------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
FDA Urges Pill to Combat Radiation
U.S. Changes Its Stance on Radiation Exposure Regimen
DOE Amends Rules on Nevada Nuclear Waste Site
Group: Taiwan Researching Missile
Suicide bombers trying chemical devices - officials
Livermore scientists track airborne toxins
Moscow, U.S. close to deal on nuclear-arms cuts
U.S. Seeks Deal on Arms Cuts by Summer
U.S. and Russia to Complete Talks on an Arms Control Pact
Bush About to Announce Withdrawal From ABM Treaty
New US uranium enrichment plant would need NRC okay
Nuclear Industry Faces Jitters
Critics: Nuclear Cleanup Falls Short
Nevada Nuke Waste Site Challenged
Congress May Create Panel to Close Military Bases
Bush Talk to Mark Attacks on 11th

MILITARY
Crowds Scuffle for Food in Kabul
Al-Qaeda announce surrender in Tora Bora: Afghan commander
Afghanistan's Next Leader
Eastern Alliance Sets Ultimatum for Al Qaeda Surrender
Witnesses Recount Taliban Dying While Held Captive
Team in Somalia May Be Planning U.S. Strikes
Milosevic Hears Genocide Allegations
Hopkins researchers' filter foils bioterror
FARC said to kill four kidnap victims
Authorities Find Ariz. Drug Tunnel
Iraq, Iran resuming talks on war captives
Israeli Missiles Injure Target and Kill Boys in West Bank
Hezbollah still terrorist
The Russian face in Riga
New Zealand Retires Air Force Jets
Bin Laden wife airs suicide strategy
Vieques Mayor Released From Prison
Dissident protests Russia, China ties to U.S. war
Group: Taiwan Researching Missile
Accepting Peace Prize, Annan Speaks of 'New Insecurity'
The U.N.'s Strangelove
U.S. acknowledges link between Gulf war, disease
The military's new generation

POLICE / PRISONERS
Computer Sciences Wins Defense Contract
Closer Look at Exports Urged
Judges not cleared for cases
More reassuring than alarming
Ex-LAPD Officer Sentenced to Prison
Officer gets 10 years for siccing dog on suspects
Executions in U.S. down by 13 in 2000
Death Penalty, Location Are Linked in Va. Study
Bush: Next Phase of War Focuses on 'Rogue States'
Tape of Bin Laden Discussing Attacks to be Released
Pope Says Self Defense Legitimate Against Terror
Suspect Is Indicted as 20th Hijacker

ENERGY AND OTHER
UK to change renewables rules to overcome planning
UK minister opens wind farm, gives OK for another
UK Kielder wind power court case delayed
Scottish to build 100 megawatt wind farm
Scientists Warn of Climate Change
WHO Lands in Africa to Fight Ebola
Irradiating Mail Has Downside
Activists Want Monitoring of UN Refugee Pact

ACTIVISTS
Mitchell Plan
Court Will Review Right to Secret Data
Spread of AIDS in Rural China Ignites Protests
Administration Lambasted on ABM Treaty Withdrawal



-------- NUCLEAR

FDA Urges Pill to Combat Radiation
Inexpensive Iodine Drug Known to Cut Risk of Thyroid Cancer From Fallout

By Justin Gillis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 11, 2001; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22582-2001Dec10?language=printer

Spurred by fears of nuclear terrorism, the Food and Drug Administration yesterday called for widespread use of a cheap, readily available pill soon after an attack to protect people against thyroid cancer.

The FDA issued new guidelines for the use of a drug called potassium iodide. They break relatively little medical ground. But by emphasizing the proven usefulness of the drug in countering radioactive fallout, the FDA's action is likely to feed a growing discussion in the country about how broadly the drug should be stockpiled.

Authorities have known for decades that taking potassium iodide before or right after exposure to radioactive fallout can prevent some ill effects, especially in young children, who are most vulnerable to thyroid cancer.

The revised FDA guidelines use studies done after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster to recommend new dosage levels for various groups, replacing guidelines based on studies of the atomic bombings in Japan in 1945.

Only a handful of states maintain stockpiles of the drug. The Department of Health and Human Services is studying whether to add potassium iodide to a national stockpile it maintains of drugs and supplies to counter large-scale terror strikes.

Some groups, noting that the drug costs as little as 10 cents a dose in bulk, have called for even broader stockpiling -- for instance, in all schools and homes that could be affected by the bombing of a nuclear plant.

"All the studies I've seen have shown that it does provide protection, particularly for young children," said David Lochbaum, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a watchdog group. "Considering its price, it just seems like a no-brainer. We should have been doing this a long time ago."

He cautioned, however, that potassium iodide protects against only one type of radiation exposure and is no substitute for preventing attacks or for evacuating people after an attack.

Some state officials are skeptical of stockpiling the drug for the same reason, saying their main focus would be on moving people out of the path of a fallout plume and preventing contamination of the food supply. Alabama, Arizona, Maine and Tennessee are the only states with large stockpiles of potassium iodide.

A handful of states maintain smaller stockpiles, and many others have begun discussing the issue since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, realizing that nuclear plants could be prime targets. The FDA emphasized yesterday that potassium iodide should be taken within hours of a radiation release and this "requires a ready supply" of the drug.

The biology works this way: The one organ in the body that uses a lot of iodine is the thyroid gland, which produces substances that help regulate metabolism. Iodine is such an important nutrient that a form of it is routinely added to salt to help prevent deficiencies.

Iodine is not normally radioactive. However, one of the prime consequences of nuclear attack or accident would be the release of radioactive forms of the element into the air and possibly the food supply. The radioactive iodine could concentrate in the thyroid glands of exposed people, particularly fast-growing children, elevating their risk of thyroid cancer.

The absorption of radioactive iodine can be slowed, however, if exposed people quickly take a large dose of nonradioactive iodine -- "flooding" the thyroid gland with the safe form of the element. Potassium iodide pills are the preferred way to do this. The pills would ideally be taken by anyone who could be exposed to fallout within a few hours of a nuclear-plant bombing or other release of radioactivity.

The FDA emphasized yesterday that the benefits of potassium iodide in the midst of a radiation disaster are clear, and the risks minimal even if people overdose on the drug. Potassium iodide is not a prescription drug, and anybody who wants to can buy it, though most pharmacies don't stock the drug.

The new guidelines call for daily doses of potassium iodide at the following levels for those likely to be exposed to radioactive fallout:

• Infants less than 1 month old: 16 milligrams.

• Children aged 1 month to 3 years: 32 milligrams.

• Children 3 to 18 years old: 65 milligrams.

• Adults, including pregnant and lactating women, and adolescents over 150 pounds: 130 milligrams.

----

NUCLEAR SAFETY
U.S. Changes Its Stance on Radiation Exposure Regimen

New York Times
December 11, 2001
By MATTHEW L. WALD with ANDREW C. REVKIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/11/politics/11THYR.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 - The government sharply changed its stance on drug treatment to prevent thyroid cancer after a nuclear emergency, saying children should be treated at far lower anticipated levels of radiation exposure than previously recommended.

The Food and Drug Administration issued new treatment guidelines today, emphasizing that the benefits of immediate therapy with the drug potassium iodide, also known by its chemical symbol, KI, far outweigh the rare instances of dangerous side effects, particularly in children, who are more likely than adults to develop thyroid cancer from radiation exposure. The drug, which is available over the counter, works by preventing the thyroid gland from taking up radioactive iodine, which can cause cancer.

The agency has been working on the new guidelines since long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, but those attacks have added an urgency. Officials at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission say they have been waiting for the F.D.A. to finish its work so they can begin negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to manufacture the drug in large quantities, which the commission plans to offer free to states that want to include its use in their emergency plans.

The drug agency stressed that the biggest benefit came from treatment with the drug as soon as an alert is issued, ideally before exposure occurs, a finding that sharply challenged the workability of existing emergency response plans in communities with nuclear plants. Many existing plans provide potassium iodide only for emergency workers.

Implicit in this conclusion was the idea that the drug, to be most effective, should be in communities near power plants, even in household medicine cabinets, so it can be given at the first warning of impending exposure.

"Although we don't make any specific recommendations in this regard, the implication from such a fact is that it needs to be available so they can take it when it's called for,"said Dr. David G. Orloff, the director of the F.D.A. division of metabolic and endocrine drug products.

"Any systems for ensuring availability of KI to the public should recognize the critical importance of KI administration in advance of exposure," the agency said in the new document, which it posted on its Web site today (fda.gov/cder/guidance/ 4825fnl.htm).

Early action is critical because it takes three to four hours for a dose of potassium iodide to affect the thyroid, flushing it with harmless iodine and preventing the absorption of radioactive iodine, officials said.

Public health experts have talked for years about how to make sure the drug is available promptly. Dr. Jacob Robbins, a scientist emeritus at the National Institutes of Health, said in an interview, "To me, the smart thing to do would be to have it in homes, in blister packs with adhesive backs."

The core conclusion in the document, which is the first revision of the agency's stance on the drug since 1982, was that KI should be available for immediate use to children in harm's way after a radiation release, because the great benefits of prompt treatment decline rapidly as treatment is delayed.

The agency sharply lowered the exposure threshold at which children should be given the drug and replaced two recommended dosages - one for infants under a year old, and one for everyone else - with a list of dosages tailored to age and weight.

It also sharply raised the level of radioactive exposure at which adults over 40 should take the drug, saying that some side effects were more likely in adults and the cancer-preventing benefits less likely.

The new recommendations repeat earlier warnings that people with iodine allergies, which they may recognize as allergies to shellfish, people with kidney failure and people on certain blood-pressure drugs like ACE inhibitors should not take KI. Such people are at risk for excessively high blood levels of potassium, which can cause heart problems.

Historically in the United States, people most at risk for thyroid cancer have included those who had radiation to the head, neck or chest. In the past, radiation was used to treat conditions like acne and enlarged tonsils in young people, a practice that was abandoned.

Since the Three Mile Island accident of March 1979, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has reversed itself several times on whether states should have the drug on hand, but in the last two years it has set aside $800,000 to buy stockpiles.

New York State stockpiles KI for emergency workers, like fire and police personnel, and current plans call for administering the pills when the anticipated exposure is 25 rem (a measure of absorbed radiation). A spokesman for the state Emergency Management Office, Donald Maurer, said today that "when the F.D.A. comes out with something like this, we have to take a look at it."

Radioactive iodine is one of many products created when reactors split uranium to make heat. Released from a reactor, it can be absorbed directly by people, where it is naturally concentrated by the body in the thyroid, just as normal iodine is. Or it can settle on grass, where it is eaten by cows and concentrated in their milk; once the milk is drunk, the iodine again goes to the thyroid, where it gives off its radiation over the next few weeks. KI stops that by flooding the thyroid with normal iodine, leaving no room for any more.

-------

DOE Amends Rules on Nevada Nuclear Waste Site

By Eric Pianin and Peter Behr
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 11, 2001; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22799-2001Dec10?language=printer

The Department of Energy has changed the rules for a proposed permanent nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada so that the government no longer must prove that the site's underground rock formations would prevent radioactive contamination of the environment.

The new rule, which takes effect Friday, permits energy officials to rely on a combination of advanced storage containers and natural geological barriers to satisfy new, rigorous environmental standards for protecting ground water and the atmosphere from the release of dangerous levels of radioactive material.

DOE officials said yesterday they were justified in making the changes based on an extensive review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, but Nevada's governor and attorney general accused the DOE of lowering standards to win approval for the long-debated Yucca Mountain storage site. They said they plan to challenge the new rules in court.

"The Department should not be evaluating the suitability of the site based on rules that were transparently reconfigured at the eleventh hour because DOE could not meet the statutory demands of Congress nor the scientific recommendations" of other agencies and groups, said Gov. Kenny Guinn (R) and state Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa in a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.

They and other critics argued that under the changed rules, downgrading the importance of the geological barriers, the nuclear waste repository could be placed just as easily in the basement of DOE headquarters in Washington as in the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

In ordering the DOE to begin studying Yucca Mountain as the repository site in 1982, Congress specified that decision should be based primarily on geological characteristics that would ensure that the nuclear waste would be safely isolated for thousands of years. But Congress authorized a subsequent review, and as the government has moved closer to a final decision, significant problems have turned up with the site.

