SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1023 (90), Tuesday, November 23, 2004
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TITLE: Ukraine
 Divided
 By Poll
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: KIEV - Tens of thousands of people packed central Kiev on Monday to protest what they called a rigged presidential election, while the Kiev city council and other municipal administrations refused to recognize the official results giving Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych an insurmountable lead over opposition candidate Victor Yushchenko.
 
The Central Elections Commission announced that Yanukovych led Yushchenko by 49.42 percent of the vote to 46.69 percent, with 99.14 percent of ballots tallied, although an exit poll released immediately after polls closed Sunday night put Yushchenko in the lead by 54 percent to 43 percent.
 Yushchenko called for countrywide protests over the official results, while his ally Yulia Timoshenko urged supporters to go on strike.
 "Remain where you are," Yushchenko told a crowd of some 100,000 people on the central Independent Square. "Tens of thousands of people are on their way here from all parts of Ukraine on carts, cars, planes and trains. Our action is only beginning."
 "I want to firmly state to you that you and I have won," Yushchenko said. "I want to state to you, Mr. Prime Minister, that you will be pushed out through an honest vote."
 He appealed to the West to take note of the events in Ukraine.
 Yanukovych said the majority of voters had backed him and criticized the call for public protests. "This small group of radicals has taken upon itself the goal of splitting Ukraine," he said on Ukrainian television.
 President Vladimir Putin, who openly backed Yanukovych, sent him his congratulations late Monday - even though the Central Elections Commission has yet to declare a winner.
 "The battle was hard-fought, but open and honest, and his victory was convincing," Interfax reported from Brazil, where Putin was on an official visit.
 Putin also spoke with outgoing President Leonid Kuchma by telephone and they agreed to meet soon in St. Petersburg, Putin's spokesman Alexei Gromov said, Interfax reported.
 The European Union, the United States and independent observers denounced Sunday's election as seriously flawed. (See story, page 3)
 Yushchenko called for a special session of parliament to discuss the election, and lawmakers agreed to meet at 2 p.m. Tuesday.
 Timoshenko, a prominent opposition leader, urged protesters to move to the parliament building at 10 a.m. Tuesday. She said that if parliament does not back Yushchenko, his supporters will install Yushchenko as president by force.
 The overall mood on Kreshchatik, the main thoroughfare, and Independence Square was upbeat Monday evening. At the square, two large screens with speakers were installed to transmit Ukrainian pop songs to the crowd.
 Yushchenko's supporters set up a tent camp on Kreshchatik to help them stay warm in the freezing temperatures. The camp site, with 200 tents able to accommodate five people each, was fenced off with a rope.
 Yushchenko told his supporters to stay in the square overnight to protect the camp.
 "We have received information that authorities want to destroy our tent city at 3 a.m. ... At 2 o'clock there should be more of us than now," Yushchenko said, Reuters reported.
 "We must defend every chestnut tree, every tent. We must show to the authorities we are here for a long time. ... There must be more and more of us here every hour."
 Police patrols were nowhere to be seen at the camp site in the evening and it was Yushchenko's own supporters who maintained order there.
 Some of the tents had leaflets pinned to their sides with pictures of a girl placing a carnation on the shield of a police commando with a note that said "Don't Shoot."
 A constant stream of people arrived at the square to be registered by Yushchenko's supporters and then accommodated in the camp. Inside the camp, activists were distributing food and warm clothes.
 Many of the newcomers had traveled to Kiev by bus, train and car from Yushchenko's strongholds in western Ukraine, including Ivano-Frankovsk, Volyn and Lviv.
 "I am here because I am fed up with injustice, " said Maya, who studies sociology at a university in Lutsk and comes from the town of Lybomyl near Ukraine's border with Poland. "There are many unemployed in our town. Some college graduates cannot find work, while some guys who have not gone to college own stores and drive around in Mercedes cars. I hope Yushchenko will end this injustice."
 Maya, who would not give her last name, said she will stay until the end. "My heart is singing and we are prepared to win," she said.
 One of the participants said he had encountered "provocateurs" in the crowd who told him and others that a peaceful protest would not bring any results and called on them to go out and seize buildings. He would not give his name.
 Nikolai Abraimov, 56, a retired military officer, arrived by bus from the western Ukrainian city of Chernigov and joined the volunteers maintaining law and order.
 Abraimov said he hopes the Verkhovnaya Rada will convene and vote to fire all members of the Central Elections Commission and appoint new members who will count the votes correctly.
 Earlier Monday, Timoshenko urged students and workers to leave school and their jobs and protest by blocking roads, railroads and airports. Roshen, a leading chocolate maker, said it would close its factories for a week in protest, the Unian news agency reported.
 "We are starting a victorious march today," Timoshenko, flanked by Yushchenko, told the rally on the square. "We won't go without power."
 Four other sizable cities - Lviv, Ternopil, Vinnytsa and Ivano-Frankivsk - announced they recognized Yushchenko as president, news agencies reported.
 The Interior Ministry and Prosecutor General's Office warned that they would act quickly to put down any lawlessness. "We appeal to the organizers of mass protests to assume responsibility for their possible consequences," they said in a joint statement, Interfax reported.


TITLE: Uproar at Zhirinovsky's Visit to Starovoitova's Grave
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Vladimir Zhirinovsky's bodyguards on Friday ripped open a wooden and plastic structure built by friends of slain Deputy Galina Starovoitova over her grave to keep him away.
 
Zhirinovsky, the flamboyant State Duma deputy speaker who seems to enjoy controversy, was in St. Petersburg to testify at the trial of seven suspects accused of participating in the 1998 assassination of the liberal Duma deputy.
 His action came on the eve of the sixth anniversary of Starovoitova's murder on Nov. 20, 1998. A memorial service was held Saturday in the Alexander Nevsky Church.
 Zhirinovsky entered the tent and set up a table beside Starovoitova's grave. He then sat on a stool, drank vodka and discussed Starovoitova with two dozen reporters.
 "She and I held different views," Zhirinovsky said. "She was fighting against the KGB, and where is she now? As for KGB, it was, it is and it will be."
 He left a bottle of Zhirinovsky cologne by the grave, calling it a New Year's gift.
 Starovoitova's friends were outraged by the behavior of Zhirinovsky, whom they consider an enemy of Starovoitova. Most suspects arrested in her death have been linked to Zhirinovsky's Liberal Democratic Party, or LDPR.
 "He came here, destroyed everything and left the table," said Ruslan Linkov, Starovoitova's assistant who was injured in the assassination. "After today's [Friday's] court hearing we will go there to clean up the place," he said.
 "It is in Zhirinovsky's spirit to do such things, because this is the man who publicly beats up women in the State Duma or on a street, where he did the same to a female journalist," he said. "I strongly believe he there is no place for him by the grave of Galina Starovoitova."
 Liberal parties also denounced the visit. "This is cynical, and this cynicism is typical of Zhirinovsky," said Maxim Reznik, head of the St. Petersburg branch of Yabloko.
 Speaking outside the court, Zhirinovsky accused Linkov of working with Western intelligence and providing the killers with information on Starovoitova's route from the airport to her apartment building, where she was shot on the staircase.
 "I believe he should face criminal charges for participating in the assassination," Zhirinovsky said.
 His claims are not supported by prosecutors, whose investigation indicates that the killers monitored Starovoitova's movements for several months, installing eavesdropping devices on her staircase and meeting all trains arriving from Moscow.
 Zhirinovsky was asked in court to explain why most of the suspects have been linked to his party and to Mikhail Glushchenko, a former LDPR Duma deputy who was named by one witness as the person who ordered the killing.
 "There are 600,000 party members all over the country. I can't look over all of the party's IDs," Zhirinovsky said. "It might have happened that somebody stole a blank ID to use it in some way.
 He added: "LDPR is not involved in this. Starovoitova and I had different point of views, but our differences remained at a political level."
 Zhirinovsky speculated that Staro-voitova's murder might have been organized by commercial interests worried that the Duma had set up a commission to review the scandalous privatizations of the early and mid-1990s.
 Then-Duma Speaker Gennady Seleznyov put Yury Shutov, a former St. Petersburg lawmaker, in charge of overseeing the commission's work in St. Petersburg. Shutov is now in jail awaiting trial on charges of organizing contract killings.
 "He [Shutov] was meeting with companies and offering them different things in exchange for something, and Starovoitova didn't like that," Zhirinovsky said.
 The detention of all suspects, which had been due to expire Nov. 30, was extended until Feb. 28, Interfax reported.

TITLE: Institute That Acts as Venue for Free Speech Faces Eviction
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The Regional Press Institute that for almost a decade has been a center for free speech has been asked to leave the premises it has rented in St. Petersburg House of Journalists for 11 years.
 
The institute has been a venue for independent analysts, politicians, journalists and environmentalists to express their views on current events and critics of the eviction see forces that want to silence them behind the move.
 In a letter signed by Andrei Bakunin, head of the St. Petersburg Union of Journalists and dated Nov. 11, the institute was notified that it should leave the building at 70 Nevsky Prospekt by Dec. 5, said Anna Sharogradskaya, the head of the institute.
 The letter was put on her desk last Wednesday while she was on a business trip, she said Monday. 
 That was less than three weeks before the institute's rental contract expires, despite the contract stipulating that any request to leave the premises should give three months' notice, she said. 
 "The most important point is our activity, that we have worked with journalists and for journalists for 11 years and I believe there should have been some serious reasons to justify issuing such an order to force us leave the premises in a rush, without talking to me," Sharogradskaya said in a telephone interview. 
 "Our institute represents a place where different opinions can be expressed," she added. "We understand the constitutional regulation on freedom of speech literally and try to fulfill it." 
 "I have made remarks that could have irritated certain people, who have the power to take the kind of decisions that could force a person who is not independent enough and who, probably, tried to resist somehow, to throw us out of the House of Journalists," Sharogradskaya said.
 However, Bakunin said the institute was being ejected for financial reasons and that he wants to organize the House of Journalists so that it makes a profit. 
 "Letters were sent to all tenant organizations in the House of Journalists and the Regional Press Institute is just one of them," he said Monday in a telephone interview. "This is being done in order to find an investor that would get busy with this building."
 "This is doesn't mean they will definitely be asked to leave the building right away, but rather that they sign some short-term rental agreements, for three months, for instance, until an investor is found," Bakunin said. "Nobody would put them out on the street with a stick and a bag behind their shoulders."
 "This is purely economic, but it looks like this is fashionable to look for a political reason in such cases ... otherwise life wouldn't be that interesting," he said.
 In its more than decade of operations, the Regional Press Institute has became known as a place where open-minded journalists who fell foul of officials or lost their job after a confrontation with authorities could find support. 
 The institute was almost the only venue where political opponents of Valentina Matviyenko, the Kremlin-backed candidate in last year's gubernatorial elections, could talk about violations after the city media fell under almost total control of representatives of the presidential administration. 
 Matviyenko went on to become city governor.
 Former vice-governor Anna Mar-kova, the strongest opponent of Matviyenko, was able to speak at news conferences run by the institutes about the battle she faced getting coverage.
 But Markova had little to say about the institute on Monday.
 "I haven't heard about it and can't say anything," Markova said in a telephone interview. 
 City Hall's Property Committee, which owns the building and has an agreement that lets the St. Petersburg Union of Journalists operate the building, said the city government has no involvement in the possible eviction of the press institute.
 "This is between themselves," Tatyana Prosvirina, spokeswoman for the property committee said Monday in a telephone interview. "The building is operated by the St. Petersburg Union of Journalists. 
 "Now they are looking for an investor to provide its renovation," she added.
 But people who worked with Sharogradskaya do not believe that commercial reasons are behind the decision.
 "The Regional Press Institute is, in fact, the last place left [in the city] to provide public freedom for political organizations and parties in St. Petersburg that want to say things to citizens that would not be published in the media," Yuly Rybakov, local human rights advocate and former State Duma deputy, said Monday in a telephone interview. 
 "The termination of the rental contract is a political action undertaken in order to stamp out the last spark of freedom in the city," he said.
 "Sharogradskaya was always critical in her comments about the governor [Matviyenko], was against her coming to City Hall and her position has certainly not been forgotten," he added. "Obviously this is a politically motivated decision to shut down the last stage where democrats would have been able to say at least something." 
 Oleg Bodrov, a member of Green World, a local environmental organization, who has repeatedly used the institute to present his views sounded shocked after being told he news. 
 "I believe the Regional Press Institute is a window that allows points of views on any problems in Russian society to be expressed," he said. "It is the stage to talk about problems with nuclear power stations, about violations of human rights.
 "I think it is another step to destroy democracy which has been being done by the president [Vladimir Putin]," Bodrov said.

TITLE: Seven Guilty
 Of Murder
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A jury in the St. Petersburg city court found guilty all seven suspects charged with killing a five-year-old Tajik girl last year, Interfax reported Monday.
 
