------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
UK nuclear sub in Gibraltar to sail in 7-10 days
UK's BNFL says E.ON nuclear deal helps Mox plant
EBRD to help Bulgaria fund closure of old reactors
Canada crash spills radioactive iridium, kills two
China Warns of Arms Race
U.S., India restore cooperation by militaries
Bush Speech Backs India's Vision on Disarmament
Israel Unveils New Missile
Japan Mulls Constitution Changes
N. Korea to extend missile test moratorium, EU says
Kim Extends Missile Test Moratorium
Taking a Look at the Workings of a Missile Shield
Top Democrats Warn of a Battle on Missile Plan
China Warns of Arms Race
Bush Defense Plan Worries Europe
Red alert over Bush's defense plan
Missile Defense Talk Outstrips Technology
Russia Prepared for Defense Talks
Russia: A Looming Proliferation Threat
Russia Alters Tone, Welcomes Talks on Missile Shield
Keep Your Waste
18 Goshutes sue to stop N-plan
Bush Criticizes Chinese Policy
Legislation seeks to make nuclear power more attractive
Rumsfeld to review China links
Bush's wasteful plan on missile defense

MILITARY
Raytheon Construction Unit Sale Probed
Brazil: US Protects Drug Companies
Powell Signals Tougher Line on Iran
Israelis Destroy Homes in Gaza Refugee Camps
U.S. Loses Seat on U.N. Rights Commission
Taliban Reject U.N. Appeal for Truce in Afghanistan
Court Serves War Crimes Indictment on Milosevic
Rumsfeld's Office Reverses China Ban
Army Aims for 'Green Ammunition'

OTHER
Australia Opens World's First Titanium Solar Cell Factory
Fine Particles of Air Pollutants Harmful as Passive Smoking
Chirac Targets Green Voters with 'Ecology Charter'
National Briefing
Pakistan to Receive World Bank Loan
N.J. Judge Verniero Urged to Resign
Spy Plane Efforts Hampered
Lucent Scientists Accused of System Theft for China
North Korea Lashes Out at U.S.
Armenian Nationalist Set Free

ACTIVISTS
Anti - Government Protest in Algiers After Riots
Falun Gong to Protest in HK During Jiang Visit
Catonsville Journal: Keeping Alive the Spirit of Vietnam War Protest
Igniting a movement


-------- NUCLEAR

-------- britain

UK nuclear sub in Gibraltar to sail in 7-10 days

UK: May 3, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10698

LONDON - A British submarine stranded in Gibraltar for almost a year is close to setting sail again, a defence ministry official said yesterday.

HMS Tireless, the focus of angry protests by environmentalists which has also clouded relations between Britain and Spain, limped into port in the tiny rocky peninsular in the Mediterranean Sea last May after breaking down.

"The engineers have finished their work," the spokesman told reporters. "The (nuclear) system has been fired and tested. Within the next seven to 10 days she will be sailing."

Local protesters have launched a hunger strike to urge Britain to remove the submarine from Gibraltar, saying that it endangered health and the local environment.

Britain has 12 nuclear attack submarines, known also as "hunter killers", but only one is fully operational with the remaining 11 out of service at various stages of repair.

"By summer we will have five of these submarines operational," the spokesman said.

----

UK's BNFL says E.ON nuclear deal helps Mox plant

UK: May 3, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10697

LONDON - British Nuclear Fuels said a prelimary deal to supply German utility E.ON with Mox reactor fuel should help it gain government approval to open its 460 million pound Mox manufacturing plant.

The controversial Sellafield Mox Plant (SMP) has lain idle since its completion in 1997 because regulatory approval to start up has been witheld because of fears there were insufficient customers for the mixed oxide fuel, a combination of plutonium and uranium oxides.

In late 1999 revelations that quality control data on a batch of Mox, made in a small demonstration unit and sent to Japan, had been falsified led to import bans by a number of countries, raising questions about the size of exports markets.

Yesterday BNFL spokesman Bill Anderton told Reuters the deal with E.ON was a "major step foward for getting approval to start-up of SMP."

Anderton said the deal with E.ON increases the amount of contracted business to over 36 percent from 22 percent adding that breakeven for SMP is 40 percent.

Under the deal, the details of which have yet to be finalised, BNFL will extract plutonium and uranium from E.ON's spent nuclear fuel to create Mox which E.ON will re-use at its nuclear plants.

The government is set to make a decision on SMP sometime this summer once a review by consultants Arthur D Little into the plant's viability is completed.

Nigel Hawkins, an utility analyst at Williams de Broe said of the E.ON deal:

"It is one step closer for BNFL getting approval, but it is far from certain".

Hawkins said he thought BNFL would also have to show progress on possible deals with Japanese customers, since the country is a key market.

BNFL's Anderston said the company's Japanese customers have declared they will do business with his group although no specific orders have been made.

Critics of Mox fuel, including environmental group Greenpeace, say manufacturing Mox makes little economic sense since it is more expensive to make than conventional uranium reactor fuel.

-------- bulgaria

EBRD to help Bulgaria fund closure of old reactors

BULGARIA: May 3, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10694

SOFIA - The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) will assist Bulgaria attract funding for the closure of two of its oldest nuclear reactors, Bulgaria's energy agency said yesterday.

The State Energy Agency (SEA) said in a statement that its chief Ivan Shilyashki and EBRD Vice President Joachim Jahnke had discussed in London a planned donors conference to set up an International Kozloduy Fund at the end of May.

Bulgaria, as apirant to membership, has agreed with EU conditions to close the two 440-megawatt reactors, number one and two, at the Soviet-designed Kozloduy plant before 2003. They were previously due to close in 2004 and 2005 respectively.

A final decision over the earlier closure of the other two 440-megawatt reactors, three and four, will be taken after negotiations with the European Commission in 2002.

"The International Kozloduy Fund and the EU grant would ensure the safe closure and decommissioning of the reactors," Shilyashki told reporters upon his return from London.

He said Britain was ready to join the decommissioning fund contributing 1.5 million euro ($1.3 million) and several more countries had indicated their intention, he added.

The Kozloduy Fund would be similar to the Ignalina Decommissioning Support Fund to start operating in Lithuania for the closure of the nuclear power plant there, Shilyashki said.

Bulgaria expects to receive a 85 million euro grant from the EU, aimed at helping it close the two oldest reactors and build a nuclear waste storage, the agency statement said.

Bulgarian energy officials say full decommissioning of the two reactors was expected to cost up to $400 million

-------- canada

Canada crash spills radioactive iridium, kills two

CANADA: May 3, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10702

TORONTO - At least two people died yesterday on the Trans-Canada Highway in northwestern Ontario when two tractor trailers collided head on and spilled a radioactive substance on to the road, Ontario Provincial Police said.

The accident took on a unpopulated segment of the highway some 1,700 kilometres (1,050 miles) northwest of Toronto. Police closed the road while investigators determined the extent of pollution from radioactive iridium carried on one truck.

"Both tractor trailer units were engulfed in flames and totally destroyed. The highway is totally blocked with debris and wreckage," OPP Constable Rick Krueger told Reuters.

He said the highway, the the main road linking eastern and western Canada, would remain closed for some time while experts assessed if the area was safe.

Krueger said police were still investigating whether other people had died in the accident. Firefighters had used excavation equipment to ensure water did not run off into the surrounding area.

-------- china

China Warns of Arms Race

MAY 03, 11:00 EST
By MARTIN FACKLER
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/?PACKAGEID=china

BEIJING (AP) - China warned on Thursday that President Bush's proposed missile defense system could spark a new arms race and undermine world peace, and state media slammed him as being a ``weak'' leader.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao urged Washington not to scrap a 1972 arms control treaty placing severe limits on anti-missile systems, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said.

``We believe the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty is the cornerstone for safeguarding global strategic balance and stability,'' Zhu was quoted as saying.

The brief report on Xinhua was the first official Chinese reaction since Bush outlined his plans for an anti-missile project Tuesday in Washington. It repeated previous Chinese government objections about abandoning the 1972 treaty, which the United States signed with the now defunct Soviet Union.

``If the treaty is destroyed, global strategic balance and stability will be broken, and the international arms control process and nonproliferation efforts will be impeded,'' the report said, paraphrasing Zhu.

The official People's Daily said Bush was pushing forward with missile defense over world objections because he fears being seen as a weak leader.

In an analysis of the new administration, the newspaper said Bush was taking a hard line to compensate for the narrow margin of his victory in last year's presidential election.

``Bush is trying to eradicate from his own mind the shadow of being a 'weak president,''' the article said.

The Bush administration is considering a missile defense system that could be rushed into operation as early as 2004, possibly relying on weapons aboard ships or planes as well as on land.

Bush outlined a multifaceted approach, including an airborne laser that would destroy a missile shortly after takeoff, as well as sea-based missiles that might share with a land-based system the task of shooting down missiles in mid-flight.

U.S. allies Britain and Canada have stopped short of endorsing the plan, while Sweden, Germany and others expressed deep concern, fearing the plan could jeopardize global security.

Russia and China have strongly opposed the plan, which they see as aimed at frustrating their nuclear deterrent.

Beijing has also reacted strongly to speculation that the shield could be extended beyond the United States to cover allies Japan and Taiwan. China considers Taiwan a wayward province that should be reunited with the mainland, and opposes any attempt to strengthen the island's defenses.

On Wednesday, Russian Minister Igor Ivanov tempered his country's long-standing opposition to a U.S. national missile defense system by praising Bush's offer to consult with other nations about the proposed missile shield.

-------- india / pakistan

U.S., India restore cooperation by militaries

May 3, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010503-15604670.htm

The United States and India are to begin military cooperation after a break of almost three years, beginning with a visit to New Delhi by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff later this month, Indian and U.S. officials said yesterday.

Indian Ambassador Lalit Mansingh said the decision follows a visit to Washington by Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh in early April, which came at a time of high tension between the United States and India´s regional rival, China.

Such cooperation, never before conducted at a significant level, was cut off completely along with other sanctions after India´s nuclear tests in May 1998.

News agency reports yesterday said the Bush administration also would lift those other sanctions, a move Mr. Mansingh said was needed to clear the way for weapons purchases and cooperation on nuclear energy and space.

"The genie can´t be put back in the bottle," Mr. Mansingh told editors and reporters during a luncheon interview at The Washington Times. "We have to get beyond and look at common strategic interests."

Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is to visit India to work on "a closer relationship" between the two nations´ military forces, said Mr. Mansingh.

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage is to visit India separately this month to consult on the Bush administration plan to build a missile defense system and possibly abandon the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

India yesterday welcomed key aspects of the Bush missile plan, citing in a press release "unilateral reductions by the U.S. of nuclear forces" and moving away from "hair-trigger alerts."

While some critics of the missile plan have said it would likely impel China to expand its nuclear missile stockpiles, the ambassador said that at present India did not fear such an outcome.

At the time of the Indian nuclear tests, Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes said its nuclear weapons were not developed to fight its old enemy Pakistan but to deter China from aggression.

India lost a 1962 border war with China, which continues to hold Indian-claimed land and insists that other large chunks of Indian territory are really Chinese.

United Press International reported yesterday that the Bush administration had assured India it will soon lift the economic sanctions imposed after the 1998 nuclear tests.

Treasury Secretary Paul H. O´Neill conveyed the decision at a recent meeting with Indian Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, who was in Washington for World Bank and International Monetary Fund meetings, UPI said.

Mr. Mansingh said that if sanctions end on military and some scientific cooperation, India hopes to work on nuclear power with U.S. companies in an effort to provide energy to its rapidly growing economy without using polluting coal, the ambassador said.

On the military side, he said, India was interested in developing service-to-service relations, cooperation on military doctrine and training, and the co-production and sale of weapons.

India had tried previously and been denied the right to purchase Harpoon anti-ship missiles and gun-locating radars, he said.

The U.S.-Indian military talks began last month, despite the sanctions, when Jaswant Singh, who serves as both foreign and defense minister, met in Washington with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Mr. Singh also met President Bush in an unexpected White House encounter April 6, at the height of the crisis over the detention on China´s Hainan island of a 24-member American air crew.

Mr. Singh was meeting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice when Mr. Bush dropped in and then invited Mr. Singh to the Oval Office for a 45-minute chat, said the ambassador.

"We were pretty impressed," said Mr. Mansingh of Mr. Bush´s understanding of Indian affairs. "He spoke fluently and did not ask aides to help him out."

He described Mr. Bush as "a person who consciously downplays himself."

U.S.-Indian military ties are warming after 50 years of Cold War mistrust -- during which Pakistan was pro-Western and India was considered pro-Soviet -- in part because of mutual concern over the intentions of China.

The United States is upset over China´s detention of the 24 fliers for 11 days last month and its refusal to return a surveillance plane, which landed after a collision with a Chinese jet. Tension is also high over Taiwan, human rights, Tibet and Chinese detention of U.S. academics.

The Indian ambassador refused to say that growing cooperation with the United States was aimed at deterring China.

A U.S. official, who confirmed the U.S. intention to draw closer to India and start military cooperation, also refused to say it was in any way related to U.S. squabbles with China.

"It serves no purpose to craft a security alliance directed against China," said the U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"If you go around Asia and try to drum up an alliance against China it would defeat our goals. We want China to integrate into the world economy and become a peaceful player."

The Bush administration has begun a review of foreign policy, and its policies toward South Asia are being discussed at present, U.S. officials said.

One of the key demands of the Clinton administration has already been scrapped -- that India sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, a pact the Republican administration opposes.

Some members of the Bush administration's Pentagon staff served during the Cold War when Pakistan was a key ally against the Soviets in Afghanistan and even earlier, when U-2 spy flights over Russia were based in Pakistan.

However, Pakistan´s decline into martial law in 1999, its allowing terrorist groups to attack Indian-held Kashmir, its support for the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan and chronic corruption and economic stagnation have made it less attractive as an ally.

India, meanwhile, has since the end of the Cold War embraced free-market reforms, chosen the United States as its main trading partner and retained its role as the world´s largest democracy.

In addition, 1 million Indian-Americans have become wealthy and leaders of the Silicon Valley high-technology boom, pouring millions of their profits into political campaign contributions to both Mr. Bush´s and Vice President Al Gore´s campaigns last year.

The Indian-Americans have formed a lobby second in influence only to that of Israel, say experts.

--------

Bush Speech Backs India's Vision on Disarmament

May 3, 2001 By John Chalmers http://news.excite.com/news/r/010503/10/politics-arms-india-usa-dc

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The conventional wisdom in India on the impact of a U.S. anti-missile shield was that it would spur Beijing to spend more on nuclear missiles and suck New Delhi into an arms race with its neighbor.

Why then was India so effusive in its applause for this week's call by President Bush's plan to deploy a defense system and make unilateral cuts in nuclear weapons?

"In terms of sheer statecraft and realpolitik India sees it as a bit of an opportunity," said Kanti Bajpai, an associate professor of disarmament at New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University.

"It's basically to build the relationship with the Americans. The general calculation is that the United States will do what it pleases pretty much, and its allies will fall in line in time."

It is true that India, which sees nuclear threats from Pakistan to the west and China to the north, is anxious to maintain the unprecedented cordiality it established with Washington toward the end of Bill Clinton's administration.

But India's unqualified praise for Bush's speech most probably stemmed from its own rejection of the Cold War idea that nuclear warheads were the best form of deterrence.

"President Bush's address...seeks to transform the strategic parameters on which the Cold War security architecture was built," the foreign ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

"India also lauds the desire expressed by the U.S. president to make a 'clean break from the past' and especially from the 'adversarial legacy of the Cold War'."

NUCLEAR NON-CONFORMIST

Bush's plan to build a "Star Wars" missile defense system, effectively ending the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Moscow, has been opposed by China and is viewed with suspicion in Russia and Europe.

India has always been a nuclear non-conformist.

It kept out of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, arguing that it legitimized nuclear arms in the hands of a few nations -- with no commitment on them to disarm within a specified timeframe -- and forced others to renounce the option to build them.

It then became the whipping boy of the Western world when it carried out a series of nuclear tests in 1998 and vowed to build a "credible minimum nuclear deterrent." Few were ready to take its calls for global disarmament seriously.

But C. Raja Mohan, an influential Indian commentator on disarmament, said Bush's vision was in keeping with India's unorthodox nuclear policy.

"We welcome the transition because historically we have been critical of the MAD (mutual assured destruction) school of thought," he told Reuters.

Many fear that a shift from Cold War-era strategic stability based on a nuclear balance of terror to a system mixing offensive and defensive weapons could lead to a dangerous arms race.

NO NUMBERS GAME WITH CHINA

But Mohan rejected this, and said there was no evidence that China would be less interested in building its arsenal if Bush decided not to pursue a national missile defense (NMD) system.

As for India, it was not interested in matching China, missile for missile.

"We don't want to be in the numbers game," he said. "When we talked about minimum deterrent we were quite clear that what we needed was a missile capability that would give us the capacity to reach China, and not equivalent in the number of warheads."

An Indian foreign ministry spokesman said on Thursday that Bush's plan to deploy missile defenses was an inevitable part of transition from MAD to a cooperative defense mechanism.

Interestingly, though, his ministry's statement the previous day did not refer specifically to the anti-missile shield.

Bajpai said a direct endorsement of the system would risk alienating China and perhaps its old Cold War ally, Russia.

"India is still very nervous about NMD but is reluctant to say much about it," said a Western diplomat in New Delhi.

He said India is anxious to engage the United States on nuclear issues to be party to a solution to the problem of disarmament and not -- as it has been viewed for so long -- "part of the awkward squad."

India also welcomed the move away from the maintenance of missiles on hair-trigger alert, an issue it brought up as a resolution in the United Nations three years ago.

"That was seen as a sop after our tests," said Bajpai. "But we have now pulled that rabbit out of the hat to make it look like the Americans are actually conforming to our agenda."

-------- israel

Israel Unveils New Missile

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Israel-Weapons.html?searchpv=aponline

JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel unveiled its newest air-to-air missile Thursday, planning to showcase it at an air show and offer it for sale around the world.

The Derby, a step up from the popular Israeli-made Python-4, is aimed at the same market courted by the U.S. manufacturers of the AIM-20 missile.

Israel sells the Python-4, a heat-seeking missile, to countries around the world, including China, where it was carried on the Chinese fighter jet that collided with a U.S. Navy surveillance aircraft last month.

