------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
Turner's anti-nuke group seeks strategy
Cancer cluster found close to nuclear plant
China Asked To Join The WTO, Didn't It?
Europeans Trying to Size Up Bush Team
German Nuke Waste Shipment Arrives
Document Reveals 1987 Bomb Test by Iraq
'This Land Is Our Land'
Bush To Propose Missile Defense
China Looks to Foil U.S. Missile Defense System
Putin Meets Chinese Leader
Stagnation Looms for Ukraine
U.S. Considers Shift In Nuclear Targets
Say What You Mean. Vaguely.
A Commitment to Europe

MILITARY
Union Workers in Colombia Are Easy Prey for Gunmen
In Latin America, Foes Aren't the Only Danger
Missionaries: On a Frontier of Danger
Celebrity Victims of the Drug War
New Mexico
Navy Bombing Is Betrayal, Puerto Rico's Governor Says
Navy halts exercises for a day in Vieques
5 Seals With Kerrey Back Him on War Raid
Healing in Vietnam
Commander will review Saudi dress code

OTHER
Use of Herbicide Is Proposed in Weed-Choked Lake George
In Early Battles, Bush Learns Need for Compromises
States
IMF endorses program to improve crisis-prevention
Top Industrial Nations Meeting About Lagging Global Economy
Mother Faults 'Signal' Sent in Diallo Case
When the Police Shoot, Who's Counting?
D.C.
Confessions of a Hero
U.S. to inspect downed plane

ACTIVISTS
Backyard Eco Conference 2001
3 Mile Island Sabotage To Be Discussed Friday Night
protest pix on website now
Vieques Turns Into a Symbol of Discontent
Conneticut


-------- NUCLEAR


Turner's anti-nuke group seeks strategy
Part of mission: Making clear that threat exists

Don Melvin - Staff
Sunday, April 29, 2001
http://www.accessatlanta.com/partners/ajc/epaper/editions/sunday/news_a3be3ad4f17d329a009b.html

Washington --- Charlie Curtis faces a daunting task.

His mission as the full-time manager of Ted Turner's Nuclear Threat Initiative is to create from nothing an international organization whose influence will be felt from Washington to Moscow and --- who knows? --- even the Indian subcontinent and maybe the Middle East.

But first he had to find office space, get the phones hooked up, hire some people and get connected to the Internet.

"A lot of people talk about starting an organization from scratch," he said in a recent interview. "And we are in the scratch stage."

Not for long.

Turner, the Atlanta billionaire who came up with the idea for the new organization --- and whose gift of $250 million over five years is paying for it --- is a man who likes quick action. Prime Washington office space has been found, 12,000 square feet on the seventh floor of an office building in the 1700 block of Pennsylvania Avenue, a block from the Old Executive Office Building. What Curtis calls a "core staff" has been hired, including three vice presidents and a senior vice president who will be Curtis' deputy. The phones are connected, everyone's on the Web, and the initial directions of the organization are starting to emerge.

Judging from the titles of the new officers, the organization will focus at first on trying to stop the spread of nuclear materials and knowledge from Russia and other former Soviet countries to other nations or organizations; on reducing the threats posed by biological weapons; and on developing a campaign to convince people that the threat of nuclear disaster did not end when the Berlin Wall came down.

The direction of the organization should snap into sharper focus on Monday, when its board holds its first substantive meeting. Curtis said he does not expect large expenditures to be authorized until a second meeting, scheduled for October. What he does expect Monday, he said, is "program direction" --- instructions from the board to flesh out proposals that will be ready for funding in the fall.

"We want to make prudent investments," he said.

Turner railed against the dangers of nuclear weapons for years but, like many others, thought the danger had eased with the end of the Cold War. His attention was drawn back to the issue in 1998 when India and Pakistan each fired missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

More than a year ago, he began working on creating an organization to reduce the threat, enlisting the help of former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), who is known for his expertise on military matters. In January, the two men announced that they were creating the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Nunn and Turner are co-chairmen of the board of directors, and Nunn is also the organization's chief executive officer, retaining his law practice but devoting half his time to the new initiative. The former senator has immersed himself in the details of setting up the initiative, Curtis said, doing everything from interviewing job candidates --- more than 180 applications were received --- to supervising the selection of telephones.

"He is very much the chief executive officer of this organization," Curtis said.

A little-known chief officer

But the chief operating officer, the man who will be at the helm 100 percent of the time, is another member of the initiative's board --- Curtis, a 61-year-old lawyer and former federal official who has been little known outside government circles.

Born in Pennsylvania and raised in Massachusetts, Curtis has been in Washington for 36 years --- 18 1/2 in government and 16 in private practice.

As deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy from 1994 to 1997, he had responsibility for the national laboratories and the nation's nuclear weapons complex. During that period, he helped establish a program designed to help ensure that nuclear materials, including plutonium and highly enriched uranium, in former Soviet laboratories were accounted for and secure. And the department also began efforts to reduce the prospect that nuclear know-how, in the person of newly unemployed Soviet scientists, would spread to rogue states or terrorist organizations offering much-needed jobs.

Curtis is also a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and a former counsel to the House Commerce Committee. He came to Turner's attention when he was hired in 1999 as chief operating officer of the U.N. Foundation, the organization set up to disburse Turner's 10-year, $1 billion grant to United Nations projects.

"Charlie is the best public policy mind I've ever worked with," said Tim Wirth, president of the U.N. Foundation, who spent 25 years in politics and government. "I've never known anyone as good as Charlie."

Curtis, Wirth said, is unflappable, universally respected, the rare person who is able to design policy, execute it, build consensus and lead.

Wirth said he spent two years trying to persuade Curtis to join the U.N. Foundation. Curtis finally accepted, then got to know Turner --- who was so impressed he hired him away within months.

Sounding the alarm

Some observers say that the Nuclear Threat Initiative's most significant contribution would be in finding ways to inform the public that nuclear dangers still exist. Opposition to nuclear weapons, which once motivated thousands of protesters, has faded over the last decade.

"They can build the political will that is needed to de-alert the thousands of weapons that are now on a hair-trigger approach to what could be nuclear oblivion," said John Anderson, the former independent presidential candidate who now is head of the World Federalist Association, which is dedicated to establishing a world government.

And some who work for nonprofit advocacy groups had expected the Nuclear Threat Initiative to resemble Turner's U.N. Foundation and work primarily to grant money to organizations already tackling nuclear issues.

But, like Nunn and Curtis, all the members of the initiative's "core staff" have deep government experience, mostly in the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, or both. And officers of the initiative have made clear that the organization, while it might make grants to other organizations, will work largely on developing its own programs.

Curtis said the initiative will open an office in Moscow by the end of this year and later, perhaps, in regions of the world that are likely to be nuclear hotspots.

"Our co-chairmen are very intent on making this an international endeavor," Curtis said. "Over time, we will both grow our board with greater international participation, and we are likely to establish a physical presence in other countries."

The initiative appears likely, as well, to work on an area that has long been of concern to Nunn --- securing the nuclear weapons and knowledge left untended by the downsizing of Russia's nuclear weapons program.

As a senator, Nunn worked with Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) to set up a program under which the U.S. government works with Russian officials --- whose government has neither the wherewithal nor the will to accomplish the task on its own --- to make the former Soviet arsenal safer. And last month, he hosted international experts at a Sam Nunn Policy Forum at Georgia Tech on, among other issues, how to help the thousands of unemployed nuclear scientists and engineers in Russia's 10 "closed nuclear cities."

This early direction by the initiative surprises Stephen Schwartz, publisher of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

"When I heard Ted talking about this at the annual meeting of the Physicians for Social Responsibility . . . what this was intended to do in part was to provide seed money, if you will, for a significant amount of new funding in an area that has been traditionally underfunded," Schwartz said.

But Schwartz said the initiative seems to have evolved and will probably "act as an adjunct" to government-funded programs such as Nunn-Lugar. And he said he is not sure this is the best way to put Turner's money to use.

"I'm sensing that it is evolving away from Ted's vision into something more along the lines of what Sen. Nunn and Charlie Curtis and other people in the foundation think is doable and practical," Schwartz said.

But there is no disagreement between Curtis and Schwartz that the nuclear dangers are great and the work, whatever form it takes, is important.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the creator of the Doomsday Clock --- a theoretical measure of the world's nuclear danger. In 1991, as the Soviet Union disintegrated, the clock read 17 minutes to midnight. But since 1998 it has been set at nine minutes to midnight, signifying greater risks.

"We still have plans to incinerate millions of people, and people don't understand that," Schwartz said.

And Curtis, asked why he took the job, said nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction pose the biggest threat to U.S. security.

"When you come to a certain age you focus on future generations," said Curtis, who turned 61 on Friday. "And this is kind of the responsibility of our generation."

-------- britain

Cancer cluster found close to nuclear plant

Anthony Browne, health editor
Sunday April 29, 2001
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/uk_news/story/0%2C6903%2C480235%2C00.html

One of the most significant leukaemia clusters in Britain has been discovered among children living near the Oldbury nuclear power station on the banks of the Severn. A study has found that people living near the river, which contains high levels of radioactive particles, are up to twice as likely to die of cancer as people elsewhere. The report claims children in Chepstow, South Wales, are 11 times more likely to get leukaemia than the national average and that the probability that this is just coincidence is one in a thousand. One primary school near Chepstow had three cases of leukaemia at the same time. The study is based on figures from 1974 to 1990, but The Observer has discovered that over the past two years there have been at least two more cases of childhood leukaemia in the town.

The report highlights a particularly high incidence of myeloid leukaemia, a very rare and dangerous form of the disease that has been linked to radiation.

The author, Dr Chris Busby, a former adviser to the Irish government on the health effects of radiation in the Irish Sea, said: 'This is a discovery of a new nuclear site child leukaemia cluster. The high level of myeloid leukaemia suggests that radiation is the cause.'

The study also finds that men living near Oldbury are 37 per cent more likely to die of prostate cancer than expected. Women living along the coast downstream from Oldbury are 50 per cent more likely to die of breast cancer than those living more than three miles inland. The chance of this being random is one in 50,000.

In Gordano, downstream from Oldbury, men are 80 per cent more likely to die of cancer than elsewhere, and women 40 per cent.

The work was commissioned by Michael Holmes, an Independent MEP for the South West, who works in co-operation with the Green Party. Holmes said: 'If the possibility of cancers is related to living near a nuclear power station, they should be closed down.'

Leukaemia clusters were first discovered around Sellafield nuclear processing plant in 1983, and have now become widely accepted by cancer epidemiologists. However, there is no consensus on whether they are caused by radiation. BNFL, which runs Oldbury, insisted that the levels of radiation emitted there are far too low to cause cancer.

A spokesman dismissed Busby's findings: 'He comes up with these things virtually every week. Every time he comes out with a report it is rubbished by people.'

-------- china

China Asked To Join The WTO, Didn't It?

By Steven Mufson
Sunday, April 29, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16396-2001Apr28?language=printer

Last autumn, China achieved a goal its government had been aiming forsince 1986 -- it finished lining up the necessary agreements to get into the World Trade Organization. It had won permanent normal trade relations from the United States. It had ironed out differences with the European Union. All but one of the then-137countries in the WTO had approved its membership.

Everything was set for the communist giant to join the ultimate capitalist club, ushering in a new era of foreign investment and economic progress for China. A Hong Kong newspaper trumpeted it as the "biggest milestone since 1978," when Maoism gave way to Deng Xiaoping's reform campaign.

Except it hasn't happened.

What went awry between the champagne toasts of October 2000 and the sour standoff of today? Why is the U.S. Congress likely to open a new round of debate over a trading status that was supposed to have been permanently settled seven months ago?

The answers to those questions reveal some important truths about a very complex country.

What happened is that the Chinese Communist Party leaders -- despite what we journalists routinely call a "monopoly on political power" -- have been reluctant to force the trade agreement down the throats of the country's farmers, laborers, corporate bureaucrats and other entrenched interest groups. The moment China joined the WTO it would have to eliminate tariffs and other barriers that have protected these groups from competition with well-financed, high-tech international conglomerates. And so China has not put the finishing touches on its WTO application, opting to haggle over a handful of points -- and thus delay the need to confront vocal trade pact foes at home.

Americans often have a black-and-white image of China. They see a government that detained 24 American military personnel for 11 days last month, and which has missiles aimed at democratic Taiwan. They read about government suppression of the Falun Gong, police detentions without charge or trial, and the Tibetans' futile appeals for greater autonomy and religious freedom. And they think, on such evidence, that the Chinese government can afford to disregard the will of the Chinese people.

But that's not entirely true. A few years ago, an American economist told me about visiting a key Communist Party elder named Bo Yibo, and telling him how China, then suffering rapid inflation, should use monetary policy to slam on the brakes. Afterward, making small talk, the American asked Bo what it was like to help lead such a huge country. Bo said, "It is like being at the head of a parade with 1.2 billion people behind you and then having some smart foreigner tell you to stop the parade."

Bo's point was plain. China's leaders have to worry about those they govern. The situation is far different than it was 25 years ago, when Mao Zedong could cling to paramount status even after his disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign led to the starvation of tens of millions of people.

Today, much like democratic governments, the ruling Chinese Communist Party and its official hierarchy have to respond to domestic constituencies, albeit in ways far different from the way we do here. That's why, when a deadly explosion took place last month in a school where students had been put to work making firecrackers, popular outrage forced Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji to apologize and promise an investigation. That's why, when villagers upset over arbitrary local taxes rioted recently, the government didn't just send in troops -- President Jiang Zemin also issued a conciliatory statement about standardizing rural taxes.

And that's why the WTO deal hasn't gone through.

The biggest of those domestic constituencies is the country's agricultural sector. Farming has also wielded tremendous power over trade positions in such countries as the United States and France, but in China, farmers have even more clout: Forty-seven percent of Chinese workers are in agriculture -- compared with less than 3 percent of their American counterparts. China is, at heart, a rural nation. Just past the Beijing city limits, high-rise buildings quickly yield to flat farmland. In Sichuan, hillside after hillside is awash with the yellow flowers of rapeseed plants, raised for their oil. In the small towns in Jinan province, giant grain warehouses dominate the landscape. And the soggy soil along the roadways in the south is planted in sugar and rice.

China's farmers have good reason to fear they could be trampled by the corporate behemoths that dominate American farming. Even after two decades of economic reforms and better incentives, most of them lack the equipment and the economies of scale that foreign agriculture has. If American firms didn't wipe the local farmers out, they could at least drive down food prices. Those anxieties may explain why a separate accord to eliminatecertain barriers to beef, wheat and citrus imports -- considered an indication of Chinese commitment to WTO -- hasn't been fully implemented yet.

China's aging industries make up another big and nervous constituency. A price war is going on in the color television market, where Dutch-owned Royal Philips Electronics has recently cut prices of three models by 10 percent to 13 percent. Banks (where until recently some tellers did their calculations by abacus) soon will face direct competition. And the once-sleepy insurance business is scrambling so it can compete with U.S. firms such as AIG as they seek to replace the vanishing government safety net.

The country also has scores of automobile factories, only a few of which will survive competition from foreign imports or foreign-funded Chinese-based manufacturers. Honda has set up a factory in Guangzhou, Ford hasentered a joint venture in Chongqing, and General Motors is churning out cars from Pudong. Even before these were these were launched, Volkswagen was selling almost half the new sedans in China.

When I worked in China, I visited a number of township and village enterprises (TVEs) -- poorly funded, poorly managed ventures that survived in rural areas essentially because pent-up demand for any goods was great. TVEs accounted for an increase of more than 100 million local jobs over a 15-year period ending in the mid-'90s. But as foreign ventures arrive, the TVEs could easily die, giving way to Hong Kong, Korean, Japanese or American chain stores and distribution networks. I remember an earnest furniture salesman near the town of Zibo. Business was slow and the quality of his merchandise was bad. Think what Home Depot could do to him.

Chinese intellectuals, especially the more nationalist ones, also have reservations about the WTO. While U.S. business executives and policymakers want to bind China by international rules and in so doing promote the rule of law, China worries that WTO rules are fundamentally American ones. Even in April 1999, when Zhu was in the United States trying to make a WTO deal, one Chinese commentator published an article called "Behind Globalization: An analysis of the U.S. and British strategic trap." Recent talk of the WTO imposing environmental and labor standards must only increase China's fears of foreign meddling.

If all that is true, why did China's leaders seek WTO membership in the first place? Because they knew it would bring tremendous benefits as well as prestige to their country. Already the program of economic reform and opening to the outside world launched by Deng in 1978 has vastly improved the lives of ordinary Chinese.

Trade makes up roughly 40 percent of China's gross domestic product. China had a trade surplus of more than $80 billion with the United States last year; it sells Americans six times what it buys from us. The export industries along the coastal areas have transformed quiet fishing towns into bustling cities, and people who flock to work there send hundreds of millions of dollars back to the poorer inland areas they came from. Now China needs economic engines for the future. WTO membership would bring new infusions of foreign investment as well as foreign technology and expertise.

In short, for all the dislocations that come with opening up its economy, new investment and open markets hold out the only hope for China to keep a growth rate rapid enough to keep the average person happy -- and employed. Moreover, foreign competition could force state-owned industries to adopt reforms that the central leadership has been unable to bring about by command.

And given the Communist Party's virtual abandonment of communist ideology, huge helpings of economic growth and slices of nationalism are the new staples of political stability.

China will almost certainly plunge ahead with the next step of "reform and opening up" -- and get back on track to join the WTO. A delegation of trade negotiators came to the United States in March, before heading to Europe. A Shanghai municipal committee was here last week to talk about WTO implementation. Some American business executives say they hope that a deal can be completed in Geneva by July. The final sticking points affect the insurance industry, the definition of a chain store, and whether China should, as a developing country, be able to dole out farm subsidies equal to 10 percent of output, or as a developed country only 5 percent. These are not insurmountable problems.

Meanwhile, however, politics can create some uncomfortable interludes. The May 1999 U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war led to a short break-off of talks. Now the Navy surveillance plane standoff and the U.S. sale of arms to Taiwan have strained ties some more. As one American business leader with interest in China wondered last week, how much diplomatic burden can trade carry on its own?

At times like this, China wants to stand up to the West, particularly the United States, while simultaneously realizing that it needs the outside world's help.

"America is both a source of hope and frustration, an unwieldy giant holding the key to China's future," Yong Deng, a U.S. Naval Academy assistant professor, and Sherry Gray, a Stanley Foundation program officer wrote in a recent issue of the Journal of Contemporary China. "This ambivalence has proven hard to overcome."

There's ambivalence on this side of the globe as well. Those who have promoted China's entrance into the WTO see its membership as a way to tame the unruly giant, getting Beijing accustomed to playing by international rules. But there is also fear that China is so big that if it fails to live up to those rules, it could wreck the WTO. And there are those who worry that China, once admitted to the WTO, will be even less concerned about world opinion and less respectful of human rights than it is now.

Many of those feelings will undoubtedly come out in Congress in the coming weeks, when debate likely begins again on the one-year renewal of China's normal trade status. Even though lawmakers felt they had cast their final votes on the issue last fall, until China actually enters the WTO, the old rules apply here in the United States as well as in China. That means that at any time before June 3, a member of Congress can introduce a measure to block China from getting a one-year renewal of the tariff treatment that almost every other country in the world receives.

Last week, China's newly arrived ambassador, the urbane Yang Jiechi, spoke to a sympathetic group of U.S. policy analysts. In the wake of U.S.-China discord over the EP-3 and the announcement on Taiwan arms sales, Yang said pointedly that when international markets failed during the Asian economic crisis, China had been able to look inward to sustain rapid growth. "Whatever happens in the world economy, the Chinese government and people can always fall back on the nation's vast domestic market," he said.

In the end, though, China will almost undoubtedly dot the i's, cross the t's and make its long-sought entry into the WTO, not as a gesture to the United States but because of its own calculated self-interest.

"China's leaders have some domestic interests they need to mollify," said an American businessman following the talks anxiously. "But they all recognize that this is what they have to do."

Steve Mufson, who covers the State Department for The Post, was a foreign correspondent in Beijing from 1994 to 1998.

-------- depleted uranium

-------- europe

Europeans Trying to Size Up Bush Team

By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 29, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14613-2001Apr28?language=printer

PARIS -- When the Bush administration last Monday offered to help Taiwan buy eight diesel submarines to be built using blueprints and technology from Germany and the Netherlands, there was one small problem: Both of the European countries have longstanding policies against selling weapons to Taiwan.

Some Europeans were aghast, seeing the announcement as the latest example of what Europe's media often portray as America's new lone ranger-style foreign policy - announce first, consult with allies later. If the Bush administration did not consult, said Francois Heisbourg, a French defense analyst, "that would indicate an enormous degree of sloppiness."

Other Europeans were more benign, calling the incident a minor glitch for a generally competent new administration that still is assembling its team. Probably "people in the administration concentrated on putting the package together without thinking about things like licenses," said Jonathan Eyal of the Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank in London.

As Bush marks his first 100 days in office, Europeans are still trying to take measure of a still largely unknown American president, and discern future policy directions from the administration's limited forays so far into foreign affairs.

