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NUCLEAR
Ireland seeks Belarus advice on Chernobyl children travel
WMC fires first salvo in Olympic struggle
Australian Mine Shares Rise in Investors' Rush for Metals
GULF WAR VETERAN WELCOMES RESULTS OF ILLNESS INQUIRY
Iran Backs Away From a Demand on A-Bomb Fuel
EU bids to force Japan's hand in nuclear haggle
Iran Seeks to Amend Nuclear Freeze Deal
Nuclear Inspectors to Return to South Korea
U.N. official 'positive' after visit to N. Korea
Decision urged on ballistic-missile shield
Russia ups the nuclear ante
Iranian nuclear move not complete: UN chief
UN official chides South Korea over nuclear activities
Fire Knocks Out Equipment at a Nuclear Fuel Plant in Kentucky
Electrical Fire at Ky. Uranium Plant
Indian Point wins high rating from NRC
MILITARY
Nigerian navy officers' trial over missing Russian tanker to go on: court
'French intervention in Ivory Coast a mistake'
Ivorian faction backs arms ban
Blix Urges Caution over Iraq 'Chemical Weapons Lab'
US to sell 50 medium-range missiles to Jordan
Boeing Converts 737 Into Bomber
Swiss FM in Russia for chemical arms reduction talks
Army tests ravaged family's land
Western Ukraine military command says it will not act against people
Discovery of weapons cache underscores Iraq weapons free-for-all
U.S. Says Police in Iraq Need Bolstering
American Envoy Killed In Baghdad
Peace hopes in Colombia as militia lays down arms
NATO chief calls for review of Ukrainian election
CIA report queries Iran's nuke program
U.N. peacekeepers face abuse charges
Guardsmen Say They're Facing Iraq Ill-Trained
More Signs of a Military Unraveling
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
52 kg drugs seized in southern Iraq
Airport screeners find 75 guns per month
Burma Says It Will Free Over 5,000 More Prisoners
POLITICS
Analysis: Cold War Has Never Been Colder
ENERGY
Ontario Plans Renewable Energy for 100,000 Homes
OTHER
Congo wars take toll on lowland gorillas
ACTIVISTS
Protests in the snow herald new Cold War
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Ireland seeks Belarus advice on Chernobyl children travel
DUBLIN (AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125131823.oyxoqoto.html
Ireland said Thursday that it would seek clarification from Belarus on a possible ban on children affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster travelling to western countries for treatment and recuperation.
Dublin's ambassador in Moscow -- who also deals with Belarus -- would consult with the Belarus ambassador on the issue, Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern said.
The issue was of "the utmost concern" to his government, Ahern told the Irish parliament, adding that representations were also being made to the Belarussian ambassador-designate to Dublin.
On Tuesday, Ahern said Dublin was worried that Belarus's President Alexander Lukashenko might be on the verge of blocking travel for child victims of Chernobyl.
Ahern said that it was understanding that in the future, every single permission would have to be approved by the minister of education in Minsk.
About 1,000 Belarussian children are due to arrive in Ireland soon for Christmas breaks organised by the Chernobyl Children's Project (CCP) charity.
The CCP, which was set up in 1991 to help children in Belarus, Western Russia and the Ukraine affected by the nuclear fallout, has brought over 10,000 children to Ireland on recuperative holidays.
Ahern said he had had been taking a Belarussian child into his own home for the past nine years when they came for holidays in Ireland.
"I have some personal experience of the very real needs of these children and of the benefits which rest and recuperation brings to their lives," he explained.
If it went ahead, the proposed travel restrictions would "add a new and worrying dimension to the isolation of Belarus from the rest of Europe", Ahern said on Tuesday.
The accident at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine on April 26, 1986 was the world's worst nuclear power disaster, contaminating a large part of Europe over a series of days.
-------- australia
WMC fires first salvo in Olympic struggle
West Australian Newspapers
JOHN PHACEAS
November 25, 2004
http://www.thewest.com.au/20041125/business/tw-business-home-sto129894.html
WMC Resources has played the first ace in its bid to fend off a $7.4 billion takeover offer from Swiss miner Xstrata, upgrading the already massive resource at the super-rich Olympic Dam copper-uranium mine by nearly 30 per cent.
But Xstrata, which came under fire when it slashed greenfields exploration spending and jobs after taking control of Queensland miner MIM last year, sought to underline its commitment to Australian industry with a pledge to spend $41 million expanding its Mt Isa copper smelter.
WMC, which maintains Xstrata's $6.35 a share offer is cheap and opportunistic, said drilling at the Roxby Downs site in South Australia had lifted the total resource to 3.8 billion tonnes at a copper equivalent grade of 2.2 per cent.
The increase, which will underpin a $4 billion expansion by the end of the decade, boosted contained copper by seven million tonnes to 42.7 million tonnes, lifted contained uranium 20 per cent to 1.4 million tonnes and contained gold almost a quarter to 55.1 million ounces.
"Based on these new estimates, Olympic Dam now contains the world's fourth largest remaining copper and gold resources, up from seventh previously," WMC chief Andrew Michelmore said.
"Already the world's largest known uranium resource, Olympic Dam now contains 38 per cent of the total global economic uranium resource base."
The bulk of the improvement came from a $50 million drilling program on the southern end of the massive orebody, he said, with the remainder due to higher uranium prices.
WMC has lifted its long-term uranium price assumption from $23.33 a pound to $30 a pound.
Uranium is now fetching over $US20 a pound after doubling over the past year, and many observers tip it to double again in the medium term as demand surges and remaining stockpiles are depleted.
China alone is planning 30 new reactors over the next 15 years, while demand from India, Korea and Japan is also racing ahead. Mr Michelmore said the upgrade would not only increased the size of the resource, which is already the world's second most valuable in terms of contained metal, but would also improve the economics of WMC's expansion and development plans.
The expansion is slated to double copper output to 500,000 tonnes a year and treble uranium output to 15,000 tonnes a year, making it the biggest and most profitable uranium supplier in the world. Mine revenues would also more than treble to $3.2 billion a year.
Analysts said the upgrade was likely to lift their valuations of the group, though most had already factored in a substantial upgrade after a site visit late last month.
UK-based broker Investec, which backs Xstrata's offer, said it believed WMC was worth at least $6.62 a share, including the company's planned expansions at Olympic Dam and its WA nickel operations.
But Investec's valuation does not include any takeover premium or potential for a counter bid: factors which have led many Australian brokers to put a short-term target on the stock above $7.50.
WMC shares took a break from their rapid rise over the last few days, settling unchanged at $7.18.
--------
Australian Mine Shares Rise in Investors' Rush for Metals
The New York Times
By HEATHER TIMMONS and WAYNE ARNOLD
November 25, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/business/worldbusiness/25mining.html?adxnnl=1&oref=login&adxnnlx=1101392147-sunHk1+vR2sfN/KHmJ8s8w
Amid heated global demand for metals, investors are so sure the Australian mining company WMC Resources will become the prize in a global bidding war that they have pushed its stock price 13 percent higher than rival Xstrata's hostile offer for the company.
And that enthusiasm is highlighting a debate within the industry: is the mining sector becoming overheated, as some say the froth in WMC shares proves, or will consolidation and stock prices only increase, spurred by an ever-growing demand for metals? The debate comes as mining stocks trade in the upper reaches of their traditional range, as compared to cash flow. Decades of history say there is not much room for them to move up - unless, of course, you believe that industrialization in China and elsewhere has permanently altered the world's demand for metals like nickel, copper and uranium.
"You're either a new paradigmer, who believes the China effect has fundamentally changed the industry's prospects for the better, or you think this is now close to the peak," said Adrian Coates, head of the metals and mining group at HSBC.
Executives from Xstrata and WMC certainly seem to be in the "new paradigmer" camp. Xstrata's all-cash $5.8 billion offer for WMC, first made as a friendly offer last month, represents a 24 percent premium to the company's stock price before the deal became public.
WMC claims the Xstrata bid undervalues the company. And the company offered evidence on Wednesday, when its chief executive, Andrew Michelmore, told Australia's stock exchange that new drilling tests indicated that the Olympic Dam mine held nearly 30 percent more copper, uranium and gold than the company previously knew about. The announcement failed, however, to move the stock price any higher.
Whether the rest of the industry will be drawn remains to be seen. WMC has retained Citigroup and UBS to help defend it against the Xstrata offer, and most bankers expect the advisers to hold an auction to attract a higher price for WMC.
There are only a handful of mining companies big enough to afford WMC: the global, diversified conglomerates known in the industry as the "three ugly sisters," BHP Billiton, Anglo American and Rio Tinto; Brazil's Companhia Vale do Rio Doce and a few smaller players like Phelps Dodge, the American copper producer, which may want to diversify like Xstrata.
Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton might be good fits, because they have operations in Australia and could cut costs, and they can afford to offer more than Xstrata.
"It's just exactly the type of resource that Rio and BHP like," said Peter Harris, senior materials analyst at Commonwealth Securities in Melbourne. "It's large, low-cost and in a country with low risk, with good connections to railways and ports."
But in recent years, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton have become very conservative about expansion after overdoing it in the last commodity price spike. BHP Billiton, in particular, bought copper mines in the United States during the Asian economic boom of the 1990's, only to have to write them off after the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998.
Underscoring that conservatism, BHP Billiton spent 2.27 billion Australian dollars ($1.8 billion) this week buying back its own shares as part of a plan to distribute record profits to shareholders rather than risk them on additional new investments. BHP would not comment on speculation on WMC, but one person who has worked with BHP on past mergers said it has the "capacity to develop a huge number of projects" without doing any deal and is "not interested in overpaying for an asset."
Executives who believe that metals prices are still cyclical say that WMC investors are over-optimistic about the company's value.
"The Australian stock market has gotten way ahead of itself," said another mining banker who has sealed several deals for one of the conglomerates. "It's less likely, rather than more likely, that someone will come along" and save WMC from Xstrata's clutches, he said.
Others say that capturing WMC could be the defining deal for the new mining company of the future. "The bidding war for WMC will not be so much about copper and nickel assets," Mr. Harris of Commonwealth wrote in a report to clients this month, "but the battle to be the world's premier mining company."
Predicting long-term demand for commodities is notoriously difficult. In bulk commodities, like coal and iron ore, confidence in short-term prices is high as most sales are based on forward contracts, said Simon Toyne, a mining analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. "There remains a lot of debate on what long-term commodity prices will be," he added.
But the unpredictable nature of metals prices has been around for a while. In 1972, a widely circulated study called "Limits to Growth" predicted that some of the world's basic commodities would run out within decades, said Stephen S. Poloz, senior vice president and chief economist at Export Development Canada, a risk management company.
The study said, for example, that global stores of copper would be completely depleted by 2000. "They didn't count on fiber optics," which replaced copper wires in telecommunications and computers, said Mr. Poloz. He said he believed that current commodity prices had topped out, and could drift lower next year.
Mr. Poloz keeps a copy of the study within easy reach in his office. "It helps to keep one humble," he said.
Heather Timmons reported for this article from London and Wayne Arnold from Singapore
-------- depleted uranium
GULF WAR VETERAN WELCOMES RESULTS OF ILLNESS INQUIRY
Surrey & Berkshire Newspapers Limited
By PHILIP SKELTON
25/11/2004
http://www.woking.co.uk/news/article/article_id=13524.html
GULF War veteran Paul Connolly, from St John's, has been given fresh hope in his fight for recognition of an illness he claims is linked to his work in the Gulf more than 14 years ago.
Paul, aged 41, of Raglan Road, suffered kidney failure on returning from the Gulf war in 1991 and joins thousands of ex-servicemen in welcoming the conclusions of an independent inquiry published on Wednesday November 17.
The inquiry, led by Lord Lloyd of Berwick, said there were a number of causes for the veterans' illnesses but these could be collectively described as Gulf War syndrome.
The inquiry also reported scientific evidence to show that veterans were twice as likely to suffer from ill health as those servicemen who served in other areas.
It has called on the Ministry of Defence (MOD) - which has never accepted the veterans' illnesses are linked to their service - to establish a fund to compensate veterans of the Gulf conflict who have suffered illness as a result.
Mr Connolly says the report is one more step towards real recognition and compensation from the MOD for victims and their families.
He explained his condition first became apparent after exposure to depleted uranium, while he was stationed in the Gulf as a civilian service engineer.
Despite being now back on life-saving dialysis treatment after his body rejected a second kidney transplant in April, he is adamant that he will continue to fight for recognition of his illness.
Mr Connolly said: "I am pleased there has finally been an independent inquiry carried out, but I am disappointed the MOD did not choose to take part.
"The ministry had the opportunity but once again it has chosen instead to bury its head in the sand.
"It has been 14 years since the Gulf War and the Ministry of Defence has never actually acknowledged that there is a link between veterans' illnesses and their service.
"No one can give us our health back, but the 6,000 veterans of the Gulf War who are still suffering deserve to be given medical help.
"This is one more step towards getting that help.
"We need to remind the government that not all of us are dead yet and I will personally continue to fight for justice until I die."
Woking MP, Humfrey Malins, has fought alongside Paul for recognition of his condition and its link to Paul's service in the Gulf.
Mr Malins said: "It is an absolute disgrace that the government has not come forward and is not prepared to
compensate Paul, or recognise that his condition is linked to the Gulf War.
"I have raised this in Parliament and I will continue to do so."
A spokesman for the MOD said: "The MOD has received a copy of the inquiry and is looking into it.
"We will give a detailed response in due course."
-------- iran
Iran Backs Away From a Demand on A-Bomb Fuel
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
November 29, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/29/international/middleeast/29iran.html?ei=5094&en=b8c0e30fd902e8e0&hp=&ex=1101790800&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print&position=
PARIS, Nov. 28 - Iran on Sunday backed off a demand to operate uranium enrichment equipment that could be used either for energy purposes or in a nuclear bomb-making project, European and Iranian officials said.
The Iranian retreat appeared to salvage a nuclear agreement reached Nov. 15 between Iran and France, Britain and Germany to freeze all of Iran's uranium enrichment, conversion and reprocessing activities.
It also paves the way for the 35 countries that make up the ruling board of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based United Nations nuclear monitoring body, to pass a resolution that will be only mildly critical of Iran's nuclear program.
Such a resolution, expected to be passed Monday, is certain to disappoint the Bush administration, which is convinced that despite Iran's denials, it has a covert program to build nuclear bombs, not simply to produce energy. The administration had wanted much tougher language in the resolution.
Iran's suspected nuclear ambition has become a leading source of worry in the Bush administration, which has said it will not allow Iran's Islamic republic, with its avowed hostility to the United States, to attain nuclear weapons or even develop a comprehensive peaceful nuclear energy program. In Washington, reports of a new accord with Iran brought expressions of caution from the Bush administration, which has been skeptical about the European efforts to negotiate with Iran.
"We've seen this kind of commitment from Iran before," a State Department official said. "We'll be looking to see whether they stick with what they agree to do. In the past they haven't, so follow-up is very important."
The retreat came in the form of a letter from Iran on Sunday to the International Atomic Energy Agency. In the letter, Iran withdrew its demand to operate 20 centrifuges - uranium enrichment machines - for research and development purposes.
"Iran will permit the I.A.E.A. to place these centrifuges under agency surveillance," said Hossein Mousavian, the chief Iranian negotiator, in a telephone interview from Vienna. "Iran will not conduct any testing."
Asked specifically whether the machines would be turned off, as the Europeans have demanded, Mr. Mousavian said, "We say Iran will not conduct any testing," adding that the matter of Iran's desire to continue research will be discussed when Iran and the European countries begin talks in the coming weeks on possible economic, technological and political incentives for Iran under the European agreement.
