------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
THE SECRET NUCLEAR WAR
Power Company Stocks Fall
Japan village mayor says MOX use tough after vote
JAPAN: SEEKING TRUST IN NUCLEAR POWER
Japanese leader to visit White House
Missile mirage
NATO Divided on Missile Defense
From remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell
Powell, Ivanov Meet in Hungary
Robertson Denies NATO Quarrel Over Missile Defense
U.S. Satisfied With Missile Reaction
In New Chair, Biden Will Try to Broaden Missile Review
Powell Fails to Persuade NATO on Antimissile Plan
Military Analysis: Russia's Role in Missile Defense
NZ Prime Minister addresses CNN on disarmament
NATO drops its support of ABM pact
FLORIDA NUKE PLANT CATCHES DOZENS OF SEA TURTLES
Nevada Nuke Dump Support Withdrawn
Errors in Yucca calculations found
Senate votes $4 million for fight against nuke waste dump
Yucca clout
Ex-DOE official says mothball Yucca dump
Former DOE official recants support for Yucca Mountain
Berkley bill would divert Yucca funds
Nuke panel finds errors in DOE plan
Regulators find errors in report on Yucca Mountain nuclear dump
'United front' rejects nuke bills

MILITARY
S. Africa Truth Commission Closes Shop
Sudan criticizes U.S. aid to rebels
Police Ousted From Bosnian Force
NATO, EU Talk Cooperation in Balkans
Supporting Macedonia
Croatia asks U.S. not to pull troops
A war to end all scores
Beijing prompts invasion fears
Colombia: Drug Runs Increased in May
Iran masses troops for war games near Iraq
Powell OKs Delay on Iraq Sanctions
Judge Orders Iraq to Pay 4 Americans $13 Million
Mitchell report missed it
Vieques Exercises to Resume in June
Panel Advises Quarantine for Any Material From Mars
Missile Goes Astray in Sweden
Surface - To - Air Missile Goes Astray
After war, send blue force
Pentagon Scaling Back Expectations
Pentagon Official Delays India Visit

OTHER
Bush won't cap energy costs
Power Company Stocks Fall
President Touts Environmental Agenda
E.P.A. Supports Rule to Reduce Haze in Parks
Toxic spill in ocean could affect China for years
Germany Torn Over Genetic Research
Amnesty Focuses on Globalization
Africa Child Labor Numbers on Rise
Amnesty: Ivory Coast Poor on Rights
China Detains Six Dissidents
EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: U.S. CLEARED OF SPYING
The Guardian, London, on the Echelon network:
Japanese Cultist Sentenced to Life
Searching for Bin Laden
U.S. Still Hopes to Nab bin Laden

ACTIVISTS
Martin Sheen denounces nuclear warheads production
Amnesty Annual Report Focuses on Globalization
IANSA WOMEN'S CAUCUS EMAIL NEWS
China Detains Six Dissidents


------- NUCLEAR

THE SECRET NUCLEAR WAR

The Ecologist
May 30, 2001
http://www.theecologist.org/nuke.html

How many deaths is the nuclear industry already responsible for? http://www.theecologist.org/Eco-Pics/nuke4.gif

The equivalent of a nuclear war has already happened. Over the last halfcentury, millions have died as a result of accidents, experiments, lies and coverups by the nuclear industry. Eduardo Goncalves pulls together a number of examples, and counts the fearful total cost.

Hugo Paulino was proud to be a fusilier. He was even prouder to be serving as a UN peacekeeper in Kosovo. It was his chance to help the innocent casualties of war. His parents did not expect him to become one. Hugo, says his father Luis, died of leukaemia caused by radiation from depleted uranium (DU) shells fired by NATO during the Kosovo war. He was one of hundreds of Portuguese peacekeepers sent to Klina, an area heavily bombed with these munitions. Their patrol detail included the local lorry park, bombed because it had served as a Serb tank reserve, and the Valujak mines, which sheltered Serbian troops. In their time off, the soldiers bathed in the river and gratefully supplemented their tasteless rations with local fruit and cheeses given to them by thankful nuns from the convent they guarded. Out of curiosity, they would climb inside the destroyed Serbian tanks littering the area. Hugo arrived back in Portugal from his tour of duty on 12 February 2000, complaining of headaches, nausea and 'flulike symptoms'. Ten days later, on 22 February, he suffered a major seizure. He was rushed to Lisbon's military hospital, where his condition rapidly deteriorated. On 9 March, he died. He was 21. The military autopsy, which was kept secret for 10 months, claimed his death was due to septicaemia and 'herpes of the brain'. Not so, says Luis Paulino. 'When he was undergoing tests, a doctor called me over and said he thought it could be from radiation.' It was only then that Luis learnt about the uranium shells - something his son had never been warned about or given protective clothing against. He contacted doctors and relatives of Belgian and Italian soldiers suspected of having succumbed to radiation poisoning. 'The similarities were extraordinary', he said. 'My son had died from leukaemia. That is why the military classified the autopsy report and wanted me to sign over all rights to its release.' Today, Kosovo is littered with destroyed tanks, and pieces of radioactive shrapnel. NATO forces fired 31,000 depleted uranium shells during the Kosovo campaign, and 10,800 into neighbouring Bosnia. The people NATO set out to protect - and the soldiers it sent out to protect them - are now dying. According to Bosnia's health minister, Boza Ljubic, cancer deaths among civilians have risen to 230 cases per 100,000 last year, up from 152 in 1999. Leukaemia cases, he added, had doubled. Scientists predict that the use of DU in Serbia will lead to more than 10,000 deaths from cancer among local residents, aid workers, and peacekeepers. Belated confessions that plutonium was also used may prompt these estimates to be revised. But while NATO struggles to stave off accusations of a coverup, the Balkans are merely the newest battlefield in a silent world war that has claimed millions of lives. Most of its victims have died not in warzones, but in ordinary communities scattered across the globe.

The hidden deaths of Newbury Far away from the wartorn Balkans is Newbury, a prosperous whitecollar industrial town in London's commuter belt. On its outskirts is Greenham Common, the former US Air Force station that was one of America's most important strategic bases during the Cold War. The base was closed down after the signing of the INF (Intermediate Nuclear Forces) Treaty by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The nuclear threat was over. Or so people thought. In August 1993, Ann Capewell - who lived just one mile away from the base's former runway - died of acute myeloid leukaemia. She was 16 when she passed away, just 40 days after diagnosis. As they were coming to terms with their sudden loss, her parents - Richard and Elizabeth - were surprised to find a number of other cases of leukaemia in their locality. The more they looked, the more cases they found. 'Many were just a stone's throw from our front door,' says Richard, 'mainly cases of myeloid leukaemia in young people.' What none of them knew was that they were the victims of a nuclear accident at Greenham Common that had been carefully covered up by successive British and American administrations. On February 28 1958, a laden B47 nuclear bomber was awaiting clearance for takeoff when it was suddenly engulfed in a huge fireball. Another bomber flying overhead had dropped a full fuel tank just 65 feet away. The plane exploded and burnt uncontrollably for days. As did its deadly payload. A secret study by scientists at Britain's nearby nuclear bomb laboratory at Aldermaston documented the fallout, but the findings were never disclosed. The report showed how radioactive particles had been 'glued' to the runway surface by firefighters attempting to extinguish the blazing bomber - and that these were now being slowly blown into Newbury and over other local communities by aircraft jet blast. Virtually all the cases of leukaemias and lymphomas are in a band stretching from Greenham Common into south Newbury,' says Elizabeth. However, the British government continues to deny the cluster's existence, whilst the Americans still insist there was no accident. Yet this was just one of countless disasters, experiments and officially sanctioned activities which the nuclear powers have kept a closely guarded secret. Between them, they have caused a global human death toll which is utterly unprecedented and profoundly shocking.

Broken Arrows In 1981, the Pentagon publicly released a list of 32 'Broken Arrows' - official military terminology for an accident involving a nuclear weapon. The report gave few details and did not divulge the location of some accidents. It was prepared in response to mounting media pressure about possible accident coverups. But another US government document, this time secret, indicates that the official report may be seriously misleading. It states that 'a total of 1,250 nuclear weapons have been involved in accidents during handling, storage and transportation', a number of which 'resulted in, or had high potential for, plutonium dispersal.' Washington has never acknowledged the human consequences of even those few accidents it admits to, such as the Thule disaster in Greenland in 1968. When a B52 bomber crashed at this secret nuclear base, all four bombs detonated, and a cloud of plutonium rose 800 metres in the air, blowing deadly radioactive particles hundreds of miles. The authorities downplayed the possibility of any health risks. But today, many local Eskimos, and their huskies, suffer from cancer, and over 300 people involved in the cleanup operation alone have since died of cancer and mysterious illnesses. We may never know the true toll from all the bomb accidents, as the nuclear powers classify these disasters not as matters of public interest but of 'national security' instead. Indeed, it is only now that details are beginning to emerge of some accidents at bomb factories and nuclear plants that took place several decades ago.

Soviet sins In 1991, Polish filmmaker Slawomir Grunberg was invited to a little known town in Russia's Ural mountains that was once part of a topsecret Soviet nuclear bombmaking complex. What he found was a tragedy of extraordinary dimensions, largely unknown to the outside world, and ignored by postCold War leaders. His film - Chelyabinsk: The Most Contaminated Spot on the Planet - tells the story of the disasters at the Soviet Union's first plutonium factory, and the poisoning of hundreds of thousands of people. For years, the complex dumped its nuclear waste - totalling 76 million cubic metres - into the Techa River, the sole water source for scores of local communities that line its banks. According to a local doctor, people received an average radiation dose 57 times higher than that of Chernobyl's inhabitants. In 1957, there was an explosion at a waste storage facility that blew 2 million curies of radiation into the atmosphere. The kilometrehigh cloud drifted over three Soviet provinces, contaminating over 250,000 people living in 217 towns and villages. Only a handful of local inhabitants were ever evacuated. 10 years later, Lake Karachay, also used as a waste dump, began to dry up. The sediment around its shores blew 5 million curies of radioactive dust over 25,000 square kilometres, irradiating 500,000 people. Even today, the lake is so 'hot' that standing on its shore will kill a person within one hour. Grunberg's film tells of the terrible toll of these disasters on local families, such as that of Idris Sunrasin, whose grandmother, parents and three siblings have died of cancer. Leukaemia cases increased by 41 per cent after the plant began operations, and the average life span for women in 1993 was 47, compared to 72 nationally. For men it was just 45.

The secret nuclear war Russia's nuclear industry is commonly regarded as cavalier in regard to health and safety. But the fact is that the nuclear military industrial complex everywhere has been quite willing to deliberately endanger and sacrifice the lives of innocent civilians to further its ambitions. The US government, for example, recently admitted its nuclear scientists carried out over 4,000 experiments on live humans between 1944 and 1974. They included feeding radioactive food to disabled children, irradiating prisoners' testicles, and trials on newborn babies and pregnant mothers. Scientists involved with the Manhattan Project injected people with plutonium without telling them. An autopsy of one of the victims reportedly showed that his bones 'looked like Swiss cheese'. At the University of Cincinnati, 88 mainly lowincome, black women were subjected to huge doses of radiation in an experiment funded by the military. They suffered acute radiation sickness. Nineteen of them died.

The effect on people's lives: Luis Paulino (left) at a press conference following the death of his son, Hugo; Greenpeace protesters (right) pour concrete into a discharge pipe from the Aldermaston nuclear and weapons research facility.

Details of many experiments still remain shrouded in secrecy, whilst little is known of the more shocking ones to come to light - such as one when a man was injected with what a report described as 'about a lethal dose' of strontium89. In Britain too, scientists have experimented with plutonium on newborn babies, ethnic minorities and the disabled. When American colleagues reviewed a British proposal for a joint experiment, they concluded: 'What is the worst thing that can happen to a human being as a result of being a subject? Death.' They also conducted experiments similar to America's 'Green Run' programme, in which 'dirty' radiation was released over populated areas in the western states of Washington and Oregon contaminating farmland, crops and water. The 'scrubber' filters in Hanford's nuclear stacks were deliberately switched off first. Scientists, posing as agriculture department officials, found radiation contamination levels on farms hundreds of times above 'safety' levels. But America's farmers and consumers were not told this, and the British public has never been officially told about experiments on its own soil.

Forty thousand Hiroshimas It is believed that the estimated 1,900 nuclear tests conducted during the Cold War released fallout equivalent to 40,000 Hiroshimas in every corner of the globe. Fission products from the Nevada Test site can be detected in the ecosystems of countries as far apart as South Africa, Brazil, and Malaysia. Here, too, ordinary people were guinea pigs in a global nuclear experiment. The public health hazards were known right from the beginning, but concealed from the public. A 1957 US government study predicted that recent American tests had produced an extra 2,000 'genetically defective' babies in the US each year, and up to 35,000 every year around the globe. They continued regardless. Ernest Sternglass's research shows how, in 1964, between 10,000 and 15,000 children were lost by miscarriage and stillbirth in New York state alone - and that there were some 10 to 15 times this number of foetal deaths across America.

Scientists at St Andrew 's University recently found that cells exposed to a dose of just two alpha particles of radiation produced as many cancers as much higher doses of radiation. They concluded that a single alpha particle of radiation could be carcinogenic. Herman Muller, who has received a Nobel Prize for his work,has shown how the human race's continuous exposure to so called 'low-level' radiation is causing a gradual reduction in its ability to survive, as successive generations are genetically damaged. The spreading and accumulation of even tiny genetic mutations pass through family lines, provoking allergies, asthma, juvenile diabetes, hypertension, arthritis, high blood cholesterol conditions, and muscular and bone defects. Dr Chris Busby (right), who has extensively researched the low-level radiation threat, has made a link between everyday radiation exposure and a range of modern ailments: 'There have been tremendous increases in diseases resulting from the breakdown of the immune system in the last 20 years: diabetes,asthma, AIDS and others which may have an immune system link, such as MS and ME. A whole spectrum of neurological conditions of unknown origin has developed'. Around the world, a pattern is emerging. For the first time in modern history, mortality rates among adults between the ages of 15 and 54 are actually increasing,and have been since 1982. In July 1983, the US Center for Birth Defects in Atlanta, Georgia, reported that physical and mental disabilities in the under-17s had doubled despite a reduction in diseases such as polio, and improved vaccines and medical care. Defects in new born babies doubled between the 1950s and 1980s, as did long-term debilitating diseases. The US Environmental Protection Agency adds that 23 per cent of US males were sterile in 1980,compared to 0.5 per cent in 1938. Above all,cancer is now an epidemic.In 1900,cancer account- ed for only 4 per cent of deaths in the US. Now it is the second leading cause of premature mortality. Worldwide, the World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates the number of cancers will double in most countries over the next 25 years. Within a few years,the chances of getting cancer in Britain will be as high as 40 per cent virtually the toss of a coin.

Those who lived closest to the test sites have seen their families decimated. Such as the 100,000 people who were directly downwind of Nevada's fallout. They included the Mormon community of St George in Utah, 100 miles away from 'Ground Zero' - the spot where the bombs were detonated. Cancer used to be virtually unheard of among its population. Mormons do not smoke or drink alcohol or coffee, and live largely off their own homegrown produce. Mormons are also highly patriotic. They believe government to be 'Godgiven', and do not protest. The military could afford to wait until the wind was blowing from the test site towards St George before detonating a device. After all, President Eisenhower had said: 'We can afford to sacrifice a few thousand people out there in defence of national security.' When the leukaemia cases suddenly appeared, doctors - unused to the disease - literally had no idea what it was. A nineyearold boy, misdiagnosed with diabetes, died after a single shot of insulin. Women who complained of radiation sickness symptoms were told they had 'housewife syndrome'. Many gave birth to terribly deformed babies that became known as 'the sacrifice babies'. Elmer Pickett, the local mortician, had to learn new embalming techniques for the small bodies of wasted children killed by leukaemia. He himself was to lose no fewer than 16 members of his immediate family to cancer. By the mid1950s, just a few years after the tests began, St George had a leukaemia rate 2.5 times the national average, whereas before it was virtually nonexistent. The total number of radiation deaths are said to have totalled 1,600 - in a town with a population of just 5,000. The military simply lied about the radiation doses people were getting. Former army medic Van Brandon later revealed how his unit kept two sets of radiation readings for test fallout in the area. 'One set was to show that no one received an [elevated] exposure' whilst 'the other set of books showed the actual reading. That set was brought in a locked briefcase every morning.'

Continuous fallout The world's population is still being subjected to the continuous fallout of the 170 megatons of longlived nuclear fission products blasted into the atmosphere and returned daily to earth by wind and rain - slowly poisoning our bodies via the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the water we drink. Scientists predict that millions will die in centuries to come from tests that happened in the 1950s and 1960s.

Lost dreams: Ann Capewell, who succumbed to acute myeloid leukaemia aged 16, and the plant at Sellafield near where she lived.

But whilst atmospheric testing is now banned, over 400 nuclear bomb factories and power plants around the world make 'routine discharges' of nuclear waste into the environment. Thousands of nuclear waste dumping grounds, many of them leaking, are contaminating soil and water every day. The production of America's nuclear weapons arsenal alone has produced 100 million cubic metres of longlived radioactive waste. The notorious Hanford plutonium factory - which produced the fissile materials for the Trinity test and Nagasaki bomb - has discharged over 440 billion gallons of contaminated liquid into the surrounding area, contaminating 200 square miles of groundwater, but concealed the dangers from the public. Officials knew as early as the late 1940s that the nearby Columbia River was becoming seriously contaminated and a hazard to local fishermen. They chose to keep information about discharges secret and not to issue warnings. In Britain, there are 7,000 sites licensed to use nuclear materials, 1,000 of which are allowed to discharge wastes. Three of them, closely involved in Britain's nuclear bomb programme, are located near the River Thames. Over the years, the Harwell, Aldermaston and Amersham plants have pumped millions of gallons of liquid contaminated with radioactive waste into the river. They did so in the face of opposition from government ministers and officials who said 'the 6 million inhabitants of London derive their drinking water from this source. Any increase in [radio]activity of the water supply would increase the genetic load on this comparatively large group.' One government minister even wrote of his fears that the dumping 'would produce between 10 and 300 severely abnormal individuals per generation'. Public relations officers at Harwell themselves added: 'the potential sufferers are 8 million in number, including both Houses of Parliament, Fleet Street and Whitehall'. These discharges continue to this day. Study after study has uncovered 'clusters' of cancers and high rates of other unusual illnesses near nuclear plants, including deformities and Down Syndrome. Exposure to radiation among Sellafield's workers, in northwest England, has been linked to a greater risk of fathering a stillborn child and leukaemia among offspring. Reports also suggest a higher risk of babies developing spina bifida in the womb. Although the plant denies any link, even official MAFF studies have shown high levels of contamination in locallygrown fruit and vegetables, as well as wild animals. The pollution from Sellafield alone is such that it has coated the shores of the whole of Britain - from Wales to Scotland, and even Hartlepool in northeastern England. A nationwide study organised by Harwell found that Sellafield 'is a source of plutonium contamination in the wider population of the British Isles'. Those who live nearest the plant face the greatest threat. A study of autopsy tissue by the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) found high plutonium levels in the lungs of local Cumbrians - 350 per cent higher than people in other parts of the country. Cancer clusters' have been found around nuclear plants across the globe - from France to Taiwan, Germany to Canada. A joint White House/US Department of Energy investigation recently found a high incidence of 22 different kinds of cancer at 14 different US nuclear weapons facilities around the country. Meanwhile, a Greenpeace USA study of the toxicity of the Mississippi river showed that from 196883 there were 66,000 radiation deaths in the counties lining its banks - more than the number of Americans who died during the Vietnam war.

Don't blame us Despite the growing catalogue of tragedy, the nuclear establishment has consistently tried to deny responsibility. It claims that only high doses of radiation - such as those experienced by the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs - are dangerous, though even here they have misrepresented the data. They say that the everyday doses from nuclear plant discharges, bomb factories and transportation of radioactive materials are 'insignificant', and that accidents are virtually impossible. The truth, however, is that the real number and seriousness of accidents has never been disclosed, and that the damage from fallout has been covered up. The nuclear establishment now grudgingly (and belatedly) accepts that there is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation, however 'low', yet the poisonous discharges continue. When those within the nuclear establishment try to speak out, they are harassed, intimidated - and even threatened. John Gofman, former head of Lawrence Livermore's biomedical unit, who helped produce the world's first plutonium for the bomb, was for years at the heart of the nuclear complex. He recalls painfully the time he was called to give evidence before a Congressional inquiry set up to defuse mounting concern over radiation's dangers. 'Chet Holifield and Craig Hosmer of the Joint Committee (on Atomic Energy) came in and turned to me and said: ÒJust what the hell do you think you two are doing, getting all those little old ladies in tennis shoes up in arms about our atomic energy program? There are people like you who have tried to hurt the Atomic Energy Commission program before. We got them, and we'll get you.Ó' Gofman was eventually forced out of his job. But the facts of his research - and that of many other scientists - speak for themselves.

