------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
nuclear cybersurvey
UK BNFL's Mox N-plant unlikely to make money - report
Raytheon Cuts Jobs As Revenue Falls
Newport News Backs Takeover Bid
Project Sunshine's dark secret
Russia Offers India Defense System
Administration charts a passage to India
Japanese Divided on Missile Plan
Nuclear accord close to collapse: NK
N. Korea Warns of Action on Missiles
Air Force Tests Missile Defense
Bush Missile Defense Plan Could Backfire, Group Says
Russia Votes to Accept Spent Foreign Nuclear Fuel
Russia Nuke Waste Bill Advances
EPA Rule Undermines Safe Drinking Water Standards
White House Seeks Solution To Atlas Peril
Fermi shows off nuclear power
Whitman Announces Final Standards for Yucca Mountain
SENATOR REID SEEKS EXPLANATION FOR CANCER CLUSTER
EPA Radiation Standards Offer Inadequate Protection
DOE work benefits state's economy
Audit criticizes depot redesigns
Democrats Grill Defense Nominees on Arms Control
New Chairmen Glance
Top Bush Adviser Moves to Sell Stocks
EPA: Nuclear waste site must have tight standards
NIMBY writ large at Yucca
GREENPEACE CALLS ON PRESIDENT BUSH TO VETO EXPORTS

MILITARY
'Taliban jets bomb residential area in northeast'
Pakistan launches drive against illegal weapons
Menem's Ex - Army Chief Held in Argentine Arms Probe
US troops still needed in Kosovo, US defense secretary told
Chinese war games in Taiwan Strait begin
Iraq Confirms U.S. Jets Bomb Southern Iraq
Iraq's fishermen run tightrope of tankers and territorial waters
Under fire, IDF digs up weapons tunnels
U.S. to keep troops in Sinai
US denies report of agreement with Israel on settlement freeze
Sharon, U.S. work out settlement freeze deal
Hamas provides social services for poor
Israel Eases Palestinian Curbs
Beyond National Missile Defense
Defense inspector general faked records
Waste, fraud linked to Clinton

OTHER
Opinion: Bush Energy Policy - Fuels Rush In
U.N. Warns of Africa Water Crisis
Pollution killing Australia's Barrier Reef - report
BUSH ADMINISTRATION JOINS INDUSTRY IN PROMOTING ENGINEERED CORN
Medicaid Curb for Immigrants Is Ruled Illegal
Pepper-spray vapor sickens students
Bush will stress rights decline with Putin
Venezuelans March to Protest Crime
CIA rejoins Mideast peace bid
Espionage Trial Begins for Retired Army Colonel

ACTIVISTS
Peace Activists Disrupt Nuclear Arms Store
Turner's U.N. Fund Plans World Resource Survey
Muslim protests
Ex-Beatle McCartney leads new anti-landmine drive
Bush Assails 'Faith-Based Initiative'
Activists Accuse Egg Farm of Cruelty


-------- NUCLEAR

nuclear cybersurvey

Do you favor building more nuclear power plants to help meet increases in U.S. energy consumption?

Detroit News cybersurvey
6/6/01:
http://detnews.com/2001/business/0106/06/a01-232903.htm

Survey results -
Here are the vote totals so far:
Yes - 74% No - 15%
Only if no radioactive waste is buried near me - 9%

-------- britain

UK BNFL's Mox N-plant unlikely to make money - report

UK: June 6, 2001
Story by Matthew Jones
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11069

LONDON - The economic prospects for British Nuclear Fuels' controversial Mox fuel manufacturing plant worsened over the last 12 months, a report commissioned by environmental groups said this week.

The report by nuclear economist Mike Sadnicki comes at a critical time for state-owned BNFL's Sellafield Mox Plant (SMP) because the government is shortly to decide whether the 482 million pound plant can start making the reactor fuel four years after it was built.

"SMP operation is still very unlikely to generate sufficient income to cover future costs", said Sadnicki, an independent economist who sits on the government's Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Committee (RWMAC).

The plant has lain idle since 1997 because approval to start up has been withheld over fears that there are not enough customers for the mixed oxide fuel, a combination of plutonium and uranium oxides.

Before SMP can be allowed to start operations the plant has to pass a test of justification required by European law, proving the benefits of a practice involving ionising radiation outweighs any adverse environmental impact.

The Sadnicki report was completed before last week's news that Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) said it will postpone loading Mox fuel at the world's largest nuclear power station after local residents voted against the fuel in a referendum.

The British government is currently waiting for an independent report it commissioned from consultants Arthur D Little into the viability of SMP.

"We expect it soon", a government spokesman said this week.

Last month Friends of the Earth launched a legal challenge to stop any moves to give SMP the go-ahead, arguing the government has acted unlawfully in not allowing the construction cost of the plant to be taken into account when its economic viability is assessed.

MOX COLOURFUL PAST

In late 1999 there an international furore after revelations that quality control data on a pilot batch of Mox fuel sent to Japan had been falsified.

The scandal led to import bans by a number of potential overseas customers and raised questions about the size of future export markets.

Critics of Mox, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, say it is more expensive than uranium - the fuel most reactors burn - and requires modifications to most reactors before it can be used. They say Mox has no real market and increases the stockpiles of highly toxic plutonium.

But BNFL argues Mox is a good way of re-using a valuable commodity and say the order book for SMP has now reached break-even.

-------- business

Raytheon Cuts Jobs As Revenue Falls

New York Times
June 6, 2001
By REUTERS Filed at 11:35 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-arms-raytheo.html?searchpv=reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) - Raytheon Aircraft, the struggling unit of U.S. missile maker Raytheon Co. (RTN.N), on Wednesday said it would cut 470 hourly jobs amid a 6 percent drop in revenue as customers buy fewer older model planes.

The nearly 5 percent work force reduction in Kansas is due to lower-than-expected customer orders for the Wichita-based division's Beechjet and King Air aircraft, the company said. In April, the aircraft unit said it would eliminate 450 salaried positions.

``I strongly think they have a triple whammy in front of them,'' said Richard Aboulafia, an aerospace analyst at Teal Group.

Raytheon Aircraft must overcome a broader market downturn, squeezed profit margins and past ``mediocre management,'' Aboulafia said.

The job cuts represent the latest in a series of moves by Raytheon to revive the aircraft unit, which it tried to sell last year to pare its debt load of more than $9 billion. Last week, Raytheon removed the aircraft unit's president after he struggled to contain cost overruns and deliver a new business jet.

Raytheon, the maker of Patriot missiles and radar, said it has not changed its earnings forecast for the year despite an expected $200 million decline in aircraft revenue.

The aircraft unit is expected to generate $3 billion in revenue this year, compared with $3.2 billion last year, Raytheon said.

Analysts expect Raytheon to earn $1.62 a share in 2001 on revenue of $17.98 billion, according to Thomson Financial/First Call.

Employee notices are expected to begin this month for the latest round of job cuts. Its total Kansas work force is about 9,800.

Raytheon aircraft plans to deliver 468 new aircraft in 2001, or 40 fewer than it originally expected. Raytheon introduced the King Air, a twin-engine, business turbo-prop, in 1965 and acquired Beechjet from Mitsubishi in 1986.

Last week, James Schuster, who led Raytheon's aircraft-integration business, replaced Hansel Tookes as president of Raytheon aircraft.

Raytheon blamed the U.S. economic downturn for weak first-quarter bookings, but said it has seen some improvement in the current quarter.

Nevertheless, Raytheon aircraft stumbled last year during a record time for the industry. While customers waited for its new Premier I business jet, rival Cessna, a unit of Textron Inc.(TXT.N) racked up impressive sales for its Citation aircraft, Aboulafia said.

Demand for the company's newer top-end business jets is leading to more pre-sales activity, the company said. But it took Raytheon 28 months longer than expected to get Federal Aviation Administration approval for the Premier.

``It's nice,'' Aboulafia said of the Premier. ``But it's very, very late.''

----

Newport News Backs Takeover Bid

By Sonja Barisic
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; 9:04 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010606/aponline090441_000.htm

NORFOLK, Va. -- The board of directors of Newport News Shipbuilding Inc. has voted to support General Dynamics Corp.'s $2.1 billion acquisition offer and reject a similar counter bid by Northrop Grumman Corp., the Navy shipbuilder said Wednesday.

The Newport News board unanimously reaffirmed its recommendation of the General Dynamics offer of $67.50 per share in cash for all outstanding shares of Newport News common stock, the company said.

The board felt the General Dynamics offer provides better and more certain value for Newport News stockholders, the company said. The Northrop offer contained a combination of cash and stock.

The board also determined that it cannot take a position on Northrop Grumman's offer until it gets more information about the positions of the Defense and Justice departments on both offers, the company said.

"We will seek to determine the position of the U.S. government regarding these two offers as expeditiously as possible," said Newport News chairman and chief executive Bill Fricks. "The primary interest of the board of directors is for our stockholders to receive the best value for their shares in any acquisition of Newport News Shipbuilding."

A Northrop Grumman spokesman did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.

Newport News designs and builds nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines for the Navy and services ships in the Navy fleet.

Northrop's offer came two weeks after General Dynamics, based in Falls Church, offered to buy the Newport News-based shipyard on April 25.

General Dynamics and Newport News officials have said a merger would streamline management and save money for the Navy, and that there would be no antitrust issues because the companies already had cooperated on nuclear submarine construction.

Los Angeles-based Northrop, General Dynamics' primary competitor for Navy shipbuilding contracts, also offered $2.1 billion, giving Newport News shareholders the opportunity to sell their shares for $67.50 each in cash or exchange them for shares of Northrop Grumman.

Northrop Grumman has said its offer stands a better chance of being approved by federal regulators because it would prevent one company from controlling all the nation's nuclear shipyards.

The Newport News board said that based on the information currently available, it cannot conclude that the Northrop Grumman offer is more likely to be approved.

On Monday, General Dynamics extended its pending tender offer for shares of Newport News Shipbuilding until June 22 from June 1.

-------- canada

Project Sunshine's dark secret
Documents reveal a Vancouver link to 'body-snatching' research in the 1950s

MURRAY CAMPBELL
Rod Mickleburgh
Wednesday, June 6, 2001
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/gam/National/20010606/UBABEN.html

He is known only as B-199. He died of encephalitis at the age of 34 in April, 1955, which is when he took what may have been the longest trip of his life, to serve the cause of science.

A doctor at Vancouver General Hospital answered the clarion call of nuclear research and shipped him to the United States, where he was cremated and his ashes subjected to intense scrutiny in an effort to find out whether the nuclear-weapons testing that dominated the Cold War landscape was poisoning the world.

B-199 was just one of at least 127 people from the Vancouver area whose bodies were used by U.S. researchers in a five-year project, run out of the University of Chicago and concluded in 1958. Their incinerated bones were used to measure radioactive fallout from the above-ground nuclear weapons tests that the United States and the Soviet Union conducted almost weekly.

The researchers, working under Nobel laureate Willard Libby, called their work Project Sunshine because they believed radioactive fallout was as ubiquitous as sunshine.

They examined animals, food and water around the world for evidence of fallout. They also examined human bones, including those belonging to B-199.

There was little glory for B-199 or anyone else whose remains were scrutinized.

About 6,000 corpses from 26 "bone collection sites" around the world were shipped under top-secret conditions to the project's headquarters in Chicago and to a satellite research office at Columbia University in New York.

The researchers' findings have been known for many years -- indeed, they paved the way for a cessation of atmospheric tests -- but recently declassified documents have detailed how the bone samples were collected.

The Australian government yesterday launched an investigation after reports in British newspapers outlined how the bodies of stillborn babies were taken from Australian hospitals for use in the U.S. study.

A spokesman for Health Minister Allan Rock yesterday declined to comment, saying that her department was unaware of the reports.

Dr. Libby, who died in 1980, was interested in strontium 90, considered the most hazardous component of radioactive fallout.

Strontium behaves much like calcium, and scientists were concerned that people were absorbing it into their skeletons. They were particularly concerned that children would absorb larger amounts of strontium than adults because their bones were still growing.

The problem was that it was difficult with contemporary devices to measure strontium in living people. The best way to measure its concentration was to cremate the remains of the dead and analyze the resulting ash with sensitive radiochemical techniques.

It is likely that Vancouver was drawn into the project in 1955, two years after it had begun. At the time, Dr. Libby appeared to be worried about not getting enough human samples to validate their initial findings because his supply of stillborns had been cut off.

"Human samples are of prime importance, and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body-snatching, they will really be serving their country," he said at a Jan. 18, 1955, meeting convened by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Lawrence Kulp, of Columbia, who had succeeded Dr. Libby as the project's director, said he had developed a back-door channel to obtain cadavers in several cities, among them Vancouver, Houston and New York.

An investigation into this "body-snatching" program and 4,000 other experiments from 1944 to 1974 was ordered in 1994 by then U.S. president Bill Clinton. A year later, the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments concluded that "researchers employed deception in the solicitation of bones of deceased babies from intermediaries with access to human remains."

Documents released by the committee show, however, that it wasn't just stillborn babies who provided bone samples.

The project's 1955-56 annual report lists Dr. W.B. Leach of the pathology department at Vancouver General as the contact for the local "bone collection site."

The report shows that Vancouver provided at least 127 of the 1,300 human bones samples collected in 1955 from around the world. The age of those whose corpses were shipped to the United States ranged from 34 to 87. There is no mention in the report of stillborns.

The report said that one of the Vancouver samples provided the highest strontium level, about 660 times the concentration found normally.

Larry Arbeiter, a spokesman for the University of Chicago, said Project Sunshine's operations have to be put in the context of the time, when procedures for disposing of human remains were not as rigid as they are now.

The Clinton advisory committee, which disbanded in 1995, similarly warned against retrospective moral judgment.

"Is it correct to evaluate the events, policy and practices of the past . . . against ethical standards and values that we accept as valid today but that may not have been widely accepted then?" it asked.

-------- india / pakistan

Russia Offers India Defense System

June 6, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Russia-India.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia has offered to provide India with a complex air defense system that would protect its entire territory, a senior Cabinet official said Wednesday.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov made the announcement after talks with visiting Indian Foreign and Defense Minister Jaswant Singh. He said Russia would soon present the project to the Indian leadership.

``This is a big and very complicated project,'' Klebanov was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency. He gave no further details.

India has been one of the largest customers of Russian weapons since Soviet times, and recently signed a multibillion series of new weapons contracts. About a third of all Russian arms exports, which totaled nearly $4 billion last year, went to New Delhi.

On Wednesday, Russian and Indian officials signed a contract on joint development and production of the Il-214 military transport plane, and Klebanov added that the two countries are planning to sign a contract soon on jointly developing a next-generation fighter plane.

Russia lacks the funds to independently develop the costly new fighter, the first examples of which are expected to fly in 2007-2008. India will help work out technical requirements for the aircraft, Klebanov told reporters.

New Russian-Indian arms deals have raised concern in Pakistan, locked in a long-standing conflict with India over the Himalayan region of Kashmir. Pakistan and India have fought three wars since they gained independence from Britain in 1947, and in 1998 the two countries declared themselves nuclear powers.

Since President Vladimir Putin visited India in October, the two countries have signed a $3 billion license deal for India to manufacture 140 Su-30 MKI fighter jets and an agreement on the delivery of 310 T-90 tanks, priced at around $1 billion.

An agreement on leasing four Russian Tu-22 M3 Backfire bombers and a deal on delivery of the Admiral Gorshkov aircraft carrier, complete with a fleet of several dozen MiG-29K fighter planes, are expected to follow soon.

----

Administration charts a passage to India

Seattle Times Company
Editorials & Opinion :
Wednesday, June 06, 2001
By Tom Plate Syndicated columnist
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis/web/vortex/display?slug=plate06&date=20010606

LOS ANGELES - While there was scarcely any U.S. media coverage of the visit of Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage to India last month, the Bush administration gesture, as well as the prior Clinton one, was intended to be profoundly significant.

The Clinton state visit represented the inauguration of an American attempt to normalize relations with India after the diplomatic deep freeze that set in after New Delhi's May 1998 nuclear-test surprise. India reciprocated with a return of visit by Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee six months later.

It's nothing new, of course, for diplomats to confer and wind up issuing meaningless communiqués. But remember: Until these high-level exchanges, India was an official international pariah for having abandoned its Gandhi/Nehru tradition, conducting a nuclear test or two and thus officially entering the elite but high-stakes world of the nuclear power club.

On one level, the Bush administration's instincts about India are sensibly similar to Clinton's. It scarcely serves the cause of regional stability to reject out of hand the claim of the world's second-most-populous nation to have the same right to nuclear protection as comparatively tiny Britain or France. Or the same right as neighboring nuclear powers China, a geopolitical giant, and politically shaky Pakistan.

Moreover, ever since the 1998 nuclear and diplomatic explosions, the Indians have been making the fair point that the United States has stockpiled more nuclear weapons than the rest of the world combined and yet has still to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) - a kind of show-me diplomatic pact.

And even though Washington rejects CTBT, India has suggested it will conduct no more nuclear tests for the time being.

Enter the Bush administration. While searching for different policy directions from its predecessor, it quickly saw the value of engaging New Delhi in strategic dialogue. Thus, Washington was warm during the visit of Indian Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh this April. Thus, U.S. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill laid out the red-carpet treatment for India's finance minister, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Henry H. Shelton jetted off to India for military consultations.

New Delhi couldn't be happier about the new bounce out of Washington and has high hopes that the administration will quietly start reducing hurtful U.S. anti-nuclear economic sanctions.

To curry Washington's favor, the Indian government wrapped a special gift for Armitage: an endorsement of the Bush administration's controversial national missile defense project. That made India one of the relatively few powers in the world, and almost the only one in Asia, to do so.

But the pan-Asian geopolitical instincts of the Bush administration have a different cutting edge from its predecessor, especially in two areas.

The first is China. The aforementioned diplomatic frenzy of activity was not just a valentine aimed at the Indian public, but also a medium-sized cluster-memo to the People's Republic of China. Its message, crudely summarized: Unlike Bill Clinton and those sheepish Democrats, we macho Republicans don't need you that much. We can always play with India. So behave yourself.

That stance has Asia feeling as if the ground underneath is shaking. Even India, which has suffered through one horrific border war with Beijing, worries about Washington's mannerisms.

The Bush administration's active engagement with India entails another complication.

Just as an in-your-face attitude toward China would alarm Asia, so would a John Wayne, we'll-do-what-we-want-our-way diplomacy toward India.

Tokyo and Seoul must be closely included in the U.S. policy loop. After all, the Bush administration, which came into office maintaining that Tokyo was inherently more important to Washington than Beijing, should not now seek to deepen relations with India without Tokyo having its say every step of the way.

Certainly, it is under an ethical obligation to closely consult with non-nuclear Japan - and, of course, non-nuclear South Korea - before making any move to lift sanctions originally implemented to punish India's nuclear breakthrough. And Tokyo and Seoul will also appreciate any effort to play it very carefully with China.

Beijing is already in a red-alert lather over the Bush administration. The effect of the new American diplomacy should be not to undermine stability in Asia or taunt China - but the opposite. Little visits and tiny diplomatic changes can have huge consequences. America's passage to India needn't become a rocky road to hell.

Tom Plate is a UCLA professor and founder of the Asia Pacific Media Network.

-------- japan

Japanese Divided on Missile Plan

By Joseph Coleman
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; 9:54 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010606/aponline095444_000.htm

TOKYO -- The missile defense shield proposed by the United States is worth researching, Japan's prime minister said Wednesday, following a string of news reports saying his foreign minister opposes it.

The anti-missile plan faces strong opposition, particularly from China and Russia. Japan, however, has taken a neutral stance, saying only that it "understands" the proposal.

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, pressed in Parliament on Wednesday to elaborate on his position, stopped short of saying that such a shield should be built.

"It is worth researching," Koizumi said during a debate with four opposition leaders. "But doing research is different from development and setting it up."

Koizumi's government has been criticized for being inconsistent about the missile shield following a series of news reports that Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka expressed doubts about it in private meetings with European and Australian officials.

Tanaka has denied much of the content in the reports.

The United States and Japan are also researching a separate Theater Missile Defense shield that would be extended beyond U.S. borders, possibly covering Japan and South Korea.

Koizumi's government, which took office in April, has enjoyed record-high support ratings. Newspaper polls last week showed approval of the new Cabinet of more than 80 percent.

That popularity showed in Wednesday's debate, the first of its kind since Koizumi took office. A relaxed Koizumi smiled and cracked jokes as he fielded questions.

-------- korea

Nuclear accord close to collapse: NK

From AFP
06jun01
http://news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,2086612%255E1702,00.html

17:20 (AEST) NORTH Korea warned today that a landmark accord with the United States to freeze its suspected nuclear arms program is close to collapse.

The North's official news agency threatened to lift a seven-year-old suspension of its nuclear program because of delays in building replacement reactors.

"If the United States fails to meet the demand for the compensation for the loss of electricity, it will be hard to save the (Agreed Framework) from its collapse and the DPRK (North Korea) will find no option but to go its own way," said the Korean Central News Agency.

Under the 1994 Agreed Framework the United States agreed to build two light water nuclear reactors (LWRs) that produce less weapons grade plutonium than the North's older graphite reactors.

In return, the North froze its reactor development which US officials feared could have led it to acquire nuclear weapons. A top Central Intelligence Agency official said last month the North probably had one or two nuclear bombs.

The light water reactors are due to be completed by 2003. But international experts believe the project cannot now be ready until at least 2008.

"Now we do not feel any need to abide by the Agreed Framwork allowing its right to existence to be infringed upon," KCNA said.

It demanded the United States pay compensation for the delayed construction and stop using its demand as "a lever for putting pressure or reigning over negotiations."

The administration of US President George W Bush has promised to fulfill its commitments under the 1994 accord, but it has demanded strict verification of North Korea's weapons commitments.

"The inspection is unthinkable before a great deal of the LWR project has been carried out," KCNA said.

The KCNA statement was the latest in a series of North Korean warnings to Washington, amid signs that its leader Kim Jong-Il may have been angered by Bush's suspension of the engagement strategy of the previous administration.

Bush froze contacts with the North when he took office in January. The communist North has in turn suspended all contacts with the South.

US officials say a policy review is being finished to determine how to handle the unpredictable communist state.

