SOURCE: The St. Petersburg Times
DATE: Issue #1026 (92), Friday, December 3, 2004
**************************************************************************


TITLE: Putin, Kuchma Reject Early Poll
PUBLISHER: Reuters
TEXT: KIEV - President Vladimir Putin threw his weight on Thursday behind Ukraine's outgoing president in his bid to block a quick rerun of disputed presidential polls that the country's opposition thinks would bring it victory. 
 
At a meeting with President Leonid Kuchma at an airport outside Moscow, Putin said the idea of restaging just the second round of the elections, as demanded by opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko, could well fail. 
 He said he shared the views of Kuchma, who has said that if the election is to be held again, it should be done from scratch - a process that could take up to three months. That would keep Kuchma in office and enable him to establish greater control over the election process and choose a candidate to his liking. 
 Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych was declared the winner of a Nov. 21 second round run-off election branded fraudulent by Yushchenko and much of the Western world. 
 Just after Putin spoke, U.S. President George W. Bush said any new election in Ukraine should be "open and fair" and free of foreign influence. "The will of the people must be known and heard," he said in Washington. 
 Putin, who twice visited Ukraine during the election campaign to back Yanukovych, told Kuchma in televized remarks: "A repeat of the run-off vote may fail to work. The re-run can be held twice, three times, 25 times until one of the parties gets the desired result." 
 He also said he was "very worried" about a possible split-up of Ukraine after the elections. 
 "We support your actions aimed at maintaining the integrity of the state," he added. 
 The Moscow talks came as Ukraine's Supreme Court looked set to rule Friday on the election dispute. 
 After 10 days of mass protests, Yushchenko supporters trudged again through slush-filled Kiev streets, responding to his call to exploit the momentum to overturn an election he said was stolen by Yanukovych through mass fraud. 
 Ukraine's politicians have agreed to wait for the court's decision before changing laws to allow a new election. 
 "Today we are finishing the process, and the judges will leave to consider. Will there be a decision by the court - I don't know, but probably yes," said Svitlana Kustova, Yushchenko's representative in the court. 
 Stepan Havrysh, a parliamentary deputy and Yanukovych's representative, said: "My forecast is that the decision will be made tomorrow before lunch." 
 If the court rules that the election was not legitimate, the Central Election Commission, which had proclaimed Yanukovych the winner, will probably call a new poll - but that issue has sparked a new struggle between the two sides. 
 Yushchenko runs the risk that the mass demonstrations in his support will lose steam and he will run out of funds if the entire process has to start over. 
 Putin was quick last week to congratulate Yanukovych on winning the poll, although the Kremlin has since backed off. Ukraine, which was second only to Russia in importance in the former Soviet Union, is of vital concern to Moscow. 
 Jan Kubis, secretary general of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and part of a foreign mediation team in Kiev, was optimistic progress was being made towards resolving the crisis. 
 "I am very glad that there is a political will on both sides to find a way out of this political crisis," he said in a BBC interview. 
 But hundreds of demonstrators blocked government buildings despite what Kuchma said had been an agreement to allow access. 
 "We are waiting for the Supreme Court decision and we believe that it will be in our favor," said Dima, a student from eastern Ukraine, who was manning a blockade near the presidential administration building. 
 "If not today, then tomorrow. I really believe that we'll win. People are becoming sick, tired. But it's impossible to break us," he said as a medic passed through the crowd, spraying throat disinfectant into the mouths of the picketers. 
 "This is a conflict between an immoral and overbearing political system and a prospect of democracy and moralisation," Cardinal Lubomyr Husar, head of Ukraine's 5-million-strong minority eastern-rite Catholic church, told Italy's daily Corriere della Sera. 
 On Wednesday, the opposition scored a victory when parliament voted to sack Yanukovych as prime minister. But he called the vote illegal and refused to accept it. 
 
 <i>
Additional reporting by Magarita Antidze, Oliver Bullough, Elizabeth Piper. </i>

TITLE: Party Boss' Slaying Set Off Purges
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Seventy years ago on Wednesday, on Dec. 1, 1934, a shot rang out that killed not only the Communist Party boss of Leningrad, but also marked the start of a wave of mass repressions by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
 
Sergei Kirov, a Politburo member, was shot dead in a corridor in the former Smolny Institute girls' school about 4:30pm by Leonid Nikolayev, a former communist who not long before the assassination had been expelled from the party for &quot;inappropriate behavior.&quot;
 But it is now widely believed by historians that Stalin organized Kirov's slaying to get rid of a popular potential rival and as a pretext for a mass purge of the citizens of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was then known, and the rest of the Soviet population.
 Stalin hated the cultured city and the purges led by Kirov's successor, Andrei Zhdanov, centered on it. Tens of thousands of citizens were arrested and it has been estimated a quarter of the city was arrested, deported or killed over the next two years. 
 &quot;The assassin detained at the scene of the crime appeared to be a member of the former opposition anti-revolutionary group that was organized by members of anti-Soviet [Grigory] Zinovyev's group in Leningrad,&quot; a Communist Party account of the incident written in 1945 says. 
 &quot;The assassination of S. M. Kirov, the working class favorite, has provoked wide-scale anger and deep regret among the workers of our country.&quot;
 Nikolayev and 13 others were charged with plotting the assassination. All were convicted, sentenced to death and shot shortly after the assassination.
 All the alleged killers, except Nikolayev, were rehabilitated in 1956 as Nikita Khrushchev tried to correct the record of those falsely incriminated during Stalin's rule. 
 But the first 14 victims were just the beginning of what is today called the Great Terror that cost millions of Soviet citizens their lives in the years before World War II. 
 Historians estimate that from Jan. 1, 1935 until July 1, 1941 (Hitler attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941) more than 19.8 million people were arrested, including 7 million who were summarily convicted, often by <i>troikas</i> of three NKD secret police officers, and shot.
 There is a widespread view in society that, unlike Stalin, the charismatic Kirov was a kind communist politician who did not support repression, that he was a matyr to the communist cause. 
 Human rights organization Memorial says this opinion is quite far from the reality.
 &quot;It is known that while Kirov was in power churches were being destroyed and that he was involved in taking decisions [on this matter]. He also personally participated in executions during the Civil War [1918-21],&quot; Tatyana Kosinova, of Memorial's research center, said Wednesday in a telephone interview. 
 &quot;However, all of the information we have on this is at the level of myths, as is the case with many other things, with no concrete materials being present.&quot;
 Meanwhile Tatyana Sukharnikova, director of the city's Kirov museum, called for a criminal investigation to be made into the assassination - something that did not occur at the time.
 The case was always used only to achieve certain political goals, but politicians have never done a thing to find out who exactly organized the assassination or why it was done, she said at a news conference at the museum.
 &quot;For 70 years in a row, the country has conducted half-whispered discussions about Kirov's assassination as if it was the greatest mystery,&quot; Sukharnikova said. &quot;For 70 years from generation to generation [people] have expressed their doubts that the truth will be revealed. Legal and judicial inertia in thinking kept leading to the creation of commissions and additional examinations that have sunk in a political bog of lies and forgeries.&quot; 
 &quot;There are few people who have thought about an obvious step that for all this years has not been taken, even though the law says it should be done, which is to open a criminal investigation,&quot; she said.
 Apart from an investigation into the political aspects of the case, Sukharnikova liked a lead that Kirov may have been having an affair with Nikolayev's wife, who worked in Smolny at the time, looked into.
 &quot;One explanation for the assassination is linked to Milda Drauri, Nikolayev's wife,&quot; she said.
 &quot;There is a version that Nikolayev killed Kirov because Nikolayev was jealous.&quot;
 Between 1956 and 1967 the Communist Party set up four commissions to investigate Kirov's assassination and the activities of the so-called Leningrad Center that was supposedly made up of the 14 convicted plotters.
 &quot;The decisions of commissions contradicted each other, but they were unified in one thing: there was no such undercover Trotsky-Zinovyev group,&quot; Sukharnikova said.
 Leon Trotsky and Zinovyev were top party officials and rivals of Stalin who were expelled when Stalin took control of the party and therefore the country at the 15th Party Congress in 1927. 
 Yury Vdovin, co-chairman of human rights group Citizen's Watch, rejected Sukharnikova's appeal.
 &quot;It would be useless to initiate a criminal case into the assassination because it would not bring out anything new,&quot; he said.
 &quot;I would forget about it totally and shut the museum itself to leave memories about this criminal Soviet power behind,&quot; Vdovin said Wednesday in a telephone interview.
 &quot;I remember when I was a child I visited this museum and I treated it quite seriously, but when I saw his apartment it became clear to me the way he lived,&quot; Vdovin added. &quot;He was a ladies' man and had a sweet tooth and was only creating comfortable conditions for himself, as all high ranking party authorities did.
 &quot;When people talk about keeping memorials for Stalin and Kirov I think the best memorial for them are their victims,&quot; Vdovin said. &quot;Just remember that Apatity city was built in the wrong way, according to Kirov's decree.&quot;
 Apatity on the Kola Peninsula in the Murmansk region was renamed Kirovsk in Kirov's honor after his assassination.
 It is home to the Apatit fertilizer mining company that has been at the center of some of the claims against former Yukos oil company managers. Apatity was built in a way that the dust from the extraction of minerals from fertilizers blew toward residential areas and ruined citizens' health. 
 Vdovin said many people were executed for this mistake in planning.
 &quot;Those people were carrying out Kirov's orders,&quot; Vdovin said.

TITLE: Moscow Apathetic to Looming AIDS Disaster
TEXT: Russia's AIDS epidemic - larger than in any other country in Europe or Central Asia - may begin killing hundreds of thousands of people in just two years, with dire effects for the economy. 
 
But despite the troubling forecasts, the federal government spends about the same amount of money to combat AIDS as it does to support the national book publishing industry.
 Yet, it is not too late to lessen the epidemic's impact, said a Nov. 23 report by UNAIDS and the World Health Organization. &quot;There is considerable scope for further expansion of the epidemic in this vast country - alongside great opportunities to prevent such an outcome,&quot; said the report, released ahead of World AIDS Day on Wednesday.
 With a population of 144 million, Russia has 860,000 people infected with HIV, according to the report. Official estimates put the number at 300,000 people, while some other experts, such as those at the Federal AIDS Center, said at least 1 million people are infected.
 Young men under the age of 30 account for 200,000 of the 300,000 people officially registered as HIV carriers, said Vadim Pokrovsky, head of the Federal AIDS Center. However, recent trends show that more women are becoming infected.
 If the national picture is bleak, in St. Petersburg, which has led the country in infection rates in the last few years, the epidemic has the city in its clutches.
 Of the 300,000 officially registered HIV-positive people in Russia , almost one in 10 lives in St. Petersburg.
 According to the Northwest region AIDS Center, there are at least 26,000 HIV-positive people in the city.
 In St. Petersburg half of city prostitutes are HIV-positive. In Moscow the comparable figure is 14 percent.
 Among the city's other recent HIV trends, which are similar to the country as a whole, has been a rising rate of HIV infections among women, including pregnant women.
 In the first six months this year, St. Petersburg doctors registered 680 pregnant women as HIV positive, compared to 380 women for all of 2001.
 Between 2001 and 2003, about 9,000 HIV-infected women gave birth to children in Russia. Every ninth child of those was born in St. Petersburg, said Yelena Vinogradova, head doctor at the city AIDS Center. 
 Another vulnerable point of St. Petersburg and Leningrad Oblast are high numbers of HIV-positive prisoners, a total of 4,000 inmates, said Aza Rakhmanova, head of infectious diseases for City Hall's health committee.
 &quot;In Russia, the system of prisons is to a certain extent separate from healthcare,&quot; Rakhmanova said. &quot;None of the infected prisoners are receiving antiretroviral treatment. When they leave prison the disease will have advanced and they will spread the virus.&quot;
 Up to 100,000 Russians may die in 2007 of AIDS-related deaths, said Rian van de Braak, executive director of AIDS Foundation East-West, or AFEW, a Dutch nongovernmental organization dedicated to fighting AIDS in the former Soviet Union. 
 These are the people who contracted the virus in 1996 and 1997, when the infection rate began to rise, and will have developed full-blown AIDS, she said.
 The national economy may lose up to 4.5 percent of its gross domestic product by 2010 because the epidemic will affect much of the labor force, according to a 2002 World Bank report. 
 Despite the looming health and economic crisis, federal funding has been scarce: just 126 million rubles (currently about $4.5 million) per year.
 &quot;The peasant will not cross himself before it begins to thunder,&quot; said Alexander Goliusov, head of the Health and Social Development Ministry's department for surveillance of HIV and AIDS, citing a proverb illustrating how people tend to take precautions only after the threat becomes imminent. 
 &quot;Too bad the people who draft the national budget don't realize the terrible prospects.&quot;
 &quot;The problem will arise when millions of people will die,&quot; van de Braak said by telephone from AFEW headquarters in Amsterdam. &quot;At this moment the problem is invisible.&quot;
 As of Oct. 5, only 4,598 HIV carriers had died in Russia, and the causes might have been other than AIDS, Interfax reported, citing official statistics.
 The country's leaders rarely talk about the issue. President Vladimir Putin has only mentioned AIDS in his state of the nation address once, in 2003. His not doing so this year was &quot;extremely disappointing,&quot; Braak said. 
 &quot;It shows that the issue has dropped off the agenda instead of becoming more important,&quot; Braak said. &quot;Apparently, they have too many other problems and this problem seems too far away.&quot;
 Goliusov said in order to effectively fight HIV-virus spread Russia needs to spend at least $144 million on prevention, or $1 for each Russian citizen. 
 Pokrovsky proposed setting aside 8 billion rubles ($285 million) every year to combat AIDS. 
 Meanwhile, international donations to Russia have ballooned in the past year. The first $10.9 million under an $88.7 million five-year program came through from the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in September. 
 St. Petersburg may receive a grant for $ 9 million from the global fund, Interfax reported Thursday.
 The World Bank has an agreement to loan Russia $50 million, which came into force in December 2003, said Vladimir Grichukha, projects director at the Fund for Russian Health Care, the state agency authorized to spend the money. 
 &quot;But any foreign aid is only temporary,&quot; Pokrovsky said. &quot;Russia must spend money itself.&quot;
 Regional authorities have been trying to make up for the lack of federal assistance. The regions spent 900 million rubles to fight AIDS last year - about eight times as much as the national budget, said Larisa Dementyeva, senior expert at Goliusov's department.
 Gennady Onishchenko, head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Consumer Rights and Human Welfare, which oversees Goliusov's department, said Russia has been negotiating with foreign pharmaceutical companies for a 70 percent discount. It also wants to be allowed to produce generic drugs domestically in order to make them more affordable, he said. Antiretroviral treatment currently costs $5,000 to $14,000 per year, depending on the individual case. Russia's goal is to lower this to $1,000.

