------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
India and Australia Start Security Dialogue
Many British Vets Report Gulf War Health Problems
Construction set for N. Korea nuclear plant
U.S. Arms Talks to Proceed, Says Russian Minister
Group Seeks End to Aid Promoting Millstone
Utilities have no claim on dump site
Sale of Indian Point 2 Progresses

MILITARY
Global military spending rising at alarming rate
Global Weapons Purchases on the Rise - UN
NATO Completes First Phase of Weapon Collection
Hardliner Mancuso Rises As AUC Boss
U.S. Planes Bomb Iraqi Radar Near Basra
Western Air Raids on Iraq Kill 3
Russia Denounces U.S. Air Strikes Against Iraq
After 2 Days, Israeli Army Leaves Palestinian Town
Japan's Ailing Space Program Boosted by Rocket Launch
Keep Space Weapons-Free, UN Urges
Scuttled by the Process

OTHER
Ending Logjam, U.S. Reaches Accord on Endangered Species
U.S. Count of Stem Cell Lines Surprised Swedes
U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship
Pope urges nations to apologize for slave trade
IMF Team to Visit Crisis - Hit Zimbabwe for Talks
Global Economy's New Guardian
2 Men Arrested Trying to Export Encryption Devices

ACTIVISTS
GLOBAL JUSTICE ACTIVISTS DENOUNCE WORLD BANK'S SHAM



-------- NUCLEAR

-------- australia

India and Australia Start Security Dialogue

August 30, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-india-australia.html?searchpv=reuters

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Indian and Australian officials held strategic talks on Thursday, the first since India's nuclear tests in 1998 soured ties between the two countries.

India's Ministry of External Affairs spokeswoman, Nirupama Rao, said the talks focused on four areas: global security issues, regional security issues, security and defense policies and exchanges, and specific issues in arms control and disarmament.

Senior officials from the foreign ministry, defense ministry and armed forces of both countries took part in the one-day dialogue in New Delhi, Rao said.

Relations between India and Australia soured in 1998 when New Delhi drew international condemnation for its nuclear tests.

The two countries agreed to hold strategic talks during a visit to Australia by India's defense and external affairs minister, Jaswant Singh, in June this year.

Earlier this year, India and Australia were among the few countries sympathetic to President Bush's planned missile defense system which sparked major concerns in Russia, Europe and China.

-------- britain

Many British Vets Report Gulf War Health Problems

Reuters
Thu, Aug 30 8:49 PM EDT
By Patricia Reaney
http://webcrawler-news.excite.com/news/r/010830/20/international-health-gulfwar-dc

LONDON - Seventeen percent of British Gulf War veterans believe they are suffering from Gulf War Syndrome, a mysterious illness blamed for a range of symptoms linked to the 1991 conflict in Kuwait.

If a survey of nearly 3,000 veterans, by researchers at Guy's, King's and St. Thomas's School of Medicine in London, is representative of the 53,000 British forces who served in the Gulf, about 9,000 men and women think they have the condition.

"Substantial numbers of British Gulf War veterans believe they have Gulf War Syndrome, which is associated with psychological distress, a high number of symptoms, and some reduction in activity levels," said Dr. Trudie Chalder, lead researcher of the study, published in the British Medical Journal.

Chalder and her colleagues found that veterans who thought they had the illness had poorer health and were distressed, tired and more likely to have suffered from post-traumatic stress than other veterans.

"It (the study) is in keeping with the other major epidemiological studies that have been performed in the U.S. in that they find there is a high incidence of reporting of these symptoms and conditions," Catherine Unwin, an epidemiologist who worked on the study, said in an interview.

Gulf War Syndrome includes a variety of symptoms such as respiratory and digestive problems, nerve damage, pain, numbness, tiredness and psychological difficulties.

SYNDROME HOTLY DEBATED

The jury is still out on the validity of Gulf War Syndrome, and its possible causes have been hotly debated. It has been linked variously to the inoculations the veterans received, pesticides they handled, smoke from oil-burning fires, stress and organophosphates -- chemicals that have been shown to affect the human nervous system.

Last month Britain's Ministry of Defense said tests on a group of British Gulf War veterans failed to turn up any trace of the syndrome.

Veterans' Minister Lewis Moonie said the lack of evidence was in line with previous research findings.

Unwin said the latest research neither supports nor refutes the results of the British tests.

In the study, the researchers said the strongest factor associated with the belief that a veteran had the syndrome was knowing another person who had the condition.

"Veterans who have symptoms believe they have Gulf War Syndrome because the most likely explanation for the symptoms stems from something they have in common -- their active service," Chalder said in the report.

Unwin added that the psychological aspect is part of the main jigsaw of the possible causes of Gulf War Syndrome.

-------- korea

Construction set for N. Korea nuclear plant

August 30, 2001
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010830-3123560.htm

The U.S.-led international consortium building two nuclear power plants for North Korea will begin excavation work for the first light-water reactor next month, the agency's executive director said this week.

Charles Kartman, the veteran U.S. diplomat who now heads the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), told a Washington gathering of Korea experts Tuesday excavation work will begin in September and KEDO could be prepared to pour the foundations for the coastal site in northern North Korea in about a year.

The $4.6 billion KEDO project, to which Japan and South Korea are major contributors, is the centerpiece of a deal worked out under the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea to supply the beleaguered communist state's energy needs in exchange for a halt to its suspected nuclear weapons development program.

"The public image [of KEDO] is that the project has been beset by problems," said Mr. Kartman. "It certainly remains a difficult task, but the project is well under way and the construction schedule is now moving on."

The construction milestone has been reached despite considerable Republican skepticism in Congress and a lengthy "policy review" earlier this year by President Bush of the Clinton administration's recent rapprochement with the North.

But both Mr. Kartman and skeptics of the North Korean project say the construction milestone puts renewed pressure on Pyongyang to live up to its end of the bargain by moving toward full compliance with the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as the first reactor nears operation.

Officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency have said they will need at least three years to conduct the inspections necessary to confirm North Korea's compliance. If Pyongyang continues to deny IAEA inspectors access, the prospect looms of a clash as the power plant nears completion.

"The worry for many of us is that big projects like this take on a life of their own, that there will be a lot of pressure to go ahead even if the North Koreans balk" said Victor Gilinsky, a Washington-based energy consultant and former member of the National Regulatory Commission under Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan.

Mr. Gilinsky said the U.S. approach should be: "If they pretend to cooperate with the IAEA, then we should just pretend to build the plant."

Said Mr. Kartman: "There remains a whole litany of things that [North Korea] must comply with before the light-water reactors can be ready. The task should be to begin earlier with those things to avoid delays in the future."

Buffeted by logistical, financing, labor, and political delays, the first of the two proposed reactors is already at least some five years behind the 2003 opening date envisaged in the 1994 accord.

Official support for the project has waxed and waned as U.S.-North Korean relations have endured numerous ups and downs over the past seven years.

President Bush's open skepticism of his precedessor's North Korea policy and efforts by Republican lawmakers to substitute a conventional energy plant for the agreement's nuclear reactors led many to predict a collapse of the effort this year.

"President Bush's insistence on verification will make it very unlikely that the nuclear reactors will ever be completed in North Korea," House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry J. Hyde, Illinois Republican, predicted in a speech earlier this year.

Henry Sokolsky, executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center and a senior nonproliferation official in the Pentagon under the first President Bush, said crucial parts of the proposed accord with North Korea remain in dispute even now.

Pyongyang, he noted, recently argued that it had only promised to begin talks on IAEA compliance when a significant portion of the first reactor had been completed, not that it would actually be in compliance by then. But Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in June reaffirmed the administration's support for the project.

The Bush administration's proposed fiscal 2002 budget also includes $95 million to purchase the 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil promised to North Korea annually until the reactor comes on line.

Alex Wagner, a research analyst for nonproliferation issues at the Arms Control Association, said the creation of a consortium to build the nuclear plant had proven effective in insulating it to some extent from domestic political pressures.

Calling the excavation announcement "a significant milestone," Mr. Wagner said he believed the KEDO partners would be able to apply the brakes to the project if North Korea refused to hold up its end of the bargain.

-------- treaties

U.S. Arms Talks to Proceed, Says Russian Minister

August 30, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-russia-usa.html?searchpv=reuters

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia will go ahead with talks with the United States on arms issues despite Washington's stated intention to abandon a critical 1972 disarmament pact, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said on Thursday.

His comments were the first official response to President Bush's remark last week that Washington would withdraw from the treaty.

Ivanov said consultations on strategic weapons and a proposed U.S. missile defense system were vital, independent of Washington's plans.

He said the United States had named no date for pulling out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), which bans the proposed missile defense scheme.

``I am convinced that it is worthwhile to hold talks on these issues. Such meetings are useful whatever the circumstances,'' Ivanov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

Ivanov said Russia was not especially alarmed by Bush's statement that Washington would withdraw ``at a time convenient to America'' as it was entitled to do so at six months' notice under its terms.

``We are very calm about this. It is the sovereign right of the American side,'' he told Russian news agencies in the southern city of Astrakhan.

Bush's statement to reporters was widely seen as a toughening of the U.S. position on abandoning the treaty, upheld by Russia as the cornerstone of three decades of disarmament.

Washington had previously said it had hoped Russia would agree to changes in the pact to enable it to proceed with the missile defense scheme -- intended to protect it against launches by ``rogue states'' like Iran, Iraq and North Korea.

President Vladimir Putin has said the treaty could be subject to changes.

But he has also suggested that abandoning ABM would annul treaties on strategic weapons, allowing Russia to place more warheads on its missiles.

Both sides maintained their positions at discussions in Moscow this month.

Ivanov, who was attending military exercises with participants from former Soviet republics, said discussions were useful to clarify positions on issues going well beyond missile defense and strategic weaponry.

Such talks, he said, also extended to NATO expansion eastwards and efforts to combat terrorism.

He said he would next meet Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in late September at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in the Italian port of Naples.

U.S. and Russian military experts would next hold talks in Moscow in mid-September, he said.

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

-------- connecticut

Group Seeks End to Aid Promoting Millstone

August 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/30/nyregion/30PLAN.html?searchpv=nytToday

HARTFORD, Aug. 29 - An antinuclear group called on the State Office of Tourism today to halt promotions of an educational center at the Millstone nuclear plant.

The group, the Connecticut Coalition Against Millstone, asked the tourism office to remove promotional materials for the Millstone Discovery Center or to attach "fact sheets" that identify what the group says are the dangers of nuclear power.

The coalition says the literature violates standards of the Office of Tourism, which bars materials that are commercially oriented or include political content.

"This promotion is a sinister public relations gimmick," Joseph H. Besade, a coalition member, said in a prepared statement.

Barbara Cieplak, marketing director of the Connecticut Office of Tourism, said the demand was a first.

"This kind of came to us as a surprise," she said. "It's never happened before." The matter will most likely be taken up by the Connecticut Tourism Council at its next meeting, scheduled for Sept. 11, she said.

Pete Hyde, a spokesman for Millstone, said the criticism would not affect the center. "I don't think the coalition is going to do anything useful by making this kind of allegation or attempt to remove us from tourism funding," he said.

The center, which provides information about nuclear power and its benefits, is an "important and useful resource," Mr. Hyde said.

