------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Clouds gather over Korean sunshine
While Beijing fumes
In splendid isolation Americans first
Food Irradiation Will Be Used
Many in the Scientific Community Are Opposed to Irradiation
In the Navy, size does matter
LET LABOR HANDLE NUCLEAR WORKERS' AID

MILITARY
Major Biker Bust Nets Drugs, Guns
U.N. Members Frustrated at Delay in U.S. Payments
Democrat criticizes Bush over drinking water
U.N., in Shift, Moves to Save Art for Afghans
Patriot Missile Apparently Passes Test

OTHER
Fingerprint May Soon Be Needed to Buy Groceries
EU: No Trade Retaliation Due U.S. Kyoto Refusal
Democrats Take Bush to Task Over Environment
No more Mr Nice Guy as Bush turns up the heat
Georgians seek changes in lumber imports
A Study of Lobster Deaths Will Test Pesticide Link
Bush Suspends Rule on U.S. Contracts
Hemisphere Conference Ends in Discord on Global Warming
Pigs Pass First Foot-and-Mouth Test
COLORADO: COYOTES ARE SPARED
Clinton Energy-Saving Rules Are Getting a Second Look
Proposal to Bar Altered Wheat Seems Doomed
Racial profiling on book shelves
Judge Is Rebuffed on Request to End Stop-and-Frisk Inquiry
Minority Legislators Urging Verniero to Quit After Hearing
CALIFORNIA: SECOND OFFICER PLEADS GUILTY
Defector Described as 'Walk-In'
Terror Suspect Fails in Effort to Move Other Trial

ACTIVISTS
Thousands Protest Against IMF in Turkey
When the wind blows
Thousands in Turkey demonstrate against government and IMF


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- korea

Clouds gather over Korean sunshine

The Age
Saturday 31 March 2001
By MICHAEL MILLETT
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/03/31/FFXIC29TWKC.html

An unseasonal chill, poetically dubbed by South Koreans as the "flower jealous snap", descended on Seoul this week, lacing the surrounding mountains with snow and subjecting its citizens to biting winds.

The depressing weather was an apt fit for the nation's mood.

South Korea is facing its most inhospitable climate since the Asian financial crisis pushed it perilously close to bankruptcy in 1997-98.

The domestic economy, lauded for its dramatic rebound after the crisis, has begun to falter amid concerns of a global slowdown and under the weight of its own internal problems.

This has big implications for Australia. South Korea may be dwarfed by neighboring Japan and China, but its demand for raw materials makes it our third largest export market and fourth largest trading partner.

The nation's chronically flawed political system continues to act as a drag on reform. So, too, are the decaying family dynasties that cling to power within the debt-ridden conglomerates, or chaebols that still dominate the corporate sector.

And - most worrying for the South Koreans - external threats are starting to re-emerge.

The heady days of last year's "twin-Kim" summit, when President Kim Dae-jung locked hands with his northern namesake, the enigmatic chairman of the Democratic Peoples' Republic of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, prompting talk of reconciliation between the two Koreas, seem a distant memory.

South Korean policy is now complicated by the emergence of a new Republican administration in Washington intent on playing what it calls "reality" diplomacy.

President George W.Bush set the tone during his summit with the visiting Mr Kim Dae-jung earlier this month.

Mr Bush expressed scepticism over his predecessor's attempts to negotiate a new deal with Pyongyang on phasing out its missile development program, signalling his intention to review the 1994 Agreed Framework - the deal underpinning the US strategy to deny Kim Jong-il nuclear capabilities.

Washington's Korea policy is now officially "under review".

It is unclear how far the Bush team will shift. Experts have pointed out that while the Agreed Framework is a Pyongyang-Washington deal, committing the West to supplying the North with heavy oil while work begins on two light-water reactors to replace the nuclear reactors planned by the North, its success depends on tight cooperation with US allies.

Still, the US seems unfazed by the torrent of criticism emanating from Pyongyang and by the hackles it is raising there and in nearby China and Russia over its determination to proceed with its controversial anti-missile shield.

The commander of the US forces in South Korea, General Thomas Schwartz, told a congressional committee this week that the North was more of a military threat now than a year ago.

Its regular army was "bigger, better, closer and deadlier".

Mr Bush's less than full endorsement of Kim Dae-jung's beloved "Sunshine Policy" of engagement with North Korea, plus his unease at the now aborted Seoul plan for a new peace treaty with Pyongyang, rocked the South, much more than was apparent at the time.

It was quickly followed by another psychological blow. The North abruptly pulled out of joint ministerial talks, apparently to demonstrate its annoyance at Washington.

Even pingpong diplomacy is suffering. Mid-week, Pyongyang abandoned plans to field an inter-Korean table tennis team in an international tournament in Japan next month. It would have been the first time in a decade that the two Koreas had combined on a sporting field.

Diplomats are now bracing for another round of anti-US sentiment in the South, as locals blame Washington for the deteriorating mood on the peninsula.

Kim Dae-jung now faces a seemingly impossible task trying to march lock-step with Washington while persevering with the policy that only a few months ago led to him being officially awarded with the Nobel Peace Prize.

The fear among security experts is that "something has to give".

"Differences between Seoul and Washington are not new," points out Yonsei University professor Lee Jung Hoon. "But in the past they have been motivated by domestic developments such as human rights abuses... For the first time, the two are not seeing eye to eye on the North for external reasons - changing US policy."

Another expert says we could be seeing an end to the Sunshine Policy as it succumbs to the twin pressures of US resistance and a lack of Korean money to fund it.

In a twist of roles, Seoul had to go cap in hand to Pyongyang to seek better terms for Hyundai's trail-blazing tourism venture into the North. Crippled with debt, Hyundai could not afford the charges levied by the North. This pessimism helps explain Mr Kim's determination - or desperation as some term it - to ensure that Chairman Kim makes his trip across the DMZ into South Korea within the next few months.

It could be a long wait for the summer warmth.

-------- missile defense

While Beijing fumes

The Age
Saturday 31 March 2001
By JOHN SCHAUBLE
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/03/31/FFXD029TWKC.html

Is George W. Bush barking up the wrong tree in Asia? China certainly thinks so.

The US President's decision last week to receive Japan's accident-prone Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori three days ahead of China's Vice-Premier Qian Qichen was no innocuous piece of diplomatic timetabling, but a clumsily delivered message about which regional power the US now sees as more important.

To underscore the point, Bush will visit both Japan and South Korea (President Kim Dae-jung made his call on Washington on March 7) before he heads to Shanghai in October for the APEC summit and then Beijing.

The best reason Bush could offer for bouncing Qian back down the visitor's list was that the US and Japan are the biggest economies in the world. Never mind that Mori's political future is likely to be as short as the northern spring. On top of its political woes, Japan's economy remains in the doldrums with the stock market at its lowest ebb in 17 years, coupled with a huge public debt. China's economy, in contrast, is growing steadily.

The presidential snub was not lost on Beijing, where officials were left fuming. In this part of the world, where form is often as important as substance, such matters are taken seriously and not quickly forgotten.

In the end, the talks appeared to go smoothly enough, with both sides making the appropriate noises to soothe their domestic constituencies. But the rocky road ahead has already been marked by a couple of bumps - the detention by Beijing of US-based academic Dr Gao Zhan on allegations of spying and the defection in Washington of People's Liberation Army Colonel Xu Junping.

In China, Bush is referred to as "Xiao Bushi" ("Little Bush", more politely rendered as "Bush junior") to distinguish him from his father "Lao Bushi" ("Bush senior"). Despite his conservative foreign policy approach, China enjoyed fairly warm relations with the father, who headed the US liaison office in Beijing in the mid-'70s. But for the moment, Beijing remains mystified by the son and the direction he intends to take.

Just two months into his administration, Bush still has his foreign policy training wheels on. The administration appears to be making up Asia policy on the fly - and it shows. About the only constant is a desire in the Bush camp to relegate China to a position of importance below that accorded to it during the second Clinton administration.

Bush is in the process of redefining the US-Sino relationship. It will no longer be the "strategic partnership" endorsed by Clinton. Instead, he has already said it will be that of "strategic competitors".

In so doing, he has reopened most of the sensitive issues that Clinton, in the final years of his presidency, had managed to cap - or at least cool. Foremost is the question of Taiwan, which the US has a legal responsibility under the Taiwan Relations Act to ply with arms. The election of Bush has re-elevated the contested island to the status of regional flashpoint.

Qian singled out Taiwan as the key issue in Sino-US relations in an address to the Asia Society in New York. "The Taiwan question is such a major one that it is actually the most important and sensitive issue in Sino-US relations," he said. "It must be taken seriously and handled properly." According to China, this means reunification of Taiwan with the mainland.

"We stand for peaceful reunification. That is to say, we will try to resolve the Taiwan issue by peaceful means," Qian said.

A close second in the sensitivity stakes is the broader question of regional security. Bush has a commitment to the pursuit of national missile defence and its concomitant theatre missile defence, under which it would provide a shield to regional allies such as Japan and Taiwan.

HUMAN rights, not normally high on the conservative agenda, has been lifted in importance in the US-Sino dialogue after Clinton managed to pay little more than lip-service while pushing the trade barrow.

More broadly in North Asia, Bush has signalled a halt to efforts to tease out a dialogue with the reclusive North Korean leadership, or so it seems. Secretary of State Colin Powell's declaration that the Bush administration would pick up on North Korea where Clinton left off was quickly hosed down, suggesting that the administration is itself not even sure where to go on this one. In his meeting with Kim Dae-jung, according to confusing accounts given later by officials, Bush expressed deep reservations about engaging North Korea, while expressing support for South Korea's attempts to forge closer ties.

Uncharacteristically, China has overtly taken the front foot in dealing with the new administration. Premier Zhu Rongji announced that Bush had been invited to make a state visit to China later this year.

Meanwhile, China's long-serving chief arms negotiator, Ambassador Sha Zukang, made it clear that any US moves to sell new-generation arms to Taiwan would provoke nothing short of a hostile response from the mainland. "We hate this idea," said Sha. "Taiwan is our territory. Arms sales to one part of a sovereign state is wrong."

Jin Canrong, research professor at the Institute of American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, believes the only thing certain about US China policy for the moment is its uncertainty.

He casts the new US policy towards China as the "three littles", a play on the "three nos" policy enunciated by Clinton (no two Chinas, no independence for Taiwan and no support for its membership of international bodies) quietly shelved this week by the new administration. Jin sees the new policy as the US being a little tougher, as casting China a little more as an adversary and China policy as a little lower as a priority.

"There has been no systematic explanation of the China policy," he says simply. "Although we can see some signs, the new administration's China policy is uncertain."

He believes China can accommodate the switch from "strategic partnership" to "strategic competitor". He rates it along a scale with "partnership" in the middle. In one direction is "friend, alliance and special alliance". In the other is "competitor, adversary and enemy".

"China at this point is on the right side. It is better than being an adversary, and certainly better than being an enemy," he says. Dr Xi Laiwang, deputy research fellow at China's Institute of Contemporary International Relations, believes little will change in substance. "All in all, the existing policy of `engagement plus precautions', with Bush junior's characteristics, will go on," he wrote in a recent issue of the Hong Kong magazine China Review. "Sino-US relations will tend to be at ease, but strained sometimes."

John Schauble is China correspondent for The Age.

-------

In splendid isolation Americans first ... George W. Bush.
George W. Bush's get-tough policies, including global warming, China and missiles, have world leaders re-examining their strategic alliances.

Sydney Morning Herald
03/31/01
Gay Alcorn, Simon Mann and Mick Millett report
http://www.smh.com.au/news/0103/31/review/review3.html

Thirteen Days is a Hollywood blockbuster which chronicles - with a "robust cast and pressure-cooker script"- the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But President George Bush, nearly four decades on from the events that took the US and Russia to the brink of war, has made a mockery of time.

In the space of just a week, he has raised the spectre of a return to Cold War posturing by expelling 50 Russian diplomats, trained America's guns on China and unilaterally torpedoed an international agreement to combat global warming, the real-life meteorological "white-knuckle" thriller that scientists say threatens life on Earth, no less.

The new President, whose first major foreign policy decision was to bomb Iraq, has also brushed off South Korea's "sunshine policy" with North Korea, embarrassing the South Korean leader, Kim Dae-jung, during his visit to Washington.

In two global flashpoints where the US has played intimate and pivotal roles - the Middle East and the Balkans - the Bush Administration has adopted an arms-length attitude.

And after assuring America's European allies that the US would not proceed with the development of a missile defence shield against attacks from "rogue states" without consultation, he dispatched Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Europe to say it would go ahead no matter what they thought.

Little more than two months into his presidency, Bush has the world - and traditional allies of the US - on edge. Old alliances are being rethought; checks and balances re-navigated; the attitudes of Clinton's America derisively cast aside.

Bush was asked at a media conference yesterday why "everyone is mad at us". Not true, he said, but "people are beginning to learn what my Administration is like". He would consult with allies, but the Kyoto treaty that would have required the world's biggest energy consumer to re-think its gas-guzzling habits would have harmed the economy.

"First things first - the people who live in America. That's my priority," Bush said.

"I think what you're seeing is the emerging of the U word - unilateralism," James Lindsay, a foreign affairs adviser to former president Bill Clinton, told the Herald.

