NUCLEAR
Safeguards against nuclear nightmare
U.S., Russia Sign Missile Agreement
Russia, US, Cut Risk of Inadvertent Nuclear Strike
shell
Putin, in Cuba, Signals Priority of Ties to U.S.
Nuclear pact to prevent 'accidents'
More Complicated Than the Red Button
US Russia sign nuclear accord
Putin hopeful about future US relations
Last Chernobyl Reactor Shut Down
Missile Defense High on Bush Agenda
Cohen Visits Troops Off Italy Coast
Bush Could Forge New Direction in U.S.-Russia Ties
Human rights low on the agenda
Missile defense sure to be high on Bush's list
Missile Defense High on Bush Agenda
Colin L. Powell: Ultimate Insider With Star Power
106th Congress Knows Partisan Trials
The Bush Foreign Policy Team
MILITARY
Rebel-Held Zone in Colombia Fears End of Truce
Libya faces up to drugs menace
Jupiter Moon May Have a Salt - Water Ocean
U.N. Economic Panel to Study Ways to Help World's Have-Nots
Zimbabwe Riot After Police Mistakenly Kill Vendor
Letter of the law
Freed American Plans Book on Spy Trial
Judge Rules Amnesia Is Feigned in Terror Case
ACTIVISTS
Power and Oppression: Rethinking U.S. Militarism Across Borders
Rome clashes erupt over Haider visit
-------- NUCLEAR
Safeguards against nuclear nightmare
BBC News
Saturday, 16 December, 2000, 13:08 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1073000/1073416.stm
Albright: "Deeper confidence" between the nations Russia and the United States have signed an agreement aimed at eliminating the risk of an accidental nuclear conflict.
At a meeting in Brussels, US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who has only five weeks left in office, and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov agreed to share data on more missile tests and other rocket launches.
The need for such safeguards was highlighted five years ago when Russia mistook a weather rocket launched in Norway for a Nato nuclear missile and prepared for a nuclear counter-strike.
The new agreement is an update to an initial early warning system set up last year by President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin to prevent accidental launches.
The updated pact will expand a joint warning centre where both sides can exchange information.
"The result will be deeper confidence and greater strategic stability between our two nations, which translates into a safer and more secure world," said Mrs Albright after the signing.
More stability
The Russian foreign minister told reporters that other nuclear powers would be invited to join the agreement to give more stability to those countries with nuclear capabilities.
Co-operation on preventing accidental missile launches began after Russia mistook the weather rocket for a Nato missile in 1995.
The then President, Boris Yeltsin, said after the event that he had used his "black suitcase" hotline link to his generals for the first time to discuss a possible retaliatory strike.
Mrs Albright used the meeting to discuss a wide range of issues in what is likely to be her last bilateral face-to-face meeting before the Clinton administration makes way for President-elect George W Bush.
Two weeks ago, Russia reneged on a 1995 agreement that barred Moscow from making new weapons deals with Iran.
No agreement was reached on the issue at this latest meeting.
---
U.S., Russia Sign Missile Agreement
Associated Press
December 16, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Russia-Missiles.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium - Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov signed an agreement Saturday aimed at strengthening cooperation on preventing accidental missile launches on both sides.
The new agreement comes as an update to an initial early warning system set up last year by President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin to prevent accidental launches. The updated pact looks to expand a joint warning center where the sides can exchange information, officials said.
``The result will be deeper confidence and greater strategic stability between our two nations, which translates into a safer and more secure world,'' Albright said after the signing.
Ivanov told reporters that other nuclear powers will be invited to join the agreement. He said such cooperation benefits everyone, not just the two former Cold War adversaries.
``All these efforts are aimed at strengthening strategic stability,'' he said.
Cooperation on preventing accidental missile launches began after a near-launch of a nuclear counterstrike in 1995, when Russia mistook a harmless weather rocket fired from Norway for a NATO missile.
Albright and Ivanov used their breakfast meeting Saturday to discuss a wide range of issues in what might be their last bilateral face-to-face meeting before the Clinton administration makes way for President-elect George W. Bush. Topics ranging from the situation in the Balkans to arms sales to Iran were on the agenda.
Two weeks ago, Russia unilaterally walked away from a 1995 agreement with the United States that barred Moscow from making new weapons deals with Iran. No agreement was reached on that issue Saturday.
Albright's visit to Europe is part of what could be her last big trip as secretary of state. She attended a NATO foreign ministers meeting on Thursday and Friday and spent the early part of the week in Africa and Hungary.
---
Russia, US, Cut Risk of Inadvertent Nuclear Strike
Reuters
December 16, 2000 Filed at 12:24 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-ru.html
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Russia and the United States on Saturday made the nightmare of inadvertent nuclear strike a little less likely -- a scenario which came terrifyingly close in 1995 when Moscow mistook a research rocket for a missile.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, with five weeks left in office, agreed with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov to share data on more missile tests and other rocket launches like the one that had former Russian President Boris Yeltsin weighing his retaliatory options.
The pre- and post-launch notification system envisages a data center opening in Moscow and builds on agreements to share early warning information signed in 1998 and June 1999.
Albright and Ivanov, at a ceremony in a Brussels hotel a day after they attended a meeting of NATO foreign ministers and Russia, also pledged to include more countries in the hope of creating what Ivanov called a ``global system of control.''
``Under our agreement, both the United States and Russia will invite the participation of other countries in the missile and space launch notification system,'' Albright said.
``This reflects the fact that proliferation is a threat to every nation, and that contributing to stability is every nation's responsibility,'' she added.
The two countries agreed back in 1991 under START I, the first in a series of Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties slashing nuclear arsenals, to tell each other about launches of intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.
Saturday's memorandum of understanding expanded on this to include shorter-range ballistic missiles, sounding and research rockets and most space launch vehicles.
It also allows for each side to notify the other on a voluntary basis of objects leaving orbit or experiments that early warning systems might mistake for missiles.
Norway said it had notified embassies beforehand when it launched its Black Brant XII research rocket in January 1995.
But the message had clearly not reached Yeltsin, who said afterwards he had used his ``black suitcase'' hotline link to his generals for the first time to discuss a possible retaliatory strike.
The near-catastrophic, 24-minute flight of the 15-meter (50 foot) long research rocket, part of a Norwegian-American project to study the Northern Lights, highlighted the dangers of nuclear arsenals which the former Cold War enemies are committed to reduce in the new era.
CLINTON ADMINISTRATION DISAPPOINTED ON NMD
Before President-elect George W. Bush takes office, President Clinton's administration had hoped to get further with Russia on arms control issues by winning Moscow's agreement to amend a Soviet-era treaty so Washington could start building a missile defense shield.
Critics see the National Missile Defense (NMD), which would use rockets to shoot down rockets in an action so delicate it has been compared to hitting a bullet with a bullet, as threatening the stability of international arms control.
Clinton deferred a decision on the system after tests failed. Bush has put less stress on getting Russian consent for the system, which he has said he will build, and is expected to take a tougher line on arms control issues with Moscow.
A senior State Department official said Saturday's deal showed the nature of U.S.-Russian relations under the outgoing administration. ``It's always been about identifying and solving problems and they did a little of that today,'' he said.
---
Subject: shell
From: "john dyer" <adnw32200@cableinet.co.uk>
Sat, 16 Dec 2000 11:39:29 -0000
My name is John Alfred Dyer. For the last thirteen years I have been researching the alleged illegal disposal/dumping of a nuclear reactor/testing cell by Shell, in 1968. Briefly my research is that:
1. In 1968, Shell, hired known criminals (with a history of illegally disposing of nuclear 'waste'), to decommission its (secret) nuclear rector/testing cell.
2. That Shell paid the said 'criminals' a six-figure CASH sun (at today's prices).
3. That Shell's reactor/testing cell decommissioning did not go to plan.
4. That huge amounts of nuclear materials/waste (thousands of tons, yes thousands of tons) were illegally dumped (onto an urban population), as part, consequence.
In 1993, my research resulted in the commissioning of a TV programme for Carlton Television-. A matter of days before the said programmes proposed transmission Shell produced an extensive 2900 word Narrative, to explain away my research. The said Narrative resulted in the TV programme being abandoned. (Shell 'explained/claimed' that I had got it wrong, for it was not a nuclear reactor/testing cell that had been decommissioned, rather, Shell claimed, it was a Cobalt-60 labyrinth- i.e. 'harmless' nuclear facility/waste)
However, I have established that the Shell's Native was a (known) tissue of leis from start to finish. Shell's legal head Richard Max Wiseman, was wheeled-out in light of my supplied evidence, to concede that the said Narrative was a 'mistake'.
As I state, and supply the evidence for my assertion(s), in my WEB site www.nuclearcrimes.com the Narrative was no 'mistake'; rather, it was a deliberate fraudulent sham Narrative to cover up Shell's wholesale nuclear dumping crimes.
You will see that I have invited Shell-following two years of correspondence with the most senior Shell directors-its Chairman and Legal Head- to sue me, if my allegations and/or evidence is incorrect/untrue. Despite specific prior threats to sue, Shell has refused to issue, or embark on any legal process. Shell, aware of the truth will not risk court action, hence no 'writs' despite Shell's lawyers threats.
In response to my WEB site, Shell has called in its scientific staff, and others, at Thornton Research Centre, Cheshire. They refused to refute my allegations, contenting themselves with repeating the lie that I have refused to call in the 'Health & Safety'.
Shell have used its muscle once to get my site shut down-see nuclearcrimes site-now after threatening, my 'new' ethical web host, and failing to get my 'him' to close down my site, Shell is presently endeavouring to get the entire domain closed.
John Dyer
---
Putin, in Cuba, Signals Priority of Ties to U.S.
New York Times
December 16, 2000
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/16/world/16PUTI.html?pagewanted=all
HAVANA, Dec. 15 - After two difficult days of talks about old debts and dashed dreams with Fidel Castro, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said today that he did not travel to this former bastion of the cold war to recreate a "union" with Cuba against the United States, but rather to clean up the economic "mess" left over from the Soviet era.
Speaking at a news conference that was not attended by the Cuban leader, Mr. Putin indicated in several ways that Russia's relations with the United States, though difficult at times, were important to Moscow.
Still, he said that Moscow would not hesitate to express opposing views on arms control issues, on questions of international security and on how to narrow the gap between the "golden billion" and the world's poorest nations, a new theme for him.
Responding to a question on whether his visit here amounted to re-establishing an alliance between Moscow and Havana, Mr. Putin said: "Unfortunately, you have been looking at the wrong kind of information. We have no union with Cuba against third countries, including the United States if you were talking about that country.
"Yes, we have differences on some questions with the United States and they are well known," he continued, but he said that these were "items of discussion and no more than that."
Stressing this point, Mr. Putin disclosed today that he had authorized his foreign minister, Igor S. Ivanov, to sign an agreement with the outgoing Clinton administration calling for advance notification of rocket launchings to further promote communication among the extensive nuclear forces of the United States and Russia. Mr. Putin said he "deeply" hoped the agreement would be concluded today, or in the near future.
Mr. Ivanov was said to be negotiating the agreement in Brussels with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.
In his remarks today, Mr. Putin appeared to be trying to put his visit to Cuba in an unthreatening context, suggesting that Moscow is merely trying to recover lost markets and multimillion-dollar Soviet-era investments rather than forge a new image of rivalry.
And the subtext of his remarks, together with comments by Russian officials traveling with Mr. Putin, also indicated that the thorny economic issues underlying Moscow's relations with Cuba did not compare to the more weighty economic and security agenda that Mr. Putin intends to pursue with the new administration in Washington.
