------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Uranium Undersold, U.S. Says
Hundreds remember Kohl's late wife
R&D chief: Arrow to be deployed despite opposition
N. Korea Lambastes U.S. Congressmen
Pentagon Sets Fourth Test of Missile For July 14
Russia Seeks 5-Nation Talks On Reducing Nuclear Arms
Waste Not, Want Not
Russia's futile warhead-rattling
White House Wants to Bury Pact Banning Tests of Nuclear Arms
Valve fixed, nuke plant reopens
Group opposes review of EPA's Yucca standards
White House Divided on Saddam
Bush Wants Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to Die

MILITARY
Serbian Police Say 800 May Be in Mass Graves
Croatia OKs War Crimes Extradition
Iran has been developing a range of missiles
Baghdad Says US, British Jets Bomb Southern Iraq
Cuomo Says Kennedy Refused Defense
Air Force Pilot Killed in S.C. Crash

OTHER
Okla. Hospital Ends Chemical Supply
School Board Signs Agreement to Produce Own Energy Supply
German Loggers to Leave 'African Eden' Untouched
Fighting AIDS: A New War Is Killing Cambodians
Guatemala seeks FBI's assistance
Christians Said Arrested in Laos
Pakistan Sets 90 - Day Limit to Clear Afghan Camp
Mexican Gov't Uncovers Spy Network
Chinese Fugitive Admits Spying

ACTIVISTS
Lone Tree Sitter Remains in Indiana
Kenyan Police Prevent Authorized Rally


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- business

Uranium Undersold, U.S. Says

Saturday, July 7, 2001
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29953-2001Jul6?language=printer

The Commerce Department imposed preliminary penalty duties on two European manufacturers of enriched uranium, concluding that the companies had been selling in this country at unfairly low prices. The ruling benefits USEC, based in Bethesda, the only U.S. supplier of enriched nuclear-power plant fuel. The ruling requires that Eurodif, a French government-controlled supplier, and a British-based unit of Urenco deposit duties of 17.5 percent and 3.35 percent, respectively. The penalties are pending a final ruling by the Commerce Department.

-------- germany

Hundreds remember Kohl's late wife

Lincoln Journal Star
Saturday, July 7, 2001
http://www.journalstar.com/nation?story_id=5186&date=20010708&past=

FRANKFURT, Germany - Hundreds of Germans lined up in Berlin on Saturday to write in a condolence book for former Chancellor Helmut Kohl's wife, who killed herself in desperation because of a severe sunlight allergy.

A reporter who had been a friend of Hannelore Kohl, 68, wrote in the Bild daily that she had received a call from her three days before her body was found Thursday at the family house in the western city of Ludwigshafen.

Dona Kujacinski wrote that Hannelore Kohl had sounded very tired, lost and confused. Asked by Kujacinski how she was doing, the former chancellor's wife said, "Very bad."

"I just wanted to tell you that I just broke off another therapy because it also failed to help me," Hannelore Kohl told Kujacinski.

"The news of her death hit me like lightning," said one of the mourners. Although he'd never met Hannelore Kohl, the man said she was a "wonderful woman" and that he owed a lot to her husband.

"Without Helmut Kohl, the (Berlin) Wall would still be standing," he said. "Then I never would have come to the West and met my wife and had my child." Team will attempt to raise Russian sub MOSCOW - Eleven months after a Russian nuclear-powered submarine sank in the Arctic Ocean, an international team is to begin this week an attempt to raise it without triggering its torpedoes or spilling radiation from its reactors.

Officials with the Russian navy and the Dutch companies hired to lift the submarine, the Kursk, said the first divers are due in the next several days at the site above the Arctic Circle. They will race against the calendar and the onset of winter weather to recover the Kursk by late September.

During Russian naval maneuvers in the Barents Sea in August, two unexplained explosions sank the sub, killing its 118 crew members. Russian President Vladimir Putin promised crewmen's families the bodies would be recovered.

While acknowledging the risks of the operation, the officials contend they are manageable.

Critics say Russia is pressing ahead with the project too quickly. U.S. Treasury head expects rebound ROME - An upbeat U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill insisted that the gloomy global economy is poised for a rebound, telling his counterparts from the world's richest countries Saturday that people must have "some perspective" about growth.

"Higher is better, but this is not terrible," O'Neill assured his colleagues at the one-day Group of Seven, or G-7, meeting. "There is some perspective required here as to where we are."

The faltering U.S. economy should climb to growth rates above 2 percent in the fourth quarter of this year and above 3 percent next year, O'Neill predicted.

The optimistic forecast contrasts with that of many economists who expect U.S. growth for the just-completed second quarter to come in below the first quarter's 1.2 percent rate. TV station director killed in Ukraine MOSCOW - A Ukrainian television station director who had been banned from journalism and took his case to an international human rights court was beaten to death by assailants wielding bats, news reports said Saturday.

Ihor Alexandrov was attacked Tuesday at the entrance to his office in the eastern Ukrainian town of Slavyansk, the advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said. He died of head injuries after three days in the hospital, Russia's ITAR-Tass and Interfax news agencies reported.

Reporters Without Borders said violence against journalists in Ukraine is now worse than in any other European country. Croatian government discusses extradition ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) - Croatia's government met in an emergency session Saturday on how to deal with the first indictments from the U.N. war crimes tribunal against its citizens for wartime atrocities against Serbs - the biggest challenge of its 18-month term.

There is little alternative for Prime Minister Ivica Racan but to act on the indictments, which call for the extradition of the suspects for trial at The Hague, Netherlands, or brace for international isolation, perhaps even sanctions.

That leaves his government in a tight spot, facing likely protests from nationalists and other Croats who hail Croat military leaders for defending the country from 1991 Serb assaults.

Seeking national consensus on such a sensitive issue, Racan first spoke to the five parties' leaders Saturday. -

-------- israel

R&D chief: Arrow to be deployed despite opposition

17 Tammuz 5761 Sunday July 8, 2001
By Arieh O'Sullivan
Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/07/08/News/News.29930.html

TEL AVIV (July 8) - The IAF is going ahead with its deployment of the Arrow anti-ballistic missile battery in Emek Hefer, despite opposition from local residents and the Environment Ministry who fear radiation from the installation's radar.

Maj.-Gen. Yitzhak Ben-Yisrael, director of weapons and infra-structure development, said yester-day tests found there is no such radiation risk. "Ultimately, this battery will be deployed there," Ben-Yisrael told The Jerusalem Post, without saying when.

He criticized the opposition as politically motivated. "The second battery was halted by the former environment minister," Ben-Yisrael said. "It was all just prattle by the politicians.

"Do they want to defend the country or not? There is no radiation. The studies all said there was nothing. Read the studies, not what is written in the papers."

Ben-Yisrael said the US is providing funding for a third Arrow 2 battery, now under assembly.

"We have one battery already. We can deploy the second one in a very short amount of time. It is in storage. And the third we are now constructing," he said. "With three it means we will be able to defend all the populated parts of Israel with very high chances of hitting incoming missiles. In other words, the chances of getting through are very low."

The system is already proving its operational worth, and on Monday its radar picked up the test launch of a Scud missile in Syria. It was the second such detection in the past year.

Just last week, the Defense Ministry announced that it had conducted radiation tests on the standing Green Pine radar at one of the IAF bases where it was deployed. It found that when in operational mode the radiation emitted is 10 times less than the normal background radiation emitted when the radar is off.

It also said defraction fences set up around the radar "completely eliminate radiation danger" to the surrounding villages and reduce it to normal background levels. "This level is 100 times less than the radiation from a normal cellphone," the ministry added.

The Environment Ministry was concerned over risk to the public from the deployment of the Arrow in the middle of a cotton field near Kibbutz Ein Shemer. It recom-mended that the IAF leave the base built there empty, and only deploy the battery in emergencies.

Residents of Ein Shemer and the surrounding area now seem resolved to the eventual deployment of the radar next to their homes.

"I don't think we'll see much of a fight against it now. This is not the time to appear unpatriotic," said Cyd Kopitchinski, a resident of Moshav Maor next to the cotton field. "In the beginning I had hoped we could stop it, but now we don't stand a chance."

Besides, she said, they had always agreed that they wouldn't fight the deployment of the Arrow in an emergency. "The more things heat up on the border, it's obvious, the greater the possibility they'll deploy the radar," Kopitchinski said.

-------- korea

N. Korea Lambastes U.S. Congressmen

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-NKorea-US.html?searchpv=aponline

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea lashed out at two U.S. congressmen who invited a prominent defector to testify on Capitol Hill, saying Saturday that it would jeopardize plans to revive a dialogue with the United States.

Republican Reps. Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, the head of the House International Relations Committee, and Christopher Cox of California recently invited Hwang Jang Yop to testify before congressional committees about communist North Korea.

Hwang, 78, formerly a close confidant of North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, defected to South Korea via Beijing in 1997, becoming the highest-ranking Northern official ever to seek asylum in the South.

``If the U.S. stages a ridiculous burlesque by inviting such human scum as traitor Hwang Jang Yop, instead of taking an honest attitude toward the improvement of the North Korea-U.S. relations ... this will only further worsen the bilateral relations,'' the North's official foreign news outlet, KCNA, quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

The spokesman, who was not identified, said the invitation reflected efforts by the Bush administration to ``isolate and stifle'' North Korea and would damage plans to reopen talks about security.

