------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
MISSILE SHIELD
C.I.A. Chief Sees Russia Trying to Revive Challenge to U.S.
Bin Laden tried to purchase uranium
Terrorist group sought uranium
Australia Rebuffs Shield Foes
Bulgaria to start new nuclear waste processing unit
BNFL says talking with EdF about nuclear contracts
German Greens aim to heal split on nuke waste in March
India to Build New Version of Agni Missile
Japan Divided On U.S. Call for Missile Defense
NUCLEAR DEADLOCK
Australia Rebuffs Shield Foes
Security Questioned at Rocky Flats
A Lesson From the Brink

MILITARY
Top Marine apologizes for calling Japanese 'wimps'
OKINAWA OUTRAGE
Investigation into cable car accident ends
Pentagon asks to visit crash sites
EASING U.S. CONCERNS
Meeting With Rebels Crucial for Colombia's Leader
Colombian rebels take over town
Colombian leader visits rebel land
Ashcroft hits Clinton on pardon, drug war
Ashcroft to focus on crime, drugs
Raids in Kentucky Aim at Deadly New Drug
Rockefeller Drug Laws
RAPPER APPEALS SENTENCE
Jerusalem Is 'Indivisible,' Sharon Says
Space seen as battlefield of future
Shuttle Atlantis Heads for Space Station
Atlantis blasts off with science lab
Space shuttle lifts with laboratory
Senate Ends Bitter Dispute With the U.N. on U.S. Dues
U.N. INCREASE
UN agency pleads for more funding
U.N. insists Kagame pull troops from Congo
President plans military visits
Defense supporters upset as Bush balks

OTHER
More people at N.Y. shelters
Siemens opens plant in Los Angeles to make solar power systems
Ford sees dawn of pollution-free hydrogen cars
DuPont forms fuel cell division
Arizona
Machines Let Resorts Please Skiers When Nature Won't
Deconstructing Gale Norton
5 Drug Makers Use Material With Possible Mad Cow Link
Canada, Brazil close to trade war
Vaccines replace cow ingredients
INCINERATOR TO CLOSE
Judge Backs U.S. Seizure of Suspected Sick Sheep
Help for California's energy
Giant squid brought to museum alive
HELP OFFERED FOR POLICE DOG
Panel would study distrust of police
F.B.I. Insists Privacy Is Not a Victim
JEWS' APPEAL DENIED
Questionnaire Makes Terror Trial Jury a Bit Less Anonymous
Witness Describes Break With Group Led by bin Laden
Terrorist aide says he warned U.S.
Bin Laden trial in 3rd country?
Greece prepares for Olympic threats
Convicted Libyan plans to appeal
Bin Laden Sought Uranium, Jury Told
Bin Laden Called Top Terrorist Threat

ACTIVISTS
Homeless Shelters in New York Fill to Highest Levels Since 80's
The Next Agenda Conference
Hong Kong Leader Promises to More Closely Monitor Falun Gong
V-Day twists holiday into male-bashing event
Anti-globalists turn to hacking
Minority Protesters in Vietnam Focus on Land and Rights Issues
Vietnam clamps down after highland protests
Wahid's fate brings violent protest
PACT TO END PROTESTS
States


-------- NUCLEAR

MISSILE SHIELD

February 8, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

SWEDEN, BRITAIN: Sweden, which holds the rotating European Union presidency, urged the United States to abandon plans for its national missile shield, urging Washington to consider the consequences for disarmament and nuclear non-proliferation efforts if plans go ahead. Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Robin Cook of Britain, above, visiting Washington, said the shield should be installed in a way that does not increase tension with Russia, stressing the need to respect the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty. (Reuters)

---

C.I.A. Chief Sees Russia Trying to Revive Its Challenge to U.S.

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08INTE.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 - Russia is using international trade in weapons and technology to improve relations with China, India and Iran while trying to revive its status as a great power and challenge United States influence, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, said today.

In blunt testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Mr. Tenet indicated that the United States intelligence community was increasingly concerned by the direction of Moscow's foreign policy under President Vladimir V. Putin.

"There can be little doubt that President Putin wants to restore some aspects of the Soviet past - status as a great power, strong central authority and a stable and predictable society - sometimes at the expense of neighboring states or the civil rights of individual Russians," Mr. Tenet said.

He made his statements in a wide- ranging annual review of the global threats that are facing the United States. The C.I.A. director's review amounts to a tour of the horizon, and it was highlighted by warnings about terrorist groups and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

Mr. Tenet said that Russia "continues to value arms and technology sales as a major source of funds" and was using that trade to improve ties with China, India and Iran. The Russians hope that cementing better ties with those countries will erode American influence, Mr. Tenet added. In addition, Moscow wants to bolster its power over the former Soviet republics while reducing United States influence, and it is demanding that its neighbors repay their energy debts, is dragging its feet on withdrawing forces from Moldova and is using pressure tactics on Georgia, Mr. Tenet said.

Mr. Putin, a former intelligence officer, has reinvigorated domestic and foreign spy services. Mr. Tenet said Mr. Putin had transferred command over the Chechnya conflict from the military to the Federal Security Service, the internal secret service.

On other topics, Mr. Tenet reaffirmed the Central Intelligence Agency's belief that the nature and structure of anti-American terrorism had radically changed over the last few years and was now dominated by independent and decentralized groups like that of Osama bin Laden. The United States has said Mr. bin Laden and his group, al-Qaeda, were behind the bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa in 1998, as well as other anti-American terrorist attacks.

But the decentralized command structure of Mr. bin Laden's organization makes it far more difficult to investigate. Al-Qaeda, Mr. Tenet noted, "is continuing to place emphasis on developing surrogates to carry out attacks in an effort to avoid detection, blame and retaliation. As a result, it is often difficult to attribute terrorist incidents to his group."

That problem has frustrated United Sates officials who are investigating the bombing of the destroyer Cole while it was in port in Yemen, with the loss of 17 lives.

Mr. Tenet also warned that the threat from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction remained high in flashpoints like the Korean peninsula and Iran. Iran continues to receive Russian missile technology and "has one of the largest and most capable ballistic missile programs in the Middle East," Mr. Tenet said.

And despite recent political gains by reformist forces, he added, Tehran "has not reduced its willingness to use terrorism to pursue strategic foreign policy agendas."

---

Bin Laden tried to purchase uranium

Thursday, February 8, 2001
Irish Times
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2001/0208/wor13.htm

THE US: Mr Osama bin Laden tried in the 1990s to buy uranium, possibly to make a weapon, a defector from his militant Islamic group testified yesterday in the trial of four men accused in the bombings of two US embassies in Africa.

Mr Jamal Ahmed al Fadl said he had served as the intermediary in the transaction between Mr bin Laden, then in Sudan, and a seller he identified only as "Bashir", who demanded $1.5 million for a cylinder of uranium about one metre long.

Mr Al Fadl said he did not know if Mr bin Laden successfully completed the purchase.

Prosecutors have called the 34-year-old Sudanese national, who defected from Mr bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation and sought protection from the US government, to help bolster their case that Mr bin Laden masterminded the near-simultaneous 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which left 224 people dead, 12 of them Americans.

US authorities have expressed numerous concerns over the past few years that a radical group was trying to obtain material to build a nuclear bomb. Mr Al Fadl's testimony offered details of the effort by Mr bin Laden, a sworn enemy of the United States.

Mr Al Fadl said he was assigned to the effort by an al-Qaeda leader known by the pseudonym Abu Fadl al Makkee, while the organisation was based in Khartoum from 1991 to 1996. He said he did not remember the exact date.

"Al Makkee told me: 'People in Khartoum have uranium. We need to buy that,' " Mr al Fadl said. At a meeting in Bait al Man, a city north of Khartoum, al Fadl was able to examine the merchandise, he said.

"There were documents about the origin of it: South Africa, serial numbers and things about quality," Mr al Fadl said. "The machine to test the cylinder would come from Kenya."

It was during the period al-Qaeda was in Sudan that Mr Al Fadl, a slightly-built man with a closely-cropped beard, left the group and offered to provide US authorities with information. His testimony is expected to last until today. The four suspects on trial in New York since Monday have pleaded innocent.

Mr bin Laden is the most immediate and serious threat to America's national security, the CIA chief, Mr George Tenet, said yesterday. In a wide-ranging annual report on threats to US security, Mr Tenet also highlighted the explosion in information technology and the exploitation of the Internet by extremist groups such as Mr bin Laden's network. Mr Tenet, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was testifying on his report to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

He focused on Russia, China and North Korea as the main suppliers of missile technology and equipment for making weapons of mass destruction to other countries, particularly to South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa. (AFP, Additional report by Reuters)

---

Terrorist group sought uranium

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

NEW YORK (AP) - A former aide to Osama bin Laden testified in the embassy bombing trial he was dispatched in 1993 to try to buy uranium, which prosecutors say the terrorist leader wanted for a nuclear weapon. Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl told jurors Wednesday that bin Laden was prepared to spend $1.5 million for black-market uranium as part of his holy war, or jihad, against Americans. Al-Fadl described arranging a series of meetings with shadowy dealers, saying one bin Laden terrorist organization, al Qaeda, was "very serious" about the purchase. He said he did not know if the deal was ever completed.

Testifying at the trial of four men charged in the deadly bombings of the U.S. embassies in east Africa, Al-Fadl also said that two years before the 1998 attacks he warned American officials that terrorists might strike. Al-Fadl said he warned U.S. officials that attacks were possible within the United States, against U.S. military forces overseas and at American embassies.

Prosecutors have portrayed the 1998 blasts at U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as part of a worldwide plot by bin Laden. Twelve Americans were among the 224 people killed.

In his second day on the witness stand, Al-Fadl said he decided to alert U.S. officials after he was kicked out of bin Laden's organization for stealing.

-------- australia

Australia Rebuffs Shield Foes

Thursday, February 8, 2001
International Herald Tribune
Reuters
http://www.iht.com/articles/9988.htm

CANBERRA Australia has dismissed Chinese concerns about U.S. plans for a missile defense system and said the actions of Russia, another critic, had helped create the problem that the system seeks to combat.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer of Australia said the Moscow government, a fierce critic of the proposed U.S. missile defense program, had been partly responsible for the proliferation of missile technology in so-called rogue states that made such a system worth developing.

"A lot of the debate here is directed at the United States," Mr. Downer said in his first comments on the program since President George W. Bush took office. "I frankly think," he said on ABC television Tuesday night, "an awful lot of the debate should instead be directed not only toward those countries that have got or are developing these missile systems but the countries that have been transferring that missile technology to those countries."

For example, he said, Russia has expressed concern, "but Russia is a country that has been involved in the proliferation of missile technology."

"If there were no missiles," he said, "there would be no need for a missile defense system." A transcript of the interview was released Wednesday. The opposition Labour Party reacted with dismay to what it said it viewed as a strengthening of Prime Minister John Howard's support for U.S. plans to develop the missile defense system.

The program is opposed not only by Russia and China but also by many of Washington's European allies.

Northern Australia is the site of a joint Australian-U.S. monitoring station at Pinewood that is designed to provide early warning in case of a nuclear attack and would presumably become a key part of a U.S. missile defense system.

Opponents of the program argue that Australia, as the eyes and ears of American forces, would become a prime target in a nuclear war.

Critics argue that Australia, which has close ties to China because of extensive trade, should resist being drawn into any confrontation as an ally of the United States. Labour's foreign affairs spokesman, Laurie Brereton, said Mr. Downer's comments "leave little doubt that the Howard government is prepared to subordinate its strategic thinking to that of the Bush administration."

"Missile proliferation is a serious problem," Mr. Brereton said, "but pushing ahead with national missile defense will leave the world less, rather than more, secure."

Mr. Downer also dismissed China's misgivings, saying the program was intended as a defense against smaller states. He discounted comments from Beijing that it would react to the program by increasing its stock of missiles.

He said China had already said it would modernize its ballistic-missile capacity. "That presumably means to expand it," he said.

-------- bulgaria

Bulgaria to start new nuclear waste processing unit

February 8, 2001
Planet Ark
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9721

BULGARIA: SOFIA - Bulgaria's Kozloduy nuclear power plant said on Wednesday it would start operating a new unit for reprocessing and conditioning low and intermediate level radioactive waste this week.

The long-delayed $30 million project, to be opened officially on Friday, would process solid waste generated by Kozloduy's four 440-megawatt and two 1,000-megawatt water pressurised reactors of Soviet-design, an official said.

Part of the equipment has been supplied by US Westinghouse, which signed a $12 million contract for designing the waste processing facility in 1991.

Some 100,000 cubic meters of radioactive waste, including outfits, filters and materials used in the construction of the plant, are expected to be reprocessed in the next few years.

The Kozloduy plant plans to start reprocessing liquid nuclear waste and operating a storage facility for the conditioned waste by year-end, said a plant's statement.

The plant also starts operating this week an upgraded and enlarged storage for spent nuclear fuel after undergoing seismic studies, plant officials said.

The Kozloduy plant produced almost half of the country's power last year hitting a record high annual output of 18 billion kilowatt hours against 15.8 billion in 1999.

Bulgaria has pledged to the European Union to close two smaller and older reactors in 2002, earlier than planned, and is negotiating when to close the other two 440 MW units.

-------- europe

BNFL says talking with EdF about nuclear contracts

February 8, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9745

LONDON - State-owned British Nuclear Fuels on Tuesday said it was in talks with Electricite de France about the possibility of winning nuclear fuel work from the French utility.

"We are in discussion with Electricite de France about all areas of business within the nuclear fuel cycle," a BNFL spokesman told Reuters.

BNFL is keen to win new business following an international scandal last year when it was discovered that some data on nuclear fuel shipments to overseas customers had been falsified.

An investigation which highlighted "systematic management failure" led to a raft of contracts being cancelled and thwarted government plans for 1.5 billion £49 percent sell off.

Despite the setbacks which led profits to evaporate, BNFL remains one of the largest nuclear groups in the world.

It has a presence in nearly all parts of the nuclear pie, engaging in reprocessing nuclear waste, manufacturing nuclear fuel, designing nuclear reactors, running nuclear power stations and decommissioning nuclear facilities.

In December the group said it will miss, for the third year in a row, its commercial targets for reprocessing nuclear waste at its 1.8 billion pound Thorp plant.

France generates about 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power.

-------- germany

German Greens aim to heal split on nuke waste in March

February 8, 2001
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9744

FRANKFURT - Germany's Green Party said on Tuesday it will try to repair a split in its ranks over participation in planned demonstrations against the Castor transport of nuclear waste at its party conference in March.

Nuclear waste has been building up in Germany since the French reprocessing plant at La Hague refused to take any more German fuel until it can return reprocessed waste for permanent storage.

"There is hope of consensus at the March meeting on anti-nuclear demonstration activities," a Green Party source said.

The party's chief Fritz Kuhn said on Monday it was "close to agreement" on the controversial transport from France to the permanent storage site in Gorleben, Lower Saxony.

Speaking after a sitting of the party council in Berlin, Kuhn said: "It is normal that we clarify disputed questions at a national party meeting."

While the Greens support Germany's nuclear compromise deal, they will demonstrate further for their energy and nuclear political goals, Kuhn said.

But they should not block the transport of German nuclear waste from France to Gorleben expected at the end of March, he added.

Germany's nuclear compromise deal followed commitments made by the industry last summer to gradually phase out atomic energy by the mid-2020s.

"We shall demonstrate for our political goals, but not against the atom compromise," Kuhn said, adding that he wanted to clarify this position to those who thought the party council had previously called for the abandonment of non-blocking demonstrations as well.

Kuhn and Environment Minister Juergen Trittin (Greens) have both said there should be no protest against the Castor transport of waste, which the government is committed to taking back as part of the compromise deal.

"We stand by the atom compromise and will not block the measures it is committed to," Kuhn said.

Greens in Lower Saxony have nevertheless planned protests against the Castor transport.

But Kuhn said he was confident that a meeting with them on Friday would produce a mutually satisfactory solution.

He added that he could imagine taking part in demonstrations against the use of Gorleben as a permanent waste disposal site.

The Green Party conference will be held in Stuttgart on March 9-11.

-------- india / pakistan

India to Build New Version of Agni Missile

Feb 8, 2001
Inside China Today
http://www.insidechina.com/news.php3?id=285432

BANGALORE -- (Reuters) India plans to build the third version of its intermediate range ballistic missile Agni but is yet to set a deadline for the project, a senior defense department official said on Thursday.

"Agni III will obviously be of a higher range and better capabilities than its predecessor," the official, who did not want to be identified, told Reuters.

"But we have not set a date to test it," the official said on the sidelines of an aerospace conference in the southern city of Bangalore.

India successfully tested Agni II for the second time last month and said it would introduce it into the country's arsenal later this year.

Agni II, an upgraded version of the original Agni, has a two-stage, all-solid motor with a 2,000-kilometer (1,250-mile) range, and is seen as a key element of India's plan to build a credible minimum nuclear deterrent.

Agni II's first test was in April 1999, prompting tests within days by Pakistan of its medium-range Ghauri II missile.

Agni, named after a Hindu fire god, is seen as a potential deterrent to India's nuclear-armed neighbors China and Pakistan. It is part of a wide-ranging missile development program.

Defense experts say Agni II can carry nuclear warheads and strike targets deep within China and Pakistan.

-------- japan

Japan Divided On U.S. Call for Missile Defense

Thursday, February 8, 2001
Washington Post
By Doug Struck
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40210-2001Feb7?language=printer

TOKYO -- The missile defense system advocated by the Bush administration is pushing Japan toward a stronger military stance, exposing the national divide between the country's pacifist post-World War II constitution and calls for Tokyo to assume a broader defense role.

Japan is worried that cooperating with the United States on a missile system -- the likely first test of the new, closer relationship promised by the Bush administration -- would result in a larger role for its military that would arouse fierce opposition and require a politically volatile change in Japan's anti-militarist constitution. The constitution renounces "the use of force as a means of settling international disputes."

Missile defense that involves Japan "will increase Japan's military power; in all the polls, the majority of the population is against strengthening the military," said Takako Doi, leader of the opposition Social Democratic Party. "It's important to say no to what we cannot do."

Japan already is engaged in joint research with the United States. It agreed in 1998 to spend about $10 million a year to research technology on missile nose cones, warhead shapes, infrared target seekers and rocket motors for a system intended to shoot down incoming missiles.

But if the United States asks Japan to move beyond research and work together to build and operate such a missile shield, Japan's Self-Defense Forces would have to share hardware, intelligence and command centers with U.S. forces, according to military experts. The Japanese military might be asked to put a sea-based system on its ships, and -- if called to action -- try to shoot down a missile that might be aimed somewhere other than Japan. Such "collective" military defense with another nation has been interpreted as unconstitutional.

"Suppose a missile was launched from North Korea aimed at the United States. If we didn't shoot it down, that would break up the alliance with the United States. But to shoot it down would be unconstitutional," said Futoshi Shibayama, a military affairs specialist at Aichi Gakuin University in Nagoya.

"I think we should try to introduce a new interpretation of the Japanese constitution," he said. "But this would be a big domestic controversy."

Since its defeat in World War II, Japan has restricted its military to minimal defense needs and stridently rejected constitutional changes regarding the role of the armed forces. But as war memories have faded, the debate has grown between those who favor a more active stance and those who bitterly recall the hardships brought by the war. The debate always draws the attention of the country's Asian neighbors, who felt the brunt of Japanese conquests and remain wary of any move to remilitarize Japan.

The missile defense issue is worrying Japanese who initially welcomed Bush's campaign promises to strengthen the U.S. alliance with Japan. But some are now wondering if that partnership will require Japan to take a larger part in guaranteeing the security of northeastern Asia.

"We don't know where this will take us," said Seiji Maehara, a legislator and missile defense expert for the Democratic Party of Japan, the main opposition party. "We consider the alliance very important, but we have to convey the Japanese people's anxiety about where we will be taken by the Americans."

Although officially neutral, Japanese government officials quietly support the missile defense plan -- a top priority of the Bush administration -- seeing it as a bid by Japan's chief military protector to maintain superiority. But some are alarmed that the new administration has charged ahead on the issue so quickly -- without first securing an agreement with Russia, thus seeming to dismiss the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and without considering the impact on northeastern Asia and Japan, its principal Asian ally.

"The problem is the road map from where we are today to a new world is unclear," said Toshiro Ozawa, head of the government-sponsored Japan Institute of International Affairs. "I think this is the point where many people have reservations."

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has led the administration's effort on the issue, and last weekend he told skeptical European allies that the administration was determined to go ahead with a system to intercept ballistic missiles. In what seemed to some here like an afterthought, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell added Sunday that he would be sure to consult with Japan and other Asian nations.

