------- Index of Articles

NUCLEAR
General Dynamics Net Rises, Meets Targets
Raytheon Earnings Meet Expectations
G8 Foreign Minister Meeting Starts
India, Pakistan Trade Blame Over Summit
Japan May Be Forced To Decide On Charter
U.S. Plans to Test Space-Based Laser To Intercept Missiles
Blair Offers to Be 'Bridge' Between U.S., Europe
Putin: No Plans for Joint Response
The 'Smart People' Were Wrong
Pentagon Revisits a Space Defense Plan
Russia to Raise Sub, but Not Mystery
Highlights of Putin News Conference
Putin: No Plans for Joint Response
Kursk Salvage Team Makes Progress
Bush vows to bury 'obsolete' missile treaty
Yucca training to cost county $1 bil.
Putin, Bush Meeting in Italy Nears
Bush Sets Off on Second Europe Trip
Bush Targets Reduction of Global Poverty
Democrats Are Warned on Missile Stance
Bush Criticized on Defense Spending
Pentagon urges Hill to fund anti-missile program

MILITARY
Pentagon has plan to defend Taiwan
Cold War foes arm Asia
Drug War Could Escalate
Iranian airlift sends more arms to Hezbollah - via Damascus
NATO Troops Training in Bosnia
Tribunal Reveals Genocide Charges
Iran Fighting a Losing Drug War
Israeli Missiles Hit Bethlehem
More Israeli Soldiers Enter W. Bank
Putin: NATO Should Change or Disband
Putin Sees No Need for NATO
NATO fans anticipation of arrests
Pentagon Revives Reagan-Era Proposal
Judge Blocks Army Training in Hawaii

OTHER
Launch Planned for Solar Spacecraft
Ohio Officials Oppose Electric Chair
GAO Issues Demand Letter on Energy
Efficiency, Renewables Research Proves Wise Investment
House Committee Approves Bush's Alaskan Refuge Drilling Plan
Bush Criticized on Global Warming
Bush Ally Supports Financing Limited Stem Cell Research
Federal report supports stem cell study on all fronts
No - Stick Coating May Stay Indefinitely
Fresh evidence backs broccoli as cancer fighter
Bush asks billions for poor nations
FBI Arms, Computers Missing
Senators Decry Lost FBI Equipment
State Dept. Reports Terrorist Threat

ACTIVISTS
Sri Lanka Opposition Vows to Defy Protest Ban
President Bush Blasts Protesters
Colorful crowds clamor outside climate talks
A Message from James Taylor, Pierce Brosnan, Jean-Michel Cousteau

-------- NUCLEAR

-------- business

General Dynamics Net Rises, Meets Targets

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-arms-general.html?searchpv=reuters

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (Reuters) - General Dynamics Corp. (news/quote) (GD.N), maker of nuclear submarines, tanks and destroyers, on Wednesday reported an 11 percent increase in second-quarter profits, in line with Wall Street forecasts, on gains in its combat systems operations.

The company, which is battling rival defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp. (news/quote) (NOC.N) to take over Newport News Shipbuilding Inc. (NNS.N), posted net earnings of $227 million, or $1.12 per share, up from $204 million, or $1.01 per share, a year ago.

Analysts had expected a profit of $1.12 per share, with estimates ranging from $1.08 to $1.15, according to tracking firm Thomson Financial/First Call.

Sales rose to $2.96 billion from $2.62 billion. Cash flow from operations for the second quarter was $208 million.

Shares of General Dynamics have risen steadily over the last year, climbing 47 percent and outperforming the Standard & Poor's 500 index, which has dropped 20 percent. The stock has outperformed its rivals, as tracked by the S&P aerospace and defense index, by about 11 percent.

----

Raytheon Earnings Meet Expectations

The Associated Press
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline204601_000.htm

BOSTON -- Defense contractor Raytheon Co., the nation's third-largest defense contractor, lost $67 million during its second quarter after it took a $184 million charge against its earnings, the company said Wednesday, but the company met Wall Street expectations.

The Lexington-based company said the 19-cent a share loss was the result of discontinued operations, as well as a 52 cent per share charge related to Raytheon's ongoing legal battle with Washington Group International. In the same time a year ago, the company had income of $49 million, or 14 cents a share.

Excluding the charges, Raytheon reported a profit of $117 million, or 33 cents per share, compared to $95 million, or 28 cents a share, the same time a year ago.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial/First Call had predicted Raytheon to post earnings of 31 cents a share.

Despite the loss, the company reported a 4 percent increase in second quarter sales from last year, and said gains in its defense sectors offset softening commercial business sales.

The company reported second quarter sales Wednesday of $4.3 billion, up 4 percent from the year-ago quarter. Last year's second quarter sales included $68 million from businesses that have since been sold.

"Despite difficult and uncertain market conditions in our commercial businesses, our defense core is strong," said Daniel P. Burnham, Raytheon's chairman and chief executive officer. "We've made significant progress toward reducing debt through operational efficiency, selling noncore businesses and our recent equity offering."

The company, one of the nation's largest defense contractors, makes the Patriot and other missiles. It also produces radar and air traffic control systems and business jets.

Shares of Raytheon were up 15 cents to close at $26 in trading on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday. The company's financial results were released after the markets closed.

-------- europe

G8 Foreign Minister Meeting Starts

By Candice Hughes
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline101529_000.htm

ROME -- Foreign ministers from the world's industrial powers kicked off a two-day conference in Rome with some tough issues to tackle. Debt, disease, poverty and wars topped their agenda.

The Rome conference is a prelude to the Group of Eight summit later this week in the northern port city of Genoa, an event that is drawing tens of thousands of demonstrators.

At host Italy's urging, the foreign ministers opened their talks with a nod to the concerns of the street crusaders who've become a fixture at inter common concern for the destiny of the world and the future of the less favored, to ensure they are not sidelined by the present globalization process."

The Rome conference gathers the foreign ministers of Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Canada, Japan, Italy and Russia.

They planned to discuss how rich countries can do more to help the poor, regional crises such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the devastating toll AIDS is taking on poor countries, especially in Africa.

Ahead of the conference, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell met with his Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov. Their talks were dominated by the American missile defense shield, which Russia bitterly opposes.

Powell later described the two-hour meeting as "very, very friendly" and Ivanov said Russia was still open to "a constructive dialogue" despite the wedge missile defense has driven in relations.

"The success of this dialogue will, by and large, determine the strategic stability of the entire world," Ivanov said.

The G-8 summit in Genoa begins Friday and ends Sunday.

Anticipating protests, authorities have deployed some 20,000 police and soldiers in Genoa, blocked off entrances to the summit site with iron gratings, and shut down the harbor and two train stations.

A series of bombs and bomb scares have also strained nerves.

On Wednesday, a small parcel bomb went off in the Milan offices of a television station owned by Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, slightly injuring the secretary who opened it. The bomb was addressed to Tg4 news director Emilio Fede.

Elsewhere in Italy, police intercepted a suspect package addressed to Italian clothing giant Benetton in Treviso, near Venice, and police disarmed an explosive device in the center of Bologna, the Italian news agency ANSA said.

There were no immediate claims of responsibility for the bombs and it wasn't clear if they were related to the summit.

In Milan, attackers broke the window of an employment agency, poured a flammable liquid in and set it on fire. Nobody was inside when the attack happened and the blaze was put out in a few minutes.

Investigators found leaflets signed by a self-styled "Revolutionary Front" group, which claims to be fighting against the exploitation of workers -- an issues also often brought up by anti-globalization protesters.

McDonald's, a frequent target of anti-globalization protesters, closed its four restaurants in Genoa as a precaution during the summit.

-------- india / pakistan

India, Pakistan Trade Blame Over Summit

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9456-2001Jul17?language=printer

NEW DELHI, July 17 -- India and Pakistan today tried to salvage some face-saving goodwill from the ashes of their failed summit, while not-so-subtly blaming each other for the abrupt breakdown of negotiations.

The foreign ministers of the South Asian neighbors and nuclear rivals said they hoped to continue working toward improved relations, and they said they still expect Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India's prime minister, to accept the invitation from Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to visit in the coming months.

But it was clear from the tone of their comments today that both governments were smarting under what each viewed as a fatal betrayal by the other side. The summit, which began in an upbeat and cordial tone Saturday, included five meetings between the two leaders over three days.

The negotiations, held in the city of Agra, broke down unexpectedly late Monday after the two governments were unable to agree on a joint statement dealing with the sensitive dispute over Kashmir, the violence-wracked Himalayan border region that is claimed by both countries and divided between them.

Jaswant Singh, India's foreign minister, said India hopes to "pick up the threads" of Musharraf's visit but that it is determined to stop "cross-border terrorism" by Pakistan, which supports Muslim separatist insurgents in the Indian portion of Kashmir.

Singh said the talks had stumbled over three issues: Pakistan's insistence on focusing on Kashmir while India sought to address an array of issues; Musharraf's unwillingness to commit to stopping cross-border terrorism in Kashmir; and his refusal to accept two previous bilateral pacts as a basis for a new agreement.

"I won't engage in a game of who backed out from what," Singh said, but then strongly hinted at the crux of the impasse: "Just as Pakistan is fixated on the issue of Kashmir, they say we are fixated on cross-border terrorism. It is one issue." While India still hopes to resolve the Kashmir issue, he added, "Let there be no illusions . . . the promotion of cross-border terrorism and violence . . . must cease."

Singh repeatedly signaled India's displeasure with Musharraf's outspoken comments to reporters during the general's visit, saying it was not "proper" to approach diplomatic negotiations as an "exercise in public relations."

"As a mature and responsible democracy, we negotiate to improve bilateral relations with our neighbors, not to indulge in public relations," Singh said.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar, speaking to journalists this afternoon in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, characterized the summit as "inconclusive but not a failure." He said Pakistan remains "optimistic" about the prospects for better relations between the two countries.

At the same time, however, Sattar said Pakistan has never fomented terrorism in Indian Kashmir and described the armed insurgency there as "indigenous." All but endorsing guerrilla violence there, he said that Indian "repression" had left Kashmiris "no alternative but to manifest their struggle by other means."

Already, the major insurgent groups operating in Kashmir have said that as a result of the failed talks in Agra, they intend to step up their violent campaign against Indian forces. More than 80 people were killed in violence there during the summit, and analysts from both countries said they expect the guerrillas and Indian forces to unleash more aggressive actions.

Sattar also defended Musharraf's televised comments to the Indian media in Agra, which apparently soured the summit's chances for success. Although Musharraf praised Vajpayee for his "wisdom and courage," he adamantly insisted that Kashmir was the central issue to be addressed and compared the Kashmiri separatist movement to the Palestinian conflict with Israel.

"In contemporary diplomacy," Sattar said, "it is impossible to segregate bilateral talks from interaction with the media." Musharraf's comments, he added, "were not a secret approach behind the backs of anybody. Most people in Agra appreciated the president's candid approach."

In Pakistan, some analysts said Musharraf, who seized power in a military coup in October 1999, had succeeded at the summit by sticking to his position on Kashmir, even if it cost him an agreement with India that he had desperately sought as a way to bolster his credibility as a leader. The Kashmiri cause is popular in Pakistan, a Muslim country where many people view India as a hegemonic Hindu power and where many Islamic groups view the Kashmiri insurgency as a religious crusade.

In New Delhi, however, officials of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Hindu nationalist party headed by Vajpayee, denounced Musharraf's public comments on Kashmir as a "gross transgression of diplomatic norms" and said they suspected his remarks were a "deliberate attempt . . . to scuttle the summit success."

Other Indian analysts took a more measured view. J.N. Dixit, a former foreign minister, said Musharraf "did not want to be seen as coming back with a rejection or a failure, but as having stood firm on Pakistan's policies and interests."

Ironically, Musharraf appeared throughout most of the summit to have gained the upper hand by presenting himself as a moderate, diplomatic and approachable head of state. Many Indians view him as a military dictator who cannot be trusted, but he charmed and impressed his host country, appearing in civilian clothes as he toured the Taj Mahal with his wife and visited the New Delhi neighborhood where he was born in 1943..

In Agra, where Indian officials were closeted from the media and said almost nothing for three days, Musharraf's aides made numerous comments, the Pakistani leader met with Indian journalists, and visiting Pakistani journalists appeared constantly on Indian television, often arguing Pakistan's point of view.

But late Monday, Pakistan's public verbal offensive appeared to have backfired. The private talks bogged down, and ultimately collapsed, over the same semantic differences in approaching the Kashmir issue that have dogged every previous India-Pakistan summit, while violence there has continued unabated.

By the time the three-day summit was over, the friendly TV images of Musharraf had been replaced by the single frozen image of a grim-faced Pakistani general, rushing home at midnight from his failed mission to India.

-------- japan

Japan May Be Forced To Decide On Charter
Baker Ties Change To Missile Defense

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 18, 2001; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9590-2001Jul17?language=printer

TOKYO, July 17 -- Howard H. Baker, the new U.S. ambassador here, said today that Japan's participation in the planned U.S. missile defense system may force it to decide "before very long" whether to revise the pacifist constitution that restricts its military.

"I'm not trying to tell them what they should do," Baker said in his first extended comments with reporters since arriving two weeks ago. But, "I think the reality of circumstances in the world is going to suggest to the Japanese that they reinterpret or redefine Article 9 of their constitution."

Baker's comments touched on an explosive issue for Japan and its Asian neighbors, one that Japanese authorities have been reluctant to confront publicly. Japan's continued work with the United States on the missile defense system may reopen a divisive issue: whether to abandon its officially passive and defensive military policy.

Japan's postwar constitution renounces the use of force as a means of settling disputes, and has been interpreted as prohibiting Japan from acting "collectively" -- that is, with another country -- to defend another country.

Some here argue that Japan, which is doing research with the United States on missile defense, is forbidden constitutionally to play a role in a system that might shoot down a missile headed for another country.

"I think they are well within their constitutional constraints so far," Baker said. But "it poses legal as well as practical considerations [that] Article 9 will have to be reconstrued if they go very far with that, and America is sensitive" to the problem.

He said the Japanese constitution "for the last 50 years has been constructive and appropriate." But he noted, "things like missile defense and international operations with peacekeeping forces will ultimately derive a decision" by Japan on whether to change or reinterpret the constitution.

Japan has welcomed the Bush administration's promises of a closer relationship. But its officials have gradually concluded that this relationship, and Bush's plan for a broad, encompassing missile defense system, may force them to make decisions they have long avoided.

Although the constitutional debate seems legalistic to some Americans, Japan's Asian neighbors react angrily to any hint of a revival of the militarism that led to Japan's attempt to conquer much of East Asia before the end of World War II. And within Japan, debate over the constitution has frequently been volatile.

Baker, 75, was Republican Senate majority leader and later head of a Washington law firm before he was named ambassador to Tokyo. Speaking to foreign reporters today, he struck an upbeat note about Japan's flagging economy.

"The Japanese banking system has serious problems, but they are not insuperable," he said. "Japan is a wealthy nation with enormous reserve assets."

-------- missile defense

U.S. Plans to Test Space-Based Laser To Intercept Missiles

By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10831-2001Jul17?language=printer

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., July 17 -- A top Pentagon official said today that the Bush administration plans to test a space-based laser interceptor as early as 2005 as part of its ambitious new missile defense agenda.

Robert Snyder, executive director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, told reporters at a missile defense conference here that $110 million has been included in the fiscal 2002 defense budget to study technologies, including the space-based laser, aimed at hitting missiles in their "boost" phase three to five minutes after launch.

The test would signal a return to the technology at the heart of the Reagan administration's Strategic Defense Initiative, dubbed "Star Wars" by critics, which defense planners envisioned as a space-based shield to protect the United States against ballistic missile attack.

While deployment of space-based missile defenses would be a clear violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, it is not clear whether an initial test of the technology would violate the pact.

Bush administration officials, in any event, told Congress last week that their missile defense plans, which call for possible "emergency" deployment of ground-, air- and sea-based defenses by 2004, could violate the ABM Treaty within months.

Beyond its treaty implications, testing a space-based laser also would represent a first step toward "weaponizing" space, a move that critics say could ignite a new arms race. No country has put weapons into orbit.

If deployed, space-based lasers would be mounted on satellites. Snyder said the test envisioned for 2005 or 2006 most likely would involve launching a prototype laser into space and then firing it back at a target in the earth's atmosphere.

"It's not clear we know how we're going to do that," Snyder said, speaking at the conference sponsored by the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command.

In the first Bush administration, a space-based missile defense initiative known as "Brilliant Pebbles" was considered but abandoned. It envisaged between 3,600 and 4,000 satellites armed with space-based interceptors.

In California, meanwhile, federal prosecutors have charged 17 activists associated with the environmental group Greenpeace with felony counts for trying to disrupt Saturday's test of a ground-based missile defense system.

During the test, an interceptor fired from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands destroyed a dummy warhead launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Officials at Vandenberg confirmed that the Greenpeace protesters delayed the launch for several minutes by piloting four Zodiac rubber boats into a safety zone that extended into the ocean near the launch site.

Four protesters were apprehended as they swam to shore, officials said. Two of the four were suffering from hypothermia and were flown to a hospital by military helicopter. The other 13 were arrested by the FBI and Coast Guard when they returned on the boats to San Luis Bay, officials said.

Seven of the 17 activists, all U.S. citizens, have been released on bond, said Sharon McCaslin, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles. She said the government was appealing a magistrate's decision granting $20,000 bond to the other 10, all foreign nationals, because it considers them flight risks.

Bonnie McDiarmid, a Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaigner, said the 17 have been charged with offenses that carry sentences of up to 11 years and possible $250,000 fines.

"We believe that 'Star Wars' is probably the single biggest threat to world peace at the moment," McDiarmid said, referring to the missile defense test. "It has the capability of igniting a whole new arms race."

----

Blair Offers to Be 'Bridge' Between U.S., Europe

By T.R. Reid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9577-2001Jul17?language=printer

LONDON, July 17 -- Britain's Tony Blair will serve as a friend in need to President Bush in Europe this week, the prime minister made clear today, emphasizing his desire to "build bridges of understanding between the U.S. and Europe" at a time when the U.S. president faces harsh opposition on this side of the Atlantic.

Blair said he recognizes that Bush "is being trashed" by pundits and interest groups in Europe, "but then I think that happens to a lot of U.S. presidents." For his own part, the prime minister had nothing but praise for the new president.

"There will always be people who will attack the U.S.," Blair said, "but I don't think we should pay a very great deal of attention to that."

Speaking to a group of reporters at No. 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's residence, Blair offered an upbeat assessment of Bush's performance at the European Union summit in Sweden last month: "I think that people were very impressed by his presentation . . . where he explained his thinking on issues like Kyoto and missile defense."

Bush has come under attack in Europe for his decision to pull the United States out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on global warming and for his determination to push ahead with a missile defense system that most European leaders oppose. Bush and members of his cabinet have failed repeatedly to win backing in Europe on these issues.

The disagreements are likely to be highlighted later this week when Bush joins other leaders of the world's leading industrial democracies and Russia at the Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy.

Blair, too, has policy differences with the president. He said today that Britain supports the Kyoto accord, despite Bush's position. He remained noncommittal on the missile defense project, noting that "we haven't received . . . a proposal yet from the U.S. government" on the design or purpose of the system.

But the prime minister, whose center-left Labor Party recently won a huge reelection victory here, said he is determined to focus on areas of European agreement with the American president. "This strict division that is played by a lot of people . . . between the Anglo-Saxon model and the European model, I think you can overdo hugely," he said.

As post-imperial Britain searches for a global role commensurate with its wealth, Blair has postulated that Britain should serve as a "bridge nation" between Europe and the United States. As prime minister of the "bridge," he has said, "it is crucially important that I have a good personal relationship" with the U.S. president.

Blair has strongly championed the European Union's moves to form a new 60,000-member "European army" -- officially known as the European Rapid Reaction Force. The EU military unit has been criticized by politicians in the United States and Britain as a threat to the countries' relations. But as Blair pointed out today, "at the Camp David summit that I had with President Bush [in February], he specifically endorsed European defense, provided that it is done consistently with NATO."

In addition to the Genoa summit, Bush this week is to meet Pope John Paul II in Rome and visit U.S. soldiers in Kosovo. Before the business part of the president's trip begins, Blair has invited him to stop off in London.

