------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Japan angered by U.S. sub's port call
France overturns ruling on Australian n-waste
Kursk Had Atomic Weapons Aboard-Report
NRC considers plan to convert plutonium to fuel
Turning An N-Power Plant Into An N-Weapon, Nuclear Sabotage
Recycled computers contain sensitive data
Colorado
NRC considers plan to convert plutonium to reactor fuel
Ecology, EPA bug DOE on funding
Nevada Concerns about Waste Transport

MILITARY
North Korea says U.S. supports war
S. Korea, China object to textbook
Japan and the Koreas Stand By Their Respective Allies
Japan may provide Myanmar 3 bln yen for aid-Jiji
Human rights monitor visits Myanmar
U.S. sees costly Columbian drug war
Ravers try to counter social image
Lawmakers reconsider drug Statute
Study of medical marijuana launched
Seventeen drug cases dismissed
Alabama
Arrests by a Drug Task Force in Texas Come Under Fire
Prosecutors Urge No Change in Strict Drug Laws
UN demands Milosovic transfer
Virginia
House acts to make all military votes count
VMI ready to defend tradition of prayers

OTHER
Texas-New Mexico Power users may choose wind service
The only Aprils fools are folks that drink fluoridated water
Cut a deal on softwood
EU condemns Bush on global warming
Desert water pumping damage feared
EPA handling of asbestos criticized
Experts: Mad cow risk very low
Foot-and-mouth shows improvement
U.S. Rebuffs European Plea Not to Abandon Climate Pact
E.P.A. Is Faulted on Asbestos Hazard
Environmental Reversals Shake Moderate Republicans
Interior Dept. plan would open lands for drilling
Bush's Eco-Challenge
Under a Cloud
States
Europeans seek to preserve Kyoto pact
Save cows, not Blair legacy House
Italian seed depot set on fire
Flexing Its Fiscal Soundness, Russia Will Bypass the I.M.F.
Hemisphere talks on trade begin
Amid Doubts, W.T.O. Plans Agriculture Talks
N.J. says cops still look at race
DiFrancesco Considers Urging Verniero to Leave Court
Philadelphia Monitor Takes Police to Task
Committee Asks for Verniero's Resignation
From Court Order to Reality:
City to pay $31,500 for jailing 3 men naked
Philadelphia cops shake up internal discipline board
Mississippi
China yields to US pressure
China's demands prolong dispute
Plane in China called 'Big Look'
Bush urges China to release crew
China caught off guard by collision
China leader demands U.S. apology
U.S. refuses to apologize to China
Taking a peek at the 'Big Look'
China arrests U.S.-based scholar
Statement by Bush on Navy Plane in China
U.S. Officials Meet With 24 Still Detained With Aircraft
Europe Sees a Major Test for the New Bush Administration
Old Hijinks May Pull the Rug From the U.S. Claim to Plane
U.S. Offers China 'Regrets,' but Stops Short of Apology
Can Americans handle the business of spying?
Cold War II?
Treaties deny China right to enter aircraft
Crew scurried to destroy data of 'crown jewel'
Government rests in terror plot case
Berenson testifies in Peruvian trial

ACTIVISTS
Quebec: Maps with access points etc.
Border Actions and Highway Clogging
Guard charged in kitten deaths gets escort past animal activists
Siege mentality?
Rainforest Conservation Measure Announced


-------- NUCLEAR

Japan angered by U.S. sub's port call

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By GARY SCHAEFER Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406628377

TOKYO (AP) - An unannounced port call in Japan by a U.S. nuclear submarine has added to mounting mistrust of the U.S. military in this nation and is threatening to further strain already tense relations between Tokyo and Washington.

The incident, which the U.S. Navy blamed on an ``administrative error,'' was the first-ever violation of a pact that requires U.S. military authorities to give 24-hour advance notice before the arrival of a nuclear-powered sub in a Japanese port.

Japan's foreign ministry said Wednesday that the United States had apologized for the incident. But an official at the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo, who spoke on condition of anonymity, wouldn't confirm the statement. The official said the the United States regrets the miscommunication and will take steps to prevent a recurrence.

The incident came at a time that many Japanese are angry over what they perceive as the arrogance of their U.S. military allies _ particularly after the accidental sinking of a Japanese fishing boat by a Navy sub off Hawaii in February.

Akira Mitsutake, mayor of Sasebo, on Tuesday criticized the arrival of the USS Chicago in the southwestern port city as an ``act of bad faith,'' while Japan's foreign minister said Japan could suspend future stopovers pending an official explanation.

``I have instructed my staff to ask the United States to clearly state why it defied previous practice and made a port call without prior notification and to confirm the cause of the incident,'' said Foreign Minister Yohei Kono.

The 6,200-ton Chicago entered Sasebo, 600 miles southwest of Tokyo, on Monday after U.S. military officials had told the city government that it would stop outside the port, said city spokesman Keiichi Matsuda.

That violated a 1964 bilateral accord that requires that local authorities be given 24-hour advance notice so they can check radioactivity levels before and after the visit _ a concern taken very seriously in nuclear-conscious Japan.

The U.S. Navy acknowledged the violation of the accord and attributed it to ``an internal administrative error.'' But it defended its safety record and said its ships pose no environmental hazards.

``U.S. Navy nuclear-powered ships have steamed more than 119 million miles and amassed more than 5,100 reactor-years operation without a reactor accident or any release of radioactivity that has had significant impact on the environment,'' it said in a statement.

Acting U.S. Ambassador Christopher LaFleur had told Japanese Foreign Ministry officials that the sub's unannounced arrival was due to a miscommunication within the U.S. Navy, said a Foreign Ministry spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Officials in cities that host the nearly 50,000 American troops stationed in this country worried about the repercussions in their communities.

Hideo Sawada, mayor of the port city of Yokosuka, said Tuesday that the incident could ``unnerve'' Japanese living near bases.

Yokosuka, 28 miles, southwest of Tokyo, is the site of a large U.S. Naval base.

-------- france

France overturns ruling on Australian n-waste

Planet Ark
FRANCE: April 4, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10382

PARIS - France's state-owned nuclear reprocessing company Cogema said it would start unloading a cargo of spent fuel rods from Australia yesterday after winning an appeal against an injunction.

A court of appeal in the Normandy town of Caen overturned the injunction, which the environmental group Greenpeace had obtained from a lower court on March 15, a Cogema statement said.

The injunction had prevented Cogema from unloading and reprocessing 360 spent nuclear fuel rods at the port of Cherbourg from the container ship Le Bouguenais.

"Unloading of the Bouguenais...will be carried out today. The spent fuel rods will be transferred to the Cogema plant in La Hague for reprocessing," Cogema said in the statement.

The injunction had placed in doubt the future of Australia's High Flux Australian Reactor (HIFAR) at Lucas Heights in Sydney, run by nuclear reactor operator Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO)

In Canberra, Australian Science and Resources Minister Nick Minchin welcomed the Caen court's ruling.

"This decision will allow ANTSO to proceed with its policy of sensibly managing fuel rods from the HIFAR reactor through reprocessing in France," Minchin said in a statement.

Greenpeace had argued that Cogema did not have proper authorisation to take the waste.

Cogema said the Caen court had rejected that argument and ruled that the lower court had not been competent to judge the matter.

Greenpeace said it planned to return to court to try again to block the reprocessing operation.

-------- russia

Kursk Had Atomic Weapons Aboard-Report

Yahoo News
Wednesday April 4
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010404/wl/russia_submarine_dc_2.html

OSLO (Reuters) - The Russian submarine Kursk had nuclear missiles aboard when it sank in Arctic waters last year, despite Moscow's assurances it was only carrying conventional arms, the Norwegian independent station TV2 said on Wednesday.

Grigorij Tjomtsjin, a member of a Russian commission investigating the accident aboard the atomic-powered Kursk, told the station ``yes, there were'' when asked if it had nuclear weapons on board.

``They are no danger,'' he added, according to a translation of his remarks from Russian. The Kursk sank after an unexplained accident during a military exercise in the Barents Sea last August with the loss of all 118 crew.

Twelve of the dead have since been recovered from the wreck. Tests in the water around the Kursk have shown no unusual traces of radioactivity, but the presence of nuclear arms aboard could complicate a plan to lift the wreck.

Harald Ramfjord of Global Tool Management, a company working on plans to raise the Kursk, also said he had seen Russian evidence of atomic missiles aboard.

``One of the documents I had access to indicated that there were two atomic missiles aboard the vessel,'' he told TV2, adding that the Russian documents were stamped ``secret.''

Norwegian Foreign Ministry spokesman Karsten Klepsvik said the Russians had repeatedly denied there were nuclear weapons aboard the Kursk. He said the ministry had asked its embassy in Moscow to investigate the TV2 report.

Einar Skorgen, a now-retired Norwegian rear admiral who led efforts by Norwegian divers to find survivors in the Kursk after it sank, said Moscow had given a string of misleading information about the Kursk.

``It's clear that it could increase the difficulties of raising the Kursk,'' if there were missiles aboard, he said.

TV2 said the missiles aboard the Kursk were apparently cruise missiles designated SSN19 Shipwreck by NATO. Such missiles could rust and start leaking far more quickly than a reactor, it said.

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

NRC considers plan to convert plutonium to reactor fuel

USA: April 4, 2001
Story by Scott DiSavino
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10376&newsDate=4-Apr-2001

NEW YORK - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said it was considering an application for construction of a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina.

The MOX facility would convert surplus weapons-grade plutonium, supplied by the Department of Energy, into fuel for use in commercial nuclear reactors.

Such use would render the plutonium essentially inaccessible and unattractive for weapons use. Commercial nuclear power plants in the United States currently use uranium as fuel; the mixed oxide fuel would be a combination of uranium and plutonium.

The agency said in a statement late Monday it will offer an opportunity for a hearing to persons whose interests may be affected by this facility.

The Department of Energy announced plans to construct a MOX fuel plant through a contract with the consortium of construction company Duke Engineering & Services, a unit of energy giant Duke Energy Corp. of Raleigh, N.C., French nuclear measurement company COGEMA Inc., and construction company Stone & Webster. The consortium is known as DCS.

DCS submitted an environmental report on the MOX facility last December, and requested authorization to construct the facility in February.

Before deciding whether to authorize construction, the NRC will prepare an environmental impact statement and will conduct a technical evaluation of the application to determine whether it meets NRC requirements.

The NRC said it will publish soon in the Federal Register a notice for a hearing on the construction of the MOX facility.

-------

Turning An N-Power Plant Into An N-Weapon, Nuclear Sabotage

Wed, 4 Apr 2001
http://www.tmia.com/sabter.html

Former nuclear weapon designer and former Deputy Director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, Ted Taylor says its very easy to turn a nuclear power plant into a nuclear weapon. Real Player 59kb.

Nuclear Terrorism
Sabotage and Terrorism of Nuclear Power Plants
load time ~ 35 seconds at 28.8

1993 Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Ivan Selin tells a congressional committee that a bomb in the parking lot is "not our problem." (Real Audio 110kb)

THREE MILE ISLAND....

North Gate

Why won't this NRC approved vehicle barrier prevent a terrorist truck bomb attack?

NUCLEAR TERRORISM

Abstract:

The threat of nuclear terrorism most often brings images of a city totally flattened and incinerated by a nuclear bomb. While the press continues to focus on the problems associated with stolen weapons-grade nuclear materials, particularly those originating from the former Soviet Union, the greater threat may actually be an attack against a nuclear power plant. Terrorists would be able to skip the formidable task of assembling or stealing a nuclear bomb. There are more than a few terrorist experts who believe that a nuclear power plant will be successfully assaulted before terrorists have the ability to deliver a nuclear weapon.

Considering the fact that a nuclear plant houses more than a thousand times the radiation as released in an atomic burst, the magnitude of a single attack could reach beyond 100,000 deaths and the immediate loss of tens of billions of dollars. The land and properties destroyed (your insurance won't cover nuclear disasters) would remain useless for decades and would become a stark monument reminding the world of the terrorists' ideology. With more than 100 reactors in the United States alone, if one is successfully destroyed, just threatening additional attacks could instill the sort of high-impact terror which is being sought by a new breed of terrorists.

Fallout Shelter

Many nuclear "watchdogs" are convinced that nuclear plants are the "soft-underbelly" of national security and represent attractive targets to enemies of the United States who do not have sophisticated weapons of war. The "Physicians for Social Responsibility" have called nuclear plants "land mines waiting to be stepped upon." Currently, the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not require commercial nuclear power plants to defend against "Enemies of the United States." There is no potential for a thermo-nuclear explosion at an electrical generating nuclear plant, but a powerful steam explosion could suddenly eject enormous amounts of radioactive particles into the atmosphere. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a long history of security problems. Federal oversight committees and reports by the US Government Accounting Office have been extremely critical of security within the nuclear power industry. Because of recent events and the continuing vulnerabilities which must be addressed; and because the NRC has now reduced certain security regulations, we believe it is now necessary for public disclosure and public pressure to compel the NRC to close these security gaps.

Three Mile Island Alert, Inc. (TMIA is a non-profit organization)

Security Committee Chairman Scott D. Portzline

c/o 315 Peffer St. Harrisburg, PA 17102 717 233-7897

Threats, sabotage incidents and security deficiencies at nuclear plants are described at this web site. We have included our testimonies and participation in the regulatory process; -- The United States Senate, The Pennsylvania House of Representatives, The United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and The Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguard. Permission to publish the text originating from this web site is granted conditional to citing this web site or the Three Mile Island Alert Security Committee as the source.

-

NEW Plot to sabotage Chernobyl foiled by Ukrainian Secret Service 9/22/2000

a.. World Trade Center Terrorists threatened to attack "nuclear targets" with "150 suicide soldiers."

b.. World Trade Center Terrorists' training camp and mock assault on an electrical substation 30 miles from Three Mile Island.

c.. The "Truck Bomb" problem

d.. Emergency declared at Three Mile Island when a station wagon crashes into the plant and the intruder can't be found.

e.. The "Insider" problem and previous acts of sabotage

f.. NEW Plot foiled to bomb reactor near 2000 Olympics in Sydney

g.. $10,000 Reward for arrest and conviction of saboteur at the St. Lucie nuclear power plant on August 14, 1996

h.. [coming soon] Fitness for Duty Programs

i.. Florida man plotted to bomb nuclear plant

j.. Was sabotage involved in the 1979 Three Mile Island emergency? Some of the original investigators suspected foul play.

k.. [coming soon] Three Mile Island Alert's efforts to close the security gaps; (includes testimony and letters)

l.. Lost and Stolen Nuclear Materials in the United States

--

THE TRUCK BOMB PROBLEM For years, what has caused concern for many observers and several federal oversight committees is a report on the potential for damage from truck bombs. Shortly after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the NRC commissioned "An Analysis of Truck Bomb Threats at Nuclear Facilities" which was performed by the Sandia National Laboratories in 1984. The study concluded:

"An Analysis of Truck Bombs Threats at Nuclear Facilities"

Sandia National Laboratories 1984 "Unacceptable damage to vital reactor systems could occur from a relatively small charge at close setback distances, and from larger but still reasonable-sized charges at large setback distances, greater than the protected area for most plants."

This represented the NRC's most feared result. At some plants, a large bomb detonated offsite can cause enough damage to lead to a deadly release of radiation or even a meltdown! Instead of taking steps for proper protection, the NRC hid the findings from the public and announced that the study was ongoing. Yet two years later in 1986, the NRC commissioners voted 3-2 to continue assuming that a terrorist would not deliver a bomb by vehicle; hence, no vehicle barriers to prevent the intrusion at Three Mile Island. Some plants are too small to erect barriers with proper setback distances. Three Mile Island is one of the smallest plants in the nation.

"America's Defense Monitor" (PBS)

The Center for Defense Information Paul Leventhal of the Nuclear Control Institute says that nuclear plants provide means for a nuclear attack (Real Audio 91kb)

The Nuclear Control Institute, The Committee to Bridge the Gap, and more recently Three Mile Island Alert has successfully lobbied the NRC to finally require vehicle barriers. But, the new regulations are a watered-down version of what is really necessary to preclude a truck bomb attack.

--

THE INSIDER SABOTAGE PROBLEM Robert Pollard, a former NRC engineer now retired from the "Union of Concerned Scientists," said in a Harrisburg Patriot-News interview, "There is sufficient information in the public domain that someone with some degree of knowledge of plant designs can relatively easily sabotage [a] plant if they gain access to the site." The NRC has known about this problem since 1975 when a systems analyst wrote a now classified report on using publicly available documents to plan an act sabotage. Up until that time, the NRC had not taken the sabotage issue seriously. The author described scenarios where a saboteur wouldn't need sophisticated tools or explosives. He says that he included only common tools found at any hardware store to write the report. He even used things like popsicle sticks. "A janitor could be trained to do it. And there are things he could do to be sure it's irreversible," he said at a Sandia National Laboratories safety conference when he presented the report 20 years ago. The author does not now have a copy of his report. Every once in a while he checks to see if it is still classified. He wants a copy if it becomes available.

At the time when he made this statement, he believed that it was easy to sabotage a plant. Now he realizes that it's even easier than he first thought. He said that he dreams up other clever ways from time to time. In fact, the Sandia National Laboratories have concluded that "there is still virtually no protection from sabotage acts of an insider."

The Union of Concerned Scientists knows of more than 120 acts of sabotage at US nuclear plants. Most of these acts were perpetrated by disgruntled workers at every level of employment including control room operators and security guards. Employees have cut electrical cables, dumped chemicals into fuel pools and water systems, set fires, drilled holes in equipment, smashed security cameras, sabotaged diesel generators and committed numerous other offenses. The NRC has a "two-man" rule which is supposed to prevent sabotage by permitting entrance into vital areas only if accompanied by a co-worker. But, not all of the plants follow these rules to the letter.

Forty days after the accident at Three Mile Island, control room operators at the Surry plant in Virginia poured sodium hydroxide onto new fuel assemblies. The fuel was stored in an area which was locked and alarmed. The NRC notified other plants that the FBI was on-site conducting an extensive investigation. They also warned that this incident "could possibly provoke similar behavior on the part of other persons."

During labor negotiations at the Salem plant in New Jersey, someone intentionally tripped a steam generator feedwater pump. To a small degree, this event imitated the Three Mile Island trip which led to the accident three years prior.

In 1981 a major portion of the emergency core cooling system was disabled at the Beaver Valley nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. Someone sabotaged the emergency diesel generators at the Nine Mile Point reactor in New York the same year.

On January 3, 1961 a love triangle apparently got in the way of research at an experimental reactor in Idaho with a grizzly display of destruction. Three men were at work on top of the reactor. One of the workers intentionally caused a damaging condition known as a power excursion by withdrawing a control rod too far. The nuclear reaction rapidly increased and the resulting steam explosion destroyed the reactor, killing the saboteur and the two other workers. At first only two bodies could be found. The other body was impaled by a control rod through the groin, out the shoulder and pinned to the roof. The dead men were highly contaminated and could not receive a normal funeral and burial. This event was classified a murder/suicide.

MORE MISCHIEF

There have been numerous events at US plants that raise concerns. Safeguarded documents including portions of security plans stored on computer disks have disappeared. The Millstone plant in Connecticut has lost security documents on numerous occasions in what may have been an organized effort to steal the entire plan. After each incident, the licensee claimed that there was no significant damage to security.

Security guards have attempted or committed suicide at several plants. A document control worker was murdered at the Catawba plant in South Carolina. A recent "Unsolved Mysteries" television program asked for any information about a suspicious death at a uranium processing plant in Fernald Ohio. A worker may have been murdered by incineration in what the show called a nuclear furnace.

At the Turkey Point plant in Florida, a security guard accidentally discharged his gun. The bullet pierced his truck. Realizing that this would result in his dismissal, he attempted to cover-up the accident by faking a shoot-out. He told his superiors that while patrolling the shoreline, he stumbled upon drug dealers in boats. To help his story along, he shot more holes in the truck.

At the Comanche Peak plant in Texas, a security officer was found bound, gagged and unconscious on the roof of a fire protection building. Her weapon lay 25 feet away. The investigation has not yet been closed because this incident may have also been faked.

Central alarm station wires were cut at the South Texas plant by an employee who was about to be laid off. A firewatch employee at Braidwood Illinois vandalized wires and fire proofing. Someone tampered with a fire protection valve at the Clinton plant also located in Illinois.

MILITARY

Operation Desert Storm forces destroyed Iraq's experimental reactor to slow down Saddam's supposedly secret nuclear program. But, this wasn't the first time that Iraq has lost a reactor at the hands of another government. One week after the March 28, 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island (fuel melted twice), a reactor under manufacture in France for Iraq was destroyed by powerful explosives. The Mossad was responsible for this 3:00 a.m. clandestine operation where the saboteurs were able to elude multiple security guards. To conceal their involvement, the Mossad made bogus calls to the media claiming to be French ecologists who were trying to "save the world from future Harrisburgs." French bomb investigators proclaimed from the beginning that the three blasts looked like the work of "well-organized professionals." The Mossad should have invented a better cover story than blaming environmentalists; after all, how many "tree huggers" had plastic explosives in 1979?

In 1985, four North Korean commandos were killed by a South Korean naval patrol when they attempted to come ashore near a nuclear power plant. At the Koeberg plant near Cape Town South Africa, guerrillas penetrated the heavily guarded plant and damaged the control room. Plants in Spain and Argentina have also experienced control room takeovers. The French Super Phenix (sic) plant fell under attack by rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles. (Plants built in the United States are not designed to withstand this type of an attack.) Fortunately, all of these plants were non-operational when the assaults occurred.

$10,000 Reward

Someone rendered important safety equipment unusable by pouring glue into three lockable switches on the backup control panel at Florida Power and Light Company's St. Lucie nuclear power plant on August 14, 1996. The back-up control room is used to gain control of a plant during an emergency if the main control room is not working or uninhabitable. If the reactor could not be controlled from the main control room, the loss of the switches could have been devastating. The company is offering a $10,000 reward for information that would lead to the arrest and conviction of the saboteur. FBI and NRC investigators are examining records and conducting interviews in an attempt to find the culprit. Meanwhile, security has been "beefed-up" at the Crystal River and Turkey Point nuclear plants also located in Florida. Three weeks prior to this act of sabotage, someone glued locker doors shut at St. Lucie. It is possible that a disgruntled employee is upset with the cost-cutting measures that some employees are alleging by Florida Power and Light.

Former nuclear weapon designer and former Deputy Director of the Defense Nuclear Agency, Ted Taylor says its very easy to turn a nuclear power plant into a nuclear weapon. Real Player 59kb.

clip provided by Ridgeway/Barlow Productions 57 minute video "Nuclear Y2K Countdown" E-mail to inquire video availability

---

Recycled computers contain sensitive data

USA Today
04/04/2001 - Updated 05:36 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-04-energydept.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Energy Department computers scheduled for reuse or disposal still had sensitive research information on their hard drives, federal investigators said Wednesday. The discovery raises more questions about federal computer security as government officials are to testify to Congress on Thursday about the widespread problem.

According to a report by the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, 26 working computers at the Energy Department were tested to see if their hard drives were wiped clean. Seven computers had their operating systems still installed, and an additional six either had readable information or held information that could be recovered easily.

"DOE does not ensure that computers have been cleared or that clearing is effective," the report's authors said. The sample was taken from about 700 used computers.

The department came under fire for lax security last year after two hard drives containing nuclear secrets disappeared at the Los Alamos National Weapons Laboratory, only to be found a month later behind a copier.

GAO investigators also surveyed 10 of the department's 15 research centers nationwide and found that only one of them complied with regulations requiring technicians to remove all data from out-of-use computers.

"Energy does not have adequate instructions, verification procedures and training on how to properly clear excessed computers," the report said, using the department's term for computers scheduled for disposal.

Responding to the report, the head of the Energy Department's security operations office said efforts are under way to solve the problems, including a change last year to the department's computer security policy.

Officials from the FBI and the departments of Energy and Commerce are scheduled to appear Thursday before a congressional panel examining the state of computer security at federal agencies. The hearing will include a demonstration in which hackers will show how easily they can penetrate government networks by using widely available tools.

Many federal agencies have had trouble keeping computer systems secure from hackers and criminals.

Last month, the GAO reported that it broke into the Internal Revenue Service's electronic tax payment system and was able to read tax returns filed online.

A congressional report released last summer found the Environmental Protection Agency's computers were "highly vulnerable to tampering" by hackers, and that the agency's previous precautions were "riddled with security weaknesses."

The Department of Veterans Affairs disclosed last September that its computers were open to attack after outside experts had no problem taking over the department's network. On Wednesday, Veterans Affairs officials told Congress about the steps they've taken to shore up their computer defenses.

-------- colorado

Colorado

USA Today
04/04/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Golden - Workers at a former nuclear weapons plant will drill through a building's foundation to determine whether chemicals have seeped into the ground. Officials say the test will determine how much cleanup work remains at Rocky Flats. The testing will be performed at the structures where radioactive materials were processed and where numerous spills occurred. It will begin today.

-------- south carolina

NRC considers plan to convert plutonium to reactor fuel

USA: April 4, 2001
Story by Scott DiSavino
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10376

NEW YORK - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) said it was considering an application for construction of a mixed oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication facility at the Department of Energy's Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina.

The MOX facility would convert surplus weapons-grade plutonium, supplied by the Department of Energy, into fuel for use in commercial nuclear reactors.

Such use would render the plutonium essentially inaccessible and unattractive for weapons use. Commercial nuclear power plants in the United States currently use uranium as fuel; the mixed oxide fuel would be a combination of uranium and plutonium.

The agency said in a statement late Monday it will offer an opportunity for a hearing to persons whose interests may be affected by this facility.

The Department of Energy announced plans to construct a MOX fuel plant through a contract with the consortium of construction company Duke Engineering & Services, a unit of energy giant Duke Energy Corp. of Raleigh, N.C., French nuclear measurement company COGEMA Inc., and construction company Stone & Webster. The consortium is known as DCS.

DCS submitted an environmental report on the MOX facility last December, and requested authorization to construct the facility in February.

Before deciding whether to authorize construction, the NRC will prepare an environmental impact statement and will conduct a technical evaluation of the application to determine whether it meets NRC requirements.

The NRC said it will publish soon in the Federal Register a notice for a hearing on the construction of the MOX facility.

-------- washington

Ecology, EPA bug DOE on funding

Hanford News
Wed, Apr 4, 2001
By John Stang Herald staff writer
http://www.hanfordnews.com/2001/0404.html

Hanford's regulators have fired another warning shot toward the Department of Energy about providing enough money to keep cleanup projects on their legal timetables.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Washington's Department of Ecology sent a letter last week to DOE, calling for adequate money in fiscal 2002 cleanup budget to meet all of the Tri-Party Agreement's legal obligations.

"Compliance with the (agreement's) requirements is not optional," said the letter signed by Charles Findley, the EPA's acting Northwest regional administrator, and Tom Fitzsimmons, the Ecology Department's director.

The letter is intended as a last-minute warning to DOE before it unveils its 2002 cleanup budget Monday, said Mike Wilson, the Ecology Department's nuclear programs manager.

DOE usually gives its budget request to Congress for the following fiscal year by the end of each February, but this year, the only clue has been the Bush administration's indication that the nationwide cleanup budget might drop from this year's $6.25 billion to about $5.8 billion in 2002.

The proposal sparked concerns in the Northwest because Hanford's share of the cleanup budget needs to increase from $1.5 billion in 2001 to about $1.85 billion in 2002 to meet all obligations in the Tri-Party Agreement, the legal pact that governs Hanford cleanup.

The consensus in Hanford circles is that additional spending appears unlikely. The state is preparing to sue DOE to force the federal government to meet its deadlines.

The lack of a budget proposal has stalled most Hanford planning for 2002 and 2003.

"This has been the most frustrating year ... for obtaining information," wrote Gerald Pollet of Heart of America-Northwest in a letter to EPA and state officials. Without a budget request, the public has no way of judging whether additional funds are needed, he said.

Regulators voiced similar concerns.

"We agreed in the Tri-Party Agreement to share budget information and to have timely dialogues. We need to know which (projects) are funded and which are not," said Doug Sherwood, the EPA's Hanford site manager.

In late March, DOE in Washington, D.C., forbade its field offices to publicly discuss 2002 budget figures until headquarters releases numbers on Monday.