The emerging view in Europe is of an administration more competent, but also more conservative, than people here initially thought; less engaged globally and less likely to put Europe at the center of its foreign policy; more prone to unilateral steps and statements, like the Taiwan arms sales affair may indicate, and somewhat less likely to factor European sensibilities into decision-making. In Washington, Bush has already had face-to-face meetings with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany and Prime Minister Bertie Ahern of Ireland. At a European Union summit in Sweden in June and at subsequent stops Bush will make in Belgium, Spain and Poland, other European leaders will get a chance to size him up in person.

The Europeans' views of the new administration tend to be colored by their own place on the ideological spectrum, analysts here point out. This helps explain why many of Europe's left-of-center news organizations have been quick to portray Bush as a dangerous cowboy, an incompetent, or both. "Presidency of dunces," was the headline on an opinion piece in Britain's Guardian newspaper, summing up Bush's first 100 days. Der Speigel magazine in Germany calls him "the little sheriff."

"The left is very critical," said Sergio Romano, a former Italian ambassador to the ex-Soviet Union and now a writer on foreign policy and political issues. ". . .They got along with Clinton. They felt there was some kind of synergy. Clinton was part of the Atlantic Left, shall we say."

As for Bush, he said, "the right is less critical because they feel he belongs to their family. They have the same economic theories," such as support of large tax cuts.

Much welcomed in European capitals was Bush's decision to fill his foreign and defense team with professionals known and respected on this side of the Atlantic, such as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was once the U.S. ambassador to NATO. The China surveillance plane crisis, many analysts here believe, showed the new team's ability to manage a crisis.

"Individually, the present team is probably more competent than the previous one, with the exception of the president," said Dominique Moisi, a political analyst with the French Institute of International Relations. "They have started to reassure Europeans, especially Colin Powell."

And on some issues, such as U.S. interest in building a missile defense system, the administration has been quite willing to consult with the allies, and with Russia, many Europeans feel. They expressed relief when U.S. officials said there would be no immediate pullout of American troops from the Balkans, as the Republicans' pre-election campaign rhetoric suggested.

But then came Bush's announcement, again, without prior consultation, that the United States would not abide by the Kyoto protocol on global climate change. Many Europeans saw this as confirming a new "unilateralist" trend.

"The perception has gone in waves," said Karl Kaiser, research director for the German Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin. "Initially great concern about unilateralism due to prior statements has become on the whole - with the exception of Kyoto - a more positive view."

On the Kyoto treaty, he added, "some Europeans are being disingenuous" in their outrage, since the treaty had already faced serious opposition in the Senate and was unlikely to be ratified, whatever Bush's position. "In that sense," he said, "Bush is more honest about the realities of American politics."

Other analysts said the European uproar over the Kyoto decision might have had less to do with the announcement itself than with the fact that the allies were not warned beforehand.

That is a key worry for many Europeans. With the Cold War over, they fear that their part of the world is sliding on Washington's scale of what's important. They feel this anxiety even as they say that Europe needs its own foreign policy, its own military force independent of NATO.

Moisi says Europe feels it is becoming less of a priority of the United States. He sees the U.S. priorities as the Americas - as evidenced by the Quebec summit of western hemisphere leaders earlier this month - and Asia, with a concentration on security.

Likewise, Europeans worry that the United States is in a state of drift on policy toward their giant neighbor Russia. "There's a feeling in Europe that America doesn't take Russia seriously," Eyal of the London think tank said. "It appears they are ready to talk to Russia, but they are not ready to talk to Russia as America's equal." With no meeting between Bush and Russian President Vladmir Putin scheduled until summer, the relationship "is now in suspended animation," he said.

The main issue that people here initially expected to test the Atlantic alliance was the administration's outspoken support of an advanced missile defense system. Europeans feared that such a system would undercut existing arms-control agreements with Russia and ignite a new arms race. They also feared that the Bush administration would forge ahead with the plan over the outspoken objections of its allies.

So far, that has not happened. When Rumsfeld made an early trip to Germany to make a speech on the missile defense project, he largely succeeded in assuaging European concerns. He convinced even skeptics that no specific plan, among several competing alternatives, had been selected, and showed that, on this issue at least, the United States would consult closely with Russia.

"Regarding missile defense, I think in the last month the anxieties have been defused," said Rafael Estrella, president of the NATO parliamentary assembly, in Madrid. ". . . We are more aware it is not something that will happen tomorrow."

Yet even those Europeans willing to give Bush better-than-expected reviews are under no illusion that foreign policy and trans-Atlantic relations will remain unchanged as the new team settles in.

Many here said they expect future clashes to erupt over trade issues - they disagree on a range of subjects including taxation of companies' international earnings and trade in farm goods, notably genetically modified ones. They also clash over the importance of international organizations and treaties, and possibly over the European preference for diplomacy and economic pressure as opposed to military might to resolve international threats.

Also, say some here, Europeans and Americans will find themselves increasingly diverging over questions that might be called "values issues," such as America's continued use of the death penalty, which Europeans find inexplicable, and the environment.

-------- germany

German Nuke Waste Shipment Arrives

The Associated Press
Sunday, April 29, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010429/aponline231141_000.htm

LONDON -- Germany's first shipment of nuclear waste to a British reprocessing plant in three years arrived quietly in Britain on Sunday after a protest-filled, five-day journey through Europe.

British Nuclear Fuels Ltd., a company wholly owned by the British government, said there were no protesters at the port in northwestern town of Barrow-in-Furness when the radioactive material arrived.

"It arrived today very quietly," said spokesman Bill Anderton, adding that the final, 50-mile rail journey to the Sellafield reprocessing plant will be made "during the early part of this week."

Anti-nuclear protesters harassed the shipment - five containers of spent fuel rods from two southern German nuclear plants - within hours after its Tuesday departure. Protesters staged a sit-in on a road near at the Neckarwestheim power plant in the southern state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, briefly delaying part of the shipment.

In northern France, protesters threw smoke bombs onto a rail line Thursday, slowing a train carrying the waste to the port town of Dunkirk.

Germany halted all nuclear shipments in 1998 after it emerged that radioactive emissions from the special containers had exceeded safety limits for years. It also suspended dealings with Sellafield plant last year in the wake of a scandal over fake records.

Germany also resumed nuclear shipments to France earlier this month for processing at the Cogema plant at La Hague, near the English Channel.

-------- iraq

Document Reveals 1987 Bomb Test by Iraq

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/world/29IRAQ.html

Iraq tested a bomb in 1987 that cast a radioactive cloud in the open air and was designed to cause vomiting, cancer, birth defects and slow death, according to a secret Iraqi report on the weapon's construction and testing.

Radiation sickness from the bomb, the document said, would "weaken enemy units from the standpoint of health and inflict losses that would be difficult to explain, possibly producing a psychological effect." Death, it added, might occur "within two to six weeks."

The bomb, 12 feet long and weighing more than a ton, according to the document, could be dropped on troop areas, industrial centers, airports, railroad stations, bridges and "any other areas the command decrees."

While the existence of Iraq's effort to build a radiological weapon has been known for several years, the 1987 report sheds light on the secret effort. The New York Times obtained the document from the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, a private group in Washington that said it acquired it from a United Nations official.

Radiation or radiological weapons, sometimes known as "dirty nukes," are the poor cousins of nuclear arms. Their conventional high explosives scatter highly radioactive materials to poison targets rather than destroying them with blast and heat. Their effects on people can range from radiation sickness to agonizingly slow death, which is why military experts often see them as ethically bankrupt.

"It shows what kind of guy we're dealing with," said Gary Milhollin, the roup's director, of the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. The bomb, he added, was "nasty stuff meant to kill people over a long period of time" and thus, he said, "crossed the line into moral barbarism."

It was basically a dud, however, Mr. Milhollin said, and that caused the Iraqis to scrap the project. The radiation levels were considered too low to achieve the grisly objectives.

The episode nonetheless "shows Iraq's intention" to develop weapons of mass destruction, he added. The official who disclosed the document, Mr. Milhollin said, is "concerned that Saddam is going to get the bomb."

The United Nations rarely discloses documents gathered in Iraq, but David Albright, formerly a nuclear inspector in Iraq, said he had seen the document and that it he did not doubt it was authentic.

He and other experts agreed that the document, which is to be posted on a Web site Monday, gives away no secrets that could aid weapons development and no indication that the project was a resounding failure.

Nuclear experts say Iraq today has neither programs to develop radiological weapons nor the reactors needed to make radioactive materials for them, and no fuel for nuclear arms. The reactor used in making the prototype radiological weapon was itself bombed during the gulf war in 1991, and inspectors tried to keep Iraq from resuming its nuclear efforts for years afterward.

But today the inspectors are largely gone and American experts worry that Iraq may be quietly shopping for bomb fuel and parts on the international black market.

"There's growing concern that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and will make steady progress because it knows so much already," said Mr. Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, an arms control group in Washington.

Iraq's testing of its radiological weapon was done in 1987 as it waged a war of attrition against Iran and considered the radiation bomb as a way to cripple enemy forces. The document said the work was undertaken by Atomic Energy Agency and the Al Qa-Qa and Al Muthanna centers of the Iraqi Military Industrial Commission.

To make the radioactive materials, Iraqi engineers prepared special metals to irradiate in a reactor at Tuwaitha, Iraq's primary nuclear site. The document said the metal was mostly zirconium, which is often used in atomic reactors because it resists corrosion. The zirconium mixture also included hafnium, uranium and iron.

Zirconium was chosen, the document said, because a production process for it already existed since the metal was used for incendiary bombs. When finely powdered, the metal ignites spontaneously in air.

The half-life of zirconium 95, the document said, was 75.5 days. This relatively short period of radioactive decay, it said, "helps to dissipate the effect of the bomb after several weeks so that it is difficult to track, analyze, or recognize." The brevity, it added, gives "the desired biological effects" while making it "possible for our units to go to the bombed area without great danger after this period has expired."

The document has many diagrams. They show at the bomb's core a thick three-foot lead case, shielding workers from its radioactive rays, that held the zirconium. This leaden case fit inside an eight-foot casing that held fuses and explosive charges and was capped by tail fins four feet long.

The weapon and its parts were tested three times in 1987, the document said. The first sought to see if the thick lead case holding an irradiated charge could be blown apart, in order to discharge. It could.

The second test was of a bomb sitting on the ground. "The explosion was awesome," said the report. "We saw the blast wave moving out of the center of the explosion in the form of a circle moving at great speed." The radioactive cloud rose more than 600 feet.

In the third test, the Iraqi Air Force dropped two bombs, which again produced huge clouds. "We must point out," the report said, "that a significant part of the fallout went with the cloud into the air and it was not possible to follow this small amount of radioactive matter by means of the portable equipment."

Radiation readings on the ground were rather low, in one case "290 times above the highest level allowed nationally for foodstuffs." The document reported no readings taken in the air - a critical oversight for a weapon eant to hurt and kill people largely through the inhalation of radioactive particles.

The main flaws of the weapon, the report said, were that its radioactive charges lost strength quickly. The irradiatiated charge had to be used within a week. Calm weather was also essential. Another drawback, it said, was that the work had to be done in strict secrecy, "even with regard to those doing the work, so as not to give rise to psychological feelings leading to hesitation because of a fear of radiation."

A final problem, it said, was that an alert enemy might come to realize that the exploding bombs packed a lingering punch, allowing the future development of defensive precautions. It even suggested that satellites might be able to spot radiation from "a concentrated strike," a feat that seems unlikely.

Iraq gave the document to the inspectors and the United Nations apparently referred to it in a April 1996 report of the United Nations special commission set up to monitor Iraq's disarmament. "Iraq declared," it said, "that no order to produce radiological weapons was given and the project was abandoned."

The document is to be posted Monday at www.iraqwatch.org, a new initiative of the Wisconsin Project. The main supporter of the Web site is the Smith-Richardson Foundation, a private group in Westport, Conn., that specializes in issues of national security.

Mr. Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project said that the radiation effort was clearly a flop, despite the report's upbeat language.

"When you read this, you get the impression that the guys in Iraq were trying to put best face on the results, to exaggerate them," he said. "But if you look at the figures, it's obvious it didn't work."

-------- israel / lebanon

'This Land Is Our Land'

Sunday, April 29, 2001
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16390-2001Apr28?language=printer

Lebanon's Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, who came to Washington last week for talks with President Bush, is a man on a tightrope. He returned to the prime minister's post last fall with the goal of helping his battered nation rebuild its economy. But the country's stability and future are tied up with two formidable presenceslargely beyond his control: Syria, which exercises considerable influence in Lebanon and has 35,000 troops stationed there; and the Syrian-backed guerrilla group Hezbollah, which attacks Israel from its base in the south of Lebanon. Washington Post columnist and Newsweek contributing editor Lally Weymouth talked with the 57-year-old Hariri during his visit to the capital. Excerpts:

How did your meeting with President Bush go?

It went well. My impression is that the president is keen to see peace in the Middle East and wants to encourage moderate governments that are working hard to achieve peace. He said if there is an impression in the area that he is not as committed to peace as the previous administration, this impression is not correct.

But there is that impression, don't you think?

The impression is there [but] he is trying to send a message. My assessment is that he will use different means [than former president Bill Clinton] but I feel strongly that he is committed to peace.

Speaking of the peace process, didn't you think that former Israeli prime minister [Ehud] Barak made a generous offer last year to the Palestinian Authority, and that [Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat made a mistake by rejecting it?

We are a small country and Israel doesn't respect international law and United Nations resolutions. . . . [But] I believe the mood in the Arab world has shifted since [the talks in] Madrid from not believing in peace to believing in peace.

How much more can Israel give than 95 percent of the West Bank, all of Gaza, parts of the Jordan valley and much of East Jerusalem?

Let me ask you a question. Why 95 percent and not 100 percent?

So you think Arafat did the right thing?

I'm not saying that. [But] you are not talking about a business deal. We are talking about the future of a people. If we believe in peace truly, we have to sacrifice for peace. In my opinion, strong people make peace; war can be made by anyone.

Does that mean Israeli Prime Minister [Ariel] Sharon?

I'm not naming anybody in particular. This is a general rule.

Do you agree with Hezbollah that Shebaa Farms [territory that Israeli says is part of the Golan Heights but Lebanon claims as its own] is Lebanese territory?

This is not the theory of Hezbollah; this is the theory of the Lebanese government. We believe it is Lebanese territory for sure.

Why haven't you sent your army to control the border in the south with Israel?

We'd like to see peace in the Middle East. Israel withdrew from Lebanon on May 25 [last year] but continues to violate our air space and our water -- by [having] planes survey all the time. . . . The most important thing is notfor us to send an army but to achieve a peace agreement.

Hezbollah is staging attacks on Israeli soldiers at the border and it is said that you need to send your army there if you're going to restore order. You're a man who wants to see his country grow. . . .

[The best way] to restore Lebanese sovereignty is to see the Israelis withdraw from all Lebanese territory.

Some say that Syria wants to keep that area hot and that is why Hezbollah attacks continually. I saw an editorial the other day in your newspaper [the Al-Mustaqbal, which Hariri owns], which questioned whether the attacks against Israel are wise.

The editorial was talking about the timing.

The attacks are okay otherwise?

Nobody wants to see a war or attacks. This land is our land, and I would like to see Israel leave as soon as possible.

It's been said that Iran has deployed missiles on your territory under Iranian command and control.

No.

But aren't there missiles deployed in your country?

I don't know. I don't think so. Have you seen any missiles used?

Presumably there is something called intelligence. . . .

If this is true, then you [would be able to]see a picture.

Some say that this is like a Cuban missile crisis, that Iran's missiles don't work well [at long distances]. And so the reason that they are deploying the missiles in Lebanon is to get them close enough to hit Israel.

But this is too close. Logically, when you build a missile to go 1,000 kilometers, you don't move it for a target of 300 meters or 500 meters.

Okay, but are there any missiles that Iran sold to Lebanon?

None. This is for sure. We have never bought any arms from Iran.

Are there any missiles deployed by Lebanon in your country?

That is our army, and I don't think that it is a good idea to speak about our army.

Sharon has said there are missiles deployed in Lebanon.

Aren't there missiles in Israel? Aren't there tanks in Israel? Isn't there an atomic bomb in Israel? You know that Israel has all kinds of arms. If we have more arms, or they do, it will not solve the problem.

I don't see the region heading toward peace negotiations.

No, it's not.

Do you think it's heading for a wider war?

I am afraid it is heading for instability. . . .

Many in Israel have given up on the peace process. They saw Israel make an offer and Arafat respond with violence. Indeed, Barak was thrown out of office. Many Israelis believe they have walked the last mile. What more can they do?

If you walk 97 percent, you can walk 100 percent.

What about the Arabs?

I don't want to talk about Arafat.

What about the recent conference, held in Beirut, of various terrorist and militant organizations?

It was not a terrorist conference. People came and expressed how they think. They did not commit any act. I do not want to defend anybody, but the [Lebanese] government was not there.

The final communique included phrases such as, "The Jerusalem issue cannot be based on co-existence with the Zionist enemy, but rather we must uproot it from our land. . . . America is the second Israel." And they called for a boycott of American products. Why would you allow a conference of this kind to be held in your country?

In Israel, there are many people who are talking much worse than that.

But aren't you worried that Lebanon could be labeled a terrorist country by the U.S.?

I'm not [worried].

You know the new president of Syria. How do you assess him as compared to his father?

He is young [and] ambitious. He believes in peace.

Really. Do you think there is any hope for an Israel-Syria agreement?

We have to see what will happen with the Palestinian-Israeli track. It is difficult for any Arab to move toward any solution because of what is going on in the West Bank and Gaza.

What is your view of Sharon?

I am the first Arab leader who said we know his past and remember him with sadness. But the day he became prime minister, I announced that despite all that happened to us because of him personally, we are ready to make peace with Sharon.

Would you like to see the Syrian troops withdraw from Lebanon?

They will withdraw when we see that it is necessary to withdraw, but now we see that they are needed.

When you were 20 years old, you answered an advertisement and went to Saudi Arabia, where you made a fortune.

I started teaching and then became a manager of an accounting office. Then I worked for a construction company and later started my own company -- a joint venture with a French company. I bought the shares of my partner, and then I bought the mother company.

You returned to Lebanon in '92 to become prime minister?

Yes, and I am still in politics today. And the one who is taking care of my business is my son. I know how much peace can give our children and grandchildren.

Should you try to disarm Hezbollah?

When we have peace, everybody will do their part. We in Lebanon are afraid of Israel. We are a small country. We don't have enough means to defend ourselves.

So you're saying Hezbollah is one way to defend yourself? What is your attitude toward Hezbollah?

Look at me. You know the answer. During the occupation, they were an important part of resisting the occupation. But I know that peace one day has to come.

-------- missile defense

Bush To Propose Missile Defense

By Robert Burns
AP Military Writer
Sunday, April 29, 2001
The Associated Press
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010429/aponline132630_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- The missile defense favored by President Bush - a shield of global reach rather than covering only U.S. territory - bears a striking resemblance to the approach his father's Pentagon was pursuing a decade ago. The Clinton administration quickly killed it.

Bush will outline his intentions for missile defense in a speech Tuesday that aides say will link the concept to his desire for substantial, perhaps unilateral reductions in the U.S. nuclear missile arsenal.

The question Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has been mulling is how to go beyond the current missile defense approach that is focused on a land-based intercept system designed to protect just the 50 U.S. states.

One approach reported to be under consideration by Rumsfeld and Bush is known as a "layered" missile defense.

It might combine the Clinton approach, which would use ground-launched rockets to intercept missiles midway through flight, with sea- and space-based weapons that would make the intercept during the hostile missile's ascent phase, or while its rocket plume was still burning inside the atmosphere.

The result - if it worked - would be a missile defense system with global reach.

Brig. Gen. Michael Hamel, director of space operations for the Air Force, said last week he supports that approach.

"Layered missile defense is absolutely the right way to go," he said.

More than 30 scientists and missile experts who oppose the administration's push for missile defense planned to gather at the Capitol on Wednesday to assert that the science of missile defense is too immature to justify moving ahead with a project expected to costs tens of billions of dollars.

The administration has made clear it will press ahead; when, at what cost and with what blueprint are the only questions.

How far-reaching a missile defense should be is a sensitive issue.

For one, it affects the degree of political support by Canada and U.S. allies in Europe. It also bears on the prohibitions against certain missile defenses spelled out in the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

The first Bush administration believed that with the demise of the Soviet Union the emphasis in missile defense should shift from protection of the United States against an attack by thousands of nuclear missiles to protection of America and its allies against perhaps several dozen missiles of any origin.

It was called Global Protection Against Limited Strikes, or GPALS, and was made public at a Pentagon news conference Feb. 12, 1991.

The official who presented the $32 billion plan was Stephen J. Hadley - then an assistant secretary of defense, now a deputy national security adviser to Bush. The defense secretary at the time was Dick Cheney, now the vice president.

Rumsfeld may come up with a different acronym, but the concept of global protection is likely to be a key aspect of whatever missile defense program the administration decides to pursue, in the view of many private analysts who follow the subject closely.

"After the president's speech we will no longer talking about national missile defense," but instead a global or international approach that is much broader - and probably much more expensive - than the Clinton administration was developing, said Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Alan Frye, an arms control expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said he believes, based on his contacts with administration officials involved in the matter, that Bush will adopt a GPALS-like approach. He also thinks it highly unlikely Bush will announce a U.S. withdrawal from the ABM treaty, but rather that he is willing to discuss possible missile defense cooperation with the Russians.