The 55-year-old president has never been to the British capital. Like many first-time visitors, he plans to see the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum and the Cabinet War Rooms, the underground bunker in Whitehall where Winston Churchill ran Britain's battle against Nazi Germany. And he will stop by Buckingham Palace just in time for the changing of the guard. Unlike other tourists, though, Bush and his wife, Laura, will continue inside for lunch with Queen Elizabeth II.

Last month, on his first presidential trip to Europe, Bush was criticized because he spent all his time at official meetings and never met with citizens.

That gap will be filled Thursday morning. The president is scheduled to visit the reading room of the British Library to read to schoolchildren.

----

[Response: mailto:OPED@washpost.com]

Putin: No Plans for Joint Response

By Vladimir Isachenkov
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline103840_000.htm

MOSCOW -- Russia has no plans for a joint response with China to counter U.S. moves to build a missile defense system, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday.

In a wide-ranging news conference at the Kremlin, Putin also said Russia does not view NATO as an enemy but sees no justification for its existence. He said that either Russia should be allowed to join or the alliance should be replaced by a Europe-wide body that includes Moscow as an equal member.

His comments on China came days after Putin signed a comprehensive friendship treaty with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, which had raised prospects for a joint stance against U.S. plans to develop a missile shield and scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

Both countries staunchly oppose the U.S. plans and warn it could spark a new arms race.

But Putin appeared to rule out coordinating with China. "We have enough means to respond to any changes ourselves," he said.

The Kremlin gathering Wednesday was the first time Putin has allowed such a large, open press conference in Moscow, with some 500 journalists, no pre-screened questions and opportunities for follow-ups - a sign of the leader's growing confidence after 19 months in power. Putin used the opportunity to lay out a range of foreign and domestic policies.

He said the U.S.-led NATO alliance has outlived its usefulness, having been created during the Cold War to oppose the Soviet bloc.

"There is no more Warsaw Pact, no more Soviet Union, but NATO continues to exist and develop," he said.

NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe creates "different levels of security on the continent ... which does not correspond to today's realities and is not caused by any political or military necessity."

"We do not see it as an enemy," he said. "We do not see a tragedy in its existence, but we also see no need for it."

He called for the creation of a "single security and defense space in Europe," which he said could be achieved either by disbanding NATO, or by Russia joining it, or by the creation of a new body in which Russia could become an equal partner.

In the news conference, Putin also called for peace in the Middle East, saying the current Israeli-Palestinian violence has "practically erased" past progress on finding a solution. Putin also dismissed calls to remove the body of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin from a Red Square mausoleum, saying it could lead to civil unrest.

Putin spoke as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell met in Italy with his Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, in talks dominated by the American missile defense plans.

Powell later described the two-hour meeting as "very, very friendly" and Ivanov said Russia was still open to "a constructive dialogue" despite the wedge missile defense has driven in relations.

"The success of this dialogue will, by and large, determine the strategic stability of the entire world," Ivanov said.

In a joint statement after their talks earlier this week, Jiang and Putin said the 1972 ABM treaty was a "cornerstone of strategic stability" that must be preserved.

But they did not comment on the United States' successful test of a missile interceptor on Sunday - suggesting suggests two countries do not view Washington's plans quite the same way.

----

The 'Smart People' Were Wrong

By Michael Kelly
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11643-2001Jul17?language=printer

On Friday, July 13, the New York Times ran a front-page story about the details of the Bush administration's plan to develop, through a series of ambitious tests, a comprehensive national missile defense system. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz had presented these details in lengthy testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Almost all of what Wolfowitz revealed, however, was deemed not fit to print; most of the Times' report was taken up with presenting criticisms of the administration's plans.

The first and most prominently displayed criticism, from the Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, rested on the common assumption that the whole idea of missile defense is a joke. "This administration's plans for missile defense for fiscal year 2002 have been harder to zero in on than a target in a missile defense test," said Levin, getting off what, in Washington, passes for a nifty.

Meanwhile, on the Times' op-ed page, columnist Tom Friedman was weighing in with a critique that twinned the administration's decision to temporarily pull back some forces in the Middle East (in response to threats from Osama bin Laden) with its decision to proceed with building an Alaska base for the missile defense system "whether the technology works or not." Wrote Friedman: "Message: We will deploy weapons that don't work against an enemy that doesn't exist, and we will withdraw forces that do work against an enemy that does exist."

The next day, Saturday, July 14, at 11:09 p.m., a "kill vehicle" launched from a test site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands intercepted and destroyed a dummy warhead that had been launched 4,800 miles away, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The impact took place 144 miles above the earth. At the moment of impact, the two projectiles were traveling at a combined speed of 4.5 miles per second -- 16,200 miles per hour.

Ever since Ronald Reagan proposed the development of a national missile defense system, the reflexive smart-people response has been the sort of shrugging dismissal typified in Levin's sound bite and Friedman's analysis just before the success of the Kwajalein test: The whole thing was "Star Wars," a silly, costly fantasy out of the mind of a B-movie actor. This response became so accepted as to relieve critics of the burden of actually knowing what they were talking about. A passing putdown delivered with a knowing air -- a sardonic smile, a little laugh about the idea of "a bullet hitting a bullet" -- well,that was more than sufficient.

This is no longer tenable. In the blink of a video screen going blinding white on July 14, it became impossible to offhandedly disdain a missile defense system as "weapons that don't work." It does work. The system had worked once before, in a 1999 test. Two tests after that met with failure, for reasons now understood and addressed. Now, success a second time: The bullet, it has been twice demonstrated, can hit the bullet.

Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, who is in charge of the development program, played down the importance of Saturday's success. And it is true, as Kadish said, that this success was just a step.

But it was a vital step, vital as much for psychological reasons as technological. Objections to the missile defense program may remain. Chief among these is the worry that going forward will, as Wolfowitz agrees, certainly lead to conflict with the terms of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. The Russians are already, predictably, threatening that this may cause a new missile race.

But these concerns fall far short of sufficiency to stop the program. After Saturday, it will go forward. And what if this most recent success is followed by another, and another, and another? At some point, Americans are going to grasp the idea that the smart people were wrong once again. It really is possible to live under an umbrella that shields us from the great threat that has hung over us for more than a half-century now. Free from this threat, the United States can, as the Bush administration proposes, unilaterally destroy a great many of its nuclear weapons. We may, at last, escape from life under the doctrine of mutual assured destruction. Most people are going to find this idea rather naturally attractive.

No one can any longer assert that missile defense is unattainable. And if it is attainable -- if it is possible, after all, to give our children the gift of a world free from the worst fear of the nuclear age -- then why in the world, most people will ask, should we not want to attain it?

--------

Pentagon Revisits a Space Defense Plan

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By JAMES GLANZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/18/national/18STAR.html?searchpv=nytToday

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., July 17 - A defense official announced today that the Pentagon planned to renew research on a highly contentious element of the Strategic Defense Initiative called Brilliant Pebbles, a plan to base thousands of missile interceptors in space.

Rob Snyder, the executive director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said the Pentagon was seeking $110 million to study a partial revival of this program and to begin a missile defense program involving interceptors that would blast off from ships to destroy missiles leaving nearby launching sites. He spoke at a briefing at the Army's Space and Missile Defense Command here.

Brilliant Pebbles has faced intense opposition by critics who have said it would be the first step in militarizing space.

The Pentagon would like to test the program in space by 2005 or 2006 if initial studies of the concept are successful, Mr. Snyder said.

The original program was first proposed by the Reagan administration in the mid-1980's, said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, and it was terminated in 1993 after $4.8 billion had been spent on it. Critics of the current plan doubt the ability of the interceptors to function when left for long periods in space.

"They almost invite an enemy to develop antisatellite weapons to knock them out," said Tom Z. Collina, director of the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

-------- russia

Russia to Raise Sub, but Not Mystery
Salvage Team to Lop Off Bow of Sunken Kursk Before Lifting It From Sea Floor

By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9442-2001Jul17?language=printer

ABOARD THE KLAVDIA YELANSKAYA, Off Murmansk, Russia, July 17 -- This stretch of ocean north of the Arctic Circle makes for a miserable grave. The water is frigid, gray and unforgiving, the weather fickle and quick to turn ugly. Nothing marks the sacrifice of the men below.

So nearly a year after the Russian submarine Kursk sank with the loss of all 118 crew members, a fleet of civilian and military vessels has converged here to attempt to raise the dead. Over the next two months, divers plan to drill holes in the hull, attach hooks and yank the doomed submarine out of the seabed 350 feet beneath the surface.

But while bringing up the boat and the bodies, Russia intends to leave the mystery of the Kursk on the bottom of the ocean. From the start, the Kremlin has preferred to blame the tragedy on a supposed collision with a foreign submarine despite a consensus among outside specialists that it was caused by a malfunctioning torpedo.

The recovery task is audacious, a mission that defies difficulty and danger as Russian authorities and the Western companies they hired try to salvage a 14,000-ton boat equipped with two nuclear reactors while avoiding any undetonated torpedoes or cruise missiles. Rarely has an operation of this delicacy been attempted in such forbidding conditions.

One way to establish the cause of the sinking would be to examine the front compartment where the explosions that crippled the Kursk went off; however, the Russians plan to saw off the bow and leave it behind.

Russian navy commanders said lifting the submarine with the damaged front section would be hazardous and promised to return next year to retrieve it. But such a follow-up operation would be carried out solely by Russians, with no assistance from foreigners who might get a look at the key part of the vessel.

"The navy believes that it is their sacred duty to determine the reason for the demise of the boat," Vice Adm. Mikhail Motsak, chief of staff of the Northern Fleet, said today from the bridge of the destroyer Severomorsk. "We're going to continue to work on this whether we raise the submarine without the first compartment or not."

Others see a darker reason for deserting the first compartment. "This is a way of hiding the causes of the tragedy," retired Rear Adm. Yuri Senatsky, once the Soviet Union's chief specialist for vessel lifting operations, said in May when the government unveiled the $80 million plan.

The skepticism runs even deeper among some active service sailors and their families in the northern port of Murmansk. "They said they were going to tell only the truth now and everyone gets ready for lies," said Igor Archipchenko, a communications officer. "No one believes the official version."

Commissioned in 1995, the Kursk was among the most modern attack submarines in the shrinking Russian fleet when a pair of explosions during training exercises last Aug. 12 sent it to the ocean floor. The ensuing drama captured world attention as Russian authorities fumbled their response. President Vladimir Putin remained on vacation and refused foreign rescue assistance, then reversed himself and accepted British and Norwegian help only after too much time had passed. The government released misinformation on issues from the date of the incident to the chances of survival to its contacts with the trapped crew.

Once rescue attempts failed, divers tried to recover the bodies, but came back with just 12 before abandoning the effort because of safety concerns. Two notes found with the bodies indicated 23 sailors survived the blasts before later succumbing to carbon monoxide poisoning; one note explicitly attributed the accident to a torpedo explosion.

Putin this week expressed no regrets about his handling of the disaster. "The quality of my perception of this problem did not depend on my geographic whereabouts," he told the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. As for the delay in seeking aid, he said, "even if they had turned for help to foreign partners on the same day, all the same they would not have been able to rescue the remaining living crew members."

Still, as it moves now to recover the remaining bodies, the Kremlin wants to repair some of the lingering political damage. It organized a trip for journalists out to the Barents Sea to demonstrate a new policy of openness -- even as it keeps the Norwegian government and environmentalists away.

At the scene of the sinking, about 100 miles from Murmansk, a half-dozen vessels were anchored today, including two warships, two ships bearing submersibles, a floating hospital and a Norwegian diving support ship, the Mayo. Early this morning, a remote-controlled submersible finished exploring the front compartment and nearby seabed in preparation for excising the bow. No unexploded torpedoes were spotted and radiation levels were "within the norm," officials said.

Navy officials said they believe the Kursk's nuclear reactors shut down after the accident, but want to reclaim them from the ocean to prevent further trouble. "The first and main reason to lift the Kursk is that in the seabed of the Barents Sea is a fully loaded nuclear reactor, although it is in safe condition," Motsak told journalists by radio from his warship.

The reactors are not the only potential hazard. Although the sun never sets here at this time of year, even summer weather in the Arctic Circle can shift to deep fog, high winds and heavy waves seemingly in an instant. Moreover, the Kursk embarked with 23 cruise missiles and a similar number of torpedoes. It fired only one of the cruise missiles during exercises.

In selecting an agent to handle the operation, Russia abruptly broke off months of negotiations with an international consortium in May when the group balked at a September deadline that it feared would "compromise the safety of its crews and equipment." Instead, the Kremlin hired Mammoet, a Dutch company with more experience in heavy lifting on land, such as installing roofs on the Olympic stadium in Moscow and Miller Park in Milwaukee.

Mammoet promises it can handle the task and brought in one of the firms from the original consortium, Smit International, as well as DSND Subsea to handle the diving.

After the bow is sliced off by Aug. 7, divers working in near-freezing water will cut 26 holes in the remaining hull and then hook in string jacks. The firms plan to raise the boatto fit under a specially fitted 420-foot pontoon starting around Sept. 15 and then take it to a dry dock near Murmansk, where the bodies and reactors will be removed.

"There is a list of 10 things that could go wrong," said Thomas Nilsen of the Norwegian environmentalist group Bellona. "They will make the entire submarine even more unstable than it is already and it will make the lifting operation more dangerous. We think we should hurry but not rush. My feeling is they're rushing."

Government officials deny that. Given the narrow window before the weather turns too nasty to work, they said they must work expeditiously but will not compromise to do so. "The Russian side," Motsak said, "is prepared to fulfill its obligations given to Mammoet to ensure the safety of the work."

--------

Highlights of Putin News Conference

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Putin-Glance.html?searchpv=aponline

ON NATO: The alliance is a holdover from the Cold War, and its expansion into Eastern Europe perpetuates the division of Europe, Putin said. The alliance should either embrace Russia, or disband, or give way to a new alliance that incorporates Russia along with the rest of Europe. ``If we fail do that ... we will continue to mistrust each other,'' he said.

U.S. MISSILE DEFENSE: Putin discussed Washington's plans to build a national missile shield with Chinese President Jiang Zemin at their summit this week, but said Moscow wasn't planning any joint action with Beijing to counter U.S. moves.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Putin and Bush developed a good rapport during their first meeting last month in Slovenia. ``He is a rather warm person, pleasant to talk to, and I would even say, maybe I shouldn't say this, but he seemed to me a little sentimental. At the same time, he sternly defends his position, especially on global security issues,'' he said.

CHECHNYA: The government will continue the military action to destroy rebels who allegedly want to carve an Islamic state in southern Russia, Putin said. He dismissed allegations of large-scale military crimes, but said soldiers found guilty of abusing civilians would be punished.

LENIN'S BURIAL: Putin voiced opposition to removing Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's embalmed body from its Red Square tomb for burial because that could split society. Russia can consider the issue once market reforms and democratic changes take stronger root, he said. Russia's Communists fear the burial would signal the start of an offensive to outlaw their party.

KURSK SUBMARINE: Putin does not regret that his government didn't immediately call for Western help when the Kursk nuclear submarine sank in August 2000 because it wouldn't have arrived in time to save the 118 crewmen. At the same time, he acknowledged it was a mistake for him not to return immediately from vacation when the Kursk sank.

--------

Putin: No Plans for Joint Response

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Putin-Missiles.html?searchpv=aponline

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia has no plans for a joint response with China to the latest U.S. moves on building a national missile defense system, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday.

``We have enough means to respond to any changes ourselves,'' Putin said at a Kremlin news conference.

Putin met earlier in the week in Moscow with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, and the missile issue came up at the talks which culminated with the signing of a comprehensive friendship treaty.

Russia has been staunchly opposed to any changes in the Soviet-era ABM treaty with Washington and has said the recent U.S. test of a missile interceptor was a threat to the entire structure of nuclear disarmament treaties.

--------

Kursk Salvage Team Makes Progress

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Nuclear-Submarine.html?searchpv=aponline

MURMANSK, Russia (AP) -- The international team working to salvage the sunken Kursk submarine used a remote-controlled vessel to clear sand and silt from the sub's damaged front compartment Wednesday to prepare for the main phase of the two-month operation, Russian officials said.

Navy spokesman Dmitry Burmistrov said the compartment needed to be cleared of silt before robots could cut it off from the rest of the submarine. The front compartment, which may contain unexploded torpedoes, is to be left at the bottom of the Barents Sea when the Kursk is raised.

The Kursk sank on Aug. 12, 2000, during a training exercise in the Arctic waters off northern Russia, killing all 118 crewmen. Russian officials said the disaster was triggered by a practice torpedo, but they remain uncertain whether it was caused by an internal malfunction -- the theory favored by most outside experts -- or a collision.

The operation to raise the submarine, which has two nuclear reactors aboard, is scheduled to last through mid-September.

Russia has maintained that no radiation has leaked from the wreck but says it is raising it to ensure it poses no future danger.

An unmanned vessel from the Norwegian dive support ship Mayo has been used for preliminary radiation tests and for clearing away the silt from the first compartment.

After the silt was cleared Wednesday, the Mayo left the site of the disaster for the Norwegian port of Kirkenes, where it will pick up equipment for the next phase of work, Northern Fleet commander Vyacheslav Popov said, according to the Interfax news agency.

The Mayo is to return in two days, the agency said.

After the first compartment is cut off, Russian and foreign divers will drill holes in the hull and attach steel cables for lifting the vessel, an operation tentatively set for mid September. The cables will be attached to 26 hydraulic lifting units anchored to a giant pontoon, which will be towed to Murmansk.

-------- treaties

Bush vows to bury 'obsolete' missile treaty

The Times (UK)
WEDNESDAY JULY 18 2001
BY BEN MACINTYRE
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,3-2001243231,00.html

Our correspondent meets a resolute President before his trip to London and the G8 summit PRESIDENT Bush spoke of his desire yesterday to "get rid" of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, in a clear sign that he has no intention of backing away from missile defence or other contentious issues when confronted by European critics at the G8 summit in Genoa beginning later this week.

On the eve of his first visit to Britain as President, Mr Bush said that he expects some heated disagreements in Genoa, but he noted: "I will not let differences of opinion get in the way of the larger picture.

"We'll have frank discussions, but I will just tell people what I think in a way that is forthright and transparent. People will know where we stand . . . Some will like it and some won't like it."

Mr Bush said that he was eagerly looking forward to his second meeting with the Queen, and his first as President, at Buckingham Palace tomorrow.

"Mum and Dad invited Laura and me to a private lunch (with the Queen) right here in this dining room," he said yesterday during an interview with The Times in the private quarters of the White House. "I found her charming, she was great, a wonderful sense of humour. My mother and I, we like to tease, and she fit right in. She was neat."

Mr Bush insisted that Russia has nothing to fear from his plans for a national missile defence. "As Russia looks west, she has no enemies, as long as I'm President . . . Russia is no longer our nation's enemy, therefore we should not view each other with suspicion."

But he made clear that he regards the ABM Treaty as essentially dead, if not yet buried. Hitherto his Administration had tended to emphasise "moving beyond" the ABM Treaty, but Mr Bush was blunt: "We ought to think sensibly about working together to get rid of a document that codified distrust: we stared each other down with missiles . . . the threats that the ABM Treaty addressed no longer exist."

With visible passion, he insisted that missile defence would create a more peaceful world, with a shield that would extend over America's allies.

"We have to have the capacity to shoot somebody's missile down if they threaten us . . . I firmly believe it's the right thing to do to keep the peace. I'm committing this nation to a more peaceful world by a realistic assessment of the threat."

Previewing the defensive arguments he will make in Genoa, Mr Bush said that the possibility of a missile launch by a "rogue state" aggressor "threatens Israel, it threatens Russia, it will threaten Europe at some time perhaps".

Mr Bush said that he expected to be questioned closely on his missile defence plans when he arrives in Britain. "I'm sure it will come up with Tony Blair and I'm looking forward to explaining my position," he said.

On the Kyoto treaty on global warming, which his Administration has rejected, Mr Bush was equally determined.

"Our country supports the goals (of the Kyoto Treaty), we just have differences about the methodology . . . The goals are unrealistic, however. My assessment of the situation was upfront. I explained as clearly as I could that our nation will work and develop a strategy that other nations can understand clearly, but they should make no mistake about it: the idea of this particular treaty

. . . is something that our country was unable to withstand."

