Sabotage

Oil prices slid for a seventh consecutive day yesterday on word that Iraq's major oil fields in the south were under American or British control, available for use in the postwar rehabilitation of Iraq. The markets were apparently buoyed by the knowledge that the bulk of the Iraqi oil industry was safe from sabotage and that the fires that flared in oil fields Thursday affected only a few wells. Crude prices dropped $1.21 to $26.91 a barrel. "The situation is surprisingly normal compared to what was expected," said John Lichtblau, chairman of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation in New York.

JERUSALEM - Israeli and Palestinian leaders have resumed cease-fire talks, but both sides fear that Palestinian militant groups are trying to sabotage negotiations before tangible results can be realized. The Israeli army said security forces are pursuing an unprecedented number of warnings of imminent suicide bombings, a spike that coincided with the publicizing this weekend of the once-secret truce meetings. "I'm sure that not all the terrorist organizations are happy with the fact that negotiations are going on," said Capt.

At Baltimore City College, Antoine D. Boykins took honors classes and went to the state championships as a star wrestler. Confident and well-spoken, he gave enough pep talks and told enough jokes to win friends inside and outside the college-prep high school. "He was one of the nicest kids around here," said a man standing near his family's West Baltimore rowhouse yesterday. Now, however, Boykins, 21, is sitting in the brig at Camp Lejeune, N.C., awaiting a likely court martial that could mire him in a military prison for life.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon suspects that Saddam Hussein will sabotage his oil fields should the United States invade Iraq, potentially creating an economic and ecological disaster that could dwarf his destruction of Kuwaiti oil fields at the close of the Persian Gulf war, a senior defense official said yesterday. As a result, the Pentagon is working on plans to quickly seize and secure the two vast oil fields in southern and northern Iraq, the official said. Special Operations forces or rapidly deployable conventional troops, such as the 82nd Airborne Division, might be used.

WEST CORNWALL, Conn. - Now that United Nations weapons inspectors have arrived in Iraq, most Americans want the inspection process to work. But the hawks in the Bush administration are petrified that it will, and doing their best to undermine it. As recently as Nov. 21, Richard Perle, a top Pentagon adviser and No. 1 cheerleader for war in Iraq, told a group of astonished British parliamentarians that even a "clean bill of health" from U.N. chief weapons...

ABOUT THE only area in which the mostly irrelevant members of the Baltimore City Council excel is self-preservation. They will do (and have done) just about anything to keep their seats. Nothing underscores that fact more vividly than Monday's action to ensure that the bloated council (18 members serving six districts plus an at-large president) will not be reduced. To achieve this, the council approved two charter referendums that ostensibly would downsize the council, but in fact would cancel out one another and a third one petitioned by a coalition of civic groups and labor activists.

TO THINK the threat of women baring their breasts would shame an oil conglomerate into behaving like a good corporate citizen. The mothers, wives, grandmothers and granddaughters who stormed a ChevronTexaco oil terminal in southeast Nigeria recently evoked the traditional tribal gesture in their protest to win jobs for their husbands and sons and services for their impoverished villages. After commandeering a ferry, they arrived at the island export facility, babies strapped to their backs, and blockaded the area, leaving several hundred oil company workers (mostly males)

Lionel "Rusty" Bernstein, 82, a white anti-apartheid activist who stood trial for sabotage with former South African President Nelson Mandela, died Sunday in Oxford, England, from what appeared to be a massive heart attack. Mr. Bernstein was one of 16 activists, including Mr. Mandela, charged in 1963 with sabotage and the attempted overthrow of the South African government. In the so-called Rivonia Trial, the defendants used the courtroom to put the apartheid state on trial. Mr. Bernstein was later acquitted after spending the year of the trial in prison.

A 20-year-old Calvert County computer programmer was sentenced yesterday in federal court to 15 months in prison for sabotaging an Internal Revenue Service computer after learning that he was about to be fired from his contractor job. Claude R. Carpenter II of Sandy Wash Court in Lusby also was ordered to pay $108,000 in fines by U.S. District Judge Deborah K. Chasanow after he pleaded guilty in Greenbelt to causing damage to a federal computer....

With America now on alert for imminent terrorist attacks, former federal agents acting as consultants to private industry say widespread security lapses have left no shortage of targets. While the Bush administration has sharply focused public attention in recent weeks on airline safety and biological weapons, security specialists say other major hazards have been imperiling U.S. population centers for years. Nationwide, they say, tons of jet fuel, gasoline, liquefied natural gas, munitions and caustic chemicals in tank farms and seaport facilities lie virtually unprotected - accessible to petty thieves, organized criminals and terrorists alike.