----

N. Korea Warns of Action on Missiles

By Joe McDonald
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; 4:31 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010606/aponline043105_000.htm

BEIJING -- North Korea has warned that it will reconsider its moratorium on missile tests if the Bush administration doesn't resume contacts aimed at normalizing relations, a U.S. researcher who visited the North said Wednesday.

Officials also said North Korea will restart its nuclear program unless Washington makes progress on supplying two reactors promised in a 1994 agreement, said Selig S. Harrison, a senior fellow of the Century Foundation in Washington.

Harrison said the North's leaders are eager for ties with Washington but dismayed at President Bush's review of policy toward them and view recent U.S. gestures as confrontational.

North Korea announced a moratorium in September, 1999, on missile tests that had unsettled South Korea, Japan and the United States. North Korean leader Kim Jong Il told a visiting European Union delegation last month that the moratorium would be extended to 2003.

But Harrison said Foreign Minister Paek Nam Soon told him that commitment was meant to be part of a diplomatic process leading to normalized relations with the United States. The two governments, whose troops fought each other in the 1950-53 Korean War, have no diplomatic ties.

"We will take a fresh look at the whole missile issue in light of the attitude of the new administration and whether it continues to make offensive statements hostile to us," Harrison quoted Paek as saying.

Harrison, who has visited North Korea seven times since 1972, said he talked with Paek for three hours and met with three other top officials. He spent five hours with Gen. Ri Chan Bok, the North Korean representative at Panmunjom, the border village used for contacts with South Korea.

After his inauguration in January, Bush suspended talks with North Korea on curbing its missile program, pending a review of U.S. policy.

Washington warned Monday that renewed missile tests would block progress toward normal relations. The impoverished North depends on outside aid to feed its 22 million people, and says missile exports are a vital source of revenue.

Harrison said none of the North Korean officials threatened a resumption of missile tests.

But he said they were unhappy that Bush hasn't followed up initiatives by the Clinton administration that led to a meeting in Pyongyang in October by then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Kim, the North's leader.

North Korea broke off talks with the South after U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in March described Kim as a dictator and said the North was a threat to its neighbors. The North says contacts won't resume until Washington finishes its policy review.

Harrison said the Bush administration's reluctance was hurting North Korean officials who favor opening up the intensely secretive Stalinist regime and forming ties with the United States.

"The Bush administration's posture toward North Korea has given a new lease on life to the hard-liners," he said. "Now Kim Jong Il is on the defensive."

Harrison said a positive first step could be a reaffirmation by Powell of a joint communique issued by Albright and North Korean officials during her October visit that the two countries have "no hostile intent" toward each other.

North Korean officials were especially upset about what they called American delays in supplying two nuclear reactors promised when the North agreed in 1994 to suspend its own nuclear program, Harrison said.

Harrison said the North Koreans accused Washington of reneging on a 1994 promise to supply energy if they stopped work on building a reactor capable of producing plutonium, the fuel for nuclear weapons.

Bush says he wants "complete verification" that North Korea is complying before taking more steps.

Little work has been done on the power plants, though the two sides had agreed on a target date of 2003 for their completion.

Harrison quoted Paek, the foreign minister, as saying, "If the U.S. fails to fulfill its agreements and continues to demand inspections ... it will mean that you are breaking the agreed framework, and we will reopen the reactor that was frozen under the 1994 agreement."

Paek said North Korea also would start work on two additional reactors, according to Harrison.

The North Korean news agency KCNA reported the same message Wednesday, saying it was the country's "deserved right and option" to resume construction of graphite-moderated reactors - which U.S. officials suspected were used to produce weapons-grade plutonium - unless it receives compensation.

"We do not feel any need to abide by the agreed framework allowing its (the North's) right to existence to be infringed upon," KCNA said.

Harrison said Gen. Ri also told him the North's military might reconsider its stance on its need for nuclear weapons.

"I don't believe there's anybody who has decided we need nuclear weapons at present, but everybody is thinking in that direction in light of the new administration's attitude," Harrison quoted the general as saying.

-------- missile defense

Air Force Tests Missile Defense

June 6, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Cruise-Defense.html?searchpv=aponline

TYNDALL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. (AP) -- An experimental cruise missile defense system performed perfectly during a four-day exercise against a simulated terrorist attack, an Air Force general said Wednesday.

Two separate systems -- one from the Army and the other from the Marine Corps -- were used for the first time to correlate ground, ship and airborne radars during the exercise that ended Monday.

Cruise missiles were simulated by 11 unmanned drones and a piloted Bede BD-5 jet plane. They took off from land and flew over a recovery vessel about 100 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico.

No live ordnance was fired, but radar lock-ons, indicating kills, were obtained on all 12 targets, said Maj. Steve Boes, chief of live exercises for the Southeast Air Defense Sector.

``We were very excited about it because it did a little bit more than what we thought we were going to be able to do,'' said Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, commander of the 1st Air Force headquartered at Tyndall.

The 1st Air Force is an Air National Guard unit that protects the 48 contiguous states against threats from aircraft and cruise missiles as part of the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command.

Arnold said he hopes to have two of the systems, called Joint Based Expedition Command and Control Centers, operating in the United States by 2005.

Each unit is expected to cost about $5 million. The units do not offer blanket protection but could be deployed to protect specific sites and events, such as a presidential inauguration or Olympics.

``The cruise missiles you'll find are easy to shoot,'' said Lt. Col. Clark ``Buck'' Rogers, chief of advanced programs for the 1st Air Force. ``The challenge and the technology solution that we're after is to find them. They're small. They fly low to the ground. They're unpredictable.''

Those factors as well as their proliferation and relatively low cost are expected to make cruise missiles attractive as terrorist weapons. Seventy-five nations have about 75,000 of the missiles, Arnold said.

----

Bush Missile Defense Plan Could Backfire, Group Says

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; Page A10
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24887-2001Jun5?language=printer

A group of liberal scientists and arms control experts said yesterday that President Bush's plan to build missile defenses could worsen rather than ease what they consider the most immediate nuclear threat to the United States: more than 1,000 Russian nuclear missiles on hair-trigger alert.

"The greatest nuclear danger to the United States today and in the near future is a Russian attack resulting from an error in Russia's warning system or a failure in its command-and-control system," according to a report issued yesterday by the Federation of American Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Bush sees things differently. In a major speech May 1, the president described "today's most urgent threat" as coming "not from thousands of ballistic missiles in Soviet hands, but from a small number of missiles in the hands of [rogue] states -- states for whom terror and blackmail are a way of life."

The panel of 16 experts, including former nuclear weapons designers and arms control negotiators, argued that a U.S. missile defense system would trigger reactions by Russia and China that "could result in a net decrease in U.S. security."

For example, the report predicted, Russia may be unwilling to reduce its forces below the level of 1,000 to 1,500 warheads, or to change its policy of keeping hundreds of missiles on "launch-on-warning" alert, if leaders in Moscow fear that U.S. missile defenses could knock down "a significant number" of their strategic missiles.

"By focusing on the wrong problem, the Bush administration is heading toward the wrong solution," said Tom Z. Collina, director of the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Bruce Blair, president of the nonprofit Center for Defense Information and a member of the panel, said it is commonly believed in the United States that Russia's huge arsenal could easily overwhelm any U.S. missile defense. But "on any given day," he said, Russia actually fields fewer than 100 strategic weapons that it can consider safe from a U.S. first strike: one or two regiments of mobile SS-25 missiles and one or two Delta IV submarines carrying ballistic missiles.

Since even the relatively modest missile defense plan that the Clinton administration was pursuing envisioned 100 to 250 interceptor missiles, Blair said, "national missile defense looks to the Russians like it could neutralize their small deterrent capability."

The panel's report recommends that the United States promptly retire all its tactical or medium-range nuclear weapons, take its strategic or long-range weapons off alert, and ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. It also calls for the United States to unilaterally reduce its nuclear arsenal to 1,000 warheads, from the current level of about 6,500.

Under the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, signed by President George H.W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin in January 1993, both countries are to cut their arsenals to between 3,000 and 3,500 warheads by the end of 2007.

-------- russia

Russia Votes to Accept Spent Foreign Nuclear Fuel

New York Times
June 6, 2001
By REUTERS Filed at 10:39 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-russia-.html

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Russian parliament passed a bill Wednesday that is likely to open Russia to imports of spent nuclear fuel, a project environmentalists say will turn the country into a dangerous nuclear dump.

The lower house, the State Duma, voted 243 to 125 in favor of the bill, which advocates say could earn Russia some $20 billion in much needed income over 10 years and help clean up the nation's own existing stocks of nuclear waste.

The bill is now expected to win the approval of the upper chamber, the Federation Council, which is made up of regional leaders, and be signed into law by President Vladimir Putin.

The international environmental group Greenpeace reacted to the vote by calling on Washington to veto any shipments of spent fuel to Russia from U.S.-designed reactors, a move it said could foil the whole project.

Ecologists and liberals had mounted fierce opposition to the bill on grounds that proceeds, rather than going into reprocessing the spent fuel, might be spent in other ways and the radioactive waste would remain buried indefinitely.

Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the liberal Yabloko party and one of the main opponents of the bill, urged the chamber to reject the law for future generations.

``The vote today can make history,'' Yavlinsky told parliament. ``One hundred million Russian citizens are against it and only 500 people are for -- 300 members sitting here and 200 bureaucrats who will be getting the money.''

Yavlinsky says opinion polls show Russians overwhelmingly reject the plan.

MONEY TO UPGRADE NUCLEAR FACILITIES

Under the project championed by the Atomic Energy Ministry, Moscow would import about 1,000 tons of spent fuel a year, roughly the amount produced now by its own power plants and those in neighboring Ukraine which sends fuel for reprocessing.

The imported fuel would then be stored until 2021 while Russia upgrades its crumbling reprocessing facilities with the money earned from prospective exporters, such as Taiwan, Japan, China, Iran and eastern Europe.

Russia is building a nuclear power plant in Iran despite strong opposition from the United States, which sees the development of nuclear technology in Tehran as a threat.

Greenpeace immediately called on President Bush to ban all shipments of spent fuel to Russia from U.S.-made reactors around the world, which would drastically reduce Moscow's prospective customer base since plant designers have a say in how waste from reactors is treated.

``Without U.S. support the whole grandiose Atomic Energy Ministry program shrinks down to the simple old Soviet practice of taking back spent fuel from the Socialist brother countries,'' Greenpeace International said in a statement.

Reprocessing at Russian plants is scheduled to begin in 2021 and take place over a 20-year period. Opponents say there are no guarantees that everything will go according to plan and be free of accidents.

``Mass imports of spent nuclear fuel mean unavoidable catastrophic consequences for the ecology which will threaten the lives of Russians for centuries to come,'' said an open letter from members of Russia's prestigious Academy of Sciences.

The letter was handed out by demonstrators outside the Duma.

Alexander Rumyantsev, appointed Atomic Energy Minister in March, says France and Britain have already carved up the market for depleted nuclear fuel and Russia will have to fight to secure a share. Reprocessed fuel can be used again, leaving small quantities of unusable radioactive waste.

----

Russia Nuke Waste Bill Advances

By Vladimir Isachenkov
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; 8:37 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010606/aponline083731_000.htm``````

MOSCOW -- Russia's lower house of parliament on Wednesday quickly approved a controversial proposal that would permit the import of other countries' nuclear waste for reprocessing.

Russia's Atomic Energy Ministry says it could earn up to $20 billion by importing 22,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel over 10 years - and use part of the money to clean up Russian regions polluted by radioactive waste from the Soviet-era nuclear program.

But opponents said the measure would make Russia the world's nuclear dump, and question whether the money will be used as promised. "Our citizens are against turning Russia into an outhouse," said Sergei Mitrokhin of the liberal Yabloko faction.

The 450-member State Duma approved the three-bill package after a 20-minute debate.

The measure must pass the Federation Council upper house and be signed by President Vladimir Putin in order to become law.

The upper house usually quickly approves government bills, but its speaker, Yegor Stroyev, warned Wednesday that passage might not be that easy. Stroyev pointed at broad public opposition to the proposals and said it must be thoroughly analyzed.

Environmentalists and other opponents are skeptical of government promises to clean up radioactive damage to the environment, since many previous pledges have gone unfulfilled.

Russian towns, rivers and swaths of land were exposed to radioactive pollution during the secretive development of the Soviet nuclear industry and environmentalists say they remain dangerously polluted.

Environmentalists also warn that large-scale imports of spent nuclear fuel would threaten radiation safety by leaving no place for Russia's own waste from nuclear power plants and decommissioned submarines.

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


EPA Rule Undermines Safe Drinking Water Standards, IEER press release

For Immediate Release,
6 June 2001
For further information contact: Arjun Makhijani 301-270-5500

EPA's Rule on Repository for High-level Radioactive Waste Seriously Undermines Safe Drinking Water Standards

Rule Sets a Precedent for Possible Future Federal Government Pollution of Public Lands, Independent Institute Claims

Takoma Park, Maryland: The Environmental Protection Agency's final rule for the proposed nuclear repository for high level radioactive waste, issued today, abandons protections for drinking water even while retaining the formalism of the Safe Drinking Water Act, according to the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER). The EPA created an exclusion zone of 18 kilometers (about 11 miles) around the repository in which the safe drinking water rules would not apply. The rule would apply beyond the exclusion zone.

The 18-kilometer zone was selected because it corresponds to the limit of the Nevada Test Site, which the EPA says is federal land (but which is also claimed by the Western Shoshone tribe). The limit of the exclusion zone is only about a mile-and-a-half from the small community of Lathrop Wells, and just eight miles from an agricultural area where water from the aquifer is used for irrigation today.

"This is the first time that the EPA has exempted a portion of a currently used aquifer from the safe drinking water act," said Dr. Arjun Makhijani, president of IEER. "The EPA's exclusion zone concept is very dangerous. Much of the land in the West is under federal control. This exclusion zone implies that the federal government can decide to exempt itself from rules that apply to everyone else whenever it wants."

The power of eminent domain makes the reasoning behind the exclusion zone even more questionable. "If private water supplies are polluted or threatened with pollution by industry or government in the future, and the federal government believes that enough is at stake, what is to prevent it from using its power of eminent domain to take over the land and the water resources beneath it? While this seems to be one small exclusion in a desert area in the vast West, it will undermine the safe drinking water act as no rule has done before," said Dr. Makhijani. "It is a misguided rule that should be rescinded."

There has been intense pressure from the nuclear industry to license Yucca Mountain, for which the rules have been relaxed twice before, according to IEER. In the late 1980s, the EPA issued a rule for high-level waste repositories, but it soon became clear that Yucca Mountain could not comply with one part of it, a judgment confirmed by the EPA Science Advisory Board in 1994. The problematic part of the rule sought to limit emissions of carbon-14, a radioactive from of carbon, from the repository. Instead of seeking a new site that could meet all then-existing rules, Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences to advise the EPA on how to set a special rule for Yucca Mountain.

"I call it the double-standard standard," said Dr. Makhijani. "The government's approach, under intense industry pressure seems to be: If Yucca Mountain can't meet the rule, just change it. In the 1990s it also became clear that Yucca Mountain probably could not the meet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing standards, issued in the 1980s. So new rules for licensing were then issued." A decision on the suitability of the site is expected from the Department of Energy later this year or early next year.

According to IEER, other problems with the rule issued today include:

· A decision to limit radiation protection to 10,000 years, even though it is officially estimated the maximum doses are likely to occur 100,000 or more years from now. The 10,000 year limit for regulation was set despite at least two reports from the National Research Council, including the 1995 report mandated by Congress on Yucca Mountain standards, that advised that the dose should be calculated at the time of the estimated peak occurrence of contamination. "The 10,000 year limit is an arbitrary and bureaucratic rejection of the advice of the National Research Council," said Dr. Makhijani.

· The abandonment of conservative principles of radiation protection which are used throughout the world. They are based on the common sense idea that lifestyles far into the future cannot be predicted and, that therefore, future populations should be protected by assuming that the most exposed person in the future will be a subsistence farmer.

· The rule does not consider doses from other pollution present at the Nevada Test Site.

"Yucca Mountain is a poor site and the government should stop wasting money on it and start afresh," Dr. Makhijani said. IEER has published extensively on nuclear waste, including an alternative waste management plan and principles for doing repository research. They can be found on IEER's web site at www.ieer.org.

-------- colorado

White House Seeks Solution To Atlas Peril

Wednesday, June 6, 2001
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.sltrib.com/06062001/nation_w/103448.htm

WASHINGTON -- The White House is requesting an immediate $1.4 million to study the best way to handle 10.5 million tons of uranium tailings on the banks of the Colorado River.

The Atlas uranium tailings, left over from Cold War weapons programs, sit just feet from the river outside Arches National Park near Moab.

Atlas Corp. filed for bankruptcy in 1998, and the court assigned PricewaterhouseCoopers as trustee, overseeing the cleanup of the pile on a shoestring budget.

The trustee drained water from the tailings before running out of money and turning the project back over to the U.S. Energy Department earlier this year.

But spring windstorms kicked up clouds of dust from the pile, alarming Moab residents. Steps have since been taken to control the dust.

The supplemental request sent by President Bush to Congress late last week included $1.4 million to study the best long-term solution.

"This is another example of the president taking steps to protect the environment using sound science," said Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah, who has been pushing for funds to move the tailings away from the river. "These funds will allow us to plan an expedited cleanup process of the Atlas pile and safeguard the Colorado River."

Some federal studies have shown that up to 45,000 gallons a day of toxic waste leaks into the Colorado River, which is the sole source of drinking water for 25 million residents downstream in California, Nevada and Arizona.

Bush's budget request for next year does not include any money for moving the pile to a safer place, which is expected to take at least 10 years and cost as much as $300 million.

Cannon said he is working to try to get $10 million added to next year's budget for the project.

-------- michigan

Fermi shows off nuclear power
As President Bush pushes for new energy sources, Newport plant shines as example.

By James V. Higgins
The Detroit News,
June 6, 2001
http://detnews.com/2001/business/0106/06/a01-232903.htm

We are walking in a cloud. It's a moist, warm, comfortable cocoon, despite its location inside the landmark 400-foot cooling towers at Detroit Edison's Fermi 2 nuclear reactor.

Imagine: Being able to step calmly and directly into what looks from a distance like the noxious byproduct of a nuclear inferno.

Emerging back into the sunshine, there was no need to check our personal dosimeters for radiation exposure. The cooling towers emit water vapor, not smoke, that is several steps removed from any form of nuclear fission.

Radiation aside (there is none; my dosimeter read zero after a four-hour tour that extended into the bowels of the plant), Fermi 2 puts fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the outboard motor on a Greenpeace Zodiac boat.

Fermi 2 puts fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than a boat's outboard motor. Plant regulations are so detailed that they extend to the way floors are mopped.

In fact, the overall impression from a half-day spent there is of a well-controlled and even benign process, padded by an astonishing array of safeguards and encumbered by federal regulations so detailed that they extend to the way floors are mopped.

Fermi 2, to a lay visitor, seems proof against any kind of accident, including earthquakes, terrorist attack and the chance that a Metro-bound jetliner would crash into the main reactor building.

But it is vulnerable to politics. That's one reason why DTE Energy, parent of Detroit Edison, is so eager to show it off -- building public support for nuclear power may be increasingly important for the electrical generating industry.

California's energy crisis has helped encourage talk of a nuclear revival, with the possibility that new plants might be added to the 103 now in operation nationwide. The last one to come on stream was the Watts Bar plant in Spring City, Tenn., in May of 1996.

President Bush's national energy policy, released last month, foresees additional new nuclear generating capacity to help meet an anticipated 30 percent increase in U.S. energy consumption over the next 20 years. Nuclear power currently accounts for about 20 percent of America's electricity output.

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, the former junior U.S. senator from Michigan, says it would be risky to rely on just one power production source -- which under current circumstances would likely be natural gas fired boilers -- to meet rising demand.

But a key hurdle remains for any long-term commitment to expanded nuclear power -- the disposal of highly radioactive spent fuel. Abraham will make a key decision this year that likely will determine the fate of a proposed national storage site, and thus of the nuclear industry.

At Yucca Mountain, Nevada, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, scientists are finishing a study of the feasibility and safety of building a radioactive waste site. Sealed canisters of spent reactor fuel would be entombed in tunnels 1,000 feet below the mountain top and 1,000 feet above the water table.

Abraham said he expects to receive their final report soon. After a review, he will make a recommendation to Bush, who would have final responsibility. Nevada, vehemently opposed to the waste site, could veto a decision to proceed with the plan, but that could be overridden by a majority vote in Congress.

"I'm not trying to prejudge this at all, but if that were to all happen and we were to begin moving ahead towards a scientifically safe repository, then I think that has a very relevant impact on decisions that might be made to add new (nuclear) facilities," Abraham said.

The 1,000-acre Fermi 2 site is certified for a second reactor. But don't look for a DTE proposal to build one any time soon.

"We won't be the first one out of the box," said William T. O'Connor, vice-president for nuclear generation at Fermi 2.

America's electric industry is forming into large regional and national groups, a few of which will become nuclear specialists. One of these, Exelon Corp. in Illinois and Pennsylvania, is investigating new technologies it says can dramatically reduce the cost of nuclear power production.

Meanwhile, Fermi 2 appears to have hit its stride after years of spotty performance. It operated at maximum capacity in 1999 and has been running at 99.7 percent of rated output this year, says O'Connor.

"Production costs for Fermi are now better than our coal units -- and far better than natural gas," he said.

That's the result of years of effort, which become clearly visible when you arrive at the Refuel Floor of the main reactor building, where nuclear fission is taking place about 100 feet under the soles of your shoes.

All the spent fuel that Fermi 2 has ever used is clearly visible in its temporary storage under 40 feet of purified water.

To arrive at that point, visitors go through a personal background check, several head-to-toe radiation sweeps and security checkpoints, and the direct scrutiny of the federally mandated -- and heavily armed -- private security force.

My "buddy" -- tour guide and former reactor operator Mike Trapp whose job was to keep me constantly in sight during the entire visit -- said the plant's 1,000 employees eventually become accustomed to having every move watched by a chain of officialdom extending from Newport to Washington, D.C.

"If you don't like someone looking over your shoulder, this is not the place to be," he said.

