------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
To Escape Global Warming, UK Turns to Nuclear Power
UK announces energy review, including nuclear
UK nuke group BNFL faces contract delays
United Kingdom Fissile Material
UK MOD releases Kosovo DU reconnaisance visit report
Ex - Army Head: Pakistan Had Nuclear Arsenal in 1989
North Korea's turn?
Cartoon on Missile Defence Systems
Pentagon cautions on missile defence plan
Japan to pursue independent missile defense
Russia Eases Travel for U.S. Citizens
Putin's Futile Warhead-Rattling
Team Will Cut Into Sunken Submarine
DOE WITHHOLDS HEU STUDY
Beryllium case jury deliberates 3rd day
Jury Rules for Beryllium Supplier
Specialist: Radiation, Paducah workers' cancer likely tied
Tribe may have say in Yucca project planning
EPA begins inquiry into radiation health standards
Radiation Payments Criticized
Congress May Help With Moab Tailings
Do as We Say, Not as We Do
Bush Nominates Science Adviser
Today In Congress
Bush Expands on His Comments About Trusting Putin
U.S. Has Bin Laden 'On the Run,' Sen. Shelby Says

MILITARY
Russians talk subs with Taipei
Pentagon says Albanian evacuation was right action
Fresh Fighting in Macedonia a Day After Albanian Evacuation
U.S. Troops Escort Rebels, Setting Off a Riot in Macedonia
U.S. Praises Yugoslavia on Milosevic
Trial Of Milosevic Could Unnerve Leaders In The U.S. And Elsewhere
Chinese warships anger Philippines
China Rips Into Taiwan's Lee Over U.S. Visit
Colombia rebels prepare peace move but intensify war
China Executes Dozens on Drug Charges
World's Biggest Dope Stash Goes Up in Smoke
Pakistan Expects Peace Process From India Summit
Russia Threatens Veto Of U.N. Iraq Resolution
Iraqi MP Welcomes Russian 'No' to Sanctions Plan
Russia Said to Block US - British Plan on Iraq
After Beirut Pullout, Lebanese Await Full Withdrawal by Syria
Soldier of the Future With New Technology
Army Chow Know-How
Daschle delays; military waits
Invisible chocolate soldiers? What next?
Pentagon shot down over film extras
Pentagon Says Betting on Lasers, Other New Gizmos
Stealth Bomber, Once Scorned, Gains Fresh Backing

OTHER
Army of the future makes its own fuel in the field
AGRICULTURE AGENCY AWARDS $2.4 MILLION FOR ALTERNATIVE ENERGY
RENEWABLE ENERGY CREDITS COULD SUPPORT GREEN POWER
Funds develop a taste for clean green energy
Fresh look at wind energy blows to US from Europe
NSW Australia eyes vegetable oil for fuel - minister
Cheney Withholds List of Those Who Spoke to Energy Panel
Pollution site victims fight for compensation
Green groups say seed patents menace food security
Supercomputers Try to Keep Pace
Before U.N., Powell Renews Call for Global War on AIDS
US makes a patently healthy decision
Probe on China Child Labor Sought
WTO Chief Says China Entry 'Very Close'
Sri Lanka to suspend GM food ban at WTO's behest
WTO Talks End, Differences Remain
Pr. George's Police Meetings to Begin
Tasers just another weapon in hands of abusive police
Institute Finds a Grim Future for Ex-Cons
Britain Riot Police Face Probe
Turkish Prison Death Toll Rises
Retired Army Officer Guilty of Spying
Russia May Charge American Scholar
Former Spy Chief Returned to Peru to Face Charges
Overlooking terrorism
A Memo From Osama

ACTIVISTS
Starving and singing against the death penalty
Peaceful protests mark biotech show
Police brace for protests
Police Accused of Starting Fight to Smash World Bank Protest
PNG Army on Standby After Three Killed in Protests
Jackson's Wife Gets 2 More Days
ABC to Edit 'Tampering With Nature'


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

To Escape Global Warming, UK Turns to Nuclear Power

June 26, 2001
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/jun2001/2001L-06-26-05.html

LONDON, England, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday threatened an explosive row over possible new nuclear power capacity as he launched the country's first comprehensive energy review for 20 years.

Blair told Parliament, "The aim of the review will be to set out the objectives of energy policy and to develop a strategy that ensures current policy commitments are consistent with longer term goals. The findings will also inform the government's response to last year's report from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution Energy - the changing climate."

Prime Minister Tony Blair (Photo courtesy UK government)

The review is aimed at juggling long term British energy security with the need to continue cutting greenhouse gas emissions against a picture of dwindling domestic oil and gas production.

The United Kingdom has been a big net petroleum exporter, but is set to become a net importer again within the next decade.

Blair's Labour government pledged not to build any more nuclear stations in the run-up to its 1997 election victory, but did not repeat the promise before its landslide re-election earlier this month.

One part of the longer term solution, the government has now signalled, might be to resume a nuclear power generation program stalled since 1987. Nuclear power production raises issues of safe disposal of the spent nuclear fuel and also operations safety issues, but nuclear power does not produce the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Nuclear generation currently produces 25 percent of UK electricity. On current trends, this could fall to three percent by 2020, with gas supplying half of energy needs, coal six percent and renewables four percent.

Britain's environmental movement reacted sharply to the suggestion of a renewed nuclear program yesterday, calling for major support of renewables instead. NGOs warned that Brian Wilson, the energy minister who will lead the review, is "pro-nuclear."

Leaked documents published in the UK Telegraph newspaper today show that massive increases in radioactive discharges into the Irish Sea are planned from the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria. Documents leaked to Greenpeace show discharges of many radioactive substances are predicted to double, and some to increase four-fold.

Across Europe, Finland is the only other country considering building more nuclear plants. Most countries with existing nuclear capacity are seeking to phase out the industry. Germany signed an agreement with its nuclear industry earlier this month that begins the phase out in 2005.

{Published in cooperation with ENDS Environment Daily, Europe's choice for environmental news. Environmental Data Services Ltd, London. Email: envdaily@ends.co.uk}

----

UK announces energy review, including nuclear

UK: June 26, 2001
Story by Mike Peacock
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11329

LONDON - Prime Minister Tony Blair announced yesterday a root-and-branch review of Britain's energy needs which will include a look at the future for nuclear power.

Blair, in a written answer to parliament, said the review would look at tackling global warming and ensuring "secure, diverse and reliable energy supplies at a competitive price."

A review group will report by the year-end.

Energy minister Brian Wilson, who will chair the group, said: "The review will consider the role of coal, gas, oil and renewables in our future energy balance as well as combined heat and power and the enhancement of energy efficiency.

"The review will also need to consider what, if any, role the nuclear industry should play in meeting the environmental and security of supply objectives."

Just two days before he was swept back to power at a June 7 election, Blair said he had no plans to increase Britain's nuclear power capability.

His Labour Party's election manifesto was slightly more opaque, saying coal and nuclear energy "currently play important roles in ensuring diversity in our sources of electricity generation."

Speculation has been rife that the review, which will be conducted by the Performance and Innovation Unit which reports direct to Blair, will sanction an extension of nuclear power.

Experts say Britain will become a net importer of oil and gas in the future. The government's investment in renewable energy sources - solar, wind power and the like - is unlikely to fill the gap.

Nuclear power stations generate around 30 percent of Britain's electricity. Renewables currently meet less than three percent of electricity demand.

"In future we expect to become increasingly dependent on imports of fuel and particularly gas which could eventually become a dominant source of our supplies," Wilson said in a statement.

"And in the longer term we will need to reduce our carbon emissions further in order to play our part in meeting the challenge of global warming."

Britain's newest nuclear power station is Sizewell B which was commissioned by British Energy in 1995.

British Nuclear Fuels owns the country's oldest power stations and has already started to shut them down. All are due to close by 2021.

Laying out its legislative plans last week, the government said it wanted to cut Britain's greenhouse gas emissions by 23 percent below 1990 levels by 2010, almost double the UK's target under the Kyoto Protocol of a 12.5 percent reduction below 1990 levels by 2008-2012.

---

UK nuke group BNFL faces contract delays - report

UK: June 26, 2001
Story by Matthew Jones
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11321

LONDON - Britain's state-owned nuclear group British Nuclear Fuels could miss by up to 10 years deadlines set in contracts to reprocess customers' waste nuclear fuel, according to a report by activist group CORE released on Sunday.

The report by Martin Forwood of Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE) said difficulties at BNFL's showcase THORP reprocessing plant at Sellafield, Cumbria in northwest England, could mean the completion of some reprocessing contracts might not occur until 2015, up to 10 years later than certain customers expect.

BNFL said it was not prepared to comment on the report.

"We have not seen this report, which is by a known anti-nuclear campaigner" BNFL spokesman Bill Anderton told Reuters.

"THORP has an order book worth 12 billion pounds and will continue to operate profitably," he said.

Conceived in the 1970s and started in the early 1990s at a cost of nearly two billion pounds THORP (Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant) generates between 25-30 percent of BNFL's 1.5 billion pound turnover by reprocessing spent uranium reactor fuel, much of it from overseas power stations.

Any delay in reprocessing as suggested in the CORE report would add to customers' costs at a time when Europe's electricity generators are increasingly sensitive to the heightened competitive market which has followed partial liberalisation.

TROUBLED TIMES

BNFL has had a difficult 18 months following an international scandal over data falisification which led to cancelled contracts, the shelving of its slated 1.5 billion pound partial privatisation and the departure of senior staff.

The group which has striven to rebuild relations with overseas customers continues to be dogged by the government's refusal to allow it to start-up a 482 million pound nuclear fuel manufacturing plant four years after it was built.

The Sellafield Mox Plant (SMP), is designed to use the plutonium extracted by THORP, to make Mox fuel, a combination of plutonium and uranium oxides which was at the centre of the data falsification scandal.

Regulatory approval to begin operations has been withheld over fears there are not enough customers for the fuel. Before the government can grant permission to start-up it must ensure the plant passes a test of justification required by European law, proving the benefits of a practice involving ionising radiation outweighs any adverse environmental impact.

A report by government appointed consultants Arthur D Little into Mox's economic viability is expected in the next few weeks.

----

United Kingdom Fissile Material
Transparency, Safeguards and Irreversibility Initiatives

Communication of 21 September 1998 Received From the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the International Atomic Energy Agency

At the request of the Governor of the United Kingdom, in his letter to the Director General dated 11 September 1998, the attached document is being circulated for the information of all Member States of the Agency.

INTRODUCTION

1. The United Kingdom's civil nuclear industry has for many years been subject to international safeguards in accordance with our Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) (INFCIRC/263) - which entered into force in 1978), and with the terms of the EURATOM Treaty (to which the United Kingdom acceded in 1973). However, as a recognised Nuclear Weapon State under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the United Kingdom is entitled to hold stocks of nuclear materials required for national security reasons outside the scope of safeguards supervision by the IAEA and EURATOM. In addition, and in accordance with our Safeguards Agreement, the United Kingdom has the right to withdraw material from safeguards when required for national security reasons.

2. Defence holdings of fissile materials consist of plutonium, high enriched uranium (HEU) and other forms of uranium. Plutonium is required for use in nuclear weapons. Uranium has a number of military uses. In addition to its use in nuclear weapons, it is used to fuel the reactors which produce tritium (for use in nuclear weapons) and to produce the fuel for the reactors that power the United Kingdom's nuclear submarines. While accounting for these materials is maintained to standards at least as high as in the civil nuclear industry, until the recent publication of the United Kingdom's Strategic Defence Review, no figures on the amounts of these materials held had been released publicly.

TRANSPARENCY

3. We have considered the arguments for maintaining previous levels of confidentiality about the stocks of fissile material required for national security reasons, and have concluded that there is no longer a need for complete confidentiality about these stocks. We have therefore declared for the first time the total size of our stockpiles of plutonium and uranium held outside international safeguards. The United Kingdom is the first State among Nuclear Weapon States and other States that have not given up the right to hold fissile material outside safeguards to take this step.

4. The United Kingdom has until now held the following stocks outside safeguards:-

7.6 tonnes of plutonium;

21.9 tonnes of high enriched uranium;

15,000 tonnes of other forms of uranium.

This information complements information already published by the United Kingdom on inventories of these materials in the civil sector, including in connection with our adoption of the "Guidelines on the Management of Plutonium" (INFCIRC/549).

FUTURE DEFENCE STOCKPILES

5. We have concluded that the number of nuclear weapons required to provide the minimum nuclear deterrent for the United Kingdom can safely be reduced. We have also considered the quantities of fissile material for which the United Kingdom will continue to have a national security requirement and concluded that substantial quantities of the material we have previously held outside international safeguards are no longer required for national security reasons. In accordance with the United Kingdom's obligations under the NPT and under the EURATOM Treaty, and with the terms of INFCIRC/263, these materials are now being placed under ERUATOM safeguards and made liable to inspection by the IAEA. We are in discussion with the IAEA and EURATOM on how this can best be achieved.

6. More specifically, 0.3 tonnes of weapons-grade plutonium is now no longer needed for the defence programme. The great majority of this material is currently stored at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) at Aldermaston in southern England. It will be moved from there to suitable civil storage facilities elsewhere in the United Kingdom, where it will be placed under EURATOM safeguards and made liable to inspection by the IAEA. In addition, HEU which is no longer required for nuclear weapons will be used instead for the naval propulsion programme, though as a consequence of this continuing defence-related use, it will not be placed under safeguards.

7. We have also concluded that there is no continuing national security requirement for 4.1 tonnes of non-weapons grade plutonium. All of this material is therefore being placed under EURATOM safeguards and made liable to inspection by the IAEA. The great majority of this material is already stored at Sellafield in north west England. The remainder, currently at AWE Aldermaston, will be transferred to a suitable non-defence location for storage and safeguarding.

8. As noted above, there will continue to be a range of defence-related requirements for forms of uranium other than HEU: for example, providing the fuel for the tritium-producing reactors at Chapelcross in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. Some stocks of these materials will therefore remain outside international safegurads. However, we have concluded that of the total current stockpile of 15,000 tonnes referred to above, over 9,000 tonnes is no longer required for national security reasons. This will therefore become subject to safeguards under the EURATOM Treaty and made liable to inspection by the IAEA.

REPROCESSING

9. It will remain necessary to reprocess at Sellafield the spent fuel arising from the operation of the tritium-producing defence reactors at Chapelcross. Previously this reprocessing has been conducted outside safeguards. It will now be conducted under EURATOM safeguards and made liable to inspection by the IAEA. This means that all planned reprocessing and enrichment operations producing fissile material in the United Kingdom will hereafter routinely be conducted under international safeguards. We are the first Nuclear Weapon State to take this step and have gone a long way towards meeting what will undoubtedly be one of the main requirements of a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty (FMCT). We will, however, retain our right to resume such production outside of safeguards until a FMCT has been agreed.

WITHDRAWALS

10. As noted in paragraph 1 above, the United Kingdom has the right to withdraw fissile material from safeguards. We have considered whether we will in future need to have the ability to exercise this right. While we will continue to maintain our legal right to withdraw material from safeguards for national security reasons, we have concluded that our policy will be that in practice such withdrawals will be severely limited. Only small quantities of materials not suitable for nuclear explosive purposes will be withdrawn (e.g. material purchased from civil manufacturers for such uses at defence nuclear facilities as the calibration of instruments and radiography and shielding of radiological sources). Information on such withdrawals will be made public. None of the material withdrawn will be used in nuclear weapons.

HISTORICAL ACCOUNTING AND DECLASSIFICATION

11. We also recognise that if we are to achieve our goal of the global elimination of nuclear weapons, it will in time be necessary for those States that have at any time had nuclear programmes outside international safeguards to account for the fissile material produced under those programmes. We have noted with interest the Openness Initiative of the Department of Energy in the United States about the US nuclear production programme. We have made clear our commitment to transparency and open government. In this spirit, we have concluded that the Ministry of Defence should now set in hand a declassification and historical accounting process. This will be a continuing activity, but our aim is to produce by the spring of 2000 an initial report on the United Kingdom's defence fissile material production since the inception of the defence nuclear programme in the 1940s.

CONCLUSION

12. We believe that the measures set out above, together with the initiatives that have already been taken in the civil sector, represent a coherent policy of transparency and openness. Moreover, taken together with the disarmament inititatives announced at the same time, they demonstrate both a positive commitment and a significant contribution to our goal of the elimination of nuclear weapons.

-------- depleted uranium

UK MOD releases Kosovo DU reconnaisance visit report

From: uranium@t-online.de -
Tue, 26 Jun 2001

Ministry of Defence: Report of a Reconnaissance Visit to Develop an Enhanced Environmental Monitoring Programme in the British-led Sector in Kosovo, London, June 2001:

http://www.mod.uk/index.php3?page=2739

SUMMARY

This paper describes the results of a reconnaissance visit to Kosovo to scope the requirements for the enhanced environmental survey programme announced by the Minister for the Armed Forces in Parliament on 9 January 2001. Although the announcement was made in response to veterans' concerns over the possible risks from depleted uranium (DU) munitions used by NATO Forces in the Balkans, the risks from other hazardous materials have not been neglected. There is already an established health and safety and environmental health regime in Kosovo and Army Environmental Health Teams in the area have identified potential risks related to air quality, heavy metals and asbestos. Assessments of the potential risks from the use of DU munitions were made before UK troops entered Kosovo and were assessed as very low. Although subsequent findings have confirmed the validity of this initial assessment, there is clearly a need for further work to address veterans' concerns.

The findings from the reconnaissance parallel those by other NATO partners and international organisations. DU contamination was found to be limited and very highly localised and no contamination was detected in the vast majority of locations surveyed. However the need for a more thorough assessment of the potential risks from low levels of caesium contamination that probably results from the Chernobyl accident was identified. The visit also highlighted some of the practical problems likely to arise during future survey work. These include uncertainty regarding the exact location of DU attacks and the presence of other known physical and environmental hazards such as unexploded ordnance and asbestos. The paper also indicates that surveys for radiological contamination provide opportunities for gathering information on other hazardous materials (such as heavy metals) at little additional cost.

[...]

CONCLUSIONS

24. The reconnaissance visit has highlighted certain key issues that need to be borne in mind when considering the proposals for the environmental survey. Whilst the reason for the survey is in response to concerns about DU, the issue of caesium-137 contamination also needs to be properly addressed. However, any proposals for environmental surveys need to be considered in the wider context of risks arising from other hazards in the Kosovo theatre. Two such hazards identified during the visit were unexploded ordnance and asbestos. These hazards must be considered as part of a comprehensive generic risk assessment, which will be required to be completed before the survey mission commences and will need to be reviewed in Kosovo in the light of local circumstances.

25. The data obtained during the reconnaissance visit is in good agreement with that reported by other NATO countries and organisations such as the United Nations Environment Programme (Reference 4). The data supports the initial assessment that the risks to UK troops are low as areas affected by the use of DU munitions are widespread and significant levels of DU contamination highly localised. The fact that most of the DU recovered was in the form of intact penetrators, even in the case of the penetrator that had hit a concrete slab, suggests that there is little DU dust produced when a penetrator misses its intended target. Given that a US Government report (Reference 5) suggests that only 10% of the DU rounds fired by A-10 aircraft hit the intended target and that trials have shown that only a percentage of the DU is converted into a respirable form, the amount of DU available for inhalation even during an attack is obviously less than 10% of the total. Those at greater distance would obviously be at less risk as the dust is diluted and dispersed by the wind and weather.

26. The fact that the penetrator found on the ground had corroded to a greater extent than those embedded in building materials is not surprising. What the finding does indicate however, is that the corrosion of DU takes a finite time and that this must be allowed for when assessing the possible environmental or health consequences. Further investigations of the rate of corrosion and nature and mobility of the corrosion products would allow more sophisticated risk assessments.

27. Areas of DU contamination are widely dispersed and there is a likelihood that DU munitions residues may not be found even when approximate grid references of attack locations are known. Therefore the maximum amount of documentary, visual and even anecdotal evidence needs to be collated in advance if there is to be a realistic chance of finding DU munitions residues on former battlefields.

Note: The appendices contain maps of each site visited plus images, including instructive images of DU penetrators recovered, showing varying degree of corrosion.

-------- india / pakistan

Ex - Army Head: Pakistan Had Nuclear Arsenal in 1989

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-pa.html?searchpv=reuters

RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan had completed its nuclear buildup nine years before it finally ended international speculation by exploding its first nuclear bomb in 1998, the head of the armed forces at the time said on Tuesday.

Mirza Aslam Beg, who now heads an independent think tank, said Pakistan had concluded by 1989 it had an adequate nuclear deterrent and did not need to increase it. He said he believed Pakistan now had no more than 30 nuclear weapons.

``We wanted a credible minimum deterrent and that deterrence is related to the very minimum number of devices that we needed and a very minimum capability to deliver those,'' Beg said.

``And that we achieved in 1989 when Benazir Bhutto was prime minister and that is (still) the policy we follow,'' the retired army commander said in an interview with Reuters television.

Beg said Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is completely safe both because the National Command Authority was set up a year ago to control nuclear weapons and because there is nothing comparable to the warheads sitting atop U.S. and Russian missiles.

``We have a bomb-in-the-basement policy where not even a bomb is placed over there, not a device, but components are there to put it together if needed,'' said Beg.

``And then it is many miles away from the delivery system, that is, the missiles and the aircraft,'' he said. ``That by itself provides tremendous security, an in-built safety which is not understood by people who don't understand the real logic of our program and the restrictions we have imposed on ourselves.''

Beg, a vigorous 73-year-old, has run the Foundation for Research on International Environment, National Development and Security (FRIENDS) since retiring from the military in 1991 after more than four decades service.

HOW MANY BOMBS?

Beg said he believed India had 60 or 70 nuclear devices by 1989 and had continued to build a stockpile that now numbers 200. But he said Pakistan had concluded in 1989 it did not need more.

``How many do you need? For what?'' he said at his office in Rawalpindi, which houses army headquarters. ``You need 10, 20, 30 -- that is all that we need and that is all we have. There is no need to add to it. I don't think they have added any more.''

The nuclear capability of Pakistan -- and neighboring India -- was a subject of international speculation until May 1998 when India suddenly carried out five nuclear blasts.

Other countries, alarmed at the prospect of nuclear war in densely populated South Asia, appealed for Pakistan not to match the India blasts. But Pakistan answered what it saw as an Indian challenge by carrying out six nuclear explosions the same month.

Despite U.S. anger at the blasts, following years of warning Islamabad not to develop nuclear weapons, Beg said Washington had long known Pakistan was building up a nuclear force.

Beg said he learned the details of Pakistan's nuclear research in 1987 when he was deputy chief of staff and when he took the top position a year later the program, launched in 1975, was nearly complete.

``The United States purposely tried not to believe Pakistan had that capability because that was a time when we were at the height of our fight with the Soviets in Afghanistan,'' Beg said.

``It was a question of, I would say, convenience for them -- a diplomatic need not to declare that Pakistan had acquired it.''

Once Soviet forces were driven from Afghanistan, the United States began demanding Pakistan halt its nuclear program and imposed economic sanctions -- after the date Beg said Pakistan already had completed its program.

-------- korea

North Korea's turn?

William J. Taylor
June 26, 2001
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20010626-426112.htm

Oh, how we love diplomatic analogies. Now, with the new announcement that Washington will resume dialogue with North Korea, key spokesmen in the White House and State Department are saying that "the ball is now in North Korea's court." Good grief; to say that the United States is ready to resume talking again means only that we are ready to return to the tennis court together. We have not yet even been served with concrete Bush administration proposals. The leaders in Pyongyang can only guess about the possible spins on the first ball served.

The four-month hiatus in U.S. policy toward North Korea, kindly called "a three-month policy review," which has seriously set back almost four years of progress toward South-North reconciliation, is over. And surprise, the conclusion is that there is no safe or sane alternative to the basic policies pursued by the Clinton administration in concert with our allies in Seoul and Tokyo. However, the Bush administration evidently has some new twists for "comprehensive talks." It's our serve.

Before those of us who have long believed that engaging North Korea across the board is the proper path sit back and rejoice, we had better consider the diplomatic nuances of how our government should now approach the leaders in North Korea. What should our first serve be? While saving for subsequent serves the various techniques of "engagement" backed up by a strong defense pursued by the Clinton administration, the first should be a totally unexpected shot delivered from a position of strength. That is, issue a public statement that the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea has been removed from the U.S. list of terrorist states, that we support loans to the DPRK from the International Monetary Fund and Asian Development Bank, that we will remove economic sanctions and that it is our intention to normalize relations.

Subsequent serves take us back into the tough negotiations over North Korea's missile programs, proliferation of missiles and missile technology, the status of nuclear capabilities and conventional arms control measures all to be underpinned by verification measures. All of these complex negotiations will take time and will involve heavy financial costs. But that first crucial serve, with no financial costs to "the World's Sole Superpower" (the undisputed world class tennis player) would set the psychological environment for the rest of the match.

We are talking here about the psychology of diplomacy with the leadership in Pyongyang. Having spent literally hundreds of hours with their senior leaders, including the Great Leader" Kim Il-sung before he died; having read deeply into English translations of "The Juche Idea," the basic philosophy of self-reliance behind the DPRK political and social system, and having traveled extensively in North Korea during four week-long trips, I am suggesting that "pressuring" them is a dangerous exercise in futility.

The extent and depth of North Korea's search for international "respect" and "dignity" cannot be exaggerated. A foreign visitor's first mandatory stops in Pyongyang include a visit to the Tower of Juche, which is emblazoned with hundreds of little plaques bearing respectful messages from leaders of "Juche societies" from many parts of the world. Paying homage to an enormous bronze statue of Kim Il-sung and, if staying in a VIP villa, watching extravaganza films about the greatness of North Korean history since the inception of Juche are other "must do's." Then, if the visitor's trip is long enough, an overnight train ride north to Mount Myohyang is in order to tour two enormous buildings, one dedicated to the Great Leader and one to his son, the Dear Leader, now ruler, General Secretary Kim Jong-Il. Inside are rows-upon-rows of valuable gifts ivory tusks, gold and silver gifts and works of art hermetically sealed in glass cases bearing inscriptions of respect mainly from Third World leaders.

The emphasis on foreign respect also punctuated the many high-level, private discussions I have held with North Korean leaders on international security, trade and aid issues. For example, from my meeting notes: "Dr. Taylor, assure your friends in Washington that we never respond positively to outside pressure" (President Kim Il-sung) or "Dr. Taylor, your government speaks of 'carrots and sticks' diplomacy toward us; one uses that on mules, and we are not mules (Central Committee Secretary Kim, Yong-sun), or "Col. Taylor, do not use with us the Gulf war as a sign of your military strength; Iraqis can not fight, but we can (Gen. Kim Young-chul).

Pyongyang's response to President Bush's statements at the March summit with South Korea's president that he does not trust the North's leadership and would end dialogue pending a policy review was predictable stony silence relieved only by inflammatory anti-American rhetoric and cessation of progress in the North-South Korean dialogue.

We have nothing of significance to lose by the diplomatic approach I suggest, an approach that has been adopted by most of the international community. This approach is also consistent with a policy of pursuing arms-control objectives while moving simultaneously toward missile defense. We have much to gain if the psychology involved leads to recognized greater "internationalism" in our approach, lessened North Korean suspicions of U.S. motives, greater willingness to enter verifiable agreements and diminished tensions on the Korean Peninsula as progress resumes in the North-South dialogue aimed at peaceful coexistence.

