------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Lawyers seek to shift blame to submarine crewman
Admirals grill sub officer about 'sloppiness'
Defense Lawyer Challenges Idea That Sub Crew Rushed
China's Latest Lie
Czechs to shut nuclear reactor for fixing valves
Balkans Task Force report on DU in Kosovo
Powell insists U.N. resume checks in Iraq
Bush Casts a Shadow On Korea Missile Talks
Bush wary of North Korea deal
Bush rules out immediate talks with N. Korea
Bush takes hard line on North Korea
Bush Tells Seoul Talks With North Won't Resume Now
Bush demands North Korea pacts verified
Bill Touts Nuclear Energy
Intel Chief Addresses Longer-Range Threats to U.S.

MILITARY
Drugs cost U.S. $4 billion
Discovery blasts off with next space station crew
French EDF plans 13 pct nuclear cost cut by 2002
Behave or Face a Diamond Ban
General Suspicion
Bush tells Pentagon to review beret issue
Killing Me Softly

OTHER
Grand National 'safe' as racing recovers
Hunters, trappers protest
Foot and mouth disease
'No end in sight' for foot-and-mouth crisis
Weighing a Demand for Gas Against the Fear of Pipelines
FOOT-AND-MOUTH
U.K., France fight livestock disease
Genetic Tinkering Is Found to Extend Roundworms' Lives
The Sheriff Relaxes and Awaits His Trial
How Inquiries Into Racial Profiling Unfolded
Witness Ties Ex-Police Boss to Killing of Serbian Warlord
Report Says Pipelines Were Tapped to Eavesdrop on Soviet Embassy
Recent Major U.S. Espionage Cases
Embassy Bombing Witnesses Recall Blood, Smoke and Chaos

ACTIVISTS
Swoosh Wars In an operation modeled on the Clinton campaign
CONFRONTING THE WORLD'S MOST DESTRUCTIVE BANK
Daewoo Car Output Resumes Despite Protests
LAYOFFS PROTESTED IN CHINA


-------- NUCLEAR

Lawyers seek to shift blame to submarine crewman

03/08/2001
USA Today
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-08-sub.htm

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) - Lawyers for submarine officers under investigation for the sinking of a Japanese fishing boat sought to shift the blame Thursday to a crewman who failed to report that the ship was nearby. As testimony at a rare Navy court of inquiry entered its fourth day, criticism mounted of a fire control technician. The crewman neglected to tell officers another boat was in close range of the USS Greeneville minutes before the submarine surfaced and smashed through the Ehime Maru, killing nine people.

Friday marks one month since the accident. The court will help determine the fate of Cmdr. Scott Waddle; Lt. j.g. Michael Coen, the officer of the deck; and Lt. Cmdr. Gerald Pfeifer, the second in command. They could face no disciplinary action or anything from a reprimand to court-martial and imprisonment.

About six minutes before the collision, the technician obtained data showing a boat 4,000 yards from the Greeneville. This happened as Coen and Waddle were conducting periscope scans for surface vessels. Both officers verbally reported seeing no close ships.

The technician should have heard that call and questioned it, Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths Jr. testified.

"(He) should have spoken up and said, 'That may be, but I think we have a close guy here,"' Griffiths said.

When a lawyer for Coen asked whether that could have prevented the collision, Griffiths replied: "Most emphatically yes." Later, Griffiths added: "I'm certain it wouldn't have occurred."

"That would have changed history," Griffiths said when asked what Waddle might have done if he had been given the information.

Griffiths conducted the preliminary investigation into the accident. The Navy had declined to name the fire control technician, but lawyers identified him in court as Petty Officer 1st Class Patrick Seacrest.

Seacrest, 34, is a veteran crewman who served aboard the Greeneville for nearly a year. He did not return messages from The Associated Press on Thursday.

Griffiths has said the technician didn't report the presence of the ship because 16 civilian visitors aboard the sub blocked his access to Waddle. However, Thursday's testimony also showed he initially received inaccurate data about the location of the Ehime Maru.

Coen's lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. Brent Filbert, revealed that at 1:31 p.m., data showed the Ehime Maru was 14,000 yards from the sub and moving away from, not closer to, the Greeneville. The inaccurate course may have been due to a submarine maneuver that makes sonar data less reliable.

The range dropped to 4,000 yards at 1:37:48, as Coen and Waddle conducted their periscope scans, and continued to drop until the Greeneville surfaced at 1:43 p.m.

"The exact moment that change was an issue, (Seacrest) ... should clearly have forcibly told the captain and the officer of the deck," Griffiths said.

Waddle's civilian attorney, Charles Gittins, maintained that moment was "the last clear chance" to avert the accident, noting Waddles would have performed his periscope search differently if he'd had that report.

Griffiths disagreed, saying Waddles could still have spotted the Ehime Maru had he conducted a longer scope search at a higher depth.

Before Thursday's hearing began, Waddle approached relatives of the Japanese victims in court and tried to offer an apology. They asked him to wait until all of the relatives could be present.

Some family members have complained that Waddle has refused to make eye contact with them. Last month, he issued a statement expressing "sincere regret" for the crash.

The three admirals presiding over the court appear to have different opinions as to the level of Waddle's culpability for the accident.

Rear Adm. David Stone suggested Greeneville's officers failed to do enough to ensure the safe operation of the submarine, such as having enough qualified personnel manning key positions, including sonar stations.

Testimony has shown the sonar room was staffed with one qualified operator, a trainee and a supervisor, even though a second qualified operator should have been present.

"Do you agree that these events ... are reflective of a command that actually increased its risk while conducting these underway operations?" Stone asked Griffiths.

The investigator said some areas of his probe must be further examined, although "I do agree that the ship made some mistakes, perhaps mistakes in judgment."

Another admiral suggested Waddle may have thought he was acting properly based upon the information he had.

"Would it be fair to say that it's a two-way street - the CO backs up his crew, and the crew backs up the CO?" asked Rear Adm. Paul Sullivan.

"You need your crew to back you up," Griffiths agreed.

Gittins later asked Griffiths whether the commander acted criminally negligent in the operation of his ship.

"In my opinion," Griffiths responded, "he was not criminally negligent".

---

Admirals grill sub officer about 'sloppiness'

03/08/2001
USA Today
By Andrea Stone,
http://usatoday.com/news/nlead.htm

PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii - The Navy officer who conducted the preliminary investigation of the collision of the submarine USS Greeneville and a Japanese boat appeared willing to give the sub's skipper the benefit of the doubt Thursday. On his fourth day on the witness stand, Rear Adm. Charles Griffiths said that although Cmdr. Scott Waddle, 41, may have made some missteps, "in my opinion, he was not criminally negligent" in the accident. The testimony was in response to questions from Waddle's civilian lawyer, Charles Gittins.

The Japanese trawler, the Ehime Maru, sank after the collision, and nine people aboard are presumed dead. Griffiths has testified that the Greeneville crew rushed a rapid-resurfacing maneuver because 16 civilian guests aboard were late getting to port.

The three admirals on the Navy court of inquiry investigating the collision challenged Waddle's claim that he used his "best judgment." They will eventually decide whether to recommend courts-martial for Waddle and two other officers named in the inquiry.

They asked pointed questions Thursday about "sloppiness" on the part of officers and crew the day of the accident.

"A commanding officer's 'best judgment' does not necessarily mean that action is prudent or safe," Rear Adm. David Stone said.

Rear Adm. Paul Sullivan asked Griffiths about the performance of the sub's enlisted crew. He honed in on the fire-control technician, Petty Officer 1st Class Patrick Seacrest, a 14-year veteran of four submarines. Seacrest reportedly told the National Transportation Safety Board that the civilians distracted him and prevented him from logging sonar contacts. Testimony showed he marked the sub's course, however.

Sullivan asked how much value a plotting chart without sonar contacts would have.

"The value is zero if it only has one ship's course on it," said Griffiths. He said it would be "easy" to plot the three sonar contacts detected before the collision.

Griffiths said Waddle or other officers were responsible for instructing Seacrest to log the contacts.

Earlier, Stone expressed concern over a missing watch bill, a document signed by the sub's commanders that names each watch stander and his qualifications.

"The signature is where one goes to determine accountability," Stone said. "Not being able to produce a signed watch bill is unusual. It is not the norm or standard for our Navy."

Stone, the most critical of the admirals, said that Gittins' statements during Wednesday's cross-examination that Waddle stressed "safety, efficiency and backup" on his submarine "are just words, just rhetoric unless they are translated into action by the commanding officer."

Stone, a surface-ship officer who commands the USS Nimitz battle group, said Waddle had left a third of his crew on shore, operated with a broken sonar monitor and had posted an unsupervised trainee at one of two sonar consoles.

Meanwhile, Navy engineers are expected to present a formal proposal to the Japanese early next week for lifting the fishing vessel, officials said in Washington. A final decision on how to proceed is not expected until several days after that, Navy officials said.

The recovery effort is expected to be a difficult one given the depth of the wreckage.

---

Defense Lawyer Challenges Idea That Sub Crew Rushed

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/national/08HAWA.html

HONOLULU, March 7 - The civilian lawyer for Cmdr. Scott D. Waddle, the captain of the submarine Greeneville, sought today to undercut damaging testimony about the submarine's collision with a Japanese fishing vessel, suggesting that the captain's actions had been reasonable and had fallen within acceptable Navy standards.

Cross-examining a witness for the first time in the Navy's court of inquiry into the accident, the captain's lawyer, Charles W. Gittins, questioned a number of details and assertions from the testimony of Rear Adm. Charles H. Griffiths Jr., who conducted a preliminary investigation of the Feb. 9 collision.

In particular, he challenged Admiral Griffiths's testimony that the Greeneville's crew rushed important maneuvers as it prepared to surface because the submarine had fallen behind schedule for its return to Pearl Harbor that afternoon.

Appearing for a third day before the court, the admiral said today that "an artificial urgency" was among the factors contributing to the collision, which sank the Ehime Maru, within minutes, leaving nine people lost at sea.

Under questioning, however, he acknowledged that the return time was not immovable and that by the time the Greeneville surfaced beneath the Japanese vessel it would not have made it back on schedule anyway. Mr. Gittins suggested that there had been no rush through the maneuvers and that their timing might have had other explanations. "If your assumptions were wrong, that places the commanding officer's actions in a totally different light, doesn't it?" Mr. Gittins asked Admiral Griffiths.

The court of inquiry, holding hearings at the Pearl Harbor Naval Station here, is not a trial but rather an investigative forum.

Nevertheless, lawyers for the "parties" to the investigation - Commander Waddle; Lt. Cmdr. Gerald K. Pfeifer, the executive officer; and Lt. j.g Michael J. Coen, the officer of the deck at the time - can question any of the witnesses as if it were a trial by jury.

Mr. Gittins used his opportunity to repeatedly challenge Admiral Griffiths's lengthy, detailed testimony, using his questions to place new evidence before the court's presiding officers, three American admirals assisted by another from Japan.

He limited his remarks to direct questions, with few assertions and little analysis, but the lines of questioning clearly outlined what are expected to be the main points of Commander Waddle's defense.

Mr. Gittins suggested that Commander Waddle had conducted a quick periscope search, but one within the range of normal tactics for submarines operating with stealth. And Admiral Griffiths acknowledged that some of the captain's actions appeared to show his diligence.

Mr. Gittins also said a fire-control technician had been able to track the submarine's course on paper, though he stopped plotting other sonar contacts, suggesting that the presence of civilian visitors in the control room might not have affected the technician as much as he told investigators. And Mr. Gittins disclosed that Lieutenant Coen had ordered another fire-control technician to provide "forceful reports of contacts" with surface ships.

Mr. Gittins - and later, Lt. Cmdr. Timothy D. Stone, the lawyer for Lieutenant Commander Pfeifer - questioned the brevity of the admiral's investigation, completed within three days of his arrival in Hawaii on Feb. 11, two days after the collision.

Both lawyers also zeroed in on the fact that Admiral Griffiths had not interviewed Commander Waddle or the other officers but had simply relied on notes made of interviews by other officers in the hours after the collision. Lieutenant Commander Stone said those notes, most typed by a yeoman, did not accurately represent the interviews. He also challenged the admiral's finding that his client, second in command of the Greeneville, had not raised concerns about the submarine's operations.

Admiral Griffiths acknowledged that his investigation was only preliminary. He also agreed with Mr. Gittins's repeated suggestions that testimony by Commander Waddle and the others could better explain what happened aboard the submarine that day.

Commander Waddle and Lieutenant Coen have requested "testimonial immunity" during the inquiry, meaning that they would testify at these hearings but that nothing they say could be used against them if the court ultimately decides to recommend courts-martial. Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, the commander of the Navy's Pacific Fleet and the officer who convened the court, has not yet ruled on the request.

During a break in the testimony this afternoon, Lieutenant Commander Pfeifer approached the relatives of the missing Japanese and apologized. "I'm sorry for your loss," he said to Ryosuke Terata, who lost his 17-year-old son Yusuke.

Admiral Griffiths's first two days of testimony described a series of seemingly damning mechanical or procedural lapses. And as he completed direct testimony this morning, Admiral Griffiths again summarized significant errors in the submarine's operations that day.

He cited a shortage of sailors on that voyage, including some in key positions; a broken sonar repeater that could have displayed contacts with the ship; "passive interference" caused by having 16 civilian visitors aboard; a rush to return to port on time; and a "command environment" in which the crew so respected its captain it would not question him.

Mr. Gittins led Admiral Griffiths to make strong statements underscoring Commander Waddle's experience and reputation. "It was clear that Commander Waddle had an excellent reputation," the admiral said in answer to one question. "He was considered one of the strongest commanders in the force."

-------- china

China's Latest Lie

Thursday, March 8, 2001
Washington Post
By Jim Hoagland
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38596-2001Mar7?language=printer

Most nations avoid directly contradicting the president of the United States, especially in the opening weeks of a new administration. But China is treating its first argument with George W. Bush as a golden opportunity to test the new occupant of the White House.

The argument is over the technical help China gave to Iraq in breaking U.N. sanctions and improving Iraq's ability to fire missiles at American and British warplanes. Bush said last month that such assistance had happened. China denied that unequivocally on Tuesday, and warned Washington to "rein in its wild horse" behavior before relations are damaged.

Whom are you going to believe, your intelligence agencies or your commercial and strategic interests? That was the implicit question asked of Bush by Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan at a confrontational Beijing news conference.

China's response of bluster, denial and deception over being caught with its hand in the cookie jar of international misbehavior is business as usual.

What is new in this case is Bush's chance to put U.S.-Chinese relations on a healthier footing. He can do that by not accepting Beijing's invitation to put the truth aside in the interests of better relations. This is the trap being laid for the new U.S. leader.

The Chinese leadership is probing to see whether this new D.C. bunch will swallow untruths as willingly -- and thus compromise themselves as deeply -- as did the Clinton crew, which brushed aside inconvenient evidence of China's breaking its word on nuclear technology and missile proliferation.

Control of the truth, or more precisely of the untruth, is too important for China's Communist leaders to leave to others. Lying is not a convenience but a basic political weapon, at home and abroad.

What sets China's government apart is not that it lies -- what government does not? -- but that it demands that its lies be actively accepted, first by its public and then by governments that want its "friendship."

The gerontocrats who run China find safety in their ability to impose their version of history on others. They know the crimes they would have to answer for if China's history books were not cooked. This is the totalitarian urge, which still dominates Chinese politics even as the Middle Kingdom's economic and social spheres slip beyond the Politburo's control.

There can still be no accounting of, much less apology for, the military massacres that occurred on the streets of Beijing in 1989. Today's Falun Gong movement must be vilified with monstrous distortions of its aims and practices. All blame for problems in the U.S.-China relationship must lie with Washington. And so on.

Politburo politics have become extremely unstable as the true Leninist survivors of the 1948 revolution dwindle, and as the pace of economic and social change accelerates to bypass the dying Communist Party. A struggle for power within that body drives the excesses of the brutal crackdown on the Falun Gong, just as it drove the massacres around Tiananmen Square nearly 12 years ago.

With no ideology to guide or rank them, the claimants for power bid against each other for the chance to put down any dissent against the system, with brutality as the coin of their realm.

The recent volume of seemingly authentic internal party documents smuggled out of China and published in the United States as "The Tiananmen Papers" exposes that competition in great detail. The book allows the first informed fixing of responsibility for the bloodshed.

That is explosive information in China, notes Arthur Waldron, director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Waldron compares the Tiananmen book to Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "secret speech" on Stalin's crimes as a potential detonator of political change.

Bush and the leaders of other democratic nations can help speed that day of change by not treating the truth as something to be set aside for the convenience of the Beijing leadership.

The Chinese denial of help to Iraq should not be handled as a face-saving fiction, or a cover story that has to be accepted as the price for getting the Chinese to stop doing what they claim they have not done. That, unfortunately, became the Clinton way of dealing with Beijing.

President Bush has identified in public a serious breach of U.N. sanctions by China -- one that threatened the lives of American pilots. That breach should be publicly referred to the United Nations for investigation. China should not be allowed to wield its latest lie as a shield for wrongdoing.

-------- czech republic

Czechs to shut nuclear reactor for fixing valves

March 8, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10024&newsDate=8-Mar-2001

PRAGUE - Czech power utility CEZ said yesterday it would shut the reactor at its controversial Temelin nuclear power plant to repair vibrating steam valves on the plant's turbine.

