-Caveat Lector- [radtimes] # 152 An informally produced compendium of vital irregularities. "We're living in rad times!" ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- How to assist RadTimes--> (See ** at end.) ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Contents: --Fears of insurance no-go zones as global warming claims rise --New Mafias Go Global --War On Drugs Targets Tech --Global warming to cost $300 bln a year - UN report --Australian scientist horrified at human clone plan --Newspaper studies confirm Democrat Gore won Florida vote --Forgotten Founding Father =================================================================== Fears of insurance no-go zones as global warming claims rise <http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/globalwarming/story/0,7369,432870,00.html> Special report: global warming by Paul Brown, environment correspondent Saturday February 3, 2001 The Guardian The insurance bill for extreme weather events and rising sea levels is set to increase tenfold - from £20bn a year to £200bn a year by 2050 - making parts of the world uninsurable, the world's leading insurers have warned. "Climatic changes could trigger worldwide losses totalling many hundreds of billions of dollars a year," Dr Gerhard Berz, head of research for the largest re-insurance company in the world, Munich Re, told the United Nations' Environment Programme (Unep) in Nairobi. "The burden of claims resulting from so-called natural catastrophes has already taken on dramatic dimensions. "There is mounting evidence of increasing frequency and intensity of natural catastrophes. Major windstorms set new loss records almost annually, while innumerable flood, tempest, drought and forest fire emergencies now seem to occur more frequently than ever before." Losses caused by the weather in the 1960s totalled £30bn (in today's prices); in the 1990s that figure rose to £250bn. But as greenhouse gas pollution increases, the bill is set to rise more dramatically, to £200bn per year by 2050. More than 100 environment ministers, including Britain's Michael Meacher, are meeting in Nairobi on Monday to discuss climate change. Dr Berz fears the losses will bankrupt parts of the industry and wants government action to halt climate change. "There is reason to fear that climatic change in nearly all regions of the Earth will lead to natural catastrophes of hitherto unknown force and frequency," he said. "Assessing these developments could jeopardise the future of entire industries in some regions." Before 1987, only one hurricane - Alicia in Texas in 1983 - cost £1bn in claims. Since then, 29 have cost that much. Munich Re's estimates are based on predictions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will double by 2050. The IPCC's previous report in 1996 saw no link between global warming and the increased frequency and intensity of extreme atmospheric events, Dr Berz said, but studies and simulations since have provided new evidence. Dr Berz is particularly concerned about the effect on Europe where he says the pattern of insurance losses shows that climate change has already begun. Flooding on the Rhine in December 1993 and January 1995, and in England in 2000 are examples. Ever more frequent and heavier downpours are predicted. "These milder winters have also reduced the extent of snow-covered areas above which stable, high-pressure zones of cold used to form, creating a barrier against low-pressure storm fronts approaching from the Atlantic," said Dr Berz. "So this barrier is often weak or has shifted far to the east. German wind records indicate a marked increase in the number of windstorm days in recent decades." He says annual losses from a rise in sea level and flooding in low-level islands such as the Maldives, the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia in the Pacific would exceed 10% of their GDP by 2050. Klaus Toepfer, executive director of Unep, said the report was of great concern. Unep is working on a vulnerability index to warn governments which of their countries are most likely to be hit by extreme events, causing loss of life and property. "The time to act is now," Mr Toepfer said. "The world has already signed up to a certain level of human induced climate change as a result of over a century of industrial emissions. We must help vulnerable areas of the world, primarily in the developing world, to adapt to the consequences of global warming." Countries such as the US would lose £5bn a year because of damage to agriculture, while the EU would stand to lose up to £6bn. The cost of premature death due to rising numbers of heatwaves is put at £14bn a year within the EU and £11bn in the US. Worldwide, the cost of premature death caused by heatwaves is put at £50bn. =================================================================== New Mafias Go Global <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/01/07/MN28992.DTL> High-tech trade in humans, drugs by Frank Viviano, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, January 7, 2001 By any standard, the journey of Mohammed Hodrat from Tajikistan to Western Europe is an astonishing testament to international financing, state-of-the-art communications and pinpoint logistics. It is also, European law enforcement authorities say, the signature of an unprecedented organized crime network, a worldwide archipelago of "mafias," loosely modeled on the Sicilian original, equipped with the latest tools of high technology and linked in powerful underworld alliances that stretch across the Earth. The chief business interests of the Mafia Archipelago are drugs, arms and, increasingly, a multibillion-dollar traffic in human beings that carried Hodrat and three members of his family to Italy. On a two-month trip by land and sea that ended with a midnight voyage across the Adriatic Sea in an open boat, the Hodrats passed through Afghanistan, Iran, eastern Turkey and Yugoslavia, crossing several of the world's most dangerous and heavily militarized borders without passports or visas. Even for a family fleeing a bloody civil war in the ruins of the Soviet empire, the experience was terrifying. "We expected to be killed at any moment, " said Hodrat, who under an assumed name spoke with a Chronicle reporter at a crowded refugee camp in southern Italy. But at every border, he said, someone was waiting in a minivan, a boat or a truck with a concealed passenger compartment to transport the family to a hiding place until the time came for them to move on to the next