------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
56 Years of Lessons From Hiroshima
Australia's brush with nuclear power 'ground zero'
German industry, greens slam nuclear phaseout pact
South Koreans Challenge Northerner on U.S. Troops
The Myth of a Perfect Defense
Vets Urged to Get Radiation Care
U.S. Senator Worries About China
U.S., Russia Meet at Pentagon
U.S., Russia discuss nuclear forces, missile defense

MILITARY
Discord on Arms a Peril to Talks in Macedonia
Colombia wary after peace talks fail
U.S. Planes Bomb Targets in Iraq
Israel´s intelligence has a deadly edge
Naples Mayor Seeks NATO Talks Delay
Navy Resumes Exercises on Vieques

OTHER
Brazil cane raisers sweet on ethanol
Fighting Plans for a Gas Pipeline: Not Under My Backyard
Energy Chief Gives Governors an Ultimatum on Power Lines
Researchers Debate Human Cloning
Human cloning to 'start in weeks'
FBI Defends Surveillance Operation
Genoa Police Unit Trained by LAPD
CIA Panel May Lack Voice for Change
Brazil's Army Defends Spying Activities

ACTIVISTS
N.J. Parents Shocked by Italy Arrest
Protesters Take Over Colombian Consulate in Sydney


-------- NUCLEAR

56 Years of Lessons From Hiroshima

August 7, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/opinion/L07HIRO.html?searchpv=nytToday

To the Editor:
Re "The Nuclear August of 1945," by Nikolay Palchikoff (Op-Ed, Aug. 6):

As an 18-year-old soldier in the Infantry Replacement Training Center, Camp Robinson, Ark., in the summer of 1945, I was part of a large group that was training for what we were told was the invasion of Japan. We were also told that the Japanese islands were heavily fortified, and it was only suggested what that would mean in terms of the possibilities of survival.

We were in the field on a typically scorching summer day when we were given the announcement about the atomic bombing of Japan. The commanding officer called off the training immediately, and the ensuing celebrations - not that so many lives were lost, but that ours were saved - continued for three days.

I have been grateful to President Harry S. Truman ever since, and continue to be, for his being able to make the most difficult decision any commander in chief has had to make.

WALTER MEYER Clearwater, Fla., Aug. 6, 2001 To the Editor:

Nikolay Palchikoff (Op-Ed, Aug. 6) believes that it would have been an equally powerful demonstration of the atomic bomb's destructive capacity if the United States had dropped it on an uninhabited island. I disagree.

The bomb's explosion on an un inhabited island would not have demonstrated to the people of the world, in human terms, its capacity to destroy life.

Although it is true that the bombing stopped the war and saved many American and Japanese lives, consider further: the victims of Hiroshima have (possibly) saved the entire world from utter annihilation.

To express the horror of what happened in Hiroshima is beyond words, and we should memorialize the victims as saviors of the human race. Had there been no atrocity, there would not today be the "remembering and talking" that may be the deterrent to blowing up our beautiful planet with its many beautiful people enjoying life on earth.

IRMA B. JAFFE New York, Aug. 6, 2001 To the Editor:

We should all concur with Nikolay Palchikoff's plea (Op-Ed, Aug. 6) to prevent atrocities like Hiroshima. The first step is to understand that we and the Russians still have thousands of nuclear warheads on hair- trigger alert, ready for launching on a few minutes' notice.

This means that 10 years after the cold war, we are still minutes from nuclear incineration by far more powerful nuclear bombs than laid waste to Hiroshima. We may be in even greater danger today from an accidental missile launching because of the deterioration of the Russian nuclear command structure and early warning system.

The greatest gift that we can give to the future is to ensure that all nuclear weapons are taken off alert status and placed in storage depots to be inspected by officials from all nuclear powers and the United Nations, leading to their complete abolition.

DOUGLAS MATTERN San Francisco, Aug. 6, 2001

-------- australia

Australia's brush with nuclear power 'ground zero'

AUSTRALIA: August 7, 2001
Story by Andrea Hopkins
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11916

JERVIS BAY, Australia - Deep within Booderee National Park, almost jutting into the blue waters of Jervis Bay, a quiet asphalt road weaves to a halt beside a stretch of sand.

Half of the clearing has been claimed as a parking lot for tourists who come to swim and snorkle in the pristine bay, while weeds have spent 30 years creeping across the remainder of the clearing where the nation's first reactor was to have stood.

The abandoned plans for that stretch of sand are as close as Australia came to generating nuclear power.

"That is exactly how close we came, the road was there, the excavation had occurred, the footings were just about to be poured. And then...the decision was made, no, we're not going to go nuclear," said park manager Martin Fortescue.

The reactor, approved in 1969, was killed two years later when pro-nuclear Prime Minister John Gorton was ousted by his own government in favour of long-time political foe, ex-treasurer and foreign minister William McMahon.

Instead, the site, about 200 km (120 miles) south of Sydney on Australia's east coast, was declared a nature reserve and park rangers moved into the handful of homes built to house the scientists who would have ushered Australia into the atomic age.

Thirty years later, the Australian government remains officially opposed to nuclear power, although the country exports uranium to fuel overseas reactors.

The decision has left Australia as the second biggest per capita air polluter in the world, reliant on coal-fired electricity plants and struggling to meet the greenhouse gas reduction targets of the troubled Kyoto climate change protocol.

START-UP COSTS

Keith Alder, who eagerly watched the Jervis Bay reactor begin to take shape as commissioner of the then Australian Atomic Energy Commission, remembers the cancellation bitterly.

"I and my assistant were called to Canberra for an interview with the prime minister to tell us that he was deferring it for a year," Alder told Reuters.

The prime minister said the start-up costs for the steam-generating heavy water reactor, to be built by a British conglomerate, were simply too great.

"I said: 'Well of course the tenders will all be invalid in a year because they're only valid for three months.' And he said: 'Well, so be it.' And that was the end of that," Alder said.

By the mid-1980s, in the wake of a near meltdown at the U.S. Three Mile Island power station in 1979 and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, all talk of nuclear power in Australia was abandoned.

Environmentalists say Jervis Bay was as close as Australia will ever get to nuclear power generation, with anti-nuke activism boosted by a raging debate over how - and where - to dispose of waste from a 43-year-old research reactor in Sydney.

"Australians are relatively savvy about nuclear waste, we've had absolute clamour in South Australia over the proposal to dump intermediate level nuclear waste down there (from the Sydney reactor)," said Greenpeace Australia campaigner Stephen Campbell.

Loud opposition to the proposed replacement of an aging, purely research reactor in Sydney is only a fraction of the outrage that would greet proposals for a power plant, he added.

"There would be vigorous, robust opposition to any proposed plan to build a nuclear plant anywhere in Australia."

Still resentful of British atomic tests and radiation experiments in outback Australia in the 1950s and 1960s, Australia has never built nuclear weapons and strongly opposes further testing anywhere in the world.

Australia led a worldwide outcry against French nuclear testing in the South Pacific in the 1990s, with a nationwide Australian consumer boycott of French goods.

KYOTO FALL-OUT

But Alder, now 80, remains convinced the decision not to go nuclear is to blame for the environmental dilemma played out by Australia at the recent Kyoto climate talks in Bonn.

"I think it was a tragic mistake," Alder said.

Australia, along with Canada, Russia and Japan, this week pushed the Kyoto accord on cutting emissions to the brink of failure before agreeing to a last-minute compromise to water down reduction targets by offsetting them through carbon-absorbing forests, and taking the teeth out of enforcement measures.

Alder believes Australia will eventually - in another 20 years or so - turn to nuclear power to keep up with the nation's growing 19 million population and burgeoning appetite for energy.

"It's inevitable. Down the track, if we don't go nuclear we die in the cold and the dark. It is as simple as that - ask California at the moment what they think," he said with a laugh.

The U.S. state, which gets 18 percent of its energy from two nuclear plants but has prohibited further reactors on environmental fears, suffered six days of blackouts this year.

NUKE RUMOURS PERSIST

But Greenpeace scoffs at suggestions, put forward in the occasional editorial, that Australia reconsider nuclear power.

"Arguing that nuclear is the solution to climate change is like arguing that you should take up crack to give up smoking," Campbell said. "One 'solution' just transfers the cost to the environment from one waste form to another."

Still, Campbell said he does not doubt that Prime Minister John Howard's conservative government, despite its official opposition, would like to re-explore the nuclear age - although the issue has barely been mentioned in years.

"I think the current government has a very pro-nuclear ideology, and I don't think that you could rule out members of this government pursuing nuclear power at some stage," he said.

To the horror of green groups, the Australian government has allowed uranium destined for overseas reactors to be mined in land adjacent to World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park.

Booderee National Park manager Fortescue admits development rumours continue to circulate about the 6,313-hectare (15,600-acre) Jervis Bay park, but he doesn't believe a nuclear reactor would be seriously considered.

"But then again, there are uranium mines in Kakadu," he said.

-------- germany

German industry, greens slam nuclear phaseout pact

GERMANY: August 7, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11927

BERLIN - German industry told a government hearing yesterday a new law phasing out nuclear energy would deprive it of vital electricity supplies which could not be replaced by a planned expansion of renewable energy.

But environmentalists told the environment ministry hearing into the law, the Atomic Consensus, that the agreement increased safety risks by allowing companies to run the power stations right up to the end of their natural life before decommissioning.

Under the law, which was signed on June 11 and is due to pass to parliament in September for approval, Germany's 19 nuclear reactors will be phased out at differing speeds by the mid-2020s.

Germany's industry lobby group argued at the hearing that nuclear energy currently supplied half the country's baseload electricity needs and was vital for many industries.