With a wry smile he added: "Some leaders were more sympathetic than others, I must confess, nevertheless I do believe that people appreciate the frank assessment."

Mr Bush clearly sees his second trip to Europe as an opportunity to dispel some of the negative reaction to his first visit in the spring.

"My first trip to Europe was an ice-breaker," he said. "A lot of people had read things about me, but they weren't able to hear my vision. They were told things in the newspapers: sometimes the things were true, sometimes they were not so true."

Mr Bush said that, while his Administration was looking to replace American troops stationed in the Balkans with civil institutions as soon as possible, there was no prospect of the United States pulling out unilaterally.

"We came in together, we will leave together," he said, but he emphasised that he had "rebuffed" the idea of nation-building and was "concerned" about peacekeeping missions. "Our military should be used to fight and win wars," he said.

He said that he was "optimistic" about relations between Europe and the United States, despite the differences. "I believe we can form a very constructive relationship with the EU," he said. "We shouldn't allow disagreements to diminish the fact that we share the same values, and it's the values, not just the history, that unite America with Europe."

Mr Bush said he was untroubled by the friendship pact between China and Russia: "I can understand nations that share a large border wanting to work on a friendship agreement. That makes sense to me."

Mr Bush said that he was also looking forward to an audience with the Pope in Rome. "You can't help but be excited, I mean, thinking about being in the presence of a great leader, a man who has got such depth and such spiritual strength."

The President said that he had little time for some of the protesters who will converge on the G8 summit. He said that while 95 per cent of demonstrators might come for peaceful purposes, some harmed their causes and a few were merely "anarchists".

"In all due respect, those who try to disrupt and hurt and destroy are really defeating their cause . . . I think a lot of people in the world are kind of sick of it. It's one thing to have an open dialogue, but another to try to hurt and destroy."

The President said that opponents of free trade are harming the poorest of the world's inhabitants. "I strongly disagree with them . . . They can protest anything they want. They need to go and ask people in Africa what their hopes and dreams are. Find out from the people they're supposedly speaking for. They'll find a different point of view."

PRESIDENT Bush spoke of his desire yesterday to "get rid" of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, in a clear sign that he has no intention of backing away from missile defence or other contentious issues when confronted by European critics at the G8 summit in Genoa beginning later this week.

On the eve of his first visit to Britain as President, Mr Bush said that he expects some heated disagreements in Genoa, but he noted: "I will not let differences of opinion get in the way of the larger picture.

"We'll have frank discussions, but I will just tell people what I think in a way that is forthright and transparent. People will know where we stand . . . Some will like it and some won't like it."

Mr Bush said that he was eagerly looking forward to his second meeting with the Queen, and his first as President, at Buckingham Palace tomorrow.

"Mum and Dad invited Laura and me to a private lunch (with the Queen) right here in this dining room," he said yesterday during an interview with The Times in the private quarters of the White House. "I found her charming, she was great, a wonderful sense of humour. My mother and I, we like to tease, and she fit right in. She was neat."

Mr Bush insisted that Russia has nothing to fear from his plans for a national missile defence. "As Russia looks west, she has no enemies, as long as I'm President . . . Russia is no longer our nation's enemy, therefore we should not view each other with suspicion."

But he made clear that he regards the ABM Treaty as essentially dead, if not yet buried. Hitherto his Administration had tended to emphasise "moving beyond" the ABM Treaty, but Mr Bush was blunt: "We ought to think sensibly about working together to get rid of a document that codified distrust: we stared each other down with missiles . . . the threats that the ABM Treaty addressed no longer exist."

With visible passion, he insisted that missile defence would create a more peaceful world, with a shield that would extend over America's allies.

"We have to have the capacity to shoot somebody's missile down if they threaten us . . . I firmly believe it's the right thing to do to keep the peace. I'm committing this nation to a more peaceful world by a realistic assessment of the threat."

Previewing the defensive arguments he will make in Genoa, Mr Bush said that the possibility of a missile launch by a "rogue state" aggressor "threatens Israel, it threatens Russia, it will threaten Europe at some time perhaps".

Mr Bush said that he expected to be questioned closely on his missile defence plans when he arrives in Britain. "I'm sure it will come up with Tony Blair and I'm looking forward to explaining my position," he said.

On the Kyoto treaty on global warming, which his Administration has rejected, Mr Bush was equally determined.

"Our country supports the goals (of the Kyoto Treaty), we just have differences about the methodology . . . The goals are unrealistic, however. My assessment of the situation was upfront. I explained as clearly as I could that our nation will work and develop a strategy that other nations can understand clearly, but they should make no mistake about it: the idea of this particular treaty

. . . is something that our country was unable to withstand."

With a wry smile he added: "Some leaders were more sympathetic than others, I must confess, nevertheless I do believe that people appreciate the frank assessment."

Mr Bush clearly sees his second trip to Europe as an opportunity to dispel some of the negative reaction to his first visit in the spring.

"My first trip to Europe was an ice-breaker," he said. "A lot of people had read things about me, but they weren't able to hear my vision. They were told things in the newspapers: sometimes the things were true, sometimes they were not so true."

Mr Bush said that, while his Administration was looking to replace American troops stationed in the Balkans with civil institutions as soon as possible, there was no prospect of the United States pulling out unilaterally.

"We came in together, we will leave together," he said, but he emphasised that he had "rebuffed" the idea of nation-building and was "concerned" about peacekeeping missions. "Our military should be used to fight and win wars," he said.

He said that he was "optimistic" about relations between Europe and the United States, despite the differences. "I believe we can form a very constructive relationship with the EU," he said. "We shouldn't allow disagreements to diminish the fact that we share the same values, and it's the values, not just the history, that unite America with Europe."

Mr Bush said he was untroubled by the friendship pact between China and Russia: "I can understand nations that share a large border wanting to work on a friendship agreement. That makes sense to me."

Mr Bush said that he was also looking forward to an audience with the Pope in Rome. "You can't help but be excited, I mean, thinking about being in the presence of a great leader, a man who has got such depth and such spiritual strength."

The President said that he had little time for some of the protesters who will converge on the G8 summit. He said that while 95 per cent of demonstrators might come for peaceful purposes, some harmed their causes and a few were merely "anarchists".

"In all due respect, those who try to disrupt and hurt and destroy are really defeating their cause . . . I think a lot of people in the world are kind of sick of it. It's one thing to have an open dialogue, but another to try to hurt and destroy."

The President said that opponents of free trade are harming the poorest of the world's inhabitants. "I strongly disagree with them . . . They can protest anything they want. They need to go and ask people in Africa what their hopes and dreams are. Find out from the people they're supposedly speaking for. They'll find a different point of view."

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

-------- nevada

Yucca training to cost county $1 bil.

July 18, 2001
By Mary Manning <manning@lasvegassun.com>
LAS VEGAS SUN
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/archives/2001/jul/18/512096663.html?Yucca%2BMountain

If a high-level nuclear waste dump is built at Yucca Mountain, Clark County would have to spend more than $1 billion to train emergency crews to respond to a possible accident, a new report says.

An accident, if it happened, would cost the county $1.4 billion per square mile to clean up. Residents near transportation routes could suffer $2.5 billion in property losses. Resorts could lose 10 percent to 20 percent of their visitors.

The Clark County Commission heard those figures Tuesday in the first in a series of reports on how the proposed nuke dump, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, would affect the county's 1.4 million residents. The reports were prepared for the county by Urban Environmental Research, a Scottsdale, Ariz., consulting company.

What the consultants could not answer is where the county would find that money. The state has refused to negotiate with the federal government for benefits, because to do so would negate its right to challenge the project.

But without federal aid, the pricetag for preparing emergency responders could fall on county taxpayers. The county's entire budget for the current fiscal year is about $3 billion.

"Who gets cut?" Urban Environmental Research principal planner Sheila Conway asked. "Is it social services, such as welfare? Or schools?"

Yucca Mountain is the only site under study by the Department of Energy for burying 77,000 tons of highly radioactive wastes from commercial reactors and defense activities. The Department of Energy has spent $7 billion over 20 years studying the site and would build the repository if it is approved.

The cost of preparing police, firefighters and Nevada Highway Patrol troopers does not include upgrading hospitals and clinics to receive and treat victims contaminated with radiation.

If an accident occurred that leaked radiation from a shipping cask, the Department of Energy has estimated that it would cost $1.4 billion a square mile to clean up the damage from such an accident.

Even if the federal government promised to help pay those costs, the county's study noted that the DOE has a "consistent track record of not living up to its agreements with states and local governments, even court-ordered written agreements," Conway said.

The research group visited New Mexico, where the DOE operates the $1.8 billion Waste Isolation Pilot Project, a site accepting plutonium-laced wastes from the Defense Department. About 850,000 containers are to be buried in the salt caverns near Carlsbad over the next 35 years.

Since 1998, when the dump opened, New Mexico has received $20 million a year in federal funding, but it would not have received that if Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., had not had the political clout to secure the funding in Congress, Conway said. The money primarily covers repair to roads damaged by shipments, but no bypass routes have been built.

The Urban Environmental Research group used the New Mexico project to estimate costs for Clark County and Southern Nevada cities. In the coming year the company will analyze the effects of radioactive accidents on property values of major Strip hotels, shopping centers and cities from Las Vegas to Mesquite.

However, the report addressed how resort business could be affected. Resort owners told researchers they expected visitor losses of 10 percent to 20 percent because of bad publicity if an accident occurred.

That large a drop could "devastate" their properties because of high fixed costs, the report said.

One casino noted that it lost 25 percent to 33 percent of its business after part of its roof collapsed during a July 1999 flash flood.

Hotel owners also told researchers that while they have evacuation plans, those contingencies would not work in a radioactive accident.

Within a 3-mile radius, 28,000 people would need to be removed from the path of a radioactive plume during a daytime accident and 24,000 at night, the study said.

During a fire, earthquake or other emergency, those people would need to be moved just outside the hotel. In a radioactive emergency, they must be moved to a nonradioactive shelter, which could be miles away.

The Las Vegas Strip and downtown resorts lie along the DOE's proposed transportation routes.

The county study also estimated value losses to residences, small commercial properties and industrial warehouses along the transportation routes.

Between 50,000 to 100,000 truckloads are expected over 24 years at Yucca Mountain, according to the DOE, which has not chosen a repository design. That averages to between five and 10 nuclear waste trips a day through Clark County.

The western and northern sections of the Beltway cannot be used to transport nuclear waste, because they do not meet federal interstate safety standards. Nuclear waste truck shipments would have to use Interstate 15 and U.S. 95 until 2025.

There are no practical alternate routes for trucks coming from Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Phoenix or Reno.

The appraised properties with the most to lose are within one mile of I-15, according to 14 of 17 local banks and certified appraisers interviewed for the study. In the worst likely accident that spilled radioactive wastes, residential property losses would reach $1.5 billion.

Along the Las Vegas Beltway, $961 million in residential property would be lost in the worst-case accident. The consultants used DOE accident scenarios, but upgraded population figures using the 2000 Census. DOE estimates used 1990 Census figures.

-------- us nuc politics

Putin, Bush Meeting in Italy Nears

By George Gedda
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline082810_000.htm

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon is feeling upbeat about the direct hit it scored in a missile defense test high over the Pacific. The Bush administration is less pleased about another direct hit - the diplomatic one that Russia scored against Secretary of State Colin Powell's Iraq policy.

Missile defense and Iraq are playing havoc with U.S.-Russian relations and will pose a test for President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin when they meet Sunday in Genoa, Italy. Powell was discussing the same issues Wednesday in Rome during a meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov.

The proliferating problems between the two countries make one wonder about the durability of the good chemistry Bush and Putin showed when they met last month in Slovenia for their inaugural chitchat.

With Bush at his side, Putin spoke of the "very high level of trust between the two of us. I must say that the president is a nice person to talk to."

Bush said of Putin: "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy."

Bush made the comment even as Powell was expressing "astonishment" that Russia, alone among permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, was thwarting his plan to make sanctions against Iraq less onerous for Iraqi civilians and more effective in blocking imports that could be used by Iraq's military.

Powell says he cannot fathom why Russia is providing aid and comfort to a regime that may be hell-bent on developing weapons of mass destruction.

Although Powell says he's unsure what the Iraqis are up to, an article in the current issue of Commentary magazine is not reassuring on this point. The article says U.N. weapons inspectors, before their departure from Iraq in 1998, prepared confidential reports recounting Iraqi efforts to build weapons forbidden by the United Nations.

Throughout the '90's, in violation of the U.N. embargo and in the teeth of the U.N. inspection regime, the Iraqis imported suspect goods from at least 20 countries, the article said, quoting from one report.

On Iraq's shopping list were "turnkey facilities, full-sized production lines, industrial know-how, hi UEY.

----

Bush Sets Off on Second Europe Trip

By Lawrence L. Knutson
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline104910_001.htm

WASHINGTON -- President Bush set off Wednesday on a weeklong trip across Europe to promote international free trade as a tool for igniting the lagging economies of developing nations.

He is also denouncing in advance anti-trade demonstrators he expects to encounter, saying they are no friends of the impoverished developing nations they champion.

Before leaving the White House, Bush greeted about 170 students from the Seeds of Peace Program, which fosters friendships among teen-agers from conflict-stricken parts of the world. While he posed for pictures and shook hands, first lady Laura Bush waited in a light drizzle for a few minutes, then walked out alone to board Marine One. The president followed shortly thereafter.

The Bush trip is centered on the meeting in Genoa, Italy, of the Group of Eight, the leaders of the seven largest industrial democracies - Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Italy and the United States - and Russia.

As in his first presidential trip to Europe five weeks ago, Bush will make clear that the United States intends to develop, test and deploy an anti-missile shield, despite agreements reached during the Cold War with the former Soviet Union.

"The Europeans heard me once, and they'll hear me again, say that the Cold War is over, that Russia is not our enemy and that we should not adhere to a treaty that prevents the United States and other freedom-loving people from developing defenses," Bush said in a pre-departure interview with the BBC.

Boarding Air Force One, Bush flies first to London, where on Thursday he plans to have lunch at Buckingham palace with Queen Elizabeth and meet with Prime Minister Tony Blair at Chequers, the prime minister's country home.

"I find Tony Blair to be somebody ... who like me will put a hundred percent effort into making sure the relationship between America and Great Britain is unique and strong," Bush told the BBC.

In London, Blair spokesman Godrick Smith said the two leaders would discuss Bush's plan for a missile defense system and his rejection of the Kyoto protocol on climate change, which Britain supports along with the European Union.

"I don't think there's any point in pretending that we have agreement on the issue," Smith said. "The prime minister will underline once again to President Bush that for the U.K. and the E.U., this is a significant issue of substance."

Bush and Blair also planned to talk about U.S.-British cooperation on Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, the Middle East, Iraq and Russia, Smith said.

Britain, with strong U.S. backing, tried to get the U.N. Security Council to revise sanctions on Iraq with the aim of easing the burden on civilians while tightening export of arms material. Among the 15 Council members, only Russia objected. Bush and Blair may be looking for a way to get around that roadblock.

During the rest of the week, Bush holds separate meetings with a succession of government leaders. Other highlights include a meeting with Pope John Paul II and a flight to Kosovo where he'll share lunch with U.S. peacekeeping troops.

In a speech on Tuesday at World Bank headquarters in Washington, Bush said he will press for a new round of global trade talks to promote free trade and "ignite a new era of global economic growth."

The president also proposed a major shift in international financial practices.

He suggested the World Bank and other international lending institutions convert up to half of their resources to grants instead of loans, which have often mired recipient countries in unpayable debt.

The grants should pay for school, health, nutrition, water and sanitation programs, the president said.

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Bush Targets Reduction of Global Poverty
President Sets Foreign Policy Priority on Eve of Summit

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10219-2001Jul17?language=printer

On the eve of his second trip to Europe, President Bush said yesterday that reducing global poverty will be a priority of his foreign policy, in part because a prosperous world would mean more customers for American firms.

Bush said he will use a summit meeting of the Group of Eight industrial nations in Italy this week to press the World Bank to provide funds to impoverished countries as grants that do not have to be repaid, rather than as loans that can choke fledgling economies with debt.

"We have, today, the opportunity to include all the world's poor in an expanding circle of development, throughout all the Americas, all of Asia, and all of Africa," Bush said in a speech at the World Bank headquarters in Washington. "This is a great moral challenge."

The campaign on behalf of struggling nations is part of an attempt to steer Bush's trip, which begins today in London, away from the contentious topics of global warming and missile defense that marked his maiden presidential trip to Europe last month. Administration officials also said it was part of an effort to make values a major theme of his presidency.

On his last trip, Bush said he found his counterparts warm and receptive. But America's major allies have continued to express deep reservations about his rejection of the Kyoto climate-change treaty, and he has made little progress in reducing resistance by Russia, China and European allies to his plan to deploy a missile defense shield.

This week, he will engage the leaders of the world's largest economies on issues in which he may find more agreement. Poverty alleviation and efforts to slow the spread of the AIDS virus will be among the focuses of the three-day G-8 meeting, and Bush said earlier this week that one of his main missions is "working with nations who are less fortunate than Great Britain and the United States -- nations in Africa."

But Bush's proposal for the World Bank to shift toward grants, which was initially advanced by Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill last month, is strongly opposed by European nations that hold major sway over the policies of the 183-nation institution. Loans to the poorest countries are already given on easy terms, with virtually no interest charges and up to 40 years to repay. The idea is that, although the burden is much lighter than an ordinary commercial loan, poor countries are more likely to use the money wisely if they know they have to pay it back.

Furthermore, Bush proposed no additional money from the United States to underwrite more favorable terms. Caroline Anstey, the bank's head of media relations, said Bush's proposal means "rich countries will need to dramatically increase their contributions" to the bank.

"We support the idea of increasing resources for poor countries, including grants for basic needs like education and communicable diseases," she said. But, she added, "If it's about grants with no idea about upping the contribution, it's half of the solution that's needed."

Some advocates for the world's poor lauded Bush's speech. "President Bush got the big picture exactly right: Poverty abroad is a moral challenge that should be a priority for the wealthiest country in the world," said Raymond C. Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, who added that his organization welcomes Bush's World Bank proposal "as long as the funding stream is secured."

Bush said he is eager to help poorer nations "because having strong and stable nations as neighbors in the world is in our own best interests."

"Strong partners export their products, not their problems," he said. "Conquering poverty creates new customers."

Bush's trip will take him to three nations over seven days. On Thursday, he will meet Queen Elizabeth II and hold private talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Then Bush will head to Genoa, Italy, for the G-8 discussions Friday through Sunday.

After the final session, Bush will hold his second meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the agenda will include "a number of issues on which we do not agree -- Chechnya, about the concerns for media freedom, and on Russia's relations with its neighbors."

Among the most sensitive issues for Bush and Putin will be the intention of the United States to modify or scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow for testing and construction of a missile shield.

"We need to move past where we are with the ABM Treaty to something that more properly reflects the new relationship with Russia," Rice said. "We also believe, by the way, that the new strategic framework should include lower offensive numbers, that it should also include new nonproliferation efforts. So this is not just missile defense. This is really redefining the strategic relationship with Russia."

On Monday, Bush will have an audience with Pope John Paul II at his summer residence outside Rome. The visit is significant for the president because Roman Catholics are among the voters he is most carefully courting. It comes as Bush continues to wrestle with whether to allow federal funding of research using stem cells from embryos, which the Catholic Church opposes. On his way back to Washington, he plans to greet U.S. troops in Kosovo.

Staff writer Paul Blustein contributed to this report.

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Democrats Are Warned on Missile Stance

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By JAMES DAO
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/18/politics/18MILI.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, July 17 - Buoyed by a successful antimissile test on Saturday, the Pentagon warned Senate Democrats today that a protracted fight over the administration's ambitious missile defense plans would undermine President Bush's effort to overhaul the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty in coming talks with Russia.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said threats by the Democrats to cut Mr. Bush's proposed $8.3 billion missile defense budget would give Russian leaders "the mistaken impression that they can somehow exercise a veto over our development of missile defenses."

Mr. Wolfowitz urged the Democrats to "show the same resolve as the president" to develop and test missile shield technology. The administration has proposed an accelerated test program that could clash with strictures of the ABM treaty, which prohibits development, deployment and some testing of national missile defense systems, within months.