-------- us nuc waste

Nevada Concerns about Waste Transport

state.nv.us

KENNY C. GUINN Governor
ROBERT R. LOUX Executive Director
STATE OF NEVADA

OFFICE OF THE GOVERNOR AGENCY FOR NUCLEAR PROJECTS
1802 N. Carson Street, Suite 252
Carson City, Nevada 89701
Telephone: (775) 687-3744 • Fax: (775) 687-5277
E-mail: nwpo@govmail.state.nv.us

April 4, 2001

Ms. Leah Dever,
Manager U.S. Department of Energy
Oak Ridge Operations Office
200 Administration Road
Oak Ridge, TN 37831

Dear Ms. Dever:

It has come to my attention that a DOE/Oak Ridge contractor, British Nuclear Fuels (BNF), is proposing to ship low-level radioactive waste (LLW) from clean-up activities at the K-25 Plant to the Nevada Test Site (NTS) for disposal. The BNF plan apparently calls for the LLW to be transported by train to Caliente, Nevada, where it would be off-loaded onto trucks for shipment to NTS. I am requesting that you reconsider this transportation plan and look for alternative methods of transporting the waste to NTS. As you may know, in Nevada we are very concerned about any actions contemplated by DOE involving the intermodal transfer of radioactive waste within Nevada.

Over the past few years DOE's Nevada Operations Office (DOE/NV) and the State of Nevada have made significant progress in addressing LLW transportation issues and concerns. This has resulted in substantial improvements in the way LLW shipments are managed including a more responsive understanding by DOE of the unique circumstances involving radioactive waste transportation in Nevada. Please be aware that establishing an intermodal transfer waste operation in Caliente, will do serious harm to the productive State-DOE relationship that has evolved with respect to NTS LLW shipment and disposal activities.

Over the past two years, Governor Guinn has met personally with former Energy Secretary Richardson and his staff and received assurances that intermodal operations in Nevada would not be used to transport LLW or Mixed LLW to the NTS. We would hope that DOE intends to continue to honor these assurances.

In recent years, the State of Nevada expressed serious concern over a prior proposal for LLW shipments to NTS that would have included intermodal operations in Nevada. In fact, it was a proposal by Fluor Daniels on behalf of DOE's Fernald facility that resulted in the Governor's discussions with Secretary Richardson. In comments on the Fernald proposal, the State asserted the following:

"It is the State's view that any action by DOE that either directly or indirectly leads to the development of an intermodal LLW facility on lands not owned or controlled by the federal government would constitute a major federal action under National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA - per Council of Environmental Quality [CEQ] regulations 1508.18(4)). At a minimum, we contend that a NEPA analysis must address the potential environmental, public health and safety, and economic impacts that may be caused by siting an intermodal LLW transfer facility in Nevada. Siting nuclear facilities can, under certain conditions, have significant negative effects by suppressing business activities, lowering property values, and causing potential new residents, tourists, and businesses to avoid areas associated with things nuclear."

We also said that if DOE proposes an action that is connected, closely related, or would automatically trigger other actions associated with an intermodal waste transfer facility, then all these actions must be analyzed together in a single NEPA document (see 40 CFR 1508.25). This is significant when considering that NTS hosts more than 15 offsite waste generators, and any one of these might take advantage of a intermodal LLW transfer facility to ship waste to Nevada for disposal. Hence, allowing development of such a facility would likely trigger other actions which would cause cumulative impacts to the human and natural environment (e.g., expanded use of an intermodal facility with associated transportation and added risks). To address such impacts, DOE's NEPA implementing regulations require that such actions be assessed together to address cumulative effect, and DOE is prohibited from categorically excluding these actions in cases where a given proposal is 'connected' to other actions or would otherwise result in cumulative effects to the environment (see 1021.410(2)).

We also said that "because of the unique hazards associated with handling radioactive waste, State officials believe that a regulatory analysis, conducted as part of the required NEPA analysis, must be undertaken to address DOE oversight and/or licensing under NRC regulations of an Intermodal LLW transfer facility." In other words, the State of Nevada still contends that any facility that handles and stores defense low-level radioactive waste (as an intermodal facility would necessarily do), must be licensed by NRC -- where such a facility is not located on withdrawn federal lands or lands otherwise owned/controlled by the DOE/DoD. We contend that such licensing is mandatory to insure full protection of public health and the environment.

Please note that Nevada will exercise whatever legal and other prerogatives it has to assure that these concerns are addressed if DOE Oak Ridge and BNF continue to pursue using intermodal transportation from Caliente or elsewhere in Nevada for LLW shipments to NTS.

Relationship to Yucca Mountain

As you know from your tenure here in Nevada, it is very difficult to "decouple" NTS LLW issues from the proposed Yucca Mountain high-level waste repository and the highly charged atmosphere that has been created here as a result of the repository program. The fact that DOE/OCRWM's Yucca Mountain draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) proposes to site and use an intermodal facility for the transport of spent nuclear fuel to the proposed repository creates a situation where any proposal for intermodal facilities involving radioactive materials, even LLW, is untenable because of the precedent that would be set and the perceptions of risk involved. (The referenced DEIS contains an alternative that sites an intermodal facility at Caliente, Nevada - see DEIS transportation map at http://yuccamountain.org/s-27.gif)

While it is my understanding that there are readily available alternatives to transhipping the BNF LLW at Caliente, if BNF is permitted to move ahead with plans for intermodal transfer of LLW in Caliente, or elsewhere in Nevada, we will take whatever legal action required to oppose such shipments. Such action would also undermine the cooperative and productive working relationship developed between the State and DOE/NV with respect to ongoing LLW and Mixed LLW shipping and disposal activities at NTS.

Thank you for you attention to this important matter. If you would like to discuss the issue further, please contact me at (775) 687-3744.

Sincerely,

Robert R. Loux Executive Director ...

-------- MILITARY

North Korea says U.S. supports war

InfoBeat News
By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA Associated Press Writer
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406632657

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - North Korea accused the United States on Wednesday of trying to undermine the Korean reconciliation process and pressure South Korea into support for war on the peninsula.

The commentary by Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the North's ruling Workers' Party, cast South Korea as a reluctant partner in an alliance with the United States and Japan.

``There is a problem to be tackled by the U.S. in strengthening the alliance. That is South Korea,'' Rodong said. ``The present U.S. ruling quarters are becoming increasingly assertive before South Korean officials'' in an effort to derail inter-Korean reconciliation.

``What the U.S. seeks is to incite enmity toward (North Korea) among Japanese and South Koreans in a bid to strengthen the triangular military alliance and use it as a springboard from which to provoke a new war of aggression,'' Rodong said.

The portrayal of a difference in policy between Seoul and Washington recalled past North Korean efforts to force a rift between the allies, which have maintained close ties since they fought together in the 1950-53 Korean War. The United States keeps 37,000 military personnel in South Korea as a deterrent against the reclusive, communist North.

South Korean officials are uneasy, however, over President Bush's blunt demands that the North Koreans show they are serious about seeking better ties with concrete gestures.

The North Koreans responded angrily to Bush's decision to suspend talks on curbing their missile program in exchange for aid or other rewards. Since last month, the North has abruptly canceled several engagements with the South, jeopardizing a reconciliation process that blossomed last year.

North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly planned to convene Thursday to showcase the authority of leader Kim Jong Il, who has established diplomatic relations with European and other nations since last year but has refused to loosen controls in the North.

The assembly, which last met a year ago, is expected to approve next year's budget over several days of meetings.

In a sign of how inter-Korean ties have cooled, upset South Korean lawmakers attending an international legislators' conference in Cuba said their North Korean counterparts had not replied to an April 1 request for a talk on reconciliation.

Rep. Yoo Jay-kun of South Korea's ruling Millennium Democratic Party said the North Koreans were courteous at last year's Inter-Parliamentary Union, held in Jakarta, Indonesia.

``They created a friendly environment last time but are giving us the cold shoulder now,'' South Korea's Yonhap news agency quoted Yoo as saying in Havana. The weeklong meeting ends this weekend.

---

S. Korea, China object to textbook

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By PAUL SHIN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406632634

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) - A new Japanese textbook obscures Japan's colonial-era atrocities and endangers good relations, South Korea and China said in formal complaints to Tokyo on Wednesday.

The history textbook calls World War II ``The Great East Asian War'' as the Japanese referred to it at the time, and stresses the damage Japan suffered while limiting references to Japan's brutality.

Critics of the middle school textbook say it justifies Japan's invasion of Asia in the early 20th century and minimizes atrocities such as the 1937 Nanking massacre. Historians say the Japanese army slaughtered at least 150,000 civilians during the occupation of the Chinese city.

South Korea's foreign minister, Han Seung-soo, met Japanese Ambassador Terusuke Terada to file a formal protest about the textbook.

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan summoned Japanese Ambassador Koreshige Anami to demand that Tokyo take immediate steps to ``safeguard the general situation of Sino-Japanese relations,'' the official Xinhua News Agency said.

Tokyo's foreign minister, Yohei Kono, said in Parliament that ``political intervention in the adoption of textbooks is impossible'' in Japan.

Authors of the textbook, who belong to the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, say they wrote it to restore Japan's prewar history to school books.

Outside the Japanese Embassy on Wednesday, a few dozen South Korean women who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the war held a protest, shouting ``Japan, repent!''

The textbook does not mention their ordeal.

On Tuesday, hundreds of activists rallied and marched through downtown Seoul, criticizing Japan's approval of the textbook.

---

Japan and the Koreas Stand By Their Respective Allies as All Feel the Tension

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/world/04ASIA.html

TOKYO, April 3 - At their simplest, the early reactions to the collision between American and Chinese aircraft off the coast of southern China on Sunday have highlighted the lines of alliance in this diplomatically complex part of the world.

Japan and South Korea have not said much officially, but there has been little doubt where Washington's two main allies stand. North Korea has been a little late off the propaganda gun, but it has been vocal on the general subject quite recently and can be expected to side with Beijing, its most important backer.

A far murkier picture turns up in the comments of military and diplomatic experts throughout the region.

These days, northeast Asia is fraught with tension to a degree rarely experienced since the cold war. The causes are as varied as they are intertwining, as each of the neighbors looks at the others and finds them wanting.

On top of that, there is the issue of Washington's annual review of arms sales to Taiwan, which wants to buy advanced weaponry to protect against the missiles that China recently situated along its coastline.

Early on the day of the collision, almost as if anticipating it, North Korea condemned American flights in the region, with an unaccustomed bluntness even for a government given to doomsday pronouncements.

"The U.S. imperialists committed over 180 cases of aerial espionage" against North Korea in March, "according to a military source," said a dispatch of the Korean Central News Agency. "Involved in them were strategic and tactical reconnaissance planes and commanding planes with various missions deployed in their overseas bases and South Korea." In Japan and South Korea, many experts interpret the incident as a sign of Chinese aggressiveness - reflecting soaring military spending - and pique reflecting its irritation over Washington's contemplation of sales of advanced arms to Taiwan.

"They are telling the United States not to provide modern equipment to Taiwan," said Bae Jong Tae, a prominent South Korean businessman. "They may use the captured American reconnaissance plane in exchange for concessions, and North Korea will also use it to criticize the United States."

A South Korean military officer gave a similar assessment, saying the Chinese had overreacted because of "frustration over the selling of destroyers to Taiwan."

The South Korean daily Joong Ang Ilbo said: "Just as `a whale fight breaks shrimps' backs,' U.S.-China discord will inevitably chill the reconciliatory and cooperative spirit on the Korean peninsula."

The episode came at a time of strongly swirling winds in this region, with North Korea feeling aggrieved over the Bush administration's plans to suspend negotiations with the North and with Japan being criticized for nationalists' efforts to revise textbooks to dilute responsibility for atrocities in World War II.

Nationalist politicians in Japan are also increasingly using the idea of a looming threat from China to push proposals for a change in Japan's Constitution, to allow it to organize a national army and to ensure its own self-defense openly for the first time since its defeat in 1945.

The United States has also come in for heavy criticism from many quarters in Japan for a maritime collision caused by an American submarine off Hawaii that resulted in nine Japanese deaths in February.

And then today, the Japanese authorities said an American nuclear submarine had docked without permission at a port near here, provoking an unusually stern demand for an explanation.

The submarine disaster off Hawaii incited a rare debate here about the merits and inconveniences of bilateral security arrangements under which 47,000 American troops have been based in Japan.

Much of the United States military presence in this part of the world is concentrated in the southern Japanese island of Okinawa, where opposition to stationing American troops has been rising. The American reconnaissance plane that was forced to land in Hainan flew from Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, a fact that will heighten sensitivities there about being on the front line.

An editorial in the Yomiuri Shimbun warned obliquely that the incident with China could "put a strain on Japanese and U.S. efforts to maintain their security setup in the region."

In the harsh light of the submarine disaster, some Japanese were quick to dismiss the alliance as a relic of the cold war that had outlived its purpose. But the Japanese have also been reading published reports of China's fast-growing military spending and of its increasingly harsh attacks against the new textbooks, which many here take as simple anti-Japanese sentiment.

Seen in that light, the American- Chinese air collision and subsequent showdown over the fate of the United States aircraft and crew seem to be reminding many here of the value of their country's alliance with Washington.

"There is a feeling here that the Chinese are becoming more and more of a threat, and this is causing Japanese to feel that they must do something," said Terumasa Naka nishi, an expert in regional relations at Kyoto University. "Certainly relations with the United States remain the most important thing, but this kind of incident could encourage unilateral actions by Japan as well."

-------- burma/myanmar

Japan may provide Myanmar 3 bln yen for aid-Jiji

From: "McCracken, Philip (TAD)" <Philip.Mccracken@fta.dot.gov>
We Must Stop Japan's ODA to Burma
Wed, 4 Apr 2001

TOKYO, April 4 (Reuters) - Japan may provide Myanmar with about three billion yen ($23.89 million) for humanitarian aid and pave the way for full resumption of official assistance which it halted in 1988, Jiji news agency said on Wednesday.

Last month, Kyodo news agency reported citing officials that Tokyo was considering resuming full official development assistance (ODA) because it saw a softening in the military government's stance.

The three billion yen aid will be aimed at repairing a power plant and also to promote dialogue between the country's military regime and pro-democracy movement leader Aung San Suu Kyi, Jiji said.

Japan has provided technological aid and grants for humanitarian purposes since 1995 but has held off from resuming full-fledged assistance, which would include new yen loans, after Myanmar's military crushed a pro-democracy uprising.

Japan provided Myanmar with 50 billion yen ($398.1 million) in ODA up to 1988, the officials said.

In contrast, grants for humanitarian purposes totalled only 880 million yen in fiscal 1999 and 1.5 billion yen ($11.94 million) ($12.78 million) in fiscal 2000, they said.

Myanmar has been requesting Japanese support for such projects as dam and road construction, domestic media said.

---

Human rights monitor visits Myanmar

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By AYE AYE WIN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406628398

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) - The first U.N. human rights official allowed into Myanmar in five years met with a top general Tuesday in a visit that signals the ruling military junta's increasing openness.

Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, a Brazilian politics professor, said he had a ``very pleasant'' meeting with Lt. Gen. Khin Nyunt, a leading member of the ruling State Peace and Development Council. He also met separately with the foreign, home and labor ministers.

Despite reports that he would meet with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been kept under virtual house arrest since Sept. 22 after defying a travel ban, officials said it was not on his agenda.

Pinheiro said he did not know whether there was a meeting arranged with Suu Kyi, who won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize for her democracy struggle.

However, on Wednesday, he is scheduled to meet with U Lwin, an executive in Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy party.

In brief comments to reporters, Pinheiro described his visit as ``exploratory.''

``I hope that I'll have the privilege to have missions in this country,'' he said.

On Wednesday, he is to fly to Kanbauk, 185 miles southeast of Yangon. He leaves Myanmar, also known as Burma, on Thursday.

Kanbauk is the land starting point of a billion-dollar natural gas pipeline that government opponents claim was built with forced labor. The line will carry natural gas from offshore oil rigs of UNOCAL and Total in the Andaman Sea to Thailand.

Pinheiro was named U.N. human rights representative in February, replacing Rajsoomer Lallah, a Mauritian judge who resigned in November.

The junta never allowed Lallah, who took the job in 1996, to visit Myanmar, accusing him of being unfairly critical of the regime.

Lallah had alleged in a report to the U.N. General Assembly that Myanmar's human rights situation deteriorated in 2000, with the government suppressing opposition activists and engaging in ``inhuman treatment'' of opposition members and ethnic minorities.

Pinheiro, however, was welcome because he seemed ``pragmatic and non-biased,'' the Foreign Ministry said last week.

The junta has showed signs in recent months that it is prepared to forge a reconciliation with Suu Kyi and her party, long a target of its repression.

The current military regime took power in 1988 after crushing a pro-democracy uprising. In 1990, it held national elections overwhelmingly won by Suu Kyi's party, but the generals refused to hand over power.

-------- colombia

U.S. sees costly Columbian drug war

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By JARED KOTLER Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406632783

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - While a U.S.-backed offensive against drug crops speeds ahead, alternative development aid for farmers will take years to fully succeed _ and will require much more money from Washington, a top U.S. official said.

George Wachtenheim, who heads the U.S. Agency for International Development in Colombia, acknowledged that the development aid was going slowly while crop dusters escorted by U.S.-trained troops and U.S.-provided combat helicopters are wiping out drug crops in Colombia at a record pace.

But he said it was ``not fair'' to expect instant results from the aid programs, which are designed to help wean farmers off profitable drug crops to other, legal plants.

With no economic alternative, many of the coca farmers in southern Colombia who have been hit by aerial fumigation earlier this year are already replanting the drug crops.

``Fumigation obviously is something that happens much faster than alternative development,'' Wachtenheim told foreign journalists on Tuesday.

Under a $1.3 billion aid program approved last year, nearly 100 square miles of coca have been fumigated since late December, mostly in Putumayo province. The campaign is ostensibly targeting large-scaled plantations.

However, small farmers who have also been hit are complaining that food crops were killed alongside the coca, and that pledged alternative development aid has not arrived.

Wachtenheim said several thousand small-time farmers who have signed pacts with the government to manually eradicate their coca crops will begin receiving seeds for growing subsistence food crops such as bananas and corn, and aid to raise livestock.

However, there is no infrastructure development for the farmers to bring their crops to markets.

Wachtenheim said longer-term development projects will require at least $220 million in additional U.S. aid over the next five years to ensure the farmers do not revert to growing coca.

-------- drug war

Ravers try to counter social image

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By MIKE SCHNEIDER Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406624950

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) - After two of David Curiel's rave-scene friends died of drug overdoses, he realized something needed to change.

So two years ago, the 30-year-old industrial designer formed The Future Tribe Project. The group consists of about 20 rave regulars who try to educate fellow ravers about drugs and safe sex in a nonjudgmental manner. They spread the word when bad drugs are circulating and pass out condoms at raves.

``We're just trying to save lives,'' said Curiel, who wears a nose ring, earrings in each ear and a stud under his lip. ``I don't want to see any more of my friends die.''

They've also tried to counter the socially irresponsible image of ravers by volunteering at a nursing home, an Adopt-a-Highway program, and helping build homes for Habitat for Humanity. One Future Tribe flier says getting high is not what raves are about.

``It's about DANCING, the music, having a good time, opening your mind, connecting with others,'' the flier reads. ``We are not the slacker losers they want you to believe we are. We are creative, dynamic, young, peaceful, evolving, beautiful people.''

The public relations campaign can't come soon enough. Orlando's rave scene has become public enemy No. 1 for the community's politicians, law enforcement officers and religious leaders.

The fans of electronic dance music, usually teen-agers or those in their early 20s, have been blamed for drug overdoses, sex crimes, vandalism and excessive noise in the city. Club drugs, such as Ecstasy, GHB and crystal meth, were responsible for 230 deaths statewide between 1996 and 1999, according to the Florida Office of Drug Control.

``Ladies and gentlemen, our children are being poisoned,'' Orange County Sheriff Kevin Beary said in February during a hearing on the rave scene.

The most recent attack against the rave scene comes from the Orange County Commission. It is expected to vote in several weeks on an ordinance that would tightly regulate after-hour venues that don't serve alcohol but attract segments of the rave scene. The so-called rave clubs would have to be licensed every year, subject to inspection at any time, and required to have off-duty police officers and paramedics on the premises.

``The idea is to create consistency between clubs that would cater to underage folks and those that would cater to adults,'' said Orange County Chair Richard Crotty. ``Clubs for adults are licensed.''

The Orange County ordinance comes almost four years after the Orlando City Council forced bars and nightclubs to close at 3 a.m. in an effort to stop raves at after-hour bars. The city's ordinance effectively moved the rave scene underground into warehouses, parks and private homes, although a few clubs outside the city began playing rave-style dance music.

One of those places was Cyberzone, outside the city in Orange County. Last September, Cyberzone patron David Stieb purchased what he thought was Ecstasy from another patron and died of an overdose. In a wrongful death lawsuit, his parents accuse Cyberzone employees of throwing Stieb out of the club while he was overdosing and not seeking medical help for him.

Drug deaths are a prime concern for The Future Tribe Project. It is affiliated with DanceSafe, an Oakland, Calif.-based group that began testing drugs in clubs several years ago to stop deaths related to the consumption of fake or impure drugs. DanceSafe now tests drugs by mail and posts the results on its Web site.

Members of the Future Tribe Project frown on places like Cyberzone. Still, they say no more drug use goes on at raves than anywhere else.

``I really, really doubt that you would have an easier time finding drugs at a rave than you would at your standard Pink Floyd concert or Doobie Brothers' concert,'' said Brad Lyons, a 20-year-old University of Central Florida student and member of the Future Tribe Project.

Legislating the problem away won't work either, Future Tribe members said.

``Everything they've done to shut us down has done nothing to stop the drug deaths,'' said Greg Shultea, 22, a light and sound technician.

---

Lawmakers reconsider drug Statute

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By CAROLYN SKORNECK Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406627472

WASHINGTON (AP) - A law that grades countries on their efforts to combat drug trafficking _ a statute long criticized by Mexico and other nations _ would be altered substantially by a Democratic proposal supported by Republicans.

Under the new plan, foreign nations, which now can lose U.S. aid if they are found not to be ``fully cooperating with the United States'' in their anti-drug efforts, would be judged instead on adherence to international treaties or other commitments.

The proposal drew no opposition during a morning meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Chairman Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and other Republicans supported the measure drawn up largely by Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn. However, a vote was delayed for lack of a quorum.

The proposal reserves the tools that the Bush administration needs to ensure that countries are cooperating with anti-drug efforts ``while removing the more offensive unilateral report card features that have been a source of friction between Mexico and the United States and other countries as well,'' Dodd said.

The existing certification program has been denounced in America by those who consider it counterproductive and by foreign countries embarrassed by their grades and annoyed at being judged by the world's biggest drug consuming-nation.

``Certification is more than an affront to Mexico and to other countries. It is a sham that should be denounced and canceled,'' Mexican President Vicente Fox said last year. President Bush has endorsed setting aside that process.

The measure, offered as a three-year trial, would, among other things:

_Eliminate the requirement that nations be ``fully cooperating with the United States'' to receive certification and foreign aid. That condition would be replaced by a requirement that the president single out the worst offenders among major drug-transit and drug-producing countries and designate which have ``failed demonstrably ... to make substantial efforts'' to adhere to international counternarcotics agreements and take other anti-drug steps.

_Shift the premise from one of guilty until proven innocent to innocent until proven guilty.

_Keep leverage over drug-producing and drug-transiting countries by continuing to make the worst offenders ineligible for U.S. aid unless the president waives the prohibition because of national interest concerns.

The bill is S.219.

---

Study of medical marijuana launched

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406632827

SAN MATEO, Calif. (AP) - The first federally approved study to give AIDS patients marijuana to determine whether the drug can effectively control their pain is under way in northern California.

In November, the federal government authorized the use of marijuana confiscated by law enforcement to be transferred to San Mateo County Health Center for a 12-week study. The center launched the study Tuesday.

Patients will be given 15 marijuana cigarettes over a prescribed time and will be asked to keep a detailed log of their drug use, said Dr. Dennis Israelski, chief of infectious diseases and AIDS medicine at the center. The study will involve 60 AIDS patients who have pain in their limbs and who have already used marijuana.

Supporters of the study hope it will determine whether marijuana relieves pain and increases appetites as many users claim.

California voters in 1996 passed a proposition which allows possession, cultivation and use of marijuana for medicinal purposes. However, implementation of the measure has proven difficult, particularly since federal law says distribution of the drug is a crime.

---

Seventeen drug cases dismissed

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By JAY JORDEN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406632921
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-04-04-cases.htm

DALLAS (AP) - Prosecutors have dismissed 17 drug cases filed by a narcotics task force accused of targeting suspects because of their race.

Dismissals of the cocaine prosecutions came a week after the American Civil Liberties Union complained to the U.S. Justice Department that the South Central Narcotics Task Force violated the civil rights of blacks during a drug bust last year that led to 28 arrests.

Eleven people had already pleaded guilty to charges in the drug raid in Hearne, about 140 miles south of Dallas.

But District Attorney John Paschall said Wednesday that the dismissals were not race related. He said charges were thrown out because of allegedly tainted evidence provided by an informant who failed a polygraph test in the other cases and was suspected of tampering with evidence.

``Two weeks ahead of their alleged complaint, we had had some complaints made by the defense attorneys,'' Paschall said. ``We checked out the allegations. He failed the polygraph test.''

The ACLU's Texas chapter, had also challenged a Panhandle drug bust in Tulia over alleged civil rights violations two years ago by a similar task force involving local, state and federal law enforcement agencies. The ACLU amended its complaint in the Tulia case to include the Hearne arrests.

A grand jury is to meet April 10 to consider evidence involving the informant, Derrick Megress. No charges have yet been filed.

William Harrell, the Texas ACLU chapter's executive director, did not immediately return a telephone message left early Wednesday from The Associated Press.

He told The New York Times he was elated by the dismissals, but said the 11 who already entered guilty pleas in Hearne should be permitted to withdraw those pleas and have their cases dismissed. Twenty-seven of the Hearne defendants were black.

The Justice Department is investigating the Tulia bust. Many of the 40 cases against residents were based solely on the testimony of an undercover officer who himself was charged with theft and abuse of power during an 18-month investigation.

Paschall said his task force would continue its work in Hearne, although no new charges would be sought in the dismissed cases.

``They will likely re-offend,'' he said. ``We won't worry about it too much.''

---

USA Today
04/04/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Alabama

Montgomery - Surprise drug tests were given to more than 400 Montgomery police officers after an officer was accused of asking a motorist to buy drugs for him. Police Chief John Wilson said test results would be available in two or three weeks and officers who test positive will be fired. Robert Bradley, a training officer, was arrested on charges of attempting to commit a controlled substance crime. He resigned.

---

Arrests by a Drug Task Force in Texas Come Under Fire

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By ROSS E. MILLOY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/national/04TEXA.html

A state prosecutor in Texas has dismissed charges against 17 residents of a small town who were arrested by a drug task force that has been accused of focusing on blacks.

The arrests, among 28 that the task force made in the past year in Hearne in Central Texas, so outraged black residents that the City Council hired a paramilitary security firm to take a color-blind approach toward drug enforcement.

The prosecutor, John Paschall, the Robertson County district attorney, said yesterday that the informer who was responsible for most of the arrests had failed polygraph tests when questioned about tampering with the evidence in some cases.

"If he tampered with one case, as far as I'm concerned, he could have tampered with others," Mr. Paschall said of the informer, Derrick Megress. "Other than those who have pled guilty already, I'm going to dismiss them."

Arrests by a similar task force - which involves local, state and federal law enforcement agencies - in Tulia in the Texas Panhandle have also been criticized for focusing on blacks and for relying on a questionable informer. The Justice Department is investigating the Tulia task force.

Last week, the Texas chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the N.A.A.C.P. asked the Justice Department to expand that investigation to the Hearne drug task force, contending that events in both towns showed a pattern of racism.

"I'm elated. This was an extraordinary release," said William Harrell, executive director of the A.C.L.U.'s Texas chapter, "but the questions still remain as to the legitimacy of that task force."

Mr. Harrell said that the 11 individuals who had already pleaded guilty in Hearne should be allowed to withdraw those pleas and have their cases dismissed.

"We still believe that all of these people had their civil rights violated, and that the Justice Department should proceed with its investigation and sanction the task forces in Hearne and Tulia," he said.

The dismissals in Hearne seemed unlikely to quell deeply held suspicions there that drug investigations have been rooted in racial bias.

"What they call a drug war is picking out 20 or 30 young black people every year, then arresting them," said Charles Workman, a Baptist minister who is one of three blacks on the five-member Hearne City Council.