``This more clearly indicates that the U.S. talk about the resumption of dialogue with North Korea is no more than a fiction,'' the spokesman said.

Washington hopes a dialogue would ease concerns about security threats from the North.

There have been no high-level contacts between North Korea and the United States since October, during the Clinton administration, when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright visited Pyongyang and met with Kim Jong Il.

President Bush last month offered to resume talks, but North Korea has not responded.

The Clinton administration sought to persuade Pyongyang to limit the development and export of long-range missiles. Bush has said he wants to expand the talks to include North Korea's massive conventional forces along the South Korean border.

Officials in Pyongyang want the discussions to focus on what they say is the failure of a U.S.-led consortium to provide North Korea with two nuclear reactors under a 1994 agreement that called on the North to freeze its suspected nuclear weapons program.

-------- missile defense

Pentagon Sets Fourth Test of Missile For July 14

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/07/world/07MISS.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, July 6 - For the first time since a failed missile defense test a year ago, the Pentagon will try to shoot down a mock warhead high over the Pacific on July 14 using a prototype interceptor, officials said today.

The test, a virtual replay of the failed interception, will be the fourth attempt to shoot down a long-range missile with a high-speed interceptor. Two previous attempts failed. A third, successful, test was called flawed by missile critics.

Unlike the case with the high-pressure test last July, which President Bill Clinton cited in deferring initial construction on a missile shield, the Pentagon is playing down the importance of the new launching, saying the Bush administration will move forward with the program, regardless of the outcome.

Still, another failure could strengthen the hand of critics in the Congress who have accused Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld of trying to rush a system into operation before it has proved effective.

Mr. Rumsfeld has requested increasing missile defense spending by $3 billion, to $8.3 billion, in the coming year. Most of that would be for research and development. Full production of a ground-based antimissile system would cost much more than $60 billion. The Pentagon is also testing air- and sea-based missile defenses.

The new test, delayed by several months while the Pentagon combed the system for flaws, is scheduled to begin shortly after 9 p.m., when a Minuteman II ballistic missile carrying a dummy warhead and a Mylar decoy balloon will be launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California.

About 20 minutes later, an interceptor missile with a prototype "kill vehicle" will be fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, 4,800 miles away. If all goes according to plan, the kill vehicle will separate from its booster, home in on the mock warhead using heat-seeking sensors and crash into it at a speed of 4,500 miles an hour, destroying itself and the warhead.

-------- russia

Russia Seeks 5-Nation Talks On Reducing Nuclear Arms

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 7, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30005-2001Jul6?language=printer

MOSCOW, July 6 -- Russia today proposed that the five long-established nuclear powers start multilateral talks aimed at eliminating 10,000 warheads in the next seven years.

The proposal would revive dormant negotiations between the United States and Russia by inviting in Britain, France and China, the three other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. The Russian Foreign Ministry suggested the five dramatically slash their collective nuclear forces from about 14,000 warheads to 4,000 by the end of 2008.

The plan, floated by Russian President Vladimir Putin during private discussions with visiting French President Jacques Chirac this week, appeared designed to enlist the other nations against U.S. plans to develop a missile defense system which could breach the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. Like Russia, China opposes missile defense; France has expressed deep skepticism and Britain has offered only a lukewarm reaction.

Next week, Putin is to meet Bush in Genoa, Italy, during the annual summit of the Group of Eight major industrial powers.

The United States and Russia have sharply scaled back their nuclear forces since the end of the Cold War. In 1990, each side had more than 10,000 strategic warheads. As of earlier this year, the United States retained 7,295 warheads and Russia 6,094. Britain and France have a few hundred each, while China is believed to have fewer than 20. Under the START I treaty, both the United States and Russia must reduce their arsenals to under 6,000 by the end of this year. The START II treaty would require cuts to about 3,500 warheads each, but the U.S. Senate has not completed ratification.

Putin, no longer able to maintain superpower expenses with an economy by some measures smaller than Portugal's, has been pushing for the two sides to go even further, cutting down to 1,500 apiece.

----

Waste Not, Want Not
The Duma's decision to allow the import of spent nuclear fuel has riled ordinary Russians

BY YURI ZARAKHOVICH MOSCOW
Saturday, July 7, 2001
http://www.time.com/time/europe/eu/printout/0,9869,130385,00.html

Last week the Russian Duma voted 243 to 125 to allow the import and storage of spent nuclear fuel in Russia. It was a triumph for the powerful nuclear lobby over public opinion. According to a poll carried out by ROMIR, an independent Russian public research center, 78% of Russians are opposed to such imports. "The people object to turning Russia into a latrine for foreign nuclear excrement," fumed liberal Duma member Sergei Mitrokhin before the vote.

Once approved by the Federation Council and signed by President Vladimir Putin, the measure will become law and would pave the way for the import of some 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel to Russia over the next decade. More than 90% of the foreign spent nuclear fuel targeted for import by Russia's Ministry of Nuclear Energy is under U.S. control. The U.S. State Department stated tersely that Russia had no right to accept spent fuel produced in America without U.S. consent. Still, the Ministry entertains hopes of obtaining an agreement with the U.S.

The Ministry insists that spent fuel imports will bring some $20 billion in revenue, money badly needed to bail out Russia's cash-starved nuclear sector and clean up the country's own contaminated areas. The imported fuel is due to be stored until 2021, when reprocessing is targeted to start. The nuclear lobby says its high-tech transport, storage and reprocessing facilities are safe. This seems a strange assurance from a country that has suffered a string of major technical catastrophes in the recent past: the demise of the Kursk nuclear submarine last year; a fire that gutted a major ground relay station of Russia's space task force and cut off communications to four military satellites; and just last week the explosion of an air defense S-300 missile. Opponents of the legislation fear that once the spent fuel imports commence Russia will be sitting on a nuclear time bomb.

Russian reprocessing facilities are mostly concentrated at the Mayak plant in Chelyabinsk-65 in the Urals, and Krasnoyarsk-26 and Tomsk-7 in Siberia. In 1993, an explosion at the Tomsk-7 nuclear reprocessing plant contaminated 120 square kilometers and sent a cloud of radiation into the atmosphere. In 1992, the Russian government fined Krasnoyarsk-26 $135 million for radioactive contamination of the region's air, soil and water. Russian experts say that figure roughly equals the cost to clean up the Yenisei river and spread 70 million cubic meters of clean topsoil around the Krasnoyarsk facility.

Vladimir Kuznetsov, Director of Nuclear Safety Program for Green Cross International, believes that importing and reprocessing 20,000 tons of spent nuclear rods will create waste dumps with dangerously high levels of radioactivity. If there were accidental discharges, the sites could poison the biosphere for thousands years. "Reprocessing 20,000 tons of spent fuel will also produce some 200 tons of reactor-grade plutonium," says Kuznetsov. "Most likely, the newly acquired plutonium will find its way abroad to the highest bidder." Another point that worries Kuznetsov is transporting the spent fuel along Russian railways, many of which are in critical condition.

The proponents of nuclear spent fuel imports hold such apprehensions in contempt. They assert that their opponents are either ignorant or paid by the West to keep Russia away from its fair share of the depleted nuclear fuel market. Asks Kuznetsov: "Last year Russia reprocessed only 123 tons of its own spent fuel, while France and Britain reprocess 1,500 tons a year. What competition is there to speak about?"

--------

Russia's futile warhead-rattling

The Kansas City Star
By R. JAMES WOOLSEY - Special to The Washington Post
07/07/01 22:00
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/opinion.pat,opinion/3acccc7e.705,.html

In response to the prospect of a U.S. missile defense system, Russian President Vladimir Putin has been trying to show a velvet glove -- nobody here but us free enterprise democrats -- and a barely concealed mailed fist. In essence, he says that if you Americans follow through on your plan, 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. 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. The Russians, however, 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, the warning or stockpile problems. The warning gaps must 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's 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. So 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 sport-utility vehicles. 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, despite 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.

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

-------- treaties

White House Wants to Bury Pact Banning Tests of Nuclear Arms

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/07/world/07NUKE.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, July 6 - In its first six months, the Bush administration has been examining ways to escape permanently from an unratified international agreement banning nuclear tests, just as it has moved to scrap the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and has rebelled against a global warming pact that it believes would cripple American industry.

But State Department lawyers told the White House that a president cannot withdraw a treaty from the Senate once it has been presented for approval. So, administration officials said, President Bush has resolved to let the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty languish in the Senate, where its supporters concede they do not have the votes to revive it.

The decision puts the test ban in the same category as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming: by informing the pact's allies that it has no chance of ratification, Mr. Bush is essentially forcing his main European partners to find alternatives more to the administration's liking.

Mr. Bush has long opposed the treaty, which the Senate rejected 51 to 48 nearly two years ago in a major defeat for President Bill Clinton. Now, in the next two weeks, Mr. Bush hopes to go a step further and persuade the treaty's allies to acknowledge that the pact is effectively dead.

The issue may be discussed at the summit meeting of industrialized nations in Genoa, Italy, later this month. But a senior administration official said today that there was no mention of the treaty in current drafts of the group's final communiqué. Some Bush administration officials even said that the treaty itself might not even come up for discussion for the first time in many years.