He also warned that a bitter fight over the missile program would weaken President Bush's ability to persuade the Russians to replace the ABM treaty with a "strategic framework" allowing limited missile defenses.

Mr. Bush is scheduled to meet with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in a visit to Europe that begins later this week.

"The unintended consequence of such action could be to rule out a cooperative solution, and leave the president no choice but to walk away from the treaty unilaterally - an outcome none of us surely wants," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

The administration's first preference was to amend or replace the treaty in talks with Russia. Failing that, Mr. Bush would unilaterally withdraw from the pact before the Pentagon broke any of its provisions, Mr. Wolfowitz said.

With today's appearance, just days after a prototype interceptor shot down a mock warhead 140 miles over the Pacific, Mr. Wolfowitz stepped up the administration's efforts to confront Democrats who strongly oppose swift deployment of missile defenses, as many Republicans have urged. The successful intercept followed two consecutive failed tests last year that had raised doubts about the program.

Though the Pentagon had previously played down the significance of the recent test, Mr. Wolfowitz described it today as "an important step" that demonstrated that "missile defense is no longer a problem of invention - it is a challenge of engineering."

But Mr. Wolfowitz's entreaties did not appear to convince Democrats on the panel, who peppered him with questions on the Pentagon's testing plan and raised concerns about what they called Mr. Bush's plans to "rip up the ABM treaty."

"No one I know is willing to give Russia or anyone else a veto over our actions," said Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "But Russian reaction to a unilateral breach of an arms control agreement is relevant to our security and could leave us a lot less secure."

The administration, and most Republicans in Congress, argue that Russia is no longer an enemy and that the treaty is a cold-war relic that prevents the United States from defending itself against missile threats from smaller nations like Iraq and North Korea.

As part of the 2002 budget, the Pentagon has proposed building a test site at Fort Greely, Alaska, equipped with five interceptors that could be used as an "emergency" missile defense by 2004. The Pentagon notified Congress today that it planned to start work on that site next month.

Many Democrats, on the other hand, contend that a unilateral American withdrawal from the ABM treaty would strain relations with Russia and China, potentially inciting a new arms race.

But a few Democrats, including Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who sits on the Armed Services Committee, have said they would support a unilateral withdrawal if concerted negotiations with the Russians failed.

During three hours of testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz and Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish, director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, also outlined three actions scheduled for early next year that might conflict with the strictures of the ABM treaty.

Mr. Wolfowitz said the first such action had been scheduled for February. He added that if Pentagon lawyers concluded that the test would clash with treaty provisions, the Pentagon would delay or restructure it to keep it compliant with the treaty.

"We are not going to violate the treaty," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

Under the treaty, Russia and the United States are required to notify each other six months in advance of withdrawing from the agreement.

Republicans on the panel argued that Democrats have in the past voted to finance missile defense programs that "bumped up" against the ABM treaty, and they urged them to set aside partisan differences to do so again this year.

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Bush Criticized on Defense Spending

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Defense-Spending.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Conservatives inside and outside Congress are beating up the Bush administration over defense spending, contending there's too little of it.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld rejected the criticism Wednesday, saying it's impossible to fix years of underfunding.

``You don't do that in one year,'' he said.

Rumsfeld boasted that the proposed $328.9 billion budget represents the largest increase since 1986, in absolute and percentage terms.

After eight years of a Democratic White House, military-minded Republicans looked forward to President Bush fulfilling his campaign promise to transform the military and turn around what he called a decline due to years of neglect. Vice President Dick Cheney encapsulated the view by announcing on the campaign trail: ``Help is on the way.''

But Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan of The Weekly Standard, a conservative publication, offered in an editorial ``some unsolicited advice for two old friends, Donald Rumsfeld and (Deputy Defense Secretary) Paul Wolfowitz: Resign.''

Only in that way, the writers said, could they draw public and official attention to the dire needs of the Defense Department.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Bob Stump spoke for many congressional Republicans when he said the budget is too small. But he's not ready to criticize the administration for working within its means.

``I think it's been neglected so long over the past eight years that it's going to take a lot of catching up,'' said Stump, R-Ariz.

Rumsfeld has acknowledged that the Pentagon really needs $347 billion next year just to keep up with current costs and inflation. He told the House Appropriations Committee's defense panel on Monday that the proposed budget ``only makes a good dent in the shortfall we're facing.''

Democratic Rep. Norman Dicks of Washington, a stalwart military booster, told him, ``I think you've tried to do your best to go down to the White House and ask for the money that's necessary to get this job done, but you've been turned down.''

``We're told you asked for like $38 billion'' but got only $18.4 billion, said Dicks, referring to the administration's late June increase in its original $310 Defense Department spending request.

But Rumsfeld bridled at that invitation to blame his boss, and gave his ritual statement that the years of underfunding cannot be rectified overnight.

Democrats who contend too little is being spent on defense generally blame Bush's $1.35 billion, 10-year tax cut for trimming the available surplus that could pay for the needed improvements, making it hard to find money for late $18.4 billion increase

``We squandered the opportunity of the accumulated surpluses to do the kind of things -- with defense, with our failing infrastructure and other areas -- that would make us as a nation, richer, safer, smarter and stronger in the future,'' Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., said at a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday.

Republicans reject the idea of tampering with the tax cut.

Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., chairman of the Armed Services Committee's readiness panel, said in an interview that he would have supported a smaller tax cut, but it was politically unrealistic to tinker with it now. In addition, he said, any money saved by a smaller tax cut would not have gone to defense.

Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., told the Budget Committee he would recommend that every other spending bill be considered for reduction to make way for more money for the military, saying, ``Why should the defense bill be held hostage?''

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Pentagon urges Hill to fund anti-missile program

July 18, 2001
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010718-32612446.htm

The Pentagon challenged Congress yesterday to capitalize on last weekend's successful missile-defense flight test by approving President Bush's request for a 57 percent increase in anti-missile development to $8.3 billion next year.

"This weekend's test shows the potential for success," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the Senate Armed Services Committee, whose Democratic chairman opposes Mr. Bush's full-throttled test schedule. "Let us not fail because we did not adequately fund the necessary testing or because we artificially restricted the exploration of every possible technology."

"The ability to defend the American people from ballistic missile attack is clearly within our grasp, but we cannot do so unless the president has Congress' support," he testified.

Mr. Wolfowitz's testimony, his second appearance within a week before the same panel on the same topic, touched off another Republican vs. Democratic debate on the president's intention to abandon the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty if Russia refuses changes to it. The treaty prohibits missile-defense deployments and some of the planned tests the administration wants executed over a Pacific Ocean test range in the next two years.

"If we are to build on this weekend's accomplishments, we must move beyond the ABM Treaty," Mr. Wolfowitz said of the Cold War pact between the United States and the Soviet Union, made at a time when fewer than 10 nations possessed ballistic missiles. Today, the number is 28, including adversaries such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

Committee Chairman Carl Levin, Michigan Democrat, seemed unimpressed by the argument. Senate sources say Mr. Levin wants the committee to slash Mr. Bush's request and distribute the money to programs benefiting military personnel.

"We should be mighty cautious before ripping up an arms-control treaty in order to try to meet the highly unlikely threat of North Korea using a missile against us," he told Mr. Wolfowitz, "unlikely because if they launched a missile against us, it would lead to their immediate destruction."

Mr. Wolfowitz also played the diplomatic card in trying to persuade the committee. The Bush administration is in intensive discussions to convince Moscow to amend the ABM Treaty to allow more aggressive testing. A "no" vote from Congress, Mr. Wolfowitz argued, would embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin to rebuff Mr. Bush at upcoming meetings in Genoa, Italy, and Crawford, Texas.

"I would urge Congress not to give the Russians the mistaken impression that they can somehow exercise a veto over our development of missile defenses," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

Responded Mr. Levin, "No one I know of is willing to give Russia or anyone else a veto over our actions. But Russian reaction to a unilateral breach of an arms-control agreement is relevant to our security and could leave us a lot less secure."

The Pentagon is assembling a team of experts to determine which types of tests would violate the treaty. One clear violation will come when a new $750 million test bed of radar and interceptor silos becomes operational in Alaska, perhaps as soon as 2004.

The new testing regime calls for sea- and land-based interceptors to knock down warheads in their midcourse (as in Saturday's test) and incoming phase. There will also be research into airborne and space-based lasers that would knock out a missile in the boost phase.

In Saturday's $100 million test, an exoatmospheric kill vehicle (EKV) was launched by a prototype booster from the Ronald Reagan Missile Site in the Marshall Islands and sent 140 miles above the Earth. There, the EKV used its own sensors and data from ground radar to intercept a dummy warhead launched on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif.

-------- MILITARY

-------- asia

Pentagon has plan to defend Taiwan

July 18, 2001
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010718-94642346.htm

The Pentagon is prepared to defend Taiwan and has developed contingency plans for military operations around the island, a spokesman said yesterday.

Pentagon officials, meanwhile, said secret talks between U.S. military planners and the Republic of China's military are set to begin shortly in Monterey, Calif. The talks have been held regularly for the past several years and are aimed a developing "contingency plans" for joint U.S.-Taiwanese military operations in the event of a war between China and Taiwan.

Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, the spokesman, also said the Pentagon is open to a suggestion made last week by President Chen Shui-bian for Taiwan to jointly develop theater missile defenses with Japan and the United States to counter China's growing short-range missile force deployed opposite the island.

The People's Republic of China views Taiwan as a breakaway province; Taiwan calls itself the Republic of China.

Joint regional missile-defense cooperation would be something decided by the area governments, Adm. Quigley said, noting that he was not aware of any recent discussions on the issue.

"Right now I think our commitment remains, at the government of the United States level, to the Taiwan defense act and all the tenets that we have tried so very hard to adhere to over the years," he said.

Joint missile defense would be different and would involve "new discussions" at high levels of the national governments, he said.

Mr. Chen said in an interview Friday with The Washington Times that Taiwan, Japan and the United States have mutual interests in cooperating on missile defenses to preserve the peace and stability of the region.

Taiwan is considering an investment in a missile-defense system but has not made any final decisions, Mr. Chen said.

On Mr. Chen's call for increased cooperation between the Pentagon and Taiwan's military, Adm. Quigley said the Pentagon also is open to increased cooperation within certain limits. "We have said for a long period of time that we are committed to providing for the necessary defensive needs of Taiwan. And we do that, and it manifests itself in a variety of ways: provision of armaments, training, parts, maintenance, things of that sort, to the systems that we provide to the Taiwanese."

Should Taiwan request additional military training or cooperation, "we would certainly consider that," Adm. Quigley said. Any "dramatic expansion of existing arrangements" would be a different issue and would require high-level U.S. government decisions, he said.

President Bush stated in a television interview in May that the United States would do "whatever it took" to defend Taiwan from a mainland attack, contradicting earlier ambiguous U.S. government positions.

Asked if the U.S. military could carry out such a defense, Adm. Quigley said: "We would do our absolute best to carry out the direction of the commander in chief."

Adm. Quigley said he did not know if the Pentagon had adjusted its war plans to defend the island but said the Pentagon had done military planning.

"We're very good at, over a period of many, many years, asking ourselves 'what if' questions and working either basic or quite advanced contingency plans for a variety of events that could happen around the world," he said. "I think contained within those is a wide variety of permutations and combinations of world events, and that would include that part of the world as well."

-------- arms sales

Cold War foes arm Asia

By Thalif Deen,
July 18, 2001
Asia Times Inter Press Service
http://atimes.com/c-asia/CG18Ag01.html

UNITED NATIONS - Most post-Cold War surplus weapons found in Asia are supplied by the United States, a new study shows.

The weapons, ranging from fighter aircraft and helicopters to armored personnel carriers and small arms, have either been sold at bargain basement prices or given without charge to cash-strapped nations fighting for economic survival, says the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC), a think tank based in Germany.

The organization says that surplus American weapons have been transferred to Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.

The list also includes Argentina, Algeria, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Grenada, Jordan, Lebanon, Lithuania, Mexico, Morocco, Oman, Peru, Poland, Senegal and also such US allies as Israel.

"In the United States, strategic interests and a strong producers' lobby directed the distribution of excess American weapons," the BICC says in a 175-page study entitled "Global Disarmament, Demilitarization and Demobilization".

Released to coincide with the ongoing, two-week United Nations conference on small arms, the study says the development of new military technology is not only providing fresh tools for the military pre-eminence of the United States and Western nations but is also hardening resistance to disarmament, provoking re-armament, and "creating new waves of surplus weapons spreading out to poorer countries".

Russia also sells surplus weapons, mostly for financial reasons. Moscow clinched a US$1.2 billion deal to sell weapons to China in an attempt to square off a debt owed by the former Soviet Union to Beijing. Not all sales are for military purposes. The aging Russian aircraft carrier, Minsk, has been converted into an amusement facility in Shenzhen, China. Upwards of $28 million was spent turning it into an amusement park complete with two retired MiG-23 fighter jets.

India has been identified as another key recipient of Russian military surplus, mostly military vehicles.

Despite the "decade of disarmament" that followed the end of the Cold War, most surplus weapons ended up in the global arms market, says BICC. "The Eastern European market is of particular interest for the sale of used military hardware."

Several of the Eastern European countries, including Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, are planning to modernize their armed forces after their recent membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Virtually all of the older model US F-16 fighter planes have been offered to Eastern European nations, notes BICC, so that the US air force could use the proceeds to finance its own acquisition of new F-16 and F-18 fighter aircraft, and also F-22s with stealth technology.

"The Cold War between Russian and American military technology is still going on in Eastern European arms markets, particularly among NATO's new and prospective member states," the study observes.

Washington has expressed reservations over a proposal in the draft program of action that calls for the destruction of surplus small arms and light weapons. "Surplus weapons retained for other purposes will be permanently disabled and decommissioned," the draft says.

In its latest "Congressional Budget Justification for Foreign Operations", the US State Department admits that most of the American surplus weapons are being transferred to developing nations under the Excess Defense Articles (EDA) program. "The grant EDA program operates at essentially no cost to the US with the recipient responsible for any required refurbishment and repair of the items, as well as any associated transportation costs," the document states.

Pointing out that the program has contributed to US "foreign policy successes", the US State Department says the "equipment has helped our Latin American and Caribbean friends combat the threat of illegal narco-trafficking, and has permitted many South American and African nations to participate in support of US and UN peacekeeping operations".

But the BICC points out that Mexico has reportedly returned its gift of secondhand US helicopters because they were too expensive to maintain while Colombia has told Washington that the millions of rounds of 1952-vintage ammunition for US-supplied machine guns were found to be "unsafe".

The Washington-based General Accounting Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the US Congress, has revealed that Washington has disposed of surplus weapons with a book value of more than $3 billion since the end of the Cold War in 1989.

According to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), an arms control think tank based in Washington DC, the US "give-aways" include machine guns, grenade launchers and helicopters to Argentina; M60 battle tanks and missiles to Bahrain; surveillance aircraft and jet engines to Bangladesh; military transport planes to Botswana and Zimbabwe; combat helicopters to Jordan; assault rifles and ammunition to the Philippines, and utility helicopters and assault rifles to Senegal.

According to the BICC, Britain transferred about 70 secondhand military vehicles to humanitarian demining agencies last year. At the same time, Britain also gave Jordan 288 secondhand Challenger battle tanks from military surplus stocks.

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Drug War Could Escalate

CBS Worldwide Inc.
July 18, 2001
http://www.cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597,302167-412,00.shtml

Democrat Charges Foreign Aid Bill Would Allow Combat In Colombia U.S. Has Hundreds Of Contractors Helping Local Anti-Drug Efforts Narcotics Trade Occurs Amid Colombia's Bloody Civil War

WASHINGTON, (CBS) A Congressional Democrat claims to have uncovered an effort by Republicans to change U.S. anti-drug efforts in Colombia to allow participation in combat, CBS News Correspondent Cynthia Bowers reports.

When lawmakers agreed to fund last year's $1.3 billion aid package, called Plan Colombia, it was sold as an anti-drug initiative aimed at attacking cocaine trafficking at its source.

Even so, the measure paid for up to 300 private military contractors, from American companies like MPRI and Dyncorp, to help fumigate coca fields and train Colombia's military - but they were barred from engaging in battles against leftist guerrillas.

In this year's version, that could change.

Buried deep in the massive foreign aid bill are a couple of innocuous sounding sentences, that once-translated, some in Congress find shocking.

What the provisions would do is give the White House the unrestricted ability to send unlimited numbers of private military personnel, or mercenaries, into Colombia, and for the first time ever allow them to take part in the fighting.

"What it means is, 'We're getting into the war baby,'" said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., whose staff uncovered what he calls a "sneaky" attempt to escalate the war without anyone noticing.

"This whole plan was sold as a way of containing the war, but then we let in all of our friends and ex-military, they can bring in all the weapons they want," he said.

Republican Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., added the provisions, and says it's not about military involvement.

"Nobody's talking about them being armed or being mercenaries or going out in the field," he said. "It's for their personal safety, just for carrying their own side arms basically."

Conyers points out that was always allowed. He is sponsoring an amendment to strike the new provisions.

Conyers complaint is not the first criticism of Plan Colombia. Some opposed it because of its focus on crop eradication and interdiction rather than giving more attention to promoting alternative crops.

It was supposed to combine military training and eradication efforts with efforts to push such crops. But a House committee report found that "by March 2000, not one grain of rice, nor one seed, had been delivered to communities that had agreed to voluntary eradication."

Others were worried that the United States would become involved in the 37-year-old civil war in Colombia, in which both right-wing paramilitaries and left-wing guerrillas are linked to the drug trade.

The bill required that Colombia, long criticized for its poor human rights record, make specific improvements before it received the money. The State Department last year found that despite a few advances, Colombia had not met the requirements. But President Clinton, citing national security reasons, waived those requirements.

The White House said it would look at the rights record again in 2001. But early this year, the outgoing Clinton administration opted not to issue a formal report on the matter.

The Plan Colombia legislation caps the number of U.S. troops to be used in Colombia at 500, but the president can waive that limitation for up to 90 days if "the Armed Forces of the United States are involved in hostilities or that imminent involvement by the Armed Forces of the United States in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances."

Even before Plan Colombia, there were U.S. troops in Colombia-and U.S. casualties. In July 1999, five U.S. soldiers died in a plane crash while conducting reconnaissance for anti-drug efforts.

According to another Colombia bill introduced in the 107th Congress by an opponent of U.S. involvement, American contractors were involved in a firefight with FARC rebels in February. Three U.S. personnel have died there since 1997 while flying planes used to spray drug crops.

Last month, Colombian investigators asked to question three American contractors who may have witnessed or participated in a 1998 massacre of 17 civilians by the Colombian military.

Analysts have expected the Bush administration to take a tougher line in Colombia. Robert Zoellick, the president's trade representative, said in a December speech that the U.S. "cannot continue to make a false distinction between counterinsurgency and counternarcotics efforts" there.

----

Iranian airlift sends more arms to Hezbollah - via Damascus

By Ze'ev Schiff,
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
Tamuz 27, 5761
Haaretz Daily
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=52593&contrassID=2&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y

Iran has transfered hundreds of tons of weapons, ammunition and other materials to the Hezbollah through Syria in recent days, according to reliable sources. The deliveries were airlifted in by giant Antonov 124 transport planes that landed at Damascus International Airport.

The equipment was then transported to the storage facilities of the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon, and to the Hezbollah. Security experts estimate that some of the equipment will be smuggled to Palestinian organizations in the territories.

Iranian assistance via Hezbollah to Palestinian organizations that attack Israel, is increasing. In addition to extensive efforts to smuggle equipment, weapons and ammunition, the Hezbollah has also started training Palestinian guerrillas in Hezbollah bases in the Beka'a Valley in Lebanon.

Intelligence also shows that the Hezbollah had direct links with Palestinian cells operating in the territories - in addition to the ties it cultivates with Fatah. One center for such links is the city of Nablus in the West Bank.

It is thought that the guerrilla infrastructure the Hezbollah is setting up in the territories is intended to be deployed to disrupt any future cease-fire agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

The large airlift is believed to be a response to the urgent need of the Revolutionary Guards and the Hezbollah for additional equipment in Lebanon.