Mr. Workman, whose nephew, Corvian, was charged with drug-related offenses by the task force, was the official who first proposed that the town - which is 44 percent black, according to the 2000 census - open its own front in the war on drugs and hire the security company.

"Our feeling was that if we're going to fight drugs, let's get everybody, from the big-time wealthy people to whoever else is involved," he said.

In February, the Council approved a $390,000 contract with ShadowGuard, a company promising that, with sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment, it could stop drug shipments to Hearne within four months, Mr. Workman said.

ShadowGuard's executive officers, Rick Castillo, 56, and Ron Holbrook, 46, said they planned to hire retired military officers and drug interdiction experts, though résumés submitted to the City Council showed their own relevant experience seemed limited to the sale of home security devices. Mr. Holbrook said last week that he had also been an unpaid undercover operative for the federal government.

The contract outraged many in Hearne, particularly white residents, who pressured the Council to rescind the agreement a week later.

Mr. Paschall, who until recently led the Hearne task force, said it was ludicrous to say blacks were the target of the task force, which he said was trying to stop mid-level dealers who were selling powdered cocaine to make crack.

"Ninety-five percent of those involved in crack cocaine are black; 95 percent of those involved in some drugs, like methamphetamines, are white or Hispanic," Mr. Paschall said. "If a task force is targeting methamphetamines, you're going to arrest more whites; if it's targeting crack cocaine, you're going to get more black people."

But many black residents of Hearne said the task force's efforts had been devastating. "It's like every year they take the high school senior class and charge them with drugs," said Michelle Brantley, 37, whose brother, Michael Wells, 28, was arrested for the second time in November.

Eleven of those arrested have already pleaded guilty, and two cases were dismissed earlier. A jury hearing charges against Mr. Workman's nephew deadlocked 11 to 1 to acquit.

As in Tulia, where a task force arrested 12 percent of the town's black population in July 1999, there were complaints from the start in Hearne about the credibility of the state's informer, Mr. Megress.

Mr. Megress, 27, has been convicted twice of theft and had an agreement with prosecutors to avoid jail if he could produce 20 drug arrests.

Until yesterday, Mr. Paschall had defended Mr. Megress's credibility. "We'd like to have Baptist ministers and Catholic priests buying and selling drugs, but the real world doesn't operate that way," he said last week.

Yesterday, Mr. Paschall said of those charged that "I don't doubt one minute their guilt in dealing drugs."

"But," he continued, "I now have a doubt as to the amount of drugs they may have sold and whether the evidence was tampered with.

"To me, that taints the investigation, that taints the charge, and I am not going to prosecute someone on that kind of evidence."

Mr. Paschall said he would not consider dropping charges against the 11 defendants who have already pleaded guilty. "These guys pled guilty because they probably were guilty," he said.

---

Prosecutors Urge No Change in Strict Drug Laws

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/nyregion/04DRUG.html

ALBANY, April 3 - The nation's former top drug enforcement official, Thomas A. Constantine, lent his voice today to the fight to preserve New York's mandatory drug sentencing laws, joining prosecutors from across the state who testified before state lawmakers here.

The governor and leaders of the two houses of the Legislature have proposed changes to the strict Rockefeller-era drug laws, and the state's prosecutors have spent the last several weeks lobbying against far-reaching changes. Today, four prosecutors, Robert M. Carney of Schenectady County, William J. Fitzpatrick of Onondaga County, Richard A. Brown of Queens and Bridget B. Brennan of the Office of Special Narcotics in Manhattan, presented their case at a hearing of the Senate Codes Committee.

The threat of stiff mandatory sentences, they told lawmakers, has been a vital hammer to hold over the heads of drug dealers, and has contributed to the radical reductions in crime.

Mr. Constantine, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration under President Clinton from 1994 to 1999, was not on the agenda. He sat quietly at the table, next to the prosecutors, and at the end of the meeting was granted the floor. "I've become very concerned that the voice of victims is not being heard," he told the panel.

Mr. Constantine's remarks came at a testy meeting. Some Democratic senators questioned the prosecutors' assertion that mandatory sentences led to lower crime. Crime, they argued, had dropped nationwide.

Others asked why the vast majority of drug offenders in prison are black and Hispanic, when most drug users in the country are white. Prosecutors insisted that residents of minority communities are not clamoring for shorter sentences.

Several relatives of people imprisoned under the Rockefeller drug laws tried to get a word in. But they were not on the list of speakers.

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

UN demands Milosovic transfer

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By ANTHONY DEUTSCH Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406633755

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - The U.N. war crimes tribunal hardened its position on the transfer of Slobodan Milosevic on Wednesday, pressing for his immediate and unconditional surrender to The Hague.

``Yugoslavia must comply and must transfer Mr. Milosevic,'' said Jean-Jacque Joris, the top political adviser to Chief Prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.

``It must occur immediately,'' Joris said at the first tribunal news conference since the former Yugoslav president was arrested last weekend.

The tribunal's position contrasted with that of European Union authorities, who have signaled they do not object to Milosevic standing trial at home as long as it does not preclude him facing justice later before the tribunal in The Hague.

Vojislav Kostunica, who replaced Milosevic after a popular uprising last year, has ruled out sending Milosevic to The Hague anytime soon, saying the issue was not a priority for his government. Many Serbs accuse the tribunal of being biased against them.

Yugoslav authorities have charged Milosevic with corruption, abuse of power and inciting violence, a charge stemming from allegations that he ordered his bodyguards to fire on police during a raid on his villa Saturday.

On Wednesday, Joris reiterated that Yugoslavia has ``an international obligation'' to extradite Milosevic.

``This obligation is not negotiable ... not in the case of Mr. Milosevic nor in any other case, regardless of rank or citizenship,'' Joris said.

Shortly after Milosevic's arrest, Del Ponte said she expected him to be sent to the Hague this year. Meanwhile, the tribunal would issue additional indictments against the former president, she said.

If Yugoslavia refuses to surrender Milosevic, Del Ponte could ask the U.N. Security Council to impose sanctions when she visits New York next month.

Joris said the tribunal would allow Yugoslav officials to continue questioning Milosevic in the U.N. detention facility in the Netherlands for charges of financial misconduct at home.

``It will be possible for the Serbian judicial investigative authorities to continue their investigation and interviews of Mr. Milosevic,'' he said.

The court's registrar, Hans Holthuis, left on a three-day trip to Belgrade Wednesday, a tribunal statement said.

Holthuis would meet with Serbian Justice Minister Vladan Batic, Federal Minister of Justice Momcilo Grubac and Serbian Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic and ``clarify the steps that have to be taken to fulfill their legal obligations,'' the statement said.

Milosevic, who presided over nearly a decade of Balkan wars, was indicted in May 1999 for alleged atrocities against Kosovar Albanians. Del Ponte is preparing more indictments on war crimes charges, including genocide, in Bosnia and Croatia in the early 1990s.

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

USA Today
04/04/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Virginia

Lexington - Virginia Military Institute is squaring off with the American Civil Liberties Union over a formal nightly dinner blessing. The ACLU says the mandatory prayer is unconstitutional and is threatening to sue on behalf of two cadets who complained. The school and the state attorney general say U.S. Supreme Court rulings on school prayer don't include dinner blessings.

---

House acts to make all military votes count

Washington Times
Published 4/4/01
Audrey Hudson THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200144223747.htm

A bipartisan group of House members yesterday introduced a bill to ensure that votes cast by overseas military personnel are counted by making it tougher to discount ballots without postmarks and setting standards for receiving votes.

"When proud young men and women are willing to put their lives on the line and are deployed to the far reaches of the globe, we cannot allow their fundamental right to vote be taken away because of a simple technicality," said Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, California Republican.

Most of the Florida election fallout focused on disenfranchised black voters. However, 1,500 military and overseas ballots were not counted in the 2000 election, said Rep. William M. "Mac" Thornberry, Texas Republican.

"You can't ask someone to take up arms in defense of our country and then deny them a ballot when it comes time to vote," Mr. Thornberry said.

During the 36-day Florida recount, Democrats challenged hundreds of absentee ballots for lacking postmarks, a state law. The Pentagon conceded some envelopes were not stamped, and President Bush's 537-vote victory highlighted problems in the military absentee voting system.

Dismissing votes cast by members of the military is "immoral," said Rep. Sam Johnson, a Texas Republican who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

"Our troops and their families put their lives on the line every day to protect the freedoms of this great nation; the least we can do is protect their right to vote," Mr. Johnson said.

The bill is endorsed by numerous veterans organizations, including the National Military/Veterans Alliance, Reserve Officers Association and National Association for Uniformed Services.

"When our young people are defending our country and its free institutions, the least we can do is to make sure that they are able to enjoy the rights they are being asked to fight to preserve," said Gen. Dick Murray, spokesman for the National Association for Uniformed Services.

A report by the Congressional Research Service said more than 40 percent of troops on active duty are residents of states that have no legislation protecting their right to vote in elections.

The measure would require states to find convincing evidence of fraud before discounting ballots because they lack postmarks in federal elections.

It also sets a standard time frame of 30 days for sending and receiving absentee military ballots, and gives military members and their families guaranteed residency to vote in federal, state and local elections.

In addition, it directs the Defense Secretary to update voting methods using the latest technology.

"It's the 21st century, and our elections should reflect that," said Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher, California Democrat.

Several similar measures are moving through the Senate, including one supported by Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican and chairman of the Armed Services Committee.

Sponsored by Sen. Wayne Allard, Colorado Republican, the bill also calls for polling places on military bases.

"This bill will help prevent a repeat of the 2000 election, where military ballots were unfairly scrutinized in a partisan attempt to silence their voice," Mr. Allard said in a statement.

Mr. Thornberry hopes to attach the House legislation to this year's defense authorization bill. One Senate leadership aide said memories of the Florida debacle are still fresh in the minds of Congress, and members on both sides of the aisle are "committed" to moving election reform this year.

Lawmakers said glitches in the military voting system have been pervasive since the Truman administration. In 1952, Mr. Truman asked Congress to fix voting procedures so troops fighting in the Korean War could vote.

---

VMI ready to defend tradition of prayers

Washington Times
Published 4/4/01
Stephen Dinan THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/default-200144221359.htm

The Virginia Military Institute says it will defend yet another of its traditions - the pre-supper prayer - against a possible court challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU's Virginia chapter, on behalf of two VMI students, has asked the school to end the practice or let students opt out, saying that as a state school it cannot require students to be part of a religious activity.

But the state's attorney general, who is the lawyer for VMI, and Maj. Gen. Josiah Bunting III, VMI's superintendent, said they are ready for a court fight over the issue.

"The Constitution does not prohibit our saying grace before supper. And we shall continue to do so," Gen. Bunting wrote in a response the ACLU received Monday.

"We appreciate your contribution to the discussion of the issue now taking place among our students and faculty. However, it is apparent that there is much you do not understand about VMI and about our prayer before the evening meal here."

VMI, located about an hour's drive southwest of Charlottesville in Lexington, is famous for former student Gen. George C. Marshall and for former faculty member Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. The school was all-male until 1996, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that 157-year-old tradition unconstitutional.

Now the school looks certain to be heading back to court.

Six nights a week, students attending supper - required of all freshmen and sophomores, and something most upperclassmen also attend - form outside barracks and go into the mess hall. They come to attention, then stand at ease while a cadet, usually the cadet chaplain, reads the day's grace. Then they eat.

Two juniors, Neil Mellen and Paul Knick, felt requiring students to observe the prayer was wrong. They asked the administration to end the practice and, when the administration said no, they asked the ACLU for help.

Kent Willis, executive director of the Virginia ACLU, said requiring students to be present during the prayer violates the First Amendment prohibition against government-sponsored religion.

Mr. Mellen, a 21-year-old from Los Angeles who was raised a Catholic, told The Washington Times in a phone interview yesterday that he and Mr. Knick were surprised when the administration refused to stop the prayer.

"It's ironic to me that such a school would flout basic laws such a nation was founded on, especially if you're going to have military officers swear to follow the law," Mr. Mellen said.

He said he's heard from both supporters and detractors at the school, but he was surprised at the vitriol of some of those upset with his stance.

"The few times we've tried to sit down and go about our business, we've had members of the cadet regiment in all number of ways explain what we're doing is bad," Mr. Mellen said. Those ways included, on one occasion, throwing crumpled up napkins at the cadets, he said.

The issue has touched off a debate at the school, with Mr. Mellen and school Chaplain James Park writing dueling editorials in the school paper, the Cadet. The chaplain argued that the prayer provides a common spiritual mooring, and he encouraged Mr. Mellen and other cadets to accept the prayer in deference to other cadets.

Some VMI graduates yesterday were supportive of the school's decision to oppose the challenge.

"It is a continuing and further assault on the values and traditions of that school," said Stephen Fogleman Jr., a 1971 graduate and former chairman of the VMI Alumni Association.

Mr. Willis said he still hopes to resolve the issue without going to court, but he, the school and state all seem prepared to end up there.

"The Supreme Court has never said adults assembled for an official meal on a college campus may not hear a blessing offered for the meal," said Virginia's Attorney General Mark L. Earley, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor.

Mealtime practices at the military academies and other schools like VMI vary.

At The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., cadets offer nonsectarian blessings before meals. At the Naval Academy in Annapolis, a chaplain says a prayer before lunch. At the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., a prayer is said only before formal dinners.

Neither the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., nor the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, have a pre-meal prayer but both hold brief moments of silence.

But Mr. Willis said VMI isn't a military academy and even in the military nobody can be coerced into a religious ceremony.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Texas-New Mexico Power users may choose wind service

USA: April 4, 2001
Story by Eileen Moustakis
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10377

NEW YORK - Texas-New Mexico Power Co. (TNMP) said yesterday beginning July 1 its customers have the option of receiving power generated by wind.

The electricity generated by the wind on the plains and mesas of West Texas will be available to TNMP customers and to the customers of its retail affiliate, First Choice Power, the company said in a statement.

Wind turbines on King Mountain will generate the power.

TNMP will sell the wind power as an Energy Ranch product.

Using wind power instead of coal, oil or natural gas offsets the use of millions of gallons of water and tons of emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and carbon dioxide, TNMP said.

"By choosing Energy Ranch wind power, TNMP customers will help save more than four million gallons of water a year," Larry Dillon, TNMP vice president of Power Resources said in the statement.

"That's the amount of water used to generate a like amount of electricity from oil or gas. In Texas, we all know the importance of water conservation, especially given last year's drought conditions."

Customer usage can vary significantly depending on the weather, but most consumers in Texas use more electricity in the long, hot summer than in the winter.

The average residential customer in Texas uses about 1,100 kilowatt-hours of power per month.

Using Energy Ranch wind power electricity will amount to 1 cent more per kilowatt-hour for TNMP customers.

Through a joint marketing agreement with Cielo Power Market, an affiliate of privately held Austin, Texas-based Cielo Wind Power LLC, customers will be eligible on a first-come, first-served basis, TNMP said.

Cielo Wind is the largest wind power developer in the state.

Fort Worth-based Texas-New Mexico Power Co. provides electricity to more than 238,000 customers in Texas and New Mexico.

-------- environment

The only Aprils fools here are folks that drink fluoridated poison water

BURLINGTON FREE PRESS
April 1, 2001.

It's time Bennington faced the realities of fluoridation Sam Hemingway.

The young boy had been admitted to the Southwestern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington with a 102-degree fever that wouldn't quit.

Four days later, hospital doctors still couldn't figure out what was causing it.

"First, they thought it might be appendicitis, but it wasn't, and nobody could figure it out," Dr. Justin Salem said. "Finally, they had the kid open his mouth."

That's where the problem was: a tooth so infected it had caused bacteremia, or infiltration of bacteria from the bad tooth into the child's bloodstream.

If incidents like this were a rarity, that would be one thing.

According to Salem, a dentist, they're not. He cited the high frequency at which the local hospital operates on children with rotten teeth and a state study that gave area high school students bad scores on tooth decay.

"We have a severe dental problem in this town among our kids," he said.

Say hello to Ground Zero in the ongoing war of words about the good and bad of fluoridation.

For decades, putting fluoride in public water systems to reduce tooth decay was akin to motherhood and apple pie in this country. Burlington and 43 other Vermont communities have long had fluoridated water systems.

Bennington was one of those places that never did. Salem, along with retired dentist Michael Brady, thinks it's about time the town caught up with reality.

Unfortunately, that's not so easy. Fluoridation has its critics now, and one of them is Bennington resident Linda Crawford. A nurse, she is head of Bennington Citizens Against Fluoridated Water and claims she is personally allergic to fluoride.

Experts cited by Crawford say the kind of fluoride used in water systems is actually an industrial waste byproduct of fertilizer manufacturing. Plus, it can't be excreted by humans and is harmful to them over time.

How so? Crawford cited findings by St. Lawrence University Professor Paul Connett that claim fluoride causes brittle bones among the elderly and lower IQs and other problems among the young.

As she and other critics see it, the real problem isn't a lack of fluoride but a failure to foster dental hygiene and better nutrition among lower-income families.

Plus, it's medication without consent. "Our water should not be used as a vehicle to distribute drugs," she said. "That's un-American."

It's that last argument that resonates most in a nation founded on skepticism of too much governmental control.

In November, these concerns were enough to persuade Brattleboro voters to reject fluoridation 2,859-2,276. Now, the same thing could happen in Bennington.

Not if Tommy Ivey, head of dental health for the state Health Department, can help it.

Today, 50 percent of Vermont's youth -- 71,000 children -- aren't receiving any dental care, and Ivey said he's had it with fluoridation opponents' intent on scaring people into undermining their kids' dental health.

"The opposition is fairly passionate and organized," he said. "All they have to do is put a little doubt in the voters' mind, stretch the truth a little bit. We can't do that."

Ivey said 3,200 studies have determined fluoridation has no downside and is no more a "medication" than the other chemicals used to purify public water.

He also said fluoride is naturally in all water, including ocean water, so Crawford's allergy claim is impossible, and the idea that public water systems are being used as a dumping ground for bad fluoride defies logic.

"I'm sorry, but I'm in a war now," he said. "It's time we had some passion on our side, too."

Considering what's at stake, you can't blame him.

---

Cut a deal on softwood

Montreal Gazette
Wednesday 4 April 2001
http://www.montrealgazette.com/editorial/pages/010404/5032576.html

A negotiated solution between Canada and the United States may not be the most elegant or principled way of ending the softwood lumber dispute that threatens trade relations between the two countries. But cutting a deal looks like the only realistic alternative at this point.

After the formal filing this week of charges by U.S. lumber interests that Canada is dumping and illegally subsidizing softwood exports, it's clear there is growing political support in Congress for penalizing Canadian lumber.

Never mind that the Americans have no real case against Canada and that their actions are an affront to free trade. Once this train starts down the track, it's going to be very hard to stop. Changes to U.S. trade law in the 1990s have made this kind of case easier to press in Washington, and easier for the Americans to win.

So what does Canada do? Simply lie down on the tracks and get run over?

The U.S. lumber industry is seeking punitive duties as high as 76 per cent on Canadian wood, which would cost our industry about $8 billion U.S. a year. The stakes are huge. Thousands of jobs across the country depend on lumber exports to the U.S. The Canadian industry would be decimated if the American trade action is successful.

So, fighting back might seem like a logical response, given that trade law appears to be on our side and given that the Americans haven't been able to make these charges stick in the past. If the U.S. Commerce Department finds against Canada, Ottawa could take the case to the World Trade Organization. It could cite previous legal decisions which have rejected the American argument that low provincial stumpage rates constitute an unfair subsidy.

Ottawa could do all that - and then it could wait years for the case to sort itself out at the WTO.

One thing is sure: every avenue of appeal would be exhausted. In the meantime, how many Canadian mills would be shut down while the legal battle drags on? The price would be too high.

Cutting a deal would be a far more sensible response. Yes, it would be craven, offensive, unpalatable - pick your adjective. Unfortunately it's the only real option if the economic ruin of the Canadian lumber industry is to be avoided.

Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew says he is prepared to discuss with the U.S. the possibility of appointing special envoys to settle the dispute. Mr. Pettigrew should push hard for such negotiations. Perhaps there is a way to limit Canadian exports, along the lines of the just-expired Softwood Lumber Agreement signed between the countries in 1996. True, this kind of agreement might be harder to obtain this time. U.S. producers say Canada had been cheating on the deal and they may be reluctant to sign on again.

Still, Canada might have some leverage. If the Bush administration wants Canada's support for a Free Trade Area of the Americas, it's unlikely to want a trade war with its northern neighbour.

------

EU condemns Bush on global warming

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By RAF CASERT Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406632902

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - European Union leaders on Wednesday said President Bush was ``completely wrong'' to pull out of a global warming agreement and held out hope the United States might yet get back on board.

``We are in genuine disagreement,'' said Prime Minister Goeran Persson of Sweden, which holds the EU presidency. ``We are going to speak loudly and clearly'' to save the deal, said Persson at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France.

French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin also criticized Bush, saying his decision not to apply the agreement was a ``serious unilateral act.''

``This is not an isolationist administration as has been the case before in the Republican tradition. This is more like a unilateralist administration,'' Jospin said.

The Bush administration said in late March that it has no plans to implement the treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, because it would be bad for the U.S. economy and Congress would never ratify it.

The Kyoto agreement calls for industrial nations to reduce emissions of so-called greenhouse gases _ mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels _ blamed by scientists for heating up the Earth's atmosphere.

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer urged the United States not to sink the accord. ``It would be a fatal mistake that would set back all international efforts to protect the environment,'' Fischer told Bunte magazine.

Persson said of the U.S. stance, ``it is completely wrong.'' He rejected calls however to get commerce and trade involved into the dispute.

``It would be extremely counterproductive to involve the World Trade Organization negotiations,'' Persson said. ``Demands like this will only lead to stalemate.''

EU Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstroem and Swedish Environment Minister Kjell Larsson were on a whirlwind tour to rally support for the embattled agreement following a two-day visit to Washington.

During the visit, Christie Whitman, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator, said the Kyoto treaty was unfair to the United States but pledged U.S. cooperation in seeking technologies and incentives to address climate change.

Wallstroem's spokeswoman Annika Oestergren stressed the U.S. reversal ``could not be an excuse for other countries'' to back out of the deal.

Over the coming week the EU delegation will seek to drum up support in Japan, Russia, China and Iran _ which currently holds the chairmanship of the G77 group of developing nations.

The EU still held out hope to get the United States back on board and were looking forward to July talks in Bonn, Germany to discuss the agreement.

``Let's hope this isn't the last word'' from the United States, said Fischer, a member of Germany's environmentalist Greens party.

---

Desert water pumping damage feared

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By LEON DROUIN KEITH Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406633792

AMBOY, Calif. (AP) - In Southern California's endless search for water, the Fenner Valley might not seem to be a promising place to look.

The forbidding stretch of Mojave Desert includes salt-encrusted dry lakes, crossed by lonely two-lane roads and dotted with abandoned shacks.

Beneath the surface, however, lies a reservoir of billions of gallons of water, the result of centuries of rain and snowmelt.

It is the region's ability to store such great amounts of water - and its greatly debated ability to replenish itself - that have put the Fenner Valley in the middle of California's latest water war.

The Metropolitan Water District, which serves 17 million Southern California residents, wants to buy groundwater from Cadiz Inc., a company that holds the rights to much of the aquifer and farms 1,600 acres of vineyards and citrus orchards in the valley.

Rancher Rob Blair, who runs 400 head of cattle in the valley, fears the project will drain the aquifer, leaving his wells dry.

``They want to sell it to L.A. so they can wash their streets off,'' he said. ``I don't appreciate that.''

Environmentalists and officials with the U.S. Geological Survey and National Park Service also are wary of the plans.

They say that drawing from the aquifer could reduce surface water, threatening bighorn sheep, desert tortoises and other species, some of them at the Joshua Tree National Park and other nearby wilderness areas.

They warn that if too much water is drained off, the Fenner Valley could become a dust bowl - which is what happened in the Owens Valley after Los Angeles made an infamous water grab there in 1913. Owens Lake became a carcinogenic dustbed, and in 1999 the city agreed to spend $100 million to clean up the air pollution by 2006.

Water agency officials said the Fenner Valley project would do no harm.

``The environmental protections are extensive beyond almost anything we have seen in the state of California,'' said Tim Blair, a specialist with the water agency.

Behind the debate is the agency's need to find new sources of water and increase its storage capacity. Under a recent agreement with other Western states, California must reduce its annual use of Colorado River water over the next several years.

The project calls for a 35-mile pipeline between Cadiz's property about 160 miles east of Los Angeles and the water agency's Colorado River aqueduct. They will split the cost of the $150 million project.

The aquifer would be used as both a source of water and a storage place.

During wet years, Colorado River water would be pumped into the aquifer and stored there for millions of families in Southern California. During dry years, the river water and water that naturally seeps into the aquifer would be drawn from the ground for the customers' use.

Cadiz, which has been losing money on its farming operations, would earn at least $6.9 million a year from selling the groundwater, according to its tentative contract with the water agency.

The water agency and Cadiz are scheduled to make their contract final this month, with a U.S. Bureau of Land Management environmental impact report due in May. The BLM has final say over the project and is expected to make a decision a few months after that.

Under the plan, up to 150,000 acre-feet of water could be pumped into the aquifer from the Colorado River during wet years. An acre-foot is enough water to cover an acre to a depth of one foot.

The tentative contract calls for pumping out as much as 1.5 million acre-feet of groundwater over 50 years, or about 30,000 acre-feet a year. Cadiz estimates 15,000 to 37,000 acre-feet of rain and snowmelt recharge the aquifer annually.

By some U.S. Geological Survey estimates, however, the valley does not get enough runoff even to replenish the 6,000 acre-feet Cadiz's farm uses each year.

Under the tentative plan, water cannot be pumped out for the first five years, while a monitoring program gets more precise data on how much water seeps back into the ground. Talks are continuing over when water levels will be considered low enough to halt pumping.

``The risks are all on the side of the proponents, and the safeguards are all on the side of the environment,'' said Tim Salt, a BLM district manager.

Taking water out faster than it can be replenished would increase dust and shrivel the streams and springs needed by wildlife, including about 200 desert bighorn sheep, said Elden Hughes of the Sierra Club.

``By the time you see the damage, it's too late,'' he said. ``I think they should really test their hypothesis of recharge before they spend $150 million to put a pipeline in.''

Seeing the ground as a major source of water might have drawn a chuckle from some of the ranchers who ran cattle through the valley over the past century. The high desert is so inhospitable it could take as much as 600 acres to sustain a single cow.

Blair, a member of the last ranching family left in the area, does not even think of water in terms of acre-feet. The fourth-generation rancher gets anywhere from a pint to five quarts a minute from his wells.

As for the pipeline project, ``I have too much vested here to just roll over and play dead,'' he said.

---

EPA handling of asbestos criticized

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406633536

KALISPELL, Mont. (AP) - The Environmental Protection Agency could have started cleaning up asbestos contamination at a Montana mine years ago had it adequately responded to several red flags that were raised over the past two decades, a federal report says.

The EPA last year asked for the independent investigation of the agency's monitoring of the former W.R. Grace vermiculite mine in Libby. The report came Tuesday, one day after W.R. Grace and Co. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing hardships from asbestos lawsuits.

Several published reports in 1999 linked the Libby mine to scores of asbestos-related deaths and illnesses among residents and former employees. Grace faces nearly 200 claims in Montana related to asbestos exposure at the mine.

Auditors found lapses in communication as early as 1980 that could have changed the course of action for Libby.

``With better communications regarding enforcement actions, EPA officials would have had the opportunity to consider a Superfund action sooner than 1999, when the mine site received media attention,'' the report said.

Vermiculite is used mainly in insulation and potting soil. Maryland-based W.R. Grace closed the Libby mine in 1990.

Paul Peronard, the EPA's on-site coordinator in Libby, agreed there was a lack of follow-up with asbestos issues at Libby through the years.

``All those breakdowns did happen,'' he said. ``But the report doesn't get into why they happened.''

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Experts: Mad cow risk very low

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406632354

WASHINGTON (AP) - Travelers to Europe are at little risk of catching mad-cow disease, given the precautions that have been put in place and the relatively few illnesses reported, U.S. health experts said Wednesday.

``The danger of driving to the airport is greater than eating meat in Europe,'' said Richard Johnson, a special adviser to the National Institutes of Health on mad-cow and related diseases.

