------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
N.Korea's Kim Leaves Russia with Arms, Trade Prizes
N.Korea Says No Talks While U.S. Conditions Exist
Missile Defense Contract Awarded
Nuclear waste recycling plant runs test
Hanford tanks off 'watch list'

MILITARY
Angola Urges U.N. For War Crimes Charge
Secret arms race revealed
Arsenal Threatens N. Ireland Conflict
Pakistan backs Beijing, denies missile nexus
British Land in Macedonia to Start NATO Campaign
Guard Troops Pick Up the Torch
Germ Warfare Negotiators End
Uneasy Iran Begins to Combat Its Scourge of Cheap Narcotics
Reports of Torture by Israelis Emerge
Out of Cash, U.N. Awaits Payment of IOUs
Rumsfeld Says Plans for Military Transformation Are Limited

OTHER
Bush's Stem Cell Policy May Streamline Research
Rootworm: A Biotech Boon?
China Jails 45 Falun Gong Organizers - Report
Washington Is Seeking Support to Handle Protests
Police Await 100,000 Protesters
Scientist Challenges Censorship
U.S. Plane's Rare Trip From China

ACTIVISTS
Mobilization for Global Justice -- Call to Action



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- korea

N.Korea's Kim Leaves Russia with Arms, Trade Prizes

August 18, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-russia-korea.html?searchpv=reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong-il ended his epic trans-Siberian train journey on Saturday, returning home from Russia with plans for greater economic ties and a document aimed at undermining U.S. missile defense plans.

Kim's trek of more than three weeks, from Pyongyang to Moscow and back, sent reminders of Russia's own Communist past echoing across the country, as vice-like security and road and rail chaos shadowed the Dear Leader's armored train.

But while much Russian coverage focused on the disruption caused to ordinary citizens by the trip, officials in Moscow and Pyongyang underlined the future benefits of economic cooperation and Kim's pledge to conduct a ``peaceful'' missile program.

``Our recent meeting...has provided a historic occasion of further developing the cooperative relations between (North Korea) and Russia and ensuring peace and security in Asia and the rest of the world,'' Pyongyang's official Korea Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying in a message to Putin.

After visiting the tomb of Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Kim met President Vladimir Putin and signed a declaration saying Pyongyang's missile program would not be a threat to any country respecting North Korean sovereignty.

Russian analysts said Putin would see the declaration as something of a triumph, giving him a document to help parry U.S. assertions that North Korea is one of several ``rogue states'' whose unpredictability must be neutralized with missile defense.

Kim also renewed his commitment to a moratorium on ballistic missile launches until 2003.

Both leaders also restated their commitment to preserving the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as the means to prevent any arms race. They say the pact would be wrecked by Washington's multi-billion dollar missile defense plans.

``NO MISSILE TALK WITH U.S.''

North Korea's official Rodong Shinmun newspaper said on Saturday officials would not hold talks with the United States while it continued to raise the issue of Pyongyang's missile capability.

``The DPRK (North Korea) and the U.S. cannot sit at the negotiating table as long as the latter has a dagger in its belt, and no success can be expected even if such dialogue takes place,'' the newspaper said in a commentary.

U.S.-North Korean contacts were put on hold when President Bush took office in January and called for a review of his predecessor's policies, which had led to a flurry of exchanges between the Cold War foes in late 2000.

But Washington said in June that it was willing to resume talks on a range of issues, including Pyongyang's nuclear program, missile program, and the concentration of troops and weapons on its border with South Korea.

The two sides held working-level talks in June, but Pyongyang has not answered a call for broader discussions.

RUSSIA BACKS REUNIFICATION

In Moscow, Putin said after meeting Kim that Russia backed reunification of North and South Korea but would not interfere in the process, and ``understood'' Pyongyang's insistence on the withdrawal of the 37,000 U.S. troops on South Korean territory.

The two Koreas remain technically at war under a 1953 armed truce that has kept their border sealed shut and fortified.

While Kim chugged back across Siberia, Russian and North Korean officials signed a deal which could culminate in a rail link uniting the peninsula, hooking Seoul's export-driven economy to Europe via the under-used trans-Siberian railway.

The line is intended to join Tumangun, on Russia's short border with North Korea, with Pyonggang on the border between North and South Korea. It would halve cargo delivery times between the peninsula and Europe.

Without giving details, Russian officials said after the summit that Moscow and Pyongyang had also agreed to cooperate in energy and mining projects and on overhauling the crumbling North Korean industrial complex.

--------

N.Korea Says No Talks While U.S. Conditions Exist

August 18, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-korea-north.html?searchpv=reuters

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea on Saturday said it has no intention of holding talks with the United States as long as it continues to raise the issue of Pyongyang's weapons capability.

``The DPRK (North Korea) and the U.S. cannot sit at the negotiating table as long as the latter has a dagger in its belt and no success can be expected even if such dialogue takes place,'' North Korea's official Rodong Shinmun newspaper said in a commentary.

``The 'issue of the reduction of nuclear, missile and conventional weapons' is a precondition for dialogue that the U.S. unilaterally imposed upon the DPRK,'' it said.

U.S.-North Korean contacts were put on hold when President Bush took office in January and called for a review of his predecessor's policies that had led to a flurry of exchanges between the Cold War foes in late 2000.

But Washington said in June that it was willing to resume talks on a range of issues, including Pyongyang's nuclear program, missile program, and concentration of troops and weapons on its border with South Korea.

Pyongyang's comments come as North Korean leader Kim Jong-il ended his 25-day epic train journey through Russia on Saturday.

During his visit, Kim met Russian President Vladimir Putin and promised that his country's missile program would not be a threat to countries that respect North Korean sovereignty.

The United States and North Korea held working-level talks in June, but Pyongyang has not responded to a call for broad talks.

The two Koreas remain technically at war under a 1953 armed truce that has kept their border sealed shut and fortified.

-------- missile defense

Missile Defense Contract Awarded

August 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Missile-Defense-Contract.html

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) -- The Department of Defense awarded a contract worth nearly $5 million to a Point Hope Native corporation to prepare Fort Greely to become a national missile defense test site.

The award is the most concrete step yet in transforming the shuttered base outside Delta Junction into the eventual core of the Pentagon's desired missile shield.

The Army Corps of Engineers awarded the site preparation contract Friday to Aglaq Construction Enterprises, a subsidiary of Tikigaq Native Corp. Aglaq will subcontract with a Fairbanks firm, Brice Inc.

The contract calls for the company to clear trees to allow for the future installation of interceptor missile silos, build a main access road, drill two water wells, and conduct other work, including soil excavation and grading.

The Army Corps of Engineers plans to issue a formal notice of the contract next week and work could start immediately afterward. The contract calls for the site work to be completed by mid-December.

The Pentagon hopes to subsequently construct up to five missile silos at Fort Greely as part of an expanded Pacific ``test bed'' for the proposed national missile defense system.

Proposed funding for that work awaits congressional approval.

``We're looking to do possible silo construction and other stuff next April at Fort Greely,'' Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization in Washington D.C., told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

-------- russia

RUSSIA: Nuclear waste recycling plant runs 1st processing furnace test

Salt Lake Tribune
Saturday, August 18, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/08182001/nation_w/123685.htm

MOSCOW -- A Russian facility selected to process spent nuclear fuel that Russia plans to import has carried out the first test of a furnace for recycling the waste, an official said Tuesday.

President Vladimir Putin signed a law last month allowing Russia to import spent nuclear fuel, despite protests by liberals and environmentalists who insist it will turn Russia into the world's nuclear dump. Proponents say it will create jobs and bring in money.

For a fee, spent fuel will be sent by armored train to the Mayak facility near Chelyabinsk in the Ural Mountains. The recycling process extracts useable nuclear material from the spent nuclear rods, while improving safety by reducing the material's potential to be used in weapons, the Russian nuclear ministry has said.

------ washington

Hanford tanks off 'watch list'

The Seattle Times Company
Local Digest
Saturday, August 18, 2001
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=dige18m&date=20010818

SPOKANE - The final 24 nuclear-waste storage tanks at Hanford were removed from a congressional "watch list" yesterday, capping a decade of work to make sure the radioactive contents did not explode.

The list, set up by a law written by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., in 1991, has contained 60 tanks considered dangerous.

"Today, I'm proud to see the watch list become extinct," Wyden said in Richland.

The Hanford nuclear reservation for four decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons, and 53 million gallons of the most dangerous wastes are stored in 177 huge, underground tanks.

Some of the tanks, which date to the 1940s, had displayed signs that a buildup of heat and gases might explode and shoot radioactive wastage into the atmosphere. There were also worries because the exact contents of many of the tanks were unknown.

The U.S. Department of Energy identified the tanks most in danger of exploding. Only two of the tanks required work.


-------- MILITARY

-------- africa

Angola Urges U.N. For War Crimes Charge

August 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Angola-Train-Ambush.html

LUANDA, Angola (AP) -- Calling the massacre of hundreds of refugees ``a heinous act of terror,'' Angola urged the United Nations to prosecute rebel leader Jonas Savimbi for war crimes.

About 10,000 people marched Saturday through Luanda in a government-organized march to protest last week's ambush of a refugee train in northwestern Angola. More than 250 people were killed.

The train was packed with more than 500 refugees who were fleeing fighting between the government and UNITA rebel forces. The train hit two mines, derailed and burst into flames before guerrillas sprayed it with gunfire.

In a message to the United Nations, the government denounced the massacre and accused Savimbi of ``indiscriminate attacks on civilians and crimes against humanity.''

The U.N. Security Council strongly condemned the ``terrorist attack'' Thursday and reiterated its call on the rebels to engage seriously in the search for peace. Council members pledged continued support for sanctions against UNITA.

In a letter to the Security Council a day later, Angola's U.N. Ambassador Ismael Martins called on the international community to redouble efforts to isolate ``those who choose to wage war.''

Fighting between the government and rebels has raged in Angola since the southern African country gained independence from Portugal in 1975. More than 4 million people -- about a quarter of Angola's population -- have been driven from their homes.

Human rights groups say both sides routinely commit atrocities.