Morton Halperin, director of policy planning at the State Department during the Clinton administration, said he believes the Russians would be more likely to engage in missile defense talks if Bush also committed to reducing the U.S. offensive nuclear arsenal to 1,500 or 1,000 warheads.

The United States now has about 7,200 active warheads and is committed to cutting to 3,500; Clinton favored cutting to 2,500, although that has not been made a binding commitment.

Rumsfeld has made a point lately of saying that he has stopped using the term "national missile defense," because "what's 'national' depends on where you live," as he put it to reporters March 8. His point was that if a U.S. missile defense is capable of protecting, say, Japan, then it is "national" to the Japanese but is global to everyone else.

--------

China Looks to Foil U.S. Missile Defense System

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/world/29CHIN.html

BEIJING - Fearful that an antimissile defense could embolden the United States to intervene in crises on China's doorstep, Beijing is focusing on low-cost ways to thwart the plan, including ways to attack the defense system itself, China's top arms control official said.

"We have seen that the United States wantonly bombed Yugoslavia and that Yugoslavia had no means to retaliate," the official, Sha Zukang, said in an interview. "Once the United States believes it has both a strong spear and a strong shield, it could lead them to conclude that nobody can harm the United States and they can harm anyone they like anywhere in the world. There could be many more bombings like what happened in Kosovo."

Determined to establish its sovereignty over Taiwan, or at least to stop Taiwan from declaring its independence, China has steadily built up its military power in the region. In so doing, it has become a rival of the United States for influence in the western Pacific.

The conflicting interests led to the recent collision between a United States Navy reconnaissance plane and a Chinese F-8 fighter. They ripple through the highly charged debate over American arms sales to Taiwan. And now they are shaping the debate over missile defense, an issue that is moving to the top of the Chinese-American agenda as the Pentagon develops its plan for a missile shield.

Mr. Sha, a veteran arms-control official famous for his blustery style, spoke in English at the hourlong interview. He made plain that China's fear was not that the United States would launch a surprise attack on China, but that a missile shield would lead American politicians to believe that the United States was so powerful and well protected that it could act with virtual impunity.

"Even when national missile defense was not there they bombed the Sudan, they bombed Afghanistan and they bombed Iraq," he said. "It could lead to the development of a tendency of the use or threat of use of force, more often than is necessary by the United States, in the conduct of international relations."

Mr. Sha did not directly refer to the tense situation in the Taiwan Strait. But even though he talked of Yugoslavia, his comments reflected deep-seated Chinese concerns that the Pentagon would develop closer ties with Taiwan's armed forces and that a missile shield might make Washington more comfortable in rushing to the island's defense.

It is not yet clear when an American missile defense might be developed or how well it might work. But some American officials say that an antimissile system could be useful in a future crisis over Taiwan. They reason that it might protect American territory against potential Chinese missile threats and could provide Washington with more diplomatic leverage. Indeed, during the election campaign President Bush spoke of the need to defend against nuclear-tipped Chinese missiles.

The dispute over missile defense is compounded by the modest size of China's nuclear force. Unlike Russia, which has enough warheads to overwhelm a limited American missile defense, China has what arms control specialists call a minimal deterrent. So any substantial American effort to build a missile defense might neutralize China's small force - even if that is not the intent - and that is a big worry for Beijing.

Apparently in an effort to ease Chinese concerns, Mr. Bush has proposed a discussion on strategic issues in a letter to President Jiang Zemin, Mr. Sha said. China is willing to listen to any ideas that the Bush administration may have. But Mr. Sha said the dialogue had not yet begun because the Bush administration was still putting its national security team in place.

He also stressed that deep cuts in American nuclear arms would not placate China if they were made in parallel with the development of a missile defense. The Bush administration has been working on a plan for deep cuts in the hopes that it would make missile defense more politically acceptable to allied nations, as well as to Russia and China.

Certainly, the American force is so large that even deep cuts would leave the United States with an overwhelming advantage over China's small deterrent. China's long-range nuclear force consists of 18 DF-5 missiles; they are old, liquid-fueled weapons that are maintained at a low level of alert, and their warheads are stored separately. The United States has a triad of air-, sea- and land-based nuclear weapons. But China has no intercontinental-range bomber force, and its lone strategic submarine rarely leaves port.

To upgrade its arsenal, China is developing the DF-31, a solid-fuel mobile missile with the range to strike Alaska and the northwestern United States, as well as a long-range follow-up, the DF-41. There has been considerable discussion about how China might respond to a missile defense program and speculation that China might expand its projected arsenal of DF-31 and DF-41 missiles to be sure to maintain its retaliatory punch.

But Mr. Sha suggested that instead of engaging in a large, costly buildup, China would concentrate on a range of relatively low-cost responses, such as developing plans to attack the radar network and communication nodes that would form the nervous system of America's defense. "We will do whatever possible to ensure that our security will not be compromised, and we are confident that we can succeed without an arms race," he said. "We believe defense itself needs defense. It is a defense system. It has many, many parts and most of them are vulnerable to an attack."

Mr. Sha did not say in detail how that might be done. But American experts say that the Chinese, for example, could target battle-management radar for the United States with land-based ballistic missiles, submarine-launched missiles, cruise missiles or other means. Another response, he implied, could be to put sophisticated decoys on missiles.

Yan Xuetong of Qinghua University suggested a possible compromise on the missile defense issue. The United States could build a system that could intercept no more than five missiles. That, he said, would protect against a possible threat from, say, Iran or Iraq without jeopardizing China's force. But the multitiered defenses the Pentagon has in mind are more ambitious than that.

-------- russia

Putin Meets Chinese Leader

By David McHugh
Associated Press Writer
Sunday, April 29, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010429/aponline112447_000.htm

MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin received Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan in the Kremlin on Sunday for a high-profile meeting underlining the growing ties between Moscow and Beijing.

Tang was in Moscow for a foreign ministers' meeting Saturday of the Shanghai Five, comprising Russia, China and three Central Asian countries. He spent Sunday in talks with Russian officials.

Greeting Tang at the Kremlin, Putin said relations between Russia and China had "a very good dynamic."

"This is reflected not only in many meetings at the highest level, but those meetings have their continuation and intensification in contacts between business people, representatives of culture and between all levels of society," Putin said.

Sino-Russian relations have improved dramatically in recent years following decades of Soviet-era rivalry for dominance in the Communist world. Russia and China have declared their opposition to what they describe as a "unipolar world," their term for alleged U.S. global domination.

Putin noted that trade between Russia and China grew 40 percent last year to a record $8 billion. China is the No. 1 customer for Russia's ailing defense industries, purchasing billions of dollars worth of jets, missiles, and ships.

At a news conference, Tang dodged a question about whether Beijing had asked Moscow to sell it more arms in the wake of President Bush's declaration that the United States would do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan, which China views as a renegade province.

He said only that he and Putin had discussed "the latest moves in American diplomacy."

Tang and Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov signed a protocol on a draft treaty on friendship and cooperation that Putin and Chinese President Jiang Zemin are to sign during Jiang's visit to Moscow in July. The two presidents will also meet in June at a Shanghai Five summit in Shanghai.

"We are unanimous in agreement that this document will play a great role in enriching the relations between our countries in all spheres," Ivanov said. The treaty "will further strategic stability and security around the world," he added.

The Russia-China relationship is not free of tensions, however. A Siberian physicist, Valentin Danilov, was arrested earlier this year for allegedly selling secret research materials to a Chinese company. On Sunday, he was charged with state treason, Russian media reported.

Tang said he was unaware of details of the case.

"But, I can categorically say that no matter what is the reality in this case, it will not affect normal Chinese-Russian relations, including in the scientific and technical field," Tang said.

-------- ukraine

Stagnation Looms for Ukraine
Political Turmoil May Sap Recent Momentum for Reform

By Sharon LaFraniere
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 29, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17726-2001Apr28?language=printer

KIEV, Ukraine, April 28 -- Serhey Tihipko wanted to talk to Prime Minister Viktor Yushchenko, but couldn't get through.

Tihipko's Ukrainian Labor Party, one of several tied to big business interests controlling much of the country's wealth, is the second-largest group in parliament after the Communists and had backed Yushchenko's dogged efforts to reform the economy. Yet it held no cabinet posts.

Tihipko said he tried for a month to get a meeting with Yushchenko to talk about it. Finally, he gave up. "During this month I met with the U.S. ambassador four times!"

Yushchenko, a leading reformer and democrat, says he refused to cede control of his government to business tycoons who wanted to further their own financial interests.

So in a gridlock of politics and principles, Yushchenko's 16-month-old government -- widely described, even by critics, as the best in Ukraine's 10 years of post-Soviet independence, met its demise on Thursday. Big business parties such as Tihipko's united with the Communists to oust the prime minister by a vote of 263 to 60.

Now Ukraine is being governed only by the president, Leonid Kuchma, who is accused of masterminding the kidnapping of a muck-raking journalist and who escaped the start of impeachment proceedings Thursday by only 21 votes.

"Ukraine is a big mess," said Markian Bilynskyj, director of the U.S.-Ukrainian Foundation in Kiev.

So much political turmoil raises Western fears that Ukraine, a strategically placed former Soviet republic of 49 million people, could go the way of neighboring Moldova and return to Communist control. Or that the country could back away from Western Europe and the United States into Russia's willing arms.

None of that is likely, according to political analysts and Western diplomats here. What is possible is that a government that seemed to be confronting some of its economic ills will slide back into the inertia of the last decade.

Ukraine's politics are like a ball of mercury, slippery and ever-changing. Excluding splinter parties, the 450-member parliament, whose power has grown as Kuchma's dwindles, divides roughly into three mutually hostile parts: Communists, pro-Yushchenko democrats, and a mix of big business and pro-Kuchma factions.

For a few months last year, the liberals and pro-Kuchma forces united behind crucial economic reforms. Then Kuchma's former security officer released secretly taped recordings that appeared to reveal Kuchma condoning corruption, ordering the kidnapping of a journalist and otherwise besmirching Ukrainian democracy.

"All the factions lost their unity," when the tapes were released, said Tihipko. "Because they all had different reactions."

Many liberals began agitating for Kuchma's ouster. Kuchma's supporters rallied around him. Yushchenko -- a Kuchma appointee -- tried to keep a foot in both camps. But when he publicly supported a key liberal whom Kuchma tossed into jail, Yulia Tymoshenko, the president drew away from him.

It didn't help that Kuchma, 63, a short, balding former Soviet missile factory manager, sank to the bottom of public opinion polls while Yushchenko, 47, a tall, handsome, former central banker, was routinely ranked as Ukraine's most trusted politician.

Pro-Kuchma forces in the legislature, sensing the widening gap between the president and the prime minister, started to demand a coalition government, partly made up of allies of big business. Tihipko said in an interview that the appointees would have helped Yushchenko reform the government and the economy. Yushchenko refused to accommodate them, he says, because of widespread corruption in Ukrainian businesses.

In an interview Friday, Yushchenko said the victory by the business interests shows that Ukraine's democracy is not yet firmly rooted.

"The real detonating force was the interest of three or four political figures," he said. "They needed direct political protection of financial and economic and property interests. . . .

"But I am optimistic because today lots of democratic forces were able to hear the bell they couldn't hear before," he said. "You have to fight for transparent politics and a non-criminal economy and democracy. If we want to have it, we have to fight for it."

Yushchenko vowed to unite the liberal democratic parties, but not to join those who want to unseat Kuchma, although he fears the tapes are authentic.

"A lot of those things that were heard might be true," he said. "Everyone wants to know the truth. Not speculation or rumors, not the ideas of the prime minister or anyone else, but the real truth."

Tihipko and other Kuchma allies say public outrage over the purported recordings has faded, and the main task is to form a new reform-minded government to work with the president. "Can you imagine what would happen in this country if the president resigned?" said Tihipko. "Then the problem would be huge."

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

U.S. Considers Shift In Nuclear Targets
Defenses to Focus on China, Experts Say

Washington Post
Sunday, April 29, 2001; Page A23
By Walter Pincus Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A18077-2001Apr28?language=printer

The Bush administration is considering major changes in America's nuclear posture, including slashing the number of strategic warheads, taking most B-52 and B-2 bombers out of the nuclear force and shifting some targets from Russia to China, according to administration officials and independent experts.

President Bush is scheduled to outline his goals for building missile defenses and reducing nuclear weapons in a speech Tuesday at the National Defense University at Fort McNair. But officials said the speech would deal with these subjects only in general terms and probably would not go much beyond Bush's campaign promises to cut the U.S. nuclear arsenal while developing a missile shield to protect the United States and its allies.

Meanwhile, an inter-agency review of nuclear strategy and weaponry, one of several reviews of the military ordered by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, is generating specific ideas as it moves closer to completion in June.

The Pentagon, some officials said, is prepared to cut the number of strategic warheads from about 7,500 today to below 2,500 if the president changes the formal guidance on what nuclear forces are needed to meet the declining threat from Russia, the smaller but growing challenge from China, and the limited danger posed by nations such as Iraq, North Korea and Iran.

The Air Force, in particular, may absorb major changes, such as switching most B-2 and B-52 bombers to conventional missions. This was proposed in 1997, when the Clinton administration discussed reducing to 2,500 warheads.

In addition, the Air Force may "de-alert," or lower the readiness of, its 50 MX "Peacekeeper" intercontinental ballistic missiles, each carrying 10 warheads. They are scheduled to be withdrawn by 2007 under the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START II.

The Navy also may reduce its fleet of Trident ballistic missile submarines from 18 to as few as 10. "You may see some changes" in the submarines' operations announced by Bush on Tuesday, a senior administration official said.

Bush said during the election campaign that some cuts could be made unilaterally, and other senior officials have said the administration intends to gradually move away from the Cold War system of negotiated, equal reductions and mutual verification procedures.

One Bush adviser, former Reagan administration nuclear strategist Richard Perle, claimed this month that U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was "imminent." Asked about that comment, a White House official described Perle as "an adviser and not a spokesman."

Another senior administration official said there was no need to withdraw from the treaty, which bans national missile defenses, for at least a year, because it would take that long to begin building the first elements of a missile shield.

However, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told the House International Relations Committee on Thursday that the United States would no longer participate in the U.S.-Russian Standing Consultative Commission, the group that regularly has met to discuss potential violations of the ABM Treaty.

Instead, Powell said, he would meet in three weeks with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov to emphasize "our total commitment to missile defense programs."

Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, an independent organization, said yesterday he expects that the Bush administration's new guidance to the Pentagon on nuclear weapons needs "to shift away from Russia and toward China," with perhaps "a 50 percent reduction in Russian targets and a 100 percent increase in China targets."

Blair said the shift might entail basing more Trident submarines on the West Coast and placing some B-2s in Guam.

A strong indication of the administration's thinking came in a January report by a panel of national security experts that called for sharp reductions in strategic nuclear forces, lower alert rates for remaining ICBMs, and freedom to develop and test smaller warheads.

The panel, brought together by the National Institute for Public Policy, included Stephen J. Hadley, now Bush's deputy national security adviser; Robert Joseph, a member of the National Security Council staff with responsibility for nuclear weapons and arms control; Stephen Cambone, who has been nominated to be deputy undersecretary of defense for policy; and William Schneider Jr., a Rumsfeld adviser.

The panel cited the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which the Senate rejected last year, as a prime example of Cold War arms control agreements "negotiated in good faith [that] can become harmful to national security when they effectively preclude the U.S. capabi lity to adapt to changing times."

Staff writer Thomas E. Ricks contributed to this report.

---

Say What You Mean. Vaguely.

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/weekinreview/29GORD.html

PRESIDENT BUSH has been criticized abroad for failing to spell out his foreign policy. But last week he received a painful lesson: Clarity can be even more risky.

Mr. Bush found that out when he declared that the United States would do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. The bald assurance was at odds with Washington's longstanding position of leaving its military response somewhat unclear, a policy known as strategic ambiguity.

But very soon after, Mr. Bush resorted to more cautious formulations, leaving many diplomats confused about what he was trying to say. In the end, it seems, Mr. Bush's main contribution has been to introduce a new degree of confusion into the issue, making it ambiguous whether the United States still holds to "strategic ambiguity."

Properly used, strategic ambiguity can be an important tool of foreign policy. Sometimes, the purpose is to keep America's adversaries off balance. At other times, the purpose is to keep Washington's options open.

During the cold war, for example, the United States reserved the right to use nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear attack by the Warsaw Pact, but left it unclear whether it would do so. The calculation was that uncertainty over the West's response would discourage an attack. It also masked an enormous debate in the West about the utility of nuclear weapons in a crisis.

In the months leading up to the Persian Gulf war, the first Bush administration decided that a vague threat could be a powerful one. It warned Saddam Hussein that his regime would pay a terrible price if it resorted to terrorism or chemical weapons. The administration had no intention of using nuclear or chemical weapons but was happy to let the worry linger.

Just as vagueness can be useful, too much precision can be risky. James Steinberg, deputy national security adviser during the Clinton administration, noted that it would be a mistake for the United States to try to specify all of the circumstance in which it would be prepared to use force. An adversary might miscalculate and try to exploit a situation that was not on the list.

"If you say you will use force in the following circumstances you could be giving a green light when you don't want to," Mr. Steinberg said. Dean Acheson, as secretary of state, may have inadvertently encouraged North Korea's decision to start the Korean War by leaving South Korea off the list of countries within the American "defense perimeter" in a speech in January 1950.

There can also be liabilities in being too precise about the nature of an American military response. President Clinton initially indicated that America had no interest in using ground forces during the Kosovo conflict. That was intended to secure Congressional support for the war, but limited America's leverage over Belgrade. Prodded by Britain, Washington eventually moved to reconsider the option of a land attack.

Taiwan has long been a delicate case. The United States has sought to deter China from attacking Taiwan while seeking at the same time to discourage Taiwan from precipitating a crisis by formally declaring independence. The solution has been to keep both sides guessing by saying Washington cares about Taiwan's security without offering ironclad guarantees.

When China fired missiles off the coast of Taiwan in 1996 the Clinton administration privately warned Beijing that there would be "grave consequences" in the event of a Chinese attack. It also dispatched two aircraft carriers to the waters east of Taiwan. That response, a senior Clinton aide recalled, was prompted by a concern that the policy of strategic ambiguity was a bit too ambiguous. Still, the United States stopped well short of saying how it would respond or creating a de facto military alliance with Taiwan.

CONSERVATIVE Republicans don't like strategic ambiguity, warning that China might conclude erroneously that Washington would stand on the sidelines during an attack on Taiwan; in other words, ambiguity could invite an attack. Democrats counter that an explicit American commitment to defend Taiwan might encourage war by letting Taiwan think it safe to defy China and declare independence.

While the debate goes on, American military officials have been careful to stick to an ambiguous policy line. Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the head of the Pacific Command, was careful not to mention the possibility of an American military intervention when he testified to the Senate last month, adjusting his response in mid- sentence. "They reserve the right to use force," he said, referring to the Chinese. "And we reserve the right to - for them not to use force."

Then President Bush challenged this policy in his interview with ABC News, broadcast on "Good Morning America." He said the United States had a duty to defend Taiwan. In so doing, he appeared to put the American interest in Taiwan's security on the same level as Washington's commitment to its NATO allies. But he tried to adjust his stance in later interviews, stressing that the United States does not support the independence of Taiwan and would do everything it could to help Taiwan defend itself. White House officials insisted there had been no change in policy, but were loath to attempt any more clarifications.

"The President," Mr. Bush's spokesman insisted, "has said what he wanted to say,"

-------- us nuc politics

A Commitment to Europe

Sunday, April 29, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A16367-2001Apr28?language=printer

THE OPENING months of the Bush administration have demonstrated that, as much as at any other time since World War II, the relationship between the United States and Europe is open to question. America is at odds with its traditional European partners on an array of issues -- from missile defense to global warming to hormones in meat -- and the arguments are so wide and deep that some on both sides wonder whether an unbridgeable gap is opening. Meanwhile, in the half of the continent freed from Soviet domination a decade ago, a dozen countries are struggling with fundamental issues about the shape of their economic and political systems and about the kind of relationship they should have with the United States -- questions that in many nations are inextricably linked.

The common denominator of the uncertainty across the continent is this: How strong is the U.S. commitment to Europe? The answer may seem obvious, but it is not. With no Soviet threat, the need for the United States to help defend Western Europe -- the original purpose of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization -- is no longer so obvious. Some in Washington question whether there is any U.S. interest in the security of countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The appeal of unilateralism is growing. Many in the Republican Party, where some seem to oppose almost any treaty or alliance that constrains American action or limits U.S. sovereignty. The manifestations of that sentiment -- most recently in the Bush administration's abrupt abandonment of the Kyoto treaty on global warming -- are one of the main factors behind the souring of European opinion on the United States.

Yet U.S. engagement with Europe remains critical, both to U.S. interests and to global stability. By strengthening its military ties with Western Europe, the United States has the opportunity to preserve the peace not only in Europe but in other regions, retaining leadership while spreading the costs -- as it has done in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans. And by engaging closely with the states of Central and Eastern Europe, it has the chance to ensure that they evolve into stable democratic countries that are allied to the West -- an outcome that, without U.S. leadership, is not at all ensured.