-------- nebraska

Utilities have no claim on dump site

BY BUTCH MABIN
Lincoln Journal Star
Aug. 30, 2001
http://www.journalstar.com/nebraska?story_id=4166&date=20010830&past=

A federal judge on Wednesday said the users and would-be builder of a proposed nuclear waste dump in northern Nebraska did not have a constitutionally protected interest in the facility's licensing.

U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf said U.S. Ecology and the five low-level nuclear waste utilities - which spent millions of dollars trying to get the warehouse built - did not have a protected "property interest" in the licensing process.

The utilities, U.S. Ecology and the Central Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Commission, are seeking to recover from the state of Nebraska about $100 million they claim was spent trying to get the warehouse licensed.

In their 1998 lawsuit, the utilities alleged the state acted in bad faith in the licensing process. Specifically, they claimed the state based its decision to deny the license for political rather than ecological reasons.

U.S. Ecology and the commission joined the lawsuit later as plaintiffs.

Brad Reynolds, the Washington, D.C., attorney representing the state, said Wednesday he was pleased with Kopf's ruling.

"Judge Kopf is correct. They have no claims under the 14th Amendment," he said. "It is a significant victory for the state."

U.S. Ecology's attorney, Steve Seglin of Lincoln, said he had not yet talked to his client about the ruling and declined comment.

Kopf's ruling came in the wake of a March ruling from the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the state can be sued by the commission.

The three-judge appeals panel, in affirming an earlier ruling from Kopf, said the state waived its sovereign immunity against lawsuits when it joined a multistate low-level waste disposal compact in the 1980s.

Reynolds has appealed that finding to the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court will decide in October whether or not to hear the case.

The 8th Circuit panel in the March ruling reversed Kopf's decision denying the state's immunity from the utilities and U.S. Ecology under commission's bylaws. But the panel also directed him to determine whether those plaintiffs could sue the state on constitutional, due process grounds.

In his analysis of that question, Kopf noted property interests aren't created by the U.S. Constitution but come from independent sources, such as state law.

He said the section of the Nebraska's administrative code controlling the issuance of the licenses gives the state such broad discretion in granting licenses that any "property interest" claims must fail.

"In particular," he wrote, "Nebraska reserves the right to decide whether the licensed disposal site will 'constitute an unreasonable risk to the public health and safety and the environment.' "

He continued: "In other words there can be no legitimate claim of entitlement to a nuclear waste disposal license when issuance of it turns almost entirely upon such open-ended factors as 'public health and safety.' "

The ruling did not end U.S. Ecology and the utilities' involvement in the case. Their cross-claim against the commission still stands, Kopf said.

That claim asserts their right to any judgment the commission would get against the state.

Nebraska joined the waste compact with Kansas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Oklahoma in compliance with a 1980 congressional mandate that states build their own nuclear waste dumps or align with other states to handle the materials.

Low-level nuclear waste includes contaminated tools and clothing from hospitals and nuclear power stations.

The utilities suing the state are Entergy Arkansas, Entergy Gulf States, Entergy Louisiana, Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Corp. and the Omaha Public Power District.

Reach Butch Mabin at 473-7234 or bmabin@journalstar.com.

-------- new york

Sale of Indian Point 2 Progresses With Board's Approval of Entergy Bid

New York Times
August 30, 2001
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/30/nyregion/30NUKE.html?searchpv=nytToday

WHITE PLAINS, Aug. 29 - The proposed sale of the Indian Point 2 nuclear plant moved closer to fruition today, as the state Public Service Commission approved a bid by the Entergy Corporation to acquire the troubled plant from Consolidated Edison.

The five-member commission voted unanimously to transfer the operating license of the plant to Entergy, based in New Orleans, from Con Edison, which must sell its electric power plants under a state plan to create a competitive electricity market.

"I firmly believe that ratepayers, and the state as a whole, will benefit," Maureen O. Helmer, the chairwoman of the Public Service Commission, said in a statement. "The transaction is consistent with our efforts to establish a competitive wholesale market that will lead to lower prices over the long run while protecting consumer rates during the transition."

The approval was the second major step in the transaction announced this week. On Monday, the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that it had given conditional approval for the transfer.

The nuclear commission's decision will not be final until a public hearing is held, at the request of critics of the sale, in late October.

Entergy and Con Edison plan to complete the paperwork for the sale within a couple of weeks, said Craig Crawford, a spokesman for Entergy.

The company wants to pay $609 million for Indian Point 2 and the dormant Indian Point 1 plant at the site.

Under Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules, Entergy will be allowed to run the plant after the sale is closed, but the plant will revert to Con Edison if the N.R.C. ultimately rejects the license transfer.

Last year, Entergy bought the other plant at the site, Indian Point 3, which had been owned by the New York Power Authority. In June, Entergy received final approval from the N.R.C. to run the plant. Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the N.R.C., said there was no timetable for a final ruling on the Indian Point 2 sale.

Con Edison has run the plant, in Buchanan, N.Y., in northern Westchester County, 35 miles north of midtown Manhattan, since 1973. It has drawn increasing scrutiny recently from regulators, anti-nuclear groups and residents over a rash of accidents, including a small radioactive leak in 2000 and a spate of non- nuclear leaks this year.

The town of Cortlandt, the Hendrick Hudson School District and an anti-nuclear group, the Westchester Citizens Awareness Network, filed protests with the N.R.C. over the sale, questioning plant safety and contending that Entergy had not supplied enough financial data to demonstrate that it could run the plant over the long term.

Those matters will be discussed at the October hearing.

Mr. Crawford said Entergy, which runs eight nuclear plants, has the financial and technical wherewithal to run the plant.

"We have been running nuclear plants for more than 20 years and consistently rank in the top percentiles of N.R.C.'s rankings," he said.


-------- MILITARY

U.N. official
Global military spending rising at alarming rate after years of decline

By Edith M. Lederer,
Associated Press,
8/30/2001
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/242/world/U_N_official_Global_military_s:.shtml

UNITED NATIONS (AP) Global military spending is rising at an alarming rate after years of decline following the end of the Cold War a decade ago, the top U.N. disarmament official said Thursday.

''The highest rates of increase, once again, were in countries with enormous unmet social and economic needs in Africa and south Asia,'' said Undersecretary-General for Disarmament Affairs Jayantha Dhanapala.

He quoted figures released in June by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute that reported that military spending by the world's nations rose to $798 billion in 2000 from $780 billion in 1999.

''All together, arms sales to developing countries exceeded $36 billion last year, an increase of 8 percent,'' Dhanapala said at Macquarie University in Sydney. His office in New York released a copy of the speech.

The United States sold almost half the weapons purchased last year by developing countries, followed by Russia, France, Germany, Britain and China, the U.S. Congressional Research reported earlier this month. The three leading purchasers were the United Arab Emirates, India and South Korea.

According to the Stockholm Institute, there were 25 major armed conflicts in the world last year 23 of them inside poor countries ''that could least afford such a tragic waste of precious human life and scarce economic resources,'' said Dhanapala.

''The tragedy of these numbers becomes all the more apparent when we consider that half the world struggles to survive on less than $2 per day,'' he said.

The U.N. Security Council passed a resolution Thursday on the prevention of armed conflict that called on member states to ensure implementation of the U.N. program of action on the illicit trade in small arms. The action program was developed during a summit on small arms in New York in July.

In his speech, Dhanapala noted that the first resolution adopted by the U.N. General Assembly more than 50 years ago called for the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction.

Yet, today, some 30,000 nuclear weapons reportedly remain in arsenals around the world, many on hair-trigger alert, he said.

There are also an estimated 550 million small arms in circulation around the world.

''Whether one looks at the big weapons or the little ones, the facts are alarming,'' Dhanapala said.

International efforts to halt or slow the spread of weapons have also stalled, he said.

Negotiations on nuclear disarmament and controlling the fissile material used in nuclear weapons are deadlocked at the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, he said. The nuclear test ban treaty hasn't received enough ratifications to enter into force, and efforts to enforce a ban on germ warfare broke down last month after the United States declared a draft proposal unacceptable.

''A new phase of the global nuclear arms race likely to be accompanied by a missile race and the weaponization of space is another risk, now that the future of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty is in jeopardy as a result of the stated intention of the U.S. to withdraw as a party,'' Dhanapala said.

President Bush has announced plans to build an anti-missile shield, which would violate the 1972 ABM treaty that Russia views as a cornerstone of international security.

-------- arms sales

Global Weapons Purchases on the Rise - UN

August 30, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-un-spending.html?searchpv=reuters

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A decade long slump in military spending that followed the end of the Cold War has been reversed and global weapons purchases are rising again, the United Nations said on Thursday.

U.S. opposition has sunk moves to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention, the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty is on thin ice and prospects for the entry into force any day soon of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) are bleak.

``Whether one looks at the big weapons or the little ones, the facts are alarming,'' Jayantha Dhanapala, U.N. Under-Secretary General for disarmament, said in a speech in Sydney.

According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military spending last year reached $800 billion, or $130 for every person in the world.

Dhanapala said that represented a ``major increase'' on 1999.

The biggest increases in spending were by developing nations -- the ones which can least afford it -- and ``Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia are two major sub regions of concern,'' he said.

To put things in perspective, he told a seminar at Sydney's Macquarie University that the Washington-based Brookings Institution think-tank had calculated that total U.S. spending on nuclear weapons amounted to some $5.8 trillion.

If you stacked those dollars, the pile would reach to the moon and almost all the way back to the Earth.

DISAGREEMENT RUBS OUT HARMONY

But it's not just the growing stock of military hardware that has the U.N. disarmament chief concerned.

Dhanapala told Reuters earlier on Thursday that a palpable sense of a ``certain harmony, a certain unity'' that existed among U.N. Security Council members just after the end of the Cold War, when everyone agreed over Iraq for instance, had ''worn thin.''

``We are beginning to see disagreements,'' he said.

In most of the points he makes, a common thread is the United States of President Bush.

Bush says he will abandon the ABM treaty, regarded as the cornerstone of nuclear stability for three decades and affirmed as such by the prior Bill Clinton administration, so Washington can pursue plans to develop a missile shield.

Clinton was on board during a 6- year international attempt to give more teeth to the Biological Weapons Convention. The Bush administration has jumped ship.

And the new U.S. President has indicated he is unlikely to resubmit the CTBT to the U.S. Senate for ratification after the upper house voted it down.

In weapons sales, Dhanapala said the United States alone was responsible for half of last year's arms trades.

Yet he said people should not become disheartened.

``In disarmament the glass is always either half full or half empty depending on how you look at it. I think we must not be totally pessimistic,'' Dhanapala said in the Reuters interview.

``It is true that we are facing a number of challenges particularly to multilateral disarmament. But I do know that the United States upholds the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, it upholds several other treaties, it would want to continue in several of our disarmament fora.''

Dhanapala said ``a la carte multilateralism'' was an in-word in Washington and the Bush administration was likely to pick and chose which multilateral agreements it would like to adhere to.

``But it will soon be realized that that is a game that other countries can also play and therefore it is not in the global interest for countries to limit their engagement,'' he said.

-------- balkans

NATO Completes First Phase of Weapon Collection

August 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Macedonia.html

SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) -- The military commander of NATO's mission in Macedonia said Thursday that his force has collected more than one third of ethnic Albanian rebels' weapons.