These include earthquake fault lines and areas of loose rock that, instead of acting as a barrier, could actually channel water and spread radioactive material.

Now the DOE is considering an approach that would store the nuclear waste in pellet form in cylindrical casks in a series of parallel tunnels, in the hope that the combination of engineered and geological barriers would provide adequate protection from pollution and meet tough standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency last summer.

"We are basing the decision both on the science of the mountain and the engineered barriers that would be put in place," said Joe Davis, a spokesman for the Energy Department. "We believe we have to rely on both."

But Victor Gilinsky, a Cal Tech-trained physicist and a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, charged yesterday that the DOE's rule, published Nov. 14, "is a radical and imprudent departure from the current rule . . . and is inconsistent with Congress's mandate for safe and environmentally acceptable disposal of high-level radioactive waste."

In an affidavit he prepared for the state of Nevada, Gilinsky noted that the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act required that detailed geologic considerations "shall be primary criteria for the selection of sites" and that the law imposed separate performance requirements for each of the natural barriers.

"The new rule lumps all of the natural and engineered barriers together and applies only one overall requirement -- that the computer model estimates of the future radiation dose to a population some distance away from the Yucca Mountain site meet the licensing standard for 10,000 years," he said.

Gilinsky's affidavit and the threat of legal action by Nevada officials are the latest in a series of challenges to the administration's aggressive schedule, which calls for Abraham to recommend to President Bush this winter whether to formally designate Yucca Mountain as the site for 78,000 tons of radioactive waste. Abraham is certain to urge Bush to move ahead with the project, according to administration and industry sources.

Industry officials are pressing the administration to move ahead to remove spent reactor fuel from the nation's 103 nuclear power plants because of the vulnerability of temporary storage facilities to terrorist attacks. Administration officials have predicted that the site could be opened as soon as 2010.

But the General Accounting Office, in a recently completed draft report, urged the administration to indefinitely postpone a decision because of uncertainties over the planning, design and cost estimates. The project is widely unpopular in Nevada and has drawn strong opposition from lawmakers and state officials, including Senate Majority Whip Harry M. Reid (D) and Guinn.

Some anti-nuclear activists argue that the DOE's new rule would permit Abraham to approve the Yucca Mountain site on the grounds that improved storage systems offset uncertainties about the site's geological sturdiness over the thousands of years that fuel would be in storage.

-------- asia

Group: Taiwan Researching Missile

By WILLIAM FOREMAN
Associated Press Writer
DECEMBER 11, 2001
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/main.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7GB1K400

TAIPEI, Taiwan (AP) - Taiwan is actively researching a ballistic missile that could strike China, a U.S. think tank says, a weapon that could radically alter the military balance in one of the world's most dangerous hotspots.

The medium-range missile could hit targets 620 miles away, according to the new RAND Corp. study, ``Taiwan's Foreign and Defense Policies: Features and Determinants.''

The Rand study - written by respected researchers Michael Swaine and James Mulvenon - was based on ``interviews in Taiwan'' with unidentified sources.

A Taiwanese Defense Ministry official who spoke on condition he not be named said Tuesday that the island was not researching such a weapon.

The RAND report said the United States would likely detect any testing or deployment of the missiles and could pressure Taiwan to stop the program.

``Policy-makers in Washington should be alerted to the possibility that the program is actually a 'card' to be dealt away in exchange for specific weapons systems or enhanced defense commitments,'' the study says.

Five decades ago, China and Taiwan split amid civil war, and Beijing has repeatedly threatened to attack if the self-ruled island - 100 miles off China's southeast coast - refuses eventual unification or seeks formal independence.

The Taiwanese military has long focused on maintaining a modern arsenal of defensive arms to stop a Chinese invasion. The island has shunned offensive weapons - such as medium-range missiles.

But some defense experts have argued that Taiwan should develop medium-range missiles as a deterrent to a first strike by China. The missiles could also help stop a second or third wave of attacks by Chinese forces.

However, other analysts have argued that if Taiwan was armed with offensive weapons, America and other nations would be less likely to assist the island in a war with China. By maintaining a purely defensive posture, Taiwan would be better able to win the sympathy of other countries if attacked by China, they say.

-------- depleted uranium

Suicide bombers trying chemical devices - officials

Reuters:
11/12/2001
http://www.planetark.org/avantgo/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=13665

JERUSALEM - Israel's Health Ministry said on the weekend that hazardous materials were found in a device detonated by Palestinian suicide bombers last week and officials believe it was a crude attempt at a chemical weapon.

Boaz Lev, the ministry's director-general, told Reuters there were "traces of a variety of chemical compounds" found in the remains of a bomb tested in a police laboratory after last week's attacks in a Jerusalem cafe district.

"Whether this was deliberate or not, we don't know," Lev said.

"A variety of materials can be used. Your imagination can lead you to anything you want and unfortunately they (the bombers) have an imagination."

An Israeli official confirmed one of the bombs used in the Jerusalem attacks had been "immersed in some kind of chemical such as pesticide".

The official said Palestinian bombers had apparently recently experimented with their explosive devices in order "to maximise the effect" by spreading hazardous materials in the vicinity of the blast.

A police spokesman said: "Since 1994 we have known of a couple of incidents in which amounts of pesticides were found in the bombs." But he added it was only "very few cases".

Eleven people were killed in a double suicide bombing and a car bomb in central Jerusalem last Saturday in attacks claimed by the militant Islamic group Hamas in revenge for Israel's killing of Hamas's military leader.

Giving weight to the reports of an attempted chemical attack, hazardous materials experts were sent to the scene of a suicide bombing near Haifa on the weekend, in which at least eight people were hurt.

An Israeli security source said because chemical traces were found in the Jerusalem bombing, hazardous materials crews would be sent to all bomb blasts in future to check whether the devices contained chemicals.

Lev said, however, that officials were not overly concerned about the possibility of non-conventional bombs.

He said the bombs generally used by Palestinian attackers - which are packed with nails - were already deadly enough when detonated in crowded places.

Scores of people have been killed in suicide bombings in the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation that erupted in September 2000 after peace talks froze.

Over the past year, Arafat has repeatedly accused Israel of using depleted uranium weapons and poison gas against Palestinians. Israel has denied the allegations.

-------- terrorism

Livermore scientists track airborne toxins
PROGRAM ALLOWS EXPERTS TO WARN PEOPLE AND MOVE THEM OUT OF HARM'S WAY

BY GLENNDA CHUI
Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2001
San Jose Mercury News
http://www0.mercurycenter.com/premium/scitech/docs/center11.htm

In a tranquil gray room in Livermore, computers hum, Christmas lights twinkle and scientists wait for the next deadly thing that could waft through the air -- whether radiation, volcanic ash, toxic chemicals or germs spread by terrorists.

If the wind can blow it around, the experts here at the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center can track it, alerting people to move out of harm's way.

During the past two decades, this little-known center at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has predicted the paths of radioactive releases from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident, ash from the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines and towering clouds of black smoke from mountains of old tires that caught fire in the Central Valley.

The Sept. 11 attacks have brought a new urgency to this work, said Jim Ellis, who directs the center: ``There's much more interest in it now.''

When the center opened, its primary job was to forecast the routes of radioactive releases, whether from power plant accidents or nuclear attack. Its first challenge was delivered two days before it was formally scheduled to open, with the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. ``We worked that around the clock for two weeks,'' Ellis said.

Today, NARAC is electronically connected to more than 20 facilities run by the departments of Energy and Defense, and it assists agencies such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the event of an emergency.

There are hundreds of other computer models doing similar work, run by private companies, air pollution districts and other agencies, Ellis said.

But none is as sophisticated as the one in Livermore, which takes in detailed weather data from around the globe and feeds them into a three-dimensional model that portrays exactly how the layers of wind are blowing -- and how the winds will shift, if conditions change.

It makes adjustments for factors such as mountains that block wind to canyons that channel it. And it understands that wind is not a monolithic force, but consists of as many as 30 layers. Some blow along the surface of the ground; others are 15 miles up, where powerful rivers of air known as jet streams rush along at hundreds of miles per hour and powerfully influence weather.

The sheer number of available computer models could lead to confusion in the event of a major terrorist attack, because they might predict different paths for a deadly emission, Ellis said.

So, he said, there is now talk of creating a single, national computer model whose forecasts would be considered definitive. In the event of a release, workers in the field would use laptop computers to interact with the model, feeding it data and drawing on the expertise of people back at the lab to create the most accurate picture of what is happening in a disaster.

Model for germs

NARAC has also been developing a model to predict, in the event of a bioterrorist attack, how germs that have settled to the ground might be kicked up and re-suspended, exposing people to a second round of danger.

Because so many factors can influence the movement of microbes, such forecasting is difficult, Ellis said. Nevertheless, he anticipates that the new model will be ready to go by the end of next year, adding a layer of sophistication to the center's forecasts.

The center has roots in the 1960s, when scientists in the Department of Energy's now-defunct Plowshare Program were trying to figure out if nuclear explosions could be harnessed for peaceful projects -- say, excavating canals and harbors. This would have required predicting the path of the radioactive material lofted into the atmosphere by the explosion, said physicist Ronald L. Baskett, operations leader of the center, who wrote an account of its history two years ago in the lab newsletter.

The Plowshare Program never got off the ground. But the idea of tracking atmospheric releases seemed like a good one. So in the 1970s, scientists lobbied for the creation of a center for tracking all kinds of plumes.

Tracking plumes

NARAC has now been put on alert or responded to more than 160 incidents. It predicted the path of smoke from hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells and fields that had been torched by Iraqi troops during the Persian Gulf War. It forecast the spread of radioactive plumes from nuclear weapons tests conducted by China. And it stood by as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched spacecrafts to Jupiter and Saturn with radioactive generators on board, in the event that radiation particles were released during a launch accident.

Here in the Bay Area, the center has simulated two types of terrorist attacks. One involved a truck explosion at the Bay Bridge toll plaza that released chlorine gas; the other, a release of sarin nerve gas from an airplane flying over San Francisco Bay.

For each of these scenarios, NARAC predicted the path of the plume and within minutes notified the Navy's command ship USS Coronado, so the ship's medical staff would know where to deploy emergency workers.

The center was quiet last week, as it is most of the time. Computer monitors were draped with festive holiday lights and tinsel. Two staff members stared at the screens and tapped at their keyboards.

Even in times of calm, Ellis said, the staff keeps busy -- planning responses to future disasters or analyzing past ones.

``We're like the fire department here -- polishing our trucks, ready to go for when it happens,'' he said. ``Fortunately, it doesn't happen often.''

Contact Glennda Chui at gchui@sjmercury.com or (408) 920-5453.

-------- treaties

Moscow, U.S. close to deal on nuclear-arms cuts

December 11, 2001
By Tom Raum
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011211-8470536.htm

MOSCOW - Russia and the United States are near agreement on drastic cuts in long-range nuclear arsenals but remain at odds over a U.S. missile-defense shield, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said yesterday.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said the arms-reduction deal could be ready for the next summit between President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin, tentatively scheduled for next spring in Moscow.

But the disagreement over missile defense is so deep that Russia is bracing for a potential U.S. withdrawal from the landmark 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, Mr. Ivanov told a joint news conference with Mr. Powell at the Kremlin.

"The positions of the sides remain unchanged," Mr. Ivanov said.

Despite the missile-defense impasse, both diplomats were upbeat about prospects for wrapping up a deal to reduce nuclear warheads.

Mr. Powell said he was taking to Mr. Bush a Russian recommendation on arms cuts that responded to the American president's announcement last month that the United States would cut its nuclear arsenal by two-thirds, from just under 6,000 warheads now to between 1,700 and 2,200.

Mr. Powell, who also met with Mr. Putin during his Moscow stay, did not disclose specifics. But a senior State Department official, briefing reporters on Mr. Powell's plane, said the Russian recommendation was in the same ballpark as the Bush announcement.

Mr. Ivanov said Russia prefers to see the reductions presented in treaty form. Mr. Bush has opposed such a move in the past, suggesting that the reductions should be put on less formal grounds.

