------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
North Korea to Stick to Missile Moratorium
Allies Join Pentagon Research on Zapping Missiles
Russian Tries to Pierce Missile Shield With Charm
U.S., Russia Officials Talk Defense
Remote Nevada mountain at center of nuclear waste dispute

MILITARY
Macedonia Rebels Attack Police
Serbia Says Policemen Killed by 'Terrorists'
Officials: Mass Quarantines Likely if America Faced Bioterrorism Attack
US threatens Colombia's aid
Spraying poison in Colombia
Rumsfeld Says Iraq Has Improved Its Air Defenses
Cheney backs Israeli assassinations
Israelis Attack Police Headquarters
Fishermen Stall Vieques Bombing
RADIO SHOW - BANNING SPACE-BASED WEAPONS
Bush backs away from international ban on land mines

OTHER
Bill Would Ban Execution of Retarded
Senate moves ahead with agenda on global warming
Britain Stem Cell Stance Evolves

ACTIVISTS
Police, Protesters Clash in Germany
Peace Activists March in Israel


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- korea

North Korea to Stick to Missile Moratorium

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international/russia-korea-north-mo.html?searchpv=reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Saturday that his country was no "rogue state" menacing global security and would stick to a moratorium on ballistic missile launches until 2003.

A declaration signed by Kim and Putin called their meeting an "historic landmark in efforts to strengthen peace and security in the Asia-Pacific region and the world," and dismissed U.S. fears of Pyongyang's nuclear missile capability.

"North Korea asserts that its missile program is peaceful in nature and does not present a threat to any nation respecting North Korea's sovereignty," the proclamation said.

"The disputed issues which exist in the world should be decided in a peaceful, political, negotiated way, on the basis of non-confrontation." The declaration further stressed the "right of every state to the same degree of safety."

Kim arrived in Moscow on Friday after a nine-day train journey across vast Russia from his homeland. His first known foreign visit outside China has been conducted under stifling security, which disrupted traffic throughout Moscow.

Little of his program has been made public. But before his Kremlin talks he adhered to communist tradition by visiting the Red Square mausoleum of Soviet state founder Vladimir Lenin.

North Korea, like Iran and Iraq, figures prominently on the list of "rogue states" cited by the administration of President Bush to buttress plans to build a defense shield against missile attacks. Russia and China are leading opponents of the plan, saying it could cause a new arms race.

Sergei Prikhodko, Putin's top foreign policy adviser, said Kim had given assurances on missile tests during the talks.

"North Korea is prepared to adhere to its stated 2003 moratorium on launching ballistic missiles," Prikhodko said.

The pledge restates a 1999 commitment by North Korea to suspend testing and export of missiles while seeking to improve ties with the United States under Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton.

Pyongyang first renewed the pledge in May during talks with Sweden's prime minister, a rare Western visitor to North Korea.

SEOUL-MOSCOW RAIL LINK

Kim and Putin reaffirmed their commitment to upholding the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which both see as under threat from Washington's multi-billion dollar shield plan.

Russia also backed reunification of North and South Korea but would not interfere in the process, and "understood" Pyongyang's insistence on the withdrawal of U.S. troops from South Korean territory.

Prikhodko said Kim and Putin wanted to upgrade the rail infrastructure on the Korean peninsula and link it to Russia's Trans-Siberian network. This could halve to 10 days the time it takes Seoul to get its exports to Western markets.

Without giving details, Prikhodko said both sides would cooperate to overhaul Pyongyang's crumbling industrial complex, much of which was built with Soviet money and expertise.

He also mentioned projects in energy and mining. Prikhodko said military-technical cooperation had not been discussed at length, but may be later between the countries' experts.

STALINIST KIM VISITS LENIN

Kim started his day by laying a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier and then sweeping into a deserted Red Square in a convoy of 15 cars, led by his Russian-made Zil limousine.

Beneath sharpshooters stationed on Kremlin towers, Kim advanced to the red-and-black marble mausoleum and laid a wreath with a band reading in Korean: "Kim Jong-il -- V.I. Lenin."

Kim entered the mausoleum for a few minutes before returning to his limousine and proceeding a few hundred yards further for talks with Putin.

The Dear Leader had overnight swapped his 21-carriage armored train for a suite in the Kremlin, where his father and veteran North Korean leader Kim Il-sung had slept in 1984.

On Sunday, Kim is scheduled to visit Russia's mission control center and the Khrunichev space technology firm, both near Moscow, before heading for Russia's second city, St. Petersburg.

-------- missile defense

Allies Join Pentagon Research on Zapping Missiles
Joint Programs Concentrate on Theater Defense

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 4, 2001; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A23429-2001Aug2.html

While the Bush administration's missile defense plans have triggered opposition in Europe and Asia, at least half a dozen countries are cooperating with the Defense Department on research projects that could play an important role in America's anti-missile system.

Most of the joint research with Germany, Italy, Japan, Israel and other countries is on theater missile defenses. These are weapons designed to protect a modest amount of territory or a cluster of warships from short- and medium-range missiles.

But the Bush administration hopes that theater missile defenses eventually can be expanded and linked as part of a "layered" shield to protect the entire United States, as well as U.S. allies and troops abroad, from intercontinental ballistic missiles.

The Pentagon is developing a short-range missile defense system with Germany and Italy. It is working on both a medium-range theater defense and a high-energy laser with Israel. It has signed an agreement with Japan for research on advanced missile components, and it is discussing joint research with Britain on sophisticated radar, a senior Navy official said.

The Clinton and Bush administrations also have raised the prospect of technical cooperation with Russia. Experts inside and outside government said the latest radar, laser and infrared sensor technologies are so highly classified that they are likely to be shared only with close allies.

But with Washington and Moscow poised to begin talks on replacing the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibits nationwide defenses against long-range missiles, a senior defense official said he would not rule out some cooperation with the Russians on missile defense. Both sides might have something to gain.

"We probably have to have a discussion with the Russians and let them tell us a little bit more about their missile defense technology," the official said. "The Russians are reported to have considerable laser infrastructure that may be applicable to the missile defense mission."

Russia's most advanced theater missile defense system, the S-300, uses an explosive warhead to knock down incoming short-range missiles. According to the Pentagon, that "blast fragmentation" technology is a generation behind American "hit-to-kill" systems, which depend on a collision.

Hit-to-kill technology, the Pentagon official said, is probably something Moscow would like to learn about, given Russia's interest in missile defense. "The Russians live in a really bad neighborhood," the official said.

Michael E. O'Hanlon, a Brookings Institution analyst and author of a book on missile defense, said he could envision the United States and Russia cooperating to develop booster rockets for advanced missile defenses, because boosters are another area in which the Russians have great expertise.

Once the talks start, O'Hanlon said, the Bush administration could tell the Russians, " 'If you want to develop the booster, we'll pay you to do it.' "

O'Hanlon said the allies working with the United States on theater missile defenses are not being hypocritical when they oppose President Bush's plan for a national missile shield, which they see as undermining arms control agreements. But the joint research, he said, shows that "the Europeans have conceded the point already that missile defense makes sense."

Germany and Italy are working with the Pentagon to develop the Medium Extended Air Defense System, or MEADS, a highly mobile system to protect troops who are sent to faraway hot spots.

A $216 million contract was issued last month for the initial design of MEADS, which is intended to knock down short-range missiles. It is the first defense initiative ever begun on the basis of technical requirements devised by the Pentagon and its international partners.

The Navy is working with Germany, Italy and the Netherlands as part of a group convened in April 1999 to look into sea-based theater missile defenses, according to the senior Navy official.

Another initiative, the official said, involves discussions between the U.S. and British navies to develop software for a tracking system that combines S-band radar, used for detecting missile launches, and X-band radar, used to distinguish among multiple objects in a "cluttered" environment.

Meanwhile, the United States and Japan signed a memorandum of understanding in August 1999 for Japanese scientists to pursue technologies for an advanced sea-based interceptor, including ceramics for lightweight nose cones and two-color infrared sensors. The memo was signed a year after North Korea launched a Taepodong-1 rocket that flew over Japan before plummeting into the Pacific.

"The Japanese are very good in the focal plane arrays, the same kind of technologies you would use in digital cameras," the Navy official said. "Some of the capability that the Japanese have in ceramics is at least as good and in some cases more advanced than what we do in the United States."

But the Pentagon's most advanced partnership on missile defenses is with Israel. The two countries have developed the Arrow to shoot down medium-range ballistic missiles. They also have devised the Tactical High Energy Laser, which may soon be deployed to try to knock out Katyusha rockets fired across Israel's northern border from Lebanon.