Temelin spokesman Milan Nebesar told Reuters the reactor would shut late on Wednesday and the work at the station would take about a week.

The $2.5 billion plant, combining a Russian-designed reactor with a western control system, has run into repeated delays during construction and the startup process.

The latest glitch was caused by vibrations and a crack in steam piping in the non-nuclear part of the plant. Connected repair works have already delayed the planned start of full operations by a month.

It is fiercely opposed on safety grounds by environmental groups and neighbouring Austria. The Czechs say the plant is a state of the art project.


-------- depleted uranium

Balkans Task Force report on DU in Kosovo

Thu, 08 Mar 2001

The United Nations Environment Program's Balkans Taks Force will release its final report on DU in Kosovo on Tuesday, 13 March 2001, at the Geneva United Nations Office (the Palais des Nations). It is very likely that the general message will be that the whole thing is much ado about nothing.

The Swiss AC Laboratorium in Spiez seems to have played a big role in the report -- not surprising, since Switzerland footed the bill for the whole thing. In the Paris daily la Libération on the 15 February, the laboratory's Max Keller is quoted as saying, as he picks up a piece of DU, "This business of depleted uranium is bordering on hysteria. Look, in my hand, I have a 30 mm. penetrator, the same as those accused of causing the Gulf War Syndrome and the Balkans Syndrome. I put it under the detector. You hears the beeps. Now I take a Swiss watch [why, of all things, a Swiss watch?] manufactured twenty years ago, I do the same thing, and you can notice by listening to the beeps that the radioactivity doses are infintely greater, without their ever having been considered dangerous."

This totally ignores the fact that the Swiss watch industry, in flagrant violation of international standards, is still putting radium on watches, hence the watch could very well be loaded iwth radium. And then there's the question of the "detector" that he's using.

The usual media correspondents in Geneva, with few exceptions, are impressive for their great number, but, generally, not for their capacity to conduct research and probing analysis into a complex question. Hence, they are quite likely to swallow the whole thing, hook, line and sinker (with their usual, inane questions, such as, "What exactly is the breakdown of your budget?" and "Was there ever a time when you thought you really might not finish soon enough?" and "What sort of accomodations did you enjoy during the field trip to Kosovo?"), all of this filmed by the United Nations television service, whose footage will then be sold to television networks throughout the world.

Hence, it is imperative that journalists with a good understanding of the subject be present in order to challenge Klaus Toefper when he presents his MAGNVS OPVM of a whitewash and to prevent the world's major news services (all represented in Geneva) from diffusing the message of a whitewash.

The fax number for the accreditation office is: + 41 22 917-00-73. The person in charge is Ms Cathy Fegli. The letter should be short, for example: "X will be covering for us the launch of the UNEP/Balkans Task Force report on 13 March at the Palais de Nations. Accordingly, please accord her/him the necessary accreditation. Thank you, etc." After putting the letter on record with Ms Fegli, one must go to the securtiy service for a badge, which can take a quarter to half an hour, since the security service's office for this is outside the U.N. building, across the street.

This may sound exaggerated, but this report will probably far supersede the RAND Corporation report and continue to be cited for years, if only because it emanates from a supposedly neutral international agency.

One need not be a full-time professional journalist to get the accreditation. The important thing is to get a letter from some sort of medium -- and ALL media are recognized by the U.N. as legitimate, be they of the caliber of the New York Times or of the Tunerville Bladder. Many publications do this for specialists in one domain or another when a particular suject comes up for which the specialists seem to be better qualified to do the coverage than a regular, layman, jounalist.

As for getting here, that's something else, but my last flight Geneva-New York-Geneva, last month, cost me $335 on KLM via Amsterdam.

Any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. The first number is my home number, and one may call even if it's the middle of the night here.

Robert James Parsons rue de la Flèche 17 CH - 1207 Geneva, Switzerland Telephone: +41 22 736-59-55

Geneva United Nations Office Press Room No 1 CH - 1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland Telephone: +41 22 917-20-18

E-mail: rjparsons@hotmail.com

-------- france

French EDF plans 13 pct nuclear cost cut by 2002

March 8, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10025&newsDate=8-Mar-2001

LONDON - French national electricity company, Electricite de France , plans to reduce nuclear production costs by 13 percent by the end of 2002, a spokesman said yesterday.

"We had a cost reduction objective of 20 percent from 1998 to 2002, we've cut cost by seven percent already. We need to go further and reduce by another 13 percent," he said.

He added the company was hoping to achieve its 20 percent cost reduction target through lower amortization costs, as some of the nuclear power plants built before 1980 were already 50 percent amortized, and through enhanced competition in uranium supplies.

He said EDF was currently supplied by an alliance between French companies Framatome and Germany's Siemens , but competitors such as Westinghouse-British Nuclear Fuel Ltd (BNFL) could also enter the French market.

"As far as I know, we have not signed any contract with Westinghouse-BNFL," he said.

Regarding EDF's overall production costs, including hydroelectric and thermal production, the average cost was 15 to 18 centimes per kilowatt hour last year, he said.

Part of the objective is also to improve plant availability from a current average of 80.4 percent.

"We want to improve the availability of nuclear plants but we have no target figure," the spokesman said.

He added that the latest generation of nuclear power plant of a capacity of 1450 megawatts (MW) had an availability rate of 95 percent, which could not be achieved by older 900 MW plants because they need maintenance every 12 months instead of 18 months for newer plants.

Annual nuclear power production increased by 5.4 percent to 395 terawatt hour in 2000, representing about 75 percent of France's electricity production.

-------- iraq

Powell insists U.N. resume checks in Iraq

March 8, 2001
Washington Times
By Ben Barber
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-200138211736.htm

Secretary of State Colin Powell yesterday toughened the administration's position on Iraq, telling a congressional panel that U.N. inspectors must return to hunt for evidence of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

"The inspectors have to go back in," Mr. Powell told the House International Relations Committee yesterday.

He said the Bush administration intends to keep U.N. controls over Iraq's money from oil sales "until our inspectors have satisfied themselves" that no more weapons of mass destruction are being produced or stored in the country.

Addressing himself to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Mr. Powell said, "Let us know when you're ready to let the inspectors in."

Mr. Powell's strong call for the return of the inspectors, who have been barred from Iraq since 1998, contrasted with a statement by Vice President Richard B. Cheney to The Washington Times that U.S. containment of Iraq did not depend on inspections.

"I don't think we want to hinge our policy just to the question of whether or not the inspectors go back in there," he said in an interview published Monday. "It may not be as crucial if you've got other measures in place and you've got a [sanctions] regime that people are willing to support."

Mr. Powell also said that "if and when we find facilities or other activities going on in Iraq that we believe are inconsistent with our obligations, we reserve the right to take military action against such facilities and will do so."

Mr. Powell had proposed during a visit to five Arab capitals last week to ease the sanctions on consumer goods for Iraq while trying to get U.S. allies in the region to crack down on that country's oil smuggling.

But, he testified yesterday, "At the end of the day, the only way [for Iraq] to get out of this regime of control of money is for us to be satisfied that no [prohibited] weapons exist or are being developed."

Mr. Powell refused to condemn the arrival of European and Middle Eastern aircraft at Baghdad's airport in recent weeks, saying it was "not clear" that the flights violate sanctions imposed by the United Nations after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman, New York Republican and former chairman of the House International Relations Committee, said that he was worried by Mr. Powell's proposal to ease the sanctions on civilian goods.

"I've been concerned" that such an action would "make it easier to purchase more weapons materials," he said.

Mr. Gilman voiced what has so far been muted criticism of Mr. Powell's Iraq policy among conservative Republicans, who are reluctant to openly attack the popular former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Mr. Gilman also said he resented accusations that U.S. and U.N. sanctions have been responsible for hunger or disease among Iraqi children. He noted that Saddam Hussein has ample funds to supply their needs.

Any extra cash Iraq received could be used "to purchase more weapons," said Mr. Gilman.

Mr. Powell said Saddam would get "no more money - just civilian goods and no access to weapons."

For several years, Iraq has been permitted to sell oil under an "oil-for-food" program under which the proceeds go into an escrow account. Purchases of food and medicine with those funds must be approved by a U.N. committee.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday that a drop in Iraqi oil exports in recent months could reduce the food and medicine available under that programs.

Iraq stopped selling oil because of a pricing dispute with the United Nations and, although it has resumed some sales, it had lost $1.8 billion in oil revenues by the end of January.

Iraq has also been demanding an illegal surcharge on its oil sales, giving it a source of revenue outside the oil-for-food program. The New York Times reported yesterday that it has similarly been demanding kickbacks from vendors of food under the U.N. program.

Mr. Powell was questioned on the Iraq policy during a hearing on the administration's request for a 5 percent increase in the budget for the State Department and other international affairs accounts, to $23 billion.

Mr. Powell said he favored getting rid of Saddam, not just containing his regime.

"Part of U.S. policy does deal with regime change," he said. "It has been part of the government's policy for a number of years now to advocate that the country would be better off without this regime.

"And to that end and with the support of the Congress, we have been supporting organizations that are committed to that proposition."

Mr. Powell told the committee that when he took office, the Iraq policy was "about to crash."

"Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime had successfully put the burden on us as denying the wherewithal for civilians and children in Iraq to live and to get the nutrition and the health care they needed. That was not true, but we had gotten that burden."

He said there were calls to ease the burden on Iraq by U.S. Arab allies as well as by Russia.

"What we've been trying to do for the last six weeks now is to see how we could stabilize this collapsing situation and . . . bring the coalition back together."

He added: "As I took this idea around the Gulf region, as I talked to my NATO and United Nations colleagues about it, I found pretty good support."

Asked when the Bush administration would honor an election pledge to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, Mr. Powell said it would not happen immediately.

"President Bush is committed to moving our embassy to Jerusalem," he said. "We have not started any actions yet, and in light of the very difficult situation that exists right now, we'll continue to examine how that process should start."

-------- korea

Bush Casts a Shadow On Korea Missile Talks

Thursday, March 8, 2001
Washington Post
By Steven Mufson
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38442-2001Mar7?language=printer

President Bush yesterday cast doubt on the future of talks to end North Korea's missile program, saying he was concerned about how to verify such an agreement and putting himself somewhat at odds with visiting South Korean President Kim Dae Jung.

Bush said he supported Kim's effort to ease tensions with North Korea, but said any deal to restrict its missiles must come with some means of verifying the terms of such a pact.

"Part of the problem in dealing with North Korea, there's not very much transparency," Bush said in a joint news conference with Kim. He added that "we're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements."

The Bush-Kim meeting was an awkward start to a relationship the Bush administration has described as important to U.S. interests and regional security in northeast Asia. It also underscored the administration's leery view of a country Bush often calls a "rogue state" and whose long-range missile program has been one rationale for a national missile defense system, which the Bush administration strongly supports.

Kim, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who came seeking support for his increasingly unpopular "sunshine policy" of engaging communist North Korea, described his talks with Bush as "a frank and honest exchange of views" that had "increased the mutual understanding," phrases often used to describe meetings where the two sides disagree.

A senior administration official, however, called the meetings "very positive." And Bush praised Kim for "leadership" and "his vision," and called him a "realist."

Kim had encouraged the Clinton administration in its pursuit of an agreement that would have sent U.S. economic aid to isolated, famine-stricken North Korea in exchange for a commitment to stop development of long-range missiles and halt exports of missiles to other nations, such as Iran and Pakistan. The South Korean president saw the negotiations as contributing to an easing of tensions on the heavily armed and divided Korean peninsula.

Bush's remarks also showed some of the new administration's difficulty in finding a common voice on foreign policy. The president's comments about talks with North Korea struck a markedly more cautious tone than comments Tuesday by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who said the administration intended "to pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off," and examine "some promising elements [that] were left on the table."

Analysts saw the series of remarks as a sign of differences, or at least a failure of coordination. "It did not seem as coordinated as one would wish," said Larry Wortzel, director of Asia studies at the Heritage Foundation. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, said, "I still don't know if this is good cop, bad cop or confusion or what."

Yesterday, Powell seemed to change emphasis, saying, "There was some suggestion that imminent negotiations are about to begin -- that is not the case." He added, "in due course, when our review is finished, we'll determine at what pace and when we will engage with the North Koreans."

Opponents of missile defense were dismayed by Bush's comments. "It is disappointing and self-defeating for President Bush not to pursue the possibility of verifiable agreement to freeze North Korea's missile program, which would be a lot more efficient than a high-priced missile defense system," said Darryl Kimball, executive director of the Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers.

Biden said he was disappointed Bush didn't signal that he is "willing to talk and negotiate if certain things happen, as opposed to emphasizing that these guys are bad guys, period."

During the presidential campaign, Bush stressed the importance of cultivating ties with U.S. allies, and South Korea has been a key ally in the half century since the Korean War. There are still 37,000 U.S. troops stationed there, substantial U.S. investments, and a significant trade relationship.

The Bush administration wanted to clarify key issues. In a recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kim endorsed language about missile defense and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty adopted at the Okinawa summit of the Group of Eight leading nations. That language is at odds, however, with Bush administration policy and the South Korean foreign ministry later scrambled to back away from the statement. Kim said yesterday that he "regretted the misunderstanding."

Missile defense would do little to protect South Korea, whose capital, Seoul, is within easy artillery range of North Korea, and Kim is not a missile defense supporter. But the South Korean president yesterday signed a communiqué with Bush that included language the United States is trying to extract from all missile defense critics.

In language similar to that endorsed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Bush-Kim communiqué said, "new types of threats, including from weapons of mass destruction and missiles as a means of delivery, have emerged that require new approaches to deterrence and defense. The two leaders shared the view that countering these threats requires a broad strategy involving a variety of measures, including active nonproliferation diplomacy, defensive systems, and other pertinent measures."

Discussion of North Korea dominated about half of the meeting yesterday between Bush and Kim, a senior administration official said. Vice President Cheney, Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and White House spokesman Ari Fleischer attended. Powell and senior State Department officials met with Kim separately earlier.

At the news conference, Kim said, "President Bush was very frank and honest in sharing with me his perceptions about the nature of North Korea and the North Korean leader, and this is very important for me to take back home and to consider."

--------

Bush wary of North Korea deal

March 8, 2001
Slate
Associated Press
http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/03/08/korea/index.html

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday he may seek to broaden prospective negotiations with North Korea beyond missiles and include American concerns about the "huge army" Pyongyang has deployed along the Demilitarized Zone.

Powell testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a day after he said the Bush administration intends to review is policy toward North Korea before resuming negotiations that the Clinton administration began last year.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said he is troubled the administration is not showing more interest in picking up the negotiations where Clinton had left them in January.

Those negotiation had focused on curbing Pyongyang's missiles and missile exports, but Powell said the administration "wants to see whether there are other things that should be included in the discussion."

He mentioned in particular the array of forces North Korea maintains within artillery range of Seoul, the South Korean capital.

Powell also said the United States supports the 1994 agreement under which North Korea agreed to freeze a nuclear weapons program in exchange for light-water reactors to generate electricity.

The replacement reactors would be used as an alternative for the country's plutonium-producing reactors, whose fuel converted into weaponry. But Powell hinted he is dissatisfied with that arrangement and is open to different types of "energy-generating capacity" for the North.

On Wednesday, the administration signaled a new chilliness in relations with North Korea as it welcomed South Korean President Kim Dae-jung on an official visit.

President Bush and other officials raised questions about the reliability of North Korean Chairman Kim Jong Il as a negotiating partner and highlighted the potential military threat that Pyongyang poses.

The use of Cold War rhetoric in discussing North Korea contrasted sharply with the mood in October when then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright exchanged champagne toasts in Pyongyang with Kim Jong Il.

Clinton stopped just short of a visit to North Korea during the last month of his presidency. But administration officials said Wednesday any discussions the Bush team may have with the North will be carried out at a much lower level.

The South Korean president was continuing his visit Thursday with meetings planned with Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. Afternoon meetings on Capitol Hill also were planned.

Powell said Wednesday the administration was undertaking a review of North Korea policy and that no substantive discussions with Pyongyang would be held in the meantime.

During Clinton's final months, North Korea sent strong signals that it was willing to curb its missile development and missile export program. But Bush, in an apparent reference to those discussions, expressed "skepticism about whether we can verify an agreement" with the secretive North Korean regime.

"I am concerned that the North Koreans are shipping weapons of mass destruction around the world," Bush said. "We want to make sure their ability to develop and spread weapons of mass destruction was in fact stopped."

Verification also was a concern of Clinton administration officials, but the language they used in describing the situation was far less provocative than Bush's.

Powell also called attention to North Korea's military might.

"It's got a huge army poised on the border within artillery and rocket distance of South Korea," Powell said.

Powell sounded far more conciliatory on Tuesday when, asked about North Korea policy during a news conference, he said the new administration planned to pick up North Korea policy where Clinton had left it. He also said there was some "promise" in what the new administration inherited on the missile issue.

On Tuesday, Powell also said North Korea had a lot to gain by reaching a missile deal with the United States, a point made moot on Wednesday based on the administration's no-negotiations posture.

The administration is concerned about North Korean missile exports to Iran and other countries and about Pyongyang's potential for launching a missile capable of reaching U.S. territory.