After the letter was received, the three European countries formally submitted a draft resolution on Iran to the United Nations agency, said Mark Gwozdecky, the agency's spokesman.
The I.A.E.A. is expected to certify Monday that Iran has frozen its entire program as defined by the agreement with the Europeans.
That will allow the agency's board to pass the resolution on Iran on Monday as well. Unlike the United Nations Security Council, where 5 of the 15 member countries have veto power, the I.A.E.A.'s board generally operates by consensus.
The Bush administration has been continually frustrated in its efforts to persuade the atomic energy agency to punish Iran for its nuclear activities. The three European countries have rejected a flurry of American proposals for a harshly worded resolution against Iran.
The breakthrough between the Europeans and Iran came after Iran suggested a change in the resolution that would more specifically reflect the positive step Iran was taking in suspending its enrichment program, both Mr. Mousavian and a senior European official said. In exchange, Iran abandoned its demand to operate the centrifuges for research.
Mr. Mousavian said the 20 centrifuge machines would not be sealed but placed under camera surveillance, a face-saving move that the I.A.E.A. said would be acceptable in terms of its monitoring capacity.
In another face-saving gesture, the Iranians said in their letter to the agency on Sunday that there would be no "testing," rather than no "research and development."
But a senior European official involved in the negotiations said that under the new arrangement, "The machines will not rotate an inch."
Despite its softer language, the resolution to be adopted Monday calls for continuing investigations into sensitive aspects of Iran's nuclear program.
The resolution also mentions "many breaches of Iran's obligations to comply" with international nuclear safeguards but notes Iran has taken "corrective measures" since beginning to disclose parts of its atomic program in October 2003.
Mr. Mousavian said Iran won a crucial change to reflect the fact that the freeze of its enrichment program was "not legally binding."
As a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Iran has the legal right to enrich uranium, and the Iranian delegation made the point repeatedly during the negotiations that its country's suspension of its uranium enrichment program was voluntary.
In Tehran on Sunday, Hamid Reza Assefi, a Foreign Ministry spokesman, said Iran hoped the issue would be resolved at the atomic energy agency. Nonetheless, he struck a defiant tone.
"We are not worried about going to the Security Council," he said. "It is not the end of the world. But we would prefer it be sorted out in the framework of the agency."
There is no national security debate inside Iran that is more intense than over the country's nuclear program, from the highest levels of government to Parliament and the street.
Iranians of all political stripes hold fast to the principle of Iran's sovereign right to conduct whatever activities it deems necessary to develop a peaceful program to produce energy, and the agreement with the Europeans has been wildly unpopular inside Iran.
Iran had agreed in negotiations with the Europeans two weeks ago to suspend all uranium enrichment activities. But that agreement was put in jeopardy last week when Iran demanded that it be allowed to operate centrifuges for research purposes. That demand came in two letters to the International Atomic Energy Agency from Iran's atomic energy agency, whose hard-liners oppose any concessions to outsiders.
But Iran misread the Europeans. At first, the Iranian delegation tried to argue that the centrifuge issue was only a technical matter. Iranian negotiators pointed out that after Iran had reached its first nuclear deal with the Europeans in October 2003, it continued to operate 10 centrifuges for research purposes and both the Europeans and the agency went along.
"With that history and everyone's agreement, we couldn't imagine that a few centrifuges would become a worldwide issue this time," Mr. Mousavian said.
But that first deal with the Europeans fell apart. Iran decided that the Europeans were stalling on delivering promised incentives and interpreted the agreement broadly to continue some uranium enrichment-related activities.
The Europeans were accused of naīveté by some hawks in the Bush administration, and have become less trusting of Iran. This time around, the Europeans negotiated a more precise deal and took an uncompromising no-exceptions line when the centrifuge issue was raised.
Nazila Fathi contributed reporting from Tehran for this article, and Steven R. Weisman from Washington.
-------- japan
EU bids to force Japan's hand in nuclear haggle
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125021351.z6922elm.html
Europe is bidding to force Japan's hand in negotiations on a revolutionary nuclear energy project, by pledging to go it alone unless Japan gives in and agrees to a French site for the facility.
In the latest twist in the high-stakes haggle, EU research ministers are expected Friday to approve changes to Europe's negotiating strategy on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project.
The new strategy was proposed last week by the European Commission, the EU's executive arm, after the latest round of six-party talks failed to break the deadlock over the choice of site, whether Japan or France.
"The Commission will try to reach a positive conclusion with all the parties as soon as possible," said the executive at the time, while EU research commissioner Louis Michel said he hoped for an accord by the end of the year.
"If, nevertheless, the parties do not reach the hoped-for consensus, the EU would launch the construction of ITER within the largest possible framework," the Commission added.
Tokyo has denounced the EU attempt to play hardball.
"(The EU's) negotiating stance is worrisome and regrettable," said Takahiro Hayashi, deputy director of Japan's Office of Fusion Energy. But he added: "I think it would be good to agree on a site quickly."
But barring upsets -- negotiations are reportedly continuing all the time -- the EU ministers are set to rubber stamp the new mandate at their talks in Brussels Friday, officials say.
The two candidates to host ITER, which would emulate the sun's nuclear fusion to generate inexhaustible electricity, are Cadarache in southern France and Rokkasho-mura in northern Japan.
So far of the six partners in the talks China and Russia support the French site, while the United States and South Korea back building ITER in Japan.
The ITER budget is projected to be 10 billion euros (13 billion dollars) over the next 30 years, including 4.7 billion euros to build the reactor. The European Union plans to finance 40 percent of the total.
The project is not expected to generate electricity before 2050.
The EU says it has already offered a "sweetener" to allow France to host the project.
"I cannot elaborate on the sweetener, but I think we have made reasonable offers," commission spokesman Fabio Fabbi said earlier this month, after the latest round of ITER talks in Vienna failed to make any progress.
Sources at the commission in Brussels said Tokyo might agree to a tradeoff scenario in which it lets ITER go to France if Japan gets to be host country for a new international scientific computing centre.
Fabbi, without specifying what the EU is offering Japan, said the 25-nation bloc had always believed the ITER project should adopt a "broader approach to meet the needs of (nuclear fusion) research across the world".
Diplomats say this month's talks in Vienna made some progress but failed to break the essential deadlock over the site. The European Commission said it still hopes for progress by the end of the year.
"I hope that we will succeed by the end of the year," commissioner Michel said. "If we need several days or several weeks more to be sure of having the six partners on board I think that it is worth it."
-----
Iran Seeks to Amend Nuclear Freeze Deal
Associated Press
By GEORGE JAHN
November 25, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Iran sought on Wednesday to partially roll back its commitment to freeze all uranium enrichment programs, demanding the right to run some equipment that can be used to produce nuclear arms.
Iran's push to operate 24 centrifuges for what it said were research purposes did not seem to represent a major move because thousands of centrifuges must operate for months to produce enough enriched uranium for a nuclear warhead.
Still, coming on the eve of a key meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, the demand was likely to strengthen perceptions that Iran's government is not interested in easing fears it is trying to develop atomic arms in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
Britain, which helped negotiate the enrichment suspension on behalf of the European Union, rejected the demand. A British official, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, said the Nov. 7 agreement would stand.
Citing the official EU stance, an EU diplomat accredited to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency said all centrifuge activity had to remain stopped under the agreement.
The deal committed the Iranian regime to full suspension of enrichment and all related activities while the two sides discuss a pact meant to provide Iran with EU technical and economic aid and other concessions.
Iran announced Monday that it had ceased enrichment, while repeating its position that the enrichment program is intended only to produce fuel for generating electricity. It denies it is working on atomic weapons.
The suspension was clearly timed to coincide with the Thursday meeting of the U.N. agency's 35-nation board and met a key demand of the last board meeting in September. It deprived the United States of arguing that Iran was defying the agency and weakened Washington's attempt to refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions against Iran. U.S. officials accuse Iran of secretly developing nuclear weapons.
"Many nations agree with us. Many nations do not - they think we are overreacting," Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday. But he noted the European Union nations felt concerned enough to pressure Iran into stopping enrichment.
The agency's board will also discuss past secret South Korean experiments in plutonium separation and uranium enrichment. Diplomats said South Korea's government would likely be reprimanded, but any decision on referring it to the Security Council would be deferred until agency investigations were complete.
The South Korean government claims it was unaware of experiments that it says were run by renegade scientists - a contention questioned by some diplomats accredited to the agency and familiar with South Korea's file.
By seeking to exempt some centrifuges from the freeze it agreed to, Iran appeared to reinforce its stance that suspension would be only temporary. It is not prohibited by the Nonproliferation Treaty from enriching uranium.
Even before the demand, Iran had cast doubt on its interest in reducing international distrust by continuing enrichment activities until shortly before Monday's freeze deadline.
The head of the nuclear agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said he believed the Iranians processed about two tons of raw uranium into a gas used as feedstock for enrichment.
A diplomat said the centrifuges Iran wanted exempted were at the central city of Natanz - where Iran says it ultimately plans to run 50,000 centrifuges. Tehran says that facility is meant to meet the fuel requirements of a nuclear reactor for an electricity-generating plant being built with Russian help that is expected to be finished next year.
For now, Iran is far short of that goal, possessing less than 1,000 centrifuges - most bought secretly through the black market network of Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Kahn and the rest made domestically.
But experts estimate the Iranians are not far from being able to run 1,500 centrifuges, which could process enough enriched uranium for one warhead a year.
On the Net: www.iaea.org
-------- korea
Nuclear Inspectors to Return to South Korea
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-SKorea-UN-Nuclear-Agency.html?pagewanted=print&position=
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- The U.N. nuclear watchdog will send a group of inspectors to South Korea next week for additional investigations into the country's past secret nuclear experiments, officials said Monday.
The inspection follows a decision Friday by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency not to refer South Korea's nuclear experiments to the U.N. Security Council. The IAEA's board of governors criticized South Korea for conducting plutonium and uranium experiments in 1982 and 2000 without reporting them to the agency, but refrained from tougher measures including possible referral to the U.N. Security Council.
The group of IAEA inspectors will arrive next Monday and conduct a four-day investigation, an official at the Science and Technology Ministry told South Korea's Yonhap news agency. The visit is the fourth by IAEA inspectors since South Korea's admission made earlier this year.
Plutonium and enriched uranium are key ingredients in nuclear weapons and revelations about the experiments threatened to disrupt already troubled efforts to persuade the South's rival, North Korea, to curb its nuclear ambitions.
------
U.N. official 'positive' after visit to N. Korea
The Korea Herald
2004.11.25
http://www.koreaherald.co.kr/SITE/data/html_dir/2004/11/25/200411250023.asp
Following his visit to North Korea, United Nations General Assembly President Jean Ping yesterday delivered a "very positive" message to top government officials here, highlighting high hopes for the future of the six-nation disarmament talks to end Pyongyang's nuclear standoff.
In a meeting with Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, Ping said, "I must say that I have strong confidence and I am very hopeful." He was referring to the positive prospect of resolving the 25-month old nuclear row.
Without elaborating the content of the "message" Ping brought from the North, Ban in response said "Thank you for bringing such great news."
Ping arrived in Seoul Tuesday after a five-day visit to Pyongyang where he held meetings with top government officials in the communist state, including Foreign Minister Paek Nam-sun and parliamentary leader Kim Yong-nam.
"The situation on the (Korean) peninsula is an important issue to the international community," Ping said in a luncheon hosted by Ban, shortly after their meeting. "I have become positive on a peaceful resolution after last week's visit to North Korea."
Ping also said Pyongyang officials also expressed that their policy is toward a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, adding that they are ready to return to the six-party framework at any time but a few conditions to be met.
He quoted Pyongyang officials as saying that the standoff will be immediately resolved if and when the United States gives up its hard-line policy on the Stalinist regime while stressing that Washington must not get involved in South-North relations.
Earlier in a meeting with Unification Minister Chung Dong-young, Ping also said he was "very positive" on a peaceful resolution to the nuclear issue, according to a press statement released by the ministry. No further details of the meeting were given.
The U.N. leader, who is also the foreign minister of Gabon, was quoted as saying that North Korea asked him to deliver a message to Washington that it wants "coexistence" with the United States.
Ping is scheduled to meet President Roh Moo-hyun today to brief him on the results of the meeting with North Korean officials and is set to leave on Friday.
The North Korean nuclear row began two years ago when U.S. officials said Pyongyang had admitted to secretly pushing a uranium-based nuclear program, in addition to its acknowledged plutonium-based one. The North has denied the U.S. claim.
North Korea and the U.S. have met three times so far to try to resolve the standoff, along with South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, but little progress has been made.
A fourth round of the six-nation talks was supposed to take place before the end of September, but has been delayed because the North refused to attend.
(bluelle@heraldm.com)
By Choi Soung-ah
-------- missile defense
Decision urged on ballistic-missile shield
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Levon Sevunts
November 25, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041124-105508-5770r.htm
MONTREAL - President Bush's re-election is pushing Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin toward an early decision about whether to participate in the U.S. ballistic-missile shield despite broad public antipathy to the idea.
Bilateral talks are well-advanced on the issue, which calls for permitting the United States to use radar and perhaps place missiles on Canadian soil. A decision is expected within weeks, though officials were uncertain whether it would be discussed when Mr. Bush visits Ottawa on Nov. 30.
But polls show a majority of Canadians are opposed to the idea, and opposition parties have forced Mr. Martin's minority Liberals to agree to a potentially bruising parliamentary debate on the matter.
David Rudd, the head of the Canadian Institute of Strategic Studies, an independent think tank, said the government had hoped to postpone a decision for as long as possible, but the re-election of Mr. Bush has made that impossible.
Melanie Grewer, Mr. Martin's assistant director of communications, said lower-level discussions on missile defense between Canadian and U.S. officials haven't been completed, and there is "very little for the two leaders to discuss" during Mr. Bush's visit.
But Mr. Rudd said Canada already had taken the most important step toward participating in the program when it agreed in August to a temporary amendment to the agreement governing North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) - the joint military arrangement set up during the Cold War to watch for missiles coming from the Soviet Union over the North Pole.
That amendment permits the NORAD operations center in Colorado Springs to share information it receives from its network of radar installations with U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the U.S.-only command that controls interceptor-missile batteries being built in Alaska and California.
"By virtue of our membership in NORAD, we have one foot planted in the missile-defense game, because missile defense requires first and foremost detection and tracking, and that's what NORAD does," Mr. Rudd said.
James Fergusson, head of the Center for Defense and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba and a leading proponent of Canada's participation in the program, said the NORAD arrangement already gave Washington all it needed from Canada to proceed with its missile-defense program.
But Canada has technological expertise that could benefit the program, and the system would be more effective in dealing with future threats from the Middle East if interceptor missiles were placed in eastern Canada, Mr. Fergusson said.
Mr. Rudd predicted that Canada's participation, at least in the early stages of the program, would be limited to its NORAD obligations and sending a few additional Air Force officers to the Cheyenne Mountain command center in Colorado.
But even that could be politically risky for the minority Liberal government, Mr. Rudd said.
Mr. Martin's own party is deeply divided on the issue, while the separatist Bloc Quebecois and the left-wing New Democratic Party - who have backed the minority Liberals in an informal coalition - strongly oppose Canadian participation in the program.
That means the Liberals would have to rely on their archrivals, the Conservative Party, which in the past has supported participation in the missile-defense program and closer security cooperation with the United States.
But smelling blood, even the Conservatives are being coy.
"Our position at the moment is we are neither for it, nor against it," said Gordon O'Connor, the Conservative Party defense critic.
"We're waiting for the government to come forward and tell us what they have agreed to. And they haven't come forward, they haven't told us yet what they believe would be involved in the agreement."