-------- nevada

Whitman Announces Final Standards for Yucca Mountain

U.S. Newswire
6 Jun 9:00
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/Current_Releases/0606-105.html

Whitman Announces Final Standards for Yucca Mountain on Public Health, Environmental Protection To: National Desk, Environment and Energy reporters Contact: Cathy Milbourn of the Environmental Protection Agency, 202-564-7824; Email: milbourn.cathy@epa.gov

WASHINGTON, June 6 /U.S. Newswire/ -- U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Whitman today announced final, very stringent public health and environmental protection standards for Yucca Mountain, the proposed repository for spent fuel from the nation's commercial nuclear power plants.

"As a nation, we must address our nuclear waste disposal problem, but we must do so in a way that protects public health and the environment," Whitman said. "EPA's Yucca Mountain environmental standards are the world's first to address long-term storage and disposal of this type of radioactive waste. These are strong standards and they should be. We designed them to ensure that people living near this potential repository will be protected -- now and for future generations."

The fundamental Yucca Mountain requirements for protecting people and ground-water have not changed from previous drafts. The standards issued today address all potential sources of radiation exposure from ground-water, air, and soil. The standards are designed to protect the residents closest to the repository at levels that are within the Agency's acceptable risk range for environmental pollutants. This corresponds to a dose limit of no more than 15 millirem per year from all pathways -- about twice the exposure of just living in a brick house for a year. Naturally occurring radioactive materials and the radiation they produce are found everywhere such as in food, soil and water.

Whitman also announced separate standards to protect groundwater resources. The proposed repository sits above an aquifer that is a critical source of water for irrigation, dairy cattle farming and drinking water. Consistent with EPA's long-standing commitment to protect potential drinking water sources, the standard for Yucca Mountain protects ground-water resources to the 4 millirem per year limit established under the Safe Drinking Water Act. The separate groundwater standard is on average 15 times more stringent than the all pathways standard. This is the same level of protection applied to current and future sources of drinking water across the U.S.

"Under these standards future generations will be securely protected. Our standards require that a person living in the vicinity of Yucca Mountain and drinking untreated water at the site 10,000 years from now, will have less radiation exposure than we get today in about two round-trip flights from New York to Los Angeles," Whitman explained. Those flights equal an exposure of about 14 millirem.

While the core environmental requirements are the same as in the proposed rule, two modifications were made that will change how the Department of Energy (DOE) would demonstrate that the Yucca Mountain facility is safe. First, the final standards were made more protective by establishing an additional 2 kilometer (1 mile) safety zone between the nearest residents and the location where DOE must prove it is meeting the EPA standard. The change is from 20 kilometers (12 miles) to 18 kilometers (11 miles) from the repository.

The second modification involves the volume of ground-water DOE will have to analyze to show it is meeting the environmental standard. EPA is requiring DOE to evaluate the potential for radiation in 3,000 acre-feet per year of ground-water. Based on public comments to our proposal, and local input, the agency adjusted the volume of water to more accurately reflect current and projected water usage near Yucca Mountain. An acre foot is one acre of water one foot deep.

Yucca Mountain is located in Nye County, Nev., on federally- owned land about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Congress designated Yucca Mountain as the site for a potential geologic repository for safe storage and disposal of spent fuel from the nation's commercial nuclear power plants and other high-level radioactive waste. That waste currently is stored at commercial nuclear power plants and research reactor sites in 43 states.

Before the site can open and accept radioactive waste, the Secretary of Energy must recommend, and the President must approve Yucca Mountain as a safe repository for nuclear waste. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission must determine that the Department of Energy can meet EPA's standards and other licensing requirements. DOE is responsible for the construction, management and operation of the repository. The earliest date the Yucca Mountain repository could be licensed and approved to accept radioactive waste is at least eight years from now -- 2010. During that time, both DOE and NRC will continue to provide the public opportunities to comment.

For more information about EPA's final public health and environmental protection standards for Yucca Mountain, go to www.epa.gov/radiation/yucca. To receive a printed copy of the final rule and support documents, call EPA's toll-free Yucca Mountain Information Line, 1-800-331-9477.

--

Yucca mountain standard, 15 millirem/year all pathways (a REM is a measure of the actual biological effects of radiation absorbed in human tissue)

Other comparable radiation exposures:
-- 3 Chest x-rays, 18 mrem
-- 2 Round-trip cross-country airplane flights, 14 mrem
-- Living in a brick house, 7 mrem
-- Living in Denver, additional 21 mrem above sea-level exposure
Average annual background radiation (all sources), about 360 mrem

----

SENATOR REID SEEKS EXPLANATION FOR CANCER CLUSTER

June 6, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jun2001/2001L-06-06-09.html

WASHINGTON, DC, Senator Harry Reid said Tuesday that he will step up efforts to investigate the possible causes of a cluster of leukemia cases striking children in the community of Fallon, Nevada.

The Nevada Democrat, who now chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, said he will seek additional information from the U.S. Navy, the Secretary of Transportation and Kinder-Morgan on the transportation, storage, use and disposal of jet fuel in Fallon.

"Whether we are discussing the Navy's practice of dumping jet fuel from its aircraft or the pipeline that carries the fuel from Reno to Fallon, lingering questions remain about this toxic substance and whether or not it could be a contributing factor in local leukemia cases," said Reid, the assistant Democratic leader. "By studying the jet fuel pipeline and documenting known incidents of contamination, we can alleviate concerns and remove any existing dangers to residents and the environment."

State health officials have confirmed 14 cases of childhood leukemia in the Fallon area. On Sunday, 10 year old Adam Jernee, became the first of these children to die of the disease.

Navy officials said they would provide all the information that Reid is seeking, but insisted again that the leukemia cluster could not be related to jet fuel contamination. JP-8 jet fuel, used by the Fallon Naval Air Station, contain known carcinogens, Reid countered.

In the effort to document known spills or releases of jet fuel, Reid has requested additional information from the air station and Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, the firm which operates the pipeline that carries fuel from Reno to Churchill County.

"The jet fuel pipeline from Reno to Fallon has been in use for more than four decades and it should be thoroughly inspected by the federal Office of Pipeline Safety, if for no other reason than to provide peace of mind to the community. At the same time, I have asked the operator of the pipeline to fully document any known fuel spills and to provide more details on the venting of harmful jet fuel vapors," Reid said.

--------

EPA Radiation Standards Offer Inadequate Protection from Proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Dump
Important Precedent for Groundwater Protection Undermined by Rule's Deficiencies

NEWS RELEASE
For immediate release:
June 6, 2001
From: "Lara Blevins" <lblevins@citizen.org>

WASHINGTON, D.C. -The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today finalized radiation protection standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository that establish a regulatory framework for legalized radiological contamination in Nevada, said environmental, public interest, and consumer advocacy groups today.

"This is another example of the Bush Administration weakening environmental regulations to keep a bad project alive," said Lisa Gue, policy analyst with Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program.

Yucca Mountain, located near Las Vegas, Nev., is currently the only site under consideration for a potential dump for high-level radioactive waste generated by U.S. commercial reactors and weapons facilities. Yucca Mountain sits above an aquifer that is a critical source of water for irrigation, dairy farming and drinking water. The EPA is required by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act to set radiation protection standards for the site. The agency released a proposed rule for comment in 1999. The final rule was issued today.

The final EPA rule retains a standard for multiple pathways of 15 millirem per year and a separate 4 millirem per year standard for exposure from groundwater. The separate groundwater standard was a central focus of public comments to the agency during the rulemaking process. However, the measures for implementing these standards continue to be inconsistent with basic scientific and regulatory principles. For these reasons, we oppose the final EPA rule.

The central weaknesses of the EPA standards include:

* By arbitrarily limiting the standard to the first 10,000 years of operation, the dose limits for the repository do not account for the maximum radionuclide exposures that will be caused by Yucca Mountain, which are projected to occur much later. * The compliance point for determining conformity with the 4 millirem per year groundwater standard is located 18 km from the site, rather than within the site boundary. * EPA's dilution factor and distant point of compliance for the groundwater standard are contrary to the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act. * EPA does not take into account the substantial radiation sources at the Nevada Test Site, which the Department of Energy estimates could have impacts on groundwater quality comparable to those of Yucca Mountain.

"While we view the inclusion of a separate groundwater standard for Yucca Mountain as a very important precedent, the EPA standards for Yucca Mountain will not adequately protect the public," said David Adelman, senior attorney with Natural Resources Defense Council. Moreover, the Bush Administration's standards undermine the Safe Drinking Water Act by significantly weakening the implementation requirements for the groundwater standard.

Public interest, environmental, and consumer advocacy organizations have closely followed EPA's rulemaking process for this standard, and have consistently emphasized the need for a stringent standard given the extremely toxic nature of high-level radioactive waste and the lack of experience with geologic disposal. "EPA's final rule does not address many of our significant health and safety concerns associated with the Yucca Mountain repository proposal," said Ruth Swanson, Associate Executive Director of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Although the rule issued today contains a separate groundwater protection standard, the final EPA standards for Yucca Mountain threaten public health and promote reliance on dilution-rather than containment-of nuclear waste to meet regulatory requirements. "From the beginning, the process for devising standards for Yucca Mountain has been driven by the intent to fit the standards to the site, rather than to ensure that the public and the environment are adequately protected," said John Hadder, northern Nevada coordinator with Citizen Alert. "The standard issued today continues this tradition."

-------- tennessee

DOE work benefits state's economy

June 6, 2001
by Paul Parson
Oak Ridger staff
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/060601/new_0606010012.html

The Department of Energy's activities in Oak Ridge during fiscal year 2000 provided a major source of economic benefits for the state of Tennessee and its residents through the creation of jobs and income and expansions in state and local tax bases, a report indicates.

In fact, the document states DOE spending supported 33,517 full-time jobs in the state for 2000, meaning that for every one DOE job, 2.2 additional jobs were supported in other sectors of the state economy.

The report was conducted by the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Tennessee. The center began conducting in-depth analyses of the economic impact of DOE payroll and non-payroll spending in 1998.

Some other highlights of the report include:

DOE's local work year led to an increase of nearly $1.8 billion in Tennessee's gross state product in 2000.

Total personal income generated in the state by DOE-related activities was nearly $1.2 billion in 2000. Each dollar of income directly paid by DOE in the state translates into a total of $1.87 in personal income for Tennessee residents.

DOE-related spending generated $56.6 million in state and local sales tax revenue in Tennessee in 2000.

Looking to the future, the report states the Spallation Neutron Source project is projected to create up to 1,500 primary and secondary jobs in the region during the construction phase. Another 1,700 primary and secondary jobs are expected to be generated during the facility's operation. The complete report is available on the Internet at www.oakridge.doe.gov/economic

-------- utah

Audit criticizes depot redesigns

By Lee Davidson
Deseret News Washington correspondent
Wednesday, June 06, 2001
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,275009949,00.html

WASHINGTON - Managers approved hundreds of design changes for Army chemical-arms-destruction plants without assessing how they would affect cost, schedule or environmental compliance.

That contributed to costs skyrocketing from the originally estimated $1.7 billion to $15 billion. The program also is more than a decade behind schedule. And design changes may force amending environmental permits that could bring more delays.

That's according to a U.S. Army Audit Agency report obtained by the Deseret News through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Utah is home to the nation's largest chemical-arms-destruction plant at Deseret Chemical Depot, where 42 percent of the nation's chemical arms were stored during the Cold War.

Lessons from its operation and those of a plant on Johnston Island were supposed to be incorporated into plants planned at seven other chemical-arms storage sites nationwide.

Army investigators wrote that managers approved more than 3,000 design changes at various plants but "didn't assess the full cost, schedule, environmental and operational effects," even though rules require such evaluation.

Using statistical sampling techniques, investigators chose 1,465 design change proposals to study in-depth. They found:

About 46 percent of the proposals were approved without a full explanation of the need for the change, the anticipated benefits from making the change, or the effects of not making the change, auditors wrote.

About 40 percent of the proposals were approved without complete cost estimates, they said.

The potential schedule impact sections for about 64 percent of the proposals were either blank or stated, without explanation, that no scheduled impact was anticipated, they said.

Environmental documentation will be corrected as required. All but 94 of these proposals were approved, auditors wrote.

Investigators said construction schedules at some facilities were extended for up to 10 months "to compensate for engineering changes that may not have been fully justified or adequately planned."

"More delays are likely."

They noted that managers, however, never tracked the actual costs or delays from most changes, so their full impact is unknown.

The first deadline set by Congress for destruction of chemical arms was 1994. It is now projected to be completed no earlier nationwide than 2010 with some internal documents obtained by watchdog groups saying it could take as long as 2018. Changes from demands for increased safety and environmental protection, plus some early funding shortages, helped drive up costs.

Auditors also wrote in the new report that because of design changes, "facility construction costs probably will be significantly higher than anticipated."

Also, "effects on environmental permits could cause lengthy delays because managers approved changes without assessing whether they complied with existing permits."

As an example of such problems, the report notes that managers in 1998 agreed to delete "dunnage furnace systems" - to burn containers and packing materials that encased arms - from designs for plants at Umatilla, Ore., and Pine Bluff, Ark.

But investigators wrote that decision "was premature because no alternatives for the safe, environmentally sound and cost-effective disposal of dunnage were suggested or otherwise identified."

In fact, the change was approved even though in spaces asking how it would affect operations, managers wrote, "Additional procurement and alternate method is unknown at this time."

Investigators complained the change was approved because "project managers believed that, had they not deleted the system, the facility construction contractor could have used it as an excuse for potentially significant construction delays" of the rest of the plant.

Investigators called that a "shortsighted approach to a long-term concern." They added that "since no alternatives were identified, Umatilla managers were placed in the awkward position of building a facility with an uncertain design."

Investigators also complained that managers did not assess how changes might affect environmental permits until after they were approved.

For example, it noted that managers at Pine Bluff decided to review how 135 changes approved there from 1995 to 1998 might affect environmental permits and found that 28 might require significant changes that could take "months to years" to approve.

The new report notes that documentation for 26 of those 28 changes included the same statement in spaces about anticipated environmental impacts: "There may be an impact. Environmental documentation will be corrected as required."

Investigators wrote, "Use of such canned wording clearly indicates that managers weren't concerned with whether changes complied with environmental permits or the potential effects of modifying existing permits until after they were approved."

Even when some cost estimates were included in design change proposals, auditors said they often proved to be wildly inaccurate.

For example, 108 change proposals included in a contract revision for the Umatilla plant were estimated to cost $1.3 million total. Auditors said they actually cost about $11 million.

Because of the findings, the Army Audit Agency recommended that managers now implement as required full evaluations of all design changes.

The Army accepted the report, and Army commanders endorsed the recommendations. They also approved recommendations that managers document keeping the status quo as an alternative to all changes and that allowable cost and schedule thresholds for changes be established.

The report obtained by the Deseret News was titled "Engineering Change Process for the Chemical Stockpile Disposal Project." It was dated Aug. 14, 2000, but review of its findings and an Army position statement on them was not completed until February 2001.

-------- us nuc politics

Democrats Grill Defense Nominees on Arms Control

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; Page A06
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26646-2001Jun5?language=printer

A day before they officially assumed control of the Senate, Democrats grilled two top Pentagon nominees about their conservative views on arms control and raised the possibility of a confirmation fight.

Under intense questioning by members of the Armed Services Committee, Douglas J. Feith, nominated by President Bush to be undersecretary of defense for policy, stood by his position that the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty lapsed when the Soviet Union went out of existence in 1991.

But Feith, a Washington lawyer who served in the Pentagon during the Reagan administration, denied that his views put him at odds with the president, who has called for amending or abrogating the treaty, which prohibits large-scale missile defense systems.

"The president . . . has said that the United States is complying with the terms of the ABM Treaty," Feith said. "I'm happy to support that policy."

Jack Dyer Crouch II, nominated as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, also drew heavy fire but stood by his writings in opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

Crouch, a professor at Southwest Missouri State University, said at one point that he believed the Bush administration should at least consider a resumption of nuclear test explosions.

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who becomes chairman of the powerful committee today, sparred repeatedly with Feith and Crouch and demanded further written answers from both men before any vote is taken to send their nominations to the floor.

A final vote on both nominees and a third Bush selection, Peter Rodman, nominated as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, could be weeks away.

At one point, Levin told Feith that his position on the status of the ABM Treaty raised "such great uncertainty" that it put him out of sync even with the Bush administration, which is skeptical of the treaty.

Levin also questioned Feith about an article he wrote expressing numerous concerns about the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, a pact brokered with the Soviet Union by the Reagan administration.

Feith insisted that he supported the INF Treaty both then and now, despite "weakness in the agreement" he thought should have been fixed.

Feith's sharpest exchange, however, came with Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), who reacted with alarm when Feith said he favored development of a policy for "the liberation of Iraq."

"Well, that's the most disturbing answer of all," Cleland said.

Cleland, a Vietnam combat veteran, summed up his feelings at the end of the hearing, telling Feith and Crouch that "your answers have been very troubling to me, and I want you to know that. And it's going to be an agonizing thing to go over your testimony."

Throughout their testimony, Feith and Crouch said repeatedly that they support most arms control agreements and want to work closely with NATO allies and Russia on Bush's proposed missile shield.

But at the end of the day, they seemed to have made little headway with Levin and other leading Democrats. After hours of back-and-forth, Levin said he thought Crouch's writings on how to counter North Korea's nuclear program were "reckless."

Crouch countered that he no longer favored either redeploying U.S. nuclear weapons in South Korea or bombing North Korea if it did not accede to U.S. demands, as he had in the mid-1990s. But he added: "Given what I knew at the time, I stick by the recommendations."

----

New Chairmen Glance

The Associated Press
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; 8:04 p.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010606/aponline200444_000.htm

A list of the new Senate committee chairmen and some issues they are expected to push:

AGRICULTURE: Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa is expected to work to overhaul the 1996 farm law, which is set to expire next year. A member of Congress since 1974, Harkin has said he would increase the role of conservation in the next farm bill. In May he introduced legislation that would give farmers and ranchers up to $50,000 annually for setting aside land under conservation programs. Other issues Harkin has promoted during his 17 years in the Senate are education and health care.

---

APPROPRIATIONS: Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia will become chairman, a post he has held before, as well the Senate's president pro tempore because he is the chamber's most senior Democrat. Byrd's first order of business will be to set spending levels for this committee's 13 subcommittees. He was a major critic of this year's budget resolution and President Bush's tax cuts, saying they squeezed too much money from needed federal programs.

---

ARMED SERVICES: Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan has been skeptical of the technical feasibility of missile defense, a Bush administration priority. As chairman, he is expected to press for more reviews before implementing such a system. But Levin has praised Bush's recent emphasis on consultations with allies, many of whom have indicated opposition to the plan. Levin wants the military to turn more attention to terrorism and favors more efforts to prevent the "proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."

---

ENERGY & NATURAL RESOURCES: Short-term solutions to the energy crunch in California and other Western state will likely be the starting point for Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. Bingaman opposes a cornerstone of Bush's energy policy, drilling for oil and gas in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and supports price caps on wholesale electricity prices in the West. He introduced an energy package that emphasizes conservation but also includes many of the same initiatives that Bush favors: increased funds for clean coal technology, improvements in electricity transmission and increased energy exploration on federal lands.

---

BANKING, HOUSING & URBAN AFFAIRS: Maryland Sen. Paul Sarbanes is expected to focus more on urban affairs and consumer protections than his predecessor, Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas. Sarbanes also supports tougher financial privacy regulations and will likely introduce legislation to combat predatory lending - when financial institutions charge high mortgage fees to primarily low-income and elderly borrowers.

---

BUDGET: Sen. Kent Conrad of North Dakota fought hard to defeat the $1.35 trillion tax cut, calling it irresponsible and unfair. "Its costs explode at precisely the time the baby boomer generation will retire, putting unprecedented strains on Social Security and Medicare," he said. Conrad will press to budget more money for Democratic priorities such as health care and education.

---

COMMERCE, SCIENCE & TRANSPORTATION: Sen. Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina is expected to place consumer protections at the top of his agenda. He joined former chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., last year to sponsor tire-safety legislation after the Ford Motor Co.'s massive tire recall. He is a critic of aviation mergers including the pending US Airways-United Airlines merger and the recent American Airlines-Trans World Airlines merger. Regional telephone companies will find him even less friendly than they viewed McCain. Broadcasters will have to deal more with his advocacy of violence-free programing in early evening prime-time hours.

---

ENVIRONMENT & PUBLIC WORKS: Vermont Sen. James M. Jeffords is expected to take over this committee from former ranking minority member Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., once a reorganization is formally approved. Jeffords, responsible for the shift in power to the Democrats when he defected from the GOP to be independent, was chairman of Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Jeffords already has introduced legislation to start regulating carbon dioxide emissions from power plants as a source of global warming - one of the positions that put him at odds with Bush.

---

FINANCE: Sen. Max Baucus of Montana was a chief co-author of the recently passed tax bill. He said he is less interested than many Republicans in a future tax bill but has not ruled out including "modest" tax breaks for small business in minimum wage legislation. Baucus is a strong supporter of normalizing trade with Vietnam and is ready to move quickly once a bilateral trade agreement signed last July reaches Congress. He supports expanding prescription drug benefits to Medicare recipients and would like to extend the Child Health Insurance Program for poor children to include low-income adults who do not qualify for Medicare.

---

FOREIGN RELATIONS: Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden is an internationalist and strong supporter of the United Nations in contrast to the former chairman, Jesse Helms, R-N.C., a frequent critic of international accords. Biden has criticized Bush's emphasis on erecting a missile defense shield as a national priority and what he calls the administration's "movement toward unilateralism."

---

GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS: Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut will become the Democrats' point man in investigating the Bush administration. Already he has scheduled hearings for later this month on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's performance in assuring that electric rates, particularly in California, are "fair and reasonable" as required by law. The Democrats' 2000 vice presidential nominee also has promised hearings on Bush's rollback of job safety and environmental regulations adopted in the last weeks of the Clinton presidency.

---

HEALTH, EDUCATION, LABOR & PENSIONS: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts is expected to push a liberal agenda, beginning with a patients' rights bill this month. In the majority or minority, Kennedy has always led the charge for increases in the minimum wage and is preparing to do so again this year. But he also was the key Democrat in crafting a compromise bill with Bush on education.

---

INTELLIGENCE: Sen. Bob Graham of Florida is more conservative than most of his Democratic colleagues. He is an advocate of making people in sensitive intelligence jobs submit to polygraph examinations and audits of their finances. He has been a major supporter of U.S. efforts against Colombian producers and exporters of illegal drugs and supported former President Clinton's military intervention in Haiti.