The Derby will be a centerpiece of the Israeli exhibition at the annual Paris air show next month, where negotiations often involve multimillion-dollar arms export deals. U.S. manufacturers will also be displaying their wares.

In the past, weapons sales competition has strained relations between the two countries, which are close strategic allies.

According to the Israeli Defense Ministry, the Derby can be launched from U.S.-made F-16s or other relatively small fighter jets in all weather. Its ability to hit targets at short and medium ranges beyond the pilot's vision is an advancement over Israel's Python-4, one of the most advanced short-range air- to-air missiles, the defense ministry said.

In a statement, the Israeli defense ministry said the Derby can be fired from the same tube as the Python-4, reducing conversion costs.

The Derby and the AIM120 missiles track aircraft with radar rather than heat.

The director of project to develop the Derby, Uzi Ganani, said the new missile is lighter than the American AIM120 and marks a ``major advancement'' because it has advanced programmable electronic counter countermeasures, which overcome aircraft defenses.

``This area is totally new for the Israeli air weapon industry. We never before had radar air missiles,'' said Yiftah Shapir, coeditor of the Middle East Military Balance, an annual report published by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Shapir said competition with the U.S. defense industry could strain relations with the United States.

``It's a very fierce competition,'' he said. ``The American industry will do everything to twist the arm of Israel and its prospective buyers. The political implications could be overwhelming.''

The two countries are locked in such a contest over a $250 million contract to sell its anti-tank missiles to the Netherlands, a contest that could determine who wins deals with the other NATO countries.

Finland has already decided on Israel's anti-tank missile, the Spike, increasing the chance that other European countries will follow -- a market that Israel's Arms Development Authority estimates to be worth more than $2 billion over the next five years.

-------- japan

Japan Mulls Constitution Changes

MAY 03, 13:32 EST
By CHIKAKO MOGI
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7BOPC400

TOKYO (AP) - With memories of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still vivid for many Japanese, tinkering with the pacifist constitution has long been taboo.

New Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is proposing to do just that, and some people here are alarmed.

Usually a time for people to bask in Japan's postwar prosperity, this year's Constitution Day instead was an occasion for heated debate.

``The reason why we've been able to live in peace was because of the constitution. We shouldn't change it,'' said housewife Haruyo Obata, who attended a rally on Thursday to mark the constitution's 54th anniversary.

The 1947 document, drafted by the United States after World War II, prohibits Japan from having an army and commits it to renouncing war as a means of settling international disputes. Japan calls its military, one of the world's largest, the Self-Defense Forces.

The constitution has been a source of comfort to many Japanese who see peace as the key to prosperity. For Japan's neighbors in Asia, it's a safeguard against resurgent militarism.

Koizumi, who took office last week, says he wants to ease into constitutional revision, first making a less controversial change to allow the prime minister to be chosen by direct popular vote rather than by Parliament.

But he has made no secret of his desire to revise the constitution's war-renouncing Article 9, saying recently that Japan should have a bigger military role in Asia and that the Self-Defense Forces should be formally renamed as an army.

Despite the immense popular support Koizumi enjoys for his economic reform pledges, there appears to be no strong public backing for constitutional revision.

The mass-circulation Asahi newspaper published a poll on Wednesday in which 74 percent of the 2,069 people surveyed said they saw no reason to revise the constitution's pacifist provision.

About 61 percent said the military's existence was constitutional, and 66 percent said the Self-Defense Forces should keep its current strength. Just 12 percent favored a stronger military. The poll gave no margin of error.

Calls for revising the constitution worry Asian neighbors who still remember Japan's brutal aggression and colonial rule in the early part of the 20th century and who feel that Japan is less sensitive than they would like to their concerns.

But Japan has come under pressure from the United States to participate more fully in the countries' security alliance - participation that many argue is now blocked.

Reflecting the deep divisions, separate rallies were held in central Tokyo on Thursday, one by revisionists, the other by opponents such as Obata.

Takako Doi, head of the opposition Social Democrats, told a crowd of 5,000 anti-revisionists that changes could be used to revive the militarism that led Japan into World War II.

``We should not be fooled,'' Doi said. ``Once revision is made, there is no guarantee that reckless actions would not follow.''

At a more subdued meeting for revisionists, participants said the constitution needs to change to keep up with the times.

``The military's role in the global arena is changing,'' said opposition Democratic Party member Satoshi Shima. He cited the example of Germany's stepped-up participation in European regional military affairs.

Some say a real debate is long overdue.

``At long last, politicians in this country have begun to argue the pros and cons of a proposal to revise the constitution - not as an issue of an extraordinary nature, but as a task to be tackled in accordance with their professional obligations,'' the Yomiuri newspaper said in an editorial on Thursday.

-------- korea

N. Korea to extend missile test moratorium, EU says

05/03/2001
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001-05-02-nkorea-eu.htm

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) - A European delegation said North Korea's leader told them Thursday that his moratorium on missile tests would last until at least 2003, and that he wants a second summit with South Korea's leader.

But Kim Jong Il said any summit with his South Korean counterpart, Kim Dae-jung, would not happen while the United States reviews its policies on the North, the European Union officials said.

During five hours of talks with the first Western European leader to visit North Korea, the communist nation also agreed to send officials to Europe this summer to discuss opening talks about its widely criticized human rights record.

The agreements came as the North's ties with South Korea and the United States seem to have soured.

"Kim Jong Il said that the moratorium on testing would last until 2003," Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson said. After that, the North Koreans "would wait and see." The Europeans, led by Persson, said they didn't know why Kim chose 2003.

Earlier this year, the North threatened to end a two-year moratorium on long-range missile tests. Pyongyang halted the tests in September 1999, a little more than year after testing a rocket that flew over Japan into the Pacific Ocean. The North agreed to the moratorium as long as its negotiations continued with the United States.

Kim - once a mysterious figure painted as a recluse, a drunk, a womanizer and a kidnapper - appeared relaxed when meeting the EU officials, smiling and even joking.

"He was very articulate, spoke without notes," said Chris Patten, another member of the EU delegation. The talks were "surprisingly open and free-flowing."

Later in the day, the EU delegation flew to Seoul to meet South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to reconcile with North Korea. Kim was scheduled to host a dinner for Persson and his entourage.

Persson said that he would deliver a message to Kim Dae-jung from the North Korean Kim, but he wouldn't reveal the contents until the South Korean had seen it.

"My firm impression is that the North wants a new summit," said Persson, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency. "But they are careful about the timing today and that is because of the policy review in the U.S."

Ties with Washington, which helps defend the South with 37,000 American soldiers, have soured since President Bush took office in January. His administration has voiced skepticism about the North and said Bush would suspend talks with Pyongyang during a policy review.

North Korea responded by cranking up anti-U.S. rhetoric and canceling a number of high-profile contacts with Seoul.

On Thursday, North Korea berated the United States for putting the communist state on its annual list of countries sponsoring terrorism, calling Washington the "kingpin of international terrorism."

If the human rights talks in Europe take place, it would be the first time the North has ever discussed this subject with another country. The U.S. State Department recently said there is a total absence of basic freedoms in North Korea, citing reports of extrajudicial killings, arbitrary detentions and tight government press controls.

Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong and now EU's commissioner for external relations, cautioned against expecting quick results from human rights talks.

"We don't think it's going to be an easy process, but we think it's important to start talking, and they've agreed to do that," he said.

After a morning session of talks, the two sides broke for an EU-hosted lunch and toasted one another with glasses of French red wine in a sumptuous dining hall in the 100 Flowers Guest House. It was tightly guarded by soldiers armed with machine guns.

"We believe that it was good judgment, a good decision for the European Union to have normalized relations with our country and to improve relations," the North's No. 2 official, Kim Yong Nam, said during his toast, as Kim Jong Il perused the menu.

During the talks, the Swedish prime minister said the two sides discussed reforming North Korea's moribund economy. The EU delegation agreed to receive a visit by senior North Korean officials to study European economies.

A string of natural disasters and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union brought a near breakdown of the North's outmoded state-run economy. Years of famine are believed to have killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The EU delegation offered the North fertilizer and agricultural equipment. It asked for a lifting of restrictions on aid groups assisting North Korea through its chronic food shortages and economic hardships.

Persson, who is also the first EU chief to visit North Korea, arrived in the secretive, totalitarian state on Wednesday to a warm welcome by Kim's government.

Last year, the leaders of the two Koreas held their first summit in Pyongyang, leading to breakthroughs such as reunions by families who have lived on opposite sides of the world's most heavily armed border since the 1950-53 Korean War.

But recently, the North abruptly pulled out of three reunification initiatives with the South, including a round of Cabinet-level talks.

----

Kim Extends Missile Test Moratorium

MAY 03, 19:04 EST
By JOHN LEICESTER
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=WORLD&PACKAGEID=korea&STORYID=APIS7BOQC800

PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Il pledged to keep a moratorium on missile tests until 2003, but said there would be no inter-Korean summit as long as Washington is reviewing its policy on the North, a European delegation said Thursday.

The promise to adhere to a moratorium that began in September 1999 was a significant advance in a process that has stalled amid U.S.-North Korean tension.

While Kim toasted European Union head Goeran Persson and his entourage with red wine, his government was reacting furiously to the release this week of a U.S. State Department report that again listed North Korea as a sponsor of terrorism.

``Washington had better mind its own business,'' KCNA, the North's foreign news outlet, said in commentary that characterized U.S. airstrikes on Iraq as an example of terrorism.

It said the United States would be ``well advised'' to wash ``its own terrorists' hands stained with blood ... before taking issue with others.''

The mood was more cordial during five hours of talks between Kim and Persson, the Swedish prime minister who traveled to one of the world's most secretive countries to try to energize efforts to end the decades-old enmity on the Korean peninsula.

``Kim Jong Il said that the moratorium on testing would last until 2003,'' said Persson, the first Western European leader to visit the totalitarian North. After that, he said, the North ``would wait and see.''

Earlier this year, the North threatened to end a two-year moratorium on long-range missile tests. Pyongyang halted the tests in September 1999, a year after testing a rocket that flew over Japan into the Pacific Ocean. The North agreed to the moratorium as long as negotiations continued with the United States.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer wouldn't comment Thursday on the substance of the talks.

``We have not received official word back from the EU on the status of their discussions. So until we receive official word from the EU, I'm going to hesitate to comment,'' Fleischer told reporters.

If true, the United States would welcome Kim's reported promise to keep Pyongyang's missile launch moratorium until at least 2003, a State Department official said, asking not be identified.

North Korea also agreed to send officials to Europe this summer to discuss opening talks about its widely criticized human rights record, European envoys said. Kim, who enjoys a personality cult and tolerates no dissent from his 22 million people, would not yield easily to European efforts to persuade him to relax his control.

``We don't think it's going to be an easy process, but we think it's important to start talking, and they've agreed to do that,'' said Chris Patten, the EU's commissioner for external relations.

The talks were held as news came that a man Japanese and South Korean authorities believe could be Kim Jong Il's eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, 29, was detained Tuesday at an airport outside Tokyo for attempting to enter Japan illegally. There was no suggestion about what Kim Jong Nam's motives would be.

After their overnight trip, the EU delegation flew Thursday to Seoul to meet South Korean President Kim Dae-jung, who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to reconcile with North Korea.

At a state dinner, Kim Dae-jung thanked European nations for making efforts to improve ties with North Korea and described inter-Korean reconciliation as an ``irreversible inevitability.''

Meeting at a groundbreaking summit in Pyongyang last year, the South Korean president and Kim Jong Il agreed to work toward reconciliation and reunification, half a century after the Korean War.

``My firm impression is that the North wants a new summit,'' said Persson, whose country holds the rotating EU presidency. ``But they are careful about the timing today and that is because of the policy review in the U.S.''

North Korea's ties with Washington, which helps guard the South with 37,000 American soldiers, have deteriorated since President Bush took office. Bush voiced skepticism about the North and said he would suspend talks with Pyongyang pending a policy review.

The State Department official said the United States still supports South Korean efforts to engage the North, and believes a second Koreas summit would be a positive development.

Kim Jong Il - once a mysterious figure painted by South Korean government propagandists as a recluse, drunk, womanizer and kidnapper - smiled and joked during the talks with EU officials.

``He was very articulate, spoke without notes,'' Patten said. ``The talks were surprisingly open and free-flowing.''

After a morning session, the two sides broke for an EU-hosted lunch and toasted one another in a sumptuous dining hall in the 100 Flowers Guest House guarded by soldiers with machine guns.

``We believe that it was good judgment, a good decision for the European Union to have normalized relations with our country and to improve relations,'' the North's No. 2 official, Kim Yong Nam, said during his toast.

Persson said the two sides also discussed reforming North Korea's moribund economy. The EU delegation agreed to a visit by North Korean officials to study European economies.

A string of natural disasters and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union brought a near- breakdown of the North's state-run economy. Years of famine killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The EU delegation offered the North fertilizer and agricultural equipment. It asked for a lifting of restrictions on aid groups assisting North Korea.

-------- missile defense

Taking a Look at the Workings of a Missile Shield

New York Times
May 3, 2001
By STEVEN LEE MYERS and JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/world/03SHIE.html

The missile shield that President Bush has vowed to build is based on weapons systems that either have yet to be tested or have so far failed to prove they can be counted on to shoot down enemy missiles.

But defense officials and analysts said that Mr. Bush's proposals seem more likely than earlier attempts by President Reagan and President Clinton to result in the actual deployment of a system of some kind. They said Mr. Bush had a better chance because of technological advances, because the administration has scaled back what it wants the system to do at the start, and because the Bush team is willing to put something in the field as soon as possible, even if it does not completely work.

Defense Department and administration officials said that, technologically, there should be nothing stopping the Pentagon from accelerating development and deployment of limited defenses, including ground- and sea-based interceptor rockets and an airborne laser.

Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, speaking on the front steps of the Pentagon Wednesday, suggested that the administration planned to pour money into research and development programs that had not received as much money as under President Clinton.

"I'll just very briefly say that there are several - somewhat more than several - things that had not been fully explored," Mr. Rumsfeld said.

While officials declined to discuss those options, Mr. Rumsfeld suggested that the administration would move rapidly with developing and testing systems, adding them to an interwoven network as they proved successful. His remarks came a day after he had said that not every layer of a system had to work completely in order for it to have some effect.

"The goal during this period," Mr. Rumsfeld said, "is to explore a variety of ways that missile defense can conceivably evolve without prejudging exactly which ones will be the most fruitful. And there's no question but that the use of land and sea and air and space are all things that need to be considered, if one is looking at the best way to provide the kind of security from ballistic missiles that is desirable for the United States and for our friends and allies."

For all the administration's optimism, there are still unsolved problems with each of the systems under consideration - from dealing with overwhelming numbers of ballistic missiles to overcoming decoys and other countermeasures and, in the case of attacking enemy missiles as they ascend from their launch pads, responding quickly enough.

Even so, Pentagon officials have said that at least a limited system could be deployed by 2004, beginning with several ground-based interceptors based in Alaska and possibly more aboard Navy cruisers, followed later by air- and space-based sensors and interceptors.

In his speech on Tuesday, Mr. Bush offered only the broadest outlines of the missile shield he envisions, and on Wednesday officials declined to discuss specific programs or timetables.

But it was clear that the administration had in mind an expanded version of the less ambitious technologies under development for "theater" missile defenses, which are meant to protect individual cities or troops in the field. Theater defenses have been designed to rely on several layers acting in concert to increase the odds of shooting down enemy missiles.

"It's as simple as the more times they get to shoot at something, the more chances they get to hit it," said Geoffrey E. Forden, a senior research fellow at the Center for International Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Possible components of an interlocking system include rocket-launched interceptors fired from the ground and from Navy ships and high-powered lasers carried by Air Force planes. Several of those components would also require new, advanced radars on the ground or at sea, and sensors in space. Enemy missiles could be destroyed as they are rising from their launch pads, high in space, or as they are falling back to earth toward their target.

Except for the ground-based interceptors, the Army-led program that was to make up the complete missile defense in the Clinton plan, all of those possibilities would require upgrades of defense systems designed for other purposes.

Compared with the futuristic technologies of the "Star Wars" days, said David E. Mosher, an analyst at the Rand Corporation who specializes in missile defense, those concepts are "closer to being in hand - in principle anyway - but they still haven't been proven in any realistic fashion."

The first chance to shoot down an enemy missile comes in its so-called boost phase, as its thrusters are firing in the atmosphere. The Airborne Laser, an Air Force program involving a powerful chemical laser carried in the nose of a Boeing 747, is being designed to shoot down short- and medium-range missiles like Iraqi Scuds in exactly that phase of its flight.

Col. Ellen Pawlikowski, the program's director at Kirtland Air Force base in Albuquerque, said laser modules were already being assembled and that the program was on track to try and shoot down a Scud in a test by 2003. Program officials have said it could easily be adapted for use against intercontinental ballistic missiles if a plane is continuously in flight near the enemy's launch pad.

The Navy believes it can contribute not only to a boost-phase defense, but also to nearly all the other phases of the defense. An official said that four detailed options involving modifications of existing Navy programs have been analyzed and presented to administration officials.

In one concept, the Navy's SM-2 air defense missile would be outfitted so that it could be fired from Aegis cruisers and chase down I.C.B.M.'s. The other options rely on improvements to a Navy system that is under development to protect troops in a battlefield theater, by intercepting missiles above the atmosphere.

This system, called the Navy Theater Wide Defense, will probably not attempt an intercept test for its original purpose before the end of this year. Even so, the official said, with improved radars and faster interceptors aboard Aegis cruisers roving the seas, "a handful could cover the whole United States."

A Navy official emphasized the system's capability in various modes, saying, "We can do all the phases. We're looking forward to the challenge of doing that." But skeptics said such statements required a large leap of faith.

"All of this is just pure used-car salesmanship at this point," said Joseph Cirincione, director of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "This stuff hasn't been built, let alone driven."

Then there is the original ground-based defense, involving interceptors launched from Alaska or North Dakota, advanced radars and sensors in space. The shield has failed in two of its three intercept attempts and scored an ambiguous success in the third.

The system's next test has been delayed several times and may now take place this spring, said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization at the Pentagon. In addition, development of the booster for the interceptors has been been delayed by more than a year.

Besides all those systems, the Theater High-Altitude Area Defense, has been discussed as a "last-gasp" shield to protect cities against warheads that slipped through other layers.