-------- russia
Russia ups the nuclear ante
Asia Times
By Sergei Blagov
Nov 25, 2004
http://atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/FK25Ag01.html
MOSCOW - Russia's bold plans to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons is a move seemingly designed to send a message to the international community.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced last week that Russia would develop a new breed of nuclear weapons that other nuclear powers do not yet have and are unlikely to develop. "We will continue to persist in consistently building up the armed forces, in general, including its nuclear component, and new nuclear missile-systems technologies that other nuclear powers do not and will not possess," Putin told a meeting of Russian generals in Moscow earlier this month. "I want all to have an understanding of this," Putin added.
The new nukes announcement was seen as a response to Washington's own missile defense efforts. Russia has long argued it had the capability to defeat the US's antimissile defense program due to the size of its ballistic missile arsenal. After President George W Bush pulled out of the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty in 2001 to pursue a new anti-missile defense program, Russia announced it no longer felt bound by previous agreements that prohibited missiles with multiple warheads. Russia has looked at equipping its new Topol missile with multiple warheads, an option that would reduce the weapon's vulnerability to the US missile defense system, which is designed to attack only one warhead at a time.
It has been also understood that Russia's promised "new nuclear missile-systems technologies" refer to the renovated RS-12M Topol-M, which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization nicknamed "SS-27" and was first tested in 1994. The Topol-M can be fired from silos or from mobile launchers. It is 75 feet long and has a range of 6,900 miles. The country now has some 40 Topol-M missile systems, with a further five to be added next year.
In its perceived drive to defeat the US antimissile defense program, Russia has also indicated plans to put dozens of previously stored multi-warhead SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missiles on combat duty. Putin previously stated that Russia has a "significant amount" of SS-19 intercontinental ballistic missiles that had been stored without fuel that had never previously been deployed - and thus not part of disarmament negotiations. Putin described the SS-19s as "the most powerful missiles in the world with unparalleled capability to overcome any anti-missile defense". Russians believe that the SS-19 could function for up to 25 more years and gradually replace decommissioned missiles. The fourth generation UR-100N UTTH, also known as the SS-19 Stiletto, is a two-stage, storable liquid-propellant intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM). The SS-19 can carry six warheads with a yield of up to one mega-ton each.
When the START-1 treaty was signed by the US and the Soviet Union in 1991 - implemented to reduce and limit strategic offensive arms - the Soviet Union had a total of 300 SS-19 missiles stationed in Russia and Ukraine. After the Soviet demise, Ukraine claimed the missiles based on its territory, while all of its 1,300 nuclear warheads were sent to Russia for destruction. According to the START-II treaty, Russia was to dismantle all ground-based ICBMs with multiple warheads. Under the treaty provisions, a total of 105 of the SS-19 missiles can be retained provided they are downloaded to carry only one warhead instead of six.
In May 2002, Putin and Bush signed the so-called Moscow Treaty that requires the two countries to cut the number of warheads on combat duty to between 1,700 and 2,200 a side. It allows both countries to store, rather than dismantle the warheads. It is the scrapping of the START-II strategic arms reduction treaty, however, that has allowed Russia to keep SS-19s on combat duty.
Russia now has three missile armies and 16 divisions that have a total of 735 ICBMs armed with 3,159 nuclear warheads, according to Russian media reports. In October 2003, Putin stated that Russia retains the right to deliver preemptive military strikes.
In February 2004, Russia said it successfully tested a new strategic supersonic system that would allow "deep maneuvering, both in altitude and course" of Russia's long-range missiles and avoid US defenses. Russian officials claimed that the prototype weapon proved it could maneuver so quickly as to make "any missile defense useless".
The technological breakthrough now being touted by Putin is believed to be the ability to have warheads detached from the main delivery missile during the final stage of its descent, then to continue the flight as cruise missiles. Such missiles would be able to evade any existing or planned missile defense shield. Russian military officials claim this new technology was successfully tested in February.
Meanwhile, in September 2004, Russia test-launched Bulava, a newly-developed submarine-mounted intercontinental ballistic missile. Russia is expected to test-fire a mobile version of its Topol-M ballistic missile this year and production of the new weapon could be commissioned in 2005.
Putin's pledges of new nukes come as the latest in a series of Russian warnings that the development of the American missile defense program will not go unchallenged. Moreover, Putin's comments came the same week the Pentagon announced that the first six interceptors had been installed at Fort Greely, Alaska - 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks. The US missile defense system is scheduled to be operational by the end of December. The system consists of six rocket interceptors installed in silos in Fort Greely, with 10 more interceptors to be installed in the future. Four more will be based at Vandenburg Air Force Base in central California.
The response from Washington of Russia's new technology was that Russia is entitled to develop new weapons and this does not violate existing treaties. White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Bush and Putin had discussed the issue previously. Asked about Putin's comments, McClellan said: "We are very well aware of their long-standing modernization efforts for their military."
Meanwhile, Russia has so far responded coolly to the deployment of the US missile shield following the announcement that the missile defense system could become operational in Alaska by the end of 2004. Last October, the Russian Defense Ministry stated that the new missile defense systems in Alaska posed no threat to Russian security.
The US defense system is designed to deploy a field of interceptors in Alaska and California that would fly into space to meet and destroy a missile. US officials have long acknowledged that the system would not defend against Russian or Chinese technology, but against countries like Iran or North Korea, which are developing long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction that could be carried by missiles.
There have been warnings stateside that the US missile defense efforts could unleash an arms race with other countries, and that not only Russia, but also China could build up its long-range nuclear forces to face future US ballistic missile defense systems. The Pentagon in its annual assessment of China's military power echoes the view that Beijing considers missile defense a direct threat. The US Defense Department's report last May said Beijing believes that US missile defenses "will challenge the credibility of China's nuclear deterrent and eventually be extended to protect Taiwan".
Russia and China are indeed concerned that their nuclear deterrent would be greatly diminished by a US missile defense system. US officials have responded that missile defenses are only designed to counter missiles launched by Iran or North Korea.
Moscow's new nuke pledges are also understood to be Moscow's way of cementing its position in a variety of international disputes: from a perennial territorial feud with Japan to rapidly emerging disagreements with the West over the future of Ukraine.
However, claims of Russian missiles with an unparalleled capability to overcome any anti-missile defense system could spark some concerns elsewhere as well. For instance, Russia has sold China S-300PMU long-range air-defense missile systems, promoted by Moscow for their reported anti-missile defense capabilities. Hence for Beijing, the Russian announcement of new weapons, capable to make "any missile defense useless", is unlikely to sound reassuring.
It is hardly a coincidence that this week China's official Xinhua news agency stressed the Russian foreign ministry's clarification that plans for a new generation of nuclear weapons will not threaten any particular country and that Russia is not considering enlarging its nuclear arsenal.
Moscow, too, moved to play down its dramatic announcement. Russia's new nuclear missile system is purely defensive and part of the country's program to upgrade its military, Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov reiterated. When asked why Russia was trying to improve its nuclear capabilities at a time when North Korea and Iran came under fire over their nuclear ambitions, Fedotov reportedly argued that "it was necessary to improve missile systems in order to avoid any accidents".
Incidentally, last year Russian media speculated that Moscow's best response to a possible nuclear conflict on the Korean Peninsula would be a preemptive missile strike against North Korean nuclear launch facilities, carried out by the Russian Pacific Fleet with its cruise missiles. Hence, Russia's new weapons announcement could be addressed to Pyongyang as well.
-------- u.n.
Iranian nuclear move not complete: UN chief
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125194937.krur6jfo.html
UN atomic agency chief Mohamed ElBardadei on Thursday reported a deadlock in talks with Iran, saying Tehran had so far failed to meet a pledge to fully suspend uranium enrichment.
As the agency met on Tehran's alleged nuclear weapons programme, he said Iran had requested to use centrifuge devices for research.
European diplomats said Iran's request goes against promises it made in an agreement with EU negotiators earlier this month in Paris to suspend uranium enrichment, the key step in making what can be fuel for nuclear reactors or in highly refined form the explosive core of atomic bombs.
"We have completed our work with regard to verification of the suspension with regard to one exception and that's the request by Iran to exempt 20 centrifuges for R and D (research and development) without using nuclear materials," ElBaradei told reporters.
Centrifuges aligned in a series known as cascades spin uranium gas at supersonic speeds in order to produce enriched uranium.
"It is not acceptable to us," a European diplomat said of the request, with the International Atomic Energy Agency meeting set to continue Friday, and possibly into the weekend, as the IAEA decides whether to bring Iran before the UN Security Council, which could impose punishing economic sanctions already sought by Washington.
The enrichment freeze was forged in talks with EU negotiators Britain, France and Germany in order to help Tehran show good faith and avoid possible UN sanctions.
Iran was also taking a hardline stance against a draft UN resolution by the European trio in moves which stalled the crucial IAEA meeting on allaying international concern over its nuclear program, which the United States claims is devoted to secretly developing atomic weapons.
In Tehran, Iranian President Mohammad Khatami criticized the draft as "not a good resolution," and Iran rejected a rewritten version circulated Friday afternoon.
The Iranian news agency IRNA quoted an Iranian diplomat in Vienna saying the revised text still called for Iran to be taken to the Security Council if the IAEA decided Iran was violating the suspension, even if the Council is never mentioned in the draft resolution.
The revised text said ElBaradei should "continue verifying that the suspension remains in place and to report without delay to the (IAEA) board should the agency find that the suspension is not fully sustained," according to a copy obtained by AFP.
The United States has for over a year been trying to get the IAEA board to take Iran before the Security Council for almost two decades of hidden nuclear activities, but non-aligned states, as well as the European trio and Russia and China, have opposed this, saying Iran must be given a chance to cooperate with a two-year-old IAEA investigation of its nuclear program.
But Iran keeps on upping the ante, diplomats said.
Iran continued to produce the uranium gas that is the first step in the enrichment process only days before Monday's ban, a move one European diplomat characterized as "not very helpful" as it led to doubts about Iran's intentions and the future of the suspension deal.
Gary Samore, a non-proliferation expert from London's International Institute for Strategic Studies, told AFP the Iranians apparently want to "clear the technical hurdle of running centrifuges together in a cascade."
He said this explains why they want to do research work with a small amount of centrifuges "but what surprises me is that they think they can get away with it."
Several diplomats said the Iranians were merely trying to use the centrifuges as a bargaining chip to get the Europeans to soften the resolution.
Iran maintains its nuclear program is strictly peaceful.
-----
UN official chides South Korea over nuclear activities
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125135441.ei9cjkyv.html
The head of the United Nations nuclear agency on Thursday expressed "serious concern" at past failures by South Korea to report activities linked to potential weapons programmes, but stopped short of saying that the country should be reported to the UN Security Council for them.
"The quantities of nuclear material involved have not been significant. Nonetheless given the nature of the activities, the failure of ROK (the Republic of Korea) to report these activities in accordance with its safeguards agreements is... a matter of serious concern," said Mohamed ElBaradei in a report submitted to the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
South Korea admitted in September that its scientists produced small amounts of plutonium in 1982, and enriched uranium in 2000 without informing the nuclear watchdog. It has since faced a series of tense inspections of its nuclear facilities.
"The Agency will continue to verify the correctness and completeness of ROK's declarations, ... and I will continue to report to the Board as appropriate," said ElBaradei in his statement ahead of an IAEA executive board meeting on Thursday.
However he conceded that the unauthorized activities appeared to have ceased. "We have not seen a continuation of the experiments," he said.
A Western diplomat said that South Korea was likely to receive a severe warning from the board, but would not be reported to the UN Security Council, a measure that the Seoul government has been anxious to avoid.
Earlier this month the IAEA submitted an official report saying that South Korea had violated international nuclear safeguards on a wider scale than it had previously declared.
But the report said South Korea's secret uranium- and plutonium-making activities were experimental and small-scale, and that it had cooperated with the agency in investigating the matter.
The case's referral to the Security Council would be embarrassing for South Korea which is playing a key role in seeking to end a drive to develop nuclear weapons in its neighbour, North Korea.
North Korea, citing concern about Seoul's past nuclear experiments as well as other issues, has refused to attend a proposed new round of multilateral talks on its nuclear weapons programmes.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- kentucky
Fire Knocks Out Equipment at a Nuclear Fuel Plant in Kentucky
The New York Times
By MATTHEW L. WALD
November 25, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/25/national/25fire.html?ex=1102050000&en=ecf0ebc8d411df0d&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1
WASHINGTON, Nov. 24 - An electrical fire Tuesday afternoon at a uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Ky., knocked out power to some of the equipment used to turn natural uranium into nuclear fuel, the plant's manager said Wednesday.
Power was restored on Wednesday afternoon, however, and by late in the day, workers were restarting the equipment, a spokeswoman for the plant's operator said.
The fire occurred at a transformer as workers were trying to install a new circuit breaker, said the plant manager, Steven R. Penrod. There were no injuries, Mr. Penrod said, and no release of radioactive material.
The equipment that was disabled by the loss of electricity is intended to strip impurities from uranium during the enrichment process. With that equipment not working, plant managers could not withdraw the finished product from the system.
And because the plant was able to continue running, as it is designed to do, the managers were forced to mix enriched uranium with more diluted uranium, for safety reasons: should the level of enrichment rise too high, a chain reaction can ensue, leading perhaps to the release of radioactivity.
The Paducah plant is the only domestic source of uranium enrichment. It was built by the government, and much of its equipment dates from the cold war. It is now operated by a private company, USEC, of Bethesda, Md.
Paducah's work consists mostly of sorting two types of uranium, U-238 and U-235, to raise the proportion of U-235, the kind that splits easily in reactors or bombs. The plant also receives enriched uranium taken from Russian stockpiles and blends it down to the level used in reactors.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has a resident inspector at the site, said that it was monitoring events involving the fire but that the episode had not risen to the level requiring an immediate formal report.
-----
Electrical Fire at Ky. Uranium Plant
November 25, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apus_story.asp?category=1110&slug=BRF%20Uranium%20Plant%20Fire
PADUCAH, Ky. -- An electrical fire in a transformer disrupted production at a uranium enrichment plant but posed no danger, according to the plant's operator.
The fire at the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant broke out Tuesday in a building where enriched uranium hexafluoride is put in cylinders for shipment to nuclear power plants, said Elizabeth Stuckle, spokeswoman for plant operator U.S. Enrichment Corp.
Stuckle said a faulty breaker in the transformer started the blaze, which was put out quickly without spreading. Operations resumed Wednesday afternoon in the building, which is separate from the plant's enrichment process, she said.
U.S. Enrichment notified the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, even though the fire did not reach the size or severity that required it be reported, Stuckle said.
The company is several months ahead of production so the disruption had no impact on meeting orders from customers, she said.
-------- new york
Indian Point wins high rating from NRC
THE NY JOURNAL NEWS
By ROGER WITHERSPOON rwithers@thejournalnews.com
November 25, 2004
http://www.nynews.com/newsroom/112504/a01p25nrcreport.html
The twin nuclear power plants at Indian Point have received high marks for a safe, effective operation in their third-quarter evaluation by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The "green" rating, the highest the agency awards in its color-coded evaluation system, means Indian Point is considered among the best-run of the nation's 103 nuclear plants. By year's end, it will begin receiving the minimum level of oversight and inspections for the first time in four years.
"It has been a slow, gradual climb for Indian Point back to the performance levels it should be at," NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said. "Since 2000, they had red, then yellow or white findings, so it was a turning point for them earlier this year when, for the first time, they didn't have any findings beyond green."
The agency's inspectors did write "deviation memos" when the green rating first was issued in April, requiring a heavier load of inspections than normal at Indian Point. The increased inspections were needed because there still were problems with equipment, training and procedures. The memos are still in effect, but the number of extra inspections has been reduced as plant performance has improved.
