SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1003 (70), Tuesday, September 14, 2004
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TITLE: Economic Approach Reflects Shift in Policy
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin's decision to fight poverty in the North Caucasus as part of his war on terror signals a serious shift in Kremlin policy because it addresses for the first time a root cause of terrorism in the region, analysts said Monday.
 
But the overall plan that Putin announced Monday remains incomplete and off-target, with measures like changes to the electoral system that will have little direct impact on authorities' ability to interdict terrorist attracts and no mention of the need to address systemic reforms in the agencies responsible for fighting terror, analysts said.
 In his speech Monday, Putin announced the creation of a special federal commission that will mainly focus on boosting living and education standards in the volatile North Caucasus region. He singled out poverty and a lack of education as factors contributing to terrorism. 
 The president also ordered the re-establishment of the Nationalities Ministry in a clear acknowledgement that federal authorities have failed to develop a comprehensive policy to deal with the intricacies of ethnic tensions and the shaping local perceptions of Moscow in multi-ethnic regions.
 "It is encouraging, given that after each previous incident Putin's instinct has been to emphasize the security dimension in exclusion of everything else," said Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian security issues at Keele University in Staffordshire, England.
 "Now at least he is talking about other dimensions," Galeotti said. 
 A main source of terrorism that Putin failed to mention, however, are political frustrations in the region, especially in Chechnya. 
 The Kremlin-backed candidate in the recent Chechen presidential election faced no serious competition, while those who favor Chechnya's independence have absolutely no chance of political representation.
 "Terrorism is a weapon of hopelessness and despair," Galeotti said. Only "if Chechnya is reconstructed and there is political representation would this allow authorities to concentrate on extremists."
 Putin's appointment of long-time confidant Dmitry Kozak to run the new federal commission bodes well for the North Caucasus, analysts said. Kozak, whom Putin also named as his new envoy to the Southern Federal District, has proved he is efficient crisis manager with no vested interests in the region. 
 But it remains unclear whether outgoing southern district envoy Vladimir Yakovlev will be able to shape an efficient policy in his new job as nationalities minister. In fact, the appointment of Yakovlev, the former St. Petersburg governor who spent just a year as Putin's envoy, shows how limited the president's personnel resources are, said Ivan Safranchuk, director of the Moscow office of the Washington-based Center for Defense Information.
 It also remains to be seen what resources and powers Kozak will have to fulfill Putin's orders to improve the economy and education while working with law enforcement and security agencies to prevent terrorist attacks.
 Despite the encouraging actions to set up the new commission and ministry, Putin's overall plan is far from comprehensive, Safranchuk said.
 He and other analysts said they were particularly puzzled about how scrapping the popular vote for regional leaders and for single-mandate State Duma deputies would make the nation more prepared to fight the imminent threat of terrorism.
 "President Putin announced measures that will make it more convenient for him to run the country instead of outlining what reforms should be introduced," Safranchuk said. "I don't quite understand how these [measures] will help in the war on terror."
 Moreover, allowing the Kremlin to handpick regional leaders could backfire because while they will be loyal to Putin, they may fail to win popular support in their regions, said Dmitry Trenin, deputy director of the Carnegie Moscow Center.
 Trenin cited the example of security services' veteran Murat Zyazikov, who won the last presidential election in Ingushetia thanks to the Kremlin's support. Zyazikov did act to deny safe havens to Chechen rebels in his republic but has failed to garner public support, leaving him in an unstable position.
 In an effort to address criticism over the inefficiency of law enforcement agencies and the lack of civil oversight, Putin announced the establishment of a "public chamber" to serve as a venue for public debates on bills of national importance. Putin said the chamber would "eventually exercise civil oversight" of the government, including law enforcement and security services.
 Both Trenin and Safranchuk said they have strong doubts that the chamber could exercise oversight, although it may serve a purpose if the Kremlin runs ideas by it before introducing specific bills. 
 Notably, even one of Putin's strongest allies, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, has acknowledged that the police and security services need to be reformed. "This demands the reform of the security services - not just the Defense Ministry - and a greater concentration of efforts," Ivanov said on NTV television Sunday.
 Ivanov's remarks indicate that the issue of reforming law enforcement agencies and the special services may still be addressed in the future, Galeotti said.
 "The issue at this stage is how to transform the law enforcement agencies, which were structured in Soviet times, and special services, which were shaped during the Cold War, to deal with the new challenges at home and abroad," Trenin said.

TITLE: Hamburg Forum Sees Criticism of Russian President
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Human rights advocates and the German media used the international forum of the St. Petersburg Dialog in Hamburg last week to criticize President Vladimir Putin for violating basic democratic principles.
 
Putin canceled his planned visit to the forum after the Beslan tragedy. Earlier, Hamburg University had postponed awarding the president an honorary doctorate, saying there would not be enough time to organize a ceremony, but only after widespread criticism of the award.
 The first of the annual forums was held in St. Petersburg in 2000 under the auspices of Putin and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. The forums are supposed to promote the development of civil society. Last week's protests were widely reported in the German media, but went practically unnoticed by the Russian press.
 Russian media outlets concentrated on cheerful speeches by top St. Petersburg officials, who gave the impression the forum was only about business and culture with not a bad word being said about the Russian president.
 While Ole von Beust, the mayor of Hamburg, was opening the forum at City Hall, Reporters without Borders and the national human rights organization Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) organized a vigil outside in the memory of victims of the war in Chechnya.
 Telman Zuelch, head of the society, said 80,000 people have become victims of the war, which was behind the tragedy in Beslan and for which Putin should be made to "answer for to an international tribunal," the Hamburger Morgenpost reported Friday. 
 Reporters without Borders filed an open letter to Putin over the parlous state of Russian media and saying that since he came to power in 2000 "journalists, in provincial areas especially, have been subject to threats and intimidation."
 "Young journalists that have worked for the German media in media-exchange programs are being called by the FSB after they come back to their home country and are questioned about details of their stay in Germany and also being intimidated," says the open letter published on Friday by Der Tagesspiegel. "Those who refuse to cooperate experience problems with their work or to traveling abroad, according to their reports."
 "These who criticize are being automatically included in the ranks of the opposition and treated as enemies of the administration [and for this reason are likely to] be eliminated, as was Maxim Gorky," said Olga Kitova, a Russian journalist who had also experienced pressure for her reports about corruption, Hamburger Morgenpost reported.
 Lyudmila Verbitskaya, dean of St. Petersburg University and a member for the St. Petersburg Dialog organization committee, said Monday on her return that the criticism arose because German journalists are badly informed about Russia.
 "Although there are even such things as the Internet, for instance, the public is badly informed about Russia," Verbitskaya said Monday at a briefing. "One example of this was a question asked by a German journalist. He asked if students coming back to Russia from Germany are being called in to the FSB for questioning. How can such a thing happen in Russia of 2004?"
 "These [kinds of] questions were asked not by just by the public, but by professional journalists," she added. "I think everyone has right to choose from the information flow. There are different people with different goals."
 Alexander Rahr, program director of think-tank Koerber Center Russia/CIS and author of a biography of Putin, said the protests had little influence on the forum.
 "There were no demonstrations," he said Monday in a telephone interview from Germany. "The forum organizers asked the human rights organizations to soften up their reaction in the light of recent events." "If Putin had arrived and Beslan hadn't have happened, there would have been demonstrations because there are many people here that are of the point of view that the weak should be protected even if the critics know they don't know all that much about what is going on in Russia," Rahr added. 
 "But Putin did not arrive and TV showed pictures from Beslan, making people reconsider their position."
 The forum for the first time had a positive impact, because this year young people's organizations had been invited to Hamburg, "which made it look like a forum for civil society rather than an elite club as it was before," Rahr said.
 Vladimir Troyan, deputy dean of St. Petersburg State University, said an agreement had been reached that young people from both countries would receive free express visas from January if they are going on youth exchanges.

TITLE: Putin Set To Boost Control
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Calling for a stronger state more capable of fighting terror, President Vladimir Putin announced a sweeping political shakeup Monday that would do away with popularly elected regional leaders and single-mandate State Duma deputies.
 
Putin appointed his confidant and Cabinet chief of staff Dmitry Kozak as the head of a new federal commission that will try to get at the roots of terrorism by tackling poverty and poor education in the North Caucasus. Putin also named Kozak as his new envoy to the Southern Federal District, which includes Chechnya.
 In addition, Putin ordered a crackdown on extremist organizations, which he called "a breeding ground for terrorism," and urged foreign leaders to cut off support to "the emissaries and lobbyists" of terrorists - a clear reference to the United States and Britain, which have granted asylum to Chechens wanted by Moscow.
 The measures will drastically alter the political landscape and further increase the Kremlin's control over political life. 
 Opposition leaders, threatened with being further sidelined by the moves, warned that cutting off voters' voices will only make the country weaker.
 "The organizers and perpetrators of the terror attack are aiming at the disintegration of the state, the breakup of Russia," Putin said in announcing the changes at a meeting attended by regional leaders and senior military, security and law enforcement officials.
 "The system of state power needs to not only adjust to the Beslan tragedy but also prevent a repeat of such a crisis," he said.
 The way to do that, Putin said, is to strengthen the executive chain of command by giving the president the authority to nominate regional leaders. The nominees would then be confirmed by popularly elected legislative assemblies in Russia's 89 regions.
 Putin said he will submit a bill on how regional leaders are elected to the Kremlin-controlled Duma this fall. 
 The move would end any of the independence still held by regional leaders, who were allowed to run their affairs pretty much as they pleased under President Boris Yeltsin and have been a thorn in Putin's side since he took office in 2000. 
 Their independence prompted Putin to carve the country into seven "super regions" early in his first term and appoint a presidential envoy to each, as well as to overhaul the Federation Council, which was once comprised of governors and is now filled with Kremlin-endorsed politicians and businessmen.
 "The abolition of elections in Russian regions deals a blow to the foundations of Russian federalism and means the return to an extremely inefficient system of government," Sergei Mitrokhin, a senior official in the liberal Yabloko party, said in a statement. 
 Sergei Markov, a former Kremlin political consultant, said the initiative could help curb corruption in some regions. 
 "At the same time, it means ... a lowering of [regional leaders'] general political authority and a serious lowering of political pluralism," Markov told Ekho Moskvy radio.
 Under the proposal, current regional leaders would serve out their terms and term limits would be scrapped - meaning Mayor Yury Luzhkov, for example, could get another four years in 2007, when his third and final term ends.
 Putin for the first time Monday publicly backed a plan by the Central Election Commission for voters in Duma elections to pick only parties, not individual candidates. Half of the 450 deputies now get seats based on how many voters picked their party, while the other deputies are elected individually in single-mandate districts.
 Putin, who promised to submit a corresponding bill to the Duma this fall, said the move "will serve the interest of strengthening the political system." 
 The president has long sought a Duma with only a few political parties, citing the U.S. Congress with its two main parties as an example. He has suggested that previous Dumas failed to get much done because they had too many parties and factions.
 Independent Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov lashed out at the move as a step that would weaken the country. "The next Duma will be simply virtual - it will consist of just marionette party lists and won't enjoy any authority," he said on Ekho Moskvy radio.
 "How is it possible the president doesn't understand that it won't strengthen the country? It will further tear apart the unity of the country and tear federal agencies' power away from the people," he said. "Yes, the Kremlin's authority will be strengthened, but the country will be weakened."
 Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov said Putin's measures are the result of an absence of dialogue between those in power and society, political parties and the media.
 In perhaps an effort to counter such complaints, Putin proposed creating a "public chamber" to provide public oversight of the government and, particularly, law enforcement and security agencies. He offered no details about the chamber.
 Putin announced that Kozak will replace Vladimir Yakovlev as the presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District, one of the seven super regions. Kozak, a driving force behind Putin's administrative reform, is widely referred to as a able political manager and organizer. 
 Putin said Kozak will also head the Special Federal Commission on the Northern Caucasus, a new group that will oversee anti-terror policy and work to get at some of the causes of terrorism, such as improving living and education standards in the region.
 Putin said Yakovlev will be the minister of a re-established Nationalities Ministry, which will be set up in the near future. 
 Putin, reiterating threats by senior military officials last week, said the military is ready to carry out preventive strikes on terrorist bases anywhere in the world. "Terrorists need to be destroyed right in their den, and if the situation demands it, they should be gotten abroad as well," he said.
 Another preventive measure, Putin said, should be the outlawing of extremist organizations who "act under the cover of religious and other rhetoric and in essence are a breeding ground for terrorism."
 "They should be banned and their leaders prosecuted," he said. 
 He called foreign leaders to end political and financial support of "the emissaries and lobbyists" of terrorists - continuing the tough rhetoric he started in a televised address on Sept. 4 in which he accused unspecified Western countries of trying to tear Russia apart. 
 Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week singled out the United States and Britain as two main irritants, saying they were not helping Russia fight terror in offering asylum to senior rebel official Ilyas Akhmadov and rebel envoy Akhmad Zakayev.
 Putin told Monday's meeting that he has ordered the security services to boost their cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies.

TITLE: Liberal Factions Ask Ustinov to Explain
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Liberal factions in the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly have demanded that the Prosecutor General's Office explain why city prosecutor Nikolai Vinnichenko has been forced to resign.
 
Vinnichenko was sent on vacation in August and is expected to continue his career at the Federal Anti-Drug Service. His vacation ended on Sunday.
 The Yabloko and SPS factions have signed a petition to Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov to attend a closed session of the assembly to explain why Sergei Zaitsev, chief prosecutor of the Chuvash region, is being plugged for the vacant position. 
 "The unexpected announcement of N. Vinnichenko's resignation has provoked a strong public reaction," the petition says. "The democratic faction believes it is necessary call a closed session of the Legislative Assembly with the participation of the Prosecutor General V.V. Ustinov and St. Petersburg prosecutor N.A. Vinnichenko to examine the reasons and circumstances that made [him] resign."
 The deputies suspect that the grounds for resignation were Vinnichenko's refusal to prosecute certain businesses that are out of favor with the Kremlin.
 "As far as I know Ustinov was absolutely unhappy that he [Vinnichenko] has not done anything to local businessmen that are not liked by the Kremlin," Boris Vishnevsky, a member of the Yabloko faction, said Friday in a telephone interview. "Vinnichenko's position on that point was clear - if there was nothing criminal involved, there are no grounds for prosecution." 
 The Prosecutor General's Office could not be reached for comment.
 Sources at the Legislative Assembly said one of Ustinov's targets could be high-profile city businessman Alexander Sabadash, who is on the boards of the Vyborgsky Pulp and Paper factory, local major alcohol producer LIVIZ and industrial plant Russky Dizel.
 Other sources at the city parliament said earlier in August that Vinnichenko's troubles could also be linked to a Kremlin group led by Igor Sechin, head of the presidential secretariat. The group is believed to be the driving force in the prosecution of Yukos and to be interested has in a deal between a major energy equipment plant in St. Petersburg and a German high-tech company.
 Meanwhile, Vadim Tyulpanov, the Legislative Assembly speaker, said the city parliament would approve Zaitsev as soon as his candidacy is presented to legislators and added that the factions are discussing his appointment.
 Tyulpanov has already discussed the possible appointment with Chuvash president Nikolai Fyodorov, the Agency for Journalistic Investigations reported last week.
 "[The Chuvash president] described him as having the reputation of an incorruptible, decent person, as an employee that knows his business and he didn't really want to let him go," he said.
 Zaitsev, 44, started working as Chuvash prosecutor in June 2000 after spending three years as a deputy chief prosecutor in Tatarstan.

TITLE: Chechen Fighters Down 2nd Chopper in a Week
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: ROSTOV-ON-DON - Chechen rebels shot down a Mi-24 helicopter near Grozny, and its two crewmembers were killed in the crash, Interfax reported Monday.
 
The helicopter was the second aircraft to be downed by fighters in the past week.
 Citing a military source, Interfax reported that fighters had targeted the helicopter Sunday with a rocket-propelled grenade and small arms fire near the village of Alkhan-Kala, southwest of Grozny. 
 Colonel Igor Konashenkov, a spokesman for the Russian military headquarters in the North Caucasus region, said investigators were looking at two possible causes of the crash: a technical problem or ground fire from a Russian-made, shoulder-fired Igla rocket. 
 However, another official in the headquarters, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators considered it most likely that the helicopter had been shot down. 
 The rebel Kavkaz Center web site posted a claim of responsibility for the downing of the helicopter. A statement attributed to a rebel official identified as Madzhilsul Shura said that fighters had used an Igla rocket. 
 The web statement also said Chechen rebels had downed another military helicopter last week in Ingushetia. 
 Military officials had publicly blamed that crash on bad weather or pilot error, but an official in the Kremlin-backed administration in Chechnya said the helicopter had been hit by ground fire. 
 Chechen rebels have shot down many military helicopters during the latest five-year war in the region.

TITLE: Finnish Consulate Is Moving
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Finland's Consulate General in St. Petersburg is moving to a new building located at 4 Ulitsa Preobrazhenskoi at the end of the month.
 
Due to the shift, the consulate will be closed on Sept. 30 and Oct. 1, the consulate said Monday in a statement.
 The consulate will start working at the new location on Oct. 4. The entrance to the visa department of the consulate will be located on Ulitsa Radischeva, on the eastern side of the building's facade.
 The visa department operates Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. without breaks.
 The consulate has equipped an inner yard for the clients of the visa department, and a room for filling in the visa application, as well as a hall with 20 windows for serving clients.
 The consulate said that to obtain a Finnish visa citizens need to submit an application form signed personally by the applicant. They also need to bring their foreign passport which must not expire within three months of the end of the term for which the visa is issued, a recent photograph and insurance.
 It said a single-entry visa for a tourist trip can be obtained through tourist agencies. A visa application costs 35 euros.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>City Skating Academy 
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A Figure Skating Academy will open in St. Petersburg in March next year, Oleg Nilov,president of the St. Petersburg Figure Skating Federation, said Friday.
 "The main construction works are over and soon we'll get to decoration works," Interfax quoted him saying.
 The building of the future Academy is located next to Komendantsky Prospekt metro station and includes three ice arenas, the report said.
 "The construction of the skating rink will allow us to attract more young people to go figure skating," Nilov said.
 