But Mr. Powell told reporters that both countries "recognize the need for a codification of the new levels we're going to. It might be in the form of a treaty, or some other way of codifying it."

"With respect to what that agreed lower level will be, we're very close," Mr. Powell said.

Mr. Powell later flew to Germany and met with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. They discussed the makeup of the international peacekeeping force that would go into Afghanistan. Germany, Britain and Turkey all have offered to take major roles in the force.

At a joint news conference with Mr. Powell in Berlin, Mr. Schroeder praised the arms-control progress by the United States and Russia. "If this can be nailed down in the form of a treaty, better still," the German leader said.

In Moscow, Mr. Powell, Mr. Putin and Mr. Ivanov discussed the new violence in the Middle East, the peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, trade and the conflict in Chechnya. But few issues seem as difficult for the two countries to resolve as the dispute over Mr. Bush's plan for a missile-defense shield.

Russia does not want to disturb the ABM Treaty, the Cold War-era pact that bars missile-defense systems like the one the Bush administration wants to build. Mr. Ivanov said Russia views the ABM pact as "the key element of the entire treaty system of providing strategic stability in the world."

----

U.S. Seeks Deal on Arms Cuts by Summer
Pact With Russia Could Be Reached Without an Agreement on Missile Defense

By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 11, 2001; Page A28
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22585-2001Dec10?language=printer

BERLIN, Dec. 10 -- The Bush administration is aiming to reach a written agreement with Russia over deep cuts in nuclear weapons by the middle of next year even if the two sides fail to close a deal allowing the United States to proceed with testing of a missile defense system, U.S. officials said today.

After a meeting in Moscow between Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Russian President Vladimir Putin, senior officials from both countries reported making progress toward an agreement reducing each side's long-range nuclear warheads by about two-thirds. They said the two governments intend to sign an agreement when President Bush visits the Russian capital, no later than next summer. No date for that trip has been set.

Though Russia did not announce precisely how far it was willing to cut into its nuclear stockpile, U.S. officials said they received a clear idea of Moscow's intended level during the private meetings today.

"With respect to what the agreed new lower level will be, we're very close," Powell said when asked by reporters whether he had been informed of the limit Russia would propose. "It's a matter of me reporting back to President Bush with what I heard today before being able to say anything more and make it public."

Putin told Bush last month that Moscow intended to reduce its arsenal by about two-thirds from its current level of about 6,000 warheads. Bush has already said he would cut the U.S. stockpile, with no more than 6,000 warheads, to between 1,700 and 2,200.

A deal over slashing offensive nuclear stockpiles would mark the first major strategic weapons agreement between Washington and Moscow in years. But it could come without comparable progress on Bush's top strategic priority: an understanding with Russia that would allow the United States to proceed with the testing of a missile defense system, which is now limited by the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972.

A senior State Department official said today that the United States would be willing to reach a written agreement on reducing the nuclear arsenals during Bush's visit to Moscow even if the two sides have not reached an understanding on missile defense. The U.S. willingness to put the agreement into writing comes in response to Russian requests.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, speaking at a news conference with Powell after the Kremlin meeting, said the ABM issue had been taken up at the talks "but the positions of the sides remain unchanged." The Russians have been more eager to reach an agreement on cutting offensive weapons than on missile defense.

The Bush administration has argued that the ABM Treaty should be scrapped so the United States can build a missile shield capable of defending against attacks from such "states of concern" as Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Russia, however, says the treaty remains essential to maintaining stability between the nuclear powers.

Powell acknowledged there were still "disagreements with regard to missile defense and the ABM Treaty and we will continue working on the whole strategic framework, both offense and defense, in the months ahead."

Russia has sought mutual reductions in both countries' nuclear stockpiles in large part because Moscow can no longer afford to maintain its existing arsenal. The Bush administration has also welcomed cuts in the number of warheads. Powell and Ivanov today spoke of the need for a written agreement on the proposed reductions and measures.

"The main thing is that there is an understanding expressed by both sides that these reductions need to be embodied in some form of treaty formalization, and during the negotiations we will decide what form it takes," Ivanov said.

----

U.S. and Russia to Complete Talks on an Arms Control Pact

December 11, 2001
By PATRICK E. TYLER
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/11/international/europe/11DIPL.html?searchpv=nytToday

MOSCOW, Dec. 10 - Russia and the United States said today that they had agreed to complete negotiations on a new strategic arms control accord that could codify a significant reduction in offensive weapons - to about 2,000 weapons each - even if they do not reach agreement on missile defenses.

After meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said for the first time that the accord might take the form of a treaty, something the Bush administration has resisted in its quest to act unilaterally in structuring the American nuclear arsenal for the future.

Secretary Powell and the Russian foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, said at a Kremlin news conference that they were under instructions from both presidents to prepare the arms control accord and have it ready for signing when President Bush makes a state visit to Moscow in the middle of next year.

Both Secretary Powell and Mr. Ivanov agreed, by contrast, that they had made no progress on the thorny issue of missile defenses as the United States continues to press forward with plans for a series of tests next spring that would violate the terms of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty.

The envisioned accord on reducing nuclear arms would include significant provisions borrowed from the Start I and Start II treaties to ensure that each side was informed of the capabilities and deployments of the other side's nuclear forces, Secretary Powell said.

"Both of our presidents have charged us to finish this work as soon as possible," Secretary Powell said, "and find ways to formalize this agreement at lower levels of strategic offensive numbers and to try to get the work concluded in time" for a Moscow summit.

"Both of us recognize the need for there to be a codification of the new levels, and we will be discussing the form that will take," he added. "It might be the form of a treaty or some other way of codifying it."

Mr. Ivanov echoed those remarks, saying, "There is an understanding expressed by both sides that these reductions need to be imported into some treaty formulation and here in the negotiations, we will decide which form it will take."

Last month, after Mr. Putin and Mr. Bush met in Crawford, Tex., Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said pointedly that while the Russians had spoken of the need for a treaty, the American side had not.

Secretary Powell's remarks today suggested that a treaty might be necessary if any new accord that set limits on the size of the nuclear arsenals was to extend beyond the term in office of both leaders.

The announcement today appeared to affirm that Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin have moved well beyond the testy oratory that characterized the opening months of the Bush administration.

Moreover, Mr. Bush appears to have modified his initial approach to arms control after developing a personal relationship with Mr. Putin, a relationship that has been bolstered by cooperation with the Russians after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In the meetings in Moscow today, Secretary Powell said he expected to receive a detailed description from the Russians of strategic arms reductions Moscow was willing to make. The United States has said it will reduce its arsenal of about 6,000 warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200.

Mr. Putin has spoken of his desire to go as low as 1,500 warheads, which would save Moscow from having to make major investments in new strategic missiles to replace the Soviet-era multiple-warhead rockets reaching the end of their service life in the next decade.

A State Department official said that the Russians did not provide a numerical breakdown on how they planned to reduce their offensive nuclear forces today.

"Maybe they are still editing the draft," the official said, adding, "It is up to them to announce it when they want to but I don't think we have any concern about that." The administration knows, he said, that the numbers are going to be in the ballpark of the American reductions.

A State Department official traveling with Secretary Powell said the agreement on reductions in offensive weapons could go forward despite the deadlock over missile defenses.

The official indicated that Russian officials wanted the United States to engage in detailed discussions on each level of missile-defense testing, something that Washington fears would amount to giving Moscow a veto over tests if the Kremlin deems a particular test would violate, even nullify, the ABM treaty.

"We have always been willing to explain our testing program," the State Department official said, adding, "That is different than giving them approval for any particular test."

Mr. Ivanov said today that Russia "has never put any prerequisites or conditions with regard to the ABM treaty," which he said still represented "the key element of the whole treaty system of providing strategic stability in the world."

The Russian view that the ABM treaty is the cornerstone of strategic arms control is largely shared by Washington's allies in Europe.

While in Moscow, Secretary Powell also met with leaders of the Russian Parliament, whose members wanted to know whether the intensification of Russian-American relations during the antiterror campaign in Afghanistan would disappear after the United States achieved its objectives.

An American official who was present quoted Secretary Powell as replying that "what happened on Sept. 11 didn't start something, it accelerated" an improvement in relations that "President Bush wants to make permanent."

In his talks with Mr. Ivanov, Secretary Powell raised the sensitive issue of Russia's arms sales to Iran and Moscow's assistance in building the first nuclear power station in Iran at Bushehr.

The State Department official said Washington acknowledged Russia's right to make certain conventional arms sales to Iran, but was concerned about sales of sophisticated weaponry and nuclear assistance that might advance Iran's secret efforts to build nuclear weapons.

"Our problem is that the legitimate nuclear programs have been used as a cover for a whole lot of other transfers and training that we think is dangerous in a country that we see is trying to develop nuclear weapons," the American official said.

--------

Bush About to Announce Withdrawal From ABM Treaty

December 11, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-Missile-Defense.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush will soon give Russia notice that the United States is withdrawing from the 1972 nuclear treaty that bans testing of missile defense systems, U.S. government officials said Tuesday.

He will announce the decision in the next several days, effectively invoking a clause in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that requires the United States and Russia to give six months' notice before abandoning the pact.

Initial White House plans called for announcing the decision Thursday, but officials cautioned that date could change. The four government officials spoke on condition of anonymity.

With the decision, Bush takes the first step toward fulfilling a campaign pledge to develop and deploy an anti-missile system that he says will protect the United States and its allies, including Russia, from missiles fired by rogue nations.

Bush has said the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks heightened the need for such a system.

Russia and many U.S. allies have warned Bush that withdrawing from the pact might trigger a nuclear arms race. Critics of the plan also question whether an effective system can be developed without enormous expense.

Conservative Republicans have urged Bush to scuttle the ABM, rejecting proposals to amend the pact or find loopholes allowing for tests.

The president defended his push for a missile shield during a national security speech Tuesday at the Citadel in South Carolina.

``Last week we conducted another promising test of our missile defense technology,'' Bush said. ``For the good of peace, we're moving forward with an active program to determine what works and what does not work. In order to do so, we must move beyond the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a treaty that was written in a different era, for a different enemy.''

``America and our allies must not be bound to the past. We must be able to build the defenses we need against the enemies of the 21st century,'' he said.

According to Bush administration officials, Russian President Vladimir Putin had assured Bush during their October talks in Washington and Crawford, Texas, that U.S.-Russian relations would not suffer even if Bush pulled out of the treaty.

They said Bush's decision reflects a desire by the Pentagon to conduct tests in the next six months or so that would violate the ABM.

The decision came as Secretary of State Colin Powell, in Moscow, said Russia and the United States are near agreement on drastic cuts in long-range nuclear arsenals, but remain at odds over a U.S. missile defense.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said the arms-reduction deal could be ready for the next summit between Bush and Putin, tentatively scheduled for Moscow next spring.

But the U.S.-Russian disagreement over missile defense is so deep that Russia is bracing for the possibility of a U.S. withdrawal from the landmark 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, Ivanov told a joint news conference with Powell at the Kremlin.

``The positions of the sides remain unchanged,'' Ivanov said.

Despite the missile-defense impasse, both Ivanov and Powell were upbeat about prospects for wrapping up a deal to reduce nuclear warheads.

Powell said he was taking Bush a Russian recommendation on arms cuts that responds to Bush's announcement last month that the United States would cut its nuclear arsenal over the next decade by two-thirds, from just under 6,000 warheads now to between 1,700 and 2,200.

Powell did not disclose specifics. But a senior State Department official, briefing reporters on Powell's plane, said the Russian recommendation was in the same ball park as the Bush announcement.

Ivanov said Russia prefers to see the reductions presented in treaty form. Bush has opposed such a move in the past, suggesting that the reductions should be put on less formal grounds.

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

New US uranium enrichment plant would need NRC okay

Story by Chris Baltimore
REUTERS USA:
December 11, 2001
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/13648/story.htm

WASHINGTON - The U.S. subsidiary of European consortium Urenco Ltd. may file a preliminary application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in early 2002 to build a new $1 billion U.S. uranium enrichment facility, a company executive said yesterday.