China and Russia, both equipped with nuclear and conventional missiles, have vehemently criticized the plan and have warned that it could lead to a new arms race. Some experts also have cautioned that the missile defense plan would derail diplomatic overtures by North Korea, ostensibly the plan's prime target.

As Rumsfeld has stepped up his disparagement of the ABM Treaty as "old history," Japan has underscored its polite diplomatic urging that the United States consult before it acts. "We've expressed the importance for policy dialogue with the Asian Pacific region," said Toyohisa Kouzuki, director of the Japan-U.S. security treaty division of Japan's Foreign Ministry. Reviving Cold War antagonisms, with China or even with a financially strapped Russia, is not in Japan's interest, analysts here say.

Japan had calculated it might sidestep the big-power dispute and finesse its own constitutional issues by developing a smaller theater missile defense (TMD) on its own, separate from the larger U.S. national missile defense (NMD). A smaller system, purely for Japan's defense, might not be seen as unconstitutional and might avoid strong objections from Moscow and Beijing.

But hints of the Bush administration's still vague missile defense proposal suggest that the new president might pursue the most troublesome option for Japan. U.S. officials now talk of a wide system of both NMD and TMD that would cover U.S. troops in Japan and South Korea as well as U.S. allies, suggesting it would be done in collaboration with Japanese forces.

To mute congressional criticism that U.S. forces carry too much of the security burden in Asia, the administration is seen as likely to seek Japan's physical and financial participation in a missile defense system, officials here say. That would put Japan squarely on the diplomatic firing line and would more pointedly raise the constitutional issue.

"If the Bush administration tries to merge the TMD and NMD, that will be a big challenge for Japan," said Shinichi Ogawa, senior research fellow at the National Institute for Defense Studies.

Japan says it has made no decision on whether to go ahead with development and deployment of a theater missile defense and insists officially that its decision will be made independent of the United States. But to attempt to build a system on its own would be enormously expensive, at a time when Japan has begun to worry about its soaring public debt, and may not be technically feasible. "They go together," a Foreign Ministry official said of the U.S. and Japanese missile defense plans.

Furthermore, Japan is eager to court American approval after eight years of a Clinton administration that the Japanese saw as China-centered and neglectful of Tokyo. "We don't need" a missile defense for Japan, said Hisahiko Okazaki, a longtime diplomat and now head of a research organization in Tokyo. "But America wants the cooperation, and we should always show we are reliable allies. If it costs money, we pay money. For Japan, the supreme target should be the maintenance of the U.S.-Japan alliance."

Government officials say they believe the Bush administration will understand the limitations of Japanese assistance, but others are not sure that it will be so patient with the agonizing pace of Japan's consensus-based decision-making.

"We may say we need more time, more deliberations," said Shibayama, the military affairs specialist. "At the shortest, it may be 10 years. For the Bush administration, Japan may not be able to react in a satisfactory way."

-------- taiwan

NUCLEAR DEADLOCK

February 8, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

TAIWAN: Negotiations between the president and the opposition Nationalist Party over a partly built nuclear power plant all but collapsed. President Chen Shui-bian's Democratic Progressive Party angrily rejected the opposition's demand that Taiwan resume building the $5.4 billion project before negotiating its long-term fate. The two sides had seemed on the verge of a deal last week. Mark Landler (NYT)

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

Australia Rebuffs Shield Foes

Thursday, February 8, 2001
International Herald Tribune
Reuters
http://www.iht.com/articles/9988.htm

CANBERRA Australia has dismissed Chinese concerns about U.S. plans for a missile defense system and said the actions of Russia, another critic, had helped create the problem that the system seeks to combat.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer of Australia said the Moscow government, a fierce critic of the proposed U.S. missile defense program, had been partly responsible for the proliferation of missile technology in so-called rogue states that made such a system worth developing.

"A lot of the debate here is directed at the United States," Mr. Downer said in his first comments on the program since President George W. Bush took office. "I frankly think," he said on ABC television Tuesday night, "an awful lot of the debate should instead be directed not only toward those countries that have got or are developing these missile systems but the countries that have been transferring that missile technology to those countries."

For example, he said, Russia has expressed concern, "but Russia is a country that has been involved in the proliferation of missile technology."

"If there were no missiles," he said, "there would be no need for a missile defense system." A transcript of the interview was released Wednesday. The opposition Labour Party reacted with dismay to what it said it viewed as a strengthening of Prime Minister John Howard's support for U.S. plans to develop the missile defense system.

The program is opposed not only by Russia and China but also by many of Washington's European allies.

Northern Australia is the site of a joint Australian-U.S. monitoring station at Pinewood that is designed to provide early warning in case of a nuclear attack and would presumably become a key part of a U.S. missile defense system.

Opponents of the program argue that Australia, as the eyes and ears of American forces, would become a prime target in a nuclear war.

Critics argue that Australia, which has close ties to China because of extensive trade, should resist being drawn into any confrontation as an ally of the United States. Labour's foreign affairs spokesman, Laurie Brereton, said Mr. Downer's comments "leave little doubt that the Howard government is prepared to subordinate its strategic thinking to that of the Bush administration."

"Missile proliferation is a serious problem," Mr. Brereton said, "but pushing ahead with national missile defense will leave the world less, rather than more, secure."

Mr. Downer also dismissed China's misgivings, saying the program was intended as a defense against smaller states. He discounted comments from Beijing that it would react to the program by increasing its stock of missiles.

He said China had already said it would modernize its ballistic-missile capacity. "That presumably means to expand it," he said.

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

-------- washington

Security Questioned at Rocky Flats

Thursday, February 8, 2001
Salt Lake Tribune
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.sltrib.com/02082001/nation_w/69493.htm

GOLDEN, Colo. -- Workers and union leaders questioned the relaxation of security measures at Building 771 at Rocky Flats, citing the safety of crews removing plutonium at the former nuclear weapons trigger factory.

Rocky Flats officials said downgrading the ultra-high security protected area and other formerly dangerous buildings to moderate security will help speed the cleanup.

But union leaders and other workers called the move premature, given the recent safety lapses at the site.

Workers will no longer have to go through a rigorous check each time they enter, according to the plan that requires Energy Department approval.

The protected area, said spokeswoman Jennifer Thompson of cleanup contractor Kaiser-Hill Co., was designed for security, not safety. Most of the waste storage and shipment facilities are outside the protected area already, she said.

The size of the protected area at the 6,400-acre site, northwest of Denver, will be reduced from 150 acres to about 30. Much of the radioactive material in the area has been shipped out of state or is stored in a nearby building that will remain in the protected area.

-------- us nuc politics

A Lesson From the Brink

Thursday, February 8, 2001
By Mary McGrory
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41551-2001Feb7?language=printer

On the long bus ride back from their weekend retreat in Pennsylvania, despondent Democrats watched "Thirteen Days," the somber and gripping dramatization of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. After it was over, they asked themselves: "Would he do what Kennedy did?"

"He," of course, is George W. Bush, who in his second week in office held a high-profile White House screening of "Thirteen Days" to which he invited the Kennedy family -- having first had a friend screen it to make sure nothing would dismay them. Indeed, there was nothing, except the exaggerated portrayal of Kenneth O'Donnell, Kennedy's appointments secretary, as the man who saved the world from annihilation. Crowning the unlikelihood, the film has O'Donnell calling the president "Jack." On the New Frontier, everyone from family to staff called him "Mr. President." It was a must because of his youth and his win-by-a-whisker.

But O'Donnell's son owns a hunk of the film company, and producer-star Kevin Costner needed a fat part.

This does not detract from the essence of "Thirteen Days," which celebrates Kennedy's remarkable grasp of two iron truths: He knew he was commander-in-chief -- Gen. Curtis LeMay, bellowing and roaring at him to bomb and invade Cuba, was wasting his breath. The second principle Kennedy never let go of was that nuclear war, which is what unrestrained military action would lead to, was unthinkable.

Kennedy relied far more on his brother Bobby, the attorney general, than he did the brass who had told him he had no choice but to go forward in the Bay of Pigs. From the first heart-stopping moment when he saw the photographs of missiles in Cuba, Kennedy insisted there had to be an option other than what his closest aide Ted Sorensen called "humiliation and escalation." He tried diplomacy and a blockade.

Washington and the world wonder about our new and untried president. Could Bush stand up to the chiefs? Or, more importantly, could he stand up to the strong-minded hawks around him, the Ford alumni like Vice President Cheney and his defense secretary? Donald H. Rumsfeld is just back from a Star Wars-selling trip to Europe, which is not all that keen about the nuclear missile shield that is the most visible part of Bush's nuclear thinking.

It's a little ironic that Hollywood is nudging Washington to do some Doomsday thinking. The fate of Earth did not figure in the presidential campaign, and was not mentioned in the debates. George W. Bush expressed enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan's Star Wars and hopes of building it. He coupled this with a declaration of his intent to reduce our nuclear arsenals, even unilaterally.

Rumsfeld's European weekend produced new expressions of doubt from our allies. They are leery of a nuclear missile defense, fearful that a new system, which would require the elimination of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Russians, could destabilize the nuclear arrangements now in effect. Russia and China refused to accept our assurances that the shield is not against them but against nasty little countries that we used to call "rogue" states but now call "states of concern."

Moscow and Peking have threatened an arms buildup if we deploy a defensive system. Rumsfeld told the dubious Europeans they just better get used to the NMD. They will be consulted, but they will have no veto power over its deployment.

Rumsfeld tried to seduce the infidels with promises of sharing our missile defense secrets with them. They did not succumb. As of now, our system doesn't work.

On Tuesday, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) sponsored a showing of "Thirteen Days" at the Library of Congress for House members. The Coolidge Auditorium was packed with staff members, many of whom looked as if they had been in kindergarten when the world lurched to the brink of nuclear confrontation -- and was pulled back by a pair of brothers from Boston who understood power and politics.

Markey was a leader of a highly popular grass-roots uprising called the nuclear freeze movement, which seized the country in 1982, and was put down by Reagan. Reagan so prized his Star Wars dream that in 1986, he turned down Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's offer of eliminating all nuclear weapons on condition that Reagan abandon Star Wars. This he refused to do.

Is Bush as gung-ho? We'll know more later. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, at his confirmation hearings, sounded less keen than his Cabinet mates, and may represent our best hope of sensible options. Meantime, Markey hopes that Bush and other people in charge learn lessons from "Thirteen Days." He hopes they will see the crisis as Kennedy did -- a "conversation" between him and Nikita Khrushchev. It was a dialogue of submarines and U-2s, missiles and warplanes, but two great powers were telling each other that they didn't really want to blow up the world.


-------- MILITARY

Top Marine apologizes for calling Japanese 'wimps'

02/08/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-08-wimp.htm

NAHA, Japan (AP) - The top U.S. Marine general on Okinawa personally apologized to the governor here Thursday for calling local leaders "a bunch of wimps" in an e-mail to his staff.

"I deeply apologize for the inappropriate remarks which were in my e-mail," Lt. Gen. Earl Hailston told Gov. Keiichi Inamine at a news conference called to discuss the e-mail, which was published in a major Okinawan newspaper earlier this week.

Hailston said that he had "no excuse," and the message "certainly did not reflect my true feelings."

Inamine called the incident "very regrettable" and said it showed a "lack of understanding and consideration toward the historical development of Okinawa and the sentiments of the Okinawan people."

The article set off a firestorm of criticism on this small island on Japan's southern fringe, which has been the key U.S. military outpost in the Pacific for decades.

It prompted assembly members in one city near Marine bases on the island to unanimously pass a resolution calling for Hailston's resignation, the first time a local government here has called for the removal of a senior U.S. military officer.

According to the newspaper report, Hailston, responding to the arrest of a Marine last month for lifting a schoolgirl's skirt, urged his staff to crack down on crimes committed by military personnel. But he also criticized Okinawan leaders' failure to stand up to Okinawans who want to reduce the U.S. military presence here.

"I think they are all nuts and a bunch of wimps," the paper quoted him as writing in the e-mail.

Military officials have not disputed the report, but have refused to confirm the contents of the e-mail, saying it was intended as a private communication. In a statement, Hailston quickly apologized for the "misunderstanding" caused by his choice of words, insisting he had only respect and admiration for local Japanese officials.

Still, many Okinawans saw that as an evasion. Okinawans were further angered by the Pentagon's announcement shortly after that it planned no punishment for the three-star general.

Hailston's meeting with Inamine on Thursday was seen as an attempt to calm the storm.

But the story continued to dominate the front pages of local newspapers, and received prominent coverage in national media.

Under a mutual security treaty between Japan and the United States, about 47,000 U.S. military service people are stationed in Japan. Nearly two-thirds of them, including the largest contingent of Marines outside the United States, are on Okinawa Island, 1,000 miles southwest of Tokyo.

---

OKINAWA OUTRAGE

February 8, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

JAPAN: Outraged lawmakers on Okinawa demanded that the chief of American military forces on the island be fired for referring to his Japanese hosts as "nuts and wimps" in an internal e-mail. The Okinawa City assembly, which adopted a resolution seeking the dismissal of Lt. Gen Earl Hailston, will send their demand to President Bush. (Reuters)

---

Investigation into cable car accident ends

02/08/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-08-cable.htm

ROME (AP) - The pilots of a U.S. Marine jet that sliced a ski gondola's cables in 1998, killing 20 people, acted as "criminals" and the U.S. chain of command were responsible, an Italian parliamentary commission said Thursday.

The 25-member commission from the lower Chamber of Deputies investigated the cause of the accident on Mount Cermis, in northern Italy, for a year, sending a mission to the Pentagon in November.

"It's a shame that these two criminals - because this is what they are - were axquitted," Ermanno Iacobellis, a centrist who headed the commission, said of the pilots. "Their responsibility is clear and direct."

A member of the commission, Luigi Olivieri, said that the U.S. Embassy in Rome had requested a copy of the report.

The embassy's press office said no officials were immediately available for a comment. No Italian government action is expected to be taken over the report.

Both Italian and American investigators had found before that the EA-6B Prowler jet was flying too low and too fast when it hit the cable, sending the skiers crashing into the mountainside.

However, the commission said the current regulations for low-altitude flights are adequate. A year after the accident, Italy and the United States reached an accord for tightening restrictions of the low flights.

A U.S. military jury acquitted the jet's pilot of manslaughter. He was later sentenced to six months in prison and was dismissed from the Marines for helping to destroy a videotape of the flight. The jet's navigator was also dismissed from the Marines over the videotape. Charges were dropped against two back-seat crewmen.

The commission's report said, however, that "responsibility could not be limited to the crew ... but involved the whole U.S. chain of command" at Aviano Air Base, where the two airmen were deployed for missions over Bosnia.

All the Marines there "enjoyed very broad and unusual autonomy, since effective controls over their activity was lacking," the commission found.

Iacobellis also lamented lack of action from Italian authorities, who, for years before the tragedy, had been receiving complaints by citizens in the ski mountain resort town of Cavalese about the low flights but never reported the danger.

"Italy was in a state of subjugation to NATO's higher needs," Iacobellis said.

---

Pentagon asks to visit crash sites

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

WASHINGTON (AP) - Pentagon officials are seeking China's permission to visit two newly discovered crash sites in Tibet that may hold the remains of American airmen whose military aircraft went down in the forbidding Himalayan Mountains during World War II.

U.S. officials have tentatively linked one of the crash sites to a C-46 transport lost on March 27, 1944, on a flight from Kunming, China, to Sookarating in the far northeastern reaches of India. The plane's crew of four is listed in Pentagon records as missing, according to spokesman Larry Greer. Less is known about the second crash site.

China first notified the Pentagon of the discoveries last fall and provided the first details in January. They said no human remains were found in an initial survey of the areas, but some unspecified personal effects were recovered.

Large portions of both aircraft apparently are still intact.

Greer said Pentagon officials are working with Chinese officials to obtain permission to visit the sites, possibly this summer.

It is not clear how the aircraft wreckage was discovered. China said the findings were made in August 1999 and May 2000.

-------- britain

EASING U.S. CONCERNS

February 8, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

BRITAIN: The Ministry of Defense sought to ease Washington concerns that European Union efforts to create a 60,000-strong rapid reaction force would detract from NATO, with an official saying NATO will remain the key to Western security. "The U.K. has an important role to play in preventing misunderstanding between the U.S. and European partners," the ministry said. Washington is in fact counting on the British to counter the French, who have sought to use the initiative to diminish American influence in Europe. Michael R. Gordon (NYT)

-------- colombia

Meeting With Rebels Crucial for Colombia's Leader

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08COLO.html?pagewanted=all

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, Feb. 7 - With the hopes of a war-weary nation on his shoulders, Andrés Pastrana won the presidency in June 1998. He was the candidate for peace who Colombians believed would bring Latin America's largest and oldest rebel group to the peace table.

But more than two and a half years later peace remains elusive, and Mr. Pastrana's popularity has plummeted. The rebels refuse to negotiate, and the swath of territory Mr. Pastrana ceded to them as a haven for peace talks remains firmly in their grasp. Many Colombians, frustrated over the lack of progress, have lost faith.

Now, Mr. Pastrana has embarked on a politically risky move analysts are calling a last-ditch effort to avert all-out war: a meeting on Thursday in the rebel zone with Manuel Marulanda, the Marxist revolutionary who leads the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.

The goal, as Mr. Pastrana put it in a direct appeal to Mr. Marulanda, is to "decide once and for all if we are going to continue the peace process that you and I started."

But political analysts say that for Mr. Pastrana to maintain political legitimacy and presidential authority, he has to return with more than just a nebulous pledge from Mr. Marulanda that his group is committed to a peaceful resolution of the 37- year-old conflict.

The rebel leader must agree - and forcefully so - that his group, known as the FARC, will pursue peace through negotiations, experts say. And to prove the rebels' sincerity to a doubtful public, progress must be made on one or more issues that have hampered negotiations.

Among Mr. Marulanda's supporters, there is divided opinion about whether to continue war or to make peace. He is also under considerable international pressure to resume peace talks. And he may be motivated to keep the government from resuming military activity, which could be ominous for both sides.

"The reunion shouldn't be just to reactivate the dialogue," said Luis Fernando Velasco, a congressman and supporter of the peace effort. "It wouldn't be enough to satisfy the expectations and the needs of the people."

Several analysts said one hopeful and likely outcome could be an announcement that the two sides had agreed to press ahead on an exchange of sick prisoners.

But better for the president would be an affirmation from the rebels that they would seriously pursue a cease-fire or the possibility of allowing international monitors into the territory the group controls.

"What has to be reaffirmed is there are two sides in this, that the FARC is also interested in moving the process forward," said Daniel García-Peña, a former government peace negotiator and now the director of a peace group called Planeta Paz. "There has to be a re-launching of the process that will bring, in a few months, some concrete results, concrete accords that can give the process some life."

Mr. Pastrana's efforts to renew the peace talks come as the United States delivers a huge aid package aimed at curtailing Colombia's cocaine trade, which has helped fuel the war.

When Mr. Pastrana first created the demilitarized zone in November 1998, hopes were high that the unusual gesture would foster enough good will to bring peace. After all, Mr. Marulanda had supported Mr. Pastrana's candidacy, even meeting with the president-elect shortly before he took office.

Months later, though, Mr. Pastrana's efforts were being seriously tested. In January 1999, Mr. Marulanda snubbed Mr. Pastrana by failing to show up at their first planned meeting inside the rebel zone.

And although the two men did finally meet again in May 1999, the last two years have seen both sides break off negotiations numerous times. Mr. Pastrana has repeatedly been forced to extend the life of the demilitarized zone to restart peace talks. All the while, the FARC has been accused of using the territory to fortify itself, hide kidnap victims and cultivate coca.

The latest slap in the face came in December, when a Colombian congressman, Diego Turbay, and six others were assassinated just outside the zone and the rebels at first declined to take responsibility or offer a denial. (Three weeks ago, however, Mr. Marulanda emphatically denied responsibility in an interview with Voz, a Communist newspaper.)

The setbacks have been devastating to Mr. Pastrana.

Semana, the leading news magazine in Colombia, noted in a story this week that the president "who will arrive for the meeting with Marulanda" is "not the same one from two and a half years ago." Mr. Pastrana "put all his chips" on the peace plan, the article went on, which could mean he will finish his presidency with little to show for his efforts unless the FARC agrees to seriously talk peace. A presidential election is scheduled next year, and Mr. Pastrana, as the incumbent, cannot run.

"At some point, he needs a concession from the FARC," explained Russell Crandall, an American political scientist who is finishing a book about American foreign policy toward Colombia. "He hasn't gotten an inch since then, and if he doesn't get a bone now, you can just forget it."