 
<b>Baltic Star Award
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Famous Polish film director Andrzej Wajda and Lithuanian actor Donatas Banionis will be awarded the new Baltiiskaya Zvyozda (Baltic Star) international prize in St. Petersburg on Oct. 1, Interfax reported Friday.
 Eugeniusz Mielcarek, Consul General of Poland to St. Petersburg, who is a member of the board of guardians for the prize, said it is hoped the award will become an annual event, the report said.
 The award is to be granted to prominent cultural, art, business, official and public figures for "developing and strengthening of humanitarian connections in the countries of the Baltic."
 This year the award will also go to Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum , and Mikhail Shvydkoi, head of the federal culture agency.
 
 
<b>600 Landmines Found
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - St. Petersburg special police found a store of more than 600 mines from the Second World War in the Tosno region of the Leningrad Oblast, Interfax reported Monday.
 The mines weighed a total of 93 kilograms and were destroyed on the spot.
 
 
<b>Ring Road Construction
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Construction of the western section of St. Petersburg's Ring Road will start in 2005-2006, Deputy Transport Minister Alexander Misharin said in St. Petersburg on Monday.
 "The project is already being considered by potential investors, and I'm sure the actual construction will start in 2005-2006," Interfax reported him saying.
 The western section is to be 46 kilometers long and will cost about 52 billion rubles ($1.8 billion). 



TITLE: Putin Lets Federation Council Probe Siege
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin changed tack Friday and authorized a parliamentary investigation into the Beslan attack, the first time he has agreed to such a probe during nearly five years in power.
 
The Kremlin effectively controls the parliament, and Putin assigned the task to the Federation Council, the especially compliant upper chamber whose senators are installed by the Kremlin. Critics said they doubted it would produce a genuinely independent look at the violence that killed at least 330 children and adults.
 But the decision to allow the inquiry at all represented a rare concession to public pressure for Putin, who refused to authorize probes after disasters such as the 2000 sinking of the submarine Kursk and the 2002 seizure of Moscow's Dubrovka theater.
 As recently as Sept. 6, Putin had scoffed at the idea of a parliamentary inquiry as nothing more than &quot;a political show&quot; that &quot;would not be very productive.&quot; He had insisted that only a closed internal inquiry would be held.
 Putin did not explain why he changed his mind about an investigation into the siege, which Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Friday was directed by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev.
 In a meeting shown prominently on state-run television, Federation Council Speaker Sergei Mironov, a Putin loyalist, told the president Friday that the council wanted an investigative commission when it convenes for its fall session Sept. 20.
 Putin agreed, telling Mironov that &quot;we are thoroughly interested in receiving a complete, objective picture of the tragic events connected with the seizure of the hostages.&quot;
 He said he would make sure the commission had access to &quot;all necessary documents and all necessary information.&quot;
 Some analysts said Putin's choice of an appointed parliamentary body rather than the elected State Duma was likely intended to keep the process under control while giving the appearance of accountability.
 Igor Trunov, an attorney representing Dubrovka victims who sued the government seeking to uncover the facts of what happened, called it a half-step forward.
 &quot;It looks like some lessons are being learned from the mistakes of the past,&quot; he said. &quot;The Federation Council is a completely controlled establishment and has only shown loyalty to authorities. That's why the word 'independent' could never be used,&quot; he added.
 Independent Duma Deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov called the inquiry a significant concession by Putin.
 &quot;Never before has parliament participated in this kind of investigation,&quot; he said.
 But he added, &quot;I think he has been pushed into a compromise, an attempt to make an investigation that is not so critical.&quot;
 He and others reeled off more than a dozen questions about the events of last week. Among them are how the attackers drove three vehicles filled with armed men past checkpoints, why elementary security measures were not taken during the standoff and why the armed response was so disorganized.
 There also are questions about how the security services failed to detect planning for this and previous spectacular raids.
 Putin's initial resistance to a public inquiry had sparked criticism, notably from former Ingush President Ruslan Aushev, who helped negotiate the release of 26 hostages from the Beslan school.
 &quot;I think the Federation Council and the Duma are obliged to take part in the process,&quot; Aushev was quoted by Noviye Izvestia as saying.
 Lavrov said Friday that Basayev directed the hostage-taking raid-the clearest accusation made by authorities yet against the Chechen warlord.
 Lavrov also said Aslan Maskhadov, who was Chechnya's president during de-facto independence in 1996-99, was connected with the hostage-taking.
 There was no reason to doubt that some of the 30 or so hostage-takers were Arab, he added.
 <i>(WP, NYT, AP) </i>

TITLE: Relatives Endure Painful Searches for the Missing
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: BESLAN, North Ossetia-Sofia Arsoyeva, a 15-year-old student at Beslan school No. 1, was seen by a classmate being driven away from the chaotic gunfight there on Sept. 3.
 
Another classmate said she was in the same car as her, heading toward the nearest hospital. But since then, no one has seen Arsoyeva.
 Arsoyeva is one of 105 people reported still missing after the school hostage siege, which left more than 330 dead and 350 injured, many of them children.
 &quot;There are many people here, who, like us, believe they will find their loved ones,&quot; Arsoyeva's 21-year-old cousin, Mamuka Kelekhsayev, said Saturday, his face stern and haggard. &quot;One of our neighbors has lost his wife, another cannot find four of his children.&quot;
 North Ossetian police are trying to find 105 people reported missing by relatives, Deputy Prosecutor General Vladimir Kolesnikov told reporters in Beslan on Friday.
 A spokesman for the republic's Health Ministry said Sunday that the identities of 239 of the hostages killed in the siege had been established, but that 90 bodies remained unidentified.
 Oleg Tsagolov, a spokesman for the North Ossetian government, said Sunday that often it had only seemed to relatives that they saw their children being rescued from the school. But most probably these hostages were caught in the explosions, their bodies now disintegrated and unidentifiable without DNA analysis, he said.
 A local deputy prosecutor, Alexander Panov, has asked Beslan residents to provide blood samples to help identify these dismembered bodies, Izvestia reported Friday, citing Lev Dzugayev, spokesman for North Ossetian President Alexander Dzasokhov.
 But with so many of the dead still unidentified and confusion remaining about the exact numbers of dead and injured, hopes still lingered among relatives at the town's cultural center Friday morning, where police investigators were collecting photos of the missing and making a note of any distinguishing marks.
 In some desperate families, two, three or even four relatives were posted missing.
 Four of the Totiyevs' eight children were reported missing. Of the other four, two were found alive in hospitals, but two died at the school with their mother.
 Frantic relatives are clinging to the hope that the missing could be among those being treated in hospital.
 In the Vladikavkaz morgue, an endless procession of relatives filed past hostages' charred bodies-afraid to recognize loved ones, yet hoping to bury them if they had perished. In their anguish, relatives' memories sometimes failed them.
 A morgue employee recalled a man who had come looking for his son's body three times, to no avail. The fourth time he came with his mother, who immediately recognized her grandson's small and blackened body by his shoes.
 North Ossetia's state-run Alania television, together with Rossia's &quot;Vesti&quot; news program, have launched a web page (www.vesti.ru/files?did422) to help trace the missing.
 
 <i>
Staff Writer Nabi Abdullaev contributed to this report from Moscow. </i>

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Prosecutors Probe Police 
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - The Moscow city prosecutor's office has opened a criminal case over allegations that two policemen assaulted retired air force colonel, Hero of Russia Magomed Tolboyev.
 Earlier, Interfax quoted Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin as saying that the allegations published in newspapers were untrue.
 Tolboyev, an assistant to State Duma Deputy Viktor Semyonov and a native of Dagestan, said two police sergeants stopped him to check his papers Thursday near Vykhino in Moscow's southern outskirts. 
 The officers said his name sounded as if he was a Chechen and took his Duma ID. 
 When Tolboyev attempted to get it back, one of the officers went behind him, put his arm around his neck and began to strangle him, Tolboyev said.
 
 
<b>Kvashnin Made Envoy
 </b>

MOSCOW (SPT) - President Vladimir Putin has appointed former chief of the General Staff Anatoly Kvashnin as his envoy to the Siberian Federal District. 
 Kvashnin replaces Leonid Dra-chevsky, who was appointed by Putin in 2000.
 Kvashnin and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov had long been at odds before Putin fired Kvashnin in July. 
 Kvashnin, 58, who had headed the General Staff for seven years, remained in Army service up until his appointment Thursday, when he was officially discharged by Putin.
 
 
<b>Bush Offers Sympathy 
 </b>

WASHINGTON (AP) - President George W. Bush made an unexpected visit to the Russian Embassy on Sunday where he signed a book of condolences for victims of the school hostage seizure and expressed outrage at the actions of "evil terrorists.''
 "The atrocities that took place in the school were beyond comprehension,'' the president said. "Many in America and, I know, many Russians cannot conceive the heart of a person who could mow down innocent children."
 
 
<b>Protests at Rebels
 </b>

MOSCOW (AP) - Hundreds of Russians demonstrated in front of the U.S. and British embassies in Moscow on Friday, accusing the Western nations' governments of double standards on terrorism and angrily demanding the extradition of two prominent Chechen separatists they have granted asylum. 
 Some 500 people gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy, criticizing Washington for sheltering Ilyas Akhmadov, who was Chechnya's foreign minister in 1999. 
 A similar crowd showed up at the British Embassy, urging London to extradite Akhmed Zakayev, an envoy for former president Aslan Maskhadov. 
 A protest was also held Friday at the U.S. consulate in St. Petersburg.
 
 
<b>Reporters Drugged
 </b>

TBILISI, Georgia (AP) - Test results indicate Russian authorities drugged a Georgian journalist who was detained covering the school standoff in southern Russia, a medical expert said. 
 Nana Lezhava and another journalist from Georgia's independent Rustavi-2 television were detained Sept. 3 in Beslan and accused of violating visa rules. The head of the oversight board at a Georgian drug research institute, Gela Lezhava, told a news conference Thursday that urine samples taken from Lezhava showed traces of tranquilizers. 
 Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya has also said she was the victim of a deliberate case of food poisoning as she tried to travel to Beslan. 



TITLE: Dutch Hermitage Draws Crowds
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: What Russia needed to offer Amsterdam was another embassy, thought Mikhail Piotrovsky, director of the State Hermitage Museum. What he decided was that one of Russia's premier art museums should have a branch in the Dutch capital.
 
But he did not come up with the idea alone. In 1996, Ernst Veen, director of the Hermitage Amsterdam and the international exhibition center Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, suggested that the city would make an ideal location for the new Hermitage.
 The timing and location could not have been better. The Amstelhof Foundation nursing home in central Amsterdam was in the process of moving to newer facilities, and its building, which was built in 1683, as well as other buildings on the premises, could be renovated into exhibition halls. 
 The relationship between Nieuwe Kerk and the Hermitage Museum dates back to 1994 when the two museums began sponsoring joint exhibitions. 
 At that time, Veen founded the Friends of the Hermitage Netherlands Foundation, which paid for several renovation projects at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
 There were also other reasons why the directors of the Hermitage were happy to dust off their museum wares and send them abroad. 
 &quot;What visitors see in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg is just five percent of what the museum holds in its reserves. It is the museum's policy to showcase as much of its collection as possible,&quot; said Svetlana Filippova, Friends coordinator at the Hermitage Museum.
 &quot;The museum's aim is to bring over temporary exhibitions of objects not found in the Netherlands, not just from the Hermitage but other Russian museums as well,&quot; Veen said. Various other Russian museums, including the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg, have also made contributions.
 Filippova said that the Hermitage Amsterdam does not intend to compete with other museums in the city. &quot;It must complement and diversify the museum scene, not compete,&quot; she said. 
 The Hermitage Amsterdam opened in February of this year, and by June the number of visitors had already exceeded 70,000. Six exhibition rooms, occupying 500 square meters of floor space, are currently open to the public. The rest of the museum should be completed by the end of 2007, bringing the total exhibition space to 40,000 square meters, Veen said. 
 Although there is no exact data on the number of Russian visitors, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg recently received a request from the Hermitage Amsterdam to print Russian-language exhibition booklets due to visitor demand, according to Filippova. 
 Currently, the museum is exhibiting Greek jewelry dating from the sixth to the second century BC. An exhibition entitled &quot;Nicholas and Alexandra, the last Tsar and Tsarina,&quot; documenting Russia's last royal family, opens on September 18. The museum also plans to exhibit the works of Venetian painters Tintoretto, Guardi, Canaletto and Tiepolo in 2005.
 All exhibits in Amsterdam will be temporary because the works belong to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. In addition to the branch in Amsterdam, there are the Hermitage Rooms in London's Somerset House and the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada. 
 Given that economic and cultural ties between the Netherlands and Russia span more than 300 years, the Dutch are understandably interested in traveling to Russia.
 &quot;They would love to come and see the mother museum now,&quot; Veen said. &quot;Before perestroika we lived behind an iron curtain. We had no contact, no possibility to learn about each other.&quot;
 Veen's estimated 20 visits to Russia have proven immensely enriching. &quot;I left my heart in Russia,&quot; he said.

TITLE: A Culturally Active Society
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Dutch are one of the most culturally active expatriate groups in Russia, and the local Dutch community says that cultural links are good for business. 
 
Nadia Voznenko, from the Netherlands Institute in St. Petersburg believes that the cultural understanding is the basis of economic partnerships.
 &quot;When people have cultural ties, it's only natural that they try to develop their relationship in other ways - through business and in trade,&quot; she said.
 Designers are one group who stand somewhere in between the cultural and business spheres.
 Henk Elenga, a designer from Rotterdam, originally came here to take part in an exhibition at the Dutch furniture gallery Bulthaup. Elenga then became involved in a variety of Dutch-Russian cultural projects, and, last year, established his own furniture company here.
 &quot;Traditionally, economics and culture are separate,&quot; Elenga said, &quot;in my work, I try to combine them.&quot; 
 &quot;I am advising an initiative group who are trying to establish a place for contemporary art and media here, like the Kunsthal in Rotterdam,&quot; he said.
 He is also organizing the &quot;Golden Container project,&quot; which will see a 20-foot gold-plated container bring 25,000 kilos of hand-made Dutch bricks, to the Peter and Paul Fortress next summer. &quot;The bricks will be a symbol of Dutch trade and the cultural and economic historical links between the two countries,&quot; he said.

TITLE: VOX POPULI
TEXT: <strong>Vladimir Sheinblap 
 Programmer at Lizatek
 </strong>I've been working at a Dutch company for the last five years and I can say that I really like the Dutch mentality. In a Dutch company, when someone tells you to do something, you can discuss it with them, and if you don't agree with something you can tell your manager what you think. 
 
I think in most Russian companies, it's quite different, and when you're told to do something, it's more like an order that's not open for discussion.
 I think that the Dutch are probably the most open people in Europe, maybe it's because of their trading traditions and the fact that they're used to cooperating with people from all over the world. The Dutch seem to have a lot of respect for other cultures and it seems like it's easy for them to accept and adjust to foreign cultures.
 
 <strong>
Nadia Voznenko
 Netherlands Institute St. Petersburg
 </strong>I don't think the mentality of the Dutch and St. Petersburgers is all that different. Dutch culture has been very influential in this city since Peter the Great returned from Europe with new ideas, scientific discoveries and architects. 
 
The Dutch are a hard-working people though. They are also very patient and polite. You can do anything you want in Holland, as long as you don't disturb other people.
 For instance, if you started playing the trumpet at three in the morning in Holland, I think everyone would be too polite to complain. They'd understand that you'd only be doing it if you had to.
 I would also say that they are an open people, but I think that they are perhaps not as open as they seem from the outside. It does take time to get to know them and to get close to them.
 
 <strong>
Bonnie van der Velde 
 Director of sales and circulation of 
 St. Petersburg In Your Pocket
 </strong>What I admire most in Russia, from the first moment I came here, are the strong Russian women you meet everywhere, fighting for a better future. For me, one of the best examples is the vice-principal of the college I started working at as a teacher five years ago. I had a lot of respect for her style of management and the way she found a balance in coping with the past, while reforming the educational system. 
 
Personally, I enjoy the balance I have found here, combining my western way of thinking with the Russian mentality. Business-wise, what has kept me here has been the potential I see around me and the positive developments the city has gone through the past few years.
 And, what I can't stand here is the stress that some Russian women put on the fact I'm not married and don't have any children yet.
 
 <strong>
Tatyana Samokovvalova
 Director, Onego Culture Centre
 </strong>The Dutch are very thorough and they can even be workalcoholics. I think it's fair to call them the Chinese of Europe.
 
They are also very tender. Dutch men aren't afraid of showing their softer sides. For instance, when we had a flowering plant at our work die, our Dutch colleague was really upset. He said he'd take it home and care for it. A Russian man would never do that.
 
 <strong>
Henk Elenga
 Designer
 </strong>Holland is a very small country, surrounded by big countries. We have had to know other languages and we have had to be adaptable, while all the time fighting against the ocean, struggling to keep our heads above water, so to speak.
 All of this makes the Dutch versatile and multilingual. The fact that they are such good communicators is one of the reasons why they are successful in business.
 Holland is a very open minded society: homosexual marriage, soft drugs and prostitution are all legal. Russia is a less free society. I get stopped once a week by police for papers. I need to get an AIDS test every time I get my visa. It's still a big bureaucracy here.
 As for Russians, I think that they're not very politically active, both domestically and internationally. They have a hard time getting by in this society already, and most of them don't <br> want to put their energy into what's going on around them.
 