"Economic as well as ecological reasons favour the preservation of the option of nuclear energy in Germany," the managing director of the German Industry Association Ludolf von Wartenberg said in a statement.

Renewable energy and combined heat and power production - which are both favoured by the ruling red-green government coalition - could not replace this supply, said von Wartenberg.

But the chairman of the environmental organisation BUND, Sebastian Schoenauer, said the phase-out deal conceded too much to Germany's nuclear industry.

"What looks like the long-called for withdrawal from nuclear energy, in fact serves the industry's purposes," he said.

Rather than spurring on the end of the industry, the deal gave the nuclear industry guarantees that its plants could be run until the end of their natural lifespan, thereby increasing safety risks, he said.

The Atomic Consensus will also gradually bring to an end current arrangements whereby Germany ships nuclear waste for reprocessing to France and Britain, sparking regular protests by environmentalists.

Under the agreement, waste reprocessing shipments should end by July 1, 2005 at the latest, after which companies will have to store waste at temporary sites until a central storage facility is available.

But the German government has left open the question of how it plans to avoid carbon dioxide emissions totalling annually 150 million tonnes which are presently saved by using nuclear power, von Wartenberg said.

Last month, Germany hosted a meeting in Bonn at which 180 countries finalised a compromise deal to reduce greenhouse emissions under the framework of the Kyoto climate change agreement.

Nuclear power stations do not produce greenhouse gas emissions and some countries, such as Russia and Japan, wanted credits for exporting nuclear technology.

But under the terms of the Bonn deal, countries will not be able to claim environmental credits for building nuclear power stations in developing countries.

-------- korea

South Koreans Challenge Northerner on U.S. Troops

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By DON KIRK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/international/asia/07KORE.html

SEOUL, South Korea, Aug. 6 - South Korea today rebuffed a statement by the North Korean leader during his weekend visit to Moscow that seemed to alter his stance toward the presence of American troops in the Korean Peninsula.

In a joint declaration issued on Saturday by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, during his visit to Moscow, North Korea demanded that the American troops be withdrawn from South Korea, saying it would speed reunification talks on the peninsula.

The Kremlin, in the declaration, expressed "understanding" of the North Korean position but did not endorse it.

In response, Kim Euy Taek, a South Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman, called the presence of American troops in South Korea "a bilateral issue between the United States and the Republic of Korea."

The United States bases 37,000 troops in South Korea, including a full combat division, near the demilitarized zone between the South and the North.

Officials and political analysts offered a range of reasons why Mr. Kim might have wanted the wording about the American troops included though he has been widely reported as having told the South Korean president, Kim Dae Jung, that he would not object if the American troops stayed on.

Kim Dae Jung frequently cited that remark, which he said the North Korean leader made at their summit meeting in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, in June of last year, as evidence of progress toward inter- Korean reconciliation, a high priority with the South Korean leader.

The wording in the Moscow declaration, was "intended more for domestic consumption than anything else," contended Mr. Kim, the Foreign Ministry spokesman.

The implication was that the North Korean leader had called for withdrawal of the troops during his Moscow visit in order to mollify hard- liners in Pyongyang, on whom he relies to maintain his power. He serves as chairman of North Korea's all-powerful national defense commission as well as general secretary of the Workers' Party.

Nonetheless, said Moon Chung In, a scholar with close ties to Kim Dae Jung, "the Moscow declaration defies Chairman Kim Jong Il's tacit acceptance of American forces in South Korea."

Mr. Moon, dean of international studies at Seoul's prestigious Yonsei University, called the North Korean demand "a setback for President Kim Dae Jung" even though he said that the reclusive North Korean's leader's meeting with Russia seemed to make it more likely that Kim Jong Il will pay a return visit to Seoul, as promised last year in Pyongyang.

A summit meeting here, he said, would be likely to lead to reopening the rail link between North and South Korea, in keeping with the Moscow declaration's commitment.

The reference to the American troops, however, appeared to some political analysts to negate the positive value of the northern leader's visit abroad and opened a fresh political debate here.

Lee Hoi Chang, leader of the opposition Grand National Party, said the declaration showed that Kim Dae Jung had "either lied to the people or was deceived by the North" on the topic of American troop withdrawal.

The Russian and North Korean leaders "are touching the guts" of South Korea's relationship with the United States "by raising the question of U.S. forces in Korea," said Kim Song Han, professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security, an adjunct of South Korea's foreign ministry. "That is the tactical strategy of North Korea."

Choi Jin Wook, director of North Korean Studies at the Korea Institute of National Unification, affiliated with the Unification Ministry, said Kim Jong Il's shift reflected the change in North Korean relations with the United States under President George W. Bush.

"North Korea still wants to talk to the United States," he said, "but North Korea is trying to strengthen its own position."

-------- missile defense

The Myth of a Perfect Defense

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By CALEB CARR
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/opinion/07CARR.html?searchpv=nytToday

Throughout the long public relations battle over a national missile defense shield, each side has scrambled to cite episodes from military history to back its position.

Proponents, led by various members of the Bush administration, have rattled off a long list of the sneak attacks that have marked human conflict since Ulysses stuffed his fellow Greek warriors into the belly of a large wooden horse - and they pay special attention, not surprisingly, to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. If the United States could have prevented that disaster through defensive technological innovation, this side argues, who among us would have stood in the way?

Opponents answer that such parallels are specious, that ballistic missiles are not analogous to the carrier-launched fighter-bombers that destroyed Pearl Harbor but rather to the bullets that those planes fired, and that the Bush administration is offering the false hope of shooting down bullets with bullets. The true historical parallel, these critics say, is the Maginot Line, the enormous - and enormously expensive - system of fixed fortifications that France built along its border with Germany and Luxembourg between the two world wars, and that was proved spectacularly ineffective by the German army and air force in 1940. The detractors argue that missile defense would mean spending a great deal of money, as the French did, building a system that cannot work and that will breed a dangerous complacency.

Of course the promises being held out for missile defense really are inflated: the planned shield cannot provide Americans with the overall security from attack that President Bush is hoping to give them. But the contentions being made about the Maginot Line are wrong, too. In this argument, as is so often the case, the lessons of military history are being misapplied by both sides.

There has never been any way, whether in 1941 or today, to defend any country from an enemy determined to launch a sneak attack, yet this is the defense the missile shield advocates say they want. Had the move against Pearl Harbor with carrier-based aircraft been ruled impossible by Japan's senior commanders because of some American defensive innovation, those very resourceful men in Tokyo would doubtless have come up with another way to achieve their purpose, for the Japanese government had decided that it was vital to cripple our power in the Pacific. Similarly, if we today made it impossible for an enemy country armed with intercontinental missiles to attack us with them, it would find some other means. There are other ways to deliver nuclear devices into this country - and with the rapid advance of weapons miniaturization, there will be more.

But the Maginot argument is specious reasoning, too: the Maginot Line was not a technological failure, but a strategic one. This marvelous system of mammoth bunkers and forts, named for the French minister of war André Maginot, did not fail to stop the German army: Germany's generals were so impressed by the line that they never seriously considered a frontal assault against it. Instead they went around it, entering France through the Ardennes forest, a thick woodland that the French had mistakenly considered an impenetrable natural obstacle. The actual flaws in the Maginot Line were that it was not extensive enough and that, crucially, its defensive role could not be shifted to an offensive one. These are also the true weaknesses of the missile defense shield.

Certainly, we will eventually find a way to make the thing work. Many of the technological problems are already being solved, and there is no reason to believe that the rest will not be - if enough money is thrown at them. Once up and running, the shield would quite probably do a good job - but only of a particular kind of defense. And if the whole sad saga of human conflict teaches us anything at all, it is that all defensive military hardware becomes obsolete so quickly that it is just as well never to build it.

President Bush has said repeatedly that the missile shield has no offensive use and that the rest of the world should therefore not feel threatened by it. He is right. Once the shield is built, the rest of the world will be able to go calmly about the business of perfecting new offensive weapons that will eventually make even a fully and perfectly functional missile defense network as irrelevant as the mighty Maginot Line proved to be in 1940. Meanwhile, American resources that should be devoted to the development of more flexible weapons and strategies will be siphoned off, and we will become, year by year, more vulnerable to new forms of attack.

In short, when our president tells us that a missile defense shield is both feasible and devoid of any offensive purpose, we should believe him - believe him and reject the project. We should go right on rejecting it until it attains the offensive capacity President Bush is so anxious to deny, a capacity that will be far more difficult to outwit than a static defensive system. No nation has ever needed a weapon that did not terrify its enemies; and we do not need this one now.

Caleb Carr, a novelist and historian, is a contributing editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. His re-evaluation of the Allied liberation of Europe will appear in the forthcoming "What If? Vol. II."

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

Vets Urged to Get Radiation Care

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Atomic-Veterans.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Thousands of veterans exposed to cancer-causing radiation during atomic tests conducted decades ago could find it easier to get compensation under a new regulation aimed at giving them the same treatment as civilians.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is to publish Wednesday in the Federal Register a proposed rule covering vets who were stricken with cancers of the lungs, colon, bone, ovary, and brain and central nervous system and who were present at certain atomic bomb exercises, served at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during post-World War II occupation in Japan or were prisoners of war in Japan.

So-called 'atomic vets' already receive compensation for 16 types of cancer, including leukemia, thyroid, breast, stomach, liver and esophagus.

The new regulation adds the five new diseases and expands places they may have been exposed to make their benefits comparable to what civilians have been receiving since last summer, said Veterans affairs spokesman Jim Benson.