"There has been a gradual stepping down in oversight, so they are not getting the baseline inspections," Sheehan said. "They still have issues to work on, though, and we will continue to keep a close watch on Indian Point."
The evaluation, covering the quarter that ended Sept. 30, found some minor problems with maintenance practices at Indian Point 2 and 3. The evaluation was released this week by the NRC. Entergy Nuclear Northeast, which owns the plants in Buchanan, declined comment on the evaluation.
NRC inspectors were critical of Entergy's ability to find the causes of major equipment failures. The plant shut down twice in September, and reduced power on a third occasion, because of problems maintaining proper water levels in one of the plant's four steam generators.
Brian McDermott, the NRC's lead evaluator of both plants, said Entergy's staff "made several unsuccessful attempts to identify the direct cause of the feedwater problems, due to the fact that they didn't apply a very formal troubleshooting and root cause analysis. They did things on a piecemeal basis and didn't work together as well as they should have."
McDermott said the lack of a systematic problem-solving system during the first shutdown Sept. 1 led to the two subsequent interruptions at the site. But, he said, Entergy officials learned from their mistakes and correctly evaluated the situation when the second shutdown occurred Sept. 24. There was no danger to the public during the incidents.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Nigerian navy officers' trial over missing Russian tanker to go on: court
LAGOS (AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125140440.qalcttu3.html
The trial of three Nigerian navy officers charged with conspiracy in the disappearance of an impounded Russian oil tanker will continue, the president of court martial said, rejecting a request by the defence to drop the case.
"A prima facie case has been established against the accused," Joseph Ajayi said, ruling that the trial should continue.
Earlier, one of the defence layers, Babatunde Fashanu, told the court that the prosecution has "failed woefully to prove its case against the accused."
Last Friday, one of the key prosecution witnesses in the case, Solomon Attam, a junior naval officer, told the court that he and three of his colleagues were offered a huge bribe to look the other way while crude oil was siphoned off the MT African Pride oil tanker and replaced by water.
He was giving evidence in the case of three senior Nigerian navy officers who have been charged with conspiracy in the disappearance of the tanker which was impounded by the military in October last year along with its crew of 13 Russian sailors.
The vessel was brought to Lagos in January and placed in the custody of security agents pending the trial, but later disappeared.
The trial formally began last November 1, and the accused, navy rear admirals Babatunde Kolawole, Francis Agbiti and Anthonio Bob-Manuel, have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
The Russian crew is on trial in a civil court accused of attempting to smuggle 11,300 tonnes of crude oil worth 345 million naira (2.6 million dollars, two million euros) out of Nigeria.
A parliamentary committee investigating the case has described the mysterious disappearance of the ship as a "national embarrassment".
--------
'French intervention in Ivory Coast a mistake'
The News International
November 25, 2004
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/nov2004-daily/25-11-2004/world/w7.htm
PARIS: France's military intervention in Ivory Coast was a mistake, Libyan leader Moamer Qaddafi said Wednesday in an interview published ahead of President Jacques Chirac's visit to Tripoli.
"Personally I have never understood the reason for France's military presence in Africa. What does it want to do there?" he told Le Figaro newspaper.
"Look at what happened in Ivory Coast. I fear it will have negative effects on Franco-African relations. There used to be mutual trust between Africa and France. I fear that it was a mistake to intervene in Ivory Coast. Now the trust has disappeared," he said.
Earlier this month France destroyed the small Ivorian air force after government forces killed nine French peacekeepers. Since then France has sent in more troop reinforcements and evacuated thousands of its nationals from Ivory Coast.
Qaddafi said the answer to conflicts in Africa was a "single African army" answering to the African Union.
"What matters to me is to get rid of all national armies in Africa. They are no longer necessary. The single African army must replace them.
-------- arms
Ivorian faction backs arms ban
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Marion Baillot
November 25, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041124-105505-3003r.htm
The U.S.-based spokesman for the opposition coalition in Ivory Coast has welcomed a French-sponsored U.N. resolution imposing an arms embargo on the West African nation.
"You cannot give that regime access to arms," Kehi Edouard Djouha said on behalf of the coalition opposed to Ivory Coast President Laurent Gbagbo.
Rebels control the northern half of Ivory Coast, and the opposition coalition consists of four political parties and three rebel groups that make up the New Forces.
Ivory Coast's latest crisis began when Mr. Gbagbo's military broke a cease-fire that followed a year of civil war with air strikes on the rebel-held north.
Warplanes also bombed a French peacekeeping post in the north on Nov. 6, killing nine French peacekeepers and an American aid worker and plunging the country into chaos. The French retaliated by destroying the Ivorian air force.
The U.N. Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1572 last week, condemning the Ivorian air strikes and reiterating support for the action carried out by the United Nations and the French peacekeepers.
Under the resolution, the arms ban will last 13 months, and the country now has a month to revive an unsteady peace process or face further sanctions.
Mr. Djouha was denied access to a speech given by Ivorian ambassador to the United Nations Philippe Djangone-Bi at the National Press Club Tuesday.
In his speech, Mr. Djangone-Bi called the arms embargo imposed by the U.N. Security Council after the outbreak of violence "unfair and biased," though he said his country will respect it.
He added that France's attitude in the resolution of the crisis is unacceptable, since, as the former colonial power and therefore a party to the conflict, it has led the diplomatic push for sanctions.
"One cannot be judge and judged," he said.
At the press conference, Mr. Djangone-Bi and three colleagues presented pictures and videos they said depicted French peacekeeping troops shooting at "unarmed civilians."
Mr. Djouha, in an interview after his expulsion by National Press Building security after the guests complained, said the French soldiers were protecting French and other foreigners seeking protection in a hotel from rampaging pro-government mobs.
He said Mr. Gbagbo had gone as far as to urge each Ivorian to "find the whites" and kill "his own little Frenchmen."
"If the French had not stopped them, today we will be watching pictures of people jumping from the top of the hotel, as it happened in New York on September 11," he said.
The U.N. resolution also expressed concern about the use of the press to broadcast hate messages against foreigners.
--------
Blix Urges Caution over Iraq 'Chemical Weapons Lab'
Scotsman.com
By Katherine Haddon, PA
25 Nov 2004
http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3805602
Former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix tonight said he would be "surprised" if a chemical laboratory found in Iraq was capable of creating weapons.
Speaking at a packed chamber at the Oxford Union, Dr Blix counselled caution in reacting to the find, made by Iraqi troops searching terrorist hideouts in Fallujah.
National security adviser Qassem Dawoud has said the soldiers found a chemical weapons lab, complete with manuals on manufacturing explosives and toxins, including anthrax.
But Dr Blix told students: "Let's see what the chemicals are ... many of these stories evaporate when they are looked at more closely."
He added: "If there were to be found something, we would all be surprised.
"The chances are, I think, relatively small. I would be surprised if it was something real."
Since the war, Dr Blix has repeatedly criticised the case made for military intervention by the US and Britain, based on the supposition that Saddam Hussein possessed illegal weapons of mass destruction.
The US military has described the find in Fallujah as the "largest weapons cache to date in Fallujah".
The weapons, including anti-tank mines and a mobile bomb-making lab, were found inside a mosque used by Sunni rebel leader, Imam Abdullah al-Janabi.
The military said troops also found documents detailing hostage interrogations, as well as what may be a mobile bomb-making factory housed in a truck, mortar systems, rocket-propelled grenades, launchers, recoilless rifles and parts of surface-to-air weapons systems.
-----
US to sell 50 medium-range missiles to Jordan
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125162235.zaebxkkt.html
The Pentagon is to sell 50 US-made air-to-air missiles to Jordan, along with supporting equipment, in a deal worth about 39 million dollars, despite objections from Israel.
In a statement released Tuesday, the Defense Department said it had notified lawmakers of the intended sale of 50 AIM-120C Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles (AMRAAM).
"The proposed sale will enhance the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a key regional partner who has proven to be a vital force for political stability and peace in the Middle East," the Pentagon statement said.
The Defense Department said Jordan needs the missiles to improve the capabilities of its F-16 jets and to work better with US forces.
"The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not affect the basic military balance in the region," the Pentagon said, adding that "there will be no adverse impact on US defense readiness as a result of this proposed sale."
In August, reports in Israel said the government, fearing that Jordan could eventually sell the AMRAAM system to Egypt, had written to members of the US Congress in an attempt to torpedo the sale.
Opposition to the deal was led by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, who were both concerned about the idea of Israel's large southern neighbor Egypt possessing such advanced weaponry, according to the reports.
In 1979, Egypt became the first Arab country to make peace with the Jewish state, and Israel concluded a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994.
Senior US officials had said in August that the opposition was unlikely to succeed in blocking the sale.
-------- business
Boeing Converts 737 Into Bomber
By Chris Genna
Nov. 25, 2004
Wired
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65817,00.html
SEATTLE -- Picture the Boeing 737 -- the small, stocky jetliner that's the workhorse of hundreds of airlines around the world. Now picture the 737 with missiles slung under its wings and a bomb bay in its belly.
Boeing is gearing up to modify its ubiquitous twin-jet, single-aisle airliner into a Navy patrol bomber called the Multi-Mission Maritime Aircraft, or MMA. The plane will have a variety of sensors to pinpoint a submarine's location: anti-submarine radar, an electro-optical-infrared camera and Magnetic Anomaly Detection, or MAD. Rotary magazines will drop sonar sonobuoys. Five tactical consoles inside will integrate information from all those sensors and inform the aircraft commander, headquarters and friendly units in real time.
What's more, the plane could launch Harpoon missiles from two racks under each wing, or from a weapons bay aft of the wing, which could also carry torpedoes, mines or nuclear or conventional depth bombs. The MMA will have a receptacle to take on more fuel in flight so it can extend a patrol for up to 21 hours.
The planes would replace the Navy's fleet of 223 Lockheed P-3 Orion undersea warfare and reconnaissance planes and EP-3E electronic intelligence planes, like the one forced to land on the Chinese island of Hainan on April 1, 2001, after it collided with a Chinese interceptor.
P-3s have four turboprop engines, and getting the Navy to consider a twin-engine turbojet wasn't easy. Boeing took a 737 to air stations around the country and Europe to show Navy aviators a twin-jet could do the job -- even on one engine if it had to -- and helped Boeing secure the contract over rival Lockheed Martin, which proposed an updated turboprop plane for the mission.
"I love the P-3," said Tim Norgart, who commanded a wing of P-3s at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station before retiring from the Navy and joining Boeing's MMA program. "It always brought me home. But I can't see my granddaughter walking out to the flight line to a propeller plane in 2050."
The world has changed since the P-3 was developed in the 1950s, but the submarine threat hasn't gone away, Norgart said. Currently, 42 nations operate diesel-electric submarines, and that technology could negate America's cutting-edge weaponry. "Can you imagine us deploying the (nuclear-powered aircraft carrier) Carl Vinson to the Gulf with one of those submarines unaccounted for?" he asked.
It shouldn't be that hard to imagine a civil airliner converted to a weapons-packing warplane -- the P-3 itself was based on the Lockheed Electra airliner. A British plane with a similar mission, the Nimrod, is based on the de Havilland Comet jetliner.
Under a $3.9 billion Navy contract awarded last June, Boeing will build seven 737 MMAs for testing. The plane's design has begun its 3,000 hours of testing in wind tunnels. First flight will be in 2008 and delivery in 2009. It would enter service in 2013. Ultimately, the Navy will need 108 of the planes, a deal that would be worth $20 billion.
A production contract will be good news for the city of Renton, Washington, where 737s are built. Boeing's factory there, with space for four production lines, went to two lines because of the worldwide airline downturn. The discontinuation of the larger 757 in October reduced production floor space even further. The 737 MMA will be built on a separate, security-controlled assembly line in Renton. The completed planes will be flown to Seattle's Boeing Field for modification into bombers.
-------- chemical weapons
Swiss FM in Russia for chemical arms reduction talks
MOSCOW (AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125162244.yki1y6n8.html
Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey arrived in Moscow on Thursday for talks with her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov focused on chemical arms reduction, and the fights against terrorism and money laundering, officials said.
Calmy-Rey and Lavrov meet Friday when Switzerland is due to commit money to a fund, for eliminating Russia's massive stock of Soviet-era chemical weapons, established by the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations in Canada in June 2002.
They are also due to sign broader agreements on the fight against money laundering and terrorism.
Trade between Switzerland and Russia has tripled over the past three years, reaching 6.34 billion dollars (4.79 billion euros) in 2003.
-----
Army tests ravaged family's land
Military blasted mines owned by Utahns with tons of chemical agents
By Lee Davidson
November 25, 2004
Deseret Morning News
http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,595107713,00.html
Siblings Louise, Douglas and Allan Cannon inherited a gold mine. But they say the Army is giving them the shaft, figuratively, as some of its old, dark secrets have turned their dream of rich income into a nightmare.
They found belatedly that the Army's nearby Dugway Proving Ground attacked the old family mines with 3,000 rounds of chemical arms at the end of World War II. The purpose was to simulate what the Army would face against Japanese bunkers and caves.
The Army also bombed the surface of 1,425 acres of Cannon family-owned land above the mines with more than 23 tons of chemical arms, including deadly mustard agent, hydrogen cyanide and the choking agent Phosgene, plus high explosives and incendiary arms that included napalm, butane and gasoline (from flame throwers).
"They bombed the heck out of it and contaminated our lands - and the surrounding (public) lands. And they won't clean it up," Louise says.
She worries that a new Army proposal to expand Proving Ground boundaries is an attempt "to try to surround us and landlock us," making it impossible to access and work the mines, eliminating the need to clean up the Cannons' land or lowering the value if the government were to take it under eminent domain provisions.
Also, it turns out that the Cannons had been quietly discussing the possibility of a repository for nuclear waste on their contaminated lands if a similar plan for the Skull Valley Goshute Reservation fails. The Dugway expansion also could block their proposal for a waste site.
It all prolongs years of frustration, lawsuits, threats and counterthreats among the Cannons, the Army and the state of Utah and related but unheeded pleas to Congress for help.
Family inheritance
The siblings' grandfather, Jesse Cannon, "patented," or bought, the land from the government in the 1920s (and his father had started working the land years earlier). Miners have sought gold, silver, lead and copper on those claims in the Dugway mountains. The inheritors say that when Jesse died in 1954, he did not pass along any knowledge of Army contamination there to their father, Floyd.
Floyd made his children partial owners of the mine areas in 1957. They became full owners when he died in 1980. Douglas, one of the siblings, said neither his father nor grandfather ever mentioned to him any knowledge about heavy bombardment of the area.
Louise said her father "did find some (chemical arms) canisters in a tunnel. He didn't know what they were. He called the Proving Ground to see if they had been doing anything in the area, and they said they had not been over there."
Court documents later said Army records showed that the father called Dugway several times to ask for cleanup of unexploded ordnance and weapon fragments he found. Louise says, "He was told they were strays from testing on the base."
Secrets begin to leak
In 1988, the Deseret News obtained and reported on Army documents that suspected public U.S. Bureau of Land Management areas in the "Southern Triangle" near the Cannons' land were likely heavily contaminated by weapons testing. Also subjected to the tests, according to the report, was the so-called "Yellow Jacket" area (the name of one of the Cannons' 86.5 patented mining claims in the region).
The Deseret News also wrote stories about how the Army then wanted to expand its boundaries to absorb such dangerous BLM areas, which the BLM opposed, preferring that the Army clean up the land instead.
The expansion never occurred. But Army officials said last month in response to Deseret Morning News inquiries that expansion has again been proposed internally. Officials have offered no further details, nor specifics on what boundaries are sought.