The laser weapon, which generates intense light beams through a chemical process that combines deuterium and fluoride, has downed more than 20 Katyushas in recent tests at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Meanwhile, in a test last September, the Arrow intercepted a missile fired from an F-15 over the Mediterranean in a trajectory simulating a Scud B missile. According to Pentagon officials, the United States has covered about 60 percent of the $2 billion cost of developing the Arrow, designed to intercept Iran's Shahab missiles, which have a range of about 1,200 miles.

Indeed, Washington's cooperation with Israel has the potential to create a new kind of proliferation issue -- involving missile defense technologies -- as Israeli officials mull Turkey's interest in buying the Arrow. While the sale would require U.S. approval, Israel has not yet asked for consideration of such a deal, an Israeli official said.

"The fact that the Bush administration is talking about missile defense in global terms has softened some of the opposition," said Baker Spring, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "Missile defense is going to become an important element in cementing our alliance relationships. I definitely see the two going hand in hand.

-------

Russian Tries to Pierce Missile Shield With Charm

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By ADAM CLYMER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/04/international/europe/04MISS.html?searchpv=nytToday

PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 3 - While his colleagues in Russia were preparing for another traditional diplomatic clash over missile defenses next week in Washington, Oleg D. Chernov was trying a different tack - "P.R."

From Harvard to Stanford, and from Senate hideaways to West Coast mansions, the 49-year-old Russian official was busy telling anyone who would listen that the Bush administration was misleading Americans about Russia's determination not to abandon the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

Reluctant to take off his suit jacket at the Portola Valley home of Walter Shorenstein, a real estate magnate and major Democratic fund-raiser, Mr. Chernov hardly looked the part of a lobbyist. But he sought to charm his audience of industrialists by praising the American willingness to listen to different points of view.

Still, when 92-year-old Ernest Gallo, the winemaker, tried to discuss Russian wines, Mr. Chernov, a senior adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin, had to concede that there was not much to talk about.

Russian leaders are more accustomed to pressing their arguments with their American counterparts face to face. But the weeklong visit by Mr. Chernov, deputy secretary of Russia's security council, reflected a sense that public opinion affects American policy, and that the Genoa agreement to discuss defensive and offensive missiles had been seen in the United States - as it had been by some of Mr. Putin's critics in Moscow - as a major Russian concession.

Many of his listeners seemed taken by his argument, but not all. In Washington, Senator Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican who breakfasted with Mr. Chernov on Wednesday, said he was disappointed by Russian rigidity.

"We have decided that we're not going to be constrained by the ABM treaty," Senator Cochran said. "We're beyond that, but the Russians don't want to admit it."

Mr. Chernov's experience of 10 years as a television correspondent in Berlin, while an agent of the K.G.B., did not lead him to hold news conferences or offer sound bites. Nor were photographers invited to record a cable car ride in San Francisco or a visit to the U.S.S. Constitution in Boston Harbor. All his audiences were invited and assured that they would not be quoted. And he asked the senators and representatives he met not to quote him - although some did anyhow.

Having this correspondent travel with him was his only step toward making his argument to a broad public instead of just to potential opinion leaders.

Mr. Chernov will not be taking part in the military talks planned to begin in Washington on Tuesday. But he was careful to speak optimistically about their prospects.

He said he was more sorry than angry about the United States position, an emotion he expressed when he told Stanford faculty members at lunch on Thursday that their former colleague, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, had declared to the Russians that the ABM treaty would be discarded. He said her remarks in Moscow last week amounted to: "The decision is made. Forget it."

Even so, he gamely insisted to the businessmen that evening, "As far as the ABM treaty, I am sure that a final decision has not yet been made by the United States."

Mr. Chernov explained to his audiences, who included Harvard and Stanford scholars, businessmen and think-tank leaders, that he hoped that the complexities of the issues and the need for a patient approach would become clearer to Americans as the talks proceeded.

The week was not spent entirely on policy matters but included some old-fashioned tourism - without photo opportunities. For example, while the age of buildings in Boston did not impress Mr. Chernov, Revolutionary War sites did. After all, Lexington and Concord came 142 years before the Russian Revolution.

Outside Faneuil Hall on Monday, he looked impressed and observed, "Lenin was second," then corrected himself to give credit to the revolution in France in 1789.

Much of his trip had a strong Kennedy flavor. For while Mr. Chernov chose the timing of his visit, he was here at the invitation of Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who has maintained personal connections with Soviet and Russian leaders since the mid-70's.

Mr. Kennedy's former chief of staff, Dr. Larry Horowitz, who is now a movie producer here, arranged the schedule and traveled with Mr. Chernov. The other Russian along was Andrei Pavlov, a Moscow official who has been Mr. Kennedy's contact there since his 1974 meeting with Leonid I. Brezhnev.

Mr. Chernov visited the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and the John F. Kennedy Library. At the museum, and again when he lunched in Senator Kennedy's Capitol hideaway on Wednesday, he praised the senator's brother, John F. Kennedy, as the first American president to seek to break the grip of the cold war.

But he was most visibly impressed by a floating monument of an earlier war, the sailing ship Constitution. Though he used interpreters and Mr. Pavlov on most of his trip, he exclaimed, "Wow!" when told how the warship Hat gotten the nickname "Old Ironsides" when British cannonballs bounced off its oaken hull in the War of 1812.

In an interview, he called the obvious pride of the crew aboard the ship the most impressive sight of his trip.

Mr. Chernov said the main purposes of his visit were, first, to show Americans that Russia was now led by a "new generation which wants to continue social progress without revolution," and not a nation of "bandits and corruption."

Second, he said, he came to explain that "strategic stability" is essential to good relations with the United States and progress at home. The cornerstone of that stability is keeping the 1972 ABM treaty in force, he said.

But he also complained that adding more nations to NATO, especially the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, seemed like an effort to isolate Russia with something like "Stalin's fence," as he called the Iron Curtain at Harvard on Monday.

Abandoning the treaty, he said in the interview, would create problems for President Putin, forcing a reconsideration of scheduled military cuts, costing scarce funds and enabling Communists and others to say he had been fooled by expressions of American good will.

Moreover, as he told Mr. Cochran and other senators on Wednesday, abandoning the treaty would lead other nuclear powers who relied on it as the cornerstone of arms control to re-examine their allegiance to a whole series of other pacts, including nuclear nonproliferation and bans on poison gas and germ warfare.

-------- russia

U.S., Russia Officials Talk Defense

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Russia-US.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- President Bush's national security adviser and Russia's defense minister discussed their countries' dispute over American missile defense proposals in a phone conversation Saturday.

Condoleezza Rice and Sergei Ivanov expressed confidence in cooperation efforts, continuing discussions that began during the security adviser's visit to Moscow last week, the ITAR-Tass and Interfax news agency quoted the Russian Defense Ministry as saying.

They also discussed coming talks in Washington on Tuesday and Wednesday between U.S. and Russian defense officials.

Rice said after returning from Moscow that Russia might share defense plans with the United States and buy American missile technology if a new strategic framework is worked out in those talks.

The talks are the first in a series designed to implement the agreement Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin reached last month in Genoa, Italy. It linked U.S. plans for a missile defense system -- which Russia strongly opposes -- with large cuts the Kremlin wants made in the two nations' still-massive nuclear weapons arsenals.

No other details of the Saturday conversation were available. It came hours after a meeting in the Kremlin between Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. Washington says it needs the anti-missile shield to protect against countries such as North Korea and Iraq.

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

-------- nevada

Remote Nevada mountain at center of nuclear waste dispute

By SCOTT CANON -
The Kansas City Star
Date: 08/04/01 22:15
http://www.kcstar.com/item/pages/printer.pat,local/3accdf07.804,.html

AMARGOSA VALLEY, Nevada -- Watch jackrabbits jerk across the bleak and baked landscape above the tunnel most likely to swallow America's nuclear leftovers, and the view alone seems to parch the throat.

And though rain is uncommon here -- 7 inches a year on average -- it does fall and work its way ever so slowly through the few tight faults and fissures in the volcanic rock of Yucca Mountain.

The rugged few who populate the Amargosa Valley worry that it is enough to penetrate the work of both man and nature to create a disaster neither could undo.

"The mountain leaks like a sieve," said Kalynda Tilges, an activist joined with other Nevadans in trying to stop Yucca Mountain from being stuffed with nuclear waste.

As those locals worry about contamination in their back yard far in the future, they emphasize that getting highly radioactive waste to Yucca Mountain means shipping it by your front porch tomorrow.

By the U.S. Department of Energy's estimates, for instance, Kansas City could see two truckloads roll through town every day for 24 years.

Defenders of Yucca Mountain's ability to contain the country's nuclear detritus counter that it will be safe -- and certainly safer than leaving the waste scattered across the United States at nuclear plants.