The five illnesses are being added to veteran affair's so-called presumptive list -- meaning if a veteran is found to have the disease and the veteran served in those locations, it is presumed the illness is related to service time.

``It's a perfect example of justice denied way too long,'' said Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat who pushed to extend the benefits.

Officials expect to receive some 92,000 claims from surviving vets and 48,000 from dependents. They have estimated the cost of the program over 10 years at $769 million.

Last year, Congress made it easier for more civilian employees to get payments from exposure in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Tennessee, Alaska and other sites. The proposed regulation would extend that to veterans.

Publishing the regulation opens a 60-day comment period after which officials could incorporate comments or amend the rule. It is then subject to another 90-day comment period before becoming final.

-------- us nuc politics

U.S. Senator Worries About China

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

SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee said Tuesday that human rights violations and possible missile sales by China to Pakistan still block smooth ties between Washington and Beijing.

But Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., expressed confidence that the United States and China will iron out their differences as the two nations build closer trade links.

``China is not our enemy. There's nothing inevitable about China and the United States not being as cooperative as other nations,'' he told reporters in Shanghai.

Biden is on his first trip to China since taking over as chairman of the influential Senate committee in June. With him are fellow senators Paul Sarbanes, D-Md.; Fred Thompson, R-Tenn.; and Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

They arrived Tuesday for a four-day visit to China that will include talks Wednesday with Chinese President Jiang Zemin at the Chinese leadership's seaside retreat at Beidaihe.

New allegations in Washington that China has been selling ballistic missile technology to Pakistan will be a top item in the talks with Jiang, Biden said.

If Beijing has broken an agreement last year not to make such sales, Biden said it may seriously undermine trust between the two countries.

``Where we come from, a deal is a deal is a deal,'' he said. ``Can we trust each other to observe the commitments that we make to each other?''

The senators warned that missile sales may force U.S. lawmakers to reconsider other agreements with China, such as Beijing's entry to the World Trade Organization and last year's granting of permanent normal trade relations.

``We have to decide if we can continue ... to support them with regard to WTO and permanent trade,'' Thompson said.

The senators said that during talks with Jiang and other Chinese leaders they will also raise China's recent detention of several U.S.-based scholars.

Biden took over the powerful policy-setting committee on June 6, when the Senate reverted to Democrats' control. He replaced Republican Sen. Jesse Helms, one of Congress' most outspoken critics of China.

The senators also met Tuesday with about 200 students at Fudan University, one of China's top colleges, and the mayor of Shanghai.

China is the delegation's second stop after Taiwan on a six-day, three nation tour that also includes South Korea.

--------

U.S., Russia Meet at Pentagon

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

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration looked for a Russian response Tuesday to a U.S. proposal for a new relationship that would include anti-missile defenses.

Delegations from the two sides planned to meet all day at the Pentagon and there again on Wednesday, with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld taking part in some of the discussions.

Rumsfeld tried to lower expectations. The talks ``will more likely be an exchange of information rather than an exchange of views,'' he said beforehand.

Rumsfeld will fly to Moscow next weekend with Assistant Secretary of State John Bolton to follow up.

The talks are the first in a series of three rounds designed to implement an agreement President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin reached July 22 in Genoa, Italy, to link U.S. planning for a missile defense system with large cuts the Kremlin wants made in the two nations' still-massive nuclear weapons arsenals.

``They will have, one would hope, a much more detailed understanding of the kinds of things we're thinking about with respect to our offensive and defensive capabilities and the various ways that our two countries can cooperate,'' Rumsfeld said.

Spurgeon Keeny, president of the Arms Control Association, said he did not doubt the Russians wanted a better understanding of the cloudy U.S. position.

But, Keeny said in an interview, Russia has made it clear it does not want to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prohibits a national anti-missile shield, ``or other formal accords limiting offensive strategic arms.''

Russia's delegation will be headed by Col. Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, first deputy chief of the general staff, and the U.S. delegation by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.

Bush, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld have talked about trying to develop a new relationship with Russia. They are hoping to soften Russia's resistance to the administration's program for a multi-billion-dollar missile shield -- one that Russia and most U.S. allies consider unnecessary, unworkable and possibly a spur to a new nuclear weapons buildup.

``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,'' Rumsfeld said. ``It is baggage that exists in people's minds, it exists in treaties, it exists in the structure of relationships, the degree of formality of them. And it will require, I think, some time to work through those things.''

Rice last week said Russia might share defense plans with the United States and buy American missile technology if the two countries are able to devise a new strategic framework.

Even membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance is not ruled out, Rice told The Associated Press. NATO was designed initially to confront Moscow.

``I am hopeful there can be a new day with Russia,'' Rice said. ``We are talking about a bigger issue than what we do about missile defenses and strategic weapons.''

She stressed that Russia had not accepted the concept.

Similarly, Rumsfeld, who was a defense secretary during the Cold War, said the Bush administration was seeking a relationship ``not premised on hostility between the two countries, that is not premised on fear as to the possibility of attack.''

Secretary of State Colin Powell is due to meet in New York in mid-September with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

--------

U.S., Russia discuss nuclear forces, missile defense

Cable News Network (CNN)
August 7, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/08/07/pentagon.russia/index.html

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Pentagon officials are meeting Tuesday with a Russian three-star general to "exchange information" in advance of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's scheduled trip to Moscow next week.

These are the first in a series of high-level meetings ordered by U.S. President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin last month.

Last week Rumsfeld said the meetings would be "an exchange of information more than an exchange of views."

The Russian delegation, headed by Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, Russian first deputy chief of staff, is scheduled to include two days of d iscussions with a Pentagon team led by Douglas Feith, under secretary of defense for policy.

The United States is seeking a new framework with Russia that would allow both sides to reduce the size of their nuclear arsenals and permit the United States to deploy a limited missile defense system, without the formality of renegotiating arms control treaties.

Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. Craig Quigley said last week, "We've stated many times, our goal is to try to design a new framework, rather than a treaty that was entered into at a different time in history, with a country that no longer exists. The preferred option is to go about this a different way.

"But the president has stated that he intends to move beyond the ABM Treaty, hopefully in concert with Russia -- a new relationship with that country," Quigley said.

-------- MILITARY

-------- balkans

Discord on Arms a Peril to Talks in Macedonia

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/international/07MACE.html

OHRID, Macedonia, Aug. 6 (Reuters) - Macedonian leaders today demanded swift and complete disarmament by rebels as part of an accord to end a five-month uprising by ethnic Albanians.

The demand could derail a Western-brokered peace effort.

Leaders of the main Macedonian Slav and ethnic Albanian political parties, who have been meeting here for more than a week, had appeared close to a final peace agreement after a breakthrough on Sunday on the issue of police reforms.

The Slavs seemed to be angry because the political agreement included a provision that reforms to give Albanians greater rights would be approved by Parliament in 45 days, but no guarantee that the rebels would disarm. The rebels, who are not at the talks, have insisted that they want to see more rights for Albanians, who make up about a third of the population, before handing over their weapons. NATO troops would supervise the disarmament.

The lack of disarmament reflects "our distrust of the Macedonian side, and not because we want to keep our weapons," a rebel commander code- named Djini said in an interview.

Two officials said Macedonia had called NATO's secretary general, Lord Robertson, to ask if he could guarantee fast and full disarmament. NATO has said it will only collect weapons handed in, not wrest them from the rebels by force.

The peace talks are expected to resume on Tuesday.

A shaky cease-fire has been in force since July 26, with only scattered shooting reported today.

The reforms sought by the Albanians include greater use of Albanian as an official language and more recognition of Islam. The Slavs fear that granting the Albanians more rights is tantamount to surrender at gunpoint if the rebels do not disarm first.

-------- colombia

Colombia wary after peace talks fail

BBC News
Wednesday, 8 August, 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1479000/1479505.stm

The Colombian military is on alert for a possible retaliation by left-wing rebels to the government's decision to call off talks with the National Liberation Army (ELN).

President Andres Pastrana announced the talks freeze on Tuesday, saying the rebels had raised new demands and rejected government proposals.

The ELN has not yet reacted to Mr Pastrana's speech, but such actions by the government in the past have been met with mass kidnappings, attacks against oil and electrical and road blockades by rebels.

Unofficial talks had been taking place in neighbouring Venezuela between representatives of the government and the ELN, Colombia's second largest rebel force.

Security alert

Interior Minister Armando Estrada said security measures were being intensified to ensure that the violence does not escalate.

Mr Pastrana had promised to end the 37-year old guerrilla war before leaving office next year.

Since 1998, the government has also been trying to persuade the larger Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to lay down their weapons, but correspondents say there has been little progress.

More than 40,000 people, mainly civilians, have lost their lives in the past decade alone.

Mr Pastrana made his announcement in a surprise, strongly-worded televised address to the nation on Tuesday.

He called the ELN rebels "obstinate" and unwilling to "advance towards a peace process".

Correspondents say the ELN has recently suffered losses on the battlefield, raising hopes that it would be more willing to reach a peace deal.

The government had offered to cede a demilitarised zone to the ELN, as it has done with the FARC, but it seems the rebels were not satisfied.

Formal peace talks taking place in Europe had also been suggested.

Political benefit

ELN commander Antonio Garcia said last week that the president was using the negotiations for his own political benefit.

A peace mediator has called the announcement "unfortunate".

Former Foreign Minister Maria Emma Mejia said: "I thought it was still possible to find a way out and not close the process definitively."

Both the ELN and FARC say that Mr Pastrana has not done enough to curb the activities of the right-wing paramilitaries who are often accused of violating human rights.

FARC and the paramilitaries are also accused of profiting from Colombia's enormous trade in cocaine and heroin.