Another girl, aged seven, was seriously injured in the attack.
 The jury ruled that all of the suspects are guilty of murder, attempted murder and of committing a serious physical assault, the report said.
 The accused will be sentenced in the first half of December, court officials said.
 Four of the suspects are in custody and three others have signed papers not to leave the city during the trial, which are closed to the public.
 The group of suspects have been found guilty of attacking a camp of Tajik Roma community next to the Dachnoye railway station in the suburbs if St. Petersburg on Sept. 21 last year. The attackers, shouting nationalistic slogans, beat up two women carrying the children with chains and sticks.

TITLE: Observers Say Fraud,
 Abuse Widespread
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: KIEV - Turnout at many polling stations was implausibly high. Absentee ballots were cast multiple times. Disappearing ink made ballots invalid.
 
These are a few of the hundreds of violations reported by voters and independent observers at Ukraine's runoff election, which Western and local observers denounced Monday as fraught with fraud and abuse.
 "It is now apparent that there was a concerted and forceful program of election day fraud and abuse enacted with the leadership or cooperation of authorities," said Richard Lugar, a senior U.S. senator who was sent by President George W. Bush to monitor the vote.
 Observers from a mission representing the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and NATO said the Ukrainian government had done nothing to act on recommendations made after the first round on Oct. 31.
 "With an even heavier heart than three weeks ago, I have to repeat the message from the first round: This election did not meet a considerable number of international standards for democratic elections," mission head Bruce George told reporters in Kiev.
 The European Union's 25 foreign ministers summoned Ukrainian ambassadors to national capitals to protest the way the vote was handled. 
 Voter turnout exceeded 100 percent at many polling stations in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Lugansk that voted predominantly for Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych in the first round, opposition challenger Viktor Yushchenko said.
 "In the Donetsk region, turnout at every third polling station was more than 100 percent," Yushchenko told a rally in Kiev. Both regions are located in eastern Ukraine, which are led by pro-Yanukovych governors and where Yanukovych has strong public support.
 The Central Elections Commission's own reports raised doubts about their plausibility. For example, turnout in the Donetsk region, where Yanukovych is from and where he once served as governor, was put at 96.23 percent.
 Yushchenko said the official results from several polling stations in Donetsk and Lugansk showed that up to 99 percent of voters picked Yanukovych. 
 The Central Elections Commission said late Monday that Yanukovych received 96.20 percent of the vote in Donetsk and 92.72 percent in Lugansk.
 Reporters and observers were denied access to many polling stations in the pro-Yanukovych regions.
 The Central Elections Commission's announcement last week that that the number of registered voters shot up by 750,000, to a total of 37.6 million shows the scale of the vote-rigging, said Andrei Duda of the Union of Ukrainian Voters, a nongovernmental organization that monitored the election.
 The commission revised the number after correcting lists of voters from the first round in this nation of 47.4 million. 
 Yushchenko said five times more absentee ballots than in the first round were distributed across the country.
 
 <i>
Saradzhyan reported from Moscow, and staff writer Oksana Yablokova contributed to this report from Moscow. </i>

TITLE: Museum Gives Kalashnikov Experience
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: The city's Artillery Museum on Monday began offering visitors a chance to get their hands on the famous Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifle.
 
From Wednesdays to Sundays at 15.30 sharp, a guide-turned-military instructor is teaching how to assemble the gun.
 The price of the training is part of the entrance fee, which is 200 rubles for a foreigner, 50 rubles for a Russian. Students get a discount.
 The opportunity will be offered in the Mikhail Kalashnikov Hall, which opened as a new permanent display on Monday. It features rare samples of Kalashnikov's invention, a reconstruction of his office, a stand of foreign guns inspired by the AK-47, and a selection of presents he has received from his admirers around the world. 
 &quot;The Kalashnikov has become an international legend,&quot; said Yevgeny Yurkevich, a junior researcher at the museum. &quot;Now, it is possible for everyone to feel it in their hands.&quot; 
 Kalashnikov, who turned 85 on Nov. 10, attended the opening of the display, said he is proud of his weapon's tremendous international success.
 &quot;I am often asked if I have any remorse because so many people have been killed by my guns,&quot; Kalashnikov said at a news conference before the exhibition's opening. &quot;But I developed this gun to defend my country, and I don't have nightmares about people being murdered with it.&quot;
 A combination of simplicity and reliability is what makes the Kalashnikov gun a long-term favorite across the globe, said Pyotr Goreglyad, a senior researcher and head of the museum's Russian arms fund. &quot;It is so remarkably simple and versatile. No modifications are required for the desert, tropical jungles or the North Pole.&quot;
 Lyudmila Glazunova, the project's curator and head of the exhibition's department, called Kalashnikov a genius. 
 &quot;His gun has been in use for more than 50 years, which seems an endless time in the era of high technologies, when computers get outdated within 10 years' time, &quot; she said.
 The museum boasts Russia's largest collection of Kalashnikov guns and memorabilia, with several items donated by the inventor himself.
 A submachine gun No.2, dating from 1942, is the only surviving sample of an experimental weapon that Kalashnikov developed during World War II. &quot;Its predecessor, the submachine gun no.1, didn't survive at all,&quot; Goreglyad said
 The legendary AK-47, which can now be found everywhere in the world, and is said to have exceeded 50 million copies globally, was once a Soviet military top secret. The exhibition shows for the first time a journal of records of the AK-47 field trials.
 &quot;During the first years, everything was classified,&quot; Glazunova said. &quot;Although the gun was already being used, no images or descriptions of the gun could be found in the print media or film.&quot;
 Kalashnikov said he would like the display to be visited by as many young people as possible as it could help encourage their patriotic spirit. &quot;Maybe then they would get more respect for the feeble, helpless, poorly dressed pensioners they see everyday,&quot; he said. &quot;These feeble people once saved the country.&quot;

TITLE: Bomb Probe
 Hits a Snag
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - The investigation into the Aug. 29 bombing at Moscow's Ryzhskaya metro station has hit a snag as medical examiners said DNA tests showed the alleged suicide bomber was not Chechen resident Roza Nagayeva, whom prosecutors had previously named as the chief suspect. 
 
It is unclear whether prosecutors know the identity of the woman, one of 10 people who died in the bombing.
 &quot;Unambiguously, it was not Roza Nagayeva,&quot; the head of the forensic laboratory at the Health's Ministry Center for Forensic Examinations, Pavel Ivanov, said by telephone Monday.
 Investigators had earlier believed that the woman was Roza Nagayeva, saying that her remains showed distinguishing marks consistent with Nagayeva's medical records.
 They said that part of the bomber's head recovered from the scene was scarred, while Nagayeva should have also had scars on her scalp after undergoing brain surgery at a Rostov-on-Don hospital in 2000.
 Investigators had earlier said they had evidence that four Chechen women - Nagayeva, her sister Amanat, Satsita Dzhebrikhanova and Maryam Taburova - traveled from Grozny to Moscow in August with the intention of carrying out terrorist attacks. The four women were said to have worked as retail traders at a Grozny market.
 Prosecutors said Amanat Nagayeva and Dzebrikhanova blew up two airborne passengers jets on Aug. 24, killing 90 people.
 A composite sketch of the fourth woman named by prosecutors, Taburova, was posted all around Moscow.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Nuclear Waste Store
 </b>

MURMANSK (SPT) - Friday this week a new storage for waste from nuclear icebreakers will start being built in Murmansk, Interfax reported last week quoting regional sea shipping company.
 The storage facility will be built on the territory of an existing Atomflot technical repair base with the participation of a British company Crown Agents, which is financed by the British government.
 The cost of the project is estimated Pound15 million ($28 million) and is provided under an agreement between G-8 leaders.
 London decided to finance the project after British companies were closely involved in works to use old nuclear submarines in the region.
 "It is also a necessary to remove the waste from the storage bases located on the Gremikha and Andreyeva Peninsula, where sites that are dangerous from the nuclear safety point of view are located," Interfax cited the press service of the shipping company as saying.
 
 
<b>Stolen Drawings Found
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Two drawings that were stolen from the Mariinsky Theater this year were found in luggage storage at the Finland train station, Interfax reported Friday.
 The drawings were made by an artist Bruni and include a sketch of a costume of a Spanish character from the Swan Lake ballet and a sketch of a bird's costume from ballet Shurale, made in 1950 by a painter Milchin.
 
 
<b>Bridges to Stay Open
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The bridges in St. Petersburg will cease to be raised at night from Wednesday, Interfax reported Monday.
 The navigation of cargo ships ended Saturday, Interfax cited Denis Blinov, head of Bolgo-Balt cargo shipping company as saying.
 In this navigation season 7,399 ships carrying cargo weighing 9.8 million metric tons have sailed under the bridges of St. Petersburg.
 
 
<b>Restricted Metro Entry
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Pionerskaya metro station has started working with a special schedule Monday because of big passenger numbers, Fontanka.ru reported.
 From 7:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. entrance to the station will be limited, and from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. the entrance will be closed. 
 Between these hours, only the station's exit will work. 



TITLE: Britain Grants Asylum
 To Russian Conscript
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - In an unprecedented decision that could chill bilateral relations, a London court has granted political asylum to a Russian conscript who fled hostilities in Chechnya. 
 
The Immigration Appeal Tribunal, Britain's highest judicial authority on asylum applications, decided to grant asylum to Andrei Krotov in May but only made the ruling public last week.
 A copy of the decision, obtained by The Moscow Times, said that Krotov, 27, arrived in Britain in February 2000 and immediately sought asylum. He deserted the Army in Grozny shortly after being sent there.
 It was not clear when exactly he was deployed in Grozny, but hostilities in Chechnya began in fall 1999.
 Krotov served in a combat reconnaissance unit and deserted his post at night while his unit was on a search patrol for rebels thought to be threatening an attack, the court papers said. 
 Krotov was drafted after several deferments.
 He deserted because he considered the war politically motivated and was afraid that he would be required to &quot;kill innocent civilians and destroy property in a reprehensible manner,&quot; the court ruling said. 
 He claimed he fled the country because he feared that as a deserter he would be jailed for an unfairly long time in a poorly maintained prison.
 The court ruling threatens to worsen ties already strained by previous British court decisions to grant asylum to Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed Zakayev and businessman Boris Berezovsky, both of whom are wanted by Moscow.
 The Foreign Ministry, which denounced the earlier asylum decisions, had no comment about the latest ruling.
 Human rights activists, who have been critical of the war in Chechnya, applauded the court's decision.
 &quot;This is another reason for the Russian authorities to think about how much longer the war in Chechnya will continue,&quot; said Lev Ponomaryov, head of the For Human Rights organization.
 He added that borders at the time of Krotov's desertion were porous and he could have escaped through Georgia, Azerbaijan or Dagestan.
 &quot;A threat of punishment in fact is more than an adequate basis to grant an asylum,&quot; said Tanya Lokhina, program director at the Moscow Helsinki Group.
 The ruling, however, will hardly bring about a flurry of desertions, she said. &quot;It's a very rare case,&quot; she said. &quot;It's not easy to get from Chechnya to England.&quot;
 In handing down the decision, the court said that &quot;there were numerous credible reports of human rights abuses and atrocities committed by federal forces&quot; in Chechnya in 1999 and 2000, when Krotov was sent there. 
 &quot;We conclude that at least during this period of large-scale conflict, the evidence shows that breaches of those basic rules were widespread,&quot; the judge, identified only as Mr. Ouseley, said in the ruling.
 Curiously, the same court refused to grant Krotov asylum in 2002, saying at the time that Krotov could refuse to carry out orders and punishment for his desertion would not involve degrading treatment, according to its web site archive.
 It was unclear what caused the court to change its mind.

TITLE: Detention of Chechen Man Linked to Klebnikov Slaying
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A Chechen man has been detained in connection with the murder of U.S. journalist Paul Klebnikov.
 
