>> HUGGING PERVEZ 3...
War on Islamic militants is a stunt, say Pakistan tribal leaders
By Peter Foster in Peshawar
(Filed: 22/03/2004)
A new offensive against Islamic militants living in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan was dismissed by tribal leaders yesterday as a stunt aimed at "appeasing America".
Amid growing anger at mounting civilian casualties, tribal elders in Wana, the scene of the fighting, called a jirga - tribal council - to demand a ceasefire from Pakistan government troops. At least 13 civilians have now died in fierce fighting which erupted around the outpost town in South Waziristan last Tuesday. Unconfirmed reports said a further eight died yesterday.
Last week official Pakistan sources, apparently backed up by the president, General Pervaiz Musharraf, said they believed the al-Qa'eda second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, might be trapped in the hills above Wana. However, officials backtracked from this position yesterday, saying it was more likely that fighters were protecting "criminals" or that the "high value al-Qa'eda target" was, in fact, an Uzbek militant leader.
This admission has only fuelled speculation that the attacks around Wana were intended to demonstrate Pakistan's commitment to the war on terrorism at a time when the US has been pressing the country to take firmer action against militants. The Pakistan military announced yesterday that it had arrested up to 100 "foreign militants".
Maulan Khalil-ur-Rehman, a tribal leader who is also a member of parliament, expressed the bitterness felt by the tribes.
"These 'foreign fighters' living in Wana were heroes of Islam when they were fighting the Soviets, but now we are told by Musharraf and America they are terrorists," he said at a demonstration in Peshawar. Crowds of demonstrators across Waziristan yesterday demanded that local politicians expel the troops from the area.
Although described as "foreign", many of those arrested, including Uzbeks, Chechens and Arabs, have lived in the region for years, marrying into local communities and speaking the local Pathan dialect.
The ferocity of the army's assault on the hills outside Wana is also partly explained by the fact that 19 paramilitaries and two officials were taken hostage in the disastrous initial assault last week. Yesterday government officials issued a two-day ultimatum to release the captives.
The government forces are also locked in a battle of political wills with the Yargul Khel clan, a warlike group who have ignored all requests to hand over "foreign militants".
Yesterday elders from Wana were dispatched to request the release of the hostages, but early reports suggested they had failed.
In the town itself, local sources reported light fighting throughout the day, but that eight road workers were killed when an army helicopter attacked them.
? Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004.
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Al-Zawahri Says Al Qaeda Has Nuke Bombs -Biographer
Sun Mar 21, 2004 09:25 PM ET
SYDNEY (Reuters) - Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri claims the militant Islamic organization has bought briefcase nuclear bombs on the central Asian black market, according to Osama bin Laden's biographer.
Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir has told an Australian Broadcasting Corporation television program, to be aired on Monday night, that when he interviewed Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahri in 2001 he asked whether al Qaeda had nuclear weapons.
Mir said al-Zawahri laughed and said: "Mr Mir, if you have US$30 million, go to the black market in central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist and a lot of dozens of smart briefcase bombs are available.
"They have contacted us, we sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other central Asian states and they negotiated and we purchased some suitcase bombs," Mir quoted al-Zawarhi on the ABC program "Enough Rope," recorded last Monday from Islamabad.
The Egyptian al-Zawahri, a doctor, is regarded as the brains of al Qaeda and a key figure behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.
Al Qaeda is suspected of having an interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction, whether nuclear, biological or chemical, but no evidence of a program was found in searches of its bases after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Security experts say it is highly unlikely that bin Laden and his al Qaeda network have got anywhere close to acquiring nuclear weapon technology, but they do not rule it out.
Experts have long said it might be easier for al Qaeda to create a dirty bomb -- a cocktail of non-fissile material and explosives capable of creating damage -- but that would spread radioactivity over only a limited area.
? Copyright Reuters 2004. All rights reserved.
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Left and Right poll upset for Chirac
By Philip Delves Broughton in Paris
(Filed: 22/03/2004)
President Jacques Chirac was reprimanded by voters last night as his party was trounced in the first round of French regional elections in which the extreme Right Front National demonstrated its growing popularity.
The Front National made advances in its traditional heartlands, the croissant shape of regions arcing from Marseilles in the south, up along the east of France and round towards Calais. These are the regions most affected by immigration.
Front National candidate Marine Le Pen votes in Paris
According to exit polls, the Left, represented by the Socialists, Communists and Greens, won around 40 per cent. The Right, led by the president's Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP), won around 35 per cent. The Front National won just over 17 per cent.
Polls have shown growing dissatisfaction with the government's attempts at economic reform. Unemployment remains high, the unions have objected consistently to pension reforms and job cuts in the public sector, and most recently France's intellectuals have accused the government of being philistine.
The Front National's results will guarantee that its candidates stay in the race for next week's second round of voting. The party's voters will then have to decide whether or not to stick with the Front, or throw their votes to either of the main Left and Right parties.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Front's leader, said last night's results were "even better" than those of the presidential election in 2002, when he succeeded in knocking the Socialists out in the first round of voting.
Both the Socialists and the UMP have ruled out cutting any deals with M Le Pen in order to secure majorities. The Socialists' leader, Francois Hollande, said the election results sent a "serious warning" to the government.
? Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004
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Chirac sinks deeper into mire of scandal
By Philip Delves Broughton in Paris
(Filed: 02/02/2004)
President Jacques Chirac was fighting last night to regain control of a fast unravelling scandal encircling his political power base.