TITLE: Chernobyl Survivors
 Start Hunger Strike
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A group of St. Petersburgers who were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation when they helped bring the 1986 Chernobyl disaster under control began a hunger strike Wednesday demanding the state pay them more compensation.
 
Eight workers based in Sestroretsk, on the city outskirts, said the government had raised the payments only once since 1997, by 19 percent in 2000, and inflation has been eating away at its value.
 &quot;I was running around the reactor right after the disaster had happened,&quot; said Sergei Kulish, the head of the group who is refusing to take liquids. &quot;I still have scars on my legs. When I came back home [from Chernobyl] my flesh was rotting before my eyes.&quot;
 He has a brain disorder, heart disease and many other illnesses that doctors have said are the consequences of the time he spent at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, he said.
 &quot;Most of us can't buy any medicine because it is so expensive; we can only use those we can get for free,&quot; he said.
 In 1997, Kulish received compensation of about 2,000 rubles a month, which was then equivalent to about $330 under the then exchange rate. Now the face value of what he gets is more - 2,500 rubles - but today this is worth only $88.60.
 The average compensation the liquidators receive is from 1,000 to 3,000 rubles, depending on how much time a worker spent on the radioactively polluted site.
 &quot;Many of my friends who I worked with there have died,&quot; Kulish said. &quot;Maybe the reason I am still alive is that I don't drink or smoke.&quot; 
 The group has four main demands: to raise the level of compensation; to complete court cases that the workers filed earlier, but which were dropped; to punish court employees who declined their appeals allegedly on government orders; for the Supreme Court to issue an official statement on the matter.
 It has written to the federal and city government, to the presidential representative in the Northwest region and to the Legislative Assembly informing them of the hunger strike, but got support only from the Yabloko party.
 &quot;They approached us asking for help,&quot; Yabloko member Boris Vishnevsky said Wednesday in a telephone interview. &quot;Now we're thinking how can we do it, but we will definitely campaign for their compensation.&quot;
 The hunger strike in Sestroretsk follows another in Bryansk in November. After eating nothing for a month, several Bryansk liquidators were hospitalized.
 Five hundred million rubles ($17.7 million) has been allocated in the 2005 federal budget for compensating liquidators, which is 420 million rubles more than this year, Interfax quoted Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu as saying Thursday.
 The government will spend an extra 300 million rubles to finance construction of apartments for liquidators this year and payments will range between 1,000 rubles and 6,000 rubles, the report said.

TITLE: Nordic Nations Eye Joint Stance on Drugs
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: Closer co-ordination on countering drug abuse and trafficking between Nordic countries and northwest Russia can benefit everyone, speakers at a seminar on the problems said.
 
&quot;A cross-border problem like drug use and trafficking require cross-border efforts, and this is exactly why we are here,&quot; Gudrun Ahlin, a senior adviser with the Nordic Council of Ministers' head office in Copenhagen, said after the seminar held in the city on Tuesday. 
 Nils-Petter Karlsson, a senior adviser with the council, said it is crucial to build a transparent and efficient system of cooperation between all sides involved. 
 &quot;Everyone should know what the other participants are doing to avoid doubling up [and wasting some of our efforts],&quot; Karlsson said. &quot;This policy, which we have in the Nordic states, helps to immediately see which fields remain uncovered.&quot;
 The seminar, which covered juvenile drug use, low living standards and homelessness, was held to establish closer contacts between the networks dealing with combating drug use in Russia and the Nordic states.
 Ahlin said the seminar was mutually beneficial. 
 &quot;I have seen the most spectacular program running in an ordinary school in the Frunzensky district,&quot; she said. &quot;They have developed health lessons for the pupils, where they focus not only on issues like prevention of drug or alcohol abuse, but they also talk about a broad range of questions related to maintaining a healthy lifestyle.&quot;
 The visit by Karlsson and Ahlin is part of the council's Action Plan on Social Well-Being, aiming at coordinating efforts of Nordic countries, Baltic states and northwest Russia in areas of public health and social well-being.
 Drug abuse is one of St. Petersburg's most pressing problems. According to City Hall's health committee, there are at least 7,000 underage drug users in town, while the city has up to 300, 000 drug users in total. 
 The youngest drug-addicts in town are aged 6. The Narcology Institute of the Health Ministry estimates there are over 3 million drug users nationwide.
 Most drug addicts are poor, and for this reason most efforts to fight drug addiction are spent on combating poverty and assistance in finding employment. 
 But Ahlin said the latest research shows drug use is not merely a question of welfare, and more and more teenagers from socially secure families show an interest in drugs. 
 &quot;Teenagers generally feel insecure about life, and the opposite sex and so on, and drugs, just like alcohol and cigarettes, are seen as a way to become - or look - tougher,&quot; she said. &quot;This is why in my home country Sweden, we concentrate prevention programs on children in the first grade, when they are still open-minded. There are psychologists and medical doctors in every school.&quot;
 Many experts involved in programs working to prevent juvenile drug abuse and children running away from home say children try drugs and escape from homes because they feel redundant.
 &quot;Children don't run away just because their parents don't feed them, although that is very often the case, but also because they don't feel loved,&quot; said Marina Levina, who runs city humanitarian organization Parents' Bridge. 
 &quot;Parents and other relatives have become much less caring than in the Soviet years. Back then, if parents abused their children or were deprived of parental rights, grandparents or aunts and uncles would step in and take care of the children. 
 &quot;Today, most people are more and more focusing only on earning a living,&quot; she said.

TITLE: No Radiation from Ship Fire
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A nuclear-powered icebreaker under construction at St. Petersburg shipbuilder Baltiisky Zavod caught fire on Tuesday morning. There was no danger of a radiation leak because the fuel rods for the reactor have not yet been installed.
 
&quot;The vessel is still under construction, and therefore there was no nuclear fuel on it,&quot; said Yelena Trekhovitskaya, head of the plant's PR department.
 One worker on board the ship, named 50 Let Pobedy, or 50th anniversary of Victory, inhaled fumes from the fire and was hospitalized. The 50th anniversary of the end of World War II was in 1995, but the vessel will not be ready until 2006, after the 60th anniversary next year. The fire started in building materials shortly before 9 a.m., possibly as a result of careless welding work, local media reported. It was out by noon. No official cause of the fire has been released. 
 The keel of the icebreaker was laid in 1989 and it was put into the water at the end of 1993. But due to the lack of financing, construction was suspended. Partial financing was renewed in the late 1990s. A contract for completing the ship was signed by Baltiisky Zavod and the government in Feb. 2003. It will join seven other nuclear icebreakers run by the Federal Nuclear Power Agency in Murmansk.

TITLE: IN BRIEF
TEXT: City Raises Fees
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - City Hall announced that the cost of a journey on all forms of municipal public transport will rise to 10 rubles from Jan. 1, 2005, Interfax reported Tuesday, quoting economic committee officials.
 The city also raised the fee for heating by 16 percent and cost electricity by 13 percent next year. The cost of drinking water would go up 10 percent to 10.29 ($0.30) rubles for a cubic meter.
 
 
<b>Syrian 'Was Pushed'
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - The city's Kuibyshev district court heard witnesses give evidence that a Syrian student who died when a metro train hit him in March was pushed, Interfax reported Tuesday.
 Witnesses said they were on their way back from a football game at Petrovsky Stadium on March 13 when they saw fighting at the Nevsky Prospekt metro station involving FC Zenit fans. Valentin Bulanov, the main suspect in the death of Abd Al Kader Badawie, got involved on the fans' side, witnesses said.
 "I saw a person fall on the railway 1 second before the collision and immediately applied the brakes, but it was impossible to avoid him," the driver of the train told the court.
 The last witness will testify Dec. 15.
 
 
<b>Ethnic Advisory Body
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - City Hall has created an advisory body on national and cultural communities' affairs, RIA-Novosti reported.
 The council would be formed of heads of ethnic communities based in St. Petersburg as well as representatives of the Legislative Assembly and City Hall that would be able to address "national" questions, the report quoted Alexander Prokhorenko, head of the committee for external relations, as saying.
 The council is to create the concept for a policy on different ethnicities in St. Petersburg, a tolerance-education program, and will look into setting up a community facility or "House of Nationalities" in the city.
 
 
<b>Studios Go Unchecked
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - City Hall's property committee faces problems trying to check if city-owned studios assigned to artists at subsidized rents are being used as intended, Interfax reported Wednesday.
 This year the committee's inspectors were denied access to 471 studios, Igor Metelsky, head of the property committee, was quoted as saying.
 The committee has conducted inspections of 887 studios out of 2,121 and found 5 percent were not used by artists but were being rented out to people or businesses that have nothing to do with art, the report said.
 
 
<b>Cocaine Smuggling
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - A salesman from a Maltese cargo ship was charged this week in an attempt to smuggle 15.6 kilos of cocaine into the St. Petersburg port, Interfax reported Thursday quoting FSB officials.
 "As a result of measures taken at the St. Petersburg port a member of the crew of the Sculptor Tomkins cargo ship, who permanently lives in Latvia was detained for smuggling cocaine," Interfax cited an FSB official statement as saying.
 The ship arrived in St. Petersburg form Ecuador with a cargo of bananas.

TITLE: BA Intends to Increase Flights
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: British Airways wants to carry even more passengers from St. Petersburg's Pulkovo airport next year after a rise of about 20 percent this year, officials said Wednesday.
 
