President George W. Bush urged NATO allies today to modernize their forces and prepare to face up to new security threats. In remarks he gave at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Bush gave a clear signal he would be trying to win support for his still-undefined vision of a missile defense system. But on his first official European trip, Bush has run into strong criticism on missile defense, with protests across the continent. About 300 demonstrators waved banners and blew whistles near NATO headquarters to protest against U.S. policy on arms and on global warming. Greenpeace said 17 of its activists from Belgium, Switzerland, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Israel and Australia chained themselves to the airport gates and made a human chain in protest of U.S. policy. Hundreds of protesters demonstrated peacefully late on Tuesday outside the U.S. Embassy in Brussels. Police threw a security cordon around the NATO complex, closing roads and disrupting traffic to ward off the demonstrators. We’ll go to Brussels in just a few minutes. But this just in: A parachutist performed a solo aerial lap over NATO headquarters today to protest the U.S. policy on missile defense, before landing in a nearby field, where he was arrested. Trailing a “Stop Star Wars” banner, the activists from the Greenpeace environmental group flew over the NATO complex using a small motor-propelled parachute.

This news from Guatemala City: A judge who convicted three soldiers and a priest of killing Roman Catholic Bishop Juan José Gerardi said he has been receiving death threats. Judge José Eduardo Cojulún headed the three-judge panel that on Friday convicted Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, Captain Byron Lima Oliva and Sergeant José Villanova and the Reverend Mario Orantes of the 1998 murder, sentencing them to 20 to 30 years in prison. Gerardi was the 75-year-old head of the Archdiocese’s Human Rights Office. He was bludgeoned to death after he had presented a report blaming the military for most of the 200,000 deaths in Guatemala.

In other death threat news, some people are taking the transfer of power in the Senate more seriously than others. This from the Associated Press: A lobbyist for the Louisiana Home Builders Association was questioned by U.S. Capitol Police for allegedly making a death threat against U.S. Senator James Jeffords of Vermont. Jeffords has been under the protection of the Capitol Police since his announcement last month that he was leaving the Republican Party to become an independent, a move that shifted control of the Senate to the Democrats. Jeffords’s switch prompted several death threats to the senator. Some were made over the telephone, and others in writing. The incident with a lobbyist happened on Thursday. The man, whose name was not released, was said to be on his way to a meeting at the office of Senator Mary Landrieu, Democrat of Louisiana, when he passed by Jeffords’s seventh floor office in the Hart Building. He went into the office and made a comment to a Jeffords aide. The Capitol Police caught up with him at Landrieu’s office, according to a report in The Advocate of Baton Rouge. Bruce Smith, the president of the National Association of Home Builders, issued a written statement acknowledging the incident, condemning it and apologizing to Jeffords. In the interest of disclosure, the vice chair of the Pacifica board is with the National Association of Home Builders in Washington, D.C.

Florida Governor Jeb Bush signed into law yesterday a bill banning the execution of mentally retarded people convicted of murder. The Florida law does not specify how low an inmate’s IQ level must be for the inmate to be considered retarded, but defines inmates as retarded if they have below-normal intellectual functions and behavior. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to consider this fall whether the execution of a mentally retarded North Carolina inmate would be cruel and unusual punishment barred under the federal Constitution.

In this news from Oklahoma, the Mexican government asked Governor Frank Keating to commute the death sentence of a Mexican man scheduled to be executed next week. Mexican authorities and attorneys for Gerardo Valdez argue that Valdez was not notified of his right to contact the Mexican Consulate after his arrest, in violation of international law. Keating is considering a recommendation by the state Pardon and Parole Board to commute Valdez’s death sentence. He’s scheduled to die June 19.

The Chicago Tribune reports, in a major boost to Midwest corn growers, the Environmental Protection Agency mandated yesterday the continued year-round use of oxygen additives, such as corn-based ethanol, in polluted cities, rejecting a California proposal to use clean-burning gasoline without such additives. By the end of next year, California will be in the market for 550 million gallons of ethanol annually, about a third of what’s produced this year. The increased demand for ethanol will be so great that there are questions about whether farmers and producers can make enough. The triumph of ethanol demonstrates anew the political muscle of an industry that donated more than $1.6 million to federal politicians in 1999 and 2000, more than half of which came from Decatur-based Archer Daniels Midland, the nation’s largest ethanol producer. It’s an industry that government subsidizes generously. Tax breaks for ethanol in Illinois cost $60 million a year, while federal ethanol subsidies this year will total $900 million.