M Chirac seized charge of an inquiry into alleged telephone taps, break-ins and violent threats against judges investigating Alain Jupp?, the former prime minister and his heir apparent, convicted on Friday of organising illegal party funding.
M Chirac: changed the law to protect him while in office
The extraordinary intervention came the day after the justice ministry announced it would investigate the allegations.
His gazumping of his own ministry indicates the seriousness with which he is taking the insinuation that he or his allies tried to pressure the judges in the Jupp? case.
A statement issued by the prime minister's office said M Chirac had asked for three of the most senior judges in Paris to oversee the investigation and report to him in a month. "If these allegations are proved, they will be extremely serious," said the statement.
It is the first time M Chirac has launched such an inquiry, despite similar allegations over many years from magistrates investigating his colourful political past.
Jupp? and 21 of M Chirac's former aides and business partners were convicted in relation to the funding of M Chirac's RPR party during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
In a tough ruling, Judge Catherine Pierce effectively ended Jupp?'s political career by banning him from public office for 10 years and handing him an 18-month suspended prison sentence.
Jupp?'s conviction has outraged M Chirac and his supporters and provoked open warfare between France's supposedly independent judiciary and the politicians who find it meddlesome.
Bernadette Chirac, the president's wife, challenged the court's findings at the weekend by calling Jupp? "a statesman of great stature and an honest man".
Others close to the president have sought to cast doubt on the judge's motives, anonymously accusing her in newspapers of envy and political malice. They are saying her ruling will be overturned on appeal.
Jupp? and M Chirac share a relationship similar in nature to that between Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair.
For nearly 30 years, Jupp? has been the tactician and organiser for the more personable M Chirac. He was described by his mentor as "the most brilliant man of his generation" and "the best among us".
Judge Pierce, 54, has hit back at the president's supporters by describing the sinister pressures placed on her and her two fellow judges in the Jupp? case.
She told Le Parisien newspaper that her office had been broken into, her home and office telephones tapped, her computer files rifled and that she received a death threat before Jupp?'s sentencing.
"Lots of people wanted to know our decision," she said. In one incident she arrived at work to find the false ceiling in her office had been pulled down. A maintenance worker said the door to the next office was jammed and he was trying to get through the gap in the ceiling.
Judge Pierce was sceptical and began keeping notes on a personal computer rather than the office system, which she suspected was being accessed by outside parties. All of the judges suspected their telephones were tapped. One complained of strange time delays during his conversations, another of strangers' voices in the background.
The allegations lend a murky aura to a long legal process which has bedevilled M Chirac and his entourage. They are also consistent with complaints by other judges who have threatened the highest levels of the establishment.
Eric Halphen, a magistrate who spent seven years investigating alleged kickbacks paid to M Chirac's staff for building contracts while he was mayor of Paris, left the legal profession in 2002 and wrote a book describing what he endured. He said threatening notes were left on his windscreen and his telephone was tapped.
M Halphen summoned the president as a witness in the case, but after months of delay M Chirac succeeded in having the law on presidential immunity changed to protect him from legal suits while in office.
Several other cases against M Chirac remain in legal limbo because of his immunity. These include charges that he fiddled his grocery bill at the Paris town hall.
How else, magistrates have asked, could he have spent ?1.5 million in eight years simply to feed himself and his wife? And why was nearly ?1 million of that settled in cash?
M Chirac has also been implicated in the case which brought down Jupp?, involving the use of Paris town hall money to pay salaries to party employees.
Jupp? told friends that if he was convicted he would leave politics altogether so that he could retain his integrity in the "eyes of Clara", his daughter.
He is currently mayor of Bordeaux, a member of parliament and president of M Chirac's ruling party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UM). He has lodged an appeal, which could take another year to be heard.
30 September 2003: Chirac feels the heat as ally faces corruption trial
? Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004
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>> OUR FRIENDS THE SAUDIS...
Saudi Arabia Criticizes U.S. Reform Plans
Sun Mar 21, 2004 10:10 AM ET
RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal criticized U.S.-led calls for reform in the Middle East on Sunday and said Arab countries could tackle their problems by themselves.
He was speaking just two days after talks in Riyadh with Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The U.S. proposals "include clear accusations against the Arab people and their governments that they are ignorant of their own affairs," the official Saudi Press Agency quoted the prince as saying in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
"Those behind these plans ignore the fact that our Arab people have cultures rooted deep in history and that we are able to handle our own affairs," he said.
Powell's visit to Riyadh was overshadowed by Washington's criticism of the arrest of at least 10 pro-reform activists in Saudi Arabia.
The United States is eager to promote reform in the Middle East and has encouraged its long-standing ally, the world's biggest oil producer, to speed up change since the September 11 attacks which were carried out by mainly Saudi hijackers.
Washington believes lack of democracy in Arab states has helped fuel Islamic militancy. Arab leaders meet in Tunis later this month seeking a common response to the U.S. plans, dubbed the "Greater Middle East Initiative."
Saudi Arabia has already promised municipal elections later this year, but the conservative Muslim kingdom says its cautious program of political change will not be influenced by outside pressure.
Last week it rejected U.S. criticism of its arrest of the reformists, saying the detentions were an internal affair. Several of the detainees have been released.
Prince Saud said calls for Arabs to join the modern world were being made "as if for all these years we had not been doing anything and had just been waiting for direction from outside."