Unilateralism is the idea that America, because of its power and role as the guardian of global peace, can exempt itself from international treaties and forums and go it alone.

The Clinton Administration attempted to forge a new post-Cold War role as a central player in world problems as diverse as Northern Ireland and AIDS.

The Bush Administration is seemingly less interested in solutions requiring international co-operation and American sacrifice. Northern Ireland and the Middle East can fix their own mess. The Balkans is Europe's problem.

Within a few short weeks, the Administration has dramatically changed the international environment, and the rest of the world is reeling from the shift. "It is not so surprising that this Administration is going to focus on doing what it sees as in America's interests," said Lindsay. "What is surprising is that they're not doing anything to make the medicine go down any easier. They are tone deaf when it comes to how they're being perceived across the world."

In Europe, where the "special relationship" with the US was the Western world's bulwark against Soviet communism throughout the Cold War, the significance of the change is beginning to dawn.

"We are not the centre of this White House's universe," concluded the London political commentator Peter Preston. "We have drifted towards bit parts on the peripheries. And what we do about it, in meek acquiescence or rediscovered independence, is down to us. In our world."

Japan, supposedly co-partners in the US's most important bilateral relationship, is also experiencing problems with the Bush Administration's initial policy forays.

While there have been strong signals, extending right back to the presidential campaign, that Bush, with his oil background and business connections, would find Kyoto hard to swallow, almost no-one expected a judgment as blunt and rapid as this one.

There was no attempt to even soften the blow to other countries, including Japan, trying to salvage the greenhouse process after the failed talks in The Hague last year.

Washington has also rocked Tokyo in other ways. There are heightened fears in Tokyo that the Bush Administration is serious about delivering on its ambitious agenda for Japan, including pressuring the nation to take more of an active security role in the region.

If Japan is nervous about Washington's initial policy forays, then South Korea, supposedly another pivotal partner, is seething. South Koreans believe Bush has boxed President Kim Dae-jung into a corner with his hardline stance on North Korea and his less than enthusiastic response for Kim's engagement policy with Pyongyang.

Needless to say, the criticism coming out of Beijing and Pyongyang is more public and more splenetic. The Administration has made no attempt to hide its view of China as "public enemy No 1", with Beijing replying in kind. North Korea is also stepping up its rhetoric, reviving venomous descriptions of "imperialist warmongers" and labelling Bush a "spoiled brat".

In Russia, President Vladimir Putin's past as a KGB spy has resulted in him being cast as a competitor, rather than a partner of the US, casting into history the brief special relationship fostered by Clinton and Yeltsin.

In the Middle East, as the gulf between Israel and the Palestinians grows and peace hopes die as the death toll rises, there is already serious questioning of the new US Administration's stand-back approach.

The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, is acutely aware of international perceptions and has appointed moderates to his department that broadly favour a foreign policy that differs only in nuance from that of the previous Democratic administration.

But, so far, Powell, who backs a stronger American response to global warming and a softening of sanctions against Iraq, has lost out to the hardliners in the Defence Department. Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz vehemently favour missile defence and want to support Iraqi opposition groups that aim to overthrow Saddam Hussein.

As well, while Bush is no isolationist, there is a conservative rump in the Republican Party which wants to withdraw now that the Cold War is over. The Defence Department is close to Vice-President Dick Cheney (Rumsfeld is his mentor), who is another foreign policy hardliner with huge authority in the Administration. The President's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, appears at this stage to be in their camp.

The moderates and conservatives are struggling to dominate the thinking of the President, who is inexperienced in foreign affairs. Republicans such as Chester Crocker, a former Ronald Reagan official, say that every administration shifts focus and this one would present a more realistic and consistent policy to the world.

He says Clinton spoke nicely to allies about the Kyoto treaty, knowing it had not a chance of getting through Congress (which rejected it in a 95-0 vote).

"During the Clinton years, we had a policy towards everything. If a mouse ran across the carpet we had an American plan for it and strong moral convictions about it."

But Bush's decision not to ratify the treaty, whether merely tactical in a bid to win greater concessions for US industry or something more sinister, has served to widen further the schism that is rapidly emerging between his Administration and Europe over a range of issues - the environment, defence, foreign policy and trade.

Bush, fear his erstwhile European partners, might just be the JR Ewing of global politics, riding roughshod over long-time allies and imposing his will on weaker parties.

So are relations between the US and its allies headed for a foreign policy train wreck? James Lindsay says there are potential long-term problems because an alliance, whether it be with Europe, Australia, Japan or South Korea, implies reciprocity.

"The expectation is not only that they can do something for the US, but also that the US can do something for them. And that expectation is changing."

For now differences are being sharply defined, not least by the row over Kyoto. Without the involvement of the US, the world's biggest energy user, accounting for about 30 per cent of total greenhouse emissions, the Kyoto process is going nowhere. No other country is going to sign up for legally binding controls on emissions knowing corporate America will be excluded.

While there have been strong signals, extending right back to the presidential campaign, that Bush would find Kyoto hard to swallow, almost no-one expected a judgment as blunt and rapid as this one.

There was no attempt to even soften the blow to other countries, including Japan, trying to salvage the greenhouse process after the failed talks in The Hague last year. It is a deep embarrassment to Japan, which, as host nation for the treaty, bears a significant responsibility for ensuring the protocol is implemented.

While Japan is as guilty as the US for tarrying over the commitments it made back in 1997, it takes its international obligations seriously. The two nations were also supposed to be helping each other on strategy as members of the so-called umbrella group (Australia is also a member) dedicated to foiling the European bloc's strategy for a "pure" implementation of the Kyoto targets for reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, there was no advance warning.

America's new, even tougher stance has placed fresh doubts over the planned resumption of negotiations in July in Bonn, Germany, ahead of the next full meeting of the parties to the Kyoto agreement, expected to be held in November in Morocco.

But the US is not the only one guilty of playing politics over this issue. Critics say Europe has been able to take the high ground by masking the poor performance of some of its members on greenhouse reform within a "bloc" target.

Other nations, like Australia, have conveniently used the American resistance as an excuse for their own dithering tactics. The Howard Government has consistently made it clear it would not ratify the protocol unless the US did first.

While it is technically possible for the other big players - Japan, Russia and Europe - to carry ratification, no-one believes the protocol can survive without the US.

And this highlights a much wider and more important point: no matter how influential the hardline "isolationists" in the Republican Party may be, the US cannot act in isolation. Whatever it decides - on issues ranging from saving the world from greenhouse gases to saving it from rogue nuclear states and terrorists - its decisions will reverberate around the world.

The question now is: how far will the Bush Administration take these reverberations into account when making its decisions?

-------- u.s. food irradiation

Food Irradiation Will Be Used
To Mask Filthy Slaughtering and Food Processing Practices

mercola.com
http://www.mercola.com/article/Diet/irradiated/irradiation_standard.htm

Food irradiation dose limit would be removed, health and safety regulations discarded under new plan, substandard food could be "treated" with high-dose radiation in unlicensed and dirty facilities.

A proposed international food irradiation standard wending its way through legal channels in Europe could jeopardize the quality and safety of food sold to United States consumers.

Under an international plan endorsed March 16, virtually every assurance that irradiated food will be of good quality, be handled by trained workers, and be processed under safe and clean conditions in government-inspected facilities would disappear. The proposal also would remove the international dose limit for food irradiation.

The proposal was endorsed in The Hague, Netherlands, by the Codex Committee on Food Additives and Contaminants (CCFAC), which advises the Codex Alimentarius ("Food Code") Commission. Operating under the auspices of the United Nations and World Health Organization (WHO), the Codex sets global food safety standards for more than 160 nations, representing about 97 percent of the world's population. The United States is one of the 160 nations.

"This proposal confirms that irradiation will be used to mask filthy slaughtering and food processing practices," said Wenonah Hauter, director of the Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program. "These antiquated ideas set back food safety more than 100 years, to a time when people routinely died from eating contaminated food. It is an outrage to the highest order. People throughout the world have cause for great worry."

Under international trade rules, countries that are members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) can challenge the standards of other countries by claiming the standards are trade barriers. If the WTO agrees, countries whose standards are challenged must amend the standard or face trade sanctions.

U.S. standards governing irradiated food are much stricter than what Codex is proposing. That means that if the Codex measure is approved, other countries could challenge US standards through the WTO.

A successful challenge could pressure the US to weaken its standards.

The proposal would amend the Codex's 22-year-old food irradiation standard by stating that food companies "should" rather than "shall" comply with the standards. Many of the changes were proposed without any advance notice and approved at meetings that were closed to the public.

Under the looser standards, irradiated food would no longer have to be "of suitable quality," in "acceptable hygienic condition," or "handled ... according to good manufacturing practices."

Additionally, food irradiation facilities would no longer have to comply with "safety" and "good hygiene practices," or be staffed by "adequate, trained and competent personnel." Nor would they have to be licensed or inspected by government officials, or maintain certain records on radioactive activities.

Also, food irradiation would no longer have to be carried out "commensurate with ... technological and public health purposes" or conducted "in accordance with good radiation processing practice."

The changes could place numerous US food and nuclear safety regulations at risk.

Among them are Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules requiring all irradiation facilities using radioactive material to be licensed and regularly inspected; Department of Agriculture rules requiring beef, pork and poultry products to meet certain quality standards; and USDA and Food and Drug Administration rules requiring food to be processed under hygienic conditions.

CCFAC also endorsed removing the current irradiation Codex dose limit of 10 kiloGray, which is the equivalent of about 330 million chest X-rays. When food is exposed to such doses of ionizing radiation, the flavor, texture, odor, nutritional integrity and chemical composition of food can change significantly. Very few of the new chemicals that are formed in irradiated food have been studied for toxicity. Most US foods are dosed with between 1 and 7.5 kiloGray.

One chemical that is a byproduct of the irradiation process, called 2-DCB, was found in 1998 to cause cellular and genetic damage in human and rat cells.

The WHO is continuing to research the potential toxicity and mutagenicity of the chemical, which is a radiation byproduct of a certain fatty acid found in beef, chicken, pork, lamb, duck, eggs, mangoes, papayas, peanuts, seafood and many other foods.

The 2-DCB studies were conducted in Germany, one of several European Union countries that is skeptical of the purported benefits of irradiation. At the recent meeting in The Hague, the German delegation objected to the CCFAC proposal.

The proposal is about halfway through the approval process. It next will be debated by the full Codex Commission, which meets July 2-7 in Geneva.

Public Citizen has been vigorously opposing efforts to weaken international food irradiation standards by organizing nongovernmental organizations and writing letters to Codex delegates. In February, Public Citizen sent letters of concern to all US delegates to CCFAC, all international delegates to the full Codex Commission, and to CCFAC Chair S.P.J. Hagenstein.

Public Citizen also has challenged the WHO's assertion that irradiated food is safe to eat by sending letters to top officials within the organization.

For more information on Public Citizen, visit www.citizen.org/cmep

DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:

I would encourage anyone in Illinois interested in this issue to contact Paul at 773-907-9845. Or you can sign on to his eGroup at ILirradiation-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

--------

Many in the Scientific Community Are Opposed to Irradiation

mercola.com
03/31/01
http://www.mercola.com/article/Diet/irradiated/irradiation_opposition.htm

Here is a sampling of what they have to say:

Yes, gamma rays can kill harmful bacteria in food, but one big problem is that they kill the helpful microflora, too. Bacteria are not just agents of disease.... One need not be a Luddite to recognize the cult of nuclear idolatry.

Geoffrey Sea, Director Atomic Reclamation and Conversion Project

There are potentially serious concerns about the issues of waste disposal, engineering safety, transport of radioactive material, production of new isotopes, handling by poorly trained personnel, and others we haven't even thought of yet.

Sheldon Margen, M.D. Professor Emeritus University of California, Berkeley

I am opposed to food irradiation because it is clear that this process increases the levels of mutagens and carcinogens in the food. The inevitable consequence of this is that in two to five decades in the future, the incidence of cancer will increase from what we see now, in direct proportion to the amounts of irradiated food consumed. Thus, food irradiation becomes very expensive both in terms of human lives, as well as health care costs.

George L. Tritsch, Ph.D. Roswell Park Cancer Institute Buffalo, NY

It is distressing to me that despite all the studies, many favorable and many unfavorable, the FDA utilized only five safety studies.

I looked in detail at two of those studies. Each raises considerable question. In one, the irradiated food was obtained from some other group and we are never actually given any data to show that the food was irradiated properly or even irradiated at all.

Additionally, the authors note an increase in abnormalities in dogs at autopsy and then seem to feel that the abnormalities they found were meaningless and should be ignored. In the other study from England, in the group receiving the food irradiated most, there were increased deaths in the offspring and this is completely ignored even though the authors say there is no explanation for it.

To me, it is somewhat amazing that these are listed as two of the five studies that are considered impeccable enough to be evaluated for safety. Those studies have considerable imperfections. For the FDA to selectively choose the five is, I believe, improper for deciding safety.

Donald B. Louria, MD University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey

I am not against food irradiation. I am opposed to the hype, some of which is voiced by people who should know better and therefore appear to be deliberate falsehoods.... I and others worked very hard trying to find a useful place for irradiation during the Atoms for Peace program. Unfortunately, we were not able to find it.

Noel F. Sommer, Ph.D., Emeritus Postharvest Pathologist University of California, Davis

The large scale irradiation of food, as proposed by the industry and administration, represents the largest prospective toxicological experiment in human populations in the history of public health.