Virtually all such lines of development would violate the Antiballistic Missile Treaty as it exists now, which is the reason supporters of a missile defense system say the treaty is outdated and should be abandoned.

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Top Democrats Warn of a Battle on Missile Plan

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By ALISON MITCHELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/world/03CONG.html

WASHINGTON, May 2 - Senate Democrats put forward some of their most influential voices on national security policy today and made clear that President Bush's plans for an expansive missile defense system could well become a defining point of contention between the two parties.

Just a day after Mr. Bush outlined a sweeping new security strategy, the Democrats raised sharp questions about his plan, bringing up issues of arms control, diplomacy, military strategy and the budgetary implications of an interwoven antimissile shield based on land, at sea, in the air and in space.

They said they would consider it a grave mistake for President Bush to abandon the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, which its defenders say has been the cornerstone of nuclear deterrence, and warned that unilateral deployment of a robust missile defense system could leave the nation less secure by sparking a new arms race.

Standing alongside the ranking Democrats on the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the minority leader, said Mr. Bush had begun "one of the most important and consequential debates we will see in our lifetime."

Mr. Daschle questioned whether a missile defense was technologically feasible and said, "A missile defense system that undermines our nation politically, economically and strategically - without providing any real security - is no defense at all."

Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, charged that the president's speech amounted to a unilateral decision "wrapped in conciliatory rhetoric."

Raising the possibility that Russia might stop dismantling its nuclear arsenal, he said, "I have great concerns about a unilateral decision, because I believe that it could risk a second cold war - Cold War II, I call it."

Mr. Bush has described only his vision for missile defense and has proposed no specific weapons systems or budget figure, and so "the devil is in the details," said Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee.

If the United States deployed a system that could strike down most missiles from North Korea, but which caused Russia and China to start a new arms race, "would America be more protected or less protected?" he asked.

The Democrats conceded that while the Senate approves treaties, it does not have the power to stop the president from withdrawing the United States from the ABM treaty. But they could try to exert leverage through the annual bills providing money for Pentagon programs.

Mr. Levin said Democrats in the Senate would "try in some way to stop the expenditure of funds for a system that would abrogate the ABM treaty." But in a Senate split 50-50 with Vice President Dick Cheney holding the deciding vote, that could prove difficult.

The statements marked a new aggressiveness by Democrats on missile defense, a favorite issue of conservatives, and one that Democrats sought to blunt under the lead of President Bill Clinton.

One Democratic strategist on Capitol Hill said the party now felt freed from having to follow policies adopted under Mr. Clinton, and he called the brewing dispute over missile defense both a matter of policy and politics.

He said that just as missile defense energized the Republicans' conservative base, Democratic loyalists and primary voters were strongly opposed to an expensive and unproven missile defense system. Several Senate Democrats are eyeing a presidential run in 2004.

Just two years ago, after Mr. Clinton dropped his longstanding veto threat, the Senate, by a vote of 97 to 3, overwhelmingly approved legislation to field a system to defend the country against limited attack from long-range missiles.

All but three Democrats agreed to the measure after working out a compromise that they said ensured that any antimissile system would not interfere with arms control negotiations with Russia and that Congress would still have to authorize missile defense funds annually.

That turnaround was driven both new policy considerations in a post- cold-war world and by domestic politics. It came after a bipartisan commission headed by Donald H. Rumsfeld - now Mr. Bush's defense secretary - warned that within five years North Korea and Iran could have the potential to hit the United States with a ballistic missile. Democrats were also aware that going into the presidential election, Republicans were accusing them of a failed foreign policy and a weak military program.

Mr. Biden acknowledged that when he voted to make it United States policy to field a system against ballistic missile threats from so-called rogue nations in 1999, he did not think there was "any immediacy to it."

Mr. Levin also said that in that vote, Democrats had agreed to field such a system only "when technically feasible" and only after reasserting their commitment to negotiate further arms reductions with Russia.

The Democrats conceded that they did not yet know many of the fundamentals of what Mr. Bush was proposing. In his speech on Tuesday he all but declared the ABM treaty dead and vowed to replace it with a new "framework." But he never said what that framework would be.

Some of the same themes were struck by other Democrats throughout the day. Senator Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said that "it would be folly to abandon the ABM treaty" before the Pentagon was close to developing a missile defense system that could work.

On the Senate floor, Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, said that "missile defense is only a response of last resort, when diplomacy and deterrence have failed." He added, "And given that no missile defense system will be 100 percent effective, we must not set aside the logic of deterrence that has kept us safe for 40 years."

Mr. Kerry called Mr. Bush's proposal to reduce American nuclear stockpiles unilaterally "an important and overdue first step toward reducing the nuclear danger." But he said Mr. Bush would have to persuade his fellow Republicans to go ahead with the cuts.

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China Warns of Arms Race

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-China-Missile-Defense.html

BEIJING (AP) -- China warned on Thursday that President Bush's proposed missile defense system could spark a new arms race and undermine world peace, and state media slammed him as being a ``weak'' leader.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao urged Washington not to scrap a 1972 arms control treaty placing severe limits on anti-missile systems, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said.

``We believe the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty is the cornerstone for safeguarding global strategic balance and stability,'' Zhu was quoted as saying.

The brief report on Xinhua was the first official Chinese reaction since Bush outlined his plans for an anti-missile project Tuesday in Washington. It repeated previous Chinese government objections about abandoning the 1972 treaty, which the United States signed with the now defunct Soviet Union.

``If the treaty is destroyed, global strategic balance and stability will be broken, and the international arms control process and nonproliferation efforts will be impeded,'' the report said, paraphrasing Zhu.

The official People's Daily said Bush was pushing forward with missile defense over world objections because he fears being seen as a weak leader.

In an analysis of the new administration, the newspaper said Bush was taking a hard line to compensate for the narrow margin of his victory in last year's presidential election.

``Bush is trying to eradicate from his own mind the shadow of being a 'weak president,''' the article said.

The Bush administration is considering a missile defense system that could be rushed into operation as early as 2004, possibly relying on weapons aboard ships or planes as well as on land.

Bush outlined a multifaceted approach, including an airborne laser that would destroy a missile shortly after takeoff, as well as sea-based missiles that might share with a land-based system the task of shooting down missiles in mid-flight.

U.S. allies Britain and Canada have stopped short of endorsing the plan, while Sweden, Germany and others expressed deep concern, fearing the plan could jeopardize global security.

Russia and China have strongly opposed the plan, which they see as aimed at frustrating their nuclear deterrent.

Beijing has also reacted strongly to speculation that the shield could be extended beyond the United States to cover allies Japan and Taiwan. China considers Taiwan a wayward province that should be reunited with the mainland, and opposes any attempt to strengthen the island's defenses.

On Wednesday, Russian Minister Igor Ivanov tempered his country's long-standing opposition to a U.S. national missile defense system by praising Bush's offer to consult with other nations about the proposed missile shield.

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Bush Defense Plan Worries Europe

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Europe-Missile-Defense.html?searchpv=aponline

BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- President Bush's decision to push ahead with a missile defense plan has drawn little criticism from America's skeptical European allies, who fear losing leverage with a superpower they suspect is ready to go it alone.

Despite misgivings over the feasibility of the missile defense plan and the possibility of a new arms race, no major NATO power publicly condemned the plan following Bush's speech Tuesday.

Neutral Sweden offered the strongest criticism.

``There is a risk that other countries will use this decision as an excuse for improving their own nuclear weapon programs and that the world will be led into a new, spiraling arms race,'' Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh said.

Among NATO governments, there was neither a ringing endorsement nor public condemnation.

Instead, the British, French, Germans, Italians and others took heart in Bush's pledge to consult with Washington's allies -- and with the Russians and the Chinese -- as his administration develops a detailed timetable.

Some urged Bush to think carefully about the implications for arms control agreements, notably the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty.

``We hope these consultations will touch on all questions raised by the project,'' the French Foreign Ministry said Wednesday. ``Our assessment, when the time comes, will be the result of the consultations to come and the definitive shape of the project.''

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he preferred to wait ``for a firm proposal before giving a firm decision.''

German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer repeated his government's concerns about a new arms race. But he avoided further criticism pending a review of the proposals and ``intense consultations'' within the NATO alliance.

Several leading European newspapers showed less restraint.

``In presenting his anti-nuclear shield project as an irrevocable decision, he has buried the concept of nuclear deterrence,'' France's newspaper Le Figaro said.

The Guardian newspaper in London warned that plan ``will have dangerously negative repercussions worldwide'' and could encourage Russia, China and India to expand their nuclear arsenals.

Another British newspaper, The Independent, said Bush ``seemed ready to ignore the concerns of the rest of the world'' and that his plan ``makes little sense in objective terms'' because of its ``severely flawed'' technology.

Many European governments share those concerns.

``The (Danish) government stresses that a missile defense must not start a new arms race,'' Denmark's foreign minister, Mogens Lykketoft, said Thursday. Denmark's cooperation is critical to the defense plan because it would use early warning radar at the U.S. air base in Thule, Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory.

Sven-Olof Pettersson of the Swedish Foreign Ministry said his country had strong misgivings about Bush's view that the ABM treaty, which would bar development of the shield, is a Cold War relic.

``I think it is very important that the United States really contacts the allies,'' Austrian Foreign Minister Benita Ferrero-Waldner said Thursday at a joint news conference in Oslo with Norwegian Foreign Minister Thorbjoern Jagland.

``There should not be any unilateral actions with regard to treaties like the ABM treaty,'' she added. Jagland called the anti-ballistic missile treaty a cornerstone of disarmament that should only be changed through negotiation.

However, confronting Washington on an issue that has broad bipartisan support in the United States could drive a wedge between the United States and its allies at a time when the Europeans are worried about an ``America First'' attitude in Washington.

The Europeans managed to convince the administration to rethink proposals stated during the election campaign to withdraw U.S. troops from the Balkans.

But Bush's decision to scrap the 1997 Kyoto agreement on global warming shocked the Europeans, who strongly support the pact. A parade of European officials who went to Washington to convince the administration to reverse its stand came back empty-handed.

With no sign that the Americans are willing to back down on missile defense, confronting them publicly could cost the Europeans what leverage remains.

``In Europe, there is a suspicion that the Bush administration has confused the verbs 'to consult' and 'to inform,''' the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung said Wednesday.

``Before the first U.S. emissary sets off to inform Europe and Asia of missile defense, it is clear: The Americans want the shield, they will build it and not really let anyone interfere.''

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Red alert over Bush's defense plan

Thursday, May 3, 2001
By Margot Higgins
http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/2001/05/05032001/nuclear_43348.asp

The Bush administration's recent decision to move forward with a National Missile Defense System is drawing fire from conservation groups.

On Tuesday President Bush called for the establishment of a network of sea-based, land-based and air-based defenses to protect the United States from the risk of nuclear war with "rogue nations" such as Korea and Iraq. As part of the plan, Bush supports the development of an outer space system that would be able to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles.

Following Bush's announcement, a panel of scientists and environmentalists warned that this "Star Wars" defense strategy will undermine world stability and lead to a new arms race in outer space.

One serious consequence of the plan would be the collapse of existing arms control and nuclear disarmament treaties such as the U.S.-Russian 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

According to Bush, the ABM Treaty is no longer viable in the post-Cold War era. But critics of the plan say it will prompt countries to build more warheads capable of breaching hi-tech defenses. The move could also send a dangerous message to countries interested in developing nuclear weapons.

According to John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace, which got its start fighting nuclear proliferation, the defense plan could lead to a "human environmental and spiritual catastrophe."

"By the mid-1990s, we had reason to believe the world was headed irrevocably toward nuclear disarmament," Passacantando said. "The Cold War was over, all nuclear weapons testing had been halted and the former nuclear rivals were engaging each other in increasingly cooperative fashion in trade, environmental policy and even in non-proliferation strategies designed to curb the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps we let our guard down and expected too much of our government."

Greenpeace notes that the United States already faces a backlog of billions of dollars for the environmental devastation caused by nuclear weapons construction during the Cold War. While Bush claims that there will be cuts in the number of nuclear weapons that the United States produces, he has proposed a 4.5 percent increase in fiscal year 2002 for the design, development and production of nuclear weapons. At the same time, Bush has cut funding for nuclear waste cleanup, conservation groups note.

About 150 sites around the country are contaminated, a result of weapons production for the nuclear arms race. The majority of those sites will never be cleaned up to allow public use of the land, according to a report conducted last August by the National Research Council.

Tom Welch, a spokesperson for the Department of Energy, said the remaining nuclear cleanup in the United States could take up to 70 years at a cost of at least $300 billion.

"The environmental implications of Bush's defense plan are clear if we start to envision the increased production of uranium, plutonium and other environmentally hazardous materials, " said Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, (D-Ohio). "This can only add to the devastation, which right now we do not have the money to clean up."

An example of that devastation is found at the Atlas uranium mill near Moab, Utah. Radioactive tailings left from the mill are poisoning endangered fish that live in the Colorado River, according to a recent study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

Ted Postal, a professor of science, technology, and national security policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Bush's defense plan requires technologies that have not yet been developed. "Much our basic science says the current technologies won't work," Postal said, noting that testing the new technologies could be especially risky for the environment.

--------

Missile Defense Talk Outstrips Technology

By Steven Mufson and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 3, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34615-2001May2?language=printer

Even with President Bush's political support, significant leaps in technology are needed to make his vision of missile defense more than what its critics call "a shield of dreams."

In a speech Tuesday committing the United States to missile defenses and to deep cuts in nuclear weapons, Bush conceded that there are "technological difficulties" in erecting a shield against ballistic missiles, and he said "we know that some approaches will not work."

But Bush also expressed confidence that one or more of what he called "complementary and innovative approaches" to missile defense eventually would succeed. Moreover, he said these included "near-term options . . . against limited threats." Administration officials have said they hope to deploy some initial defenses before the end of Bush's term in 2004.

Experts on both sides of the missile defense debate agree that such rapid progress is far from certain. John Pike, a specialist in space weapons and missile defense, said Bush appeared to be talking about "systems that don't work to deal with threats that don't exist."

Others expressed support for Bush's initiative, even though its architecture, cost and schedule are unclear. "He's got to start making general arguments about this stuff. He can't just pop a system out and expect everyone to be wowed," said Henry D. Sokolski, executive director of the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center.

At this stage, the options under consideration remain very broad, including so-called boost phase, mid-course, terminal, laser and theater defenses. "There's no question but that the use of land and sea and air and space are all things that need to be considered," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday.

The system the Clinton administration was developing, and which may be closest to construction, is a mid-course defense. It would attempt to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles somewhere in the middle of their trajectories, as they hurtle through space at thousands of miles per hour.

It would use ground-based interceptor rockets and command-and-control radars. These would be linked to space-based early warning and targeting satellites that would help guide the rockets toward incoming warheads. In the final minutes, each rocket would release an independent "kill vehicle" that would seek out and smash into a warhead, destroying it high above the Earth.

Under the Clinton plan, a key radar facility was to be built at Shemya Island, off the Alaska coast, to provide coverage of North Korea. Recently, there has been talk of a facility in Maine to cover Iran and Iraq. If the Bush administration wants to demonstrate its commitment to missile defense, it could break ground on one of those sites within a year or two.

Initial, tightly controlled tests of the interceptor rockets and kill vehicles were mostly successful, but the most recent tests last year were failures. Moreover, they did not pit the kill vehicles against targets using sophisticated evasion and decoy techniques. Another test is expected in June with a new booster rocket. But the technology for the sophisticated space-based infrared radars (SBIRS) that would help guide the interceptors has developed more slowly than expected. Moreover, SBIRS will rely on 11 satellites in various orbits, and those satellites are not expected to be fully deployed until 2011.

A boost-phase missile defense system, in contrast, would try to intercept the missiles shortly after launch, while they are struggling against gravity and moving relatively slowly.

One plan to defend against possible North Korean missiles would put interceptor rockets on U.S. military ships perhaps 100 miles off Japan's coast. Another option would be to base interceptors on land, but that would require U.S.-Russian cooperation at a site south of the port of Vladivostok.

Advocates of such a system say it could be deployed relatively quickly. Critics say that even a rudimentary version would require new heat-sensing capabilities, while a more sophisticated boost-phase system -- based on a future version of the Navy's Aegis destroyer with a new radar and intercept system -- would not be ready before 2008. The United States also would need to develop faster rockets to catch up with rising missiles 100 miles or more away.

A third possible defensive system would be based on laser technology that has shown promise in some joint U.S.-Israeli tests. But lasers dissipate and are bent by the atmosphere, making them difficult to use except over short ranges.

Space-based laser systems are in their earliest research phases. Closer to fruition is an airborne laser program that involves mounting a laser cannon on a modified Boeing 747. But it is designed by Lockheed-Martin Space Systems Co. for use against enemy aircraft and cruise missiles, not against ICBMs. Flight tests are not expected until next year. When completed, an airborne laser might be used as a boost-phase defense against short-range or "theater" ballistic missiles with a beam that could travel only hundreds of miles.

None of these systems would be well equipped to deal with surprise attacks from vessels close to U.S. shores or forces. The 1998 commission headed by Rumsfeld that surveyed missile threats to the United States and its troops abroad cited the prospect of a nuclear weapon launched from a ship off the coast.

A fourth type of missile defense is the updated version of the Patriot missiles used with limited success during the Persian Gulf War to protect Israel from Iraqi Scud missiles.

Later this decade, the Army's more effective THAAD (theater anti-air defense) and the Navy's wide-area system would be ready, said Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, head of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization. But at best, those systems will be able to protect an area with only a 100-square-mile radius, far short of the global shield Bush seeks. They could be the "terminal" defense systems Bush mentioned, protecting large cities, U.S. troops abroad, or small countries such as Israel and Taiwan.

-------- russia

Russia Prepared for Defense Talks

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Bush-Defense-World-Reax.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Despite Russia's long opposition to a U.S. national missile defense system, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov responded on Wednesday to President Bush's commitment to the system by accentuating the positive.

At a news conference the day after Bush declared his intentions to go ahead with the defense shield, Ivanov praised U.S. plans to consult with other nations on the program.

``It is extremely important that the U.S. administration does not intend to take unilateral steps, but intends to consult with its allies and friends, including Russia,'' Ivanov said.

``Russia is ready for such consultations,'' Ivanov said. ``President (Vladimir) Putin has outlined a complex program on strategic nuclear arms and anti-missile defense.''