The way for the Bush administration to accomplish both these aims is to make the reinforcement and expansion of NATO a high priority during the next two years. NATO has already decided to take up the question of expansion at a summit scheduled for Prague next year, and no less than nine nations are hoping for invitations: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on the Baltic coast; Slovakia and Slovenia in Central Europe; and Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia and Albania in the south.

In some ways the debate over expansion should be simplified by NATO's successful integration of Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary since 1997. Though all three countries, like their West European neighbors, have been slow to increase defense spending and upgrade their militaries, all three have made valuable contributions to NATO operations in the Balkans. All three have become flourishing democracies and have been more supportive of the United States diplomatically than Germany or France. And contrary to much overheated rhetoric in both Moscow and Washington five years ago, all three of these former Warsaw Pact countries have retained good relations with Russia despite their NATO membership.

The next group of countries inspires many of the same doubts that were raised about Poland and Hungary in the early 1990s. Some worry that admission of the Baltic states, which are former republics of the Soviet Union, will be too provocative to Russia. Others argue that countries like Romania and Albania have not yet proven to be stable democracies. But the problem with both these arguments is that they risk becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. The Baltic states now are relatively free from Russian bullying, but if NATO decides to exclude them for fear of offending Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin will surely conclude that he has been granted a license to restore suzerainty. Similarly, the hope of joining NATO has helped preserve the fragile democratic institutions of Romania; but were Bucharest rejected by the West, it would be more likely to take the road of its neighbor, Moldova, which recently restored the Communist Party to power.

Clearly it would be difficult both politically and militarily for NATO to integrate all nine candidate nations at once. But it could resolve at Prague that all are, in principle, accepted as NATO partners, while setting specific political and military standards that must be met for full integration. These standards should include such democratic tests as freedom of the press, civilian control of the military and respect for minority rights as well as purely military criteria. Nations should win full admittance as soon as they fulfill the standards. Some would get in almost immediately, while others would require more time. But all would have a powerful incentive to meet Western norms and the security of knowing that their future lay with an alliance of democracies led by the United States.

Europe's uncertainty about the future of its relationship with the United States means that NATO expansion will never occur if the initiative is left to Europe. But if President Bush makes NATO expansion a priority, it will surely move to the center of the transatlantic relationship, offering a ready means to revitalize the alliance and ensure that democracy and American leadership define the future of Central and Eastern Europe. President Bush will make his first trip to Europe as president in six weeks' time. NATO expansion should be at the center of his agenda.

-------- MILITARY

-------- colombia

Union Workers in Colombia Are Easy Prey for Gunmen

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By JUAN FORERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/world/29COLO.html

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, April 28 - Ricardo Orozco, vice president of the hospital workers' union, had pleaded with the government to provide him with bodyguards. For weeks, he had been certain that his name was on a list of potential targets for right-wing gunmen. But the government had determined that the chances of assassination were slim, and no bodyguards were assigned.

So on a recent morning, Mr. Orozco was unprotected as a gunman attacked from behind and fired five bullets at him in Barranquilla in northern Colombia. Mr. Orozco, 36, married and the father of a baby girl, was left dead on the street.

That attack and dozens of others is part of a terror campaign, mostly carried out by an illegal paramilitary group, that has debilitated the union movement and undermined the efforts of labor leaders involved in peace talks with leftist rebels. Labor officials say that at least 120 union workers were slain last year and 69 in 1999. Thirty-five have died so far this year.

Union leaders here and foreign labor organizations say the government could have prevented many slayings by expanding a program that assigns bodyguards and other protection. Along with groups like Amnesty International and the International Labor Organization, they also argue that the government has allowed the problem to worsen by not effectively focusing on paramilitary gunmen and others who attack union workers.

The paramilitary groups, who have waged their own war against the two largest rebel forces and anyone suspected of backing them, regard union organizers, with their leftist leanings and sometimes vocal criticism of the paramilitary movement, as akin to guerrillas, union leaders said.

More than 1,200 unionists have been slain since 1991, most by paramilitary groups or assassins believed to have ties to the right, according to labor leaders and the National Union School, a research and educational center in Medellín.

The problem, union officials say, is that the Interior Ministry's General Office for Human Rights, which is responsible for assessing the risks against union leaders and offering protection, operates on a meager budget that fell almost 30 percent, to $1.7 million this year from $2.4 million in 1999.

The government failed to allocate even that money until the end of last month, said Labor Minister Angelino Garzón. "They were practically paralyzed for lack of resources," said Mr. Garzón, who announced his resignation this month, possibly to run for president.

After prodding by Mr. Garzón and labor leaders, an additional $1.3 million has been allocated for the Administrative Department of Security, which provides bodyguards and other protective measures. Labor leaders, however, say the resources are too scant to cover the dozens of endangered people.

"The truth is that this entity doesn't work at all," said Alex Iván Ortiz, president of the union that represents electric utility workers, who remains unprotected despite requests for bodyguards. "People are killed, people are threatened, and then nothing is ever done."

Interior Ministry officials disagree. Yet even they acknowledge shortcomings. One official explained that the lack of protection was "because of the lack of resources."

Héctor Fajardo, secretary general of the Unified Confederation of Workers, is among the leaders who have received some protection. His office here is outfitted with rocket- proof windows. Bodyguards accompany him around the clock.

"But when you look at all the union workers who have died, you see that this is not enough," Mr. Fajardo said. "Yes, they protect my life. But meanwhile, the killers knock down 100. What we need is for the government to take the necessary measures."

His confederation, the largest in Colombia, represents 750,000 workers.

Labor officials said the violence had severely damaged organizing, especially among unions in the fields of education, health care, petroleum and utilities.

Unions consider themselves a legal and legitimate opposition to fiscally conservative governments that have been bent on privatizing industries and holding down labor spending. But many union leaders say their once fiery enthusiasm was inhibited with each slaying and threat.

After a series of assassinations and threats, the oil workers' union in the Middle Magdalena River Valley has closed offices in isolated regions. A member of the union's Human Rights Commission, Ramón Rangel, said union workers were often "found out by these groups, threatened, told to submit, not to do anything, say anything or else risk becoming military targets."

For those without bodyguards, Mr. Ortiz of the electric workers' union said, the key to survival is to take as many precautions as possible. Mr. Ortiz varies his routes to and from his office. He gave up jogging, and he rarely ventures out at night.

"I'm terrified," he said recently before going to lunch. "My wife is about to pick me up in a few minutes, and we might get killed out there. That is because I don't have protection."

The most active or vocal union leaders are those most at risk, particularly the leaders who are critical of regional governments or who advocate negotiated settlements with the insurgencies.

The paramilitary group tied to most of the killings, the United Self- Defense Forces of Colombia, has vehemently opposed talks with the rebels. In one of its more spectacular assassination attempts, the group tried to gun down the swaggering president of the Federation of State Workers, Wilson Borja, who had been encouraging talks.

The shooting, in broad daylight in December on a street in Bogotá, left Mr. Borja alive but with three bullet wounds, two bodyguards wounded and a bystander dead. One gunman was killed.

Prosecutors said a police captain, who was later charged, had cooperated in the attack. The press also reported that investigators had found that in the days before the attack the gunman who was killed had called military and police officials on his cellular telephone and had received calls from them.

"The fundamental reason why the union movement is being attacked is because of intolerance," Mr. Borja said by telephone from Cuba, where he is recuperating from his injuries. "That intolerance means that everything smells like Communism, everything smells like a leftist, and what they want is to maintain the status quo."

-------- drug war

In Latin America, Foes Aren't the Only Danger

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By TIM WEINER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/weekinreview/29TIMW.html

WHEN the fighter pilot's fire ripped through a plane carrying an American missionary family over Peru last week, the bullet holes opened up ironic points of light into American foreign policy in Latin America. "Know your enemy and know yourself; in 100 battles you will never be in peril," Sun Tzu wrote in "The Art of War." In Latin America, though, it is its friends and allies that the United States does not seem to want to know too well. Today, particularly where the drug war rages, it finds itself, as it has so often in the past, in the awkward position of an arm's-length embrace.

The American drug warriors working hand-in-hand with the Peruvian Air Force pilot were there as part of a pact struck with Peru's disgraced and exiled former president, Alberto K. Fujimori. "It was a compact with Fujimori rather than with Peruvian society," said Robert E. White, a former United States ambassador in El Salvador and Paraguay. And Mr. White, who is now president of the Center for International Policy in Washington, said that such deals may be seen as something less than a bargain by the general populations south of the border: "We don't understand in this country how much Latin Americans look on drugs as our problem and not their problem."

The killing of a missionary and her baby in a plane that C.I.A.-employed spotters had first noticed on radar raised questions that go far beyond the drug war: What is America doing down there, and with whom? Who are its friends, and what happens when it befriends them?

Last year, the United States sent more than $1 billion in weapons, equipment and training to Latin American security forces, largely in the name of fighting drugs. It was more than all the economic and development assistance it provided to the region. A decade after the end of the cold war, Washington is working with every army in Latin America save Cuba's, and military officers, spies and their political cohorts are often its primary points of contact.

The Pentagon says democracy can grow out of this association: that working side-by-side will teach Latin American armies American values. "The sometimes overeager and trigger-happy officers of our partners in the drug wars" will learn discipline that way, as Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal.

But the picture is larger than that. The Latin American military still serves and represents a ruling class far smaller and proportionately more powerful than the United States has seen since the days of the robber barons. The armies no longer run Latin America's governments directly, and they have rewritten their doctrines since the end of the cold war - no longer scorching the earth as they did in the days of dictatorships. But they have kept their mandate to preserve the power of elites who still wield immense influence even under the region's new civilian governments. And the United States values its own ties to those powerful people - businessmen, bankers, dynastic families and generals - as it pursues the varied aspects of its policy, particularly the drug war and free-trade pacts.

What the United States gets out of these alliances, in part, is a variety of stability, which is useful for oil companies seeking to pump Venezuela's crude, for clothing chains seeking cheap Central American labor and for Pentagon officers trying to enforce American drug policy. The argument for such stability is that it could allow prosperity to flourish, and prosperity could transform the region's politics. The problem, though, is when stability becomes stasis and it merely preserves the old economic and political order, in which prosperity has proved to be the most difficult thing to share.

Look back 40 years, to President John F. Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, the cold- war carrot that went with the stick of coups and counterinsurgency. The program helped build factories in El Salvador. They were run by the same people who ran the rural haciendas. They dealt with their workers as peons - same as ever - and the factories did little to lift the lives of the poor. This fed a cycle of rebellion and repression that burst out in the late 1970's and continued until 1992.

Twenty years ago, as that violence began, a New York Times reporter asked José Napoleón Duarte, the centrist leader of El Salvador's new ruling junta, why the guerrillas were in the hills. The answer was pithy: "Fifty years of lies, 50 years of injustice, 50 years of frustration. This is a history of people starving to death, living in misery. For 50 years the same people had all the power, all the money, all the jobs, all the education, all the opportunities." By and large, they still do.

The American left has had its own set of prisms, often idealizing guerrillas who were no more than bitter men with automatic weapons. Lori Berenson, the American activist imprisoned for life as a Marxist revolutionary in Peru by a hooded military judge in 1996, might possibly be a case in point: Miguel Rincon, a member of the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, testified at her retrial last week that she had no idea with whom she had become mixed up.

But over the years, military and political leaders in places like Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Peru developed a clearer sense of the rules. They learned that it paid well to appear to be a partner of the United States and a part of American foreign policy. Even better if, like General Manuel Noriega, Panama's dictator in the 1980's, or Vladimiro Montesinos, Peru's spymaster in the 1990's, you were a close friend of the Central Intelligence Agency, providing inside information while nibbling the American embassy's canapes. And better still if you told the gringos what they wanted to hear, reinforcing their preconceptions, creating a closed loop of political analysis.

Such allies received "resources, prestige, legitimacy, and this appeal to the higher authority of the United States - higher than the fragmented and fractured politics of their own nations and existing institutions," said Marc Chernick, a professor of government and Latin American studies at Georgetown University. The payoff often included access to arms and gentle treatment when issues like corruption, torture and inequality arose.

Peru is a particularly pointed case. It strongly suggests that "we are working with untrustworthy rogue allies," said Coletta Youngers, a senior associate at the Washington Office on Latin America, which monitors human-rights issues in the region. "We are trying to impose a military and intelligence solution to a problem that in Latin America is fundamentally economic."

Mr. Fujimori, Peru's president from 1990 until he fled the country in November, had assumed a dictator's mantle. But as he brought inflation under control, attracted new foreign investment, crushed the Marxists and appeared to fight the cocaine trade, he won a measure of approval from Washington. Even after he appeared to steal a third election, the American ambassador in Lima, John Hamilton, attended his inauguration last July. His presence, a senior official of the Clinton administration told The Times, signaled "the reality" that Mr. Fujimori "is going to head the government of Peru at least for the foreseeable future, and we acknowledge that we have mutual, bilateral business to conduct."

Reality has shifted since then. Mr. Fujimori's government lasted less than four more months. It now appears clear that it was a mafia. Mr. Montesinos, the C.I.A.'s old interlocutor, fled into hiding after videotapes showed him as a corrupter of the highest rank. The commander of Peru's armed forces from 1992 to 2000, Gen. Nicolás Hermoza, now stands accused of working with drug smugglers and depositing $14.5 million in Swiss bank accounts. Other senior Peruvian officers stand accused of selling intelligence to drug traffickers to protect them from the shoot-first, ask-later air war - a key part of the bilateral business between Washington and Lima.

The C.I.A. contractors who man the spotter planes over the Andes were officially out of the chain of command that gave the order to fire on the plane carrying the American missionary, Roni Bowers, 35, and her seven- month-old daughter, Charity, who died. But the plane that fired was made and paid for in America. The pilot was American- trained. And even though some American officials argue that the pilot shouldn't have pulled the trigger without further checks on the airplane's identity, the intelligence that first put the missionaries in the crosshairs was American intelligence, gathered by American personnel, in furtherance of American foreign policy - which is an attempt to solve the problem of Americans' desire to smoke, snort and shoot cocaine.

Two more deaths will matter little to thousands of peasants growing coca leaves in the Andes because growing corn and beans does not pay them enough to survive. And in the end, they may matter little in a multibillion-dollar American policy, executed by American military and intelligence officers who rely on friends in Latin America for whom past American support has meant much - a little more immunity, a little more impunity and a lot more power.

---

Missionaries: On a Frontier of Danger

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/weekinreview/29ROHT.html

RIO DE JANEIRO - AMERICAN missionaries working in Latin America have always had to contend with obstacles, starting with distrustful local churches and governments. But the death of a Baptist missionary and her infant daughter, shot down in Peru on April 20 after their plane was confused with that of drug traffickers, is a sobering reminder that even as the success of their evangelization effort has grown, so have the risks faced by the more than 10,000 American missionaries now in the region.

Since they first began heading south in the mid- 1800's, American missionaries have had to labor under the twin burdens of being foreigners and, for the most part, Protestant. In a region where the original Iberian conquerors themselves imposed Catholicism by "the sword and the cross," it was probably inevitable that the Americans would end up being stigmatized as agents of cultural and political imperialism.

Nonetheless, in recent years, Protestantism, especially of the evangelical variety, has made remarkable gains in countries ranging from Guatemala to Brazil, most notably in cities. As a result, according to David Stoll, the author of "Is Latin America Turning Protestant?: The Politics of Evangelical Growth," "the frontier of the faith is now out in rural areas" like the Amazon, where Veronica and James Bowers were living when their plane was attacked.

But missionary organizations that choose to work in such remote areas, where the state's presence is weak and the population is largely Indian, have been regarded with a particularly suspicious eye. In country after country, groups like the New Tribes Mission and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a branch of the Wycliffe Bible Translators, have been accused of spying for the C.I.A. or of clandestinely prospecting for gold, diamonds, emeralds or uranium.

"We are fully aware that we have been accused of being duplicitous," said David Oltrogge, director of Latin American Initiatives for the Wycliffe Bible Translators, which has compiled dictionaries in more than 300 American Indian languages. "But our motivation is to translate the Bible into as many languages as we can."

On the other hand, because American missionary groups have modern organizational and record-keeping skills, the United States Agency for International Development sometimes awards contracts to their local affiliates, and a congressional investigation in the 1970's found that many missionaries returning to the United States were debriefed by the C.I.A.

In recent years, "those criticisms have dwindled to insignificance compared to the problem of drug lords and paramilitaries killing people who will not cooperate with them," said Dr. Stoll, a professor of anthropology at Middlebury College. But the overall level of danger faced by missionaries - including kidnapping for ransom - has grown, especially in Peru's neighbor Colombia, where some organizations are pulling back from "portions of the country that it is ridiculous even to think of entering," as Dr. Oltrogge put it.

Many American missionary groups working in Latin America began their activities in Asia or Africa, where they served as bearers of Western values. When they first arrived in Latin America, they quickly discovered they were on different terrain: this region is part of the West, and Christianity is the native religion.

Still, until recently the relationship between Protestant missionaries and the local Catholic hierarchy was largely one of mutual hostility and suspicion.

"Even today, the majority of Protestant American missionaries are more likely to be conservative evangelicals than from the so-called mainline denominations," said Robert T. Coote of the Overseas Ministries Study Center. "We grew up thinking Catholicism couldn't possibly be right, that it was harmful even."

During the 1970's and into the 1980's, military regimes were "interested in ways of clipping the wings of the Catholic Church," as Ralph della Cava of Columbia University puts it, and in Protestantism they thought they had found an ideal vehicle. Like religious minorities in other parts of the world, Protestants sought to cooperate with whatever government was in power - rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.

For Roman Catholic missionaries from the United States, many of them drawn to Latin America by the theology of liberation, the situation was almost exactly the opposite. The 1980 rape and murder of three American nuns and a lay worker by soldiers in El Salvador was only the most grotesque example of American missionaries suffering the same repression as the liberals among their Latin American brethren.

Today, the byword for American missionaries in the region appears to be "cultural sensitivity," said Mr. Coote. Particularly among Protestants, "Christian anthropology" has developed, aimed at making proselytizing less intrusive - and more effective.

---

Celebrity Victims of the Drug War

New York Times
April 29, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/opinion/L29DRUG.html

To the Editor:

Ethan Nadelmann ("An Unwinnable War on Drugs," Op-Ed, April 26) makes an important point regarding two notable victims, Darryl Strawberry and Robert Downey Jr.

That these men have failed to stop their drug use despite imprisonment and coerced treatment is no indication of their weakness. Rather, it underscores the complexity and depth of the demon called addiction, a condition for which approximately 10 percent of us are vulnerable.

The war on drugs has cost Mr. Downey and Mr. Strawberry their careers and possibly their freedom. Such punishment will serve no positive end. We must stop this insane war and develop policies based on common sense, science, public health and respect for individual rights.

DONALD M. TOPPING President, Drug Policy Forum of Hawaii Honolulu, April 26, 2001

•To the Editor:

Re "An Unwinnable War on Drugs," by Ethan Nadelmann (Op- Ed, April 26):

Alcohol Prohibition gave us Al Capone and organized crime, widespread corruption, homemade liquor that killed or blinded thousands, and easy access to a drink for anybody who wanted one.

Drug prohibition has given us international drug cartels that rival the power of small countries, widespread corruption, impure drugs that kill or injure thousands, and easy access to drugs for anybody who wants them.

Drugs are a medical and social problem that we're trying to treat as a law-enforcement problem. Mr. Nadelmann is correct: the "war on drugs" is unwinnable because we've stated the problem incorrectly.

STEVE WELLCOME Bolton, Mass., April 27, 2001

---

New Mexico

USA Today
04/29/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Albuquerque - A federal judge ruled that the Hobbs Police Department deserves a new trial in a lawsuit filed by a man who alleged an officer planted a small amount of marijuana on him. Jurors relied on their own incorrect definition of planted evidence in ruling for Liberato Olivas, Judge Bruce Black ruled in dismissing the verdict.

-------- puerto rico

Navy Bombing Is Betrayal, Puerto Rico's Governor Says

April 29, 2001
By ANDREW JACOBS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/national/29SILA.html

SAN JUAN, P.R., April 28 - As Sila M. Calderón hopscotched across this island during her successful campaign for governor last year, she promised that, if elected, she would end the Navy's bombing runs on the island of Vieques that have so inflamed the nationalistic passion of Puerto Ricans. It is a promise that helped make her the first woman to become governor of this commonwealth, but one she has not been able to keep.

In the last two days, as hundreds of protesters gathered in Vieques, where the Navy is holding military maneuvers, Governor Calderón remained at La Fortaleza, the Governor's Mansion here in the capital, largely out of sight, keeping a frenzied press at bay.

But today, in her first interview since the Navy resumed exercises on Friday, the governor said she felt as angry and betrayed as fellow Puerto Ricans.

"I'm so sorry it has come to this," she said, sitting in her office in this 16th century palace. "It has been a very difficult time for us."