Samuel S. Epstein, MD Professor of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, The University of Illinois at Chicago

What we do know with certainty is that irradiation causes a host of unnatural and sometimes unidentifiable chemicals to be formed within the irradiated foods, and that the number, kind, and permanence of these foreign chemical compounds depend on the food itself and the dose of radiation.

Our ignorance about these foreign compounds makes it simply a fraud to tell the public that we know irradiated foods would be safe to eat; it is dishonorable to trick people into buying irradiated foods, because such behavior is a violation of the basic human right.

John W. Gofman, MD, Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley

It has been shown repeatedly that mutagenic doses of formaldehyde are formed during irradiation of carbohydrate. Meat, although protein, also contains carbohydrates. Anyone can choose not to eat saturated fats and cholesterol, but once the food supply is supplemented with mutagens, it will take massive efforts to dislodge a well entrenched and financed industry which will deny to the end that it is responsible for the inevitable increase in neoplasia which in effect it has caused.

Furthermore, the organisms remaining in the irradiated food are by definition radiation resistant, and no work whatever has been done on what these new organisms populating the gastrointestinal tract and their progeny will do to man and the environment.

George L. Tritsch, Ph.D. Roswell Park Cancer Institute Buffalo, NY

First, since we do not know what we are seeking in the experiments, though they are designed with the best toxicological techniques available, they can not prove the safety of the irradiated food in question, but merely give us a measure of confidence that it is safe. The ultimate test will be in the human after lifetimes or generations of consumption.

Dr. Jacqueline Verrett former FDA toxicologist

These studies reviewed in the 1982 memo from the FDA were not adequate by 1982 standards, and are even less adequate by 1993 standards to evaluate the safety of any product, especially a food product such as irradiated foods.

Marcia van Gemert, Ph.D. Toxicologist and former chair of an FDA irradiation committee

Radiation is a carcinogen, mutagen, and teratogen. At doses of 100,000 rads to fruits and vegetables, the cells of the fruits and vegetables will be destroyed, but fungi, bacteria, and viruses growing on the fruits and vegetables will not all be killed or inactivated at these doses. They will be mutated, possibly leading to more virulent contaminants. Has anyone addressed this problem?

Geraldine Dettman, Ph.D. Radiation Safety Officer, Biosafety Officer, Brown University

Food and Water On-Line

COMMENT:

Food and Water does a great job of getting the truth out about irradiation. For more information about this topic, visit their Irradiation page on their website.

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

In the Navy, size does matter
Smaller, faster ships on the drawing board

MSNBC
By Michael Moran MSNBC
mailto:Michael.Moran@msnbc.com
http://www.msnbc.com/news/546846.asp?0sp=n5b2

NEWPORT, R.I. _ Consider the following scenario: It is August 2015 and the U.S. president receives reports that an American air base in the Mideast has been attacked. All evidence points to Iraq's Uday Hussein, son of the now deceased Saddam, as the mastermind. Unlike his father, Uday possesses a formidable arsenal of ballistic missiles and tactical nuclear weapons. What are the American president's options?

THE 2001 RESPONSE would probably involve America's giant aircraft carriers, floating cities that carry more air power than most air forces.

But in 2015, the idea of putting 5,000 American sailors in range of Iraq's latest missiles would be foolhardy. As formidable as they are, the Nimitz-class carriers simply can no longer venture close enough to shore to put Iraqi targets within range of their aircraft.

Nor can the president risk launching long-range missiles, fearing such a move could be mistaken by China or another nuclear rival as an attack on them. Finally, Stealth bombers that performed so well at the end of the last century have been compromised, too, their secrets leaked out in sloppy technology transfers.

THINKING SMALL

For a growing cadre of senior officers and military experts who appear to have Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's ear, the way to prevent this dilemma lies in "Streetfighters," a totally new class of smaller, faster, stealthier vessels that will expose a far smaller crew to the increasingly dangerous coastal waters of the nation's foes. These ships would be integrated in a single battlefield computer network, enabling commanders to move and strike with unprecedented precision.

In a series of exclusive interviews with MSNBC.com, Navy officials sketched out their vision of how a Streetfighter force might work and why, in the changing environment of the 21st century, the ships of the Cold War fleet may not suffice.

Among these vessels is a fast-moving missile attack ship built on a catamaran hull known as Sea Lance, along with a towed "arsenal barge" loaded with Tomahawk missiles. Sea Lance could operate with unmanned midget submarines and fast assault craft capable of moving 1,000 troops and their equipment in and out of battle zones at speeds of up to 50 knots.

The most dramatic proposal, and the one likely to prove most controversial for a service built around the big carriers, is a plan to build a new class of pocket aircraft carriers known as Corsairs. MSNBC.com has learned that the Navy envisions the Corsairs as a carrier of only 6,000 tons with a crew of about 20 sailors. It might carry only a half dozen Joint Strike Fighters, the aircraft now being developed for the Navy and Air Force. Ultimately, the Corsairs would field UCAVs - unmanned combat air vehicles.

An artist's conception of the Sea Lance, complete with a towed missile barge.

Vessels like the Sea Lance or the Corsair might be built on the order of several hundred million dollars, compared with the $4 billion price tag of a Nimitz carrier. Not only would it allow the Navy to operate in coastal waters even as the missile power of its foes increase; it would also allow the United States to provide air cover for smaller deployments like the peacekeeping missions in Haiti or East Timor - missions typical of the post-Cold War era that currently tend to divert a giant Nimitz-class carrier.

"The key is some balance of large deck areas and much smaller Streetfighter/Corsairs," said William Turcotte, chairman of the National Security Decision Making Department at the Naval War College in Rhode Island. "You could, with numbers of Streetfighter derivatives, take additional risk, spread the opponent's targeting problem and bring complex, distributed and (computer) networked fire power."

As one civilian expert put it more frankly: "No one wants to say it outright, but Streetfighter is a synonym for expendable. That sounds harsh, but war is harsh."

SEA CHANGE? Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski, president of the Naval War College, is Streetfighter's most passionate proponent. He views these ships as a means of bridging the gap between the great fleet of the Cold War, built to battle the Soviet Navy in deep water, and the new missions of the 21st century, which will often call for the Navy to strike at targets deep inland.

Last week, the Washington Post reported that Rumsfeld's review will recommend that the U.S. Navy stop building the big-deck Nimitz-class carriers that have been the focus of the fleet - and its budgets - for generations. Instead, the report will recommend that money be diverted to build smaller carriers that the Navy can afford to put at risk in the coastal waters of a foe bristling with missile forces of its own.

That approach echoes what Cebrowski has been saying for years. "In an age of missile proliferation, do you send a Nimitz into the Persian Gulf so its planes and missile ships are in range of their targets?" asked Cebrowski. "Not in 10 years, you don't."

The story on the Rumsfeld report ran through the fleet like an Exocet missile, sparking lively derision on Internet military bulletin boards and in chat rooms. Some in Congress, too, rose to defend the carriers - among them members of the Virginia delegation, home to the Navy's Atlantic Fleet headquarters and Newport News Shipbuilding, which has a contract to build CVN-77, the final Nimitz carrier.

Cebrowski and other supporters are quick to point out that the Corsairs are not meant to replace the large aircraft carriers.

"There still is no better way to show the flag, and certainly there is no better way to keep other world powers from thinking they can challenge the U.S. on the high seas," says Krepinevich. "Of course, the Navy remains dominated by carrier officers. As with the Army and all the services, the old-timers will make an argument that says, 'If it isn't broke, don't fix it. We've got the world's best military, we won the Cold War, what's the issue?'"

CATAMARAN AHOY

One way or another, Cebrowski and his supporters intend to press the argument. Cebrowski has asked the Navy for approval to lease a huge catamaran for experiments with the fleet.

The Australian Navy's HMAS Jervis Bay, a vessel that "stunned" the U.S. 7th Fleet last year during the East Timor peacekeeping operations.

One such ship, leased by the Australian Navy and put into service as the HMAS Jervis Bay, stunned U.S. Seventh Fleet personnel during peacekeeping operations around East Timor in 1999. The craft is built by INCAT, an Australian manufacturer that makes fast cargo haulers for the Pacific trade and is capable of hauling 1,000 troops and their equipment at speeds nearing 45 knots. That is more than twice the speed of any such vessel in the U.S. Navy, and when it arrived in East Timor, it unloaded at a pace the new class of Navy assault ships can't match.

In a military cable obtained by MSNBC.com, an officer on board the USS Tarawa, an American assault ship involved in the maneuvers with the Jervis Bay last year, gushed about its potential as a fast assault ship and even a platform for aircraft. "Ship self-defense systems combined with the ship's small radar cross section would make the catamaran less vulnerable to air threat. ... The craft has an unparalleled potential as a force multiplier."

None of this is likely to displace the role of the Nimitz-class carrier in the short-term. Even if CVN-77 turned out to be the last of its kind, it would join nine others launched since 1975. Given the big ships' long service life of up to 50 years, the Nimitz-class will be part of the fleet well into the 21st century.

Still, the idea that these behemoths might not be at the center of naval strategy is hard for many in the Navy to accept. And that sets the stage for a battle that pits those who see the carriers as increasingly vulnerable to cheap enemy missiles against those who command them, pilots who fly off them and the politicians whose districts build and play host to them.

Michael Moran is senior producer, special reports, at MSNBC. Part II of The Secret Empire, a look at the explosion in America's commitments abroad since the Cold War ended, appears next Thursday, April 5.

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

LET LABOR HANDLE NUCLEAR WORKERS' AID, LAWMAKERS SAY

Saturday, March 31, 2001
The Columbus Dispatch Online Archival Article (2)
By Jonathan Riskind Dispatch Washington Bureau Chief

WASHINGTON -- Several lawmakers are fuming about the Bush administration's apparent intent to shift responsibility for a federal program to compensate workers sickened by workplace conditions at nuclear plants during the Cold War.

Sen. George V. Voinovich, R-Ohio, and others say moving the program to the U.S. Justice Department from the Labor Department could interfere with getting timely aid to ailing workers and family members of deceased workers.

Despite lobbying by Voinovich, Rep. Ted Strickland, D-Lucasville, and lawmakers from other states, the White House Office of Management and Budget is circulating a draft executive order shifting the program to the Justice Department.

It could not be determined yesterday whether President Bush intends to sign the order. Officials from the Office of Management and Budget declined to comment; the office of Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao did not return calls.

But the draft order signals that Chao may be on the verge of winning her bid to dump responsibility for the program.

Chao says the Justice Department already runs a compensation program for sick uranium miners and therefore is better able to run the new program, which will provide $150,000 lump-sum payments and lifetime health care to potentially thousands of nuclear workers nationwide. Congress established the program last fall, and it is to go into effect July 31.

Among the recipients could be several hundred people at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, which enriched weapons- grade uranium during the Cold War.

Voinovich said the Labor Department already runs a variety of workers' compensation programs. The program for uranium miners is more of an "apology'' initiative, and the Justice Department isn't well-suited to running a formal program, he said.

The uranium-miners program also benefited civilians who were exposed to fallout from nuclear tests.

"While the federal government rearranges the deck chairs, the ship is sinkingfor a lot of people who served this country with dedication,'' Voinovich said. "We don't have time to figure out which agency can serve them best. . . . Justice will, I think, be overwhelmed, and people won't get the help they need.''

The most notable advocate for putting the program into the Justice Department has been Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Hatch, like Chao, says the program for nuclear workers would fit with the uranium- miners assistance.

But critics say the program for uranium miners has been underfunded and poorly run. They say Hatch, the architect of the legislation that created the program, is trying to rescue it by adding the nuclear workers' compensation program to the Justice Department's portfolio.

Strickland said shifting responsibility to the Justice Department now, when the program is supposed to be launched in a couple of months, would hang up assistance.

"This will undoubtedly slow down the process, I think, by months, if not a year or longer, in getting it going and getting resources to the people who are sick and dying,'' he said.

Caption: Sen. George V. Voinovich says the Labor Department should oversee the program.

-------- MILITARY

-------- drug war


Major Biker Bust Nets Drugs, Guns

Media Awareness Project
http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n570/a07.html
Sat, 31 Mar 2001
Edmonton Sun (CN AB)
Michael Wood and Mike D'Amour

MAJOR BIKER BUST NETS DRUGS, GUNS

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n570/a07.html

CALGARY -- In the biggest bust of its kind in Alberta, a massive early morning raid netted cops $1 million in dope, scads of weapons and resulted in the arrest of dozens of people - including nearly half the membership of the Calgary Hells Angels. "Not only is it large by Calgary standards, but by national standards as well," said Calgary police Insp. Murray Stooke.

The 11-month undercover operation ended yesterday when more than 200 Calgary police officers, Edmonton cops and Mounties executed 27 search warrants at separate locations, beginning about 4:30 a.m.

"We laid about 200 drug-and-weapon-related charges," said Calgary police Chief Jack Beaton.

Eight members of the 18-member strong Calgary Hells Angels and more than 30 club prospects and associates were charged with numerous drug and weapons charges following the nearly year-long investigation that saw undercover cops buying street drugs.

During the course of the investigation - either through more than 80 undercover drug buys, search warrants or arrests - police seized 11 kilograms of cocaine, four kilograms of marijuana and smaller amounts of methamphetamine, Valium, morphine and ecstasy.