---

JUDICIARY: Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont has said his first priority will be investigating the FBI in the wake of its failure to turn over documents in the Oklahoma City bombing to Timothy McVeigh's attorneys. But his biggest power will be in weighing and deciding which of Bush's judicial nominees should make it to the federal bench. Leahy has promised to begin holding hearings on Bush's first 16 nominees for appeals court judgeships within two weeks of the Senate getting reorganized. Republicans fear Bush's more conservative nominees may never get a vote in the full Senate.

---

SMALL BUSINESS: Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry will take the reins of the small business committee pushing for the passage of two bills he introduced last month. One bill would expand the Small Business Technology Program; the other would set up a Small Business Administration pilot program to increase awareness of telecommuting to small business owners.

---

VETERANS AFFAIRS: Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia is expected to hold hearings on the Department of Veterans Affairs efforts to recruit more nurses, and on a 1999 law that requires the department to provide institutional care to veterans at least 70 percent disabled from their service. He is also interested in enhancing the Montgomery GI Bill and making it easier for Vietnam veterans with Hepatitis C to get help from the veterans department. Rockefeller was chairman of this committee during the 103rd Congress.

----

Top Bush Adviser Moves to Sell Stocks

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26020-2001Jun5?language=printer

Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, acted yesterday to sell his stocks in energy, defense and pharmaceutical companies with stakes in administration policies.

An administration official said Rove has long planned to sell his stocks, and made a final decision at an April 24 meeting with White House lawyers, but has been unable to complete the process because of the complex paperwork and legal issues.

A financial disclosure form released by the White House on Friday showed Rove owned holdings worth more than $100,000 each in Boeing Co., one of the nation's three largest defense contractors; Enron Corp., a Houston energy conglomerate; General Electric Co., a supplier for nuclear and fossil fuel power generators; and Pfizer Inc., a pharmaceutical manufacturer. A notation dated May 18 said, "All individual stock holdings to be sold."

Rove yesterday sought a certificate of divestiture from the Office of Government Ethics, which allows deferral of capital gains taxes on sales that are made to avoid conflicts. The holdings would be rolled into government securities or diversified accounts.

Bloomberg News reported Monday that Rove had not yet sought the certificate. An administration official said yesterday that Rove had submitted a draft request.

Democratic Senate aides said they would determine if a hearing might be warranted, since Rove had retained his holdings throughout the administration's deliberation on its energy policy, which Bush announced May 17.

The administration official said Rove has "intended to sell all of his stock from the very beginning, and was told not to proceed" by the White House counsel's office until his situation was thoroughly examined. At the April 24 meeting, lawyers outlined several options and Rove chose divestiture.

"Mr. Rove has followed the instructions of the White House counsel's office and has avoided discussions that could specifically or materially affect his holdings while consultations regarding his financial situation were ongoing," the official said.

-------- us nuc waste

EPA: Nuclear waste site must have tight standards

June 6, 2001
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/science/06/06/yucca.nuclear.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada must comply with stringent groundwater standards to ensure public health, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday.

Although the nuclear industry has said the new requirements will make the site much more costly and could threaten its approval, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said: "We believe we can meet the requirements."

The EPA health standards for the proposed Yucca Mountain burial site for thousands of tons of used reactor fuel would limit radiation exposure from groundwater near the site to no more than 4 millirems per year. Overall radiation from all sources from the site would be capped at 15 millirems.

"Under these standards future generations will be securely protected," EPA Administrator Christie Whitman said in a statement, calling the requirements "strong standards" that will protect residents near the Nevada site thousands of years from now.

President Bush is expected later this year, or possibly early next year, to decide whether to approve the Yucca Mountain site in the Nevada desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas as a permanent repository for 70,000 tons of used reactor fuel now at commercial power plants.

Scientists have not given the site a final approval, but Abraham said he plans to make a recommendation to Bush later this year. He told an oil industry conference Wednesday he hoped to make a recommendation "at the earliest practical time."

"The EPA has issued tough and challenging standards," said Abraham in a statement, "tougher than the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the National Academy of Sciences considered necessary. But we believe we can meet the requirements."

The government's health standards for the Nevada site have been considered crucial in determining whether the federal facility can be built.

Health requirements debated

Nuclear industry leaders and many of their supporters in Congress have argued that a 4 millirem groundwater requirements -- essentially what is required now for drinking water -- may not be achievable and could mean doom for the proposed Yucca location.

They have sought a less stringent health requirement proposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC proposal would call for a maximum 25 millirem radiation cap from all pathways -- air, ground and water -- and no specific groundwater requirement.

"The nuclear industry is extremely disappointed," said Marvin Fertel, director of business operation at the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's trade group. "The groundwater provision lacks a sound scientific basis."

He said its application to the proposed Nevada site "will cost taxpayers and electricity consumers billions of additional dollars to license and build the repository without making the facility any safer."

A spokesman for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, said that the rule was still being analyzed, but that at first look it appeared to be similar to what the EPA had proposed under the Clinton administration.

'More stringent'

"It's even more stringent than the previous administration (proposed)," said Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nevada, noting that the rule requires water samples to be taken a mile closer to the site than the Clinton plan.

The EPA standard would call for an overall 15 millirem maximum exposure from the Yucca site to an individual located 11 miles from the nuclear waste burial site. A millirem is a measurement of the biological effects of radiation absorbed in human tissue.

The waste, which would be placed in canisters some 600 feet below the surface at the Yucca Mountain facility, would remain highly radioactive for more than 10,000 years.

Whitman said that under the EPA requirement a person living near the site 10,000 years from now "will have less radiation exposure than we get today in about two round trip flights from New York to Los Angeles."

By comparison, background radiation exposes people to about 360 millirems of radiation annually. Three chest X-rays expose a person to about 18 millirem.

"We must address our nuclear waste disposal problem," said Whitman. "but we must do so in a way that protects public health and the environment. ... These are strong standards and they should be."

----

NIMBY writ large at Yucca

June 6, 2001
Charles Rousseaux
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20010606-86508156.htm

First of two parts.

Even before the Senate officially shifted seats, new majority leader Tom Daschle went nuclear. Last Thursday, he declared, "As long as we´re in the majority, it´s dead."

"It" is a plan to store high-level nuclear waste in a repository at Yucca Mountain, a move opposed by environmentalists and Nevadians. Yet Mr. Daschle´s myopic move should cause taxpayers to go ballistic: Billions of their dollars have already been spent studying the problem, and failure to proceed with the repository at Yucca Mountain will most likely result in a nightmarish nuclear not-in-my-back-yard problem that could last for generations.

Nuclear waste has been building up since the mushroom cloud was merely a gleam in the eye of Robert J. Oppenheimer. The buildup of waste from atomic weapons has been enriched from that coming of civilian power plants, many of which were built during the radioactive power situation of the 1970s.

The country is facing a similar energy situation today: While it is easy to disbelieve the power crisis out West (many of us never believed in California´s existence anyway), blackouts may well roll though the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard this summer. To avert a similarly dim outlook over the next two decades, the U.S. will need to build between 1,300 and 1,900 new power plants over the next two decades according to the National Energy Policy Development Group (NEPD) report on the energy crisis.

One of the solutions advocated by the NEPD is an expansion of nuclear power, since it is reliable, relatively low-cost (once the reactors are built), and fairly friendly to the environment. Nuclear power already supplies about 20 percent of the nation´s electricity needs, (a relatively low percentage compared to many other countries). And aside from safety concerns, nuclear power´s biggest drawback is the waste it generates, regardless whether fuel rods are reprocessed.

According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, the 103 operational nuclear power plants in the United States produce a combined total of about 2,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste annually, primarily consisting of spent, but still intensely radioactive, reactor fuel rods. In more than three decades of operation, such plants have produced a total of about 36,500 metric tons of such waste, which, if stacked side-to-side and laid end-to-end, would cover an area the size of a football field about 12 feet deep.

That isn´t surprising, since all sources of energy, whether renewable or non-, come with inherent drawbacks. Whirling windmills tend to chop up endangered avians, shining solar panels turn off when the sun goes down, and burning fossil fuels cause environmentalists to exhale voluminous amounts of noxious gasses that eventually cause costly presidential policy corrections.

Fossil fuels have other drawbacks as well. They are far less energetic a thimble-full of uranium will produce the same amount of electricity as 149 gallons of oil or almost a ton of coal, and they generate far more waste, some it radioactive.

In fact, small amounts of radiation are inherent in the matrix of life the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe. Damage to humans caused by radiation exposure is usually measured in rems. Exposures of around 10 rems may cause detectable deleterious damage in an individual´s blood, exposures of 100 rems are usually sickening, and exposures of more than 1,000 rems are almost inevitably fatal. The average American is exposed to 360 millirems of radiation each year, more than 80 percent of it from natural sources, and the rest from a variety of events, ranging from plane travel to television viewing.

Radiation damage is due to the fact that, like actors in a spaghetti Western, radioactive elements "die," by breaking up into smaller particles (a process called radioactive decay), while simultaneously shooting out "bullets" of energy and/or particles. Those "bullets" (divided into alpha, beta and gamma particles) can wreck delicate protein machinery a cell needs to function and/or can chew the rungs off the delicate DNA ladder of life, potentially leading to various types of cancer. If reproductive cells have such broken rungs of DNA (called mutations) they can lead to multiple generations of families having genetic abnormalities and even higher-than-normal incidences of various cancers.

Radioactive materials can remain harmful for decades, and even centuries. For that reason, high-level nuclear waste needs to be stored somewhere, preferably far away from most things biological, or at least human. Several possibilities have been investigated since the brilliant dawn of the nuclear age. Burying the material on the ocean floor was sunk due to titanic technical and political difficulties. Safely sending the material into space proved far too challenging, as witness the Challenger disaster. The idea of storing the material on an isolated island was cast away, since Tom Hanks (and, for that matter, Gilligan and the Skipper too), could have been stranded anywhere. The Antarctic Treaty of 1959 froze out the idea of burying the material deep in polar ice.

Partially due to the paucity of safe, long-term storage alternatives, spent fuel rods are currently being kept in temporary storage containers on the sites of the nuclear plants in which they were used, either in steel- and concrete-lined pools or dry casks made of the same materials. Beyond the environmental, health and safety risks posed by such short-term solutions is the simple fact that nuclear plants are running out of room to place spent fuel rods. By 2010, the earliest that the repository at Yucca Mountain is expected to open, nearly 80 percent of nuclear plants will have exhausted their storage capacities.

The problem of high-level storage is literally approaching critical mass, and Yucca Mountain seems to offer the best long-term solution find out why tomorrow.

Charles Rousseaux is an editor for the Commentary pages of The Washington Times.

--------

GREENPEACE CALLS ON PRESIDENT BUSH TO VETO EXPORTS OF US CONTROLLED NUCLEAR WASTE TO RUSSIA

6 June 2001
http://www.greenpeace.org/pressreleases/nucwaste/2001jun6.html

Moscow - Greenpeace today called on President Bush to veto any shipments to Russia of spent nuclear fuel originating from the US, following today's vote in the Russian parliament to overturn a ban on the import of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel.

Recent calculations based on data provided by the US Department of Energy (DOE) show that more than 90% of foreign radioactive waste (spent nuclear fuel) considered for import by Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy (Minatom) is under US control. Only 180t (or 7.5%) of the 2,400 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel produced annually by Minatom's claimed potential client countries, could be exported to Russia without US approval. This material is produced in China, Eastern European countries and at some reactors in Switzerland, which are not of US design.

"US permission for the export of spent nuclear fuel to Russia would be a clear contradiction of the most fundamental US nuclear non-proliferation policy", said Tobias Muenchmeyer of Greenpeace International. "Reprocessing of imported spent nuclear fuel, as envisaged by Minatom, would clearly undermine all US efforts to discourage the accumulation of plutonium and the proliferation of nuclear weapons."

"Without US support, the whole grandiose Minatom program shrinks down to the simple old Soviet practice of taking back spent fuel from the socialist brother countries." said Muenchmeyer.

The Russian Duma today finally approved a controversial amendment to the environmental bill allowing the import of radioactive waste to Russia. With 243 votes in favor of the amendment, the supporters of spent fuel imports got only slightly more than the minimal required 226 votes.

The Duma vote ignored popular opposition to the proposal with more than 2.5 million Russians signing a petition, sponsored by Greenpeace and other environmental groups, calling for a national referendum on the issue. However, on 2 November, last year, Russia's Central Election Committee declared 600,000 signatures invalid, taking the number below the 2 million threshold required to trigger a referendum. Also an opinion poll, conducted for Greenpeace in May, this year, by independent Russian public research center ROMIR, found that 78.9 per cent of Russians were opposed to the import of radioactive waste and would not vote for Duma members who supported this legislation.

The law changes, approved by the Duma today, must now go to the Russian Upper House. The leader of Russia's Upper House is opposed to the radioactive waste import legislation. Federation Council Chairman Yegor Stroyev told the Interfax news agency on 7 March this year: "Only the mafia could be interested in laws that actually open the way to imports of nuclear wastes and turn Russia into a nuclear dump. The idea of importing nuclear wastes to Russia is insane."

The permission for importing radioactive waste, being promoted by the cash-strapped Minatom, is designed to allow Russia to become the world's nuclear waste dump. Minatom believes that over the next decade it could import up to 20,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel from countries including Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, Germany and Spain in contracts worth up to $21 billion.

The main promoter of the radioactive waste import scheme, former Atomic Minister Evgeny Adamov, was sacked by the Russian President Vladimir Putin on 28 March. The dismissal of Adamov followed the release by Greenpeace, on 3 March, of a confidential report from the Russian Parliamentary Anti-Corruption Commission detailing Adamov's large-scale illegal business activities.

The proposed sites for Spent Nuclear Fuel storage are Mayak in the Ural mountains and Krasnoyarsk in Siberia. Mayak is the world's largest nuclear complex and one of the most radioactively contaminated sites in the world. According to a 1998 statement by G.J. Dicus, a commissioner for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission: "As a result of early operational practices and some accidents at Mayak, workers at the plant and populations around the site were exposed to unusually large amounts of radiation and radioactive materials. In many cases, the doses were comparable to those received by survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings."

Tobias Muenchmeyer, Greenpeace's expert on Russian nuclear issues, was declared persona non grata by the Russian Foreign Ministry in December 1999 and has been banned from entering Russia ever since. No reason has been given why Muenchmeyer is not allowed to enter Russia anymore, except that it "is in the interest of state security" to deny him a visa. Greenpeace is campaigning to overturn this undemocratic decision which strikes at the heart of free speech.

--

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT: Tobias Muenchmeyer (Berlin) +49 170 86 66 052 Ivan Blokov (Moscow) +7 095 257 41 22 Or visit the Greenpeace website at www.greenpeace.org/~nuclear/waste/russianwaste.html where a chronology of events leading up to today's Duma vote is available.


-------- MILITARY

-------- afghanistan

'Taliban jets bomb residential area in northeast'

Wednesday 6 June 2001
Times of India
http://www.timesofindia.com/060601/06nbrs12.htm

KABUL: Taliban militia jets bombed military and civilian targets in central and northeastern Afghanistan on Tuesday, opposition sources said.

The militia's aged MIG bombers targeted opposition positions in Yakawlang district of central Bamiyan province as well as villages in Chal district of northeastern Takhar province, the sources said.

Heavy fighting has broken out in both areas, and while the Taliban were forced to abandon Yakawlang on Monday night, they were pressing on with attacks on Tuesday in Chal, south of the provincial capital Taloqan.

"The warplanes of the Taliban bombed the residential areas (in Chal) three times and the heights of Shakh-e-Palang once," said Mohammad Habeel, a spokesman for opposition commander Ahmad Shah Masood.

He said Shakh-e-Palang were hills about eight kilometres northeast of Taloqan, which is under Taliban control.

Habeel said he did not know of any civilian casualties during the raids.

In Yakawlang, a spokesman with the opposition Shiite Hizb-e-Wahdat faction said Taliban jets flew three bombing raids on Tuesday morning.

"The warplanes bombed the hilltops thinking they were our strongholds but there were no casualties," said spokesman Ahmad Bahram. (AFP)

-------- arms sales

Pakistan launches drive against illegal weapons

Wednesday 6 June 2001
Times of India
http://www.timesofindia.com/060601/06nbrs4.htm

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Tuesday launched a campaign to flush out millions of illegal weapons blamed for fuelling deadly sectarian violence, officials said.

Officials said anyone possessing an illegal weapon could hand it in to the government without charge under an amnesty from Tuesday, the birthday of the Prophet Mohammad, until June 20.

The amnesty is the first step in a major drive against the gun culture in Pakistan.

In its final stages later this year the government has said it will conduct house-to-house searches if they are deemed necessary.

"It is hoped and expected that the public will cooperate with the government in the larger national interest to eliminate illicit weapons," said an official announcement.

"The aim of the campaign is to re-establish peace and harmony in the society for a better future for our children," it added.

Some police and officials fear retaliation from extremist groups, whether sectarian radicals or jihadis bent on war in Kashmir or neighbouring Afghanistan.

Millions of weapons, from assault rifles to artillery and missiles, found their way to Pakistan during the 1979-89 Soviet war in Afghanistan.

Around the same time, demand for guns rose as the government encouraged fundamentalist Sunni groups to fight with the Afghan Mujahideen or form a home guard against radical Shiites from revolutionary Iran.

But the government is now faced with relentless gang-style violence between radical Sunnis and Shiites, plus well armed and restive Pashtun tribes in the northwest.

Tribal clashes in North West Frontier Province, a semi-autonomous zone bordering Afghanistan where gun markets produce cheap copies of military weapons, frequently involve rockets and machine guns.

In May troops were called in to quell one such clash between Turi and Mangal tribesmen of the rival Sunni and Shiite sects.

"There are no exact figures available but conservative estimates put the figure anywhere between five and 10 million (illegal weapons in Pakistan)," said Police Bureau of Research chief Shoaib Suddle.

He said there were already around 5.2 million licensed weapons in the country.

"If the drive succeeds, it will clearly show the writ of the government is established and help reduce the graph of violence," he said. (AFP)

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Menem's Ex - Army Chief Held in Argentine Arms Probe

June 6, 2001
By REUTERS Filed at 10:00 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-arms-ar.html

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Reuters) - Former Argentine President Carlos Menem's ex-army chief Martin Balza was detained on Wednesday by a judge investigating illegal arms sales to Croatia and Ecuador in the 1990s, Balza's family said.

``My father is under arrest,'' Ines Balza, the popular general's daughter, told reporters.

Balza ran the army during Menem's 1989-99 presidency. Menem is due to testify on Thursday as a suspected organizer of an ''illicit association'' to sell Argentine rifles, cannons, shells and gunpowder to Croatia in 1991 and 1993, violating a U.N. arms embargo, and Ecuador in 1995 during a war with Peru.

Menem's ex-brother-in-law and one of his former ministers have also been detained in two parallel federal court investigations. If convicted of organizing the arms deal, they face three to 10 years in jail.

Balza, widely respected in Argentina for an historic ``mea culpa'' in 1995 for the army's role in human rights crimes during a 1976-1983 dictatorship, was detained at a federal court and taken to an army jail at the Campo de Mayo barracks outside Buenos Aires, said his lawyer Manuel Omar Lozano.

-------- balkans

US troops still needed in Kosovo, US defense secretary told

Wednesday June 6, 1:41 AM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010605/1/samx.html

MIJAK, Yugoslavia, US peacekeeping troops are still needed in Kosovo to maintain the fragile stability in the Balkans, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld heard as he made a whistlestop tour of the region Tuesday.

"I will not conjecture what will happen if the US troops are removed," the top US commander in the NATO-led KFOR peacekeeping force in Kosovo, Army Brigadier General William David, said after Rumsfeld flew into Kosovo.

"As long as KFOR has been here, levels of instability have been managed," he said.

"If asked, I would tell Rumsfeld that US troops are still needed here."

Rumsfeld, who has made no secret of his skepticism about keeping US forces in the Balkans, was making his first official visit to Kosovo since becoming defense secretary in the administration of US President George W. Bush.

To an assembly of US troops at Camp Bondsteel, the main US base in Kosovo, Rumsfeld said: "Your task here is to help maintain stability in this important region.

"But you also are here to help protect the freedom of men and women back home."

Thanking them for their work, Rumsfeld said that he knew that "peacekeeping operations are complex, sometimes extremely dangerous" and added: "We watch what's happening out there very carefully in Washington. We see intelligence reports, we follow the details."

Some 6,000 US soldiers are deployed with the 41,000-strong KFOR presence that has been ensuring security in Kosovo since the end of NATO's 1999 war on Yugoslavia.

Rumsfeld has shown himself to be lukewarm to keeping the US troops in Kosovo, partly because the United States has turned its military attention more to Asia than to Europe and partly because of the Balkans' notorious volatility.

In recent months, the US forces' assigned sector of Kosovo, the southeast, has been the scene of much activity as ethnic Albanian rebels criss-cross over the border with Macedonia to wage a conflict with the Macedonian army.

Rumsfeld, who met briefly with Macedonian Defense Minister Vlado Buckovski at the airport in the airport in the Macedonian capital of Skopje on his way to Kosovo, also viewed the border area.

After flying over a ridge where rebels had been fighting Macedonian forces, the UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters carrying Rumsfeld and his party, and their Apache gunship escorts, landed for a closer look.

The village they landed near was Mijak, a cluster of houses 50 metres (yards) from a Macedonian border post.

A 31-member US platoon has been standing guard and posted here since early March, when they drove out ethnic Albanian rebels in a firefight, the platoon commander, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Owens, told Rumsfeld.

Since then, they have been trying to staunch the flow of weapons over the border to the rebels.

The US defense secretary walked around the zone, ducking into a sandbagged observation post to shake hands with troops in combat gear, and peering across razor wire separating Kosovo from Macedonia.

At one point, Rumsfeld asked how many arms smugglers had recently crossed over.

Owens turned to his sergeant. "How many 'mules' did we see coming through the night before?" he asked.

"Nine, sir."

After leaving Kosovo, Rumsfeld passed again through Skopje, which is being used as a logistics supply base for KFOR. There, he inspected five US army "Hunter" drones used for unmanned aerial surveillance missions along the Kosovo-Macedonian border.

He then boarded a flight for Salonika, Greece, where he is Wednesday to participate in a meeting of defense ministers from southeast European countries which is expected to dominated by the security situation in the Balkans.