Maj. Gen. Gunnar Lange said he had handed a letter to President Boris Trajkovski informing him of the completion of the first phase of the weapon's collection program.

U.S. Maj. Barry Johnson, the NATO spokesman in Skopje, told The Associated Press that a total of 1,400 weapons have been collected so far. He gave no specifics on the type of weapons, but said that the overall operation is ahead of schedule.

According to a peace plan, the rebel handover of weapons is to be followed by step-by-step political reforms that would give Macedonia's ethnic Albanian minority greater rights.

``I really hope that this will contribute to the parliament process,'' Lange said.

Parliament is expected to begin debating the political reforms on Friday now that one-third of the weapons have been handed in. However, enactment of the reforms will only occur when the goal of collecting 3,300 weapons has been reached.

The NATO mission began this week and is slated to end within a month. But NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson on Wednesday suggested that his alliance was ready to play a future role in the country, and on Thursday, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw acknowledged the weapons culling mission itself might extend its original 30-day limit.

``Nothing, particularly in the Balkans, is inevitable,'' Straw told BBC radio. ``If you're asking me whether that NATO decision may change, it could change.''

Macedonian officials have criticized the NATO mission, saying the total number of arms the alliance is to collect is far below the true size of the rebel arsenal. The government insists the rebels have closer to 60,000 weapons.

Ethnic Albanian rebels staged an insurgency for six months this year in a struggle to win more rights for their people, a third of Macedonia's 2 million population.

Despite the reported progress, tensions persisted.

An explosion rocked an ethnic Albanian commercial district of Skopje early Thursday, the fourth to hit the capital in as many days. No injuries were reported.

Residents saw anti-terror squads investigating the site of the pre-dawn explosion that destroyed an Albanian-owned restaurant.

Macedonian parliament speaker Stojan Andov condemned the explosion, warning the blasts represent a ``threat that could complicate the peace process.''

In other incidents, Macedonians blockaded the Blace crossing on the border with the NATO-run Serbian province of Kosovo, delaying the arrival of German soldiers who are part of NATO's mission here. Macedonian villagers from Matejce, 14 miles north of Skopje, also blocked a nearby border crossing to protest NATO's mission.

On Wednesday, Robertson urged Macedonia's parliament to pass the legislation envisioned in the peace deal, saying the alternative could be another Balkan war. But with the disagreement over arms numbers continuing, parliamentary hard-liners could stall the debate.

In talks with Robertson, Trajkovski insisted the criteria for the success of the mission include whether refugees will be allowed to return and whether the Macedonian government was able to regain control of territory now held by rebels.

Robertson stressed that such issues were more the concern of ``other organizations which are a critical part of this peace process,'' and not of NATO alone.

However, Robertson left the option open for possible future international involvement in Macedonia, if asked for by the government.

``I don't think the international community could stand back if the people of Macedonia cry for help,'' he said.

In Vienna, Macedonian Foreign Minister Ilinka Mitreva on Thursday formally asked the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to double the number of border monitors it has in the region.

The OSCE began monitoring the border with Macedonia in 1992 to help prevent violence in the former Yugoslavia from spilling over into Macedonia.

Mitreva also said Macedonia ``desperately'' needs the financial help of the international community because it is ``on the verge of economic collapse.''

-------- colombia

Hardliner Mancuso Rises As AUC Boss

August 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Colombia-Paramilitary-Boss.html

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) -- A hard-liner from northern Colombia's cattle country is emerging as the likely new leader of the country's brutal right-wing paramilitary forces.

Although he has not yet accepted the position, Salvatore Mancuso is already considered the new boss of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC. That word came from former AUC commander Carlos Castano, in an editorial posted Thursday on the group's Internet site.

``We in the AUC are already addressing him as Commander General,'' wrote Castano, the group's longtime leader who stepped down in May to manage its political affairs.

The change could herald an even more combative posture by the AUC -- a group that has committed hundreds of massacres and was recently mentioned for the first time on a U.S. State Department list of terrorist organizations.

The news also comes as a visiting high-level delegation from Washington tries to chart a course for the Bush administration in this South American country plagued by drug trafficking and a 37-year civil war.

The persistent violence continued Thursday. The army said 28 guerrillas and five members of the security forces were killed in fighting and rebel attacks around the country, including a car bombing that killed a police officer in Sativanorte, 130 miles north of Bogota.

While the U.S. group headed by Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman toured military bases Thursday, President Andres Pastrana said the Americans had expressed ``very clear'' support for peace talks and his Plan Colombia drug-fighting initiative.

Under last year's $1.3 billion aid package, Washington is providing helicopters, troop training and crop-spraying aircraft for an offensive to eradicate illegal drug crops that are guarded and taxed by armed guerrillas and paramilitaries.

Human rights groups charge Washington could be fueling the AUC's counterinsurgency campaign through its growing military aid. High-ranking military officers have been accused of tolerance and complicity with the paramilitaries, and some AUC officers are U.S.-trained former army soldiers.

Castano is a former army scout whose father was kidnapped and killed by guerrillas. His resignation was seen as a move to distance himself from some of group's atrocities and as a concession to harder-line sectors inside the AUC represented by Mancuso.

At the time, some skeptics speculated that Castano would remain in control of the organization even though he was stepping out of the limelight. The group's secretive nature makes it difficult to know how much power he still wields.

The 8,000-strong nationwide militia has generally not turned its guns on government forces. But following a recent government raid on his wife's residence and those of dozens of suspected AUC financiers, Mancuso was reportedly urging retaliation.

Prosecutors' agents shot and killed a Mancuso family chauffeur in the May crackdown in his home town of Monteria, a pro-paramilitary ranching town in northern Cordoba state.

Mancuso -- the son of Italian immigrants -- was unknown to most Colombians until his name appeared as a member of a nine-man collective leadership council announced at the time of Castano's resignation. He is remembered around Monteria as a motocross enthusiast from an upper middle-class family that owned an imported-car dealership.

While naming Mancuso as the AUC's likely new chief, Castano said the group now operates as a ``decentralized confederation'' in which each commander takes responsibility for his own fighters' actions.

Castano acknowledged the group had committed ``military excesses'' in the past, but said it remained determined to eliminate Colombia's guerrillas.

-------- iraq

Officials: U.S. Planes Bomb Iraqi Radar Near Basra

August 30, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-usa-attack.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. F-16 warplanes attacked a radar at a military-civilian airport near Basra in southern Iraq on Thursday in the second such raid against Baghdad's air defenses this week, U.S. defense officials said.

The officials, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters four F-16 jets conducted the raid with precision-guided weapons at the field, used by both military and civilian aircraft, and returned safely to base in a neighboring country.

It was part of a continuing attempt to halt Iraq's aggressive efforts to shoot down U.S. and British warplanes patrolling two ``no-fly'' zones in Iraq for nearly a decade.

A brief announcement by the U.S. military's Central Command in Tampa, Florida, which controls operations in the gulf region, said only that the warplanes had attacked ``a military radar'' in southern Iraq at about 1:30 p.m. EDT and after dark in Iraq.

But U.S. officials said privately the radar was located at an airfield.

''The attack was against a radar at a combined military-civilian airfield near the city of Basra'' about 300 miles southeast of Baghdad, one of the officials said.

``The radar is used to track (U.S. and British) coalition aircraft,'' the official said.

A similar raid was carried out in the south by both U.S. and British aircraft on Tuesday against facilities used to guide Iraqi fighter jets. The Pentagon said it had also hit military air defense targets in Iraq last Saturday in retaliation for increasing attempts by Iraq's President Saddam Hussein to shoot down a western warplane.

INCREASING FIRE BETWEEN SIDES

Tuesday's raid came a day after Iraq said it shot down an unmanned U.S. ``Predator'' reconnaissance aircraft over southern Iraq. That raid hit a control tower and another target used to guide Iraqi fighters.

Iraqi fighters have made recent attempts to attack unmanned reconnaissance aircraft but have not engaged sophisticated American and British jets.

U.S. defense officials this week conceded the RQ-1B Predator spy plane was missing but could not say whether the $3.2 million weapon had been shot down or crashed due to a mechanical malfunction.

Monday's crash came after the Pentagon warned of the growing sophistication of Baghdad's air defenses. It could be the first loss of a U.S. aircraft to Iraqi fire in a decade of aerial monitoring of no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq.

Iraq's official press said on Tuesday Baghdad had dealt Washington a blow by shooting down the plane.

``This slap on America's ugly face was a surprise to its arrogant administration. The Americans will have to retire these kind of planes and stop them from harming our proud nation,'' said an editorial in al-Jumhuriya newspaper.

But Pentagon officials said that shooting down a slow-moving reconnaissance aircraft, which transmits television pictures and other information back to base via satellite, was nothing to brag about because it flies up to a maximum altitude of only 25,000 feet and at speeds up to only 140 mph.

A new version of the Predator is being developed that will fly at three times the altitude and more than twice the current speed. It also will be capable of carrying a load of up to 800 pounds, which could eventually include missiles.

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Western Air Raids on Iraq Kill 3

August 30, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/30/international/middleeast/30IRAQ.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 29 (Reuters) - Western air raids on southern Iraq overnight killed 3 civilians and wounded 15, the Iraqi Army said today. Iraqi television showed the funerals of two men from the remote village of al Ahrar whom it described as victims of the raids.

Baghdad says more than 300 civilians have been killed in similar strikes designed to bolster the so- called no-flight zones declared by the United States and Britain in northern and southern Iraq.

The Pentagon said American warplanes attacked Iraqi military installations on Tuesday.

The United States and Britain have stepped up raids this month on what they describe as upgraded Iraqi air defenses in the southern no- flight zone.

--------

Russia Denounces U.S. Air Strikes Against Iraq

August 30, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-russia.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia denounced recent U.S. air strikes against Iraq on Thursday and urged the West to respect the country's territorial integrity.

U.S. and British planes enforce ``no-fly'' zone in southern and northern Iraq and sometimes strike at Iraqi air defense sites. Baghdad says three civilians were killed and 15 wounded in two U.S. attacks this week.

``Routine attempts by the U.S. military command to justify such actions as the pilots' reaction to Iraqi air defenses sound unconvincing against the background of the tragedy of Iraqis who have lost their loved-ones,'' the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Russia advocates lifting U.N. sanctions imposed against Baghdad in 1990 after the Iraqi invasion in Kuwait. It also does not recognize the legality of the ``no-fly'' zones.

``We assume that all states should base their relations with Iraq on the principles of respect for its sovereignty and territorial integrity,'' the statement said.

``We view this as a precondition for progress in unblocking the situation around Iraq and making the Gulf situation more stable.''

-------- israel

After 2 Days, Israeli Army Leaves Palestinian Town in West Bank

New York Times
August 30, 2001
By CLYDE HABERMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/30/international/30LEAV.html

JERUSALEM, Thursday, Aug. 30 - The Israeli Army withdrew its tanks and soldiers early today from Beit Jala in the West Bank, ending Israel's longest stay in a Palestinian-ruled area - a little over two days.

Israel agreed to keep out of the town, just south of Jerusalem, as long as Palestinian gunmen there stopped shooting at Gilo, an Israeli neighborhood on Jerusalem's southern edge that has been under repeated fire for months. Gunfire in Beit Jala reportedly stopped around midnight, and the Israeli forces began moving out about four hours later, just before dawn.