As an example, Mr. Putin cited his pardon on Thursday - as a "goodwill gesture" - of Edmond Pope, the former American naval intelligence officer convicted of espionage in Moscow this month and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Mr. Putin said he had no reason to doubt the appropriateness of the guilty verdict against the 54-year-old businessman, but added that the activities of intelligence agencies, charged with protecting national security, "should not inflict damage on relations between nations, the more so in the case of such key countries as Russia and the United States."
On another point about continuing intelligence activities, the Russian leader indicated that the 1,500 Russian military technicians who operate an electronic eavesdropping facility at Lourdes, outside the Cuban capital and used to intercept communications in the United States, may not be here permanently. "Russia and Cuba at this specific moment are interested that this center will continue to work," he said, adding, "and then we'll see."
As he prepared for the final rounds of tough negotiations with Mr. Castro over whether Cuba intends to even recognize the estimated $20 billion in debt that accumulated during three decades of Soviet patronage here, Mr. Putin also went out of his way to compliment the skill and experience of the foreign policy advisers that President-elect George W. Bush is gathering around him in Washington.
"Judging by the staff surrounding the president-elect," Mr. Putin observed, "these people are quite well- known professionals, who deeply understand the nuances in relations between the two states."
The Russian leader was clear about the major differences of opinion: Moscow opposes Mr. Bush's advocacy of abrogating the anti-ballistic missile treaty of 1972 in order to build an anti-missile shield over the United States.
In addition, he said, "we don't think that the principle of humanitarian intervention is right." He was referring to NATO's decision in 1999 to intervene militarily in Kosovo to stop Serbian ethnic violence against civilians there.
While Mr. Putin was speaking with reporters in Havana, Russian state television was airing a lengthy interview with Mr. Castro.
Though Mr. Castro extolled the new friendship between Russia and Cuba, he restated his grievance that Cuba had been "left alone" by the circumstances of Soviet collapse and Russian withdrawal from Cuba, which had to face "the most powerful state in the world."
Mr. Castro made no reference to Cuba's residual debts to Moscow, and he avoided discussion of the complicated economic issues that he and Mr. Putin are trying to resolve.
Mr. Putin and Mr. Castro will retreat to the luxurious beach resort of Varadero this weekend to try to conclude some common understanding of how Moscow and Havana can put substance behind the new vocabulary of friendship and economic cooperation.
Mr. Putin said Russians have several goals in this first foray back to Latin America since Mr. Putin was elected last March. "The first one is the activation of relations in the political sphere, cleaning up the mess and choosing priorities of cooperation between the two states in the economic sphere," he said.
The Russian leader indicated today that Moscow has spent $30 million in recent years "conserving" its investment in a large nuclear power station at Jurgua near Cienfuegos, but had come to no agreement about how to complete the plant. Russian officials traveling with Mr. Putin indicated that Cuba is no longer interested in completing the nuclear complex, but there has been no public confirmation of this position from Mr. Castro's government.
----------
Nuclear pact to prevent 'accidents'
CNN
December 16, 2000
http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/12/16/russia.nuclear.ap/index.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- Russia and the United States have signed an agreement aimed at preventing accidental missile launches by either country.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright signed the pact, which looks to expand a joint warning centre, officials said.
The agreement updates an initial early-warning system set up last year by Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Bill Clinton to prevent accidental launches.
"The result will be deeper confidence and greater strategic stability between our two nations, which translates into a safer and more secure world," Albright said after the signing ceremony in Brussels on Saturday.
Ivanov told reporters that other nuclear powers would be invited to join the pact. He said such cooperation benefited everyone, not just the two former Cold War adversaries.
"All these efforts are aimed at strengthening strategic stability," he said.
Iranian impasse
Cooperation on preventing catastrophic misunderstandings began after the near-launch of a nuclear counterstrike in 1995, when Russia mistook a harmless weather rocket fired from Norway for a NATO missile.
Albright and Ivanov used their Saturday breakfast meeting to discuss a wide range of issues in what might be their last bilateral face-to-face meeting before the Clinton administration makes way for President-elect George W. Bush.
Topics ranging from the situation in the Balkans to arms sales to Iran were on the agenda.
Two weeks ago, Russia unilaterally walked away from a 1995 agreement with the U.S. that barred Moscow from making new weapons deals with Iran. No agreement was reached on that issue on Saturday.
Albright's visit to Europe is part of what could be her last big trip as secretary of state. She attended a NATO foreign ministers meeting on Thursday and Friday and spent the early part of the week in Africa and Hungary.
---
More Complicated Than the Red Button
Fox News
Saturday, December 16, 2000
Associated Press
http://www.foxnews.com/world/121600/russia_us.sml
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov signed an agreement Saturday aimed at strengthening cooperation on preventing accidental missile launches on both sides.
The new agreement comes as an update to an initial early warning system set up last year by President Clinton and Russian President Vladimir Putin to prevent accidental launches. The updated pact looks to expand a joint warning center where the sides can exchange information, officials said.
"The result will be deeper confidence and greater strategic stability between our two nations, which translates into a safer and more secure world," Albright said after the signing.
Ivanov told reporters that other nuclear powers will be invited to join the agreement. He said such cooperation benefits everyone, not just the two former Cold War adversaries.
"All these efforts are aimed at strengthening strategic stability," he said.
Cooperation on preventing accidental missile launches began after a near-launch of a nuclear counterstrike in 1995, when Russia mistook a harmless weather rocket fired from Norway for a NATO missile.
Albright and Ivanov used their breakfast meeting Saturday to discuss a wide range of issues in what might be their last bilateral face-to-face meeting before the Clinton administration makes way for President-elect George W. Bush. Topics ranging from the situation in the Balkans to arms sales to Iran were on the agenda.
Two weeks ago, Russia unilaterally walked away from a 1995 agreement with the United States that barred Moscow from making new weapons deals with Iran. No agreement was reached on that issue Saturday.
Albright's visit to Europe is part of what could be her last big trip as secretary of state. She attended a NATO foreign ministers meeting on Thursday and Friday and spent the early part of the week in Africa and Hungary.
---
US Russia sign nuclear accord
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Sat, 16 Dec 2000 22:59 ADST
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newslink/weekly/newsnat-16dec2000-60.htm
The United States and Russia have signed a new agreement aimed at preventing inadvertent retaliation in response to a false warning or missile attack.
The accord, which expands an earlier agreement, aims to reduce nuclear danger by establishing a pre-and post-launch notification system for launches of ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles.
It also provides for voluntary notification of satellites forced out of orbit, and certain space experiments that could adversely affect the operation of early warning radars.
--------
Putin hopeful about future US relations
Irish Times
Saturday, December 16, 2000
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2000/1216/wor14.htm
CUBA: Russian President Vladimir Putin, visiting Cuba, said yesterday he was optimistic about the future of Washington-Moscow ties under President-elect George W. Bush.
"Currently we have no special grounds to worry about the fate of Russian-American relations," Mr Putin told a news conference in Havana on the second full day of his visit.
Mr Putin, who sent a message on Thursday congratulating Mr Bush, added, however, that Russia continued to have various "differences" with the United States, including issues of international security.
"Much will depend on the policy of the new administration. The most important thing is that all the positive things we accumulated in recent years be preserved and increased. We have ground to hope that this development is possible," he said.
"During Bush's election campaign he expressed exactly this attitude to the prospects of Russia-US relations. And judging by the staff surrounding the US president-elect, these people are quite well-known professionals who know the situation deeply in the relations between the two states."
Mr Putin underlined Moscow's outstanding points of contention with Washington.
"We have differences with the US. Our positions referring to the anti-missile defence and to the system of international security differ," he said. "We don't think that the principle of humanitarian interventions is right."
Mr Putin, who joined President Fidel Castro in publicly condemning on Thursday the US embargo on Cuba, also called for a narrowing of wealth differences between "the golden billion" and the rest of the world's population.
Asked about the effect of the recent jailing, then pardon by Moscow, of American Edmond Pope, convicted of being a spy, he said it should not have any lasting impact on US-Russian ties.
"The activities of secret services of any state is aimed to protect state interests. But actions of these services, including intelligence and counterintelligence, shouldn't interfere in relations between states," Mr Putin said.
Mr Putin wound down his historic Cuba visit yesterday by hailing the dawn of a new era of warm ties with President Castro but without solving any of their outstanding disputes.
Two of his biggest disappointments were his failure to resolve the future of a half-built Russian-technology nuclear power plant in Cuba's Cienfuegos province, for whose upkeep Moscow still pays, or the fate of Havana's $11 billion Russian debt. - (AFP)
-------- ukraine
Last Chernobyl Reactor Shut Down
International Herald Tribune
Saturday, December 16, 2000
Sharon LaFraniere Washington Post Service
http://www.iht.com/articles/4504.htm
Ukrainians Recall Dead and Ailing, and Some Grieve for Jobs
CHERNOBYL, Ukraine From her narrow cot at a clinic in Kiev, Jenna Nitsko viewed the closing on Friday of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant with grim satisfaction.
The 24-year-old, dark-haired mother has a thick and ugly scar across her throat where, six weeks ago, a surgeon removed a malignant tumor from her thyroid.
Her doctor blames the 1986 explosion at one of Chernobyl's four reactors for the tumor. It was the world's worst nuclear accident, spewing radioactive dust and debris over Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and parts of Northern and Western Europe.
"Excellent," said Mrs. Nitsko, pausing momentarily from her book to comment on the Ukrainian authorities' decision to shut down the plant.
President Leonid Kuchma gave the ceremonial order from Kiev on Friday to halt the last reactor. The shutdown followed years of intense international pressure.
The plant's last operating reactor was No. 3. It is in the same building as reactor No. 4, which exploded and caught fire April 26, 1986, during an experiment.
Mrs. Nitsko's view is widely shared by the patients and staff at the National Institute of Endocrinology in Kiev, where the number of thyroid cancer patients has grown rapidly since the disaster.
But two hours away by car, in the town of Slavutich, built especially for Chernobyl workers, people regard the closing with dread.
As they see it, they risked their health in exchange for what they thought would be lifelong, well-paying jobs at the Chernobyl plant, which at the end was providing only about 5 percent of Ukraine's electricity. Now the workers will have fears for their health, but no work.
Anatoli Ignatenko, a 23-year veteran of the plant, said the Ukrainian authorities were breaking their promises to Chernobyl workers for purely political reasons.
"They told us this would be a city of the 21st century," he said. "I think they just deceived us."
As the debate between the clinic and the town illustrates, Chernobyl's emotional fallout continues even as workers prepared to push the button in the control room of reactor No. 3.
Questions persist about how to deal safely with the 200 tons of uranium and plutonium inside the ruined reactor No. 4 from the 1986 explosion.
Reactor No. 2 was shut down in 1991 after a fire and reactor No. 1 was closed in 1996 at the end of its planned life span.
The long-term health consequences of the accident are also a matter of continuing debate. In a recent report, the United Nations said the worst effects might be yet to come.
More than 4,000 Ukrainians who took part in the cleanup effort have died and 70,000 were disabled by radiation, according to the government.
About 3.4 million of the 50 million people in Ukraine, including 1.26 million children, are believed to have been affected by the accident.
Under pressure from the West, Mr. Kuchma decided in the summer to decommission the plant, although Ukraine badly needs the power and the jobs it provides. Western funding will help complete replacement reactors in western Ukraine.