They also nabbed several weapons including five handguns, an Israeli-made Uzi machine gun with a silencer, 11 rifles, a shotgun and a Taser stun gun.

The $2.5-million probe, dubbed "Operation Shadow," took police to spots in Calgary, Chestermere and Turner Valley.

Cops also hit one home south of Calgary where dozens of police, including TAC team members clad in bullet-proof vests, helmets and balaclavas, swooped down on a tiny farm house near Okotoks.

The local raid came just two days after similar raids in Quebec where 2,000 police officers swooped down on and arrested more than 100 Hells Angels.

Many of those rounded up made their first appearances before a judge via a special video link from prison.

They ranged from stereotypical tattooed, beefy bikers to a 77-year-old man who shuffled before the camera and told the judge he can't stay in jail because he's just had prostate surgery and is troubled by a hernia.

Police said they had been biting their nails, wondering if the Quebec arrests would prematurely spook those targeted in yesterday's raid.

The fact members of the local chapter - dubbed privately by some cops as The Apple Dumpling Gang - knew about the eastern raids but were still allegedly nabbed with drugs and guns baffled Beaton.

"Yes, we were surprised, but that told us they didn't know we were coming," he said.

Beaton said he had a mandate from the public to do something about the city's drug trade. "Calgarians have told us illegal drugs are one of their top concerns."

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

U.N. Members Frustrated at Delay in U.S. Payments

Yahoo News
Saturday March 31
By Evelyn Leopold
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010331/pl/un_budget_dc_2.html

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. members are getting increasingly impatient with Washington's delay in paying its debt to the world body following a deal that cut U.S. payments.

At meetings of a key U.N. financial committee during the week, several nations sharply criticized the United States, prompting Washington to issue a statement attributing the holdup to the U.S. legislative process.

South Korean Ambassador Lee Ho-Jin, for one, said he expected quick payment from the United States, noting that Seoul had had its contributions raised while Washington's were being lowered.

And Bagher Asadi of Iran, representing 130 developing nations in the so-called ``Group of 77,'' said, ``What everybody expected from the American administration and the American delegation was just to show their good faith and pay.''

Without the U.S. money, the United Nations cannot make a dent in the $910 million owed to countries who contribute troops and equipment, such as India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, Joseph Connor, the U.N. undersecretary-general for administration and management, told a Friday news conference.

Connor said that U.S. debts were mounting, having reached $1.4 billion at the end of December and increasing to at least $1.7 billion this year.

In response, Donald Hays, the U.S. envoy in charge of finances, delivered a statement to the delegates. ``Any further delay in payment is not a reflection of political opposition but rather a legislative process,'' he said.

New Rates Set

The 189-member U.N. General Assembly agreed in December to cut the U.S. share of the $1 billion annual administrative budget to 22 percent from 25 percent. The U.S. share of the $3 billion peacekeeping budget was reduced to 28 percent from 31 percent this year and will drop to a bit over 25 percent in several years.

In return, Washington, under a deal arranged by former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, was to keep up with its payments and release $582 million, the bulk of the $986 million earmarked for past debts to the world body.

While the U.S. Senate approved the amount in February, the House of Representatives has not done so, to the consternation of congressmen in both parties, who have appealed to House Speaker Denis Hastert. But there is no sign that he intends to rush the measure through.

In addition, there is still U.S. legislation on the books that limits all peacekeeping payments to 25 percent, even though the Holbrooke deal is for more than that. Without a repeal of the cap, the U.S. debt will continue to grow, leaving the United States open to losing its vote in the General Assembly.

Washington has given itself a unilateral discount of 25 percent on its peacekeeping payments since 1990, accounting for at least a $600 million difference between U.N. debt figures and those put out by the United States.

Connor noted that current unpaid assessments totaled $2.25 billion, the highest amount in four years, with the United States accounting for most of it.

Even the $31 million that media mogul Ted Turner promised to the State Department to make up for a shortfall in U.S. contributions this year has not been received, Connor said.

---

Democrat criticizes Bush over drinking water

USA Today
03/31/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-03-31-water.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush is leading a strategic assault on the environment after he announced plans to rescind a Clinton-era regulation limiting the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water, a Democratic governor said Saturday.

Washington Gov. Gary Locke said Bush is in the pocket of big business and is taking his cues from the energy industry.

"It is the wealthy donors and the special interests that helped put him in the White House who want to loosen environmental controls," Locke said in the Democrats' weekly radio address. "As a result, their problems are his problems, and the environmental regulations that are in their way, are in his way too."

The comments were in reaction to Bush's announcement this week that he will pursue a reduction in the amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water, but not before more scientific studies indicate where the level should be set.

The current standard, set in 1942, allows a maximum of 50 parts per billion. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency recommended reducing that to 5 parts per billion as demanded by many environmentalists, but President Clinton directed that the standard be set at 10 parts per billion.

The Bush administration says it will withdraw the Clinton standard, which would have taken effect later this year.

Health and environmental groups have been campaigning since 1996 to reduce the standard. The EPA acted as part of a court settlement after the National Academy of Sciences found in 1999 that arsenic in drinking water can cause bladder, lung and skin cancer, and might cause liver and kidney cancer.

Locke said Bush's action is just the latest in his "anti-environmental initiatives."

"On the campaign trail, then-Governor Bush promised that he would place limits on the level of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere," Locke said. "Right after he got into the White House, though, that pledge went out the window."

"Two days later, the president announced that he thought our national parks, such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, have great potential for oil drilling," the governor said. "We urge the president in the strongest terms to protect our environment."

-------

U.N., in Shift, Moves to Save Art for Afghans

New York Times
March 31, 2001
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/arts/31AFGH.html

As recently as last year, Afghans, including members of the ruling Taliban, were imploring outsiders to help protect the country's cultural heritage by taking away portable items for safekeeping, scholars say. But international cultural organizations and Western archeologists blocked their removal out of a longstanding concern for keeping artifacts in their historical settings.

Then came the Taliban's decision to destroy religious images, even those in museums, saying they were an offense to Islam. The shattering of the giant Buddhist statues in Bamiyan finally focused the world's attention on what has been lost in Afghanistan in more than two decades of civil war.

As a result, the world's leading cultural guardians have reversed a rigid 30-year-old policy. Yesterday Unesco joined scholars and a handful of museum curators and cultural preservationists who are trying to take Afghan art threatened by vandalism and looting to safety beyond its borders.

Christian Manhart, program director for Asia in Unesco's division of cultural heritage, said in an interview that the agency decided to support removing endangered art from Afghanistan only. "We are in an exceptional and very new situation, and this made us rethink," he said. "Our director general is very clear about this: he wants the safekeeping of these objects outside Afghanistan."

Unesco's director general, Koichiro Matsuura, said in Paris on Tuesday, "This general mobilization in favor of cultural heritage has transcended the boundaries between nationalities and religion." Next week he will go to Pakistan, where numerous missing Afghan treasures are thought to have been taken, many of them illegally, to discuss the Afghan cultural crisis and other issues with regional leaders. Mr. Matsuura, who is Japanese, has been promised financial help by Japan.

The missed opportunities to save Afghan's ancient art from theft and vandalism have rekindled a debate on when, if ever, cultural treasures should be removed from their historical settings.

Over the last century, especially as colonial empires were collapsing, an overriding principle was embraced by many archaeologists and enshrined in international conventions and the policies of organizations like Unesco: Artifacts should never be removed from a country, however poor or unstable it might be. Across Asia, Africa and the Mediterranean, governments and citizens campaigned to bring pillaged art back home.

But even ardent advocates of that principle now concede that, when applied to Afghanistan, the policy may have contributed to the ruin of some of the very treasures it was meant to protect. Museum officials and scholars say that despite repeated Afghan requests that priceless treasures be safeguarded over the last 20 years - during the decade-long Soviet occupation, and then amid civil war and fierce Islamic radicalism - virtually none were officially removed, although pieces have been regularly smuggled out for sale. Of particular concern was a priceless museum collection of ancient Greco-Afghan, Buddhist and Islamic treasures, including coins, small statues and Persian-style miniature paintings.

On each occasion, Unesco, Western archaeologists and the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage, a group formed in 1994 to raise awareness and money, opposed the removal of artifacts.

In interviews this week, several scholars told of recent thwarted efforts by Afghans to get help.

Paul Bucherer, director of a Biblioteca Afghanica, a foundation backed by the Swiss government, said he had been approached by Afghans on numerous occasions for aid in saving artifacts. The foundation opened a new museum last year in the Swiss town of Bubendorf to safeguard Afghan art that had been rescued or returned by collectors who didn't know it had been stolen.

In the last two years, Mr. Bucherer said, he has been visited by high-ranking representatives of both sides in the Afghan civil war, now confined to a small northeastern corner of the country not yet controled by the Taliban. The Taliban sent Qudratullah Jamal, its culture minister, and Jalil Ahmad, an adviser to the movement's supreme leader, the Emir Mohammed Omar. The president of the Afghan opposition, Burhanuddin Rabbani, went to Bubendorf a year earlier.

"There were requests from both sides to store artifacts temporarily in Switzerland and show them in some kind of museum," Mr. Bucherer said, adding that the Afghans seemed unsure what to do about their cultural heritage or indeed what it was. "They stressed very much that it shouldn't be in an existing foreign museum, but an Afghan museum in exile. It was not my idea. It was not a Swiss idea. It was not a Unesco idea. It was a pure Afghan idea."

On visits to Afghanistan last year, Mr. Bucherer said, he was "pressed very hard by Afghani officials to take things from the Kabul Museum." He told them that without a better security system, which his Swiss museum could not afford, he could not take the responsibility.

Turning to Unesco, he offered his museum as a pilot project for saving the endangered art. He ran into what he called "a very, very severe problem with Unesco," he said. "On one hand, they were willing to take this over as a pilot project for the very first time to take items out for protection. On the other hand, they had to be very careful not to create a precedent."

Talks between Unesco and the Swiss government were "terribly slow," he said. "We did not have the legal basis to take out these materials."

Mr. Manhart said today that Unesco backed Mr. Bucherer's project but that it had to be approved by the Swiss Foreign Ministry and that talks had been going on for nine months. "For him, things went too slowly," Mr. Manhart said of Mr. Bucherer. "But we are bound to the 1970 convention, and this made things very complicated." This United Nations convention restricts the removal of artifacts.

Mr. Bucherer said he had other requests. In 1989, just after Soviet troops withdrew, the government of Najibullah, the last Communist ruler of Afghanistan, asked Switzerland to take a rare collection from the ancient Bactrian kingdoms. Mr. Najibullah (who was later hanged from a lamppost by the Taliban) was overruled by his own ministers, who were backed by Afghan and foreign archaeologists.

In 1994 and 1995, when a fractious coalition of former anti-Soviet groups known the mujahedin were in control of Afghanistan and dividing up the spoils, Michael Barry, a scholar of Afghan culture who was working in the country, was among the experts approached for help. "The Afghan director of the Kabul Museum suggested that I submit to various international bodies a plan to ship everything of value out of the museum to a safe location in Europe or Japan under Unesco auspices, for return when conditions allowed," he said. "I was completely overruled by diplomats in Pakistan."

The Pakistani capital, Islamabad, is the regional base for international organizations working in Afghanistan.

Mr. Barry said that the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage told him that it would be better to move the collection to another building in Kabul. But in Kabul, he said, "The Afghans told me, `We fear the coming of the fundamentalists, and anything can happen.' "

Mr. Manhart said that in Unesco's experience, museums had been skittish about accepting works for safekeeping, especially institutions in Pakistan and France, which have been the targets of campaigns to return art already in their collections.

The society and Unesco were in the midst of moving the museum collection to the Kabul Hotel when the Taliban took the city in September 1996. At Unesco, Mr. Manhart said it would have been physically impossible to take the collection out of the country. "There were hundreds of huge boxes," he said. "There was no way of taking all these things out."

The steadfast opposition at Unesco and elsewhere against removing artifacts had its roots in efforts to reverse centuries of looting in the developing world and to help new nations build national identities.

Theo-Ben Gurirab, Namibia's foreign minister and a leading proponent for the return of African art from Europe's ethnographic collections, said that many of the missing artifacts played an integral role in spiritual life. "We talk to them. They talk to us," he said. "It is through them that the living spirits of our people, of our history, of our culture, interface and interact with us."

Vishakha Desai, senior vice president and director of the galleries at the Asia Society in New York, said: "There are a lot of collectors who are now saying that what the archaeologists have insisted - that you never can remove anything from a country - has just been thrown out the window."

But the issue is more complex, she said.

"What the whole Afghanistan question has done for all of us in the museum world is show that simplistic questions about cultural patrimony do not work," said Ms. Desai. "One has to begin to raise questions about how something is going to be preserved in the best possible way, and at the same time take into consideration what is the situation on the ground."

For Mr. Barry, the lesson is clear: "We can be a little too dogmatic with the notion of keeping things in a country regardless of the conditions."

In Afghanistan, he said, not only material artifacts have been lost but also a unique repository of knowledge about a distinctive civilization blending eastern Asian and Mediterranean influences that developed along the old trade routes that cross the country.

