gases, contributing an estimated 25 percent of all such gases, though its population accounts for only about 4 percent of the world population.

Talks on carrying out the Kyoto agreement broke down last November at a meeting of developed nations in The Hague. The talks are scheduled to resume on July 16 in Bonn.

The treaty has been signed by more than 100 countries but has not yet been ratified by any industrial country.

Earlier this month, President Bush reversed course and said he would not ask power plants to cut emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas that most scientists say is a major factor in rising average temperatures.

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Human Nature: New Hope for Community Gardeners

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By ANNE RAVER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/living/29BRON.html

IT'S an old New York story. The snow melts, the crocuses are up and community gardeners start wondering if this is the last year the roses will bloom on their patch of land. Their fears are not unfounded. Over the last 15 years, 100 gardens have been leveled, and 80 are on sites singled out for development.

But this spring, things look a little different. A lawsuit by Eliot L. Spitzer, the state attorney general, has blocked the sale or destruction of any of the city's remaining 650 community gardens without an environmental impact study. The suit argues that gardens in existence for 20 or 30 years have in essence become public parkland, said Christopher Amato, an assistant attorney general working on the case.

There is also action on other fronts. A growing number of elected officials are making distinctions between historic community gardens that deserve preservation and gardens of lesser import. A bill filed more than a year ago by Councilman Kenneth K. Fisher of Brooklyn and others would require a case-by-case review of all the gardens on city-owned land, preserving the ones that anchor their communities.

And a new study argues that higher-density housing would not only supply more affordable housing but leave more room for gardens and parks.

This growing support for open space, however, doesn't mean that gardeners in the South Bronx don't still feel the sword of Damocles hanging over them. A 21-year-old garden on Bristow Street in Morrisania lies across the street from Community School 134; many of its students grow vegetables and flowers there. "That little teddy bear belongs to the Teddy Bear Club," said Cordelia Guilford, a retired assistant teacher, pointing to a weatherworn bear guarding a raised bed where the club grows peppers, eggplants and tomatoes. She showed off the strawberry beds, the blackberry bushes, the crab apple and dogwood trees, the irises poking up beneath the big beech tree that survived when the house that once stood here burned to the ground.

William Smith, 80, has a garden one block south that commands a large sunny space on the corner of Chisholm and Freeman Streets. "This is my 24th year," Mr. Smith said. "We moved about 70 cars, just pushed them out on the street until the city carted them away." His garden grows corn, tomatoes, okra, strawberries, but it also sprouts toys, rocking horses, tables and folding chairs, and a hodgepodge of trellises made from bedsteads.

Both gardens were approved for preservation by their community board, but the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development is asking Mr. Smith, Ms. Guilford and members of eight other gardens in Morrisania to move to a 50,000-square-foot space behind an elementary school on Bristow Street. Their garden spaces would then be filled by new homes built by the New York City Housing Partnership.

The new census reports that 85,000 new residents have moved into the Bronx in the last 10 years. Since a housing plan was put into effect in 1985, District 3, where Ms. Guilford and Mr. Smith garden, has gained 2,822 subsidized housing units, largely under the New York City Housing Partnership home ownership program. In the Bronx, the partnership model has been two- or three- family houses, with gated parking spaces filling what could be a yard.

The new study from the Design Trust for Public Space, "Achieving a Balance: Housing and Open Space in Bronx Community District 3," suggests that higher-density housing - 60 to 120 units an acre in five- or six-story buildings - would not only create a stronger tax base and more commercial development, but save space for the community's best gardens and much needed parks. The report maintains that early projects that lured homeowners back to the South Bronx, like Charlotte Gardens, with 16 suburban-style ranch houses to an acre, privatized too much open space.

Mr. Smith remembers Morrisania before its tidy row houses with their porches fell into ruin during the white flight of the 1950's and 60's. For years he and others created community gardens that became bona fide day care centers. "Some of the kids are too old for a baby sitter and too young to be left alone, so the parents allow them to come here," said Mr. Smith, a jaunty presence in his baseball cap. "Even some of the parents come and sit and watch the kids play."

The new site for the 10 gardens is hidden behind the school. For some, it will require a mile walk. And how many elderly gardeners have the body and soul to start over?

In seeking answers to some of these dilemmas, the Design Trust report suggests changing the zoning of vast lots now earmarked for industry to mixed use, which could include more housing and open space. It also notes that lack of staffing and money for Bronx parks has left potential jewels like Rocks and Roots Park, an undeveloped acre on Fulton Avenue, and the Charlton Garden, a half-acre park on 164th Street complete with Greek-style pergola, padlocked.

In nearby Melrose, another scenario is being played out: community leaders want to displace one of the city's most significant gardens. "Rincon Criollo has to move," said Yolanda Garcia, the director of Nos Quedamos ("We Stay"), which was formed in 1993 to stop an urban renewal plan that would have destroyed many businesses and homes. "We need that block for housing."

Rincon Criollo, a garden carved out of rubble on 158th Street more than 20 years ago, is a little piece of Puerto Rico. A rooster crows outside the casita, or little garden house; a map of Puerto Rico, complete with mountains and rivers, has been poured in concrete and painted green and blue. People flock here to learn how to make and play the panderetas, traditional drums.

"The governor of Puerto Rico sends people here," said Pedro Figueroa, a gardener who reconnected with his own roots at the garden. "They stand at the fence and cry. Because it brings back their own home before concrete came to our island."

But Nos Quedamos has other plans. When it organized the community eight years ago, it persuaded the City Planning Commission to forge a new plan with local residents. Now, with $80 million to develop a plan for 1,700 housing units and an ambitious vision for commercial and community space including four acres of open space, Nos Quedamos wants to displace 16 gardens.

The group's plan would move Rincon Criollo one block, to 157th Street, behind Ms. Garcia's family carpet store. "If we don't take out the garden," Ms. Garcia said, "we cannot take out the methadone clinic," which is just down the block. The gardeners, who have lived peaceably with the methadone clients, even helping some get jobs, don't have the same objective.

Jose (Chema) Soto, who started the garden in 1979, said, "We supported her, and now she's turning her back on us."

This is the very conflict that the legislation proposed by Councilman Fisher would resolve; it would recognize gardens that have become more than a place to grow corn. The Design Trust, along with other groups like Trust for Public Land, the Green Guerrillas and the Municipal Arts Society, are backing the legislation.

"Some gardens have a sense of identity that has made its way through very hard times," said Jocelyne Chait, the project director of the Design Trust report. "I don't think that there are so many gardens that those can't be preserved."

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NEWARK: FOOT-AND-MOUTH WARNING

New York Times
March 29, 2001
Metro Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/nyregion/29MBRF.html

Federal agriculture officials have warned the state's livestock producers to watch for signs of foot-and-mouth disease, which is devastating livestock in Britain but has not been detected in the United States. In a letter sent to farmers and veterinarians last week, the United States Department of Agriculture said that the state's huge shipping industry and the large number of overseas travelers at Newark International Airport made New Jersey especially susceptible. Although livestock is a small part of the state's economy, a task force is to meet today to devise plans in case of an outbreak. Andrew Jacobs (NYT)

NEWBURGH: THREE HEARINGS ON DREDGING

The United States Environmental Protection Agency, after conducting eight public hearings, has scheduled three additional sessions for discussion of the dredging of the Hudson River. E.P.A. representatives will answer questions about the agency's plan to dredge PCB-contaminated sediment from the river and to require General Electric to pay the $460 million cost. The hearings, all at 7 p.m., are scheduled for April 2 at the Newburgh Free Academy, April 4 at Queensbury High School and April 5 at Doyle Middle School, Troy. (AP)

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We Can't See the Forest for the Roads

New York Times
March 29, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/opinion/L29FORE.html

To the Editor:

Former President Jimmy Carter's March 24 Op-Ed article, "A Flawed Timber Market," is a pearl of wisdom. For years public lands have been pillaged by subsidized lumber companies that receive contracts for below-market timber sales.

The Forest Service never comes close to breaking even on a timber sale after the cost of all the roads and scientific studies are subtracted. The damage from these sales is extensive. Our forests look like a dog with mange.

As a seasonal biologist for the agency, I walked these clear-cuts for five years trying to make ecological sense of the policy. I never could. Now the timber interests are champing at the bit to see who gets the last tree. Or the last refuge.

The Bush administration is trying to kill the roadless plan for our national forests. This is not the time to reverse the current policy.