Despite early Deseret News stories, the Cannons said they did not truly suspect heavy contamination of their lands until the Army Corps of Engineers requested official permission in 1994 to enter their property "to determine whether . . . these lands have been impacted by unexploded ordnance."
Louise said she later happened to be at the Tooele County Courthouse on Aug. 30, 1994, filing paperwork on a mining claim when a worker told her the Army was holding an information session downstairs about possible contamination on desert lands.
"I signed in, picked up the fact sheets and left," she says. "The fact sheets said they were checking for contamination in the Southern Triangle and on private property, but did not name the Cannon property."
However, by signing in there, courts would later rule that Louise had enough knowledge about potential contamination on the Cannon lands that she unwittingly started a clock ticking toward a two-year deadline to file any lawsuits against the government. She would not learn about that deadline until it was too late.
Contamination aplenty
In 1996, a government contractor finished a draft study that said the Cannon property was heavily contaminated. Visits by the contractor had found intact, high-explosive mortar shells and burster tubes from chemical-filled rockets and bombs.
According to court documents, the study said a full-scale removal of munitions and debris in the Yellow Jacket claim area alone - only a small part of the Cannons' property - would cost $12.3 million.
It also said record searches showed at least 3,004 rounds of chemical weapons had been fired into some of the Cannon mines, and it listed the other weapon types tested on the property. It found chemical munitions residue and chemical agent contamination throughout the area and said it was likely the entire 1,425 acres of Cannon property was contaminated.
It recommended buying the land, fencing it, posting warning signs, doing some limited munitions removal and sealing the mines.
Douglas Cannon says a gold company that had a lease on the Cannon mines abandoned it for fear of the contamination. He said other companies that had shown interest in leasing it also backed away quickly once they learned about the Army's testing and contamination.
Louise says she had been anxiously awaiting the study that confirmed the contamination, and often called the Army Corps of Engineers seeking it. "They kept saying it would come in 30 days. Then in another 30 days," she said.
She says one employee there finally warned her that she only had two years from the time she learned of potential contamination to file a suit. She called an attorney, who confirmed that.
After the Cannons saw the draft study confirming contamination, they filed a claim with the Army, and then a lawsuit in federal court, seeking $8.8 million in damages, the value they put on the land.
Family secrets
As the lawsuit advanced, the Army said it found an old contract it had signed with the siblings' grandfather, Jesse Cannon, that had allowed the military to use the Yellow Jacket area for testing for six months. "We had never known about it," Louise says.
That contract, which gave Jesse just $1, allowed the Army to use a portion of his property in exchange for the Army's promise to "leave the property of the owner in as good condition as it was on the date of the government's entry."
Louise says, "The Justice Department says he did that because he was patriotic" and wanted to help the war effort against the Japanese. "We'll never know," she says. "It (the contract) never mentions any military maneuvers or testing. He wasn't allowed on the property for the six months it was used. I don't think he knew what they planned."
After the Army's "Project Sphinx" testing ended on that land, documents that emerged during court proceedings show that Jesse Cannon was not happy with what he found.
He walked the area with an Army claims officer who found the "entire area is liberally covered with shell, rocket and bomb fragments," and that "just outside a cabin are 10 butane-filled dud bombs."
Jesse filed a first claim for damages, and was paid $755.48. Later, he filed another claim for damages to mine shaft timbers from the testing and was paid $2,064.
He filed a third claim five years later in 1950. He said while he accepted the earlier payment in full for all claims for damages at his Yellow Jacket mine, "I did not believe at that time that the chemical agents used by the Army would remain in the workings and make it impossible for me to ever operate the mine again without some sort of decontamination."
The claim added he found there was "still a concentration of poison gas present in the mine," and said miners who considered leasing it "shied away when they learned of the Army's use of the mine." He never collected money on that claim, and his grandchildren never learned about it from him.
Regardless, Louise says, "The Army was under contractual obligation to clean up the land, and they never have."
Court win, court loss
The younger Cannons initially won $160,937 in damages against the Army in 2002, but the Army appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, which reversed the decision.
Despite the reversal, the appeals court's written opinion blasted "the government's abysmal failure over the past half-century to clean up the test site."
It lamented that the law gave the Cannon siblings only two years from when they learned about the possibility of heavy contamination of their property to file suit. The Cannons had contended the clock should have started ticking when the Army's draft study of contamination was released in 1996 (which is also when they filed suit).
But the court agreed with the Army's assertion that it began when Louise attended the information meeting in 1994, and when the Army asked permission to search for unexploded ordnance. That meant the statute of limitations allowed by law had expired, and the Cannons lost.
Still, the court wrote, "The United States government has yet fully to recognize and appreciate Jesse F. Cannon's contribution to national security during World War II. The government should have lived up to its obligations long ago. . . . The Cannons' remedy at this stage is political, however, not legal."
Congress no help
Taking the judges' hint that only political and not legal help was available, the Cannons started asking Congress for compensation for their contaminated land.
"I have written to some members of the Utah congressional delegation and to 200 different members of appropriations or other committees who are over defense or public lands," Louise said. "I have not received one reply."
She said she also wrote to Utah governors, the Environmental Protection Agency and other government agencies she thought would have an interest in cleaning up the area, especially neighboring state-owned school trust land sections that likely had been contaminated as well. She said none showed interest.
Louise said that during the trial, she said to a government lawyer that maybe the Cannon family should clean up the land itself, and keep the munitions they find. She said the government informed her that was not allowed because it owned the unexploded ordnance, and only the federal government could remove it. The lawyers also said they considered her suggestion "to be a threat against the United States."
Because she was frustrated, she said she would return any munitions found "in a yellow rental truck parked next to the federal building" (sounding like the Oklahoma City bombing). She said the lawyers also took that as a threat but didn't see leaving the old ordnance on Cannon land as a threat.
Weak actions
Douglas Cannon said Army representatives said in court that there are plans eventually to clean up the area. But the Army cannot do it until it receives funding from Congress, which likely is years away.
He said when the judge asked the Army if it would be interested in buying the land, "They said no because it is contaminated. That is ironic, because they contaminated it. They said they didn't have the budget to handle it," Douglas said.
Amid frustration, Louise said she once called the state to ask what would happen if she did not pay taxes on the contaminated land and let it revert to the government or if she simply deeded it over to the state.
"They said, 'We would sue you.' "
"I said, 'What?' They said, 'If you let property that you knew to be contaminated come back to the state, we would sue you to clean it up.' I said, 'You've got to be kidding. I didn't do this.' And they said, 'It doesn't matter,' " Louise said.
The Cannons said the only effort the Army made on their land was to post some signs warning that it is a Formerly Used Defensive Site, and that no one should pick up munitions they see.
Louise said the Army also accused her of stealing such signs that disappeared. But when the Army told her the signs had been made of wood, she said, "Anything made of wood out there disappears quickly. They have all theses campers, hikers and motorcyclists out there. They make little campfires. If you leave any wood out there unattended for 24 hours, it disappears," she said.
Louise said that on another occasion, the Army accused her of stealing an old chemical rocket booster that erosion had laid bare on Cannon property. It had been spotted by Army crews in the area.
"They flagged it, and when they returned to Dugway they left orders for others to go get it," she said. "Eleven days later when they went looking for it, they couldn't find it, but saw a lot of tire tracks around the site. So they called me and asked if I had taken it."
She says she replied, "Are you people out of your minds? No I don't have it. There are so many people who go out there (for hiking and four-wheeling) that it's probably sitting on some guy's mantle, and he doesn't know what he has. That's why you need to clean up that area."
She said she then received a lecture on how it would be illegal for her to take such munitions if she finds them.
The waste option
Faced with not being able to clean up the property or mine it safely, Louise said, the siblings considered another option.
"I also had several conversations with the nuclear waste people that were trying to put that storage of nuclear waste in Skull Valley," she says. The state has fought for years to block an above-ground storage area proposal by Private Fuels Storage on the Goshute Reservation. The company is a consortium of Midwest nuclear power utilities.
"Because they've kind of been hitting one roadblock after another to put it in Skull Valley, the Dugway property that is owned by the Cannons is looking better and better to them," she says.
Louise says her family's property is more stable geologically than the Skull Valley site, and the land sits beneath a "no fly zone." The state has fought the Skull Valley site in part by contending it is too near faults and that a plane crash into it could be catastrophic.
If Dugway Proving Ground expansion took the Cannon property - or surrounded it - that would almost surely prevent a private repository there, too.
In a Catch-22
Louise says, "We're in a Catch-22. We can't get the property cleaned up. We can't lease it. We can't even get rid of it. I even worry we might be liable if someone is hurt out there by some of the contamination."
Douglas says, "The property is now useless to us. No development or potential sale can take place because of the danger and because necessary insurance cannot be obtained inexpensively to protect personnel from injury or death."
They worry that the latest disclosure by the Army that it is considering expanding Dugway boundaries is aimed, at least in part, at them and their property. (The Deseret Morning News has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for specifics about the proposal, but the Army has not yet responded.)
"My fear is that what they are trying to do is surround us and landlock us," preventing access to the mines and any hope of developing them, Louise says. "It's privately owned, and they don't want to clean it up."
She adds, "What I want them to do is clean it up. The price of precious minerals is going up, especially gold. It's not only a large mine, but it has shown promise in the past" and managed to produce $246,000 in lease fees despite the contamination worries between 1969 and 1993. Some promising veins have been identified.
But the Cannons say the jury is still out on whether they will really get the gold mine - or just the shaft.
E-mail: lee@desnews.com
-------- europe
Western Ukraine military command says it will not act against people
(AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125145048.gmom5kl8.html
LVIV, Ukraine The military command in western Ukraine, which is an opposition bastion, said Thursday it was staying out of the political crisis gripping the country and would not act against its own people.
"The western command will not act against its own people," said Lieutenant General Mikhail Kutsin.
He said over the past days political forces had been appealing to army units for support.
"The western military forces are stationed at their bases and they won't participate in any political activities," said Kutsin.
"The army won't interfere ... and one shouldn't say that the army might act against Ukrainian citizens."
-------- iraq
Discovery of weapons cache underscores Iraq weapons free-for-all
(AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125173424.c5plsccf.html
FALLUJAH, Iraq The reported discovery of a mosque packed with weapons and a chemicals lab in Fallujah were the latest revelations about an arms haul one US military officer said was enough to take over Iraq.
Weapons found in and around the Saad Abi Bin Waqas mosque represented the largest cache discovered by US and Iraqi forces since they launched a massive assault to crush insurgents in Fallujah, the US military said Thursday.
The army described the mosque as a suspected safe house where Abdullah al-Janabi, the insurgents' spiritual leader, preached his sermons laden with "anti-coalition rhetoric".
A truck was found in compound that contained various explosive compounds, rocket-propelled grenades, grenades, mortar rounds, rockets and bomb making materials, it said.
"Initial assessments indicate the truck may have been a mobile IED factory," it said, using the term for home-made bombs that the military calls improvised explosive devices.
In Baghdad, Iraqi security chief Qassem Daoud said national guardsmen had found a workshop in Fallujah used to manufacture explosives and chemical substances.
"In a house in the industrial district, in southwest Fallujah, national guards discovered a chemical materials laboratory that was used to make explosives and toxic substances," he told a news conference.
"There were also pamphlets showing ways to make explosives, toxic substances, including anthrax," he said.
On Wednesday, US Lieutenant Colonel Dan Wilson told reporters that troops had been surprised by the number of weapons found, describing a "free-for-all in the city of Fallujah for months".
"The sheer amount of caches we've found would stun you. You could literally take over this country with the number of weapons we've found," he said.
On November 8, US and Iraqi troops launched a massive assault against Fallujah -- the largest post-war military operation in Iraq -- in a bid to reclaim the lawless enclave ahead of key elections scheduled for January 30.
The Sunni Muslim bastion had been off-limits for months. The US-led forces are keen to prevent rebels from leaving Fallujah to join ranks with other insurgents and take the battle to other cities.
-----
U.S. Says Police in Iraq Need Bolstering
More Arms, Trainers, Backup Units Sought
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 25, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11263-2004Nov24.html
BAGHDAD, Nov. 24 -- As insurgents intensify attacks on members of Iraq's fledgling security forces, U.S. authorities have concluded that plans to provide new police officers with a two-month introductory course followed by some on-the-job mentoring will not be enough to ensure their effectiveness.
With many police officers intimidated by killings and threats, some U.S. officials have even begun questioning the notion of trying to establish a system of local policing at this time.
"Community policing, local policing, is a very strong tactic when the problem is crime," said Ron Neumann, the top political-military counselor at the U.S. Embassy here. "But when the problem switches to insurgency, community-based police and their families become vulnerable. You may have to consider moving to a whole new concept of some form of national or regional police."
The creation of homegrown military and law enforcement forces is a central part of the U.S. strategy for stabilizing Iraq and eventually allowing the withdrawal of U.S. troops. U.S. and Iraqi officials want to rely solely on Iraqi forces to guard polling places during national elections scheduled for Jan. 30, keeping U.S. troops at a distance.
The police are one element in the mix of security services taking shape in Iraq. Other major components -- the army and the National Guard -- have also suffered performance and retention setbacks. But for the most part, they have won passing marks or better while operating alongside U.S. forces since the summer in critical fights in Najaf, Samarra and Fallujah.
U.S. authorities overseeing the buildup of the Iraqi force say there is no time to draft an entirely new concept for the police. Instead, they are struggling to adapt the original plan by bolstering the police with more weapons, more heavily fortified stations, additional trainers and new specialized backup units.
"The key to this is constantly adapting to whatever the situation is on the ground," said Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, the senior U.S. officer responsible for training and equipping the Iraqi forces.
Local policing is working in many parts of Iraq, Petraeus said. One particularly encouraging example he cited was Najaf, where the U.S. military battled the militia of Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr in April and August, ultimately routing the fighters. Much of the credit for the quiet there now goes to good local policing as well as strong political leadership from the provincial governor and popular support, said Petraeus during a visit to the city Tuesday.
But the police have performed poorly in the Sunni Muslim areas in central and northwestern Iraq, where much of the current violence is concentrated. As a dramatic case in point, the police force in Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, collapsed earlier this month. A wave of attacks on police stations and other government buildings prompted 3,200 of the city's 4,000 police officers to abandon their jobs. Insurgents have waged a ferocious campaign of intimidation against the police. While attacks on U.S. and other foreign troops have increased 24 percent since the handover of power in late June, attacks on Iraqi security forces have risen 50 percent, according to the U.S. military command here.
To boost their firepower, more police officers will be getting AK-47 assault rifles. Instead of one for every third policeman, as initially called for in U.S. plans, every other policeman will receive one.
Efforts also are underway to make instruction at the eight-week introductory course more practical, with greater emphasis on marksmanship skills and lessons in how to identify roadside bombs.
Some U.S. officials have advocated lengthening the course to 12 weeks. But Petraeus has argued that more can be gained by altering the structure of the new forces and changing their operational concepts.
In an interview, Petraeus asserted the importance of establishing cohesive police units with clear chains of command and using them to deal with trouble spots rather than sending in individual police officers unfamiliar with each other. He also said there is a need for specialized units that could bring extra combat power and intelligence-gathering assets to a fight and help bridge the capability gap between police and army forces.
To help restore order in Mosul, for instance, Baghdad authorities dispatched a "special police commando" battalion to the northwestern city. Six such battalions are being set up under a plan conceived two months ago to establish paramilitary-type units within police ranks.
The battalions, each with about 750 members, consist largely of highly skilled veterans of former Iraqi special forces teams. They have been used to quell resistance in Samarra and north Babil province. One battalion is slated to go to Fallujah.