Environmentalists and others, they insist, simply sound false alarms about the Nevada site as a ploy to keep the nuclear industry from opening new plants -- not because the science suggests real flaws in the plans for Yucca Mountain.

"Sure, there's risk with anything," said Cash Jaszczak, who works with one of the contractors studying the mountain. "But this thing will work. The geology is right, and the technology is right."

Yucca Mountain has been tagged for more than 20 years as a possible waste site. Should Congress approve the plan, a nearly constant flow of shipments would start in 2010.

Yet the issue is far from settled.

President Bush needs the site approved if his plan to recharge the nation's electricity supply with more nuclear plants is to surpass pure fantasy. But the second-most-powerful Senate Democrat is from Nevada -- positioned and determined to block the waste plan.

And consider that the 2000 race for the U.S. Senate had John Ashcroft and Mel Carnahan at one point quibbling over who was the most ferocious opponent of nuclear shipments through Missouri.

Back and forth the argument goes.

Environmentalists argue that it is unsafe to move the waste along Interstate 70 or to store it inside Nevada rock. They multiply the annual 7 inches of rain by 10,000 years -- the time federal law says the site must hold tight -- factor in the fissures of the mostly solid rock, and say the mountain could sprout a radioactive disaster.

Yucca Mountain champions respond that almost no water passes through the mountain. What does trickle through moves at the pace of the ages. And should it penetrate the storage chambers, it would confront the sturdiest of tanks holding waste already transformed into solids of glass or ceramic.

Think, they say, of trying to dissolve your toilet in water.

`The biggest issue'

The stakes in the scientific debate rank no smaller than the future of nuclear power.

Until a waste site is cleared, says nearly everyone in the field, no utility is likely to plunge ahead with plans to build another nuclear plant. After all, who wants to be responsible for looking after highly toxic trash that federal law says must be kept safe for eons?

That is why discussion of Yucca Mountain can be so, well, radioactive.

"It's a key for both sides," said Michael Mariotte, the executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an anti-nuclear power, anti-Yucca Mountain group. "Waste disposal is the biggest issue facing the industry."

Speaking for itself, the industry says objections to storing waste at Yucca Mountain grow from opposition to nuclear power -- not from the $4.5 billion of study spent on the site. Its view is that the mountain doesn't leak and that the engineering at the site will keep radiation locked in casks as tight as anything man has designed.

"We see it as purely a political issue," said Melanie White, spokeswoman for the pro-nuke Nuclear Energy Institute. Its members -- in costs passed on to virtually anyone in America who uses electricity -- have contributed to a fund that has spent $6 billion to study waste disposal and has set aside $16 billion to eventually operate a site.

Although the newest nuclear power plant started kicking out power in 1996, the last order for such a generator came during the Carter administration.

The federal government started out studying a handful of possible repositories -- places in Washington state, Texas and Kansas. But several years ago in what is described around here as the "Screw Nevada Bill,"Congress told the Department of Energy to put all its effort into Yucca Mountain.

The site is remote -- Las Vegas, the closest metropolitan area, sits 100 miles away -- and in an area where nearly all the acreage is undeveloped and government-owned.

Next door sits Nellis Air Force Base -- arid ground pockmarked by years of use as a bombing range -- and the Nevada Test Site, where America for years tested the might of its nuclear warheads.

But water wells drawing from an underground reservoir 1,000 feet below the Amargosa Valley turn patches of the desert -- virtually invisible from atop Yucca Mountain -- a luminescent green. They produce fields of grain, nurture orchards and replenish dairy cattle by the thousands, with each animal slurping up to 50 gallons of water a day.

Nevadans see the state as a choice made of political convenience -- believing a sparsely populated state was picked because it lacked much clout to fight back. They see it as unfair because no nuclear plants sit in the state. (During peak demand periods, Nevadans pull a small amount of their electricity from nuclear plants in other western states. Nuclear plants churn out a fifth of the nation's electricity.)

"People look out on that mountaintop, and they talk about how desolate and uninhabited it is out here," said pistachio farmer Ralph McCracken, setting up a line he has become fond of. "I guess that makes me an uninhabitant."

Both sides of the issue expect the Department of Energy to tell President Bush this year that Nevada can safely hold the country's nuclear waste. Bush, in turn, is expected to agree and send the matter to Congress.

Conceivably, that could lead to a license application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by 2003, approval as soon as 2005 and operation by 2010.

The consensus is that Bush could coax the Republican-led House his way. The Senate won't prove so easy.

When Democrats seized control there earlier this year, Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada won the gavel to a key appropriations committee. And opposition to Yucca Mountain is mandatory for political success in Nevada. Attending a recent fund-raising event for Reid, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle vowed that the Democrats would not let Yucca Mountain consent move ahead.

Indeed, in mid-July the Senate passed a resolution slashing in half the money for ongoing operations at Yucca Mountain.

The Nuclear Energy Institute's president, Joe Colvin, described the move as a blow to "scientific decision making." The anti-nuke lobby, meanwhile, cheered.

So the outcome of the 2002 congressional elections could determine whether the nation is ready to open its first permanent nuclear waste dump -- and to chart the future of nuclear power in America.

Current storage

Decades ago, fission was trumpeted as an inexhaustible font of the country's power needs -- a source of electricity that would be "too cheap to meter."

But put into practice, nuclear energy proved something short of a power panacea. After a partial core meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, far tighter regulations sent the cost of building and erecting the plants soaring.

Now the dilemma of disposal nags at the industry. Consider the Callaway plant run by AmerenUE in central Missouri. As it generates enough electricity to power 750,000 homes, the nuclear generator there has new fuel rod assemblies put in place every 18 months.

When that happens, spent fuel rod assemblies -- the nuclear waste -- move through a short indoor canal into a pool about 50 feet deep turned a surreal teal by neutron-absorbing boron.

Each spent fuel assembly is made up of pencil-thick metal rods filled with eraser-sized pellets of waste. Bundled together they measure 12 feet long by 81/2 inches wide and stand racked together vertically in the pool.

When the plant opened in 1984, plans called for beginning to move some of the waste by 2004. But no one expects a nuclear dump open by then. So two years ago the plant rearranged the underwater racks more tightly -- now the assemblies have a quarter-inch to spare for a fuel assembly instead of an inch. The resulting setup means Callaway has room enough for the waste it will have created through 2024, when its license is due to expire.

"We don't have any crisis," said John Blosser, the utility's manager of regulatory affairs at the plant. "But it's a long-term issue that's pretty important. We'll need to get rid of it eventually."

Other plants across the country have moved their older waste into dry casks outdoors, and some waste has been shipped from older plants with little storage space to newer plants with room.

So, contrary to the plans of the industry in its infancy, the plants have become de facto dumps for storing their own waste.

Critics of the Yucca Mountain idea say that for now, the safest thing is to leave the waste where it is, wait for the scientific understanding of nuclear waste to mature and move the stuff with more confidence later.

"The plants are already dumps. Keep it there," said Wenonah Hauter, director of energy and environment programs for the anti-nuclear Public Citizen. "Making thousands of shipments only makes things worse."

Two plans -- at best, preliminary -- call for moving the waste to Yucca Mountain either over highways or mostly by rail. Waste would be moved from the Wolf Creek plant operated by Western Resources Inc. and Kansas City Power & Light Co. about 100 miles southwest of Kansas City along with that from the AmerenUE-owned Callaway plant.

Shipments would pass by, too, from points east.

"We'll be prepared and safe here for anything that comes near," said Stephen Cloobeck, who is leading the ad hoc Save Nevada group of businesses and casino interests lobbying against waste storage at Yucca Mountain. "But is every town along these routes ready for a nuclear disaster? Are their fire departments prepared? Anything we do here, you'd better have ready in your town."

The nuclear industry and the Department of Energy, however, have great faith in the durability of the shipping casks. They've doused prototypes in burning fuel and rammed them with locomotives running full tilt. Each test, they say, has proved them practically indestructible.

High-level nuclear waste is already shipped in the country. Most of it comes from military submarine reactors, and some shipments involve moving waste from one plant to another. Of about 2,000 shipments -- typically taking shorter routes than to Nevada -- eight have been involved in accidents that released small amounts of radioactivity.

That accident number serves as fodder for both sides. Nuclear critics cite the number as evidence that sooner or later something will go more seriously wrong. Boosters counter that accidents were expected and that there has been no leak of truly dangerous radiation, and no leak at all since 1981.

The Nevada plan

If waste ever arrives at Yucca Mountain, it will be placed in chambers 25 feet tall carved from the side of a five-mile underground tunnel. Plans call for the chambers to be filled with 70,000 metric tons of waste over 24 years before being plugged up with concrete.