&quot;It is a profitable route,&quot; said Daniel Burkhard, regional commercial manager of British Airways for Eastern Europe, including Russia. &quot;In summer we carry many tourists and in winter numbers are boosted by students traveling to Britain to learn English.&quot;
 Not only had the increase to seven flights to London a week been a success for the airline, it is looking to double the current figure to 14, he said. 
 Getting permission for that many flights will depend on intergovernmental negotiations that are likely to be protracted - shifting from five flights a week to the current daily schedule, introduced in April, took about five years of negotiations, he said.
 The current schedule's departures from St. Petersburg have not been particularly suitable for business travelers: London arrival at 5:40 p.m. has meant at least a day in transit before the next business hours.
 The company responded that it will seek to have the take-offs spread far apart from each other so as to give people a choice of arriving at different times of day, if the airline is permitted to make two flights a day from Pulkovo, Burkhard said.
 British Airways' competitor on the route is Pulkovo Airlines, which flies once a week in winter and thrice weekly in summer. British Airways' fares start from $300 roundtrip, not including taxes, while Pulkovo's fares start from $270 roundtrip.
 Burkhard said bigger, 181-seater Airbus 321 aircraft are likely to ply the route for British Airways next summer alongside the regular 145-seater Airbus 320 aircraft.
 Paul Duffy, an independent aviation analyst, said in a telephone interview from Moscow that British Airways may soon face increased competition from Pulkovo Airlines. Next year the domestic company will replace its Tupolev-154M aircraft with ex-Aer Lingus 737-500s on European routes and London is likely to be one of those to have the new planes.
 Speaking after a press conference, Burkhard said he did not expect the planned merger of Pulkovo Airlines and airline Rossiya (which demands Pulkovo to relinquish its position as operator of Pulkovo airport) will harm British Airways' ambitions.
 &quot;It's a development in the right direction,&quot; he said. &quot;Making clear the division between the airline and the airport will make it clearer what the true costs and fees are.&quot;
 David Rousham, BA's area commercial manager for Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, said his airline is unlikely to face strong competition from low-cost airlines such as Easyjet or Ryanair in Russia, because of strict regulations, state, rather than private, control of aviation and high compliance costs.
 Duffy said that the Russian aviation authority is against low-cost carriers entering Russian airspace. However, under a Soviet-era agreement, two British carriers are allowed to fly to Russia and currently only British Airways does.
 The second airline to service the route could be British-owned Easyjet, which recently began flights to Tallinn, or Ryanair, which flies to Tampere in Finland. 
 Ryanair might be able to fill the position on the grounds of its takeover of British airline Buzz, he said.

TITLE: Tetra Pak Seeks to Move Consumers to UHT milk
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: A rise in long-life packaged milk consumption will indicate the development of a modern and civilized dairy market in the country, said Russia's leading food packaging firm.
 
Tetra Pak, which plans to open its largest factory in Easter Europe in the Moscow region in 2006, has been trying to up sales of long-life or UHT milk in the Northwest region this year, said the company's management on Wednesday.
 Although the company is not a milk or dairy producer, it has been investing hundreds of thousand of dollars into developing the market segment.
 In November, Tetra Pak completed an extensive promotional campaign at 300 St. Petersburg retail stores aimed at educating consumers about the benefits of UHT milk.
 Main suppliers of UHT milk in the region are Petmol, Piskarevsky and Wimm-Bill-Dann milk factories, with the first two using UHT production lines supplied by Tetra Pak.
 Seven new Tetra Pak production lines were installed in the Northwest this year and eight more will follow next year, said Fyodor Chumak, head of the company's St. Petersburg branch. Each assembly line costs about $7 million, but Tetra Pak supplies it under a leasing scheme with factories paying only 30 percent of the real costs, Chumak said.
 &quot;We want to make it easier for the companies to purchase our technology,&quot; he said.
 Andrei Baklan, the technical director at Petmol, said the company has been using milk-treatment equipment for UHT since 1994, and has installed three new lines from Tetra Pak in 2004.
 &quot;The technology requires high-quality milk. Back in the 90s we had problems with the quality, but now it is up to standards,&quot; Baklan said to business daily Delovoi Peterburg.
 However, the consumption of UHT milk in Russia remains under five liters, much lower than the consumption of the product in European countries, said Vladimir Shloma, Tetra Pak's deputy marketing director.
 &quot;Educating the consumers about the product will lead to a projected 30 percent market growth,&quot; he said.
 &quot;A wider UHT milk consumption can indicate the development of a modern, civilized dairy market,&quot; said Tetra Pak general director Igor Akimov in a company statement.
 Tetra Pak dominates the Russian food packaging market, providing products for a variety of food categories, including juice and dairy segments.
 Packages for pasteurized or heated fresh milk products make up Tetra Pak's main competitor in the dairy market. 
 Currently fresh milk has about 66 percent of the total milk market in larger cities; in the regions that figure rises to over 80 percent.
 The dairy market still has great potential for growth, according to a RosBusinesConsulting report. Average dairy consumption hit 280 kilograms per person in 2003, down from the early 90s 370-kilogram level.
 The Leningrad Oblast is the main dairy supplier for the Northwest, with a total of 16 milk plants operating in the region.

TITLE: Tele2 Offers Clients Money
PUBLISHER: The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Mobile communications operator Tele2 announced a launch of a new tariff plan Wednesday in a bid to cement its position as a low-cost operator.
 
&quot;We do not feel that we need to provide such tariffs, but it is one more opportunity to highlight our position on the markets as the cheapest operator,&quot; said Sergei Sukharev, general director of Tele2 in St. Petersburg at a briefing.
 The tariff plan called &quot;Subscribers Get Paid,&quot; is based around the fact that the subscriber gets $.01 per every incoming call that lasts over a minute.
 If the call is under a minute, however, the subscriber gets charged $.06. Meanwhile, incoming calls have been overwhelmingly free of charge under other tariff plans. 
 &quot;Taking into consideration the average length of a phone call, which is 45 seconds, the subscriber will have to pay most of the time,&quot; said Alyona Sayapina, a ACM-Consulting analyst, to business daily Kommersant.
 Perhaps that explains why other mobile operators did not seem worried by the Swedish company's initiative. &quot;On the contrary, most cellular providers are trying to make their tariffs as simple and transparent as possible,&quot; said Pavel Nefeodov, the head of the press service at Mobile Tele Systems.

TITLE: Audit Report Hardly Bothers
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - A much-feared Audit Chamber report on privatization violations from 1993 to 2003 sent stocks tumbling nearly 3 percent Wednesday, but big business and market watchers fought off yawns.
 
The report, published on the parliamentary watchdog's web site Tuesday, appeared to be far from earth-shattering, Aton brokerage wrote in a research note, while Alfa Bank described it as much ado about nothing.
 The report slammed privatization as not leading &quot;to the creation of efficient owners or to the establishment of a socially-oriented market economy.&quot;
 &quot;Courts should ensure the restoration of the government's ownership rights on the basis of proven facts,&quot; the report said it in its most threatening-sounding comments.
 But it also said there should be no mass re-examination of the nation's privatization results. &quot;The inadequacy of Russian laws can't be the grounds for a sweeping reversal of the results of the 1993-2003 privatizations,&quot; the report said. 
 The sell-offs allowed 2 percent of the population to amass an income equal to 15 percent of gross domestic product and 10 percent of the population to control one quarter of the nation's wealth, it said.
 &quot;We stress that its recommendations and conclusions appear to be purely advisory in nature and do not represent an imminent threat to particular companies,&quot; Alfa Bank said in a research note.
 The report, which audited 140 companies, specifically mentions violations by Yukos, LUKoil, Surgutneftegaz, TNK, Sibneft and Unified Energy Systems. Also listed are a number of metals, timber, coal and defense companies. 
 The Audit Chamber also advised that foreign ownership be limited in defense companies, saying that from past experience foreign investors have not brought any added value to the companies, while their participation has jeopardized development.
 The report was released on the same day that President Vladimir Putin complained that oligarchs who made their billions during the chaotic 1990s still hold a grip over the state. &quot;We are fighting this and will continue to fight this,&quot; Putin said at a congress of judges.
 The RTS index dropped 2.69 percent to 611.07. Yukos shares, which have been in a tailspin for months as the company faces bankruptcy over a tax bill of more than $20 billion, shed 10 percent of their value. UES lost 3 percent, while LUKoil dropped 1.28 percent.
 The privatization report, however, was only one of the factors depressing the market, analysts said. 
 &quot;Concern on how this will be handled is one of the reasons - along with the Ukraine risk and uncertainty on Yukos endgame consequences - causing market nervousness this week,&quot; said Christopher Weafer, chief strategist with Alfa Bank.
 &quot;Most portfolio investors have decided that the prudent approach is to do nothing until these uncertainties are removed, and even local traders are largely inactive,&quot; he said.
 Large companies named in the report refused to comment on its findings Wednesday, but industry lobby groups said it draws a line under privatizations and makes it highly unlikely that the Kremlin will wage war on businesses beyond Yukos.
 The big-business lobby group met with Putin last month, and the president reiterated that privatization results would not be revised.
 Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political consultant, agreed that the report is unlikely to be used in any attempt to take back assets.
 &quot;There has been a political decision to draw a line under past privatizations. ... 
 &quot;The report might only be used if a company's policy runs counter to that of the government's, but even then it would serve as a tool and not as the reason,&quot; Markov said.

TITLE: Manufacturing Boom Ends, Economy Slows
PUBLISHER: Staff Writer
TEXT: MOSCOW - Manufacturing contracted in November for the first time in six years, the latest sign that contradictory government policies and waning business confidence could be undermining the longest boom since the fall of the Soviet Union.
 
Moscow Narodny Bank's Purchasing Managers Index published Wednesday showed manufacturing slowed for the first time since November 1998 as prices for materials and energy rose and capital became harder to attract.
 The index fell to 49.8 from 51.5 in October, the fifth straight month of decline. A reading above 50 indicates growth, below 50 contraction.
 Wednesday's manufacturing figures were just the latest in a string of indicators showing evidence of a slowdown. Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref told lawmakers Wednesday that his ministry had pared its forecast for economic growth this year to 6.8 percent from 6.9 percent. The economy grew 7.3 percent last year.
 Gref said investment in oil production, the engine of the economy, has plummeted this year, slowing output growth.
 &quot;The economy is clearly still adjusting to the worsening investment climate, the result of errors in economic policy this year that presented Russia with a banking crisis, an escalation of the Yukos affair, growth in oil sector taxation and an unclear economic strategy,&quot; Troika Dialog said in its monthly overview of the economy. The investment bank said growth would slow even further this year, to 6.4 percent.
 Gross domestic product has more than doubled in nominal dollar terms since 1999, while high prices for oil, gas and metals have driven a massive turnaround in state finances, with record foreign currency reserves and five straight years of budget surpluses.
 But now many economists - including Gref - say the government's behavior is threatening to undermine the best external conditions the country has seen in decades. In the past year, confidence has been hit by mixed signals from the Kremlin, the summer banking crisis, stalled reforms and fears of further attacks on big business after the hammering of Yukos, Russia's top oil producer.
 &quot;We have been sending conflicting signals from the beginning of this year,&quot; Gref told deputies, adding that previously the government had sought to free up the economy. &quot;But the signals that came after this have brought tensions to the relationship between business and the authorities. We have seen a pause of some kind, and in fact, the pause continues.&quot;
 Gref warned lawmakers about the growing influence of the state in the economy, particularly Gazprom, the national gas monopoly that plans to bid for Yukos' main production unit later this month. He added that imports have been growing faster than domestic production as consumers choose foreign goods. Rising prices for goods and energy, according to Moscow Narodny Bank, are hitting domestic producers.
 The competitive advantage Russian exporters gained from the ruble devaluation in 1998 is all but gone. The currency, which has gained 4.5 percent against the dollar since October, hit a fresh four-year high Wednesday, breaking through 28.
 &quot;There were again widespread reports of difficulties in accessing working capital in the latest survey period, which was closely linked by a number of panelists to the effects of sharply rising input costs,&quot; Paul Timmons, an economist at Moscow Narodny Bank, said in a statement.
 While domestic companies are facing higher costs, oil companies have scaled back investments in production as oil export growth is constrained by a lack of capacity in pipelines.
 Gref said investments in oil production dropped 20 percent in the first 9 months, cutting oil output growth from 9.8 percent in June to 7 percent in October, RIA-Novosti reported. Energy and metals make up 75 percent of the country's exports, according to the Economic Development and Trade Ministry.
 Deputy Finance Minister Sergei Shatalov said the tax burden on oil and gas companies may be eased next year to allow higher investment in production.
 &quot;We understand that additional taxes paid by oil companies are so high that they take practically all the profits from these high prices,&quot; Shatalov said.
 He said export duties could be lowered in January or February, but no decision has been made yet.

TITLE: Gref Against Gazprom Buying Yukos' Unit
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: MOSCOW - Russia's economy minister German Gref is trying to halt plans for the Gazprom monopoly to bid for the main production unit of embattled Yukos, Meanwhile Russia's MICEX bourse suspended trading in Yukos' ruble shares after they fell 34 percent Thursday to 27.5 rubles. 
 