The plant, estimated to cost $1 billion, would be only the second to operate in the United States, converting raw uranium to fuel used by nuclear power plants to make electricity. Urenco's plan would dovetail with the Bush administration's national energy policy for the U.S. to build more nuclear power plants.

If built, the Urenco plant would also stir competition in the U.S. enrichment market now dominated by USEC Inc. subsidiary United States Enrichment Corp. USEC's Paducah, Kentucky, plant supplies up to 70 percent of U.S. material.

Paducah has boilerplate capacity of about 11 million units of uranium annually - enough to power about 109 nuclear plants for a year. But yearly production often comes in below that figure, USEC said.

"We don't have domestic production capacity to meet all U.S. demand," said Charles Yulish, a USEC spokesman. "This is a competitive market."

It takes about 100,000 units to power typical 1,000 megawatt nuke plant for a year, according to the USEC website. There are 103 active U.S. nuclear plants, and a megawatt powers about 1,000 homes. Nuclear plants produce about 20 percent of all U.S. electricity.

Preliminary plans call for Urenco's plant, which has no designated site, to produce about 3 million units of uranium each year, said Peter Lenny, president of Urenco Inc., the U.S. arm of the British, Dutch and German consortium.

"This is in the very preliminary stage," Lenny said in a Reuters interview. "We are very optimistic that these applications and steps will be taken."

Urenco would partner with Duke Energy Corp. , Exelon Corp. and possible other firms to build the plant, he said.

Lenny, along with Urenco Ltd. Chief Executive Klaus Messer and executives from Exelon, met with NRC officials last week to discuss the approval process, Lenny said.

After an internal review, Urenco could make a preliminary filing with NRC in early 2002, with a site-specific application later in the year, he said. The plant could be operational within the next five years, he said.

NRC approval would likely take several years, an agency spokeswoman said. "It would take roughly three years from the date of the application to the date of the decision on whether or not to issue a license," NRC spokeswoman Sue Gagner said.

NRC's review would focus on safety and environmental impact issues rather than market competition, she said.

FIRMS SEE BENEFIT OF COMPETITION

Duke said it will support the project because it will lead to more competitive suppliers.

"We do feel very strongly ... the need for (uranium enrichment) competition in the U.S.," said Tom Shiel, a Duke spokesman. Duke operates three nuclear plants with seven total reactor units that generate about 7,000 megawatts of electricity.

On Oct. 25, Duke and Exelon executives sent a letter to President George W. Bush stating that a group of U.S. firms is "actively seeking to deploy proven and competitive enrichment technology in the U.S."

USEC has brought anti-dumping charges against Urenco, charging the firm of flooding U.S. markets to suppress prices. The U.S. Department of Commerce could complete its findings on the case on Friday, USEC said.

The same Urenco consortium in 1998 shelved plans to build an enrichment plant in Louisiana because the NRC delayed its approval.

"It took seven years to get through the process and by that time conditions had changed dramatically," Lenny said.

Urenco does not expect a repeat of its earlier problem, Lenny said, because the NRC has a more progressive attitude toward site permitting.

The firm is considering all potential sites, but would prefer to locate the plant on an existing nuclear site, such as the ones in Kentucky and Ohio, he said.

SWORDS TO PLOWSHARES

USEC is the sole executive agent the U.S. government allows to purchase highly enriched uranium from dismantled Russian missiles in a 1993 swords-to-plowshares deal. USEC convert the uranium to low-power fuel and sells it to nuke plants.

USEC has bought about $2 billion worth of Russian weapons-grade uranium, about 5,481 warheads, according to USEC congressional testimony.

USEC's Paducah facility uses gaseous diffusion to boost the radioactive concentration of naturally occurring uranium to 5 percent. It changes uranium hexaflouride into U-235, which powers nuclear reactors.

NRC currently regulates Paducah, USEC said.

Four firms currently control the worldwide market for enriched uranium - USEC, Urenco, along with French-based Eurodif-Cogema and Russian-based Tenex.

(additional reporting by Tom Doggett).

----

Nuclear Industry Faces Jitters

December 11, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Jitters.html?searchpv=aponline

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) -- Diana Sidebotham attended her first public hearing as a critic of nuclear power when the Vermont Yankee plant's license application was pending in 1971.

Some 30 years and scores of such forums later, Sidebotham went to yet another one last week at a Brattleboro high school and encountered the biggest crowd she had ever seen at such an event -- more than 500 people.

Worries about nuclear power -- in particular, fears of a terrorist attack on a plant -- have taken on new urgency since Sept. 11.

``Now that a major disaster has occurred, people are beginning to understand that we are vulnerable,'' Sidebotham said.

The new fear is that terrorists will crash a jetliner into a nuclear plant, scattering radiation in a Chernobyl-like disaster.

Around the country since Sept. 11:

-- The Federal Aviation Administration ordered no-fly zones around the nation's nuclear plants for two weeks in October. When a student pilot flew a small plane into airspace near a former nuclear plant in Colorado, two F-16s were scrambled and escorted the aircraft to a landing.

-- National Guardsmen were posted in recent weeks at nuclear plants in several states, and many installations have added private security guards.

-- Governors are clamoring for the federal government to open a long-delayed high-level waste-disposal site and take spent fuel now stored in pools considered more vulnerable to attacks than the reactors themselves.

-- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is co-sponsoring legislation that would make nuclear plant security a federal responsibility.

-- A panel that advises Connecticut Gov. John G. Rowland recommended the nation consider arming nuclear plants with air defense systems.

-- Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, a doctor, reversed his earlier position and said he wants the state to stockpile potassium iodide, a drug that can protect against one form of radiation.

Defenders of nuclear power have given assurances about security at the nation's 103 reactors.

``There has been no credible threat against any nuclear facility in this country, and if there was, we would be equipped to deal with it,'' Nils Diaz, a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said last month in Florida.

A 1982 Argonne National Laboratory study said it would be possible for a large jetliner to breach a reactor containment vessel and spread radiation. There are also fears that a jet hitting the open-topped pools of highly radioactive waste could also cause a major release of radiation.

At last week's meeting in Brattleboro, Hubert Miller, an NRC regional administrator, said nuclear plants were not designed with an attack by a large passenger jet in mind. But he said the containment vessels that surround reactors are among the strongest buildings in the country.

He repeatedly told the crowd that security at Vermont Yankee is ``robust.''

Some in the audience were skeptical because just the week before, preliminary results were released from a drill Aug. 23 at Vermont Yankee in which the plant failed to repel a mock terrorist attack. Vermont Yankee received the lowest grade in the industry. Improvements have been made since then, officials assured the audience, but they would not give specifics.

In a measure of how jittery people are, a Brattleboro newspaper photographer was detained by Vernon police last month under a 1917 treason law for taking pictures of Vermont Yankee. Prosecutors declined to press charges.

The new wave of concern about nuclear power comes just as the industry's fortunes appeared to be improving. No new U.S. nuclear plant has been ordered since before the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979.

But in the couple of years before Sept. 11, several utilities had won license extensions. Nuclear plants that are being sold in the newly deregulated electric market are fetching higher prices. And nuclear power has some supporters in the Bush administration, chief among them Vice President Dick Cheney.

However, the call for a new round of nuclear plant construction has been muted since the September attacks. Instead, the discussion has focused on how to protect reactors and how effective emergency evacuation plans would be in a disaster.

``In Vermont and throughout this country now there is very increased concern about the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to terrorist attacks and the huge consequences that an attack could bring forth,'' said Rep. Bernard Sanders, a Vermont independent who organized the Brattleboro meeting and was amazed by the turnout in the town of 12,000.

Sidebotham recalled that when she and other nuclear opponents went before the NRC's predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, in 1971, ``Concerns were raised about the possibility of sabotage at a nuclear plant. It was very much pooh-poohed.''

But Sept. 11, Sidebotham said, ``made the incredible credible.''

Nuclear Regulatory Commission: www.nrc.gov Nuclear Energy Institute: www.nei.org Nuclear Control Institute: www.nci.org

-------- colorado

Critics: Nuclear Cleanup Falls Short

December 11, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Rocky-Flats-Cleanup.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government is spending $7 billion to decontaminate a former nuclear weapons plant in Colorado and turn it into a wildlife refuge. But critics said Tuesday that the cleanup will still leave the soil too polluted.

Legislation before Congress would officially designate the Rocky Flats site, 15 miles northwest of Denver, a wildlife refuge after cleanup is completed.

Rocky Flats is contaminated with tons of plutonium and other radioactive materials, in buildings and in the soil, after years of weapons work. The Energy Department and its civilian contractor will decide early next year how clean the site should become.

A report by the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research contends that the residual contamination levels being considered by the government are 40 times greater than what would be allowed if the land is used for something other than a wildlife refuge. ``We have no control over what will happen at Rocky Flats in the future,'' said LeRoy Moore, a member of a citizens' group in Boulder, Colo., that is monitoring the cleanup. About 2.5 million people live within 50 miles of the facility.

While the site stretches across more than 6,000 acres, less than 200 acres are contaminated. While much of the soil will be trucked away, acres will remain contaminated.

The report by IEER, a research group long involved in nuclear watchdog activities, contends that designating the area a wildlife refuge will allow the cleanup to be less stringent.

``We don't oppose the designation of this site as a wildlife refuge as a short-term way to keep the public off the site,'' said Arjun Mahkijani, a nuclear physicist who heads the institute in Takoma Park, Md. But he said cleanup standards should take into account other likely uses of the land, including farming or residential development, where people are more likely to become exposed.

Plutonium and other radioisotopes that will be left over in the soil would be expected to remain dangerous for thousands of years, he said. After the cleanup, the report said, the soil should be left with no more than 10 pico-curies of radioactivity per gram of soil, far cleaner than what the Energy Department has been considering.

Jeremy Karpatkin, a spokesman for the Energy Department's Rocky Flats project office, said no decision has been made on the level of residual contamination. Meeting the level sought by Makhijani, though, ``would involve spending hundreds of millions of dollars unnecessarily for very little risk reduction to the public,'' he said, even taking into account various uses for the land.

Preliminary analysis from the department concludes that soil contamination could be as high as 490 pico-curies. It could still fall within acceptable risk levels of no more than one additional cancer per 10,000 individuals if the land becomes a wildlife refuge.

The maximum contamination allowed would fall to 173 pico-curies if the land became ``rural residential,'' according to the DOE analysis cited by Rocky Flats officials.

Whatever the final standard, ``We will provide a safe and effective cleanup of Rocky Flats,'' said Karpatkin. The government already has spent nearly $3 billion on the cleanup, and will spend another $4 billion over the next five years, he said.

Makhijani said the use of wildlife designations is a way to cut cleanup costs at Rocky Flats and, possibly, at other contaminated weapons sites in South Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho and Washington state.

``This is a foot in the door for relaxation of cleanup standards,'' he said.

-------- us nuc waste

Nevada Nuke Waste Site Challenged

December 11, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Yucca-Nuclear-Waste.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nevada officials will ask the federal courts to block a decision on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site, claiming the Energy Department has abandoned a congressional mandate that the site's natural geology must protect the public from radiation.

Instead, the Nevada officials say, the latest design for the waste burial ground, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, relies ``nearly 100 percent'' on engineered barriers to assure the waste's isolation.

The design amounts to ``a glorified waste package'' that could be deemed scientifically suitable ``even if sited on the shores of Lake Tahoe,'' Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, a Republican, wrote Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham.

The salvo is only the latest in the increasingly bitter confrontation between Nevada officials and the Bush administration over the proposed nuclear repository. It is supposed to hold thousands of tons of used reactor fuel now kept at nuclear power plants in 31 states. If given the go-ahead, it is scheduled to open in 2010.

Early next year Abraham is expected to recommend to President Bush that the site be approved, although department officials emphasized Tuesday that no decision has been made by Abraham so far.

Robert Loux, the Nevada governor's top adviser on the nuclear waste site, said in an interview that Nevada will file a lawsuit next week, possibly Monday, and ask the court to block Abraham from making a recommendation.

The Nevada lawsuit will argue that the Energy Department has failed to follow the legal requirement that the waste site rely almost exclusively on its natural geology to safeguard the waste, including radioisotopes that will remain highly radioactive for more than 10,000 years.