U.S. officials have argued for years that the Chernobyl-style reactors, which exist only in Russia and some neighboring countries, are extremely unsafe.
Bill Richardson, the U.S. secretary of energy, said that Mr. Kuchma's decision was "a turning point for Ukraine, a symbolic break from its Soviet past and an entrance into the West."
With the plant closed, U.S. officials hope Ukrainian authorities can focus on the job of encasing, for the second time, the reactor that exploded 14 years ago, releasing 100 times more radiation than the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.
That reactor unit is now entombed in a "sarcophagus" of concrete and metal sheeting above which a reinforced smokestack rises about 250 feet.
The cover, built in the months after the accident, was supposed to endure 30 years. But water is already leaking inside and under some scenarios the whole basketball arena-sized structure could abruptly collapse.
Plans call for a new cover to built on top of the old one over the next seven years. Western countries have pledged to come up with $710 million of the estimated cost of $750 million. But how exactly it will be done, without risking more lives, is not yet clear.
"There has never been a project like this before," said Carlos Pascual, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.
Fresh evidence of the uncertainties that surround that reactor surfaced only a month ago. Plant officials said a 20 centimeter (8-inch) radioactive chunk of melted fuel dislodged from the smokestack and dropped onto the roof. Now, workers must figure out how to remove it.
At the endocrinology institute, the deputy director, Valeri Tereshchenko, faces more puzzles. He knows that the Chernobyl accident dramatically drove up rates of thyroid cancer in children.
Among children who lived closest to the plant, the rate of thyroid cancer - curable if caught early enough - is 100 times greater than the norm, he said. The disease won't peak until 2005.
What cannot be said for certain, according to Mr. Tereshchenko, is what other health problems might be traced to Chernobyl. "Decades will pass before we know all the consequences," he said.
Chernobyl workers have heard this kind of talk almost since the day of the accident, which killed 31 of their fellow workers. But today, foremost in their minds is how they will live after the closing of the plant, not what a doctor might tell them in the future.
About a third of the plant's 9,192 workers will lose their jobs after the televised ceremony in reactor No. 3's control room.
Slavutich, with its blocks of cheerful yellow apartment buildings, groves of trees and electric train to the plant, could start to resemble Pripyat, Chernobyl's old housing development. Evacuated after the accident, Pripyat is deserted under the shadow of a Ferris wheel, its yellow seats motionless for nearly 15 years.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Missile Defense High on Bush Agenda
New York Times
December 16, 2000 Filed at 5:03 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-Bush-and-the-World.html?pagewanted=all
The world according to George W. Bush during the campaign: a stronger U.S. military, a tougher line on Russia and China, a scaled-down peacekeeping role and a missile defense system to protect America, whether the rest of the globe likes it or not.
Now, as the president-elect builds his Cabinet and team of advisers, allies and foes wait to see how much of the Bush vision will become reality.
Not much, says Jonathan Stevenson, a research fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
``He faces a very divided Congress and one in which the Democrats are still stinging,'' Stevenson said. ``He probably will find it somewhat difficult to implement any radical changes in foreign policy terribly quickly. There will be gridlock.''
Bush, who cites Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill as his political heroes, has called for a ``new American internationalism'' in which U.S. interests come a very firm first.
The missile defense, a costly holdover from the Reagan era, is high on Bush's agenda and could provoke his first major international showdown. Russia is deeply opposed to its development, which would breach a 28-year-old treaty. Russian leaders fear it could ignite another arms race, which their beleaguered economy can't afford.
British Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain said Saturday that his government recognizes U.S. concerns over possible threats by so-called rogue states, but hopes Bush will pay attention to other nations' concerns about the missile defense system.
``What we don't want to see is any unilateral steps by Washington which could breach the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, especially in terms of Russian interests,'' Hain told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
The days of seemingly boundless friendship between the Kremlin and the White House seem unlikely to carry over to Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
``The Bush policy will be more realistic and not have any softness toward Russia. We could say the same for Putin's policy,'' said Vladimir Kovikov, research fellow at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies. ``They are not adversaries, but not allies either.''
The Middle East is wondering whether to expect a more detached approach, especially after the failure of President Clinton's strong personal effort to broker a peace deal between Palestinians and Israelis.
``I think we will see a different policy, not based on emotional attachment to the peace process, but with more realpolitik. ... There will be more pressure on the parties in the region to think about their own policies,'' said Gerald Steinberg, head of the conflict resolution program at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel.
In Asia, the Bush policies may bite most sharply in China and Japan.
Bush supports trade deals to further open the giant Chinese market. But he has been unwavering in criticism of the ``appalling'' policies of the nation where his father -- former President George Bush -- was America's chief diplomat in the mid-1970s.
He has clearly defined his military and diplomatic support for Taiwan, China's rival. He has called China ``an espionage threat'' and denounced its population-control programs and curbs on religious freedom as ``policies without reason and without mercy.''
A hard line against China, however, could send shivers through the whole region.
''(Bush) has to consider having strategic cooperation with China. Without it, it will be impossible to preserve stability in the Asia-Pacific,'' said Yan Xuetong, an international security specialist at Beijing's Tsinghua University.
Still, the tensions aren't new, and past Chinese and U.S. governments have always worked hard to keep things under control. Both the Chinese and members of the Bush camp have expressed a desire to forge a working relationship, and at least one Bush adviser has traveled to Beijing to gauge its misgivings.
Japan will be alert for any sign that the Bush administration may intensify old trade rivalries as the U.S. economy cools. ``They may begin to pick on Japan again,'' said Junichi Makino, an economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research in Tokyo. ``They've been quiet because the U.S. economy was doing great.''
Asian leaders also fear that with his narrow and disputed mandate, Bush may lack the clout to rush to their aid during fiscal and political unrest, as Clinton did for Mexico in 1994.
``He doesn't have a perceived mandate,'' said Desmond Supple, director of economic research at Barclays Capital in Singapore.
Bush must overcome another perception: that he lacks international experience and is too reliant on a military-minded group led by Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, a former defense secretary, and retired Gen. Colin Powell, named Saturday as Bush's choice for secretary of state.
Sen. Jesse Helms, head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will also have a pipeline into the White House for his hostile attitude to the U.N. bureaucracy and other international bodies.
Bush backs the Senate's rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- a position that has won him praise from other treaty opponents such as India.
The Balkans could be a key test of a new U.S. attitude.
Bush has pledged to reduce the present 9,000-member U.S. military contingent in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. He says U.S. forces should be consolidated in order to fight large-scale wars where U.S. interests are directly at stake.
Bush has acknowledged that a Balkan withdrawal is not imminent, but he has made it clear that European allies should play a greater role in policing the continent. At the same time, European Union leaders are seeking to create their own defense arm.
``It's an opportunity for Europe to emancipate itself, to mature,'' said Thanos Veremis, president of the Hellenic Foundation for Defense and Foreign Policy in Athens, Greece.
The new Yugoslav leadership is also seeking more European intervention to counterbalance the United States. But the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are desperate for a strong American presence.
``The withdrawal of American troops would mean Kosovo would again be a flashpoint,'' warned Kole Berisha, vice president of Kosovo's main political party.
Yugoslav President Vojislav Kostunica said Saturday he expects less American presence in the Balkans under the Bush administration and added that NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia last year would have been unlikely had a Republican been in the White House.
The Republicans ``always had an isolationist wing,'' Kostunica said, ``which is strictly against American interference in disputes in certain parts of the world, and which is against the thinking that protection of American interests demands a presence in the Balkans or bombing like the one last year against Yugoslavia.''
Some Africans fear that their continent's miseries -- wars, famine, AIDS -- may register only a blip on the Bush radar, compared with the unprecedented interest shown by the Clinton administration.
``A Bush presidency portends a return to the blatantly anti-African policies of the Reagan-Bush years,'' wrote Salih Booker, director of the African Policy Information Center in Washington.
Latin America will be watching whether Bush scales back the Clinton administration's role in a Colombian drive to wipe out coca plants in the country's cocaine-producing regions.
One country that foresees no change is Cuba, which expects Bush to uphold the U.S. embargo.
``From the new boss, we expect little,'' said a statement read on Cuban state television.
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Cohen Visits Troops Off Italy Coast
Associated Press
December 16, 2000 Filed at 12:22 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Italy-Cohen.html
ABOARD THE USS TRUMAN (AP) -- American officials are on guard against possible terrorist attacks during the holiday season, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen said Saturday.
Cohen was aboard the aircraft carrier USS Truman off the Italian coast, the first stop of a four-day trip to visit U.S. troops in Italy and the Balkans.
``We're trying to anticipate whether or not there will be any action that might coincide with the end of Ramadan and the beginning of our Christmas holidays,'' the outgoing defense secretary said. ``It is a period that we watch very closely.''
Earlier this month, Cohen authorized the deployment of extra Navy and Coast Guard personnel in the Persian Gulf, stepping up security in the aftermath of the Oct. 12 terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 sailors.
Cohen also said that the transformation of the U.S. military into a ``more rapidly deployable, lighter and more sustainable'' force is ``irreversible,'' and that the new administration led by President-elect George W. Bush will have to follow the same path.
``These initiatives are essential if we're going to transform the force that we had in the 20th century into one of the 21st century,'' Cohen said. ``I don't see any prospects of them fading away.''
Cohen said such a force would be better equipped against the challenges the United States and Europe will confront in the upcoming years, such as transnational terrorism, the use of chemical and biological weapons and political instability.
Cohen was on his fourth and last tour of U.S. troops abroad.
``It is the most exhausting job one could possibly ever have,'' he said of his tenure as defense secretary, addressing hundreds of soldiers in the ship's hangar. ``It's also the most rewarding.''
Accompanying Cohen on his visit to the carrier was his wife, Janet, and a lineup of celebrities that include football Hall-of-Famer Terry Bradshaw and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.
The Truman is a new, nuclear-powered vessel on its first deployment. It carries a crew of 5,000.
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Bush Could Forge New Direction in U.S.-Russia Ties
Russia Today
Dec 16, 2000
http://www.russiatoday.com/news.php3?id=230858
WASHINGTON -- (Reuters) Relations between the United States and Russia, which experts say are now at a critical juncture, could undergo fundamental change as President-elect George W. Bush takes power in Washington.
Over the past year, he and his advisers outlined views that critics fear would turn Russia back into an enemy. But Republicans have insisted the Bush positions are more realistic and would better protect U.S. interests.
Many details of Bush's policy are left unclear.
But during the election campaign, Bush himself raised expectations for significant changes in U.S.-Russian ties, calling for nothing less than a "new strategic relationship to protect the peace of the world."
This is likely to be underpinned by Bush's stated conviction that "Russia is a great power and must always be treated as such."
But the president-elect's approach is also expected to reflect a tougher line toward Moscow on missile defenses, aid, corruption, arms control and Chechnya, as well as a greater proclivity to take on Russia when it acts against perceived U.S. interests.
CLINTON FAULTED
Bush advisers had accused the Clinton administration for having too "romantic" a view of Russia after communism fell and the country moved toward democracy and capitalism.
"People know that policy toward Russia has failed," Bush foreign policy adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters last September.
Bush may have a freer hand in dealing sternly with Moscow now that the Russian president is Vladimir Putin, who has made strides in reforming the economy but has set back the cause of democracy by weakening all major sources of power independent of the executive branch.
On missile defenses, Bush has publicly promised to "develop and deploy" national and theater systems, despite strong opposition from Russia, as well as China and NATO allies.