MARK A. YORK Sunland, Calif., March 24, 200

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STEP TOWARD REVERSING CLINTON ON MONUMENTS

New York Times
March 29, 2001
National Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/national/29BRFS.html

The interior secretary, Gale A. Norton, began a process that could lead to significant revisions of national monument designations made by President Bill Clinton. In a letter to Western governors and local officials, she sought help in "charting a course of action" toward 19 monuments created or expanded by Mr. Clinton in 10 states and territories. Ms. Norton had previously said that the Bush administration would not reverse the designations, but her letter reflects a view that Mr. Clinton acted without proper deference to local opinion. Douglas Jehl (NYT)

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Bush defends arsenic delay

USA Today
03/29/2001 - Updated 12:48 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-29-arsenic.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush said Thursday he will pursue some reduction in the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water, but not before more scientific studies on where the level should be set.

Bush defended his decision to withdraw new arsenic regulations issued by President Clinton in the final days of his administration.

"We pulled back his decision so that we can make a decision based on sound science," said Bush. He promised that after the science review "there will be a reduction in arsenic" in drinking water.

The current standards, set in 1942, allow a maximum of 50 parts per billion arsenic in drinking water. Clinton's Environmental Protection Agency directed the standards be lowered to 10 parts per billion.

The decision, although announced three days before Clinton left office, had been in the works for several years, prompted in part by a lawsuit by environmentalists.

On Wednesday, two senior House Democrats questioned the legality of Bush's action.

In a letter to EPA Administrator Christie Whitman, Reps. John Dingell of Michigan and Frank Pallone of New Jersey noted that Congress last year ordered the EPA to have the standards in place by June 22.

"Serious questions have been raised about the legality of your recent announcement, including its effect on the intent of Congress to have a new protective drinking water standard for arsenic," Dingell and Pallone wrote.

The new Clinton standards were to have taken effect March 23.

Whitman, however, announced three days earlier that she was withdrawing them, saying there was not enough scientific evidence to justify the $200 million annual cost to municipalities, states and industry of meeting the new standards by 2006.

She said in an interview later that the administration will ask Congress to extend "until the end of the calendar year" the deadline for coming up with a new standard.

Dingell and Pallone, respectively the top Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and its environment subcommittee, asked Whitman for a detailed legal analysis of the decision.

"Our intention is to be sure that we have a good understanding of their legal analysis," said the committee's Democratic staff spokeswoman, Laura Sheehan. "We see it as a very clear line in the sand. Do they see it that way?"

Whitman on Tuesday also claimed a shortage of scientific support for the new standard.

"I wish I could point to a definitive study that said this is the level at which arsenic poses no threat to humans or this is the level above which arsenic starts to accumulate and pose a problem," she said.

Health and environmental groups have been campaigning since 1996 to reduce the standards. The EPA acted as part of a court settlement after the National Academy of Sciences found in 1999 that arsenic in drinking water can cause bladder, lung and skin cancer, and might cause liver and kidney cancer.

Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, citing the study's finding that the current arsenic standards could result in a 1-in-100 risk of cancer, has said the Bush administration's claim that those standards are not supported by the best available science simply is not true.

"The president is simply choosing to ignore that warning and embrace a standard for drinking water that creates a cancer risk 10,000 times higher than EPA allows for food," Daschle said last week. "It is an outrageous and indefensible decision and we are exploring every possible option to reverse it."

Meanwhile, Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the senior Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said Wednesday he was "fully prepared" to seek subpoena power as a last resort in his inquiry into Bush's decision-making on the arsenic standards.

Environmentalists have complained the decision was a favor to the mining industry, a charge Whitman denied.

"I never even considered the mining industry in the arsenic decision," she said. "It may sound very naive, but I didn't even know they were one of the biggest producers."

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Schroeder brings thorny issues to White House

USA Today
03/29/2001 - Updated 10:27 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-29-schroeder.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The White House calls it a get-acquainted session, but German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder is bringing a list of grievances and concerns to President Bush.

With the Bush administration signaling it will not implement a global warming treaty, Schroeder planned to urge Bush not to back off the accord, a German government official said.

Schroeder was conveying European dismay at Bush's recent announcement that he would not seek curbs on carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. industry, which reversed a position Bush took during last year's presidential campaign. The emissions are thought to contribute to global warming.

"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 before Schroeder's trip.

Schroeder was meeting Bush on Thursday at the White House.

Germany's environmental Green Party is in a governing coalition with Schroeder's Social Democrats. The ranking Green member is Joschka Fischer, the foreign minister.

Schroeder also was to use his first meeting with Bush to raise European misgivings about American plans for a national missile defense system and about U.S.-Russian tensions, the German official said. Specifically, Schroeder was troubled by the recent tit-for-tat U.S. and Russian expulsions of alleged spies.

The White House offered only a broad preview of the meeting. "The president expects to talk about the strong lasting bilateral relationship we have with Germany," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

"They're going to discuss regional and global issues and have substantive talks," said another Bush administration official who asked not to be identified by name. As a first sit-down, it was largely a get-to-know-you meeting, the official said.

The German leader nevertheless was raising some of the thorniest issues between the two nations.

Schroeder wrote to Bush this month urging him to rethink his stand on pollution but has received no reply, the German official said.

Europeans are upset mainly over Bush's attitudes toward the Kyoto agreement, negotiated in 1997 to lower levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Many scientists think greenhouse gases are heating up the Earth's atmosphere dangerously. The agreement, never ratified by the United States, specifies that industrial nations must reduce emissions by 2012 to below 1990 levels. The United States would be required to cut emissions by 7.2% of its 1990 level.

Christie Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said Tuesday the administration has no plans to implement the accord because Congress would never ratify it.

The White House said Wednesday that Bush would seek an alternative to the Kyoto global warming pact that would "include the world" in the effort to reduce pollution. Fleischer told reporters that Bush wants to work with U.S. allies on a plan that would require developing nations to meet certain standards.

"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."

Japanese officials also expressed dismay about the Bush administration's view of the Kyoto treaty. In Tokyo, Yasuko Shiraishi, an Environment Ministry official, said the government would continue working with the European Union and other nations to persuade the United States to implement the accord.

And Teiichi Aramaki, the Kyoto governor, said, "It is truly unfortunate and regrettable because (Bush's decision) would nullify efforts taken so far by the international community."

On security topics, Schroeder wanted to ask for details on U.S. missile defense plans that have sparked opposition from Russia and European nations.

At the same time, the German official said, Schroeder would defend European plans for a military role within NATO.

Schroeder also will seek reassurances from Bush that he will abide by a Clinton administration agreement to urge American courts to close class-action lawsuits by Nazi-era slave laborers and accept a new German foundation as the sole channel for settling claims.

---

USA Today
03/29/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Massachusetts

Boston - Until now, state lands have been off-limits to snowmobiles. But a proposal under consideration by state legislators would give off-trail riders access to all 27 state forests. Critics say the machines shatter the snowy silence. Proponents say they have a right to enjoy the parks as much as birdwatchers and hikers.

Nebraska

Lynch - Boyd County wants to build an information center where explorers Lewis and Clark first documented the prairie dog, an animal new to science in 1804. Residents hope to raise enough money to have the scenic lookout in place for the 2003 bicentennial of the explorers' trip through the American West. It would be built atop a Missouri River bluff that provides a panoramic view.

Texas

College Station - Lush pastures are hurting some cattle. The Texas Ag Extension Service said the thick forage is causing some grazing cattle to bloat from a buildup of gas in their digestive tracts. Some have died. Experts blamed forage ripe with protein, which occurs when plants grow wildly after being dormant in winter.

Utah

Clearfield - City officials abandoned a plan to use taxpayer money to fight the fluoridation of Davis County water. The City Council scuttled a 2-week-old resolution that would have lent money to citizens' groups that oppose the fluoridation. In November, Davis County voters approved the fluoridation 52% to 48%.

Wyoming

Cheyenne - Air Force representatives say it will take up to 22 years and nearly $3.6 million to clean up two contaminated groundwater sites at F.E. Warren Air Force Base. Both are on the list of Environmental Protection Agency Superfund Sites.

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Turner keeps talking

Washington Times
March 29, 2001
Inside Politics
News and political dispatches from around the nation.
Greg Pierce
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inpolitics.htm

Television-industry billionaire Ted Turner, who can always be counted on for an incendiary quote, says President Bush "was bought and paid for by the petroleum industry" and that "the Republican Party has become the party of polluters."

Mr. Turner made the comments Tuesday to an environmental seminar of nine students at McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn., which he attended in 1956.

The vice chairman of AOL Time Warner called the November election results "a disaster" and said that Mr. Bush's plan to allow oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge "is ridiculous," the Chattanooga Times Free Press reports.

"We should be moving away from fossil fuels. He is trying to steer the country by looking in the rearview mirror," Mr. Turner added.

Mr. Turner apologized recently after referring to some CNN employees as "Jesus freaks." The employees had attended Ash Wednesday services and had ashes on their foreheads.

Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or by e-mail: Pierce@twtmail.com

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Science can wait

Washington Times
March 29, 2001
Kenneth D. Smith
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010329-232163.htm

"This is another example of a special interest payback to industries that gave millions of dollars in campaign contributions" to then-presidential candidate George W. Bush, says Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California. "They are mounting a bigger assault on the environment and public health than any other administration or the Gingrich Congress did," says Philip Clapp, president of an organization called the National Environmental Trust. Those were some of the more thoughtful comments by critics of the Bush administration´s decision to postpone introduction of new limits on the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water.

So which health-assaulting, environment-destroying K Street interest group had the nerve to say the following: "No human studies of sufficient statistical power or scope have examined whether the consumption of arsenic in drinking water at the current results in an increased incidence of cancer or noncancerous effects?" The mining industry? The wood products industry? State and local officials concerned about the cost of meeting a new, lower standard? All have an interest in what the ultimate standard is. Try the National Research Council (NRC).

At the request of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), an NRC panel studied the risks of arsenic, both a naturally occurring substance and a manufacturing byproduct, in drinking water and released its findings in 1999. Based in part on studies of persons outside the United States, who were exposed to arsenic at substantially higher levels than Americans, the NRC recommended lowering concentrations of the substance in U.S. drinking water supplies. At the same time, however, it acknowledged numerous factors genetics, nutrition, sex and more that could confound the extrapolation of foreign data to the United States. It also recommended more study.

On the "strength" of these findings, the Clinton EPA used its last days in power to hustle out new, lower standards for arsenic in drinking water. To the Waxmans of the world, running through this regulatory express checkout amounted to the last word in the debate. To state and local officials around the country, though, it meant potentially enormous expense for localities by some estimates $5 billion or more to upgrade water facilities, replace filtration systems and so on. New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici complained that the standard would cost his state alone between $400 million and $500 million.

What does money matter when a life is at stake? EPA predicted that when the standard was phased in, it might mean 37-57 fewer cancers nationwide. But these aren´t real cancers. They are guestimates based on models and assumptions. EPA can´t show you anyone who has gotten cancer from trace amounts of arsenic in the water supply. But the money spent preventing these imaginary cancers won´t be available to prevent real cancers. That $5 billion happens to be more than the government now spends on breast or prostate cancer prevention.

This controversy speaks to more than just the Bush administration´s environmental and health priorities. It speaks to the enormous power of the executive branch of government. During the presidential campaign, there was much discussion of the fact that whoever became president would have to reach across the political aisle to get anything done legislatively, so closely divided was power in Congress.

But Mr. Clinton understood that he had the authority to effect enormous changes in government roadless wilderness areas, emission reductions, monument designations, pardons and, yes, arsenic standards by relying on powers that Congress ceded to the executive branch long ago. Mr. Waxman applauded rule by executive fiat, so long as Mr. Clinton was issuing the fiats. But now that the ranks of the Bush administration are rapidly filling with horrors known conservatives determined to use that power for different ends, he and his allies have lost their enthusiasm for it.

The controversy also speaks to the familiar rule of toxicology that "the dose makes the poison." Put another way, there is no such thing as a toxic substance. There is only a toxic dose. The rule applies to arsenic no less than any other substance. Environmentalists argue that if a substance is poisonous at a high dose, it is poisonous at a low dose; there is no threshold exposure below which it is safe. It´s a convenient argument when one is trying to close a manufacturer which produces trace amounts of a suspect chemical or to raise money from a fearful public.

Consider again the case of arsenic. At high doses, well above existing standards, arsenic is toxic. But in trace amounts it may not only be harmless, it may be benign. A check of the medical literature turns up dozens of studies in peer-reviewed journals on the use of arsenic in the treatment of leukemia, for example. By diverting scarce tax dollars from real to hypothetical health problems, the fear-mongering over arsenic may wind up being a bigger assault on the environment and public health than arsenic ever was.

E-mail: ksmith@washingtontimes.com

Kenneth Smith is deputy editorial page editor of The Washington Times.His column appears on Thursdays.

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What's for dinner?
A steak, maybe, but fear is rare

Washington Times
March 29, 2001
By Darlene Superville ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/business/default-2001329214616.htm

Where's the beef?

A lot of it is on America's dinner tables.

Americans spent a record $52 billion on red meat in 2000 and ate, on average, 70 pounds of it. Concern about livestock diseases in Europe has grown in recent weeks, but Americans haven't put aside the craving for a juicy T-bone steak, or even the ubiquitous cheeseburger.

"I have great faith in the [U.S. Department of Agriculture]," says Gordon Harvey, 65, of Arlington, who bought bacon, a pork roast and a steak at the bustling Eastern Market in the District. Then he headed for the poultry counter.

"I wouldn't hesitate to stop buying meat altogether if I thought it was dangerous," he says.

Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman says there are no signs that Americans are shunning beef, despite confusing foot-and-mouth disease, which does not infect humans, with the rarer and more dangerous mad cow disease, a form of which can infect humans.

Mad cow disease has never been found in the United States. But inspectors for the U.S. Department of Agriculture seized hundreds of imported sheep from two Vermont farms last week - the first such seizure of U.S. farm animals - fearing they may be infected with a version of mad cow.

Inspectors are watching more than two dozen imported cows in Minnesota, Texas and Vermont for signs of the disease, which is linked to a brain-wasting illness in humans.

Foot-and-mouth disease, sometimes called hoof-and-mouth, is harmless to humans but can be spread by them, and was last reported in the United States in 1929.

Unless one of those diseases hits the United States, Americans seem unlikely to change their beef-eating habits.

"That fact is, it's not here," says Chuck Levitt, a meat analyst with Alaron Trading Corp. of Chicago. "The American people by and large still feel we have the safest food supply on the planet, and by and large we do."

Farmers fear the economic consequences of foot-and-mouth more than the disease itself, as infected pigs, sheep and cows lose their appetite and stop growing and producing milk.

The fast-spreading disease struck Britain in mid-February and has touched France, the Netherlands and Ireland. Argentina is contending with a new outbreak.

Britain has lost $240 million, and the toll in lost trade and livestock - which are being destroyed to contain the spread - could approach $1 billion.

The United States has barred meat imports from 15 European countries and Argentina until the outbreak is controlled. U.S. consumers could pay higher beef prices at neighborhood butcher shops, grocery stores and restaurants as a result.

"If England doesn't have any meat, they're going to have to buy it from somewhere," says Tony Heath, owner of Quality Cash Market in Concord, N.H. "They're probably going to buy it from us, and we have just so much, so all prices will rise because of the limited supply."

Chuck Boppell, president and chief executive officer of the Sizzler chain of steakhouse restaurants says, "We're seeing the prices on the futures market just go crazy."

Contracts for certain cuts of beef, for future delivery, have risen by half, he says.

This comes as beef consumption has been rising after years of decline.

The $52 billion spent on beef last year was up from $48.7 billion in 1999, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association says. American beef consumption, 70 pounds per person last year, has reflected steady but modest increases since 1993, when consumption fell to 65.1 pounds. Even so, Americans ate more chicken last year, 82.1 pounds.

Even the recall last year of nearly 3 million pounds of ground beef and beef products because of suspected contamination by E. coli and listeria bacteria didn't seem to affect U.S. beef-eating habits, Mr. Levitt says.

He predicts the jittery economy and rising fuel prices would influence beef consumption more than the outbreaks of animal disease overseas.

Still, mad cow disease worries people, with nearly two-thirds of Americans concerned about it becoming a problem in the United States, as reflected in a new USA Today-CNN poll taken by Gallup.

"I haven't considered it, but if I traveled to other places I'd be concerned about it," says Sylvester Copeland, 64, an Army veteran who enjoys a good "half smoke" sausage. He bought six at Eastern Market, a short walk from his senior citizens home.

Comparing meat prices at the D.C. market, Brenda Bunting of Haleiwa, Hawaii, says she will worry when, or if, the disease is confirmed in the United States.

"Then I will think it's only a matter of time before it reaches me in Hawaii."

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

Russia snubs IMF on terms for loan

Washington Times
March 29, 2001
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-2001329212012.htm

MOSCOW - Russia has rejected a loan offer from the International Monetary Fund because the country doesn't need the money or want the fund's binding policy advice, the finance minister said yesterday.

The one-year, standby loan agreement had prompted complaints from Russian officials that the terms were too strict for a meager offer.

"Having considered our possibilities, we made the decision not to conclude a full cooperation program with the IMF for a year," Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

-------- police

Our Towns: Amnesia Runs Rampant in Testimony

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By MATTHEW PURDY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/nyregion/29TOWN.html

TRENTON -- It's a minor miracle that Peter G. Verniero remembered to show up yesterday to testify about all that he had forgotten about his role in New Jersey's racial profiling debacle.

He was on time, carefully coiffed and neatly dressed. The moment was pregnant with expectation that the former attorney general would reveal what he knew about racial profiling and when he knew it.

But then he simply couldn't remember. He had forgotten memos, meetings, numbers, legal proceedings, his thoughts at the time, conversations, dates, times.