border. At no point were they asked for any more money than the $24,000 fee that was paid by a relative in Norway to a Serbian "businessman" before their departure. Interpol, the international police agency, estimates that 4 million human beings per year are being smuggled across international borders by transnational criminal syndicates: Chinese triads and Italian Mafia clans, and their counterparts from the former Soviet Union, the Balkans, Israel, Lebanon, Vietnam, Nigeria, Colombia and elsewhere. Never in history, say leading law enforcement figures, have such far-flung criminal organizations combined their financial and logistical operations in a single enterprise. The traffic in human beings by this network "is among the most serious and fastest-growing problems in the world," warns Raymond E. Kendall, Interpol's secretary general. According to the Turin-based United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute, human trafficking now earns multinational criminal syndicates up to $7 billion annually. Britain's Immigration and Nationality Directorate believes that the number of immigrants involved exceeds 25 million per year, and that the mafias' take is as high as $30 billion. On Dec. 15, the Clinton administration released a 120-page report characterizing global organized crime as a full-fledged "national security crisis" for the United States, equivalent to international terrorism. Yet at present, no one in the world's beleaguered police and legal establishments knows how the Mafia Archipelago's labyrinthine partnerships are formed. No one knows who monitors its costs, keeps the accounts, supervises itineraries, transport and warehousing, whether the "goods" are heroin, weapons or desperate human beings, and sees to it that profits are satisfactorily shared. No one knows how the network is directed, or from where. "What we do know, because such sophisticated operations would otherwise be impossible, is that there must be a single umbrella organization that oversees illicit trafficking, with representatives everywhere," says Umberto Santino, a leading expert on the criminal underworld. Beyond that assumption, says a U.N. criminologist based in Europe, there are only questions. "It is as though all of us, at international agencies and national police forces alike, are working separately on a 5,000-piece puzzle, but none of us has more than five pieces," the official said. UNDERGROUND PASSAGE At its most basic level, the traffic in human beings through the Mafia Archipelago is a gigantic transportation system, arranging passage from the world's poorest or most conflict-ridden corners to the rich nations of Western Europe and North America. Most of its "clients" disappear into Europe's clandestine economy, spending years trying to pay off travel debts. Others, like the Hodrats, are quickly apprehended by police and languish for years in refugee camps, or are returned penniless to their homelands. They are the lucky ones. The United Nations estimates that 1 million women and children per year, some no older than 8 -- are drawn or forced into vast prostitution and sexual exploitation rings after setting out into the Mafia Archipelago. In 1975, the worldwide flow of migrants was estimated at fewer than 85 million people. Today, it is thought to approach 145 million per year, reflecting an immense increase in the desperation that makes the Mafia Archipelago so lucrative. "The income gap between the richest and poorest countries was 30-to-1 40 years ago. By 1997, it had increased to 74-to-1," notes Enzo Bianco, minister of the Interior in Italy, Western Europe's principal port of entry for trafficked immigrants. "There is a direct connection between those numbers and the globalization of organized crime." There is also a direct connection between the massive flow of clandestine immigrants and blatant contradictions in Western immigration policy. For a quarter of a century, the rich European nations have made legal immigration impossible. Yet these same nations have extremely low birthrates and a growing labor shortage that makes newcomers essential. To maintain its economic standards, according to a recent U.N. report, the European Union needs 1.6 million workers per year more than it produces through natural population growth. The criminal organizations that govern the Mafia Archipelago, in that sense, provide a service to the legitimate economies of the West. "The European Union needs workers, and the criminal groups deliver them," points out Spartak Poci, Albania's minister of public order. "The absence of a clear policy addressing these population and economic trends is what makes the involvement of criminal actors possible." As in America, undocumented workers in Europe are commonly employed in the food, textile and construction industries, with many local police departments turning a blind eye to their presence and to evidence of labor abuses by unscrupulous employers, according to the International Organization for Migration in Geneva. In the implicit relationship between the Mafia Archipelago and the legitimate economies of Europe, "it is increasingly difficult to establish who services whom, who learns from whom, and ultimately who corrupts whom," says criminologist Vincenzo Ruggiero of Britain's Middlesex University. Almost always, it is the immigrants who pay. A 1998 University of London study found that clandestine immigrants are charged from $3,000 to $30,000 each by organized crime groups for transport, depending on the difficulty of the journey and the wealth of the destination country. Chinese undocumented immigrants in European estimated 80,000 are in Paris alone, according to Interpol, are reportedly forced to work in triad-run sweatshops for up to five years to pay off travel debts. "For organized crime, the narcotics trade is like investing in high-risk stocks. It offers the prospect of fast money if things work out right," says a U.N. official. "But trafficking in human beings is like investing in bonds. The money can keep coming for years and years, and the risks are much lower." International agencies believe each immigrant woman or child smuggled into prostitution generates from $120,000 to $150,000 annually for an underworld boss. Altogether too typical is the story of "V," a 21-year-old Moldovan whose case profile was made available to The Chronicle by the Italian government. In the summer of 1999, V paid a fee to an "employment agency" in her hometown that promised opportunities for domestic work in