Other Russian politicians complained the U.S. plans could destroy the foundations of global security and suggested Russia might respond by pulling out of the START II nuclear arms reduction treaty.

But Ivanov's remarks suggested Russia was becoming resigned to U.S. intentions despite months of vehement criticism. Other countries have echoed Russia's concerns, but opponents of the plan have not been able to mount an influential front.

China's state-run news agency quoted unidentified analysts as saying Bush's decision will ``spark a new arms race and create a proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.''

Russia's prime argument against the U.S. system is that it would violate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which allows Russia and the United States only minimal missile defenses under the theory that a country would not launch a nuclear strike if it were unable to defend against a retaliatory attack.

To restore the deterrent balance, Russia would have to mount a nuclear force large enough to overwhelm the U.S. system, which would be a crushing economic burden on the struggling country.

The United States says the missile defense system is needed to counter the potential threat posed by smaller nations believed to be developing nuclear weapons.

Putin last year proposed a small European missile defense system, but the idea was seen as an attempt to drive a wedge between European NATO members and the United States. The proposal has never been fleshed out.

Later Wednesday, the news agency ITAR-Tass reported that an anti-ballistic missile using ``new technology'' had been launched from the Saryshagan base in Kakzakstan, Russia's ABM testing facility. Missile forces officials could not be reached for confirmation.

Russia in recent years has eagerly pursued measures to reduce both sides' nuclear forces and Putin succeeded in pushing through ratification of the START II treaty last year.

But Dmitry Rogozin, head of the international affairs committee in the Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament, said Wednesday that the Duma would consider pulling out of START II if the United States abandons the ABM treaty.

Reaction from U.S. allies varied. The most favorable response came from Australia, which said it would allow the United States to use joint military bases on its soil for the shield. Asian nations were restrained.

NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson said the allies welcomed Bush's intention of consulting them on his plans. But Robertson said ``among some of the European countries there are concerns and worries about what missile defense might mean.''

Britain and Canada issued statements that stopped short of endorsing the plan, while Sweden, Germany and others expressed deep concern, fearing the plan could jeopardize global security. But Germany praised Bush for showing readiness to talk to other countries about the plans.

``When you compare this to what we heard in the (U.S.) election campaign, this is essentially a cooperative sign,'' German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said.

The German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung suggested that may be naive.

``In Europe, there is a suspicion that the Bush administration has confused the verbs 'to consult' and 'to inform','' the newspaper said.

A French Foreign Ministry statement noted ``we hope these consultations will touch upon all the questions raised by the project.''

Moving to calm concern among allies, Bush called South Korean President Kim Dae-jung and Secretary of State Colin Powell talked to Japanese Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka.

--------

Russia: A Looming Proliferation Threat

Analysis From Washington
By Paul Goble
3 May 2001 (RFE/RL)
http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/2001/05/03052001112618.asp

Washington, Falling salaries among Russian scientists working on nuclear weapons and missiles represent a looming proliferation threat, according to a study by an American think tank.

That is because, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said in a report released this week, many of these underpaid specialists may now consider selling nuclear materials or even offering their own services abroad.

Prepared by Russian social scientist Valentin Tikhonov, who was able to gain access to areas still closed to Western scholars, the Carnegie study reports on surveys conducted in eight Russian cities, five of which specialize in building nuclear weapons and another three which are involved in the production of missiles and missile-related technologies.

According to the Carnegie report, 62 percent of all workers in the enterprises in these cities make less than $50 a month, with more than half of the scientists involved reporting being forced to take a second job to make ends meet. Almost nine out of ten said they had suffered a decline in their standard of living, and a majority felt their salaries were only a third or half of what they should be.

Because of the precipitous decline in their incomes, the report suggests, at least some of the scientists may be tempted to sell off some of the nuclear materials to anyone with the money to buy. And at least some of the nuclear and missile scientists said they would like to work outside of Russia, raising the specter that they might sell their services to rogue states interested in developing a nuclear missile capability.

If the scientists either sell nuclear materials or offer their services to rogue states, the report says, this would exacerbate "the problem of nuclear weapons proliferation" around the world. If they do both, that could represent one of the most serious proliferation threats of all time. And to prevent that, the Carnegie report urges that both Moscow and the West work together to increase the salaries and job satisfaction of the scientists involved.

At the very least, it says, "the Russian government and associated experts have a responsibility to understand the particular social and economic problems that beset these specialists at a time when Russian reforms are evolving" because "the better these trends are understood, the more effective targeted programs to address current circumstances will be."

What makes the Carnegie report so disturbing is that it comes after almost a decade of efforts both by Moscow and by Western governments and especially that of the United States to try to prevent any leakage of nuclear weapons, equipment, or personnel out of the countries that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Beginning almost immediately after 1991, the U.S. successfully pushed for the return of all Soviet nuclear weapons to the Russian Federation. It promoted the dismantling of nuclear weapons and the denaturing of nuclear materials. And it provided assistance through the Nunn-Lugar program to sustain Russian nuclear scientists and thus dissuade them from selling their services to rogue states.

Since 1991, the so-called Nunn-Lugar program -- named for U.S. Senator Richard Lugar and former U.S. Senator Sam Nunn -- has helped destroy some 5,000 nuclear warheads as well as weapon materials and delivery systems.

Throughout this decade, the Russian government has continued to insist that it has complete and effective control over nuclear weapons, nuclear materials, and nuclear and missile scientists. So far, there is no evidence that Moscow has lost control over the weapons, but there has been leakage of at least small amounts of nuclear materials and some nuclear and missile scientists seeking higher-paid work.

The Carnegie report suggests that there may be more leakage of both in the near term unless something more is done to address the income needs of the Russian scientists. And its conclusions are likely to prompt at least some Western governments to consider extending more assistance to prevent the flight of nuclear fuel and nuclear scientists to countries like Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

But precisely because the Carnegie study calls into question much of the optimism at the core of most earlier investigations into this matter, its findings are likely to spark a new debate in both Moscow and the West about just what is the best way to prevent proliferation at a time when the major nuclear powers are cutting back their programs while some other countries are seeking to acquire such weapons.

And in that debate, some are certain to call for a new round of disarmament talks, while others are likely to insist that the Russian government must take steps to control the situation with its nuclear scientists if it wants to be taken seriously. But as the Carnegie study reminds, while this debate is taking place, ever more Russian nuclear and missile scientists will be reconsidering just what their options are in the post-Cold War environment.

----

Russia Alters Tone, Welcomes Talks on Missile Shield

By Peter Baker and William Drozdiak
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, May 3, 2001
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A34353-2001May2?language=printer

MOSCOW, May 2 -- Russia welcomed President Bush's call for consultations on a planned U.S. missile defense system and signaled today that it might be ready to make a deal in exchange for deeper cuts in strategic arms. Its response was notably conciliatory after months of confrontation with Washington over missile defense.

America's NATO allies, meanwhile, gave a generally cool reception to Bush's reaffirmation Tuesday that the United States intended to proceed with a missile defense shield. But, like Russia, they welcomed his determination to cut nuclear arsenals and consult on how to avoid a new global arms race.

While reasserting their support for the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which Bush wants to rewrite, Russian leaders found much to like in the president's speech. "Russia is ready for . . . consultations," said Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov. "We have something to say."

Bush's pledge not to act unilaterally was "of principal importance," Ivanov said. "It opens up a possibility for jointly -- I repeat, jointly -- seeking solutions to those problems that are on the agenda today, in the interests of preserving [and] strengthening strategic stability without damaging anyone's interests."

Russia has indicated that it wants to be treated with respect as the only other country that can match U.S. nuclear power. Until now, it had felt offended by Bush's distant approach.

President Vladimir Putin and his government in recent weeks had sought ways to move past strident rhetoric and engage the West in dialogue. Putin recently gave NATO a proposal for a more limited missile-defense program that would protect Europe and sent aides to Washington to seek a summit with Bush.

"It's clear that Putin wants to be invited, wants to be admitted, wants to join," said Sergei Rogov, head of the Institute for USA and Canadian Studies. "So if the door is open, he will go."

Putin's eagerness to talk stems in part from domestic pressures to scale back Russia's antiquated and expensive nuclear arsenal. In recent weeks, he has fired both Defense Minister Igor Sergeyev and strategic rocket forces commander Vladimir Yakovlev, the most prominent supporters of devoting resources to nuclear weapons rather than modernizing conventional forces.

The European allies have lately refrained from criticizing the missile defense plan, but many remain troubled by Bush's proposal to alter or abrogate the 1972 treaty, which has served as the cornerstone of arms control. They also fear that building defensive systems will encourage countries to develop a new generation of offensive weapons that could prove dangerous to strategic stability.

Another important factor for European leaders is whether Bush's missile defense strategy will sustain equal zones of security within an alliance that was founded on the basis of "one for all, all for one" in dealing with adversaries.

During his first 100 days, many Europeans castigated Bush for what they see as a tendency to pursue U.S. interests without serious concern for the views of allies on such matters as global warming, Balkan peacekeeping and missile defense.

France has harshly criticized Bush's anti-missile plan, which President Jacques Chirac has described as "an invitation to proliferation" of nuclear weapons. France may also be worried about the impact on its small nuclear force, which could be rendered impotent if anti-missile technology became the basis for a post-Cold War strategy.

Britain and Canada, whose radar stations would be vital to any U.S. missile shield, stopped short of endorsing Bush's plan. British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook focused on the positive elements in Bush's speech, saying, "I welcome the president's commitment to reductions in U.S. nuclear weapons," but declining to express an opinion on the wisdom of building missile defenses.

Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien adopted a wait-and-see attitude, saying that "it will take not only weeks, but months or even years before we conclude this."

Other allies were more forthright. Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, whose country holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, said the U.S. missile defense program would encourage the growth of more sophisticated nuclear weapons. "That is why we urge President Bush to abstain from the national missile defense," she said, "just as we urge China, India and Pakistan to discontinue their nuclear arsenals."

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

-------- utah

Keep Your Waste

Thursday, May 3, 2001
http://www.sltrib.com/05032001/public_f/94175.htm

Envirocare's engineering consultant Ronald Gaynor writes soothingly (Forum, April 24) thatif Utah's citizens would just listen to the "facts," we would have nothing to fear and Envirocare could get on with the business of importing hotter radioactive waste into the state.

But what Mr. Gaynor, Private Fuel Storage, and other supporters of the nuclear waste industry have to remember is that Utah's citizens have been listening to such reassurances of safety for the past five decades -- the safety of atomic testing, of Dugway's nerve gas, of uranium mining, and so on -- and have become justifiably suspicious of such "facts." (If you have any doubts about this sad legacy of deceit, I'd recommend Chip Ward's Canaries on the Rim or Curtis and Diane Oberhansleys' new book, Downwinders: An Atomic Tale.)

And there is one other fact that those who would make Utah the nation's nuclear waste dump conveniently keep overlooking: The overwhelming majority of Utahns do not want hotter nuclear waste brought into this state, period. Now, that's a fact!

KELLER HIGBEE Salt Lake City

--------

18 Goshutes sue to stop N-plan

Thursday, May 03, 2001
By Donna Kemp Spangler
Deseret News staff writer
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0%2C1249%2C270016623%2C00.html

Eighteen members of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute Indians have sued the federal government for allowing a high-level nuclear storage facility on the reservation to move forward.

Sammy Blackbear, Margene Bullcreek and other tribal members opposed to a plan for a nuclear waste repository are alleging a variety of misdeeds.

But primarily, they say the U.S. Department of Interior and U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) have discriminated against them by ignoring their complaints about the legality of a lease agreement that Tribal Chairman Leon Bear signed in 1997 with Private Fuel Storage (PFS), a consortium of out-of-state utility companies looking for a repository for highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel rods.

Melodie Rydalch, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney's Office, couldn't comment on the lawsuit because it hasn't been served yet.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court names as defendants Interior Secretary Gale Norton and two top officials of the BIA, Wayne Nordwall, the Phoenix-area director and David Allison, superintendent of Uintah and Ouray agency.

It doesn't name PFS. But Blackbear says that's a strategic move.

"It's a chess match," said Blackbear. "It all fits in. We're not going to let these people get away with what they have done."

The lawsuit was filed in response to a federal judge's dismissal of Blackbear's original lawsuit against BIA and PFS. The judge ruled that Blackbear and other opposition leaders did not exhaust their administrative appeal process with BIA.

But Blackbear said neither BIA nor the U.S. Department of Interior had looked into their complaints. So he and others filed a lawsuit against them.

"We feel confident in going back to court with what we have done. We have done everything the judge asked us to do," Blackbear said.

The complaints in this lawsuit are similar to the previously dismissed lawsuit.

Blackbear and other opposition leaders say the Goshute-PFS lease was approved illegally. They allege tribal members were bribed into approving the lease. And the federal government ignored their appeal of "BIA's wrongful and improper approval of a purported lease agreement placing high level nuclear waste on an Indian reservation."

At issue is a highly controversial plan to store 40,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel rods on the reservation, 80 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Blackbear and his supporters have fought the project. Gov. Mike Leavitt and other state leaders also have tried to block the proposal with a number of laws that make it illegal to ship nuclear waste into Utah. Bear and PFS recently filed a lawsuit against Leavitt and other state officials, claiming the laws are unconstitutional.

The lawsuit against the state is another delay tactic, Blackbear said.

"PFS and BIA's strategy all along is to stall us because they didn't think we would be there to sustain our lawsuit. Now up comes our lawsuit," he added. "They thought we were gone and we're ready to fight."

E-mail: donna@desnews.com

-------- us nuc politics

Bush Criticizes Chinese Policy

May 3, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-China.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush expressed concern Thursday at what he described as growing persecution of religious followers in China, saying he viewed such government attacks as a sign of ``weakness.''

In a speech on religious freedom to the American Jewish Committee, Bush lamented ``intensifying attacks'' on religious freedom in China. He cited arrests of followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, destruction of churches and mosques, and widespread arrests of worshippers and religious leaders. He singled out religious followers in Tibet as ``the target of especially harsh and unjust persecution.''

``The Chinese government continues to display an unreasonable and unworthy suspicion of freedom of conscience,'' Bush said in prepared remarks.

The president praised China for ``great strides toward freedom in recent decades,'' offering as examples expanded access to information and greater liberty to travel, but he said the religious restrictions threaten China's growth.

``China aspires to national strength and greatness,'' he said, ``but these acts of persecution are acts of fear -- and therefore, of weakness.''

``This persecution is unworthy of all that China has been: a civilization with a history of tolerance,'' Bush said. ``And this persecution is unworthy of all that China should become -- an open society that respects the spiritual dignity of its people.''

A State Department report said China's human rights record deteriorated last year, with intensified crackdowns on religion and political dissent.

Bush's remarks came at a tense time in U.S-China relations. A U.S. Navy spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet on April 1 over the South China Sea. The U.S. crew made an emergency landing, and the Chinese pilot was lost. The American crew was held on Hainan island for 11 days before being released.

The Pentagon said this week that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had suspended all contacts with the Chinese military. The Bush administration retracted the statement, which it called a misunderstanding.

Administration officials scrambled Thursday to explain that Bush and Rumsfeld intended all elements of the military-to-military contacts to be ``reviewed and approved on a case-by-case basis.''

``What the secretary was rightly doing was saying that we're going to review all opportunities to interface with the Chinese and if it enhances our relationship, it may make sense,'' Bush said Thursday.

``We've only been in office for 104 days. We've got to review all policy that we inherited,'' Bush said.

----

Legislation seeks to make nuclear power more attractive

USA: May 3, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10692

WASHINGTON - A bipartisan bill introduced in Congress yesterday seeks to ensure a prominent role for nuclear power in providing electricity in the U.S. by ending a 25-year drought in the construction of commercial reactors.

No new permits for nuclear power plants have been issued since the mid-1970s. Currently, the 103 operating nuclear plants provide 20 percent of the U.S. power generation.

South Carolina Rep. Lindsey Graham, a Republican, and Texas Rep. Charles Stenholm, a Democrat, used the California energy crisis as an example of what could happen across the country if the nation does not have a diverse electric generation base.

"We should learn from the problems California is experiencing and adopt a national energy policy which recognizes and promotes additional sources of energy production," Graham said.

"If we don't, we may all one day follow California's lead," he said.

Graham noted that his own state produces more than 65 percent of its power from nuclear energy.

California power officials expect the supply of generation to fall well short of demand this summer, possibly creating the need for 200-odd hours of rolling blackouts to temper consumer electricity needs.

Graham said the bill, which is a companion to one introduced earlier this year in the Senate by New Mexico Republican Sen. Pete Domenici, allows nuclear power the same federal incentives and other benefits as other emission free "clean" fuels.

"It's our goal with the introduction of this bill to bring nuclear energy back to the forefront of the growing national debate over the best way to meet our countries growing energy needs," Graham said.

This month, Vice President Dick Cheney is expected to release a report on the nation's energy needs, and experts in the power industry think promotion of nuclear power will be a prominent feature of his findings.

The nuclear power industry applauded the bill, pointing out the need to "level the playing field" by barring discrimination against nuclear generation in federal purchasing programs and federally supported emission-free electricity facilities.

"This bill provides a comprehensive framework that will help maintain nuclear energy as a strong component of the portfolio needed to meet America's future electricity demands," said Joe Colvin, president and chief executive officer of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Other provisions of the bill support nuclear engineering education, authorize more funding for nuclear technology and new plant designs and renews the Price-Anderson law providing liability coverage for nuclear plant operators.

----

Rumsfeld to review China links

May 3, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010503-3416174.htm

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld will personally scrutinize proposed military-to-military contacts with China under a new policy approved this week, officials said yesterday.

Mr. Rumsfeld, who has complained privately of the access Chinese military officers receive at U.S. installations and aboard ships, will now have his personal staff review each proposed contact on a case-by-case basis.

The new top-level scrutiny makes it more likely that the Pentagon will turn down some contacts that give China´s People´s Liberation Army (PLA) too much access to U.S. military know-how, according to congressional defense aides.

The change is the Bush administration´s latest shift away from Clinton-era defense policies. It comes amid continued bitterness between Washington and Beijing over China´s detention of 24 EP-3E reconnaissance crew members who were forced to land April 1 on Hainan island after a Chinese fighter collided with the U.S. plane´s propeller.