On Tuesday, a top official at Gazprom said the behemoth would bid for Yukos's Yuganskneftegas at a December 19 auction, confirming long-held rumors that the state would take over the unit that produces about the same amount of oil per day as the US state of Texas.
 But Gref, the economic trade and development minister, prevented Gazprom's board where he holds a seat from approving the measure later in the day, according to Russian media reports.
 &quot;It was clear at the board meeting that he did not agree with it,&quot; Vedomosti quoted an unnamed board member as saying.
 But analysts said that the reformist minister is unlikely to influence the purchase that, according to observers, is being decided by political considerations at the Kremlin.
 &quot;Gref's lone stand against the Yukos affair steamroller is unlikely to come to anything,&quot; said the UFG brokerage in a research note.
 Among Gref's concerns was that a purchase of Yugansk would open Gazprom to lawsuits from Yukos shareholders, amid strong doubts that the auction is legal, according to Vedomosti.
 The minister was also troubled by the fact that, in order to raise cash for Yugansk, Gazprom planned to scale back its investments by about 3.6 billion dollars (2.7 billion euros) and borrow the rest to cover the 8.6 billion dollars starting price, the official told Vedomosti.
 A source familiar with the situation said Gazprom was holding talks with Deutsche Bank and ABN AMRO to raise as much as $10 billion to finance the acquisition of Yukos' key unit, Yuganskneftegaz. 
 Gref's objections led the board to put off approving its 2005 investment program, which includes the Yugansk purchase and Gref kep up his criticism the next day, when he told parliament deputies that he did not approve of &quot;an increased government presence in market sectors of the economy&quot;, a clear allusion to the deal.
 <i>(Agence France Presse, 
 Reuters, SPT) </i>

TITLE: Dollar Hits A New Low
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BERLIN - The U.S. dollar dropped to a new record Thursday against the euro and its lowest level in nearly five years against the Japanese yen amid uncertainty about whether officials would intervene to curb the currency's slide.
 
The decline of the U.S. currency is a global concern, since it makes exports to the United States more expensive, while reducing earnings when they are shipped back to their home countries.
 A low dollar has been good for U.S. exports by making American products cheaper abroad, but makes life more expensive for Americans living overseas. The U.S. military announced this week that it would give troops posted in Europe a 31 percent increase in their cost of living adjustments to help offset their loss of spending power.
 The euro has shot up from about $1.20 in September to $1.33 over continued concerns about the U.S. trade and budget deficits and signals from the Bush administration that it would not step in to stem the tide.

TITLE: AIDS is Not as Simple as ABC
TEXT: The HIV/AIDS epidemic in Eastern Europe and Central Asia has often been overlooked by the West. Major Western donors interested in the East mostly focus on political and economic transition, while those who are concerned about HIV/AIDS mostly look south to sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic has reached a much more visible stage. If the epidemic in Eastern Europe and Central Asia continues to be largely ignored, however, this region will eventually face a similar disaster.
 
The United States cannot be accused of ignoring the HIV/AIDS epidemic in this region. The U.S. government has been making its presence felt with AIDS-related development assistance, notably in Ukraine and Central Asian countries, for the past decade. U.S. diplomats and politicians have also raised the profile of HIV/AIDS in discussions with their Russian counterparts. Yet there is a risk that certain approaches trumpeted by U.S. politicians and aid agencies will undermine the hard work of preventing HIV already under way in this region.
 The core of the current U.S. approach is the so-called &quot;ABC&quot; strategy, based primarily on the experience of Uganda. &quot;A&quot; stands for abstinence, &quot;B&quot; for &quot;Be faithful,&quot; and &quot;C&quot; for condoms. Abstinence, according to this theory, should take precedence for people who are not in a relationship. Those who are in a relationship should remain faithful to their partners. And if the first two strategies fail for any reason, one should use condoms to prevent the transmission of HIV.
 The message delivered by the ABC approach is that the best way to avoid HIV is to refrain from sexual activity. But HIV prevention programs that focus on absolutes, such as total abstinence, allowing for no choices or mistakes, are likely to end in failure.
 The absurdity of such an absolutist approach becomes clear when you apply it, for example, to automobile safety. It is common knowledge that wearing a seat belt does not guarantee that the wearer will emerge from an accident unharmed. Seat belts merely reduce the chances of serious injury or death. The only way to rule out injury in an accident entirely is not to get in the car in the first place. Worse, if drivers and passengers are told repeatedly that seat belts are not 100 percent effective, they may question the wisdom of wearing them at all, leading inevitably to an increase in injuries and deaths.
 We encounter a similar problem when encouraging people to use condoms. Advocates of the ABC approach exaggerate the failure rate of condoms in order to scare young people into abstinence. Should these young people decide to engage in sexual activity anyway, they may well opt to do so without protection, figuring that since condoms are not 100 percent effective they run the risk of infection whether they wear one or not.
 This is not to say that encouraging abstinence should play no role in an HIV/AIDS prevention strategy. Abstinence, or delaying first intercourse, can play an important role in controlling the epidemic. Yet it should not be encouraged in such a way that it discourages the use of condoms. Any HIV/AIDS prevention message must focus on the fact that people have choices in life and they should be given frank and accurate information to help them make the right choices to protect themselves from HIV.
 The ABC formula is a simplistic device that may work well for politicians and op-ed pages, but does not work as well when faced with more complex challenges on the ground. Instead of catchy but misleading acronyms and abbreviations, we should promote the integrated and multi-sectoral approach that those of us involved in the global fight against AIDS have been pushing for years. This approach requires the cooperation of policymakers, health care workers, teachers and schools, businessmen, people living with HIV/AIDS, and everyone else in the community to discuss openly HIV/AIDS, its methods of transmission, and how to reduce stigma and discrimination as well as how to promote better medical care for those with HIV/AIDS.
 In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, we encounter other damaging aspects of the United States' absolutist approach, particularly its shunning of comprehensive approaches that target injecting drug users and sex workers. Many people from this region broadly share the conservative values of many Americans and naturally shy away from such frank public discussions. The United States also struggled in the early days of its own HIV/AIDS epidemic, which was largely related to taboo social groups such as gay men and intravenous drug users. The United States still struggles with these issues to some extent. Yet one of the greatest contributions that the United States can make in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the world is to share its experience of largely overcoming these taboos and making the HIV/AIDS epidemic a manageable and fairly predictable, if permanent, part of American life.
 
 <i>David Veazey is a senior adviser and Rian van de Braak is the executive director of the Dutch NGO AIDS Foundation East-West, a Moscow-based charity fighting the AIDS epidemic in Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Mongolia. They contributed this comment to The St. Petersburg Times on the occasion of World AIDS Day on Wednesday. </i>

TITLE: 'They Don't Get Paid for Carrying People'
TEXT: A small party last week at the apartment of a friend who lives in the city center ended up with me and three other guests carrying an old woman from her apartment to an ambulance downstairs.
 
There was no elevator and the medics refused to carry the patient, demanding money from the woman's relatives that they did not have. Her daughter had to ask neighbors for help.
 This behavior, as I later found out, is typical of the state-financed medical system. But all the same I was shocked by it.
 &quot;Does this happen often?&quot; I asked a female nurse. Beside her stood the ambulance driver and a medical assistant.
 &quot;It happens every time,&quot; she said. &quot;Who else should do the carrying?&quot; 
 &quot;What about these two guys? What do they do here?&quot; I said.
 &quot;Hmm,&quot; the nurse replied. &quot;They don't get paid for carrying people.&quot;
 An hour earlier, I thought the neighbor was joking when she offered to pay 50 rubles to anyone who would carry her mother down the stairs. We guests were confused at first, but when we understood her predicament, we agreed to help out at no charge.
 &quot;This is an everyday occurrence,&quot; another guest said. &quot;I remember that when a relative had to be delivered to a hospital a couple of years ago, the ambulance staff arrived and told me to find some other people to carry her down from the ninth floor. I had to run around until I finally found some homeless people who would do it.&quot;
 When we entered the neighbor's apartment it seemed to be part of a communal apartment. The woman, who was 87, was moved off the sofa on to a piece of material spread on the floor and she was covered with a dirty blanket.
 One guest appeared to be quite experienced.
 &quot;Let's turn her around, it wouldn't be good for her circulation to carry her headfirst down the stairs,&quot; he said. Despite being born in this country and having lived here all my life, this all looked completely crazy to me. The whole attitude of the medical staff toward another human being and the way the ambulance workers treat emergency patients seems out of keeping with the year 2004. On the outside there is a new century, but inside people's minds they appear to be still in the Soviet Union or maybe something even older.
 The salaries of medical workers in St. Petersburg are very low, but not so dire that they have to stop being human beings.
 After speaking with medical staff at the Mariinsky Hospital I learned their salaries are between $200 and $300 a month, which is average for this city. It is hard, but possible, to live on this, so I would not have imagined these people would need to extort extra cash from patients who have no choice.
 Teachers in St. Petersburg who also have extremely low incomes, also find ways to earn money on the side, but I have never heard of a teacher refusing to give lessons to a child if his parents are unable to pay an additional 1,000 rubles.
 I was stunned that the level of moral standards have fallen so low, especially in the medical sphere.
 I would be more optimistic if this was just an isolated incident, but the problem is that this is the system. Many people I talked to about it told me that the same had happened to their relatives.
 I remember the expression of the ambulance driver's face, which said it was not his business to shift patients unless he got paid for it. In the Mariinsky Hospital, by the way, I was told part of the drivers' job description is to assist carrying patients.

TITLE: Why Putin Gave Support To Yanukovych
TEXT: An acquaintance of mine, a world karate champion, once told me that when you're competing on enemy territory the judges will never let you win on points. You've got to win by knockout.
 
Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko won the election on points and now he's going for a knockout. In the election game, a knockout is known as a revolution.
 Russia was predestined to referee this bout between Ukrainian political heavyweights. But President Vladimir Putin opted to be the guy in Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych's corner who hands him the towel and the spit bucket. The trainer can't be the referee. So the Ukrainians called in Javier Solana and Lech Walesa.
 Why did Putin choose to work in the corner of a twice-convicted candidate?
 If elected, would Yanukovych give preference to Russian businesses? Not likely. During the campaign, the government privatized the crown jewel of the Ukrainian metals industry, VAT Kryvorizhstal. Alexei Mordashov, head of Severstal and a Kremlin favorite, offered $1.2 billion for Ukraine's largest steel producer. But the company was sold to Investment and Steel Union, a company run by President Leonid Kuchma's son-in-law and a Ukrainian businessman, Rynat Akhmetov, for just $800 million.
 If we're treated like that during the campaign, imagine what will happen once the election is over. 
 Perhaps the Kremlin was trying to keep Ukraine from joining the European Union and NATO. Who came up with the idea of cozying up to the West in the first place? Kuchma and Yanukovych, that's who. Every time Russia complained that Ukraine was stealing its natural gas, Kuchma replied: &quot;So that's how it is. Fine. We're joining NATO.&quot;
 If Russia had a different president and a different army, the results of the election in Ukraine could have led to a schism between east and west, with Russian troops rolling into the eastern part of the country to the cheers of the local residents. After all, eastern Ukraine from Odessa to Donetsk is basically Russian territory that was artificially annexed to Ukraine in the Soviet era along the line of the Russo-German front in 1918.
 But that would require a different Kremlin and a different army. As things stand today, if Yushchenko wins, Russia will have backed the loser; if Yanukovych wins, we'll have backed the guy who stabbed us in the back.
 So why did Russia put its money on Yanukovych? I have a theory.
 You see, Yushchenko's wife is American. And she's not just any American, she's a former U.S. government official. Their first meeting was extremely romantic - they were seated next to one another on an airplane. 
 Lots of people meet like this. But Putin, an old KGB man, could be led to believe that any coincidence is in fact a plot hatched by foreign agents. Belief in a CIA conspiracy against Russia runs high in Putin's inner circle. They blame it for everything from downed planes to Beslan. Following this logic, however, the heads of the Interior Ministry and the Federal Security Service should be the first ones suspected of spying for a foreign power.
 You tell Putin that one of the candidates in the Ukrainian election has an American wife, and that they met by chance on a flight somewhere. His natural conclusion: Yushchenko is a CIA agent.
 Why plant this idea in Putin's head, you ask? Very simple. The Kremlin has been making a lot of money in the political campaign business for a long time. Now the campaign business is dying in Russia, replaced by the so-called power vertical, or executive chain of command. But these people still have to make a living. 
 The Ukrainian election presented a huge opportunity. All they had to do was set the process in motion by convincing the higher-ups that a CIA conspiracy was involved.
 
 <i>Yulia Latynina hosts a political talk show on Ekho Moskvy radio. </i>

TITLE: Death becomes her
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: Following Damien Hirst's small-scale exhibition at the Russian Museum last year, the museum welcomed another artist from the celebrated Young British Artists movement last week when it unveiled photo and video works by Sam Taylor-Wood at the Mikhailovsky Castle. 
 