While Governor Calderón refrained from attacking the Bush administration for its unwillingness to stop the military maneuvers, she did not hide her disappointment, saying that she had believed the Navy would abide by an accord reached in January. That agreement, between the governor and Richard Danzig, the secretary of the Navy at the time, called for a halt to shelling until preliminary findings of a health study of Vieques could be reviewed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

The study, by a panel of Puerto Rican researchers, showed a high incidence of cardiac problems among Viequenses.

In February, in a meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Governor Calderón said she was told that the accord was still valid under the Bush administration. The discussions were going so well, she said, that she decided to withhold legal action seeking an immediate closing of the bombing range though she had promised to pursue such a course during her campaign.

But in announcing its decision two weeks ago to resume training on Vieques, the Pentagon dismissed the health study and said the more pressing issue was military readiness. Opened about 60 years ago, the firing range is the only site in the Atlantic where simultaneous bombardment from sea, air and land is possible. To Navy officials, the 900-acre bombing area is irreplaceable.

Under a deal reached by her predecessor, Gov. Pedro Rosselló, the Navy was allowed to continue training with inert ammunition for three years. In exchange, Vieques residents are to decide in a referendum in November whether they want the Navy to leave by May 2003 or stay indefinitely.

But after visiting Vieques and learning about health problems among its 9,400 residents, Ms. Calderón decided that to wait three years was too much. Today, she recalled meeting with about 300 residents at a community center. When those in the room were asked how many relatives had cancer, Governor Calderón said, nearly everyone raised a hand.

"You don't have to be a genius to see that something is happening there," she said. "People are dying."

The study showing a high incidence of a cardiovascular ailment in Vieques and a possible link to the noise of explosions fortified her decision to disregard Mr. Rosselló's deal with the United States.

"These are very poor people and someone has to speak for them," she said. "It is my obligation to speak for them."

Governor Calderón said she hoped that a federal judge in Washington would decide to halt the Navy maneuvers. Hearings on the case begin next month. The judge, Gladys Kessler, denied the Puerto Rican government's request for a temporary restraining order last Thursday but she voiced support for the underlying health concerns.

Despite her vocal stance against the Navy, Ms. Calderón criticized protesters who tore up the fence at Camp García in Vieques on Friday. "All eyes of the world are on Puerto Rico," she said. "We should show them we are peaceful people."

Mindful of the growing public outrage here - and its possible impact on Washington - Governor Calderón made it clear that her opposition to the Navy's presence in Vieques should not be construed as anti-military or anti-American. "This is not an ideological issue, nor is it a political issue," she said. "This is about human rights."

---

Navy halts exercises for a day in Vieques

USA Today
4/29/2001 - Updated 05:53 PM ET
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2001-04-29-navy.htm

VIEQUES, Puerto Rico (AP) - The U.S. Navy halted bombing exercises on Vieques as a gesture of respect as the Vatican beatified the first Puerto Rican ever on Sunday, bringing a pause to two days of clashes between protesters and federal authorities.

The exercises are to resume Monday morning and are expected to last several more days, Navy Lt. Jeff Gordon said. The Navy avoided exercises Sunday as the largely Catholic U.S. territory observed the ceremony putting Carlos Manuel Rodriguez on the path to sainthood.

Rodriguez - one of five people beatified by Pope John Paul II on Sunday - was a layman who died in 1963 after a life dedicated to the church. The Vatican has attributed a miracle to him: a woman recovered from non-Hodgkins lymphoma after praying to Rodriguez.

Some 25,000 people, including many Puerto Ricans, attended the ceremony in St. Peter's Square. Rodriquez, an office clerk, gained fame in Puerto Rico for his piety and his efforts to spread the study of liturgy and bring laypeople into the church.

On the occasion of the beatification, Puerto Rico's governor, Sila Calderon, asked the pope to act to bring a permanent stop to U.S. bombing exercises on the outlying island of Vieques. She made the request in a letter delivered to John Paul by her secretary of state.

On Vieques, dozens of protesters formed picket lines near Navy land on Sunday, but there were no reports of conflicts with military security.

The Navy did not report any new arrests of protesters trespassing on the bombing range. So far, 128 protesters have been arrested since Thursday night for entering the range in hopes of thwarting the exercises, which began Friday.

Activists claimed they still had about 40 people on the Navy bombing range.

"We're going to keep putting people on the bombing range because we have demonstrated that we have been more efficient at getting people in there than the Navy has been at taking them out," said protest leader Carlos Zenon.

Three people were injured in clashes between authorities and protesters on Friday and Saturday, including a sailor and two demonstrators.

Calderon on Sunday urged protesters to behave in "a pacific and orderly manner."

The Navy has used its Vieques range for six decades and says it is vital for national defense. It denies anti-Navy activists' claims that the exercises cause health problems.

Opposition to the exercises grew after an April 1999 accident in which two off-target bombs killed a Puerto Rican civilian guard on the range.

The current exercises involve about 15,000 sailors and Marines and a dozen cruisers and destroyers in the battle group led by the Norfolk, Virginia-based aircraft carrier USS Enterprise. Jets also were dropping non-explosive bombs.

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

5 Seals With Kerrey Back Him on War Raid

New York Times
April 29, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/world/29VIET.html

Bob Kerrey has been joined by five members of his Navy Seals team in denying that they knowingly killed civilians during the Vietnam War in a wanton raid. The statement disputes assertions of a seventh member of the team that it herded civilians into a group and killed them.

Mr. Kerrey, a former Democratic governor and senator from Nebraska, and his five wartime colleagues provided their statement to The Washington Post for today's issue. It followed a five-hour meeting of the six men on Friday night, the newspaper said. It contradicts interviews with the seventh team member, published today in The New York Times Magazine and scheduled to be broadcast on the CBS News program "60 Minutes II" on Tuesday.

In interviews for the magazine article, Mr. Kerrey acknowledged that the mission he led in 1969 in Thanh Phong caused the deaths of 13 to 20 unarmed civilians, mostly women and children. He said his team received fire and returned it.

In an interview last night with The Associated Press, Mr. Kerrey lashed out at The Times and CBS, saying: "The Vietnam government likes to routinely say how terrible Americans were. The Times and CBS are now collaborating in that effort."

Joseph Lelyveld, the executive editor of The Times, said, "I think he knows better." A spokesman for CBS, Kevin Tedesco, said, "We stand by our story 100 percent."

Mr. Kerrey could not be reached for further comment last night.

---

Healing in Vietnam

New York Times
April 29, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/opinion/L29KERR.html

To the Editor:

Just "remembering the horrible lesson" of the Vietnam War is not enough ("The War Within Bob Kerrey," editorial, April 26). We also need to pursue justice and true reconciliation. Although it is late, we need to take serious measures to redress the gross pain and sufferings inflicted on the Vietnamese by American leaders and foot soldiers like Bob Kerrey.

Bob Kerrey should go back to the village of Thanh Phong, offer his apology and the Bronze Star, and build a monument for the civilian victims.

At the same time, the United States government should undertake a thorough review of the killing, prosecute those responsible, and offer just compensation to the survivors or families of the victims.

Only then can true peace and reconciliation be realized for Vietnamese and Americans alike, including Bob Kerrey.

JOHN H. KIM New York, April 26, 2001 The writer is president of the New York chapter of Veterans for Peace.

---

Commander will review Saudi dress code

USA Today
04/29/2001 - Updated 08:19 PM ET
By Edward T. Pound, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washdc/2001-04-30-dress-usat.htm

WASHINGTON - The senior U.S. military commander in Saudi Arabia will review and may change a policy requiring female personnel deployed in that country to wear a neck-to-toe robe known as an abaya, military officials say.

The review was disclosed in the wake of complaints about the dress policy by Maj. Martha McSally, 35, the highest-ranking female fighter pilot in the U.S. Air Force. In an interview published April 18 in USA TODAY, McSally said that the policy discriminated against women.

Military spokesmen say that Air Force Gen. Gary Dylewski, who assumed the command earlier this month, would review the policy. As the new commander, they say, he is reviewing all operational policies.

Officials say they don't know when the review of the dress policy would be completed. And, they say, Dylewski may keep the policy intact.

McSally met with Dylewski on Thursday at the Eskan Village military command, near the Saudi capital of Riyadh, to discuss the policy. She says she told him she agrees the military needs to "be aware of and comply with the customs of our hosts," but not when they "fundamentally conflict with the values of our nation." But in the case of the abaya, she says she explained that "there is a fundamental conflict with one American value: that all humans are created equal and should be treated with that respect, regardless of race, religion or gender."

McSally, whose promotion to lieutenant colonel becomes effective Tuesday, says she urged Dylewski to modify the policy. "I have argued for a reasonable balance where all our troops wear conservative Western clothing when off-duty or their uniform when on-duty and off the military compound."

The military follows a stricter dress code in Saudi Arabia than the State Department. The policy also conflicts with the official guidance that the Saudi government gives to foreigners. The guidance, according to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, does not require non-Muslim women to wear an abaya. The guidance says women should dress conservatively when in public, including loose-fitting dresses draped well below the knees with long sleeves and a high neckline.

U.S. military officials say the policy was put in place after the Gulf War ended in 1991. They say it was implemented out of respect for Islamic law and Saudi customs and to protect personnel from harassment by the mutawa, or religious police, and from potential terrorists.

The officials also say that while State Department employees have diplomatic immunity, military personnel do not have such protections and might face a tougher time if detained by the religious police.

Dylewski directs Operation Southern Watch, the mission to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq. McSally runs search and rescue for that operation. In 1995, she became the first woman in the Air Force to fly a combat aircraft into enemy territory when she piloted her A-10 Warthog jet over southern Iraq in the no-fly zone operation.

-------- OTHER

-------- environment

Use of Herbicide Is Proposed in Weed-Choked Lake George

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By WINNIE HU
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/nyregion/29LAKE.html

A state environmental agency charged with protecting Lake George is proposing the first use of an herbicide in an Adirondack lake, to fend off an insidious weed that has choked native plants and mired swimmers and boats.

Under a proposal by the Lake George Park Commission, about 175 pounds of the herbicide, Sonar, would be applied to 36 of the 28,000 acres of Lake George as early as June. Sonar, which contains the active ingredient fluridone, has been used to kill the weed, Eurasian watermilfoil, in New York since 1995, but never in the state-protected Adirondack Park.

The use of Sonar in Lake George, which would be financed with $215,000 in state and private grants and donations, must still be approved by the state's Adirondack Park Agency and the Department of Environmental Conservation. A two-hour public hearing last week in the town of Lake George drew more than 50 people on both sides of the issue.

Michael White, executive director of the Lake George Park Commission, said in an interview that use of the herbicide was necessary to save the lake from the encroaching weeds. "It's out of balance and not going to right itself," he said of the lake.

But some local residents say Sonar would kill rare plants in the lake and pose a health risk to people who swim in the water or drink it.

"It's a chemical quick fix," said Ted Brothers, 72, a Presbyterian minister who has lived on the shores of Lake George for a decade. "And I don't think it can be done safely."

Nina Habib Spencer, a spokeswoman for the federal Environmental Protection Agency, said that Sonar, when used correctly, is considered one of the less toxic pesticides and is not believed to harm humans. The agency has ranked it in the same category of toxicity as malathion and Anvil, used against mosquitoes, and many over-the-counter pesticides.

But several environmental groups have voiced concern that the use of Sonar would undermine their efforts to persuade towns in the Adirondacks to refrain from using pesticides. "We're worried that the idea would be expanded to the other 2,800 lakes and ponds and we'll be fighting it over and over," said John F. Sheehan, a spokesman for the Adirondack Council, an advocacy group.

Mr. Sheehan said that state environmental officials have allowed two types of pesticides to be used in the Adirondacks: rotenone, which kills fish and other aquatic species that have taken over the natural habitat of the brook trout, and aerial sprays that kill black flies.

Eurasian watermilfoil has infiltrated lakes and ponds around the country, including more than a dozen in the Adirondacks. The weed can grow as tall as 20 feet, and has long, feathery branches that form dense mats on the water's surface.

The watermilfoil was identified in Lake George in 1985, and is growing in 136 sites around the lake. Previous efforts to control the weed by pulling it out by hand or with a suction hose, or smothering it with plastic mats, have cost more than $750,000. "It's not enough," said Charles Boylen, a biology professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who oversees watermilfoil research on Lake George. "There are areas so dense that all we've been able to do is let it grow."

Professor Boylen and others say the watermilfoil has already killed rare plants, and would crowd out other native plants if not reined in.

"We're not a big promoter of the use of chemicals," said Mary-Arthur Beebe, executive director of the Lake George Association, a nonprofit citizens group. "But we think the milfoil is the most dangerous risk to the lake by far."

---

In Early Battles, Bush Learns Need for Compromises

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By DAVID E. SANGER and MARC LACEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/national/29BUSH.html

WASHINGTON, April 28 - George W. Bush, who came to the presidency vowing to change the tone of Washington and the policies of his predecessor, has found that Washington has compelled him to change as well, both by moderating his own tone and by accepting compromises on some of his top priorities.

Mr. Bush has been widely praised for his administration's discipline, the speed with which it won consensus for what will likely prove to be one of the biggest tax cuts since the Reagan era, and the largely successful way he faced his first foreign challenge, an unexpected confrontation with China. Not surprisingly, Mr. Bush has given himself high marks.

"There's less name-calling and finger-pointing," he said today in a radio address on the eve of his 100th day in office. "We're sharing credit. We are learning we can make our points without making enemies."

Yet Mr. Bush is also discovering that presidents must pick their fights with care. Quietly, often denying it along the way, Mr. Bush has been forced to excise school vouchers from his education proposals and drop the idea of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which he once called an essential element of a national energy policy. And in the last few days, after adamantly insisting for so long that $1.6 trillion was "the right number" for a tax cut over the next 10 years, he has begun to concede that he will have to settle for a smaller figure.

"He knew the moment would come to compromise," a top Bush adviser said the other day. "It's just come a little faster than some anticipated."

The changes in Mr. Bush's approach are subtle, and his aides insist that he is governing the nation with the same principles and approach he used in governing Texas. His detractors say otherwise; that he has proven far more conservative in the White House than he appeared as a candidate.

But even his critics say he is a far more confident leader than he was on Jan. 20, something he demonstrated in Quebec last weekend, when he handled questions on Latin American politics, drugs and trade issues with a subtlety that was missing in his first days in the White House.

Yet he has begun to discover, as most presidents do, that the world looks far more complicated from inside the Oval Office than it did from the campaign trail.

Just a year ago he was denouncing the Clinton administration for pouring money into every failing economy around the world; last weekend he told a journalist from Argentina that he might consider helping prop up her country's troubled economy. A few days later he did exactly that for Turkey.

His face-off with China early this month gave him a boost in approval ratings for defusing a potentially explosive situation, but his comments since about China and Taiwan, which weaved toward a change of policy and then back again, have shown his continuing unease.

"He's still searching for the right tone for talking to the world," one senior aide concedes.

At home that tone is friendly but studiously unemotive, more Eisenhower than Reagan. But when it comes to courting conservatives who doubted if he was a true believer, it is Mr. Reagan who most comes to mind. Even leading conservatives say they have been surprised at the degree to which Mr. Bush has sought their views, incorporated their policies and placed them in prominent positions.

Like Mr. Reagan, he is a delegator. But Mr. Reagan never made use of the president's father, who was Mr. Reagan's vice president, the way George W. Bush makes use of Vice President Dick Cheney. Because Mr. Cheney is an older, more experienced hand with no presidential ambitions of his own, his behind-the- scenes role appears difficult to overstate. He is running Mr. Bush's energy review and is expected to play an important role in shaping Mr. Bush's thinking on national missile defense, which Mr. Bush will discuss in a speech on Tuesday. And Mr. Cheney remains the White House's main channel to Congress and the conservative media.

Mr. Cheney also plays a role, some aides say, in calming Mr. Bush, who angers more quickly than his father did, especially when the White House wanders from its carefully prepared scripts.

"George W. Bush has a little more of his mother in him," says Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, who worked in the previous Bush White House. "Where his father would bite his tongue," Mr. Card said, "every once in a while George W. Bush flaps his tongue. His emotions are a little more visible for those of us who work with him. I know when he's upset. His father masked it. You learn when you're in the doghouse a little earlier now than you did with his dad."

A Premium on Charm

Mr. Bush went into office believing that likability would count a lot in Washington, just as it did in Texas. For a month, he was right. He handed out nicknames, unveiled a birthday cake for the House minority leader, Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, and invited the Kennedy family over for hamburgers and a viewing of "Thirteen Days." Members of the Black Congressional Caucus, no friend of Republicans, were invited for a grievance session, and Mr. Bush listened intently.

In his radio address today, he claimed to be marking "100 days of Congress and the president working together."

But in the last three months, as introductions have given way to negotiations and negotiations to open conflict, Mr. Bush has discovered that in Washington, good feelings do not translate into legislative majorities.

Consider the case of Representative George Miller, a Democrat from California and a senior member of the House committee that oversees education. Mr. Miller backed major elements of the president's education overhaul plan and helped the president show he had allies in both parties. Mr. Bush called him Big George and praised his intellect and bipartisan spirit.

The two men seemed genuinely to hit it off.

But listen to Big George now. "In the first few weeks he did reach out to Democrats," Mr. Miller said. "But we all wondered whether he would keep it up when it was time to get down to business. As it turns out, the White House went off and took a series of unilateral actions that ended any good feelings there may have been. President Bush is very friendly. Many of his policies have been less so."

Today Mr. Miller disparages Mr. Bush's environmental policies and accuses him of underfinancing education.

On Monday, when Mr. Bush will offer lunch to all 100 senators and 435 representatives, Mr. Miller and many other Democrats say they have other plans.

Was the strategy a failure?

"It's not a strategy," said Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser. "We're not trying to win the afternoon news cycle. We are trying to drain some of the hyperpartisanship out of the system. He will continue to do what he has done."

Mr. Rove knew from the start that chatting up members of Congress would not be enough, so he came up with a parallel approach: Have the president visit key states around the country, where he could put maximum pressure on wavering members of Congress.

The result has been a blitz of travel. In the first 100 days, Mr. Bush has visited 26 states, what appears to be a modern record for the start of a presidency.

Such visits always get big local coverage, as do Mr. Cheney's weekly calls to talk-radio programs. But only occasionally do they get much national coverage. And there is a sense among many in Washington that Mr. Bush's presidency seems somehow smaller in the life of the nation. Historians like Michael Beschloss have compared it to the presidencies in the late part of the 19th century, when often the occupant of the White House did not have much to say in public.

Mr. Bush says he does not feel compelled to show up on television "every hour of every day." He was happy to let his attorney general, John Ashcroft, make the public statements about the administration's view of the rioting in Cincinnati after the shooting of a black teenager by the police. Mr. Bush deliberately skipped the homecoming ceremony near Seattle for the 24 United States military personnel detained by the Chinese, saying it was a moment for family reunions, not for a president hogging the limelight.

Nor does Mr. Bush put on formal news conferences in the East Room, a favorite setting for past presidents. He prefers quick, impromptu questioning when meeting foreign or Congressional leaders. He has held two news conferences in the press room at very short notice. "We think that the president is taking as many or more questions than his predecessors did," said Karen P. Hughes, one of the inner circle of advisers. "But it's in his style." That style makes it easy, however, to duck queries he does not want to hear, or feels unready to answer.

First Up, Taxes

Mr. Bush's steadfast drive toward his first goal, a big tax cut, dominated his first 100 days in office. It will not be as big as he likes, as he now acknowledges. But his constant insistence that a large chunk of the surplus should be returned to the American people in the form of deep tax cuts wore down Democrats. Mr. Bush almost crows these days that during the campaign "a lot of the punditry kind of had a blank stare on their face" when he talked about tax cuts. "They thought I was, as they say, whistling into the wind," he told an enthusiastic rally at a New Orleans baseball stadium on Wednesday. Now, he said, "tax relief is on the way."

And despite the administration's repeated warnings of a possible recession, as the first 100 days come to a close, Mr. Bush has some reason to believe that he may have avoided a politically dangerous economic downturn.

But if Mr. Bush changed the tone of Washington on taxes, he has failed so far on his view of how to approach environmental issues: an insistence, born of his business experience in Texas, that any regulation must be carefully weighed against its potential costs.

Publicly Mr. Bush's aides insist that the president has been unfairly tarred as anti-environment: He simply wanted "good science" to dictate how to change rules on arsenic levels; he was "realistic" in declaring the Kyoto treaty on global warming dead. Inside the White House, the regulations President Bill Clinton left on everything from roadless areas in the national forests to workplace ergonomic rules are derisively called "regulatory pardons."

In backing away from them, Mr. Bush revealed a blind spot in the administration's political view, one that is evident from polls showing that a growing number of Americans are worried that the president thinks more about his corporate supporters than the environment.

"We should have done a better job in setting the stage for the decisions the president made," Mr. Card now says.

The mistake has left Mr. Bush retrenching, emphasizing in his radio talk today that he let stand "sensible rules" on lead emissions, wetlands, pesticides, and pollution from diesel engines.

A Wavering Voice Abroad

Mr. Bush rarely travels these days without one aide at his side: Condoleezza Rice, the former Stanford provost who, as national security adviser, has taken on the role of tutoring Mr. Bush on the complexities of a broader world he is learning about on the job.