---

Bush rules out immediate talks with N. Korea

March 8, 2001
Chicago Sun-Times
BY RON FOURNIER
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/korea08.html

WASHINGTON--President Bush took a hard line against North Korea on Wednesday, ruling out an immediate resumption of Clinton-era negotiations between the United States and the communist government in Pyongyang and urging South Korea's president to be skeptical of his neighbor.

Bush praised President Kim Dae-jung for reaching out to North Korea's leaders, but said any deal in which North Korea agrees to limit its missiles must include verifiable terms that would prevent cheating.

"I do have some skepticism about the leader of North Korea," Bush said of Kim Jong Il.

The most sensitive foreign policy session of Bush's presidency produced discussions that Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell termed candid and frank--signals that Bush and Kim Dae-jung took differing views.

Kim has moved close to what he calls a declaration of peace with North Korea, which worries Bush administration officials who say they don't want him moving too quickly without demanding strong concessions.

"The president was very forthright in describing his vision, and I was forthright in describing my support for his vision, as well as my skepticism about whether or not we can verify an agreement in a country that doesn't enjoy the freedoms that our two countries understand," Bush said.

The United States came close under former President Bill Clinton last year to striking an agreement to curb North Korean missile development and missile exports in exchange for aid to the wretchedly poor North Korea.

Powell ducked out of the Bush-Kim meeting to tell reporters that negotiations will be on hold until the United States completes a "full review" of U.S.-North Korean relations. Bush himself suggested that more work needs to be done before talks can resume.

North Korean officials, bristling over the slow pace of Bush's review, have warned they might scrap a moratorium on long-range missile tests and revive a nuclear program Washington fears was being used to develop weapons.

---

Bush takes hard line on North Korea
President reverses Clinton policy and puts U.S. at odds with South Korea

Thursday, March 8, 2001
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://seattlep-i.nwsource.com/national/korea08.shtml

WASHINGTON -- President Bush told President Kim Dae-jung of South Korea yesterday that he would not resume negotiations with North Korea on missile talks anytime soon, putting the United States and a major Asian ally at sharp odds over how to deal with the communist regime.

Kim had come to Washington to urge Bush to pick up immediately where the Clinton administration left off in its dealings with North Korea, which in the last six months has emerged from the diplomatic seclusion that has surrounded the country for nearly half a century.

Bush told the South Korean leader, who is preparing to sign his own peace declaration with the North, that the United States still regards the North Korean regime as a threat.

"When you make an agreement with a country that is secretive, how are you aware as to whether or not they are keeping the terms of the agreement?" Bush asked in a brief exchange with reporters.

At another point he added: "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements."

It was an apparent reference to the 1994 accord under which North Korea agreed to freeze operations at its main nuclear weapons facility.

There have been suggestions, but never any substantive proof, that the country has moved its plutonium-producing operations elsewhere.

Yesterday's meeting marked the first time that Bush had publicly clashed with a visiting leader, and Kim, winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to reach an accord with the North, sat stoically in the Oval Office, saying little.

He was scheduled to have dinner last night with a group of U.S. experts on Korea, and to see congressional leaders today.

Kim, sitting next to Bush in the Oval Office, offered a tepid assessment of his conversation with Bush.

"The greatest outcome today has to be that, through a frank and honest exchange of views on the situation on the Korean peninsula, we have increased the mutual understanding," Kim said, using a phrase that is often used in Asia to mark substantive disagreement.

Kim said he would continue his efforts to open up North Korea, but that South Korea "will consult with the United States every step of the way so that the progress in South-North Korean relations serves the interests of our two countries."

In a sign of Washington's new hard line, Secretary of State Colin Powell backed away from his statements of Tuesday that there were promising elements in the missile-control deal that President Clinton nearly completed late last year.

While Powell said on Tuesday that the United States would pick up where the Clinton administration had left off, yesterday he struck a very different tone.

He told reporters that Bush had told Kim that the United States was still conducting a full review of the United States' relationship with North Korea.

"There are suggestions that there are imminent negotiations about to take place" between the United States and North Korea, Powell said. "That is not the case."

Powell called North Korea a threat to the United States.

"It's got a huge army poised on the border within artillery and rocket distance of South Korea" and the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, Powell said.

A quick resumption of talks is exactly what Kim had hoped to achieve on his visit here.

He has told American visitors and his aides that he believes that the window for striking a deal with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, may be closing.

A hard line from Washington, he fears, could prompt a similarly tough backlash from the North Korean military, which has been skeptical of the openings to South Korea, Japan and the West.

------

Bush Tells Seoul Talks With North Won't Resume Now

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/world/08KORE.html

WASHINGTON, March 7 -- President Bush told President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea today that he would not resume missile talks with North Korea anytime soon, putting aside indefinitely the Clinton administration's two-year campaign for a deal and the eventual normalization of relations with the reclusive Communist state.

Mr. Bush's comments, while couched in reassuring statements about the American alliance with South Korea, came as a clear rebuff to President Kim. Awarded last year's Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to open dialogue across one of the most heavily armed borders on earth, the South Korean leader has told Americans officials that he believes there is only a narrow window of opportunity to seize on North Korea's recent willingness to emerge from its diplomatic seclusion.

Just days before President Kim arrived, one of his top advisers said in an interview that "timing is critical" and expressed concern that North Korea might retreat to its hard-line positions if it concluded the new administration in Washington was not willing to pick up where Mr. Clinton -- who was planning a last-minute trip to North Korea -- left off.

Today Mr. Bush made it clear that he had little intention of following Mr. Clinton's path, at least not now. In a brief exchange with reporters after meeting Mr. Kim in the Oval Office, Mr. Bush said: "We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements."

But the United States has only one agreement with North Korea -- the 1994 accord that froze North Korea's plutonium processing at a suspected nuclear weapons plant. And at a briefing this afternoon two senior administration officials, asked about the president's statement, said there was no evidence that North Korea is violating its terms.

Later, a White House spokesman said that Mr. Bush was referring to his concern about whether the North would comply with future accords, even though he did not use the future tense. "That's how the president speaks," the official said.

Mr. Bush had said, "When you make an agreement with a country that is secretive, how are you aware as to whether or not they are keeping the terms of the agreement?"

The White House insisted that today's meeting was cordial, and said that Mr. Bush embraced Mr. Kim's "vision of peace on the Korean peninsula." But they also distanced Mr. Bush from the details of that vision, including Mr. Kim's statements, outside the meeting today, that he plans to sign a peace "declaration" with North Korea if its leader, Kim Jong Il, visits Seoul this spring.

American officials said that President Kim Dae Jung made no specific references to those plans today. But he did promise, during the brief encounter with reporters, that "we will consult with the United States every step of the way."

Nonetheless, Mr. Kim, sitting next to Mr. Bush in the Oval Office, offered a tepid assessment of his conversation with the American president

"The greatest outcome today has to be that, through a frank and honest exchange of views on the situation on the Korean peninsula, we have increased the mutual understanding," Mr. Kim said, using a phrase often used in diplomacy to skim past substantive disagreement.

He added later that President Bush, who has visited Asia only once, a trip to China a quarter-century ago, "was very frank and honest in sharing with me his perceptions about the nature of North Korea and the North Korean leader."

In another sign of Washington's new, harder line toward North Korea, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell appeared to back away from his statements on Tuesday that he hoped to "pick up where President Clinton and his administration left off." His comments seemed at odds with those of a senior administration official who had invited a group of reporters to the White House that same day to stress that a complete review of North Korea policy was under way.

Today General Powell stepped out of the Oval Office meeting to tell reporters that North Korea was "a threat" and "we have to not be naïve about the nature of this threat, but at the same time realize that changes are taking place."

"There are suggestions that there are imminent negotiations about to take place" between the United States and North Korea, General Powell added. "That is not the case."

That is a political blow to Mr. Kim, who has hoped to leverage his status as a Nobel laureate and his long history as South Korea's most prominent dissident voice during a series of military governments to negotiate a broad peace on the Korean peninsula.

But he knows that he has little time. Mr. Kim has less than two years left in office, not long to put together all the moving parts of a deal: An agreement to stop North Korea's missile and nuclear programs, a pullback from the Demilitarized Zone, and full commercial interactions between the two Koreas.

Even as Mr. Kim's international stature has grown, his influence in Seoul is ebbing. After presiding over South Korea's revival from the Asian economic crisis, he has seen country's economy once again decline. Opposition leaders, including his predecessor, Kim Young Sam, have charged him with naïveté in dealing with the North.

Mr. Bush's new administration is struggling to bridge differences within the Republican Party over how to deal with the North Korean threat.

Conservatives in the party have long been critical of the 1994 "Agreed Framework," struck by the Clinton administration after a confrontation over nuclear inspections.

Under the agreement, North Korea froze its nuclear-processing operations, and international inspectors regularly monitor compliance. But conservatives and other critics say that the West essentially gave in to blackmail, offering to build two nuclear power plants for the North and supply it with fuel oil until construction is completed. Mr. Bush's aides have said they will respect the deal, but some want to reopen it, in hopes of replacing the two plants with coal-fired generators that would not create more nuclear waste.

The 1994 agreement did nothing to restrict the North's production or sale of missiles, and it has become a major provider of missile technology to other states described as sponsors of terrorism by the State Department. So after a lengthy review of North Korean policy, the Clinton administration opened talks on limiting missile research, production and sales.

It was close to reaching such an accord in December, but ran out of time -- in part because of the long election recount here, and in part because of North Korean intransigence on allowing regular verification that all missile work and research has stopped.

Mr. Kim, meanwhile, has been pursuing a North-South agreement, mindful that he cannot get too far ahead of his American ally. But his philosophy differs sharply from Mr. Bush's. He believes that the major problem with North Korea is that it is an insecure regime, and that he must change the atmosphere of confrontation.

"I think Kim is correct that the window is narrow," Senator Joseph R. Biden of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said this evening. "I don't know whether what's on the other side of the window is worth it, but we sure should go and look."

---

Bush demands North Korea pacts verified

March 8, 2001
Washington Times
By Willis Witter
http://www.washtimes.com/world/default-200138223739.htm

President Bush demanded "complete verification" of any agreements with North Korea yesterday and backed away from remarks by his secretary of state a day earlier that Washington was ready to resume missile talks with its communist foe.

Following a White House meeting with South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, Mr. Bush told reporters:

"I am concerned about the fact that the North Koreans are shipping weapons around the world, and any agreement that would convince them not to do so would be beneficial," the president said.

"But we want to make sure that their ability to develop and spread weapons of mass destruction was, in fact stopped . . . and that we could verify that in fact they had stopped it."

The president's remarks offered the clearest indication yet that he planned to take a hard-line stance against North Korea and appeared to put the United States at odds with South Korea, its longtime ally that hosts 37,000 American troops.

Both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kim - winner of last year's Nobel Peace Price for his efforts to reconcile the two Koreas -characterized their talks as "frank" - a euphemism meaning they disagreed.

They quashed speculation of any discord, with Mr. Bush praising Mr. Kim's "sunshine policy" of engagement with the North and urging him to continue.

At the same time, the president halted - at least temporarily - the push for a U.S.-North Korean missile deal that marked the final days of the Clinton administration.

President Clinton sought to visit Pyongyang, meet its secretive leader, Kim Jong-il, and sign an agreement ending the communist nation's manufacture and export of ballistic missiles to nations such as Iran, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan.

Mr. Bush indicated the United States was in no hurry to continue.

"We look forward to at some point in the future having a dialogue with the North Koreans, but any negotiation would require complete verification of the terms," Mr. Bush said.

Mr. Bush's message also hinted at some dissonance within his own administration over how to approach North Korea - a nation with a million-man army on hair-trigger alert across a 150-mile-long buffer zone that 37,000 U.S. troops help guard.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said: "We do plan to engage with North Korea and to pick up where President Clinton left off."

It's too soon to tell where this administration is headed, said Joel Wit, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

"Any new administration has to struggle between continuity and change. It's a delicate balance, and we're going to wind up with something in between," said Mr. Wit, who helped draft a 1994 nuclear deal with North Korea.

Administration officials dismissed suggestions of inconsistency between statements by the president and Mr. Powell, with one official saying they reflected two sides of the same coin.

But Mr. Bush's comments yesterday went well beyond anything said previously in laying out a hard-line stance against North Korea.

Apart from the pending missile deal, Mr. Bush questioned whether North Korea was in compliance with past agreements and by inference, the 1994 nuclear deal in which North Korea gave up its efforts to make atom bombs in exchange for the promise of two nuclear power plants from the West.

"Part of the problem in dealing with North Korea, there's not much transparency. We're not certain as to whether or not they're keeping all terms of all agreements, and that's part of the issue [Mr. Kim] and I discussed," Mr. Bush said. "When you make an agreement with a country that is secretive, how do you -how are you aware as to whether or not they're keeping the terms of the agreement?"

A senior administration official later cautioned reporters against interpreting the president's remarks as aimed at the nuclear deal, known as the "agreed framework."

"There's been no indication of [North Korea] violating the agreed framework," said the official, who added that the United States would continue to adhere to the agreement.

"We're going to look at it and see how we can improve it and make [the agreed framework] better," said the official, who added, "it's going to be a consultative process" within the administration and among U.S. allies.

The nuclear deal involves the United States, South Korea and Japan in a consortium that has pledged to build the two atomic power stations in the North.

In contrast, the missile deal sought by Mr. Clinton involved Washington and Pyongyang alone.

North Korea, in principle, agreed to halt the manufacture, development and exports of ballistic missiles. In exchange, the United States would provide rockets to launch North Korean satellites into outer space and help the impoverished nation feed its 22 million people.

However, those familiar with the 11th-hour negotiations under Mr. Clinton say verification measures sought by the United States, including on-site checks of missile factories, inspections of mobile missile launchers and peeks into underground tunnels, were unacceptable to Pyongyang.

Mr. Powell told reporters yesterday that North Korea remains a threat:

"It's got a huge army poised on the border, within artillery and rocket distance of South Korea, and the president forcefully made this point to President Kim Dae-jung. And they still have weapons of mass destruction. So we have to see them as a threat. . . .

"But at the same time realize that changes are taking place," he said.

In the past year, North Korea sought to end its longtime isolation, hosting visiting heads of state, including the South Korean president in June and Madeleine K. Albright, secretary of state under Mr. Clinton, in October.

But while Mr. Clinton seemed eager to meet the man known in North Korea as the "dear leader," Mr. Bush said yesterday he did not trust him.

"I do have some skepticism about the leader of North Korea," Mr. Bush said.

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

Bill Touts Nuclear Energy

Thursday, March 8, 2001
Albuquerque Journal
By Michael Coleman
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/269612news03-08-01.htm

WASHINGTON - Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., introduced ambitious legislation Wednesday aimed at encouraging more use of nuclear energy while reducing dangerous waste.

Domenici said his bill, called the Nuclear Energy Electricity Assurance Act of 2001, could help prevent future American energy crunches by reducing the nation's dependence on foreign oil.

He also said power shortages in California, coupled with rising fuel prices and pollution from fossil fuels, give Congress a good reason to consider expanding nuclear energy sources.

"It's just about an opportune time to bring this issue up," Domenici said at a Capitol Hill news conference.

The bipartisan bill, on which Domenici has been working for several years, focuses on five areas related to nuclear power. They are: Supporting nuclear energy production, encouraging new plant construction, ensuring nuclear energy is given equal consideration in Congress to other power sources, minimizing waste and revising Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations.

"This bill will encourage new plant construction, ensure a level playing field for nuclear power and create waste solutions," Domenici said, adding that nuclear power is nearly emission-free.

The legislation would provide $406 million toward meeting those initiatives. Some of the bill's big-ticket items include $60 million for a new Nuclear Energy Research Initiative and $32 million to create a Nuclear Energy Research Advisory Committee that would explore ways to bolster nuclear engineering education at American universities.

The bill also contains $120 million for a program that finds ways to convert spent nuclear fuel into more energy instead of disposing of it in expensive and controversial repositories.

That provision has some nuclear watchdogs concerned.

Ed Lyman, scientific director for the Nuclear Control Institute in Washington, said so-called "reprocessing" of spent nuclear fuel creates weapons-grade plutonium, which could fall into the hands of rogue nations.

"Reprocessing spent fuel is fundamentally misguided," Lyman said. "It only succeeds in building up huge inventories of weapons-usable plutonium."

Lyman also said Domenici's bill should spark a public debate about whether the massive costs of building more nuclear power plants would justify the benefits.

Currently, 103 nuclear power plants are in operation in the United States, and the reactors provide roughly 22 percent of the nation's energy supply, according to Domenici's office.

New Mexico has no nuclear power plants, but the federal government spends billions of dollars on nuclear weapons research and management at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.

Some research initiatives contained in the bill, including the science of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel, would be conducted at the nuclear labs in New Mexico, a Domenici spokesman said.

No expansion here

New Mexico's largest utility, Public Service Company of New Mexico, owns part of the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station outside Phoenix, but that's as far as it wants to go with nuclear energy, a company spokeswoman said.

"PNM has no plans to build any nuclear generating power plants at this time," spokeswoman Julie Grey said in Albuquerque on Wednesday.

PNM also has no plans at present to buy any more nuclear generating capacity. However, the utility will have a 550-megawatt share in a Kansas nuclear-powered generating station when its planned merger with Western Resources gets regulatory approval in late 2001 or early 2002.