During the Clinton years, Canada, the major European allies and Japan called on "all those states which have not yet done so to sign and ratify the treaty without delay." Mr. Bush's aides have worked to delete that wording from other international communiqués, while still calling on nations to abide by a nonbinding moratorium on nuclear testing.

Behind the arcane change in wording that is part of a radical change in American arms control strategy is a concept that could include deep, even unilateral, cuts in the nation's nuclear arsenal, deployment of missile defenses and a new framework to combat proliferation that builds on some current pacts but rejects others.

The test ban treaty "does not help our nonproliferation goals," said an administration official who discussed the president's emerging strategy on the condition that he not be identified.

He said the treaty "is cited as providing a new moral and legal barrier to proliferation."

He also said the treaty was also cited as preventing a potential nuclear power from developing a weapon in confidence. "It is presented as a treaty that is verifiable. And it is presented as something that, in fact, still allows us to maintain our nuclear stockpile in confidence. And I think you'll find that it's wrong on every count, that those contentions are wrong."

As of today, 161 nations have signed the treaty, and 77 of them have ratified it. Among those 77 nations are 31 of the 44 states required for the treaty to enter into force; among the remaining 13 are the United States, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel. In the absence of a treaty, nations are free to conduct nuclear tests, although a nonbinding moratorium is in place.

Administration officials studied the barriers to pulling the treaty from Senate consideration in order to bury it, as well as the potential outcry here and abroad should the United States abandon it. Today, officials said, Mr. Bush "has no plans" to do anything with the treaty, but also "has no plans" to break from the moratorium on nuclear tests.

But treaties do not die at the adjournment of a Congress as bills do, and can be taken up again at any time by a subsequent Senate. Thus, once the test ban treaty was rejected by the Senate, it reverted to the legal property of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Although a Democrat who supports the treaty, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, became the committee chairman when Republicans lost their majority, Senate rules require a two-thirds vote to ratify the treaty, as its proponents desire, or send it back to Mr. Bush for disposal, as its opponents want.

The math of the Senate split renders either action nearly impossible.

"There is no excuse for our failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," Mr. Biden said last month. While agreeing that there are "legitimate concerns" regarding the nation's long-term ability to maintain the nuclear stockpile without nuclear tests and with verification, he said those problems could be resolved before Senate approval.

Mr. Bush expressed unwavering criticism of the treaty during the campaign, saying it did not further the nation's nonproliferation policy or strengthen national security, and his administration conducted a review of test-ban issues.

In the most explicit inquiry into the president's options, John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, asked the State Department's legal office to determine whether a president had the power to unilaterally withdraw a treaty pending before the Senate, officials said.

The legal office reported that the answer was "no," officials said. Once a a treaty is sent to the Senate, there is little a president or a successor can do to dispose of it.

Supporters of the treaty criticized the administration's approach, saying the test ban is a cornerstone of nonproliferation efforts and has overwhelming domestic and international support.

"Continued U.S. failure to follow through on its C.T.B.T. commitments leaves the door open to a global chain reaction of nuclear testing, instability and confrontation in the future," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers.

Mr. Kimball said efforts to delete support for the treaty from multilateral documents "demonstrate that the U.S. is clearly out of step with the rest of the international community on the subject of ending nuclear testing and curbing nuclear proliferation."

He said administration statements "leave open the option to test in the future, and I think that their current approach of rejecting the C.T.B.T. and continuing the moratorium is simply the most politically convenient approach given the overwhelming domestic and international support for a test ban and opposition to a resumption of testing."

The administration's first major success in altering the allies' publicly stated policy - though not necessarily their belief - on the test ban treaty was at the most recent meeting of NATO foreign ministers, this past May in Budapest.

The ministers' final communiqué said, "As long as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (C.T.B.T.) has not entered into force, we urge all states to maintain existing moratoria on nuclear testing."

The language of that compromise statement was in stark contrast to the previous meeting, in Brussels in December, when the ministers stated, "We remain committed to an early entry into force of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and, in the meanwhile, urge all states to refrain from any acts which would defeat its object and purpose."

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

-------- illinois

Valve fixed, nuke plant reopens

Chicago Sun-Times
July 8, 2001
BY BRENDA WARNER ROTZOLL STAFF REPORTER
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/nuke08.html

A faulty temperature control valve triggered Thursday's alert and shutdown of Unit 3 at the Dresden nuclear power plant near Morris, Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Jan Strasma said Friday.

A valve pin was replaced and the unit was started up again at 7:20 a.m. Friday, Exelon Nuclear spokeswoman Ann Mary Carley said.

She said Unit 3 should be back at full power early Monday.

"The operators made a very good, conservative decision when they brought the unit off line" before attempting repairs, Carley said.

There are four categories for trouble at nuclear power plants. An alert, the second-lowest category, means there is a potential for things to get worse and threaten public health and safety, Strasma said.

The worst category, general emergency, has been reached only twice in the world, at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania when there was no leakage of radiation, and the explosion and fire at Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986 that sent clouds of radiation across the northern hemisphere.

Exelon Nuclear is the plant-operating unit of Exelon, formed by the merger of Commonwealth Edison and Philadelphia-based PICO. ComEd is the transmission portion of the new company.

-------- nevada

Group opposes review of EPA's Yucca standards
Utility regulators say reopening decision records on radiation levels is unnecessary

By KEITH ROGERS
Saturday, July 07, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/cgi-bin/printable.cgi?/lvrj_home/2001/Jul-07-Sat-2001/news/16488237.html

A nationwide utility regulators group this week took issue with an ongoing Environmental Protection Agency inquiry into how the agency arrived at health standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository.

"I do not believe there is a need for an investigation. ... Now that the standards have been issued, what point is there in having an investigation?" Brian O'Connell, director of the Nuclear Waste Program Office for the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, asked in a letter Monday to EPA National Ombudsman Robert Martin.

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners is a nonprofit group of representatives from government agencies that regulate utilities in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Martin serves as a neutral third party who is empowered to investigate EPA hazardous waste issues and make recommendations. If he determines he has jurisdiction and a full investigation is warranted, he can reopen decision records, such as the Yucca Mountain radiation standards, and make nonbinding recommendations to the EPA. The agency agrees to follow those recommendations about 80 percent of the time.

Martin's role is different than an inspector general who investigates allegations of waste, fraud and abuse and has subpoena power.

At the request of Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., Martin launched a preliminary investigation last month to see whether he has jurisdiction to probe complaints by Nevada officials and citizens regarding the Yucca Mountain Project. The Department of Energy project is aimed at making Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, the burial site for 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste, most of it spent fuel from commercial power reactors.

In an interview Friday, O'Connell said he is baffled by Martin's logic behind his inquiry. "I'm totally mystified. I don't understand what he is investigating."

Berkley was unavailable Friday, but her spokesman, Michael O'Donovan, said she wants Martin to investigate how the EPA standards were reached and the decision process. Berkley also wants to explore expanding the probe, if one is conducted, to cover the history of the project to determine whether decisions have been made in an appropriate manner.

In a letter Thursday, Martin asked O'Connell to explain what he meant by "accusations of alleged abuse that have been investigated and have been found to be without basis."

O'Connell responded Friday, saying he was referring to a DOE Inspector General's probe requested in December by Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., to investigate whether the DOE or its contractors conducted scientific studies with a bias in favor of building a repository at Yucca Mountain.

In April, DOE Inspector General Gregory Friedman dismayed Nevada's congressional delegation when he found no evidence to back up the delegation's claim that bias compromised the integrity of the Yucca Mountain Project, even though wording in some internal, draft documents was "inappropriate" for the site evaluation process.

This story is located at:
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/Jul-07-Sat-2001/news/16488237.html

-------- us nuc politics

White House Divided on Saddam

Wes Vernon
Saturday, July 7, 2001
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/7/6/205549.shtml

WASHINGTON - NewsMax.com has learned a proposal to overthrow the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein has divided top officials of the Bush administration.

At the center of the debate is a 1998 letter signed by three current Bush administration officials.

That proposal to the then-Clinton administration was instigated by former Rep. Stephen Solarz, D-N.Y., and one-time Reagan Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle. It urged an active U.S. role in overthrowing the regime in Baghdad.

Current Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld signed on to the letter. So too did current Bush administration officials Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Armitage.

However, the plan is not supported by Secretary of State Colin Powell. That sets the stage for another in a series of inside policy battles between Powell and Rumsfeld.

The bold plan included recognizing the insurrectionary government of Iraq, restoring a safe haven in northern Iraq and releasing $1.6 million in frozen Iraqi assets, which would be used to help pay for the uprising.

The plan would involve an air campaign to assist the insurrection and U.S. ground forces, which would be used "as a last resort" to protect the anti-Saddam rebels.

Editorial support for the strategy this week by the Wall Street Journal prompted a dispute Friday at a luncheon sponsored by the Kuwait Information Center.

"In short, yes," said Dr. Michael Rubin, Carnegie Council expert on Near East Policy, when asked if he supported the aggressive strategy.

"Negotiating with Saddam Hussein is a lost cause," he told NewsMax.com. There will be a problem whether we negotiate or not, explained the Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. And the reason is simple.

"Saddam Hussein interprets any negotiations as weakness and as encouragement to flout international law," Rubin said.