The final reckoning But could radiation really be to blame for these deaths? Are the health costs really that great? The latest research suggests they are. It is only very recently that clues have surfaced as to the massive destructive power of radiation in terms of human health. The accident at Chernobyl will kill an estimated half a million people worldwide from cancer, and perhaps more. 90 per cent of children in the neighbouring former Soviet republic of Belarus are contaminated for life - the poisoning of an entire country's gene pool. Ernest Sternglass calculates that, at the height of nuclear testing, there were as many as 3 million foetal deaths, spontaneous abortions and stillbirths in the US alone. In addition, 375,000 babies died in their first year of life from radiationlinked diseases. Rosalie Bertell, author of the classic book No Immediate Danger, now revised and rereleased, has attempted to piece together a global casualty list from the nuclear establishment's own data. The figures she has come up with are chilling - but entirely plausible. Using the official 'radiation risk' estimates published in 1991 by the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP), and the total radiation exposure data to the global population calculated by the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) in 1993, she has come up with a terrifying tally: ¥ 358 million cancers from nuclear bomb production and testing ¥ 9.7 million cancers from bomb and plant accidents ¥ 6.6 million cancers from the 'routine discharges' of nuclear power plants (5 million of them among populations living nearby). ¥ As many as 175 million of these cancers could be fatal. Added to this number are no fewer than 235 million genetically damaged and diseased people, and a staggering 588 million children born with what are called 'teratogenic effects' - diseases such as brain damage, mental disabilities, spina bifida, genital deformities, and childhood cancers. Furthermore, says Bertell, we should include 'the problem of nonfatal cancers and of other damage which is debilitating but not counted for insurance and liability purposes' - such as the 500 million babies lost as stillbirths because they were exposed to radiation whilst still in the womb, but are not counted as 'official' radiation victims. It is what the nuclear holocaust peace campaigners always warned of if war between the old superpowers broke out, yet it has already happened and with barely a shot being fired. Its toll is greater than that of all the wars in history put together, yet noone is counted as among the war dead. Its virtually infinite killing and maiming power leads Rosalie Bertell to demand that we learn a new language to express a terrifying possibility: 'The concept of species annihilation means a relatively swift, deliberately induced end to history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act which requires a new word to describe it: omnicide'.

Eduardo Goncalves is a freelance journalist and environmental researcher. He is author of the reports Broken Arrow - Greenham Common's Secret Nuclear Accident and Nuclear Guinea Pigs - British Human Radiation Experiments, published by CND (UK), and was researcher to the film The Dragon that Slew St George. He is currently writing a book about the hidden history of the nuclear age.

In 1998 The Ecologist published an article by Terry Tempest Williams. Titled The Clan of OneBreasted Women, it is the author's account of her Utah Mormon family who one by one succumbed to cancer after military atomic testing in the Utah desert between 1951 and 1962. (See The Ecologist (printed version) Vol 28 No 2)

-------- business

Power Company Stocks Fall

By Brad Foss
AP Business Writer
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010530/aponline085246_001.htm

NEW YORK -- Investors in power companies who were sipping champagne after President Bush unveiled his national energy strategy got a bad case of the hiccups when Democrats regained control of the Senate.

Shares of companies that trade power climbed higher in the days following the release of the Bush plan. They've been sliding since Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont defected from the Republican Party, and Wall Street analysts say perceptions about the fate of the Bush plan are definitely a factor.

"The energy bill was so favorable it almost seemed like (power companies) got everything they would have asked for," said Barry Abramson, utility analyst at UBS Warburg. "Now it looks like everything is going to be more difficult to achieve, but not impossible."

The Bush plan seeks to give oil and gas drillers easier access to public lands, to speed up the review process for refinery and power plant expansions and spur renewed interest in nuclear power.

Shares of Calpine Corp., Dynegy Inc. and Mirant Corp., climbed steadily from May 16 to May 22 - the time between the release of the Bush plan and reports of a Senate shake-up.

These stocks began to descend on May 23, when Sen. Jeffords' plans were first reported, and have continued downward, with Calpine losing 10 percent, Dynegy slipping 12 percent and Mirant off nearly 13 percent by the end of the day Tuesday.

Still, analysts say investors may be overreacting.

"Despite the fanfare following the unveiling of President Bush's energy plan, we believed its chances of passage - even with a Republican majority - was slim at best," said Daniel Ford, head of Lehman Brothers' team of energy analysts. "With Jeffords move, the effort may be even more remote, but the most likely outcome, inaction, has not changed."

Ford acknowledged that talk of capping wholesale electricity prices for California has resurfaced in the Senate, though he dismissed the likelihood of this happening - even with a Democratic majority - because "Bush still has veto power and, to date, has been steadfastly against caps."

Democrats no doubt will emphasize conservation more than Republicans would have, but the momentum shift in the Senate will not be overly dramatic, according to Bill Breier, vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based group that represents utilities.

There will still be fierce battles over efforts to relax power plant emissions - a Bush proposal that would benefit coal burners - and proposals to expand the nation's electricity and natural gas infrastructure.

"There's going to have to be consensus and we've known that from the get-go," Breier said.

Analysts emphasized that it would be wrong to assume that much of the Bush energy plan is now dead-on-arrival with Democrats in control of the Senate.

For instance, attention has been given to the fact that Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat from New Mexico, will take over as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, replacing Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska.

But Bingaman supports legislation critical to the nuclear power industry, including the Price Anderson Act, a 1957 law set to expire in 2002 that limits corporate liability from a nuclear accident.

Other energy strategies favored by Bush, such as the deregulation of electricity markets and the construction of some 1,300 new power plants over the next 20 years, will not be affected by the Senate overhaul simply because their implementation is heavily dependent on state government, not federal, said Ray Niles, who analyzes the power and natural gas industries for Salomon Smith Barney.

"I don't think it makes a huge amount of difference," Niles said. "Things like increasing drilling were going to be a hard haul for the country anyway."

-------- japan

Japan village mayor says MOX use tough after vote

JAPAN: May 30, 2001
Story by Miho Yoshikawa
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10994

TOKYO - The mayor of a Japanese village that voted against the use of a controversial nuclear fuel said yesterday it would now be difficult to go ahead with plans to load the fuel next month.

In a meeting with the president of Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO) , Kariwa Mayor Hiroo Shinada said loading the recycled MOX fuel had been complicated by Sunday's referendum in which 53.4 percent of the villagers said "no" to its use.

"It is very difficult," he told reporters in Tokyo after the meeting when asked if plans for using MOX would go ahead.

The northern village of Kariwa is home to TEPCO's 8.2-megawatt Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant, which provides 20 percent of Tokyo's power supply, and the company had been planning to load the fuel during the plant's current maintenance period.

TEPCO must make a final decision on whether to load conventional nuclear fuel or MOX fuel at the reactor by mid-June.

A MOX fuel supporter, Shinada said he had told TEPCO President Nobuya Minami that the circumstances surrounding the use of the fuel were "difficult" given the referendum result.

He said he would postpone a final decision until after he held talks with the mayor of the nearby town of Kashiwazaki and the governor of northern Niigata Prefecture.

A TEPCO spokesman who was at the meeting said the crucial issue of whether the loading of MOX fuel will be postponed was not raised at the meeting.

Japan's energy industry and government say they remain committed to the use of MOX fuel - a blend of uranium and plutonium recycled from spent nuclear fuel - despite Sunday's vote.

But the result, while not binding, has created a dilemma for the government, which wants to make MOX a cornerstone of its energy policy.

GOVT STILL COMMITTED

Earlier yesterday, Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Takeo Hiranuma said that MOX was a necessary part of Japan's energy policy.

"It is a policy that we need for energy in the 21st century," Hiranuma said.

Resource-poor Japan had been due to start using MOX in 1999 but it was forced to delay its plan after a controversy surrounding state-owned British Nuclear Fuels Ltd's (BNFL) falsification of data on MOX fuel shipped to Kansai Electric Power Co Inc in western Japan.

Anti-MOX campaigners argue that the fuel is dangerous and does not make economic sense because it is more expensive than conventional nuclear fuel. And a series of nuclear power-related accidents has hurt public faith in the industry.

In Japan's worst nuclear accident in September 1999, two workers at a uranium processing plant died after being fatally exposed to radiation.

Mayor Shinada also met briefly with the Hiranuma after talks with Minami, but details of what were discussed were not immediately available, a ministry official said.

Nuclear power accounts for about a third of Japan's electric power supply.

----

JAPAN: SEEKING TRUST IN NUCLEAR POWER

New York Times
May 30, 2001
World Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/30/world/30BRIE.html

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he would have to work with electricity companies to persuade the public that nuclear power is safe. His statement came after voters in Kariwamura, 185 miles northwest of Tokyo, rejected plans by the country's biggest utility to use a hotly debated new technology at an existing nuclear plant that would allow it to burn a plutonium-uranium mixture created from the enriched spent fuel from other reactors. Howard French (NYT)

----

Japanese leader to visit White House

Washington Times
World Scene
May 30, 2001
Combined dispatches and staff reports
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010530-39941582.htm

TOKYO -- Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi will hold his first summit with President Bush on June 30 at Camp David, government officials said yesterday.

Japanese media reports said Mr. Koizumi hoped to confirm the strength of the two countries´ security relations and brief the U.S. president on his proposals for economic and other reforms.

-------- missile defense

Missile mirage

A BOSTON GLOBE
EDITORIAL
May 30, 2001
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/150/editorials/Missile_mirage+.shtml

IT HAS BEEN a bad week for President Bush's scheme to sell Russia and the NATO allies on the merits of missile defense and the correlative abandonment of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. These failures may be embarrassing for Bush, but they can become a blessing if they lead the president and his advisers to reconsider their heedless chase after the receding mirage of missile defense.

Russia's defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, said Monday that despite Washington's offers of defense contracts and cooperation in development of missile defenses ''nothing has changed'' in the Kremlin's opposition to any effort to abrogate the ABM Treaty.

NATO foreign ministers, gathered in Budapest for a meeting of the North Atlantic Council, refused yesterday to say that the alliance faced a ''common threat'' of missiles from rogue states - a phrase the administration wanted as a rationale for missile defense.

Instead the council's final communique said: ''We continue to place great importance on nonproliferation and export control regimes, international arms control, and disarmament as means to prevent proliferation.''

Beneath these polite phrases lies a deep division between the administration and Western allies. The assumption behind Bush's infatuation with the notion of missile defense is that arms control and disarmament accords are insufficient to protect against rogue regimes that may develop long-range missiles.

However, there is at present no technology for a workable missile defense, and no effective system can be envisioned before the end of this decade. Hence Bush is asking Moscow and the NATO allies to do something rash: throw away an international security system that is working for an American technological gamble that will not be available, under the best of circumstances, for many years.

Impatient attempts to develop missile defense, particularly if they entail an American abrogation of the ABM Treaty, are almost certain to provoke a new arms race in nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them.

If Bush unilaterally disavows America's commitment not to build elaborate missile defenses, he will stimulate deployment of more offensive weapons. He will also imperil the START II treaty limiting Russia's multiple-warhead missiles, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Missile Technology Control Regime, among other crucial arms control accords.

This is exactly what the Europeans and the Russians fear Bush is doing. The new Democratic committee chairmen in the Senate will be contributing to national security if they hold hearings on the technological difficulties and the security risks of scrapping the ABM Treaty for the boondoggle of missile defense.

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NATO Divided on Missile Defense
Europeans Rebuff Powell's Plea to Recognize 'Common Threat'

By William Drozdiak
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A92494-2001May29?language=printer

BUDAPEST, May 29 -- The United States clashed today with several European countries over whether NATO faces a serious risk of a missile attack from hostile states, reflecting deep misgivings in European capitals over the Bush administration's plans to press ahead with a missile defense system.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell sought unsuccessfully to convince his European counterparts that the alliance as a whole must take urgent measures to cope with a "common threat" posed by intercontinental ballistic missiles being developed by potential enemies such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

But European allies, notably France and Germany, rejected his appeal that they embrace the same security-risk assessment that the United States holds. They said raising the level of perceived threat was unreasonable because they did not feel endangered and did not deem it wise to provoke a potential confrontation by declaring that they were.

The conflict emerged at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers here -- the first ever in a former Warsaw Pact state -- as participants debated phrasing of a document listing NATO's defense priorities. While the dispute might appear trivial, it demonstrated the wide gap that separates the United States from much of the alliance over Washington's plans to build a missile shield.

Early this month, the United States dispatched a team of envoys to Europe and Asia in a bid to persuade friendly nations to cooperate with, or at least show sympathy for, its missile defense plans. But European governments have grown more antagonistic toward missile defense since the idea was revived in the waning days of the Clinton administration.

Since President Bush assumed office insisting that any anti-missile umbrella be large enough to protect allied countries as well as the United States, European governments have stepped up criticism of what they see as an expensive and unrealistic project that could trigger a global arms race by goading countries to develop new arsenals to overwhelm such defenses.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine expressed concern about the impact a defense system would have on arms control treaties and the danger of provoking an arms race. But he welcomed the prospect of further consultations with the United States and the Bush administration's willingness to keep open channels of discussion.

Washington maintains that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, signed in 1972 by the United States and the Soviet Union to restrict development of national missile defenses, has become obsolete and no longer corresponds to post-Cold War security threats. But many European governments still refer to it as "the cornerstone of strategic stability."

Until today's meeting, that language was enshrined in NATO's twice-annual policymaking reviews. But at Powell's insistence, the language was dropped from the communique, a gesture that European diplomats said was retribution for their refusal to endorse the "common threat" language sought by the United States in the passage on missile defense. Because NATO works by consensus, any member can exercise a veto.

To satisfy everybody, NATO approved consultations that "will include appropriate assessment of threats and address the full range of strategic issues affecting our common security, and the means to address them, including deterrence and offensive and defensive means, and enhancing the effectiveness of arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation, as well as diplomatic and counter-proliferation measures."

Powell acknowledged that "it may take some time" to persuade the allies to accept the administration's approach in dealing with a new strategic environment, but he expressed confidence that they will agree once they understand the nature of emerging threats and the technological potential to respond to them.

"I did not take a poll of everyone in the room today, but I think I can safely say there is recognition of some sort of threat out there and that it would be irresponsible for the United States not to do something about it," Powell said. "Some people see it as more immediate. Some see it as greater than perhaps others. But I don't think there's any question but that there's some sort of threat out there."

[In Washington, a senior administration official said the NATO meeting was a success, staff writer Alan Sipress reported. Despite the Europeans' accounts of major differences, the official said the ministers had accepted the U.S. position that alliance members are endangered by the spread of weapons of mass destruction and missiles to carry them. He said the administration was also pleased that the ministers welcomed further consultation about ways to address this threat, including through defensive systems.

[While the official acknowledged that NATO ministers had not signed on to the U.S. vision of missile defense, he said that the final communique, which dropped any reference to the ABM Treaty, represented a "huge" advance for the U.S. initiative.]

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From remarks by Secretary of State Colin Powell during a news conference yesterday in Budapest:

Washington Post
For the Record
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A94422-2001May29?language=printer

With respect to the strategic framework that we are consulting with our allies on, and the Russians and the Chinese and other concerned nations, I made it clear to my colleaguesthat President Bush sees this in terms of an overall strategic framework dealing with offensive weapons, missile defense, proliferation, nonproliferation, counterproliferation, cooperative arrangements and agreements: the whole range of issues that would reflect the new strategic environment and not the old strategic environment.

We're looking at reductions in offensive weapons. We're looking at what technologies are available to deal with limited missile attacks coming our ways. I made it clear to them that this is a real consultation that President Bush launched on May 1 with his speech in the National Defense University and not a phony consultation. We really want to hear back from our allies. We are an alliance; we believe in this alliance, and we're going to consult with our colleagues as we move forward.

But at the same time, I made it clear to them that we know we have to move forward; we can see the threat, the threat is clear, and we have to deal with that threat, and we'll do it in a way that I think will enhance overall strategic stability. And it will take us time to convince everybody of that proposition, but I think we'll be successful at the end of the day.

----

Powell, Ivanov Meet in Hungary

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-US-Russia.html?searchpv=aponline

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed U.S. plans for a national missile defense with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Wednesday but didn't outline any new incentives to make the plan more palatable to Moscow.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Powell and Ivanov will leave it to President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin to grapple with the issue when they meet next month.

The missile plan is one of the most contentious issues between the two nations.

``He didn't come with any new proposals,'' Boucher said of Powell. It was a reference to reports that the Bush administration is prepared to offer Moscow a series of incentives in exchange for support for the program.

These includes the U.S. purchase of Russia's S-300 surface-to-air missiles and joint co-operation for upgrading Russia's early warning systems, some U.S. officials have suggested.

Russia has expressed opposition to the plan, suggesting it could lead to a new arms race and undermine what it views as a bedrock disarmament agreement: the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty.

Bush has dismissed the ABM as a relic of the Cold War that should not block protecting the United States from missile attack.

``The whole idea of missile defense will be discussed by the presidents,'' Boucher said. Bush and Putin meet June 16 in Slovenia.

Powell and Ivanov met for about half an hour on the sidelines of the final day of a two-day NATO meeting.

Ivanov and Powell also talked about the Middle East, Afghanistan, and efforts by the United States and Britain to win Russian support for a series of sanctions on Iraq.

The current phase of the U.N. humanitarian ``oil-for-food'' program expires on June 3. So far, Russia has opposed proposed revisions in the sanctions program sought by the United States and Britain.

No agreement was reached in Budapest, but Boucher said Powell was hopeful that an agreement could be reached by negotiators at the United Nations in New York before the deadline.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration sought to put the best face on NATO's continuing rebuff of U.S. missile defense proposals.

The Bush administration failed to win NATO's support at the Budapest meeting for stronger language in a statement pledging to continue talks with Washington over Bush's plan for a shield against missile attack.

However, NATO ministers did bow to a request by Powell in deleting from a joint statement any reference to the ABM treaty. In past statements, NATO leaders have referred to the treaty as the ``cornerstone of strategic stability.''

Despite criticism of the missile defense concept by some allies, mainly Germany and France, the United States has ``everything we want at this stage,'' Boucher told a news briefing.

``We didn't come out here with a plan, we didn't come out here for approval of a plan,'' Boucher said.

Powell's delegation had pushed for NATO to include strong language in its policy statement acknowledging a ``common threat'' from missile attack from terrorists or hostile nations.

Instead, the alliance only said in the statement that it welcomed continued consultations with Washington on the proposal.

In his only appearance before reporters on Wednesday, a picture-taking session with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Powell declined to take questions.

Hungarian Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi, meanwhile, told reporters that he didn't see the missile defense issue as a defeat for the Bush administration.

``I'm of a more positive mind,'' he said. ``The U.S. government is consulting with allies, with Asian countries and with Russia. This will be a major issue at the U.S.-Russian summit in Slovenia. No one is saying there are no dangers. We need to see if the international instruments in place are adequate.''

----

Robertson Denies NATO Quarrel Over Missile Defense

Wednesday May 30 3:39 PM ET
Reuters
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010530/pl/nato_robertson_missiles_dc_2.html

VILNIUS - NATO Secretary General George Robertson said on Wednesday the United States and its European allies had not argued at a meeting this week over President - web Bush's plans to create a missile defense system.

``What I'm doing, I'm refuting completely the allegation that there was a row in NATO yesterday and that somehow America was marginalized by the European allies. That is completely and totally wrong,'' Robertson told reporters.

Robertson made the comments after arriving in Lithuania following the NATO foreign ministers' meeting in Hungary.

An arms control expert close to the negotiations in Budapest had said the United States failed to persuade the Europeans to state that the Western alliance faces a common missile threat, which would validate U.S. missile defense plans.

The United States sent out diplomatic missions to Europe and Asia earlier this month to explain its missile defense plans but got an unenthusiastic reception in most countries.

Opponents of the U.S. plans say that missile defenses would uncork another nuclear arms race because other countries would build more missiles to overcome U.S. defenses.

``America is sharing its thinking on missile defense with the allies, but it has no plans, it has no proposals. Therefore there could have been no rebuff by the European allies of the American proposals,'' Robertson said.

``We value, all of the NATO allies value, the fact that President Bush has instructed that he will share the thinking about missile defense and about the threats that are all acknowledged to exist and how we might deal with them.''

Robertson, a former British defense minister, said the meetings in Hungary had been a ``cordial discussion.''

Robertson was in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius to give a speech to a session of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly on Thursday.

----

U.S. Satisfied With Missile Reaction

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-NATO-Powell.html?searchpv=aponline

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) -- The Bush administration has ``everything we want at this stage'' from NATO allies on a contentious missile defense program, Secretary of State Colin Powell's spokesman asserted Wednesday.

"We didn't come out here with a plan, we didn't come out here for approval of a plan," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher.

NATO allies declined the day before to rally behind President Bush's plan for a national missile defense system, despite a push by Powell and other U.S. administration officials to win support for strong language acknowledging a "common threat" from missile attack from terrorists or hostile nations.

Powell attended final NATO sessions on Wednesday before heading home to Washington.

The secretary of state discussed missile defense plans briefly in a 30-minute meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, Boucher said. But the conversation was in terms of Bush's meeting in June with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"The whole idea of missile defense will be discussed by the presidents," Boucher said.

"He didn't come with any new proposals," Boucher said, referring to reports that the Bush administration is prepared to offer Moscow a series of incentives in an attempt to win its support for the U.S. missile defense plan.

These include the U.S. purchase of Russia's S-300 surface-to-air missiles and co-operation in upgrading Russia's early warning systems.

Ivanov and Powell also talked about the Middle East, Afghanistan, and efforts by the United States and Britain to win Russian support for a series of sanctions on Iraq.

The current phase of the U.N. humanitarian "oil-for-food" program expires Sunday. So far, Russia has opposed proposed revisions in the sanctions program sought by the United States and Britain.

No agreement was reached in Budapest, but Boucher said Powell was hopeful negotiators at the United Nations in New York could reach an agreement before the deadline.

Powell also talked by phone to the new U.S. envoy to the Middle East, William Burns, Boucher said, to discuss peace talks. A U.S.-mediated meeting of Israeli and Palestinian security chiefs ended Wednesday without result as violence in the region persisted.

The Bush administration failed to win NATO's support the day before for stronger language in a statement pledging to continue talks with Washington over Bush's plan for a shield against missile attack.

NATO ministers did bow to a request by the administration in deleting from a joint statement any reference to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which prevents development of national missile defense systems.

Although many NATO allies, led by Germany and France, continued to voice deep skepticism about the missile plan, U.S. officials sought to put the best face on the setback.

"In general, we have everything we want to at this stage," Boucher said.

He said that, while some allies have expressed reservations about a missile defense, contending it will lead to a resumption of an arms race, "nobody has specifically rejected it."

"No one is saying there are no dangers," Hungarian Foreign Minister Janos Martonyi said Wednesday in response to the Bush administration's missile defense plans. "We need to see if the international instruments in place are adequate."