Historically, wars often start by accident or miscalculation at times of high tension. The U.S.-South Korean combined forces would win a war quickly, but it would be a Pyrrhic victory in which hundreds of thousands of Americans and our allies in Japan and South Korea would perish.

Now, let's get in the right first serve. Our Asian allies, along with most others worldwide, would applaud loudly at a time when the United States can use a little positive foreign. public relations.

William J. Taylor, a retired Army colonel and former senior executive with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.

-------- missile defense

Cartoon on Missile Defence Systems

From: "Viviane Lerner" <vlerner@interpac.net>
"If I Had A Missile" - by Mark Fiore
http://www.motherjones.com/web_exclusives/commentary/humor/defense.html

----

Pentagon cautions on missile defence plan

By James Dao in Washington,
The New York Times,
June 26, 2001
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0106/26/world/world1.html

A Pentagon study concluded last year that testing on the proposed national missile shield was behind schedule and unrealistic and had suffered too many failures to justify its deployment in 2005, a year after the Bush Administration is considering deploying one.

The August 2000 report, only recently released to Congress, offers new details about problems in developing anti-missile technology and raises questions about how quickly an effective system can be made operational.

The Pentagon is studying proposals to deploy a limited system - but one that would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty - as soon as 2004. In recent weeks, the Secretary of Defence has indicated a willingness to deploy a system before tests have been completed if an attack seems imminent.

But as an example of unrealistic testing, the report cited an October 1999 experiment in which a global positioning system inside a mock warhead helped guide an intercept missile towards a target over the Pacific. That test was successful, but two more recent flight tests failed.

None of those tests used the kinds of sophisticated decoys that a real ballistic missile would use to confuse an anti-missile system, the report said. The decoy in each test was a large balloon that did not look like a warhead and that the kill vehicle's sensors could easily distinguish from the target.

The report also asserted that the Pentagon had not even scheduled a test involving multiple targets, the likely situation in an attack. And it found software problems with a training simulator that made it appear as if twice as many warheads had been fired at the US as had been intended in a 1999 exercise.

The simulator then fired interceptors at those "phantom tracks," and operators were unable to override it.

The report, which then president Bill Clinton read just before deferring initial construction of a missile system last September, acknowledged the program was still young and was progressing well on some fronts. But it concluded that unless testing was significantly accelerated, at significantly higher cost, the program would not be ready for use against real attacks for several years.

Officials with the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defence Organisation disputed parts of the report, saying the global positioning system used in the 1999 test did not guide the kill vehicle to the target.

But critics of the scheme said the report clearly showed that even the most advanced anti-missile technology needed years of testing. Without such testing, they warned, the system would be ineffective or even dangerous.

The report, which members of Congress plan to make public this week, is expected to fuel a contentious debate over how swiftly a missile system should be deployed and how much money should be spent developing one.

----

Japan to pursue independent missile defense

Saturday, June 23, 2001 at 16:30 JST
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=1&id=37544

WASHINGTON - Japanese Defense Agency chief Gen Nakatani told the United States on Friday that any missile defense program Japan may pursue in the future would be independent of U.S. plans to build a national defense shield.

Nakatani outlined the Japanese security policy in a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. At a news conference after their one-hour meeting, Nakatani said he told Rumsfeld, "If Japan is to own a missile defense system, it should be used to protect Japan's territory and operated by Japan on its own initiative." (Kyodo News)

Japan Today Discussion: Post Your Opinion!

[Interesting debate...] http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=1&id=37544

-------- russia

Russia Eases Travel for U.S. Citizens

Washington Post,
June 26, 2001
Associated Press
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45575-2001Jun25?language=printer

MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to abolish a requirement for transit visas for American travelers after the United States dropped a similar rule for Russians, news reports said.

After two months of diplomatic tension over the issue, the Russian Foreign Ministry proposed abandoning the requirement, and Putin agreed, presidential spokesman Alexei Gromov was quoted by the Interfax news agency and NTV television as saying.

----

Putin's Futile Warhead-Rattling

By R. James Woolsey,
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45513-2001Jun25?language=printer

In his recent marathon press conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to show both a velvet glove -- nobody here but us free enterprise democrats, folks -- and a barely concealed mailed fist: In essence, if you Americans deploy ballistic missile defenses we will put multiple warheads on our new ICBMs.

Some European and American observers have already declared that Putin has now trumped every card in the American hand. What could be worse, they ask, than more Russian strategic warheads? Destabilizing! Arms race! Stop Bush from provoking this horror!

Whoa.

The proper riposte to Putin's threat is the one given earlier this year by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when Russia's current defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, similarly told him that Russia would deploy more strategic warheads if the United States pursued defenses. Essentially, Rumsfeld shrugged.

Exactly right. If Putin wants to waste his rubles convincing the world that his nostalgia for the Cold War knows no bounds, it's his problem, not ours. The number of Russian strategic warheads was a central concern for us only in the historical context of the Cold War and the threat the Soviets then posed to Europe. Fixation on such numbers today is a demonstration of short-term memory loss -- about everything that's happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today we have two serious problems with Russia's nuclear forces, but neither has anything to do with the number of their strategic warheads.

First, Russian warning systems are thoroughly decrepit and riddled with gaps. Some of their radars are not even in Russia, due to the breakup of the Soviet Union, and the satellites in their warning network are starting to fail. In 1995 President Boris Yeltsin was falsely alerted because the wheezing Russian warning system mistakenly took the launch of a Norwegian scientific rocket (of which they had been notified) for a possible missile launch from a U.S. submarine. The Russians need help filling these gaps in their warning systems, and two years ago we agreed to do so -- by forming a joint U.S.-Russian warning center in Moscow that would use data from both countries -- but the Russians continue to delay its implementation.

Second, although Russian strategic warheads are well-guarded, large numbers of small tactical nuclear warheads and huge amounts of fissionable material usable for bombs are not, and these create a serious stockpile security problem. Nunn-Lugar funds from the United States have helped secure about two-thirds of this mess from theft and smuggling and could help secure the rest, but again Russian stalling (much of it from President Putin's old outfit, the domestic successor to the KGB) is holding up progress.

The numbers of Russian strategic warheads don't cause, or even exacerbate, either the warning or the stockpile problems. The warning gaps have to be fixed whether the Russians have 1,000 strategic warheads or 5,000 -- the accidental launch of even one would be an incredible disaster -- and this risk is basically unaffected by warhead numbers. The stockpile security problem is also independent of strategic warhead numbers. It is fissionable material and small tactical warheads that are in danger of being stolen or sold, not the well-guarded strategic systems.

So why the excitement about Putin's strategic warhead brandishing? It's been said that the most common form of mistake is forgetting what it is you're trying to accomplish. This is what has happened to those who have started fluttering about Putin's threat.

During the Cold War there was indeed a reason we cared about the number of warheads on Soviet strategic ballistic missiles. More than 20 armored and mechanized Soviet divisions were poised only a few days' march from the Low Countries and the English Channel. We needed to be sure that, in a crisis, our allies would hold firm. and thus we could brook no doubts about our steadfastness. We wanted them, and the Soviets, to have no doubt that if necessary we would use our strategic forces to defend Europe.

The bulk of our deterrent was in our silo-based ICBMs, and they were crucial to us because of their unique accuracy and reliable communications, and because, unlike the bomber force, the Soviets had no defenses against them. We were deeply concerned that if the Soviets could credibly threaten to strike first and destroy our ICBMs with a small number of their own ICBMs carrying multiple warheads -- while retaining the bulk of their strategic forces in reserve -- our allies would doubt our resolve.

Our ballistic missile submarine force was steadily modernized over the years, but most of us were unwilling to rely on it alone. Consequently in the arms control negotiations of the '70s and '80s, we bargained hard to limit Soviet warhead numbers, to protect our ICBMs from attack.

Today's world bears not the faintest resemblance to that of the Cold War. Brussels indeed stands naked to invaders, but it is to a golden horde of antitrust lobbyists. Some of our allies doubt our resolve, but their concern is our fetish for CO2-emitting SUVs. Missiles are still the heart of our nuclear deterrent, but the bulk of them are on Trident submarines; added numbers of strategic warheads, by anyone, do not make them vulnerable.

It is reported that President Bush may soon show he is not obsessed by strategic warhead numbers by unilaterally reducing ours. We should also keep trying to get the Russians to let us help them solve their real strategic problems -- decrepit warning and unsecured stockpiles. And if part of the administration's defense plan against rogue states includes boost phase intercept -- being able to shoot down offensive missiles very early in their flight -- the system would incidentally also defend Russia.

If, in spite of all this, Putin keeps threatening to add to Russia's strategic warhead numbers, we have two things to communicate to him. First, as an act of kindness we could point out that he'd get substantially more military utility out of battleships, the political currency of 1920s arms control. But if he ignores that friendly suggestion, then it's time for the shrug.

The writer, an attorney and a former CIA director, was ambassador, delegate or adviser in five U.S.-Soviet arms control negotiations.

--------

Team Will Cut Into Sunken Submarine

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- The Russian-Dutch team in charge of lifting the Kursk nuclear submarine will begin working July 10 to fasten cables to the mangled wreck, an official said Tuesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov said the first phase of the operation would last from July 10-15, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported.

The engineers will slice into the steel hull to attach the cables, and also will cut off the front section of the submarine, Klebanov was quoted as saying. The front section suffered the heaviest damage from the explosions that sank the Kursk in the Barents Sea last August, killing all 118 men aboard.

The second phase of the project is scheduled for September. That is when the submarine will be lifted to the surface and floated on four large pontoons, then be towed to a dock for examination.

Russian officials say they are raising the submarine to remove a potential radiation threat from the sub's nuclear reactors. They also say they hope raising the vessel will help determine what caused the explosions that sank it.

Russia signed contracts with the Netherlands firms Mammoet Transport for the project. The Dutch firm Smit International is also expected to help build the pontoons. The amount of the contract was not made public, but is expected to cost tens of millions of dollars.

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

DOE WITHHOLDS HEU STUDY

Secrecy News,
June 26, 2001
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/index.html

In 1996, the Department of Energy pledged to publish a comprehensive report entitled "Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU): The First 50 Years." The report was in fact completed in 1997 and formally declassified earlier this year, but it is still being withheld by DOE.

The HEU report, originally requested by the Secretary of Energy in February 1996, describes the history of US production, disposition, and inventories of highly enriched uranium.

"This report will provide assistance to worldwide nonproliferation efforts," according to a 1997 DOE statement, by promoting increased transparency and accountability. "It will also assist regulators in environmental, health, and safety matters at domestic sites where this material is stored or buried."

Yet for no valid reason, and despite its legal obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, DOE has still failed to disclose the 1997 report, which by now is four years out of date. No explanation for the continued withholding of the document could be elicited from a DOE spokesman.

Meanwhile, the United Kingdom has surpassed the United States in transparency on this front. In 1998, the UK disclosed its total stockpiles of uranium and plutonium in an unclassified memorandum to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

"The United Kingdom is the first State among Nuclear Weapon States ... to take this step," the memo stated. See the text of the memo in IAEA Information Circular (INFCIRC) 570, dated 21 September 1998, here:

http://www.iaea.org/worldatom/Documents/Infcircs/1998/infcirc570.shtml

Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.

-------- colorado

Beryllium case jury deliberates 3rd day

Tuesday, June 26, 2001
Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0%2C1002%2C53~51615%2C00.html

Jefferson County jurors today begin their third day of deliberations in the case of ill Rocky Flats workers who have sued the Ohio-based maker of beryllium.

Jurors told the judge Monday evening they were still struggling to reach a verdict. Four Rocky Flats workers and their wives claim Brush Wellman Inc. caused employees at the former nuclear weapons plant to get chronic beryllium disease, a lung ailment that can be fatal.

The jury listened to 13 days of testimony about what Brush knew about the toxic metal it supplied to Rocky Flats.

The workers believe Brush covered up vital information about beryllium's hazards. The company countered that the workers were made ill through sloppy conditions at a poorly run plant.

----

Jury Rules for Beryllium Supplier

By Jennifer Hamilton
Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; 10:22 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010626/aponline222226_000.htm

GOLDEN, Colo. -- The company that supplied beryllium to a former nuclear weapons plant was not responsible for the illness of four workers who said they were sickened from exposure to the metal, a jury decided Tuesday.

The six-person jury ruled that Cleveland-based Brush Wellman was not negligent, and no damages were awarded to the plaintiffs.

Jurors told attorneys they believed the former employees of the now-closed Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant assumed some risk with the job, said Al Stewart, attorney for the plaintiffs.

The workers had asserted that Brush Wellman failed to warn them about the metal's effects. The Jefferson County District Court jury found that poor management at Rocky Flats was to blame.

The plaintiffs have filed separate claims against the government; Rocky Flats operators; Dow Chemical; and Rockwell International.

Brush Wellman attorney Jeffrey Ubersux said the jury's verdict confirms that "Brush Wellman had provided adequate warnings to the users of its products."

Beryllium is a hard, gray metal that is extracted from ore, refined into a very fine powder and used in manufacturing nuclear weapons, cars, cell phones and other products.

Chronic beryllium disease inflames and scars the lungs, making it difficult to breathe. Of the four workers in court Thursday, two were using oxygen tanks.

The plaintiffs had no comment on Tuesday's verdict. Stewart said no decision has been made on whether his clients will appeal.

-------- kentucky

Specialist: Radiation, Paducah workers' cancer likely tied
Others dismiss conclusion of plaintiffs' witness

By James R. Carroll and James Malone
The Louisville, KY Courier-Journal,
June 26, 2001
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2001/06/26/ke062601s42762.htm

Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant workers who developed cancer after years of radiation exposure almost certainly became ill because of their jobs, a British radiation specialist concluded.

However, critics say the conclusion of Michael Thorne, contained in an affidavit filed to support a $10 billion lawsuit against the uranium plant's former operators, is faulty in assessing blame. Thorne is an expert witness being paid by the plaintiffs.

''Attorneys want to be able . . . to either predict or assign blame for a (person's) cancer, but you can't do that,'' said Joel Cehn, a California radiation safety consultant who is not involved in the case. ''There's no way to know if an individual -- even if that individual was exposed to radiation, develops cancer -- was it caused by radiation? There is no way to know that.''

Thorne's affidavit filed this month said there is a significant likelihood -- greater than 50 percent to more than 90 percent -- that career Paducah employees who worked around high radiation levels and then got cancer did so because of their jobs.

''On the basis of internationally accepted radiation biology models and . . . risk assessment, the workers at (Paducah) were exposed to illegally excessive levels of radiation at the plant, and, if still living, have a significant and unacceptable probability of dying as a result,'' the affidavit said.

Bill McMurry, a Louisville attorney who represents the plaintiffs, called Thorne's conclusion ''the linchpin to the issue of whether the workers sustained injury even though they don't have cancer, or even though they don't have symptoms of radiation-related diseases.''

The lawsuit, filed in 1999 by current and former plant workers and survivors of workers who have died, contends that plant operators exposed the workers to high levels of radiation without telling them, and that workers should be compensated for their increased risk of developing cancer. The trial is scheduled for July 2003.

''We are not championing the cause of dead people who died from cancer, or even of people with cancer,'' McMurry said. ''This is about those who live at risk of cancer . . . and suffer the emotional damage of living in fear.''

David Fuller, president of Local 3-550 of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers International Union that represents several hundred workers at the Paducah plant said Thorne's study is one of the first on plant conditions that isn't tied to the Department of Energy, and as such its implications were disturbing.

''I've not seen anything except what DOE has done and DOE can be conservative,'' Fuller said. '' . . . I'm wondering if we have cancer in our future.''

Thorne said exposure levels he tracked at the plant were close to what the Energy Department found in a survey released last year. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Thorne said in a telephone interview from his office in West Yorkshire, England, plant workers received radiation doses that exceeded the acceptable limit of 5 rem per year. In addition, some workers were likely to have been exposed at levels as high as 62.5 rem per year and perhaps higher, he said.

Thorne, a former scientific secretary on the International Commission on Radiological Protection, then calculated probabilities that cancers in workers were caused by onthe-job exposures, primarily due to inhalation of neptunium, plutonium and uranium isotopes. He offered the following analysis, based on 300 hours of research:

''Assume a man worked in the production facilities . . . for a period of 20 years, beginning on his 20th birthday and retiring on his 40th birthday. Assume such a man received in excess of 5 rem per year, as the data suggest is the case for (Paducah) production facilities. Assume that at age 65 this same man presents himself with cancer and dies from such cancer.

''According to the model, and the underlying assumptions . . . there is better than a 50 percent chance that such a cancer death was caused by radiation . . . and not from any other sources. This probability rises sharply with the overall level of exposure. At annual exposures of over 60 rem, which DOE documents on the basis of air (sample) data, the probability exceeds 90 percent for a 20-year exposure period.''

Radiation exposure is measured in units called rem, or millirem. The 5-rem-per-year exposure limit is equal to 5,000 millirem. Experts say the average annual radiation dose in the United States is 360 millirem, from natural sources such as radon gas and cosmic radiation to man-made sources ranging from medical x-rays to bricks in houses.

Cehn, the radiation safety consultant, whose expertise was offered by the Nuclear Energy Institute, said one in four Americans develops cancer. He said that makes the probability of developing the disease in the general population fairly high to begin with.

Gail Rymer, a spokeswoman for Lockheed Martin Corp., one of the former Paducah plant operators being sued, said Thorne's study ''runs contrary to known science.''

Tomm Sprick, a spokesman for defendant Union Carbide, now part of Dow Chemical, said Thorne's affidavit was ''one of many documents that have been filed in this case, and our attorneys will be reviewing this latest filing within the context of the entire case.''

The Energy Department did not return a call seeking comment on Thorne's study.

Jim Chesnut, 71, a retired Paducah plant worker who is not a party to the lawsuit, said he doesn't doubt Thorne's conclusions. ''I have lost so many buddies, and I can't help think much of it was caused by radiation,'' he said.

But J.W. Cleary, who has worked at the plant since 1990, said safety has improved in recent years. ''We realize now that there was some danger,'' said Cleary, who also is not involved in the lawsuit.

An ongoing medical testing program of current and former Paducah workers is aimed, in part, at detecting cancers in their early stages.

-------- nevada

Tribe may have say in Yucca project planning

Tuesday, June 26, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
By KEITH ROGERS REVIEW-JOURNAL
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Jun-26-Tue-2001/news/16401196.html

Having learned a lesson from nuclear weapons testing, the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe today becomes the second tribe to ask Interior Secretary Gale Norton to designate that it is affected by the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

A designation as an affected American Indian tribe would give it full participation in the Yucca Mountain Project planning process, allowing the possibility for oversight money appropriated by Congress.

"Department of Energy programs lack an understanding of tribal culture and are not always sensitive or appropriate when applied to tribal society," according to a statement released by Duckwater Shoshone officials.

"This we have learned from our own tragic experience as down-wind victims from 928 U.S. weapons tested near Yucca Mountain at the Nevada Test Site," the statement read.

Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is the only site the Department of Energy is studying to entomb the nation's highly radioactive waste.

Currently there are no tribes with affected status involving the Yucca Mountain Project. The Timbisha Shoshone council of Death Valley, Calif., 50 miles west of Yucca Mountain, applied for designation as an affected tribe in April, citing concerns about health and safety.

Similarly, Duckwater Shoshones say they "may be substantially and adversely affected by the siting of a repository at Yucca Mountain."

"The Duckwater Shoshone Tribe intends to participate in the oversight of Department of Energy site characterization activities at Yucca Mountain, to participate in licensing for construction authorization, and to participate in licensing of actual repository operations as contemplated by Congress," the tribe's statement read.

----

EPA begins inquiry into radiation health standards

Tuesday, June 26, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
By STEVE TETREAULT DONREY WASHINGTON BUREAU
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Jun-26-Tue-2001/news/16404842.html

WASHINGTON -- An independent investigator within the Environmental Protection Agency issued a call for documents Monday as he began an initial inquiry into radiation health standards the EPA set for the proposed Nevada nuclear waste repository.

Robert J. Martin, the EPA's national ombudsman, said he thinks he has authority to investigate how the agency formed the standards, which are expected to play a role in determining the suitability of nuclear waste burial at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Martin said EPA higher-ups think he does not have jurisdiction to get involved, but he said he will press forward until he is convinced otherwise.

"At this time I am making a rebuttable presumption that I have the authority to investigate concerns in connection with the Yucca Mountain site," he said.

Martin's announcement comes a week after he traveled to Las Vegas at the request of Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev. He met with state and county officials who complained about the standards.

Martin sent notices Monday to representatives of 35 groups including the Energy Department, Yucca Mountain contractors, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Nevada Resort Association, Nevada state, county and city officials, University of Nevada, Las Vegas officials and environmental groups.

He gave them 30 days to submit comments "in connection with the EPA's involvement in the Yucca Mountain site." He said he may decide to grant some respondents extra time.

Martin asked the EPA's regional office and the state of Nevada to provide permits and other documents regarding hazardous materials at Yucca Mountain.

The site had been assigned a hazardous waste identification number, which Martin says supports his involvement. The EPA ombudsman referees disputes involving the agency and communities affected by its hazardous waste management programs.

A spokesman said Martin would decide within 30 days after receiving the comments whether to launch a fuller investigation, which could involve holding public hearings and conducting on-the-record interviews of participants.

The ombudsman does not have binding authority to make recommendations stick, but he said his findings are accepted more than half the time.

-------- new mexico

Radiation Payments Criticized

By Jennifer McKee,
Albuquerque Journal,
June 26, 2001
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/369724news06-26-01.htm

A sluggish, uncooperative bureaucracy could shackle a new law designed to pay nuclear bomb workers sickened by radiation and other workplace hazards, critics said.

"It's not uncommon for DOE to stonewall records," said Betty Gunther, a Los Alamos National Laboratory employee and president of the University Professional and Technical Employees Union, which has been organizing at the lab for several years.

The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, passed last October, goes into effect July 31. The law calls for a lump sum of $150,000 for every Department of Energy worker diseased by his or her work, plus medical assistance for the disease.

The law covers every DOE worker or DOE contract worker - except soldiers - who worked at Energy Department sites starting from the earliest days of the Manhattan Project, said program director Pete Turcic of the U.S. Department of Labor in Washington, D.C. The law contains a list of certain ailments, such as beryllium disease and silicosis, which are uniformly covered, he said. In those cases, he said, there's no medical doubt that an employee developed the disease because of his or her occupational exposure.

But other diseases are trickier, such as cancer. Because cancer has a host of causes, not every former DOE worker who gets cancer is automatically covered under the law, Turcic said.

The law sets out a complicated formula for proving if workers with cancer got their disease from work. And according to Gunther, the process isn't perfect.

According to Turcic, workers must write to the Department of Labor saying what disease they have, where they worked and when. If the person has cancer, the Labor Department will forward that claim to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There, workers will calculate how much radiation the worker likely absorbed on the job and try to figure out if that radiation caused the cancer. Then, a Labor Department worker will decide if the employee is covered by the law.

According to Larry Elliot, with the national institute's lab in Cincinnati charged with estimating each workers radiation dose, the lab isn't trying to pinpoint every radiation exposure a DOE employee may have had.

Instead, he said, they're only going to verify where and for how long the employee worked and what radioactive materials were present at that time. From there, health workers will ascertain whether such a so-called radiation "dose" could cause cancer.

"We put confidence limits around those estimates," Elliot said. "The less we know, the more our uncertainty is."

But to get all that information, his office must request records for every single employee who applies.

At Los Alamos, according to Turcic, some 69,000 current and former employees are eligible. Elliot, who has worked with DOE sites before, said he is already anticipating some snags getting the necessary records.

"I'm not naive enough to say we're not going to have any problems," he said.

His office has an agreement with the DOE to provide the records and said the employees who will view the documents all have the necessary security clearances to see secret information.

But according to Gunther, the DOE, especially at Los Alamos, has a history of freezing out investigators searching records.

She cited an ongoing effort by the CDC to cobble together a list of all the radioactive pollution that has left the lab in its entire half-century history. In that case, the lab's buckled-down security measures froze out a team of workers for months and almost canceled the study altogether. Furthermore, Gunther said, the law includes no time limits for when the DOE must provide the records.

"You have to depend on them doing it correctly and willingly," she said.

The lab keeps many of its records in "banker boxes," she said, making finding specific records about a specific employee difficult.

"It's not like a library," Gunther said. "You can't just go in and look up your own records."

The union has other problems with the bill. For example, survivors of workers who died from their diseases are also covered. But the law only offers cash payments for children under 18 right now, not children who were under 18 when their mother or father died.

Gunther said she knows of one widow trying to send her college-aged children to school with no support.

"They can't get help and their father is dead," Gunther said.

A local DOE spokeswoman was not immediately available for comment Monday.

-------- utah

Congress May Help With Moab Tailings

Tuesday, June 26, 2001,
BY JUDY FAHYS,
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE
http://www.sltrib.com/06262001/utah/108849.htm

Work would go forward on the Atlas uranium tailings pile in Moab under a bill making its way through Congress.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a supplemental defense spending bill that includes $1.9 million that the U.S. Energy Department can use for the radioactive mining waste. All three Utahns in the House voted for the measure.

The Senate this week is expected to take up a version of the bill that dedicates $1.4 million for the work.

Money is needed to study the best way to remove the tailings, to keep the tainted dust from blowing into town, to prevent contaminated silt from leaching into the adjacent Colorado River and to transfer the 130-acre site into the ownership of the Energy Department.

Currently the tailings pile is owned by an accounting firm, the bankruptcy trustee of the defunct Atlas Corp. Under legislation Congress passed last year, the accounting firm was responsible for stabilizing the pile before the Energy Department assumed responsibility for it.

Estimates for removal of the mill tailings have been as high as $300 million. Gov. Mike Leavitt and Utah Reps. Chris Cannon and Jim Matheson asked for $10 million earlier this year to continue with the work.

"These funds will allow us to plan an expedited cleanup process of the Atlas pile and safeguard both the residents of Moab and the Colorado River," said Cannon.

"President Bush is to be commended for prioritizing the health and safety of the citizens of Moab, as well as the millions of Americans who rely on the Colorado River for the water supply."

-------- us nuc politics

Do as We Say, Not as We Do
Milosevic pales in comparison to McNamara.

By ROBERT SCHEER,
Los Angeles Times,
Tuesday, June 26, 2001
http://www.latimes.com/news/comment/20010626/t000052822.html

What's wrong with this picture?: Slobodan Milosevic will be dragged before an international war crimes tribunal while Robert McNamara tours American college campuses touting his latest book on how to achieve world peace, and Henry Kissinger advises corporations, for a fat fee, on how to do business with dictators.

Clearly, when it comes to war crimes, this nation is above the law.

The United States has supported, nay imposed, a standard of official morality on the world while blithely insisting that no American leader ever could be held accountable to that same standard.

The persistent, if implicit, argument, made since the time of the Nuremberg post-World War II trials, is that we get to judge but not be judged because we are a democratic and free people inherently accountable to the highest of standards. Dropping atomic bombs on Japanese civilians was, therefore, a peaceful gesture because it shortened the war. Wouldn't we judge such a claim as barbaric if employed by any other nation to justify using such a weapon?

As the war in Vietnam further demonstrated, we are deeply invested in the righteousness of war against civilians, but only when we are the warriors. Now we will judge Milosevic a war criminal because he did the same.