But Ms. Rice cannot teach him how to navigate a deep fracture in his own party, between a business community that wants him to focus on economic integration and conservatives who argue that America has been taken for a ride by Russia and China, and needs to flex its muscles as the world's sole superpower.

So far, Mr. Bush has bridged this division by sounding both themes. In the China standoff he took a tough line in the first two days, then eased back and talked of the economic damage that bad relations would wreak on both countries. With the crew of the American spy plane out of China, he has veered again, walking to the edge of redefining a willingness to defend Taiwan, then insisting that the policy has not changed.

Mr. Bush had similar trouble controlling his language on how to deal with North Korea, and angered Europe by giving no warning on his declaration that the Kyoto treaty would be scrapped. Foreign leaders say they like him, but they worry about his experience. "I left wondering whether he had read his briefing papers," said one participant in his recent meeting with the president of Chile.

Of course, it took Mr. Clinton two years before he learned how to talk the language of diplomacy. Mr. Bush is starting small. He spent time last weekend sipping coffee with the prime minister of St. Kitts, population 39,000. He has yet to sit down with Vladimir V. Putin of Russia or Jiang Zemin of China.

---

USA Today
04/29/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Alaska

Barrow - Biologists are counting migrating bowhead whales 3 miles out on the Chukchi Sea ice, relying on both sightings and acoustic systems that listen to the animals. The count is expected to last until late May or early June. The bowhead whale population is estimated at 8,200, based on the last full census in 1993.

Colorado

Pueblo - Settlement talks between Rocky Mountain Steel Mills and state regulators have collapsed, and a district judge ordered both sides to prepare for trial. The company tentatively agreed to pay $1 million to settle the state lawsuit for pollution but balked at continued monitoring of nighttime emissions. The trial may begin this summer.

Florida

Fort Lauderdale - Workers began cutting down trees infected with citrus canker in South Florida for the first time since January. The work follows new controls designed to appease homeowners who called the eradication program too extreme. Unlike before, the crews will not cut healthy trees. Workers had targeted all citrus trees within 1,900 feet of an infected one to stop the spread of canker, which can scar fruit and make it fall prematurely.

Montana

Helena - The widow of a mine worker who died from asbestos exposure is suing the state on claims of negligence. She says health officials knew about the hazards of W.R. Grace & Co.'s vermiculite mine in Libby as long ago as the 1950s but failed to act. Carol Graham's husband, Robert, died in 1998 of lung cancer linked to asbestos.

New Jersey

Trenton - The state Department of Environmental Protection wants to hire more dam inspectors, doubling their number from nine to 18. Concerns about overdue inspections rose after severe storms in northwestern New Jersey last August caused four dams to collapse and damaged others. The money would come from a $10 million fund set up after last year's flooding.

Oregon

Portland - A state Department of Agriculture helicopter sprayed a biological pesticide over 910 acres in and near Forest Park to stop an infestation of Asian gypsy moths. Officials posted signs at the boundaries of the spray zone. The signs advised anyone living or working there to stay indoors. Sprayings also are scheduled May 9 and May 22.

-------- imf / world bank

IMF endorses program to improve crisis-prevention

USA Today
04/29/2001
http://usatoday.com/money/economy/2001-04-29-imf-summit.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - The International Monetary Fund, prodded by the Bush administration, endorsed a program Sunday to establish better procedures to prevent a repeat of the 1997-1998 Asian currency crisis that plunged two-fifths of the world into recession. The IMF's policy-setting committee approved a nine-page statement declaring that ''strong and effective crisis prevention'' should be a top priority for the agency.

The panel instructed IMF Managing Director Horst Koehler to proceed with efforts to overhaul the agency's procedures.

''The IMF needs to work even harder to put crisis prevention at the heart of its activities,'' Koehler said in a statement released at the end of the daylong discussions.

As the IMF was concluding its discussions, about 200 protesters with banners and puppets demanded that the financial institutions work to erase poor countries' debt.

''The World Bank has got to go,'' the protesters shouted as they asked for ''global justice ... now.'' The peaceful nature of the rally - and the size of the crowd - was in sharp contrast to the protests at last spring's IMF-World Bank meetings, when riot-clad police used pepper spray to subdue demonstrators.

More than 1,200 were arrested during the protests last year.

The IMF's policy-setting International Monetary and Financial Committee, composed of finance ministers and central bank presidents representing the 183 nations that are members of the lending agency, accepted recommendations on crisis prevention that had been put forward by the Bush administration.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, since taking office, has voiced criticism with the IMF's handling of the 1997-98 Asian currency crisis, which plunged a number of countries into steep recessions and forced the agency to assemble more than $100 billion in rescue packages.

''Preventing financial crises through early and clear diagnoses of problems, and taking the proper, often tough, policy response is critical,'' O'Neill told finance ministers at the final session on Sunday.

Koehler also announced that the IMF has reached an agreement in principle to extend new financial support to Turkey and Argentina, two countries currently facing economic troubles.

IMF Deputy Managing Director Stanley Fischer said the package with Turkey indicated the package with Turkey could be announced as soon as Monday with the support for Argentina coming ''a day or two later.''

Echoing the view of finance ministers and central bank presidents from the world's seven richest countries, the IMF policy panel said it was optimistic that the current global slowdown, the most severe since the 1997-98 currency crisis, would not be an extended one.

''While we recognize that the short-term prospects have weakened considerably, we believe the slowdown will be short-lived,'' Gordon Brown, Britain's chancellor of the exchequer and the chairman of the group, told reporters.

While the Group of Seven nations had papered over disagreements in the group over the need for the European Central Bank to cut interest rates, several finance ministers on Sunday urged Europe to act to support global growth.

Given the long lag between a rate cut and its impact on economic growth, Canadian Finance Minister Paul Martin warned that ''waiting too long to ease could prove costly.''

Responding to the concerns raised by protesters, the IMF panel endorsed proceeding with efforts to cut the debts of the world's poorest countries and opened the door for greater reductions down the road.

Drop the Debt, a coalition of groups pushing for total debt forgiveness for the world's 39 poorest nations, said that the Sunday discussions had cleared an important milestone by recognizing that more needs to be done. ''The cat is out of the bag.

They have no choice but to agree to deeper debt cancellation,'' said Adrian Lovett, director of Drop the Debt.

In the area of crisis prevention, the policy group encouraged Koehler to proceed with a program to strengthen the IMF's understanding of how massive capital flows can disrupt countries and to move forward with publication of better early-warning indicators for individual countries.

The IMF communique said that there was a ''need for global action'' in the fight against AIDS and other infectious diseases, a proposal that was endorsed later on Sunday at a joint meeting of policy-setting panels for the IMF and the World Bank.

Brown said that the exact amount of money, expected to be in the billions of dollars, for the new health effort has yet to be determined but that agreement on the effort was likely to be reached at the annual economic summit of leaders of the G-7 countries in Genoa, Italy, in July.

A senior U.S. Treasury official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity, said the administration was interested in the AIDS proposal but wanted to make sure such an effort would ''accomplish real change for real people.''

Turkish Finance Minister Kemal Dervis told reporters Sunday that his country and the IMF were ''very close, very close'' to finalizing a new $10 billion loan package.

Argentine Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo sought to put to rest worries that his country's economic troubles will force his nation to default on its foreign loans.

''We strongly oppose such a destructive idea,'' Cavallo said. ''Getting the economy moving again is our critical task.''

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Top Industrial Nations Meeting About Lagging Global Economy

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/world/29GROU.html

WASHINGTON, April 28 - Top finance officials from the world's leading industrial nations were meeting here today to discuss ways to avert a slowdown in the global economy.

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of Seven - the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan - have come to Washington at a time when there are warnings that growth around the world is slowing.

Their task is to find a common strategy for reinvigorating economic activity without singling out any region for not contributing as fully as possible to improve growth prospects. The session, taking place alongside meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, has already been tinged with controversy over Europe's decision not to cut its interest rates as the non-European nations in the group have done.

Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the host for the meeting, said at a briefing on Friday that every region has to make an effort to support growth but insisted he was not about to take on the European Central Bank over rates.

"A healthy global economy requires all of us to perform to our full potential," Mr. O'Neill said. "I attach tremendous importance to strong and balanced global growth in the context of interdependent U.S., European and Japanese economies."

The Federal Reserve has aggressively cut short-term interest rates four times this year, while rates within the 12-nation euro zone bloc have been steady since last October.

But Mr. O'Neill denied he was part of any effort to break down European resistance to cheaper rates, saying it would be "particularly inappropriate" for him to do so because he did not advise the American central bank on its monetary policy.

"I don't have a comment about what the European Central Bank should be doing," Mr. O'Neill said. But he added that it was important for the developed countries to try to reach their economic potential and so create capital that can be used for loans to help poorer countries pull themselves up.

Japan is expected to be less of a focus at this session of the industrialized nations than in the past, because its new government is being given time to try to get its house in order. The new Japanese finance minister, Masajuro Shiokawa, is to attend and meet separately with Mr. O'Neill.

Mr. O'Neill said Japan should be able to do better than it has over the past 10 years, suggesting its economy should be able to grow at around 3 percent a year.

-------- police

Mother Faults 'Signal' Sent in Diallo Case

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/nyregion/29DIAL.html

Amadou Diallo's mother lashed out at the Police Department yesterday for not disciplining the four officers who shot her unarmed son to death two years ago, and civil liberties and community groups said that the police had squandered an opportunity to reach out to alienated minorities in the racially divisive case.

But Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani again called the killing of Mr. Diallo, a black West African immigrant, by four white officers a tragic accident, and urged critics to accept the conclusions of a state criminal jury and federal and city investigators and to abandon what he termed an "angry prejudice" against the police.

A day after Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik said he would not discipline the officers but keep them in desk jobs without guns or badges for the foreseeable future, passions continued to swirl in a case that has led to a citywide debate over aggressive police tactics.

"This has sent a signal that a black child's life has no meaning," the slain man's mother, Kadiatou Diallo, declared at a news conference in Harlem. "We need accountability. Until we get that, we will not rest. We will continue to seek justice. I will never give up on my son."

Flanked by her lawyer, Anthony Gair, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, Mrs. Diallo reminded the mayor and Mr. Kerik that they were answerable to the people for police conduct, and she expressed hope that her son's death would bring about what she called positive changes.

"I think the racial profiling needs to end," she said. "I think the racial stereotyping needs to end. The mayor and the police commissioner must answer why they have to profile the people in the neighborhood."

Mr. Giuliani, speaking on John Gambling's show on WABC Radio, called Mr. Diallo's death "a tragic, horrible accident" that critics of the police were unwilling to accept. Referring to a Bronx mural painted in memory of Mr. Diallo and depicting four officers in Ku Klux Klan hoods, the mayor said:

"What that mural shows is that hatred and bigotry I'm talking about, and the inability of some people - and in some cases a fair number of people - to readjust their angry prejudice to the reality that these four police officers made a terrible mistake. They did not commit a crime."

Donna Lieberman, interim executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said that the Police Department, in refusing to discipline the officers, had passed up an opportunity to re-examine its policies and reach out to minority communities. She called the response of the mayor and the department to the whole case of her son's killing "an insult to his memory, to his family and to all New Yorkers, especially African-Americans who have been prime targets of racial profiling by the N.Y.P.D."

Mr. Kerik's decision not to punish the officers followed the recommendations of two department investigative panels that found that the officers, despite firing 41 bullets at Mr. Diallo, had not violated police guidelines because they believed that he was armed and that their lives were in imminent danger.

The officers - Kenneth Boss, Sean Carroll, Edward McMellon and Richard Murphy - were acquitted last year in a criminal trial that was moved to Albany after a judge said a fair trial was all but impossible in the city. The United States Justice Department decided in January that there was no basis for bringing civil rights charges against the officers.

Mr. Diallo, 22, a vendor from Guinea, was killed in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building on Feb. 4, 1999, by officers who said they thought he resembled a rape suspect. As they approached him, they began firing when, they said, he drew out what they believed to be a gun, but which turned out to be a wallet.

Commissioner Kerik confronted some of the passions generated by the case in a meeting yesterday with 400 predominantly black and Hispanic members of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, at Our Lady of Refuge Church in the Bronx.

After Mr. Kerik spoke about crime being down in the Bronx, Karen Washington, president of the group, expressed disappointment in his decision not to punish the officers in the Diallo case and, to a standing ovation, called on the commissioner to denounce "racial profiling, police brutality and injustice of any kind."

He did so, and pledged to dismiss officers guilty of such misconduct. Pressed about the Diallo case, Mr. Kerik called the shooting "a very tragic and terrible incident," but said there was no basis for criminal or administrative sanctions. "Was there a tragedy?" he said. "Absolutely. It was a terrible mistake. It was a judgment call."

---

When the Police Shoot, Who's Counting?

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/weekinreview/29BUTT.html

WE like to think we live in the information age, when daily or even second-by-second statistics on such fare as stock prices and the annual number of homicides are at our fingertips. For all the careful accounting, however, there are two figures Americans don't have: the precise number of people killed by the police, and the number of times police use excessive force.

Despite widespread public interest and a provision in the 1994 Crime Control Act requiring the Attorney General to collect the data and publish an annual report on them, statistics on police shootings and use of nondeadly force continue to be piecemeal products of spotty collection, and are dependent on the cooperation of local police departments. No comprehensive accounting for all of the nation's 17,000 police department exists.

This lack of accurate statistics makes it virtually impossible, experts say, to draw meaningful, big-picture conclusions about deadly encounters between the police and the civilian population, including the fatal shooting earlier this month of an unarmed black man in Cincinnati, an incident that incited days of violent protests and vandalism. Without a national barometer, there is no conclusive way to determine whether this or other incidents around the country - like those involving Amadou Diallo in New York and Rodney King in Los Angeles - represent racially based police misconduct, or any kind of trend at all.

The major reasons for the vacuum, the experts agree, are twofold. The lack of information on police shootings is attributable to the failure of police departments in many cities to keep and report accurate figures that distinguish between what the police see as "justifiable" shootings - those in which the suspect posed a serious threat - and incidents where an officer may have unlawfully fired at an unarmed civilian.

The International Chiefs of Police, a police organization, tried in the 1980's to collect such information, but "the figures were very embarrassing to a lot of police departments," said James Fyfe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University who is a former New York City police lieutenant. The results, he said, varied wildly. New Orleans had 10 times as many shootings per 100 officers as Newark. Long Beach had twice as many as neighboring Los Angeles, which in turn had three times more than New York.

Some cities did not provide data at all, Professor Fyfe said, but the results, such as they were, showed that "the rates of deadly force are all over the lot," meaning that some cities appear to be much better and some much worse at managing their police forces.

As for the lack of figures on the use of nondeadly force, the situation is even murkier because there are no uniform definitions of force and no standard reporting requirements from one police department to another.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics, the statistical arm of the Justice Department, has tried to fill in some of the blanks on police behavior, issuing a number of surveys and reports on the topic. Most recently, the bureau quietly released a report, "Policing and Homicide, 1976- 1998." But the report itself underscores the continued problems in knowing what is really happening.

On its cover, for example, the report refers to all the victims of police shootings as "felons justifiably killed by police," a categorization that Samuel Walker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, termed "deeply offensive and legally incorrect." In fact, a Justice Department official said the bureau was so embarrassed by the term, and the lack of distinction between justifiable police shootings and murders, that it did not send out its usual promotional material announcing the report.

BUT, the official said, the bureau was trapped because it depends on local police departments to report their figures on police shootings to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and "felons" is the term that police departments insist on using when they do so.

Making matters worse, some police departments fail to report their shootings at all, and for some years, figures from entire states are missing. Although the 1994 crime act ordered the Justice Department to collect such data, there is no law requiring local police departments to provide it, Janet Reno, the former attorney general, acknowledged in a 1999 speech.

Based on the data available, this most recent report suggests that the number of "justifiable" police killings has not increased since 1976, averaging 373 a year, despite a growth in both the population and the number of police officers. And while the rate at which blacks are killed by the police still far surpasses the rate at which whites are shot and killed, it has dropped to four times the white rate in 1998 compared to eight times in 1976.

But the report also acknowledges its own limitations. "One statistic that is impossible to obtain" from the Justice Department's database, it said, "or from any other currently existing database, is the number of murders by police," because in reporting their shooting figures, the police don't distinguish between justified and unjustified killings. The report also fails to break down the number of police shootings by city, unlike other Justice Department reports on crime, making it impossible to compare police performance.

Viewed on a case-by-case basis, things do appear to be improving in some cities. Minneapolis, Boston, Miami-Dade County, Tampa, Phoenix, Seattle and Portland, Ore., are among cities that have implemented improved systems to report all use of force and shootings by officers, better systems for keeping track of civilian complaints and a program police departments are calling an early warning system.

"The early warning systems collect data on citizen complaints and look for patterns by computer to flag officers with problems," Professor Walker said, adding that this "creates more accountability."

Still, the efforts of individual cities often get lost amid the drumbeat and drama of each new instance in which a police officer shoots a civilian, partly because there is no national store of numbers to provide a sense of proportion. And until more comprehensive data are collected, those looking for the national trends behind each local incident are likely to be frustrated.

The lack of good data "is a national scandal," said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of South Carolina and a leading authority on police use of force. "It's a scandal in the sense that these are public servants who work for us and are paid to protect us."

---

D.C.

USA Today
04/29/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Police Chief Charles Ramsey says his early estimate that 10% of the force may have sent racist, sexist, homophobic or obscene e-mails from their cruisers was too high. Ramsey now says the number was far less, but he wouldn't specify. Some officers say Ramsey's original estimate was made without evidence and his apology makes little difference.

-------- spying

Confessions of a Hero

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 29, 2001; Page F01

Mike Shanklin's Bond-like ability to keep cool in the face of danger made him a great spy. His Bond-like ability to bend the rules made him a former spy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9660-2001Apr27?language=printer

APPLAUSE FILLED THE AUDITORIUM at CIA headquarters as Mike Shanklin strode across the stage, shook hands with the agency's director and received its second-highest honor, the Intelligence Star, for bravery in Somalia.

It was a moment Hollywood might have scripted for a spy who made his name working the back streets in Africa and the Middle East, and learned to talk his way out of trouble as he looked down the barrel of a gun.

Now cut to seven years later. Shanklin, applause turned to silence, is walking away from the CIA, dejected and bitter. He'd always been cool under fire. But the agency's unyielding polygraph examiners shook him in a way no rebel with an AK-47 ever could.

He tried to come clean about rules he broke along the way. He hoped his candor -- and his heroics -- would be enough to compensate for what at bottom were breaches of proper procedure, not betrayals. But in the end, the CIA showed him the door for "personal conduct, security violations, and outside activities."

His is an espionage story of our time, written by security bureaucrats on the gray side of the spy business that Hollywood has no interest in. Far from the movie hero he seemed to be at the height of his career, Shanklin today is like a character straight out of a novel by John LeCarre, loyal to the service but deeply ambivalent about what it has become.

Ever since Aldrich H. Ames was unmasked as a Soviet mole who'd operated for years inside the CIA despite all sorts of missed warning signals, the agency has been taking potential security infractions, typically turned up during routine polygraph examinations, much more seriously.

Indeed, no sooner had Ames been packed off to jail than CIA security began working its way through a list of 350 officers who had registered "indications of deception" on the polygraph -- glitches that in the past had been possible to explain away, without further investigation.

But there would be no more leniency. The agency found one mole in that group -- former CIA officer Harold J. Nicholson, now serving a 23-year sentence -- and upended dozens of careers. And with accused spy Robert P. Hanssen in prison and awaiting indictment sometime next month for alleged crimes at least as spectacular as those of Ames, the same process has already begun inside the FBI.

Many veterans of the CIA and the FBI believe that the pendulum may have swung too far, and the agencies' obsessive focus on security and counterintelligence will end up muting their own effectiveness, driving some of the most capable people -- people like Mike Shanklin -- out of the business.

"Whatever got Mike Shanklin crosswise with 'the process' simply cannot obscure the role Shanklin and those just like him played when times were tough," said Milt Bearden, a retired CIA station chief for whom Shanklin worked in Sudan in the mid-1980s.

"When I'm in the midst of an East African revolution and need someone to blend into a howling mob with a radio under his robe," Bearden said, "I need a Mike Shanklin and not some slightly more 'perfected' officer that the process may seem to seek today."

CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said he could not comment on the specifics of Shanklin's case. But he did acknowledge Shanklin was a "highly regarded" operative who did a "terrific job not just in Somalia, but throughout his career.

"There's nothing we would like better than a highly regarded, heroic case officer being part of the organization," Harlow said. "We've got to try to maintain some consistency -- and it is painful when you see good people run afoul of rules and regulations. But the regulations are not arbitrary and capricious."

Shanklin, a former Marine major and Vietnam veteran who grew up poor in the Watts section of Los Angeles, isn't asking anybody to feel sorry for him. He prides himself for earning everything he achieved during 13 years at the CIA. And he remains unwavering in his loyalty to the agency.

Indeed, as one of the few African American case officers there, Shanklin said he was "never inhibited because of my race -- if anything, I was given a lot of opportunities to do a lot of unique things" because being black enabled him to operate in areas his white colleagues could not.