-------- iraq

U.S. Planes Bomb Targets in Iraq

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. fighter planes bombed an air defense site in northern Iraq Tuesday after taking fire from Iraqi surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery, U.S. officials said.

In a written statement, the U.S. European Command said the bombing was in self-defense. Officials said it was not a planned attack in response to the recent near-miss Iraqi attack on a U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane.

European Command said the U.S. aircraft, which flew from an air base in south-central Turkey, departed Iraqi airspace safely.

Tuesday's exchange north of the city of Mosul was the latest in a long-running series of attacks and counterattacks in northern and southern Iraq, where U.S. and British aircraft enforce ``no fly'' zones established shortly after the 1991 Gulf War.

Vacationing in Texas, President Bush defended the missions as fully in accordance with international law.

Iraqi President ``Saddam Hussein is a menace and we need to keep him in check and we will,'' Bush told reporters Tuesday. ``He's been a menace forever and he needs to open his country for inspection so we can see whether he is making weapons of mass destruction.''

Iraq considers the ``no fly'' zones to be illegal and has mounted a sustained effort to shoot down a U.S. or British plane.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said last Friday that Iraq has rebuilt its air defenses since U.S. and British warplanes attacked radar and communications targets around Baghdad on Feb. 16.

Rumsfeld offered no indication of whether or how the United States would respond, but he seemed to hint that any retaliation would go beyond the limited set of targets in the February raid.

``One tends to want to do things that will have somewhat more lasting effects,'' he told a Pentagon news conference.

He noted that the February attacks struck air defense sites that had been linked by fiber-optic cable to make them more effective. The problem, he said, with striking those cables is that they get re-laid.

-------- israel

Israel´s intelligence has a deadly edge

August 7, 2001
By Abraham Rabinovich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010807-7011880.htm

JERUSALEM -- Locked in a spiraling struggle with Israel, the Palestinians have turned their attention to the enemy within: Palestinian collaborators who have been providing Israel with precise intelligence.

The uncanny accuracy with which Israel has carried out a succession of strikes against Palestinian militants has alarmed the Palestinian leadership and infuriated the public.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher joined the criticism yesterday, calling Israel's government a "gang of assassins."

"Israel's policy violates all laws and conventions," Mr. Maher told reporters in Cairo. "It is unprecedented for a government to become a gang which assassinates people, which uses the methods of gangs in assassinating people.

"No civilized government which believes in the law can accept this behavior," he added after a meeting with the U.S. charge d'affaires, Reno Harnish, in Cairo.

Israel, which has been demanding that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat lock up about 100 suspected Palestinian militants, published a list Sunday that named the seven men it most wanted to see behind bars.

Israel's implied warning is that if the Palestinian Authority does not detain these activists, the "wanted" list will become a hit list. Palestinian leaders yesterday rejected Israel's demand.

"It's not an issue of seven or 700. All the Palestinian people are targeted by the Israeli missiles," said Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian leader who says he was the target of an Israeli missile attack Saturday. "Why should the Palestinian Authority arrest them?"

In an attack Saturday, helicopters fired two missiles and wounded one of Mr. Barghouti's bodyguards, who was traveling in a car outside Mr. Barghouti's office in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

According to Israel, the bodyguard was responsible for several attacks against Israel and was the target of the raid.

Asked whether Mr. Arafat has any reason to fear for his life, Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer said: "I have this to say to Arafat. Don't worry. Nothing is going to happen to you. I guarantee it. I want you here, leading your people to peace."

Palestinian anger at collaborators was unleashed last week in the wake of an attack by helicopters in Nablus that killed the senior Hamas official on the West Bank and seven others. The Israelis knew at what time the official was holding a meeting and through which windows in the seven-story building to fire the missiles.

Thousands of Nablus residents gathered outside a local prison after the attack and demanded that three Palestinians convicted of spying for Israel be handed over.

Police restored order, but the judges who were to sentence the men in two days moved the sentencing up by one day and pronounced the death penalty, to cheers from the crowd in the courtroom.

Three other suspected collaborators were killed elsewhere on the West Bank during the week by unknown hands.

Officials of the Palestinian Authority, concerned at the spread of lynch law, urged the public to inform the authorities of any suspicions and not to take the law into their own hands.

Palestinian security officials are acutely embarrassed by Israel's success in identifying persons involved in attacks on Israeli targets and in being able to track their movements.

"The Israelis themselves weren't able to prevent the assassination of [former Prime Minister Yitzhak] Rabin," said one senior official in an interview on Palestinian television.

One Palestinian security official said the Israelis pulled into their intelligence net people who require permits of one kind or another, like students or merchants, and who could thus be pressured to provide information.

Financial incentives and perhaps also rivalries within the Palestinian camp also presumably play a role.

In any case, Israel clearly has an abundance of intelligence sources. The accuracy with which it is able to put its hands on specific individuals would do credit to a security agency working within its own population, let alone one working secretly within a hostile population.

On Sunday, Israeli helicopters fired a missile at a car in Tulkarm, killing a Hamas activist, Omar Madiri, said by Israel to have been on his way with explosives to two suicide bombers about to be dispatched into Israel.

Yesterday, Israeli commandos penetrated the West Bank and brought back, alive, a Palestinian thought to have been one of the suicide bombers.

-------- nato

Naples Mayor Seeks NATO Talks Delay

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Italy-NATO-Meeting.html?searchpv=aponline

ROME (AP) -- The mayor of Naples wants to postpone a NATO meeting to take place in her city next month to avoid the risk of riots between anti-globalization protesters and police that marred last month's Group of Eight summit in Genoa.

``The atmosphere in the country is overheated,'' Rosa Russo Jervolino said in an interview published Tuesday in La Repubblica. ``Putting it off would be opportune as we are running the risk of massive protests.''

The comments come just days after Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi suggested that a conference of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, scheduled Nov. 5-9, be moved from Rome.

The informal NATO summit, to be held in Naples Sept. 26-27, will bring together defense ministers for talks over the U.S. plan to build a missile defense system. Anti-globalization protesters have said they are gearing up to hold demonstrations in Naples.

``There will be direct and extreme actions of protest,'' said Francesco Caruso, a leader of the Naples-based No Global Network.

The protesters rally around a variety of causes, but are generally opposed to the current global power structure, which they say prioritizes corporate and military interests far above those of the poor and the environment.

The Italian government has been embarrassed by last month's G-8 summit, which was marred by clashes between police and anti-globalization protesters and allegations of police brutality.

One protester was shot dead and more than 200 hundred others were injured in clashes between police and demonstrator, a violent core of whom torched cars and buildings, causing millions of dollars in damage.

A Foreign Ministry official met with FAO Director-General Jacques Diouf over the weekend to discuss whether the food summit should be moved from Rome, but no immediate decisions were expected. It is up to the U.N. agency to make the final decision.

Italy's center-left opposition has criticized Berlusconi's suggestion to move a U.N. summit from Rome for security concerns. Rome's center-left mayor, Walter Veltroni, said the city is ready to host the FAO meeting.

``It's the duty of the Italian government to guarantee the security of its people,'' Veltroni said. ``At this hour, Italy isn't looking very good to the outside world.''

-------- puerto rico

Navy Resumes Exercises on Vieques

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Puerto-Rico-Vieques.html

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico (AP) -- The U.S. Navy pressed ahead with bombing exercises on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques as groups of protesters continued to break into the bombing range, hoping to thwart the maneuvers.

Authorities detained nine people Monday as ships pounded the bombing range with 70-pound shells and Navy personnel practiced land assaults. Since this round of exercises began Thursday, 59 people have been arrested, said Navy spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Katherine Goode.

Barring more interruptions from protests or other delays, the main exercises would likely end by Tuesday, Goode said.

``This is an injustice ... that has to stop now, not in 2003,'' said a protester, Yaritza Perez, as she was led away in handcuffs Monday night.

The Navy has used its Vieques range for about 60 years, but President Bush has promised to end the Navy exercises by 2003.

Protest leader Robert Rabin said independence leader Juan Mari Bras, his son and grandson were among those detained Monday, several hours after they entered Navy land. The Navy could not confirm their identities.

Mari Bras, 73, made headlines several years ago when he attempted to renounce his U.S. citizenship in favor of Puerto Rican citizenship, a move ultimately blocked by the U.S. State Department.

The United States seized Puerto Rico from Spain in 1898. Islanders are U.S. citizens who cannot vote for president but have fought in major conflicts from World War II to Vietnam.

On Sunday, while the Navy took a break from training on Vieques, protesters were planning new ways to disrupt the exercises. ``We're redoubling our efforts for the continuation of this fight,'' Rabin said.

Goode said the Navy searched the range with foot patrols, helicopters and search dogs but protesters said eight people were hiding.

``The brush is very thick, and if anyone really is determined to dig themselves in ... then it's possible you could get past a sweep but not on long term basis,'' Goode said. ``We're very confident we've done everything possible to be sure the range is clear before we start exercises.''

On Saturday, protesters in boats entered the restricted area and disrupted exercises for about three hours.

About 21,000 sailors and 2,000 marines were participating in the exercises Monday, which include amphibious invasions, ship-to-shore shelling and airplanes dropping inert bombs, Goode said.

The latest Vieques exercises started four days after 70 percent of Vieques residents voted on July 29 for an immediate end to the bombing in a nonbinding local referendum. Thirty percent supported the Navy remaining indefinitely and resuming live bombing.

The current exercises are final training for the Norfolk, Va.-based Theodore Roosevelt battle group, which will likely head next to the Persian Gulf or the Mediterranean.