Italy. The agency, she now understands, was a front for a multinational network of underworld prostitution bosses. Along with 20 other women, V was first bused to Romania, then delivered by train to Belgrade, where Serbian racketeers took over and put them on another bus to Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro. Montenegro has no extradition treaty with the West, which makes it a valuable "transshipment hub" in the Mafia Archipelago for contraband of every description. From Podgorica, the women proceeded on foot over the mountains into Albania. Exhausted and disoriented, they were divided into groups of two or three, under the supervision of armed gunmen who beat and raped each of them. Two days later, V was literally sold for $2,000 to a man who traveled with her to Milan and forced her to work as a streetwalker until her detention by Italian police, who returned her to Moldova. "People have become products" for the transnational crime network, says Interpol's Kendall. GLOBAL CONNECTIONS These "products" are shipped through the Mafia Archipelago on carefully designed, systematic routings that highlight the extraordinary level of collaboration among crime groups. Lithuania is one of the few countries to have conducted a detailed study of the traffic in human beings, based on lengthy debriefings of arrested clandestine immigrants in 1996. Although Lithuania itself is only a transit country, separated by Poland and Belarus from the nearest major immigrant destination, Germany, 80 percent of the immigrants had already crossed three or four borders before they were arrested. More than 75 percent confirmed that the routes were determined completely by the gangs that organized their passage. Indeed, very few had ever heard of Lithuania before they were detained in it. They were housed and fed in a series of constantly changing "safe houses," which they were not allowed to leave until it was time to move on, according to the study. Each of the detainees had on the average used four different means of transportation, a bewildering combination of airplane flights, boat and train voyages, cars and buses, journeys on foot and periods enclosed in truck containers similar to the one in which 58 Chinese immigrants died after crossing the English Channel last year. On Oct. 20, in a similar tragedy, six Kurds from Iran suffocated near the Italian city of Foggia in a sealed truck with Greek plates, driven by a Bulgarian. The journeys often begin and end with brokers from the same ethnically defined clans. "We find, for instance, that Chinese immigrants are usually handed over to Chinese criminal groups resident in Italy when they arrive here, " says Piero Luigi Vigna, director the Italian National Anti-Mafia Prosecutors Office in Rome. Constant intimidation in Western Europe by ethnic gangs from their own native lands tends to reinforce "a wall of silence" surrounding the immigrants themselves, says Interior Minister Bianco. Fearful that their families back home will be targeted if they alert authorities, the vast majority of clandestine immigrants are trapped helplessly in the shadows of illegality. "We know, and certainly the Italian bosses know, that the Albanians, the Chinese triads and Turkish and Nigerian crime groups operate in Milan, Florence, Turin, Rome and along Italy's eastern coasts and borders," says a top international law enforcement official. In 1999 alone, more than 17,000 ethnic Albanians, either from Kosovo or Albania itself, were arrested in Italy on criminal charges or placed under investigation for illegal activities. Altogether, 14,000 of the 52,000 inmates of Italy's maximum-security prisons today are foreigners, a third of them convicted of narcotics trafficking. "But to use American terminology," the official continues, "the various syndicates aren't bumping each other off. On the contrary, they are working very efficiently together, inside and outside of their own respective territories. That is unprecedented and profoundly troubling." Michael Koutouzis, a former Greek official regarded as a leading expert on the narcotics trade, says, "The borders between criminal clans were even more important than the borders between states in the past." Today by contrast, Vigna says, "Albanian criminal groups fulfill the functions of a kind of service agency, establishing, for the management of clandestine immigration toward Italy, ties with the Chinese mafia, and with its Turkish and Russian counterparts." In a rare interview with a trafficker, conducted by a voluntary organization that assists refugees, "it emerged that joint ventures between southern Italian organized crime and groups operating in Albania are frequent, and that such partnerships are imposed by local criminal entrepreneurs who expect to be given a percentage of the profits earned by their Albanian counterparts," says criminologist Ruggiero. Some criminal syndicates have gone so far as to seal their distant clans in marriage alliances. Josip Loncarcic, 45, the Croatian-born mastermind of human trafficking along the western border of Slovenia, was apprehended Nov. 28 by Slovenian police with his wife, Xue Mei Wang granddaughter of a Chinese triad boss deeply involved in the smuggling of Asians to Europe. DANGEROUS CROSSINGS The cross-border collaboration is most striking on the long leg, sometimes lasting four months, between the departure of clandestine immigrants from their Asian, African or Eastern European homelands, and their arrival in a destination country. En route, they may pass through a gamut of powerful underworld clans, most notably those of Russia, Albania and Turkey. At any given moment, according to Interpol, from 200,000 to 300,000 clandestine immigrants are hidden in Moscow, awaiting onward transportation under the auspices of the Russian mafia. The Moscow hub is just one on a dizzying array of routes through the Mafia Archipelago. Thanks to high-technology communications, its directors are able to shift enormous numbers of clandestine immigrants from one route to another within hours, depending on unexpected political developments or changing conditions at borders. The next stops, after Moscow, are usually the westernmost nations of the former Soviet Union, most of which require no inbound visas from Russia, en route to the Turkish Black Sea coast. "In Turkey, illegal traffickers buy old, cheap trucks and ships to transport illegal immigrants so that they can easily abandon their vehicles (and vessels) when they come close to the destination