The Israeli Army confirmed the withdrawal. But Israel's public radio said government officials had warned that the tanks would take up new positions not far away, and if the shooting resumed, they would re-enter Beit Jala in "even greater force."

The move into Beit Jala on Tuesday, for an indefinite stay that deepened the Middle East crisis, was intended to make life safe for Gilo's residents. Israel defended its operation as an act of self-defense, but Palestinians denounced it as a step toward reoccupying territory that forms their autonomous zones. The United States and other countries added their criticism of what turned out to be Israel's most prolonged stay in an area that is under Palestinian control.

All through Wednesday, diplomats and officials on both sides tried to arrange a truce. A deal was finally reached with help from the United States and the European Union, including the intervention of Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. Also, the Israeli foreign minister, Shimon Peres, had several telephone conversations with the Palestinian Authority chairman, Yasir Arafat, on restoring calm to this phase of the 11-month-old conflict.

But an understanding on a withdrawal faltered Wednesday night when firing on Gilo resumed, as did fighting in Beit Jala, where soldiers took over several houses and, for a while, a Lutheran church compound, to shoot at Palestinian gunmen crouching on the streets.

But then things calmed down. After a three-hour meeting with senior cabinet members, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, agreed early today to remove Israel's soldiers as long as the situation did not deteriorate. A cabinet minister, Dan Meridor, said that the only alternative to the withdrawal would have been to remain in Beit Jala with a military force of "even greater dimension."

Some of Mr. Sharon's advisers expressed skepticism that Mr. Arafat would keep the truce. But aides to the more dovish Mr. Peres said they hoped that a deal on Gilo and Beit Jala might serve as an example to end the fighting elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The agreement may have also breathed new life into attempts to arrange a Peres-Arafat meeting to discuss how to bring about the first meaningful cease-fire in Israel and Palestinian territories since the conflict began nearly a year ago. Some officials talked about a possible meeting next week, perhaps in Europe, and Mr. Peres raised the matter in a talk with members of his Labor Party on Wednesday night.

"If things occur as they should next week, we should be able to start the more serious talks in order to stop the fighting," he said.

Gilo and Beit Jala loomed so large that, even without many casualties in the last two days, they overshadowed violence that produced still more deaths today.

An Israeli truck driver and a Palestinian laborer were killed in ambush attacks in the West Bank.

The Israeli driver, Oleg Sudnikov, 35, was delivering gas to a Palestinian village near Tulkarm when he was reportedly shot in his truck, dragged to ground while still alive and then riddled with bullets. Responsibility was claimed by gunmen from Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement.

The Palestinian laborer, Haider Canaan, 27, was shot to death in his car near a refugee camp north of Jerusalem, presumably by Israelis.

-------- space

Japan's Ailing Space Program Boosted by Rocket Launch

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 30, 2001; Page A24
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16152-2001Aug29?language=printer

TANEGASHIMA SPACE CENTER, Japan, Aug. 29 -- A Japanese rocket raced through wispy Pacific clouds into orbit today, reviving the country's hopes of reaching into outer space.

The successful launch of the H-2A rocket, after three previous rockets failed, was a relief to officials who feared Japan's halting space program would become a victim of budget cuts if it suffered another failure.

"It was such a long time until today," said launch spokesman Shinji Nio, grinning after the rocket reached its orbit. "I want a nice sake."

The 290-ton, 172-foot rocket, whose scheduled liftoff Saturday was delayed by a series of mechanical problems, roared off the launch pad at 4 p.m. The sleek cylinder shot eastward with a tail of fire, flawlessly shedding its boosters and two liquid-filled engines en route to reaching an orbit 20,000 miles from Earth.

It carried only a dummy satellite, but officials of the National Space Development Agency hope the success will put Japan back into the commercial satellite business. The agency lost contracts for 18 launches with two U.S. satellite manufacturers after its string of failures, which began in 1998.

Japan is also counting on future launches of the H-2A to carry its own research and space exploration satellites, parts for the international space station, its first intelligence satellites and perhaps a Japanese version of an unmanned space shuttle.

"I have a dream. I want to see the day Japanese technology carries people into space," Shuichiro Yamanouchi, head of the space development agency, said after the launch. "This was the first step. Our flight was a great success."

"Space is now becoming a world of business," he said before the launch. "Japan must rely on its own technology to compete in that."

The H-2A is a redesigned version of the H-2 powerhouse that made five successful launches before 1998, carrying dozens of satellites and feeding Japan's ambitions to match its economic stature with a leading role in space.

But after two failures of the H-2 and one of the lighter M-5, Japan revamped its rocket program. It threw out the "all-made-in-Japan" concept that had made the H-2 hugely expensive, and instead imported parts and streamlined the rocket.

In doing so, it cut expenses in half, and now expects to spend about $70 million per launch of the H-2A, competitive with many of the approximately 15 launch sites around the world now offering to put satellites into orbit.

Because of that fierce competition, however, Japan "is not very likely to have wide economic success" in the commercial satellite business, said Fujio Nakano, a space program analyst who watched the launch on this Pacific island.

"But with this success we could start to make a breakthrough into the field of new technology," he said. "The real meaning of this launch is to go toward a goal of manned space flight, which is a symbol of the mature development of space technology."

But Japanese officials were not sure the H-2A would work, and they acknowledged they were apprehensive before the launch.

"It took us two years to come to this point," said Shoshin Sonoda, chief of planning for the launch. "We don't want to make the same mistakes. We don't want to repeat two years of failure."

"The fate of Japan's rocketry is at stake," Yamanouchi said in a broadcast over the space agency's closed-circuit network just 50 minutes before the launch.

Officials here said they planned to avoid failure by "verifying the most minute details," according to Mamoru Endo, deputy chief of the rocket project. It was a phrase repeated over and over at Tanegashima, one of two launch sites in southern Japan.

Tuesday night, the towering rocket was rolled slowly to the launch pad, and today a small army of nearly 600 space workers and manufacturer representatives performed final checks.

This lush island of rural towns and sugar cane fields is connected to Japan's southernmost main island, Kyushu, by a 70-mile ferry route and occasional flights.

The launch is expected to give a boost to the government's $588 million budget request to build eight reconnaissance satellites. The spy satellites would give Japan intelligence independent of the United States, which supplies Japan with images from space. Japan opted to build its own network because it was dissatisfied with the delay in information from the United States after North Korea fired a rocket over Japan in 1998.

--------

Keep Space Weapons-Free, UN Urges

By Michael Christie Reuters
30 August 2001
http://www.space.com/news/un_missile_defense_wg_010830.html

SYDNEY (Reuters) -- The United Nations on Thursday urged President Bush to keep his plans for a missile shield down on earth and to preserve outer space for peace.

"Hitherto outer space has been militarized we concede but not weaponized. There has been no placement of weapons in outer space," said U.N. Under-Secretary General for disarmament affairs Jayantha Dhanapala in an interview.

"I believe it is vitally important that we should preserve outer space for peaceful purposes and the development of missile defenses should in no way violate the present non-weaponized state of outer space,'' Dhanapala told Reuters in Sydney.

Bush has given long-simmering U.S. plans to build a missile shield new impetus and says Washington intends to opt out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty -- the bedrock of nuclear stability through the end of the Cold War.

The United States says a missile shield would be aimed at "rogue" states such as North Korea and Iraq.

But the plans have alarmed China and Russia and raised fears even among U.S. allies that it could spark a new arms race.

Bush's vision of a National Missile Defense involves a mix of land- and sea-based and aircraft-borne systems to shoot down incoming missiles and is likely also to feature some role for space.

Dhanapala said a commission chartered by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had endorsed a view that the United States should seek total domination of space, indicating that could be a future direction of U.S. policy.

Space whiz military chief

Bush also this month appointed an expert in computer and space warfare, General Richard Myers, to head the military Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The world's nuclear powers agreed in 1967 in the Outer Space Treaty not to place nuclear weapons in space.

Dhanapala also expressed more general reservations about the U.S. president's missile defense plans and his intention to withdraw from the ABM treaty.

While U.N. member states had the freedom to decide on their own security arrangements, he said any abrogation of the treaty or multilateral push to build a missile shield could carry an "enormous cost."

"It's going to certainly according to the stated intentions of some countries lead to the production of more missiles,'' Dhanapala said.

"So what we are going to see is perhaps an increase in tension ... we are probably going to see a deterioration in the international peace and security situation unless of course there is some kind of collective agreement among the nuclear weapons states which will help to salvage the present situation."

China is already modernizing its relatively small collection of around 20 intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Dhanapala said Beijing had made it clear to him that that process would be accelerated if Washington went ahead.

"My discussions with the Chinese, discussions I've had in Beijing and elsewhere, indicated this,'' he said.

High-ranking U.S. officials have blitzed around the world to consult other countries over missile defense and to explain the Bush administration's point of view.

The U.N. disarmament envoy welcomed the consultations, saying he hoped they led to agreements on disarmament.

He also said he had taken note of a suggestion by Bush that the United States would be willing to unilaterally slash its nuclear warheads as part of a missile shield plan.

But Dhanapala said the United Nations preferred multilateral treaties to unilateral promises for the simple reason that they were irreversible, and could be verified and legally enforced.

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

Scuttled by the Process
Navy Likes Md. Firm's Ideas for Battle System -- but Won't Use Them

By Greg Schneider
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 29, 2001; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10693-2001Aug28?language=printer

The Navy is about to decide whether to buy an electronics system that could be the fleet's biggest technological leap in years. In the works since the 1980s and costing more than $2 billion to develop, the system promises a clever and powerful way for ships to target even the sneakiest enemies at great distances.

For the past two years, however, scientists at a small company in Laurel have contended that they can use Internet-age advances to make the system even better.

The Navy likes the ideas put forward by the company -- Solipsys Corp. -- and has given its technology high marks in early testing. Contractor Lockheed Martin Corp. has even pounced on the Solipsys approach as a key to its future in naval electronics.

But the Navy is pulling back from doing business with Solipsys. It's not that Navy officials don't believe the company, and it's not that they disregard the benefits the new product seems to provide.

It's just that the Navy has invested too much time and money in its current system -- the Cooperative Engagement Capability, or CEC, built by Raytheon Co. -- to think about changing course now, according to Navy officials.

"CEC -- we need it today. So we're rushing to get that out there as quickly as the system . . . allows us to do it," said Rear Adm. Phillip M. Balisle, who oversees surface warfare. "I do not have the luxury, no matter how attractive the option is, to simply wipe the slate clean. . . . This is not a simple issue of which widget is better than the other one."

The experience of Solipsys, experts and industry officials say, demonstrates how unwieldy the Pentagon's weapons-buying process can be in an era of lightning-fast change and why the government often winds up with technology that is old by the time it reaches the arsenal.

"The revolution in technologies and capabilities of systems is occurring at a pace that is simply inconsistent with government procurement," said Brett Lambert, a defense expert with the consulting firm DFI International.

With the military services competing as never before for scarce military dollars, Lambert said, any program that appears to be changing too much can seem unstable and ripe for cuts. So with a high-profile system such as CEC, the Navy is better off churning ahead, even if it means steaming past promising new areas of innovation.

"We were wide-eyed optimists doing this, thinking we'll come up with a better idea. How could anybody argue with that?" said Warren Citrin, president of Solipsys. "Talk about naive."