The previous route used by the Iranians to airlift equipment to the Hezbollah in Lebanon crossed over Turkey. However, following a request by Ankara that Iranian flights over Turkey en route to Damascus declare the nature of their cargo, the flights were stopped. The current airlift is believed to have crossed over Saudi Arabian and Jordanian airspace on its way to Syria.

The pace of weapons transfers to the Hezbollah in Lebanon was shown in the past to be dictated by security developments in Lebanon. Following the withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces from south Lebanon in May last year, Iran sought to replenish the military stores of the Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards stationed in Lebanon

According to Israeli estimates, the Hezbollah has some 7,000 Katyusha rockets.

-------- balkans

NATO Troops Training in Bosnia

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Bosnia-War-Crimes.html

SCEPAN POLJE, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- Thousands of NATO troops launched a routine training exercise Wednesday in eastern Bosnia, where the U.N. war crimes tribunal's two most-wanted suspects are believed to be hiding.

Although the annual exercise officially has nothing to do with the hunt for former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his wartime military leader, Gen. Ratko Mladic, it raised expectations the two fugitives indicted for genocide in the Bosnian war won't elude authorities for long.

The three-day exercise involves 2,000 NATO troops from Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Morocco. It began in the village of Kalinovik, Mladic's birthplace.

The NATO-led force, which is made up of 19,500 troops from 34 countries, is in charge of keeping the peace in Bosnia, but it occasionally arrests war crimes suspects and hands them over to the tribunal based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Speculation that the arrests of Karadzic and Mladic could be imminent has soared since former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was handed over to the U.N. court last month. Karadzic is believed to be on the run within Bosnia, often changing his hide-outs in an attempt to evade capture. Mladic was seen in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, as recently as last month, but is said to frequently cross into neighboring Bosnia.

Both were indicted for genocide for atrocities their forces committed during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, including the infamous massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.

NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson warned last week it was only a matter of time before Karadzic and Mladic were captured, but he cautioned that Bosnian suspects are not always in the country and sometimes hide in neighboring nations where NATO peacekeepers have no jurisdiction to act.

Bosnians interpreted his remarks as a reference to the area along the Bosnia-Montenegro border, where both suspects come from and are believed to be hiding.

Karadzic was born in a small village in the mountains on the Montenegrin side, where special police forces loyal to Montenegro's pro-Western government are rumored to be trying to hunt him down in cooperation with NATO forces on the Bosnian side.

The Montenegrin government officially denies Karadzic is in its territory, but says it will arrest him if he strays across. However, a high-ranking government official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that special forces were in the area. That official refused to say how many troops were there or to link their deployment to Karadzic.

Karadzic's supporters fear the military exercise might be a cover for an operation under way to nab him.

Just to the north, in the border town of Visegrad, a 50-year-old man who gave his name only as Milan B. said Karadzic could be killed in such an operation, and if that happened, his supporters would exact brutal revenge on NATO soldiers.

``If they kill him, none of them will get out of here alive,'' he said.

Officers stationed at the Scepan Polje border crossing between Bosnia and Montenegro said they had received hundreds of phone calls over the past two days from local and foreign journalists inquiring about the timing of the military exercise.

French Gen. Maurice Amargera, who is in charge of the sector, told reporters the exercise was routine and had been announced in advance.

``I would be surprised if we would encounter Karadzic or Mladic,'' he said. However, if it happened, ``we would just arrest them and I would be very proud. Surprised, but proud.''

--------

Tribunal Reveals Genocide Charges

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-War-Crimes-Bosnia.html

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) -- War crimes prosecutors revealed a secret indictment Wednesday against a former Bosnian Serb security chief charged with the genocide of Muslims and Croats during the Bosnian war.

Stojan Zupljanin, the former head of Serbian security services and special adviser to wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadic, has been charged with 12 counts of genocide, torture, murder, persecution, extermination and deportation for atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, according to his indictment.

Zupljanin, believed by tribunal officials to be near Banja Luka, was secretly indicted in 1999 along with Gen. Momir Talic and Radoslav Brdjanin, both of whom were arrested last year and are awaiting trial in the Netherlands, where the court is based.

Talic, a Bosnian Serb military chief, and Brdjanin, a former deputy prime minister, pleaded innocent to allegations of genocide and crimes against humanity in January 2000.

Zupljanin, 49, has been charged with every crime in the tribunal's statute. Prosecutors allege that Serb forces under his command unleashed a campaign of terror to rid Serb-dominated regions of non-Serbs and create a ``greater'' Serbia.

War crimes prosecutors requested that the indictment be made public to pressure Bosnian Serb authorities and the NATO-led international Stabilization Force in Bosnia, known as SFOR, to detain him and transfer him to the court.

Prosecutors allege that as a leading official -- at one point holding the position of internal affairs minister in the Serb-held Croatian territory of Krajina -- Zupljanin should have prevented the atrocities or punish the culprits who committed them.

Forces under Zupljanin's command attacked Muslim and Croat villages throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, murdered the inhabitants and deported others to concentration camps where they were tortured, sexually assaulted and starved, the indictment says.

Zupljanin is the 13th official to be openly indicted for genocide by the U.N. court, established by the Security Council in 1993 to prosecute the individuals responsible for atrocities during the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. There has not yet been a genocide conviction.

-------- iran

Iran Fighting a Losing Drug War
Armed Villagers Struggle to Seal Afghanistan Border

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4720-2001Jul16?language=printer

KOOHSEFID, Iran -- The call to arms wailed over the loudspeakers of the village mosque: "Get ready to fight!"

Two dozen men and boys clutching Kalashnikov assault rifles raced out of their baked-mud houses, clambered aboard trucks and headed for battle across an east Iranian desert already seared by the 8 a.m. sun.

Within two hours, 130 police officers and armed volunteers from surrounding villages converged on the enemy -- suspected Afghan drug smugglers who had stopped to have tea on the side of a narrow mountain road.

"We circled around them, there were shouts, and the shooting started," said Ibrahim Gholami, 68, chief of the Koohsefid village guards and one of several participants who described the recent confrontation. "We killed four of them." They also rescued a hostage who had been kidnapped from a nearby village by the alleged smugglers.

Here in the austere badlands along its eastern border with Afghanistan, Iran is waging one of the world's most violent and hard-fought campaigns against drug trafficking. A nation that Washington labels a sponsor of international terrorism, Iran has become the critical bulwark between the globe's largest opium supplier and consumers in Europe, the Middle East and, increasingly, the United States.

Last year Iran seized 85 percent of all the opium and nearly half of the heroin and morphine captured worldwide -- 278 tons of opiates, according to the U.N. Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention.

Even so, officials here concede they are losing this war.

"If we built the Great Wall of China, the traffickers would still find a way to get in," said Hossein Ketabdar, the anti-drug chief of Khorasan province, which is jammed against Afghanistan and Turkmenistan on Iran's eastern border. "We shoot one today, and tomorrow there are two."

More than 3,000 Iranian law enforcement officers have been killed in combat with suspected drug traffickers in the past two decades, most on the border with Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan. Last year Iranian police and village guards waged more than 1,500 gunfights with narcotics traffickers, an average of about four a day.

The drug runners regularly outnumber and outgun the police. Iranian authorities have reported drug caravans with dozens of vehicles and pack animals, guarded by men equipped with antiaircraft missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, machine guns, night-vision goggles and satellite telephones.

In an effort to stanch the hemorrhage of illegal drugs across its borders, the Iranian government has armed tens of thousands of villagers, constructed hundreds of miles of trenches, berms and fences, and posted 30,000 armed law enforcement officers on its vast borders.

"No other country has taken the fight to the Afghan drug trade to this extent," the U.S. State Department wrote in its most recent annual report on international drug trafficking.

Afghanistan's illegal drug trade has escalated dramatically and become vastly more organized, profitable and violent since the Taliban, a radical Islamic militia, took control of most of the country five years ago, according to Iranian and international law enforcement officials.

Last year, Afghanistan produced 70 percent of the world's opium -- three times the output of Burma, its closest competitor. And, in the past two years, Afghan drug organizations have increased profits by producing their own high-grade heroin rather than exporting opium, heroin's principal ingredient, for processing.

Several months ago, one of the Taliban's top clerics issued a decree banning the farming of poppies, the raw material in opium and heroin. Although opium seizures have dropped in the past six months, skeptical Iranian officials said they believe the announcement was a ploy to drive up the price of opium, which had fallen to record lows, and to use up huge stockpiles that had collected in Afghan warehouses. International authorities said it will take two or three more harvests to determine whether the decree is being enforced.

More than two decades of isolation from much of the outside world has left Iran poorly prepared for its escalating drug war. Traffickers have more advanced telecommunications equipment and weapons than do the police. Drug detection techniques are outdated. Antiquated laws that only now are being rewritten have made it virtually impossible to pursue drug-related money-laundering cases, conduct undercover drug operations or arrest traffickers for possessing the chemicals used in making morphine and heroin.

As a result, Khorasan's anti-drug chief, Ketabdar, made the kind of plea to the outside world that a man in his position would not have dared utter even a few years ago: "We need help."

The traffickers' success stems in part from Iran's rugged geography. For hundreds of years, invading forces have swarmed through the nearby passes of the 1,000 Mosque Mountains and marauded across the sepia desert flatlands that do not separate Iran and Afghanistan so much as blur the boundary between them.

That makes the border all the more appealing to modern invaders like Hassan Ayoub, 38, an Afghan whose thick, black mustache dominates his freckled face. Ayoub said he used to make the clandestine trip across the border at least twice a year, packing 30 to 80 pounds of opium in a knapsack or on the back of a donkey. Today he is among the 55 percent of the inmate population in Mashhad Central Prison in the capital of Khorasan province who are serving time on drug charges.

Although Ayoub's story was impossible to verify independently, it was typical of the accounts repeated by many Afghan traffickers: He worked another man's land, taking home one-tenth of the earnings from each season's harvest of wheat and barley. Then came the droughts, and he was earning one-tenth of next to nothing.

For Ayoub, becoming a drug courier was as easy as walking into one of the many opium storehouses in his west Afghanistan city of Herat, barely 70 miles from the Iranian border.

"They'd leave it open like a shop," Ayoub said. "Anyone could come in. You take something and agree to bring it to Iran." Runners are required to return 60 percent of their proceeds to the warehouse. Some gangs reportedly also rent weapons to couriers.

Last year, Ayoub decided to stay in Iran, working the distribution networks from this side of the border. When he didn't return to Herat with his last payment, his brother-in-law was taken hostage. Although he was released after two months under orders that he report Ayoub's whereabouts, Ayoub said he has sent his wife and two young children into hiding for fear they will be abducted.

That brutal enforcement tactic has prompted many smugglers who lose their drugs in police ambushes to, in turn, kidnap Iranian villagers for ransom to make their payments, according to Iranian police.

This cycle of violence has taken a heavy toll among the people of eastern Iran. In Koohsefid, a mud village molded from the desert floor of northeastern Khorasan province, Gholami, a farmer, husband to three wives and father of 22 children, commands the 30-member volunteer guard force.

About 30 miles from Turkmenistan, just over 60 miles from the Afghan border and 500 miles from the Iranian capital, Tehran, there are few signs of the 21st century. Houses are constructed of baked mud. Village women take turns baking flat bread each day in a communal mud oven. The hamlet of 300 inhabitants has one telephone and no satellite dish.

No place in all of Iran has been hit harder by the drug war than Khorasan province. Iranian officials have identified 90 smuggling routes into the province, and last year law enforcement authorities seized 44 tons of drugs here, more than in any other location in the country. Sixty-two law enforcement officers and 840 suspected drug traffickers died in gunfights.

"Drugs have always been smuggled around here," said Gholami, a fur cap perched over his sun-creased face even in the 100-degree heat. "But in the last four years, the activity has intensified. Now they kidnap ordinary people and hold them hostage in the mountains."

Last year, Gholami said, one of his sons-in-law was kidnapped as he was guarding his sheep. During one 10-day period last December, Iranian law enforcement authorities in Khorasan said they shot dead 82 suspected Afghan drug traffickers and freed 64 hostages the traffickers had reportedly held captive.

"We're always afraid," said 13-year-old Maryam Bahonar as she washed tea glasses in a muddy stream that trickled through Qalepokhtook, a border village about a 40-minute drive from Koohsefid. "We're worried they might come and attack us." Kidnappings and raids against villagers for food and shelter have become so common that the government has armed civilians in 1,000 Khorasan villages with "tens of thousands" of AK-47s and machine guns, according to law enforcement authorities.

"Whoever's capable of holding a gun can be a volunteer," said Mohammad Gholami, 62, who leads the Qalepokhtook guards and is the brother of Koohsefid's commander. "If it's necessary, we'll arm the women as well."

-------- israel

Israeli Missiles Hit Bethlehem
Palestinians Strike Back in Jerusalem

By Lee Hockstader
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9455-2001Jul17?language=printer

BETHLEHEM, West Bank, July 17 -- An Israeli helicopter on an assassination mission fired guided missiles at a hut in Bethlehem today, killing four Palestinians, and a few hours later Palestinians fired mortars for the first time into a Jewish neighborhood on the edge of Jerusalem.

Israel said the Palestinians -- killed in a sun-soaked orchard where they raised pigeons, canaries and chickens -- included operatives of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, who were planning a terrorist attack at the closing ceremonies next week of the Maccabiah Games. The Games, which began this week amid extraordinarily tight security, are held quadrennially in Israel and are known informally as the Jewish Olympics.

Palestinian officials condemned the killings as an example of Israeli state terrorism that undercuts efforts to restore calm. It was at least the fourth such operation in the last month.

The United States and its European allies have criticized the assassinations carried out by Israel against a number of Palestinian militants involved in the nine-month-old uprising against Israel's military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. Without specifically condemning today's killings, the State Department called on Israel to exercise restraint, saying "there is no military solution to this conflict." But the Israeli army said it will continue to target "terrorists who are planning attacks."

"We are talking about a clear-cut preventive operation," an Israeli military official said of today's strike.

In recent days, Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority and his security chief on the West Bank, Jibril Rajoub, have issued statements urging Palestinians to stop the attacks, especially inside Israel proper. But Hamas officials suggested they will seek revenge for today's missile strike.

"Hamas will never forget the blood of its martyrs, and when our civilians are brutally killed, the military wing of Hamas will never keep silent and will respond in the time and the place it determines," Abdel Aziz Rantissi, a senior Hamas official, told the Reuters news agency.

Clashes in recent days, including Palestinian sniper attacks and retaliation by Israeli tank cannons, have extinguished most of the talk of a gradual end to fighting that followed a U.S.-brokered cease-fire agreement one month ago. Despite mediation by CIA Director George J. Tenet and a hastily arranged follow-up visit by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, the accord never produced a genuine cease-fire.

As Israel declared a nationwide security alert and both sides braced for further attacks, Israelis and Palestinians fought gun battles tonight in Hebron, in the West Bank, and around Gilo, a Jewish neighborhood built on land captured in 1967 on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, near where the army said two Palestinian mortar shells fell harmlessly a few hours before.

Although Palestinians have regularly used mortars in the Gaza Strip, today's attack marked the first of its kind around Jerusalem and the West Bank. In reaction, the army announced plans to reinforce armored and infantry units in the area.

The day's violence occurred on the heels of a Palestinian suicide bombing that killed two young Israeli soldiers and left several others badly wounded Monday evening. A few hours afterward, Israel responded with tank blasts directed at Palestinian security positions in the West Bank cities of Jenin and Tulkarm.

Islamic Jihad, another Palestinian militant group, took responsibility for the suicide bombing, which it said was carried out by a Jenin man in his twenties whose cousin was killed by Israeli tank fire several months ago. The group said it had dozens more suicide bombers waiting to act and warned Israel against "any act of stupidity against the Palestinian people."

The Palestinian militants in Bethlehem were hit by at least three wire-guided missiles fired by a pair of Israeli helicopter gunships. At least two of the men were inside a cinder block hut situated among grapevines and a lush grove of olive, pear, lemon and pomegranate trees when the first two missiles struck. They obliterated the place. A few minutes later, after other men had apparently approached the smoking rubble, at least one more missile slammed into the site, killing two of them. At least a dozen people were injured, the Palestinians said.

The Israeli army said in a statement that one of the dead, identified by Hamas as Omar Saada, 45, commanded the group's military wing in the Bethlehem area. At least one of the other dead men was identified by neighbors and relatives as a Hamas operative, and two others were Saada's relatives.

Shortly after the missile strikes, all that was left of the hut was a pile of cinder blocks strewn amid the fruit trees, as well as a half-dozen dead birds, the odd patch of blood and entrails, and a shattered television.

"It's a big loss," said a victim's relative at the scene, who declined to give his name. "We have many orphan children now, and women to care for." He estimated the four men had more than 20 children among them, the youngest an infant of 6 months.

Further increasing tensions, Israel's public security minister, Uzi Landau, issued an order banning any large gathering at a scheduled memorial service for Faisal Husseini, the Palestinian leader in Jerusalem who died at the end of May. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of mourners had been expected to attend the service tonight at Orient House, the Palestinian headquarters in East Jerusalem where Husseini had his office.

After the order was published this morning, Israeli police scuffled with Palestinians on the usually quiet street in front of Orient House, and a few of them charged briefly inside the gates, swinging their truncheons as they went. By tonight, hundreds more heavily armed police had been deployed around Orient House to prevent all mourners except Husseini's family from attending the service. Among those blocked was Ahmed Querei, speaker of the Palestinian parliament and a lifelong friend of Husseini.

Landau, one of the most hard-line members of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government, said he issued the ban because of concerns the service would turn into an occasion of Palestinian nationalism and violence. He said he was appalled by Husseini's funeral June 1, at which thousands of Palestinians, some waving flags for militant organizations, marched through Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem.

"This is not going to take place in Jerusalem again," Landau said.

Staff writer Alan Sipress in Washington contributed to this report.

----

More Israeli Soldiers Enter W. Bank

By Ibrahim Hazboun
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001; 10:53 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline105322_000.htm

BETHLEHEM, West Bank -- Extra Israeli soldiers, tanks and military vehicles took up new positions Wednesday in the West Bank, beefing up their presence around Palestinian towns as tension and violence escalate.

Israeli officials denied the troop reinforcements were part of a plan to launch a major assault or reoccupy land under Palestinian control. Israeli media have reported that the military has drawn up such plans and the new troops raised Palestinian concerns.

"Contrary to the reports we don't intend to reconquer, so to speak, the territories," Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said in London, where he arrived for talks with British leaders.

Raanan Gissin, a top aide to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, called the reports "absolute nonsense," saying the new forces were "intended as a deterrent."

Meanwhile, relatives and masked, armed comrades mourned four Palestinians killed Tuesday in an Israeli assassination strike, including the target, Omar Saadeh, a Bethlehem-area Hamas military leader Israel says was plotting a major terror attack.

After friends and relatives kissed the bodies wrapped in green Hamas flags, young men carried them on stretchers through Bethlehem streets. Thousands followed; some sobbed, others chanted anti-Israeli slogans and shouted "Revenge, Revenge!" Israeli flags were set ablaze in the city, which was observing a general strike.

Additional Israeli soldiers arrived at existing West Bank checkpoints early Wednesday. Others took up positions along roads, stopping and searching passing cars. No figures were available on the size of the buildup, made public late Tuesday by Israeli military sources.

Many Palestinians traveling from Bethlehem to Jerusalem bypassed the crowded checkpoint on foot, taking dirt paths skirting the main road. Black smoke rose from a burning tire - a common symbol of Palestinian annoyance with Israeli measures - on the Bethlehem side of the checkpoint.

Near Gilo, an Israeli neighborhood on disputed land near Jerusalem, more military vehicles pulled up behind concrete barriers on the hillside overlooking the Palestinian town of Beit Jalla.

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat condemned the buildup on arriving in Cairo, Egypt, for a meeting of Arab foreign ministers: "What is happening now with Israeli escalation shows their intention to continue their aggression."

Violence of the past few days, including a suicide bombing that killed two Israelis and the Israeli assassination strike, have left in tatters the always wavering cease-fire negotiated last month by CIA chief George Tenet.

Ahmed Abdel-Rahman, general secretary of the Palestinian Cabinet urged the international community to act quickly to get the cease-fire back on track. But he added that Palestinians "will defend themselves against the Israeli aggression - and we will not be terrorized by the additional Israeli tanks or gunships."