countries," says Hikmet Sami-Turk, Turkey's minister of Justice. On Nov. 6, 1,200 clandestine travelers, including hundreds of small children, came perilously close to drowning when the leaking Ukrainian ship transporting them from Turkey was abandoned by its crew off the southern Italian coast. Another ship full of undocumented immigrants, this time under the flag of Georgia, broke apart in a storm off the Turkish coast on New Year's Day, killing dozens. In the past three years, Sami-Turk says, the number of people arrested while attempting to transit his country illegally has more than doubled, and is now running at close to 6,000 per month. But that is a fraction of the numbers who reach the Yugoslav republic of Montenegro or Albania, the primary final jumping off points for the European Union. The capture last year of Princ Dobroshi, one of the Albanian transit corridor's most infamous "godfathers," dramatizes the global character of the new crime links. Dobroshi was tracked down by police in Prague, in the Czech Republic, en route to a destination unknown in a BMW with German plates. In his bags, the police found a Croatian machine gun, a shotgun with a Chinese silencer and a Czech dagger. He had been imprisoned six years earlier on charges of trafficking in Turkish heroin in Norway, with other charges pending in Sweden and Denmark, but escaped from prison in Oslo. A LOSING STRUGGLE To meet the rising menace of the Mafia Archipelago in human trafficking, almost all experts on the phenomenon agree, the governments of source, transit and destination countries must develop coordinated policies. "But national law enforcement agencies are just that -- 'national,' " says Irena Omelaniuk of the International Organization for Migration. "They don't share information or equipment with their counterparts in other countries." The result, at the moment, is a losing struggle in which no single police force or judiciary has the power to confront a criminal network with operations as globalized as those of Microsoft. "The international crime networks are better equipped, better organized and have more money than national law enforcement agencies," says Omelaniuk. She cites a new anti-counterfeit paper, developed to prevent passport fraud, that was recently adopted by several countries along the primary routes of the Mafia Archipelago. "It took the criminal organizations exactly 24 hours to come up with a near-exact reproduction of the new paper," she says. "It's not simply a matter of organized crime employing the swiftest means of transporting illicit goods, or human beings, or even their embrace of continuous innovations in the field of communications, which often produces an overwhelming gap in tools with those of the states where they operate," says Italy's Vigna. "We also have to contend with the global dimensions of financial markets, which are indispensable to criminal groups in managing their immense earnings, and the introduction, even in this field, of technological instruments like the Internet that are outside of effective government control." According to the International Monetary Fund, money-laundering activities could add up to more than $1.5 trillion per year, a figure that exceeds the gross domestic products of all but the world's five largest economies. No single element in this ocean of dirty cash is larger than the proceeds laundered by the burgeoning network of organized crime. In August, scandal rocked the U.S. financial community over disclosures that the venerable Bank of New York had been used to launder some $10 billion in underworld money. The principal account-holder in the scheme was Semion Mogilevich, boss of the "Red Mafia," with operations in Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Hungary and the United States. The group has been identified by the FBI as a major player in the transnational trafficking of drugs, arms and women into sex rings. The crisis is compounded by the huge costs necessary to mount a successful police and judicial campaign against criminal syndicates engaged in human trafficking. In a single 1997 case, involving Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants smuggled into Germany, "over 140 house searches were made in 27 German cities, 12,000 phone calls were registered on five phone lines, 170 suspects were identified and 280 cases of illegal immigration detected," says Interpol's Kendall. "The main suspect had connections in Portugal, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States," he says. If the task is daunting for Germany, one of the world's richest nations, it is all but impossible for impoverished transit and source nations. "It takes practical measures, implemented at every border, with sophisticated controls to enhance security and identify traffickers in human beings, drugs and weapons," says Vladimir Turcanu, minister of the Interior for Moldova. "But our financial resources only allow such measures at two of our 31 crossing points, and we have no database at all for things like fingerprinting suspected traffickers." The rich countries often respond by complaining that former Communist nations, especially, either lack laws against trafficking or seldom invoke them. In Albania, the hub from which hundreds of thousands of clandestine immigrants are smuggled annually into Western Europe, a grand total of 20 people have been charged with trafficking in human beings this year. Both sides contend that progress is being made. They point to a ground- breaking conference held in mid-December, convened, symbolically, in Palermo, at which government ministers from 150 nations met and hammered out the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime, laying the groundwork for joint research, enforcement and judicial action. But rich and poor alike admit that a long, difficult road lies ahead. "At this juncture, we don't even have a shared data bank on organized crime prosecutions," Vigna says. "We don't have compatible laws." In Italy, where Chinese triads are a growing criminal force, police departments and courts seldom have a staff member who can read or speak Mandarin. "Local Chinese who might act in that capacity for us are traumatized by the fear of reprisals," says a law enforcement official in Turin. Ukraine, which has the bleak distinction of being both a major source country and a major transit country for clandestine immigrants, finally passed a law against human trafficking in 1998. To date, notes Ukranian criminologist Lydia Gorbunova, "not a