 <strong>
Lizette Breukink
 Director of software company Lizatec
 </strong>Russians live in the moment, and I've noticed that when it comes to building a business, they often spend their money for short-term gain and buy things like fast cars, rather than reinvesting in their companies for future development.
 
I like Russian hospitality and I think that Russians can be very industrious. When they have an aim, they study and work hard, and I admire that. 
 There are also great intellectual resources here, although people are not always as organized as they could be. I think that that's something that Russians could learn from the Dutch.
 
 <strong>
Tonny Dekker 
 Partner at Ernst &amp; Young CIS
 </strong>Russians, or at least the Russians I work with, are all much more intelligent than I am. That's something I like about living here. 
 Intelligence is a difficult word, and many different elements contribute to intelligence. But, I feel like my staff and colleagues here have more of those elements than most Western Europeans: that is, education, mathematics, reading and things like going to the theatre. I've never met so many people who have read the Bible as well as the Koran.
 
One thing I don't like is the lack of openness. I don't think Russians are very open to what other nations think. They have a tendency to exercise dominance, in business, in politics - wherever. But, maybe that's normal behaviour in any big nation.

TITLE: The Night Terror Visited Guryanova
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Vladimir had lived on Ulitsa Guryanova for 12 years until the day the world collapsed on him.
 
When the explosion hit No. 19 at midnight on the night of Sept. 8-9, 1999, it killed 109 of his neighbors. Vladimir was sent falling down with the rubble-but miraculously emerged without a scratch.
 On Thursday, five years later to the day, he returned to the place where his home had been-one of 300 relatives, neighbors and officials who gathered by a modest memorial on the spot where 17-19 Ulitsa Guryanova once stood.
 &quot;I pulled them out with my own hands,&quot; Vladimir said, talking of friends Olga and Nikolai who died in the blast.
 A squat middle-aged man, old before his time, he spent most of the ceremony in quiet tears or smoking Belomor cigarettes relentlessly.
 &quot;It was like a small village,&quot; he said of his building. &quot;We never locked our doors.&quot;
 Relatives had privately remembered the dead at midnight Wednesday, leaving flowers and candles by the monument and in the church opposite, which was also built in memory of the tragedy. The attacks on Beslan, the airplanes and the Moscow metro in recent weeks have made things even more painful, several of the relatives said.
 The official anniversary ceremony was a chance to grieve and also to vent their anger and fear.
 Before the ceremony, one of the women walked up to light a candle by the monument and then started giving an emotional speech to the rows of cameras from Russian and foreign television channels.
 &quot;Are you men?&quot; she shouted, asking for revenge for the deaths of her loved ones.
 &quot;We will not forget our boys and girls,&quot; Vladimir said. &quot;You see my tears-they will be bloody tears. You think we will forgive you... Never.... We haven't forgotten.&quot;
 Recalling the search for people-some he found living, some dead-after the building blew up, Vladimir said that he knows how relatives feel in Beslan.
 Mayor Yury Luzhkov and the other officials present all linked the events of Beslan and Guryanova in one breath.
 &quot;It was the start of the war,&quot; said Valery Draganov, State Duma deputy for the district where Ulitsa Guryanova is located.
 Luzhkov used his speech to repeat his calls for new security measures in Moscow.
 &quot;Five years ago, the most horrifyingly evil of those attacks happened in Moscow,&quot; said Luzhkov.
 &quot;Moscow is the desired target for terrorists,&quot; he said. &quot;The State Duma, the country's government and other politicians need to understand that Moscow needs special security measures.&quot;
 Using the word &quot;democrats&quot; as an insult, he lambasted those <i>boltuny</i>, or &quot;chatterboxes,&quot; who had criticized the city in 1999. Although not saying exactly what the city hoped to do, it seemed that Luzhkov was partly referring to the strict system of propiska, or registration, which allows people to live in Moscow. Many human rights activists have said the system violates the Constitution.
 People at the memorial ceremony bemoaned the difficulties in the fight against terror, where the enemy is largely an unseen one.
 &quot;It's an invisible enemy, you can't do anything. It's not like the Germans who came and you had to shoot,&quot; said one woman, who remembers the blast well. &quot;You can't suspect everyone.&quot;
 But moments later she echoed Luzhkov's call for restrictions on who can live in Moscow. &quot;We need to get rid of all the illegal immigrants,&quot; she said.
 The explosion at Guryanova was the first in the series of apartment bombings in the fall of 1999. Weeks later the second Chechen war began.
 The apartment bombings, together with an invasion of Dagestan by forces led by Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, produced a wave of patriotic feeling and the return of federal forces to Chechnya. Revulsion at the bombings was a key factor in propelling then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin toward the presidency.
 Last year, prosecutors said the Guryanova bombing was ordered by foreign warlords Khattab and Abu Umar, and said a group of eight Russian citizens had carried it out.
 Authorities blamed the same people for the Kashirskoye Shosse explosion that took place four days later and for preparing to set off two more explosions that were thwarted.
 Khattab and Umar were later killed in action in Chechnya, as were Denis Saitakov, Ruslan Akhmyarov and brothers Zaur and Timur Batchayev, who were accused of helping to organize the explosion.
 The Moscow City Court sentenced Yusuf Krymshamkhalov and Adam Dekkushev in January to life in prison on charges of making the explosives for the bombings and bringing them to Moscow.
 Achimez Gochiyayev, who prosecutors said led the bombing preparations, is reported to be still at large, perhaps in Georgia's Pankisi gorge. One member of his group, Khakim Abayev, was reported killed in Ingushetia last June, Grani.ru reported.
 A Kislovodsk court sentenced a local traffic police officer, Stanislav Lyubichev, to four years in prison in May 2003 for letting the explosives-six tons of hexogen-slip into Moscow.

TITLE: A Deafening Silence From the Political Elite
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - As the 52-hour hostage siege came to a bloody finale on Sept. 3, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov announced the government's privatization plans for 2005 on state television.
 
During the standoff, he addressed the issue once, a full day after it started, and ordered his government to &quot;normalize the situation as soon as possible.&quot;
 The rest of the country's political elite, meanwhile, kept painfully quiet. State Duma deputies did not cut short their vacations to discuss the school crisis, and only a few have commented about it since it ended.
 Vyacheslav Volodin, deputy head of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party, which controls the Duma, could not be bothered to discuss Beslan when approached by a reporter on Stary Arbat the day after the siege. &quot;I have the right to have a private life,&quot; he said.
 Perhaps the best explanation for the deafening silence was inadvertently given Sept. 5 by an anchorman at Kremlin-controlled Rossia television. Explaining why the Beslan crisis had ended badly, he blamed &quot;generals, the military and civilians&quot; for refusing to act &quot;until the president gives them an order.&quot;
 In President Vladimir Putin's Russia, the political elite keep silent out of fear of antagonizing the Kremlin, and they particularly did not want to talk themselves into a corner during the school siege, said Igor Bunin, director of the Center for Political Technologies.
 &quot;Nobody but the president said anything,&quot; Bunin said.
 &quot;Our system has been transformed into one that is more administrative than political. In this kind of system, everyone waits for the president to speak first in a crisis,&quot; he said.
 Politicians weren't always like this. Duma deputies convened a special session in 1999 to condemn the NATO air strikes in Yugoslavia. Although they were not on vacation that time, they were on summer break in 1998 when they rushed back to Moscow to address the Aug. 17 debt default.
 When the country faced a hostage crisis in June 1995, then-Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin held telephone negotiations with guerrilla leader Shamil Basayev-on national television. Basayev led a group of rebels in taking 2,000 hostages in the southern city of Budyonnovsk and issued the same demand made in Beslan: for federal troops to leave Chechnya.
 Fradkov-who analysts see more as a figurehead than a prime minister but was nevertheless appointed by Putin in March as the country's second-in-command-has had little to say about Beslan even in the week after the crisis ended. At a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, he said the government should take measures to assist the town's families.
 Politicians and bureaucrats should not be blamed for their silence, analysts said, because they are just cogs in a Putin-built system in which all power is concentrated in the Kremlin.
 &quot;Institutions have been dramatically weakened. Public politics is generally over in Russia, and this is the result of Putin's rule,&quot; said Masha Lipman, a political analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
 &quot;His consistent policy is not to have any political opposition inside.&quot;
 Putin thought that putting everyone under his strict control would let him manage the country better, Lipman said. &quot;But as we see, this reduction of the political system by ridding the country of political rivals is not helping to keep the country secure or, in fact, under control,&quot; she said.
 Vladimir Pribylovsky, head of the Panorama think tank, said the Duma was able to decide on its own whether it should call an emergency session when Boris Yeltsin was president.
 &quot;This time, the Duma was waiting for orders from the Kremlin, but they didn't come,&quot; he said.
 &quot;The Duma has lost its role to such an extent that Surkov has simply forgotten about it,&quot; he said, referring to Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the presidential administration who supervises United Russia's activities in the Duma. &quot;They even forgot to pretend the Duma has a role.&quot;
 Oleg Kovalyov, head of the Duma Management Committee, said the Duma will hold its plenary session on Sept. 22 as planned. He said the session will be devoted to Beslan, not the results of the Olympic Games as planned.
 Four committee chairmen met Sept. 3 to discuss measures to increase security in airports, metro stations, stadiums, outdoor markets and other public venues.
 Deputies are not the only ones who have been silent this month. Senior security and law enforcement officers have kept out of sight. The few opposition politicians who have spoken out got little media exposure.
 &quot;There hasn't been a single person - politicians or experts - offering his own opinion on television,&quot; Lipman said.
 Curiously, even Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinsky, a vocal critic of Putin in the previous Duma, has not uttered a word against the president, confining his criticism instead to the crisis in general and how federal forces handled it.
 Yavlinsky and his party failed to get into the Duma in elections last December, and the Communists lost half their seats, in what Lipman said was a lesson from the Kremlin to the opposition. 
 &quot;Once intimidated, these people are unwilling to break their silence at the risk of infuriating the Kremlin. This is the political scene that has been created in Russia,&quot; Lipman said.

TITLE: Boy in Hostage Videotape Recounts How He Survived the Beslan Ordeal
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: VLADIKAVKAZ - In a terrifying videotape of the Beslan school hostage-taking, Georgy Farniyev, 10, sat near a bomb, his hands behind his head and his face a mask of misery.
 
He looked certain to die, but survived through luck, self-possession beyond his years and enough grit to pull shrapnel out of his own arm.
 On Thursday, Georgy spoke of his ordeal from the back of an ambulance that was about to take him to a plane for Moscow, where he was to get treatment for his injuries.
 It was the first day of school when the attack began Sept. 1, and Georgy remembered lining up with his classmates when the gunmen arrived, shooting into the air and herding the parents and children into the gymnasium. He was there with his aunt Irina and 6-year-old cousin, Elbrus, who also survived with injuries.
 &quot;They told us to 'sit tight and if you scream we will kill 20 children.' One terrorist had 20 children [of his own] who were killed, and because of that they came to kill us,&quot; Georgy said.
 There was not much water to drink, and only a few people were allowed to go to the bathroom during the attack, Georgy said.
 &quot;Children, women and even men were fainting. They were not giving us water,&quot; Georgy said, appearing emotionally numb from his ordeal and his train of thought swerving back and forth as he recounted his experiences.
 Some of the terrorists had beards, and one was clean-shaven, and he said the women were wearing what looked like money pouches, &quot;but there was no money, only explosives.&quot;
 The attackers busied themselves with placing bombs around the gym and hanging explosives from basketball hoops after they first arrived. On the second day, he said the terrorists killed some adults and one girl-shooting one victim before the eyes of the gathered hostages in the gym but taking the others who were killed elsewhere.
 On the tape, apparently taken by the attackers, Georgy was sitting close to the side of the gym where some of the explosives were concentrated-which other survivors said would likely have caused his immediate death when they went off in the chaos that ended the standoff last Friday. He said he had been directly on a square-shaped explosive.
 &quot;One of the mines was right under us,&quot; he said. &quot;There were a lot of explosives, grenades, bombs.&quot; But at one point later Georgy was told to move, a move that apparently saved his life.
 &quot;When they started to shoot and the bomb went off, it didn't do anything to me, not even a scratch,&quot; he said. &quot;There was shooting, grenades, bombs.&quot;
 Georgy rushed from the gym to a nearby room, then to a cafeteria where he was hit by some shrapnel in his right knee and left upper arm. Fleeing for his life, he limped into a kitchen and hid in a closet.
 Georgy pulled the shrapnel from his arm and cleaned it with water, but was unable to pull the shrapnel from his knee. 
 He said he found a telephone and tried to call for help, but it was broken. Earlier the terrorists had destroyed hostages' cellphones with the butts of their rifles, he said.
 As he remained hiding, he said a soldier later approached and asked, &quot;Are there any more Chechens?&quot; &quot;I said 'No,&quot;' Georgy said.
 Someone then took his hand, and he was passed out a window and into a rescue vehicle to be taken away, but was separated from his relatives. 
 Georgy was to be treated for <br> complications of the knee injury in Moscow.

TITLE: The Last Trotsky: Visiting the Firebrand's Grandson
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MEXICO CITY, Mexico - Lev Trotsky, one of the key players in Russia's October Revolution did not escape the violence that he himself helped sow. Stalin murdered his arch-enemy in his self-imposed exile in Mexico on Aug. 20 1940.
 
In Mexico City, Trotsky's last refuge, his grandson tends the memory of his famous grandfather to this day.
 Every morning on the dot of 8:30 a.m., Lev Trotsky would feed his hens. Then it was the turn of the rabbits. Bleached photos show the legendary goatee-bearded revolutionary living a relaxed, even remote existence. The physical work did him good, his grandson says. Was he a strict grandfather? Esteban Volkow pauses. Certainly, work and discipline were sacred to him, in everyday life just as in the revolution. But luck was no less important. &quot;Natasha!&quot; Trotsky would exclaim every day after surviving the first attempt to assassinate him in Mexico. &quot;They have let us live for one more day.&quot;
 Volkow, a tall man wearing a denim shirt and a woollen jacket, is 78 years old. His humility is not an act, the elegance is not accompanied by any sense of self-importance. His job is <i>ingeniero</i> at Museo Casa Leon Trotsky (the house museum of Lev Trotsky) where part of the sun-drenched garden is covered and used as a caf&eacute;. A gaudy televised novel is running on the screen of a television set there while a young cricket loudly gnaws the scanty grass. A couple of steps away a young man rakes leaves together. On the lawn a red flag flutters in the wind. Volkow arrived here at the age of 13 in August 1939 as acquaintances sought to take the orphan out of reach of Stalin's executioners. His mother, Trotsky's daughter Zinaida, couldn't stand the ideologically driven pursuit of her father any more and had committed suicide; a stepson Platon died in exile in Siberia. So it came about that &quot;Sieva,&quot; as Trotsky called the boy, spent a year at the side of the world-famous refugee.
 
 <strong>
RECEIVED WITH HONOR
 </strong>The revolutionary strategist and founder of the Red Army had to leave his homeland in the late 1920s after an open power struggle broke out following Lenin's death in 1924. After an odyssey through Turkey, France and Norway, Trotsky arrived with his second wife Natalya in the Mexican harbor of Tampico on Jan. 9 1937. It was thanks to the painter Diego Rivera that he was met by a special train belonging to President Lazaro Cardenas. At the request of a U.S. support committee, Rivera had asked Cardenas to issue a visa for Trotsky. The United States, in contradiction to the Stalinist propaganda description of the dissident revolutionary as &quot;accomplice of Yankee Imperialism,&quot; did not want Trotsky on its soil. Mexico, however, admitted the loudly denounced Russian, as it did later thousands of Spanish and German antifascists, despite the shrill denunciation campaign by the Mexican Communist Party.
 
To this day the suburb where Trotsky lived, the picturesque Coyacan, with its cobbled streets, pretty plazas and colonial residences, is a trendy one. In the 1930s this was the home of the Mexican bohemians, who were still filled with the sprit of their own revolution of 1910 to 1917. The Trotskys' first home was in the house of the parents of painter Frida Kahlo. There, the 58-year-old, as all the world knows from Salma Hayek's film &quot;Frida,&quot; is supposed to have had a secret affair with the charismatic artist. &quot;It's quite possible,&quot; says Volkow and shrugs his shoulders. Frida &quot;was like a whirlpool who sucked up everything that was around her.&quot; He is not upset by the film version of his grandfather, who is portrayed as a merry old man surrounded by gangster-like bodyguards and easily recognizable by his trademark beard, glasses and empty phrases. &quot;It's a movie,&quot; he says and grins.
 The photos show another, little-seen Trotsky. He goes fishing and kayaking, collecting cactuses, enjoying picnics and climbing pyramids. &quot;We lived as if we were on another planet,&quot; Natasha is supposed to have noted later. However, the cultural community was deeply divided with Stalinist artists like David Alfaro Siqueiros, another icon of Mexican wall painting, agitating against the 'traitor.&quot; The ideologically undecided Rivera moved between the two fronts. In spring 1939, Lev and Natalya moved a few blocks away into this small, run-down house surrounded by high walls and right next to the main highway. Today it is the only Trotsky museum in the world. 
 