Israel's security Cabinet, led by Sharon, met Wednesday and agreed on ways to prevent Palestinians from crossing into Israel in areas near larger West Bank towns that border Israeli territory, such as Tulkarem and Qalqilya. Gissin said measures would include additional monitoring, patrols and sniffer dogs and perhaps electronic sensors.

Targeted killings of Palestinian militants suspected of plotting terror attacks also are part of Israel's effort to prevent strikes inside Israeli territory. The four Palestinians being buried Wednesday were killed by helicopter missile fire at the cinderblock chicken coop where they were gathered in Bethlehem.

Military sources said Saadeh, a Bethlehem-area Hamas military leader, was planning an attack for next week's closing ceremony of the Maccabiah Games, the Jewish Olympics that opened Monday.

Nasser Ahmed, a 36-year-old mourner, said Israel alone is escalating the conflict through such assassinations. "These four martyrs are my neighbors and friends and Israel caused me to lose them," Ahmed said.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer defended the strike: "Hamas (activists) who in the past were responsible for many attacks ... came to the end of their road."

A few hours later on Tuesday, Palestinians fired the two mortar shells in the Gilo area, setting off a fierce exchange of fire between Palestinians and Israeli forces.

Until Tuesday, mortar attacks had been confined to the Gaza Strip area, where the Israeli army said two mortar shells were fired Wednesday at Netzarim settlement and two more at an Israeli kibbutz, or collective farming village, just outside Gaza. It also reported scattered gunfire exchanges in the West Bank. There were no reports of casualties.

In fighting since Sept. 28, 521 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 128 on the Israeli side.

-------- nato

Putin: NATO Should Change or Disband

By Vladimir Isachenkov
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline113429_000.htm

MOSCOW -- Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that his country should be allowed to join NATO or the alliance should be disbanded and replaced by a new body that includes all of Europe and Russia.

In his first major Kremlin news conference, Putin also said Russia has no plans for a joint response with China to counter U.S. moves to build a missile defense system. The prospect of a coordinated stance was raised by Putin's meetings this week with the Chinese president.

The Russian president - who in two days attends the G-8 summit in Italy gathering the leaders of the world's top economic nations - said the U.S.-led NATO alliance has outlived its usefulness, having been created during the Cold War to oppose the Soviet bloc.

"There is no more Warsaw Pact, no more Soviet Union, but NATO continues to exist and develop," he said.

"We do not see it as an enemy," he said. "We do not see a tragedy in its existence, but we also see no need for it."

NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe creates "different levels of security on the continent ... which does not correspond to today's realities and is not caused by any political or military necessity."

He called instead for the creation of a "single security and defense space in Europe," which he said could be achieved either by disbanding NATO, or by Russia joining it, or by the creation of a new body in which Russia could become an equal partner.

The Kremlin gathering Wednesday was the first time Putin has allowed such a large, open press conference in Moscow, with some 500 journalists, no pre-screened questions and opportunities for follow-ups - a sign of the leader's growing confidence after 19 months in power. Putin used the opportunity to lay out a range of foreign and domestic policies.

But despite the tone which could seem anti-American at times, Putin was full of praise for his U.S. counterpart, President Bush.

"I do not share the opinion of those who say he lacks experience," Putin said, describing Bush as a warm person, pleasant to talk to and even "a little bit sentimental."

His comments on China came days after Putin signed a comprehensive friendship treaty with Chinese President Jiang Zemin, which had raised prospects for a joint stance against U.S. plans to develop a missile shield and scrap the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty.

Both countries staunchly oppose the U.S. plans and warn it could spark a new arms race.

But Putin appeared to rule out coordinating with China. "We have enough means to respond to any changes ourselves," he said.

Putin spoke as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell met in Italy with his Russian counterpart, Igor Ivanov, in talks dominated by the American missile defense plans.

Powell later described the two-hour meeting as "very, very friendly" and Ivanov said Russia was still open to "a constructive dialogue" despite the wedge missile defense has driven in relations.

"The success of this dialogue will, by and large, determine the strategic stability of the entire world," Ivanov said.

In a joint statement after their talks earlier this week, Jiang and Putin said the 1972 ABM treaty was a "cornerstone of strategic stability" that must be preserved.

But they did not comment on the United States' successful test of a missile interceptor on Sunday - suggesting suggests two countries do not view Washington's plans quite the same way.

In the news conference, Putin also called for peace in the Middle East, saying the current Israeli-Palestinian violence has "practically erased" past progress on finding a solution. He also spoke in favor of lifting sanctions against Iraq.

He dismissed calls to remove the body of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin from a Red Square mausoleum, saying it could lead to civil unrest. He also praised a series of reform laws recently adopted by the parliament's lower house as a move toward "liberalization of the economy and the exclusion of unfounded state intervention."

Putin appeared at ease at the press conference, answering every question and going beyond the scheduled one-hour length.

Previously, Putin had confined his interviews mostly to carefully managed sessions where his staff tried to screen most questions, or to meetings with small groups of reporters where follow-up questions were frowned upon.

--------

Putin Sees No Need for NATO

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-Putin-NATO.html

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia does not view the U.S.-led NATO alliance as an enemy but sees no justification for its existence, President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday.

``We do not see it as an enemy,'' Putin told reporters in the Kremlin. ``We do not see a tragedy in its existence, but we also see no need for it.''

NATO's expansion into Eastern Europe creates ``different levels of security on the continent ... which does not correspond to today's realities and is not caused by any political or military necessity.''

Putin called for the creation of a ``single security and defense space in Europe,'' which he said could be achieved either by disbanding NATO, or by Russia joining it, or by the creation of a new body in which Russia could become an equal partner.

Putin argued that NATO was created as a Cold War alliance aimed against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellites and has outlived its time.

``There is no more Warsaw Pact, no more Soviet Union, but NATO continues to exist and develop,'' he said.

Putin dismissed claims that today's NATO was a political alliance, saying NATO's bombing raids on Yugoslavia were the work of a ``military organization, and we're not happy about it.''

--------

NATO fans anticipation of arrests

By ALEXANDAR S. DRAGICEVIC
The Associated Press
http://www.canoe.ca/CNEWSBalkans0107/18_nato-ap.html

SCEPAN POLJE, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- Thousands of NATO troops launched a routine training exercise Wednesday in eastern Bosnia, where the U.N. war crimes tribunal's two most-wanted suspects are believed to be hiding.

Although the annual exercise officially has nothing to do with the hunt for former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his wartime military leader, Gen. Ratko Mladic, it raised expectations the two fugitives indicted for genocide in the Bosnian war won't elude authorities for long.

The three-day exercise involves 2,000 NATO troops from Germany, Spain, France, Italy and Morocco. It began in the village of Kalinovik, Mladic's birthplace.

The NATO-led force, which is made up of 19,500 troops from 34 countries, is in charge of keeping the peace in Bosnia, but it occasionally arrests war crimes suspects and hands them over to the tribunal based in The Hague, Netherlands.

Speculation that the arrests of Karadzic and Mladic could be imminent has soared since former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic was handed over to the U.N. court last month. Karadzic is believed to be on the run within Bosnia, often changing his hide-outs in an attempt to evade capture. Mladic was seen in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital, as recently as last month, but is said to frequently cross into neighboring Bosnia.

Both were indicted for genocide for atrocities their forces committed during Bosnia's 1992-95 war, including the infamous massacre of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.

NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson warned last week it was only a matter of time before Karadzic and Mladic were captured, but he cautioned that Bosnian suspects are not always in the country and sometimes hide in neighboring nations where NATO peacekeepers have no jurisdiction to act.

Bosnians interpreted his remarks as a reference to the area along the Bosnia-Montenegro border, where both suspects come from and are believed to be hiding.

Karadzic was born in a small village in the mountains on the Montenegrin side, where special police forces loyal to Montenegro's pro-Western government are rumored to be trying to hunt him down in cooperation with NATO forces on the Bosnian side.

The Montenegrin government officially denies Karadzic is in its territory, but says it will arrest him if he strays across. However, a high-ranking government official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity that special forces were in the area. That official refused to say how many troops were there or to link their deployment to Karadzic.

Karadzic's supporters fear the military exercise might be a cover for an operation under way to nab him.

Just to the north, in the border town of Visegrad, a 50-year-old man who gave his name only as Milan B. said Karadzic could be killed in such an operation, and if that happened, his supporters would exact brutal revenge on NATO soldiers.

"If they kill him, none of them will get out of here alive," he said.

Officers stationed at the Scepan Polje border crossing between Bosnia and Montenegro said they had received hundreds of phone calls over the past two days from local and foreign journalists inquiring about the timing of the military exercise.

French Gen. Maurice Amargera, who is in charge of the sector, told reporters the exercise was routine and had been announced in advance.

"I would be surprised if we would encounter Karadzic or Mladic," he said. However, if it happened, "we would just arrest them and I would be very proud. Surprised, but proud."

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

Pentagon Revives Reagan-Era Proposal

By Robert Burns
AP Military Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline043035_000.htm

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- In its push for more aggressive research into missile defense technologies, the Pentagon has proposed the first test of a space-based interceptor by 2006.

Details of the test are not yet worked out, and space-based weaponry - though a long-range possibility - is not the Pentagon's first priority for missile defense, said Robert Snyder, executive director of the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which manages the Pentagon missile defense research.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday at an Army-sponsored briefing on missile defense, Snyder said the proposed test would aim to demonstrate the concept of hitting a ballistic missile early in its flight with a projectile launched from space.

The concept was first pursued in the 1980s as part of President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, which aimed to create an impenetrable shield against attack on the United States by thousands of Soviet missiles. It never progressed to an actual test in space and was shelved in the early 1990s.

The Reagan administration also pursued putting lasers and X-rays in space as missile defense weapons, but they never were tested in space.

In the experiment planned for 2005-06, the projectile would not be based on a satellite because it would be intended only to prove the basic concept; instead it would be launched into space aboard a rocket, oriented as if it had been stationed in space and then released to chase down its target, Snyder said.

Snyder also said improvements and expansion of the Pacific testing range for missile defense will cost about $2 billion, of which $800 million is proposed for the 2002 budget. The Pentagon has told Congress the expansion is needed for more frequent and realistic testing.

Baker Spring, a missile defense expert at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based think tank, said it is debatable whether the experiment planned by 2006 would violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. It clearly would be a violation, he said, if a spaced-based interceptor were deployed.

He said the issue of treaty violation is probably moot since the Bush administration has said it intends to go beyond the ABM treaty with other kinds of tests even before 2005. President Bush wants to either replace the treaty with some other arrangement that would permit missile defense deployment or exercise the U.S. right to withdraw from it after a six-month notice.

The Bush administration has not publicly emphasized the space-based weapon concept because it recalls the "Star Wars" tag that Reagan's critics attached to his Strategic Defense Initiative. The administration is focusing most of its missile defense efforts on anti-missile weapons based on land, at sea and in the air.

Snyder said that although the space-based concept is unproven, it has certain attractive aspects.

"The space assets are there, they're global, they're sitting up there in orbit available to use whenever," he said. "There's an advantage to global satellites and global interceptors in the sense that they're always there."

During the administration of Bush's father, the Pentagon briefly pursued a version of space-based missile defense that it called Brilliant Pebbles. It was based on the notion of building a constellation of 3,600 to 4,000 orbiting satellites from which anti-missile projectiles could be launched.

--------

Judge Blocks Army Training in Hawaii

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Hawaii-Army-Blocked.html

HONOLULU (AP) -- A federal judge, siding with a Native Hawaiian group,temporarily blocked the Army's planned live ammunition training in a remote valley.

A group called Malama Makua contends there is a serious potential for harm to endangered species and ancient Hawaiian cultural sites in the Makua Valley on the island of Oahu if the training, suspended since 1998, is allowed to resume.

U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday blocking the training pending an Oct. 29 hearing on whether the Army should have completed an environmental impact statement instead of the less-comprehensive environmental assessment it performed.

The Army had argued that troop readiness and morale have suffered because of the need to send soldiers to Thailand and the U.S. mainland for training at less ideal sites.

Training at the site was suspended in 1998 to address environmental concerns.

``Our position throughout this process is that the Army needs Makua in order to conduct realistic training,'' an Army statement said. ``We remain committed to demonstrating to the court that we can protect the environment in Makua and maintain the readiness of our forces in Hawaii.''

-------- OTHER

-------- alternative energy

Launch Planned for Solar Spacecraft

By Andrew Bridges
AP Science Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001; 4:28 a.m. EDT
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline042831_000.htm

LOS ANGELES -- The Planetary Society, founded by astronomer Carl Sagan to promote space exploration, is planning the first launch of an unmanned solar sail designed to use the pressure of the sun's rays to propel it through space.

The first test of the privately funded Cosmos 1 project is planned for Thursday, using a converted intercontinental ballistic missile launched from a Russian submarine to carry two Russian-built sail blades aloft.

The 30-minute suborbital flight is only designed to test how the blades unfurl, but it is preparation for a launch later this year of a spacecraft powered by a pinwheel of solar sail blades.

The $4 million, privately funded project could lead to future spacecraft capable of exploring the planets, said Louis Friedman, executive director of The Planetary Society and the project's director.

The solar sail is designed to use the steady pressure of photons hitting it to move forward, just as a sail uses the wind. The sun's pressure is strong enough to sail within the bounds of the orbit of Jupiter; beyond that, scientists envision using lasers to push the sail.

The sail is made of lightweight Mylar about a quarter the thickness of a garbage bag. Since it is powered by sunlight, a solar sail spacecraft would require little or no propellent.

"It's an opportunity to step into history. It's amazing in this day and age that there's a first available for the taking in space exploration," said Ann Druyan, chief executive officer of mission co-underwriter Cosmos Studios and Sagan's widow. A&E Network also sponsors the mission.

The Cosmos 1 spacecraft expected to launch this fall is designed to gradually spiral away from Earth as sunlight pushes its 720 square yards of sail. The 88-pound craft will carry two cameras and instruments to monitor its progress. It was built by the Babakin Space Center in Russia.

NASA has said it wants to launch an interstellar probe powered by space sails by 2010.

Solar-driven spacecraft will be slow to accelerate, but with time should reach velocities that will make travel across great distances possible. The sails could theoretically attain speeds 10 times greater than NASA's Voyager I and II, which travel at 38,000 mph.

-------- death penalty

Ohio Officials Oppose Electric Chair

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Electric-Chair.html

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Prison officials are asking the state Legislature to bar the use of the electric chair because of concerns about possible malfunctions.

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction wants lawmakers to change state law to make lethal injection the only option for death row inmates, department spokesman Joe Andrews said Wednesday.

``We're looking at other states and what's happened with the possibilities of malfunctions and so on, and we just think it would be more difficult for the staff,'' Andrews said.

``The probability of something going wrong and inducing more stress on staff is more likely with electrocutions. I don't think our staff needs to go through that,'' said Reginald Wilkinson, director of the state prison system.

Gov. Bob Taft has said he would support eliminating the electric chair.

The next scheduled execution is Sept. 12 for John W. Byrd Jr., who was convicted of killing a Cincinnati convenience store clerk in 1983. In the past Byrd has indicated he would choose the electric chair, but prison officials won't ask for his choice until about one week before the execution, Andrews said.

The last execution by electric chair in Ohio was in 1963. Ohio has executed only two men since then -- one last month and one in 1999 -- both by lethal injection.

Last year, Florida switched to lethal injection to stave off a U.S. Supreme Court review of whether the electric chair was cruel and unusual punishment. In previous electrocutions, one inmate bled from the nose and another had flames shoot from his mask.

Georgia's Supreme Court is currently considering whether use of the electric chair is unconstitutional. It is not expected to rule for several months.

Georgia legislators have already decided that anyone sentenced to death for crimes committed after May 1, 2000, will be executed by injection. But those convicted of crimes committed earlier are to die by electrocution.

Nebraska and Alabama are the only states that have the electric chair as their only means of execution.

-------- energy

GAO Issues Demand Letter on Energy

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Cheney-Energy-Meetings.html?searchpv=aponline

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The investigative arm of Congress demanded Wednesday that Vice President Dick Cheney identify all the industry leaders who helped formulate the Bush administration's energy policy. Refusal could lead to a court fight.

The White House, which is reviewing the request, said it would work with the General Accounting Office to resolve the issue.

The GAO letter follows repeated refusals by the vice president's office to provide names and titles of participants who met with the energy task force chaired by Cheney.

Under the law, the GAO could sue if the Bush administration fails to supply the data within 20 days.

This is the first demand letter ever issued by the GAO to the vice president of the United States, said Democratic Reps. John Dingell and Henry Waxman, who directed the agency to review the task force's work nearly three months ago.

The vice president's lawyer has told the GAO there were nine meetings of the task force and that staffers also met with many people to gather information.

The result was an energy policy, announced May 17, that is aimed at increasing the nation's supply of energy. It includes expanded oil and gas drilling on public land and a rejuvenated nuclear power system.

White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said the letter is under review and ``we will continue to work with the GAO to resolve this issue.''

The vice president's office ``has continued on its course of secrecy and obstinance,'' Dingell said in a statement.

``The White House should simply try telling the truth ... and stop hiding information that Congress and the public have a right to see,'' said Waxman.

The White House's position is that the GAO is entitled to information on the task force's costs, but that the congressional watchdog agency doesn't have authority to ask for lists of those with whom the task force met.

Waxman is also pressing for a Justice Department investigation of Karl Rove over the Bush political strategist's energy-related meetings.

The White House has acknowledged that Rove participated in meetings on the administration's energy policy while he owned stock in energy companies such as Texas-based Enron Corp. The White House has supplied no details on Rove's meetings.

-------- environment

Efficiency, Renewables Research Proves Wise Investment

By Cat Lazaroff
July 18, 2001
ENS
http://ens.lycos.com/ens/jul2001/2001L-07-18-06.html

WASHINGTON, DC, In a comprehensive review of federal research and development efforts to advance energy efficient and fossil fuel technologies, a scientific committee found these programs have yielded significant economic, environmental and national security benefits. The report suggests that the Bush administration should rethink plans to cut funding for alternative fuels and efficiency research.

Looking back as far as 1978, the report by the National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council examines 17 research and development (R&D) programs in energy efficiency and 22 programs in fossil energy funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). These programs yielded economic returns of an estimated $40 billion from an investment of $13 billion, the research council learned.

The development of more efficient compressors for refrigerators and freezers have helped the DOE to reap millions of dollars from a relatively small research investment (Photo courtesy D&R Int., LTD/National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

Three energy efficiency programs, costing about $11 million, produced almost three-quarters of this benefit. Most significant were advances made in compressors for refrigerators and freezers, energy efficient fluorescent lighting components called electronic ballasts, and low emission or heat resistant window glass.

Standards and regulations incorporating efficiencies attainable by these new technologies ensured that the technologies would be adopted nationwide, dramatically compounding their impact.

"Government funding can stimulate R&D benefits in areas where there is little incentive to improve existing technologies," said Robert Fri, director of the National Museum of Natural History and chair of the committee which wrote the report.

"We discovered that a few key programs have delivered benefits many times over the total amount invested," said Fri. "Also, some technologies are poised to have a significant impact once the economic climate is right, while other R&D efforts have added to our stock of engineering and science knowledge in several fields."

The committee's study emphasized that DOE research has produced large public benefits that cannot easily be reduced to dollar terms. Large environmental gains were identified chiefly in the fossil energy arena, where two technologies - atmospheric fluidized bed combustion, a cleaner, more thorough method for burning coal, and nitrogen oxides control to reduce emissions - decreased nitrogen oxides in the atmosphere by more than 26 million tons and sulfur dioxide by two million tons.

Technology that makes coal burn more cleanly, developed with DOE research funding, has helped reduce air pollution (Photo courtesy National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

The resulting environmental savings translated to more than $60 billion in damage and mitigation costs that were avoided. In addition, three programs - the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), integrated gasification combined cycle and advanced turbine systems - have created important options that could produce large benefits if economic or policy incentives support their commercialization.

However, the Bush administration's proposed budget would eliminate the PNGV program, and cut several other renewable energy research and development programs by more than $277 million in funds. Energy efficiency programs, with the exception of the home weatherization program, would be cut by up to 50 percent under the Bush plan.