single person has been convicted for trafficking in human beings."Tomorrow: The Cosa Nuova, the new version of the Mafia, is more mysterious than its parent and every bit as ruthless. =================================================================== Friday February 02 War On Drugs Targets Tech by Lewis Z. Koch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Special To Interactive Week, Interactive Week The new scapegoat for the failed War on Drugs is, of all things, technology. The 120-page December 2000 International Crime Threat Assessment report - created by basically every federal law enforcement agency in the U.S. - is riddled with examples of how computer technology has advanced the cause of national and international crime. Modern telecommunications and information systems, state-of-the-art communications equipment, computers - they're all to blame. What the report fails to squarely acknowledge is that the oil that fuels organized crime in the U.S. and abroad, including terrorist organizations, is profit from the trade in illegal drugs bound for the U.S. - billions of dollars in profit from drug sales that enhance the power of international crime cartels and their ability to corrupt police, judges and governmental officials from Tijuana to Tanzania. "Through the use of computers, international criminals have an unprecedented capability to obtain, process and protect information and sidestep law enforcement investigations," the report stated. "They can use the interactive capabilities of advanced computers and telecommunications systems to plot marketing strategies for drugs and other illicit commodities, to find the most efficient routes and methods for smuggling and moving money in the financial system and to create false trails for law enforcement or banking security." It goes on to assert: "More threateningly, some criminal organizations appear to be adept at using technology for counterintelligence purposes and for tracking law enforcement activities." In other words, it's not our flawed drug policy that's to blame - it's new technology. Where All This Began In 1937, Harry J. Anslinger, six years into his 30-year-reign as director at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, testified before the U.S. Senate on behalf of the "Marihuana Tax Act." This delighted the Hearst newspapers, which, lacking a real war to increase newspaper sales, launched an all-out battle against demon marijuana. Here are a few excerpts from Anslinger's sworn testimony. Clearly, our drug policy traces its roots to reasoning that was as racist and alarmist as it was wildly inaccurate: "There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana can cause white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others." "The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races." "Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death." "Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind." With Hearst's backing, Anslinger's war on marijuana escalated to an all-out war on narcotics. Now, after six and a half decades of speeches and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of arrests, convictions and sentences, what signs point to even modest success in this multitrillion-dollar war against drugs? Drug trafficking is the most profitable of all illegal activities, according to the International Crime Threat Assessment. Where Do We Go from Here? Instead of rethinking the sanity of our basic policy on drugs, federal police agencies appear bent on blaming technology - unbreakable encryption via e-mail, encrypted cellular phones and faster, cheaper networked computers - for the losses sustained in the drug war. This is clearly nonsense. In 1999 alone, Americans spent an estimated $63 billion on illegal drugs, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. And the National Institute on Drug Abuse stated: "The estimated total cost of drug abuse in the United States - including health care and lost productivity - was $110 billion in 1995, the latest year for which data is available." In addition, a U.S. Customs Service report said the department will soon be able to inspect only 1 percent of all goods entering the U.S. This is the score after six and a half decades of our drug policy. Do we have to wait until 2037 to recognize that we lost the Hundred Years' Drug War? And, in the meantime, will we see more and more attacks on technology as the evil ally of narcotics? The obvious yet politically difficult solution here is to remove the profitability factor from drugs. Will there be more casualties? Will more people succumb to addiction? Maybe. But don't we already have casualties? You have to employ some tortured logic to rationalize how removing the profit incentive from drug use could make things any worse than they are. Now the Feds want to escalate the war as an excuse for having their way with encryption. But encryption is an essential business tool and a means of protecting our privacy. Outlawing it as a scapegoat of our drug policy is like trembling in fear before the great Wizard of Oz and paying no attention to the discredited man and his policies behind the curtain. =================================================================== Global warming to cost $300 bln a year - UN report <http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm?newsid=9684> February 4, 2001 NAIROBI - An increase in natural disasters as a result of global warming could cost the world over $300 billion annually by the year 2050, a new United Nations commissioned report says. According to the report from leading German re-insurers Munich Re, the losses would result from more frequent tropical cyclones, loss of land as a result of rising sea levels and consequent damage to agriculture and fishing stock. "Most countries can expect their losses to range from a few tenths of a percent to a few percent of their gross domestic product each year," Gerhard Berz, head of Munich Re's Geoscience Research group, wrote in the latest edition of the UN Environment Programme's Our Planet magazine. "And certain countries, especially small island states, could face losses far exceeding 10 percent." Low-lying states most at risk included the Maldives, the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia. Berz conceded in the article that the calculations may need refining but hoped the statistics will jolt governments and businesses into action in the fight against global warming. UN climate talks called to plan ways of coordinating cuts in