Musa Vakhayev, 40, a native of the Chechen town of Urus-Martan, was detained in Moscow on Thursday in connection with Klebnikov's murder, a police source told Interfax. Moscow's Basmanny District Court on Friday sanctioned Vakhayev's detention for 10 days at the behest of the Prosecutor General's Office, which is investigating the murder.
 A source close to the investigating team said the suspect will be charged with involvement in the murder but did not specify what charges would be filed.
 Kommersant on Saturday reported, without citing any source, that Vakhayev was detained at his apartment in southwest Moscow early Wednesday morning.
 After taking Vakhayev to city police headquarters for questioning, detectives told him that the primary suspect in Klebnikov's killing, whom they identified as a man named Kazbek, made several calls to Vakhayev's cellphone on the evening of the murder, Kommersant reported. When asked what the men had discussed, Vakhayev said they were making plans to play billiards.
 After fingerprinting Vakhayev, it was discovered that a print from the middle finger on his left hand matched a fingerprint found on the Lada from which Klebnikov was gunned down, Kommersant reported.
 Klebnikov, the editor of Forbes Russia, was shot outside his office July 9 in an apparent contract hit. 
 Klebnikov's brother Michael said by telephone on Friday that his family had not yet been contacted about Vakhayev's arrest and could not comment. &quot;Right now we're just waiting for more information,&quot; he said.
 Both the Prosecutor General's Office and the Basmanny District Court declined to comment when reached by telephone Friday, but the unnamed police source told Interfax, &quot;At this stage of the investigation, the primary version is the so-called 'Chechen trail.'&quot;
 Media reports have speculated that Chechen rebels may have been connected to the killing. Klebnikov published a book last year based on interviews with suspected Chechen rebel financier Khozh-Akhmed Nukhayev. The book, &quot;Conversations With a Barbarian,&quot; is a mix of Nukhayev's tales of fighting in Chechnya, his views on the future of Islam in Russia and worldwide, and Klebnikov's own commentary.
 One theory about the murder is that the book could have provoked a negative reaction from Nukhayev's immediate allies or other Chechen rebel leaders.
 Oleg Panfilov, head of the Center for Journalists in Extreme Situations, said investigators are barking up the wrong tree in looking for a Chechen link.
 &quot;This is just a very convenient version for the police and prosecutors,&quot; Panfilov said. &quot;They can say it will be a long investigation because of the war going on there. I think you have to look for the killers in Moscow, not in Chechnya.&quot;
 The announcement of Vakhayev's arrest came one day after Klebnikov's family called on journalists to conduct an independent investigation into the killing.
 &quot;In this awful tragedy there are seeds of hope,&quot; Klebnikov's brother Peter told a news conference Thursday in Washington organized by the Committee to Protect Journalists. &quot;We've been approached by many journalists who seek to send a message to the killers.&quot;

TITLE: Fight Over Showing
 Violence on Television
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - The State Duma is considering a bill that would heavily restrict scenes of violence on television, but which people in the television industry warned could kill the medium.
 
The bill, which taps into the deep-rooted perception in some circles that Western influences are eroding values, would not only prohibit television from showing Hollywood action flicks from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. but also everything from boxing matches to terrorist attacks.
 &quot;The streams of blood that splash today on the screens are destructive for the fragile psyches of children,&quot; the bill's sponsor, Deputy Andrei Skoch of the United Russia party, said in a statement. &quot;Society must have reasonable restrictions that protect our children from non-children fare.&quot;
 The bill says television would not be able to show &quot;dead bodies, scenes of murder, beatings, the infliction of serious, medium and light injuries, and rape and other violent activity of a sexual nature.&quot;
 The Duma's Information Policy Committee opposed the bill, but deputies still unanimously passed it in a first reading Nov. 10. 
 A raft of amendments is expected before the bill comes up for a second reading, but the unanimous vote the first time around has set off alarm bells among television executives and media analysts alike.
 NTV general director Vladimir Kulistikov said television would not be able to cover terrorist attacks, crimes and emergencies properly, and effectively would be forced to report lies, Izvestia reported.
 He said the bill in its current form would even bar film adaptations of Tolstoy's &quot;War and Peace&quot; because they depict battles, blood and dead bodies.
 Irina Petrovskaya, a prominent television critic, said the bill is poorly written and should be scuttled.
 &quot;If it's adopted, it could paralyze the activities of any television channel,&quot; she said. &quot;They won't be able to broadcast anything, even the program 'In the World of Animals.'&quot;
 Skoch, however, insisted that his bill only targets &quot;tough American action movies&quot; and &quot;skin flicks&quot; and promised to submit amendments to clarify that.
 Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov said Nov. 11 that deputies will press ahead with the bill if the authorities refuse to enforce an existing law aimed at reducing the amount of violence shown on television.
 However, the law that Gryzlov was apparently referring to, Article 4 of the media law, is no longer in force, said Andrei Richter, director of the Media Law and Policy Institute. 
 Article 4 stipulated punishment for &quot;propagandizing the culture of abuse and violence.&quot; But this was dropped from the list of punishable crimes in the Criminal Code at the end of the 1990s, Richter said.
 In the latest attack on television, Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II accused the media last Tuesday of corrupting moral values and contributing to the country's demographic crisis.
 &quot;The population of our country shrinks by about 1 million people every year,&quot; the patriarch said at the opening of a festival of Orthodox media. &quot;The people to blame for this ... are largely the journalists who propagate the culture of violence, abuse, lechery, permissiveness and the culture of pleasure-seeking.&quot;

TITLE: Gas Station Plots to Be Auctioned
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A total of 18 land plots for gas station construction will be auctioned off as a single lot by Smolny before the end of the year, said a city official Friday. 
 
The city expects the larger companies to make the purchase, the initial price of which will be about $5.7 million, said Igor Metelsky, head of the Federal Property Management (FPM) committee at a government meeting.
 &quot;Among the potential buyers we see [oil companies] such as LUKoil and Shell,&quot; said Metelsky.
 The 18-plot offer comes after LUKoil last week said that it was going to pay 4 billion rubles ($139 million) in taxes to the city budget for 2005.
 Earlier, Governor Valentina Matviyenko declared that all land for gas stations will be sold by the city in an open auction. This, in essence, voided an initial agreement with Lukoil to provide the company with 60 land plots in a &quot;wholesale&quot; deal.
 There are about 270 gas stations operating in St. Petersburg, and the market's potential is valued at $350 million in annual revenues.
 The last time the city held an auction for three land plots in August, takings totaled $1.7 million with Shell making a record bid of $1.07 million for one city center location.
 Looking at this next auction, local market players agree that only a major company will be able to afford such a big chunk of land.
 &quot;We can participate in the auction, but it is impossible to develop all of the 18 land plots simultaneously,&quot; said Andrei Chernyak, head of gas station chain Faeton's investment management department.
 From LUKoil's press office the reaction was positive, yet cautious. &quot;Everything will depend on the location of the plots. Although Lukoil is interested in expanding its presence in St. Petersburg,&quot; Dmitry Dolgov said, as reported by Kommersant. Neste, Sibneft and TNK-BP were named as the other interested companies by the newspaper.
 Neste's president Arvo Ruotsolainen told Vedomosti the company has not made a final decision regarding its participation yet. The main concern of many market players is the size of the land deal.
 &quot;It remains to be seen which particular land plots are on the list. We would prefer smaller lots, since they are easier to choose and analyze,&quot; said Vyacheslav Saveliyev, Neste's technical director.
 Representatives of Sibneft and Shell could not be reached for comments.
 The president of St. Petersburg Oil Club, Oleg Ashihmin, said the lack of competition at the auction may cause Smolny to sell the lot much cheaper than would have been gained from separate sales.
 Ashimin said that while the plots could have been sold for $10 million to $12 million one by one, &quot;the entire lot can be auctioned off at about $9 million, based on August estimates of $500,000 per gas station.&quot;
 The head of city construction committee Yevgeny Iashitzin, also present at Friday's meeting, said his department is preparing documents for 22 land plots that can be sold at the beginning of next year. With future auctions, there will be an offer of single land plots as well as larger lots for sale, Metelsky said.
 The city sees the land auctions as one of the biggest money-making tools for the budget, the administration said in earlier statements.

TITLE: Gray Salary Firms Put on List
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A list of companies that pay out salaries below a set minimum wage has been filed with the Leningrad Oblast authorities.
 
Along with the list came orders to take measures to urge an increase in payments, Fontanka.ru reported Friday.
 A decree passed by Oblast governor Valery Serdyukin determined that workers in the region must receive not less than the minimum wage of $100 a month, starting from January 2005.
 One of the main effects of the decree is to force companies to declare real salaries, meaning that the state will collect more taxes. Examinations of company salary payments are to be conducted by tax police inspectors, the State Statistics Committee, the State Inspection for Secure Labor, the police and the federal emergency ministry.
 &quot;None of the joint stock companies' real salaries amount to 500-700 rubles ($17.5-24.5) [as they declare]. Most of the money is being paid [by cash] in envelopes,&quot; Fontanka.ru cited Serdyukov as saying.
 The so-called cash-in-hand salaries are estimated as being up to 10 times higher than the figures declared in tax assessment forms.
 Last week, inspectors started their tax investigations in the industrial and food sector and some results were already achieved, according to the report.
 In its actions, the government has the support of many business representatives who are also talking to their colleagues, the report said.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Toyota Nears Russia
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - Toyota is close to making the final decision over construction of a car assembly plant in St. Petersburg, Japan's Sankei Shimbun newspaper reported on its web site Monday.
 The plans for such a plant in Russia foresee an output of 100,000 cars a year and a total investment of between 80 billion and 100 billion yen ($750 million -$950 million), said Sankei, informing that the plant could open in 2006.
 This would make it the biggest investment by a foreign car manufacturer in Russia, far outstripping recent inputs by Ford ($150 million into its Vsevolozhsk factory) and General Motors (into the Chevrolet-Avtovaz joint venture).
 Toyota's chairman of the board Hiroshi Okuda officially announced the firm's intentions to build a plant in Russia this September.
 "Russia is the only large country in the world where we do not have a production unit, but sooner or later we should build one there," Okuda said.
 On Monday, none of the parties involved confirmed the report.
 In the first nine months of 2004 Toyota has doubled its sales in Russia.
 
<b>Gas Reform 'Dead'
 </b>

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The World Bank's chief economist in Russia said Monday that state reform of Gazprom was going nowhere and seemed "pretty much dead in the water." 
 "Certainly we think that the gas sector from the point of view of structural reform has been a disappointment in Russia," John Litwack told a news conference in Moscow.
 
 
<b>Sea Port Stake for Sale
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - City Hall has decided to sell its 28-percent stake in the St. Petersburg sea port, Fontanka,ru reported Friday.
 The city's stake will be sold together with the federal government's 20 percent stake. Igor Metelsky, head of the city property committee, or KUGI, said earlier that selling the two stakes together would generate a higher return. 
 Experts say the two stakes are unlikely to fetch more than $10 million, the report said. 
 An unidentified spokesman for the Federal Agency for Managing State Property said the stakes could be sold in the first half of next year. 



TITLE: Yugansk Goes on the Block for $8.6 Bln
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Yukos' main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz, will be sold at auction with a starting price of $8.65 billion, confirming investors' worst fears that the country's biggest oil exporter will be carved up.
 
The Federal Property Fund said in an official notice published in Rossiiskaya Gazeta that 76.79 percent of Yugansk will be sold at auction on Dec. 19 with a starting price of 246.75 billion rubles ($8.65 billion).
 Within hours of the announcement, Yukos said it had received a $5.96 billion back tax claim from the Federal Tax Service, this time for 2003. Tax claims against the company now total more than $24 billion, four times the company's market capitalization. Shares fell 30 percent Friday, now at their lowest level in nearly four years.
 Yukos CEO Steven Theede branded the sale as &quot;government-organized theft to settle a political score,&quot; and said that the authorities may &quot;steal more of Yukos' assets.&quot; Management may be forced to declare bankruptcy ahead of the sale, the company's CFO, Bruce Misamore, said by telephone Friday.
 In what appeared to be a warning of possible production disruptions ahead, former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky said the sale announcement meant responsibility for the oil major's production now lay in the state's hands. 
 The battle between President Vladimir Putin and Khodorkovsky, the founder of Yukos majority shareholder Group Menatep, is reaching its crescendo with the country's biggest oil exporter on the brink of breakup, Khodorkovsky making threats from jail and the Kremlin's reputation among investors in tatters.
 &quot;This is a game of chicken where the cars are now about to collide,&quot; said William Browder, chief executive at Hermitage Capital Management, which has $1.5 billion in Russian stocks under management. 
 State-controlled energy giant Gazprom has been tipped as a prime contender for Yugansk, as has Surgutneftegaz, possibly through the creation of a separate entity with foreign participation. Italian oil major Eni is being seen as a potential dealmaker. 
 Putin flew to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Santiago, Chile, on Friday. In comments to Brazilian reporters, he said attempts to politicize the Yukos conflict should be resisted. But the sale announcement even drew criticism from within the Kremlin.
 &quot;This is daylight robbery,&quot; Putin economic adviser Andrei Illarionov said in an interview. &quot;This creates serious doubt for any businessman about the existence of the rule of law.&quot;
 Law enforcement agents have been searching the homes and offices of dozens of Yukos managers in what one unnamed board member described as a massive campaign reminiscent of the Stalinist terror, Interfax reported Sunday.
 &quot;The searches happen for some reason at night,&quot; Interfax quoted the official as saying. &quot;This creates an atmosphere of terror reminiscent of 1937.&quot;
 The Federal Property Fund said it will sell all 43 common shares in Yugansk at open auction and that bidders will be required to hand over a returnable deposit of 49.4 billion rubles ($1.73 billion). Bids can be submitted until Dec. 18. 
 The total tax claims against the company are nearly three times the Yugansk starting price, increasing the chance that Yukos may lose its other assets, too, leaving it an empty shell.
 &quot;The endgame has been glaringly obvious for some time now,&quot; said Martin Taylor, a fund manager at Thames River Capital, which has $1 billion in emerging markets. &quot;Yukos may go to zero; there is a pretty big chance they will sell Yukos' other assets, too.&quot;
 &quot;The sale of Yuganskneftegaz at a low price increases the probability that the Russian government will then proceed to steal more of Yukos' assets through artificial sales to meet artificial tax bills,&quot; Theede said. 
 The auction is set for a Sunday, one day ahead of a planned extraordinary shareholders meeting called by Yukos to consider whether to file for bankruptcy. &quot;It is not unexpected, but it is depressing and childish to have the auction the day before the shareholders meeting. I would recommend Yukos declare bankruptcy,&quot; said Mattias Westman, chief executive of Prosperity Capital Management. &quot;I think the government is making a fool out of itself as they are showing so blatantly that they are not trying to find a solution.&quot;
 Meantime, Group Menatep said the sale amounts to &quot;an expropriation&quot; and said it would &quot;take all legal steps available ... to prevent the unwarranted sale in any form of any of Yukos' assets, as well as any expropriation of any part of the company.&quot;

TITLE: Russia Turned Prolific in Mergers and Acquisitions
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - If the amount of money being spent on mergers and acquisitions is a gauge of political stability and the economy, Russia has something to be proud of.
 