As the train was heading southeast from Luanda to Dondo, drums of gasoline on board exploded, engulfing adjoining carriages in a fireball. None of the small towns in the area had firefighting crews.

UNITA claimed the train carried troops and ammunition, making it a legitimate target.

The government denied this, although survivors said the train had an army escort.

-------- arms sales

Secret arms race revealed

By CAMERON STEWART
18 aug 01
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0%2C4057%2C2621218^2^^nbv%2C00.html

AUSTRALIA harboured plans to become a billion-dollar-a-year arms exporter to Asia in the mid-1990s as a way of currying favour in the region and ensuring the survival of the local defence industry.

A special investigation by The Australian reveals for the first time the full extent and ambition of the arms export program, much of which was conducted in secret between 1993 and 1996.

It shows how Paul Keating's government recruited colourful arms dealers to lead the campaign, including the mysterious Liberal Party volunteer John Seyffer, who would later become a key figure in the Liberals' pursuit of former Labor prime minister Keating over his piggery business.

It reveals how these arms salesmen fell out with each other in a bitter rift and the ultimate destruction of the careers of two of them.

And it shows how Australian officials - inexperienced and ill-prepared - stumbled into the world of international arms trading.

Confidential Defence documents reveal how the government secretly backed a range of arms sales, all of which ultimately failed.

A Defence Department report on "prospective defence exports" dated August 1993 and obtained by The Australian reveals that the government investigated the possible sale of minehunter vessels and intelligence-gathering towed sonar arrays to Taiwan - a move that would have angered China.

It also backed a failed bid to sell 400,000 Australian infantry Steyr rifles to Thailand at a time when rebel elements of the Thai military were aiding the Khmer Rouge in neighbouring Cambodia.

In 1994, the government gave in-principle approval for 20 Steyr rifles to be sent to Jakarta for trial by Indonesia's special forces, Kopassus, despite allegations that Kopassus troops were involved in human rights abuses in East Timor.

The Asian export push, which also included Australian-built submarines and large offshore patrol vessels, was an almost complete failure and was effectively abandoned in 1997.

However, according to Defence documents, the government in 1993 believed it could create a defence export industry that had the potential to earn $1billion a year.

"We were not talking a few rifles here," said former director of defence exports Adrian Fielding, one of several people who agreed to speak publicly about the program for the first time.

"We were talking massive programs and massive opportunities. We were going to create a new defence export industry for Australia which the government saw as an extra arm of diplomacy - a way to strengthen ties with Asia."

In order to avoid possible bad publicity and protests from peace groups, the government adopted a "low profile" for the export plan.

However, the export attempt was bungled, not only by personality clashes, but also by inflated expectations about Australia's business clout in the region. Australian officials found themselves outmanoeuvred by the tricks of more experienced arms-dealing nations such as Britain, France and the US, which often had the full backing of their respective intelligence agencies.

"If we (Australia) seemed to be getting the upper hand, they (rival defence exporters) would try to get copies of the documentation, find holes in it and then bring it to the attention of the government," one former Australian official said.

----

Arsenal Threatens N. Ireland Conflict

August 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-The-IRAs-Arsenal.html

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP) -- Off the rocky coast of Brittany, the crew of an aging freighter was trying desperately to abandon ship and scuttle an enormous cargo of armaments -- nearly 150 tons of guns, grenades, bullets, explosives, fuses and detonators.

It was the late autumn of 1987, and international authorities were swooping in for what was to be their biggest-ever seizure of smuggled Irish Republican Army weapons on the high seas, this one from Libya.

As French customs officers boarded the Panamanian-flagged vessel Eksund, the crew -- aware they had been spotted -- had already donned wetsuits, readied dinghies and begun flooding the ballast tanks, hoping to send their illicit shipment to the bottom of the icy Atlantic.

The Eksund affair was a notable triumph in the long and often fruitless struggle by the British and Irish security forces to stem the flood of weapons to the IRA during the 1970s and 1980s.

But for every shipment intercepted, more made it safely through, intelligence experts say.

``By the time of that seizure, the IRA already had an oversupply of arms -- more than enough for a long, long conflict,'' said Sean Boyne, who writes about the group for Jane's Intelligence Review.

The formidable arsenal the IRA amassed in those years -- buried in secret underground bunkers across the Irish countryside -- is at the heart of a bitter dispute threatening Northern Ireland's fragile peace accord.

Although the group has observed a cease-fire since 1997, it is digging in its heels at giving up its guns.

Earlier this month, hopes of a breakthrough were raised -- and then dashed -- when the IRA reaffirmed its intention to move ahead with disarmament, then rescinded the offer amid political wrangling by the partners in the province's Protestant and Catholic power-sharing government.

More ominously, the arrests of three IRA men in Colombia last week on suspicion of training guerrillas there in the use of explosives raised fears that despite the cease-fire, the IRA might still be enmeshed in the shadowy underworld of arms trafficking.

While the facts of the Colombia case have yet to emerge in court, it has already cast a shadow on the yet-to-be-developed relationship of the IRA-allied Sinn Fein political party and the Bush administration. The State Department said last week it would be troubled by any link established between the IRA and guerrillas in Colombia.

The question of IRA weaponry, like so many other points of dispute in Northern Ireland, has psychological as well as political dimensions.

Even among Roman Catholics who support the peace accord, there is reluctance to see the IRA give up its arms, especially by those who feel personally threatened by Protestant paramilitary groups.

``You take people who have traditionally seen the IRA as their protectors -- even people who think that disarmament is the logical outcome of this whole process -- and you see a certain fearfulness,'' said Eoin O'Broin, a Sinn Fein city councilman who represents a run-down Belfast district that has been the scene of ugly sectarian confrontations all summer.

``If their house is being firebombed, if their children can't go to school without being blockaded by (Protestant) neighbors, it's a hard thing to get past.''

Reflecting that sentiment, defiant anti-disarmament slogans are daubed on walls in Catholic neighborhoods with strong ties to the republican movement. ``Not one ounce, not one bullet,'' read the scrawled foot-high letters.

Sinn Fein believes disproportionate -- and unfair -- attention has been paid to the IRA's failure to begin disarming, as it, along with other paramilitary groups, was supposed to have already done under the province's 1998 Good Friday accord.

The party's leaders point to what they consider a too slow pace of progress in British troop pullbacks and reform of Northern Ireland's Protestant-dominated police force, also mandated by the peace agreement. A package of police reforms unveiled Friday by Britain were widely criticized by Catholics as inadequate and by Protestants as going too far.

The voluntary surrender of weapons has no historic precedent in the IRA, and even to talk about disarmament goes against a closely guarded tradition, say longtime observers of the group.

``Republican philosophy has always attached great importance to safeguarding weapons,'' said Boyne, the intelligence analyst. Illustrating that, the IRA rule book says misappropriation of weaponry is grounds for a death sentence.

Peace moves in the mid-to-late 1990s caused a profound schism within the IRA, leading to the emergence of the splinter group known as the Real IRA. When it broke away, dissidents managed to appropriate a small but deadly share of the main IRA arsenal, analysts say.

In August 1998, the Real IRA claimed responsibility for Northern Ireland's worst single atrocity, a car bombing in the town of Omagh that killed 29 people. The group is also blamed for a string of much less serious attacks on the British mainland.

In past decades of scouring the world for weaponry, the IRA scored its greatest success in Moammar Gadhafi's Libya.

By the time the Eksund was intercepted in 1987, at least three other large shipments from Libya had gotten through during the previous two years, including substantial stocks of the Czech-manufactured plastic explosive Semtex.

The Libyan shipments ``transformed the fortunes of the IRA,'' said Toby Harnden, a journalist whose book ``Bandit Country'' includes a detailed account of the Eksund's seizure, based on security sources and French judicial documents.

IRA supporters in the United States also funneled in weapons, though on a considerably smaller scale. In 1984, Irish authorities seized the trawler Marita Ann, carrying seven tons of arms that had been procured in Boston.

Sporadic trafficking from the United States continued into recent years. In 1999, the FBI broke up what it said was an IRA ring smuggling handguns and ammunition from Florida, leading to jail terms for four people.

But support for aiding IRA arms acquisitions appeared to trail off as the peace process gathered momentum, said Richard Finnegan, director of Irish studies at Stonehill College in Easton, Mass.

``Since the Good Friday accord, the prevailing mainstream view among Irish-Americans is that political negotiations are the way to go,'' he said. But a breakdown in the peace process could again prime the weapons pipeline, Finnegan said.

So delicate is the subject of disarmament that only the most carefully calibrated language is used to discuss it.

The accord envisages paramilitary weaponry being placed ``completely and verifiably beyond use'' -- which could mean anything from cementing over arms dumps to dismantling guns and rocket launchers or discarding armaments at sea.

In addition to the logistical problems that scrapping the arsenal would pose, the fact that no one knows exactly how much weaponry there is would inevitably spark disputes over whether the IRA was holding some in reserve.

Even if disarmament somehow moves ahead, Northern Ireland's culture of guns is so deeply ingrained that it would really mark only a tentative first step, said John Hulsman, a research fellow in European affairs at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

``Eradicating it altogether -- that would take a generation,'' he said.

--------

Pakistan backs Beijing, denies missile nexus

Washington Times
August 18, 2001
From combined dispatches
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010818-89860.htm

Pakistan's top foreign policy official said yesterday that Islamabad has not imported Chinese technology to bolster its missile arsenal, but he pledged that his country would "cherish" and "nurture" its relations with Beijing.

Foreign Secretary Inam-ul-Haque noted that Chinese leaders already had denied a story in The Washington Times that said a state-run Chinese company, the China National Machinery & Equipment Import & Export Corp., sent a dozen shipments of missile components to Pakistan this year. The story cited U.S. intelligence officials familiar with reports on the transfers detected by a spy satellite.

"I can also confirm that there have been no missile technology transfers between China and Pakistan in recent years," Mr. ul-Haque said during an appearance at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. "Pakistan is not interested in an arms race in the region."

Mr. ul-Haque's remarks contradicted comments made this week by Republican Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who just returned from meetings in China. Mr. Thompson said Wednesday that China recently had been "caught shipping additional missile components to Pakistan."

Reports of China's missile technology transfers have created tension between the United States and Beijing as President Bush prepares to visit China in October.