But if the price of natural gas continues to climb much higher, said Grey, "nuclear power may have a place in the future."

The Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute hailed Domenici's bill as "visionary" and said it would help meet increasing demands for energy in the digital economy.

Domenici said conservation and alternative forms of energy, such as solar or wind power, are important, but those programs cannot provide enough power for America's growing energy needs.

"Even if we double, triple or quadruple (use of alternative energy sources), America can't solve its energy problems there," Domenici said.

Sen. Frank Murkowski, an Alaska Republican who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, applauded Domenici's bill as a way to reduce America's dependence on Middle Eastern oil. He also said Europe and Japan are expanding their use of nuclear power and America should keep up.

"We don't want to have that technology pass us by," said Murkowski, a co-sponsor of the bill. "If we ever hope to achieve energy security and energy independence in this country, we simply cannot abandon the nuclear option."

Reliable energy source

Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., another co-sponsor of the bill, said the bill would increase the efficiency and capacity of existing nuclear plants. She said a nuclear power plant in her state has been a good, reliable source of energy for her constituents.

Domenici conceded that many Americans remain wary of nuclear power, in part because of the problems at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. But he said technology is vastly improved and public education should put many of those fears to rest.

He also said members of Congress seem willing to consider the bill, and he is optimistic it will be approved.

So far, eight Republicans, including Domenici, and three Democrats have co-sponsored the bill.

White House spokeswoman Jeannie Mano said President Bush has not seen Domenici's bill. She said it remains unclear how much emphasis Bush will put on nuclear energy as he develops a comprehensive national energy policy.

To see more details of the Domenici bill, visit the Web www.domenici.senate.gov.

Journal staff writer Rosalie Rayburn contributed to this story.

--------- us nuc politics

Intel Chief Addresses Longer-Range Threats to U.S.

Thu, 08 Mar 2001
American Forces Press Service
By Jim Garamone

WASHINGTON, March 6, 2001 -- The United States is the world's sole remaining super power. America faces challenges and threats that span the spectrum of warfare, said Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Wilson, testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the turbulence the world has experienced in the past decade would probably continue. "This turbulence could spawn a spectrum of potential conflict ranging from larger-scale combat contingencies, through containment deployments, peace operations and humanitarian relief operations," he said.

Each threat alone poses no real danger to the United States, Wilson said, but "collectively, they form a significant barrier to our goals for the future."

While the United States must be prepared for all contingencies, the 1991 Gulf War taught potential opponents to forgo conventional warfare, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in January. The most likely threats, Wilson said, are foes whose challenges render U.S. military power indecisive or irrelevant to their operations and objectives.

Foes will pursue asymmetric warfare -- a variety of low-cost strategies they hope will achieve disproportionate results. A classic example is Somalia. After the "Day of the Rangers," when Somali warlords killed 18 U.S. soldiers and wounded 73 in the capital of Mogadishu in 1992, the United States changed its policies and eventually withdrew.

"(Foes) seek capabilities that we are either unwilling or unable to counter, thereby either denying our leadership the 'military option' or forcing us to 'disengage' before they are defeated," Wilson said.

Wilson said enemies would likely use asymmetric approaches that will fit generally into five broad, overlapping categories: counter will, counter access, counter precision strike, counter protection and counter information.

Counter will approaches are designed to intimidate the United States into not deploying or into leaving before the mission is accomplished.

Counter access strategies are designed to deny U.S. forces access to seaports or airports. It could include use of sea mines or forces to close sea lanes or air forces to close air routes.

Counter precision strike is designed to defeat or degrade U.S. precision intelligence and attack capabilities.

Counter protection is designed to increase U.S. casualties and, in some cases, directly threaten the United States.

Counter information is designed to prevent the United States from attaining information and decision superiority.

The means to attack the United States asymmetrically are everyone's bad dream. It includes terrorism, cyberwarfare and information warfare, and attacks using weapons of mass destruction, and operations directed against U.S. space-based systems.

Terrorism remains the most likely attack at home and abroad. "This threat will grow as disgruntled groups and individuals focus on America as the source of their troubles," Wilson said. "Most anti-U.S. terrorism will be regional and based on perceived racial, ethnic or religious grievances."

He said terrorism would likely occur in urban centers, often capitals. U.S. service members will be obvious targets. "Our overseas military presence and our military's status as a symbol of U.S. power, interests and influence can make it a target," he said.

Military force protection measures may drive terrorists to attack softer targets such as private citizens or commercial interests. "Middle East-based terrorist groups will remain the most important threat, but our citizens, facilities and interests will be targeted worldwide," Wilson said. "State sponsors -- primarily Iran -- and individuals with the financial means -- such as Osama bin Ladin -- will continue to provide much of the economic and technological support needed by terrorists.

More destructive attacks are likely if terrorist organizations gain access to more destructive conventional weapons technologies and weapons of mass destruction, he said.

The news media call information operations "cyberwar." High profile hacker attacks such as the Love Bug show how vulnerable an information society can be. But information operations are more than just computer warfare. It can include electronic warfare, psychological operations, physical attack, denial and deception, computer network attack and the use of more exotic technologies such as directed energy weapons or electromagnetic pulse weapons.

"Adversaries recognize our civilian and military reliance on advanced information technologies and systems and understand that information superiority provides the United States with unique capability advantages," Wilson said. Adversaries also recognize that by using information operations to attack the U.S. infrastructure they may change U.S. support for operations.

"Software tools for network intrusion and disruption are becoming globally available over the Internet, providing almost any interested U.S. adversary a basic computer network exploitation or attack capability," Wilson said. "To date, however, the skills and effort needed for adversaries to use tools and technology effectively, such as intensive reconnaissance of U.S. target networks, for example, remain important limits on foreign cyber attack capabilities."

Many states see weapons of mass destruction as their only hope of countering U.S. conventional military prominence. Former Indian army Chief of Staff Gen. K. Sundarji allegedly said the principal lesson of the Gulf War is that if a state intends to fight the United States, it should avoid doing so until and unless it possesses nuclear weapons.

"The pressure to acquire weapons of mass destruction and missiles is high, and, unfortunately, globalization creates an environment more amenable to proliferation activities," Wilson said. Twenty-five countries now possess or are acquiring and developing weapons of mass destruction or missiles.

He said Russia, China and North Korea remain the suppliers of WMD technology. Russia, he said, has shipped ballistic missile and nuclear technology to Iran. China has provided missile and other assistance to Iran and Pakistan. North Korea remains a key source for ballistic missiles and related components and materials.

Wilson said Iran and Iraq could acquire nuclear weapons during the next decade. He said India and Pakistan would undoubtedly increase their nuclear capabilities and inventories.

The United States relies on satellites for much of its information dominance. Enemies know this and look for ways to negate this advantage. Many are attempting to reduce this advantage by developing capabilities to threaten US space assets, in particular through denial and deception, signal jamming, and ground segment attack.

A number of countries are interested in or experimenting with a variety of technologies that could be used to develop counter-space capabilities. These efforts could result in improved systems for space object tracking, electronic warfare or jamming and directed-energy weapons. Wilson said that by 2015, future adversaries would be able to employ a wide variety of means to disrupt, degrade or defeat portions of the U.S. space support system.


-------- MILITARY

-------- drug war

Drugs cost U.S. $4 billion

03/08/2001
USA Today
By Donna Leinwand
http://usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-08-drug-use.htm

WASHINGTON - Young people are beginning to use drugs earlier and are increasingly likely to choose ecstasy and hallucinogens over marijuana and cocaine, according to a report to be released Friday by Brandeis University.

The report, which tracks drug- and alcohol-use trends over several decades, also indicates that drug use, alcohol consumption and smoking cost the United States more than $400 billion a year in health-care claims, lost productivity and criminal justice expenses.

The report was funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic group in Princeton, N.J., that supports health-care research. Analysts who reviewed hundreds of substance abuse studies linked one in four U.S. deaths to tobacco, alcohol or drug use.

Although overall levels of drug and alcohol use peaked in the 1970s and 1980s and have fallen substantially, some substances favored by teens are bucking the trend, the report says.

Alcohol remains the most commonly used substance among teens. Marijuana use, which rose among teens in the early 1990s, began to drop in 1996. And cocaine use, which peaked in the 1980s, also is down. The study calls ecstasy a "notable exception." It links the overall rise in heroin and hallucinogen use with the drugs' popularity among those younger than 26.

A decade ago, 14% of eighth-graders had tried illicit drugs other than marijuana. That percentage had risen to 16% by 2000, the report says.

-------- space

Discovery blasts off with next space station crew

03/08/2001
USA Today

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Space shuttle Discovery soared into the dawn Thursday, carrying a new crew to the International Space Station to relieve the three men who have been toiling in orbit for the past four months. The shuttle will catch up with the space station early Saturday, and the fresh crew and the weary one will immediately begin trading places. It was a smooth countdown and a flawless climb to orbit. Discovery arced neatly through a stunningly clear sky tinged peach from the rising sun. It was 45 degrees, one of the colder launch-time temperatures, but well within the safety limits.

"I was beginning to think something was wrong because nothing was wrong," launch director Mike Leinbach joked.

The International Space Station, Alpha, and its crew were passing high above the Indian Ocean near Australia when Discovery took off. American astronaut Bill Shepherd and his Russian shipmates, logging their 128th day in space, welcomed the news that Discovery was on the way.

Russian cosmonaut Yuri Usachev and American astronauts Jim Voss and Susan Helms will spend the next four months aboard the space station.

Besides a new space station crew and four other astronauts, Discovery is hauling 10,000 pounds of supplies packed in an Italian-made module named Leonardo.

During Discovery's eight days at the space station, Leonardo will be attached to the complex and emptied of its contents. It will then be brought back to Earth aboard the shuttle on March 20.

Helms will be the first woman to live on the space station. Looking a little sad, she waved and said, "Bye, Mom" to the TV cameras just before liftoff, which took place on International Women's Day.

Before crawling into Discovery, Usachev and Voss held up a sign with the words "Happy Women's Day!" in Russian and English.

Once in orbit, Voss passed on this request to Mission Control: "This was a really busy day today and we're hoping that when we go to work over on the station, we won't see too many days like this one."

Mission Control laughed.

The flight of Leonardo, the first of Italy's three $150 million cargo carriers to be launched, drew dozens of Italian space officials to Cape Canaveral. (The two other reusable modules are dubbed Raffaello and Donatello.)

Sergio De Julio, president of the Italian Space Agency, ended up haggling with NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin for a bigger piece of the space station project.

Because of a projected $4 billion cost overrun in the space station program, President Bush wants NASA to halt construction three years early in orbit and eliminate the dormitory-style habitation module and crew rescue vehicle.

De Julio said Italy is considering supplying the module and maybe seven-person lifeboats, too, in exchange for full partnership and more Italians assigned to space station flights.

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

Behave or Face a Diamond Ban,
Security Council Tells Liberians

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/world/08LIBE.html

UNITED NATIONS, March 7 - The Security Council voted unanimously today to bar all diamond exports from the West African nation of Liberia if the country does not stop supporting a rebel army that has ravaged neighboring Sierra Leone. The embargo and a ban on travel by Liberia's president, Charles Taylor, will take effect on May 7 if the council's demands are not met.

The council, led by the United States and Britain, had wanted to impose new sanctions earlier, after an investigation panel reported late last year that Liberia was being used by the Sierre Leone rebel group, the Revolutionary United Front, to sell diamonds for weapons. Liberia has been under an arms embargo since 1992 because of its own civil war.

But nations belonging to the Economic Community of West African States, or Ecowas, which will have to monitor and enforce the resolution, wanted more time.

In today's resolution, Liberia was asked to cut off links and stop sending aid to the rebel group, known as the R.U.F. The council also demanded that Liberia ground its aircraft until it completes an acceptable registration system for planes. The investigation panel reported last year that Liberian planes were involved in the region in dubious, if not illegal, activities.

"The message that I hope the Liberians will get," said James B. Cunningham, the United States representative on the council, "is that, as the Security Council mission said and others in the region have been saying for a long time, we think that President Taylor and his government bear a special responsibility with regard to the fighting and support for the R.U.F., that they haven't broken off that support and that the council is not satisfied with the case that they've made, with the explanations they provided."

The Liberians deny that they are still behind the Sierra Leone war, which has been marked by savage butchery. President Taylor has also said he has ended air violations. If sanctions are imposed, the travel ban on Mr. Taylor would extend to his family and other Liberian officials.

In an attempt at a pre-emptive move, Liberia said today that it would suspend diamond exports for 120 days until it could create a gem certification system to meet international standards for identifying the origin of diamonds for sale.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's ambassador to the United Nations, said today that certification was not the point. "The council demands no diamonds be exported until President Taylor has fully met the requirements of the resolution we just passed," he said.

Mr. Cunningham said that the initial African reluctance to support new sanctions on Liberia was a "tactical difference" with the council, not opposition to the move.

"We've had a long discussion with them about what the best tactic is here - whether to just give him time and see what happens or whether it's better to put this sword into place and use that as extra leverage," he said of regional African leaders. "We think this actually increases Ecowas's leverage to work with Taylor because there is now something specific in place that will happen if there isn't a performance."

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

General Suspicion

Thu, 8 Mar 2001
"Slate Magazine"
By Scott Shuger

Working some inside sources, the WP fronts word that the Pentagon's investigation into possible safety mismanagement of its experimental Osprey vertical lift aircraft has shifted from the operational level up into the Pentagon itself. The paper says the DOD inspector general has now seized data from the computers of two Marine generals overseeing the program. The paper also reports it has notes from two different meetings showing two different generals' interest in figuring out a way to make the plane's performance look better than its maintenance records suggest.

The NYT goes inside to report that yesterday the Pentagon unveiled "the rubber bullet of the 21st century"--a crowd dispersal device that uses an electromagnetic pulse to create a burning sensation on the skin at a distance of up to 700 yards, but supposedly without causing any actual burns. The story quotes a couple of think-tank doubters, but strangely misses a big reporting opportunity. It describes a Pentagon briefer "encouraging reporters" to "stick a finger under the invisible ray and feel the heat" from a demonstration model of the weapon. And yet as far as the story indicates, the Times guy didn't take him up on it (there is a passing reference to a "balky reporter"), settling instead for the official Pentagon description of the weapon's effects. Chicken Times policy, or merely chicken Times reporter?

---

Bush tells Pentagon to review beret issue

March 8, 2001
Washington Times
By Rowan Scarborough
http://www.washtimes.com/national/default-200138225042.htm

President Bush has asked the Pentagon to review an Army decision to issue black berets to all soldiers, in response to complaints from disgruntled Rangers over losing the uniqueness of their headgear.

The commander in chief dived into the beret brouhaha after a lawmaker buttonholed him on a trip to an Army base, conveying the anger in the ranks.

Gen. Eric Shinseki, Army chief of staff, last fall announced universal black berets as a way to boost soldiers' morale and increase recruiting numbers. But the new policy brought a strong backlash from special-operations soldiers who say beret soldiers - airborne, special forces and Rangers - will lose the uniqueness of being a beret-designated elite unit. Airborne troops wear red berets; Special Forces green; and Rangers black.

Three former Rangers are now marching from Ranger headquarters at Fort Benning, Ga., to Washington to protest Gen. Shinseki's policy. They are due to arrive tomorrow and participate in a rally Saturday at the Lincoln Memorial.

The Special Forces Association, a group of 7,000 former and current commandos, issued a statement condemning the beret-for-all approach.

Now, the commander in chief has joined the debate.

"The president has asked the Department of Defense to look into that matter, and that's what they're doing at his direction," says White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

Rep. Charlie Norwood, whose Georgia district includes Fort Stewart, accompanied Mr. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on a visit to the Army base last month. Aboard Air Force One, the Republican lawmaker broached the beret debate.

"I just said I was real upset with what was going on with the black beret and the Rangers," Mr. Norwood said in an interview with The Washington Times. "They had earned that. They were very upset. . . . I didn't blame them. . . . I didn't understand why we would want to do that. Nobody minds all the Army wearing a beret. Just don't choose that color. . . . I don't think there's much point in upsetting people who are as patriotic as they are."

Mr. Norwood, who served as an Army dentist in an airborne medical unit in Vietnam, said he wants Mr. Rumsfeld to overrule Gen. Shinseki, but understands such a move carries risks.

"You want to be careful just coming into office and start cutting the legs out from under people," he said. "You have to handle it carefully."

One of the marchers coming to Washington is David Nielsen, a Ranger from 1989 to 1992 who participated in the invasion of Panama. He saw a battle mate, James Markwell, shot and killed shortly after parachuting into Panama. He is carrying Mr. Markwell's black beret during the arduous 700-mile march.

"The black beret has to be earned and not issued," Mr. Nielsen, 30, said Tuesday as he hiked up Route 1, north of Fredericksburg, Va., facing stiff winds and subfreezing wind chill.

He described Gen. Shinseki's decision as "good intentions. Bad judgment. We understand the general idea is to boost morale. But just choose any other color but black. It's been our color for many years."

Mr. Nielsen, an English major at George Mason University, planned to reach Quantico Tuesday night and drive into Washington yesterday to visit various lawmakers. The team is scheduled to then drive back to Quantico and resume the march to Washington.