Opposition to the exercises has grown since a civilian guard was killed by off-target bombs in 1999, prompting hundreds of protesters to invade Navy land to try to thwart exercises. The Navy has used inert ammunition since that accident.

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Brazil cane raisers sweet on ethanol

BRAZIL: August 7, 2001
Story by Reese Ewing
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11914

SERTAOZINHO, Brazil - Maurilio Biagi, president of Brazil's largest sugarcane mill, hopes to wake up one day soon to his sweet dream in which cane-based alcohol fuels the world's cars and trades as a world commodity.

Brazil began its Pro-Alcohol Program during the world oil crisis in the early 1970s to reduce the country's dependency on petroleum imports, which still rack up a trade-balance debit to the tune of about 450,000 barrels a day.

The program also served to divert the majority of Brazil's annual cane production - the world's largest at roughly 260 million tonnes - from being refined into sugar, thus supporting the commodity's price.

"Brazil - one of the few countries with a renewable source of energy at its disposal, alcohol - has still not awoken to the economic opportunities inherent in trying to reconcile an ever growing world with limited natural resources," said Biagi, whose grandfather founded Santa Elisa sugarcane mill.

With commerce moving more freely across the globe daily, the demand for new resources in potentially enormous emerging world economies such as China and India and the growing concerns over the environment, Biagi may see his dream unfold before his eyes sooner than he had imagined.

The American Ethanol Exchange launched a new online exchange as part of a neutral electronic marketplace for the global ethanol industry in June.

APPEAL OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGIES

Santa Elisa, like many other of Brazil's cane mills, has never relied on the local power company for electricity in the 50 years of its existence, running its own power plant fueled by cane left over after crushing, called bagasse.

This fact was not given much notice until the country was seized by the worst energy crisis in several decades. Now mills are selling excess electric energy back to the grid.

But the thrifty, conservationist nature of Brazil's cane farming, which tends to find multiple uses for what most people would consider garbage, has caught the eye of nations around the world with the potential of its alcohol industry.

Brazil far exceeds any other nation in cane-based ethanol production, with 10 million to 15 million cubic meters in total pouring out of its northern and center-south cane crops annually.

After crude oil bubbled to around $30 a barrel last year, developing countries like India realized they could not fuel their economic growth at such high costs and recently sent emissaries trekking through Brazil's interior to study cane-based ethanol, or alcohol, production.

China recently began to mix alcohol into gasoline in its Henan province, where it has begun operations at its ethanol refinery.

Meanwhile, despite their dispute over the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gasses, both the United States and Europe are seeking for ways to clean up their auto emissions. The French Agriculture Ministry said recently the European Union should raise the level of ethanol in gasoline to cut auto pollutants.

U.S. federal law requires reformulated gasoline with at least 2 percent oxygen by weight in areas with the worst pollution. A petroleum derivative called MTBE and ethanols distilled from corn are currently the most widely used oxygenates in states with ultra-clean-burning gasoline.

But California decided to ban the use of all MTBE by 2003 after the Environmental Protection Agency found residues of it in the state ground water. This will force the state known for its love affair with the automobile to seek out new oxygen-enhancing additive such as ethanol, or alcohol.

Brazil's cane industry, which has been in contact with Californian officials recently, may become a new supplier of the clean-burning additive, the demand for which in the state is seen quadrupling by 2003 to 580 gallons annually.

ALCOHOL IS NICE BUT SUGAR IS SWEET

Production and prices of alcohol in Brazil are moved largely by free-market forces. Currently, the government - with consultation from market representatives - only regulates the amount of alcohol cut into the nationally sold gasoline, which fluctuates relatively little from year to year.

Some in the sector, however, are concerned that the attractive price of sugar on the international market - especially in local currency terms, which have fallen against the strong dollar - could lead to a shortage of alcohol at home.

Mills produce both sugar and alcohol from the sweet juice squeezed from the cane plant.

"One of the big concerns right now, especially in the production and sale of cars that run on 100 percent alcohol, is a potential shortage of the fuel, as occurred in 1989-1990," said analyst Leila Vieira of MB Associados.

Sector analysts, with Sao Paulo's Cane Agroindustry Union (Unica) and the federal government, are debating the merits of a policy that would guarantee the supply of alcohol at home.

But Unica said there should be little change in production this year, with the normal 55 percent of the cane from the 2001/02 crop distilled into alcohol and the remaining 45 percent refined into sugar. These figures have varied little over the past decade and most mills dismiss talk of a shortage of alcohol in Brazil.

"We should export an unusual amount of alcohol this year, but there's no risk of a shortage domestically. The sector is incredibly flexible - it can shift alcohol from Brazil's northern crop to the south, it can reduce the alcohol in gasoline or it can expand the cane harvest," said Luiz Martins, president of the Minas Gerais Alcohol Industry Union.

BRAZIL GREEN FUEL ENTERING LIMELIGHT

Brazil's cane industry is quick to point out that unlike their slower-growing cousins, trees - which have recently come under question as big consumers of carbon dioxide gasses - the fast-growing cane plant consumes healthy amounts of CO2, and alcohol burns 10 percent cleaner than gasoline.

After fueling its cars with alcohol for more than 30 year's, Brazil is testing alcohol-and vegetable oil-based bio-diesels in city bus fleets that could cut their caustic emissions by almost 40 percent.

Aside from sugar refining, plantations distill a small percentage of neutral alcohol used for cosmetics and perfumes, medicines and for potable spirits called pinga or cachaca.

A greater amount of cane juice is fermented and distilled into anhydrous alcohol, which is currently used as a 22 percent supplement in all gasoline sold at the nation's pumps.

Finally, mills divert the largest amount of cane juice to the production of hydrous alcohol, which is used to power Brazil's fleet of alcohol cars equipped with engines specially fitted to accommodate the clean-burning fuel.

The sales of alcohol cars are only a fraction of total car sales in Brazil, despite the attractive costs due to tax breaks and the technological advancements in engines that have improved car performance while running on the green fuel.

"I believe I have the only BMW powered by alcohol," said Biagi, who is also the president of the environment council with the Sao Paulo state Industry Federation (Fiesp). "I just wait a few seconds to let it warm up after I start it, and off I go."

Biagi says he simply uses high quality alcohol in his standard, gas-powered BMW sedan without any modification to the engine or performance problems.

But, the Santa Elisa mill, based in Sertaozinho in rural Sao Paulo state, is famous for its sweltering temperatures, which are best suited for alcohol cars. The cars do not run as well in cooler climates.

But this should not preclude cars around the world from running, at least partially, on the fermented juice of Brazilian cane.

Not only are sugar prices on the international market becoming increasingly attractive to Brazilian exporters as the nation's real currency reaches almost daily record lows against the muscle-bound dollar, but Brazil's green fuel is beginning to enter the limelight on the world market as a fuel additive.

"Exporting deserves consideration. Brazil is just now beginning to enter the world export market with alcohol, which it hasn't really achieved before on any scale," said Biagi. "With the dollar at its current rate (against the real), Brazil should be trying to export everything, even thoughts."

-------- energy

Fighting Plans for a Gas Pipeline: Not Under My Backyard

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/nyregion/07PIPE.html?pagewanted=all

MOUNT VERNON, N.Y., Aug. 6 - It would be buried at least three feet underground, an invisible, silent artery carrying the lifeblood, natural gas, for an anticipated new crop of power plants to meet New York's growing electricity needs.

But to an increasing number of New York State residents and environmentalists, the proposed Millennium Pipeline may as well be a pollution-spewing superhighway running through the prettiest meadows, woods and waterways.

An unusually fierce, multipronged assault is under way to fight the project, the first major pipeline to be built in New York in nine years, and the longest of 23 such proposals nationwide under review by federal regulators. The battle here reflects the mounting tension between the region's growing demand for energy and the communities that will have to live with the messy details of meeting it.

Few large projects these days, particularly in the suburbs, go from drawing board to groundbreaking without heated, often sophisticated, resistance. But in New York, the Millennium Pipeline has accumulated a string of foes as sprawling and elaborate as the project itself.

Through the blasting of rock, dredging of rivers and lakes and plain old digging, the 425-mile steel pipe would start at the Canadian border on Lake Erie, snake along the Southern Tier, tunnel under the Hudson River and traverse about 32 miles of some of Westchester County's most scenic communities before ending in this densely populated city.

Opposition to the plan has loosely linked conservationists, state officials, suburban homeowners and Seneca Indians, and even prompted a rare meeting of the supervisors of 10 towns along the route in Westchester last month. It has made strange bedfellows of environmentalists and their usual nemesis, Consolidated Edison. And it has generated a litany of complaints and fears, from concerns about its safety and its effects on soil, drinking water, Lake Erie and the Hudson to claims that it would discriminate against the minority neighborhood here at the pipeline's end.

"This is somewhat unique in that it is a pipeline through a built-up, urban environment," said Fred Zalcman, executive director of the Pace University Law School Energy Project, which studies energy issues. "The community does seem organized against it, but there is countervailing pressure to build new pipeline capacity."

Any day now, the staff of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency that oversees the location and construction of interstate gas pipelines, is expected to release a final report on the Millennium's effect on the environment. That report, prepared in consultation with other federal and state agencies, is expected to guide the commission's decision, expected as soon as this fall, on whether to approve the pipeline, with or without modifications.

The agency's approval would clear a major hurdle for the pipeline, barring legal challenges. The New York Department of State must also decide whether the pipeline's crossings of Lake Erie and the Hudson would interfere with the state's federally sanctioned plan to manage development in coastal areas.