Whatever the horrors inflicted upon noncombatants during Milosevic's tenure, they pale in comparison to what McNamara did during the eight years that he presided over the Vietnam War, in which millions died because of the lies he told and policies he ordered.

Milosevic is accused of using military force to wage a campaign of terror against the civilian population of Kosovo. Yet it was McNamara who defined the largest part of the Vietnamese countryside, populated by peasants, as a free-fire zone. At no point was the population of Kosovo systematically raked with anti-personnel bombs and incinerated with napalm, as were the Vietnamese under the McNamara-directed policy.

McNamara refused to discuss his role in Vietnam for 27 years after leaving his post as secretary of Defense, yet the acts over which he concedes guilt in his 1995 memoir certainly could have formed the basis of war crimes investigations of both McNamara and Lyndon Baines Johnson, the president he served. In his book, McNamara makes clear that neither he nor Johnson believed that the U.S. had a moral right to carpet-bomb the Vietnamese into submission to achieve irrational U.S. policy goals.

In a letter McNamara wrote to Johnson in 1967, the secretary of Defense conceded that the U.S. was flirting with war crimes and cautioned the president that "there may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go." He added: "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one." But LBJ and McNamara were never held accountable in a court committed to those human rights limits, and their successors, Richard Nixon and his key warrior, Kissinger, promptly escalated the war, carpet-bombing North Vietnamese peasants and destroying all normal life in neutral Cambodia. The fierce bombings that destroyed the Cambodian countryside also collapsed civil rule there, paving the way for Pol Pot, a mass murderer who killed more than a million of his own people and yet later became an ally of the U.S. It was only when he was no longer useful to U.S. policymakers that they considered him worthy of a war crimes trial. By then he was infirm.

Certainly Milosevic would seem to qualify as a war criminal, but forcing him to trial while McNamara and Kissinger enjoy acclaim as elder statesmen is to desecrate the standard of moral accountability. McNamara was forced to address the war crimes issue last week before a USC audience. He said he wished that international standards had been in place when the U.S. was in Vietnam. Well, there was a standard. It was established at Nuremberg, and McNamara and company clearly violated it.

As for Kissinger, his offenses are not restricted to any one continent. He recently said he was too busy to answer a subpoena ordering him to appear before a Paris judge investigating crimes by the Kissinger-backed Pinochet regime in Chile.

Milosevic may well be a war criminal, but what arrogance to condemn Yugoslavia's butcher of civilians when we have exonerated our own.

Robert Scheer Writes a Syndicated Column

----

Bush Nominates Science Adviser

Newsday
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; Page A15
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45530-2001Jun25?language=printer

President Bush nominated John H. Marburger III, the director of Brookhaven National Laboratory, to be his science adviser yesterday.

Marburger, a laser physicist and lifelong Democrat, has led the Department of Energy's Brookhaven since 1998 and is credited with helping to restore the laboratory's public image following concerns about its environmental record.

As science adviser, Marburger would be joining an administration that has come under criticism for some of its science-related policies, including its stance on how best to address concerns about global warming. He also would face such contentious issues as energy policy and whether the federal government should fund biomedical research involving embryonic stem cells.

----

Today In Congress
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; Page A04
Reuters
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45572-2001Jun25?language=printer

SENATE
Meets at 9:30 a.m.

Committees:

Armed Services -- 9:30 a.m. Strategic forces subc. Energy Dept.'s Environmental Management Office budget. 222 Russell Office Building.

Energy & Natural Resources -- 9:30 a.m. Price-Anderson Act amendments & nuclear energy incentives. 366 DOB.

HOUSE Meets at 9 a.m.

Committees:

Armed Services -- 10 a.m. Military research & dev. subc. Defense science & technology program. 2118 Rayburn House Office Building.

Armed Services -- 1:30 p.m. Special oversight panel on Dept. of Energy reorganization. Natl. Nuclear Security Administration. John Foster, chairman of panel assessing reliability, safety & security of nuclear stockpile. 2216 RHOB.

Armed Services -- 3 p.m. Military readiness subc. Readiness posture. 2212 RHOB.

Resources -- 10 a.m. Energy & mineral resources subc. Using oil reserve lease fees for environmental restoration. 1324 LHOB.

----

Bush Expands on His Comments About Trusting Putin

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44910-2001Jun25?language=printer

President Bush said in an interview published yesterday that when he declared his trust in Russian President Vladimir Putin, he was also thinking: "until he proves otherwise."

Bush made the comments to Peggy Noonan, who wrote speeches for President Ronald Reagan and for Bush's father during his presidential campaign, coining the term "kinder, gentler." She is a columnist for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which published the remarks.

Since his June 16 summit meeting with Putin in Slovenia, Bush has been lambasted by Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill for saying that in their 90-minute session, he got a sense of Putin's "soul" and decided the Russian leader was trustworthy.

In the Noonan interview, Bush compared his statement to Reagan's famous remark to former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: "Trust, but verify."

"I just didn't complete the Reagan sentence," Noonan quoted Bush as saying. "Reagan said, 'Trust and verify.' My attitude was, I said, 'Trust.' Sophisticates surely understand that once you lie, you know, that trust isn't forever, trust is something you must earn. But when I looked at him I felt like he was shooting straight with me."

Noonan wrote that she had requested the interview for a book about Reagan, and later received permission to use Bush's remarks about his five-nation trip from June 11 to 16.

Bush apparently was eager to put a new gloss on several episodes from the trip. It has been widely reported, for example, that his dinner in Sweden with the 15 heads of state of the European Union was dominated by criticism of his decision to reject the Kyoto global warming treaty.

Bush said he "patiently sat there as all 15 in one form or another told me how wrong I was" about the Kyoto accord. "And at the end I said, 'I appreciate your point of view, but this is the American position because it's right for America,' " Bush said.

"With all due modesty, I think Ronald Reagan would have been proud of how I conducted myself," Bush told Noonan in the Oval Office. "I went to Europe a humble leader of a great country, and stood my ground. I wasn't going to yield. I listened, but I made my point."

Most reports have said Bush encountered broad skepticism from European leaders about his plans for a global missile shield. But he told Noonan that he thought the Europeans seemed "a little more forward-leaning" on missile defense.

Bush also said Putin agreed, without hesitation, to a one-on-one dialogue over missile defense between Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Putin's top security adviser, Sergei Ivanov. Bush said he found Putin to be "a man who realizes his future lies with the West" but does not want Russia to be "diminished" by the United States.

"I've been noticing some of these guys popping off saying Bush shouldn't have used the word 'trust,' " he said. " . . . My attitude is, and this is Reaganesque in a sense, 'Yes, I trust him, until he proves otherwise.' But why say the 'proves otherwise'? To me that goes without saying."

Noonan said Bush apparently felt sympathy for Putin before their joint news conference June 16 because the Russian is six years younger and in some ways unused to the demands of the world stage. "I knew what to expect," Bush said. "I knew there were going to be essentially softball questions by those reporters."

----

U.S. Has Bin Laden 'On the Run,' Sen. Shelby Says

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45532-2001Jun25?language=printer

Back from a six-country tour of the Persian Gulf, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) believes U.S. counterterrorism officials are winning the war against Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden.

It's not always easy to understand how, since bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists clearly have the U.S. military on edge. Whatever terrorist group attacked the USS Cole last October has succeeded in driving the Navy away from the Yemeni port of Aden. And the circulation of a bin Laden propaganda video in the Middle East last week, coupled with reports of increased activity by individuals linked to bin Laden, put U.S. forces on the highest state of alert throughout the region.

But Shelby, vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview that bin Laden is the one who's on edge.

"He's on the run, and I think he will continue to be on the run, because we are not going to let up," Shelby said.

"I don't think you could say he's got us hunkered down. I believe he's more hunkered down," Shelby said. "He's moved and tried to be one step ahead of our intelligence on where he might be. He knows he's hunted, and he's not exactly strolling down the streets of London or Paris or Berlin, shopping."

After meeting with U.S. intelligence and law enforcement personnel throughout the region, Shelby said that he thinks the CIA has made progress in hiring case officers who look and talk like natives of the region.

"They're doing a lot better -- I've seen it," Shelby said. "But they've got a long way to go."

CIA RECALCITRANCE? Over on the House side, the Government Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) is not quite so favorably impressed, at last when it comes to the Central Intelligence Agency's record of cooperation with the panel.

The government efficiency subcommittee chaired by Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.) and the national security subcommittee chaired by Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) have scheduled a hearing next month to consider whether the CIA's "refusal to cooperate with congressional inquiries" threatens "effective oversight of federal operations."

Horn's subcommittee became annoyed with the agency when CIA officials refused to provide information about cyber-security precautions being used to protect classified computer networks, Capitol Hill sources said. Shays's panel experienced similar frustration recently when it asked the CIA for information about terrorism, according to one source, and got back information that was essentially available in the newspaper.

"In general, they take the view that the intelligence committees [perform oversight of the agency], and they don't want to, or have to, talk to us," the source said.

One intelligence official responded that during fiscal 2000, the CIA participated in 1,200 briefings of Congress, provided over 2,500 documents to lawmakers and their staffs, and took part in 500 congressional inquiries.

"There is continual and rigorous review of the CIA's activities by the House and Senate intelligence committees, which have been charged with the CIA's oversight for 25 years -- and CIA welcomes such oversight," the official said.

FBI at DOE: Michael J. Waguespack, former deputy assistant director of the FBI's National Security Division, has been appointed director of counterintelligence at the Department of Energy.

The move continues the Clinton administration policy of assigning a senior FBI executive to oversee counterintelligence at DOE. Waguespack replaces Edward J. Curran, who left Energy at the end of last year after rebuilding its counterintelligence program in the wake of an espionage probe involving former Los Alamos physicist Wen Ho Lee.

After Curran's departure, it looked as though the FBI might try to get out from under its commitment under the policy, particularly since Congress created a semi-autonomous agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), to oversee security and counterintelligence at the weapons laboratories.

One irony of Congress's focus on foreign spies at the weapons labs is that the current head of counterintelligence at the NNSA, Catherine Eberwein, is a career Capitol Hill staffer who had no actual experience working counterintelligence cases before she got the top job.

-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

Russians talk subs with Taipei

21 June 2001
WENDELL MINNICKJDW Correspondent Taipei &
ROBERT KARNIOL JDW Asia-Pacific Editor Bangkok
http://janes.com/regional_news/asia_pacific/news/jdw/jdw010621_1_n.shtml

Private individuals from Russia are pursuing exploratory discussions with Taiwan on the latter's capability to build the Russian-designed Kilo-class diesel-electric patrol submarine, according to locally-based defence sources.

The talks are reportedly "unsanctioned by either government". This may well be the case with respect to the Russians involved, as Moscow has strong political and economic ties with Beijing.

However, on the Taiwanese side, such a programme would almost certainly be led by the Ministry of Defence's Chung Shan Institute of Science and Technology, with construction by state-owned China Shipbuilding.

Taiwan has long been eager to acquire new submarines to supplement or replace its current fleet, with some sources suggesting a requirement for six to 12 platforms. The navy now operates two Hai Lung-class boats obtained from the Netherlands and commissioned in 1987/88 and two US-built Guppy II-class boats dating from the mid-1940s.

China blocked all previous efforts to obtain additional platforms. However, the Bush administration reversed earlier US policy in April with its stated support for Taiwan's acquisition of eight diesel-electric submarines (Jane's Defence Weekly 2 May).

Initial reports suggested that these boats could be built in the USA from a Dutch or German design but Amsterdam and Berlin were quick to reject this option. It remains unclear how this project will be pursued.

Taiwanese officials are known to have informally explored the acquisition of Russian submarines around a decade ago, but these enquiries were firmly rejected. A subsequent initiative saw Taipei seek to hire Russian designers and technicians on private contract, a move that Beijing would find difficult to block, but this first initiative aimed at local construction ultimately produced no result.

The current talks appear to replicate these earlier discussions, centring on the hiring of specialised personnel under private contract. Moscow would find it difficult to restrict the movement of private citizens in such circumstances, regardless of China's displeasure. Locally-based defence industry sources, together with US government sources, are nevertheless sceptical such a plan could succeed because of political and technical reasons. Among other constraints, they argue that Taiwan lacks the capability to build such a complex platform, even with outside help.

-------- balkans

Pentagon says Albanian evacuation was right action

By Tabassum Zakaria
http://www.serbianna.com/news/06_26/22.shtml

WASHINGTON, June 26 (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Tuesday stood by a decision to send U.S. troops to evacuate ethnic Albanian rebels with their weapons from a village in Macedonia, saying the goal had been to defuse a volatile situation.

It was the first time the U.S. military had taken such an active step in the conflict between the government and minority ethnic Albanians in the Balkan state.

But a Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, said the action did not suggest a new U.S. or NATO policy.

"It was a new event. We've not done this before. But what I'm reluctant to predict is this being a harbinger of some major new policy decision and a new area of continued activity on the part of U.S. forces," he said. "I do not think that is the case."

The evacuation on Monday sparked riots in the Macedonian capital Skopje by ethnic Slavs furious at a cease-fire deal that allowed the U.S. evacuation of ethnic Albanian rebels.

Discussions on using U.S. troops started on Sunday night, including talks between NATO Secretary General George Robertson and Supreme Commander Gen. Joseph Ralston.

The evacuation decision was agreed to by NATO, the European Union, the Macedonian government and the ethnic Albanian rebels, Quigley said.

"In this particular case we feel very much that it was the right thing to do," he said at a media briefing.

A U.S. convoy of about 20 vehicles, mostly buses and four armored Humvees armed with machine guns, evacuated about 350 ethnic Albanians including about 100 rebels from the village of Aracinovo to another village 11 miles (18 km) away, Quigley said.

The convoy involved 81 U.S. military personnel and 20 others mainly driving the buses, the Pentagon said.

After the convoy dropped the Albanians off at the village, it took nine hours to return to Camp Able Sentry, less than 10 miles (16 km) from Aracinovo, because large groups of people, some armed, had gathered at checkpoints.

When the convoy arrived at the first checkpoint a crowd started to gather with weapons, so the U.S. commander decided to seek another route, Quigley said.

A Hunter unmanned aerial vehicle was sent to scout ahead on the second route and it detected another checkpoint at which a crowd was gathering, he said.

So the convoy halted and sent the Hunter to search for a third route that was clear.

The United States was the only country that provided the troops and the vehicles for the evacuation because they were immediately available, Quigley said.

"Speed was an important element of this operation because of the rising tensions and the desire to defuse it as quickly as possible," he said.

The United States urged Macedonians on Tuesday to pull back from "mob action" after riots prompted the Balkan state's president to issue a stark warning on the threat of civil war.

"I want to make clear that we condemn the violence overnight in Skopje. The European Union has said the same thing. We join them in that condemnation," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a news briefing.

----

Fresh Fighting in Macedonia a Day After Albanian Evacuation

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Macedonia.html

SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) -- Fresh fighting broke out in Macedonia on Tuesday, aftershocks from rioting the day before that was touched off after Americauatn troops helped NATO evace armed ethnic Albanian rebels from a besieged town.

New clashes were reported near the village of Nikustak, about six miles northeast of Aracinovo, a suburb of the capital, Skopje, at the center of the conflict the day before.

American troops provided Humvees, trucks, buses and ambulances on Monday to support a NATO effort to move rebels out of Aracinovo and end fighting there.

Army spokesman Blagoja Markovski said government forces were attacked with mortar, sniper and automatic fire near Nikustak.

Also Tuesday, police in Tetovo, Macedonia's second-largest city, said on condition they not be named that rebels attacked police positions on the outskirts of the city and that government forces returned fire. The rebels also attacked a police position near the city stadium, a military spokesman said. There were no reports of injury.

The fighting came despite international efforts to stop a full-scale war between ethnic Albanians and majority Slavs.

While the evacuation was the first U.S. involvement in the Macedonian conflict, American troops have been stationed in Macedonia since former President Clinton sent them as part of a U.N. peacekeeping operation in 1993.

U.S. spokesman Maj. Barry Johnson would not specify how many Americans participated in the evacuation Monday. He said the troops provided 16 Humvees, nine buses, three ambulances and three cargo trucks.

Ethnic Albanian militants withdrew from Aracinovo under the NATO plan. Alliance peacekeepers used NATO trucks to drive rebel weapons past Macedonian government lines. Buses ferried the rebels to safety.

The withdrawal outraged thousands of Macedonian Slavs, who gathered outside parliament Monday evening demanding harsher action against the rebels. Some broke into the legislature and shattered windows.

Shots were fired, but there were no reports of injuries. Police reservists were called in and the riot broke up after they were ordered to pull back. The attack shattered a cease-fire meant to create conditions for peace talks to end Macedonia's most severe crisis ever.

While journalists did not hear any explicit anti-American slogans, demonstrators did burn photographs of Javier Solana, the European Union's top foreign policy official, and Anna Lindh, foreign minister of Sweden, which currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU.

With tensions still on high, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw postponed a visit to Skopje. He was expected to hold talks with political leaders from both sides who are increasingly estranged after the peace talks collapsed in disarray. Such dialogue is likely to become harder to arrange, with both ethnic Albanian and Macedonian Slav leaders facing more pressure from their constituencies.

Western intervention of all kinds becoming increasingly unpopular among Macedonian Slav hard-liners. Straw said it would have been inappropriate to go ahead with his planned visit while Macedonian ministers were preoccupied with trying to calm the situation on the ground.

The European Union's new envoy for Macedonia, meanwhile, consulted with EU ministers Tuesday before beginning his mission to Skopje. EU officials said former French Defense Minister Francois Leotard would leave ``very soon'' for Macedonia after the talks.

The violence is likely to place more pressure on President Boris Trajkovski, who has been trying to revive peace talks. He scheduled a televised nationwide address for later Tuesday.

The lack of progress has dismayed EU leaders, who have been trying for months to persuade the Macedonian Slav leadership and ethnic Albanian political leaders to compromise and avert civil war.

To back up that point, EU foreign ministers told Macedonian Foreign Minister Ilinka Mitreva on Monday during talks in Luxembourg not to count on new financial aid unless the government and ethnic Albanian opponents settle their differences.

Trajkovski has appealed to all political leaders to return to the bargaining table to reconsider his peace plan. The plan calls for amnesty for most rebels who disarm voluntarily and greater inclusion of ethnic Albanians in state bodies and institutions.

--------

U.S. Troops Escort Rebels, Setting Off a Riot in Macedonia

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By IAN FISHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/26/world/26MACE.html

SKOPJE, Macedonia, June 25 - American troops waded into the worsening crisis in Macedonia today, in an unplanned operation to escort several hundred armed Albanian rebels away from a town that has been the most recent flashpoint. The operation set off a huge riot here in the capital, where citizens are already angry over outside intervention.

The American soldiers were already stationed here, as part of the NATO mission to keep the peace in neighboring Kosovo. And while NATO has expressed willingness to assist in Macedonia, officials said it would do so only if the majority Slavs and the ethnic Albanians made progress toward ending a fight that seems to be teetering on the edge of civil war.

But the conditions in which NATO made a first, ad hoc step here seemed to be just the opposite. Tonight, more than 5,000 Macedonian Slavs marched through the streets of the capital, protesting Western involvement in the conflict, firing guns into the air and occupying the Parliament building for several hours. Other Macedonians angrily lined the highways as the American troops returned to their bases tonight, a military official said.

The violence was the worst in Skopje, the capital, since the conflict began.

A United States diplomat was slightly wounded after being shot, apparently accidentally, by Macedonian soldiers outside the capital earlier in the day.

In an atmosphere of rising chaos, the NATO spokesman here, Maj. Barry Johnson, said the involvement of NATO through the American soldiers was a one-time initiative aimed at supporting a partial cease-fire agreed to on Sunday.

"This was definitely to bring about a cease-fire and to end the aggressive fighting," he said. "This was an opportunity to give them a chance so they could continue their dialogue and find that common ground."

But the attempt did not seem to quell heightened passions here, and in fact, may have worsened them.

The conflict between the Slavs and ethnic Albanians, who make up roughly a third of the country's two million people, began in March. The Albanian rebels, taking up the cause of greater political rights for Albanians in Macedonia, began capturing towns south of the border with Kosovo, which is itself populated mostly of ethnic Albanians.

Macedonian Slav politicians, particularly President Boris Trajkovski, have shown some willingness to negotiate opening up power, but have also condemned the rebels, known as the National Liberation Army, as "terrorists" whose demands cannot be accommodated. That condemnation has been echoed by most outside governments and NATO.

For two weeks, the rebels had held Aracinovo, but on Sunday they agreed to evacuate it as part of the cease-fire after government forces pounded the town with heavy artillery for three days, inflicting heavy damage.

Today, NATO troops offered to step in to defuse what seemed to be the most delicate event in the conflict so far: evacuating the Albanian rebels from Aracinovo, which is six miles from Skopje, well within shelling range of the city, the airport and the country's only oil refinery. The fighting had taken place in view of the main highway, attracting hundreds of spectators, who brought binoculars, cameras and their children.

American soldiers became involved through a chance chain of events: The first bus company contracted to evacuate the rebels refused to do so at the last minute, Major Johnson said.

A second company was hired, he said, but NATO officials deemed its three buses and one other vehicle insufficient. So NATO officials asked the various outside nations with troops already here whether they would be willing to help, as a way of moving the cease-fire forward. Major Johnson said this was not an official part of the NATO operation here, which began in 1999 as part of the alliance's intervention in the conflict in Kosovo.

"It was simply a request for nations to decide what support they were willing to provide," he said. Major Johnson said that several nations had agreed, but that only the United States military was able to provide the troops and vehicles fast enough - 15 buses, 3 trucks, 3 ambulances and 16 Humvees. He did not know how many troops took part.

By 5 p.m., the buses left Aracinovo with 200 to 250 of the rebels, and 100 to 150 more left with the American soldiers, he said.

The decision angered many Macedonian Slavs, not least because under the cease-fire the rebels were permitted to keep their weapons, even though the arms were taken away during their ride to the rebel-held town of Nikustak, roughly four miles away. Many Macedonian Slavs were already upset because they believed that foreign officials - and particularly those of NATO - had prevented them from ending the war against the rebels militarily.

"Our army has to defend its territory," Mitko Acef, 54, a laborer, said as the demonstrations began in the capital. "NATO should be here as a peacekeeping force, and they are now the obstacle, not letting the Macedonian Army finish the job of defeating the rebels."

Although Aracinovo was quiet this afternoon, fighting flared near the northwestern city of Tetovo, with mortars buzzing over the city and rockets plunging into rebel-held towns. The police reported fresh attacks by the rebels, one at a ski resort with an army post and another at an army checkpoint.

Early tonight, smoke rose from the rebel-held village of Gajre, on a hillside outside of Tetovo, and a government helicopter hovered above. Fadil Dehari, a 30-year-old Albanian from the town, looked up at the smoke from the main square in Tetovo.

"I think it's my house burning," he said as Katyusha rockets fired from a nearby hill fell into the town. He and his family left the house, built by his father, in March when fighting in the area began. "Now where am I going to go back to?" he asked. "You work 50 years on a house, and it's gone in a second."

In Skopje late tonight, protesters fired automatic weapons repeatedly around the city center. Some smashed shop windows, and several foreigners were beaten up, including two journalists with the BBC. There were reports that the elite special police forces, along with army reservists also disgruntled with NATO involvement, had joined the protesters as they took over Parliament.

"The situation is not as healthy as it could be," said a Western diplomat who asked not to be identified. "There has been a lot of pent-up anger in the past, but now it seems to have surfaced."

--------

U.S. Praises Yugoslavia on Milosevic

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Yugoslavia.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The State Department inched toward participation in an international conference on financial aid to Yugoslavia, praising the Serbian government's moves toward extraditing former President Slobodan Milosevic to the U.N. war crimes tribunal in the Hague.

The administration has linked Yugoslav cooperation with the tribunal to U.S. participation in the donors' conference, which is set for Friday in Brussels.

``We very much welcome the moves that the Yugoslav government, the Serbian government have been taking,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.

``We welcome the Yugoslav decree on cooperation with the tribunal. We welcome the initiation of legal proceedings against Milosevic pursuant to this decree. We're encouraged by these positive developments as we consider participating in Friday's donors' conference.''

A recommendation on participation has not yet been sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Boucher said, adding that the positive steps taken thus far will ``weigh heavily'' on the U.S. decision on attendance.

Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica said there was no possibility that Milosevic could be transferred to Hague tribunal custody before Friday's donors' conference.

Privately, a U.S. official raised the possibility of U.S. participation even if Milosevic is not extradited.

Any pledges of financial support for Yugoslavia could be contingent on Milosevic's extradition, the official said.

The tribunal indicted Milosevic for crimes committed against the Kosovo Albanian population in Kosovo in 1999.

--------

Trial Of Milosevic Could Unnerve Leaders In The U.S. And Elsewhere

Foreign Affairs News
Stratfor.com
June 26, 2001
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b39c0fb1e1b.htm

Summary -- The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia now awaits Slobodan Milosevic for alleged war crimes in Kosovo. But in the two years since the Kosovo conflict, it appears that the former president did not commit the genocide he was accused of by NATO, including the deaths of some 10,000 people. Ironically, the charges he faces would make it easy for international courts to try a variety of foreign leaders and military officers, including Americans.

Analysis -- Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic will likely be extradited to face charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Milosevic is charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes for his role in the 1999 Kosovo conflict. An indictment for Milosevic's role in the Bosnian war, from 1992 to 1995, has not yet been released, according to an ICTY spokeswoman.

The Kosovo indictment includes persecution and seven instances of murder, totaling 340 victims. These murders are classified both as alleged war crimes - violations of the codes and practices of war - and as crimes against humanity, defined as severe crimes conducted against innocents, often outside the context of war. Milosevic also stands accused of crimes against humanity for the forcible deportation of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo.

But noticeably absent are charges of genocide. This is striking because Milosevic's government was blamed for as many as 10,000 killings of ethnic Albanians during the opening weeks of the 1999 war for Kosovo. It now appears that these mass killings have not been borne out by two years of excavations and investigations.

As a result, the prosecution in The Hague appears to have settled on lesser charges that will more easily result in a guilty verdict. But this development may set a new precedent, making it easier for international courts to bring charges against other democratically elected heads of state as well as military officers. This precedent poses a risk both to American political leaders and U.S. military officers who command missions overseas that kill local civilians.

The Yugoslav cabinet agreed at a meeting in Belgrade June 23 that it was prepared to extradite war crimes suspects to a United Nations tribunal, opening the door to sending Milosevic to trial. A cabinet decree handed authority for all extraditions to Yugoslavia's republics, Serbia and Montenegro. In Serbia, where Milosevic has been imprisoned for corruption, Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic said he expected Milosevic's extradition within three weeks, after he exhausts appeals.

But the charges Milosevic must answer to in The Hague are significantly different from the charges of genocide leveled by London and Washington just two years ago. During the initial weeks of the war, NATO governments claimed that the numbers of ethnic Albanian dead and missing ranged in the tens of thousands. Eventually, the accepted number of Albanian dead settled around 10,000. And the ICTY stated that it would leave itself the option of adding genocide charges.

But the tribunal has not added these charges because Kosovo has not yet yielded the killing fields the West expected two years ago. The ICTY has exhumed about 4,000 bodies to date, according to a spokeswoman. However, many of these bodies have not been definitively identified, either as non-combatant ethnic Albanians or otherwise. They may be casualties of battle, collateral damage or ethnic infighting. More Albanian bodies have recently been discovered in Serbia.