He said any foreign help should be concentrated toward settling the Palestinian-Israel conflict and a "genuine economic partnership" with the Arab world.
? Copyright Reuters 2004. All rights reserved.
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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
Sunday, March 21, 2004 ? Last updated 11:08 a.m. PT
Seven of 13 Saudis detained are released
By DONNA ABU-NASR
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia -- Seven of 13 Saudi reformists arrested in a crackdown on dissent that brought condemnation from Washington have been released, activists said Sunday.
One of those released, Najib al-Khunaizi, said they first had to pledge in writing not to petition for reform of the Saudi system or talk to reporters.
The professors, lawyers and writers, who were detained last week in several Saudi cities, had - in newspaper articles and television appearances - criticized the kingdom's strict religious environment and slow pace of reform.
The Saudi government began a cautious move toward reform after the Sept. 11 attacks carried out by 19 Arab hijackers, 15 of them Saudi.
While it has encouraged debate and allowed newspapers more freedom to criticize, the arrests indicate the regime sees the reformists as a threat.
"Those guys who were detained and the ideas they represent have made a lot of waves, sparking a lot of debate," said Ibrahim al-Mugaiteeb, head of Human Rights First, an independent group.
"The government was afraid the debate would not remain a debate in the papers," he added.
Some had signed a recent letter to Crown Prince Abdullah calling for a speedy introduction of political, economic and social reform, including elections of the Consultative Council, which acts as a parliament and is appointed by the king.
Others had demanded the absolute monarchy become a constitutional monarchy and that Saudi Arabia review its relations with the United States.
And some criticized the new, National Human Rights Association, whose members also are appointed by the king.
U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli condemned the detentions last week as "inconsistent with the kind of forward progress that reform-minded people are looking for."
Angered by what it saw as U.S. interference in an internal matter, the Saudi Foreign Ministry responded by issuing a statement saying it was "disappointed" by the U.S. reaction to the arrests.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed concern over the detentions during a meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah in Riyadh on Friday.
The Saudi government has accused the men of incitement and of using the names of prominent Saudis in petitions without asking their permission first.
Despite their activities, the men do not carry the kind of importance, political weight or popular base that would have undermined the government.
However, the arrests were seen as a message to other, more influential Saudis whose detentions would have created a stir among the public - such as religious clerics who claim they have shed their extremist past and are pursuing a more moderate course.
Al-Khunaizi, who was arrested Tuesday in the eastern, mostly Shiite city of al-Qatif, said the detainees were treated well and kept in offices or in villas, not in prison cells. "There was no abuse or insults of any kind," he said in a telephone interview.
The detentions were a test of the new, state-sanctioned human rights group. Several of its members refused to comment on the detentions, telling The Associated Press it was too early to do so.
Many Saudi intellectuals and liberals have cast doubt on the association's ability to function as an independent body when many of its members hold government jobs, are former civil servants or close to the government. Its head, Abdullah al-Obeid, is a member of the Consultative Council.
Al-Obeid remained silent on the issue for a few days. In remarks published Saturday, he told Okaz daily that his association will be "following up on this matter with the competent authorities."
Al-Obeid was quoted as saying the association does not know the reasons for the men's arrest, "but the official authorities ... are entitled to arrest anyone for questioning - this matter is legal."
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The NHS can't afford to lose able managers who tell the truth
By Barbara Amiel
(Filed: 22/03/2004)
Squish. Kaput. A combination of union bullies and cowardly colleagues managed to get rid of a leading hospital trust administrator last Friday. Since effective hospital trust chairmen are as close to extinction as certain blue butterflies, this is not progress for the NHS - though it is certainly a politically correct moment. Goodbye, Barrie Blower, MBE, chairman of the three-star Walsall hospital trust, who resigned last Friday.
About once a week, we read of a hospital horror. The wrong kidney is removed from some poor bloke, who is left on dialysis for life. A large clamp remains inside a patient after surgery.
Mistakes are made in all sorts of jobs; it's just that, in the world of medicine, the mistake can kill. Most hospital chiefs prefer an administrative Valhalla, where they don't have to answer questions from families of patients. They can issue an anaemic statement apologising for any concern caused. The matter is "under investigation".
Mr Blower appears not to have been like that at all. When Tracey Davies wanted to talk about the death of her mother from lung cancer last December, Mr Blower made himself available. And not just for a 10-minute chat: for three hours.
Later, Mrs Davies, 41, would say: "My mother was terminally ill, and there has never been any question about the nursing staff being negligent, but we felt we needed more information about the time she died." She was not allowed to speak to the nurses who were on duty at the time and Mrs Davies wanted to hear about the last hours of her mum.
Some post-mortem it turned out to be. For Mrs Davies was wired. She secretly recorded her conversation with Mr Blower on a tape recorder, either under her clothes or in a James Bond handbag.
She says that, after getting the run-around from two lower-level hospital managers, she wanted to prevent Mr Blower "going back on anything he said". Fair enough, though that doesn't quite explain why the tape leapt from her hands into those of Carlton Television.
This is what Mr Blower "couldn't take back". In speaking of agency nurses, he said: "It's an awful set-up. We advertise in the Philippines and in India to attract nurses to be attached to the hospital, to try and get rid of these agency people. They kill more people than they bloody save, these do. It's an awful bloody set-up but we've got to have them." Newspaper leaders were apoplectic. Unison, the public service union, called for his resignation.