Boucher said allies universally appreciated the promise that the administration will consult with them on the plan before deploying it.

Powell declined to take questions in his only appearance before reporters Wednesday, a picture-taking session with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

------

In New Chair, Biden Will Try to Broaden Missile Review

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/30/world/30BIDE.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, May 29 - Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., a skeptic of President Bush's plan for a missile defense system, said today that he would seek to broaden the debate over the strategy when he takes over next week as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, said the decision on building a missile shield was the most significant national security issue that confronts American policy makers. Aides said the issue was central to the senator's decision to accept the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee instead of heading the judiciary panel when control of the Senate shifts to the Democrats.

"The decisions we will make on this one issue alone promises to be the most important national security debate and decision in our lifetime," Mr. Biden said at a news conference in Wilmington, Del. "It will have profound consequences for our children and generations to come."

Mr. Biden's stand is a setback for the White House, which had until now relied on the stewardship of Senator Jesse Helms, Republican of North Carolina. The incoming chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin of Michigan, is also a critic of the missile plan.

The White House had no comment on Mr. Biden's decision.

Mr. Bush wants to amend the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia to allow for missile defense, an effort that would require Senate approval.

Mr. Biden, who has been in the Senate for nearly 30 years and briefly ran for president in 1988, has supported research and development of the antimissile system and is not an outright opponent. But, aides said, he believes that the United States faces greater risks than the possibility of an attack by intercontinental missiles, namely, terrorist attacks relying on simple technology.

The senator, who supports vigorous United States involvement in world affairs, was an ardent supporter of lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia, backed the expansion of NATO and advocated increasing the State Department budget.

He is quite likely, aides said, to clash with the administration on other issues, including the role of American forces abroad.

----

Powell Fails to Persuade NATO on Antimissile Plan

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By MARC LACEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/30/world/30POWE.html?searchpv=nytToday

BUDAPEST, May 29 - In his first effort to sell President Bush's missile defense plan to allies, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell failed today to pierce NATO's sharp opposition. He could not even convince them that a threat of a missile attack against their countries actually exists.

At a meeting of foreign ministers, Secretary Powell pressed the administration's case for abandoning the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty and shifting American doctrine away from the cold war theory of mutually assured destruction.

But the French and the Germans, in particular, remained skeptical, along with other NATO members, according to diplomats in the closed- door meetings. The ABM treaty has long been the centerpiece of the alliance's defense strategy, and it specifically prohibits the development of a nationwide missile defense shield.

"Clearly not all allies are on the same page," a senior State Department official conceded.

But the Bush administration appeared to make some gains during the meeting. Just a year ago, in a joint communiqué, the NATO ministers called the ABM treaty "a cornerstone of strategic stability" that was essential in reducing offensive nuclear weapons.

But today, the ministers, divided on what to say, did not mention the ABM treaty, a move that pleased the administration because it considers the accord an artifact of the cold war.

On the issues of a nuclear test-ban treaty, the ministers' language this year appeared to be a compromise. Last year at a meeting in Florence, they endorsed the treaty, which the Bush administration opposes as unverifiable and unenforceable. So this year, the ministers replaced their endorsement with a call on all nations to maintain a voluntary ban on nuclear testing.

American officials had also hoped to win approval of a joint statement today that would declare that NATO countries faced a "common threat" of missile attack - stronger language than the reference last year to a "potential threat.". But the ministers could not agree after a long debate, so they vowed instead to continue assessing the level of threats.

"I didn't take a poll around the room but I think I can safely say there is recognition that there is a threat out there," Secretary Powell said later at a news conference, discounting the conflict. "Some people see it as more immediate than others. Some see it as greater than others. It would be irresponsible for the United States as a nation with the capability to do something about such a threat not to do something,"

In Washington, a senior administration official said Secretary Powell had made some headway with the ministers. "We wanted them to move conceptually, and they did," he said. "We didn't expect them to jump ahead. We expected, and hoped, they would move conceptually." He was referring to the threat and the need for defenses.

Germany's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, said that he continued to have concerns about the American plans and that he would continue challenging them until he is sure they add to NATO's security and stability. "It must not lead to another arms race," Mr. Fischer said.

France's foreign minister, Hubert Védrine,said in a briefing with reporters that he continues to see multilateral agreements like the ABM treaty and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as important. "I stressed the importance of multilateral agreements in controlling levels of armaments," Mr. Védrine said. "They are important for our safety."

The allies, meeting for the first time in a country once part of the Soviet bloc, tried to paper over the discord by issuing a statement in which they said they were pleased by the Bush administration's consulting them as it moved forward with missile defense.

That back-and-forth will continue next week when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who is in charge of pursuing a missile defense system, will brief NATO defense ministers on his review of technological options. And Mr. Bush will make his case personally at a meeting of NATO heads of state in mid- June.

"People want to hear the thinking and to contribute to that thought process before the American proposals have been firmed up," said the NATO secretary general, Lord Robertson.

American officials said they were listening even as they moved ahead with the planning stages of developing such a system. "This is a real consultation that President Bush wants and not a phony consultation," Secretary Powell said. "We really want to hear back from our allies. At the same time we made clear to them we have to move forward. We see a threat."

The secretary also reassured the allies that the United States did not intend to pull its peacekeeping troops out of the Balkans, despite suggestions by Mr. Rumsfeld that the military work in Bosnia is over and that the Americans troops ought to go. "We went into this together and we'll come out together," Secretary Powell said he told the group, dismissing reports of discord.

The allies endorsed "a moderate reduction" in the number of peacekeepers in Bosnia but made clear that "it is not advisable at this time to consider major restructuring or reductions."

The expected reduction to 18,000 from 21,000 troops will be announced next week in Brussels. The American contingent in Bosnia will very likely be reduced to 3,100 from 3,600 troops, officials say. When the mission began in the mid-1990's, 60,000 NATO troops were stationed in Bosnia - a third of them American.

On the worsening crisis in Macedonia, the ministers condemned Albanian rebels and called on them to lay down their arms. Javier Solana, the European Union's security policy chief, briefed officials on his recent talks with feuding factions in Skopje.

"A band of armed thugs must not be allowed to destroy a multi-ethnic democracy," Lord Robertson said. "There can be no place at the table for those who take up arms against a democratic government."

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Military Analysis: Russia's Role in Missile Defense

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By MICHAEL R. GORDON
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/30/world/30MILI.html?searchpv=nytToday

LONDON, May 29 - It is not surprising that the Bush administration's new effort to persuade Russia to scrap the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty has received a chilly reception in Moscow. It fails to address Russia's central concern, to ensure there are strict limits - or at least clearly defined ones - on the development and deployment of antimissile systems.

That way Russia can ensure that an American missile shield can never become effective enough to neutralize Moscow's nuclear deterrent and that there are some constraints on how much the United States can exploit its technological and economic advantages.

But the Bush administration's latest proposals are silent on that count. Instead of new limits on defensive systems, it offers the Russians less vital inducements: joint antimissile exercises, arms purchases and funds to repair Russia's early warning network. Few of those suggestions are new and some are already in effect.

That does not mean that a new understanding on missile defense cannot be reached with Moscow or that the administration's proposals may not prove useful. But it suggests that if a compromise is to be reached permitting the United States to erect a limited nationwide defense, the administration's proposals are at best only part of the solution.

"The bottom line for the Russians is that a defense has to be limited," observed Joseph Cirincione, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "They can't go along with an open-ended defense that has the potential to overwhelm their deterrent."

When the Bush administration took office it appeared to have little interest in wooing Moscow. Senior aides signaled that the decision to build an antimissile defense had been made, and the implication was that there was little Moscow could or should be able to do about it.

That may still be the administration's real thinking. But politics at home and abroad requires that the White House make a diplomatic effort - or at least be perceived as trying.

With the Democrats taking control of the Senate - and with skeptics of the administration's missile plans leading the Foreign Relations and Armed Services Committees - there will be little support for money for an antimissile defense if Washington does not try to talk to Moscow.

As for the allies, they seem prepared to go along grudgingly with a missile defense, but only if a way can be found to maintain a working relationship with Russia and preserve a modicum of arms control.

The unease of the allies about the Bush administration's still vague missile plan, and the still sketchy arms control strategy that undergirds it, was evident today at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Budapest. To the frustration of the administration, they declined even to acknowledge formally that the allies faced a "common threat" of a missile attack.

A senior White House official seemed to concede the new political realities when he acknowledged, "If we are going to make this work, the Russians have to agree to the plan."

The paradox is that having acknowledged the growing importance of securing Moscow's assent, or at least acquiescence, the administration's proposals are not sufficient to close the gap.

Consider the offer to conduct joint exercises of tactical antimissile systems, the sort used against medium- and short-range missiles. That is not a new idea; the program is already under way. Two exercises involving computer simulation have been held in Moscow and Colorado, and a team of Russian officials visited the United States in February to plan a field exercise next year at Fort Bliss, Tex.

Another offer is to share early warning data on missile launches. But the Clinton administration and the Kremlin reached an agreement in 1998 to do just that, and a center to share such data is to be established in Moscow.

The Bush administration is also ready to finance improvements in Russia's early warning system, but one example suggests that is not sufficient to win the hearts and minds of the Russian military.

The Clinton administration offered assistance in constructing an early warning radar in eastern Siberia and in launching Russian early warning satellites. In return, the Clinton team sought the right to build a limited nationwide missile defense. Moscow rejected that offer. Now the Bush team is recycling the Clinton plan, but it wants the right to build a much larger antimissile system than the Clinton administration considered.

Finally, the Bush administration is offering to buy S-300 antimissile systems, which the Russians have offered to install in Europe. Those would provide a defense against medium- and short-range missiles within the strict limits of the ABM treaty. Because the sale of the S-300 was essentially a Russian idea, Moscow can hardly object. But it is unlikely that the purchase of the systems will be decisive in overcoming Russia's concerns about a multitiered missile defense.

The key questions for the Russians - and for Congress and the United States' allies - are clear: What sort of defensive system does the Bush administration propose to build? Will it be ground based or sea based, or will some elements be based in space (a big worry for Moscow, which fears that a space-based system could be expanded into a much vaster shield)? How long will it take to develop? And when does the program bump up against the limits of the ABM treaty?

And if the ABM treaty is abandoned, does the Bush administration plan to negotiate new binding limits on antimissile defenses and offensive nuclear arms? In short, what is the new strategic framework President Bush has called for (but never defined)?

Until the Bush administration fills in those blanks, it will be hard not only to hammer out an agreement, it will be hard even to have a serious discussion.

"In order to hold a discussion, you have to have some subject for it, a plan, a concrete understanding of what the other side wants," said Sergei B. Ivanov, the Russian defense minister. "For now, there are no such plans."

-------- new zealand

NZ Prime Minister addresses CNN on disarmament

Date: Wed, 30 May 2001
From: "Alyn Ware" alynw@attglobal.net

Helen Clark, the New Zealand Prime Minister, in the keynote address delivered via satellite to the 12th Annual CNN World Report Conference in Atlanta, urged world media to support disarmament. "The news media can play a major role in support of disarmament by refusing to ignore the issue and by not sanctioning the continued nuclear threat with silence," she said.

She said that eliminating the nuclear threat was an achievable goal. "The New Zealand Government will pursue it vigorously. We hope others will join us."

However, when questioned about a Green Party Bill before the New Zealand parliament which aims to prohibit nuclear weapons and waste from passing through New Zealand's territorial waters and 200 mile exclusive economic zone, Ms Clark said that the Government did not believe the Green initiative was right under international law. The Prime Minister also reponded to charges that her government was leaving New Zealand defenceless through its reorganisation of the defence forces. She noted that defence spending was being more focused on New Zealand's real needs and that New Zealand's military continues to play an important role in developing regional and international security through participation in UN peacekeeping operations such as that in East Timor.

For more information about New Zealand's defence changes and the nuclear free zone extension bill, contact alynw@attglobal.net

-------- treaties

NATO drops its support of ABM pact

May 30, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010530-83906600.htm

BUDAPEST -- The United States persuaded NATO foreign ministers at a one-day meeting yesterday to drop from their closing communique all references to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, marking a major reversal by America´s European allies.

At the same meeting a year ago, the ministers described the treaty, which stands in the way of U.S. plans for a missile defense system, as "a cornerstone of strategic stability."

Despite the backdown, strong opposition to the missile defense system continued behind closed doors as some NATO members, each of whom has a veto on NATO decisions, sought to stymie the vastly more powerful United States.

"I am pleased that the acronym [ABM] didn´t warrant attention this time," Secretary of State Colin Powell said after the meeting. "There´s a recognition that there is a threat out there."

NATO Secretary-General George Robertson said support for the ABM was dropped, in part, because last year "there was a different American administration."

A senior U.S. official said that dropping support for the ABM Treaty in the NATO communique "is a sign the alliance is working to adapt . . . to our new thinking."

The Clinton administration had supported a more modest missile defense system and had tried to win approval for it from Russia, the only other party to the ABM Treaty besides the United States.

President Bush, however, has said the treaty is outmoded and needs to be scrapped, though he has not said he will do so unilaterally.

The ABM Treaty prevents either Russia or the United States from building anti-missile defenses that would be effective enough to make either country believe it could attack the other country and survive a reprisal.

The Bush administration says that approach is outdated and that missile defense is needed in the face of the growing threat of a missile attack by a rogue nation.

The United States is now offering to protect NATO allies with the shield and is reportedly ready to offer to share the technology with Russia in an effort to overcome its strong opposition.

French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine told reporters yesterday that he was pleased that the Bush administration was consulting with allies on missile defense. He appeared to indicate it would be a long and drawn-out process that could delay any NATO decision.

He also said that defense against rogue attacks is provided by nuclear deterrence -- the promise of being blasted in return.

He said multilateral agreements on arms control were important for allied security, a view distinctly at odds with the Bush administration´s skepticism about such treaties and accords.

Mr. Powell told reporters that no plan was presented at the foreign ministers´ summit yesterday but that the United States was consulting with allies on missile defense and on various ways to protect America and its allies.

"I made clear to my colleagues this morning that President Bush sees this in terms of an overall strategic framework, dealing with offensive weapons, missile defense, proliferation, nonproliferation, counter proliferation, cooperative arrangements and agreements -- a whole range of issues," Mr. Powell said.

"We really want to hear back from our allies," he added. "At the same time, I made clear to them that we know we have to move forward. . . . It will take us time to persuade everybody."

Sources who attended the meeting said some participants had questioned whether any rogue state currently had the ability to launch an attack with weapons of mass destruction on the United States or Europe.

Mr. Powell said this is a moot argument and the United States had to prepare for the threat immediately. "If you want to have the systems that can deal with such threats, you don´t wait till it´s pointed at your heart," he said.

Besides dropping mention of the ABM Treaty from the annual communique, the document watered down significantly NATO backing for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), which the Bush administration and the Republican Party have opposed.

Last year, NATO said its members "remain committed to an early entry into force" of the CTBT, which requires that the United States and other states ratify the treaty.

But this year, given the strong Bush administration opposition to ratifying the treaty, NATO said only, "We urge all states to maintain existing moratoria on nuclear testing."

The Clinton administration signed the CTBT in an effort to win a worldwide ban on nuclear tests and introduced a voluntary moratorium on testing, which the Bush administration has left in place. However, the treaty was defeated in the Senate in 1999 amid strong concerns over the ability to verify compliance.

The year before, India and Pakistan set off nuclear blasts, adding their names to the nuclear powers list of the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France. Israel is widely believed to also possess nuclear weapons.

The communique allowed for minor reductions in U.S. and other allied troop strength in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as Mr. Powell had forecast Monday.

"It is not advisable at this time to consider major restructuring or reduction of [the NATO-led Stabilization Force in Bosnia] . . . but a moderate reduction in overall troop levels could be undertaken" the communique said.

A formal decision on Bosnia troop cuts will be made at a NATO defense ministers´ meeting in Brussels June 7 and 8.

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

-------- florida

FLORIDA NUKE PLANT CATCHES DOZENS OF SEA TURTLES

AmeriScan:
May 30, 2001
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/may2001/2001L-05-30-09.html

CRYSTAL RIVER, Florida, May 30, 2001 (ENS) - A total of 45 sea turtles have been caught in the water intake areas of the Crystal River nuclear power plant in Florida since January 1, the plant's operators have reported.

Under its licensing agreement, the Crystal River Nuclear Plant is required to report to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) if its facilities snare more than 40 live sea turtles within any two year period. That number is set by the National Marine and Fisheries Service (NMFS).

The NMFS has established numerical limits on the snaring of live turtles, the killing of turtles as a result of plant operations, and dead turtles that are not related to plant operations.

Since the latest two year monitoring period began on January 1, 2001, 45 sea turtles have been discovered in plant intake areas or other areas related to the operations of Crystal River's three nuclear reactors.

The 40th snared turtle, which triggered the reporting requirement, was found on April 9. Two more were caught at the plant in April, and three have so far been caught in May.

The live turtles are kept by licensed rehabilitators for observation, then released back into the sea.

-------- nevada

Nevada Nuke Dump Support Withdrawn

The Associated Press
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010530/aponline182631_000.htm

LAS VEGAS -- A former Department of Energy official who drafted a proposal to make Nevada's Yucca Mountain a nuclear waste disposal site is withdrawing his support for the project.

W. Kenneth Davis, undersecretary from 1981 to 1983 during the Reagan administration, sent an unsolicited letter to the White House saying that the site won't be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"In my opinion, (it) should be put in mothballs," Davis wrote in a three-page memorandum. Last week, President Bush called for a national nuclear waste repository as part of his energy plan.

Since 1987, Yucca Mountain has been the only site studied to become the graveyard for the nation's 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive research waste.

But Davis said that Yucca Mountain can't overcome Nevada's strong opposition to transporting and storing the waste 1,000 feet beneath a wind-swept ridge, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"At Yucca Mountain, you are going to run into a hailstorm of protest over shipping," he said in Wednesday's editions of the Las Vegas Sun.

Gov. Kenny Guinn, all four members of Nevada's bipartisan congressional delegation and Las Vegas business and casino interests oppose the Yucca Mountain plan. The state Legislature is considering allocating $4 million for a public relations campaign and legal fight.

Davis cited the potential for water and radiation to escape Yucca Mountain and said burying nuclear wastes in a permanent repository was never intended when he authored the policy.

-------- us nuc waste

Errors in Yucca calculations found
Documents predict how dump would handle elements

By KEITH ROGERS
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/May-30-Wed-2001/news/16207009.html

Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff want Department of Energy scientists to correct some calculations related to how a proposed nuclear waste repository would endure inside Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

Eight "technical errors and/or inconsistencies" in the repository's Total System Performance Assessment were pointed out to Yucca Mountain Project officials in a May 17 letter from the NRC's high-level waste branch chief, William Reamer.

"DOE needs to document the preliminary results of its follow-up actions, provide formal documentation of the technical errors and/or inconsistencies corrections, and provide its final plans for the continued response to this matter," Reamer's letter says.

His letter refers to errors in calculations on the chemistry of the waste packages and when they would fail; how fast some of the materials surrounding the waste would degrade over thousands of years; and doses that could result from a potential future volcanic release.

Energy Department officials on Tuesday said the errors found by the NRC would have only a minimal effect on projections of how the repository would perform. But Bob Loux, Nevada's Nuclear Projects Agency chief, said finding calculational errors "doesn't speak very well to DOE's accuracy to its performance assessment and its use as a tool for site suitability."

"I think they've got a real big problem on their hands. They are going to have to go through and test every single assumption," Loux said.

Yucca Mountain Project scientists said they are taking the NRC's concerns seriously, but they are still confident the proposed disposal site, with its engineered barriers, will meet the requirements for entombing 77,000 tons of the nation's most lethal radioactive waste.

"I would say, based on how they look so far, it doesn't make a big difference in the end result. However, you don't want them to slip through the system," said Steve Brocoum, the Yucca Mountain Project's assistant manager for the Office of Licensing and Regulatory Compliance.

Brocoum and the project's quality assurance manager, Bob Clark, said all the calculations in question would be analyzed and corrected. Ultimately, the performance assessment, along with other documents, will be used by decision-makers to determine whether the site is suitable and can safely contain highly radioactive wastes -- mostly spent fuel pellets encased in metal rods -- for at least 10,000 years.

"All those calculations will be checked to make sure we're not underestimating peak doses," Brocoum said in a telephone interview. He said the issues would be discussed at a meeting in Washington next month with NRC staff members.

Loux noted the methods used by the Department of Energy mask deficiencies with the Yucca Mountain Project in forecasting when nuclear materials could escape into the environment and how that would translate to radiation exposure to the public.

"It could be 25 millirems. Or, it could be 25,000 millirems. That's a hell of a boost in uncertainty," he said, referring to a possible margin of error if one radiation standard proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency is finally adopted.

"DOE says there are no show-stoppers, but they don't know because the Total System Performance Assessment doesn't allow you to see them," Loux said.

---

Senate votes $4 million for fight against nuke waste dump

By SEAN WHALEY
DONREY CAPITAL BUREAU
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/May-30-Wed-2001/news/16207248.html

CARSON CITY -- A bill appropriating $4 million in part to take Nevada's fight against the construction of a nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain to residents of other cities and states passed the Senate on a unanimous vote Tuesday.

Senate Bill 494, proposed by Gov. Kenny Guinn to also provide money for legal defense if the U.S. Energy Department recommends construction of a high-level nuclear waste dump in Nevada, will now be considered by the Assembly.

The bill originally appropriated $5 million for the anti-dump efforts, but was reduced because of budget concerns.

There was no discussion or debate before the Senate voted for the bill.

Marybel Batjer, Guinn's chief of staff, testified for the measure earlier in the session.

"The governor feels very strongly that protecting Nevada from nuclear waste is the most important issue facing Nevada now and into the future," she said.

The Nevada Protection Account is also supported by Attorney General Frankie Sue Del Papa and Brian McKay, a former state attorney general who is chairman of the Commission on Nuclear Projects.