greenhouse gas emissions ended acrimoniously in the Hague in November and major economic powers blamed each other for the collapse of the negotiations. The Hague conference had sought agreement on implementing a pact reached in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, which called for developed nations to cut their emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide by an average of five percent from 1990 levels by 2010. Last month a UN report said average global temperatures could rise by up to 5.8 degrees Celsius over the 21st century, much higher than previously thought. Berz's report said flood defence schemes to protect homes, factories and power stations from rising sea levels and storm surges could cost an average $1 billion dollars. The losses of ecosystems such as coral reefs, coastal lagoons and mangrove swamps could cost over $70 billion by 2050. Munich Re has been monitoring the cost of natural disasters since the 1960s. Other disaster-related problems would bring the bill to $304.2 billion a year. The extra costs from health-related measures and more intensive water management could cost the United States nearly $30 billion a year and Europe $21.9 billion annually by 2050, the report says. =================================================================== Australian scientist horrified at human clone plan By PAUL HEINRICHS Sunday 4 February 2001 Two international medical scientists are trying to lure Victoria's top reproductive scientist, Alan Trounson, into a taboo-busting project aimed at cloning the first human being. First reports of the project indicated that an Australian couple and an Australian scientist were already lined up as part of an international effort to create a technological breakthrough. "This is an international problem that needs to be addressed with international experts," Panos Zavos, of Kentucky, told The Sunday Age last week, "and I think that Alan will be participating in this consortium - he's welcome to participate." Professor Zavos, who runs a fertility clinic in Lexington, says reputable scientists need to take an initiative on cloning before "the Saddam Husseins in this world" get their hands on the technology to replicate themselves. "Of course, we haven't asked him (Professor Trounson) as yet, but I'm sure he would be glad to and we would be glad to have him, because it is people like that that can make the difference." But Professor Trounson, the scientific director of the Monash IVF team and recently honored by the US Science magazine, is horrified by the plans, and is having none of it. "No way!" he replied. "I'm sure they would like anybody who would add credibility to the team to go on it. No way. No way!" Professors Severino Antinori and Zavos announced in Kentucky last week that they would try to produce the first cloned human within a year. Professor Antinori has a clinic in Rome, just around a corner from the Vatican. He is already notorious as the man who helped older British women - one of 63, another of 59 - to have babies. This led him into stormy TV debates with Britain's leader in this field, Lord Robert Winston. At the announcement, Professor Antinori stressed that he would consider only what he called "therapeutic cloning" to help infertile couples, such as an American pair whose male partner lost his testicles in an accident. Professor Zavos is a friend and colleague of Professor Antinori who says he will go to Rome in March to help form the international coalition of scientists. "Somebody has to be a catalyst in this world," Professor Zavos says. "We regard ourselves as the catalyst, but we're not going to be the gods. The moral of the story is that Antinori and I decided we have to take this from under the table to on the table." He believes the world will catch up ethically. "We listen to those people," he said. "Those are the people who keep us on our toes, who keep us thinking, but at the time, this is a kind of a dirty job but somebody has to do it, and it will be done. "The ethical issues obviously are for the world to decide. It is not for us. We're scientists." Dr Antinori is proposing that the work would be done in an unspecified Mediterranean country where he had permission to create humans through cloning. In Australia, the cloning of humans is outlawed under federal and state legislation, and many countries have similar laws. The technique outlined would essentially be the one used to clone animals such as Dolly the sheep, producing an exact genetic replica of its father. The baby would be created by taking the nucleus of a man's cell, probably a skin cell, and injecting it into a human egg that had been stripped of its own genetic material. After a few days, if the embryo began to develop, it would be implanted in the uterus of the "mother" in the hope of producing a healthy baby. But Professor Trounson, as well as condemning the scheme ethically, discounted the practicalities because reproductive technology had not yet reached a state where it could be done without causing harm. "We don't know, but one could imagine that if you could do other animal species, you could do a human, but what would be certainly true is that it wouldn't be any more efficient than any of the other species. It would take more than 100 eggs to produce an offspring, and there's a very good chance that offspring wouldn't survive." The foetus could die or, in the event of a birth, the child could have serious developmental abnormalities or birth defects, he said. "We still don't know how to reprogram these cells when we do a nuclear transfer," he said. "When we take a skin cell, we still don't know how to make it into an embryonic nucleus." Professor Trounson has long been on the record as being opposed to any attempts to introduce full human cloning. "I don't see any medical reason for it at all. There are social or personal things involved that have nothing to do with any medical condition," he says. In the case of Professors Antinori and Zavos, he said: "I think they're driving their own interests, and creating an international name for themselves on something that has no relationship to medicine. "It has a relationship to glory, fame ... I can't be anything but critical." =================================================================== Newspaper studies confirm Democrat Gore won Florida vote <http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/feb2001/flor-f05.shtml> By Patrick Martin 5 February 2001 Two newly published studies of the ballots cast in the US