Mr Blower's remarks were certainly intemperate and reckless and he has apologised fully for them. But was the outrage because those remarks were untrue? Were they ill-informed?
If dependence on agency nurses compromises standards of care, then, even if they don't kill more people than they save, the importance of what he is saying dwarfs any problem of intemperance he exhibited. And we should be grateful that, far from resigning, he had the courage to finger a problem that is potentially a matter of life and death for every one of us.
Walsall Hospital has looked at its records and sees no relationship between complaints and agency nurses. The hospital uses fewer agency nurses than many trusts, and its use of them has been declining. The larger issue remains, though. Agency nurses are the supply teachers of the medical profession. They come in to fill a vacancy. Sometimes they fill in for a shift, sometimes for a couple of days.
A few years ago, when I was a regular patient at a London NHS hospital, the agency nurses would occasionally be assigned to wards in which they had no particular expertise. Some were good. Some were bad. In this, they matched the normal ratio in nursing, or any other job.
But common sense suggests that there is a fundamental difference between the history supply teacher who fills in for a geography class and the paediatric nurse who is assigned to the trauma floor.
Hospitals do their best to fit nurses to the job for which they are qualified. I'm fairly certain no hospital would allow an inexperienced nurse to assist in the operating room or intensive care unit. But a lot of damage can get done in much less dramatic settings.
The best nursing care comes from the nurse who is not only experienced but has some continuity with both patients and hospital. Continuity of care ought to be a high priority.
Agency nurses can have all the training in the world, but they aren't Socrates and Mother Teresa combined. Dropping nurses into constantly new settings is like putting a pupil in a new school each time. They don't get what's going on.
One of my agency nurses was unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of the doctor's handwriting and the routine I was on. When there was no senior nurse around to help her, she hooked up another bottle of my unfamiliar and rather viscose infusion at a speed that would have burst my bad veins in short order.
After she had left, I changed the volumetric pump to a slower drip, having learnt that the safest thing in hospital is to learn how to do things for yourself. Easy enough for me, but not so easy for the very ill chap on the same floor who got hooked up to the wrong tube for a nasty few moments.
The nursing profession is in crisis. In the grim old days, women seeking work had fewer choices than they do now. The grim thing today is the working conditions of nurses and so, understandably, fewer women choose to go into the profession.
Health care is crumbling under the costs of our ageing society. The standard market solution - solve shortages by competitive salaries - is not possible. Importing nurses from overseas, which Mr Blower sees as the solution, creates its own problems.
The six-month period of "adaptation" is sometimes more honoured in the breach: language and body language between foreign nurse and British patient are often unsatisfactory.
According to studies, some "English-speaking" nurses speak English all right; they just don't understand local English very well - which may be why the on-line Hindustan Times accused Mr Blower of "racism" when his remarks were quite the opposite.
Some foreign nurses see the request for painkillers as unnecessary, given standards in their homeland or the rather reticent behaviour of the British in pain.
At any rate, the NHS is now short of one skilled manager. Mr and Mrs Davies are said to be distraught that their actions caused this situation. "I haven't slept for three days," says Mrs Davies. We wish her a good night. A lot of patients may lose their sleep for far longer.
Next story: You can probably be sure of Shell
? Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2004
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washingtonpost.com
Doomed Hubble's Fans Flood NASA With Ideas
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 21, 2004; Page A01
BALTIMORE -- One devotee wants to send a "giant clamshell" into space to pluck the telescope from the ether and bring it home. Several others suggest sending it to the moon. Or maybe selling it to Coca-Cola to pay for a rescue. And if all it took were donations or volunteers, the job would probably already be done:
"I am broke . . . but I will send $50.00 right now, if it will help save Hubble," read one message that fluttered in over NASA's Hubblesite Web page a couple of weeks ago. "If you need someone to take a chance riding the shuttle and help fix it, I am your guy. You should know that I am almost 50. Kind of makes me a long-shot candidate."
Two months have elapsed since NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced that the agency was canceling the Hubble Space Telescope's fourth space shuttle servicing mission, essentially sentencing the orbiting observatory to death sometime in the next few years.
The news was divulged almost as a by-the-way amid the fanfare accompanying President Bush's new moon-Mars initiative, but it has provoked a level of anguish and outrage that has overwhelmed whatever excitement the administration may have hoped to kindle with proposed new ventures in space.
Hubble's distress touched a national nerve. It has become the people's telescope, its fate of vital interest to everyone from the scientists who use it and minister to its needs to amateur astronomers to breakfast-table enthusiasts who marvel at Hubble's spectacular images.
"Let me get this straight. We are going to take the greatest telescope ever conceived . . . and then we are going to blow it up?" one man wrote on Hubblesite. "Do you people have a clue? . . . The American People own the Hubble. How dare you even consider blowing her up?"
"Within our own Hubble community, we've had nothing but shock and outrage," said Steven Beckwith, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) here, which supervises Hubble's observations. "The public outpouring has been extraordinary."
Beckwith said he has received hundreds of e-mails of support and suggestions for saving Hubble. O'Keefe has acknowledged to reporters that his "e-mail system is clogged every day."
Other NASA offices also report a brisk traffic in Hubble mail, and Hubblesite has received thousands of messages, Beckwith said. Institute officials agreed to let The Washington Post quote from the January and February Hubblesite traffic as long as the writers were not identified.
What emerges from this outpouring is an "us-vs.-them" truculence that views the Hubble's demise as collateral damage in what many see as the administration's misguided march to the moon and Mars, an idea opposed by 62 percent of Americans, according to a Jan. 18 Washington Post-ABC News poll.