Mad-cow, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, is linked to a human brain-wasting disease that has killed some 80 Europeans since the mid-1990s, mostly in Britain. Cases have been reported in France, Portugal, Germany, Spain and Ireland.

Britain has implemented a number of controls on animal feed and meatpacking in an effort to eradicate the disease.

``It's much safer now to eat beef in Britain, although I've eaten beef in Britain throughout this thing,'' Johnson told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

There has never been a confirmed case of mad-cow disease in the United States, and it is unlikely to reach this country because of restrictions on livestock and meat imports, said government officials and animal experts.

``The likelihood of BSE is very low. It is not zero,'' said William Hueston, a mad-cow expert at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine.

Mad-cow disease is believed to be transmitted through eating pieces of the brain or nervous system of an infected animal.

Foot-and-mouth disease, which is harmless to humans, is spread far more easily.

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Foot-and-mouth shows improvement

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By BETH GARDINER Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406632931

LONDON (AP) - There have been signs of progress in stemming the spread of foot-and-mouth disease, making it less likely Britain will resort to a controversial vaccination program, Prime Minister Tony Blair's office said Wednesday.

As the number of infected sites passed 1,000, Britain's chief scientist told Blair that the widespread slaughter of livestock was ``starting to bite'' into the disease, heading off worst-case projections and lessening the need for export-damaging vaccinations, said the spokesman, who declined to be named.

``We are somewhere between the medium and best-case scenarios,'' said the spokesman, adding that vaccination remains an option, ``but at this stage we don't feel we need to go down that route, given that the policy seems to be starting to bite.''

After getting European Union permission to vaccinate up to 180,000 dairy cattle in the worst-hit areas of Devon, in southwest England, and the northwestern county of Cumbria, the government has twice postponed a decision on whether to do so.

Blair is reluctant to approve vaccination because it would lengthen the time Britain needs to regain its ``foot-and-mouth-free'' status and begin exporting again after the disease is eradicated. Tests for foot-and-mouth can't distinguish between animals that have been infected and those that have been vaccinated, so other countries will not accept meat and animals from a vaccinating country.

Humans cannot catch foot-and-mouth and it is not normally fatal to livestock. But because it lowers production and is highly contagious, many countries shut their doors to animal products from infected nations.

According to Blair's spokesman, chief scientist David King said the government's efforts _ which included culling animals in farms adjacent to infected ones and using the army to help speed the time from infected animals' diagnosis to slaughter _ appeared to have avoided the most fearsome projections.

King was part of a panel of experts that last month predicted there could be as many as 4,000 cases by June. He also said then that as many as half of Britain's 63 million livestock might have to be sacrificed to stop the spread of the disease.

More than a million animals have been condemned for slaughter. So far, the disease that began in England in February has spread to France, the Netherlands and Ireland.

Three new cases were identified Tuesday in the Netherlands, bringing the total number of infected farms to 15. The Dutch Agriculture Ministry said about 15,000 animals have been vaccinated to contain the disease until authorities have a chance to destroy all 115,000 animals in the infected area.

The area falls within about 18 miles of the German border, which has sparked some alarm in Berlin. The disease has not been found in Germany, but sheep at a small western farm were slaughtered Wednesday because of suspicions that they were in contact with animals from a nearby site that showed possible foot-and-mouth symptoms, state authorities said.

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U.S. Rebuffs European Plea Not to Abandon Climate Pact

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/science/04WARM.html

WASHINGTON, April 3 - The Bush administration turned down a European request today that it reconsider a decision seen as likely to doom the international treaty on global warming known as the Kyoto accord.

In meetings with European Union emissaries, who had been dispatched to Washington on an emergency mission, administration officials restated a view that the 1997 treaty was "unfair to the United States" and that it was not worthy of American support.

The European Union has been a vocal supporter of the accord, and it was among the foreign voices that reacted harshly to President Bush's decision last week to abandon the treaty, which was signed by the United States and 100 other countries. After a meeting with Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the head of the European delegation said he had heard no indication that the administration might change its mind.

"We are going to continue the Kyoto process; we have the same objectives as before," said the delegation chief, Kjell Larsson, who is Sweden's environment minister. "There are very small chances, if any, of United States participation."

The treaty has been ratified by only one country, Romania, and while it could technically be put into effect without American support, United States and foreign officials have described that scenario as highly unlikely.

With another international meeting on global warming scheduled for later this month, in New York, the new American stance leaves unresolved even the most basic questions about how the Bush administration might now propose to tackle the problem.

In a statement, Ms. Whitman said little more than that she was "optimistic" that through "international processes we can develop technologies, market-based incentives, and other innovative approaches to global climate change." She delivered much the same message to a conference of environment ministers from the Western Hemisphere in Montreal last week.

The White House has said the global warming policy is the subject of a cabinet-level review. But in a sign that the issue remains in flux, administration officials said today that no decisions had been made as to whether Ms. Whitman or some lower-level official would represent the United States at the New York meeting and at one in Bonn in July.

"They do not have any concrete alternatives or options for the moment," Margot Wallstrom, the European Union's environment commissioner, said after today's meetings. With Japan, Russia, Germany, Britain, Canada, Australia and France all explicit in their criticism of the new American position, Ms. Wallstrom said, the issue was becoming a foreign-policy problem for the United States.

"It is becoming clear to the Bush administration that this is about international relations as well, and other countries are reacting very strongly against the U.S.," she said.

The Kyoto treaty, the most far-reaching international agreement on global warming, would require the United States and other industrialized countries to reduce emissions of heat-trapping gases by 5 percent to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The White House has objected in particular to the fact that, under the treaty, developing countries would not be subject to any immediate restriction. In ruling out a plan to impose restrictions on power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the gases that would be regulated under the accord, it said such a step would be too costly to the economy and to American consumers.

The 16-member delegation also met today with Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, and Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, who as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has been critical of the administration's decision to abandon hope for the Kyoto accord.

Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a research and advocacy group in Washington, said today that it was important that the administration move swiftly in formulating a new policy.

"They know what they don't want, which is Kyoto," Ms. Claussen said. "I don't think they're very far along in deciding what they do want."

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E.P.A. Is Faulted on Asbestos Hazard

New York Times
April 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/national/04ASBE.html

The Environmental Protection Agency did not adequately respond to evidence that asbestos-contaminated ore from a Montana mine operated by W. R. Grace & Company posed a health hazard, the agency's inspector general said yesterday.

The announcement came a day after Grace filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing hardships from asbestos lawsuits.

The ore, vermiculite, was used in an array of building products until Grace closed the mine in Libby, Mont., in 1990. With large numbers of residents now showing signs of asbestos-related disease, the agency is trying to clean up the area and examine sites throughout the country where the ore was processed.

Last year, agency officials acknowledged shortcomings in their oversight of the Libby vermiculite and asked the inspector general to examine the agency's conduct.

The inspector general found that for years, the agency had not acted on its own data that the vermiculite posed potential health problems. For example, a draft 1982 report by the agency found that asbestos-contaminated vermiculite caused "significant adverse health effects" among people working with the ore, and that the public was generally unaware that some consumer uses could pose significant health hazards.

A Grace spokesman declined to comment yesterday, saying he had not yet seen the report. The health effects, if any, of vermiculite-based products remain unclear.

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Environmental Reversals Shake Moderate Republicans

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By ROBIN TONER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/politics/04ENVI.html

WASHINGTON, April 3 - These are not easy days for the greener wing of the Republican Party. A series of environmental reversals by the Bush administration has highlighted an old fault line in the party that is both geographic and ideological, and shaken many of the party's Northeastern moderates.

Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, says his college-student daughter, "a true-blue Republican," is wondering "what the heck is happening with our party when it comes to the environment."

Representative Marge Roukema, Republican of New Jersey, fired off a letter after the Bush administration reversed itself on regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants: "Mr. President, health and safety first! We urge you in the strongest possible terms to reconsider your decision."

And Senator Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, when asked about the reaction back home, said, "There's a realization that some of the Western senators and more conservative elements of the party are calling some important shots" - adding that the carbon dioxide issue was "an important one."

In fact, environmental issues often pit moderates against conservatives, Northeast against South and West in the Republican Party. The moderates, many from suburban districts that voted for Vice President Al Gore last year, are careful to praise President Bush's performance over all - but are just as careful to note their disagreements on the environment. And these tensions are widely expected to increase as the administration moves on energy policy.

Democrats, scenting blood, have been scathing on the administration's recent environmental decisions to oppose the Kyoto treaty on global warming, to reverse the campaign position on carbon dioxide emissions and to reconsider Clinton administration standards on arsenic in drinking water.

And environmental groups are warning that Mr. Bush's policies could cost his party dearly in next year's elections.

Ted Roosevelt, a Republican who is chairman of the League of Conservation Voters and was a Bush delegate at last year's party convention - although his organization endorsed Mr. Gore - described himself as "obviously disappointed."

Mr. Roosevelt, whose great-grandfather President Theodore Roosevelt helped found the modern conservation movement, added of Mr. Bush: "The environment is such a key issue, and he's got such a very small margin in Congress. If the administration is consistently anti-environment, I can almost guarantee that he will lose a majority in both the House and the Senate."

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, said the Bush decisions put moderate Republicans in a difficult place, with a choice of breaking with the administration or alienating their constituents.

It is not an unfamiliar place to them. Representative Sherwood Boehlert, the Republican from central New York who heads the House Committee on Science, often fought his party on environmental issues in the antiregulatory heyday of the Congress led by Newt Gingrich.

"We don't get paid for the easy ones," Mr. Boehlert said philosophically.

He is one of the highest-rated House members in the League of Conservation Voters' Republican honor roll, a list dominated by Northeasterners, who, Mr. Boehlert noted, have ample experience with the perils of pollution.

Mr. Boehlert said he was "profoundly disappointed" by Mr. Bush's position on carbon dioxide emissions, and would continue to push for legislation that would regulate those emissions as part of a "four-pollutant strategy." But he also said he remained hopeful about the Bush administration's environmental direction, noting that it was still early and that Mr. Bush had yet to assemble his science team.

"When that happens, he will get some advice he is not now getting," Mr. Boehlert said.

William K. Reilly, who was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency for Mr. Bush's father, President George Bush, also noted that Mr. Bush's decision on carbon dioxide had come "awfully early."

"One really has to hope - and I really do believe - it's not the last word," Mr. Reilly said.

Indeed, many Republican moderates were delighted by the appointment, early on, of one of their own to the top job at the Environmental Protection Agency, former Gov. Christie Whitman of New Jersey.

"That sent a strong signal to me that this administration is committed to improving our environment," said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, who said she remained hopeful. But Mrs. Whitman has been the target of fierce criticism on the right, and Mr. Bush's decision on carbon dioxide was widely seen as undercutting her at a critically early time.

Mrs. Whitman did not respond to a request for comment.

As for the White House, a spokesman said, "The president has taken any number of bold steps to safeguard our environment."

Asked about the environmental divisions in the Republican Party, Mr. Reilly said: "The antiregulatory wing of the Republican Party always gets stronger when it does not occupy the White House. Once in charge of the regulatory process, once on the line for pollution events or failures of environmental protection, Republican presidents become more environmentally sensitive, and Republicans generally become more environmentally supportive."

If nothing else, some analysts suggest, politics will push the administration greenward. And indeed, some environmentally friendly moves are expected from the White House before Earth Day on April 22. Charles Cook, who publishes an independent political newsletter, said that given the extraordinary closeness of the 2000 elections, "this whole suburban thing is key."

"They got killed in the non-Southern suburbs," Mr. Cook said of the Republicans, "and it's a collection of social, cultural and environmental things - guns, abortion and certainly the environment."

"They need to do a couple really green things really soon," he added. "House Republicans back in '95 and '96 saw what happens if you are perceived as anti-environment. That really hurt them in '96."

Senator Robert C. Smith, the New Hampshire Republican who is chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, is cited by advocates on both sides as a man who recognized the power of the environment in his region. Mr. Smith, who is up for re-election in 2002, is described by Mr. Pope of the Sierra Club as "a profoundly conservative senator who knows how to listen to his constituents."

Others argue that the calculus is different now that the country is in an economic funk and worried about energy, and Mr. Bush seems a leading proponent of that view.

A New York Times/CBS News Poll in early March suggested that this argument carried the most weight with Republicans. Asked which was most important, producing energy or protecting the environment, 44 percent said energy, 47 percent said the environment. But 64 percent of the independents polled said the environment should take precedence, as did 71 percent of the Democrats.

Grover Norquist, a conservative strategist, said Republicans needed to talk about the environment in their own terms.

"Just as you can be for poor people without signing on to some left-wing redistributionist scheme," Mr. Norquist said, "you can be for the environment without being for some extreme regulatory scheme."

As this struggle plays out, Mr. Boehlert said he expected the party's moderates to play a critical role.

"The balance is so close in the House, the moderates can tip it one way or the other," he said. (Although even among themselves, moderates can disagree on policy specifics, like the wisdom of the Kyoto treaty.)

For example, the administration's proposal to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, part of its energy policy, is dismissed out of hand by some moderates.

"The votes aren't there for drilling in A.N.W.R.," said Representative Constance A. Morella, Republican of Maryland, who was among the Republicans who successfully urged committee leaders to omit Arctic drilling from the budget resolution.

Representative James C. Greenwood, a Republican whose suburban Philadelphia district voted for Mr. Gore last year, argued: "We have to look for a position that may not be where the president is, and probably won't be where the Sierra Club is. But we moderate Republicans have to find a middle ground that's environmentally sensible."

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Interior Dept. plan would open lands for drilling

USA Today
04/04/2001 - Updated 10:27 PM ET
By Tom Kenworthy, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-05-energydrilling.htm

Millions of acres of federal land that contain protected wildlife and scenery would be opened for oil and gas drilling under a plan being finalized by the Interior Department.

The draft recommendations, obtained by USA TODAY, are contained in a report being prepared for a Bush administration task force, chaired by Vice President Cheney, that is developing a national energy policy.

They offer the first details of how the administration might implement President Bush's repeated pledge to expand domestic energy development with more aggressive drilling on federal lands.

Bush and Interior Secretary Gale Norton have argued that modern technology makes possible greatly expanded oil and gas drilling on federal lands without environmental damage. The centerpiece of that effort is winning congressional approval for drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Some Interior officials also have proposed consolidating power over energy exploration decisions on federal land within Norton's office and the Bureau of Land Management, an agency that historically has supported mining, grazing and other commercial activities. That change would strip other agencies such as the Forest Service of their power to limit drilling.

Norton declined to discuss the recommendations until the administration finalizes its energy plan.

"It would be premature for me to talk about any specific proposals," she said.

Cheney's spokeswoman, Juleanna Glover Weiss, said the energy task force has not received the recommendations from Interior and is "not close to making any policy announcements."

The draft report says many of the proposals would take two to eight years to implement. With conservationists attacking the Bush administration's policies on global warming, drinking water standards and smokestack emissions, the recommendations for enhancing energy production from federal lands are likely to be controversial. They include:

Pushing Congress to decide which lands among 17 million acres of "wilderness study areas" should be permanently protected. The remainder would be released for development.

Modifying Forest Service land-use plans that restrict energy development. Those comprehensive plans, usually many years in the making and involving extensive public comment, ban drilling in such sensitive areas as Montana's Lewis and Clark National Forest.

Expediting applications for construction of a natural gas pipeline to deliver gas from Alaska's North Slope.

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Bush's Eco-Challenge

Slate
Wednesday, April 4, 2001
ballot box
By Jacob Weisberg
http://slate.msn.com/code/BallotBox/BallotBox.asp?Show=4/4/2001&idMessage=7434

Two issues pose a special risk to Republicans these days: abortion and the environment. What makes these areas especially hazardous for the GOP is not simply that the party's familiar positions are out of step with those of a majority of citizens. It's that a lot of swing voters care about them enough for them to be a significant factor in voting decisions. It's also that abortion and the environment are issues where liberal interest groups have a big advantage in terms of organization, mobilization, and funding. (On abortion it's a potential advantage, one that would make itself felt if the basic legal status of abortion were ever seriously threatened.)

It's instructive to contrast the ways in which President Bush has handled the two issues. On abortion, he has behaved in a predictable, politically intelligible way. That is to say, after some initial posturing to the right, he has made fairly clear that he isn't going to squander any political capital promoting his unpopular position in favor of a constitutional amendment making abortion illegal. Bush has reinstated Ronald Reagan's "Mexico City" policy, which bans federal support for groups that provide abortions abroad. But at home, Bush has deferred on all the tricky subsidiary issues like RU-486 and fetal stem-cell research. And on the big questions of abortion's legal status, he shows every sign of bowing to political reality. Instead of trying to change the law, he'll try to "change hearts." That's because according to the most recent Gallup poll on the topic, Americans oppose Bush's position by a margin of more than 2 to 1. Bush won't be challenging this consensus with any kind of serious effort because he knows that overturning Roe would be a political Waterloo for the GOP.

On environmental issues, however, Bush has been acting lately in a way that seems the opposite of politically astute. He has taken a strong stance in favor of gas drilling ("exploration" in Bushspeak) in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. Last month, he knee-capped EPA chief Christine Todd Whitman when he reversed his campaign pledge to combat global warming by lowering carbon dioxide emission standards for power plants. Then, most recently, he blocked a Clinton administration executive order that would have set lower levels of arsenic in drinking water.

With the exception of drilling in Alaska, an issue that even the Republican Congress is afraid to back Bush on, it can be argued that Bush's substantive positions on these issues are not especially fanatical. In the case of both CO2 emissions and arsenic levels, Bush isn't repealing existing standards or regulations. He's simply resisting proposals to tighten them. In a context of rising standards, however, forestalling additional progress essentially means going backward. Democrats are already salivating at the prospect of using arsenic levels as an issue in 2002. Politically, it's a pretty obvious call. Bush would have been far more sensible to let the Clinton regs stand.

When a politician takes a position that is apparently self-destructive in the way that Bush's arsenic-friendly stance is, it can indicate one of three things. The first thing to look for is the possibility that the person is so isolated that he doesn't recognize political reality. A second possibility is that the politician is making a more complex political judgment than most people assume. For example, a straightforward reading of national poll numbers suggests that gun control should be an issue helpful to Democrats. But in 2000 it wasn't because the NRA is stronger than its counterparts on the other side, because the issue is important to blue-collar men, and because those blue-collar men are crucial in several swing states in the South and Midwest. A third and final possibility is that a politician's unpopular decision is motivated by conscience. He may be willing to accept a potential risk or damage in order to do what he believes in.

In the case of Bush and the environment, we're dealing with a combination of these factors. The right-wing echo chamber effect leads administration officials to believe that there's a bona fide national constituency for things like arsenic in tap water, negligence on global warming, and derricks in Alaskan wilderness. I don't think that Bush's guru Karl Rove is so blinded by ideology that he thought these would be popular stands. But it's likely that everyone Rove speaks to on a daily basis thinks they were the right ones to take.

The better explanation, however, is that Bush is acting from conscience and thinks he can frame the issues in a politically advantageous way. Bush's political case is that voters back environmental protection until they're faced with its real costs. He calculates that the public prefers a pristine home for caribou in the abstract, but that most people aren't willing to pay more for gasoline to preserve it. The same goes for CO2 emissions and arsenic water. People may be worried about global warming and environmental toxins. But Bush thinks they're more worried about their utility bills and the general health of the economy. His rationalizations may also have something to do with appeasing conservative zealots within his party.

But--and this is the important point--Bush wouldn't be straining so hard to come up with plausible political justifications if he weren't acting on the basis of conviction. The widespread cynical assumption is that Bush's pro-industry measures are rewards for corporate contributors. But a look at Bush's biography and Texas record underscores a much stronger case that for him, this is a rare matter of fundamental belief. Bush's first career was exploring for oil. As governor of Texas, he clearly and consistently took the position that the rights of businessmen trumped a variety of other public goods, such as cleaner air and water. You can say what you want about this view. But you can't say that Bush doesn't sincerely hold it.

It seems likely that Bush's principles have led him into an important political miscalculation. Texas is America, but America is not Texas. A moderate, pro-environmental consensus has become a powerful force in many states that Bush aspires to win in 2004, including Florida, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. On the one hand, I suppose it's admirable that Bush is willing to take a big political risk for the sake of his beliefs, even if his beliefs are dead wrong. (Like Clinton, he doesn't govern merely according to the polls.) On the other hand, government by polls isn't always such a bad thing. A bit of political cowardice can be a powerful antidote to ideological extremism.

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Under a Cloud

New York Times
April 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/opinion/L04KYOT.html

To the Editor:

Re "Bush Angers Europe by Eroding Pact on Warming" (news article, April 1):

Many of us Americans feel the same emotions that you ascribe to European leaders regarding President Bush's abandoning the Kyoto treaty on global warming (that is, frustration and depression) plus one: embarrassment.

ROBERT LEBOW Southbridge, Mass., April 1, 2001

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USA Today
04/04/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Alaska

Anchorage - A federal judge has ruled that the Forest Service violated the law by not proposing new wilderness areas when it updated a forest-management plan for the Tongass National Forest four years ago. Judge James Singleton enjoined any further actions that would alter the wilderness character of roadless areas until the Forest Service complies with the law. A spokesman for an environmental group said the decision means that all logging on the Tongass' 9.4 million roadless acres must stop.

Delaware

Delaware City - State environmental officials filed several misdemeanor charges against the Motiva Enterprises LLC refinery in Delaware City for disposing of hazardous waste and discharge of a pollutant into a nearby creek. Motiva agreed last month to pay a $2.8 million fine for air-pollution violations, the largest environmental fine ever assessed by Delaware.

Florida

Belle Glade - Sewage backed up and spilled into Glades Central High School. The overflow marked the third time in two years that a backup spilled into the school's hallways. The wastewater flooded about 12 classrooms. Students were moved to other areas, including the gym and library. The health department ensured that the school was safe to occupy during the cleanup.

Hawaii

Honolulu - Six leopard geckos have been turned in to the Honolulu Zoo. The animal's anonymous owner was granted immunity from prosecution under the state's amnesty program for illegal animals. Leopard geckos are well known in the pet industry on the mainland but are banned in Hawaii, where experts say they could damage the environment by disrupting the food chain.

Idaho

Boise - In an action likely to be repeated as Idaho's drought deepens, the state Department of Fish and Game is allowing anglers to salvage trout on the blue-ribbon Big Wood River. State wildlife officials are allowing anglers to fish for trout past the normal suspension from April 1 to the Saturday of the Memorial Day weekend. Anglers can fish on a 4-mile stretch flowing out of Magic Reservoir, which will likely shrink to a puddle by early summer.

Wyoming

Riverton - A prehistoric village in the Wind River Basin will be surrounded by a growing landfill, not covered by it, the sanitation district director said. The site contains artifacts up to 1,800 years old and challenges the theory that the basin's food supply could sustain only small families, Assistant Wyoming State Archaeologist Danny Walker said.

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Europeans seek to preserve Kyoto pact

Washington Times
Published 4/4/01
Patrice Hill
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200144221735.htm

European ministers, stung by President Bush's rejection of the global-warming treaty, say they will try to get other industrial nations to ratify the treaty over the United States' head.

"We are prepared to go on alone, to go on without the United States," said Kjell Larsson, the environment minister of Sweden, which currently holds the European Union's rotating presidency, after failing to convince top Bush administration officials at meetings yesterday to reconsider their stance on the treaty.

"We cannot allow one country to kill the process," he said, referring to the series of negotiations since 1992 that led to the drafting of the treaty in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997.

Mr. Bush campaigned against the treaty, saying it unfairly exempts developing countries from steep cuts in energy use and emissions, while imposing stringent curbs on the United States that would hurt its economy.

European leaders nevertheless were stunned and angered when the White House last month said it would shelve the treaty. Leaders from New Zealand, Japan and several other nations also have protested the U.S. move.

European Union ministers say they want to ratify the treaty by 2002, though none of the 15 members of the union has done so as yet. Winning ratification without the United States would not be easy, since it is the world's largest consumer of energy and produces one-quarter of all man-made "greenhouse" gases.

To take effect, the treaty would have to be ratified by at least 55 nations that collectively produce 55 percent or more of the carbon dioxide and other gases thought to cause global warming. Romania is the only industrial nation so far to have ratified the treaty.

Mr. Larsson said he and other European ministers will meet in the next week with leaders from Russia, Canada, Japan, China and Iran, which currently represents a group of 77 developing countries, in an effort to win support for ratification without the United States.

Mr. Larsson acknowledged it would be difficult to curb global warming without the United States and said he was willing to consider taking a "fresh, new approach," as suggested by the Bush administration. But he said he doubted that would succeed.

"The Kyoto Protocol is still alive," he said. "No individual country has the right to declare a multilateral agreement as dead."

Phil Goff, foreign minister of New Zealand, earlier this week appeared less willing than the Europeans to go on without the United States.

"We would expect the United States to remain involved and to work with the international community to find a solution," he said.

Margot Wallstroem, the European Union's environment commissioner, warned that countries pursuing ratification without the United States might rewrite the treaty to exclude mechanisms sought by Americans to make it less costly to reduce emissions.

"The construction of the Kyoto mechanisms were American ideas from the beginning," she said. "But that will change if they withdraw."

Negotiations aimed at working out details of the Kyoto treaty collapsed at The Hague last year because Europeans were unwilling to accommodate various U.S. "mechanisms," including a proposal to allow countries to rely on carbon-absorbing forests and grasslands to achieve their emissions cuts.

Miss Wallstroem scolded the United States for putting its economy ahead of the world's climate. "Of course there is a cost to this, but there is also a cost to climate change," she said.

She added that by arguing the agreement would hurt the U.S. economy, the United States has only made it more difficult to win agreement from developing countries to reduce emissions.

"If you say we cannot afford to take action, what do you think will be the argument from the least-developed nations?" she asked.

Bush administration officials said after meeting with the Europeans that they view global warming as a real problem and are still developing a strategy to deal with it.

The administration's goal, they said, is to work with other countries to draft a new treaty that is more workable and fair at negotiations in Bonn in July.

"The Kyoto Protocol is unfair to the United States and to other industrialized nations because it exempts 80 percent of the world from compliance," said Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman.

"I am optimistic [that] we can develop technologies, market-based incentives and other innovative approaches to global climate change," she said.

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Save cows, not Blair legacy

Washington Times
Published 4/4/01
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010404-809056.htm

Like his recently retired American counterpart, British Prime Minister Tony Blair is spending the final weeks of his current term trying to guess how his legacy should best be preserved. No, he´s not trying to solve a crisis in the Middle East or in Northern Ireland. Instead, Mr. Blair has allowed himself to be carried along by the national hysteria over foot and mouth disease, a virus which is the equivalent of cows or sheep having a bad case of the flu. In a country where the prime minister can call an election on his own whim (as long as it is within five years of the last one), having what has been deemed a national disaster just prior to voting day can be helpful. That is, if Mr. Blair can paint himself the hero in this "emergency."

If he had wanted to go ahead with elections as planned May 3, he would have had to call them this week. Instead, he postponed them Monday until June 7. This was a rather unexpected move as his Labour Party had timed its budget and other significant announcements around the May date.

Unfortunately, Mr. Blair and his agriculture department took their time in acting to stop the disease. So Mr. Blair and most Cabinet ministers had been pushing for getting the problem out of the way fast (i.e., calling for the killing of almost a million cows, pigs and sheep), in time for the May vote. Then Mr. Blair came under fire from some in the farming community for this method, as they suspected he was trying to rush the election without having fully addressed how to handle the disease. "This decision to kill healthy animals was made on political grounds," spokesman Andrew Spence of the lobby group Farmers for Action told Agence France-Presse.

Instead of having the cattle, whose disease does nothing to humans and is not lethal to sheep and cows, killed en masse, critics suggest he could have a more limited number killed and the rest immunized. But that would be admitting that Britain has a problem. It could lose its disease-free status, and it would take a few extra weeks of precious time. It would mean farmers would face a ban on exports. As it is now, Mr. Blair has called out the army to build pyres to burn the carcasses and dig ditches to bury them in, the Financial Times reported.

Whether those piles of carcasses leave Mr. Blair´s legacy rotting, or make him a national hero, will depend on whether he uses the intervening time campaigning to put the needs of others the farmers, his countrymen living next to the mass graves and the cows before politics.

-------- genetics

Italian seed depot set on fire

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By ALESSSANDRA RIZZO Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406628306

ROME (AP) - Arsonists on Tuesday set fire to a Monsanto depot a week after the Italian government said tests showed genetically modified material in one of the company's seed shipments.