The show is the second in a planned series of contemporary art exhbitions inititiated by Alexander Borovsky of the Russian Museum's Contemporay Art Department, and supported by the British Council. While the Hirst show largely failed to live up to the hype, Borovsky clearly has a hit on his hands with Taylor-Wood. 
 The artist, whose photography portrays famous actors crying, ballet dancers flying and fruits slowly decomposing, has casually established herself as a contemporary art star not with the shock tactics of her YBA cohorts but by provoking amazement with her classical, restrained studies of mortality and pain. 
 Even wearing a baggy T-shirt with a scary dog with rabbit's ears at last week's glitzy opening, it seems that she is more cautious than many of her YBA colleagues. 
 They portray dead animals; she chooses decaying fruit - both tell us about the reality of death, but it is the beauty, grace and gentleness of the process that attracts Taylor-Wood. 
 A three-minute video called &quot;Still Life&quot; (2001) which shows decomposing fruit is included in the Mikhai-lovsky Castle show. 
 Taylor-Wood said the video took 9 weeks to make, adding, &quot;I filmed to a point of almost liquid state. Flies came, and then left&quot;. 
 A tiny detail in the video catches the eye of the modern viewer - near the fruit, arranged in the style of an Old Master, there's a plastic pen that remains unchanged throughout the film.
 Referring to Hirst's pickled sharks, sheep and cows, Taylor-Wood said that she would find exhibiting the decomposing corpse of a living creature &quot;quite extreme.&quot; 
 &quot;I had the idea for another 'Still Life.' I bought a dead hare, hung it, set the camera and filmed it for several days. When I got back and watched what I had shot, I realized that it was the most disturbing film I'd ever seen. I sat there with my mouth open. It was rough decay. It was pure violence&quot;. She refers to plans by the British TV station Channel Four to make a reality show out of a decomposing body as &quot;very hardcore.&quot; 
 If other members of the YBA group make people look disgusting, Taylor-Wood makes actors cry. Her project, &quot;Crying Men,&quot; (2002-2004) in which famous Hollywood actors such as Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Fishburne are photographed with tears in their eyes, forms part of the St. Petersburg show.
 Taylor-Wood handles her star status with equanimity, but there's no doubt she's firmly part of the British establishment. Borovsky calls her a &quot;princess of the London art world.&quot; She names Sir Elton John and soccer superstar David Beckham among her close friends, and she's married to the director of London's leading contemporary art gallery, the White Cube Gallery. 
 She has also made a show for the Pet Shop Boys and is currently working on a film dedicated to William Blake.
 She also knows how to catch the zeitgeist - several months ago she exhibited a video loop of hours of footage showing an angelically sleeping David Beckham at Britain's National Portrait Gallery, and the work has become an instant classic. The work perfectly encapsulates Taylor-Wood's style: classical aesthetics recast by modern technology,a poignant reflection on the brevity of life and emotional states. 
 Taylor-Wood has survived cancer twice, an experience that has clearly affected her work. Her early work is full of anguish and pain, but her post-cancer work has, as she says, &quot;another level, it has a sense of mortality and a sense of what it is to be human.&quot;
 The artist has a goddaughter in St. Petersburg, whose father is an English architect living not far from the Mikhailovsky Castle where the Taylor-Wood show is taking place. It was the architect who first introduced Taylor-Wood to St. Petersburg during her first visit three years ago. 
 &quot;St. Petersburg has a very different feeling to London, and it is also such a beautiful city,&quot; she said in an interview with The St. Petersburg Times. &quot;There are so many churches, and there's water everywhere... and I like the cold.&quot;
 It might also have been the Russian ballet that inspired Taylor-Wood to create another of the videos that forms part of her St. Petersburg show. In &quot;Strings,&quot; (2003) Royal Ballet soloist Ivan Putrov (who was born in Kiev) is strung over a string quartet, and soars serenely as if in tune with the increasing tempo of a Tchaikovsky score. 
 Taylor-Wood's method of putting themes and motifs from fine art, classical music and canonical architecture into a contemporary art context is reminiscent of the films of British auteur Peter Greenaway. The artist said that Greenaway's &quot;A Zed &amp; Two Noughts&quot; (1985), which features decomposing animals, was one of the first films she saw as an emerging artist.
 Even though Taylor-Wood is not wholly familiar with Russian contemporary art, her works obviously find response from the St. Petersburg-based artistic movement of Neo-Academists, established by the late St. Petersburg artist Timur Novikov. 
 The Petersburg group also works with combinations of fine art archetypes and images and modren media techniques to create an interaction of art styles.
 As for her YBA contempories, Taylor-Wood says that for her it feels almost as if they grew up together.
 &quot;Everybody's work was very different from the very beginning, but there were a lot of artists having recognition at the same time. So the media, which couldn't hold on to something, in a way like with op-art, or pop-art, as the only thing they could determine was the same about us was that we were young and British, that's why they called us Young British Artists,&quot; said Taylor-Wood. 
 &quot;A lot of people are older now, and their work is changing and growing, so hopefully, we'll move slowly to another idea. Maybe, Middle-Aged British Artists!&quot;
 
 <i>
Sam Taylor-Wood 
 at the Mikhailovsky (Engineer's ) Castle of the State Russian Museum. Nov. 24 through Jan. 15. 
 www.rusmuseum.ru </i>

TITLE: CHERNOV'S CHOICE
TEXT: A concert by Franz Ferdinand has been finally confirmed by the band, according to the local promoter Svetlaya Muzyka. Britain's latest rock and roll sensation will perform in the city on May 28. However, the location has yet to be chosen.
 Once-hot British group The Brand New Heavies are to perform at the Pribaltiiskaya Hotel. The pioneering acid-jazz band will arrive with new vocalist Nicole Ausso and a new album, &quot;All About the Funk.&quot; The band was formed by guitarist Simon Bartholomew, bassist Andrew Levy and drummer Jan Kincaid as an instrumental band in London way back in 1985. 
 Of home-grown bands, <strong>Auktsyon </strong>at PORT on Friday, <strong>Pep-See </strong>at Moloko and <strong>Dva Samaliota</strong> on Saturday and <strong>Kacheli</strong> at Rossi's on Sunday may deserve attention.
 Dva Samaliota will re-release its &quot;secret&quot; album, &quot;Poo,&quot; to a wider audience. Originally recorded with the band's late singer and guitarist Vladik Pokrovsky in 2002, it failed to be released because of a condition in the contract with Dva Samaliota's former, Moscow-based management company. According to Mikhail Sindalovsky, the band will launch &quot;Poo&quot; at the Griboyedov club on Dec. 24. The band, which criticized its former company overproducing its most recent album, &quot;Ka-Ra-Bas,&quot; is also planning to start recording its next CD soon.
 <strong>Tequilajazzz </strong>has been advertized to perform at the unlikely location of the cabaret venue Gigant Hall, also known as Casino Conti, but will not appear, said the band's frontman Zhenya Fyodorov. Even if Tequilajazzz's name appears on the street posters for the concert, the band is planning to leave for Murmansk on that very day, where it plays on Saturday.
 Tequilajazzz recently performed at Moloko club's anniversary concert, but has no immediate plans to play in St. Petersburg, Fyodorov said.
 Meanwhile, Fyodorov's new project, <strong>The Optymistica Orchestra,</strong> with members of Leningrad, Markscheider Kunst and Akvarium's former cello player Seva Gakkel recorded its debut album late last month. It is expected to be released in February. The Optymistica Orchestra will perform at Moscow's 16 Tons on Dec. 11, but no local dates have been scheduled.
 <strong>Alexei Khvostenko,</strong> the Paris-based emigre painter, poet and singer/songwriter, died of a heart condition in Moscow on Tuesday. Nicknamed &quot;Khvost,&quot; (Tail) he was best-known among Russian rock fans for co-writing the song &quot;Rai&quot; (Paradise) which was covered by Akvarium as &quot;Pod Nebom Golubym&quot; (Under the Blue Skies) in the 1980s as well as for his collaborations with the local band Auktsyon. Khvostenko has been living in France since 1977. He was 64.
 Last week's column contained an error. As an anonymous reader pointed out via email, what is printed on the front cover of <strong>Rammstein's</strong> most recent album is not the record's title. In reality it is called &quot;Reise, Reise.&quot; Its stadium concert last week drew a motley crowd of students, technical intelligentsia, Zenit Football Club fans and skinheads.
 
 <i>
- By Sergey Chernov
 </i>

TITLE: Carthage on Nevsky
TEXT: Kartago, 11 Nevsky Prospekt
 Open 24 hours a day. No credits cards. 
 Lunch for three, without alcohol: 1,152 rubles ($41).
 Tel: 314 7021. It may be a long way from sunny Tunisia, but the Kartago bistro is a hospitable place to get a quick, hearty lunch (or dinner or midnight snack) in downtown St. Petersburg.
 
Like the Antalia bistro around the corner, Kartago displays all the dishes at the front counter. Cafeteria style, what you see is what you get. This is good news for non-Russian-speaking foreigners: point and eat is spoken here.
 But seriously, the servers behind the counter seem to treat all customers with equal geniality, patiently explaining the ingredients of the dishes and adjusting portions to suit appetites.
 Main dishes vary, but there is always a choice of fish, chicken and red meat, not to mention such vaguely ethnic dishes as moussaka, goulash and shaverma (shaurma). Saffron rice with nuts and sliced potatoes baked in oil are standard sides.
 Moving from left to right, we come to the salad station. Here another helpful server negotiates portions of fresh salad sold by weight (no lettuce; these are mostly Russian salads).
 Finally, the dessert carousel displays cakes and eastern sweets to go along with tea, espresso or cappuccino. Meat, grains and dairy already on the plate, now it is time for the fourth food group: baklava.
 Seated at one of the ten or so tables and gazing at the Mediterranean view on the wall, my friends and I dig into our food. On the other side of the glass, just a few meters away, weary pedestrians slop along in the black slush and are splattered with mud by passing <i>marshrutki</i>.
 It goes without saying that against such a backdrop the Greek salad was brightly colored and fresh. The cauliflower salad - chilled, breaded, fried and smothered in garlic sauce - was a tasty twist on the usually bland vegetable (all salads are 30 rubles/$1.07 per 100 g). The moussaka (70 rubles, $2.50) was a bit salty and took some washing down with fresh-squeezed carrot and apple juice (60 rubles, $2.14), and the hearty potatoes (20 rubles, 71 cents) were heavy after the moussaka. The salmon (100 rubles, $3.57) may also have been oversalted, but rewarding. The lamb ribs (70 rubles, $2.50) were good. You could always skip the main dish and stock up on vegetables, or go for the lentil soup (25 rubles, 89 cents) which both my companions recommended.
 Finally, the baklava (55 rubles, $1.96) and green tea (Ronenfeldt at 25 rubles/89 cents a cup) are the main reasons to come here. The manager was surprised at our wanting to know where the baklava was made: &quot;at a central location in St. Petersburg,&quot; he said. Some people take good things for granted.
 In any case, the sweet honey and phyllo dough with nuts is a pleasant alternative to the heavy cheesecake (55 rubles, $1.96) or Sacher-torte (55 rubles, $1.96), although my companions were pleased with their choices. One companion remarked that the creme brulee milkshake (45 rubles, $1.60) was good.
 So if you are looking for a quick and hearty meal, Kartago is the place to go. Takeout is available and there is another bistro at 79 Bolshoi Prospekt, Petrograd Side (Tel: 314-7021).

TITLE: Balanchine remembered
TEXT: A scene from the Mariinsky Theater's production of George Balanchine's Serenade, a ballet often performed in the city of his birth. Marking the 100th anniversary of George Balanchine's birth, this year saw an explosion of dance events across the world, from tributes at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where the choreographer was born, to exhibitions and performances by the New York City Ballet, where he made his career. More recently, the aftershocks have been felt in the literary realm, with the release of two short biographies by New York arts critic Terry Teachout and former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb.
 