Despite his denials of missile technology transfers, Mr. ul-Haque said objections to Pakistan procuring weapons from China were out of line, arguing that archrival India had long been equipping itself with foreign arms.

And with U.S.-Pakistani relations enduring a tense phase, he said Islamabad wants to improve its ties with Beijing.

"This is a relationship that we cherish. We will continue to nurture this relationship in the future."

After meetings at the State Department yesterday, Mr. ul-Haque said he was hopeful the United States would soon lift sanctions imposed on Pakistan and India after the two countries tested nuclear weapons in 1998.

"These sanctions are not serving any purpose, and it would be better if they were removed," he said. "They are, in fact, redundant."

The Bush administration is expected to decide next month whether to lift these sanctions. In recent months, U.S. officials have made clear they are interested in removing post-test sanctions on India, but they have been divided on how to handle Pakistan, which is subject to other sanctions as well.

State Department discussions yesterday touched on the overall relationship, stability in the region, the restoration of democracy in Pakistan, nonproliferation concerns, cooperation against terrorism, and trade and economic issues, a U.S. official said.

The two sides made no progress on U.S. efforts to convince Pakistan that instead of supporting one faction in Afghanistan -- the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban -- it should join Washington in trying to get all the various Afghan groups to form a more broad-based government.

Mr. ul-Haque said Pakistan supports the Taliban politically but does not provide it with military aid.

-------- balkans

British Land in Macedonia to Start NATO Campaign

New York Times
August 18, 2001
By IAN FISHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/international/europe/18MACE.html

SKOPJE, Macedonia, Aug. 17 - Forty-one British troops arrived here tonight as part of an advance NATO team that will help decide when and if Macedonia is safe and stable enough for a full contingent of 3,500 NATO troops to come in and disarm ethnic Albanian guerrillas.

The commander of the unit, Brig. Barney White-Spunner, said tonight that the decision would depend on "a real commitment on behalf of the parties involved."

"There is a real commitment from NATO to make this work," he said just after a British C-130 cargo plane touched down about 10 p.m. with troops from the 16 Air Assault Brigade. "If the conditions are right, we will make this work. And it seems to us there is a real opportunity for the future."

But NATO officials have made it clear that the moment is not yet right. In Brussels today, the alliance's leaders agreed that they would wait until next week before deciding whether to deploy all 3,500 soldiers.

If authorized, the full NATO force could be in place in two weeks, diplomats in Brussels said. Its mission would be to collect the weapons, expected to be anything from pistols to mortars, that guerrillas voluntarily turn in.

But the 19 NATO ministers who will ultimately decide whether to deploy the full force are concerned about the status of the cease-fire. The organization wants its troops to play an extremely limited role, preferably no more than one month. But the alliance does not want to endanger the troops by prematurely sending them into an unstable situation.

The ministers considered giving the go-ahead today but leaving it "under silence" until next week, meaning that member countries could still object over the weekend and ask for a new meeting. That was rejected as too confusing.

A clear go-or-don't-go order "makes the military side of the house more comfortable," the diplomat in Brussels said.

There has not been a day of complete quiet since a broad peace accord was signed on Monday between leaders of the majority Slavic Macedonians and ethnic Albanians, who make up one-third of Macedonia's two million people.

Today, fighting was reported near a border town, Radusha, the day after a police officer and a 70-year- old ethnic Albanian man were killed in Tetovo, in the northwest.

But the clashes have not been nearly as intense as just before the signing of the peace pact.

NATO is moving with a mix of speed and caution, seeking to balance the need to bolster the peace accord with the real fear that the mission will fail if the combatants are not ready to stop fighting.

As the plans to dispatch the troops begin to take shape, military officials here are stressing that the NATO mission is strictly limited to end a conflict before it becomes as bloody as the Balkan wars in Bosnia or in Kosovo.

"We are here to collect weapons over a 30-day period, weapons that are handed over voluntarily under terms and agreements agreed by all," a spokesman for the British brigade, Maj. Alex Dick, said at a news briefing today. "We are not here to enforce any peace. We are not here to physically take any weapons."

Specifically, officials say that means NATO troops will not end clashes or patrol front lines.

But many questions remain, particularly what NATO troops will do if fighting breaks out near them, if civilians are attacked or if the peace deal unravels completely while they are here.

Some military experts have questioned whether 30 days will be enough to set the groundwork for peace. Ali Ahmeti, the leader of the Albanian fighters, has argued for a longer deployment, saying that is needed to protect Albanians from reprisals by the police.

Many in the majority who largely oppose NATO's presence say they fear a longer deployment is inevitable. They added that would lead to ethnic partition, and turn Macedonia into a western protectorate.

"NATO was involved in Bosnia," said Todor Petrov, leader of the hard-line World Macedonian Congress, which opposes the peace accord. "They said they would stay for six months. Six years have passed, and they are still there. It's the same film."

The arrival of the British unit has been described as a "down payment" on the full contingent of troops, assuming that the cease-fire holds. The 41 soldiers were the first of 400 British troops who will arrive over the weekend.

Their job is to set up headquarters for the NATO mission, establish communications systems and talk to the government and the rebels, the National Liberation Army, NATO officials said today.

--------

Guard Troops Pick Up the Torch
750 Members of Regional Division Prepare for Deployment to Bosnia

By Steve Vogel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22970-2001Aug16?language=printer

About 750 National Guard members from Maryland and Virginia will be shipping out to Bosnia in the coming weeks, part of the biggest overseas deployment for the regional Guard division since World War II, when the famed "Blue and Gray" division landed on Omaha Beach in the invasion of Normandy.

Four dozen Maryland troops from the 29th Infantry Division will leave tomorrow in a convoy to Fort Dix, N.J., for final preparations before they join U.S. peacekeeping forces in the Balkans. The headquarters staff, based at Fort Belvoir in Fairfax County, will officially be mobilized Labor Day weekend, with troops from across the region deploying in shifts.

The National Guard assignment to Bosnia reflects a new reality: American participation in the NATO mission enforcing a peace accord between ethnic Serb, Muslim and Croat populations is increasingly dependent on citizen soldiers. The Army, caught between cuts to its force and ongoing commitments, is turning missions in Bosnia and elsewhere over to the Guard.

With National Guard or Reserve troops making up about 70 percent of the 2,700-member U.S. force to be commanded by the 29th Division, it will be the first time that they will outnumber regular Army troops in Bosnia since the mission began in 1995.

The largest proportion of the Guard soldiers are coming from units in Maryland and Virginia. Some District residents are members of those units. More are coming from 29th units in Connecticut and Massachusetts, as well as National Guard or Reserve units in a dozen other states. Guard divisions from elsewhere in the country also have been selected for six-month stints.

The new reality is taking its toll on households across the Washington area, as fathers and mothers leave families behind. Most had some choice in whether to go, but deployment was mandatory for some soldiers with special skills, according to commanders.

They will be in Bosnia for six months, but training and processing before and after will extend their service another month.

"Seven months," said Maj. Gen. Steven Blum, of Reisterstown, Md., a Maryland National Guard officer who will command the 29th Division troops in Bosnia. "That is a lot to ask, to take away from family, to take away from loved ones, to take away from jobs. Seven months is a lot to ask, and that's a pretty damn good measure of their commitment."

Pvt. Mark Stanton, wincing as an Army doctor jabbed his arm with a hepatitis B shot at a makeshift medical center at the Medford Armory in Annapolis on Thursday, will be leaving behind his wife and five children -- ages 10, 7, 6, 3 and 2 -- at their home in the District.

"I'm going to miss the first day of school, my wife's birthday, the kids' birthdays, Christmas, you name it," Stanton said. "I feel bad, but I know they support me, and when I get back, we'll have a big celebration."

Many of the soldiers who are shipping out admit that there will be family hardships but say they are going because of a sense of duty to their country and a belief that this is a one-time opportunity to put years of military training to work on an important peacekeeping mission.

Staff Sgt. Claudie McPhearson, a resident of Edgewater in Anne Arundel County, is temporarily breaking up her family. McPhearson's two sons, 8 and 13, will stay with their father in Edgewater. But her 15-year-old daughter will live with an aunt in Christiansburg, Va., six hours away, and enroll in a different school.

"They don't want me to go," McPhearson said. "It's hard for me. I'm very family-oriented, so leaving my husband and kids is very hard. I never thought something like this would happen."

Lt. Col. Christine Stark, a Woodbridge resident who is deploying with the 29th as its provost marshal, will leave behind 13-year-old twins and a 9-year-old with her husband. "He knows how important this deployment is to me," Stark said.

For months, Stark would tell people "the kids are fine with it," she recalled.

"Finally, they pulled me aside and said, 'We're not fine with it. We'd much rather you were at home.' I'm trying to make everything sound rosy, and they're saying, 'Wait a minute -- it's not rosy.' "

Capt. Drake McGraw, commander of Troop A of the 158th Cavalry Regiment, is leaving behind his 6-year-old son. "Six months is a long time for a 6-year-old," said McGraw, a Bowie resident who works for a Texas congressman. "He calls it my field trip. I don't know if it's sunk in yet."

Houston Matney, president of a local Vietnam Veterans of America chapter, stopped by the Annapolis armory on Thursday to wish the troops well. "These people are giving up their jobs and families for quite a few months, and people in the community are not aware of that," he said.

Unmarried soldiers have moved out of their apartments and put their household goods in storage. They face the task of finding new homes when they return.

Some of the deploying soldiers are worried about what will happen to their civilian jobs. By law, employers are required to retain people called to active duty and give them the same pay and similar work on their return. But soldiers say some employers look dimly on workers who leave for six months, regardless of the reason.

"They'll have to prove themselves again," McGraw said. "It's not supposed to be that way."

The worries for those left behind are no less. Troop A family members have formed a support group and will travel to Fort Dix together before their loved ones fly to Bosnia.

"It's very stressful," said Therese Capal, of Germantown. Her husband, Lt. Matt Longabaugh, a financial analyst with the National Institutes of Health, is going to Bosnia with Troop A.

"In a way, I'm kind of relieved the day is here," Capal said. "We've been working on it for so long, it's sort of been torture."

