HANOI, Vietnam — The United Nations has launched a $5 million project to clean up Agent Orange contamination at a former U.S military air base in Vietnam, the world body said today.

The project will focus on dioxin contamination at Bien Hoa airport on the outskirts of southern Ho Chi Minh City. It is one of three former American air bases where U.S. forces mixed, stored and loaded the defoliant onto planes for spraying missions during the Vietnam War to destroy jungle hide-outs of enemy Communist forces.

Between 1962 and 1971, the U.S. military sprayed roughly 11 million gallons of Agent Orange across large swaths of southern Vietnam. Dioxin is a toxic chemical used in the herbicide that has been linked to cancers, birth defects and other ailments.

ATHENS, Greece — Public services shut down across Greece today as workers walked off the job in a new nationwide general strike that disrupted public transport, left hospitals operating on emergency staff and pulled all news broadcasts off the air.Tension mounted once more in the country's main port of Piraeus, where hundreds of demonstrators from Communist Party-backed labor union PAME attempted to prevent tourists and locals from boarding ferries to Aegean islands, even though a court had declared seamen's participation in the strike illegal.A similar strike by two seamen's unions last week — which was also declared illegal — left thousands of travelers stranded for a day in Piraeus.