The international search for Kosovo's killing fields has yielded a significant share of critics - among the very people who have gone to Kosovo to uncover the truth. A Spanish team returned from Kosovo in 1999; its leader told the El Pais newspaper that the limited individual gravesites were the result of fighting between ethnic Albanian guerrillas and Yugoslav forces, in stark contrast to the piles of corpses at genocide sites in Rwanda.

As a result, the ICTY appears to have shifted strategy. In April 2000, the tribunal announced an ambitious schedule to uncover 300 suspected burial sites. In August, London-based Guardian newspaper reported that ICTY spokesman Paul Risley said that the number of victims was far less than 10,000 and closer to 2,000 to 3,000 - only slightly more than the number uncovered in the summer of 1999, immediately after the war. In the summer or 2000, the tribunal found only 680 bodies, The Guardian reported.

Late in 2000, the ICTY changed its tactic: It shifted from conducting a mass search for the killing fields to putting together a case, based on available evidence that would convict Milosevic. As a result, the charges are certainly somber but of lesser magnitude.

In the Hague, for example, Rwandans have recently stood trial for genocide. A number of Serbs are under indictment for genocide in Bosnia. In contrast, Milosevic would stand trial for war crimes - violations of the Geneva Conventions that are comparatively common in conflict - as well as certain crimes against humanity, but not genocide.

But the tribunal is helping to set an important and ironic precedent. By dropping the genocide charge, the court has set a relatively undemanding hurdle for trying heads of state or military leaders. And the ICTY's most serious charges - crimes against humanity - are not iron-clad in the sense that the crimes are not on the scale of, say, Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.

As a result, the threshold for crimes against humanity - and their ferocity - have been signficantly lowered. If an unpopular but democratically elected former leader like Milosevic can be indicted, extradited and tried for these crimes, so can many other political leaders in a variety of governments around the world.

Every leader who has sent troops into conflict is liable for civilian deaths or excessive force. The potential list ranges from influential figures like Russian President Vladimir Putin, for Chechnya, to lesser-known leaders like Mozambique's Joaquim Chissano, who presided over his own country's civil war and remains in power.

On this front, Americans may have some of the greatest legal exposure. Former President Clinton ordered U.S. operations in Kosovo, Somalia, Afghanistan and Sudan - all of which resulted in civilian deaths. U.S. military officers may face additional legal exposure abroad, as would officers in the Canadian, British and Nordic militaries who contribute forces to peacekeeping operations.

The one significant trouble international courts will have in enforcing this precedent is the lack of an executive arm with which to reach out and grab suspects. No court in the world has the ability to coerce China, Russia or the United States to hand over a current or former leader. They enjoy much more political power than does a country like Chile, unable to gain the release of former President Augusto Pinochet.

But the indictment process is likely to become more institutionalized. A permanent international war crimes tribunal, sponsored by the United Nations, is likely to begin operations within a few years. The United States has attempted to hinder the creation of this tribunal, but half the necessary signatories have ratified the treaty.

-------- china

Chinese warships anger Philippines

June 26, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010626-69686290.htm

A Philippine government spokesman said yesterday that Chinese warship deployments to disputed Spratlys islands are a "major development" that could prompt diplomatic protests to Beijing.

Rigoberto Tiglao, a spokesman for Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, said the Chinese ship deployments, if confirmed, represent "a major disturbance to the implicit agreement that we maintain, that we don't disturb the status quo of the Spratlys."

The spokesman was commenting on an article in yesterday's editions of The Washington Times that said U.S. intelligence reports showed China was stepping up warship deployments in the Spratlys.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, said the Chinese movement of ships to the Spratlys is "an example of Chinese military adventurism off the Philippine coast."

"This is more than disturbing," he said. "This is alarming."

State Department spokesman Philip Reeker declined to comment, but he reiterated the department's position on the Spratlys that "all claimants to [the islands] should exercise restraint."

A dozen Chinese warships recently transited waters close to the Spratlys, according to intelligence reports. They also disclosed the first major Chinese naval deployments to Scarborough Reef, where two of the Chinese warships were spotted.

U.S. intelligence officials said a Chinese Foreign Ministry official in April promised that China would not seek to establish a military presence near the reef. However, in May the two Chinese warships and a vessel suspected of intelligence gathering were deployed to Scarborough Reef, and Chinese navy helicopters flew over the reef.

Mr. Tiglao would not say if Manila planned to issue a formal protest over the incursion, saying that the reports needed to be verified first.

Meanwhile, Chang Chun-hsiung, prime minister of the Republic of China (Taiwan), said in Taipei that disputes regarding the South China Sea should be settled peacefully. "We have been promoting peace in the South China Sea," Mr. Chang said of a recent trip to Tungsha Island, about 100 miles north of the disputed Spratly islands group.

Mr. Chang said nations in the region should approach their differences according to the principles of "peaceful settlement, joint exploration and sharing of resources."

Taiwan occupies Taiping island, the largest of the Spratlys.

The Spratlys are claimed in whole or part by Taiwan, the Philippines, China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Brunei.

Mr. Chang noted that lingering tensions in the region could become a flash point.

"We know the South China Sea issues are ever-changing and complicated. Training must be beefed up to safeguard the sovereignty and territory," he said.

--------

China Rips Into Taiwan's Lee Over U.S. Visit

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-china-t.html?searchpv=reuters

BEIJING (Reuters) - China ripped into former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui on Tuesday as he kicked off a private trip to the United States that is likely to add strain to already tense China-U.S. relations.

Lee, 78, who dropped a political bombshell this month by throwing his weight behind current President Chen Shui-bian, began his 10-day U.S. tour by calling for the Taiwan people to unite.

Lee flew to the United States on Sunday to visit his alma mater Cornell University in New York, leaving Taiwan polarized by his attempt to make a political comeback through backing Chen, whose party advocates independence from China.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue accused Lee of leading an independence movement on the island China regards as a rebel province that must be re-united with the mainland -- by force if necessary.

She pressed Washington to prevent Lee from conducting ''separatist activities'' on U.S. soil.

``Although he has stepped down he is still the chief representative of Taiwan independence forces,'' she told a news conference.

``His aim is to carry out separatist activities aimed at undermining cross-Strait relations and Sino-U.S. ties. These efforts will come to no good end.''

VISA ANGERS BEIJING

Lee's landmark private visit to Cornell in 1995 when he was president so upset Beijing that it briefly downgraded ties with Washington, froze semi-official talks with Taipei and menaced the island with months of war games and missile tests.

The United States responded by sending two aircraft carrier battle groups to the region.

This year, Washington's decision to grant Lee a visa has again angered Beijing, which accuses him of trying to break Taiwan out of diplomatic isolation during his 12-year rule and remains deeply distrustful of him even in retirement.

Zhang said Beijing had expressed its ``displeasure'' to the United States and demanded Washington stop Lee from ``engaging in separatist activities while he is in the United States so as to avoid fresh damage to Sino-US relations.''

However, Taiwanese and American analysts say the diplomatic fallout from the visit will be limited as it follows a string of more serious bilateral disputes on issues including the U.S. spy plane crisis and U.S. offers of major arms sales to Taiwan.

Lee's visit also comes on the heels of a stopover in New York last month by Chen, who met members of the U.S. Congress -- something Lee was not allowed to do when president. That raised hackles even further in Beijing.

NO WAY TO RETIRE

Lee began his U.S. tour with an hour-long speech to an enthusiastic, mostly Taiwanese, crowd of about 1,700 supporters in Los Angeles.

He called for unity between political parties but left many listeners confused about his own political ambitions.

``If Taiwan's economy and democracy are not stable, I have no way of retiring,'' he said, underlining his bid to bounce back from political retirement.

But he denied secretly supporting Chen in the 2000 presidential elections.

``If I die, I die with the Nationalist Party. But the most important thing is Taiwan's freedom and democracy must not be abandoned.''

Lee said he had backed Chen more recently because of the need for unity at a time of political and economic instability.

``For the sake of our country, let us not be critical,'' he said of Chen. ``Let us be supportive.''

BEIJING SHOULD LEARN

Lee, who served 12 years as Taiwan's first directly elected president, said Beijing ``should learn'' from the peaceful transfer of power in Taiwan after the last election.

``Taiwan is already a country of freedom and democracy and the people in China need to learn from Taiwan. Power should not rest in a few hands,'' he said to applause.

Cornell said Lee would meet Taiwanese-Americans, visit his granddaughter who is taking summer courses at the university, and have discussions with university officials.

The China Daily scorned that explanation as an attempt to change Lee's image.

``To alter his troublemaker image, this time he took on the kindly face of an old man who has visit his granddaughter,'' it said.

-------- colombia

Colombia rebels prepare peace move but intensify war

Tuesday June 26, 10:40 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010626/1/16az1.html

BOGOTA, June 26 (AFP) - Even as they prepare to release several hundred government troops on Thursday in a move hailed as a step to peace, Colombia's Marxist insurgents have stepped up military actions and warned of a further escalation of fighting.

Manuel Marulanda, the septuagenarian leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), has said he saw no contradiction in the rebels' actions, since President Andres Pastrana had agreed to conduct the peace process amid war.

Pastrana's strategy has drawn fierce criticism, notably from the armed forces where several senior officers believe a cease-fire should have been sought before peace talks started two and a half years ago.

The president has pointed to the prisoner releases as a breakthrough in the peace process.

On Thursday, the FARC is to release between 250 and 300 soldiers and police troops in what the rebels called a "peacemaking gesture."

Marulanda, known as "Tirofijo," Spanish for "Sureshot," said no senior officers would be among those released. "We believe those officers should be with us a while longer," he said Monday.

The unilateral move comes on the heels of a prisoner exchange between the government and the FARC that Pastrana hailed as "the best moment" in the on-again-off-again process to find a peaceful end to 37 years of bloody conflict.

But it also comes at a time of intense fighting that left dozens of soldiers and rebels dead over the past few days.

The FARC, with 16,500 fighters the country's largest insurgency, say they will now head out of their jungle strongholds to wage urban warfare.

"Here in the forest, there will be no one left but rats, turkeys and birds, because the guerrillas are coming to town; you'll see us there," said Jorge Briceno, the FARC's military leader also known as Mono Jojoy.

Local media said he made the boast to the troops who are set to be released within the 42,000 square kilometer (26,000 square mile) area effectively handed over to the FARC in November 1998 to facilitate peace talks.

An urban commando of the Marxist insurgency already conducted a raid Saturday against a high-security prison in Bogota, freeing dozens of prisoners, many of whom were later recaptured.

"Our aim is to free the FARC prisoners from all the country's jails because the government has refused to do a swap," said Briceno.

A total of 55 government troops and 14 FARC members were released earlier this month in a humanitarian agreement to free sick captives. But the government has refused to respond in kind to the rebel's announcement they would release several hundred troops this week.

The military establishment generally opposes prisoner swaps that are not based on humanitarian grounds, since this would imply recognizing the FARC as a belligerent force.

The armed forces have made it clear they would not accept the FARC's invitation to witness Thursday's release of captives. It was not immediately clear whether Pastrana would be present.

The rebels also invited representatives from about 20 countries, but pointedly omitted the United States, which has given more than one billion dollars in military and other aid as part of Plan Colombia, which aims at eradicating cocaine production and trafficking in this South American country.

The well financed FARC draws much of its funding from the cocaine trade, though the rebels say they only protect peasants growing coca leaf, the drug's base ingredient.

Last week, the FARC attacked a military base in the coca-producing Putumayo department. The action was highly symbolic as the rebels killed 30 soldiers trained by US troops as part of Plan Colombia.

-------- drug war

China Executes Dozens on Drug Charges

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-China-Drugs-Executions.html

BEIJING (AP) -- China marked a U.N. anti-drug day Tuesday by executing dozens of people for drug crimes, burning narcotics and staging rallies nationwide.

Chinese authorities have executed hundreds of people since April in a crime crackdown labeled ``Strike Hard'' that allows for speeded up trials and broader use of the death penalty. On Monday and Tuesday alone, authorities executed at least 60 people for drug offences.

Thousands of people attended a rally at a stadium in Kunming, capital of southwestern Yunnan province, where 20 suspected drug traffickers were sentenced to death, then executed at a separate location, a police official said. Executions are usually done by a gunshot to the head.

Officials in Kunming used remote control detonators to ignite 2 tons of confiscated heroin placed in large metal pans and doused with gasoline. State television broadcast the burning live.

Separately on Tuesday, eight people in the central city of Wuhan and eight people on the southern island of Hainan were executed for drug trafficking.

In coastal Fujian province, five Taiwanese citizens were executed Monday for attempting to smuggle crystal methamphetamine to Taiwan. Eighteen heroin traffickers were also executed Monday in Chongqing, a city in southwestern China, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Yunnan authorities also executed Li Shaoju, a citizen of Myanmar, on Monday for smuggling more than 300 pounds of heroin, opium, and morphine from Myanmar to China, newspapers reported.

European Union diplomats in Beijing, monitoring reports in Chinese state-run media, have tallied more than 1,000 executions and many more death sentences in the crackdown on violent and gang-related crime.

``Drug abuse, drug trafficking are indeed very terrible problems of our day,'' U.N. deputy spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said in New York. But he added that as far as he was aware, a 1998 U.N. convention that sets a legal framework for fighting drug trafficking ``does not provide for the application of the death penalty.''

China has detained 15,000 suspected drug dealers and seized 2.2 tons of heroin, 1.2 tons of opium, and 2 tons of methamphetamine in the first five months of the year, state media reported.

The number of registered drug addicts in China has risen to 860,000 in 2000 from 681,000 in 1999, according to the Ministry of Public Security.

-------

World's Biggest Dope Stash Goes Up in Smoke

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-crime-d.html

CUBATAO, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil on Tuesday incinerated what it claims is the biggest batch of dope ever torched, vying for a place in the Guinness Book of Records and highlighting its drug fight on its national anti-drug day.

Guarded by 300 police agents in 25 vehicles and helicopters buzzing overhead, a convoy of seven trucks carried the stash 652 miles from Brazil's southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul to Sao Paulo state for destruction.

A string of boxes containing sealed packages of 140 tons of seized marijuana, cocaine and hashish were winched above a furnace raging at about 1500 degrees Celsius and dropped inside, federal police said.

``The drugs that are being burned here today will not reach their perverse end of degrading our youth and encouraging crime,'' Justice Minister Jose Gregori said at the ceremonial burning, watched by scores of TV cameras and reporters.

Alongside, a federal police band played the theme song to U.S. TV cop series ``S.W.A.T.'' as the parcels of white powder, cannabis flowers and resin met their fiery end. The scent of marijuana filled the air above the industrial town of Cubatao as 120 tons of cannabis went up in smoke.

Brazil timed the high-profile incineration to coincide with its National Anti-Drugs Day, drawing the spotlight to its battle against the scourge of drug trafficking and consumption. Police in other cities also burned drug hauls, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Authorities are now hoping the ceremony will earn Brazil a place in the Guinness Book of Records for the biggest batch of drugs ever destroyed.

Federal police chose Cubatao for the burning since only its vast steel plant had the capacity to accommodate the hefty drug haul, seized over the past 12 months. The incineration was expected to take 15 hours, police said.

Cubatao was a fitting site for the display. Its skyline of tall smoke-belching chimneys has prompted many visitors to liken the city to something out of a science-fiction movie.

Police had planned to play to the cameras and drop the drug parcels off a conveyor belt into a mobile furnace but they moved the burning to a stationary furnace after the drugs repeatedly fell off the conveyor belt.

-------- india/pakistan

Pakistan Expects Peace Process From India Summit

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-pakista.html?searchpv=reuters

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistani military ruler General Pervez Musharraf said on Tuesday he expected his summit talks in India next month to set off a process for settling the two countries' bitter dispute over Kashmir.

Musharraf, who assumed Pakistan's presidency last week, told a meeting with newspaper editors that he would join the talks with Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee with ``an open mind and an open agenda focusing on Kashmir'' but also would be willing to discuss all other issues.

The July 14-16 talks will be the first summit between the nuclear-capable neighbors in more than two years.

A government statement after the meeting quoted Musharraf as saying he was ``keenly aware of serious impediments in the way of normalization of relations'' between the rival states, which have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947, two over the Himalayan region of Kashmir.

The statement quoted Musharraf as saying he ``sensed a realization on the other side also for a resolution of the issue of Kashmir,'' which he said was not the case in previous talks.

The statement said he ``cautioned against placing too much hope in this visit alone as the complexities of the problem and the mistrust of half a century could not be removed overnight.''

``However, the will and the determination to pursue peace and progress and to honor the rights of the people to choose their own destiny can make the difference between harmony and discord, between progress and poverty,'' he said.

PACKAGE OF PEACE MEASURES

An Indian newspaper, The Asian Age, reported on Tuesday that the Musharraf-Vajpayee summit would work out a package of peace measures for Kashmir.

The paper said the deal would include a reduction of Indian troops both along the Line of Control dividing Kashmir and in the insurgency-plagued territory ruled by India.

This would come in response to a ``reduction in terrorist violence, a firm schedule for continuing dialogue and a possible withdrawal of (both sides') troops from Siachen'' in northern Kashmir. Pakistan's English-language Dawn newspaper had a similar report.

Indian and Pakistani troops have been locked since 1984 in a slow-motion battle on the blizzard-swept Siachen glacier, which at 20,000 feet (6,000 meters) above sea level is the world's highest battleground.

Tuesday's meeting was one of a series Musharraf has planned to consult politicians, journalists and religious leaders before going to India after two years of a deadlock in peace talks because of tensions over Kashmir.

Pakistan's main political alliance said on Tuesday it would boycott Musharraf's meeting with politicians on Wednesday mainly to protest at his controversial assumption of the country's presidency, replacing civilian president Mohammad Rafiq Tarar.

The 16-party Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy said it was also protesting against Musharraf's exclusion of some of its parties from the meeting.

Musharraf suspended Pakistan's constitution and national and provincial parliaments when he seized power in a bloodless army coup in October 1999.

-------- iraq

Russia Threatens Veto Of U.N. Iraq Resolution

By Colum Lynch
The Washington Post
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45571-2001Jun25?language=printer

UNITED NATIONS, June 25 -- Russia has threatened to veto a U.S.-backed resolution in the Security Council that would revamp the embargo on Iraq and tighten United Nations controls over Baghdad's imports of military-related items, officials said.

Russian Foreign Minister Ivan Ivanov warned U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in a letter over the weekend that Moscow would block the resolution because it would damage commercial relations with Iraq.

"We see in the new scheme a major threat to Russian trade and economic interests in Iraq," Ivanov wrote. "We cannot allow it to pass."

Powell told reporters today that Washington may not meet its July 3 target for passage of the resolution. If so, it would be the second postponement because of strong opposition from Moscow and Beijing.

Powell said the Russians and others had rejected a U.S. list of "dual use" items -- goods with both a civilian and military application -- that Iraq could not import. "We have been unable to resolve the various technical issues with the list," he said.

Russia intends to introduce its own resolution Tuesday to continue the U.N.-sponsored oil-for-food deal, which allows Iraq to sell oil to meet the humanitarian needs of its people. Russia has signed contracts with Iraq valued at more than $1 billion in the past year through a U.N.-sponsored humanitarian aid program. It has been awarded billions more in future contracts to develop Iraq's oil fields after sanctions.

The United States has opposed any proposal allowing major foreign investment into Iraq's oil industry until Iraq meets the Security Council demands to eliminate its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs.

--------

Iraqi MP Welcomes Russian 'No' to Sanctions Plan

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-ru.html

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - A senior Iraqi parliamentarian on Tuesday welcomed a Russian rejection of a U.S.-British resolution at the United Nations to revamp sanctions on Iraq.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, said in a weekend letter to the United States, and presumably to Britain, France and China also, that Moscow would not allow the draft resolution to pass.

``We cannot allow it to pass,'' Ivanov's letter said, according to U.N. diplomats.

``If Russia prevents it being passed, the Russian stance will be highly appreciated by the Iraqi leadership and people,'' Salim al-Qubaisi, head of Arab and international relations committee at the Iraqi parliament, told Reuters.

At issue is a resolution that seeks to ease restrictions on civilian goods, retain bans on military hardware and come to an agreement on a lengthy list of ``dual use'' supplies that can be used for both military and civilian purposes.

----------

Russia Said to Block US - British Plan on Iraq

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-un.html

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Russia has told its key counterparts on the U.N. Security Council it would reject a U.S.-British resolution to revamp sanctions on Iraq if the measure were put to a vote, diplomats said.

``We cannot allow it to pass,'' Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, said in a weekend letter to the United States, and presumably to Britain, France and China also, the envoys reported.

Ivanov stopped short of using the word ``veto'' but council diplomats said late on Monday it was clear Moscow was threatening to kill the measure. Russia, the United States, Britain, France and China are permanent members of the 15-nation Security Council with veto power.

``This is not a negotiating stance. This is what they plan to do,'' said one council member.

Russia, Iraq's closest ally on the council, has long opposed the embargoes. Ivanov last week criticized the U.S.-British plan and said he would probably offer an alternative, which diplomats expected at a public meeting on Iraq, scheduled for late on Tuesday.

Word of Russia's position came hours after Secretary of State Colin Powell visited the United Nations on Monday to speak at a major U.N. AIDS conference.

He told reporters after his address that the council might not meet its self-imposed July 3 deadline for adoption of the British-drafted resolution on the plan.

``We have been unable to resolve all the technical issues,'' he said. ``If no resolution is arrived at, we will have to figure out what to do -- how to extend the current situation and how long.''

Russia has raised objections to the plan for months, saying the United Nations should instead seek ways to move toward a suspension of the sanctions, imposed when Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

At issue is a resolution that seeks to ease restrictions on civilian goods, retain bans on military hardware and come to an agreement on a lengthy list of ``dual use'' supplies that can be used for both military and civilian purposes.

It also aims to stop smuggling, worth about $1 billion a year, and have the monies paid to a separate account rather than to Baghdad directly.

On Monday, Iraq's ambassador in Moscow, Mozher al-Douri, said Baghdad would favor Russian firms doing business in the country in return for Moscow's opposition to the resolution.

Before the sanctions were imposed in 1990, Russia supplied Baghdad with military goods worth up to $8 billion to be repaid with oil. Its only chance to recoup some of the outstanding debts is if sanctions are lifted and Russian firms are allowed to invest in Iraqi oilfields.

The new resolution would be part of the oil-for-food plan, an exception to the sanctions, which allows Iraq to sell oil to meet basic demands of ordinary Iraqis.

The plan has expanded over the years to a large variety of goods but Iraq's oil revenues are put in a U.N. escrow fund out of which suppliers are paid.

Powell acknowledged the list of ``dual use'' goods was in dispute. ``Where the difficulty has arisen is we have been unable to resolve the various technical issues with the list. And that has become quite a problem which all sides have been working out,'' he said.

Iraq stopped oil flows on June 4 and threatened to stop trade with its neighbors if the resolution were adopted.

If the council does not reach an agreement on changing the sanctions, it would probably continue the current oil-for-food plan. Powell, however, would not be drawn into a discussion about how long the program might be extended.

In order to get sanctions suspended, Iraq has to allow U.N. arms inspectors back into the country to check on its weapons of mass destruction programs.

That requirement is contained in a December 1999 resolution, which Russia says needs to be refined. The inspectors have not been allowed back into Iraq since they left on the eve of a December 1998 bombing campaign.

-------- lebanon

After Beirut Pullout, Lebanese Await Full Withdrawal by Syria
20,000 Troops Remain in Countryside

By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; Page A11
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45171-2001Jun25?language=printer

BEIRUT, June 25 -- Residents of Beirut celebrating the unexpected departure of Syrian soldiers from positions in and around the Lebanese capital have begun to dream of a possibility unthinkable for decades: life without an occupying army in their country.

Even after the pullout from Beirut last week, as many as 20,000 Syrian troops remain in the Lebanese countryside. And no one here suggests that Damascus has diminished the network of political and security ties that allow it to influence Lebanese politics and keep a grip on the fundamentalist Hezbollah movement whose militia has continued to mount sporadic attacks against Israeli forces in a disputed border enclave.

But after 30 years in which Lebanon has been used as a proxy battlefield for outside powers, including Israel and the Palestinians, and has been split by its own Muslim-Christian civil war, pressure has increased for a full Syrian withdrawal. That was a possibility that once seemed remote, but now seems more realistic following the pullout from Beirut.

"Having any military in an urban area is not a normal situation," said Oussama Kabbani, an urban planner with Solidere, the quasi-governmental agency that has tried to lure investors to rebuild Beirut's devastated city center despite the presence of Syrian troops, an image of instability and the lingering threat of Israeli air raids.

For a nation of only 3.5 million, Lebanon has played an outsize role in the Middle East conflict. In the 1970s, Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization established a strong military presence in the country, using its rugged southern terrain to launch attacks against Israel and challenging the authority of the Christian-dominated Lebanese state. Christian leaders organized counter-militias, which in 1975 precipitated a civil war that led Syria, at the Christians' request, to send in troops the following year to quiet the fighting.

Syria has long been the dominant political force here, a role it insists on to ensure stability in its own politics, bolster its economy and provide a base from which to pressure Israel through Hezbollah operations. Lebanese politicians rise and fall partly on the basis of their success in dealing with the Syrian government. In addition, an estimated 1 million Syrians work in Lebanon, and the markets here are an important outlet for low-cost Syrian agricultural products.

With so much affected by decisions made in Damascus, any shift in Syrian policy is closely watched in Beirut. In this case, more than a dozen Syrian positions in Beirut were vacated, including several prime coastal buildings overlooking the Mediterranean, outposts near Christian neighborhoods in East Beirut that had drawn particular protest, and barracks near the Defense Ministry and presidential palace that reminded the Lebanese who really controls their country.

Some of the troops involved simply redeployed eastward to the Bekaa Valley or to positions along the highway running from Beirut to Damascus. But Lebanese officials estimate that between 5,000 and 10,000 Syrians left the country altogether.

The Syrians have given no full explanation of the decision. Those sympathetic to the Syrian government say a reorganization has been in the works since the Israelis pulled out 13 months ago from the 12-mile-deep zone in southern Lebanon they had occupied for more than two decades. Their departure made the Syrian presence here less urgent and less defensible.

But critics say the political leadership in Damascus simply wised up to expanding popular anger among Lebanese, particularly the Christian minority, over the heavy Syrian hand in Lebanon and decided to use a lower profile and a lighter touch.

In his most extensive comments on the issue, to a French television channel last week, Syrian President Bashar Assad characterized the withdrawal from Beirut as mostly a technical military matter. But he also said it reaffirms that the Syrian military presence in Lebanon is temporary.

That was welcome news to the growing number of Lebanese who have felt emboldened recently to challenge Syria's role in the country, hoping that the younger Assad would be more flexible than his hard-line father, Hafez Assad, who died a year ago. With new leadership in Damascus, and the Israelis having ended their occupation, such Christian leaders as Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Pierre Sfeir have argued for a broad national debate about whether Syria should leave as well. Under a 1989 agreement ending Lebanon's civil war, they note, Syria should long since have pulled back.

Although it was a Christian leadership that originally asked the Syrians to send troops to help defend against Palestinian guerrillas and their Lebanese Muslim allies, Christian political leaders were at the forefront of those charging that the Syrian military force had come to symbolize dependence on foreign authority -- from the goals of Israeli generals to the efforts by Iranian radicals to expand their Shiite revolution. While the Syrians were ostensibly here for "brotherly" reasons -- and they are credited with allowing the Lebanese military to try to heal divisions between Christian and Muslim troops -- many Lebanese consider their involvement no less a threat to Lebanon's sovereignty than that posed by Israel.