-------- biological weapons

Germ Warfare Negotiators End

August 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Biological-Ban.html

GENEVA (AP) -- Negotiators from 60 countries labored late into the night to salvage six years of work to create a way to enforce a ban on germ warfare -- but hit an impasse early Saturday over assigning blame for the breakdown, diplomats said.

Cuba and Iran led nonaligned nations in seeking to fix blame on the United States, which shocked fellow negotiators at the start of the four-week round of talks by declaring a draft proposal unacceptable and refusing to negotiate further on it.

The Western group of nations refused to blame the United States in a final report on the talks.

``Unfortunately, because of this issue, it was impossible to agree on the whole of the report,'' said Tibor Toth, the Hungarian diplomat who has been chairing the negotiations since they began in January 1995. ``We were very, very close.''

Diplomats said the focus now shifts to this fall's U.N. General Assembly. Parts of the draft protocol will be preserved for possible negotiations in the future, Toth said.

Negotiators have been trying to put teeth into the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, a Cold War-era treaty that lacks a mechanism to enforce the ban -- in part because no one seriously thought any country would try to use germ warfare.

Iraq's germ warfare arsenal in the 1991 Gulf War prompted nations to begin talks on creating a way to enforce the ban.

Most of the countries had accepted the compromise text put forward by Toth. But six key nations -- China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Cuba and Iran -- said there would have to be some modifications.

Those negotiations never got under way. At the start of this round of talks, the United States abruptly rejected the 210-page draft protocol that was six years in the making, saying it would be ineffective in stopping countries from developing biological weapons.

The United States said the proposal, which includes limited inspections of biotech industries and defense facilities, would pose risks to U.S. national security and to commercial secrets of the U.S. biotech industry, the largest in world.

Washington promised to come up with other ideas on how to enforce the ban on germ warfare, and many delegates said they were awaiting those proposals.

Meanwhile, negotiators got stuck writing the report on the talks, usually a routine process -- an indication of how deeply divided they remain.

The nonaligned nations dropped their demand that blame be stated in the report itself, but insisted that the national speeches delivered during the session -- including the U.S. denunciation of the compromise -- be attached to the report.

The next step is liable to be the U.N. General Assembly meeting this fall, said Toth. The assembly has routinely passed a resolution supporting efforts to enforce the ban on biological weapons.

``It will be a continuation of this discussion in a different forum. The U.N. General Assembly is not a negotiating forum,'' he said.

Toth said he has had no indication that any countries are considering a move recommended by some disarmament campaigners who have urged the world to bypass the United States and create an enforcement mechanism as they did last month with an agreement to fight global warming after Washington withdrew.

Another chance for advancement comes in November, when the 143 nations that have ratified the accord gather in Geneva to review what has happened over the past five years, Toth said.

``Hopefully there will have to be some ideas how to overcome an impasse, because there is a certain impasse -- it is absolutely clear,'' he said.

-------- iran

Uneasy Iran Begins to Combat Its Scourge of Cheap Narcotics

New York Times
August 18, 2001
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/international/middleeast/18IRAN.html

ZAHEDAN, Iran, Aug. 14 - Six addicts were milling around in the corridor of an unusual clinic here, waiting for the start of their third day of treatment, when a young patient suddenly emitted a deep bestial groan and collapsed to the floor, writhing.

"He must have epilepsy," said Dr. Mohsen Kianpour, the unflappable psychiatrist who founded the place, stepping over to help restrain the young man until the seizure subsided. "You know, a lot of epileptics use opium to treat their symptoms. But he didn't tell us. Maybe he was afraid he wouldn't be admitted."

Fear has been the guiding principle behind the approach to the treatment of drug addicts in Iran for almost 20 years, with addiction a crime that brought at least jail and occasionally even a death sentence.

But given the alarming wave of addicts that is swamping the prisons, clogging the justice system and taxing hospitals, the Islamic Republic is shifting tactics.

It is slowly recognizing that addiction is a disease, and that treatment might slow the flood of drugs into the country. This year, the new Outpatient Clinic for the Treatment of Addictive Behavior at the Zahedan Psychiatric Hospital has taken the unusual step of experimenting with methadone treatments.

"As long as people don't want to change, nothing will work," Iran's drug czar, Mohammad Fallah, said in an interview in Tehran. "That is fundamental. But we have begun to revise our past policies. Maybe in the future we will change the prison law as well."

Official estimates, generally deemed accurate, count 1.2 million addicts in a population of 63 million, with at least one million more casual users.

In view of the fear tied to admitting to addiction, however, other groups say there may be more than three million addicts, as much as 5 percent of the population. By comparison, Britain, with a similar population, has 200,000 addicts.

For years Iran tried to hide drug abuse, the standard reaction to social problems in a country that promotes Islamic government as the key to an earthly Eden. "They said we are Islamic, so we don't have any addiction, we don't have any prostitution, it is all good," said Fatimeh Farangkhah, a social worker at one of the few private groups that work with addicts.

The difficulty of initiating an honest social discussion has been compounded by the fact that addiction, like much else here, has become a political football between reformists and conservatives. The conservatives argue that the problem stems from exposing the young to the West, thus diluting Islamic principles. Reformists say the young, starved for any form of public entertainment, turn to drugs.

Everyone agrees that drugs are readily available largely because of the accident of geography: Iran is the major land route for much of the heroin and opium smuggled to Western Europe from Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as hashish.

Iran itself was a major producer under the shah. Now, according to United Nations figures, Iran leads the world in seizures of opium and its derivatives.

The extent of smuggling puts drug prices on a par with cigarettes, especially in cities like Zahedan, 30 miles from where the three nations converge. The city is the provincial capital of Sistan va Baluchistan, one of Iran's poorest provinces, where the anemic economy has long made smuggling a hallowed tradition.

"This province is a paradise for addicts, because it is a gateway for drugs," Dr. Kianpour said. "People move here from all over Iran because the opium is cheaper."

For years the government has been trying and failing to stem the flow of drugs by sealing the border. The costs in money and manpower are enormous. Almost half the 3,000 police officers killed in the war on drugs in the last 20 years have died in this province.

Throughout Iran last year, there were more than 1,500 firefights with heavily armed drug smugglers. In that effort, Sistan va Baluchistan constitutes the Wild East. In a six- hour gun battle in 1999, 33 officers died.

"Every corner of the desert around here is the site of clashes between the Iranian security forces and drug smugglers," said Danial Mollaee, political and security deputy to the provincial governor.

Aside from the craggy terrain, Mr. Mollaee said, the problem is compounded by the fact that Baluchi tribesmen inhabit all three countries and consider the border a fiction.

Some even keep one wife and family on the Iranian side and one across the border, officials said, and the border no man's land is reportedly so untamed that an arms bazaar there offers tanks for sale.

"The government accepted that Zahedan is a special case," Dr. Kianpour said as he told how he won his argument to use methadone despite the suspicion that surrounds it. Abstinence remains the cure of choice. The government has long been concerned that making methadone legal would only feed the drug market.

Even to this day, a Health Ministry official is at the clinic to supervise the distribution of each painful injection. Iran has yet to seek the syrup used elsewhere. "If we didn't use methadone, nobody would come to us to seek a cure, because drugs are so cheap here," Dr. Kianpour said.

It cost less than $90 a kilogram until this spring, when the price shot up to $375 a kilo after the Taliban government in Afghanistan had banned poppy cultivation.

The jump pushed many people to seek treatment. Dr. Kianpour can treat a maximum 20 patients in each two-week program, because methadone is expensive and Iran, despite its frontline status, receives little foreign aid to combat the scourge. He said he thought that he was doing well, with 15 percent of his patients staying clean.

On the surface, the patients' lives seem perfectly ordinary, if difficult. One is an overworked fifth-grade schoolteacher. Another is a veteran who is nursing shrapnel wounds from the Iran-Iraq war. A third is a homemaker who seeks solace over her shiftless husband. They each turned to drugs, they said, to try to ease their problems because they were so easy to buy.

Parvis, the teacher, who only wants his first name used to protect his job, turned to opium to try to gather more energy. His salary was too meager to feed four children, he said, and he took on private students until 10 p.m. every day and drove a taxicab during the summers.

"It took me three years to become an addict," said the teacher, gaunt at 125 pounds and looking far older than his 35 years. "Eventually I didn't even have time to smoke. So I just ate the extract."

Most of the young men in the Zahedan clinic complained of boredom. The town, with 600,000 residents, has two decrepit theaters, endlessly repeating movies made 10 years ago. Satellite television is rare. Internet connections are almost nonexistent. The best job is working as a guard on a drug-smuggling caravan.

"There are no factories, no stadiums, and the agriculture is kaput, so we have nothing to do except either take drugs or deal drugs," said Abed Zeinalabadine, 34, a war veteran from nearby Zabol. "There is only one park, and it has something like four trees."

The schoolteacher interjected, saying, "Instead of trees in our parks, all you find are drug dealers."

-------- israel

Reports of Torture by Israelis Emerge
Rights Groups Document Frequent Police Abuses Against Palestinians

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, August 18, 2001; Page A01
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26223-2001Aug17?language=printer

HUSAN, West Bank -- It was nearly 1 a.m. on a chilly night in January when Israeli soldiers pounded on the Zaul family's door in this scruffy Palestinian village. "Open up, it's the army!" they shouted.

Then they rushed in and grabbed Ibrahim Zaul, 15, a lanky boy growing a wispy mustache. Zaul was taken to an Israeli police station, where for the next eight or nine hours, he said, he was blindfolded and spat upon, cursed and threatened with death, beaten with fists, truncheons and rifle butts until he screamed, doused with freezing water and forced to stand upright with a heavy weight hung excruciatingly from his neck.

"I would fall to the ground, and whenever I fell, they would kick me in the back," he said in an interview.

It did not take long for Zaul to break: Later that morning, he confessed to having thrown stones at Israeli troops and eventually served four months in prison.

About a dozen teenagers, all minors and most from Husan or nearby villages south of Jerusalem, have given similar accounts of arrests, beatings and torture by Israeli police in recent months. Their stories, which differ only in the harrowing details, have been recorded by Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations, which find them credible.