Now there is only the tunnel, chewed out of the mountain to test the rock.

Train tracks run down its center, a conveyor belt along its side. Barrel-size ventilation tubes hang from overhead. Near the tunnel's deepest probe into Yucca Mountain -- the rock is really more of a ridge in a desert mountain range -- a sealed room roasts with electric heaters around the clock.

The heaters are standing in for nuclear waste. Once casts are packed in and the site sealed off, scientists predict the heat from their radioactivity will cook the rock so much that the tiny drops of water trapped in the rock will boil for an estimated 1,565 years.

Department of Energy scientists expect that heat will push the water away from the chambers and dry out the rock while the waste gradually loses its radioactivity.

If water does drip into the chambers, it will first hit thick plates of titanium -- drip shields draped over the casks like high-tech carports as part of a heavily engineered series of deliberately redundant structures aimed at protecting the waste.

Critics seize on the faith put in those systems as a chief flaw in making a nuclear dump out of Yucca Mountain. The idea, they remind, was to use the existing rock for safety. Man-made reinforcements were added to make up for the faults and fissures that earthquakes have created over time.

"We believe that (the Department of Energy) has virtually conceded all of the site suitability concerns that we've raised," said Bob Loux, the executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects. "So now they're trying to beef up the container."

And Loux said faith should not be put into something required by law to last 10,000 years -- and to hold materials such as plutonium 239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years -- when nothing man-made has been tested beyond a fraction of that.

Government nuclear engineers such as Richard Spence -- they like to call Yucca Mountain the world's most-studied real estate -- concede that for the first 10 millenniums the chief protection from pollution will be human engineering rather than the natural rock barrier.

"But this isn't something that's just thrown together," Spence said. There are intense tests of materials. Those combine with myriad computer models, hundreds of test wells and the massive hillside tunnel that plumbs Yucca Mountain. "This will be safe."

Yet with every draft environmental impact statement, transportation preview or public hearing that Yucca Mountain's scientists crank out, the scattering of nearby residents find cause for worry and skepticism.

Ed Goedhart manages Ponderosa Dairies, which consumes a third of the water used in the valley to keep roughly 8,000 Holsteins fit and productive. Much of the milk is marketed as organic, so Goedhart grows anxious that the dairy's milk would take on even the perception of contamination.

"We're worried that the decision was made long ago to put (the waste) here," Goedhart said. "It's the needs of the many put before the needs of a few."

To reach Scott Canon, national correspondent, call (816) 234-4754 or send e-mail to scanon@kcstar.com.

On the Web

To learn more about nuclear waste, go to The Star online at www.kansascity.com.

-------- MILITARY

-------- balkans

Macedonia Rebels Attack Police

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Macedonia.html

OHRID, Macedonia (AP) -- Ethnic Albanian rebels lobbed mortars at Macedonian police positions near the country's second largest city Saturday, straining a shaky truce that has coincided with peace talks, state radio reported.

News of the cease-fire violations came as a key European envoy announced plans to travel to Macedonia to bolster Western peace efforts for the troubled Balkan nation.

EU security chief Javier Solana will fly from Ukraine to Macedonia on Sunday to attend the talks at the lake resort of Ohrid, said his spokesman, Christina Gallach.

``He wants to support the negotiations at this particular moment,'' she said. ``We hope for final progress as soon as possible.''

The rebels launched several gun and mortar attacks against Macedonian police positions near the northwestern, mostly ethnic Albanian-populated city of Tetovo, Macedonia's state-run radio said Saturday. There were no reports of casualties.

The often-violated truce was signed last month in order to make it possible for talks to start between majority Macedonians and the ethnic Albanians.

The talks on a complex, Western-designed peace plan are focusing now on increasing the number of ethnic Albanians in the country's police force. Western mediators discussed deploying dozens of foreign police experts and officers to help carry out reforms if the rival sides agree on a peace plan, officials said while speaking on condition of anonymity.

The officers and experts would come on top of the estimated 3,000 NATO troops that the proposed peace plan envisages to help disarm the ethnic Albanian rebels.

Ethnic Albanians are demanding that their sizable community -- nearly a third of Macedonia's 2 million people -- be proportionately represented in police forces, especially in areas where they are the majority.

They also want to independently elect police chiefs who would answer to local leaders rather than the central government in the capital, Skopje. The ethnic Albanians also demand that the rebels become members of the police force once a peace deal is reached.

Macedonians see these demands as part of an ethnic Albanian strategy to ultimately carve off and break away northwestern regions where the restive minority lives and where the rebels already control chunks of territory.

Several Macedonian-populated villages in the area have been cut off for days by the rebels. Authorities dispatched a humanitarian convoy Saturday with 40 tons of food and medicine.

But a few hundred local ethnic Albanian civilians stopped the convoy around noon and refused to let the aid reach 2,400 Macedonians, said a relief worker with the convoy, Saso Klekovski. The convoy returned to the capital, Skopje.

The insurgency, which began in February, has left dozens dead and thousands displaced. The rebels say they are fighting for more rights.

Talks to end the crisis have dragged on for about a month.

Ukraine's Foreign Minister, Anatoliy Zlenko, is also scheduled to attend Sunday's session, Macedonian President Boris Trajkovski's office said. The visit could not be independently confirmed.

President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, traveled to Ukraine last month to win assurances that Ukraine -- Macedonia's key arms supplier -- would stop the sales.

Ukraine has promised to ``consider'' stopping weapons supplies but pledged to continue military-technical cooperation with Macedonia, according to a Foreign Ministry statement last week.

--------

Serbia Says Policemen Killed by 'Terrorists'

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-yugosla.html

BELGRADE (Reuters) - Serbia accused Albanian ``terrorists'' on Saturday of killing two of its policemen, and the U.N. refugee agency warned that the incident threatened to undermine fragile peace in the south of the country.

Two Serb policemen were killed and two others wounded in the attack late on Friday in the village of Muhovac in the Presevo Valley region of southern Serbia, a government official said.

It was the first serious clash in the remote and hilly area east of U.N.-governed Kosovo since a 16-month-long local Albanian guerrilla insurgency ended in May.

The Presevo Valley lies north of Macedonia, where government forces have clashed sporadically with a different Albanian guerrilla group over the last five months.

Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Nebojsa Covic, who rushed to the scene of the killing, said Serbia would fight ``terrorism'' with all available means, adding that police would undertake house-to-house searches watched by international monitors.

``What happened last night...is not an outburst of nationalism or extremism. It is an obvious form of terrorism and we will use all means available to deal with terrorists,'' the official Tanjug news agency quoted Covic as saying.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugeesstrongly condemned the attack on a police post as a ``grave criminal act'' threatening to undermine hard-won stability in the Presevo Valley, which has a large Albanian population.

``This is a cowardly act which does not serve the people of southern Serbia, many of whom have finally been able to return to their homes after nearly two years of displacement in Kosovo,'' said Eric Morris, special UNHCR envoy in the Balkans.

The refugee agency added in a statement it was concerned the incident would dampen its refugee return efforts in southern Serbia. About 5,000 Albanian villagers have returned to their homes since peace returned less than three months ago.

Miodrag Miljkovic, a spokesman for a government-run press office in the regional center of Bujanovac, told reporters that policemen Dragan Brcarevic and Miodrag Mladenovic, both from the eastern Serbian town of Kladovo, died in the attack.

Two were wounded, one of them seriously, he said.

A police statement said Albanian ``terrorists'' using automatic rifles attacked police performing regular duties at around 10:30 p.m. local on Friday.

A guerrilla group known as the Liberation Army of Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB) agreed in May to disarm under a NATO-brokered deal in return for political and economic measures to benefit the region's large Albanian community.

A leading former guerrilla official said the disbanded group was not involved in Friday's incident. ``We have no idea what happened, the UCPMB has nothing to do with this,'' the official told Reuters in Albanian-dominated Kosovo.

-------- biological weapons

Officials: Mass Quarantines Likely if America Faced Bioterrorism Attack

August 4, 2001
FoxNews
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,31376,00.html

CHICAGO - In an America that guards its civil liberties, police can't just shut down cities, make mass arrests and quarantine thousands of people. Or can they?

Current and former federal officials said Friday that if there is a terrorist attack with biological weapons, private rights would quickly be swamped by the need to protect the public. State borders could close, vaccines could be rationed or commandeered, the Army could even take over cities within weeks of a deadly attack, an American Bar Association panel predicted.

"To an extent, people are going to do what needs to be done and worry about the legal niceties later," said Suzanne Spaulding, a former top lawyer for the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The ABA panel, part of the annual meeting of the 400,000-lawyer organization, played out an imaginary terrorist campaign to infect Americans with the plague - from the first tips by an FBI informant in New Mexico to closure of the Minnesota borders and riots in Cincinnati.