Doing nothing would "guarantee" that Hussein would cause significant regional instability. He plays the propaganda war "brilliantly" but pushes things too far, "provoking the neighbors and causing chaos in the region."

Rubin "respectfully disagree[d]" with Colin Powell, Richard Haas and "others in the State Department."

Rubin, who has spent nine months in northern Iraq, seven months in Iran and seven more months in other Arab areas, reminded his audience that he is no "armchair analyst."

"Now, it's all well and good to take the [traditional] State Department diplomatic view that it's always possible to somehow maneuver a win/win compromise," warned the former visiting professor of Iranian history at three universities in Kurdish-governed northern Iraq. "It may work back in the United States. It may work on Capitol Hill. But I can guarantee you it will not work in Iraq."

Further, he thinks Powell will "be forced to come around sooner rather than later because what is being interpreted over there as the current indecision in U.S. foreign policy is going to lead to trouble."

Rubin further believes if the U.S. had forced Iraq to live up to its international commitments during the Clinton years, "I don't think we would be in the situation we are in now."

But professor Carole O'Leary, just back from a fact-finding mission to northern Iraq, took a more cautious approach.

"If the United States were to support the overthrow of Saddam," she said, several questions must be answered. Is the United States going to go it alone? What kind of support are we going to have? Is this going to be "another situation like under Clinton where the [international community] is told to go by one group and then pulled back?"

Another source at the lunch meeting presented NewsMax.com with a paper form the Nixon Center, a think tank named after the former president. That document said, among other things, "We have little expectation that any of the Iraqi opposition forces could at any time soon provide the basis of military challenge to Saddam Hussein."

Rather, the authors argued, the opposition should be encouraged to "remain active in the political arena and the propaganda war against the regime."

Take one step at a time. "Provision of lethal assistance could be considered based on future political progress, provided it does not precipitate a breakdown of a new sanctions regime or commit the U.S. to provide military forces to assist the opposition."

Upgrade the propaganda war, which the U.S. has been losing, the Nixon Center advises. And finally, "it is important that the U.S. be prepared for sudden change in Iraq, including the death of Saddam Hussein by natural causes or assassination."

To spotlight the barbaric cruelty that continues in that part of the world, O'Leary said at the Friday meeting that she had "visited the burned-out remnants of one of Saddam's special prisons for political prisoners .... As I walked through the remains of this house of horrors, I saw meat hooks hanging from the walls and ceilings and the remains of electric torture equipment .... My immediate thought was that Saddam really is an equal opportunity killer. Gender, ethnic origin, religion and even age are no impediment for him."

What has to be worrying the policymakers at the White House is not only Saddam's unspeakable crimes, but also the war machine he is building, including chemical and nuclear warfare.

That undoubtedly weighs on the mind of President Bush as he decides whether the time has arrived to strike against the Butcher of Baghdad.

-------

Bush Wants Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to Die

Reuters Jul 7 2001 3:37PM
From: "Adam Weissman, Wetlands Preserve" <jun1022@cybernex.net>

KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine (Reuters) - President Bush, who has often criticized a global nuclear test ban treaty, hopes the treaty will die in the Senate where it was rejected two years ago, White House officials said on Saturday.

Officials noted that Bush had repeatedly voiced his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty during the 2000 presidential campaign, calling it "fatally flawed."

The Senate, previously controlled by Republicans, declined to ratify the treaty in 1999, to the dismay of U.S. allies.

Now that the Senate is led by Democrats, some analysts say the treaty could be revived. Despite that possibility, Bush will not try to withdraw the CTBT because, as one official said, there was "little precedent" for taking a treaty back once it had been sent to the Senate.

Before leaving office, former President Bill Clinton had urged the new Senate to take up the treaty again.

But the Bush administration disagrees.

"There is little confidence that the treaty can actually be verified," a senior administration official said. "With a treaty flawed in that way, it doesn't further nonproliferation efforts."

Some analysts had expected Democrats to launch an effort to revive the test ban treaty after they took 50-49 control of the Senate last month.

The Bush administration has no desire to see a new debate on the treaty.

"There is no support within the administration for the treaty to be taken up for consideration again," the official said.

Delaware Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden, who replaced North Carolina Republican Sen. Jesse Helms -- an opponent of the treaty -- as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, supports the CTBT, but it needs a two-thirds majority to be ratified.

In January, just before Bush took office, Gen. John Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presented a report to Clinton urging the United States to ratify the treaty.

More than 150 countries have signed the CTBT, but it can come into force only when 44 potentially nuclear-capable countries ratify it.

Shalikashvili, who spent 10 months conducting a review of the contents of the treaty by interviewing nuclear experts, weapons designers and senators, concluded that ratifying the CTBT would increase national security, and the security benefits of the treaty would outweigh disadvantages.

He had said the Senate's vote not to ratify the treaty raised concern at home and abroad that the United States might be walking away from its traditional leadership of international nonproliferation efforts.


-------- MILITARY

-------- balkans

Serbian Police Say 800 May Be in Mass Graves

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/07/world/07YUGO.html

BELGRADE, Serbia, July 6 - Interior Minister Dusan Mihajlovic said today that the police believed that 800 victims of the Kosovo conflict in 1999 had been buried in mass graves and promised that the guilty would not elude responsibility.

Mr. Mihajlovic, a leading member of the alliance that ousted the Yugoslav president, Slobodan Milosevic, last year, said the police would learn who had ordered the "monstrous operation" to send bodies to mass graves across Serbia.

He spoke at a news conference just over a week after the Serbian government sent Mr. Milosevic to the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague to face charges stemming from the Kosovo conflict.

"No one in Serbia will sleep in peace and have a clear conscience until the truth is found and justice done," Mr. Mihajlovic said.

The authorities have announced finding three mass graves with 110 bodies, believed to be Kosovo Albanians. Mr. Mihajlovic said the figure of 800 bodies included those exhumed from the three mass graves and was based on information gathered after that finding. In May, the police accused Mr. Milosevic and top aides of covering up evidence of possible war crimes committed in military operations against ethnic Albanian guerrillas in Kosovo. They said they arrived at the findings while investigating a truckload of corpses dumped in the Danube in the 1999 NATO bombing.

Mr. Mihajlovic said the police were determined to find every mass grave in Serbia, including Kosovo. "We can expect around 800 bodies of victims in all possible locations in the whole of Serbia," he said. "We want to identify the victims, return them to their families so that they can be buried in a dignified way."

The police, who have a special war crimes section, are trying to establish how the deaths occurred. The police, Mr. Mihajlovic said, are cooperating with the United Nations mission in Kosovo and other organizations that could have information on crimes against Albanians or Serbs.

--------

Croatia OKs War Crimes Extradition

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Croatia-War-Crimes.html

ZAGREB, Croatia (AP) -- In an emergency meeting that immediately plunged Croatia into a political crisis, the Cabinet on Saturday gave the green light for any citizen indicted by the U.N. war crimes tribunal to be arrested and extradited.

Following the decision, announced by Prime Minister Ivica Racan, four ministers in the 23-member Cabinet offered their resignations in protest.

Alluding to the international praise that followed the extradition of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to the Netherlands-based tribunal, Racan said rejecting the tribunal's requests to extradite Croatian citizens ``would return us into the abyss of the troubled Balkans, from which even Serbia'' is escaping.

The comment reflected the pressure on Croatian leaders to act on previous promises to cooperate with the tribunal. Serbia's prime minister recently sent Milosevic to The Hague tribunal.

Racan, who must accept the resignations to make them formal, announced he would ask parliament to give his government a vote of confidence ``as soon as possible.''

The four were all Social Liberals, from Racan's main partner party in the five-party coalition government. The party has 23 deputies in the 151-seat parliament.

Racan's Social Democrats hold 45 seats. He can also count on 24 deputies from his other coalition partners, and possibly some other smaller parties.

But the nationalists from the former ruling party of the late president, Franjo Tudjman, hold 41 seats and other nationalist parties are expected to vote against Racan's Cabinet, making the outcome of the vote unclear and meaning his government could fall.

Government sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said parliament may meet to vote as early as on Monday or Tuesday.

The crisis was triggered by Friday's announcement by Carla Del Ponte, the chief prosecutor of the U.N. tribunal, that her court had for the first time indicted Croatian citizens for alleged war crimes against Serbs in the country who rebelled in 1991 against the republic's decision to split from Yugoslavia.

Croatian sources said the indictments target two army generals.

The issue is delicate in Croatia, where many glorify the country's wartime commanders as protectors from the Serb rebels, who killed thousands of their countrymen and reduced villages and cities to rubble in 1991. Although many Serbs also died, many Croats still believe Croats were the sole victims of the war.

Appearing before reporters late Saturday, Racan said that the Cabinet decided to ``assign the Justice Ministry to go ahead with the procedure of arresting and extraditing persons indicted'' by the Hague court.

The decision is effective immediately, he said.

Tribunal prosecutors have been investigating the slayings of hundreds of Serbs following Zagreb's 1995 offensive to recapture land seized by Serb rebels during the six-month war of 1991, as well as earlier slayings of Serbs during the 1991 war.