He also recognizes that he brought his problems on himself -- and feels more than a little guilty about possibly dishonoring the agency. "I have to take responsibility for breaking the rules -- and I broke the rules," said Shanklin, whose major transgression seems to have been an unreported affair with a foreigner -- a woman he ended up marrying.

But he still thinks he deserves a break -- because he still thinks he has something to offer.

"Are they treating me any differently than they would treat anybody else? Probably not," Shanklin said. "But I don't think I am anybody else. I'm the guy who went anywhere they wanted me to go anytime they wanted me to go. But when I needed them to cut me some slack, they said, 'No, you broke the rules.' "

In Harm's Way

Michael Louis Shanklin, 58, still can't say much about his career at the CIA, which put him in some very tight spots in some very inhospitable countries -- Sudan, Chad, Algeria, Jordan, Liberia. But he gained the most notoriety in a country that was probably the most inhospitable of them all, Somalia.

Shanklin became deputy chief of station in Mogadishu in 1990, when guerrillas under the leadership of Gen. Mohamed Farah Aideed began closing in on the brutal 20-year dictatorship of Mohamed Siad Barre.

For months, Shanklin worked night and day cultivating a relationship with a wealthy businessman in North Mogadishu. Thepowerful and well-connected young man with his own private army -- whose name Shanklin cannot reveal -- ultimately became a prized CIA "asset," providing valuable information and insights as civil war engulfed Somalia. The U.S. government didn't pick sides in the fight, but wanted to avoid any nasty surprises.

Shanklin said he forged an extremely close bond of loyalty with his prized recruit. As chaos descended on Mogadishu, Shanklin also became acquainted with the man's close friend and companion, Stefania Pace, an Italian physician working for a humanitarian organization. Tragedy would ultimately befall all of them in Somalia. And Pace would come to rely on Shanklin for solace -- and then, far more.

Shanklin left Somalia the first time in January 1991 as guerrilla factions finally drove Barre from power and took over Mogadishu before turning their guns on one another. The U.S. government ordered its embassy evacuated.

With every American in Somalia huddled at the embassy, Shanklin's boss told him he had left some critical intelligence -- Shanklin can't say exactly what -- back at his residence. Shanklin bailed him out, driving into the battle, through small arms fire, to retrieve it. A short time later he was gone, one of the last Americans out of the country, lifting off in a chopper carrying the U.S. ambassador.

Shanklin spent all of five days at CIA headquarters before the agency sent him off to the Persian Gulf War as an intelligence liaison to the U.S. military, where Scud missile attacks punctuated his days. From there, he went to Liberia as chief of the CIA's operation there.

When he returned in the fall of 1992, Shanklin told his superiors he just wanted an assignment where the lights go on when you flick the switch, and the water runs when you turn the tap.

Nobody could say he hadn't earned some ease. He'd held down company interests in an African country flooded with assassins hunting CIA officers. He'd slipped into the Middle East on a tourist visa and driven a fellow officer to safety through a series of security checkpoints where guards would have loved nothing more than to execute a couple of American spies.

Shanklin got the milk run he was after, assigned to London as a CIA liaison with the British intelligence service. It didn't last long.

At Thanksgiving, when then-President George Bush approved sending a division of Marines to Somalia to assure that relief supplies got to hundreds of thousands of starving people, the CIA tapped Shanklin to secretly enter the country with an intelligence force responsible for making sure the troops could land without casualties. With his top Somali asset providing logistical support, the Americans flew in on small aircraft and landed at a remote airstrip far to the north of Mogadishu. Just being in Mogadishu put them all in danger. It was a crazed, lawless environment where enforcers prowled the streets in "technicals" -- jeeps with mounted machine guns -- and virtually everyone carried weapons they weren't the least bit shy about firing.

When the Marines waded ashore in South Mogadishu on Dec. 9, 1992, Shanklin's men and their Somali agents had the beach under surveillance and felt confident Aideed's gunners would not attack. Shanklin wasn't nearly so confident when a band of armed thugs held up his vehicle in North Mogadishu a short while later as he drove his boss, the CIA station chief, through contested terrain to meet an asset.

The marauders stole an automatic weapon from a CIA security guard seated next to Shanklin. Shanklin got out of the car, looked down the barrel of a rifle pointing in his face and told the chief bandit to calm down. He was sure he and his two colleagues were about to be executed. But when the gun-filcher caused a moment of distraction by running off to admire his high-tech contraband, Shanklin jumped back in his four-wheel drive and floored it.

Operation Restore Hope had begun.

'That Blood Is My Blood'

Not long after Shanklin returned to his cushy assignment in London, he realized he hated being someplace where the lights worked and the water ran. He didn't have long to fret. By the summer of 1993, Mogadishu was again in turmoil. As the United Nations tried to return a semblance of order to Somalia, Aideed began increasing his armed presence in Mogadishu and filling the airwaves with anti-U.N. rhetoric from a radio station he controlled. When Pakistani peacekeepers went to make an inventory in early June of weapons Aideed had been allowed to store at the broadcast center, 24 were killed in an ambush thought to have been carried out by Aideed's men.

The U.N. responded by ordering Aideed's arrest, turning the peacekeeping operation into a posse. Shanklin's young businessman friend in North Mogadishu became a key to the manhunt, possessed of the connections necessary to locate Aideed. It only made sense to summon Shanklin from London to run his prized recruit.

The destruction in Mogadishu looked like Berlin in 1945. Everything -- houses, buildings, hospitals, schools -- was demolished, as if it had been carpet bombed. Roads were littered with wreckage. The smell of burning garbage permeated the city.

While he and his contact had both left at the height of the civil war, Shanklin was amazed to find out that Stefania Pace, the Italian doctor, had stayed behind and continued to run her aid organization through the worst of the fighting.

Shanklin didn't frighten easily, but Somalia scared him -- the chaos, the destruction and the constant eruption of gunfire, now aimed by Aideed's men at the Americans hunting their chief.

After four American soldiers were killed by a command-detonated mine in early August, President Clinton ordered 130 Delta Force commandos, 160 Army Rangers and 16 helicopters to Somalia to capture Aideed.

Shanklin knew capture was unlikely: Aideed was moving every couple of hours to avoid capture and his men were heavily armed. But he thought that the CIA's network of spies would be able to at least locate the rogue warlord, thanks largely to the services of his star asset -- a man so well connected that after Shanklin told him about the bandits' theft of the CIA rifle, he went right out and got it back.

But the asset wouldn't be able to help this time. One evening a few weeks after Shanklin's return, the young businessman stood with a handful of trusted lieutenants on the front lawn of his villa, playing the ultimate high-stakes game: Russian roulette. Shanklin had heard rumors that his friend had done this before -- a crazy test of machismo against the background of deadly chaos -- but had never been able to confirm it. Until now.

The man pointed a revolver at the head of one aide and pulled the trigger. The gun didn't fire. He pointed it at the head of another and pulled the trigger. Another empty chamber. He pointed it at a third man and pulled. Empty again. Then he put the gun to his own head -- and fired a bullet into his brain.

Pace, always terrified by what she called her companion's "passion for guns," heard the shot and peered down from a balcony to see him lying in a pool of blood.

Shanklin received a frantic radio call and rushed to the hospital where he found one of the man's closest confidants wandering the halls in a shirt soaked with his friend's blood.

"That blood is my blood," Shanklin told the Somali, handing him a new shirt and taking the stained garment.

By morning, his friend had died.

Shanklin told Pace, who wept in his arms.

Down and Dirty

As the huge Delta contingent settled in over the next several days, the CIA took stock of its intelligence assets on the ground and despaired.

"We thought we were screwed, we really did," Shanklin recalled. He and his agency colleagues believed that with the death of his friend, Shanklin's ability to organize Somali surveillance teams capable of penetrating South Mogadishu and finding Aideed had been destroyed.

But Shanklin soon realized the Somali he'd taken the bloody shirt from at the hospital was nearly as well positioned as his friend had been. So he pitched a plan to Garrett Jones, the CIA's station chief: He would get down and dirty, mingling with his dead asset's associates on their turf. At a time when Americans were being actively hunted by Aideed, Shanklin proposed taking an agency team 15 miles from the relatively safe CIA station in the embassy compound into the teeth of the conflict to operate out of a safe house in North Mogadishu.

The whole operation was predicated on Shanklin's ability to get a large team of 15 Americans in and out -- fast, if need be -- and manage their own security in a terrifyingly insecure environment. The team included four heavily armed Navy SEALs. But those commandos could not have held off a full-scale assault by Aideed's forces -- and Shanklin never could rule out the possibility that Aideed had a mole among the asset's men. The risks were great and Shanklin's cover thin: There were so many antennas sprouting from the villa's roof that people in the neighborhood started calling it the CNN house.

After almost three weeks, Shanklin was told by one of his Somali spies that Aideed knew where he was.

"I called Garrett and said, 'Look, this thing has been compromised, let's get the [blank] out of here,' " Shanklin said.

That night, U.S. helicopters landed at an abandoned soccer stadium half a mile from the safe house and evacuated Shanklin and his spy team. But he maintained contact with Somali lookouts, who would soon prove their value.

When Aideed proved unfindable, the lookouts developed a contact who met regularly with Osman Ato, a wealthy businessman, arms importer and Aideed money man whose name was right below Aideed's on the CIA wanted list.

Shanklin remembered a plan, never executed, to give Aideed an ivory-handled cane with an electronic locator hidden inside. The magic cane was still around. He had his lookouts give it to their contact to present to Ato. With a surveillance helicopter monitoring the cane's beacon from above, the contact climbed into a car in North Mogadishu that was supposed to take him to meet Ato. But when the car stopped for gas, one of Shanklin's lookouts radioed him and said Ato was already in the car.

Shanklin immediately called Delta, which launched within minutes.

A Little Bird helicopter found the car and swooped so low that a sniper was able to lean out of the chopper and fire three clean shots into the vehicle's engine. The car ground to a halt as Delta Force commandos roped down from a hovering Blackhawk helicopter and handcuffed Ato -- the first known helicopter take-down of people in a moving car.

But success in Mogadishu was fleeting. A little less than two weeks later, on Oct. 3, 1993, a Sunday afternoon, Shanklin was relaxing at his hilltop base near the airstrip when he heard over his radio that an American helicopter had been shot down during a large operation aimed at arresting a cadre of top Aideed lieutenants.

Soon, Mogadishu exploded with the most intense combat engaged in by U.S. forces since Vietnam. The battle continued throughout the night after a second Blackhawk was downed and two truck convoys tried and failed to reach 90 American soldiers pinned down deep in Aideed territory. In the end, 18 American soldiers were killed and 84 were wounded. That was the end of this country's manhunt for Aideed -- and, for all intents and purposes, its interest in Somalia. Shanklin left a few days later.

"Whatever our policy was, it ended October 3," Shanklin said. "From an agency standpoint, this thing was over. I wanted to get out of there."

The following July, Shanklin was back in London, bored out of his mind, when he got a call from a Somali contact who told him that Pace, the Italian doctor, had returned to Rome but was still depressed and traumatized by her friend's death. On her motorbike rides to and from work, she found herself hoping for an accident that would put her out of her misery.

Shanklin got permission from CIA headquarters to visit her.

Pace had carried on in Mogadishu for months, living on emotional autopilot, working long hours distributing relief supplies and arranging flights of food and medicine into the country.

"I was trying to cope with it by not coping with it, trying to keep myself busy, busy, busy," she said. "But I felt the need to leave, because I knew that I had to mourn, and I hadn't yet."

She found little relief in Rome. "I felt like I was totally isolated. I didn't want to live, but I knew I had to. My parents had only me. I needed to talk to somebody who knew Somalia. Nobody, not even my dearest friends, could relate to what I had done. So Mike came and he really did me a lot of good."

Purely by coincidence, Pace and Shanklin say, they met again the following month in Nairobi. By the end of the year, they both realized they were beginning to fall in love, even though she wasn't sure she was ready for another serious relationship and Shanklin, while separated, was still entangled in a failed marriage.

The romance posed a serious career problem. From the start, Shanklin decided not to tell the CIA about the affair, even though he knew that "close and continuing" relationships with foreign nationals had to be immediately reported to security officials empowered to decide whether a particular relationship was appropriate.

He knew he would be yanked back to headquarters and investigated. With Pace planning to take a full-time job running a Somalia relief operation out of Kenya, he wasn't prepared to leave her behind.

"I knew I was screwing up," he said. "But we had become committed to each other."

Faced with a choice between Pace and the CIA, Shanklin picked Pace, came back to the United States and retired -- his bosses none the wiser -- even though he really didn't want to leave the agency.

Because he would be joining Pace in Kenya, the CIA told Shanklin he had to retire "covert," meaning he was not allowed to tell anyone he had spent 13 years working for the CIA. But Shanklin violated this "covert" arrangement, telling several large American companies that he approached for employment as a security consultant about his CIA background.

He finally landed a job in 1997 as a representative for an American armored car company in Kenya, but that was far from the kind of security consulting work he had in mind.

Watching Shanklin's frustrations grow, Pace quit her job. "We both have given up a lot for each other," she said. "This is what happens when two adult people -- not 20-year-olds -- meet across the oceans."

They moved to Fairfax three years ago; she recently received a master's degree in public health from George Washington University. And he went back to the place he knew best, the CIA, hoping to be cleared for work as a contractor in security or training.

Thousands of former CIA employees go the contractor route and get their "green badges" -- security passes that give them access to CIA installations -- as a way to maintain a relationship with the agency.

But to get his badge, Shanklin had to pass a routine polygraph examination.

Before the test began, Shanklin admitted he had failed to divulge his "close and continuing" relationship with Pace. But that admission, he said, only seemed to raise suspicions and whet the polygraph operator's appetite for more. The test went badly. Another was scheduled.

It went even worse, despite Shanklin's decision to be honest. He admitted talking with a ghostwriter who was helping a colleague write a novel (so far unpublished). He admitted telling prospective American employers in Kenya about his CIA employment. He admitted helping a Somali youth whose feet had been blown off by a land mine get medical attention by stating he was related to a CIA asset, when he was not.

The more he told, Shanklin said, the more the polygraphers wanted to hear. At one point, with no evidence, they insinuated he might have been involved in his asset's gunshot death. That, said Shanklin, pushed him over the edge. He got into a screaming match with the polygrapher. The test was a disaster.

Another was scheduled a month later. There were more questions about relationships with foreign nationals and compromises of classified information. Shanklin says he had nothing left to admit but still felt his emotions surge, sending the needle on the polygraph jumping.

"They think that I'm holding something back -- and I'm not," Shanklin said. "And because they can't prove that, the best course of action is, we don't care what he did in the past or how great he was, we have grounds to get rid of him. He broke our rules."

With Shanklin's security review still unresolved, he and Pace went to Fairfax City Hall one day in June 1998 and tied the knot, hoping the CIA would stop bugging him about their relationship.

One final polygraph test was scheduled. Shanklin said he still felt quite nervous, but thought he had done okay. The result was inconclusive.

Months passed. He was working as an international security consultant but had nowhere near the options a green badge would have offered. He started calling senior CIA officials. They were polite but couldn't help.

Finally in December -- almost three years after that first failed polygraph -- a two-page letter arrived from the CIA: Green badge denied. His wife hid it so as not to spoil an upcoming trip to Italy. Just after Christmas, at her parents' home in Tolfa outside Rome, she finally broke the bad news.

"I was hurt, disappointed," Shanklin recalled. "I was hoping they would have said, 'You shouldn't have done these stupid things, and we're going to watch you, don't do it again.' "

He arrived home in a fighting mood and called a lawyer, who filed a notice of appeal, but ultimately convinced Shanklin that the process would be long, expensive and probably fruitless. "He told me, 'Mike, we can do this, but they'll spin you around for eternity,' " Shanklin said.

On Feb. 21, he withdrew his appeal.

"I am proud of my Agency career and always will be," he wrote. "That said, there is no longer any requirement on my part to appeal this case or request a copy of my file."

This weekend, the Shanklins are holding a garage sale at their Northern Virginia town house. On Thursday they get on a plane bound for Italy, eager to start anew, away from the long shadow of CIA headquarters.

Shanklin figures he's already lost three years of his life fighting the CIA and doesn't want to lose any more. "At some point," the ex-spy said, "you've got to turn the page."

----

U.S. to inspect downed plane

USA Today
04/29/2001
By Bill Nichols, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-04-29-china-usat.htm

WASHINGTON - Administration officials said Sunday that China will allow access to a downed Navy surveillance plane, raising the possibility that the $80 million aircraft could be returned soon. "I see it as an encouraging sign that they're willing to proceed," Vice President Cheney said on Fox New Sunday. However, Cheney denied reports from Beijing that the Bush administration would make a payment to China in the wake of the collision on April 1 between the EP-3 plane and a Chinese fighter.

"What's intended here is that we will pay whatever costs are associated with recovering the aircraft," Cheney said. "We certainly have not offered any compensation."

China's official Xinhua News Agency announced Sunday that the Beijing regime has decided to let a U.S. team inspect the badly damaged surveillance plane, which made an emergency landing on China's Hainan island after the collision.

The Chinese fighter jet crashed into the South China Sea; its pilot, Wang Wei, is missing and presumed dead.

U.S. officials say the collision was an accident brought on by Wang's overly aggressive flying. China insists its jet was rammed by the U.S. plane.

China held 24 U.S. crewmembers for 11 days. They were released after the Bush administration said it was "very sorry" about Wang's death and for the unscheduled landing of the U.S. plane on Chinese soil.

U.S. officials hailed China's decision to allow access to the plane, but said it was too soon to tell whether its complete recovery would follow.

"The important thing now is we have a constructive development," White House Chief of Staff Andy Card said on ABC's This Week. Pentagon officials say the crew was able to destroy some, but not all, of the secret material aboard the plane before it landed.

State Department officials said a U.S. inspection team could leave for China as early as today. The team is being assembled at Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan.

Cheney said the plane did not appear airworthy. "The nose is gone from it, all of the instruments don't work, two of the engines are out," he said. "There isn't any way you're going to fly that aircraft out of there. Somebody's going to have to go in and load it on something and transport it out, probably a barge or something."

While lauding China's latest move in the plane standoff, Cheney and Card reiterated Bush's recent warning that the United States would defend Taiwan from attack.

Bush's comments were criticized by leading Democrats on Capitol Hill for going beyond three decades of U.S. policy on Taiwan.

Former presidents, at least in public statements, were ambiguous about whether the United States would defend Taiwan, which broke from mainland China during the revolution in 1949 in which Communists took power in Beijing.

"It's important that the United States live up to its obligations to help Taiwan defend itself, and that's what the president reiterated," Card said.

-------- activists

Backyard Eco Conference 2001
Part of the closing circle at Pine Point-Eco 1999.

home.earthlink.net

Feel free to print out the registration form below and submit it to our registrar.
http://home.earthlink.net/~cacceco/eco2001.1.html

Love your Mother---
Safe Food, Good Communities and Honest Politics
May 11,12,13

Mystic Lake YMCA Camp
Clare County, Michigan

Greetings!

Well - if adversity tends to promote environmental activism, then the next few years should be exciting and busy!

CACC is again offering to "First Time Adult Enrollees" a 20% discount off their total cost.

We are presenting another fine mix this year of great speakers, talented musicians and artists, fabulous food and a fun learning experience for the kids. all in a peaceful, beautiful setting!

Please come and share a day or the weekend with us. Bring a friend and meet new ones.

Peace!

John Witucki, For the CACC Board

The Nuclear-Free Great Lakes Campaign will hold an all-afternoon planning meeting Saturday, preparing for the Third Great Lakes Anti-Nuclear Action Camp to be held in Michigan in late summer. Consisting of several regional safe-energy organizations, the group is actively working to rid the Great Lakes Bio-Region of all hazardous nuclear reactors and contamination sites.

The camp aims to

• Educate about nuclear power hazards, and promote safe-energy alternatives • Train the next generation of safe-energy activists, both on energy related issues and in skills needed to become effective activists and organizers, and Environmentalists attending ECO are welcome to attend.

KEYNOTERS

Merrill Clark

A certified organic farmer/marketer herself since the early 1980's, Merrill Clark has seen the industry and state certification activities sputter, then take major steps forward to not only keep up, but also excel in certain activities. She is also co-chair of Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance (MOFFA) and coordinated two MOFFA Harvest Festivals at Washtenaw College near Ann Arbor and at the Ingham County Fairgrounds in Mason. She and her family own Roseland Organic Farms in Cassopolis, MI, an 1800 acre diversified beef and grain farm which features 100's of acres of wetlands, natural marl, ponds, woodlots, a papaw patch, a cottage market, and a goodly array of John's recyclables.

THE GIFT OF LAND..AND GOOD FOOD

How we treat the gifted land on which we all walk and from which we retrieve our food is an indication of how much we cherish our own lives and the lives of those that follow.

This talk will examine how the artlessness of typical food production in this country is taking a toll on the Earth and its resources, as well as on the health of all the Earth's inhabitants.

Can organic food production step up to the proverbial plate and put plentiful, nutritious and clean food on that plate for consumption by this county's families? What are audience members doing to bring clean food to their family tables? Is there enough organic food available to you or do you just do "the best you can" at the shelves of a Meijers?