It's natural, when two books on the same subject come out at the same time, to weigh them against each other. But determining which of these profiles is more worth reading is a bit like choosing between two exceptional dancers. By limiting yourself to just one, you miss out on what the other has to offer. While Teachout's &quot;All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine&quot; benefits from the standpoint of an independent observer, Gottlieb's &quot;George Balanchine: The Ballet Maker&quot; draws on years of collaboration to paint a more personal portrait of the artist.
 Teachout, a drama critic for The Wall Street Journal and music critic for Commentary, takes the juicier route. Unlike Gottlieb, he had no professional association with Balanchine and is more willing to linger on the unseemly aspects of his subject's character. And there were many. Over the 35 years that he ruled the NYCB, the maker of such masterpieces as &quot;Apollo,&quot; &quot;Agon&quot; and &quot;The Four Temperaments&quot; acquired a reputation for ruthlessness. &quot;Those who rebelled learned that he had a hundred ways of expressing his displeasure,&quot; Teachout writes. &quot;They might be dropped from their favorite roles, or ordered to wear unflattering costumes. Such was life in a company organized to serve the whims of an all-seeing genius.&quot;
 Although Balanchine was &quot;scrupulously tolerant&quot; of the homosexual dancers with whom he worked, Teachout continues, his pettiness showed when it came to NYCB associate artistic director Jerome Robbins, with whom he was vying for the public's affection. &quot;How you like ballet by Jerry the fairy?&quot; Balanchine hissed at several dancers coming off the stage during Robbins' &quot;Dances at a Gathering,&quot; which premiered in 1969. 
 This is not to say that Teachout does not appreciate Balanchine. On the contrary, he is clearly determined that &quot;the greatest ballet choreographer of the 20th century&quot; be remembered as a figure as pivotal as Henri Matisse, and directs his book at those seeing Balanchine's work for the first time. Ever marveling at the swift craftsmanship of a man who made ballets &quot;as casually as another man might wind his watch,&quot; Teachout takes readers on a tour of his works, using vivid imagery for the budding dance lover. 
 Also helpful for the uninitiated, Teachout excels at explaining Balanchine's significance in the history of dance. Rejecting the long tradition of story ballets, Balanchine focused on the music instead of the plot and produced dances of &quot;sound made visible,&quot; Teachout explains. &quot;Instead of concocting redundant visual equivalents of the rhythmic surface of a symphony or concerto, he plunged into its inner structure, moving his dancers in silent counterpoint to its unfolding action.&quot; 
 But music was not the only thing that inspired the man famous for saying, &quot;Ballet is woman.&quot; Married four times officially and one time unofficially (he and the Russian dancer Alexandra Danilova had no marriage papers), Balanchine had a penchant for romancing his muses. His very public - and unsuccessful - pursuit of ballerina Suzanne Farrell, 41 years his junior, unfolded as Wife No. 5, a former prima ballerina who was sidelined at the height of her career by polio, looked on from her wheelchair. 
 Gottlieb explains Balanchine's inability to form lasting attachments as the result of his difficult childhood in St. Petersburg. &quot;Balanchine as a child had been abandoned - not once but twice,&quot; he writes. &quot;At nine he was deposited at the Mariinsky School and left there, never really to be absorbed back into the life of the family. Then, when he was 14, his family moved away, leaving him on his own. There is no way that a sensitive boy, strongly attached to his mother, would not be damaged by such an abandonment. And it would be recapitulated throughout his life: All his wives, he was to say, left him, rather than the other way around.&quot;
 It was through the ballet connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein, who brought Balanchine to the United States, that Gottlieb began working with Balanchine in the early '70s as a member of the NYCB's board of directors and an unofficial manager. Gottlieb uses his insider's knowledge to illuminate Balanchine the man. 
 He was a man always sure of his higher calling, Gottlieb writes, and that higher calling was ballet. &quot;His security about his place in dance history, combined with his conviction that he was in the hands of fate, made it possible for him to confront moments of crisis imperturbably.&quot; 
 When a harrowing orchestra standoff finally ended satisfactorily, just as the audience was entering the theater for a new season's opening night, Gottlieb came across Balanchine calmly sipping a glass of champagne. &quot;There was nothing he could do to help matters, so why get agitated?&quot; 
 But when Balanchine could help matters, he acted quickly. The exalted choreographer was even willing to play errand boy. During another protracted orchestra strike, which had been purposely timed for the 1976 run of &quot;The Nutcracker&quot; to inflict maximum box office damage, NYCB managers ran out of dimes for making payphone calls. 
 A message sent to another George asking for more was mistakenly given to Balanchine, who, assuming that the money was somehow vital to negotiations, one hour later &quot;burst into the room with a bag of dimes, asking, 'Am I in time?'&quot;
 Gottlieb, whose book is part of HarperCollins' Eminent Lives series, gives a particularly well-crafted description of Balanchine's early years, influences and work, with various versions of an event where definitive accounts are lacking. In the end, Gottlieb writes, Balanchine remains a mystery. &quot;He was both cool and ardent, sad and full of fun, arrogant and modest, a much-married man who never really wanted a wife, a towering genius who liked to iron and to play solitaire.&quot;
 To Teachout as well, Balanchine is &quot;ultimately impossible to know.&quot; But what is unequivocal in both of these gracefully written, insightful books is the clarity and brilliance of Balanchine's artistic vision, which revolutionized ballet and endures not only at the NYCB, but in the repertories of ballet companies the world over.
 <i>

 Margaret Henry, a translator and editor of the first English editions of Russia's Ballet magazine and a former arts and features editor of The Moscow Times, teaches journalism in Mississippi. </i>

TITLE: THE WORD'S WORTH
TEXT: Lately in Russia there's been a lot of talk about<i> ++&quot;@&Acirc;&Ograve;&Ograve;&Euml;fl ++&Igrave;&quot;&Icirc;&Euml;&Egrave;&Ograve;&Iacute;&Oacute;&quot;&Oacute; fl&Aacute;(o)&Iacute;++ </i>(the invasion of the English language): the huge influx of English words into Russian. In this battle, I'm fully on the side of the Russians. First, because all these English words that are bandied about are understood by Russians variously, so the politician who talks about <i>&Uacute;@++&Igrave;&Ograve;&Ocirc;++@++&Igrave;&Uacute;&Igrave;&Oacute;&Ograve;&Uacute;, .&Euml;&Aacute;&Igrave;&Acirc;&Ograve;++ </i>(transparency of business) is understood by one person to mean open accounting and records, and by another to mean using clear plastic packaging. The second reason is that it's just not fair. Imagine how your Aunt Mary in Des Moines would react if she were watching the news and heard: &quot;Tonight's special report is on pokhishcheniye lyudei.&quot; Well, that's about how <i>&Uacute;fi&Uacute;fl &aring;++-++ </i>in Tula feels when the newscaster says, <i>&lt;&lt;C&Acirc;&quot;&Oacute;o/oo&Igrave;fl &Igrave;++- &Ograve;&Ocirc;&Acirc;^&Euml;++&Icirc;,&Igrave;(o)&Egrave; @&Acirc;&Ocirc;&Oacute;@&Uacute;++&Ecirc; -&Iacute;&Euml;o/oo&Igrave;~&Ocirc;&Ocirc;&Euml;&Igrave;&quot;.&gt;&gt;</i>
 Where I disagree is on who's to blame. As far as I know, the U.S. and British embassies don't call up the TV stations and demand they say <i>~&Iacute;&Aacute;&Euml;&Uacute;-&Ocirc;&Oacute;&Icirc; </i>(exit poll) or <i>i&Euml;&Uacute; &Ograve;&Acirc;&Aacute;&Oacute;&Igrave;++ </i>(season hit). I don't think it's so much <i>++&quot;@&Acirc;&Ograve;&Ograve;&Euml;fl </i>as<i> &Aacute;++&Euml;&Iuml;&Ograve;&Uacute;'&Oacute;'++&Igrave;&Euml;&Acirc; </i>(borrowing). Russians have grabbed up a lot of words in fields that didn't exist during Soviet times (advertising, management, computer technology, entertainment), and incorporated them into Russian. This makes sense only when the object or concept did not exist in Russian before. 
 So if you are a boss, please don't call yourself <i>&Ograve;&Ucirc;&Ocirc;&Acirc;@'++&Egrave;&Aacute;&Oacute;@; </i>refer to yourself as <i>@&Ucirc;&Iacute;&Oacute;'&Oacute;o/oo&Euml;&Uacute;&Acirc;&Icirc;, </i>or <i>&Igrave;++~++&Icirc;,&Igrave;&Euml;&Iacute;. </i>And don't even think of saying, <i>&uuml; &Ograve;&Ucirc;&Ocirc;&Acirc;@'&Euml;&Aacute;&Euml;@&Ucirc;, &Oacute;&Uacute;o/oo&Acirc;&Icirc; @&Acirc;&Iacute;&Icirc;++&Iuml;(o). </i>(I supervise, from the invented verb <i>&Ograve;&Ucirc;&Ocirc;&Acirc;@'&Euml;&Aacute;&Euml;@&Oacute;'++&Uacute;,, </i>the ad department.) Try: <i>&uuml; '&Oacute;&Aacute;&quot;&Icirc;++'&Icirc;fl, &Oacute;&Uacute;o/oo&Acirc;&Icirc; </i>(I head the department) or <i>&uuml; &Oacute;&Uacute;'&Acirc;~++, &Aacute;++ @++.&Oacute;&Uacute;&Ucirc; &Oacute;&Uacute;o/oo&Acirc;&Icirc;++ </i>(I'm responsible for the department). Instead of asking, <i>&aacute;++&Iacute;&Oacute;&Igrave;~&Euml;&Icirc;&Euml; o/oo@++&Ugrave;&Uacute; &Oacute;&Uacute;~fi&Uacute;++? </i>(Did you finish the draft of the report?), say, <i>Co/oo&Acirc;&Icirc;++&Icirc;&Euml; ~&Acirc;@&Igrave;&Oacute;'&Oacute;&Egrave; '++@&Euml;++&Igrave;&Uacute; &Oacute;&Uacute;~fi&Uacute;++? Neither should you call a &Ograve;&Uacute;++&Ugrave;-&Iuml;&Euml;&Uacute;&Euml;&Igrave;&quot;.</i> Call it a <i>&Ograve;&Oacute;'&Acirc;^++&Igrave;&Euml;&Acirc; </i>or even <i>&Icirc;&Acirc;&Uacute;&Ucirc;~&Iacute;++ </i>- the Russian word for a short meeting. 
 When you are inviting people for a job interview, don't say, <i>&egrave;@&Euml;&quot;&Icirc;++-++, &Igrave;++ &Euml;&Igrave;&Uacute;&Acirc;@',,. </i>(That really means, &quot;I'm asking to interview you [for an article].&quot;) Say instead: <i>&egrave;@&Euml;&quot;&Icirc;++-++, &Igrave;++ &Ograve;&Oacute;.&Acirc;&Ograve;&Acirc;o/oo&Oacute;'++&Igrave;&Euml;&Acirc;. </i>You'll make Russians happy if you ask job applicants for their <i>@++.&Oacute;~++fl .&Euml;&Oacute;&quot;@++&Ugrave;&Euml;fl </i>(work biography) instead of their <i>C&Euml;&Ccedil;&Euml; (CV)</i> or <i>@&Acirc;&Aacute;,&Iuml;&Acirc; </i>(resume). 
 And when you can't get along with one of your co-workers, don't ever say, <i>C &Uacute;&Oacute;.&Oacute;&Egrave; &Ograve;&Oacute;'&Acirc;@-&Acirc;&Igrave;&Igrave;&Oacute; &Igrave;&Acirc;'&Oacute;&Aacute;&Iuml;&Oacute;&Ecirc;&Igrave;&Oacute; &Iacute;&Oacute;&Iuml;&Iuml;&Ucirc;&Igrave;&Euml;&Iacute;&Euml;@&Oacute;'++&Uacute;,! </i>(It's impossible to communicate with you!) The last time I checked, the Russian word <i>&quot;&Oacute;'&Oacute;@&Euml;&Uacute;, </i>still means &quot;to talk.&quot; 
 Refer to your office foyer as the <i>&Ocirc;@&Euml;fi&Iuml;&Igrave;++fl </i>not <i>@&Acirc;&Ograve;&Acirc;&Ocirc;-&Igrave; </i>(reception). When you have a new product, say: <i>&aring;(o) &Ograve;&Oacute;.&Euml;@++&Acirc;&Iuml;&Ograve;fl ++&Iacute;&Uacute;&Euml;'&Igrave;&Oacute; &Ocirc;@&Oacute;o/oo'&Euml;&quot;++&Uacute;, &Acirc;&quot;&Oacute; &Igrave;++ @(o)&Igrave;&Oacute;&Iacute;.</i> (We're planning to promote it aggressively.) Please don't use the non-word <i>&Ocirc;@&Oacute;&Iuml;&Oacute;&Uacute;&Euml;@&Oacute;'++&Uacute;, </i>(from the word &quot;promote&quot;). <i>&aring;++@&Iacute;&Acirc;&Uacute;&Euml;&Igrave;&quot; </i>has entered the language (the process didn't entirely exist in Soviet Russia), but there's nothing wrong with saying <i>++&Igrave;++&Icirc;&Euml;&Aacute; @(o)&Igrave;&Iacute;++ </i>(market analysis) when you are talking about one aspect of it. And please, please, please, don't use the fake word <i>++&Iacute;&Uacute;&Oacute;@ </i>in the dreadful phrase, <i>&eacute;&Igrave; &Oacute;o/oo&Euml;&Igrave; &Euml;&Aacute; ++&Iacute;&Uacute;&Oacute;@&Oacute;' &Igrave;++ &Iuml;&Euml;@&Oacute;'&Oacute;&Egrave; &Ocirc;&Oacute;&Icirc;&Euml;&Uacute;&Euml;~&Acirc;&Ograve;&Iacute;&Oacute;&Egrave; &Ograve;^&Acirc;&Igrave;&Acirc;. </i>(He's one of the actors in the global political arena.) There's nothing wrong with the Russian word <i>&Ugrave;&Euml;&quot;&Ucirc;@++ </i>(figure) or even <i>&Euml;&quot;@&Oacute;&Iacute; </i>if you want the sense of &quot;player.&quot; 
 
 <i>
Michele A. Berdy is a Moscow-based translator and interpreter. </i>

TITLE: Novel proposition
TEXT: Riding a wave of fame since his science-fiction novel &quot;Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor) became a hit movie last summer, author Sergei Lukyanenko plans to publish a new book in installments on his own web site, and has polled readers for creative-writing tips.
 