The names in the indictments were not revealed. But Croatia's state news agency, HINA, citing unidentified government sources, reported earlier that the likely suspects are retired general Ante Gotovina, a commander during the 1995 offensive, and Rahim Ademi, a general of Kosovo Albanian origin. Ademi would be likely charged with responsibility in the killings of dozens of Serbs during a 1993 offensive in central Croatia against the Serb rebels.

On Saturday, the biggest association of the veterans of Croatia's 1991 war threatened to use ``the most radical measures'' against extradition, including mass protests and road blockades.

``There will be no extradition; we will prevent them,'' declared veterans' leader Mirko Condic, whose group gathered 150,000 people at a February rally against a local court's war crimes prosecution of an ex-general.

Asked whether he fears the extradition decision would trigger protests, Racan said he does, but added: ``I believe in the maturity of the Croatian people. I cannot believe that some groups would be ready to jeopardize Croatia's interests.''

Offering to resign Saturday were Goran Granic, Racan's deputy, Defense Minister Jozo Rados, Economics Minister Goranko Fizulic and Science Minister Hrvoje Kraljevic.

-------- iran

Iran has been developing a range of missiles

Middle East Newsline
July 7, 2001
http://menewsline.com/stories/2001/july/07_05_1.html

WASHINGTON [MENL] -- Iran has been developing a range of missiles, the most advanced of which could achieve a range of 5,000 kilometers, a leading federal lawmaker said.

Rep. Curt Weldon, a Republican from Pennsylvania, said Iran is obtaining help from North Korea and Russia to complete a range of intermediate- and long-range missiles. These include such missiles as the Shihab-3, Shihab-4 and Shihab-5.

"Iran has been working now on a system, Shihab-3, Shihab-4 and Shihab-5, which now possesses a capability of sending a missile about 2,500 kilometers," Weldon said. "That covers a good part of Europe. Iran is also working on a missile system called the Shihab-5. That system will have a range, we think, of 5,000 kilometers. Iran's goal is to develop a long-range missile to eventually hit the U.S."

U.S. officials have discussed the development of the Shihab-3 and Shihab-4. But officials and many experts had dismissed the Shihab-5 as a feasible program.

Weldon said that Moscow -- which is helping Iran's missile programs -- has been marketing missile defense systems to Israel, a target of Teheran. He said Russia has tried to sell Greece and Israel the Antei-2500 system. The system has also been marketed in the Gulf.

-------- iraq

Baghdad Says US, British Jets Bomb Southern Iraq

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-ra.html

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq said U.S. and British planes flying from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait attacked targets in the south of the country on Saturday, but no casualties were reported.

``At 8:50 a.m. on Saturday U.S. and British warplanes carried out 20 sorties from Saudi Arabia and 27 sorties from Kuwait...over the provinces of Basra, Dhiqar, Qadissiya, Muthanna, Najaf and Meisan,'' a military spokesman said, according to the official Iraqi News Agency.

He said the planes attacked civilian installations but were forced to return to their bases by anti-aircraft fire.

There was no confirmation from the United States or Britain, whose aircraft patrol no-fly zones set up to protect a Kurdish enclave in the north of Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south from possible attacks by Baghdad forces.

U.S. and British air raids have become commonplace since Iraq, which does not recognize the no-fly zones, vowed in 1998 to challenge the patrols with its anti-aircraft defenses.

-------- puerto rico

Cuomo Says Kennedy Refused Defense

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Vieques-Cuomo.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and a co-defendant refused legal defenses that might have averted their 30-day jail sentences for trespassing on Navy land on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques, their lawyer said Saturday.

Kennedy and New York labor leader Dennis Rivera wanted to follow the lead of other activists jailed for protesting the Navy's bombing and shelling exercises on the island, said their attorney, Mario Cuomo, the former New York governor.

``Kennedy and Rivera asked us not to use certain defenses,'' Cuomo said in a telephone interview after returning from San Juan, where the two were sentenced on Friday. ``What they were saying is, 'We'd like to avoid any excessive punishment but since others have done it this way, we only think it's right and honorable that we take our medicine, too.'''

Cuomo would not disclose details on the defenses the two had rejected.

Both men were being held at San Juan's federal Metropolitan Detention Center. Friends of Kennedy, a lawyer and environmental activist, said his detention means he probably will miss the birth of his sixth child, expected next week.

Kennedy, son of the late Sen. Robert Kennedy, and Rivera are the latest well-known demonstrators convicted of trespassing to protest the Navy's long-standing use of Vieques for bombing practice.

Jacqueline Jackson, wife of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, served a 10-day sentence last month and the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York is still serving a 90-day sentence. Actor Edward James Olmos and U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., have yet to go to trial.

President Bush announced last month that bombing exercises on Vieques would end by May 2003, but protesters have continued demonstrations urging an immediate halt.

Kennedy and Rivera may decide against requesting transfers to prisons on the mainland, Rivera because he has relatives in Puerto Rico and Kennedy because he has environmental litigation against the Navy pending on the island, Cuomo said.

Cuomo said he doesn't know if his clients will decide to go on a hunger strike, as Sharpton has done.

``From what I am told about the food in most of these places, I think if they don't eat, it won't necessarily be political,'' Cuomo said.

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

Air Force Pilot Killed in S.C. Crash

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Plane-Down.html

CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) -- An Air Force pilot was killed Friday when a jet fighter crashed about 40 miles off the coast, officials said.

The aircraft, an F-16CJ, was in a military training area and the pilot was involved in a combat training mission, said Senior Airman Lee Watts, of Shaw Air Force Base. After the plane went down, the U.S. Coast Guard found the pilot but not the plane.

The pilot was the only person on board. The aircraft was assigned to the 20th Fighter Wing at Shaw, which is in Sumter, about 90 miles northwest of Charleston.

Conditions were partly cloudy to clear Friday at the time of the accident, said Ted Rodgers, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

-------- OTHER

-------- death penalty

Okla. Hospital Ends Chemical Supply

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Execution-Chemicals.html

MCALESTER, Okla. (AP) -- A hospital has decided to end its practice of supplying the state prison system with the chemicals used in executions, following a request from an anti-death penalty group.

The Corrections Department will find another supplier of the drugs and the hospital's decision shouldn't delay the execution of Jerald Wayne Harjo, who is scheduled to die July 17, said department spokesman Jerry Massie.

The agency will likely turn to its internal pharmacies to supply the drugs, Massie said.

The department bought the drugs -- a mix of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride -- from McAlester Regional Health Center for use in the death chamber at Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.

The hospital reconsidered its policy after being contacted by Human Rights Watch, an organization which opposes the death penalty.

The group cited the investigation of Oklahoma City police chemist Joyce Gilchrist, who has been accused of misidentifying hair and fiber evidence. Authorities have restudied dozens of cases in which she provided evidence.

``Revelations that tainted evidence may have been used in capital trials in Oklahoma make your institution's participation in the administration of capital punishment particularly disturbing,'' Allyson Collins wrote in a June 14 letter, referring to the investigation of Gilchrist.

The group also cited the case of Robert Lee Miller, who was freed after seven years on death row when DNA evidence showed he wasn't guilty. Gilchrist worked on the Miller case.

Gilchrist has denied allegations that she wrongly linked defendants to crime scenes by misidentifying fiber and fluid evidence.

In a response a week after Collins' letter, hospital chief executive officer Joel Tate wrote that the board had only recently been made aware of the practice of providing the drugs to the prison.

``What does seem clear ... is that assisting the state in the implementation of the death penalty seems inconsistent with the mission of a community hospital,'' Tate wrote.

``Therefore, we have recently informed the state that effective immediately we will no longer be providing lethal drugs to the state for this purpose.''

Massie said it was the first time a lobbying group has caused a vendor to stop doing business with the Corrections Department.

Oklahoma has executed 13 people this year.

-------- energy

School Board Signs Agreement to Produce Own Energy Supply

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/07/national/07PENN.html

PITTSBURGH, July 6 - After a winter of paying high prices for natural gas, a school system near Pittsburgh has decided to produce its own.

The school board in Penn Hills, a community of 50,000, has struck a deal with the Penneco Oil Company to sink as many as 10 natural gas wells on school district property.

The school system would get 12.5 percent royalties and a fixed share of the gas. That would not be enough to supply all the district's energy needs, but would cut its heating costs in half and delay a tax increase, officials said.

Last school year, the district paid $450,000 to heat schools, in part because of natural gas prices that were almost six times higher than normal.

"We might as well tap our own gas and use the savings," said Barry Patterson, a school board member. "I'm not sure it will eliminate the need to buy any gas, but whatever the savings, we will gladly accept them. So will the taxpayers."

The gas wells still need city and state approval. Officials hope to have the first well producing as early as next month in Penn Hills, which is about 10 miles from downtown Pittsburgh.

Other schools around the country and in Pennsylvania have leased drilling rights over the years.

"In view of the higher prices that we've seen, it kind of makes sense for them to do something. It could be a happy marriage," said Terry Jacobs, president of Penneco.

In oil-patch states like Oklahoma and Texas, oil and gas wells dot the landscape.

"We have got oil wells and gas wells producing next to schools, churches, restaurants, you name it," said Mickey Thompson, executive vice president of the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association.

And at least one other district in Western Pennsylvania has gas wells on school property.

About five miles from Penn Hills, the Plum Borough district has three wells, one about 500 feet from an elementary school, that have produced natural since 1996. Officials said the wells helped them avoid last winter's energy crunch and earned $11,000 in royalties last year.