During the trek, the ex-Rangers have camped out and slept inside an accompanying four-wheel-drive vehicle at truck stops.

"We're on the home stretch," Mr. Nielsen said. "The flu just kind of went through the whole team. We feel good and are motivated better than ever. We went through the blister phase. Our feet are toughened up."

The Army spokesman at the Pentagon said yesterday that the Defense Department has yet to ask the service about the beret decision.

"We are not aware of any formal or informal requests for briefings specifically linked to the comments by Mr. Fleischer," the spokesman said.

The Rangers, elite airborne combat soldiers, are not the only ones within the special-operations community who are upset.

Ex-Special Forces soldiers also believe standard-issue berets cheapen their Green Berets.

"The awarding of elite unit headgear is given because of the high-risk business they are in," said Jimmy Dean of the Special Forces Association. "To give that headgear to every soldier in the Army is disrespectful to the soldiers who are triple volunteers - volunteers for the Army, volunteers for the Airborne and volunteers for dangerous assignments and missions."

Gen. Shinseki, who is guiding the 474,000-soldier Army through one of its most far-reaching transformations, says the headgear will be a symbol for a more agile force in the 21st century.

"It will be a symbol of unity, a symbol of Army excellence, a symbol of our values," he told the annual convention of the Association of the United States Army in October.

The black beret will replace the standard green, foldable cap.

Despite the protests, the Army is moving ahead with its plan to issue black berets for all soldiers. It awarded $23 million in contracts to nine companies for 1.3 million black berets. By next month, the headgear will be shipped to units and handed out to soldiers.

-------

Killing Me Softly
While you weren't looking, Ray Bradbury took over weapons design at the Pentagon.

by Brooke Shelby Biggs
March 8, 2001
Mother Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/web_exclusives/commentary/opinion/newshole1.html

Last week, the Pentagon unveiled its newest weapon: the Vehicle Mounted Active Denial System (VMADS). It's being billed as a kinder, gentler weapon; "non-lethal," "less than lethal," or "soft kill" in Pentagon parlance. In other words it usually doesn't kill people; it just hurts them enough to make 'em run away. Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy, doesn't it?

Well, it makes you warm, anyway. VMADS shoots a concentrated beam of electromagnetic energy at human targets -- sort of like a tank-mounted microwave oven set on high with the door left open.

According to an Air Force spokesman at the unveiling, "It's the kind of pain you would feel if you were being burned. It's just not intense enough to cause any damage."

But according to scientists at Loma Linda University Medical Center, long-term effects of exposure to the weapon are unknown, and may include cancer and cataracts. "[The Pentagon's] claims are a bunch of crap," said Prof. W. Ross Adey. "We've known that many forms of microwaves at levels below heating can cause significant health effects in the long term."

And that's if the new weapon is used properly. According to the Marine Times, the VMADS -- called the "people zapper" -- may be capable of inflicting far more than brief discomfort when not used as directed; that is, for no more than three seconds. "The amount of time the weapon must be trained on an individual to cause permanent damage or death is classified." (In other words, it only takes one 18-year-old recruit with a sick curiosity or a slow watch to turn the thing deadly.)

In 1995, in fact, a military spokesman qualified the concept of "non-lethal" weapons: "[I]t's really less lethal ... because these weapons if improperly used could be lethal." Marine Col George Fenton, likewise, is on record in the May 2000 National Defense Magazine saying the term "non-lethal ... does not mean that they can't kill or injure." Reassuring, isn't it?

Think you have nothing to worry about because you have no plans to join the army of some rogue state? You may be surprised one day to see VMADS -- or a civilian law-enforcement version of the weapon -- on a city street near you. VMADS and its "non-lethal" kin are being hyped by the Pentagon as "crowd dispersal" devices, which makes them a handy tool for quelling civil unrest, without the fuss and muss of rubber bullets and tear gas. According to the defense journal Jane's, "The 'non-lethal' nature of these weapons might ... encourage military forces to use them directly against civilians and civilian targets." Indeed: A July 2000 Army newsletter featured a section called "Civil Disturbances; Incorporating Non-Lethal Technologies."

So instead of donning bullet-proof vests and gas masks, activists at the next Seattle-style protest might strap frozen HungryMan dinners to their bodies when they take to the streets. At least they'll get a hot meal while they wait to post bail.

Critics also note that the US loves to export its weapons technology. In Le Monde in 1999, Steve Wright argued that the spread of non-lethal weapons like VMADS will "spawn ever more advanced techniques of repression. And if democratic countries let their arms manufacturers develop these techniques, they will be exported to places less concerned about brutalizing their populations."

International law seems fuzzy on this point. Although the Geneva Convention doesn't address the science-fictionesque subject of laser weapons, an amendment added in 1949 did ban "weapons, projectiles and materials and methods of warfare of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering."

VMADS is just the tip of the non-lethal iceberg. In 1995, the Center For Defense Information listed possible non-lethal weapons under consideration by the Pentagon, including "super acids, goop guns, blinding lasers, non-nuclear electromagnetic pulses, high power microwaves, laser weapons, infrasound, computer viruses, and metal-eating microbes."

Human Rights Watch has been fighting the international development of "blinding lasers" designed to cause irreversible eye damage. In 1995, the US agreed to an international ban on blinding lasers, but continued development of "dazzling lasers" or "dazzlers," another form of laser weapon targeting human eyes. (Law enforcement groups are developing applications of this type of weapon for police use, giving the high-tech toys groovy names like "The Laser Dissuader").

And then there's the Anti-Personnel Beam Weapon that can stun or immobilize humans from a distance of 100 yards by sending an electrical current through a high-speed channel of ionized air.

According to one Web source, the US is also developing a sonic weapon which causes "the bowels of enemy troops to spasm and their contents to liquefy, thus reducing millions of soldiers to, as one government report says, 'quivering diarrhetic messes.'"

Finally, the US military is developing non-lethal low-frequency radio technologies -- which conspiracy theorists suspect have mind-control capabilities -- such as the much-criticized High Frequency Active Auroral Project (HAARP).

It's easy to forget that the US military and intelligence communities are run by a bunch of boys playing with really big toys. The Hanssen spy case, after all, revealed that even after the Cold War was over, the CIA was actually tunneling under DC streets and into the Russian embassy. Makes one wonder if Tom Clancy has been writing policy for the past 20 years. What do you think?

Bits and Pieces

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY "According to World Bank figures, at least 20 percent of women have been physically or sexually assaulted," reports Amnesty. "Official reports in the US say a women is battered every 15 seconds and 700,000 are raped each year. In India more than 40 percent of married women reported being kicked, slapped or sexually abused for reasons such as their husbands' dissatisfaction with their cooking or cleaning, jealousy, or other motives. In Egypt, 35 percent of women reported being beaten by their husbands."

MORE UPLIFTING NEWS

Loggers in Mexico, angry over a government setaside of wooded land for Monarch butterfly sanctuaries, apparently wiped out some 22 million of the insects with a pesticide.

HIGH-TECH CONTRACEPTIVE

In San Diego, some clever entrepreneurs have come up with Baby Think It Over, a lifelike doll designed to teach teenagers about the downside of unprotected sex. The doll has a chip which tracks the care it's given, and in addition to crying, eating, and messing its diaper, this doozy screams in the middle of the night.


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Grand National 'safe' as racing recovers

Thursday, 8 March, 2001
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/hi/english/other_sports/newsid_1208000/1208842.stm

Racing fans should be seeing scenes like this at Aintree

Aintree officials are still confident that the Grand National will go ahead as planned despite the postponement of the Cheltenham Festival to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth disease.

The Course's Managing Director Charles Barnett told BBC Sport Online that because there were no outbreaks of the disease in the Liverpool area the meeting would still take place from 5-7 April.

"There is still four weeks to go until the Grand National and alot of water to pass under the bridge," he said.

"But we are an urban/metropolitan racecourse so do not have the same problems facing the rural courses.

"But of course we are complying with all the instructions and precautions issued by the Ministry of Agriculture and the Jockey Club."

The positive news from Aintree contrasts with the despair felt throughout the sport following the postponement of the Cheltenham Festival.

Racing believed it was returning to normal after a meeting at Lingfield Park on Wednesday ended its self-imposed suspension.

On Friday the Queen Mother will give the resumption the royal seal of approval when she visits Sandown Park.

But it will be some time before normal service is resumed across the country, a point confirmed by the cancellation of next Tuesday's meeting at Sedgefield.

Worries still remain and two outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease have been confirmed close to two of the country's principal training centres.

Chris Boddington, a spokesman for the Ministry of Agriculture in Reading, said: "A location near Hungerford has been confirmed as a positive foot-and-mouth outbreak."

This latest outbreak at Stype - the 87th nationwide - is within about 15 miles of Lambourn.

Another case of the virus was found at Hawes in North Yorkshire, which is a similar distance away from the Middleham bases of Ferdy Murphy, George Moore and Micky Hammond.

There is another location in the Lambourn area where there is a suspected outbreak that has yet to be confirmed.

Preliminary tests have been taken from animals at a farm near Baydon next to the M4 and Boddington added: "The outbreak at Baydon has not been confirmed and the farm is still under investigation."

Peter Walwyn, chairman of the Lambourn Trainers' Association, said: "We know the farm is near Baydon but the case has not been confirmed.

"It was the AGM of the National Trainers Federation yesterday and Peter Webbon (the Jockey Club's chief veterinary adviser) spoke to them and explained the whole situation.

"Provided they take the right precautions there is little or no risk-but it is still a worry.

"None of the Lambourn stables are anywhere near the farm and they wouldn't exercise near there anyway.

"The farm is away from the training grounds but we are still being vigilant.

"And the other case is the other side of Hungerford and about 15 miles away from Lambourn, well away from the training areas.

"We are continuing to monitor everything and taking all the precautions."

John Maxse, the Jockey Club's public relations officer, said: "The Lambourn case started being investigated on Monday - there is no news yet and that is good news but we must wait and see.

"It is a worry but even so the precautions racing has in place can deal with horses moving from infected areas."

---

Hunters, trappers protest
Dyson offers shield for 'part of our heritage.'

March 8, 2001
Alaska Daily News
Anchorage Daily News
By Martha Bellisle
http://www.adn.com/metro/pstory/0,2976,246478,00.html

Juneau -- Hunters, fishermen and trappers are a vulnerable minority under siege by increasingly strong and wealthy anti-hunting groups, a House panel heard Wednesday, and deserve the strongest legal armor the state can give: constitutional protection.

"Hunting, fishing and trapping are part of our heritage," said Rep. Fred Dyson, R-Eagle River and sponsor of a constitutional amendment that states that these activities "shall be forever preserved for the people and shall be managed by law for the public good."

"We've seen a constant threat to those uses," Jesse VanderZanden, executive director of the Alaska Outdoor Council, told the House Resources Committee.

Rod Arno, a big-game guide and hunter from Palmer, added: "It's evident that we have an organized group, the Alaska Wildlife Alliance, that is advocating for our demise. As hunters, fishermen and trappers, we need the support and protection that other minorities are afforded."

Paul Joslin, director of the wildlife alliance, did not participate in the hearing, He said afterward his group is not pushing to eliminate hunting.

"Our position is that, according to our constitution, the wildlife is for all of us. We need to protect wildlife for all uses, including viewing, photography," he said.

The attorney general's office warned that adding such broad new language to the constitution could cause unanticipated problems with wildlife management.

"One person's public good may be another person's public ill," said Steve White, an assistant attorney general.

White quoted from a report by a legal committee of the International Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, assigned to review similar constitutional changes made or proposed in other states. That group concluded that wildlife should be managed and regulated for everyone's good.

"From the perspective of both the resource management agency as well as the hunter, making hunting a constitutional right may fundamentally alter and drastically interfere with wildlife management as currently practiced," the report said.

Wayne Regelin, director of the Department of Fish and Game's wildlife division, said making hunting a constitutional right may open the door to those claiming they have the right to hunt and that the department has no legal right to close a season.

Sue Schrader, spokeswoman for Alaska Conservation Voters, didn't testify but said in an interview later that her group's greatest concerns with House Joint Resolution 12 are implications and potential legal problems no one has thought of yet.

"We don't know what types of legal challenges could be brought," she said. "Do we really want to put our constitution at risk?"

Hunters, fishermen and trappers are a minority in Alaska and appear to be on the decline.

For instance: the state sold 23,156 resident hunting licenses in 1991, but only 20,623 in 2000. Resident combination sport fishing/hunting licenses dropped from 44,711 to 41,382. Resident fishing/hunting/trapping licenses declined from 6,230 to 5,331.

During the same period, nonresident hunting licenses jumped from 5,758 to 11,184 in 2000.

Rep. Beth Kerttula, D-Juneau, a committee member, questioned how the measure would affect another part of the constitution that requires wildlife be managed for the maximum "sustained yield." Kerttula offered a change, which was approved, to say that hunting, fishing and trapping be managed "in accordance with the sustained yield principle."

The committee then passed the measure on to the House Judiciary Committee.

Reporter Martha Bellisle can be reached at mbellisle@adn.com and 907-586-1531.

---

Foot and mouth disease

Thursday March 8, 2001
The Guardian
Paul Brown,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/footandmouth/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/footandmouth/story/0,7369,448159,00.html

Fifteen new cases of foot and mouth were identified yesterday, five of them in new areas, the worst day so far and dashing hopes of an early end to the outbreaks.

New exclusions zones were put around Hawes, North Yorkshire; Queensbury, West Yorkshire; Hilton, Derbyshire, Chaddesley Corbett, Warwickshire, and Hungerford in Berkshire.when the infections were confirmed in the afternoon.

Four new outbreaks in Cumbria, two in Dumfries and Galloway, two in Deven and one each in Durham and Worcestershire were already inside other infected areas. The total stands at 96 confirmed cases.

Earlier when Jim Scudamore, the government's chief vet, was called to Downing Street to report on the progress of the outbreak he was able to tell the prime minister that there had been no new cases overnight - the first time for 12 days - but he refused to predict that the worst was over.

Mr Scudamore, on whose advice animal movements were halted on February 23, told Mr Blair to expect more cases in the next few days. With 135 farms awaiting test results it would be surprising if more were not returned positive.

Yesterday morning 47,000 animals had been killed out of 82,000 which had been condemned. Yesterday's outbreaks add around 2,000 more to the total. Mr Scudamore is still seriously concerned about the fate of the 46,000 animals on Dartmoor where the source of the outbreak at Dunna Bridge Farm has not been confirmed.

Ministry officials remain convinced that there will be a link with other sheep movement, a vehicle or a person who has been infected from another West County holding.

Mr Scudamore said: "There is an intense epidemiological investigation going on to discover how the disease got there. We are hoping that the disease is contained and it has not got onto the moor itself."

He said the stock involved and those in the immediate area were behind fences and so if there were dangerous contacts they would be on neighbouring holdings and not spread to large numbers of animals mingling together. Some of the dangerous contact animals will be slaughtered to try and protect the rest.

The ministry's confidence that it may have contained the outbreak was improved with the issue of a map yesterday showing the links between all the outbreaks so far. With the Heddon-on-the-Wall outbreak in Northumberland still firmly in the frame as the source of the infection, the tentacles of the disease spread south to pigs in Essex and then west and south in sheep.

In Northumberland the spread of the disease appears to have been airborne because of the clouds of virus given off by the badly infected herd of pigs belonging to Heddon-on-the-Wall farmer Bobby Waugh. Nearly all the rest were spread in markets as dealers traded and re-sold sheep in a bewildering series of trades reaching down to Devon, across to Northern Ireland and into Cumbria and Scotland. Willy Cleave, the Devon dealer who unwittingly spread the disease from Northumberland to his home farm, is the source of all the outbreaks in the West Country, Wiltshire and Northampton. Only 11 of the outbreaks plotted so far by vets were spread "across the fence" to neighbouring holdings, adding to hopes the disease has been contained.

Supplies of livestock direct to abattoirs for slaughter continued yesterday, restoring supplies of British meat to the shops, but the plan for holding centres to aid smaller farmers in sending stock for slaughter was held up because of EU restrictions.

---

'No end in sight' for foot-and-mouth crisis

Thursday 8th March 2001
Ananova
http://www.ananova.co.uk/news/story/sm_232780.html

Farmers have been warned that the foot-and-mouth crisis is far from over and is going to last a long time.

The country's chief vet Jim Scudamore delivered the frank warning as the tally of outbreaks topped 100.

Fifteen outbreaks confirmed yesterday, including in four previously unaffected counties, and eight more cases this morning, have effectively put an end to faint hopes that the spread of the disease was about to peak.

Mr Scudamore said: "We have such a large number of tracings and movements (of animals) to follow still.

"We will not see the disease disappearing at the end of this week and this outbreak is going to last for a long time."

Mr Scudamore said the biggest problem is that the disease seems to be spreading most rapidly among cattle which have come into contact with sheep carrying the virus.

Since the outbreak began more than two weeks ago, officials have been trying to trace the movements of 100,000 sheep which passed through markets where the disease was believed to have been present.

With Britain in the lambing season, Mr Scudamore urged sheep farmers to look out for signs of the disease in their livestock.

It could include an abnormally high rate of death in young lambs and abortions in pregnant sheep. Other classical symptoms are lameness and listlessness.