But Mr. Crandall, who teaches at Davidson College in North Carolina, said Mr. Pastrana's efforts to get a lifeline from the FARC are fraught with risks. The FARC, after all, can simply pull out of talks if Pastrana "pushes too hard," he said.

"Then what's he going to do?" Mr. Crandall said. "It's almost like the government needs these negotiations more than the FARC does."

Mr. Pastrana also has to walk the political tightrope of modern-day Colombian politics, making sure not to ruffle the feathers of the military or more conservative elements whose views hold more sway these days.

One of those conservatives is Álvaro Uribe, a presidential candidate whose popularity has surged in recent months because of his hard-line stance toward the rebels.

Mr. Uribe said he believes that for Mr. Pastrana to succeed in talks with Mr. Marulanda he must come away with a cease-fire agreement, something most analysts say is very unlikely.

Still, there is a strong contingent of congressmen and analysts - not to mention the international community, including the United States - who vocally support the president's efforts. They say that Mr. Pastrana's willingness to meet with Mr. Marulanda to pursue peace in the face of stiff opposition may provide the impetus to restart talks.

"This new encounter between these two players in the conflict is historically significant in the sense that it reinvigorates the process," said Arturo Alape, who wrote a biography of Mr. Marulanda.

"It's a response against the war zealots who think that the solution for Colombia is to continue fighting, to do away with the demilitarized zone," Mr. Alape said. "The country has to understand that the only future for Colombia is the peace path. If war continues, we're talking about 20 or 30 years more of this."

---

Colombian rebels take over town

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia (AP) - With a martial display, rebels on Wednesday demonstrated their control of a southern region where their commander plans to meet with President Andres Pastrana for a summit aimed at salvaging peace talks. About 100 rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia - wearing green combat fatigues, black berets, and shouldering assault rifles - conducted drills on the main plaza of this cattle-ranching town as residents watched. The rebels also hoisted their red, yellow, and blue flag above the dusty square.

The rebels had also erected a billboard in the square protesting a $1.3 billion U.S. aid program for Colombia that consists mainly of military assistance for eradicating drug crops in regions near here under the control of the guerrillas.

San Vicente del Caguan is the largest town in a safe haven twice the size of New Jersey which Pastrana granted to the rebels two years ago to spur peace talks forward.

His meeting with rebel chief Manuel Marulanda on Thursday would be their third face-to-face encounter.

A rebel commander, Simon Trinidad, gave assurances that Marulanda would attend, rejecting speculation that he might stand up Pastrana, as he did two years ago at the outset of peace talks.

---

Colombian leader visits rebel land

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia (AP) - With minimal security and a country's peace hopes on his shoulders, President Andres Pastrana flew Thursday into guerrilla territory for a summit aimed at rescuing troubled peace talks.

Pastrana stepped off his plane and was greeted by a 60-member police security contingent and by a rebel commander. The president wants the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia to resume peace talks they walked out of three months ago, and is seeking concessions that would win back public support for his administration's negotiations with the powerful leftist insurgency. It would be the third face-to-face meeting between Pastrana and Marulanda, the 70-year-old founder and leader of the rebel group, known by its Spanish initials as the FARC.

The group has been fighting for 37 years, claiming to represent the poor. The rebels walked out of formal peace talks in November, demanding that Pastrana crack down on right-wing paramilitary militias and scale back an anti-drug offensive backed by growing U.S. military aid.

-------- drug war

Ashcroft hits Clinton on pardon, drug war

02/08/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-02-08-ashcroft.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - John Ashcroft used his first interview as attorney general to take out after Bill Clinton over the war on drugs and his pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich.

In a television interview Wednesday night, the new attorney general said his top three goals were to increase gun prosecutions, reinvigorate the war on drugs and to stamp out racial discrimination.

But he also looked back at some of former President Clinton's most controversial moves, including his pardon of Rich on his last day in office.

"A pardon should be reserved for a situation where there is a manifest sense of injustice," Ashcroft said Wednesday night on CNN's "Larry King Live" program. "The American people are troubled whenever they think a pardon would be associated with political support or financial support."

Although expressing "surprise" with the pardon, Ashcroft nevertheless said the Constitution gives a president a "pretty unfettered right" to pardon anyone.

Clinton's pardon has been criticized because Rich has stayed in Switzerland rather than returning to face 51 counts of tax evasion and fraud filed against him in 1983.

In addition, the pardon was requested by his ex-wife, Denise, who has given Democrats about $1 million since 1993. Clinton has denied any political or financial motivation.

The new attorney general also blamed Clinton in part for a rise in marijuana use during the 1990s. In the 1992 campaign, Clinton said he once had smoked marijuana, but didn't inhale. He later told an MTV town forum that if he had to do it again, he would inhale "if I could; I tried before."

"I think that sends the wrong signal," Ashcroft said. "It's so important you have a president who will speak forcefully against drug use, rather than wink and give the nod in some sense, saying 'I didn't inhale, but I wish I had."'

Ashcroft said he and President Bush want to "concentrate on educating children away from drugs."

Listing his three top priorities, Ashcroft said, "I want to stop gun violence, to reinvigorate the war on drugs, to end discrimination wherever I find it."

He particularly mentioned enforcing voting rights, fair housing laws and putting a stop to racial profiling by police. "It's wrong for police to stop people based on race."

After his civil rights record was bitterly attacked during a stormy Senate confirmation battle, Ashcroft is inviting Justice Department's civil rights division officials to a brown bag lunch in his private department dining room next week, chief spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said. Civil rights will be first, but he plans to hold these lunches with each division.

With every news organization clamoring to talk to him, Ashcroft unveiled his priorities in an interview with King, known for polite questioning rather than hostile cross-examination.

Ashcroft has three main civil rights issues in mind, Tucker said.

"He wants to make sure no American feels outside the protection of the law," she said. "He wants to make sure all people have access and that no voting rights are violated."

This includes the department's ongoing investigation of the presidential election in Florida, where black voters have complained were systematically turned away from the polls, but also reports of ballot access problems and voting fraud in other locations, she said.

He also wants to "take a serious look at hate crimes," Tucker said. He previously opposed legislation backed by the Clinton administration to expand the federal hate crimes law to cover attacks on homosexuals and to remove a requirement that a federally protected right be involved, which has been an obstacle to some prosecutions.

One of the biggest backers of that legislation, Ashcroft's predecessor Janet Reno, flew from her home in Florida to have lunch Thursday with Ashcroft in his private dining room.

When Ashcroft told reporters how much he appreciated the chance to confer with the nation's longest-serving attorney general, Reno promptly corrected him, noting her eight years were second to the 11 served by William Wirt. "I told you I could learn things from her," Ashcroft remarked.

Reno was asked if she agreed with the Rich pardon but ducked the question. "I don't do things on Thursday any more," she replied in a reference to no longer holding her weekly Thursday news conference. Ashcroft roared with laughter.

In an effort to reduce the incidence of gun crimes, Ashcroft said he wants to expand a federal antigun effort used in Virginia known as Project Exile. Under the project, federal prosecutors handle most gun crimes and seek stiff sentences. The National Rifle Association strongly backs the program.

"There has been a lack of gun prosecutions in recent years," Tucker said, echoing a recent Republican criticism of the Clinton administration.

Reno's aides acknowledged that federal gun prosecutions dropped for two years during the mid-1990s as they focused federal efforts on the biggest gun traffickers and referred smaller cases to local prosecutors. Combined federal and state gun prosecutions rose through the 1990s. The federal prosecutors also handled gun cases in states where federal statutes were tougher than state gun laws. And federal gun prosecutions rose for the final few years of the Clinton administration.

---

Ashcroft to focus on crime, drugs

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

WASHINGTON (AP) - Attorney General John Ashcroft intends to increase gun prosecutions, renew the war on drugs, and reach out to minorities as his three top priorities, a spokeswoman said Wednesday.

After his civil rights record was bitterly attacked during a stormy Senate confirmation battle, Ashcroft is inviting Justice Department's civil rights division officials to a brown bag lunch in his private department dining room next week, spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said. Civil rights will be first, but he plans to hold these lunches with each division. Ashcroft has three main civil rights issues in mind, Tucker said. He intends to focus on racial profiling, the practice by which police pull over minorities for questioning about crimes based on their race alone rather than real evidence.

Voting rights is another area he will focus on. This includes the department's ongoing investigation of the presidential election in Florida, where black voters have complained were systematically turned away from the polls, but also reports of ballot access problems and voting fraud in other locations. He also wants to "take a serious look at hate crimes," Tucker said. He previously opposed legislation backed by the Clinton administration to expand the federal hate crimes law to cover attacks on homosexuals and to remove a requirement that a federally protected right be involved, which has been an obstacle to some prosecutions.

Finally, Ashcroft wants to re-energize the war on drugs by increasing the Drug Enforcement Administration budget and by "using the bully pulpit to remind children that drug use is wrong and bad for you," Tucker said.

---

Raids in Kentucky Aim at Deadly New Drug

February 8, 2001
New York Times
National News Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/national/08NATI.html

LEXINGTON, Ky., Feb. 7 (AP) - State and federal authorities said they arrested 201 drug dealers in raids today and Tuesday to crack down on a deadly new narcotic that has been compared to heroin.

Those arrested were charged with distributing the drug, OxyContin, a prescription painkiller produced by Purdue Pharma of Norwalk, Conn. OxyContin, a synthetic morphine, is used by cancer patients and others in severe pain.

The raids were the largest ever made in Kentucky, United States Attorney Joseph Famularo said.

At least 59 people have died from overdoses of OxyContin in eastern Kentucky in the last year, Mr. Famularo said.

---

Rockefeller Drug Laws

February 8, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/opinion/L08DRU.html To the Editor:

It is not surprising that New York's district attorneys are speaking out against reform of the state's mandatory sentencing laws, even those applying to low-level nonviolent drug offenders (news article, Feb. 6). These harsh drug statutes do not abolish discretion; they remove it from the judge's hands and concentrate it in the prosecutor's office. Now, whoever sets the charge controls the outcome of the case.

The statewide coalition of New York's prosecutors has always aggressively opposed any proposal to amend the Rockefeller drug laws, even those modest in scope, because such measures would curtail their power.

It is welcome news that the state's political leaders, including Gov. George E. Pataki, now appear willing to challenge this self-interested posture of law enforcement officials.

ROBERT GANGI Executive Director, Correctional Association of New York New York, Feb. 6, 2001

---

RAPPER APPEALS SENTENCE

February 8, 2001
New York Times
Metro Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/nyregion/08MBRF.html

BUFFALO: Lawyers for the rap performer known as DMX plan to be in federal court today in an effort to keep their client from beginning a 15-day jail term tomorrow. DMX, whose real name is Earl Simmons, was fined $400 and sentenced to 15 days in the Erie County Correctional Facility in Alden after pleading guilty in May to marijuana possession and other violations, including driving without a license. One of the lawyers, Mark Mahoney, said they were asking Judge Richard Arcara of Federal District Court to stay the sentence and either set it aside or send it back to state court to determine whether it is excessive. (AP)

-------- israel

Jerusalem Is 'Indivisible,' Sharon Says

Thursday, February 8, 2001
Washington Post
By Lee Hockstader
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A40177-2001Feb7?language=printer

JERUSALEM, Feb. 7 -- A day after his crushing electoral victory, Prime Minister-elect Ariel Sharon donned a black velvet skullcap, murmured a prayer before the hulking, ancient stones of Jerusalem's Western Wall and sent an unmistakable signal that on his watch there would be no more offers of concessions to the Palestinians on control of the contested city.

"I am visiting Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people for the past 3,000 years and the united and indivisible capital of Israel -- with the Temple Mount at its center -- for all eternity," Sharon told reporters at the Wall. With that, he served notice that the offer by his defeated opponent, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Barak, to share sovereignty over the sacred city with Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority was henceforth void.

In symbols and words, Sharon, who trounced Barak 62.5 percent to 37.4 percent in Tuesday's election, spent much of his first day as leader-in-waiting spreading the news that the end had come for the search launched seven years ago in Oslo for a comprehensive peace to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was decidedly less clear about what would take its place.

Even as Sharon's aides released a letter from Arafat congratulating him on his triumph and expressing hope the sides would "continue to build a peace of the brave," they reiterated his message that the Palestinians could forget about negotiations until their four-month-old revolt against Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip ceased.

And they made clear that even when talks resumed, there would be no attempt to reach a comprehensive peace along the lines Barak had in mind. Instead, Sharon is expected to propose a more modest interim deal, trading some small amount of land or economic benefits for Palestinian non-belligerency.

"Oslo as we know it is over," said Yossi Alpher, an Israeli strategic analyst. "Something in the spirit of Oslo on an interim level is what Sharon has in mind . . . but based on conditions I think Arafat will find unacceptable."

"The mandate he got from Israeli voters in an overwhelming way is to take a different approach," said Raanan Gissin, Sharon's spokesman. "The Israeli people are fed up with being suckers."

As for the territorial concessions in the West Bank and Jerusalem offered by Barak to Arafat last summer at Camp David in negotiations brokered by President Bill Clinton, Gissin added: "Everything in Camp David is null and void unless it was signed, and nothing was signed."

Gissin also spoke in general terms about a need to take more effective military steps to put down the Palestinian uprising. "If hostilities continue, you have to take certain measures that would take the enemy off balance," he said. "It's like pacification in Vietnam -- you must separate civilian and terrorist populations."

As Sharon and his aides laid out their stands, the Palestinian Authority -- Arafat's government in land handed over by Israel since the Oslo agreements -- issued a statement declaring the election "an internal Israeli matter" and called on the incoming government to resume negotiations where they left off under Barak.

But elsewhere among the Palestinians, Sharon's tough talk was met with talk at least as tough. Fatah, Arafat's political movement within the Palestine Liberation Organization, issued a statement pledging to intensify the revolt against Israel's occupation in response to the election of a man it called "the butcher Sharon."

"If Israelis think that Sharon will make security for them, we say loudly that Israel will never have security at all," the statement said.

Jibril Rajoub, the Palestinian security chief in the West Bank, amplified the message. Sharon "and his policies and the statements he has made that he wants to dictate peace and dictate terms on the Palestinian people and the Arab world is craziness that will drag us into bloodshed," Rajoub said, speaking in Hebrew to Israel Radio.

Looking abroad, Sharon tried to send soothing signals. He is reportedly ready to send three of his Likud Party's top foreign policy hands to Washington next week to ensure smooth relations with the Bush administration. The three -- Moshe Arens, a former defense minister; Zalman Shoval, a former ambassador to the United States; and Dore Gold, a former ambassador to the United Nations -- are expected to discuss the Palestinian issue, but not at the exclusion of other matters.

Mindful that the Bush administration is seeking to lessen the U.S. role as a mediator between Israel and the Palestinians, Sharon has instructed his envoys to raise with Washington the threat of missile proliferation in Iran and Iraq and Russian transfers of military technology to Iran.

Sharon is also sending envoys to Europe, where the Palestinians enjoy considerable public sympathy and the incoming Israeli leader is regarded in some capitals with suspicion bordering on dread.

"There's no doubt there's an image problem [for Sharon] in the West," said Gissin. "He's a big target. . . . When it comes to policy, he ignores image."

Sharon's closest advisers also are trying to calm Israelis about the incoming leader's intentions. Hours after his victory became apparent Tuesday night, his son and confidant Omri assured television viewers that it would be a kinder and gentler Sharon who would guide Israel during the bloodiest Israeli-Palestinian violence in a decade.

"I think when Ariel Sharon speaks it will be a soothing message, and I think many people still do not appreciate just how soothing it will be," said Omri Sharon.

Nonetheless, the shape of Sharon's government and policies, and possibly even his political survival, remain open questions. He has until March 30 to form a government and until March 31 to get a budget passed. His chances of success hinge largely on the question of whether he will be able to make good on his repeated pledge to forge an alliance with Barak's left-leaning Labor Party.

Sharon and his closest advisers view a partnership with Labor as the key to their success, buying them political breathing room at home and credibility overseas. Without such a right-left coalition, Sharon would be left with a narrow right-wing and religious-party government that some analysts say would be toppled within months by Israel's unruly parliament, which is divided among 16 parties.

But he faces serious obstacles in trying to cobble together a government of "national unity." One is the deep ideological split between Likud and Labor, especially in their approach to peacemaking with the Palestinians. The other is the disarray within the Labor Party, which was stunned by Barak's surprise resignation as party leader and legislator following his defeat Tuesday night.

Committed Labor peace advocates, including Justice Minister Yossi Beilin, insisted today that the party should refuse to join any alliance with Sharon. But several other Labor ministers, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres, seemed more receptive. Under such an arrangement, Peres could end up as foreign minister.

A complicating factor is that it remains unclear who will replace Barak as head of the Labor Party, although there was a gathering consensus today that Peres would at least represent the party in negotiations on an alliance with Sharon. The fight to replace Barak as party leader, which may involve Peres, Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami, parliament Speaker Avraham Burg and others, could be bitter.

-------- space

Space seen as battlefield of future

February 8, 2001
Washington Times
By Bill Gertz
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-20012823833.htm

China and Russia are working on a wide range of weapons capable of attacking U.S. satellites and space sensors, the Pentagon's top intelligence official told Congress yesterday.

Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, also said his agency is unable to certify that China is adhering to pledges made to the United States to curb sales of missiles and weapons of mass destruction.

"A number of countries are interested in or experimenting with a variety of technologies that could be used to develop counterspace capabilities," Adm. Wilson said in prepared testimony on national security threats.

"China and Russia have across-the-board programs under way, and other smaller states and nonstate entities are pursuing more limited - though potentially effective - approaches."

He appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee with CIA Director George J. Tenet as part of the U.S. intelligence community's annual world threat briefing.

The three-star admiral said that by 2015 "future adversaries will be able to employ a wide variety of means to disrupt, degrade or defeat portions of the U.S. space support system."

The U.S. military is heavily reliant on satellites and space-based sensors for communications, intelligence, reconnaissance, and command and control of forces around the world.

Weaker foreign militaries view U.S. space systems as a key vulnerability that would provide a strategic advantage during a conflict.

Mr. Tenet, in his prepared statement for the Senate hearing, also said information warfare and space weapons are a growing threat.

"Our adversaries well understand U.S. strategic dependence on access to space," Mr. Tenet said. "Operations to disrupt, degrade, or defeat U.S. space assets will be attractive options for those seeking to counter U.S. strategic military superiority."

It was the first time U.S. intelligence officials publicly discussed the space warfare threat.

The disclosure followed recent official statements by Russian and Chinese governments criticizing a U.S. Air Force war game involving a simulated future conflict with China. Mock Chinese forces attacked U.S. space systems during the exercise, according to military officials.

China is developing ground-based laser weapons and electronic pulse weapons that can blind or destroy U.S. satellites, U.S. intelligence officials have said.

In wide-ranging testimony, Mr. Tenet, flanked by Adm. Wilson and the State Department intelligence chief, Thomas Fingar, testified that:

• Terrorists linked to Saudi fugitive Osama bin Ladin pose "the most immediate and serious threat" of attacks on American interests. "The threat from terrorism is real, immediate and evolving," Mr. Tenet said.

• Long-range ballistic missiles are a growing threat beyond the strategic missile arsenals of Russia and China and include North Korea, Iran and possibly Iraq.

• The risk of war between South Asia rivals India and Pakistan is "unacceptably high" and could lead to a regional conventional and nuclear conflict. The dispute over the Kashmir region has the potential to lead to "full-scale war."

• India and Pakistan may conduct another round of underground nuclear tests, and Pakistan may test-fire one of its medium-range missiles in response to India's recent flight test of an Agni missile.

• The Islamist Taleban regime in Afghanistan is involved in drug trafficking and has provided safe harbor to bin Laden.

• Mr. Tenet said he has no intention of reinstating security clearances for former CIA Director John Deutch, who was pardoned last month by outgoing President Clinton shortly before he was to have pleaded guilty to charges he mishandled classified information.

• Leaks of classified information have been "devastating," and the CIA director hopes Congress will renew efforts to pass new legislation aimed at increasing criminal penalties for disclosing secrets. Similar legislation was vetoed by Mr. Clinton last year.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin is reverting to a Soviet-style government in several areas that undermine democracy.

On future warfare, Mr. Tenet did not identify China and Russia as among the nations working on space weapons. However, he stated that "foreign countries are interested in or experimenting with a variety of technologies that could be used to develop counterspace capabilities."

Mr. Tenet said no other country in the world is so reliant and dependent on computer information systems. "The great advantage we derive from this also presents us with unique vulnerabilities," he said. "Computer-based information operations could provide our adversaries with an asymmetric response to U.S. military superiority by giving them the potential to degrade or circumvent our advantage in conventional military power."