The two buildings that were burned early Tuesday at the depot in Lodi, 18 miles south of Milan, did not contain the seeds under suspicion but rather conventional seeds to be distributed to Italian farmers, the U.S. biotechnology company said.

Monsanto has maintained all its imported seeds were conventional, and said if there were any genetically modified organisms found, they were below the limits at which the seeds would be considered genetically engineered.

The European Union three years ago banned genetically altered foodstuffs, saying they could pose a risk to health and the environment.

At the early Tuesday fire scene, police found two containers of flammable liquid, but have not yet identified any suspects. No one was injured in the blaze.

The words ``Monsanto Killer: No GMOs,'' referring to genetically modified organisms, were spray-painted on one wall.

``Today's events are the result of a campaign of disinformation launched by some environmental groups and representatives of the political world over the last 10 days,'' Jean-Michel Duhamel, the chairman of Monsanto's Italian branch, said in a statement.

The Italian Agriculture Ministry last week said it found genetically modified material in a batch of soybean and corn seed imported from the United States last month.

The seeds that were not tested were sent to Lodi.

The company lost about 19 tons of maize and 7 tons of soybeans in the fire, and estimated its losses and damage at $160,000.

Agriculture Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio called the incident ``mysterious.''

The minister last week had called for the suspension of Monsanto's license as an importer and distributor, and called for the seeds in question to be seized.

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

Flexing Its Fiscal Soundness, Russia Will Bypass the I.M.F.

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/business/04RUBL.html

MOSCOW, April 3 - Flush with oil money and bristling with a new assertiveness, Russia is moving to shake off the training wheels of Western help, particularly from the International Monetary Fund, and manage its finances on its own.

Last week, Russia announced that it would no longer seek approval from the I.M.F. for its economic program, even though fund officials have said the program meets all their requirements. By the end of this month, it expects to catch up on all its foreign-debt arrears. And the economy is purring.

"Now we are stronger inside the country," Russia's finance minister and deputy prime minister, Aleksei Kudrin, said in an interview. "We have a balanced budget; we are conducting reforms. We can afford not to get embroiled in obligations."

As recently as two months ago, Russia was near default on the $42 billion it owes to a group of Western governments known as the Paris Club, and was asking for relief, especially from Germany, which holds about half of the debt. The request was turned down, but high oil prices and a rising growth rate provided all the relief Russia wound up needing; it is now paying both interest and principal on this Soviet-era debt.

Making its debt payments in full and turning its back on the I.M.F. would have been unthinkable for Russia three years ago, when it was mired in a deep recession after its banking system and its budget fell apart and it defaulted on its ruble- denominated debt, much of it held by foreigners. To win emergency loans, the government had to scramble to satisfy conditions imposed by the fund. Now Russia has enough cash to dispense with loans from the fund.

"They've graduated," said Al Breach, an economist at Goldman, Sachs in Moscow. "They are now standing on their own two feet and paying what they owe without any funding - that's important. It's so different from the fiscal crises of the late 1980's and 1990's."

Mr. Kudrin expressed hope that Russia's economic performance this year - he expects 4 percent growth - will put it in a better bargaining position when longer-term debts mature in future years, especially in 2003, when about $19 billion of debt payments will come due.

There is always the chance that the price of oil, Russia's main export, will fall unexpectedly and undercut its finances again. That has happened twice, with disastrous results, the last two decades, and Russia's brittle, obsolescent banking and court systems need revamping before the country will be able to absorb such shocks.

But Mr. Kudrin says Russia has already done a lot of growing up since 1998. In February, when he announced that the government's inflation forecast might be revised by one or two percentage points, Russian newspapers followed the news with a vigorous debate the next day. "We've reached the point in our development that even a correction of one point interests everyone," Mr. Kudrin said, with evident pride in the country's largely tamed inflation rate. "That didn't happen at 60 percent and 30 percent a year."

---

Hemisphere talks on trade begin

Washington Times
Published 4/4/01
World Scene
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200144211443.htm

TORONTO - Finance ministers from 34 countries in the Americas began gathering here yesterday to discuss prospects for a hemispheric free-trade agreement.

The meeting was under tight security as protesters of globalization converged near their meeting site.

The ministers are to examine initiatives for a proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by 2005, the challenges of globalization and abuses of international financial systems, including money laundering and tax evasion.

-----

Amid Doubts, W.T.O. Plans Agriculture Talks

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By ELIZABETH OLSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/business/04WTOO.html

GENEVA, April 3 - After a year of proposals and counterproposals, the member nations of the World Trade Organization have finally agreed to begin negotiations in May on freer trade in agricultural goods. An agenda for the talks was approved late last week.

But there was broad skepticism that talks on so contentious an issue could succeed without a whole new round of comprehensive trade negotiations being convened.

The talks to be held in May "are not going to be easy," said Mike Moore, the organization's director general. But the fact that they will be held at all shows "a widespread commitment to continue to reform agricultural trade," he said.

"The interests of everyone, from subsistence cultivators and herdsmen in developing countries to modern farms in the developed nations, are being pushed in these talks," he said.

Under the agenda agreement, the talks will cover a wide range of technical issues like export subsidies and credits, as well as broader questions like assuring the safety of food supplies and preserving rural life, which the recent mad cow and foot-and- mouth crises have brought to center stage in recent months.

Agriculture remains one sector in which trade is most likely to be impeded by a bewildering array of tariffs, subsidies, credits, standards and quotas. The European Union's farm policies have frequently caused friction with big agricultural exporters like Australia and the United States.

Officials of the union are eager to start the talks, and they have shown willingness to consider big changes in policy. But decades- old disputes over farm subsidies may once again prove insurmountable, trade experts said.

Differences on this and other topics helped stall efforts to begin a new global trade round in Seattle in December 1999. The agriculture talks that are to convene in May are unfinished business from the previous negotiations, known as the Uruguay round, and are expected to last a year.

Discussions on liberalizing trade in services like banking, insurance, shipping and telecommunications are also still pending from Uruguay. But here, too, many diplomats see little hope for major progress without convening a new umbrella round.

In single-sector talks, the diplomats say, there are fewer opportunities for countries to swap concessions in one area to win them in another. Barriers like the anti- dumping rules of the United States that are popular at home can become politically impregnablein such talks.

Still, developing countries, many of which are dissatisfied with the results of the Uruguay round, are resisting a new round. Mr. Moore has said he will decide by the end of July whether to try starting a new round at the ministerial meeting set for Doha, Qatar, in November.

-------- police

N.J. says cops still look at race

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By JOHN P. McALPIN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406627290

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) - Some state troopers are still practicing racial profiling on the New Jersey Turnpike despite a major reform effort, the state's attorney general told a Senate committee Tuesday.

Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. began an internal audit of last year's trooper activity after a January study showed blacks and Hispanics were being stopped more than whites. Investigators are reviewing videotapes of every motor vehicle stop by suspected troopers, Farmer told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Blacks and Hispanics are being searched much more than white drivers, Farmer said, even though reports show whites carry drugs more often than do minorities. Searches of minority drivers are also based on lower legal standards than the one troopers use for white drivers, Farmer said.

Troopers seized drugs or cash in 25 percent of their searches of whites, compared to 13 percent of searches of blacks and only 5 percent involving Hispanics, officials said.

Minorities accounted for 73 percent of people searched by troopers on the turnpike last year. In a report covering 1994 to 1996, minority motorists were involved in 84 percent of searches.

``That's astounding,'' said the Rev. Reginald Jackson, executive director of the Black Ministers Council of New Jersey. ``We've been dealing with this about three years since that admission and you see nothing done.''

The probe focuses on the Moorestown barracks of Troop D, which patrols the southern end of the highway.

Troopers are searching minority drivers based on race, and the videotapes show that, Farmer said.

``Now we have proof. Some of the video recordings confirm what the numbers suggest,'' Farmer said.

Farmer began his testimony by saying the reforms are working, but he said the numbers show the need to continue work.

Former Attorney General Peter G. Verniero, now a state Supreme Court justice, broke years of denials two years ago and acknowledged that racial profiling was real.

Verniero's admission came one year after two white troopers fired 11 shots at four unarmed minority men _ wounding three _ during a turnpike traffic stop near Trenton.

Last week, Verniero testified for nearly 13 hours and defended his actions as attorney general. On Monday, Verniero said he would not return to testify.

After replacing Verniero, Farmer agreed to a deal with the U.S. Justice Department to allow federal monitoring and oversight of state police operations.

---

DiFrancesco Considers Urging Verniero to Leave Court

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By LAURA MANSNERUS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/nyregion/04TROO.html

TRENTON, April 3 - Acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco said tonight that he would consider urging Justice Peter G. Verniero, who is at the center of a State Senate inquiry into racial profiling by the state police, to step down from the State Supreme Court.

In his first public comments on Mr. Verniero's role in the racial profiling controversy, Mr. DiFrancesco responded to reports that members of the Senate Judiciary Committee had asked for Mr. Verniero's resignation. Some committee members contend that Mr. Verniero gave misleading accounts of his response, when he was state attorney general, to complaints that minority drivers were being singled out for traffic stops on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Mr. DiFrancesco said he was troubled by "allegations that he wasn't as candid as he should have been," and would tell the committee in a day or two whether he would press Mr. Verniero to resign.

After 13 hours of questioning last Wednesday, Mr. Verniero was chastised by the committee's chairman, Senator William L. Gormley, who said he was dissatisfied with the testimony and asked Mr. Verniero to return. Yesterday, Mr. Verniero said he would not appear again.

In testimony today, Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. released data showing that black drivers are still more likely than white drivers to undergo searches on the turnpike, and that in searches they are half as likely to be found with contraband.

Mr. Farmer acknowledged the continuing disparities in traffic stops and searches, and he described a chasm between the state police and civil rights advocates that "has been painful to live and now to relive."

The committee met with Mr. DiFrancesco today after hearing from Mr. Farmer and the state police superintendent, Col. Carson Dunbar. Senator Gormley would say only that the committee had briefed the acting governor on the hearings.

But in an interview tonight with radio station NJ-FM (101.5), Mr. DiFrancesco said, "Most of the Judiciary Committee members are upset by the sequence of events, by the timing of all this, what was said or not said."

Much of the testimony in the hearings has focused on Mr. Verniero's quick reversal on racial profiling, which he had not acknowledged for more than two years, in the weeks after he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1999. In his confirmation hearings, he said his office had begun to collect data about a year earlier; by some other accounts, the office had statistical evidence of discrimination by the state police as early as 1996.

Mr. DiFrancesco said he was reviewing materials given to him by the committee. Asked whether he would urge Mr. Verniero to resign if he was convinced that the justice was not fit to serve, he said, "I'm going through that process now."

Mr. Farmer testified today that the federal monitors who have been overseeing the state police for two years were pleased with the steps taken to discourage profiling, and he promised, "I want to get this right."

Still, the data he released today were similar to those reported two years ago by Mr. Verniero's office, and they show only modest improvement from those found in sketchy surveys from 1994 to 1996. The state police gathered those statistics after a judge found "de facto racial profiling" on the turnpike; many witnesses in the current hearings have tried to explain why that information remained in a file drawer in the attorney general's office for three years.

When asked whether the disparities in the new data demonstrated racial profiling, Mr. Farmer said, "Looks that way to me."

The survey found that last year, black drivers accounted for 32 percent of turnpike stops and 46 percent of searches, while white drivers accounted for 54 of the stops and 27 percent of the searches, and Hispanic drivers for 8 percent of the stops and 25 percent of the searches.

In 1995, according to one state police internal survey covering only the southern part of the turnpike, black and Hispanic drivers made up 62 percent of those undergoing consent searches. Another sampling, reported in a memo that warned, "We are in a very bad spot," found that much higher percentages were minorities.

But at least in last year's data, the percentage of searches yielding criminal evidence is much higher for whites: 25 percent for white drivers, 13 percent for black drivers and 5 percent for Hispanic drivers.

Several members of the Senate committee, pointing out that the police are apparently focusing on drivers who are less likely to be carrying contraband, suggested an end to searches without probable cause.

Those searches, called consent searches because a trooper must get a driver's permission first, are considered a better indicator of racial discrimination than the rate at which drivers are stopped. In New Jersey, a consent search requires a reasonable suspicion of contraband.

Even though a driver signs a form, said Senator John A. Lynch, a Democratic committee member, "It's a ruse; it's not consent at all."

---

Philadelphia Monitor Takes Police to Task

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By FRANCIS X. CLINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/national/04PHIL.html

PHILADELPHIA, April 3 - Ellen Ceisler dutifully heads into work each morning as something of a civilian pariah, the lone court-appointed auditor of the Philadelphia Police Department's chronically scandalous attempts at self-discipline. She seems no match for the larger- than-life statue she passes - that of the late mayor and police commissioner Frank L. Rizzo, whose iron-fisted defense of the police knew no bounds.

"Some people joke that Rizzo ought to be holding civilian complaint forms in his hand," notes Ms. Ceisler, director of the Police Integrity and Accountability Office. But she is hardly laughing as she monitors a 20-year record of hundreds of internal police cases that have led her to conclude in a new study that the department's discipline of its officers has ranged from "inscrutable" to "dysfunctional," with wayward officers often unpunished in the face of union prerogatives and a questionable arbitration system.

"Some of these officers, because of their known propensity towards violence, instability, anger or histories of drug and alcohol abuse, pose a danger not only to citizens who live and work in this city, and the people who pass through it, but also to the other officers with whom they work," Ms. Ceisler warned in her report.

The report concluded that the department was making attempts at progress but needed a far greater effort against entrenched abuses. Ms. Ceisler criticized the arbitration process for reinstating officers despite evidence of misconduct including drug use, theft, and physical abuse and sexual harassment of civilians. In one case, she cited the failure to discipline an officer despite "overwhelming evidence" that he had left a shooting victim to die in the street.

Ms. Ceisler, a former investigative journalist, admits that she expected her study to draw little attention in a city so inured to its traditions. Her oversight job was created after a notorious bout of corruption in the 1990's, which can seem like ancient history in this hard-driving place of cyclical police scandal. At that time, the city had to scrap hundreds of criminal prosecutions and pay tens of millions of dollars in damages when a ring of officers in the 39th district were found rigging allegations and evidence against innocent blacks.

As Ms. Ceisler's study was issued last month, the administration of Mayor John F. Street was coincidentally embarrassed by headlines about a three-year-old incident of police misconduct. Department investigators found that officers had staged a midnight traffic accident to prevent the potential firing of a homicide commander who had crashed his unmarked car while drunk, then lied along with others in a cover-up.

"I believe in redemption," Police Commissioner John F. Timoney said as the story broke in The Inquirer and he had to defend his decision to mete out only a mild suspension to the commander. "Take your medicine like a good soldier," Commissioner Timoney said, contending that the police union would have reversed any stronger punishment in an arbitration appeal.

But, in the glare of headlines, Mayor Street found the medicine shockingly innocuous. "There shouldn't be a double standard," he said last week as he appointed a task force to study discipline problems and bolster public confidence in the police.

At his side, a chastened Commissioner Timoney transferred the accused commander, Capt. James J. Brady, from homicide to the night squad that officers commonly refer to as Siberia. Of the earlier punishment, Commissioner Timoney said, "Upon reflection, I believe that was not a good decision."

Commissioner Timoney was recruited from the New York City Police Department three years ago to run the often unruly department of 7,000 officers here. In her report, Ms. Ceisler praised him as a leader of the drive for stronger discipline. But she also concluded that the city must do a far better job of investigating complaints, of facing up to the union and of pressing cases through the maze of hearing and arbitration procedures that, she warned, is itself a big part of the disciplinary problem.

"The arbitrators have become super-commissioners, in effect," Ms. Ceisler said in an interview. "The department needs to figure out what its values and standards are and stick by them."

The police union, the Fraternal Order of Police, was defended by its president, Richard Costello, who described Ms. Ceisler's report as "woefully inadequate and incomplete." Mr. Costello said a "lynch mob mentality" was at work, with officers' civil rights at stake in the growing criticism of the arbitration process. The union represents almost the entire department in this pro-union city and has succeeded in reversing about 90 percent of the misconduct findings routinely appealed to the private arbitrators, chosen jointly under the contract between the union and the city.

Mr. Costello denies complaints that the union can afford high- paid defense lawyers to best the department's overworked disciplinary staff.

"They're losing cases because they continue to make the same mistakes over and over again," he said, alleging department "arrogance" and attempts at "punishment by headline."

But critics of the union stress that the commissioner has authority to appoint only a very few of his top aides, and say he is no match for the union in the power politics of this city.

"It's a horror show here," said Dr. James J. Fyfe, a former New York City police officer who is a specialist in police misbehavior as a professor at Temple University. "A film noir."

Dr. Fyfe has been studying the Police Department here for 20 years as an academic and Justice Department consultant, and has concluded that it is one of the worst in the nation for lax discipline, excessive union power and an arbitration process that favors the police and cuts off most city appeals to the courts.

Critics of the department praise Commissioner Timoney's efforts to fight the Fraternal Order of Police, or F.O.P., by appointing a more aggressive inquiry prosecutor and by requiring fuller disclosure of disciplinary findings. He has also been seeking state legislation to gain a stronger hand to fire the sort of abusive officers who Ms. Ceisler concluded are too often reinstated by arbitrators.

"In past contract negotiations, when the city wouldn't pay its police what they deserved, in return the control of the adjudicatory processes was turned over to the F.O.P.," said Stefan Presser, legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania. "Now it's time for the city to bite the bullet," he said, and be more aggressive in negotiating to reclaim control.

---

Committee Asks for Verniero's Resignation

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/nyregion/04WEB-TROOPERS.html

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- Supreme Court Justice Peter G. Verniero should resign because he ignored evidence of racial profiling while attorney general and misled a Senate committee, the senators who approved his nomination said Wednesday.

In a letter to Acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco, all 11 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said he should urge Verniero to resign immediately.

Evidence presented in six days of hearings showed Verniero was personally aware of racial profiling at least three years before he admitted it publicly, the letter said.

"Then Attorney General Verniero had substantial notice of recent relevant profiling evidence and chose to ignore it," the letter states, "or to withhold it from the Department of Justice and other officials within the Department of Law and Public Safety."

DiFrancesco's office received the letter Wednesday morning. On Tuesday night, the acting governor met with the committee privately for more than an hour.

"As he said last night he wants to review the testimony and he considers this a very serious matter," DiFrancesco spokeswoman Jayne O'Connor said Wednesday.

Verniero's attorney Robert Mintz did not immediately return a call for comment Wednesday.

After his meeting with lawmakers Tuesday, DiFrancesco said he needed time to consider the request.

"You'll know in a day or two what my answer is," DiFrancesco said in a radio interview, adding that he is reviewing materials given to him by committee members.

"Obviously, I am greatly concerned by much of what was characterized as difficult testimony," DiFrancesco said.

The acting governor listened to a summary of testimony as well as the feelings senators had after listening to key witnesses, state Sen. William L. Gormley, R-Atlantic, said Tuesday.

Gormley, the committee chairman, was the only legislator to speak publicly immediately after the hour-long meeting with the governor.

"He listened," Gormley said. "He wants to make sure that we all work together, Republicans and Democrats alike, to make sure New Jersey is a state that becomes known for ending racial profiling."

Tuesday's hearings ended after testimony by state police Superintendent Carson Dunbar and Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr., who said racial profiling still exists in New Jersey.

Last week Verniero testified for nearly 13 hours and defended his actions while he was attorney general. Gormley accused the former attorney general of giving "misleading" answers to questions about profiling during his confirmation hearings two years ago.

Verniero said Monday he would not return to testify.

In April 1999, Verniero became the first attorney general to admit publicly that state troopers were engaging in racial profiling. Verniero's admission came one year after two white troopers fired 11 shots at four unarmed minority men -- wounding three -- during a traffic stop near Trenton on the New Jersey Turnpike.

---

From Court Order to Reality:
A Diverse Boston Police Force

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By C. J. CHIVERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/nyregion/04POLI.html

BOSTON - After more than a quarter-century of court-ordered diversification, the police here have achieved one of law enforcement's more elusive goals: a force in which the proportion of blacks in uniform approximates the proportion of black residents in the city.

The integration of Boston's blue line is in many ways the straightforward consequence of an activist federal court that forced the police, just as it forced the schools, to provide more minority access. A 1973 consent decree, still in effect, requires the department to select recruits from a list that includes one minority candidate for every white.

But the force's integration success also results from a department whose leadership has come to accept one of the court's underlying propositions: that something approaching racial balancing - a police force whose demographics match those of the city - can improve not just the social climate but the effectiveness of the police as well.

To this end, as white men have challenged the consent decree in court, saying it is unconstitutional and a tool that has outlived its usefulness, the city has fought to keep it in effect. It has also pursued administrative measures that could ensure that a proportionate number of minority applicants will be hired and promoted should the consent decree expire or fall in a court challenge.

For example, the department now actively recruits applicants with specialized language skills, is overhauling promotion rules in a way that could advance more minority officers, and recruits only city residents, which provides a proportionally more diverse group of applicants than if it accepted suburban residents, too.

Police Commissioner Paul F. Evans summarized the official sentiment this way: "I'm an attorney, and I know the arguments for and against affirmative action well enough to argue either side. But I'm also a practical person and police commander, and I know that having African-American and Hispanic and Vietnamese officers, people of different backgrounds and cultures who can conduct comfortable interviews with crime victims and can infiltrate crime rings that aren't white - I know the need for that is just common sense."

Mr. Evans and others said the department seemed to have both improved its reputation and successfully combatted crime during the period diversity took hold. The department has helped bring about a decade of declines in serious crime in the city, with the reductions achieved in everything from homicide to car theft.

And James J. Fyfe, a criminologist at Temple University and a former New York City police officer, said that in recent years the Boston department had simultaneously repaired much of its image as insensitive and insular.

Those troubles were perhaps no more rawly in evidence than in 1989, when the Boston police swept through Roxbury, a black neighborhood, stopping and interrogating scores of black men and youths in pursuit of what they believed was the killer of a pregnant white woman. The authorities eventually concluded that the killer was the woman's husband, Charles Stuart, who committed suicide. The handling of the case led to several investigations into the Police Department's treatment of the city's black residents.

"During the 1970's and 1980's I could have made a very good living as an expert in civil rights cases in Boston," Dr. Fyfe said. "That, interestingly, has changed. It's very clear that something dramatic has happened."

The effects of the court order and the department's internal efforts are also apparent in a comparison with New York. In the mid-1970's, 3.5 percent of the officers in Boston were black men. Since then, the percentage has increased to 18.8. When black women are added, the proportion climbs to 24.6 percent, which exceeds the Census Bureau's latest count of black representation in the city.

During the same period in New York, the police increased the percentage of male black officers to 9.2 from 7.7. With black women, representation reaches 14 percent, slightly more than half of the census's estimate of black residents.

Certainly, Boston has enjoyed greater success in part because it operates with different standards than New York. Boston accepts high school graduates as recruits, while since the mid-1990's New York has required two years of college for almost all recruits, a standard that disproportionately disqualifies minority applicants. Further, New York has no residency requirement, having relied on applicants from the suburbs to populate its ranks.

And some of Boston's diversification seems connected to one of its attractive benefits: pay. Police officers start here at about $40,000 a year, compared with $31,305 in New York. Wearing a police uniform in Boston can be so lucrative that newspapers make sport of publishing lists of the city's highest paid officers, who double, even triple, their salaries with overtime, detail pay or other bonuses. The most recent roster, published in The Boston Herald, included 11 officers who earned more than $200,000 in 2000, and 727 who earned more than $100,000. The department has roughly 2,200 officers.

"Financially, it's the best job in Boston for someone with a high school diploma," said Leonard C. Alkins, president of the Boston branch of the N.A.A.C.P.

In New York, Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik declined to comment on Boston's police demographics. But black officers and others in New York said they were impressed that Boston, where residents defied school integration in the 1970's, had moved so far ahead of New York in integrating blacks.

"It is impossible to review this and not conclude that some of the reason the department has diversified has come from the top," said Toni G. Wolfman, a Boston lawyer who has defended Boston's consent decree in court. "When the person at the top is pushing, things have a chance of getting done."

And they note that while the consent decree has been the primary force of change, the department and the city have created qualifications and programs that all but ensure that more minority applicants will be hired.

One change can be attributed to the City Council and Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who in 1994 enacted an ordinance mandating that municipal employees be city residents. Others stem from decisions by Mr. Evans.

In 1994, Mr. Evans examined Civil Service law and found that he could hire applicants with special skills regardless of their test scores, as long as they passed the exam. The commissioner declared that speaking French Creole was a special skill, saying the department needed Creole-speaking officers to improve policing in Haitian neighborhoods. Since then, the department has hired 11 black officers of Haitian descent, and the commissioner has extended the special skills designation to speakers of Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish.

Mr. Evans also overhauled the department's cadet program, which guarantees cadets a job after two years as long as they have passing test scores and there are vacancies. Cadets are not covered by the consent decree, and police officials said the program had become a subterfuge to elude the court order and preserve patronage and nepotism. From 1993 to 1996, 96.5 percent of the cadets were white.

At Mr. Evans's insistence, the program began energetically recruiting minority trainees, who account for 42 percent of the cadets today, said Edward P. Callahan, the department's director of human resources.

Boston's police force also has a larger share of black supervisors than New York's, and again judicial intervention helps account for it. From 1980 to 1999, a court order required that the department increase its numbers of black sergeants. Although the court order was successfully challenged by white officers, black men today represent 14.3 percent of Boston's sergeants and 8.7 percent of its captains, compared with 5.7 percent and 2 percent in New York.

Boston police officials say the department is determined not to lose ground with black supervisors, and has hired a consultant, Morris & McDaniel Inc. of Virginia, to recommend changes to the Civil Service tests that govern promotion. Historically, the tests have resulted in a disproportionate number of white officers' gaining promotions.

Mr. Evans does not hide his disappointment over the tests, not just because they seem to be skewed against minority officers, he said, but because they do not provide a meaningful measuring stick of who should get rank.

"The best indicator of future performance, of leadership, is past performance," he said. "Our current Civil Service doesn't really look at performance. It looks at what someone scores on a multiple choice test. If we were in the private sector, we'd go bankrupt if we promoted that way."

Recommendations for another promotion system are not yet public. Dr. David M. Morris, the consultant who is preparing them, said he might propose a selection process, called an assessment center, which could include exams that cover practical skills, an oral question-and-answer session in front of multiple observers, or both.

"This is not an affirmative action gimmick," Mr. Morris said. "We believe you can have two things: a higher quality supervisor, someone who has been promoted by relevant selection procedures, and you can have diversity, too."

To be certain, diversification has not occurred without consequences.

In practice, the consent decree has meant that the department has bypassed some whites to hire blacks and Hispanics with lower test scores. The department is defending discrimination lawsuits from whites who claim that the decree is not likely to pass constitutional muster, although it has in the past.

"The way the Police Department is doing this now, using separate standards to achieve strict racial balancing, is unconstitutional on its face," said Michael C. McLaughlin, a lawyer representing a white male applicant. "Think about this: whites are being denied jobs only because of their race."

Black officers also have complaints over what they see as unequal outcomes of the department's disciplinary and assignment policies, and the lack of access by minority officers to vigorous union representation - all similar to complaints among black officers in New York.

They also describe difficulties in some Boston neighborhoods where, as one officer said, "the only real cop in the eyes of the people is white, Irish and male."

"This is still a work in progress," said Officer Larry Brown, president of the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers.

And even after nearly 30 years of court-enforced remedy, and a clear change in the composition of the ranks, police diversity faces obstacles.

Mr. Alkins said the department would attract more black men if the city were not living under its legacy of racism, illustrated most powerfully by the busing protests in the 1970's. He noted that in 1999 a black lieutenant found a crime-scene tape, knotted into a noose, dangling above his motorcycle - a sign to many blacks that pockets of racism endure within the department.

"We are still in a situation where there are African-Americans who believe that they should not take this job," Mr. Alkins said. "They think, `Who's going to watch my back when I go in there, with all that racist history?' "

Mr. Evans and others say that the recruiting is not as difficult as that, and that with diversification has come a reduced degree of public animus and suspicion.

But he acknowledged: "We've got a deep, deep racial history. There's a lot of history in this city that we work every day to overcome."

---

City to pay $31,500 for jailing 3 men naked

USA Today
04/04/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-04-04-naked.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nweird/nweird.htm

KALAMAZOO, Mich. (AP) - The City Commission has agreed to pay $31,500 to three men who were stripped of their clothing and jailed naked by police officers under a suicide prevention policy.