"Continuing and expanding programs that have been in place as the country drifted to the brink of an energy crisis does not appear to be a wise course of action," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham when Bush released his proposed budget in April. "We need a better measure of success in the energy resource area."

The new National Research Council report would appear to provide that information. Among the program areas found to have fallen below expectations are ones in which the DOE attempted to introduce new technology that lacked the incentives necessary for adoption in the private sector.

These include fuel cells for home and industry uses and the now defunct magnetohydrodynamic electricity production technology.

The Ford Prodigy, a concept car that could travel 660 miles on a tank of diesel fuel, is among the potentially valuable technologies developed through the DOE funded the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (Photo courtesy Ford Motor Company)

For certain fuel cell technologies, the DOE has not identified clear technological goals, has funded a variety of disparate programs, and has not partnered with industry to help make products marketable. For example, magnetohydrodynamic electricity production, a technology that was identified as a potentially efficient method for generating electricity from domestic coal, continued to be funded long after the technology was found to be too costly and complex for widespread use.

The report was requested by Congress to identify general improvements that can be attributed to federal funding in these areas, including more efficient generation of electricity, lower environmental emissions, and reduced energy cost. The committee developed a comprehensive framework by which the DOE could evaluate the success of its programs.

Using this framework, the committee evaluated each program for its possible public benefits, both quantitative and qualitative. These included economic benefits, measured in dollars and energy saved; environmental gains, measured in tons of pollutants reduced; and national security benefits, measured in amount of fuel and energy saved.

Even research that did not result in immediately useful technologies may reap benefits to the public, the committee said. For example, economic conditions could change, paving the way for a new, more affordable technology, or knowledge gained from failed attempts may prove useful for developing future technologies.

"Overall, the NAS findings support our energy research efforts and provide clear indications that increasing efficiency, as well as increasing domestic energy supplies - two goals of the President's National Energy Plan - are supported by science and are cost effective," Secretary Abraham said on Tuesday, reflecting the Bush administration's recent attempts to boost appreciation for the energy efficiency programs supported by the White House.

"The findings also reaffirm the importance of a diversified energy research and development portfolio," added Abraham.

The president's budget would cut R&D funds for biomass gasification projects, like this wood burning power plant in Vermont. The research council's report identifies these programs as offering potentially enormous environmental and economic benefits (Photo courtesy National Renewable Energy Lab)

Clear performance targets and milestones should be defined at a program's start to help the DOE determine whether to proceed with a program or to abandon it before too much money has been spent, the committee recommended.

The committee found that market incentives, such as new standards and regulations, can sometimes be useful for helping programs achieve success by increasing the likelihood that a technology will be adopted.

Finally, the DOE should continue cost sharing efforts with industry, so that the most promising programs - those with the greatest potential for success in the marketplace - are funded.

The report "generally reaffirms our efforts" said Secretary Abraham. "The Energy Efficiency and Fossil Energy research budgets reviewed returned more than three dollars in economic benefits for every dollar invested to date, a return of investment that any business would envy."

Abraham took special note of the environmental benefits reaped from the DOE research programs.

"According to the NAS report, benefits gained from reduced power plant emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide together reach upwards of $60 billion or roughly five dollars for every dollar invested," said Abraham. "Technologies such as energy efficient lights, windows and refrigerators provided a net $30 billion in economic savings, far more than the $1.6 billion spent on energy efficient technologies examined by the NAS."

The research council committee recommended that future DOE programs include objectives that support economic, environmental and national security goals, the report advises.

"Our work at the Energy Department will continue to focus on those energy research programs that will provide the most cost effective and environmentally friendly benefits to the nation," Abraham concluded.

The National Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. It is a private, nonprofit institution that provides science and technology advice under a congressional charter.

----

House Committee Approves Bush's Alaskan Refuge Drilling Plan

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/18/politics/18ENER.html?searchpv=nytToday

WASHINGTON, July 17 - House Republicans moved swiftly today to transform President Bush's energy plan into legislation as a committee for the first time endorsed the White House plan to drill for oil in an Arctic wildlife refuge.

After a heated debate over the drilling provision the House Resources Committee voted 29 to 19 to kill a Democratic amendment to ban exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Five Democrats joined 24 Republicans in defeating the ban on Alaskan drilling, effectively endorsing the drilling plan.

The oil-drilling provision is now expected to move to the full House as part of a larger energy package in the coming weeks. But it faces a tough road there and an even tougher one in the Senate, where many Democrats and moderate Republicans oppose opening the refuge for oil exploration and have expressed resistance to expanded oil drilling on other federal lands.

Indeed, today's approval of oil drilling in the Arctic refuge sets the stage for a battle over Mr. Bush's energy plan on the House floor.

"I don't think we will drill in A.N.W.R," Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York, said, using the abbreviation for the Arctic refuge. "It's much talked about but it isn't going to happen."

In an effort to bolster the Alaska oil-drilling provisions, Republican leaders have enlisted the support of trade unions to battle the environmental groups and try to persuade Democrats and moderate Republicans to support the bill.

The strategy splits two traditionally Democratic constituencies. Many unions support the drilling bill because it would create jobs for their workers.

"We are putting everything into it we can, along with many other members of organized labor," said Jerry Hood, principal officer for Teamsters Local 959 in Alaska. "By the end of September, we will be planning for the environmentally responsible opening of A.N.W.R. because it is going to pass."

The White House has worked behind the scenes with union leaders to try to push the bill in Congress. Last week, James P. Hoffa, the general president of the teamsters, appeared at a news conference with Representative Don Young, an Alaska Republican, and Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton.

"I think the votes are there on A.N.W.R.," said Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, who helped write parts of the energy legislation. "We have to work it."

Also today, the Energy and Commerce Committee, hoping to lace the overall package with less contentious, more popular proposals, took up a bill to reward energy conservation and strengthen fuel efficiency standards for light trucks and sport utility vehicles, among other things.

Republicans plan to move other elements of the energy package to the full House later this week, including one that provides tax incentives for energy-efficient cars and solar energy devices.

But that measure is also running into opposition from Democrats, who said they supported the tax breaks but feared they would take too large a bite out of the budget surplus.

The committee has also postponed action on more complex energy bills dealing with electricity deregulation, the overhaul of electricity grids and the renewal of liability insurance for nuclear power plants.

Representative Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who is the committee's chairman, said it would take up those issues in the coming weeks.

The Republican push to move energy legislation comes as the public's concerns about energy appear to be waning. Gasoline prices have dipped and California has not yet suffered the rolling summer blackouts that had been feared.

Hoping to promote the White House plan, Mr. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and five cabinet secretaries traveled around the country to emphasize the need for a national energy policy.

House Republicans are moving swiftly on major elements of Mr. Bush's plan. But they are also trying to avoid following the exact tack taken by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, who have been criticized for focusing too much on oil and too little on conservation and other environmentally friendly policies.

By making conservation one of the first major elements of the package, Republicans are trying to undo some of the political damage.

Democrats today, though, castigated Republicans for doing too little to reduce energy use and said that the committee's measure to toughen fuel efficiency standards could do more harm than good.

"This bill is a lost opportunity," said Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat.

The efficiency provision was the product of a compromise between Mr. Tauzin and Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, the committee's ranking Democrat.

It would require the Transportation Department to raise fuel economy standards for sport utility vehicles and minivans high enough to save five billion gallons of gasoline from 2004 to 2010.

The White House has not endorsed any increases in fuel economy standards.

In light of a draft report by the National Academy of Sciences that calls for even greater increases in fuel economy standards, Democrats on the committee said that the measure did not go far enough.

"It will reduce consumption by one-tenth of one percent but, due to loopholes, it will actually worsen motor vehicle fuel economy standards," Mr. Waxman said.

Other provisions in the two energy bills include tax breaks for cleaner coal-burning technology, and more money to help low-income households winterize their homes and pay their energy bills.

One of several oil-related provisions would encourage oil production on federal lands; another would allow companies to pay royalties in gas or oil instead of cash.

The Resources Committee legislation, to which the arctic drilling measure was attached, was passed by the full committee tonight.

--------

Bush Criticized on Global Warming

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-Climate-Change.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush was accused by senators in both parties and scientists Wednesday of mishandling U.S. policy on global warming.

``The way President Bush handled this whole Kyoto thing -- from a public relations standpoint, he could have handled it a whole lot differently,'' Sen. George Voinovich, R-Ohio, said during a hearing by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee.

Voinovich asked James E. Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, if he and other scientists believe that the Bush White House has provided enough leadership on the issue.

``There's pretty widespread agreement that it's not as coordinated as it should be,'' Hansen replied.

Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., testified before the committee that the nearly $5 billion plan he is sponsoring with Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, paying for new research into technologies and two new climate change offices in the White House and Energy Department, would fill a void in the administration's current approach that ``only pays lip service'' to the challenge.

``We must go further than just making small, incremental improvements in our existing research and development programs,'' Byrd said. ``I hope that this Congress and this administration are willing to step up to the plate.''

Bush announced in March that the United States was abandoning the 1997 international climate treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan. He said the mandated reductions in industry emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that many scientists say are warming the globe would disproportionately damage the U.S. economy in relation to other nations.

That month, Bush also reversed a campaign promise to start regulating C02 emissions from coal-burning power plants as a pollutant. And in June, he announced a series of multimillion-dollar studies and initiatives aimed at reducing the impact of heat-trapping gases on the globe. The package, including a $120 million NASA research project on climate modeling, was partly intended to blunt criticism of his stance on the climate treaty.

``We are fully engaged in international discussions, and the president is moving forward with specific initiatives to advance the science and technological innovation that will help us toward our shared goal of reducing greenhouse gases,'' White House spokesman Scott McLellan said Wednesday.

Republican Sens. Fred Thompson of Tennessee and Robert Bennett of Utah also defended the administration's opposition to the treaty. Bennett said the treaty would place the United States ``chasing down the cliff ... of Kyoto.''

``The greatest enemy of the environment is poverty,'' he said.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has increased about 30 percent, Hansen told the committee. ``We're pretty darn sure that's almost entirely due to us, actually,'' he testified.

The view was echoed by Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center: ``The best evidence suggests the warming today is very unusual.''

Both Hansen and Karl were members of a panel of 12 scientists that recently sent Bush a report concluding that global warming is a real phenomenon and the United Nations-sponsored research into it is sound.

Bush has promised European allies and other countries negotiating on climate change this week in Bonn, Germany, that he would help devise an alternative to the Kyoto treaty that would ease global warming without hurting the U.S. and other economies.

-------- genetics

Bush Ally Supports Financing Limited Stem Cell Research

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/18/politics/18CND-STEM.html

WASHINGTON, July 18 - In a hint of how President Bush might resolve the divisive debate over embryonic stem cell experiments, Senator Bill Frist, a transplant surgeon and close ally of the president, today announced his qualified support of federal financing for the research "within a very carefully regulated, fully transparent framework."

At a Senate hearing, Mr. Frist, a Tennessee Republican who aides say has had several brief talks with the president about stem cell research, outlined a 10-point plan that would provide government money for such research over five years. But he called for restrictions that are opposed by leading scientists, including an unspecified limit on the cell variants, or lines, that researchers could work with.

The views of Mr. Frist, the only physician in the Senate, are important for two reasons. First, he strongly opposes abortion, and Mr. Bush is conscious that experiments involving human embryos greatly offend abortion opponents, who make up an important part of his political base. Second, Mr. Bush has previously looked to Mr. Frist for advice on health matters; during his election campaign, he adopted Mr. Frist's model for overhauling Medicare.

One prominent Republican who advises the administration said that in view of Mr. Frist's "ties to the White House, I don't think he'd go out there and take this political grief from the pro-life community if it didn't presage where the administration is going."

Today's hearing shed light on the scientific arguments in favor of embryonic stem cell research, and revealed how lawmakers are wrestling with the moral questions it poses. The cells, which hold promise for treating many diseases, are extracted from human embryos so tiny they could fit on the tip of a needle. But the embryos are destroyed in the process, and opponents liken the science to murder.

Among them is Senator Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican and opponent of the research, who said today that the experiments should not go forward until the most fundamental question of human existence - When does life begin? - has been answered. "This embryo is alive," Mr. Brownback said. "The central question remains: Is it a life?"

Senator Gordon Smith, Republican of Oregon and a supporter of federal financing of stem cell research, replied by quoting from the Book of Genesis - "And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life" - to argue that life requires the presence of the soul.

Mr. Smith talked of how Parkinson's disease has devastated his family, afflicting his grandmother, an uncle, a brother-in-law and a cousin, Morris K. Udall, the former representative from Arizona. As a young boy, Mr. Smith recalled, he watched his cousin "literally die in public."

--------

Federal report supports stem cell study on all fronts

USA Today
07/18/2001 - Updated 06:55 PM ET
The Associated Press
http://usatoday.com/news/washdc/july01/2001-07-18-stem-study.htm

WASHINGTON (AP) - Embryonic stem cell research should be included among the possible avenues for treating disease, federal researchers told the Bush administration as it considers whether to allow federal funding of the approach. Bush asked the federal researchers for more information on the issue, but the confidential report from the National Institutes of Health does not make a recommendation one way or the other on federal funding. Instead, an executive summary, obtained by The Associated Press, focused on science.

"During the next several years, it will be important to compare embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells in terms of their ability to proliferate, differentiate, survive and function after transplant, and avoid immune rejection," said the report.

The report was to be presented formally at a Senate subcommittee hearing Wednesday. The White House received a copy Tuesday, said presidential spokesman Scott McClellan.

"The report is one component of the scientific, ethical and legal issues involved," McClellan said. "The president intends to look at it in that context."

Bush is weighing whether to allow federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, which is opposed by some because isolating the cells requires the death of a human embryo.

Scientists believe they can learn to direct the development of embryonic stem cells to grow mature cells or tissues that could be used to treat disease. Some estimate that stem cells could benefit more than 100 million patients with such disorders as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes and spinal cord injuries.

Opponents of the research believe embryos should not be killed, even for the treatment of disease. Instead, they favor research using the adult stem cells, which are taken from mature organs and then manipulated in the lab.

The federal researchers said embryonic stem cells can develop into all types of cells and tissue, a flexibility that may be lacking in so-called "adult" stem cells taken from mature tissue. However, the report concludes, "the answers clearly lie in conducting more research."

A consistent theme of the report is that more research is needed before any firm, scientific conclusion can be reached on the relative medical value of the stem cell types.

Nonetheless opposing sides are contending the report validates their argument.

"They don't take ethics into consideration, they ignore some of the recent studies that show adult stem cells can change and proliferate, and still they conclude that adult stem cells have amazing potential," said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who opposes embryonic stem cell research.

To Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the report says that in some cases, "embryonic stem cells are more promising than adult stem cells."

Harkin, whose Senate panel oversees federal health spending, would push for legislation allowing the stem cell funding if Bush doesn't approve it.

-------- health

No - Stick Coating May Stay Indefinitely

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Teflon-Pollution.html

NEW YORK (AP) -- Heating nonstick coatings such as the Teflon on pots and pans can generate a chemical compound that persists in the environment indefinitely, research has found.

There is no evidence that the compound, trifluoroacetate, poses any threat to human health, said study author Scott Mabury. But because of its longevity and some of the other chemicals his research saw Teflon and similar substances producing, Mabury recommended more research on the potential environmental effects.

Mabury and three colleagues reported their findings in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

The scientists heated various fluoropolymers, which are used as nonstick coatings, engine oil additives and other products, to temperatures between 400 and 900 degrees. The heat caused a gradual breakdown of the fluoropolymers into a variety of other compounds that were released into the air.

The researchers said the compounds are also released, though more slowly, at normal cooking temperatures. They did not look at whether the compounds get into food during cooking.

Among the compounds released were a witches' brew of environmentally suspect chemicals. Besides trifluoroacetate they included:

-- Polyfluorocarboxylic and polyfluorocarboxylic acids, a family of chemicals that includes one being phased out of Scotchguard and other products because it accumulates in the human body.

-- Ozone-destroying CFCs.

-- Fluorocarbons, which contribute to global warming by trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Trifluoroacetate, or TFA, is known to be mildly toxic to some plants. Because it takes decades or centuries to break down, some scientists have speculated that it could accumulate and cause harm in certain locations, such as wetlands.

``The consequences of this TFA has never really been looked into,'' said Charles Driscoll, a professor at Syracuse University.

But there is little reason to believe that TFA or any of the other substances produced by heating fluoropolymers are causing serious environmental damage, Mabury said.

``There's not lots to worry about, frankly,'' said Mabury, a professor of chemistry at the University of Toronto. ``It's something that needs to be looked at.''

----

Fresh evidence backs broccoli as cancer fighter

Wednesday, July 18, 2001
By Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2001/07/07182001/reu_broccoli_44346.asp

WASHINGTON - Scientists have found fresh evidence that a chemical found in broccoli and other vegetables may cut the risk of cancer, a researcher said on Tuesday at a conference on nutrition and cancer.

Dr. Paul Talalay of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine said sulforaphane, the chemical contained in vegetables such as broccoli, brussels sprouts, kale, and cabbage, triggers cancer-blocking agents.

The chemical stimulates the activity of so-called phase 2 enzymes. "These enzymes don't operate at their maximum capacity, and boosting (their operating capacity) results in protection (from cancer)," Talalay said.

Direct antioxidants, such as vitamins C and E, latch onto carcinogens and neutralize them. Sulforaphane and other chemicals in the same family are indirect antioxidants - catalysts, rather than direct actors.

"The inducers, like sulforaphane, do not themselves take part in the destruction of the ... stress molecules," Talalay said. "They are not consumed."

Talalay, one of the first scientists to isolate sulforaphane in 1992, pointed to the research of colleagues in Japan and Baltimore as evidence that this biological reaction works to fight the onset of cancer. Researchers engineered mice without the genetic "switch" that helps sulforaphane stimulate phase 2 enzymes. In these mice, the incidence of cancerous tumors was 50 to 60 percent greater, Talalay said.

"This shows the protective mechanism is blunted," Talalay said.

Some plants, such as young, days-old broccoli sprouts that are engineered plants more consistently boost phase 2 enzyme activity, he said.

Other scientists, in a news briefing at the American Institute for Cancer Research's conference, pointed to chemical compounds found in other foods, such as green and chamomile tea, rosemary, mustard, and turmeric, as beneficial in inhibiting possibly toxic effects from phase 1 enzymes.

-------- imf / world bank / G8

Bush asks billions for poor nations

July 18, 2001
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20010718-841890.htm

President Bush yesterday proposed that the World Bank give away billions of dollars to poor countries, a move the international financing institution said would be disastrous for the long-term stability of world economics.

In a effort to change the perception that the new president is falling short of his call for compassion on the world stage, Mr. Bush said the United States "is and will continue to be a world leader on responsible debt relief."

"I propose that up to 50 percent of the funds provided by the developing banks to the poorest countries be provided as grants for education, health, nutrition, water supplies, sanitation and other human needs.

"It would be a major step forward. Debt relief is really a short-term fix. The proposal today doesn't merely drop the debt, it helps stop the debt," Mr. Bush said in a speech to the World Bank on the eve of his trip to Italy to meet with leaders of the most industrialized nations plus Russia, the Group of Eight.

"A world where some live in comfort and plenty, while half of the human race lives on less than $2 a day, is neither just nor stable," he said.

The World Bank now lends about $6 billion yearly to poor countries through the International Development Association (IDA). Mr. Bush wants to increase grants -- which now account for less than 5 percent of the funds directed to poor nations -- to $3 billion annually.

Mr. Bush called his proposals "compassionate conservatism at an international level."

World Bank officials, however, said the president's proposals could not be achieved without donor members providing billions of dollars more for aid, especially the Group of Eight nations (Germany, Italy, Canada, Britain, France, Russia and the United States). The United States this year gave $803 million, the most of any member country.

"In the very short run, there would not be a dramatic effect," said Jeff Lamb, director of resource mobilization for the World Bank. "If today we grant -- take any IDA country, Uganda, Ghana -- a loan of $10 million, there is a 10-year grace period before they start repaying. For 10 years the loan looks just like a grant on our balance sheet," he said.

"What happens in year 11, where you would be getting money back in on a loan, we won't get that. At that point, donors -- or somebody -- either have to start making up all of those grants that we've been making or else the capacity of IDA to help other poor countries just goes in the toilet."