-------- china

Chinese war games in Taiwan Strait begin

Wednesday 6 June 2001
Times of India
http://www.timesofindia.com/060601/06nbrs3.htm

BEIJING: China announced on Tuesday that it had begun military exercises in the Taiwan Strait but stressed they were "routine" war games aimed at raising combat capabilities.

"The People's Liberation Army is conducting military exercises on Dongshan Island which are annual, routine exercises aimed at raising the combat capacity of the troops," foreign ministry spokesman Sun Yuxi said.

"They are within the sovereignty and territory of China so they have nothing to do with any other country," he said.

The Chinese press has billed the exercises the biggest war games in the Taiwan Strait since Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian took office a year ago.

"In order to warn Taiwan's new leaders and the leaders of the US government not to play with fire on the question of Taiwan, the top mainland leadership decided to hold large-scale exercises aimed at Taiwan," the official Qianlong website said last week.

The joint exercises between China's army, air force and navy were codenamed "Liberation Number One," and were aimed at taking one of Taiwan's offshore islands and attacking an "aircraft carrier," the report said.

Sun refused to comment on such reports and warned journalists against "confusing (the war games) with other issues."

Dongshan Island, which lies some 98 nautical miles east of Taiwan's Penghu Islands, hosted large-scale beach landing exercises in 1996 during the Taiwan missile crisis when China tested-fired missiles over the island.

A guided-missile brigade, two tank brigades, marines, submarines and China's Russian-made Sukhoi SU-27s will be used in the exercises, the website said.

The upcoming exercises appear to be aimed at showing China's growing impatience with Chen for refusing to recognise its "One China" principle, which enshrines China's claim of sovereignty over Taiwan.

They are also being held after US President George W Bush approved a multi-billion dollar weapons package for Taiwan in late April.

Taiwan has been ruled separately from mainland China since nationalist forces fled to the island following their defeat by the communists in 1949 following a long civil war.

China has since considered Taiwan a renegade province that must be brought back under its rule, by military force if necessary. (AFP)

-------- iraq

Iraq Confirms U.S. Jets Bomb Southern Iraq

June 6, 2001
By REUTERS Filed at 6:27 a.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-iraq-us.html

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi newspapers on Wednesday confirmed that American planes had attacked installations in the southern Iraq on Tuesday.

The U.S. military had said in Washington on Tuesday that American jets enforcing a ``no-fly'' zone over southern Iraq had attacked an anti-aircraft artillery site ``in response to recent Iraqi hostile acts.''

The Iraqi papers quoted an Iraqi military spokesman as saying that the attacks had been on unspecified civilian installations and that British planes had also been involved.

He said the planes had flown out of bases in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and been driven off by Iraqi anti-aircraft defenses.

Western powers established no-fly zones in the north and south of Iraq after the Gulf War in 1991 to help protect a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq and Shi'ite Muslims in the south from possible attacks by Iraqi forces.

Last Monday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said improvements in Iraqi defenses had increased the risk of an American plane being shot down.

U.S. military commanders overseeing operations over Iraq have said it might be necessary to cut back on the enforcement flights in the face of increasing and more effective attacks on them from the ground.

----

Iraq's fishermen run tightrope of tankers and territorial waters

Wednesday June 6, 12:28 PM
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010606/1/se6g.html

FAO PENINSULA, Iraq, Off the Fao peninsula, where Iraq's territorial waters meet with those of Iran and Kuwait, thousands of Iraqi fishermen battle every day to reach the lucrative fishing grounds of the Gulf.

The port at Fao serves as a base for around 8,000 fishing boats, each with a crew of up to 10 men, most of whom hail from Basra, the largest commercial port in southern Iraq.

"If you want a good catch, you have to go far into Khor Abdullah or near the (Kuwaiti) Bubiyan island while trying to stay in Iraqi waters," said 50-year-old fisherman Adel Murtada.

The Khor Abdullah channel, an inlet between Bubiyan and the Iraqi shore, is mainly controlled by Kuwait under the UN demarcation of the Iraq-Kuwaiti border after the 1991 Gulf War.

The United Nations established a demilitarized zone (DMZ) that extends 10 kilometres (six miles) into Iraq and five kilometers into Kuwait, and reports to the UN Security Council any violation by either side.

The DMZ arches for about 300 kilometres (180 miles) round the north of Kuwait from the Gulf to the frontier between Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, including the 40 kilometre (25 mile) length of Khor Abdullah.

"Our boats are often intercepted by Kuwait coastguards who treat us in a humiliating way," said a demoralised Murtada, dressed in a darned head-to-toe dishdasha.

"The Kuwaitis ask us to take down the Iraqi flag but we refuse. When they stop us, they confiscate our fish and throw our equipment in the sea. I've been stopped on more than one occasion," he said.

The fishermen, who mainly use simple locally-made wooden boats, also risk a run-in if they lose their way and end up in Iranian waters further east.

"But the Iranians who intercept us generally let us go in exchange for a few kilos (pounds) of fish or a small amount of money," another fisherman said.

To take to the sea from the Fao peninsula, each boat captain must pay a port tax equivalent to one dollar to the authorities which rubberstamps the vessel for a period of 10 days.

"Sometimes we catch between one and three tonnes of fish and sometime our nets remain empty," Murtada said.

The catches, composed mainly of zubaidi -- the favoured silver-finned fish of the Gulf that sells for a princely five dollars a kilo (2.2 pounds) in Iraq --, grouper and prawns are sold immediately on the quayside to buyers from the four corners of Iraq.

After several run-ins with Iranian and Kuwaiti coastguards, fisherman Faisal Abdul Zahra, 35, now throws his nets close to the Iraqi oil terminal of Mina al-Bakr.

"I am exposing myself to death to feed my seven children," Faisal said. "I avoid the Kuwaitis and the Iranians but on several occasions I have almost been hit by the huge oil tankers that arrive at the terminal."

Around 60 percent of Iraq's oil exports, suspended on Monday, have passed through Mina al-Bakr since the introduction in 1996 of the UN oil-for-food programme.

-------- israel / palestine

Under fire, IDF digs up weapons tunnels

By Ze'ev Schiff
Ha'aretz Correspondent
Wednesday June 6
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=14&datee=6/6/01&id=120768

Despite declarations of a cease-fire by both sides, Palestinians are using heavy firepower to thwart a major engineering mission by the Israel Defense Forces along the border between Sinai and the Gaza Strip. The Israel Defense Forces are working to find and block underground tunnels used by Palestinians to smuggle large quantities of firearms and ammunition - and also people.

Digging a deep trench, ten meters deep in some parts, along several kilometers of the southern border, the IDF is trying to detect Palestinian smuggling operations, and to drive a wedge between the Palestinian and Egyptian sections of the city of Rafah.

The IDF has sent armored tractors to do the digging. The work is slow-going: Progressing no more than 60 to 100 meters each day, the IDF has at this point dug a channel a little over a kilometer in length.

Trudging along, the army has uncovered two Palestinian tunnels, one of which contained a variety of firearms.

Understanding the objectives of the IDF work, Palestinian gunmen often shoot at operators of the heavy army equipment, and at foot soldiers escorting the work crews. In addition to semi-automatic rifle fire, Palestinians also fire light anti-tank weapons and mortars.

Under the Oslo accords, Israel controls the thin strip which runs between the southern tip of the Palestinian-held Gaza Strip and the Egyptian Sinai peninsula. The IDF calls this narrow route the "Philadelphi" road. Although Oslo agreement maps demarcate an Israeli-controlled strip about 100 meters in width, Palestinian construction in the Rafah area reduced the dimensions of this buffer zone. At one stage the strip narrowed to about 15 meters in width. The IDF responded by destroying some structures and expanding the strip to around 50 meters in width - and in some areas to the full 100 meters.

The Philadelphi road has always been a violent flash-point, and a number of IDF soldiers have been wounded or killed in the area. The IDF set up two manned posts along the strip; both have periodically been the target of Palestinian attacks and gunfire assaults against them have intensified recently.

Underground Palestinian smuggling efforts precede the current Intifada.

Smugglers start digging on the Egyptian side of Rafah, taking cover between houses, and emerge between - and even inside - houses on the Palestinian side. Israeli security experts believe that efforts to smuggle to Gaza are mainly directed along these underground passages.

Prior to the Intifada, the IDF undertook sporadic drilling operations to hunt for these tunnels. A special unit in the Southern Command was set up for this purpose, but its success was limited.

This time around, with fighting intensifying, the IDF has decided on a drastic solution to the smuggling problem: digging a deep, long counter-channel.

----

U.S. to keep troops in Sinai

Wednesday, June 6, 2001
The Associated Press
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=14&datee=6/6/01&id=120757

CAIRO - The United States will not unilaterally withdraw its troops from the Sinai peninsula and will consult with key players if it aims to reduce the force, U.S. Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, said yesterday.

Last month, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the U.S. administration wanted to withdraw American troops from the Sinai peacekeeping force. But after Israeli concerns that this indicated a U.S. desire to distance itself from the Middle East, Rumsfeld said he was simply sounding out Israel and Egypt about a troop reduction.

"We would like to consult with our friends ... to see if there is a way to maybe reduce some of our presence although the United States will remain a part of that force in some form," Shelton told reporters yesterday after meeting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. "It will be done in full consultations with Egypt and with the other parties to the agreement."

The Multinational Force and Observers unit was set up in 1982 after the 1979 Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. The 1,900-strong force from 10 countries includes 865 Americans.

----

US denies report of agreement with Israel on settlement freeze

Wednesday June 6, 7:16 PM
AFP
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/010606/1/sio8.html

JERUSALEM, The United States denied Wednesday an Israeli newspaper report that there was a US-Israel deal on freezing Jewish settlement-building in the occupied Palestinian territories.

"It's completely incorrect," a US embassy spokesman told AFP.

The Haaretz newspaper had said the United States had worked out with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a formula for a freeze on settlements, which is one of the most divisive issues between Israel and the Palestinians.

It said that, under the terms of the plan, no new settlements would be constructed, no additional land expropriated for building and there would be a freeze on building beyond existing built-up areas.

The fate of the settlements themselves would be reserved for final status negotiations.

The report of the US-led Mitchell commission called last month for a halt to settlement activity in the Palestinian territories as part of a series of confidence-building measures aimed at halting the eight-month tide of Israeli-Palestinian violence.

Currently, around 200,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, occupied by Israel since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher recently called Israel's settlement policy "provocative."

---

Sharon, U.S. work out settlement freeze deal

By Aluf Benn
Ha'aretz Diplomatic Correspondent
Wednesday June 6
http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=14&datee=6/6/01&id=120766

The Americans have managed to work out a settlement freeze formula with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that they would never have dared dream of under previous Israeli governments. "Construction beyond current built-up areas will be frozen," this formula holds.

According to the terms of the understanding, no new settlements will be constructed, in accordance with the basic guidelines of the government. Other points include:

l No additional land will be expropriated for the purpose of construction.

l A freeze on settlement construction beyond existing built-up areas.

l The above provisions are contingent upon implementation of all other terms of the initiative.

l The issue of settlements is being reserved for final status negotiations as per existing agreements.

The understanding further notes that Israel went a long way in accepting the report of the Mitchell Commission, as evidenced in the comment delivered by Foreign Minister Shimon Peres to U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Trying to promote security contacts between the sides, the Bush administration has decided to send CIA director George Tenet to Israel and the Palestinian Authority tomorrow. Tenet will report back to Washington about the status of the cease-fire commitments.

Tenet's trip to Israel reflects intensified American mediation involvement, as well as a belief that both sides have in recent days taken positive steps toward reducing violence. "In the past 48 hours we've seen a decrease in violence, and we're happy that both sides are on the right road," State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher declared yesterday.

The Palestinians put in a special request for the CIA director's involvement in security talks, and Israel did not object to Tenet's arrival. Under the Clinton administration, Tenet played an active role in security contacts between Israel and the PA.

Special U.S. envoy William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, will also return to the country, in a bid to consolidate cease-fire arrangements and forestall violence so that the next steps in the implementation of the Mitchell plan can be implemented. Cordial daily chats Daily talks between Sharon and Powell are cordial. "I'm phoning to see how you're doing," Powell says. He salutes Sharon at the end of these chats, saying "thank you, general."

"Thank you, from one general to the other," Sharon salutes back.

Yet behind these diplomatic niceties, a war of nerves is being waged.

Sharon continually warns that his ability to exercise restraint is limited, and that he's only prepared to give Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat a few more days to deliver his side of the bargain. "I'm not going to surprise you," Sharon has promised Powell, "but we can't continue this way."

Trying to assuage Sharon's anger, Powell strokes back: "Your restraint gives us hope!"

The Bush administration has learned that the best way to deal with Sharon is with tender loving care. For his part, Sharon has come to regard congenial understandings reached with George W. Bush as a supreme Israeli asset.

The Americans and Sharon are currently playing a dangerous game of brinksmanship. Warning ominously about what's liable to happen should the cease-fire agreement collapse, the prime minister is telling Washington "hold things together for me." But Sharon inwardly believes that Arafat is very unlikely to uphold the cease-fire truce which he's promised. Apart from two wanted men, terror suspects haven't been arrested; and anti-Israel incitement in the Palestinian media continues. So, too, continues gunfire against Israeli targets.

Though this is far from a hermetically-sealed PA cease-fire, Sharon's office regards the no-shooting order given by Arafat as a diplomatic triumph of sorts. For the first time in more than eight months of violent confrontation, Arafat issued such an order; and quiet has been restored to many areas in the territories.

As is his wont, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres sees the half-filled part of the glass. He's devoting his energy these days to the effort to fortifying the shaky bridges leading to a stable cease-fire. As he lobbies in the international arena for pressure to be put on Arafat, Peres is doing his utmost to stop Israel from playing into Arafat's hands by giving him an excuse not to honor his cease-fire pledge.

From the day he took up his post, Sharon warned that if Arafat doesn't take action to stop terror, as he is obligated to do under existing agreements, Israel will do the work for him. In recent days, Sharon has toughened his stance. Issuing warnings about what Israel might be forced to do should terror continue, the prime minister has deliberately removed the pledge "we'll refrain from escalation."

The attack at the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium last Friday deferred a large-scale operation which the IDF has planned for PA territories. Under this plan, Israel intends to "stamp out terror" by flexing its own muscles. According to Israeli sources, the plan includes invasion into A areas (under full Palestinian control), removal of terror suspects and heads of hostile extremist organizations from their homes and offices, the destruction of some PA buildings and the forcible confiscation of "illegal firearms." Some sources say that the intention is to re-establish a military government for some period of time.

In other words, the Sharon government is holding in store a strong, perhaps mortal, blow against the Palestinian Authority apparatus.

Yet Sharon doesn't aspire to seize permanent control of A areas in the territories. He continues to view their transfer to the Palestinians as an irreversible step.

Sharon is convinced that fear of massive Israeli retaliation is what caused Arafat to issue his cease-fire declaration on Saturday. Foreign diplomats who have followed PA-Israel affairs closely corroborate Sharon's interpretation. Post-Dolphinarium reality The foreign officials believe that the diplomatic pendulum started to swing in Israel's favor the moment Sharon made his unilateral cease-fire announcement, and also embraced the Mitchell report recommendations. For the first time since the Intifada erupted, the Palestinians were losing diplomatic ground, these foreign diplomats say - and then came the terror attack in the heart of Tel Aviv, hurling international opinion directly to Sharon's side.

Diplomats who have mediated between the sides awakened Saturday morning to a new, post-Dolphinarium, reality. They learned that Sharon's cabinet was in session, and feared that a countdown leading toward massive Israeli retaliation had started.

Prior to the Friday terror attack, Israel had sent hints about its intention to use force against Arafat. Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy sent reams of information attesting to Arafat's involvement in terror, and to heavy firearms stockpiled by the PA, to his intelligence counterparts around the world. Halevy briefed UN Special Envoy to the Middle East, Terje Larsen.

All international officials agreed that this time Arafat had better do something, that he simply had to bite the bullet and do what he had failed to do since late September - it was his last chance to issue a cease-fire declaration. They knew that if he continued to hold back, this time around Israel was liable to crush his regime.

Larsen set off Saturday morning to Ramallah, to meet with Arafat. En route, he drew up a three-part Arafat declaration: a sharp denunciation of the Dolphinarium attack, an immediate cease-fire, and a full, 100 percent effort to clamp down on terror featuring practical steps, such as the resumption of security contacts.

When Larsen entered Arafat's office, he found that he had been beaten to the punch by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer - the contents of a cease-fire declaration were already being formulated. Most officials in the PA Chairman's office belonged to Fischer's entourage; the sole PA official who stayed around Nabil Sha'ath, whose task was to translate the declaration from Arabic to English.

In the middle of the discussion in Arafat's office, Fischer and Larsen received phone calls from Peres. They told the Israeli foreign minister that a PA cease-fire declaration was in the works, and also that they hadn't received any instructions or guidance from the Israeli side. Peres complained that in Ramallah, Palestinians danced with glee after the terror attack in Tel Aviv.

"You are here," Arafat said to Larsen. "Can you see anyone dancing?"

"Peres saw something on television," the Oslo process-polished Norwegian diplomat responded.

None of the mediators harbored any illusions concerning Arafat. On Saturday evening, Peres and Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer told U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk that Arafat had 48 hours to act.

For the time being, both the Israeli and Palestinian leaders are acting against their own inclinations and impulses, trying to maintain a highly anomalous situation in which two unilateral cease-fires are being upheld. Talking with the leaders, Powell can hear the strain in their voices. "It's too bad you have to deal with such a murderer," Sharon tells the U.S. Secretary of State. Arafat asks the Americans for more time, and more information. Egypt accepts new Israeli envoy Egypt sent a positive diplomatic message to Israel yesterday when it consented formally to accept newly appointed ambassador Gideon Ben-Ami, who is slated to take up his post in Cairo starting in August. Israel named Ben-Ami to the post some months ago, but Cairo stalled "before giving the new ambassador the normal nod yesterday.

----

Hamas provides social services for poor

June 6, 2001
By Richard Engel
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010606-10559674.htm

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip -- Amin Amoudy, enveloped in a huddle of his 17-member family, opened the door to his apartment in this squalid neighborhood in Gaza City and peeled back his lips in a grin. Hamas was paying him a visit, and now they could eat.

Mr. Amoudy welcomed in two bearded aid workers, and his children eagerly set about unwrapping the bags they had brought, containing tinned beans, sugar, flour and cooking oil.

"I take from the Palestinian Authority and from the U.N. agencies, but the Islamic Charity provides the most aid," said Mr. Amoudy, referring to a Hamas-run group that operates a network of kindergartens, health clinics and 35 youth-league volleyball and soccer teams in the Gaza Strip.

Hamas, which is known to outsiders for its suicide bombers like the one that killed 20 persons at a seaside Israeli disco Friday, yesterday rejected calls by Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for a cease-fire.

Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin said his group would continue to attack Israelis, brushing aside threats of Israeli retaliation for Friday´s attack that had prompted Mr. Arafat to call a truce.

"If I accept a cease-fire, it means ... I am raising a white flag," Sheik Yassin told reporters after a rally of some 500 Hamas supporters in Gaza. " should remove their settlers. Our land must be returned and our people must win liberation."

Hamas has claimed responsibility for the disco bombing, referring to it as "the great Tel Aviv operation" carried out by "our heroic brigades."

It was the deadliest attack in Israel since the Palestinian uprising began in September.

But Hamas´ popularity in squalid refugee camps in the Gaza Strip appears to come as much from its aid to the poor as its war against Israel.

Hamas provides food and cash to all of Gaza´s poor, regardless of their political affiliation, periodically handing out to each family the equivalent of $50 in Israeli shekels, the currency most used by Palestinians.

"How can I live? How is the authority going to help me?" asked a woman, referring to the Palestinian Authority headed by Mr. Arafat. The woman, who declined to give her name, clutched two 100-shekel notes given to her by Hamas.

The political message underlying the Hamas charitable organizations is nonetheless obvious.

At a recent play conducted at one of the Hamas-run kindergartens, one boy acted out the role of Sheik Yassin, the wheelchair-bound spiritual leader of Hamas.

Another boy pretended to be Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese guerrilla group, Hezbollah. Other children in the play were bodyguards, armed with plastic assault rifles.

Israel has said Hamas provides social services as a means to recruit suicide bombers like the one who detonated himself outside the Tel Aviv nightclub on Friday.

Israel has demanded that Mr. Arafat, as chairman of the Palestinian Authority, take control of Hamas and the smaller Islamic Jihad group; otherwise, Israel has said in thinly veiled threats, the Palestinian Authority will pay the price because it set free many jailed Muslim militants.

But trying to dismantle Hamas, which has become increasingly popular among Palestinians since the start of the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, last fall could be political suicide for Mr. Arafat.

Israel also has made it clear that allowing Hamas to operate freely, could also cost Mr. Arafat dearly.

The director of Hamas´ Islamic Charity in the Gaza Strip, Sheik Ahmed Bahr, said the group acts as a type of "shadow government."

"We help the families of prisoners, the poor, the families of martyrs, in particular now when the people are in a time of need because of the Zionist aggressions," Sheik Bahr said.

U.N. Commissioner-General Peter Hansen, who is in charge of providing basic services for some 4 million Palestinian refugees, has said Palestinians are growing increasingly desperate as the intifada drags on.

He said Israel´s closure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and harsh security measures, including bulldozing Palestinian farmland, have "sown the seeds of hatred."

"There has been a very strong radicalization, which shouldn´t surprise anyone with the kind of destruction that is going on here, with fighter bombers flying overhead every day, helicopter gunships firing missiles at houses, the massive destruction of houses, and bulldozers used to turn refugee shelters into rubble," Mr. Hansen said.

"You cannot expect anything but a radicalization and a feeling on the part of many that the path towards peace proved to them so far to be a path to nowhere or even a path to even greater subjugation and humiliation."

A recent opinion poll by the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion said that a vast majority of Palestinians support suicide attacks against Israelis.

Senior Hamas political leader Ismail Abu Shanab said suicide attacks against Israeli shopping malls and nightclubs were necessary because Israel was also guilty of killing Palestinian civilians.

"The terror among Palestinian society which came after each Israeli attack and the long-lasting terror from the occupation which lasted more than 35 years up to this point now the Palestinians are trying to balance this terror by reacting against Israelis," said Mr. Shanab.

"So you can consider the Palestinian attacks on Israeli society as balancing terror or deterring terror to deter Israelis from terrorizing Palestinians."