Mr. Rumsfeld´s new China policy did not get off to a smooth start. A Pentagon spokesman said an aide misinterpreted the defense secretary´s directives and signed a directive that suspended all military-to-military contacts with China.

The spokesman said this was not Mr. Rumsfeld´s intent. The inaccurate memo was signed by Christopher Williams, special assistant to the secretary of defense, and sent to military commanders on Monday.

The corrected policy on Chinese military contacts comes during the same week President Bush announced a major departure from the Clinton administration on missile defense. Mr. Bush said Tuesday he was prepared to abandon the 3-decades-old Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty to enable the United States to build a robust missile defense system that relies on land-, sea- and space-based missile killers such as lasers and interceptors. Former President Bill Clinton took a more cautious approach and never proposed ditching the ABM Treaty.

The Clinton administration also greatly increased ties between the PLA and American military units, beginning in 1993. The Pentagon said that the military exchanges were routine. However, China critics said the PLA, an arm of the Chinese Communist Party, was getting briefings on U.S. war doctrine and tactics that could help them in a future conflict with the United States.

"This was the centerpiece of the Clinton Pentagon," said William Triplett, an author on Asia and member of Washington´s "blue team," an ad hoc group of policy specialists who want Washington to take a tougher approach toward Beijing.

He said the new review process will ensure contacts "are not a one-way pipeline for U.S. military secrets and technology. Getting a handle on military-to-military relations between us and China has been a top priority for the blue team for years."

Mr. Triplett added, "It was a one-way street. We weren´t getting anything back and we were resurrecting the PLA that keeps the rotten dirty system in power."

After the PLA killed demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in 1989, the military contacts in the United States "restored their prestige and as soon as we did it all the allies began having military-to-military contacts with them too," he said.

The Pentagon announced Mr. Rumsfeld´s review while China continues to keep the $80 million EP-3E plane. Chinese technicians have gutted the plane´s sophisticated suite of electronic listening devices and computers, and have most likely learned U.S. techniques for intercepting radio and telephone communications.

The Bush administration continues to press Beijing to return the plan. Yesterday, a team of U.S. technicians arrived on Hainan island to figure out how to bring the four-engine plane home.

Outgoing U.S. Ambassador Joseph Prueher said the sooner the plane is returned to the United States the sooner relations between the two countries can return to normal.

"The airplane is sort of a corrosive element right now in our relationship," he said to the Associated Press in Beijing.

"It´s a reminder of a hard spot, and we need to clean that up and get on with things," he said.

He expressed hope that the U.S. technicians will have full access to the EP-3E, paving the way for the plane´s return to the United States. "I hope they´ll get a look at it, make an assessment," he said, before boarding a flight back to the United States. "That´s what we have to do first and then get on to get that out."

The Navy plane is not flyable and will likely leave China on a barge.

--------

Bush's wasteful plan on missile defense

By Martin T. Meehan,
5/3/2001
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/123/oped/Bush_s_wasteful_plan_on_missile_defenseP.shtml

IN A SPEECH before the National Defense University on Tuesday, President Bush laid out his vision for rapid deployment of a vast land, sea, and space-based missile defense system. If deployed, according to this accelerated timetable, the system would discard the cornerstone arms control treaty and undermine progress toward reducing the Russian nuclear stockpile. It is a vision short on details and long on unrealistic cost estimates.

By signaling his willingness to abandon the 1972 Antiballistic Missile defense treaty, Bush has decided that scoring points with the GOP's right wing is more important than working with our allies to curb nuclear proliferation. He has also decided to siphon scarce resources away from more pressing priorities, like investing in education and providing for a Medicare prescription drug benefit.

The truth is that today's national security environment is both nuanced and dangerous. In today's national security environment, ballistic missiles from so-called rogue nations like North Korea, Libya, and Iran pose a real threat. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent export of its technology and brainpower coupled with advances in computing technology are spurring nuclear proliferation.

Intelligence sources confirm that North Korea has developed missile technology potentially capable of hitting the West Coast. Moreover, China, India, and Pakistan have engaged in a dangerous regional nuclear arms race in Asia.

In response to this threat, the Clinton administration began researching the development of a national missile defense system, consisting of space and ground-based radars, 100 land-based interceptors, and a battle-management radar in the Aleutian islands off Alaska. The goal was to respond to nuclear proliferation by providing for defense against a limited nuclear attack by a rogue nation or an accidental launch by another country.

The Clinton plan is highly controversial. Primarily, there remain some concerns about whether such a system is feasible using today's technology. For example, the interceptors, which are the primary component of the Clinton plan, fail to perform on a consistent basis after years of development.

Despite these concerns, Bush has moved forward with his proposal for a vastly expanded system of multi-layers of air, space, sea and land components - a national missile defense system that causes far greater national security and budgetary concerns than the original Clinton proposal.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the plan is the president's apparent disregard for the ABM treaty. In 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union signed the treaty, which sets strict limits on testing and deployment of missile defense systems. The treaty had a stabilizing effect on our arms race with the Soviet Union, and it served as the backdrop for subsequent treaties with the Soviet Union and eventually bilateral cuts in nuclear weapons.

The Clinton plan for national missile defense, however controversial, was pursued with the intent of renegotiating the ABM treaty with Russia. The goal was to convince the Russians to amend the treaty before moving forward with deployment. In contrast, Bush is pursuing a path that is an affront to the ABM treaty and will risk every gain made in the area of nuclear arms control over the past 30 years.

It is my job in Congress to assist the military in shaping its annual budgets with respect to new and emerging technologies aimed at meeting future national security threats. Development and deployment of a national missile defense system should not adversely affect our military's readiness, quality of life, and modernization programs for conventional sources.

Last week, in anticipation of the president's address, the Pentagon leaked word that it will request a 10 to 15 percent increase in funding over the next years. Coupled with the president's tax plan, this $200 billion to $300 billion increase in defense spending could return us to deficit spending in a matter of two to three years.

I oppose the Bush proposal because I believe that the president is investing in an unproven system and siphoning money away from other budget priorities. It is a system with an enormous price tag that will grow exponentially. It has few working parts. It will take money away from other pressing budget priorities like education and Medicare prescription drugs, despite the fact that it is not ready to move forward. It appeals to those who argue that the United States should disengage from world affairs and live underneath a physical as well as an ideological shield.

Martin T. Meehan represents the 5th Congressional District of Massachusetts. He is the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee's Subcommittee on Military Research and Development.


-------- MILITARY

-------- arms sales

Raytheon Construction Unit Sale Probed

By REUTERS
May 3, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-arms-raytheo.html

LEXINGTON, Mass. (Reuters) - U.S. securities regulators are investigating Raytheon Co.'s sale of its struggling construction business last year after the buyer, Washington Group International Inc. (WNG.N), complained they were defrauded by the No. 3 defense contractor.

Raytheon (RTNa.N) (RTNb.n) on Thursday confirmed it received a subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission requesting information about its construction and engineering unit. Raytheon said the federal inquiry did not suggest it violated any law.

Washington Group, which led the construction of the Hoover Dam, has accused Raytheon of withholding key financial information about construction projects it sold with the engineering business. The No. 4 construction firm said the SEC has contacted them, too.

Boise, Idaho-based Washington Group, formerly known as Morrison Knudsen Co., also has sued Raytheon to rescind its purchase of the operation, accusing Raytheon of fraud and material misrepresentations about its construction and engineering business. Raytheon has said the allegations are not true.

``We will respond to the SEC's questions and supply whatever information is requested,'' Raytheon Chairman Daniel Burnham said in a statement. ``We have made extensive disclosures regarding Raytheon Engineers & Constructors (RE&C) and its disposition to WGI and believe that our policies and practices are in compliance with all regulations and laws.''

Raytheon, maker of Patriot missiles, business jets and radar systems, sold the engineering and construction business to Washington Group last July for $73 million in cash and assumed liabilities then estimated at $450 million. Raytheon subsequently has increased the loss on the sale to $415 million before taxes.

A few months after buying the business, Washington Group reduced the carrying value of several contracts and increased estimated liabilities by about $700 million.

Since then, Washington Group has walked off two Massachusetts construction jobs, alleging Raytheon withheld financial information about the projects.

``We can confirm that we have been contacted by the SEC and asked to provide accounting documents concerning the Raytheon divestiture of RE&C,'' Brent Brandon, the company's vice president of investor relations, told Reuters.

At a court hearing in Boise, Idaho on Wednesday, Washington Group officials stacked 27 boxes filled with binders of forensic accounting evidence they were giving to the SEC.

Some 34 of the 104 binders were accounting reviews of RE&C projects, including construction of two power plants that Washington Group abandoned in Massachusetts last month. Raytheon is now in charge of the power plant projects.

Washington Group is in a severe liquidity crisis and is seeking to have a judge compel Raytheon to produce an audit document needed to resolve purchase price adjustments with Raytheon.

The ongoing dispute has also taken a toll on Raytheon's financial results, contributing to first-quarter pretax charges of $325 million, or 61 cents a share, against earnings. The company has warned that the situation would hurt operating cash flow over the next four to six quarters.

The SEC would neither confirm nor deny the existence of the probe, but noted it issues subpoenas as an investigative tool. Generally, an SEC spokesman said, subpoenas are issued when efforts to get the information from a company voluntarily fail.

The engineering and construction unit was among a number of non-core businesses that Raytheon has sold to cut down a nagging debt load that remains at about $9.6 billion.

Washington Group has said its acquisition of the Raytheon unit led to liquidity problems that resulted in defaults on its bank debt.

Shares of Raytheon's widely traded Class B stock was trading at $28.85 down 80 cents or 2.73 percent in midday trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

Washington Group shares were trading at $1.13 up 3.67 percent or 4 cents in midday trading on the same exchange.

-------- drug war

Brazil: US Protects Drug Companies

MAY 03, 04:50 EST
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=CSA&STORYID=APIS7BOHNHG0

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Brazil's AIDS chief accused the Bush administration of protecting the interests of drug companies instead of promoting cheaper drugs to fight AIDS in developing countries.

Paulo Teixeira said Wednesday his government is ``very surprised'' that President Bush has toughened the U.S. position on Brazil's policy of producing cheap generic drugs and providing an anti-AIDS ``cocktail'' free to anyone who needs it.

The Brazilian program - hailed by doctors as a model for developing countries - has cut AIDS deaths by 50 percent to 70 percent, he said.

But a report on patent protections, released by the Bush administration Monday, put Brazil and a number of other countries on notice that they could face U.S. trade sanctions unless they remove objectionable trade barriers to U.S. products.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick said Brazil's patent law discriminated against all imported products, not just drugs. However, the United States on Feb. 1 filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization contending that Brazil's patent law discriminates against drug imports in violation of the rights of drug companies.

Teixeira told a U.N. news conference that Brazil had been optimistic about negotiating the WTO complaint last week, but after Zoellick's announcement, it finds the entire U.S. approach to combatting AIDS ``unacceptable.''

Brazil will campaign to give drug treatment a much higher priority in upcoming discussions on a global fund to combat AIDS, and at a June AIDS summit in New York, Teixeira said.

In his report, Zoellick named three countries with limited means that the United States believes have done ``an excellent job addressing the AIDS crisis'' - Uganda, Senegal and Thailand.

``The cost of drugs is but one of many important issues that must be addressed,'' Zoellick said, in addition to education and prevention.

But Teixeira said the United States chose Thailand, Senegal and Uganda as examples because they have made good progress in AIDS prevention - but none provide extensive treatment with anti-AIDS drugs.

He warned that the global fight against AIDS will be lost if the focus remains on prevention without a major investment in treatment.

-------- iran

Powell Signals Tougher Line on Iran

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iran.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Talks with Iran can occur only when that makes ``some sense,'' Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday, backing away from President Clinton's support of an unconditional dialogue with Tehran.

Powell told a hearing of a Senate Appropriations subcommittee that Iran not only is attempting to produce weapons of mass destruction but also continues to ``hang on to an ideology no longer relevant.''

Alluding to Iran's weapons program, Powell said, ``We will contain them. We will deter them.''

The administration has had little to say about Iran since taking office, and Powell addressed the issue only briefly in his testimony.

His comments represented a departure from the Clinton administration's policy of using the election of moderate leadership in 1997 as a potential springboard for beginning a new relationship with Iran.

Clinton had called for the opening of an official dialogue with Iran but the appeal fell on deaf ears. Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said that any such talks must be preceded by a dialogue of ``civilizations,'' meaning non-official contacts by religious or other groups.

Khatami is a leading reformer but national security issues remain under the control of a conservative, avowedly anti-American clergy led by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

New presidential elections are set for June. Khatami has until Sunday to decide whether to seek a second term.

The State Department has regarded Iran as the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism for the past decade, a designation reaffirmed in the department's latest terrorism report, released Monday.

Other concerns are Iran's efforts to develop biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and to undermine the Middle East peace process.

On other subjects, Powell said that after a month of particularly difficult relations with China, he is anxious to get U.S. ties with Beijing back on an ``even keel.''

He said he believes the two countries will ``get past'' the issue of the U.S. spy plane which has been in Chinese custody since April 1 after it collided with a a Chinese military plane over the South China Sea.

Powell said the United States must do its best to bring China into the international community even though the administration has ``no illusions about the nature of the regime.''

Several senators cautioned Powell about not attempting to block Beijing from hosting the 2008 Olympic games. Powell indicated the administration is content to leave that decision to the International Olympic Committee without U.S. interference.

Powell also said the administration is doing its best to contain the high cost of building secure diplomatic installations, acknowledging that a new embassy under construction in Beijing will cost more than $600 million.

Powell also said the administration is weighing the possibility seeking a supplemental appropriation for Israel to compensate for the costs the Israeli military has incurred during clashes with Palestinians that began last September.

``We have it under consideration,'' he said.

-------- israel

Israelis Destroy Homes in Gaza Refugee Camps

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By JOEL GREENBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/world/03MIDE.html

JERUSALEM, May 2 - Near the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt, Israeli Army bulldozers backed by tanks rumbled into a Palestinian refugee camp today and razed homes as terrified residents fled into the early morning darkness.

Firing tank shells and machine guns to cover their thrust, the Israelis battled Palestinian gunmen who fired antitank grenades and automatic weapons, witnesses reported. A teenager was killed and 14 other Palestinians were wounded, United Nations and Palestinian officials said. The demolition in the refugee camp in Rafah, described by an army spokesman as "engineering work," was the latest example of an increasingly common tactic used by the Israeli Army in its battles with Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

The army - in trying to silence gunfire aimed at its positions around Jewish settlements and along the Gaza Strip's border with Egypt - has punched into neighboring Palestinian-controlled refugee camps to clear swaths of territory with bulldozers. By leveling refugee dwellings and destroying farmland, the Israelis have a clear field of vision from army outposts, denying cover to Palestinian gunmen, and can dominate the zones with their own gunfire.

In recent weeks the Israelis have razed dozens of houses in refugee camps in Rafah and Khan Yunis, leaving hundreds of people homeless.

Today's action drew a rebuke from the State Department. A spokesman said that such moves "undermine efforts to defuse the situation and bring an end to the violence and escalation."

Palestinian officials denounced the actions as dangerous aggression that underlines the need for an international force to protect Palestinians.

But Israeli military officials say they are acting to protect their troops against escalating attacks.

The operation in Rafah followed a four-hour gun battle in the area on Tuesday in which a Palestinian police officer was killed. The army said that an Israeli border patrol came under heavy gunfire and an attack of more than 20 grenades as it defused two roadside bombs and a third exploded, causing no casualties.

Lt. Col. Olivier Rafowicz, an army spokesman, said that the bulldozed buildings had served the Palestinian attackers. "If a place is used as a military position, it becomes a military objective," he said. "If shots are fired at us and we receive so many grenades, we have to fight back to protect ourselves. This was a defensive action."

Denying attackers a staging ground for assaults was the idea behind an Israeli incursion into the northeast corner of the Gaza Strip last month after mortars were fired at the southern Israeli town of Sderot.

That action was denounced by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell as "excessive and disproportionate," but a senior Israeli officer at the scene said that his forces, using bulldozers to clear orchards, were setting up a "destruction zone" that would enable them to wipe out any would-be attackers.

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

U.S. Loses Seat on U.N. Rights Commission

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-un-usa-.html?searchpv=reuters

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States, for the first time since 1947, failed to win re-election on Thursday to the key Geneva-based Human Rights Commission that probes rights abuses throughout the world.

Instead France, Austria and Sweden were chosen for the three seats allocated to Western countries that were up for election. The balloting was conducted in secret among 53 nations voting in the Economic and Social Council, the parent group for the rights commission, U.N. officials said.

``Understandably, we are very disappointed,'' James Cunningham, the chief U.S. representative, told reporters, declining to speculate on the reason for the defeat.

``It was an election between a number of solid candidates,'' Cunningham said. ``We very much wanted to serve on the committee.''

The commission was created in 1947 and the United States, Russia and India had served on the body ever since. Eleanor Roosevelt, the widow of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was the first U.S. delegate to the commission, which issued the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

On Thursday, the United States came in fourth in the balloting among Western nations with 29 votes. France was high scorer with 52 votes, followed by Austria with 41 and Sweden with 32.

Rita Lowey, a Democratic Congresswoman from New York, said the defeat was an ``embarrassment for our country'' and said George W. Bush had ``dragged his feet'' in getting key foreign policy officials confirmed, including a U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, expected to be John Negroponte.

``The U.S. commitment to human rights has fallen victim to the administration's laissez-faire attitude toward diplomacy and foreign policy,'' she said in a statement.

Singapore's ambassador, Kishore Mahbubani, called the vote ''a stunning development ... when I heard it, I couldn't believe it,'' he said.

And British Ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock, whose country has a seat of the commission, said he hoped the U.S. defeat was an ``aberration'' but noted elections at the United Nations often involved doing deals.

``This can mean less focus on the suitability of candidates. The U.S. has tended not to be keen on doing deals,'' he said.

``There are always some who want to strike out at the United States as the only super-power but most U.N. members recognize its importance,'' Greenstock said.

Some Western diplomats said the Bush administration's opposition to the Kyoto climate change treaty as well as its plans for a missile defense shield, contributed to the loss.

But Joanna Weschler, the U.N. representative of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said both Western and developing countries bore grudges against the United States.

``Washington should have seen it coming because there has been a growing resentment toward the United States and votes on key human rights standards, including opposition to a treaty to abolish land mines and to the International Criminal Court and making AIDS drugs available to everyone,'' she said.