For example, the early Greco-Afghan kingdoms that arose in the region after the breakup of the empire of Alexander the Great around the middle of the third century B.C. produced an extraordinary culturally Greek city known now as Ay Khanum, near the northeastern finger of Afghanistan that reaches toward China.

The ruins of the city was not discovered until the 1960's, just after the Afghan government terminated a 1922 agreement under which French and Afghan teams were excavating and splitting the treasures between the Kabul Museum and the Musée Guimet, a leading Asian art collection in Paris.

Troves of essentially Greek-style gold and silver coins bearing the images of kings and gods all went to Kabul. "When I saw the Kabul Museum in 1994," Mr. Barry said, "all the coins were gone."

As time passed Buddhist kingdoms arose. "The Buddhist art of China, Korea and Japan is inconceivable without evidence provided by the Afghan workshops," Mr. Barry said. "Which means that the destruction of the evidence is not only an aesthetic crime, but also a scientific crime as ghastly as destroying paleontological evidence for certain steps in the formation of humanity itself."

"The consequences for Buddhists are appalling," he said. "But it is important for Westerners, too, because we were just beginning to research the profound influence of Buddhism on our own civilization through western Asia." Because little of value has been removed from Afghanistan for safekeeping elsewhere, he said, "there are now black holes in history."

"To me, to have been able to move these things under Unesco auspices could have saved these pieces and ultimately allowed for their return to a civilized Afghanistan again," he said. "Now what is destroyed is destroyed, irrevocably. Whatever survives of Afghanistan's artistic heritage survives in foreign collections."

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

Patriot Missile Apparently Passes Test

Albuquerque Journal
March 31, 2001
The Associated Press
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/missle03-31-01.htm

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE - The Army's new Patriot interceptor missile performed well in a crowded sky above here Saturday, preliminary data indicated.

Two Pac-3 missiles were launched from White Sands Missile Range against a Hera ballistic missile target. A Pac-2 missile was launched against a Patriot missile configured as a target, an Army spokeswoman in Huntsville, Ala. said.

Preliminary test data indicated the Pac-3 and Pac-2 missiles intercepted their assigned targets and other objectives were met, according to a U.S. Army news release.

The Hera ballistic missile was launched from Fort Wingate near Gallup at 6:18 a.m.

White Sands Missile Range public affairs specialist Monte Marlin said all missiles were launched as planned.

It appears "at this point it was a good test and everything worked as planned for the missile firings," Marlin said.

Launch officials used high altitude photos Saturday to determine the success of the actual impact.

The next generation Patriot missile is being developed to provide increased defense against advanced tactical ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and hostile aircraft.

The Pac-3 has successfully completed eight flights - the first two without targets. The remaining missions will involve the Pac-3 missiles intercepting various classes of targets.

The Pac-3 uses kinetic energy, rather than an explosive warhead, to destroy targets.

-------- OTHER

Fingerprint May Soon Be Needed to Buy Groceries

NewsMax
Saturday, March 31, 2001
David M. Bresnahan http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/3/30/172528.shtml

The day will come when you put your finger on a scanning device to prove who you are before you engage in transactions at retail stores, ATMs, banks and even when you buy groceries. One company making such a device is engaged in a pilot project with the nation's largest grocery chain.

Biometric Access Corp. has teamed up with four Kroger stores in the Houston area to test a point-of-sale finger-scanning device for retail transactions. The pilot project has been under way for just over a year and is working well, even though some customers don't like it, according to Kroger spokesman Gary Huddleston.

The Kroger stores are using the device to provide positive identification for payroll check cashing, not for actual sales. Huddleston says customer acceptance is one of the challenges that must be overcome if the device is to be used for all transactions.

"Many customers have seen the value of the security in the system. The finger image is positive identification," Huddleston told NewsMax.com in a phone interview. He said a personal identification number was not very secure.

Will the finger-image scanner become common in all retail stores in the future?

"I'm sure it will," said Huddleston. "Customer acceptance is one challenge, and cost is the other challenge. As soon as we overcome those."

Use of the finger image for check cashing at the four pilot Kroger stores is optional, but Huddleston said most customers use it once they understand how it works and that they can get their check cashed faster if they submit to the finger-image scan.

The finger-image scanner can easily be used for all point-of-sale transactions, including the use of checks, credit cards and debit cards, according to Biometric Access Corp. spokesman Hal Jennings. The system is also used for computer security and for clocking workers in and out of work, replacing old-fashioned time cards.

The use of finger-image scans is hailed by some and highly criticized by others.

"My primary objection is to government surveillance of citizens, more so than that of private businesses. However, the trend by retailers and employers to use biometrics to screen customers and employees is alarming," said activist Scott McDonald, who has a Web site (www.networkusa.org/fingerprint.shtml) that fights the use of fingerprints.

Conditioning the Public

He says the use of finger-image scans by retail stores is one way the government can "condition" the public to "accept the same kind of perpetual scrutiny by government using the same technologies."

McDonald told NewsMax.com that he was concerned about an increase in the number of government and business partnerships.

"It is likely the information generated by private biometric scanning by banks, businesses and employers will eventually be linked to, or accessible by, government computers," explained McDonald.

Biometric Access Corp. has also established a contract with H.E. Butt Grocery Co. in Texas "which will result in a large-scale implementation of the SecureTouch On-Time(tm) time and attendance system," Jennings said.

More than 700 units will be installed in stores using biometric fingerprint readers to keep track of 50,000 employees as they clock in and out of work.

Biometric Access Corp. also sold 6,000 similar readers to the state of New York for the Office of Mental Health to be used to protect highly confidential files.

David M. Bresnahan (David@Bresnahan.com) is an independent journalist. An archive of his work is available at http://InvestigativeJournal.com.

-------- environment

EU: No Trade Retaliation Due U.S. Kyoto Refusal

Yahoo News
Saturday March 31
By Eva Sohlman
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20010331/pl/environment_eu_dc_7.html

KIRUNA, Sweden (Reuters) - The European Union said on Saturday it did not accept a recent U.S. rejection of the Kyoto treaty to cut greenhouse gases but would not retaliate in the form of trade sanctions.

U.S. President Bush said this week that the 1997 Kyoto pact, which calls for targeted cuts of carbon dioxide emissions to reduce the risk of disastrous global warming, was not in the U.S. interest.

His announcement prompted a storm of protest from Europe to the Pacific.

``Kyoto is still alive,'' said Swedish Environment Minister Kjell Larsson, hosting a meeting of EU environment ministers in Kiruna, which lies 60 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

``No country has the right to declare Kyoto dead,'' he added.

Larsson, whose country is holding the rotating EU presidency, said the EU would actively participate in the Kyoto process and would support a resumption of a global environment action plan in Bonn in July.

He described the general feeling over Bush's decision as very concerned and said discussions on the issue were intense.

Washington's new environmental agenda had strained diplomatic relations between Europe and the United States but the EU would not exert any pressure on the U.S. and trade would not be affected, Larsson said.

``I believe we can reason with them,'' he said.

The EU would ratify the treaty without the United States, if necessary, Larsson said, adding he hoped the U.S. would participate in the process.

The Kyoto protocol calls on industrial countries to cut carbon dioxide emissions by on average 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States is the world's biggest source of emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas which many scientists say is the main culprit behind global warming.

Scientists believe that greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels, trap heat in the atmosphere and contribute to global warming which can lead to disastrous weather changes.

A troika made up of the EU Commissioner for the environment, Margot Wallstrom, Sweden's Larsson and representatives of Belgium, which takes over at the EU helm in July, will travel to Washington on Monday.

Their brief is to find out more about what the United States intended with its rejection of the Kyoto agreement.

``We will argue the weaknesses of their arguments,'' Larsson told Reuters.

Washington's opposition to the Kyoto protocol has also sparked strong reactions of disagreement among members of the umbrella group, which traditionally support the U.S. in climate talks.

The umbrella group consists of Japan, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

``We are seeing a very interesting development of the umbrella group,'' German Environment Minister Jurgen Trittin told Reuters.

He said closer collaboration between the EU and the umbrella group could put some pressure on the United States to rethink its rejection of the climate change policy accord.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who visited the United States on Thursday, had stressed the importance of the treaty and stated that the EU was willing to go ahead and ratify it also without a U.S. commitment, Trittin said.

Between April 6 and 11, the EU troika will visit China, Russia, Iran and Japan to assess how these countries wanted to proceed in the global climate change talks, and whether it would be possible to ratify the treaty without the United States.

---

Democrats Take Bush to Task Over Environment

Yahoo News
Reuters
Mar 31 Saturday
By JoAnne Allen
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010331/pl/bush_democrats_dc_1.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrats fired another volley on Saturday in a battle with the White House over environmental rules, accusing President Bush (news - web sites) of leading ``an assault'' on the environment in a bow to special interests.

In the Democrat's weekly radio address, Washington Gov. Gary Locke said U.S. environmental protection rules are coming under attack ``and the person leading that charge is none other than President Bush.''

``In his barely two months in office, President Bush has led an assault on the environment, the likes of which our country has not seen in decades,'' Locke said.

Locke accused Bush a sacrificing the environment ``at the altar'' of special interests groups. Congressional Democrats and environmental activists contend the White House has been too eager to ease environmental rules that could be costly for mining, oil, timber and other industries.

Democratic lawmakers this week launched a counter-offensive to White House decisions to suspend tight new standards for arsenic in drinking water and curb mining waste.

The president also reversed a campaign promise to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants -- viewed by many scientists as a major cause of global warming. He also rejected an international treaty to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

``In an already long list of actions that will harm environmental quality, one of the most egregious was his recent announcement that he would roll back regulations that limit the amounts of arsenic in our drinking water,'' Locke said in the radio address.

He said Bush ignored a 1999 National Academy of Sciences (news - web sites) report concluding that the old arsenic standard is no longer adequate for public health protection.

``So why did George Bush cut back on protections against arsenic in our drinking water? Is he pro-arsenic? Of course not. The problem is that special interests, and not George Bush, seem to be controlling America's environmental safety programs,'' Lock said.

``It is the wealthy donors and the special interests that helped put him in the White House who want to loosen environmental controls,'' Locke said.

``We urge the president in the strongest terms to protect our environment, and to shift his priorities away from the special interests and back to the people he swore to protect,'' Locke concluded.

The Washington Post on Saturday said the Bush administration had been stung by the furious reaction to its decisions on the environment. The paper said Bush aides have held meetings in recent days to plot strategy to polish the president's environmental credentials.

---

No more Mr Nice Guy as Bush turns up the heat

The Age
Saturday 31 March 2001
By GAY ALCORN and SIMON MANN
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/03/31/FFXSOWGTWKC.html

Ten weeks into the job, President George W. Bush's "humble" foreign policy is emerging. Dump the Kyoto global warming treaty, without giving allies any warning.

Embarrass the South Korean leader Kim Dae-jung during his visit to Washington by brushing off his Sunshine policy with North Korea because the President says the North can't be trusted.

Bomb Iraq. With a whiff of Cold War paranoia, expel 50 Russians. Assure allies that a missile defence shield to protect America against attacks from "rogue states" would not proceed without consultation, and then dispatch Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Europe to say it would go ahead no matter what they thought.

Shift the American strategic focus from Russia to China, and call the emerging power a "competitor", not a "partner". Keep at arm's length from the escalating violence in the Middle East and say virtually nothing about troubles in Macedonia.

President Bush was asked at a media conference this week why "everyone is mad at us". Not true, he said, but "people are beginning to learn what my administration is like". He would consult with allies, but the Kyoto treaty that would have required the world's biggest energy consumer to rethink its gas-guzzling habits would have harmed the economy.

"First things first, are the people who live in America. That's my priority," Bush said.

"I think what you're seeing is the emerging of the U-word - unilateralism," James Lindsay, a foreign affairs adviser to former president Bill Clinton, told The Age. Unilateralism is the idea that America, because of its power and role as the guardian of global peace, can exempt itself from international treaties and forums and go it alone.

The Clinton administration attempted to forge a new post-Cold War role as a central player in world problems as diverse as Northern Ireland and AIDS. The Bush administration is seemingly less interested in solutions requiring international cooperation and American sacrifice. Ireland and the Middle East can fix their own mess. The Balkans are Europe's problem.

Within a few short weeks, the Bush administration has dramatically changed the international environment, and the rest of the world is reeling from the shift.

"It is not so surprising that this administration is going to focus on doing what it sees as in America's interests," says Lindsay. "What is surprising is that they're not doing anything to make the medicine go down any easier. They are tone deaf when it comes to how they're being perceived across the world."

THE BACKDOWN on Kyoto and greenhouse represent the most significant policy reversal yet by the Bush administration. As an American president raised on the high-octane power of the Texas oil industry, and whose election was bankrolled by US energy companies, Bush's green credentials were only ever vapor-thin.

So, say his critics, it was hardly surprising that the president chose to throw oil on the troubled waters of the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gas emissions, igniting European anger and inviting charges of environmental vandalism.

But Bush's decision not to ratify the treaty, whether merely tactical in a bid to win greater concessions for US industry, or something more sinister, has served to widen the schism that is rapidly emerging between his administration and Europe over a range of issues - the environment, defence, foreign policy and trade.

Bush, his erstwhile European partners fear, might be the J.R.Ewing of global politics, riding roughshod over long-time allies and imposing his will on weaker parties.