As the Palestinian-Israeli conflict drags through its bloodiest chapter in a generation, there are signs that fraying discipline and an atmosphere of permissiveness in the ranks of Israeli security forces are resulting in violence and abuse directed at Palestinian civilians. Operating under tense, occasionally lethal conditions in the West Bank and Gaza territories they occupy, and sometimes attacked by Palestinian gunmen and bombers, some Israeli soldiers and police appear to have taken out their frustrations with their fists and gun butts, according to human rights groups and spokesmen for the Israeli army.

Most concern from abroad has focused on Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian activists involved in attacks on Israel, or on the Israeli military's retaliatory attacks on Palestinian-controlled areas. But the increase in abusive behavior by the security forces, and the Israeli public's tendency to overlook it, has led some dovish Israelis -- a distinct minority in the current climate -- to warn of what they call a widening mentality of occupation.

More broadly, it has raised questions about whether Israel can fulfill its own ambitions to be the Middle East's only democracy with Western-style rights guarantees in the crucible of the bloody conflict between Arabs and Jews.

Nearly from its inception at mid-century, Israel has boasted that it alone in the region strives to meet Western human rights standards. It made that argument even while the late Yitzhak Rabin encouraged the army to "break their bones" when Palestinians staged the first intifada, or uprising, in the late 1980s. And for years the main domestic security service, Shin Bet, regularly tortured Arab detainees. Moreover, Israel's Arab citizens were denied basic rights in housing, employment and land ownership.

The Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that Shin Bet's torture of prisoners was illegal, and the agency says it has halted the practice in most cases. Human rights activists and liberals celebrated the ruling at the time, hailing it as a sign of enlightenment. But now those same advocates say the current conflict is leading Israel to use brutal practices in which beatings and abuse of Palestinians are regarded not only as necessary, but as acceptable. Some Israelis suggest the practices also betray a vein of racism.

"All colonial wars have the same inner logic," said Uri Avnery, a veteran of the frayed Israeli peace movement. "When you are occupiers subjugating another people, you need some moral reason for it, and the reason is that they are an inferior race. You have that mentality here. It's like the old American South: If the brutal sheriff is the hero and the inferior people are seen as becoming uppity, as raping our women, then it's okay to be brutal toward them. It's harder, in fact, not to be brutal."

One of the more dramatic examples is an allegation that at least 10 Palestinian teenagers, including Zaul, were tortured into giving confessions at Israel's Gush Etzion police station in the southern West Bank. The experience has embittered some of the youths; one told an Israeli newspaper he was thinking of retaliating against Israel by becoming a suicide bomber.

There has been a rash of other recent incidents and allegations involving beatings and abuse by Israeli soldiers and police, often at checkpoints where they regulate the daily movements of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Last week, six Israeli soldiers were arrested on suspicion that they had subjected a group of West Bank Palestinian taxi passengers to a two-hour ordeal of beating and humiliation, clubbing one of them into unconsciousness and forcing others at gunpoint to pair off and beat each other. The case against one of the soldiers was dropped; the other five may face courts-martial.

"We didn't receive cases like that before this" Palestinian uprising, said Yael Stein, research director for the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, referring to the all-night beatings and forced confessions at the Gush Etzion police station. "There were cases of beatings before by border police or by soldiers, but this is different because this is not just cases of sheer brutality. This is real torture."

As the Israeli media, foreign journalists and human rights organizations have detailed what seems to be an escalating pattern of abuse, senior Israeli army officers have expressed alarm, mostly at the potential damage to the military's image, while saying they are investigating.

The army said it has launched a campaign of training and education to dissuade soldiers from abusing Palestinians. Eight cases of alleged abuse have been investigated by the military police in the past 10 months of violence, army spokesman Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz said.

"It's not simple, because everywhere in the West Bank we are facing terror attacks, car bombs, sometimes suicide bombers, sometimes [seemingly] innocent people with a donkey or a bicycle who are hiding a bomb," Rafowicz said. "So it's a balance between security necessities and letting people go about their normal lives and movements. It can happen that there are some mistakes. If there are clear instances of misbehavior against the regulations, we are not waiting for human rights groups in order to have an investigation."

But in cases involving the police, such as the alleged pattern of torture at the Gush Etzion police station, officials said they will only investigate if a Palestinian personally files a specific complaint with the authorities.

"If we don't have any complaint or evidence, we can't do anything about it," said Yaacov Gallanti, spokesman for the Justice Ministry's branch for internal police investigations. In the instance of the Palestinian teenagers, Gallanti said "only one of them did bring charges, and charges brought were very partial."

In most instances, Palestinians said they are reluctant to register a complaint with Israeli authorities, saying either they doubt it will result in a genuine investigation, or that they are afraid.

Reports of torture, beatings, abuse and humiliation have not generated an outcry from the Israeli public. In a new poll conducted by Tel Aviv University, nearly half the Israelis surveyed said uniformed soldiers and police should be treated leniently if they abuse Palestinians, or should not be disciplined at all; another 10 percent had no opinion.

The poll was taken immediately following reports in the Israeli media describing instances in which Israeli soldiers have detained Palestinians at roadblocks, confined them to their cars in the sun on hot days and extracted small bribes known as "passage fees" -- packs of cigarettes, for example -- at army checkpoints.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, quoting high-ranking army officers, said the incidents of abuse that have come to light represent "only the tip of the iceberg in what is actually a much broader phenomenon."

According to a report by B'Tselem, the gist of which army spokesmen are not denying, the six soldiers arrested last week had stopped two Palestinian taxis on July 23 near Hebron, on one of the many hundreds of roads Palestinians use to bypass Israeli roadblocks. Nine of the passengers were lined up against a wall. The soldiers, from the Shimshon Battalion, then beat them with rifle butts and helmets, according to the report. One of the Palestinians was knocked unconscious.

"One of the soldiers grabbed me by the neck and pulled me up," said one of the men, Mohammed Salamin, a 28-year-old taxi driver. "I tried to turn around to see his face, and then he slapped me hard and ordered me to walk without looking left or right. . . . While I was walking, the soldiers kicked and punched me all over my body."

The other taxi driver, 36-year-old Khaled Rawashdeh, described how the soldiers forced the men to pair off and beat each other, and then ordered one young passenger to beat the others. "He refused, but the soldiers threatened to kill him on the spot. . . . With tears falling from his eyes, the young man started to beat us with his fist on our faces and heads. He tried to beat us gently, but one of the soldiers put his gun to his head and told him to beat us more seriously. They told him to beat me the most. He struck my face six or seven times."

When the Israelis finally released their captives after about two hours, they told them to get lost.

"They added that they wanted us to feel how painful the stones were when they were thrown at soldiers," Rawashdeh said. "As we began leaving, some of the soldiers began to stone us. Some of the stones hit our backs and legs."

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

Out of Cash, U.N. Awaits Payment of IOUs

By Steven Mufson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 18, 2001; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27979-2001Aug17?language=printer

The United Nations ran out of cash in its regular budget this week and expects to be $75 million "in the hole" by the end of the month, Joseph Connor, the U.N. undersecretary for administration and management, said yesterday.

Tardy payments by the United States and other countries often force the United Nations to borrow money for operating expenses from other accounts late in the year, but this is unusually early for the organization to dip into other funds, Connor said.

This year, the United Nations is borrowing from its separate peacekeeping account, which contains cash only because the United Nations has failed to pay about $900 million owed to 70 countries that have contributed soldiers, materiel or support for peacekeeping operations.

"How come we have peacekeeping cash? The answer is, I don't pay the troops," Connor said. "It's like floating a bond issue, without interest."

Five countries -- the United States, Japan, Brazil, Argentina and China -- owe substantial amounts for the regular budget. The United States owes $464 million, nearly two-thirds of all the late dues.

Japan, which usually pays in mid-September, owes $152 million. Brazil owes $38 million; Argentina, $20 million; China, $7 million; and all other countries together, about $45 million.

The bulk of the $464 million U.S. debt will be paid once Congress passes a State Department authorization bill.

The bill, which has cleared the House but not the Senate, contains $266 million for the U.N. regular budget. CNN founder Ted Turner has pledged to pay $31 million on behalf of the United States from his private foundation.

The United States also owes $167 million for U.N. annual budgets from earlier years, but it has not made any provision to pay that.

On top of those arrears, the United States owes roughly $726 million for peacekeeping operations. The State Department authorization bill contains $582 million for peacekeeping, the second and largest of three payments that the Clinton administration and congressional leaders agreed to make in a deal with the United Nations last year.

The State Department authorization bill is being held up by a dispute over an amendment by House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) to undercut the International Criminal Court, which is being established in the Netherlands to prosecute war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Some members of Congress fear that it might someday try to prosecute U.S. soldiers or leaders.

Sources close to the administration said the State Department has asked Vice President Cheney to help break the impasse by urging DeLay and House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.) to drop their opposition to a measure to release money for the United Nations.

If the dispute is not resolved by late September, it could prove a major embarrassment for President Bush when he addresses the U.N. General Assembly in New York.

U.N. officials are dismayed that the United States continues to haggle over its payments even after the organization has trimmed its budget.

Connor, a former Price Waterhouse executive, was given his U.N. post in 1994. Over the next three years, the organization cut $50 million from its annual budget and eliminated nearly 1,000 jobs.

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

Rumsfeld Says Plans for Military Transformation Are Limited

New York Times
August 18, 2001
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/politics/18MILI.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 - Seeking to quiet anger from some uniformed officers and in Congress, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld described his vision of military transformation today as one that may not even challenge current weapons programs or affect more than a "modest fraction" of the Pentagon's forces.

Mr. Rumsfeld said his changes would focus on new technology, especially communications networks, to link current weapons systems and provide information on the enemy more speedily to soldiers, sailors, pilots and marines.

On "transformation," the label that has been affixed to the idea of overhauling the country's military, Mr. Rumsfeld said: "When they see that word, there's a tendency to think that you go from this to something different. There is a tendency to hear the word and think of a platform, a weapons system that is distinctly different. Both are wrong."

Instead, Mr. Rumsfeld said he was "thinking about outcomes and capabilities, and it may not involve a single change in a platform."