As its name suggests, the Millennium Pipeline was supposed to be completed a few years ago, in time for the turn-of-the-century celebrations. The Columbia Gas Transmission Company of Fairfax, Va., which proposed the $700 million project in December 1997, has promoted the pipeline as a safe vehicle to transport natural gas, which is increasingly looked at as a cleaner, cheaper fuel for power plants than oil or coal.

The company has won support from some leading New York politicians, including Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat, and Representative Benjamin A. Gilman, a Rockland County Republican, who see it as a vital step toward easing the tight electricity supplies and rising prices that have prompted calls for new power plants in or near New York City.

Columbia Gas is seizing the moment. Its New York pipeline would hook up with a proposed 180-mile segment in Ontario, Canada, that, in turn, would connect to an existing transcontinental network tapping vast natural gas reserves in western Canada. The sponsors of the Canadian end are holding off seeking approvals there until a decision is reached in the United States.

The New York pipeline, which would have a diameter of 36 inches for much of its length but 24 inches in Westchester, would carry 700 million cubic feet of gas a day, or enough to supply 6,500 homes for a year. About 80 percent of the line would either replace lines Columbia has operated for 40 years across thinly populated areas of southern New York or be located on utility rights of way. The key new stretches would be the Lake Erie crossing, the Hudson crossing and the route through Westchester

"We like to think that, after construction is done, this will not impact people's lives going forward, and there is a greater chance people's lives will not be interrupted by power shortages," said David Pentzien, the project manager for the pipeline.

But a wide range of opponents have sought to block its path. The pipeline, environmentalists say, will upset one of the most ecologically sensitive parts of the Hudson by crossing at Haverstraw Bay. Foes here in Mount Vernon, where the pipeline will connect with the Con Ed distribution system, have accused Columbia, despite its denials, of failing to consult with people in the poor, predominantly black neighborhood where the pipeline would end.

Nature lovers are fuming that thousands of trees will be destroyed as construction crews lay the pipe across the Teatown Lake Reservation in Yorktown, the county's largest private nature preserve. The state official charged with protecting the reservoirs supplying New York City's drinking water said the destruction of trees and blasting could cause mud and pollutants in storm- water runoff to contaminate the unsoiled waters.

In a new line of attack, Croton-on- Hudson has discovered dioxin, a chemical carcinogen, in the soil adjacent to the proposed route and is demanding that the energy commission order testing of the soil there. Village officials say they are concerned that pipeline construction will disturb the soil, kicking up the dioxin. And there are the usual concerns from residents about the proximity of the pipeline and the disturbance its construction, and perhaps a natural gas explosion, could cause.

"Our property all backs up to a forest, with deer and coyote, and it is absolutely pristine without this thing," said Dani Glazer, a Croton- on-Hudson resident fighting the pipeline through a group called Not Under My Backyard, whose 100-odd members have paid $32,000 out of their own pockets to hire lawyers to guide their fight. "This thing is destroying lives."

All this adds to the complaints of environmentalists in western New York that dredging for the Millennium, the first gas pipeline to cross Lake Erie, would harm the lake. And the Seneca Indian Nation has raised concerns that the pipeline would disturb areas that may harbor ancient burial grounds.

Most important, opponents dispute the notion that the pipeline is needed. They have suggested that the gas it would supply could be provided instead by a patchwork of existing pipelines in New Jersey and New York, including two interstate pipelines that pass through Westchester, or the proposed expansion of the Iroquois Pipeline from Long Island to the Bronx. But in its preliminary reports on the Millennium, the energy commission has suggested that those alternatives could be impractical and more costly.

Columbia, mindful that the energy commission will not approve a pipeline unless the operator can demonstrate its need, says it has secured commitments from seven companies, which would use 85 percent of the line's capacity.

Con Ed objected to the initial proposed route, on a right of way carrying high-voltage transmission towers that, on a warm day, bring in about 40 percent of New York City and Westchester's electricity. Although Con Edison officials said the danger of an explosion was remote, it could be catastrophic to the power supply. Columbia then shifted the route westward, closer to the Route 9/9A corridor near the riverfront, but the loud protests of a coalition of elected officials and residents blocked the new route.

With the backing of the State Public Service Commission, Columbia announced a third proposed route in April, returning to the Con Edison right of way but moving the pipeline farther from the towers and aligning it with highways, including the Taconic and Saw Mill River Parkways.

This may have mollified some towns, but it angered others, as was clearly noted on July 23 at a gathering of the town leaders from along the route. It was one of the rare times in Westchester that municipal officials have met to brainstorm toward a common purpose, in this case the possibility of proposing yet another route.

"It's like the Balkans here," said Paul Feiner, the supervisor of Greenburgh, who urged the towns to pool legal resources. "We are not going to be successful if everyone is doing this on their own."

Opponents do not put much faith in the energy commission, which they see as a distant, omnipotent Washington agency with little expertise or concern for local matters, as well as a bias toward the oil and gas industries as the Bush administration pushes for increased energy production.

Tamara Young-Allen, a spokeswoman for the agency, said the agency did not always side with industry. In April, it rejected the plans of the Transcontinental Gas Pipeline Corporation to build 60 miles of new pipe through a densely populated part of northern New Jersey, saying the company failed to demonstrate that it had lined up customers for the gas.

But opponents question how the agency could approve any project facing such a litany of concerns.

"It's not just a Croton issue, it's not just a Westchester County issue," said Karen Wells, an organizer of Not Under My Backyard, which is trying to unite with other detractors. "It's a regional issue. It's a New York State issue. It's a New York City watershed issue, a Great Lakes issue. It's much more."

--------

Energy Chief Gives Governors an Ultimatum on Power Lines

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By B. DRUMMOND AYRES Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/07/politics/07GOVS.html

PROVIDENCE, R. I., Aug. 6 - Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham warned governors today that if states did not help ease the country's electric power crisis by rapidly approving construction of transmission lines, the Bush administration would consider asking Congress for federal authority to take over the approval process.

The governors, here for their annual conference, countered that states had already begun approving new lines more quickly and would resist any federal encroachment.

Mr. Abraham said the administration was eager to help states speed construction and viewed the taking over of project approval as a last resort because the process so often involved eminent domain, or government condemnation of private property. But there can be no delay in stringing new lines, he said, because they are one of the keys to ending the power crisis.

"This needs to be a federal-state joint effort," he told a committee of governors studying energy policy. "We respect the rights of states."

He added: "Let states try first. But if they refuse, in the national interest the federal government needs to be able to step in. We have an infrastructure system that is not prepared to meet the needs of the country."

The shortage of transmission lines is nationwide and will worsen as the demand for electricity grows if corrective steps are not quickly taken, Mr. Abraham said.

Gov. Tom Vilsack of Iowa, a Democrat, said that in this instance, federal authorities seemed to have decided that states would fail to act and that therefore Washington would have to step in.

"I am very, very concerned by this," he said. "Trust us to do the right thing before approaching Congress."

The committee's vice chairman, Gov. Frank Keating of Oklahoma, a Republican, struck a similar note.

"Anytime you have the federal government imposing a solution before states have a chance, that's wrong," Mr. Keating said. "Local, state and regional solutions first. Always. If they fail to act, however, then I don't have any problem with federal action."

-------- genetics

Researchers Debate Human Cloning

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Cloning.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Amid growing controversy over the safety of human cloning, three researchers argued Tuesday for trying to make genetic duplicates of people by adapting the techniques used to create the sheep Dolly.

``Infertility is a disease,'' and couples who suffer from it need help to have children, Panayiotis Zavos, who runs an infertility clinic in Lexington, Ky., told a cloning conference convened by the National Academy of Sciences.

Zavos and Dr. Severino Antinori of Rome said there are ways to screen out abnormal embryos created in the cloning process.

Others contended that cloning is an error-prone process.

``At present there is no way to predict whether a given clone will develop into a normal or abnormal individual,'' Rudolf Jaenisch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the conference.

``There is no way to do this,'' Jaenisch responded, saying even apparently normal animal clones may have abnormalities too subtle to detect at that stage.

In some cases embryos grow abnormally large, Jaenisch said. Others have abnormal placentas or suffer respiratory problems or heart and circulatory abnormalities.

Alan Colman, research director of PPL Therapeutics in Scotland, told the panel that cloning in animals is improving and he expects much greater efficiency as techniques get better.

``The bottom line is practice makes perfect. But is it ethical to practice in humans? I think it isn't,'' he said.

Ryuzo Yanagimachi, a professor at the University of Hawaii, said cloned animals are likely to harbor defective genes that are not apparent early on and this weighs against cloning humans.

Brigitte Boisselier, a cloning advocate, responded: ``When you say some genes are likely to harbor defects and use that to say we shouldn't go on, we all know that in our bodies there are genes that may have defects'' and will cause problems later in life.

Since the day in 1997 that scientists in Scotland announced the successful cloning of a sheep named Dolly, the fear of -- or hope for -- human cloning has been a major focus of discussion and of legislation in many countries banning the practice.

Citing widespread confusion about human cloning and the complex ethical issues it raises, the National Academy of Sciences brought together an international panel of scientists to discuss the technology and where it may be heading.

Zavos, like Antinori an advocate of human cloning, contended that Jaenisch was focusing only on failures.

``But there are also successes. If we can clone an animal, we can clone an animal,'' said Zavos, who runs a fertility clinic in Lexington, Ky.

Antinori drew a fresh rebuke from Italian medical authorities on Monday, who warned that he risked losing his right to practice in Italy because of his plans to clone humans.

Antinori, who has repeatedly discussed plans to begin human cloning this year, told La Stampa newspaper that 1,300 couples in America, mostly in Kentucky, and 200 in Italy are candidates for his research -- and that he plans to start cloning embryos in November.