"The Syrians clashed with everybody in Lebanon -- with the Palestinians, with the Christians, with the Muslims, with the Hezbollah," said Farid Khazen, a political scientist at the American University of Beirut.

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

Soldier of the Future With New Technology,
He Might Fight Like Robocop, Drive Like James Bond

ABC News,
June 26, 2001
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/armysoldierofthefuture_010626.html

Guns that hit targets around corners, computerized helmets, a grenade-launching pickup truck that foils pursuers with oil slicks and smoke screens. The U.S. Army is investing in a host of new technologies that might someday revolutionize American war fighting.

From what U.S. soldiers eat, to how they communicate and what types of weapons they fire, the Army is hoping science and engineering can make GIs better informed, more lethal and harder to injure and kill.

Some of the technologies can be quite exotic. Take, for instance, the British-designed Objective Individual Combat Weapon, in the early stages of development. It's a lightweight do-it-all weapon, intended to replace M-16 rifles, M4 carbines and M203 grenade launchers.

It is said to "shoot around corners," because it is designed to fire shells that can be primed to explode at a determined distance, such as over an enemy ditch, or just past a wall.

Then there's the "Transdermal Nutrient Delivery System" which is being designed to transmit essential vitamins and nutrients through the skin by an osmotic process, similar to a nicotine patch, providing soldiers nutrition in extreme circumstances. It's "pushing the limits of existing food technology," according to the Army.

The armor-plated SmarTruck concept, developed at the Army's National Automotive Center in conjunction with the private sector, might enable the occupants to disorient the enemy with its headlights, fend off attackers with electrified door handles, launch grenades and emit smoke screens to obscure a pursuer's line of vision.

"It's a test bed to prove that all of these advanced technologies can be integrated onto a commercial platform," says Rae Higgins, a public affairs officer with the Army Tank-Automotive & Armaments Command. "If it were ever to see the light of day, this would be something that would have a role in complex and urban terrain, for anti-terrorist missions perhaps."

It might also be attractive to other U.S. agencies, foreign governments, and for commercial use to protect corporate executives traveling in countries known for kidnapping schemes, she says. "A SmarTruck type vehicle might offer them a level of protection that they don't have right now."

Fighter of Tomorrow It could be many years before any of those technologies might be fielded, if they ever are. But one of the Army's more pressing initiatives is the "Land Warrior" system, a new look for soldiers, intended to integrate soldiers in the field into a networked, computerized war fighting system.

The 79-pound uniform would include a new helmet assembly, more protective clothing, an improved rifle, and a computer and radio, intended to significantly improve communications, night vision, weaponry, and armor protection, among other things.

Land Warrior's most revolutionary aspect, perhaps, is its communications system. Each soldier will be linked into a computer network, accessed through a pop-up display attached to each helmet. The display would provide a topographical map that indicates a soldier's position and those of fellow fighters and suspected enemies, with the aid of global positioning satellites. Troops would communicate quietly through headsets.

"We're going to be buying these systems for the infantry soldiers, the medics, and the people who support the artillery units ... the spotters and the forward observers," says Jeff Witherel, an official with the Camber Corp., a major contractor on the system.

In field training last summer with an 82nd Airborne platoon, he says, the Land Warrior systems dynamics of warfighting changed for the better. "This whole platoon became a proactive element, everybody got up and moved at the same time, everybody knew what was going on, they all reacted just like an office does on e-mail."

Currently in research and development, the Army is planning to begin issuing some 37,000 sets to Rangers and infantry soldiers as early as 2006, at a cost of $17,000 per soldier - $32,000 including storage, training, maintenance and spare parts, according to Witherel. The Marines and Navy SEALs also are looking at the system.

The Land Warrior package also includes a "daylight video sight" - a camera attached the standard rifle that takes pictures displayed over the local area wireless network, for others to see - a lightweight thermal sight on the rifle for night and low-visibility vision, and improved body armor, 35 percent lighter than current "flak jackets."

Other Technologies One of the most radical concepts under consideration is the Future Combat System. The Army currently aims to transform itself into a lighter, more versatile, faster-reacting force. Reflecting that goal, it is examining the concept of replacing today's 70-ton Abrams tanks with a system of robots, advanced sensors, cannons, and other platforms linked by computers.

"We're pursuing the fullest range of technologies to provide material solutions that can blur the traditional distinctions between the Army's heavy and light forces," said Michael Andrews, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for research and development, at a congressional hearing today reviewing the military's new technology initiatives.

The program, involving some 40 industrial contractors, received the largest portion of the Army's science and technology funding this year - $500 million - with the hope of fielding the system by 2010, Andrews said.

The Army also is developing a new protective mask, intended to be easier to breathe in than conventional gas masks and improve protection against toxic industrial material and nuclear, biological and chemical threats.

There's also the GAYL Blaster, which might be used for crowd control, by emitting a disturbing noise that defies some hearing protection.

And "advanced field-ration recipes and menu items" are being developed to "cater to the diverse cultural and ethnic food preferences of the 21st Century soldier," according to an Army publication.

Lessons Learned Much of what is being developed is motivated by previous war-fighting experience in real combat. The Army's "Force Provider" program, for instance, was conceived in 1991 as a response to inadequate living conditions for U.S. soldiers during Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm. It provides "containerized, rapidly deployable 'cities,'" for quick delivery to theaters of action.

The movable cities include "advanced" laundry, shower, latrine, kitchen and billeting systems for 550 soldiers, according to the Army, are able to operate in temperatures between 15 and 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and also include religious, morale, welfare, and recreational facilities. The Army has contracted for 36 to be built by 2003.

In response to lessons learned from an October 1993 Army firefight with Somali militia in Mogadishu that left 18 Americans dead, the Army jointly with the Marines has been developing new equipment, techniques and tactics for urban area war-fighting, called the Military Operations in Urban Terrain MOUT Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration.

The U.S. military traditionally has avoided fighting in cities for a host of reasons. But it expects urban operations to become common in the future. The technologies examined in the program, which is winding down, were off-the-shelf, meaning they were already developed by other entities for other purposes.

Among the most promising technologies were an M-16 rifle-launched munition, developed in Israel, which is designed for gaining quick entry into a building by blasting through a door or a window, and joint protection: knee and elbow pads, an idea drawn from the rollerblading industry.

"There was a lot of stuff out there applicable for the urban environment force, so there was a lot of low-hanging fruit," says Carol Fitzgerald, manager of the program. "You don't necessarily need a whole lot of sophisticated technology to allow for mini-revolutions in military affairs at the tactical level - to me that's a pretty significant thing."

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Army Chow Know-How
Future Grub May Make Grunts Glow, or Grow Itself in Days

By Amanda Onion,
ABC News,
June 26, 2001
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/DailyNews/techfood010626.html

In Star Trek, the crew of the starship Enterprise could instantly acquire any meal by ordering up their preference on the food-producing "replicator." Now that was a Meal-Ready-to-Eat.

Such technology may seem like a pipe dream of the far future , but it provided inspiration for scientists developing high-tech food ideas for Army troops.

In a newly released scientific report commissioned by the Army, scientists suggest, among other ideas, that soldiers could one day carry specially engineered seeds that would sprout from the ground in a matter of days, instead of weeks.

"It wouldn't exactly work as fast as the 'replicator' and it wouldn't be gourmet food," says Robert Love, director of the study by the National Research Council's Board on Army Science and Technology, "but in a survival situation troops could grow food at an accelerated rate."

As Napoleon Bonaparte once declared, "an army travels on its stomach," and the new report aims to ensure that Army food science keeps pace with the rigorous field of biotechnology.

"We don't know exactly what developments will come or when," says Michael Ladisch, a professor of agriculture and biological engineering at Purdue University and chair of the NRC committee. "But the idea is to staff the Army with the right scientists who can recognize and take advantage of developments as they arrive."

Eat and Glow

The list of proposals reads like science fiction, but the authors say most of them could materialize by 2025.

In addition to fast-sprouting seeds, the scientists suggest soldiers could eat engineered food that would make them easily detectable to their comrades in the field. After ingesting candy bars containing special biomarkers, sensor-equipped snipers could identify friend from foe at great distances by detecting the biomarkers in the soldiers' breath or sweat.

Also on the drawing board are edible vaccines that could protect soldiers from stomach-borne diseases. Now vaccinations for diseases like dysentery must be administered by injections and over a period of time. Ladisch says scientists are already close to providing foods packed with edible vaccines.

Food preservation is a big logistical issue for the Army, particularly when troops are on the move and refrigeration isn't available. New technology, says the report, could reduce spoilage and contamination by using features similar to the currently controversial biologically engineered corn.

While engineered corn crops develop with a natural resistance to certain insects, the soldiers' rations would contain proteins with a natural resistance to bacteria or enemy poisons.

In case infection does occur, the report suggests troops could wear wristwatch-like instruments that could detect any poisons or spoilage in food or water.

"The watch would have a chip coated with specific proteins," explains Ladisch. "And if the proteins bind with a list of known poisons it would signal a warning."

Steak and Potatoes in One Bar

Since food can be a heavy load to carry, the scientists looked into ways of concentrating needed calories and nutrients into bars that pack easily. Army troops already pack high-energy bars known as "Hooha's," and athletes can choose from a wide variety of commercial nutritional bars. But the committee suggests the concept can be taken further.

"Think about putting steak, eggs and vegetables in a candy bar," says Love. "Anything that cuts back on the supply chain helps."

Borrowing from temperature regulating features found in animals, such as horses, Love and the others hope troop rations might also help cool or warm a soldier for better comfort.

Beyond digestible innovations, the report outlines how uniforms could be enhanced through biotechnology. Using similar features of the chameleon, the scientists believe engineers could manufacture true camouflage clothes that would adopt the hues and patterns of a soldier's surroundings. And protein-coated material could shield soldiers from radar or enemy detectors.

Military officials are expected to meet with the scientific committee later this year after reading through the extraordinary range of possibilities.

Then, says Ladisch, the idea is to recruit biotechnology experts to the Pentagon who could take the ideas that now seem like sci-fi fantasy and develop them into real Army assets.

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Daschle delays; military waits

June 26, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough and Dave Boyer
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010626-77701352.htm

The U.S. military would be forced to curtail or cancel training exercises, facility repairs and equipment maintenance if Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle holds up a pending emergency budget until late July, according to Pentagon projections.

The Pentagon provided a list of hardships at the request of Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott. He used the list yesterday to criticize Mr. Daschle for threatening to delay action on a $6.5 billion supplemental budget bill until the Senate completes work on a contentious patients' bill of rights. That delay would push approval of the fiscal 2001 defense legislation until late July or beyond.

"If we don't get this bill completed by ... mid-July, we're going to have canceling of base-property maintenance, holding some of our deployed units where they are overseas until the end of the fiscal year [Sept. 30]," said Mr. Lott. "So we're really pushing the envelope when it comes to the needs of our military personnel in health as well as in steaming hours."

Picking his first confrontation with Democrats since they took control of the Senate, Mr. Lott also accused Mr. Daschle of sacrificing the nation's urgent energy needs in order to push through the health care bill.

Neglecting energy and defense has "very dangerous implications for the security and prosperity of the American people," the Mississippi Republican said.

Nearly all the budget bill's funding goes for replenishing military training accounts depleted by peacekeeping missions in the Balkans and elsewhere. Without emergency funding soon, the military would be forced to:

- Curtail all nonessential operations such as pilot training, steaming hours, fleet exercises and air combat training maneuvers. The Air Force and Navy would ground some pilots and aircraft.

- Perhaps hold deployed units overseas until the new fiscal years begins Oct. 1.

- Cancel training for units getting ready to deploy for peacekeeping duties.

- Stop or slow down maintenance of equipment at large regional depots.

"This will lead to the loss of jobs for many Americans," Mr. Lott's office said.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff originally wanted about $9 billion in emergency funding in January. But incoming Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld nixed the request. The White House scrubbed the numbers and presented the $6.5 billion proposal. The House already has approved that number, as did the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Mr. Lott said he suggested the Senate OK the emergency defense bill by unanimous consent, since both chambers approved Mr. Bush's list of spending requests without adding home-state projects, as was the practice with supplemental bills the past few years. But Mr. Lott said Mr. Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, rejected that idea.

Mr. Daschle, despite earlier indications that he would allow a speedy vote on the spending bill, told colleagues Friday that he would not bring it to the floor until the Senate completes work on a patients' bill of rights.

Republicans have been slowing down final passage of that legislation, raising concerns about employer liability and increasing premiums. Their tactics could derail Mr. Daschle's stated goal of finishing the bill by Friday.

The fate of the health care bill is particularly sensitive for Mr. Daschle because it is his first test of his ability to move legislation since becoming majority leader. Senate committees remain unable to take up new legislation due to prolonged negotiations between the parties on how to reorganize and whether to guarantee votes on Supreme Court nominees.

Daschle spokeswoman Molly Rowley said Mr. Daschle wants to complete the patients' bill of rights, the spending bill and the reorganization before the Senate adjourns for the Fourth of July recess.

"We think all three of these things can be done this week before we leave," she said.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia Democrat and chairman of the Appropriations Committee that approved the spending bill last week, said yesterday he was "not in a position to comment" on Mr. Daschle's intentions.

"The leader has to balance a lot of things," Mr. Byrd said. "I'm sure he'll get to the [spending bill] when he thinks he can."

Mr. Lott said Mr. Daschle rejected his suggestion to approve the spending bill by today, making it unlikely that a conference bill could be worked out before the House adjourns Friday for a weeklong Independence Day vacation.

"We need to get this defense and other issues supplemental done before we leave, because it is critical for nonessential operations like pilot training, steaming hours, fleet exercises," Mr. Lott said. "I'm very worried that by not acting this week on the defense supplemental appropriations bill we're asking for more delay and even more problems with our defense needs."

Mr. Daschle has been threatening to cancel the Senate's vacation to compel Republicans to finish work on the health care bill.

Republicans and Democrats have been sniping politely about legislative priorities ever since the power shift in the Senate. Republican lawmakers have been pressing for passage of President Bush's energy plan, but Mr. Daschle has expressed more interest in the health-care legislation, as well as increasing the minimum wage and passing a hate-crimes bill.

Mr. Lott said yesterday that Democratic leaders do not intend to address the energy issue by the end of July.

Congress is in recess for the entire month of August, meaning the Senate would not take up the administration's energy plan until September at the earliest.

House and Senate Republicans met with White House representatives late yesterday and agreed to call attention to Democrats' inaction on an energy plan over the recess next week. The meeting took place in the office of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, Texas Republican.

John Godfrey contributed to this report.

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Invisible chocolate soldiers? What next?

By Robert Uhlig in London -
Sydney Morning Herald,
June 26, 2001
The Telegraph, London
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0106/26/world/world11.html

Chocolate bars that make soldiers less visible to the enemy and rations that vaccinate against combat illnesses could be in use by 2025, according to a United States Government report.

In a study that brings new meaning to Napoleon's dictum "an army marches on its stomach", scientists have outlined a vision of foods that will keep future soldiers warm, disease-free and even safe from friendly fire.

Confectionery bars which elevate body temperatures in cold weather or reduce susceptibility to detection by thermal imaging sensors are just two proposals.

The report published by the National Research Council's Board on Army Science and Technology also discusses plants that grow in days instead of weeks. Such foods are already being developed for use on space missions to Mars.

An edible solution for friendly fire casualties, one of the most serious problems in combat, is also suggested in the report.

It says soldiers' food could contain biomarkers that would identify friendly soldiers in combat or peacekeeping actions by tracking them on the ground or via remote sensing satellites.

Field rations would also contain anti-microbial agents to keep food fresh without refrigeration and be contain anti-infection agents.

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Pentagon shot down over film extras

TUESDAY JUNE 26 2001
FROM GRACE BRADBERRY IN LOS ANGELES
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2001220544,00.html

THE Pentagon has been criticised for sending eight Black Hawk combat helicopters and 30 elite Army Rangers to Morocco to take part in a film about the 1993 battle of Mogadishu.

Traditionalists within the military are rumoured to be appalled at the decision by Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, to deploy US troops on foreign soil for the purpose of shooting a film.

Although the helicopters and troops have been in Morocco for about a month, unease has grown after the premiere of Pearl Harbor, when a US Navy aircraft carrier was sent to Hawaii specifically to become a party venue for the launch of the Disney film.

The decision to send troops to Morocco is particularly controversial because the film, Black Hawk Down, directed by the British film-maker Ridley Scott, tells the story of the disastrous confrontation in Mogadishu in which 18 American soldiers died as they tried to capture Somali warlords wanted by the United Nations.

The mission led to a reassessment of American involvement in UN peacekeeping operations. Ordinary Americans were horrified, in particular, by a photograph of a Somali mob dragging the half-naked corpse of a pilot, Bill Cleveland, through the streets of Mogadishu.

Despite the horrors of the mission the US military co-operated with Mark Bowden, the author of the bestselling book on which the film is based, putting him in touch with many of the survivors.

The Department of Defence apparently believes that the film will demonstrate the valour and commitment of the US, even though it will also show the moment when US troops fired on a woman in the street.

The script was reviewed by various chiefs within the Army, by the US Army Special Operations Command and the Department of Defence.

Kathleen Ross, of the Chief US Office of Public Affairs in Los Angeles, said that the decision to deploy troops for the film was taken partly because it was rare to find a realistic film based on a recent mission. "Most movies involving the military are either period pieces or films like Top Gun or Rambo, that are just not realistic," she said.

Sony, the studio behind film, will reimburse the military for the deployment.

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Pentagon Says Betting on Lasers, Other New Gizmos

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-arms-usa-researc.html?searchpv=reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Defense Department said on Tuesday it was pouring research dollars into high-energy lasers, microwave systems and a host of other advanced gizmos designed to win 21st-century wars more quickly and decisively than ever.

Development of such things as unmanned systems for land, air, space, sea and underwater was to counter the spread of ''asymmetric'' threats to U.S. forces in the past decade, Pentagon officials told Congress.

Among these they cited ballistic missiles, possibly tipped with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; keyboard-launched ''information operations,'' for instance against U.S. military satellites, and ``terrorism.''

``Future adversaries will increasingly rely on unconventional strategies and tactics to offset the superiority of U.S. forces,'' Edward Aldridge, the Pentagon's new chief weapons buyer, said in testimony prepared for the House Armed Services Research and Development Subcommittee. ``We must be conscious of these threats as we foster technology breakthroughs ... to cope with that environment.''

Aldridge did not spell out precisely how much was being spent in his joint statement with Delores Etter, deputy director of defense research and engineering. But they said basic defense science and technology research accounts for about 40 percent of federal support for all engineering research in universities.

THREE CATEGORIES OF U.S. NEEDS

All told, the Defense Department employs 28,500 scientists and engineers in its 84 labs and research and development centers, down 42 percent from 43,800 at the end of 1990, they said.

Aldridge divided U.S. needs into three categories: ``hard problems,'' or significant technical challenges that, if solved, would check a significant threat; ``revolutionary war-fighting concepts,'' and militarily significant research areas.

``Hard problems'' include developing a remote capability to detect and identify potentially toxic chemical and biological agents and to forecast their dispersion through a battlefield. Another such challenge is coming up with munitions capable of knocking out deeply buried targets.

For ``revolutionary war-fighting concepts,'' new technologies are being worked on for ``fuller dominance of space.'' Key areas include affordable space transportation including advanced propulsion and long-lasting power systems; sensing technologies for enhanced space surveillance, and protection of U.S. assets in space.

Also needed are network systems that communicate seamlessly among themselves, operationally responsive and reliable networks and tools for boiling down vast amounts of information and helping decision makers, the officials said.

In militarily significant research, the third category, a priority is the ``generation, storage, use and projection of electrical and other forms of power throughout the battle-space,'' Aldridge and Etter said.

He said ``directed-energy'' weapons -- lasers and high-powered microwave systems -- had the potential to shoot down ballistic missiles as they were lifting off, to defeat high-speed anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles and to zero in on targets in urban centers without harming civilians.

Breakthroughs were needed in ``advanced power,'' including new battery systems and fuel cells, to enhance the U.S. capability to focus power and energy in a way that could be supported logistically, added Aldridge, the department's third-ranking civilian as under secretary for acquisition, technology and logistics.

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Stealth Bomber, Once Scorned, Gains Fresh Backing

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/26/national/26BOMB.html?searchpv=nytToday

WHITEMAN AIR FORCE BASE, Mo. - A pair of Air Force pilots recently locked themselves inside a closet-size metal box here for 50 hours, subsisting on cold pizza and instant noodles, amusing themselves with crossword puzzles and paperback books, and taking occasional catnaps on a fold-up chaise longue from Wal-Mart.

The box was a B-2 bomber simulator, and the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the pilots could overcome the tedium, confinement and sleep deprivation entailed in attacking distant targets - in Asia, say - from Missouri, home of the nation's B-2 fleet. But to B-2 devotees, a broader proposition was being tested: that the bat-winged stealth plane, once derided for its high price and questionable durability, could play a lead role in President Bush's new Pacific-oriented military strategy.

The B-2, the world's most expensive aircraft, is trying to make a comeback. Four years after the Northrop Grumman Corporation stopped producing the planes because Congress had balked at their $2.2-billion-apiece price, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld is considering buying 40 more of them, this time for $735 million each.

B-2 fans say it is about time. Mr. Rumsfeld is developing a military strategy that seeks to reduce American dependence on overseas bases in favor of stealthy, precision-guided, long-range weaponry. To B-2 advocates, that is a recipe for their plane, which, with the help of airborne fuel tankers, flew nonstop raids from Missouri to Serbia during the 1999 air war there, dropping radar-guided bombs with apparently great accuracy.

"People focus too much on the cost of the plane rather than its effectiveness," said Representative Norm Dicks, a Washington Democrat who is helping to lead a bipartisan charge for the B-2 in Congress. "You don't need nuclear weapons when you have this kind of capability."

Mr. Rumsfeld, who along with Dick Cheney endorsed the plane in a 1995 letter to President Bill Clinton, has remained silent about his intentions.

But the B-2's critics say it remains a luxury the Pentagon cannot afford, particularly as the services cry poverty when it comes to buying basic things like bullets, housing and spare parts. As the technology develops, less expensive weapons, among them long-range cruise missiles and unmanned aircraft, will do the job just as well, they say.

"If you were bombing the way we did in Vietnam, maybe it would make sense to buy them," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution. "But that doesn't seem to be where things are going. Given that, there are more economical ways to go."

Moreover, those critics say, the plane is not all that stealthy. During the air war over Yugoslavia, the B-2 conducted raids only at night, because its huge black V-shaped body is readily visible by day. Some of those planes were also accompanied by radar-jamming aircraft.

Even senior Air Force officers argue for buying the F-22 Raptor fighter jet instead of more B-2's. Their reasoning is that the Air Force needs faster, stealthier fighters to protect its relatively slow and insufficiently stealthy bombers, particularly since potentially hostile nations are developing more powerful radar and better air defenses.

And because radar-jammers, fighters and fuel tankers cannot fly all the way from the United States, buying B-2's would not eliminate the need for overseas bases.

"The B-2's are stealthy," one Air Force general said, "but they still need help."

The B-2 was conceived in the early 1980's as one leg of the nation's strategic force, capable of sweeping undetected into Soviet airspace to drop nuclear bombs. In the Reagan administration, plans were drawn up to build 132 of the planes at Northrop plants in Palmdale and Pico Rivera, Calif.

The program was plagued, however, by cost overruns and production delays, at one point failing a radar- detection test. And with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Congress began slashing the B-2 budget during the 1990's, stopping production after 21 aircraft had been built for $44 billion. (That price included research and development costs that would not be part of any new production run, Northrop points out.)

After the first B-2's were delivered here to Whiteman Air Force Base in 1993, new problems emerged. In 1997, the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative and auditing arm, reported that the aircraft's radar-absorbing skin could be damaged by moisture and extreme weather conditions. The plane, the report concluded, could not be deployed overseas without special climate-controlled shelters.

And to maintain stealth, every nick or dent on the plane's specially designed skin must be repaired with particular kinds of tape and epoxy that require as long as 80 hours to cure. Stealth also requires that each time crews open panels to reach internal parts, technicians spend hours sealing the minuscule gaps around the panels.

As a result, Pentagon testers found, the B-2's were often grounded, reducing the number of sorties they could fly and sharply increasing maintenance costs, nearly $140 million last year. (The B-2 wing at Whiteman, the 509th, has more than 1,000 maintenance workers for the 20 planes.) Northrop is trying to redesign the aircraft to reduce the time required to replace panels.

"Every aircraft has some challenge," said Col. Anthony F. Przybyslawski, commander of the 509th Wing. "This one's challenge is keeping it pristine."

The B-2 managed to quiet some of its critics on its first combat mission, in 1999, when six of the planes took part in strikes over Kosovo and Serbia, flying nearly 50 missions, all from Whiteman. Though that number accounted for just 1 percent of NATO's sorties, the B-2's dropped 11 percent of the bombs, the Clinton administration reported.

By most accounts, the B-2 performed well. Using Global Positioning Systems, the planes accurately hit targets with precision-guided bombs even on cloudy days that stymied other allied aircraft. On a visit to Whiteman in 1999, President Clinton called the B-2 a "truly remarkable aircraft."

The goal of the 509th Wing now is to prove that with the prospect of fewer overseas bases, the B-2 can fulfill the kind of missions over the Pacific that it performed over Kosovo. And that is why pilots like Capt. Andy Gebara have been spending 50 hours at a stretch here inside the simulator that closely replicates the B-2's cramped cockpit.

"It's a long time to be stuck in a small container," Captain Gebara said. "But given the constraints we have with the shrinkage of bases, we kind of have to do this. We can't go anywhere we want in the world anymore."

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Army of the future makes its own fuel in the field

Tuesday, June 26, 2001
By Environmental News Network
http://enn.com/news/enn-stories/2001/06/06262001/army_44100.asp

Future U.S. Army operations in the field could rely on alternative fuels and biological methods to produce electricity, says a blue-ribbon committee of university and industry scientists.

A report by the National Research Council's Board on Army Science and Technology found that fuel that can be produced on the spot from waste plant materials.

By 2025 soldiers could make fuel and electricity where they are, instead of relying on long supply chains to transport energy to them, the report predicts.

"The Army needs to be investigating surrogate fuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, and make sure their engines can run on a variety of fuels," says Michael Ladisch, professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University and chair of the 16 member National Research Council (NRC) committee. "Actually, I think this can be done with a minimal amount of modification. They're in pretty good shape in this area."

Scientists are already making fuel from waste plant materials such as cellulose and hemicellulose. Grasses, surplus grains, spoiled food, food wrappers, paper or cotton cloth could be converted into fuel. "In theory, these materials could be produced in the field, if the theater of operation were in a temperate zone, and used as fuels," the report states.

Robert Love, study director for the National Research Council, says, "The real issues for the Army are the ability to simplify logistics requirements, to remain flexible with battlefield fuels, and to capitalize on alternative fuels, such as methane, instead of restricting ourselves to fossil fuels," he says.

Military officials glimpsed the near term future of non-fossil fueled transport in 1999 when manufacturers demonstrated a hybrid electric High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HUMVEE) at Fort Gillem, Georgia.