----

Israel Eases Palestinian Curbs

JUNE 06, 09:08 EST
By MARK LAVIE
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_package.html?FRONTID=WORLD&PACKAGEID=mideast&STORYID=APIS7CF2MIG0&SLUG=ISRAEL%2dPALESTINIANS

JERUSALEM (AP) - As a fragile cease-fire held, Israel on Wednesday began easing travel and other restrictions on Palestinians that were imposed after last week's suicide bombing outside a Tel Aviv disco.

About 2,000 Palestinian workers were allowed to enter an Israeli industrial zone inside the Gaza Strip on Wednesday and several food trucks were seen entering the territories. In the West Bank, though, Palestinian communities remained sealed off from each other.

Though fighting has cooled since Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat called a cease-fire Saturday, it hasn't stopped entirely. Arafat's call staved off Israeli retaliation for the Tel Aviv suicide attack, which killed 21 people, including the bomber.

Late Tuesday, a 5-month-old Israeli boy, Yehuda Shoham, was critically injured when Palestinians threw rocks at a car in the West Bank, according to Jewish settlers, Yehuda's relatives and the Israeli military.

The baby suffered severe brain damage, according to Dr. Karman Goitein, head of intensive care at Hadassah Ein Karem Hospital.

``The family, as you can imagine, is devastated and hopes that he recovers and also (is) angry because this is happening all the time,'' said Eve Harrow, Yehuda's great-aunt.

Settlers demonstrating Wednesday morning at the site where the car was struck burned a Palestinian greenhouse and two buildings, police said. Settlers and Palestinians threw rocks at each other. One Israeli and seven Palestinians were injured, according to Israel radio.

Also Wednesday, Palestinians were outraged by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's reference to Arafat as a ``murderer'' and ``pathological liar.'' Sharon made the comments in an interview on the Russian TV channel NTV that was broadcast by Israeli TV.

Most of those killed in the disco bombing were Russian immigrants and the outraged community has complained Sharon has not retaliated.

In his strongest attack on Arafat since taking office in March, Sharon complained Arafat is welcomed around the world ``with a red carpet,'' when instead of acting like a head of state, ``he behaves as the head of terrorists and murderers.''

``I think the world knows who is the murderer,'' said Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian parliament speaker. ``Arafat is not the murderer. Arafat is the leader of his people.''

Palestinian Cabinet minister Nabil Shaath said Sharon should respect Arafat. Sharon's remarks show that ``he doesn't have the attitude befitting a person who is looking for peacemaking,'' he said.

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres agreed that Arafat could be described as a terrorist, but recommended against using such terms. ``The words create a horrible psychological situation,'' he told Israel radio. ``We have to restrain ourselves.''

The Israeli Defense Ministry said that borders would be opened to allow Palestinians to return home from Egypt and Jordan, raw materials would be allowed into and out of the Palestinian territories and Palestinian workers could return to their jobs in an industrial zone next to the Erez crossing point.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer eased the restrictions because of a ``significant reduction in the number of attacks,'' according to a statement. However, the strict closure confining Palestinians to their towns is still in effect, spokesman Maj. Peter Lerner said.

Palestinian security commanders Maj. Gen. Abdel Razek al-Majaidah and Maj. Gen. Amin el-Hindi have traveled to trouble spots in the southern Gaza Strip to consult local officers about enforcing the cease-fire.

El-Hindi said ``all the Palestinian people respect the decision'' to stop firing. It was the first time in four months that Israel had allowed senior security commanders to visit the southern part of the territory.

The United States is moving back to center stage with the visit of CIA chief George Tenet, after the administration of President Bush showed initial reluctance to become deeply involved in the conflict.

Washington said Tenet was heading to the region Wednesday but, citing security concerns, wouldn't say where he would go or who he would meet with. Palestinian security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he would arrive early Thursday and meet separately with the Israeli and Palestinian sides.

In more than eight months of fighting, 484 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 108 on the Israeli side.

----

Beyond National Missile Defense,
Bush Team Envisions Space Weaponization Karl Grossman

Economists Allied for Arms Reduction [ECAAR] newsletter:
http://www.ecaar.org/Library/News/grossmanspaceweapons.html

It is generally believed that the Bush administration's space military program is essentially about "missile defense." But, in fact, "missile defense" is part of a broader program to make space a new arena of war.

The wider program's blueprint is revealed in the recently released report of the "Space Commission" chaired by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "Power projection in, from and through space" is advocated for the United States in the report of the 13-member body, formally called the Commission to Assess United States National Security Space Management and Organization. "In the coming period," states the report of January 11, 2001,"the U.S. will conduct operations to, from, in and through space in support of its national interests both on the earth and in space."

It urges the U.S. president to "have the option to deploy weapons in space." It states that it is "possible to project power through and from space in response to events anywhere in the world. Unlike weapons from aircraft, land forces or ships, space missions initiated from earth or space could be carried out with little transit, information or weather delay."

Plan Recommends Separate `Space Department' It recommends a transition of the U.S. Space Command, established by the Pentagon in 1985 to coordinate Air Force, Army and Navy space forces, to a "Space Corps" along the lines of the Marine Corps. Then it would possibly become a fully separate "Space Department"- equal to the Army, Navy and Air Force. Urging "missile defense", it warns of a "Space Pearl Harbor" without it

The Rumsfeld "Space Commission" report follows a series of U.S. military reports in recent years that call for the United States to "control space" and from space "dominate" the Earth below; reports in which "missile defense" is presented as a "layer" in a broader U.S. space military program.

As the U.S. Space Command's "Long Range Plan" of 1998 declares: "The time has come to address, among warfighters and national policy makers, the emergence of space as a center of gravity for DoD and the nation. . . . Space power in the 2lst Century looks similar to previous military revolutions, such as aircraft-carrier warfare and Blitzkrieg."

Space: the Frontier for War Fighting "Space is seen as a new place to wage war. Already, we are underwater, over-water, on-the-land, in-the-air - and now we want to go to another dimension: space," says Rear Admiral Eugene J. Carroll, Jr. (USN, ret.), vice president of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, D.C. "Missile defense doesn't make any sense and everybody realizes that," says Carroll. "The least likely threat we face is some third-rate nation developing an ICBM and launching it at the United States knowing they will get back 50 times what they send. There are all kinds of ways that are cheaper and more reliable - smuggling in a suitcase bomb, for example - to inflict harm and not be subject to instantaneous retaliation."

"You look at the Rumsfeld report and his [Rumsfeld's] statements and the other [military] reports and you have to realize that they are thinking in terms of militarizing space, of space warfare," said Carroll.

It is not just rhetoric, he notes. The Defense Department gave the go-ahead in December for development of the Space-Based Laser, a joint project of TRW, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The Public Affairs Office at the Army's Redstone Arsenal describes it as having a "lifecycle budget" of $20 to $30 billion.

A second space-based laser project underway and in testing is the "Alpha High-Energy Laser." Built by TRW, it conducted its twenty-second successful test firing last year. Unless a stop is put to it, "We are going into space with lasers," warns Carroll.

Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, agrees. Missile Defense "is the foot in the door," he says.

NMD Sets the Stage for Future Space Militarization Missile Defense has been the "spin" for the space military program because "defense" is seen as an acceptable concept for the U.S. public, he says. Then, says Gagnon, with "a deployment OK" it would be "followed up by the real Reagan Star Wars program that includes space-based weapons."

Mike Moore, of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in an article on the Rumsfeld "Space Commission" report in the March/April issue of the Bulletin wrote: "The heart of the report lies in the bald assertion that it is time to weaponize space." The report showed: "Apparently, Rumsfeld will push vigorously for the weaponization of space, soon rather than later," he stated. Moore told the press review, Extra!, published by the New York-based media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), that it "amazes" him that other journalists have "missed" the central message of the report

Thrilled, meanwhile, with the Rumsfeld "Space Commission" report is the official whose legislation got the commission established in 2000, U.S. Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire. In an interview in the new television documentary Star Wars Returns, Senator Smith comments about the United States seeking to "control space" that: "It is our manifest destiny. You know we went from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States of America settling the continent and they call that manifest destiny and the next continent if you will, the next frontier, is space and it goes on forever."

Gagnon, whose Gainesville, Florida-based Global Network is the lead organization challenging the U.S. program for space warfare, says: "If the House and the Senate allow Bush to carry out this space weaponization plan they will have all created the conditions that will surely move the arms race into the heavens. The aerospace industry will get rich from it, and the taxpayers will get a more unstable world. The people of the world must speak out loudly and clearly if we are to stop this new insanity!"

The Global Network is conducting a series of conferences and protests around the world in the coming months including an international meeting in May in Leeds in the United Kingdom and in October an "International Day of Protest to Stop the Militarization of Space." "If the U.S. is allowed to move the arms race into space, there will be no return," says Gagnon. "We have this one chance," he emphasizes, "this one moment in history, to stop the weaponization of space from happening." Earlier military reports laying out U.S. space military plans include the Vision Beyond National Missile Defense for 2020 report of the U.S. Space Command. Its cover depicts a laser weapon shooting a beam down from space zapping a target, and the opening page proclaims the U.S. Space Command's mission of "dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment."

Vision for 2020, issued in 1996, compares the U.S. effort to "control space" and "dominate" the Earth below to how centuries ago "nations built navies to protect and enhance their commercial interests." It stresses the global economy stating: "The globalization of the world economy will also continue, with a widening between `haves' and `have-nots."

Weapons Contractors Behind Effort The U.S. Space Command praises corporate involvement in developing U.S. space military doctrine. The Long Range Plan opens by saying that the "development and production process, by design, involved hundreds of people including about 75 corporations" and subsequently lists these corporations beginning with Aerojet and Boeing and including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Sparta Corp.,TRW and Vista Technologies. Some $6 billion annually - plus monies in the "black" or secret - have been going into U.S. space military activities in recent years. This is expected to greatly increase under the Bush-Cheney administration.

In addition to the new "Space-Based Laser" project, a second space-based laser already in testing is the "Alpha High-Energy Laser" built by TRW. It conducted its twenty-second test-fire last year.

Aware of the U.S. space warfare program, other nations of the world arranged for a vote in the United Nations General Assembly in New York on November 20, 2000 - to reaffirm the fundamental international law on space, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, and, specifically, its provision that space be reserved for "peaceful purposes."

Some 163 nations supported the resolution titled "Prevention of An Arms Race In Outer Space." It recognized "the common interest of all mankind in the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes" and reiterated that the use of space "shall be for peaceful purpose . . . carried out for the benefit and in the interest of all countries." The measure stated that the "prevention of an arms race in outer space would avert a grave danger for international peace and security." The United States, backed by Israel and Micronesia, abstained.

Canada and China have been leaders at the United Nations in challenging the U.S. space military plans and seeking to strengthen the Outer Space Treaty by banning all weapons in space (the treaty currently prohibits nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction).

Marc Vidricaire, counselor with the Canadian delegation to the United Nations, in a speech last October 19 stated: "It has been suggested that our proposal is not relevant because the assessment on which it rests is either premature or alarmist. In our view, it is neither. " Moreover, he continued, it is clear that technology can be developed to place weapons in outer space, and no state can expect to maintain a monopoly on such knowledge - or such capabilities - for all time. If one state actively pursues the weaponization of space, we can be sure others will follow."

China and Russia Call for Halting Program In March 1999, at the UN in Geneva, Wang Xiao, first secretary of China's UN delegation said, "Outer space is the common heritage of human beings. It should be used entirely for peaceful purposes and for the economic, scientific, and cultural development of all countries as well as the well-being of mankind. It must not be weaponized and become another arena of the arms race. Space domination is a hegemonic concept. Its essence is monopoly of space and denial of others access to it."

In his first address to the United Nations, Russian President Vladimir Putin in September 2000 told the "Millenium Summit that "particularly alarming are the plans for the militarization of the outer space." In Canada in December, Putin and Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien issued a joint statement announcing that "Canada and the Russian Federation will continue close cooperation in preventing an arms race in outer space."

Highly active on the space military issue, too, has been Kofi Annan who in opening the Third United Nations Conference on Exploration and Peaceful Uses of Outer Space in Vienna in July 1999 declared: "Above all, we must guard against the misuse of outer space. We recognized early on that a legal regime was needed to prevent it from being another arena of military confrontation. The international community has acted jointly, through the United Nations, to ensure that outer space will be developed peacefully."

"But there is much more to be done," said Annan. "We must not allow this century, so plagued with war and suffering, to pass on its legacy, when the technology at our disposal will be even more awesome. We cannot view the expanse of space as another battleground for our earthly conflicts."

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury and an award-winning investigative reporter, is a charter member of the Commission on Disarmament Education, Conflict Resolution and Peace of the International Association of University Presidents and the United Nations.

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

Defense inspector general faked records

June 6, 2001
By Scott L. Wheeler
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010606-17883192.htm

The Office of Inspector General of the Department of Defense has lost its legal audit authority because it falsified documents to pass a 2000 peer review, The Washington Times has learned. The fraudulent peer review went unnoticed until a whistleblower and an anonymous letter alerted the office of Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Mr. Grassley cited information from the General Accounting Office (GAO) and an internal review by a "senior official within the IG´s audit chain of command" that accused the highest levels of the IG´s office of "tampering with audit materials to alter the outcome of a peer review required by law." In the May 22 letter, obtained by The Times, Mr. Grassley called the matter "a major integrity violation" and said that according to GAO standards, the automatic result is that "the IG´s office has lost its accreditation as a government audit authority."

Mr. Rumsfeld has not yet installed his own management team at the Pentagon and its inspector general´s office. The Grassley letter states that the whistleblower had led him to contact the General Accounting Office and ask them to "examine the results of both the 1997 and 2000 peer reviews." Mr. Grassley also notified the President´s Counsel on Integrity and Efficiency. In an interview with The Times, Gaston Gianni Jr., vice chairman of the council, confirmed that his agency had examined the matter and said that "work papers were fabricated" in the peer review.

The peer review process is "a critical, independent quality-control check" created by Congress, that occurs every three years to ensure that the inspectors general are conducting proper audits and evaluations of the government agencies they oversee. According to Mr. Grassley´s letter, the peer reviews were conducted by the inspector general for tax administration at the Treasury Department (TIGTA), which asked to look at eight audit reports from the Pentagon inspector general´s office.

In August 2000, TIGTA "believed that all the materials examined met or exceeded established audit standards." But the anonymous letter to Mr. Grassley, which also was sent to TIGTA, the IG office, Republican Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia and others, stated that there was "peer review fraud at the DoD Inspector General." The letter also charged that the assistant inspector general for auditing, Robert Lieberman, and one of his deputies Jay Lane, "knew the fraud was being perpetrated,but looked the other way."

Acting upon Mr. Grassley´s request, the GAO sent the Senate Finance Committee a report that the Iowa Republican said "substantiated most of the allegations" in the anonymous letter. In his letter to Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Grassley states that the GAO determined that when the Treasury IG "identified the eight audits selected for review, officials in the [Defense] IG´s office realized that one report" on what it called the Defense use of "pseudo-Social Security numbers . . . would never measure up" and that a preliminary review showed "at least 47 known deficiencies."

Mr. Grassley said that instead of submitting that report, "a decision was made to destroy all the original work papers and to re-create an entirely new set. "Senior IG officials apparently ordered the staff to sign and backdate the new working papers as if they had been prepared at the time of the original audit," Mr. Grassley said. The effort, Mr. Grassley said, "required extensive use of overtime and cost an estimated $63,000."

Susan Hansen, Defense Department spokeswoman, would say only that "the secretary of defense has received the letter and will respond to Senator Grassley after appropriate review of the letter." Mr. Grassley´s letter calls the current situation "totally unacceptable" and says "the DoD IG must be subjected to another Peer Review as soon as possible -- and earn a passing grade." Mr. Gianni described the matter as "one of the priority matters to be resolved."

---

Waste, fraud linked to Clinton

["Many of the problems 'were not created by the Clinton administration. But the Clinton administration did not give them the attention they deserved, either.'"]

June 6, 2001
By John Godfrey
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010606-292023.htm

The Clinton administration´s staff cuts are to blame for much of the waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, according to a report released yesterday by Sen. Fred Thompson, Tennessee Republican.

The report, filed by Mr. Thompson on his last day as chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee, found that staff reductions under Mr. Clinton "actually detracted from the capacity of agencies to carry out essential functions and made them more vulnerable to fraud, waste and mismanagement."

The report said the layoffs caused a "brain drain that cost the government many of its most experienced and valuable employees."

More importantly, the administration did not provide a commensurate reduction in federal responsibilities, meaning "the federal government wound up doing the same old things in the same old way, but with fewer experienced employees."

At a press conference yesterday, Mr. Thompson downplayed the report´s criticism of the Clinton administration, saying it would take leadership and bipartisanship to fix the problem.

The findings are part of two-volume, 200-page report cataloging reports of mismanagement filed over the last two years by the General Accounting Office, departmental inspectors general and others.

That report found problems not only with the federal work force, but with financial management, information technology and with overlap and duplication of government efforts.

"This is something the president takes very seriously," said Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels, who accepted the report from Mr. Thompson at the press conference.

"[Mr. Thompson] has provided us a road map to attack a problem that has been festering for a long time," he said.

Mr. Thompson said many of the problems, including Boston´s $13.6 billion "Big Dig" highway project, which is more than five times more expensive than projected, mammoth financial mismanagement at the Department of Defense, and $12 billion in annual mispayments from Medicare, "were not created by the Clinton administration. But the Clinton administration did not give them the attention they deserved, either."

Also on a top-10 list of the worst examples of mismanagement is the Internal Revenue Service for its financial shortcomings.

But Mr. Daniels said he and the White House will reject the funding increases recommended by the IRS Oversight Board, an independent board created by Congress. The board says the Bush administration´s request for a 4.7 percent funding increase for the agency is inadequate.

Mr. Daniels dismissed the recommendation as having come from a "single-issue" group.

The report took aim at duplication of government effort, such as the nine agencies operating 27 teen-pregnancy programs, and raw mismanagement, such as $1.3 billion in mispayments made by the Department of Agriculture through the food stamp program.

But the report also found fault with Congress.

"We, as senators, presume already that the Pentagon needs more money," the report quotes Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, as saying during a speech from the Senate floor this winter. But, Mr. Grassley continued, "the Pentagon does not know how much it spends, [and] if the Pentagon does not know what it owns and spends, then how does the Pentagon know it needs more money?"

Mr. Thompson said the report shows that the government must also make some new investments in human capital and technology.

"We need to get the federal government into the 21st century, even if we have to drag it in kicking and screaming," the report concluded.

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-------- energy

Opinion: Bush Energy Policy - Fuels Rush In

By John Berger, Ph.D.
http://ens-news.com/ens/jun2001/2001L-06-06-04.html

SAN FRANCISCO, California, June 6, 2001 (ENS) - Lobbyists for the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries can congratulate themselves on a job well done. The Bush administration's energy plan reads as if it were drafted by a second GOP - gas, oil and power interests.

Given reports of their entree with Vice President Dick Cheney's Energy Policy Task Force, the energy interests got exactly what they wanted: relaxation of the Clean Air Act and other environmental regulations in order to fast track a profusion of new power plants, creation of 38,000 miles of new gas pipelines (12 times the width of America), expansion of oil refineries under reduced regulation and approval to drill for oil with impunity in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other protected public lands.

President George W. Bush (left) is congratulated by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, a Republican May 18, the day after the National Energy Policy was announced. (Photo courtesy the White House)

A central component of the plan - the creation of a new national power grid - is not a bad idea in principle. We do need new transmission capacity to bring the nation's huge treasure trove of clean wind, geothermal, biomass and solar electric energy to market. But if the transmission lines are situated primarily to facilitate the transport of power generated by coal and other fossil fuels, the nation will suffer a severe setback in its quest for clean, affordable energy.

Another key element of the plan - increasing natural gas imports and the use of federal powers of eminent domain to quash local opposition to the proposed new pipelines - hardly seems to square with the vaunted "energy independence" which the administration has emphasized.

Predictably, the plan shows little enthusiasm for renewable energy sources and no immediate relief from soaring prices for electricity, natural gas and gasoline.

Vice President Dick Cheney headed the task force that wrote the National Energy Policy. (Photo courtesy the White House)

It also ignores the issue of national fuel economy standards, a program that has stagnated since 1975. Cheney, intellectual author of the plan unveiled last week, promised only that the administration will "look at" the standards issue.

Laudable by themselves are the plan's proposals for a small residential solar tax credit, tax credits for hybrid-electric vehicles and the extension of the Clinton administration's wind energy production tax incentives. But these will have little effect on national energy use for the near future.

The plan curtseys to conservation, a last minute insert, provoked no doubt by looking at public opinion polls. But the administration would further slash the already inadequate research and development budgets for clean energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, hydrogen and biomass power, although Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, bowing to a growing backlash, has said he would revisit these items.

But of much greater interest to the Bush administration is what Cheney calls "environmentally friendly clean coal" which some might consider an oxymoron, and a revival of the moribund nuclear power industry.

Under the plan, the Price-Anderson Act would be renewed, limiting the liability of nuclear power plant owners in the event of a catastrophic nuclear accident.

Catastrophic nuclear accidents don't seem to concern the vice president. He is on record as referring to the Three Mile Island core-melt accident, in which thousands of people were evacuated from their homes, as "the Three Mile Island flap."

If you listen carefully to the supposed "need" to build 1,300 new power plants - more than one a week for the next 20 years - you can actually hear old ghosts a-croaking.

In 1972, the Atomic Energy Commission, in similar fear-mongering fashion, declared that up to 1,500 large new nuclear power plants would be required to meet the nation's energy needs. The AEC's successor, the Energy Research and Development Administration, modified that ridiculous claim and more circumspectly projected that 725 reactors by the year 2000 would do nicely.

That was the conventional wisdom of the Nixon-Ford years. Never mind that giant cost overruns, expensive electricity, accident risks, waste problems and proliferation concerns stopped the sales of these white elephants in the mid-1970s, with America's civilian nuclear power inventory topping out at 103 plants. Yet this is the technology that Cheney now wants to resurrect, calling it a safe, clean and plentiful energy source.

Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant (Photo courtesy Nuclear Regulatory Commission)

That is exactly the line the nuclear industry has been pushing since the 1950s when it promised that "our friend the atom" would produce power "too cheap to meter." Tell that to the ratepayers of California who have had to spend billions bailing out "stranded" nuclear assets, such as PG&E's Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant.