``Ours will be an experiment of therapeutic cloning for those couples who have no hope of having children,'' La Stampa quoted Antinori as saying. Because cloning would be illegal in Italy, he has said he would do the work in an unnamed Mediterranean country.

Zavos, who heads an organization called The Andrology Institute, also has said he wants to begin cloning a human by the end of this year.

The Food and Drug Administration has prohibited human cloning in the United States, however.

Boisselier, in June, accepted an agreement with the FDA promising not to do human cloning experiments without agency approval. The agreement was signed after the FDA inspected her lab. The agency declined to say where it was located.

On Sunday, Mark Hunt, a West Virginia lawyer, said he had spent less than $500,000 to set up a lab for Boisselier in Nitro, W.Va., but now has changed his mind about asking her to clone his late son.

Boisselier is scientific director of Clonaid, which advertises cloning services on its Web site for fees starting at $200,000. It was founded in 1997 by a French race car driver who changed his name to Rael and started the Raelian Movement, which claims that life on Earth was created by extraterrestrial scientists.

Among the debates over cloning is the issue of creating embryos to harvest stem cells for use in medical research.

The House of Representatives has voted to ban human cloning for any purpose. President Bush is contemplating whether to allow use of government funds in embryonic stem cell research, including such research that does not involve cloning.

On the other hand, in England, 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.

Stem cells are the master cells found in early stage embryos. They evolve into all the different tissues of the body and doctors hope to treat many diseases by directing the cells to develop into needed implants.

Cloning is reproducing without mating a male sperm and female egg.

In sexual reproduction, the offspring get half its genes from each parent. In cloning, the embryo gets all genes from one individual.

In Dolly's case, for example, all of her genes came from a 6-year-old adult ewe. Researchers removed an egg from one ewe and took out the nucleus, the master control center that includes the genes.

From the 6-year-old ewe, the researchers then took a mature udder cell and removed the nucleus, including the genes. The nucleus was put into the denucleated egg from the first ewe. Lab manipulation caused the egg and transplanted nucleus to develop into an embryo.

This was then placed into the uterus of a third ewe, which later gave birth to Dolly, who had all the same genes as the 6-year-old, thus becoming a clone of that sheep.

However, she wasn't an instant carbon copy. To begin with, the ``parent'' sheep was six years older and they were raised in different environments.

--------

Human cloning to 'start in weeks'

BBC News
Tuesday, 7 August, 2001
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1477000/1477476.stm

Doctors have defended their controversial plans to clone humans before an expert scientific panel in the US.

Dr Panos Zavos and Dr Severino Antinori said they intended to start their experiments within weeks.

Dr Brigitte Boisselier, a member of a group known as the Raelians, claimed she had already undertaken some human cloning work.

The doctors were trying to convince an investigative committee of the National Academies of Science (NAS) that the use of cloning to help childless couples conceive was both practically and ethically acceptable.

Dolly scientist

But they received a stark warning from Professor Ian Wilmut, the man who led the team that created Dolly the sheep clone.

"Animal cloning is inefficient in all species," he told the same panel. "Expect the same outcome in humans as in other species: late abortions, dead children and surviving but abnormal children."

Dr Zavos told the panel that he and Dr Antinori would inform potential patients that cloning involved risks.

"There is no such thing as total perfection in the business of human reproduction," he said. "Certainly there are difficulties, certainly there are problems, but... we do not preach for a perfect world."

To watch coverage of a BBC News Online forum with Dr Panos Zavos, please click here: 56k

Dr Brigitte Boisselier, a biochemist and member of a UFO group that runs a company called Clonaid, claims to have already started experimentation.

She told the NAS meeting that her group had carried out the first stage of human cloning - transferring human genetic material into an empty egg and allowing it to develop into an early embryo.

"We have reproducible data today that we hope we will be able to publish," she said.

Dr Boisselier said she believed an individual had a fundamental right to choose the way they wanted to reproduce.

"If you want to reproduce yourself by cloning, it's also your choice," she added. "As long as you're not producing the same person as yourself, you're producing your belated twin."

'Bottom line'

Time and again, however, animal cloning experts called by the panel highlighted the dangers associated with the technology.

Rudolf Jaenisch, of the Whitehead Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said only 1% to 5% of animal clones survived.

"Even clones that survive to birth often have severe abnormalities and die [prematurely] later," he said.

And Alan Colman, research director of PPL Therapeutics, a Scottish company pioneering pig cloning, told the panel that it would be a long time before techniques had been properly developed.

"The bottom line is practice makes perfect. But is it ethical to practise in humans? I think it isn't," he said.

European convention

The NAS panel is looking into all aspects of cloning - as a way to develop new therapies and improve agricultural livestock. It will produce a discussion document for the American people later in the year.

By this time, Drs Zavos and Antinori hope to have started their cloning programme. "We are considering 200 couples," Dr Zavos said before he went into the NAS meeting.

"We are probably going to start human reproductive cloning in 30 to 60 days from now," he told the BBC.

Dr Antinori flew into Washington after receiving a warning from the vice president of Rome's medical association that he could be barred from practising altogether if he carried through his cloning plans.

"He is risking not being allowed to practice medicine in this country (Italy)," Mario Falconi said, adding that Dr Antinori had already been asked to appear before the association's governing council.

Italy's medical code stipulates that medical experimentation is only allowed for the prevention and correction of medical problems. Cloning is also prohibited under a Council of Europe convention that came into force in March.

-------- police / prisoners

FBI Defends Surveillance Operation

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-FBI-Surveillance.html

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) -- The Justice Department claims that revealing details about how it bugged the computer of an accused bookie could threaten national security.

Disclosing material about the ``key logger system'' the FBI installed on the computer of Nicodemo S. Scarfo Jr. would hurt ongoing investigations of foreign intelligence agents and endanger the lives of U.S. agents, according to court documents filed by the government.

The Justice Department claims the system must remain secret to keep hostile intelligence officers from employing ``counter-surveillance tactics to thwart law enforcement.''

The case is being watched by privacy experts concerned over the government use of spy technology.

Lawyers for Scarfo, the son of a jailed mob boss, say they need the information to determine if the intrusion violated his constitutional rights. If it did, none of the evidence from the computer could be used at his trial.

U.S. District Judge Nicholas H. Politan has not said when he would rule on the motion. At a hearing last week, the judge said the matter should not delay the Sept. 11 trial date for Scarfo, 36, and Frank Paolercio, 32, who are accused of loansharking and running a gambling racket.

Scarfo's father, Nicodemo ``Little Nicky'' Scarfo, is serving a life term for running the Philadelphia-Atlantic City mob in the 1980s.

Politan has barred attorneys in the case from talking to reporters.

In an affidavit filed Friday, Donald Kerr, the assistant director of the FBI lab, said that ``there are only a limited number of effective techniques available to the FBI to cope with encrypted data, one of which is the 'key logger system.''' If criminals learn how the logger works, they can circumvent it, he said.

Scarfo used the software PGP -- Pretty Good Privacy -- to encode gambling records, authorities maintain. PGP is a strong, free encryption program that can be used for e-mail or individual files.

FBI agents installed the key logger system on Scarfo's computer after getting a search warrant allowing them to break into his Essex County business and look for a password that would unlock files they believed contained records of the illegal enterprise.

The system, which recorded every keystroke, eventually captured the password they needed. A three-count indictment was returned in June 2000 against Scarfo and Paolercio.

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Genoa Police Unit Trained by LAPD

Date: Tue Aug 07 2001
From: Max Obuszewski MObuszewski@afsc.org

ROME (Reuters) - An elite Italian police unit which carried out a bloody raid against protesters at a Group of Eight summit in Genoa was trained by U.S. police chiefs, an Italian newspaper reported Tuesday.

For four months, 70 specially selected officers were trained by two Los Angeles police sheriffs. A larger number of police also received a week-long training course from the Americans, according to the Communist daily Liberazione.

"The prime responsibility of the two Los Angeles sheriffs was to train the men from the special unit in the use of American aluminum batons," an unidentified policeman who took part in the one-week course was quoted as saying.

"From the start, they openly criticized the way in which Italian police carry out public order," he said.

Not only is the use of foreign expertise likely to cause consternation, but the fact the officers came from Los Angeles, a city scarred by mass riots in 1992 following the police beating of black motorist Rodney King, also raises serious questions.

In a midnight assault on a school which was acting as a headquarters for protest groups during the July 20-22 summit, 62 people were injured and 93 arrested. Many were laid out on stretchers with blood-stained faces.

Reporters who entered the school soon afterwards saw blood stains on the walls and broken teeth scattered on the floor. At least one protester has since undergone brain surgery.

Allegations of police brutality have flooded in and three top police officials have been transferred by the interior minister, who has faced calls for his own resignation.

The Interior Ministry declined to make a comment at this time on the involvement of the American sheriffs.

As well as brutality, there were also allegations that police sexually assaulted female protesters. Two weeks after the summit, nearly 50 demonstrators are still in prison. Many say their human and civil rights have been violated.

The police source told the paper the American sheriffs had said repeatedly that "in Los Angeles all we need is a nucleus of 20 cops to disperse hundreds of demonstrators because we can fire rubber bullets which wound, but don't kill."

On the first day of the Genoa summit, a 23-year-old protester who was attacking a police vehicle was shot and killed by an Italian paramilitary policeman.

The source also said that the week-long course he had been assigned to was more like a military boot camp.

"We marched, learned how to form shield defenses and how to jump through fire or out of a moving vehicle," he said.

"It was more like a medieval tournament. In the end we were doing purely military training. There seemed no difference between police officers and soldiers."