Along the way came word that a rogue Russian scientist and the Iraqi military were involved. Eventually, the FBI, CIA, National Centers for Disease Control, the White House, Pentagon and governors of several states were also involved - each with broader power than many people probably know they have, participants said.

Under the hypothetical scenario, law enforcement could do little when a would-be terrorist shows up at a Santa Fe emergency room with a case of the plague. The investigation intensified, and the FBI got much broader authority, when several people died of the plague after attending a concert in Minneapolis.

Political pressure intensified, with a demand from 20 senators of the opposite political party from the president that the White House declare a national state of emergency. Then came word that the terrorists planned another attack during a street festival in Cincinnati.

Under this scenario, the FBI could go to a special court for permission to investigate foreigners, but could not begin stopping everyone in downtown Cincinnati who resembles a tipster's description of a suspected terrorist, said Eugene Bowman, deputy general counsel for the FBI.

Nor could the FBI order the downtown area cordoned off and every building searched, Bowman said. Agents would need warrants based on better specifics than those offered in the hypothetical terrorist attack.

But local police could do what the FBI cannot, so long as it was based on the need to protect public health, said Terry O'Brien, legal consultant to a national notification network tracking infections diseases.

"The idea is to prevent the epidemic," not to catch and punish a wrongdoer, O'Brien said.

The president could declare martial law and federalize state National Guards, said Michael Wermuth, head of a group advising the government on how well it is preparing for nuclear, chemical or biological terrorism.

The attorney general and the defense secretary could also invoke a federal law that lets them call in soldiers to keep order if police or other law enforcement cannot, Wermuth said.

"The military can be engaged directly in arrests, search and seizure and intelligence collection for law enforcement purposes," Wermuth said. "There's very raw authority to use the military to do any number of things that (look) like law enforcement, or to assist public health authorities by (enforcing) quarantines."

The government would also have the legal power to force people to be immunized, although as a practical matter it is probably impossible, O'Brien said. "What are you going to do, go into somebody's home and tie them up?"

On the other hand, the government could take control of vaccine supplies, even if it meant overriding state governors bent on hoarding their in-state stockpiles, the panelists said.

The hypothetical exercise ended short of the president declaring nationwide martial law, and without the arrest or trial of the terrorists.

-------- colombia

US threatens Colombia's aid

Thursday, 2 August, 2001,
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1471000/1471127.stm

The United States has warned that hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Colombia are at risk because of a court ruling suspending crop-spraying on illegal drug plantations.

The US ambassador to Bogota, Anne Patterson, said that a halt in aerial fumigation - would have what she described as an "immediate and devastating" effect on US support.

Last week, a judge ordered the suspension of spraying operations, which are financed heavily by the Americans, on indigenous Indian lands on health grounds.

Correspondents say the US is horrified by the prospect of a protracted legal battle over the crop-spraying, which they see as the only way to curb record levels of cocaine production.

But opponents of the US fumigation programme, in which chemicals are sprayed across large swathes of the country, are jubilant.

Ban

After indigenous communities filed an injunction, Judge Gilberto Reyes, a circuit judge in Bogota blocked continued spraying in Indian reserves.

Colombia's Justice Minister, Romulo Gonzalez has said the government will fight to overturn the ruling.

"It contravenes Colombian law which orders the destruction of all illegal crops and for growers of drug crops to be punished," he said.

The anti-narcotics police chief has also ordered spraying to continue in other areas after the court clarified its ruling

However, a high-level commission of Colombian governors and politicians has gone to the United States to air worries about the programme.

"The fumigation policy is crazy and must be stopped because it is unproductive and damaging to the environment and human rights," said Senator Rafael Orduz earlier this week.

The UN and the World Health Organisation have asked for fumigation to be suspended whilst they set up an international monitoring body to study the its effects.

Aid warning

The BBC's Jeremy McDermott says their anti-spraying campaign's jubilation may evaporate in the light of the US threat to halt aid.

Last year President Clinton visited Colombia and delivered a package worth $1.3bn mostly military aid, to President Pastrana's Plan Colombia, designed to fight the drugs trade and get the country back on its feet.

President Pastrana, politically isolated and with his approval rating hovering at just 20%, cannot afford to lose US support.

Our correspondent says his order to the government lawyers must be very clear: overturn the ruling on the suspension of fumigation, and do it now.

--------

Spraying poison in Colombia

Published August 4, 2001
Chicago Tribune
http://chicagotribune.com/news/printedition/chi-0108040025aug04.story?

Children in southern Colombia have developed sores on their skin. Potatoes and onions, a staple of poor families in rural provinces there, are drying out. Colombians have been stricken with bloody diarrhea from contaminated drinking water.

Governors, senators, farmers, Indian groups and others from the region are blaming those ailments, along with environmental and agricultural fallout, on a U.S.-funded anti-narcotics program of aerial fumigation under way there. The U.S. and Colombia dispute the claims that the local population is at risk from an American-made chemical--glyphosate, used in herbicide products like RoundUp--that is being sprayed to eradicate illegal crops of coca and heroin poppy.

But the people on whom the stuff is falling disagree. They want it stopped. They argue that it has harmed communities, livestock, fish and food supplies.

The Bush administration should listen to them. The aerial spraying is a centerpiece of its $1.3 billion Plan Colombia assault on cocaine and heroin production in Colombia. However, after fumigating 128,000 acres of coca, indications are the effort has only succeeded in pushing growers to relocate their crops.

"All of us involved in this process are enemies of narcotrafficking," observed Gov. Parmenio Cuellar of Narino province, one of two governors who recently visited Washington, with Colombian legislators, to lobby for an end to aerial defoliation in their provinces. Instead, they propose a program of manual eradication (such as spraying on the ground), combined with alternative crop development programs. Cuellar said that despite years of fumigation, the size of the coca crop in Colombia has continued expanding. The U.S. General Accounting Office concluded the same thing in a 1999 report.

As for Plan Colombia, Gov. Floro Alberto Tunubala Paja of Cauca province said, "The great majority of Colombians don't agree with it because they were not consulted." Colombia's human rights ombudsman, Eduardo Cifuentes Munoz, has demanded a suspension of fumigation. He questions the lack of an environmental management plan and information about the effects of the chemicals used in the spray.

On top of that, now the United Nations has demanded an audit of the crop-dusting, calling it "ineffective." Neighboring Ecuador has asked that fumigation be kept 6 miles away from its border, due to concerns about the spray drifting.

The health concerns are grave enough. But members of Congress increasingly question U.S. military aid under Plan Colombia, given the Colombian military's human rights record and its links with right-wing paramilitary groups accused of committing 70 percent of the nation's political murders. That violence has grown since U.S. aid started flowing.

President Bush and Colombian President Andres Pastrana invested much in this policy, but it's becoming a disaster.

Bush came into office quite correctly questioning the value of waging war on foreign drug traffickers without a strong program at home to quash demand. What happened? If Plan Colombia proves anything, it's that spending the money in the U.S.--on drug education and treatment programs--would be wiser.

-------- iraq

Rumsfeld Says Iraq Has Improved Its Air Defenses

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/04/international/middleeast/04RUMS.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 - Iraq has rebuilt and even improved its air defenses since American and British planes flew strikes against radar stations and command centers in February, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said today.

"It does appear that Iraq has been successful in quantitatively and qualitatively improving their air defense," Mr. Rumsfeld said during a news conference, at which he also announced that he would travel to Russia next week for talks with Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov.

Administration officials say Iraq has become more aggressive and effective in targeting American and British planes over the no-flight zones in northern and southern Iraq, and has even fired at American planes in the airspace of neighboring countries.

Mr. Rumsfeld refused to be drawn into a discussion of specific plans to strike again at Iraqi targets, but he did say, "One tends to want to do things that will have somewhat more lasting effects."

President Bush's senior national security team convened on Thursday to discuss policy toward Iraq, Mr. Rumsfeld said. Administration and Pentagon officials said today that the policy review had not been completed, and that no decision had been made about mounting a major strike.

In recent days, the Pentagon cataloged Iraqi military actions against American and British aircraft; these "provocations" were defined as firing antiaircraft artillery and surface-to-air missiles, as well as locking onto planes with the radar that controlled those weapons.

There were 370 incidents of that kind by the Iraqi military in the southern zone so far this year, compared with 221 in all of 2000, the Pentagon said. Iraqi provocations in northern Iraq totaled 62 so far this year, compared with 145 last year.