-------- environment

German Loggers to Leave 'African Eden' Untouched

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/07/world/07FORE.html

In a move that wildlife biologists say has spared an African Eden, a German logging company said yesterday that it had given up its lease on a tract of swamp-fringed rain forest in the Congo Republic. The Congo government said the land, the 100-square-mile Goualogo Triangle, would be added to the adjacent Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park.

Biologists at a news conference at the Bronx Zoo, where the deal was announced, called the tract an untouched ecosystem set in a fast-deteriorating landscape. They said it was one of the few places left in central Africa where animals showed no fear of humans, because few humans have ever set foot there.

African conservation experts said this was the first time a logging company had voluntarily given up land rights without some tradeoff.

The agreement was announced by officials from the company and the Congo government and scientists from the zoo's parent organization, the Wildlife Conservation Society, which worked with the company to survey the region's wildlife.

The Goualogo tract, in the remote north, is bordered by two unbridged rivers and flooded forests. People who venture in "feel like you're violating a place, like you don't belong," said Paul Elkan, a biologist who spent two years surveying the holdings of the logging company for the conservation society.

Mr. Elkan described the moment last year when he realized there was something special about this place.

In Central Africa, when chimpanzees spot humans, the chimps' reaction, honed by long experience with meat-hunting crews, is to shriek and vanish.

After crossing the Ndoki River, establishing a camp and then cutting a trail, Mr. Elkan and the other surveyors heard chimps nearby, he said. A storm swept in and the surveyors raced back toward camp. But the sound of the chimps did not fade.

"They were following me," he said. "I went back and met them."

As the team explored the area, which is about four times the size of Manhattan, they found that many chimpanzees, gorillas, forest antelope, red colobus monkeys and other animals showed little fear and in many cases showed almost as much curiosity as the human interlopers. Mr. Elkan described trails created by herds of forest elephants as "boulevards."

Preservation of the tract was the fruit of a new relationship between African loggers and conservationists, who until now have tended to battle each other.

"Logging companies are here to stay in central Africa," said Jean- Gael Collomb, a biologist who maps logging leases for the World Resources Institute, a private group in Washington. "At some point you have to give up and realize that to reach your objectives you have to be a bit more creative, including working with some of them."

Giuseppe Topa, the chief forestry specialist for the World Bank, said, "The big news here for me is simply that there is a place in Congo that had never seen a man."

Officials of the German-owned company, Congolaise Industrielle des Bois, or C.I.B., said that once the biological riches in this particular tract were evident, it was clear the land had to be set aside, even though they estimated the timber was worth $40 million.

Hinrich L. Stoll, the president of the company, said: "There was no compensation to us for this. This decision came from a mutual understanding to give up part of a forest with great value." The company, the largest employer in Congo, with 1,200 workers, is privately held and does not release its earnings.

Mr. Stoll said the decision was part of an intensifying effort to shed the longstanding image of tropical loggers as despoilers of fragile ecosystems. Like most logging companies in Africa, C.I.B. has long been the target of boycotts and criticism, particularly by European environmental groups.

The company retains leases on more than 5,000 square miles of forest land in Northern Congo, but in 1999 reached agreement with the government and the Wildlife Conservation Society to limit hunting by its cutting crews and to plan its harvest in ways that would limit environmental damage.

The decision to set aside the Goualogo tract came after a four-month survey last year of its wood and wildlife by scientists and experts from the conservation group, the company and the Congo Forestry Ministry.

At the news conference, Henri Djombo, the forestry minister, said his country was hoping for assistance from wealthy countries in return for protecting this tract and many others. Eleven percent of Congo's land is set aside as parks.

Mr. Topa, of the World Bank, said the Congo government was doing a good job of trying to build respect in a region where most governments are either shattered or riddled with corruption.

"We've been bashing African governments because they don't do enough for conservation," he said. "We should recognize such efforts when they occur."

Some private environmental groups were not as quick to hail the announcement.

The partnership between C.I.B. and the Wildlife Conservation Society has long been criticized by some groups, particularly in Europe, that see the efforts as a possible attempt by the company to polish its image without changing its practices.

Yesterday Simon Counsell, the director of the Rainforest Foundation in Britain, said, "It's very hard to know whether C.I.B. should be deserving of any green plaudits because apart from selected people from W.C.S., the company has refused to allow independent environmental observers into their logging areas."

Dr. John G. Robinson, the Wildlife Conservation Society's vice president for international conservation, said other outside groups, including a television crew from the BBC, had recently toured the region.

"The company has been a constructive partner," he said. "The net result for conservation has been good, and the Goualogo Triangle by itself is an amazing step."

-------- health

Fighting AIDS: A New War Is Killing Cambodians

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By SETH MYDANS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/07/world/07CAMB.html

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, July 2 - Just as Cambodia is emerging from three decades of war and mass killings, it finds itself swept by the beginnings of a new scourge: AIDS. Cambodia is the sickest country in Asia now, at risk for a devastating spread of the disease.

"It is certainly the hot spot of the epidemic in Asia, in terms of the highest prevalence of infection," said Peter Ghys, an epidemiologist with the United Nations office on AIDS in Geneva.

It is the epicenter of what he said was the next potential explosion of AIDS - the Indochinese countries of Cambodia and Vietnam, as well as nearby Myanmar.

In Cambodia's cities and scattered villages, it is common now to see spectral figures looking much like the starving victims of the Khmer Rouge years. More than a million people died when the Communist Khmer Rouge ruled the country from 1975 to 1979, and many more lost their lives in the civil war that followed.

One of these new sufferers is Touch Saroeun, a weak and wasted man of 31 with large, glowing eyes and the stunned look of someone who has been ambushed.

When he was a Khmer Rouge soldier not long ago, he was certain that nothing could kill him. His comrades marveled, he said, as he strolled through a minefield to buy a pack of cigarettes.

As a tank driver - shackled to his tank like the others so he would not flee - he survived some of the fiercest battles in more than a decade of civil war.

Peace came three years ago, and it is peace that has brought him death.

When the war ended, the minefields around the former Khmer Rouge stronghold at Pailin were cleared away. At the same time, brothels opened, bringing women more beautiful than any he had ever seen. "I was so excited that I got drunk and forgot to wear a condom," Mr. Touch Saroeun said.

When he fell ill, he said, he discovered that half the men at the hospital in nearby Battambang, mostly soldiers, were infected like him, with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. And when he transferred to a hospital here in the capital, he found its courtyards and corridors populated with AIDS patients.

Around the country about 170,000 people are believed to be infected, nearly 3 percent of the adult population. This number is still far lower than the 36 million infected in Africa, where the epidemic is well entrenched, or in the United States, where more than one million have been infected and 450,000 have died.

"In my more pessimistic moments, I'm afraid that in the next few years more people could die of AIDS than in the Pol Pot time," said the Rev. James Noonan, a Maryknoll priest who administers the Seedling of Hope H.I.V./AIDS Project.

That may be an exaggerated fear, but in the dark heart of the epidemic it is not uncommon for the sufferers themselves to make the comparison. The biographies of patients invariably include past horrors.

"Now I am suffering just like in the Khmer Rouge time," said Ngau Rotheany, 39, a patient at Calmette Hospital in Phnom Penh whose husband has already died of AIDS. "No husband, no money, nothing to eat, sick and suffering."

Experts see a pale ray of hope that Cambodia may avoid the worst. United Nations specialists are finding signs that awareness of the illness and its causes has been rising, along with increased use of condoms. The infection rate among young sex workers appears to be dropping.

The very sight of the emaciated victims may have done more to advertise the scourge than any amount of public education. Almost everyone in Phnom Penh seems to know someone who is infected.

"Despite everything that we were faced with - an infrastructure that is in disrepair and human capital that has been destroyed - we were able to have a response to expenditure that appears to have had initial, at least, results," said Geoff Manthey, country program adviser for the United Nations program.

Cambodia is now at a critical moment, the experts say, when it is still possible to hold back full-scale disaster. In the meantime, deaths will certainly rise as tens of thousands of infected people fall ill.

"There seem to be some early indications of initial positive trends," said Mr. Ghys, the epidemiologist. "But we would want to see confirmation in the coming years before we declare success."

Cambodia seems a poor candidate for a safe-sex campaign. It is a poorly developed, poorly educated country with a thriving sex industry fueled by poverty. It is common for men to visit a prostitute before going home to their wives, and casual sex among young people appears to be rising. The growth of the epidemic has been fueled by a combination of risky behavior and ignorance.

One characteristic of the epidemic is women who have been infected by their husbands and are now dying, often along with their children.

People who work with patients here say they are wary of optimistic predictions.

"What we see every day is that the number of people developing AIDS and dying is very high and it's not declining at all," said Catherine Quillet, the chief of the French mission of Médecins Sans Frontières. "We have more and more patients arriving and fewer places where they can go."

Particularly tragic is the high cost of treatment, she said. Desperate patients and their families sell their motorbikes, their farm animals and even their land to pay for ineffective herbal potions or for sophisticated Western treatments that they cannot afford to continue.

The patients die and their families are left destitute.

Perhaps even more painful is the stigma that causes many sufferers to be abandoned by their families and shunned by their neighbors.