CEC may have a low profile in the outside world but it carries something like glamour in military circles. That's because CEC's mission -- linking radars of far-flung ships -- represents the Pentagon's deepest push yet into one of the hottest fields of defense technology: network-centric warfare.

Military planners and contractors alike dream of building an information super-network linking ships, planes, tanks and ground troops. Like the Borg in "Star Trek: The Next Generation," a fully networked military would have an almost god-like perspective over its opponents, strategists say. And the contractor that built and serviced such a network would have a revenue source for decades.

On board the USS Cape St. George, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser tied up at the Norfolk Naval Base, Capt. Mark Wahlstrom hunched his shoulders one recent morning as he ducked into the ship's combat information center to watch his staff fire up one of the fleet's few working CEC units.

The Cape St. George was one of the first two ships equipped with prototype CEC systems, in 1994. As Wahlstrom watched a big computerized map of Chesapeake Bay fill with swarms of CEC-tracked targets -- mostly commercial aircraft -- he smiled.

"Trust me, after 24 years of doing air defending, this thing is eye-watering," he said. "When you get it up and running, it is awesome."

Wahlstrom said he feels safer with the system because it appears to help defend against one of the gravest threats to U.S. ships on deployment: cruise missiles.

Navy ships have little protection against cruise missiles, which are so small and fly so low that radar has a hard time tracking them. If the missile is coming straight on, its nose cone provides almost no surface area for a radar signal to bounce off.

The Navy asked the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins University to work on that problem more than 15 years ago. A team of scientists that included Warren Citrin -- now of Solipsys -- responded with the CEC concept.

An Advance, With Limits

The basic idea was to link all the radars in a battle group so every ship could see targets from every angle. Ships today swap basic radar pictures over systems called Link 11 and Link 16, but that information is too slow and crude to use for targeting missiles.

CEC is designed to provide vast, raw data in real time. Add a CEC-equipped airplane or two, and the fleet begins to have a spectacular range of vision -- all without upgrading any existing radars.

"The beauty of CEC is, it doesn't replace everything, it makes the old stuff better," said Balisle, who before his promotion to admiral was captain of the other ship that got a CEC prototype in 1994. Although he cautioned that the results of a final sea test of CEC won't be known until later this week, Balisle is enthusiastic.

He believes the system will revolutionize naval warfare, creating "a total shift in how you think tactically, how you arrange resources. It is completely different from anything before."

The Pentagon will decide this fall on the Navy's plans to buy 215 CEC systems for about $2.5 billion, including testing and support services.

Even if the technology works as designed, there are limitations to its effectiveness. The number of sensors that can participate on a secure CEC network is classified, but Capt. Dan Busch, the Navy's CEC program manager, said that tests so far have included no more than 11. Navy planners would like to extend the network significantly, bringing in data from other services and foreign allies.

To get the network signal, each ship has to have an expensive new receiver. And every member of the network gets the full fire hose of data regardless of how much it might need. That means the system uses a huge amount of bandwidth, a resource that is becoming increasingly precious to the military.

Citrin was still thinking about those problems when he and two colleagues left the Applied Physics Lab five years ago to form Solipsys. Using Internet-era advances in the understanding of how networks function, the scientists came up with a new approach called Tactical Component Network, or TCN.

TCN allows every user to take only as much information from the radar network as needed, meaning a Marine on shore could tap in for basic data with a hand-held computer.

At the same time, the network takes only what information it needs from each participant. Adding users does not add bandwidth, as the Navy confirmed through tests of the system in November. According to a briefing package summarizing those test results, the Solipsys system met or exceeded requirements for CEC.

Users also could plug into TCN without reconfiguring their equipment or getting expensive new devices. Citrin said it would cost about $1 million to outfit a ship with TCN but an aircraft or ground soldier could join the network with existing gear.

Those capabilities are what caught the eye of engineers at Lockheed Martin, who see them as opening the door to true network-centric warfare.

"What Warren has done in characterizing the network-centric warfare problem, and defining the attributes in a system design -- they're hard to argue with," said Mark Trenor, director of naval command and control programs at Lockheed Martin. "They really do represent very good cornerstones."

'An Intricate Balance'

Navy officials agree that Citrin's thinking is something they want to pursue. They just aren't sure how quickly they can do so.

"I'm not going to take on Warren. He's a smart guy," said Busch, the Navy's CEC program manager. "But sometimes Warren gets in a position of 'CEC is broken and I'm going to fix it with TCN.' . . . I don't want to reject TCN as having potential to help. But there's got to be caution."

Balisle said the Navy works "an intricate balance" in trying to keep up with changing technology without overwhelming the sailors who have to use it. Strategy, training and equipment must be coordinated, and the capabilities of allies must be taken into account.

Otherwise, he said, "it can be a wonderful technological breakthrough, and the war-fighter can be penalized."

The path is especially tricky for a massive institution such as the Navy, which has equipment positioned around the globe, said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense specialist at the Brookings Institution.

"If you insist on buying a system every three years so you'll have the latest machine, you might over-invest in that area," O'Hanlon said.

As the maker of CEC, Raytheon also is cautious about embracing Citrin's system. It is an unlikely rivalry: Raytheon, with its 92,000 employees, worrying about a few dozen engineers at Solipsys. But Lockheed Martin's role as a Solipsys backer, along with the fact that the Pentagon has not yet committed to Raytheon's system, breeds tension.

"We'd like to know precisely what TCN really is," said Tony Gecan, who runs the Raytheon advanced engineering group in St. Petersburg, Fla., that produces CEC. "I would point out that CEC has gone through an enormous amount of rigorous testing. TCN thus far is a set of claims about what it can do. . . . I don't know the answer. The answer is unknowable, that's really the bottom line."

TCN simulations look "reasonable," Gecan said, but that is no substitute for the extensive real-world testing his system has undergone. And although he acknowledged that TCN's goals of extending the Navy's network to more users and consuming less bandwidth are desirable, Gecan said that scientists at Raytheon are "developing our own approach to those type of problems."

A Winning Hand Lost?

In the end, that is what worries Citrin most.

"What I'm detecting is perhaps a morphing of [the Navy's and Raytheon's] concept into an adoption of much of what we've been saying," he said. "If that's what's going on, it doesn't encourage businesses to innovate just to have the ideas taken from them."

That is an understandable concern for a small contractor, said Ronald O'Rourke, a Navy analyst with the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan arm of the Library of Congress. "That is something that the Navy needs to make sure they manage appropriately," O'Rourke said, adding that a misstep "will serve as a disincentive in the future for companies to come forward with ideas of that kind."

But such risk, said several industry officials familiar with both the Raytheon and the Solipsys products, is simply the way the military contracting machine works, especially when there is a large constituency with a stake in the existing structure.

"With programs like CEC . . . the numbers are so large in terms of contract value and the competition is so fierce that smaller, more entrepreneurial firms really don't have an opportunity," said Lambert, the defense consultant. "There are too few resources and too many companies chasing them."

Now that Solipsys has put its cards on the table, said an industry official who asked not to be identified, the big guys can simply play them. "When you have an established program in the services, it's very difficult to introduce a new technology. . . . TCN probably opened a lot of folks' eyes in terms of what attributes you need. But you don't necessarily have to buy TCN to get it."


-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Ending Logjam, U.S. Reaches Accord on Endangered Species

New York Times
August 30, 2001
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/30/politics/30SPEC.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 - Breaking a logjam that had all but stopped the Fish and Wildlife Service from listing new endangered species, the Bush administration promised quick action today to protect 29 vanishing plant and animal species, including some that are on the verge of extinction.

In exchange, a coalition of environmental groups agreed not to demand the government's immediate compliance with court orders affecting a few other species.

The arrangement meant that the government, which had been directed to designate habitats for newly listed endangered species at the center of lawsuits, could now divert the money it was spending to the more urgent task of saving these 29 plant and animal species from disease, predators and bulldozers.

"Things will start moving through the system very quickly," said Gary Frazer, assistant director for endangered species at the wildlife service. "This will allow us to do the things that are the most beneficial for those species that need protection under the act."

Last November, the agency said it had lost control of the protection process because it was overwhelmed by court orders. Once a plant or animal species is listed as endangered, government agencies and private companies are blocked from doing anything that harms it or disrupts its habitat.

The animals that the wildlife service agreed today to protect include the Chiricahua leopard frog and the Mississippi gopher frog, which once ranged across the Deep South but now exists in just one pond in Harrison County, Miss., where it is threatened by a housing development and highways.

Another animal on the list is the pygmy rabbit, the smallest in the United States. Once common in Washington State, the pygmy rabbit has been ravaged by development, disease and predators and now numbers just 50.

Declining too is the island fox, which inhabits six islands off Southern California. The plunge in the fox population - to less than 2,000 from 6,000 - has been attributed to canine distemper and attacks by golden eagles.

Kieran Suckling, executive director of the Center for Biological Diversity, who helped negotiate the agreement, said the island fox was the top predator on the islands, influencing the distribution of smaller mammals and birds. This in turn controls the distribution of seeds, which then affects the presence of plants, which ultimately affects the course of wildfires.

"That whole Channel Island system is imperiled by the loss of the fox species," Mr. Suckling said. "When you're talking about species that are this close to extinction, it is desperate, and it is time to pull out the stops and do whatever you can and worry about the politics later on."

While extinction occurs naturally, he said, the current rate of extinction rivals the very high rates during earlier geological epochs when meteors crashed into Earth and tidal waves swept over vast land masses.

"The difference is that this is caused by humans and can be turned around by humans," he said.

The federal government had listed 1,244 endangered species as of the end of last year. From 1996 to 2000, the list grew by about 50 species a year. The last time the wildlife service added a species without a court order was on Dec. 26, listing nine species of invertebrates in Bexar County, Tex.

Since January and the advent of the Bush administration, only one species, the milk vetch plant, has been listed, and that was under a court order.

While those involved in the negotiations have come to an agreement, the wildlife service said a formal settlement document must still be written and approved by the Departments of Interior and Justice before it is presented to courts with jurisdiction over the cases. The agreement diverts $588,000, an almost negligible sum in the federal government's $1.9 trillion budget. But Mr. Frazer of the wild life service said it was a significant part of the $6.3 million that the wildlife service had for species protection.

"There is a disconnect between what we need to do under the act and the funds we have to do it," he said.

The Interior Department has requested an additional $1.3 million for species protection for the 2002 fiscal year, which begins on Oct. 1, although the service has said it needs $120 million to cover its endangered species backlog and comply with court orders.

Chris Tollefson, a spokesman for the wildlife service, said, "Our entire fiscal 2001 listing budget was consumed with complying with settlement agreements and court orders relating to critical habitats."

Mr. Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity said that today's agreement highlighted how Congress had shucked its responsibility to provide money for the mandates of the Endangered Species Act.

"Making money available should be the responsibility of Congress," he said. "Instead, citizen groups are by necessity having to step in and figure out creative ways to funnel money to the agency so the agency can do its job. That's not how it should work."

Today's agreement gives the government some breathing room on court-imposed deadlines to designate habitats for other imperiled species. The other groups involved in the settlement, apart from the Center for Biological Diversity, were the Southern Appalachian Biodiversity Project and the California Native Plant Society, which were involved in the original legal actions.