An informal survey conducted by Democratic legislative aides counted 158 "I don't recalls," 21 "I don't remembers" and 38 "I don't knows." And those were the totals at the 5 p.m. break.

At one point yesterday, Michael Chertoff, the special counsel to the State Senate's Judiciary Committee, reminded Mr. Verniero that he had just referred to the controversy over racial profiling in the late 1990's as "a historic time" and yet "you don't have much of a recollection of any circumstances of this."

Mr. Verniero responded, "It was historic and unique and I'm doing the best I can with all the human frailties of memory and otherwise to answer your questions."

Yesterday was billed as the climax of the State Legislature's hearings on racial profiling, the day Mr. Verniero, now a State Supreme Court justice, would be confronted over why it took Gov. Christie Whitman's administration so long to face the reality of profiling.

But Mr. Verniero exhibited signs of Post- Profiling Stress Syndrome, an affliction of New Jersey politicians that hampers the ability to confront the issue.

Mr. Verniero had a bad case yesterday. The Whitman administration acknowledged racial profiling as a practice by the state police two years ago, but hard information showing that the problem was severe existed at least two years before that.

One memo that went to Mr. Verniero showed that 62 percent of the motorists searched on one part of the New Jersey Turnpike were members of minorities. What did Mr. Verniero have to say about that yesterday? "I don't recall specifically wading through this document," he said.

Another memo had statistics about turnpike stops that could have shown a serious profiling problem. "Did you ask anyone what this means?" Mr. Verniero was asked. "I don't recall," he said.

In case you don't recall, Mr. Verniero was a longtime aide to Mrs. Whitman. When he joined her administration after her 1993 victory, he was named chief counsel. He told a reporter, "She is my one and only client."

He explained his stance toward racial profiling by saying that as attorney general, the state police was his client and that his job was to defend the police against accusations of profiling.

YESTERDAY, Peter Verniero was representing a new client. Peter Verniero.

On his own behalf, Mr. Verniero was contrite. "I wish I had done more," he said.

He appealed for sympathy. "It was a lonely place at that point in time," he said of the attorney general's office. "I gave it my best shot."

He was understanding. "Reasonable minds may differ regarding the timeliness of my actions," he said.

But Peter Verniero the lawyer couldn't stop Peter Verniero the client from revealing some of the past. He portrayed the Whitman administration as trying to manage the appearance of the racial profiling problem.

In 1999, Mr. Verniero indicted two white troopers in the falsifying of records, even though some aides warned it could have jeopardized a larger investigation of the same troopers in the shooting of three unarmed minority men. Yesterday, Mr. Verniero said he went ahead with the indictment partly to answer criticism of his office's ability to police the police.

He called it "a time of great public cynicism and skepticism of my office."

When the federal government began an inquiry into racial profiling in New Jersey, Mr. Verniero requested the federal government not to put the fact of the investigation in writing. Why? he was asked yesterday. To "avoid having New Jersey stigmatized" by an unfair investigation, he said.

It was left to Mr. Verniero to point out that he eventually did issue a report acknowledging the reality of profiling. It happened just as he was facing a bruising battle to win confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1999.

He told the senators, "I would like to think that we made significant accomplishments during my 34-month tenure."

None of the senators rose to agree. They probably meant to. They just forgot.

---

Verniero Admits Being Lax on Profiling Data

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By LAURA MANSNERUS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/nyregion/29TROO.html

TRENTON, March 28 - After months of speculation and investigation about his responsibility for racial profiling in New Jersey, the state's former attorney general, Peter G. Verniero, testified today that he continually assigned subordinates to look into troublesome reports about the treatment of minority drivers by the state police. But he said he rarely followed up to learn what they had found.

"I wish I had said more," he said in testimony before the State Senate Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the state's response to racial profiling. "I wish I had done more. I wish I had asked more probing and searching questions." But even the Republicans on the committee were less than forgiving, and in a dramatic ending tonight to 13 hours of testimony, the committee's chairman, William L. Gormley, accused Mr. Verniero of misleading the panel during its hearings two years ago on his nomination to the State Supreme Court. Mr. Gormley then told Justice Verniero that he might be called back before the senators next week. When Mr. Verniero asked to submit a written statement in lieu of questioning, Senator Gormley leaned forward and, almost whispering, said: "Oh, no. I'm going to take it up with the committee. We can take a vote. And my vote would be that you'd have to come back in. O.K.?" All day, defending himself against accusations that he had ignored evidence of racial profiling, Mr. Verniero told the committee repeatedly that he could not remember dozens of documents that had crossed his desk while the issue was gaining national attention. Presented with one document after another from a period stretching from 1996 to 1999, Mr. Verniero said "I don't recall" more than 150 times before a late-afternoon break in testimony.

His much-awaited appearance before the Judiciary Committee came after three days of hearings in which state police officials and former aides told of documents showing that troopers were singling out minority drivers for stops and searches.

Mr. Verniero said today that until the highly publicized shooting of three black and Hispanic men on the New Jersey Turnpike in April 1998, he relied on assurances from the state police that they did not engage in racial profiling.

He also cited the assessment of Deborah T. Poritz, who was his predecessor as attorney general and is now the state's chief justice, that earlier legal challenges alleging the practice were based on "junk science."

Mr. Verniero acknowledged that while he was attorney general, he worried about a federal civil rights inquiry into profiling that began in 1996. But he said he had no knowledge of particular memos and reports that were supposed to be passed along to the Justice Department over the next few years.

After showing Mr. Verniero a series of memos, Michael Chertoff, the Judiciary Committee's special counsel, paused and asked, "Did you have an interest in finding out whether there was racial profiling going on?"

Mr. Verniero replied, "I was told in very adamant terms that it was not an issue."

Mr. Verniero was facing the committee for the third time in two years. The committee is revisiting a flurry of activity in the spring of 1999, when the attorney general, a political appointee still short of his 40th birthday, had just been nominated to the Supreme Court.

Within weeks, he changed his position on racial profiling, issuing a report that said the practice was "real, not imagined."

He also directed deputies to move faster to obtain indictments against the two troopers involved in the turnpike episode, withdrew an appeal of a court ruling that had found a "de facto policy" of profiling in traffic stops, and entered into a settlement with the Justice Department, which had threatened to sue the state over civil rights violations.

The committee questioned Mr. Verniero in April 1999, during its first hearings into racial profiling, and again several weeks later, when his Supreme Court nomination went before the panel.

Two of the seven Republicans now on the panel voted against him. The full Senate approved the nomination by one vote.

Today, Justice Verniero was questioned sharply about assertions in his earlier testimony and in an April 1999 report on profiling that his office did not receive some of the state police data on traffic stops and searches until mid-March 1999.

"I believed it was accurate at the time," he said, "that there were certain documents I had not seen."

He acknowledged that in the early stages of the Justice Department investigation, he deleted a paragraph in a January 1997 letter to the department that said a survey of one police station showed that troopers were continuing to stop black drivers at disproportionately high rates.

He said he edited the letter because he thought the information was unreliable. "I'm giving you my best guess as to what went through my mind when I deleted this paragraph," he said.

"Of course we know, down the road, that we shouldn't have discounted that data," he said, "but you're asking me about 1997."

He was also pressed on a meeting in May 1997 at which he and aides discussed data on searches of minority drivers. Aides testified that Mr. Verniero seemed to be quite familiar with the data, which were worrisome because they showed patterns similar to those found in Maryland, where the state police had recently come under court supervision.

"I don't recall a specific discussion of Maryland in that meeting," he said. "This meeting has attained an almost legendary significance in these proceedings, but for me at the time it was essentially a status meeting."

At the time, Mr. Verniero and the superintendent of the state police, Col. Carl A. Williams, were trying to avoid a similar agreement, called a consent decree, with the Justice Department.

Mr. Verniero maintained in his April 1999 testimony that the reality of racial profiling began to "crystallize" in his mind - a term that he said today was open to different interpretations - after the turnpike shooting.

Senator Gormley, in closing, gave Mr. Verniero a blistering lecture about his answers to several questions posed during his court confirmation hearings. Saying that it would be "far more than a mistake" to have misled the senators about the timing of his investigations, he added: "I want you to know, between mislead and mistake, at this moment in time, I fall: mislead. But obviously I would want to afford you, before the end of these hearings, the opportunity to provide whatever other facts would demonstrate why this wasn't the case."

---

Mayor Questions Placement of Critic of Police on Panel

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By DIANE CARDWELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/nyregion/29CCRB.html

Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani raised questions yesterday about the possible appointment of Iris Baez, whose son was choked to death by a city police officer, to the Civilian Complaint Review Board, saying that he believed board members should be disinterested parties.