 <strong>
UNRELENTING STALIN 
 </strong>More than 60 years have left a dusty veil over the spartan shack. In the tiny bathroom there is a washing basket next to a rust-covered bathtub. A dressing gown hangs on a hook and there are pajamas in the wardrobe. In one of the workrooms there is still an ancient dictation machine. In another, a yellowed map of Mexico hangs on the wall. A globe stands on the writing table next to a small stretcher with a plaid cover. The last manuscript Trotsky was writing was a biography of Stalin. This is a curious coincidence with Kahlo, even though her attitudes were the opposite of Trotsky's toward the Kremlin chief. When the painter died in 1954 the last sketch on her easel was a portrait of Stalin - but Frida painted him as a hero, not as a tyrant.
 
In the bedroom there are several holes forming tiny black craters in the wall above the bed. They have not been patched up and need no commentary. Twenty men intruded one day in May 1940. Led by Siqueiros, they came to kill the &quot;counterrevolutionary.&quot; They got inside the garden and fired through the bedroom window. The only one hurt was the young Esteban as a wayward bullet scratched his foot. After that the house became a fortress. Watchtowers were built, the windows were fastened and the doors were covered with metal sheets. The revolvers, bodyguards and &quot;this sense of danger&quot; were quite exciting to the 13-year-old boy, Volkow says.
 In the garden, time seems to pass more slowly. A white bench invites one to sit and bizarre cactuses are scattered throughout the greenery. In a fleshy agave, a hammer and sickle have been carved out beside the name &quot;Trotsky&quot; in gold letters. There is no trace of Natasha, whose ashes are buried here. The weather-beaten hen and rabbit coops show the comfortable life the family enjoyed. Grain was milled by hand for baking bread and tortillas.
 The tranquillity was to come to a sudden end. A young man, who was involved with the sister of one of Trotsky's secretaries, presented himself at the house as Frank Jackson in mid-August. He asked if the Russian would read one of his articles. On the evening of Aug. 20. 1940, Jackson knocked on the door of Trotsky's workroom. What happened next has already become a legend: The visitor raised an ice pick and struck the 60-year-old deep in the skull. &quot;Even from far away, I could see that something was wrong,&quot; remembers Volkow, who at the time was coming home from school.
 In front of the house were many cars and policemen. &quot;I went though to the garden and saw Jackson being taken away.&quot; Jackson's real name was Ramon Mercador del Rio and he worked for the Soviet secret services.
 
 <strong>
AN OPEN MUSEUM
 </strong>Defying cheap Stalinist propaganda, a quarter of a million people attended the funeral. After 20 years in jail, Mercador del Rio was awarded the honor &quot;for service of the Fatherland&quot; by the Soviet Union. &quot;For security reasons&quot; the archives of the Russian revolutionary were sent to the Harvard University library. Esteban and his grandmother stayed on in the house, living in a sideroom. Trotsky's widow, who thereafter shuttled between Mexico and Paris, died in 1961 in the latter city. The young Volkow studied, married, became a father and all four daughters were born in his grandfather's house. It was not until the 1970s that the family moved out and soon after the dwelling was classified an historical monument. The house was always open for interested visitors and in the early 1990s was transformed into a public museum. After a series of renovations, since 2001 the Trotsky house has become a new, lighter dwelling open to tourists and Trotskyists, the curious and nostalgic from all over the world. Next to the exhibition about the life of Trotsky and the library, there are also exhibitions and readings by authors.
 
What would Trotsky make of the world today? With his theory of &quot;permanent international revolution&quot; would he lead the critics of globalization? Volkow doesn't want to speculate on that. Russia, he says, has fulfiled Trotsky's prophecy and thrown out the bureaucratic terror of Stalin, making way for a new, limited capitalism. &quot;The contemporary mafia-capitalists are deeply in debt to Comrade Stalin, says Trotsky's grandson. But Volkow has little interest in a career in politics. The chemistry graduate has spent his life keeping politics at a distance and none of his daughters have been interested in it either. One is a psychiatrist in the United Sates, another a writer, and the twins work as an AIDS specialist and a civil engineer. 
 The visitor is impressed. 
 Volkow smiles. &quot;Oh well, some of his gray matter has been inherited by his descendants.&quot; Even in his own specialty of hormone research,Volkow has profited from Trotsky's spirit: all dogma should be doubted, apparently ordinary events should be questioned and new possibilities should be investigated. 
 &quot;Without this, even in chemistry experiments, you won't make any progress,&quot; Volkow says.
 
 <i>
This article first appeared in the Neue Zuercher Zeitung on the anniversary of Trotsky's assassination. </i>

TITLE: Deal Ends Dockers' Strike at Seaport
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The St. Petersburg Seaport joint-stock company and the port committee of the dockers' trade union signed a one-year agreement Friday, ending a two-month standoff that has been paralyzing the port's activities.
 
The agreement, signed by the dockers with the seaport's First and Second Stevedoring, or cargo-transporting companies, said that, &quot;the employer will secure the dockers' average monthly salary ... under the condition that the monthly overtime unload norms are completed.&quot; This means the dockers will be guaranteed a minimum salary of 26,000 rubles ($900) if they outperform the daily norm by 30 percent, explained a representative from the dockers' trade union. 
 The agreement has been extended for one year, during which time the trade union hopes to continue negotiations with the port's owner - the steel major Novolipetsk - the representative said. The trade union is demanding that the owner indexes dockers' salaries to match inflation.
 The dockers have been refusing to work overtime since early July, and though they have completed their stated daily norms, cargo transportation has been proceeding very slowly. The Oktyabrskaya rail road and the port's warehouses have reported being over stacked with cargo.
 There is a need for overtime during seasonal cargo-volume growth, and it is in the interest of all transportation stakeholders, said a port press release which announced the agreement on Friday. 
 The standoff had mainly affected the First and Second Stevedoring companies, which are responsible for the port's metals transportation. Major shipment delays have been reported by metal traders and shipping agents both in Russia and in Europe.
 The delays have led some companies to start bypassing the St. Petersburg port, sending their freight shipments to ports in the Baltic States instead.
 The First and Second Stevedoring companies, however, denied that there had been any slowdown in the port's activities and, in fact, reported 20 percent growth instead, news agency Fontanka.ru reported. 
 The standoff is estimated to have caused monetary losses of between $6 million and $10 million. More than 100 companies, including ship owners and shipping agents, have been losing thousands of dollars a day.
 The agreement should allow for negotiations to continue without interrupting the work flow, the port's statement said.
 Similar agreements have been reached with the dockers by the Third and Fourth Stevedoring companies, though official documents have not been signed yet, Fontanka.ru reported Monday.

TITLE: Yukos Threatened With Loss of Drilling Permits
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - The Natural Resources Ministry threatened Friday to revoke the extraction permits held by Yukos' main production unit because it stopped paying taxes.
 
&quot;After analyzing the way the licenses' terms are fulfilled, our specialists have concluded that non-payment of taxes is a serious enough reason to suspend licenses and revoke them through court procedures,&quot; a ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
 The official said the Federal Tax Service sent the ministry a complaint last week saying Yuganskneftegaz, which produces two-thirds of Yukos' crude, had stopped paying current taxes. He said a decision on revoking Yugansk's licenses would be made within two weeks.
 The move is a fresh blow for Yukos, whose accounts are already frozen by marshals seeking to secure payment of over $7 billion in back taxes for 2000 and 2001.
 It also puts time pressure on investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, which the state has hired to value Yugansk for sale to cover the tax debt.
 Yukos has said that a freeze on its bank accounts means it can no longer pay its taxes or fund daily operations.
 The Natural Resources Ministry source said Yugansk owed a total of 3.55 billion rubles ($121.5 million) in taxes for this and last month.
 Yukos was quick to react: &quot;President Vladimir Putin asked journalists this week to name officials who wanted to bankrupt Yukos and promised to fire them,&quot; said company spokesman Alexander Shadrin. &quot;I think we know now where these officials are.&quot;
 Yukos shares, which have lost nearly three-quarters of their value since April, lost all their session gains of 6 percent on the news, but soared later Friday to close 9 percent higher at 128.5 rubles on the MICEX bourse.
 Traders said the rally was due to Western buying on rumors that Yukos had managed to clinch a deal to demerge itself from former partner Sibneft and could get an extra $3 billion in return.
 Analysts believe the state would not seek to paralyze Yukos' production to avoid western criticism for fueling global supply disruption fears and pushing oil prices further from their current peaks.
 &quot;Putin wants this to end under an umbrella of legal legitimacy-Russian style of course-and that means the 'orderly' removal of Yuganskneftegaz and the confiscation or acquisition of Menatep's stake in Yukos,&quot; said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank. &quot;Of course we will not have a re-nationalization as such, but in practice it will amount to the same thing,&quot; Weafer said.
 In a related development, the government extended the detention of Yukos co-owner Platon Lebedev.
 Moscow's Meschansky District Court on Friday upheld a request by prosecutors to extend Lebedev's detention, which was due to end Sept. 26, for three more months, Interfax reported.
 <i>
 (Reuters, SPT, Bloomberg) </i>

TITLE: UN Ceases Issuing Export Quotas for Caviar
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: ALMATY, Kazakhstan - A United Nations agency has quietly stopped issuing export quotas for Caspian caviar until Russia and other countries bordering that sea curb rampant poaching.
 
The Geneva-based Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora, or CITES, which is responsible for issuing quotas for caviar from sturgeon, an endangered species, says it does not expect to approve any exports from the Caspian Sea at all this year because the five states that border it have failed to bring illegal fishing to heel.
 In the past, all Russia and the other Caspian states - Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan - had to do to receive a quota was convince CITES that the amount of sturgeon they planned to fish would not push the species closer to extinction. The effects of poaching were ignored. But a rule that came into effect this year gives the secretariat wider latitude to decide whether &quot;catch quotas are based on an appropriate regional conservation strategy.&quot; 
 CITES officials have interpreted this to mean that such a strategy must take poaching into account.
 &quot;[Caviar-exporting states] must take into account the levels of illegal harvesting ... by modifying their annual catch quotas accordingly,&quot; Jim Armstrong, the CITES deputy secretary-general, said in a recent interview in Geneva.
 For beluga, the rarest and most expensive of the commercially harvested species of sturgeon, the sustainable harvest in the Ural River has been set at 20 percent of the fish that go up that river, where most Caspian beluga spawn. 
 On Tuesday, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia received CITES export quotas of nearly six tons of caviar taken from the Danube River, where Black Sea sturgeon spawn. 
 Poaching there is considered to be under control. Not so in the former Soviet Union and Iran.
 In the early 1990s, Russian scientists estimated the basin-wide illegal catch of beluga, sevruga and osetra was more than 10 times the legal one.
 Today, the proportion is estimated generally at two to five times the legal catch. In the case of the beluga, this means that between 60 percent and 100 percent of the beluga swimming up the Ural are caught before they can spawn - a clearly unsustainable level that explains why stocks have dropped 90 percent over the past 20 years.
 Underpinning the CITES policy is the hope that Caspian governments, notably in Russia and Kazakhstan, the main culprits, will cut poaching in order to resume exports. But that will not be easy. 
 In both these countries, according to fishermen, traders and local officials, poaching, negligible during the Soviet period, has become a way of life. 
 In Astrakhan, the city at the head of the delta of the Volga, the biggest river to flow into the Caspian, local officials say privately that poachers hide from wardens and pay them off if they get caught. They sell the caviar to organized-crime rings who can it, often in unsanitary ways, and smuggle it throughout the former Soviet Union, where it is easily available and usually costs less than $300 per kilogram.
 &quot;Poachers are being protected by those who are supposed to fight against them,&quot; Vladimir Yakovlev, the Kremlin's representative in the Southern Federal District, was quoted as saying at a conference in June. He added that 90 percent of Russia's caviar is illegally fished - meaning poachers net nine times the legal harvest - and he compared the caviar trade with the narcotics business. 
 In Kazakhstan, local sources say poachers pay off the local law enforcement officials and work undisturbed.
 In an unusually candid report filed two years ago one Kazakh prosecutor complained that despite a considerable increase in funding for anti-poaching equipment, each fish warden on average each month confiscated only 500 grams of caviar and levied fines of less than $12.
 In the United States, environmentalists who got the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to put beluga on its threatened species list said they had been unaware of the new CITES policy.
 &quot;This ban on caviar exports is a very positive sign,&quot; said Ellen Pikitch, who started the campaign and heads the University of Miami's Pew Institute for Ocean Sciences. &quot;It must be sustained.&quot;
 Pikitch had been critical of CITES in the past, notably the agency's endorsement of Russian estimates of sturgeon population and growth that she and other scientists denounced as unrealistically high.
 CITES officials say that since they started regulating the international trade, illegal exports have dwindled, but they admit they have had little effect on the illegal fishing.
 The head of Russia's caviar union, Vyacheslav Mironov, who also runs Astrakhan's largest and oldest cannery, Russkaya Ikra, derided the new move by CITES as &quot;unjustified and unfair&quot; and said it is unlikely to help combat poaching and illegal exports.
 &quot;They should combat illegal export and distribution, but not introduce meaningless bans on legal produce,&quot; he said by telephone from Astrakhan.
 Mironov said Russian producers would not suffer, however, since previous quotas set by CITES were tiny compared to the amount sold domestically and because the price difference between the two markets has closed dramatically. 
 
 <i>
Denis Maternovsky contributed to this report. </i>

TITLE: The Dutch Could be Doing Better in Russia
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Holland's economic relationship with Russia is strong and trade is on the increase. However, there are still many sectors of the Russian economy where Dutch companies could play a bigger role, according to St. Petersburg's Dutch community.
 
&quot;This is a huge country and it has so many resources and possibilities,&quot; said Lizette Breukink, the Dutch director of local software company Lizatec. &quot;The challenge is how to manage those resources and build a sustainable economy,&quot; she said.
 &quot;In contrast, Holland is a small knowledge country. The Dutch are experts in agriculture, water-management and business.&quot; They are very organized and they manage their limited resources well and that is something Russia can learn from them, she said. 
 Tonny Dekker, a partner at Ernst &amp; Young CIS and a St. Petersburg resident, has lived in Russia since 1998. Dekker's work takes him from Novosibirsk to Psebai, and brings him in contact with a wide range of industries. 
 Dekker says that the business relationship between Holland and Russia is positive. What he likes most about doing business here are the seemingly endless possibilities. 
 Still, according to this thirty-four-year-old consultant, there are several areas where Dutch companies could play a bigger role. Port handling, logistics and agriculture and livestock are a few that he mentioned.
 &quot;Holland has more pigs than people - not many people know that,&quot; he said. 
 &quot;Russia's agricultural sector is at its lowest level and cattle stocks are a fraction of what they could be. It's going to take a long time for this sector to recover, and there are still a lot of administrative and legislative obstacles which need to be removed.&quot;
 St. Petersburg's largest poultry farm - Severnaya - is Dutch-owned, and several agricultural machinery companies are exporting their products to the Northwest region. However, at present, Russia is relying more on Dutch agricultural imports than Dutch know-how to develop its own agricultural capacity.
 In 2003, Russian imported 733 million euros worth of Dutch agricultural products. This figure is sure to increase now that tariffs on agricultural imports have been reduced, following an agreement between EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy and Russian Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref in May.
 Russia could learn some lessons from Holland - one of Europe's smallest countries and one of its biggest agricultural exporters. Total trade between Holland and Russia has grown by more than a third over the last three years, with Dutch exports to Russia totaling 2.8 billion euros in 2003 and Russian exports to Holland totaling 4.4 billion euros, according to figures from the Agency for International Business Cooperation.
 The Netherlands has a highly export-oriented economy, however, despite the size of its market, Russia does not make the top-ten of Holland's export destinations. Still, Holland's trade with non-EU trading partners is growing, and last year Dutch trade with Central and Eastern European markets increased by more than 10 percent. Russia's share of this market is growing too, and, last year, Russia overtook Poland as Holland's biggest export market in Eastern Europe.
 Holland's most-important export products are computers, petroleum products, semiconductor elements, machinery parts and flowers and plants. 
 Up until quite recently, Russia was one of Holland's top ten flower export destinations. The bulk of Dutch flowers for Russia came through St. Petersburg and Dutch imports accounted for 90 percent of the city's flower market.
 Flower Power is one of several Dutch flower companies operating in St. Petersburg which has stopped importing Dutch flowers because of a decision taken by Rosvetnadzor, the federal veterinary and agriculture agency, to ban Dutch flowers. The ban was imposed, allegedly, because thrips - a parasite that attacks flowers in pots - was discovered in a large Netherlands' shipment.
 The agency has said that the ban will remain in place at least until a delegation of Russian botanists conducts checks in the Netherlands. 
 No-one ever said doing business in Russia was easy. Other challenges local Dutch businesses have reported include: problems understanding customs legislation, difficulties obtaining the correct documentation and certification for incoming goods and not being able to enforce contractual agreements.
 &quot;The Dutch are open and easy-going,&quot; Dekker said. &quot;And, that can be a weakness here.&quot; Europeans need to stop treating Russia like a developing country and start treating it like a business country, he said, adding that he had seen some Dutch people behave very naively here.
 &quot;Western business people should do business here like anywhere else, and by that I mean they should not be so trusting in easily giving up control or ownership rights to Russian partners,&quot; he said.
 The lack of transparency in certain structures is the thing that annoys Dekker the most about Russia. It is this lack of transparency, he said, which makes things that seem perfectly logical completely impossible. 
 Despite the challenges of doing business here, it's hard to dampen the enthusiasm of the Dutch.
 In St. Petersburg, Dutch companies are particularly active in water and ecological management, finance and insurance and software development. 
 Interestingly, the largest national chamber of commerce in Holland is the Netherlands Russian Chamber of Commerce. This organization, which is working to assist Dutch companies establish themselves in Russia and the CIS, has about 300 Dutch companies as members.
 The Dutch community in St. Petersburg, which totals around 40 permanent residents, say more could be done to assist and promote Dutch companies doing business here.
 &quot;I think that up till now the work of the Consulate in business has been a bit scattered,&quot; said Breukink. &quot;I don't think they have had a real vision of how they should present Holland as a country.&quot; Breukink thinks Holland should promote itself more as a specialist in trading, in water management and ecological management.
 Dekker also said that Holland needed a unified front in St. Petersburg. &quot;If you want to improve business links, you need to unite individuals and companies who support the idea,&quot; he said, &quot;both on the Russian and the Dutch sides. We need a broad platform to promote Dutch business here, and, right now, there isn't one.&quot; 
 &quot;The Americans and Germans are doing a good job,&quot; Dekker said. &quot;They're actively building links here, and I don't see why the Dutch can't do the same, if not better.&quot;
 A series of well-run trade-missions could be an effective platform, he suggested.
 In a recent interview, the new Dutch Consul General Eduard Hoeks said that the Consulate aims to boost Russia and Holland's trade relationship by enhancing the visibility of the Netherlands in the city. 
 Several members of the local Dutch community said they were hopeful that the new Consul General would assume an active role in business and trade development - they said they were optimistic he would.