-------- spying

CIA Panel May Lack Voice for Change

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 7, 2001; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40737-2001Aug6?language=printer

A panel of outside experts selected by CIA Director George J. Tenet to conduct a "comprehensive review" of the U.S. intelligence community has plenty of big names but seemingly few voices for radical change.

The eight-member panel, created under a directive issued by President Bush in May, is headed by retired Gen. Brent Scowcroft and includes retired Adm. David Jeremiah, former CIA deputy director Richard Kerr, former undersecretary of state Stapleton Roy and former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick.

"These are all good people with old ideas," said Robert D. Steele, a former CIA case officer turned open-source intelligence entrepreneur. "There isn't a single iconoclast in the group."

Steele said he would have preferred to see the panel include people such as Loch Johnson, a Church committee staffer now teaching at the University of Georgia; Harlan Cleveland, a former ambassador to NATO and author of "The Knowledge Executive"; and Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired Magazine.

But Jack Devine, a former top CIA operations official with a reformist's bent, said the Scowcroft panel is more than a rubber stamp for the status quo, particularly with people such as Kerr and Jeremiah on board.

"I think they've got all the bases covered with high-caliber people -- and people who aren't afraid to think out of the box," Devine said.

Other members of the panel, which is scheduled to complete its review by the end of September, are John Foster, a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1973 to 1990; Jeong Kim, an information technology expert who serves on the board of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's nonsecret venture capital fund; and William Schneider, a businessman who heads the Defense Science Board.

TURNOVER: Rapid turnover atop the CIA's storied Directorate of Science and Technology continued last week when Tenet tapped Donald M. Kerr to run the DS&T, making him the fourth deputy director in six years.

Kerr, hired four years ago by the FBI to clean up its troubled laboratory, replaces Joanne O. Isham, who is off to serve as deputy director of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Isham lasted slightly more than a year as deputy director, having replaced Gary L. Smith, who lasted nine months.

"The major question it raises is why?" author Jeffrey T. Richelson said of Kerr's appointment. "Things seemed to be running well under Isham, even though she was not a technologist. Morale seemed to be going back up."

Richelson should know. His latest book, "The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology," is due out in bookstores next month. In it, he chronicles the rise and eventual dismemberment of the DS&T, which developed the U-2 and SR-71 reconnaissance aircraft and the nation's first fleet of spy satellites in the 1950s and 1960s.

Richelson said it isn't immediately clear to him why Tenet picked Kerr, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He also noted that the directorate's Office of Advanced Information Technology, created in October, has already been disbanded and its responsibilities turned over to the CIA's new chief information officer. Richelson called it "almost a quantum office."

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said Tenet wants Isham to improve morale at NIMA and views Kerr as "a world-class scientist" who can help restore the DS&T luster. "It sounds like a win-win to me," he said.

NEW BLOOD: The National Security Agency recently named four new outsiders to top jobs at Fort Meade, continuing Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden's push for outside talent. The most interesting among them may be Riley Purdue, an executive at Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), as chief of signals intelligence (SIGINT) requirements in the newly created Directorate of Signals Intelligence.

Purdue will be responsible for taking requests for information and telling NSA technicians how to go about getting it.

The other three appointees are:

• Richard G. Turner, former information technology executive at the Federal Trade Commission, who becomes the agency's new chief information officer.

• Michael G. Lawrence, former director of intergovernmental affairs at the District's Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, who becomes director of legislative affairs.

• William E. Vajda, a former information systems official at the IRS, who becomes deputy director for information technology and infrastructure services.

--------

Brazil's Army Defends Spying Activities

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

BRASILIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Brazil's army defended its spying activities on Tuesday in response to a newspaper report on how it gathered information on radical social movements, but said it would investigate alleged ``transgressions.''

In a three-page statement, the army said a report alleging that it spied on social movements it labeled ``adversaries'' included references to spying practices no longer used by the army, which ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985.

The report, published last week by daily Folha de Sao Paulo based on a set of army documents it had obtained, included a document in which the army allegedly said, ``often it is even necessary to scratch out citizens' rights'' in order to maintain public order.

Human rights groups were outraged by the report, saying it showed the army still used practices of the dictatorship.

The army said statements like ``'scratching out citizens rights' and 'eliminate opponents''' were no longer included in any of its documents on intelligence gathering.

But it added, ``Like any armed force committed to the efficient fulfillment of its mission, the Brazilian army has an intelligence system to provide the command with the necessary information to take decisions to fulfill its constitutional mission.''

The statement said, however, that the army would investigate the documents to verify whether they include ''transgressions from the norms that govern army intelligence, allowing for the necessary corrections.''

It said a reported description of the radical Landless Movement (MST), which groups poor rural workers who illegally occupy unused farmland to make a living, as an adversary ``may be improper.'' MST leaders were angered by the report alleging that the army spied on their group.

The army said the description of the MST as an ``adversary'' was improper. Rather, that applied to those within the MST ''that act on the margin of the law.''

-------- activists

N.J. Parents Shocked by Italy Arrest

New York Times
August 7, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Summit-Jailed-Student.html

WARREN, N.J. (AP) -- A telephone call from Italy put Rick and Cathy Thomas' lives into a spin. Their daughter was in jail, accused of conspiring with anarchists to loot and destroy property during last month's Group of Eight summit.

The Thomases were shocked. Susanna, a 21-year-old honors student at Bryn Mawr College, had been accompanying a street theater group as part of her research on nonviolent social activism, they said.

As a member of the pacifist Christian Quakers, Susanna would not be involved in violent anarchy, the Thomases said.

``She's a prisoner of happenstance,'' Rick Thomas said. ``It's all a horrible accident.''

Since that first call from the U.S. consulate on July 24 to their home in Warren, N.J., about 30 miles west of New York, the Thomases have spent hours on the phone with Italian and U.S. officials, their two U.S. senators, attorneys they've retained on two continents, and an international network of fellow Quakers. Rick Thomas set up a Web site seeking support for her release from the jail in Genoa, Italy only hours after learning of her arrest.

In the chaos that has enveloped their lives, the Thomases now average 10 hours of sleep between them.

Susanna Thomas faces 15 years in prison on a charge of conspiring with the Black Bloc during the protests. The July 20-22 summit was marked by anti-globalization protests, some violent, and one protester was killed.

Susanna and two dozen members of the Austrian political street theater company Publix Theater were arrested July 22 after leaving Genoa in a caravan of vehicles. Three other Americans were among those detained.

Susanna had just spent a semester in Paris and had begun her senior thesis topic -- the spiritual roots and techniques of social activism.

Working as a journalist, Susanna had been covering the theater group as they moved about refugee camps in Europe. During the summit, she worked as an interpreter at the Austrian Independent Media Center and the Genoa Social Forum, an alternative summit.

In the United States, Susanna was active in human rights causes -- but her activism has always been peaceful, said people who know her.

``She's a shining example of someone who hasn't been touched by popular culture,'' said Robin Whitely, a family friend and fellow Quaker.

The Thomases said their daughter e-mailed them on July 22, saying she planned a one-day trip to the beach before heading home to New Jersey. But two days later, the U.S. consulate in Milan told the Thomases she was being held at a women's prison in Voghera, halfway between Genoa and Milan.

Cathy Thomas said she spoke to her daughter briefly on Tuesday for the first time since the arrest.

``She was scared -- scared about her defense, and how the appeal will go,'' she said. ``She wants the whole group released because they are innocent.''

The other Americans in the group of 25 detainees include a Dearborn, Mich. woman, and two men Rick Thomas said. He had no further details about the other Americans.

The Thomases' attorney, Richard Atkins of Philadelphia, said he suspects the Italian police targeted the theater group when they were unable to arrest any Black Bloc members.

He said Italian authorities found two pen knives and a black bra tucked away in a suitcase that they are linking to the black-garbed anarchists.

``It's the strangest alleged piece of evidence I've heard of,'' Atkins said.

An Italian court next week will review the arraigning judge's decision to hold the 25 detainees. They could be set free, held for trial, or released on bond.

Meanwhile, the Thomases said they will continue to campaign for her release, pray and worry.

``I believe that in a rational world, she would be released,'' said Rick Thomas. ``But I understand this is not a rational world. I don't want to say I hope for things that I don't know will happen.''

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Protesters Take Over Colombian Consulate in Sydney

Tue, Aug 07 10:00 PM EDT
Reuters
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/010807/22/international-australia-colombia-consulate-dc

SYDNEY - A group of Colombians on Wednesday took over the country's consulate in Sydney to protest against what they called the "American invasion" of Colombia and a Washington-backed plan to wipe out the drug trade.

A spokesman for the group of about 25 Colombians residents in Australia told Reuters they represented an organization calling itself "The Bolivarian Movement for a Second Independence," and were demanding an end to U.S. influence over Bogota.

"We are protesting against Plan Colombia, we are protesting against the Yankee invasion of Latin America, and the American invasion of Colombia," the man said, declining to be identified.

Plan Colombia is a multibillion-dollar offensive against Colombia's thriving cocaine and heroin trade, and is also aimed at making peace with the country's leftist rebels.

The United States is offering considerable support, mainly in the form of military training and helicopters.

Australian police said they were "responding to an incident" but gave no further details. Heavily armed police surrounded the consulate in north Sydney shortly after the occupation of the offices at 9:30 a.m., according to local reporters.

An employee of the consulate, who also asked not to be identified, said the group was not armed and the occupation was peaceful.

"They are not armed at all. Everything is peaceful," she told Reuters after answering the consulate's telephone.

She added that the protesters were demanding they be allowed to speak with Colombian President Andres Pastrana and were refusing to allow consulate employees to leave until they had done so.



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