Instead, the state argues, the Energy Department is incorporating numerous engineered barriers to counter shortcomings in the site's geology.

``The notion that geological features must be the primary form of containment is ... explicitly required'' by the 1982 law that is the basis for developing a nuclear waste repository, Guinn wrote.

Energy Department officials dismissed the state's latest threat of legal action and strongly defended the use of both geology and engineered barriers.

``We're not relying specifically on engineered barriers to meet the regulations. We are looking at the scientific evidence of both the geological and engineered barriers together to determine the site's suitability,'' said DOE spokesman Joe Davis.

``One doesn't outweigh the other. They both work hand in hand,'' said Davis. The department contends that Congress in 1992 cleared the way for use of a ``total system performance'' approach to safeguarding the waste.

But Loux said that Congress also envisioned that the site's geology ``be the primary barrier'' to isolate the waste and that the approach by the Energy Department ``does not even come close to being in compliance the law.''

In recent years, the scientists and engineers working on the Yucca Mountain project have incorporated more manmade protective devices.

For example, after concern was raised about the possible effect of water moving through the rocks, stronger and more corrosion-resistant canisters were added to the design. ``Drip shields'' were added to keep water from hitting the waste once the containers begin to disintegrate hundreds of years from now.

An alternative design spreads out the canisters to deal the impact of high temperatures on surrounding rocks.

These improvements only add to the site's safeguards and do not detract from the fact that ``the mountain performs pretty well'' in protecting the waste, says Marvin Fertel, a vice president for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade association.

-------- us politics

Congress May Create Panel to Close Military Bases After '04 Elections

Tuesday, December 11, 2001
Washington Post
Helen Dewar
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22812-2001Dec10.html

Leaders from both parties on the House and Senate Armed Services committees are proposing a compromise to authorize a new round of military base closings but delay any action until after the 2004 presidential and congressional elections.

The proposal, designed to break an impasse that has been stalling the defense authorization bill for fiscal 2002, will go before House-Senate conferees over the next couple of days. Although such recommendations are normally approved, the issue is highly controversial, and the compromise's prospects are unclear.

The Pentagon earlier this year proposed creation of a commission to propose closing and realignment of obsolete bases starting in 2003. The Senate narrowly approved the proposal, but the House declined to act on it. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said he would recommend a veto of the defense bill if a base-closing commission is not included.

The Pentagon and its congressional allies argued that, with the closing of outmoded facilities, billions of dollars could be saved for more urgent military needs. Critics contended that, with the nation at war and in recession, base closings should wait.

----

Bush Talk to Mark Attacks on 11th
President to Focus on Role of Military, Fight Against New Threats

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 11, 2001; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22632-2001Dec10?language=printer

President Bush will mark the three-month anniversary of the terrorist attacks with an address today on the role of the military in a changed world, emphasizing the importance of meshing intelligence and technology to fight new threats.

In an effort to keep pressure on Iraq and North Korea, Bush plans to discuss the need to protect the nation from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The administration took the unusual step yesterday of e-mailing reporters the text of a national security speech Bush had delivered in 1999, when he was Texas governor and beginning his fight for the Republican presidential nomination.

That address, which focused on military transformation, included a warning about "the threat of biological, chemical and nuclear terrorism -- barbarism emboldened by technology," and noted that such weapons can be delivered "by everything from airplanes to cruise missiles, from shipping containers to suitcases."

To underscore the connection between the two speeches, Bush is returning to the site of the campaign appearance -- The Citadel, the formerly all-male military college in Charleston, S.C.

William J. Taylor, a retired Army colonel who is a professor at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, said Bush's campaign warning about terrorism could have been inspired by any of numerous widely available studies. "It was out there, so somebody briefed him and he said it and he was right," Taylor said. "Now, the people in the White House are trying to say, 'He told you so.' But you can't blame them for doing that. It is kind of uncanny."

Bush rarely discussed terrorism after the Citadel speech, and did not focus on the subject in presidential debates. But White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the Citadel speech, called "A Period of Consequences," contains "many of the seeds of the actions he has taken today to defend our country."

In that speech, Bush said, "Our first line of defense is a simple message: Every group or nation must know, if they sponsor such attacks, our response will be devastating."

In his address to the nation on the night of Sept. 11, he echoed that: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."

Bush will fly down to South Carolina after a solemn South Lawn ceremony at 8:46 a.m., the moment the first plane hit the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. The White House orchestrated a global commemoration, "The World Will Always Remember," with events planned in more than 86 countries. Electronic billboards in Times Square will flash patriotic messages, and the U.S. and Russian national anthems will be played on the International Space Station.

Last night, Bush and first lady Laura Bush held a Hanukkah reception, and lit a menorah in the White House residence for what he said was the first time in U.S. history. Bush noted that 2001 had been "a year of much sadness in the United States, and for our friends in Israel."

"America and Israel have been through much together," Bush said. "This year we have grieved together. But as we watch the lighting of this second candle of Hanukkah, we're reminded of the ancient story of Israel's courage and of the power of faith to make the darkness bright."


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

Crowds Scuffle for Food in Kabul
As Winter Cold Deepens, Survival Is Daily Struggle

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 11, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22749-2001Dec10.html

KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 10 -- A sea of people surged toward the barred steel fence, shouting and struggling and crushing each other in desperation. Soldiers beat them back with branches and belts, but their hunger was unstoppable.

In a schoolyard on the other side of the fence were three cargo trucks piled with sacks of wheat. The U.N. World Food Program has been distributing them this week to an estimated 1.3 million Kabul residents after determining that roughly two-thirds of the city's populace does not have enough to eat.

The crowds massing at 16 distribution sites today included war widows in patched veils and unemployed engineers in shabby tweed jackets. There were taxi drivers, teachers and former army officers, reduced to peddling soap or onions for a living.

"My husband was killed by a rocket last year. My children work loading carts, and sometimes I have to beg," said Zarim Gul, 35, who watched through a thick blue veil as her designated sack was heaved onto a wheelbarrow. "Usually we have only potato soup to eat, but we will try to make this last a month."

It has been almost a month since the Taliban Islamic militia abandoned Kabul, a change that has breathed life into the once-cowed capital and filled the air with once-banned music. But most inhabitants still face a grim daily struggle to survive, with the winter cold deepening by the day and little timely relief in sight.

U.N. relief officials have described Afghanistan as the worst humanitarian situation in the world, and Kabul, a city ruined by years of war and crammed with rural refugees from drought and civil conflict, is its most visible symbol.

Because the Taliban fired most public employees after capturing Kabul in 1996 and scared off the meager outside investment in the war-torn country, government agencies barely functioned and most industry shut down long ago. As a result, at least two-thirds of the city's 1.8 million inhabitants have no formal jobs. Virtually no buildings in Kabul have central heating, and many people spend much of their earnings on charcoal and firewood. Meat and milk are plentiful in the markets, but tens of thousands of people are forced to live on bread, potatoes and tea.

International relief agencies, which withdrew their foreign staffs in September and reduced their Kabul operations to a minimum during the U.S. bombing in October and November, are rushing to gear up again, hiring thousands of Afghan workers and trucking tons of food and supplies across the border from Pakistan.

Foreign donors have pledged millions of dollars in aid, and last week's agreement by Afghan political factions to set up an interim government and hold elections within 2 1/2 years should release a multibillion-dollar package of international relief and development assistance.

The United States' top relief official said today that fears of a countrywide famine appear to be lessening and that remote areas far from Kabul actually have begun to receive enough food aid to avert the catastrophe that was feared just a month or two ago.

"It was quite dire before, but since the end of November we've proved we can distribute from across the border into the villages and drive the death rates down and stabilize the situation," said Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. "As long as we get security in the remaining areas, we'll get hold of the situation."

The World Food Program is feeding 7 million Afghans nationwide, bringing more than 55,000 tons of food a month into the country. Two areas of continuing concern, Natsios said, are a displaced persons camp west of Mazar-e Sharif and a camp north of Herat for people fleeing drought. But earlier fears that many would starve this winter in mountainous central Afghanistan and the northern city of Kunduz have been lessened, he said, because food has been delivered to both places recently and more relief convoys are on the road.

But the immediate need here in Kabul is so dire and public frustration so high that relief officials cannot move fast enough to contain it. The World Food Program was unprepared for the aggressive mobs that have thronged the food distribution sites since Saturday, breaking down fences and attacking policemen and aid workers.

"We tried to control the situation, but it was impossible," said one relief official Sunday, after the distributions were suspended for a day to improve security. "People were beaten and punched. I saw two women staff members practically torn apart."

The distribution was more organized today, with soldiers guarding the walled school sites, but in several places unruly crowds broke through, and troops beat them with rifle butts and in one place resorted to shooting.

"There is more than enough wheat to go around, but people are hungry and they do not trust the system, so when they see an opportunity, they grab for it and a crush results," said Yusuf Hassan, a spokesman for U.N. agencies here.

In one schoolyard, a jobless engineer named Gul Mohammed, waited patiently for his sack of wheat. Like many Kabul residents, he has not held a real job since the Taliban seized the capital.

"For us, these five years have been a living death," said Mohammed, 43, a father of seven. "The rich people all left, and the rest of us became poor. Now the doors are opening a bit, and we are starting to revive day by day. But if the world doesn't help us, conditions could become worse than the Taliban."

Away from the distribution sites, many destitute Kabul residents are silently enduring the harsh winter in frigid homes. Many are refugees who fled from fighting in rural areas between Taliban forces and the opposition Northern Alliance, and another 10,000 have returned to Kabul this month after fleeing the bombing by the United States. About 1,500 such families have been given sacks of coal and other supplies by the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Macrorayan, a dilapidated middle-class apartment complex in central Kabul, was damaged by bombs aimed at a Taliban military base across the street. On Oct. 17, one bomb struck the apartment of Abdul Basir, 34, a jobless policeman, and a wall collapsed on his 3-year-old daughter Sweeta, killing her instantly.

Shivering in a neighbor's apartment this week, Basir and his wife Nazila, a former teacher, wept as they described Sweeta as a bright girl who loved to try on nail polish and sing.

Their own dreams had already been shattered, they said, when they lost their jobs under the Taliban. Basir, a police veteran, has sold vegetables to feed his family; his wife said she was beaten by Taliban police when she went out to fetch water once without wearing a veil.

But despite their fresh grief and cumulative hardships, the couple insisted that they did not blame anyone for Sweeta's death, and that they were grateful to the United States for liberating Afghanistan from Taliban rule.

"We lost our little girl, but we know those pilots did not do this deliberately," Basir said. "I appreciate the American attacks, because they saved our country from barbarism. "

Staff writer Marc Kaufman in Washington contributed to this report.

----

Al-Qaeda announce surrender in Tora Bora: Afghan commander

Tuesday December 11, 2001 8:22 PM
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/011211/1/23649.html

Al-Qaeda fighters loyal to Osama bin Laden agreed to surrender to militia forces after fierce fighting on the rugged Tora Bora mountain in eastern Afghanistan Tuesday, a local commander said.

Haji Mohammad Zaman, one of the three leaders of local groups engaged in a week-long battle against the last al-Qaeda stronghold, told journalists of the surrender following several hours of fighting.

Zaman said the mostly foreign al-Qaeda fighters had agreed to come down from the mountain at 8:00 am (0330 GMT) Wednesday.

"Its finished," Zaman told journalists. "They told us: 'We don't want to fight with you, we surrender'."

It was not immediately clear how many out of the total al-Qaeda forces had surrendered, or whether bin Laden himself was among them.

The report could not be independently confirmed, but an AFP reporter saw that the al-Qaeda forces had lost most of their positions as the militia, backed by US air and ground support, advanced up the rugged mountainside, overrunning enemy positions.

Scores of US special forces troops were reported to have joined the militiamen on the ground overnight for the final battle to eliminate al-Qaeda as a military presence in Afghanistan.

As UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi arrived in Kabul for talks with leaders who will run Afghanistan after December 22, the United States began marking the third month anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks at home and abroad -- and in outer space.