The city has a policy of removing the clothing of inmates who are considered potentially suicidal but a shortage of anti-suicide gowns were cited in the three cases.

The commission on Monday agreed to pay $19,500 to Beryl Wilson, $9,500 to Michael A. Moran and $2,500 to Ricardo Montalvo.

The payments were issued to settle federal lawsuits filed after Wilson complained he was jailed naked for eight hours in 1999 after a misdemeanor arrest.

"These guys settled because they wanted to get on with their lives and not drag it out through the trial process," said their attorney, James Hyman.

Officers stripped Moran after a 1998 arrest, jailing him overnight in what he called "a humiliating and embarrassing tragedy."

---

Philadelphia cops shake up internal discipline board

USA Today
04/04/2001
http://www.usatoday.com/news/digest/nd1.htm

PHILADELPHIA - The city's police commissioner has named a new head of the department's internal discipline board in the wake of allegations that officers covered up a captain's alcohol-related traffic accident. Lt. Jacqueline Daley, a 19-year police veteran, will head the Police Board of Inquiry. She is the first lawyer ever to head the board. In her new job, Daley will be responsible for presenting evidence from internal police investigations to a three-member jury of officers.

---

USA Today
04/04/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Mississippi

Biloxi - Sheriff George Payne will bring in extra deputies for Black Springbreak as authorities and businesses prepare for this weekend's event. The Board of Supervisors gave Payne authority to pay the expenses for the additional lawmen. Local authorities were ill-prepared last year to deal with the traffic and disorderly conduct from 30,000 college students on spring break.

-------- spying

China yields to US pressure

Australian News Network
04apr01
http://news.com.au/newspulse/pulseframe/0,4711,1861816^2,00.html

THE American ambassador said yesterday that China agreed to let diplomats see the 24 crew members of a US Navy spy plane being held on a tropical Chinese island.

Ambassador Joseph Prueher, said the meeting was to take place last night ending a wait of more than two days that prompted complaints by US President George W. Bush.

The unarmed EP-3 surveillance plane made an emergency landing on Sunday at a Chinese naval air base on Hainan island after an in-flight collision with a Chinese fighter jet. China says the fighter pilot parachuted out and is missing.

"We had a meeting with Assistant Foreign Minister Zhou Wenzhong at the Foreign Ministry where he gave us the expectation that we will see the crew this evening. And we are expecting to do that," Mr Prueher said.

Three US diplomats, including military attache Army Brigadier-General Neal Sealock, said they were ready to meet the crew "as soon as possible".

China said a massive search by planes and ships had turned up no sign of its missing pilot.

Chinese President Jiang Zemin expressed "great concern for the safety of the missing pilot," according to Xinhua newsagency.

US officials have complained that China was slow in responding to diplomatic contacts. It is not unusual for China's secretive bureaucratic system to take a long time to make decisions, especially where the military or national security concerns are involved.

The collision occurred over the South China Sea about 100km southeast of Hainan.

The US military said the plane was on a routine surveillance mission in international air space. After its left wing and the left-most of its four engines were damaged, the pilot put out a distress call and landed at the nearest airfield on Hainan.

US officials said China did not respond to an offer to help search for its missing pilot.

China said the American pilot caused the crash by suddenly veering into the Chinese jet, one of two sent up to follow the plane. However, US military authorities said it was more likely that the faster, lighter Chinese plane brushed against the lumbering propeller-driven EP-3, which is about the size of a 150-seater commercial jetliner.

It was still unclear whether Chinese experts had tried to examine the EP-3's hi-tech surveillance equipment. US officials said the plane shouldn't be boarded without the commander's permission.

US officials said the last communication from the plane's crew on Monday was that armed Chinese soldiers were boarding the aircraft, raising concerns over the security of one of the most technologically sophisticated US surveillance planes.

The aircraft is a potential treasure trove of military intelligence for China.

Chinese officials disputed US assertion over the inspection of the plane saying they had the right to inspect the US Navy surveillance plane despite the US claim that it is protected American territory, a spokesman of China's Foreign Ministry said.

"Based on Chinese law, and international practice, we have the right to conduct an investigation," spokesman, Zhu Bangzao, said.

However, he refused to say whether Chinese military officials have boarded the US spy plane since it landing on Sunday.

Mr Zhu also quoted Mr Jiang as saying the US should stop reconnaissance flights near the Chinese coast.

---

China's demands prolong dispute
Downed spy plane gives China leverage to ask for US apology and policy changes.

Christian Science Monitor
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 4, 2001
By Robert Marquand Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/04/04/fpcon-intl.shtml

BEIJING - The White House demand for a "prompt return" of the 24 crew members of a US Navy surveillance plane was met with counter demands from Chinese President Jiang Zemin yesterday.

Mr. Jiang suggested that resolution of this international stand-off - and the release of the American crew - may hinge on a US agreement to stop flying surveillance missions off China's coast, and a US apology.

In laying out for the first time the Chinese view of the event, officials here yesterday painted an entirely different picture of the collision on Sunday, with Chinese officials refuting US claims nearly point by point.

The unexpectedly tough Chinese position, one in which the Chinese vociferously argue they are "victims," suggests the South China Sea case is fast moving from an isolated incident into a broader confrontation with the US - and may indicate that a resolution won't come quickly.

US officials met with the entire Navy crew yesterday on the island of Hainan. But at press time, there was no information about when the crew members would be released.

Such a meeting is itself not necessarily a breakthrough. It takes place in accordance with a US-Chinese consular agreement signed in 1979 by then President Jimmy Carter. The agreement requires the country detaining a US or Chinese foreign national to allow a consular visit within 48 hours of notification. Since Chinese officials first confirmed the presence of the aircrew Sunday night, Tuesday night was the deadline for a visit.

In two separate press briefings here yesterday, Chinese officials refuted almost every point regarding the incident made Monday in Washington and by US Ambassador Joseph Prueher here in Beijing. Western analysts here suggest that the Chinese may were making public a detailed version of events before US officials spoke with the Navy crew.

US officials responded by saying there will be no apology, and privately expressed dismay and some gloom about the prospects for a speedy end to the affair.

The US, for example, says the plane was operating in international air space when it was hit. The Chinese jet fighter was 400 meters away when the EP-3 Navy turboprop aircraft suddenly swerved into it, said a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman yesterday. The Chinese yesterday offered an unusual interpretation of international law - saying that the US flight was contravening UN maritime law by operating above a Chinese "economic exclusion zone" that while not strictly Chinese airspace, falls under a category of law that binds military flights to a higher standard of culpability than ordinary civil aviation. US officials claim they were flying in international airspace.

While the US argued the EP-3 aircraft landed legally after sending out a "Mayday" signal; the Chinese say it landed illegally, without permission, and that no signal was given.

The US says the aircrew is immune from Chinese law and that an airplane landing in an emergency is sovereign territory. The Chinese say there is no immunity and no sovereignty.

"There is no immunity," stated Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao at a press conference yesterday. "How is it that American territory has moved to Chinese land? We don't recognize such sovereignty."

When asked about President George Bush's request for a quick return of the crew and plane - a request that did not go over well in China, which probably lost a pilot during Sunday's incident - Mr. Zhu responded: "This is a serious incident, the US is responsible, and it should take effective measures to stop this from happening again. What the US side should do is to make an explanation to the Chinese government and people ... instead of raising these sort of demands, and shirking its responsibilities."

Why China wants to escalate what is already a tragedy into an international event with broader implications is a source of much puzzlement. Experts offer a cornucopia of causes, many of which may be true at the same time, including the possibility that the tough line is simply a temporary ploy that designed to get the get Washington's attention.

"I think it tells us a lot more about the internal political dynamics of China than it does about any [Chinese] assessment of this incident," says Robert Manning, director of Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. "Politically in China, you don't get anywhere by being soft on the US."

Mr. Manning says that China's response "starts from a sense of aggrievement that has accumulated," citing NATO's accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, the fact that China's 2000 Olympics bid was blocked, and a pending decision on the sale of US destroyers to Taiwan. "I don't think they've thought through the larger consequences [of their response]."

Among other reasons being discussed by China analysts: Beijing does not like the sterner position on China taken by the Bush administration; they may be striking out at the new White House to show disapproval and to keep the new president off balance. Officials may feel an international incident will exploit sharp differences on how to handle China within the US foreign-policy establishment - pitting hawks against doves.

The "China is a great power" argument is another possibility. China as the preeminent power in Asia does not want to be dictated to by others, and wants US spy missions stopped. China naturally wants to show its people it won't be pushed around. China may feel the White House has already decided to sell high-tech weapons to Taiwan, and this is a preemptive warning about how the future will look. China may also feel the US does not have the stomach or popular mandate for a prolonged confrontation with China.

Again, by making claims of "jurisdiction" over wide swaths of the South China Sea and its airspace, Beijing may feel it is inching closer toward claims of that water and air space.

And China may simply be escalating the incident before releasing the crew members, but keeping the sophisticated spy plane for an extended period.

The difficulty in reading the Chinese position was illustrated yesterday when a Reuters correspondent asked whether the Chinese were worried this incident might negatively affect a pending US decision on arms sales to Taiwan, and a pending Olympics bid. "How can you put Taiwan arms sales and the Olympic Games together? They have no connection?" Mr. Zhu remarked.

---

Plane in China called 'Big Look'

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By NANCY BENAC Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406628342

WASHINGTON (AP) - The main spy system on the U.S. Navy plane that's being held in China is called ``Big Look'' _ and does it ever.

From a ``radome'' under the front of the plane and from covered pods called ``canoes'' on the aircraft's top and underside, dozens of sensitive antennae pick up signals from radar, radio, cell phones, perhaps even e-mail.

``It's got more antennae than a dog has fleas,'' John Pike, a private military analyst, said Tuesday. ``The communist Chinese would love to pop those canoes off and get a look.''

The EP-3E Aires II plane made an emergency landing Sunday at a Chinese naval air base after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The Pentagon says its 24 crew members, still detained in China, sent a message that they began destroying the plane's intelligence-gathering equipment and information before landing.

One of only a dozen such planes in operation, the aircraft uses a complex combination of receivers, antennae, computers, displays and recording devices to intercept radar and other communications signals up to 460 miles away.

Put more simply, ``The airplane is basically a really big flying tape recorder,'' said Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a private defense policy organization.

U.S. officials bristle at talk that the plane was spying on China.

``Spies take part in espionage, and that's not at all what we're talking about here,'' said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley. ``This was overt, routine surveillance and reconnaissance.''

Spying or not, virtually anything transmitted through the air would be within reach.

``You're sort of sensing the air,'' said Daniel Goure, a former Pentagon official now at the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va.

With the plane's capabilities, the United States could pluck all sorts of information from the atmosphere. The specific characteristics of Chinese radar sites on land, at sea, even on planes would be of particular significance.

Armed with that information, U.S. officials could develop ways to jam and neutralize the radars, said Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the private National Security Archive.

Tracking communications among Chinese military leaders and units also could help U.S. officials determine locations of military forces and ships, their capabilities, how frequently they go on maneuvers, even how well-trained they are.

Operating to the south of China as it was, the plane's focus most likely was Chinese naval operations, Goure said.

In 1996, the six-plane squadron that includes the aircraft on the ground in China flew 1,319 sorties and picked up 2,911 signals of ``tactical significance'' from land, sea and planes in targeted countries and located 72 ``nonfriendly'' submarines, according to an annual history of the squadron obtained by Richelson.

Were the Chinese to be able to analyze what the United States was learning from the plane, they could figure out ``how leaky their system is,'' says Goure.

``Then they could change what they do and make it much tougher for us to get the information next time around,'' he added.

Paul Beaver of Jane's Information Group, publisher of Jane's Defense Weekly, said China also might gain insights into how the United States deals with electronic warfare, which could have implications for U.S. allies such as Japan and Taiwan that use American technology.

``The Chinese could counter their systems as well,'' said Beaver. ``We literally don't know the scope of what damage this could do if the Chinese in fact boarded the plane.''

Joseph Prueher, the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, said Tuesday on ABC, ``We have every reason to think the Chinese have been all over the airplane.''

The plane's main antenna is known as ``Big Look'' and is housed in a flat, elliptical dome under the fuselage that is 12 feet in diameter and 3 feet deep. Dozens more antennae are found in upper and lower housings known as canoes.

The plane's interior features rows of radar consoles running down both sides, with huge racks of computers and 19 work stations, where technicians search for, collect and interpret information. A folding ladder is stored inside the cabin for boarding and deplaning. The lavatory and galley are in the rear.

Sophisticated as its intelligence-gathering techniques are, the four-engine turboprop is anything but nimble in flight _ a ``flying pig'' is how one military commander described it Tuesday _ it lumbers along at about 345 mph.

---

Bush urges China to release crew

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406627403

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush warned China on Tuesday that it risks damaging relations with the United States unless it quickly releases the American crew of a damaged Navy spy plane.

``It is time for our servicemen and women to return home,'' Bush said at the White House. ``It is time for the Chinese government to return our plane.''

Bush said he wanted to give China time to respond to the weekend episode to prevent the stalemate from escalating into a full-fledged crisis. But, the president said, a grace period was quickly running out.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, using harsher language than the White House, said the 24 crew members were in Chinese ``detention.''

``They're being held incommunicado under circumstances that I don't find acceptable,'' Powell told reporters traveling with him from Florida to Washington. ``The Chinese have said they're being protected _ I don't know from what. In my judgment, they're being detained.''

Asked whether he considered the crew hostages, Powell said: ``I don't know I'd want to characterize it in a legal status. ... I don't know if that's the right word because no demands have been placed.''

``I prefer the word they're being 'detained,''' he said.

Powell told reporters he heard there were suggestions that China is seeking a U.S. apology for the collision between the spy plane and a Chinese fighter on Sunday.

``We have nothing to apologize for,'' Powell said. ``We did not do anything wrong. Our airplane was in international airspace, an accident took place and the pilot, in order to save 24 lives, including his own, under circumstances we now have determined must have been hair-raising, safely got that plane on the ground.''

Bush said he had talked to Army Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock, the U.S. Embassy defense attache in Beijing who participated in a meeting earlier in the day with the 24 crew members _ 21 men and three women _ on China's Hainan island.

``The general tells me they are in good health, they suffered no injuries and they have not been mistreated. I know this is a relief to their loved ones,'' Bush said.

``The crew members expressed their faith in America, and we have faith in them,'' the president said. ``They're looking forward to coming home and we are looking forward to bringing them home.''

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the crew was being kept in guest houses _ two to a unit, with the exception of the pilot, who was being held alone.

Despite the president's appeal, there were few indications China was ready yet to give back either the crew or the equipment-laden aircraft, which was more heavily damaged in the collision than originally reported. The senior official said two of four propellers were damaged as well as the nose cone, wing flaps and equipment indicating the plane's air speed. The plane plummeted 8,000 feet at one point, said the official, who called the pilot's efforts extraordinary.

It was not clear whether Chinese officials had tampered with the plane, said the official, who has worked closely with Bush on the situation.

Aides said the president wanted to be careful not to inflame the situation further by issuing hard demands or a timetable for the release of the crew. His statement was intended to be firm but patient, aides said.

Bush has refrained from talking to Chinese leaders himself, allowing aides to work through channels established by the Chinese. But officials suggested that Bush might become personally involved if the crew was not returned soon.

Richard Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, was summoning China's ambassador, Yang Jiechi, to reinforce Bush's message, a senior U.S. official said.

Officials said Bush's national security team was considering a range of options in the event China does not act quickly. The options, which the officials said had not reached Bush's desk, included canceling Bush's planned trip to Beijing _ announced just last month during a White House visit by China's deputy prime minister _ and withdrawing some diplomats from China.

Bush made his public remarks several hours after a U.S. diplomatic team met with the crew. Powell said of that meeting, ``I hope that is the beginning of an end to this incident.''

The EP-3E Aries II electronic eavesdropping plane made an emergency landing on the tropical island after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet that had shadowed it over the South China Sea.

Several U.S. officials said the Chinese wanted a government apology before allowing the crew to leave China, but the senior administration official speaking for Bush said the United States had nothing to apologize for.

``This accident has the potential of undermining our hopes for a fruitful and productive relationship between our two countries,'' Bush said. ``To keep that from happening, our servicemen and women need to come home.''

The senior administration official said there was no evidence that the crew had been interrogated. The official refrained from calling the crew prisoners or hostages _ another sign that Bush wants to prevent the situation from being inflamed.

Congress took note of the dispute Tuesday night, with the House approving a resolution condemning China's human rights record. Lawmakers cited the detention of the 24 U.S. service members as an example of how the Chinese violate people's rights.

China blamed the American plane for causing the collision and said it landed illegally on Chinese territory. The Chinese fighter that collided with the Navy spy plane crashed and its pilot remains missing.

Chinese President Jiang Zemin urged the United States to stop surveillance flights off the country's coasts. A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, said he doubted that would happen.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman also dismissed U.S. claims that the plane was sovereign American territory and therefore Chinese officials had no right to board it. He refused to say whether they had done so already, although U.S. officials in Washington said they believed that had occurred.

A senior U.S. defense official said the spy plane's crew said in a message as it prepared for its emergency landing that they had begun destroying sensitive intelligence-collection equipment and information.

---

China caught off guard by collision

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By JOE McDONALD Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406628354

BEIJING (AP) _ After a U.S. Navy spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet and landed on Chinese soil, American officials waited for China to respond. And they waited. And waited.

For two days, Chinese leaders said nothing in public and seemed to be deciding how to satisfy China's public and politically influential military while still hoping for good relations with the new Bush administration.

``The government doesn't want to deal with this problem hastily,'' said Zhang Yebai, a foreign policy expert at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. ``China doesn't want to ruin relations with the United States, but Chinese leaders also have to pay attention to public opinion.''

So Chinese leaders have given mixed signals on how hard a line they are taking on the incident _ how much anger to show at U.S. surveillance off their coasts and what to do with the 24-member crew and the plane itself, stuffed with hi-tech equipment. China finally allowed U.S. diplomats to see the crew Tuesday, but there is so far no word on when they will be allowed to leave.

In Washington, a senior Bush administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, suggested an even more serious reason for the delay: a possible squabble for control between political and military leaders.

The air collision couldn't come at a more complex time in U.S.-Chinese ties, strained by disputes over human rights and American weapons sales to rival Taiwan.

Beijing wants U.S. support to win membership in the World Trade Organization. It has expressed outrage at a measure introduced in Congress opposing Beijing's bid to host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

The United States is both China's biggest export market and the country viewed by more hawkish Chinese as the biggest obstacle to achieving its political and military ambitions.

Beijing sent its deputy premier to Washington last month in hopes of getting relations with Bush off on the right foot. But the visit was overshadowed by a storm of American protest over the arrest of a U.S.-based Chinese scholar and detention of her 5-year-old son.

Adding to potential pitfalls, the latest dispute draws in China's politically active military. Chinese generals view the United States as a threat, not the potential partner seen by Chinese technocrats and businessmen.

``Some military people view the United States as China's main rival in the Asia-Pacific. So they think U.S. military strength in the region is focused on China,'' said Zhang.

The military angle makes the incident especially critical for President Jiang Zemin. Despite his post as chairman of the body that controls the army, many believe that Jiang can't afford to defy China's generals on major issues and risk losing their support.

The collision Sunday over the South China Sea could feed hard-line fears that the United States, mimicking its confrontation with the former Soviet Union, wants to contain China.

The EP-3E plane was on a surveillance flight that the U.S. military says was routine but that China regards as threatening and intrusive. Adding to the sensitivity of the incident for the military, Beijing says its fighter jet crashed and the pilot is missing.

Yet state newspapers and television have refrained from stoking public anger, in contrast to the uproar the NATO bombing of China's embassy in Yugoslavia in May, 1999, which killed three Chinese. Then, rioters encouraged by the entirely state-controlled media pelted the U.S. and British embassies in Beijing with rocks, ink and bottles.

Any internal indecision by Chinese leaders also is compounded by chronic problems of unreliable information, poor communications and a secretive, bureaucratic decision-making process.

Since its emergency landing Sunday, the EP-3E and its 24 crew members have been held on one of the most remote spots in China _ Hainan island in the South China Sea.

The island's isolation has made it a haven for smugglers and gangsters. Some accounts suggest civilian leaders in Beijing have trouble controlling military commanders there.

Premier Zhu Rongji admitted that he didn't trust his own government's information-gathering system after an explosion in March at a schoolhouse in southern China killed 42 people, most of them children.

At a news conference ten days after the March 6 blast in Jiangxi province, Zhu said he had so much doubt about the official explanation that he sent his own team of inspectors to review the evidence.

---

China leader demands U.S. apology

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By MARTIN FACKLER Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406633686

HAIKOU, China (AP) - Chinese President Jiang Zemin demanded an American apology for a collision between a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet. But China's foreign minister hinted Wednesday at a way out of the crisis, saying Beijing wants a quick but dignified settlement.

The White House ruled out any apology, but Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday did express ``regret'' over the apparent death of the Chinese pilot.

``We regret the loss of life of that Chinese pilot but now we need to move on,'' Powell told reporters. ``We need to bring this to a resolution and we're using every avenue available to us to talk to the Chinese side to exchange explanations.''

On Tuesday, President Bush warned that ties with Beijing could suffer unless it quickly releases the EP-3E plane, which made an emergency landing on a Chinese island, and the 24 crew members.

Washington ``should bear all responsibilities for the collision incident,'' Jiang said, quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency. ``The U.S. side should apologize to the Chinese people.'' The Chinese pilot is still missing after parachuting from his fighter over the South China Sea on Sunday.

Jiang demanded that the United States ``do something favorable to the smooth development of China-U.S. relations, rather than make remarks that confuse right and wrong and are harmful to the relations,'' Xinhua said.

It was not clear whether Powell's statement would satisfy the Chinese.

The Chinese president left later Wednesday for a six-nation visit to Latin America, sticking to his official schedule despite U.S. complaints that Chinese leaders have failed to focus on settling the conflict. Jiang arrives Thursday in Chile and also is to visit Argentina, Uruguay, Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil.

U.S. officials said Wednesday that the crew indicated they managed to destroy at least some of the electronic intelligence-gathering equipment and data aboard the plane before it landed. Earlier, U.S. military officials said they believe Chinese officials had boarded the plane and examined its equipment despite American objections.

Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan echoed Jiang's demand for an apology in a meeting with U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher, who was summoned to hear a formal protest.

But Tang added that China ``hopes to see the collision incident resolved appropriately as soon as possible,'' according to state television and Xinhua. Tang said China wanted to protect its ``sovereignty and dignity.''

The reports didn't give any other details, but Tang's comment was the first expression of Chinese desire to settle the standoff.

China's deputy U.N. ambassador Shen Guofang said China hoped the tensions could be ``solved though peaceful negotiations on the basis of mutual respect.'' But he said it was up to Washington to make the next move. ``It depends on the U.S. attitude and we are waiting for their response. The ball is on their side,'' he told The Associated Press.

He said an apology was not a precondition. ``But this is what they should do. I think they should do something about an apology and explanation of all kinds of things,'' he said.

In Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer refused any apology. ``The United States government doesn't understand the reason for an apology,'' he told reporters. ``Our airplane was operating in international airspace and (the crew) did nothing wrong.''

U.S. diplomats were allowed to see the EP-3E crew for the first time late Tuesday on Hainan island in the South China Sea. The diplomats later visited local stores to buy the crew soap, laundry detergent, underwear and other supplies. But they said there was no indication when they could see the 21 men and three women again or deliver the supplies.

Jiang on Tuesday demanded that the United States end surveillance flights off China's coast. A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, said in Washington that the United States was unlikely to do so. Such surveillance flights are meant to gather information on China's military by recording radio, radar and other signals.

The U.S. military says the EP-3E was flying in international airspace when it collided with one of two Chinese F-8 fighters sent up to track it. A U.S. official said that the Navy plane plummeted some 8,000 feet at one point. Each side has blamed the other's plane for the crash.

Bush warned Tuesday in Washington that ties with Beijing could suffer unless it quickly releases the EP-3E and its crew.

``This accident has the potential of undermining our hopes for a fruitful and productive relationship between our two countries,'' Bush said.

China says the American plane rammed the Chinese jet about 60 miles south of Hainan, causing it to crash. Xinhua said a search for the missing pilot, identified as Wang Wei, was stepped up Wednesday, with 48 planes and 29 ships scanning the sea. U.S. officials say it's more likely the faster, more maneuverable fighter ran into the large, slower EP-3E.

State television broadcast comments by ordinary Chinese expressing anger over the incident. They hewed closely to the official account blaming the American pilot.

One of those interviewed also urged Chinese to stick to their normal work and study routines. That appeared to be intended to discourage mass anti-U.S. protests such as those that followed the bombing of China's embassy in Yugoslavia in 1999.

Security at U.S. diplomatic missions has been stepped up since Sunday.

Pictures of the EP-3E in state newspapers Wednesday showed damage to its leftmost propellor and the underside of its left wing. The plane's nose cone was missing.

---

U.S. refuses to apologize to China

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406633168

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States on Wednesday refused to apologize to China for an incident in which a U.S. spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet.

``The United States doesn't understand the reason for an apology,'' White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters. ``Our airplanes are operating in international airspace, and the United States did nothing wrong.''

Fleischer said U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher was summoned to a meeting earlier Wednesday with the Chinese foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, in Beijing. Tang demanded an apology for the incident and Prueher refused, Fleischer said.

``He reiterated what the president said yesterday about President Bush's desire to end this situation, to allow our men and women to come home and have the plane returned as well,'' Fleischer said.

China maintains the crew of 24, which made an emergency landing after the collision Sunday, is being held in ``protective custody'' and that the United States should apologize for the incident that landed them there.

``This accident has the potential of undermining our hopes for a fruitful and productive relationship between our two countries,'' Bush said Tuesday. ``To keep that from happening, our servicemen and women need to come home.''

U.S. diplomatic representatives met Tuesday with the crew members on China's Hainan Island and reported them to be in good health. Chinese officials refused to allow the American officials to meet alone with the crew members and have not allowed them to contact their families in the United States.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, using harsher language than the White House, called the meeting a positive step but said the crew remained in ``detention.''

``They're being held incommunicado under circumstances that I don't find acceptable,'' Powell said. ``The Chinese have said they're being protected - I don't know from what. In my judgment, they're being detained.''

The Chinese on Wednesday raised the volume of their call for an apology with President Jiang Zemin making the demand for the first time publicly.

``The U.S. side should apologize to the Chinese people,'' Jiang said in Beijing before leaving on a visit to Latin America, according to the Xinhua News Agency. ``The United States should do something favorable to the smooth development of China-U.S. relations, rather than make remarks that confuse right and wrong and are harmful to the relations.''

Prior to Jiang's statement, which came in the middle of the night in Washington, Powell told reporters:

``We have nothing to apologize for. We did not do anything wrong. Our airplane was in international air space, an accident took place, and the pilot, in order to save 24 lives, including his own, under circumstances we now have determined must have been hair-raising, safely got that plane on the ground.''

The Navy EP-3E Aries II electronic surveillance collided with the Chinese jet over the South China Sea. U.S. officials said the Chinese plane rammed the spy plane; China blamed the collision on the U.S. plane and said it was subject to Chinese control and inspection because it landed in China without permission. U.S. officials said Wednesday the crew indicated they managed to destroy at least some of the highly sensitive electronic intelligence-gathering equipment and data on board the plane before it landed. It was unclear how much of an intelligence bonanza the Chinese might enjoy if they should keep the plane.

Shortly after the incident, U.S. officials said they believed one of the EP-3E's four engines was damaged in the collision. On Tuesday they said the damage was more extensive, including damage to the nose section, which contains radar equipment; damage to two of the four propellers; and a damaged wing flap.

One official said the plane tumbled 8,000 feet after the collision and had trouble getting its wing flaps down.

Bush said he wanted to give China time to resolve the matter and to prevent the stalemate from escalating into a full-fledged crisis. But, the president said, such a grace period was quickly running out.

He said he talked with Army Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock, the U.S. Embassy's defense attache in Beijing, who participated in a meeting Tuesday with the 21 men and three women of the plane's crew.

``The general tells me they are in good health, they suffered no injuries and they have not been mistreated. I know this is a relief to their loved ones,'' Bush said.