"Hubble is the only truly useful piece of work NASA has done in years," one man wrote to Hubblesite in January. "Moon-or-Mars-men are . . . a waste of taxpayer money. Do real science. Do Astronomy!"
What has happened, said University of Michigan psychologist Daniel J. Kruger, is that Hubble has become a national treasure. "It doesn't need a publicist, because it speaks for itself," said Kruger, who studies the spread of ideas and culture. "When we have something like the Hubble sacrificed, people want to know, 'What do we get out of this?' We may eventually get to do [the moon and Mars], but at what price?"
The dismay wells up at all levels. At an institute news briefing earlier this month to unveil a Hubble deep space image, the usually circumspect Beckwith suddenly remarked in anguished wonderment that "never in the history of telescopes have we developed an observing capability and given it up."
Scientists and staff at the same meeting broke into cheers and applause when Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) promised "to stand up for Hubble" and seek reconsideration of O'Keefe's decision. "I believe that the future of Hubble should not be made by one man in a back room," she said.
Later that week, after a mostly cordial encounter with O'Keefe during a Senate hearing, Mikulski said she would ask the National Academy of Sciences to do a "risk-value" study on a space shuttle mission to service the Hubble. When it became apparent that O'Keefe did not share her views, she sent him a letter threatening to continue funding the telescope "until an informed decision" on Hubble's future could be made.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Capitol, Rep. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) is circulating a proposed resolution calling for a review of O'Keefe's decision and continuation of plans for a servicing mission until Hubble's fate is resolved.
"I didn't know the interest was there, but we're getting hundreds of letters and e-mails," Udall said in a telephone interview. "People are saying, 'Wait a minute, this is penny-wise and pound-foolish. With a little gumption and hard work, we can get the service mission up there.' "
Probably not. Despite the cascade of bad publicity, O'Keefe has remained steadfast in his view that the shuttle will not travel to Hubble unless the mission complies with new safety measures recommended after the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated on reentry last year.
The likelihood that a Hubble mission could comply is virtually nil, O'Keefe said to reporters recently. NASA would have to develop special technologies allowing a shuttle crew to make repairs to the spacecraft without assistance. This might be done, but not in time to get a shuttle to the telescope before its batteries wear out and its gyroscopes spin down.
"Could we [send the shuttle early] and take the risk? Sure," O'Keefe said. "But somebody else will have to make that decision. Not me." Hubble, he acknowledged, "is a real gem of an instrument. But you have to think about reality."
The hope now is that a Feb. 20 "request for information" put out by NASA will elicit fresh thoughts on how an unmanned mission might travel to Hubble and somehow service the telescope.
"There's no shortage of ideas," said Hubble project manager Preston Burch, of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, in charge of Hubble hardware and servicing. Among the potentially feasible ones are suggestions that a robot spacecraft might grapple Hubble and attach external power packs and gyroscopes to keep it operating.
Not plausible so far, however, is the idea that the shuttle might somehow tow the telescope to the international space station for periodic servicing. This engineering exploit, a favorite on the Internet, would require a change in the inclination and height of Hubble's orbit.
"It would take a tremendous amount of power to do that," Burch said in a telephone interview. "And if you bring it down to the space station, how do you get it back up?"
While these options percolate, Goddard is also working on the grimmer business of prolonging Hubble's life, and eventually pushing the dead telescope into a higher graveyard "parking orbit" or steering it into Earth's atmosphere on a trajectory that would guide its fiery remains to crash into an uninhabited area.
At best, the batteries and gyros will last until about 2008, but Goddard engineers say they may be able to squeeze out an extra year or two by running the telescope on two, or even one, gyroscope, adopting battery-saving measures and, finally, triage.
"You have to have enough battery power to run the equipment at night and have a backup for emergencies," explained David S. Leckrone, Hubble's senior project scientist. "At some point, the batteries will no longer be able to fully charge during the day, and when that happens, we'll have to turn off equipment."
For a public in denial, however, the focus is on cures, not hospice care. "Wouldn't it be easier to robotically go up there with a giant clamshell made from those fancy reentry tiles and just bring it back?" asked one man on Hubblesite in January.
Or have the telescope "contract with Coca-Cola or Pepsi, etc. to pay the Russians to repair HST in return for a small Coke, Pepsi, etc. logo in the corner of each Hubble picture," another message said.
Other correspondents suggested that NASA "put it on eBay," "issue Hubble bonds," "get schoolchildren involved in collecting donations," or "land your telescope on the moon and build abservatorium there."
But above all, "please don't can the Hubble," one fan wrote. "I made Ds in high school science, and a D in college science. Until the Hubble, I thought the only galaxy was the Milky Way."
? 2004 The Washington Post Company
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Decoding the Chatter
Inside the nerve center of America's counterterrorist operations
By TIMOTHY J. BURGER
Most of America is sleeping, but deep within CIA headquarters in northern Virginia, officials pulling overnight duty are scarfing junk food, soft drinks and coffee as they surf mountains of intelligence reports for the latest potential threat to Americans. These are the men and women of the year-old Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC). As they sit at gray, modular workstations equipped with secure computer terminals and phones, their toil is long and arduous but never dull. "It's day right now in half the world, so this shift's pretty fast paced," says an official. "In another hour, it's morning prayers in East Africa. It's morning already in Kabul."