Mr Scudamore appealed for any farmers who bought sheep outside the main sales rings at Longtown Market, a focal point for tracing the disease, to contact their local animal health officer as soon as possible.

---

Weighing a Demand for Gas Against the Fear of Pipelines

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/national/08PIPE.html

PALMETTO, Fla., March 1 - Since 1959, a single pipeline that runs overland from South Texas has supplied every last bit of the natural gas that Florida consumes. But in the American stampede for gas, that pipeline is no longer enough.

Florida's appetite for natural gas is expected to double in the next eight years, with most to be used by power companies to generate electricity. Here and across the country, the shift to gas from dirtier fuels like oil and coal is widely agreed to be an environmental good.

But in the scramble to produce more fuel and deliver it to market, the industry and the government are running into a problem: the same people who swear by the virtues of natural gas tend to swear at gas pipelines, whose susceptibility to explosions, even though they are infrequent, is sometimes seen as making them the worst of neighbors.

"I think the opposition will continue to grow, so how should we deal with it?" said Cuba Wadlington Jr., president and chief executive of the Williams Gas Pipeline Company, which is seeking approval of a plan to build a $1.6 billion pipeline that would become Florida's main source of resupply. "The government has to help us so that the public understands that these pipelines are needed."

With President Bush urging measures to increase the domestic production of energy - oil and coal as well as natural gas - the strains on the energy distribution network are likely to be compounded. But a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney is working on a plan to accelerate federal approval of new projects, because some estimates project that up to 38,000 miles of new interstate gas pipelines will be needed by 2015. There are now 270,000 miles of such pipeline nationwide.

Pointing to what it calls past mistakes, the Bush administration has already singled out federal indecision under President Bill Clinton as having set back by several years the completion of two major pipelines. The pipelines would serve the Northeast, which along with California has a gas-delivery network that is already close to overtaxed.

Still, some experts have expressed wariness about the new administration's approach, saying that the rush to meet the nation's surging demand for national gas should not lead regulators to overlook the very real concerns that pipelines can pose to the environment and public safety.

"The stress on the energy infrastructure should not stampede us to do things that would be other than prudent," said James Hoecker, who under Mr. Clinton headed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which is charged with determining when a proposed pipeline would serve the public interest.

As a way around some opposition, the pipeline industry and regulators have begun to look with increasing favor on plans that would bypass most critics by delivering natural gas along undersea routes. The pipeline proposed by Williams for Florida would travel across hundreds of miles of the Gulf of Mexico.

But while causing less inconvenience to property owners, that project, known as Gulfstream, would carry its own brand of hazard, including permanent damage to parts of the sensitive seabed and potential harm to essential fish habitat, according to a federal environmental impact report on the Florida plan.

Recently, the Florida proposal won an initial go-ahead from the state and from the federal energy commission, whose new chairman, Curt Hebert, appointed by President Bush, called the decision a sign of the commission's determination to meet the rising demand for natural gas.

But the Florida pipeline, which would be the largest in the gulf, remains among the projects still being scrutinized by other federal agencies for potential risk. That process is being closely watched by officials like Amy Stein, vice chairwoman of the Manatee County Commission in Florida. The Gulfstream pipeline would come ashore in an industrial port on the south edge of Tampa Bay in her county.

"There are only so many options to generate electricity, and this is the best there is," Ms. Stein said in an interview here. "You don't get clean natural gas without a pipeline. So you bite the bullet and you live with it."

But others in the county, which would be the starting point for the overland part of the 750-mile pipeline that is to begin in Mississippi and Louisiana, scheduled to be completed in 2002, say they are less certain that benefits will outweigh costs.

"The environmental and safety risks are there," said Mary Sheppard, conservation chairwoman of the local Sierra Club.

In general, environmental organizations have rarely been active in the opposition to gas pipelines, seeing them as a necessary part of a welcome equation leading to greater use of the clean-burning fuel. In the case of the Gulfstream, the pattern has held true, with most criticisms addressed by the company's willingness to revise its plans to limit harm.

But elsewhere, the objections have been far more vociferous, particularly after gas pipeline accidents in New Mexico and Washington State in 1999 killed 15 people.

The Northeast has been home to the loudest opposition, with fierce challenges from property owners and state officials in New Jersey and New York leaving in doubt two major natural-gas projects.

Those projects were to have begun delivering natural gas last year. But because of the opposition, their sponsors have had to revise proposed routes several times, and the projects remain bogged down in the review by the regulatory commission. They cannot now be completed until 2002 at the earliest.

Over all, gas pipelines are among the safest forms of energy distribution, records have shown, but on both environmental and safety, there is still cause for concern.

A report last year by the General Accounting Office that did not distinguish between gas and liquid pipelines found that the number of major pipeline accidents - those involving injury, death or significant property damage - had increased an average of 4 percent a year from 1989 to 1999.

And in a criminal case that remains the biggest of its kind, the company that operates the Iroquois gas pipeline, which extends from the Canadian border to Long Island, pleaded guilty in 1996 to four felonies for violating federal environmental laws. The company agreed to pay $22 million in fines.

With the Energy Department projecting a 30 percent increase in the nation's demand for natural gas by 2010, the debate about new pipelines is likely to extend to places that have paid them little recent attention.

In Alaska, a consortium of major oil companies is weighing plans to build a multibillion-dollar pipeline up to 1,800 miles long that would deliver gas from the North Slope to feed the lower 48 states. And in the Rockies, another source of untapped gas, additional pipelines would be needed to make viable the administration's plans for a surge of exploration.

In proposals modeled after the Gulfstream's project, other companies are considering underwater pipelines for Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and the coast of New England.

The industry, which has been outspoken in its frustration over past delays, has said it hopes the new administration can reduce by half the approval time for major pipeline projects, which now averages 18 to 24 months. Only with such a streamlining, officials say, can the industry fix shortcomings like those in California, whose energy crisis has shown pipeline capacity to be inadequate, and in Florida, where the projected natural gas demand for 2009 is more than a third greater than the capacity of the sole existing pipeline, known as the Florida Gas Transmission.

"The interstate pipeline grid is clearly at a pinch point," said Mr. Wadlington, whose company is one of the nation's largest pipeline operators and is seeking federal approval of several projects.

But critics say that Mr. Cheney, a former chief executive of the Halliburton Company, the oil services giant, needs to be skeptical.

"I don't believe there's a capacity shortage everywhere," said Lois Epstein, an engineer for Environmental Defense, the advocacy group. "We need to be very careful that we identify only the pockets where new pipelines are truly needed."

---

FOOT-AND-MOUTH

March 8, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/world/08BRIE.html

BRITAIN, ITALY: Hopes that Britain's curbs on the movement of livestock, cancellation of countryside activities and destruction of suspect herds might have stemmed the outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease were dashed with the report of 15 new cases, bringing the total to 96, and of the virus's spread to four more northern England counties. Italy ordered a ban on any imports of livestock susceptible to the disease, going beyond measures agreed to by the European Union. Warren Hoge, Alessandra Stanley (NYT)

---

U.K., France fight livestock disease

03/09/2001
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2001-03-08-foot.htm

LONDON (AP) - Hoteliers, pub landlords and shopkeepers in the western English town of Cheltenham faced the loss of millions in revenues Thursday, after one of the country's biggest racing events was postponed because of the foot-and-mouth crisis. Meanwhile, France, concerned about possible spread of the disease from Britain, is disinfecting every arriving vehicle from the Eurotunnel. The roadway, dubbed the ''Chunnel,'' runs under the English Channel and connects Britain and France.

The Cheltenham National Hunt Festival, the most prestigious event in European jump racing, was called off after an outbreak of the disease near stables used by some of the horses.

Agriculture officials reported eight new cases Thursday, bringing the total to 104 since the beginning of the outbreak on Feb. 19.

Britain has taken strict measures to stop the spread of the highly infectious livestock disease, closing country footpaths, discouraging travel in the countryside and canceling sporting events.

The British Horseracing Board announced late Wednesday that the Cheltenham Festival, to begin next Tuesday, would be postponed, possibly until April. The decision was made after a suspected foot-and-mouth outbreak was reported at a farm that houses England's main jump-racing training center and stables used by many leading contenders.

It came hours after racing resumed in Britain after a weeklong suspension. Races were run Wednesday at the Lingfield Park track, about 40 miles south of London. Racegoers were required to disinfect their footwear before entering the grounds.

Britain resumed some transportation and slaughter of livestock this week in areas certified to be free of the disease. All other livestock movements remain suspended.

Agriculture Minister Nick Brown said Thursday that all vehicles leaving the United Kingdom would have to pass over a disinfectant bath.

Although no confirmed cases have been found outside the United Kingdom, the European Union has closed all livestock markets and banned exports of meat, livestock and milk products from Britain.

France has destroyed nearly 50,000 sheep as a precaution, Ireland canceled the Six Nations rugby union games against England and Scotland because of fears the disease could be carried in by fans and Norway canceled traditional reindeer races Thursday.

The nation has taken strict precautions to protect its reindeer, which are mostly semi-wild and roam open ranges in the arctic, making it almost impossible to control any outbreak that might hit them.

Foot-and-mouth disease - which strikes cloven-hoofed animals like sheep, pigs and cows - is easily spread by afflicted animals or carriers such as humans, horses and wild animals. It can also become airborne.

-------- genetics

Genetic Tinkering Is Found to Extend Roundworms' Lives

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/health/08WORM.html

Scientists say they have extended the life span of an animal - though just a worm - by tinkering with its genetic makeup. The findings could one day lead to drugs that help humans live longer, researchers said.

Roundworms normally die at about two weeks old, but after researchers at M.I.T. gave the tiny creatures extra copies of chromosomes containing a specific gene, they lived up to three weeks, or 50 percent longer.

The researchers, led by Leonard Guarente and Heidi Tissenbaum, report their results today in the journal Nature.

Scientists have known for decades that the key to extending life spans in yeast, worms, mice and possibly primates is restricting calories to a fraction of their normal levels.

Based on his earlier studies with yeast, Dr. Guarente has suggested that this effect occurred because of the interaction between metabolism and a gene that shuts down other genes. He has shown that yeast with two copies of this SIR2 gene lived longer and that yeast without it had a shorter life span.

In the new study, Dr. Guarente and colleagues showed that a similar gene, SIR2.1, had the same effect on a higher organism, the roundworm. The result suggests that similar genes could be linked to aging in all organisms, including humans, they said.

Scientists have known for decades that the key to extending life spans in yeast, worms, mice and possibly primates is restricting calories to a fraction of normal levels.

"The big question is the mechanism by which that works. How does that confer longevity? That's what we are trying to get at here. Our proposal is that this could be at least part of the answer to that question," Dr. Guarente said.

In the yeast studies, the scientists showed that the effect of SIR2 on aging is linked to nutrition and metabolic rate. They suspect the same is true with worms.

-------- police

The Sheriff Relaxes and Awaits His Trial

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By CHARLIE LeDUFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/nyregion/08PROF.html

SHERIFF PATRICK A. MAHONEY answered his door looking trim and well rested. Just back from a Florida trip, he was tan and clean-shaven. He wore a pink oxford shirt with an open collar, jeans and a brown belt that matched his brown loafers. Outside, a blizzard blanketed his new county-owned car. His dog, a cockapoo, whimpered at his heel.

From the door, one could see that his home was tastefully decorated in wood and sensible earth tones. It was well lighted and smelled of morning coffee, which the sheriff takes with fat-free creamer. Life couldn't look better.

All very nice, except the sheriff is going to court on Monday, and it could mean prison time and the end of his career.

"It's dirty out here," the sheriff said as he poured the coffee. "They say if you've done nothing wrong then you shouldn't be worried. But it doesn't work like that out in Suffolk County."

That will be for the jury to decide.

Mr. Mahoney was charged last summer with one felony count of defrauding the government and 54 misdemeanor counts in connection with his handling of the Suffolk County Jail, charges the sheriff described as trumped-up and motivated by the enmity between him and officials in the Republican Party machine.

The felony count involves an accusation that the sheriff used a county employee to keep track of political contributions made by Sheriff's Department officers, employees and others. Mr. Mahoney has also been accused of sending work crews to clean a county-owned museum run by his former undersheriff and doling out ceremonial deputy jobs to the highest bidder. The trial is to be held in State Supreme Court in Central Islip.

The sheriff had no lawyer with him in his home, and his wife, Marilyn, was at work. When confronted with the litany of crimes he is accused of committing, the sheriff neither professed innocence nor admitted guilt. He simply rolled his eyes.

"The whole party machine never liked me," the sheriff said with no tone of self-pity. "I was always a maverick."

Through his second cup of coffee, he talked about his career as the sheriff, a position he continues to hold. He is most proud of two programs he started: the domestic violence unit, under which orders of protection are now served to abusers by sheriff's deputies instead of by the battered women themselves; and the drunken drivers rehabilitation center, which has cut down on repeat offenders by 75 percent.

But his time at the 1,300-bed jail, near the banks of the Peconic River, has been marred by a poor relationship with the guards and by overcrowding that routinely runs at 140 percent of capacity.

"I won't say I built a paradise there," the sheriff said. "But I've been a prudent manager, and I'm proud of my record."

The rap sheet on Patrick A. Mahoney: Date of birth: 3/21/42. Height: 5 feet 10. Weight: 170 lbs. Race: Caucasian. Bats: right. Throws: right. No tattoos or distinguishing scars. Three children. Employment: 21 years with the Suffolk County Police Department. Suffolk County legislator, 1984-90. Suffolk County sheriff, 1991 to present. Awards: detective of the year, 1975. Meritorious Police Service Award, 1975.

BORN in Bay Shore, N.Y., he is the son of an Irish Catholic billboard hanger and a homemaker who were tough and by the book. "I was the second of eight children and I had to go out and help support the family after high school," he said. "That's the family way."

He worked as a plasterer's apprentice until he passed the police exam and entered the academy in 1963. He was a radio-car operator for six years and was promoted to detective in 1968. He worked in the organized-crime unit, and his biggest case came in 1975, when he hid under a tractor-trailer to break a multimillion-dollar international stolen-truck ring.

It was a sewer pipe that led him to politics, he said. For a year his driveway was torn up for a construction project that was rife with corruption, cost overruns and shoddy materials. Officials eventually went to prison over the sewer project, and Mr. Mahoney went to the County Legislature. There, he routinely voted against what he regarded as similar boondoggles, projects like the Shoreham nuclear power plant that eventually cost millions while never producing a watt.

He did not make many friends in the party. Politics in Suffolk, he said, are never far from the sewer pipes.

He was a lifelong Republican who switched parties two years ago, around the time that a grand jury was convened by the Republican district attorney to investigate him. In an attempt to destroy the machine that created him, Mr. Mahoney challenged the Republican incumbent for the county executive's seat. By all accounts, including his own, the sheriff ran a lackluster campaign and was mopped up.

Mr. Mahoney is at the end of his third term as sheriff. He plans to run for re-election this year. As a Democrat. As an indicted Democrat.

"I'm my own man," Mr. Mahoney said. "I don't believe in phony appearances."

The doorbell rang. It was a photographer who had come to take his picture. "Oh, let me go put on a tie," he said. "I am the sheriff, after all."

---

How Inquiries Into Racial Profiling Unfolded

March 8, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/nyregion/08TIME.html?pagewanted=print

Following are major events in the investigations into racial profiling by the New Jersey State Police:

MARCH 1996 The office of the state attorney general, Deborah T. Poritz, starts looking into allegations of racial profiling after a judge, siding with defendants in a criminal case, finds that troopers on a southern stretch of the New Jersey Turnpike are stopping minority drivers far more often than white drivers.

JULY Peter G. Verniero is sworn in as attorney general.

NOVEMBER The federal Justice Department opens its investigation into profiling by New Jersey State Police.

FEBRUARY 1997 Sgt. Thomas Gilbert of the state police compiles the state's first data on profiling. It shows that turnpike drivers who agreed to have their cars searched by the state police were overwhelmingly black and Hispanic. The rate is similar to that in Maryland, which the Justice Department has forced to sign a consent decree admitting that profiling exists and promising to end it.

MAY Meeting with aides, Mr. Verniero says he will be dragged behind a train before he signs such a consent decree, according to the testimony of several people at the meeting.

JUNE New Jersey starts sending the Justice Department information and data on state police practices related to profiling.

JULY Mr. Verniero gets the first statistical data on racial profiling, but finds it inconclusive.

APRIL 1998 Two state troopers fire on a van carrying four unarmed black and Hispanic men on the turnpike, wounding three of the men.

FEBRUARY 1999 Gov. Christie Whitman fires the state police superintendent, Carl A. Williams, after a newspaper interview is published in which he links minority groups to drug trafficking. Mrs. Whitman nominates Mr. Verniero to the State Supreme Court.

APRIL Mr.Verniero releases a report saying that racial profiling is "real, not imagined."

MAY Mr. Verniero is narrowly confirmed as a justice.

DECEMBER 1999 Attorney General John J. Farmer enters consent decree with the Justice Department, admitting that the state police have practiced racial profiling.

---

Witness Ties Ex-Police Boss to Killing of Serbian Warlord

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/world/08YUGO.html

BELGRADE, Serbia, March 7 - Rade Markovic, Serbia's former secret police chief, will be summoned as a witness in the trial of 10 men accused of killing Arkan, a notorious paramilitary leader, a Belgrade judge ruled today.