Bob Loux, executive director of the Agency for Nuclear Projects, said the original plan was to put about $1 million into the public information campaign and $4 million into legal defense. The funding distribution is flexible, however, and will now be re-evaluated based on the smaller appropriation, he said.

Yucca Mountain in Nevada is the only site being studied to entomb the nation's highly radioactive waste.

---

Yucca clout

Las Vegas Review Journal,
May 30, 2001
http://www.lvrj.com/lvrj_home/2001/May-30-Wed-2001/opinion/16187017.html

To the editor:

Sen. Harry Reid has just notified us that the fix is in. He is not going to attempt to drastically reduce funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository ("Reid intends caution with clout on Yucca," May 25). He does not believe that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will approve the site. Really? He has to know better.

Now that the Democrats are in charge of the Senate, everyone who held their noses and voted for Bush/Cheney had to believe that at least Nevada had a chance of escaping the label of nuclear waste dump. Apparently not. Can't be done, according to Sen. Reid and the "experts." Then how did current minority Republican Sen. Pete Domenici keep the dump from going to the most geologically suitable site? That would be Sen. Domenici's New Mexico. I guess being in the Democratic leadership must be different than being in the Republican leadership.

Slightly less interesting is retired lawyer/columnist Barbara Robinson's take on this. It is still the Republicans' fault. Get real. There is plenty of blame for both political monopolies/parties. And, Ms. Robinson, having been a lawyer, I had assumed you might have read the Nevada state constitution. It specifically states that we cannot secede from the United States.

However, if you want to lead a fight to restore the right of secession to the citizens of Nevada, I am with you. Just tell me where to send the letters begging for our freedom.

BRIAN KOMINSKY
LAS VEGAS

---

Ex-DOE official says mothball Yucca dump

By Mary Manning <manning@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN
May 30, 2001
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2001/may/30/511886709.html

The principal author of the policy that identified Yucca Mountain as a potential site for a high-level nuclear waste repository now says the project plans should be scrapped.

W. Kenneth Davis, who was the Energy Department's undersecretary from 1981 to 1983 in the Reagan administration, wrote in an unsolicited letter to the Bush White House saying that Yucca will not be approved as a repository by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and that the project should be abandoned.

"Yucca Mountain, which is unlikely to be licensed, in any case is not a reasonable solution in view of the shipping required if nothing else, and in my opinion should be put in mothballs," Davis wrote in a three-page memo last week on the Bush-Cheney energy plan.

"Most of my friends are going to be mad at me," Davis said in an interview from his California home last week. "A lot of people think Yucca Mountain is going to be licensed. That is baloney."

Davis said he sees two reasons Yucca Mountain cannot be licensed.

The first reason is Nevada's opposition to storing 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The second involves technical problems -- such as the potential for water and radiation to escape Yucca Mountain -- that keep emerging as DOE scientists study the site.

Davis said burying nuclear wastes in a permanent repository was never intended when he authored the policy. Now Yucca Mountain is the only site being studied for permanent storage of highly radioactive commercial and defense waste.

"The problems of building a spent fuel repository are enormous, particularly when the state of Nevada is so opposed to it," Davis said.

DOE officials in 1982-83 envisioned storage at regional plants, where technicians would reprocess the nuclear fuel, he said. Regional repositories, one in the East and one in the West, would have stored the remaining wastes for up to 300 years.

At the time, scientists were studying breeder reactors, a technology that in effect cleans the uranium and plutonium of toxic byproducts and recycles it to produce electricity.

"Spent fuel ... lasts for hundreds of thousands of years," Davis said. "Reprocessing would take out the long-living materials and use the plutonium in reactors."

That approach was abandoned during the Ford and Carter administrations, partly out of fear that the recycled fuel could be stolen by terrorists or rogue nations to build nuclear weapons.

President Reagan sought to rekindle the technology, but officials in the nuclear industry said it was too costly, and reprocessing has remained in limbo.

However, scientists have begun research on transmutation, which promises to change the highly radioactive substances to less radioactive waste. That research is being funded by the Energy Department but is not being considered seriously as an alternative to a repository.

Daniel Hirsch, technical adviser to the Committee to Bridge the Gap, an environmental watchdog group in California that stopped a new low-level nuclear waste site from opening near Needles, Calif., and the Colorado River, said that reprocessing was too dangerous to pursue.

"Reprocessing doesn't remove the need for a repository," Hirsch said. "The process leaves half of the plutonium in the wastes and it doesn't touch other long-living radioactive elements."

Reprocessing either increases the volume of the radioactive waste or creates liquid nuclear wastes, Hirsch said.

Under the strategy developed by Davis, any U.S. repository would have been temporary, and the stored fuel pellets would have been retrievable for future use. But in April 1986 the former Soviet Union's Chernobyl Unit 4 reactor disaster occurred, bringing a halt to nuclear reactor development in the United States. The following year, the U.S. passed its Yucca Mountain repository strategy.

Another problem with a permanent repository at Yucca Mountain is public opposition to shipping the wastes across country, Davis said.

If the DOE built special sites, called monitored retrievable storage facilities, across the country near the reactors, the costs of shipping would be reduced, he said.

"At Yucca Mountain, you are going to run into a hailstorm of protest over shipping," he said.

Davis said he left the DOE before a decision was made to turn temporary nuclear waste storage into a permanent solution. He went from the federal agency to Bechtel Inc., a government contractor, from where he retired in 1995. Bechtel is now part of the partnership, Bechtel-SAIC, that holds the main Yucca Mountain contract.

"It (Yucca Mountain) was never intended to store spent fuel, and I can't find out who made that decision," Davis said. "For some 20 years I have wondered how that happened."

Congress amended the original Nuclear Waste Policy Act in 1987, singling out Yucca Mountain as the only site for the DOE to study as a permanent repository. About 70,000 tons of commercial spent nuclear fuel could be buried starting in 2010, if the project is found scientifically suitable. Another 7,000 tons would come from building the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.

"Congress changed the act to get a permanent repository built before monitored retrievable storage sites," Davis said.

The Bush-Cheney energy plan signaled a revived interest in nuclear power. Nuclear industry executives have set a goal to build up to 50 new nuclear reactors in the next two decades.

Nuclear Energy Institute spokesman Steve Kerekes noted that Yucca Mountain was singled out in 1987 by Congress as the sole U.S. site for the DOE to study.

"It has been scientific opinion for many years that the safest way to dispose of the nuclear wastes is a deep geological repository," Kerekes said.

"If Davis wants to change the policy, maybe he should take it up with Congress," Kerekes said. Only Russia, France and Britain reprocess fuel for civilian reactor operations.

In 30 or 40 years, if scientists turned their attention and funding to research and development, breeder reactors could be ready to produce power, Davis said.

"The need for a Yucca Mountain repository is a psychological thing," he said. "In the real world, that's not the way to go."

---

Former DOE official recants support for Yucca Mountain

May 30, 2001
Las Vegas Sun
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2001/may/30/053010271.html

LAS VEGAS (AP) - The principal author of the policy zeroing in on Yucca Mountain as a potential site for storing the nation's high-level nuclear waste now says the project should be scrapped.

W. Kenneth Davis, Energy Department undersecretary from 1981 to 1983 during the Reagan administration, said in an unsolicited letter to the Bush White House that the site won't be approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"In my opinion, (it) should be put in mothballs," Davis wrote in a three-page memorandum after the Bush-Cheney national energy plan signaled renewed federal support of nuclear power.

Davis told the Las Vegas Sun that Yucca Mountain can't overcome political and technical obstacles.

He cited Nevada's strong opposition to transporting and storing 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at the site, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

"At Yucca Mountain, you are going to run into a hailstorm of protest over shipping," he said.

Nevada also is balking at providing water rights to the project, and state lawmakers are allocating $4 million for a public relations campaign and legal fight.

Gov. Kenny Guinn, all four members of Nevada's bipartisan congressional delegation and Las Vegas business and casino interests are united in opposition to the Yucca Mountain plan.

Davis cited the potential for water and radiation to escape Yucca Mountain and said burying nuclear wastes in a permanent repository was never intended when he authored the policy.

He said he left the DOE before a decision was made to turn temporary nuclear waste storage into a permanent solution.

Yucca Mountain was selected in 1987 as the only site to be studied for permanent storage of highly radioactive commercial and defense nuclear waste.

Davis went from the federal agency to Bechtel Inc., a government contractor, and retired in 1995. Bechtel is now part of the Bechtel-SAIC partnership that holds the main Yucca Mountain contract.

---

Berkley bill would divert Yucca funds

May 30, 2001
By Benjamin Grove <grove@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2001/may/30/511886563.html

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., plans to introduce a bill next week that would divert all spending on the proposed Yucca Mountain project to alternative waste-management technologies.

The bill would immediately funnel this year's proposed $445 million Department of Energy budget for Yucca projects to other studies, which would likely include transmutation and reprocessing.

All future spending would be "redirected," too, according to the bill. The total cost of Yucca in the coming years could total $58 billion, officials estimate.

The legislation would be a radical departure from Congress' current course. It was not immediately clear today if Berkley's bill would have any support among lawmakers. Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear dump in 1987 and the Department of Energy has invested 14 years and about $7 billion studying it, most of that money from a waste fund fed by ratepayers who used nuclear-generated electricity.

Strident Yucca plan supporters say that while transmutation and reprocessing could be supplemental options to Yucca, new technologies will not replace the need for a permanent repository.

Still, it's realistic to consider that the bill could get some support, Berkley spokesman Michael O'Donovan said. Researchers are just now beginning to understand the implications of new waste management technologies, which could one day be a full-blown alternative to Yucca, O'Donovan said.

"They deserve adequate research and funding to fully understand how these technologies can help us solve the problem in a real and long-term way," O'Donovan said.

The bill would allow the Department of Energy to determine where the money would be spent. But options include transmutation, a process that speeds up the break-down of waste, as well as waste reprocessing, or "recycling" waste.

President Bush in his National Energy Policy recommended further investigating those technologies as supplements -- not alternatives -- to constructing Yucca Mountain.

Yucca Mountain is the proposed site of the nation's permanent burial ground for high-level nuclear waste, eventually 77,000 tons of it. The waste is now stored on-site at the nation's 103 commercial nuclear reactors, and at U.S. defense sites. Yucca, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, would be the first permanent waste repository of its kind.

Nevada's four-member congressional delegation, strongly opposed to burying waste in the state, has played a part in delaying the project.

"Fighting off a bad idea is not enough," Berkley said in a written statement today. "And the stalemate that we've been able to pull off so far is not a solution.

"If we're going to come up with long-term solutions that make sense for the future of our country, then we're going to have to show a willingness to work together and come up with some alternatives."

Nuclear energy industry officials are luke-warm about reprocessing used nuclear fuel. Several countries, including France, which relies heavily on nuclear power, reprocess spent fuel. But the United States has avoided it because the process separates out plutonium, which officials worry could fall into the wrong hands.

Officials with the industry's top lobby group, the Nuclear Energy Institute, have said reprocessing is not economical. They adamantly back the Yucca plan.

---

Nuke panel finds errors in DOE plan

May 30, 2001
By Mary Manning <manning@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2001/may/30/511886561.html

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff has identified numerous errors in the Department of Energy's plan for how a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain would perform over thousands of years.

Nevada and Clark County officials called the findings significant, but DOE officials said the errors should not affect their predictions on how Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, would behave over time.

Yucca Mountain is the only site under study as the nation's high-level nuclear repository for burying 77,000 tons of commercial spent fuel and radioactive wastes from developing nuclear weapons.

Under eight topics detailed in a May 17 letter, the NRC's high-level nuclear waste branch Chief William Reamer explained the errors discovered by commission staff using DOE's computer models and hand calculations.

"NRC has asked DOE to determine the scope of these errors to evaluate the implications for the quality and adequacy of DOE's performance assessment," Reamer said.

The DOE is investigating how the errors in calculations and missing information could affect the quality and adequacy of its scientific data, officials said. Further meetings between the NRC and the DOE are scheduled in June.

The NRC wrote the letter after two conference calls between the agencies on May 4 and 9. The DOE confirmed the errors on May 9.

Reamer said the DOE erred in calculating the chemistry inside the waste packages. If there is higher acid content than the DOE expects inside the buried containers, all waste packages could fail sooner, perhaps within 1,000 years, allowing radiation to escape the site.

The NRC staff also noted that radiation doses are underestimated. While Don Kalinich of DOE said the error comes from using the same figures twice, Reamer noted that the radiation exposure numbers were 12 times lower than expected if a volcanic eruption swept through the repository at 500 years.

The DOE is checking its calculations and will report to the NRC in the coming months, said Steve Brocoum, the Yucca Mountain Project assistant manager for the Office of Licensing and Regulatory Compliance.

State and county officials who oppose the repository said the DOE's errors are significant.

Correcting the errors could delay the licensing hearing before the NRC, which will determine whether a Yucca Mountain repository would open by 2010, said Bob Loux, director of the state's Agency for Nuclear Projects.

"The DOE will have to revise every single calculation, and that could delay the licensing," Loux said.

"If this is an example of the sound science that the decision will be based on," County Nuclear Waste Division Director Irene Navis said, "then Nevada residents have every right to object to the disposal of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain."

---

Regulators find errors in report on Yucca Mountain nuclear dump

May 30, 2001
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/lv-other/2001/may/30/053010180.html

LAS VEGAS (AP) - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission wants Department of Energy scientists to recalculate how a proposed nuclear waste repository would endure inside Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

William Reamer, the commission's high-level waste branch chief, called for Yucca Mountain Project managers to address eight "technical errors" or "inconsistencies" in the repository's Total System Performance Assessment.

The document will be one of many used to determine whether the site is suitable and can safely contain the nation's highly radioactive waste for at least 10,000 years.

In a May 17 letter, Reamer refers to errors in calculations on the chemistry of waste containment packages and when they would fail; how fast some of the materials surrounding the waste would degrade over thousands of years; and the amount of radioactivity that could escape from a potential volcanic release.

Energy Department officials said Tuesday that the errors found in the report would have a minimal effect on performance projections.

But a top Nevada official heading state efforts to fight the proposed waste dump said the discovery of errors undermines the credibility of the performance report.

"I think they've got a real big problem on their hands," said Bob Loux, Nevada's Nuclear Projects Agency.

Yucca Mountain Project scientists said they're confident that engineered barriers and the geology of the mountain will meet requirements for entombing 77,000 tons of radioactive waste.

The site is at the western edge of the Nevada Test Site, 90 miles from Las Vegas and 20 miles from the California state line. It is the only site in the nation under study for storing the nation's commercial and military nuclear waste.

Steve Brocoum, assistant manager for the project's Office of Licensing and Regulatory Compliance, and Bob Clark, the project's quality assurance manager, said all the calculations in question would be analyzed and corrected.

The Energy Department is expected to forward its recommendation on the Yucca Mountain site next year to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. He'll follow with a recommendation to President Bush. The earliest the first load of nuclear waste could arrive is 2010.

---

'United front' rejects nuke bills

By Cy Ryan <cy@lasvegassun.com>
SUN CAPITAL BUREAU
May 30, 2001
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/dossier/nuke/

CARSON CITY -- The Nevada Legislature will end this session in strong opposition to a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain.

Two resolutions that favored contingency plans in case the Energy Department selected Nevada as the site are dead in the Senate Transportation Committee.

Opponents of a dump said the resolutions implied Nevada was sending a mixed message to Washington, D.C., that it might accept the waste under certain conditions.

Sen. Bill O'Donnell, R-Las Vegas, chairman of the transportation committee, said Tuesday a vote would not be taken on the two resolutions.

O'Donnell had sponsored Senate Joint Resolution 4, which urged the governor to designate alternative routes outside of Las Vegas for the transportation of the material to Yucca Mountain.

Sen. Ray Shaffer, D-North Las Vegas, had introduced Senate Joint Resolution 10, which urged Congress to implement certain safety precautions if Yucca Mountain is chosen.

"I made my point," O'Donnell said. "Public perception now is there is a real likelihood that this thing will come to pass. Even our congressional delegation is taking notes and positioning accordingly for Nevada's best interest."

O'Donnell acknowledged he drew a lot of opposition. "I got a lot of heat from a very focused group of individuals. However, in talking to the general public, I got a lot of support." "The attorney general (Frankie Sue Del Papa) had problems with it (SJR4) because she feared it would be implied consent," O'Donnell said.

"However, in light of the news report on (Vice President Dick) Cheney's energy policy, we are a key component in the production of electricity for the next 20 years.

"So I don't see the issue of Yucca Mountain going away even if we do spend $4 million," he said, referring to a bill pushed by Gov. Kenny Guinn to spend $4 million to fight location of the dump in Nevada.

Nevada Adjutant General Tony Clark said passage of those two resolutions "would have sent the wrong message to the Department of Energy and the nuclear industry, and we could be fragmented. It is better that did not pass at this point."

Clark and Del Papa worked together against the two resolutions.

Another resolution by Sen. Jon Porter, R-Boulder City, urging Congress to require federal agencies to prepare environmental impact statements on the transportation of waste, also died without a vote.

Clark said the attorney general's office supported the Porter resolution. He said it was essential the DOE conduct these studies on the impact of shipping this waste through numerous states.

The one resolution that passed this session expressed strong opposition to any nuclear waste in Nevada and it served notice the state would veto any plan.

Clark said, "It shows a united front in opposition to having that trash stored in Nevada."

He said, "Nevada has already done its share in nuclear development in this country -- the Test Site and the storing low-level nuclear waste."

Most of these nuclear power plants are east of the Mississippi River.

If there is a storage repository, it should be in that region of the nation "where they are generating the waste," he said.

-------- MILITARY

-------- africa

S. Africa Truth Commission Closes Shop

MAY 30, 13:40 EST
By MIKE COHEN
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=AFRICA&STORYID=APIS7CAJ1700

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) - They came by the thousands: traumatized mothers wanting to know the fate of their children, unapologetic policemen seeking absolution for unspeakable crimes and self-righteous politicians, shunning responsibility for the brutality they presided over.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up following South Africa's first all-race elections in 1994, laid bare the cruelty of the racist apartheid regime and worked to help the country come to terms with its past by granting amnesty to perpetrators willing to tell the whole story behind their crimes.

As the commission's last remaining committee prepares to shut down Thursday, many South Africans are still debating the success of their country's historic exercise in confronting its past.

``I am happy because we know the truth,'' said Cape Town resident Cynthia Ngewu, 60, who learned how her teen-age son Christopher Piet was gunned down in a 1986 police ambush.

The hearings were by turns horrifying and overwhelming.

In a 1996 hearing in East London, former African National Congress guerrilla Singqokwana Malgas described being savagely beaten by police, watching his house consumed in an arson fire, then suffering the disappearance of his son. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace laureate who chaired the commission, put his head in his hands and cried.

Commission critics range from conservative whites who argue it was a witch hunt to black victims who complain it let their persecutors get away with murder.

Other victims, however, cherished the chance to tell their stories, and, in some cases, lay old ghosts to rest.

More than 6,000 people applied for amnesty, bringing to light information that would have remained secret had they been prosecuted.

However, almost all senior apartheid-era politicians never accounted for their actions, most notably P.W. Botha, who ruled South Africa during some of the worst atrocities from 1978 to 1989, and ignored a commission summons.

Botha's successor, F.W. de Klerk, did testify. He gave a qualified apology for apartheid, saying he was unaware of the extent to which abuses took place. De Klerk secured a court ruling preventing the commission from writing about him in its interim report.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, anti-apartheid heroine and ex-wife of former President Nelson Mandela, was linked to killings, torture, assaults and arson carried out by her bodyguards in the late 1980s. But she was unapologetic in her testimony before the commission, saying she had been fighting a just war.

The committee considering perpetrators' amnesty applications will shut down Thursday and the commission, established in 1995, is to issue a final report in September.

The government says it is satisfied the commission did more to heal the country than trials like those of Nazi leaders held in Nuremberg, Germany, after World War II.

``The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has managed to lay solid foundations for reconciliation,'' said Justice Ministry spokesman Paul Setsetse.

While truth commissions have been established in El Salvador, Guatemala and Chile, the South African commission was hailed internationally as a testament to the power of forgiveness, even in the face of widespread repression.

Some critics say it failed to come to grips with how apartheid affected the country as a whole or to expose how whites became undeservedly rich under apartheid.

``The perpetrators and victims are less than half a percent of the population,'' said retired economics professor Sampie Terreblanche. ``The inability of the commission to uncover the systemic exploitation is to my mind a very, very serious shortcoming.''

Commissioner Mary Burton said the main accomplishment was to reveal the terror of apartheid. ``People can no longer deny what happened,'' she said.

But Burton is less certain whether the commission succeeded in bringing a deeply divided society closer together.

``I don't know that the victims who came forward can say they benefitted very much,'' she said.

Though many victims approved of the hearings instead of prosecutions, they also felt they had not been given enough support, victims' advocates said.

``Our experience has been that the whole process has been perpetrator-friendly,'' said Shirley Gunn, of the Khulumani victims' support group.

More than 21,000 victims have still not received the reparations that were considered an integral part of the healing process.

The commission recommended in 1998 that victims be paid a total of $380 million, but less than a third of that has been budgeted for reparations.

Ngewu, who has come to terms with the loss of her son, remains bitter.

``We get nothing (and) I blame the government,'' she said. ``I wish they could make a monument for our children.''

-------

Sudan criticizes U.S. aid to rebels

May 30, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010530-35507020.htm

The government of Sudan objected yesterday to a U.S. decision last week to provide $3 million in support to a rebel alliance just days before the first meeting in four years between the two sides in Sudan´s 17-year-old civil war.

"The news of today that the U.S. administration has decided to supply $3 million in support for the Sudanese opposition group, National Democratic Alliance (NDA), is a very disappointing development," said a statement from the Sudan Embassy in Washington.

"It came as an unexpected response to a bold step toward peace," the statement said of the Khartoum government´s announcement a day earlier of a unilateral halt to all aerial bombing in southern Sudan and the Nuba mountains.