With the passage this winter of part one of the Michigan Organic Food Products Act, agencies engaged in overseeing the policies related to conventional agricultural production will shift gears to promote and regulate organic production and marketing. Some don't want to see MDA anywhere near organic farm fields and others wonder about the typical and often contradictory "promote and regulate" roles of the Department. The USDA has also just released a final rule on organic food standards for public comment. Keep an ear to the ground.

Greg Coleridge,

Greg Coleridge is the Director of the Economic Justice & Empowerment Program of the Northeast Ohio American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker social action organization, where he currently works on issues of campaign finance reform, environmental cleanup, and corporate power and democracy. He is co-coordinator of the Ohio Committee on Corporations, Law and Democracy, which in 1998 published Citizens over Corporations, a brief history of corporate power and democracy in Ohio. He received the Public Service Achievement Award by the national group Common Cause in 1998. Corporate Fairy Tales and Democratic Myths: From the Commerce Clause to Santa Clause

Our political culture is filled with myths. None may be more powerful and dangerous than the myth that our system is "democratic". Authentic democratic self-expression in our communities and nation is simply not possible, in a culture that defines money as free speech, corporations as persons, and property as beyond democratic control. Nor can we hope to have a voice in decisions that affect our lives if we continue to believe that the Constitution exists to protect all equally, that the Bill of Rights is as expansive as it can be, and that judges and courts are objective, neutral and "above politics". We need to debunk such myths and begin to build a reality which is grounded on ideas, institutions, and programs which affirm the voices of every person and works in harmony with democrats (note the small "d") in other communities and nations.

Stephanie Mills

Stephanie Mills is an author, editor, and speaker who has been working in the ecology movement since 1969. Leland Press will publish her fifth book, Epicurean Simplicity in spring of 2002. Mills lives in Northern Michigan. Life is a Mystery "Resisting the Techno-Craze, Respecting the Wild"

Stephanie will urge a radical re-thinking of our society's drift toward the synthetic. Authenticity and renewal; inspiration and instruction, can best be found in the wild: self-willed natural areas and free people. Heedless technology would compromise human nature and nature itself. Time to struggle to preserve earthly reality! and to celebrate the non-technological wonders of evolutionary time.

SPEAKERS:

Edward C. Lorenz

"Update on St. Louis/Pine River"

Mr. Lorenz teaches both history and political science courses and directs the Public Affairs Institute. He also heads the Community Advisory Group (CAG) in Gratiot County that began with a focus on the environmental problems resulting from the operation of the Velsicol Chemical Company who dumped thousands of tons of DDT in the Pine River and other regions near St. Louis. The Velsicol plant also was famous for the accident that led to mixing cattle feed with the fire retardant PBB in 1973, one of the worst food chain contamination accidents in history. Consequently, the communities have two active Superfund sites and a river with the highest levels of DDT ever documented in this country (up to 44,000 ppm). The shared sense of indignation and frustration that surfaced as a result of these initial meetings empowered the community to form a community advisory group. This group, incorporated as the Pine River Superfund Citizens Taskforce, continuously monitors the clean up and provides a forum for community input. Mr. Lorenz will provide an update on the cleanup and on their federal lawsuit.

Lisa Gue

National Nuclear Waste policy-Deadly Directions

Lisa Gue is a policy analyst on nuclear waste issues for Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program, with a specific focus on fighting the proposal for a high-level radioactive waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Based in Washington, D.C., Lisa monitors this issue in congress and the federal agencies. Last summer she worked on the Radioactive Roads and Rails campaign, teaming up with local groups in six states to host events aimed at raising awareness among citizens, politicians, and the media about the dangers associated with transporting high-level nuclear waste.

Lisa studied international development at the University of Calgary, in Western Canada. She was centrally involved in student activism at local and national levels. She worked internationally with non-governmental groups in Europe on globalization issues before coming to Public Citizen last year.

Cheryl Collins/Terry Gill

Protecting Streams through Citizen's Monitoring

Cheryl resides in Oakland County, Michigan with her husband Bill, a wetlands Consultant. She is a founding member of the Thumb Bioregional Alliance (TBA). Cheryl was one of the original members of both the Mill Creek Coalition - organized to oppose 17 miles of dredging of Mill Creek in St. Clair County - and Don't Waste Michigan Site #2 Chapter - which helped defeat siting of a Low Level Radioactive Waste Facility in St. Clair County. Cheryl also served on the St. Clair County Solid Waste Planning Committee. With Terry Gill, Cheryl helped organize monitoring of Mill Creek.

Terry has been an outspoken advocate for preserving our environment for many years. She has served as a board member of the Michigan Environmental Council, the St. Clair County Solid Waste Planning Committee, the Low Level Radioactive Waste institute for Research and Education and Greenwood Township's planning commission. She is also the Project Manager of the Mill Creek Volunteer Monitoring Project (MCVMP) that is part of the Michigan DEQ' s "Michigan Volunteer Monitoring Program". The MCVMP compares data collected by volunteers from sections of Mill Creek that have been recently dredged to data collected from sections of the creek, which remain natural, and sections of the creek where river restoration techniques have been applied. Some of the types of data collected include stream wildlife, water characteristics (runs, rifles, pools, eddies), stream bank habitat, bank erosion, stream shading and sediment depth. Dramatic results of the first year of data collection have shown the value of river restoration versus conventional dredging. The report and the project itself have sparked considerable interest and praise from state regulators.

Amanda Hathaway/Dennis Fox

MUCC and Toxics Issues

Amanda is a Public Relations Specialist who joined MUCC in June of 1997. She previously worked as an Environmental Education Specialist in MUCC's Education Department for three years and as Assistant to the Michigan State Parks Adventure Program for several years prior, bringing public attention to this free summer interpretive program showcasing Michigan's natural resources. She has received Bachelor's degrees in Science and Technology Studies from Lyman Briggs. She also holds a Master's degree in Agricultural and Natural Resources Communications and in Park, Recreation and Tourism Resources with an emphasis on marketing, all from Michigan State University.

Dennis Fox, MUCC Land Use and Waste Issue Staff Contact. Dennis is an Environmental Policy Specialist who joined MUCC in May of 1999. Previously he worked as a Policy Analyst for the Senate Democratic Caucus in Lansing for seven years on agricultural, administrative rules, environment, land use, and natural resources issues. He received a Bachelor's degree in Political Science - Pre-Law from Michigan State University.

Amanda will introduce participants to the Michigan United Conservation Clubs (MUCC) with a multimedia presentation, outlining the organization's history, mission, goals, and organizational structure. Dennis Fox will then detail MUCC's work on toxics, including local, state and federal efforts. Both speakers will highlight ways in which participants can become informed of or involved in MUCC's conservation work.

Tom Shea

Michigan Peace Team -Civil Disobedience Workshop

After a brief assessment of participants experience and knowledge of civil disobedience, this session will involve participants in a combination of information, reflection, and an emphasis on practice exercises around three main questions about civil disobedience: How does theory relate to practice? What are the skills involved in practicing civil disobedience? What are some expected and unexpected outcomes?

Tom Shea is a long-time member of the twenty-two year old Faith and Resistance movement in Michigan and currently a senior trainer for Michigan Peace Team. He has personal experience from a number of civil disobedience actions.

Youth Programs:

The backyard Eco Conference Youth Program sets this gathering apart from any other. Activities have been designed to capture the interest and involvement of the three groups. All young people are expected to be enrolled in Eco's Youth Programs for the duration of the conference, except for the tiniest babies. Unsupervised children are not permitted as they are not only at risk for themselves but lead to the disruption of planned activities.

Eco Youth 2001

Explore, explore, explore. 2000 Eco Conference Youth are in for fun and adventure. Friday evening and night the youth will be responsible for checking in at our Arts and Crafts building. There they will find out the weekends planned activities. All youth are expected to be enrolled with the youth program. Young ones under 6, should be registered with our Earthcrawlers program. Earthcrawlers are supervised all day and parents are asked to dedicate half a day with the toddlers. Meals at Eco are times for everyone to eat together and share the day's experiences.

Every acre, every wetland and hillside will see the footprints of our group. Mystic Lake Camp is big so be ready to hike, play animal survival, build shelters, have campfires, sing songs, draw, paint and sculpt. With a diverse age group, we will all work together to make sure everyone has fun. Sometimes there will be activities just for the more mature youth. And for the younger youth, high energy and creative programs will be played all day.

Youth programs conclude with the day's seminars and workshops. Saturday we will have an evening campfire and Sunday concludes the weekend with a drum circle and song dedication.

Eco Youth Friend will be lead by Alayne Speltz and her talented staff. If you are interested in playing with us or leading an activity call (517) 544-2844.

Electronic Communications Email, the Internet, and Beyond -

Joseph Badura

Building on similar sessions offered in previous years, Joseph will offer one-on-one and small group assistance with negotiating the resources of the word wide web, establishing an email account and the basics of electronic communication. A sign-up sheet will be available at Registration to schedule times for individual assistance. Small group sessions will be offered throughout the weekend.

Eco Food:

The conference opens with a potluck supper Friday evening, so remember to bring a dish to pass. We'll supply beverages.

Mike Everetts of Petoskey is bringing his "Real Food" Dream Kitchen to Eco again! Mike has planned a delicious menu of natural foods with an emphasis on whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables.

Volunteer help is always appreciated in the kitchen; especially at the end of the conference for clean up!

Eco Auction:

The Eco Auction is an opportunity to bring something special to the Eco Conference to donate to help support the work of CACC. A silent auction will be held throughout the weekend, with individual items being auctioned off before the group. Previous "prizes" have included handmade cards, artwork, a water filtration kit, composter and a bed and breakfast weekend.

All contributions donated for this purpose are, of course, tax deductible and will be acknowledged.

Eco Arts and Music:

Victor McManemy has been a feature of all of the past Eco Conferences. His songs are a call to action, whether describing the mistreatment of indigenous peoples or the abuse of our environment. It has been said that the waters of the Great Lakes flow in the veins of the life-long Traverse area resident.

Tim Joseph sings the old songs along with some new ones. A founder and organizer of the Spirit of the Woods Music Festival, Tim has always had a love for the people's music. When not playing the guitar and banjo he's a stonemason and carpenter from the Manistee County town of Brethren.

Fine Arts Exhibit:

Gretchen Michaels will again be returning to provide another glimpse at the endless possibilities of integrating Fine Arts and Environmental Education.

This year we will have a chance to learn the "Art of Paper Making". From our first teachers, the paper wasps, to the contemporary Eco-Art form, explore papermaking with Gretchen. Create note cards, baskets and collages with natural fibers, plants and pulps.

All materials and equipment will be available through out the weekend. While enjoying the paper making process, you will contemplate both the aesthetic and pragmatic sides of the paper industry. This inter-generational art activity will send you home with a unique art piece as well as a renewed awareness of the quantity and quality of 21st century paper production.

As in past years, Gretchen Michaels is coordinating the collection and display of arts that celebrate the Earth through painting, sculpture, drawings, photograph, and writings. If you want to exhibit art at Eco, contact Gretchen at 248-628-7463 in the evening. NOTE: 20% Discount on total for all first time adult Eco Registrants - Plus a Free Gift!

Registration

Name__________________________________ Address_________________________________ City___________________________________ State/Province__________________Zip______ Telephone Day ( )____________________ Telephone Evening ( )____________________

List the persons registered with this form. Please give complete names and information on each person. Attach additional sheet if needed.

Name Adult(M/F) Child Age (M/F)

Name Adult(M/F) Child Age (M/F)

Name Adult(M/F) Child Age (M/F)

Name Adult(M/F) Child Age (M/F)

[ ] Reservation for Technical Tree Climbing (limit 6 adults)

Conference Fees

Adult Registration 50.00 x = $________ Student (with ID) 25.00 x =$________

Youth Program 25.00 x =$________

FOOD:

Meal Pass - 5 meals 25.00 x =$________

Single Meal Ticket 5.50 x =$________

Child's Meal Pass 12.00 x =$________

Single Child's Meal 3.00 x =$________

(Child 8-14, free below 8, 15 + adult)

HOUSING:

Cabin (per person) 20.00 x =$_______

Rough camping (tent /site) 5.00 =$_______

RV Parking (no hookups) /site 7.50 =$_______

CACC Membership

Individual 25.00 $_______

Family 30.00 $_______ Organization 50.00 $_______

Donation $_______

Total Amount $_______

Send with your check made out to CACC

Eco Conference Registrar

564 Parkway Gladwin, MI 48624

Full refunds granted prior to May 5

No refunds thereafter.

Attention College Students - A discounted registration fee and free camping is offered to students with college/university identification. Please bring your ID with you to the conference to confirm your discount.

Early Registration Bonus! - All adult registrations postmarked by May 5 will receive a Backyard Eco Conference tote bag featuring the CACC logo. Registrants after that date will have the opportunity to purchase a bag at Eco.

Scholarships - A limited number of scholarships are available. Call the Eco Registrar at 517-426-5540 (evenings) for details.

Conference Schedule

Friday May 11
3:00 - 8:00 Registration
5:30 - 7:00 Potluck Dinner (Please bring dish to pass!)
7:00 - 8:00 CACC's Annual Meeting
8:00 - 10:00 Merrill Clark "The Gift of Good Land..and Good Food"
10:00 -12:00 Informal Reception (Music, Socializing) Victor McManemy, Tim Joseph and friends

Saturday May 12
7:00 - 8:30 Breakfast
8:30 - Noon Registration Continues
8:45 - 10:15 Cheryl Collins/Terry Gill "Protecting Streams through Citizen' s Monitoring"
10:30 - 11:45 Panel discussion on Great Lakes/National Nuclear Waste Issues with Lisa Gue Noon
1:00 Lunch
1:15 - 4:45 Tom Shea - "Civil Disobedience Workshop"

OPTION S
1:15 - 3:00 Dennis Fox "MUCC and Toxics Issues" Amanda Hathaway "MUCC and Local Activities"
3:00 - 4:45 Ed Lorenz "Update on Contamination in Pine River at St. Louis"
5:00 - 6:30 Dinner
6:30 - 7:00 Free Time
7:00 - 7:30 Eco Awards Auction
8:00 - 9:30 Greg Coleridge "Corporate Fairy Tales and Democratic Myths: From the Commerce Clause to Santa Claus"
10:00 - 1:00 Campfire Music with Victor, Tim & Friends

Sunday May 13
7:00 - 8:30 Breakfast
8:30 - 9:45 Freetime or Round table discussion 10:00 - 10:30 Children's Presentation
10:30 - 11:15 Closing Speaker - Stephanie Mills "Life is a Mystery-Resisting the Techno-Craze, Respecting the Wild"

Noon Closing Circle
12:30 - 1:30 Lunch 1:30 - ? Socialize, Clean up, Pack up, Departure

For More Information Contact:
CACC 8735 Maple Grove Road Lake, MI 48632-9511
Eco Registrar: Karen Freel Klein (517) 426-5540 E-Mail: kfklein@voyager.net

---

3 Mile Island Sabotage To Be Discussed Friday Night

From: "Bill Smirnow" <smirnowb@ix.netcom.com>
To: "Nukenet" <nukenet@envirolink.org> Subject:
Sun, 29 Apr 2001

Scott Portzline of TMI-Alert will be on the Jeff Rense Show on Friday night May 4th at 10:05pm EDT to discuss sabotage evidence at TMI. Can be heard via Real Player and Windows Media as well as numerous AM stations.

www.sightings.com

---

protest pix on website now

Sun, 29 Apr 2001
From: Norman Cohen <ncohen12@home.com>

Hi all, Please check out pictures from our Chernobyl Day Protest, new to the UNPLUG website
Robvfp@aol.com wrote:

UNPLUG SALEM
http://www.unplugsalem.org/

---

Vieques Turns Into a Symbol of Discontent

New York Times
April 29, 2001
By ANDREW JACOBS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/29/national/29PUER.html

VIEQUES, P.R., April 28 - The politicians, celebrities and cameramen had turned in for the night, but Martina Rodríguez and her friends from the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan were in no mood to sleep. They talked politics, shared cold hamburgers and smoked cigarettes as a nearby contingent of police officers, looking bored and sleepy, stood behind barricades.

It was nearly 2 this morning, and despite the exhaustion from a day of protests, Ms. Rodríguez, 19, said she wanted to stay up all night in case there was a skirmish with the police. "We've never felt anything like this before," said Ms. Rodríguez, who said she had been largely apolitical before Vieques became a rallying cry for millions of Puerto Ricans. "This is the Vietnam of my generation. We want to stop the mayhem. We want to make a difference."

The Navy's decision to resume bombing exercises here has galvanized the commonwealth of Puerto Rico, bringing together people of all ideologies and backgrounds who view the vast military firing range as a symbol of everything that is wrong with Puerto Rico's relationship with the United States.

More than 600 people have been arrested since April 1999, when a bombing accident killed a civilian security guard and sparked the rallies and vigils that have become a central theme for Puerto Rican politicians and the news media.

Gov. Sila M. Calderón, who was elected in November, the first woman to hold that post in Puerto Rico, made Vieques one of her top issues, promising to evict the Navy from Vieques.

After years of feeling frustrated by a lack of popular support, Farrique Pesquera, an independence advocate, said he was heartened by the swelling anger among students, housewives, clergymen and Puerto Rican pop stars like Ricky Martin, Marc Anthony and José Feliciano.

"People here have no self-esteem," Mr. Pesquera said, intentionally raising his voice so the police could hear. "They have been brainwashed to think that they can't survive without America, that all our air comes from the north. Struggles like this one will change that."

But the campaign to turn Vieques into a cause célèbre is not universally admired among the 9,400 residents of this 33,000-acre island off the eastern tip of Puerto Rico. While many residents have painted "No Más Bombas" - no more bombs - on their car windows, there is a quiet contingent that resents the protesters, the politicians and the reporters.

The most persistent protesters, the locals point out, are from the Big Island - as Puerto Rico is called by Vieques residents - intellectuals and ideologues who did not care a wisp about Vieques until recently. "These big city guys are just playing with us, using Vieques for their own political end," said Juan Morales, a 56-year-old handyman, as he sipped a beer at a roadside bodega.

Some, like Tito Padro, a waiter, said the demonstrators missed the point when they shouted about the health problems wrought by 60 years of the Navy's dropping ordnance at Camp García, the firing range on the eastern third of Vieques.

"The protesters and politicians say that the Navy has destroyed Vieques, but no one wants to help us deal with our real problems," he said. The real problems, he and others said, are poor roads, an overburdened sewage system, poor schools and an unemployment rate near 50 percent. "The bombing overshadows all our other problems," he said.

And some who live off the island's fledgling tourist trade, many of them Americans, blame the protesters for scaring off business. Burr Vail, for one, said business at his hotel had been growing 20 percent a year until the battle over Vieques began two years ago. Now it is down 20 percent. "The Navy has been a poor neighbor, to be sure, but until recently we managed to co-exist," Mr. Vail said.

Many restaurant and hotel owners say the effect of the bombing has been exaggerated, but a preliminary study by the Puerto Rican government has shown a high incidence of vibroacoustic disease, a rare disorder associated with loud noises. (The bombing range is nine miles from the nearest house.)

Pete Baumgartner, 65, a South Carolina native who owns a gift shop here, described the sound of falling shells as distant thunder, not the heart-stopping explosions he has read about in the newspaper. The exercises, Mr. Baumgartner said, take place a few weeks each year, and before the protests began most tourists barely noticed they were sharing the island with the Navy.

Before the protests began, he said, many of Camp García's beaches - considered the best on Vieques - were unofficially open to the public. These days even fishermen are forbidden from dropping their lobster traps in the restricted zone that extends a half mile from the coast.

As the protesters held their all- night vigil, Mr. Baumgartner and his friends gathered at Bananas, a restaurant down the road, downing beers and grousing about the media circus, the Puerto Rican government's inattention to the island and the sense that life on Vieques will never be the same.

Rick Smith, 52, a security guard, said he had moved here from St. Thomas seven years ago to escape the commercialization that has transformed so many other Caribbean islands. "I love the fact that there's no Burger King, no Hiltons and no Hyatts," Mr. Smith said.

About 4,000 tourists come here each year, but that number is expected to grow if the residents vote in favor of a referendum next November that would evict the Navy by 2003. Longtime residents like Carmen Pérez, 47, believe the Navy's departure would put an end to the bad publicity and free thousands of acres controlled by the United States government. "We need progress," said Mrs. Pérez, who has been unemployed for eight years. "We need more tourists."

But many tourists who take the 20- minute flight from San Juan say large-scale development would be a mistake. Paul Smith, 37, an audio technician from New York, said he found the Navy's presence here insulting but admitted that he liked the unintended result."We wanted to find a place that wasn't superdeveloped, where there isn't a casino and where music isn't piped into the street," he said. "I'm sure it must be awful to live with all that bombing, but I have to admit that if it weren't for the U.S. military, this place would have been ruined long ago."

---

Conneticut

USA Today
04/29/01
States
http://www.usatoday.com/news/states/all50.htm

Middletown - Wesleyan University students peacefully ended an overnight sit-in protesting the plight of a history professor whose contract will not be renewed. Howard Bernstein has been a visiting professor at the liberal arts college since 1979. The students staged a hunger strike and one-day sit-in at the office of school President Douglas Bennet.


------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)

------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!