Under questioning from Sen. Richard C. Shelby, Alabama Republican and committee chairman, all three intelligence officials acknowledged that China does not appear to be living up to pledges made to the United States to halt dangerous missile sales and nuclear transfers.

"People make pledges," Mr. Tenet said.

"And some people don't keep them, do they?" Mr. Shelby said in response.

China recently pledged that it would not sell nuclear-capable missiles in exchange for a decision by the U.S. government not to impose economic sanctions for Beijing's missile sales to Iran and Pakistan.

Asked if he could assure the panel that China is no longer engaged in activities it has agreed to halt, Adm. Wilson said, "I could not assure the committee of that."

Mr. Tenet said the Chinese are continuing to have contacts that are "worrisome" as far as weapons sales are concerns. "I'm not giving anybody a clean bill of health," he said.

Russia, China and North Korea are the most active suppliers of missiles and weapons of mass destruction, and Pakistan and Iran and other states are "secondary" weapons suppliers - transferring to third parties weapons technology gained from others, Mr. Tenet said.

---

Shuttle Atlantis Heads for Space Station Carrying Laboratory

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By WARREN E. LEARY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/science/08SHUT.html?pagewanted=all

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Feb. 7 - The space shuttle Atlantis, carrying a giant American science laboratory that will anchor further expansion of the International Space Station, created a visual spectacular today as it rocketed into the twilight.

Carrying a crew of five, the shuttle rose from the Kennedy Space Center in a dazzling splash of color across the sky to begin a two-day chase of the space station. The mission, one of the most crucial for the station, is to give the orbiting outpost the ability to do cutting-edge science, one purpose of the $60 billion program.

The launching was timed for 6:13 p.m. Eastern time in coordination with the orbit of the space station. It sent the shuttle climbing into the fleeting rays of the setting sun, which turned the thick rocket plume into a tower of changing colors that varied from beige to orange to several shades of yellow and white. Light filtering through the exhaust also created a bluish-red rainbow that arced across the sky toward a full moon over the Atlantic.

"I've never seen any launch that was as beautiful as this," said Dr. Roger Crouch, NASA's chief scientist for the space station. "You can hardly believe what your eyes are seeing."

Ground crews faced no major technical issues before the flight, and weather was ideal. There was concern at first about poor weather over three overseas emergency landing sites, one of which must be available before a shuttle launching. Controllers approved the liftoff of the Atlantis when weather over the site in Zaragoza, Spain, improved.

The shuttle, guided by Kenneth D. Cockrell, the mission commander, and Mark L. Polansky, a former Air Force flier on his first shuttle mission as pilot, went into orbit without incident in pursuit of the station. The rest of the crew consists of Marsha S. Ivins, Cmdr. Robert L. Curbeam Jr. of the Navy, and Thomas D. Jones, all mission specialists and veteran space fliers.

The space station and its three- man crew had just crossed Newfoundland and was moving over the North Atlantic when the Atlantis was launched. The station's crew, William M. Shepherd, an American, and Sergie K. Krikalev and Yuri P. Gidzenko, both Russians, were awake during what would have been their normal sleep period and smiled as they watched a video playback of the takeoff of their guests.

The Destiny laboratory module, built by the Boeing Company at a cost of $1.38 billion, is the most expensive segment developed for the station and is expected to be the cornerstone for research aboard the space outpost for 10 to 15 years.

The laboratory, which is 28 feet long and 14 feet in diameter, weighed 29,500 pounds at launching. It went aloft stripped of much of its gear because its weight was at the limit of shuttle capacity.

The laboratory module is equipped with five of the 24 removable, closet- sized racks of equipment it will eventually house. The initial racks, and six more to be delivered this spring, are packed with equipment and computers to support the laboratory and the rest of the station, including the means to control power, temperature, cooling, humidity, communications and orientation of the complex.

Before completion of the station in 2006, the module will get another 13 racks that will house equipment to study human physiology, molecular structures, crystal growth and materials processing and perform pharmaceutical research and studies in many other disciplines.

The station will also later receive research modules made by other partners in the project, including the European Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency and Russia.

The Atlantis is scheduled to dock with the space station on Friday around noon Eastern time, beginning six days of joint operations to install Destiny and get it up and running. Within two hours of docking, the astronauts will open hatches between the two craft so the crews can greet one another and do an initial cargo exchange. The ships will then be sealed off from one another for three days so atmospheric pressure in the shuttle can be lowered to make later spacewalks easier.

On Saturday, during the first of three scheduled spacewalks by Mr. Jones and Mr. Curbeam, the massive laboratory will be painstakingly lifted from the shuttle's payload bay using the shuttle's 50-foot robot arm. As primary operator of the Canadian-built arm, Ms. Ivins will first use it to remove and temporarily set aside a large shuttle mating port that will later be attached to Destiny.

Then Ms. Ivins will conduct the most difficult part of the mission: lifting Destiny from the bay with only an inch of clearance on both sides, rotating the laboratory 180 degrees to orient it toward its docking port and guiding the connection to the station. Once the laboratory is hooked to the space station, the astronauts outside the station will attach power and data cables.

When the Destiny module is attached, the space station will have a mass of 112 tons and a habitable volume greater than that of Russia's Mir station or the United States' earlier Skylab. With the new module, the station will be 171 feet long, 90 feet high and 240 feet wide when measured across the solar power panels.

---

Atlantis blasts off with science lab

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Space shuttle Atlantis blasted off Wednesday with the most expensive and pivotal piece of the international space station: a $1.4 billion science laboratory.

Atlantis and its crew of five soared into a clear sky at 6:13 p.m., with a rising full moon in the background and the setting sun turning the exhaust trail a beautiful gold and peach. The plume cast a rainbow-like shadow that seemed to stretch all the way to the moon.

The future of the space station, Alpha, is riding on the 11-day mission, three weeks late because of the need to inspect wiring on the shuttle's boosters.

NASA's Destiny laboratory is the first of at least three research modules planned for the station. It is so expensive that the space agency could not afford to build a backup. If the lab is damaged or destroyed in flight, the space station will be set back for years.

Without Destiny, astronauts and cosmonauts cannot do any major science work aboard the space station. No experiments are flying aboard the lab because the shuttle cannot handle the additional weight; the first one is due to arrive in March.

Destiny and its computers will enable NASA's Mission Control to take over control of the space station from the Russians.

---

Space shuttle lifts with laboratory

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Space shuttle Atlantis and its cargo, a billion-dollar science laboratory, chased after the international space station early Thursday following a spectacular sunset launch.

The setting sun and a rising full moon made for a dramatic send-off Wednesday of NASA's $1.4 billion Destiny laboratory module, the most expensive piece of the space station.

The space station, Alpha, was soaring over the North Atlantic east of Newfoundland when Atlantis took off at 6:13 p.m. The shuttle and its crew should catch up to the station Friday and install the Destiny laboratory on Saturday.

Three spacewalks will be needed during the week the shuttle is docked to the station to make all the lab connections.

By midday Thursday, Atlantis was trailing Alpha by less than 1,600 miles and gaining on it with every circling of Earth.

In preparation for Friday's linkup, a garbage-filled supply ship was undocked from the station to make room for the shuttle.

Space station Alpha's three residents learned of the launch as soon as Atlantis reached orbit.

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

Senate Ends Bitter Dispute With the U.N. on U.S. Dues

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08DUES.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 - Ending a bitter dispute with the United Nations, the Senate voted today to release immediately $582 million the United States owes in back dues, a recognition that the world organization has made significant strides toward revamping its operations.

The Senate vote - 99 to 0 - came less than two months after Richard C. Holbrooke, who served as the Clinton administration's United Nations ambassador, brokered a deal to reduce American dues for the first time in more than 28 years.

In a game of brinkmanship, Congress withheld a portion of the United States' dues to the United Nations for more than a decade, arguing that the American people were paying too much for peacekeeping missions and that the United Nations was mismanaging its money. The standoff complicated diplomatic relationships and drew criticism from other nations, which labeled the United States an arrogant, deadbeat superpower.

Senator Jesse Helms, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who spearheaded the crusade to reform the United Nations, said he was sufficiently satisfied with the United Nations to free the bulk of the $926 million owed in arrears. The Bush administration, which has yet to appoint a new ambassador to the United Nations, also supports the bill. The legislation now goes to the House, where passage is expected.

In 1999, Senator Helms and Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the ranking Democrat on the committee, drew up a three-year plan to release the money if the United Nations agreed to a series of goals. Chief among them was the question of reducing the United States' dues.

"We were persistent, and sometimes to the point of being regarded as a little bit obnoxious, but not arrogant," said Mr. Helms, a North Carolina Republican, quoting Mr. Holbrooke's testimony before his committee. "And we got the job done. And I think that can be a model."

Senator Biden said that by passing the bill the Senate was recognizing the United Nations' "good faith effort" to follow a path that will make "an institution of the 20th century relevant in the 21st century."

Fred Eckhard, spokesman for the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, said today's vote showed that "the Senate has kept faith with the United Nations on reform. We eagerly await the money once the process is completed, because we owe it all and more to those countries that contribute troops to U.N. peacekeeping."

Under the deal that was reached by Mr. Holbrooke, the American share of the United Nations' $1.1 billion administrative budget would drop to 22 percent, which Congress stipulated, from 25 percent. The American contribution to the $2.5 billion annual peacekeeping budget would be reduced, in increments, from 31 percent to 26.5 percent by the end of 2002, and eventually to 25 percent.

Other United Nations members did not agree to scale back in the short term to the 25 percent that Mr. Helms originally wanted but came close enough. The Senate released the first $100 million under the plan's initial phase. The third chunk of money - $244 million - will be released next year, on the condition of changes in some auditing procedures at the World Health Organization and other independent agencies.

In his speech today, Mr. Helms said the reduction in dues would save $170 million a year in dues that the United Nations had billed taxpayers.

Mr. Holbrooke spent almost all of his 17 months as ambassador trying to broker an agreement on American payments. What unfolded over that time was a remarkable tale in which Mr. Helms delivered a defiant speech to the United Nations Security Council, the first ever by a member of Congress, and Ted Turner, founder of CNN, donated $34 million to some foreign nations, as a sweetener to get them to sign off on the deal.

Mr. Holbrooke argued that the dues charged for peacekeeping had not changed since 1973 and had failed to keep pace with a quickly changing world. But opposition was fierce. Some newly prospering countries did not want to see their dues rise, while others did not want to bow to an ultimatum from Congress.

Mr. Helms praised some countries - Israel, South Korea, Hungary, Estonia and Slovenia - for their willingness to pay a larger share, but castigated the Middle East and East Asia for having "dragged their feet."

A few countries argued to Mr. Holbrooke that even if they wanted to pay more, they lacked the money to do so immediately. To blunt that objection, Mr. Turner stepped in last November and offered a one-time gift of $34 million to help those countries make up the difference.

"I would say that it really does begin to address in a very tactical way our concerns about the relationship we have with the United Nations," said Donald Hayes, the American representative to the United Nations for management and reform.

The United Nations and the United States still disagree over the amount of arrears that is actually owed. United Nations officials say the United States owes another $500 million in dues.

---

U.N. INCREASE

February 8, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

CONGO: Secretary General Kofi Annan told the Security Council after meeting President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, left, that the United Nations was prepared to send more military observers to Congo, where Rwandan troops are likely to withdraw soon from the southeast town of Pweto. In Kinshasa, a United Nations spokesman said the military observer mission was preparing for 40 more members by the end of the month, with another 82 by April. Barbara Crossette (NYT)

---

UN agency pleads for more funding

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)- Governments must come up with more money to help the U.N. Environment Program combat global warming and other pressing environmental problems, director Klaus Toepfer told some 80 environment ministers and delegates Thursday. Toepfer said governments had to be willing to pay to sustain the environment, rather than exploit it for commercial reasons. "We have to use economic instruments to pay for the environment and not the other way round. I believe this a huge challenge for our negotiations here," Toepfer said at the opening of ministerial discussions at the 21st Session of UNEP's Governing Council.

The environment ministers began two days of talks Thursday on governing and financing the environmental agency.

UNEP relies on governmental grants for much of its funding, in particular for projects aimed at protecting and sustaining the environment. The latest round of talks ended in failure in November. A key point of conflict is a U.S.-led attempt to cushion the blow of cuts by subtracting carbon dioxide absorbed by forests and farmland from countries' reduction quotas.

---

U.N. insists Kagame pull troops from Congo

February 8, 2001
Washington Times
By Betsy Pisik
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-20012822730.htm

NEW YORK - Members of the U.N. Security Council yesterday urged Rwandan President Paul Kagame to withdraw his troops from Congo.

But Mr. Kagame, who has been in the United States since he met with U.S. officials in Washington last week, rebuffed his critics by demanding help in cutting off Rwandan rebels who have taken refuge in Congo's forests.

"We spend so much talking about invited, non-invited [soldiers], but the agreement signed by everybody says 'all forces must go,' " said Mr. Kagame, who sat through three hours of Security Council speeches chastising his government for deploying soldiers into Congo.

Council members, who have been watching the Great Lakes region of central Africa implode into fitful bloodshed since the mid-1990s, repeatedly urged Mr. Kagame to take a verifiable step toward peace.

In often stark language, they also warned him to rein in human rights abuses in his own country and in eastern Congo.

"We do not believe that Rwanda can secure its long-term security interests via a policy of military opposition to the government of the [Congo]," said acting U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham.

"Likewise, we do not believe that the withdrawal of foreign forces from the [Congo] can be accomplished through military means," he said.

The Security Council last year authorized a peacekeeping mission to Congo in which 500 military observers would be protected by some 5,000 troops.

Because the country is too large to patrol, and because an absence of roads makes a traditional deployment nearly impossible, the observers were to be clustered into four strategic locations.

So far, only 200 peacekeepers have been dispatched, most of them in the capital, Kinshasa.

This was the council's second recent meeting on the Great Lakes region. Joseph Kabila, son and successor of assassinated Congolese President Laurent Kabila, spoke to the body Friday.

Mr. Kagame and several diplomats have praised the younger Mr. Kabila, saying he appears to be more flexible than his father in negotiations that will help implement the 1999 cease-fire agreement that was signed in the Zambian capital, Lusaka.

That accord was signed by leaders of six nations and three rebel groups, but it has been repeatedly violated by nearly all parties.

Mr. Kagame indicated he might withdraw his troops from the diamond-rich region if the U.N. monitors are fully deployed there.

"We are ready to withdraw from it as long as there are monitors that come on the ground, as long as they can come and occupy this place," he said.

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

President plans military visits

02/08/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-02-08-bush-military.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Accompanied by his national security team, President Bush will visit military units in Georgia, Virginia and West Virginia next week, administration and Republican officials said.

Shifting this week's tax-cuts focus to defense policy, Bush is scheduled to travel with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Fort Stewart in Savannah, Ga. on Monday; the U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va. on Tuesday; and on Wednesday, to an Air National Guard base in Charleston, W.Va.

The president's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was likely to join at least one of the outings, officials said.

At Fort Stewart, the largest Army post east of the Mississippi River, Bush was expected to focus on his campaign promises to improve morale and quality of life for America's troops.

The White House was put on the defensive this week when word leaked from the Pentagon that Bush planned to ask for no immediate major increase to the $310 billion budget the Clinton administration left for the Defense Department.

In the backlash from conservatives, administration officials hastened to emphasize that they were leaving the door open to bigger, amended budget requests later in the year - particularly $1 billion to cover promised military pay raises - after Rumsfeld completes his force structure review.

"The president believes we need to rebuild our military, and the force structure review is a part of doing that," White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Thursday.

"In addition, the president's budget that he will submit will honor the campaign promises he made to increase pay for men and women who wear the uniform, as well as to improve the housing for the men and women who wear the uniform, and that will be an increase above and beyond what was spent previously."

Army Gen. Hugh Shelton, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was expected to accompany the president and Rumsfeld to Norfolk, home port of the USS Cole, the target of last year's terrorist bombing in Yemen that killed 17 U.S. sailors.

At the Joint Forces Command, which is responsible for the training of 1.2 million American service personnel, Bush was to meet with NATO staffers and address plans for modernizing the Cold War-based military, making it more mobile and adapting it to 21st century-style missions.

The three one-day trips are Bush's first substantive ventures outside Washington since he became president - and his first to visit American troops as their commander in chief. They will provide the first glimpse at how Bush is received among the rank and file. Bush avoided military service in Vietnam by joining the Texas Air National Guard.

Clinton, who also avoided serving in Vietnam and began his administration by trying to undo the military's ban on gay personnel, had a shaky relationship with the military, which made his first outings to military bases awkward.

Last weekend, Bush traveled to Virginia and Pennsylvania for closed-door political conferences with congressional Republicans and the House Democratic Caucus.

---

Defense supporters upset as Bush balks

February 8, 2001
Washington Times
By Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200128225227.htm

Congressional Republicans expressed frustration yesterday with President Bush's decision not to immediately shore up military readiness, as the Joint Chiefs of Staff pressed the case inside the Pentagon for $7 billion in emergency aid.

Several Republican lawmakers are upset with Mr. Bush but are reluctant to criticize the president publicly. They privately point to Vice President Richard B. Cheney's pledge to troops during the campaign that "help is on the way" and then note recent White House statements that no emergency funds will be approved for now.

Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in an interview he agrees a Pentagon transformation study is needed, as Mr. Bush has ordered.

But he added, "We've got to fix [readiness] now. So you go on two tracks." He said he would like Mr. Bush to submit a supplemental bill to Congress in May or June so it could be on the president's desk for his signature by August.

Mr. Warner hammered home this point in a letter signed by other Republican committee members and sent to the president last night.

"As you and Vice President Cheney pointed out frequently during the campaign," Mr. Warner wrote, "there are serious readiness and personnel problems which require immediate attention. It is important that we quickly address these problems and fix the force that is currently in place. That force could be called on to act at anytime and it must be ready."

One Republican staffer said Mr. Bush's pro-defense supporters are using the word "betrayal."

"My phone is ringing off the hook saying, 'What's going on and why did we support Bush,' " said the aide. "People are livid. Betrayal is a good word."

Asked if lawmakers would write their own supplemental bill, the staffer said, "I don't see how we can buck a Republican president."

In their first skirmish with the new commander in chief, the Joint Chiefs this week continued to make the case for a quick infusion of money to purchase spare parts, fuel and ammunition, and to repair housing.

Defense officials said the chiefs met Monday in a secure meeting room known as the "tank" and made their case for emergency aid to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Officials said Mr. Rumsfeld said no "immediate" supplemental request will be sent to Congress, but that one may be submitted later to bolster this year's $295 billion defense budget.

"The service chiefs feel they have a need for an emergency supplemental at some level of dollars," said one defense source.

Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said he was "disappointed" that Mr. Bush did not back a supplemental bill and that it was tantamount to breaking a campaign promise.

"Have you called any of those generals and admirals who endorsed Bush?" Mr. Skelton said. "Ask them if they have egg on their face. This isn't going to help recruiting. It's not going to help retention."

Regarding Mr. Bush's plan to hold off on substantial increases in defense spending until the fiscal 2003 budget, the congressman said, "I think they can do it much faster than that. The service chiefs have already been over to talk to the president. He knows what the service chiefs need. I don't think it takes a full year to do a review."

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer yesterday defended the president's approach.

"The president has said that he will seek no immediate supplemental," Mr. Fleischer said. "He has not ruled one out for later in the year. But his first priority is to make certain that we attend to America's defense needs, and that is why he has directed Secretary Rumsfeld to begin the force structure review."

The review, which has yet to begin, would identify the nation's post-Cold War threats and then shape the force to meet the challenges to national security in the years ahead. Mr. Bush said during the campaign that the transformation of the armed forces could involve canceling major weapons systems in favor of research into more technologically advanced weapons.

Under this plan, Mr. Bush's first significant imprint on the Pentagon budget would not come until the fiscal 2003 plan submitted one year from now. The White House plans to send Congress a "lean" budget this month for fiscal 2002, which begins Oct. 1, that will bump up spending to around $310 billion.

But Republican staffers said yesterday they hoped the time frame would not scuttle a supplemental bill. After all, they said, the spending would go for immediate needs such as aircraft and truck parts, and fuel to maintain flying hours and ship deployments.

Jack Spencer, a military analyst at the Heritage Foundation, says the military needs an immediate add-on of $10 billion this year and $25 billion in fiscal 2002 principally to tackle combat-readiness shortfalls.

Still, he is reluctant to criticize Mr. Bush.

"I'm hesitant to come down hard on the administration right now, simply because I'm waiting to see how this pans out," Mr. Spencer said. "I have no problem with the strategy overview. I think that's imperative that they do that before coming up with huge amounts of funds. They can't do that overnight. It's going to be a year before they can do that budget."