TITLE: New Dutch Consul Happy to be Back in Russia
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: In nearly thirty years in the foreign service, career-diplomat Eduard Hoeks has witnessed three revolutionary changes in three countries on three continents. 
 
The new Dutch Consul General to St. Petersburg, who arrived just a few weeks ago, said in an interview that the time he spent working in Russia in the early 1980s in Moscow was his most memorable diplomatic posting. 
 &quot;It gave me the opportunity to witness the beginning of the change of a system,&quot; he said. He first arrived in Moscow when Brezhnev was still alive, and later saw Yury Andropov take control.
 &quot;When Andropov came to power, we all had hopes that things would change,&quot; he said. &quot;We could see the light of new developments.&quot; But, that flicker of light was smothered by Andropov's death and Konstantin Chernenko's assent to power, which largely returned the country to the stagnation of the Brezhnev era, he said.
 Then, Mikhail Gorbachev took the helm, steering the USSR toward glasnost and perestroika - an historic time and yet another change in the country's due course, Hoeks said.
 He said his time in Moscow was a real highlight because he was witness to the flow of changes of the political process.
 Other career highlights for Hoeks have been his postings in Algeria and Indonesia where he was also witness to historical regime changes. He was the deputy chief of mission in Algeria, at the time of an Islamic revival which led to &quot;heart-breaking conflicts,&quot; he said. Hoeks also saw volatile times in Indonesia, where he served as the political head of the Dutch Embassy.
 &quot;I was very lucky to witness in three important countries ... changes of political systems which had long lasting influences on the daily lives of the citizens,&quot; he said. Hoeks' role in St. Petersburg will focus on maintaining and strengthening the economic, commercial and cultural ties between the Netherlands and the city.
 &quot;Our main task is to promote,&quot; he said. One of those activities is the &quot;Window on the Netherlands,&quot; the annual cultural festival that includes Dutch workshops, seminars and exhibitions.
 The Netherlands also currently holds the EU presidency, and the annual EU-Russia Summit will be held in The Hague this Nov. The focus of the summit will be the relationship between the EU and Russia. It will cover the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement and the treatment of Russian minorities in the newly minted Baltic EU member states, Hoeks said, adding that economic, security, educational and cultural issues would also be addressed.
 The summit will come just two months after a series of devastating terrorist attacks in Russia and Dutch Foreign Minister Bernard Bot's controversial questioning of the Russian government's actions in Beslan.
 &quot;We would like to help each other, world wide, to combat terrorism in all its forms. We're all combating the same enemy, the enemy of terrorism, and we hope that this can be done successfully without it spreading to the regions,&quot; Hoeks said.
 Born in the southern city of Breda, near the Belgian border, Hoeks has also spent several years working in The Hague, and his last posting was in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. 
 Still, Hoeks seemed pleased to be back in Russia. 
 &quot;St. Petersburg has always been on my list of interests,&quot; he said. &quot;We're really quite happy here.&quot;
 A great admirer of Russian literature, Hoeks enumerated with ease a long list of literary greats who called St. Petersburg home. His favorite among them is Fyodor Tyutchev, a lesser-known luminary who Hoeks said is under appreciated.
 &quot;He was a diplomat himself - he served in Germany for a time,&quot; he said. 
 Hoeks speaks fluent Russian, which he learned before his time in Moscow.
 &quot;I noticed that I have not forgotten the language,&quot; he said, although it has been about twenty years since he last lived in Russia. 
 The diplomatic profession is one of an observer, not a revolutionary, and it is a profession that imparts a certain wisdom, he said.
 &quot;Nothing is eternal, things can change overnight,&quot; he said. &quot;Change is a continuous force in our lives.&quot;
 Hoeks is joined in his eleventh international posting by his wife Odilia, who will undertake charitable activities in the city. 
 &quot;He finds it wonderful to be back,&quot; she said. &quot;After four years in Moscow, his heart is a little bit here.&quot;
 The couple have three daughters aged 22, 20 and 16, who live and study in the Netherlands.

TITLE: Dutch Festival Kicks Off Again
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The ninth Window on the Netherlands festival opened Monday to showcase cultural, scientific and commercial aspects of Dutch life in the city. Organized by the Consulate of the Netherlands in St. Petersburg, the festival will include about 40 events over two and a half weeks.
 
&quot;Window on the Netherlands is an umbrella covering a wide array of connections the Dutch have been forming in St. Petersburg for the last 300 years,&quot; said a representative from the Consulate of the Netherlands.
 Founded in 1996 to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Peter the Great's embassy to Holland, the program has since gained public recognition and become much easier to organize, the representative said. 
 &quot;Nearly all event initiatives come from the participating companies,&quot; she said. The consulate provides the organization and the presentation framework, without allocating major funds, and manages to make a big impact, the representative said.
 Even Dutch companies not involved in the festival say it has a positive impact on business. Several said that the program increased general interest in the Netherlands and in the activities of Dutch companies. 
 &quot;The program and its format has become a tradition in the city,&quot; said Vladislav Bocharov, a representative from KLM Royal Dutch Airlines' service center. &quot;And, it does have a positive effect on sales,&quot; he said.
 This year, the festival's events range from a modern Rotterdam painters' exhibition at the city's Borei gallery to the launch of a new Unilever manufacturing plant for the production of Dove brand products.
 Of special interest to the local business community, consular officials said, is the Biomass: Alternative Fuel Conference organized by the Gorni Institute, which takes place on Wednesday. 
 The Consul General of the Netherlands in St. Petersburg Eduard Hoeks, in an open letter to city residents published in the business daily Delovoi Peterburg, said that he hopes the ninth festival will serve as a catalyst for further economic development between the Netherlands and the city.
 Some of the most interesting parts of the festival, Hoeks said, are the events held to celebrate the 300 years of a Dutch community's existence in St. Petersburg. 
 The anniversary, celebrated on Sept. 18, will be marked with a church service in the Former Dutch Reform Church on Nevsky Prospekt - the first service to be conducted in the church for almost 80 years. 
 At 2 p.m. and 4 p.m, buses will leave from the church for tours of &quot;Dutch St. Petersburg.&quot; A Dutch business fair representing companies from the Netherlands operating in the city will also be running throughout the day.
 &quot;The program is focused on the city's residents, but it includes all aspects of cooperation between our countries: culture, science, law, healthcare, environmental issues and others,&quot; said Hoeks at the program's news conference Friday. 
 The festival began Monday with the opening of the Dutch painter Bakker's exhibition at the Peter and Paul fortress and runs though Sept. 30.
 <strong>P R O G R A M “ W I N D O W O N T H E N E T H E R L A N D S — 2 0 0 4 ”</strong> 

<strong>TUESDAY, 14 SEPTEMBER
 </strong>10.00 Legal seminar, <i>Corinthia Nevskij Palace Hotel, 
 57 Nevsky Prospekt (by invitation). Tel. 324 7324
 </i>14.00 Meeting of the Ombudsman of Amsterdam, 
 Mrs. N. Salomons, with the deputies of the Legislative
 Assembly of St. Petersburg <i>Mariinsky Palace, 1 St. Isaac's Square. 
 </i>17.00 Opening of the exhibition of Rotterdam artists 
 <i> Borey Gallery, 58 Liteiny Prospekt (free entrance). 
 Tel. 275 3837</i>
 18.00 Workshop by Jorge Isaac on using of electronics 
 in contemporary music, <i>Pro Arte institute, Nevskaya 
 Kurtina of the Peter and Paul Fortress. Tel. 233 0553
 </i>19.00 Concert of the Dutch ensemble &quot;Oxalys,&quot; 
 <i>Menshikov Palace, Universitetskaya Nab. 15.
 Tel. 334 0200
 </i>
 <strong>WEDNESDAY, 15 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>20.00 &quot;Mensa Secunda,&quot; multimedia performance for the 
 block-flute musicians Jorge Isaac and presentation 
 CD &quot;Touch-and-Go&quot; with electro-acoustic music 
 by Roderik de Man, <i>Museum-flat of Samoilovs, 
 8 Stremyannaya Ulitsa (by invitation). </i>
 20.00 Exhibition &quot;Dutch Design 2&quot;and photo-exhibition of
 Vladimir Balabnev &quot;Amsterdam-St. Petersburg&quot; 
 (open till Sept. 24, 2004), <i>Bulthaup Center Design Gallery St. Petersburg, 2 Bolshaya Konyushen- 
 naya Ulitsa, main entrance, 3rd floor ((by invitation). 
 Tel. 102 05 10)
 </i>
 <strong>THURSDAY, 16 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>14.30 Lecture by the Ombudsman of Amsterdam, Mrs. N.
 Salomons, to students of St. Petersburg State
 University. <i>Faculty of International Relations of the
 University, Smolny, 1/3, entrance 8. 
 Tel. 276 19 47 (by invitation).
 </i>19.00 Concert of the Dutch ensemble &quot;Oxalys,&quot; <i>Glazunov 
 Hall of the St. Petersburg State Conservatory, 3 Teatralnaya Ploshchad (tickets from box offices). 
 </i>
 <strong>FRIDAY, 17 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>17.00 Meeting of the Dutch-Russian Club, <i>Menshikov palace, 15 Universitetskaya Naberezhnaya (by invitation).
 </i>
 <strong>SATURDAY, 18 SEPTEMBER 
 Special day dedicated to the 300th Anniversary of the establishment of the Dutch Community in St. Petersburg
 </strong>10.00 Church service by Pieter Holtrop 
 <i> Church hall of the building of the Former Dutch 
 Reformed Church in St. Petersburg on 20 Nevsky. </i>11.30 Special guided tours in the State Hermitage 
 &quot;Dutch Hermitage&quot; (in Russian), State Hermitage Museum. Meeting point - in front of ticket-office 
 (tickets at ticket-office)
 12.00 Special guided tours of the Peter and Paul Fortress called &quot;The Dutch and Peter and the Paul Fortress&quot; (in Russian). Meeting point - in front of ticket-office 
 (tickets at ticket-office)
 11.00 Non-stop show of the documentaries 
 &quot;Dutch Petersburg,&quot; &quot;Beatrix, Queen of the Dutch&quot; 
 16.00 &quot;My chere Annett.&quot; 
 <i>Kazemat of the Tsar Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress (free entrance)
 </i>12.00- Fair of the Dutch companies working in St. Peterburg 
 17.00 <i>Church Hall of the building of the Former Dutch 
 Reformed Church in St. Petersburg at 20 Nevsky Prospekt. (free entrance)
 </i>12.00 Bus guided tours &quot;Dutch Petersburg&quot; (in Russian)
 14.00 <i>Departure from the building of the Former Dutch 
 Reformed Church in St. Petersburg at 20 Nevsky.
 (Tickets available on the bus, price: 50 rubles, all 
 takings are for the renovation of the Former Church 
 building after fire)
 </i>16.00 Lectures &quot;Dutch in St. Petersburg&quot; and &quot;Anna 
 Pavlovna - Russian Great Duchess and Dutch Queen&quot; by P. Holtrop, H. Slechte and Nika Strijak
 <i>Kazemat of the Tsar Bastion of the Peter and Paul fortress (free entrance)
 </i>22.00 Orange party by DJ Natascha (Holland)
 <i>Flying Dutchman entertainment centre, 6 Mytninskaya Naberezhnaya (by invitation).
 </i>
 <strong>SUNDAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>p.m. Opening of the Study week of the joint Russian-Dutch
 Presidential Program
 <i> TBA
 </i>16:00 Showing of the film &quot;Drunk Angel&quot;
 <i> Art Center &quot;Pushkinskaya 10&quot; (free entrance). 
 Tel. 164 6527
 </i>19.00 Jazz concert by Monsieur Dubois group 
 <i>JFC Jazz Club, 33 Shpalernaya Ulitsa (tickets from the ticket-office). </i>Tel. 380 9109
 
 <strong>MONDAY, 20 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>10.00 Conference about Public Health and AIDS 
 <i> Conference hall of the Mariinsky Palace, 1 St. Isaac's Square (by invitation), Tel. 314 1892
 </i>
 <strong>TUESDAY, 21 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>18:00 Poetic evening by A. Kushner connected to the 
 S. Bakker exhibition 
 Cycles about Mandelshtam and Armenia 
 <i> Kazemat of the Tsar Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress (free entrance). Tel. 327 0887
 </i>20.00 Jazz concert by Monsieur Dubois group 
 <i> Jet Set club, 58B Furshtadskaya Ulitsa. (free entrance)</i>
 
 <strong>WEDNESDAY, 22 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>10.00 Biomass Conference 
 <i> Mining Institute (by invitation) 
 </i>14.00 Dissemination seminar on the PSO project 
 &quot;Logistics centres in the North-West of Russia and
 Regional Distribution Council&quot;
 <i> TBA
 </i>20.00 Concert by Dutch guitarist Jan Akkerman 
 <i> Red Club, 7 Poltavskaya Ulitsa (tickets available at ticket office)
 </i>
 <strong>THURSDAY, 23 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>11.00 Masterclass by the soloists of the &quot;Flanders 
 Recorder Quartet&quot; (part of the Earlymusic
 Festival), <i>Museum G.R. Derzhavin, 118 Fontanka. 
 </i>p.m. Meeting of the working groups on transport and water 
 management in connection with the Standing 
 Committee between the Administration of St. 
 Petersburg and the Ministry of Transport and Water 
 Management of the Netherlands 
 <i> TBA. Tel. 334 0200 
 </i>20.00 Concert by Dutch guitarist Jan Akkerman 
 <i> JFC Jazz Club, 33 Shpalernaya Ulitsa (tickets available at the ticket office). Tel. 380 9109
 </i>
 <strong>FRIDAY, 24 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>16.00 Program of the Netherlands Institute in St. Petersburg 
 dedication to the finalisation of the restoration of the 
 16th century Dutch Atlas &quot;Civitates orbis terrarum&quot;
 <i> Russian National Library, 165 Moskovsky Prospekt, (by invitation). Tel. 327 0887</i>
 17.00 Closing of the Study week of the joint Russian-Dutch 
 Presidential Program
 <i> TBA
 </i>17.30 Opening of the exhibition &quot;The Mirror of the World: 
 Five centuries of geographical atlases. From the collection of the Russian National Library&quot;
 <i> Russian National Library, 165 Moskovsky Prospekt (by invitation). Tel. 327 0887
 </i>18.00 10th Anniversary of the flower firm &quot;Flora International&quot;
 <i> 11 Shturmanskaya Ulitsa (by invitation). Tel.334 0434 
 </i>19.00 Concert of the &quot;Flanders Recorders Quartet&quot; 
 (part of the Earlymusic Festival) 
 <i> Small Hall of St. Petersburg Philharmonia, 30 Nevsky Prospekt (tickets from box office). Tel. 325 7052</i><strong>
 </strong>
 <strong>SUNDAY, 26 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong> Masterclass by Maria Leonhardt (part of the Earlymusic festival) 
 <i> TBA. Tel. 325 7052 
 </i>
 <strong>MONDAY, 27 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>10.00 Conference on the MATRA program of the Ministry 
 of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands
 <i> St. Petersburg City Palace of the Creativity of Youth, 39 Nevsky Prospekt (by invitation). Tel 334 02 00 </i>
 19.00 Concert of Gustav Leonhardt (part of the Earlymusic festival) 
 <i> Small Philharmonia Hall, 30 Nevsky Prospekt (tickets from box office). Tel. 325 70 52 </i>
 
 <strong>TUESDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>11.30. Opening of the new personal care products factory of the Unilever company. <i>Tel.(095) 745 73 21</i>
 
 <strong>WEDNESDAY, 29 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>18.00 Nijhoff Lecture by Kees Verheul, Irina Mickailova 
 and Alexei Purin 
 <i> Poterna of the Tsar Bastion of the Peter and Paul Fortress (free entrance), tel. 327 0887 
 </i>
 <strong>THURSDAY, 30 SEPTEMBER 
 </strong>10.00 Enviromental conference of the DCMR Agency (Rotterdam)
 <i> &quot;Environmental Control, Perspectives for Co-operation&quot;
 Yusupov Mansion, 9 Moskovsky Prospekt (by invitation). Tel. 359 5936</i>
 18.30 Opening of the &quot;Third Session of the Dutch Salons&quot; 
 program. Lecture by Mrs. G.V. Rodionova: 
 &quot;The Dutch Spirit of the Menshikov Palace&quot;
 <i> Menshikov Palace, 15 Universitetskaya Naberezhnaya, 
 (by invitation).
 Tel. 327 0887
 </i>

TITLE: S&amp;P: Banking System Is Risky
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: LONDON - Russia's banking system is still considered among the riskiest in the world, despite strong economic growth, because the economy is concentrated in too few areas such as oil and gas, ratings agency Standard and Poor's said Tuesday.
 
