Subject: Italy threatens to pull plug on Vatican radio (Burmaster).
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 134051 -0600
From: Roy Beavers
To: guru
--------------------------------------------------
.......From EMF-L......
The Holy Father was warned!!!..... Sometime back -- on EMF-L......
Consider: the "law" that "counts" here .. is the law of
electromagnetic radiation...... One of God's laws.......
......guru......
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: SX3S1: Italy threatens to pull plug on Vatican radio
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2001 11:50:30 EST
From: Envoptions@aol.com
To: roy@emfguru.com
Italy threatens to pull plug on Vatican radio
By Jane Barrett
ROME, March 16 (Reuters) - An unprecedented ecological battle between the
Vatican and Italy heated up on Friday when Italian Environment Minister
Willer Bordon boldly threatened to cut off the electricity supply to Vatican
Radio.
Vatican Radio, which has been charged with breaking Italian laws on
electromagnetic levels, said it was "astonished" by the threat, which would
effectively pull the plug on the station which broadcasts Pope John Paul's
words around the world.
"If within 15 days the broadcaster does not get back down under the limits, I
will order the national electricity provider to suspend supply to the
transmission centres," Bordon told a news conference.
"If the supplier continued to provide electricity, it too would be held
responsible for committing a crime," he added.
Vatican Radio broadcasts the Pope's speeches and events to the world in some
40 languages from a huge forest of antennae north of Rome where some groups
have reported abnormally high levels of cancer. The transmission centre, like
Vatican City itself in the centre of Rome, is on extra-territorial land and
considered part of a sovereign state.
Bordon said the National Agency for the Protection of the Environment had
registered three times Italy's legal limit of electromagnetism during one of
Vatican Radio's evening broadcasts.
Italy has slapped strict regulations on emission levels -- the tightest in
the European Union -- after Vatican Radio had been set up 44 years ago.
A CHANGING LANDSCAPE
The land was once open countryside but has since been heavily built up with
housing and factories.
"Vatican Radio is very open to collaborating (with Italy) but the right and
just way to deal with the problem is in the commission we've set up," the
station's programme director Father Federico Lombardi told Reuters.
Representatives from both Italy and the Vatican have set up a group to deal
with the problem of polluting airwaves, dubbed "electrosmog" by the Italian
press.
The main stumbling block for the Italian government is how to force the
Vatican, a sovereign state, to comply with its national laws.
Earlier this week, a judge suspended a court case dealing with the Vatican
Radio charges over a technicality of how three of its employees -- a
cardinal, a priest and a technician -- were told they were being investigated
by Italy.
Bordon said too much was being made of the so-called extraterritorial
question and that the only issue on the table was the health of people living
around the antenna field.
According to national consumer group Codacons, a study by a local health
agency found more children living near the enormous net of antennae had
contracted leukaemia than in other parts of the capital.
"If someone threw something out of an embassy window like a fridge and hurt a
citizen of the host country, that would be a problem you just can't ignore.
You would do everything you could to protect people underneath," Bordon said.
09:38 03-16-01
Copyright 2001 Reuters Limited.
Forwarded by Spark Burmaster
Environmental Options
Wisconsin, USA
Archive provided courtesy of WaveGuide, http://www.wave-guide.org
Reprinted with permission of Roy Beavers, http://www.emfguru.com