They have agreed to a six-month delay in the mapping of critical habitats for four Hawaiian invertebrates and a nine-month delay in a critical habitat for the California plants and a freshwater clam from the Appalachians.

In exchange for those delays, the wildlife service agreed to various levels of action on 29 other plant and animal species:

It put three species on the emergency endangered list, the top listing, which recognizes these species are on the brink of extinction. The three are the Tumbling Creek cavesnail, the pygmy rabbit and the Carson wandering skipper, a butterfly in Nevada and California. The wildlife service will issue "final listing decisions" for 14 other species and will propose eight more for listing..

Each of these actions can have serious consequences. For example, the coastal cutthroat trout in Washington and Oregon is among the 14 on which a final decision is to be made shortly. If the trout is listed, it could bar logging, hydro-electric power generation and flood control in the area if those activities harm the water quality in a habitat for threatened species.

-------- genetics

U.S. Count of Stem Cell Lines Surprised Swedes

By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, August 30, 2001; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16324-2001Aug29?language=printer

GOTEBORG, Sweden, Aug. 29 -- Responding to a flurry of appeals from the Bush administration, a Swedish fertility expert, Lars Hamberger, flew to Washington a week ago to brief Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on the hot topic of stem cell research.

"I told him very carefully," Hamberger recalled today, "exactly what we have here at Goteborg University: We have three defined cell lines, and four that we are trying to develop, and perhaps a dozen others that could possibly be developed in the future."

So the amiable, white-haired scholar said he and his colleagues were surprised five days later when Thompson's department issued its global inventory of stem cell lines, or colonies, and reported that Goteborg University had 19.

"When we saw the announcement, we first thought maybe we made a mistake in our presentation," Hamberger said. "Then we thought maybe it was just their mistake.

"Or maybe they wanted to come up to the number that the White House had already used, so they have to stretch things, I don't know. It could have been a deliberately over-optimistic interpretation of what we said."

The figure of 19 stem cell lines at Goteborg was a key factor in bringing the HHS inventory to the figure Bush had cited on Aug. 9, when he announced his rules for federal funding of research on human embryonic stem cells. Responding to suggestions that the Bush criteria were too strict, Thompson said later that more than 60 "robust" and "viable" lines of stem cells would qualify for research funding.

HHS spokesman Bill Pierce denied that politics played any role in arriving at that figure. "No one was asked to inflate, pump, do-whatever-you-can to get a decent number," he said. "We feel very comfortable with our numbers, given what we asked them.

"The president did not have a number in mind when he made a decision," Pierce said. "If there had been two, he would have made the same decision. If there were 128, it still would have been his decision."

Pierce said he felt that any disagreement with the Swedes was only semantic -- all 19 of the lines that Goteborg possesses would qualify for federal funding in their current stages of development, he said. The Swedes, however, say that most of what they have are not, at present, stem cell lines.

There is debate in the scientific community as to precisely what the term means.

In Sweden, it is being read as a lesson in the nexus between science and politics in Washington. "In my mind," said Hamberger, 61, "it was rather silly to have given a number in the first place. Now they are liable to be attacked for getting this wrong."

On the other hand, Thompson's figure could eventually turn out to be right. Hamberger's colleagues in the Stem Cell Research Group at Goteborg's Sahlgrenska University Hospital say they could have 19 or more established stem cell lines by the end of this year, although it is unlikely they will get that many.

The whole field of embryonic stem cells dates back all of three years. So "it is hard to say what we are going to come up with months from now," said Henrik Semb, a member of the Goteborg group.

Embryonic stem cells are taken from five-day-old human embryos before they begin to form specific tissues. They can morph into any kind of human tissue. Scientists hope to use them to replace missing tissue to help cure diabetes, Parkinson's disease, arthritis, spinal injuries and other degenerative syndromes.

The stem cell group here has been successful, Semb explained, because it covers the whole spectrum of the task. Some Goteborg doctors cultivate embryos in fertilization clinics; others develop stem cell lines from embryos that go unused there; still others are working on ways to use stem cells in recuperative surgery.

To date, more than 1,000 patients here have had pre-arthritic knees repaired with cartilage stem cells (taken not from an embryo, but from the patient's own joints). The athletic Semb is himself a beneficiary of the treatment. "Without it, I could not . . . cross-country ski, and that is life and death in Sweden," he said today.

But it is not just the lust for Nordic skiing that has made Sweden a global force in the emerging stem cell world. With a population of 9 million -- barely 3 percent of the U.S. figure -- this wealthy nation is immensely proud of its contributions to modern life, which include the zipper, the ball bearing, the cardboard milk carton and the government ombudsman, an official to whom ordinary citizens can take their concerns.

Hamberger was one of the global pioneers of in vitro fertilization two decades ago, and his work prompted the Swedes to develop programs and ethics rules on the use of embryos before almost anyone else.

"The ethical and scientific debates you Americans have now, we had in the 1980s," said Thomas Ostros, the Swedish minister of science. "After a long national discussion, we passed legislation in 1990 governing embryonic research. When the embryonic stem cell was found, we were ready."

"You have all this religious debate in the U.S., but in fact the rules for test-tube babies are much stricter here in Sweden," Hamberger said. "Things that are standard in U.S. in vitro clinics, if you do in Sweden, you lose your license."

In vitro fertilization here is available only for stable couples using their own egg and sperm; the United States permits third-party donors, surrogate mothers and single parents. Stem cells developed in Sweden can come only from embryos created for the purpose of childbirth by consenting, unpaid couples. That means the lines here and at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm would meet Bush's criteria for federally funded research, as long as they were created before Aug. 9, the date of Bush's speech.

Swedish officials say whatever lines they have could be made available for appropriate research by American scientists.

Staff writer Rick Weiss in Washington contributed to this report.

-------- human rights

U.S. May Help Chinese Evade Net Censorship

New York Times
August 30, 2001
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/30/technology/30VOIC.html

The United States government agencies that once tried to breach the Iron Curtain with radio broadcasts are taking the information war to the Internet, hoping to finance an American-based computer network designed to thwart attempts by the Chinese government to censor the World Wide Web for users in China.

Government officials and private architects of the plan say the program would be financed by the International Broadcasting Bureau, parent agency of the Voice of America, which has been presenting the American view abroad - mostly by radio - for decades. It would mark a significant expansion of the long-running information war between China and the United States.

The agency is in advanced discussions with Safeweb, a small company based in Emeryville, Calif., which has received financing from the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, In-Q-Tel. The discussions were confirmed by parties on both sides.

Safeweb currently runs its own worldwide network of about 100 privacy servers - computers that help disguise what Web sites a user is seeking to view - which are popular with users in China. The privacy servers have been a continuing target for the Chinese government, which has blocked most of them in recent weeks.

The bureau would provide money for new computers to run Safeweb software specifically tailored for the Chinese audience and intended to be more resistant to blocking by the government. It would also cover some of the costs of network bandwidth to carry the the Internet traffic, but would not act as host for the computers itself.

The plan would initially pay for around a dozen computers, with an option to grow to a larger number after the new federal fiscal year begins on Oct. 1. The project would be financed from a Congressional allocation of $5 million last year intended to improve broadcasting to China, including both Internet and radio. Of that $5 million, $800,000 was approved for "Internet and multimedia enhancement," some of which is scheduled for use on this project.

"We recognized that we have an obligation to reach out to our audience in ways that are effective, that includes the Internet," said Tish King, a spokeswoman for the International Broadcasting Bureau.

To that end, Voice of America also started VOANews.com to make news available worldwide on the Internet. Currently, audio broadcasts in over 53 languages are streamed live and archived on the site. Text is archived in almost all the languages.

Voice of America has been developing an Internet strategy to reach an audience in China with a daily newsletter in Chinese that is e- mailed to 180,000 people and a Chinese-language news Web site.

In addition to a Chinese-language Web site, Radio Free Asia also maintains Web sites aimed at ethnic minority groups in China like Tibetans and Uighurs, who are concentrated in the northwest region of Xinjiang.

But the Chinese government has sporadically jammed the radio broadcasts from Voice of America since 1989 and from Radio Free Asia since 1997, a year after it began, specifically those in Mandarin and Tibetan. The government has also blocked the Chinese-language Web sites of Voice of America since 1997 and Radio Free Asia almost since it began in 1998.

For Chinese leaders, the Internet is a doubled-edged sword, a rapidly evolving medium that brings economic opportunity but remains beyond complete control.

Internet use in China is growing dramatically, seeping from urban universities and businesses to homes and affordable Internet cafes all over the country. The Chinese government estimates there were over 26 million Internet users in July, compared to only 9 million at the end of 1999.

Periodically, the government tries new ways to tighten control, including police raids. Since April the government has waged a campaign to shut down thousands of unlicensed Internet cafes, and the government has publicized the arrests of over a dozen "Internet dissidents" over the last three years.

The government maintains an elaborate set of rules that requires Internet service providers to electronically filter content that may be pornographic, anti-government, violent, unhealthy or superstitious.

Among sites that are blocked for the vast majority of users are those of The Washington Post (news/quote), Amnesty International and various sites identifying with the Falun Gong spiritual movement, which the Chinese government has accused of being a cult. However, users can access other news sites including ABCnews.com, the British Broadcasting Corporation and USA Today.

Until early this month, the site for The New York Times (news/quote) on the Web was blocked. The blocking was lifted after an interview with President Jiang Zemin by top editors at The Times in which President Jiang was specifically questioned about the blocking of the site.

Chinese Web users have nevertheless found methods to get around the censorship. In a recent study by researchers at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, more than a quarter of Internet users admitted to occasionally using Internet proxy computers, which work similarly to those of Safeweb, while 10 percent admitted to frequent use. That was much higher than was expected, said Guo Liang, one of the researchers.

Among the most popular masquerade services is Safeweb, an 18- month-old company. The technology, dubbed Triangle Boy (after a character in an episode of the sitcom "Seinfeld"), can fool an electronic filter into thinking Web content is coming from a benign computer server instead of a blocked site like Human Rights Watch.

But the service has become a target for the Chinese government, which has engaged in a cat-and- mouse game with Safeweb, blacklisting the Triangle Boy servers themselves.

"They are becoming increasingly aggressive," said Stephen Hsu, chief executive of Safeweb. "We get these frantic emails from users saying they are totally cut off now."

In addition, Safeweb says, the Chinese government is now blocking e- mail sent to users who request Triangle Boy e-mail addresses. As a response, Safeweb is encouraging users to sign up for free Web-based e- mail accounts at non-Chinese services like Hotmail and Yahoo (news/quote).

Part of the proposal being financed by the International Broadcasting Bureau would have the Triangle Boy servers change their Internet addresses on a regular basis - perhaps as frequently as every few hours - to make them more difficult for the Chinese government to find and block.

Despite government efforts to rein in the Internet, it is playing an emerging political role in China. The study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, one of the most rigorous Internet studies in China to date, found that 67.5 percent of adult users believe the Internet gives people more opportunity to criticize government policies. And more than 74 percent agree the Internet allows people to "express their political views" and to learn about politics.

"We want to force the Chinese government to accept the pro-democracy consequences of the Internet," said Dr. Hsu. "Up until now the Chinese government has been amazingly successful at having their cake and eating it too."

--------

Pope urges nations to apologize for slave trade

USA TODAY
08/30/2001
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001/08/30/slavetrade.htm

VATICAN CITY (AP) - Nearly a decade ago, Pope John Paul II went to Africa and asked forgiveness for Christians' role in slavery. Now the Vatican is urging nations that took part in the slave trade to consider apologizing, too.