The Washington Post reported on Dec. 10 that Bush told the Russian foreign minister directly last April that the U.S. commitment to build a missile defense system was "a political fact of life that Russia and other nations had to absorb."
The issue is certain to be a continuing flashpoint between Washington and Moscow, in addition to other capitals.
Russia fears that a national missile defense system that seeks to protect U.S. territory, would seriously undermine or erode its nuclear arsenal, which has been the basis of deterrence for the past 50 years.
But the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a recent report on the need to "renew" U.S.-Russia ties, said any system that the United States would be able to deploy in the next 10-15 years would not threaten Russia in that way.
MISSILE DEFENSE KEY ISSUE
The report argued that before moving ahead with missile defense, the Bush administration should make a fresh assessment of the threat from missiles capable of hitting the United States and redouble efforts to stem proliferation.
And unless the missile proliferation threat significantly worsens (with another North Korean test, for instance) then the United States should not unilaterally defect from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, which limits missiles defenses, the Carnegie experts said.
The Bush team has also signaled that the new president would end U.S. support for billions of dollars in aid to Russia from the International Monetary Fund.
Bush "does think further IMF funding doesn't make sense at this point," Rice, who is expected to be Bush's National Security Adviser, said in an interview during the campaign.
She has complained about Russia's lack of a rule of law, a senseless tax policy and rampant corruption and blamed the Clinton administration for missing an opportunity to really transform the Russian economy.
The Bush team has also declared its intention to withhold international financial assistance to Russia because of the Russian government's attacks against civilians in the breakaway province of Chechnya.
"Even as we support Russian reform, we cannot excuse Russian brutality," Bush said in his major foreign policy speech in November 1999.
UNILATERAL ARMS CUTS
Bush has expressed skepticism about the process of negotiated arms deals that has been a staple feature of the U.S.-Soviet and then U.S.-Russia relationship.
But he has endorsed further reductions in nuclear weapons and has hinted he might take unilateral action, which could dramatically change the international security environment.
The United States and Russia are already committed under the START II treaty to slash their nuclear arsenals from more than 6,000 deployed weapons to 3,000-3,500 weapons by 2007.
The Carnegie report argued that Washington should unilaterally reduce its level to 1,000 to 1,5000 weapons.
Putin has suggested that Russia, which is finding it increasingly difficult to maintain its nuclear arsenal because of economic problems, would take similar action.
Bush, concerned that vast amounts of Russian nuclear material cannot be accounted for, has declared his intention to press for an accurate inventory of this material and to seek expanded funding from Congress to dismantle as many of Russia's weapons as quickly as possible.
Tensions in the U.S.-Russia relationship could flare over plans to expand NATO further, Moscow's transfer of conventional arms and nuclear expertise to Iran and Putin's effort this week to breathe new life into ties with Cuba.
But Moscow defused another problem this week by pardoning and freeing American Edmund Pope, who was convicted of espionage after spending eight months in jail. He denied the charges.
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Human rights low on the agenda
Sydney Morning Herald
16/12/2000
By Hamish McDonald, Foreign Editor
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0012/16/text/world8.html
A new Republican administration under George W.Bush is likely to look out to Asia with a stronger focus on defence issues, and less interest in human rights, labour standards and perhaps democratic reforms than the outgoing Clinton presidency.
Allies in the region, such as Australia, are likely to get a more sympathetic hearing in Washington, but will be expected to shape up better as loyal defence partners.
Key positions in the State and Defence departments and the National Security Council will be filled by hawkish figures who made their names on the defence side of the Reagan and Bush snr administrations.
Clinton, by contrast, had looked more to corporate law and trade experts.
The crucial pivot of American policy will be the handling of the triangular United States-China-Japan strategic relationship, and its Korean peninsula sideshow, on which the overall level of regional tension will depend.
The Bush team is generally expected to be less respectful of the "One China" policy by giving clearer defence guarantees to Taiwan, and less inclined to engage with Beijing, which Bush has described as a strategic "competitor", in contrast to Clinton's line that China is a "strategic partner".
Bush is more likely to support a "robust" national missile defence system, which would call into question China's small nuclear deterrent force and possibly force it into a faster and expensive nuclear build-up.
If a theatre missile shield was offered to Japan, the more so if it covered Taiwan as well, Beijing would feel it was being put on the spot over recovering the breakaway island.
One of Bush's key defence advisors, former deputy defence secretary Richard Armitage, even warned last year that if it came to conflict over Taiwan, Washington would expect Australia to share the "dirty, hard and dangerous work".
In that extreme case, with the long-range Collins-class submarines being brought to full operational readiness, and the latest Defence White Paper announcing an upgrade for our F-111 strike aircraft, Australia will not be able to plead lack of capability.
It would be a nightmarish decision.
But tensions over Taiwan have eased since the island's elections in May, and much will depend on China's behaviour. In addition, missile defence is still unproven technically and raises major problems in further arms reduction measures with Russia. In office, these hurdles may loom larger to Bush than they did on the campaign trail.
The Bush team is inclined to stress the primacy of Japan as its defence partner in Asia-in an echo of the "Ron-Yasu" (Reagan-Nakasone) duo's squeeze on the dying Soviet Union in the 1980s.
As well as alarming China at the start of a new Asian "containment" policy, this will renew stress on the war-renouncing Article 9 of Japan's postwar Constitution and possibly give a lifeline to its failing conservative politicians.
The security emphasis may preclude any risk-taking with American forces in North-East Asia, such as pulling the unpopular US Marine garrison in Okinawa back to Guam, or reducing the American "tripwire" force in South Korea.
However, the Republicans will be less interested in using sanctions to force internal structural changes. China, Burma and Indonesia will face less pressure on democratic reforms and labour issues.
The administration would be less inclined to insist on political strings to IMF and World Bank aid. But the flipside is an objection to economic bail-outs.
Clinton's tough line towards reform of the Indonesian military, and a clean-up of the West Timor militias, may be toned down and a drift back to authoritarian rule in Jakarta accepted.
Henry Kissinger, the mentor of many Bush advisers, recently joined the board of Freeport McMoran, which runs the giant gold and copper mine in West Papua. Washington may place renewed stress on Indonesia's national unity.
In South Asia, the Republicans may be inclined to restore relations with military-ruled Pakistan, reversing Clinton's tilt towards New Delhi, which acknowledges India's emerging economic importance.
The Republicans will have to grapple with the fraying sanctions around Iraq, while, with Iran, big oil is likely to speak loudest, and Washington is likely to let American firms compete with European rivals for Iranian and Central Asian natural gas and oil.
If some of the pre-election Republican pronouncements have been belligerent, the focus of the expected seniormost foreign policy officials - Colin Powell as secretary of state and Condoleeza Rice as national security adviser - will be on Europe and the Middle East.
The key diplomatic position for our region, assistant secretary of state for east Asian affairs, is tipped to go to James A.Kelly, who was a Pentagon official and a member of the National Security Council in the Reagan administration.
Now presiding over the Pacific Forum/Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Hawaii, Kelly is well acquainted with counterparts across the region, and would be a cautious, reassuring face for the administration.
Asian policy will increasingly get the Bush administration's attention, as the next summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum will be held in Shanghai in November 2001, by which time Bush must have his China policies in shape.
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Missile defense sure to be high on Bush's list
Advisers say he's open to options to current ground-based system
Alabama Live
12/16/00
Huntsville Times
By BRETT DAVIS Times Washington Correspondent
http://www.al.com/news/huntsville/Dec2000/16-e15598.html
WASHINGTON - President-elect Bush has said he will push hard to deploy a nationwide missile defense system as soon as possible.
But that may not necessarily be good news for the Huntsville defense industry.
Bush's defense advisers have also said he's willing to consider alternative ways of deploying a defense beyond the present ground-based system, including putting interceptors on ships to hit enemy missiles shortly after they launch. Follow-on, space-based systems could do that job even better.
The National Missile Defense system is being developed largely by the Army in Huntsville under the guidance of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, but two consecutive botched intercept tests have clouded its future.
Adherents of alternate plans argued their cases in newspaper op-eds and policy papers over the summer, hoping to influence whichever candidate won the White House.
Condoleezza Rice, Bush's probable national security adviser, has indicated Bush is open to hearing new ideas. At this summer's GOP National Convention, she told The Times that Bush ''really wants to look at all the options.''
But some defense observers say no other system is as far along as the National Missile ''Such an evaluation should not be permitted to delay efforts to deploy a land-based national missile defense system.'' Defense study conducted by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies Defense program, which is likely to remain the centerpiece for America's ballistic defense efforts for at least the near future.
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., one of the House's most fervent supporters of missile defense, said he hopes backers of sea-based defenses and ground-based defenses don't get into a political war under the Bush administration.
''I know there are some who have taken sides,'' said Weldon, who's being considered as possible chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. ''I have not taken sides.''
He said he supports the current ground-based system, but he would like to see the Pentagon investigate ship-based defenses and other systems.
''We need to start fresh and ask that question'' about what other defenses could work, Weldon said.
However, he said some supporters of sea-based defenses have been guilty of overstating how quickly such a system could be ready. ''I think there's been some overselling of the sea-based approach,'' Weldon said Friday.
Weldon appeared at a Capitol Hill press conference to announce a defense study conducted by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies, an international policy analysis group headed by President Clinton's former Deputy Secretary of Defense John Hamre.
That study said the Pentagon should consider putting a ground-based National Missile Defense site in Grand Forks, N.D., as soon as possible, to serve as a test bed for a much larger system that would have interceptors at three to five sites.
It also called for more testing of the system, especially testing against tough countermeasures the attacker might use to confuse the defense system, such as Mylar balloons that can shield a nuclear warhead from detection by an incoming interceptor.
The study also says the next White House should consider sea-based defenses, and defenses that shoot down enemy missiles shortly after they launch, rather than when they're attempting to re-enter the atmosphere - but they should complement the ground-based system, not compete with it.
''Such an evaluation should not be permitted to delay efforts to deploy a land-based national missile defense system,'' the report says.
Call for more money
It also called for big bucks in the future to be added to the program's budget - ''several billion dollars annually,'' it said, on top of a missile defense budget already hovering around $4 billion a year.
Missile defense was only one part of a defense system considered by the study, which also looked at ways to fight chemical or biological weapons attacks by terrorists or rogue states.
The study's proposals won the support of Weldon and other prominent lawmakers, including Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Co-existing plans
Baker Spring, who analyzes national security issues for the conservative Heritage Foundation, predicted a larger missile defense pie that new proposals and existing programs will share.
''He's not going to want to fracture the pro-missile defense coalition on Capitol Hill by pitting one specific element of the architecture against another,'' Spring said of Bush.
Spring predicts Bush will be much more skeptical of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, which prohibits deployment of a nationwide missile defense.
Missile treaty
Clinton hoped to persuade Russia to agree to amend that treaty so the Nation Missile Defense system could be deployed but, so far, Russia has balked. Some missile defense proponents in Congress want to scuttle the treaty altogether and build a much larger defense system.
Bush has signaled he'd like to try amending the treaty, too - but he's also willing to walk away from it if Russia won't agree.
''My judgment is he cannot save the ABM treaty,'' Spring said. ''At some point or another, there's going to have to be a walking away from the ABM treaty.''
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Missile Defense High on Bush Agenda
Associated Press
December 16, 2000 Filed at 12:49 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-Bush-and-the-World.html?pagewanted=all
The world according to George W. Bush during the campaign: a stronger U.S. military, a tougher line on Russia and China, a scaled-down peacekeeping role and a missile defense system to protect America, whether the rest of the globe likes it or not.