The vehicle, more powerful and quicker than the standard military Humvee, can accelerate faster and climb steeper grades at higher speeds. Powered by 55-kilowatt magnet motors attached to each wheel, the vehicle draws electric energy from advanced, sealed lead acid batteries and a 55-kilowatt alternator, which is integrated with a high efficiency diesel engine.

But this is only an interim solution because batteries are bulky and very heavy. Biological systems may be the answer, the NRC committee suggests. "Right now the Army is dependent on batteries, and they can't take seriously other energy sources such as solar power," Love says.

"One of the things the report investigated was photovoltaic energy, and how bioelectronics might make it possible to increase the efficiency of converting sunlight to usable energy. If you put this together with fuel cell storage techniques, this would have a large impact on how the military operates, especially for small unit operations," he says.

The NRC Board on Army Science and Technology recommends that the Army investigate how plants convert photons to energy because plants are so good at pulling energy from the natural environment. Plants convert 98 percent of the sunlight they receive into energy. By comparison, current solar energy systems are only 10 percent to 15 percent efficient, with the most efficient reaching conversion rates of 32 percent.

The NRC report suggests that coupling the light-harvesting capabilities of plants with protein-based devices could lead to solar energy systems capable of converting solar energy at 40 percent to 50 percent efficiency.

Ladisch and Love also envision protein based solar photovoltaic coatings on the Kelvar military helmets that could produce enough energy to power a soldier's electronics. Equipment and vehicles could also be coated with protein based solar converters to produce a constant stream of electricity.

A side benefit of such technology, the report notes, is that the protein coatings would make whatever they coat more difficult to detect by electronic means since they would mimic the natural environment.

Although using non-petroleum sources of energy would have obvious environmental and social benefits, Love says this didn't factor into the committee's considerations. He said, "Obviously there are always spin-offs of military innovation, but the committee was concerned with what would improve the operations of the Army."

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AGRICULTURE AGENCY AWARDS $2.4 MILLION FOR ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

June 26, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jun2001/2001L-06-26-09.html

WASHINGTON, DC, The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has approved $2.4 million in grants to promote the development of alternative energy sources.

"These grants will help further the development of biomass fuel facilities that utilize agricultural products in finding long term energy solutions," said Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman. "Agriculture is part of the solution to energy shortfalls and we continue seeking these type of projects in support of the President's energy strategy."

In May, President George W. Bush unveiled his national energy policy, which included a greater reliance on alternative and renewable energy sources, including the use of biofuels and biomass energy sources. Ethanol is the most widely used biofuel, and its production is now 1.9 billion gallons a year, representing an almost ten fold growth from about 200 million gallons a year in 1980.

When complete, the new USDA grants will bring an additional 105 million gallons of ethanol production to the U.S.

"For centuries, America's agricultural producers have brought us safe and reliable food for our tables," said Veneman. "Today, agriculture is a leading force in finding alternative uses for raw commodities and playing a key role in developing renewable sources for tomorrow's energy needs."

Examples of funded projects include a proposal in Michigan to construct a soybean oil refinery capable of converting raw soybean oil into food grade oil; efforts in North Dakota to develop a marketing and sales strategy for fiberboard products made of wheat straw; and in California where grant funds will be used for market development of a new wild rice product.

Funds for the Value-Added Agricultural Product Market Development Grant program are administered through the Rural Business-Cooperative Service, an agency within USDA Rural Development. Additional program funding and grant application procedures are available at: http://www.rurdev.usda.gov

A complete list of grant recipients is available at: http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/rd/newsroom/2001/vadgrecips.html

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RENEWABLE ENERGY CREDITS COULD SUPPORT GREEN POWER

June 26, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jun2001/2001L-06-26-09.html

NEW YORK, New York, Thirty of the nation's top renewable energy professionals gathered last week to discuss future markets for Tradable Renewable Energy Credits.

The tradable credits are touted as a new means for facilitating the development of environmentally friendly renewable energy.

Hosted by the Center for Resource Solutions, the meeting aimed to create a set of recommended criteria for the certification of renewable energy products. Tradable Renewable Energy Credits (TRCs), also known as green tags or green certificates, represent the collective environmental, social and other benefits that can be separated from the electrical power generated at renewable energy facilities.

TRCs may be sold separately from electricity or combined with system power at the point of sale. Energy experts and representatives from public utilities, electricity generating companies, renewable energy marketers, state regulatory agencies and renewable energy advocacy organizations, came to the table for discussion on this emerging advancement of renewable energy.

The attractiveness of TRCs is that they allow customers anywhere to support the development of renewable energy.

"Now consumers in states that have not deregulated, or who have little choice about the source of their electricity, can support renewables such as wind, solar, biomass, hydro and geothermal power," said Dan Lieberman of the Center for Resource Solutions.

The Center for Resource Solutions runs the Green-e program, which certifies renewable energy. Green-e is the nation's first voluntary certification and verification program for renewable electricity products.

----

Funds develop a taste for clean green energy

UK: June 26, 2001
Story by Stephanie Holmes
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11328

LONDON - Green really is the colour of money. Investments in new energy technology, the power behind renewable energy, are booming as fund managers discover the potential of these verdant industries.

The headiest estimates currently value the energy technology market at $7 billion and according to research consultants Clean Edge, based in the heart of the high-tech Silicon Valley, the figure will blossom to $82 billion by 2010.

London-based fund managers say they are eager to buy large portions of companies that make fuel cells and wind turbines, solar energy technolgy and offshore power generation.

"From a small base there is massive opportunity," says Robin Batchelor, head of energy at Merrill Lynch. "Many investment banks are starting analyst teams because of the high growth rates."

Batchelor has just launched the investment bank's second fund, the New Energy Technology Fund focusing on alternative energy-providers.

The fund includes a range of stocks that span renewable energies like wind, wave, solar and biomass, onsite energy generation, energy storage and the engineering that 'glues' all the technology together.

No longer merely the domain of the "socially responsible" or "green" investor the underlying motivation of these funds is simple - to make a decent profit.

"When you look at what is energy the mix is changing, investors were interested in a purer form of investing," Batchelor explained.

"We didn't specifically label it as a "green investment", we came from the energy side," he added.

RENEWABLES FASTEST GROWING ENERGY

Up to 25 percent of the assets held include unquoted companies, a measure of the potential growth in the sector.

Renewable energies are projected to be the fastest growing energy sector of consumption across the world, according to figures from the industrialised world's energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency. Energy from renewable sources is set to double by 2020.

Of course "Green funds" are nothing new. Jupiter Asset Management launched their "Ecology Fund" over a decade ago and saw it achieve a growth rate of 73 percent over the past 5 years.

What is changing is the increasing number of alternative energy technolgies that make up the fund manager's portfolio.

Jupiter has recently launched its Global Green Investment Trust worth 70 billion pounds. Alternative energy makes up 30 percent of its portfolio.

The change is partly fuelled by changes in pension fund regulation, now trustees have to say whether or not they take social, ethical and environmental issues into account when investing.

"It was a huge wake-up call as far as the city was concerned," Jupiter's Emma Howard Boyd said.

BUSH NOT A DETERRENT

Even President George W. Bush's proposals to increase reliance on coal and nuclear power won't dampen down growth in the new energy market, according to Clean Edge's Joel Makower.

"It would be great if the U.S. was leading the way but the train has already left the station," he said. "It won't stop companies from forging ahead. If they can't do it here, they'll do it elsewhere."

"The technology is being pulled along because it provides solutions to the industry's problems," Batchelor said.

But the high level of risk involved in unlisted companies and the complexity of the fledgling market is discouraging some venture capitalists.

According to Louise Hulme of London-based GEO Capital many simply don't have the manpower to research this emerging market.

"There are a lot of issues. It is a cyclical market, it would need a lot of investment and research. It is by now means a simple market to invest in," she said.

For Clean Edge, investors who risked all buying Internet stocks are now looking at new markets to place their money but the returns won't be as dramatic.

"This is where the second wave of smart money is going but this is not going to be a fast ramp-up," Makower said.

----

Fresh look at wind energy blows to US from Europe

USA: June 26, 2001
Story by Jonathan Landreth
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11324

NEW YORK - Windpower is poised for a relaunch in the United States, where regulators, investors and utilities, following Europe's lead, are tilting toward improved technology that now makes windpower cost-effective, experts say.

Long-tainted by failures that burned early U.S. backers and by critics who saw windmills as an eyesore and as a danger to birds, windpower still only provides the United States with less than 1 percent of its energy.

"But now there is a perceived shortage of power that wasn't there 5 to 10 years ago," said Maurice Miller, an independent renewable energy consultant in California, where a bungled attempt at deregulation and a host of other factors has made rolling electricity blackouts part of life in the state.

"Wind energy companies are now perceived as viable, competitive businesses," said Miller, who, as former chief financial officer of U.S. Windpower, the wind industry's most notorious failure would know.

Nowadays, windpower is a viable business by nearly any standard, and is growing at 25 percent a year worldwide.

Led by Denmark, which gets 10 percent of its electricity from wind, and by widespread wind development in Germany and Spain, well-placed windfarms in spots such as the American plains states are estimated to be capable of producing three times the total electricity now generated in the entire nation.

Wind turbine technology, vastly improved in recent years, is ideal for flatlands where hot air rises - off the plains of the Dakotas, Kansas and Texas, for instance - and where cool winds are drawn off bodies of water such as the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific Ocean off California's coast.

SLOW TO SHIFT

But Merrill Lynch analyst Steven Fleishman said wind is still a "minute factor" for the two biggest players in the U.S. windpower market, giant utility Florida Power and Light , and Enron Corp. , the largest U.S. maker of wind turbines.

Still, spurred by prices that make windpower as affordable as natural gas or coal as well as by tax subsidies for developers and government mandates requiring utilities to buy more power from renewable energy sources, both companies are now involved in big windpower projects.

And now a handful of other U.S. fund managers say wind has huge potential to make money. So much so, that Jack Robinson's Winslow Green Growth and Green Century Balanced mutual funds have twice the weighting in renewable energy companies as the S&P 500 index .

"Wind is at an inflection point where it doesn't need subsidies to be competitive with traditional power sources," Robinson said.

THE COST OF WIND

While governor of Texas, President George W. Bush signed a law mandating utilities to buy more power from alternative energy sources. Texas now has the fourth largest installed windpower capacity in the United States, and can deliver wind power at a competitive 5 cents per megawatt hour.

But Robert Beningson, chief executive of York Research Corp., an alternative energy developer based in New York City, said wind only achieves such competitive prices with the crutch of tax subsidies for developers.

What the U.S. wind industry needs now to catch up with Europe's wind power craze, Beningson said, is an extension of the Production Tax Credit (PTC), a move mentioned but not mandated in the Bush administration's new proposed energy policy.

Lyn Harrison, editor of industry magazine Windpower Monthly agrees.

"Wind is Bush's chance to marry his big business stance and the environmental messages in his proposed energy plan," said Harrison, whose magazine has offices in wind-rich Denmark and California.

Long term forecasts in the early 1990s by Pacific Gas & Electric and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) said wind would ultimately become the least expensive electricity source.

Current data shows those forecasts are no longer pipe dreams. Based on its knowledge of current market conditions, the Washington, D.C.-based American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) estimates that the cost of tax-subsidzed wind energy at good sites ranges from 3 cents to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh).

Without the tax subsidies, or PTCs, wind generated electricity still sells at a low cost between 4 cents and 6 cents per kWh, comparable with the 4.8 cent to 5.5 cent per kWh cost of coal and the 3.9 cent to 4.4 cent per kWh cost of gas.

WIND'S TROUBLED PAST

But experts note that wind still suffers from its early bad reputation with U.S. investors.

Since its inception in the United States the late 1970s, the American wind power industry faced an uphill battle against bigger and more established oil and gas companies.

In September 1993, a California company called U.S. Windpower, then the only U.S. maker of wind turbines, raised $90 million in an initial public offering underwritten by Merrill Lynch, hoping to use the money to improve its turbine technology.

By May 1996, U.S. Windpower filed for bankruptcy after a series of mechanical failures proved windpower too expensive.

"There isn't a major institutional investor who wasn't burned by U.S. Windpower," said Jan Paulin, chief executive of Sea West, a private wind developer based in San Diego. "Their efforts were noble but they miscalculated."

Because wind development's cost reflects the time and money needed for making better equipment, scouting the windiest sties, and getting permits to build wind farms, the economics of the wind turbine business are highly sensitive to the interest rate banks charge developers, experts say.

"It's a shame that U.S. institutional investors have such an outdated view of the industry and the technology," Paulin said. "To this day, most of the U.S. wind power developments were initially funded by European banks."

Also, governmental commitment to windpower in Europe helped jump-start the industry before it became self sufficient.

WINDPOWER IN EUROPE

If wind farms were financed on the same terms as natural gas plants, their cost would drop by nearly 40 percent, according to an AWEA study.

Technological improvements that enable turbines to generate steady streams of power no matter what the wind's speed means that it is just a matter of time before U.S. investors, like Europeans, head straight into the wind business, fund manager Robinson said.

"American investors will come to wind, but they may not be investing in U.S. companies at this point in time as there are very few pure plays," said Robinson, whose funds hold the shares of Denmark's two biggest publicly listed wind turbine makers, Vestas Wind Systems, the largest wind turbine maker in the world, and NEG Micron, the No. 4 wind turbine company in the world.

Shares of Vestas and NEG Micron - both part of the Copenhagen Bourse's top-20 index, KFX - soared on May 1 after a Danish government researcher forecast that wind turbines would supply 10 percent of the world's electricity in 20 years.

Soon after, Merrill Lynch started coverage of Vestas with a "neutral" rating in the intermediate term and a "buy" rating in the long term, citing a belief that the wind power companies were on course for a sustained period of strong growth.

Denmark already gets 10 percent of its power from wind, and Vestas and NEG Micron share prices have doubled in a year.

Vestas also holds a 40 percent stake in world's No. 2 wind turbine maker, Gamesa Eolica, which is part of Spain's Gamesa Group.

----

NSW Australia eyes vegetable oil for fuel - minister

AUSTRALIA: June 26, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11319

SYDNEY - The state government of New South Wales (NSW) supported the promotion of an industry using vegetable oils as an alternative fuel, Agriculture Minister Richard Amery said yesterday.

Speaking in state parliament on Monday, Amery said that over the next 10 years the Biodiesel Association of Australia hoped to supply 10 percent of the 11.56 billion litres of diesel fuel currently consumed in Australia each year.

That would require one million tonnes of vegetable oil to be produced by Australia's farmers, he said.

Annual production of canola alone in Australia reached 860,000 tonnes in 1997, with almost half, 310,000 tonnes, produced in NSW, he said.

By 2005, NSW production was predicted to more than double, to about 750,000 tonnes a year, he said.

Waste oils from restaurants and kitchens could also be used for biodiesel, with the McDonald's restaurant chain alone producing about 1,100 tonnes of recycled frying oil in Australia each year, he said.

He said biodiesel contained no sulphur, had low toxicity and emitted 80 percent less greenhouse gases than diesel fuel.

Amery said the state's Agriculture Department would help the Sydney-based Biodiesel Association expand its information network, link it with industry groups and provide information.

Research had shown that vegetable oils could be used to power motor vehicles. Work was progressing to develop a viable and sustainable biodiesel industry using vegetable oils, he said.

-------- energy

Cheney Withholds List of Those Who Spoke to Energy Panel

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/26/politics/26CHEN.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, June 25 - Vice President Dick Cheney has declined to identify the people who met privately with his energy task force, raising tensions with Congressional investigators who have repeatedly requested the information.

The General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, sent Mr. Cheney's office a letter late last week complaining that a month had passed since it first submitted an inquiry about the workings of the task force. The letter said the vice president had a legal obligation to provide the information immediately.

Mr. Cheney's office said the letter was sent one day after it submitted 77 pages of documents to the accounting office.

"Our correspondence crossed in the mail," said Juleanna Glover Weiss, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney.

But Ms. Weiss said the vice president had not provided the names of people, including industry executives, who may have influenced the formation of the Bush administration's energy policy, which was released last month.

"Our counsel and the G.A.O. will continue to talk about this," Ms. Weiss said.

The energy task force Mr. Cheney headed spent several months compiling a lengthy energy strategy that contained about 150 recommendations for administrative and legislative actions to address what it termed an energy crisis.

Administration officials have said that they met with a wide variety of people concerned about energy issues, including executives of oil, natural gas, electricity, nuclear power and energy infrastructure companies. They have declined to provide a list of people who had access to the task force.

Some Democrats have asserted that leading Republican donors had special access to the task force and that the energy policy is skewed toward measures favored by major corporations. Two Democratic representatives, Henry A. Waxman of California and John D. Dingell of Michigan, asked the accounting office to report on the officials who served on the task force, what information was collected by the panel, whom they met with and how much the task force spent.

The White House provided the G.A.O. with the financial records of the task force. But administration officials have told the investigative body that they are not compelled to provide the names of outsiders who met with the task force.

The accounting office's general counsel, Anthony H. Gamboa, said in a letter to Mr. Cheney's office last week that the investigative body is entitled to more information.

The letter warned that if the White House does not provide the full range of information the G.A.O. is seeking, it may issue a "demand letter," a more formal request. Under the law, the White House would have 20 days to respond.

If the dispute continues, the accounting office could bring a civil action against the administration.

-------- environment

Pollution site victims fight for compensation

USA: June 26, 2001
Story by Alan Elsner, National Correspondent
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11325

SAUGET, Ill. - As a child, Nancy Mercer and her friends liked to ride their bicycles down Dead Creek, which ran past the end of their street.

"The creek was usually dried out, unless it had rained. We would skid our wheels and embers would fly in the air. We thought it was pretty cool and we did it a lot," Mercer said. Sometimes the creek, now designated by the federal government as one of the 1,200 most urgent hazardous waste sites, smoked by day, glowed by night and would spontaneously burst into flames.

The United States is grappling with the huge problem of cleaning up some of its most severely contaminated waste sites, which like the creek, are an unwanted legacy of its industrial past.

The U.S. General Accounting Office estimates that after nearly 20 years and outlays of more than $14 billion, the Superfund program has yet to complete cleanups of 42 percent of the 1,200 sites on the list. Thousands more sites remain to be studied.

This year, President George W. Bush's budget requested $1.3 billion for Superfund. That's for the sites. Despite the publicity generated by movies like "Erin Brockovich" and "A Civil Action," the human victims of such pollution are on their own.

Mercer's parents, Robert and Nancy Batson, and their neighbors did not know that Dead Creek was a deadly toxic dumping group for industrial plants. Those poisons often overflowed into the pond in their back yard.

FROGS WITH TWO HEADS

"We would see fish with tumors, frogs with two heads. It was gross," Mercer said. That didn't stop neighborhood kids from digging holes around the banks of the pond, jumping in to cool off in summer, skating on the poisoned surface in winter.

"I took many a mouthful," Mercer said.

Now, Robert Batson has leukemia, several of his neighbors have died of cancer and his four children live in constant fear they will also get sick.

Batson and some 15 other Sauget residents are suing some 30 companies for damages, alleging they negligently discharged toxic substances into the air and sewer system and failed to warn citizens of Sauget of the danger. Batson would like his medical bills covered and frequent medical monitoring for his children to ensure early detection if they develop cancer.

An analysis by PHR Environmental Consultants Inc., conducted in 1999 for the purpose of a federally mandated cleanup, identified 12 zones of extreme contamination in the area located close to the Mississippi River opposite the city of St. Louis. Until 1967, Sauget was known as the Village of Monsanto, after the largest industrial company operating within its bounds.

"Contaminants identified to date in the subject area include: PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), heavy metals including arsenic, barium, copper, lead, mercury, nickel and zinc; volatile organic compounds, including chloroform, benzene, 111-trichloethene, tetrachloroethene, chlorobenzene, toluene and xylenes; semi-volatile organic compounds such as phenol, naphthalene and pentachlorophenol; pesticides; the breakdown products of chlorinated hydrocarbon solvents have also been detected in the ground water," the report said.

Exposure to many of these compounds, especially PCBs, dioxins and benzene, is known to cause cancer in humans and animals.

The PHR report states that pollution of Dead Creek began in 1918 when St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. began manufacturing chemicals there. As early as 1923, six local landowners sued Monsanto for damages to their agricultural land caused by the release of chemical wastes into Dead Creek.

Over the years, dozens of companies contributed to the problem. Some are no longer in business; some have been acquired by other companies. Monsanto itself has spun off its Sauget plant to a subsidiary, Solutia Inc.

Solutia has taken responsibility for cleaning up the site and spent around $17 million trying to do so. Solutia bought the Batson's house for $40,000 last year and demolished it.

But the company, which last April settled a similar case of PCB contamination in Alabama for $40 million, is fighting the lawsuit. Solutia has petitioned to have the case transferred from an Illinois county court to federal court, arguing much of the pollution stemmed from a period during World War Two when the company was producing poisoned gas for the military.

"We believe the U.S. government will be a defendant and therefore it should be heard in federal court," said Solutia spokesman Glenn Ruskin.

Additionally, Ruskin stated: "I have not heard of any medical knowledge or studies that the form of leukemia Mr. Batson has is associated with exposure to chemicals."

Chemical engineer Melvyn Kopstein, an expert retained by Batson's lawyer Bill Gavin, said in an affidavit: "Benzene has long been known to cause myelogenous leukemia in humans."

Gavin believes Solutia's attempt to shift the case to federal court is aimed at avoiding disclosure of documents. "The federal court system has strict restrictions on the kind of discovery that can be conducted," he said.

The federal judge has told plaintiffs they can only send 50 interrogatories, or questions, to each defendant and 20 requests for production of documents.

"That severely limits my ability to shake information out of them," Gavin said.

-------- genetics

Green groups say seed patents menace food security

ITALY: June 26, 2001
Story by David Brough
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11327

ROME - Environment groups said yesterday the patenting of food and seeds by multinational companies threatened food security and access by farmers to vital genetic resources.

"Seeds should be owned by people. They should not be owned by multinational companies," Henk Hobbelink of Genetics Resources Action International (GRAIN) told a news conference organised by the Greenpeace group.

Greenpeace spokesman Christoph Then said, "If we don't stop companies getting those patents, world food security will be in the control of those multinationals."

He added, "There should be no patents in seeds and food. It should not be possible to get exclusive rights on world food security."

A meeting of the Commission for Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, part of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), in Rome this week brings together representatives of 161 countries seeking to conserve the world's genetic resources.

The meeting aims to establish a comprehensive system for the management and sharing of inherited biodiversity.

OPEN ACCESS

The environmentalists urged the meeting to agree on an international undertaking that incorporated open access by farmers and plant breeders to genetic resources.

The current practice whereby multinationals patented seeds and foodstuffs in Europe and the United States threatened food production by ensnaring farmers, they said.

"We need more support...for a patent-free zone for plant genetic resources," said Then. "Civil society wants control of its own resources."

Blessing Butaummocho, a representative of smallholder farmers in southern Africa, said multinationals could hold poor farmers to ransom by forcing them to pay dearly for seeds.

"Now many poor farmers get their seeds from family and friends," he said. "If they had to get patented seeds from multinationals, they would have to pay much more."

He added, "Patents restrict access to seeds for food production by smallholder farmers. Farmers' access to their own food would be restricted."

The environmentalists urged the meeting, which continues until Saturday, to agree on ways to protect the inherited components of biodiversity, which are dwindling fast.

More than 90 percent of the agricultural diversity that existed at the beginning of the 20th century had been lost, FAO officials said.

--------

Supercomputers Try to Keep Pace

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Gene-Crunchers.html?searchpv=aponline

ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) -- Cloaked in government secrecy, the world of supercomputing was populated through the 1980s chiefly by nuclear scientists developing weapons and doomsday simulations.

The industry suffered post-Cold War pangs as government contracts diminished -- even as computers themselves gained immensely in power.

Now, in a swords-to-ploughshares twist, biologists mining genetic data for life-saving drugs are driving a renaissance in supercomputing -- and the machines may have a difficult time keeping pace.

``The whole area of genomics and biological sciences is fundamentally transforming our industry,'' said Ty Rabe, director of high-performance computing for Compaq Computer Corp.

The burgeoning field, known as bioinformatics, comes of the marriage between biology and high-powered computing that was instrumental in deciphering the human genome.

Craving vastly more speed and power to isolate the genetic origins of myriad afflictions, the biotechnology industry's demand for ever more muscular computers is expected to be insatiable.

It was high-speed computers that enabled researchers from Celera Genomics and the federal Human Genome Project to make a blueprint of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that comprise the human genetic makeup.

But researchers now must study the roughly 30,000 genes and hundreds of thousands of proteins that are the keys to the future drugs that can attack many diseases at their biological origin.

That requires computer simulations of how drugs may act on humans, or how they may interact with other drugs -- and vast amounts of storage space for all that data.

``It's great to have all this genomics, but when you can actually model how a cell works, what causes it to malfunction and how to correct that malfunction, that is where the real value will come,'' said Marshall Peterson, head of infrastructure technology at Celera. ``There isn't enough computer power on the planet yet to do that.''

Beyond the laboratory, the demand for processing and storage muscle may well come from what is becoming known as personal medicine.

In personal medicine, an individual's genetic data would be stored digitally, providing doctors with information needed to develop individualized care -- from attacking inherited diseases to designing rehabilitation therapies.

``If the DNA of 6 billion people has to be stored or deciphered, the magnitude of that would be enormous,'' said Sia Zadeh, group manager of Sun Microsystem's life sciences division.

Such a task would require a now unimaginable amount of computing power.

It's no wonder companies including Sun, Compaq and IBM have in the past year made major investments in life sciences. IBM estimates the overall market could be worth $40 billion annually by 2004.

Keeping up with the number-crunching demands of biotech could help restore some shine to a computer industry battered by this year's devastating slump in PC sales.

Compaq has partnered with Celera Genomics and the federal Sandia National Laboratories nuclear facility in New Mexico to create a computer that can handle 100 trillion computations per second.

That's 100,000 times faster than the average desktop PC.

IBM is building Blue Gene, which promises to perform 1 quadrillion (referred to as 1 petaflop) operations per second when finished in 2004.

The $100 million experimental project will be 2 million times more powerful than today's desktop PCs. It will focus on how proteins fold and change their shape, a key to understanding their biological function.

A single protein can perform a much different -- and often harmful -- role in the body depending on its contortions.

Blue Gene is the showpiece of IBM's new Life Sciences business unit, created last year with a $100 million initial investment and headed by Caroline Kovac.

Among clients for customized IBM systems is NuTec Sciences, an Atlanta-based bioinformatics company. The cluster of 1,250 IBM servers can perform 7.5 trillion calculations per second, making it the world's fastest commercial computer.

NuTec will lease its system to academic researchers, including the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University. Winship says it plans to tailor cancer treatments to individual patients by next year.

Biopsies will be loaded into the computer, which will analyze the genes of cancer cells. It will then help researchers find the most effective drug or treatment for exploiting a tumor's weaknesses.

``We're the first to actually hook a supercomputer into a clinic taking care of patients,'' said Winship director Dr. Jonathan Simons.

To help decipher the human genome, Celera used about 200 high-end AlphaServer systems provided by Compaq, which includes biotech giant Genentech and MIT's Whitehead Institute among its supercomputing clients.

Celera estimates that it will take a system that can perform 500 trillion operations per second just to model the activity of a single cell, said Peterson of Celera.

