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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JDN who wrote (120848)	1/3/2001 9:28:50 AM
From: peter a. pedroli	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

with over 70 yrs of cold war experience in my family, the one thing i can say with assurance is Ivan doesn't take a "shit" without a plan. Russia is falling a part. in 15 yrs. their population is expected to drop to some 122 million. you are seeing the military combing the streets of Russia for warm bodies to file the ranks because avoidance to the draft is at an all time high. industrial output is at all time lows and life expectancy to adult males is 59 yrs of age. you are looking at a N.Korea with the bomb and the only thing they have left is to play up nationalism and attempt to raise fear of NATO in doing so. here is another telling story of the break down in Russia. WEDNESDAY JANUARY 03 2001 Fears for health after Russian prison amnesty FROM ALICE LAGNADO IN MOSCOW A THIRD of the Russian prison population, about 350,000 inmates, will be released this year, provoking fears of a crime wave and a massive rise in cases of tuberculosis and Aids. “Our goal is to introduce more humane methods of criminal prosecution and punishment for crimes,” Yuri Chaika, the Justice Minister, said yesterday when he announced the release. He did not explain what alternative punishments could be given to criminals or how Russia will cope with their release into society, however. The amnesty could have a disastrous effect on the nation’s already poor health. Russia’s Dickensian prisons are rife with TB, Aids and other infectious diseases that could easily be spread to the general population by freed prisoners. One in ten prisoners carries TB and 10,000 die of the illness each year. A third of inmates contract drug-resistant forms of TB that are difficult and expensive to treat. Drug use, the primary cause of Aids in Russia, is part of prison life and convicts who enter prison clean are likely to leave addicted to heroin, the cheapest and most popular drug. Previous amnesties have been widely condemned in Russia for allowing the release of dangerous criminals. An amnesty of 120,000 prisoners in May included the freeing of Colonel Yuri Budanov, convicted of the rape and murder of an 18-year-old Chechen woman, and five army officers charged with murdering Dmitri Kholodov, the Moscow journalist, in 1994. This latest amnesty appears to be Russia’s answer to international criticism of its overcrowded prison system. Mary Robinson, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said recently that conditions in Moscow’s Butyrka prison amounted to torture.