Despite the pledge, rebels of the Sudan People´s Liberation Army (SPLA) said in a communique received by Reuters news agency in Cairo that government forces had burned 14 villages in a failed raid this week on rebel positions in the Nuba mountains.

Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters during his trip to Africa last week that the $3 million was to assist the NDA, an umbrella group of opposition parties, in negotiating with the Sudan government in Khartoum.

He said the money would go for nonlethal items such as office equipment and training in negotiations.

Mr. Powell said that any U.S. aid was meant to be humanitarian and the U.S. goal was reconciliation.

The Sudan Embassy statement, however, said that armed rebels of the SPLA would be the only beneficiaries. "The decision runs contrary to all efforts exerted to achieve a just and peaceful solution and will only contribute to more bloodshed and killing."

Mr. Powell met last week in Nairobi, Kenya, with nongovernment and humanitarian groups supplying aid to southern Sudan, where autonomy-seeking Christian and animist rebels are fighting the Islamic Sudanese government forces. Unlike former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, Mr. Powell did not meet with rebel leader John Garang.

He sent the administrator of the Agency for International Development, Andrew Natsios, to Nairobi Sunday to meet with both sides in the conflict and to prepare emergency grain supplies to the north, where a famine is affecting millions.

In the latest fighting, the rebels told Reuters news agency they had repelled a government offensive in three battles yesterday, killing 400 government troops. It said the fighting took place in the west of Bahr al-Gazal province, 600 miles southwest of Khartoum. The statement did not say how many rebels were killed.

The SPLA announced on Monday that its leader, Mr. Garang, would meet Sudan President Omar Hassan Bashir at a peace conference in Nairobi on Saturday.

-------- balkans

Police Ousted From Bosnian Force

MAY 30, 18:01 EST
By EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS7CAMR600

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Dozens of international police officers, including a number of Americans, have been removed from the U.N. force in Bosnia because of misconduct over the past five years, a U.N. official said Wednesday.

Officers have been found guilty of violating the force's code of conduct for a variety of offenses, including accepting financial favors, overstepping authority, patronizing prostitutes, and committing statutory rape, the official said on condition he not be named.

Those found to have violated the force's conduct rules have been immediately removed, and the information regarding the investigation forwarded to the government of the officer's home country, he said.

It is then the responsibility of the individual U.N. member nation to take any disciplinary or legal action against the police officer.

Under the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, which ended a 3 1/2 -year war in Bosnia, the United Nations halved the 40,000-strong Serb, Croat and Muslim police force. The U.N. police were then authorized to take the 20,000 police remaining and train them in human rights, forensics, pathology, traffic management and criminology, a job that is expected to be completed by December 2002.

Nearly 10,000 police officers from countries around the world, including 800 Americans, have served in the U.N. International Police Task Force and ``the vast majority...have performed in a highly professional manner,'' but allegations of misconduct have arisen, the U.N. official said.

Since mid-1999, when Jacques Klein became the U.N. envoy to Bosnia, 24 international police officers, including eight Americans, have been removed from the force for misconduct, he said. Exact figures of the number of police officers removed for misconduct in earlier years were not available.

The United Nations does not have its own police force and therefore must rely on member nations to provide qualified officers.

----

NATO, EU Talk Cooperation in Balkans

MAY 30, 18:48 EST
By JEFFREY ULBRICH
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS7CANHL00

BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) - NATO and European Union foreign ministers praised the EU's foreign policy chief on Wednesday for saving the coalition government in Macedonia, and said ethnic Albanian rebels must either lay down their arms or face the consequences.

Macedonia is the main staging area for NATO's peacekeeping operation in Kosovo and hosts thousands of NATO rear-echelon forces. Its government has been under attack by ethnic Albanian rebels in the north.

``I don't want to say the problem is solved,'' EU policy chief Javier Solana said at a joint NATO-EU foreign ministers meeting after briefing ministers on his diplomacy of the past few days. ``It is not solved yet. We are taking steps in the right direction.''

The ethnic Albanian rebels in the mountains of northern Macedonia remain a threat, Solana acknowledged, but he said they would never be allowed to become part of the negotiating process.

``What they have to do is lay down their weapons and get themselves incorporated into the political system,'' Solana said. ``Those who don't want to do that will have to be prosecuted.''

Solana persuaded Macedonia's Slavic and ethnic Albanian political party leaders to revive cooperation in their national unity government and end a weeklong deadlock that began when ethnic Albanian political leaders signed a peace deal with the rebel forces. Macedonia's Slavic leaders had insisted the ethnic Albanian politicians renounce the deal before cooperation could resume.

NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson said EU-NATO cooperation in the Balkans boded well for future relations between the two institutions as the EU develops its own defense arm. The EU plans to have a 60,000-man rapid-reaction corps ready for action in peacekeeping and humanitarian missions by 2003.

The two organizations have been negotiating for the past several months on how this new cooperation will work, particularly how the EU will access such NATO assets as planning facilities, intelligence and communications. Final agreement has been difficult because NATO nations who are not members of the EU, particularly Turkey, want to have a strong say in the EU military decision-making process.

While the problem in most organizations, Robertson said, is putting the theory into practice, in this case, the practice of cooperation between NATO and the EU has been going very well but the difficulty lies in developing the theory.

``Problems in southern Serbia and the continued unstable situation in ... Macedonia have been the occasion for enhanced NATO-EU crisis management cooperation,'' he said.

With regard to Macedonia, where more than a quarter of the population is made up of ethnic Albanians, Solana said getting the unity government restarted was the key.

``Now what we have to do is continue the dialogue ... and to isolate those who still do not want to participate in the political process,'' Solana said.

Illustrating the fast-changing situation in the Balkans, Yugoslav Foreign Minister Goran Svilanovic addressed a meeting of the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, a forum made up of NATO's 19 members and 27 partner countries, which meet several times a year to discuss European security issues.

Just two years ago, NATO bombs and missiles rained down on Yugoslav army forces in Kosovo and Serbia. Today, President Slobodan Milosevic is out of power and the foreign minister of a new democratic government is speaking at NATO meetings.

----

Supporting Macedonia

May 30, 2001
Embassy Row
James Morrison
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010530-1031963.htm

The U.S. ambassador to Poland is urging NATO to mount a show of force to support Macedonia against ethnic Albanian rebels that are threatening the stability of the Balkan nation.

Christopher Hill, also a former ambassador to Macedonia, yesterday told representatives at a NATO conference that the Albanian separatists misinterpreted Western action in the Serbian region of Kosovo, where NATO intervened to stop the ethnic cleansing of ethnic Albanians.

Mr. Hill said NATO support would be "not so much in the application of force but visible so the Albanian insurgents understand they are not only up against the Macedonian army, but up against NATO as well."

Mr. Hill is representing the United States at a conference of 200 representatives from 19 NATO countries and 16 other countries in Vilnius, Lithuania, where they are considering issues facing the Western alliance.

He also discussed Bush administration plans for a national missile defense system and European plans for a security force separate from NATO.

Mr. Hill said European concerns about the missile plan were "heard and understood" during consultation earlier this month.

"This shows there can be a real coming together on defining threats and moving ahead," he said.

The Bush administration supports the European defense concept "provided it can add to our collective capabilities," he said, referring to U.S. concerns that the Europeans consult closely with NATO on any operations.

----

Croatia asks U.S. not to pull troops

May 30, 2001
By Jeffrey T. Kuhner
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010530-27877420.htm

Croatia´s foreign minister yesterday warned the Bush administration that withdrawing U.S. troops from the Balkans would lead to instability and increased violence in the region.

Tonino Picula, in a telephone interview with The Washington Times from Budapest, said, "I do not think it´s possible for American troops to leave the region any time, in the short term at least."

Mr. Picula, who became foreign minister last year after the new reformist government won both the presidential and parliamentary elections, endorsed Secretary of State Colin Powell´s decision at the NATO ministers´ conference in Budapest this week to maintain U.S. troops in Bosnia-Herzegovina -- although at reduced levels.

"The presence of the United States is vital" to the peace and security of the region, Mr. Picula said. He added that the United States "can reduce troops in Bosnia and Macedonia, but not leave those countries entirely."

Mr. Picula stressed that a full-scale withdrawal of U.S. troops would threaten the internal stability of neighboring Bosnia, which fought a bitter three-year civil war beginning in 1992. "It will not help the process of normalization within Bosnia," he said.

The foreign minister said his government openly welcomes a vigorous role by the United States in international affairs -- especially in the Balkans.

"Thanks to its global position and global interests, is almost a neighboring nation to every country in the world," he said. He predicted the Bush administration "will not leave Bosnia."

Under the new reformist government in Zagreb, Croatia has emerged from the international isolation of the nationalist regime led by former President Franjo Tudjman, who led the country in its successful drive for independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. Mr. Tudjman was criticized by Western governments for his authoritarian rule and especially his desire to carve up Bosnia with former Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

Mr. Picula praised the United States for supporting the new government´s agenda of democratic and economic reform. "We are very happy with the support of the United States," the foreign minister said.

Yet he acknowledged that more needed to be done to promote U.S. foreign investment in Croatia. The country´s unemployment rate is 23 percent and its foreign debt is nearly $10 billion.

Mr. Picula said that the greatest change from the previous regime is the new government´s pro-Western orientation. He stressed that Croatia´s "two major foreign policy goals are joining the European Union and NATO."

The new government has said it is committed to privatizing about 1,850 state-owned companies by the end of the year. Implementing economic reform and privatization is vital to becoming a member of the European Union. "We are trying our best to become a new member by the end of 2006," Mr. Picula said.

However, the foreign minister said that his government´s immediate priorities are "improving the economic situation and fostering good relations with our neighbors."

Mr. Picula believes that promoting an aggressive free-trade agenda in the region will help foster economic growth and political stability. He said economic development and greater trade will create closer cooperation among the former republics of Yugoslavia.

He said his government also plans to forge economic links with the new reformist government in Belgrade, putting aside the bitter memories of the 1991-95 war in which nearly one-third of Croatia´s territory was occupied by rebel Serbs backed by the Yugoslav army. Croatia eventually recovered its lost territories.

"We are opening negotiations with Yugoslavia," Mr. Picula said. "We will host the Yugoslav foreign minister next month to begin negotiating a free-trade agreement."

----

A war to end all scores

May 30, 2001
Helle Bering
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010530-94715944.htm

After "Pearl Harbor," will the next Hollywood epic be "Kosovo"? If some studio decided to do it, this movie would probably not be famous for the heroic action scenes. The Kosovo operation featured American and British bombers high in the sky so as to be out of reach of any Serbian anti-aircraft fire and to preclude any loss of pilots´ lives. On the ground, meanwhile, you would be seeing cursing Serbs in Belgrade shaking their hands at the invisible enemy above. There would be endless streams of desperate Albanian refugees trudging through mud and burned out villages in Kosovo, and there would be the awful evidence of the Serbian ethnic cleansing campaign that precipitated it all. This could the stuff of a gut-wrenching East European existential drama, but hardly a Hollywood extravaganza.

In all, it was a strange war. As Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley K. Clark writes in "Waging Modern War," a fascinating first-hand account of the operation, "In fact, we were never allowed to call it a war. But it was of course. This was modern war, the first fought in Europe in half a century, and the first ever fought by NATO."

"The Alliance and its members nations weren´t under attack. This war wasn´t about national survival, or the survival of democratic systems of government. . . .Modern war is different. Operation Allied Force was limited, carefully constrained in geography, scope, weaponry, and effects. Every measure of escalation was excruciatingly weighed. . . There was extraordinary concern for military losses, on all sides. Even accidental damage to civilian property was carefully considered. And 'victory´ was carefully defined."

In this definition of modern warfare, all lines are blurred. Civilians and combatants become indistinguishable, as do political and military measures. Conflict between politicians in Washington and Europe and military leaders on the ground is inevitable, and intrigue and old-fashioned personality conflict make for engaging reading. For Gen. Clark, Operation Allied Force in Kosovo clearly took on overtones of Vietnam, where political "signals" were considered more important than military victories.

It has been no secret that during the operation in the spring and summer of 1999, Gen. Clark was constantly at odds with his superiors at the Pentagon, who wanted to hold him back as best they could, and who hated the idea of further intervention in the Balkans. In the end, the Pentagon brass took revenge on the outspoken and publicity-seeking general, denying him the glory of victory (such as it was) and cutting his tour of duty short after less than three years. This sent him into premature retirement in Little Rock, Ark., of all places, so it is no wonder the man is miffed.

Particularly, Gen. Clark has scores to settle with then-Defense Secretary William Cohen, who was adamantly opposed to the use of ground troops. Mr. Cohen apparently went so far as to exclude his own top commander from Pentagon planning meetings. Another favorite target here is vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Ralston, who yelled back at Clark in the spring of 1998, "Look, Wes, we´ve got a lot on our plates here. We can´t deal with any more problems." Well, just a year later, those same problems had spun completely out of hand and required intervention. Yet another score to be settled is the case of the famous Apache attack helicopters, which the Pentagon had promised Gen. Clark to fight Serbian troops in Kosovo, who were terrorizing the Albanian civilian population. The helicopters, as will be recalled, took weeks and weeks to travel the modest distance from Germany to Albania. In the end they never saw combat.

Among the book´s truly memorable scenes is the showdown with British Gen. Sir Michael Jackson over the airport in Pristina, capital of Kosovo, where Russian troops turned up most unexpectedly in June of 1999. The scene features the elegant and keen-eyed Gen. Clark vs. the craggy and growling Gen. Jackson, who refused to obey the NATO commander´s orders to block the Russians on the airport runway. "Sir, I am not starting World War Three for you...," Gen. Jackson told him, and flat out refused to take orders from Washington. The spat could contain one of the lessons of modern warfare that when push comes to shove, the NATO command structure collapses and national governments still have the ultimate control over their soldiers.

"What I saw in the Kosovo conflict was the significant difficulty the U.S. armed forces and some of its leaders faced in adapting to the requirements of a new situation," writes Gen. Clark. "I think these difficulties were in part due to organizational factors, such as the Armed Forces´ effort to cling to the 1991 Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm, as the model for future operations, rather than facing up to an ambiguous, tense, highly political coalition environment in which military actions would face tight restraints, constant high-level oversight, and continuing public scrutiny."

Now all of this way well be true. Does not the fact that we always fight the last war , however, suggest that if we prepare for another Kosovo in Europe we will be missing the point again? Where in Europe will the next Kosovo occur? Having posed that question to EU officials, who advocate a European rapid reaction force to deal with such contingencies, I have yet to receive an answer to that question. Kosovo may simply be Kosovo, a unique problem. In fact, this may not be the only shape of modern warfare, and we would to well to be prepared for more than ethnic conflicts and humanitarian interventions.

E-mail: hbering@washingtontimes.com

-------- china

Beijing prompts invasion fears

May 30, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010530-78946308.htm

China has massed amphibious vehicles and landing craft on an island near Taiwan as part of large-scale military exercises that are now under way, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

At least 157 amphibious craft and vehicles were spotted recently on Dongshan island by U.S. intelligence-gathering aircraft. The island is located across the Taiwan Strait from southern Taiwan.

The exercise is raising concerns among some in the Pentagon that China is practicing for a future invasion of Taiwan or an attack on one of Taiwan´s smaller islands near the Chinese coast.

"We have not seen these kinds of forces there for some time," said one intelligence official, who noted that the numbers were three times higher than during past exercises. The amphibious exercise is expected to be one of the largest shore-based war games held by the Chinese military in recent years.

Other defense officials sought to play down the exercises. One official said the Dongshan maneuvers are "Phase 2" of war games under way in the South China Sea.

"This is part of the spring amphibious exercise series," the official said. "Dongshan is right across from Taiwan, but we think these are normal [exercises]. It is not unusual for the Chinese to put everything they have into the mix."

A third official said the equipment involved in the exercise includes amphibious tanks, jeeps, armored vehicles and landing craft. The maneuvers also are expected to employ hovercraft troop transports deployed from large amphibious ships.

Amphibious assault landings during exercises by U.S. Marine Corps forces normally include scores of landing craft and some water-capable tanks and armored combat vehicles. In February 1945, for instance, when U.S. Marines assaulted the island of Iowa Jima it took 495 ships to land 75,000 troops.

Preparations for the amphibious exercise near Taiwan come as Chinese forces are engaged in another military exercise farther south in the South China Sea, said officials familiar with U.S. intelligence reports.

Activities related to both exercises were first reported by The Washington Times on May 17. U.S. officials said the South China Sea drills involve Chinese naval and air forces on Hainan island and on Woody Island, a small disputed islet claimed by both China and the Philippines.

The amphibious warfare arms on Dongshan were photographed last week and their presence was reported to Pentagon policy-makers.

Taiwan´s Defense Ministry said Friday that the military drills are "routine." His statement did not provide details on the exercises. "They are not targeted [at Taiwan] and have nothing to do with the president´s visit abroad," the ministry said in a statement, referring to the fact that Taiwanese leader Chen Shui-bian currently is traveling in South America.

Reports of the Chinese military exercises caused stocks to fall and the value of the Taiwanese dollar to drop.

A Taiwanese government official said on Friday that Chinese military exercises and missile deployments near Taiwan are not helpful in improving ties between the two countries. "We don´t feel military intimidation is constructive," said Tsai Ing-wen, head of the Taipei government´s Mainland Affairs Council, Reuters reported from Taipei. "Military exercises and missile deployment targeting Taiwan violate the mainland´s commitment of using peaceful means to solve the problems across the Strait," he said.

A Pentagon report to Congress on the Taiwan Strait military balance said an invasion of the island by China is one of three possible forms of attack. "The PRC could launch an invasion of Taiwan (or an offshore island), using amphibious or other sea or air transported forces," the report said. Other possibilities include a blockade or combined air and missile attacks.

Adm. Dennis Blair, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, has said a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is not likely because China´s military lacks ships for moving troops and equipment over water. China has fewer than 100 amphibious warfare ships capable of carrying large numbers of troops and tanks.

Dongshan, where the current exercises are being held, was the main site of China´s 1996 military amphibious exercises involving ground, air and naval forces. Those maneuvers also included missile test firings north and south of Taiwan.

The exercises and missile launches were viewed by the Pentagon at that time as possible preparations for a military attack on Taiwan. They came amid preparations for elections in Taiwan and were seen as part of efforts by Beijing to intimidate Taiwanese voters.

The United States responded with the dispatch of two aircraft carrier battle groups to waters near Taiwan in a show of force.

China´s military has been building up its naval forces since the 1996 standoff that has become known as the Taiwan Strait crisis.

Richard Fisher, a specialist on the Chinese military, said Beijing will likely use the maneuvers to showcase their new amphibious tanks, armored personnel carriers and jeeps near Taiwan.

"We should be very concerned about this exercise and what the combined PLA exercises over the last two years tell us about the accelerating capability of the People´s Liberation Army to conduct combined arms warfare," Mr. Fisher said.

Mr. Fisher said that China´s limited amphibious warfare capability can be used for a range of operations, from attacking Taiwan´s small islands to conducting a security following large-scale aerial bombing and missile attacks.

A photograph of a new Chinese armored personnel carrier shows a combat vehicle with an outboard motor attached. "This is why we say the Chinese are using ´60s tactics with ´50s technology," one defense official said.

Chinese military writings also have discussed using fishing boats and other small vessels as part of an invasion force against Taiwan.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon said yesterday that a team of four officials would travel to China later this week to assess how to ship the damaged EP-3E surveillance aircraft out of Hainan island, where it has been held since the April 1 collision with a Chinese F-8 jet.

-------- colombia

Colombia: Drug Runs Increased in May

MAY 28, 13:37 EST
Associated Press
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=CSA&STORYID=APIS7C98PK00

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) - Drug-smuggling flights have multiplied since the United States stopped sharing radar data over the accidental downing of a missionary plane in Peru, Colombia's air force commander said.

Washington suspended the sharing of such information with Peru and Colombia after a Peruvian warplane guided by a U.S. intelligence flight attacked the plane on April 20 over the Amazon, killing missionary Veronica Bowers and her 7-month-old daughter.

Under the anti-drug program, U.S. AWACS surveillance planes fly over drug-producing regions. When a radar plane detects a suspicious flight, it radios for a smaller U.S. plane that can fly low and watch the target.

Colombian Air Force Gen. Hector Fabio Velasco told reporters last week that the number of drug flights had increased as a result of the suspension.

He said that during the first half of last week alone, three planes loaded with cocaine had been intercepted over Meta state, in central Colombia, and that one of the pilots had dumped his load into the jungle before being forced to land.

Velasco said that in the absence of radar intelligence from the U.S. planes, the Colombian air force is intensifying cooperation with the air forces of Brazil and Venezuela, where many of the drug planes take off.

-------- iran

Iran masses troops for war games near Iraq

Special to World Tribune.com
MIDDLE EAST NEWSLINE
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/Archive-2001/me-iran-05-30.html

NICOSIA - Iran has launched new military exercises near the Iraqi border.

The exercise, termed Eqtedar-80, began over the weekend and will last a week. The maneuvers comprise 20,000 Iranian troops in the western and southern districts of Iran.

Officials acknowledge that the exercise is meant to increase Iranian deterrence amid growing tension with Iraq. In April, Iranian forces attacked Iraqi bases in the most intense rocket barrage since the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

"The maneuvers are aimed to reinforce the deterring power of the national army, stepping up security along the borders and displaying capabilities of the national army including their rapid reaction force as well as showcasing their inventions," Iranian media quoted a senior commander identified as Brig. Gen. Mahmoudi as saying.

Officials said Iran will probably deploy new weapons during the exercise. Teheran has unveiled new 125 mm shells produced for the nation's fleet of T-72 tanks. Iran has also built and tested the Shihab-3 missile, with a range of 1,300 kilometers.

Iran conducts about 40 exercises a year. Many of them are in the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Oman.

In another development, Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei has appointed Brig. Gen. Habib Baqaie as the acting commander of the army. Khamenei also appointed Brig. Gen. Reza Pardis as commanders of the air force.