Chinese officials sat in on the crew meeting and attempted to restrict the American officials' inquiries to health matters, although some of the ground rules were ignored, officials said. At one point, Sealock and the Chinese debated a ground rule and the American, knowing the meeting was to last just 45 minutes, cracked to the Chinese officials, ``Can I have my 60 seconds back?''

Officials said Bush's national security team was considering a range of options in the event China does not act quickly. The options, which the officials said have not reached Bush's desk, include canceling Bush's planned trip to Beijing - announced just last month during a White House visit by China's deputy prime minister - and withdrawing some diplomats from China.

In addition to calling for an apology, Jiang urged the United States to stop surveillance flights off the country's coasts. A Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, said he doubted that would happen.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman also dismissed U.S. claims that the plane was sovereign American territory and therefore Chinese officials had no right to board it.

The EP-3E is from Fleet Air Reconnaissance Squadron One, whose home base is Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, Wash. The crew consisted of 22 Navy personnel and one each from the Air Force and Marine Corps.

---

Taking a peek at the 'Big Look'

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By NANCY BENAC Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406633355

WASHINGTON (AP) - The main spy system on the U.S. Navy plane that's being held in China is called ``Big Look'' - and does it ever.

From a ``radome'' under the front of the plane and from covered pods called ``canoes'' on the aircraft's top and underside, dozens of sensitive antennae pick up signals from radar, radio, cell phones, perhaps even e-mail.

``It's got more antennae than a dog has fleas,'' John Pike, a private military analyst, said Tuesday. ``The communist Chinese would love to pop those canoes off and get a look.''

The EP-3E Aries II plane made an emergency landing Sunday at a Chinese naval air base after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet. The Pentagon says its 24 crew members, still detained in China, sent a message that they began destroying the plane's intelligence-gathering equipment and information before landing.

One of only a dozen such planes in operation, the aircraft uses a complex combination of receivers, antennae, computers, displays and recording devices to intercept radar and other communications signals up to 460 miles away.

Put more simply, ``The airplane is basically a really big flying tape recorder,'' said Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a private defense policy organization.

U.S. officials bristle at talk that the plane was spying on China.

``Spies take part in espionage, and that's not at all what we're talking about here,'' said Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley. ``This was overt, routine surveillance and reconnaissance.''

Spying or not, virtually anything transmitted through the air would be within reach.

``You're sort of sensing the air,'' said Daniel Goure, a former Pentagon official now at the Lexington Institute, a think tank in Arlington, Va.

With the plane's capabilities, the United States could pluck all sorts of information from the atmosphere. The specific characteristics of Chinese radar sites on land, at sea, even on planes would be of particular significance.

Armed with that information, U.S. officials could develop ways to jam and neutralize the radars, said Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the private National Security Archive.

Tracking communications among Chinese military leaders and units also could help U.S. officials determine locations of military forces and ships, their capabilities, how frequently they go on maneuvers, even how well-trained they are.

Operating to the south of China as it was, the plane's focus most likely was Chinese naval operations, Goure said.

In 1996, the six-plane squadron that includes the aircraft on the ground in China flew 1,319 sorties and picked up 2,911 signals of ``tactical significance'' from land, sea and planes in targeted countries and located 72 ``nonfriendly'' submarines, according to an annual history of the squadron obtained by Richelson.

Were the Chinese to be able to analyze what the United States was learning from the plane, they could figure out ``how leaky their system is,'' says Goure.

``Then they could change what they do and make it much tougher for us to get the information next time around,'' he added.

Paul Beaver of Jane's Information Group, publisher of Jane's Defense Weekly, said China also might gain insights into how the United States deals with electronic warfare, which could have implications for U.S. allies such as Japan and Taiwan that use American technology. ``The Chinese could counter their systems as well,'' said Beaver. ``We literally don't know the scope of what damage this could do if the Chinese in fact boarded the plane.''

Joseph Prueher, the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, said Tuesday on ABC, ``We have every reason to think the Chinese have been all over the airplane.''

The plane's main antenna is known as ``Big Look'' and is housed in a flat, elliptical dome under the fuselage that is 12 feet in diameter and 3 feet deep. Dozens more antennae are found in upper and lower housings known as canoes.

The plane's interior features rows of radar consoles running down both sides, with huge racks of computers and 19 work stations, where technicians search for, collect and interpret information. A folding ladder is stored inside the cabin for boarding and deplaning. The lavatory and galley are in the rear.

Sophisticated as its intelligence-gathering techniques are, the four-engine turboprop is anything but nimble in flight - a ``flying pig'' is how one military commander described it Tuesday - it lumbers along at about 345 mph.

---

China arrests U.S.-based scholar

InfoBeat News
Afternoon Edition - 4/4/2001
By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN Associated Press Writer
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406631469

BEIJING (AP) - A U.S.-based political scientist whose detention caused a diplomatic uproar with Washington has been formally arrested in spying charges, a human rights group said Wednesday.

The arrest of Gao Zhan appeared certain to add to already major strains on relations with Washington amid a standoff over a U.S. Navy plane and its crew being held on a Chinese island.

Gao's arrest sheet, given to her parents Tuesday by security agents, accuses her of ``accepting money from a foreign intelligence agency and participating in espionage activities in China,'' New York-based Human Rights in China said.

Such a charge almost guarantees Gao's conviction and a long sentence. China tries such security cases in secret and allows little chance for defendants to respond to the charges.

Gao, an unpaid researcher at American University in Washington, was picked up at the Beijing airport on Feb. 11 at the end of a family vacation. Her husband and 5-year-old son were held for 26 days before being allowed to return to the United States.

U.S. officials including Secretary of State Colin Powell sharply criticized China for holding Gao's son, an American citizen, and failing to notify the U.S. Embassy of his detention as required by treaty. They also have appealed for Gao's release on humanitarian grounds.

Gao's husband, Xue Donghua, has denied that his wife was a spy. She has visited rival Taiwan, which China regards as a renegade province, but Xue said the trip was purely academic.

Officials of the State Security Ministry refused to comment on the report.

The detentions of two other scholars with U.S. ties have been revealed in the past week _ one of them an American citizen.

Gao's arrest is ``directly tied to the escalating tensions between the United States and China,'' said Liu Qing, president of Human Rights in China.

Liu, in a written statement, said Gao and other detainees were being used as bargaining chips by China to advance political and economic interests.

Xue, quoted in Liu's statement, echoed those sentiments. He noted that Gao went from being under investigation to being formally arrested just after the surveillance plane incident.

``My wife ... has nothing to with the intelligence activities of any government. There is no reason for her to become a victim of US-China relations,'' Xue was quoted as saying.

---

Statement by Bush on Navy Plane in China

New York Times
April 4, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/world/04TEXT.html

WASHINGTON, April 3 - Following is President Bush's statement today on the crew of the American Navy plane in China, as provided by Federal News Service Inc.:

I want to report to the American people, and especially to the families involved, that I've just talked with Brigadier General Sealock, who earlier today met with our 24 men and women in China.

The general tells me they are in good health, they suffered no injuries, and they have not been mistreated. I know this is a relief to their loved ones and to all Americans.

Our crew members expressed their faith in America, and we have faith in them. They send their love to their families. They said they are looking forward to coming home. And we are looking forward to bringing them home.

This is an unusual situation in which an American military aircraft had to make an emergency landing on Chinese soil. Our approach has been to keep this accident from becoming an international incident. We have allowed the Chinese government time to do the right thing. But now it is time for our servicemen and women to return home, and it is time for the Chinese government to return our plane.

This accident has the potential of undermining our hopes for a fruitful and productive relationship between our two countries. To keep that from happening, our servicemen and women need to come home.

Thank you very much.

---

U.S. Officials Meet With 24 Still Detained With Aircraft

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By CRAIG S. SMITH
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/world/04CREW.html

HAIKOU, China, Wednesday, April 4 - Two American officials met with the crew members of a downed spy plane here today, the first contact the United States has had with the 21 men and 3 women since they were taken into custody by Chinese officials early Sunday.

"They are in good health and are being well taken care of," said Brig. Gen. Neal Sealock, the American defense attaché in Beijing, after the 40- minute meeting early this morning. The crew members, wearing the same clothes they wore when they landed here on Hainan island after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet, were reported to be in high spirits.

"The entire crew has faith in America, and I indicated we have faith in them," General Sealock said. He said that the next step was to "get them home as soon as possible," but that he had not discussed the timing with his Chinese counterparts.

In Key West, Fla., on Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters that he hoped the meeting was the "beginning of an end to this incident."

"I hope that this meeting will lead to the rapid release of all of the members of the crew back to the United States, so that they can be returned to their organizations and their families, and I also hope it will lead to the rapid return of our airplane," General Powell said.

But China is arguing that the crew breached Chinese sovereignty and may bear legal liability for the collision, in which a Chinese fighter pilot was lost at sea. It says it has the right to detain and interrogate the American crew members.

China said Tuesday that the pilot, Wang Wei, parachuted out of his F-8 jet after the collision on Sunday. He has not been found.

The American officials were expected to try to visit the crew members again later today, when they hoped to arrange for fresh clothing, toiletries and other items for them.

This morning's meeting, which came as tension over the incident mounted between the United States and China, followed three frustrating days for American officials who were awaiting word of the crew. General Sealock, Ted Gong, an American consul in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, and Capt. Bradley Kaplan of the United States Navy had flown to Haikou on Monday and then traveled overland to the south of Hainan island in the hope of seeing the detained men and women.

But they spent Monday and much of Tuesday at a resort hotel near the airfield at which the plane had landed. Diplomats in Beijing and Washington, meanwhile, tried to negotiate a meeting with the crew.

In midafternoon on Tuesday, General Sealock and Mr. Gong were ordered back to Haikou and left by car for the return trip north. Haikou is the capital of Hainan, a provincial level special economic zone that is best known for its beaches, its coconuts, its clusters of unfinished buildings left over from an ill considered mid-1990's building boom and its droves of prostitutes.

Shortly after the two officials left the south, reporters who had staked out a roadblock to the Lingshui airfield, where the damaged EP-3E Aries II plane is, and near where the crew is believed to have been held since Sunday, said a police car leading two buses with darkened windows had left the airfield.

General Sealock and Mr. Gong were met in Haikou by two more American consular officials from Guangzhou and a lower-level defense attaché from Beijing.

Captain Kaplan, the United States' naval attaché, remained in the south to underscore the United States' interest in arranging the timely return of the damaged aircraft.

Shortly before 10 p.m., General Sealock appeared in uniform in the Haikou hotel lobby, trailed by the other American diplomats and surrounded by a crush of reporters and People's Armed Police officers in plainclothes. The American officials were driven to the Hainan provincial government compound in downtown Haikou.

There, they met with five Chinese officials for more than an hour, exchanging pleasantries and negotiating the terms of the visit with the crew. One condition was that only two officials could attend the meeting, and three of the diplomats returned to the hotel while General Sealock and Mr. Gong went to meet the crew members around midnight at an undisclosed location in Haikou.

The meeting focused on the well- being of the crew, rather than the details of the collision and emergency landing, presumably because Chinese officials were there.

Reuters quoted an American official as saying that the United States has satellite images that show Chinese authorities examining the plane. It was not clear whether they had removed any of the aircraft's sensitive surveillance equipment.

---

Europe Sees a Major Test for the New Bush Administration

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By SUZANNE DALEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/world/04EURO.html

PARIS, April 3 - Across Europe, the standoff between the United States and China is being seen as a serious international crisis and a test of President Bush's young administration.

Reports of the collision between an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter plane were front page news just about everywhere and prompted dozens of editorials, most of them urging China to return the American aircraft and its 24-member crew.

But many also expressed concern that the administration would try too hard to be cowboy-tough, instead of seeking a diplomatic solution.

In Britain, The Guardian said the incident showed "just how easily George Bush's concept of `strategic competition' with China could turn nasty."

A few European politicians expressed similar concerns. "If the Chinese do not return that airplane without taking the equipment apart piece by piece, as the Pentagon fears, what will Washington do?" said Enrico Jacchia, a conservative Italian senator who is a foreign policy expert. He offered an answer to his own question, saying Europeans should press Mr. Bush so that, "in a so delicate moment, the new and more aggressive policy of the White House does not provoke unpredictable consequences."

But Mr. Jacchia was one of the few to speak out. While similar worries were discussed in the corridors of Europe's governments today, few leaders had anything public to say on the matter, declining to meddle in what was seen as a delicate affair.

As scheduled, President Jacques Chirac of France met with the Chinese foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, on Monday, but Mr. Chirac's spokesperson, Catherine Colonna, said the subject of the American spy plane had not come up. Nor was there any comment from Downing Street.

The European Union's top foreign policy official, Javier Solana, responded to a reporter's question on the subject by saying only, "International law must be complied with." Later, his press officer, Christina Gallach, said the union "does not have a position on the incident."

Some experts said that silence should not be interpreted as widespread approval of Mr. Bush's handling of Chinese-American relations, which along with his handling of relations with Russia are seen here as stuck in a time warp.

"The Americans and the Chinese are playing cold war with each other, which is very strange," said Dominique Moisi, a French political analyst. "No one wants to support the Chinese. But they don't want to encourage the United States either. The silence is partly a measure of indifference and partly a measure of the embarrassment of the diplomatic elite."

In recent weeks, Europe has grown more assertive in the foreign policy arena, offering President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a political embrace within days of the United States decision to expel 50 Russian diplomats and deciding to send a delegation to visit North Korea, at a time when Mr. Bush had frozen peace talks with that country.

In the press, Mr. Bush is often described as either overly aggressive or as still wet behind the ears. Neither view is very comforting when it comes to dealing with security matters.

One Austrian daily, Die Presse, ventured that the incident might be a good thing since it might force the Bush administration to formulate a clear foreign policy.

In Italy, Sergio Romano, a former ambassador to the United States, wrote a front-page column today in the Milan daily Corriere della Sera, taking a similar view. The incident, he speculated, would be "part of the apprenticeship of a young president who rules the world, but is only truly knowledgeable about Texas."

"His character and somewhat rash style, along with the requests of his Republican electors suggest that he should show muscle, speak forcefully and proclaim that America's interest comes before all other considerations," Mr. Romano said. "He will realize soon that others also have their interests and that even the president of the United States must take them into consideration."

---

Old Hijinks May Pull the Rug From the U.S. Claim to Plane

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/world/04LEGA.html

If the collision between the Navy surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter jet last Sunday occurred where the Pentagon has indicated, the Bush administration has strong legal standing in demanding that both the plane and its crew be released promptly, several legal experts said yesterday.

But in the more practical realm of negotiating that release, they said, the American position could be damaged, to a degree, by some of the Pentagon's own cold war escapades.

For instance, the Bush administration has insisted that the Chinese have no right to hold or even to inspect the Navy's EP-3E surveillance aircraft, which made an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island after the collision with a Chinese jet that was tailing it. All 24 Americans survived and are being held in China; the Chinese plane crashed and its pilot is missing.

Yet the Pentagon itself has often rejected appeals from other countries similar to the ones it is making. For instance, in 1976, when a defecting Soviet pilot flew a MIG-25 fighter jet to Japan, American intelligence officials, despite Soviet protests, spent nine weeks taking it apart and inspecting it before sending the plane back to Moscow - in packing crates.

And even now, defense analysts said, the Pentagon maintains programs to obtain military equipment from potentially hostile nations, including China, through practically any means possible.

Indeed, some experts said China's delay in releasing the Navy crew and its plane stems in part from the animosity that Chinese officials feel at being the object of such American intelligence operations. And they said that this could well complicate the negotiations between the two nations, shifting the focus from legal issues to the murkier set of ethics that govern the cloak-and-dagger operations in the spy world.

Still, some analysts noted a distinction between aircraft brought in by defectors and the situation of the American plane in China.

"Since there was an accident over international waters, it was an aircraft in distress, and ought to be left alone," said R. James Woolsey, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. "When we exploited aircraft for intelligence it's been when defectors brought them in, which is under a very different condition."

But China's president, Jiang Zemin, objected yesterday to the plane's spying mission. He also said that the United States should bear the full responsibility for the collision and that it should stop all such flights along the Chinese coast.

Pentagon officials said the collision occurred about 80 miles southeast of Hainan island after the Chinese jet darted too close to the lumbering American craft. They also said the Navy plane, which was intercepting electronic signals, was flying over international waters and had every right to be there.

Chinese officials, however, have said the American plane veered into the path of the Chinese jet.

In interviews, several experts on international and maritime law said a number of serious legal issues were at stake, as well as customs that have prevailed for centuries among seafaring nations.

The first question, they said, was whether the collision occurred was outside the 12-mile band of Chinese territorial waters.

Pentagon officials have said that clearly was the case, and Chinese officials agree that the collision took place nearly 80 miles off Hainan. But in addition to Hainan, China also claims ownership of tiny islands farther out in the South China Sea. And some Chinese officials have said China's domain stretches 188 miles from China's coast, in which it has primary fishing and mining rights.

But several legal experts disputed those claims. John Temple Swing, the president emeritus of the private Foreign Policy Association, said that under a Law of the Sea treaty negotiated in the early 1980's, China's rights to the larger, 188-mile zone were purely economic and would not prevent other countries from sending ships or planes there.

China and most other countries have signed the treaty. The United States has never ratified the treaty, but adheres to many of its principles.

Lori F. Damrosch, an international law professor at Columbia, said the small islands cited by China as part of its boundary amounted to just "a bunch of little specks of rocks."

American officials, in turn, have maintained that the Navy plane represents a sovereign extension of United States authority and that, as such, China has no right to inspect it without permission.

Several lawyers said it had long been axiomatic that while anyone could salvage wrecked and unclaimed commercial vessels, damaged warships have always belonged to the nation that built them.

Jonathan I. Charney, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, said he knew of no similar provision for military planes. But Ruth G. Wedgwood, an international law professor at Yale, said she believed that warplanes should logically enjoy the same protection - and be able to seek safety at any airport during a peacetime emergency.

As a result, she said, in delaying the release of the Navy plane and crew, "the Chinese are playing with fire, both legally and politically."

Still, some intelligence officials acknowledged that legal lines have often been blurred in situations when the United States, or other countries, had opportunities to seize military hardware.

In most cases, the Pentagon's chances to study adversaries' planes and ships have been offered by defectors - or come through stealth.

The most audacious effort occurred in the mid-1970's, when the C.I.A. tried, unsuccessfully, to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the bottom of the Pacific.

William E. Colby, who was then the C.I.A. director, once acknowledged that given the traditional sovreignty accorded sunken warships, C.I.A. officials knew that what they were doing constituted theft.

Norman Polmar, an independent naval analyst, noted that during and after the Korean War, the United States offered payments of gold and persuaded at least two North Korean and Chinese pilots to defect with MIG fighter planes, which the United States kept.

------

U.S. Offers China 'Regrets,' but Stops Short of Apology

New York Times
April 4, 2001
By DAVID STOUT
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/04/world/04CND-PLANE.html

WASHINGTON, April 4 - The United States expressed regret today over the presumed death of a Chinese pilot in his fighter's collision with an American airplane on Sunday. But that regret did not include a formal apology.

The United States' response was voiced by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who called the collision "a tragic accident" and said, "We regret the loss of life of that Chinese pilot."

But Mr. Powell immediately added, "Now we need to move on. We need to bring this to a resolution, and we're using every avenue available to us to talk to the Chinese side to exchange explanations."

President Bush's chief spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said this afternoon that "conversations will continue" with the Chinese in an effort to retrieve both the American aircraft and its 24 crew members. The plane and crew members have been in China since the surveillance aircraft landed there on Sunday after the collision.

Mr. Fleischer said the United States' sense of regret - but not an apology - as expressed by Mr. Powell were conveyed earlier today by American diplomats in Beijing to their Chinese counterparts.

"The United States is concerned about the missing Chinese serviceman and we have expressed our concern and our regrets about that incident," Mr. Fleischer said.

Asked whether Mr. Powell's remarks amounted to "an olive branch" extended to the Chinese, Mr. Fleischer declined to characterize it as such. "The United States is concerned about the missing Chinese serviceman," Mr. Fleischer said and, ergo, a statement of regret was appropriate.

President Jiang Zemin of China has insisted on a formal apology from the United States for the accident, which he blames on the Americans.

Asked whether the sentiments General Powell expressed today might be enough to placate Beijing, Mr. Fleischer said, "I'm not in a position to say what's good enough for a foreign government."

President Bush's position has been that the United States has no reason to apologize for the accidental collision, and Mr. Fleischer said today there is no change in that stance. That being the case, he was asked, what are the conversations between the United States and China about?

In diplomacy, Mr. Fleischer replied, "the less said is the most productive."

Asked whether the United States would settle for the return of the crew without the plane, Mr. Fleischer said Mr. Bush wants plane and crew returned.

Mr. Fleischer said President Bush is on top of moment-by-moment events in the China episode without being "preoccupied" by them. The spokesman said Mr. Bush has been conferring often with Mr. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser.

But, Mr. Fleischer said, the president has also been following developments on Capitol Hill regarding his budget and tax plans. And this afternoon, he planned to meet with Agriculture Secretary Ann Venaman.

---

Can Americans handle the business of spying?

USA Today
04/04/2001 - Updated 06:39 PM ET
By John Omicinski, Gannett News Service
http://www.usatoday.com/news/e98/omicinski/074.htm

WASHINGTON - What's most remarkable about the case of Robert P. Hanssen, a Russian mole for two decades while working at the highest levels of the FBI counterspy division, is that he never was required to take a lie detector test.

On that slender but glaring bit of evidence alone, we must conclude that something has gone terribly wrong inside the FBI. "Who's watching the watchers?" is an old rule of intelligence.

In Washington, apparently no one.

Hanssen, disguised as a devoted and religious family man, for many years played a double game wherein he gave away the nation's secret jewels to Russians for $1.4 million and a few James Bondian thrills. He's a pretty sick puppy.

The Central Intelligence Agency, likewise, marked a modern Waterloo with the 1994 arrest of counterspy Aldrich Ames as a Soviet mole whose information caused the deaths of 10 or more U.S. agents and double agents.

Ames and Hanssen both profited from the new, lax counterspy environment.

As former CIA Director James Woolsey noted at a recent espionage seminar at the Richard Nixon Center, the CIA in Ames' times became so decentralized that people who knew about his heavy drinking weren't the same people who knew he had a flashy new house and a red convertible.

In the immortal words of Casey Stengel as he managed the New York Mets to loss after pitiful loss, "Can't anybody here play this game?"

The answer is no.

And the reasons boil down to a few: James Jesus Angleton, Frank Church, William Colby, Stansfield Turner, Jimmy Carter and Congress. Angleton was the legendary "Gray Ghost" of the CIA; a hard-drinking, chain-smoking career spy catcher who ran counterintelligence from 1954 to 1974, at which point CIA Director Colby sacked him.

"If you control counterintelligence, you control the intelligence service," was a favorite Angletonism. And the Ames and Hanssen experiences prove him right. Critics called him "arrogant beyond belief," Tom Mangold reports in his excellent book, "Cold Warrior," but Angleton's fiercely loyal group of CIA "Fundamentalists" protected the boss at all costs.

As he grew more paranoid under alcohol's influence, Angleton lost his veil of charisma and mystique, especially when he launched a "mole hunt" that destroyed excellent careers and threw wrenches into good, working spy operations.

By 1975, the late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, and his special committee on intelligence went after Angleton and the CIA. In the process of investigating the agency, Church's committee discredited it, as well, and damaged internal morale. It was a sad business, more a case of The Liberals' Revenge than solid lawmaking.

Then Stansfield Turner came in as President Carter's CIA chief and finished the destruction job that Church and Colby started. Turner decentralized an organization that relies on detailed, intimate study, and shared data for its success.

Turner and Congress also changed the rules and made it more difficult to demand polygraph tests or to check out employee bank accounts for sudden wealth.

Church, Colby, Carter and Turner made the CIA what it is today.

Paul Redmond, the ex-CIA counterintelligence chief who caught Ames, described the current situation this way: "Anarchy reigns and promiscuity prevails in the ways that classified information moves (carelessly) around town." He recalled that in the mid-'80s he suggested lie detector tests for a bunch of people and said he was told, "We can't! We'll get sued!"

Redmond concludes that Americans simply "don't like the whole yucky business of spying," and he may be right. But that's not an excuse for Washington not to protect those same blase Americans with the best intelligence and counterintelligence operations on the globe.

The Ames and Hanssen debacles demonstrate that Congress and the administration must work together to repair serious institutional cracks at both the FBI and the CIA.

And Attorney General John Ashcroft's suggestion that Hanssen is a good candidate for the death penalty also makes sense, too. Nowadays, people spy for money and not ideology, and the threat of a gas chamber or a fatal injection can have a decided effect upon greedy people.

---

Cold War II?

Washington Times
Published 4/4/01
Alan Dowd
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010404-628309.htm

Playing "bumper cars in the air" to capture a U.S. Navy surveillance plane, China´s dictators have scored another propaganda victory at home. However, by detaining the 24-man crew incommunicado for 48 hours, barring U.S. diplomats from visiting the American hostages and rummaging through the plane, Beijing may be losing points and supporters where it counts in Washington.

The "trade uber alles" caucus promised us that Permanent Normal Trade Relations would reform Beijing and make such messy diplomatic and military disputes a relic of the 20th century.

But just as a tiger can´t change his stripes, a military dictatorship cannot change its behavior. Some of us knew that even before this latest incident, which occurred more than 35 miles outside China´s territorial waters. Others are just being reminded of it. But this chilling reminder of how far apart China and America remain couldn´t come at a better time.

A potpourri of anti-China legislation is simmering in Congress, addressing everything from China´s bid to host the Olympics to Taiwan´s bid for ballistic-missile defenses. And since ramming unarmed U.S. aircraft and humiliating U.S. diplomats is not the best way to get in the good graces of Congress, some of that legislation is bound to boil over.

Taiwan promises to benefit most from Beijing´s blunder above the South China Sea. Taiwan has weathered the mainland´s bullying for decades, and Taipei will no doubt have a more receptive ear in Washington in the wake of China´s spy plane standoff.

Not only is Taiwan pressing for World Trade Organization membership, but the Taiwanese military has been waiting for Washington to give it the green light on a range of new weapons purchases. Topping Taiwan´s wish list is a small fleet of warships equipped with sophisticated anti-missile systems that could give the tiny island a fighting chance against Beijing´s rocket-laden ships and coastlines. Ironically, Taiwan is also requesting P-3 Orion anti-submarine planes similar to the EP-3 that China forced into a crash landing.

But Taiwan needed the new hardware and America needed a new China policy long before China´s cloned MiG-21 slammed into the American EP-3. China is in the midst of the greatest military buildup on earth. In fact, just last month, China announced a staggering 17.7 percent increase in military spending. This follows a 314 percent increase over the last decade.

The crippled and compromised hulk of the U.S. plane sitting on Hainan island gives us a glimpse of what China wants to do with this new military intimidate its neighbors in the short-term and challenge America in the long-term.

As a Pentagon report for Congress warned last year, "China´s resolve to employ military force should not be discounted." And history shows why:

In the 1950s, China seized Tibet, invaded Korea and bombed the Taiwanese islands of Quemoy and Matsu. In the 1960s, it turned west, attacking India, and north, invading the Soviet Union. In the 1970s, China gobbled up the Paracel Islands and invaded Vietnam. In the 1980s, Beijing invaded India for a second time and took Vietnam´s Spratly Islands.

And in the 1990s, amid the most open period of U.S.-China trade in 60 years, Beijing swung its military sights back to Taiwan with waves of missile tests that effectively blockaded the democratic island, a fusillade of demands that invoked memories of Austria´s pre-World War I ultimatums on Serbia and a nuclear-tipped warning for America.

China is carving out an empire of its own, and its leaders are in no mood to ask Washington for permission. They may not want war, but as Churchill surmised of Stalin and his henchmen, "they want the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power." Echoing Churchill, the Pentagon concluded that China seeks nothing less than to become the pre-eminent power in the region.

We´ve been here before. Three times in the last century alone, empires emerged that threatened America´s very existence. It wasn´t trade bills or wishful thinking that staved off those empires. In one form or another, it was conflict.

The nature of the conflict we will wage against China is still largely up to us but only if we learn from history.

Appeasing bullies or buying them off with trade deals never keeps the peace. It failed in the 1930s, and it will fail in the 2000s. But as Churchill concluded after a lifetime of struggle against dictators, strength and resolve seldom fail.

"There is nothing they admire so much as strength," he said of the Soviets at the beginning of the first Cold War. The same could be said of the men who control Beijing today.