What would you like the style of my new book to be?&quot; Lukyanenko questioned readers recently on the blog site LiveJournal.com. He went on to ask whether the main character should be male or female, and whether the novel should focus on product placement or sex.
 The prolific author, a psychiatrist by profession, has been writing short stories and novels since the late 1980s, but his trilogy about a battle between supernatural forces on Moscow's streets, &quot;Night Watch,&quot; (1998), &quot;Day Watch&quot; (2000) and &quot;Dusk Watch&quot; (2004), is his best-known work, thanks to Timur Bekmambetov's films, the first of which came out in July, and the last of which is due to be filmed next year.
 The new novel won't be a continuation of the saga, Lukyanenko told readers of his LiveJournal site last month, refusing to give out details of its title, plot or central characters. 
 &quot;This will be a new novel, not affiliated with any of [my] old cycles,&quot; he wrote. But Lukyanenko did promise to stick to a strict timetable for readers eager to know more.
 &quot;Beginning tomorrow, Nov. 11, I will start writing a new novel,&quot; he promised. By writing no less than 40,000 characters per week, he wrote, he will finish the novel in five months, just in time for his 37th birthday on April 11.
 Members of LiveJournal, a site popular with Russian literati, responded enthusiastically. More than 2,000 people placed requests for their favorite genre, with the top choice being a &quot;city fantasy like 'Night Watch.'&quot; Content-wise, the book should have plenty of &quot;ideas,&quot; voters overwhelmingly decided. Romance and sex polled a mere 70 and 82 votes, respectively.
 The novel should be narrated in the first person, and that person should be male. Only 16.5 percent thought the main character should be a woman. As for the hero's age, 28 is just right, 446 voters said.
 Joking about the buzz that last summer's &quot;Night Watch&quot; film generated with its profit-minded shots of the logos of Nescafe and cellular operator MTS, Lukyanenko asked his readers whether they would like to see more product placement in his new book. Two hundred seventeen voters thought it was a good idea.
 Nevertheless, Lukyanenko is not collecting opinions in order to tailor the plot, he wrote. &quot;I'll be grateful for people telling me about mistakes of various kinds, but that isn't the aim.&quot; The author has been using the blog for more than a year to respond to questions and comments about his books, taking the username Doctor Livesey, a character from Robert Louis Stevenson's &quot;Treasure Island.&quot;
 &quot;I had a think about what the point of [LiveJournal] is for a writer,&quot; he wrote. &quot;To argue with literary opponents? That's more fun to do on forums. To hear readers' opinions? Partly yes, but not every day. To read other people's blogs? Wonderful, but then why write your own? And this is what I decided: A writer needs a blog to write books.&quot;
 The idea of publishing literary works online is not a new one for Russian writers. Journalist and poet Linor Goralik's recent book &quot;Not Baby Food&quot; originally came out as a collection of sketches on her LiveJournal web page. Other active contributors to the LiveJournal site include Russian-American writer Masha Gessen and poet and translator Dmitry Kuzmin. 
 But publishing work on the Internet is risky business for many authors, who gain thousands of readers but lose paying customers. 
 In a recent scandal hotly discussed on LiveJournal, popular mystery writer Boris Akunin's latest novel, &quot;Special Correspondent,&quot; mysteriously appeared on the Internet and then disappeared again, all before it hit the bookstores.
 Keeping future profits in mind, Lukyanenko will only publish the first half of his new novel on LiveJournal. That comes on the heels of his decision last year to stop the free downloading of novels from his official site, citing the reluctance of publishers to accept books already available on the Internet. These days, visitors to his official site must pay to download the electronic versions.
 &quot;These are norms of relations between authors and publishers that are accepted in civilized countries,&quot; Lukyanenko wrote on his official site to explain the decision. &quot;Most Russian publishers also demand that their authors not display the text of their books on the Internet. I held out longer than almost all my colleagues.&quot;

TITLE: Building bridges
PUBLISHER: Special to The St. Petersburg Times
TEXT: A photo exhibition of British contemporary bridges along with the best proposals for a new pedestrian bridge in St. Petersburg designed by young Russian architects opened at the Peter and Paul Fortress last week. The exhibition is the highlight of a modern British architecture initiative organized by the British Consulate General, which began on Nov. 22 and runs through Dec. 5.
 
Only a few British architects have contributed to St. Petersburg's architectural landscape (Charles Cameron, who worked during the reign of Catherine the Great is probably the most prominent among them), but the tradition of attracting foreign architects, if only as consultants, is being revived.
 Currently, U.K.-based architects benefit the city's look by offering consultancy in the areas of industrial re-development and the integration of modern architectural concepts in the historical downtown districts. Another possible sector for co-operation is the construction of bridges, which has both an architectural and, more broadly, socio-cultural impact.
 That's why more than a month before the kick-off of the British architecture festival, a competition to design a new pedestrian bridge, open to young St. Petersburg architects, was announced. By the closing date more than 30 projects had been submitted and the best of them exhibited in the Peter and Paul Fortress, Victor Polischyuk, deputy head for the City Committee of city-construction and architecture, which acted as one of the organizers for this competition, said at a press conference before the exhibit opened.
 The projects were judged by an expert panel, which included two British architects, Paul Davis and Fred Manson, who came to St. Petersburg especially to participate in the project. Apart from the competition, both architects took part in workshops: one for the students of St. Petersburg State Architectural-Construction University on the subject of the reconstruction of the University's inner yards; another for young St. Petersburg architects on the creation of an exhibition hall in Gosudarev Bastion (the so-called, &quot;Poterna&quot; or &quot;secret walk&quot;) of the Peter and Paul Fortress. 
 The first prize for the best pedestrian bridge design was won by two young architects - Nadezhda Melennaya and Alexander Kulakov. Their project - &quot;Fontanny Most&quot; (Fountain Bridge) - is an aluminum, minimalist bridge over Fontanka, with two rows of fountains spraying on both sides of the walk. The directions and colors of the fountains change all the time, depending on the pedestrians walking by and the time of day. 
 &quot;Our bridge is very calm and light - it corresponds to the foggy and phantom-like spirit of the city. But it will also enliven and brighten up the night look of St. Petersburg along the Fontanka embankment,&quot; Kulakov told The St. Petersburg Times.
 Melennaya and Kulakov won a two-week-traineeship at Davis' architectural firm in London, Yelena Mishkiniuk from the British Consulate said.
 Even though their project is not due to be realized in St. Petersburg in the near future, some other issues discussed during the British architects' visit may yield results soon. 
 One of the projects discussed at the round-table on Nov. 25, in which both British and Russian architects participated with City Hall representatives, was the reconstruction of the derelict and underused industrial areas between Nevsky Prospekt, Obvodny Canal and Ligovsky Prospekt into a modern business area. 
 The question of redevelopment of old industrial districts, especially in the center of St. Petersburg, is one of the most important issues for City Hall's construction policy at the present time.
 &quot;This specific site - the Moscow Railway station area - is a very exciting project for us,&quot; Davis said. 
 He said that reconstruction of such areas should aim for &quot;better public spaces [and a] better mix of uses&quot;. Manson, added that the generation which builds now, in fact, builds for the future.
 &quot;In a city like St. Petersburg you can't build a house which will look like nothing next to an old historical mansion - you can't build something that could be in any city,&quot; he said.
 <i>

TITLE: HIV Rises in China and Thailand
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: BANGKOK, Thailand - Activists handed out condoms to passers-by and pamphlets urging people not to inject drugs, challenging conservative social mores in Asia as the region marked World AIDS Day on Wednesday with vows to fight harder to halt the disease's spread.
 
In China, the government signaled it was heeding dire warnings of an AIDS explosion this decade by broadcasting television footage of President Hu Jintao making a rare visit to AIDS patients in a hospital and ordering thousands of local officials to learn about the disease.
 Like many countries in Asia, China has been criticized for being slow to admit that AIDS is a growing problem and for leaving public health systems ill-equipped to deal with it.
 National infection rates are lower in Asia than in other parts of the world - particularly worst-hit Africa - but the large populations of many countries in the region mean vast numbers of people are stricken. The epidemic has claimed about 540,000 lives in Asia so far this year.
 Chinese President Hu Jintao shook hands with AIDS patients during Tuesday's highly publicized hospital visit. On Wednesday, he called on &quot;leaders of various levels to enhance their HIV/AIDS knowledge,&quot; the official Xinhua News Agency said.
 China says it has an estimated 840,000 people infected with the AIDS virus and 84,000 who have the full-blown disease. The UN AIDS agency has warned that China could have as many as 10 million people infected by 2010 if it doesn't take urgent action.
 Some 47 percent of the 39.4 million people worldwide infected with HIV are female, and women in East Asia are contracting the disease at a faster rate, often because men who visit prostitutes are increasingly passing on the virus to their wives, the United Nations warned last week.
 Health workers, patients and volunteers in Thailand - one of the countries hardest hit by the disease and among the first to launch preventative campaigns - were due to march through the streets of the capital, Bangkok.
 About 600,000 people have died of AIDS in Thailand, where about 572,000 others live with the disease. Thai health authorities are providing free generic anti-retroviral drugs to about 50,000 people this year.
 In the Philippines, gay men strutted before the press Tuesday to promote HIV testing. Marches and a clothing donation drive were held in Vietnam, where alarming new infection rates have been reported in low-risk groups such as pregnant women.

TITLE: Kofi Annan Asked to Quit
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: UNITED NATIONS - United Nations member states voiced support for Secretary-General Kofi Annan after a U.S. senator called for him to resign over possible fraud in Iraq's oil-for-food program. The State Department endorsed a Senate investigation of the troubled program but sidestepped the issue of Annan's future.
 
Senator Norm Coleman, who is leading one of five U.S. congressional investigations into the UN oil-for-food program, wrote in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal that Annan should step down because &quot;the most extensive fraud in the history of the UN occurred on his watch.&quot;
 Outside of Coleman's call, the secretary-general appears to retain wide support among the 191 UN member states who elected him to a second five-year term in 2001.
 Russia, Britain, Chile, Spain and other nations on the UN Security Council strongly backed Annan in recent days, as did non-council members. The 54 African nations sent a letter of support.
 The allegations of corruption in the oil-for-food program, which first surfaced in January, have escalated, embarrassing Annan and taking the spotlight off his agenda.
 Two weeks ago, Coleman's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations said it had uncovered evidence that Saddam Hussein's government raised more than $21.3 billion in illegal revenue by subverting UN sanctions against Iraq, including the oil-for-food program.
 On Monday, Annan said he was &quot;very disappointed and surprised&quot; that his son Kojo received payments until February 2004 from a firm that had a contract with the oil-for-food program. The Swiss-based firm Cotecna Inspection S.A., said Kojo Annan was paid $2,500 a month to prevent him from working for competitors after he left the company in 1998.

TITLE: NHL Spat Hits A Low Point
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: CALGARY, Alberta - Bitter sniping between the National Hockey League players union and commissioner Gary Bettman hit a low point Wednesday, with an National Hockey League Players' Association senior director saying Bettman is the wrong man to lead the league. 
 