Simulating tissues and organs, meanwhile, will require ``several tens of petaflops'' -- computing power that will be out of reach of even IBM's Blue Gene.

``This will require a revolution in computing. The current evolutionary steps will not make it,'' said Peterson.

-------- health

Before U.N., Powell Renews Call for Global War on AIDS

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER S. WREN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/26/world/26AIDS.html

UNITED NATIONS, June 25 - Striking an assertive tone for the Bush administration on AIDS policy, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the General Assembly today that "from this moment on," the world's response to the disease "must be no less comprehensive, no less relentless and no less swift than the pandemic itself."

During a special session on AIDS, Secretary Powell held out the possibility of further American contributions to a global fund being set up to finance the fight against the disease, following the $200 million offered by the Bush administration last month. The secretary of state, who expressed his concern over the AIDS crisis in Africa during a visit last month, said the United States would also continue to lead the world in providing money for research.

Secretary Powell stopped short of saying how much more money the administration would contribute to the global fund, or when. But he said the initial contribution was "only a beginning."

As the session got under way, the United States also announced in Washington that it would drop its World Trade Organization litigation against Brazil for planning to produce and market generic anti- AIDS medicine.

Echoing the basis of that decision, Secretary Powell told the delegates: "No war on the face of the world is more destructive than the AIDS pandemic. I was a soldier, but I know of no enemy in war more insidious or vicious than AIDS, an enemy that poses a clear and present danger to the world."

Later, answering questions from reporters about the Bush administration's plans, Secretary Powell said, "I would expect that additional funds would be found in the future and appropriated" by the United States. He said he expected the new global fund, which Secretary General Kofi Annan proposed in April, to start showing results by the end of the year. "To date, the United States has dedicated over $1.6 billion to combat AIDS in the developing world," Secretary Powell said in his speech. President Bush's budget for the next fiscal year seeks $480 million to fight AIDS, the secretary said, more than twice that spent during the 2000 fiscal year.

President Bush is also requesting more than $3.4 billion for AIDS research, Secretary Powell said. "The United States, I pledge today, will continue to lead the world in funding vital research," he said.

The special session, to conclude on Wednesday, is the first devoted to a public health issue. For all the talk today in more than 70 speeches, success hinges in large part on Mr. Annan's ability to attract donors to the global fund, which would spend $7 billion to $10 billion annually to combat AIDS and other infectious diseases, notably malaria and tuberculosis.

Mr. Annan said his goal was to have the fund operating by the end of the year. "We must mobilize the money required for this exceptional effort, and we must make sure it is used effectively," he said today.

So far, the United States, France and Britain, as well as the the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have together pledged a little more than $500 million. Norway came forward today to offer $110 million. "The counteroffensive against AIDS cannot be won without a bigger war chest," said the Norwegian minister for international development, Anne Kristin Sydnes.

The secretary general opened the conference today with a plea for more compassion for people with AIDS. "When we urge others to change their behavior, so as to protect themselves against infection, we must be able to change our behavior in the public arena," Mr. Annan said.

"We cannot deal with AIDS by making moral judgments or refusing to face unpleasant facts - and still less by stigmatizing those who are infected, and making out that it is all their fault," he continued. "We can only do it by speaking clearly and openly, both about the ways that people become infected, and about what they can do to avoid infection."

The secretary general's appeal for tolerance was the latest in his continuing effort during the last year to curb divisions and antagonisms - prejudice against AIDS patients, poor countries' resentment of richer ones and suspicion of big business, especially pharmaceutical companies - that have frustrated the formation of an effective united front against the epidemic.

Mr. Annan demonstrated anew his instincts for conciliation, which further assured his anticipated nomination this week for a second five-year term as secretary general. The Security Council is expected to endorse him on Wednesday and the General Assembly appears in a mood to approve another term.

Still, it was unclear how much would be accomplished at the General Assembly session, which was attended by two dozen heads of state and hundreds of health ministers, other government officials and diplomats. An estimated 3,000 people have attended, inside and outside the conference.

Clare Short, the British secretary of state for international development, complained that AIDS had been around for 20 years, and that too much time and energy were being wasted at United Nations conferences. "We use up enormous energy in arguing at great length over texts that provide few, if any, followup mechanisms or assurances that governments and U.N. agencies will carry forward the declarations that are agreed," she said.

"There have been enough conferences and declarations," Ms. Short said. "What we need now is urgent and much more effective action on a much wider scale to prevent the terrible suffering, loss of life and costs to development that this terrible disease is inflicting across the world."

The conference is scheduled to conclude with the signing of a declaration setting out goals and targets containing and reversing the AIDS epidemic. But some Muslim countries have objected to explicit references in the draft text to homosexuals, prostitutes and intravenous drug users as people vulnerable to the disease, delaying its completion.

In another contentious event, a private advocacy group, the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, regained its seat in one of the roundtable discussions outside the General Assembly after Canada, Norway and Sweden pressed its case. The group was excluded when some conservative delegates objected to its participation.

Mr. Annan reminded delegates that AIDS had set back development in some African countries by a decade or more, and was now spreading "with lightning speed" through Eastern Europe, Asia and the Caribbean. He recited statistics underscoring the toll taken by AIDS around the world: nearly 22 million dead, 13 million children orphaned, more than 36 million living with AIDS or H.I.V. "Every day, another 15,000 people acquire the virus," he said.

President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria painted an even bleaker picture of Africa as home to 70 percent of the adults and 80 percent of the children infected with H.I.V. in the world and three-fourths of those who have died from AIDS.

"With this trend in statistics, the future of our continent is bleak, to say the least, and the prospect of extinction of the entire continent looms larger and larger," Mr. Obasanjo said. "We do not have any choice but to contemplate exceptional measures to contain the spread and devastation of H.I.V./AIDS."

President John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana said: "These statistics are frightening and more so when we know that only about 40 percent of the cases are recorded. What this means is that our social security and our economic development efforts are being undermined faster than we can by ourselves contain."

President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who once expressed doubts that AIDS was caused by a virus, did not attend the session, despite his visit to Washington this week.

His government recently set aside plans to distribute antiretroviral AIDS drugs, after battling pharmaceutical companies for the right to do do.

--------

US makes a patently healthy decision
The withdrawal of an American complaint to the World Trade Organisation about Brazil's HIV/Aids drugs policy amounts to an admission that some things are more important than corporate profit

Julian Borger.
Tuesday June 26, 2001
http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,512861,00.html

Something extraordinary happened in the United Nations yesterday: an event that should be cited every time the usefulness of that global bureaucracy is brought into question.

At the launch of the UN general assembly's special session on Aids, the US unexpectedly withdrew its trade complaint against Brazil over its drug policy.

The decision, announced by the US trade representative, Robert Zoellick, represented a stunning admission that some things (the deaths of millions from disease, for example) are more important than corporate profit.

The US had taken Brazil to the World Trade Organisation in February for its policy of allowing its pharmaceutical companies to manufacture cheap generic versions of patented Aids drugs, allowing the government to provide free care for HIV sufferers.

The US pharmaceutical industry had put intense pressure on Mr Zoellick and his predecessor, Charlene Barshevsky, to take Brazil to task before a WTO tribunal, with the implied threat of sanctions.

If patents were allowed to fall into abeyance, the industry lobbyists insisted, chaos would reign, eroding the profit incentive necessary to induce companies to invest in research and development.

It was a vitally important case, because the WTO's agreement on intellectual property (known as TRIPS) included a clause allowing governments to issue compulsory licences for generic production in the case of a health emergency.

Brazil's response was that if the Aids epidemic did not qualify as such an emergency then the clause was meaningless.

Brazil's victory was a triumph for good sense. It has put to rest the inherently racist argument put forward by supporters of the western pharmaceutical companies that distribution of Aids drugs in the third world would cause more harm than good because poor people were unable to stick to complicated timetables for taking medicines.

The Brazilian experience demonstrated that, with the right coaching and labeling, patients in the slums of Sao Paolo were just as capable as their fellow sufferers in the west of sticking to a regime.

Although HIV infection is still spreading, the Brazilian death rate from Aids has dropped 60% in the last few years.

That success, in turn, has encouraged more Brazilians to come forward for HIV testing, boosting the parallel effort aimed at education and prevention.

The Brazil case is just the latest in a series of David v Goliath wins. In March, a student protest at Yale University forced Bristol-Myers Squibb to relax its South African patent on an Aids anti-retroviral drug, d4T, by pointing out that it was actually discovered at Yale, giving the university some say in how it was used.

Soon afterwards, an alliance of 39 pharmaceutical companies dropped their legal attempt to stop the South African government importing generic Aids medicines from low-cost Indian manufacturers.

These developments are central in the crusade to manage the Aids epidemic, although even at generic prices, African states would need substantial financial support to be able to make them available to their own populations.

Just as important, arguably, is the significance of these breakthroughs for the future of globalisation. The Brazilian case represents an admission, by one of the most pro-business administrations in US history no less, that the process cannot be driven by profit alone.

The protection of intellectual property is vital if trade is to expand, but as the struggle over Aids has demonstrated, it is a policy goal, not an article of religious faith.

Even after these defeats, the pharmaceutical companies are still likely to make profits far in excess of most other industries.

The rights of corporations should be safeguarded to provide incentives for research and growth, but they are not the only ones with rights. Labour and the environment also require protection if globalisation is to work for the world, rather than the other way around.

Email julian.borger@guardian.co.uk

-------- human rights

Probe on China Child Labor Sought

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
June 26, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Chinese-Fireworks.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rep. George Miller asked the Department of Labor and the Customs Service Tuesday to investigate whether fireworks imported from China are made using forced child labor.

Americans could be ``unwittingly contributing to the forced exploitation of Chinese children'' when they celebrate the July Fourth holiday next week, said Miller, D-Calif.

The United States last year imported $130 million worth of fireworks, more than 90 percent of them from China, Miller said.

U.S. law prohibits importing goods made with forced or indentured child labor. An executive order issued by former President Clinton also makes it illegal for the government to purchase products made by children involuntarily.

Miller said a March 6 explosion that destroyed a schoolhouse in a fireworks-producing area of China, killing 37 children, is evidence that forced child labor is involved. He cited 1996 statistics from the official Chinese News Agency saying that about 93 percent of schools in China have set up cottage industries to raise funds for schools.

The Chinese government denies that schoolchildren are making fireworks against their will. But Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji has acknowledged that the school involved in the March blast required pupils to fit fuses to fireworks in 1999.

The Labor Department keeps a list of products that the government is not allowed to buy because they are made using forced child labor. Eleven products are currently listed: 10 from Burma and one from Pakistan.

-------- imf / world bank / wto

WTO Chief Says China Entry 'Very Close'

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-trade-c.html

GENEVA (Reuters) - China's long-awaited entry to the World Trade Organization is now ``very close,'' WTO Director-General Mike Moore said on Tuesday.

``In principle, we are just about there. I want it and everyone wants it,'' Moore told Reuters Television in an interview on the eve of new WTO talks on the issue.

His remarks followed the successful conclusion over the past two weeks of separate negotiations between China and the two top trading powers, the European Union and the United States.

Both had sought stronger commitments from Beijing on access to Chinese markets for insurance companies and trading firms, and on keeping down production subsidies to China's farmers.

Those agreements have been widely seen as clearing the way for completion of almost all detailed negotiations on the terms of Chinese admission to the 141-member body, nearly 15 years after it applied to join.

Mexico, which has yet to conclude its bilateral talks with Beijing, has said it will not block China's entry when the final documents come before the WTO's General Council for approval.

Chinese officials have voiced optimism that a week of talks on its application starting on Thursday will wrap up all major issues.

Moore indicated he also felt this was possible, but said it was still uncertain whether China could be in the body in time for a WTO ministerial meeting in Qatar from November 9-13.

Getting China in before Qatar was ``technically possible, but very difficult,'' he said.

``There is still a lot of technical and legal work to be done,'' Moore added, referring to protocols that have to be compiled of all the agreements China has reached with its trading partners and the final admission agreement.

China has indicated it wants to be a member by November so it can be in at the start if the ministers from all WTO countries agree to launch a new global round of trade liberalization negotiations.

``China has seen a tremendous benefit to its people (from trade and economic liberalization)....One hundred million lifted from extreme poverty in over a decade, so it is going to be a strong supporter of more open markets and a rules-based system,'' said Moore, a former New Zealand prime minister.

If China is not a member before Qatar, it would still be able to take part as an observer, and then come in as a full member once the accession process is completed.

--------

Sri Lanka to suspend GM food ban at WTO's behest

SRI LANKA: June 26, 2001
Story by Dayan Candappa
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11330

COLOMBO - Sri Lanka announced yesterday it would comply with a World Trade Organisation (WTO) request to suspend one of the world's toughest bans on genetically modified (GM) food, but insisted the restrictions would be reimposed.

The ban, which went into effect on May 1, will be lifted this week after the WTO asked Sri Lanka to give its trading partners 60 days to prepare for the restrictions, the country's top food safety official said.

"This is merely a suspension consequent to some communication with the WTO and we are not backtracking," said S. Nagiah, chief food inspector of the Health Ministry, adding the controls could be reimposed by September 1.

The ban has drawn fire from the United States which has said there was "no credible scientific evidence" to justify it.

Nagiah said the controls would allow Sri Lanka time to study health risks associated with GM foods.

The ban requires 21 categories of food imports to be completely free of GM products, which contain a gene from another organism, generally to make them resistant to herbicides or to produce their own toxins to kill pests.

Proponents of the new technology say it contributes to higher crop yields and lower production costs, while critics fear long-term health and environmental consequences.

Sri Lanka does not have a mechanism to test imports for genetic modifications, but Nagiah said a certification laboratory would be set up to implement the controls.

The United Nations' Codex Alimentarius is due to announce an international standards regime for GM foods in 2003.

Until the system is in place, Nagiah said the Sri Lanka would rely entirely on certification in the country of origin and would not import products that were not certified as being free of genetic modifications.

He said he expected some problems with processed food imports such as cereal and milk, but did not see the ban seriously hampering trade.

"Most of our big purchases are from sources that are satisfactory in terms of certification," said Nagiah.

He said countries such as Canada, Pakistan and neighbouring India from which Sri Lanka imports corn, wheat, soya and lentils had certification procedures in line with the new regulations.

Washington does not certify its exports for genetic modifications, but the ban will affect about only four percent of U.S. agricultural exports to Sri Lanka.

The United States accounts for about half the 900,000 tonnes of wheat Sri Lanka imports each year, but U.S. wheat is not genetically modified.

--------

WTO Talks End, Differences Remain

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-WTO-Trade-Talks.html

GENEVA (AP) -- World Trade Organization members wrapped up two days of meetings Tuesday on the feasibility of launching a new round of trade liberalization talks, with big differences remaining.

Senior trade negotiators from the United States and European Union indicated growing common ground. But the gap between rich and poor countries was undiminished.

The WTO's last big conference in Seattle in 1999 collapsed in disarray because of disagreement between the United States and European Union over farm subsidies, and between developed and developing countries over issues such as labor standards.

Governments have made it clear they do not want to travel to the next ministerial meeting in Doha, Qatar, in November with an ambitious agenda if this is clearly unachievable.

``The task is to see the outline of what is doable. We have learned the lesson of Seattle, where we pushed hope against hope,'' said Canada's Ambassador Sergio Marchi.

The WTO's 141 member countries have agreed to carry out a ``reality check'' at the end of July to consider frankly whether there is any chance of agreement. With a month to go, nations are trumpeting progress in some areas, but they admit that deep divisions remain in others.

There is fairly wide consensus on the need to cut industrial import tariffs, and in the new area of e-commerce, which straddles the traditional divide between goods trade and services trade.

However, poorer countries are reluctant to discuss investment and competition policy -- key demands of the United States and the EU, according to officials present at the meetings.

Differences between the United States and Europe continue -- notably over the EU's insistence on ``comprehensive'' talks to broaden the subject area and so shift the focus away from agriculture.

However the two trade giants called a joint news conference to stress their commitment to the new round.

``There is a growing convergence between us on issues of principle, on issues of organization, of substance and of process,'' said Peter Carl, director-general for trade in the European Commission, the EU's executive arm.

Deputy U.S. Trade Representative Peter Allgeier added that U.S.-EU cooperation was important, but it was not enough.

``We recognize that we cannot alone decide an outcome, and so anything that we are able to do together must be brought into the wider circle of trading partners, and in fact we are doing that,'' he said.

-------- police / prisons

Pr. George's Police Meetings to Begin

METRO In Brief,
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; Page B03
Washington Post
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45531-2001Jun25?language=printer

Justice Department officials tonight will monitor the first of three meetings in Prince George's County at which residents who feel they have been brutalized, racially profiled, harassed or otherwise mistreated by county police can voice their concerns.

The reports will be used by the Justice Department in its investigation of the county police force.

The meetings, sponsored by human rights organization Amnesty International, will be held during the next few months at various locations in the county.

Tonight's meeting begins at 7 p.m. at Spauldings Branch Library at 5811 Old Silver Hill Rd. in Forestville.

----

Tasers just another weapon in hands of abusive police

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
June 26, 2001
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010626-73490554.htm#2

The Prince George's County Police Department's public relations "spin machine" is working overtime. In news reports that the department will begin arming sergeants with a new electronic shock weapon, Chief John S. Farrell claims that violent police contact is "at a 15-year low" ("Tasers touted as alternative to deadly fire," Metro, June 21). County Executive Wayne K. Curry has called the police department "a model agency."

These statements ignore the pain of the surviving family members and friends of the seven persons who have been shot and killed by police officers in roughly the past two years. The statements further dismiss the fact that police behavior has led to an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice to determine whether a pattern of abuse exists within the police department.

It simply defies logic to add electroshock weapons to the arsenal of a police department with a documented history of exercising excessive force and misusing police dogs with near-total impunity. The public still awaits a full report on the slaying of Prince Jones, who was followed across three jurisdictions before being shot and killed by an undercover officer nearly a year ago. Yet, during the same time, the department was studying how to increase its firepower with weapons that have a potential for misuse.

Amnesty International has documented the abuse of such devices. For instance, an inmate in a Virginia prison died last July 4 after being restrained with an electroshock weapon. The human rights organization has called for a ban on the use of all electroshock weapons until an independent study into their use and effects is conducted.

Given the Prince George's County Police Department's history of abuse and lingering unanswered questions surrounding numerous incidents of harm and death to residents, introducing electroshock weapons appears to be a recipe for disaster.

JODI LONGO Director, Mid-Atlantic Region Amnesty International US Washington

----

Institute Finds a Grim Future for Ex-Cons

By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; Page A15
Washington Post
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45534-2001Jun25?language=printer

There may be one thing worse than going to prison: getting out, according to a chilling new Urban Institute study.

Nearly 1,600 men and women are released from state and federal prisons each day, "returning home . . . less prepared for life on the outside, with less assistance in their reintegration" than prisoners were at release just a few years ago, reported the study team headed by senior fellow Jeremy Travis.

Little effort is made to train prisoners for suitable employment or deal with their health or substance abuse problems before they go home, the researchers found. Post-release programs are spotty and chronically under-funded. No surprise, then, that nearly two-thirds of all prisoners will be arrested within three years of their release.

Travis and colleagues Amy Solomon and Michelle Waul blame shortsighted policymaking. One example: Per capita funding for parole supervision is declining -- at a time of "substantial increases in funding for prison construction."

----

Britain Riot Police Face Probe

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Britain-Riot.html

BURNLEY, England (AP) -- Police face an investigation of their riot-control tactics after a community leader of Asian descent was battered during a third night of racial violence in this northeastern town.

Shahid Malik, 33, a member of the Labor Party's national executive committee and the son of the town's deputy mayor, said he was attacked by a policeman as riot officers in body armor, armed with shields and batons, tried to disperse a crowd of Asian youths.

Lancashire police confirmed that Malik, of Pakistani descent, had been injured, arrested and released in the violence late Monday and early Tuesday morning. Britain's Police Complaints Authority will conduct an inquiry into the incident, they said.

About 6,000 of Burnley's 92,000 residents are from ethnic minorities, most from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds.

Large numbers of police patrolled the gritty industrial town Tuesday night to try to prevent a fourth night of violence.

The night before, more than 200 riot police tried to prevent serious violence, arresting people for violent and drunken disorder and incitement to racial hatred.

Knives, clubs and two crates of homemade gasoline bombs were seized, police said. Two cars were set on fire and firefighters were called out to a blaze at a scrap yard shortly after midnight. In the nearby village of Hapton, an Indian restaurant called the ``Agra'' was firebombed, police said.

Malik was one of 22 people arrested.

``It was a completely unprovoked and unnecessary assault by police officers. I have four or five stitches above the eye, bruising to my face, lacerations to the arms and both wrists are swollen from handcuffs,'' Malik said at his home.

``I had my hands up saying, 'There is no trouble here.' Within seconds one of the officers had lifted his riot shield, turned it 90 degrees and smashed it into my face. I was hit two or three times more by some officer. I fell to the ground and was unconscious for two or three seconds.''

Malik, who was treated for injuries in a hospital, said he was considering civil proceedings against the police, who he said had ``potentially put back race relations months, if not years, in Burnley.''

At a press briefing at Burnley Town Hall on Tuesday, Deputy Chief Constable Paul Stephenson said Malik was injured after police came under a ``sustained attack'' from a large group of Asian youths. The group threw stones and other objects as officers approached to disperse them, so the riot police were deployed, Stephenson said.

------

Turkish Prison Death Toll Rises

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Turkey-Hunger-Strike.html

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) -- A prisoner starved to death Tuesday, becoming the 25th person to die in an eight-month hunger strike by Turkish prisoners and their relatives to protest a new maximum-security prison system.

Aysun Bozdogan, 25, died at a hospital in Istanbul, the prisoners solidarity group Ozgur Tayad said. Bozdogan was a member of the outlawed Turkish Communist Party-Leninist, and had been in Istanbul's Kartal prison since 1999.

Bozdogan was one of over 200 political prisoners who have been fasting to protest their transfers from large, dormitory-style prisons to new maximum-security prisons with one or three-person cells. Clashes broke out in December when security forces transferred inmates to the new prisons, leaving 30 inmates and two soldiers dead.

Some prisoners' relatives have also joined the fast. The hunger strikers have been taking sugared and salted water with vitamins to prolong their fast.

Inmates say the new prisons leave them isolated and vulnerable to abuse by guards. The government insists there can be no return to the old system of wards holding up to 100 prisoners -- a system, officials say, that enabled Kurdish, leftist and Islamic groups to use the wards as training centers.

Turkey's parliament has passed a law allowing inmates in the small cells to take part in some collective activities, and the government has also allowed civilian inspection of prisons.

But Amnesty International and other human rights groups say the government's response does not go far enough. Some European countries have also pressed Turkey to take measures to end the fast.

-------- spying

Retired Army Officer Guilty of Spying

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Military-Espionage.html

TAMPA, Fla. (AP) -- A retired Army man was found guilty Tuesday of selling Cold War military secrets to Moscow over two decades, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. officer to be convicted of espionage.

George Trofimoff, 74, could get up to life in prison.

The retired colonel in the Army Reserves oversaw an intelligence center in Germany from the 1960s to 1990s. He was working as a grocery store bagger last year when he was arrested in an FBI sting trying to collect money he thought was coming from the Russians.

Trofimoff stood erect and showed no emotion when the verdict was announced. His wife wept.

Sentencing was set for Sept. 27.

``What this case should do is send a message to those we entrust our nation's secrets to that if you sell those secrets, if you spy against the United States, we'll pull out all the stops to catch you, to bring you to justice and to convict you,'' federal prosecutor Laura Ingersoll said.

From 1968 to 1994, Trofimoff was the civilian chief of an Army interrogation center in Nuremberg, Germany, where refugees and defectors from the Soviet bloc were questioned. The center also housed volumes of secret documents detailing what the United States knew about its Soviet adversaries and other Warsaw Pact nations.

Prosecutors said Trofimoff collected $300,000 for photographing U.S. intelligence documents and giving them to the KGB through a go-between, boyhood friend Igor Vladimirovich Susemihl, a Russian Orthodox priest.

Among the information prosecutors said Trofimoff smuggled to the Soviets were CIA documents and details of what the United States knew about Soviet military preparedness.

A former KGB general testified that Trofimoff was one of the Soviet Union's top spies during the 1970s. He said Trofimoff was even brought to a resort for Soviet military officials as a reward.

Trofimoff, born in Germany to Russian emigres, wept on the stand as he described growing up hating communists because some of his family members were unable to escape the Bolshevik Revolution and were killed.

He insisted that he never was a spy, but pretended to be one because he needed money. But jurors laughed at Trofimoff when he testified it was a coincidence that he was able to name several Soviet spies when shown them by an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian diplomat.

Jury foreman Mark King said only one vote was needed: Jurors agreed Trofimoff was guilty after viewing a videotape of him describing his spying activities. Deliberations took just two hours.

Defense attorney Daniel Hernandez said he will appeal.

Trofimoff became a U.S. citizen in 1951, joined the Army in 1953 and was honorably discharged three years later. He was hired as a civilian in Army intelligence in 1959.

Trofimoff was recruited to spy by Susemihl, a high-ranking priest for the Moscow-controlled branch of the Russian Orthodox church, investigators said. Susemihl was arrested and freed in 1994; he died five years later.

Trofimoff, who married five times, concealed his activities for years from U.S. authorities and his wives. He carefully copied the documents at night in his basement, investigators said.

He was living in a military retirement community in Melbourne when he was arrested. As authorities closed in, Trofimoff was captured on videotape in 1999 putting his hand to his heart and telling an undercover agent posing as a Russian agent: ``I'm not American in here.''

--------

Russia May Charge American Scholar

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-Tobin.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russian security officials said Tuesday they may bring espionage charges against John Tobin, a U.S. Fulbright scholar jailed on a drug conviction in Russia -- a claim his lawyers called a dubious legal bid to keep Tobin behind bars.

An official at the Moscow headquarters of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor to the KGB, said in a telephone interview that the new accusations against Tobin could be based on the testimony of a Russian scholar who claimed the American tried to recruit him as a spy for the United States. The official for the security service's head office in Moscow refused to give his name.

Pavel Bolshunov, an FSB spokesman in the southern city of Voronezh, said the scientist, Dmitry Kuznetsov, named Tobin as an agent who interrogated him in a U.S. prison in January 1998.

Kuznetsov, an expert on toxic agents who had been arrested on fraud charges the month before, said Tobin sought information on his scientific research and contacts among other Russian scholars.

Bolshunov, who is subordinate to Moscow, said authorities were still examining the evidence from Kuznetsov's testimony and that no new action against Tobin has been taken so far. He said the case was complicated because Tobin's alleged attempt to recruit Kuznetsov took place in the United States, not Russia.

``Kuznetsov's evidence shows that we were right in suspecting Tobin to be a U.S. intelligence agent,'' Bolshunov said.

Tobin was arrested in January on charges of obtaining, possessing and distributing marijuana. The otherwise routine case attracted broad attention when Russian security officials publicly accused him of being a spy in training and an alleged interrogation expert. The claims came amid a series of spy scandals between the United States and Russia earlier this year.

No espionage charges were filed, and Tobin has said in e-mail correspondence that he was framed because he refused to become a spy for Russia.

Tobin's lawyer Maxim Bayev, responding to the new accusations, said, ``I think they wanted to stir up tension to prevent the court from setting Tobin free.''

A court in Voronezh sentenced Tobin to 37 months in prison in April, but earlier this month a higher court reduced the sentence to a year on appeal.