presidential election confirm that Democrat Al Gore was the choice of more Florida voters than Republican George W. Bush, who was installed as president after an unprecedented and anti-democratic intervention by the US Supreme Court. One study was conducted by the Washington Post, the other by Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. The Post endorsed Gore editorially in the November election, while the Tribune endorsed Bush. The Post reviewed computerized records of 2.7 million votes in eight of Florida's largest counties to examine the pattern of the so-called overvotes, those ballots on which computer scanners or other vote-counting machines detected votes for more than one presidential candidate and discarded the ballots as invalid. The newspaper did not recount individual ballots, but relied on reports from county officials based on machine tabulation of the invalid ballots. The analysis found that of the more than 60,000 ballots in the eight counties showing overvotes, the bulk of the statewide total, Gore's name was marked on 46,000, while Bush was marked on only 17,000. This includes several thousand ballots in which both Gore and Bush were marked. The 3-1 Democratic to Republican ratio among the overvotes was confirmed in the analysis of other votes cast by those voters further down the ballot. Three quarters of those who improperly cast a presidential overvote marked their ballots correctly for US senator. Of these, 70 percent voted for Democrat Bill Nelson, only 24 percent for Republican Bill McCollum, while 6 percent voted for third-party candidates. The nearly 30,000-vote margin for Gore among the overvotes dwarfs the 537 votes which was Bush's official margin of victory in Florida. On the basis of that minuscule and highly dubious number, the Republican-controlled state government, headed by his brother, Governor Jeb Bush, awarded him the state's 25 electoral votes and a four-vote margin in the Electoral College nationally. The eight counties examined by the Post included Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Broward (Fort Lauderdale), Pinellas (St. Petersburg), Hillsborough (Tampa), Marion (Ocala), Highlands and Pasco. Four of these counties went for Gore and four for Bush. The pattern of more overvotes for Gore prevailed in all the counties, however, regardless of who won the county overall. The notorious "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County accounted for 8,000 of the Gore overvotes, most of them double votes for Gore and far-right Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan, who was listed across from Gore on the ballot, with his punch-hole close to the names of Gore and Lieberman. Gore-Buchanan voters in Palm Beach County voted 10-1 Democratic in the US Senate race. In the other seven counties, the largest group of overvotes were for Gore and the candidate who followed immediately after him on the ballot, Libertarian Harry Browne. Such a combination is incomprehensible as a protest vote, especially one supposedly chosen by 6,800 voters. It more likely reflects confusion among voters who thought they had to cast votes for president and vice-president. Confirming the notion that the overvotes were largely intended for Gore is the fact that most of the third-party candidates on the ballot for president received more votes paired with Gore as overvotes than they did in their own right. In the eight counties, Socialist Workers Party candidate James Harris received a total of 300 votes, but his name was punched 12,600 times on ballots with Gore, Bush or another presidential candidate42 inadvertent votes for each intentional vote. The Republican head of the Florida Division of Elections, Clay Roberts, dismissed the Post analysis with an argument of stupefying cynicism, claiming that overvotes were intentional political choices. "People who are engaged in politics can't understand why people would overvote," he said. "But there are valid reasons for undervotes and overvotes. For some voters, that undervote or overvote is their decision." The Post also found more than 15,000 voters in the eight counties who cast no recorded votes for any office or referendum. This suggests widespread difficulty with voting equipment, or major errors in the computerized count, or both, since it is impossible to believe that so many people turned out at the polls, many of them waiting hours in line, only to cast a blank ballot. The Tribune Co. study examined ballots in 15 smaller counties, not including any of the eight in the Post study, that used paper ballots that were marked in pencil and then read by optical scanners. While much public attention has been given to the punch card ballots that proved so defective in major urban counties, the rate of invalid votes was actually higher in these 15 counties, ten of which are predominately white and rural areas in north Florida. The reason is that these counties lacked the financial resources to have an optical reader in each precinct. In the 26 counties that did have scanners available in each precinct, voters were instructed to put the ballot in the scanner themselves. In the event of an improper vote, the scanner rejects the ballot and the voter corrects the mistake and resubmits it. In the poorer counties, the ballots from each precinct are delivered to a central counting location. Voters who mark their ballots improperly have no chance to correct an error, since the mistakes are not detected until the ballots are fed into the scanner at the county seat. Their votes are simply discarded. Counties with optical scanners in each precinct had a vote error rate of less than 1 percent. By comparison, punch-card counties had an error rate of 3.9 percent, and counties with optical scanners only in a central location had an error rate of 5.7 percent. In Gadsden County, the only black majority county in Florida, which used optical scanners at a central location, the error rate was 12.4 percent, and in some precincts as many as one vote in four was ruled invalid. The poorest and least educated voters were obviously those most likely to make a mistake in casting their ballots. These voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. As a result, the Tribune Co.'s recount of the 15,596 invalid ballots showed a gain for Gore of 366 votes, even though Bush carried 14 of the 15 counties. A key factor in overvoting errors was the design of the ballot, almost as confusing as Palm Beach's butterfly ballot. In 13 of the 15 counties, the candidates for