Before forcing her to leave their home, the relatives of Mrs. Ngau Rotheany made her sleep in an outhouse, cook on a separate fire and eat off a separate plate. They ordered their children to stay away from her, telling them, "Why do you want to talk to someone with AIDS?"

Vieng Chantha, 33, who was also infected by her husband, gave away her three children when she fell ill. Her family rejected her with the words, "Go somewhere else to die."

At the Maryknoll hospice in southern Phnom Penh, where 12 patients wait out their days shivering and coughing under their blankets, Keo Chantha, 23, is familiar with abandonment. She was sold into prostitution by her brother at the age of 14.

Bald now and scratching at her scabs, she has nothing left of her former beauty but her radiant smile.

She said she had one wish now, to see her mother before she dies. She sent a friend to her village to beg her parents to visit, but they refused.

Uy Kimheng, 33, looked down at her hands and clipped her nails as she described her ailments - weakness, loss of appetite, tuberculosis. In her bright yellow T-shirt, she looks too healthy to be waiting for death.

With a shy smile, she admitted to feeling angry: at the Khmer Rouge who killed her father, at the husband who infected her.

The hardest thing now, she said, is that she cannot sleep at night. "I wake up at 4 in the morning and I lie there thinking," she said.

Thinking about what?

She smiled again in embarrassment. "I think about the day I'll die."

Mr. Touch Saroeun, the former Khmer Rouge soldier, is luckier. His father, a subsistence farmer, has visited him in the hospital in Phnom Penh and plans to take him home to his distant village to care for him.

But Mr. Touch Saroeun said it was terrible to have to tell his father that he was sick. "My father loves me very much," he said.

When the old man came to visit, he sat quietly beside his son on his bed, caressing his hand.

"I told him I was sorry," Mr. Touch Saroeun said. "He was so sad and he kept looking into my face. He didn't say anything. He just looked at me and shook his head."

When Mr. Touch Saroeun leaves for his village, the hospital will give him a month's medicine to treat his symptoms. He will have the right to return each month for more, he said, but he does not know where he will get the money to make the trip.

-------- human rights

Guatemala seeks FBI's assistance

July 7, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010707-46064479.htm

The president of Guatemala yesterday said he has asked the FBI to help investigate human rights abuses that threaten to tear apart his nation's fragile democracy.

"I made a commitment that the FBI and the National Security Council will help investigate harassment of human rights investigators. We asked for the support of the FBI," President Alfonso Portillo said during a visit to The Washington Times.

Assassinations and threats to Mr. Portillo's 2-year-old presidency continue to endanger a 1996 truce that ended Guatemala's long civil war.

"Yesterday, I made the decision on the FBI the details are to be worked out with our ambassadors and the State Department," Mr. Portillo said. His remarks came one day after meeting with President Bush at the White House.

Mr. Portillo said he has personally faced threats from 16 powerful families, which have monopolized trading of commodities such as sugar, fertilizer and cement, after he sought to collect taxes on their earnings.

He said he agreed with Mr. Bush's assessment that transparency and fighting corruption are major tasks that Guatemala's civilian government must tackle before foreign investors will take a risk there.

However, Mr. Portillo said that security represents an even bigger obstacle for Guatemala's fledgling democracy.

"There is a climate of uncertainty. There are groups more powerful than the president of the republic," he said.

While the president has worked to break up monopolistic control over the Guatemalan economy, many question if he really is able to control the dark elements of his nation's past.

Paramilitary death squads once slaughtered tens of thousands of mainly ethnic Indians suspected of sympathy with Marxist guerrillas in the 1960s, '70s and '80s.

A 1998 report by the Catholic Church said the army and other security forces killed most of the 200,000 victims of the civil war.

Two days after the report was issued, 75-year-old Roman Catholic Bishop Juan Jose Gerardi was bludgeoned to death in what was widely seen as a reprisal for the report.

Recently, a three-judge panel convicted three former military officers and a priest in the murder.

They were the highest-level convictions of members of the military. Human rights activists continue to exhume bodies of massacre victims from many sites around Guatemala.

The U.N. Committee Against Torture in November noted a "deteriorating" human rights situation, including intimidation, harassment and death threats against judges, journalists, prosecutors, witnesses and others.

Mr. Portillo said he inherited a country with a legacy of "500 years of intolerance" and that he has fired 20 generals and dozens of other military officers.

But he said that in order to train and deploy 20,000 civilian police as called for by the 1996 U.N. peace plan, he needs $500 million in aid.

The Washington-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) Thursday issued a statement calling Mr. Portillo "a well-intentioned but powerless president" who must defer to the real power in the country, former strongman Efrain Rios Montt, who is currently head of the legislature.

The group cited slayings of American journalist Larry Lee in 1999 and the recent slaying of American nun Barbara Ford as part of a wave of human rights abuses unleashed by former death-squad activists.

Many judges and witnesses in human rights cases have been threatened, attacked or fled the country, according to COHA, which cited U.N. and State Department reports.

The State Department has found that those guilty of human rights abuses often take advantage of the country's judicial inefficiencies by loading the courts down with motions and trial delays.

Mr. Bush raised the human rights problems with Mr. Portillo, who said he was powerless to intercede in judicial matters.

"There have been many scars in our country, but we are in a healing process," Mr. Portillo said Thursday at the White House.

"What is most important is the executive is not standing in the middle to hinder the judicial process."

Mr. Portillo said that despite reports that Mr. Rios Montt intends to try to become president once more, he was unlikely to get the two-thirds vote needed to amend the constitution to allow him to run.

Mr. Rios Montt headed the country in the 1980s, during a period of intense violence against civilians.

Both Mr. Rios Montt and Mr. Portillo belong to the conservative Guatemalan Republican Front.

However, Mr. Portillo was elected on a populist platform in 1999 by pledging to support the peace plan, an end to rampant crime and help for the poor.

Yesterday, Mr. Portillo said he will not back down on plans to raise taxes needed to provide the education and other services he has promised to the poor.

He said he would resist complaints by the nation's powerful families, known as "oligarchs," against new labor laws and a minimum-wage bill.

Mr. Portillo also asked Mr. Bush to help more than 1 million Guatemalans in the United States many of whom came to escape the civil war to remain here.

In addition, he pledged to work with the United States to curb illegal immigration and drug smuggling into the United States.

--------

Christians Said Arrested in Laos

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Laos-Christians-Arrested.html

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) -- Authorities in communist Laos have arrested eight Christians and are forcing churches across the country to close, a British human rights group said Saturday.

The Jubilee Campaign said in a statement received here that seven church leaders and one church member were arrested on May 31 in Songkhone district of central Savannakhet province because they refused to sign affidavits renouncing their religious beliefs.

The statement said the eight men were charged with anti-government activities and involvement with foreign political movements trying to weaken the government.

Three of the detainees were now too weak to walk because of poor prison conditions, it said.

Residents of the Lao capital Vientiane, contacted by telephone from Bangkok and speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that a group of local church leaders had been arrested in Songkhone district, where a decades-old church was recently shut down.

Calls to the press department of Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Vientiane on Saturday went unanswered.

The Southeast Asian country is predominantly Buddhist, with only a small proportion of Christians. Although it is a one-party state, Laos's constitution provides for freedom of worship.

But in recent years there have been reports of localized persecution of Christians by officials apparently wary that church gatherings could be a focus of anti-government dissent. The secretive regime tolerates no political opposition.

``The communist government in Laos is intent on wiping out the church there,'' said Wilfred Wong, a researcher for the Jubilee Campaign, a Christian group based in Guildford, England that lobbies for the rights of children and against religious persecution.

According to a U.S. State Department human rights report on Laos, more than 95 Christians were arrested and held in custody last year, some for months. In isolated cases, prisoners were detained in prison with crude, one-leg wood stocks or hand manacles, it said.

Residents in Vientiane said that this year, some churches had been shut down in Savannakhet, Luang Prabang and Vientiane provinces and worshippers forced by local officials to renounce their religious beliefs. It was not clear if the officials were acting on orders from central government, they said.

Some of the country's longest-established churches are in Savannakhet province, where the first Christian missionaries came to Laos from Switzerland in 1902.

--------

Pakistan Sets 90 - Day Limit to Clear Afghan Camp

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-pakista.html

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - The Pakistani government intends to clear more than 60,000 Afghan refugees from a camp on the outskirts of Peshawar in west Pakistan within three months, the minister in charge of the program said on Saturday.

Abbas Sarfaraz Khan, minister responsible for camps housing an estimated 1.65 million Afghans, said he wanted to start a three-month screening program to determine which residents of Nasir Bagh should be sent home or transferred to other camps.

``Within the shortest period time, let me say not even 90 days, we want the screening process to be completed so that camp can be cleared and construction work can start on low-income housing,'' he said in an interview with Reuters Television.

The planned clearance of Nasir Bagh to build housing for civil servants is part of a broader clampdown on Afghan refugees, but one that has created friction with the United Nations.

The clearing would be followed by screening to remove some 70,000 Afghans huddled in squalid conditions at Jallozai, a makeshift camp with no official status 70 miles west of Islamabad.

Khan said he was still seeking U.N. agreement for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights to contribute members to screening teams, which have been scaled back from 100 proposed by Pakistan to 30.