"My initial reaction is that she has demonstrated such a strong position on the other side and is such an interested party that that would not be the best appointment to a position where you're supposed to be somewhat disinterested," Mr. Giuliani said. "Is that the right appointment for someone who's supposed to be disinterested and be able to have demonstrated that they can see both sides of a question? Since basically what they're doing is making a determination about who's telling the truth in situations that are very, very close and very difficult."

Council members from the Bronx have recommended to Speaker Peter F. Vallone that Ms. Baez, also of the Bronx, replace Lorraine Cortez-Vazquez, who has been appointed to the State Board of Regents and has announced her intention to step down from the C.C.R.B. Ms. Baez became an advocate against police brutality after her son, Anthony, was killed in 1994. Her family settled a lawsuit against the Police Department for a little more than $2.5 million.

The 13 members of the C.C.R.B. are appointed by the mayor, but the City Council recommends the five borough representatives. The rules committee of the Council usually follows the recommendation of the borough's delegation, and the full Council ratifies the committee's candidate, said Councilman Sheldon S. Leffler. But the authority to make appointments rests with the mayor. If he does not approve the Council's candidate, the Council has to submit another name, something Ms. Baez's supporters are hoping to avoid.

Ms. Baez and her backers were quick to respond yesterday that while she has been an outspoken opponent of police brutality, she is not anti-police. "I don't know how he could say that," Ms. Baez said of the mayor. She said that while Mr. Giuliani did not know her personally, "he knows of me, and he knows what I stand for."

The Bronx borough president, Fernando Ferrer, who is running for mayor, said that Ms. Baez would make a fine addition to the board. "What she has lost and the way she has lost it will give her a very important credibility when she asks the right questions," he said.

Ms. Baez, who said that she has been learning about the C.C.R.B. since her son's death and has wanted to serve on it for some time, said that if appointed she would weigh the evidence in each case separately and try to be fair.

Mr. Leffler, chairman of the public safety committee, said that there was a good chance she would be approved by the full Council, adding, "I think it's now hers to lose."

"I think the Mayor should not immediately write this candidate off," said Councilman Adolfo Carrión Jr. of the Bronx. "She has always made it clear that she supports good policing and has good relations with the police in her community."

---

PHILADELPHIA: HOMICIDE COMMANDER REASSIGNED

New York Times
March 29, 2001
National Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/national/29BRFS.html

The Philadelphia police commissioner, John F. Timoney, reassigned the department's homicide commander, Capt. James J. Brady, to nighttime duty in another division in the wake of a public outcry over a 1998 incident in which the commander drunkenly crashed his car and tried to cover it up with the help of police officers. Mr. Timoney announced his decision at a news conference at which Mayor John Street called the initial action, a 20-day suspension, too lenient. Sara Rimer (NYT)

---

What a sinkhole

USA Today
03/29/01
Offbeat
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nweird/nweird.htm

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - There's no denying it: the city's police are going downhill. That's because Alexandria's Public Safety Center, built atop a landfill, is sinking. The floor slopes so steeply that barbells roll through the police weight room. A recent study found that the building has sunk as much as four inches since the $26 million complex was built 14 years ago. The sinking is caused by decaying landfill material underneath the building. It may cost more than $4.5 million to fix the problem.

---

USA Today
03/29/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Delaware

Wilmington - Relatives of a man critically wounded by a New Castle County police officer are criticizing police for the shooting. Police say Darren Brooks, 31, was shot after using a knife to back an officer into a corner. Relatives say Brooks is disabled and can use only one arm. He's in critical condition.

Idaho

Fort Hall - About 40 members of the Shoshone-Bannock Indian Tribes have asked the Justice Department to investigate the Fort Hall Reservation police. They contend that the police have brutalized them for 35 years. Fort Hall Business Council Chairman Lionel Boyer said they should have come to him first. The group says the tribal government is corrupt and ineffective.

Kansas

Topeka - The House approved a 13% pay raise for Kansas Highway Patrol officers. That's 5% more than the increase recommended by Gov. Graves. The House proposal would raise troopers' starting pay to more than $29,000 from the current $26,000, in line with neighboring states.

New Mexico

Albuquerque - A grand jury has indicted a police officer on charges of aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, prosecutors say. Tom Benard has been forced to turn in his badge and gun. Charges stem from an incident last April in which police put a gun to the head of a man they believed was a murder suspect. Later, investigators determined the man was not the suspect.

-------- spying

Accused spy's lawyers denounce Ashcroft's comments

CNN
March 29, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/03/29/crime.spying.reut/index.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Lawyers for accused spy Robert Hanssen have denounced as inappropriate Attorney General John Ashcroft's comments about possibly seeking the death penalty or a plea bargain, saying he may have violated Justice Department guidelines.

In a letter to Ashcroft sent Wednesday and made available Thursday, Plato Cacheris and two other defense lawyers said Ashcroft's remarks "give us great concern."

Ashcroft, in an interview with Reuters Tuesday, said the death penalty would be considered for Hanssen, a former FBI agent accused of passing some of the nation's most sensitive secrets to Moscow.

"The laws provide for, in some cases, the death penalty, and I would not hesitate to include the death penalty among the options that are to be considered, based on making sure that we pursue the national interest at the highest level," he said.

Hanssen was arrested last month on charges of selling secrets to Moscow over the last 15 years of his 25-year FBI career for $1.4 million in money and diamonds. Cacheris has said Hanssen will plead not guilty.

At a later Justice Department news conference Tuesday, Ashcroft declined to discuss specifics of the Hanssen case, but explained what would have to be considered in such cases.

"There is a national interest in making sure that we send a signal that we take very seriously any compromises of ...national security," he said.

"But we would also take very seriously the need or opportunity to ascertain things important for us to know about the nature of what had happened that might be available to us in the context of a plea bargain," Ashcroft said.

Cacheris said Ashcroft's public comments were "not appropriate," especially because Hanssen has yet to be indicted and defense lawyers have received no notice the Justice Department intends to seek the death penalty.

Cacheris and his colleagues said they do not believe the death penalty may be legally sought in the case.

They objected to Ashcroft's comments at the news conference for seeming to link a decision on whether to seek the death penalty with the information Hanssen may give in a plea deal.

They cited Justice Department guidelines, which state, "The death penalty may not be sought, and no attorney for the government may threaten to seek it, for the purpose of obtaining a more desirable negotiating position."

Justice Department spokeswoman Chris Watney said, "We will respond appropriately to Mr. Cacheris directly."

---

Lawyer Says Ashcroft Spoke Inappropriately in Spy Case

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By DAVID JOHNSTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/national/29SPY.html?pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON, March 28 - A lawyer for Robert P. Hanssen, an F.B.I. agent accused of spying for Moscow, lodged a complaint today over Attorney General John Ashcroft's comments this week about whether Justice Department prosecutors would seek the death penalty against Mr. Hanssen.

The lawyer, Plato Cacheris, said Mr. Ashcroft's comments, in a news conference on Tuesday, suggested that prosecutors would threaten Mr. Hanssen with the possibility of execution to pressure him into pleading guilty to obtain a reduced sentence.

Federal guidelines prohibit using the death penalty as a threat.

In his comments, Mr. Ashcroft said he would not comment on the Hanssen case, insisting, "I really don't want to discuss specific cases." But he went on to indicate in general remarks that he believed there should be an assessment of whether the death penalty was justified in serious espionage cases.

Mr. Ashcroft said the government needed "to send a signal that we take very seriously any compromises of the national interest and the national security by individuals who would inappropriately leak" or sell information. "But," he continued, "we would also take very seriously the need or opportunity to ascertain things important for us to know about the nature of what had happened that might be available to us in the context of a plea bargain."

Such a comment "seems to be a threat," said Mr. Cacheris, adding that no plea talks had occurred.

In a letter to Mr. Ashcroft today, Mr. Cacheris and two other defense lawyers, Preston Burton and John F. Hundley, said, "Your public comments are not appropriate, especially in a context where Mr. Hanssen has not been indicted and counsel have received no notice of the department's intention to seek the death penalty."

Mr. Hanssen, who is accused of two counts of espionage, is said to have revealed the identities of three Russian intelligence officers secretly working for the United States. Two of them were executed, officials said.

---

Former KGB agent new chief of Defense

Washington Times
March 29, 2001
By David R. Sands THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-200132921539.htm

Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday tapped an old KGB colleague to be the Defense Ministry's first civilian chief ever, in the Kremlin's biggest personnel shake-up since Mr. Putin came to power a year ago.

Sergei Ivanov, like Mr. Putin a 48-year-old St. Petersburg native who spent his formative years in the Soviet spy service, replaces Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev.

The 62-year-old Gen. Sergeyev had been appointed by Boris Yeltsin, Mr. Putin's predecessor, and had been widely seen as lukewarm to the sweeping force reductions and defense reforms Mr. Putin wants.