president were divided into two pages. Eight were listed on the first page and two, Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party and Howard Phillips of the Constitutional Party, on the second. Some 4,252 voters cast ballots for Gore or Bush on the first page, and then for Moorehead or Phillips on the second page. If those votes had been counted for Gore and Bush, Gore would have gained 564 votes, more than Bush's statewide margin. It is a curious fact that the designer of the two-page ballot, Hart InterCivic, is a consulting firm based in Austin, Texas, headquarters of the Bush presidential campaign. The company said it followed a format sent out by the Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris, Florida co-chairman of the Bush campaign and a member of the cabinet of Governor Jeb Bush. There were other anomalies. Officials in Lake County, who are Republican loyalists, ruled that a presidential ballot with two marks on itone by the name, the other a write-in for the same candidate, was invalid, although state law allows them to be counted. The result was that 628 legal votes were discarded, votes which went disproportionately to Gore. Including these votes would have cut Bush's lead by 122 votes. Gore would have gained another 72 votes from similar double votes discarded in several smaller counties. Lake County also printed the name of Joe Lieberman in small type directly above the word Libertarian in the party label on the line below. As a result, nearly 300 voters in Lake County cast ballots for Gore and Libertarian Harry Browne, which were ruled invalid. The Post and Tribune studies have gone virtually unmentioned in the America media, except for the newspapers that commissioned them. Not a single prominent Democratic Party politician has taken note of their findings. Speaking on a television interview program January 28, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt repeated what has become the standard Democratic refrain. He said that in his opinion, Gore had won the most votes nationally and the most votes in Florida. But, he added, his opinion no longer mattered, and he accepted the legitimacy of Bush as president, following the Supreme Court decision of last December 12. Such comments, and the ongoing silence over the evidence trickling in from Florida, demonstrates how far the Democratic Party is from any principled defense of democratic rights. Prostrate before the right wing, this big business party is incapable of defending its own immediate electoral interests, let alone the social and political interests of working people. =================================================================== Forgotten Founding Father By Mumia Abu-Jamal, M.A. #491 Column Written 1/18/2001 "Free America without her Thomas Paine is unthinkable." - General Lafayette It is impossible for one to be an American without hearing nonstop paeans of praise to those called "The Founding Fathers" of the American Revolution, and of the United States. In every part of the world one finds people aware of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and folks like Patrick Henry. Their lives and ideas are studied by school children around the world. How few of us know of, study, or teach about the American revolutionary, Thomas Paine! As the writer of the pamphlet Common Sense (Jan. 1776), Paine called for the separation of the Anglo- American colonies from Britain. Paine was truly a remarkable man, who left the fledgling U.S. after the revolution, to go to Britain. Paine, born in England, returned to his birthplace as a man convinced of the inherent rights of common folks to freedom, and the necessity of equality. In 1791 he published Rights of Man in critical response to the book by British conservative, Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution. Paine argued that the world belongs to those who live in it, not to the dead. The Crown didn't care for Paine's ideas, and banished him from England for "high treason." His book was banned. Paine set sail for a France that was in the grip of revolutionary extra-judicial violence, and was contemplating regicide. Hearing of the coming of the American revolutionary, the French National Assembly named him a French citizen, and residents of the rural district of Calais elected Paine to the Revolutionary Convention, as a deputy. Paine was further elected to the "Committee of the Nine," with Danton, Brissot, and others, to draft a new Constitution for the newly-declared republic. He was in the Assembly when Louis XVI was placed on trial, and argued (quite successfully) for the life of the usurped royal. Paine's defense of the life of Louis landed him in prison with a date for the guillotine. He was himself luckier than the king, and escaped the thirsty blade by purest chance. It was the custom of the executioner to draw a cross on the doors of those to be guillotined the next dawn. When he came to Paine's door, it was open, and the cross mark was made on the inside. Once the door was closed, the mark was invisible. Several days later, French revolutionary, Robespierre was sent to the Blade, and Paine was spared. As neither President Washington, nor U.S. diplomat Gouverneur Morris, did anything to help him during his long detention, and close brush with death, Paine was both bitter and angry. He would later write to Washington (1796): And as to you, Sir, treacherous in private friendship (for so you have been to me, and that in the day of danger) and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor; whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any. Just a few years before, he wrote Washington in a far lighter mood, saying, "A share in two revolutions is living to some purpose." Paine was an internationalist, who was an Englishman by birth, a French citizen by decree, and an American by adoption. He wrote, "The World is my country, all mankind my brethren, and to do good is my religion." This, the most radical of American revolutionaries, should not be forgotten. =================================================================== "Anarchy doesn't mean out of control. It means out of 'their' control." -Jim Dodge ====================================================== "Communications without intelligence is noise; intelligence without communications is irrelevant." -Gen. Alfred. M. Gray, USMC ====================================================== "It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." -J. 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