In an unprecedented tour of TTIC's interim quarters as well as the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and the pipeline that leads to the site of President Bush's top-secret daily intelligence briefings, TIME correspondents got an inside look at the nerve center of America's efforts against terrorism. The atmosphere was one of camaraderie mixed with urgency. Asked how often a night goes by without any potentially alarming intelligence reports coming in, an official replies, "I haven't had a night like that. There's always something."
Each day, officials at TTIC (pronounced tee-tic) examine 5,000 to 6,000 pieces of intelligence, trying to assemble the best picture of what's out there. Staffed by representatives of about a dozen government entities, TTIC strives to address the failure of agencies to share vital intelligence before 9/11. "We have an FBI analyst who's sitting next to a CIA analyst who's sitting next to a Secret Service analyst who's sitting next to a Coast Guard analyst," says TTIC chief John Brennan, a senior CIA officer. "They take information from their different systems and say, 'Hey, have you seen this?' or 'Is this something that affects what you're doing now?'"
Brennan insists TTIC doesn't run spy operations inside the U.S., which the CIA is prohibited from doing. But, he says, as TTIC chief he can quickly get the FBI to do so to fill "gaps in our knowledge." The center is helping to monitor "a lot of folks who have acquired U.S. citizenship or green cards that are engaged in international terrorism," says Brennan. A well-placed source says the FBI now keeps tabs on about 400 individuals in the U.S. who are thought to be sympathetic to al-Qaeda or somehow connected to Sunni extremism. The FBI has also tried to co-opt some of them as informants.
Toward midnight, in an interview in a nondescript office in the Counterterrorist Center, a senior official describes a mission that is much closer to the Hollywood image of spy work: intense, often risky covert action against terrorists abroad. "Our job is to capture them and kill them," the official says. That means, he explains, taking action "at the direction of the President, by formal decree, clandestinely. Sometimes you're acting at his direction to change the world."
But even at the Counterterrorist Center, the official notes, much of the work is "so goddam nitty-gritty it'll turn your mind numb." Some of the best intelligence comes from interrogating captured terrorists. The Counterterrorist Center helps direct and analyze those sessions. It's all about "who knew who five years ago," says the official. "Where did they go after that? How did the network expand? What were they plotting then? Where did they live? Who did they live with?" But the adrenaline really gets pumping after an attack like the one in Madrid. The Counterterrorist Center will immediately run through a checklist of questions: What's the first take from the local intelligence service? What kind of evidence was found? Did anyone get a license plate? Was there any known operational terrorist cell there before? Are there satellite intercepts of telephone conversations? If the local authorities arrested someone, is that person known to the CIA?
In another part of the CIA complex, President Bush's briefer is on her way in. The thirtysomething, nine-year agency veteran is winding up a year-plus rotation in the job, which requires her to get to work around 2 a.m., six days a week. "Everything [the CIA] has produced in the past 24 hours crosses my desk," she says. That's plenty. To determine what intelligence the President should hear at around 8 a.m., along with his standard daily reports, she will zoom through a stack of fresh intelligence as tall as three phone books.
--By Timothy J. Burger. With reporting by Viveca Novak and Elaine Shannon/Washington
Copyright ? 2004 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
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Trilateral Maneuvers
Iran gets tight with Syria and Lebanon.
By Ilan Berman
If the Bush administration needed another reason to look beyond Baghdad in its war on terrorism, it has just been given one. In late February, Iran's defense minister, Rear Admiral Ali Shamkhani, embarked on a whirlwind tour of Syria and Lebanon. The resulting tightening of ties between Tehran, Beirut, and Damascus marks the birth of an ominous new alliance, deeply threatening to American interests.
Shamkhani's diplomatic offensive commenced with a two-day tour of Syria. There, Iran's defense minister held a very public summit with his Syrian counterpart, Lieutenant General Mustafa Tlas, at which the two hammered out a landmark strategic accord. The new "memorandum of understanding" establishes a joint working group on bilateral military and security, paving the way for deeper defense-industrial cooperation between Tehran and Damascus. More significant still, the agreement contains an unprecedented Iranian commitment to defend Syria in the event of either an Israeli or an American offensive, formally making the Baathist state a part of Iran's security.
From Damascus, Shamkhani traveled to Beirut, where he held court with the upper echelons of the Lebanese government. In meetings with the country's president, Emile Lahoud, as well as Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Berri and Army Commander Michel Soleyman, he pledged closer military ties with Beirut -- and an active Iranian role in Lebanon's emerging military modernization.
The Iranian defense minister also made a point of meeting with the leadership of Lebanon's Shiite terrorist powerhouse, Hezbollah, to whom he confirmed that the newly minted security guarantees between Syria and Iran would extend to their country. The message was unmistakable -- the Israeli and American "enemy" would now "think a thousand times before attacking Lebanon."
Tehran's full-court press is already paying dividends. In an outright show of support, President Lahoud has publicly praised the regional importance of the emerging "Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut axis." And Syrian officials -- under fire abroad for their government's deep support for terrorism -- have similarly made no secret of their enthusiasm for the nascent alliance's deterrent potential.
But these stirrings reflect more than simply a broadening of political bonds between Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. They are indicative of a larger realignment now underway in the Middle East, where the political vacuum created by overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime has begun to be filled.