&quot;You may have very high economic growth in Russia but the economy is very concentrated in the oil and gas sector. So the real economy in Russia, which the banking sector normally intermediates has a lot of risks still there,&quot; John Gibling, director of financial services ratings at S&amp;P said before a conference on emerging market banks.
 &quot;High economic and industry risks make the Russian banking system one of the riskiest in the world,&quot; said Gibling. The ratings agency said in a research report published later in the day that private banks may face more turbulence this year if the Central Bank steps up enforcement of regulations ahead of the creation of a deposit insurance system.
 &quot;The Central Bank's task of cleaning up the financial sector while maintaining depositor confidence in banks will be daunting,&quot; the report said. &quot;The second half of this year and 2005 are still likely to be periods of uncertainty.&quot;
 Russians pulled 25 billion rubles ($860 million) from the nation's banking system over two days in July after eight lenders lost their licenses or failed to make payments. The run on deposits at lenders including Alfa Bank and Guta Bank was the biggest test of confidence for Russia's banking system since the government defaulted on $40 billion in debt in August 1998, wiping away citizens' savings.
 The Central Bank is enforcing laws as Russia sets up a deposit insurance system to protect citizens' savings. Russians have lost their savings on at least three occasions since 1991.
 In May, the Central Bank stepped up its crackdown by revoking a license from Sodbiznesbank for money laundering violations. It was the first time Russian authorities shut down a lender under new money laundering laws and the move sparked public panic and the mass withdrawal of funds.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>TMK Share Offering
 </b>

MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - Trubnaya Metallurgicheskaya Kompaniya, the world's second-biggest producer of steel pipes, plans to sell shares to investors by 2008, Interfax reported.
 The company will sell $250 million to $300 million of Eurobonds at some stage before the share offering, Interfax said, citing Alexander Shiryayev, TMK's deputy general director for finance, from Yekaterinburg.
 TMK earlier said it will boost output 5 percent this year to 2.7 million tons.
 The company, which owns four pipe plants, is raising sales as local and international energy producers invest in Russia to increase output after rising oil and gas prices boosted profits.
 
 
<b>$60M Sun Brewery
 </b>

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia's second biggest brewery, Sun Interbrew, backed by Belgian brewing giant Interbrew, is considering building a $60 million brewery in Siberia, the local administration said this week. 
 The Irkutsk administration said in a statement that Sun Interbrew's board had made the decision in principle and would make a final decision at the end of September or the start of October. 
 The Russian beer market, the world's fifth biggest, is 60-percent controlled by major foreign brewers.
 
 
<b>MDM Seeks $200M 
 </b>

MOSCOW (Bloomberg) - MDM Bank, the country's fourth-largest private bank, plans to sell $200 million in two-year notes to boost corporate lending, said Andrei Dobrynin, director for international capital markets at the Moscow-based bank.
 Goldman, Sachs &amp; Co. and UBS will manage the sale, he said in an e-mail. MDM will hold a presentation for investors this week, he said.
 
 
<b>Mazheikiu Refining Up
 </b>

VILNIUS, Lithuania (Bloomberg) - Yukos' Lithuanian unit, Mazheikiu Nafta, said it refined a third more crude oil in August than it had a year earlier and the most in any month since 1992.
 The refinery in the western Lithuanian town of Juodeikiai processed 813,000 tons (192,235 barrels per day) of crude oil and other feedstock in August, compared with 803,000 tons in July and 607,000 tons in August 2003, Mazheikiu said in a statement.
 "It's our third record month in a row," Mazheikiu spokesman Giedrius Karsokas said in a telephone interview."
 
 
<b>UES' Slovak Plans
 </b>

PRAGUE (Bloomberg) - Unified Energy Systems, the country's largest power generator, said it might sell part of Slovakia's electricity producer to Germany's E.ON if its bid for a majority stake in the utility succeeds.
 UES is one of the three companies that bid for a 66 percent stake in state-owned Slovenske Elektrarne, and it has agreed to cooperate with E.ON, Europe's second-largest power utility, UES said in a statement through its public relations agency.
 The steering committee for the sale will meet to choose the best bid Friday. The bidders are seeking to expand in Eastern Europe, where economic growth is fueling demand for electricity. 



TITLE: Painted Into a Corner
TEXT: President Vladimir Putin is caught in a trap of his own making. By placing his trust entirely in his old KGB colleagues, and by shutting out all other interest groups and institutions - such as business, political parties and the press - Putin has left himself no room for maneuver.
 
In the aftermath of the tragedy in Beslan, however, it has become clear that the president can no longer rely on his power base, much less trust it. During the hostage crisis and after its catastrophic resolution, law enforcement and the security services consistently lied in order to avoid taking responsibility.
 In a meeting with foreign journalists and analysts on Sept. 6, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, himself a former intelligence officer, said that there were no ethnic Chechens among the terrorists who seized the school in Beslan. His statement was apparently intended for policy briefings in Washington, London and other western capitals.
 But it was an outright lie. 
 The Russian media have carried reports, based on information from the government's crisis headquarters in North Ossetia, indicating that at least six of the terrorists were from Chechnya. State Duma deputies who were present in Beslan during and after the crisis have corroborated this information.
 Ivanov's lie was obviously intended to divert the world's attention from the failures of the Kremlin's military and security policy in Chechnya, and to present the tragedy as the result of the invisible, faceless phantom known as &quot;international terrorism.&quot;
 In a televised meeting with Putin a couple days later, Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov - who is in charge of the investigation into Beslan - announced the official body count. Yet as a number of newspapers reported, Ustinov's figures were low even according to other government estimates. While the official death toll rose to some 330 over the weekend, a source close to the Putin administration has put the actual number of dead in Beslan at close to 600.
 In a town as small as Beslan, the authorities obviously won't be able to conceal the truth forever. So why does the government continue to lie? According to my Kremlin source, one reason is that delivering the bad news in dribs and drabs rather than all at once will dampen the public backlash against the government.
 Second, lower casualty figures make the Federal Security Service, which headed up the rescue operation in Beslan, look less incompetent. In an operation like this, a death toll of 20 to 30 percent is considered unavoidable. But if 600 of the roughly 1,200 hostages-50 percent-have died, this would indicate that the FSB failed miserably in Beslan.
 The Interior Ministry, headed by another KGB alumnus, Rashid Nurgaliyev, has been serving up its own string of falsehoods. One day it announced that the terrorists had bribed police on their way to Beslan, then turned around and said they hadn't. First the ministry said that the terrorists had accomplices in the local police and had planted explosives and weapons at the school in advance; then it reversed its story. And on it goes.
 It doesn't really matter whether Putin reads the papers, or if he relies on his inner circle for information. The president has painted himself into a corner. 
 He has packed the government with security service alumni, who are also busily taking over the country's energy sector. And the chekists know that they have nothing to fear from the president. Unlike his predecessor Boris Yeltsin, Putin has no other power base.
 In fact, the situation is even worse. Putin faces mounting pressure from the most conservative wing of the Moscow political establishment to tighten the screws and adopt a harder line at home and abroad. Rodina, a nationalist faction in the State Duma, has launched an aggressive campaign calling for the government of Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov to step down.
 Rodina is known to enjoy the backing of many former and current members of the security services who are considered hard-liners even by the chekists' own standards. Their goals are clear. 
 The first is to get rid of any remaining reform-minded moderates within the government and take control of the country's financial and natural resources. The second is to cut Putin off from the influence of the few liberals-such as Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref and Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov-who are trying to resist pressure from the bureaucrats in epaulets and to keep economic reforms going.
 In short, the chekists want Putin to become a dictator along the lines of Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, thereby assuring their own survival. 
 Will this help the state in the battle against terrorism? Ekho Moskvy radio asked its listeners if Putin could win this battle. Of the 5,900 people who called in, 93 percent said &quot;no.&quot;
 
 <i>Yevgenia Albats, who hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio on Sundays, contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: A Lurch in The Wrong Direction
TEXT: On Monday, President Vladimir Putin called for sweeping changes to the structure of the Russian government in an effort to strengthen the Russian state and to improve its ability to repulse terrorist threats. The president's proposals are cause for grave concern. Rather than tackling the issue of terrorism head-on, Putin's plan would achieve little more than greater centralization of power, tightening the Kremlin's stranglehold on the body politic and further entrenching a system of power that the tragedy in Beslan has brutally discredited.
 
Putin proposed, first, to scrap direct gubernatorial elections, replacing them with a system in which the president would submit nominees to the regional legislatures for approval. He also called for doing away with first-past-the-post contests - in which governors exert significant influence on the outcome - for the State Duma. Instead, the lower house would be composed entirely of candidates elected from party lists. 
 The implications of Putin's proposals are clear. The Kremlin would accumulate even greater power at the expense of participatory democracy and the already enfeebled governors. Are we to assume that a central plank in the Kremlin's damage control strategy is to make regional leaders the scapegoats for recent failures in the war against terrorism, thereby minimizing the responsibility that should properly be assumed by the central authorities, in particular members of Putin's inner circle such as Federal Security Service Director Nikolai Patrushev?
 The president has emphasized the important role that a robust civil society and broader public participation in the political process should play in countering the terrorist threat. It is somewhat ironic, to say the least, that he has now called for the abolition of direct gubernatorial elections - a slap in the face of the voters, as if to say that Putin has no faith in the public's ability to vote for the &quot;right&quot; governor.
 Putin also came out Monday in favor of creating some sort of &quot;public chamber&quot; to serve as a &quot;platform for broad dialogue&quot; and to provide public oversight of the executive branch, &quot;including law enforcement and the security services.&quot; But this probably amounts to little more an attempt to be seen as backing up his rhetoric about greater public participation with substance. Moreover, in a functioning democracy the functions that Putin mentioned would be performed by parliament. In any case, it is far from clear who would appoint representatives to the chamber, and whether or not it would have any teeth.
 The overriding impression is that Putin and his entourage are out of their depth and instinctively reaching for the traditional &quot;panacea&quot; for Russia's ills - centralization of power. In the absence of proper public oversight and institutional checks and balances, a powerful, personalized regime does not translate into a strong state or efficient government. Until the Kremlin realizes this, it will not be able effectively to combat the terrorist threat or anything else.


TITLE: Hotel Shortage Could be Solved By Existing Plan
TEXT: It has been obvious to everyone for a long time that there are not nearly enough hotels in the city, especially small, mid-range ones, for the development of tourism. And so, because there is no money in the budget for this, the investment committee worked out a program designed to attract private investors Attached to the text of the program is a list of addresses in areas of the city close to the center, where hotels could be placed.
 
Study of the program shows that officials have clearly not worn themselves out over it. Around 70 percent of the list of addresses for the placement of hotels has simply migrated from previous lists, and the text of the program is almost entirely made up of fragments of the &quot;Plan for the development of the St. Petersburg tourism industry,&quot; prepared a year ago by specialists of the Russian Tourism Industry Union, or RST, which is made up of players on the tourism market.
 None of this would matter, except that, as if by the cruel hand of fate, the sections the plagiarists have borrowed from the primary source are far from the most important. They would have done better to simply copy everything conscientiously. Then the program would have contained a well thought-out set of methods, well thought out by specialists of the RST, for stimulating investors. The supervisor of the program, Vice Governor Yury Molchanov, believes that no stimulation at all is necessary, as &quot;the hospitality market today is attractive enough not to require any preferential treatment from the city.&quot;
 However the potential investors themselves maintain the opposite. They cite a heap of problems, the main one which involves moving the current occupiers out of the addresses. In their unanimous opinion, only the administration can effectively deal with this, therefore it should specifically devote itself to this. The job of business is to build the hotel, manage it, make money and pay taxes. Officials want to lump everything on the entrepreneurs. But investors won't agree to it - it is far more profitable for them to build business centers and trade and entertainment complexes.
 If the compilers of the addresses for hotel locations had simply copied other lists, then their list of addresses would have included so called loopholes - vacant sites within the boundaries of St. Petersburg's protected zone, which according to the joint decision of the architecture and historic monument committees can be built on. These loophole sites are far more suitable for the construction of hotels than the investment committee's addresses, which are burdened by numerous occupiers, including residents. Although the list of loophole sites has been ratified by the government - and this means investors could receive an agreement on them without any problem - the investment committee has not included them in its list.
 If until now Smolny produced programs and ideas that weren't bad, what has openly emerged from its depths this time is rubbish.
 It seems the list of loophole sites was ignored because it was drawn up by Vice Governor Alexander Vakhmistrov's department, whereas the list of addresses for potential hotels was compiled by subordinates of Vice Governor Yury Molchanov. Furthermore, it is obvious that there is a lack of any systematic approach to the resolution of the tasks of the city's development - in this case, the main task is to increasing the efficiency of the use of city territory, which affects all the different areas of the city's economy.
 If the authorities are really concerned with creating conditions for mass investment in hotel construction, then they should at least work seriously at increasing the efficiency of the use of city land. A lack of construction sites - for housing, and trade and entertainment complexes, and for hotels too - results in a deficit and artificially holds back the development of whole sectors of the market, including the hospitality sector.
 <i>
 Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comments are broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Fridays. </i>

TITLE: Chris Floyd's Global Eye
TEXT: <b>Night and Fog
 </b>You think it's not true, you think it's not coming, you think &quot;it can't happen here.&quot; But it can, and it is, right before your eyes. 
 
George Bush's America is clearly in a proto-fascist condition. Of course, there's no such thing as direct equivalence between historical events. The same dangers never come around again - not in the same form or with precisely identical content. At every point in time, a new set of elements and circumstances coalesce to create the unique reality of that particular historical moment. 
 But if you take the general definition of fascism provided by its founder, Benito Mussolini - &quot;the merger of corporate and state power&quot; - and apply it to the elements that are coalescing in America at this historical moment, you could hardly find a more apt description of the Bush Regime. Couple that with the Bushists' radical transformation of party politics into a quasi-religious cult of militarism and Leader worship, and you have not an equivalence but certainly an ever-deepening resonance with the malevolent spirit that swept Germany and Italy during the first half of the 20th century.
 The Bushist convention in New York - an unprecedented belching forth of bile, mendacity and bootlicking - gave ample proof that Republicans now &quot;claim to be far more than a political party; they [are] a movement, sweeping up the ... people and carrying them unstoppably to a better future,&quot; as historian Richard Evans described a similar ugly metamorphosis in his excellent new book, &quot;The Coming of the Third Reich.&quot; &quot;The vagueness of the [party's] program, its symbolic mixture of old and new, its eclectic, often inconsistent character, to a large extent allowed people to read into it what they wanted and edit out anything they might have found disturbing,&quot; he wrote of the Nazis. Evans also notes: &quot;What the [party] did not offer, however, were concrete solutions to [the nation's] problems, least of all where they were most needed, in economy and society.&quot;
 Again, the resonances are striking. Like the Nazis, the Bushists aren't interested in actual policies, actual governance. They're not even interested in politics as such, i.e. the pursuit of effective government through open debate and honorable compromise with fellow citizens of opposing views. No, what drives their &quot;movement&quot; is a lust for raw power: the power to impose their brutal vision of unbridled state corporatism - which Bush calls &quot;the single sustainable model of national success.&quot; Policies, programs, grand ideological crusades (&quot;family values,&quot; &quot;national security,&quot; &quot;war on terror,&quot; &quot;defense of marriage,&quot; &quot;ownership society&quot;) are all just empty blather to the Bushists, false fronts to be shuffled, twisted or dropped as necessary to mask the rapacious (and unpopular) nature of their ultimate goal. 
 Bush's state corporatism entails the destruction of government as an instrument for social good and civic life; any possible fetters on the desires of the powerful for more money and more privilege must be removed. The only &quot;legitimate&quot; functions of government in such a system are dividing the spoils of power among favored interest groups (Bush's loyal cadre of Christian extremists, for example), and maintaining a gargantuan military machine to &quot;project dominance,&quot; grab loot and provide fat contracts for arms dealers, servicing companies, mercenaries and other corporate war profiteers. Everything else can be privatized, outsourced, sold off to cronies - or simply eliminated in &quot;forced&quot; cutbacks blamed on deliberately engineered budget deficits.
 The Bushist movement also entails the destruction of ordinary politics. Any opposition to the &quot;single sustainable model&quot; - even the timid deviations offered by the thoroughly corporatized Democrats - must be crushed, and relentlessly demonized as an &quot;attack on America from within,&quot; as the Bushists declared at their convention. Even the democratic process itself - the Constitutionally mandated presidential election - was scorned from the podium as nothing more than a &quot;manic obsession to bring down our commander-in-chief.&quot; Thus the very idea of free, contested elections - &quot;the consent of the governed&quot; - is now openly dismissed as a dangerous notion, a sign of mental illness. 
 There are more sinister resonances between Reich and Regime, of course. One is the penchant for aggressive war based on false premises, in the name of protecting the sacred &quot;Homeland&quot; from imminent attack by godless evildoers. Another is the brazen use of the &quot;Big Lie,&quot; such as Bush's repeated public assertions that he was &quot;forced&quot; to invade Iraq because &quot;Saddam wouldn't allow the inspectors back in&quot; - an extraordinary perversion of reality on a par with any of Hitler's delusionary propaganda.
 Finally, as in earlier fascist movements, the faith of Bush's adherents has been sealed in blood: a proven method of binding followers to a ruthless leader. With his illegal aggression, Hitlerian in principle if not yet in scale, Bush has made his followers - and by extension, his nation - complicit in mass murder. The terrorist horrors of Beslan have been replicated 70-fold across Iraq, where an estimated 35,000 non-combatants have been killed. As in Beslan, this slaughter of innocents was deliberate. For example, Pentagon chief Don Rumsfeld personally approved every bombing raid likely to kill 30 or more civilians - and there were more than 50 such consciously chosen mass terror killings in all, The New York Times reports. No wonder Bush's zealots swallow his lies so readily; otherwise they would have to acknowledge the blood dripping from their own hands.
 You think it's not happening, because the crudities of yesteryear - brownshirts, goosesteps, shattered glass - are absent, because the targets of wrath and fear are different. But the Bush Regime is the form that state corporatism - fascism - is taking in this particular historical moment. It is happening. The night and fog are coming.
 