He added: "We continue to infer certain things from a little bit of what's being said by the administration. I'm waiting to see what their actions are. They certainly ran on a platform to fix readiness right up front."

-------- OTHER

More people at N.Y. shelters

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
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NEW YORK (AP) - The number of people staying in New York City's homeless shelters has surpassed 25,000 people a night, the highest level since the late 1980s. Nearly three-quarters of people staying in shelters were in families, with more than 10,000 children in shelters a night.

Staggering housing costs, more evictions and a decline in subsidized housing all are likely contributing factors, said Martin Oesterreich, the city's commissioner of homeless services. Another factor is a campaign encouraging victims of domestic violence to seek help.

The increase has been steady over the past few years and comes despite tough screening procedures instituted by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's administration resulting in more families being turned away.

Advocates for the homeless said evictions played an important role. Evictions were up to about 122,000 last year from 114,000 in 1999, civil court statistics show.

-------- alternative energy

Siemens opens plant in Los Angeles to make solar power systems

February 8, 2001
Planet Ark
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9725

LOS ANGELES - Leading solar power systems maker Siemens Solar on Wednesday announced it is opening a facility in the Los Angeles area, attracted by an incentive program offered by the city which can more than cut in half installation costs.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has offered discounts of $5 a watt for customers who buy solar panels made in the city and the Siemens facility will be the first to qualify for the incentive.

LADWP, the nation's largest municipal utility, had budgeted a total of $8 million for its solar panel incentive program which it believes holds the potential of creating 2 megawatts of photovoltaic energy, or enough to power 600 homes annually.

That total is dwarfed by the average 1,000 MW produced by a single-unit nuclear power plant.

LADWP said an average system producing 2 kilowatts of electricity, enough to supply 20 to 60 percent of the needs of an average home, would cost around $8,000 with the incentive, representing a discount of about 56 percent.

California is in the midst of a chronic power shortage caused partly by a failed deregulation experiment.

The new Siemens plant will employ about 50 people.

Siemens Solar Industries L.P. is an affiliate of Siemens AG .

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Ford sees dawn of pollution-free hydrogen cars

February 8, 2001
Planet Ark
REUTERS NEWS SERVICE
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9718

BRUSSELS - Non-polluting hydrogen-powered car technology could replace conventional oil-fuelled vehicles within a generation, Ford of Europe Chairman Nick Scheele said on Tuesday.

Ford would be road testing a fleet of the so-called fuel cell cars within the next two years, Scheele said.

"We believe that fuel cell cars have the potential in our life-time to end the 100-year reign of the internal combustion engine," Scheele told a conference in Brussels where Ford was presenting a range of environmentally friendly cars.

"The first test fleet will be on the road in California by the end of next year," he said.

Most car makers are developing fuel cell technology, which uses a chemical process to convert hydrogen and atmospheric oxygen into electricity.

The only emission is water - avoiding the carbon dioxide and noxious pollutants that come from traditional cars.

The head of the European Union's energy and transport policy, EU Commissioner Loyola de Palacio, test drove a prototype fuel cell Ford Focus, worth more than $1 million, and gave her seal of approval to the technology.

"Developing the use of hydrogen as a fuel would allow us to reduce road transport's impact on air quality and help reduce our reliance on oil products," de Palacio told the conference.

Car makers say it will be many years before fuel cell cars are widely available because of the high cost to make them and the difficulties of distributing and storing hydrogen.

Ford plans to launch its Think City cars - small battery-powered vehicles with a body made largely of plastic - in Europe, and an ethanol-powered Ford Focus on to the Swedish market later this year.

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DuPont forms fuel cell division

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
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WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) - DuPont said Thursday that it has formed a fuel-cell unit to capture a piece of the growing market for the clean-energy technology the chemical giant said it expects to be worth $10 billion by the end of the decade. Fuel cells are battery-like devices that combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, heat and water. DuPont said it will focus on proton-exchange, or PEM, fuel cells, which are primarily used in portable and small stationary power generators and transportation applications.

DuPont said it will at first supply materials, including its Nafion membranes, which have been used in fuel cells for space travel for more than 35 years, and engineering polymers. DuPont said it later plans to supply fuel-cell system developers with other products, including PEM fuel cell stack components such as membrane electrode assemblies and conductive plates.

DuPont said it also is involved in the development of direct methanol fuel cell technology.

--------

USA Today
01/02/08
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Arizona

Florence - A federal agency proposed an "instant power plant" to avoid a 300% increase in electricity rates for rural customers here. The Bureau of Indian Affairs' western region, which oversees the San Carlos Irrigation Project, said that by using prefabricated modules the $31.3 million natural gas-powered plant could be running within six months of approval. The irrigation project said its rates would rise because of California's energy crisis and the resulting higher cost of buying energy on the open market.

-------- environment

Machines Let Resorts Please Skiers When Nature Won't

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By JEFFREY SELINGO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/technology/08HOWW.html?pagewanted=all

IN the past, when dry weather lingered in the Northeast in mid-February, that would have meant the cancellation of many a ski trip. But later this month, even if there is no hint of snow in the forecast, thousands of skiers will make their way to mountain resorts, comforted by ski reports on the radio announcing that all the trails are open.

They have snow-making to thank.

Mild winters with little snow once meant financial disaster for the ski industry. But in the past 30 years, the widespread use of snow-making equipment has provided so much stability to a ski resort's season that even traditionalists in the Swiss Alps and British Columbia have decided to install it.

While natural snow is preferable for most resort owners, Mother Nature doesn't provide enough of it in many parts of the world for resorts to open early in the season and survive to early spring. "It used to be that the ski industry was satisfied with the economic performance of natural snow," said Curt Bender, a professor of ski area operations at Colorado Mountain College in Leadville, Colo. "But staying open 70 days a season is no longer acceptable. Nowadays, skiing is more of a business, and resorts are required to have that guarantee that they'll perform."

Fake snow has become so popular among some resort owners that they sometimes look at nature as getting in the way, especially when it keeps skiers from getting to the mountain. "There's no question that a few inches of snow in Boston is a huge shot in the arm for resorts in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont," said Skip King, a vice president at American Skiing Company, the largest operator of ski resorts in the country. "But it's less critical than it once was. People know we can make snow."

Still, making snow is not cheap. It is typically the second-largest cost, after labor, for resorts. New systems can cost upward of $40,000 per acre to install and $1,700 per hour to operate.

The earliest snow-making machines used leftovers from household plumbing supplies and irrigation equipment. Although the technology has improved, the basic concept of snow-making has remained the same. Making artificial snow mimics what happens in nature, but the snow is produced much more quickly: In one method, water is pumped to a snow gun, where compressed air blows the stream of water into tiny particles that are then shot out into the air, where they crystallize and fall to the ground as snow.

Walter R. Schoenknecht, owner of Mohawk Mountain in Cornwall, Conn., was one of the first to turn to technology to make an end run around nature in the winter of 1949-50. With no natural snow in early January, Mr. Schoenknecht trucked in blocks of ice, broke it up with an ice-crusher and spread the chips over one slope. "We spent about $3,500, used nearly 500 tons of ice, but the important thing was that there was good skiing, and that the skiers were happy," he wrote in The American Ski Annual and Skiing Journal a year later.

Machine-made snow was first mass-produced by three engineers - Art Hunt, Dave Richey and Wayne Pierce - on March 14, 1950, in Milford, Conn. Using a garden hose, a 10-horsepower compressor and a spray-gun nozzle, they produced about 20 inches of snow. They later patented their invention.

"The first attempts in snow-making were oddball solutions to a lack of snow," said Jeffrey R. Leich, executive director of the New England Ski Museum in Franconia, N.H. Despite those early efforts, the widespread installation of snow-making machines did not start until the 1970's, he added.

"For the most part, there was enough snow," Mr. Leich said, "and it wasn't seen as a competitive advantage to have snow-making machines. Now, it's unthinkable that you operate without snow-making."

But there are more than financial costs to snow- making. In some states, environmental advocates have complained about power consumption and the reduction of water levels in lakes and rivers. A few state environmental agencies have required ski resorts to build large holding ponds to furnish water during parts of the season when natural water levels are low.

Making snow is not as simple as running water through a hose. A lot depends on the weather, and it is not the temperature on your outside thermometer - known as the dry bulb temperature - that is important. What snow-making operators look at is the wet- bulb temperature, which is adjusted for humidity.

When the humidity is high, water may not freeze even at temperatures lower than 32 degrees. And when the air is extremely dry, water can freeze even at temperatures higher than 32 degrees. So low air temperatures and low humidity are the optimal conditions for making snow. But the weather can change from one place on the mountain to the next. Until recently, when computers became better able to monitor and adjust snow-making machines, changes in temperature and humidity caused extra- wet or extra-fluffy snow to stream from the machines. Such problems gave machine-made snow a bad name, said Mr. King.

Today, ski resort operators like to say that there is virtually no difference between artificial and real snow - and that machine-made snow is better in some cases. But experienced skiers say they can still tell the difference.

"What man cannot create," said Craig Bury, of Washington, who has been skiing for 41 years, "is the champagne of snow for the advanced or expert skier, and that is light, dry, big, fluffy flakes."

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Deconstructing Gale Norton

February 7, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/07/opinion/08THU4.html

As at her confirmation hearings, Gale Norton, the new secretary of the interior, delivered a polished public- relations performance on NBC's "Today" show Tuesday morning. Once again she asserted that she would enforce the various laws protecting endangered species, and would do nothing to threaten "our wildlife and our national treasures." Yet before anyone gets too dewy- eyed, it should be remembered where she is coming from and where she is headed.

She is coming from a long association with right- wing property rights groups, and she is headed toward a policy that opens up more of the public lands, chiefly the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to oil and gas exploration. It must also be pointed out that when Ms. Norton talks rhapsodically about protecting "national treasures," she is usually talking about the national parks, which under law cannot be touched anyway.

The adage about paying attention to what politicians and bureaucrats do rather than what they say applies to Ms. Norton. For instance, it will be interesting to see whether she seeks to lift existing protections for sensitive areas along the Rocky Mountain front and whether, again in the interests of oil and gas exploration, she pushes Congress to overturn any of President Clinton's national monument designations.

On that score, Ms. Norton repeated the erroneous charge, floated during the Bush campaign, that the Clinton administration did not consult with local interests before making nearly two dozen national monument designations. It is true that Bruce Babbitt, Ms. Norton's predecessor, failed to prepare the citizens of Utah for the first monument designation, back in 1996, but he consulted exhaustively on all the rest.

That may seem a fine point, but the energy debate is in danger of being corrupted by misstatements small and large. Among these is the insupportable proposition that the California energy crisis can somehow be relieved by drilling in the Arctic refuge - an idea Ms. Norton echoed when she said that new drilling would "resolve some of the problems we've been having lately." Americans should check Ms. Norton's facts and listen closely to her rhetoric as well. It is the rhetoric of someone whose underlying desire is to drill unnecessary wells on land that should be guarded, not exploited.

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5 Drug Makers Use Material With Possible Mad Cow Link

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By MELODY PETERSEN and GREG WINTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/health/08COW.html?pagewanted=all

For the last eight years, the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly asked pharmaceutical companies not to use materials from cattle raised in countries where there is a risk of mad cow disease.

But regulators discovered last year that five companies, including some of the world's largest drug concerns, were still using ingredients from those countries to make nine widely used vaccines.

Some of the companies say that they found the F.D.A.'s request unclear and do not believe they did anything wrong. Others say they could not keep up with the government's expanding list of countries where cattle could be infected. One, however, acknowledged that it could have moved more quickly.

The nine vaccines include some regularly given to millions of American children, including common vaccines to prevent polio, diphtheria and tetanus. They also include the anthrax vaccine, which the government requires for soldiers serving in the Persian Gulf.

Federal health officials stress that the vaccines are still considered safe. They calculate that the odds of these vaccines passing on the disease, in the worst eventualities, are between one in 40 million and one in 40 billion doses.

The officials say that the very slight chance that someone could be infected is far outweighed by the benefits that these vaccines bring in fighting disease and preventing death. Indeed, it is now only a scientific theory that a vaccine could infect someone with the human form of mad cow disease - called new variant Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease. No one is known to have contracted the disease this way.

"Any risk is very remote," said Dr. Karen Midthune, director of the F.D.A.'s Office of Vaccine Research and Review. "But if we have the ability to bring this remote risk to zero, that is something we want to do."

Nonetheless, the fact that these suspect materials slipped into the nation's vaccine supply - and that the F.D.A. did not discover it for seven years - raises questions about the agency's ability to ensure that all medicines are free of the infectious proteins that can cause mad cow disease.

The F.D.A. so far has only investigated the vaccine makers and has not looked to see whether other medicine is free of possible mad cow contaminants. Some experts say they worry more about dietary supplements. Unlike drugs, supplements are largely unregulated. The F.D.A. is not even sure how many supplement makers there are.

"It's just insane not to have greater safeguards" for supplements, said Dr. Paul W. Brown, chairman of the F.D.A.'s advisory committee on mad cow disease. "The potential exists for abuse."

All five vaccine makers, which include GlaxoSmithKline, Aventis and American Home Products, have now agreed to stop using the suspect materials, which include blood, fetal calf serum and meat broth.

But it will take a year or more to replace existing supplies with reformulated products, because it can take many months to grow cultures used in making vaccines. Both the companies and the F.D.A. say that the current products are safe and should remain on pharmacy shelves.

They point out that the suspect ingredients, for the most part, are used only in the early stages of manufacturing, when cultures are grown. Blood, for instance, may be used to feed the bacteria and viruses in these cultures. The cultures are then significantly diluted in the final vaccine.

The F.D.A. first asked the vaccine makers in a 1993 letter to stop using materials from cattle raised in Britain and other countries where there was a threat of mad cow disease. Regulators followed up with another letter in 1996 in which the agency "strongly" recommended that drug companies take "immediate and concrete steps" to make sure they were not using the materials.

In interviews, regulators said it was not until last year that they learned that some vaccine makers were not complying. During a routine review of a company's application for a license, the F.D.A. discovered that the company, which it will not identify, was using cattle parts from a high-risk country.

Regulators immediately demanded that all vaccine makers identify where their biologic ingredients were coming from. That review found the nine vaccines.

Dr. Murray M. Lumpkin, a senior medical adviser at the F.D.A., said his agency's investigative resources were limited.

"You have to prioritize where the greater risk is," Dr. Lumpkin said. For example, the F.D.A. now has inspectors visiting animal feed companies, he said, after it found that many of them were not following regulations adopted in 1997. Those rules, in part, prohibit using beef parts to make cattle feed. Scientists contend that cattle in Britain were infected after eating feed that contained parts of other infected cows.

"That is where we think the greatest risk for Americans is at this time," Dr. Lumpkin said.

But critics including doctors, scientists and consumer advocates say that the F.D.A. should have acted more aggressively by ordering, rather than asking, companies to follow the agency's recommendations.

"The companies acted recklessly because, in part, the F.D.A. failed to regulate them," said Dr. Peter G. Lurie, another member of the F.D.A's advisory committee on the disease.

Dr. Lurie, a researcher at Public Citizen, the consumer group, said he agreed that the vaccines should stay on pharmacy shelves. But he faulted both the companies and the F.D.A. for possibly undermining public confidence in the safety of vaccines.

In their defense, F.D.A. officials said they expected companies to heed their requests.

"The expectation," Dr. Lumpkin said, "is that people will behave responsibly."

Mad cow disease, which is always fatal, is believed to be caused by an infectious protein called a prion. In sick animals or humans, the prion twists into an abnormal shape, often in the brain. These misfolded prions accumulate in toxic clumps, eventually destroying normal brain tissue and creating spongelike holes.

Cattle ingredients are used in a myriad of drugs other than vaccines. But the F.D.A. says it cannot release a list of these drugs because many details of how a product is manufactured are proprietary corporate information.

But regulators say, for instance, that many drugs contain gelatin, made from the bones or hooves of cattle. And calf lungs are used to make surfactants, which help premature infants breathe.

As for dietary supplements, the industry's trade groups say that hundreds of products use an array of cow tissues, from ground prostate glands and testicles in pills that supposedly bolster sexual vitality to thymus extract for healthy skin.

Many organs that scientists consider particularly risky for the transmission of mad cow disease are also used, including freeze-dried brain and pituitary glands in supplements that manufacturers say stimulate memory, adrenal extract for energy, even powdered spleen to help clear the sinuses.

As with vaccines, the F.D.A. has urged supplement makers not to use cow tissue from certain countries. But the F.D.A., which has no specific manufacturing rules for supplements, cannot say whether products sold in the United States are free of such ingredients.

"The F.D.A. is toothless," Dr. Brown said. "Their purview over dietary supplements is infinitesimally small."

Without comprehensive federal guidelines, the Natural Nutritional Foods Association, the largest trade group, started a voluntary program in 1999 to test whether its members' products are free of contaminants, including mad cow disease. But of about 500 companies eligible, only 20 have gone through the review.

For its part, the F.D.A. inspects only about 60 of the more than 1,000 supplement manufacturers each year. "We rely on the industry to do the right thing," said Dr. Christine Lewis, director of the F.D.A.'s dietary supplement division.

In 1995, the F.D.A. told its border agents to detain any imports of suspect cattle parts or products made from them. Regulators say they have not found any supplements sold in the United States that contain the materials.

And one industry executive said there was little incentive to even try to import such materials. "These glands are not very expensive," said Matt Schueller, vice president at Enzymatic Therapy, a supplement maker in Green Bay, Wis.

Even so, Dr. Brown and others say that the border controls are not enough.

Every year, more than $1 billion of supplements are imported from high-risk countries, according to a 1999 F.D.A. study. Only about 7 percent of these products say on their labels that they contain animal parts, but there could be more, Dr. Brown said. Foreign labeling laws vary widely, he said, making it hard to know what some imports contain.

The companies that make the nine vaccines say they have tried to comply with the F.D.A.'s requests and, over the years, have provided regulators with any information they asked for.

They say that in most of the vaccines, the ingredients that regulators have questioned are in the cultures used to start each batch. They say that some of these cultures, which are used year after year, were created in the 1980's, before the F.D.A. told them to stop using material from certain countries.

American Home Products has been working for five years to change the material used in bacterial seed cultures for its vaccine, Pnu- Imune 23, which prevents pneumonia, said Dr. Peter R. Paradiso, a top researcher in the company's Lederle Vaccine subsidiary. The 23 cultures making up the vaccine must be modified one at a time, he said, with regulators approving each one.

"The risk is very, very minuscule," Dr. Paradiso said. He calculates the risk of Pnu-Imune passing on the disease, in a worst case situation, at one in 2.4 trillion doses.

At Aventis, Len Lavenda, a spokesman, said that the company had believed that IPOL, its polio vaccine, complied with the F.D.A.'s request. But last year, regulators disagreed, he said, because the company cannot trace the origin of some ingredients purchased in the 1980's.

In ActHIB, Aventis's vaccine to protect against haemophilus influenzae Type B bacterium, the company used small amounts of hemin, a blood derivative, from cattle in the Netherlands. Material from the Netherlands was banned in 1997, but Aventis decided not to change its supplier, he said, because its scientists believed that infectious material could not survive the production process.

"That was probably a mistake," Mr. Lavenda said. The vaccines are safe, he said, but the company fears its decision could weaken the public's confidence in the vaccines.

BioPort, which makes vaccines against rabies and anthrax, said that it did not understand until last year that the F.D.A. wanted the companies to change seed cultures created before 1993.

GlaxoSmithKline, the British pharmaceutical giant that sells three of the vaccines cited by the F.D.A., declined to answer specific questions. Carmel M. Hogan, a company spokeswoman, said the company had been trying since 1990 "to move away from using bovine materials from infected countries."

The F.D.A. said the problem with Infanrix, one of GlaxoSmithKline's vaccines, which prevents diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, stems from an ingredient made for it by Chiron Behring in Germany. Chiron stopped using material from German cows in September, said Thomas Schick, a Chiron spokesman, after American regulators visited its factory.

The final vaccine, Certiva, also for children, was made by North American Vaccines until 1999 when there were production problems. Baxter International, which purchased North American last year, said the company did not intend to sell Certiva again.

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Canada, Brazil close to trade war

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) - By suspending imports of Brazilian beef over concerns about mad cow disease, Canada has hacked more than 10% off Brazil's beef export market and has pushed the two countries closer than ever to an all-out trade war. Canada announced last Friday it would stop imports until the risk of mad cow disease in Brazil was fully assessed, fueling tensions between the two countries that started as a trade spat over aircraft subsidies. The United States and Mexico, Canada's partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement, were quickly obliged to follow suit on the beef ban.