And Iran is rapidly emerging as the biggest beneficiary of the new regional status quo. Over the past two years, American efforts in the war on terrorism have successfully eliminated Iran's most immediate strategic adversaries -- Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan -- while effectively de-clawing the principal terror threat to the Islamic republic: the radical, Iraq-based Mujahedeen e-Khalq organization. These moves have left the United States Iran's principal remaining regional challenger. It is no wonder that Iranian policymakers like Expediency Council Secretary Mohsen Rezai have begun to view their country as the natural "center of international power politics" in the post-Saddam Middle East.
Tehran has wasted no time translating this vision into action. In recent months, the Islamic republic has gravitated toward a new, more confrontational strategic doctrine -- one that includes a major expansion of Iran's military capabilities and political presence in both the Persian Gulf and the Caucasus. This aggressive agenda has only been solidified by the sweeping victory of regime hard-liners in the country's recent, hotly contested parliamentary elections.
The trilateral alliance just crafted in Damascus and Beirut is a big part of these plans. Iran's leaders hope that such a radical coalition will blunt the impact of the U.S.-led transformation taking place in Iraq on their own restive population, and derail larger American plans for a sea change in the region's political balance -- an initiative they view as a "serious threat to the security, independence, and stability of the Islamic countries." Simultaneously, Tehran is seeking an answer to pro-Western constructs, like the Israeli-Turkish strategic partnership, capable of supplementing American efforts. And, in the midst of the war on terrorism, the Islamic republic is working hard to ensure the continued relevance of its most potent regional proxy, Hezbollah.
If it manages to accomplish these objectives, Washington might just find that U.S. Middle East policy has become a victim of Tehran's success.
-- Ilan Berman is vice president for policy at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/berman200403190918.asp
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ON LANGUAGE
Outsource
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Outsourcing has become a national dirty word,'' reports National Journal's Congress Daily.
And it started out so brisk and efficient. Back in 1979, The Journal of the Royal Society of Arts reported an American auto executive's saying, ''We are so short of professional engineers in the motor industry that we are having to outsource design work to Germany.'' But the business practice of contracting with outside suppliers -- especially those outside the United States -- soon brought frowns from labor unions. Business Week noted in 1981 that the ''decline in auto industry jobs . . . will make outsourcing a key issue.''
When a new verb makes it to a gerund so quickly, it's a sign that the word fills a linguistic need. (Outsourcing is the present participle of a verb -- ending in ing -- that is used as a noun, which makes it a gerund, and there'll be a question about that in your exam.) For a generation, as globalization generated about twice as many jobs in the United States as it shipped abroad, the issue was relatively quiescent. But since 2000, when the creation of new jobs began to dip and then further decreased during recession, outsourcing became a favored political target of populists.
N. Gregory Mankiw, the Harvard economist and political innocent heading the Council of Economic Advisers, placed himself squarely in the bull's-eye. In his annual report -- 417 dreary pages issued in the president's name that nobody on the White House staff had the good sense to vet -- he noted that ''one facet of increased services trade is the increased use of offshore outsourcing, in which a company relocates labor-intensive service-industry functions to another country.'' He then observed, ''When a good or service is produced more cheaply abroad, it makes more sense to import it than to make or provide it domestically.''
Though few economists would take issue with this idea first propounded by David Ricardo in 1817, the language seemed deliciously insensitive in a campaign year. Mankiw was forced to apologize: ''My lack of clarity left the wrong impression that I praised the loss of U.S. jobs.''
Writing on the Web site of the leftist magazine The Nation, the iconoclastic Matt Bivens blurted out the truth: ''The dirty little secret in all of this is that both parties support free trade -- which works roughly as Mankiw describes it. He just wasn't supposed to be so coolly honest about it. It's disconcerting.'' Even more disconcerting to antiprotectionists was another attack gerund, emphasizing the shipment of jobs not just to outside suppliers but also to those in foreign lands: offshoring.
Business interests immediately considered a euphemistic counter-attack. A few years ago, in 2001, when legislation was introduced to enable the president to negotiate trade deals without subsequent Congressional modifications, free-traders changed the name of fast track authority, which seemed hasty, to trade promotion authority, a lexical coating that helped the necessary medicine go down.
The earliest thought along these lines appeared in 1998 in Fleet Owner magazine, noted by the alert Paul McFedries in his Web site, wordspy.com: ''While the traditional model of outsourcing defines the customer and the service provider as two separate systems, the intersourcing model integrates two systems.'' However, the freshly coined intersource, while a perfectly logical extension of the outsource concept, could lend itself to sexual innuendo on late-night television and was hurriedly abandoned.
This month, a group calling itself the Coalition for Economic Growth and American Jobs (who could be against that?) decided to oust out from outsourcing, proposing instead worldwide sourcing.
Within Cegaj, as the coalition has not yet become widely known, worldwide was chosen over global because the adjective global had become too warm -- that is, the noun formed from the adjective's verb, globalization, had acquired a pejorative connotation, in turn casting a pall over the root global itself. The use of world as an attributive noun, however, is still O.K.; that use as a modifier has been long established in World Series, World Cup, World Bank, World Economic Forum, world class, etc. This is despite the fact that the word, as a regular noun, is now eschewed by concerned liberals, who much prefer planet.
Forget international. This soporific modifier has been rejected by naming committees not on ideological grounds but because it is too long a word to fit in a one-column headline. It remains in old and revered institutions, like the International Monetary Fund and the International House of Pancakes, but is not being used in the newest nomenclature.