Other nations the United States has held up to the spotlight in the Geneva commission, such as China or Cuba, resented U.S. actions on the committee and ``made their feelings well known in their speeches,'' she said in an interview.

Weschler also said the 53-member commission was turning into an ``abuser solidarity'' group with more and more countries with questionable human rights records gaining election and then voting as a bloc against singling out individual nations for human rights abuses.

Also elected to the human rights commission on Thursday were Bahrain, South Korea, Pakistan, Croatia and Armenia. Chile, Mexico, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Togo and Uganda won uncontested seats. Countries whose candidates failed to get seats were Iran, Saudi Arabia, Latvia, and Azerbaijan in addition to the United States.

--------

Taliban Reject U.N. Appeal for Truce in Afghanistan

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-afghan-.html

KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Afghanistan's ruling Taliban rejected a U.N. appeal Thursday for a cease-fire to allow the United Nations to deal with a deepening humanitarian crisis caused by war and drought.

``The high commissioner had his specific offer for a cease-fire. We told him that a cease-fire was not a solution to the Afghan problem,'' Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil said after talks with U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Ruud Lubbers.

Lubbers secured an endorsement Wednesday from the opposition faction led by former President Burhanuddin Rabbani for a six- to 12-month cease-fire in the civil war on condition the Taliban also halted fighting.

Lubbers was concluding a four-day tour of the country, which has been battered by war for 21 years and is now suffering the worst drought in three decades. At least 700,000 people are believed to have abandoned their homes in the past year in search of food and safety.

The Taliban have imposed a strict version of Islam over the 90 percent of Afghanistan they control, but still are fighting pockets of opposition.

Muttawakil accused the Taliban's opponents of violating previous cease-fires, a charge the opposition Northern Alliance has also made against the Taliban.

``Our experiences show that a short-term cease-fire is exploited by certain groups who use it to expand the front line and lead even to bloodier war,'' Muttawakil said. ``Rabbani is not in control of his forces and has never respected a cease-fire.''

Lubbers, a former Dutch prime minister, said at a separate news conference after meeting Muttawakil that he was not pleased with the Taliban reaction to his proposal for averting a humanitarian disaster.

Lubbers said the minister from the Taliban, who resumed their annual fighting a week ago, thought it might harm their goals. ``He said the cease-fire might be counterproductive from their perspective,'' said Lubbers, who is due to hold meetings in Pakistan over the next few days.

Muttawakil told reporters the Taliban was ready to start peace talks with its opponents to permanently end the conflict but ruled out any role for the United Nations.

``We again extend our invitation for peace talks to end the war in Afghanistan,'' he said. But he made clear the Taliban saw itself in a dominating position.

``We don't want them to surrender to us. We want them to surrender for the interests of the Afghan people,'' he replied when asked if he meant the opposition should surrender or the Taliban was ready to share power.

Muttawakil said he told Lubbers the United Nations must increase funds for displaced Afghans living in awful conditions in Afghanistan and neighboring countries. There has been widespread criticism of the warring factions' continued spending on war when the country faces a risk of famine.

--------

Court Serves War Crimes Indictment on Milosevic

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-yugosla.html

BELGRADE (Reuters) - A Yugoslav court said it submitted the U.N. tribunal's indictment for war crimes on Thursday to former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in his Belgrade jail cell.

But the office of Milosevic's lawyer said he had refused to accept the document. Milosevic, arrested last month on charges of abuse of power, has in the past denounced the court based in The Hague as an instrument of Western imperialism.

``He did not receive the indictment, it was left on the bars of his cell, he did not want to take it,'' an aide to lawyer Toma Fila told Reuters.

The move by Belgrade's district court still looked likely to be welcomed by the U.N. war crimes court and by Western officials, looking for signs that Yugoslavia's new reformist rulers are cooperating with the tribunal.

``It's a first step and the second step is Milosevic's transfer (to The Hague),'' said Jean-Jacques Joris, political adviser to chief U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte.

Last month the United States ruled Yugoslavia fit for aid after Milosevic's arrest but warned Belgrade to step up cooperation with the tribunal to win U.S. support for a big donors' meeting tentatively scheduled for June.

The court's announcement of the handing over of the indictment came a week after del Ponte demanded that Yugoslavia reveal whether its authorities, as required, had delivered it to Milosevic.

Tribunal registrar Hans Holthuis gave the indictment and an arrest warrant to Yugoslav Justice Minister Momcilo Grubac in Belgrade early last month, but Milosevic's lawyer was quoted later in the month as saying the document had not been served.

The Belgrade court said in a statement it had received the indictment on April 26 from the Yugoslav Justice Ministry, adding that the reason for handing it to Milosevic was for him to learn of its content.

The statement did not explicitly mention the arrest warrant and court officials were not immediately available to say whether this had also been submitted to Milosevic.

Milosevic, 59, the key figure in a decade of Balkan conflict, was arrested on April 1 on suspicion of abuse of office after a 36-hour armed standoff at his villa.

MILOSEVIC ACCUSED OF CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY

The Belgrade district court last Monday remanded Milosevic in custody for a further two months, a decision appealed by Fila, his lawyer, Thursday.

The U.N. war crimes court indicted him and four close associates in May 1999 for alleged atrocities committed by Yugoslav troops under their command against Kosovo Albanians.

Charged with crimes against humanity and violations of the laws or customs of war, the five are accused of deporting 740,000 ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and of murdering 340 Albanians identified by May 24, 1999 when the indictment was confirmed by a judge, during NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia.

U.N. war crimes prosecutors say they are also preparing indictments over his role in the earlier wars in Bosnia and Croatia after they broke away from the federation in the 1990s.

Yugoslavia's new leadership has so far rebuffed the court's demands for a swift handover of Milosevic, ousted in a popular uprising last October.

Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic was quoted as saying Wednesday that Yugoslavia might charge Milosevic with war crimes, but that the country needs time to show it is capable of handling the trial.

Djindjic said in an interview with the French daily Le Monde that Milosevic would be seen as the winner if Belgrade were forced to surrender him to an international war crimes trial in The Hague.

``If we can try him in a correct fashion in Belgrade, why would he have to go to The Hague. He would have to go if they suspected that we couldn't do it. But we will,'' Djindjic said.

Del Ponte's spokesman made clear the prosecutor saw the idea of Milosevic being tried for war crimes in Belgrade as unacceptable.

``For us it is clear that there is a legal obligation (to send Milosevic to The Hague),'' Joris said.

``He must be transferred. It may be the same tune from us, but we will never tire of singing it.''

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

Rumsfeld's Office Reverses China Ban

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By STEVEN LEE MYERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/world/03MILI.html

WASHINGTON, May 2 - The office of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered the suspension of military exchanges and contacts with the Chinese armed forces and then abruptly reversed the order today after the White House objected, Pentagon officials said.

The reversal, which the Pentagon announced in an unusual retraction this evening, reflected a degree of confusion in an administration that had tried to project a disciplined management style.

It also underscored divisions among President Bush's advisers over how tough to be with China after the confrontation over an American surveillance aircraft that remains at a Chinese military base on Hainan Island.

A memorandum dated April 30 and signed by Chris Williams, a senior adviser to Mr. Rumsfeld for policy matters, directed the United States armed forces to suspend contacts between their civilian and military officials and their Chinese counterparts "until further notice," according to an official who read it.

Several hours after the order became public, in a CNN broadcast, the Pentagon issued a statement saying that the memorandum had "misinterpreted the position" of Mr. Rumsfeld, even though Pentagon officials had earlier confirmed the memo's main points.

A spokesman for Mr. Bush, Ari Fleisher, said in an interview later that his office had objected to the disclosure because it did not reflect what the White House understood to be the thrust of Mr. Rumsfeld's guidance.

Other Pentagon officials and lawmakers contradicted the account that Mr. Rumsfeld had not approved the cancellation of military- to-military contacts.

John W. Warner, the Republican of Virginia who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he had spoken with Mr. Rumsfeld about suspending contacts with the Chinese military and heartily endorsed the tougher line that it suggested.

"I strongly support his action for the following reasons," Mr. Warner said. "That has been a very valuable series of contacts for China. It gives them stature in the eyes of the other militaries of the world. They learn from it. I'm not suggesting secrets. But they learn about how a professional military is run. And China did not handle, from beginning to end, the tragedy of this forced downing of our aircraft in a professional manner."

He added that the suspension was "a purely understandable message" to the Chinese military that it had inappropriately detained the 24 crew members of the American surveillance plane, an EP-3E Aries II, for 11 days after it and a Chinese fighter collided on April 1 over the South China Sea and made an emergency landing on Hainan island. The Chinese jet and its pilot were lost.

The order and its reversal occurred at a delicate moment in the administration's efforts to retrieve the aircraft. A team of American technicians from Lockheed Martin, the main builder of the aircraft, arrived on Tuesday on Hainan to begin examining the damage to determine whether the plane can be flown off the island.

It was not clear whether the announcements today would affect those efforts. But they seems highly likely to strain relations with the Chinese even further. China has pointedly objected to Washington's plans to sell advanced weaponry to Taiwan and to deploy missiles in a move that China contends would be destablizing.

The administration suspended its military-to-military contacts with the Chinese in the midst of the tense diplomatic standoff last month, saying it planned to review the status of the contacts in the months ahead.

The Pentagon statement this evening said that Mr. Rumsfeld planned to review any contacts case by case and that it was not imposing a blanket suspension. A spokesman for the Pentagon, Rear Adm. Craig R. Quigley, said there were no contacts planned for this month.

The memorandum, now disavowed, appeared to have resulted in at least one Chinese scholar's losing an invitation to a security seminar at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies of the Pentagon, in Hawaii, according to two officials.

The question of contacts between the American and Chinese militaries, which includes activities like high-level visits by senior commanders and civilian leaders as well as lower-level exchanges of officers and experts, has been politically sensitive for years.

Compared with similar programs with Russia, the China contacts remain relatively limited, and they have repeatedly fallen victim to the ebbs and flows of Chinese-American relations.

"It's very clear that over the years the military-to-military relationship has been the most vulnerable link between the two countries in times of stress," said David M. Finkelstein, an analyst for the CNA Corporation's Center for Strategic Studies who has studied the exchanges.

The United States suspended all military-to-military contacts after the military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, resumed them in 1994 and suspended them again in 1996, after China fired missiles off the coast of Taiwan.

After a brief restoration of contacts, China angrily halted them after the American bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 in the NATO's air campaign against the former Yugoslavia, only to restart them in January 2000.

Senior military commanders, including Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the commander of American forces in the Pacific, strongly support the contacts and exchanges as valuable tools to reduce tensions, build confidence and learn about the Chinese strategies and programs.

The American ambassador to China, Adm. Joseph W. Prueher, was appointed in part because of contacts developed with Chinese military and civilian leaders while he was commander of American forces in the Pacific.

In recent years, the contacts have been criticized by conservative lawmakers as ineffective. Last year, Congress mandated that the Pentagon evaluate the program's goals and effectiveness and report back by March 31, a deadline that the Pentagon missed.

Mr. Finkelstein said it was important to resume the contacts. "If you have potentially serious security disagreements," he said, "then that's all the more reason to find a proper venue for continuing contacts."

--------

Army Aims for 'Green Ammunition'

MAY 03, 02:45 EST
By PAULINE JELINEK
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=WORLD&PACKAGEID=military&STORYID=APIS7BOFSV00

WASHINGTON (AP) - The U.S. military is trying to go green, and not just with berets or fatigues.

In a multimillion dollar project, the Army has come up with a new bullet said to be just as deadly as the old lead-based one but cleaner for the Earth.

``We want to be good stewards of the environment,'' said Army spokeswoman Karen Baker.

The military says using ``green ammunition'' cuts soil contamination caused by the millions of slugs fired year after year at its practice ranges. In the new bullet, a less toxic tungsten composite replaces the lead.

It's just one of the Pentagon's efforts to keep troops trained for combat while protecting the environment on military land. Critics say the armed forces have a long way to go on that score.

In a program it says has cost about $12 million so far, the Army in 1994 started researching ways to make a more environmentally friendly 5.56 mm bullet. It's used in the M-16 rifle, a weapon issued to every Army infantry soldier, and an estimated 200 million rounds are shot a year.

Researchers studied different combinations of metal to design a slug that would perform the same as the old one, have the same density, ballistic quality and so on, said Michael Dette of the Army Environmental Center at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.

They settled on a tungsten composite slug and kept the old copper casing to produce a bullet Dette says actually turned out to be more accurate and causes less barrel erosion. Soldiers won't notice a difference, he said.

The Army, which produces ammunition for all the services, started limited use of the new version in 1999 and is producing 50 million rounds this year for practice at a new range in Alaska and an old contaminated one in Massachusetts.

Officials hope the switch to lead-free slugs will be complete in 2005.

The new bullets cost about 8 cents each compared with a half cent for the old ones. Dette said they'll cost less in full production and when officials consider the savings of millions of dollars that would otherwise go for cleaning contaminated ranges.

The 5.56 mm bullet accounts for half the small caliber ammunition used annually - troops shoot another 200 million rounds of 7.62 mm and 9 mm bullets, not to mention mortars, artillery and other large ammunition.

The lead slug is not the only noxious part of the bullet.

Chemicals used for sealing, waterproofing and painting the bullet as well as for propelling the slug also are being studied - and some of their ingredients have been changed, too. But officials don't know when ammunition might be completely green.

In 1997, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered the Army's Massachusetts Military Reservation to stop all live-fire training after a study showed lead and other toxins seeping into Cape Cod's underground water supply. Troops started using the new ammunition there in October 1999.

But critics recently urged an end to training in small weapons at the reservation's Camp Edwards after a new National Guard study said soil had illegally high amounts of an ingredient from the ammunition's propellant.

Baker said the Army is working on its own study.

``It doesn't matter what you make the bullet out of if the propellant is nasty stuff,'' said Joel Feigenbaum, a local activist. ``Then it's not green.''

Activists are pressing for widespread improvements in munitions and want something done about the chemical runoff from solvents that troops use to wash machinery.

``If they eventually get the lead out of everything and all the other hazards out of everything, this could be an important step,'' said Steven Taylor of the advocacy group Military Toxics Project based in Lewiston, Me.

``But if it's taken ... years to get this far, it doesn't speak well for how long it might take to get the rest of the way ,'' he said.

Taylor said the $4.3 billion the Pentagon will spend on environmental activities this year is too tiny a fraction of its $296 billion budget.

Pentagon officials say keeping forces ready for combat is getting to be a challenge when they have to deal with environmental laws and urban sprawl that has brought civilians to the fence line of once-isolated military facilities.

On one training range, a law on erosion prevents digging of troop fighting positions. A ruling on an endangered bird prohibits tree trimming and requires soldiers and their vehicles to stay on established trails at another.

``As the Army tries to balance its testing and training mission with its requirement to comply with environmental regulations ... we are pushing already severely constrained resources to the breaking point,'' Maj. Gen. R.L. Van Antwerp recently told a Senate hearing.

After all, he said, ``The primary mission of the United States Army is to fight and win in armed conflict.''


-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Australia Opens World's First Titanium Solar Cell Factory

May 3, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/may2001/2001L-05-03-02.html

CANBERRA, Australia, The government of Australia is committed to meeting its international climate change obligations, but is not prepared to sacrifice economic growth and Australian jobs, Minister for Industry, Science and Resources, Senator Nick Minchin said Wednesday.

Minchin spoke at the opening of the world's first titania dye solar cell manufacturing operation developed by the company Sustainable Technologies International at Queanbeyan, near Canberra.

The new cell technology has the capacity to provide low cost solar energy supplies to buildings, remote areas and businesses around the world, providing significant environmental benefits.

The opening of the Queanbeyan factory is the culmination of seven years of research and A$12 million expenditure. Sustainable Technologies International has received a A$1 million grant under the Commonwealth government's Renewable Energy Commercialisation Program to construct the facility.

The factory makes a new type of photovoltaic solar cell based on nanocristaline titanium dioxide as the semiconductor. The titania solar cells use a titanium dioxide semiconductor coated with ruthenium dye, which absorbs light in the visible spectrum. Sustainable Technologies Australia is the sole licensee outside Europe of the patented core technology for dyed titania cells.

Production costs are cheaper compared with the silicon based solar cells that are now most widely used. Titania cells perform under a wide range of temperature and light conditions including low and diffuse light, and they can be optically transparent or opaque.

The basic titania cell consists of a sandwich of titanium dioxide, dye, electrolyte and catalyst between two conductive transparent electrodes. Upon illumination of the cell, light excites the dye, sending an electron on its way to be picked up and transmitted by the semiconducting titania dioxide to become electrical energy.

Each of the layers is screen printed on to the glass and baked on using cost effective standard equipment from the semiconductor industry.

The company claims the production of its cells is less harmful to the environment than the manufacture of silicon cells which emits hazardous gases and requires the use of hazardous gases and a great deal of water and electricity. Titania solar cell manufacture produces no toxic gas emissions, Sustainable Technologies says.

Senator Minchin said the development of this Australian technology is an excellent example of Australian innovation and the success of the government's package of greenhouse response measures.

The greenhouse gas emissions of developing countries such as China, India and Brazil are estimated to overtake those of developed countries by 2004. Senator Minchin renewed his call for developing countries to be engaged in the Kyoto Protocol process. "If developing countries are not involved, Australia and other developed nations will lose industry and jobs offshore as companies relocate to avoid greenhouse restrictions," he said.

The Kyoto Protocol, an addition to the United Nations climate treaty, governs the emissions of six greenhouse gases by 39 industrialized countries including Australia. Most of the countries must reduce their gas emissions relative to their 1990 levels, but Australia is permitted to increase its emissions by eight percent.

Still, says Minchin, Australia's economy would be hurt if the protocol comes into effect.

A member of Australia's Liberal government, Senator Minchin accused the Labor opposition of threatening the future of Australian industry and the livelihood of its workers by committing to ratify the Protocol, even without US backing and the engagement of developing nations.

"Allens Consulting has estimated that more than 50,000 jobs in non-metropolitan Queensland alone, would be lost if the Protocol was implemented in its current form. Labor is courting the extreme green vote at the cost of industry and jobs for Australians," Minchin charged.