Meanwhile, Iraq has again threatened to halt exports unless United Nations sanctions are lifted.

Iraqi statements said the regime of President Saddam Hussein does not rule out such a prospect if the UN oil-for-food program continues. Officials said Baghdad might simply halt exports under the program.

Taha Hamoud Mussa, a senior officials in the Iraqi Oil Ministry, said an Iraqi halt in oil exports would spark a crisis in the world market. He said Baghdad had been planning on increasing oil production to 3.5 million barrels a day by the end of the year.

Iraq currently produces 3 million barrels a day with plans to double this figure by 2005.

The threat comes as Iraq reports new oil finds in the western desert. Officials said natural gas deposits have also been detected.

-------- iraq

Powell OKs Delay on Iraq Sanctions

MAY 31, 03:00 EST
By TOM RAUM
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ELECTION&STORYID=APIS7CAUNS80

WASHINGTON (AP) - The United States and its allies are willing to postpone for up to six months a U.N. decision on restructuring sanctions against Iraq to give Russia more time to study proposed changes.

U.S. officials, however, said they are hopeful Moscow's review can be completed in one month.

Secretary of State Colin Powell cited ``general agreement'' among members of the U.N. Security Council that sanctions ``have lost some of their effectiveness.''

``It is wise to move forward,'' he said, speaking with reporters as he flew home late Wednesday from a NATO meeting in Budapest.

Powell expressed optimism that agreement on a new sanctions package could soon be reached.

While in Budapest, Powell conferred separately with foreign ministers of Britain, France and Russia. With the United States, these nations represent four of the five permanent members of the Security Council.

China, the fifth member, was not directly involved in the talks. Each of the five permanent members has veto power.

``The action is (now) back in New York,'' Powell said, referring to negotiations expected to continue at UN headquarters on the contentious issue.

The current humanitarian oil-for-food program is due to expire on June 3.

Under the informal agreement nailed down by Powell, that program will be temporarily extended, primarily to give Russia a chance to scrutinize a proposed new list of banned items, said a senior administration official.

The extension, to be put in the form of a U.N. resolution over the weekend, will nominally be for six months. But the official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity, said the United States expected Russia's review to be completed in a month.

The agreement to ``roll over'' the current program was an attempt to overcome a serious impasse on the Security Council, with the June 3 deadline fast approaching.

The United States and Britain want to restructure the sanctions to allow free trade on most civilian goods while tightening them on military imports.

Russia has been the main obstacle to putting such a plan in place, although France and China have also urged against haste.

Final details of the proposed agreement came together during a Wednesday meeting between Powell and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

Under the current deadline, the Security Council must extend - or revamp - the program that allows Iraq to sell unlimited quantities of oil to pay for the needs of its civilian population.

Iraq remains under sanctions imposed after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.

The restructuring of sanctions is one of the Bush administration's first foreign policy initiatives.

The U.S.-British plan would remove most restrictions on trade in consumer goods and materials for rebuilding public services. It would retain control of Iraqi oil profits through U.N.-administered escrow accounts.

The United States wants to see controls tightened on items it considers as dangerous, particularly those which could be used to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

The proposal would keep in place the United Nations resolution that states sanctions cannot be removed until Iraq allows arms inspectors to return.

Other issues still remain to be decided, including how the embargo is to be enforced at border points and how to control smuggling.

``There are lots of variants,'' Powell said.

The United States is compiling a list of items it wants banned, including certain technologies and communications equipment.

Many items now banned, such as small diesel generators and refrigerator pumps, would be removed from the list.

Powell said the sanctions were originally intended as ``an arms control program,'' not an attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

On another subject, Powell took issue with those who saw NATO's reluctance to be more supportive of the U.S. missile defense plan as a setback for the Bush administration.

``Everybody was keeping a scorecard on who won and who lost in Budapest. We weren't playing a game in Budapest,'' he said.

``I didn't come with a proposal to lay before them,'' he said.

Administration officials worked unsuccessfully behind the scenes to get NATO to adopt language recognizing a ``common threat'' from missile attack from terrorists or hostile nations.

Instead, NATO leaders only agreed to continue consultations with Washington on the subject.

----

Judge Orders Iraq to Pay 4 Americans $13 Million

By Bill Miller
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A92896-2001May29?language=printer

A federal judge has ordered the government of Iraq to pay nearly $13 million in damages to four Americans who were jailed in Baghdad for alleged border infractions, ruling that Iraqi guards illegally seized the men and tortured them.

Senior U.S. District Judge Louis F. Oberdorfer also ordered Iraq to pay $6 million to the men's wives for loss of companionship and psychological trauma.

The ruling marks the first time that Iraq has been ordered to pay damages under a 1996 law meant to give Americans who are victims of terrorist acts abroad a recourse in the courts. But there is no guarantee the families will collect. Iraq initially hired a legal team that argued the U.S. courts lacked jurisdiction. When the trial went forward, Iraq withdrew its lawyers and lost by default.

"I feel very relieved and vindicated," said Kenneth Beaty, 53, a drilling rig supervisor who was detained in April 1993. "I think it was very important after spending 205 days [in jail], knowing you're a political pawn and had done nothing wrong."

Oberdorfer said the damages were to compensate the men for the time unfairly spent in captivity as well as lost income. Beaty was awarded $4.2 million. Chad Hall, of Knoxville, Tenn., a civilian bomb-disposal specialist who was jailed for five days in 1992, was awarded $1.8 million. William Barloon and David Daliberti, both of Jacksonville, Fla., were awarded $2.9 million and $3.8 million, respectively. They were civilian defense contractors who were confined for 126 days in 1995.

Similar judgments have been returned in recent years against the governments of Iran and Cuba. Last year, Congress passed legislation providing for the United States to pay more than $200 million to eight families that won antiterrorism judgments against Iran and more than $50 million to three families that won a judgment against Cuba. U.S. officials have said that they intend to recover money from Iran through negotiations or an international claims tribunal and that they used frozen assets in the Cuban matter.

Andrew Hall, a Miami lawyer who represented Beaty and other plaintiffs, said he hopes President Bush or Congress will pay the businessmen and their wives from roughly $1.5 billion in frozen Iraqi assets.

Mohammed Aldouri, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, did not return a telephone message seeking comment on the ruling.

In an opinion issued Friday, Oberdorfer said evidence showed that Iraq hoped that the United States government would lift economic sanctions or provide other monetary benefits in return for the men's release. That didn't happen, but Beaty's wife, Robin, raised about $5 million in humanitarian aid that she turned over just before he was freed. The judge found that the men were kept in horrible conditions and threatened.

All four men had been based in Kuwait and had job assignments near the Iraqi border. Tensions there remained high after the Persian Gulf War, they said. During a four-day trial in March, Hall testified that Iraqi soldiers crossed the border into Kuwait to apprehend him without cause. Beaty said he was seized when he stopped at an Iraqi border checkpoint. Barloon and Daliberti said they mistakenly wound up just past the Iraqi side of the border.

Hall testified that he was released after extensive interrogation. The others were tried in Iraqi courts on charges that they illegally entered the country and were given eight-year prison terms. Beaty was freed after the humanitarian aid was delivered and with the help of then-Sen. David L. Boren (D-Okla.), who traveled to Iraq to get him. Barloon and Daliberti were freed after then-Rep. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.) met with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

-------- israel

Mitchell report missed it

May 30, 2001
Daniel Pipes
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20010530-92643400.htm

Former Sen. George Mitchell and four eminent colleagues were asked in October by then-President Clinton to write a report about the outbreak of Palestinian-Israeli violence "to determine what happened and how to avoid it recurring in the future." The fact-finding committee traveled to the region, held consultations with leaders and issued its report last week.

It is a great disappointment, and for three main reasons. First, it reveals the would-be peacemaker´s typical unwillingness to judge right and wrong. Had the Mitchell committee been asked to assess the outbreak of World War II, it would likely have regretted Hitler´s crossing of the Polish border but balanced this with tsk-tsking about "provocative" statements coming from Warsaw. Assigned the same job for the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor, it would have evenhandedly blamed both parties. Saddam Hussein´s invasion of Kuwait? A regrettable development for which both Iraq and Kuwait must be blamed.

Not wanting to offend, in other words, creates an illusionary balance of blame ("Fear, hate, anger, and frustration have risen on both sides," says the report) that makes it impossible to distinguish between aggressor and victim, between right and wrong.

In fact, the recent violence has a clear address, and it is the Palestinians. The Israeli government, hoping to end the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, made unexpected and startling concessions to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in July 2000, only to have these contemptuously rejected. Worse, in an effort to extract even more concessions than the Israelis had offered, two months later, the Palestinians began a round of violence that still continues.

This was clearly not a question of equal responsibility, but a plain case of one side aggressing against the other.

Second, the Mitchell report suggests that Israel "should freeze all settlement activity" to mollify the Palestinians. This is a step the Israelis never agreed to, even when negotiations were under way. To do so now rewards the Palestinians for engaging in violence, something objectionable in principle and ineffectual in practice.

Third, and most profoundly, the report emphasizes getting the two parties back to the negotiating table, as though this were an end in itself. It seems oblivious to the important fact that negotiations over the past eight years did not bring the parties closer to a settlement but, to the contrary, exacerbated differences and had a role in the outbreak of violence. Contrasting the relatively benign and hopeful mood of 1993 with the venom and dangers of today, it is clear that the talks were part of the problem, not part of the solution.

The Mitchell committee seems myopically unaware of the real issue at hand, which is not violence, or Jewish settlements, or Jerusalem. It is, rather, the enduring Arab reluctance to accept the existence of a sovereign Jewish state. Always present, this somewhat diminished by the early 1990s, only to flare up again as a result of the Oslo process.

In other words, the Israeli flexibility, aimed at closing down the conflict, was received by many Arabs not as a sign of goodwill but as an indication that Israel was weak and vulnerable. Rather than want to live harmoniously with Israel, these concessions made Israel into a more tempting target.

Contrary to the Mitchell report, the solution lies not in getting the parties back as fast as possible to diplomacy, but in instilling in the Palestinians an awareness of the futility of their use of violence against the Jewish state. It would be wonderful if this could be achieved through negotiations; unfortunately, the negotiations that began in 1993 and lasted until last September show that it can only be done through force. The Oslo process was an effort to avoid force; it failed.

What the Israeli authorities are now doing, with great reluctance and with a minimum of violence, is sending a message to the Palestinians: Give up on your aspiration of destroying Israel, end your reliance on force, experience a change of heart. That message needs to be endorsed by the U.S. government.

Talk-talk is always better than war-war, but in some cases an aggressor cannot be dissuaded by talk alone, and so war is a necessity. Sadly, that is the case with the Palestinians today. Sadly too, the Mitchell commission did not comprehend this fact. And so, its report is destined either to get in the way of a solution; or, more likely, to disappear quickly and without a trace.

Daniel Pipes is director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post. He can be reached via www.DanielPipes.org.

-------- puerto rico

Vieques Exercises to Resume in June

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Puerto-Rico-Vieques.html

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) -- The U.S. Navy intends to resume exercises next month on the Vieques island bombing range despite continuing protests, Puerto Rico's governor said Wednesday.

The Navy notified Puerto Rico that it will hold its next exercises as early as June 13 and they will last no more than 18 days, said Gov. Sila Calderon.

In the Navy's last exercises on Vieques, from April 27 to May 1, about 180 people were arrested for trespassing on Navy land in protests seeking to stop the exercises. The U.S. District Court for Puerto Rico has not tried all the arrested.

More than 40 protesters, including New York activist the Rev. Al Sharpton, have been sentenced to jail terms up to four months.

The Navy has used its range on Vieques, which has a population of 9,400, for six decades and says it is vital for national security. Critics say it poses a health threat, which the Navy denies.

Opposition to the exercises grew after a civilian guard was killed on the range in 1999 by two off-target bombs. The Navy has since stopped using live ammunition, and islanders will vote in November whether the Navy must leave in 2003 or can stay, resuming the use of live ammunition.

-------- space

Panel Advises Quarantine for Any Material From Mars

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By KENNETH CHANG
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/30/science/30MARS.html?searchpv=nytToday

Rocks and soil brought back to Earth from Mars by a future space mission should be handled as if they were chock full of deadly microbes, even though they will almost certainly prove lifeless, a panel of experts said yesterday.

Upon arrival on Earth, the material should be quarantined in a special laboratory similar to those used to study Ebola and other highly contagious, lethal diseases, the panel said, and unless it is completely devoid of any possible signs of life, it should be sterilized through heat or radiation before being released to researchers outside of the quarantine.

Although a mission to bring back a piece of Mars - probably about a pound of soil - will not occur for at least a decade, designing, building and testing the quarantine center will take at least seven years, the panel said. Even before that, NASA should commission research on sterilization techniques, to ensure that any Martian organisms would be killed while limiting damage to the molecules that would hint at past life on Mars.

The Committee on Planetary and Lunar Exploration, part of the National Research Council, released the report at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Boston.

"We have time to do the job right, if we start now," said Dr. John A. Wood, a staff scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who is chairman of the committee. "It's not an insurmountable task. The thing is, a mockup needs to be built. You have to try these things, test them and see how well they work."

NASA should not repeat the shortcomings of quarantine efforts during the Apollo moon missions, which did not start until two years before the first moon landing in 1969. If any microbes lived on the Moon, they would probably have escaped the imperfect quarantine and been released into the environment in the Pacific Ocean and at the lunar laboratory in Houston.

"I give a lot of credit to the efforts they made to do this right," Dr. Wood said. "In the end, there really was not enough time."

The first mission to bring back a sample from Mars could be launched in 2011 with a return by 2014.

In its early history, Mars is believed to have been warm and wet, hospitable to the advent of life. But the surface of Mars, which long since dried up, is now cold and airless. The chances of life living in those conditions are remote.

-------- sweden

Missile Goes Astray in Sweden

Wednesday May 30
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010530/wl/sweden_missile_astray_1.html

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - A loaded surface-to-air missile that disappeared Wednesday during a practice launch was found not far from where it took off, according to the Swedish Defense Authority.

No injuries or damage were reported.

The missile malfunctioned after it was fired at the Vaeddoe test range during a military exercise in Sweden, suddenly changing course and diving into the water.

It surfaced seconds later and disappeared in the air, defense authorities said in a statement.

The errant missile was discovered on an island less than 20 miles from the test range after an extensive, four-hour search that included a helicopter and warnings to the public the weapon was loaded and dangerous.

No explanation for the malfunction was given in the statement, but military spokesman Ulf Eriksson said earlier the mishap would be investigated.

The test range was some 45 miles northwest of the capital, Stockholm.

--------

Surface - To - Air Missile Goes Astray

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Sweden-Missile-Astray.html?searchpv=aponline

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- A surface-to-air missile with a live warhead was found Wednesday shortly after it disappeared during a practice launch, according to the Swedish Defense Authority.

No injuries or damage were reported.

The missile malfunctioned after it was fired at the Vaeddoe test range during a military exercise, suddenly changing course and diving into the water. It emerged seconds later and disappeared in the air, defense authorities said in a statement.

The errant missile was discovered on an island less than 20 miles from the test range after an extensive, four-hour helicopter search. It did not explode on impact.

No explanation for the malfunction was given in the statement, but military spokesman Ulf Eriksson said earlier the mishap would be investigated.

The test range was some 45 miles northwest of the capital, Stockholm.

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

After war, send blue force

OPINION
By Graham Day,
Christian Science Monitor,
WEDNESDAY, MAY 30, 2001
http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2001/05/30/p11s2.htm

The use of police instead of military forces as the primary peacekeepers in post-war conflict areas is an idea whose time has come.

Both Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have publicly stated that they wish to use police or constabulary forces to relieve the pressure of peace- support operations on the US military. In fact, a bill has been introduced in Congress directing the United States to support a UN rapid-police deployment plan. Unfortunately, few in the US foreign policy community seem to have recognized yet the extraordinary potential that this proposal holds.

Military force will always be needed when fully coercive measures, such as forcing a cease-fire, are necessary. But once a cease-fire begins, the efficacy of the military dramatically diminishes. At the same time, the need for civilian peace-building tools - the agencies of law and order: the police, judiciary, penal system, and body of law - increases. These are needs the military is ill-equipped to meet.

A rapid-deployment police or "blue force" - as blue is the most common color of law-enforcement uniforms throughout the world - would provide exactly the right tool at the right moment. Consisting of specially trained law enforcement officials, each blue-force member would be specifically trained in the plethora of possible civil challenges that inevitably arise in a post-conflict peace-building situation.

Further, the blue force would provide the right tool at the right price. In contrast with regular military forces, a blue force would need only conventional police equipment, long-barreled weapons, and some armored personnel carriers, along with other miscellaneous public-order support equipment for riot control. Without a need for tracked vehicles or heavy artillery, policymakers would find a blue force much cheaper to support on the ground than an army (or green force) without sacrificing peacekeeping capacity.

The blue force could easily deploy to a trouble spot before a cease-fire while the green forces are still on the ground. From the time of the signing of the cease-fire agreement, the blue force would be responsible for public order, routine police work, the arrest of war criminals, security for refugees, and, most important, starting the process of vetting, restructuring, and training the local police. The majority of a nation's military forces could start to withdraw as soon as the blue force was fully deployed.

In essence, the blue force becomes the most important factor in a military exit strategy. The start of the blue force's engagement would trigger the first phase of the army's withdrawal. In fact, had such a force quickly deployed to Kosovo we would not now be facing the growing loss of confidence in law and order in that region. We would in fact be able to plan more effectively the withdrawal of the "heavy" military units which serve little peace-building purpose anyway.

Different countries have different abilities to support such a blue force. The United States, Canada, and Mexico have complementary strengths that could be enhanced in the growing cooperation and sophistication of the North American politico-economic environment. The three countries could jointly form a "Corps of the Americas," whose units would train with each other and assist each other in understanding both common and civil law procedures.

Perhaps most important, their equipment would be air transportable from bases relatively close to each other.

Such a corps would constitute a significant foundation for a viable blue force - a substantial contribution to world peace and a meaningful institution of solidarity within North America.

Currently, there are proposals for the United Nations to have a standing constabulary force of 5,000 people. The Europeans are showing great enthusiasm for this idea and have already implemented the necessary European Union committees to make a blue force a reality. By 2003 the European Union will have 5,000 police identified, of whom 1,200 will be rapidly available, and have further plans to field 200 judges and prosecutors as well. However, the US stands to be left out of this new field unless action is taken now.

While the idea of a standing UN army is rightly an unrealistic dream, the idea of a standing UN constabulary force is a practical possibility of great importance. The blue force would not only provide US policymakers with a cheaper and more efficient tool than the use of military personnel, it would also supply the essential element in any real exit strategy for US military forces involved in post-conflict peace-building operations.

Making a blue force a reality is a major opportunity for the Bush administration to show that it is not going to renege on world leadership, while also demonstrating that it is serious about exit strategies. The blue force is needed now. Let's not let it slip quietly into the night.

• Graham Day is a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace. He is former district administrator for the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor. Before that, he directed post-conflict civilian police training for the UN mission in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The views expressed here are his own.

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

Pentagon Scaling Back Expectations

By Robert Burns
AP Military Writer
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010530/aponline100207_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- The big Pentagon shake-up some expected when President Bush took office - after campaigning on a pledge to modernize the military and repair morale - is looking less likely.

Or at least it is slower in coming.

A spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that the policy reviews he undertook three months ago to fashion a new approach to defense are likely to produce less dramatic results than commonly believed.

"I think there was a widespread perception that there would be many more near-term announcements of dramatic change than what we're actually going to see," said Rear Adm. Craig Quigley.

Originally, there was anxiety in the defense industry and among the military services that Rumsfeld would take an ax to major weapons programs like the Air Force's F-22 stealth fighter, the Marine Corps' V-22 Osprey aircraft or the Navy's DD-21 new-generation destroyer. More recently, the Army has fretted over rumors that Rumsfeld would make troop cuts. Congress worried about military bases being closed.

In fact, there have been no dramatic changes yet. Even for one of Bush's highest national security priorities - missile defense - Rumsfeld has yet to come up with specific program changes.

In a sign of the uncertainty facing U.S. military leaders, Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Wednesday postponed a planned trip to India so that he could attend a series of closed-door meetings this week with Rumsfeld and the service chiefs. They will meet each day this week, culminating in a Saturday session to be attended also by the war-fighting commanders.

"The chairman felt these are extremely important (meetings) in helping to determine the future of U.S. forces over the next several years," said Shelton's spokesman, Navy Capt. T.L. McCreary. Shelton hopes to make the India trip later, he said.

Some private analysts who have monitored Rumsfeld's reviews think the Bush administration's approach to defense will turn out more like the Clinton administration's than anyone might have believed even a few weeks ago.

"The new Pentagon team has basically been reinventing the wheel," says Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a think tank. "It is gradually backing into all the beliefs about geopolitical, technological and managerial trends that the Clinton team had arrived at after eight laborious years."

The main difference, Thompson believes, is that Bush will find more money to carry out his policies.

"With Democrats now in control of the Senate, the most likely outcome for defense is that Donald Rumsfeld will end up carrying out the Clinton transformation plan to fruition by adequately funding it. That's not the way he will describe it, but that is what it will amount to," Thompson said.

Rumsfeld on Tuesday held the first in a series of meetings with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to reach a consensus view on how to approach yet another major review of the military; this one, known as the quadrennial defense review, or QDR, is required by law and is due to Congress by Sept. 30.

The last QDR, in 1997, was based on a strategy that Bush has criticized for getting the U.S. military involved in too many peacekeeping and other non-combat missions. Bush directed Rumsfeld to come up with another strategy, but so far the defense secretary has not said publicly what it will be.

Quigley said the policy reviews Rumsfeld requested shortly after he took office in January are now largely done. Most will not result in published papers but were meant to "stimulate his thinking" on important topics, such as how to properly size the military and other subjects to be studied in the QDR.

Quigley said Rumsfeld has not yet presented President Bush with a final version of his defense strategy, nor has Rumsfeld decided what portions of the various policy reviews will be made public, or when.