It's all very well for British Prime Minister Tony Blair to pronounce the "special relationship" alive and kicking, but Blair's European colleagues appear increasingly likely to brook his suggestion that Britain can be their conduit for a transatlantic alliance.

Key divisions have emerged, specifically on defence, with the Bush administration anxious to extract its forces from the Balkans and for Europe to take greater responsibility for its own borders.

But, in a glaring contradiction, Washington remains deeply suspicious of Europe's planned 60,000-strong rapid reaction force, which it sees as directly undermining the NATO alliance. Most of Europe's states, meanwhile, strongly oppose the American President's aim of developing a nuclear missile defence shield.

Bush has also ditched the Russians, bemoaning the cost of aid for its crippled economy. Moscow, in response, has moved closer to Europe and has suggested that it, too, ought to be tucked under the umbrella of Europe's version of the missile defence system being proposed by the Americans.

In the first of a series of radical redefinitions of perceived threats to the US, Bush has also apparently decided that, favored trading nation aside, China is America's new public enemy number one, foreshadowing a policy that would run counter to Europe's twinned approach of dialogue and gentle pressure on human rights.

In Europe, expectation is mounting that the European Union may emerge stronger than ever, released from the burden of always pleasing the Americans and free to carve out a truly autonomous foreign policy.

A sharp decline in America's economic fortunes might also knock the stuffing out of the Bush administration, and allow Europe to take the lead on several policy fronts.

For now differences are being sharply defined, not least by the row about Kyoto. Europe's Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallstroem, yesterday set the tone for a meeting in Washington between Bush and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder by warning the US not to treat the issue of global warming lightly.

"I think we all have to make absolutely clear to the United States that this is not an issue which can be regarded as some kind of marginal environmental issue," she said.

Of all Western nations, only Blair's Britain has pledged to ratify Kyoto, which calls for an average 5.2 per cent cut in developing countries' 1990 emission levels from 2012. But most other European member states have endorsed Kyoto's principles.

MEANWHILE, an internal struggle is emerging within the Bush administration about the shape and direction of foreign policy, despite the emphatic nature of the President's announcements. US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, aware of international perceptions, has appointed moderates to his department who favor a foreign policy that differs only in nuance from that of the previous administration.

But, so far, Powell, who backs a stronger American response to global warming and a softening of sanctions against Iraq, has lost out to the hardliners in the Defence Department. Secretary Rumsfeld and deputy secretary Paul Wolfowitz vehemently favor missile defence and want to support Iraqi opposition groups that aim to overthrow Saddam Hussein. As well, while Bush is no isolationist, there is a conservative rump in the Republican Party that wants to withdraw now that the Cold War is over.

The Defence Department is close to Vice-President Dick Cheney (Rumsfeld is his mentor), who is another foreign policy hardliner with huge authority in the administration. The President's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, appears to be in their camp, which is unsurprising. In an article in Foreign Affairs magazine last year, she referred to Kyoto in insisting that America "has a special role in the world and should not adhere to every international convention and agreement that someone thinks to propose".

The moderates and conservatives are struggling to dominate the thinking of the President, who is inexperienced in foreign affairs.

Republicans such as Chester Crocker, a former Ronald Reagan official, say that every administration shifts focus and this one would present a more realistic and consistent policy to the world. Clinton spoke nicely to allies about the Kyoto treaty, knowing it had not a chance of getting through Congress (which rejected it in a 95-0 vote).

"During the Clinton years, we had a policy towards everything - if a mouse ran across the carpet, we had an American plan for it and strong moral convictions about it," Crocker says.

Allies may have been critical of Clinton's inconsistency in foreign policy, but things have changed.

So, are relations between America and its allies headed for a foreign policy train wreck? James Lindsay says there are potential long-term problems because an alliance, whether it be with Europe, Australia, Japan or South Korea, implies reciprocity.

"The expectation is not only that they can do something for the US, but also that the US can do something for them. And that expectation is changing."

Gay Alcorn is The Age's Washington correspondent. Simon Mann is Europe correspondent.

---

Georgians seek changes in lumber imports

USA Today
03/31/2001 - Updated 08:22 AM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-03-31-georgia.htm

ALBANY, Ga. (AP) - The state's forestry community, including former President Carter, is calling for changes in Canadian lumber imports, which it blames for falling prices and sawmill closures.

Landowners, loggers, sawmill operators and congressmen, along with Carter and his wife, Rosalynn, planned a protest in Macon on Saturday as a lumber agreement between the United States and Canada was set to expire. The Carters sell timber from their land in southwest Georgia.

The participants say no agreement or a simple continuation of the present one would be deadly for the U.S. lumber industry. They blame Canadian imports for a 33% drop in lumber prices since January 2000.

"Canada is a sovereign government. They have a right to run their industry as they see fit," said Rusty Wood, president and chief executive of Tolleson Lumber Inc. "But when the result of that policy crosses the border, then we have a right to defend ourselves."

The 5-year-old agreement outlined how much softwood Canada's four major lumber-producing provinces may export to the United States duty free.

Wood, who planned to speak at the rally, said 95% of Canadian timber is government owned. The timber is allocated to Canadian mills at a fraction of its market value to provide steady jobs for Canadian workers and then exported to the United States, he said.

He said lumber is at its lowest price in 10 years and the United States has lost 100 sawmills, either temporarily or permanently, in the past six months.

Michael Kergin, Canada's ambassador in Washington, defended his country's practices in a letter earlier this month to Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont.

"The United States is not self-sufficient in lumber, and future U.S. supply is not expected to match increases in U.S. demand," Kergin wrote. "Restrictions on lumber trade have a negative impact on U.S. consumers and lumber-dependent industries."

But Carter says changes are needed to ensure a level playing field between the two countries. He said the current timber situation could be devastating to 10 million American landowners, 20,000 sawmill owners and more than 700,000 workers.

"What we need is a permanent agreement that ensures free trade, but ends the artificial price restrictions that the Canadian government has put on timber," Carter wrote in a letter to The New York Times last week.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick and Canadian International Trade Minister Pierre Pettigrew spoke Thursday about appointing envoys to negotiate a solution to the decades-long dispute, but no agreement was reached. Zoellick has suggested an export tax as a possible remedy.

Softwood lumber - processed from cone-bearing trees - is often used for home construction. Canada sold the United States about $7 billion worth last year, about a third of its supply.

---

A Study of Lobster Deaths Will Test Pesticide Link

New York Times
March 31, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/science/31LOBS.html

STORRS, Conn., March 30 - Ever since Long Island Sound lobstermen began pulling up traps full of dead lobsters two years ago, they have blamed the pesticides used in the fight against the West Nile virus. But scientists have been skeptical, saying that pesticides may play a role but that more study is needed.

Now Connecticut has approved such a study, to be conducted by a University of Connecticut biologist who helped develop the pesticide he suspects caused the lobsters to die off.

The biologist, Dr. Hans Laufer, and seven colleagues will receive nearly $250,000 to begin the first research into a possible link between the lobster deaths and a pesticide used to kill mosquitoes, officials from the state's Department of Environmental Protection said this week.

Dr. Laufer's study will also investigate the effects of higher than normal temperatures in the Sound.

Since 1999, when the lobsters began dying off, the lobster industry in Long Island Sound has nearly collapsed. That year, cities and towns began floating solid cakes of the chemical methoprene in storm drains to kill mosquitoes that they feared carried the West Nile virus or Eastern equine encephalitis, a deadly mosquito-borne virus. New York and Connecticut officials also sprayed other mosquito-killing chemicals from airplanes.

Last August, lobster fishermen from New York and Connecticut sued five pesticide companies, blaming them for the lobster deaths. No scientific evidence backed up their claims, though Dr. Laufer, who in the early 1980's worked with a team whose research led to the development of methoprene, said that he had suspected for two years that the pesticide was playing a role. He said that a lawyer for the lobstermen had asked him to do a quick study to back up their lawsuit and that he refused.

Dr. Laufer, 71, said he was inspired to do his study last April, when scientists met about the lobster problem in Stamford.

"They were saying, `We don't know why they died,' but they were reporting 60 days of high temperatures in Long Island Sound, more than I knew they could stand," he said. "And they said, `Oh, by the way, we're using methoprene to control the mosquitoes.' So I said, `Do you understand what methoprene is and what it does, and how it would act on lobsters?' And they said, `No.' Dr. Laufer said he has watched lobsters die in tanks that reach 71.6 degrees - the mark Long Island Sound reached in 1999 - and that hormone-disrupting chemicals interfere with reproduction and growth.

In his earlier work on methoprene, he identified a lobster hormone and studied the effect that hormone-disrupting chemicals had on it. His team found that methoprene killed mosquitoes and killed or damaged crustaceans. Dr. Laufer said he also conducted experiments in the 80's showing that methoprene harmed the brine shrimp and a fresh-water flea, both crustaceans.

In the new study, the state's environmental protection agency plans to ask Dr. Laufer's team to expand its research to include some of the aerial pesticide sprays, said Jane Stahl, a deputy commissioner.

She said the department would also award $265,000 to two University of Connecticut pathobiologists to study several species of paramoeba, a parasite, which were found in dead lobsters, and $124,000 to a Wesleyan University scientist to examine the Sound's sediments.

Later this year, the federal government, through its Sea Grant programs in New York and Connecticut, is expected to allocate $2.5 million for lobster research.

Dr. Richard Robohm, chief of biotechnology for the federal government's Northeast Fisheries Science Center in Milford, Conn., said that pesticide studies were needed. "No one is sure if it will prove positive," he said, "and whether it will show even if there is an effect."

---

Bush Suspends Rule on U.S. Contracts

New York Times
March 31, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/politics/31CONT.html

WASHINGTON, March 30 - A Clinton administration regulation prohibiting federal contracts from going to bidders with a history of violating environmental, health, safety and other federal laws was suspended today by the Bush administration, angering Congressional Democrats and organized labor.

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, said he was dismayed by the move, the latest in a series of policy reversals undertaken by the new administration. "Taxpayer-funded contracts should go to those who obey the laws," he said.

The rule was issued by President Bill Clinton in December. Business groups called it a "parting gift" to labor, saying it was unfair because an accusation of wrongdoing could be sufficient to reject a bidder. They welcomed Mr. Bush's action today.

"You were putting a contracting officer in the position of determining whether a contractor has been allegedly violating labor, environmental, tax and consumer protection laws," said Stephen E. Sandherr, chief executive officer of the Associated General Contractors of America.

Mr. Lieberman said the Bush administration wanted to permanently revoke the rules, which cover $200 billion in federal contracts.

---

Hemisphere Conference Ends in Discord on Global Warming

New York Times
March 31, 2001
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/science/31WARM.html

MONTREAL, March 30 - An international conference here ended in disagreement today after the United States declined to go along with a Latin American- backed call for industrialized countries to reduce their emissions of the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming.

The division was a further reflection of the gap that has emerged between the United States and leading allies over the issue since the Bush administration made clear its opposition to the Kyoto accord of 1997, the most far-reaching international treaty on the effort to address climate change.

Senior delegates to the gathering, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said American representatives who tried to smooth over the disagreement had been unable to win approval of a compromise statement that would have stopped short of a call for specific action.

But most Latin American representatives issued a statement of their own calling for industrialized countries to "engage in an effort to reduce their domestic emissions of greenhouse gases."

In a news conference at the end of the two-day gathering, a meeting of environment ministers from the Western Hemisphere, David Anderson, the Canadian environment minister, said that there had been general recognition of a need to reduce greenhouse gases but that "there was not total consensus among ministers that we were able to reflect in the final communiqué."

The Kyoto Protocol, signed by the United States and 100 other countries but not yet ratified by any industrialized nation, would require industrialized countries to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases 5 percent to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The Bush administration, saying that such reductions would be too costly and that in any case developing countries should be bound by similar obligations, has made clear that it has no interest in carrying out the accord and will seek to develop alternative proposals.

Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, had headed the American delegation here, but she left the conference on Thursday afternoon, leaving her seat to be filled by subordinates.

Delegates said Canada had been among a handful of countries that indicated a willingness to go along with the compromise language proposed by the United States, even though senior Canadian officials had expressed deep disappointment with the American position.

Canadian officials argued that the United States was not the only one to blame for the current discord. They noted that Europe's refusal to accept an American- backed proposal allowing the trading of emissions reductions had led to the breakdown of efforts at The Hague last November to forge an agreement that might have brought the Kyoto Protocol's ratification, and by extension to the Bush administration's decision to abandon any support for the treaty.

"Europe adopted a position they knew would force the United States to pull out," said Mr. Anderson, the Canadian environment minister. "This is going to be an ongoing struggle."

---

Pigs Pass First Foot-and-Mouth Test as U.S. Increases Precautions

New York Times
March 31, 2001
By ELIZABETH BECKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/national/31FOOT.html

WASHINGTON, March 30 - Agriculture Department officials said today that while tests of four North Carolina pigs suspected of carrying foot-and-mouth disease were negative, they would accelerate training of dogs used to help prevent the disease from entering the country.

Officials are awaiting results from a second test of the pigs on Friday. Officials emphasized that the department did roughly 100 tests a year for foot-and-mouth disease.

In the face of growing concerns, Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman said this week that she was doubling to 100 the number of beagle teams posted at ports and airports to sniff out suspect meat or meat products. She is also adding about 400 people to her agency this year to increase inspections and quarantine of animals and plants.