Additionally, three public order battalions, initially conceived for riot control missions, are being beefed up and dispatched to Fallujah and Baghdad. Plans are underway to establish two special police regiments with wheeled armored vehicles. Police emergency response units are forming as well, with the goal being to have one in every province. This is meant to ensure that regular police officers can summon reinforcements when in trouble.
"What you need is something effective and dependable that local police chiefs can turn to, something that will make them feel they have some backup," Petraeus said.
Under the original U.S. plan, fresh police course graduates were to receive mentoring by U.S. or other international law enforcement officers for six months. That is typical of police training programs set up by the United States elsewhere in the world, according to Robert B. Charles, who runs the State Department's office of international narcotics and law enforcement.
But the large numbers of new Iraqi police officers have outpaced the supply of experienced international mentors. About 47,000 police officers are now on duty, with plans to expand the force to 135,000.
--------
American Envoy Killed In Baghdad
By Anthony Shadid and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, November 25, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10907-2004Nov24?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 24 -- An American diplomat was killed Wednesday in an attack near the heavily fortified sector of central Baghdad known as the Green Zone, U.S. officials said.
Jim Mollen, 48, of Binghamton, N.Y., was the U.S. Embassy's senior consultant to the Iraqi ministers of education and higher education. He was shot to death while traveling in a car within a mile of the Green Zone, according to his mother, Anne Mollen.
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in a statement that he was "profoundly saddened" by Mollen's killing. "Jim dedicated his life to a noble cause: improving the quality of education for thousands of Iraqis," Powell said.
Mollen was the second U.S. diplomat known to have been killed in Baghdad since Iraq's interim government assumed political power on June 28. Edward J. Seitz, an assistant regional security officer for the U.S. Embassy, was killed in an attack on a U.S. military base near Baghdad's airport on Oct. 24.
Meanwhile, a car bomb exploded Wednesday on the road to the airport, killing three people, and the U.S. military said it found five more bodies in the northern city of Mosul.
The grisly discovery in Iraq's third-largest city brought to 20 the number of corpses found there in the past week. Of those, at least 10 were Iraqi soldiers, nine of them killed execution-style. Four others were decapitated and have not been identified.
In Baghdad, the car bomb was packed in a red Volkswagen. It exploded in the Yarmuk neighborhood on an overpass behind a convoy of sport-utility vehicles, the kind that often carry diplomats, U.S. officials or contractors. The convoy was apparently unscathed, but the blast hurled a car off the bridge, killing a woman and two children inside, said Ahmed Gatia, an Iraqi policeman at the scene.
Baghdad was comparatively calm Wednesday after street battles in a Sunni Muslim neighborhood erupted this past weekend between U.S. forces and insurgents armed with rifles and rocket-propelled grenades. But many in Baghdad have said they fear the violence will only mount as the country approaches parliamentary elections scheduled for Jan. 30. Powerful groups among Iraq's Sunni minority have called for an election boycott, and the influential Iraqi Islamic Party called for a six-month delay in the ballot.
The interim government of Prime Minister Ayad Allawi has insisted that U.S. troops, with the help of Iraqi security forces, will establish control over restive, Sunni-dominated regions in central Iraq by election day, a claim met by skepticism in Baghdad.
"As the election gets closer, the situation will get worse," said Osama Hussein, 25, a jeweler in the Shiite Muslim neighborhood of Kadhimiya, a relatively tranquil oasis of Baghdad where crowds still walk the streets past sunset. "God willing, things will get better after the election. Right now, we only feel safe here."
South of Baghdad in Babil province, Iraqi police captured "a suspected insurgent leader," according to U.S. military spokesmen. Few details were available about the capture, which the U.S. military said occurred at the agricultural bank in the town of Mahmudiyah.
The police raid was part of a larger operation that began Tuesday in which U.S., British and Iraqi forces hunted insurgents in the northern part of the province. U.S. troops there saw little action Wednesday.
"It was a relatively quiet day," said Capt. David Nevers, spokesman for the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which is leading the effort. "We expect more in the days to come."
The operation is targeting a number of houses and other locations where insurgents are thought to be hiding. But unlike the recent major assaults on Fallujah and Samarra, which involved large clusters of forces maneuvering through urban neighborhoods in house-to-house searches, this push is likely to proceed in starts and stops, officers said.
"There are going to be a series of hot and cold days," Nevers said in a telephone interview. "Several thousand forces are participating, but they're not all sweeping across the province at once."
The operation involves about 3,100 Marines, more than 1,000 Iraqi security troops and 900 members of the Black Watch, a British infantry regiment. In 11 early morning raids Tuesday in Jabella, about 50 miles south of Baghdad, forces captured 32 suspected insurgents and uncovered caches of munitions, Nevers said.
Among those sought by U.S. forces are insurgent leaders believed to have operated out of Fallujah. Those men -- Abdullah Janabi, Omar Hadid and Abu Musab Zarqawi -- all apparently escaped this month's U.S.-led offensive in Fallujah, and military officials have speculated that Zarqawi headed north, perhaps to Mosul.
In an audiotape purportedly made by Zarqawi and posted on the Internet on Wednesday, the Jordanian criticized Muslim scholars for not speaking out against U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The authenticity of the tape could not be independently verified.
"You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy. . . . You have quit supporting the holy warriors," he said, according to the Associated Press, which transcribed the tape. "Hundreds of thousands of the nation's sons are being slaughtered at the hands of the infidels because of your silence."
Mollen, the slain American diplomat, joined the State Department in 2002 and went to Iraq in 2003, working originally for the Coalition Provisional Authority, according to a State Department spokesman. An official biography said Mollen was working to rebuild Iraq's 20 major universities and 40 technical institutes, research centers and colleges.
In an interview before he left for Iraq about a year ago, Mollen told a reporter for a State Department publication that his goals included rebuilding academic buildings, classrooms, libraries and laboratories, as well as building Western-style graduate business schools in Iraq. He also sought to set up online digital video conferencing at Iraqi universities, so students and teachers could communicate with their contemporaries in the United States.
"Jim was a great guy, and a beloved son, and an idealist that was trying to do something for the world, and he got shot to death for it," said his father, John Mollen.
Mollen's mother, Anne, said her son "was very, very much into the work he was doing in Iraq. . . . He was working very closely with the school systems and the universities, trying to get them back up and running."
Anne Mollen said that U.S. officials told her that her son had just left a meeting at Iraq's Education Ministry and was driving away in his car when another car pulled up alongside and a gunman inside shot him. He died instantly, and no one else was hurt, she said.
Mollen was to have returned home for good on Dec. 1, she said. "We were expecting him for Christmas, and it's just devastating."
Staff writers Rebecca Dana and Thomas E. Ricks in Washington and special correspondent Naseer Nouri in Baghdad contributed to this report.
-------- latin america
Peace hopes in Colombia as militia lays down arms
independent.co.uk
By Zoe Selsky
26 November 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=586798
Some 450 right-wing Colombian paramilitary fighters turned in their weapons yesterday and asked society to allow them back into its fold.
The members of the "Banana Bloc" of the outlawed United Self-Defence Forces, or AUC, sang the national anthem, then laid down hundreds of rifles, grenade-launchers and mortars on a long table.
"We have been given hope again," Luis Carlos Restrepo, the government peace commissioner, told the disarmament ceremony at a football stadium in Turbo, 310 miles north-west of the capital, Bogota. The ceremony completes the disbandment of the Banana Bloc, which for more than a decade held sway over much of Colombia's main banana-growing region, Antioquia state.
The fighters will now head to a nearby country estate where authorities will review their individual legal status, health, education and job prospects. Once deemed fit to return to civil society, they will be allowed to leave as free men.
Villagers, however, have expressed concern that Marxist rebels driven away by the paramilitaries could return to fill the void. The army says it has sent 500 additional troops to secure the region.
Peace talks between the government and the AUC began in July in a safe haven in north-west Colombia and aim to demobilise the AUC's 15,000 right-wing fighters by 2006. Hundreds have already demobilised, though the fate of commanders and fighters accused of gross human rights abuses has yet to be decided.
Right-wing paramilitary groups were created two decades ago to combat leftist guerrillas. They finance themselves through drug trafficking and extortion.
-------- nato
NATO chief calls for review of Ukrainian election
(AFP)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041125193851.xuz9bkx1.html
ALGIERS - NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer called on Thursday for a review of the contested election results in Ukraine, and a non-violent end to the current crisis.
"NATO can not accept the results as they are presented. It wants a revision," de Hoop Scheffer said during a news conference in Algiers, during a brief visit aimed at strengthening ties between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the North African country.
He termed an "interesting development" a decision by the former Soviet republic's supreme court to stop the publication of the results of the election, which were declared in favor of Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich on Wednesday by the central election commission, until it has examined an appeal by the opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko.
"Courts should play the role assigned to them in the Constitution," he said.
He said the transatlantic military alliance and the European Union were closely coordinating on the Ukraine crisis.
On Wednesday de Hoop Scheffer had already voiced NATO's "very grave concerns about ... fraud" in the weekend run-off ballots.
"Any solution for the present crisis should be absolutely a non-violent solution," he added, speaking at NATO's Brussels headquarters.
During his visit to Algeria de Hoop Scheffer had talks with President Abdelaziz Bouteflika and Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Belkhadem.
He said that his visit was aimed at promoting political dialogue, as well as links between NATO and Algeria, in the civilian, military, peace and anti-terrorist areas.
-------- spies
CIA report queries Iran's nuke program
Associated Press
By Tabassum Zakaria
November 25, 2004
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,11492221%255E401,00.html
IRAN pursued programs to produce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons during the latter part of 2003 and was working to improve delivery systems, a CIA report said yesterday.
The report also said the al-Qaeda terrorist network was engaged in rudimentary nuclear research and its stated willingness to launch an unconventional attack was a major concern.
The report on the acquisition of technology relating to weapons of mass destruction from July 1 to December 31, 2003, was posted on the intelligence agency's website www.cia.gov.
"Iran's nuclear program received significant assistance in the past from the proliferation network headed by Pakistani scientist AQ Khan," the CIA report said. Abdul Qadeer Khan's network provided Iran with designs for Pakistan's older centrifuges and for more advanced and efficient models, and components, it said.
Iran was trying to improve delivery systems and sought foreign materials, training and equipment from Russia, China, North Korea and Europe, the report said.
Iran last week denied allegations it had obtained weapons-grade uranium and a nuclear bomb design from Dr Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb.
An Iranian envoy said yesterday he had received Chinese support in Tehran's diplomatic campaign to block Washington from having the dispute over Iran's nuclear program referred to the UN Security Council.
Seyed Hossein Mussavian, Iran's envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency, visited Beijing on the eve of an IAEA board meeting that is to review an investigation of suspect Iranian activities.
The US believes Iran has been pursuing a secret nuclear weapons program and has tried to convince the international community of those concerns.
US President George W. Bush has ordered fresh measures to bolster the CIA in combating weapons of mass destruction, directing the agency to present "diverse views" to policymakers.
The steps came in response to the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the US, masterminded by Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
The CIA said in its report: "One of our highest concerns is al-Qaeda's stated readiness to attempt unconventional attacks against us."
Documents recovered in Afghanistan showed that al-Qaeda "was engaged in rudimentary nuclear research, although the extent of its indigenous program is unclear", it said. Pakistani nuclear engineer Bashir al-Din Mahmood, who reportedly met bin Laden, "may have provided some assistance to al-Qaeda's program", the CIA report said. - with Associated Press
-------- un
U.N. peacekeepers face abuse charges
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Nick Wadhams
November 25, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041124-105509-4845r.htm
NEW YORK - Linked in the past to sex crimes in East Timor, and prostitution in Cambodia and Kosovo, U.N. peacekeepers now have been accused of sexually abusing the very population they were deployed to protect in Congo.
And although the 150 charges of rape, pedophilia and solicitation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo may be the United Nations' worst sex scandal in years, chronic problems almost guarantee that few of the suspects will face punishment.
The problem is simple: The United Nations often implores member nations to discipline their peacekeepers, but it has little power to enforce the rules. And when nations are reluctant anyway to contribute soldiers for dangerous missions such as in Congo, it's tough to turn the tables and shame them publicly.
"The U.N. goes around trying to cajole countries to provide peacekeepers," said Edward Luck, a professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. "They're having a hard time getting any member states to respond, and that doesn't give the U.N. a great deal of leverage in these kinds of situations."
Although thousands of U.N. peacekeepers have served without incident, some have been accused of smuggling weapons and exotic animals, selling fuel on the black market, vandalizing airplanes, and standing by while mobs looted storefronts - if the peacekeepers didn't join in the chaos themselves.
At other times their inaction has led to even more grievous crimes, as when Dutch peacekeepers under a U.N. mandate didn't stop Bosnian troops in the enclave of Srebrenica from loading Muslim men onto buses and taking them away to be killed in 1995.
That failure led the entire Dutch government to resign. It brought words of remorse at the United Nations, but no firings.
In the case of Congo, the accusations seem as bad as anything the United Nations has seen in its history. Women and children reportedly have been raped, and there is said to be video and photographic evidence of crimes.
Similar accusations have been directed at U.N. peacekeepers and officials in East Timor. And in Cambodia and Kosovo, local officials and human rights group say the presence of U.N. forces has been linked to an increase in trafficking of women and a sharp rise in prostitution.
In a new embarrassment, the United Nations confirmed Tuesday that a U.N. auditor in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa, had been accused of hiring a prostitute. He belongs to the agency that is investigating the latest claims, but isn't taking part in the probe.
The Congo charges come at a particularly bad time for the United Nations and its secretary-general, Kofi Annan.
U.N. officials have been accused of allowing corruption under Iraq's oil-for-food program. The U.N. refugee chief was accused of sexual harassment and cleared by Mr. Annan, which angered the world body's staff. The United Nations' top investigator reportedly recruited and promoted staff based on ethnicity, but was cleared by Mr. Annan.
"The last 18 months have been one of the worst years and a half for the United Nations of any similar period that I can remember," said Jonathan Tepperman, senior editor at Foreign Affairs magazine. "This is the last thing that Kofi needed."
-------- us
Guardsmen Say They're Facing Iraq Ill-Trained
Los Angeles Times
By Scott Gold
Nov 25, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20041125/ts_latimes/guardsmensaytheyrefacingiraqilltrained&cid=2026&ncid=1480
DOŅA ANA RANGE, N.M. - Members of a California Army National Guard battalion preparing for deployment to Iraq (news - web sites) said this week that they were under strict lockdown and being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the remote desert camp where they are training.
More troubling, a number of the soldiers said, is that the training they have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.
They said they believed their treatment and training reflected an institutional bias against National Guard troops by commanders in the active-duty Army, an allegation that Army commanders denied.
The 680 soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment were activated in August and are preparing for deployment at Doņa Ana, a former World War II prisoner-of-war camp 20 miles west of its large parent base, Ft. Bliss, Texas.
Members of the battalion, headquartered in Modesto, said in two dozen interviews that they were allowed no visitors or travel passes, had scant contact with their families and that morale was terrible.
"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year Guard veteran from Fresno who works for an armored transport company when not on active duty.
Several soldiers have fled Doņa Ana by vaulting over rolls of barbed wire that surround the small camp, the soldiers interviewed said. Others, they said, are contemplating going AWOL, at least temporarily, to reunite with their families for Thanksgiving.
Army commanders said the concerns were an inevitable result of the decision to shore up the strained military by turning "citizen soldiers" into fully integrated, front-line combat troops. About 40% of the troops in Iraq are either reservists or National Guard troops.
Lt. Col. Michael Hubbard of Ft. Bliss said the military must confine the soldiers largely to Doņa Ana to ensure that their training is complete before they are sent to Iraq.