Brazil was outraged. On Wednesday, the congress unanimously asked the government to suspend all trade agreements with Canada until it lifts the ban. Congressman Aloizio Mercadante said Brazil "must act firmly to defend its economy and not passively accept the aggression being committed against it." It wasn't immediately clear if the government would take the proposal of the Chamber of Deputies under consideration.

The feud started over subsidies to jetmakers Bombardier Inc. of Canada and Brazil's Embraer SA but now seems to be spiraling out of control.

Canada recently won permission from the World Trade Organization to apply $1.4 billion in trade sanctions against Brazil because its subsidies to Embraer were found to infringe WTO rules.

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Vaccines replace cow ingredients

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

WASHINGTON (AP) - Cow-derived ingredients from mad cow-infected countries are being replaced in certain vaccines as an extra precaution, even though the government's top mad cow experts call any risk theoretical.

The Food and Drug Administration discovered last February that a few makers of common childhood vaccines, from diphtheria to polio, had continued using the ingredients for seven years after the FDA told them to stop. In July, the FDA's scientific advisers publicly debated the issue and "we agreed any risk was very small," said panelist Dr. Peter Lurie, a physician and consumer advocate.

As The Associated Press reported this week, the vaccines are being reformulated as a precaution. To ensure consumers understood the issue, FDA last year created an Internet page stressing the vaccines are safe to use.

One of the first steps in making vaccines involves growing bacterial or viral cultures. Certain animal-derived ingredients are added to help the cultures grow; some, for instance, are briefly bathed in blood from calves or sugars from cow's milk. The vaccine mix then undergoes repeated purification.

Winds halt oil cleanup in Taiwan

LUNGKENG, Taiwan (AP) - Blustery winds forced cleanup crews Thursday to abandon work on a oil-blackened shoreline Thursday at a Taiwanese coral reef reserve, where a stranded ship was leaking hundreds of tons of oil.

Meng Pei-jie, a scientist for the National Museum of Marine Biology, said about 1,210 tons of oil have oozed out of the Greek-registered cargo ship, partially submerged about a half mile offshore. The 35,000-ton ship was sailing from Singapore to China when it developed mechanical problems and got stuck on a reef on Jan. 14. Meng said oil has washed up on about 2 miles of shoreline at the Lungkeng Ecological Preservation Area, a dry, barren coastal reef with scattered shrubs and low palm trees. It was too early to say what the long-term effects would be, Meng said, and officials were hoping that the Pacific Ocean's current would shift and wash the oil away from the coastline. The scientist said that only a small amount of fish and crabs have been killed and that birds seemed to have survived the spill.

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INCINERATOR TO CLOSE

February 8, 2001
New York Times
Metro Business Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/nyregion/08BBRF.html

The Safety- Kleen Corporation, one of the country's largest hazardous-waste managers, will close its incinerator in Logan Township, N.J., the company has announced. The closing will mean the loss of 120 jobs. The plant, in Gloucester County, in southern New Jersey, is the only hazardous waste incinerator on the East Coast. If it is closed, companies in the Northeast could have to pay more to ship waste to other sites. (AP)

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Judge Backs U.S. Seizure of Suspected Sick Sheep

February 8, 2001
New York Times
National News Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/national/08NATI.html

MONTPELIER, Vt., Feb. 7 (AP) - The United States Department of Agriculture can seize two flocks of imported sheep suspected of carrying a form of mad cow disease, a federal judge has ruled.

The judge, J. Garvan Murtha of Federal District Court, ruled on Tuesday that the owners of the sheep must comply with an order to give up the herd that had been issued by former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman.

A lawyer for two of the owners of the sheep said his clients would appeal.

The Agriculture Department moved in July to seize the 355 sheep, which were imported from Belgium, after a laboratory test indicated that four were infected with a form of "transmissible spongiform encephalopathy," a family of illnesses that includes mad cow disease.

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Help for California's energy

February 8, 2001
Washington Times
Paul Driessen
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/ed-column-20012819513.htm

The Golden State is losing some of its luster, as energy prices soar, shortages become more acute, rolling blackouts disrupt lives and businesses and utility companies approach bankruptcy. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton left the White House amid a flurry of last minute orders to close still more federal land to energy exploration, and environmentalists rail at President Bush's secretary of the interior, Gale Norton, for suggesting that a small slice of frozen tundra in Alaska should be opened to oil and gas exploration.

The true source of the California energy crisis may not be readily apparent to most citizens - and ideologically hidebound politicians and environmental activists may never admit that they played a major role in causing it. But California's energy woes are due in large part to its misguided, convoluted version of electricity deregulation, and to an even more basic cause: too much demand chasing too little energy production.

For the past decade, California's energy demand curve has risen nearly twice as fast as the national average. Yet, the state produces only 85 percent of the energy it consumes. Indeed, it produces less electricity per capita than any other state, reflecting its failure to build a single new electrical generating plant for some years. The rest of its electricity needs have been met by imports from states that now have little surplus juice to spare, and thus are charging more.

Compounding the problem, the state decreed that only natural gas (no coal) may be burned to generate electricity in fossil fuel plants. Then it led the charge to close state and federal forests and offshore areas to oil and natural gas exploration and development - not just in California, but throughout the Western states, on America's Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) and in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). State and environmentalist opposition to drilling continues even now, in the midst of this downward energy and economic spiral.

Government geologists estimate that ANWR could hold 6-16 billion barrels of recoverable oil. That's equivalent to 11-30 years of imports from Saudi Arabia. Turned into gasoline, it would power California's cars and trucks for 18-50 years. Midrange estimates put ANWR's natural gas potential at 4 trillion cubic feet - enough to fuel California's electrical generating plants, homes, schools and businesses for several decades. Developing these resources would contribute $50-100 billion to the U.S. economy and create 250,000 to 735,000 American jobs.

Environmentalists naturally claim energy development would "irreparably destroy one of America's crown jewels." Let's look at the facts.

ANWR covers 19 million acres - an area the size of South Carolina. Of all this land, only 2,000 acres along the "coastal plain" would actually be disturbed by drilling and development. That's one-twentieth of Washington - or about the same as one of the buildings Boeing uses to manufacture its 747 jets.

As to being a "crown jewel," the beautiful mountains seen in all the anti-drilling photos are actually 50 miles away from the coastal plain. The potentially oil-rich area is nothing more than a flat, treeless stretch of tundra.

During eight or nine months of winter, when drilling would take place, virtually no wildlife are present - and who could blame the critters for heading south? Winter temperatures drop as low as 40 degrees below freezing. The tundra turns rock solid. Spit, and your saliva freezes before it hits the ground. But the nasty conditions mean drilling can be done with ice airstrips, roads and platforms.

During the summer, caribou return, along with arctic fox, geese, shore birds and the Alaska state bird, Mosquito Giganteus. If ANWR is opened to oil drilling, come summer, the ice airstrips, roads and platforms would melt, leaving only puddles and little holes. And the caribou would do just what they have for 25 years in the middle of the nearby Prudhoe Bay oil field: hang out, eat and make babies. In fact, Prudhoe's caribou herd has increased from 6,000 head in 1978 to 27,000 last year.

Drilling for oil and gas in ANWR and our OCS will not solve California's immediate problem. That will require an honest commitment by its lawmakers and citizens to stop looking for scapegoats, confront the root causes of the crisis and fast-track construction of more electrical generating plants. But drilling is a key component of any sound, rational energy policy for a nation that imports nearly 60 percent of its oil and faces dwindling supplies of natural gas.

If California wants national help in addressing its energy crisis, it could gain much needed support by displaying bipartisan leadership in support of opening ANWR, our OCS, and other public lands to exploration - and restoring balance to our environmental policies.

Paul Driessen is a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in Fairfax

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Giant squid brought to museum alive

February 8, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200128213655.htm

MELBOURNE, Australia - An Australian museum took possession yesterday of one of the most elusive creatures known to man.

Melbourne Museum received a rare, 550-pound giant squid dredged up by fishermen from deep waters off the southern coast of Australia.

A live giant squid has never been seen - and scientists flock to the rare examples snared by fishermen and brought up dead in the hope of finding out more about their life cycles.

Melbourne Museum visiting scientist Mark Norman described the giant squid as one of the "last true monsters of the deep."

Arctic said to yield greenhouse gases

NAIROBI, Kenya - Greenhouse gases that have been locked safely in the Arctic's permafrost for millennia are now being released because of global warming, scientists warned here yesterday.

"Global warming may be set to accelerate as rising temperatures in the Arctic melt the permafrost, causing it to release greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) said in a statement released during a weeklong meeting here of more than 80 environment ministers from around the world.

"The Arctic is an area where the climate changes are going to cause tremendous problems," wrote Svein Tveitdal, who heads a UNEP research center observing the permafrost in Arendal, Norway.

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HELP OFFERED FOR POLICE DOG

February 8, 2001
New York Times
Metro Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/nyregion/08MBRF.html
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

PLEASANTVILLE: An anonymous donor is offering to buy a police dog whose cause was taken up by animal welfare advocates after he was separated from his longtime handler, who is on disability leave. City officials have yet to decide whether to accept the offer of $2,900, training and care expenses for Kye, a 4-year-old German shepherd. Animal welfare advocates say the dog's isolation is a form of cruelty. (AP)

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Panel would study distrust of police

USA Today
02/08/2001 - Updated 12:22 AM ET
By Kevin Johnson, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-02-07-bush-cops.htm

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is considering whether to create a national law enforcement panel to examine racial profiling, excessive use of force and a range of other issues that police officials say are undermining public trust in the nation's cops.

It would be patterned after a landmark panel convened more than 35 years ago under President Lyndon Johnson. That panel dealt with segregated police forces and dire needs in police training. The one proposed by one of the USA's largest police lobbying groups would address what it calls "a serious gap developing between police agencies and communities."

Bush aides will meet next week with leaders of the International Association of Chiefs of Police to discuss the group's plan. Bruce Glasscock, head of the 18,000-member group, says the talks are aimed at a "top-to-bottom review" of U.S. law enforcement.

"We look forward to meeting with the chiefs," Bush aide Scott McClellan says.

"These are individuals on the front lines in a very important fight."

Recent incidents have drawn attention to increasing complaints about police actions. Corruption among Los Angeles officers assigned to anti-gang duties and the shooting of unarmed African immigrant Amadou Diallo by New York City police are among dozens of incidents that have contributed to an "erosion of public confidence and trust" in police, Glasscock says.

Four officers were acquitted on state charges in Diallo's death. Last week, the Justice Department declined to press federal charges, angering some black residents.

Officials say reviving the 1960s-era panel could ease such tension.

-------- spying

In Tapping Net,
F.B.I. Insists Privacy Is Not a Victim

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/technology/08CARN.html?pagewanted=all

QUANTICO, Va. -- AS long as there have been law enforcement agents, they have tried to listen in on what the bad guys are planning.

In early times, that meant standing next to a window in the evesdrope, the place where water from the eaves drips, to overhear conversations. As communications went electronic, eavesdropping did, too: Gen. Jeb Stuart hired a tapper to intercept telegraph messages in the Civil War. And by the 1890's, two decades after Alexander Graham Bell's first call to Watson, the first known telephone wiretaps by the police were in place.

The Internet, in turn, has provided new frontiers for law enforcement tappers. At first, surveillance of Internet traffic was useful only in hacking cases - after all, only geeks were online. But as the world has gone digital, criminals have as well, and Internet taps are requested in a growing number of cases. According to documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group based in Washington, requests from field offices for help with "data interception operations" rose more than 18-fold between fiscal years 1997 and 1999.

In Congressional testimony in July, the assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's laboratory division, Donald M. Kerr, painted a stark portrait of the dangers of the online world.

"The use of computers and the Internet is growing rapidly, paralleled by exploitation of computers, networks and databases to commit crimes and to harm the safety, security and privacy of others," he said. All manner of crimes - child pornography, fraud, identity theft, even terrorism - are being perpetrated using the Internet as a tool, he said.

But one device developed by the F.B.I. to deal with this new world of crime has drawn it squarely into a debate over the proper limits of government surveillance: an Internet wiretapping system called Carnivore. The Carnivore effort, which came to light last June, met with resistance from groups as diverse as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives.

The F.B.I. says it has already used the device in dozens of investigations. But critics are concerned that Carnivore, much more than telephone wiretaps, can cast an investigative net that captures the communications of bystanders along with those of a suspect.

The House majority leader, Dick Armey of Texas, has said the technology raises "strong concerns" that the government "is infringing on Americans' basic constitutional protection against unwarranted search and seizure."

"Until these concerns are addressed," he said, "Carnivore should be shut down."

The name, to be sure, has not helped the F.B.I.'s salesmanship. It was derived from an earlier system, called Omnivore, that captured most of the Internet traffic coursing through a network. "As the tool developed and became more discerning" - able to get at the meat of an investigation - "it was named Carnivore," an official said. ("If they called it Device 374," he explained, "nobody could remember what Device 374 is.")

The F.B.I. says the real value of Carnivore, by any name, is that it can do much less than its predecessors. It says agents can fine-tune the system to yield only the sources and recipients of the suspect's e- mail traffic, providing Internet versions of the phone-tapping tools that record the numbers dialed by a suspect and the numbers of those calling in.

Those tools, known respectively as pen registers and "trap and trace" devices, are valuable building blocks of any preliminary investigation. "Trap and trace is vital," said Marcus C. Thomas, who heads the bureau's cybertechnology section, "to try to understand criminal organizations, who's communicating with who."

Moreover, a full federal wiretap - whether of a suspect's phone or of Internet traffic - requires extensive evidence of criminal activity and approval from high Justice Department officials and a judge. Court approval to monitor the origins and destinations, not the content, requires only a pledge from the investigators that the information would be relevant.

Law enforcement officials say the goal of Carnivore is to protect privacy. Under most wiretaps, they reason, investigators have to review all the material that comes in over the wire and discard any material that they are not entitled to review under the terms of the warrant - say, a conversation with the suspect's grandmother. Because the path of online data is harder to isolate than a telephone line, Carnivore may capture communications unrelated to the suspect. But because it then filters out whatever investigators are not entitled to see, officials say, privacy is enhanced.

To understand why the F.B.I. hungers for Carnivore, behold its ancestor: a hulking stainless steel box the size of an old Kelvinator in the building in Quantico where the bureau designs what it calls interception systems. The $80,000 behemoth can monitor data traffic on three phone lines simultaneously and translate the squeal of modems into the e-mail and Web pages that a criminal suspect sees.

But it can monitor only a standard modem. If a criminal suspect has, like millions of other Americans, decided to trade up to high-speed Internet access through a cable modem or the telephone service known as D.S.L., "it's worthless," Mr. Thomas said.

In contrast to that middle-tech dinosaur, Carnivore is a sleek and speedy mammal, a black box of a PC built to work with the vast amounts of high-speed data that course through the Internet. The machine can tap communications for almost all of the ways that people get online. It costs a tenth of what the bureau pays for each of the older machines, and it can do far more: it can sift through all the communications of an Internet service provider, perhaps including tens of thousands of users, and pull out the e-mail and Web travels of the suspect. And although doing so would raise deep constitutional issues, the system can even be programmed to monitor the use of particular words and phrases used in messages by anyone on the network.

When law enforcement agents get permission to install Carnivore, they send their own technicians to the office of an Internet service provider. The system itself, once programmed with the details of a search, can easily be installed on the same racks that the company uses for its own network equipment, and is tied in to the flow of data.

For all its power, however, Carnivore cannot digest all that it eats: if law enforcement officials intercept a message that has been encrypted, they will get a featureless fuzz of ones and zeroes.

The furor over the technology caught the F.B.I. by surprise. "What would you have us do?" Mr. Thomas asked in frustration. "Stop enforcing laws because it's on the Internet?" Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, added, "The public should be concerned about the criminals out there abusing this stuff, and not the good guys."

The two men discussed the system in Mr. Thomas's office at the bureau's research center at Quantico, home of the F.B.I. training academy. From the outside, the center is so unremarkable that it could be a college classroom building in a witness-protection program. But the array of dishes and antennas along the roofline suggest that something more interesting is going on inside.

This is where three F.B.I. engineers took pieces of commercial software and modified them in an effort to allow the kind of selective data retrieval that the law requires, and where they have worked to upgrade the system in response to the criticism of Carnivore. The engineers have added auditing features, for example, that the bureau says will help insure that investigators will not tamper with the system or try to gather more information than authorized.

But the F.B.I. is not depending on Carnivore alone for the future of online surveillance. According to budget documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center under a Freedom of Information Act request, the bureau's plans include developing ways to listen in on the growing medium of voice telephone calls conducted over the Internet and to monitor the live online discussion system known as Internet Relay Chat, as well as other network technologies that were identified in the original document but were blacked out in the copies provided to the group.

Some alternatives are already in use, including one that reportedly figured in an investigation of Nicodemo S. Scarfo Jr., an accused bookmaker whose imprisoned father is the former head of the Philadelphia crime organization. In 1999, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported recently, agents planted a tap in Mr. Scarfo's computer keyboard that stored everything the suspect typed - including the password for the encryption software used to protect files on his hard drive.

Mr. Thomas was unwilling to discuss new techology methods in detail, but said he knew of only two cases in which such devices had been used.

A former federal prosecutor, Mark Rasch, says still more methods of Internet wiretap could be on the way. Mr. Rasch, vice president for cyberlaw at Predictive Systems, an Internet consulting company, noted that hacker groups had developed malicious computer programs with names like Back Orifice 2000 that when planted in a target computer give full remote access of the target machine to the hacker. Mr. Rasch suggested that such remote-control programs could reduce the risk of break-ins for the agency and might already be in use.

"I would be shocked," he said, if such software were not being used in intelligence investigations, which provide government agents with more leeway than in criminal investigations of American citizens.

But Marc J. Zwillinger, a former Justice Department lawyer, said law enforcement agents were unlikely to take such a risky course, because "it would be difficult to control, and if it did get out of control, there would be a backlash against the agency."

In the meantime, as the Congressional debate over Carnivore continues, the future of the system is uncertain. [The new attorney general, John Ashcroft, has not addressed Carnivore directly, but he has taken a tough stand in the past against what he sees as high-tech government intrusions into privacy.]

Members of Congress and civil libertarians argue that the analogies to telephone taps are flawed and that the Carnivore technology violates constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.

"The whole controversy is over intercepting thousands of conversations simultaneously," regardless of the filtering then applied, said Richard Diamond, a spokesman for Mr. Armey, the House majority leader.

Some critics have suggested imposing the same strict authorization rules on Carnivore that prevail for full-scale telephone wiretaps, with stiff penalties for any abuse of the system. Still, many of those who oppose Carnivore have concluded that it is here to stay.

"You can't outlaw this technology," said James X. Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a high-tech policy group in Washington. "All you can do is set strict legal standards."

---

JEWS' APPEAL DENIED

February 8, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

IRAN: The supreme court has denied an appeal by 10 Iranian Jews convicted of spying for Israel, the official Iranian news agency said. It quoted a statement by the prosecutor's office as saying three supreme court judges had found the appeal to have no legal basis. (Reuters)

-------- terrorism

Questionnaire Makes Terror Trial Jury a Bit Less Anonymous

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08JURY.html

They are bank tellers, retired track workers, accountants, book editors, salesmen, construction workers and office clerks. They are black, white, Hispanic and Indian, and their homes are scattered through Manhattan, Westchester County and the Bronx.

When they are not busy reading Casino Player magazine or Runner's World or The Western Journal of Nursing Research, they are likely to be fishing, writing poems, making jewelry or working on their cars. They are, on average, 46 years old. And though all 18 of them were selected as jurors in the highly publicized bombings conspiracy trial, at least five had no idea before their first day in court that two United States Embassies in Africa were destroyed by a pair of terrorist blasts three years ago.

In December, a staggering 1,302 potential panelists filled out questionnaires in Federal District Court in Manhattan in a daunting effort to pick a jury for the bombings trial, a legal marathon that is expected to last 9 or 10 months. More than two- thirds of them were immediately excused because of hardships, court records show, leaving a pool of 424.

The 18 jurors who were finally chosen are now hearing the case of four men accused of joining a worldwide terror plot that led to the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania on Aug. 7, 1998. Although the panelists have been granted anonymity for their safety, a basic sketch of who they are came to light yesterday as court officials released copies of their completed 30-page questionnaires.

Unlike lawyers who typically do not mind talking or witnesses who are forced tell their stories on the stand, jurors usually bring an inscrutable silence into court. The published questionnaires, which delved into the jurors' attitudes toward everything from Islam to the death penalty, are likely to provide one of the few glimpses into the panelists' minds that the public will ever get.