From a miniscule $1.694 billion in 1999, Russian and foreign investors plowed a record $19.467 billion into M&amp;A last year - and the total is still a milestone if statistics-tilting mega-deals like the TNK-BP merger and the failed Yukos-Sibneft hookup are left out.
 But the numbers are looking stagnant this year, and the latest deals appear to only be a reflection of current Russian business trends, government policies and the government's economic and political shortcomings. 
 Furthermore, the amount of money being invested and the number of deals being struck remain small compared to those in Western nations and even countries in Central and Eastern Europe, in an indication that a lot remains to be done to convince investors to put their money to work. 
 &quot;Venturing into M&amp;A means a diversification of activities; that's a good sign,&quot; said Anton Struchenevsky, an economist at Troika Dialog. &quot;But the movement in this area is still pretty small.&quot;
 The economy remains dependent on natural resources and exports; these areas accounted for the largest slice of the estimated total of $6.59 billion spent on M&amp;A in the first half of 2004, or 38.3 percent, according to KPMG Russia. 
 The country's leading financial-industrial groups are busy vertically integrating and shedding non-core assets - and this is reflected in a number of deals including the biggest proposed acquisition of the year: Norilsk Nickel's offer to take a 20 percent stake in South Africa's Gold Fields Ltd. for $1.2 billion.
 The Kremlin, meanwhile, has sent out a clear signal through the legal assault on Yukos that its approval is needed for big deals, particularly those involving foreigners - and the biggest foreign acquisition so far this year was the purchase of a state-owned 7.59 percent stake in LUKoil by ConocoPhillips for nearly $2 billion in September.
 M&amp;A experts said they see big growth ahead. The growth will be fueled by excess cash accumulated by Russian exporters and involve both acquisitions at home and abroad, said Wilfried Pototschnig, associate director of Corporate Finance at KPMG Russia and CIS, which co-sponsored an M&amp;A conference at Moscow's Marriott Aurora hotel on Friday.
 In more good news, the volume and number of deals have been growing faster in Russia than in Central and Eastern Europe in recent years, said Mikhail Tsarev, managing partner of Financial Advisory Services at the KPMG office.
 Tsarev said Russian companies' need to increase capitalization and competitiveness could be a key driver for reinvestments and stimulate domestic M&amp;A activities, as well as deliver growth in cross-border M&amp;A deals.

TITLE: Gazprom Net Profits Dropped by 50%
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: Natural gas giant Gazprom, Russia's largest taxpayer, said Friday its second-quarter net profit fell 50 percent despite higher revenues because of a surge in production taxes, wages and other costs.
 
Net income to international accounting standards in the quarter fell to 23.9 billion rubles ($837 million) from 47.8 billion rubles a year earlier, the company said in a report on its web site. A poll of analysts had forecast a profit of $1.4 billion. 
 Revenue rose 14 percent in April-June to 215.6 billion rubles from 189.6 billion rubles in the same period last year. The revenue figure is 8.6 percent higher than the analysts' median estimate of $7 billion.
 Gazprom, the world's top gas producer and a key European supplier, also said its net profit for the first six months of the year dropped 13.3 percent. Analysts had forecast first-half profits to rise 5 percent to an average $3.47 billion. 
 The company said costs rose 40 percent after Russia raised royalty taxes because of a surge in oil prices on world markets, steel costs increased, driving up pipeline costs, and the consolidation of chemical ventures raised its staffing expenses. 
 &quot;The figures are disappointing,&quot; said Adam Landes, a London-based oil analyst at Renaissance Capital.
 The market is preoccupied with Gazprom's upcoming merger with state oil firm Rosneft, which will remove two-tier trading in its shares to open them up to foreign investors, so many analysts are bullish on the company. 
 Gazprom's shares are up more than 120 percent on the year on hopes for the share liberalization and also because the market views the company as a likely buyer of assets in troubled oil giant Yukos' main production unit, Yuganskneftegaz. 
 Gazprom's stock lost more than 3 percent to close at 81.9 rubles Friday. But that was due to a market-wide sell-off after the government announced it would sell Yugansk to help offset Yukos' ballooning $24 billion bill for back taxes. 
 &quot;Gazprom's well-below-consensus results were released after the markets closed on Friday, so the opening trades [Monday] morning should reflect investor bewilderment as to why the numbers were so far off,&quot; said Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank.
 Gazprom also announced it owns 25 percent of Moscow monopoly utility Mosenergo, up from a previously disclosed 15.76 percent. 
 Gazprom's reach spreads well beyond the energy sector into banking, real estate and media, and acts as a government cash cow, representing about a fifth of federal budget revenues. 
 
 <i>(Reuters, Bloomberg, SPT) </i>

TITLE: Independent Media Buys Potanin Stake
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: MOSCOW - Independent Media CEO Derk Sauer and his partners bought back the 35 percent of the company that they sold to billionaire Vladimir Potanin's Prof-Media last year, both companies said Thursday.
 
Dutch-registered Independent Media, Russia's leading magazine publisher and the parent company of The St. Petersburg Times and The Moscow Times, and Prof-Media, whose titles include the top-selling tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, had planned to merge to create Russia's largest publishing house.
 Neither company would disclose financial details, although Independent Media said Prof-Media made money on the transactions.
 &quot;We did pay more for the stake than we originally sold it for,&quot; Independent Media board member Yelena Myasnikova said. Prof-Media bought the stake in March 2003 for an estimated $35 million and sold it back for about $45 million, Kommersant reported Thursday, citing unnamed industry analysts.
 Myasnikova said the higher price reflected the growing ad market and rising value of Independent Media's holdings, which include top business daily Vedomosti and more than a dozen glossies, including the Russian versions of Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, FHM and Popular Mechanics.
 Myasnikova declined to say why plans to merge the two companies collapsed, but Prof-Media suggested there were political concerns over who would control a combined company. 
 &quot;It became clear that our businesses cannot be integrated due to circumstances that did not depend on us,&quot; Prof-Media general director Rafael Akopov told Kommersant.
 To counter concerns over editorial integrity after Potanin's company bought the 35 percent stake last year, the co-owners of Vedomosti - Independent Media and the parent companies of The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times - agreed to give the two Western newspapers the right to appoint both the editor and opinion editor in the future.
 Although Sauer and his partners once again own 100 percent of Independent Media, Myasnikova did not rule out selling a stake in the company to another buyer. 
 In addition to Komsomolskaya Pravda, Prof-Media's holdings include the newspapers Izvestia, Sovietsky Sport and Express-Gazeta, the magazine Finansovy Direktor, radio stations Avtoradio, Energia and Disko, and the Cinema-Park chain of movie theaters.

TITLE: VimpelCom Alters Its Receipts on the NYSE
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Vimpel-Communications (operating under the Beeline GSM mobile network brand) experienced a change in the ratio of its American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), reported the firm's press office Monday.
 
In order to bring the ADR price into line, VimpelCom will change the ratio from four ADRs for three common shares to four ADRs for one common share, as effective from Monday.
 &quot;The change in the ADR ratio is designed to help increase NYSE volumes and create a more liquid market for our shares,&quot; said Alexander Izosimov, Chief Executive Officer of VimpelCom.
 To implement the ratio change, VimpelCom ADR holders will receive two additional ADRs for every ADR held at the beginning of this week. There will be no change to VimpelCom's underlying common shares.
 VimpelCom was the first Russian company to list shares on the NYSE in 1996. The firm's price per ADR has risen from $20.50 to over $100 in that time.
 o
 
ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The volumes of trade on the St. Petersburg Stock Exchange and Moscow's RTS Stock Exchange increased by 54 percent on Monday, reported RosBusinessConsulting.
 
Trade volume grew to 16.5 billion rubles ($577.93m) from November 15 to November 19. One of the largest increases came in net trading: as the proportion of deals concluded via the net reached 40 percent, according to RTS' press service, compared to 39 percent of in the previous period.

TITLE: Northern Culture Show
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The largest collaborative project between Norway and Russia in the sphere of culture, an exhibition charting 1,000 years of the two countries' cultural, scientific and political relations, is coming to St. Petersburg in 2005.
 
The exhibition, entitled simply &quot;Norway-Russia&quot; is scheduled to open in April 2005 and run until the end of June in the Russian Ethnographic Museum. According to Norwegian Consul General, Otto H. Mamelund, the exhibition aims to &quot;expose cultural, political and scientific relations going back 1000 years&quot; in an effort to broaden the countries' knowledge of each other and promote mutual understanding between its people.
 &quot;It's a huge exhibition with thousands of items on display,&quot; Mamelund said. &quot;The catalogue for the exhibition alone, which contains articles by Russian and Finnish experts, weighs three kilograms!&quot;
 Mr Mamelund is keen to stress the collaborative nature of the exhibition. &quot;The artefacts for these exhibits have been gathered from museums throughout Norway and Russia.
 &quot;A good deal of new research has been done, charting the history of relations between the two countries from the earliest Vikin-Pomor trade through to collaborations between Russian and Norwegian authors, composers and scientists right up to the present day,&quot; he said.
 Earlier this year the exhibition was shown in Oslo at the Norwegian Folk Museum, where it was a great success.
 To mark the end of the collaboration, at the end of June, the Norwegian Royal Opera will be coming to St. Petersburg, performing Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg's famous &quot;Peer Gynt&quot; at the Marinsky Theater. Other events are also being planned to coincide with the celebration.
 Mumelund believes the exhibition is a very good thing for Russian-Norwegian relations. &quot;Russian- Norwegian relations are very good at the moment, expanding both in width and depth and economic cooperation between us is also growing all the time.&quot;
 In the meantime, more Norwegian cultural events are expected in St. Petersburg both at the end of this year and in 2005 (see box).

TITLE: Painting The Town Marine
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Some of St. Petersburg's most famous bridges have a distinctly Norwegian shine to them. Paint used to maintain their gleaming color is supplied by none other than Jotun, a Norwegian company operating in Russia since 1989.
 
One of a small number of Norway-based companies working in St. Petersburg, Jotun ranks as a leading suppliers of paints, varnishes and lacquers for ship companies, industrial projects and bridge-constructing companies all over Russia.
 Many of St. Petersburg's bridges have been painted with Jotun paints, including Liteiny, Troitsky and Alexandra Nevskogo Bridges. Other important projects include Konstantinovsky Palace in Strelna, the fence around Smolny Cathedral, and several road junctions in St. Petersburg.
 According to Jotun's spokesperson in St. Petersburg, Anna Kamalutdinova, the company has provided an impressive catalogue of Russian architectural constructions with their color. Outside of St. Petersburg, Jotun's paints were used for Krymsky Bridge in Moscow, as well as a number of bridges in Kotlas, Murmansk and Archangelsk. 
 Kamalutdinova said that Jotun has been an active participant in city life. It acted as one of the sponsored of St. Petersburg's 300 year anniversary celebrations and was named a &quot;participant&quot; of the jubilee. 
 Jotun was set up in Norway in 1926 as the producer of paints for vessels. From local beginnings it has grown to run 25 plants and 50 representative offices worldwide. Keeping true to its origins the firm recently signed a contract with Severnaya Verf ship-constructing company for painting 10 new vessels.

TITLE: A Northern Business Tale of Warm Relations
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Norway is one of the richest countries in the world. Its 4.5 million people enjoy a gross domestic product per capita of $42,103 against Russia's 145.3 million with a $2,384 per capita, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Even when making the comparison more realistic by taking into account the different costs in the two countries, the comparison is $37,024 of purchasing power parity in Norway versus $7,500 in Russia, according to the EIU.
 