"A lot of these individuals are used to doing this two days a month and then going home," Hubbard said. "Now the job is 24/7. And they experience culture shock."
But many of the soldiers interviewed said the problems they cited went much deeper than culture shock.
And military analysts agree that tensions between active-duty Army soldiers and National Guard troops have been exacerbated as the war in Iraq has required dangerous and long-term deployments of both.
The concerns of the Guard troops at Doņa Ana represent the latest in a series of incidents involving allegations that a two-tier system has shortchanged reservist and National Guard units compared with their active-duty counterparts.
In September, a National Guard battalion undergoing accelerated training at Ft. Dix, N.J., was confined to barracks for two weeks after 13 soldiers reportedly went AWOL to see family before shipping out for Iraq.
Last month, an Army National Guard platoon at Camp Shelby, Miss., refused its orders after voicing concerns about training conditions and poor leadership.
In the most highly publicized incident, in October, more than two dozen Army reservists in Iraq refused to drive a fuel convoy to a town north of Baghdad after arguing that the trucks they had been given were not armored for combat duty.
At Doņa Ana, soldiers have questioned their commanders about conditions at the camp, occasionally breaking the protocol of formation drills to do so. They said they had been told repeatedly that they could not be trusted because they were not active-duty soldiers - though many of them are former active-duty soldiers.
"I'm a cop. I've got a career, a house, a family, a college degree," said one sergeant, who lives in Southern California and spoke, like most of the soldiers, on condition of anonymity.
"I came back to the National Guard specifically to go to Baghdad, because I believed in it, believed in the mission. But I have regretted every day of it. This is demoralizing, demeaning, degrading. And we're supposed to be ambassadors to another country? We're supposed to go to war like this?"
Pentagon (news - web sites) and Army commanders rejected the allegation that National Guard or reserve troops were prepared for war differently than their active-duty counterparts.
"There is no difference," said Lt. Col. Chris Rodney, an Army spokesman in Washington. "We are, more than ever, one Army. Some have to come from a little farther back - they have a little less training. But the goal is to get everybody the same."
The Guard troops at Doņa Ana were scheduled to train for six months before beginning a yearlong deployment. They recently learned, however, that the Army planned to send them overseas a month early - in January, most likely - as it speeds up troop movement to compensate for a shortage of full-time, active-duty troops.
Hubbard, the officer at Ft. Bliss, also said conditions at Doņa Ana were designed to mirror the harsh and often thankless assignments the soldiers would take on in Iraq. That was an initiative launched by Brig. Gen. Joseph Chavez, commander of the 29th Separate Infantry Brigade, which includes the 184th Regiment.
The program has resulted in everything from an alcohol ban to armed guards at the entrance to Doņa Ana, Hubbard said.
"We are preparing you and training you for what you're going to encounter over there," Hubbard said. "And they just have to get used to it."
Military analysts, however, questioned whether the soldiers' concerns could be attributed entirely to the military's attempt to mirror conditions in Iraq. For example, the soldiers say that an ammunition shortage has meant that they have often conducted operations firing blanks.
"The Bush administration had over a year of planning before going to war in Iraq," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who has acted as a defense lawyer in military courts. "An ammunition shortage is not an exercise in tough love."
Turley said that in every military since Alexander the Great's, there have been "gripes from grunts" but that "the complaints raised by these National Guardsmen raise some significant and troubling concerns."
The Guard troops in New Mexico said they wanted more sophisticated training and better equipment. They said they had been told, for example, that the vehicles they would drive in Iraq would not be armored, a common complaint among their counterparts already serving overseas.
They also said the bulk of their training had been basic, such as first aid and rifle work, and not "theater-specific" to Iraq. They are supposed to be able to use night-vision goggles, for instance, because many patrols in Iraq take place in darkness. But one group of 200 soldiers trained for just an hour with 30 pairs of goggles, which they had to pass around quickly, soldiers said.
The soldiers said they had received little or no training for operations that they expected to undertake in Iraq, from convoy protection to guarding against insurgents' roadside bombs. One said he has put together a diary of what he called "wasted days" of training. It lists 95 days, he said, during which the soldiers learned nothing that would prepare them for Iraq.
Hubbard had said he would make two field commanders available on Tuesday to answer specific questions from the Los Angeles Times about the training, but that did not happen.
The fact that the National Guardsmen have undergone largely basic training suggests that Army commanders do not trust their skills as soldiers, said David Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland. That tension underscores a divide that has long existed between "citizen soldiers" and their active-duty counterparts, he said.
"These soldiers should be getting theater-specific training," Segal said. "This should not be an area where they are getting on-the-job training. The military is just making a bad situation worse."
The soldiers at Doņa Ana emphasized their support for the war in Iraq. "In fact, a lot of us would rather go now rather than stay here," said one, a specialist and six-year National Guard veteran who works as a security guard in his civilian life in Southern California.
The soldiers also said they were risking courts-martial or other punishment by speaking publicly about their situation. But Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45, one of the soldiers who allowed his identity to be revealed, said he feared that if nothing changed, men in his platoon would be killed in Iraq.
Dominguez is a father of two - including a 13-month-old son named Reagan, after the former president - and an employee of a mortgage bank in Alta Loma, Calif. A senior squad leader of his platoon, Dominguez said he had been in the National Guard for 20 years.
"Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die unnecessarily because of the lack of training," he said. "So I don't care. Let them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at the end of our rope."
-----
More Signs of a Military Unraveling
By Ed Offley
11-25-2004
http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/csNews.cgi?database=FTE.db&command=viewone&op=t&id=60&rnd=10.3042402933054
From the Editor:
When I first heard about the bedsheet cutbacks a couple of months ago, I thought it was some weird practical joke: To save money, a local Navy base planned to end a longstanding practice where staff housekeepers washed and replaced the sheets and pillowcases in the Bachelor Officers Quarters. Henceforth, a bunch of single ensigns and lieutenants were being banished to the local laundromat.
Now I know better. This was no joke - instead, it was a precursor of the oncoming train wreck.
The defense train wreck.
All but drowned out by the videotapes of street battles in Iraq and the shouting TV-heads of the 2004 presidential race, a long-ignored resource crisis confronting the U.S. military has steadily worsened over the past year.
Simply put: The massive structural under-financing of military operations and the intentional plundering of military procurement funds in the decade before 9/11 set the stage for the defense train wreck.
By 2000, the Defense Department had been short-changed by an estimated $426 billion over actual requirements during the previous decade, mostly in deferred or cancelled procurement. Despite hefty increases in defense spending since then, the Defense Department and White House have grossly underestimated the actual costs for prosecuting the war in Iraq, allowing the dangerous trend to continue despite the apparent infusion of new funding.
It is not difficult to find evidence of the looming crisis in major defense program activities. As I noted in an article about the Navy several months ago ("Navy's Newest Heads for Troubled Waters," DefenseWatch, Aug. 28, 2004), barring a turnabout in new ship construction rates, the sea service is vanishing before our very eyes as the size of the fleet steadily declines from about 300 ships to a projected level of 120 in the next two decades.
My colleague, Senior Editor Paul Connors, revealed this summer a future massive downsizing of Air Force tactical aviation driven by the same budget pressures ("Smaller Fighter Force On The Way," DefenseWatch, July 14, 2004). And it's impossible to write about the Army or its reserve components nowadays without tripping over the multiple problems of deployment "overstretch" and unit manning woes that have occurred by shoving a 10-division ground force into a 20-division wartime operational requirement.
What is distressing to realize is that no one - the DoD civilian leadership, Joint Chiefs of Staff, congressional defense committees or even the White House - is taking this problem seriously. That is because correcting the lag in procurement, closing the end-strength personnel gap, and covering all wartime operating costs will require an order of magnitude increase in defense spending.
Meanwhile, instances of what I term "21st century chickenshit" are proliferating. These are variants of the BOQ bedsheet ban, instigated by frantic military middle managers to keep the checks from bouncing.
Item: The Baltimore Sun revealed today that a shortage of Army officers available for staff duty in Iraq and Afghanistan is prompting the service to consider imposing changes in a number of longstanding programs to provide the warm bodies for a new 12-month tour, up from the current 179 days. Options include yanking a small number of officers out of the one-year Army War College degree program before they finish their 12-month stay; delaying entry for other officers until they have served the year abroad; and even curtailing a family-friendly program that allows Army families to extend their tours at a base for a year to allow their children to graduate from the local high school.
A number of Army officers interviewed by the Sun said such changes would backfire, prompting good leaders to get out or retire early. "A lot of people who have options to retire will retire," one officer told the newspaper. "We are eating our seed corn."
Item: Despite its success in increasing the availability of surface warships and amphibious vessels overseas, the Navy's "Sea Swap" program - where several entire crews take turns operating a warship in the Persian Gulf region - is sparking strong resentment among the sailors, the General Accountability Office recently concluded (for an earlier explanation of "Sea Swap," see "One Ship, Three Crews, Enhanced Sea Power," DefenseWatch, Apr. 2, 2004).
According to a report this week in The Virginian-Pilot, "The GAO, Congress' financial watchdog agency, said sailors in each of 26 focus groups it conducted for crews of the destroyer Higgins and several coastal patrol ships reported 'a highly negative quality of life, decreased morale and a strong desire to not participate on any more crew rotations.' " The newspaper also noted that the Center for Naval Analyses reported in July that 73 percent of sailors it surveyed said they would be less likely to stay in the Navy "if all deployments were like Sea Swap."
No one has sucked it up more since 9/11 than the men and women of the U.S. armed forces. They have deployed to harsh, isolated, dangerous places teeming with our enemies. There they have fought, bled and died to prevent the horrors of that black Tuesday from ever happening again to Americans in their own homeland. They have, served with honor and distinction, and will continue to do so.
But this remains an all-volunteer military, and essential to that construct is an explicit social contract between people in uniform and the American taxpayers: They serve, but we promise them and their families in turn a decent life - not a plethora of costly luxuries, but a stable, middle-class environment in which to raise their children and to live when the overseas deployment is finished. Even in wartime.
Nearly four years ago, defense analyst Dan Goure - one of the unheralded Cassandras of the looming defense train wreck - said this: "Everybody hits the wall about 2005-2006. The derailment is in sight."
We are starting to see how this will play out: A cash-starved and personnel-deficient Defense Department will continue to balance the checkbook on the backs of 19-year-old soldiers living on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring the deeper structural crisis. We will begin to see an exodus of experienced personnel the likes of which we have not seen since the post-Vietnam 1970s. We will see more breakdowns in unit discipline and morale like the ill-prepared 800th Military Police Brigade at Abu Ghraib. Ultimately, our battlefield performance will begin to degrade, raising the possibility of a serious setback or even battlefield defeat.
This is one problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. A lot of money.
That requires a national leadership willing to recognize the crisis for what it is, and to spend the "political capital" necessary to win the support of the American people for a genuine wartime mobilization.
Ed Offley is Editor of DefenseWatch. He can be reached at dweditor@yahoo.com. Please send Feedback responses to dwfeedback@yahoo.com.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- drug war
(Xinhuanet)
2004-11-25
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-11/25/content_2262121.htm
BAGHDAD, Nov. 25 -- The border police in the south of Iraq announced that 52 kg Hashish was seized near the Mohamarah border checkpoint with Saudi Arabia, the Al Sabah newspaper reported on Thursday.
"The border police in Iraq's southern governorate of Muthana clashed with a group of smugglers near the Mohamarah border checkpoint and seized 52 kg Hashish, but the smugglers escaped," said colonel Ali Al Mosawi, chief of the border and customs police in the southern area.
These drugs were to be smuggled to the Saudi Arabia, added Mosawi.
In addition, the police chief said the border police in the southern port city of Basra seized two boats in the waters of Shat Al Arab, which were carrying 100 tons of gasoline, prepared to be smuggled abroad.
The Iraqi border and customs authorities have managed in the past few months to seize large amounts of drugs and smuggled goods and arrested a good number of smugglers. Enditem
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Airport screeners find 75 guns per month
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Audrey Hudson
November 25, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041124-115904-7635r.htm
Traveling for the holidays? Have everything you need? Razor? Toothbrush? Handgun? Ammunition?
Homeland Security officials say that even now, three years after the September 11 terrorist attacks prompted new security measures at airports, passengers continue to show up at the terminals carrying guns and bullets.
Airport screeners find 2,000 bullets and 75 guns per month on passengers or in carry-on bags, said Mark Hatfield, spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). At 450 airports across the country, an average of two guns per day are discovered.
"The numbers are going up," Mr. Hatfield said.
Nearly every case is accidental - hunters forget to take ammo out of coat pockets and sportsmen forget to take guns out of bags after target practice or a trip to the skeet range, he said.
A 79-year-old woman was arrested Tuesday at Fort Lauderdale International Airport in Florida after a single-shot Colt Derringer and seven bullets were found in her tote bag.
The woman said she had placed the gun in a hollowed-out book in the bag months ago and had forgotten about it. She faces a penalty of up to five years in prison.
"That underscores the importance of the need to screen everyone," TSA spokeswoman Yolanda Clark said. "This continues to be a significant problem at checkpoints across the country."
The National Rifle Association (NRA) is teaming up with the TSA on a public service campaign to remind its members to include guns and bullets in last-minute travel checks and remove them from bags and coat pockets.
The NRA is running public service announcements and articles in its publications to educate readers on how to travel legally with weapons, which must be declared at the check-in counter. The weapon must be enclosed in a lockbox, and a key must be provided so screeners can check to ensure that the gun is not loaded.
"They have a very large number of hunters and sportsmen, and they have been very enthusiastic about placing articles, and their communication has helped us extend our reach," Mr. Hatfield said.
"It's as simple as emptying all your pockets and checking in the pocket zippers," he said. "Most airlines will allow you to carry weapons in checked baggage, but it should be unloaded in a hard case" and lockbox.
Hunters and sportsmen also should check state laws and city ordinances at their destinations.
"You may be in compliance with the laws in the states you are departing, but you need to make sure your destination state also allows for the possession and transport of weapons," Mr. Hatfield said.
More than 15 million prohibited items, including more than 2,000 guns, have been confiscated from passengers since the TSA took over screening responsibility in February 2002.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Burma Says It Will Free Over 5,000 More Prisoners
Reuters
By Darren Schuettler
November 25, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13266-2004Nov25.html
RANGOON, Burma, Nov. 25 -- Burma announced Thursday that it would release more than 5,000 prisoners, and a senior official said a top dissident who was democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's closest aide would also be freed before long.
State television and radio said 5,311 inmates would be released from various prisons, in addition to the 3,937 prisoners whose release was announced Nov. 19.
The military, which has ruled Burma in one form or another since 1962, said those to be freed had been jailed "inappropriately" by the military intelligence service headed by then-Prime Minister Khin Nyunt, who was purged last month.
Deputy Foreign Minister Kyaw Thu said the recent upheaval would not derail the seven-step "road map to democracy" that Khin Nyunt announced just days after becoming prime minister in August last year. "It is the road which will lead Myanmar to democracy," Kyaw Thu said, using the name for the country preferred by the generals. "It is not the brainchild of the former prime minister. It is a plan which was carefully formulated by the senior leadership."
Kyaw Thu disputed reports that the promised release of the first batch of prisoners, which began last week, was fizzling out. Part of the reason for the slowness of the releases is the time it is taking to bring prisoners to Rangoon, Burma's capital, from jails across the country, he said.
Win Tin, 74, who was Suu Kyi's closest aide until his imprisonment in 1989, was among that first group, Kyaw Thu said.
Kyaw Thu said he did not know when Suu Kyi would be released from house arrest at her lakeside villa in Rangoon, where she is without a telephone and requires permission to receive visitors. "I don't know when this house arrest will be lifted," he said. The same applied to Tin Oo, deputy leader of Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy, he added.