China and America are rapidly nearing a crossroads in history. War is not inevitable, but neither is peace. Whether or not Beijing chooses to follow the path taken by yesterday´s empires is something over which we have little control. But whether we stand by like an addict´s enablers and walk them down that path is still our choice.

It shouldn´t be a difficult one to make. A second Cold War is preferable to another shooting war in Asia.

Alan Dowd writes on foreign and national security affairs.

---

Treaties deny China right to enter aircraft

Washington Times
Published 4/4/01
Ben Barber THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-200144214217.htm

China has no legal right, under international agreements accepted by both China and the United States, to detain the crew or to enter the U.S. spy plane that was forced to land on Hainan Island, international legal scholars said yesterday.

Under one treaty signed by both nations, each is required to assist a damaged aircraft and thus, the spy plane could not be considered to have entered China illegally, analysts said.

"It seems the plane had the right to land under 'force majeure' " in order to deal with an incident beyond its control, such as damage from colliding with the Chinese chase plane," said Georgetown University law professor Anthony Clark Arend.

"Under the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, China and the United States are parties which 'undertake to provide such measures of assistance to aircraft in distress in its territory as it may find practicable,' " said Mr. Arend, citing the convention.

"One could argue that the Chicago convention only applies to civil and not military aircraft. But given the concept of force majeure it is not unreasonable to apply it to military planes because of distress.

"I think there is a right to land if it is in distress" said Mr. Arend, citing both the Chicago convention and the more recent Law of the Sea Treaty.

In another legal twist to the 3-day-old spy-plane standoff, China further claims it has the right to search the plane and detain the crew because it was conducting spying operations inside Chinese airspace.

This indicates China is reasserting its claim to much of the South China Sea - a claim that has already led to Chinese naval clashes with Vietnam and the Philippines, which are among six countries claiming portions of the sea.

Chinese President Jiang Zemin said the EP-3E spy plane violated international law and intruded into Chinese airspace with its emergency landing.

"The responsibility fully lies with the American side" for the collision with a Chinese jet, he said.

Washington and Beijing look certain to continue arguing over who was responsible for the aerial collision.

But Yale University law professor Ruth Wedgwood said the plane had a right to land safely and to remain immune from search.

"There is a traditional right of safe harbor in distress. So when the plane lands because of engine problems or hurricanes it's as if the plane isn't there. This goes back to the 19th century and earlier maritime law.

"And if they called in a distress, that's a super-duper case of no right to go into the plane, especially if they were responsible for the plane having to make a forced landing."

China asserts the large, propeller-driven Navy surveillance plane was damaged when it intentionally rammed one of two Chinese F-8 jets sent to intercept it.

U.S. officials say no such move was intended and the swifter, smaller Chinese fighter jet was required to give way before the slower heavier U.S. plane.

Interception flights are commonly carried out as countries send off planes to monitor foreign surveillance flights carried out in legal airspace at least 12 miles off shore.

In recent weeks, however, U.S. officials had complained that the Chinese pilots were crowding the U.S. planes.

Chinese officials and government-controlled news media have raised several objections to the plane's landing without permission as justification for taking control of the crew and aircraft.

They have claimed the plane entered Chinese airspace illegally without permission, that it conducted spying within Chinese airspace and that it was responsible for colliding with the Chinese jet, which was subsequently lost at sea.

Said George Washington University law professor Raj Bhala: "I understand the plane is part of the United States and they can't board it. If they have, they have already violated the sovereignty of the United States.

"But the Chinese don't see it this way. They are saying the aircraft came into our airspace and this is a military aircraft and it was conducting unauthorized operations in our airspace. So we have a right, almost self-defense, to question the crew and to board the plane and examine what's going on in the plane.

"They are not seeing this as happening in international water or seeing it as a sovereignty issue."

Key to the legality may be China's claim - disputed by the United States and China's neighbors - to millions of square miles of the South China Sea.

China insists that the whole area running more than 1,000 miles distant from China's coastline is traditional Chinese territory. It also stakes its claim to the sea on the basis of claims that it owns the Spratly Islands, clusters of reefs and atolls astride the main shipping lanes bringing oil tankers from the Persian Gulf to Japan and Northeast Asia.

However parts of the Spratlys are also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei.

Since 1988 China has clashed with Vietnam and the Philippines over possession of the reefs.

U.S. officials say the plane was operating 60 miles off the coast of China's Hainan Island - far beyond the 12-mile territorial limit from which foreign ships and planes are subject to Chinese law under the Law of the Sea Treaty, which China has ratified.

The United States has not yet ratified the treaty but largely observes its rules.

Beijing has also claimed that the plane was conducting illegal activities by surveillance within the 200-mile economic zone off its shores granted by the Law of the Sea Treaty.

However experts said that collecting data and spying is not forbidden in the 200-mile zone.

The treaty explicitly allows for armed warships to travel through the zone, provided its activities are not "prejudicial to the peace, good order or security" of the country that has stewardship over the zone, according to the National Council for Science and the Environment.

Japan criticized China for having its warships and research vessels encroach on Japan's zone in August. China stopped short of promising that it would not happen again.

• Staff writer Carter Dougherty contributed to this article.

---

Crew scurried to destroy data of 'crown jewel'

Washington Times
Published 4/4/01
Rowan Scarborough THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200144225218.htm

The crew of the disabled EP-3E had only a frantic 20 minutes to destroy high-tech eavesdropping equipment before the plane staggered into an airstrip where Chinese soldiers quickly seized the intelligence "crown jewel," Pentagon officials say.

The sources said that in the last desperate radio communications between the Navy aircraft and U.S. Pacific Command, the pilot said the crew had begun destroying vital data such as code-breaking devices and computer software.

But there was no subsequent report as to whether the technicians had time to successfully carry out the equipment carnage.

"We don't know," Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, a Pentagon spokesman, said three days after the EP-3E Aries II collided with a Chinese jet fighter over the South China Sea and made an emergency landing on China's Hainan Island on Sunday morning, local time.

"We know it was a limited amount of time between the collision and actually the plane touching down," Adm. Quigley said. "How much of the emergency destruct process had been carried out by the time they landed, we just don't know."

Its nose, a wing and one engine sheared by the collision with an F-8 fighter, the EP-3E sent out a "mayday" on an international frequency, then headed for the nearest airfield - the Lingshui naval air base.

Once on the ground, armed Chinese soldiers quickly commandeered the plane, removed the crew and ushered technicians on board to inspect what was left of the plane's exotic electronics suite, Pentagon officials said.

Retired Adm. Joseph Prueher, the U.S. ambassador to China, told NBC, "We suppose that the Chinese certainly boarded the aircraft and that they have had access to the aircraft for about 60 hours now. And in that case, they would have access to the information. And then the degree of exploitation they might have participated in is something we don't know yet."

The problem for the Pentagon is that the Aries II is stocked with some of the latest advances in electronic means to intercept a variety of communication lines and data links.

Its radome-covered antennas can listen in on radio and telephone communication and steal data from ground radars and missile tests.

Couple that with China's proven ability to "reverse engineer" systems and then build their own, and the incident could provide the communist regime with an intelligence bonanza.

"If they can get their hands on some of the hardware, they may be able to duplicate some of it," said a Navy aviator who asked not to be named. "Witness what they've done in missile and nuclear warhead technology since the Los Alamos giveaway."

This is a reference to a congressional committee's finding that China stole nuclear weapons designs from U.S. laboratories and duplicated production of an advanced warhead.

"The EP-3 is a wealth of the most sophisticated electronic surveillance measures equipment in the world," the Navy source said. "The other area that could be severely damaged is encryption codes and encoding/decoding equipment. If that is compromised, we have to start all over."

Adm. Quigley acknowledged the Pentagon is worried.

"The complexities and the sophistication of this plane are the electronic equipment that it carries," he said. "It is, indeed, sensitive."

He said the plane has "capabilities and limitations that we would not like to share with others. So yes, we're concerned. And we're concerned more than anything else about the crew and wanting to get them back."

Pentagon officials privately expressed doubt that the People's Liberation Army will ever return a "crown jewel" intelligence coup such as the EP-3E.

The officials said the plane's crew would use a multitude of methods -from shredding documents to literally smashing equipment with a hammer -to make the equipment useless to the Chinese.

"If it's electronic equipment, you disable it in a variety of ways, whether it's physical destruction . . . whether it's the shredding of classified papers and things of that sort," Adm. Quigley said. "You just say what is it about this equipment that would provide information to a foreign government that I don't want to share."

Sunday's collision culminated a month of increasingly aggressive intercepts by Chinese fighters scrambling to monitor the Navy's only airborne intelligence collection platform.

The same EP-3E had flown a series of missions from the U.S. Kadena air base on Okinawa, Japan. Each time, the pilots reported, Chinese supersonic jet fighters came closer and closer to the lumbering, four-engine turboprop.

"Lately, we saw some unsafe flying practices coming within 30 feet," said the Pentagon official. "This was more like flying cowboys. . . . If anything goes wrong, that's not a lot of room for correction."

This official said analysts are unsure whether the Chinese aggressiveness was by design or simply a lack of proper training on how to intercept and monitor a foreign military aircraft.

The Pentagon maintained that the EP-3E flew at a "straight and level" course and faulted the two fighters for flying erratically and too close. The fighter that collided with the U.S. plane crashed into the South China Sea. The pilot is presumed dead.

-------- terrorism

Government rests in terror plot case

InfoBeat News
Morning Coffee Edition - 4/4/2001
By LINDA DEUTSCH AP Special Correspondent
http://www.infobeat.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/IBFrontEnd.woa/wa/fullStory?article=406626773

LOS ANGELES (AP) - The government rested its case Tuesday against an Algerian man accused of smuggling explosives into the United States in an alleged conspiracy to attack West Coast cities during millennium celebrations.

Ahmed Ressam, 33, was arrested Dec. 14, 1999, by U.S. Customs inspectors at Port Angeles, Wash., when they found bomb-making materials and timers in his car after he arrived by ferry from Canada.

Jurors were shown guide book pages with pictures of the Los Angeles skyline and the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco and were told that Ressam's fingerprints were all over the pages.

Jurors also heard brief testimony from a French investigative magistrate. But his account, which had been expected to connect the dots in the alleged terrorist network, was truncated by a judge's ruling that he could not give his opinions.

The French magistrate, Jean-Louis Bruguiere, was on the stand barely 45 minutes and the defense did not cross-examine him.

Following the government's announcement that it was resting its case, the defense moved for dismissal of several counts for lack of evidence. U.S. District Judge John Coughenour denied the request.

The defense, which opened its case with a brief videotape of testimony from a co-defendant's brother in Canada, said there would be five or six witnesses on Wednesday and would conclude its case then.

The defense videotape of Kamel Dahoumane, brother of Abdelmajid Dahoumane, focused primarily on his whereabouts in December 1999. The witness said his brother was in Vancouver, British Columbia, but he did not know exactly when.

When he returned to Montreal, he said, his brother brought along gifts which were mailed to family in Algeria.

The prosecution had presented testimony that the smuggled explosives were manufactured in a Vancouver motel room before being brought over the border.

Abdelmajid Dahoumane is in custody in Algeria. A prosecutor there said Sunday that Dahoumane will face trial in that country on charges of participating in terrorist groups.

------

Berenson testifies in Peruvian trial

Washington Times
Published 4/4/01
World Scene
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200144211443.htm

LIMA, Peru - Lori Berenson, a New York woman on trial for collaboration with leftist guerrillas in Peru, said yesterday that notes written in Spanish in the margins of a rebel manuscript resembled her handwriting but insisted she had never seen the document.

In the toughest cross-examination yet by the presiding magistrate, Miss Berenson also was instructed to write a series of numbers for comparison with a seating chart of Congress that she supposedly sketched to help plan a thwarted takeover of the legislature.

-------- activists

Quebec: Maps with access points etc.

Organization: Community Network
From: "Edward Pickersgill" <Lab@assets.net>
Wed, 4 Apr 2001

The Summit Security site has released maps of the summit perimeter and access points in Quebec City, the airport, and the area surrounding the airport in Ste. Foy (with special traffic regulations during the summit). These are all worth close examination.

http://www.securitesommet.ca/pages/p_citoyen/p_cito_pe_e.html

The maps are only available in French, but non-francophones will be able to figure out most of the labels (at least the ones that are actually big enough to be legible).

Note that 'pieton' means 'pedestrian.' The black perimeter line represents the section of the perimeter which doesn't follow a street (hors rue). Also, the line going through Ste. Foy basically follows Turmel Street (with tributary streets here and there). Parking will be prohibited from Thursday thru Sunday along yellow lines.

---

Border Actions and Highway Clogging

Organization: Community Network
From: "Edward Pickersgill" <Lab@assets.net>
Wed, 4 Apr 2001

SMASH FTAA: THE BORDER CARAVAN (http://www.tao.ca/~kdawg/smashftaa.html)

Community activists from Eastern Ontario, upstate New York, the Mohawk Nation, Toronto, Guelph, NYC and New England would like to invite all FTAA opponents to take part in a border action caravan the day before demonstrations at the Summit of the Americas conference in Quebec City. We encourage all of those either organizing locally or travelling to the Summit of the Americas to fight against international capital every inch of the way.

Ensure Safe Border Crossing for All People

Organizers, and activists from Peterborough, Belleville, Toronto and all points west are invited to stay in Kingston with billets on the evening of Wednesday, April 18. For billets, people should contact Paul Quick (the last name is important, he lives with another Paul) at (613) 536-1636. We need to know how many people are expected, whether they are looking for women's only space, are there kids, etc., so please contact us soon.

We will leave Kingston at 7am Thursday 19 in caravan and travel towards Quebec City, along the "NAFTA Free Trade Corridor" Hwy 401. We will do this very slowly, creating a clogged artery in a major Canada-US trade route. We will stop at the 1000 Islands International Bridge past Gananoque to wait for allies from Syracuse, Utica, Binghamton, the rest of New York State and beyond.

A cell-phone number will be available for any comrades from the US. These will be available closer to the event. If they are not allowed free passage, we will close down the border. If they can't pass, nothing will.

From the 1000 Islands bridge the Caravan will continue east, picking up activists from Ottawa at the junction of Hwy 401 and Hwy 16. (If we are blocking the bridge Ottawa activists could join us)

Shut Down the Life-Lines of the Global Economy or Block the Locks!

The caravan will stop in Cornwall, again to ensure safe crossing at the border for anyone who wants to enter Canada. The action at the bridge in Cornwall on Mohawk Territory at Akwesasne is shaping up to be huge (see http://www.geocities.com/ericsquire/mohawk.htm for more info). Also, near Cornwall are a series of locks for the St.Lawrence Seaway. We will lock down these locks, stopping the vast commercial shipping volume in or out of the Seaway. Paul Martin, Canada's Finance Minister owns CSL (Canada Shipping Lines) Closing the locks closes down not just an inhumane economic system but directly affects the pocketbooks of the very people implementing the neo-liberal agenda.

From here caravanners could continue to Quebec City or keep the locks shut down. We hope to be in Cornwall by noon, which would leave lots of time to get to Quebec City the evening before all of the action.

For more details, including contacts for specific areas getting involved and maps of the route and the locks, see http://www.tao.ca/~kdawg/smashftaa.html.

---

Guard charged in kitten deaths gets escort past animal activists
The Sing Sing Kittens - PETA Response

Wednesday, April 4, 2001
By JIM FITZGERALD
The Associated Press

OSSINING, N.Y. -- A Sing Sing prison guard accused of squeezing five kittens to death in a trash compactor used a dozen burly colleagues for protection from animal advocates Tuesday outside a village courthouse.

Sgt. Ronald Hunlock was rendered nearly invisible as fellow correction officers, all out of uniform, surrounded him like rugby players as he left a hearing in Ossining Village Court. The protesters, who waved signs but made no apparent threat, simply stepped aside.

One carried a placard that lumped Hunlock with famous serial killers, asking, "What do Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, David Berkowitz and Ronald Hunlock all have in common? They all abused animals."

Hunlock found the kittens while searching an inmate's cell March 11 and allegedly ordered the inmate to put them in the compactor. When the inmate refused, Hunlock allegedly dumped them in and turned it on.

The kittens' mother, Midnight, was found by prison officials and is now boarding with the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in Manhattan. A spokeswoman there, Jacqueline Sammek, said Midnight is in excellent health, "all cuddly and loving," but can't be offered for adoption until the court case is over.

In court, Hunlock was silent as his lawyer, Daniel Gallivan, argued for a reduction in bail. Hunlock, who is charged with felony animal cruelty, is free on $25,000 bond.

Gallivan said Hunlock's record gave no reason to think he might not show up in court but prosecutor Lynn Rosenthal opposed the request, calling the crime serious and unique. Village Justice Raymond Barlaam kept the bail at $25,000.

Rosenthal said the case would be presented to a Westchester County grand jury for possible indictment. The charge, aggravated animal cruelty, carries a maximum two-year prison term.

After the brief hearing, Hunlock's supporters tried to keep him hidden from news cameras. Hunlock did not answer questions, taking refuge in the moving knot of men while walking to a car several blocks away. His supporters would not comment and Gallivan did not immediately return a call.

Jim Flateau, a spokesman for the state Department of Correctional Services, said Hunlock was suspended without pay Monday when departmental charges were filed. Dennis Fitzpatrick, a spokesman for the state correction officers union, complained that the department had "already found him guilty of all charges."

Flateau also said the prison administration had nothing to do with the kittens' demise.

The protesters, organized by In Defense of Animals, stood outside the courthouse, which happens to be across the street from the headquarters of Rotanis Pet Products, which makes beds and sweaters for cats.

They demanded a conviction and maximum sentence "to send a strong signal to animal abusers that this type of crime is heinous and unforgivable," said Barbara Stago, the group's Northeast director. "Can you imagine the suffering these little kittens went through? And it's really scary that this is a man who has control over other human beings."

---

Siege mentality?
Ramifications of the free-trade accord take back seat to possibility of violence

Montreal Gazette
Wednesday 4 April 2001
BASEM BOSHRA The Gazette
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/010404/5031812.html

Much has been written in recent weeks of the 25,000 protesters expected to swarm Quebec City during this month's Summit of the Americas, and the 6,000 more police officers being corralled from Quebec and the rest of Canada to keep the demonstrators at bay.

More than 9,000 delegates from 34 countries in North, South and Central America are to meet April 20 to 22 to try to make some headway toward a hemisphere-wide free-trade agreement.

But a figure that hasn't received nearly as much ink is 3,000 - the number of journalists from around the globe who are to converge on La Vieille Capitale to capture every potentially chaotic moment. If you do the math, that comes out to one reporter for every three summit delegates, 10 protesters and two police officers.

Typical media overkill?

Or is it simply a measured response to an event that could have a major economic and social impact on the lives of the more than 800 million people who live in this hemisphere?

Judging by the media coverage from abroad thus far, the ostensible focus of the summit - work toward an agreement on a Free Trade Area of the Americas - has taken a back seat to the spectre of violence erupting between the hordes of demonstrators and the police.

Most notably, dispatches have focused on the extraordinary security measures organizers have taken to try to prevent a repeat of the violence that erupted during the World Trade Organization talks in Seattle in 1999 that did $17 million in damage.

The news media - at least the ones who've delved into Quebec City's history - have been quick to pick up on the irony that the city was originally designed as a fortress.

Now it's being further fortified to stand up to the expected onslaught of protesters.

"The towers and walls built to repel invaders of centuries past no longer suffice," wrote Associated Press reporter Tom Cohen, who described Quebec as a "European-style fortress on the bluffs above the St. Lawrence River."

The Boston Globe remarked on the "extraordinary effort to transform this Old World-style city of narrow lanes, stone houses and soaring church spires into an ultra-security zone."

"Not since 1759, when troops under the Marquis de Montcalm anxiously hunkered behind Quebec's fortress walls, awaiting an English invasion force, has this achingly beautiful city, perched above the St. Lawrence River, been so braced for trouble," the Boston Globe's Colin Nickerson wrote.

On a recent broadcast of the Background Briefing radio program on the Australian Broadcasting Corp., host Ian Walker also commented on the crackdown on protesters.

"The Canadian government has responded with the country's biggest ever peacetime security operation," Walker said.

"A second wall is being built around the old walled city, and a prison is being cleared out to house the troublemakers."

But he also said the unprecedented security measures for the summit, which he described as "a watershed for Canadian anti-corporate activists," could actually have the opposite of their desired effect.

"The unprecedented level of militarization will only help to radicalize a whole new generation of Canadians and make sure Quebec, April 2001, is remembered right up there alongside the Battle in Seattle," Walker said.

Editorials in international newspapers have chastised the Canadian government and summit organizers, calling them heavy-handed in their treatment of those with a different viewpoint.

"A month before the summit, Quebec City has been successfully transformed into a menacing place, inhospitable to people with concerns about corporate-driven trade and economic deregulation," according to an editorial in Britain's The Guardian.

An editorial in The Observer newspaper in Jamaica, one of the countries that has expressed the most reservations about the Free Trade Area of the Americas, also warned summit organizers of the risks of stifling dissent.

"The debate over the expansion of free trade must be allowed to proceed unabated," the editorial said.

"Putting up barriers, whether physical or psychological, to those who have thus far expressed a dim view of globalization in general, and the FTAA in particular, will serve only to bolster that viewpoint."

--------

Largest Rainforest Conservation Measure in North American History Announced

Wed, 4 Apr 2001
From: "Patrick Reinsborough" <organize@ran.org>

In this post:

CONGRATULATIONS EVERYONE!

3.5 million acres. Say it loud. Say it proud. This is big! The biological core of the Great Bear Rainforest is permanently protected with the surrounding areas in moratorium for now (this fight is not over yet). This is the culmination of years of work by thousands of grassroots activists around the continent.

Every letter writing table, every creative action at a Home Depot, every demonstration at a wood distributor; it all helped played into this historic victory. This just shows with coordinated, strategic pressure grassroots activists can change the world. Whether its Boise Cascade, Staples or even the banks and the global financial system itself - when we all unite we CAN stop the destruction.

This fight isn't just about saving acres its about shifting paradigms and through everyone's hard work we are doing it!

Think Structurally. Act Specifically! Onward and upwards towards a just, democratic and ecologically sane global society.

inspired by you all, Grassroots Team, RAN

--

Press Release from Rainforest Action Network, ForestEthics and Natural Resource Defense Council

For Immediate Release: April 4, 2001

Largest Rainforest Conservation Measure in North American History Announced

US Consumers' and Corporations' Actions Key Factor in the Protection of Great Bear Rainforest

San Francisco, CA; Washington D.C. -- Today the government of British Columbia, in coordination with environmental organizations, logging companies, and First Nations, announced the largest rainforest conservation measure in North American history. Some 3.5 million acres--an area four times the size of Rhode Island--of ancient rainforests will be immediately protected or put into deferral. This region, referred to as the "Great Bear Rainforest," is a wildlife hot spot and is considered one North America's biological gems.

The agreement culminates what has at times been a contentious and highly confrontational dialogue, but represents a rare example of successful collaboration among industry, environmentalists, native peoples, rural communities, and government.

The consensus agreement package contains a combination of protected areas and deferrals amounting to more than 3.5 million acres, plus a new ecosystem-based approach to planning, an independent body of scientists and economists, government to government protocols and a "managing change plan" for economic diversification.

ForestEthics, Rainforest Action Network, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) have targeted U.S. customers of the B.C. logging industry in a successful effort to transform the wood product marketplace, and stem the tide of wood from ancient rainforests. Pressure has also come from major customers in Europe and Japan.

Forest protection organizations commenting on today's announcement called on concerned U.S. corporations to help ensure that as the plan is implemented over the next two years, that it translates into real protection for the remaining intact rainforest valleys and the region's biodiversity.

The Great Bear Rainforest is the largest contiguous temperate rainforest left in the world. It is home to extremely rare and endangered wildlife including white spirit bears, grizzly bears, salmon and eagles. Despite its ecological and recreational value, nearly every intact watershed on the B.C. coast had been slated for road building or clearcut logging over the next decade.

Dozens of Fortune 500 companies -- including Kinko's, Nike, 3M and Starbucks -- and hundreds of smaller U.S. companies have pledged to avoid buying products derived from the destruction of ancient forests. After being a target of a two-year international campaign, Home Depot, the world's largest retailer of wood, pledged to phase out purchases from endangered regions by 2002. Lowe's, another home improvement giant, went even further by announcing an immediate ban on wood from the Great Bear Rainforest.

NRDC recently named the Great Bear Rainforest one of twelve threatened BioGems in North and Central America. The BioGems initiative targets wildlands of exceptional natural values that are threatened with destruction. A special website, www.SaveBioGems.org, was set up to give people the opportunity to take direct action to protect BioGems with the click of a mouse.

Contacts:

Tzeporah Berman, ForestEthics, Director of B.C. Programs: 604/603-5110; Todd Paglia: 360/961-3850 Michael Brune, Rainforest Action Network, Campaigns Director, 415/398-4404 Matt Price, NRDC, Spirit Bear Campaign Director, 250/884-6979; Tammy Boyer 323/934-6900

Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2001 (A2, plus page 1 teaser)

Canada, Timber Firms Agree On Pact to Protect Rainforest By JIM CARLTON Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In a major victory for environmentalists, Canadian government and timber-industry officials have agreed to protect 3.5 million acres of British Columbia's ancient coastal rainforest from logging.

The action, expected to be announced Wednesday, caps one of the highest-priority environmental campaigns in the world, aimed at protecting one of the world's last temperate rainforests from wholesale logging. Called the Great Bear Rainforest by activists, the wilderness of 1,000-year-old spruce trees has been the scene of anti-logging protests over the past decade. Environmentalists have succeeded in pressuring U.S. companies like Home Depot Inc. and Lowe's Cos. to boycott wood products from the area.

The new accord, which has been approved by British Columbia's provincial government, will be implemented by province officials, who have jurisdiction over the forest. It calls for 1.5 million acres to be permanently protected from logging, and another two million to be protected under a logging moratorium for two years until more-stringent forestry standards can be established.

The area is nearly twice the size of Yellowstone National Park and inhabited by a rare white-colored black bear. Activists say the expansive agreement could help extend protections to other ancient forests and believe it could put pressure on the Bush administration to leave in place President Clinton's order to protect 58 million acres of U.S. national forest from new roads.

"We anticipate this will signal the beginning of the end for old-growth logging," said Michael Brune, campaign director for the Rainforest Action Network, a San Francisco-based environmental group that helped negotiate the accord. Others backing the agreement include: the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace and ForestEthics, and Canadian timber companies International Forest Products Ltd., West Fraser Timber Co. and Canfor Corp., as well as Weyerhaeuser Co., of the U.S.

Industry officials acknowledge activists influenced their decision-making, but added other issues factored in, including a desire to bring more predictability to timber harvests. "We believe this will go a long way to create the certainty the industry is seeking," said Richard Slaco, chief forester for International Forest, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the region's most prolific harvester.

The agreement comes after a decade of rancorous debate, spurred by hundreds of activists who mounted protests on a pristine stretch of Vancouver Island against the industry's practice of cutting down large swathes of forest, which is known as clear-cutting.

After industry executives agreed to leave that area alone, the controversy shifted north to the Great Bear Rainforest, which goes up the British Columbia coast for hundreds of miles to Alaska. British Columbia activists joined forces with their counterparts in the U.S., and mounted a campaign that relied primarily on pressuring buyers of Canadian wood to boycott products from the Great Bear.

In the U.S., environmentalists conducted in-store protests at Home Depot stores, for example, while Greenpeace activists have staged protests and blockades of shipments of Great Bear wood in Europe, North America, China and Japan. They attracted celebrity supporters like actor Jack Lemmon and Bobby Kennedy Jr., a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

"The basic goal is for the consumer to ask, 'Where does my wood come from?'" said Matt Price, a British Columbia activist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which is based in New York. "Once they start doing that, good things happen."

A British Columbia official called the agreement a "victory for everyone," saying the pact came as part of a long-term land-use plan being put into place.

Indeed, Home Depot officials announced in 1999 a gradual phase-out of buying wood from ancient forests in general. Rival Lowe's followed suit a few weeks later, announcing a boycott that the company said would specifically include the Great Bear Rainforest.

As a result, the activists early last year persuaded some other timber companies, including Weyerhaeuser and Canada's Western Forest Products, a unit of Doman Industries Ltd., to curb logging in the forest. The campaign against International Forest and West Fraser continued until Wednesday's agreement was hammered out over the past few days.

Write to Jim Carlton at jim.carlton@wsj.com


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