"I don't think the secretary has a complete understanding in his own mind of how he wants to fold all the parts together," the spokesman said.

The air of uncertainty in which the Pentagon has operated since Rumsfeld took office has frustrated and even angered some senior military leaders, although they have kept their concerns mostly private. Many have said they worry that Rumsfeld until recently kept them at arms length and consulted less than they would have liked on important issues affecting the future of their service branch.

Quigley was asked whether Rumsfeld had, in effect, scaled back the size of his expectations for shaking up the Pentagon.

"No, he just didn't know what he was going to find when he started down this road," Quigley replied. "He started a process to help him better understanding the issues ... and how they were going to be rolled out, in what manner, in what time frame. He didn't have a clue in the early February time frame when he started this effort.

"As time has passed and the studies have matured and his thinking has matured, I think he has a better understanding, but he was never on much of a timetable."

-------

Pentagon Official Delays India Visit

By Robert Burns
Washington Post
AP Military Writer
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010530/aponline101339_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has postponed a trip to India so he can attend a series of high-level Pentagon meetings, his spokesman said Wednesday.

On Tuesday, the Pentagon had announced Shelton would leave for India on Wednesday to begin a world tour that also was to take him to the Middle East and to NATO headquarters in Europe.

Shelton called his Indian counterpart, Adm. Sushil Kumar, on Wednesday to "express his sincere regret" and to ask if the visit could be rescheduled, said Navy Capt. T.L. McCreary, a Shelton spokesman. Shelton was to have arrived in New Delhi on Thursday and left on Friday.

McCreary said the decision to put off the trip was based entirely on Shelton's desire to attend meetings each day this week with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the chiefs of the armed services.

The Pentagon talks are intended to chart a course for a congressionally mandated review of U.S. defenses. They are to culminate Saturday with a session to be joined by the commanders of the war-fighting commands around the world.

"The chairman felt these are extremely important (meetings) in helping to determine the future of U.S. forces over the next several years," McCreary said.

It was to be Shelton's first trip to India as joint chiefs chairman. He would have been the highest ranking U.S. military officer to visit since India's nuclear test in 1998, which prompted the Clinton administration to scale back military-to-military contacts.

Shelton still has no plans to visit Pakistan. Previous U.S. administrations have been closer to Pakistan than India, but that tilt began to change at the end of former President Clinton's term after Gen. Pervez Musharraf came to power in Islamabad in a military coup.

Although he is canceling the India visit, Shelton will leave on Saturday to visit Jordan and Egypt, then go to Brussels, Belgium, for NATO meetings June 7-8, McCreary said. Shelton originally had planned to stop in Oman and Qatar also, but those visits have been postponed, the spokesman said.

-------- OTHER

-------- energy

Bush won't cap energy costs

May 30, 2001
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010530-773328.htm

LOS ANGELES -- President Bush yesterday told California he will not impose federal price caps on energy costs in the state, asserting that they "do nothing to reduce demand and they do nothing to increase supply."

Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat who has blamed the president for the state´s energy woes and says the state is "entitled" to immediate relief, promptly announced he would sue a federal agency in hopes of winning "substantial refunds" for Californians.

In his first visit to a state he lost to former Vice President Al Gore by 1 million votes in the 2000 election, Mr. Bush pointed out his opposition to price caps "was the position of the prior administration" -- that of former President Bill Clinton, who twice won California by substantial margins.

"At first blush, for those struggling to pay high energy bills, price caps may sound appealing. But their result will ultimately be more serious shortages and, therefore, higher prices," Mr. Bush said in a speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.

Mr. Davis, accused by Vice President Richard B. Cheney of failing to act for more than a year on signs that an energy crisis was coming, did not take the news well.

"California is entitled to price relief," said Mr. Davis, who hopes to challenge Mr. Bush in 2004. "I don´t think it´s a matter of philosophy or idealogy, it´s a matter of law."

But Mr. Bush said a short-term fix to a problem that has been brewing for more than a decade and spiraled out of control after California deregulated wholesale energy prices is not the solution.

"All our efforts are guided by a simple test: Will any action increase supply at fair and reasonable prices?" the president said. "Will it decrease demand in equitable ways? Anything that meets that test will alleviate the shortage, and we will act swiftly to adopt it. Anything that fails that test will make the shortage worse.

"We will not take any action that makes California´s problem worse," he said.

The president vowed to make sure no energy company gets away with "illegally gouging consumers" and said the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) is acting swiftly toward that end. "My administration is committed to doing our part to help California as it confronts its energy problems."

Mr. Davis had a private 40-minute meeting -- twice as long as scheduled -- with the president to make his case for price caps.

He said FERC twice made determinations that "the California market was dysfunctional, that prices were too high -- the term they used was 'unjust and unreasonable´ -- and we are entitled as a matter of law to some form of price relief."

"That can come in the form of very substantial refunds or some tempering of the price in the future," Mr. Davis said in a press conference.

Mr. Davis said the state spent $7 billion for electricity in 1999, $27 billion in 2000 and is projected to spend $50 billion in 2001.

"Now surely electricity deregulation is not working if Californians have to spend 700 percent more for electricity in 2001 than they did in 1999," the governor said.

In a press conference that interrupted one by Bush chief of staff Andrew Card, Mr. Davis announced he will sue FERC for "failing to discharge its legal obligations."

"Since 1935, it has had the obligation to ensure that markets are functional and rates are just and reasonable. It has found that both conditions are missing; it simply hasn´t provided us any relief," he said.

Top Bush aides scrambled to react to the governor´s actions. As they watched his press conference on television, one said, "Well, that´s a legal question, that´s a legal question."

A few minutes later, Bush adviser Karl Rove held his own press conference to react to the governor´s charges and recount the meeting.

"The president reaffirmed . . . his commitment to seeing that federal agencies, FERC and other agencies . . . carefully examine questions of illegal price gouging," Mr. Rove said.

Bush officials also said FERC will continue to investigate California prices to determine if there is price gouging, but so far it has determined there have been no illegal activities.

Mr. Card said the president will dispatch a new FERC member, Pat Wood, to visit California and speak with the governor. The chief of staff also said Mr. Davis and Mr. Bush did not discuss the governor´s suit against FERC.

Meanwhile yesterday, a federal appeals court in San Francisco rejected a suit by the city of Oakland and two Democratic state lawmakers, who had asked the court to order FERC to impose energy price caps.

During the three-day visit to California, few administration officials were as firm as Mr. Cheney on placing the blame for California´s current crisis on California. While Mr. Bush likely cannot count on the state´s 54 electoral votes in the 2004 election, Bush aides clearly did not want to appear too confrontational over the energy issue.

But at least two Bush aides were miffed by Mr. Davis´ decision to hold a press conference after his meeting with the president.

"We make time for him and this is how he repays us?" one aide said to another in a hotel elevator.

The governor, who faces re-election next year, has repeatedly charged the Bush administration with ignoring the state, where energy shortages began nearly a year before Mr. Bush took office.

Recent "rolling blackouts" across the northern part of the state have angered many Californians, 60 percent of whom now view the governor´s job performance as "poor," according to a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. But 56 percent also say Mr. Bush has not done enough to solve the state´s energy problems.

Mr. Bush faced his first truly hostile crowd during his Los Angeles speech at the Century Plaza Hotel, where three protesters interrupted Mr. Bush with shouts of "Price caps now" and "Stop the gouging."

The three women were led away by security agents.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Bush traveled to Camp Pendleton, headquarters of the 1st Marine Division, outside San Diego.

There, he proposed adding $150 million to a $300 million budget for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helps residents cope with high power bills.

--------

Power Company Stocks Fall

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Energy-Plan-Stocks.html?searchpv=aponline

NEW YORK (AP) -- Investors in power companies who were sipping champagne after President Bush unveiled his national energy strategy got a bad case of the hiccups when Democrats regained control of the Senate.

Shares of companies that trade power climbed higher in the days following the release of the Bush plan. They've been sliding since Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont defected from the Republican Party, and Wall Street analysts say perceptions about the fate of the Bush plan are definitely a factor.

``The energy bill was so favorable it almost seemed like (power companies) got everything they would have asked for,'' said Barry Abramson, utility analyst at UBS Warburg. ``Now it looks like everything is going to be more difficult to achieve, but not impossible.''

The Bush plan seeks to give oil and gas drillers easier access to public lands, to speed up the review process for refinery and power plant expansions and spur renewed interest in nuclear power.

Shares of Calpine Corp., Dynegy Inc. and Mirant Corp., climbed steadily from May 16 to May 22 -- the time between the release of the Bush plan and reports of a Senate shake-up.

These stocks began to descend on May 23, when Sen. Jeffords' plans were first reported, and have continued downward, with Calpine losing 10 percent, Dynegy slipping 12 percent and Mirant off nearly 13 percent by the end of the day Tuesday.

Still, analysts say investors may be overreacting.

``Despite the fanfare following the unveiling of President Bush's energy plan, we believed its chances of passage -- even with a Republican majority -- was slim at best,'' said Daniel Ford, head of Lehman Brothers' team of energy analysts. ``With Jeffords move, the effort may be even more remote, but the most likely outcome, inaction, has not changed.''

Ford acknowledged that talk of capping wholesale electricity prices for California has resurfaced in the Senate, though he dismissed the likelihood of this happening -- even with a Democratic majority -- because ``Bush still has veto power and, to date, has been steadfastly against caps.''

Democrats no doubt will emphasize conservation more than Republicans would have, but the momentum shift in the Senate will not be overly dramatic, according to Bill Breier, vice president of the Edison Electric Institute, a Washington-based group that represents utilities.

There will still be fierce battles over efforts to relax power plant emissions -- a Bush proposal that would benefit coal burners -- and proposals to expand the nation's electricity and natural gas infrastructure.

``There's going to have to be consensus and we've known that from the get-go,'' Breier said.

Analysts emphasized that it would be wrong to assume that much of the Bush energy plan is now dead-on-arrival with Democrats in control of the Senate.

For instance, attention has been given to the fact that Sen. Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat from New Mexico, will take over as chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, replacing Sen. Frank Murkowski of Alaska.

But Bingaman supports legislation critical to the nuclear power industry, including the Price Anderson Act, a 1957 law set to expire in 2002 that limits corporate liability from a nuclear accident.

Other energy strategies favored by Bush, such as the deregulation of electricity markets and the construction of some 1,300 new power plants over the next 20 years, will not be affected by the Senate overhaul simply because their implementation is heavily dependent on state government, not federal, said Ray Niles, who analyzes the power and natural gas industries for Salomon Smith Barney.

``I don't think it makes a huge amount of difference,'' Niles said. ``Things like increasing drilling were going to be a hard haul for the country anyway.''

-------- environment

President Touts Environmental Agenda

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-Bush.html?searchpv=aponline

SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) -- Amid towering trees that are among Earth's oldest and largest living things, President Bush pledged Wednesday to protect ``these works of God'' and other natural treasures from mankind.

Sequoias taller than the Statue of Liberty, broader than a bus and older than the Roman Empire served as a backdrop while Bush sought to answer critics of his environmental policies.

``Our duty is to use the land well, and sometimes not to use it at all,'' the cowboy boots-clad president said at the close of a three-day West Coast trip.

He announced a new directive calling for rangers to conduct annual reviews of each national park and renewed his move for a five-year, $5 billion effort to cut back the parks' heavy maintenance backlogs.

In advance of the trip, the administration announced it would let stand a proposal approved in the last days of the Clinton presidency to clean up hazy skies over national parks and wilderness areas. It would require older coal-fired utilities, among others, to be retrofitted with new pollution-control technology by 2013.

``Had Christ himself stood on this spot, he would have been in the shade of this very tree,'' Bush said in a speech that touched on the moral imperative to protect the Earth.

``There's much to admire and appreciate in the works of man. But come here, and you're reminded of a design that is not our own,'' he said. ``We find a grandeur beyond our power to equal.''

The president has been criticized for his support of logging in national forests and drilling on public lands as well as his backtracking from the Clinton administration policy to reduce arsenic levels in water and his broken campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.

The Sierra Club suggested that Bush was in no position to claim the mantle of environmentalist.

``Our national monuments and other public wild lands deserve full protection and not exploitation for profit,'' said the club's executive director, Carl Pope.

As Bush left the park for a visit to an elementary school at nearby Dunlap, Calif., in the Sierra Nevada foothills, the presidential motorcade passed about 30 protesters carrying signs protesting Bush's environmental policies. Among the signs where ``No drilling ANWR'' -- the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge -- and ``Protect what's left.''

With polls showing voters skeptical of his commitment to the environment, advisers say Bush plans a series of trips and events that reflect deep concern for natural resources. He is scheduled to announce new protections for the Everglades during a trip to Florida on Monday and Tuesday.

``We cannot see into the centuries ahead, but we can be sure, in a place like this, that we're in the presence of enduring things. And it will be to our lasting credit if these works of God are still standing a thousand years from now,'' the president said.

In broad strokes, Bush outlined a philosophy that calls for a balance between environmentalism and sound economics. Washington plays a major protective role, he said, but ``states and localities have their own responsibilities for the environment.''

He added: ``We must protect the claims of nature while also protecting the legal rights of property owners.''

Before his speech to about 130 National Park Service employees and their families, the president hiked for about 20 minutes to the summit of Moro Rock, a barren 6,500-foot-tall granite dome. He marveled at the 13,000-foot peaks to the east and California's sprawling central valley to the west.

Walking gingerly toward the edge a cliff, the president told reporters, ``It's something else up here, isn't it? I'm impressed you guys made it.''

Accompanied by Interior Secretary Gale Norton, the president also stopped at the 275-feet-high General Sherman Tree, a sequoia thought to be one of the largest living things on Earth, estimated at more than 2,100 years old.

``When men and women walk into a setting like this, we must walk with care,'' he said. ``Of all the forces on Earth, only man is capable of cutting down a sequoia, and only man is capable of fully appreciating its beauty.''

A wide array of maintenance issues plague the 57 national parks and 327 other natural and historic sites that comprise the National Park System.

The White House provided for no new park acquisitions in its budget request to Congress this year. Instead, the Interior Department was told to focus on Bush's campaign promise to clear up a $4.9 billion backlog of park maintenance and repairs.

Bush sent Congress a proposal last month to pay for a portion of his pledge -- $439.6 million for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

--------

E.P.A. Supports Rule to Reduce Haze in Parks

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/30/politics/30PARK.html

WASHINGTON, May 29 - The Bush administration will not challenge a proposal approved in the last days of the Clinton presidency to clean up hazy skies over national parks and wilderness areas, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christie Whitman, said today.

"Part of the president's commitment to protecting national parks includes protecting the views that draw us to these parks year after year," Mrs. Whitman said.

The rule would cut sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter and directly improve the air in 156 national parks and wilderness areas, the agency said.

The proposed rule requires states to impose pollution controls on hundreds of older power plants. It would require coal-fired utilities, industrial boilers, refineries and iron and steel plants built from 1962 to 1977 to be retrofitted with new pollution-control technology by 2013.

Environmentalists said they worried that the Bush administration might still try to delay or weaken the plan before a final rule was issued.

"The concern is that the White House or the Office of Management and Budget or the utility industry would push for a weakening of the more aggressive approach reflected in the Clinton proposal," said John Walke, director of clean air programs for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The proposal, amending part of the agency's 1999 regional haze rule, tells states which of the older industrial facilities that emit more than 250 tons of view-impairing pollutants annually must install "best available retrofit technology."

But it also gives states flexibility to consider economic factors, energy impacts and the remaining useful life of the facility.

--------

Toxic spill in ocean could affect China for years

CHINA: May 30, 2001
Story by Edwin Chan
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=10993

SHANGHAI - Chinese environmental experts are struggling to contain damage from toxic styrene which leaked from a ship last month and fishermen along the eastern coast fear their livelihoods could be threatened for years to come.

About 700 tonnes of the chemical, which is poisonous to humans, seeped into the waters near Shanghai after a South Korean vessel collided with a Hong Kong ship on April 17.

Shanghai environmental officials say they plan to seek damages for the leak - which has been effectively now been plugged - but are still coming to terms with the full impact of their worst such chemical spill.

"There's definitely a long-term influence to human health, but we can't say exactly what that would be," said Zhang Long, a spokesman for the Shanghai Environmental Monitoring Centre.

"Our experts say they have never seen this before, nor does the country have any experience with spills of styrene."

Styrene is a colourless oil derivative widely used to make rubber, food containers and carpet backing.

Negotiations are underway with the vessels' British insurers but Chinese officials threatened to go to court if a suitable amount of compensation for the eastern region's lucrative fish business was not agreed, officials said.

Thousands of small fishing boats ply the Yangtze river delta in search of anchovy, eel and, further upriver, river crab popular in eastern Chinese cuisine.

"We don't have a final, concrete assessment, but we estimate that for two to three years the pollution will continue to disrupt the fish industry," Ma Yi, a senior manager at Shanghai's fish industry supervisory body, told Reuters.

"We'll have to talk to the insurers. If we can agree on compensation, then we won't have to go to court," he said.

While initial mopping up was complete, he said an undisclosed amount of money was needed to restore the polluted area and recoup lost fishery production.

"The damage will remain for a long time in the environment," Ma said. "This kind of substance cannot be immediately, totally cleaned up."

Officials say the owners of the Korean and Hong Kong ships had agreed to pay $4 million each as "guarantees", after which the Korean vessel - currently docked in a Chinese port for repairs - would be allowed to sail home.

"We're waiting for the money guarantees - after that, the Korean ship can leave," said a Shanghai Maritime Bureau official.

FOG ON THE YANGTZE

State media said the South Korean freighter Dayong was carrying nearly 2,300 tonnes of styrene when it collided with the Hong Kong vessel in dense fog at the mouth of the Yangtze River, near Jigujiao, translated literally as "chicken bone reef".

Chinese officials declined to identify the owners of the Korean vessel.

The ship rocked and swayed after the collision, quickening the flow of chemicals from a breach in its hull, the Wenhui Daily said.

A number of government organisations are holding hurried talks to decide how best to handle the situation.

The government had a preliminary damage report, but environmental specialists would need a fair bit of time for a more accurate assessment, said the monitoring centre's Zhang.

China has had a number of serious toxic ocean spills in recent years, many in the busy southern shipping lanes near the mouth of the Pearl River. One spill in that area in March last year leaked 500 tonnes of oil and caused damage of $4.8 million.

In 1998, two tankers collided - again near the Pearl River delta - producing an oil slick 10 km (six miles) long and 50 metres wide, state media reported.

-------- genetics

Germany Torn Over Genetic Research

MAY 31, 09:12 EST
By TONY CZUCZKA
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=SCIENCE&STORYID=APIS7CB46E80

BERLIN (AP) - Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder came out strongly Thursday in favor of certain kinds of genetic research, stoking an intense ethical discussion in a nation darkened by the legacy of Nazi scientific experiments.

Parliament's first major debate on the topic showed lawmakers torn between biotechnology's promise and moral, as well as religious, reservations. But Schroeder made his clearest statement yet against imposing too many limits in the search for new cures for hard-to-treat ailments.

``The ethics of healing and helping deserve the same respect as that which we have for creation,'' he said. ``I don't see us in a situation where one excludes the other.''

His approach was met with hesitation from a wide range of lawmakers, some of whom warned that unbridled genetic research could lead to selection - an idea that raises echoes, particularly in Germany, of the Nazi quest for a master race.

Schroeder said lives could be saved by research on so-called stem cells, a sensitive issue because many are obtained from embryos. Some scientists are pushing for a change in the law to allow such research in Germany.

He also suggested Germany reconsider its ban on checking test-tube embryos for hereditary diseases before implanting them in the womb, a practice allowed in some European countries.

``Is that really something that one must exclude under all circumstances?'' he said. ``I don't think so.''

Schroeder has stressed the economic and jobs potential of genetic research, recently arguing for an ``unbiased'' debate over its merits. He says Germany has more biotechnology companies than any other European country.

Criticism has come from some church leaders and, notably, German President Johannes Rau, who recalled this month that the Third Reich led to scientific experiments ``without moral scruples.''

Rau's office is largely ceremonial, but he carries weight as a moral arbiter. Rau, a Calvinist pastor's son with strong religious convictions, said the Nazi experience ``must play an important role in drawing ethical conclusions'' in Germany and beyond.

In Thursday's four-hour debate, leaders of the opposition Christian Democrats insisted that science should not lead people to expect ``the guarantee of a healthy child'' and warned against putting economic arguments above ethics.

But the conservative leaders also revealed differences of approach on genetic research, reflecting disunity on the issue inside a party traditionally strong among religious voters.

Schroeder this month set up a wide-ranging ethics panel he said would help guide the public and lawmakers as they grapple with sensitive scientific issues such as genetic research.

Opposition politicians Thursday renewed criticism of the panel, whose members range from scientists to church leaders and philosophers, casting doubt on its independence and criticizing it as an attempt to bypass parliament.

-------- human rights

Amnesty Focuses on Globalization

MAY 30, 10:12 EST
By CHRIS FONTAINE
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=EUROPE&STORYID=APIS7CAFVEG2

LONDON (AP) - Globalization has brought economic prosperity to some, but it has left too many others mired in debt, poverty and oppression, Amnesty International said Wednesday as it marked its 40th anniversary.

Grim tallies of torture and extrajudicial killings in Amnesty's 2001 report were accompanied by a little soul-searching as the group examined the past and charted the future of its struggle for universal respect for human rights.

``The human rights movement has grown in strength and numbers, and consciousness of human rights is undoubtedly greater than ever. Yet repression, poverty and war devastate the lives of much of humanity,'' Amnesty Secretary-General Pierre Sane wrote in the report.

The London-based group said governments must not back away from protecting rights even as globalization puts more power in the hands of others, such as international corporations and financial institutions.

``States have to confront their cowardice, their cover-ups and their efforts to shirk responsibilities,'' the group said in a statement. ``They have the power, despite external constraints, to deliver human rights if they have the political will.''