American and British warplanes conducted 19 days of strikes against targets in southern Iraq this year, compared with 32 days in all of last year. In northern Iraq, air strikes were carried out on 7 days so far this year, compared with 48 days in 2000.

The zones were established after the Persian Gulf war in 1991 to protect ethnic groups threatened with repression by Saddam Hussein's government, which has denounced them as infringing on its sovereignty.

Gen. Greg Martin, commander of United States Air Forces Europe, whose planes fly the northern no- flight zone over Iraq, said in an interview today that despite the hazards, pilots and air crews "are dedicated and devoted to the mission."

He said pilots routinely told him that they would rather be flying real missions over Iraq than training runs at their bases back home.

Mr. Rumsfeld also announced that he would depart on Aug. 11 for talks in Moscow with his counterpart to build on discussions between President Bush and President Vladimir V. Putin about proposals for a new security framework reducing nuclear arsenals and building missile defenses.

"There is an awful lot of baggage left over in the relationship, the old relationship, the cold war relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union," he said.

"And that means we've got to go from what was clearly a hostile relationship and a whole set of structures that fit a hostile relationship to something that is much more akin to relationships that are natural and normal and understandable and workable between countries that don't consider themselves hostile to each other." he added.

-------- israel

Cheney backs Israeli assassinations

Sydney Morning Herald
By Mark Lavie, in Jerusalem
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0108/04/world/world1.html

The United States Vice-President, Mr Dick Cheney, says there is "some justification" to Israel's controversial policy of assassinating suspected Palestinian terrorists.

His comment follows an Israeli helicopter strike in the West Bank town of Nablus on Tuesday, which killed eight people including two Hamas militant leaders and two young boys, who were standing nearby.

"If you've got an organisation that has plotted or is plotting some kind of suicide bomber attack, for example, and they have hard evidence of who it is and where they're located, I think there's some justification in their trying to protect themselves by pre-empting," Mr Cheney told Fox News television.

However, the Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, expressed concern about Israel's policy of targeted assassination in a telephone call to the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon.

"[Mr Powell] expressed our concerns about the rocket attack on the apartment building and about targeted killings in general," said the State Department spokesman, Mr Richard Boucher.

Mr Boucher said he had no confirmation that there was a Hamas office inside the building hit by Israeli fire, but said: "We're against this practice of targeted killings, and we're against this particular attack."

On Tuesday Washington denounced the Nablus attack as "highly provocative" and a "new and dangerous escalation of violence" in the Middle East conflict.

Israeli police deployed thousands of officers in Jerusalem yesterday in case of clashes with Palestinians at an Old City holy site where a Palestinian uprising erupted 10 months ago.

The police move followed further violence on Thursday. Palestinians aimed mortar shells at Jewish settlements in Gaza and fired rifles and grenades at Israeli Army positions, the Israeli military said.

Israeli tanks shelled residential areas in central Gaza and moved about 800 metres into Palestinian-controlled territory, Palestinian security officials said.

No injuries were reported. Israeli military sources said a tank chased the Palestinians who were firing the mortars.

A Palestinian security court in the West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday condemned Ahmed Abu Issah, 50, to death by firing squad for collaborating with Israel. He was the third Palestinian sentenced to death this week for helping Israel kill militants.

"I'm guilty, and I'm asking for mercy," said Abu Issah, whose face crumpled in agony as he confessed.

As the judges rejected his plea for clemency at the end of a 90-minute hearing, the spectators in the gallery and hundreds more outside the court roared "execution, execution".

Three other suspected collaborators were shot and killed near their homes this week, and the Fatah group of the Palestinian leader, Mr Yasser Arafat, took responsibility.

Speaking at a military graduation ceremony outside Tel Aviv, Mr Sharon said Israel would continue to hit militants.

"We will continue to strike daily at terrorists and those who send them."

Returning from talks in Rome, Mr Arafat accused Israel of making "a decision of escalation", pointing to the tank incursion in central Gaza and killing of militants.

Earlier, after meeting government leaders and the Pope, Mr Arafat said: "From Rome, I call to stop all forms of violence, including bombardments, and [for] the dispatch of international observers immediately.''

Mr Sharon said Israel must lower its sights in negotiations with the Palestinians. "A clear-eyed outlook of the continued state of animosity," he said, "demands a different approach than the one we have tried so far with the Palestinians.''

--------

Israelis Attack Police Headquarters

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Attack.html

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- Israeli helicopters fired rockets at Palestinian police headquarters in the southern Gaza Strip early Sunday, both sides said.

There were no immediate reports of casualties. The Israeli military said the attack followed repeated mortar attacks by the Palestinians on Jewish settlements and Israeli army outposts.

Palestinian security officials said Israeli helicopters fired four missiles at the national security forces headquarters in the town of Rafah, near the Gaza-Egypt border.

The Israeli military said the helicopter attack followed firing of 26 mortar rounds by the Palestinians.

-------- puerto rico

Fishermen Stall Vieques Bombing

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Puerto-Rico-Vieques.html?ex=997502400&en=c3eb7f9570ac6e12&ei=5040&partner=MOREOVER

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico (AP) -- Thirty fishermen on speedboats invaded restricted waters around the bombing range on Vieques island Saturday, disrupting a third day of ship-to-shore shelling.

The nine speedboats ended up about three miles from two U.S. Navy warships and about 500 feet from amphibious personnel carriers heading toward one of the island's beaches, officials said.

``The U.S. Coast Guard, naval coastal warfare boats and the local police are in the process of chasing them down,'' said Navy spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Katherine Goode. ``But yes, exercises have been stalled.''

Goode said she expected exercises to resume quickly, and at least one warship had already completed its training Saturday.

Since this round of exercises began Thursday, at least 25 people have been detained for allegedly trespassing on federal property.

At dawn Saturday, six members of Puerto Rico's Independence Party were detained after entering a restricted area on the outlying Puerto Rican island, said the group's spokesman, Manuel Rodriguez Orellana.

``This is a war that we have had with them for 60 years,'' said Jose Garcia, a 39-year-old fisherman. ``My grandfather, father and my uncle all fought the same war and the Navy hasn't been able to put us down. The fishermen are the biggest headaches that they have.''

The fishermen, who say the waters around the bombing range are rich with conch, lobster and dolphin, are prohibited from fishing in the restricted areas during the Navy exercises.

The Navy recently announced a program of compensation that would pay fishermen $100 for each day that bombing exercises prevent them working, and grants of up to $25,000 to start small businesses.

But some say it's not enough.

``This is to make them know that this island and these waters are ours,'' said Carlos Maldonado, a 25-year-old fisherman, before he joined Saturday's protests. ``They have to leave.''

The latest Vieques exercises started four days after 70 percent of Vieques residents voted for an immediate end to the bombing in a nonbinding local referendum Sunday. Thirty percent supported the Navy remaining indefinitely and resuming live bombing.

President Bush has promised that the Navy will leave by 2003 but only 1.7 percent of voters among Vieques' 9,100 residents backed his plan.

The exercises, expected to last 10 days, involve ship-to-shore shelling, air-to-ground bombing and beach landings with 23,000 personnel, making the maneuvers some of the biggest since a civilian guard was killed by off-target bombs in 1999, when the Navy began using inert bombs.

The bombing is conducted four miles from civilian areas.

-------- space

RADIO SHOW - BANNING SPACE-BASED WEAPONS

Saturday, Aug. 4, 11 PM - 1 AM PST
GROUND ZERO Radio Show
Audio: http://www.clydelewis.com
Host: Clyde Lewis Guests: Dr. Carol Rosin and Alfred Webre
From: "EcoNews Service" <econews@ecologynews.com>

This program will explore a growing consensus in the world community to ban space based weapons, and to stop an arms race in Outer Space.

According to Reuters, the U.S. Air Force top general, Gen. Michael Ryan, has stated the U.S. plans to place weapons in space for military dominance. U.S. Congressman Kucinich's legislation (see announcement below) would ban all space-based missile defense weapons announced by the Bush administration.

On July 26, 2001 Congressman Dennis Kucinich's announced he will introduce legislation in the U.S. Congress to ban space-based weapons. On the same day, Canada's Foreign Minister announced that "Canada would be very happy...to launch an initiative to see an international convention preventing the weaponization of space." Two major space-faring nations, China and Russia, have agreed to ban space-based weapons and to preserve the ABM treaty. On June 8 Chinese Ambassador Hu Xiaodi told a 66-nation Conference on Disarmament that, "All space-based weapons...are to be prohibited once and for all."

Guests Dr. Carol Rosin and Alfred Webre are both Disclosure Project witnesses. Their focus includes a permanent world ban on space-based weapons; transformation of the international aerospace industry from a weapons and war-based industry to cooperative world space exploration and development industry; and development of a world and governmental interface with off-planet civilizations and technologies.