The Vatican released a document Wednesday outlining its positions on some of the issues to be discussed this week at a U.N. conference on race, including whether there should be reparations for those whose ancestors were sold or born into slavery.

Vatican delegates will attend the eight-day conference, which starts Friday in Durban, South Africa.

In taking up the cause, the Vatican joined Senegal, South Africa and others in supporting the search for a way to make amends.

A campaign driven by African activists is asking the conference to endorse proposals for an apology and financial compensation from nations that benefited from the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

The United States and former colonial powers of Europe are at odds with African nations and many advocacy groups on the issue, fearing that such an acknowledgment could lead to huge compensation claims.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Colin Powell will not attend the conference because of Arab-backed language in the draft document accusing Israel of discriminatory treatment of Palestinians. The United States had not ruled out a complete boycott of the conference unless the language was softened.

Backers of reparations say details would still have to be worked out - but at a minimum reparations would include cancellation of Africa's billions of dollars in foreign debt, and funding of social, education and health programs. John Paul has championed the side of those pushing for forgiveness of debt in the developing world as a way to foster closeness between nations.

Saying that calculation of compensation could be difficult, the Vatican said Wednesday an alternative might be an "apology or expression of regret to the victim state by the state responsible for the wrong."

"It is not the church's task to propose a technical solution to so complex a problem. But the Holy See wishes to emphasize that the need for reparation reinforces the obligation of giving substantial help to developing countries, an obligation weighing chiefly on the more developed countries," the Vatican said.

Calls for reconciliation have been a hallmark of John Paul's papacy - he also has expressed regret for the Roman Catholic Church's treatment of Jews and Orthodox Christians.

In 1992, while visiting a former slave barracks on Goree Island off Senegal, John Paul asked forgiveness for Christians involved in the business of selling human beings.

Most historians agree that between 12 million and 15 million Africans were shipped into slavery in Europe and the Americas.

In Senegal, President Abdoulaye Wade - himself a descendant of generations of slave-owning African kings - told The Associated Press he found it "insulting" that some supporters of reparations seek "to give us money to forget our ancestors, and the suffering they went through."

South African President Thabo Mbeki said Tuesday he hoped for "a measurable commitment within countries and among all nations that practical steps will be taken and resources allocated ... to eradicate the legacy of slavery, colonialism and racism."

Mbeki said he considers an unequivocal condemnation of slavery "a necessary first step in this regard."

In line with the Vatican reasoning that it would be hard to calculate damages, Wade said what he wanted was acknowledgment of the slave trade as a crime against humanity.

"In Europe, they were sold as goods, and that's what's important, and that's what should be considered a crime against humanity," Wade said, citing Catholic priests who once decreed Africans have no souls, "so you can sell them like beasts."

-------- imf / world bank

IMF Team to Visit Crisis - Hit Zimbabwe for Talks

August 30, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-zimbabwe-imf.html

HARARE (Reuters) - An International Monetary Fundmission is to visit crisis-ridden Zimbabwe for discussions on the country, which has been without fund aid since 1999, a senior IMF official said on Tuesday.

Gerry Johnson, the IMF's senior representative in Zimbabwe, said the visit had been agreed with the Zimbabwe authorities. Its purpose would be a standard review of the economy.

Earlier this week, Zimbabwe's main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) unveiled a recovery plan aimed at pulling the country out of a devastating economic crisis if it wins next year's presidential elections.

MDC economics secretary Eddie Cross said the plan, which also seeks to restore ties with international communities, would be presented to IMF and World Bank visiting teams next week.

Zimbabwe is in its third year of recession, with analysts warning that likely food shortages after a sharp decline in agricultural output could spark civil unrest by year-end.

The economic malaise has been worsened by the suspension of aid in 1999 by western donors, mainly over policy differences with President Robert Mugabe's government. His controversial seizure of white-owned farmland for black resettlement without compensation is a major bone of contention.

In May, the IMF said cash-strapped Zimbabwe was late in its debt repayments to the fund.

The following month, Finance Minister Simba Makoni appealed for IMF and World Bank help for Zimbabwe to fulfil its debt obligations, saying that it was determined to pay off $600 million worth of arrears.

Mugabe's government denies that it has mismanaged the economy since assuming power at independence from Britain in 1980. It accuses the IMF and World Bank of being used by Western countries working to topple it in retaliation over the land program.

-------- police / prisoners

Global Economy's New Guardian
D.C.'s Answer to IMF, World Bank Protests: Miles of Chain-Link

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 30, 2001; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16237-2001Aug29?language=printer

The D.C. police are old hands at crowd control, but they never went this far before. They never boosted their arsenal with a weapon as tricky and volatile as a great big shiny silver chain-link monster anti-protester peace device, a fence designed to keep globalization-haters from getting at globalizers among the bankers and trade ministers gathering at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Depending on what part of the country you're from, you might know it as a cyclone fence or a hurricane fence. Pick your storm.

The fence will be nine feet tall. It will have a perimeter of 2 1/2 miles. It will enclose 220 downtown acres and block 27 streets, according to preliminary plans. Corralled will be: the White House, parts of Foggy Bottom and George Washington University, four apartment buildings, a church, dozens of stores, restaurants and offices.

We've had astounding, unpredictable and occasionally violent crowds converge on Washington before, but never a fence like this. Among the unfenced: Martin Luther King Jr. and the March on Washington; the May Day and Moratorium demonstrations against the Vietnam War; the boisterous rejection of inaugurations, from Richard Nixon's second in 1973 to George W. Bush's in 2001; the crusades for and against abortion rights, gay rights and women's rights; the Million Man, Mom and Family Marches; last year's anti-globalization protests.

When there was fencing, it was piecemeal, ad hoc, not a single grand installation. During anti-Vietnam protests, police surrounded the White House grounds with buses. It was kind of cute, the buses shoved nose-to-butt like elephants.

This is a much more ambitious quarantine. Perhaps it springs from the same good intentions and low tolerance for dread and uncertainty that are driving the crusade for a missile defense shield.

When the police propose to erect the biggest cyclone fence ever seen in Washington, are we supposed to grab Toto and hunker down for heavy weather?

Don't expect a straight answer from a fence. Fences have two sides, and at least as many meanings. Sometimes good fences make good neighbors. Sometimes.

"In our society people think a fence is just a fence," says Craig Herrick, commercial sales manager for Long Fence in Capitol Heights. "There's a lot more to it."

Keeping New World Order

Call this one chain-link, in fence industry esperanto, recognized from coast to coast, around ball fields, playgrounds, racetracks, rock concerts and construction sites. You see them everywhere -- until you don't notice them anymore, as though they were transparent, but not quite.

The ingenious but unlovely essentials haven't changed in about a century -- galvanized steel wire woven into a fabric of two-inch diamond shapes and stretched between horizontal and vertical steel poles.

The chief tenants of this new gated community will be the globalization grandees who've somehow attracted some of the biggest First World protest demonstrations in more than 30 years. Abroad, the World Bank and the IMF boss around presidents and despots, rescue economies, strive to end poverty while defending wealth. At home, they need a big fence to keep out people who doubt it is possible to end poverty while defending wealth.

Police say 100,000 demonstrators, some violent, will be on hand during the annual meeting of the bank and the IMF Sept. 29 and 30. Hence the fence. Protesters insist their numbers will be much smaller, and peaceful, so don't fence them out. (Afterward, numerical self-interest will invert; protesters will claim a big number, police a smaller one. Each will accuse the other of being more violent.)

The $2 million fence will do its thing that weekend, then come down. But erecting 14,000 linear feet of chain-link in the middle of a city is no simple thing. Fence companies are used to putting up temporary fences of comparable dimensions around rural stock car courses and monster truck pits, parking lots and political conventions. In those cases, there usually are no streets to close, no lunch crowds or commuters to discommode -- and still it takes two or three weeks to deploy that much shiny steel.

"It's very unusual to have two miles of fence in a city somewhere," Herrick says.

Not to worry. Urban civil disorder that explodes on schedule -- whenever that new world cuisine IMF-WTO-G8-FTAA-NAFTA alphabet soup is being cooked up -- is a growth market for the fence industry. And the industry can meet the challenge. Pay enough money, and a big fence can be made to surround part of a city in a week, maybe less. The Secret Service is picking up the tab for this one, and everyone figures it's willing to pay overtime.

So pretty soon, the fence guys will go to work downtown. They'll sink steel poles into concrete Jersey barriers, unload 50-foot rolls of wire mesh, speak knowingly of features like "twisted 12.5-gauge with barbs four inches on center."

The D.C. police won't reveal details -- are the 42-inch-high Jersey barriers included in the nine-foot fence height calculation? No one expects them to crown the ensemble with coils of razor or concertina wire. The pictures would be awful. Too Belfast.

And what shall we call it? Fences have traditionally gotten their names from the companies that built them -- Hurricane out West, Cyclone back East. Long Fence is bidding on this contract. Look closely at fences around town, and you'll see little name plates signifying that Long is the author of lots of them. This fence might be a Long fence, but it definitely will be a long fence.

The protesters are coming up with names, like Wall of Shame, and invoking the Berlin Wall. The analogy works for their purposes: That wall was a symbol of oppression, and it got torn down, a fate some protesters hope to visit upon this fence. "Mr. Wolfensohn, tear down this wall," they say, paraphrasing Ronald Reagan and referring to the president of the World Bank. Their lawyers are in U.S. District Court describing the fence as a violation of free-speech rights.

The authorities have a different take. The fence is a precaution, a containment strategy. They predict most protesters will be peaceful, but Mayor Anthony Williams has been muttering lately about "a cabal of maybe a thousand to two thousand anarchists or whatever they call themselves who are bent on destruction of public property or personal injury or worse." The police chief is all but promising some level of property destruction even with the fence -- thus implying actual doom without one.

Either way, a fence is not neutral, just ambiguous. This one forces us to consider whether it is necessary because of the character of the people on the outside, or the ones on the inside.

Even the fence guys, who are more comfortable with practical questions of wire gauge strength, see the symbolism in all this.

They will tell you that, in fact, a fence is not guaranteed to do what it appears designed to do, which is to keep people in or out.

Really? Even for $2 million? Yes.

In other words, at its essence, a fence is not a physical frontier at all. Its power lies elsewhere. It is not supposed to be, but to mean.

"What a fence is doing 90 percent of the time is telling someone not to go here," says Mark Davis, owner of Carlson Fence in Miami and president of the American Fence Association. "A fence will stop a pretty honest person. But anybody with a tool or ability to get in will get in."

Shake, Rattle and Roll

A Leatherman hand tool, for example, will not do. You need longer-handled shears to gain the leverage required to cut through a chain-link fence.

You figured this out quickly in Quebec City last April. Your comrades were behind you, and a line of police in riot gear was in front of you, on the other side of the fence. You could smell tear gas from confrontations elsewhere. Your friends were loud, shouting, "Take it down!" and the police were very quiet, staring through their tinted shatterproof visors.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, those law enforcement tastemakers, were the first to hit upon the idea of a big cyclone fence for a trade meeting. The Mounties and their colleagues in provincial and local police departments erected the 10-foot high, 2 1/2-mile screen around the Old Quebec section of the city. It took two weeks to build. Heads of state huddled behind the fence to discuss the FTAA, or Free Trade Area of the Americas.