Amnesty International was born on May 28, 1961, when The Observer newspaper in London published a piece by London lawyer Peter Benenson calling for the release of ``prisoners of conscience'' incarcerated because of their beliefs or origins.

Forty years later, Amnesty employs more than 350 staff and has an annual budget of almost $28 million. It says it has so far dealt with the cases of 47,000 prisoners of conscience.

This year's annual report documents extrajudicial executions in 61 countries; prisoners of conscience in at least 63 countries; and cases of torture and ill-treatment in 125 countries.

The cases occurred against a backdrop of post-Cold War globalization that once promised ``a new world order that would bring freedom and prosperity for all,'' Sane said.

Instead, globalization has brought worker exploitation and economic instability to many countries, Amnesty said, noting that more than 80 nations had a lower per capita income in 2000 than they had in 1999.

But the effects of globalization haven't been all bad, Amnesty said. The group applauded the birth of a new network of protest movements that use the Internet and other new technologies.

``The forces against human rights may be formidable,'' the group said, ``but the outrage at injustice that led to the founding of Amnesty International 40 years ago continues to motivate millions of people to tackle governments with a determination to build a better world.''

----

Africa Child Labor Numbers on Rise

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Africa-Child-Labor.html

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Eighty million children in Africa are forced to work -- some as prostitutes or miners -- creating one of the world's most serious child labor problems, delegates at a forum on child labor said Wednesday.

And the number of these child laborers -- children 5 to 14 years old -- could rise to 100 million by 2015, said Tim De Meyer of the International Labor Organization, a Geneva-based U.N. agency.

De Meyer and others spoke at the Pan-African Forum on the Future of Children. The gathering, attended by 53 African nations, is seeking to adopt an ``common African position'' to represent the continent in a special U.N. General Assembly session on children in September.

The delegates said that child trafficking is the most insidious form of child labor because it often leads to slavery. However, the scope of child trafficking is difficult to determine because countries involved don't keep records and frequently deny there is a problem.

But UNICEF, the U.N. Children's Fund, said 200,000 children are trafficked across West and Central African borders alone every year by smuggling rings preying on poor rural families hoping for a better life for their kids.

In this trade, Meera Sethi of the International Migration Organization said, children are used for prostitution, begging, work on construction sites, plantations or in mines.

``Many of these children end up as victims of modern day slavery or forced labor,'' Sethi said. ``They are deprived of food, denied basic medical care, denied their wages, abused, beaten, raped, suffer from medical and physical trauma and many pay the ultimate price: death.''

``There is not a single country on the continent that is spared,'' she said, with most nations serving as suppliers, receivers or transit points. Trafficking of children to Gulf and European Union countries is also on the rise, she said.

In Sudan, Western diplomats, aid workers and U.N. officials point to the practice of slavery, which the Islamic government there denies.

Most children smuggled from countries such as Benin, Mali and Burkina Faso are sold to the owners of coffee, cocoa and cotton plantations in better-off countries, delegates said.

----

Amnesty: Ivory Coast Poor on Rights

MAY 30, 21:55 EST
Associated Press
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=AFRICA&STORYID=APIS7CAQ94O0

LONDON (AP) - Ivory Coast security forces carried out killings and torture with impunity last year, Amnesty International said Wednesday in its annual report.

In a year filled with violent political upheaval, the West African country experienced some of the worst human rights violations in three decades, the London-based human rights organization said.

At least 57 opposition supporters were found dead in a mass grave in October, reportedly the victims of extrajudicial executions, Amnesty said.

In December, when supporters of Alassane Dramane Ouattara clashed with security forces over the opposition leader's exclusion from legislative elections, scores of detainees were reportedly beaten, burned or raped.

Amnesty Secretary General Pierre Sane led a delegation to the West African country in May last year.

They met General Robert Guei, who headed a transitional government after a military coup in December 1999. Another research visit was carried out in November, shortly after President Laurent Gbagbo took power in a popular uprising.

During Guei's rule, military gangs publicly killed suspected criminals, and they arrested, threatened and ill-treated others, including critics of the government, Amnesty said.

In May, his soldiers detained and beat several journalists from La Reference newspaper, Amnesty said.

On Oct. 24, in Abidjan, Guei's presidential guard fired on hundreds of peaceful demonstrators as they called on the military government to respect the results of a presidential election won two days earlier by Gbagbo, the report said.

The report concluded: ``Some members of the military personnel believe they have impunity above the law.''

Amnesty's annual report documents executions outside the bounds of judicial process in 61 countries, prisoners of conscience in at least 63 countries and cases of torture and ill treatment in 125 countries.

----

China Detains Six Dissidents

MAY 30, 12:23 EST
Associated Press
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7CAHT0G0

BEIJING (AP) - Police detained six dissidents in southwestern China ahead of next month's anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on democracy protests, a human rights group said Wednesday.

Hu Mingjun was taken from his home in Chengdu on Tuesday and remains in custody, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy reported. Police searched his home and confiscated property, the Hong Kong-based group reported.

On Monday, police took five people from their homes in Chengdu and nearby Suining, the center said. They were questioned and warned not to take part in any activities around the time of the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown on democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, it said.

The five - Ouyang Yi, Zhou Zhigang, Chen Mingxian, Zhang Ling and Chen Wei - were released Tuesday, the center said.

At least four of those detained have been associated with the China Democracy Party, which briefly tried to challenge the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on power three years ago.

Troops launched an assault on the night of June 3, 1989, ending seven weeks of protests in Bejing calling for greater freedoms and an end to official corruption. Hundreds, possibly thousands were killed in the crackdown.

China's government says it was putting down an anti-government rebellion and has never given a full accounting of the event.

-------- spying

EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: U.S. CLEARED OF SPYING

New York Times,
May 30, 2001
Suzanne Daley
World Briefs
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/30/world/30BRIE.html

A European Parliament report has not found any concrete evidence that the United States-led spying system known as Echelon has been used in commercial espionage against European companies. The Parliament began an investigation last year after hearing allegations that American companies were gaining a competitive edge with information gathered via the eavesdropping network. But the report found nothing to support the allegations and concluded that the network was not nearly as extensive as believed.

---

The Guardian, London, on the Echelon network:

May 30
Washington Post
Editorial Roundup
The Associated Press
Wednesday, May 30, 2001; 2:21 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010530/aponline142115_000.htm

In a long-awaited report published yesterday, the European Parliament warned EU citizens of the threat to their privacy from Echelon, a global eavesdropping network run by the U.S. National Security Agency in cooperation with Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Britain's security and intelligence agencies - Echelon's only EU customers - concede the system is designed to "counter" industrial espionage, including corruption. They also argue that countermeasures must be taken against the growing use of electronic communications by terrorist groups and international criminal gangs.

The argument about industrial espionage is a politically inspired red herring. The crucial issue, as James Bamford, a U.S. authority on the NSA, says in his book "Body of Secrets," is individual privacy. Unchecked, he says, Echelon could become a "cyber secret police, without courts, juries or the right to a defense."

-------- terrorism

Japanese Cultist Sentenced to Life

MAY 30, 11:56 EST
Associated Press
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ASIA&STORYID=APIS7CAHG4G0

TOKYO (AP) - A former member of the cult that attacked Tokyo's subway with poison gas in 1995 was convicted and sentenced Wednesday to life imprisonment for crimes including murder and a separate attack in 1994.

The Tokyo District Court convicted Noboru Nakamura, 34, of slaying a fellow member of the Aum Shinri Kyo cult, abducting and killing the relative of another member, and helping the group build a factory to produce the lethal sarin gas, a court spokesman said.

Nakamura was also found guilty of helping commit murder during the cult's sarin attack in June 1994 on a dormitory that housed judges handling a cult-related dispute. That assault in Matsumoto, central Japan, killed seven people and injured four.

Nakamura said he had only acted as a lookout during the Matsumoto attack and did not intend to kill anyone, Kyodo News agency said.

Prosecutors had demanded the death penalty.

The March 20, 1995, attack on the Tokyo subway killed 12 people and sickened thousands.

Now called Aleph, the Aum cult is under surveillance by Japan's public safety agency, which has warned the organization is still a threat. Authorities say it is regrouping and attracting followers through the Internet.

Several former cult leaders have been sentenced to death for their roles in the 1995 subway gas attack and other killings. Group founder Shoko Asahara is on trial for masterminding the subway attack and a dozen other charges.

----

Searching for Bin Laden

Wednesday May 30
By ABCNEWS.com
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/abc/20010530/ts/binladen_010529_1.html

U.S. commandos have been inside Afghanistan (news - web sites), ready to seize Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), but were called off at the last moment.

The U.S. government set up several secret commando missions to capture Osama bin Laden, only to call them off at the last minute, U.S. military and intelligence sources have told ABCNEWS.

The commando missions were arranged by teams assembled by the CIA (news - web sites) and the Defense Department, but abandoned because people in charge were not comfortable with the risks, sources say.

Some of the commando team members have already been inside Afghanistan, where bin Laden has lived since 1996. Other teams are on several hours' notice to try again, the sources say.

A commando operation to capture bin Laden would entail much higher risks. American commandos could be killed or captured, and any botched raid would only add to bin Laden's mystique, U.S. officials say.

U.S. officials accuse the exiled Saudi dissident of masterminding the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and want him to stand trial. Four of his followers were convicted in the case Tuesday, but bin Laden and numerous other defendants are still at large. The bombings killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.

The United States targeted bin Laden three years ago, soon after the bombings. U.S. warships in the Arabian Sea fired cruise missiles at a suspected bin Laden training camp in Afghanistan.

A Hard Man to Find

The U.S. government spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year trying to learn every detail of bin Laden's life, using satellites and a network of informers. For years, the United States has been waiting for him to make a mistake.

"We have people that track him all the time and know him probably better than his wives know him," says Jeff Ellis, a former commando who participated in several secret missions to capture terrorists overseas.

"If there's an opportunity to grab this guy, the government, unless they've changed, will go after him," says Ellis, who now works for Research Planning Inc., a private sector company based in Falls Church, Va.

But bin Laden has proven to be an extremely difficult target, sources say.

He has stopped using easy-to-trace satellite phones. He disguises his travel by using beaten-up old trucks or cars, sleeps in a different place every night and often changes his plans at the last minute. He is heavily guarded.

"He'll have people that will sit down there and work him through where he gets his food, how he gets his food, where he sleeps that night, how they're going to move him. It's just like the Secret Service protecting our president," says Ellis.

"The kind of detailed knowledge we need about his immediate movements, his everyday activities and his current location at any given time are very difficult to come up with," says retired Lt. Gen. Patrick Hughes, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. "Without knowing where he is going to be, chances are you won't apprehend him."

In the 1998 airstrike, the cruise missiles hit the camp just two hours after bin Laden's departure, U.S. sources say.

"The problem is, if one is going to contemplate a strike on him ... one needs absolutely perfect information. Not only now but where he will be in the next hour or two," says Ken Katzman, a former CIA analyst who now works for the Congressional Research Service.

----

U.S. Still Hopes to Nab bin Laden

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Osama-bin-Laden.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration hasn't given up on capturing Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi accused of masterminding terrorism, now isolated in Afghanistan with a $5 million bounty on his head.

While hailing the convictions of four followers of bin Laden in New York, U.S. officials and private analysts acknowledge that a long and difficult road lies ahead before victory can be proclaimed over bin Laden.

State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said Wednesday the United States remains ``committed to seeing justice done.''

``Mr. bin Laden should be delivered to a country where he can be brought to justice,'' Reeker said. He said strict U.N. sanctions against the Islamic Taliban regime, which controls Afghanistan and considers bin Laden a persecuted holy warrior, demonstrates the global opposition to sheltering him.

U.S. officials acknowledged that Pakistan, a Cold War ally and Afghanistan's eastern neighbor, has been an obstacle to fulfilling of U.S. policy goals. They said Pakistan continues to supply weapons to the Taliban in defiance of a U.N. Security Council resolution.

Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA chief of counterterrorism operations, called Tuesday's convictions in a New York court a modest victory but said there are ``hundreds and hundreds more like them who will take their place.''

On Tuesday, a Manhattan federal court jury convicted the four allies of bin Laden for their roles in the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 that killed 228 people.

As for bin Laden, Cannistraro said, ``We don't have him on the run. He's still able to do about one major operation a year.''

A U.S. official who follows terrorism said the convictions marked a breakthrough but added the threat has not abated.

Hours after the convictions were announced, the State Department urged overseas Americans to maintain high vigilance and to increase their security awareness.

The statement was a reaffirmation of a warning issued three weeks ago, after the trial began.

The CIA would not comment on the verdict but said testimony on bin Laden last February by CIA Director George Tenet remains valid.

At the time, Tenet said bin Laden had declared all U.S. citizens legitimate targets of attack and demonstrated a capability to plan ``multiple attacks with little or no warning.''

The Bush administration is reviewing the policy for dealing with bin Laden that it inherited from the Clinton administration. The State Department is offering a reward of up to $5 million for information leading to bin Laden's capture.

As evidence of international opposition to the Taliban, the U.N. Security Council has imposed sanctions twice over the past two years.

Nevertheless, the Taliban vowed Wednesday never to hand over bin Laden.

``He is a great holy warrior of Islam and a great benefactor of the Afghan people,'' said Abdul Anan Himat, a senior official at the Taliban information ministry.

The Afghan problem is one of the few issues on which the United States and Russia agree. Russia believes bin Laden is using Afghanistan as a base to foment Islamic fundamentalist uprisings in Chechnya as well as several of the former Soviet republics, including Uzbekistan.

U.S. and Russian officials have met several times on the issue, including last week at the State Department. The department said the two sides agreed ``to review specific steps to counter the threats from terrorism and narcotics production emanating from Afghan territory.''

Cannistraro said Russia, along with Iran and India, has been supporting an anti-Taliban resistance group in Northern Afghanistan, and he urged the Bush administration to adopt the same policy. It is not clear whether the administration is considering that option.

The most dramatic U.S. attempt to do away with bin Laden occurred in August 1998 when President Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes against bin Laden's suspected hide-out. The missiles landed wide of the mark.

Barnett Rubin, of New York University's Center for International Cooperation, recommended that the United States offer a large package of reconstruction aid to the Taliban in return for a change in behavior.

He said he was not confident the proposal would be accepted by the Afghans, but the mere offer could encourage Taliban moderates to challenge the rule of the hard-line faction now in charge.

-------- activists

Martin Sheen denounces nuclear warheads production

Wednesday, May 30, 2001
http://www.canoe.ca/JamMovies/may30_sheen-ap.html
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010530/en/sheen_anti_nuke_1.html

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) -- More on: Martin Sheen, a veteran anti-nuke activist, has narrated a video that encourages demonstrations against nuclear warhead production at the Y-12 Plant.

"Coming to the gates of Y-12 makes a stand for peace," Sheen says in Stop The Bombs, a video produced by the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance.

"It helps to spread the word and create pressure to convert from nuclear weapons work to cleanup and restoration. Everyone has an important role. We can stop the bombs, but we cannot do it without you."

Ralph Hutchison, group co-ordinator, said the 24-minute video was produced last year and has become popular with activists.

"People around the country are having video parties," he said, noting more than 130 copies have been distributed.

The Y-12 Plant makes parts for the MX missile system and stores highly enriched uranium used in warheads.

Sheen, the 60-year-old actor who plays President Josiah Bartlet on the NBC drama The West Wing, gave his services for free. He may attend a future protest against Y-12, organizer Paloma Galindo said.

The U.S. Department of Energy facility has been targeted by protests since 1998. About 300 people marched to the plant gates in April, with about 30 arrested for trespassing.

Another protest is planned Aug. 6, the anniversary of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Japan. The bomb was developed in part at Oak Ridge.

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Amnesty Annual Report Focuses on Globalization

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Amnesty-Globalization.html

LONDON (AP) -- Globalization has brought economic prosperity to some, but it has left too many others mired in debt, poverty and oppression, Amnesty International said Wednesday as it marked its 40th anniversary.

Grim tallies of torture and extrajudicial killings in Amnesty's 2001 report were accompanied by a little soul-searching as the group examined the past and charted the future of its struggle for universal respect for human rights.

``The human rights movement has grown in strength and numbers, and consciousness of human rights is undoubtedly greater than ever. Yet repression, poverty and war devastate the lives of much of humanity,'' Amnesty Secretary-General Pierre Sane wrote in the report.

The London-based group said governments must not back away from protecting rights even as globalization puts more power in the hands of others, such as international corporations and financial institutions.

``States have to confront their cowardice, their cover-ups and their efforts to shirk responsibilities,'' the group said in a statement. ``They have the power, despite external constraints, to deliver human rights if they have the political will.''

Amnesty International was born on May 28, 1961, when The Observer newspaper in London published a piece by London lawyer Peter Benenson calling for the release of ``prisoners of conscience'' incarcerated because of their beliefs or origins.

Forty years later, Amnesty employs more than 350 staff and has an annual budget of almost $28 million. It says it has so far dealt with the cases of 47,000 prisoners of conscience.

This year's annual report documents extrajudicial executions in 61 countries; prisoners of conscience in at least 63 countries; and cases of torture and ill-treatment in 125 countries.

The cases occurred against a backdrop of post-Cold War globalization that once promised ``a new world order that would bring freedom and prosperity for all,'' Sane said.

Instead, globalization has brought worker exploitation and economic instability to many countries, Amnesty said, noting that more than 80 nations had a lower per capita income in 2000 than they had in 1999.

But the effects of globalization haven't been all bad, Amnesty said. The group applauded the birth of a new network of protest movements that use the Internet and other new technologies.

``The forces against human rights may be formidable,'' the group said, ``but the outrage at injustice that led to the founding of Amnesty International 40 years ago continues to motivate millions of people to tackle governments with a determination to build a better world.''

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IANSA WOMEN'S CAUCUS EMAIL NEWS

1. IANSA WOMEN'S CAUCUS WEBSITE

Please check us out in http://www.iansa.org home page listed under announcements on the IANSA site - http://www.iansa.org Or click here http://www.peacewomen.org/campaigns/outreach/international/iansawomen/index.html

There are three main parts on the website:

1. Articles, testimonies and essays of women experience of the small arms issues
2. Events and Activities organized by women worldwide
3. Resources and Links of women's organizations and initiatives

WE NEED YOUR INPUT AND FEEDBACK!

Do you have a campaign or news on women and small arms that we should feature?
Do you have a report or analysis that should be available?
Do you know of organizations and initiatives that should be listed?

EMAIL or FAX US!

2. COMPILATION OF ESSAYS AND TESTIMONIES

We invite you to send in a ONE-page article, essay or poem of women's experience of small arms. The format can be varied, for example,either a poem, lobby points, article or other creative image.

The book will feature women world-wide - who may tell in their own language - stories of thier suffering, day to day fears, and the disruption of their families, due to the presence of small arms in their community. Given that women's experience of armed conflict is different from men's, it would be really important to have a story from the perspective of women. It is also important to bring forward the efforts by women's campaigns against gun violence, like Million Mom March and Viva Rio's Mother's Day campaign, to show that women are taking an active role in dealing with the small arms problem. The essays and stories in the book can be used over and over again to lobby for women's rights and concerns in situations of armed conflict, both in July and in the future.

The publication will be launch during July Friday 13th Women's Day at the UN Conference on Small Arms. The deadline is June 15th, 2001. Further, we can use these stories as testimonies in the truth commision, as well as contributions to the "Wall of Pain" that would on exhibition throughout the July Conference.

3. GLOBAL ACTION JUNE 9th and 10th

Between June 9-20, exactly one month before the UN Conference, IANSA members around the world will lobby their governments to play an active role in the negotiations that will take place at the Conference in New York in July. Please go to http://www.iansa.org/globalaction/ and see how you can get involved.

4. SMALL ARMS DESTRUCTION DAY

This is an initiative by the Governments of Brazil, Mali, the Netherlands and Britain. Women are encouraged to get involved in this activity by lobbying their foreign ministries to destroy all weapons collected.

5. AT THE CONFERENCE

Friday July 13th is Women's Day during UN Conference on Small Arms.

Our activities during the conference will include: - Launch of IANSA Women's Caucus publication, and compilation of women's essays on small arms.

- Women's Caucus meeting throughout conference to discuss follow-up to July Conference

- Demonstration and rally on July 17th. IANSA Women's Caucus will be using a Clothline as part of the demonstration on July 17th . The Clothesline project has been a very powerful way of making violence against women visible. Survivors of violence, and relatives and friends of those killed by violence create artwork on a piece of clothing. The Clothesline becomes a gallery of testimony. We will be bringing a clothesline to the demonstration, and will be marching under the IANSA Women's Caucus banner.

COME ALONG !

Contact person: Magdalene Pua IANSA WOMEN'S CAUCUS Email: mag@dalene.com Ph# : +1 212 953 1238 Fax# : + 1 212 286 8211 Mail: IANSA 847 A Second Avenue #365, New York, NY 10017

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China Detains Six Dissidents

New York Times
May 30, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-China-Dissent.html

BEIJING (AP) -- Police detained six dissidents in southwestern China ahead of next month's anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on democracy protests, a human rights group said Wednesday.

Hu Mingjun was taken from his home in Chengdu on Tuesday and remains in custody, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy reported. Police searched his home and confiscated property, the Hong Kong-based group reported.

On Monday, police took five people from their homes in Chengdu and nearby Suining, the center said. They were questioned and warned not to take part in any activities around the time of the anniversary of the June 4, 1989, crackdown on democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, it said.

The five -- Ouyang Yi, Zhou Zhigang, Chen Mingxian, Zhang Ling and Chen Wei -- were released Tuesday, the center said.

At least four of those detained have been associated with the China Democracy Party, which briefly tried to challenge the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on power three years ago.

Troops launched an assault on the night of June 3, 1989, ending seven weeks of protests in Bejing calling for greater freedoms and an end to official corruption. Hundreds, possibly thousands were killed in the crackdown.

China's government says it was putting down an anti-government rebellion and has never given a full accounting of the event.


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