"It's a step toward demilitarizing Russia's public life," Mr. Putin said in televised remarks in Moscow yesterday after announcing the shift.

In addition, Mr. Putin increased his personal stamp on the top echelons of government by naming Boris Gryzlov, head of the pro-Kremlin Unity party faction in the State Duma, as the new interior minister. He replaces Vladimir Rushailo, who inherits Mr. Ivanov's old post as head of the Kremlin's Security Council - akin to the U.S. national security adviser.

Mr. Putin also replaced the ministers overseeing Russia's lucrative nuclear power industry and the country's tax police.

Heritage Foundation Russia analyst Ariel Cohen said that Mr. Putin observed the barest of decent intervals before moving to overhaul the team assembled by Mr. Yeltsin.

"Mr. Putin proved a man of his word," Mr. Cohen said. "He gave his word he'd make no major changes for a year, and he waited a year and two days."

Mr. Cohen noted that there was a history of tension between the intelligence services and the military, dating back to Soviet times. Appointing a career KGB agent to the defense post sends a clear message, he said.

"My sense is that a KGB general has a better understanding of the real security challenges to Russia today than does a career military officer like Sergeyev," said Mr. Cohen. "And it shows Mr. Putin understands that fear is the best motivator in politics."

This is not the first time Mr. Putin has used his old KGB connections to fill key government posts. Two of the seven regional administrative chiefs he appointed last year to rein in Russia's regional governors came from the intelligence ranks as well.

Kremlin watchers predicted that yesterday's personnel moves were just the beginning. Mr. Putin has governed for a year with an odd mix of holdovers from the Yeltsin "Family," KGB associates, and colleagues from his days serving under liberal St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak in the early 1990s.

"All the power ministers were unchanged since Yeltsin, so this is Putin's attempt to create his own team," Yuri Korgunuk, director of the Moscow-based think tank Indem, told the Bloomberg News service. "These changes are not a surprise. It's more a question of why Putin waited so long."

Political oddsmakers in Moscow say that Prime Minister Mikhail Kasynov may not survive long, and Mr. Putin's changes yesterday did not affect the government's economic policy team.

Mr. Putin yesterday only promised more personnel announcements soon that will "attract attention."

Gen. Sergeyev, who resisted efforts to shift Russia's defense focus from nuclear arms to conventional forces, was named a security adviser to Mr. Putin, but it is expected that his real influence will be greatly reduced.

Mr. Putin has backed a plan to sharply reduce Russia's bloated military ranks while increasing pay and training for those who do serve. Both Defense and Interior Ministry troops are involved in the grinding guerrilla struggle in the breakaway republic of Chechnya, which shows no signs of flagging.

Although he rose to the rank of lieutenant general in the successor organization to the old KGB, Mr. Ivanov left the service last year and thus will be the first civilian ever to hold the Russian defense portfolio.

"While conducting military reform it's necessary to appoint a civilian to the job of defense minister," Mr. Putin said yesterday. "The time has come for personnel changes, which would be the logical conclusion of the modernization of the military structure."

-------- terrorism

Demands for a terrorist crackdown irk Greece

Christian Science Monitor
THURSDAY, MARCH 29, 2001
By Andrew Marshall Special to The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/03/29/fp7s2-csm.shtml

Even by the shadowy standards of terrorist groups, the Revolutionary Organization November 17 is a mysterious entity. In the past 26 years, it has killed 23 people, including four American officials, a US Embassy employee, and a British military attaché.

While the CIA, the FBI, and Britain's Scotland Yard have at times assisted Greek authorities in their investigations, no one has ever been arrested for the murders.

Families of some of the victims - frustrated with the lack of results - have begun a lobbying campaign that they hope will achieve what Greek police haven't: bring those responsible to justice. And they hope the attention Greece gets leading up to the 2004 Olympics, in Athens, will help.

Critical documentary

On March 18, the BBC ran a highly critical documentary - which speculated on possible ties between the terrorist group and an influential Greek political party.

Nicos Peraticos, a London-based businessman whose brother was killed by November 17 in 1997, says the families want "to take the opportunity to remind anyone who would listen that there's this terrible unresolved injustice."

The US State Department and Congress have both criticized Athens for its record on terrorism, charging the government with a lack of political will. Some in Congress have even called for sanctions.

Behind the name

The name November 17 commemorates a student uprising against the military junta that ran Greece from 1967 to 1974. Its first victim, in 1975, was Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens. Others followed, each accompanied by a rambling justification based on a struggle against imperialism.

The murder last year of Brig. Stephen Saunders, the British defense attaché in Athens, brought the group back to public attention in Europe. November 17 said its ambush was in response to his alleged involvement in the 1999 NATO airstrikes against Yugoslavia.

His widow, Heather Saunders, made a tearful appeal to Greek authorities at the time: "For the sake and future of Greece within the European Community, these wicked men must be brought to justice." Officers from Scotland Yard flew to Greece to assist in the investigation. But since then, the case seems to have dried up.

Mrs. Saunders and Mr. Peraticos, who are leaders of the lobbying effort, hope that bringing the issue before policymakers and the public will pressure the Greek government to take a more aggressive stance. On Sunday, Saunders will unveil a plaque in her husband's memory at the British Embassy in Athens.

The BBC's hour-long documentary ran on the eve of a visit to London by Greek Prime Minister Costas Simitis. What most infuriated Greek officials was its mention of one of many conspiracy theories that circulate about the group: that November 17 has been shielded because it has ties to senior members of PASOK, the socialist party that has been in power in Greece for most of the past quarter-century. Ties may have been formed under the junta between members of the group and leading socialists, the BBC program speculated.

That view is "absolutely preposterous," says Nicos Papadakis, press counselor at the Greek Embassy in London. The program was prejudiced and ill-informed, he says, noting that the great majority of November 17's victims have been Greeks, not foreigners. What's more, he says, several of the governments in power since the group appeared have been conservative - including the current administration.

Mr. Papadakis expressed sympathy for the victims' families, saying Heather Saunders is "a very dignified lady, and our heart and our sympathy go out to her."

He says Greece's failure to catch any of the killers, "is a legitimate question.

"We are the first to recognize we have a problem," Papadakis adds.

The mysterious November 17

That problem lies in the lack of police resources and training, and in the methodology and structure of November 17, he says. The group kills irregularly, it appears to be very small, and it has never engaged in indiscriminate acts of mass terror of the sort that might persuade others to turn in the culprits.

November 17 is "a small, tightly compartmentalized organization," says Bruce Hoffman, an expert on international terrorism at the Rand Corp. The group is "not vulnerable to informants or agents provocateurs," he says. And in terms of their professionalism, "their tradecraft is very good."

Papadakis says new legislation designed to combat terrorism and organized crime will help. Among other provisions, it introduces a witness-protection program.

-------- activists

Buzz on campus
In the city's colleges and universities, summit's like rallying points of the '60s

Montreal Gazette
Thursday 29 March 2001
CHARLIE FIDELMAN The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010329/5088604.html

Montreal's college and university campuses are abuzz with talk reminiscent of the protest movements of the 1960s.

Students are even invoking some of the landmark events of those restless times - the Vietnam War and the Kent State shootings - as they call for class boycotts and picket lines to protest against the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City next month.

"Everybody is talking about it," said Heloise Moysan-Laplante of College de Maisonneuve.

It's hard to miss kiosks set up in high-traffic locations near the entrances to college and university buildings, decorated with colourful banners and containing information about Internet sites, meetings and training camps devoted to protesting against the summit.

At the downtown campus of the Universite du Quebec a Montreal, lunch hour is a particularly busy period, with debates, documentary films and the distribution of pamphlets filled with warnings about the impact of globalization.

Students say they worry that the Free Trade Area of the Americas - the agreement that the leaders of 34 countries from North, Central and South America will be working toward April 20-22 - will erode human rights, the environment, health care, working conditions and education. The slogan on posters and pamphlets on every campus in French, English and Spanish is: "No Way FTAA."

"It's going to affect society as a whole, but particularly students, and we have to act," said Moysan-Laplante, secretary of the students' association at Maisonneuve.

"We're searching for concrete methods to oppose what's happening," said Moysan-Laplante, co-ordinator of a movement set up to press for a widespread student strike. "One of the ways that's most visible and most powerful is a strike."

If that happened, students would boycott classes and exams in the week leading up to the weekend summit.

Phil Ilijevski, of the Quebec branch of the Canadian Federation of Students, called strike action by students, especially at colleges, "very likely."

"Many are calling for a general strike during the summit. Things are really heating up," Ilijevski said.

Moysan-Laplante said that if college and university authorities refuse to recognize the protest action by canceling classes and exams, the students will try to cause enough disruption that things will shut down anyway.

Students in some faculties at the Universite du Montreal and UQAM are also expected to participate in some form of protest during summit week.