Despite a huge difference in size and population - Russia has 17 million square kilometers compared to Norway's 387,000 square kilometers - the Norwegian economy is more than half the size of Russia's. In 2002, Norway's GDP totaled a mighty $190.5 billion against the $346.5 billion in Russia the same year, the EIU reported.
 Despite their differences, Otto Mamelund, Norway's Consul General to St. Petersburg points to the many similarities between the two countries.
 Both have large oil and gas reserves that account for a large part of their economies and both are traditional exporters of raw materials, he said in an interview.
 &quot;The incomes don't tell you everything about how people live,&quot; he added. &quot;If you have an educated Russian in a good job his pay is about a quarter of what he would earn in Norway.
 &quot;When you take into account the 13-percent income tax, that his apartment is less than a quarter the price in Norway, and the cost of cars, cigarettes, alcohol and fuel - in Norway these are some of the most expensive in the world - it doesn't really say everything.&quot;
 Trade relations between Russia and Norway are substantial with about $1 billion worth of mostly non-ferrous metals, bauxite, fish and fuel going from Russia to Norway each year and large amounts of fish, chemicals and engineering products worth about half as much moving in the opposite direction.
 Russia accounts for about 2 percent of Norway's trade and is Norway's No. 14 trading partner, accounting for slightly more than Spain and a little less than Canada.
 
 <strong>
LONG HISTORY
 </strong>Trading relations between the countries go back to the Middle Ages. With geographical proximity, especially in the north where the two counties border each other, and the two populations practicing different trades, a useful trade exchange was bound to develop.
 
Close to the border, Russian settlements were mostly military outposts, monasteries and trading posts, while on the Norwegian side it was mainly fishing villages. There was a roaring trade in grain from Russia in return for fish, mostly the <i>selyodka</i> (herring) beloved by Russians, from Norway.
 &quot;The Russians used their port of Arkhangelsk as a huge trading center from where merchants would trade with Norway, Britain and the Netherlands. A Danish-Norwegian consulate was there until 1917,&quot; Mamelund said.
 The borders have shifted many times; in the 13th century, for instance, all of the Kola peninsula was Norwegian. Next to the border there used to be a common taxation zone. 
 Unluckily for the Sami reindeer herders (previously known as Lapps), whose lives revolved around the border area, for some time taxes were collected by the Danish-Norwegian king, the city of Novogorod and also the King of Sweden.
 &quot;The border with Russia was established only in 1826, but it is the oldest part of the Russian border; it has always been peaceful and undisputed,&quot; Mamelund said.
 Then, as technology advanced, Arkhangelsk became a trading center.
 And by the late 19th century, as many as 200 Russian cargo vessels that carried grain, flour and many other goods were passing the winters in the Norwegian port of Andenes - resulting in quite a few marriages between Russians and Norwegians.
 &quot;There even developed Norwegian-Russian pidgin, the last speaker of which died in the last 10 years,&quot; Mamelund said.
 
 <strong>
UP NORTH
 </strong>The focus of much of Norway's activity in Russia is in the Northwest, where non-commercial programs have been developed since the beginning in the 1990s through the Barents-Euro Arctic Council.
 
&quot;Much of Norway's effort is directed toward the north, while maybe Sweden and Finland focus largely on the Baltic States,&quot; Mamelund said.
 Many Norwegians look to Murmansk as the center of the sparsely populated Arctic area they live in. 
 &quot;Murmansk is to northern Norway what St. Petersburg is to Southern Finland,&quot; Mamelund added. &quot;It's only a three-hour drive from the Norwegian border.
 If further proof were needed of Murmansk's ties with Norway, one could judge by the Norwegian visa statistics. Last year, 13,000 were issued in Murmansk, but only 4,500 in St. Petersburg, the consul general said.
 Many of the travelers were tourists who love Norway's unspoiled nature and the opportunities for fishing, he added.
 &quot;We want to increase this,&quot; he said.
 
 <strong>
SPITZBERGEN
 </strong>A special feature of Norwegian-Russian relations is that a Russian community of somewhat less than 2,000 lives on the Norwegian island of Vestspitsbergen (Western Spitsbergen), in the company town of Barentsburg run by Arktikugol. 
 The community's reason for being there is to mine coal and it is self-sufficient. The presence is in keeping with the 1925 Treaty of Spitzbergen that allows any signatory to exploit the land resources there.
 
Traditionally, this population has been from the Donbass coal mining area of the Ukraine, with miners tending to travel to the far north for a few years to earn above average wages. The community has its own farms with cattle, chickens and pigs.
 And, although far from the cultural capitals, this community has one claim to a great star; Bolshoi's prima ballerina, Maya Plitsetskaya, spent some of her childhood in the community. 
 
 <strong>
SHIPPING
 </strong>Norway's landscape lies beautiful but rugged; getting around's easiest by sea. This means of transportation and communication is still one of the key modes for Norwegians today.
 
Norwegians have built up tremendous expertise in all areas of shipping from construction to operation, also repairing and fitting advanced technology. It has certainly served in good stead in the last 30 years as Norway moved into exploiting its offshore energy reserves.
 It comes as no surprise then that St. Petersburg and the eastern Baltic, with its great shipbuilding capacity, is eyed as an important partner for Norwegian ventures.
 Norwegian-British holding Kvaerner owned the Vyborg shipyards for some years in the 1990s. Today it fills many orders for Norwegian contractors. Altogether 10 big, modern trawlers have been launched there for Norwegian orders. The shipyard counts as one of the most modern in the St. Petersburg area.
 At the end of October, another shipowner, Bergen-based Odfjell, signed a contract with the Russian shipyard Sevmash at Severodvinsk (just outside Arkangelsk) to build up to 12 tankers for transporting chemicals.
 Each vessel is to be 45,000 deadweight tons, and the contract is the largest ever entered into by Odfjell for the building of ships. It's valued between 2 and 3 billion Norwegian krone ($320 million -$480 million).
 According to the contract, the yard will build eight tankers for Odfjell, with an option to build another four.
 Mamelund said it is the largest shipbuilding order from Norway in Russia and is of enormous importance to Sevmash.
 In August, Norwegian bankers and politicians, backed by guarantees from Trondheim-based shipbuilder Fosen Mekaniske Verksteder, proposed the building of two ice-class, roll-on roll-off ferries for Swedish ferry operator Stena. The $144 million project envisages St. Petersburg's Baltiisky Zavod factory building 212-meter, 7,500 deadweight-ton hulls for the vessels.
 One key element to future mutual development in the Norwegian and Russian shipbuilding industries may be Russia's development of its offshore grounds.
 Already some 200 Norwegians are based in the Far East port of Nakhodka, working on contracts associated with the Sakhalin-1 offshore oil and gas drilling projects, making concrete submersible structures.
 Nikolai Shavrov, director of Norwegian consulate's commercial section in St. Petersburg, said in an interview that while conditions at Norway's offshore fields in the North Sea are not as difficult as those in the Arctic - where Russia plans to develop extraction in the Barents or Kara Seas - Norway's experience could prove invaluable.
 &quot;Russia cannot afford to reinvent the wheel,&quot; he said.
 Many of the Norwegian companies operating in St. Petersburg are linked to maritime activities. They include Jotun, which sells marine paints, fishing tackle maker Mustad, Unitor that provides shipping equipment, port services firm Barwil, marine supplier Rossnor and Det Noske Veritas, which classifies ships and advises on ship building.
 
 <strong>
FISH</strong>
 Norway is a big producer and also a big consumer of fish.
 
&quot;Fish is one of the major commodities, accounting for about 70 percent of exports by value of Norwegian-Russian trade,&quot; Shavrov said.
 &quot;It also accounts for about 12 percent of the trade from Russia to Norway,&quot; he added.
 The trade had remained quite traditional, with Norwegians exporting mainly herring, mackerel and salmon/trout. As Russians get wealthier, the structure of this trade is changing.
 &quot;Traditionally the most important commodity was herring, accounting for 60 percent to 70 percent of the trade, but in recent years salmon has been taking an increasing stake of the share of fish exports to Russia,&quot; Shavrov said.
 &quot;Last year salmon accounted for 45 percent of fish exports by value, reflecting the increased purchasing power of the Russian consumer. They are shifting from cheap protein to expensive protein.
 &quot;Demand is rising for the higher quality salmon, which is sent fresh or chilled on ice. Last year, this segment accounted for more than half of all salmon sold to Russia.&quot; Almost all Norwegian salmon is farmed and exported around the world. Another way that Russia is involved in the salmon trade is through Aeroflot which transports the chilled salmon to high-value markets such as that of Japan, and in a condition to satisfy the choosy palate of the gourmet consumers.
 Most of the fish Russia exports to Norway is re-exported.
 
 <strong>
METAL
 </strong>Mamelund said that metallurgy has been one of the pathways to Norway becoming a high-technology country.
 
Almost all of Norway's electricity is hydroelectric and when the first hydro dams were built, about the end of the 19th century, foundries or metal workshops were often built near them because of the ready supply of electricity at low cost.
 Norwegian industrial giant Norsk Hydro sprung up as one of the results of the process. A Fortune 500 company, it is a leading offshore producer of oil and gas and the world's No. 3 aluminium supplier. With time, it has diversified into many areas and now operates in more than 40 countries.
 Norsk Hydro is a key buyer of mineral fertilizers from Russia. It also produces its own, with the Russian imports then sold beyond Norway.
 Taking into account the size of Norsk Hydro's operations, it is not surprising that its trade relations with Russia are worth double that of the country of Norway, Mamelund said.
 <strong>
INVESTMENT
 </strong>Norway is not a leading investor in Russia and those Norwegians who came looking for quick money soon after the end of the Soviet Union have long left.
 
&quot;At the beginning of the 1990s there were very many representatives from small- and medium-sized Norwegian firms, but many failed,&quot; Mamelund. &quot;The people who operate in Russia now hold much more serious intentions and represent very solid Norwegian companies that can make larger investments.&quot;
 Norwegian telecommunications firm Telenor has a 25-percent stake in leading Russian mobile operator Vimpelcom and 20 percent in Golden Telecom.
 Norwegian publishing house A-pressen owns a 25-percent stake plus one share of Russia's largest circulation daily Komsomolskaya Pravda. A-pressen also has printing houses in Yekaterinburg and Nizhny Novgorod.
 St. Petersburg's Baltika Brewery was started by joint venture company Baltic Beverages Holdings (BBH). Beer production was initiated in 1990 by Scandinavian companies Orkla from Norway and Hartwall of Finland. In 2003, the business was acquired by Carlsberg Breweries.
 Norwegian oil giant Statoil, which is the leading gas station operator in Latvia, has about half a dozen gas stations in Murmansk.
 Mamelund said many Norwegian investments in Russia are in different joint ventures.
 &quot;There could have been more, but in general Russia is still perceived as a difficult place to make investments, because of obvious factors which everyone knows,&quot; he said. &quot;Norwegian companies are more focused on establishing branch offices or representative offices.
 
 <strong>
GLOBALIZATION
 </strong>Norway is small but very international, the consul general said.
 
&quot;The Norwegian economy has been globalized since way before the 20th century,&quot; he added. &quot;Shipping is the most international business in the world.&quot;
 Two examples of this relating to Russian-Norwegian relations show that high technology input to products has not been a one-sided affair.
 Mamelund says that C-map, a Norwegian company that develops digital maritime maps, has all the work done in St. Petersburg and has already mapped 80 to 90 percent of the Earth's shipping lanes.
 The Norwegian port of Bergen has the only seal-skin producer who can turn the skins into high-fashion products. St. Petersburg fashion designer Irina Tantsurina turns them into top fashion garments. 
 Another St. Petersburg designer, Natalia Leikis, who is based in Oslo. designs clothes that are worn by Bjorg Bondevik, wife of Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik.

TITLE: Toilet Rags to Riches, Norway to St. Petersburg
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Who would have thought that somebody who started his carrier by washing toilets would one day head an office of a company with a multi million-dollar turnover? But this is what exactly happened to Allan Christiansen, a Norwegian national, head of Eltek Energy in Russia, a power transmission equipment supplier.
 