Mr. Markovic will be called, along with several other senior police officers who served under President Slobodan Milosevic, because testimony connected them today to the killing of Arkan and two others last year.

Of the gang of 10 from the town of Loznica, in western Serbia, one man is charged with murder and the rest as accomplices, one in absentia.

Arkan, whose name was Zeljko Raznatovic, was gunned down at the Hotel Intercontinental in Belgrade on Jan. 15, 2000, along with two associates - a businessman and a police colonel. He was wanted by the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

Today Vojislav Jekic, the former police chief of Loznica, emerged from hiding to testify against the group, some of whom he said he had known for years. Mr. Jekic, 52, told the court that two of the defendants had told him the group, backed by Mr. Markovic and a wealthy businessman, was responsible for the killings.

Mr. Jekic said that he had reported his suspicions to the top criminal police general in Belgrade, Gen. Dragan Ilic, but that he had come under pressure to drop the case.

After a month, a warrant was issued for his arrest and he fled the country, taking refuge in the Bosnian Serb Republic. He only returned recently under protection of Arkan's family to testify at the trial.

One defendant, Milan Djurecic, known as Miki, vehemently denied Mr. Jekic's accusations.

"It's not true, it's all lies," said Miki, a hard-faced man in his 20's with short-shaven hair.

The other defendants, each given a turn to speak, asked the former police chief to testify that they had not been involved. One, a former police inspector who had served under him, wanted it on record that he had fought in the war against NATO. Another wanted it confirmed that he had asked for advice after lending his car unknowingly to members of the gang.

The lawyers of several defendants asked the judge to release them on bail, but he refused.

Mr. Jekic's claims remain circumstantial but point to high-level involvement in the killing of Arkan. Mr. Milosevic and his wife, Mirjana Markovic, could be implicated through the secret police chief, Mr. Markovic, a close ally of the family (though no relation).

Mr. Markovic was arrested on Jan. 24 and is being detained in Belgrade jail, a suspect in the deaths of four peoplein a 1999 car crash apparently intended to kill the former opposition leader Vuk Draskovic.

-------- spying

Report Says Pipelines Were Tapped to Eavesdrop on Soviet Embassy

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/world/08CND-RUSSIA.html

MOSCOW, March 8 - Russian security experts detected and "liquidated" a sophisticated American effort some 10 years ago to eavesdrop on the Soviet Union's embassy in Washington by tapping pipelines and even the embassy's underground pilings, a Moscow news agency reported today.

But the service, quoting an anonymous Russian counterintelligence official, disputed a report in The New York Times on Sunday that said the United States had secretly dug a tunnel beneath the embassy to conduct eavesdropping operations.

The Times quoted anonymous American intelligence and law-enforcement officials as saying that the Russians had been told of the tunnel by Robert P. Hanssen, the senior FBI agent arrested last month and accused of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia for 15 years.

The apparent disclosure, those officials said, compromised an operation that had cost hundreds of millions of dollars and was the most expensive intelligence operation that Mr. Hanssen had revealed to the Russians.

Today's news agency report, by RIA Novosti, claimed that "there has never been and there isn't any tunnel under the Russian embassy in Washington." Rather, it stated that the story was fabricated "to place some substantial guilt upon FBI employee Robert Hanssen, arrested on charges of espionage."

The agency quoted "a well placed resource" in Russia's Federal Security Service, the agency in charge of counterintelligence, as saying that the United States lacked concrete proof that Mr. Hanssen had spied for the Russians. In fact, the FBI has released an unusually voluminous account of what it says was Mr. Hanssen's espionage, apparently based on secret Russian documents handed over to the United States.

Far more revealing than that debate, however, is the Russian official's disclosure, for the first time, that Moscow had in fact shut down an American effort to monitor activities inside its Washington embassy.

"According to the source, about 10 years ago Russian specialists found and liquidated a well-thought-out system of eavesdropping on the Soviet and then Russian embassy," the report stated. "To carry out radio-electronic espionage against Russian diplomats, the U.S.A. used communications wells and pipelines, and also the load-bearing supports under the Russian embassy in Washington."

Despite the denial, that would appear to confirm, at least indirectly, that the United States had gone beneath the embassy to attach monitoring devices. Virtually all Russia was on holiday today observing International Women's Day, and officials could not be reached for comment on the report.

The Washington embassy building was half of a deal struck between Moscow and Washington in the 1970's under which both nations won the rights to build new embassies in each other's capital. The American building, erected in the mid-1980's with Soviet labor, was subsequently found to be so thoroughly riddled with eavesdropping devices that American workers eventually lopped off and rebuilt the top two floors to guarantee a secure space for intelligence and diplomatic workers. It opened only last year.

The Soviet embassy in Washington was the object of repeated rows in the 1980's over whether its location atop one of central Washington's highest hills gave Moscow too choice a spot for intercepting radio and telephone signals.

Mr. Hansen, a 25-year veteran of the FBI, is accused of spying for the Russians since October 1985. As a senior official in the bureau's Soviet and later Russian counterintelligence section, he is believed by prosecutors to have betrayed a vast array of American counterintelligence techniques and operations, as well as the names of Russians who were giving the FBI information.

---

Recent Major U.S. Espionage Cases

Thursday, March 8, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41612-2001Mar8?language=printer

• Former CIA agent David H. Barnett pleaded guilty in 1980 to spying for the Soviet Union between 1976 and 1979 while based in Indonesia. The first current or former CIA agent convicted of espionage, Barnett admitted exposing the identities of 30 U.S. agents.

• Richard William Miller was a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who was arrested for passing classified documents to two pro-Soviet immigrants, who also were arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Miller pleaded innocent, saying he was trying to infiltrate the KGB. His first trial ended in a mistrial, but he was found guilty in second trial in 1986. That verdict was overturned in 1989 on a technicality. In a third trial, he was convicted again and sentenced to 20 years in 1991. He was released in 1994 after a federal judge reduced his sentence.

• Former CIA clerk Sharon Scranage pleaded guilty in 1985 to disclosing the names of U.S. agents to her Ghanaian boyfriend. Scranage served the CIA in Ghana.

• Former CIA officer Edward Lee Howard fled the country in 1985 as the FBI was investigating him for spying for the Soviet Union. Howard, who is accused of disclosing the identities of CIA agents in Moscow, turned up in the Soviet Union in 1986, where he still lives. He eluded FBI surveillance of his home in Santa Fe, N.M., where he worked for the New Mexico Legislature.

The CIA withheld from the FBI its suspicions about Howard, who had been fired in 1983 after failing a lie-detector test.

• Retired Navy Warrant Officer John A. Walker Jr. pleaded guilty in 1985 along with his son, Navy Seaman Michael L. Walker, 22, to charges of spying for the Soviet Union. Walker admitted passing secrets to the Soviets while he was a shipboard communications officer and after his retirement by recruiting his son, brother and a friend to provide fresh information.

Walker's brother, Arthur Walker, a retired Navy lieutenant commander, was convicted in 1985 of stealing secret documents from a defense contractor and giving them to John A. Walker Jr. for delivery to the Soviets.

Another member of the ring, Jerry A. Whitworth, a Navy chief petty officer, was convicted in 1986 of passing secret Navy codes to Walker.

• Former National Security Agency employee Ronald W. Pelton was convicted in 1986 of selling top-secret signals intelligence information to the Soviet Union.

• Jonathan Jay Pollard, a civilian Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in 1986 to spying for Israel. He is serving a life sentence, which President Clinton refused to commute despite pleas from the Israeli government.

• Foreign Service officer Felix Bloch was suspended in 1989 by the State Department after reportedly being monitored by video camera passing a suitcase to a Soviet agent in Paris. Bloch, who was once charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, was not charged with espionage, but was fired in 1990 on the grounds that he lied to investigators.

• Aldrich H. Ames, a CIA counterintelligence official, and his wife, Rosario, pleaded guilty in 1994 to spying for the Soviet Union in the most damaging espionage case in U.S. history. Ames passed information to the Soviets from 1985 to 1994, including the identities of U.S. agents. He is blamed for the deaths of at least nine U.S. agents in the Soviet Union, and for disclosing U.S. counterintelligence techniques.

• CIA Officer Harold James Nicholson was arrested by the FBI in November 1996 and charged with committing espionage on behalf of Russia. Nicholson was arrested at a Washington airport en route to a clandestine meeting in Europe with his Russian intelligence handlers. At the time of his arrest, he was carrying rolls of exposed film which contained Secret and Top Secret information. In March 1997, Nicholson pleaded guilty to the charges, and he was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

• A 13-year veteran of the FBI, Earl Edwin Pitts contacted the KGB in 1987 to offer his services and continued selling secrets to the Russians until 1992. He supposedly received $224,000 for his services. Tipped off by a Russian double agent, the FBI launched a sting operation of Pitts in 1995 in which agents posing as his Russian handlers paid Pitts $65,000 in exchange for classified FBI information. Arrested in December 1996, the 43-year-old Pitts pleaded guilty to espionage charges in 1997 and was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

• A former Army signals analyst for the National Security Agency, David Boone was arrested in October 1998 and charged with selling classified documents to the Soviet Union between 1988 and 1991, including a list of Russian sites targeted by U.S. nuclear weapons. According to the FBI, Boone was under financial difficulties and volunteered his services to the Soviets by walking into the Soviet Embassy in Washington in October 1988.

Boone was indicted on three counts of espionage. In December 1998, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, and in February 1999, he was sentenced to 24 years and four months in prison. Under a plea agreement, Boone was also required to forfeit $52,000 and a hand-held scanner he used to copy documents.

• Wen Ho Lee was accused of spying for the Chinese in his job as a physicist at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, nuclear laboratory. Lee was arrested December 10, 1999, after allegations surfaced that he had downloaded classified information at the laboratory. A 59-count federal indictment alleged that Lee failed to safeguard classified information adequately by downloading top secret data into a nonsecure computer, but it did not accuse him of spying for China or any other country. He was ordered to await trial in jail without bail.

While Lee was imprisoned, the government's case came under increasing criticism. Asian-American groups accused the government of prosecuting Lee because of his Asian heritage. The government's credibility also suffered when FBI agent Robert Messier testified that he gave false testimony when Lee was ordered to be held without bail. The case against Lee ended when he pleaded guilty September 13, 2000, to one charge of mishandling classified information in exchange for the government dropping the remaining 58 counts.

• George Trofimoff, a retired Army Reserve colonel, was accused last year of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia for a quarter of a century. He is the highest-ranking U.S. military officer ever charged with espionage. He allegedly photographed U.S. documents and passed the film to KGB agents, and was later recruited into the KGB.

Sources: Associated Press, U.S. Defense Security Services

-------- terrorism

Embassy Bombing Witnesses Recall Blood, Smoke and Chaos

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By ALAN FEUER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/world/08TERR.html

It is shocking how long it takes to read aloud the names, ages and sex of 213 dead people. It takes 20 minutes, give or take a minute or two. It is a painful thing to hear. It happened yesterday at the embassy bombings trial.

The names read aloud were those who perished in the terrorist blast that destroyed the American Embassy in Kenya on Aug. 7, 1998. A prosecutor stood at a lectern in Federal District Court in Manhattan and pronounced each one in a solemn voice. Reading the list, a government exhibit, he started with, "Bonita Achola. Age 22. Female." He ended with, "Uttamlal Thomas Shah. Age 37. Male."

The trial has now entered its fifth week, but the reading of the names - a death poem chilling in its utter plainness - was the first time that all the victims of the Nairobi bombing were mentioned in open court. At least one juror cried as the names struggled to reach the high ceilings of Courtroom 318. The four defendants showed little reaction. They scratched their eyes or played with their pens or stared into space.

The four men - Wadih El-Hage, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh and Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali - have been accused of joining with Osama bin Laden in a terrorist conspiracy that led to the bombing of the Nairobi embassy and a nearly simultaneous blast that destroyed the American Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 11 more.

Mr. al-'Owhali was the focus of the afternoon session as a federal agent testified that he had confessed to riding in the bomb truck to the Nairobi embassy and being present as the bomb went off. But the morning was given over to eyewitness accounts of the grisly attack, horror and death.

Frank Pressley, an American, was working as the information management officer at the embassy on the day of the bombing. He had just finished helping a colleague fix her fax machine when, out of the blue, the bomb went off.

"Suddenly I was flying," he said. "Something picked me up and I went flying through the air."

The force of the blast knocked Mr. Pressley against the wall and to the ground. He would eventually lose part of his shoulder and a section of his jaw in surgery. But on that day, when he finally got up and made his way to the hall, it was not his jaw or shoulder but his eyes, and what they saw, that caused the most pain.

"There were chunks of blood like red meat on the walls," he recalled, laboring to maintain his poise. "It was pretty shocking."

In all, a dozen eyewitnesses were called to the stand, and the stories they told were filled with decapitated bodies, disembodied legs, blood, smoke, chaos and despair. Their recollections proved that there is no ominous soundtrack to warn of terror in real life.

George Mimba was supposed to take a business trip on the day the huge explosion came. He had just told a co-worker that he would bring back a dress for her when suddenly he was hurtling through the air.

He landed and could not see because of the smoke. Neither could he breathe. He started to pray, "Oh Lord, just take my soul." He thought the apocalypse had come.

Mr. Mimba, a Kenyan, worked in the embassy's information office, and his first instinct was to reach for his identification card. "I fumbled for my ID," he said. "My brothers and father loved me so much, and I wanted them to know my body."

Although he finally escaped, Mr. Mimba heard the voices of the dying calling for help. He went back into the smoldering building, "fumbling," he said, "for anyone I could get."

He heard their pleas: "`George? George? Please help me.'" He reached out blindly to pull a woman to safety, then realized it was a man.

"But the lady's voice kept coming," he recalled. "It's been haunting me. I really want to know if she survived."

There may have been no soundtrack warning people like Mr. Mimba that a bomb was about to explode, but as the eyewitnesses testified yesterday, a keening wind from a nearby air shaft whistled mournfully through the room.

The wind was silent by the time Stephen Gaudin, an F.B.I. agent, took the stand. Agent Gaudin told the jury that two weeks after the Nairobi bombing, Mr. al-'Owhali, at 24 the youngest defendant, was in custody and had confessed to taking part in the attack.

If convicted, Mr. al-'Owhali could face the death penalty. Mr. Gaudin said that Mr. al-'Owhali had expected to die in the bombing. His mission, the agent testified, was to ride in the truck with the bomb to the embassy, then stun the guards with grenades and gunshots so the truck could get close to the embassy walls.

Mr. al-'Owhali traveled to the embassy on the day of the attack with a partner referred to only as Azzam, who was driving. On the way, Agent Gaudin said, the two men listened to "chanting poems for motivation" on the tape deck in the truck.

The bomb was packed in the back of the truck in wooden crates, the agent said. He added that Mr. al- 'Owhali told him of a contingency plan: if the electrical detonator failed to work, it was Mr. al-'Owhali's job to toss a grenade in back to ensure that the bomb went off.

At the embassy, Agent Gaudin said, Azzam drove the truck to a parking lot in back. Mr. al-'Owhali jumped out, the agent went on, ready to shoot at the military guard.

There was a problem, Agent Gaudin said: Mr. al-'Owhali suddenly realized that he had left his pistol in the truck. So he tossed a grenade at the guard, the agent testified, and people began to run.

Although Mr. al-'Owhali was ready to die, Agent Gaudin said, it dawned on him that the truck was near the embassy and his mission was done. "To die after a mission was already complete," the agent said, "is not martyrdom. It's suicide."

So Mr. al-'Owhali ran. The bomb went off and he was injured. He was arrested five days later, Agent Gaudin said, and during hours of interrogation, eventually confessed.

At the end of his interrogation, Mr. al-'Owhali was shown a picture of Azzam, which he brought to his lips and kissed, Agent Gaudin said. He started to chant, the agent added, and explained that the chant "questioned whether or not two friends will ever meet again in paradise."

"As al-'Owhali reflected on his friendship with Azzam and this chanting poem," the agent went on, "al-'Owhali began to cry."

-------- activists

Swoosh Wars In an operation modeled on the Clinton campaign machine,
Nike takes on its enemies

Thu, 8 Mar 2001
NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL
By Tony Emerson

March 12 issue - The campus radicals met their shadow from Nike in Chicago. It was day six of a barnstorming summer "Truth Tour," accusing Niketown megastores of selling sneakers and clothes made in sweatshops.

STARTING OUT FROM New York, the 10 college activists had planned excitedly for a daily Webcast of their coming adventure, modeled on MTV's "Road Rules." But as they motored west in a big recreational vehicle, they grew increasingly bewildered that Nike managed to call out the local police to foil their every rally. Finally, banished to the street outside Niketown Chicago, Carrie Brunk spotted a lean man with salt-and-pepper hair who stood out in a motley crowd chanting anti-Nike slogans. "He was wearing the Nike corporate-casual line-you know, with the swoosh on the collar. Real sharp," says Brunk. "Frankly, we were amazed they would send this bigwig from the corporate headquarters to follow 10 kids in an RV."

"When the students saw the growing security and police presence, it had a deterrent effect, and I think it went very smoothly. Nike approaches this as it approaches everything-as competition. And we aim to win."

- VADA MANAGER Nike director of global issues management The elegant gentleman introduced himself as Vada Manager, Nike director of global issues management, but the students still had no idea what they were up against.