Concordia University agreed to defer exam dates for students who chose to protest in Quebec City at exam time.

McGill University refused to follow suit, prompting some students to say they will boycott their exams if they fall during the week of the summit.

"People are bringing up references to Vietnam and the Kent State shooting," said Wojtek Baraniak, president of the student society at McGill. "They're willing to make that sacrifice, and I applaud them. I found it ironic that the university wasn't according deferral for students who wanted to voice their dissent."

Rosalie Jukier, McGill's dean of students, warned that skipping exams will result in "academic consequences."

"The university was worried about creating a precedent," Jukier explained after the senate voted 32-31 against deferring exams. "A protest is not a legitimate reason for not (taking) exams."

About 5,000 Montreal-area students are expected to join thousands of anti-globalization activists in Quebec City.

The Canadian Federation of Students is part of Common Frontiers, one of the two coalitions behind the Peoples' Summit of the Americas, a parallel event to the official summit that is to be held April 17-21.

Francophone and anglophone student groups are working to together to organize bus transportation to Quebec City for the protests.

Booths set up at Concordia, McGill and UQAM are taking reservations for seats. A total of 104 yellow school buses, seating 48 each, will be leaving for Quebec between April 19 and 21.

Bus companies initially demanded a surcharge above the regular rental fee of $300 per bus, Ilijevski said, "but they backed down."

With hotels in Quebec City fully booked, Universite Laval last week announced that it will open its facilities to accommodate 3,000 out-of-town students during the summit.

Protest activities planned for Quebec City include street blockages on April 20 and a massive march and demonstration the following day.

The student movement is crucial, said Alvaro Vargas of the Groupe Oppose a la Mondialisation des Marches, a Montreal student coalition.

"They have a capacity for mobilization that's outstanding. These are the people who are most critical of globalization," Vargas said, although he noted that not all of those critics are completely against a free-trade agreement.

"Some of us want to negotiate and modify it a bit."

To prepare for and counter the planned efforts by an estimated 6,000 police officers to keep the protesters away from the summit, student groups have organized campus training sessions on civil disobedience and have brought in speakers on safety issues.

The police will be armed with stun guns, plastic bullets, billy clubs, pepper pray and tear gas, members of Vargas's group told students yesterday at a meeting at UQAM.

"For us, occupying a public street means taking part in a peaceful, democratic process," Vargas said of non-violent protests. "There are other groups that are more radical and we respect their strategy, but we have made our decision."

- Reservations for seats on the student buses going to Quebec City can be made by calling (514) 931-2377. More information on student anti-summit activities is available at www.education-action.net and at www.cmaq.net.

---

Zapatista Leaders Make Their Case to Mexico's Congress

New York Times
March 29, 2001
By GINGER THOMPSON and TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29MEXI.html

MEXICO CITY, March 28 - In an act of political theater that brought Mexico's fledgling civil rights movement center stage, masked commanders of the rebel Zapatistas took the floor of Congress today to defend a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing new rights for the country's 10 million Indians.

For nearly two hours, rebel leaders delivered a series of passionate speeches, their identities obscured by the black woolen ski masks they say symbolize the facelessness of indigenous people in Mexico.

They urged a half-full chamber - many lawmakers chose to boycott the session - to deliver the two-thirds majority vote required to pass an Indian rights bill known as the San Andrés Accords.

Rebel leaders said the session, broadcast live on two national television networks, formally marked the end of the Zapatistas' existence as an armed guerrilla movement confined to the jungles of the southern state of Chiapas, and their emergence as an open political force.

Underlining that point, the group's mysterious and media-savvy spokesman, Subcommander Marcos, was conspicuously absent. The 23-member delegation was led by a Mayan woman who uses the name Commander Esther.

She explained that as the Zapatistas' chief military strategist, Marcos had no place in their peaceful presentation before Congress.

Dressed in an embroidered blouse and sandals, Commander Esther called herself the head of a "legitimate and honest" civilian movement. She said the Zapatistas were prepared to open talks with President Vicente Fox, whom she praised for complying with their demands for the withdrawal of troops from seven bases near rebel strongholds.

But she said two more demands must be met before the rebels would agree to restart formal negotiations - suspended in 1996 - to end their seven-year-old conflict.

"In this way, we make clear our disposition toward dialogue, toward the building of agreements and toward achieving peace," Commander Esther said.

The rebels have demanded the release of all Zapatista prisoners. More than 80 have been freed, but the Zapatistas have said others remain in jails in the states of Tabasco, Veracruz and Querétaro.

The rebels have also demanded the adoption of the indigenous rights measures, agreed to in negotiations between the rebels and the government in 1996. President Ernesto Zedillo reneged on his promise to send the bill to Congress, and it was shelved until Mr. Fox submitted it after he took office in December.

The rebels' appearance today was the culmination of weeks of drama surrounding their journey from the wilderness in Chiapas to the boulevards of Mexico City, and their struggle to win a hearing in Congress. It also marked the beginning of a fight to pass the rights bill, which aims to address the historic mistreatment of Mexico's Indian population, the largest in Latin America.

Suffering the legacy of conquest and slavery, Mexico's Indians endure disproportionate rates of illiteracy, malnutrition, infant mortality and unemployment.

President Fox lobbied Congress to accept the rebel delegation and pass the rights bill, saying Mexico's Indians had been "exploited, humiliated, robbed and discriminated against." But his efforts were scorned by many members of his own National Action Party. All but a handful of the party's legislators boycotted the Zapatistas' speeches today, demonstrating that winning passage of the law will be difficult, at best.

Lawmakers and political analysts - left, right and center - have raised questions about the bill, which would amend the Constitution to give indigenous communities the power of "free determination" and "autonomy as part of the Mexican state."

The bill would allow local communities to administer justice in accordance with their traditions, while demanding respect for human rights. It would let indigenous people choose their own form of local government, give them greater legal control over their land, take measures to preserve their languages and cultures and run their own media.

Opponents say that traditional councils of elders could suppress individual rights, and that the freedoms granted by the bill could fragment the nation into fiefs.

"We have to be very careful on the one hand not to alter the political structure of the Mexican nation and on the other not to create a situation that marginalizes and and segregates the indigenous," said Enrique Jackson, a Senate leader of the former governing party.

Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, a leader of Mr. Fox's party in the lower house, said he did not want to follow the example of "the United States, which banished the Indians to reservations far off in the mountains and the deserts, isolated and separated them."

But supporters of the bill say the stakes are larger than a struggle for political advantage.

Xochitl Gálvez, Mr. Fox's minister for Indian affairs, said Mexico had long seen its Indians "as inferior human beings, and thought maybe if they disappeared, the problems they presented would be solved."

"You could see this as indifference, or you could see it as ethnocide," Ms. Gálvez said.

The Zapatistas, she said, have made these people visible and worthy of constitutional protections.

"The indigenous people have already said they don't want to become independent from this country," she said. "The only thing they want is that we recognize that they have rights: the right to be different, the right to speak their language, to be educated in their language, to preserve their culture, to have some control over the land they live on, not to cede it to the local political bosses."

Commander Esther, in her speech to the legislators today, also responded to those who oppose the bill.

"There are those who say that this proposal will create Indian reservations, but they forget that Indians already live separated from other Mexicans and that we are at risk of extinction," she said. "They say that this law will promote a backward legal system, but they forget that the current laws only promote confrontation, punish the poor, give impunity for the rich, condemn the color of our skin and make our language a crime."

After the rebels' appearance in Congress, Subcommander Marcos joined the delegation for a celebratory rally where he announced that the commanders had accomplished the political objectives of their journey and would begin packing on Thursday for their return to Chiapas.

"We are not going with empty hands," he said, adding that they would carry back the support of "those who rose up against the stubbornness of the few who attempted to close the doors of dialogue."

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New York Times
March 29, 2001
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/29/world/29BRIE.html

VIETNAM: PROTESTS TELEVISED State television showed film for the first time of ethnic protests that led to violence and a military crackdown last month in the Central Highlands. The unusual publicity followed protests against land seizures and the suppression of Protestant observances. Seth Mydans (NYT)

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Zapatistas address Congress, return to jungle

USA Today
03/29/2001 - Updated 08:01 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-29-zapatistas.htm

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Cheered even by critics, the Zapatista rebels made a historic appearance before Congress to appeal for Indian rights, then announced they were heading back to the jungle.

The 24 masked rebel leaders depart - possibly Thursday - with major political victories. And they leave behind a gift for President Vicente Fox: an agreement to begin the contacts he has repeatedly sought.

Zapatista Comandante Esther said Wednesday that Fox had given "a signal of peace" by meeting the rebel demand to close seven army bases near their strongholds.

"We too will give orders of peace to our forces," she said, promising that Zapatista National Liberation Army would not replace the departing troops: "We should not respond to a sign of peace with a sign of war."