Now, as the president-elect builds his Cabinet and team of advisers, allies and foes wait to see how much of the Bush vision will become reality.
Not much, says Jonathan Stevenson, a research fellow at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.
``He faces a very divided Congress and one in which the Democrats are still stinging,'' Stevenson said. ``He probably will find it somewhat difficult to implement any radical changes in foreign policy terribly quickly. There will be gridlock.''
Bush, who cites Ronald Reagan and Winston Churchill as his political heroes, has called for a ``new American internationalism'' in which U.S. interests come a very firm first.
The missile defense, a costly holdover from the Reagan era, is high on Bush's agenda and could provoke his first major international showdown. Russia is deeply opposed to its development, which would breach a 28-year-old treaty. Russian leaders fear it could ignite another arms race, which their beleaguered economy can't afford.
British Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain said Saturday that his government recognizes U.S. concerns over possible threats by so-called rogue states, but hopes Bush will pay attention to other nations' concerns about the missile defense system.
``What we don't want to see is any unilateral steps by Washington which could breach the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, especially in terms of Russian interests,'' Hain told British Broadcasting Corp. radio.
The days of seemingly boundless friendship between the Kremlin and the White House seem unlikely to carry over to Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
``The Bush policy will be more realistic and not have any softness toward Russia. We could say the same for Putin's policy,'' said Vladimir Kovikov, research fellow at the Russian Institute of Strategic Studies. ``They are not adversaries, but not allies either.''
The Middle East is wondering whether to expect a more detached approach, especially after the failure of President Clinton's strong personal effort to broker a peace deal between Palestinians and Israelis.
``I think we will see a different policy, not based on emotional attachment to the peace process, but with more realpolitik. ... There will be more pressure on the parties in the region to think about their own policies,'' said Gerald Steinberg, head of the conflict resolution program at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, Israel.
In Asia, the Bush policies may bite most sharply in China and Japan.
Bush supports trade deals to further open the giant Chinese market. But he has been unwavering in criticism of the ``appalling'' policies of the nation where his father -- former President George Bush -- was America's chief diplomat in the mid-1970s.
He has clearly defined his military and diplomatic support for Taiwan, China's rival. He has called China ``an espionage threat'' and denounced its population-control programs and curbs on religious freedom as ``policies without reason and without mercy.''
A hard line against China, however, could send shivers through the whole region.
''(Bush) has to consider having strategic cooperation with China. Without it, it will be impossible to preserve stability in the Asia-Pacific,'' said Yan Xuetong, an international security specialist at Beijing's Tsinghua University.
Still, the tensions aren't new, and past Chinese and U.S. governments have always worked hard to keep things under control. Both the Chinese and members of the Bush camp have expressed a desire to forge a working relationship, and at least one Bush adviser has traveled to Beijing to gauge its misgivings.
Japan will be alert for any sign that the Bush administration may intensify old trade rivalries as the U.S. economy cools. ``They may begin to pick on Japan again,'' said Junichi Makino, an economist at the Daiwa Institute of Research in Tokyo. ``They've been quiet because the U.S. economy was doing great.''
Asian leaders also fear that with his narrow and disputed mandate, Bush may lack the clout to rush to their aid during fiscal and political unrest, as Clinton did for Mexico in 1994.
``He doesn't have a perceived mandate,'' said Desmond Supple, director of economic research at Barclays Capital in Singapore.
Bush must overcome another perception: that he lacks international experience and is too reliant on a military-minded group led by Vice President-elect Dick Cheney, a former defense secretary, and retired Gen. Colin Powell, named Saturday as Bush's choice for secretary of state.
Sen. Jesse Helms, head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, will also have a pipeline into the White House for his hostile attitude to the U.N. bureaucracy and other international bodies.
Bush backs the Senate's rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty -- a position that has won him praise from other treaty opponents such as India.
The Balkans could be a key test of a new U.S. attitude.
Bush has pledged to reduce the present 9,000-member U.S. military contingent in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. He says U.S. forces should be consolidated in order to fight large-scale wars where U.S. interests are directly at stake.
Bush has acknowledged that a Balkan withdrawal is not imminent, but he has made it clear that European allies should play a greater role in policing the continent. At the same time, European Union leaders are seeking to create their own defense arm.
``It's an opportunity for Europe to emancipate itself, to mature,'' said Thanos Veremis, president of the Hellenic Foundation for Defense and Foreign Policy in Athens, Greece.
The new Yugoslav leadership is also seeking more European intervention to counterbalance the United States. But the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are desperate for a strong American presence.
``The withdrawal of American troops would mean Kosovo would again be a flashpoint,'' warned Kole Berisha, vice president of Kosovo's main political party.
Some Africans fear that their continent's miseries -- wars, famine, AIDS -- may register only a blip on the Bush radar, compared with the unprecedented interest shown by the Clinton administration.
``A Bush presidency portends a return to the blatantly anti-African policies of the Reagan-Bush years,'' wrote Salih Booker, director of the African Policy Information Center in Washington.
Latin America will be watching whether Bush scales back the Clinton administration's role in a Colombian drive to wipe out coca plants in the country's cocaine-producing regions.
One country that foresees no change is Cuba, which expects Bush to uphold the U.S. embargo.
``From the new boss, we expect little,'' said a statement read on Cuban state television.
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Colin L. Powell: Ultimate Insider With Star Power
Associated Press
December 16, 2000
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/16/politics/17POWE.html?pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 -- Gen. Colin L. Powell has been lionized in stamps, baseball cards, bronze medals, audio tapes and more than a dozen biographies for children and adults.
But of all the icons venerating the retired four-star general over the years, the one than stands out is the limited-edition, G. I. Joe "action figure" that the toy maker Hasbro produced two years ago.
The doll's face is fiercer, its shoulders broader, its waist slimmer and its complexion fairer than the real-life model. But it came dressed in a true-to-scale uniform decorated with ribbons, insignias and stars and included a press release that lauded General Powell as "a real-life hero" and an "inspiration" to the children of America.
Now General Powell will get the chance to channel some of that star power to a Bush presidency. As the nominee for secretary of state -- the first black who will hold the post -- he brings 35 years of military service with him, including four years as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff both for the Bush and the Clinton administrations.
General Powell brings savvy negotiating skills honed as deputy national security adviser and then as national security adviser in the Reagan administration, where he was a key player at the summit meetings that brought the United States and the former Soviet Union closer.
He is the ultimate insider, a policy maker's general, touted as the model of the modern Army general in an era when diplomatic finesse seemed as important as combat experience. Indeed, except for four command assignments, none more than 15 months, General Powell served in the power corridors of Washington from 1969 until he retired in 1993.
General Powell was offered the job of secretary of state once before, at the end of 1994, by President Clinton, when Warren Christopher was thinking of leaving. But the general said no, writing in his autobiography that when Mr. Clinton summoned him to the residential quarters of the White House one December Sunday morning, he replied that he and his wife, Alma, wanted a "longer break from public life."
In private life, General Powell has made millions from his speeches (about $75,000 an appearance) and his 1995 autobiography, "My American Journey," which earned him a $6 million advance and was a runaway best seller. Under an arrangement with his speaker's agent, he has barred most video or audio taping of his speeches, which means there is no definitive public record of his views since he left the government.
In 1995, General Powell flirted with the idea of running for president, and his deliberations tantalized voters and for a time froze the Republican nomination. At about the same time, he embarked on a successful book tour for his autobiography. But his wife said that she would worry about her husband's safety if he became a candidate, and he announced that he would not run in 1996 because the campaign would require "a calling that I do not yet hear."
Two years later, he became founder and chairman of America's Promise: The Alliance for Youth, an organization that works with corporations, charities and communities to encourage volunteerism to help disadvantaged youth. (The organization, which has claimed to have mobilized millions of volunteers and contributed $300 million to programs helping 10 million children, has been criticized by some experts on volunteerism for inflating its results.)
"He is," wrote the historian Ronald Steel, "as Walter Lippmann wrote about Ike before he won the Republican nomination in 1952, 'not a real figure in our public life, but a kind of dream boy embodying all the unsatisfied wishes of all the people who are discontented with things as they are.'"
The son of immigrants from Jamaica, Colin Luther Powell was born on April 5, 1937, in Harlem, and reared in a racially and ethnically integrated neighborhood in the South Bronx. His father was a gardener and a building superintendent, and a stock boy, shipping clerk and foreman in Manhattan's garment district; his mother was a seamstress.
He earned a bachelor's degree in geology from the City University of New York where he fell in love with the Reserve Officer Training Corps program. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and was sent to Fort Benning, Ga., in 1958. There, he found a career in the Army, already probably the most integrated institution in American life.
He met his wife, Alma Vivian Johnson, on a blind date in 1961. They were married less than a year later. "She came from a fine family, got along with my circle of friends and was even a great cook," he wrote about her in his memoirs. They have three grown children, Michael, Linda and Anne, and two grandchildren, Jeffrey and Bryan.
Less than four years after his first commission, General Powell was on his way to Vietnam, where he completed two tours of combat duty. Wounded slightly in combat, once by stepping on punji stick, once in a helicopter crash, he was awarded the Purple Heart. He also holds the Defense Distinguished Service Medal with oak leaf cluster, the military's highest noncombat decoration, and two Presidential Medals of Freedom.
After Vietnam, the Army sent him to George Washington University, in 1969, to earn a master's degree in business administration. When only a major, he was catapulted into the political arena in 1972 with membership into an elite club: the one-year White House fellowship program, working in the Office of Management and Budget studying the structure of government. After tours of duty in the field, including command of an infantry battalion in South Korea, he spent four years in the Pentagon under President Carter, followed by a year as a senior aide in the Energy Department.
By 1983 he had worked his way up to military assistant to Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger. In that job, General Powell issued the secret order approved by President Reagan to transfer 4,000 antitank missiles from the Army to the Central Intelligence Agency for transshipment to Iran to help free American hostages in Lebanon in violation of the administration's stated weapons embargo of Iran. (Despite the uproar that ensued, it was determined that General Powell did nothing illegal.)
After three years, General Powell returned to soldiering, when he commanded the Army's Fifth Corps in Western Europe. But the lure of Washington was too strong, and in 1986 he was drawn back to the White House as deputy national security adviser, becoming national security adviser the following year. Before President Reagan left office he awarded General Powell his fourth star, assigning him to head the Forces Command, overseeing all troops in the continental United States with responsibility for defense of the American mainland.
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Bush administration (the youngest ever), General Powell is best known by the American public for wielding a mean baton at the televised war briefings from the Pentagon as he oversaw the war that forced President Saddam Hussein of Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Criticized afterwards as a "reluctant warrior" for ending the war without destroying all of Iraq's elite Republican Guards and removing Mr. Hussein from power, he wrote in his memoirs: "A reluctant warrior? Guilty. War is a deadly game and I do not believe in spending the lives of Americans lightly."
Since his retirement, he has made no secret of his disdain for the centralized decision-making process in Washington. "I don't waste time in Washington," he said during this year's campaign, adding that he had just come from a conference of governors. "That's where the action is."
General Powell has not spent nearly as much time with Mr. Bush as has Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Bush's choice as national security adviser, or Dick Cheney, the vice president-elect. How the general's strongly held views will fit with those of Mr. Bush and others on his team will have to unfold along the way.
During the campaign, for example, Mr. Bush repeatedly used the phrase "rogue state" to refer to North Korea, Iran and Iraq, an expression that was underscored by Ms. Rice in an article earlier this year in Foreign Affairs.