Over the course of the 13-day tour, a NEWSWEEK reporter interviewed dozens of students, fellow activists and company officials, assembling an inside look at one battle in the running war between anti-globalization protesters and one of their favorite targets, the world's largest shoe and apparel company. While rivals lie low, Nike has launched a counteroffensive true to its "in your face" culture. A longtime Washington operative, Manager says he was hired by Nike in 1997 to provide "political insight and strategy." Using the "permanent campaign" of the Clinton White House as a model, Manager now answers every attack, no matter how small, from unions and activists to the United Students Against Sweatshops, who organized the summer Truth Tour. Behind the scenes, Manager taps a network of campus allies for "direct intelligence" on the student movement. Tipped off in advance, he dispatched teams of senior sales and security executives to head off the Truth Tour at every store on its route. He alerted police to the identity of the students and to be ready for violence, and took some satisfaction when the tour fell apart before reaching its final target: Nike headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. "When the students saw the growing security and police presence, it had a deterrent effect, and I think it went very smoothly," says Manager. "Nike approaches this as it approaches everything-as competition. And we aim to win."

STORMING NIKETOWN

Inside the Nike campus, set on 174 verdant acres behind a high earthen wall, executives described the students as tools of far more powerful forces. Exposes about long hours, child labor and toxic glues at factories used by Nike first linked it to the "sweatshop" charge in 1992. Nike quickly became what Manager calls "the poster corporation" of the emerging anti-globalization movement, targeted for its size, fame and worldwide reach. By 1998 the sweatshop cause had taken hold on U.S. campuses, mingling on occasion with union protests at Niketowns. By the time black-suited anarchists stormed Niketown Seattle during the World Trade Organization summit in December 1999, Manager was waiting inside with extra security, escape routes at the ready and a sense that students, anarchists and unions were now part of one broad anti-Nike front. "It saddens me," says Nike VP for corporate responsibility Dusty Kidd. "I think one day the students will wake up and realize they've been used by their mentors in the union movement."

The counteroffensive came straight from the top. In an office overlooking Lake Nike at the heart of his campus, founder and chairman Phil Knight says he decided in late 1997 to seize "the initiative" against protesters out to trash the brand he once called "my novel, my painting." It was a dark time for Nike. After tripling in the 1990s to more than $9 billion, Nike sales had hit a plateau. Shares were falling, morale was tanking and sweatshop activists were at the gate with a 40-foot cutout of Knight, "corporate villain." Debate erupted inside Nike over whether to abandon collegiate apparel, rather than risk further controversy in a niche that provides only about 1 percent of Nike sales. Rival brands were lying low or pulling out of the college market-an option Knight rejected. "The students are just one of the weird anti-globalization bedfellows who have made Nike their main target from the beginning, and they're not going away," says Knight. "This is going to be a long fight, but I'm confident the truth will win in the end."

The risks seemed obvious. "It's interesting Nike has chosen to take on these students, who represent their core young customers," says Atlanta brand consultant Alicia Reiss. "In the long run, they risk alienating youth, subtly eroding the brand." Interesting, but no surprise. Nike had revolutionized the $2.5 billion college-apparel market by signing multimillion-dollar marketing deals that allowed it to place its trademark swoosh on the uniforms and stadiums of nearly all the top collegiate sports teams in America. For Nike, retreat would have been high-profile humiliation. "Nike had a choice, fight back or sit back and take it," says Mike Pallerino, editor of Sports Trend Info. "And remember, this is Nike. They don't f-k around."

'THE GREAT SATAN' SPEAKS

Working from a "war room" in Beaverton, a team of Nike executives came up with a plan. They would set the "industry standard" for sweatshop reform, and promote it with Nike's famous attitude. On May 8, 1998, Knight delivered his first speech in Washington, introducing himself sarcastically to the National Press Club as "the great Satan." Knight acknowledged past problems in Nike's network of 700 contract factories overseas, and unveiled a package of reform, including a minimum working age of 16, maximum weekly hours of 50 and inspectors to police the new rules. Inside Nike, the speech was a "watershed event" that required "a sea change in the company culture," says Knight.

In short, a company that still thinks of itself as an Oregon maverick entered politics. The war-room team became a standing operation and beefed up its Washington lobby. Manager has broad power to assemble "virtual teams" of executives and outside consultants to respond to any challenge. He hired pollsters to study the sweatshop controversy, and says the results so far show that while "many" consumers do associate Nike with sweatshops, a "negligible" few care enough to stop buying Nikes. In a series of ads in major college newspapers, Nike invited students on Truth Tours to see Nike factories for themselves, and spoofed anyone who would get facts from "the guy carrying a poster and chanting, 'Nike sucks'." "This is out of the Clinton playbook: leave no charge unanswered, control the agenda," says Manager, 39 and a veteran of four Democratic presidential campaigns.

Meanwhile, Nike threw its weight behind White House plans for a watchdog group to certify clothes made in "clean factories." Knight and other industry leaders created the Fair Labor Association in a Rose Garden ceremony with Bill Clinton in February 1999, and the response was swift. Dismissing the White House plan as "PR cover for Nike," the United Students Against Sweatshops mobilized to demand that schools give workers and students power to inspect factories making collegiate apparel for Nike and other brands. They built a shantytown at Yale, occupied administration buildings at Michigan and Wisconsin, chained themselves together by the neck in a boardroom at Kentucky. As the protests swelled into the biggest campus uprising since the early 1980s, Nike was the only manufacturer to answer in public. When the University of Oregon said it would agree to the USAS inspection plan, Knight withdrew a $30 million personal gift and lashed out at the school-his alma mater-for "meddling in the world economy where I make my living."

CONFRONTATION ON 57TH STREET

Realizing they could get a rise out of Knight and angered by his "condescension and arrogance," the USAS decided to launch its own Truth Tour against Nike. Things got ugly on day one, Aug. 3, in New York. The students pulled up outside Niketown on 57th Street in an RV rented and driven by members of the needleworkers union. Before they could drop a single banner, dozens of burly Nike security officers swooped in, setting off a melee that spilled over five floors of the megastore and left one needleworkers organizer, Jim Grogan, with a cracked rib.

Manager got advance notice of the tour through a network of paid student sales reps and friendly administrators at more than 200 universities with Nike apparel deals. He monitors college papers and anti-sweatshop Web sites, and describes listening on the phone while administrators report on anti-Nike protests outside their windows. "I've never called Nike in alarm, but we do watch," says Mike Low, licensing director at the University of Arizona, a major Nike school. In talks with Nike, Low says, he has broken down the student movement into three strains: "good-hearted liberals," "hateful radicals" and "anarchists who just want to destroy things."

That last group worries Nike most. Since 1997 there have been 40 to 50 protests at Niketowns. Last year anarchists lit firecrackers, smashed pumpkins and tossed clothes racks inside an Oregon store. In fact, such "in-store actions" have grown so common, says Manager, that "we have pretty good relations with police desk officers in all the cities where there are Niketowns."

AN INTIMIDATING WELCOME

It was easy to prepare an intimidating welcome for the Truth Tour. The Nike team took videotape of the New York fracas and relayed it, along with bios of the RV activists (downloaded from the Truth Tour Web site), to police all along the route. In Chicago, Nike hired off-duty police to beef up security, and they greeted several startled Truth Tour protesters by name before hustling them out. "They were like, 'Hello, Carrie, you're not welcome in the store today'," says Carrie Brunk.

The tour sputtered to a stop at a USAS organizing conference in Eugene, Oregon, where leaders of the movement predicted Nike's "crackdown" would only inspire wider protests this spring. A day later, five Truth Tour stragglers arrived on the Nike campus for a final showdown. They drew shocked stares in their black anti-sweatshop T shirts and immediately asked the war-room team to "just sit and listen." They demanded, among other things, that Nike "stop criminalizing student activists." Steaming, the Nike executives demanded "some respect" and a chance to defend their factory record. Kidd offered to work "as partners" against sweatshops. With an incredulous wave at the coffee and cookies, Brunk snapped, "You try to make it all cozy here, but you just had police follow and harass us across the country!"

Nike won't back off. "It's just not in the culture here to retreat, or to keep your mouth shut," says war-room team member Amanda Tucker. Manager says his political polling and intelligence tell him the students are a "marginal" group who arouse little sympathy from peers or consumers. And he fully expects further clashes. As Manager escorted the protesters to the front gate, he muttered, almost to himself, "Well, I'm sure we'll be talking again. Just mix it up."

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CONFRONTING THE WORLD'S MOST DESTRUCTIVE BANK

Thu, 8 Mar 2001

THE PEOPLE vs CITIGROUP
APRIL 11TH GLOBAL SHOWDOWN! Day of Action!

A call for creative non-violent action! Whether its civil disobedience, mass credit card cut-ups, teach-ins, shareholder activism, demonstrations, phone zaps, fax blasts, press conferences, guerilla theater, informational pickets or whatever - take action against CITIGROUP on April 11th.

FOR MORE INFO, TO GET AN ORGANIZING PACKET OR TO CONNECT WITH LOCAL ACTIVISTS IN YOUR AREA CONTACT RAINFOREST ACTION NETWORK:

NY - Beka Economopoulos beka@ran.org, 917-560-3609/888-840-6416 or
SF - Patrick Reinsborough organize@ran.org, 415-398-4404/800-989-RAIN

-

Citi has over 1200 branches and offices around the US and office in over 100 countries around the world. Find your local subsidiary and ORGANIZE LOCALLY! :

http://www.citibank.com/branches/
http://www.citifinancial.com/branchlocator/
http://www.salomonsmithbarney.com/abt_sb/brnchloc.html

-

Are you sick of corporate globalization and all the environmental destruction, poverty and injustice it is creating? Sick of undemocratic Free Trade agreements like NAFTA, WTO and FTAA being rammed down your throat? Are you ready to stand up to the system of global destruction that put the interests of corporate elites ahead of local communities, workers, farmers, the environment and democratic decision-making? Can you envision a global society based on justice, democracy and ecological sanity? Well then it sounds like you are ready to go for the jugular of the corporate global economy - and take on the world's most destructive bank - CITIGROUP.

CITIGROUP is America's largest financial institution made up of Citibank, Citifinancial, Traveler's insurance and investment house Salomon Smith Barney (now called Citi Asset Management). From rainforest destruction to redlining, prisons to pollution Citi is the world's most destructive bank.

A few examples of what Citi has been involved in -

FOREST DESTRUCTION Mining in the Amazon. Clear-cutting rainforests in Indonesia. Liquidating California's last ancient redwoods.

FOSSIL FUELS Drilling in Venezuela's fragile Orinoco River Delta. Helping Exxon-Mobil and the repressive governments of Chad and Cameroon build a massive oil pipeline. ECONOMIC INJUSTICE From predatory lending to redlining communities of color to strangling poor nations with crippling debt payments.

HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS Involved in China's Three Gorges Dam which will displace 2 million people. Underwriting the Colombian government despite their horrible track record on human rights.

GENETIC ENGINEERING Raising money for biotech investments. Promoting Genetically engineered trees. PRISONS Supporting the privatization of the prison industry through underwriting bonds for Wackenhut corporation ANTI-LABOR From laying off 10,000 workers to bankrolling strikebreaking companies to profiting from sweatshop labor, Citigroup's practices attack working people everywhere.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE CORRUPTION Citi has profited from the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington. Former Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin spearhead the effort to rewrite the laws to allow the Citibank/Travelers merger than left public office to become the Chairman of the Board of the newly formed Citigroup! While this was happening Citi spent over $18 million on lobbying and campaign contributions.

CITI is creating a global economy with no rules its up to all of us to unite for an economy where principles come before corporate profits!

Demand that Citi go BEYOND THE BOTTOMLINE to stop investing in the destruction of the environment and communities around the world.

CITI is uniquely vulnerable to grassroots pressure because of their massive consumer presence and efforts to promote the Citi brandname.

They are terrified that the word will get out about their destructive

Practices. So let's organize people to cut up their Citi credit cards, switch their student loans, cancel their accounts And confront Citi at their local branches! Together we can send a strong message that you won't do business with the world's most destructive bank!

We want to hear from you with your questions, ideas, strategies, tactics or local research. To learn more, get involved, or endorse this campaign contact us:

NY - Beka Economopoulos beka@ran.org, 917-560-3609/888-840-6416 or
SF - Patrick Reinsborough organize@ran.org, 415-398-4404/800-989-RAIN

DON'T BE AFRAID TO THINK BIG. OUR TIMES DEMAND IT.

Beka Economopoulos Rainforest Action Network East Coast Grassroots Organizer http://www.ran.org 888-840-6416 office 917-560-3609 cell

"Only after the last tree has been cut down. Only after the last river has been poisoned. Only after the last fish has been caught. Only then you will find that money cannot be eaten." -- Cree Indian Proverb

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Daewoo Car Output Resumes Despite Protests

March 8, 2001
New York Times
By DON KIRK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/business/08KORE-BIZ.html

INCHON, South Korea, March 7 - Laid-off Daewoo Motor workers pounded columns of police officers with rocks, bricks and one or two Molotov cocktails today in the streets near the plant where they once worked in the Pupyong district of Inchon, about 20 miles west of Seoul, while car production resumed with little hindrance inside the gates.

The Korean Confederation of Trade Unions promised to expand the protest into a general movement against the government of President Kim Dae Jung, even as Daewoo Motor managers said they thought the worst of the protests was over.

"It will be impossible for the factory to return to normal," said Dan Byong Ho, president of the confederation. "They can only resume partial operations." Moreover, he told reporters in front of a Roman Catholic church where union leaders have set up a protest headquarters, "the factory will always need the police to protect the facilities."

The workers' words and acts of rage had no visible effect on production at the factory, which reopened today after three weeks of suspended operations while the company tried to sell excess inventory. Though the union was able to marshal many of the 1,750 workers whose jobs were eliminated during the suspension to join the protest, nearly all of the 7,000 workers still employed at the plant appeared to have reported for work.

They rode in to the plant on 100 buses from four pickup points early today, guarded by some of the 9,300 police officers deployed at the scene. About 200 people who tried to block some of the buses were briefly detained. Other protesters' efforts to get into the plant grounds were thwarted by police.

"Everything is going very well," said Kim Sung Soo, a company official. "Maybe they will demonstrate for a few more days, that's all."

The views of workers inside the plant contrasted sharply with those protesting outside on the most important issue facing them and the company, the efforts by the committee of creditors who now control the bankrupt company to sell it to General Motors. G.M. has said it is unwilling to make a firm offer while the company's labor problems remain unresolved.

"Most of the workers believe G.M. should take over Daewoo," said Jin Hyun Sik, chief of an assembly line where 105 workers were assembling Magnus and Leganza cars. "There's not much conflict."

Kim Myung Sun, a worker hammering trim onto Leganza doors as they moved down the line, was more equivocal. "I have very much mixed feelings," Mr. Kim said. "I'm upset because my friends are out there. Whether it's G.M. or another buyer, I just hope everything will work out all right."

But the union's leaders and the laid-off workers maintained that a G.M. takeover would spell disaster for Daewoo Motor, which has slipped from second to third place among South Korean motor vehicle manufacturers since collapsing under a debt load of more than $10 billion in mid-1999.

"G.M. will close this factory if they take over Daewoo," said Hwang Sung Jin, one of the dismissed workers taking part in the protest. "They want only the other plants," he said, referring to factories at Kunsan on the west coast and at Changwon in the south, which are much more modern than the 29-year-old Inchon plant. "We have to struggle for our survival, for our lives, for our nation," Mr. Hwang said. "I don't like foreigners to take over."

As South Korea struggles to realign its economy and cope with huge overhangs of debt, it has run into mounting resistance from unions whose members' jobs are threatened by cost-cutting. Bank workers have repeatedly protested government- mandated mergers in the banking industry, at one point trapping one bank's chief executive in his office for several days. Cutbacks in heavy industries like carmaking and shipbuilding, long a strength of the South Korean economy, have also ignited bitter reactions.

About 1,500 of the protesters outside the Daewoo plant today surprised the police by marching to the campus of the Inchon University of Education, about a mile from the plant, where they were joined by about 500 students waving flags and banners.

A scuffle broke out, and a dozen workers and students and six police officers were injured, none seriously, before the demonstrators suddenly halted. Protest leaders tried to redirect the march toward the Pupyong railway station, but lines of police officers blocked the way, and the protest dissolved.

"It's not just a fight against Daewoo Motor," said Mun Seong Hyeon, president of the Korea Metal Workers' Union, a principal member of the labor federation. "We will expand the issue in protest against the government of President Kim Dae Jung." Mr. Mun said protests would resume Thursday.

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LAYOFFS PROTESTED IN CHINA

March 8, 2001
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/08/business/08FOBR.html

More than 1,000 workers protested layoffs at the Shanghai Tyre and Rubber Company in an industrial suburb of Shanghai but were dispersed by the police. Such protests are becoming more common in China as the state cuts subsidies and banks cut off credit for money-losing government-owned enterprises like Shanghai Tyre, and they are likely to spread after China enters the World Trade Organization and competitive pressures increase. Zeng Peiyan, above, the head of China's State Planning Commission, said that he expected bankruptcies to rise after the country joins the W.T.O. Craig S. Smith (NYT)

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