Khan said those Afghans who met U.N. criteria for refugee status would not be sent back, but a very large proportion were fleeing economic hardship caused by severe drought in Afghanistan and should return to their homeland.

BULLDOZED HOUSES

While Khan said he would not use ``punitive action'' to force refugees from Nasir Bagh, where they have lived since the early 1980s, he said three houses had been bulldozed to symbolize the state's determination to take the land.

Thirty-nine families left for Afghanistan on Thursday in trucks piled with belongings following the government vow to clear the camp. The original deadline was June 30.

``We want to go ahead with the screening,'' Khan said, ``so we can be very clear on who the genuine refugees are and those who are here as common migrants, because we do feel there is a very large proportion of them in these camps.''

Khan said legitimate refugees would likely be transferred to New Shamshato camp in Peshawar, which has already taken more than planned when the United Nations opened it less than a year ago.

``If we find there is not much space left there we have indicated to the U.N...we will assist them to try to put up another camp,'' said Khan, who is also responsible for Kashmir and northern areas of Pakistan.

``But the negotiations with local people will have to be conducted by the U.N. because we are finding a lot of resistance now from locals who are not prepared to give up their land,'' he said.

There was growing impatience among Pakistanis at the lack of any apparent prospect for a return of the refugees, whom he said totaled 2.35 million, counting those dispersed in cities.

Khan said he realized conditions inside Afghanistan were very difficult after more than two decades of war and four years of drought. But the peace established in the parts of the country run by the Taliban would allow refugees to go home.

-------- spying

Mexican Gov't Uncovers Spy Network

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Mexico-Spy-Network.html

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- The Mexican government said Saturday it had uncovered an espionage network in the capital that spied on public officials through phone taps, hidden cameras and bugs.

The network, which also had an office in nearby Mexico state, employed at least 35 people, the attorney general's office said in a statement. Eleven were placed under 90-day house arrest while an investigation continued.

Authorities did not release the locations of the offices or the names of the suspects and presumed targets. They said they had not yet determined who was behind the network.

Some of the suspects told investigators that they had worked previously for now-defunct federal agencies specializing in espionage, including the former Federal Security Department. Nine of the detained employees also identified themselves as current employees of the state of Mexico.

The spy network's targets appeared to consist mainly of federal and state officials, as well as members of different political organizations -- an assumption investigators based on a list of names they found in logs seized from the suspects.

Authorities began to uncover the network on July 4 when, during a kidnapping investigation, they arrested two people carrying numerous tapes of telephone conversations.

Subsequent searches conducted in Mexico City and the state of Mexico turned up telephone tapping equipment, cameras and electronic listening devices.

Fears and allegations of internal espionage have abounded for years in Mexico.

Earlier this week, a city delegation leader charged that pieces of telephone conversations she had had with various people were taped, then spliced together in order to implicate her on corruption charges.

Last September, a little over two months after President Vicente Fox's historic victory brought an end to 71 years of one-party rule, a newspaper released telephone conversations that someone had recorded between Fox and First Lady Martha Sahagun, who at the time was the president's press liaison.

The newspaper that broke the story said the conversations were illegally recorded by government intelligence and national security agencies prior to Fox's election as part of a ``plot'' to benefit his main opponent, Francisco Labastida, of the then-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

Government agencies denied any involvement.

It is widely known, however, that Mexico's federal intelligence agency, the Center for Investigation and National Security, for decades conducted illegal spying and intimidated political opponents.

As part of a broad campaign against corruption and crime, Fox's administration announced earlier this year that the center henceforth would concentrate solely on combating organized crime.

--------

Chinese Fugitive Admits Spying

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Canada-China-Fugitive.html

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) -- A fugitive wanted in China's largest smuggling scandal says he once spied on Taiwan at the request of the Chinese government.

Lai Changxing testified for a third straight day Friday before a two-member refugee panel that will decide if he and his family will be deported.

The Chinese government has accused Lai of controlling a multibillion-dollar smuggling operation in the coastal province of Fujian, opposite Taiwan. Lai claims that, like others implicated in the scandal, he will be executed if returned to China.

Beijing has told the Canadian government he would not be executed, meeting a requirement set by Canada's Supreme Court that the country cannot extradite or deport people to face the death penalty.

Lai, regarded as one of China's most wanted fugitives, told Friday how he expanded a manufacturing empire in Fujian to Hong Kong. He said he was then invited by Taiwanese officials to become head of an association of Hong Kong citizens who originally came from Taiwan or Fujian province.

When China became aware of Taiwan's request, the government asked Lai to provide intelligence on Taiwan, he said.

``They wanted me to find all Taiwan organizations in Hong Kong and their personnel,'' said Lai, speaking in Mandarin through an interpreter.

He also said he provided some military information to China.

Lai and his wife, Tsang Mingna, were arrested Nov. 23 for allegedly giving false or incomplete information when they first entered Canada in August 1999 as visitors with Hong Kong passports.

They received six-month extensions in March 2000 and applied for refugee status in June 2000.

In China, at least 84 people have been convicted in the smuggling and bribery case that touched the highest echelons of the ruling Communist Party. At least seven have been executed, according to Chinese reports.

The Chinese government alleges that Lai masterminded a network allegedly paid off officials to cover up the smuggling of cars, oil, cigarettes and other goods worth $6.4 billion. Lost import duties cost China's treasury $3.6 billion, it says.

In the ``personal information form'' of his refugee claim, Lai says political power struggles in China caused his business venture to come under suspicion, resulting in accusations of bribery, smuggling, fraud, and corruption.

Canada's immigration ministry opposes granting refugee status to Lai and his wife. The hearing is before the Immigration and Refugee Board, a separate body.

-------- activists

Lone Tree Sitter Remains in Indiana

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Tree-Sitters.html

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) -- A lone tree-sitter continued his protest of a planned housing development Saturday, while six more protesters were arrested after chaining themselves arm-to-arm across the street leading to the site.

Outside the 50-acre wooded plot, a few fellow activists kept contact with the tree-sitter -- known only as ``Moss'' -- who was resting in a hammock in the upper branches of a 90-foot-tall red oak.

He said over a two-way radio that he was generally in good spirits, though he had run out of water late Friday.

``All I need is a nice, steady downpour for about 10 or 15 minutes and I'll be all right,'' said Moss, who has set up tarps to catch rainwater.

Opponents of the planned low-income apartment complex were surprised early Friday by construction workers who cleared a path for state police and sheriff's officers.

Authorities raided the woods, removing three other tree sitters and everyone on the grounds. A bulldozer tore a path through the woods, and authorities used a hydraulic lift to rise into the branches and arrest protesters.

Moss eluded them by climbing higher up the red oak, taking with him a supply of food and a hammock from the platform he'd been living on. Construction workers destroyed the platform, but couldn't go high enough to reach the protester.

Early Saturday, five men and a woman chained themselves together arm-to-arm and attached themselves to sewer grates. It took police more than an hour to free the prone protesters, who were all arrested. That brought the number of arrests since Friday to 15.

Environmentalists have demonstrated since March 22, saying the dense woods is not environmentally suited for the 208-unit complex.

The Indianapolis-based developer said construction will begin this month.

On the road outside the site, small groups of activists worked in shifts, maintaining a vigil.

``It seems so wrong that it's hard for me to believe somebody's not going to hear what we're saying,'' said Feather Sebree, an activist from nearby Bedford. ``I keep hoping somebody will say, 'We're making a mistake here.'''

Next to her, an off-duty sheriff's officer worked as part of the 24-hour security the construction company has put in place.

In the past in Bloomington and surrounding counties, radical environmental groups like the Earth Liberation Front have sabotaged heavy equipment and committed other acts of vandalism in an attempt to stop urban sprawl.

--------

Kenyan Police Prevent Authorized Rally

New York Times
July 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Kenya-Political-Violence.html

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Police used tear gas to prevent demonstrators from taking part in a rally Saturday and arrested two men after they planted a tree to commemorate victims of the struggle for multiparty democracy in Kenya.

The government offered assurances Friday that the opposition rally at the Kamakunji grounds could go ahead as planned, and it was not immediately clear why police moved in to block the protest.

But opponents of President Daniel arap Moi have tried to assemble at the site every year since 1990, when police shot and killed at least 17 people during a rally to promote multiparty politics, and every year police have prevented them from doing so.

At least 150 riot police blocked access to Kamakunji, just outside of downtown Nairobi, on Saturday. When the demonstrators tried to enter the grounds, police fired tear gas and chased them away. It was not immediately clear if anyone was injured.

Environmental activist Wangari Maathai and opposition legislator James Orengo were taken into custody after planting a tree and saying prayers in Nairobi's Uhuru (Freedom) Park, police said on condition of anonymity.

``These arrests are in violation of the freedom given to us by God and the constitution of Kenya to assemble peacefully,'' opposition legislator Moses Muihia told reporters. ``There is no offense. Kenyans have been planting trees for centuries.''

The police spokesman was unavailable for comment.

Since the repeal in 1997 of colonial-era laws designed to restrict public assembly, police permits have not been required for public rallies.

Kenya's first multiparty elections since 1964 were held in 1992. Moi, who has been in power since 1978, easily won election in 1992 and 1997. He is obliged by Kenya's constitution to step down next year at the end of his second five-year elected term, but he hasn't confirmed that he will do so.


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