In case anyone has forgotten, the cost of civilian nuclear power for taxpayers, consumers and private investors has been estimated at $492 billion (in 1990 dollars) between 1950 and 1990.

Perhaps that is why the vice president is so fond of it. Corporations like Cheney's Halliburton Co. were deeply involved in slopping up the nuclear gravy through Halliburton's subsidiaries, Ebasco Service Inc. and Brown & Root Inc.

Consider, by contrast, his faintly contemptuous remark, "Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy."

Forget for a moment that not even the most committed environmentalist is suggesting that we rely entirely on conservation to meet future energy needs. Note instead that five national scientific laboratories have recently shown that straightforward energy efficiency programs could eliminate the need for more than 600 new power plants.

Aware of criticism, the Bush administration is now trying to make nice, with Bush absurdly declaring his policy as "a new kind of conservation, a 21st century conservation."

It's an interesting kind of "new" conservation that does not dare call upon restraints on conspicuous consumption, no matter how unnecessarily gas-guzzling the SUV or grandiose the monster home may be.

In a statement in May, the vice president actually said that he's not in favor of doing more with less energy, a pronouncement a freshman engineering student would find astounding.

Merrily burning as much nonrenewable fuel as possible, wringing the last drop of oil from protected public lands, trampling on local rights in the name of pipeline building and resurrecting the specter of nuclear power, with all its danger and all its deadly waste, hardly comports with the "compassionate conservatism" espoused by the Bush-Cheney election campaign.

Neither does it accord with the wishes of the American people.

The National Energy Policy is available online at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/energy/

{John Berger is an energy and environmental consultant. He has worked for the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, corporations such as Lockheed and Chevron, nonprofit groups, and governmental organizations, including the U.S. Congress. He is the author of "Charging Ahead - The Business of Renewable Energy and What it Means for America," and "Beating the Heat: Why and How We Must Combat Global Warming."}

-------- environment

U.N. Warns of Africa Water Crisis

JUNE 06, 20:35 EST
By MATT CRENSON
AP National Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=AFRICA&STORYID=APIS7CFCOCO0

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Millions of poor African families desperately need clean water, hiking for miles to fetch it or buying exorbitantly priced bottled water, even as wealthy Africans wash their cars and water their lawns. Many slum dwellers simply steal water from pipelines.

What Africa needs to solve the problem is privatized water companies that would make people pay for what they use, even if it means putting water meters in every household, an expert panel said at the United Nations on Wednesday.

Most African cities provide running water to only a portion of their residents. Other citizens, mostly those living in shantytowns on the outskirts of town, make enormous sacrifices to get their daily drinking water supply. Or they go without.

In Accra, Ghana, the water company delivers about half of the water the city needs. Rich people use drinking water to water lawns and wash cars, said Kwamena Bartels, Ghana's Minister for Public Works and Housing. Meanwhile, slum dwellers buy expensive bottled water from people who illegally siphon it out of the city's pipes. The practice is common throughout sub-Saharan Africa.

``It is unbelievable but true that an inhabitant of Kibera slum in Nairobi, earning less than a dollar a day, pays as much as five times the price paid by an average U.S. citizen for a liter of water,'' said Anna Tibaijuka, director of the U.N. Center for Human Settlements.

That wouldn't be the case if everybody had to pay a fair price for what they used, water managers from several African nations told the U.N. Conference on Human Settlements. The three-day conference opened Wednesday.

Accra has invited private investors to lease and operate the city's water distribution system for profit, Bartels said. There are currently five contenders for two contracts. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, will soon adopt a similar approach.

The hope is that a profit motive will drive those investors to make the water distribution system more efficient and affordable.

Water currently costs 27 cents a cubic meter in Accra. Today, a private investor would have to charge 63 cents to turn a profit. The World Bank has agreed to pay the difference for the next five years, but by then the private company is expected to have brought the cost down through increased efficiency

There is plenty of room for improvement. Half of Accra's water simply disappears between the treatment plant and the customers, lost to leaks and theft. Only 10 percent of Dar es Salaam's customers even have water meters.

``There is a lot of stealing,'' said Victor Kanu, a senior education specialist from Zambia. ``A lot of pilfery. There is a lot of tampering with meters.''

The inequitable distribution of water has unexpected and long-lasting effects on African society, Tibaijuka said.

For example, girls who traditionally fetch water cannot attend school during the hours they spend each day toting heavy containers. With no chance to get an education, these girls will have little chance of escaping poverty.

``If girls can be relieved of this burden, a lot of difference can be made in their lives,'' Tibaijuka said.

----

Pollution killing Australia's Barrier Reef - report

AUSTRALIA: June 6, 2001
Story by Michael Perry
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11073

SYDNEY - The Great Barrier Reef's inshore coral and seagrass meadows are choking under a blanket of mud laced with toxic pesticides being washed off farmlands and many reefs are unlikely to survive the next five to 10 years.

A World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) report on Australia's Great Barrier Reef released yesterday says increasing land-based pollution, coupled with bleaching due to global warming, was seriously threatening the world's largest coral reef formation.

"That spells catastrophe for the reef," said the report, released on World Environment Day. "There is now serious cause for concern about the survival of the inshore reefs from Hinchinbrook Island to Port Douglas."

"Many inshore reefs are now either highly degraded or dead. They have collapsed from the effects of sediment and nutrients pouring out of our rivers," WWF said.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest living reef formation stretching 2,000 km (1,300 miles) north to south along Australia's northeast coast.

WWF said 28 million tonnes of sediment flowed into the waters of the Great Barrier Reef each year, the equivalent of 3.5 million dump trucks emptying soil onto the reef.

"Land clearing and overgrazing is responsible for the vast majority of this sediment pollution," said the report, adding 76.9 percent of the reef's catchment was now grazing land compared with 10.8 percent pristine environment.

Farms with some 4.9 million cattle were depositing 18 million tonnes of sediment a year. Sugar cane farms which dot the coast resulted in another 1.3 million tonnes.

"The water is often thick and brown, like a muddy milkshake, along many parts of the coastline. Murky water is not good for reefs and seagrass which need sunlight to survive."

PESTICIDES POISON REEF

WWF said thousands of tonnes of nitrogen and phosphorous from fertilisers, used on cane, banana and cotton farms, were being washed into the sea and poisoning marine life.

In 1994 an estimated 8,800 tonnes of nitrogen and 1,300 tonnes of phosphorous was washed into the sea around the reef. Pesticides diuron, atrazine and ametryn, used to fight weeds, rats and diseases, were also found in coastal sugar cane areas.

But at the same time up to 80 percent of freshwater wetlands, which act as filters protecting the reef from pollution run-off, have been lost due to cane growing and coastal development.

Excessive nutrient from run-off has led to massive growth of unwanted organism, like blue-green algae, and nitrate fertiliser are causing reproduction problems for coral larvae.

"The view amongst the experts is that high concentrations of nitrate runoff from cane and other intensive cropping is the greatest chronic pollutant source to the reef," said WWF.

Toxic dioxin was also found in sediment and estuaries from Cardwell south to Brisbane and in some endangered dugongs. But it was unclear the source of the dioxin.

"The levels detected were higher than levels found in high polluted waterways adjacent to urban areas in Europe and the United States," said WWF.

WWF called for a stop to land clearing of the Great Barrier Reef catchment and for farming practices to change.

"If we spend the next five to 10 years monitoring the decline and discussing the problem then it may be too late to rescue them," it said.

-------- genetics

BUSH ADMINISTRATION JOINS INDUSTRY IN PROMOTING ENGINEERED CORN

June 6, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jun2001/2001L-06-06-09.html

GUADALAJARA, Mexico, Bush Administration officials joined lobbyists from Monsanto and other genetic engineering firms at the First Trilateral Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology to urge Mexico to allow commercialization of gene altered crops.

The two day meeting, which also included Canadian government representatives, could affect the future of corn farming around the world, said environmental activists. Mexico is now the global center of corn biodiversity, but many corn varieties could be lost if engineered corn wins as large a share of the Mexican market as it enjoys in the U.S..

A Greenpeace activist outside the First Trilateral Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology (Photo courtesy Greenpeace)

"The Mexican people, not foreign industries and governments, should decide the future of this vital natural resource," said Hector Magallon, a genetic engineering campaigner for Greenpeace Mexico. "The Bush Administration would endanger the world's genetic reserve of corn germplasm for the short term gain of a few huge biotech firms."

The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity gives countries sovereignty over their biodiversity.

While representatives from almost every major biotechnology company participated in the meeting, no citizens groups were invited other than Greenpeace, which was allowed to make a short presentation.

Critics of genetically engineered corn varieties warn that their engineered genes could be spread to some of the 300 local varieties that live in Mexico. In the U.S., an unapproved variety of engineered corn, planted on fewer than one percent of all corn acres, contaminated millions of bushels of natural corn last fall, leading to over 300 food product recalls and major market disruptions for U.S. corn farmers.

In Mexico, such genetic contamination could cause the extinction of wild corn relatives such as teocinte, which serves as a genetic reserve for corn farmers around the globe.

-------- health

Medicaid Curb for Immigrants Is Ruled Illegal

New York Times
June 6, 2001
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/06/nyregion/06IMMI.html

ALBANY, June 5 - New York's highest court ruled today that the state had violated the state and federal Constitutions by denying Medicaid benefits to thousands of needy legal immigrants.

The state policy applied to immigrants who arrived in this country after August 1996. At that time, under a far-reaching new welfare law, Congress barred immigrants who came after that from availing themselves of a range of federally financed government benefits. It was left to the states to decide whether to cover the cost of those benefits, including Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor. At the insistence of Gov. George E. Pataki, the state decided not to, and state legislation was passed to conform to the federal act.

In a unanimous ruling today, the State Court of Appeals found that by doing so, New York had violated its own constitutional provision to aid the poor. "Care for the needy is not a matter of legislative grace; it is a constitutional mandate," the seven- member panel ruled in its 26-page opinion.

Further, the court found, singling out poor New Yorkers on the basis of their immigration status violated the equal-protection clause of the United States Constitution. In effect, the court found, Congress had no power to authorize the states to violate the federal Constitution. The Court of Appeals ruling overturned an appellate court decision and sent the case back to the trial court that had ruled in the plaintiffs' favor two years ago.

Today, lawyers for the plaintiffs hailed the ruling as the strongest affirmation of the state's provisions for indigent care in more than a decade.

"The Court of Appeals says, `You live here legally, you pay taxes, you contribute like every other New York State resident,' " said Elisabeth Benjamin, interim supervising lawyer for the health law unit of the Legal Aid Society. "You are entitled to have the same kinds of benefits as any other resident." Two other groups joined in the case: the New York Legal Assistance Group and the Greater Upstate Law Project

The state court, of course, cannot compel the federal government to help pay for Medicaid benefits for immigrants. So in practical terms, today's decision means that the Pataki administration will have to pay to extend coverage for all legal immigrants. Precise figures of the cost were not available today, but estimates varied widely, from $2.5 million to hundreds of millions.

At a news conference here this afternoon, Governor Pataki pledged to comply with the court order and repeatedly denounced the 1996 decision by Congress that denied federal Medicaid benefits for post-1996 legal immigrants. At the time, Congress reasoned that the change would slow the flow of immigrants who would end up becoming a public charge.

"We'll certainly provide the services, and at the same time urge the federal government to correct what I believe was the mistaken decision in '96 to cut off these benefits," Mr. Pataki said. "I believed then the federal government made the wrong decision in abdicating its responsibility. I still believe it was wrong. And we're going to continue to make the case for them to pick up their fair share."

Legal advocates said they hoped that the Court of Appeals decision would sway other states and perhaps even Congress to consider repealing the restrictions. They argued that in many cases, providing Medicaid coverage to patients with chronic illnesses that require routine care, like diabetes, was far less costly for states than incurring emergency- room bills through required Medicaid care.

Several other states with large immigrant populations, including California and New Jersey, have decided to spend their own money to extend Medicaid to all legal immigrants. Other states, like Florida and Texas, use state funds to offer health benefits to poor immigrant children but not to adults.

Since 1996, several state governors have expressed frustration at having to bear the full cost of immigrants' Medicaid benefits. Last month, the National Governors' Association urged Congress to restore federal Medicaid matching funds for immigrant children and pregnant women.

Still unresolved in New York is whether the court decision affects a related health insurance program for the working poor called Family Health Plus. Until now, legal immigrants who arrived after 1996 have been ineligible for the program, which, like Medicaid, is paid for with a combination of state and federal dollars.

The governor said today that he had not decided whether the ruling obliges the state to extend Family Health Plus benefits to post-1996 immigrants. Democrats in the Assembly insisted that it did. "People who are covered by Family Health Plus have been designated as needy by the Legislature," Richard Gottfried, chairman of the Assembly Health Committee, said this afternoon. "The Court of Appeals has said if we designate a group of people as needy we cannot discriminate because they are immigrants."

Legislation has been pending in both the Democrat-controlled State Assembly and the Republican-controlled Senate to extend Medicaid and Family Health Plus benefits to this group of legal immigrants using only state funds. Legislation is not necessarily required to implement today's court order.

On the cost to the state, widely divergent estimates were offered today. The governor said it would be significant, estimating that it could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars - "certainly in the nine figures," he said.

A recent report by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonpartisan health care research group, estimated that 100,000 legal immigrants would be eligible for Medicaid under the change. Roughly a third of them would use those benefits, the report projected, at a cost of about $2.5 million a year to the state.

Although legally binding only in New York, the court decision potentially holds important implications for immigrants' rights nationwide. Similar lawsuits in other states are likely to seek state-funded medical coverage for needy immigrants.

"The reasoning of this court decision may cause other states to come in line," said David Super, general counsel at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal public policy research organization in Washington. "If enough states are having to bear the full burden of paying for these immigrants, that could bring political pressure on Congress to provide the usual federal matching funds."

The court decision applies to only one piece of the complicated patchwork of health care policy for immigrant New Yorkers. It does not apply to illegal immigrants. They have never been eligible for government benefits, except in the case of children and those who ended up in hospital emergency rooms. Pregnant women who were in the country illegally had also been receiving prenatal care that was paid for in part with federal funds, but a federal appeals court struck that down last month, saying the federal Welfare Reform Act did not permit such coverage. Legislation was introduced last week in the Assembly to use only state dollars to pay for their care.

----

Pepper-spray vapor sickens students

June 6, 2001
By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20010606-98607204.htm

Four teachers and several students fell ill yesterday morning at George Mason Middle School and High School -- a joint middle school and high school in Falls Church -- owing to noxious vapors. A hazardous-materials team was summoned.

The Fairfax Hazardous Materials team arrived at the school in the 7100 block of Leesburg Pike at 8:40 a.m. and later discovered a cannister of pepper spray that was secured in a staff member´s desk drawer.

A member of the team located the canister just before leaving a room where it was suspected that the vapor had originated, said Lt. Mark Stone, a spokesman for the Fairfax County Fire Department. But Fairfax fire officials are unsure how the contents of the cannister were released.

"It was a key-ring-style cannister for personal use, not a bomb or a handmade device," Lt. Stone said.

He discounted the possibility of legal action against the staff member, saying, "From what I know of school policy, it is acceptable for a staff member to have pepper spray on school property as long as it is secured, and it appears to have been."

Students in the home-economics room located in the school´s "H-wing," a connected but sectioned-off portion on the east side of the school, began to notice a strange smell in their classroom at the beginning of classes yesterday, said Falls Church spokeswoman Dionne Williams.

Twelve students and four members of the school´s staff were overcome by the noxious vapors and taken to Inova Fairfax Hospital in Fairfax County for evaluation and treatment, Mrs. Williams said.

Classes were immediately relocated from that section of the building and were conducted in the school´s library, she said.

"We had 10 students in that part of the building who experienced no symptoms," said Mrs. Williams. Those students were under observation in the school´s clinic until the end of the day yesterday, she said.

Contrary to early news reports, the school was not evacuated, and by noon the fire marshal deemed the H-Wing was secure and turned it back over to school officials.

"We will continue to investigate until tomorrow, but our preliminary findings seem to be right on," said Lt. Stone.

Although pepper spray is not a lethal substance, fire department officials said it can affect people differently and can be extremely hazardous to individuals who have respiratory problems.

"Speaking from personal experience, it can make you nauseous, light-headed, and it can seriously hamper or abort your ability to breathe and swallow," said Mrs. Williams.

"But once the windows are opened and the rooms are aired out, it is gone," she said.

-------- human rights

Bush will stress rights decline with Putin

June 6, 2001
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010606-22290600.htm

President Bush will forcefully raise the issue of Russia´s recent human rights record in his first meeting with President Vladimir Putin next week in Slovenia, the State Department´s top Russia officer said yesterday.

"Absolutely, human rights will be on the agenda, and Secretary [of State Colin] Powell has left no doubt of that" in preliminary talks with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, said John Beyrle, acting special adviser to Mr. Powell for Russia and the other nations of the former Soviet Union.

In a relatively downbeat assessment, Mr. Beyrle told the congressional U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe that human rights in Russia under Mr. Putin had suffered after the tremendous progress seen in the first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

He cited the continuing military campaign in Chechnya, religious persecution, corruption and abuse in the legal system, and government moves to silence critical media outlets, notably the NTV independent television network.

"Russia appears to be pursuing a 'managed democracy,´" said Mr. Beyrle, "in which the boundaries of free speech, dissent, the media, religion, civil society and politics are loosely determined by the executive and maintained through the use of law enforcement and other activities."

Mr. Beyrle said the human rights issue has the potential to cloud the entire U.S.-Russia relationship.

"If we have a sense that progress on human rights and democratization has stopped or is being reversed, then it can´t help but have a serious impact on the relationship as a whole," he said.

Russian human rights activist Elena Bonner, who also testified at yesterday´s Capitol Hill hearing, accused Russian troops of war crimes in the Chechnya campaign. She said the government has failed to provide for the huge numbers of civilian refugees created by the fighting.

"In Chechnya, mass violation of the rights of the civilian population -- looting, 'cleansing´ of villages, torture, imprisonment in pits, extrajudicial executions, including the shooting of children -- are continuing," said Mrs. Bonner, the widow of longtime Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov. "The genocide of the Chechen nation continues."

Russia contends it is fighting Islamic "terrorists" in Chechnya who are determined to break away from Moscow´s control and sow instability all along Russia´s southern flank.

U.S. officials privately have put a good deal of stress on the Bush-Putin summit June 16 In Ljubljana, Slovenia, the first meeting between the two leaders. Relations between the two countries have gotten off to a rocky start, but Bush administration officials have sketched out plans to break new ground with Moscow on a range of subjects, from missile defense and nonproliferation to economic cooperation.

The issue of human rights could complicate those plans.

The State Department has repeatedly condemned the Russian government´s dealings with Media-Most, the press conglomerate controlled by Vladimir Gusinsky that was outspokenly critical of Mr. Putin´s Chechnya policy. Under heavy pressure from Russian prosecutors and tax police, Mr. Gusinsky recently lost control of NTV, Media-Most´s flagship property, to the partially state-owned energy giant Gazprom.

The United States and leading Western European nations have also been harshly critical of the Chechnya campaign and of Moscow´s attempts to limit independent reporting from the front on conditions there.

But Mr. Beyrle said yesterday that recent talks with Mr. Ivanov and Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana, the chairman of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, have left U.S. officials optimistic that OSCE observers will be allowed back into Chechnya in the near future.

-------- police

Venezuelans March to Protest Crime

JUNE 06, 06:41 EST
By FABIOLA SANCHEZ
Associated Press Writer
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=CSA&STORYID=APIS7CF0HH00

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - Tired of living in one of South America's most dangerous cities, thousands of Venezuelans marched through Caracas to demand government action against a crime wave that claims dozens of lives each week.

Brandishing signs reading ``Enough Violence'' and ``No More Impunity,'' at least 10,000 people paraded through downtown Caracas on Tuesday. Cars carried coffins on their roofs bearing the names of slain victims.

``Criminals have us against a wall,'' said Mario Quintana, a truck driver. ``We can't live thinking that our lives are in constant danger.''

At least 2,000 people have died across the country this year in armed robberies, slayings and criminal gang clashes, according to police figures. Police estimate that crime has risen to its highest level in two decades in this impoverished nation of 24 million.

Private guards sit outside homes and businesses in Caracas. Police are afraid to venture into the sprawling hillside slums, where lynch mobs recently killed eight suspected criminals.

A respected polling firm recently found that 80 percent of Venezuelans are dissatisfied with government efforts to control crime. President Hugo Chavez's government is constantly besieged with strikes and protests against crime and unemployment despite the charismatic leader's resilient popularity among the poor.

Chavez recently deployed the National Guard to calm the unrest and threatened to declare a ``state of emergency'' because of unmanageable corruption, crime and poverty.

Promising to get tough on lawbreakers, Caracas Mayor Alfredo Pena hired former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton to reorganize the city's understaffed and underpaid police force.

Pena's chief security adviser Ivan Simonovis estimates that the city needs to double its 8,000-member police force to fight crime in this city of 7 million.

-------- spying

CIA rejoins Mideast peace bid

June 6, 2001
By Ben Barber
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010606-48832.htm

The Bush administration dispatched CIA chief George Tenet to the Middle East yesterday in hopes of extending an uneasy truce and encouraging talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

The CIA was a major player in the Clinton administration´s Middle East negotiations, which crumbled into the violence of the intifada last year.

The agency was a trusted link between Palestinian and Israeli security chiefs, who were cooperating at the time to halt terrorism.

Israel declared a cease-fire two weeks ago, and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat declared a cease-fire after a suicide bombing Friday that killed 20 Israeli teen-agers at a Tel Aviv disco.

The announcement by State Department spokesman Richard Boucher that Mr. Tenet would depart for the region today to meet with Israeli and Palestinian security officials came as occasional gunfire rattled the calm.

But an overall reduction in the level of violence was reported for the first time in months of daily fighting.

"We´ve seen a lower level of violence in the last 24 hours," Mr. Boucher said.

The Israeli ambassador in Washington agreed.

"There is a reduction of violence," said Ambassador David Ivry in an interview with The Washington Times. "There has been a reduction of incitement. But they are still not jailing those with the intention to bomb the cities of Israel."

Mr. Ivry, a former air force commander, said any fresh suicide bombing "can break all the process started now" to move toward peace.