 <i>
For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com
 
 Chris Floyd's book, Empire Burlesque, is available at www.globaleyefloyd.com </i>

TITLE: YOUR LETTERS: The Lessons From Beslan, Our 1,000th Issue
TEXT: <i>Editor,</i>
 Journalists are serving the government and all the plumbers have gone to fight terrorism. The horror that Russia has witnessed in the last few days is unprecedented - terror, international terror and the deaths of hundreds of people, including hundreds of children.
 
Just imagine, children who happily set off for their first and last day of school with flowers in their hands have died - that should not happen.
 The unavoidable question is: how did this happen? What turned those fighters into such monsters?
 There are many possible answers, but it should be admitted that a large part of the responsibility for this tragedy is the fault of the mass media and journalists, whose consciences have been subjugated and serve the authorities and obediently lie and remain silent about the plight of Chechnya, who lull public opinion with fairytales about international terrorism and a swift and final victory over the fighters.
 Dear journalists who serve the government. This is wrong.
 You are also to blame for this frightening tragedy - you lie and are silent to order. That's not journalism - it is serving the state through the special services of mass media. And, while the government uses you as special agents in the mass media to brainwash citizens and denies them the possibility of receiving reliable information about what is going on in the world and this country, we can expect more disasters and misfortunes.
 There is only one way out and it is a fantasy - journalists must declare a strike and refuse to work for the special services of mass media while they continue to lie and hold their tongues.
 A meeting, organized by the government in St. Petersburg denounces terror, which all normal people agree with, but in the communal housing sector no plumbers are available to fix blocked pipes - because plumbers have joined the fight against terrorism.
 But journalists on television programs say how citizens of our city are united in the fight against international terrorism and have given their support to the president.
 <i>Yury Vdovin
 Co-chair Citizens' Watch
 St. Petersburg
 </i>
 <i>
Editor, </i>
 On behalf of my family and I, our most sincere condolences to all the victims and families who were affected by these Islamic terrorists. Our hearts go out to all in the town of Beslan.
 
As we in the United States saw the tragic events unfold and the senseless murdering of so many innocent children one has to wonder why our political leaders do not take a stronger stance against these subhuman individuals. If only the world would unite, we could kill this cancer.
 <i>Benny Alvarado
 Tulsa, Oklahoma
 </i>
 <i>
Editor,</i>
 I wish to voice the outrage that we all feel so far away. I find your articles fascinating, we hear virtually nothing about the inner workings, the sensationalism and horror are more important and then it will be passed over, but never forgotten.
 
We are all aware of Russian incompetence, and of the bankruptcy that paralyses the state functions. The KGB is alive and well. Russia must rid itself of this legacy if it has any hope to survive the inevitable civil war and wholesale destruction.
 <i>Mark Sandstad
 Auckland, New Zealand
 </i>
 <i>
Editor,</i>
 My heart goes out to the Russian people. These Muslims will not stop their killing. These are not freedom fighters or rebels. They are murdering cowards.
 
Where are the moderate Muslims? Their silence is deafening. Could it be there are not any Muslims that disagree with the brutal torture and murder of even babies? Do they support this evil by their silence and refusal to stop this bloodshed? Since this is all in the name of religion, why don't the clerics of the &quot;peaceful&quot; religion of Islam condemn these atrocities?
 The Russian people must show the world their courage. [The United States] government refuses to annihilate the terrorists, in fact, they keep granting more and more of them asylum.
 I think everyone ought to stop criticizing the Russian government, police and army and start putting the blame on the shoulders where it belongs - the Muslims!
 This is not a hate mail; this is the truth that many refuse to face! If it is not Islam, then Islam should silence those that have supposedly taken their religion hostage. Those that do not distance themselves in the strongest voice and action are collaborators. 
 Please, Russia, lead the way.
 May God bless the families of those who faced the horror caused by those cockroaches! 
 <i>Jackie Yamauchi
 Dallas, Texas
 
 
Editor,
 </i>It seems time for governments to take responsibility for their part in terrorist attacks against civilians of their nations. As absolutely horrific as the most recent attacks have been, the Kremlin should acknowledge that their position in Chechnya and the harsh treatment by troops there has much to do with the growing anger and resentment of these people who feel their only choice to make their voices heard is to commit heinous crimes. 
 
Let there be no doubt that I believe the same is absolutely true for the United States government regarding the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
 I feel tremendous sorrow for the loss of life in Beslan and can only hope that the Russian people will take this opportunity to investigate and examine their country's foreign policies (especially those in Chechnya) to better understand where such hate is cultivated, and in turn, take steps to force their elected leaders to no longer commit horrific crimes against others. If they lie about the number of hostages, what else are they lying about? There is nothing new about rulers lying to their people, but there is something new about the people having the right to a voice that is heard and a system where they have some say in who the leaders will be. It is the responsibility of the people to look beyond the lies, as we know they exist. 
 I realize this must seem absolutely absurd coming from an American, but I have dedicated the past couple of years of my life, and will continue to everyday until our next presidential election, to do everything I can to ensure there is a change in the administration in the U.S.
 <i>Kristi Parker
 New York City
 
Editor,
 </i>The authorities are always responsible for everything that happens in a country. They are obliged to take care of citizen's safety, but I disagree with those that suggest that in the Beslan tragedy they tried to hide the true number of hostages intentionally, or that they provoked terrorists by lying about the number.
 
I would also like to mention, that the Russian authorities really are to blame for many mistakes. They are to be blamed above all for the high level of corruption in the police force, particularly in local police, they are to be blamed for the high level of corruption in political structures, particularly in local authorities, and particularly in the southern regions of Russia. 
 In Southern Russia local authorities are often responsible for provoking ethnic hostility. It is necessary to say here that the policies of the Soviet Union - and it is not the only country responsible - was one of the main sources of today's terrorism because it provided various so-called freedom fighters in Angola, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and other locations with guns and money, encouraging their actions, teaching and training them.
 I still quite clearly remember how Soviet propaganda portrayed Palestine &quot;black panthers&quot; fighters as heroes. Other countries fostered their own such &quot;heroes,&quot; including those Egyptians and Saudis who learned to fly Boeings at pilot schools in Florida. Now is the time &quot;to pay the bills&quot; for the past .
 I would also like to mention that the Beslan tragedy is least of all something to do with figures. Whether you lose one life or 20 lives, these lives are just as valuable as when you lose 1,000. And when you lose people's lives, whenever you lose children, it is always a horrible tragedy.
 <i>Sergei Berezinsky
 St. Petersburg
 </i>
 <i>
Editor,
 </i>No words in any language can possibly bring adequate comfort to you in this time. But please know that there are people in the United Kingdom that are unbelievably angry with what has happened to you and our hearts are with you all. 
 
Please also know that the stupid comments of some of our politicians and &quot;opinion formers&quot; in the media are a million miles away from what ordinary people in the Britain are feeling.
 God bless you all.
 <i>The Jones Family
 Beckenham London
 </i>
 <i>
Editor,</i>
 Anything that wears a mask and hides behind it and terrorizes helpless women and children is the lowest life form on this planet. We dare not yield to these cowards. My wife and I send our deepest and most heartfelt sympathy to the families of Beslan on their tragedy and terrible loss. 
 <i>
Bill Rowe
 Paxton, Florida
 
Editor,
 </i>With a heavy heart and during these somber and somewhat difficult times, I would like to express my condolences and sympathies to the Russian people. It is difficult to comprehend the grief suffered by so many and it is even harder to understand how the lives of so many innocent people can be lost in such a tragic way. I have very close friends in St. Petersburg, and the events that unfolded in Beslan, have certainly bought about a feeling of concern for my Russian friends, for whom I care very much. 
 
On a more positive note, I have spent much time with my friends in Russia, and I can say that Russians possess a patriotic and unified bond, and I know that these attributes will only support the healing process of those who are suffering. Strength, support and love will ultimately emerge as the victor from such losses. The Russian spirit will not be taunted or broken by such acts.
 <i>Simon Hallam
 Hamburg, Germany
 
Editor,
 </i>I hope that the anger against Muslims is confined to the terrorists. Most Muslims do not condone what these people did, nor what al-Qaida and others are doing. 
 I think that these people just enjoy killing and are using an excuse to do so.
 <i>
Jean Beam
 Las Vegas, Nevada
 </i>
 <i>
Editor,
 </i>Unfortunately, I couldn't attend the meeting against terrorism in Palace Square [on Sept. 6] but believe me when I say that my soul and my thoughts are with all the families who lost their loved ones in Beslan. 
 Not even all the words we know can describe the loss and the tragedy that came down to all those families and especially to those children who saw their future vanishing.
 <i>
Marcos Costa
 Portugal, Lisbon
 </i>
 <i>
Editor,
 </i>I wish to convey my deepest condolences, sympathy and prayers to the families of the children, babies and victims of the hostage siege, and those fortunate enough to have survived, as well as the families of the victims and crewmembers of the two planes.
 
I also pray for the soldiers, police officials, volunteers, doctors, nurses involved during and after the siege. My thoughts and prayers go out to your president, Vladimir Putin, for the difficult times ahead.
 It is incomprehensible and sickening that anyone could do something so despicable as to target children and babies. Imagine someone actually getting up in the morning, calling a meeting and deciding (as a group) that this was supposed to be a good idea. What is worst, nobody got up and said, &quot;No, it is not a good idea for a million reasons.&quot; I am at a loss of words.
 <i>Ruth Spiegel
 Cape Town, South Africa</i>
 <strong>
<b>1,000th issue
 </strong><i></b>
In response to the 1,000th issue of The St. Petersburg Times published on Sept. 3
 

 
Editor
 </i>Objectivity and taking all sides into account are the main standards of journalists, even though journalists themselves often break these rules. Western journalists do not always uphold them, but it is even rarer in Russia to find publications that observe them.
 
Objectivity and independence are what sets apart The St. Petersburg Times from the majority of Russian newspapers.
 When The St. Petersburg Times started out, it seemed to many that its readership would be limited to foreign tourists visiting St. Petersburg. In recent years, the city has become more and more attractive for foreign guests. But businesses that are partly funded from foreign capital are growing even more dynamically. This is one achievement of your newspaper. It has been the guide for many foreign entrepreneurs to our city.
 In addition, The St. Petersburg Times has never been afraid to tell the truth, no matter how unpleasant that has been for those in power. The publication has grown together with businesses and has raised the number of tourists. That's how it should be.
 But, apart from that, the newspaper has become a source of information not only for foreigners, but also for homegrown St. Petersburgers. It is not unusual for it to fill in the gaps in access to information that were created by a Russian media that is not always of high quality.
 The media world of our city is far from perfect, but without The St. Petersburg Times, it would be even worse. By its very foundation, St, Petersburg is an international city. One hundred years ago, when it was the capital, dozens of newspapers in different languages were published here. The St. Petersburg Times is continuing and developing that tradition.
 I wish it success in doing so.
 <i>Alexander Gorshkov
 Fontanka.ru</i>
 
 <i>
Editor,
 </i>During the more than 16 months I have spent in St. Petersburg as a student, intern and tourist, the paper has always been an invaluable source of information. In its online edition it continues to be my window to beloved St. Petersburg and Russia from far away, providing an update on this dynamic and changing city. 
 
The product of your work is extraordinary. Thank you.
 May The St. Petersburg Times prosper for another 1000 issues and beyond.
 <i>Andrej Novak
 Berlin, Germany
 

 Editor,
 </i>Congratulations on your 1000th issue of The St. Petersburg Times. As a regular visitor to Russia and especially to St. Petersburg, I have become a regular reader of the paper, and now look at every issue online. 
 
Over the last five years, I have spent more than six months in St. Petersburg and often consider moving there. The St. Petersburg Times adds to my pleasure of visiting your lovely city. I only wish that I could actually get a copy here in the U.S. to read and enjoy. Outside of my home, St. Petersburg has become my favorite city, my home away from home. 
 I hope that you continue for many years in the future to produce the paper. You are making a wonderful contribution to bringing Russia closer to the West and the West closer to Russia.
 <i>Mark Taylor
 Santa Cruz, California
 </i>

TITLE: Insurgents Bombard Baghdad With Rockets
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD, Iraq - Insurgents hammered central Baghdad on Sunday with one of their most intense mortar and rocket barrages ever in the heart of the capital, heralding a day of violence that killed nearly 60 people nationwide as security appeared to spiral out of control.
 
At least 37 people were killed in Baghdad alone. Many of them died when a U.S. helicopter fired on a disabled U.S. Bradley fighting vehicle as Iraqis swarmed around it, cheering, throwing stones and waving the black and yellow sunburst banner of Iraq's most-feared terror organization.
 The dead from the helicopter strike included Arab television reporter Mazen al-Tumeizi, who screamed, &quot;I'm dying! I'm dying!&quot; as a cameraman recorded the chaotic scene. An Iraqi cameraman working for the Reuters news agency and an Iraqi freelance photographer for Getty Images were wounded.
 Maimed and lifeless bodies of young men and boys lay in the street as the stricken U.S. vehicle was engulfed in flames and thick black smoke.
 Across the country, the death toll Sunday was at least 59, according to figures from the Health Ministry, the Multinational Force command and local authorities.
 Nearly 200 people were wounded, more than half of them in Baghdad.
 Strong detonations again shook the center of Baghdad after sunset Sunday. There were no reports of damage or casualties.
 As the early morning barrage was under way in Baghdad, insurgents attacked the infamous U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison on the city's western edge. Several mortar shells exploded outside the complex about 6 a.m., and about 20 minutes later a pickup truck packed with artillery shells crashed through the chain-link fence on the outer perimeter.
 Marines opened fire and the vehicle exploded before reaching the main security wall, killing the driver, a military statement said. Seven people were later arrested, it said.
 Tawhid and Jihad, a militant group linked to al-Qaida and led by Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, said it carried out Sunday's coordinated campaign of violence in Baghdad.
 In an Internet statement, the group boasted that it holds the initiative in the Iraqi insurgency and possesses the &quot;capability to surprise the enemy and hit its strategic installations at the right time and place.&quot;
 The statement's source could not be verified, but the scope and intensity of the attacks raised serious questions about the state of security, which has deteriorated since the June 28 transfer of sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government.
 The violence continued on Monday when U.S. warplanes and artillery units bombed the Sunni insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, killing at least nine people.

TITLE: Huge Explosion 'Part of Hydro Project'
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEOUL, South Korea - A huge cloud that billowed up from North Korea on Thursday was an intentional part of a planned demolition for a hydroelectric project, the BBC quoted the country's foreign minister as saying Monday.
 
Foreign Minister Paek Nam Sun was responding to a request for information from British Foreign Office minister Bill Rammell, who is visiting Pyongyang, the British Broadcasting Corp. said on its web site.
 South Korean and U.S. officials had already ruled out a nuclear explosion but said the cause of the smoke was a mystery.
 The South Korean news agency Yonhap reported that the cloud, which it said was more than two miles in breadth, was due to a mammoth explosion. 
 It added that the blast was stronger than an April explosion that killed 160 people and injured an estimated 1,300 at a North Korean railway station when a train carrying oil and chemicals apparently hit power lines.
 The huge size of the explosion on Thursday, the 56th anniversary of the foundation of North Korea, had raised speculation that it might be a nuclear test. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said there was no indication it was.
 China's government, which has the closest relations with North Korea, had no immediate comment about the reported explosion.
 The United States, Russia, Japan, China and the two Koreas have held talks on North Korea's suspected nuclear weapons development, and they agreed to hold another round of negotiations in Beijing this month. No date has been set.
 The United States has pushed for North Korea to fully disclose all of its nuclear activities and allow outside monitoring before it receives any assistance. 
 North Korea wants energy aid, lifting of economic sanctions and removal from its inclusion on Washington's list of state sponsors of terrorism.
 On &quot;Fox News Sunday,&quot; Powell expressed skepticism North Korea would stage a nuclear test.
 The North Koreans &quot;know this would not be a sensible step for them to take,&quot; he said. &quot;And it is not just the reaction that they might see in the United States; it's their own neighbors.&quot;
 But another senior Bush administration official said on condition of anonymity that the United States has received indications North Korea might be trying to test a nuclear weapon.
 &quot;We're watching the indicators to see whether this is normal activity or whether something else is under way,&quot; the official said.
 Democrat John Kerry said that just the idea that the United States was thinking North Korea might test a nuclear weapon highlights a national security failure by Bush. Under Bush's watch, North Korea has advanced its nuclear program, he said.
 &quot;North Korea's nuclear program is well ahead of what Saddam Hussein was even suspected of doing-yet the president took his eye off the ball, wrongly ignoring this growing danger,&quot; Kerry said in a statement.
 On Saturday, North Korea said recent revelations that South Korea conducted secret nuclear experiments involving uranium and plutonium made the communist state more determined to pursue its own nuclear programs.
 The South Korean experiments in 1982 and 2000, which the South said did not reflect an attempt to develop weapons, are likely to further complicate six-nation talks aimed at dismantling North Korea's nuclear development.