One of the most important details the questionnaires show is that the jurors - 12 regular panelists and six alternates - are almost evenly divided between those who have had contact with people who practice Islam and those who have never had such contact. That is sure to be an major issue in the trial because the defendants - Wadih El-Hage, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali - have been described by the prosecution as being part of a terrorist conspiracy "dedicated to opposing non-Islamic governments with force and violence."

Because two suspects - Mr. Mohamed and Mr. al-'Owhali - could be put to death if they are convicted, both the prosecution and the defense wanted detailed information about what the jurors thought of capital punishment. The jurors more or less support the death penalty, the questionnaires show. In fact, on a scale of 1 to 10 - with 1 meaning strongly opposed and 10 meaning strongly in favor - the overwhelming majority gave answers of 5, 6 or 7. One juror answered 2, indicating that she was more strongly against capital punishment. But another answered 10, suggesting he had few qualms about putting someone to death.

"I am not a proponent of the death penalty," the juror who answered 2 wrote. "I believe that a solution for protecting society is a complex matter, and that the death penalty serves as one of its solutions, but think that alternatives should be pursued on an ongoing basis."

While the questionnaires were obviously intended to help both sides in the case categorize the jurors according to several broad themes, they also had the fascinating effect of taking a sociological snapshot of 18 ordinary citizens at a time when steel barriers were being erected to protect the federal courthouse from a potential terrorist assault.

One learns, for example, that the woman who has strong reservations about the death penalty is an art therapist who does the crossword puzzle in The New York Times, glances at fashion magazines, attends church regularly and has traveled to Canada, England and Bermuda. The man who strongly favors capital punishment once loaded trains for a living, reads The Daily News and lives in Castle Hill, a neighborhood in the Bronx.

The jury also includes a Brooklyn- born Jewish man who works as a book editor and gives money to the Film Forum and the Museum of Modern Art. There is also a 26-year- old black woman, one of the alternate jurors, who works as a bank teller, reads Essence and is a member of the Pentecostal church.

One juror is an Indian car inspector who speaks Hindi and lives in Throgs Neck, another Bronx neighborhood, where he peruses The Wall Street Journal four times a week and writes poetry. He had an unusual response to the question, "How do you feel about the death penalty?"

"Just changing the mineral and water from an improperly behavioral person to another creature possibly properly or improperly behaved," he wrote.

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Witness Describes Break With Group Led by bin Laden

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By BENJAMIN WEISER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08TERR.html?pagewanted=all

One day in mid-1996, a Sudanese man stood in the visa line at an American embassy abroad. When a clerk asked if he wanted an application, he replied, "No, I don't want visa, but I have some information for your government."

He was asked to wait. After 20 minutes, an official met him. He told her that he had been in Afghanistan, and had worked with a group that wanted "to make war against your country." He added that the group might "try to do something inside United States," might also "fight the United States Army" overseas, "and also they try make bomb against some embassy."

Yesterday, the man, Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, recounted the conversation in Federal District Court in Manhattan, telling a jury what had driven him into the hands of the Americans, a decision that involved an even more difficult step: betraying his leader, Osama bin Laden.

The warnings, while not enough to prevent the bombings two years later of the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, attracted enough interest that Mr. Al-Fadl was taken into F.B.I. custody, and was eventually entered into the American witness protection program.

Mr. Al-Fadl, testifying for the second straight day under questioning by the government, was not asked to elaborate on the warnings he gave to the Americans, and further details were not available yesterday. He is to be cross-examined by defense lawyers beginning on Tuesday.

Since the bombings, there has been a continuing debate over whether the State Department reacted quickly enough to a series of ominous clues and potential threats against the embassy in Nairobi that were being picked up by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. in the year or two before the attacks, which occurred on Aug. 7, 1998.

The blast in Nairobi and the nearly simultaneous bombing of the embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed 224 people and wounded thousands.

Mr. Al-Fadl, who had been a close aide to Mr. bin Laden, was testifying in the trial of four men charged with participating in a global terrorist conspiracy that prosecutors say was led by Mr. bin Laden and included the embassy bombings. Mr. bin Laden, who remains a fugitive, is believed to be living in Afghanistan under the protection of the ruling Taliban.

Yesterday, in the heavily guarded courtroom, Mr. Al-Fadl, who had been a secret informer for the government known in court papers only as CS-1, spoke calmly in heavily accented English.

He continued his detailed account of the inner workings of Mr. bin Laden's group, Al Qaeda. He also described his role in Al Qaeda's attempt in 1993 to buy uranium for $1.5 million, which prosecutors say Mr. bin Laden wanted for a nuclear weapon. Mr. Al-Fadl said he did know whether the purchase actually went through.

But it was Mr. Al-Fadl's extraordinary account of his break with Mr. bin Laden, which occurred between May and July of 1996, and his decision to cooperate with the American government that was the most striking testimony yesterday.

He told the jury about his unhappiness with Al Qaeda, which he had joined around the time of its creation in the early 1990's, swearing "bayat," or an oath of allegiance.

He said he had complained about his monthly salary of $500, which was less than other Al Qaeda members.

He said he began skimming money from Mr. bin Laden's commodities deals, demanding commissions from local companies that were buying sugar and oil from Al Qaeda. Mr. Al- Fadl said he stole $110,000, which he used to buy four pieces of land and a car, before one of Mr. bin Laden's aides confronted him, saying he had heard about his scheme.

At first, Mr. Al-Fadl said, he denied taking money, but he was confronted again by two of Mr. bin Laden's top aides.

"They told me, `Our relationship start from beginning with you,' " he testified. " `We cannot believe you did that.' "

Mr. Al-Fadl said he confessed to the senior aides and asked for their forgiveness.

But the aides said he would have to see Mr. bin Laden himself. The meeting took place in one of Mr. bin Laden's offices. "He told me, `I don't care about the money, but I care about you,' " Mr. Al-Fadl said, " `because you start this from the beginning. You work hard in Afghanistan. You are one of the best people in Al Qaeda group.' "

Mr. Al-Fadl said that Mr. bin Laden told him: " `We give you salary, we give you everything. When you travel, we give you extra money; we pay your medical bills.' "

Mr. Al-Fadl said he had complained about the disparity in Al Qaeda salaries, but Mr. bin Laden was not moved. "He said: `There's no reason for you to do that. If you need money, you should come to us.' "

Mr. Al-Fadl, who said he had paid back about $30,000, told Mr. bin Laden he had paid all he could. "I did my best to be a good person," he said he told Mr. bin Laden, adding that he would "love to be in Al Qaeda group again."

Mr. Al-Fadl said Mr. bin Laden told him: " `Give all the money back, and after that everything going to be fine.'

"I tell him: `But there's no money left.'

"And he say, `I can't, I can't forgive you until you give all the money.' "

Mr. Al-Fadl said the meeting lasted about 30 to 45 minutes. "I don't have any hope when I left the office."

Mr. Al-Fadl said he approached officials in several other countries, which he did not identify, and told them about Mr. bin Laden. It was not clear what resulted from those meetings.

He then entered the visa line at the American embassy in an unidentified country. After saying he had information for the government, and needed help, he was told to sit in a chair and waited for 20 minutes. He was finally met by an embassy official, and began to talk about Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda, which he said was training "to make war against your country."

He said the official asked, " `What kind of war?' " He laid out the possibilities of attacks inside the United States, on the Army abroad, and of an embassy bombing.

The official asked how he knew. He said he told her that he had been working with members of the group for years - dating back to 1986 when he first went to work for a Muslim relief organization in Brooklyn, which was then supporting the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

He said he told the official: " `I left the group, and there's no relationship with them no more, and I do my best if you help me, I give you all the information.' "

Mr. Al-Fadl said he was debriefed by American officials for about three weeks, and then was taken to Europe to meet with representatives of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department.

He was then flown to the United States, where he remained in F.B.I. custody for more than 18 months.

Mr. Al-Fadl said that as part of a cooperation agreement with the government, he has pleaded guilty to federal terrorism charges that could result in a sentence of up to 15 years in prison.

He said he and his family were allowed to enter the witness protection program, and government officials told him they were giving him a $20,000 loan "to start your life."

---

Terrorist aide says he warned U.S.

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

NEW YORK (AP) - A former aide to Osama bin Laden testified Wednesday that two years before the deadly 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, he warned American officials that terrorists might strike.

Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, testifying at the trial of four men charged in the twin bombings, said he told U.S. officials that he had heard talk that bin Laden's terrorist group would make bombs against "some embassy." He did not name specific targets. In fact, Al-Fadl said he warned U.S. officials that attacks were possible within the United States, against U.S. military forces overseas and at American embassies.

Prosecutors have portrayed the 1998 blasts at U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as part of a worldwide plot by bin Laden. Twelve Americans were among the 224 people killed.

Wahid El-Hage, 40, and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, 35, could get life sentences if convicted of conspiracy. Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-'Owhali, 24, and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 27, could face the death penalty.

Al-Fadl, in his second day on the witness stand, said he decided to alert U.S. officials after he was kicked out of bin Laden's organization for stealing. Sometime in 1996, Al-Fadl said, he went to a U.S. embassy in an unidentified country and told officials he had "information about people who want to do something against your government." Al-Fadl said he told embassy officials, and later the FBI, that militant Muslim followers of bin Laden were preparing to wage war against America.

---

Bin Laden trial in 3rd country?

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Pakistan's military leader has suggested Osama bin Laden, sought by the United States on terrorism charges, be tried in a third country, following the recent Lockerbie trial, an Egyptian newspaper reported Thursday.

Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in an interview with the Al-Ahram daily, compared the case of bin Laden - who is in hiding in Afghanistan - to the trial of two Libyans, held in a special court in the Netherlands after a deal between Libya and the United States and Britain.

"Between the American and the Afghan extreme stances, it's possible that the United States and Afghanistan can choose another country where bin Laden can have a fair trial," Musharraf said.

The U.S. accuses bin Laden of masterminding the bombing of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and has demanded that Afghanistan's Taliban government hand him over for trial. Twelve Americans were among the 224 people killed in the bombings.

The United Nations has imposed sanctions on Afghanistan's ruling militia, the Taliban, to press demands that they hand over bin Laden for trial in the United States or a third country.

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Greece prepares for Olympic threats

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

ATHENS, Greece (AP) - Greece insisted Thursday it will be ready to counter possible terrorism at the 2004 Olympics despite warnings from the CIA director that the threats should be taken more seriously.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, CIA Director George Tenet said the U.S. government has spoken to Greek officials "about their need to take this terrorist threat far more seriously than it's been taken in the past, that the Olympics are a major vulnerability." The United States has long pressed the Greek government to take stronger measures against terrorists, and some observers have voiced concern over the safety of the Olympics in Athens.

Greece is home to the November 17 terrorist group, which has killed 22 people since it first appeared in 1975 with the assassination of the CIA station chief in Athens. Some U.S. officials have expressed greater worry that non-Greek terrorists could try to use the Olympics as a high-profile backdrop for attacks.

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Convicted Libyan plans to appeal

February 8, 2001
Washington Times
World Scene Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene-200128213655.htm

EDINBURGH, Scotland - Libyan secret agent Abdel Basset Megrahi announced yesterday his intention to appeal his conviction for the deadly 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing, officials said.

Notice of his intention to appeal was filed in Edinburgh, the Scottish Executive, or devolved government, said in a statement.

Megrahi was found guilty of murder Jan. 31 for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie that killed 270 people, including 189 Americans. He was sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommendation that he serve at least 20 years.

CIA calls bin Laden Biggest threat

WASHINGTON (AP) - The biggest threat to U.S. national security is the Muslim extremist network of Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi who has declared holy war on America, CIA director George Tenet said Wednesday.

In a detailed assessment of global threats facing the United States, Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that international terrorists are becoming more technologically sophisticated and difficult to combat. "Osama bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat," Tenet said.

The director of central intelligence makes annual public presentations to Congress on the most acute threats to American security.

bin Laden is wanted by the FBI in connection with the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people.

Tenet said the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which allows bin Laden to operate from its territory, "encourages and profits from the drug trade." He said opium production in Afghanistan has been "exploding," accounting for 72% of the world's illicit opium production last year.

A major theme of Tenet's presentation to Congress on the same topic in March 2000 was the risk of sudden surprise and the growing importance of transnational threats - those that cross national borders. He cited a "growing risk of surprise" as a result of gaps in intelligence insight into the efforts of certain countries and groups to obtain or produce weapons of mass destruction.

A year ago Tenet said the CIA and other parts of the U.S. intelligence community had identified more than 50 nations "of concern'' as suppliers, conduits or potential proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. He said intelligence efforts were focused mostly on 10 of those 50, and they include North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

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Bin Laden Sought Uranium, Jury Told

Thursday, February 8, 2001
Washington Post
By Colum Lynch
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41224-2001Feb7?language=printer

NEW YORK, Feb. 7 -- A former member of Osama bin Laden's alleged terrorist network told a federal jury today that the Islamic extremist group tried to buy uranium in late 1993 but that he was not sure whether the deal was completed.

Jamal Ahmed Fadl, 38, a Sudanese militant who claims to have served in bin Laden's organization for nine years, also testified he warned U.S. officials in 1996 that the group was planning to attack American targets.

The warning came more than two years before the Aug. 7, 1998, truck bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people and wounded thousands.

"They try to make war against your country, and they train very hard," Fadl said he told an American official in the summer of 1996. "Maybe they try to do something inside the United States and they try to fight the United States Army outside, and also they try to make bomb against some embassy."

Fadl is the first government witness in the trial of four men accused of participating in the East African embassy bombings. The trial, which began Monday, is expected to last months.

Speaking in heavily accented English, Fadl said he was ordered in 1993 by one of bin Laden's top lieutenants to try to buy uranium from a former Sudanese military officer named Salah Abdel Mobruk, apparently to make an atomic weapon.

"I tell him we hear he's got uranium and we want to know if it's true," Fadl told the jury. "We want to buy it."

Fadl said an associate of Mobruk had offered to sell some uranium for $1.5 million, plus a commission. At one point, he said, the associate showed bin Laden's agents a bag containing a two- to three-foot cylinder that purportedly contained uranium, along with documents saying the material came from South Africa, a former nuclear power.

But Fadl said he was withdrawn from the negotiations a short time later. Although he never learned whether bin Laden's organization had bought the material, he said, he was paid a $10,000 bonus for arranging the deal.

The testimony appeared to be aimed at supporting the government's contention that bin Laden's group -- known as al Qaeda, Arabic for "the Base" -- planned terrorist acts and sought to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons in a crusade to drive American forces out of the Islamic world. But U.S. weapons experts cautioned that there is no evidence that Sudan or al Qaeda has ever possessed nuclear materials.

"The scary part is that they tried to get it," said Steven Dolley, research director at the Nuclear Control Institute, a Washington-based research group. "It sounds like it might have been a scam."

In his second day of testimony, Fadl also said he had helped the organization transfer money and weapons to like-minded terrorist organizations in the Philippines, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Yemen. Noting that the organization had purchased as many as 100 camels to carry rifles across the desert, he said, "We use camels to smuggle Kalashnikovs to Egypt."

Despite a privileged position in the organization, Fadl said, he grew angry over disparities in wages paid to al Qaeda members. While Fadl was paid $300 a month by the organization and $200 by one of bin Laden's companies, other members, particularly senior Egyptian officials, were making as much as $1,500 a month, he said.

Fadl handled the organization's payroll and complained to bin Laden that it was unfair that Egyptian members should be given greater responsibilities and wages than those who had served al Qaeda from its founding days in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. So he took about $110,000 in kickbacks from the sale of oil and sugar from one of bin Laden's companies, using the money to buy a car and land. "I feel I had to do something for myself," he explained.

Fadl said that the theft was soon discovered and that bin Laden insisted he pay back all the money. Instead, Fadl fled Sudan for an undisclosed country. Some time between May and July 1996, he said, he walked into a U.S. embassy and got in line for a visa.

"I don't want visa," he recalled telling a consular official when his turn came. "I have some information for your government about some people, they want to do something against your government."

Within 20 minutes, Fadl was being questioned by American officials. The U.S. government put him up in a nearby hotel and began three weeks of intelligence debriefings. He was then transferred to an undisclosed location in Europe, where he was questioned by officials from the FBI and the Justice Department.

Fadl said he was flown to the United States and placed in the custody of the FBI for about two years before entering a federal witness protection program. Although the United States refused to give him a reward for testifying against bin Laden, he said, the government brought his family from Sudan and lent him $20,000.

In exchange, Fadl said, he pleaded guilty to weapons and explosives charges. The charges carry a maximum of 15 years in prison, but he said officials have promised to ask the judge for leniency.

----

Bin Laden Called Top Terrorist Threat

Thursday, February 8, 2001
Washington Post
By Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41544-2001Feb7?language=printer

CIA Director George J. Tenet yesterday described Saudi exile Osama bin Laden's "global network" as the "most immediate and serious" terrorist threat to the United States.

Tenet also reported that Russia, China and North Korea have continued in the past year to sell missile technology to Iran, Pakistan and other countries.

Delivering the CIA's annual assessment of worldwide threats, Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that state-sponsored terrorism appears to be declining. But "transnational" terrorist groups -- such as bin Laden's network of Arabs who fought to drive Soviet troops out of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and have since turned against the United States and pro-Western Arab governments -- are "becoming more operationally adept and more technically sophisticated," he said.

Bin Laden, who is believed to be living in Afghanistan under the protection of the ruling Taliban, has been indicted in New York for conspiring to attack U.S. troops in Somalia in 1993 and to bomb two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Four alleged members of his organization, known as al Qaeda or "the Base," went on trial this week in Manhattan for the embassy bombings, which killed 224 people, including 12 Americans. U.S. and Yemeni officials also have said they believe that bin Laden was behind the Oct. 12 bombing of the Navy destroyer USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors in the Yemeni port of Aden.

Bin Laden's organization, Tenet said, "is continuing to place emphasis on developing surrogates to carry out attacks in an effort to avoid detection, blame and retaliation."

Thomas Fingar, acting head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, emphasized the elusive nature of al Qaeda. He told the Senate committee that bin Laden was like the chief operating officer of a multinational corporation that provides "guidance, funding and logistical support" to henchmen who, "like regional directors or affiliates, have broad latitude and sometimes pursue their own agendas."

In discussing the spread of weapons of mass destruction, Tenet said Russian defense firms last year supplied ballistic missile technology to Iran, India, China and Libya, although he did not name the companies or specify what they sold. He also said Russia provided assistance to Iran's civilian nuclear program that "could be used to advance its weapons programs as well."

Under questioning from Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), a critic of the Bush administration's national missile defense plan, Tenet reiterated a U.S. intelligence estimate that the "most likely" way for an enemy to attack the United States with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons would be with "non-missile delivery means," such as a bomb contained in a truck, shipping container or suitcase.

Asked by Sen. Fred D. Thompson (R-Tenn.) to assess China's military buildup and "increasingly harsh rhetoric about what the future holds" for U.S.-Chinese relations, Fingar said: "In some respects, it's a mirror image of the testimony that all of us [U.S. intelligence officials] have prepared" about China.

"We're the yardstick, and if you're going to justify budgets in China, you need a formidable adversary," he said.

In discussing the Middle East, Tenet said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein "has grown more confident in his ability to hold on to his power." But he added that Iraq's military capabilities have declined as a result of sanctions, a conclusion endorsed by another witness at the Senate hearing, Vice Adm. Thomas R. Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Wilson added that Hussein "probably retains limited numbers" of missiles, launchers and warheads.

Tenet, Fingar and Wilson all noted that the Iraqi leader has effectively taken advantage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has made progress in his diplomatic efforts to chip away at the sanctions.

In other remarks, Tenet said:

• The Caucasus and Central Asia are "parts of the world that have the potential to become more volatile as they become more important to the United States" because of U.S. investments in extracting oil and gas from the Caspian Sea. Faced with Islamic extremist groups, Central Asian leaders "are looking increasingly to the West for support."

• India and Pakistan are likely to conduct additional ballistic missile tests and, possibly, more nuclear tests.

• Information warfare, such as computer attacks over the Internet, are a likely way for adversaries to respond to overwhelming U.S. military superiority.


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Homeless Shelters in New York Fill to Highest Levels Since 80's

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-China-Human-Rights.html

The number of homeless people lodging nightly in the New York City shelter system this winter has risen above 25,000, the most since the late 1980's, city figures show, with the largest increases coming among women and children over the last few years.

Officials say no single factor explains the increase in families seeking shelter. Likely explanations include sharply rising housing costs in an economic boom, a subway advertisement campaign that encourages victims of domestic violence to seek help, more court orders for eviction, and declines in subsidized housing, said Martin Oesterreich, the city's commissioner of homeless services.

The number of family shelter applicants has grown 10 percent in the last year alone, he said.