In the early 1990s Christiansen, now 33, worked as a cleaner for the Swedish immigration service, studying economics at a local university in the evenings.
 &quot;Our job was basically to maintain and wash toilets. It was the time when the war in Kosovo was on and we had lots of people coming from the Kosovo region. Washing toilets was not a nice job, it was really bad,&quot; Christiansen said in an interview last week.
 A friend of Christiansen had had to move to Russia because of his father being offered the job as head of the Russian office of Volvo Car International. 
 The friend too found a job in a small Swedish company in St. Petersburg, selling office supplies and furniture. After working there for half a year, he found the job too demanding for one person, and asked his boss if he could employ another worker.
 Christiansen was 22 at the time.
 &quot;He contacted me and asked if I want to come to Russia. And I thought, you know, do I continue washing toilets or should I go to Russia? So I went to Russia,&quot; he said.
 Christiansen got the job in St. Petersburg the same week as he graduated from university, in 1993.
 &quot;We started working here in St. Petersburg in a small office, which looked like s..., totally horrible. And even more horrible was our apartment right across Nevsky Palace. We had rats and different pests, cockroaches, everything. We lived there for almost a year until we found out that we were not going anywhere with the job and that if we want to do something we have to do it on our own,&quot; he said.
 In 1994 the friends started their own company Swedish Branch, which sold office supplies, furniture and also dealt with industrial film for clients such as Coca Cola, Baltika and other breweries. In time the company became quite successful, Christiansen said, employing 17 people.
 &quot;It was a good time for me because by this time I'd already found my wife, we got married and in 1996 she got pregnant. We thought about it if we are going to stay here, it we will be forever. But we had another option, to move to Norway and explore our possibilities there,&quot; he said.
 Christiansen did not have much of money to start with even if he sold his shares in the company. He found a new job in Norway in the area he had grown accustomed to selling office supplies. Later, he moved onto retailing in chocolate at a different job. After the management of the chocolate company found that he had been in Russia, they sent him there as a representative.
 &quot;I came back to Russia and found myself on the street with a bag of chocolates, and I had to sell this stuff to hungry Russian people, I guess.
 &quot;And, chocolate seemed like a poor option for further career development.&quot;
 Christiansen could have been stuck with chocolate, but one day he met Eltek Energy's general director who offered him a job selling power transmission equipment. 
 After working for a few months with the company he suddenly got an idea that appeared destined to lead to success.
 &quot;The company was dealing through a local partner here, but did not have a representative office. My boss gave me $5,000 to open an office here, which was just enough to buy a computer and some furniture, including one table,&quot; Christiansen said. 
 That was in 2001. Now Eltek has two offices in Russia, in St. Petersburg and in Moscow, and is planning to open a third one in Yekaterinburg.
 Three years passed since his last arrival in Russia. Christiansen is sat in a relatively big and nice-looking offce located in a business center on Sovetskaya Street. 
 It is equipped with modern computers; he and his colleagues work in a warm atmosphere, enjoying life in St. Petersburg. His table is arranged with numerous pictures of his children, here is a family man with a successful story.
 Life in St. Petersburg is hard, Christiansen assesses, but he likes it.
 &quot;Everything is in chaos. Every single day you have to deal with a problem here. Look how cars drive here. It is one problem to get from home to work and another problem getting home from work. You have corruption, you don't have clean water, the environment is in a poor condition. I got used to the high mountain air in Norway, you see,&quot;
 Christiansen said. 
 &quot;But people are standing together here: when they have problems, they help one another and that is the best,&quot; he said.

TITLE: Awash in Shrinking Petrodollars
TEXT: While waiting at Heathrow Airport for a flight to New York recently, I got to talking with a Russian couple. With nothing but sagging U.S. dollars in my wallet, I had found Britain terribly expensive and thought I would get sympathy from Muscovites. 
 
Nothing doing. As far as they were concerned, London prices were reasonable.
 People have differing ideas of what's expensive, of course, but in my own experience everything apart from staples costs considerably more in Moscow than in New York. 
 There are various microeconomic reasons for this, including lack of competition, corruption and concentration of consumer demand in Moscow. 
 But there are also macroeconomic factors at work, suggesting that over the long run Russia may not benefit from high commodity prices as much as it hopes.
 Energy accounts for about 52 percent of Russian exports; together with metals and chemicals, commodities account for at least 70 percent of exports. 
 Oil and other commodities are traded in dollars, and the greenback has lost some 10 percent against the ruble since 2002. Taking into account the appreciation of the ruble in real terms, in constant 2002 rubles every dollar Russia earns is now worth nearly 40 percent less.
 U.S. goods account for just 5 to 6 percent of Russian imports, while over 40 percent of imports come from Western Europe and other countries whose currencies are linked to the euro. 
 Not surprisingly, there has been a shift in Moscow from the dollar to the euro as the uslovnaya edinitsa, or unit of account. The euro averaged around 29.5 rubles in 2002, but now trades at 37 rubles. This alone has led to a sharp deterioration in Russia's terms of trade and domestic price increases. 
 A heated debate is now underway about the limit of the dollar's fall. The decline of the dollar is largely self-correcting. 
 The U.S. market remains pivotal for global economic growth. If the dollar weakens too much, Americans will buy less from Europe and Asia, growth there will slow and the greenback will rebound. As a result, even pessimists see $1.40 per euro as the lower limit, as compared to $1.30 currently. 
 This level will still surpass the all-time low against the German mark seen 10 years ago. Nevertheless, the greenback retains considerable underside risk because it is a corrective measure against high commodity prices. The overall commodity price index is now at its highest level in a quarter of a century, going back to around 1980. Back then, the run-up in commodity prices also coincided with a period of persistent dollar weakness as well as high inflation. This was no coincidence, however, since both were a way of minimizing the economic pain of commodity price increases.
 The depreciation of the dollar and inflation are two sides of the same coin. Inflation is the loss of value of money in terms of goods and services, whereas currency depreciation is the same thing in an international context. 
 Both have the same root cause: too many dollars in circulation.
 When oil prices jumped in 1973, U.S. monetary authorities faced a choice. If they left the supply of dollars steady, oil consumption would have dropped, triggering a recession; or, since people had to drive and heat their homes, prices of less essential goods and services would have declined.
 Instead, the U.S. government chose to print a lot more dollars to pay commodity producers. 
 The dollar weakened, but wages and prices rose along with inflation, gradually catching up with higher commodity prices.
 It is thought that commodity producers benefited from high inflation in the 1970s. They were raking in enormous quantities of dollars, but those dollars were worth progressively less. Moreover, they were forced to recycle their dollars back into U.S. Treasury bonds lest their currencies rocketed against the greenback. Meanwhile inflation, which is always kind to debtors and hard on creditors, kept reducing the value of their dollar-denominated assets. 
 In other words, as long as they sell their commodities for dollars - and they don't really have much choice - commodity producers will be forced to share their windfall with the rest of the world by means of a lower dollar or higher dollar-based inflation.
 This time around, commodity prices have been creeping upward since 1999, but inflation has been held in check by the surplus of manufacturing capacity in the world economy and intense competition among producers. Asian goods exporters have been absorbing commodity price increases, while their central banks have been buying enormous quantities of dollars, keeping its value from dropping lower. But with benchmark Texas crude trading in the $45-$55 range and other commodity prices rising, the supply of dollars has become simply too vast to be mopped up. 
 Asian countries are probably being taken for a ride, since they are now stuck with over $1 trillion worth of depreciating dollar-denominated securities. 
 They are being forced to subsidize U.S. demand and share the fruits of their labors with Americans only because the United States supplies the international reserve currency. But they are also industrializing and growing richer. Incomes in Singapore and Hong Kong are now comparable with those in rich industrial countries, while South Korea and Taiwan are not far behind.
 Commodity producers, meanwhile, are selling nonrenewable resources for pieces of paper. For them, it is always either feast or famine. Their national wealth - and that of their people - fluctuates sharply depending on the price of their export commodities. This is something for Russia to consider even as it basks in the massive inflow of petrodollars.
 
 <i>Alexei Bayer, a New York-based economist, writes the Globalist column in Vedomosti on alternate weeks. He contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times. </i>

TITLE: Cheaper Land Provides Incentive for Better Use
TEXT: Last Tuesday, City Hall approved a draft bill that lowered the purchase price of state land in the city by more than threefold in all areas suitable for construction. This is a rather radical step in the solution of important city problems - organizing a normal market for land.
 
It is well known that St. Petersburg does not have a proper market for land. In Moscow situation is even worse. Not only is there no proper market, but also there are no land sales. Only rentals are permitted. In St. Petersburg at least there are sales, but no more than 10 percent of land is available - 90 percent remains the property of the city. This creates a huge number of negative consequences. 
 They include a black market in rights to rent city lands, which like all black markets gives rise to corruption and malpractice. There are big problems in realizing investment plans connected to the transferal of industry away from the center of the city.
 And, most importantly, city land is a most valuable resource and it is being used extremely ineffectively. A great part of the city is occupied by industrial slums, which are used as barracks and in some cases rubbish dumps, and even vacant lots. 
 This is not to mention such things that have no place at all near to the central districts - railway tracks, military bases and so on. 
 At the same time there is a dearth of land for development, especially for residential and office construction. The result of this is that apartment prices have reached astronomical heights.
 The reason behind all this disorder is the lack of logical, regulated land use. Governor Valentina Matviyenko's administration started to reform this sector as soon as it came to power. First of all, conditions for land lease were tightened. The method of calculating rental rates was changed for the use of land under enterprises resulting in getting rid of obvious flaws. The odious, regressive scale of land payments for industry was eliminated. 
 It had been introduced as an anti-crisis measure in 1999 and created a perverse dependence of the rental payment on the square area of a land plot. Now all land plots on which stand factories, construction, communal or transport users get no subsidies at all. Payments for renting land plots, on which empty buildings or incomplete buildings stand, have been raised 500 percent.
 These administrative measures hope to veer potential leasees away from surplus or largely empty land. 
 But the reformers want to go even further - to stimulate the tenants to buy the land from the state so that a normal land market will be created. To achieve this several measures have been adopted. 
 Above all the calculation method for rentals has been changed in such a way that it is higher than the land tax that the owner of land must pay. In this way it has become more profitable to own, rather than to rent, state land.
 It seems as if tenants, and that is mainly industrial enterprises, should now propel themselves into buying up their land. But that is not happening because the sale price is extremely high. 
 The price was set by the previous city government at 30 times the annual land tax for the larger part of the city's territory - and I would like to note here that the federal law allowed it to be set at six times less. As a result the price of state land plots exceeds the prices on the private land market. Buying industrial land to build a new factory costs more than in the Netherlands, not to mention the Leningrad Oblast and the Baltic states.
 Matviyenko's government decided to reduce the sale price threefold so that it is now only nine times the annual land tax. Vladimir Blank, head of City Hall's committee for economic development, industrial policy and trade, says the new price is in line with the current market price for land without utilities installed. 
 The price of land under industrial enterprises is fully competitive with the Leningrad Oblast and the Baltic States.
 The administration calculates that land users will start to look at its use as a serious activity and will quickly buy it up. This will allow the city government together with the landowners to swiftly remove industrial enterprises from the center of the city. 
 And, apart from that, new industrial zones will be created. To achieve that they have made another step - all industrial zones will be declared territories of minimal city planning value. That will allow the price for land in industrial zones to fall even lower. 
 
 <i>Vladimir Gryaznevich is a political analyst with Expert Severo-Zapad magazine. His comment was first broadcast on Ekho Moskvy in St. Petersburg on Friday. </i>

TITLE: Ring of Fire
TEXT: The inferno ... is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: Accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.&quot; - Italo Calvino, &quot; Invisible Cities.&quot; 
 