"I detest the term 'rogue state,' General Powell said during the campaign. "I don't know what you gain throwing a lot of different countries into a pot and calling them rogue states. They are all so different."
And while Mr. Bush has said that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty should be scrapped if the Russians refused to make changes acceptable to the United States, General Powell has been more cautious, saying in an interview: "I think probably it should be modified. But it's going to scare the bejesus out of a lot of our friends."
General Powell has also split with President-elect Bush on the issue of affirmative action. Mr. Bush has opposed policies that have given preferences to minorities; General Powell has fiercely criticized the Republican Party for condemning affirmative action. "Some in our Party miss no opportunity to roundly and loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand kids get an education, but you hardly hear a whimper when it's affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax code with preferences for special interests," he said at the Republican National Convention.
There is also the question of whether the general, even wearing diplomatic pinstripes, might outshine the commander in chief. In serving in the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, General Powell served a president who was a decorated combat pilot in World War II.
In serving in a George Walker Bush administration, General Powell will serve a president who avoided service in Vietnam by joining the Texas Air National Guard. And yet General Powell, in his memoirs, condemned as "an anti-democratic disgrace" the way America's political leaders chose who would and who would not serve in Vietnam.
He wrote: "I am angry that so many of the sons of the powerful and well-placed" managed "to wrangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units."
"Of the many tragedies of Vietnam," he continued, "this raw class discrimination strikes me a the most damaging to the ideal that all Americans are created equal and owe equal allegiance to their country."
---
106th Congress Knows Partisan Trials
Associated Press
December 16, 2000 Filed at 12:19 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Congress-in-Review.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- It was a Congress that began with an attempt to unseat the president, was dominated by both parties thwarting the goals of the other and ended with many major issues unaddressed.
While President-elect Bush promises to bring a new attitude of bipartisanship, the reality of the departing Congress is that it was one of the most partisan in recent history, starting with the impeachment trial.
The 106th Congress also was one of the longest, finally concluding Friday, 10 weeks behind schedule because of tenacious battles over spending levels and issues, from immigration reform to workplace safety rules.
Assessment of the two-year session, like everything else, differs along party lines.
House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, in a year-end memo to fellow Republicans, said that with a thin majority, they had ``produced historic achievements that were unthinkable during 40 years of Democratic rule.''
Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, at a Halloween news conference decorated with gravestones marking failed legislative efforts, said it had become ``the Congress of the living dead.''
There were a few major accomplishments: modernizing the nation's banking system, normalizing trade relations with China, boosting investment in the nation's aviation system and initiating a cleanup of Florida's Everglades.
On the technology front, Congress successfully passed legislation to validate electronic signatures and make satellite television accessible to more Americans.
Lawmakers increased defense spending, gave service members a healthy pay raise and committed the nation to building missile defense system.
Entering the new age of budget surpluses, the national debt was reduced $354 billion over the past three years. Meantime, the final budget deal completed Friday contained significant new spending for health and education programs that enjoy broad support from both parties.
But more often, the pattern was the House passing legislation that died in the Senate, or the House and Senate failing to agree, or President Clinton vetoing GOP bills.
Patients' rights legislation stalled in a House-Senate conference over to what extent patients and their families should be allowed to sue insurers and HMOs. A similar fate met gun safety measures attached to a juvenile crime bill after the shootings at Colorado's Columbine High School more than a year ago.
The two parties, while agreeing on general goals, failed to bridge their philosophical differences on how best to provide prescription drug benefits to seniors, or extend the lives of the Social Security and Medicare programs.
Clinton never sent a hostile Senate an international agreement on global warming, and the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Other Democratic priorities such as campaign finance reform, a minimum wage increase and expanding federal hate crimes protection to homosexuals made little headway.
``This Congress wasted its energy,'' said Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. ``It was a tragedy of missed opportunities.''
But Armey said it was a victory for Congress that ``we didn't do all kinds of bad things.'' He mentioned patients' rights measures that would enrich trial lawyers, in addition to affirmative action, limits on gun owners' rights and the hate crimes measure.
Republicans scored some major defeats and modest victories on their top agenda item, cutting taxes. Last year President Clinton vetoed a massive plan to reduce taxes by $792 billion over 10 years.
This year Republicans shifted strategy, passing smaller, more targeted tax packages. But Clinton again vetoed a measure to eliminate estate taxes and another aimed at easing the ``marriage penalty'' paid by millions of two-income couples. Other plans to end a telephone tax, and expand contribution limits on 401(k) and IRA investments never reached him.
Clinton did sign a measure scrapping a law that reduced Social Security benefits for working seniors and is expected to sign another that gives tax relief for community renewal projects.
``It was a housekeeping session,'' said Larry Sabato, a professor at the University of Virginia who studies Congress. ``There were lots of small things passed, but nothing that will dramatically change American lives.''
Despite the popularity of some of the Democratic causes, Sabato noted that voters decided to keep Republicans in power in the House, if by a slightly smaller margin.
``If people wanted an activist Congress, this election provided a perfect opportunity for change,'' he said. ``There are times in American history when people want to be left alone.''
---
The Bush Foreign Policy Team
New York Times
December 16, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/16/opinion/16SAT1.html
President-elect George W. Bush's intention to name Colin Powell as secretary of state and Condoleezza Rice as national security adviser instantly enhances his coming administration. They are seasoned, thoughtful practitioners who will bring international stature and extensive knowledge to the Bush administration and will help compensate for Mr. Bush's own inexperience.
Just where the administration intends to take American foreign policy remains unclear. The backgrounds of these and other prospective Bush advisers suggest a revival of the broad policy ideas of the past two Republican presidents. But the policies will need to be adapted to a changed world. Unlike the other governors who assumed the presidency in recent decades - Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton - Mr. Bush has devoted scant time to thinking about national security matters. And until his run for president, he showed passing curiosity about the world.
General Powell has a distinguished record of military and civilian leadership, having served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Presidents Bush and Clinton and as national security adviser under President Reagan. He would be the first former general to head the State Department since Alexander Haig two decades ago and the first African-American. General Powell unquestionably has the political skills and command presence to become the dominant voice in policymaking, but he has more experience in executing and coordinating policy than in designing it. Dick Cheney, a former secretary of defense, is likely to exercise considerable influence on these matters as vice president, as is the new Pentagon chief whom Mr. Bush selects.
Ms. Rice seems likely to play a formidable role as well, not only because she was a shaper of policy during the presidency of Mr. Bush's father but also because she has developed a close working relationship with the Texas governor during the last 18 months. Ms. Rice, a former Stanford provost, gained critical experience as the White House's senior director for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the years of Communism's collapse, helping the last Bush administration successfully handle the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the reunification of Germany. She would be the first woman to hold the top White House foreign policy job. One of her most important responsibilities will be to manage the flow of advice reaching Mr. Bush and to dampen the inevitable foreign policy frictions that develop within an administration. She well knows that such tensions can paralyze the White House.
During the presidential campaign Mr. Bush sketched out the broad outlines of his foreign policy thinking. What emerged was a blend of hard-nosed realism, based on military strength and idealistic goals, that can be achieved only through patient diplomacy and compromise. As president, he will find it harder to resolve the paradoxes than he did as a candidate. Mr. Bush wants to curb the spread of nuclear and other unconventional weapons. But he is also prepared to set aside the nuclear test ban and anti-ballistic missile treaties and to build a national missile defense. He wants to use American power to expand democracy. But he is reluctant to have American troops take part in extended peacekeeping missions. He wants to reinforce the Atlantic alliance. But Ms. Rice unsettled allies during the campaign when she suggested that Mr. Bush would ask Europe to let America phase out its participation in NATO's missions in Bosnia and Kosovo.
It will now be up to Mr. Bush and his advisers to translate these sometimes conflicting objectives into workable policies. They will also have to figure out how America can best support the crucial transitions to democracy and free markets in Russia and China. Mr. Bush has promised to take a tougher line against corrupt Russian officials. He has also vowed to resist Chinese military pressures in Asia and help Taiwan defend itself against threats from Beijing.
During his tenure at the Joint Chiefs, a time that included the Persian Gulf war, Mr. Powell was notably cautious about recommending the commitment of American troops to combat. Drawing on his experience as a young officer in Vietnam, he favored intervention only when American troops could be assured of an overwheming force advantage and provided with a clear exit strategy. These are sensible guidelines, and the use of American military power should come only as a last resort. But Washington is increasingly faced with foreign conflicts like those in the Balkans, where the limited application of American force can be warranted and effective. As secretary of state, Mr. Powell must be flexible enough to recognize them.
Mr. Bush's foreign policy team may face an early test in the Middle East, where the danger of regional war is at its highest point in a decade. Long-simmering crises in Iraq, Kashmir, the Korean peninsula or the Taiwan Straits could erupt suddenly and unpredictably. Deadly new terrorist attacks against American forces or diplomats can happen at any time. At such dangerous moments Mr. Bush will need to avail himself of seasoned and sensible advice. How well he uses it will be one measure of his presidential leadership.
-------- MILITARY
-------- colombia
Rebel-Held Zone in Colombia Fears End of Truce
New York Times
December 16, 2000
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/16/world/16COLO.html?pagewanted=all
LOS POZOS, Colombia, Dec. 14 - For many Colombians, María Muñoz's existence in the heart of rebel- controlled territory in southern Colombia would be unfathomable.
A shop owner in this sliver of a community surrounded by thick forests and verdant cattle ranches, Ms. Muñoz lives with her family just a few hundreds yards from the regional headquarters of the leftist rebel group that has battled the government for 36 years.
Here, in the heart of the 16,000- square-mile zone that Colombia's government ceded to guerrillas two years ago as a peace gesture, the rebels operate the courts, press public officials to pave roads, set up roadblocks, and levy "taxes" against ranchers and cocaine traffickers.
Millions in Colombia angrily see the government's arrangement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish acronym FARC, as a concession that has produced few tangible benefits.
But Ms. Muñoz has grown accustomed, even grateful, for the rebel presence, she said.
After all, the tradeoff that brought rebel rule has also translated into a measure of calm for at least one region of a country considered the hemisphere's most violent, a rugged land where assassinations and robberies that end in murder are all too commonplace.
"Here, we don't have a war," Ms. Muñoz said, as her children scampered in the street. "You're tranquil here. Your life is safe. We don't have disorder or thieves, or anyone stealing anything. And if we need help, other people are there to lend a hand."
But the future of the demilitarized zone, known here as the despeje, or clearance, is in doubt just a week after President Andrés Pastrana agreed to extend its existence through Jan. 31.
The rebels have refused to return to the peace table, and a growing number of people in Colombia are clamoring for the president to revoke the FARC's privileges.
Military officials are talking tough about the possibility of stepping up Colombia's already brutal conflict, with Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora, commander of the army, assuring reporters this week that government forces would be prepared to retake the territory.
"Every day we're coming dangerously close to war," said Omar García, mayor of San Vicente del Caguán, the largest of the five towns in the demilitarized zone. "The guerrillas still have their freeze on the talks, and on the other side, the military is ready to jump in right now."
The developments have left the humble farmers and small merchants of this region in Caquetá Province bracing for the possibility of an onslaught of violence. They talk about the arrival of troops, armored vehicles and helicopter gunships.
They also worry about the coming of right-wing paramilitary death squads, which in Colombia carry out violence against civilians accused of having worked with the rebels.
Residents say they are hoping that the demilitarized zone will remain in place, not necessarily because they support the guerrillas, but because they do not want to return to the frontier-style disorder that plagued the region in the past.