Bayev filed a second appeal to the Voronezh Regional Court on June 18, which is to be heard within 30 days. Bayev said Tobin could be freed as early as next month.

The congressman who represents Tobin's district in the U.S. House of Rep. James Maloney, a Democrat from Connecticut, said Tuesday he plans to send a letter to President Bush asking him to intervene in the case. Maloney warned that filing espionage charges against Tobin could harm U.S.-Russian relations.

Kuznetsov, the scientist, told the FSB that Tobin promised him better conditions in the U.S. prison where he was being held, a positive outcome of his trial and a monetary reward if he cooperated, Bolshunov said. The Moskovsky Komsomolets daily quoted Kuznetsov as saying he had been held in a state prison in Bridgeport, Conn.

Russia's Interfax news agency quoted Kuznetsov as saying that U.S. prison officials introduced Tobin to him as an FBI agent. He said Tobin asked him to give his written opinion on several works on toxicology, which Kuznetsov said he did and later was paid for.

Kuznetsov said that several months later he was fined $2,500 and freed on the promise that he deliver 150 hours of free lectures in U.S. universities.

Kuznetsov, speaking to Interfax, said he met with Tobin in a Voronezh jail to make ``100 percent sure'' that he was the U.S. official who interrogated him.

``Although Tobin pretended that he saw me for the first time, I immediately recognized that he was the FBI agent who tried to force me to cooperate in prison,'' Kuznetsov said, according to Interfax. ``He has a special, characteristic smile.''

Tobin, a native of Ridgefield, Conn., was doing political research at a university in Voronezh, about 300 miles south of Moscow, when he was arrested outside a local nightclub on the drug charges. He has insisted he is innocent.

--------

Former Spy Chief Returned to Peru to Face Charges

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/26/world/26PERU.html

BUENOS AIRES, June 25 - Vladimiro Montesinos, the former Peruvian spy chief who evaded an international manhunt for eight months before his arrest last weekend, was flown to Lima today in handcuffs and a bulletproof vest and began what promises to be months of questioning and legal processing.

Once a top aide to former President Alberto K. Fujimori who had cooperated with the Central Intelligence Agency, Mr. Montesinos was evicted early this morning from Venezuela, where he had been hiding.

Peruvian prosecutors say he faces a possible life sentence on charges he was involved in arms trafficking, money laundering, death squad activities, torture, the purchasing of faulty armaments for kickbacks, and the bribing of officials to fix the election last year for Mr. Fujimori, who is now in exile in Japan.

Mr. Montesinos, 56, was briefly seen on Peruvian television, wearing jeans, a tan jacket and a thin smile, as he was taken off an aircraft by heavily armed security officers. After hours of questioning, he was expected to be placed in a high security prison in the port of Callao - the same facility where the top leader of the Shining Path terrorist group has been imprisoned.

Six investigative judges began interrogating Mr. Montesinos today in an underground cell in a courthouse in downtown Lima. Already, 140 criminal investigations are under way involving the former spy chief, with more than 500 people implicated in his crimes.

The first details of how his arrest was made on Saturday night in Caracas were made public today by Peruvian and American officials who emphasized that the role of the Venezuelan security forces was secondary.

What has emerged is a story of some good detective work by one American law enforcement agency to catch an official who for years had done favors for the C.I.A. Mr. Montesinos, who first began trading information with the C.I.A. in the 1970's, managed a large Peruvian antidrug operation set up by the agency in the early 1990's - a period when narcotics traffickers said he was taking bribes from them.

Even though Mr. Montesinos was long a controversial figure in the eyes of the Clinton administration, American officials still went to him to lobby for the interests of American businesses in Peru and to lobby for human rights votes against Cuba in The Hague.

The first major breaks that led to Mr. Montesinos's arrest came about two months ago as the F.B.I. and Peruvian law enforcement agents scoured the world to find and freeze Mr. Montesinos's numerous bank accounts. As the operation progressed, the F.B.I. located a $38 million account in the Pacific Industrial Bank, an offshore financial institution headquartered in Grand Cayman with offices in Miami, which was then frozen at the request of the Peruvian authorities.

A month ago, said an American Embassy official in Lima, a former Venezuelan intelligence officer who served as an aide to Mr. Montesinos tried to extort the bank to release the frozen money. The Venezuelan, who remains unidentified, threatened that Mr. Montesinos would reveal the bank's involvement in an assortment of money laundering schemes. But bank officials contacted the F.B.I., the American official said, to report the threat.

The F.B.I. then identified the Venezuelan and managed to intercept his e-mail communications with Mr. Montesinos, officials said. F.B.I. agents set up a sting operation, posing as bank officials, to meet with the Venezuelan.

The F.B.I. arrested the Venezuelan on Thursday in Miami on charges of extortion. During his interrogation, the Venezuelan told them Mr. Montesinos's whereabouts - a hideaway in Caracas not far from President Hugo Chávez's presidential palace.

Peruvian and American law enforcement agencies and diplomats worked closely to bypass the Venezuelan government, which officials said they believed had been protecting Mr. Montesinos all along.

Officials said Mr. Montesinos's Venezuelan bodyguards somehow learned that the American and Peruvian governments were closing in on the arrest. Peruvian law enforcement officials tried to make an agreement with the Venezuelans, in which they would hand Mr. Montesinos over to Peruvian diplomats in Caracas. But the guards changed their minds at the last minute and handed Mr. Montesinos over to Venezuelan intelligence agents instead.

"The end result was the same," the American official said.

Peruvian law enforcement officials and Congressional investigators say they are hoping that Mr. Montesinos will lead them to many corrupt officials who remain in Peru's bureaucracy. Hundreds of videotapes captured from Mr. Montesinos after he fled Peru late last year have already shown congressmen, top military officials, owners of television stations and businessmen taking bribes and conspiring.

-------- terrorism

Overlooking terrorism

June 26, 2001
Khalid Duran
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010626-76841096.htm

The State Department's newly released report on "Patterns of Global Terrorism" does not mention Pakistan among its short list of terrorist states. Washington must still be hoping that Islamabad's nominal chief executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, will seek to block the military adventurism of his fellow generals and Pakistan's intelligence directorate, the ISI, which has characterized the junta's actions during its first two years in power. Several recent developments, however, cast doubts on Mr. Musharraf's ability to assert any measure of democratic, peaceable rule. Moreover, there is today greater reason to question if he is at all willing to foreswear the militancy (here called Jihadism) of the Islamists who dominate the country's armed forces.

In the Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, a Pakistan-supported insurgency continues unabated. New Delhi has provided documentary proof that hundreds of the guerrilla fighters are Pakistani nationals and Afghans. India's political leadership has enacted and repeatedly extended a unilateral cease-fire in the region despite provocations by the Islamist militants. New Delhi's conciliatory calls for political reconciliation in the province have rarely been heard since the beginning of the conflict in 1948.

While India is winning the propaganda war, Pakistan is stepping up anti-Indian militancy throughout the region. In Bangladesh, which used to be East Pakistan until 1971, pro-Pakistani elements within the military are causing Prime Minister Hasina Wajed embarrassment by attacking Indian border posts. In one such incident, the worst since the independence of Bangladesh, 19 Indian soldiers were massacred. While the secularist Hasina Wajed is seeking to hunt down the Islamist assassins of her father, the ISI pursues a cloak-and-dagger policy to have her removed by the pro-Pakistani opposition among which Islamists dominate.

North of Bangladesh in the Indian state of Assam, a local, tribal-based insurgency enjoys the backing of Pakistan's ISI, while in the nearby Himalayan state of Nepal, the intelligence services of India and Pakistan are locked in a fierce competition for influence. For the ISI, Nepal has proven to be a favorite gateway to India, allowing for a steady infiltration of terrorists, weapons and money. The hijacking of an Indian passenger plane two years ago had its starting point in Nepal's capital, Katmandu. And in April of this year, a Pakistani diplomat was expelled from Nepal after he was found in possession of large quantities of weapons and more than 20 pounds of plastic explosives.

In the last few years the Muslim minority in Nepal has more than doubled, mainly due to immigration from war-torn Kashmir. The ISI has sought to recruit militants from among these Muslims, while also lending support to anti-Indian, Sikh militants and even some fringe Maoist insurgents. In short, every available means is being employed to sow dissent on India's borders.

Particularly nasty results of this subversion are the frequent bomb blasts in India and Pakistan that kill hundreds of civilians every year. This tit-for-tat policy was first used in the early 1970s, but slowly abated as it became clear that no side could bring down the other with terror. Today a new generation of ISI officers seems prepared for total war, a result of their ideological schooling in Jihadism, a tenet of fundamentalist Islam.

Mr. Musharraf has impressed visitors by assuring them that he is taking steps against the proliferation of madrasas, schools designed to impart an Islamic education, theoretically akin to the Jewish yeshiva. In Pakistan, however, many madrasas have become means of Jihadist indoctrination and even military training. Their aim is to produce militants like Afghanistan's Taliban. And while such Islamist groups have scarcely ever garnered more than a million votes in Pakistani elections, with today more than 1 million students enrolled in such madrasas, future graduates are promising to make up an increasingly important part of Pakistan's political and social life. The dissolution of these schools will not go unopposed and the recent appointment of a fervent Islamist as minister of religious affairs seems to almost belie Mr. Musharraf's assurances that he intends to nip terrorism in the bud.

Ironically, there is more state-sponsored terrorism to report from Pakistan than from some of the other countries that figure on the State Department's list. Pakistan's Islamist political party, the Jama`at-e Islami, notorious for carrying out the murders of foreign tourists, is known to have spawned other groups which figure on the list of foreign terrorist organizations. Exempting Pakistan from this list and trusting that Mr. Musharraf would be able to put his house in order may have seemed a wise policy a year ago. By now this approach looks dubious and brings into question the credibility of U.S. efforts in combating terrorism. With the rising strength of Pakistan's Islamist groups, the United States should no longer hesitate to name Pakistan as one of those states that support terrorism.

Khalid Duran is editor of Trans-Islam Magazine, a quarterly journal of Islamic studies, and author of the recently published "The Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews," published by the American Jewish Committee Press.

--------

A Memo From Osama

New York Times
June 26, 2001
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/26/opinion/26FRIE.html?searchpv=nytToday

Memo From: Osama bin Laden
To: all field operatives

My men: This is a great day! Did you see what we accomplished last week? We drove the U.S. armed forces out of three Arab countries by just threatening to hit them. I had some of our boys discuss an attack against the U.S. over cell phones, the C.I.A. picked it up, and look what happened: The F.B.I. team in Yemen, which was investigating our destruction of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor, just packed up and left - even though the State Department was begging them to stay. See ya. Then, after we made a few more phone calls, hundreds of U.S. marines - marines! - who were conducting a joint exercise with the Jordanian Army cut short their operation, got back on their amphibious vessels and fled Jordan on Saturday. See ya. Then all the U.S. warships in Bahrain, which is the headquarters of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, were so scared of being hit by us they evacuated Bahrain's harbor and sailed out into the Persian Gulf. Boys, there is a military term for all this; it's called a "retreat." Allahu Akbar! God is Great!

This is a superpower? The Americans turned tail as soon as they picked up a few threats from us. The U.S. press barely reported it; the White House press didn't even ask the president about it. But trust me, everyone out here noticed it. It told them many things: The Americans are afraid of sustaining even one casualty to their soldiers, they don't trust their own intelligence or weak Arab allies to protect them, and they have no military answer for our threat.

I love America. The Bush people want to spend $100 billion on a missile defense shield to deal with a threat that doesn't yet exist, and they run away from the threat that already exists. They think we rogues are going to attack them with an intercontinental ballistic missile with a return address on it. Are they kidding? Am I wearing a sign that says STUPID on it? We'll hit them the way the Iranians blew up the U.S. base at Khobar, in Saudi Arabia. We'll use layers of local operatives, who can't be traced to any country. Look at the indictment the U.S. courts just passed down for the Khobar bombing. They named 14 people, and they hinted that Iranian agents had coordinated them all, but they had no proof, so they could never pin it on Iran, so they could never retaliate against Iran.

The people who had the proof were the Saudis, but they refused to turn it over to the F.B.I. Why? Because the Saudis never trusted the Americans to retaliate properly. They figured the U.S. would launch a few cruise missiles at Iran and then run - leaving the Saudis to face Iran alone. Which reminds me, the Russians have hinted that if the U.S. builds a missile defense system against Russia's wishes, the Russians will just sell more missiles to Iraq, Iran or China to overwhelm the system. The fools at the Bush Pentagon say the Russians would never do that because the missiles would also threaten them. Oh yeah? The Russians don't believe in missile shields. They believe in classic deterrence. When the Chechens blew up a few apartment blocks in Moscow with human missiles, the Russians blew up Chechnya. Remember when four Russian diplomats were kidnapped in Beirut in 1985? The Russians retaliated by kidnapping a member of the kidnappers' group, chopped off one of his body parts and sent it back in the mail. Presto! The Russians were released. This isn't Norway out here.

That's why we'd never mess with the Russians. But the great thing is that Donald Rumsfeld is so obsessed with getting his missile-shield toy, he's been telling everyone that deterrence doesn't work anymore against people like us. So they need a missile shield instead. And Bush just repeats it. I love it, because we are not going to attack America's strength at home, we are going to attack soft U.S. targets abroad through shadows. So I hope the Americans invest all their defense budget in a Star Wars shield that will have no effect on us, but will divert them from the real means and the real deterrence that could hurt us.

Yo, Rummy, who needs missiles? We just drove the F.B.I., the Marines and the U.S. Navy out of the Middle East with a few threats whispered over Nokia cell phones! So who's the dummy, Rummy?

God is Great. America is stupid. Revolution until victory.
Osama@Jihadonline [JOL]

-------- activists

Starving and singing against the death penalty

Tue, 26 Jun 2001 16:18:51 -0400
http://www.abolition.org/annual.html From: Max Obuszewski <MObuszewski@afsc.org>

The 8th annual fast and vigil to abolish the death penalty will take place in front of the Supreme Court of the United States from June 29 through July 2. One can participate without fasting, as the idea is to maintain a presence , in front of the court , protesting capital punishment. For more information on the fast and vigil please visit: http://www.abolition.org/annual.html

Steve Earle will be performing at a free concert/rally on Sunday, July 1, at 7 PM in the park directly across the street from the Supreme Court building in Washington DC. His performance is in support of the 8th annual Fast and Vigil to abolish the death penalty. All are welcome.

HELP PERFORM A MOCK EXECUTION

Maryland Coalition Against State Executions will be doing street theatre again this year at the Fast and Vigil in front of the Supreme Court. P articipants a r e needed for a mock execution. Last year seven people were executed in front of a silent and transfixed crowd. It was a powerful and moving experience for all involved. Once again, people are needed to play all parts -- inmates, guards, technicians, executioner. If you're interested please let us know. All participants should be in front of the court by 10:30 on Saturday, June 30. This year we will set aside time for processing by participants after the performance, so plan to be involved till about 2 PM. We need YOU. If you are interested please let us know so we'll have some idea of who we can count on.

Many thanks. stephanie gibson Maryland Coalition Against State Executions info@mdcase.org

----

Peaceful protests mark biotech show

Tuesday, June 26, 2001
By Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/06/06262001/protests_44094.asp

SAN DIEGO - Up to 1,000 demonstrators, some dressed as ears of corn or genetically engineered tomatoes, staged a colorful but largely peaceful protest Sunday on the opening day of a biotechnology trade show.

Many demonstrators said they are concerned that businesses are introducing genetically modified crops and seeds into the food supply without knowing the long-term consequences.

"The biotech industry is conducting a real-time experiment with our biosphere," said 26-year-old Shannon Service of Boulder, Colo., who was dressed as a monarch butterfly. "They don't know the results, they can't possibly know the results. The monarch butterfly represents that well."

Research has suggested pollen from genetically engineered corn can be toxic to the butterflies, whose favorite food, milkweed, grows in and around corn fields. The altered corn produces its own pesticide to kill an insect pest.

Earlier this year, a panel of scientists who advise the federal government urged more research into such crops to determine their effect on the environment.

The estimated 750 to 1,000 demonstrators gathered in Balboa Park for an afternoon march to the San Diego Convention Center, where participants registered for the Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual conference.

They listened to speeches, performed street theater and hung banners. One man was dressed as a tomato and wore a sign reading "I was a test tube veggie." Another carried a sign reading "Biocide is Homicide."

The protests were largely peaceful. Police arrested two people for carrying concealed knives, police spokesman Dave Cohen said. Outside the convention center, a black-dressed protester burned an American flag.

Some spectators disagreed with protesters' concerns about genetically altered crops.

"I have no problem with their right to protest, but they have no clue what they're talking about," said Jessica Van Wert, 52, of San Diego. "People are starving. We so desperately need technology to step up and feed the world."

Protest organizers had expected several thousand participants and blamed the lower turnout on police and the media.

They "drummed up a tremendous amount of paranoia and hysteria," said Han Shan, spokesman for the Ruckus Society, which trained protesters in nonviolent tactics for the event.

"The whole downtown of San Diego has been militarized," Shan said. "There are a lot of people out here who feel we're being criminalized for simply expressing concern with biotechnology."

Police said they were determined to avoid a repeat of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, which caused $2.5 million in downtown property damage. More than 600 people were arrested.

Uniformed officers kept their distance from protesters in the park, but dozens of police cars, motorcycles and officers - some in riot gear - were available on nearby streets. Police followed demonstrators on their march to the convention center.

Police said their main concern was the anarchist groups that have disrupted previous anti-globalization demonstrations around the country.

Members of those groups often dress in black and wrap their faces in ski masks or bandannas, or carry gas masks. Several were among the marchers Sunday.

Conference organizers acknowledge the protesters' concerns but defended the industry and the trade show, which is expected to draw 15,000 participants.

Michael J. Phillips, the organization's executive director of food and agriculture, said that research showing the crops are safe is "sound and irrefutable."

Eric Anderson, an ornamental seed farmer from north San Diego County, came to Balboa Park to counter the protesters' message.

"We let the protests define our work for far too long," he said, saying biotechnology makes his work easier and safer. "We're able to do more with less - less chemicals and more environmentally friendly."

----

Police brace for protests

World Scene
June 26, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010626-20277472.htm

VIENNA, Austria -- Austrian police are bracing for possibly violent anti-globalization demonstrations at a regional economic summit in Salzburg starting next weekend, a spokesman said yesterday.

Border controls have been stepped up and police reinforcements drafted in from across the country for the July 1-3 European Economic Summit meeting organized by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

A demonstration by some 5,000 protesters is expected to gather Sunday afternoon, as the summit opens, said Salzburg police spokesman Rudolf Feichtinger.

----

Police Accused of Starting Fight to Smash World Bank Protest

by Kernan Turner in Barcelona,
Tuesday, June 26, 2001
Independent / UK
From: Max Obuszewski <MObuszewski@afsc.org>

Riot police made what appeared to be an unprovoked attack on anti-globalization protesters who had gathered in a Barcelona park yesterday after a march down the city's Passeig de Gracia boulevard.

Thousands of screaming and shouting demonstrators, some with small children, fled in panic as the police, equipped with riot shields, pushed into the crowd, wielding truncheons and firing blank gun shots.

An unidentified demonstrator licks the shield of a police officer during a protest against the World Bank in Barcelona, Spain Sunday June 24, 2001. The protest went ahead despite the World Bank's decision to cancel its annual meeting in Barcelona, scheduled for June 25-27, for fear of violence. (AP Photo/EFE, Albert Olive)

"We raised our arms and shouted, 'Peace, peace', but they just kept coming," said a woman in her 30s who identified herself as Yolanda.

The police waded into the crowd after a small group of masked men and women who appeared to be police agents staged a fight at the edge of the park. A few dozen demonstrators were pulled into the violence. "Police provoked the fight. They were part of it," said Ada Colau, a spokeswoman for the Campaign Against the World Bank, one of the protest organizations.

Observers said the police appeared to stage the scuffle as a bait to lure protesters into it and then use the fighting as a pretext to storm the park. A second assault wave emptied the park within minutes. About 20 people were injured.

The masked assailants, some apparently wearing earphones, had gathered in groups on the fringes of the protest march as it arrived at the park. They were wearing knapsacks and carrying sticks, but were able to walk freely past police, pull on their masks and position themselves between the edge of the crowd in the park and the police lines 25 yards away.

The fight began when one man grabbed another and pulled him to the ground. Others from the same group began kicking and hitting each other. When demonstrators saw what was going on and joined the fight, the police charged into the park. The men and women involved in the original scuffle walked through the police line and boarded the vans.

The organizers of the protest had decided to go ahead with the weekend demonstration despite the World Bank's decision to cancel an annual meeting scheduled to be held in Barcelona this week.

Ms Colau said all other scheduled events had been canceled, including a mock trial of the World Bank, a pajama party outside the Stock Exchange yesterday evening and a "tour" of the Stock Exchange this morning.

In the past two years, anti-globalization activists have been staging regular protests at summits of the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank - institutions that they claim widen the gap between rich and poor.

Some of the protests have resulted in violent clashes with the police - at Seattle in America, Nice in France and most recently at the European Union summit in Gothenburg, Sweden, when three people were wounded by gunshots fired by police.

Ms Colau had said in an interview before yesterday's march that her organization was "prepared for violence" in case fringe groups or the police instigated it. The theme of the march was "a better world is possible". Protesters ranged from illegal immigrants, seeking the right to work, to trade unions, environmentalists and women's rights advocates. (AP)

----

PNG Army on Standby After Three Killed in Protests

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-papua-p.html

PORT MORESBY (Reuters) - Papua New Guinea's army was on standby on Tuesday night after student protests against IMF-backed economic reforms degenerated into violence in which three people were shot dead and 13 injured.

Acting police commissioner Joseph Kupo told reporters he had met the country's army commander and agreed on a call out order for the military if the situation deteriorates.

``The army is on standby,'' Kupo said.

Police used teargas to disperse hundreds of demonstrators outside Prime Minister Sir Mekere Morauta's office and in a separate incident fired warning shots in the air.

``We now have three confirmed dead from gunshots to the abdominal region and head,'' Dr. Chris Marjen, chief executive of the Port Moresby General Hospital, told Reuters.

Police denied they were responsible for the deaths.

``Police have received information about students being shot but we don't think it was by our men,'' deputy commissioner of operations Sam Inguba told Kalang National Radio.

The government district of the city looked like a battleground, with streets strewn with rocks, warehouses looted and cars and shops burned, said an Australian journalist who flew over the area in a helicopter.

``Today was a sad day for the country as criminals...took advantage of the opportunity to cause massive destruction to properties in the city,'' Kupo said.

The former Australian colony has been plagued by political and economic chaos since independence in 1975.

Prime Minister Sir Mekere Morauta's economic reforms and privatizations, backed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, are aimed at getting the resource-rich but impoverished South Pacific nation back on an even economic keel.

But opposition to the reforms, based on nationalist fears the country will be sold to foreigners and on fears of job losses if state firms are sold, has mounted since soldiers staged a 12-day mutiny in May over reports the armed forces would be slashed.

PORT MORESBY SHUT DOWN

Shops, schools and government offices were closed on Tuesday and the streets of the capital deserted, except for some students, police and roaming gangs. Roadblocks at one stage cut off the airport, but air services continued.

Trade unions, which were not part of the student protest but are opposed to privatization, called for Morauta to step down.

Unions threatened to close ports, shut down the national flag carrier Air Nuigini and disrupt power supplies.

A spokesman for Morauta called for calm late on Tuesday.

``I appeal for calm in the city. I also appeal to the media not to report rumors that may be spreading because these are intended to inflame the present situation,'' he said.

Local reporters on the streets after dark said Port Moresby was quiet with students back on campus, but feared more trouble overnight if gangs get drunk.

Peaceful protests against the World Bank and IMF economic program began last Thursday.

Joined by the public, 2,000 students protested outside the prime minister's office on Monday, calling on him to dump the reforms and to expel the multilateral agencies.

Most protesters dispersed after handing in a petition for the prime minister. Police ordered the rest to move off and fired teargas when they refused early on Tuesday.

Police reinforcements were due to fly into Port Moresby from the neighboring island of Rabaul on Tuesday, police said.

Australia said the situation was very tense and warned its citizens to minimize travel around the capital.

----

Jackson's Wife Gets 2 More Days

New York Times
June 26, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Vieques-Bombing.html

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- A federal judge sentenced the Rev. Jesse Jackson's wife to two more days in jail Tuesday, ignoring her pleas for freedom after serving more than a week for trespassing during protests on Vieques island.

Jacqueline Jackson was sentenced to 10 days but the eight days she's already served were counted. Mrs. Jackson had refused to post $3,000 bail after her arrest last week.

``Because of my convictions I have spent eight days in jail suffering insults to my dignity too horrible to tell. As both a mother and political prisoner, I ask you to restore my right as a citizen and my dignity,'' Mrs. Jackson, 57, said tearfully on the stand after she was found guilty.

``Time served should have been enough,'' Jackson said as his wife was led away in handcuffs.

Eight other protesters who appeared in court Tuesday received similar sentences.

On Vieques, meanwhile, the Navy -- which denies its exercises are harmful -- continued bombing exercises Tuesday even as more protesters gathered to get arrested. Fifty-three have been detained in the past week.

----

[Can't help wondering who the parents were that objected, and silenced their seemingly intelligent children. et]

ABC to Edit 'Tampering With Nature'

By David Bauder
AP Television Writer
Tuesday, June 26, 2001; 6:11 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010626/aponline181143_000.htm

NEW YORK -- ABC agreed Tuesday to edit a special on the environment to remove interviews with several California children after their parents complained about the line of questioning by correspondent John Stossel.

The five-minute segment in Friday's special, "Tampering with Nature," will be replaced by a discussion of the parents' complaints, ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said.

The parents, from the affluent Los Angeles section of Pacific Palisades, accused Stossel and his staff of misrepresenting the nature of their story and of trying to lead the children into giving answers that fit his point of view.

In a letter to ABC, they said they had withdrawn their consent to let ABC News speak to their children.

ABC, in a statement, backed Stossel's work and concluded the interviews were done "in a professional and responsible manner according to the highest journalistic standards."

The network noted that none of the parents complained until two months after the interviews were done, and not until after some of them had spoken to environmental activists.

"At the same time, ABC News is sensitive when parents raise objections regarding the appearance of their young children on television and will consider such objections carefully," ABC said. "In the present case, ABC News has decided it will respect the belated decision of a number of parents to withdraw their consent."

Michael Scott, a lawyer whose children Rachel, 10, and Zachary, 8, were interviewed, praised ABC News for its decision.

"If they were going to err, I would rather they err on the side of being more conservative and cautious, because they were children who were involved," Scott said.

According to a tape of the episode before the children's comments were edited out, they were featured in a segment that accuses educators of presenting only one side of an environmental debate in schools.

Stossel suggests the children are being indoctrinated by environmental activists and not educated.

Stossel asks a group of children whether solar power should be used, and they all raise their hands to indicate yes. When he asks about nuclear power, none of them raise their hands.

The unedited special also quotes a child who says that President Bush is intent on helping his friends in the oil industry.

A Washington-based lobbying group, Environmental Working Group, had supported the parents in their effort to get the interviews removed.

Stossel was forced to apologize last year for a misleading report on organic produce after EWG pointed out that the correspondent had cited results from a test that had never been taken. The lobbying group has called for Stossel to be fired.



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