There is of course no space, nowhere to move or breathe in the sealed chamber of the American Infoglomerate - the vast entanglement of corporate media and government propaganda that smothers the body politic with hysterical outpourings of diversion, drivel and deadening white noise. Here, events occur in a total vacuum: they have no history, no context, no consequences. Stripped of the heft and scope of reality, they can easily be molded and distorted to fit the prevailing political and business agendas. Amnesia, ignorance, confusion and fear are left to rule the day: excellent fuel for the stokers of the inferno, who use the heat to work their alchemical magic - transforming human blood into gold.
 &quot;There are more and more dead bodies on the streets and the stench is unbearable. Smoke is everywhere. It's hard to know how much people outside Fallujah are aware of what is going on here. There are dead women and children lying on the streets. People are getting weaker from hunger. Many are dying are from their injuries because there is no medical help left in the city whatsoever. Some families have started burying their dead in their gardens.&quot;
 This was a voice from the depths of the inferno: Fadhil Badrani, reporter for the BBC and Reuters, trapped in the iron encirclement along with tens of thousands of civilians. It was a rare breath of truth. The reality of a major city being ground into rubble was meant to be obscured by the Infoglomerate's wall of noise: murder trials, state visits, Cabinet shuffles, celebrity weddings - and, above all, the reports of &quot;embedded&quot; journalists shaping the &quot;narrative&quot; into its proper form: a magnificent feat of arms carried out with surgical precision against an enemy openly identified by American commanders as &quot;Satan,&quot; the AP reports.
 One of the first moves in this magnificent feat was the destruction and capture of medical centers. Twenty doctors - and their patients, including women and children - were killed in an airstrike on one major clinic, the UN Information Service reports, while the city's main hospital was seized in the early hours of the ground assault. Why? Because these places of healing could be used as &quot;propaganda centers,&quot; the Pentagon's &quot;information warfare&quot; specialists told The New York Times. Unlike the first attack on Fallujah last spring, there was to be no unseemly footage of gutted children bleeding to death on hospital beds. This time - except for NBC's brief, heavily edited, quickly buried clip of the usual lone &quot;bad apple&quot; shooting a wounded Iraqi prisoner - the visuals were rigorously scrubbed.
 So while Americans saw stories of rugged &quot;Marlboro Men&quot; winning the day against Satan, they were spared shots of engineers cutting off water and electricity to the city - a flagrant war crime under the Geneva Conventions, as CounterPunch notes, but standard practice throughout the occupation. Nor did pictures of attack helicopters gunning down civilians trying to escape across the Euphrates River - including a family of five - make the television news, despite the eyewitness account of an AP journalist. Nor were tender American sensibilities subjected to the sight of phosphorous shells bathing enemy fighters - and nearby civilians - with unquenchable chemical fire, literally melting their skin, as the Washington Post reports. Nor did they see the fetus being blown out of the body of Artica Salim when her home was bombed during the &quot;softening-up attacks&quot; that raged relentlessly - and unnoticed - in the closing days of George W. Bush's presidential campaign, the Scotland Sunday Herald reports.
 What they saw instead were two loudly devout Christians, Bush and Tony Blair, clasping hands and proclaiming that Artica Salim had been torn to shreds in order to fight terrorism - specifically, the terrorism of Jordanian thug Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The city's alleged refusal to turn over Zarqawi was the ostensible reason for the attack. Yet halfway through the assault, with dead civilian bodies already stinking in the streets, Coalition commanders finally admitted the truth: Zarqawi wasn't in Fallujah, and hadn't been there for weeks, perhaps months. 
 But then, Zarqawi leads a peculiarly charmed life. Three times before the war, U.S. forces were set to kill him and destroy his organization. It wasn't that difficult; after all, he was operating in Kurdish-held Iraqi territory, where the U.S. military had free rein. Yet each time, Bush called off the strike, the Wall Street Journal reports. He needed Zarqawi for his pre-war propaganda, so he could point to an &quot;al-Qaida ally in Iraq&quot; - even though Zarqawi was on <i>Bush's</i> Iraqi turf, not Saddam's. 
 And Bush still needs Zarqawi, or someone like him - a killer whose lurid malefactions obscure the even larger crime that set all these atrocities in motion: an unprovoked aggressive war based on lies, whose only goal is the imposition of a regime that will enrich Bush's cronies while advancing American dominance of the world's resources. 
 Bush and Zarqawi are mirror-image enemies: foreign terrorists breaking into Iraq to spread indiscriminate death and ruin in pursuit of their brutal visions. Everywhere they go, everything they touch, everyone they draw to their cause becomes inferno.
 
 <i>For annotational references, see Opinion at www.sptimesrussia.com </i>

TITLE: Iraq Authorities Set Jan. 30 as Election Date
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraqi authorities set Jan. 30 as the date for the nation's first election since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship and pledged that voting would take place throughout the country despite rising violence and calls by Sunni clerics for a boycott. 
 
Farid Ayar, spokesman of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, said voting would push ahead even in areas still wracked by violence - including Fallujah, Mosul and other parts of the volatile Sunni Triangle. 
 The vote for the 275-member National Assembly is seen as a major step toward building democracy after years of Saddam's tyranny. 
 But the violence, which has escalated this month with the U.S.-led offensive against Fallujah, has raised fears voting will be nearly impossible in insurgency-torn regions - or that Sunni Arabs, angry at the U.S.-Iraqi crackdown, will reject the election. 
 If either takes place, it could undermine the vote's legitimacy. 
 Ayar insisted that &quot;no Iraqi province will be excluded because the law considers Iraq as one constituency, and therefore it is not legal to exclude any province.&quot; 
 To bolster Iraq's democracy, 19 creditor nations - including the United States, Japan, Russia and many in Europe - agreed Sunday to write off 80 percent of the $38.9 billion that Iraq owes them. U.S. and Iraqi troops have been clearing the last of the resistance from Fallujah, the main rebel bastion stormed Nov. 8 in hopes of breaking the back of the insurgency before the election. 
 Secretary of State Colin Powell said he believed the battle of Fallujah did &quot;serious damage&quot; to the insurgency, adding that &quot;it remains to be seen how severe it was&quot; and whether the guerrillas will be able &quot;to regenerate.&quot; 
 In Fallujah, Marine Major Jim West said Sunday that U.S. troops have found nearly 20 &quot;atrocity sites&quot; where insurgents imprisoned, tortured and murdered hostages. 
 West said troops found rooms containing knives and black hoods, &quot;many of them blood-covered.&quot; 
 The storming of Fallujah has heightened tensions throughout Sunni Arab areas, triggering clashes in Mosul, Beiji, Samarra, Ramadi and elsewhere. 
 In Ramadi, 44 kilometers west of Baghdad, insurgents ambushed an Iraqi National Guard patrol, killing eight guardsmen and injuring 18 others, police said.

TITLE: Chinese Passenger Airliner Crashes Killing 53 on Board
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BEIJING - A passenger plane crashed in an ice-covered lake in northern China seconds after takeoff yesterday, killing all 53 people aboard and one person on the ground after an apparent midair explosion, the government said.
 
There was no word on the cause of the crash, which was the country's deadliest in more than two years and was a setback to China's efforts to improve air safety following a string of accidents in the 1990s.
 The China Eastern Airlines plane went down in Baotou, a city in the Inner Mongolia region 500 kilometers northwest of Beijing, &quot;only about a dozen seconds&quot; after takeoff at 8:20 a.m., the official Xinhua news agency said.
 The airplane, a Bombardier CRJ-200, was headed for Shanghai with 47 passengers and six crew members when it crashed into the lake in Nanhai Park, Xinhua said. The weather was clear and cold.
 Premier Wen Jiabao ordered all-out efforts to determine the crash's cause, state television reported in its national evening newscast.
 All CRJ-200 aircraft in China were grounded, and cabinet-level investigators were dispatched to the crash site from Beijing, Xinhua said.
 Witnesses told the agency they heard an explosion before the airplane hit the ground, and one described seeing &quot;a big fireball&quot; overhead.
 A worker on the ground at Nanhai Park was also killed, Xinhua said. Early reports said two park workers were killed, but that was later revised to one confirmed death.
 One Indonesian was among the passengers killed, and the rest were Chinese nationals, the reports said.
 China had numerous deadly airplane crashes in the 1990s, prompting the government to tighten safety measures and upgrade airplanes in the completely state-controlled aviation industry.

TITLE: Congress Leaders Hoping to Pass 9/11 Bill
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: WASHINGTON - Unwilling to concede defeat, congressional leaders expressed hope Sunday that lawmakers could return next month to resolve a turf battle that has blocked passage of an overhaul of the nation's intelligence agencies. President George W. Bush pledged to work with them for passage. 
 
Congressional leaders said prospects depended on how successful Bush was in lining up support. 
 &quot;For us to do the bill in early December it will take significant involvement by the president and the vice president,&quot; said Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. &quot;It will take real focus on their part.&quot; 
 At a news conference after an economic summit in Chile, Bush said: &quot;I was disappointed the bill didn't pass. I thought it was going to pass up to the last minute.&quot; 
 He said he and Vice President Dick Cheney had talked with key members of the House and &quot;it was clear I wanted the bill passed.&quot; He did not respond directly to a question about whether opposition from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld contributed to the deadlock. 
 Bush noted that Congress would return for another effort in December. &quot;Hopefully, we'll get a bill done,&quot; Bush said, promising to work with interested parties. &quot;When I get home I look forward to getting it done.&quot; 
 During a chaotic Saturday that was intended as the final meeting of the 108th Congress, negotiators announced a compromise on the intelligence bill. Hours later, opposition from the Republican chairmen of two committees stymied the legislation, which would create a national intelligence director. 
 Reflecting Pentagon concerns about the legislation, California Representative Duncan Hunter of the House Armed Services warned that the bill could interfere with the military chain of command and endanger troops in the field. Wisconsin Representative James Sensenbrenner of the House Judiciary Committee demanded that the bill deal with illegal immigration. 
 Congress did manage to pass a 3,000-page, $388 billion spending bill that covers most nondefense and non-security programs for the budget year that began Oct. 1. 
 But there will be a delay in getting President Bush's signature. The hang-up is because of a single line in the bill that would have given two committee chairmen and their assistants access to people's income tax returns. 
 The Senate approved a resolution nullifying the idea; House leaders promised to pass it Wednesday. Then, the spending bill will head to the White House. 
 &quot;I have no earthly idea how it got in there,&quot; Frist said on CBS' &quot;Face the Nation.&quot; &quot;But, obviously, somebody is going to know, and accountability will be carried out.&quot; 
 Frist referred to the bill Saturday night as the &quot;Istook amendment,&quot; and congressional aides said it was inserted at the request of Representative Ernest Istook Jnr. 
 Istook, chairman of the House Appropriations transportation subcommittee, said in a statement Sunday that the Internal Revenue Service drafted the language, which he said would not have allowed any inspections of tax returns. &quot;Nobody's privacy was ever jeopardized,&quot; the statement said. 
 Congress had worked for three months on legislation that carries out the recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission for a director of national intelligence and a national counterterrorism center. 
 The legislation has met resistance from Rumsfeld and other Pentagon leaders who do not want to cede control of the intelligence budget. The Pentagon now controls roughly 80 percent of the estimated $40 billion spent on intelligence each year.

TITLE: Study Implicates Chernobyl
 In Cancers of 800 Swedes
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: STOCKHOLM, Sweden - More than 800 people in northern Sweden may have cancer as a result of the fallout that spewed over the region after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, according to a new study by Swedish scientists. 
 
The figure is significantly higher than any previous estimate, and the study drew immediate fire from critics who said they doubted the accuracy of the results. 
 The radiation was released on April 26, 1986, when reactor No. 4 at Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded and caught fire, contaminating an area roughly half the size of Colorado, forcing the resettlement of hundreds of thousands of people and ruining some of Europe's most fertile farmland. 
 The study monitored cancer cases among the more than 1.1 million people in the northern parts of Sweden who were exposed to the radioactive fallout between 1988-1996, and found that the cancer risk increased in areas with higher levels of fallout, which was spread by winds. 
 Of the 22,400 cancer cases among the group, 849 can be statistically attributed to Chernobyl, said Martin Tondel, a researcher at Linkoeping University who headed the study. The findings were first published in this month's issue of the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, a science magazine. 
 But Leif Moberg, a radiation expert with the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority, questioned the findings. 
 &quot;The radiation dosage that we in Sweden got after the accident was too low to produce this many cancer cases,&quot; Moberg said, adding it was probably too early to see any definite results of Chernobyl. &quot;Most cancer cases don't develop until 20, 30 or 50 years later,&quot; he said. 
 Tondel, however, said that although the increase of cases can't directly be attributed to Chernobyl, he could not see any other explanation. 


TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: <b>Flight to U.S. Diverted
 </b>

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An Air France flight from Paris to Washington was diverted to Maine when authorities discovered the name of one of the passengers on a U.S. no-fly list, a U.S. customs spokesman said on Sunday. 
 Air France Flight 026 was diverted to Maine on Saturday. One passenger was taken off the flight with an expired passport and his companion voluntarily decided not to continue traveling without him, said Barry Morrissey, spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 
 The two men were held overnight in Bangor, Maine, and were being taken to Massachusetts to be put on a flight back to Paris, Morrissey said. 
 
 
<b>Hutu Repatriation
 </b>

KIGALI, Rwanda (Reuters) - Rwanda pushed U.N. Security Council members on Sunday to allow forcible repatriation and disarmament of Rwandan Hutu rebels in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo instead of a voluntary method the council favors.
 "You can't voluntarily disarm these combatants, many of whom are extremists, and I think asking them to voluntarily leave what they have been doing for the last 10 years is unattainable," Rwandan President Paul Kagame said at a news conference.
 
 
<b>Arafat Record Spat
 </b>

PARIS (AFP) - The widow of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has questioned the right of his nephew to receive a copy of Arafat's medical records, her lawyers said in a statement Sunday.
 Without mentioning the name of Arafat's nephew, Nasser al-Kidwa, who arrived in Paris earlier in the day from Cairo to pick up his uncle's medical records, the lawyers, Philippe Plantade and Jean-Marie Burguburu, said that only Arafat's widow, Suha Arafat, was entitled to the file.
 
 
<b>Nujoma Successor Wins 
 </b>

WINDHOEK, Namibia (AFP) - Namibian President Sam Nujoma's chosen successor, Hifikepunye Pohamba, won a landslide victory with more than 76 percent of the vote in the country's third elections since independence, according to final results. 
 Pohamba, 69, the present lands minister, is set to become Namibia's second president since independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, replacing Nujoma who has dominated the political scene in this southern African nation for five decades. 
 The ruling South West Africa People's Organization won 75.1 percent of the ballot in last week's parliamentary elections. 
 