"We control all of the Melawa and Tora Bora area," military commander Hazrat Ali told reporters earlier, "except for one place," which he described as a "five by five kilometer" (three by three mile) region called Regan.

Asked whether bin Laden could also be in that area, Ali said he was certain "ninety percent he is in that Regan place".

Afghan soldiers on the front lines said US helicopters were involved in overnight air raids and one said he saw about 25 all-terrain vehicles full of US troops pass his position during the night.

They were heading toward Melawa mountain and although some returned during the night, others were still there, he said.

Another Afghan fighter said he saw about 10 US vehicles carrying 60 to 70 US troops during the night after his unit was advised by radio that the Americans were coming.

Most of Tuesday's shelling was concentrated on a wooded zone near the summit of Tora Bora mountain, an AFP reporter saw.

Explosions were heard and clouds of smoke rose from the summit amid the din of assault rifles, machine guns and mortars.

After a night of air and artillery strikes, three Soviet-made T-55 tanks were deployed on a hillside opposite the mountain and a fourth light tank was operating from a valley near Tora Bora village.

US military sources could not confirm the militia's claims, nor say for certain whether bin Laden was in the region, but said they had dropped one of the biggest conventional bombs in their arsenal -- a 7.5-tonne (15,000-pound) "daisy cutter" -- on one of the caves in the Tora Bora complex.

Brahimi met Tuesday in Kabul with foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah and defense minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim "about a smooth transition of power" in Afghanistan, the UN envoy's spokesman Ahmed Fawzi told journalists.

A meeting was also possible with Hamid Karzai, the Pashtun royalist who will head the six-month interim administration that takes over on December 22 under an agreement reached by anti-Taliban Afghan groups last week in Bonn.

Karzai is in Kandahar, but said Monday that he expected to go to Kabul soon.

Among the thorniest issues on Brahimi's agenda is the deployment of an international security force in demilitarized Kabul, a key clause of the UN-brokered Bonn accord.

The ethnic Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance, which holds power in Kabul and will hold the key foreign affairs, defense and interior posts in the interim cabinet, insisted Monday that it would not withdraw all its soldiers from the Afghan capital.

It had pledged in the Bonn accord to demilitarize the city before the deployment of UN-mandated peacekeepers.

In the first clear sign of resistance to the proposed force, a top aide to Fahim also said the peacekeepers would not be allowed to patrol Kabul -- a task reserved for Afghan security forces.

"The question of security is of paramount importance for the new interim administration," Fawzi said when asked about the disagreement. "The four groups who were in Bonn, when they signed on to this agreement, made a specific request to the (UN) Security Council to consider early deployment of a security force."

Abdullah did not refer to the controversy when he met Brahimi, saying only: "We are all hopeful, optimistic for seeing a lasting peace and settlement for the conflict in Afghanistan."

----

Afghanistan's Next Leader
Karzai Warns U.S. Not to 'Walk Away,' Pledges Friendship

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 11, 2001; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23023-2001Dec10?language=printer

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Dec. 10 -- Hamid Karzai, the Pashtun commander who has been named leader of Afghanistan's interim government, warned the United States today to never again "walk away from Afghanistan" and promised his country will be "a good friend, a trusted friend and an ally" in the fight against terrorism.

Karzai issued his warning during an interview here in Kandahar, the former citadel of Taliban power that fell Friday to his and other Pashtun militia groups backed by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces coordinating air support. Speaking at his new headquarters -- the sprawling former residence of Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader -- Karzai said he completely backs U.S. efforts to capture or kill members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network in Afghanistan.

"We must finish them all, completely burn them out," he told reporters who drove in today from the Pakistani border along a road lined with the charred detritus of war.

Despite earlier efforts to arrange guarantees for Omar's safety -- which were opposed by the Bush administration -- Karzai tonight called the toppled Taliban leader "a fugitive, a criminal" and vowed to put him on trial, clearly realigning himself with U.S. policy.

"Omar has committed crimes, he's killed thousands of people, he's destroyed vineyards, he's butchered my country, he's brought terrorists here," Karzai said as the light from a single gas lamp flickered across his salt-and-pepper beard. "I want him tried."

Tribal elders, sporting elaborately embroidered turbans and tunics, filled the room. Many kissed Karzai's right hand, a Pashtun sign of respect. Several were among 1,800 anti-Taliban political prisoners whom Karzai had ordered released from jail since the fall of Kandahar.

With a bombed-out window and a broken air conditioner as a backdrop, the 43-year-old son of a prominent Afghan politician also pledged to push to disarm the Afghan people after two decades of near-continual warfare. "The gun has to stop ruling the country," said Karzai, whose father was assassinated two years ago.

The tableau of Karzai sitting in the antechamber of Omar's house, receiving homage from local dignitaries and making proclamations about the future, evoked the idea of rebirth for Afghanistan after so many years of bloodshed. Electricity has not been restored to this part of Kandahar, but it was in the air tonight at Omar's former residence.

Asked how things are going, Karzai's brother Ahmed, who has acted as his spokesman, shook his head: "So little time, too much to do."

Just days after Karzai was appointed leader of an interim government that will take power in Kabul on Dec. 22, he encountered his first crisis. Under a deal Karzai brokered with the Taliban, Naqibullah, a pro-Taliban commander, was supposed to assume control of Kandahar. That was preempted, however, when Gul Agha Shirzai, the exiled former governor of Kandahar, marched into the city early Friday and seized the governor's house and the foreign ministry.

In a series of meetings held to avoid an eruption of the factional fighting that brought Afghanistan to its knees in the 1990s, Karzai brokered a compromise, allowing Gul Agha to resume his former position and Naqibullah to become his deputy. Karzai said tonight the deal was "peanuts."

"We never had any problem," he added. "Naqibullah was very gracious, He never was a contender for anything."

Karzai and Gul Agha dined together tonight and met representatives of a municipal council. Speeches were given. Karzai called it "the first touch of democracy in Afghanistan."

"People debated things and asked for things," he said. "It was very good."

The affair was a way of installing Gul Agha as governor or, as Karzai said, "putting a new turban on the head of the new leader."

Gul Agha's first reign in Kandahar was marked by corruption and chaos, and his return has troubled many Afghans. But Karzai said he is not wary of what came before.

"Two things are very different from the past," he said. "One, Afghans have suffered. We saw Afghans butchered by the Taliban and saw how the Taliban became terrorists as well. We won't repeat those mistakes.

"Second, the international community recognizes that Afghanistan needs to be rebuilt. There is a stark recognition that Afghanistan must return to better times."

In that vein, Karzai said, the United States must not repeat the same mistake it made 12 years ago when, after helping dislodge the Soviet occupation, it abandoned Afghanistan to its neighbors, Pakistan and Iran, and the radical Islam practiced by such influential foreign fighters as bin Laden.

"Things went wrong in Afghanistan because the United States walked away," he said. "So don't walk away again."

Karzai said he planned to head to Kabul, the capital, in two days to prepare to assume power. While he was in Shawali Kot, his wartime headquarters 20 miles north of Kandahar, he said, he wrote a letter of thanks to President Bush. "I thanked him for his help and for liberating us from this horrible force," he said, "and then I reassured him that we would very, very earnestly work to destroy terrorism in Afghanistan."

Karzai, who has a slight tic on the left side of his face, a resonant voice and a penchant for calling women "madam," was not totally ready for the international limelight focused on him by arriving reporters. "I'm going to see if my turban is all right," he said as two photographers snapped away. "Is it okay?"

"I haven't touched my beard in months now so I don't look my best," he added, stroking his beard, scraggly after two months living mostly in mountainous Uruzgan province, where he led a revolt against the Taliban.

Reporters and photographers who traveled to Kandahar had to negotiate their way out of Pakistan, which has all but blocked access to the city, and then travel 60 miles to the former Taliban stronghold.

First stop was the border town of Spin Boldak, one of Asia's smuggling centers and a main source of revenue for the Taliban government. Rival tribes there have armed compounds and the streets bristle with guns. Pickups packed with young men in camouflage and turbans, wielding rocket-propelled grenade launchers and Soviet-made heavy machine guns, cruise the streets. In one compound, a fortified parking lot surrounded by mud walls, eight men were introduced to reporters and each was called "the commander."

"I have been fighting for 23 years, 28 years, 40 years, I don't know," said Kush Nekaka, one of the commanders, a diminutive 58-year-old with a devilish grin floating from under a bushy gray beard. "Look at this," he said, pointing to the wooden left leg of the man to one side. "Look at that," he said, grabbing the plastic knee of the man to his left. "We are tired of war." Asked about competition in the town between two Pashtun tribes, the Achekzais and the Noorzais, he laughed. "That's not war," he said, "that's natural."

Along the road, signs of war and political change emerged at every turn. Three weeks ago, only the white flag of the Taliban flapped from houses and warehouses. Today, the red, black and green flag of Afghanistan's exiled king was everywhere -- on pickup trucks, flying tattered from tractors carrying branches, wrapped around the neck of a camel leading a convoy of nomads, atop the passport office of what used to be the Islamic Emirates of Afghanistan and on the dashboard of Basha Khan, the brother of Gul Agha, who led the reporters to Kandahar.

Deeper into the country, the landscape widened into desolate loneliness. Enormous khaki-colored hills faded to red as the sun descended.

Evidence of the withering U.S. air campaign dotted the road. Pickup trucks, splattered with blood, lay gutted in ditches. The force of one U.S. attack had turned a tractor-trailer into a giant mangled insect and tossed the cab and engine hundreds of feet in the air over a levee, leaving the cargo far behind. At Takhteh Pol, 25 miles southeast of Kandahar and the first place in this region to be captured by opposition fighters, a shiny Soviet-built tank watched over the road.

At the Kandahar airport, the scene of perhaps the fiercest fighting, scores of fighters prepared their end-of-day breakfast atop open-air fires. The soldiers said that despite the fighting, they were observing the Islamic holy month of Ramadan, fasting during the day and eating only after the sun went down.

The airport appeared gutted. Airplane fins lay on the runway. The only thing untouched was a marvelously fragrant rose bed at the traffic circle in front of the terminal.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has begun collecting bodies from the streets of Kandahar, and 100 graves have been dug, a spokesman in Kabul told the Associated Press.

With several bandoliers of machine-gun bullets across his chest, Sayed Abdul Khaliq cut an imposing figure. Khaliq, about 6 feet 4 and with hair so dirty it had turned to dreadlocks naturally, said the fighting at the airport had been fierce.

"They were Arabs and they fought hard," he said.

Basha Khan, Gul Agha's brother, had said earlier that at least 40 foreign fighters were killed near the airport. He said Gul Agha's fighters were divided among 10 pickup trucks, each carrying about 10 men. They attacked in the trucks, firing rocket-propelled grenades from the vehicles and then jumping off to launch infantry attacks.

Despite the bloodshed, Khaliq expressed satisfaction with the outcome and his role in it: "I am staying in the army," he said. "I am going to become a commander."

--------

Eastern Alliance Sets Ultimatum for Al Qaeda Surrender

December 11, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Fighting.html

TORA BORA, Afghanistan (AP) -- Afghan tribal fighters backed by intense U.S. airstrikes overran some al-Qaida cave hide-outs at Tora Bora on Tuesday and set a deadline for the surrender of a group of fleeing members of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.

After making a last stand on a wind-swept mountain top, hundreds of foreign fighters tried to escape a relentless tribal advance but were trapped by shelling in a rocky canyon. Some pleaded for mercy and said by radio that they were ready to give up. During the assault overnight, U.S. special forces were seen heading for the front.

Mohammed Zaman, defense chief for the tribal eastern alliance, declared a cease-fire and demanded that the al-Qaida force walk out of the Tora Bora and Milawa valleys in eastern Afghanistan by 8 a.m. Wednesday (10:30 p.m. EST Tuesday) or face a new attack. He said they must submit to international prosecution.

The whereabouts of bin Laden, who U.S. officials suspected was in Tora Bora, remained unclear. Another tribal commander claimed local intelligence officers spotted the Saudi-born dissident with al-Qaida troops in the area Monday, but no independent verification was possible. U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the best indications point to the area, although admitted the reports are ``not very reliable.''