TITLE: Hurricane Ivan Causes Havoc in the Caribbean
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands - Hurricane Ivan pummeled the Cayman Islands with fierce winds that ripped off roofs and floodwaters that swamped homes, then strengthened to an extremely dangerous Category 5 storm as it headed for western Cuba.
 
The hurricane, one of the strongest on record in the region, has killed at least 65 people across the Caribbean. About 1.3 million Cubans were evacuated from their homes, most taking refuge in the sturdier homes of relatives or neighbors ahead of its expected arrival on Monday.
 &quot;It's as bad as it can possibly get,&quot; Justin Uzzell, 35, said Sunday by telephone from his fifth-floor refuge in an office building on Grand Cayman island. &quot;It's a horizontal blizzard,&quot; he said, &quot;The air is just foam.&quot;
 Ivan's sustained winds weakened to 240 kilometers per hour as they neared the wealthy British territory, then intensified late Sunday as the hurricane headed for western Cuba with sustained winds nearing 260 kilometers per hour.
 Officials had yet to assess damage, but Donnie Ebanks, deputy chairman of the Cayman Islands' National Hurricane Committee, estimated between a quarter and half of the 15,000 homes in Grand Cayman suffered some damage.
 Ivan was projected to pass near or over Cuba's western end by Monday afternoon or evening. 
 The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said the storm surge could reach 8 meters with dangerous, battering waves.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Airline Seeks Bankruptcy
 </b>

ARLINGTON, Virginia - US Airways Group Inc., the United States' seventh largest airline, filed for bankruptcy protection Sunday for the second time in two years. 
 The company's president vowed to continue restructuring the airline into a low-cost carrier during the bankruptcy process.
 "We have come too far and accomplished too much to simply stop the process and not succeed," said Bruce Lakefield, US Airways' president and chief executive. "A restructured US Airways with low costs and low fares will be a dynamic competitor."
 The Chapter 11 filing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Alexandria came after US Airways was unable to obtain $800 million in annual cost cuts from its workers' unions.
 
 
<b>Migrant Flow Irks Italy
 </b>

ROME (AP) - Italian authorities found a boatload of almost 500 illegal immigrants traveling from North Africa to Sicily, prompting the government to press Libya for more cooperation in fighting the flow of unlawful arrivals there. 
 Dozens of illegal immigrants reach Italian shores most days during the summer, but the latest arrival near the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa was particularly large. Italy has said most of the immigrants leave from Libya, and it has already agreed on several measures with Tripoli to fight illegal immigration.
 The Foreign Ministry said the Libyan ambassador to Italy had been summoned for a Monday morning meeting "in relation to the new, massive influx of illegal immigrants."
 
 
 
<b>Hong Kong Elections
 </b>

HONG KONG (AP) - Pro-democracy opposition figures gained more clout in Hong Kong's legislature with three new seats, but they fell short of expectations and resumed grumbling Monday about a system they call unfairly rigged. 
 Critics quickly took aim at problems such as polling stations that ran short of ballot boxes on Sunday, prompting some people to give up without voting, and the Hong Kong electoral system that gives special interest groups the right to pick 30 of the territory's 60 lawmakers. 
 Analysts had predicted the pro-democracy camp could claim 25 to 28 seats, but it got just 25, according to official results Monday. Pro-democracy politicians held 22 seats in the last legislature. 
 
 
<b>Italy Regrets Awards
 </b>

ROME (AP) - Italian media grumbled Sunday over the failure of a hometown film to win big prizes at the Venice Film Festival, where the British movie "Vera Drake" by director Mike Leigh grabbed the best-picture award. 
 "Venice disappoints our cinema," Rome's La Repubblica newspaper said in a front-page headline, noting that the jury didn't give a single prize to "Le Chiavi di Casa" ("The House Keys") by Italy's Gianni Amelio.
 Twenty-two films from around the world were in competition for the Golden Lion awards handed out Saturday night. 
 "Vera Drake" won best picture and the best actress category for Imelda Staunton. The runner-up - Spanish film "Mar Adentro" by Alejandro Amenabar - took home both the Silver Lion Jury Grand Prix and best actor award for Javier Bardem. 



TITLE: St. Petersburg's Kuznetsova Takes U.S. Open Crown
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: NEW YORK - By all rights, St. Petersburg's Svetlana Kuznetsova should have been a cycling star: Her brother and parents all won or coached others to Olympic medals and world titles in that sport. Kuznetsova gave it a shot, hated it, and moved on to tennis.
 
What a brilliant career move. Still just 19, with braces on her teeth, she's the U.S. Open champion, the third Russian woman in a row to win a major.
 Pounding ferocious forehands and covering the baseline with the muscular legs of a Tour de France rider, Kuznetsova overwhelmed Yelena Dementyeva 6-3, 7-5 Saturday night in the American Grand Slam's first all-Russian final.
 &quot;When I played the first game, I was, 'Wow, there are so many people out here.' I was nervous,&quot; said Kuznetsova, who had never got further than the quarterfinals at a major before. &quot;This morning, I was nervous. I was stiff. But something inside of me was telling me I would be fine.&quot;
 As of four months ago, no Russian woman had ever won a major, but Anastasia Myskina beat Dementyeva in the French Open final, and Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon. Russians occupy half of the top 10 spots in the rankings.
 &quot;Russia is just a powerful country,&quot; said Kuznetsova, the youngest Open champion since Serena Williams won aged 17 in 1999. &quot;There's competition between us.&quot;
 Until now, Kuznetsova probably was the least-known of her country's crop of rising stars, instead most famous for being Martina Navratilova's former doubles partner. They won five titles as a pair and were the runners-up at the 2003 Open.
 How anonymous is Kuznetsova? After a practice session 1 1/2 hours before the match, she walked across the National Tennis Center grounds without getting asked for autographs or photos. She might as well have been another fan in a gray sweatshirt, milling around, waiting for the U.S. Open final to start.
 Indeed, during the on-court trophy presentation after the match, U.S. Tennis Association president Alan Schwartz mispronounced her name before correcting himself.
 The evening began on a somber note, with 20,524 spectators joining in a moment of silence to remember victims of Sept. 11, 2001, and the recent terrorist attack at a school in Russia. Kuznetsova and Dementyeva both wore black ribbons in memory of the hundreds of Russian victims, and they walked out from the locker room wearing blue baseball caps with &quot;FDNY&quot; and &quot;NYPD&quot; to honor New York's police and fire workers.
 The American flag atop the stadium was at half-staff, and a 15-meter flag was unfurled on court before the match. Dementyeva asked the crowd to observe another moment of silence after the match.
 &quot;It's a great day for me as a tennis player,&quot; Dementyeva said. &quot;It's a day to remember. You lost hundreds of people on Sept. 11, 2001 - Sept. 1, 2004, we lost hundreds of children.&quot;
 When play began, Kuznetsova was brilliant, striking winner after winner on the forehand side. She finished with 23 from that wing alone. Dementyeva normally has just as good a forehand but was reduced to chasing shots on defense and wound up with a total of just seven winners overall - 27 fewer than Kuznetsova.
 &quot;I was playing in pain these two weeks,&quot; said Dementyeva, slowed by an injury to her left leg which was heavily wrapped.
 She again was undone by some key double-faults. Her total of serving miscues wasn't nearly as high as earlier in the tournament, but she was broken in every game in which she had at least one of her four double-faults. And unlike Dementyeva's previous opponents at the Open, including new No. 1 Amelie Mauresmo of France and former No. 1 Jennifer Capriati, Kuznetsova stepped up to hammer forehand returns, making her opponent pay for serves around 120 kilometers per hour.
 &quot;Serving like this, I can beat a lot of players. But Svetlana has a great return,&quot; Dementyeva said.
 Dementyeva broke Kuznetsova twice in the second set, but then began the next game with a double-fault each time en route to ceding the advantage right back. The second time, Dementyeva ended the game with a double-fault, too.
 When Kuznetsova held in the next game to make it 4-all, Dementyeva's left leg appeared to buckle a bit while she reached for a backhand, and she went down on that knee. 
 Dementyeva was slow getting to a shot in the next game, but she somehow managed to fight off a break point with a backhand that caught the baseline.
 But at 5-5, Dementyeva double-faulted to break point, then sailed a forehand wide. Kuznetsova served the match out, then climbed into the stands for celebratory hugs, including with Navratilova and coach Sergio Casal.
 Her father sent her to work with Casal in Barcelona from her native St. Petersburg when Kuznetsova was 15 - sometimes she'll yell at herself on court in Spanish. 
 At 16 years old, Kuznetsova booked herself a place in the main draw of the Australian Open. Aged 17 she won her first WTA title in Bali, Indonesia. Her success there was two-fold: she not only won the singles, but also the doubles with Spanish star Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario. In the fall of 2002 Russian tennis head Shamil Tarpishchev expressed the opinion that Kuznetsova would, along with Dinara Safina, soon be among the five best players in the world. His predictions are gradually being proved right. 
 Kuznetsova's father Alexander Kuznetsov coached five Olympic and world cycling champions, including Kuznetsova's mother Galina Tsareva, and her brother won a silver in cycling at the 1996 Atlanta Games.
 &quot;They're all cycling,&quot; Kuznetsova said. &quot;My dad decided: 'She had to do something different.&quot;'
 She did try cycling but gave it up after her second race. She hadn't had much success in tennis's Grand Slam tournaments until this U.S. Open, losing in the first round at both the Australian Open and Wimbledon this year. Dementyeva did that, too, but she had a great run at the U.S. Open until Saturday night.
 Asked what she loves about tennis, Kuznetsova said: &quot;I can express myself on the court. It's like a singer singing a song from the heart.&quot;
 <i>(SPT, AP) </i>

TITLE: Latin Duo Take Doubles Again
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Virginia Ruano Pascual and Paola Suarez won their third straight U.S. Open doubles title by beating singles champion Svetlana Kuznetsova and Yelena Likhovtseva 6-4, 7-5 Sunday. 
 
Ruano Pascual, of Spain, and Suarez, of Argentina, won three Grand Slam doubles championships this year, raising their career total to seven. They've played in 10 of the past 11 major finals; the only blip was a loss to Cara Black and Rennae Stubbs in this year's Wimbledon semifinals. 
 Serving for the match at 5-4, Suarez double-faulted to love-40, then sailed a shot long to get broken to 5-all. But Likhovtseva was broken at love right back, and Ruano Pascual served it out. 
 It's the first time in the Open era, which began in 1968, that a pair won three straight women's doubles titles at the U.S. Open. Last year, Ruano Pascual and Suarez beat Kuznetsova and Martina Navratilova for the title. In 2002, they defeated Yelena Dementyeva and Janette Husarova.

TITLE: New Rankings Put Mauresmo, Myskina Top
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Amelie Mauresmo became just the second player to reach No. 1 in the WTA rankings without winning a Grand Slam title, while U.S. Open champion Svetlana Kuznetsova rose to a career-high No. 6 on Monday. At No. 9, Kuznetsova was the American Grand Slam's lowest-seeded champion in the Open era. 
 Mauresmo rose from No. 2 despite losing in the quarterfinals at Flushing Meadows. She's been to only one major final - the 1999 Australian Open. The other woman to top the rankings without winning a Slam, Kim Clijsters, had just lost the French Open final to Henin-Hardenne when she first got to No. 1, then was also the runner-up at the U.S. Open and Australian Open. 
 &quot;Hopefully, now the Grand Slams will follow,&quot; Mauresmo said last week. 
 Formerly top-ranked Justine Henin-Hardenne, who lost in the fourth round of the Open, dropped to No. 4. 
 Reigning French Open champion Anastasia Myskina moved up one place to a career-high No. 2, followed by Lindsay Davenport, Henin-Hardenne and U.S. Open runner-up Yelena Dementyeva. 
 Clijsters, out since the spring with a left wrist injury, is No. 7, followed by Jennifer Capriati, Wimbledon champion Maria Sharapova, and Serena Williams. Venus Williams is No. 12. 
 Roger Federer's U.S. Open title, making him the first man since 1988 to win three majors in a season, allowed him to double his lead over No. 2 Andy Roddick in the ATP entry rankings. U.S. Open runner-up Lleyton Hewitt moved up two places to No. 3.

TITLE: Federer's Performance is Almost Flawless
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - Walking off the court after being overwhelmed by Roger Federer, Lleyton Hewitt gently tapped the Swiss star on the stomach. 
 
That was about the only way Hewitt could touch him. 
 In a display of sheer dominance, Federer won the U.S. Open final 6-0, 7-6 (3), 6-0 Sunday by trouncing an opponent who had not yet lost a single set in the tournament. 
 Federer became the first man to win three majors in a year since Mats Wilander in 1988. 
 Having also won the Australian Open and Wimbledon, Federer's lone Grand Slam miss came in a third-round loss in the French Open to three-time champion Gustavo Kuerten. 
 &quot;Traveling the world, being No. 1 in tennis, isn't so bad,&quot; he said. &quot;I'd like to be a superstar.&quot;
 This marked the first time there were a pair of shutout sets in the event's title match since 1884. It has happened in a Grand Slam final just four times overall - it occurred twice in the French Open. 
 Federer finished it off with one final forehand winner, a blazer down the line. He let loose a whoop, raised both arms, fell to his knees and rolled over. 
 Then it hit him, what he'd done. 
 &quot;I think the first moment is when I was lying on my back and I saw the lights of the stadium and I thought, 'This is unbelievable.'&quot; 
 Asked on the court at Arthur Ashe Stadium what more he could have accomplished, he smiled and offered, &quot;That's all I got.&quot;
 A day after Svetlana Kuznetsova swept out Yelena Dementyeva of an all-Russian final for the women's title (see page 23), Federer also quickly got it over with. 
 He did it without a lot of fanfare - in a two-week tournament sometimes marked by blown calls and the arguing and pointing that followed, Federer efficiently went about his business. 
 At 23, Federer improved to 4-0 in major finals, making him the first player in the Open era - from 1968 on - to start out that way. And he raised more questions about whether he'd someday match Pete Sampras' mark of 14 Grand Slam singles titles. 
 &quot;I'm still all the way in the beginning,&quot; he said. &quot;I hope I can keep it up as long as I can. Once I get sick and tired of everything, you never know when that day will come.&quot; 
 The fourth-seeded Hewitt had won his only two Slam finals, including the 2001 Open, and was trying to become the first man to win the Open without losing a set since Neale Fraser in 1960. Hewitt took a 16-match winning streak into the afternoon. 
 &quot;Just fell one short,&quot; Hewitt said. &quot;He didn't give me too many free points out there.&quot; 
 The Australian began the day with an 8-5 lifetime mark against Federer. But Federer had beaten him at Wimbledon and the Australian Open, and right away showed he intended to do it again. 
 Federer won 24 of 29 points in a first set that lasted all of 18 minutes. Not since 1903 had there been a &quot;bagel&quot; - tennis talk for a 6-0 whipping - in the opening set. 
 &quot;It was a perfect start,&quot; he said. &quot;Tough for Lleyton, obviously, but for me, a great start.&quot;
 Hewitt, 23, is considered the best returner among current players, but he rarely could pin Federer. Instead, Federer pitched a complete game - powerful forehands, precise backhands, penetrating serve. 
 As evidence: Federer topped Hewitt in winners (40-12), aces (11-1), and service breaks (7-1), and took the point on 31 of 35 trips to the net. 
 Federer became the first player to win consecutive Slam events since Andre Agassi took the 1999 U.S. Open and 2000 Australian Open. Agassi tried to stop Federer at Flushing Meadows without success, losing in five sets in a quarterfinal match that was suspended by rain.
 Federer earned $1 million for the victory. 
 The prestige of winning three majors was pretty valuable, too. 
 &quot;It's an incredible effort, what he's done,&quot; Hewitt said. &quot;I don't think people probably realize how hard it is.&quot;
 Rod Laver was the last man to get the Grand Slam, back in 1969. For now, matching Wilander's mark was plenty for Federer. 
 &quot;He's a little better than everyone else at everything right now,&quot; Wilander said after Federer was done. 
 &quot;Physically and mentally he has the advantage over the other players. At the moment, I don't see anyone who can beat him.&quot;

TITLE: Singh Beats Local Hero Weir, Canadian Public Distraught
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: OAKVILLE, Ontario - Vijay Singh won another dramatic duel and earned another No. 1 ranking - Public Enemy No. 1 in Canada - for beating Mike Weir in a playoff at the Canadian Open and denying the fans a celebration they had been wanting for 50 years. 
 
Don't blame Singh. 
 Weir had three putts to become the first Canadian in 50 years to win his national title - a 10-footer for birdie on the 72nd hole, a 25-footer for eagle on No. 18 in the playoff, and a 5-footer on No. 17 at the second playoff hole. 
 He missed them all, and finally ran out of luck. 
 Weir pulled his tee shot on No. 18 for the third playoff hole, laid up and then hit his approach in the water. Some 25,000 fans let out a collective groan, and gave begrudging applause when Singh three-putted from the fringe for par. 
 &quot;I feel for Mike,&quot; Singh said. &quot;That was the one person I didn't want to beat.&quot;
 Maybe when the Canadians get over the loss, they'll realize who won their national championship. 
 Singh closed with a 69 for his seventh victory of the year - only Tiger Woods (twice), Jack Nicklaus (twice) and Johnny Miller have won that often since 1950. 
 More importantly for the 41-year-old Fijian, the $810,000 he won Sunday at Glen Abbey gives him just short of $8.7 million for the season, allowing him to close in on Woods' single-season record of $9.1 million. 
 Despite a sore left knee all week, despite playing the 11th hole in 7 over par, and despite trailing Weir by two shots with three holes to play, Singh again found a way to get it done. 
 He took over the No. 1 ranking from Woods last week, and showed it's in good hands. 
 Ultimately, however, this will be remembered as one Weir gave away.