 
<b>Myanmar Amnesty
 </b>

Yangon, Myanmar (AP) - One of Myanmar's best known and longest-imprisoned political dissidents has been freed as part of a general release of almost 4,000 prisoners granted by the country's ruling junta, a family member confirmed Saturday. 
 Min Ko Naing, 42, whose real name is Paw U Tun, is one of about two dozen political detainees believed to have been released since Thursday, when the junta announced it was suspending the sentences of 3,937 prisoners. 



TITLE: Rugby in Petersburg: White Knights Delight
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: The three billion fans worldwide who watched the 2004 World Cup final between Australia and England were entertained by a close match, fought hard on both sides to the finish. The conclusion was clear and decisive for popular appeal: rugby is an exciting game. Now that game is coming in shining armor to St. Petersburg. 
 
A group of ex-pats are organizing a rugby union club and invites interested players, coaches and spectators to join them. The White Knights of St. Petersburg begin their quest in the corporate league of Russian rugby this winter. In order to survive their inaugural season it will mark another test of the city's strength, endurance and take many acts of gallantry. 
 Rugby may be one of the only hard-contact sports where after the game both teams manage to shake hands honorably and then head to the pub together for a pint. The real question one needs to ask about the White Knights: is it a club or a team? Work hard, play hard, have a club. The team's unofficial motto suggests a recipe for success for this newest addition to the sporting landscape of St. Petersburg. 
 Rugby is a hooligans' game played by gentleman, according to its players and coaches. That may seem like an appropriate match for the Russian psyche. 
 The organizers of the new team in St. Petersburg believe it could play an important role in the community for expats to build camaraderie in the global language of sport while inviting Russians to try out their hands, backs and feet in rigorous but friendly competition. 
 There are 8 professional rugby teams currently in Russia and games are now being televised nationally. The Moscow Dragons form an essential role in the community of expats in the capital. So why not try it out in St. Petersburg as well? 
 Daniel Kearvell, director of the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce in St. Petersburg, thought the time had come to call a council for the White Knights. 
 The idea, he said, is &quot;to raise the profile of youth rugby, and to promote amateur team sports in St. Petersburg&quot; Rugby is one of the most popular sports that is not yet a part of the Olympic Games, he notes. When it finally does join the Olympics in 2008 or 2012, interest in the sport will undoubtedly grow.
 The White Knights will practice at an indoor facility during the winter and play games against other Russian teams and squads from the Baltic States. 
 A match with the sister club in Moscow is set for Dec. 11.
 St. Petersburg rugby was the national champion in the 1970s, but has not succeeded in gaining conscripts ahead of hockey and football in recent years. Now it will have the opportunity to rise again in the form of the White Knights. It's both a team and a club; sport and community development. 
 Those anxious to join the Knights and try their hand at rugby, or would like to watch a game, can contact club president Michael Walsh at the Hotel Angleterre.

TITLE: Giant Manning Has Room For Growth
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: EAST RUTHERFORD, New Jersey - The talk finally finished, and the football finally started, but Eli Manning didn't quite emulate Ben Roethlisberger's early success in the NFL. Not that the New York Giants are complaining about the top overall draft pick's debut. 
 
After a shaky first half, Manning showed Sunday why the Giants mortgaged their future on draft day. He led New York on two second-half drives that turned a one-sided game into a thriller in a 14-10 loss to Atlanta. 
 A 6-yard touchdown pass to Jeremy Shockey got New York (5-5) within 14-7 in the third quarter and another long drive set up a 24-yard field goal by Steve Christie with 6:29 to play. 
 That was all he could manage, however, and the Giants lost their third straight. &quot;His first game, there is a lot of hype, a lot of pressure on him,&quot; said the Falcons' Michael Vick, the No. 1 pick in 2001, who had a solid game at Giants Stadium. 
 &quot;He came out and played with poise,&quot; Vick said. &quot;He made some plays you can't expect a rookie quarterback to make. I told him he's going to be just like his brother [Peyton] in due time.&quot; 
 Manning, the top overall pick acquired from San Diego in a trade during the draft, also threw two interceptions starting in place of Kurt Warner, who was benched Monday. 
 &quot;I was disappointed the way I started the game,&quot; said Manning, who was victimized by several drops by Giants receivers. &quot;I was better in the second half.&quot; 
 Vick ran for 104 yards and threw two first-half touchdown passes to Alge Crumpler to lead the Falcons to 8-2 for the season. Manning already has lost more games than Pittsburgh's Roethlisberger, who is 8-0 after a 19-14 victory at Cincinnati. The only rookie quarterback to start his career so well, Roethlisberger struggled a bit and was sacked seven times. But he had a strong defense and Jerome Bettis to rely on. 
 Bettis rumbled for 129 yards and Pittsburgh (9-1) overcame an out-of-sync first half for its best start since 1978, when an identical mark led to the Steelers' third Super Bowl win in five years. 
 &quot;I wasn't flustered, just disappointed in my play,&quot; said Roethlisberger, who went 15-of-21 for 138 yards, but lost 54 yards on sacks.
 The host Bengals (4-6) had a season high for sacks and forced Roethlisberger to make poor decisions. But with Duce Staley (hamstring) sidelined a third straight game, Bettis came through with his third successive 100-yard game. He repeatedly bowled over tacklers during his 11th 100-yard performance against the Bengals, and moved ahead of Tony Dorsett for fifth place on the NFL's career rushing list. 
 &quot;It reminds me of Steeler football, the way we've played since I've been here,&quot; said Bettis, in his ninth season with Pittsburgh. &quot;That's important. We've got to remain ourselves. We've got an identity and we've got to stick to it.&quot;
 In Chicago, Eli's older brother, Peyton Manning was unstoppable again. He threw four more touchdown passes and has 35 this season, 13 shy of Dan Marino's NFL record set in 1984. 
 Edgerrin James punished the Bears with 204 yards on 23 carries. Both he and Manning sat out the fourth quarter. 
 The Colts (7-3) feasted on five turnovers by the Bears (4-6), four by shaky rookie quarterback Craig Krenzel, who lost two fumbles and threw two interceptions as the Bears' three-game winning streak ended.
 Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Eagles' Donovan McNabb equaled a career high with four touchdown passes in a 28-6 win over the Washington Redskins, and the Eagles improved to 9-1 for the first time since the 1980 season, when they opened 11-1 and went to the Super Bowl. 
 McNabb threw two TD passes to Brian Westbrook and one each to Terrell Owens and Chad Lewis. It was his second straight four-TD performance and fourth of the season. 
 Owens became just the second receiver in NFL history to score 13 TDs in five seasons, joining Jerry Rice, who has done it eight times. The Eagles can clinch their fourth consecutive NFC East title with a victory at the New York Giants next Sunday. 
 Patrick Ramsey, making his first start of the season after replacing Mark Brunell, couldn't revive the sputtering offense for Washington (3-7).
 At Minneapolis, the Minnesota Vikings (6-4) stayed atop the NFC North and ended a three-game losing streak as they shut out Detroit in the second half and overcame a 12-point deficit in the fourth quarter to gain a 22-19 win. 
 Eddie Drummond ran the opening kickoff back for a 92-yard touchdown, his third score in a five-return span after setting an NFL record with two punt returns for TDs in the fourth quarter last week at Jacksonville. But the Lions (4-6) dropped their fourth in a row.
 The champion New England Patriots were due to play at Kansas City on Monday.

TITLE: League Slaps Example Ban On Brawling Ball Players
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: NEW YORK - The wrath of David Stern was unleashed, giving Ron Artest, Stephen Jackson and Jermaine O'Neal a long time - extremely long in Artest's case - to ponder the error of their ways. 
 
The NBA commissioner suspended Artest for the remainder of this season Sunday and disciplined eight other members of the Indiana Pacers and Detriot Pistons, sending a strong message that the league won't tolerate the type of unprecedented violence displayed Friday night. 
 The initial skirmish wasn't all that bad, with Artest retreating to the scorer's table and lying atop it after Ben Wallace of Detriot sent him reeling backward. But when a fan tossed a cup at Artest, he stormed into the stands, throwing punches as he climbed over seats. Jackson joined Artest and threw punches at fans, who punched back. At one point, a chair was tossed into the fray. After the fight ended, the referees called off the rest of the game. 
 &quot;Mr. Jackson was well into the stands, and certainly anyone who watched any television this weekend understood he wasn't going in as a peacemaker,&quot; Stern said. &quot;Jermaine, I think it's fair to say, exceeded any bounds of peacemaking with the altercation with the fan in which he was involved.&quot;
 Jackson drew a 30-game suspension and his Indiana teammate O'Neal was banned for 25 games. Ben Wallace was hit with a six-game ban, and Indiana's Anthony Johnson got a five-game suspension. 
 Four others drew one-game suspensions for leaving the bench during the initial stages of a fracas that quickly escalated into a five-minute melee with players and patrons exchanging punches. 
 While coming down hard on the players, Stern also announced the league would review several procedures, from in-game security to alcohol sales, in order to establish a safer arena environment. 
 &quot;There is an element out there that thinks they can take certain liberties. That didn't used to be the case,&quot; Stern said. &quot;Frankly, we've got a lot of work to do in the next several days and weeks.&quot; 
 Reaction to the suspensions came quickly. 
 Artest issued a contrite statement in which he questioned the length of his suspension, while O'Neal's agent released an angry missive accusing the league of singling out O'Neal without taking into concern the fear for their own safety that the players were feeling. 
 Stern, meanwhile, said Artest's history of suspensions and anger management issues contributed to the severity of his penalty. He also made clear that things could have been even worse for O'Neal. Four players - Indiana's Reggie Miller, and Detroit's Chauncey Billups, Elden Campbell and Derrick Coleman - were suspended one game apiece for leaving the bench during the initial fracas. 
 Artest's suspension is the strongest ever levied for a fight during a game. 
 &quot;The line is drawn, and my guess is that won't happen again - certainly not by anybody who wants to be associated with our league,&quot; Stern said. 
 All of the suspensions are without pay. Artest will lose approximately $5 million in salary, while O'Neal's suspension will cost him nearly 25 percent of his $14.8 million salary for the current season. Limited to just six players Saturday, Indiana dropped an 86-83 decision to Orlando. 
 Billups, Coleman and Campbell served their suspensions Sunday as Detroit defeated Charlotte 117-116.

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: <b>Federer Wins Again
 </b>

HOUSTON, Texas (AP) - Roger Federer started the week recuperating from a torn thigh muscle and ended it with a strong hold on the No. 1 ranking. 
 The top-seeded Federer won a record 13th straight final Sunday, beating Lleyton Hewitt 6-3 6-2 in the title match of the ATP Masters Cup. 
 Federer's victory broke the record he shared with Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe. He ended the season with 17 straight match victories.
 
 
<b>Expos Name Changes
 </b>

WASHINGTON DC (AP) - The Montreal Expos are about to get their new name: the Washington Nationals. 
 A city official and a baseball official, both speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that the team will reveal its new name, cap and red-white-and-blue color scheme during a news conference Monday. 
 The search for a new name began Sept. 29, when Major League Baseball announced it planned to relocate the team for the 2005 season. Initially, the plan was to wait until the team was sold to select the name, but the sale process is expected to take months - and the team needs to start marketing itself in its new home city immediately.
 
 
<b>Beckham Real Upset
 </b>

MADRID (Reuters) - David Beckham has dismissed talk that Real Madrid's comprehensive 3-0 defeat by Barcelona is a sign that the side are in decline and says they should not be written off from the title race just yet. "I think they were better than us last night, but I feel that there isn't that much between us," said Beckham. "They are playing very good football and they have some of the best players in the world and they've got a strong togetherness as a team. 
 "But I still think we can compete with Barcelona and the league is not over yet. We'll see at the end of the season who is the best team."
 
 
<b>Wright Not Wrong 
 </b>

LAS VEGAS (AP) - Winky Wright pronounced himself one of boxing's elite contenders Saturday night after beating Shane Mosley in a rematch and holding onto his 154-pound titles. It was a narrow win not decided until the final round, but Wright immediately began campaigning for even bigger fights. 
 Among the names suggested were Felix Trinidad and Bernard Hopkins. For a fighter who toiled nearly 14 years in boxing's minor leagues, those are big names indeed. 
 After beating Mosley a second time, Wright is now ready to cash in. 
 "I'm from the 'hood, where we have an expression: 'Show me the money,'" Wright said.
 
 
<b>Tiger Burning Bright 
 </b>

MIYAZAKI, Japan (AP) - Tiger Woods shot a 3-under 67 Sunday to win the Dunlop Phoenix by eight strokes for his first title since February. 
 Woods, who entered the final round with a 10-stroke lead, carded five birdies against a pair of bogeys at the Phoenix Country Club to finish at 16-under 264.
 Woods recorded his lone victory this year at the Match Play Championship. The last time he won a stroke-play tournament was in October 2003.