"I'm scared now," said Albeny Campos, a seamstress who runs a small bodega in Los Pozos, "because if the despeje is over, imagine the insecurity. We don't know what will happen. We're going to have nothing but fear until Jan. 31. It's hard. I'm so afraid. I have two little girls, and I worry about them. What will we do if a war comes here?"
Yet, while support for the demilitarized zone appears to be widespread, interviews with ordinary people from Los Pozos to the municipal seat in San Vicente suggest a persistent unease. People here may have peace, but they have never been confident that it will last.
And while many go about their everyday lives as if the FARC were not in control, they know that if a dispute arises between themselves and the armed men in charge, they will almost certainly be on the losing end. "People don't really have the chance to make their own decisions," said a San Vicente official. "They don't have a choice. They just go along with this thing."
Indeed, in whispers, many privately complain about overbearing FARC authority, from the taxes levied on cattle ranchers and small farmers to rebel involvement in public works projects. A few will talk of more serious abuses: the forced recruitment of teenage guerrillas, the harboring of kidnap victims, the expansion of coca farms throughout the despeje.
In a report issued this month, the private monitoring group Human Rights Watch linked the FARC to 26 executions in the zone as of this summer, with another 16 people reported missing.
This month, José Miguel Vivanco, head of the organization's Americas division, criticized Mr. Pastrana for extending the zone on Dec. 6 without having put in place a mechanism to ensure that the rights of residents were respected.
Guillermo Lombano, who manages a cattle ranch, knows all too well about such abuses. One night in April 1999, he watched as three rebel gunmen kidnapped his son, a 9-millimeter handgun pressed to the young man's head. Days later, the guerrilla leadership accused Guillermo Lombano Jr., who was then 16, of being a member of paramilitary death squads.
Mr. Lombano still believes that his son is alive, but the FARC's usual practice is to kill paramilitary collaborators.
Álvaro Castelblanco, the government's human rights ombudsman in San Vicente, said he had repeatedly asked the FARC to respond to complaints about disappearances and other abuses but had received no response.
The FARC admits to 19 executions inside the demilitarized zone, but it denies taking advantage of the government's generosity. Rebel leaders contend that they have made corrupt local governments honest and brought peace to the streets. Drunken brawls have decreased.
Town officials say homicides, which could number dozens a month in an area with just 100,000 people, have dropped to a handful for the year. The rebels say they have also settled disputes of all kinds.
"This is now a normal town, like any in Colombia," said Alicia Ramírez, a rebel official who this week ran the FARC office in San Vicente, "but here the people breathe free. Things here are peaceful."
Earlier this week at the FARC's version of the People's Court, a hillside encampment of several tents overlooking a green valley and towering mountains, María Bolaños complained about her husband to the judge, a rebel in her 20's dressed in green camouflage.
Ms. Bolaños said he had abandoned her for another woman, taking the car and leaving her with the bills. The judge promised a resolution within days, and Ms. Bolaños seemed relieved.
"This is a good thing," she said, as the hearing wound down. "This is the only place where they'll figure out the problem and then handle the problem directly."
Indeed, the court is a streamlined affair. Appointments are quickly scheduled. The hearings take minutes.
For many, the FARC's system of justice is just another sign that the rebels have imposed their will on a people who have long been accustomed to being left alone in this rural area far from Colombia's large cities.
But town leaders do not blame just the FARC for their predicament. They say the government made the decision to hand over San Vicente and four other towns without considering the repercussions. Now that the future of this territory is up in the air, town leaders are scrambling to find ways to prod the government and the rebels to resume talks or, if negotiations fail and conflict returns, to ensure that civilians are protected.
"We have to push for peace talks, whether there is a demilitarized zone or not," said one man, speaking at a recent gathering of town leaders. "We have to do this because it gives us a future, with some hope."
So far, though, town officials said, letters to President Pastrana have gone unanswered. There has been no response from the FARC either, with rebel leaders this week abandoning the retreat at Los Pozos where peace talks have been held.
For those who are closely following developments, the hardening positions of the two sides has meant increased anxiety as Jan. 31 approaches.
"We just want to be left along, to do our work and get on with our life," said Carlos Penagos, a community leader from San Vicente. "But the government at any moment can do away with the despeje, and that wouldn't be taking account of us, about our safety."
-------- drug war
Libya faces up to drugs menace
BBC News
Saturday, 16 December, 2000, 14:19 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/monitoring/media_reports/newsid_1073000/1073413.stm
Tripoli - a serious drugs threat? Libyan television has for the first time highlighted a growing drugs problem in the country.
The main evening news showed a report from a drugs rehabilitation centre in the south, where a group of 157 young former users and addicts were attending a "graduation ceremony" before being released back into society. The centre, at Tajurah, gives young people "the necessary medical treatment to be cured from this illness which destroys man, his humanity, his senses and physical and mental capabilities," a correspondent said.
An official added that the best way of fighting the drugs problem was to stamp out the supply.
"Dealers and pushers target the infrastructure of this country. They are agents of colonialism and Zionism," he said.
But the centre would help young Libyans turn away from drugs and "become once again a model human being free from complexes and destructive traits".
In another sign that Libya is becoming more willing to admit its internal problems to the rest of the world, Justice and Public Security Minister Musa al-Abbar this month attended an international conference on organised crime in Palermo.
He admitted that Libya had a problem with criminal gangs who made use of its geographical position for smuggling.
And he said that new laws had been introduced to fight drugs, including providing addicts with treatment and aftercare instead of punishing them.
Last year Libyan doctors were allowed to admit to foreign journalists that a heroin problem was spreading among "children of the rich and young women".
But this is the first time the drugs issue has been referred to openly inside the country.
BBC Monitoring, based in Caversham in southern England, selects and translates information from radio, television, press, news agencies and the Internet from 150 countries in more than 70 languages.
-------- space
Jupiter Moon May Have a Salt - Water Ocean
December 16, 2000 Filed at 10:20 p.m. ET
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/science/science-space-ganymed.html
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Scientists studying data sent back to Earth from NASA's Galileo spacecraft have concluded that Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, may possess a huge salt-water ocean beneath its crusty surface.
Galileo probe data on two other Jovian moons -- Europa and Callisto -- has already indicated that they probably have subsurface Water, a key building block for life.
Now, Ganymede -- which is larger than Mercury or Pluto -- also looks likely to be concealing a thick layer of melted, salty water beneath its icy crust, researchers told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union here on Saturday.
Margaret Kivelson of the University of California-Los Angeles said that magnetic readings taken by the Galileo craft during close approaches in May 2000 and earlier were ``highly suggestive'' that a salty, liquid ocean existed there.
``It would need to be something more electrically conductive than solid ice,'' she said, adding that a melted layer of water several Kilometers or miles thick, beginning within 120 miles of Ganymede's surface would fit the data if it were about as salty as Earth's oceans.
Other scientists studying readings from an infrared spectrometer to identify surface materials on Ganymede said portions of the moon appear to have types of salt minerals that would have been left behind by exposure of salty water near or on the surface.
``They are similar to the hydrated salt minerals we see on Europa, possibly the result of brine making its way to the surface by eruptions or through cracks,'' said Thomas McCord, a geophysicist at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.
That hypothesis is also bolstered by new, high-resolution images of Ganymede sent back by Galileo, which hint that water or slushy ice may have surfaced through the fractured crust to create smooth areas in between separated areas of crust.
Dr. Dave Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology said natural radioactivity in Ganymede's rocky interior should provide enough heating to maintain a stable layer of liquid water between two layers of ice, about 90 to 120 miles below the surface.
``I would have been surprised if Ganymede had not had an ocean, but the issue of whether it's there is different than the issue of whether you can expect to see it clearly in the data,'' Stevenson said.
-------- u.n.
U.N. Economic Panel to Study Ways to Help World's Have-Nots
New York Times
December 16, 2000
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/16/world/16NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 15 - Secretary General Kofi Annan named a high-level advisory panel of international financial experts today and gave them five months to come up with concrete ideas to help poor countries that are falling farther and farther behind a global economic boom.
The panel will be led by Ernesto Zedillo, the former president of Mexico, who is an economist. Among its members are Robert E. Rubin, the former United States treasury secretary and now chairman of Citigroup's executive committee, and Jacques Delors, a former president of the European Commission and finance minister of France. Other members will include a labor expert and the head of a major private relief organization, Oxfam.
"Development has been the twin objective of the United Nations alongside international peace and security," Mr. Annan said at a news conference with Mr. Zedillo this morning. "Development cannot happen without resources, especially financial resources," he said, noting that official development assistance has been in steady decline for well over a decade. He said that poor countries are so far in debt that many of them are paying more in interest and loan payments to industrialized countries than they are receiving in aid from those countries.
"It is vital that we turn the situation around," he said. "But how?"
The naming of the panel on financing development is another unusual initiative by a secretary general who is willing to reach outside the United Nations for expertise and opinions. It is also a move to inject a dose of financial expertise and realism into the agenda of a United Nations conference on how to finance development that will be held in early 2002.
The panel will not approach the problem the usual way - by looking primarily at traditional patterns of foreign aid for answers to the paradox of growing poverty amid plenty - often in the same country. Instead, it will be expected to study the full range of economic factors affecting development, from trade, investment and debt relief to the failure of many nations to raise more of their own money domestically.
This year, according to United Nations figures, foreign direct investment around the world - money invested in a country from outside - will total more than $1.1 trillion, twice what it was three years ago. But less than a fifth of that total goes to developing nations, and most of that to 20 countries with already growing economies. The poorest nations attracted only about 0.5 percent of investments made abroad in 1999.
At the same time, foreign aid has been falling, especially from the United States, which during the Clinton administration slipped well behind all other industrial countries in the proportion of gross domestic product given in assistance. Over all, foreign aid to the poorest countries fell nearly 25 percent during the last part of the 1990's.
Also serving on the panel will be Abdulatif al-Hammad, president of the Arab Fund for Economic Development; David Bryer, director of Oxfam; Mary Chinery-Hesse, a former deputy director general of the International Labor Organization; Rebeca Grynspan, former vice president of Costa Rica; Majid Osman, a commercial banker who was formerly finance minister of Mozambique; and Manmohan Singh, former finance minister of India and a major architect of its economic liberalization policies.
-------- OTHER
-------- police
Zimbabwe Riot After Police Mistakenly Kill Vendor
Yahoo News
World News
Saturday December 16 9:30 AM ET
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20001216/wl/zimbabwe_riot_dc_1.html
HARARE (Reuters) - Rioters set fire to cars and shattered windows in a Harare city mall on Saturday after a street vendor was killed by a stray gunshot from a policeman, police said.
Dozens of police fired teargas and several people were injured as officers battled to control about 200 people who had attacked police in Harare's old city district after the accidental shooting, witnesses said.
Calm was later restored to the area. But police confirmed that the woman vendor had been killed by a stray shot in the neck after an officer fired on a commuter minibus that had defied an order to stop at a nearby roadblock.
``We are investigating the case...but obviously we are very sorry for what happened,'' a police spokesman said, declining to give more details.
The incident was the second in as many months and is a sign of the increasing tension in Zimbabwe, where people are becoming angrier and more volatile as the result of a deepening economic crisis blamed on President Robert Mugabe.
The southern African country is struggling with a severe fuel shortage, and government statistics show that poverty afflicts 75 percent of the 12.5 million population from 40 percent 10 years ago.
