The Washington Post is reporting that the Bush administration will announce today that the US military will be allowed to continue using antipersonnel landmines indefinitely. President Clinton had made an agreement to stop the use of such mines by 2006. Steve Goose, who heads the arms division of Human Rights Watch, said, “It looks like a victory for those in the Pentagon who want to cling to outmoded weapons, and a failure of political leadership on the part of the White House. And it is stunningly at odds with what’s happening in the rest of the world, where governments and armies are giving up these weapons.” To date 150 countries have signed an anti-landmine treaty. According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, a total of nearly 12,000 people were reported killed by land mines in 2002. The Washington Post report the Bush administration will bar the use of traditional landmines but will continue to allow the use of so-called smart landmines which have timing devices to automatically defuse the explosives within hours or days. In addition the military will continue to use the old type of landmine along the Korea border until the year 2010. The government will also vow to double the amount it spends removing landmines and it will insure that all future landmines contain enough iron in order to be detected by minesweeping devices. Coverage of this issue in the country’s major papers today is remarkably different. The Washington Post runs it as its lead front page story under the headline “Bush Shifts U.S. Stance On Use of Land Mines: Policy Slated for 2010 Won’t Ban All Devices Designed to Kill Troops” Meanwhile the New York Times stuffs the article on page 14 with the headline “New U.S. Land Mines to Pose Less Long-Term Danger.”