Dr. Carol Rosin has been a leading aerospace executive, and is founder of the Institute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space, in consultative status with United Nations ECOSOC. According to Military Space (July '84) "Dr. Rosin is regarded to be the original political architect of the move to stop the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) and ASATs (Anti-satellite weapons)". Dr. Rosin testifies against the weaponization of space, for military, civil and commercial world cooperation in space, and for the transformation of the war industry into a space industry without space-based weapons.

Alfred Webre has been a delegate to UNISPACE. His most recent book, Exopolitics: A Decade of Contact, is a treatise on politics, law, and government in the Universe, and is at http://www.exopolitics.com

Hear Congressman Dennis Kucinich speak on banning space-based weapons at www.flashpoints.net. Click on "audio" for July 31, and fast-forward to the Kucinich interview with journalist Leslie Kean.

NEWS RELEASE

Kucinich to Introduce Legislation to Ban Weaponization of Space

Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-Cleveland) today announced his intention to introduce legislation to ban the weaponization of space.

"The time has come to ban the further weaponization of space," Congressman Kucinich said. "We must work toward the elimination of all nuclear weapons, and an end to policies which cause this country to move toward the weaponization of space. I was pleased with the recent news from our neighbor to the north that Canada is ready to join an international effort to prohibit weapons in space. It is time for the United States to take the lead and end the weaponization of space."

Kucinich said the argument that supporters of weaponization use claiming our national security and commercial interests would be put at risk are fear tactics backed by greed. "We signed the ABM treaty nearly 30 years ago; which requires a reduction in strategic arms, nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. Weaponization of space clearly violates that treaty. My bill will call for an immediate and permanent termination of research, testing, manufacturing, production and deployment of all space-based weapons systems and components by any person, agency or contractor of the U.S. government."

Kucinich will introduce the Space Preservation Act of 2001 this autumn.

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

Bush backs away from international ban on land mines

Sydney Morning Herald
August 4, 2001
Los Angeles Times
By Norman Kempster in Washington
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0108/04/world/world8.html

The Bush Administration has backed away from a promise made by the Clinton White House that the United States would eventually comply with an international treaty banning land mines. US forces may need to use them, it says.

In a letter to a leading congressional critic of land mines, Mr James McGovern, a Democrat, the State Department's chief lobbyist said the Administration was reviewing "the need for land mines on the modern battlefields of the future".

Mr Paul Kelly, the head of the State Department's legislative affairs bureau, added that the department believed that land-mine policy should be left "to our colleagues in the Department of Defence for their determination and judgment".

The Administration's reluctance to embrace a treaty that has been signed by 140 countries and ratified by 117 of them is the latest example of what critics call an increasing US tendency to go it alone in international affairs. In a foreign-policy address on Thursday, the House Democratic leader, Mr Richard Gephardt, said: "The Administration has ratcheted up the unilateral rhetoric in just the last few months."

The Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, insisted in a CNN interview that the Administration was not turning its back on international co-operation, although it had serious objections to some treaties.

"Just because they are multilateral doesn't mean they are good," Mr Powell said.

Mr McGovern said he was disturbed by the Kelly letter because it did not acknowledge Mr Clinton's promise that the US would comply with the treaty by 2006 after giving the Pentagon time to develop a substitute for mines, which kill and maim thousands of civilians every year.

In 1997, when much of the world endorsed the anti-mine treaty, the US balked.

The Clinton Administration acknowledged that many mines remained deadly for decades, but it said they were a necessary part of US strategy on the Korean peninsula, where mines are sown along the border that separates the communist North from the democratic South.

Mr Clinton, while refusing to join the treaty, signed an executive order in 1998 promising to obey the ban everywhere but on the Korean peninsula by 2003, and in all countries by 2006.

Mr McGovern said he was disappointed by Mr Clinton's cautious approach, "but I thought that the question was not if we would sign the treaty but when we would sign it. After reading the letter from Kelly, I have doubts about whether we ever will sign the treaty.''

Mr McGovern said Washington's refusal to sign the treaty made it impossible for the US to press Russia, China and a handful of other countries to stop using land mines.

"Because we won't sign, we aren't in a position to pressure or embarrass anybody else into not using mines."

-------- OTHER

-------- death penalty

Bill Would Ban Execution of Retarded

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Death-Penalty-Retarded.html

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- A spokesman for Gov. Mike Easley said he would sign legislation this weekend that bans executions of the mentally retarded.

Even without the governor's signature, the bill would become law Sunday barring a gubernatorial veto.

Seventeen states and the federal government already have some kind of ban on executions of the mentally retarded, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

``North Carolina is joining what is a national viewpoint that it is wrong to execute the mentally retarded, that we should not be killing people with the minds of children,'' said Jonathan Broun, a lawyer with the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.

The new law would define as mentally retarded anyone whose IQ was recorded at 70 or lower before the age of 18, with ``significant limitations in adaptive functioning'' at the same time. A mentally retarded person still could be sentenced to life in prison without parole for first-degree murder.

Lawmakers approved the ban Tuesday. The governor was expected to sign the legislation before he left town Saturday afternoon.

Easley, a former prosecutor and state attorney general, has not embraced the legislation but agreed to sign it because of the consensus for such a ban.

The law would apply to capital cases that begin after Oct. 1, though current death row inmates would have several months to seek hearings on the issue.

Opponents of the legislation argued that supporters were trying to use it to gut the death penalty in North Carolina.

-------- environment

Senate moves ahead with agenda on global warming

USA TODAY
08/04/2001 - Updated 10:09 AM ET
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/august01/2001-08-04-globablwarming.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Two influential senators are seeking mandatory limits on greenhouse gases because they say the voluntary steps favored by President Bush to deal with global warming will not work.

Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., said there is a need for regulations for carbon dioxide and other emissions that are believed to be changing the earth's climate.

In a clear sign the Senate is determined to pursue its own climate agenda, the two senators said Friday they would introduce legislation imposing a nationwide "cap and trade" system on greenhouse emissions.

Otherwise, they argued, American businesses will suffer as the rest of the industrial countries begin trading emission credits under the Kyoto climate agreement recently rejected by the Bush administration.

"The current situation demands leadership from the United States," McCain said. He said purely voluntary approaches "will not be enough to meet the goal of preventing dangerous effects on the climate system."

In an interview, Lieberman acknowledged that the proposal will likely unleash "a big fight" in the Congress. But he said he and McCain are "committed to this."

White House spokesman Scott McClellan did not respond specifically to the McCain-Lieberman proposal. He said the administration has "a shared goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in a truly global approach that would not exempt developing countries and won't harm America's economy."

A Cabinet-level working group on climate change is developing alternatives to the Kyoto accord, he said.

Fred Krupp, head of the environmental advocacy group Environmental Defense, said the Lieberman-McCain alliance indicates "an emerging movement on Capitol Hill to move beyond the failed voluntary approaches of the past" in dealing with global warming.

In abandoning the Kyoto climate treaty earlier this year, Bush expressed his opposition to mandatory restrictions or regulation of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. Such controls, he said, would cost too much and hurt the economy.

The administration has not offered a specific program to deal with climate change. Bush has said his approach would rely on voluntary actions by industry and development of new technologies to capture carbon releases and reduce energy use.

Lieberman responded: "Voluntary programs, unfortunately, do not work."

The two senators warned that U.S. businesses stand a chance of being left out of an international trading program of greenhouse gases under the Kyoto protocol unless a domestic trading scheme is put in place.

Their legislation would establish a ceiling, or cap, on the amount of greenhouse gases that could be emitted nationwide. Caps also would be imposed for specific economic sectors such as power plants and transportation.

Companies that exceed the limits could purchase credits from other entities whose emissions are lower.

In recent days, the Democratic-controlled Senate has shown it intends to press ahead with its own climate agenda.

On Thursday, legislation advanced that would pump nearly $5 billion into research technologies to combat global warming. A day earlier, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a resolution urging Bush to reconsider his rejection of the Kyoto treaty.

At the same time, Sen. Jim Jeffords, the independent from Vermont whose defection from the Republican Party put Democrats in control of the Senate, said he was intent on getting a bill passed to regulate carbon dioxide along with three other pollutants.

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Britain Stem Cell Stance Evolves

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Stem-Cell-Research.html

LONDON (AP) -- The U.S. House just voted to ban human cloning for any purpose, including medical research, but Britain has decided to let scientists use cloning in the search for new ways to fight disease.

Parliament voted in January to permit stem cell research on human embryos and also made Britain the first nation to specifically allow cloning to create embryos for that purpose.