-------- environment

Fine Particles of Air Pollutants Harmful as Passive Smoking

May 3, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/may2001/2001L-05-03-01.html

LONDON, United Kingdom, Long term exposure to fine particle pollution is likely to be as dangerous as passive smoking, UK government scientists said today. They were releasing details of their first attempt to quantify effects of long term exposure on life expectancy.

According to the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP), the new findings are even more alarming than its 1998 estimate that particle pollution results in 8,000 premature deaths annually in the UK.

Environment Minister Michael Meacher described the results as "very important" and said the government "would certainly be strengthening its particle emission targets" in light of them.

He said that consultation on new targets would take place this summer. COMEAP's findings will also lend support to European Commission plans to prioritize the control of particle pollution over the coming decade, under its "Clean Air for Europe" program.

Primary PM-2.5 particulates result largely from combustion of fossil fuels or biomass, and some industrial processes.

Particulate pollution arises from dust and vehicle exhaust at this construction site, Canary Wharf, Docklands, London (Photo courtesy Freefoto.com)

The sources of PM-2.5 include, but are not limited to, gasoline and diesel exhaust, wood stoves and fireplaces, land clearing, wildland prescribed burning, and wild fires.

Sources of primary particulates include fugitive emissions from paved and unpaved roads, dust from ore processing and refining, and to a lesser extent, crustal material from construction activities, agricultural tilling, and wind erosion.

COMEAP's work is based on conclusions from several American studies on the human health impacts of fine particles, known as PM2.5. These found that adults living in the "dirtiest" cities were 20 percent more likely to die than those living in "clean" cities and suggested that fine particles accounted for most of the difference.

COMEAP applied this information to UK particle pollution levels. The committee estimates that if PM2.5 levels were reduced by one microgram per cubic metre, each person's lifespan would theoretically increase by between 1.5 to 3.5 days.

However, such an even distribution among the population is highly unlikely and the ministry of health is considering funding research to determine which groups are most at risk and how much earlier they die.

The COMEAP report is available online at: http://www.doh.gov.uk/comeap/longtermeffects.pdf

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website on PM2.5 particle pollution is online at: http://www.epa.gov/ttn/chief/eiip/pm25inventory/index.html

----

Chirac Targets Green Voters with 'Ecology Charter'

May 3, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-environ.html

ORLEANS, France (Reuters) - French President Jacques Chirac sought on Thursday to lure green-minded voters in next year's national elections with a proposal that the public be granted a constitutional right to a clean environment.

The call for a broad ``ecological charter'' came as his likely leftist rival in the 2002 presidential race, Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, faced a row in his coalition over the use of controversial taxes in environment policy.

Jospin's government has been attacked for its uncertain handling of weeks of flooding in the northern Somme valley region that has forced thousands to leave their homes and has focused public attention on the environment.

``We all have the feeling that apparently natural phenomena can be caused or aggravated by human action or inaction,'' Chirac was due to say in a speech released to the media ahead of a visit to the Loire Valley town of Orleans.

``The right to an environment that is protected and preserved (must be) considered on a par with civil liberties,'' he said, calling on parliament to draft a constitutional annex offering such guarantees.

Chirac renewed his support for the Koyoto protocol aimed at cutting the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming and warned the Bush administration, which rejects the accord, that the United States must pull its weight in reducing pollution.

He also urged a debate ``without taboo'' on France's reliance on atomic energy for over half its electricity, while noting that nuclear reactors helped save on greenhouse gas emissions.

IS CALL CREDIBLE?

While the Greens in Jospin's coalition have been the traditional party of ecology-minded voters, Chirac strategists believe the environment is becoming a dominant theme on which conservatives can score points.

Many first-round Green voters in March's town hall elections ignored party advice to switch their support to the main leftist candidate in the decisive second round, helping the right chalk up surprise victories across the country.

Victims of the Somme flooding -- not proved to be the result of global warming -- say authorities have been slow to mobilize mechanical pumps that are now alleviating the situation.

Aside for the call for a constitutional right to a clean environment, Chirac urged a ``green audit'' of all government policy based on ecological criteria and renewed a call for the creation of a powerful world environmental body.

As a long-time backer of nuclear fuel and the intensive farming methods now blamed by many for the spread of mad cow disease and the foot-and-mouth virus, Chirac may face a credibility hurdle with some ecologist voters.

Yet Jospin, who trails Chirac in polls ahead of next spring's presidential election, will have his pro-environment credentials tested on Friday during talks with the Greens party chief, Environment Minister Dominique Voynet, over the future of energy taxes aimed at curbing pollution.

She wants Jospin to affirm his previous backing for the levies after some in his coalition -- including Finance Minister Laurent Fabius -- said they should be ditched.

``I don't want to go on the warpath over this issue,'' she told business daily Les Echos. ``But I do not imagine that he will not keep his word,'' she added.

----

National Briefing

May 3, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/03/national/03BRFS.html

ALASKA: BATTLE OVER CRUISE SHIP DUMPING As the first big cruise ship of the season sailed up the Inside Passage to Juneau, lawmakers in the Capitol were hammering out details of a bill intended to crack down on sewage dumping and other pollution by the ships. State officials and lobbyists reached agreement on a bill after Gov. Tony Knowles, a Democrat, rejected an earlier version as a "license to pollute." The new bill was passed by the House and now heads to the Senate.

Sam Howe Verhovek (NYT)

COLORADO: WARNINGS ON BEARS After two summers in which bears have become ever more brazen, searching for food in Aspen, city officials have stepped up efforts to cite businesses and home owners who do not keep their garbage cans locked. After issuing no more than eight citations all of last year, Brian Flynn, the city's environmental ranger, said he had issued more than 50 so far this year. A third offense can bring the offender a maximum fine of $1,000 and 90 days in jail.

Michael Janofsky (NYT)

FLORIDA: WATER PLAN IS DELAYED The state put off until next year a decision on a plan that would have allowed billions of gallons of untreated, partly contaminated water to be injected into underground aquifers as a hedge against drought. The decision by Gov. Jeb Bush was a surprise turnaround on the initiative. Mr. Bush did not give up on the measure, but he said he was not ready to ask his allies in the Legislature to cast votes in favor of the plan, saying he wanted to protect them for now from taking a stand that might be "grossly distorted" by environmentalists.

Douglas Jehl (NYT)

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

Pakistan to Receive World Bank Loan

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Pakistan-Loans.html?searchpv=aponline

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- The World Bank plans to offer cash-strapped Pakistan around $700 million in loans this year -- the largest loan since the military seized power in October 1999, Pakistan's finance minister Shaukat Aziz said Thursday.

The World Bank's board is likely to approve the loan in its June 14 meeting, Aziz told reporters on his return from Washington, where he attended the International Monetary Fund/World Bank spring meetings.

``Once the World Bank board approves loans, their disbursement will start immediately,'' he said.

The bulk of loans are for structural reforms in the economy and banking sector. The bank will give another $50 million for the health industry, he said.

The military-led government, which toppled the elected Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup on Oct. 12, 1999, has struggled to secure foreign loans and woo investments to revive Pakistan's economy.

Under Sharif, the economy soured after industrialized nations imposed sanctions for its May 1998 underground nuclear tests.

The IMF also delayed disbursement of loans to Pakistan when Sharif's government failed to meet the conditions of the deal, including letting the currency float in foreign exchange trading, boosting revenues and privatizing state-run institutions.

But the military-led goverment's efforts to carry out reforms, and a move by the United States to relax sanctions, prompted the IMF last year to extend a $596 million loan -- though under tougher conditions.

``Donors appreciate our performance and are now more willing to extend help,'' Aziz said.

After the IMF's current one-year loan ends in September, Pakistan will ask for a three-year loan package, Aziz said.

-------- police

N.J. Judge Verniero Urged to Resign

May 3, 2001
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/nyregion/AP-Racial-Profiling.html

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) -- The Senate approved a resolution Thursday urging Supreme Court Justice Peter G. Verniero to resign because he allegedly lied about racial profiling by state police.

Acting governor and Senate leader Donald T. DiFrancesco, who called for Verniero's resignation last month, supported the measure, which passed 37-1. The resolution is non-binding; the Senate cannot force Verniero to resign.

``This makes it very clear. Republicans and Democrats alike feel he should not sit on the Supreme Court,'' said the resolution's sponsor, Sen. William L. Gormley.

Sen. Walter Kavanaugh was the only lawmaker to vote no: ``I'm not going to condemn him just because someone puts a piece of paper in front of me.''

Verniero has repeatedly refused to step down; a telephone call to his lawyer seeking comment Thursday wasn't immediately returned.

Last month, DiFrancesco said he believed Verniero misled senators when he was questioned about racial profiling during his 1999 court confirmation hearings. The day before, all 11 members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent DiFrancesco a letter saying Verniero should resign.

Those committee members later sent Assembly Speaker Jack Collins six reasons Verniero should be impeached, including that he withheld information about racial profiling from federal investigators.

Last week Collins refused to act on impeachment, saying the case against Verniero should be handled by the courts.

Before Thursday's vote, Assembly Democrats introduced articles of impeachment against Verniero. They plan to push for a full vote on the matter next week. If the Assembly votes to impeach, the case would be sent to the Senate for a trial.

-------- spying

Spy Plane Efforts Hampered

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Spy-Plane.html

WASHINGTON -- U.S. technicians need more time to wrap up their inspection of a downed U.S. Navy reconnaissance plane, an effort hampered by the Chinese military's refusal to supply power for the work, a Pentagon official said Thursday.

Pentagon spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, said U.S. government representatives had thought such assistance was to have been provided, and they hoped to ``clearly explain the technical support we need'' before Friday. At that time, the five-person team would be able to put in at least one full day to study whether the damaged aircraft could fly, he said.

The damaged reconnaissance plane has been on the tarmac of a military airfield on Hainan island since April 1. It made an emergency landing after colliding with a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea. Its American crew was held on Hainan for 11 days before being released, resulting in weeks of touchy relations between Washington and Beijing.

The team of U.S. technicians must have power to check such things as the aircraft's electronic systems, hydraulics and other items needed to fly the aircraft, Quigley said.

``There was the expectation that power was to be provided,'' Quigley said. He said he could not explain why it wasn't made available.

The American team was able to inspect the exterior of the damaged EP-3E Aries II surveillance plane and take photographs, Quigley said.

``We need one more full day,'' he said if the proper assistance is given to the technicians.

Asked about reports that the crew had had items confiscated by the Chinese, Quigley said the team was not allowed to bring into China their own satellite telephone system. That leaves the team with phone communications that can be monitored, he added.

The technicians from Lockheed Martin Corp., maker of the EP-3E, spent about four hours inspecting the plane on Wednesday. They are to decide whether the plane should be flown home or partially disassembled and returned by ship or air, Quigley said.

Accounts from both sides indicate the plane lost its nose cone, and at least one of its four propeller engines was damaged. The impact pushed the plane into an 8,000-foot dive before the pilot regained control.

The Chinese fighter apparently broke in half, killing pilot Wang Wei.

It wasn't clear whether the problems encountered by the Lockheed team were related to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's order to require advance approval of any Defense Department contact with the Chinese military. On Wednesday the Pentagon released, and then withdrew, a memo saying it was suspending such ties.

The Pentagon had previously said it was going to reconsider how to proceed with contacts.

--------

Lucent Scientists Accused of System Theft for China

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-crime-lucent-dc.html

NEWARK, N.J. (Reuters) - Two Lucent Technologies Inc. (LU.N) scientists and a third man were arrested Thursday and charged with stealing key trade secrets from the telecommunications equipment giant's systems for transfer to a state-owned Chinese company, U.S. officials said.

U.S. Attorney Robert Cleary in Newark, New Jersey, accused two Chinese nationals and a U.S. citizen of ``corporate espionage,'' alleging they conspired to steal source code and software associated with Lucent's PathStar Access Server, which facilitates the transmission of voice communication through the Internet while also providing call-waiting, speed dialing, and other telephone-related features.

The case comes amid rising tensions between the United States and China, strained by the recent U.S. spy plane landing on a Chinese island, U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, and President Bush's pledge to defend Taiwan.

It also highlights the threat to U.S. companies of economic espionage, a growing preoccupation of spies around the world since the end of the Cold War.

Two of the accused -- named in the prosecutor's complaint filed in federal court as scientists Lin Hai and Xu Kai -- held high-level positions at the Murray Hill, N.J.-based Lucent. The third man, Chang Yong-Qing, was vice president of Village Networks, an optical network vendor in Eatontown, N.J., authorities said.

``They pirated Lucent's PathStar technology,'' Cleary said at a news conference. ``In short, Lin and Xu came to Lucent as scholars, but in reality they were nothing more than sleuths.''

The Pathstar technology generated revenues of about $100 million in fiscal 2000 at the $33.8 billion company, but was discontinued in January as part of Lucent's restructuring, company spokesman William Price said.

The theft the defendants were charged with took place last fall and early this year, according to court documents.

``We aggressively protect our intellectual property and trade secrets,'' Price said. ``Any breach of that is a serious matter for us. There is inherent value to those assets, to the intellectual property.''

The three men were each charged with one count of conspiring to commit wire fraud and, if convicted, could face a maximum of five years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. All three made an initial court appearance in federal court in Newark and will be held without bail until another hearing scheduled for Tuesday. They did not enter any plea.

However, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney said federal officials are not limited to the current charges. ``In a hypothetical situation, other charges could result,'' said Michael Drewniak, when asked if the federal prosecutors could level more stringent charges against the men.

Stephen Sozio, a Cleveland attorney who specializes in corporate criminal investigations, said the men are likely to be charged with violating the Economic Espionage Act, which makes it a federal crime to steal or use stolen trade secrets. Under the act, the defendants could face up to 15 years in prison and fines of up to $500,000.

JOINT VENTURE

The complaint alleged Lin and Xu established a company called ComTriad Technologies Inc. in Jan. 2000 and in July 2000 Chang visited China to negotiate a joint venture with state-run Datang Telecom Technology Co. of Beijing. The complaint alleged that Datang was to invest $1.2 million in ComTriad in return for 1.2 million shares of preferred stock in ComTriad.

``The goals for the joint venture were for it to become the leading data networking company in China, 'the Cisco of China' and to go public both in China and the U.S. with initial public offerings in stock,'' the complaint charged.

Officials said Lucent became suspicious of the two scientists, who until now had been considered model employees, in February, and told the FBI. From a Web site and e-mails, agents discovered last month the men were allegedly trying to make a system identical to PathStar -- they called it CLX1000 -- and had successfully transferred it out of Lucent systems.

Kevin Donovan, special agent in charge of the Newark FBI office, said the men intended to ``create a server identical to Lucent's PathStar.

``We do know that a substantial amount of the source code, which is the crown jewel of the system, was stored on their Web site,'' he said.

Corporate piracy is not an uncommon occurrence, especially for companies striving to develop new technologies.

Richard Heffernan, president of security consulting company R.J. Heffernan Associates of Branford, Connecticut, said that estimates of how much money U.S. companies lose to corporate spying each year vary widely.

``The estimates have really been all over the place -- from $10 million to $250 million. It's extremely difficult to estimate the amount that is lost,'' he said.

The timing is not good for struggling Lucent, which reported a $3.7 billion fiscal second-quarter loss last week and is in the midst of a $2.7 billion restructuring, including other one-time costs. It reported a $1 billion first-quarter loss in January and announced plans to cut its work force by 16,000 jobs, or 15 percent.

Lucent sports a largely aging product line, which has cost it significant market share. Its chairman was ousted last October and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is now probing sales Lucent said last fall were improperly booked.

While Lucent has recently cut into its debt burden by selling its power systems unit and spinning off its Agere Systems (AGRa.N) optical components business, investor concerns led Lucent in early April to deny rumors it was planning to file for bankruptcy protection.

Lucent shares ended trading Thursday down 62 cents, or 5.5 percent, at $10.70. Over the past year, the shares have underperformed the Standard & Poor's 500 Index by 80 percent.

-------- terrorism

North Korea Lashes Out at U.S.

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-NKorea-Terrorism.html

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea berated the United States on Thursday for putting the communist state on its annual list of countries sponsoring terrorists, calling Washington the ``kingpin of international terrorism.''

The harsh verbal attack came three days after the U.S. State Department released the names of North Korea and six other countries it considers sponsors of terrorism.

Being on the list prevents hunger-stricken North Korea from receiving U.S. economic assistance, including support for its loan requests to the World Bank and other international lending institutions.

``This is a provocative criminal move of the Bush administration to internationally isolate the Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea,'' said the North's official news agency, KCNA.

The report said the United States was not entitled to accuse other nations of terrorism, describing U.S. airstrikes on Iraq as terrorist acts designed to overthrow a sovereign state.

KCNA said the U.S. terrorism list was ``aimed at concealing its true colors as the kingpin of international terrorism.'' North Korea was opposed to all forms of terrorism, it said.

North Korea was first put on the terrorist list in 1998 because of its alleged involvement in the bombing of a South Korean airliner in the skies near Myanmar, also known as Burma, in 1987. All 115 people aboard the Korean Air flight died.

Removing its name from the list was North Korea's key condition for improving ties with Washington.

During the last months of former President Clinton's term, Washington and Pyongyang held a series of high-level talks over the possibility of ending the North's program to develop and export long-range missiles and removing its name from the list of terrorist countries.

In October, the State Department even released a joint U.S.-North Korean communique in which North Korea said it opposed all forms of terrorism. In return, Washington hinted at its willingness to remove the country from the list.

However, the hard-line North Korean regime sharply escalated its anti-U.S. rhetoric after the inauguration of Bush, who said he was skeptical about the communist state and would not resume a dialogue with it any time soon.

--------

Armenian Nationalist Set Free

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Armenia-Nationalist-Freed.html

YEREVAN, Armenia (AP) -- Serving a prison sentence for terrorism in France, Armenian nationalist Varuzhan Karapetian painted pictures, served in a prison workshop and saw his dream of Armenian independence come true.

He was convicted in 1983 of planting a bomb that killed eight people and sentenced to life imprisonment. Freed last month, Karapetian made his first public appearance in Armenia on Thursday.

``Liberation from life imprisonment is like resurrection from the dead,'' he said at a news conference in Yerevan Thursday, promising to dedicated himself to ``serving the people.''

He had become a symbol of the struggle for Armenian rights among the diaspora. Armenian President Robert Kocharian had appealed to French head of state Jacques Chirac for a pardon, although not all Armenians approved of his violent acts.