"I can't screw the front door any tighter," Mr. Oesterreich said, in reference to tough screening procedures started by the Giuliani administration in 1996, resulting in more families being turned away.

"We are focused on getting through what I view as a temporary crisis," he added. "That's not to say that I may not be proven wrong, and that this is instead a major shift in family homelessness."

The increase, Mr. Oesterreich stressed, is part of a national trend. He cited a 25-city survey by the United States Conference of Mayors that calculated a 17 percent rise in the number of families applying for help because of homelessness.

But New York City's system is the only one in the nation that operates under a court-ordered right to shelter for the truly homeless. On a typical night this week, it gave beds to 10,177 children and their 8,024 adult family members, as well as 7,492 single adults. Thousands more do not seek shelter, but no reliable estimates exist for those on the street.

Seventy-eight percent of homeless shelter residents are in families or are single women. Twenty-two percent are single men - down from a third in the late 1980's.

Families caught in the overflow, including about 500 families a night already found eligible for refuge from domestic violence, have been required in recent weeks to return again and again to the Emergency Assistance Unit in the Bronx because they had been given beds for only one night. The unit is the city's sole portal to the shelter system for families.

Mr. Oesterreich said that more families seeking shelter apparently come straight from being evicted, though most double up with relatives before seeking official help.

Advocates for the homeless say evictions are an important factor. "The emergency assistance unit is a window into what's happening in the economy over all," said Steven Banks, counsel to the Coalition to the Homeless and to the Homeless Rights Project of the Legal Aid Society.

For example, he said, landlords have been increasingly successful in obtaining eviction warrants, which were up last year to about 122,000 from 114,000 in 1999, according to the civil court's latest caseload activity report. The number of evictions actually carried out by marshals is basically unchanged, he said, but families faced with a warrant often choose to leave an apartment before they are thrown on the street.

"Whereas the debate for the last few years has been about work programs," he said, "what we're seeing now is that work isn't enough to keep people out of the shelter system." The $5.15 per hour minimum wage is not enough to cover rents greater than $700 or $800 a month, he said.

To a large extent, the latest numbers underline a reality that is already familiar to scholars, but still counterintuitive to many city dwellers who associate homelessness with the derelict men and women they see in public places.

The research of Dennis Culhane, a professor of social welfare policy at the University of Pennsylvania who has analyzed computerized shelter system data for New York and Philadelphia shows that by far the most likely person to become homeless in both cities is a poor African-American child younger than 5.

The daily shelter census is just a snapshot of the total population moving in and out of homelessness. More than 333,000 individual New Yorkers - 4.6 percent of the city's 1990 population - stayed in public shelters for one day or more between 1987 and 1996, according to published analysis of computer records.

In a little more than two decades, Mr. Culhane added, largely because of an economic boom that increased demand for urban housing by single adults who could pay, "homelessness went from a problem afflicting a few thousand skid-row denizens, to a commonplace way station for millions of America's poor."

Mr. Oesterreich said the city was taking a three-pronged approach to the problem. A $12 million expansion of the family shelter system over three years is part of the proposed budget of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. The city has already sharply increased the number of temporary beds used in hotels - adding 965 beds for families this year, and 300 beds for single adults, mainly women. The numbers of single women admitted to shelter has been rising rapidly in the last two years, to 1,714 this week, from 1,200 to 1,300 during most of the 1990's.

Both Mr. Giuliani and Mayor David N. Dinkins had turned away from the use of hotels as shelters for families in the 1990's, and the bulk of regular shelter placements are now provided by private nonprofit organization under city contract. But in December the city had 1,334 families lodged in 29 hotels, city figures show, up from 887 families in 16 hotels in December 1999.

An apartment rent subsidy program was announced in October, but it is only now getting under way, with the first 17 of 350 families selected, but not yet housed.

The length of stay by families in the shelter system has increased as families are unable to find affordable apartments. Even those able to obtain federal housing vouchers - a subsidy sharply cut by Congress in the 1990's - often cannot find landlords willing to accept them. In October, Mr. Oesterreich said, the city began increasing a bonus paid to landlords who rent to homeless families, but that move has not eased the bottleneck.

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The Next Agenda Conference

Thu, 08 Feb 2001

To: Progressive leaders, activists, organizations, and individuals
From: Campaign/Institute for America's Future

John Sweeney, Jesse Jackson, Paul Wellstone, Jan Schakowsky, Julian Bond, Patricia Ireland, George Becker and other progressive leaders invite you to join activists, policy experts, Members of Congress and leaders of labor and citizen organizations at a national conference on THE NEXT AGENDA National Press Club, 14th and F Streets NW 8:30 am to 10 pm FEBRUARY 28, 2001

Conference presentations will include:

Jesse Jackson, Jan Schakowsky, John Sweeney on Strategies for Progressives

Heidi Hartmann on Economic Security for Women and Children

NAACP's Hillary Shelton on the Imperative of Voting Reform

SEIU President Andrew Stern, Yale's Ted Marmor, and Senator Paul Wellstone on Health Care for All.

Carl Pope on Green Growth: the Challenge and Opportunity of Global Warming

Jeff Faux on Responding to the Coming Economic Crisis

William Greider on the Global Economy.

We invite Americans who want to move our country Forward.

The Conference will feature discussion of a core progressive agenda that can help forge a new majority for significant reform. It will dissect the message of election 2000, highlight pressing economic and political reforms, and feature leading progressive legislators, citizen leaders and analysts.

The accidental presidency of George W. Bush presents progressives with a dual task: fighting against a new reaction while putting forth a clear vision and bold agenda for progressive reform.

George Bush may be in the White House, but he did not win this election.

The total vote for Vice President Al Gore and Green Party nominee Ralph Nader was 52%, the largest center left vote since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. As Senator Paul Wellstone notes, "this election confirms what we already knew: progressive politics are winning politics. Health care, education, retirement security and broadening our prosperity are the issues foremost on voters' minds. The challenge facing us now is to translate the dominance of our issues into a winning progressive agenda.

Also, at the conference the Campaign for America's Future will release a new book: THE NEXT AGENDA: BLUEPRINT FOR A NEW PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT published by Westview Press.

Join us as we begin at the National Conference on the Next Agenda.

For more detailed INFORMATION and to REGISTER go to www.ourfuture.org.

EDUCATION for PEACE in IRAQ CENTER (EPIC) 1101 Penn. Ave SE, Washington, DC 20003 202-543-6176; 202-546-5103 (fax) http://saveageneration.org

Visit us on the web at http://saveageneration.org for more information and NEW updates.

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Hong Kong Leader Promises to More Closely Monitor Falun Gong

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Banned-Sect.html

HONG KONG (AP) -- Largely adopting Beijing's line on Falun Gong but stopping short of action, Hong Kong's leader on Thursday called the group a cult whose members set themselves ablaze in China and must be closely monitored.

``Anyone who has watched the self-immolation on Tiananmen Square would be very shocked,'' Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa said in a legislative question-and-answer session that sharply escalated the war of words over Falun Gong's activities in Hong Kong.

``I certainly hope that such incidents will not happen in Hong Kong and I believe the people of Hong Kong share this view,'' Tung said.

``We will have to monitor them very carefully,'' he added. ``How can we protect Hong Kong security?''

Tung did not announce any sort of clampdown on Falun Gong, despite Beijing's recent demands that the group be stopped from using Hong Kong as a base.

Falun Gong is outlawed in mainland China and subjected to an often-violent crackdown there but remains legal in Hong Kong.

Falun Gong insists it is not political but is campaigning only to gain the right to practice freely on the mainland. The group has attracted millions of adherents, mostly Chinese, with its combination of slow-motion exercises and philosophy drawn from Taoism, Buddhism and the often unorthodox ideas of exiled founder Li Hongzhi.

China's battle against Falun Gong spilled over into Hong Kong last month. Local government officials let Falun Gong rent space in City Hall to hold an international conference, where followers demanded the right to practice freely on the mainland and an end to alleged torture-killings by mainland security forces.

Beijing and its allies among local newspapers and politicians were outraged to see anti-China campaigning right on Chinese soil.

Tung finds himself caught between Beijing's demands that Falun Gong be stifled and equally vigorous arguments from pro-democracy and human rights campaigners who say Hong Kong's cherished freedoms are under threat.

The issue is one of the biggest tests yet of the ``one country, two systems'' government put in place when Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.

The system gives Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy and citizens enjoy Western-style personal liberties unheard of on the mainland.

Despite Tung's harsh language, he said Hong Kong will deal with the group according to the rule of law and he avoided any mention of alleged subversion of China by the group.

He sought to allay concerns the controversy would prompt Hong Kong to swiftly enact an anti-subversion law, which it must do at some point now that it has returned to China.

Tung did say that Falun Gong has shown characteristics of an ``evil religion'' or ``evil cult,'' depending on what translation from the Cantonese dialect is used. Beijing refers to Falun Gong as an ``evil cult'' and Tung's aides said later that Tung was calling the group a ``cult.''

Furious Falun Gong followers said the meaning was clear -- and frightening.

``How can he say we're an evil cult?'' asked Falun Gong spokeswoman Hui Yee-han.

``I'm afraid Mr. Tung's comments on Falun Gong will incite hatred against us,'' she said. ``All of our activities are carried out peacefully in Hong Kong.''

Falun Gong found Tung's reference to the immolations in Beijing particularly galling.

Beijing's propaganda campaign against Falun Gong has highlighted the incident last month, in which one person died and four were injured. Falun Gong members insist the people could not have been true followers because the sect's teachings prohibit any killing, including suicide.

Opposition politicians were alarmed by Tung's comments.

``We are worried,'' Democratic Party leader Martin Lee said. ``If we carry on like this -- and the central government isn't nice to the Catholics, or Protestants, or the Buddhists, either -- if these are all branded as cults, will Hong Kong call them cults, too?''

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V-Day twists holiday into male-bashing event

02/08/2001
USA Today
By Christina Hoff Sommers
http://usatoday.com/news/comment/2001-02-08-ncguest2.htm

Saturday evening, thousands of women will gather at Madison Square Garden in New York City to observe "V-Day."

The sponsors of this "Violence Against Women Day" intend to transform Valentine's Day into a "holiday" that deplores men's brutal treatment of women. "V-Day," say the planners, "proclaims Valentine's Day as V-Day until the violence stops. When all women live in safety, then it will be known as Victory Over Violence Day."

One might expect strong resistance to the idea of changing a charming and well-loved romantic holiday into a day of outrage. In fact, V-Day now is in its fourth year, and its popularity is growing.

V-Day originated in the mind of Eve Ensler, author of the off-Broadway hit, The Vagina Monologues. This play is loosely based on interviews with more than 200 women on the subject of their intimate anatomy. Theatergoers find some of the comments amusing. But its more serious preoccupation is exposing male insensitivity and violence. It offers a rogues' gallery of oafs, brutes, adulterers, rapists, child molesters and vile little boys.

An information sheet assures us that "it isn't the style or substance of V-Day to bash anyone." But apart from this disclaimer, V-Day, like The Monologues, appears dedicated to the proposition that women are from Venus and men are from hell.

Dozens of luminaries, among them Oprah Winfrey, Brooke Shields, Winona Ryder and Calista Flockhart, are scheduled to participate in Saturday's gala. Activities will include speeches against rape and battery, "empowerment" workshops and dramatic readings from The Vagina Monologues.

Jane Fonda, who just donated $1 million to the V-Day campaign, is honorary chair. Celebrity acolytes refer to themselves as "Eve's Army."

An unassailable goal?

V-Day supporters justify their movement to redefine Valentine's Day by pointing to the high purpose this serves. How, they ask, could anyone possibly object to a holiday dedicated to diminishing battery and murder?

The first thing to say is that choosing Valentine's Day for any such purpose is grossly inappropriate. Why pick the one day that celebrates all of the good things that happen between men and women and turn it into a day that focuses on the bad things? By this twisted logic, we should be working to turn Mother's Day into a "holiday" condemning all of the vicious things some mothers do to their children.

V-Day's sponsors portray the United States as one of the most repressive and barbarous places on earth for women. One "fact sheet" they distribute says "22% to 35% of women who visit emergency rooms are there for injuries related to ongoing abuse."

Too many, but not that many

These numbers are egregiously wrong. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that about one-half of 1% of women who visit emergency rooms are there for injuries related to domestic abuse. That still translates into distressingly high numbers of victims. But the true numbers are apparently not high enough for V-Day proponents. They are determined to implicate the average American man in an ongoing social atrocity and to place the United States on a moral par with countries that practice genital mutilation and bride burnings.

A holiday based on hysterical overstatement about the plight of American women is a bad idea on any day of the year. But "V-Day," say its supporters, "is a fierce, wild, unstoppable movement."

It certainly has momentum. This year, V-Day will be observed in 50 cities and 300 colleges worldwide. Organizers expect 20,000 women at Saturday's event and believe it will raise millions of dollars for the cause. Ensler herself is a formidable asset; her celebrity followers revere her. "She's giving us our souls back," Glenn Close told CNN.

Can Valentine's Day withstand the V-Day assault? It can and will. The millions of women and men who quietly celebrate the day in the traditional manner are its best defense. Their tender sentiments, expressed in flowers, heart-shaped boxes of chocolate and half-serious little poems, give the lie to Ensler's grim way of looking at the world.

Eve's Army may be marching in the name of women, but it certainly does not represent them.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Her latest book is The War Against Boys: How Feminism is Harming Our Young Men.

---

Anti-globalists turn to hacking

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

GENEVA (AP) - The technicians at the World Trade Organization got a bit suspicious when "journalists" in an online press conference went by screen names like "NO-TO-WTO." Still, WTO Director-General Mike Moore gamely answered all questions thrown at him - until he was knocked off-line by anti-globalization protesters with excellent computer skills.

This week, similarly motivated "hacktivists" grabbed headlines, announcing they'd collected credit card and other personal data on some 1,400 business and political leaders by breaking into the database of last month's World Economic Forum.

Increasingly, social activists have turned to hacking to make their point, breaking into computer systems and wreaking havoc on organizations they oppose. The Internet has turned out to be a remarkable tool for nonviolent protest on a scale activists could only dream of before. The term "hacktivist" was first applied to supporters of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas, who have sabotaged Mexican government Web sites since 1998 and held "virtual sit-ins" designed to overload servers.

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Minority Protesters in Vietnam Focus on Land and Rights Issues

February 8, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08VIET.html

HANOI, Vietnam, Feb. 7 - Two important coffee-growing provinces in Vietnam's central highlands were tense today after several days of sometimes violent land and rights protests by thousands of ethnic-minority people.

The protests in the provinces of Dac Lac and Gia Lai were the biggest known for years in the tightly controlled country. A Western diplomat in Hanoi quoted Vietnamese sources as saying the army had been put on "high alert."

Military officers in Dac Lac and Gia Lai said they had not received such an order, however. Officers in Hanoi would not comment.

A resident of Buon Ma Thuot, the capital of Dac Lac, said the town was calm after weekend protests but neighbouring districts of Buon Don, Ea Sup and Ea H'leo were tense, and helicopters had circled the area for several days. The resident also said protesters had been stopping cars and beating travelers. Members of the Vietnamese majority, blamed for encroaching on land traditionally held by members of minority groups, had been singled out for attack, and the police had set up roadblocks to prevent minority people from entering more populated areas.

Residents said the protests started on Friday in Pleiku, the capital of Gia Lai, where there were violent clashes between the police and demonstrators. The protests spread south to to Dac Lac the following day.

Residents said the Pleiku protest involved several thousand people and that the protesters had mobile phones to help them in organizing the demonstrations.

The Foreign Ministry issued a brief statement saying that some people had gathered in front of the Gia Lai People's Committee on Jan. 29 after the arrest of two residents, but had dispersed now that the two had been freed. It gave no details of the numbers of protesters and did not say why the two men were arrested.

Residents and diplomats said the protests appeared to have been started by disputes including land encroachment by Vietnamese migrants, the routing of a new north- south highway and religious rights.

The relocation of large numbers of lowland-residing Vietnamese people to the highlands has created friction with members of ethnic groups who have lived there for generations, and the problem has been exacerbated by corruption among officials.

It was not clear from which ethnic group the protesters came, but the Ede and the Gia Rai are the largest groups in the area. Traders said the unrest had not hurt the coffee business and appeared unlikely to do so.

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Vietnam clamps down after highland protests

02/08/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-02-08-viet.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Vietnam-Rural-Unrest.html?printpage=yes

HANOI, Vietnam (AP) - Vietnamese soldiers and riot police were on high alert in the central highlands Thursday, days after large-scale protests by thousands of Vietnam's ethnic minorities erupted in the streets of several provincial capitals.

At the same time, authorities have been trying to close off the area to outsiders, blocking major roads and stopping motorists, residents said.

Over the past week, thousands of people have protested in front of the government and communist party buildings in Pleiku and Buon Ma Thuot, the coffee-growing capitals of Gia Lai and Daklak provinces, residents and officials reported.

The protests appear to stem from religious tensions and complaints over land encroachment. Government confiscation of ethnic minority land for coffee plantations has been a major sore point.

Many of the central highland ethnic minority groups are converts to Protestantism. Communist Vietnam has a record of suppressing religious groups in recent years.

Rural unrest is rare in tightly controlled Vietnam. In 1997, however, villagers in northern Thai Binh province, 77 miles south of Hanoi, took more than 20 police officers hostage to protest local corruption and excessive taxes.

So far, 20 people have been arrested in the recent troubles, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh said, including "provocative people" who destroyed schools and offices, resisted police, and caused instability.

Army troops and anti-riot police were sent to the area in recent days, a government official said. Residents were told that all state employees, local police and military were ordered to stay on 24-hour alert.

Residents in both Buon Ma Thuot and Pleiku report seeing increased police and military patrolling day and night.

"The situation in Pleiku has been calm over the past few days, but there are still problems in some rural districts," said one resident on condition of anonymity.

Hotels in Pleiku were ordered by authorities two days ago to keep out foreigners and the ban was in effect until Feb. 15, a hotel executive in the area said.

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Wahid's fate brings violent protest

2/8/2001
InfoBeat News
http://us.f23.mail.yahoo.com/ym/login?.rand=e4nqbdvq27v8i

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Police fired warning shots in two towns and a mob in two others burned the office of the former ruling party on Thursday as protests raged over parliament's attempt to impeach Indonesia's president.

President Abdurrahman Wahid plans to visit East Java, his party's heartland and center of the protests, on Friday to calm the situation, his spokesman said. Wahid has refused to step down despite mounting pressure after the parliament last week censured him over two corruption scandals and opened the door to his possible impeachment, which could take at least four months.

Police in Lamongan in East Java province, 330 miles east of Jakarta, said about 10,000 pro-Wahid demonstrators tried to attack a local office of the Golkar Party, which used to support former dictator Suharto and is now backing moves to oust Wahid.

On Wednesday, Wahid dismissed Justice Minister Yusril Mahendra for suggesting publicly that he quit.

An investigative committee last week released a report claiming that Wahid was aware of an illegal transfer of $4 million from a government agency by a former business associate.

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PACT TO END PROTESTS

February 8, 2001
New York Times
World Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/08/world/08BRIE.html?pagewanted=all

ECUADOR: President Gustavo Noboa reached an accord with Indian leaders to end protests by indigenous groups over proposed fuel and transport price increases, local news media and indigenous leaders said. The pact effectively defused growing turmoil after two weeks of Indian protests led to clashes in which at least four Indians died. (Reuters)

CHINA: NEW SECT DEATHS REPORTED A rights group said seven more members of the outlawed Falun Gong spiritual group have died in custody, raising the death toll to 112 in a crackdown by the government. Four reportedly died in labor camps, including two who were apparently injured during force feeding, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said in Hong Kong. (AP)

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USA Today
01/02/08
States
http://usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Maine

Bangor - Eleven demonstrators protesting clear-cutting in the rain forests of British Columbia have been arrested for criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. Several of the Greenpeace members suspended themselves from 20-foot tripods erected at Wickes Lumber Co. They want the company to stop buying from International Forest Products, which clear-cuts in B.C.

Maryland

Hagerstown - Sportsmen may boycott hunting in Maryland and take their guns to neighboring states. The Coalition of Western Maryland Sportsmen, representing about 4,000 hunters, will consider the proposal Sunday. They are angry with Gov. Glendening for implementing anti-hunting policies and for appointing an animal-rights activist to the state Wildlife Advisory Commission, traditionally a pro-hunting group.

Texas

Denton - Demonstrators at the University of North Texas wore T-shirts saying You Spell Unity With UNT. Hundreds of people took part in the march in support of racial diversity. The action came after the Kappa Alpha fraternity chapter was suspended for five years because some members allegedly taunted black football recruits with racial slurs.

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