Last Friday, the day after the government said it would free 3,937 people, more than 200 prisoners were freed. Among them was the most prominent political prisoner after Suu Kyi -- Min Ko Naing, 42, the leader of a student campaign for democracy that was ruthlessly crushed by the military in 1988.
Only about two dozen prisoners of conscience had been released so far, opposition sources said.
-------- POLITICS
Analysis: Cold War Has Never Been Colder
Washington (UPI)
Nov 25, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/russia-04d.html
Supporters of Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko demonstrate in front of the tax office building in Lviv, 25 November 2004 to protest against the results of the presidential elections. Ukraine split into two geographic camps 25 November as the nationalist West backed the pro-Western opposition leader as president while the Russian-speaking East supported the disputed victory of the Prime Minister. AFP photo by Janek Skarzynski. Washington (UPI) Nov 25, 2004 And you thought the Cold War was over with the demise of communism? Think again. Relations between the West and its old nemesis, the Russian bear, have never been as frigid; at least not since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
If East-West relations had somewhat thawed after the threat of communism dissipated, distrust never really melted away all together. Last Sunday's muddled elections in Ukraine have demonstrated just how precarious those relations really are, and how much is at stake - for both sides.
Ukraine's election commission Wednesday declared pro-Moscow Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych the winner of the hotly contested presidential runoff, despite widespread beliefs and accusations of voting irregularities by supporters of Victor Yushchenko, the pro-West opposition leader.
The Commission reported that Yanukovych took 49.46 percent of the vote, leaving opposition candidate Yushchenko with 46.61 of the ballots. Yushchenko's supporters accused the authorities of being guilty of massive fraud.
Braving inclement weather and snow, Yushchenko's supporters disputed the results, with close to a quarter of a million people taking to the streets of the capital, Kiev, amid cries of foul play that were heard from the Urals to the banks of the Potomac.
While Moscow and Russian President Vladimir Putin stood firmly behind their man Yanukovych, Brussels, Washington, Prague, Budapest and numerous other capitals made their stand clear, voicing their support for Yushchenko.
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell quickly dismissed the election as marred by fraud. Powell urged Ukraine's leaders to respond immediately and warned hat there will be consequences for the United States' relationship with Ukraine.
Earlier, American officials had predicted a chilly period in relations with Ukraine in case of stolen elections, and said it cannot accept Sunday's poll result as legitimate.
It did not take long for that chill to set in.
What is at stake is far more than Ukraine's election, important as it may be to the people of that country, and to the democratic process of free elections. Indeed, what is at stake is Russia's last ditch to impose itself as a regional hegemony, having lost their super power status when they lost the Cold War.
Many in Russia never lived down the demise of the Soviet Union and still regard some of their old dominions - Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova - with nostalgia, and view them as part of the Greater Russia where they feel Moscow should still have a say.
Already, Moscow had a hard time accepting the fact that the three Baltic states - Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - which were once part of the Soviet Union, passed over to the West, joining NATO and the European Union. And that former Warsaw Pact satellite states - Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and the Baltics - once their front lines of defense, have absconded and joined NATO.
In that spirit, Russia's President Putin has been eager to reclaim a little bit of the lost empire. Quarrels with the super-rich oligarchs and Russian oil barons, such as Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the head of the country's largest oil firm, Yukos, were no accident. It was, in fact, an attempt by Putin to re-assert control of the nation's finances. Likewise, Putin's support of Yanukovych in the Ukrainian election is an attempt to reclaim influence over geo-politics, and to see Moscow recover some of the grounds it lost to the West.
Putin is aware that this is Russia's last ditch at retaining some degree of influence over its former republics, before it loses them forever to the West.
Putin also realizes that the once-heavy-handed tactics employed by the Soviet Union to dominate their colonies can no longer be applied. Instead, today, a more judicious approach is required, such as ensuring that user-friendly leaders, who will remain faithful to Moscow, are empowered. As is the case with the backing of Yanukovych in Kiev.
Moscow is cognizant that a Yushchenko victory would push Ukraine unequivocally to the West. Yushchenko as president means Ukraine applying for admission into the European Union and quite possibly into NATO. For Russia, this would mean a monumental shift of borders with NATO forces suddenly all that much closer to home.
Ukraine is a vast expanse of plains stretching for 1,300 km (about 870 miles) from north to south, and has over the centuries acted as a buffer zone between the West and Russia. In fact, Ukraine means borderland.
The Soviet Union's former satellite states, who have not forgotten nearly 50 years of Soviet domination, are just as cognizant of Russia's intentions and lost no time voicing their concerns. Romania, Hungary, Poland and Bulgaria, all voiced support for opposition leader Victor Yushchenko.
Former Polish President Lech Walesa, who played a leading role in ousting communism from Poland, and who is a staunch Yushchenko supporter, has gone to Kiev to offer his help to resolve the crisis.
Jose Manuel Barroso, the new head of the European Commission, also warned Ukraine of consequences for its relations with the European Union, unless there was a serious and independent review of the election irregularities.
Meanwhile in Kiev, the pro-Western Yushchenko, rejected the fraudulent election results as the latest crime of the Ukrainian authorities. This comes amid a nationwide strike, intended to shut factories, shops and schools and paralyze Ukraine's major transportation arteries.
There is some fear that the planned stoppage could further divide the country with Yushchenko's supporters, coming mainly from the predominantly Ukrainian-speaking western and central regions, clashing with the Russian-speaking people from the eastern region bordering Russia.
The crisis in Ukraine could be the last showdown between Russia and the West, if democracy prevails and Yushchenko wins. The alternative will be a revival of the Cold War, with Moscow seeking to recapture some of the clout it lost.
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-------- ENERGY
-------- alternative energy
Ontario Plans Renewable Energy for 100,000 Homes
By Reuters
November 25, 2004
http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=458
TORONTO - Ontario plans 10 new energy projects that could supply power to 100,000 homes from renewable sources like wind, hydro and landfill biogas, the provincial government said Wednesday.
The five wind farms, two hydro plants, and three landfill gas and biogas facilities would cost nearly C$700 million ($600 million) and have the capacity to generate 395 megawatts of electricity, officials said.
"The projects will...reduce our dependence on dirty coal-fired plants, and enhance air quality throughout the province," provincial Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said in a statement.
Some 90 percent of planned electricity output from the new projects, or 355 megawatts, will come from wind power, and all the facilities will be operational by 2007, the government said.
Ontario, Canada's most populous province, aims to ensure that 5 percent of its electricity comes from renewable sources by 2007, rising to 10 percent by 2010. The 2007 target is for 1,350 megawatts of renewable energy generating capacity.
Canada's current wind power capacity is 372 megawatts, with several wind turbine farms located in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Quebec.
But last month, Hydro-Quebec awarded C$1.9 billion in wind-power projects that would generate 990 megawatts of electricity in the wind-swept Gaspe peninsula in the Gulf of St Lawrence. ($1-$1.18 Canadian.)
-------- OTHER
-------- environment
Congo wars take toll on lowland gorillas
ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Todd Pitman
November 25, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041124-105509-6694r.htm
KAHUZI-BIEGA NATIONAL PARK, Congo -Beneath the peaks of two extinct volcanos in eastern Congo, at the edge of a tropical rain forest, an enormous silverback gorilla called Chimenuka lounges on his back, two feet propped against a tree.
The burly animal shows little interest in a small group of machete-wielding Pygmy trackers, park rangers and armed guards who have come to check on him - until they take one step too close.
In a second, the 400-pound gorilla springs upright, beating his chest, grunting and charging forward, making his guests cower before he slips away on all fours into a curtain of thick underbrush.
Encounters like these once lured tourists from around the world to the misty highlands of Kahuzi-Biega National Park, where gorilla tourism was born in the 1970s. But a decade of turmoil, a 1998-2002 civil war and fresh fighting this summer have decimated the region's eastern lowland gorillas and driven tourists away.
Today, not even the experts know how many gorillas are left.
"It's tragic. Nobody has been able to conduct a full survey in a decade," said Innocent Liengola of the Wildlife Conservation Society. "Most areas are too insecure to visit."
In late October, the New York-based organization resumed a head-counting operation in Kahuzi-Biega that was called off in April when Mr. Liengola and his colleagues fled volleys of automatic-weapons fire - a firefight, authorities said, between rebels from neighboring Rwanda and a local pro-government militia called the Mayi Mayi.
Eastern lowland gorillas, the tallest apes on Earth, live only in Congo and inhabit a broad band of forests stretching from Lake Albert near the Ugandan border to the northern tip of Lake Tanganyika on the frontier with Burundi.
Conservationists say a deadly combination of poachers, refugees, miners and combat have devastated the gorilla habitat and population, but by how much, they can only speculate.
The Atlanta-based Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International believes their numbers have plummeted 70 percent in the last decade - to 5,000 lowland gorillas from around 17,000 in 1994.
Patrick Melman, a Dian Fossey researcher in Goma, eastern Congo, acknowledges the figures are only "an estimate," but says they are based on the data available, including that from Kahuzi-Biega, where park rangers and researchers visit dozens of gorillas daily.
Founded in 1970 and declared a U.N. World Heritage Site a decade later, Kahuzi-Biega was supposed to be a protected sanctuary. In practice, the park "hasn't had more of a chance than anywhere else" in eastern Congo, Mr. Melman said.
Speaking at the Wildlife Conservation Society's offices in Bukavu, Mr. Liengola waved a finger across a digital map of Kahuzi-Biega on his laptop computer, indicating dangerous areas he and park rangers avoid. The screen is splattered with red blotches - no-go zones were militiamen or guerrilla fighters are active.
Bukavu, the starting point for tours of Kahuzi-Biega, was ravaged this summer by fighting between rebels and government loyalists.
Despite Kahuzi-Biega's status as a park, Pygmies have regularly trooped in illegally to hunt bush meat to feed their families.
But things took a dramatic turn for the worse after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, when millions of refugees, soldiers and militiamen fled across the border and cut down huge swathes of forest to survive.
The crisis deepened with Congo's own wars - first in 1996-97 and again in 1998-2002. The fighting led to a breakdown of authority and opened the gorilla habitat to the Mayi Mayi, as well as miners in search of gold, coltan and other precious minerals.
Miners and militiamen cut down trees to put up makeshift houses for their families. They also hunted game, including great apes, for food.
The effect has been devastating.
In 1996, the Kahuzi-Biega's highlands had 258 lowland gorillas. Today, it is believed about 130 remain, said park director Iyomi Iyatshi.
Though closed from 1998 to 2000, the park's highlands have remained open throughout most of the region's troubles - for whoever is willing to pay the $250 fee.
At full capacity, eight tourists a day could visit each of the three separate gorilla families habituated to human visits.
But the dusty visitor books at Tshivanga, the park's headquarters, show an average of just five visitors a month - mostly U.N. peacekeepers, aid workers and missionaries from Bukavu.
"We can't really talk of tourism now," said Mr. Iyatshi. "People aren't coming. They're afraid of the war."
In the short run at least, that might be better for the park's inhabitants - particularly the 50 or so habituated gorillas.
"It has always been the habituated gorillas that were most at risk of being killed," explained Mr. Liengola, the Wildlife Conservation Society official. He said apes cannot easily differentiate between armed park guards and armed fighters or poachers, who can sell baby gorillas for as much as $30,000 on the black market.
"The strategy now is to habituate less to tourists, so they learn to avoid contact with human beings," Mr. Liengola said.
The Wildlife Conservation Society hopes to expand its census next year into the rest of eastern Congo, if the security situation permits.
The first stop will be Kahuzi-Biega's forested lowlands, a vast, lawless area that makes up 90 percent of the park. For years, park rangers were afraid to enter the area because of militia activity, but last February, 30 rangers were posted at two stations on the lowlands' outskirts for the first time.
Up in the highlands, ranger Robert Mulimbi, 40, pulls back branches to get a better look at Chimenuka's troop, which he checks on every day.
Relaxing on a bed of leaves, a mother cradled a 4-month-old baby gorilla - a black ball of fur with large dark eyes - Chimenuka's only son. Two other babies were born in July.
"We're not tracking gorillas outside the park," Mr. Mulimbi said. "We have no idea about the rest."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Protests in the snow herald new Cold War
The Times
From Jeremy Page
November 25, 2004
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-1373643,00.html
THE Union Jack looked incongruous when raised over the demonstrations in Kiev yesterday. Equally surprising were the people beneath it - not British tourists, expatriates or activists, but young Ukrainian software developers.
Yet this band of protesters, hunched against the driving snow in Independence Square, highlighted the political and economic crossroads at which this country of 48 million people stands, and the implications for the outside world.
"People in the United Kingdom probably don't know what Ukraine is, but when we become a properly independent nation everyone in Europe will know who we are," said Valery Verbovetsky, 27, head of a British-Ukrainian joint venture.
To him, the disputed presidential election represents a choice between a future in a European country with a competitive business environment and transparent, accountable government, or four more years in a post-Soviet mire of corruption and authoritarian rule. For his colleague, Vlad Isakov, it is a stark choice between Russia and the West. "The EU should realise that Russia is building a new empire on its borders and should help us not to be part of it," he said.
These two young businessmen, like most of those in Independence Square, represent a new face of Ukraine: Western-minded and determined to shake off their Soviet past.
For 15 years Ukraine has languished, caught between its communist past and a future as the economic powerhouse of Eastern Europe. Since winning independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, and giving up its nuclear weapons, it has rarely attracted media attention except for occasional reports about internet brides or illegal sales of radioactive material.
Behind the scenes, a Cold War-style battle for Ukraine has been waged for some time. Western governments have poured money into pro-democracy organisations that back the opposition leader, Viktor Yushchenko, while Kremlin spin-doctors have directed the campaign of the Prime Minister, Viktor Yanukovych.
The ideological differences may not be as extreme as during the Cold War, but they have intensified since President Putin began rolling back democracy in Russia. Now the West is acknowledging the strategic importance and economic potential of this country sandwiched between Russia and the expanded European Union. Politicians and diplomats on both sides are talking in earnest again about the dividing line between the democratic world and the historically despotic East. That line now cuts through Ukraine, separating the Ukrainian-speaking West, which backs Mr Yushchenko, from the Russian-speaking East, which backs the Prime Minister. "This country is at a crossroads," said Oleksandr Volkov, a Ukrainian MP and former aide to the outgoing president, Leonid Kuchma. "The outcome will affect the whole new world order."
Where the line ends up depends on whether the Government sends police and troops to clear the protesters from the streets, or accepts their demands for the election results to be declared invalid. A reformed Ukraine, with its abundant natural resources and well-educated people, could become an economic powerhouse in Eastern Europe. For Mr Putin losing Ukraine would be a huge personal embarrassment.
Most Russians still view Ukraine as a part of their country. Kiev was the capital of the first Russian state - Kiev Rus - and breadbasket of the Soviet Union. Today it hosts the Russian fleet in the Black Sea port of Sevastopol, and transports Russian gas to Western markets through its pipelines.
Mr Yushchenko, who advocates joining the EU and Nato, would have little interest in promoting the economic union between Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan that his rival supports.
Over recent years Mr Putin has looked on helplessly as the United States established military bases in Central Asia and conducted military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the past year alone, a pro-Western leader seized power in Georgia in the "rose" revolution, the EU expanded up to Russia's western borders, and Nato planes were stationed in Lithuania.
"The Ukrainian election means more for us than for the West," Konstantin Zatulin, director of the Institute of CIS Countries in Moscow, said. The CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) was set up when the Soviet Union collapsed. "The West will lose practically nothing if its candidate doesn't win. However, for us, it can mean a reappraisal of values and significant expenses."
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