Zimbabwe has suffered several riots in the last three years over food prices, wages and taxes. Last month a municipal policeman in Zimbabwe's eastern border city of Mutare triggered a riot after accidentally shooting dead a baby strapped to the back of her mother at the town's main bus terminus.
Mugabe, who has been in power since the former Rhodesia gained independence from Britain 20 years ago, was endorsed as the ruling ZANU-PF's leaders at a party congress on Friday.
-------- spying
Letter of the law
Why seal envelopes if the police can see inside anyway?
New Scientist
16 December 2000.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns226930
A SPRAY that makes unopened envelopes transparent--so the letters inside are as easy to read as postcards--has been developed by a company in the US. And the spray leaves no trace, says its inventor, Mistral Security of Bethesda, Maryland.
"With a business card in a brown envelope," says company spokesman Bob Schlagel, "you can read the card, the e-mail address, the telephone number, everything."
Schlagel says that the spray, called "See-Through" was developed to let police forces inspect potentially dangerous packages, like a letter bomb.
Described as a "non-conductive, non-toxic, environmentally safe liquid", the spray has been tested to make sure it leaves no trace on envelopes, Schlagel says. "It leaves an odour for 10 to 15 minutes," he adds, "but apart from that, there's no smudging of ink on the envelope or on the letter, no watermark, no evidence at all."
He says tests have shown that the spray works on all colours of envelopes, unless they have a plastic barrier like those found on padded envelopes. Mistral's distributors will only sell the product to "law enforcement agencies", he adds.
John Wadham, director of Liberty, the human rights organisation, says that police in Britain would need a warrant to use such a spray to examine letters. But Simon Davies, director of Privacy International, a London-based human rights group focusing on surveillance issues, says the spray could tempt security forces to bend laws. "It's an opportunity for governments to side-step legislation on mail interception and opening," he says. "It's an ethically questionable product."
Ian Sample
---
Freed American Plans Book on Spy Trial
New York Times
December 16, 2000
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/16/world/16SPY.html
LANDSTUHL, Germany, Dec. 15 - Edmond Pope, the American businessman released from a Russian prison this week, denied today that he was a spy and said he would write a book to reveal the truth about his eight-month ordeal leading up to his espionage conviction and 20-year sentence.
Pressure from President Clinton helped win a pardon for Mr. Pope from President Vladimir V. Putin in a gesture intended to ease relations with the new administration of George W. Bush.
Mr. Pope, 54, a former naval intelligence officer, arrived in Germany on Thursday for medical tests at an American military base here.
He has cancer and was wearing a patch on his left cheek to cover a lesion caused by the illness. He appeared tired and drawn but said he was still on "an emotional high" and looking forward to returning home, probably over the weekend.
"It's wonderful to be back with my wife," he told reporters. "I'm looking forward to getting some sleep."
He denied charges that he was trying to obtain secrets about a high-speed Russian torpedo.
"It's a long and complicated story that goes back 10 years and needs careful explaining," he said at a news conference today. "But the big thing is, the truth will be in the book. And I am not a spy."
-------- terrorism
Judge Rules Amnesia Is Feigned in Terror Case
New York Times
December 16, 2000
By BENJAMIN WEISER
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/16/nyregion/16TERR.html
A federal judge in the embassy bombings case in Manhattan ruled yesterday that a defendant whose lawyers had suggested he was suffering from mental illness was competent to stand trial.
The judge, Leonard B. Sand of Federal District Court, said opinions by three court-appointed experts that the defendant, Wadih El-Hage, 40, "is malingering and faking symptoms of amnesia, are well founded."
Mr. El-Hage's lawyers had said that his mental condition had deteriorated under harsh jail restrictions and that he did not recognize them. One document showed that Mr. El- Hage thought that he was 18 years old and that the year was 1978, they said.
The judge's ruling means that Mr. El-Hage will be expected to go to trial on Jan. 3 along with three co- defendants on charges that they participated in a global terrorism conspiracy led by the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. Prosecutors say the conspiracy included the August 1998 attacks on the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed more than 200 people and wounded thousands. All four of the defendants have pleaded not guilty.
One of Mr. El-Hage's lawyers, Sam A. Schmidt, said after yesterday's hearing that he was "very pessimistic" that Mr. El-Hage would be able to assist "in any way" at trial. He would not be able to testify, "to explain what he was doing and why," Mr. Schmidt said.
The judge yesterday also rejected the idea of relaxing restrictions on Mr. El-Hage in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he and the other defendants have been held in near isolation, barred from communicating with outsiders, except for their lawyers and immediate family members. More restrictions were imposed, Mr. Schmidt said, after a jail guard, Louis Pepe, was critically wounded in a stabbing.
No charges have been filed in the assault, but the authorities say two of Mr. El-Hage's co-defendants, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, carried out the stabbing, and that others may have been involved in its planning.
The judge said Mr. Pepe was known for being a sympathetic and generous guard, "who made the mistake of having sufficient trust in the defendants to walk them down the hall without handcuffing."
Judge Sand said, without elaboration, that the jail "had good reason to believe that this was a planned event" that involved more than the two men. "We cannot restore Officer Pepe to the condition he was in before he sustained the severe brain injury which resulted from this," he said. "But I think we can take reasonable steps to prevent their repetition."
There has been no public allegation that Mr. El-Hage was involved in the planning of the attack, but his lawyers said his cell was emptied of virtually all possessions, that he was being strip-searched more often and that he was initially kept from seeing his lawyers or speaking with his family by phone.
The combination of these factors was devastating psychologically, the lawyers said. He no longer recognized them, or knew he had a wife in the United States, they said. In one letter, dated Nov. 21, Mr. El-Hage addressed his wife as if she were a stranger, and said he was in "an institution that kidnaps foreign students and makes physical and mental experiments on them."
But the three medical experts, two of whom testified yesterday, said that Mr. El-Hage, while traumatized by the recent events in the jail, had no mental disorder. One psychiatrist said he had memories of events that were inconsistent with amnesia.
"These findings are highly suggestive of malingering and not consistent with true illness," wrote the psychiatrist, Dr. Eric Goldsmith.
The judge, who viewed videotapes of strip-searches of Mr. El-Hage, said Mr. El-Hage had brought on much of the problem by refusing to submit to the searches.
The government agreed. "The bottom line is Mr. El-Hage has been faking symptoms," said a federal prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald. "He should just knock it off, work with his counsel, and proceed."
-------- activists
Power and Oppression: Rethinking U.S. Militarism Across Borders
Fri, 15 Dec 2000 17:30:37 -0500
From: Norman & Karen Cohen <norco@bellatlantic.net>
Come to the Student Peace Action Network National Organizing Conference in Washington, DC
SPAN Summit Feb 3- 4, 2001
Join students from across the country to strategize and organize for Peace through Justice!
Workshops/Roundtable Discussions:
Making the Connections Between U.S. Militarism Abroad and Domestic Militarization at Home Domestic Militarization: the Prison Industrial Complex, Police Brutality, and the Death Penalty Militarization of the U.S./Mexican Border U.S. Military Bases Past and Present: Vieques, Okinawa, and the Philippines Globalization and Economic Justice Anti-Oppression Work Within the Peace and Justice Movement Human Rights Religion and Reconciliation
Skills Trainings:
Building Up a Regional NetworkNonviolence MethodsPlanning a Direct ActionMedia Work and Indy MediaLegal TrainingConsensus Process and FacilitationFundraising/Grantwriting
Travel Stipends Available
More information about SPAN and a pdf version of this flyer (with graphics) can be found at <http://www.gospan.org/>www.goSPAN.org To register, fill out the following form and email to <mailto:span@peace-action.org>span@peace-action.org or snailmail to the Student Peace Action Network, 1819 H Street NW Suite 425, Washington DC 20006. Email or call 202.862.9740 x 3051 for more information.
Information on inexpensive/free housing options is available.
Name
University
Address
Phone
Email
Method of Travel
Amount Requested for Travel Expenses
--
Coalition for Peace and Justice and the UNPLUG Salem Campaign; 321 Barr Ave., Linwood, NJ 08221; 609-601-8537 or 609-601-8583 (8583: fax, answer machine); norco@bellatlantic.net; UNPLUG SALEM WEBSITE: <http://www.unplugsalem.org/>http://www.unplugsalem.org/ COALITION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE WEBSITE: <http:/www.coalitionforpeaceandjustice.org>http:/www.coalitionforpeaceandjus tice.org The Coalition for Peace and Justice is a chapter of Peace Action.
"First they ignore you; Then they laugh at you; Then they fight you; Then you win. (Gandhi)
"Why walk when you can fly?" (Mary Chapin Carpenter)
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Rome clashes erupt over Haider visit
BBC News
Saturday, 16 December, 2000, 17:00 GMT
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/europe/newsid_1073000/1073787.stm
No way through to St Peter's Square
Hundreds of protesters marching against the visit of Austrian far-right leader Joerg Haider to the Vatican have clashed with Italian riot police.
Demonstrators threw bricks and cobblestones and police responded with tear gas and beat many demonstrators to the ground with batons, witnesses said.
They had been trying to force their way down the avenue leading to St Peter's Square, where a Christmas tree given to the Vatican by Mr Haider's home province of Carinthia was being lit up.
But their path was blocked by police vans, while police formed a phalanx with shields and batons and charged the demonstrators. One person was injured in the clashes.
The confrontation took place about 500 metres from the square, but the ceremony went ahead undisturbed, with the Austrian populist sitting in a place of honour near the tree.
Pope John Paul II did not attend the tree-lighting ceremony, but earlier in the day Mr Haider had a private audience with him.
Mr Haider's visit has provoked protests by politicians, the Jewish community, wartime deportees and students.
Jewish shopkeepers had said they would switch their lights off when the Christmas tree's lights were switched on.
Papal audience
Mr Haider's audience with the Pope was over in three minutes.
The Pope gave him a copy of his New Year message warning against nationalism, racism and xenophobia, but Mr Haider had no time to deliver his pre-prepared remarks.
The Vatican accepted the offer of a Christmas tree in 1997, when Mr Haider was not governor of Carinthia.
Mr Haider resigned as head of Austria's far-right Freedom Party after the party's success at last year's general election earned it a place in the governing coalition.
He is notorious for making remarks apparently sympathetic to the policies of Nazi Germany, and for xenophobic views on immigration.
Protesters in Rome on Saturday said his visit was "a provocation and an offence to the city's history".
The Vatican has defended the meeting on the grounds that the Holy See is open to all.
The Vatican's number two, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, told the La Repubblica newspaper: "We must make a difference between an error and one who errs."
Vatican uneasy
BBC Rome correspondent David Willey says the Vatican is clearly embarrassed at the political row that has broken out over the Haider visit.
However, the officials insist that timing of the release of the anti-xenophobia message was coincidental.
The controversy over Mr Haider's visit has been sharpened by a row over remarks he made earlier this week criticising the Italian Government as "overly generous" on immigration.
Prime Minister Giuliano Amato said on Friday he would write to Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel to express his government's displeasure at Mr Haider's criticism of President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi and Italy's policies on immigration.
"The government cannot but judge extremely severely such criticisms, which are even more unacceptable coming from someone who holds an official position in another European Union country," Mr Amato said.
Mr Haider had said that Austria should reconsider its membership of the EU's open-borders Schengen agreement because of Italy's stance.
The Italian president responded by explaining that Italy had always been a country of migration and was a humane society.
Then, in an interview with Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper, the Austrian populist said President Ciampi's response was typical of a left-wing politician.
------- Onelist (submissions from subscribers)