"It may be simply connecting a collection of platforms and capabilities in a way that creates a capability that could be characterized as transformed or transformational," he said.

By finding new ways to integrate and coordinate the military's weapons systems, he said, the Pentagon may be able to "change some modest fraction of your force, with the effect being transformational."

Mr. Rumsfeld's critics will probably seize upon his words to argue that he is retreating from the "revolution in military affairs" promised by President Bush in last year's election campaign.

But a senior Defense Department official said that Mr. Rumsfeld did not believe that the military in general opposed his version of transformation, and that his comments were simply to re-emphasize that his program was less about cutting troops or weapons than about using them effectively in combat.

Even so, Mr. Rumsfeld's explanation of transformation as a slower, perhaps less sweeping process could help him in the negotiations under way at the Pentagon and soon moving to Congress.

Military officers and Pentagon planners acknowledge that "transformation" has become the buzzword. Anything that can be labeled "transformational" is a plus in defending financing for weapons or personnel levels, and dubbing anything "nontransformational" is a curse.

At a Pentagon news briefing, Mr. Rumsfeld noted the difficulty in changing a bureaucracy as large as the Department of Defense.

"The idea of transforming from this to that is unrealistic if you think of the size of the defense establishment and the weapons systems we have and the numbers of years, the investments in them and the number of years that they last," he said.

Only a small part of the military may have to change, he said.

"Even though you know you may still end up with horses and buggies as a part of your force, the fact that you have changed some fraction of it or connected it differently may create something that could be characterized as transformed," he said.

Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington research and policy organization, supported this argument that only a fraction of a military must change to gain a combat advantage.

Mr. O'Hanlon pointed out that before World War II, the German army transformed less than 20 percent of its ground forces into the blitzkrieg capability that won the sudden, decisive victories in the early years of the war in Europe.

"What Rumsfeld is really talking about is the ability to exchange and process information much more quickly," Mr. O'Hanlon said. "In other words, the tank you see with a satellite when it was exposed, you can hit with a plane 20 miles away, rather than only hearing about it the next day when it's too late."

Mr. O'Hanlon predicted that many of the major weapons systems now in the military - tanks and bombers and aircraft carriers - would remain an important part of the force for many years to come.

"I'm not saying all these platforms will stay the same forever," he said, "but in the near-term they will remain and gain technologies to acquire targets and process information and disseminate that information much more quickly."

The measured definition of transformation offered by Mr. Rumsfeld today comes at an important time politically, as those who oppose force cuts or base closings are beginning to rally in opposition to some of Mr. Rumsfeld's expected proposals, Mr. O'Hanlon said.

"If he can make a good intellectual case as to why transformation is really a gradual thing, that will soften the opposition on Capitol Hill," he said.


-------- OTHER

-------- genetics

Bush's Stem Cell Policy May Streamline Research

New York Times
August 18, 2001
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/health/18CELL.html

Biologists may find there are fewer restrictions on research with embryonic stem cells under the Bush administration than they would have faced under the Clinton administration, whose guidelines have been scrapped, officials at the White House and the National Institutes of Health said.

The abolition of the guidelines means that researchers can now use, among other sources, the embryonic stem cells first derived in 1998 by Dr. James A. Thomson of the University of Wisconsin, which did not comply with the Clinton administration guidelines in two technical respects. And the foundation that handles the university's patents has said there was nothing in the way of researchers gaining access to the cells and doing any research they please except for cloning a human or inserting the cells into other embryos.

Dr. Lana R. Skirboll, director of the Office of Science Policy at the health institutes, said the guidelines governing embryonic stem cell research would be replaced by the four conditions specified by President Bush in his Aug. 9 speech: that the cells were derived before that date, that donors gave informed consent, that the cells must come from excess embryos created solely for reproductive purposes and that donors were not offered financial inducement.

Scientists applying for federal grants from the health institutes need only list which of the approved embryonic cell lines they intend to use, and there will be no further scrutiny other than the usual review of grants by outside experts. The agency is developing the registry and will publish it soon on the Internet, Dr. Skirboll said.

Along with the guidelines, a supervisory panel of the health institutes called the Human Pluripotent Stem Cell Review Group has been abolished.

"We see a much more streamlined process," Dr. Skirboll said. "Once the registry is up, if your grant application lists a cell line on the registry, there is no secondary review."

The guidelines drawn up under the Clinton administration "no longer pertain," she said, because the criteria specified by President Bush "capture the essential elements of the guidelines and supplant them."

The four straightforward principles described by Mr. Bush replace many pages of federal regulations specifying the conditions under which the cells must have been obtained. The reason is that with research now confined to existing cell lines, the guidelines are unnecessary, a White House official said.

The new Council on Bioethics, to be led by Dr. Leon Richard Kass of the University of Chicago, will provide general ethical guidance, and it will not, as many scientists had expected, revise the health institutes' guidelines on stem cell research or draw up new ones of its own. The Kass council "will not be developing specific regulations," the White House official said.

Dr. Skirboll said the full registry of up to 60 lines of human embryonic stem lines would be published as soon as permission had been obtained from those who derived them to use their names.

The 60 lines were all derived independently, from different human embryos, and are not clones of one another, she said. Some of the derivers have expressed interest in taking DNA fingerprints of their cells, similar to those used in forensic cases, to keep track of who is using them. Dr. Skirboll said that the idea was being considered for that purpose, and not as a method of policing the Aug. 9 cut-off date.

Though some of the 60 cell lines may prove unsuitable on further study, researchers should have a much wider choice than many had expected would be the case.

A second respect in which stem cell research has been made easier is that the elimination of the agency's guidelines resolves a difficulty faced by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, which owns the patent on the human embryonic stem cells derived by Dr. Thomson.

The problem is that Dr. Thomson's cells, which he derived before the agency's guidelines were written, did not fully comply with the guidelines. The donor's informed consent was obtained before the embryos were created, not afterward, as the guidelines required. Also, the guidelines required the embryos to have been already frozen for storage. Dr. Thomson used embryos from two sources. One was a United States in vitro fertilization clinic, in which the embryos were frozen; the other was a clinic in Israel, which may have supplied fresh embryos. "We could not certify that they were frozen and Jamie is not in a position to say," said Andrew Cohn, a spokesman for WARF.

Frozen embryos lose viability over time and fresh embryos would be better starting material for making embryonic stem cells, which some scientists speculate may have been one of the several factors behind Dr. Thomson's success in being the first to establish lines of the cells.

Mr. Cohn said WARF was eager to get its embryonic cell lines into researchers' hands with minimal restrictions. "We want to push this research forward as fast as we can," Mr. Cohn said. All distribution of the cells to academic researchers is handled by WARF, not by the Geron Corporation, the biotechnology company that holds a major license to the cells.

WARF will make the cells available to academic biologists for a subsidized fee of $5,000, and they may do whatever research they wish, Mr. Cohn said.

"Any researcher who gets our cells and makes a patentable discovery will own that patent," Mr. Cohn said. But, as is routine practice, if researchers wish to commercialize any discovery they make on the basis of WARF's patent, they must negotiate a license with WARF, or with Geron for anything that falls in the scope of Geron's license. Geron financed Dr. Thomson's research and has commercial rights to six types of human cell that can be derived from the stem cells.

Mr. Cohn said he was baffled by some researchers' belief that WARF's conditions on use of the cells turned them into employees of Geron. Geron would negotiate an agreement in the usual way, he said, and was hardly likely to block any invention covered by its license.

In the event agreement could not be reached, Geron as licensee had no right to go to federal court to enforce its patent, Mr. Cohn said. "They have to come to WARF because we are the patent holder. Who would you rather have as an arbitrator, a nonprofit, university-affiliated entity or a private company?"

Biology has made rapid progress over the last quarter century, with several pioneering discoveries that seemed to place their authors in a monopoly position, like the recombinant DNA technique for moving genes between organisms. In that case the patent holders profited without holding researchers to ransom.

"On broad pioneering-type inventions like these it inevitably works out that all the stake-holders are satisfied," said Todd Dickinson, a former director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Mr. Dickinson, now at Howrey Simon Arnold & White, a Washington law firm, said he expected the same would prove true of embryonic stem cells, without the need for legislation.

"The system has almost inevitably self-corrected and access to the technology has been made available. I would expect that WARF would be fairly likely to take a positive approach to making this technology widely available," he said, noting WARF's role as the patent portfolio manager of a leading research university.

--------

Rootworm: A Biotech Boon?
Corn Designed to Kill Common Pest Stirs Hope as Pesticide Alternative

By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 18, 2001http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26910-2001Aug17?language=printer

WAYNESBORO, Va. -- Armed with a shovel and a machete, two men entered a lush stand of corn ripening on a rolling Shenandoah Valley farm and began digging up stalks to examine the roots. The corn looked healthy, and entirely normal.

But below ground, something with potentially great implications was happening: An especially destructive and widespread pest, the corn rootworm, was being killed without the use of chemical pesticides. Genetic engineering was employed instead, and the men were there to study the results.

"Farmers don't like using soil insecticides," agronomist James Haldeman said as he tramped through the stand. "Some of them stink and they're nasty."

The sponsor of the field test, Monsanto Co., believes the new corn will be the next big development in crop biotechnology, transforming the way farmers control the worst pest of the nation's largest crop. If it does, genetic engineering could finally begin to realize one of its most tantalizing promises: helping the environment by allowing farmers to cut their need for chemical pesticides as never before.

"The issue of pesticide use is clearly a key concern for farmers, consumers and regulatory agencies," said Robert Fraley, the company's chief technology officer. "All three groups want to find alternatives to the current approaches. It's our strong belief that biotechnology offers a better approach, with considerably less impact on the environment than current insecticide use."

While some environmentalists are concerned about its safety and worried that it will quickly be overused -- saying Monsanto is more interested in making a profit than a safer world for corn growers and consumers -- even some who are usually skittish about tinkering with the genes of plants acknowledge the corn's possible benefits. Federal regulators, who are still studying its safety and effectiveness, are enthusiastic about its environmental advantages as well.

This response has raised hopes in the biotechnology industry that the corn can help ease the public's general queasiness about genetically engineered crops, which are highly controversial in Europe and increasingly so in the United States. Rootworm-resistant corn, the industry hopes, will refocus attention away from potential problems to the technology's ability to reduce the use of environmentally destructive farm practices and help feed the world's hungry.