Bettman retorted that the union's rhetoric was getting desperate as the NHL lockout drags on. 
 &quot;I don't mind being the whipping boy if this gets us closer to the right result,&quot; Bettman said after meeting with Calgary Flames staff and season ticket holders. 
 Ted Saskin of the NHLPA in a radio interview with The Score in Toronto, said that Bettman is not respected by the players. 
 &quot;Certainly not now,&quot; Saskin said. 
 Asked if Bettman is the right man to run the NHL, Saskin replied, &quot;Not from what I've seen.&quot; 
 Bettman said he wasn't surprised. 
 &quot;We're finally getting to the stage where the union is resorting to personal attacks, a very common practice in collective bargaining when a union isn't getting what it wants,&quot; said Bettman. &quot;If the union is indeed saying that, those would seem to be desperate words.&quot; 
 Saskin said Bettman has put forth a proposal to get rid of guaranteed contracts. The union spokesman said he believed Bettman was trying to go too far.
 &quot;That's an interesting comment, because we went to the union in 1999 and begged them to begin addressing our problems,&quot; Bettman said. &quot;If the union was looking for a moderated, mitigated, phased-in approach, we could have been doing that for the last few years.&quot;
 Bettman repeated his message that a deal giving parity to the league's 30 teams is essential for small-market clubs such as the Flames or the Edmonton Oilers who can't afford to compete with the wealthier big-market teams for players. 
 &quot;We're trying to forge a partnership; unfortunately the union is trying to bargain by confrontation,&quot; he said. 
 Flames president Ken King says although his team posted a profit following its dream ride to the Stanley Cup finals, the business reality is it came after seven years of missing the playoffs partly because of not having enough money to put together a competitive team. 
 &quot;Our ability to take a year that was an anomaly out of the last 10 and build a base of business to go forward, planning on that is just not possible,&quot; said King. 
 &quot;Nobody on the planet wants to play hockey more than the Calgary Flames, coming off the spring of 2004,&quot; he said. &quot;We would love nothing less than to get ourselves mired in the same muck that we went through for seven long, tired years. The damage to us in those years is far more arduous that the damage we may incur trying to fix it.&quot;
 Flames owners are forecasting losses of $5 to $7 million if the entire 2004-05 season is wiped out. 
 Bettman said no &quot;drop dead&quot; date has been set that would cancel the season.

TITLE: Nadal Surprise Spanish Pick
 For Davis Cup Final vs. U.S.
PUBLISHER: The Associated Press
TEXT: SEVILLE, Spain - American Mardy Fish will play Spain's Carlos Moya on Friday in the opening singles match of the Davis Cup final. 
 
America's top player, Andy Roddick, will face Spanish teenager Rafael Nadal in the second match of the best-of-five final on clay at Seville's Olympic Stadium. 
 Nadal, 18, was a late replacement for Juan Carlos Ferrero, a former No. 1 who has been struggling with illness and injuries this season. 
 Fish, ranked No. 37, has a 2-1 record against No. 5 Moya, but none of his wins were on clay. Roddick, the world's No. 2-ranked player, is 1-0 against Nadal. 
 Saturday's doubles will pit American twins Bob and Mike Bryan against Nadal and Tommy Robredo. 
 In Sunday's reverse singles, Roddick will face Moya and Fish will play Nadal. 
 The team captains can change the lineup an hour before the match. 
 The surprise of Thursday's draw was the selection of Nadal, Spain's lowest-ranked player at No. 51. However, the hard-hitting left-hander has been a clutch Davis Cup player. 
 Nadal, the youngest Davis Cup player in Spanish history, won the deciding fifth match against the Czech Republic in February. As a late replacement for Moya, he won the clinching match in the semifinals against France. Spain is considered the favorite, playing on a slow, red clay surface before an anticipated record crowd of 26,600. 
 Spain is appearing in its third final in five seasons. It won its first Davis Cup title in 2000, defeating Australia in Barcelona. 
 The United States is trying to win its first title since 1995. The Americans have won the Davis Cup a record 31 times, but this is their first appearance in the final since 1997. 
 Spain has spent about $1 million to build a covered clay court inside its 60,000-seat Olympic Stadium. Despite the roof, the sides of the venue will be open giving it an outdoor feel. 
 Organizers expect the largest crowd ever to attend a &quot;sanctioned&quot; tennis event. The existing mark was set in 1954 in Sydney, Australia, when 25,578 watched the United States defeat Australia in the Davis Cup final. 
 Several exhibition tennis matches have drawn bigger crowds.
 Roddick has a 14-3 singles record in Davis Cup play since joining the team in 2001 and has not lost a set in six Davis Cup singles matches this year. 
 Fish won the silver medal at the Athens Olympics. He has been a Davis Cup player since 2002, holding a 4-4 record. 
 The Bryan brothers have yet to lose a set in Davis Cup play.

TITLE: England Passing Zimbabwe Test
PUBLISHER: Combined Reports
TEXT: HARARE, Zimbabwe - England wicketkeeper Geraint Jones decided to follow his instincts rather than the textbook last season and is happy with the results so far. 
 
&quot;I've been happy with my progress, but there's a long way to go,&quot; Jones told a news conference on Thursday. 
 &quot;Halfway through last season I decided to do things my way instead of in textbook fashion. 
 &quot;My decision was made after the culmination of a few matches in which I wasn't happy with the way I was catching the ball, so I went back and thought about the times when I was happy with it. 
 &quot;You could say I followed my instincts, although I suppose my style is a combination of several different styles.&quot; 
 Jones said he spoke to former England wicketkeeper Jack Russell, who advised him to be relaxed but mentally aggressive, wanting the ball and wanting to be part of the game all the time. 
 &quot;I needed to tune up on that, because as the wicketkeeper I've got to run the fielding show out there.&quot; 
 Jones showed his batting prowess in the second one-day international against Zimbabwe on Wednesday when he smashed 66 off 46 balls to help England recover from 121 for five to total 263 for six. 
 Jones shared a record sixth-wicket stand of 120 with Kevin Pietersen, who scored an unbeaten 77. 
 &quot;We could have been bowled out cheaply, and that would have been embarrassing,&quot; Jones said. 
 &quot;But it set up a situation for me to go out and show I could score runs in a one-day situation. It was nice to bat for a longer time on a good pitch. 
 &quot;In test matches you are always trying to bat for longer periods but in one-day cricket the situation changes all the time.&quot; 
 Jones said he had been preparing for the scenario that unfolded. 
 &quot;It's something I've been working on, the situation where you need to push the scoring rate up,&quot; he said. 
 &quot;I've been working on getting my front leg out of the way and getting into the right position to hit the ball hard.&quot; 
 England won the match by 161 runs to go 2-0 up in the four-match series, which will be completed in Bulawayo with games on Saturday and Sunday. 
 England's tour of Zimbabwe is taking place despite a flap over visas which had been orginally denied to 13 British media representatives who are covering it. A rancorous debate about whether the team should play cricket in a country which has become an international pariah under the dicatatorship of President Robert Mugabe also preceded the tour. 
 Relations between Zimbabwe and its former colonial ruler Britain have hit rock bottom since Mugabe launched a campaign of chaotic and often violent seizures of land from white farmers, many of whom held dual British citizenship. 
 Britain, accusing Mugabe of rigging his 2002 re-election, has spearheaded international sanctions against Mugabe, who in return says London has masterminded a campaign of economic sabotage and negative media coverage as the once prosperous Zimbabwean economy faces its worst crisis since independence.
 
 o
 Off spinner Harbhajan Singh took seven wickets as India crushed South Africa by eight wickets to clinch the two-test series 1-0 on Thursday. 
 Harbhajan's 15th five-wicket haul in his 41st test helped dismiss the tourists for 222, leaving India a victory target of 117 which they reached in the 40th over with Rahul Dravid contributing an unbeaten 47. 
 The series victory was India's first on home soil since beating West Indies in 2002. They drew with New Zealand last year and lost 2-1 to Australia last month. 
 The series victory was India's first on home soil since beating West Indies in 2002. They drew with New Zealand last year and lost 2-1 to Australia last month. 
 &quot;It was a very important test for us after the going has been very tough for the last four or five months,&quot; India captain Sourab Ganguly told reporters. 
 &quot;The wicket was a little flat and we were worried it might be a draw. But the spinners used the footmarks well and Harbhajan picked up those seven crucial wickets.&quot; 
 
 <i>
(Reuters, SPT) </i>

TITLE: SPORTS WATCH
TEXT: A Bridge a Too Far?
 </b>

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) - FC Zenit were due to play TSV Alemannia Aachen in The Netherlands late Thursday in the continuing Group Stage of the UEFA Cup. A win for the St. Petersburg side would have confirmed a placing in the last 32 teams in the competion and progress to the next stage. 
 Aachen take on Zenit full of optimism after overwhelming TSV 1860 Munchen 5-1 on Sunday. "We know we are outsiders, but hopefully we will can pull off another surprise win," coach Dieter Hacking told uefa.com.
 Zenit, on four points from three games, were due to have fielded a side that included Martin Srkrtel, back after his achilles injury. Martin Horak, Olexandr Spivak and Vladislav Radimov were also announced as playing despite minor injuries. 
 
 
<b>Ebersol's Plane Was Icy
 </b>

MONTROSE, Colorado (AP) - NBC Sports executive Dick Ebersol told investigators his chartered jet struggled just 20 feet into the air before it fell back to the runway and broke apart, aviation officials said Wednesday. 
 Ebersol's 14-year-old son Edward "Teddy" and two crew members were killed when the twin-engine CL-601 Challenger crashed in light snow, fog and freezing temperatures at Montrose Regional Airport on Sunday. 
 National Transportation Safety Board investigators said the plane had not de-iced before attempting takeoff. 
 Ebersol, 57, and another son, Charlie, 21, remained hospitalized in Grand Junction but were expected to make a full recovery, 
 
 
<b>Kiev Offers Guarantee
 </b>

MADRID (Reuters) - The Champions League game between Barcelona and Shakhtar Donetsk on Dec. 7 will go ahead after Ukrainian authorities gave security guarantees to UEFA, the European soccer governing body says.
 Barcelona had expressed concerns earlier Tuesday about instability in Ukraine and asked UEFA for its opinion on the situation there ahead of the match, due to be played in Donetsk.
 Barcelona chairman Joan Laporta sent a letter to UEFA expressing his concerns that the international impact of the game might be taken advantage of given the instability in the country, the Spanish club said on its web site Tuesday.
 However, UEFA has told the two clubs and football associations in both countries that Ukrainian authorities have committed to taking all necessary measures to ensure the match goes ahead, the governing body said on its web site.
 
<b>Abramovich Richest
 </b>

LONDON (AP) - Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich and England captain David Beckham top English soccer's rich lists. 
 Abramovich, the Russian businessman, is the richest man in the English game with an estimated wealth of Pound7.5 billion ($14.15 billion), according to Four Four Two magazine's annual survey. 
 Beckham, who plays in Spain for Real Madrid, is the richest active player with a personal fortune of Pound65 million ($123 million), the magazine reported Wednesday. 
 Arsenal's Dutch forward, Dennis Bergkamp, is second richest player with Pound37 million ($69.6 million). 
 American businessman Malcolm Glazer, who has increased his shares in Manchester United to more than 28 percent, is sixth on the owners' list. 
 Glazer, who owns the Tampa Bay Buccaneers NFL team, is worth Pound560 million ($1.58 billion), according to the survey. 
 
 
<b>Kirilenko Injured 
 </b>

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The Utah Jazz placed forward Andrei Kirilenko and center Curtis Borchardt on the injured list Tuesday. 
 Kirilenko will be sidelined at least the next two weeks with a sprained ligament in his right knee. Jazz trainer Gary Briggs said an MRI taken Sunday showed the ligament was sprained but not completely ruptured. 
 Kirilenko, an All-Star last season in his third year in the NBA, is second on the Jazz in scoring (14.8 points) and rebounding (7.2) and averages more than four blocks per game. 
 Borchardt is listed as having inflammation in his right foot, which caused him to miss all of the 2002-03 season after having surgery. 
 The Jazz filled the two roster spots by activating rookie forward Kris Humphries and center Aleksandar Radojevic. 
 
 
<b>Cities To Stop 'Bickering'
 </b>

LONDON (Reuters) - International Olympic Committee (IOC) chief Jacques Rogge has called for an end to the "bickering" between the cities seeking to host the 2012 Games. 
 "I would ask them - with no exception - to focus on their own bid, stop looking at what the others are doing and stop bickering and accusing each other," the IOC president said. 
 London, Paris, Madrid, New York and Moscow remain in the race for the Games, with the decision due next July.