Armenia was part of the Soviet Union until 1991. Armenian nationalists also struggled to draw attention to Armenia's suffering under Ottoman Turkish rule including mass deaths during World War I.

France this year joined a handful of countries officially describing those killings as genocide, and Karapetian's release was seen as tied to France's position on the issue.

Turkey has maintained that the deaths don't amount to genocide and that Armenians were killed or displaced as the Ottoman Empire tried to quell civil unrest.

Karapetian was convicted of assisting the group ASALA which planted a bomb at a Turkish Air counter in Orly airport south of Paris. The blast killed eight people and wounded 15 others.

An appeals court freed Karapetian on April 23 after he expressed remorse for the killings, and deported him to Armenia. Over the years, he had sent his wages from working in prison to relatives of the bombing victims.

-------- activists

Anti - Government Protest in Algiers After Riots

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-algeria.html

ALGIERS (Reuters) - Thousands of anti-government demonstrators took to the streets of Algiers Thursday in protest against a violent police crackdown in the Berber region of Kabylie in which more than 40 people have been killed.

The march organized by the main opposition party, the Socialist Forces Front (FFS), was the biggest in the North African capital in four years. Organizers said it drew about 25,000 people, while police put the turnout at 10,000.

Chanting ``government, terrorist,'' the protesters called for an international probe into the killing by security forces of at least 41 young rioters last week in Kabylie.

The marchers dispersed peacefully and there were no reports of incidents.

``We're here to pay homage to the victims of the repression in Kabylie and to make sure it never happens again,'' one student said.

Clashes between young Berbers and police broke out again on Thursday in the troubled north-eastern province, residents said.

In Bejaia, 155 miles east of Algiers, security forces threw tear gas canisters near the university to prevent hundreds of students marching into the city center.

At least 11 protesters were injured including a 14-year-old boy hit by gunfire, the town mayor, Rachid Chabati, told Reuters by telephone.

Residents said shops were closed and described the situation in the coastal city as very tense.

COMMISSION OF INQUIRY

In Algiers, hundreds of students -- up to 3,000, witnesses said, but only 400 according to the official APS news agency -- marched before the FFS protest, chanting ``government, murderer,'' ``gendarmes, criminals'' in Arabic and in French.

There were no reports of clashes as they gathered in front of the government building cordoned off by police.

The government said 42 people were killed, including one paramilitary gendarme, and nearly 600 injured in the week-long riots sparked by the shooting in a gendarmerie of a teenage student on April 18.

Algerian media have reported that riot police shot up to 80 people dead.

Wednesday President Abdelaziz Bouteflika appointed a respected lawyer and university professor, Mohand Issad, to head an independent commission of inquiry into the riots.

Issad said he had received ``full powers'' to name the members of the commission, set procedures of investigation and summon people for questioning, the government daily El Moudjahid said.

Berber militants have long demanded recognition of their Tamazight tongue as an official language.

However, residents in Kabylie, a traditional hotbed of opposition to central rule, said the unrest went far beyond the issue of regional identity and culture and included wider social demands like access to jobs and better housing.

Angry youths also denounced what they called the contempt that gendarmes, seen as corrupt and brutal, show to the population.

--------

Falun Gong to Protest in HK During Jiang Visit

May 3, 2001
New York Times
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-rights-.html

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Followers of the Falun Gong spiritual movement in Hong Kong said on Thursday they had received police permission to protest during Chinese President Jiang Zemin's planned visit to the territory next week.

A leader of the movement in Hong Kong told Reuters he expected over 200 people to participate in mass outdoor exercises to take place on May 8, the first day of the three-day Fortune Global Forum which Jiang is scheduled to attend.

``We estimate around 200 local practitioners will participate. Some overseas practitioners also plan to come,'' Falun Gong spokesman Kan Hung-cheung told Reuters.

But Kan said the location of the protest zone was far from ideal because it would be a fair distance away from the venue of the forum.

He would not say where exactly the demonstration would take place, but added the group would announce details of the arrangement on Saturday.

Members hope the session would draw world attention to what it called ``cruel persecution'' of Falun Gong adherents in mainland China.

Falun Gong, which combines meditation and exercise with Buddhists and Taoist teachings, was banned in China in July 1999 but remains legal in Hong Kong.

Apart from the exercise session, members also plan to distribute flyers, hold a photo exhibition and seminar as well as hand a petition to Jiang.

During a Falun Gong conference in January in Hong Kong, the followers blamed Jiang personally for trying to crush the movement in China.

Local officials in Hong Kong subsequently said they would tighten their watch on the group for fear it would disrupt the territory's stability.

Kan said police had implied the protest this time around should not include personal attacks against anyone but he said the group would still erect banners with Jiang's name on them.

Analysts see the upcoming event as the toughest test yet to Hong Kong's promised freedom since the former colony's handover from Britain to China in mid-1997.

Hong Kong leader Tung Chee-hwa issued his sternest warning yet to the Falun Gong last week accusing the practitioners of deliberately undermining ties between Hong Kong and Beijing and seeking to damage Hong Kong interests with its planned protest during Jiang's visit.

----

Catonsville Journal: Keeping Alive the Spirit of Vietnam War Protest

by Francis X. Clines
Thursday, May 3, 2001
New York Times
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/0503-02.htm

CATONSVILLE, Md. - As they round out their eighth decade, the Berrigan brothers, Philip and Daniel, are entitled to retire from the protest wars, but they are still up to their fervid old ways of getting arrested in nonviolent resistance to American military policy.

No one is more delighted at their constancy than Alva Grubb, one of the jurors who reluctantly convicted Phil Berrigan 33 years ago in one of the brothers' then-famous protest trials - the "Baltimore Four" resisters who spilled pig's blood on military draft records and helped stoke the furious national debate over the morality of the Vietnam War.

Never ones to protest once, the Berrigans, amid that trial, organized the Catonsville Nine act of resistance: They walked into the Knights of Columbus Hall here in their Catholic clerical garb, seized documents from the Selective Service military draft board and burned them in the parking lot.

"This little village never got over the audacity of their protest," said Ms. Grubb, a 79-year-old resident who opposed the Vietnam War then and now. "But just look at Phil Berrigan all these years later, still getting arrested for the courage of his convictions. He had very strong opinions and that's what this country is about."

Two years' fresh imprisonment in Ohio for nonviolent interference with a modern weapons system is the reason Phil Berrigan, 77, will miss the Maryland Film Festival's premiere on Thursday of "Investigation of a Flame." This is a documentary by Lynne Sachs about the protest events that made this unpretentious suburb on the cusp of Baltimore a flash point for citizens' resistance at the height of the war.

"Phil's been consistent; he's been faithful; he's been stalwart;" said Elizabeth McAlister, his wife. She awaits his next return from prison to Jonah House, a Baltimore religious residence for eight people who are still dedicated to a level of nonviolent protest forged in the Catonsville Nine days.

"Phil's been amazing," said Ms. McAlister, who noted that Daniel Berrigan, who will be 80 on Sunday, has not lost his protest edge either. "Dan was last arrested Good Friday" at a demonstration in New York.

After the film is shown at The Senator theater in Baltimore, there will be a discussion featuring protest participants, law enforcement principals and assorted adherents of the Berrigans' tradition.

"I left the seminary in '67 to protest the war," said Brendan Walsh, a gray-haired activist just up the road in West Baltimore at Viva House, once a sanctuary for conscientious objectors and now a soup kitchen for the city's teeming poor. "The war keeps coming back; it's forever," said Mr. Walsh, noting how it retains a definitive power in American life, exemplified lately by former Senator Bob Kerrey's admission of killing Vietnamese women and children.

"Back then, we thought Vietnam was some terrible aberration but the country would come to its senses so that we could engage the poverty of the cities," Mr. Walsh said, grimacing. "To see 250,000 flee this city since then and things get worse for the poor - that's the craziest thing of all about that war."

Ms. Sachs, who created an earlier documentary in touring post- war Vietnam, lives here and decided to explore the protest story as Catonsville's asterisk in history. She found assorted characters still firm to fiery on the topic. The Selective Service clerk, Mary Murphy, once a famous figure here for signing every eligible male's draft card, remains opposed to what she views as the Berrigans' intrusion on the government's war mission, just as Ms. McAlister remains proud.

"This has been an odyssey," said Ms. Sachs, a 39-year-old who has been fascinated since childhood by the war's divisiveness. "I'm interested in pivotal choices people make in their lives, the moments from which there's no turning back," she said, noting she came to admire the consistency of the mutual antagonists in an argument that still rages.

At the Knights of Columbus hall, the only contentious event in sight lately was a bingo game. But Wilbur Baldwin, a 79-year-old veteran of World War II, recalled the Catonsville Nine days and his distaste for the behavior of the dissenters.

"The Berrigans are troublemakers," Mr. Baldwin said. "That's a war we never won," he said, looking back and glowering as he blamed the use of the defoliant Agent Orange for the death of his brother, Frankie, in Vietnam. This was exactly the sort of war technology decried by the Berrigans, but Mr. Baldwin was adamant. "The Berrigans are troublemakers."

And on a good day, they remain troublemakers, by the accounting of Tom Lewis, one of the Baltimore Four who, like the Berrigans, has been arrested many times over the years. Most recently Mr. Lewis, a 60-year-old artist close to the Catholic Worker movement in Worcester, Mass., was arrested at a Raytheon weapons factory where he prayed and blocked a road to protest against a part of the Star Wars research program known as the "Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle."

"My feeling is the Vietnam War was a war against the poor," said Mr. Lewis. He views Star Wars as a continuation of the same issue from his protest youth, contending that it shows military spending as overshadowing the unmet needs of the poor. "There's been a certain consistency in making nonviolent creative statements against the madness," the aging protester said as he took inventory on all the troublemaking still sparked by the Catonsville Nine. "An important consistency."

---

Igniting a movement
Lynne Sachs' new documentary on the Catonsville Nine shows us an era of protest beginning with soul-searching and civility.

By Carl Schoettler
Baltimore Sun Staff
May 3, 2001
From: Max Obuszewski - MObuszewski@afsc.org [See note below.]

The Catonsville Nine have become legendary in the three decades since the group's May 1968 "action" against the war in Vietnam, perhaps the most famous protest during an epoch of dissent and discord in the United States.

Filmmaker Lynne Sachs takes a fresh look at the seven men and two women who made up the Catonsville Nine, their friends and their detractors in her impressionistic documentary, "Investigation of a Flame," which opens the Baltimore Film Festival tonight.

Sachs, who has been making films since 1989, moved to Catonsville about three years ago when her husband, Mark, also a filmmaker, took a teaching post at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

She began hearing Catonsville Nine stories. She heard people once arrived at UMBC believing Catonsville was a hotbed of radicalism because of the Nine. She started reading about their protest, and she was hooked. She began looking up the people caught up in the action, and her project began taking shape.

Howard Zinn, the historian who wrote "A People's History of the United States," told her that the Catonsville Nine "became a kind of model for all the others. There was the Milwaukee Fourteen and the Camden 28 and the Boston Five."

All the "Number People," as they were then called, mostly disparagingly, and all the others who protested against the war, went to jail and helped bring about peace.

As a reminder for people for whom the war in Vietnam seems as remote as the Peloponnesian War, the Nine entered a Catonsville draft board, took records and burned them in a trash container in the parking lot.

The Catonsville Nine may have been models for the dissent that followed, but their protest was the most civil of disobedience.

"The myth of the '60s is that anybody who cared had long hair and was on psychedelic drugs," says Sachs, 39. "They were living an alternative lifestyle, so they had these alternative ideas."

But in archival footage she unearthed, mostly unseen for three decades, the action unfolds almost as a religious rite, purification by fire, perhaps. The Nine clasp hands and recite the Lord's Prayer. They apologize for jostling a couple of clerks. They finally file quietly into a paddy wagon as a cop counts them off, "... seven, eight, nine."

The whole action takes perhaps 10 minutes.

"I was kind of intrigued by it as a kind of performance piece," Sachs says.

She's not a political documentarian. Her style is impressionistic, her images lyrical, as Jed Dietz, the director of the Baltimore Film Festival suggests, even poetic. She found her closest rapport with Daniel Berrigan, for example, when they talked about his poetry.

"To me it was like they were in their costumes, their clerical collars and the women in their skirts," she says, of the action. "I think it was very well thought out. It was saying that they were people from Middle America, citizens of the United States who were passionately against the war."

"And they were older, too," Sachs adds.

Daniel Berrigan was the oldest at 47, Philip was next at 44, all the rest except Tom Lewis, 28, and David Darst, 26, were in their 30s. They were not counterculture hippies, rebelling against their parents.

Darst died in an automobile crash in October 1969. Mary Moylan, who was in her late 30s in May 1968, went underground for nearly 10 years after the trial. She died alone and infirm in April 1995.

The tone in the archival footage is quiet, almost somber. The Nine seem a bit uneasy. They were uneasy, even Daniel Berrigan.

He recalls for Sachs that his brother was awaiting sentencing in the 1967 Baltimore Four protest, where he helped pour blood over draft files at the Custom House. Daniel was a professor at Cornell University when Philip came up in the spring of 1968.

"He said some of us are going to do it again, and you're invited," Daniel Berrigan says. "Whereupon I started quaking in my boots."

Berrigan's face in close-up in Sachs' film is a glowing landscape of the furrows and planes earned in a lifetime of activism and poetry. He will be 80 next Wednesday.

"It had never really occurred to me that I would ever take part in something that serious as far as consequences went," he says. "The idea of putting myself in the furnace of the king ... was pretty shocking and new.

"So I told Philip give me a few days to think this over and pray over it, and I'll let you know. So I did. I went through some pretty serious soul-searching and talked to my family. I couldn't see any reason not to do it. I didn't want to do it. But I couldn't not do it."

Sachs has been making documentaries since 1989, when she completed her thesis film for a masters of fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute. (She received her undergraduate degree in history at Brown University.)

She'd grown up in Memphis, Tenn., and her first film was "Sermons and Sacred Pictures: The Life and Work of Rev. L. O. Taylor." He was a fiery African-American minister from Memphis who made his own films of black life in the south in the 1930s and 1940s.

She's made a half-dozen movies since then, notably "Which Way Is East." Her sister, Dana, lived in Hanoi for about five years, fell in love with Vietnam and produced her own book: "The House on Dream Street: Memoirs of an American Woman in Vietnam."

Sachs visited her for a month or so in 1992. They traveled from Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi, and Sachs came back with the makings of a film about her relationship with her sister and Vietnamese culture. Her trip to Hanoi also gave her a certain cachet with the Catonsville Nine.

For the Catonsville film, she often had to catch her subjects more or less on the run. She interviewed Philip Berrigan in her car.

"Which isn't the most visually alluring thing," she says. "He was only out of prison for about a year in this whole project, and he had warned me there was going to be another action and either I was going to talk to him or he was going to be out of commission."

Philip Berrigan is jail today. He's serving out a sentence for banging on some military airplanes at the National Guard base at Middle River in an anti-nuclear "action" aimed at highlighting U.S. use of depleted uranium weapons.

"I called him one day," Sachs says, "and I said can I interview you sometime in the next week, and it was raining. And he said you have to do it today, right now, because I paint houses for a living. If you want to do it we have to do it now because I can't paint the house I was going to paint.

"I had none of my equipment. Nobody to help me. I had to pick him up in my car and go to the Knights of Columbus building."

The building housed the Catonsville draft board office in 1968.

"He wouldn't go inside. So we had to do it in the car," she says. "This was the closest he wanted to get to that building and to those memories and to that time.

"I can't achieve identity with the poor except when I'm in jail," Berrigan says. "When I start feeling sorry with myself, I always tend to think about what it would mean if I stopped. That's a terrible prospect, and I've never been able to acclimate to that. And I won't. I hope that I can keep going until ... until I die."

A letter from Mary Moylan, while she was underground, is read in the film. "I very definitely think of myself as a criminal," Moylan says in the letter. "I think if we're serious about changing this society, that's how we have to see ourselves. We're all out on bail, and let's all stay out."

Sachs caught Tom Lewis, the artist who was at both the Catonsville Nine and Baltimore Four protests with Berrigan, coming out of prison.

"He was walking out the door," she says, when she showed up to interview him. His wife, Andrea, and daughter, Nora, then 6, were there, too. Nora, a lovely child, blonde and blue-eyed, nestles in his arms during the film interview and walks with her father in the woods as he answers questions.

Lewis was in Allenwood for an anti-nuclear "action" at the Bath Iron Works in Maine, where he and Philip Berrigan and Susan Crane from Jonah House and three others poured blood on an Aegis destroyer, hammered on the components of missile launchers and unfurled their Prince of Peace Plowshares banner.

The Catonsville Nine survivors all remain social and political activists. And for that matter Mary Murphy, a clerk at the draft board now in her middle 90s, still believes she was doing the right thing.

"I was sold on the idea we were trying to fight communism in that part of the world," she told Sachs.

Steve Sachs (no relation to the filmmaker), who led the prosecution of the Nine, hasn't changed his position one whit in 33 years. He opposed the war, but his belief in the sanctity of the law seemed and seems immutable: The Nine erred when they took the law into their own hands at Catonsville. In the film, he reads from St. Thomas More, the great Catholic humanist lawyer beheaded by Henry VIII, to argue his case.

"I didn't feel any sense of guilt or regret at prosecuting what I regarded as excessive, arrogant attempts to inflict their views on others," says Steve Sachs. "That's not the way democracy is supposed to work."

Steve Sachs and Mary Murphy, and Daniel Berrigan, John Hogan, George Mische, Tom and Marjorie Melville from the Catonsville Nine, and their admirers and supporters, detractors and opponents plan to be at the premier of Lynne Sachs' film tonight.

"Jed Dietz said let's bring everybody in and see what happens," Sachs says. " 'Let's put all these live wires together and see what incendiary events we get.' "

"None of them have seen the movie," she says. "And they're all coming."

[Note - there is a slight inaccuracy in the article appearing below. Philip Berrigan is in prison today because of the Feb. 12, 1997 Prince of Peace Plowshares action at the Bath Iron Works in Maine with five others. After serving his original prison sentence, he was released on federal probation. After completing his sentence for his Dec. 19, 1999 role in the Plowshares Vs. Depleted Uranium disarmament near Baltimore, he returned to Maine for a probation violation hearing. Convicted of probation violation in federal court in Portland, Maine, Phil is currently serving a one-year sentence. Max Obuszewski mailto:MObuszewski@afsc.org]


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