"It's time for people to acknowledge that genetic engineering can lead to the use of fewer pesticides or less dangerous pesticides," agreed Michael Jacobson of the public interest group Center for Science in the Public Interest. "Environmentalists have been rightly concerned about chemical pesticides since Rachel Carson and 'Silent Spring,' and here is a real potential alternative."

Like many genetically engineered farm crops, the rootworm-control corn is created by splicing into seeds a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) -- a family of soil bacteria that produces toxins fatal to many pests, but not to humans. The Bt genes produce different Bt toxins that kill different pests, essentially endowing the engineered plants with their own "biological" insecticide.

Pesticide Dependence

Research has generally concluded that Bt toxins are less harmful to the environment than chemical pesticides. While many chemical pesticides do a good job of killing harmful pests and weeds, they can also harm a broad range of insects (and sometimes birds and fish). If misused, they can affect people in and around farms as well. For decades, organic farmers have sprayed mixtures of Bt toxins as a natural insecticide.

Modifying crops to produce Bt toxins has helped reduce insecticide use in some crops, most notably cotton, and has allowed the widespread use of less harmful herbicides. But overall, federal statistics show, American farmers now spread about the same amount of pesticides as they did before the biotechnology revolution began.

That would clearly change if federal regulators approve the new corn modified to resist the rootworm, which costs farmers an estimated $1 billion a year and is the target of well over half of the 10 million pounds of insecticides used annually by corn growers. Monsanto hopes the new corn will be available in time for next spring's planting.

"We only have estimates now, but as much as 8.5 million pounds of insecticides would not be used if the [rootworm] technology lives up to the promise it's showing" in experimental test plots, said Stephen Johnson, assistant EPA administrator for the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances. "That affords some rather dramatic decreases in insecticide use that would have a tremendous impact on both the environment and farm workers themselves."

An extensive review by the National Academy of Sciences last year found that pest control through biotechnology generally killed fewer creatures unintentionally and so was preferable to chemical pesticides. The use of genetic engineering, the report concluded, "could lead to greater biodiversity in [farmland] where they replace the use of insecticides."

Officials at Dow AgriSciences, which produces one of the most widely used chemical pesticides for controlling the corn rootworm -- Lorsban -- agree that genetically engineered rootworm control is the wave of the future. The firm, a unit of Dow Chemical Co., is developing a modified alternative to its own chemical insecticide that it hopes to have available by 2004.

"A good amount of rootworm control will go to that market because it's so effective and easy to use. That comes as no shock to us," said Stan Howell, a Dow vice president for insect management. "Actually, we hope to displace ourselves with our own [genetic modification] technology."

Doubters Persist

But some environmentalists do not agree that modified Bt crops are benign, and they are trying to block the new corn's approval. They say the rootworm-destroying corn is particularly troublesome because it is designed to produce Bt toxin at higher levels than in almost any other genetically engineered crop plant. They also worry that large amounts of Bt toxin could be released through the roots into the soil -- where it breaks down more slowly than the Bt toxins sprayed onto plant leaves in the sunshine. As a result, the modified corn could prove more harmful to beneficial bugs and worms.

And they are concerned that as more Bt variations are engineered into corn seeds to kill a range of pests, unforeseen effects could appear that each single use avoids. Their conclusion: Organic and other "sustainable" types of farming are the only long-term solution to pest control.

"While future genetically engineered crops could significantly shift or reduce pesticide use, they mean trading one set of inadequately researched and regulated health and environmental risks for another," said Skip Spitzer of the Pesticide Action Network, an environmental group. "They are not a sensible alternative."

Regulators are still examining the long-term impact of anti-rootworm corn on creatures living in the soil. Monsanto researchers have exposed many of them to large amounts of the rootworm-killing Bt and have reported that they were not harmed, or faced a risk far smaller than with most chemical pesticides.

Despite their concerns, some researchers and environmentalists acknowledge the especially great potential for pesticide reduction with the new anti-rootworm corn.

For instance, Charles Benbrook, a former agriculture specialist for the National Academy of Sciences, opposed the Monsanto rootworm application on behalf of the Union of Concerned Scientists on the grounds that there were too many environmental risks and unresolved technical questions. But he also said that "this is the first application of biotechnology to manage crop pests where there is some substantial potential to move away from chemical pesticide use, with all its negative environmental impacts."

The corn rootworm -- the larval stage of a beetle -- is widespread in the Corn Belt and very damaging if left untreated. The larvae eat the roots of plants and leave them unable to absorb water and nutrients. The insecticide DDT was widely used against the rootworm until it was taken off the market because of environmental concerns.

The pest is most common in states such as Nebraska where farmers plant corn year after year, rather than alternating it with other crops such as soybeans. Until recently, the rotation to other crops generally killed off the rootworm, but in some areas the pest has developed an ability stay alive in soybean fields. That, in turn, has increased the use of chemical pesticides.

Fears of Overuse

The prevalence of the corn rootworm and the tons of chemicals used to control it are what make it a potential textbook case in pesticide replacement. But the fact that it is so widespread also leaves farm specialists worried that the new biotech control could quickly become overused and ineffective.

Just as the rootworm developed an ability to withstand chemical treatments and to live in previously fatal soybean fields, they say, it can develop a resistance to the toxin in rootworm-resistant corn. The potential for Bt resistance is especially troubling to organic farmers, who depend on natural Bt varieties as their primary insecticide.

Michael E. Gray of the University of Illinois, a member of an EPA advisory panel on the issue, said he worries that farmers will see the new product as a "silver bullet."

"There is a definite concern that it will be embraced by producers in a way that will undermine its usefulness," Gray said. "The rootworm has a remarkable ability to adapt, and it will adapt to Bt quickly unless we are thoughtful and careful."

One possible brake on the use of the Bt corn for rootworm is that Monsanto says it will not sell the seed here until Japanese regulators have also given their approval. American public opinion will play a role as well, and consumer uneasiness has already stopped or reduced the development of genetically modified potatoes and corn-on-the-cob. "Farmers tell us they would like to grow it, and that it would cut back on [insecticide] applications a lot," said Greg Neusley of the University of Florida, who field-tested the sweet corn for Syngenta, an agribusiness company. "But their buyers don't want genetically modified corn, and they have to do what their customers want."

The Environmental Protection Agency, however, says it is actively looking for alternatives to chemical pesticides. It has a program to analyze and rank pesticide risks and to limit the more toxic ones, and Johnson, an assistant administrator, said genetically modified crops are expected to play a large role in future replacements.

Biotech critic Benbrook, who directs the Northwest Science and Environmental Policy Center in Idaho, said the Bt corn for rootworm will provide an "acid test" of the agency's sincerity about pesticide reduction.

"If they approve Bt corn for rootworm, they should restrict the use of organophosphates," a particularly toxic class of insecticides, Benbrook said. "That will show whether they're really serious about pesticide reduction."

-------- human rights

China Jails 45 Falun Gong Organizers - Report

August 18, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-religion-china.html

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese courts have jailed 45 alleged Falun Gong organizers for up to 13 years for helping the spiritual movement battle an intense government effort to wipe it out, an official newspaper reported on Sunday.

The Beijing Daily said they were sentenced in Beijing over the past few days for organizing protests, making banners and printing leaflets in defiance of a government campaign against a movement it outlawed and declared an ``evil cult'' in 1999.

The newspaper said the heaviest sentence was imposed on Zhang Hongli, jailed for 13 years on charges of renting a safe house, organizing the manufacture of banners and printing Falun Gong leaflets.

Others were sentenced for their roles in what were once almost daily protests in Tiananmen Square, China's political heart, which are now rare.

The Beijing Daily said Shao Qiang and Qiu Xiuxin were each jailed for 10 years for making banners and organizing people to try to raise them in the square, where a heavy police presence meant few such attempts were successful.

It gave no personal details of those sentenced beyond calling them ``diehards,'' but when the Communist Party began its crackdown on Falun Gong, it found adherents almost everywhere.

In the party's war against Falun Gong organizers have been jailed while recalcitrant followers have generally been sent without trial to labor camps.

The Communist Party accuses Falun Gong, which stunned the leadership with a mass protest outside its central Beijing compound in April 1999, of aspiring to overthrow it. Falun Gong denies any political aims.

The movement says more than 50,000 followers have been jailed, sent to labor camps or mental institutions in the crackdown. It alleges many are tortured, some to death.

The government has acknowledged several deaths in custody, but ascribed them to suicide or illnesses.

It has declared victory over Falun Gong several times and its intense campaign appears to have ended what were once daily protests in Tiananmen Square.

However, the movement has become more and more active overseas in a mounting campaign for international backing against China's crackdown.

In the latest action, eight followers launched a hunger strike in front of the Chinese embassy in Washington D.C. to appeal for the release of practitioners held in China.

The eight said they launched the protest on Friday to press for the release of 130 members who began a hunger strike at a labor camp in the northeastern province of Liaoning three weeks ago.

There has been no official comment in China on the hunger strike.

-------- police / prisoners

Washington Is Seeking Support to Handle Protests at 2 Meetings

August 18, 2001
NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/national/18PROT.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 - City officials said today that federal assistance would be needed to cover security expenses for the meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund scheduled to be held here in six weeks.

Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, deputy mayor for public safety and justice, said Washington was "not in a position to absorb the costs of the event," which she estimated at about $30 million.

After the clashes between protesters and the police at the Summit of the Americas meeting in Quebec this spring and at the Group of Eight meetings in Genoa, Italy, last month, officials from Washington's city government are working closely with police officers and federal officials to draw up a plan for protecting city property and residents.

In addition, officials said they were seeking to assure demonstrators free expression of their views while providing security for the 12 heads of state, about 250 other dignitaries and 15,000 delegates who are expected to attend the meetings, which are set for the last weekend of September.

In April 2000, Washington police officers arrested more than 1,000 people during demonstrations against the World Bank and the I.M.F. Many protesters said they were trying to draw attention to what they see as an unfair split in the effects of globalization where the wealthy benefit more than the poor.