"You need to continuously review the programs that are in place," a department spokesman, Kevin Herglotz, said.

With the highly contagious disease reported in four European countries, American farmers and ranchers have become extremely cautious and are quickly reporting any suspicion of the disease, Mr. Herglotz said.

The Agriculture Department says it has investigated 24 potential cases of foot-and-mouth disease here since the outbreak in Europe, and all the tests have been negative.

Ms. Veneman said that she would make significant increases in next year's budget for protection and quarantine against foreign animal and plant diseases. She has refused requests from European nations to lift any of the temporary bans on European meat or meat products.

President Bush has conferred regularly with Ms. Veneman on the disease, according to his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, who said today that the president "is concerned that we make sure the United States does take appropriate action."

"He's satisfied we have," Mr. Fleischer said.

Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, the senior Democrat on the Agriculture Committee, asked Ms. Veneman today to strengthen enforcement of the border protections, citing reports he said he had received from travelers that scrutiny at American airports was lax.

"The fact that foot-and-mouth disease has not been found in the U.S. since 1929 is a testimony to the men and women who work each day to protect our nation from foreign animal diseases," Mr. Harkin said. "That protective system, however, is now under unprecedented strain given the sheer volume of commerce and travel between the U.S. and Europe."

The department is retooling its 1982 plan for dealing with the disease if it moves across the Atlantic and infects any of the nation's 170 million cattle, sheep and pigs.

That plan relies on state veterinarians as well as federal and state officials. It would include quarantines, the destruction of infected herds, the creation of buffer or control zones around an infected area and the requirement that all people, vehicles and equipment leaving those zones be disinfected.

---

New York Times
March 31, 2001
National Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/national/31BRFS.html

COLORADO: COYOTES ARE SPARED Lawmakers killed a plan to shoot coyotes in western Colorado to see if they were responsible for a decline in mule deer. The Division of Wildlife had proposed the shootings because the state's deer population, roughly 545,000, is about 90,000 fewer than desired. Environmentalists had criticized the plan as a concession to hunters.

--------

Clinton Energy-Saving Rules Are Getting a Second Look

New York Times
March 31, 2001
By MATTHEW L. WALD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/politics/31POWE.html

WASHINGTON, March 30 - The Energy Department is reviewing energy efficiency standards, issued in the last weeks of the Clinton administration, that would require new clothes washers, water heaters and central air-conditioners to use less electricity and natural gas.

A spokesman for the department, Joseph H. Davis, confirmed that the new standards were under review, as part of an effort ordered by the White House to look at all regulations published in the last 60 days of the Clinton administration. People involved in the review said the standard under closest scrutiny was the one governing air-conditioners; if left standing, it would save the most electricity and reduce pollution from power plants the most, but would also impose the greatest costs.

The rule requires that beginning in 2006, new central air-conditioners (and also central heat pumps, which can heat or cool) run on 30 percent less electricity than under current minimum standards of efficiency. In negotiations that led to the rule, the manufacturers had pressed for improvement of only 20 percent. A lawsuit against the new standard has been filed by their trade association, the Air Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute, which calls the extra cost of building more efficient machines a "cruel penalty" on consumers, to whom those costs would be passed on.

When the rule was written last year, however, its backers called it a bargain for consumers, and they are even more strongly in support now that the price of electricity has been rising.

The new standards for washers, water heaters and air-conditioners were adopted to meet the requirements of a federal law. That legislation was adopted by Congress fully 14 years ago, but, as the Energy Department sat down to work out the details, Congress blocked the regulations in the mid-1990's.

When the air-conditioner rule was finally issued this Jan. 17, Bill Richardson, the departing energy secretary, said the resulting reduction in energy bills and in pollution from power plants would be "one of the biggest environmental achievements of the Clinton administration."

Now, though, that rule and the others are getting a second look. Staff members at the Energy Department say the agency's acting general counsel has asked them to prepare memorandums addressing whether the benefits of each of the rules might have been overstated or the costs understated, whether they could be considered an "overreach" and whether they pose a potential for litigation. The staff is also looking into whether any procedural errors were made in the rules' adoption.

Bush administration officials say they can rescind any rule not yet in force.

"It would be irresponsible and wrong," said Mr. Davis, the Energy Department spokesman, "if the administration, newly elected and sworn into office, couldn't review regulations that have yet to take effect."

Some opponents, however, maintain that with the rules' publication in the Federal Register, the procedure would be more complicated. They also point to President Bush's depiction of "an energy crisis" in defense of his decision to oppose limiting power plants' emissions of carbon dioxide, and to his call for more energy drilling and more use of "clean coal" technologies.

Dan W. Reicher, who was assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy in the Clinton administration, said, "It's stunning that at the very moment the new administration is telling us there's an energy crisis, they would be looking at rolling back standards that will save us more energy than virtually anything else we've done in 20 years."

Mr. Reicher said the economics of the regulations looked even more favorable now, after a period of rising prices for natural gas and electricity, than when the rules were drafted last year.

Efficiency experts say that in California, air-conditioning consumes 28 percent of the electricity used during peak hours in summer, and that a standard that takes the low-efficiency models off the market would gradually reduce the need for new power plants.

But the industry argues that the cost could exceed $5 billion and that the pay-back period for consumers - the length of time it would take for their cumulative electricity savings to equal the additional cost of a higher-efficiency air-conditioner - would be 9 to 14 years.

The politics of the clothes-washer standard is more complicated. The manufacturers' trade group, the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, is pleading to keep the rule in place.

"The whole rationale" behind negotiations that led to that rule was that "the members wanted a standard which they could plan towards," said Edward C. Foley Jr., director of the group's major-appliance and supplier division. "Certainty is always better than uncertainty."

Under this rule, the improvements are to come in two stages, in 2004 and in 2007. The improvement in efficiency is put at 35 percent.

As for the water-heater standard, which applies to both electric and gas models, the Gas Appliance Manufacturers Association petitioned the Energy Department earlier this month to revise it. If it is left to stand, water heaters will need more insulation and may require a U-shaped trap to stop hot water from rising up the pipe when no faucet is turned on, keeping the water in the heater until it is needed. Efficiency improvement is put at 5 to 9 percent.

-------- genetics

Proposal to Bar Altered Wheat Seems Doomed

New York Times
March 31, 2001
By ANDREW POLLACK
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/health/31DAKO.html

A bill that would prohibit planting genetically modified wheat in North Dakota for two years appears headed toward defeat, legislators in the state said yesterday.

The State Senate's Agriculture Committee amended the bill on Thursday to replace the moratorium with a study of the benefits and risks of genetically modified crops.

Senator Kenneth Kroeplin, a co- sponsor of the moratorium proposal, said that he would try to revive it on the floor of the Senate but conceded that the chances of success were slim. "The bill as is is pretty much dead," said Mr. Kroeplin, a Democrat.

The bill, which was approved by the state's House of Representatives by a wide margin, would have been the first state law banning a genetically modified crop. It has gotten further than a few dozen other state bills that would regulate such crops or require labeling of bioengineered foods.

-------- police

Racial profiling on book shelves

From: Fitzhugh MacCrae <alaidh@yahoo.com>
Sat, 31 Mar 2001

Thomas Sowell

Now that police departments are supposed to stop racial profiling, maybe it is time for book publishers and bookstores to stop as well.

I first became aware of the racial profiling of authors when I saw my book "Migrations and Cultures" in the black studies section of my local bookstore. Since the book is about migrations from Europe and Asia, obviously the only reason for putting it there was that the author is black.

Racial bean counters are asking publishers to tell them which of their authors are black and no doubt some of these publishers are complying. But the practical consequence of this racial profiling is that a black author who writes a book about cameras or cooking is liable to have his book put on a bookstore shelf based on the race of the writer, rather than the subject of the book. This means readers who are looking for books on cameras or cooking are unlikely to find his book in the section where such books are kept.

Some people may actually think they are doing black writers a favor by setting up a black authors´ section of a bookstore. But, with friends like these, who needs enemies? Black writers, like white writers, want their books to reach the readers and anything that interferes with that is bad news.

University of California Regent Ward Connerly found the same practice in an East Coast bookstore that I found on the West Coast. His partly autobiographical and partly political book, "Creating Equal" was nowhere to be seen in either the biographical section of the bookstore or in the political section. It was on the shelves for "African-American Interest." The store manager said that this was done as a "service to the community."

What a service putting a book where it is least likely to be found. If it is a service to any black writers, it is a service only to those who write exclusively for and about fellow blacks. But does either the black community or American society in general need a literary version of racial apartheid?

It is no service to readers either. Imagine you are looking for a book on the history of military conquests and cannot find anything you like in the history section of your local bookstore and that a book on that very subject by a black writer (yours truly, for example) is off in another part of the store.

Someone who stood in the black studies section of a major bookstore for 20 minutes reported that not a single white person entered that section during that time. Why would anyone want to put books where only a fraction of the public is likely to look especially if it is a book on a subject of no special interest to that particular fraction?

It is bad enough that bookstores engage in the racial profiling of authors. But so do some publishers.

The ridiculous lengths to which publishers can carry racial profiling was demonstrated to me when copies of my recently published book "Basic Economics" were sent out to Jet magazine, the Amsterdam News and other black publications. Only after I complained were copies then sent to the Wall Street Journal and other publications dealing with economics.

I had naively believed publishers were not only in the business of publishing books but also of selling them. But apparently keeping up with fads is considered more important. The mindless political correctness of the racial bean counters has invaded and corrupted one institution after another. A recent advertisement in the Chronicle of Higher Education lists a job as "vice-provost for diversity and equal opportunity." In other words, this job is being campus quota czar. You have reached the holy grail of "diversity" when you have black leftists, white leftists, female leftists and Hispanic leftists as professors.

Only such an underlying assumption could create even the semblance of rationality to the notion that you are promoting "diversity" of viewpoints by having people of different skin colors on campus or in business or with their books in different parts of bookstores.

Thomas Sowell is a nationally syndicated columnist.

---

Judge Is Rebuffed on Request to End Stop-and-Frisk Inquiry

New York Times
March 31, 2001
By BENJAMIN WEISER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/nyregion/31POLI.html

A federal judge in Manhattan tried to win a promise yesterday from the United States attorney's office that it would conclude its lengthy investigation of the stop-and-frisk tactics of the Police Department within 90 or 120 days, but a prosecutor refused, saying only that the government would continue to act expeditiously.

The judge, Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court, seemed to sympathize with the city, which has stopped cooperating with the federal investigation, begun two years ago.

"Maybe one of their annoyances is it's dragging on," Judge Scheindlin said. "Maybe because it's so open- ended and hanging over their head."

Prosecutors in the office of United States Attorney Mary Jo White had been reviewing internal records of police stop-and-frisks as part of an investigation into the Street Crime Unit.

The investigation began in March 1999, in the weeks after the fatal shooting of Amadou Diallo by four officers who were members of the unit.

Ms. White's office has the power to sue the city, seeking reforms in police practices and possibly a police monitor. To bring such a suit, the government must show a pattern or practice of civil rights violations.

The city had been voluntarily giving the federal investigators internal reports of stop-and-frisks by the department. It also produced similar records in a private class-action lawsuit before Judge Scheindlin.

Last year, Ms. White's office reached an internal conclusion that there was a statistical pattern of racial profiling by Street Crime Unit officers, but the office has yet to file a lawsuit and has continued its investigation.

Last fall, the city stopped cooperating with that investigation, leading Ms. White's office to go into court, asking Judge Scheindlin to order that the records be turned over so that the government could make a final decision on whether to sue.

A federal prosecutor, Sara L. Shudofsky, cited a great public interest in whether the New York Police Department "discriminated against blacks and Hispanics in stop-and- frisk practices."

A senior lawyer for the city, Daniel S. Connolly, did not specify why the city stopped cooperating with Ms. White's office, but his comments suggested that the city thought that it was being treated unfairly.

He said there were questions about the "good faith of how the investigation was being conducted" and whether information provided by the city had been misused or improperly released.

Ms. Shudofsky rejected any suggestions of bad faith.

Mr. Connolly also made clear that the city saw the federal investigation as an unreasonable intrusion into local affairs. "We have the responsibility, the City of New York, to conduct law enforcement activities the best way we see fit," he said.

Judge Scheindlin also quizzed Mr. Connolly about the wisdom of not cooperating with Ms. White's office, particularly if the city, which has denied any wrongdoing by its officers, believed that the documents would help prove its case that there is no justification for a suit.

"You're inviting the action, and I don't understand it," Judge Scheindlin said.

When the judge asked for a time limit on resolving the question of a lawsuit, Ms. Shudofsky said she did not have the authority to make such a promise.

"We're certainly interested in doing this quickly," she said. "We're not interested in its dragging on."

---

Minority Legislators Urging Verniero to Quit After Hearing

New York Times
March 31, 2001
By LAURA MANSNERUS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/nyregion/31TROO.html

The New Jersey Legislature's Black and Latino Caucus, dissatisfied with State Supreme Court Justice Peter G. Verniero's testimony in hearings on racial profiling, yesterday called for his resignation.

Justice Verniero has not decided whether to give more testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, his lawyer, Robert A. Mintz, said. He was asked to return by Senator William L. Gormley, the committee chairman, who at the close of Mr. Verniero's testimony Wednesday night accused him of having misled the panel in his own court confirmation hearings in 1999.