``I don't know if he is dead or alive. Tomorrow we may know,'' Zaman said of bin Laden.

Tuesday's advance on Tora Bora coincided with the three-month anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States that Washington says were masterminded by bin Laden. Washington has posted a $25 million reward for him.

It was unclear how much of the extensive cave complex at Tora Bora had been captured and whether any al-Qaida personnel were still hiding within. It was also far from certain whether all al-Qaida forces around Tora Bora would surrender. In the past, forces loyal to bin Laden have vowed to fight to the death.

Zaman agreed to the truce after a radio conversation with a number of al-Qaida fighters in the Afghan Pashtun language, monitored in part by an interpreter working for The Associated Press. It was followed by a face-to-face meeting between his officers and al-Qaida commanders.

The al-Qaida fighters ``called me, they said, 'Please don't fight us, we want to surrender,''' Zaman said.

Zaman said the al-Qaida members agreed to surrender in small groups, but he was skeptical if all would disarm peacefully.

``We'll give them to the United Nations. I asked them whether there were any women and children. They said they were only young men,'' Zaman said. ``Tonight we will make a plan to get them out.''

The contact came after Hazrat Ali, a senior commander with the tribal eastern alliance, said his forces had taken one of two peaks on Enzeri Zur mountain. Hundreds of al-Qaida fighters -- mainly Arab and foreign Muslims -- had made a stand there after being flushed from their cave shelters overnight by massive U.S. bombing and raids by U.S. troops.

Shelling and machine-gun fire echoed across the valleys as B-52s and U.S. surveillance aircraft circled above. U.S. helicopters were also sighted.

Afghan troops said dozens of heavily armed U.S. soldiers were seen headed to the front late Monday and that small arms fire was heard during the night. The Americans returned before dawn Tuesday to a camp in the nearby village of Pacir.

``We were successful. We captured a lot of caves,'' Ali said as his troops staged mop-up operations. ``The largest ones were full of documents and personal belongings.

Ali said fleeing al-Qaida troops had been trying to head south to escape into Pakistan. Other commanders said retreating fighters might head along the Kharoti Pass, a high and often snowbound track through the 15,400-foot White Mountains that leads south into Pakistan.

Pakistan intelligence officials said their country has blocked all possible escape routes for bin Laden or his men by deploying 4,000 troops along a 25-mile stretch of border in the White Mountains and enhancing aerial surveillance.

Eastern alliance forces launched a three-pronged assault against al-Qaida defenders on Monday following days of intense U.S. bombing, including 15,000-pound ``daisy cutter'' bombs used to attack caves and underground command centers.

By Tuesday morning, the assault transformed what had been al-Qaida's main base in Afghanistan into a scene of devastation.

One hilltop overlooking the battlefield had been flattened. Trees were reduced to ashes and the ground was littered with shrapnel and bits of cluster bombs. Stone buildings and bomb shelters were destroyed. Mountainside caves that sheltered fighters from airstrikes for weeks were abandoned.

A sniper nest on top of a ridge contained three dead al-Qaida fighters, their bodies shredded by heavy machine gun fire. Outside an al-Qaida gun training center, paper targets from the National Rifle Association littered the ground complete with names and scores written in Arabic.

Meanwhile, in southern Afghanistan, U.S. Marines stepped up their hunt for fleeing Taliban fighters by widening their operations near the city of Kandahar.

The Marines began Tuesday searching for weapons at checkpoints in the south. ``If we see weapons, we collect them and identify them'' by serial number, then destroy them, said Capt. David Romley. He did not say how many weapons, if any, had been seized so far. Taliban fighters who surrender their arms will be allowed to go free; those who resist will be killed, he said.

Although U.S. officials have described Tora Bora as bin Laden's most likely hiding place, they also have said he and fugitive Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammed Omar could be sheltering somewhere around Kandahar.

The Taliban surrendered Kandahar on Friday to tribal forces.

The Pakistan-based Afghan Islamic Press news agency reported that residents of Kandahar buried at least 50 bodies of Arabs fighters killed in U.S. strikes near the airport. The report could not be verified.

Marines from a base in the desert 70 miles southwest of Kandahar moved closer to the city Monday to move more quickly against any Taliban and al-Qaida movements.

In other developments:

-- U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi arrived in the Afghan capital, Kabul, for talks with leaders of rival political factions ahead of the Dec. 22 inauguration of an interim administration.

-- Secretary of State Colin Powell said Britain will take the lead role in overseeing the peacekeeping force for Afghanistan.

-- In Kabul, hungry crowds jostled for sacks of wheat being handed out by the U.N. World Food Program.

--------

PRISONERS
Witnesses Recount Taliban Dying While Held Captive

December 11, 2001
By CARLOTTA GALL
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/11/international/asia/11JAIL.html

SHIBARGHAN, Afghanistan, Dec. 9 - Dozens of Taliban prisoners died after surrendering to Northern Alliance forces, asphyxiated in the shipping containers used to transport them to prison, witnesses say.

The deaths occurred as the prisoners, many of them foreign fighters for the Taliban, were brought from the town of Kunduz to the prison here, a journey that took two or three days for some.

Colonel General Jurabek, the Northern Alliance commander in charge of some 3,000 prisoners being held here, said Saturday that 43 prisoners had died in half a dozen containers on the way, either from injuries or asphyxiation. Three others died from their wounds after arrival, and had been given a Muslim burial at the town of Dasht-i-Laili, he said.

But the number of deaths may be much higher. Several Pakistani prisoners interviewed in the prison have said that dozens of people died in their containers during the journey here. Omar, a pale and slight youth, who clutched a blanket round his head and shoulders, said through the bars of his prison wing that all but seven people in his container had died from lack of air. He estimated that more than 100 had died. Another Pakistani said 13 had died in his container and that the survivors had taken turns to breathe through a hole in the metal wall.

One prisoner, Ibrahim, a 30-year- old Pakistani mechanic interviewed in the presence of General Jurabek, said he thought some 35 people had died in his container en route from Kunduz. "No oxygen, no oxygen," he said urgently in English. The general corrected him and said only five or six had died.

Faced with transporting thousands of potentially dangerous prisoners even while a prisoner uprising in the Qala Jangi fort near Mazar-i- Sharif was under way, the Northern Alliance packed many of the detained into the sealed shipping containers for the journey from Kunduz, the last Taliban stronghold in the north, to this town, the hometown of Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum.

Shipping containers line the roads of Afghanistan and are frequently used not only to hold and transport prisoners, but to use as shops where items of all sorts are for sale. The uprising at the Qala Jangi fort, in which some 230 prisoners and one C.I.A. officer died, and the sheer logistics of detaining and transporting more than 4,000 prisoners - many of them foreign fighters for the Taliban - have overwhelmed the new authorities in the north, who are still confronting pockets of Taliban resistance.

One witness, a local driver who declined to be interviewed but spoke to Afghan acquaintances, said he had seen soldiers unloading many dead bodies from a container by the road not far from here.

General Jurabek, who oversees the largest detention center for Taliban prisoners in northern Afghanistan, watched from his upstairs room in the gatehouse of the prison as a container packed with prisoners was backed into the prison courtyard below. Fifty-five more Taliban prisoners were arriving from the town of Balkh.

"I am here 24 hours a day," he said. "If I was not here the prisoners would be eating each other"

General Jurabek does appear to have brought order to the chaotic scenes of a week earlier, when thousands of dirty, hungry and hostile prisoners milled in the central courtyard and guards fingered their guns nervously. Among those prisoners were up to 100 who were wounded, and more than 80 men who had survived the battle in the fort.

It was considered a success - and a significant improvement on the widespread revenge killings of previous offensives in Afghanistan's 22 years of civil war - that the Northern Alliance negotiated for the Taliban to surrender Kunduz, their last stronghold in the north, without a fight. But the enormous number of prisoners posed its own problems. At Qala Jangi, more than 100 Northern Alliance soldiers and officers died in the uprising, which took six days to quell.

More prisoners are arriving each day at the prison here. After several days of barring journalists on security grounds, the authorities have now opened the prison gates to foreign visitors. The prisoners have been registered and questioned, and the badly wounded have been transferred to a newly secured wing of the local hospital. New kitchens and barrels of drinking water have been set up for them.

They are kept in three wings around a central courtyard, approximately 40 men to a room off a broad central corridor. On Saturday, they approached the bars at the end of the corridor to the courtyard to talk to their guards and to journalists. The mood was calm as a line of prisoners was allowed out with plastic bowls to collect rations of rice and bread. A bag of rubber galoshes lay in the corridor for those prisoners who were without shoes. Prisoners are also receiving re-education.

"Day by day we are explaining to them that no one will hurt them and that we will treat the injured," said General Jurabek, a Soviet-trained officer. "I explained to them that Osama bin Laden is a vile hard-line terrorist and Mullah Muhammad Omar too, because they wanted to destroy all of Afghanistan," he said. "And the prisoners are changing their minds now."

Yet there remains a feeling of desperation among some of the prisoners. Eleven men from Uzbekistan survived the battle at Qala Jangi but now fear that they will be deported home, where they would face brutal treatment and even death under the harsh system run by President Islam Karimov. "They are going to send us back to Uzbekistan, and there we will not survive prison," said one, Abdul Jabar, 26, close to tears. "We are all educated. We don't want to be returned home."

Another prisoner, an Iraqi from Baghdad, Ali Abdul Matalib, 30, said he had been trying to smuggle himself from Kunduz to Russia and then Europe when he got caught up in the war. "I had nothing to do with this," he said, leaning through the bars. "This was between the Taliban and America. I am just afraid for my future. I just want to get to Europe."

The other Arabs, some 40 who survived the battle in Qala Jangi, would not consent to be interviewed and remain set in their opinions, General Jurabek said. "When we mention America they spit on us," he said. "And when we say their own country will serve the death sentence on them, they say `Thanks be to God.' "

-------- africa

Team in Somalia May Be Planning U.S. Strikes

By Steve Vogel and Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, December 11, 2001; Page A21
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22722-2001Dec10?language=printer

A five-member U.S. government delegation visited western Somalia on Sunday to meet with local warlords and Ethiopian military officers in what regional analysts said appeared to be a scouting mission for possible strikes against terrorist targets in the country.

The meeting, in the western town of Baidoa, was reported by a radio station in Mogadishu, the Somali capital 150 miles to the southeast, and was confirmed yesterday by Western aid workers who operate in Baidoa.

"They didn't stop to talk to us, but we saw them there," said one humanitarian worker. "They were in civilian clothes. They saw the Somali leadership and the Ethiopians, who were in uniform."

A Defense Department official said no U.S. military personnel were involved in the visit, but the official added he could not exclude the possibility that other government agencies might have been involved. Bill Harlow, the chief CIA spokesman, refused to comment.

U.S. military planners said the Bush administration has begun to look at Somalia as a possible future venue for the U.S.-led war on terrorism. U.S. officials charge that Somalia harbors members of al Qaeda, the terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden, and there are fears that al Qaeda militants being driven from Afghanistan could try to take refuge there.

"People mention Somalia for obvious reasons," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday, though he appeared unaware of reports of Sunday's visit to the country by the U.S. officials. "It's a country virtually without a government, a country that has a certain al Qaeda presence already."

Afghan fighters backed by U.S. airstrikes are advancing on al Qaeda positions in fortified caves in eastern Afghanistan, and Wolfowitz said the United States is stepping up surveillance of "possible escape routes, possible sanctuaries."

The effort includes a force of U.S. and allied warships in the Arabian Sea that for the last month has been questioning and, in some cases, boarding ships coming out of Pakistan. "We're using everything we've got," a Navy official said. "Every ship we have out there is participating in this in some sense."

U.S. submarines and P-3 aircraft are working with surface ships to monitor sea traffic, officials said. The United States has 30 to 40 ships in the area. The carrier USS John C. Stennis is expected in the region soon, which will give the United States an additional carrier battle group in the area before the carrier USS Carl Vinson is sent home.

The interdiction force includes British, French, Italian, Canadian and Australian ships. France maintains a large naval base on the Gulf of Aden in Djibouti, which is on Somalia's northern border.