Someone had the right kind of cutters. And someone else climbed on top of the fence and rode the cross-pole as if it were one of those mechanical broncos in an arcade. He started rocking the fence back and forth, and the crowd grabbed hold and made the rocking more violent. Rocking and cutting, rocking and cutting. Pretty soon, the wire mesh was rent in vertical seams, and a big section of fence flopped over.

A crowd rushed across the frontier, and was quickly repelled by the police using plenty of tear gas.

A group calling itself the Medieval Bloc brought up a catapult and lobbed stuffed teddy bears and Barney dolls over the fence. The bears were marked with red dots, signifying the ancient technique of launching plague-infected animals at enemy forces. The Barneys were dotless, just smiling as they rained purple down on police, a rejected icon suggesting maybe we're not a happy family after all.

The thing was, whatever you did with the fence, you were still doing something with it, and that had a strange effect. The fence shaped the protests.

It gave demonstrators victories: If you tore down a section, that felt huge, even if you made it only a few feet inside. You were all fired up for the next assault.

The fence also was a provocation. It raised the anger level higher than it might have been, then presented a target at which to vent that anger. The fence just about guaranteed there would be property destruction and tear gas.

"It's something designed to get you angry," says Jamie Loughner, a protester from Washington who joined the Medieval Bloc in Quebec City. "People become more outraged because they are so offended by the fence. . . . It's easy to shake your focus from what you're truly protesting."

There was a danger for the protesters that the demonstration would devolve into something that was all about the fence, not about grievances over the inequities of global capitalism. Is that what the police had in mind?

Galvanized Crowd Control

You're a sworn officer, and your job is to protect property and people, while letting the demonstrators have their say. You figure a fence can help.

For one thing, even with the 3,000 reinforcements being recruited from other departments to join about 3,600 D.C. police officers, there won't be enough men and women to cover the whole perimeter. Plus, a fence can minimize physical contact with the protesters. That's good for you, and good for them.

"It helps you control a crowd, whether it's friendly or unfriendly," says Thomas Seamon, a law enforcement consultant who was deputy commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department. "Will demonstrators try to scale it or rip it down? Certainly."

That's when you might consider dousing them with pepper spray or another chemical, or possibly shooting rubber bullets. Later, the fence can provide evidence in court.

"It gives you a very clear boundary, that people have in fact breached the law," Seamon says. "People are going to actively either climb over it or attempt to rip it down. Then there's no question you've broken the law."

Maybe the protesters will expend all their energy against the fence.

"If you can make the fence a target so police aren't the target, or private property is not the target, or individuals are not the target, then this fence would have served its purpose," says Hubert Williams, former chief of the Newark Police Department and now president of the Police Foundation, a District-based outfit that provides research and technical support.

But handle a fence with care.

"People who will be looking at breaking the line and getting into that critical area to disrupt the police may develop counter-tactics to the fence," Williams says.

Such as?

"I don't want to give any ideas," he says.

"It's a problem if it's toppled over on police officers, used in a way to undermine police officers. . . . The biggest problem for the police is that tactics might be developed where the fence could be used against them."

Don't Fence Me In

You hear about the fence one day at home in your apartment in the York, at 532 20th St. NW. In the newspaper you check the map of the preliminary plan: Yes, you will be fenced in.

There must be hundreds of you, also counting the folks living in the Empire, the Statesman, the Letterman House.

You get out an old collection of Robert Frost you last read in college. You search for something, find it: a sly poem about mending a wall. It has the line "Good fences make good neighbors." Frost puts that sentiment in the mouth of the narrator's neighbor. What the narrator of the poem thinks is harder to tell. On the one hand, here he is rebuilding the wall, but he also thinks to himself, "Something there is that doesn't love a wall."

That's the way it is with you and your neighbors. You can see the point of this fence, and you can't.

It will be possible for you to worship at the United Church, shop at Tower Records and the Gap, eat lunch at the BreadLine and dinner at Kinkead's -- all inside the fence.

Wait a minute: What if you need groceries?

"I just think it's nuts," says Elizabeth Elliott, who lives and operates her design consulting business in the York. "What are they going to do -- we'll be fed through the fence?"

The police haven't said how residents will get in and out. In Quebec City, people living inside the fence were given big ID badges.

"The Metropolitan Police Department seems to have taken the strange view that they can make a preemptive strike and prevent people from demonstrating and from moving freely around the city, all because of an exaggerated fear of violence," says Mark Furstenberg, owner of the BreadLine bakery and restaurant on Pennsylvania Avenue near 18th Street NW. "Making it possible for the delegates to get to the meetings, and making it possible for the demonstrators to be heard by those delegates -- that's hard. But that's what we pay them for."

Laetitia Combrinck, on the other hand, also a resident of the York, can live with the fence. "If it takes a fence to protect us, I'm for it," she says.

So your neighbors may disagree on whether the fence is necessary or proper, but they agree on a larger meaning of the fence: It says your neighborhood, Foggy Bottom, is disposable.

When it looked as though Woodley Park might suffer from the protesters and police, the meetings were shifted from there to Foggy Bottom, pronto. You think you know why: Woodley Park has more money and clout.

To be sure, the bank and the IMF are headquartered in Foggy Bottom. But still. Over the years you've watched so many residents move away as the bank, the IMF, the university and other big-foot institutions expanded. Yet you pay taxes, and they don't.

"Put 'em on a ship and put 'em out in the middle of the Atlantic," says Jack Batham, who lives in the Empire. "I'm getting tired as a citizen of the city having to be just tormented by stuff like this."

Defining Boundaries The protesters are "beyond the pale" -- which means irrevocably unacceptable or unreasonable, says the dictionary.

That phrase derives from an old meaning of a fence. When the English conquered territory in other lands, such as Ireland, the part within English control, inside the fence, was the pale. Outside was, well, anarchy.

Now fences give off other vibes. "Assuming that D.C. and the IMF were my clients, I cannot envision saying, 'I've got a great idea to get people to like you -- put up a fence,' " says Eric Dezenhall, a specialist in damage control with Nichols-Dezenhall Communications. "But it's a great security idea."

The fence is that rarest of things in Washington, an unspinnable object. Dezenhall would recommend a counter-protest to change the subject, featuring people from poor countries who actually like the bank and IMF.

Some of the demonstrators are so happy about the fence they almost hope the lawyers fail to get it quashed on constitutional grounds. The fence is a chain-link manifestation of their claim about how the whole global capital system is undemocratic and protective only of select elites.

Others are unhappy about the fence, because they say it unfairly paints them as violent.

The fence has it both ways.

So there's a lot of debate and confusion about how to protest the bank and the IMF without getting sucked into a war with the fence. Past protests have featured radical cheerleaders, and radical stilt-walkers. Maybe radical pole vaulters this time. They could be dressed in tight black gym shorts and tank tops -- clearly not armed. When they land defenseless and hilarious among the riot squads, what will happen to them? Shift the focus off the fence and onto the police.

Loughner, of the Medieval Bloc, holds out some scrap metal. She jingles it in her hands. Look closely. The pieces are strands of shiny steel wire, neatly snipped. Souvenirs of the fence last time.

She says, "I was present and I saw them drop and I picked them up, just like anyone who was helping to break down the Berlin Wall."

-------- spying

2 Men Arrested Trying to Export Encryption Devices

New York Times
August 30, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/30/technology/30SMUG.html

WASHINGTON, Aug. 29 - The Customs Service today announced the arrests of two men suspected of trying to export highly sophisticated encryption devices to China.

The men, Eugene You Tsai Hsu, of Blue Springs, Mo., and David Tzu Wvi Yang, of Temple City, Calif., were charged with trying to buy encryption units from a Maryland manufacturer and ship them through intermediaries to China, customs officials said.

The units, produced by Mykotronx Inc., a technology company in Columbia, Md., are used by the United States government and its allies to transmit secret information by telephone or fax. The devices are relatively inexpensive - about $8,000 a unit - but are so important that their sale must be approved by the National Security Agency, the officials said.

"It's some of the best encryption technology the U.S. government has," said Allan J. Doody, the Customs special-agent-in-charge in Baltimore.

According to the Customs affidavit, Mr. Hsu contacted Mykotronx in May to ask about the cost of the encryption units. A Mykotronx security officer alerted Customs to his interest in the top-secret technology.

Customs then assigned an undercover agent who posed as an intermediary and corresponded with Mr. Hsu and two others: Mr. Yang, the owner of a freight forwarding business in Compton, Calif., and Charlson Ho, who represented a Singapore company that sought to buy the units.

The undercover agent notified Mr. Hsu that the technology he sought was on the State Department's Munitions List, and would require a license for export, the affidavit said. Mr. Hsu then asked if he could get a license, and the agent told him that no license would be approved for export to China. But Mr. Hsu persisted, discussing ways to repackage the units and disguise their ultimate destination, the affidavit said.

Mr. Hsu is a naturalized United States citizen, officials said; Mr. Yang was born in Taiwan and is a permanent resident alien.

A relative of Mr. Hsu declined to discuss the case. A young woman who identified herself as Mr. Yang's daughter said she had no information about the arrest.

Violators of the Arms Export Control Act face a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine.


-------- activists

GLOBAL JUSTICE ACTIVISTS DENOUNCE WORLD BANK'S SHAM DISCLOSURE POLICY
DEMONSTRATION TO BE HELD TODAY AT WORLD BANK [6 pm]

Mobilization for Global Justice Press Statement
For Immediate release
August 30, 2001
From: stop-imf@venice.essential.org
contacts: Robert Weissman (cell) 202-904-4068 - rob@essential.org
David Levy (cell) 202-669-5929

Washington - Global justice activists today denounced an expected new World Bank "Information Disclosure Policy." The disclosure policy, which is itself still secret, is a sham attempt to address the demand of critics that World Bank decision-making be open to the scrutiny of the public and the news media.

The disclosure policy is expected to be approved by the World Bank Board of Directors on Thursday - in a meeting that will be closed to the public and to the news media. The policy specifies what the public is allowed to know and is not allowed to know about the operations of the World Bank.

According to World Bank documents leaked to non-governmental organizations, under the "new" policy, meetings of the Board of Directors will continue to be closed to the public and the news media. Neither transcripts nor minutes of the meetings will be released. Documents on investments in projects such as dams, roads, oil and mining will only be released after project approval, thus blocking public input.

Robert Naiman, a member of the Mobilization for Global Justice, said today, "The World Bank's expected approval of this policy makes a mockery of its claims to be open to considering the demands of critics. The meeting where they will ratify the policy will be secret. The document is secret. Everything is secret. The World Bank seems to fear sunlight more than Dracula."

Global justice activists and members of the Mobilization for Global Justice will hold an emergency demonstration at the World Bank's headquarters at 1818 H St NW at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 30.

The Mobilization for Global Justice has demanded that all IMF and World Bank meetings should be open to the public and the news media and broadcast on C-SPAN. The MGJ has also demanded that the institutions cancel impoverished country debt, end policies that block access to education, health care, clean drinking water, and other human needs, and end support for environmentally and socially destructive projects, including oil, gas, mining, and dams.

For more information, see www.globalizethis.org or call the MGJ office at 265-7714.


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