The lower level of violence led Israel to announce late yesterday that it would loosen its blockade on goods in and out of the Palestinian territories but keep limits on movement of people.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer said Israel would end restrictions on the passage of oil, gas and food products between Israel and the occupied territories.

But hopes for an end to the eight months of fighting that has left about 450 Palestinians and 100 Israelis dead was tempered by conflicting reports on whether the main terrorist groups -- Hamas and Islamic Jihad -- would rein in their suicide bombers.

A senior political official of Hamas, Ismail Abu Shanab, denied yesterday that the group had agreed to a cease-fire.

And there was no indication that Mr. Arafat was prepared to re-arrest the members of Hamas and other terrorist groups who have been released from jail during the uprising, or intifada, that has raged in the West Bank and Gaza since September.

An Israeli official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the danger of more terrorist attacks is high.

"Intelligence information says there are more suicide bombers out there," he said.

"If another one goes off, I don´t know if [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon can not respond, there is so much public pressure on him.

"We have the information, the Americans have the information, the Palestinians have the information. Arafat has the names -- he knows who were released."

The suicide bomber who killed the 20 teen-agers in Tel Aviv Friday was one of those released from jail by the Palestinians, Mr. Ivry said.

In Jerusalem, Mr. Sharon lashed out at Mr. Arafat during an interview with Israel´s Channel Two television.

"He´s a murderer and a pathological liar," Mr. Sharon said. "He´s not a head of state. There were some people that expected he will behave like a head of state, but he behaves as a head of terrorists and murderers."

In a separate interview with Deutsche Welle radio, Mr. Sharon said Israel was ready for a military strike if necessary to halt Palestinian violence. "We have prepared everything. We know exactly what we have to do," he said.

In Washington, Mr. Boucher said Mr. Tenet would leave for the Middle East by this afternoon and spend several days in the region, where he will coordinate with the Bush administration´s special envoy and new assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, William Burns.

Mr. Tenet´s new mission is to report on the security situation and to encourage the two sides to cooperate on ending violence, Mr. Boucher said.

Although the Bush administration initially said it would take a more hands-off approach to the Middle East and pull the CIA out of its direct role in the peace process, the rising tide of violence has forced a more active role.

----

Espionage Trial Begins for Retired Army Colonel

By Sue Anne Pressley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A24881-2001Jun5?language=printer

TAMPA, June 5 -- Nearly every day for 25 years, federal prosecutors say, George Trofimoff stuffed his briefcase full of classified documents from the U.S. Army intelligence unit he headed in Nuremberg, Germany, took them home and photographed them in secret. Then he allegedly turned the copies over to his boyhood friend -- a high-ranking official in the Russian Orthodox Church who also may have been a top agent for the Soviet KGB.

Trofimoff, now 74, a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel born to Russian parents, allegedly sold more than 50,000 pages of secret documents to the Soviet intelligence agency between 1969 and 1994, Assistant U.S. Attorney Terry Furr told jurors today in opening statements in Trofimoff's espionage trial.

"He became virtually a salaried employee of the KGB," Furr said. "They even gave him bonuses. He makes it clear on the [FBI surveillance] tapes that he doesn't think of himself as an American, but as a Russian. 'I did it for the Motherland,' he said."

Prosecutors describe Trofimoff, who faces life in prison if convicted, as the highest-ranking American military officer ever charged with espionage. He was arrested at a hotel here last year after months of taped conversations with a federal undercover agent posing as a KGB operative.

The trial, expected to last a month, promises to plunge jurors back into the days of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union and the United States faced off as superpowers and the Iron Curtain shrouded much of Eastern Europe.

Furr charged that, with each side eager for information about the other's military strength and preparedness, Trofimoff relayed secrets to the Soviets on chemical warfare, U.S. missile systems and other vital matters -- including what the United States knew about the Soviets.

Trofimoff worked from 1969 to 1994 at the Joint Interrogation Center (JIC) in Nuremberg, where he debriefed defectors from the Soviet bloc. His actions may have endangered their lives and those of family members left behind, prosecutors said.

Daniel Hernandez, Trofimoff's attorney, told jurors that his client "categorically denies the charges, categorically denies working for the KGB, categorically denies betraying this country."

"The government will try to make this into a major production, something that will rival Steven Spielberg," Hernandez said, noting that federal prosecutors plan to call former KGB agents and a retired U.S. four-star general as witnesses.

Hernandez acknowledged that Trofimoff was close to Igor Susemihl, who rose to the rank of archbishop of Vienna and then metropolitan of Austria, the equivalent of a cardinal, in the Russian Orthodox Church. He said Susemihl, who died in 1999, often lent money to the financially strapped Trofimoff.

"If not budgeting your money well is an offense, then Mr. Trofimoff is guilty of that offense," Hernandez said. When he was arrested, Trofimoff, who moved to Melbourne, Fla., after his retirement in 1994, was working as a bagger at a grocery store but living in an exclusive military retirement community with his wife.

Trofimoff, a bald, distinguished-looking man who claims to be descended from Russian nobility, was born in Berlin, the son of Russian immigrants, and grew up in the same household as Susemihl, whom he considered a brother.

After World War II, Trofimoff moved to the United States, enlisting in the U.S. Army in 1948 and becoming a naturalized citizen three years later. In 1969, he went to work in Nuremberg with a top security clearance. At that time, Furr said, Trofimoff's old friend Susemihl recruited him to work for the KGB.

Furr said the classified documents were kept in a special room -- "it looked kind of like a safe" -- but that access to the information involved little more than trust. "It was easier to get a classified document out of that JIC than to walk down to the public library and check out a book," he said.

"The only thing that stopped it was the KGB," Furr said. "The [Berlin] Wall fell over in Germany, and the KGB told the defendant they didn't want the information anymore. But he continued to steal documents and photos [until 1994]."

The German government arrested Trofimoff and Susemihl on espionage charges in 1994 but dropped the charges because of Germany's five-year statute of limitations for espionage. A federal undercover agent contacted Trofimoff in Florida in 1997 and began making contact periodically under the pretense of seeking information about a former KGB analyst. He indicated he would pay for the information.

A centerpiece of the prosecution case is a six-hour videotape of two of their meetings in February 1999. In it, Furr said, Trofimoff talks with the undercover agent about how he lied to his wives over the years about what he was doing, and how scared he was that he might someday get caught. There is no time limit on espionage prosecutions in the United States, and Trofimoff was aware of that, Furr said.

But Hernandez said Trofimoff, who was enticed by the prospect of being paid once again, lied to the undercover agent just as the agent lied to him.

"The video shows two people trying to deceive each other," he said. "Mr. Trofimoff gave false information, information he sometimes made up or went along with. That was the only way in his mind he could collect the money he needed."

-------- activists

Peace Activists Disrupt Nuclear Arms Store

Trident Ploughshares
6th June 2001
From: Stephen Kobasa <skobasa@pop.snet.net>

This morning activists caused significant disruption to the work of the Coulport Arms Depot on Loch Long, where warheads for the UK's Trident missiles are stored, by blockading the main entrance to the base.

The blockade, which is part of Faslane Peace Camp's special Week of Action, began at 7.37 this morning as five activists locked on to each other and to the wheel chair of one of the group. It took police until 9.15 to clear the gateway. The blockade had been timed to prevent day-shift workers entering the base and a long tail back of traffic quickly developed. At 8 a.m. base authorities opened a second gateway to allow access but traffic confusion and snarl-ups persisted.

The five are now in the custody of the Ministry of Defence Police and it is expected that they will be charged with a breach of the peace. They are: Roz Bullen (31), an artist from Edinburgh; Alex Cochrane (26) and Amanda McDonald (20), both from Glasgow, film student Paddy Brown (23) and Tim Coleman (27), from Faslane Peace Camp.

Campaigners were delighted that they had achieved such an effective blockade with a relatively small group of activists and in the face of heightened police surveillance. A spokesperson said: "Tomorrow people will be voting in the next government. We ask them to consider voting for a party or a candidate that will rid us of Trident - our appalling weapon of mass destruction."

Last night two activists were arrested as they cut into the perimeter fence of the base. The Week of Action continues.

1st June 2001

Sheriff Refuses To Recommend Deportation of Peace Activist Message of Support From Member of European Parliament

A Scottish Sheriff today refused to recommend the deportation of a Trident Ploughshares activist after her third conviction for direct action against Trident.

Marjan Willemsen (24), a Dutch national who is a full time activist at Faslane Peace Camp, was convicted today in Dumbarton of breach of the peace and breach of bail after taking part in the Crimebusters blockade of Faslane naval base on 14th February 2000.

The citation papers for the case advised Marjan that the court might recommend deportation and today Procurator Fiscal Scott Simpson brought the issue up again when he said that there was no indication that she would not commit further offences. Appearing for Marjan solicitor Andrew Brophy argued that the relevant section of the Immigration Act was not intended to relate to such minor offences. Agreeing that deportation was inappropriate Sheriff Murphy was content to fine Marjan a total of £100 for both charges.

Marjan had entered a guilty plea after reaching agreement with the Procurator Fiscal that the phrases "you did conduct yourself in a disorderly manner" and "to the alarm and annoyance of the lieges" would be removed from the breach of the peace charge.

A spokesperson said: "We are pleased that Sheriff Murphy gave short shrift to the Procurator Fiscal's suggestion. In this shrinking world it is important that we are able to support each other across national boundaries in the struggle for peace and justice. So much of the inspiration and energy for confronting the Scottish Trident bases has come from the active involvement of people like Marjan from the rest of the UK and worldwide."

MEP Caroline Lucas said: "I entirely support and applaud the actions of Marjan Willemsen The effects of nuclear weapons do not respect borders... that is why the anti-nuclear movement is, at heart, an international movement - and why it is so important that representatives of all nationalities campaign and act together, wherever the threat of nuclear weapons exists."

----

Turner's U.N. Fund Plans World Resource Survey

New York Times
By BARBARA CROSSETTE
June 6, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/06/world/06NATI.html

UNITED NATIONS, June 5 - One of the most ambitious projects to assess global environmental damage from the rapid consumption of natural resources was announced today by an unusual coalition of scientists, corporations, foundations and international agencies.

Timothy E. Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation, a sponsor of the project, called it "the first global report card on our environment." The fund, set up in 1997 with a 10-year $1 billion grant from Ted Turner, founder of CNN, has been looking for environmental projects to support. It has already made grants in areas like women's and girls' health.

In March, it approved its largest donation, $10 million, for a campaign to save endangered coral reefs. The fund will give $4 million to the effort to give the earth a physical checkup.

Other contributors include the World Resources Institute in Washington, whose president, Jonathan Lash, was instrumental in developing the project; the Global Environment Facility, set up after the Rio de Janeiro summit meeting on the environment in 1992; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation; and the World Bank.

Officials expect the project to cost $21 million, with $17 million already pledged. Up to 1,500 scientists will be asked to volunteer for the cause. Secretary General Kofi Annan, formally introducing the program today, said that it was "designed to bring the world's best science to bear on the present choices we face in managing the global environment."

The project, set up and run by the United Nations Environment Program, will also benefit from 16,000 satellite images donated by NASA.

Officials expect a final report to be published in 2005, with interim studies released occasionally.

At a news session today, Mr. Wirth, a former senator from Colorado and a former under secretary of state for global affairs, called the survey the first real assessment on the earth's life-support systems.

"Why is this important?" he asked. "The very basic fact is that we are living off our ecological capital, and if we continue this approach, we will soon discover that this is a bankrupt way for us to operate. The bulk of our economy is rooted in five biological systems - crop lands, forests, grasslands, oceans and freshwater ways. When the environment is forced to file for bankruptcy under Chapter 11 because its resource base has been polluted, degraded, dissipated and irretrievably compromised, then the economy goes down to bankruptcy with it, and so does everything else."

Angela Cropper of Trinidad and Tobago, a development expert who will be a scientific panel co-leader, saw much preliminary evidence. "Coral reefs are dying, the forests are being degraded and disappearing - these things have to be rehabilitated," she said. "Fish stocks are being significantly depleted."

She said the world would have to learn to regulate and manage dwindling natural resources.

Mr. Lash of the resources institute added that two-thirds of the agricultural lands were seriously degraded and that the number of people who depended on those lands for food was expanding. To revive that land, water is needed, among other items.

"Water use is rising twice as fast as population," he said. "Seventy percent of water is used for irrigation, and that suggests a set of trends that simply do not lead to a good outcome."

Calling the report crucial to understanding how to deal with growing human pressures on resources, Mr. Lash said, "If it's successful, in a few years you will have a good statement of the state of the world's health in terms of its capacity to produce the goods and services that support all human well-being and prosperity - food, clean water, fiber, the materials that make our world possible."

----

Muslim protests

Washington Times
June 6, 2001
Embassy Row, James Morrison
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20010606-9783214.htm American Muslim groups demonstrated outside the State Department yesterday to protest Washington´s "continuing and uncritical support of Israel."

No one was arrested, and the groups pledged to hold more demonstrations at the State Department and outside the White House.

"We will keep reminding our government officials that their uncritical support for Israel has compromised America´s interests and damaged its reputation worldwide," said Nihad Awad, director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

They demanded that Israel withdraw from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered similar concessions before Palestinians began the latest round of rioting that has cost the lives of more than 400 Palestinians and dozens of Israelis.

"We ... are compelled to carry out this act of civil disobedience because of our country´s continuing and uncritical support for Israel´s immoral, illegal and unjust policies toward Palestinian Muslims and Christians," they said in a statement before they held a "sit-in."

"U.S. interests will be served and our credibility enhanced when we accept the role of a true honest broker and impose a level of responsibility on Israel consistent with the billions of American taxpayer-funded aid Israel receives per year," they stated.

State Department spokesman Richard Boucher yesterday said U.S. policy is to work for an end to the violence and a return to negotiations.

The group involved in the protest included the American Muslim Council, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Islamic Association of Palestine and the Muslim American Society.

----

Ex-Beatle McCartney leads new anti-landmine drive

UK: June 6, 2001
REUTERS
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=11070

LONDON - Former Beatle Paul McCartney and his girlfriend, Heather Mills, launched a new campaign this week to rid the world of landmines.

"Landmines take or wreck three lives an hour, every hour, every day of every year. We have to come together now to try to stop that," McCartney said on launching Adopt-A-Minefield UK, a new charity raising funds for mine clearance and landmine survivors.

An estimated 60 million landmines may still be hidden in the ground in 70 countries. Each year an estimated 26,000 people are killed or injured by landmines. As many as a third of the victims are children.

Britain's late Princess Diana made the abolition of landmines one of the causes she backed before being killed in a Paris car crash in 1997.

Mills said more work must still be done. "There have been many excellent and high-profile campaigns against this hidden killer, but the need for a continued, concerted drive to rid the world of landmines is as great now as it ever was," she said."

In April, Mills and McCartney took their campaign to Washington where they said they found Secretary of State Colin Powell supportive despite U.S. reservations about a worldwide ban.

----

Bush Assails 'Faith-Based Initiative'
Critics Habitat for Humanity Cited as a Model

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; Page A06
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26100-2001Jun5?language=printer

TAMPA, June 5 -- President Bush today struck back at critics of his plan to fund religious charities, saying that opponents "don't understand the power of faith" and suggesting that they would cut off popular efforts such as the Habitat for Humanity home-building program.

Bush's message, on the day before the first congressional hearings on his embattled "faith-based initiative," was equal parts perspiration and inspiration, delivered after he drove a few nails at a Habitat for Humanity building site here. "Oh, there are some in our society who are skeptical about funding faith," Bush said. "I hear it all the time in the halls of Congress. If that's the case, are they willing to eliminate the line item for programs such as Habitat for Humanity?"

Bush's initiative seeks to boost religious charitable efforts by easing the regulations on them and allowing them to receive government grants for administering programs that help the poor and disadvantaged. Though the overall effort to boost charities has broad appeal, the method Bush proposes -- direct government grants -- has raised objections from liberals and conservatives on grounds of church-state separation.

The targets of Bush's criticism reacted angrily today, arguing that he inaccurately characterized their objections. And Habitat for Humanity's founder and president, Millard Fuller, said after the event that his organization is thriving under current law. He expressed the fear that changes could upset the "balance" between religion, government and corporations.

At the same time, the president's words today encouraged some of his initiative's conservative critics because they interpreted Bush's remarks as a stepping away from his plan's most controversial element, which has caused the legislation to stall in the Senate: the system of direct government grants to religious charities.

"The president may be sending a subtle signal to move away from the federal grant-based system and all the inevitable gridlock that goes with it," said Michael Horowitz of the conservative Hudson Institute.

Bush cited religious hospitals and colleges as two examples of the success of government backing of religious charities. "Should we eliminate college scholarships where a child can go to a faith-based university?" he asked. "Should we say Medicaid or Medicare recipients can't take their federal money to a religious hospital?"

Both types of institutions receive government funds primarily through their patients or students -- a system similar to the voucher system that has much broader support than the direct-grant proposal. Liberal critics argue that direct funding of religious charities could cause the government to bankroll programs that coerce participants to be religious. Conservative critics worry that government funding of religious charities will dilute the charities' religious mission.

Fuller, who attended this morning's event, said Habitat would be pleased to receive more government funds. "But we don't want unlimited involvement," he said. "The big concern is if it gets out of balance. Then you end up in court."

Fuller said Habitat for Humanity, though a Christian organization, doesn't need the looser regulations that Bush's proposal would allow. The group doesn't have a religious requirement for recipients, volunteers, donors or most employees, and its religious elements -- an opening prayer before starting work at a building site and a dedication of new homes -- are optional. Habitat uses government funds to buy land but not to build. "God's love extends to everyone -- we don't foist religion off on people," Fuller said.

But Bush used Habitat for Humanity to make the case for his initiative. "To the skeptics of faith in our society, I say, come to Habitat for Humanity building sites, listen to the opening prayer, so eloquently delivered today by a fellow Methodist," he said. "Those who worry about faith in our society, and government's willingness to stand side by side with faith, don't understand the power of faith and the promise of faith and the hope of faith," he said.

Terri Schroeder of the American Civil Liberties Union said her organization, which opposes Bush's plan, supports Habitat for Humanity, as well as religious hospitals and colleges, precisely because each functions without the additional freedom that Bush would give religious charities. "In his zeal to pass his faith-based initiative, President Bush is willing to distort the truth," she said.

Bush worked with 30 volunteers on a home for Johana Rodriguez, a single mother of three who is also caring for her wheelchair-bound mother. A prayer was said before Bush, in blue jeans, got down on his knees and pounded nails into two-by-fours.

The visit to a Habitat for Humanity home has become something of a ritual for politicians. President Bill Clinton did his share, and Bush, as Texas governor, worked on a home with former president Jimmy Carter, who has been active in the program since its beginning. The program is often cited as a model for nonprofits -- using funds from government and private sources while requiring the low-income recipients of its houses to put in hours of "sweat equity" on their homes and to pay back the cost of the home under a "Bible finance" mortgage with zero interest.

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Activists Accuse Egg Farm of Cruelty
Animal Rights Group Says Photos Show Inhumane Conditions at Md. Facility

By Lori Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 6, 2001; Page B05
http://washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26584-2001Jun5?language=printer

The pictures show thousands of hens crowded into small cages in a long shed. Many are missing so many feathers they look as if they've been plucked. Here and there, a bird stands immobilized, her head or wing caught in the wires. A few appear to have died this way, leaving their cagemates to negotiate a decomposing corpse.

According to a local animal rights group, the photos were taken during four clandestine visits to a Maryland egg farm operated by ISE America, one of the nation's largest egg producers.

The activists "rescued" eight chickens -- pronounced to be in "very poor" health by a Hyattstown veterinarian -- and today plan to urge Maryland officials to prosecute ISE America under the state's newly fortified animal cruelty laws.

State and local officials, however, have shown little interest in pursuing the allegations, the latest in a national crusade to force egg farmers to abandon wire "battery cages" and improve living conditions for the flocks that produce 75 billion eggs each year.

Gregg Clanton, ISE America's vice president, is not certain the group's members visited his facility in Cecil County. ISE America owns more than a quarter of the 4.4 million laying hens in Maryland, where eggs are a $48 million a year business and chickens generally are the largest agricultural industry in the state.

Clanton denied that dead hens are left to fester in the cages, saying the company keeps its hens "healthy and alive."

"We use normal industry practices. Their complaint lies with our industry, not our facility," he said.

Miyun Park, president of Compassion Over Killing, a Washington-based animal rights organization, agreed with that assessment, calling conditions at the ISE farm "fairly normal."

"If consumers knew how animals are abused by the egg industry, they would never eat eggs," Park said.

Park's group targeted ISE America after Maryland became the 32nd state to elevate cruelty to animals from a misdemeanor to a felony. The new law, signed by Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D), takes effect Oct. 1.

But, like most other states, Maryland has an exemption for "customary and normal . . . agricultural husbandry practices," making the prosecution of cruelty to farm animals a rarity.

Farm Sanctuary, a farm animal protection organization, won a conviction last year against an ISE America farm in New Jersey where two live birds had been thrown into a barrel with dead ones. But the misdemeanor conviction and $564 fine were overturned when a judge found insufficient evidence that farm workers had maliciously neglected the birds.

Controversy over conditions for laying hens has raged since at least the 1960s, when a British activist wrote about modern farm practices in a book called "Animal Machines." Among the book's targets: battery cages, small enclosures in which hens are housed in such cramped quarters they can neither lie down nor stretch their wings.

Animal welfare activists claim the cages place birds under severe stress. To prevent hens from pecking each other, farmers often trim their beaks with hot knives when they are young, causing chronic pain, said Suzanne Millman, who studies farm animals for the Humane Society of the United States.

Egg farmers say battery cages produce healthier birds and healthier eggs, because the birds are prevented from eating their own feces and protected from germs. Poultry are not covered by federal animal welfare laws, but farmers say economics demand that the hens be treated well.

"If you crowd your chickens too much, they will lay fewer eggs and have higher mortality," said Don Bell, a poultry specialist at the University of California-Riverside.

Still, facing pressure from animal welfare activists, the European Union ordered its farmers to phase out battery cages by 2012. Last year, McDonald's announced its restaurants would buy eggs only from farms that give hens 72 square inches of cage space, boosting the industry standard by nearly 50 percent.

Even that is not enough, animal rights activists say. The hens "rescued" from Cecil County didn't perk up until they had a bath and the run of Park's Dupont Circle apartment, Park said.

Photos taken by Compassion Over Killing can be seen on the Internet at www.isecruelty.com


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