On average, about 30 to 40 boats, ranging from large ships to small ones, are challenged each day, and a much smaller number are searched, but no ship has been detained, officials said.

Last Thursday, U.S. forces intercepted a large container ship suspected of carrying senior al Qaeda leaders in waters south of Pakistan. A contingent of Marines and U.S. Navy SEALS from the USS Shreveport boarded the ship by helicopter and went through dozens of containers. "They boarded, searched and didn't find anything," said a Navy official.

The reason for the visit by the U.S. officials to Somalia was unclear. The Reuters news service quoted sources in Somalia as saying the five officials were meeting with local warlords and Ethiopian officers to discuss possible cooperation should the war on terrorism focus on Somalia.

"They were discussing whether they [the warlords] know of any terrorist bases in south and southwest Somalia," one of the sources said.

The sources said the Americans met with leaders of the Rahanwein Resistance Army, a faction opposed to Somalia's fledgling government, Reuters reported, as well as with four officers of the Ethiopian army, which has been actively backing the anti-government factions.

There have been no known U.S. military visits to Somalia since 1994, when the Clinton administration withdrew U.S. military personnel from the country following the deaths of 18 U.S. soldiers in a clash with militias in Mogadishu the year before.

Wolfowitz cautioned against speculation that the United States is shifting its war aims outside of Afghanistan. "Our focus is on Afghanistan, and there's a great danger if we don't keep that focus, if we start spreading our net too wide, that we will lose the focus," Wolfowitz said.

U.S. officials and experts they are consulting say Somalia, a lawless state that has been without a central government since 1991, makes a relatively poor candidate for military strikes. Intense aerial reconnaissance has failed to produce hard physical targets such as terrorist training camps, said one U.S. specialist on the region.

The Islamist organization al-Ittihad al-Islamiya, which the Bush administration said has ties to al Qaeda, "is not very visible at all" since being thrashed by Ethiopian forces four years ago, a regional security expert said.

Given the absence of hard targets, the likeliest U.S. action in Somalia would be "extraction" of suspected terrorists, according to U.S. sources.

By one count, American investigators have identified roughly a dozen al Qaeda figures believed to have been inside Somalia recently. "And they may have been snatched already," said one source. "This is a moving target."

Such abductions could be carried out by American forces. But analysts called that option unlikely. Analysts said U.S. policymakers can avoid the expense and risk of engaging U.S. forces by using proxies. Ethiopia, which shares a long border and has a history of rivalry with Somalia, has already fought al-Ittihad, and it has publicly volunteered what it called evidence that its neighbor harbors Islamic extremists. Analysts said local militias might also be put to use.

In an apparently unrelated development yesterday, Kenyan police announced they had arrested a possible suspect in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi.

Acting on a tip forwarded in October by the U.S. mission in Nairobi, police detained a man thought to be Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan, one of two men alleged to have purchased the truck packed with TNT and detonated outside the embassy on Aug. 7, 1998.

But the identity of the suspect was uncertain, according to embassy and police spokesmen. Local Islamic activists said the man arrested in Mandera, on the border with Somalia, was in his sixties, or roughly a generation older than Swedan.

Vick reported from Nairobi. Staff writer Vernon Loeb contributed to this report.

-------- balkans

Milosevic Hears Genocide Allegations

By ANTHONY DEUTSCH
Associated Press Writer
DECEMBER 11, 07:01 ET
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=WORLD&PACKAGEID=warcrimes&SLUG=WAR-CRIMES-MILOSEVIC

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) - Slobodan Milosevic refused on Tuesday to plead to genocide charges that allege he presided over the killing or expulsion of Muslims and Croats in the Bosnian war.

As in previous indictments, the U.N. war crimes tribunal entered a plea of innocent on his behalf.

``This miserable text is the ultimate absurdity. I should be given credit for peace in Bosnia, not war,'' Milosevic said when asked if he were guilty or innocent.

For more than an hour, he sat impassively, often looking around the courtroom, as the indictment was read in his native Serbian language.

The indictment charges that Milosevic ``exercised effective control or substantial influence'' over the political officials and military officers who committed ``the widespread killing of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats.''

Thousands were held in detention ``calculated to bring about the partial physical destruction of those groups, namely through starvation, contaminated water, forced labor, inadequate medical care and constant physical and psychological assault,'' the indictment said.

Taken together, the lengthy list of criminal acts during the 1992-1995 Bosnian war constitute genocide - a planned and carefully executed scheme to liquidate or deport the entire non-Serb population of parts of Bosnia, the prosecutors say.

It was the third and final indictment against Milosevic for his 13 years as Yugoslavia's president, during which he is accused of instigating and conducting a decade of ethnic war.

Milosevic has persistently rejected the legitimacy of the U.N. court and has refused to cooperate, alleging it is a political tool of the NATO alliance.

``The responsibility for the war in Bosnia lies with the (Western) powers and their agents, not in Bosnia and not with Serbs, Serb people or Serb policy,'' Milosevic said before Judge Richard May cut him short.

The Bosnia indictment is the first to charge him with genocide, and is the most serious challenge since Serbian authorities transferred him to The Hague for trial on June 28.

The 38-page document links Milosevic to dozens of execution sites, scores of detention facilities where inmates were beaten and sexually assaulted, and the killing of more than 8,600 Bosnians.

Milosevic has been charged with 29 counts of genocide, complicity to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and violations of the laws or customs of war - every crime in the tribunal's statute.

To substantiate their case, prosecutors hope to call other members of what they call a ``joint criminal enterprise'' responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the region in an attempt to form a Serb state.

Two leading Serb political officials awaiting trial on genocide charges, Biljana Plavsic and Momcilo Krajisnik, could provide incriminating evidence against Milosevic.

Later Tuesday, prosecutors were to request that three separate indictments against the defendant be joined into a comprehensive Milosevic file, spanning more than a decade of Balkan bloodshed and 66 charges of war crimes.

Joining the indictments would shorten the length of the trial and eliminate duplicate testimony and overlapping evidence. But it also would delay the start of the first trial, for Kosovo, which had been scheduled for Feb. 12.

The former head of state appeared alone on the defendant's side of the courtroom because he refused to appoint defense attorneys.

Prosecutors gained their first genocide conviction in August. In a case that could be a precedent in the Milosevic trial, Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic was sentenced to 46 years in prison for deeds committed by his subordinates. Some 15,000 troops under his command killed up to 8,000 men and boys in the summer of 1995.

Though he was not convicted for directly killing anyone, he was found guilty of ``command responsibility.'' In a direct reference to Krstic's superiors, including Milosevic, the tribunal concluded that ``someone else probably decided to order the execution.''

-------- biological weapons

Hopkins researchers' filter foils bioterror

ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 11, 2001
http://www.washingtontimes.com/metro/20011211-41550040.htm

A year ago, before most Americans worried about bioterrorism, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel began developing a filtration system to destroy airborne biological agents in ventilation systems.

Preliminary tests on the system have been excellent, said lead investigator Richard Potember.

The chemist came up with the idea of combining traditional High-Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters with newer technology to neutralize airborne pathogens such as spores, bacteria and viruses. The system is intended to prevent the spread of infection through ventilation systems in government facilities, office buildings and subways.

The new technology uses free radicals - molecules with unpaired electrons that "steal" electrons from other molecules to pair up. A combination of ozone, water, ultraviolet lights and a metal matrix kills the pathogens.

Mr. Potember and his fellow researchers, including co-investigator and physical chemist Wayne Bryden, built a heating and air conditioning system to test the process. Biologists at the laboratory provided solutions that imitate pathogens like anthrax and smallpox.

"We are getting 100 percent kill with the bacteria and viruses," Mr. Potember said. "Anthrax is somewhat hard to kill because it's a spore, and spores can live in the dirt for a long period of time."

But, he added, most of the spores are large enough to be caught by the typical HEPA filter.

"We only have to kill the few remaining spores that get through," Mr. Potember said.

Mr. Potember is applying for a patent and seeking federal funding for research on the new system, which has been funded so far only by the laboratory.

Mr. Potember and Mr. Bryden said obtaining federal money to continue research is difficult, and current events make it even more complicated.

Biodefense "is a hot topic right now. Really, it is in everyone's thinking," Mr. Bryden said. "But that's a good thing and a bad thing, because with a lot more interest in this area, there are a lot more people going after these pots of federal money."

Mr. Bryden said he is optimistic that the promising preliminary test results will help the research win federal support.

Mr. Potember said the system also could have other applications, such as preventing secondary infections like staphylococcus in hospitals.

-------- colombia

FARC said to kill four kidnap victims

December 11, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011211-514080.htm

BOGOTA, Colombia - Four kidnap victims held by Colombia's largest guerrilla group were killed by their captors yesterday, authorities said.

The four were among more than 20 people kidnapped by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on Sunday from a luxury hotel in the town of Jardin, 260 miles northwest of Bogota.

The Marxist rebels killed one hotel employee who refused to go with them, said a military spokesman.

The guerrillas took their victims toward the mountains in Antioquia province before releasing all but six, the spokesman told Agence France-Presse.

-------- drug war

Authorities Find Ariz. Drug Tunnel

December 11, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Drug-Tunnel.html

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) -- Federal authorities found an 85-foot tunnel under the U.S.-Mexican border Tuesday and said they believed it had been used to smuggle $21 million worth of cocaine and marijuana into the United States.

Authorities said they had seized all the drugs -- 956 pounds of cocaine and 839 pounds of marijuana -- since smugglers began using the tunnel in late summer, Customs Agent Vince Iglio said. Two people were arrested last month.

The tunnel stretched from underneath a home in Nogales, 55 miles south of Tucson, to a concrete wash on the Mexican side of the border. Iglio said the opening on the Mexican side was covered by a steel utility plate and resealed with cement each time it was used.

The 4-foot-high tunnel, shored up throughout with lumber like a mine, was ``one of the most complicated we've seen,'' Iglio said. It was strung with electricity and tracks had been laid inside.

In a bedroom of the Nogales home, authorities found a mechanic's dolly with a long rope attached. In a corner of the room, under carpeting and wooden flooring, was a 30-foot vertical shaft leading to the tunnel.

The occupant of the home has not been found, Iglio said. The home's owner does not live there and isn't believed to be involved in the drug smuggling.

The city of Nogales plans to excavate and seal the tunnel, he said.

Iglio compared the new tunnel to a concrete-lined, electrified 300-foot tunnel found in 1990. That tunnel ran about 30 feet under the border between a home in Agua Prieta, Mexico, and a warehouse in Douglas, with secret entrances on both sides and a hydraulic lift.

The tunnel was the eighth discovered in Nogales since 1995 but the first in the city to run directly beneath the border. The others have led into sewer lines that feed into a canal system that flows from Mexico into Nogales.

-------- iraq

Iraq, Iran resuming talks on war captives

World Scene
December 11, 2001
Washington Times
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20011211-56729356.htm

BAGHDAD - Iraq and Iran will resume talks on captives from their 1980-88 war, one of the main sticking points to normalization, after the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, an Iraqi paper said yesterday.

"The two parties have agreed to resume talks on prisoners-of-war after Eid al-Fitr," Nabd al-Shabab reported. Eid al-Fitr is the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan, scheduled for Dec. 16.

According to the weekly, Iraq has obtained "documents on the fate of 97 percent of Iraqi prisoners held in prisons in Iran."

-------- israel

Israeli Missiles Injure Target and Kill Boys in West Bank

New York Times
December 11, 2001
By JAMES BENNET
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/11/international/middleeast/11MIDE.html

EBRON, West Bank, Dec. 10 - Two Israeli helicopter gunships fired missiles at a car that was stopped at a busy intersection here today, wounding their intended target but killing two boys, one 2 years old and the other 13.

The Israeli Army said it was trying to kill Muhammad Sidir, 24, whom it accused of masterminding attacks against Israelis as a local leader of the extremist group Islamic Jihad.

One missile slammed into the road about 20 feet in front of Mr. Sidir, witnesses said, and the second struck his car and exploded in a fiery blast. Riding with Mr. Sidir were his uncle, Muhammad Ibrahim Himouni, and his 2-year-old cousin, Burhan.

Burhan was dismembered by the explosion, witnesses and hospital offic