While the World Bank and the I.M.F. have shortened the meetings to two days, about 6,000 police officers from Washington and surrounding areas expect as many as 100,000 demonstrators to come to the city.

Suburban and state police forces in Maryland and Virginia, state police in Pennsylvania and city police from New York, Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C., have said they will provide extra support, Charles Ramsey, the Washington chief of police, said.

City officials met this week with the White House to discuss allocations of money toward the security effort. Ms. Kellems said the Bush administration had been a "cooperative and hard-working partner" in the discussions. The two sides were negotiating whether money would be paid in advance or if costs would be reimbursed after the event, she said.

Mayor Anthony A. Williams noted that the three-day meetings in Quebec cost the Canadian government about $70 million and that the costs of the meetings in Genoa were estimated at more than $100 million.

Chief Ramsey said the Secret Service would be the primary agency in charge of the meetings because they have been classified as a national security event. "But we need additional resources," he said.

Claire Buchan, a White House spokeswoman, said no decision had been made.

"We are committed to working on a coordinated security plan to ensure the safety of the people who live and work here, and for those visiting Washington," Ms. Buchan said.

--------

Police Await 100,000 Protesters
Some IMF Activists Dispute Figure; Groups to Continue Push for Access

By Arthur Santana and Manny Fernandez
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 18, 2001; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27308-2001Aug17?language=printer

District officials and protest organizers are disputing crowd estimates and permits for demonstrations six weeks before the fall meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Officials used a news briefing yesterday to predict that 100,000 protesters would descend on the city the last weekend in September to protest policies of the world bodies and that the activists would threaten peace in the city.

A letter from Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) to President Bush warned of demonstrations "of an intensity, scope, and magnitude that we have never seen in this city."

D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey, noting that protests might not stay peaceful, said, "The odds of us escaping without any property damage of any kind is probably fairly low."

Protesters, meanwhile, said the predictions were an attempt by officials to deny them permits for demonstrations. They have repeatedly chided D.C. police for forecasting disturbances, saying the police and their tactics are what turn protests violent.

Some organizers questioned the chief's estimate of protesters, although Ramsey said he got it from the protesters themselves. It would be more than five times the number that protested meetings of the World Bank and IMF in the District in 2000 and double the previous estimate for next month.

"We've never used the figure 100,000," said Brian Becker, co-director of the International Action Center, one of the main organizing groups. "That's the figure Chief Ramsey has been using in the media at the same time as he's trying to paint a picture that civil war will soon descend on Washington, D.C."

The 100,000 figure would match the high police estimate of the most recent protests, in Genoa, Italy, where one protester was shot dead by Italian police.

The Genoa protests, at a meeting of the Group of Eight industrial nations' financial leaders, was the latest in a series of escalating conflicts since the anti-globalization movement gained new momentum in Seattle in 1999.

The protest against the World Bank and IMF in April 2000 brought more than 20,000 demonstrators to Washington. There were clashes in Prague, Gothenburg, Sweden, and Quebec City before Genoa.

In Quebec City, police erected a high fence, and D.C. Executive Assistant Chief Terrance W. Gainer has said such a measure is under discussion for a large swath of the city. Police also plan to recruit more than 3,000 officers from other East Coast cities to help with security.

The buildup of security plans, including the possibility of fencing, has angered protesters, who say that it is a needless expenditure, that protesters in the city have not proved violent and that officials may be trying to keep them from demonstrating.

Groups from a wide spectrum of causes are expected in Washington the last week of September, including immigrant rights organizations, anti-capitalists and the AFL-CIO. Protesters want to draw attention to policies of the World Bank and IMF and want those bodies to cancel the debt of the poorest countries, stop funding environmentally destructive projects and open their meetings.

The mayor's letter was released at a news conference from which protest organizers were barred. Tony Bullock, a spokesman for the mayor, said release of the Aug. 6 letter was "merely as a courtesy" to journalists and not a maneuver to have the mayor's urgent call for a commitment of federal funds publicized. "We're not that smart," Bullock said.

Ramsey said he based his crowd estimate on what protesters have told police. "That's what they are saying," Ramsey said. "You read the Web sites, and they are claiming that they can get that many people out."

Nadine Bloch, an organizer with the Mobilization for Global Justice, said that she did not want to play "the numbers game" with city officials and that crowd estimates are not "where we want to put our focus."

Organizers and their supporters said that they consider permits to be granted and that they had been told that.

Toni Carroll, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service, said groups have filed 12 applications; under federal regulations, they are assumed to be granted if not denied within 24 hours.

However, the Department of the Interior's superintendent for each park can revoke permits under some conditions, Carroll said, adding that it was unclear if and when the permit office would act.

Protesters plan to take the access issue to court. Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a lawyer with Partnership for Civil Justice, said plans to challenge the constitutionality of "exclusion zones" will go forward in federal court.

Keeping protesters out of eyesight and earshot of their targets violates free speech rights protected by the Constitution, Verheyden-Hilliard said.

She added that a police effort to "cordon off areas of the nation's capital and impose no-speech zones is unconstitutional."

D.C. police said this week that one concession they hoped to make to protest groups would be to allow them to demonstrate at Edward R. Murrow Park, which is across the street from the World Bank headquarters, or at the Ellipse. But Maj. Tom Pellinger, who is heading up preparation efforts for U.S. Park Police, said officials are still discussing where to allow protesters to gather and are unable to make a decision until authorities firm up their plans.

Pellinger said he was also concerned about protests at Lafayette Square because of its proximity to the White House. He said Park Police officials were especially worried about the possible use of molotov cocktails in light of their use at other international anti-globalization protests.

The use of molotov cocktails -- bottles filled with flammable liquid, wrapped in a saturated rag, ignited and hurled -- is a federal offense, he said, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. "It's very serious. If anyone is thinking about doing that, and they are caught, serious charges will be applied," he said.

-------- spying

Scientist Challenges Censorship
Agencies Bar Part Of Weapons Book

Associated Press
Saturday, August 18, 2001; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28055-2001Aug18?language=printer

ALBUQUERQUE, Aug. 17 -- The government has cleared for publication 85 percent of a book written by Danny Stillman, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, about China's nuclear program, Stillman's attorney said today.

Stillman headed the lab's intelligence division for nearly 14 years before retiring in 1993. He wrote his 500-page book, "Inside China's Nuclear Weapons Program," based on nine trips he made to China from 1990 to 1999.

"I was not operating as an intelligence officer or agent of the United States," Stillman said in documents filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. "I was merely a loyal American citizen who served as a voluntary source of information" in debriefings after returning from China.

Stillman, 67, said he wrote the book in a way that would exclude classified information.

Stillman's attorney, Mark Zaid, has asked the court to order a public evidentiary hearing to determine whether the Defense Department, Defense Intelligence Agency and CIA have the right to withhold the remaining 15 percent of the book.

----

U.S. Plane's Rare Trip From China

New York Times
August 18, 2001
By THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/18/international/18PLAN.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 17 - The collision on April 1 between a Chinese jet fighter and a Navy surveillance plane bruised relations between the two nations, killed the Chinese pilot and resulted in the 11-day detention of the 24-member American crew.

But the recovery of the EP-3E Aries II, as these photographs show, was a rather unusual international encounter all its own. A top-secret American intelligence plane was hauled up and away from a Chinese military runway in the belly of a commercial Russian cargo plane, the largest in the world.

These photographs accompanied a briefing prepared by the United States Air Forces in the Pacific to describe the cutting of the EP-3E into pieces after diplomats had negotiated its return.

The nose cone, propellers and flying surfaces all show signs of damage from the collision and the emergency landing on Hainan island, which earned medals for each crew member.

After the collision, in international airspace, the captain brought the plane down safely, and the crew destroyed much - but not all - of the surveillance equipment, programs and manuals on board. When the Chinese refused to grant permission for the United States to repair the plane and fly it out, it fell to Lockheed Martin to take it out in pieces aboard an Antonov AN-124 Ruslan.

All four engines were sliced off the wings in one day. The tail section was cut off, with workers dangling from a crane to carry out the task. The wings were removed in sections, requiring workers to crawl inside the wing structure, vanishing all the way to the tops of their boots, to cut interior pipes and cables.

Finally, the fuselage was carefully slid into the open jaws of the Russian cargo plane.

The recovery effort, from June 16 to July 3, was carried out in 107- degree heat and high humidity, according to Air Force reports. The team took its own doctor. Reporters, photographers and camera crews were kept away until the final day.

For their part, Chinese military personnel "monitored operations closely," according to the Air Force report, videotaping the entire operation and demanding the right to review photos and videos made by the Americans.

The relationship was "nonthreatening," the Air Force said, but the Chinese imposed "home- turf rules."

The crew and the plane are home now, with the plane in Marietta, Ga. But left unresolved is a dispute over compensation. The Chinese demanded $1 million to pay for the care and feeding of the crew members and for other expenses in the three months it held the plane and helped engineer its return.

The United States did its own calculations and sent $34,567, which the Chinese angrily rejected this week.

Photographs from the briefing can be viewed at a United States Pacific Command Web site, www.pacom.mil/ep3photos.htm.


-------- activists

Mobilization for Global Justice -- Call to Action

Date: Sat, 18 Aug 2001 14:54:36 -0400
From: Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>, Mobilization for Global Justice, www.globalizethis.org

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank will hold their Joint Annual General Meetings in Washington, DC from September 28 to October 4, 2001....

We demand that the World Bank and International Monetary Fund:

- Open all World Bank and IMF meetings to the media and the public.

- Cancel all impoverished country debt to the World Bank and IMF, using the institutions' own resources.

- End all World Bank and IMF policies that hinder people's access to food, clean water, shelter, health care, education, and right to organize. (Such "structural adjustment" policies include user fees, privatization, and economic austerity programs.)

- Stop all World Bank support for socially and environmentally destructive projects such as oil, gas, and mining activities, and all support for projects such as dams that include forced relocation of people.

We furthermore demand that the United States government, the largest shareholder and most influential government in the World Bank and IMF, adopt the above demands, and work vigorously to compel the World Bank and IMF to implement them.

For more information, or to endorse the Mobilization for Global Justice, go to www.globalizethis.org

--------



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