More significantly, she said Zapatista envoy Fernando Yanez would contact Fox's peace representative, Luis Alvarez, to coordinate efforts at re-establishing direct talks. Fox has repeatedly invited the Zapatistas to talk.

"We now have our steps firmly on the road to peace treaties," Fox said during a speech in Mexico City.

Seeming to echo the Zapatistas, Fox warned that peace "is not the destination, it is only the starting point so that our country pays that enormous debt we have with 10 million Indian brothers and sisters who live in extreme poverty."

Two television networks gave the event about seven hours of live coverage.

The rebels' mere presence at the podium of Congress was a triumph for a group whose only military victories came on a single day seven years ago when they sneaked past a surprised federal army to seize several towns in Chiapas state.

But the Zapatistas have become a powerful political force, winning wide support in Mexico and abroad as champions of rights for Mexico's Indians, aided by the charisma and literary style of their military leader, Subcomandante Marcos.

On Wednesday, as the Zapatistas made their most prominent speeches yet, Marcos was pointedly left off the speakers' list - an omission that emphasized the Indian character of the movement and its increasing turn from arms to politics.

"Our warriors have done their job, thanks to the support of popular mobilization in Mexico and the world," Esther said.

"The hour now is ours," she added, saying that the Indian commanders "represent the civilian part of the EZLN."

Even some who fought to keep the rebels out of Congress' chambers were encouraged by the tone of the discussion. Sen. Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, who has exchanged insults with Marcos via the press, expressed "enormous joy" at the civilized tone.

In the wake of the meeting, Marcos joined the comandantes at a rally Wednesday to thank supporters and bid them farewell.

"Tomorrow we are going to pack out bags and leave on the return to our place," Marcos said.

It took a 220-210 vote across party lines to let the rebels use the podium of Congress - and then only in a mass committee meeting, not in a formal joint session.

"This podium is a symbol. That is why it caused so much argument," Esther said. "And it is also symbolic that it is I - a poor, Indian Zapatista woman - who has the first word."

In Mexico's relatively fledgling democracy, the Indian autonomy bill at stake could take minority rights to unpredictable lengths.

It proposes constitutional amendments that would allow Indians to govern themselves at the local level; promote their own languages, customs and justice systems; and grant them greater land rights.

Critics worry the law could allow traditional Indian councils of elders to discriminate against women, political or religious minorities, or to take over nature reserves for farming.

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Attack ideas in campus ad, not right to free speech

USA Today
03/29/2001
By DeWayne Wickham
http://www.usatoday.com/news/comment/columnists/wickham/2001-03-29-wickham.htm

David Horowitz, a man whose views on race relations track closer to those of David Duke than Martin Luther King Jr., has sparked a heated - and often ugly - debate on college campuses.

The conservative commentator generated howls of protests recently when he placed an ad in several college newspapers titled, "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery is a Bad Idea - and Racist Too." Some student papers refused to run the ad, which roots its arguments in intellectual quicksand. But the few that exercised their constitutional right to publish Horowitz's babble became the targets of angry protests.

Students at Brown University seized nearly 4,000 copies of the campus paper. Protesters demanded that the $725 fee Horowitz paid the student newspaper to run his ad be given to Third World organizations. On other campuses, students who railed against the ad called for an apology from the staffs of the papers that ran it. There also have been reports of threatening mail and telephone calls.

The students' rage is understandable, but their tactics are indefensible. They make a serious mistake by attacking free speech - even Horowitz's noxious brand - in their efforts to counter his arguments. It was the free speech of abolitionists, including the impassioned words of Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, that helped bring about slavery's demise.

The students who were angered by Horowitz's ad ought to dissect his shabby arguments with a focused, intellectual response. They should expose the bloated, soft underbelly of the thinking of Horowitz, a former Black Panther Party devotee who Time columnist Jack E. White said now embraces "the Ridiculous Right as passionately as he had once clung to the Lunatic Left."

Flawed reasoning

In his ad, Horowitz said no single group of people in this country is responsible for or benefited from slavery. Just "a tiny minority of white Americans ever owned slaves," and most Americans have no connection to that peculiar institution, he argued.

Student protesters should have responded to him by pointing out that the push for reparations is a claim against the U.S. government, not against any one race or group of people in this country. For nearly a century, Congress regulated slavery's existence and protected the property rights slaveholders claimed to have over their human chattel. Just as Jews correctly demanded reparations of one sort or another from governments that countenanced the Holocaust, African-Americans have a right to seek the same from this nation's government, Horowitz's campus critics should have said.

To shoot down Horowitz's claim that no "living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system," the students should have countered that Jim Crow laws locked millions of black folks into a bog of cultural, economic and political indentured servitude lasting well into the 1960s. The huge financial settlements made recently by companies accused of widespread acts of discrimination against black workers are chilling proof of the continuum of racial bigotry that stretched from the antebellum plantations to the 21st century boardrooms of corporate America.

Research needed

To convincingly make these arguments, Horowitz's detractors need knowledge, not just rage. They have to do the research that exposes the bankruptcy of his ideas. That should be easy to do on college campuses.

Although Horowitz sent his ad to just a few college newspapers, its message was directed to a much broader audience. He knew its contents would set off a firestorm of criticism that would project his rancid thinking onto the pages of many of this nation's daily newspapers. And in this he has succeeded.

But the students who were enraged by Horowitz's ad still can deny him the ultimate victory he seeks - not by trampling upon his right to free speech, but by answering him with the kind of knowledge that ought to be in great supply on their campuses.

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Up with free speech

Washington Times
EDITORIAL • March 29, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010329-620473.htm

From college campuses to Capitol Hill, the First Amendment and the political freedoms it safeguards is under attack.

On campus, student journalists play censor and suppress "offensive" arguments or face campus opprobrium (more on that below). In Washington, lawmakers deliberate "reforms" that would greatly expand the government´s power to regulate political communication or answer to Sen. John McCain.

This is a natural step, perhaps, for a legislative body where the once-outlandish notion of infringing on First Amendment speech protections has become a stump staple. John "If I could think of a way constitutionally, I would ban negative ads" McCain, of course, springs to mind as the archetypal "reformer," but as George Will recently wrote, no fewer than 38 senators actually voted in 1997 to amend the First Amendment to impose "reasonable" restrictions on political speech. Congressional minority leader Dick Gephardt has said, "What we have is two important values in direct conflict: freedom of speech and our desire for healthy campaigns in a healthy democracy."

That an American statesman could ever see freedom of speech and "healthy campaigns" in conflict, direct or otherwise, is a sorry development. But it´s not just the political climate that is increasingly open to setting limits on political communication. So are the nation´s campuses, where what has turned into a novel campaign to test the limits of free speech, launched by daring conservative author David Horowitz, has shown, with shockingly few exceptions, that the unfettered exchange of political ideas is far less sacred to America´s young and educated than a rigid adherence to prevailing political orthodoxies.

Seeking to engage students in the debate over reparations for slavery, Mr. Horowitz wrote up an advertisement titled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks and Racist Too" and attempted to place it in more than 50 college newspapers across the country. The ad (full text available at frontpagemag.com) makes its case with a muscular clarity. Mr. Horowitz lists such incontrovertible points as "there is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery" along with more controversial but no less intriguing statements such as "reparations have already been paid" in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences.

The reaction has been explosive as denunciations and protests have erupted with particular intensity at such campuses as Berkeley, where editors promptly issued a craven apology for running the ad and turning their paper into "a vehicle of bigotry," and Brown, where protesters openly threatened editor Brooks King that "they would make sure that no one would see the paper," as Mr. King recalled, should he refuse their various demands. Admirably, he did refuse and the entire press run was stolen and trashed. Why? Critics claimed the ad was "inflammatory," "racist," and "a direct assault on communities of color." One teaching assistant actually said that students told him "they can´t perform basic functions like walking or sleeping because of this ad."

Please. These are words on a page. The way to answer words on a page is with better words on another page. But these young people have not only never learned this basic lesson of democracy, they have never been taught it. Instead, they have learned that feelings are more important than facts; that a sense of grievance is more important than a handle on reality and that it is therefore permissible, if not better, to shout down a provocative argument than to rebut it.

Not surprisingly, the word from the university top has been hopelessly equivocal. "We have two very critical principles, freedom of speech and community values," said Brown interim president Sheila E. Blumstein, sounding a familiar theme (see Dick Gephardt´s quotation above). "To make it a simplistic argument that you either have to believe in one or the other is incorrect."

So now upholding freedom of speech is "simplistic," just another factor to balance against competing communities and their feelings. Mr. Horowitz´s national experiment has brought this ominous reality into sharp relief, and for this he should be well-thanked. It can no longer be ignored that among the nation´s best and brightest it is widely believed that speech should and must be limited for a greater good or else. Whatever one may call this blinkered vision, it has nothing to do with freedom.

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