It was not seen by many here as an ethical leap. In the nation that produced the first test-tube baby and Dolly the cloned sheep, public sentiment came down on the side of using embryos in medical research more than a decade ago.

Britain's fertility research laws, passed in 1990, allowed some research on embryos and permitted the creation of embryos specifically for that research. In January, lawmakers added stem cell research to the list of approved work and also allowed cloning, which was not mentioned in the original law because the technique was not available then.

``For us, this was not something that was breaking hugely new ground,'' said Dr. Sandy Thomas, director of Britain's independent bioethics organization, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

``We've had a 10-year track record of very successful stewardship of reproductive research, so we were a long way down that path. It was a compelling use of embryos and people were fairly easily persuaded.''

Stem cells are the ``master cells'' found in early stage embryos. They evolve into every cell and tissue type that make up the human body, and doctors hope to treat hundreds of diseases by directing stem cells to develop into any type of tissue needed for transplant.

Scientists believe that by creating cloned embryos from patients, they will be able to extract stem cells that are perfectly matched for transplant.

The United States, where scientists were the first to isolate human stem cells in 1998, has a ban on federal funding for research that damages or destroys human embryos, although President Bush is reviewing the policy in light of the potential of stem cells.

On Wednesday, though, after an emotional debate on science, morality and the definition of life, the U.S. House voted to bar human cloning and then to ban even limited use of cloning to create human embryos for research into possible cures for fatal or disabling diseases.

Part of the reason Britain has moved ahead with embryo research is because the anti-abortion movement is much less influential than in America. However, the Pro-Life Alliance party has filed for a judicial review of the changes Parliament made in January, and will get a hearing in October.

The group intends to argue that embryos created by cloning do not fit the definition of embryo under the 1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act because fertilization is not involved. Therefore, the group contends, such cloned embryos are not subject to regulation under the act, which would mean the parliamentary vote was invalid.

The British began grappling with the issues of embryo research after the birth of the world's first test-tube baby here in 1978.

Confronting the prospect of embryos living outside the womb for the first time, the government appointed an independent committee to investigate new reproductive technologies and make recommendations on the freezing and storage of human embryos and their use in research.

After six years of public debate the panel's recommendations formed the basis of the 1990 act.

``When this idea was first floated, public opinion, and parliamentary opinion, was very hostile,'' said Anne McLaren, a Cambridge University embryologist who was on the panel. ``But gradually ... opinion swung in favor of the research.''

The legislation allowed scientists to experiment on embryos for insight into five areas only: infertility, recurrent miscarriage, congenital diseases, embryo development and contraception.

However, embryos could be used only until 14 days old, the point at which a central nervous system starts to develop.

In 1997, the announcement of the birth of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, sparked discussion about whether human cloning was on the horizon and what should be done about it.

``Initially, after Dolly, it was all about reproductive cloning. Later, stem cells were isolated for the first time and people started talking about using the cloning technique to make stem cells, and the two came together technically,'' Thomas said.

Regulators sought public opinion on cloning and reported at the end of 1998 that while opposition to producing cloned babies remained strong in Britain, many people saw a benefit to cloning for stem cell therapy.

After studying the pros and cons of stem cell research and using cloning to produce embryos for such work, an advisory group set up by the government's chief medical officer recommended allowing both.

Anti-abortion campaigners tried to revive the embryo destruction issue, but unsuccessfully.

They also pointed to the recent discovery that stem cells harvested from adult humans might have promise, arguing that embryo research may not be necessary. Experts countered that adult stem cells do not seem to be as adaptable and that embryo stem cell research should not be held back while scientists investigate the potential of adult cells.

Cloning was the most controversial point. Many feared the proposal was a step toward producing cloned babies. However, proponents for the changes said the requirement that research embryos be destroyed after 14 days of age meant no cloned embryo would develop into a fetus.

The government's legislation to amend the 1990 embryo law passed comfortably in both houses of Parliament.

``There really wasn't much objection. When you've already approved research on embryos and the creation of embryos for research into infertility, recurrent miscarriage and congenital disease, there really wasn't any way to argue against allowing it for other serious diseases -- unless you were against all research on embryos, but that had already been dealt with in 1990,'' McLaren said.

-------- activists

Police, Protesters Clash in Germany

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Germany-Airport-Protest.html

FRANKFURT, Germany (AP) -- Police used clubs to beat back demonstrators who tried to burst into the main terminal of Frankfurt's airport Saturday as part of protests aimed at pressuring the airport to close its deportation center for refugees.

Hundreds of helmeted riot police had been braced for possible conflicts with the 2,000 protesters, who claim asylum-seekers are mishandled and kept in bad conditions.

A group of about 100 protesters broke off from the march and tried to force their way into the main terminal, but were beaten back by police using clubs and pepper spray. Only passengers with a flight ticket were allowed to enter the terminals.

The clash came after the demonstrators had tried to march on a building where the deportation center is located. There, they were met with a double row of coiled razor wire, backed by four water cannons and dozens of riot police.

The demonstrators are part of a group called No One is Illegal, supporting open borders, eased immigration laws and the immediate halt to deportations of illegal aliens. They have been camped out near the airport for more than a week, staging spontaneous daily rallies against deportation and a smattering of other issues.

At one point, 250 protesters stretched banners across the road outside the arrivals area, blocking traffic for about 20 minutes before they peacefully left the road and regrouped on the sidewalks. Later, about 300 demonstrators tried to enter a terminal through a covered overpass bridge but were turned back by rows of riot police.

Karl-Heinz Greul a taxi driver who was stuck in the backlog of cars and buses for nearly an hour, was unsympathetic to the protesters.

``This is craziness, absolutely pointless,'' Greul said.

On Friday, several dozen activists briefly took over the Italian Tourist office in downtown Frankfurt, calling for the release of 49 Germans who remain jailed in the Italian port city of Genoa, where they were arrested during protests at the July 20-22 Group of Eight summit.

Afterward they moved to neighboring city of Offenbach, where they threw eggs, stones and bottles at a building where illegal immigrants are kept pending clarification of their asylum status. Police later cleared them from the area with billy clubs, injuring one protester.

--------

Peace Activists March in Israel

New York Times
August 4, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Peace-Rally.html

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- Thousands of peace activists marched through Tel Aviv Saturday, demanding an end to 10 months of Israeli-Palestinian violence. It was the largest demonstration by the shattered Israeli peace camp since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon took office in February.

Carrying torches and shouting together, ``Occupation no; peace yes,'' some 3,000 protesters marched to the gates of the Defense Ministry from a large downtown plaza where former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Israeli opposed to the leader's search for peace with the Palestinians.

Despite the relative size of the demonstration, its numbers fell short of the 10,000 who used to turn out for marches before the failure of last summer's peace talks and the Palestinian uprising that followed. It followed a week of gunbattles, bombing attempts and pinpoint attacks on Palestinian leaders.

The peace camp was left bewildered and directionless after the Palestinians rejected an offer by Prime Minister Ehud Barak -- 91 percent of the West Bank and the willingness to discuss dividing Jerusalem. But the Palestinians said Barak's proposals would have sliced the West Bank into three parts cut off from each other by Israeli roads and settlements.

``It (the peace movement) is obviously confused,'' said Colette Avital, a parliament member from the leftist Labor Party. ``But there are still people in Israel who believe that occupation has to come to an end, who still believe that there should be a chance for peace.''

The protesters carried posters showing Palestinian and Israeli flags drawn as jigsaw puzzle pieces fitting together. Other signs read, ``Bring the settlers home.'' Security around the demonstration was tight. Police pushed suspicious demonstrators out of the crowd, searched bags and perched on the roofs of nearby buildings.

Liad Kantrorowicz, 23, from Jaffa, wore a gas mask like a hat above her black hair and pounded a small tin can with drum sticks. She said she is angry at what she described as a narrowing movement that focuses on peace rather than fighting for justice and civil rights for Palestinians. The demonstration's slogan, ``No to an unnecessary war,'' did not go far enough for her.

``War is an act against humanity. It's also ethnic cleansing.'' Still, she believes the peace camp has gained some strength by shedding those ``who did not have their hearts in it.''

Speaking to the crowd, opposition leader Yossi Sarid, of the dovish Meretz Party, said the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land must end, Jewish settlements in the Palestinian areas must be dismantled and Israel must again pursue peace negotiations with Palestinian leaders.

But 10 months of Israeli-Palestinian bloodletting have drowned out that message, even in traditionally liberal Tel Aviv.

Lena Turel, 25, brought her big brown dog, Sherlock, to the march. On the dog's back she wrapped a sign that read, ``Save the peace.''

She said she sees fewer younger people turning up at peace rallies.

``I'm alone,'' she said. ``My friends don't come anymore. That says something.''



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