Some World Bank officials said the president's proposal is merely political posturing because the effect would not be felt until Mr. Bush is no longer president. "He will be well out of office before there is any effect from his proposals," said one, who asked to remain anonymous.

Others said the Bush proposals have virtually no chance of passing muster with other donor nations, who have looked at increasing grants to about $1 billion a year. These officials said Mr. Bush can safely propose an extemely high price tag without fear that the United States will actually have to fund the increase.

But Alan Meltzer, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and chairman of a blue-ribbon panel that studied the World Bank, said the proposals will work, and the institution's claim that donations would have to increase dramatically is incorrect.

"That's a statement that is made out of ignorance. That's absolutely false. It's shameful that they continue to produce these canards.

"Despite what they say, the grants proposal would be more efficient; that is, they would be able to give more aid with the existing resources," Mr. Meltzer said.

The World Bank would give, for instance, half the amount of the requested loan and the poor country would be able to borrow the rest "because they have the bank's guarantee," Mr. Meltzer said.

"You can understand the motivation of the bank. The bank always wants to use any opportunity to get more money. It doesn't need more money, assuming the repayment of the existing loans," he said.

A spokesman for House Majority Leader Dick Armey said the Texas Republican, an outspoken critic of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, supports the president's proposals.

"The proposal generally tracks the Meltzer commission, which is something Mr. Armey has endorsed," Greg Crist said. "The feeling is this is the best course of action in giving those countries the financial boost they need to sustain their long-term growth and development."

Mary Ellen Countryman, White House assistant press secretary for foreign affairs, said the Bush proposals are simply plain speaking. "Let's call it what it is. A lot of the loans aren't getting paid back anyway."

Mr. Lamb, however, said the perception that debts held by poor countries are not repaid is simply untrue. "IDA's repayment record from those countries is pretty stellar. We have had around 3 or 4 percent of nonpayment over the years. In other words, countries do pay us back."

He said $40 of every $100 the World Bank lends to poor nations comes from repayment of debt.

While 23 countries, now known as Heavily Indebted Poor Countries under a program begun in the mid-1990s, have been relieved of $34 billion in loans from the World Bank, increasing grants to 50 percent "would completely change the nature of the funding you would have to have in order to do that," Mr. Lamb said.

"Having a bit more grant money, maybe 10, 15, 20 percent, for these very specific purposes, that kind of makes sense and it doesn't change the whole nature of their financing. To suddenly say, 'Let's convert 50 percent of it into a giveaway' is not really sustainable," Mr. Lamb said.

The president's proposals, he said, are merely a short-term fix.

"The proposals the president made, maybe they resonate with the sort of stuff about faith-based charity and such, but they don't resonate with conservative economics to me. That's the bottom line," he said.

In his speech, Mr. Bush made a pre-emptive strike on protesters who oppose globalization and free trade and are preparing to disrupt the G-8 meeting in Genoa.

"I respect the right to peaceful expression, but make no mistake -- those who protest free trade are no friends of the poor. Those who protest free trade seek to deny them their best hope for escaping poverty," he said.

Italian authorities are bracing for as many as 100,000 protesters during the summit.

-------- police / prisoners

FBI Arms, Computers Missing
Agency Says Hundreds Have Been Lost, Stolen

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9831-2001Jul17?language=printer

Hundreds of FBI weapons and laptop computers have been stolen or lost over the last decade, including one handgun used in a homicide and at least one laptop that contains classified information, Justice Department and FBI officials said yesterday.

Nearly 450 firearms are missing -- including semiautomatic pistols, revolvers, assault rifles and shotguns, officials said. The list includes 184 weapons stolen from agents' cars and homes, one of which was used in a slaying in the South, the only crime connected to one of the FBI guns, officials said.

An additional 265 weapons are unaccounted for. Many apparently were improperly kept by FBI agents who retired or were fired. FBI officials said they would pursue prosecutions of those former agents.

Thirteen of the 184 missing laptops are also believed to have been stolen, including one that contained classified information related to two closed espionage cases and three others that may contain secret files, FBI officials said.

The new revelations, reported yesterday by Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard to Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, are the latest blow to the beleaguered law enforcement agency. The bureau already is the focus of four separate investigations, including probes of the Robert P. Hanssen spy case and the embarrassing disclosure that the FBI had not turned over thousands of documents to defense attorneys for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh.

The search for missing items was prompted by requests from both Congress and William H. Webster, the former FBI and CIA director who is heading up one of the investigations into FBI security problems.

Yesterday's disclosures, made by senior Justice Department and FBI officials who declined to be identified, came the day before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on problems at the FBI and are certain to be brought up when senators question witnesses today.

In response, Ashcroft asked Inspector General Glenn A. Fine yesterday to inventory the entire Justice Department's stock of firearms, laptops and other items that might compromise public safety, national security or ongoing investigations. The FBI alone has an estimated 50,000 weapons and 13,000 laptop computers.

In March, Fine reported a similar problem at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which could not account for more than 500 weapons issued to its officers. Six INS weapons were later connected to crimes.

"The department must ensure the highest standards for the inventory and accounting of law enforcement equipment issued to department employees and agents," Ashcroft said in a statement. "In order for law enforcement organizations to be effective, they must have the public's confidence in their ability to perform not only the most complex duties, but also the most basic responsibilities."

The FBI said it has ordered its 56 field offices and other units to conduct an inventory of all bureau equipment worth $500 or more, from guns and computers to desks and other furniture. Those offices that do not complete a report by Sept. 30 will not receive money to keep operating until they do, FBI officials said.

"The intent is for that to be somewhat motivating," a bureau administrator said.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a longtime critic of the FBI's management and investigative lapses, said yesterday that "this disclosure of missing firearms and laptops is another indication of the need for fundamental reform."

"To have laptops missing that could have national security information on them would be atrocious," Grassley said. "For the FBI to have lost firearms and failed to account for them is inexcusable. . . . We need to know if proper procedures for sensitive inventory have been enforced by the FBI."

All FBI agents are issued service weapons -- currently Glock .40-caliber semiautomatic pistols -- upon graduation from the FBI Academy at Quantico, and many agents have several weapons issued to them, officials said. FBI weapons are also issued temporarily to other police officers participating in joint task forces.

Investigators looked for weapons and laptops lost or stolen since about 1990 and do not intend to go back farther. They did not track lost or stolen ammunition.

The stolen weapons were taken during car break-ins, home burglaries and, on a few occasions, armed robberies of FBI personnel, officials said.

Of the 265 lost weapons, 91 are training guns that are inoperable but could be converted back to use, and 70 others are linked to agents who retired, died or were fired from the bureau.

The whereabouts of the remaining 104 firearms are unknown, though some may have been destroyed or locked in storerooms without proper documentation, the FBI said.

FBI officials, who initially said yesterday that none of the weapons was linked to a homicide, declined to provide details of the slaying for fear of providing incorrect information. The weapon was stolen from an FBI agent in an unidentified jurisdiction and used in a slaying in a different city in the South, an official said.

All weapons reported stolen or missing from the FBI are supposed to be entered into the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, where they can later be matched with weapons retrieved by police. The Firearms Training Unit at Quantico is responsible for keeping track of all FBI weapons.

None of the missing laptops is linked to Hanssen, the recently imprisoned FBI spy who is believed to have given a personal computer with encrypted files to an exotic dancer he befriended, a top official said.

The missing computers also have no connection to the case of Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos nuclear scientist who pleaded guilty to a single felony count of mishandling classified nuclear data, or to the still unsolved case of a missing laptop at the State Department that contains classified data on proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The FBI participated in the investigation of the State Department case.

A top FBI official said the ongoing equipment review, although prompted by outside requests, is part of a "back to basics" approach at an agency that has often seen its accomplishments overshadowed by routine mistakes.

"There is clearly a significant effort underway to raise the level of accountability for things that used to be treated as mundane," the official said. "We need to get back to the basics and make sure we're doing those as well as we do everything else."

Last week, Ashcroft broadened Inspector General Fine's powers to investigate the FBI. But Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the missing guns and computers show the need for a separate inspector general exclusively focused on the FBI.

----

Senators Decry Lost FBI Equipment

By Jesse J. Holland
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, July 18, 2001
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20010718/aponline112251_000.htm

WASHINGTON (AP)- Senators said Wednesday the loss of 449 guns and more than 180 computers from the FBI proves the nation's premiere law enforcement agency needs to be reformed.

"There are some very, very serious management problems at the FBI," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Justice Department revealed Tuesday that 449 side arms and submachine guns and more than 180 computers - at least one containing classified data - are missing.

Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held an oversight hearing on the FBI's management Wednesday, were outraged at the loss of so much dangerous equipment.

"To have laptops missing that could have national security information on them would be atrocious," said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a longtime FBI critic. "For the FBI to have lost firearms and failed to account for them is inexcusable."

Added Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y: "The fact that, with computers with classified information and with weapons like machine guns, the FBI had such lax procedures is damning, especially for what has been regarded as the premier law enforcement agency in the world. One scratches one's head in wonderment and asks: 'How does a law enforcement agency lose guns, especially machine guns?'"

The FBI has been under fire for missteps going back years, including the failure to provide thousands of documents to Timothy McVeigh's lawyers, the Robert Hanssen spy case, the bloody Branch Davidian and Ruby Ridge standoffs and the botched investigation of former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee.

"Large FBI foul-ups used to be extraordinary events, yet now they appear to be deteriorating into regular occurrences," said the House Judiciary Committee chairman, Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.

Senators have complained for weeks that the FBI has a culture of covering up its mistakes and have offered several bills to reform the agency, including provisions for outside reviews and more power for agency watchdogs such as the inspector general's office.

The missing computers and weapons revealed Tuesday were discovered during a comprehensive inventory of equipment undertaken at the behest of the Justice Department. FBI officials said Tuesday the bureau tracks lost weapons, but this was the first time a serious effort was mounted to try to get an accounting of missing equipment from all FBI field offices.

Besides the theft of 184 FBI weapons, 265 were lost, said FBI and Justice officials, discussing the problem on condition of anonymity. Most of the missing weapons are handguns, officials said, but submachine guns are included.

Ninety-one of the missing guns were training weapons with firing pins removed, but one of the missing weapons had been used in a homicide, officials said. They gave no additional details.

In all 184 laptops are missing, including 13 believed to have been stolen, officials said. They said that in addition to one computer known to have contained classified information, three other missing machines might also have had classified material.

After the FBI reported the missing hardware, Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the Justice Department's inspector general to do a department-wide review of inventory controls over guns and other law enforcement equipment.

Two FBI administrators are to testify Wednesday, including Deputy Assistant Director Kenneth Senser, who has internal security as a primary duty. Senser already identified before Tuesday's revelations at least 15 security areas the agency needed to improve on, sources with knowledge of his testimony told The Associated Press on condition they not be named.

The missing equipment has been lost, stolen or otherwise unaccounted for over the last 11 or 12 years, FBI officials said.

They have ordered field offices to do comprehensive inventories by Sept. 30 of all equipment worth more than $500.

They also said the bureau will open criminal investigations into what happened to weapons given to some agents who have retired or been fired.

-------- terrorism

State Dept. Reports Terrorist Threat

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/news/AP-US-Terrorism.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Strong indications of possible imminent terrorist actions against the United States in the Arabian Peninsula were reported Wednesday by the State Department.

``As always, we take this information seriously,'' the department said in a public announcement. ``U.S. government facilities remain at a heightened state of alert.''

U.S. citizens were urged to remain vigilant and to exercise caution.

In the past, the statement said, terrorists have not distinguished between official and civilian targets.

Department officials said they had no further information on specific targets, timing or method of attack.

On June 22, the State Department warned Americans in the Middle East to be especially wary of the threat of terrorism.

The warning followed indictments in the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 19 Americans in Saudi Arabia. The warning said that Americans should maintain a low profile in the region.

-------- activists

Sri Lanka Opposition Vows to Defy Protest Ban

New York Times
July 18, 2001
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-srilank.html

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (Reuters) - Sri Lanka's opposition vowed Wednesday to go ahead with a massive rally in the capital, Colombo, Thursday, to protest the suspension of parliament despite police warnings that demonstrators would be arrested.

``We are going ahead with the march as planned. Let them do whatever they like. This is a democratic action and there are no laws against it,'' Gamini Athukorale, assistant leader of the main opposition United National Party (UNP), said.

The ban sets up yet another confrontation between the government and the opposition, the latest in a series since the ruling party lost its majority in parliament last month with the defection of a key ally.

The opposition had planned to use its majority to press for a non-confidence motion, but that was sidelined last week when President Chandrika Kumaratunga suspended parliament.

Worried about escalating unrest in Sri Lanka, the United States issued an advisory warning its citizens about traveling

to the island.

``It appears Sri Lanka may be entering a period of increased civil unrest and mass political demonstrations,'' a State Department announcement said.

The opposition said it planned six marches and a huge rally in Colombo to protest the suspension of parliament.

A police statement said an application by Athukorale for police protection for the marches had been rejected.

``The inspector-general of police has informed the Honorable

Gamini Athukorale that permission cannot be allowed for processions as indicated and the police will not provide protection for unlawful acts,'' the statement said.

ANOTHER CONFRONTATION

``Those who commit or attempt to commit breach of such acts are liable to be arrested and prosecuted,'' the police said.

Supporters from more than 15 parties from across the political spectrum were expected to join the marches, which were to meet in the center of Colombo.

The opposition has also said it would try to impeach Kumaratunga when parliament reconvened in September.

That seemed a remote possibility as the opposition would need about 30 ruling party legislators to defect to reach the required two-thirds majority to pass an impeachment in the 225-seat legislature.

Kumaratunga has also called for an Aug. 21 referendum on her plans to change the constitution. The police statement referred to a 1981 Referendum Act that bans rallies when a plebiscite is called.

Kumaratunga said she was seeking the constitutional changes to help end the country's bitter ethnic war and to change an electoral system she said prompted her to suspend parliament.

The violent nature of Sri Lankan politics was underscored Wednesday when a series of explosions destroyed an office of the Sri Lankan Muslim party that defected to the opposition, leaving the ruling party in a minority.

Three devices exploded before dawn at the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress office in the eastern town of Kalmunai, destroying the building but causing no casualties, police said.

--------

President Bush Blasts Protesters

The Washington Times
JULY 18, 21:18 EST
http://wire.ap.org/APnews/center_story.html?FRONTID=ELECTION&STORYID=APIS7DB3AL00

PARIS (AP) - President Bush says anti-globalization protesters are hurting the chances for poorer nations to develop economically.

Speaking to a group of foreign journalists before leaving for the Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy, which begins Friday, Bush criticized the protesters for getting in the way of international development.

``The protesters in Italy have the right to express their opinion in a peaceful way,'' Bush said, the French newspaper Le Monde reported Wednesday. ``But they hurt the case of the poor when they argue against trade, they hurt the opportunities for developing nations to grow.''

Officials have been on guard for massive protests that have disrupted other summits in Prague, Czech Republic; Goteborg, Sweden; and Seattle in recent years. Italy is expected to call out as many as 20,000 police officers to provide security during the summit.

Bush arrived in London Wednesday, the first stop of his six-day visit to Europe.

Bush said his strategy in Genoa will be to call on prosperous nations ``to put policies in place to enhance prosperity: lower taxes, less regulation and free trade.''

The economic health of the world's wealthy nations is necessary to help developing countries, Bush said.

``If our economies don't grow, it's very difficult for African nations to grow,'' he said.

On defense matters, Bush said the United States is committed to expanding NATO and said the suggestion by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Russia might join the alliance is ``interesting.''

---------

Colorful crowds clamor outside climate talks

07/18/2001 - Updated 08:03 PM ET
By Traci Watson, USA TODAY
http://usatoday.com/news/world/2001/07/19/kyoto-usat.htm

BONN, Germany - Inside the conference hall, diplomats from 178 nations did battle Wednesday over the future of the world's first treaty on global warming.

Outside the hall, another battle was being waged: which of the roughly 100 student activists would claim victory for creating the most eye-catching costume and silliest chant?

At previous global-warming talks, student protesters who side with environmental groups have had the meeting and the media spotlight to themselves.

But at the 12-day talks that started here Monday, conservative U.S. college students turned out in force to support President Bush and his opposition to the treaty - and to give their Greenpeace counterparts some competition.

"All of us are tired of the portrayal of students as environmental radicals," said Alex Kauffman of Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. "We just want to show the other side that science and logic can prevail."

"We're here to tell the world that the American delegation doesn't represent the point of view of America," countered Matt Ewing of Grinnell College in Grinnell, Iowa. "Poll after poll has shown that the American people care about global warming."

The students' verbal jousting over the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to cut emissions of gases linked to global warming, spilled into the streets. Each side held colorful demonstrations that succeeded in catching media interest.

"One, two, three, four, throw Kyoto out the door. Five, six, seven, eight, U.S. won't participate," the conservatives chanted as they marched near the conference hall.

One student wore a chicken costume to represent Chicken Little, famous for her view that the "sky is falling." Another dressed as a cow, referring to scientific reports that methane from flatulent cattle contributes to global warming. "Do you think my gases are causing a climate catastrophe?" the cow's sign read. "That's crap!"

Several hours later, the Greenpeace students replied with a cheerleading routine of their own.

"One, two, three, four, knock on the White House door," they chanted. "Five, six, seven, eight no, we won't hesitate with Kyoto. Go! Fight back! Save it from White House attack!"

As they yelled, the students - mostly young women wearing short skirts - waved pom-poms of shredded plastic. They wore the letters "K" and "P" - for Kyoto Protocol - painted on their cheeks. For maximum effect, they staged their rally outside the conference's media tent.

One Greenpeace student was barred from the rest of the meeting for videotaping a U.S. lobbyist representing industry groups.

Gary Skulnik of Greenpeace said the group wants to put lobbyists "on notice that their actions do not go undocumented."

The groups may have been equal in media savvy and fervor, but the two sides differed vastly in resources. The nearly 40 conservative students were attending the talks at the suggestion of a Washington-based conservative think tank, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, but they paid for their own plane fare and rooms. Few knew much about global warming before the trip.

The 25-plus environmentalist students, however, had Greenpeace's 30-person delegation and large conference office for support, and Greenpeace paid for their rooms. All of them attended last November's global-warming talks in The Hague, Netherlands.

Despite their differences, the students struck up conversations with each other and discovered their opponents aren't monsters.

"They're certainly reasonable, rational people," says Greenpeace's Genevieve Maricle of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

"They're good guys. They really are," says conservative Kerry Medaris of Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va. "Their ideas are a little incorrect, but they probably think ours are, too."

---------

A Message from James Taylor, Pierce Brosnan, Jean-Michel Cousteau

From: James Taylor
Date: Wednesday, July 18, 2001
From: Sunrise Harmony sunshipway@yahoo.com

We wanted to pass along to you our message about the Navy's plans to blast the world's oceans with a dangerous new sonar system, and the urgent need for us to fight back.... [P]lease do us the great favor of forwarding our message to everyone you know -- your friends, family, co-workers, discussion groups -- encouraging them to join us in this critical battle.

Sincerely yours,

James Taylor Pierce Brosnan Jean-Michel Cousteau

=====

Dear Friend,

The three of us have never teamed up like this before. But we all share something in common: a deep love of the ocean and marine mammals. That's why we're very disturbed by a U.S. military program that, if approved, will soon be bombarding millions of whales and dolphins around the world with intense noise.

You may have read about the U.S. Navy's "Low-Frequency Active" (LFA) sonar program. The military has been testing this new, high-powered system in secret for years. Now, the Navy wants to deploy it across 80 percent of our planet's oceans. LFA sonar is designed to detect enemy submarines by flooding vast expanses of the oceans with sound. Leaving aside the military wisdom of this sonar -- which is still in dispute -- the environmental dangers are becoming increasingly clear.

Here's the problem: LFA noise is billions of times more intense than that known to disturb whale migration and communication. Whales and dolphins depend on their sensitive hearing for survival. To put it simply, a deaf whale is a dead whale. Deafening noise from the LFA system will interfere with the vital biological activities of marine mammals. Scientists fear that long-term exposure to LFA could push entire populations over the brink into extinction.

Inevitably, there will also be marine mammals unlucky enough to swim too close to LFA loudspeakers. Imagine an acoustic wave so powerful that, even at substantial distances, it can destroy your hearing, cause your lungs or ears to hemorrhage, or even kill you.

---------


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