The astute reader (apparently the only kind I have, judging by sustained and gleeful e-mail howling from the Gotcha! Gang) will note the use of source two paragraphs above in its journalistic sense, as ''provider of information.''
In the inexorable trend toward the verbification of nouns, the question asked a generation ago by editors -- ''Do you really have a source for this?'' -- was changed to ''How has this been sourced?'' As if on cue, in galumphed the gerund -- ''You have to be careful about sourcing'' -- and sourcemanship became as good as scholarship. Our use of the gerund (which, you may recall, is a verb ending in ing used as a noun and possesses mysterious syntactical qualities) surely influenced the adoption of outsourcing.
In journalese, sourcing means ''getting some living person or historical citation to justify an assertion.'' Viewed from inside an organization, a source can be a despised leaker, traditionally described as ''a disgruntled ex-employee''; viewed from outside, he or she is a courageous whistle-blower. Closing down an overseas bureau and hiring independent ''stringers'' to do the reporting can be considered a specialized form of outsourcing. Basing an article on information gleaned from a journalistic colleague is sometimes called sourcing once removed, but maybe we should take another look at intersource.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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>> AHEM...
(AP Photo/Chitose Suzuki)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/040321/480/bx10103212130
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, right, makes a joke about a rumor that Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (news - web sites) had a plastic surgery, holding photos of Kerry, left, and pop star Michael Jackson during the annual St. Patrick's Day breakfast in Boston, Sunday, March 21, 2004. The breakfast, which gave President Bush (news - web sites) and Kerry the opportunity to engage in some lighthearted, long-distance one-upmanship, has been a tradition for more than 50 years, and is a prelude to the annual South Boston St. Patrick's Day Parade. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino is seen laughing in the foreground.
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Kerry and Bush urged to tone down election attacks frenzy
Sun Mar 21, 6:08 PM ET Add Politics - AFP to My Yahoo!
WASHINGTON (AFP) - President George W. Bush (news - web sites) and Democratic rival John Kerry (news - web sites) were warned tone down their presidential election attacks or risk a vote boycott by alienated Americans.
With a new poll showing Bush and Kerry neck-and-neck in the race, senior members of the Republican and Democratic parties appealed to the rivals to change tactics.
"Let's keep it civil so we don't get so nasty that we discourage people from coming out and voting in a very important election," said Senator Joseph Lieberman, who was a contender against Kerry for the Democratic nomination.
"This nation is almost evenly divided politically. And there are strategists in both parties who are urging both candidates to go for victory by whipping up into a frenzy the partisan, ideological base of both parties," Lieberman told Fox News channel.
Senator John McCain, who challenged Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000, said opinion poll verdicts on the campaign of attack adverts and political mudslinging would force them to change tactics.
"If they start getting polling numbers like I think they will of people who will say: 'A pox on both your houses,' then I think it will change. And I hope that it does," he told Fox.
McCain said he was hearing from people in his home state of Arizona who are saying: "Look, I'm not even going to vote if this is the way the campaign's going to be conducted."
With the election months away on November 2, Bush and Kerry are already entrenched in what has become the longest White House campaign ever.
Kerry launched aggressive attacks on the Republican president during his battle for the Democratic nomination. Bush is now fighting back with a series of television adverts decrying the Democrat as "wrong on taxes" and "wrong on defence".
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney (news - web sites) have made strong assaults on Kerry and his policies and voting record in recent speeches.
A Newsweek magazine survey released Saturday said Bush and Kerry were even on 48 percent of voter support. A poll by the magazine one month ago put the Massachusetts senator ahead of the president 48-45 percent.
The survey said that if veteran liberal consumer advocate Ralph Nader (news - web sites) maintains his candidacy, Bush would lead by 48-45 percent.
Meanwhile, Bush encroached on Kerry's home turf Sunday when he called Massachusetts politicians who were attending an annual Saint Patrick's day breakfast in Boston.
One local politicans jokingly asked Bush to dump Cheney and consider Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, as his new running mate.
"Look, you're lucky to have the guy. Here's the way I like to put it about Massachusetts: I know there's a lot of talk about a Massachusetts politician who has his eye on the presidency," Bush responded.
"But tell Mitt it's not open until 2008," he said, referring to the year that would mark the end of his second term if he were re-elected to a second four-year term.
On the more serious side, one other prominent Republican, Senator Chuck Hagel, was also critical of the Bush campaign's attacks on Kerry's Senate voting record.
"The facts just don't measure the rhetoric," he told ABC television.
He said campaigns could take the voting record of any longstanding senator "pick out different votes, and then try to manufacture something around that."
All the senators warned that a vicious election campaign risked undermining what should be a common aim to win the war on terror and make a success of attempts to restore order in Iraq (news - web sites).
Hagel said: "Kerry and Bush must conduct themselves in a way that when November 2 comes, whoever wins, they are going to have to be able to have legitimacy and the authority to govern this country and keep this coalition together."
He warned: "We may find ourselves over the next four years unable to sustain our policies in Iraq, Afghanistan (news - web sites) and on our war against terrorism, because the politics have so divided this country."
Lieberman, Democrat Al Gore (news - web sites)'s running mate in the 2000 presdiential election, said Bush and Kerry must "make sure that we carry on this debate in a way that doesn't send a mixed message to the Iraqis or our troops there, or to our enemies there. We're together in trying to find a strategy for success and victory and democracy in Iraq."
He added: "Our security is being challenged in a way that it's never been challenged before, so let's not divide ourselves right now."
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