In 13 hours before the committee, which is examining the state's response to racial profiling when he was the attorney general, Mr. Verniero could not answer many questions about his office's review of state police practices or his cooperation with the Justice Department, which was also investigating the state police.

In a letter sent yesterday afternoon, the 20-member Black and Latino Caucus said Justice Verniero's failure to recall many documents and conversations from 1996 to 1999 was "disturbing and unacceptable."

The letter, signed by Assemblyman Joseph Charles Jr., also said that Mr. Verniero's testimony was "at odds with" his response to a request for records two years ago, while his nomination to the court was pending.

After the caucus asked for records of traffic stops by state troopers, Mr. Verniero replied in a letter dated March 29, 1999, that "I cannot provide this information at this time." The attorney general's department did have some data on stops at the time, as Mr. Verniero and others have since acknowledged.

The hearings have led to newspaper editorials calling for Justice Verniero's resignation. Yesterday, The Record of Hackensack said he should step down, as The Home News Tribune of New Brunswick did Monday. Today, The New York Times is doing the same.

The hearings resume Monday with testimony from four lawyers from the attorney general's office. The first is Paul Zoubek, the first assistant attorney general, who oversaw investigations of the state police, including the officers accused in the 1998 shooting of three men on the New Jersey Turnpike.

David Hespe, who was Mr. Verniero's chief assistant briefly and was later named commissioner of education, is also scheduled to testify Monday. Another deputy, George Rover, testified last week that Mr. Hespe had told him not to forward a state police report that Mr. Rover said should be forwarded to Justice Department investigators.

Mr. Hespe is now teaching at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J.

It is not clear when Justice Verniero might testify again. Senator Gormley said Wednesday night that the committee might demand his return, but yesterday aides to the committee said it was Mr. Verniero's decision to make.

---

New York Times
March 31, 2001
National Briefing
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/national/31BRFS.html

CALIFORNIA: SECOND OFFICER PLEADS GUILTY A second Los Angeles policeman has agreed to a plea deal and will help an investigation of abuses at an antigang unit. The officer, Nino Durden, said he and his partner had shot an unarmed, handcuffed gang member. He pleaded guilty to state charges and is expected to receive nearly eight years in prison. James Sterngold (NYT)

-------- spying

Defector Described as 'Walk-In'
Senior Chinese Colonel Closely Tied to Intelligence Bureau

By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, March 31, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17881-2001Mar30?language=printer

BEIJING, March 30 -- A senior colonel from the People's Liberation Army who defected in the United States last December was a "walk-in" whose defection was apparently not arranged before his departure from China, Chinese and Western sources said today.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, identified the defector as Xu Junping, director of the American and Oceanic Office of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Chinese Ministry of National Defense. He was the highest-ranking Chinese military officer in years whose defection has been publicly acknowledged by the Chinese government.

Chinese and Western sources said the colonel, who studied at Harvard University in 1999 in a program for Chinese officers, was closely tied to the Second Department, or intelligence bureau, of the General Staff Department of the People's Liberation Army. A former U.S. official who met him on numerous occasions said Xu belonged to a select group of Chinese military officers who were trained to deal with foreigners under Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai, the longtime chief of China's military intelligence bureau and now a senior army officer.

When Xu's defection was reported last week, without his name or exact title, other sources said it was arranged beforehand that he would walk away during a visit by a military delegation to the United States and Canada. But the sources contacted today said Xu's departure from the delegation was not arranged beforehand. They also contradicted a previous report from unnamed Chinese officials that the U.S. Embassy had arranged for Xu's wife to go to the United States. Xu's family remains in China, they said.

In his position at the defense ministry, Xu was in charge of managing military-to-military relations with the United States, the former U.S. official said, but his real employer was the Second Department. "These people are trained as military intelligence agents," he said. "As such, Xu would be able to provide the United States with some useful intelligence."

Xu's sudden disappearance from the delegation of Chinese officers marked another serious defeat for the military's intelligence wing. Last year, the former chief of the Second Department, Maj. Gen. Ji Shengde, was sentenced to a lengthy jail term for his part in a massive smuggling ring based in southern China, Chinese officials have said. In August 1999, two senior Chinese officers were executed for allegedly providing Taiwan with important information about China's military capability.

James Mulvenon, an expert on the Chinese military at the Rand Corp., said Xu is "smart, cosmopolitan, arrogant and extremely good at what he used to do."

"He was a regular face of the military-to-military relations and ably represented their side, which is a nice way of saying that he regularly thwarted what we wanted to see and hear," he said.

While not commenting directly on the case, Mulvenon said he disagreed with some reports about Xu that suggested his value as a source of information for the U.S. government was limited because he was "only a barbarian handler."

"Someone at his level, especially operating in a political hothouse like Beijing, would have access to a wide range of formal and informal information, ranging from high-level gossip about the military and civilian leadership to the basic stuff of daily life in the PLA," Mulvenon said. "All of this information, high and low, would be extremely valuable to his current custodians, whoever they may be, since our collective knowledge about even the most mundane aspects of PLA life are so limited."

Chinese and Western sources said they could not confirm rumors that Xu decided to defect after he was implicated in a corruption scandal or associated with Ji's alleged smuggling activities. A former Western diplomat, however, said Xu was known to have a mistress in the United States.

-------- terrorism

Terror Suspect Fails in Effort to Move Other Trial

New York Times
March 31, 2001
By BENJAMIN WEISER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/31/nyregion/31TERR.html

Citing the unusual character of New York juries, a federal judge in Manhattan has refused to move the trial of a Sudanese man who was charged with stabbing a jail guard last November while he was awaiting a separate trial in the embassy bombings conspiracy.

The defendant, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, had contended that publicity surrounding the cases presented "an extraordinarily rare mix of conditions" that mandated moving the stabbing case out of New York City. But the judge, Deborah A. Batts of Federal District Court, ruled this week that Mr. Salim had failed to show he could not get a fair trial.

Judge Batts, citing an observation first made by Judge Kevin T. Duffy, who presided in the World Trade Center bombing trial in 1993, said that jurors in New York, "one of the largest and most diverse" judicial districts in the country, "are able, if not better suited, to rise to the occasion of trying this case with an open mind."

Mr. Salim, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges, has been described by prosecutors as a high- level adviser to the Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. Mr. Salim was to have been tried with four other men in the current embassy bombings trial in Manhattan, but his case was separated from the others after he was accused of stabbing and critically injuring the guard, Luis Pepe, in the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Nov. 1.

Mr. Salim's lawyer, Richard B. Lind, would not comment. A court filing shows that Mr. Salim may invoke a defense of mental illness in the stabbing case, based in part on highly restrictive jail conditions.

A prosecutor, Michael J. Garcia, has written to Judge Batts, saying that far from being the result of jail conditions, "Salim's violent attack on the prison guard was a natural outgrowth of his long-held intention of killing American civilians as part of an ongoing campaign of terror."

-------- activists

Thousands Protest Against IMF in Turkey

Yahoo News
Reuters
Mar 31 Saturday
By Orhan Coskun
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010331/wl/economy_turkey_dc_4.html

ANKARA (Reuters) - Thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in cities across Turkey on Saturday to protest at economic reforms backed by the International Monetary Fund (news - web sites).

Shouting ``IMF go home,'' they gathered mainly in downtown Ankara and in Istanbul amid a heavy police presence.

The protests came as the government met union leaders and employers in a bid to muster broad public support for a new economic program after a devastating financial crisis.

``The social contract is one of the most important factors for the preparation and implementation of the program,'' Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said in a statement after a meeting of the Social Council.

``The cost of the program must be shared by all segments of society in a just and balanced way,'' he said, calling for unity.

Economy Minister Kemal Dervis is working on a program of major structural reforms that he says are essential to win support from international lenders and the markets.

Dervis, a former senior official of the World Bank (news - web sites), was brought in to take over the reins of the economy at the start of March after a crisis that ripped apart an $11 billion IMF program.

Unions have criticized his proposals.

``The policies of the IMF and the World Bank do not aim to help Turkey but to assure that Turkey can pay its debts on time and in full,'' said Bayram Meral, president of Turkey's largest union confederation Turk-Is, in the text of a speech prepared before the meeting with the government.

Major unions under the umbrella of the Labor Platform say a new IMF-backed economic program based on the principles of the Fund will be unacceptable and that protests and stoppages will be the response. They want wage rises to match real inflation rather than price targets which have been missed in the past.

``In the program that is being prepared there should be a remedy for poverty because as in all economic crises the price of this crisis is paid most heavily by the workers,'' said Recay Baskan, head of the Hak-Is union confederation.

Friction Within Government

The latest financial crisis was sparked by a political row which quickly engulfed the markets.

Turkey was forced to float the lira on February 22, abandoning a crawling currency peg that had been the centerpiece of a three-year, IMF-backed disinflation program. The lira has since lost around a third of its value against the dollar.

On Friday, Turkish military and political leaders signaled unity in efforts to combat the crisis, condemning speculation that the government could soon fall to make way for an ``interim regime.'' That helped drive shares up 12 percent on Friday.

Worries about apparent friction within the three-party coalition over Dervis's stewardship and the government's ability to implement reform laws had earlier sent markets tumbling.

Turkey reached a framework agreement with the IMF earlier this month on a new economic program which it aims to finalize with a letter of intent to the Fund to be signed by the end of April. The IMF wants to see concrete evidence that Ankara is implementing its promises, particularly in reforms of the banking sector, before it will discuss any new lending.

But privatization and reform of state banks which have for years supported industry via subsidized lending are likely to be painful, at least in the short term.

``Today in the real economy, production is approaching a standstill,'' said Refik Baydur, head of the Turkish Employers Unions Confederation. ``Our country is facing the threat of major unemployment. The government has to listen to our demands.''

--------

When the wind blows
Beware tumbleweeds . . . they may have strayed into a radioactive pond

New Scientist magazine
31 March 2001
<http://www.newscientist.com/newsletter/news.jsp?id=ns228434>

MIGRATING ducks and stray tumbleweeds have been contaminated with radioactivity after landing fleetingly in ponds of waste water at a nuclear facility in the US. The news raises questions about the practice of leaving such ponds open to the elements.

In the mid-1990s, staff at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) realised that tumbleweeds were able to "blow into waste-water ponds, and wash up on shore and blow out again", says Ronald Warren, an independent environmental monitoring expert who is contracted to scrutinise radioactivity at INEEL.

"The tumbleweeds blew against the [2-metre high] fence where they built up, forming a ramp other weeds could climb over," he says.

In a two-year study, Warren and his colleagues measured how much radiation the tumbleweeds took with them from two waste ponds near a US Navy test reactor. The team found that the tumbleweeds, which were mostly Russian thistle (Salsola kali), carried out a total of 66 megabecquerels of radiation and spread it over a 32-hectare area.

"The activity from those tumbleweeds made a relatively small, around 15 per cent, increase to the activity due to global fallout in that area," he says.

Risk to humans is slight since the nearest house is 42 kilometres away and the tumbleweeds travelled less than a kilometre.

Nonetheless, INEEL has taken action.

"They've now made the fence higher and they go out and collect tumbleweeds and bury them," Warren says.

Growing shrubs near the ponds has also hampered the tumbleweed.

But birdlife is not so easily thwarted. In research yet to be published, Warren says he has found 21 species of migratory duck that fly over INEEL, and some take a rest stop in the waste ponds. Warren says the duck's radiation levels wouldn't harm you, even if you ate a whole one.

"The maximum radiation dose you'd get would be less than you'd get from a dental X-ray," he says.

This does not reassure everyone.

"I haven't a clue why they don't cover the ponds with any kind of net," says Margaret Stewart of the Snake River Alliance, an anti-nuclear pressure group based in Idaho. "It seems like a sensible kind of thing to do if you're trying to keep birds out."

But an INEEL spokesman maintains that radionuclide concentrations are so low in the ponds that birds would face more risk of death from entanglement in netting.

Britain had its own problem with birds in 1999, when researchers found that pigeons visiting contaminated buildings at the Sellafield nuclear complex were concentrating radioactivity in their droppings in the nearby village of Seascale.

------

Thousands in Turkey demonstrate against government and IMF
Saturday, 31-Mar-2001

ISTANBUL, March 31 (AFP) - Several thousand people, among them trade union and civil rights supporters, demonstrated in Istanbul Saturday with banners attacking the government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over the economic crisis.

Estimates of the numbers varied between 3,000 and 5,000. The unauthorised demonstration passed off peacefully, without police intervention.

One banner read: "Down with the government, lackey of the IMF!"

Since February the country has been plunged into financial crisis after it allowed its currency, the lira, to float, causing it to lose some 30 percent against the dollar.

Ankara is drawing up a new economic programme after it abandoned its pegged currency rate and floated the lira.

The country appealed to the IMF in November for renewed help in a liquidity crisis which resulted in several financially unstable private banks being placed under strict state control.

The economic crisis has forced the government to give up a stabilisation plan started in 1999 with IMF help, and also to abandon a programme to reduce inflation.

The IMF said Tuesday its future financial assistance to Turkey would be determined by the content of the new economic reform package.

Turkey's Economy Minister Kemal Dervis expressed optimism on Friday that Ankara would get foreign aid to overhaul its battered economy, and urged quick legislative action on a series of bills at the core of its recovery programme.


------- Onelist (submissions from subscribers)